Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Naomi Klein on How To Stay Sane In An Increasingly Warped Online World

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

*** It's not too late to register for our live (or livestream) Meditation party Oct 13-15 — sign up here!***Klein goes down the rabbit hole after learning she has a digital doppelgänger who has gone all in on conspiracies.Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author. Her most recent book is Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. She is a columnist with The Guardian. In 2018 she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers University and is now Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers. In September 2021 she joined the University of British Columbia as UBC Professor of Climate Justice and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice.In this episode we talk about:Why she says conspiracy culture often gets the facts wrong but the feelings rightHow and why you should listen to people on the other side of the aisleThe convergence of wellness culture and rightwing ideologyThe precariousness of the selfHow she learned to loosen the death grip on her egoAnd the importance of coming from a place of calm in the stormVOTE for us in the Signal Awards: Best Host, Best Health & Wellness Podcast, Best Self-Improvement & Self-Help PodcastRelated Episodes:Ten Percent Happier: This Scientist Says One Emotion Might Be the Key to Happiness. Can You Guess What It Is? | Dacher KeltnerFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/naomi-kleinSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm your host, your boy, Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. I am, as some of you may know, very interested in how to stay sane in an increasingly warped online world, which most of us really do have to get entangled with, at least sometimes. How do you maintain intellectual humility

in the midst of what my friend Maria Popova calls a pandemic of certainty, where most of us are trapped in self-graded information silos. And if you do try to appear beyond your tribal encampments, how do you keep your bearings? How do you know what's true? And more generally, what does it do to your psyche, to your sense of self, to be constantly cultivating an online persona or brand?

And what does it do to our culture when we spend so much of our time interacting with other people's personas? Naomi Klein is not the kind of guest we generally have on this show. She's written a bunch of best-selling very influential books, critiquing capitalism, marketing, and also taking on the climate crisis with titles such as no logo, the shock doctrine, and this changes everything. But her new book is a real departure. It has elements of with titles such as No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and This Changes Everything. But her new book is a real departure. It has elements of memoir, actually.

It starts off with her noticing how another Naomi, Naomi Wolf, is also a well-known author in public intellectual for whom Naomi Klein, my guest today, is often confused. The book starts off with her noticing how Naomi Wolf seemed to have made some radical ideological shifts. Naomi Klein, again, our guest, was initially horrified by how many people were getting angry at her for the controversial stuff that other Naomi, Naomi Wolf, was saying. But then Naomi Klein got interested in the whole phenomenon here, about how our digital world is so rife with conspiracy theories and what all of that is doing to our minds and our culture.

The net result of this deep dive into what she calls a rabbit hole, which is described in Naomi Klein's new book, which is called doppelganger, seems to be really profound and also, and this is a bit surprising, calming. So in this conversation, we talk about why Naomi Klein says conspiracy culture often gets the facts wrong, but the feelings right. How and why you should listen to people on the other side of the aisle, the convergence of wellness, culture, and right-wing ideology, the precariousness of the self, and how she learned to loosen the death grip on her ego. Bosh Legacy returns, now streaming. Maddie's been taken.

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But ultimately, I shrugged it all off. That is, until a couple of years ago, when I discovered that every subsequent occupant of that house is convinced they've experienced something inexplicable too, including the most recent inhabitant who says she was visited at night by the ghost of a faceless woman. And it gets even stranger. It just so happens that the alleged ghost haunting my childhood room might just be my wife's great grandmother. It was murdered in the house next door by two gunshots to the face. From Wondering and Pineapple Street Studios comes GoStory for podcasts about

family secrets, overwhelming coincidence, and the things that come back to haunt us. Follow GoStory on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus. Now on me Klein, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. I suspect there may be some people who don't have a deep familiarity with your past work. I'd be curious to get you to talk a little bit about what your writing career was like

up until this most recent book and why this most recent book is such a departure. Sure. I've been writing nonfiction books since I was in my 20s. My first book was called No Logo and it came out just as the new millennium was beginning almost 25 years ago And it was about the rise of lifestyle branding and it was predicting that there was a new anti-corporate politics among people of my generation, Gen X at that time. And the book was at the printer when these big protests happened against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. And then there were protests that were kind of taking on corporate power from a left perspective around the world. And so I got one of those lucky magic carpet rides for our first time author, the book was translated into 30 languages. And so after Nologo, I really wanted to change topics. I was still interested in corporate power, but I focused on marketing, which a lot of that book

had been about. Took me five years, I wrote a book called The Shock Doctor and the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which was an alternative history of the rise of free market economics. And then my next book was called This Changes Everything and it was about the climate crisis. And that came out in 2014. I've been writing about the climate crisis ever since. I teach in the geography department

at University of British Columbia. My title is Professor of Climate Justice, and I co-lead a research center about climate justice. So that's my day job. And this book is different from those books, which were more conventional nonfiction. They put their thesis up front, then they defended it and defended it and defended it.

And you know, went in a pretty straight line to a preordained destination. This new book is a departure because it's more personal. It's stranger. I say, you know, it's a weirder book for weirder times. It tackles the doubling of the self. It returns to some of the material in No Logo in that that book came out just at the beginning of the personal branding craze. It wasn't that possible for individual, non-famous people to be brands pre-social media. But obviously, it is now, because we all have little marketing devices in our pockets

in the form of our phones and their connections to social media platforms. So I had been looking for a way to come back to personal branding as a way of kind of doubling ourselves, like creating an external product version of ourselves, but I didn't want to do it in a conventional way. I wanted to do it in a way where I was more implicated in it. And so having a doppelganger and having somebody who people confused with me, which is the sort of conceit of this book or the literary device of this book was a way for me to kind

of confront my own hypocrisies and repressed parts of myself because, of course, having a doppelganger is sort of having a branding crisis. You know, if you spent your life projecting a certain kind of self into the world and then many, many people confuse you with somebody else and that somebody else that somebody you wouldn't want to be confused with. It sort of points to the futility of all of that polishing and performing of the self that we are all encouraged to do. So yeah, it's a very different kind of book, but I do think that it's themes are serious because I think that the amount of space all of our individual selves take up is really intimately tied to whether or not we're going to meet

our historical moment, including the moment of climate breakdown. So let's talk about your doppelganger, your double. Who is Naomi Wolf? All right, so the Gen Xers in your audience will probably remember that in the 90s, she published a real breakthrough book. It was a big deal when I was in university came out when I was in second year university called the Beauty Myth and It was a book that argued that there was a kind of tax on women just at the moment that women were Achieving higher levels of quality shattering the glass ceiling in a lot of workplaces

The Beauty Myth argued that at that very moment these new beauty standards were being applied to everyday women that created a kind of a third shift for women. So there's the first shift, which is your real job. There's the second shift, which is taking care of the kids and making dinner. And the third shift, Wolf argued, was trying to achieve model-like levels of beauty, which she, you know, some people said the book was conspiratorial because she was sort of casted as if it was patriarchy's way of keeping women back, that it was a way to keep women from really being able to compete on a level playing field with men. So she then went on to be a consultant for the Democratic Party. She advised Al Gore famously

in the 2000 elections. She advised him on how to attract women voters and was much mocked for this and late night television and so on because she allegedly told him he had to become an alpha male rather than a beta male. And people said that she told him that he had to wear brown suits and earth tones. I don't know. OK, I don't even know if that's true.

But that's who Naomi was. And the reason why I got interested in the fact that people are perennially confusing me with her is that she's a doppelganger of me and more that she has become a doppelganger of her former self. She is one of these people who, in the COVID era, seem to turn into somebody else, a different kind of person.

So here's this person, a lifelong liberal, involved in the Democratic Party, prominent feminist. Suddenly she starts spreading all of this medical misinformation about vaccines, shedding particles, and potentially making women infertile. Then she's saying that vaccine verification apps are a plot to bring Chinese Communist Party social credit systems to the West.

And she starts getting kicked off social media and welcomed onto Tucker Carlson's show. She becomes a regular on Steve Bannon's show. They write a book together. Now, she's not the only person. She's an extreme case, obviously, but she's not the only person who has seemed to change in the COVID era. There's so many people who I talk to these days

who tell me, oh my God, I can't talk to my sister anymore. I can't talk to my father, my mother, my uncle, my yoga teacher, my chiropractor. They seem to have gone down, you know, what we call a rabbit hole. And so I thought, I don't wanna write a book about her, but what if she were the white rabbit that led me down the rabbit hole

and I could write a book about the rabbit hole and what that is telling us about the way COVID has redrawn the political maps and really remade our world and our brains in lots of ways? I want to go down the rabbit hole with you, but let me just get you to talk a little bit about the impact on you psychologically of seeing Naomi Wolf make these ideological moves, given that a lot of people think you're the same person. So, I mean, the book is not about the pandemic, but I think the seeds of it are planted in the pandemic. And in this period of dislocation, that those of us who were lucky enough to be part of the lockdown class experienced, right? Where, like, in my case, I'd been teaching at Rutgers,

but I'm Canadian and my parents live in British Columbia. So in the summer of 2020, I moved, well, I actually just thought I was going to spend the summer near my parents in a pretty remote part of British Columbia, three hours from the closest city, Vancouver. But then everything went remote that fall, including my son's school. So I thought, well, why would I leave this incredibly beautiful place? I'll just be remote.

And I think there was something about this confluence of not being able to do any of the things that tell me who I am in the world, right? Because I think when we think of what the self is, the self is a kind of a dance between our inner sense of self, who we are, but also the self that the world reflects back to us in the form of our friendships, in the form of our relationships. And if you're a public person, as I've kind of been since I was in my 20s, then it's also going into rooms full of people who tell you what my work met to them, things like that. So all of that was canceled, as we all know. And so I, like so many of us, would go online to try to get some simulation of the community

and relationships and camaraderie that we no longer had, right? I had this very particular experience, which was that when I would log on to these so-called social networks, I would get blasted with people who were furious at me or were thanking me or were expressing their pity for me about things that somebody else had said it was not me, who they were confusing with me. And so it was this kind of vertigo on top of vertigo because of course the pandemic itself was this kind of vertigo on top of vertigo, because of course, the pandemic itself was this incredibly vertiginous moment of seeing our world transform, like whoever thought they would have seen Times Square empty, right? But on top of that, my

identity in the world seemed to be dissolving, especially because I was not one of these people who was very talkative during COVID, like I would lurk online, but I somehow felt a little bit speechless myself. And so this other Naomi, who people were confusing with me because she was doing a kind of doppelganger version of the shock doctrine on Tucker Carlson, I felt a little bit like I was disappearing.

And then I just got interested in this phenomenon and this whole idea that we look to the internet to perform versions of ourselves and how easy we are to confuse with one another when we don't actually know each other. We're just seeing this tiny little thumbnail. And from that perspective, I get why people are confused. We're both like brown hair, Naomi's with blonde highlights,

saying things about people in power and Bill Gates. And you know, I mean, she's saying Bill Gates has a plan to track people, I'm saying I don't think we should have put the patents on the vaccines in the first place. We should have just had open source vaccines for everyone in the world. But who has time to worry about that? They have their own lives. And we're just a bunch of opinionated Naomi is going on about stuff. So I just started reading books about doppelgangers, like diving into the doppelgangers' cinematic canon, which is fantastic.

You know, everything from diney on this, enemy to the double, to the great dictator, Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece, fight club, and then Jordan Peale, whose entire body of work is all about doubles and shadow worlds. And the more I research doppelgangers, the more I realize, oh, you know, in mythology and literature, when your double appears, it's usually a message, it's usually a warning.

So I experimented with instead of feeling defensive about my identity. What if I just got interested in the phenomenon of identity confusion and tried to figure out if it was trying to send me some kind of message and I dove down into the rabbit hole. What did you find in the rabbit hole? A lot of guns. I didn't like that part. I listened to a lot of C. Bannon and because she was such a regular on the show, but then I found that I got more and more interested in the way his form of communication is a kind of a doubling, like anything that is being said in liberal or left circles, there's a doppelganger answer for, right? So like there's big steel, big lie, you know, there's the reproductive freedom movements,

my body, my choice, and then in the rabbit hole, it's my body, my choice, but it's about vaccines. There's, I can't breathe from the Black Lives Matter racial justice apprisings, and then there's, I can't breathe because you're making me wear a mask or you're making my kid wear a mask. And you know, what scared me most about the research into what Benin was up to was that he was really capitalizing on fears about big tech, big pharma surveillance.

And he was mixing and matching it with xenophobia, with transphobia. What worried me, though, was that it seemed like, like when I looked around, I wasn't seeing a lot of people on the left who were talking about COVID profiteering by the big pharmaceutical companies. And it seemed as if once an issue became an issue that got a lot of traction in what I call the mirror world, then it became almost untouchable.

Like, a good example of this would be like the Wuhan lab leak theory, right? That for a long time in liberal circles, you would be called a conspiracy theorist if you said, well, maybe we should look into the Wuhan lab. And it was because, well, that was an issue that had been picked up by people like Bannon. And I think that this reactivity of like as soon as they talk about an issue, we can't talk about it, is really dangerous because it leaves some very fertile issues unattended and ripe for the picking.

This is what Bannon did in 2016 with Trump, where he noticed that a lot of workers were feeling betrayed over free trade deals, where they had voted for Democrats who had said they were going to stop these deals or renegotiate them and they never had, and then just kind of stop talking about it. And so he was like, this is an issue that we're going to fold into the mega messaging. And I think for Bannon, it's not a question of whether or not he believes it. It's a question of whether or not it's unattended, whether or not it's there for the picking.

So yeah, that's some of the stuff I found in the mural world. Doppler Ganger literature is very clear that even if you think you're looking at them, you end up looking at yourself. I want to talk more about what you learned about yourself for sure, But staying in the rabbit hole for a minute, you had a very specific experience, you're a public figure, you had another person out there, also named Naomi, saying things that were sort of a warped version of your arguments, and then you decided to follow her

down the rabbit hole to learn what this says about you and what this says about modern society. But let's stay on that part. Like what does what you learned say about modern society that would be useful and illuminating for the rest of us? Because most of the rest of us were not public figures and we don't have people out there who share our first name and are saying bastardized versions of the things we say. No, we don't, but I think, you know, in the age of AI, it's quite possible that many of us will have the experience of seeing a digital version of us

saying things that we would never say, you know, when you think about the ability to do malicious things with AI-generated figures and deep fakes, I think that this experience might not be as niche as it might burst up here. And even just the act of creating an avatar, right? The act of creating a personal brand and sort of telling oneself, well, this is not me. This is just a kind of a professional version of me that I am creating consciously in order to get followers, get jobs, get jobs, monetize. And it's perfectly understandable why we feel that we have to do this, right?

And this is part of what I'm looking at in the book is like when I first started researching this idea of personal brands in the 90s, it was clearly being offered to people as a kind of a sob instead of a job, right? That jobs were being eliminated. They were being replaced with short-term contracts. And the message was, don't worry, we can all become our personal brands.

And I think that if our cells are created cells, these sort of doppelgangers that we create of ourselves are our income, our retirement plans, our kids, you kids, college tuition, then it's frightening to think of how they can blow back on us with a wrong tweet or with a hacked account. So I do think that part of the reason why the book is resonating is that even though I'm writing about a very specific

Naomi V. Naomi issue, a lot of people have had this feeling of digital doubling and being frightened of the double that even they create it and what it can do to them. And creating a brand of oneself is to create a commodity version of us, right? Like that is a thing version of you. It's not really you. And the trouble with that, I think, is that we stop believing in a sense that each other are real. You know, there's a lot of analysis about internet, pylon culture and cancel culture, etc. And part of it being that the algorithms encourage rage and encourage a certain kind of communication. I think that's all true. But I think there's an

element that we often miss, which is that part of the reason why it's possible to be as cruel to one another online as we are, is that we are performing a thing version of ourselves. And if you're saying, I'm an object, then people will throw things at you because they will think you don't bleed. They will believe you, right? And that is part of my

doppelganger story, like Naomi Wolf, I think part of why she flipped and went, you know, as far right as she's gone, is that she was the object of one of these, like, really intense internet pylons after she published a book called Out Rages, she went on a big BBC radio show and live on the air, the host revealed to her that she had made a really foundational error in her research and misinterpreted a phrase in the historical records. And I know about it because people were like,

oh my God, Naomi Klein is, I can't believe she made it. I was like, it wasn't me. But I mean, it's every writer's worst fear. You're live on the BBC and they expose that you've made this mass of error, publish your cancels the book, it gets pulped. I mean, it really is the writer's nightmare.

But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that then it becomes the internet's favorite joke. And that pain is just replicated and mirrored over and over and over and over again for laughs. And I think there's a cost to that. I mean, I think that's one of the things that I learned. I've made this sort of half joking equation

to try to understand people who have changed in the way that she has changed. And I said, it's narcissism slash grandiosity times social media addiction plus midlife crisis divided by public shaming equals right-wing meltdown. And I think there is some truth to that little bit of math. And I don't think everybody will check every one of those boxes, but I think if people listening are probably thinking of somebody in their heads, like, you know, who seem to

really, really change in the COVID period. And suddenly, they're following online exploded, but with very different followers. And then they had audience capture. And then they had to give them more. And then they had to double down and go more extreme, compare them against this equation. And let me know how it goes. Coming up Naomi Klein talks about why you should listen to people with whom you disagree. And the convergence of wellness, culture, and right-wing ideology. We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it. Tomorrow sounds like hydrogen being added to natural gas to make it more sustainable.

It sounds like solar panels generating thousands of megawatts, and it sounds like carbon being captured and stored, keeping it out of our atmosphere. We've been bridging to a sustainable energy future for more than 20 years. Because what we do today helps ensure tomorrow is on. End bridge. Life takes energy. I'm Rob Briden and welcome to my podcast, Briden and... We are now in our third series. Among those still to come is some Michael Paling, the comedy duo Egg and Robbie Williams.

The list goes on, so do sit back and enjoy. Briden and on Amazon Music, Wondery Plus or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't miss out on Celebration of Sharon Salzburg's new book. We've made her course on Loving Kindness, which we call 10% nicer. Free over in the 10% happier app until October 23rd. Download the 10% happier app today wherever you get your apps and get started for free. But let me just get back to some of the points you were making earlier, which is that the reason why regular people, the rest of us should be concerned, I guess I shouldn't say the rest of us because I'm a something of a public figure myself, but just as a turn of phrase, the rest of us should be concerned about this phenomenon

of doppelgangers. I'm hearing two reasons. One is, if you think of yourself, if you objectify yourself and are forced to perform a version of yourself online, well, that can create a bit of a skitzoid split, which is tough to manage. Also, then if something goes wrong online with the objectified version of yourself, then they can destroy you because you send running wrong tweet or somebody hacks your account and sends a bunch of misinformation out on X or Twitter or whatever we're calling it now.

And then from a macro perspective, the danger is now that we're all objectifying each other, it becomes way easier to have this polarized tribal warfare because you're not actually seeing anybody in person. So you're not having to deal with the emotional consequences of calling them an asshole or whatever it is. It is you're calling them. You're just throwing objects against another object. Exactly. And the thing is it's not true. Behind those performed objects, those performed brands are people. You might not like them, but they are people and they are damaged by that abuse. And some people will turn on themselves and self-harm. Some people will just go silent, but some people will rush into the arms of some pretty dangerous characters who are waiting to say, well, we would never treat you like that over here.

And this is one of the things that I was struck by by listening to hundreds of hours of Steve Bannon is that as somebody who is on the left, the band in I know is the band in being dragged off in handcuffs, or the band in being made fun of on late night, or the band in, who is being clipped, just saying, or the banan being made fun of on late night or the banan who is being clipped, just saying, you know, storm the capital or seeming to say storm the capital. But if you become a longitudinal listener of Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, what will you will discover? Is there

is this cuddlier version of him? I'm going to put that in air quotes where he really performs being the mere opposite of this kind of cruel culture on the left. So he talks a lot about, we'll never cancel you. He'll say, we will never other you, which is a very interesting appropriation of, you know, a word that is used to describe what fascists do, right? And Bannon is building a network of far right parties, including parties with real fascist roots,

like Fratelli Tallia and Italy. But he's using the word othering. So this is partly what I'm talking about when I talk about mirror world. And one thing I say in the book is that we are divided from each other with one way glass. In the sense that generally people who are on the liberal or left side of the political spectrum don't pay attention, don't look at things that are going on on that side of the glass unless it makes news, Donald Trump gets arrested

or whatever. So for instance, when Naomi Wolf got de-platform from Twitter for COVID misinformation, the response on Twitter was like Ding Dongle, which is dead. Somebody actually tweeted that, but they acted as if she had been deleted from planet Earth that because she was no longer on this platform, she no longer existed. And what I knew from Researching this was that in fact she had access to much larger platforms than she had had at any point since she was working for Al Gore You know Tucker Carlson still had a show then and he was you know bringing her to his three million viewers a night

So there is this one way glass where, when I would say to people, oh, I heard this on Steve Bannon's podcast, they would say, why? Not what, why? Like, why are you listening to that? And my answer is because he's listening to us. So we may not see them,

because we're seeing a kind of a reflective surface, but Steve Bannon really studies what is going on in liberal and left circles to look for openings to look for opportunities. And so when he sees, okay, well, people are pretty mistreated over there. I'm just going to overperform inclusion over here. It's interesting what you say about the one-way glass. I used to be right in the belly of the beast in mainstream media for decades. And it always struck me that people on the left were only getting caricatured version of people on the right because people on the left weren't

watching right-wing media or listening to it or reading it. And then people on the right are getting the same thing. They're getting the craziest versions of people on the left. And so that just revs everybody up. Yeah, lives of TikTok, yeah. Yes, exactly, exactly. So just to echo that observation, the other thing I wanted to say, which is more of a question, which is, do you recommend that the rest of us get curious about what's happening on the other side of the ideological spectrum from wherever we sit. I mean, I don't recommend you listen to hundreds of hours of steep and I did it for you. I did it so you don't have to. But I do think that what I saw was like a mix and match of appropriation of some issues of very valid concern with issues that were just about making an other, just about directing hate,

with fantastical claims utterly unsupported by reality. Now, there's not much that we can do about two of those things, right? Like there's not much that can be done to keep people from spreading fantastical theories, and there's not much that can be done about the fact that there are deep hatreds and divisions that the far right is always going to draw from.

There's a deep history of white supremacy, a deep history of Christian supremacy. I don't know how to deal with that, frankly. But when I hear Steve Bannon saying things that sort of sound like things that I would say, you know, where he does a montage of all the corporate media brought to you by Pfizer, brought to you by Pfizer, brought to you by Pfizer, I think, well, why aren't I talking? Like why are more people on the left side of the spectrum talking more about corporate media consolidation and the dependence on drug company advertising? That is a valid discussion. But more importantly, why aren't we talking about real solutions for the fact that people

can't afford health care or that they can't afford pharmaceuticals? And there's a reason to distrust these companies. It's not based on nothing. So one of the things that I wrote in the book is that conspiracy culture often gets the facts wrong, but the feelings right. That is something that Banna's quite good at. Or even if you think about QAnon, right? It's this fantastical world of tunnels and children being kidnapped to be drained of a

dream of chrome. And this is not true. This is not happening. But we do live in a culture where a lot of people feel suck dry where I mean, there are real tunnels under Las Vegas. It's not a conspiracy. It's just where people who have no money, who have been discarded from society, live in the storm tunnels under shiny Las Vegas. So you know this is what some of the doppelganger art gets at. This is what Jordan Peel's amazing film us was embodying this world on top of a shadow world.

So I don't accept that they are the ones who have rejected reality and the rest of us on this side of the glass are the serious people who are seriously focused on reality. I think there's a lot of different ways of looking away from very hard truths, like the fact that we do live in a world where our comforts depend on a network of shadow worlds. It's not a conspiracy, but it is a reality that we're implicated by what we wear, what we eat, the glow of our screens, to a very, very unequal system. And as we consume, we add our little bits of poison to the storms that are hitting our communities. These are hard things to look at. One way we can look away is by giving ourselves over

to fantastical conspiracy theories. Another way we can look away is by standing in line to watch the Barbie movie for the eighth time. I don't accept that liberals are seriously focused on the reality of what it means to be alive in 2023 as the climate crisis bangs down our doors in the middle of a global authoritarian crisis. I think we all distract ourselves and numb ourselves out in different ways. So I try to resist the urge to just say, oh, you, you are the denialists because I know that I look away in different ways. I appreciate that your critique is omnidirectional.

You're not just critiquing the far right. It sounds like you're critiquing everybody else. What I was trying to get at in my question, though, is this something a little different, which is, we all exist in these information silos, or most of us do, who are really tailoring the inputs. And I'm wondering whether it might make sense to listen to people on the other side of the aisle doesn't have to be super hard right or super hard left but maybe somewhere in the middle not in a predatory listening way where we're just trying to figure out what they're saying so that we can rebut it

but really within attempt to understand with a genuine sense of intellectual humility. Yeah, I think it's a very good idea and I think it's a good idea to do so and think where are my points of agreement? Because all the social science shows that you can get radicalized very, very quickly in these spaces. We know that. We've seen that. We've read the stories. We've seen the documentaries about how quickly it can happen. But I don't think that means you just write people off because they have started to believe some of these fantastical theories. I think you listen for the parts where you might be able to

throw out some kind of a bridge and see whether you can connect on that because the research does show that if somebody is going to come back from the more extreme parts of these worlds, it's going to be because somebody who loves them reached out, like not because they read my book, they're not going to read my book. They are already pre-protected intellectually from my book. They already have me in a box, but if you are their sister, if you are their best friend from high school, if you have some kind of shared history, it's much, much more likely that if you find some common

ground and give them some out, you might be able to help them. Because I do think that it very quickly seems to get heavily armed and civil war talk. So I don't think it's just like, oh, let's just listen and see if we agree, because I think that there's a trajectory there that is not good. And we should be pretty seriously focused on it as well. So it's okay to listen with a sense of let me have an open mind and see where we agree, but also I think you're saying we need to listen to figure out what people we disagree with are up to because they may be doing something that could harm us. Yeah, I mean, I think post January 6th, and if you listen in on the trials of the proud boys

and the kind of rhetoric that escalated so quickly, I mean, these folks aren't playing, and once you fall down one of these rabbit holes, it ends up in a place which is at war with basic principles of representative democracy where supremacist logics run rampant. So I'm not like, I don't think we should both sides it. Like, I don't think we should say, okay, we all just have like different interpretations of reality. You know, I think we're at a dangerous moment and it's important to draw people back from these worlds and not write them off. Setting aside just for the moment, this issue of what do you do with somebody who's been seemingly radicalized?

I don't mean to dismiss that as an issue a lot of us are dealing with, but just to tick more macro from there. For those of us who are interested in hearing from people that we might not fully agree with, I often think about a tweet that was sent out from Ian Bremer, international relations expert, the tweet was, if you're only following people on this website that you agree with, you're doing it wrong, and I have to agree with that tweet. What I've noticed though, because I've done a lot of work and trying to listen to people I disagree with. I don't even agree with everything you're saying, but I try to really keep an open mind. It can be, and this is a word you used before, vertiginous and confusing and like utterly, irreparably postmodern. And so how do you find your bearings once you open your mind in this way?

I think you need to know what your values are, and that's pretty important. If you are going to start exploring these worlds, it's important to be clear about who you are as much as possible. This is why I'm saying I'm not both sides of it, because I think, you know, when I'm talking about the journey I've gone on, when I say I'm going down a rabbit hole, the stakes of it are very serious, right? These are conspiracy theories that encouraged people not to do things that might have saved their lives. These are conspiracy theories that are bound up increasingly with the great replacement theory and this idea that immigrants and non-white people are replacing white people, and this is the ideology that is driving, you know,

18-year-olds to bring automatic weapons into supermarkets and cinemas and so on. So, I think if you want to listen in, you need to be really clear about who you are and what your core beliefs are, or you could fall down yourself. I mean, it's a general question. It really does depend who you are.

So one of the stranger things that I've witnessed is just this convergence of wellness culture and really extreme, far right conspiracy culture. And you wouldn't expect a lot of yoga teachers to have gone this route. But I think part of the reason why you have this convergence of sort of alt health worlds with increasingly explicitly supremacist ideological movements is because parts of the

wellness world, not all of it, but parts of it, have internalized this idea that your only protection in this chaotic dangerous world is the perfection of the self, the perfection of the body optimizing the self, right? These are the kind of mantras of the wellness world. I mean, there's lots of incredible people who work in wellness who've got huge hearts and really deeply believe in the interconnection between people, but there is a side of wellness which becomes a kind of body supremacy.

And then when it mixes up with people who say, like, we don't have to care about those people, those immunocompromised people, maybe they should die, like, maybe this is survival of the fittest. Maybe there's a culling, maybe we need a culling. They're vulnerable to it because their values were out of whack to begin with. Coming up, Naomi talks about the precariousness of the self and the importance of coming from a place of calm in the midst of the many global dumpster fires. What if we told you that there's a darker side to royalty? And more often than not, life as a prince or princess is anything but a fairy tale. I'm Brooke Sifrin, and I'm Arisha Skidmore

Williams, and we're the hosts of Wonder Ees Podcasts, even the rich and rich and daily, and we're so excited to tell you about our brand new podcast called Even the Royals, where we'll be pulling back the curtain on royal families past and present from all over the world. On Even the Royals, we'll cover everything from stories you thought you knew, like Marie Antoinette, who was actually a victim of a vulgar propaganda campaign which started a wild chain of events that led to her eventual beheading. Or, Catherine de Medici, who was assumed to be responsible for one of the most devastating massacres in French history.

But in reality, she was a mother holding on to her dying dynasty. Royal status might be bright and shiny, but it comes of the expense of everything else, like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. Follow even the royals on the Wendery app or wherever you get your podcasts. If you don't want to wait for more episodes, join Wendery Plus today to listen exclusively and add free. Deep in the Enchanted Forest, from the whimsical world of Disney Frozen, something is wrong. Arendel is in danger once again from dark forces threatening to disrupt the peace and tranquility. And it's up to Anna and Elsa to stop the villains before it's too late.

For the last ten years, Frozen has mesmerized millions around the world. Now, Wondry presents Disney Frozen, Forces of Nature podcast, which extends the storytelling of the beloved animated series as an audio-first original story, complete with new characters and a standalone adventure set after the events of Frozen 2. Reunite with the whole crew, Anna, Elsa, Olaf, and Kristoff for an action-packed adventure of fun, imagination, and mystery. Follow along as the gang enlist the help of old friends and new as they venture deep into the forest and discover the mysterious copper machines behind the chaos. And count yourself amongst the allies as they investigate the strange happenings in

the enchanted forest. The only question is, are Anna and Elsa able to save their peaceful kingdom? Listen early and add free to the entire season of Disney Frozen Forces of Nature podcast, along with exclusive bonus content on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, or Wondery Plus kits on Apple Podcasts. So you very kindly brought us back to the self, which is really what I'm most interested in.

This is a podcast that doesn't dwell that much in nitty gritty of politics, but your opinion is so interesting. I wanted to ask you a few questions about it. Having said that, we're really focused here on the human condition, and your book has a lot to say about that. Let me just read a quote from you about what you learned about the mutability of the self by going down this rabbit hole. I'll read it to you and then maybe you can comment on the back end. You write the self as perfected brand, the self as digital avatar, the self as data mind, the self as idealized body, the self as racist and anti-semitic projection, the child as mirror of the self, the self as eternal victim.

projection, the child as mirror of the self, the self as eternal victim. These doubles share one thing in common. All our ways have not seen, not seeing ourselves clearly because we're so busy performing an idealized version of ourselves, not seeing one another clearly because we're so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others, and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly because we've partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision. I think this more than anything else explains the uncanny feeling of our moment in history with all of its mirrorings, synthetic selves, and manufactured realities. At bottom, it comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see in our past, in our present,

and in the future, racing towards us. past in our present and in the future racing towards us. Well, you know, what became clear, and I was alluding to a little earlier around the role of conspiracy culture in distraction. I think there are so many ways of not seeing, including by over focusing on the self. And, you know, when we think about overinflated senses of self, you know, we think, oh, that's just the self. And you know, when we think about overinflated senses of self, you know, we think, oh, that's just the narcissist. It's not, it's not me. It's people who just like have this huge,

huge ego. But Freud said about doppelgangers that part of what appeals, like what, why people are drawn to the idea of the doppelganger, of the idea that there's another person who looks just like you walking around somewhere and you could bump into them at any time, is that the doppelganger stands in for the multiple possibilities of lives that we could have led, right? That we know that who we are is the result of a series of choices that we made and that others made for us, right? That we know that who we are is the result of a series of choices that we made and that others made for us, right? That, you know, it's because we went to that university or didn't go, it's because we took that job in that city or we didn't take it, we decided to have a kid,

we didn't decide to have a kid, we were born, you know, into a middle class family, we weren't born into it, we were born in that country and have that passport instead of this one. And so there's this idea that I think we all hold that there are multiple selves that we might have been, right? And I think that that's also the appeal of the kind of multiverse story as well, because it speaks to the fact that we do contain multitudes. And, you know, it's hard for me not to talk about politics because I am a political person. But I believe that one of the factors that makes us one kind of person versus another kind of person has to do with the social systems that we live inside, right?

I live in Canada. I was born in Canada, but much of my family is in the US. I've spent a lot of time living in the US. And I think about how different social policies create more or less insecurity in the person, in the self, right? You know, if you live in a society that won't guarantee you health care or says that, you know, for your kids to get a good education, you need to have $100,000 a year to spare. You're going to act differently. You're going to protect yourself with more ferocity, right? And the thing about having a doppelganger that's so interesting is that it forces you to confront the futility of a lot of the things that we do to protect ourselves, right? Like I'm a person who, like I said earlier, I got lucky with my first book, right? So suddenly I felt very kind of surveilled by the culture.

And I was in a way, you know, because there was a low point in my life when Vice Magazine sent a reporter to go through my garbage to try to prove that Naomi Klein who wrote no logo, consumed logos. And they did like a double page spread of my Diet Coke cans. But, you know, and I really, I think having had that experience, I just took myself much too seriously. And there was something really, like first horrifying and then liberating about realizing that no matter what I did, people would think that I got caught on BBC making those foundational errors, or despite the fact that I'm a pretty repressed person

that I wrote a book called My vagina, or something, you know, she wrote a book called vagina, which is fine, which is fine. It's just not something I would do. But the whole thing I've decided to sort of embrace as a kind of exercise in not annihilation of the ego, but just loosening the sort of death grip on the self that I think living in a society

that does tell us all that we're on our own. So we have to fortress ourselves, encourages so, so very, very much. And I really do believe, as far as that passage is concerned that we're not gonna meet any of the overlapping emergencies that we're up against on our own. We're only going to do it with other people.

We're only going to do it if not if we annihilate our egos, but if we loosen the grip on the individual self or the narrow identity group enough to find common ground, enough to find coalition, to find solidarity. And so I really do honestly appreciate my doppelganger for having taught me that it was pretty futile to try to play this personal branding game. And I think the appeal of the doppelganger through the ages, you know, Dusty F. Skier, so little like when, you know, Narcissist like it's,

it recurs and recurs and recurs. It's because it recurs and recurs and recurs. It's because it points to the precarity of the carefully tended self, right? Like, like, the self we think we are can end so quickly, you know? We've talked about a hack to count, but, you know, what about a catastrophic illness? What about an accident? What about, what about a bad trip, you know, what like, like we can lose hold of ourselves in lots of different ways. So I think the more we let go of the illusion that we are totally in control, the better

we will weather those bumps. Is that just an intellectual move that we need to make to let go of that illusion or are there practices that you engage in and that you would recommend to others that would help in this process? I mean, I joke that this is sort of like my version of like a Zen meditation practice of loosening the boundaries on the self. I think there's lots of ways of doing it. You know, Silasaybin, join doing it. You know, Silas, I've been joined a revolution, you know, take your

back. Yeah, I would just add meditation into that mix. And I think there are ancient practices that are designed to help us not take ourselves so seriously, not take our every thought and opinion. So personally, and they all can supercharge what it is you've gone through, which is a loosening of the grip. Loosing of the grip, but the only thing I would just say is, I think meditation absolutely can help

and I've found different embodied practices can help. But I also just think we're lonely and we should be careful not to make all the solutions one that we do on our own with our phone. I would encourage us to find other people. I agree with that. And it does harken back to something you said a few minutes ago, which is, yeah, this is a two-step process as far as I can tell.

This is your argument. The first step is to loosen the grip of the ego, not take yourself. So seriously, it'll make your day to day life better. It will make your political participation a little bit more nuanced. The second step is to really turn the dial up on the political participation or the community participation. Once you realize that yourself is hard to find and poorly defined and doesn't have clear borders and you're not fully in control of it, then you would make the move to work with other people to fix the structural problems we're facing as a planet.

Yes, I think that's true. I love Iris Murdoch, the British novelist of philosophers, phrase unselfing. And she uses that phrase to talk about the state that we enter when we behold beauty. And she writes about beholding a bird, but it could also be a work of art that when you have a truly transcendent experience of wonder, you lose yourself, you're not conscious of yourself. You are in a state of openness and porousness. And that, those are the most beautiful moments that life has to offer. You know, it's why I live in this really remote place because I have more opportunities for unselfing and connection, and though I do

believe strongly that we need coalition, community of other humans and political movements, I also like to feel connected with seals and orcas and eagles as well. Yeah, it's nice where I live. I can, I believe it. And I've heard it argued on this show that there is actually an evolutionary function to awe, which is what you're describing, which is that it inculcates in us a sense of moral responsibility. It turns down the volume on the self, makes us feel small in a good way, and encourages

cooperation. And that seems to fit right into your thesis. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's not about annihilating the self, but it is about getting the self into some kind of proper perspective so that we can see one another and the world around us and respond, respond responsibly and not look away. I think the reason why we need all of these distractions, whether it's distractions that

conspiracy, culture offers or the distractions that streaming television offers or whatever the numbing out, you know, we choose. And I choose some of it, you know, I'm not saying I'm above it, is that it is really hard to actually look with eyes open at the moment we're living through. The climate crisis alone, but it isn't only the climate crisis. It's all of these other, just like that we kick the can down the road on a lot of issues, and it's all coming to do at once. And so, of course, if we think we have to look at it alone, we look away. But creating kind of collective containers where we can look together, I think, is what

we need more of. That because it helps us bear it. It helps us bear it. And also, like art has a huge role to play in transmuting that which is painful to look at and mixing it with beauty and catharsis and release. I want to go back to something you said about another salutary impact of this unselving that you went through by chasing Naomi Wolf, other Naomi down the rabbit hole, which is that it seems like it reduced any sense of separation and perhaps even superiority you may have

felt about people with whom you disagree. You know, in the quote I read from you earlier, you talked about how we're not seeing one another because we're so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto other people. And you go on to say, and this is another quote, to be clear, I'm not planning to embrace my doppelganger as a long-lost relative, but doppelgangers by messing with our heads and our illusions of sovereignty can teach us this lesson that we're not as separate from one another as we might think, not as individuals, and perhaps not even as groups of individuals who've been born into various kinds of seemingly eternal fratricidal tools. And you know, that just rhymes a lot with something that I think about a lot as somebody who's been prone

to feeling separate or superior from people with whom I disagree either personally or politically, that you know, it just dawned on me in the last couple of years, that if I came out of those wounds and had those life conditions, I'd probably believe and do the same shit that those people are doing.

And that I find soothing, actually. Is that land for you? Absolutely. Yeah, it really does. I think we need to do a lot more of that kind of empathy work. And it's interesting. I mean, I think when I started this project, I really did. I don't know.

There's a pre-raffulate painting. It's one of the earliest depictions of doppelgangers by Rosetti, and it depicts a couple in medieval dress walking in the woods, meeting their doubles. And the man draws his sword against his double and the woman faints. And the title of the painting is when they met themselves, which is, you know, a doppelganger journey, you are always going to

meet yourself in the woods. You may think that you're going to draw your sword and be, you know, the last you standing and a fight for your name, but you will, you will end up meeting yourself somehow or another. Well, yeah, you see it in the Empire Strikes Back and now I'm exposing myself as a total nerd. You mean like the guy who's not going to be able to do that? And also, but Luke goes into a Yoda sends Luke into a cave and says, don't fight whatever you see there and he sees Darth Vader and he smites him and then the mask comes off and he sees his own face under Darth Vader's mask. I probably should have told you this before you wrote the book.

We've got that in the trailer. That's gonna be good. Good doppelganger stuff. There's so much. It's such a rich topic. It really is. And it sounds like, I mean, you write this that the net effect for you has been,

it's like you use the word comma. And then you quote somebody named John Berger who told you calm Berger. Berger. Sorry. I apologize to you, John, who taught you calm as a form of resistance. Yeah. So John Berger was, he passed away a few years ago, novelist and literary critic. And he became famous with this BBC series called Ways of Seeing, which trained a generation in how to look at art and also in the concept of the male gaze, the way different people are positioned in art. But yeah, I think comb, it's not the opposite of passion, it's not the opposite, of like righteous indignation,

but it is the precondition to make any kind of thoughtful decisions. And I am struck when I research conspiracy culture that the affective aim of so many of the theories that swirl is to get people into a state of panic. And if that is successful, then we are incapable of reasoning or doing any of this kind of, you know, more empathetic work that we're talking about. You know, I don't think we can become all the time, but I do think for me as a writer, that's why I write, you know, and it's an illusion, right? Because you make order out of the chaos of life, you organize things into categories, and the effect of it, if it's successful, is it makes you calm and with any luck makes some of your readers feel calm too, right? And the chaos is all still swirling and we still need to respond to it.

But if we're doing it right, we have found a point of calm in the storm where we're able to think more loosely. When you talk about the affective aim of conspiracy theorists to create panic, how do you differentiate that from your aims over the years to wake us up to systemic issues related to capitalism that we need to be aware of. Are you not going for panic? I don't think I am. I mean, what Berger wrote about

it was in response to the shock doctrine. He said that the effect it had on him was to instill a sense of calm because he felt that there was an order, there was a logic. You know, this is part of the ways that I've had to loosen the grip on myself. I do work pretty hard to be calm. And yes, I don't think that that is antithetical to sharing information that may be distressing, but I think there are different ways of sharing information. I think there are ways of sharing it that may inspire people to act. I mean, move people, and there are ways of sharing it that may inspire people to act. I mean, move people and there are ways of sharing it, which are really just about shaking them and making them scared.

And I don't think I do that. I really have tried not to do that over the years. And yeah, I mean, it's one of the things that was hardest about being confused with Naomi Wolf was that she would often say that she was terrified, that this is the most terrifying, you know, and her affective state was this sort of being terrified and spreading terror in others.

And I also question why I try to stay as calm as I do, you know, like I think some of it is probably misogyny, like some of it is that as a woman in public, I'm supposed to be calm. Nobody likes a hysteric, you know, so I've probably overly trained myself to relay distressing information in a way that is effectively calm. Maybe that sends a mixed message, like maybe people don't know what to do with the combination of

distressing information and a calm delivery, but no, I'd strive for calm. Yeah, I mean, in the Buddhist tradition, we talk a lot about equanimity being a precondition for truly effective compassion. You need to have some balance in order to approach big problems and suffer it. But I don't want to turn off the part of me that has the ability to be indignant. You know, I mean, when I know I'm depressed, it's when I can't feel those things. You know, I, my research is around the climate crisis, I co-lead a research center about climate justice and injustice. And I know I'm in trouble when I feel kind of deadened to the

injustices of the impacts of the climate crisis. It's so unequal, you know, who created the crisis and who's on the front lines. I wanna still be able to be mad about that, but I don't, I wanna do it from a place of control calm. I don't wanna numb out. Amen to that. To the extent that I understand Buddhism at all,

my understanding is that indignation is not off the table. It's just a question of what do you want to be your fuel? Do you want it to be just fear, dread, hatred, and fury? Or do you want to have it be actually giving a shit about the problem and wanting to help people? And the latter is love. Right, that's just another way of saying it. The latter is a cleaner burning fuel. It's also, yeah, definitely last longer. You burn out last. No, I mean, I think about that as a parent, you know,

even though all my research is about the climate crisis, I waited as long as I possibly could before I told my kid about the climate crisis. You know, I wanted him to have as many beautiful experiences in nature without it being all mixed up with extinction and loss because I want him to be able to defend this place and the places that he loves from a place of love and protection, which can get fierce, which should get fierce. Yeah, I agree. Two more questions for me. One is you have referenced

their various points in this conversation. How tricky it is to interact with capitalism and logos because of the many pernicious impacts of capitalism, you know, the shadow lands of people who are unseen victims of many of our consumer decisions, the impact on the climate, the impact on our psychology of everybody feeling they need to have a personal brand. And yet, apparently, you drink Diet Coke. And we all, you know, to use that as a night. So well, you're not anymore. Okay. Well, my point is not the Diet Coke, which is that we exist in the capitalist system anyway. So how do you recommend we interact with the unavoidable without going off the grid or without constantly living in a state of self-laceration?

Yeah, well, you know, I do occasionally have a Diet Coke. But I think this is one other occasionally have a diapoe. But I think this is one other way that we overburden the self. And we imagine that we can solve huge global collective problems through our individual selves and personal behaviors and performances. And there is no way as individual consumers that we are going to move the needle in the

face of still growing carbon emissions. That is going to be the work of policy. That doesn't mean that it doesn't matter because we are social animals and we look to each other for social cues. So I think that it does matter when we see each other taking it seriously enough to change our behaviors, but that's the main way that those decisions matter. They mainly matter as a form of social communication, not as actually this is going to be lowering emissions. And I think that we just have to be generous with ourselves and with each other that we didn't build this system,

but we are all in it. And you know, one of the things I'm really trying to do by implicating myself in all of these contradictions of like, yeah, I wrote a book against branding and I am worried about my brand. That is what is happening right now. That is why I'm upset about being confused with her. And here's what troubles me about that. And maybe we should all be less worried, but nobody's going to listen to me saying we should all be less worried unless I'm willing to fess up that I worry.

But I still don't think this is something that we're going to address in any meaningful way just on our own. This is system work, and this is political work, which is why it is important that we find each other, that we build relationships that can engage in civic life and political life. And I see that happening. I'm talking to you from Los Angeles and you know, this is the shiny glitzy city of dreams and half of it's on strike right now.

And you know, there's all these beautiful people on the picket line, you know, finding solidarity and realizing that they don't just want to compete with each other for the next job. They actually want to be in coalition and it's kind of cool. Right. So step one, as we've established, get over yourself, step two, get involved. Find your people.

Final question from me. I'm sure you get asked this all the time. Have you talked to Naomi Wolfe about your book? I reached out to her. She used to reach out to me online to try to pull me into various debates about theories of hers. I would talk about climate action, like it's a green new deal and she had a theory about that. So she has reached out to me in the past,

but not since this flip over to what I call the mirror world. I reached out to her, including through a mutual friend, and you know, four different ways, and didn't hear anything back. I think she feels so misrepresented and mistreated by people who she would put in the basket of liberal media and I guess she puts me in that basket that I think she doesn't think it's worth talking, but if she changes her mind, I'm here. I did lie a little bit when I said those were my last two questions.

I do have two questions I always ask at the end of every interview. One of them is, is there something I should have asked, but didn't? I don't think so. No, I think we covered a lot of good stuff. I agree. Then the final question is, can you please shamelessly plug your new book and anything else you would like to plug? Okay, my new book is called Dopplerganger, a trip into the mirror world and it's published by

for our stress-jurus and I also read my own audiobook for the first time. So yeah, thank you so much for all of this time and such a lovely conversation. I was just going to say that to you. Really appreciate. Thank you. Thanks again to Naomi Klein. Thanks to you for listening. Really appreciate you listening to this show. I wouldn't have a job without you. So thank you, seriously. Also, if you want to do me a solid,

give us a rating or a review on your podcast player. And go check out the stuff we're posting on TikTok and Instagram. Recently, we're doing a bunch of experiments with wisdom bombs via social media. We'd love your feedback on that. Thank you most of all to everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davy, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson.

DJ Casimir is our senior producer, Marissa Schneidermann is our senior editor, and Kimi Regler is our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands, Rotar Theme. Check out the new Islands record. Just came out very, very good. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode with Sarah Cooper. Hey, hey, prime members.

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