Naomi Klein: It was Neoliberal Capitalism all along!
In this episode, your favourite neoliberal Decoder shills take a break from managing the decline of late-stage capitalism to examine the insights of famed writer and renegade activist Naomi Klein. The focus is her latest literary offering, Doppelganger, where Klein wrestles with the existential dread of being confused with Naomi Wolf and uses that mix-up as a gateway to explore the "Mirror World" of conspiracy theories and online gurus (a landscape our listeners know all too well).Along the way, Matt and Chris discover Klein's views on Steve Bannon's dubious charm (and what percentage he gets right), the cause of Russell Brand's descent, the real agenda behind conspiracy theories, and why neoliberal capitalism remains the root of all evil. Plus, special guest interviewer Ryan Grim parachutes to 'just ask questions' about the lab leak, vaccine side effects and other forbidden topics that the people were not allowed to talk about!So, whether you’re a champagne socialist, a crypto libertarian, a neoliberal shill, or just here for the popcorn, join Matt and Chris as they parse Klein’s content and consider: is Klein speaking truth to power, or just preaching to the choir?SourcesPenguin Books: How did conspiracy theories become mainstream? | Naomi Klein | Big QuestionsNaomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.Politics and Prose. Naomi Klein — Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World - with Ryan GrimTHIS- The Rebel Sell: If we all hate consumerism, how come we can’t stop shopping?Ryan McBeth: Exposing the Military Industrial Complex
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer, and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matthew Brown, psychologist from Australia, and with me is Chris Kavanagh, the grimmer wormtongue to my theoden, anthropologist from Japan, and whisperer of dark secrets into my ear.
Hi, Chris.
I feel anthropologists in Japan might be more accurate.
Otherwise, you know, when people see my picture, they'll be like, wait a second, false advertising.
Well, isn't that race essentialism?
It is racist, isn't it?
One from Japan has to look Japanese?
Come on.
True, true.
I might be an indigenous person born and bred here who just happens.
To not be ethnically Japanese, but that's not true.
Speaking of indigeneity, do you know your family's genetic background?
Were they always from that little part of Northern Ireland, or did they drift there from other places?
What a fraught question.
I don't want to get you beaten up when you go back home.
The answer is no.
I don't really know my family tree except as far back as my grandfather's parents.
Is that reasonably fair back?
And I know that they were all from Ireland.
But from different parts of Ireland.
Some of them were from the south of Ireland.
And I think one of them was from Dublin.
So there you go.
All right, so the southerners can't look down on you.
That's good.
That's good.
Okay, okay.
So, you know, whereas, you know, there was the diaspora, lots of adventurous people heading out there, fleeing the English, making new lives for themselves, your ancestors decided to just stay put and stick it out.
We don't know that.
We don't know that.
My ancestors could have been the, like, people who were, you know, dynamically evading.
During the Viking era or whatnot, I could have the stock of rampaging Norsemen.
That's possible.
Not just the cowardly.
You just don't have that Nordic vibe though, Chris.
I don't know what it is.
Maybe...
Norwegians like me, Matt.
Ask Dags or us, okay?
They like everyone.
Do they?
Is that what they're famous for?
Well, that's true, though.
I don't really see a big Norwegian...
You know, my stereotypical view of, like, a large, huge-muscled, big-bearded...
Yeah, Sven, Sven, Sven, Sven, Sven, Sven.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
That's what they all look like, right?
Yeah.
Rippling muscles.
So...
Yeah, they do.
I don't know.
So that's it.
Why do you ask?
Why do you ask?
Why do I ask?
I don't know.
Just thoughts come into my mind.
They pass into my mouth and then they float away again.
You know another thing I was thinking about, Chris?
I was thinking, I can't get the Sabine Hossenfelder thing.
Oh dear.
It's just niggling at me.
Yeah, what about it?
What you don't know?
No, it's just the old thing.
That thing that we mentioned.
She's got bad video.
Academia is communism.
We had a little altercation on Twitter.
And, you know, other people have challenged her too, saying, come on, academia is communism, really?
It looks like clickbait.
It looks like you're pandering to the standard right-wing tropes.
And she's like, no, no, no, no, no.
Come on, don't misinterpret me.
I'm not saying it's literally communism.
I'm saying it's got some aspects in common with communism.
Most specifically, she says, the funding model.
Is communism.
Because it's like centrally planned.
There's a few.
There's a committee somewhere.
That's not true.
I know.
And the thing that annoys me is that even in the Mott and Bailey scenario, the Mott, I think it is, the more defensible position that she has there, it just absolutely isn't true either.
It's just not true.
Like it's incredibly decentralized that there is like funding sources come from all over the place.
Yes, there are national peak bodies, but even them, they send the proposals out for peer review.
They get crowdsourced, basically, the evaluations.
And, you know, I never get funded from that place anywhere.
Many researchers get them from all kinds of, you know, charitable organizations or people that are interested in heart disease or this, that, and the other, or industry or state governments.
Sorry, Matt.
There's lots of subcommittees in communism, okay?
They are also.
If you want to stretch the analogy far enough, I'm sure you can justify it.
But yeah, I get it.
I know it's annoying.
I know.
It's just a bit annoying.
Yeah, she's pandering.
She's pandering.
But you know who is pandering in a good way, Matt?
You!
You!
I just want to give you credit.
Because you entered this decoding episode on your squeaky-ass horrible chair.
But you discarded it for the quiet, nice chair that, you know, you now sit in.
Even though you don't like it.
You've sacrificed your comfort for the good of the podcast.
So I just want to give you credit.
Credit where it's due, Matt, that you are sacrificing, you know, the integrity of your lower carriage for this podcast.
I am.
I am.
It's too short.
My legs are too long for it.
It's uneasable to me.
This is the problem with internet shopping.
You know the beauty there?
You moved around, you jumped around, but it was just silence.
Nobody heard anything.
There was no creaking or...
Yeah.
I heard it.
When I saw you sitting there, I was like, what?
What's he done?
He's thrown away the good chair already.
He's back on old creaky.
But no, it's sitting there just threatening me in the background.
This is now a two-chair office.
There's the chair.
There's the normal chair.
There's the recording chair.
That's my life now.
That's it.
That's it.
Well, what we're here for today, Matt.
Now, we tried to take a holiday from the right-wing reactionary, you know, conspiracy-laden gurus with Chris Langan.
That didn't work.
In fact, that might have been the absolute worst way to take a holiday from that.
He covered more of that than probably anyone we've covered in the past year.
I know.
It's false advertising.
False advertising.
He gave me the impression that he was a physics guru.
He was a crank.
A physics crank.
A nice, you know, completely innocuous physics crank.
But no, no, no, he's not.
He's so much more.
So we didn't get our holiday.
What does that mean?
Well, someone that we said that we would do for ages, and we also said, you know, in general, we'll do...
A couple of people on the left just to, you know, just to kind of spread things out and because hopefully they're doing something different.
Hopefully.
And so, Naomi Klein, a writer quite well known for writing books, kind of critical about capitalism and corporations.
She wrote No Logo in 1999.
I remember that, the black cover.
And the shock doctrine in 2007.
This changes everything in 2014.
And more recently, she published a book called Doppelganger, which we'll talk about and which is the kind of subject of the interviews and material that we looked at.
So she's, you know, corporate power, neoliberal economics, unchecked capitalism, not good, threats to democracy, exacerbating.
Inequality and driving climate change, all those kind of things, right?
So she is a Canadian writer, primarily, but a feature on the left-wing side of the spectrum in terms of like a big ideas person.
And also because she was writing about Naomi Wolf, who is another writer who used to be a...
She's another Naomi, Chris.
She's another Naomi as well.
Yeah.
And similar age, right?
Sort of vaguely similar background.
So sometimes the two of them got confused, partly because Naomi Wolf was also writing about like feminism, a little bit less of a critique of capitalism, but, you know, kind of consumerist culture and all this kind of thing in the 90s.
However, more recently famous because she became an extreme conspiracy.
I think that was always kind of down to work, but setting that aside, she became more glaringly conspiratorial during COVID and is now, like, prominent in the krankosphere.
As you might anticipate, she's pro-MAGA and all that kind of stuff.
So Naomi Klein's book was kind of based around the conceit of her being mistaken throughout her career and more recently for...
Naomi Wolf and this, one, causing her trouble, but two, also giving her insight into that whole alternative ecosystem, the mirror world, as she calls it.
And we haven't read her book.
I've read a bit of it.
I've read a bit of it.
I started reading it.
It's quite long.
But I wanted to check some things in it.
But yes, this is not a decoding of the...
As our usual format is, we took two pieces of content here and looked at them.
And it was a little bit hard to find content because a lot of it is it's discussing the book, but it's very like it's a book interview, which is not the things that we normally lean towards.
But so we find Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, a trip into the mirror world with Ryan Grimm for a channel called Politics and Prose.
That's from...
About a year ago.
And we also saw how did conspiracies take over?
This is a shorter video on Penguin Books UK channel, right?
So it's kind of like a promotion of ideas in the book.
So those are the two things that we are looking at here.
And who found the second?
The one that was arguably more substantive, Chris, who did that?
It was one of us.
Yes, on this occasion, Matt did point out the second video.
That's right.
Because, you know, we like to have our little jokes, don't we, on this show?
Like, we like to pretend that I'm much, much older than you.
And it's funny because it's so obviously untrue.
And we also like to joke around about how you do all the work and do all the things.
And I just turn up.
Ha, ha, ha.
Everyone knows how silly that is.
And that's why it's funny, Chris.
That's why it's funny.
That's why it's funny.
Yeah, well, also, Mickey Yenslick made those jibes, right?
Suggesting I'm doing everything.
The hard work is all in the other day and all of that.
But he also took some remarks on my height.
Well, he also pointed out I'm not an intimidating figure in real life.
But I don't think I...
A January intimidation vibes.
That's not what I'm going for.
So I wonder, you know, was he expecting me to glower when I met him?
But yeah, so...
You're no Sven Svensen.
That's all I'll say.
Things were taken.
Things were taken to both of us, right?
Unfairly.
Well, you know, that's our job, to take all those slings and arrows.
That's right.
Five foot nine, okay?
That's reasonable.
Hi, I'm not Joe Rogan.
Not that tall, either.
That's almost like...
Absolute bog standard height, I feel like.
Well, my son is, you know, just in those teenage years and he's, you know, he's getting taller and he's sort of, you know, you're never quite sure when they're going to stop growing.
And he's not quite as tall as me, but I said, don't worry, you're already taller than Chris.
That's tall enough.
He was quite happy with that.
Yeah, well, that's alright.
I think that's the benchmark.
You know, on the bell curve, I am the bell.
You're the satisfactory.
You're the passing grade.
Yep, I agree.
Yeah, that's it.
Same on the IQ curve.
Not showing off, not falling behind.
That's why I aspire to be in life.
Well, well now.
So Matt is right that...
The material he found, the short video from Penguin Books, is actually more...
There's more meat on the bones, right?
But I'm still going to use the clips from the Ryan Grimm interview because I made them.
And they have, you know, like an introduction section and she talks...
I think this is either reading from the book or introducing the book.
So here's a little...
Except, Matt, to start things off, this is from the Ryan Grimm interview.
In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book.
I did not have time.
No one asked me to.
And several people cautioned against it.
Not now.
Not with the literal and figurative fires roiling our planet.
And certainly not about this.
Other Naomi.
That is how I refer to her now.
This person with whom I have been chronically confused for over a decade.
My big-haired doppelganger.
A person whom so many others appear to find indistinguishable from me.
A person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me or thank me or express their pity for me.
The very fact that I refer to her with any kind of code speaks to the absurdity of my situation.
I have been a person who writes about corporate power and its ravages.
I sneak into abusive factories in faraway countries and across borders to military occupations.
I report in the aftermath of oil spills and Category 5 hurricanes.
I write books of big ideas about serious subjects.
And yet, in the months and years during which this text came into being, A time when cemeteries ran out of space and billionaires blasted themselves into outer space.
Everything else that I might have written appeared only as an unwanted intrusion, a rude interruption.
Yeah, yeah.
I guess that would be frustrating to be continually confused with Naomi Wolf, who is really quite mad, and that would be frustrating.
The doppelganger book, Chris.
This is the latest one.
But that's just the latest in a bunch of them.
I see, you know, No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything.
A whole bunch of books, really.
Each of which sort of pursuing a theme, which, as you said, is kind of all generally on the very progressive left.
Anti-capitalism, corporate branding, activism, the importance of grassroots movements, etc.
So yeah, so the docbook on your book, what you got to say about it.
Yeah, I have a little bit more that relates to that, but I will also just note that in my, you know, guru spidey sense, whenever somebody describes themselves as like, "I sneak into abusive factories in faraway countries,
across borders to military occupations, I report in the aftermath of oil spills and Category 5 hurricanes, I write books of big ideas about serious subjects,
My hackles go off, right?
Because most of those, I think all of those, can be linked to things that she has done, right?
Like reporting in Iraq or whatnot.
But it does have the kind of ring of...
You know, a heroic, renegade journalist who's out there fighting tooth and nail and getting the big scoops and whatnot.
And I feel like that might not be an entirely accurate representation of the day-to-day in terms of what Naomi Klein's journalism is.
But I'm just saying it's not unusual for writers to focus.
In that way.
But if you wanted what I'm highlighting as a contrast, I would find it rare that Helen Lewis would describe herself in this kind of way if she was discussing about her journalism career.
So I'm just flagging it up.
It's a minor point, but you know.
It's a minor point, but I do agree.
I guess people have different cultural norms around these things.
To you and me, the tone is somewhat self-aggrandizing, yes.
Yes, but not in a big way, right?
Just in the normal, and this is her reading an extract from a book, right?
In books, people might be encouraged by their editors to kind of, you know, speak bombastically or whatever, in any case.
So, in terms of the book Doppelganger and whatnot, here's a little bit more about what this was based around.
I engaged in all of this neglect so that I could, what?
Check her serially suspended Twitter account?
Study her appearances on Steve Bannon's live streams for insights into their electric chemistry?
Read or listen to yet another of her warnings that basic health measures were actually a covert plot orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, and the World Economic Forum to sow mass death on such a scale?
It could only be the work of the devil himself.
My deepest shame rests with the unspeakable number of podcasts I mainlined, the sheer volume of hours lost that I will never get back, a master's degree worth of hours.
I told myself it was research that if I was going to understand her and her fellow travelers who are now in open warfare against subjective reality, I had to immerse myself in the archive of several.
Extremely prolific and editing-averse weekly and twice-weekly shows with names like QAnon Anonymous and Conspirituality that unpack and deconstruct the co-mingling worlds of conspiracy theories, wellness hucksters, and their various intersections with COVID-19 denial,
anti-vaccine hysteria, and rising fascism.
This on top of keeping up with the daily output from Bannon and Tucker Carlson on whose shows Other Naomi.
I feel closer to the hosts of conspirituality than to you, I whimpered one night into my best friend's voicemail.
Glaring omission there, Mark.
Where is the Cody the Gurus reference?
I mean, that's really what we've got to focus on here.
So she's doing, in essence, something like what we do, right?
Or at least.
Just in terms of the skill.
As we have established, I would be doing this were we not recording the podcast.
You might for certain figures or whatnot, but I suspect it would be a less regular thing.
I put that to you, Brian.
Is that not fair to say?
Oh, yes.
Yeah, look, and you often whimper into my ear.
I feel closer, you say, to Derrick Weinstein than I do to my own family.
Derrick Weinstein?
What?
This is the sacrifices you make.
That is a lie and slam.
But also, Machi is saying she feels closer to the hosts of Conspiratuality.
Yes, hello investigators, I know.
So be careful, don't misrepresent, okay?
Like she's saying, you know, those that are documenting and kind of, you know, critiquing the gurus, she feels closer to it.
Now, again, the omission of the code in the gurus, a glaring omission in that reference there, but that's something we can overlook.
Well, it's a dark road going down there and studying all of this, this shadow world of...
Whatever, online influencers and so on.
So I have a lot of sympathy for you.
Me?
Oh, me?
Oh, me and Naomi.
Okay, right.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I've listened to her in other interviews talk about the amount of stuff she listened to.
It is a lot, but it's rookie numbers when you're talking about the amount of crap that I listened to.
But nonetheless, I think this is something that you can sympathize, right?
like somebody who wants to understand this and starts to listen to this like you know alternative media sets and there really is an unlimited amount that you could listen to like she's listening to stuff
around Steve Bannon and Naomi Wolf appearances and then listening to you know like conspiracy knowledge fight or that kind of thing.
I don't speak German, guys.
Properly neo-Nazi podcast stuff.
So there's a lot of crap out there on the internet and it's prodigious the amount that people produce.
Like I remember Stefan Molyneux finding out that he was producing, you know, at one time, I don't know if he still is, but it was two or three hours per day and streamers are doing that as well, like for eight hours a day now.
So yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
So that's good.
This is the most recent work, of course, on the political identity and misinformation in the digital age.
This is the doppelganger book.
Yes.
So now on Steve Bannon, I'll go down this alley a little bit more because there's some talk about that and where elements of what Bannon pumps out are.
Interesting to know in terms of like where they get their hooks and that kind of thing.
So listen to this.
And what you realize as a longitudinal band and listener, like he does put out 17 hours a week around.
That's an enormous output.
You know, and I did listen to hundreds of hours.
Is there is this really, there's a real other side to him.
And, you know, he...
You know, I'm interested in the things he does well because I think he is a dangerous figure.
I think, you know, I take him seriously as somebody who takes internationalism in some ways more seriously than a lot of the left.
You know, he is building an international nationalist alliance, authoritarian alliance.
You know, when Giorgio Malone was elected prime minister of Italy in April, 2022, I mean, he was like a proud papa.
You know, that was like, that's part of his project.
He's been weaving together, you know,
I think it's a deeply nefarious project.
So I wasn't surprised by the nefarious things he was saying.
The points where I felt real vertigo, and this book is not about my doppelganger, it's really about this vertiginous moment, and it is very It's unsettling to lose control over oneself in the ether.
And so that kind of became a metaphor for this, I think, a collective unsettling where so many of us have had this feeling of like, what is this world?
You know, how people are behaving so strangely.
I thought I knew who this person was.
They're now acting really, really differently.
I can't talk to my grandma anymore.
Yep.
Yep.
Is that all you have to say?
Well, I mean, so far, isn't she, Chris?
Essentially describing what is pretty much common knowledge these days.
Internet's full of misinformation.
There's a lot of weird political ideas out there.
It's become this kind of postmodern grab bag, a choose-your-own-adventure of beliefs.
Most people know someone that has gone down various rabbit holes.
So wouldn't you agree with that?
I would, yeah.
And she's also talking about there being, you know, certain things that Bannon does well, like building an international alliance of kind of right-wing populist figures, right?
Like they're interacting and they're kind of supportive, like Elon Musk supporting AFD and praising Orban's government and, you know, basically all the people that Trump...
He says that he respects and likes tend to be part of this club, right?
So there is an international movement of sorts, though it does seem to be one that is opportunistic in terms of when you're a nationalist populist, you can only so much appeal into the broader international hard right,
because at some point you have to...
You know, be presenting that you're going to put your country first.
So like, I think that's part of the issue in Canada at the minute where you might have, you know, the Pierre Bolivier, is it?
The conservative leader, right?
But while Trump is cyber rattling at Canada, then the response to praise Trump doesn't work.
So as a result, his kind of popularity has plummeted.
Just before the election.
So, yeah, I mean, that's interesting.
But certainly she's right that, you know, this coalition and desire to appeal to it is there.
Like you go to the ARC conference and you're likely to find people from the Hungarian government talking about Judeo-Christian values or whatever the case might be.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, now, another aspect is that...
Bannon might be doing some things more effectively that people on the left who also want to engage in political campaigning could learn lessons from.
And my most vertiginous moments listening to Bannon were honestly when he sounded a little like me.
You know, when he would do these, I'm sure you've heard this, but these audio montages.
Of the big cable news shows on MSNBC and CNN, brought to you by Pfizer, brought to you by Moderna.
And it sounds like the media education sort of 101 that we did in the alter-globalization movement, you know, in the late 90s, where we were like, okay, look, there's just a few companies that own the whole thing.
And what worried me about it was not that he was doing it.
It was that we weren't doing it anymore, right?
So I was, you know, I worry when...
Or when he talks about transhumanism, I don't know, that's a big hobby horse, right?
And he talks a lot about how tech is replacing the human.
I wonder if we are, right?
I wonder if we're speaking to those fears.
You know, one of the things I write in the book is conspiracy culture, and I call it conspiracy culture, not conspiracy theories, because it really is conspiracy without a theory, throwing a lot of stuff at the wall, seeing what sticks.
It gets the facts wrong.
A lot of the time, but gets the feelings right a lot of the time.
So a feeling of being surveilled, a feeling of being left behind.
So, you know, I take that really seriously.
And a lot of it I see as a failure of kind of our side.
You know, you can't blame a strategist for being strategic.
And it's very strategic to pick up the issues your opponents have carelessly left unattended.
Right.
So the strategist she's referring to, isn't still Steve Bannon?
It's Steve Bannon.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or, you know, all the people in his being.
Right.
So people like Steve Bannon are effectively critiquing companies like Moderna or whatever.
Pfizer.
Pfizer.
The difficulties with them being irresponsible, not having the public's interests at heart.
And that's a topic that the left has left on the table.
Is that right?
Yes.
I think that's the general thing.
And there's like a feeling.
That people are being, you know, they're not doing as well as their parents' generation.
There's inequality.
There's the feeling that the state is engaged in surveillance against its own citizens.
So there's these like paranoid feelings about the state and corporations engaged in the various activities, which are true.
But then what these sentiments are being channeled towards.
Is kind of right-wing populist answers, which don't really provide any answers.
But so the argument is that the sensation is based on something which is actually there, right?
It's picking up like a genuine thing, which is because of the kind of feelings that are generated by existing in late-stage capitalist, corporatist societies.
Yeah, well, you know, though I don't really buy into that sweeping...
You know, anti-capitalist smash-the-system type perspective of hers.
I think the part of it that I think is a reasonable thesis is that the stagnating wages, basically, and an increased portion of the economic benefits going to people with capital,
basically, as opposed to wage earners.
That is a documented fact that's been happening for decades now.
I think you do see it in growing I think?
big business guys with cigars with factories, right?
It could just be old people that have got investments and have got their investment homes and so on and basically the investments keep growing, getting more expensive, they get richer, the young people don't.
So I think
Economic forces like that do create a sense of discontent, and inflation is one way it's made tangible, and that discontent can be expressed in a variety of different ways.
It could be coded politically on the political spectrum in almost any way, but the discontent does drive radical politics.
It has done since the French Revolution, and I think it's still happening now.
Yeah, I think that's true, though.
I think it's worth noting, and I think probably Norman Klein would agree with this, that that sentiment of the system is rigged against you as a working person who isn't a billionaire.
In the current manifestation of that sentiment, it's directed...
Towards the deep state and, you know, academia and the lying Democrats and all this kind of thing by a cadre of people who are billionaires and millionaires.
You know, the populist MAGA movement, if you look at the cabinet, Trump's cabinet, it's full of incredibly rich people, people that have no issues or making lots of money.
So it feels to me like anti-corporate in the way that Joe Rogan, Is supposedly anti-corporate where, you know, he's a millionaire living in a mansion selling his multi-million dollar supplement company or his like sharing it to Uniliver and then getting a free figure deal from Spotify all while talking about,
you know, corporations and Nancy Pelosi benefiting and whatnot.
So now the client does talk about this, about how people are like redirecting.
The frustration that people feel into these targets where there's not really any impact of their frustration.
But I feel like maybe you can create a cigar-smoking villain, a capitalist villain, and that's an appealing villain, just as the right is easily creating villains.
Like, an out-of-touch person who wants, you know, things that you don't and wants to keep everyone down.
So, yeah, it's just, I think, in part, it is that people are very susceptible to being told that, you know, their issues are because of, like, a group of bad people.
Yeah, that's right.
There's a small trace of irony there because while I, you know, have a lot of overlap in terms of my just general...
Political views with Naomi Klein.
Her criticism of or observation of these right-wing populists pushing, you know, very compelling narratives that tap into what may well be a genuine sense of grievance, you know, arguably, well,
actually not arguably, it has been argued by many of her critics that she does a similar thing on the left, essentially putting together a very compelling narrative that connects disparate events and pins the source of the troubles on a very specific set of actors without that necessarily being entirely true.
Yeah, and I think her counter to that is that the evidence that she presents is better evidenced, or is better supported and better researched than Naomi Wolf, which is undoubtedly true.
Definitely better than Naomi Wolf.
By that standard, true.
But we can play some more clips that highlight this line of thinking.
This is from the Penguin book thing, promoting the 12-minute video.
A bit more on conspiracies and the role they play currently and in the past.
Conspiracies have been mainstream at various points in history.
I don't think we are in entirely new uncharted territories.
I think that conspiracy theories play particular roles in our mental architecture and in our social relations.
And the one thing that conspiracy theories do is distract us from From unbearable reality.
So a lot of my work has been about the climate crisis.
And if I look at climate change denial, which is a conspiracy theory, right?
The reason that conspiracy has gotten traction is a combination of the fact that there are very powerful vested interests in our society that don't want us to focus on the real causes of the warming because it would threaten their entire business model, that being the fossil fuel companies that have underwritten that conspiracy theory.
But also just the reality that, you know, like Al Gore said back in the day, it is an inconvenient truth in that it does require change from us.
It's always easier to take a flight into fantasy than it is to confront a difficult reality.
Yeah, yeah.
I think I go along with about 90% of that.
I think she's correct, Chris, in saying that climate change in our world absolutely is a conspiracy theory.
I think she's correct to identify the two.
Two major drivers there.
One is the powerful and wealthy interest groups with very much like no action on climate change because it's a direct threat to the business centrists.
There's documentation of that.
And also, it is an inconvenient truth, like Al Gore said.
I mean, but she does downplay that a little bit in terms of saying that it requires change from us.
But it actually requires more than just change.
It actually costs individual citizens.
So I remember back when Australia was seriously considering a carbon tax.
It was a very hot topic.
Certainly, I saw the other effects that she's talking about, the effects of vested interest.
But actually, even though I was and still am incredibly in favor of it, we kind of lost.
And a large part of why we lost is that people looked at the cost.
They correctly assessed that this would...
Cost them money in the short term, right?
And that they would be less well off economically.
And I think that played a big factor in normal everyday people voting against it.
So I guess what I'm saying is that we can't always point the finger at the cigar-spoking, top-hat-wearing captain of industry who's behind the scenes pulling all the levers and preventing the public will.
From being manifested, actually, us, the public, have to take some responsibility too, because unfortunately, the general public often votes for things that are short-sighted and not in our long-term interests,
and we vote for things where we see a direct benefit to us in the next election cycle.
So I just think maybe us, the people, need to take a bit of responsibility for it too.
Yeah, well, I don't think she's opposed to that because I think in all her work she has emphasized that.
But yes, I think one thing that she says is correct is that it's been mainstream for conspiracies throughout history, right, or at various points.
I would say it's pretty consistent, but there are periods where it becomes stronger, like it's more stronger and more mainstream now than it was in like the early 2000s, even with 9-11 conspiracies, right?
So I agree with that.
And I also...
I agree with the point that to a certain extent, there can be psychological defense mechanism whereby there's something uncomfortable that you don't want to acknowledge because it's scary and unpleasant.
So you just say it isn't happening, right?
Like there's motivated reasoning at play there.
And that, I don't doubt, is certainly the case in some respects for some people when they approach an issue, right?
Like you can just imagine it not about climate change where There's some coverage which suggests some politician like Trump or whatever is doing something bad.
And then you go and look and you can find media that says actually he's just being misrepresented by like a partisan media, right?
And you can retain a positive image.
So you can like seek out disconfirming evidence for whatever the narrative you don't like is or vice versa, right?
So motivated reasoning is a thing.
I do think that that isn't all of the explanation.
No, because I don't think it is the case that, like, the majority of people who buy into climate change denial or whatever, they actually deep down recognize that it's true and they simply, you know, are taking the preferred option to protect their,
like, psychological well-being.
I think they actually do believe the sources which are saying it's not real, right?
Wait, Chris, but that's how psychological defenses work like that.
They genuinely do end up believing that it's a scam, that it's not true.
Because...
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I know.
So I'm basically making the distinction between, like, a fantasy that people are aware of, you know, at some state that it's not true, but they're kind of willingly, you know, like Cipher, or what's his name, in The Matrix,
the guy that says, you know, like, intentionally deciding that you'll accept the fantasy because it's more Like appealing for you in the moment versus somebody that actually believes the matrix is real, that doesn't know it's fake.
That's the distinction I'm making.
And I think the people who actually believe the narrative that climate change is fake, that the scientists are lying or this kind of thing, that that contingent is substantial, not just like a minority from the amount of people that actually really believe it's occurring.
But buy into narratives, you know, just for psychological protection.
But I realize it's a fuzzy boundary between those two categories.
But you would have some cases where there's going to be people falling into like the pure version of those categories, right?
Okay, sure.
Yeah, that's it.
But so in general, I would say that these points are reasonable.
And I was going to push back when you said this is a conspiracy theory, because I was like, well, Does it involve a smaller group with nefarious intentions?
But I guess the point is the nefarious intentions are put capital and profit above environmental harm.
Because a key component of a conspiracy theory is that the people are motivated by malevolent intentions.
That would be what distinguishes a conspiracy theory from a conspiracy.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, let's not get into definitions.
Why not?
Well, I'm personally quite comfortable with the more expansive definition of conspiracy theories.
Rather, technically, it's conspiratorial ideation, which, you know, rather than it being a strict definition about the malevolent group of actors acting in secret or whatever, that actually, it's fine, that definition, but it's not as useful as the other one where you're fabricating an alternative Baroque.
explanation for how the world works that is fundamentally paranormal.
Yeah, but so that's why I think you have to be clear in this, because a conspiracy theory is built on conspiratorial ideation, right?
It is the output of conspiratorial ideation, whereas detecting conspiracies, legitimate conspiracies that occur, is not detected by conspiratorial ideation.
So if you label anything That involves, like, planning that is not out in the open.
A conspiracy theory.
You end up in the Shermer mistake world where you're completing the two.
Yeah, yeah.
And I wouldn't recommend doing that.
I mean, to take an example, like Sabine Hossenfeld's theory about academia, right?
She's not saying there's a small group of malevolent actors who are setting things up, right?
She's saying it's just the outcome of bad incentives that's created this system that everyone's kind of going along with it because they're fallible.
But to my mind, it does smack her of conspiracism, right?
Because it requires what is basically an outrageous model of how the world works.
I would say in her model, it does.
And so there are elements of it that you're right, that it is systemic, is what she's talking about.
But she is suggesting that there's a lot of figures, especially those in senior positions, who are motivated.
With malevolent intentions, right?
Like they're only interested in their own position.
They don't care about the truth.
That's right, but it's not a small group.
That's right, but it doesn't fit the technical definition.
It's not a small group of powerful actors, right?
It's a very large group.
It's crowdsourced.
I mean, the anti-vaxxers have the same theory about...
The corruption amongst, you know, vaccinologists and vaccine researchers, right?
They have a similar view.
They're not proposing that there's a small group of powerful actors.
They're saying it's systemic.
Oh, yes, they are.
They're doing both because they're saying like Anthony Fauci.
You don't think he's like a villain or Klaus Schwab or those.
They're all those villains, but they have created this system which is expansive.
Okay, but you and I have heard versions, right, where they talk about it being a kind of a...
A systemic problem, right, of all of these researchers going along with something and being afraid to speak out and so on.
Yes.
I'm just saying that conspiratorialism doesn't always fit this definition.
Yeah, but I still think the malevolent intentions are pretty central to most of those because even in the case where it's a polluted system, they almost can't resist eventually identifying...
Villains that are responsible.
Like it's, you know, if you take the Lamb Lake movement, for example, right?
At the start, they're talking about this is being suppressed by authorities.
But now they have a cast of personified villains that they can reference, right?
And who they think are primarily responsible.
And it is rarely that they talk about a disembodied system.
That's part of their critique.
But like if you look at their accounts.
They are very focused on these, like, personified figures.
I'm not disagreeing with you.
It's often, you know, powerful malevolent actors are often a feature of when I'm just saying it's not a deal breaker to me when they're not there.
Yeah.
Well, this is why I think it's fine to debate and discuss those things because, you know, reasonable people can disagree, Matt.
Even co-hosts on a podcast, they're able to disagree about those kind of things.
But, okay, so...
To continue on, actually, before we go to linking this to COVID and neoliberal responses to it and whatnot, I just want to play a clip of Ryan Grimm.
I don't really like Ryan Grimm in general as a journalist.
He does cover things well on some occasions, but he's also prone to making various exaggerated claims and whatnot.
And he's a lab leak guy, right, as we'll see.
An example of this would be in his response when they're talking about Steve Bannon, right?
So she's talking about how Steve Bannon, you know, is getting the sentiment correct and channeling it into unproductive things.
Ryan Grimm goes a bit further than that.
He'll talk about Ro Khanna as somebody that he thinks is like, as a Democrat.
Framing things the way, if Democrats would do that more, that he'd be nervous.
Right.
Or he would say, I would have been nervous if Trump was running against Bernie.
I mean, he's been open about that, right?
Yeah, he said that, and you'll hear his riffs, and 90% of them, you're like, actually, okay, all that's right.
And then he veers off and did.
No, not 90, Ryan, not 90. Oh, yeah, 90 within a show.
So within a show, let's say it's a two-hour show.
An hour and a half of that is complete nonsense.
But then you'll get a 20-second riff, and in that 20-second riff, he'll go for 15 seconds.
And then at the very end, it just crashes into a wall of xenophobia.
Well, because it's a bait-and-switch.
I mean, it's not like there's an actual plan to do anything.
Yeah, so that was something of a misstep there by Ryan, saying that Bannon is 90% right.
Reminds me of people, some of our gurus talking about Alex Jones, you know, 90% of what he said turned out to be true.
Joe Rogan would say, no, it didn't.
So she was right to push back on in there.
But then, like, towards the end, she's kind of agreeing in saying, but, you know, he's right about a lot of things, you know, the military-industrial complex, the endless wars.
And, you know, I think you start to see an intersection between appealing populist narratives that both the left and the right are quite happy to dip into.
I mean, for instance, if you want to talk about this nefarious military-industrial complex that is just all about, you know, getting us to spend more and more money on military machines so we can wage these endless wars, then...
Please address how, at the end of the Cold War, the major Western nations massively cut their military spending.
In Europe, famously, to close to 1% of GDP, but even in the United States, which has a much bigger footprint, was cut a great deal.
If there was a military-industrial complex like just manufacturing unnecessary spending, then why did we do that?
It's almost as if governments chose to stop spending Money on the military as soon as they were able to.
Anyway, I don't like those sorts of narratives.
Ryan McBeth has a good video addressing the issues around.
It's not that there isn't anything legitimate to criticize around the military-industrial complex or whatever that is generally pointing at, the companies that have defense contracts and whatnot.
There's plenty.
There to criticize, but there are facts which go against it being this like kind of shadow system in control of the government when you look at what has actually happened from the 90s and the fact that the level of profit there compared like say from Apple or Procter and Gamble to defense contractors.
It's not particularly excessive.
That's right.
I mean, I used to subscribe to an Australian little investor, a thing called Intelligent Investor, where they'd basically say, "Hey, here's a company.
Study a company.
Here's its books.
It's a good or a bad investment."
I stopped subscribing because I don't care.
It's so boring.
But one of the things that was there is that it did cover a couple of military...
Companies that did stuff for the military.
One of them was ASB, I think it is.
It basically builds boats, builds ships.
It's not very profitable, Chris.
It's actually a bad investment.
The strong impression you get from looking at the financial details from the point of view of a straight-up investor is that their books look very much like a normal company's books, and they're often not that particularly good.
So, you know, that's not to say there isn't rorting and stuff like that.
There aren't sweetheart deals with lucky mommy when they had some closed door meetings.
There's a lot of suspicious things, for instance, when politicians, you know, leave office and then they go on the board of a company.
I'm sure there's water truth to all of that.
But, you know, once again, you know, you just have to be careful with these narratives because they are very appealing and you can lay them on with a very broad brush.
And I think, you know, in doing a bit of background research on...
Naomi Klein's work, I just noticed that a lot of other people, not just sort of liberals, neoliberals, people more on the free market side of things, but the other people, too, noticed that aspect.
Yeah, and on Ryan Grimm, so I don't want to make clear that like...
Sorry.
No, no, that's fine.
But if Naomi Klein had said yes there, I think he would have continued on saying, you know, there's a lot, like, Bannon gets a lot right, right?
But because she laughed and was like, no, no, no, no.
It's nowhere near 90%.
He then says, okay, well, like, in a two-hour show, an hour and a half is complete nonsense, right?
So then he's suggesting 30 minutes is good.
But then he says, actually, you'll get a 20-second riff.
And then he shortens it down and says, and then 15 seconds.
Maybe if that is, yeah.
But before he got to that, he clarified he didn't mean 90%.
He meant 90 times in a year.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So he walked back to that.
Yeah, he said 90% is correct.
Then she was like, what the hell are you talking about?
And he said, well, you know, maybe 90 times in a year.
But then he's trying to backpedal there.
But what he said is exactly what we heard Russell Brown say when he talked about...
Bannon and listening to his stuff.
You know, remember we did Russell Brand before he took the right-wing conspiratorial turn, like, fully?
And he was talking about listening to Steve Bannon.
He said, everything Steve Bannon says, like, I listened to it expecting to hate it.
And I found out that, like, I agreed with 90% of it.
And it was just like this end bit where he started talking about nationalism and whatnot that I found wrong.
So Ryan Grimm is saying the same thing here, but now the client, to credit, is saying, "No, no, no, no, it's not 90%." Like, he's talking a lot more nonsense.
I agree that she does then kind of pivot, you know, onto the point of agreement, but I respected her response a lot more than Brian Grimm's because I know that if there was a susceptible host who had agreed that they would have just moved on and it would have been what you're talking about with Joe Rogan.
Saying, you know, he gets most of the things right, but it's just there's a couple of things that he gets wrong there.
Yeah.
So in any case, there's sections of it that are talking about COVID, right?
Because obviously part of this book was written during that era.
And a lot of the things that she's talking about were exacerbated by the COVID pandemic and the, you know, online responses to it.
And she talks a little bit about why she thinks people were attracted to conspiracies, particularly in this period.
And so I think that COVID was also a difficult reality and it asks difficult things of us.
We also live in a society that tends to turn to individual responses.
As opposed to more difficult collective responses, right?
So our neoliberal governments were more likely to tell us to wear a mask and get vaccinated than they were to say, let's make sure that every worker has sick leave, has enough money to stay home if they need to.
Let's make sure that...
Our kids go to schools with lots of great ventilations.
These are all possible responses our governments could have had to COVID.
And we still would have needed to wear masks and get vaccinated.
But they put everything onto those individual responses and really neglected those collective responses that would have made it easier.
Many people weren't supported by the programs that were supposed to support people to stay home, right?
And so a lot of people chose Fantasy.
And just chose to believe that COVID was a conspiracy.
Yeah, it's an interesting point there.
I mean, I think there's a danger of downplaying the importance of vaccinations and framing it as an individual-level response.
And you could just as easily frame public vaccination as a community-level response.
Yeah.
To get, like, flock.
What is it called?
Not flock.
Herd immunity.
Thank you.
Herd immunity.
But on the other hand, look, I mean, I think the aspect where I agree there is that certainly the various restrictions that were proposed and implemented in places like Australia, you know, Australia's a bit different from North America there in that we actually did those,
at least some of those society-level measures that she's talking about, they're a lot easier.
For people in the desk working class, like myself, than for people who probably earn a lot less money, who probably don't have as much savings.
And actually, if they don't get to go to work at the restaurant or another public place, then they don't have income that fortnight.
So the bit where I'd agree is that we could have done an awful lot better there in terms of making sure the pain was borne more equitably.
But at the other hand, there's a limit to how much as a society you can just tell everyone to stay home because ultimately you need the economy to function.
Otherwise, we'll all starve.
Disease or no disease.
So there are hard limits on the efficacy of those sorts of measures.
Anyway, I understand where she's coming from, but you sort of always see the influence of the, I guess, left-wing point of view.
Well, yeah, because in this case, the kind of argument, it builds on the point that we were debating back and forth a little before, which is she finishes out by saying a lot of people chose fantasy and just chose to believe that COVID was a conspiracy.
And this is because...
They needed to go to their jobs, right?
That's the kind of suggestion there that it was a survival mechanism not to believe in COVID as a thing because you actually have to go and, you know, put yourself at risk and whatnot.
But I'm sure that applies in some cases.
But I think that there are plenty of people who bought into conspiracies and whatnot.
But they weren't...
Well, Brett Weinstein and Joe Rogan certainly didn't need to leave their podcast.
Yeah, but there's lots, right?
There's lots in the middle class and upper class that are also inclined that way.
So, like, I'm not saying it doesn't account for any of the explanation, but it seems to, like, be giving too much prominence to that reaction.
That's what I feel like.
And, like, what you said when it comes to...
The framing of actions as collective or not.
Like vaccination to me, mass vaccination campaigns are better framed as like a collective response because that's what a lot of the way that it was marketed was, you know, this is a responsibility to not just to you, but the other people.
And that's what like Joe Rogan and stuff, the anti-vax people got wrong.
They didn't like that.
That's right.
The right explicitly just disliked masking and vaccinations.
Because of their individualistic tendencies.
They just didn't buy into the idea that you should be doing something to prevent transmission through other people.
Framing that as an individualistic intervention is interesting.
As we've mentioned, Matt, my experience in the pandemic was very different to people in America, right?
Because I was in Japan, which also had mass vaccination campaigns and mask wearing, which is also...
A neoliberal hellscape.
If you want to see a society which is capitalist and reveling in it, lots of things in Japan that fit that system.
And yet, you know, hyper-consumerist in so many ways.
And it didn't produce that people were unwilling to wear masks.
So, like, that explanation...
Well, I think, Chris, that observation, right, that a country like Japan...
As you said, incredibly capitalist, incredibly consumerist, all that stuff.
Also, incredibly happy to do those community-level social type things.
So I think that points to a fundamental difference in view that we both might have with Klein, which is that through a lot of her work, she frames that if you want to solve the problem, whether it's climate change or the disease or whatever, capitalism is the problem.
We need to get rid of the capitalism.
And then we're going to be able to solve it.
But I guess I don't really agree with that, right?
I think you can solve these problems within a capitalist framework.
And if you're going to wave your hand and say, oh, we'll get rid of capitalism and that's how we're going to deal with truck climate change.
Well, it's a radical point of view, but you also have to explain exactly how we're going to get rid of capitalism in a lot more detail.
Yeah, and I mean, I think there's...
There's aspects where you can point to, which he does point to, which are issues around, you know, patents around vaccines and how they are being, you know, distributed to developing countries and priorities there being askew, which I think are legitimate points to raise.
And, you know, you do see efforts being made to make low-cost vaccines or alternatives which are not controlled by...
I know that Peter Hotez, for example, was involved.
But still villainized, even though he's doing the move which should be presented as not aligned with corporate interests.
But he's still accused of, by anti-vaxxers, he's still accused of being in the pocket of big pharma.
But even with that one, Chris, feel free to disagree with me, right?
But the patent mechanism is there to incentivize companies to spend a huge amount of money sometimes.
On developing intellectual property that could be very useful.
Now, biotech companies spend a huge amount of money and most of the costs are in R&D.
So if you simply say, well, actually, in the interest of global justice or whatever, we're cancelling that pattern.
You know what I mean?
R&D, forget about it.
You've lost that.
We're taking that because we need to give it away.
That's not a very good mechanism, right?
Because it's going to de-incentivize future R&D, which we're definitely going to need if another virus comes along.
I mean, clearly, you have to start getting into the mechanism.
And it could be, you know, if governments, societies, like rich countries like Australia or the United States say, we think it's really important to provide these vaccines at a lower cost to developing nations, then it can be done in a way such that it is funded without just...
You know, saying patents are bad, yo.
Oh, yeah.
No, I agree.
I agree.
So, like, I don't know enough about this topic to have, like, a well-informed opinion about the mechanism by which it would apply.
But my general notion would be that you do want, you know, the companies incentivized to compete to develop, you know, vaccines.
But you also want it that governments have a role to play in reducing the costs or incentivizing companies to, you know, engage in.
Humanitarian stuff as well as profit maximizing.
And I imagine there was lots of ways that that was done and that Naomi Klein's critique that various companies will have taken steps to undermine those efforts to increase profits will be correct.
But it'll be a complicated thing, right?
But fundamentally, yes, I agree that you want companies to be incentivized that they put R&D into products and that...
They do get a reward for it.
And I think that is the case.
But I'm certain that the balance is not going to be completely optimized, right?
That there's always going to be ways that it can be reformed and whatnot.
And look, as much as companies, its national governments like Australia or the United States are often incredibly selfish.
And prioritize their own citizens' well-being and don't really give a damn about other countries, right?
And same with the election, right?
Those of us who vote for our governments, right?
And you could even encompass other ideas, like changing patent law in some sort of way that still incentivizes this R&D that you absolutely need.
While still accommodating these other issues.
I guess the point is that it's complicated, right?
And I just am very wary when we...
You saw this with Monsanto, for instance, and GMOs and stuff as well.
It's not just the right, but there's a history on the left of doing it, of just essentially demonizing a particular company and saying, well, as long as those evil people get punished somehow, then this problem...
Will be sorted.
And I just don't think that's a very helpful way to think about things.
It's conspiratorial.
Yeah, so it's complicated.
I think that we would agree with the notion that the COVID pandemic increased the amount that people were susceptible to conspiracy theories.
Yes, absolutely.
But we probably disagree with Naomi Klein that this is purely due to ineffective neoliberal Government responses.
I suspect that those exist and that that might work, right?
That you can find cases, right, of like the British government granting contracts to like a friend of Boris Johnson or this kind of thing.
You're going to be able to find those and that legitimately will make people conspiratorial.
But you are also going to have the fact that there is like a mortality salience, you know, people dying and whatnot and like an actual pathogen.
In the environment, which makes people prone to, you know, looking for threats and humans in general are prone to imagining agents generating those threats.
So, like, I just think the environment, it's not just the neoliberal capitalism thing that generates the conspiratorial tendencies.
Well, yeah, that's my point too.
And it's not just neoliberal capitalism that is influencing even a suboptimal response to COVID.
Again, in Australia, our federal and state governments were quite quick off the mark.
With various lockdowns and all kinds of restrictions.
Very quick.
Somehow, neoliberal capitalism didn't prevent them from doing that.
But how you saw the discourse unfolding is that they came under incredible pressure, not from business interests, but from the public, because everybody hates lockdowns.
So you could see the various governments, and I sympathize with them, trying to strike that balance.
Of preventing contagion, but actually responding to very widespread grassroots dissatisfaction with lockdowns, right?
Now, the public may be right or they may be wrong.
They might have their priorities right or wrong about balancing the risks versus the costs and so on.
But this linking everything to neoliberal capitalism, it's often not the key thing.
Well, I'll just play one last clip.
This is from the Ryan Grimm where she's kind of echoing the same points.
Maybe this is like a rebuttal to some of our points here.
And so I was really interested in that reactivity, but also the final third of the book is about what are we not looking at when we're looking at ourselves as brands, as perfected beings, or when we're just reacting with one another.
And the final third of the book is called...
The shadow lands.
And that's, you know, I think, you know, as James Baldwin said, it's like, what are we not looking at?
We're not willing to look at death.
We're not willing to look at trouble.
We're not willing to look at history.
And I think this is such a moment of wild distraction.
And it makes sense.
Like, this is a hard moment to hold.
The COVID was this reckoning, this unveiling of so many.
Pre-existing injustices and inequalities that became unignorable because the people who were in the shadows holding the world up, highly racialized, were the COVID hotspots.
I mean, it was the meatpacking plants.
It was the Amazon warehouses.
And here's an airborne virus that forces us to think about who else...
Breathe this air.
Could they call in sick?
Did they have any rights?
And it is an absolute frontal confrontation with the logic at the heart of capitalism that tells you you're on your own.
You are an island.
All of your successes are yours alone.
And people who don't have them, it's their fault.
And suddenly...
No, we are enmeshed.
And that was a very hard reckoning to hold when you've been told your whole life that you make yourself, you know, and your only duty is to yourself and your family.
And if you are successful.
Then you've won the prize, right?
And now suddenly you have to think about vulnerable people.
You have to think about workers.
You have to think about racialized workers.
That was not the bargain that a lot of people signed up for.
And I don't think it should be a surprise that a lot of people rebelled against that and said, no way.
Okay, so maybe you could reiterate what were her main points there, Chris.
It seems to me that she's saying that neoliberal capitalism says that you don't need to...
You don't worry about anyone else.
You just worry about yourself and getting ahead.
And that things like COVID put an imperative on us to think about other people, think about people that are less well off than ourselves, and people don't want to do that.
Yeah, and that leads to denialism of the reality which pushes people towards conspiracism.
I think that's the general path there, right?
Parts of it, as per usual, I think this is a new running theme that I agree with.
This is going to be the theme of this show.
Yeah, which is like, I think we've often raised this point, right, about the hyper-individualist aspect around, especially stuff in North America, but including in the guru sphere and the reaction to vaccines and stuff like that,
which is, it's a very individual-focused, my body, my choice, right, this kind of...
I'm going to have a treatment which is more bespoke.
Like, you know, Joe Rogan doesn't mind pumping himself with experimental chemicals.
It's his chosen chemicals that's an important thing.
And not just the bog-standard vaccines, right?
Like, so I totally agree with that.
And I do think that COVID was a salient reminder to people that we are a society.
That, like, what other people do impacts you and, you know, that you may have taken it for granted.
That you're not as reliant on other people and, you know, systems and whatnot.
So all of that and with, it's maybe just that additional jump that those facts meant that people reacted by denying that the virus was real and that therefore they escaped into conspiracism rather than confront the reality.
Of the brutal capitalist reality.
Because, again, the thing which strikes me just here is that Japan is just as capitalist in so many different ways as North America.
But there is not the view that you are a complete island detached from all the people around you.
There's a very different intra-group, collectivist, socio-ecological setting.
But in other ways, you have all the same things she's talking about.
You know, you have people working in convenience stores.
You have immigrant workers who work on building sites and all this kind of same situation.
But you didn't get this, like, upspring of the kind of conspiracism that you saw in North America and Europe.
So does that mean that Japan is, like, less diffused with, like, capitalism and consumerist culture?
Like, no.
Yeah, I think there's a bit of a conflation with American cultural individualism, which I think is a very real thing, a cultural thing.
I saw it when I would speak to people about guns and self-defense and so on, and they're quite shocked by the idea that you can't take responsibility for your own defense and defend your home and kill someone who comes onto your property and stuff.
Whereas for me, that's normal, right?
So there's a cultural difference there.
But that's not capitalism.
That's not neoliberal capitalism.
That's different, right?
Europe has capitalism, right?
And like, if you take the UK, right, the NHS was being hugely celebrated at the start of the pandemic and actually probably generally throughout.
But now you can point out about the government not getting enough resources or these kinds of things.
But like those models, you know, like the Scandinavian countries and whatnot.
They're also, to me, they're like capitalist countries.
They just also have social welfare systems and maybe less of an individualistic focus than North America.
Yeah, that's right.
So if what she's against is a kind of ultra-libertarian anarcho-capitalism, sort of ultra-neoliberalism, this is the hard version of neoliberalism.
I suppose, right?
Where you have no government, you have no social services, you have no social consensus, no social obligations, then I'm all for it, right?
That's a crazy way to live, but I think a terrible way to live.
But that's not how the world is at the moment.
I think even the United States, even though Trump's trying to dismantle it, they still have a pretty healthy government sector.
Countries like Australia and Europe are definitely mixed market economies.
And the idea is that you have an economic engine which runs according to neoliberal economics, free trade and markets and so on.
But that's the engine.
It doesn't drive the car, right?
Now, again, if the critique is, well, the money that's involved in that engine can then influence policy.
In a way such that the tail is wagging the dog, and I see it with gambling companies and the way they exert influence, and I'm sure there are instances of weapons manufacturers and stuff doing the same thing.
Then again, I'd say that's an absolute real problem and should be criticized.
But I think there is a danger in just...
I see her identifying real things, and I agree, like you said, with a lot of it.
And then it ends with neoliberal capitalism as the root cause of everything.
And I'm like, hang on.
People were conspiratorial a long time before that came along.
People were selfish, right?
And prioritized themselves and their family for a long time.
I don't think we can blame everything on neoliberal capitalism.
That's all.
Yeah.
I don't think the response in a lot of...
I think self-declared socialist states as well was something to write.
Like the Chinese response was pretty hoisty.
Anyway.
Yeah, yeah.
So, well, if you think that that is us injecting our politics into these takes, so this is a little bit more about these broader systems.
I'm going to shout freedom in the freezing cold, and that's what happened in my country.
Honk your air horn.
But I think it's equally interesting that a lot of people who grew up in that same individualistic culture welcomed the emergence of a social state that...
You know, put an eviction moratorium, paid people to stay home, you know, set up mutual aid networks and said, yeah, like we want to show up for each other.
And then there's a racial justice reckoning in the middle of that.
And it deepens.
And there's a vision for another kind of society with radically different spending priorities.
So, you know, I think we're in this moment where you've got a reckoning with our present incredibly unjust economic order.
Which you can no longer unsee on some level, especially if you're part of the lockdown class, because you know that you are being supported by all these other people who bore so much more risk unequally.
You've got a reckoning with the very creation of settler colonial states.
And then you've got a reckoning with the future, right?
Which is the climate crisis is here and we are all implicated in it.
So I think there's all kinds of distractions being thrown up right now.
And that's what this book is trying to do, is like map the weirdness of now.
Yeah.
Like, I don't know.
There's a lot to unpack there.
But introducing a bunch of stuff there as the COVID reaction being...
Like, welcomed by left-wing people because it was pushing things in the right direction.
Like, I don't know, like, the presumption there is that she said that the spending priorities, for instance, are out of whack, right?
And what we need to do is reorient them so that they're more going in the right direction.
But look at what are the spending priorities of, let's just take the Canadian federal budget, right?
Where she's from.
I mean, it looks very, very similar to the Australian federal budget, which is the vast majority of it is spent on health and education and social welfare payments, particularly to the elderly, and, you know, administering the various government departments and so on.
Not a big military-industrial complex?
Not yet.
I don't have the percentage that they spend on the military to hand, but it would be, you know, under three or four percent.
Right?
It's certainly in Canada, probably much lower than that.
So like in what ways are the spending priorities all completely wrong?
I find that, you know, like whenever things get tied in with racial reckoning, settler colonial states, right?
Like those words in particular, to me, feel like you're wedging in.
A particular ideological perspective, because by using just those terms, it kind of signifies that, you know, you're talking to a particular political segment with a particular analysis.
And like, is the reaction about COVID in Canada around settler colonialism that much?
Like, it doesn't seem to me like that's hugely related.
To the response, even though it is undoubtedly going to be the case that there are minority groups that are, you know, treated worse in different societies or have different access to the facilities and so on, which are reasonable to point out.
But it kind of fits what you said about the neoliberal capitalism thing, which, like, it feels like that's a conclusion that's already set, no matter what it is, because it will be.
About settler colonialism and racial reckoning and whatever other issues are currently at the forefront of the kind of progressive leftist movement because that's the movement that she identifies with and belongs to.
So it feels like an ideological framework that is ready to go whatever facts fall into it.
And there is a critique of that.
Somewhat in what she's doing.
But, you know, like, I think this is the point because she does point out that there are parallels, right?
And the mean difference is that the structural factors that she is identifying and which leftist critics in general identify are real and they are genuine conspiracies based on consumer capitalism.
And so in this mirror world, they're identifying...
Real sentiments.
But they're not actually identifying the root cause.
The correct root cause.
But the vibes are correct.
That's like something is rotten in Denmark.
And yeah.
Yeah, I feel like repping in a whole bunch of those things.
Again, it's a bit of a broad brush, right?
Just gesturing at a whole bunch of...
Well, I don't want to say buzzwords, but they're phrases which are...
Magical phrases, I guess, on the left.
There's a critique, and this is from back in 2002.
There was a book, and I think it's a short summary article, called The Rebel Cell.
The article was written by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, both from the University of Toronto.
And I think their book was, in essence, anti-consumerist.
They are bought in on the same ideology as Naomi Klein, probably broadly alongside us as well, to a certain extent.
But their argument in this article, and they took some shots at Naomi Klein, and they were arguing that this was particularly focused on her book No Logo, that there is a kind of critique of consumerism, which is in itself a brand of consumerism.
Right.
So like, you know, they highlighted American Beauty and Fight Club and the fact that the characters are relying against this like kind of blonde, corporatist, IKEA lifestyle.
You care about this $4,000, you know, Italian leather sofa or whatever.
But at the same time, it's celebrating like a different kind of consumerism, which is more alternative, more underground.
So like the character in American Beauty buys, you know, like a vintage car that he wanted.
From the 70s or like people going on nature trails and going to underground rock concerts or whatever.
That is, you know, consumerism, which is fuck the system, consumerism.
But like fundamentally, it is in itself like an anti-brand brand, right?
And Elm Klein talks about this in her book as well.
But I think when you see that there are a set of like kind of Phrases or topics that just like come up, no matter what the issue is being discussed, it does feel a little bit like you're pitching it to a particular audience or like,
you know, there are certain aspects that you are expected to bring up as a good, you know, leftist.
And the same thing would apply in any other political movement that there are just, you know, there are, they're kind of like the crowd pleaser.
Things that you hit on.
And it doesn't mean that the issues that you're raising are not genuine.
There aren't issues with consumerism, with mass production and so on.
But it is just that you should realize that your own group also has these topics and phrases that you can hit on, which are likely to get you support and consensus.
Yeah, I mean, I was looking into the No Logo book she wrote, talking about how corporations have shifted their focus from manufacturing per se.
Manufacturing still happens, but it happens in a sort of commodified sort of way.
Yeah, branding.
Yeah, and branding.
And I think I'm sympathetic to that sort of point.
But like you sort of pointed out, Chris, the kind of hip way.
To consume these days, right?
Where you get your locally sourced, whatever, fresh foods and stuff like that.
Raw milk?
Yeah, get your raw milk.
Like, I'll give you another good example.
My cousin, she's a potter.
She does pottery, right?
She's very good.
Her work's even been exhibited in galleries and stuff like that.
And she sells, you know, plates and cups and various things you can buy.
I can't afford them, right?
And it's not because she's not charging an exhaustive amount.
It's incredibly expensive to make stuff like that.
But I think that would be cool consumption, right?
But that kind of bespoke sort of hip service delivery in places like the West, it's really only possible because we have mass production and stuff like that which enables our basic needs to be met.
So I guess what I'm saying is that, like, I could see that it's very hip and cool to prefer, like, non-commodified products.
But if they are bespoke and they're made in a sort of a craft kind of way, then they are going to be very expensive and not everyone can afford that.
Yeah, well, so maybe this is a good point.
Before we go back to COVID conspiracies and whatnot, to talk about, you know, algorithms and brands and this kind of thing, which is a topic that she also addresses, right?
So this is her talking about the algorithm and its role or, you know, how much explanatory power to attach to that.
The algorithms are a house of mirrors.
You know, we've all had that experience of like, okay, well, maybe I wanted to watch that one video, but does that mean I want to watch 10 videos just like it?
This is a loop that we're in, and loops don't tend to be very healthy.
I guess the other way that I worry about the way algorithms are changing us is just the currency of the attention economy, right?
Of likes, of retweets.
They're value-free measurements, right?
In the same way that money is.
And the question is not like, was this insightful?
Was it correct?
It's how many?
How much?
Right?
So that's sometimes referred to as clout online.
And what clout measures is not...
Is it good?
Is it bad?
Is it true?
Is it false?
It's how much bulk you-ness there is in the world.
I say in the book, like, if influence sways, clout just squats.
And I think that what that does is it, if that's the currency of the online economy, it selects for a certain type of personality that really needs a lot of attention for whatever reason.
The attention economy Rewards the part of ourselves that wants the attention, that wants to see our name, that wants that validation.
And it changes us.
I think it does change us.
I think we all know people who have been changed.
I've been changed.
I'm still from the block.
What's the word?
You're still mad from the block.
I got a response to this because I think there's an aspect of this which I really agree with, which is about the attention economy and metrics and so on.
It is fundamentally all about measuring quantity.
Likes and retweets and all of those things.
And that is, you know, like podcast viewer numbers, right?
Those things are indicators of success.
You know, this is an offhand comment, Chris, but you know what else has been commodified in that numeric kind of way?
Academic brownie points, number of publications, how many citations, a very similar kind of thing.
And I saw an interesting paper, by the way, about how they've done some empirical research on that and they are arguing that actually there's glut.
Because obviously this metric-based system has resulted in a huge increase in the sheer number of papers that are getting written and published.
And paradoxically, it means that it's making it more difficult for fields to progress because genuinely new stuff is still getting published.
But it's kind of lost amongst this flood of PDFs that are out there on the internet.
But that's an aside, Chris.
I basically fundamentally agree with those concerns.
I think we can overstate the impact of the algorithm.
Algorithms, I think, do have an impact.
They almost have to exist because when you...
Log on to YouTube or anything, then it has to display something.
Or do you do a Google search?
Something has to be displayed first.
And what you've liked and what you've enjoyed before is the best, or what you've subscribed to, is obviously the best indicator of what you want to see.
My feed, I actually just logged on to YouTube to double check.
You know, it perfectly reflects my interests, which is good for me.
I think if you are going down a conspiratorial rabbit hole, going into weird...
All right, in-cell, manosphere stuff, then your feet is probably going to look a lot less healthy.
But yeah, I'm not quite sure to which the algorithms are sort of instrumental in causing the badness, you know?
Now, there's more to it that she will touch, but I agree, like you, that the point she makes about the current social media systems and whatnot, like...
Being a playground for narcissists, right?
Or people who want attention.
And we've documented on here lots of people who are very much focused on metrics, how many downloads they get.
Jordan Peterson often takes his downloads as indicators of how many people agree with him, right?
Or how much important she is.
And how correct he is.
Yeah.
So she's right about that.
You know, I do think that there is differences in the degree to which people are susceptible to online dynamics.
But a lot of this sounds, you know, maybe this would be an unflattering comparison, but, like, I think Jonathan Haidt is making similar points, right, about the deranging aspects of social media and how, you know, we could change them so that they're not promoting our worst aspects.
And I actually do think, and this isn't so much of a controversial point, because I think, like, Rebecca Lewis, The author who wrote for Data and Society, the Alternative Influencer Report.
She also argued that people overstate the influence of the algorithm.
And a lot of it is interpersonal stuff and people selecting the kind of narratives that they want to hear.
So I don't think it's that unusual to make that point.
But I can't remember where I was going.
You were mainly agreeing with...
I was meanly agreeing.
That's right.
That's right.
I was meanly agreeing.
So I'm just saying there are people on different sides like Jonathan Haidt and Rebecca Lewis are very different in lots of different ways.
But I pointed out there's the ranging aspects of social media, but it's not all attributable to the algorithm.
I think Naomi Klein would agree with that.
But on the personal branding point in particular, a little bit more.
Almost 25 years ago now, I published a book called No Logo, which was about the rise of branding in the corporate world.
And this was just the very beginning of this idea that it isn't just corporations like Nike or Starbucks that should be brands, but individuals should also be brands.
When I wrote that book, that seemed like an absolutely absurd idea.
Because it's one thing for a celebrity.
To be a brand because they can afford to promote that brand.
They have publicists and they have PR consultants.
They have stylists.
But normal workers in the economy don't have any of those things.
It just didn't compute to our 1990s brains.
And of course, the game changer is social media because it puts at our fingertips this huge marketing potential.
If you've got the phone, it's pretty much free.
But I don't think you can Pry apart the idea that people are performing kind of branded versions of ourselves online from the broader economic insecurity and precarity that produced this idea that this is all we have.
Yeah.
Again, Chris, she touches on really interesting points, I think, and then veers at the end to this is terrible and it's because of...
Neoliberal capitalism.
So to take this point, let's start with the positives.
We've talked about this offline.
You and I both love I Think You Should Leave.
Oh, the driving crooner.
The driving crooner, right?
I mean, that's a skit, but it's pointing to something real, as we talked about.
But for people that haven't heard it.
People haven't heard it.
The joke is there's a guy, he's got his thing.
His thing is to be the driving cruder.
And he drives people around his car.
But on his window, driver's side window, he's got like a couple of stickers.
There's a hat and a cigar.
And then as cars pass him, he acts like he's puffing on the cigar.
With crooning music coming inside the car.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's a ridiculous idea.
But it's his shtick, right?
It's his idea.
He's like, I've got to work out how to make some money out of this.
The idea's too good.
I bet you didn't know you were driving with a driving crooner, did you?
Or working with a driving crooner.
No, I didn't know you do this.
Oh yeah, I do this.
I own this.
You own what?
TheDrivingCrooner.com, baby!
Don't you love it?
I gotta figure out how to make money on this thing.
It's simply too good.
The dream is to have five cars going around statewide.
Hey, watch out for this guy here.
Fuck, he's trying to steal my decals!
What the hell are you doing?
It's very funny because it's so absurd.
I thought it was just pure absurdism.
But then, as we talked about, I think he was actually making a little bit of social commentary in the line of Naomi Klein because while I was in the States, I would see a lot of people who had their...
Add their gimmick.
It was incredibly bespoke.
Someone driving around in a tiny little pink motorized baby car, like a children's sort of car in public and dressed outrageously or someone else who, when their car pulled up at the stoplights, they would pull out their drums, which were like a somehow drum in the car.
And that was attached to speakers.
And they would do this crazy drum riff.
And then when the light turned green, they would drive off again.
Yeah, this is all fun stuff.
But I think it is pointing to a reality, which is just like companies.
Companies don't want to be in the business of producing a commodity.
They want to have product differentiation.
If you're producing a commodity, then you'll always be only getting paid the lowest common.
Denominator type income from it.
It's not a very good way to make money.
What's better is if you've got something special that you're bringing to the table, people want your particular product or service, and therefore you can charge more money.
Now, I think the same thing applies to people in a service economy.
A lot of us are not in the business of producing commodities.
In the olden days, a lot of people were involved in Like literally producing commodities, like growing grain, mining coal, producing whatever, ballpoint pens or screwdrivers or whatever from in a factory.
Pretty generic stuff because the world didn't have enough generic stuff and most people were employed in creating it.
Now in economies that have transitioned to a more service economy, there is enough stuff in the sense that you don't need to devote a large proportion of the workforce.
To be growing grain or producing widgets in a factory.
And you have people doing far more bespoke, particularist kind of jobs, whether you're working for the government or a private organization or whether you're producing content that's going to appear online like you and me.
You have your incredibly specific niche.
Knowing a client towards the end of that frames that as this is a terrible thing, right?
We're branding ourselves, right?
And it's a result of precarity.
But I think you can observe the same phenomena and attribute it to non-scary processes, you know?
And I don't know that it needs to be cast as a negative thing.
Yeah, I mean, there's arguments for decentralized, like, economics going on there.
Yes, you have these platforms that are hosting things and yes, there are algorithms and it creates incentives.
But like you said, it is true that now an individual can do a funny dance to Rasputin and then become like a social media figure with a huge account and they become somebody whose job is dancing around.
And before that, they were somebody also trying to make a living by being a dancer.
But suddenly they have an audience because of like a one-off thing.
And yes, you can regard it as like a lottery where, you know, there's lots of people who might be deserving of attention who don't get it.
But it's been noted that it's removed a lot of the gatekeeping from artists and singer-songwriters and this kind of thing.
So like you can't frame that in a way as leveling out the playing field away from these.
Record labels or whatever that have like the sole power over who gets to have, you know, a successful music career.
Yeah.
I mean, like we could return again to my cousin who's the Potter, right?
She's got a website.
She has her brand, right?
Like literally her name on the brand.
And, you know, it's happening through word of mouth and, you know, just general awareness.
But, you know, she certainly has a brand.
And it's the fact that it's her name attached to what she produces.
That means that people would be willing to pay what they do for those products, right?
So I'm sure Naomi Klein would be in favor of that kind of thing, but I don't see how it's...
I think it's personal branding as much as Dakota Nagurus is a brand.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, so there's a little bit more on this point, which highlights some more of the argument that she wants to make.
I'll play that.
Let's hear her elaborate a bit more.
And so I don't like just blaming it on social media or just blaming it on the algorithms, because I think that if what's really driving it is terror, what's really driving it is the fear of being capitalist roadkill.
I know a lot of people who do kind of social media not out of addiction, but out of a sense of duty and fear.
That if they don't do it, if they don't have a brand, if they don't perform themselves, which is not themselves, which is something for the consumption of others.
It's an idealized version of oneself, whether that's like, you know, a beautiful, idealized, perfect life version or an aggressive, narcissistic, racist version to a different niche audience, right?
It's still kind of a partitioned, performed version designed to get that.
To get the likes, to get the views, to get the clout, which in turn is not just about the likes.
It's monetizable.
Again, an incredibly negative framing to it.
Capitalist roadkill.
Capitalist roadkill.
That's what drives us to record.
I know that's...
Fear.
Fear.
Another cog in the machine.
Yeah.
Look, I mean, you know, just to reiterate, we do agree partially with some of this, right?
We reckon that these gamified incentives that are metric-driven stuff is incentivizing a lot of poor behavior, ranging from the gurus that we cover.
But, you know, depending on your point of view, you might include, like, OnlyFans-type stuff for streamers.
Playing computer games, you might say that's a silly thing to be doing, a bad thing to be doing.
But, you know, I do bristle a little bit about just some of the stuff that gets subjected to there.
For instance, like saying that every time you perform, by which she means anytime you provide a service in this sense, you know what I mean, then you're not being authentic to yourself because you're not expressing your true self.
I mean, for me, this is a bit like saying to, A doctor, you know, a medical doctor who is seeing patients and acts like a doctor, you know, is performing that role when they do it, saying, well, this is terrible.
This is capitalism going crazy because they're not being their authentic self.
They're having to perform the role of a doctor.
And I think that's a bit silly.
Well, yeah, I think this ties in.
So this is, you know, this is a recurring theme on our podcast, Matt, right?
This relies on the notion of an authentic, pure self, which is not constrained by social roles or capitalist motivations or these kind of things.
And that, to me, is a very particular notion of a kind of self-help view of the self, that there's a pure, pristine you, which is constricted by society and expectations.
Social performance.
And the real you is, you know, this pure, unbridled, altruistic being.
And like, no, like to me, it seems like if you take what she's saying to say, people play up characters online.
They can get caught in negative feedbacks.
There's audience caption dynamics and whatnot.
Absolutely true.
All correct.
But it sounds like it's going farther to that, to being like, everybody's creating this kind of...
They idealize double of themselves, that they present and project to the world, and it's inauthentic.
A doppelganger, if you will.
Yeah, a doppelganger, if you will.
Yeah, and it's not like, I find that, although that you can find figures who are like that, I suspect Constantine Kesson is that much of a prick, like in other aspects of his life.
I think I am fundamentally very similar, you know, like across platforms.
I could...
I can vouch for this.
Chris is absolutely identical when you speak to him one-on-one on the phone.
He's not performing at all.
He should.
He should perform more.
I should perform more.
There's sometimes the notion that like, well, people will be kinder face-to-face and like, yeah, sure.
I mean, that's...
Not Chris.
Not Chris.
No, I'm kinder in person.
Vicky said so.
I've never been particularly cruel to Vicky, though.
But like, I think this does rely on that, you know, that thing that there's the online world and there's the offline, touching grass, real world.
Around you.
And I am more in the mode that people do perform online.
That is definitely true.
But a lot of shitty stuff online reflects that the people are actually shitty.
They're not underneath this beautiful butterfly that is trapped in this social media cocoon of horror.
Well, I agree with you, Chris.
And actually, this parallels.
What we were saying before about where we might differ on blaming neoliberal capitalism on everything.
Perhaps as a psychologist, as an anthropologist, we look at things a bit more broadly.
And, you know, I don't pin it all on, you know, capitalism is alienating us from each other and it's forcing us to be our inauthentic selves and perform and become brands, etc., etc.
Because this does presume.
This kind of idealized, I don't know, hippie collective thing, right?
As a better idea.
As a better idea, where we're not selfish and we don't prioritize our families over others.
And, you know, we're always thinking about the community.
We don't care about making money or material status and things like that.
We're expressing ourselves authentically and harmoniously within the community.
And this is a lovely idea that cults...
Around the world have tried out many times.
And it doesn't end well.
And just like you're saying, I don't think we can pin it on...
You can note unhealthy aspects of algorithms and online culture and post-industrial capitalism.
But I think there is a Rousseauian romantic temptation to think that There would be some sort of Garden of Eden, utopia, Simpsons, children holding hands with rainbows, singing without these things.
My understanding of human psychology does not support that.
Yeah.
So the division of labor, is it a bad thing for Marxists?
I know it's like a thing that happened, right?
But normally in Marxist thing, it's kind of like the candlestick maker gets separated from the...
The wax maker.
It's alienation, right?
There's the issue that as you become increasingly specialized, people become alienated from the mode of production.
That's right.
When you're working in a Ford factory and you're just working on the brakes and you don't get to craft a car in its entirety.
Then it's very alienating.
I mean, that's how the theory goes, of course.
In practice, actual communist economies involve a huge amount of specialization and factory lines and all the rest.
I agree, I agree.
But I'm only asking because, you know, I'm thinking that like in this kind of creator ecosystem, right, you know, the Twitch streamers and your Patreons and your online influencers and all that kind of thing, people...
To a certain extent, it's been painted here as an inherently negative thing, but isn't it in some ways, couldn't you frame it as a correction?
Because now you have media companies, you have Novara Media, you have some more news, you have leftist companies, Jacobin, that are able to put out their product to get support from people who directly support the creators who are creating the thing.
Like skimming off.
Of course, they're skimming off from all different companies, service providers, banks, whatever.
They're skimming going on.
But isn't this, in a way, allowing people, like in a different framing, the same ecosystems that allow Steve Bannon and Infowars to kind of thrive in the modern environment are the same...
Platforms that allow Novara Media and Jacobin and the Young Turks and David Pakman, the Majority Report and whatnot to also become like so, like for me, right?
Because I'm not anti-capitalist.
I have the usual pretensions about like, you know, disgusting consumer culture and whatnot that like, you know, an academic group would tend to have.
I also recognize that those ecosystems can produce bad things, produce good things, like Coffezilla.
I like his stuff.
I don't like InfoWars.
And I think that InfoWars is more exploitative.
I'd like relying on supplements and whatnot.
But it's just that thing where, like, for me, it's not that there's nothing that you can critique about those systems and the incentives they introduce, but there's good and bad that come out of it.
But I get the implication, you know, from that one and others that It's kind of broadly presented as negative, but they're often grappling with this issue that they are also benefiting from these systems and it creates a little bit of a cognitive dissonance that needs to be managed.
Why is it that we're going to critique this kind of influencer system, but I'm now talking to a left-wing influencer on a leftist?
Platform that is monetized through YouTube.
And is the general critique just, you know, the usual, there's a man in a whale, but that explains it.
So don't worry about it.
Yeah.
No, I hear what you're saying.
Like post-industrial economies tend to have a lot more diverse set of jobs and jobs that tend to be less routine.
And you tend to have a...
A market whereby people are not just looking for a standard kind of factory-produced mug, say.
They want something bespoke, right?
They're not satisfied with the standard kind of branded coffee.
They've got the cool cafe where they know the name of the person and they have those cute things and whatever.
So, you know, we're all the driving crooner now, to some degree.
And, you know, that's not entirely a...
A bad thing?
Or perhaps?
I don't know.
Matt, do you want another wrinkle added to the driving crooner saga?
Always.
On Amazon, you can now buy driving crooner decals that are actually being...
I hope the driving crooner is getting a cut.
I hope he's managed to monetize it.
Yeah, so it's gone.
You know, what's this post-ironic consumption?
I wonder if there actually ends up a service of driving cruders.
That's hugely profitable.
So if I have a countless business that's producing driving cruders decals and selling them...
Yeah, well, what's the age of countless?
That's a good question.
But, well, we're kind of, we're actually...
Approaching the end of her 12-minute video.
There's a bit more in the Ryan Grimm stuff that I want to cover, but why don't we continue through to where she gets?
Because she talks a bit about what a healthy social media ecosystem might look like, right?
And I think there's some material there to consider.
You know, I think we need a real public commons.
I mean, I think we need a real information commons.
We're circling around.
Oh, that platform used to be good and it used to have real, I mean, this is the story for everyone, you know, Tumblr and Twitter and yeah, early TikTok, where it was smaller and it was more of a space for experimentation and a place for people who would not have had access to large audiences or even just meeting people who are like them.
I don't want to say that there's no value in it.
I think there is real value, but I think that this pattern of, and then it gets really big, and then we don't understand the algorithm, and then people start getting canceled and injected, and we, you know...
This happens again and again because these are not democratic spaces at all.
They are black box algorithms.
And by black box, you know, I mean that we don't understand and it's proprietary how these decisions get made about what's going to be lifted up, what's going to be suppressed.
I mean, this is why things like the Twitter files have gotten, you know, a lot of traction, a lot of attention because it's a look behind the curtain.
Chris, remind me about the Twitter files.
What was the deal with those?
That was, you know, Elon Musk releasing like behind the scenes emails back and forth with a selection of handpicked journalists from the Free Press, Matt Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, looking for smoking guns off the Twitter company employees,
collaborating with the Biden administration or, you know, the woke mind virus agenda.
And they found very little.
If you recall, like, it did give a look behind the curtain, but it was mostly innocuous.
It was like, mostly was there were requests from governments, including Biden and whatnot, but either the majority of them were reasonable requests.
They were like, you know, about Hunter Biden's penis or something, like an account that was promoted.
Or they just were not heated.
They were just...
You know, a government request, like, look at these accounts and they didn't remove them.
It wasn't what it was billed as, which was the government simply could flag an account and that was it.
And it was removed.
And so she there, she doesn't really go into it, but she is quasi endorsing the kind of promotional view of what the Twitter files were, which was it wasn't an open.
Behind the curtain, it was more like a curated selection of emails to make things look nefarious.
But when you actually read them in totality, it was just like what you would expect.
You know, companies debating over how to moderate controversial issues and what to do with Trump and all this kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's my memory, too.
So, yeah, I think she misses the mic there a little bit.
I think overall, though, that critique of...
Online media platforms, again, it feels like it's hitting some sort of buzzwordy phrases, like, you know, creating organic, small-scale spaces for exploration and experimentation and stuff.
And also sort of hearkening back to some golden era of social media where things were good.
Local, when there were local forums, Matt, for local people.
For local people, yes.
When Tumblr existed, and we had MySpace, you know, back in those funky days.
Back in the good old days.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so I don't know.
Like, on one hand, the point of agreement, of course, is that there are definitely issues, of course, with these private companies in private hands, running companies like Twitter, Elon Musk.
He's really the alpha and omega of this problematic behavior.
And, yeah, it's become incredibly worse because of his own ideological proclivities and hand-fisted attempts at monetization.
So that's certainly true.
But, I don't know, the critique there, which is why aren't things better, I don't know, it doesn't really offer a clear solution, does it?
Let's go back to the days of ICQ chat rooms and Napster.
I used message boards back in the day.
I was a moderator on message boards, right?
An early adopter of internet stuff.
They were not the golden era of the...
I understand that people looked fondly back on the earlier...
Internet era.
But there was a lot of shit going on there.
A lot of what you see on Reddit forums now is just very similar to what was happening on forums before.
And there still is this kind of federalized, localized stuff.
Subreddits are like that.
They all have their own cultures and their own rules and whatnot.
Compare Lex Friedman to our subreddit.
Yeah, that's right.
One of them, a healthy garden in which a thousand flowers bloom.
And the other.
Yeah.
Filled with idiots.
No, no.
It's a strongly moderated space, which actually there's been no new threads on for a month.
Oh, it's been shut down.
Yeah.
Stalin-esque is how it is run.
Look, the other thing too, though, is also on that theme of local isn't always better.
You know, there's still a lot of local Facebook groups.
My wife and I are a member of our local small towns Facebook group.
And you might say, this is great.
You know what I mean?
A lot of experimentation, building connections, setting up cooperatives.
No, it's the most absolute toxic, hot mess.
It is amazing.
Yes.
What sort of issues?
What sort of issues come up on you?
A typical thread would go like this.
I saw a croc dying in the lake.
Something like that.
Well, a typical thing would go, oh, you know, there are a couple of dogs running down the street.
You know, someone's let them out of their house.
They scared my baby.
And then someone will reply, you know, what are you trying to do?
You're trying to get them locked up and put down by the dog catcher?
And then someone will...
We'll jump in with there and go...
Shouldn't let your baby roam around anyway.
That's right.
That's right.
And then it's all off for young and old.
And then they'll start relitigating old grievances because they'll know each other, which makes things incredibly worse.
So, look, I'm just saying there isn't...
I don't know if there is that beautiful alternative that is sitting there, although definitely, you know, like a public commons of some kind.
What is good, right?
I don't think we're ever going to have the perfect one.
You're going to have multiple ones, right?
And I have a lot of concerns about this private ownership and how people like Elon are going to screw things up.
But I don't know.
You have to think carefully about exactly how it works then.
You know what I mean?
Are you going to socialize them?
Is the government going to buy Twitter and run it?
How do you do it?
Nice tea up, Matt.
So let's hear a little bit about that.
The solution is not to have one of the richest men in the world leak documents to a few of his hand-picked friends.
It is to have a democratically controlled internet.
The Internet was developed by the U.S. government originally.
It's a process of enclosing the commons, of enclosing these publicly developed tools and allowing a handful of individuals to get unfathomably rich from them and using the discourse of the commons of the public sphere in order to sell these products back to us.
I think we should actually think about what it would mean to have democratically controlled social media and prioritize that.
Democratically controlled social media, like the early internet controlled by American.
I think what she is talking about is more of a kind of cooperatively owned, like, council democratic system or whatever.
I don't really know, but what she is describing sounds more like the CCP.
Like, you know, centrally managing the internet and setting a set of rules.
And typically, that's not a system that, you know, you would prefer to operate under.
Well, like, I mean, look, charitably, there are definitely sort of open source and open protocol type initiatives and open standards and things like that, which sort of can be set up.
Arguably, something like Wikipedia.
Like, it's kind of democratic in its content.
Creation.
In a way.
But editors, you know, there's issues there as well.
Like all these systems, they have issues about management and people becoming little earls and kings in their fiefdoms, right?
But no system is perfect.
So where I agree...
I think it's right to be concerned about the concentration of power around tech elites and around unelected platforms that are suddenly having a lot of power to shape conversations through algorithmic or editorial choices.
This is certainly the case.
But I don't know.
The solution to that being a more federalist system, lots of different platforms, that's one way.
There's the centralized government way, and there's the open sources, the kind of federalized system that encourages it, but they all have these issues and limitations.
Well, I think the main issue with what Naomi's saying there is that this is very vague, you know what I mean?
It's nice to say that, oh, what we need is to stop them in closing the commons and have a democratically controlled internet, but that is...
Just incredibly broad and vague, and really the devil is in the detail.
How do you do it?
I don't know how to do it, but just to give you an example of what I mean is that if we identify a problem, like a crazy rich person like Elon Musk buying an influential platform like Twitter and then bending it to his will, and we might, say, discount the idea of the government buying these things and running them like,
say, the Australian government runs the ABC or the BBC, right?
Let's say we didn't want to do that.
You might say institute some rule where, yes, they are in private hands, but, you know, they have to be publicly traded companies and no one shareholder can own more than, whatever, 5% of the stock.
And basically there's a board and stuff like that.
In other words, it gets run very much like, you know, a boring kind of company that doesn't have such vulnerability, right, to a takeover.
By a particular small group of rich people.
So, I mean, that might not work.
That may well be a dumb idea, right?
But the point is that we can all notice things about the internet we don't like.
I think for it to be a substantive contribution, we need to be a bit more specific about what is the alternative that we're proposing.
Yeah, and I think there's always just the attraction in general to harken back to like a previous era where things were better.
And people were more concerned about their communities and whatnot.
And it does seem to happen on both right and left.
There was a period where people were living in greater harmony.
I don't remember it from being on the internet since it was around.
Like when it was restricted to fewer people, there was still Curtis Sharvin.
Right. Right.
So like, yeah, just not.
Well, I mean, my.
My prejudice, though, to disagree a little bit, I think you did it was a little bit better when the bar to entry was a little bit higher.
You know what I mean?
Like, yes, it was full of weird, obsessive tech geeks, but at least the bar at entry wasn't having an opposable thumb because, my God, the...
But, you know, I don't know.
I say that, but then again, a lot of it just gets...
You filter it all out, you know?
Like, even in the era of Trump...
And Elon Musk.
I still have my Twitter account.
I've silenced notifications from people I don't follow.
I only follow people that I think are good.
And as a result, my feed is actually good, but by my lights anyway.
If you want me to offer a hot take around technology, as I'm sure you do, I can see it in your eyes and the listeners at home saying, oh yeah, you offer hot take.
What does Chris think?
Why doesn't he speak more?
One thing I'll say is like, we're in some sense in a transitionary period, right, where our generation, or my generation, your generation as well.
Careful, careful, Chris.
Yeah.
We were around when the internet came into existence, right?
We lived in the pre-internet era.
You definitely, me as well.
And then...
People are more savvy, right?
And our kids are better than us in terms of navigating the internet and digital products and whatnot.
They're digital natives, right?
That's the kind of trendy buzzword term.
And I understand that in the era of Trump, in the era of Elon Musk, it looks like people are incredibly vulnerable and susceptible to conspiracy and those kinds of things.
But I do feel like people's digital literacy Younger people's digital literacy and skepticism is improving in a way that the boomers perhaps have not got.
So we'll see when it's a generation where they're in their 50s, but the internet has always been there.
And there's always been social media disinformation campaigns and all this kind of thing.
I think it's worth noting that there was a substantial transition in the past 30 years.
Odd years, right, to the online environment.
So, you know, growing parents.
That's fair.
That's fair.
Yeah, I remember, and it still happens with boomers, of course, but certainly when email and stuff was a new thing to many Australians, then you had people of my parents' generation, like getting an email just filled with the most outrageous lies, like essentially a chain letter that they would read.
And it was typewritten.
It was on the computer.
Therefore, they took it at face value.
And that's just the kind of thing that my children would never do in a million years, right?
I think you're right.
There is a climatization or adjustment that's going on.
There's hope for us yet.
There's hope for us yet.
But let's see, because according to Jonathan Haidt, all the girls will just kill themselves for being exposed to Instagram and whatnot.
So, you know.
The other opinions are available.
Now, in line with this, Matt, and kind of building on the notion of the kind of conglomeration of power around tech elite and them having some somewhat nefarious, often capitalistic goals in mind,
listen to this bit where she's discussing Conspiracy theories and how she frames them because I think this is a little bit of a difference than how we would.
Conspiracy theories get the facts wrong, but they often get the feelings right.
And the feeling is something's being hidden from us.
Something doesn't add up.
Like, you know, there is impunity for the powerful.
Rather than seeing a system, you know, and I'm somebody who's been studying the system of capitalism for my, you know, through all of my books, that's really what they're all about.
Conspiracy says, no, it's this, it's Fauci, it's Schwab, it's this meeting in Davos.
And so this is the other reason why conspiracies are spreading now and becoming so mainstream.
Even though conspiracy theorists always talk about the elites, the elites, they're after you.
The people who conspiracy theories benefit most are the elites, because it deflects attention away from the system that has made them billionaires.
And it says, no, it's not the system.
It's just those three guys.
We just have to get those three guys.
It's a system-protecting framework, conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories often play on racial and ethnic stereotypes, right?
They break apart potential coalitions from below.
That is an interesting and different take on conspiracies and conspiracy theories.
I guess she frames them as having a functional role, a system-protecting role, one that aligns with...
For the powerful.
Yes, the powerful.
She doesn't really explain why they align with the powerful, apart from perhaps people just prefer the status quo, maybe.
But I'm reading into that.
Well, I think the argument is that they're like a version of false consciousness, that people are unsatisfied.
They're going to rise up.
So if you are an elite in control of social media or whatever, you want to channel that outrage into targeting Soros and Fauci as opposed to...
You know, hatred for the extractive capitalist class, which you are part of.
Yes, yes.
Now, you know, I can think of a charitable way to think about that.
But on the other hand, I can also think of an awful lot of counter examples, an awful lot of conspiracy theories, which are directed against, you know, powerful people in the establishment, right?
There could be big corporations.
Like big pharmaceutical companies or biotech companies.
Monsanto is the classic one directed at the government generally, you know, including conservative governments.
You know, rich people generally.
Rich people often, Soros and so on, feature in conspiracy theories.
So yes, they sometimes do involve...
Marginalized groups.
The Jews, for instance, are the famous examples.
But basically, I feel like she's cherry-picking here.
The charitable take on her take there would be one that would have to cherry-pick conspiracy theories to fit her framing.
I agree with this because I think there are a class of conspiracy theories where you can see powerful people You know, targeting minority groups or scapegoating people, right?
Like there's famously examples throughout history, the Nazis, Roller infamously presented the Jews as having, you know, conspiracy against the German people in particular, but also, you know, just Western civilization overall,
like a kind of parasitic, like fifth column located within the societies.
And that's very common in lots of...
Not just like historical context, right?
Like kind of demonizing a minority group and using that as our society is being subverted by these people.
And I think that is often like an explicit agenda of elites as part of a system to keep in power.
But I think the issue is presenting that as conspiracies.
This version of it presents them as largely a top-down targeted Whereas, as you highlight, they equally can be targeting people that are in positions of power and /or they can actually justify revolutions and be bottom-up movements,
right?
Where people invent, you know, the royal family being bloodsucking four-dimensional reptiles.
That is a conspiracy theory, which I don't think.
It's particularly helpful for the royal family, for example.
Well, look, I think we could say that Nomi Klein's framing of conspiracy theories there is very much the political type of framing.
You know what I mean?
It situates them as operating within this political system in terms of how she thinks about how politics works when that's not at all in keeping with the vast amount of academic literature on this topic.
For example, It's well documented that a lot of conspiracy theories are particularly popular amongst marginalized groups for understandable reasons.
They've often been subjected to real disadvantage.
Their real ambitions have been thwarted and that creates a fertile ground for completely false conspiracy theories that may have nothing to do with those actual reasons because it sets the psychological preconditions up.
Yeah, no, I have to write that as a pretty, you know, I think the theme here is that generally when she talks about these topics, whether it's the digital commons and platforms or conspiracy theories, it's not that there's absolutely nothing to what she's saying,
but it's not the whole picture at all.
It's a version of the truth that sort of aligns with her general theme that she is mainly focused on.
Yeah, I mean, basically, the riposte I would have is that you can have various revolutionary movements, for example, that are based on conspiratorial beliefs targeting elites.
They're well-documented throughout history.
And even in those cases, you sometimes have elites which are part of revolutionary movements promoting conspiracies.
You sometimes have people coming from, you know, The governors, the proletariat who are advancing conspiracy theories.
I feel that the use of conspiracy theories is not strictly restricted to this kind of capitalist class in any way, but it is used by them.
So she's not wrong to point out that there are top-down conspiracy theories which states and powerful people use to scapegoat different communities or to...
You know, you can see, I think it's very legitimate in the era of Trump to see that there's a whole bunch of stuff that is like using conspiracy theories in order to justify whatever particular policy they want to promote,
right?
Zelensky, you know, there were labs that were cooking up bioweapons and whatnot, and that's why Russia had to envy it, right?
So those things do.
But it's just that they don't only exist in MAGA or from other capitalist things.
You can find them in socialist countries just as well.
Yeah, exactly.
That's right.
So she's describing, whatever, 10%, 15% of conspiracy theories that happen to fit her narrative.
But it's a very incomplete picture and it's not the fundamental way to understand why there are conspiracy theories.
They get weaponized, they get leveraged by any number of groups, both powerful and unpowerful, are often satisfying cognitive and emotional needs.
But, you know, it's much more general than she's presenting it.
And, you know, it's worthwhile mentioning that there are a lot of left-wing conspiratorial beliefs as well.
And in fact, you know, arguably proposing that all the conspiracies that are floating around out there.
Actually have been sort of projected into the community by the rich and powerful in order to sustain themselves at the top is a kind of conspiratorial thinking itself, right?
Yeah, you know, Marxism in general as an approach has elements of, you know, the false consciousness does approach an unfalsifiable...
Conspiracy theory in some of its manifestations, but in all our manifestations, it's also undeniably true that like, you know, state propaganda and there are media institutions like, you know, if you look at Russia and its media apparatus, you can definitely say,
you know, they are trying to generate a false consciousness around the state.
And in the same way, you can also look at like capitalist companies and the way that they cloak, you know, their profit seeking.
Around this mantle of social justice and concern for the environment and whatnot, you know, there is plenty of reasonable versions of it, but there's also a conspiratorial reading of it.
So on that topic, or kind of like tangential to that, so Naomi Klein previously appeared with Russell Brand a couple of times.
You know, you remember before Russell Brand took his turn into right-wing MAGA populism, he was presenting himself as a left-wing.
Anti-capitalist revolutionary, right?
So he was very in favor of people like Naomi Klein.
I actually watched an interview of him interviewing her.
And God, he's an obnoxious person.
But the interesting thing, watching it back now, you know, from five years ago, you can see him talking about how appealing Trump is and, you know, like how authentic he comes across and all this kind of thing.
So like...
You know, the signs were there if you wanted to heed them.
But Naomi Klein talks a little bit with Ryan Grimm about what happened with Russell Brand.
I think it's interesting.
So here's her take on his trajectory.
I want to tell you an interesting story related to that before we go down the list because there are real things that were true things and things that were abandoned.
But some of this is just about clout chasing.
And the reason I know that is because So Russell Brand read that article on his show.
He would often just read articles of mine.
If anyone who's listened to his podcast knows that a lot of what he does is just sort of read articles written by other people with feeling.
And an accent.
And so he does this show where he says, Naomi Klein's written this really interesting article.
I know a lot of people are talking about the great...
The Great Reset.
It explains what it is.
It's nothing to get excited about.
And he reads the article and says, you know, this is all true.
And then he puts Great Reset, you know, as one of the tags.
You know about all this.
And then all of a sudden, he gets a lot more views than he had been getting before.
Because, of course, all the people who believe in the Great Reset find it and they watch it.
And suddenly, Russell Brand has a whole bunch of new followers.
And then he goes back to the Great Reset about 20 times, except for now, it's audience capture, and he's giving them what they want, which is a much more conspiratorial take on it.
So I sort of watched that happening with great fascination.
Anyway, it's just interesting.
That is interesting, yeah.
Just a bit of firsthand reporting on the dissent of Russell Brand and the role that Metrix played in driving him the way.
He went.
Yeah, and then in that case, she's talking about an article that she wrote that, you know, was kind of downplaying the Great Reset as this big nefarious thing because she was saying, you know, this is just the standard WEF, the UN workgroup.
They're not hiding it.
And it might be nefarious in certain ways, but it's not nefarious in this conspiratorial way.
And Russell Brown was reading it out.
But that alone, talking about the topic, you know, got him more attention.
So he returned to it, even though the actual...
Substance of the article was downplaying the significance of that.
I think that is interesting.
It's something that we've talked about.
And actually, there's a follow-up talking about the incentives on YouTube.
It's a clout mine.
But YouTube does that to a lot of its content creators.
It will pull them into conspiracy land further and further by funneling more and more traffic to them.
And then they'll cross an arbitrary line and they'll nuke their channel.
It's a bizarre thing where they don't...
They're feeding the very thing that they then nuke.
We've talked about this with Sabine.
Yeah, although I haven't seen any of them unfortunately nuke their own channel in the sense of destroying it.
They seem to just get more and more popular.
Yes, this is true.
Maybe he's talking about like credibility.
They nook the credibility, but only in certain circles.
Yeah, only in certain circles.
John Campbell would be another one who clearly stumbled into anti-vax conspiracism, figured out that it was just this magic golden ticket for viewership and monetization and dived in with both feet.
Yeah.
And so, you know, one thing for me in regards that analysis of Russell Brand, it somewhat ignores that Russell Brand was always a conspiratorial, spiritually inclined populist type figure, including when he was a left wing darling promoting like revolution.
I know this because I was very critical of him at the time.
And got pushback from various people, right?
I still have the Facebook post that I wrote about it, so this is not me reinventing the view there.
But Russell Brand was always very superficial, very conspiratorially inclined, and had these pseudo-spiritual views on how society would be saved.
So it is true that he spiraled and he leaned more into the conspiratorial right-wing ecosystem.
But his heuristics previously were also not good.
When he was having Naomi Klein on, he was conspiratorially inclined then.
It was just not in the same direction.
That's right.
And the majority of left-wing people did not have a problem with him when he was doing the same song and dance, but using a different set of buzzwords to hit those emotional...
You know, it was rhetoric and it was extremely facile and shallow, but he was saying the right stuff as far as many of us were concerned, so he gets a pass.
So yeah, I think that is worth recognizing that if you're operating purely from a political lens, then you're only going to see bad things when they don't align with your own political views, which is a bit limiting.
Yeah, and to be clear, She does make reference to this parallel in the analysis and reflects on whether there are aspects that deserve criticism from that or whether it's different.
So here's her talking about the notable parallels between the shock doctrine, disaster capitalism, and great reset conspiracy.
So listen to this.
Okay, I just want to, like, point out that I'm in a particularly awkward situation here because there is this thing where I did write a book called The Shock Doctrine.
It is about how large-scale emergencies are exploited by elites to push through a pre-existing wish list.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's all proven.
It's real.
It's still happening.
Happening in Hawaii right now.
It's happening under cover of COVID.
It's not...
A conspiracy, but it is true that, for instance, the UK government has used the fact that hospitals were overcapacity to attack the NHS, to attack their much-loved National Health Service.
Different right-wing-run Canadian provinces have done the same thing.
I think a lot of the attacks on schools around COVID policies were actually just attacks on public schools.
And part of that...
The pre-existing pattern of whatever the disaster, let's use it to have vouchers and charters and the same thing that happened after Katrina and Maria and again and again and again.
This was awkward for me, and I did write a lot about that in the early stages of the pandemic, but then all of a sudden there was this kind of doppelganger version of the shock doctrine, which was this great reset conspiracy theory that was coursing through the world, which was like the shock doctrine with all the facts and evidence removed in order to expose a conspiracy that actually had a website and a marketing firm,
which was the World Economic Forum said, yes, we want a great reset.
It wasn't hidden, but somehow it got like It got recast as if it was some great feat of investigative journalism to find this website.
And watch a couple of YouTube videos that they made, right?
Right, which included people like King Charles, right?
So it's like if you were trying to hide something, you wouldn't get him involved, you know?
So that left me speechless.
Like, I didn't know what to do.
Okay, so it sounds like she's contrasting there.
The kind of careful analysis that she does for something like the shock doctrine, where she correctly identifies the truth that predatory corporate free market forces perhaps create,
but certainly take advantage of crises in order to force through radical reforms that the population doesn't want.
As compared to the conspiracy theory that the right have, About, you know, Klaus Schwab or whatever, you know, wanting to try to trick people into eating bugs and, you know, owning nothing, that kind of thing.
And, you know, like, I'm not well enough acquainted with the quality of her arguments in the shock to comment.
But I will say that I have read a lot of critiques from a bunch of people who basically argued that...
She does link together a bunch of disparate phenomena to create a kind of Malcolm Gladwell-esque, superficially plausible narrative around this.
And it's not to say that there certainly would be lots of grains of truth there, but it is weaving together a narrative.
This is entirely different from what happens on the other side of the fence there.
According to the Wikipedia thing anyway, it's said that she even insinuated Margaret Thatcher.
Manufactured the Falklands War for neoliberal ends, for instance.
Okay.
Which would be, I think, a bit questionable, assuming it were true.
Apparently, there's a claim that China's post-Tiananmen Square crackdowns were sort of taken advantage of in order to enable capitalist reforms in the country.
People can read about it themselves.
I'm not qualified to judge.
But I'll just say that for what I've read about it secondhand, it does seem a little bit tendentious.
It's maybe not so grounded in undisputable truth, as she might claim.
Yeah, like, you know, I think it's this issue where you always come up where there's a modern Bailey argument.
So do corporations and governments make use of crises to push through their particular agenda, be it neoliberal or radical right wing or, you know, capitalist, whatever the case
Yes, I would think invariably they do.
And you'll be able to find tons of examples where this occurs.
So on that level, it would be hard to argue against, you know, that natural disasters or, you know, moments of significant national emotion or whatever are opportunities for people to promote.
Their agendas.
I think very few people would be able to disagree with that.
But on the other hand, like just for example, again, I'll stick with Japan.
After you had the tsunami and the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, you had an anti-nuclear movement strengthened in Japan.
You had a focus on renewable energy and you had various nuclear power plants being closed down.
The nuclear industry certainly didn't benefit from that, but renewable energies did, right?
And there was also, yes, TEPCO tried to cover up things, but they were also then uncovered and hugely criticized for their actions in the wake of that disaster.
So it isn't so simple.
It's messy.
Construction companies, I'm sure, benefited.
Yeah, like, that's the thing, I guess.
It is a Martin Bailey thing, because it is trivially true that disruptions and crises precipitate changes, right?
Yeah.
In some way, shape, or form, you know, pushed along by some interest group or constituency.
But it's taking another step to sort of weave a bunch of these together to say that there is this, yeah, it is like a conspiratorial type of claim that they're being...
Manufactured and there is a systematic sort of play-in in order to sort of do things that are against people's consent.
Let's take another example.
During COVID, Australia infamously...
You know, they had like camps, right?
Like not a camp camp, but you know what I mean?
Like people that were infected, you know, who were flying in or whatever and tested and whatever, would stay in a facility, very comfortable facility with hotel food and a pool and very nice, right?
I heard there were concentration camps.
That's right.
They were basically portrayed as concentration camps.
And the narrative there was that the Australian government, with its Stalinist communist agenda...
Wanting to break people's freedom was taking advantage of the COVID crisis in order to push through this agenda to get people to forget about their individual liberties and freedoms.
Now, Naomi Klein would probably reject that because it doesn't align.
She's saying that's the grit reset.
That's right, because it doesn't align with her political preferences.
I'm just saying I don't see a great deal of difference between the kinds of narratives and cherry-picking that happens on one side and the other.
So I'm not sure I buy it that the other side are just doing the cherry-picking and the conspiracy theorizing and that the arguments that she's making are all perfectly substantiated.
They look pretty similar to me.
Yeah, well, you know, I just would wonder in those cases would it be the same thing that you would say?
The companies are making a kind of agenda to promote renewable energy because they're seizing on anti-nuclear sentiment, which has grown in the week of a disaster.
Because they are.
But would that be presented as the kind of thing, you know, like the disaster capitalism?
Because, yeah.
Or, you know, just like in Syria, at the minute, there's been a regime change.
There's a lot of powers vying there now to gain control.
There's targeting.
Of minorities.
And it is opportunistic.
It does involve Iran and U.S. interests and Russian interests and, you know, all different geopolitical forces acting there.
But my issue is that it's almost always boiled down to like capitalist elites.
And like, I think if you want to understand what's happening in Syria now after the Assad regime.
It's not just capitalism, right?
It's ethnic divisions, it's political divisions, it's religious divisions.
Yeah, all kinds of people, all kinds of groups, all kinds of interest groups take advantage of whatever comes to hand, right?
And this is kind of natural and normal.
To take another example that's a bit closer to home for Naomi Klein, because it features the military-industrial complex, who we know is just the most insidious evil force on Earth.
Yes, bad guys.
Bad guys.
Shares in Ryan Mittal.
Germany's very large armaments, military-type company.
I've gone up a lot, right?
I would imagine so.
With America.
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, this was facilitated partly by a crisis of Russia invading Ukraine and now a new crisis caused by Trump cutting off military assistance.
If you were wanting to weave a narrative in five years' time or something, you could probably join a lot of dots and create quite a compelling story about the military-industrial complex, crisis, capitalism, and armaments production,
sort of implying there's something insidious there.
But is there, though?
Isn't it just normal, just how the world functions?
Yeah, I know.
Yeah, just consider this like an illustration of our skepticism around all-encompassing grand narratives, big ideas.
Like, the world is complicated.
So, like, it's not that I think you can't have your focus, but if you present your focus as being the single thing which explains everything, it inevitably rests on, like, you know, cherry-picking.
So, that's a little bit what we're bumping up against here.
But I can turn to a point that we'll agree on, Matt.
Some, you know, be a bit charitable.
With each other or with no?
Well, we always agree with each other.
We're always in complete lockstep, as they're just treated by this episode.
But when it comes to conspiracies, this is a point that you've made and that Naomi Klein is going to make.
So maybe let's turn to a point of agreement.
Yep.
What's interesting about studying COVID conspiracy theories is that they're not really theories.
Like, they're just a range of plots.
Most of which contradict each other, right?
So one of them is COVID is a biological weapon developed in a lab by the Chinese in order to wipe out the West.
Also, don't wear a mask, which is weird because if it's a biological weapon, you'd think you would take...
Precautions.
And then also the vaccines are a bioweapon, right?
So it's just like, well, is it COVID that's the bioweapon?
It doesn't matter.
It's just generally the moral of the story is you don't need to do anything.
You don't need to stay home.
You don't need to wear the mask.
You don't need to get vaccinated.
I'm glad we're finding something to agree on.
That's right.
So what she's saying now, I think, is totally in keeping, not just with my opinion, but with academic research on this matter.
The first point she makes is that conspiracy theories are not coherent.
There seems to be a complete disinterest amongst people who are susceptible to conspiracy theories to ensure that their various beliefs on different matters are actually internally consistent and not mutually contradictory.
And I think the second thing that she hits there is that she focuses on the psychological motivation of complacency.
Not needing to do anything, not needing to make change, right?
And we all like that, right?
We don't want to be hassled, right?
We don't want to deal with the unpleasant and difficult thing.
And that's true, but, you know, a lot of conspiracy theories satisfy that particular psychological motivation.
My only little critique there, Chris, is that that's not the only psychological motivation that is at play in terms of what conspiracy theories satisfy.
Well, you can also imagine that there are cases where actually for people to take a strong anti-vaccine stance, they have to do a lot of things.
They might have to lose their position at, you know, some place that requires them to get vaccinated.
They might have to attend protests and all that kind of thing.
So it is presented here as a response that gives you the justification to do nothing.
But there's a lot of engaged anti-vaxxers, which is kind of counter.
To that presentation.
So I agree, the psychological things are different.
And this is not solely restricted to COVID, right?
As you highlighted, it's the general thing with conspiracy theories.
The 9 /11 trooper conspiracies don't work together.
Yeah, it's not a COVID specific thing.
Yeah, and there are lots of interesting contradictions with conspiracy theories.
Like some of them don't seem to...
Actually make you feel better at all.
Being concerned about chemtrails or thinking that the government is totally covering up the reality of the flat earth generally leads to people feeling that the world is a dark and scary place and feeling quite neurotic and so on.
But I think Naomi Klein has fastened on that one particular motivation, like that thing of complacency.
Which I think is a real one, right?
I think that would be a motivator.
It is real that it's motivating, for instance, with climate change denial, I would say.
But I think she likes that one because it fits in nicely, again, with a particular political lens for situating conspiracy theories.
The albeit of the masses.
Yes, that's right.
That's right.
It serves a sort of structural purpose to kind of maintain the status quo and prevent yada, yada, yada.
And again, you know.
There's grains of truth in it, but if you restrict your analysis of social psychological stuff to stuff that's purely within a particular political lens, then you're getting a very partial picture.
Well, I've been good because I haven't engaged much with Ryan Grimm.
I pointed out his 90% thing, okay?
But as I mentioned earlier, he has a bit of a bugbear around the lab.
Like he's a big lab like guy like he he's, you know, pretty much certain it came from
It does come up quite a bit in this interview.
So I just want to highlight his framing of things and a little bit how Naomi Klein tries to navigate around it.
But listen to this, for example.
It has to be understood through the prism of the doppelganger and through the framework of the doppelganger.
So therefore, it can't be understood without reference to ourselves as well.
And you go into a number of different areas where you change your own mind and you're self-critical.
For people who haven't read the book, there's a lot of self-criticism of things that you wish you had given more thought to early on in the pandemic.
Some of them, COVID origin.
You write about the vaccine and complications around pregnancy and some other warnings that could have been given.
Let's go through some of those.
Which ones do you want to start with?
Just some examples.
COVID origins, vaccine side effects.
Just a random selection of possible things that you might want to talk about.
Yes, you can see where his interests lie.
Actually, I spotted a little thing at the beginning there, which it could just be happenstance, perhaps, because it was his words, not hers, but she did agree with it 100%.
The phrase, like, the mirror world can only be understood with respect to the doppelganger.
I mean, that started sounding a bit sense-maker-y to me, you know?
They're just a bit allergic to these kind of terms.
But yes, that is true.
But it's not...
That unusual when you're promoting someone's book that you would use their terminology and say, you came up with this concept of the, you know, like scientific hipsterism.
Does this explain blah, blah, blah?
So, you know, I know, I know.
Well, so, you know, that was that was actually how it then got onto the discussion of she then pivoted to the parallels about like the Great Reset and, you know, the shock doctrine.
That was the lead into that question.
But so Brian Graham returns because like she didn't focus, you know, on COVID stuff then.
So later on, we get this.
Which actually, let me ask you about, you hinted at censorship a couple of times and the whole big tech used to be a thing of the left that you don't want big tech telling, you know, people what they can and can't say.
That's become a right wing thing.
Right.
And looking back, With Facebook, for instance, wouldn't let you post anything that's speculated about the Wuhan lab being the origin of COVID.
You would lose your account.
I think Twitter had some penalties, but it wasn't as draconian as Facebook.
That's terrifying.
That's a real terrifying thing that actually happened.
Yeah.
And it's also not the first time.
This idea that this is a right-wing concern is a very specifically American phenomenon.
If you ask folks in Turkey or India, they will most certainly say that it is their extreme right-wing governments that are working with these same tech companies to de-platform dissidents and toe the government line.
Because the right is doing that here as well.
Including buying the platform and directing it their way.
I like that he goes to Facebook completely.
You weren't even allowed to mention the COVID origins.
The fact that there were a number of people who strongly promoted that throughout the pandemic.
Brett Weinstein is still able to access Facebook freely.
I do think...
He promoted that particular view.
So there's always this claim that it was impossible because there was something on Facebook for a while, but it was mainly focused around like if you were really hardcore saying it was a bioweapon manufactured, right?
They were not kicking people off for just...
I know this because I saw it all the time.
And it's the same thing on Twitter where they were like, you weren't even allowed to talk about it.
And you're like, you were.
People endlessly talked about it with me.
They never shut up about it.
Like, so their memory, like Brett Weinstein was not kicked off Twitter.
Or these other platforms.
There was a temporary time that he was banned on Facebook, but it was due to like a neo-Nazi infestation of Game B. So it was a different thing.
But this view that it was absolutely draconian, any mention against the status quo, and you were off the platform.
No, it wasn't like that.
And in fact, the hand-fisted enforcement meant that when we produced a video critiquing Joe Rogan.
For promoting anti-vaccine stuff, we had our video flagged up as anti-vaccine and given a strike.
So, like, it was more that the systems were just, whereas, like, larger anti-vax accounts continued to flourish, right?
If they were big enough.
Russell Brown was not removed.
Like, so, this narrative of Ryan Grimm, I feel...
And not only Klein agrees with that narrative, it calls it terrifying.
Yes, she does.
But the thing to her credit is she then pivots immediately to, like, and right-wing governments are working with tech companies too, right?
Like, this isn't just the left-wing.
So she's, like, quickly switching the topic.
That's good.
I do get the feeling that she's, you know, she's being, what's the word, amenable or whatever, but is accommodating, that's the word.
She's moving the conversation along, which is what people do in these sorts of public interviews.
It's what I do with you all the time.
It doesn't work so much.
It doesn't work.
Ryan Grimm.
After she pivoted to that, Ryan talked about this.
This is what Ryan Grimm then did.
What do you think that we could acknowledge that we did wrong in the last couple of years in general, particularly when it comes to COVID?
Who's the we?
Who's the we?
The we would be the kind of broad, progressive left.
I mean, I think it was, I think we should have got all in.
For lifting the patents on the vaccines.
I think there should have been just really militant internationalism.
Like, I won't get my third shot until everybody on this planet gets their first one.
You know, that was one of the moments where, like, we had this big trucker convoy in Canada that shut down Ottawa for three weeks.
And it was weird because I was like, well, what if we'd shut down Ottawa for three weeks?
You know, actually with some real demands for justice.
And so, you know, I think that's one.
I think that if you're going to ask individuals to do hard things, it has to be fair.
You know, this is the lesson of the mobilizations during the Second World War, where people did a lot of hard things for the war effort.
But it was incredibly important that it be...
Perceived by the public to apply to everyone.
So I think that we should have gone after profiteering, like COVID profiteering hammer and tongs.
Like nobody should have been allowed to get rich, let alone have these billionaires double their already obscene wealth.
It's so demoralizing.
And when you have systems that are allowing that to happen and then are saying, you know, close down your small business, close down your small job, come on.
That is not going to work, right?
And then turning around and saying, oh, those people are jerks.
It doesn't hold.
It really, really doesn't hold.
So I think that that's where the energy should have gone.
And it still can.
It still can.
We can take these issues back.
What did you think about that, Chris?
I think she did a good job of focusing it on what her message.
Which is, you know, she wants to focus on equitable distribution of vaccines, a good point of view, not like profiteering and focusing more on, you know, social justice type endeavors.
So she does a good job of not focusing on vaccine side effects and COVID origins, because that is what Ryan Grimm wants her to talk about, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I mean, I understand that she was taking the question in a direction that's different from the one that he wanted.
But actually, I found her suggestions there kind of annoying.
Because, Chris, like, I basically think that the governments, like Australian, that it didn't really matter if they were liberal or conservative or whatever, but it was still endorsed by the general...
Progressive consensus, right, which is get masked, get vaccinated, social distancing, a whole bunch of things.
I thought it was, on the whole, given that it was an unfolding crisis and there's always going to be mistakes, I think it was incredibly good, right?
I don't think we had a huge amount to flagellate ourselves about.
I know the entire right wing now disagrees with me, but what?
No, I think, I mean, I think you can always flagellate over the response and you'll always be able to find incompetent things from like government underreactions or overreactions.
But I do think that the speed of which a vaccine or multiple vaccines were developed and distributed is a significant achievement.
The fact that like there were.
Able to be, you know, lockdowns and masking in countries where it wasn't normal, where public weren't used to it and whatnot.
Like, there was things that are notable achievements and large public health campaigns, the size of which, you know, had not been seen for a couple of generations.
So, yeah, there is stuff that could have been done better, inevitably.
And there is stuff to be proud of what humanity achieved.
But you can also...
From her point of view, I think it isn't invalid to say that the degree to which the different countries and societies rolled out and received these benefits of mass vaccination projects and whatnot,
it wasn't equitable.
I agree, Chris.
I agree with you and her that equitable access to vaccines is clearly a good thing and should be prioritized.
100% agree.
Right?
I'm not a monster, Chris.
Obviously, I agree with the goals.
The goals are laudable, equitable access to vaccines and basic public healthcare.
Everyone's going to agree with that.
The bit I find a bit annoying is just that the question was, well, what advice do you have?
What should we have done differently?
And it's just so pie in the sky.
The first thing she mentioned was, oh, we should have lifted the patents.
Okay.
Like, it doesn't explain how.
Like, you can't just go around, like, you had companies that there's billions of dollars to develop something that's incredibly useful.
You go, well, that's very useful.
Right, we're stripping you of that now.
Like, you need to explain what you need to do.
And in fact, the governments did try to do some things in terms of subsidizing vaccines and ensuring that they were offered at cheaper prices in other countries and stuff.
It's just a bit more complicated than saying we should have lifted the patterns.
Well, yes, I agree.
Though I do remember there being campaigns about that kind of thing, that patents could be lifted in certain territories or, like you said, like, you know, cheaper things being made available.
But also the notion that, like, the trucker convoy, that they paralyzed the city and that it would have been better.
It had been like a leftist kind of social justice convoy that paralyzed.
And I was like, really?
Is that, you know, you're jealous because the annoying truckers were, you know, right-wing reactionaries.
Yeah.
And, you know, yeah, like I guess there should have been more specific.
Said, okay, what we should have done is done something where, you know, developing markets were segregated from the thing and that they had access to generic vaccine, whatever.
Like, but just...
You know, lifting patterns is just so broad.
And the other one was like saying no shot, you know, to people, I'm not going to get my third shot until everyone in the world gets their first shot.
Like that kind of, like, it may sound very virtuous, but I don't know whether Irma Klein did reject her third shot until everyone else had gotten at least one or two.
But, you know, it's like not buying eggs.
Until everyone has got eggs.
It's just very ineffective.
The question was, what should the liberal progressive left have done differently?
I don't think...
Rejecting boosters on Ottawa?
They're just not good ideas.
You can argue about the priority.
It shouldn't have been on everybody getting boosted if there are people that haven't had the first shot.
You might argue for a reorientation of that.
Reject your booster until everybody else has got it.
It just seems like that's not a good solution.
I'd just be really clear.
The thing that annoys me is not the goal, right?
The goal is good, right?
If you want people access to vaccines, absolutely agree.
It's just that the, you know, if the question is, what should we do, then it's sort of clear that sort of no thought has been put into that at all, apart from stuff that's...
I don't know.
Yeah, get more people infected by the variants because the government doesn't have the right priorities internationally.
No, that doesn't seem a great solution.
Well, so now, we don't agree with some of the points, but we agree with the goal.
That's true.
Now, Ryan Grimm, however, that's not what he wanted to talk about, Matt.
It wasn't about...
Vaccine patents and developing countries and whatnot.
So he tries again.
Last question for me, and then if you want to read a little bit more.
So one of the main things I took away from your book is how much fear of the mirror world shapes our own approach to truth and to our own politics.
Justified, I think, fear.
Which then ends up linking...
The things that we believe with our tribe, with our partisan politics, and you become unable then, you end up with a situation where things that don't have any obvious partisan valence take one on.
I understand why most progressives say that minimum wage should be higher, and conservatives say there should be no minimum wage.
That makes ideological sense.
It doesn't make ideological sense to say, To talk about COVID origins.
Like, that doesn't fit into a partisan list.
Or what you wrote about with potential complications that the virus produces during pregnancy or during a menstrual cycle.
Like, that shouldn't have anything to do with partisan politics.
Yet, it did.
And so, on the vaccine, for instance, as it became increasingly clear that it wasn't, you know, stopping the spread.
It was impossible for Democrats to talk about that.
And I feel like the fear that you write about in your book helps to explain that.
So how can people break out of that?
No, Ryan Grimm sucks.
He sucks.
What an idiot.
Did you pick up on what he wanted to get at, Matt?
Yeah.
After it was proved, the vaccines didn't stop the spread.
And he's so uncomfortable with the fact that he's bought into some pretty dumb misinformation and conspiracy theories.
And he's very uncomfortable because he's a left-wing ideologue.
He doesn't like it.
He's not allowed to be into this stuff because those are the right-wing ones.
Like, why does the right-wing get to have those?
Why can't we have those ones as well?
Yeah, I know.
It's that thing, Matt.
It's never going to stop being a thing that annoys me when people are like, you weren't allowed to talk about the transmission not being completely stopped.
Yes, you were.
Yes, you were.
People talked about it on the podcast dedicated to viruses.
I heard them discussing it before, after, during.
I heard it talked about on interviews.
I heard the same clips that everyone else did about Rachel Maddow or somebody, you know, saying an overstatement, right?
But in most cases, especially with Fauci, when you went on to listen to what he actually said, he was always pretty clear about trade-offs or uncertainties or these kind of things.
But like Ryan Grimm and his cadre, they presented that nobody ever...
Discuss the possibility of it being a lab leak.
That was not allowed in the scientific literature.
Yes, it was.
People were discussing that.
People were publishing papers about it.
Articles were being written about it.
And you still can talk about it now.
And back then, there were certain progressive journalists or whatever, discourse surfers, who, yes, only take these issues through a political...
But that is not the entire discourse around it.
It's not even the entire of the left wing, let alone the scientific community.
And they just always act like now everyone is looking back and we've all been vindicated.
You know, it's basically Brett Weinstein is what he's presenting here as being vindicated.
And no, sorry, Ryan, you were not vindicated.
You're not.
You should subscribe to Debunk the Funk and watch.
Some of the videos about, you know, transmission effects and whatnot of vaccination.
But yeah, anyway, sorry.
It frustrates me, Matt.
That's because you just endlessly hear it.
Well, clearly this show, we should have covered Ryan Grimm rather than...
I'm not a human fan.
You're much more passionate about him.
All right.
All right.
Well, that's good.
You got that off your chest.
I got that off my chest a little bit.
But Naomi Klein, I think she did a good job of...
Deflecting away from that for most of the interview, Matt.
But she finally gives in and kind of gives him what he wants.
So this is, or at least to me, this is like an effort to placate Brian Grimm in the hope that the question's right in.
So I think that is incredibly important work.
I think as a journalist, there just needs to be a little bit of just doing our jobs, right?
I think people can handle more complexity than we sometimes give them credit for.
So you can say that there are some adverse reactions to vaccines and people can still make an educated decision about it.
And if you don't, then they're going to go do their own research and they're going to end up in the arms of some people who are really, really untrustworthy.
I think what you were referencing around vaccines and pregnancy...
It's incredibly important for pregnant women to be vaccinated because your immune system is suppressed when you are pregnant, because your body needs not to reject the fetus.
And so if you get COVID when you're pregnant, there's a really good chance you'll get quite sick.
This was not really explained.
It was just sort of treated like, oh, what a ridiculous idea people, you know.
And so I just think, you know, Just doing some basic education and also explaining and also just treating people a little more kindly.
That's a really legitimate question.
Like, I was afraid of everything when I was pregnant.
I was afraid of eating soft cheese when I was pregnant.
So I can understand why people were afraid of these vaccines.
And I think it was honestly a failure of scientific communication that that sort of simple fact was not explained properly.
But I just saw a lot of mocking of people who had those concerns.
And I think a lot of people were pushed into...
They were suddenly getting their advice from Instagram.
That's her best effort of throwing them a bone.
But she does highlight, even in that response, that actually people that were pregnant, they did benefit from getting vaccinated.
She's quite deft there.
Starts off with agreeing with him, in the tone of agreeing with him, but sort of judo flips it around, kind of not really agreeing with him.
But look, in any case, whatever you think of that, we're going to give her a pass because clearly that is the interviewer's driving that stuff.
Particular pet topic.
Yes, it is.
I think she navigated it as well as can be, but he wanted her to focus on...
The scientists, the miscommunication, they were arrogant, they talked down to people, they ignored legitimate critiques.
And she kind of, you know, gave him a bit of that.
She threw him a bone.
Yeah, I possibly would have.
Just stop asking.
Just can we stop talking?
We move on.
Yeah.
I just like that, you know, it's always free of this.
Like, for example, COVID origins.
Like, for example, you know, I can pick anything.
That's one that we might talk about.
So, yeah, it is what it is.
So there we go, Matt.
We've covered a bunch of different things.
We got a little bit Ryan Grimm in there, but...
What's the big idea, the big picture for you with Dalma Klein?
What's, you know, your takeaway?
Is she a secular guru?
What's, you know, what do you think?
Yeah, that's right.
We haven't really talked about really much of how she does or doesn't fit the gurometer throughout this episode.
I mean, there are a couple of small things.
Like, there's that little bit of that sort of self-congratulatory, self-aggrandizing kind of narrative stuff.
Like we talked about.
Not too much.
No, it's pretty much on a bar with your typical TEDx-y sort of thing.
Look, I don't think she's a guru.
I don't think she hits the vast majority of things on our gurometer very highly.
But on the other hand, I guess I don't super love what I've heard.
And I think it's because...
You know, the thing with Malcolm Gladwell, right, is what he does is he pieces together a superficially compelling narrative by a bunch of cherry picking and framing and stuff like that.
So if you read it casually, you'll come away with this, like, you've just been dazzled by this amazing big idea, right, which links together all of these different phenomena, and now you can kind of see it.
And Malcolm Gladwell's hook is kind of like...
Like a surprising, out-of-the-box way of looking at things.
Counterintuitive.
That's it.
That's the hook for him.
For Naomi Klein, the hook is anti-capitalism and corporations are bad, you know, community building and, you know, lifting up less advantage.
Basically all of the hyper-progressive stuff right now.
So if you are a hyper-progressive...
Or just a somewhat progressive person, then it will ding all of those things and it will feel that you'll get that aha moment all the time.
It will be very satisfying in the same way that a Malcolm Gladwell book can be.
But as far as I can tell, and the caveat here is I haven't read her books.
I've only read a lot of secondhand stuff about them and listened to Naomi herself.
But I get the feeling that it's kind of like Malcolm Gladwell for progressives.
What do you think?
Too harsh?
Well, I think, you know, from what I've seen, often I agree with various points that she's making on the analysis around the topics that I know, right?
Which is like conspiracy theories and charismatic gurus and this kind of thing.
She is pointing to real issues.
She's highlighting incentives at play and psychological motivations that are real.
But I feel that there's a framework.
That she is fitting those facts into, which is, you know, as you said, like kind of anti-capitalist political activist agenda.
And around that, the conspiracy theory narratives and all those kind of things get marshaled into that broader framework.
Because she presented, I heard in another interview, or maybe it was in the book that she was talking about how she...
Resisted becoming a brand by self-consciously trying to avoid becoming pigeonholed by talking about different issues.
She was talking about corporations and brands and marketing.
Then she was talking about global warming.
Then she was talking about response to disasters and so on and so forth.
And she presented that as an eclectic series of interests, which I agree with in one direction, but I'm also like...
But it's not very unpredictable to me.
It's a particular genre, right?
And its ultimate conclusion is always the kind of neoliberal capitalism and globalization is bad, right?
And it's very familiar to me in part because that was the same conclusion that everybody that I went to university with in SOAS had, right?
And it's a very...
You know, prominent and popular conclusion amongst the left, particularly amongst the progressive set of the left.
So I think that you have to acknowledge, and maybe I think she probably does to a certain extent, that her output is a little bit more towards the activist side, right, in terms of promoting a particular vision and wanting to advocate for a particular kind of politics.
And that means that The analysis is in service of that.
And as a result, things get skewed a bit.
So I think a lot of it comes down to the modern Bailey aspect of, are you taking the strong version or are you taking the weak version?
And the weak version is often perfectly reasonable, but the strong version, much less so.
And I do think, to use my own buzzword, there's an ethnocentric kind of focus on it.
That when you're talking about capitalism, what you actually mean is North American consumerism and a particular kind of consumerism as well.
You're not talking about capitalism in Norway or capitalism in Japan or these different cultural contexts because there the patterns look different.
And I just think that there are things that you can explain.
Through the economic system and the political system, but that's not all there is.
Perhaps, understandably, as an anthropologist, I think the culture is very significant and it is not purely determined by the mode of production in a society.
So, in terms of the worst parts where I think there is guru-esque aspects coming through, I think it is in those aspects where the agenda And the kind of desire to have, like, big ideas,
which are how you sell books, is over-saturating, you know, the analysis.
So the last thing I'll say is there's points where you're agreeing with everything.
The points she's making are valid, even, you know, where they are, like, focusing on a particular criticism of capitalism or whatnot.
But then the conclusion often, like, veers off into what feel like much less substantial.
Points that rely a bit more on buzzwords and that kind of thing.
That's right.
I mean, this is the thing.
Like you, I agree with a lot of the tenets of that progressive point of view.
So like free markets, fundamentalism, deregulation, privatization of everything, austerity policies, globalization, right?
These can have...
You're for them all.
I am somewhat for them.
No, you're supposed to say...
No, I mean, that's the thing.
They could have bad and good things, right?
On one hand, Naomi Klein would say, look, corporations have been able to exploit lax labor laws in developing countries and therefore maximize their profits and concentrate wealth, right?
Now, that is true, but it is also very, very true that literally billions of people have come out of poverty as a result of those very same forces, right?
Countries like Singapore, Places like Hong Kong and large areas of China, they were incredibly poor before participating in that sort of global economy.
So for me personally, I would just find a more interesting analysis would be one that doesn't just look at like one side of the coin or the other, like isn't just like a simple cheerleader for, yay, you know, globalization and free market, great.
Just focusing on the negative things, a more interesting analysis would be to integrate it all, a balanced one.
But I think a book or an analysis like that would be less appealing to many people because I think most of us would prefer to have the kind of Malcolm Gladwell-esque, neat narratives that are provided,
whether they're right-wing or left-wing.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, that's our take.
On it, for what it's worth.
Yeah, and I do think there's substance to the stuff that she's talking about, and there are real issues that are highlighted in that kind of thing, but it's just...
I do think that when it comes to reflecting on the parallels, that there is a somewhat self-serving position that, like, well...
All of the things that I identify are true and well supported, even if they look conspiratorial, whereas everything that, you know, is identified on the opposing side is a fake clown show version of it.
Like, I totally get that it is the case that she's not a Russell Brown type figure, right?
But yeah, that just seems like a little bit...
I think that's a common malaise on the left, to be honest.
And I think it's founded in some truth because as far as I can tell, the conspiracy or conspiratorial type thinking that you see on the right tends to be very concrete.
You know, like it's demonstrably wrong in point of fact.
And yeah, it's just concrete.
That's probably the best way to describe it.
Where I see those sorts of leanings on the left, they're a bit more abstracted.
So rather than saying that George Soros is personally hatching some evil scheme to do everything, rather you'll get a, in some cases, equally conspiratorial narrative, but it's framed around slightly more abstract concepts around global capitalism and the military-industrial complex or whatever.
So perhaps they're a bit smarter than the right-wing ones, but they kind of function.
In a similar kind of way.
But I think Donna Cohen is very honest in the way she perceives it there, because I think it's a view that's shared by most people who are progressives, which is that conspiracy theories are things that only right-wing people suffer from, basically.
Well, so I think there's more nuance in the book, but that does come across.
And so maybe we'll read the book in our book club, and I'm fine that a lot of these are addressed.
But we were looking at the pieces of content that we looked at, and That's it.
And to be honest, it is still refreshing to just not be in right-wing reactionary hellhole.
It is different.
It is different.
There's a different flavor to the examples that are brought up and stuff like that.
So this was a holiday of sorts.
It did what it was intended to do.
Yes, that's right.
Then we've got our quibbles and our complaints and our critiques.
I mean, the fact is that this is so refreshing compared to the kinds of lunacy that we've been covering recently, which have all been right-wingers, absolute mentalists.
So thank you, Naomi Klein, for not being like that and giving us some interesting things to talk about.
Yeah, yeah.
Well said.
Well, Mark, this has been a long one.
Maybe we'll skip the self-indulgent review of your views, and we'll go straight to the giving back, returning to those that support us, Matt.
You know, the kind listeners who grant us their support.
Don't they deserve a little shout-out, Matt?
Would you begrudge that to them?
Oh, go on, then.
Go on.
All right.
All right.
So, for conspiracy hypothesizers, and we should say $3.
$6, $10 tiers.
You get different things.
At the $6 and above, you get access to the Decoding Academia series where we talk about papers.
You get access to live hangouts at the $10 tier.
But, you know, the lowest tier as well.
You get access to bonus stuff, garrometer episodes, early episodes.
Everybody!
We get stuff, right?
Just go have a little look if you're interested.
You know, there's different varieties for all.
It's capitalism.
Consumer capitalism.
You choose your poison.
That's right.
Yeah.
Now, conspiracy hypothesizers.
For there, Matt, we have:
Darf Zoidberg, Marcus Lund-Barstad, Armin, Nicholas Barris, Graham Rellerford, Frank List, Carl Schindler, David Mahola, Carolyn Scott, Marius Faust, Harry Howard, Farooq Ahmed, Stian
Sharksberg-Solim, Jeff Feddersen, Zach Zinowicz, Stuart Black, C. Hale,
Wow.
A veritable cavalcade of fine folk.
Support us all, and we thank you.
We do.
I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions, and they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Aha!
No revolutionary geniuses, Matt.
We have a few.
We have Gal, Rye, Tony Finch, Mike Eisenhower, Kate Bronoslawski, Forrest Green, Drake, Marcus Sigal, Alexander Fanner, Her K, Morrison
McQueen, Cole, Paula Brayton, Rodrigo Borges, Logan Moore, KB, Eric Vaughan and Samar Sal.
Well, look, these people, just like the other group of people, except they're actually paying us more money, so obviously I'm even fonder of them.
That's right.
That's right.
Your capitalist heart beats a little faster when you see them.
So thank you to them.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
And what else would be stunning, Chris?
A $10 top-tier Patreon.
That would be stunning.
Well, we've got them as well, Matt.
They're staring at me.
They're looking at me in the face, saying, what about me?
What about me?
And I'm saying, don't worry, I got you.
I got you in my warm embrace.
I have Overzealous Euphemeseist Lewis Kahn Mr. Tasabian Lander Brian Palmer Jory, Jeremy David Ortega Alexander Cabanoff Alan,
Leanne Jadani Jadani Foggers, Jeff Hackett Nick, Uncle Full
T-shirt and Robbie Lally
Laliberti.
Those are our Galaxian girls.
Wow.
Stunning.
Every one of them.
I bet every one of them is attractive, physically fit, and incredibly interesting and popular at parties.
They'd have to be, I think, to be in that group.
It's the only way that you could be at that level.
So thank you.
Thank you all.
We do appreciate it.
We do appreciate it.
Come harass us in person.
$10 gives you the ability to...
You know, tell us how much you appreciate us.
Or whatever you want to say.
Join the book club.
Read the books.
Come along to the live hangouts.
They're good.
That's right.
We tried to warn people.
Yeah.
Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
Yes, yes, yes.
Well, I have no tribe either.
You know, Chris, I am.
That's right.
That's what I often say about you.
Matt is a tribe of one.
Yeah.
I was cast out for...
Anyway.
Stealing seashells or whatnot.
Cavorting with aquatic creatures.
But, Matt, next time, I'm taking you back somewhere you don't want to go.
I'm taking you...
Down a dark, dark K-hole.
That's what I'm going to tell you.
We're going back in the K-hole.
You thought you were right.
You're getting pulled back in.
Dr. K!
Dr. K!
He's done something.
We're just coming back in for a second.
He's done something.
We can't let it go past.
What if he did something and we just let it go?
We can't.
Just give him a pass.
This time, no.
This time, he's got too many passes.
We said we were out of the Dr. K game.
We wanted to be out of the Dr. K game.
But he's done something, Mark.
And he's drawn me back in.
Clearly one of us.
But only for one episode.
It's not going to be three episodes, okay?
It's just one.
A whole episode.
A whole episode.
Maybe.
It really warrants it.
Does it really?
I think it does.
But yeah, Schellenberger and Peterson, Michael Hobbs, all coming up.
They're all on the docket.
Don't worry.
Exciting things.
Exciting times.
Big things in store.
Yeah, that's right.
This is your GuruPod money working hard for you.
That's right.
Those investments are paying off.
Forget about Bitcoin.
Like, you know, diamond hands.
This is the real thing that ends.
Yeah.
All right.
Well.
There we go.
Back to lead stage capitalism.
Off we go.
Viva la revolution, if that's your bag.
Whatever you fancy.
I'm going back into the world so I can pop out of it anytime somebody walks past.
Remind them.
I'm just working within society.
We are just victims of lead stage capitalism, okay?
Don't blame us.
Blame the system.
That's right.
That's right.
I mean, we didn't want to brand ourselves.
We didn't want to be performative, like performing for everyone.
I wanted to be my true, authentic self, which is lying around in my underwear, vaping and drinking whiskey.
That's what my heart wants.
And I'm being forced by late-stage capitalism to put on pants and talk to you, Chris.
