WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1469 - Naomi Klein

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Naomi Klein was faced with a rather common problem. She was consistently mistaken for someone else. But because Naomi is one of our most perceptive and astute social critics, she was able to to turn that case of mistaken identity into an examination of the many public threats pervading society and how they’re connected by the deliberate blurring of reality and identity. Naomi and Marc talk about all the research and conclusions of her new book, Doppelgänger: A Trip Into The Mirror World. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Death is in our air. This year's most anticipated series, FX's Shogun, only on Disney+. We live and we die. We control nothing beyond that. An epic saga based on the global best-selling novel by James Clavel. To show your true heart is to risk your life.

When I die here, you'll never leave Japan alive. FX's Shogun, a new original series streaming February 27th, exclusively on Disney Plus. 18 plus subscription required. T's and C's apply. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing with cannabis legalization. It's a brand new challenging marketing category.

legalization. It's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. Lock the gates! and ACAS Creative. What the fuck, buddies? What the fuck, Knicks? What's happening? I'm Marc Maron. This is my podcast.

Welcome to it. It's called WTF. It's been called that since 2009. Founded in 2009. Going strong since 2009. Wow. Long time. Staying steady. What's happening? How's everybody out there? Today on the show, I talked to Naomi Klein. This has been something I've wanted to do my entire life. I've been a big fan of Naomi Klein for a long time, since back in the era America days. I just always thought she was amazing, amazing thinker. She is a formidable leftist intellect. She's an author, an activist, a true public intellectual. Her first book was No Logo, which became an anti-globalization Bible for many people. She also wrote The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Her new book is Doppelganger, A Trip into the Mirror World, which I read and underlined like a fiend. When I knew Naomi Klein was coming over, I'm like, I got to read this book.

And Brendan was like, don't read it too early. I had it months ago. And he's like, just try to save it for a couple weeks before you finish it, a couple weeks before she comes over. So it stays fresh because this is, this is heavy stuff, heady stuff, dense. It's not dense. It's very readable because there's a lot, there's a kind of a through line about her tackling the reality that, you know, in the, in the world, in the social media platform world and in the world in general, uh, she's often confused with Naomi Wolf, who is in some ways the opposite of Naomi Klein. And that is the portal to the book and her entering the mirror world, or as we know it as the non-reality bubble, the world of the conspiracistsists the fascists the uh false informationists but uh but yeah i read it

man i read it and i underlined the fuck out of it and you know when we were talking you know i knew what i want to talk about i knew i was excited about but there was like a point in the episode where i'm like let me just make sure i talked about everything i underlined and then i started going through the book and i'm like, I underlined so much. There's so much underlined. I will, I'll, I'll have to go back and think about it. But I think we did cover it. I think we did cover it mostly, but do know that I was insanely excited to talk to Naomi

Klein this week. I'm doing five shows at Helium in St. Louis Thursday September 14th through Saturday September 16th I'll be at Wise Guys in Las Vegas on September 22nd and 23rd for four shows I'm in Bellingham Washington at the Mount Baker Theater for one show on Saturday October 14th as part of the Bellingham Exit Festival I'm at the Chemo Theater in Albuquerque New Mexico for one show on November 11th and Denver Colorado I'll be at the Comedy Works South for four shows, November 17th and 18th. Go to WTFpod.com slash tour for tickets. I'm talking to fucking Naomi Klein today.

Everybody should be listening to Naomi Klein. Everybody should be reading Naomi Klein to sort of get a sense. Klein. Everybody should be reading Naomi Klein to sort of get a sense. If you want to consider yourself a critical thinker or somebody who is seeing things with the proper perspective in terms of what is happening, and then with very sort of decent, but seemingly difficult conclusions and solutions, you should be listening. And I just started to think about the nature of discourse in the culture we live in there's no time for it for most people and it's a lot of buttons and quick bait and and simplification and misinformation and things that make emotions go uh get excited emotional reaction driven stuff and then there's stuff that gets the juice of controversy these

these bits of clickbait and bullshit and fake controversy that keeps us distracted from the bigger issues at hand, primarily climate change and fascism. There's no other issues. There are no other issues. Cancel culture is not an issue. The problem with free speech is not an issue. Hunter Biden's not an issue. Epstein's list is not an issue. Vaccines are not an issue. Climate change and fascism. Those are all that's happening. And what the fuck is going on?

What is going to happen? How is it going to turn out? What can we do? Those are the only issues. All of the rest of it is garbage. And coincidentally, I'll be talking to Naomi Klein about a lot of that stuff. But in a nuanced way, in a personal way, there are personal stories that sort of lead into all this stuff. But that's it, man.

The rest is just distraction. So some updates. You want a fridge update? Well, this has taken a turn. And it's not, it's not, it's not taking a turn for the, for the better. So, you know, Alex came over and he put the door back on with his son. There was no yelling. There was not a big problem, but he did put the door back on. And as I reported, I believe they then said, or Alex said that he had to bring some other guy over with a dolly to pull the

whole fridge out so he could get around back to put some tubes on or something so that was where we left it but after they left I looked inside the freezer and it had been making ice now you realize that the original problem was the ice maker and it was making ice so I texted Alex I'm like it's making ice what the fuck I took a picture of the ice it made. It made like, and then I kept emptying it in the bags to see if it would keep making ice. And it kept making ice. And I was like, holy shit, look at that. I don't know what they did or if they did anything, but it's making ice again. And I had my valve downstairs. I put it on a very easy flow, not too much water. Cause we assumed that was the problem. Water pressure was making the noise and fucking up the ice machine. So everything was great. I thought like, finally we're through

the tunnel. He doesn't need to come back. And no less than a few hours after I had that resolution, uh, the fucking noise came back and it came back louder. It was the exact noise that drove me to reach out to these repair guys to begin with. So here we are. The freezer is closed. The door works. And the exact thing that happened when I first called them after this three-month, four-month arc is now happening again, but a little louder. So now I turned it off, and that's where we're at. And I told Alex, I said, hey Hey man, it's back. And he's

like, yeah, I got to replace the part. And I'm like, Oh my God, deja vu. Did any of the other stuff really happen? Did any of the other stuff really happen, Alex? So that's where that's at. so that's where that's at. So look, I like my cats. I love my cats. Okay. I'm very close with my cats. I have a relationship with them. You know, we, when you have cats, each one is very unique for a while there. I thought that Sammy had, uh, was, uh, somehow mentally, um, handicapped. It's hard to tell what cats I feel like like he i thought he was very i thought he might have been a little stupid a little dim uh sort of odd which he is all those things but it's it's turning out now uh two plus years in however old he is that i'm starting to understand sam uh sammy and i i you know i've i figured out a tone uh that can speak to Sam with, and I can create a focus just for Sam that is Sam-centric.

And we're starting to understand each other a little bit. So I'm happy to report that I don't think Sam is mentally disabled or stupid. He might be neurodivergent. Is that what you call it? He may be on the cat spectrum a little bit. So also, Charlie, I don't know where he's at now because he's a little over a year old, and I don't know when it stops because now we're in a phase where knocking over any kind of can is what happens. And I drink sodas, Zevias, and I drink my liquid deaths. And no matter where I leave them,

if I'm not paying attention, Charlie will knock them over and spill them all over everything. He just knocks shit over. And that's his thing, okay? He's knocking cans over and he's climbing curtains. He will just launch himself up to the top of the curtains in my bedroom and then jump down on me while I'm

sleeping. So now he can't sleep and now they're out. And then I got to let him back in because Sammy will want to come into the room at around 4.35 in the morning. He'll cry and scratch. And then I open the door and they're all there and they just want some, uh, some, uh, a little, a little snuggle time. But so we're climbing curtains and we're knocking over cans. And so yesterday it happened. He knocked over a can and some of it got on my computer and it didn't kill the computer. It was touch and go. Uh, the computer is compromised. The computer is now, I believe, mentally handicapped in that it got the corner. So the little touch sensor doesn't work. And I was just livid.

I was furious at fucking Charlie, but they don't register that. It's very fleeting. They don't give a fuck. And then I got hold of my computer guy. He's like, well, it should all be up on the cloud and that should be comforting. But then I was sort of like, what is going on with the cloud? Is the cloud the great zeitgeist of all of our everything? You know, I thought like, well, that's good.

But like, it's all up there. Everything's up there. Wait, how is, and then I started thinking of the cloud mills. When I was driving through the Midwest, I can't even remember where. They're just these weird blocks of structure out on the horizon. Just acres and acres of what looks like a windowless place just humming away, maintaining our collective unconscious through whatever we do on our phones and on our computers. It's sort of some sort of a mid-level platform of what is the Jungian unconscious.

I'm tripping balls, man, without anything. Just caffeine. Tripping balls about the cloud consciousness and wondering if it's a good thing, but grateful for it because I had to order a new computer and we can just download all this stuff that I don't need anymore onto my new computer. All the digital detritus from the beginning of my digital existence can now be redownloaded onto a new machine and kept in the memory there of things that I will not visit. Though I did recently go through my contacts and it's turning into a bit of a graveyard. Yes.

So I was going through my contacts, scrolling through them, looking at old message threads. And it was pretty heartbreaking because there's a lot of dead people in my contacts, but I don't want to take them out. I don't know what to do. I just leave them there. They live, they live on in text threads. It's kind of weird though, right? I guess that's all up on the cloud too. The cloud is kind of like heaven. The cloud is a technological heaven. It's where all your dead friends still exist. All your exchanges with them still exist.

Their being and whatever was on their computer. There is a heaven. It's the cloud. Naomi Klein is here. Strap in. Her book, Doppelganger, A Trip Into the Mirror World, comes out tomorrow, September 12th, wherever you get books.

And this is me, slightly manic, talking to somebody I respect a great deal, Naomi Klein. You can get anything you need with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats. But meatballs and mozzarella balls, yes, we can deliver that. Uber Eats.

Get almost, almost anything. Order now. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details. Death is in our air. This year's most anticipated series, FX's Shogun, only on Disney+. We live and we die. We control nothing beyond that.

An epic saga based on the global best-selling novel by James Clavel. To show your true heart is to risk your life. When I die here, you'll never leave Japan alive. FX's Shogun, a new original series streaming February 27thth exclusively on Disney+. 18 plus subscription required. T's and C's apply.

I think there's a whole kind of crowd of progressives that kind of thrive on hopelessness. Do you believe that to be true? That they're sort of like, ugh, I knew it was bad, but it's just so bad. I think it's increasing. And I see it around climate change a fair bit. Sure, yeah. There's definitely more of a just kind of wallowing in the doom school. Right.

And there's lots to be very, very frightened about and concerned about. I mean, I'm not a sunny optimist by any means. No, I wasn't. Yeah. I mean, I'm not a sunny optimist by any means. No, I wasn't. Yeah. But I guess I just sort of feel like I don't really understand. I completely understand feeling hopeless.

Yeah. And I completely understand feeling doomy. Yeah. I don't totally understand the motivation to tell everyone about it. Because it is contagious, right? Like we are social beings. So like, you know, if we spread an optimistic message, if we convince other people that there is something that we can do, and then they do it, that has an effect on the world, right? We change each other. world, right? We change each other. And if you go around and you have a big platform and you just tell people there's no hope, it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I had this argument with Chris Hedges ages ago. Oh my God, that's a heavy conversation you've been in for five minutes. I mean, this was 2007 because the shock doctrine had just come out and we were both at the Miami

Book Fair. And I gave a speech, which I did not consider an optimistic speech about the shock doctrine, but I did say that there were things we could do to, you know, try to stop the war and to, you know, to hold these people accountable. And he said to me backstage, he said, I don't share your optimism. I said, it wasn't optimistic. I just said that they were like, that all is not lost. And then he listed all the things, the reasons why we were doomed and, you know, they control the media, they control this, they control that they have the churches. And I just said, if I felt like that, I'd stay home. I'm not going to argue with you, but when you stand up in front of hundreds of people and tell people that, that has an effect on the world, you know?

So that said, you don't have a responsibility just because you're a great reporter to spread optimism. That's a different thing. He's not an inspirational speaker. No, no. Are there any on the left? I mean, is there someone I don't know about? Is there a leader in our midst that is spreading the message of optimism and hope and can do? There are people who are more optimistic.

You know, Rebecca, I used to have Rebecca Solnit on. She's good at being, she wrote Hope in the Dark. You know, she's good at that. I'm not looking for optimism necessarily, but I found in reading the book that like when I was kind of, I was wary of the ending because I knew that you were going to have to, not the very ending, the punchline about the other Naomi, but the, I don't want to do spoilers. You actually have a book where I'm like,

I don't want to spoil the end. But I knew that there was going to be some practical kind of, you know, organizing ideas and ways that people can get involved and ways that people can sort of reach out to other humans. The idea that we're all humans, go outside, meet some other humans and do the right thing kind of stuff. I like that, but there was still part of me that's sort of like, no, I don't know. Well, there's also, I think, unlike my previous books,

like my previous books, there's also some kind of homework in terms of the inner work, because a lot of, a lot of this journey for me has been about looking at just how much our individual egos, our individual selves, um, how much space they take up, how much energy they take up, how much labor they take up. Yeah. It seems like that's where it all started. I mean, I would assume it feels like there's a memoir in here. Like this is about as close as you're going to come to a memoir. And it was essentially you addressing yourself in relation to this other Naomi,

but also in relation to things you've talked about before, personal branding and what that means, and also the isolation of what capitalism has done to us as individuals. So there you were stranded, wherever you were stranded during COVID. And I think we should sort of, you know, kind of set up the book a little bit because it was, you were having an issue. It really starts with you eventually having an issue with this other Naomi, Naomi Wolf, who you're confused about. My producer, Brendan, told me about something that happened at Air America. We weren't involved in it, but it had something to do with Sam Seder thinking he was booking you and accidentally booking her.

It happened for years this has been happening. Oh, yeah. Oh, man, I never heard that story. But so at the beginning of it, oh, before we start, I want to ask you one other thing, personal. Yeah, my dad's a doctor. I feel like we have things in common. I feel like that we come from sort of the similar stuff Jew-wise. from sort of the similar stuff Jew-wise. But when you talk about learning medical things before other things, like way too young.

I mean, like my dad was an orthopedic surgeon, so I was seeing like, you know, surgeries and there were all these stacks of magazines with every kind of illness in them. What do you think it did to you? I'm just laughing. Scarred me for life. Right. Yeah. No, because I'm just laughing. Scarred me for life. Right.

Yeah. No, because I'm just laughing because my dad was in obstetrics. Yeah. So the things that were lying around were like, you know, like heads crowning and things like that. Right. Really, really inappropriate. And you're like eight?

Yeah. Like, no!. And you're like eight? Yeah. Like, no! Yeah. That's probably why I waited for a really long time before having kids. Yeah. But you think it had an impact on me. I've been talking about it on stage, one in particular thing where my dad took me to the hospital to watch a film on how to do a procedure.

And I must have been like 10. And it was like a total hip. And it was like, you know, cutting and hammers. And it was, I I'm just recently looking at my life trying to try to figure out why I am me and which, which particular trauma in the spectrum of it had the most effect. Well, this, okay. You know, this is the thing about, about thing about having a doppelganger is it's fascinating because if you are a person who tries to control themselves in the world, you know, if you're a person with like a high degree of self-consciousness, you're... Any person or a public person? I would think any person who probably cares a little too much about how they are projecting themselves into the world.

Yeah. Having a doppelganger is really going to challenge that, right? Because somebody else is out there doing things in the world. People think it is you. Right. And you just can't do anything about it. And you just can't do anything about it. So you can polish and you can control and you can be very, very careful in your choice of words and what you wear.

And I'm a person who I think put a fair amount of work into controlling my public image because it's hard to be a woman in public. But also because I had very exhibitionist parents, like, you know, like my parents without those kinds of boundaries. Right. So that made me very, like, it made me feel like I had to be the adult. That's interesting. It's sort of like, it's like the child of, well, obviously this isn't the case, but if you're a child of an alcoholic who's without boundaries and erratic, either you become an alcoholic, you become the control one. The one who tries to control. Yeah, yeah. So if you have, like, parents that are way out there, one way or the other,

either you're going to be like that or you're going to be like, no, I'm going to lock down. Yeah. So the idea of the doppelganger, because that's the name of the book, you were able to sort of source it throughout the history of literature, philosophy. You refer to Philip Roth's Operation Shylock a lot. What does it mean to you, you know, as a portal for cultural criticism? How does that work? Well, you know, it's this recurring literary technique, image, figure. I mean, back to

ancient mythology, but in the history of modern literature and film, it just recurs again and again. And it's often a kind of a warning. There's often an uncertainty in doppelganger stories about whether the doppelganger really is a separate person or whether it's just a projection of a kind of unhinged imagination. So that's true. And then it turns out that they, often it turns out that they aren't real. Right. I don't know if you, did you ever see Enemy by Denis Villeneuve? No. That's a good doppelganger film that's loosely based on a novel called The Double by Jose Saramago. And then there's the, everybody does adaptations of Dostoevsky's short story, The Double. There was one starring Jesse Eisenberg a few years back, which was really good. And there's that uncertainty. Like, is this another person or is this me? And

ultimately, you either get overtaken by your double or you figure out how to sort of inhabit yourself better, right? So I, you know, this is like, I think when I started out, I didn't really understand that in the end it was going to be about me. Like, I think I thought, I'm just going to write a book about her. I'm not about her. She's got it coming. You know, I thought she was like, you know, a friend of mine put it that she's like a narrow aperture to look at a bunch of things. And I had wanted to look at different kinds of doublings. Like my first book, No Logo, was about branding

and it was about lifestyle branding, but I wrote it in the 90s and that was before... Social media. Yeah, so that was before regular people could see themselves as brands. Celebrities, like, you know, I was writing about Michael Jordan and Oprah, but I wasn't writing about just like a normal undergrad.

Or somebody that can create a fictional version of themselves by just changing a name or creating an avatar. Right. And live in the world. And so I had really wanted to return to that material. And so it struck me that using my own doppelganger really as a literary technique, which is what I do in the book. I mean, she is a case study of a certain kind of left-to-right crossover star.

But more than that, it's a book about all these different kinds of doublings and projections, like the way we create a second us that represents us to the world on social media or in video games, like with our avatars. The way tech companies do that to us by hoovering up our data and creating a profile of us. That's our digital doppelganger, really. And now AI companies kind of breathe life into them. And, you know, there can be a AI Marc Maron doing God knows what. I hope he's doing a good job at it. And you can relax. Making an okay living.

He's going to take your job. Yeah, I'm sure. So that's what I was thinking, too, before you came over, is that, like, within us, there's more than one doppelganger. Because, like, I like to – you refer to your image, but, I mean, you had to sort of come to grips with the fact that you are a brand. Yeah. And that, you know, it seems like during COVID, you had the time, you know, a sort of panicky time. Because, like, I mean, look, I live in the world of panic. And, you know, in your book, there's a point where you say that's sort of the way it's designed right now in terms of how things are being presented to us. in terms of how things are being presented to us.

But it felt like to me that you had that moment that we all have if we have any public personality out in the world is eventually you get mildly obsessed, you get angry, and that obsession, that angry obsession, becomes sort of a fascination. And all of a sudden, you cannot stop yourself from listening to Bannon's War Room, which you just wanted to check in to see what your doppelganger

Naomi Wolf was doing. But then you're sort of like, this is the door into what you call the mirror world. Yeah. And I listened to a lot of Bannon. And yeah, I mean, I have been getting confused with her, but it was much more periodic before COVID. It would happen occasionally. I would have like weird moments.

Like I remember one time I was on book tour and I met this famous Australian writer and I said, nice to meet you. And he very huffily told me that we had met before. In fact, we had been at a Christmas party at Random House in London. I'm like, what are you talking about? And then later, I just thought he definitely thought it was Naomi Wolf. And often there's a bit of anti-Semitism, particularly with the Brits, where they're just like, oh, a bunch of loudmouthed Naomis with lots of opinions. Another one. Jew-esque. Yes. I mean, it happens a lot with the Brits, I'll tell you.

It's happening all over a little more now, to be honest with you. it's happening all over a little more now, to be honest with you. But so it was just one of these things that would happen periodically because, you know, I'd log on and all of a sudden there'd be a bunch of people angry at me about something that I hadn't done, you know, like, and it would turn out, oh, she'd said something really inappropriate about Julian Assange or Dominique Strauss-Kahn. And, you know, and so I would tweet like, keep your Naomi straight or something like that. It was not a big deal.

Speaking of sort of my overly developed self-consciousness and sense of shame, truly the worst moment in my Naomi confusion, because I am a repressed person. Yeah. You may not know this about me, but I'm sharing with you now because it's your podcast.

Yeah. That's what we're supposed to do. You can do whatever you want. Yeah. And anyway, I am a pretty repressed person. And at one point, it came to my attention that she had written a book called Vagina. Yeah. And it was about her troubles with her vagina and her troubles having an orgasm and then

figuring out how to have an orgasm again. And it's like if you were to design a doppelganger that was just scientifically designed to cause maximum humiliation to me personally and my particular bundle of neuroses, it would definitely be somebody writing a book about their vagina while making a lot of factual errors. Well, that's the amazing setup for this because this woman was a lefty for the most part. I found myself trying to psychoanalyze her through this book, and I think you were a bit too. And at the end, you know, I was at the very end where you kind of reveal that first encounter. You know, I definitely have my ideas of her, but it seemed to me that as a doppelganger that is going to take you on

this journey through why fascism is happening globally because of late-stage capitalism, you know, that you couldn't have picked, this is like a gift. Gift that keeps on giving. Yeah. And that it's fascinating. Because when I started, you know, I have this quote that is a bit of a kind of a recurrent mantra in the book from Philip Roth's Operation Shylock, just to bring another Jew into the conversation. Which is, you know, Operation Shylock, I mean, every Philip Roth novel is a doppelganger novel. He always has a protagonist who is clearly—

You think it might be him, some version of him, yeah. Zuckerberg, you know. Some version of him, yeah. Zuckerberg, you know. But in Shylock, he goes all the way. And the main character of the book is named Philip Roth, who has written all of Philip Roth's books, who has a doppelganger who is also calling himself Philip Roth and who's running around Jerusalem causing all kinds of mayhem. And Roth writes, it's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous. And so when I started this little investigation, which was supposed to just be like maybe an essay that I was going to pitch to The New Yorker and then it just kept getting more and more. It was more ridiculous than serious. Carlson and the rest of them really decided that she was the key to the COVID moms, right? Yeah. To get these sort of angry, like suburban moms.

Bannon says this explicitly. All these moms who are listening to Naomi Wolf, who were upset about closed schools, who were upset about vaccine mandates, who were tired of being mocked as Karens. mocked as Karens, they saw them as the key to getting the white women suburban votes that they haven't been able to get, which is really their key to getting the White House back. So it started to get more and more serious. Then she got a gun, then she started taking pictures of her gun, then she started posting pictures of her husband who also has an automatic weapon. posting pictures of her husband who also has an automatic weapon. And so it is still like I'm still in the perpetual kind of laugh-cry emoji state of like,

is this funny? Is it not? But it's more serious than ridiculous now. And I think the closer we get to the 2024 elections, the less we're laughing about the Marjorie Taylor Greene's and, you know, the Jewish space lasers because they've got a hell of a lot of power. They do, because and this is sort of like I think the way we can go through this stuff, you know, the because you talk about everything in here. Like, I think you talk about the entire arc of the things that you've been intellectually interested in and interested in as an activist. It's all in here. So we can't go through all of it.

But the stuff that resonated with me because it gave me some answers around how to assess this thing, because I had a guy in here named Robert Guffey a few weeks ago. He's a professor of literature out at University of California in Long Beach, but he wrote a book called Operation Mindfuck. You know it? I have the book, yeah. Well, did you take a look at it? Because he really sort of gives you a historical overview of conspiracies and how they've built on themselves. And you do that as well, that, you know, the go-to conspiracy, and I think you frame it in the book somewhere as being a go-to for like thousands of years is Blaine the Jews. So it's all going to end up there, right? But I thought what was interesting and what you're talking about now in Naomi Wolf

being used by the right, volunteering for it, but I think characterologically or psychologically, and just like, I want to get this out so I don't forget it. It seems to me that when she came out criticizing Israel, that the way that fractured the left in terms of respecting her as an intellectual, I think that kind of broke her. And I think that, you know, she realized, like, well, why don't I just go somewhere where where they'll all believe me and I'll you know, I can remain a star as long as I stay within the talking points of that context. star as long as I stay within the talking points of that context. I think it was a really important point on the journey where, yeah, she said and wrote some really important and good stuff, I think, in defense of Palestinian human rights. You know, she identifies as a liberal Zionist, but she was shocked at the willingness to bomb civilians in Gaza and the death toll it took, particularly on children. And she started to write about it and, you know, maybe she used

some overblown language. She always does, but she was essentially absolutely right. And she claims that it cost her a position at Barnard that she, um, was, you know, like she was called an anti-Semite and, you know, by this rabbi who, you know, does this professionally. And so I think, you know, the thing about Wolf, and I write about this in the book, is that even though people have been conflating us, one of the differences between me and her, other than that we're different people, other than, you know, I grew up in Canada. She grew up in the States. She has blue eyes, I have brown eyes. The biggest difference that I care about is that she's a liberal and I'm a leftist.

You know, she was quite a main... Her analysis is quite mainstream. Right. Always has been. Yeah. The Beauty Myths and her other feminist books have really, you know, they were not a radical critique at all of patriarchy.

They were basically saying an argument for women to be treated, it was a little bit like lean-in feminism, like Sheryl Sandberg, you know. She was very explicit that she just, she thought that this beauty standards were holding women back from being able to compete with men on equal terms in the workplace. Which is not a breakthrough critique. No, no. She believed in the system and she wanted it to be fair. Right.

You think the system of capitalism is totally corrupt. I think you could make the system, you could remake the system so that women and people of color and queer people were as perfectly represented in elite spaces

as they are in the population, and the system would still be incredibly cruel, and the planet would still burn. But I guess what I'm saying is that she believed in the meritocracy. She followed a certain kind of career path. She married somebody who worked, he was the editor of the New York Times op-ed page. Then he was a White House speechwriter for Bill Clinton. She worked as a political consultant for the Democratic Party. She was one of Al Gore's top consultants in 2000.

And so what happened with Israel is that she kind of got kicked out of liberalism's house. Right. You know? And that betrayal, I think, just broke her ego. It broke her ego. And she needed a new house. Right. She needed somewhere else to go. It's interesting. She'd go to that house, just broke her ego. It broke her ego, and she needed a new house. She needed somewhere else to go.

It's interesting she'd go to that house, the Mirror World house. Now, so this is the thing that I've been, the dots you connected for me, that the Mirror World, the primary tool, once they've sort of tapped in and exploited the panic and fear and anger of the denizens of the Shadowlands and GOP, and we'll talk about the Shadowlands in a minute, GOP operatives who really turn out to be uninspired grifters, you know, most of them, and shameless fascists at this point, is this appropriation of language. Now, you really kind of thoroughly break that down. But if we could talk about it, that there is this futility on behalf of liberals and leftists that they've taken all the language.

I know you are, but what am I? And then they take it. And then we're standing there going, what did we say now? But how does that work? I mean, it seems so organized and it seems to go all the way down to even the sort of seemingly dumbest of righty influencers that they just kind of figured this system out. All you got to do is take the word tyranny, authoritarianism, any sort of labeling of victimization and apply it to us instead of letting them have it. Well, I don't think it's as simple as that.

You know, like, I'll give you like there's no doubt that they just appropriate wildly. But for like one example that I think a lot of people have seen is anti-vax, like anti-COVID vaxxers holding up signs that say like my body, my choice. Right. Right. I mean, that's obnoxious. It's hypocritical because some of these same people are perfectly happy to cheer the Supreme Court's attacks on Roe v. Wade. But I don't think that the fact that they are saying my body, my choice materially hurts

the movement for reproductive freedom because that movement is really organized and is actually doing a lot to defend reproductive freedom. So where I think they, where I think we're really screwed is when they appropriate ideas that we're not really using, that we have stopped using. Well, okay. I'll give you an example. And this was one of my more chilling moments in listening to Bannon. You know, I was tuned in one day, I think it was like you an example. And this was one of my more chilling moments in listening to Bannon. Yeah. I was tuned in one day, I think it was like December 2021. And he had this little audio montage, or I was listening, but it was probably a video montage too, where his producers had cut together the intros and outros to a bunch of cable news shows that said, brought to you by Pfizer. So it was like, Anderson Cooper, brought to you by Pfizer.

You know, like Rachel Maddow, brought to you by Pfizer. And the thing that chilled me about it was it was pretty indistinguishable from the kind of media education, like with help from Noam Chomsky, that I did, that we did, like at teach-ins in the 90s, you know, when we were talking about how the corporate media, you know, was sort of bought and paid for and there's certain critiques that would never make it on. And we had all read Manufacturing Consent

and I'm not throwing Manufacturing Consent under the bus. I think it's a really good book. What chilled me about it was I realized who on the left is talking about this anymore? We really are not talking about corporate control of the media anymore. There isn't a movement that is talking about this anymore. Because is it a lost fight? You know, I think because partly we become so reactive to them, right? So we are, like, I think Trump broke the political sort of spectrum. So we just became

kind of anti-Trump. He broke the world. Yeah. Yeah. And so the more systemic analysis of how, like, the world that produced Trump, a lot of the parts of it were abdicated. Like, so we weren't occupying those spaces. So then somebody like RFK gets to be the one who's talking about big pharma and is talking about corporate capture of government agencies. Listen, I used to talk about that all the time. There was a whole movement that was talking about corporate capture of our governments on the left, but where is that movement now? So this is what is scary. This is how fascism rises. It is a dialectic between the abandonments of neoliberalism, the latent and never disappearing white supremacy and Christian supremacy, but also the left not doing its job.

Because, you know, I can't believe I'm doing this, but Rosa Luxemburg did say it was socialism or barbarism. And barbarism is ascendant. And there isn't really a powerful socialist movement. You know, this is why Bannon was terrified of Bernie Sanders, because he didn't want to run Trump against Bernie Sanders, because Bernie Sanders makes Trump look like the counterfeit that he is, right? He wants to run Trump against a centrist corporate Democrat, because Trump looks authentic next to them, right? So for me, like what chills me, what scares me is when they appropriate something I know that we have left unattended. Well, but isn't that, look, and I'm guilty of it.

I know that, you know, I am a progressive at heart, but in function, you know, I don't do the work. I pay lip service to things. I don't get a sense. And I used to talk about this with Cedar and Cedar's, you know, a real left guy, but it doesn't seem like there, there is, uh, uh, an organizational consistency. And that was always the joke. It like when we used to be at air America, you know, the left is this huge tent and, you know, no one can decide on where to sit or who's going to have the table or what we're going to talk about. I mean, it sort of trivializes it, but there's a fragmentation that's implicit in it, but also stifles organization, no? Yeah. I mean, there is at the moment, you know, and, you know, one of the things

I write about at the end of the book was, you know, I was involved in the Sanders campaign. I was one of his surrogates on his climate policies. I'd never really gotten involved in a presidential campaign before in that way, but I went to five states with Bernie. And there's a very particular sort of experience of people who were part of the Bernie campaign, the experience of the pandemic, because it coincided exactly with Bernie's collapse, right? And so we went from the highest political high any of us had ever experienced. I was in Nevada when Bernie swept the strip. And we were like, what is happening? The Las Vegas strip just voted overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders. We thought anything was possible.

It was just like the people who make that You know, we thought anything was possible, you know. It was just like the people who make that city work, who clean the slot machines, who vacuum the hotel rooms, just stood up and said, we are going for universal health care and like, you know, $15 minimum wage. And then it all just shut down all at once. Like the world shut down. The Democratic Party rallied around Biden. And, you know, and so I guess what I'm just saying is I don shut down all at once. Like the world shut down, the Democratic Party rallied around Biden. And, you know, and so I guess what I'm just saying is I don't think all is lost. Like we have had moments where actually the left was stronger than it's been at any point in my lifetime. We didn't get, we didn't win.

We didn't win. But that, like I grew up in the 90s. Like we thought no one liked our ideas. You know, there's an incredible proof of concept when you look at Bernie, when you look at AOC. Like, so I wouldn't say the left is just hopeless. It can't organize. But we've had a few blows. There's no doubt. But I think one of the things that you were mentioning before and about the mirror world so we can, because it is a subtitle of this book, Your Time in the Mirror World, is that by appropriating these ideas that you say were abandoned by the left, they build this structure of being the people's sort of voice, right?

But I think inherent in the sort of my body, my choice thing, that that sort of illustrates the other tool of this right-wing momentum, which is constant false equivalency, constant. And also there's a lot of people that have been enabled by people like Bannon, like Rogan and who he platforms to believe that they have an intelligence because they're now up to speed with something. But what they're up to speed with is the mirror world, which makes it seem like they've really got a handle on things. But I think a lot of it is driven by false equivalency. Well, absolutely. And I mean, false equivalencies with,

there's this strange kind of victim jealousy that is happening. Like, I don't think it's a coincidence. It's one of the things that I get into in the book that this COVID denialism movement really takes off after the racial justice uprisings in the book, that this COVID denialism movement really takes off after the racial justice uprisings in the summer of 2020, when every industry is looking inward and going, wait a minute, maybe we should hire some black people. Maybe we should have some black shows on television. Like maybe we actually have to do some of these things that we have not been doing for so long. And then you have this movement filled with, and a lot of the people leading it are white women, white middle-aged women like me,

who are suddenly saying, it's apartheid. It's Jim Crow. I can't breathe, but they're talking about putting on a mask. Just wild appropriation and wild equivalencies. And it happens so quickly. Who drives that? and wild equivalencies. And it happens so quickly. Who drives that? Well, I think these podcasts, a lot of it drives it. I mean, I think the, I mean, look, God bless you, Mark,

for having like actually a progressive podcast that is part of people's lives. And I think, you know, from your experience, like there is a real intimacy to being a regular podcaster. I mean, Joe Rogan, like, what does he broadcast? Three hours a day. Bannon, also, like, hour and a half every single day. He's on for, like, 17 hours a week.

He is a bigger part of people's lives than anybody else in their lives. Who else do you spend 17 hours a week with? I can barely spend that time with myself. It's challenging. So it's very intimate. Okay, okay. And it's very intimate. Okay. And it's happening at a time when so many of our other social relationships are not available to us because of COVID.

Yeah. Right. So I think that they had a huge impact. And it was like the intersection of loneliness, these parasocial relationships that we have with people who we don't know, who we sort of feel like we know. Believe me, I understand that one. Because you're getting a lot, you probably get emails from that. Sure. Marriage proposals. Oh yeah, all that kind of stuff. But also the rabbit hole phenomenon is that, you know, the truth is, is that most people, well, I'm not going to call them stupid, I'm not going to call them ignorant, but don't have a framework for critical thinking.

And they don't have an education around history. So, you know, when history on the Internet, when everybody's yammering and everybody's making these movies that look like news, and even news like, what is that one? Plandemic? Plandemic was a big one. But there's news networks that are clearly shameless propaganda. It's one news network or something.

All this stuff happens in a present without historical context, right? I did a joke years ago about future generations where you'll hear things like, oh, Hitler was the guy with the mustache, right? point of reference and it's all happening at once and it's all sort of visceral and locks onto people's fears for their kids, for themselves, and for what they see the world. But this is all happening in these isolated moments. But, I mean, there's something where I get really alarmed

is when I realize that these big podcasts like Rogan Bannon, to a lesser extent, it's not like he talks about books all that much, although he does sometimes. But Jordan Peterson, you know? But that's Rogan's fault. What is Rogan's fault? That guy's success.

Right, definitely. He should have been left in academia to argue with progressives. That's all that guy deserves. You know, you got to have one at a college, but not one out touring. that guy deserves. You know, you got to have one at a college, but not one out touring. The point is, there is an appetite for people to be talked about as if they are intelligent, right? You know, so I think Peterson's appeal, part of it is that he's talking to people as if they could handle big books, big ideas, you know, as if they can sustain a thought for a period of time. Whereas, you know, match of the media that is smeared as being liberal media is in these tiny little sound bites and assumes that people are incapable of reading a book.

So the idea that the right is taking is more kind of, I mean, it's not intellectually serious, but it has more of an appetite or doing more of a performance of actually engaging with history, engaging with theory. That's big trouble. Like, when the hell did that happen? Sure. I mean, the left is supposed to be, you know, have the sort of theory corner. Yeah, but see, what happened is, is like, you know, and look, I know Rogan. I've known him for years.

And like, you know, as a thinker, that's not really the problem. It's who he platforms and his lack of ability to really push back. Right. And his choices are he's easily a lot of these free speech kind of pseudo libertarian guys are easily co-opted by the right. They just become stooges and they don't care. They're making money and they don't even think it through that much. I think what Rogan succeeded in doing, coming out of the world of UFC, is he made this a team sport.

Yeah, yeah. And what Bannon succeeded in doing was by co-opting all these young, angry, primarily white guys into taking gaming into the world of real culture and politics. Yeah, yeah. So between the sportification of ideology They're taking gaming into the world of real culture and politics. Yeah. So between the sportification of ideology and the gaming element, you know, Andrew Tate is a former reality television person. So is obviously Trump, you know, and Bannon, you know, Hollywood, gaming, Seinfeld, you know, I mean, they know how to put on a show, obviously. Sure.

That's their skill. Sure. And, but the other piece of it is the wellness piece. Yeah, this is. Or the body piece. This is the other thing. Yeah, and that's where Rogan is really a player, right? Right.

Because he makes such a fetish of his own body and considers himself such an expert on health. Right. Because he, you know, works out or, you know. Well, he does it all. I mean, it is fundamentally a lifestyle show and fundamentally for men. So, but this was the other thing I had, I wanted to talk about because I could never quite, you know, make the connection of why, why are these yoga instructors going full cue?

And then I started to realize like, well, it's not like they're tethered to anything, you know, intellectually solid or spiritually solid. I mean, they're fundamentally probably somewhat psychologically damaged or troubled people that are holding on to a spectrum of ideas that they call spirituality. So, like, I could kind of grasp how they were vulnerable to this way of thinking but it seemed again that the vaccine thing and how you explore it in your book really puts it together with what is fundamentally uh one of the the pillars of fascism which is the body which is the body in purity the superior body yeah i like i have a

strong immune system um yeah, yeah. And there was that moment in the book where we were, where we met this, um, I mean, a woman who I could have easily taken a Ashtanga class from, you know, uh, and she said about people who were, uh, immunocompromised with the idea that she had a responsibility to get vaccinated, maybe for them, if not, if she didn't, even if she didn't feel she needed it, she said, I think they should die. Now that is a very extreme thing to say out loud, but there is a kind of body fascism at play here. And I do try to explore it. And here, I'm not saying everybody in the wellness world, you know, shares this. And there are lots of people in yoga communities who. Yeah, there was a fight within the yoga community around vaccination.

Yeah, a big one. Because I think, because there are different worldviews, really. I mean, I think there are people who really believe that yoga points to our, you know, enmeshment with all living beings. I mean, I remember I had a wonderful yoga teacher in Toronto who, he would do this thing. This sounds so flaky, but I really loved it. He was so good. He would have us breathe in some really uncomfortable pose. And he would say, now breathe in, breathe out. Now think about the fact that that same air that you're breathing in, that you're breathing out was like inhaled and exhaled by raccoons and deers. And I just thought that was like so beautiful. And it really landed with me. Like we share the same air, you know, which is the same thing that COVID forced us to reckon with when we were thinking about this airborne virus. Who shares the air with us? Can they call in sick, you know, or do they have to go to work? And, you know, what would real

solidarity mean? There's another part of the wellness world that is not interested in that web of interconnection, but really is kind of fortifying the body as a kind of sort of a prepper move in the, you know, there's the world, the world's gone mad. The one thing you can control is your body and your health, and you can optimize it and you can perfect it. And it shouldn't be a surprise that that strain of the wellness world intersected perfectly well with this free market fundamentalism, screw everybody else, let the vulnerable die, you know, just keep the malls open. But also it fits right in with the idea of othering, which, you know, can get to a point of genocide or death through negligence. Because I have a superior body. I mean, it's at the heart.

It's at the heart of the genocidal logic. Yes. And wellness and pseudo-spiritual and weirdo wellness stuff was massive for the Nazis. And marketing yourself, it's a different place on the spectrum of selfishness, of self-centeredness, of not being really caring about other people. Yeah. And through your own experience having a child who is, is it neurodivergent is the right word, that you sort of explore this one particular doctor who was in, was it Austria or? Yeah, Austria, Hans Asperger. Yeah, the guy who Asperger is named for, right? Yeah, yeah. And how he was eventually, it seemed fairly simply, you know, caring about the full spectrum of different types of people, neurodivergence and people with unique sort of conditions as being just another, you know, part of the human spectrum. And then once the Nazis took over, he shifted and started sorting, sorting, culling.

Started sorting. Sorting. Culling, you talk about. The willingness to cull is – because I always wonder, like, when does this – when does the label of woke, which is sort of an umbrella term for others, Jews, LGBTQ, anybody, when does that become murderous? Like, how close are we to that? And it happened fairly quickly when the fascists took over. Yeah. Yeah. And Hans Asperger is really a harrowing example. And this is, you know, one of the reasons why doppelgangers are interesting literary tools is that they, you know, they stand in for them. You know, Freud talked about how they stood in for the multiplicity of the self. Like every self has multiple possibilities.

There was the Hans Asperger pre-fascism, and he seemed like a pretty nice guy, you know, and he was interested in treating these neurodiverse kids. And he actually didn't pathologize autism at all. He didn't think that it needed to have a medical diagnosis. He just thought these kids are different. Let's study them. Let's try to help them. But once the Nazis took over in Austria, he was an ambitious guy. They got rid of all the Jewish doctors. So suddenly he's rising very far,

very quickly in Austria. That's what happens when all the Jewish doctors get sent away. And he completely changes his writing about autism. And now he's measuring these kids against the fascist ideal. And basically, his definition of autism is a deficit of fascism. Because, I mean,

fascism requires that the person have a consciousness of being part of the whole, the fascist project. And because autistic children, this is in his writing, are turned inwards, they're not interested in the project. And so they started to be killed en masse. But he made a distinction for some of these kids who he called his little professors.

And he thought that because they had this extreme ability to focus, that they could be useful for the army and for the party. They could code, they could do things like that. So he saved some of his little professors, but he signed death orders or transfer orders. He knew what was going to happen. And who knows this history of the guy that the term Asperger's is, it was a diagnosis for a while. I guess it's dated. Yeah. It's no longer, it's been struck and doctors no longer use it because of this fascist history. A lot of this only came out pretty recently, like the actual evidence that Asperger had signed these orders. But, you know, I want to come back to what we're talking about around the sort of selfishness of these figures.

Sure. Yeah. Okay. You know, it's all true. But we are all within these systems that light up different parts of ourselves. And what's interesting about a figure like Asperger that you can see is that under one system, he was one type of a person. And under another system, he became a very different kind of person, which is why doppelgangers in art are often used to explore the threat of fascism because whole societies have this ability to flip, right? Suddenly your nice neighbor down the hall is turning you in. That nice teenager's got a gun, you know, and has joined the Hitler youth. Like, fascism is like, becomes the doppelganger of the open liberal society. And we feel that. That is what we're afraid of.

That is the shadow lurking that we are afraid the whole thing could flip. Now. Now. Now. Right. Which is why doppelgangers are everywhere in the culture. Like Merriam-Webster just tweeted that doppelganger was one of their top lookups. You know, this always happens during moments where people are afraid.

Suddenly in the culture, there's doubles everywhere. And doubles could be, you know, the guy you work with. What's he doing at home? Right. Sure. So like, so, you know, in that sense, we all have these possibilities as selves. So, I mean, coming back to the wellness people and all that, you know, we all have this capacity inside us. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying we all have the capacity to be fascist necessarily, but.

We definitely have the capacity to sort of like play along. Right. Out of survival. And we know from our personal experience that we can be incredibly selfish and we can be incredibly compassionate. You know, it can change from morning to afternoon. Like humans are a whole bunch of things at once. And the systems that we live inside light up different parts. So we live in a system that does tell people you're on your own. It does tell people, I'm not even going to give you health care. If you want to send your kid to college, it's going to cost $100,000 if you want it to be one of these good colleges. So of course, people behave like complete selfish

jerks. The entire system is telling them that they're on their own. So they perfect their body, they perfect their brand. You know, they perform themselves. They try to turn their kids into little trophy doubles of themselves. But I'm less interested in the individual, you know, obnoxious person than I am in the structure we live in is that there's this never-ending drumbeat of repetition to the people that are on board and all that, the futility that they may feel that they're up against a system that was rigged against them from the beginning. It's just the nature of capitalism at this point in time. So somehow

or another feeding them with this idea that if we get rid of Mexicans, we get rid of gays, we make abortion illegal, the Jews are a problem, that that's somehow going to satisfy their quest for vengeance or justice. And belonging and community. I mean, because if you're on the inside and you're not the other, then you have actually something that our society doesn't offer, which is a common project, a sense of there being a broader we. That's the part of like, it's like Ernest Becker, you know, the denial of death, the sort of almost genetic compulsion to be part of something bigger than yourself to define who you are, right? Which is all the more reason to not have them be the only ones offering people something bigger than themselves. Well, that's right. But the thing is, is that like, the weird thing is, is like people like, you know, I don't know what Bill Maher thinks, like that he's a half a Jew, they're not going to put him up against the wall. What does Naomi Wolf think? I mean, it's like that. Well, that's a crazy thing that there was, you know,

all these Jewish industrialists in Germany and even working people that are like, we can work with this Hitler. So I mean, the part of it that really does my head in is that she wrote an entire book about how societies turned fascist. And now she's hanging out with these people. And this and so to be clear again, so people understand, this is the mural world that is sort of like at one time was a fringe element, but now is its own bubble because of the fragmentation of media in general. Mainstream media, as much as people pay lip service to it, barely functions as something that holds us together for any reason.

And there's all these bits and pieces of this kind of other media that is, it's that drumbeat, man. I mean, it can't be stopped. And a lot of us who are liberals or progressives, we're just sort of trying to do the little things we can do in our lives or try to, you know, in some form of mild denial, think that, you know, something will turn, you know, but like you're saying, we're at the precipice of something. And I don't know that everybody quite realizes that.

I think they're going to realize it pretty soon as we get closer to this election. And I think a lot of people are frightened, you know. Frightened, but it's a little nebulous. Well, yeah. I mean, it depends where they live because teachers are getting fired, libraries are getting closed, books are getting banned. I mean, it's really happening. It's happening and it's happening in areas that are very close to people's lives. Florida. Yeah. Texas, Missouri. I mean, you know, whatever DeSantis is doing there, you know, he, you know, whether he can be president or not, he's showing us what the vision of the future looks like by what he's doing in Florida.

And I talked to my mother who lives down there. I never thought I'd see a day where Jews leave Florida. But, you know, but, you know, when I talked to my mother at her age, she's like, yeah, I don't like him. I just don't like him. But she didn't know why she doesn't like him because she's been a Democrat all her life. It's not because he's making the state fascist. And then it becomes about what you talk about. Let's talk about the shadow lands for a second, because it seems like the direct effect this these policies have, like if you have money and you live outside of Austin and you're able to sort of not pay your taxes and rise

above any sense of government, which is the problem with, I think, capitalism in general. Yeah. You know, like I don't know how people live in Texas given that it's a functioning fascist state. That keeps getting hit with climate disasters. But the people that it affects directly are, I don't know if the word is the underclass or the Shadowlands or however you want to frame it,

but a lot of your book talks about that you're not going to be systemically able to avoid the voices of this group of people, which is a lot, most. Well, look, I think that we are, what we're describing here, you know, what I'm calling the mirror world, it's a kind of a mass derangement. It's also a distraction machine, you know. There are so many things that we know about and can prove that should be good enough to have a mass uprising, right? I mean, you've got billionaires with their rocket ships sailing overseas of human misery.

You have massive pandemic profiteering by the tech companies, by the pharmaceutical companies. So the interesting thing about conspiracy culture that I've always been struck by is it moves the horizon of outrage always just a little bit away from where we are right now. So we've got plenty that we could choose to organize around, choose to make the issue of the day. But instead, it's something that you're just about to prove, like the vaccines are really killing babies and they're trying to hide it, you know. are really killing babies and they're trying to hide it, you know? Or that there's pedophile baby cannibals feeding on adrenochrome in tunnels, and you make a point that there are actually people living in tunnels. Right, but you can understand why somebody like Elon Musk, who on a good day is the richest man alive, or a good day for him, why a guy like that would be so drawn to conspiracy theories,

because it taps into all the anger at elites that is righteous anger. People should be angry at elites. They absolutely should be angry at elites. But it pivots it away from the real targets, like Elon Musk. And puts it on Hollywood people. Right. Puts it on a fantasy or just about, like Q's about to unmask the white hats, the this, the that, you know. It's just always about to happen.

It's like the 9-11 inside job people. You know, I remember when I was touring with the shock doctrine. I'd give a talk about how hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq had died, you know, based on a lie. And Halliburton and Bechtel were profiteering in Blackwater. And then every single speech, some guy would come to the mic and be like, why won't you admit 9-11 was an inside job? And I'd be like, why isn't the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead

and we can prove it enough for you? Why are you latching onto something that you can't prove? And this is the thing about conspiracy culture. It seems like it's anti-establishment. It is a gift to the establishment. But the distraction has a market because who wants to look at reality? You know, like the moment we're in is like this triple reckoning where we are, COVID unveiled this incredible, like I think there was a sort of humiliation about being part of the lockdown class. a sort of humiliation about being part of the lockdown class, where we knew there were all these people out there serving us, you know, vulnerable to the virus, bringing us food,

bringing us packages, you know, in the emergency rooms, and we were home comfortable at home, you know. So COVID acted like this unveiling, because we had to think about all of those people who the system is designed to hide, you know, in this so-called frictionless economy, which just means we don't see, you know, who is packing the boxes and who is delivering it. So that's one reckoning. And then in the middle of all that, we have the 2020 racial justice uprising and this huge reckoning with the past and how this country was built. And then climate change is a reckoning with the future. Like the future is here. It is racing towards us. And we're not separate from any of this. Like it's enmeshed in every bit of

food we eat. Every screen we look at is part of the problem, right? So that is incredibly hard to carry. And so the right is going, hey, let's just leave reality. Like, let's just go into fantasy land. Well, what's mainstream society? They're saying, go see Barbie. Like, it's not like we're looking at it directly, you know? And so what I call the shadow lands are like just all these things that we're looking away from all of the, and, you know, it's a little bit like that moment in Jordan Peele's film Us. Yeah. When, did you see Us? Yes.

Yeah. For people who haven't seen Us, you know, the premise is a world much like our own sitting on top of a shadow world where everyone above ground has a doppelganger below ground. And they have to reenact everything that we do, but they do it in darkness and misery and our comforts rely on them. So it's a metaphor for capitalism, for imperialism, you know, for racism, for all of it. And the shadow people come up and wreck havoc. And there's a moment where one of the characters says, who are these people? And the answer is, or he says, says, who are these people? And the answer is, or he says, who are you? And they say, we're Americans. We are you, you know? And that's, you know, that's another way that I feel like looking at them ended up being kind of looking in the mirror because I don't feel

like we are the ones who are doggedly looking at reality. We distract ourselves and numb ourselves and look away. The problem with the distraction of how conspiracy theories serve the existing order is that the people that believe them believe that they've got a pulse on reality, that this is a secret wisdom. Of course, this is all connected. reality, that this is a secret wisdom. Of course, this is all connected. So what I mean, what strengthens the metaphor of the mirror world is that they believe that they know the real truth. They think we're in a fantasy world. Right. By obfuscating these realities and the idea of what DeSantis is doing in schools around race and teaching the true history of this country around natives and African-Americans, it's a fascist tactic, but it also sells to people who are selfish and willing to sort of abide by the idea.

It's like, well, that's old news. And, you know, I mean, personally, I don't think we get out of this mess unless there is a horizon of the future that everybody can see themselves in, like where we want to go to, because it's so hard to look at. They're right. It's hard to look at the past, especially if you don't know what the future can look like. But every time we get a window in, you know, these idiots are calling it a false flag. get a window in, you know, these idiots are calling it a false flag. So like anytime there's an indicator, you know, that, you know, within the mirror world, they can just tell their people that, you know, that's not real. This was set up this way. Like, I don't know what it would take. Or it's AI. AI is not helping with this. Sure. If you've got a reality problem, don't flood the zone with deep fakes.

But how do you rationalize the sky is on fire? Well, they have a rationale. I mean, they say it's a directed energy weapon actually set fire to Matthew. God, you've really done your homework on this. It's amazing you held your brain together. Actually, I learned things in interviews. Like somebody said to me, I was talking to somebody who spends actually more time in these worlds than I do. And apparently there's a conspiracy that the sun isn't real. Oh, the earth is flat. I mean, oh man, I don't-

They're like, don't you think it looks weird? It's like, yeah, it looks weird because of wildfire smoke. Yeah. Well, Wolf did some of that looks weird? It's like, yeah, it looks weird because of wildfire smoke. Yeah. Well, Wolf did some of that, right, with the air? Yeah. She's a cloud truther. A cloud truther. But, like, you know, me, just because, you know, I'm a nervous person, and I'm recently starting to realize that, you know, I wish I had a little more control over my imagination because what it does on its own is not great.

I'd look at the sky and I'm like, it doesn't seem to be functioning. The sky seems a little broken. The sky is a little broken. I know. We broke it. We broke it. That's the important thing. The amount of organization that they attribute to the fucking government

is ridiculous. This idea that everyone, that somehow or another, all these things are connected because there's some sort of dark, what do they call it? Deep state? The deep state is doing this.

Which is another appropriation. That was a left-wing term for Turkey. And right at the beginning of Trump, I'm like, you know, I'm very disappointed with the deep state. I really thought they would have had a hand on this. Like whatever we thought the deep state was, they failed miserably because this guy is still president and it's a year in. But the idea that they can, it doesn't matter.

I don't want to talk about how conspiracists think anymore because there's no, you can't, there's no. No. And it's important not to call them conspiracy theorists because they don't have a coherent theory. No, no, no. They're conspiracy influencers. Hmm. And it's a conspiracy culture. But I'm trying to discipline myself because I wish I had only used conspiracy influencer throughout the whole book.

Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. Or I call them conspiracists. But they're not conspiracy theorists. They do not really have a theory. No. They can't really have a theory. They can't decide if COVID is a bad cold or a bioweapon.

Right. And also it evolves almost daily. They can just add things in and correct things as it unfolds. But I like that the book is fundamentally Jewish. Thank you. It's my most Jewish book. Yes. I'm very happy that you've decided to use the word pippic in a way.

What is pippic? Thank you. Getting pippicism into the lexicon is one of my goals, as well as dog-pull-ganger. Okay. That's a word for your dog when it sees itself in the mirror and barks. Okay, yeah, right. It thinks there's another dog. Okay. Looks just like them.

Those are good contributions. My dog has a dog-pull-ganger. Sometimes she wants to play with that looks just like them. Those are good contributions. My dog has a doppelganger. Yeah. Sometimes she wants to play with that nice, cute dog. Yeah. But mostly she's very threatened by it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Pipickism.

Okay, so in Operation Shylock, Philip Roth is trying to get a handle on his doppelganger, Philip Roth. doppelganger, Philip Roth, and he decides to refuse to call him Philip Roth because he calls himself, the doppelganger calls himself Philip Roth. Right. And he renames him Moishapipik, which is a diminutive from his childhood. All the adults would call the kids Moishapipik. It basically, it means literally in Yiddish, Moses is belly button. A Pippek is a belly button. And so Philip Roth thinks that if he calls his doppelganger

Moishe Pippek, he'll have less power over him. It'll be more ridiculous than serious. Right. But then he gets carried away and talks about the forces of Pippekism is the forces of absurdization that renders everything trivial and absurd, everything it touches. So I found that to be a very resonant term, pipicism, that all kinds of things are getting pipicked.

I mean, we're talking about all these appropriations. They're pipicisms. Right, appropriations and also this sort of hyperdrive of false equivalency. Yeah, yeah. It's almost an immediate reaction. And the main goal isn't really to use it. It's to keep us from using it. It's to drain it of its power.

If a Bannon takes a word like othering, right? He doesn't care about othering, and he's probably not going to use it that much. But he's pippicked the term, you know? Sure. But do you think that a lot of these guys, Trump included, now, it seems that much of their behavior is instinctual.

That it's, you know, maybe they studied this stuff, but even someone like Bannon, who is like, you know, an acolyte and a fan of fascism. It seems that these type of egos do this instinctually, which is kind of it's disconcerting. And it's odd because Trump doesn't seem like any kind of inspired strongman, but it seems like it is a type. So I do think that Trump and Bannon are different types. I don't think Trump thinks much. I think Bannon is a strategist. And I unfortunately think he's a good strategist. You don't have to be that smart to look at an electoral map, you know, and realize that if you were to get this slice from your opponent, you could win an election. And he did that in 2016

for Trump with mostly white working class guys who had voted Democrat, you know, three times, four times. But their communities had been gutted by offshoring. And these Democrats had promised that they were going to, you know, kill the trade deals and bring the jobs back. And they never did. And so I think Bannon is very good at looking at the issues that his opponents have given up and where

this is why he didn't want to run against Bernie. He's looking at the map from 2020, and he knows white women are a problem for Trump. There has to be an offer for white women. And that is definitely what his interest in anti-vax conspiracies were. He saw all these women who had voted Democrat but did not like what was happening in the schools. You know, they were at the yoga studio. They didn't want to get vaccinated, whatever it was.

And he's like, this is the key. But he also was looking at the world and looking at certain cults within Catholicism. He's also, for a while there, had this global vision. Oh, yeah. And he still does. You know, when Giorgio Malone became the prime minister

in Italy in last year, October 2022, I mean, they had a party on the podcast because she's one of his acolytes. You know, right after he left, well, he got kicked out of the White House, and he's been trying to get back in this whole time. He did

a lot of organizing internationally. He's starting a kind of fascist international. Yeah. And he brought together a few different far-right parties in Europe to strategize. One of them was Fratelli d'Italia, which is Giorgio Malone's party, and she's now in power. She's now the prime minister. prime minister. So that's another thing that's kind of weird is realizing that Bannon has a bit more of like an internationalist lens than MSNBC. But this kind of like is the mirror world of globalization.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's the mirror world of the anti-globalization movement, because when you listen to Georgia Maloney she says, I don't want you to be a consumer slave. I don't want you to, you know, you're not just a product. We need to stand up to the big banks, by which she means Jews.

But, you know, she's using a lot of these dog whistles. And then she mixes it when she says, I am a woman. I am a Christian. As if anyone is trying to keep her from being these things. But the interesting thing, though, is that, you know, in the long game, they know that the fascists know that big business will align themselves with fascism. Yeah. What I realized when Netflix got pushback from the LGBTQ community around Chappelle's special and the way he was framing trans people was that they kind of sat on it on a little bit.

They waited it out to see what kind of pushback they would get. And when it didn't seem that threatening, they just let it ride in the guise of free speech. I got no problem with free speech. You can say whatever you want. But it made me realize at that moment that they'll serve anybody. That, you know, if everything shifts in this country and they got to rename it Reich Flicks, they'll do it. Yeah. And we were already starting to see some really disturbing caves around libraries and books. And, you know, not just in Florida.

Like people are looking at what's happening in Florida and they're getting worried about certain books. About their kids. And they're sort of pre-censoring because they're afraid of, you know, becoming targets. And, you know, there's some cowardice that's starting to rear its head instead of people just being defiant. Well, that's necessary for fascism to work. It is. People need to stiffen their spines and actually fight back.

You do not appease. I've been doing this joke. I did it twice. I was trying to make it work about how the GOP is not really the GOP. They're fascists. And that they never saw democracy as a democracy. They always say, it's a Federalist Republic thing. That's what they say.

So I said, does that mean the camps will be a states issue? But it's kind of true. Oh my goodness. I'm so happy I moved back to Canada. I've applied for permanent residency. Can you talk to somebody? Sure. As long as our fascist doesn't get elected in the next election.

Oh, is that going to happen there? There's no place to go? There's less people there, it seems so. There's more space. Yeah. That doesn't necessarily affect election results. No, I know. I know.

Sadly, there's half a million. Do what I can, Mark. I appreciate that. I'm glad to be there. Well, it was good talking to you. You think we covered it thoroughly enough? I think it was really fun. Yeah.

I love talking with you. And one thing I would just say is it's fun to read, I hope. I let myself have more fun writing because things are bleak, but writing can still be fun. No, I thought it was. Yeah. And I thought like there's so much is touched upon in this. Like I earmark things and I don't even know if we got to them. I really appreciate how you engage with the book.

Thank you so much. Well, it's like, you know, I have a lot of underlined books. I'm a book defacer. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But a lot of times, years later, I go back and I'm like, I don't even understand that now. You know what's weird is sometimes I'll deface a book, make tons of notes, and then reread it again and have no memory of having read it. Sure.

Yeah, it's very weird. Yeah, because I used to say that the thing about books is when you read that stuff, it feels like you're thinking it. So you just integrate it. But I think we did all right. Okay. I think we did good. Do you think we got enough around the self sort of taking up too much space? Well, I think that is all the way through.

And I think that it's important because I don't think a lot of us know how to get out of that or what we're supposed to do. I think that we're overwhelmed all the time by how we choose to take in information, even if we're not working, that it's, and I think it's the problem with technology in general, that it's, and I think it's the problem with technology in general,

that it disassociates us, but it also sort of has this, I feel like you're constantly overwhelmed to the point of paralysis, to an anxiety-ridden paralysis. And, you know, oddly, I'm happy that people are going out again. I mean, I do comedy. And it seems that it is true that people crave community. Yeah. And we don't, I mean, if we're going to get over ourselves a little bit, I mean, we're not going to annihilate our egos. We are not going to not care about ourselves. But we don't have to care this much. Like, it's out of control.

How much, and the labor of the self, the labor of perfecting and, you know, we are only alive for a finite hours on this earth. And it does take away from the work that is needed to fight fascism and fight the climate crisis, fight climate breakdown to actually get us to somewhere safer. So loosening the grip on the self is something we can only do with each other. It does matter. Get out of your house. Find one another. I don't know what that looks like. Some of it is just going to be in the arts.

Get involved in civic activity. I'm saying this to myself, too. But also, I think you're very clear in the book how that the climate issue, the crisis, is a direct byproduct of global free market capitalism that has become completely untethered from regulation and will never stop. As a machine, it won't stop. Well, and we're certainly not going to stop it with our individual self-perfections. You know, we can become eco-perfect. But we'll survive. We'll survive whatever happens.

My big question about these preppers is like, who the fuck wants to live in that world? Whatever you're preparing for, if it involves all of that. With Peter Thiel and Joe Rogan. Yeah, sure. It'll be awesome. The billionaires who can actually have underground cities. It's true. All right. This was fun. Thank you, Mark. It'll be awesome. The billionaires who can actually have underground cities. It's true. All right, this was fun.

Thank you, Mark. Thank you. Well, there you go. Did that work out? Naomi's book, Doppelganger, A Trip Into the Mirror World, comes out tomorrow, September 12th, wherever you get books. Hang out for a minute, wherever you get books. Hang out for a minute, will you?

I got to take a break just from even airing that. Hang out for a second. Oh, that coffee smells good. Can you pass me the sugar when you're finished? Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you doing? That's salt, not sugar. Let's get you another coffee.

Feeling distracted? You're not alone. Many Canadians are finding it hard to focus with mortgage payments on their minds. If you're struggling with your payments, speak to your bank. The earlier they understand your situation, the more options and relief measures could be available to you. Learn more at Canada.ca slash it pays to know. A message from the Government of Canada. It's winter and you can get anything you need

delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats. But meatballs, mozzarella balls and arancini balls? Yes, we deliver those. Moose? No. But moose head? Yes. Because that's alcohol and we deliver that too.

Along with your favorite restaurant food, groceries, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. Okay, so listen, people. Three years ago today, we were doing Zoom interviews, and on September 10th, 2020, I talked with Martin Short.

I thought you were great in the morning show. Oh, thank you. Thank you. That was something I— That's a cool series. I know. I really—I kind of liked it. And I had not seen you do something like that. I mean, because, you know, it's so funny, because when you show up on screen, there's Martin Short,

you have these expectations, and you're like, holy shit you know, it's so funny because when I when you show up on screen, there's Martin Short, you have these expectations. Then you're like, holy shit, this guy's a fucking monster. You know, I guess, you know, because like, you know, a lifetime of watching Martin Short doesn't really prepare you for where you go with that guy. Well, you know, it's tricky is I remember I did a season of a series called Damages. Oh, yeah. And at the very first show, I was playing a lawyer, kind of a Madoff-type lawyer. And I remember one of the producers came up to me and said,

you know, they'd be watching the takes, and we'd do another take. Marty, can you not smile? Because when you smile, it becomes Martin Short. And I said, well, see, now we have a problem because Hitler smiled. The devious are the biggest smilers. And he went, you're right. And that was the last concern about that. In other words, you were stuck with the clown, and now you had to somehow forget that he was a clown. Yeah, but that's not really your fault. No, it's not my fault at all.

I can't. It's not my fault I'm this beloved, iconic person. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, fuck that. But it's a burden. It's a burden.

That's episode 1156 with Martin Short, And you can listen to that for free right now on the podcast player you're using. If you want all WTF episodes without ads, plus the twice weekly bonus episodes we're doing, sign up for WTF plus. Just go to the link in the episode description or go to WTF pod dot com and click on WTF plus here's a lick I've done before probably Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. boomer lives monkey and the fonda cat angels everywhere