Ep10: HOW TO Strength Train

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The show where we talk to people about ideas that could radically change the world with an open mind and a critical lens. [MUSIC] My guest this week has been a trailblazer in that third category of stories. She's one of the most influential figures on the political left. And whether you agree with her or not, Naomi Klein's writing has helped redefine our relationship with capitalism in the post-Cold War era. From her early books like No Logo and The Shocked Doctrine to her latest volume, End Times Fascism, which I have here, she's reached millions of people with her critique of our global economic and political system. And her suggestions for how to change it. Naomi Klein, welcome to Radical. Thank you, it's me with you. It's great to have you here. We've just relaunched the show. And when we were thinking about who should be our first guest, I thought you would be absolutely perfect. But then I wondered whether it does Naomi Klein herself think she is radical? Are you a Radical? You know, I have been treated as a Radical, but I don't actually think my ideas are all that radical. I thought you'd say that. And, but, you know, I think the center has moved further to a more radical place, and certainly the right has become more and more radical. So I do think that the more the crises of capitalism deepen, the more the ecological crises deepen, the more inequality widens, the more radical the responses need to be to just get us to a stable place, right? And I think that, you know, ever since I've been writing about climate change, which is a long time, I, in my first book on the subject, which came out in 2014, I quoted a climate scientist named Michael Mann, who talks about the procrastination penalty, meaning if you don't act on the warnings we're giving you, then what you need to do becomes more radical. So I guess more radical. And in the sentence, what is your most radical thought of what we need to do? We'll get into the detail later, but just like nail it down. I mean, I, I believe the capitalism is driving us off a cliff. And in order to justify the continued existence of an economic model built on, on endless growth and always looking for the next bubble, we as a society have found ourselves rationalizing increasingly unacceptable realities like the existence of trillionaires or like artificial intelligence models whose makers themselves tell us there's a good chance they might wipe out. Humanity or a energy system that is rapidly overheating our shared planet. So I, you know, I think that when I started writing like my first book, No Logo, was pretty tame. If you look back, I'm like, I think there should be trade unions. And I think that there should be a public sphere. And it was really critiquing neoliberal capitalism more than the system itself. But I suppose I've been radicalized by reality. Right. Yeah. Right. You want to bring down the system before it brings us down. Right. I think it's perreigning. That is radical. But so I do think we that that's something very straightforward, like maximum wealth. I don't think that we can co-exist with billionaires anymore. Let's, we'll get to the solutions later. I want to just take you back to the beginning. Sure. You didn't start off as a radical. You were, I've heard you describe yourself as a mole rash. Well, I was a teenager. We've all been teenagers. But, but, but I think that as an adult, I have been, you know, writing critically about capitalism, you know, since, since my earliest writing. But I'm not sure I can still justify. I like, I'm not sure it's worth discussing myself at 14. No, but I, I like to, I'd like to know where you come from as a person. Yeah. You come from, you come from radical stock. Um, yeah, it's true. I do come from some troublemakers on my father's side. My mom's side is, is a little bit more conventional her family. But my, my father was a, is sometimes called a red diaper baby. His parents were, you know, communist. You know, they would argue, I mean, you know, I, but I, I think it's fair. I mean, they were definitely, it's okay. You can say the word. Yeah. It's not a dirty word. Yeah, I mean, but it's funny because they weren't card caring members of the communist party. But they were definitely adjacent. And they were, my, my grandfather's an artist. And the major Disney, right? Yes. Um, yeah, he worked on these early kind of iconic films like Bambi and Fantasia. And um, he drew Donald Duck. He was in charge of Donald Duck continuity. Um, and he, um, was part of this landmark strike in 1942 at the Disney Studios in Burbank, California, where they walked off the job while they were making Dumbo. And he was, yeah, one of a handful of strike leaders who then got blacklisted and, um, fired a blacklisted, yeah, so he wasn't able to work as an animator after that. And he and my grandmother were part of this kind of intentional community, um, in rural New Jersey called nature friends. So they were more like, they were kind of hippie-ish like radicals. Yeah, definitely like, you know, when my grandmother died, I wrote an obituary saying that she was like the original hippie before there were hippies. But your parents moved to Canada, uh, uh, to avoid the draft. Well, my dad was, yeah, he was, he was drafted. He was a conscripted, he was a medical student at the time. And he didn't want to be in the army during the Vietnam War. And went to Canada with a wave of war resistors. You preferred to be called a war resistor that a draft dodger. I can, I can understand why you prefer that. Um, and so, and your, your mother, uh, made this sort of iconic, uh, feminist anti-pornography film, when you were, what, just, you were still at elementary school. Yeah, I was, it came out when I was in 50th grade, yeah. And I was that for you. Yeah, it was, it was interesting. Yeah, she worked at a, um, film studio at the National Film Board of Canada, which was the first, uh, women's, women's film studio. So they were all, it was very much a second wave, feminist, consciousness raising films about issues. Um, she also made a film about nuclear war, the threat of nuclear war, called the fuel of this planet. Um, and she made a film about women in the discernment movement, called speaking our piece. So she made a lot of different rabble-rousing films during the Cold War years. And just to come back to your teenage years, you basically rebelled. Yeah, I, I, um, I wasn't political as a teenager. And what changed? I grew up. Okay, you grew up. Okay, you grew up. I mean, I, like, I, I've told this story before I don't know. Oh, well, the whole point of podcasts is you talk stories again and again. I'm sorry. Okay, so once you grew up, uh, you, you changed, um, and you wrote no logo, you wrote, um, the shock doctrine, which was about disaster capitalism. And now, together with Astriteli, you've written a new book, End Times Fascism, which I think is an evolution of the books that you've written before. Certainly, it seems that way. - You know, and I was first and foremost a journalist, right? And I was, you know, my books are books of reporting, right? Then my first book, No Logo, built on reporting that I did in the early union movements in what used to be called Mick Jobs, right? Like some of the first union drives at shopping malls, like young workers trying to get decent wages at jobs. They were told weren't kind of real jobs. And so yeah, and then eventually traveling and visiting some of the sweatshops that were producing the clothes that, you know, me and my friends were wearing. So, you know, these were works of journalism, less kind of political theory. And then the shock doctrine grew out of reporting that I did for Harper's Magazine in Iraq in the after the US and UK invasion and occupation. But I was covering the economic plans for Iraq. So like the push to privatize Iraqi industry very, very quickly. So I became interested in the political and economic uses of shock. So that very much relates to this new book with Astriteli, because there is an evolution in what I originally called disaster capitalism. So when I was writing about Iraq, I started noticing that after natural disasters, many of the companies that had been central to the occupation of Iraq. And I'm sure these names will be reminiscent for some of your listeners, Alibur and Bechtel, Blackwater. Like I'll never forget I got this phone call from the photographer who I'd gone to Baghdad with Andrew Stern. And he was in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And I was already writing a book that I thought was just going to be about the war in Iraq. And Andrew called me and said, you have to come to New Orleans because they're calling it Baghdad on the bayou. All the contractors are here. Everybody's talking about privatization. And so I went and ended up, that's the first time I use the phrase disaster capitalism. - Right, and I've just read End Times Fascism. And if I'm right, if I can sum up what the argument there is, is that the tendencies that you identified in the shock doctrine, which is big companies profiting opportunistically from disasters has morphed into something more sinister whereby essentially there's a coalition of religious fundamentalists, tech oligarchs and white supremacists who've not just made peace with the idea of rolling disasters that they could possibly profit from, but they want to hasten the end of the world so that they can be the chosen ones to survive. Is that a fair question? - Some of them, there are parts of that coalition that we're writing about that are actively accelerationists. - Such as whom? - Well, such as the religious end-timers, right? I mean, if you really do believe that when the end of the world comes the Messiah arrives and if you have followed religious rules strictly enough, you get an elevator ride to heaven and you're chosen and it's really utopian. - The rapture. - Yeah. So there are accelerationists among Messianic Jews where there's an intense focus on temple mount as they call it or al-Aqsa and because it's so central to the prophecy that you have to rebuild the third temple and when that happens, the Messiah will arrive and then they have made alliance with Christian Zionists and if this has been going on for a long time, what we're tracking in the book is how the people who had been quite marginal have moved into positions of increasing power at key sites, whether military, whether judicial and so that's what we're tracking, increased power. - Can we just look a little bit at the tech piece of this process? - Sure, yeah. - Because that's a big part of the book and it's also a big part of what I've been reporting on for the last few years. And in fact, quite a lot of the people that appear as villains in your book, I've hung out with these people. I've met them like who? - Well, I've met Peter Teal, Patrick Friedman. I went on a road trip with Patrick Friedman who is Milton Friedman's grandson and appears a number of times in the book. I went with him to Prosper, this island city state. - You know all about the dream. - Well, so the dream, but can you just describe to me in your own words? And I will say that, you know, up close, these people look slightly less villainous than they do from afar, although they do have very radical ideas. Can you just sort of sum up for me? - Even Peter Teal? - I sometimes wonder whether Peter Teal is Peter Teal trolling? Is he lapping? Is he for real? Everything Peter Teal says, you can find a Peter Teal quote that says the opposite. It's kind of hard to tell for me how much of what he says is real, how much is a hedge, you know? - Yeah, I mean, I think that, I guess in North America right now, it feels more serious because, you know, entire cities are being occupied by men with masks. Demonstrators who try to just observe and collect evidence have been shot in the streets. People are being bundled into cars. And, you know, there's a level of brutality that, you know, is the kind of thing. I mean, I've done a lot of research in Latin America and the dirty wars and the dictatorships. And it's happening again. - It's a performative brutality, if you like, or performative. - Well, the performativity is making memes about it afterwards and bragging about it. But this is just happening. It's not a performance. It is happening. So I don't see why I would treat Peter Teal as a troll when he says he doesn't believe in democracy. Or when, you know, he's been involved in founding an autonomous weapons company that's worth $60 billion. He, like, I wouldn't take him seriously, yeah. - No, I'm talking about Andrew. - Both of these companies are sort of heavily enmeshed as you describe in your book in the US. - I think there are two of the most dangerous companies in the world, which is just why, like, I keep encountering this from the press of this idea, like, maybe we shouldn't take them seriously. And I actually think that's exquisitely dangerous. - So just to, just like when people tell you who they are, you should believe them. To quote my co-author, Astrotailer, they want to be both our overlords and our meme lords. And that's, that's a good phrase. - And there's that strategy of kind of destabilizing you where you never know quite whether to take them seriously or whether to laugh or cry, is actually a very effective political strategy. - Do you think that's deliberate, the sort of? - I think at a certain point, the right started using memes in a trolling way, which made everybody unsure. I mean, here this goes back sort of like 15 years where I was like, should you be worried about Pepe the Frog or not, right? I mean, this has been a strategy on the right. But now that we have like hardcore neo-nazis in the streets, you know, it's clear that they meant a lot of it, right? And now that there actually are, there is a strategy of nasty portations of people who are black and brown and remigration and stripping people of citizenship. Like, I think that we didn't believe that it was real for a long time because it had this jockey quality to it. And Elon Musk is the master of this, right? I mean, he is the meme lord, right? But he also was head of doge and he actually really did feed USAID into the woodchipper to quote him and that has real material impacts on human beings. I think at this point, we should probably discuss the F word, right, fascism. Yeah, but I'm curious to know why you think they shouldn't be taken seriously. I mean, you have to be in time with them. You know what they're doing. And I mean, I'm not saying they shouldn't. And to be clear, I actually think they should be taken seriously. But I think as you yourself say, they deliberately muddy the waters. They deliberately say outrageous things that can be clipped and meamed in order to fire up their supporters, their base. This is a clear strategy. I think this is-- It's also a strategy to be casual about the stakes, right? I mean, you can-- It's just-- I tell you what it is. When I've been to, for example, Prospero, which is this semi-private city state run on Bitcoin-- Cated community with the Med Spa without regulation. Yeah, no regulations. And they do things like gene therapy to increase longevity. And it's all this kind of stuff about living forever. And it's got-- on the outside, looking at it from the outside, it's got sort of bond villain qualities, right? It's a little island off the coast of Central America. It's living forever. When you actually get there, it's a bunch of guys in their 20s and 30s who are a bit lonely, who are desperately looking for community. Maybe the apps they've created have kind of destroyed their real communities and they're trying to recreate them. It just-- it doesn't look as powerful or as menacing as it appears in your book when you get up close. It's not as menacing as the tech that has been used to target bombing of boats, and their algorithms say, oh, this person is smuggling drugs, but they are not producing evidence. - These are killing, it's not like these companies are carrying them out off their own bat, right? These are things that are being done by the American government. - With Palantirati. - Sure, because they're the instrument, as it were. - I mean, there's a true, and this is why I think that it is worth using words like fascism because that connection between corporations and governments is this kind of merger and this blurring of the lines is one of the key characteristics. But just to come back to what you were saying about Prosper, we ended up writing very little about their dreams of escape, because I also think that they're a little bit silly. I mean, I think that they want to be free of regulations, but they're finding ways to be free of regulations while still living within our borders, within our countries. And I think they're rich enough to experiment with various sorts of escape hedges, like the bunker in New Zealand, in Argentina, a little piece, - It strikes me that a lot of it is really about making money. I mean, there's real bet is Andrew and Palantir, which requires governments to buy the tax. - I went to an event a couple of years ago in Manhattan for another sort of Prosper-type, private city called Praxis. I didn't even come across this guy. And they gave out this magazine, which is sort of very aimed at edgy iconography. And they had this little quote in their magazine from Gone with the Wind. And it says, "I told you once before that there were two times for making big money, one in the upbuilding of a country and the other in its destruction, slow money on the upbuilding, fast money in the crack up." So I wonder whether the aim is not so much the end of the world, but making big bucks. - I don't think those are mutually exclusive. I don't think they're aiming for the end of the world. I think they're okay with it. And so they're slamming the foot on the accelerator, especially when it comes to energy. And there's really been such a striking transformation of Silicon Valley from, I mean, Tiel is it in his own category and that he supported Trump the first time around. He was really the only prominent Silicon Valley figure who supported Trump in '26. - And as soon as he sort of got this sort of almost pantomime villain status amongst Silicon Valley. - Yeah, and maybe he's a bit of a distraction. I mean, let's look at Jeff Bezos, who was so committed to acting in the face of the climate crisis that he handed out an earth prize and he renamed an arena in Seattle called the Climate Pledge Arena. He became a major funder of green groups. And now in the face of AI, which they're all convinced is the ultimate prize, the ultimate technology. That's what it's really about. It is about being the winner in the AI race, the stakes of which are controlling the entire global economy. And so it's absolutely about money, but they also understand that to reach that prize, they have to burn so much fossil fuels. And that's true at Microsoft's, Google, it's true. It's true at Amazon, it's true at meta. - And it's also sort of becoming true in national governments, right? We are talking about net zero. - And it's true at Elon Musk, who is Mr. Green Energy and electric cars. - I want to come to AR. - I mean, he's powering his data centers with methane. - With methane turbines, which you document in the book. - So it's not that they want the world to end. It's that they think they will be fine. And they think they're wealth will protect them. - Or they can float off to Mars. - They have various escapes as discussed. - I want to come back to AI because it's such an important piece of your argument. But I do want to nail down fascism, the F word, because it's such a loaded word. I'll just quote a bit from your book, and you say that fascism, at least in its early stages, is now taken for granted by many scholars of authoritarianism. So fascism, you say, is capitalism, most ferocious response, a way of making sure that public anger is directed downward at the vulnerable, rather than upward at the system. Now, do you stand by that? Because the anger is also directed upward at elites. We hear about that all the time. - Of course, and those are the conditions under which fascism emerges, that we describe in the book, that it always emerges in times where there are real crises. It's not our imagination. It's that there are people feel failed by the systems. And of course, this was very obvious after the First World War and the wreckage and the humiliation. - Sure, but left-wing totalitarianism also comes out of those, you know, stylism also emerges in the sense. - If I can finish the sentence, it emerges in the pincer of a real threat from the left, from below, a real redistribution threat that actually wants to change the system itself. And so what fascism does, and this is why we describe it, as capitalism's most ferocious threat response or capitalism's worst mood, or capitalism with bare teeth, we've used all of that, is that it recognizes the anger, it legitimizes the anger, but redirects it away from the system and towards scapegoats, which was certainly the case for Mussolini and Hitler. - And Stalin. - Well, because that's why there's a blind spot. - The totalitarianism, so the difference between a proletarian revolution is that it emerges from below. And I'm not saying it can't be totalitarian. I've never argued otherwise, but fascism is something specific. Fascism is always a movement of the injured strong. You know, it's military veterans in alliance with, you know, corporate leaders, and it always has this masculine quality of we're gonna restore the family and order. It attacks the system itself. So that's not saying, I'm not saying it's better or worse. I'm saying that these are different systems that scholars of totalitarianism make a distinction. So the other-- - But Hannah, can I just put it into it? - Hannah Arendt calls totalitarianism, the temporary alliance of the elite and the mob, right? Now that seems to me, totalitarianism, seems to me to be a more opposite word, to describe what you're describing, which is the allegiance of a kind of mega base of voters with the obviously a financial elite that is around Silicon Valley and-- - The real difference is that you can have totalitarianism, you can have an absolute dictatorship without the mass. Like you can have a dictator with no support who just overthrows the system from above. What makes fascism specific as it's a right-wing movement is that it does have a mass base. And we're arguing in this book that the mass, that supported Trump is much more vulnerable to being peeled away than in the fascisms of the past because this particular iteration of fascism, we quote Primo Levy, who says that every era has its own fascism. So we're not looking for a direct replica. And I don't think we really seriously believe that history repeats on the moon. We change. - And you make that clear. - You make that clear, but it's a very loaded word. I want to-- - Well, these are very loaded times, but honestly, I don't care. Like, I mean, I'm having these semantic conversations about a word and I'm not sure exactly what the fear is because when I talk to people in Minneapolis or Chicago who have come face to face with ICE agents, they feel that they're living under fascism. It is not exactly the same, but the reason why it's important for them to name it as such is because when it comes to your city and occupies your city and bundles away your neighbors, you know to fight it. You know to fight it because you know it's serious and if you won't name it, then why would you fight it? - For me, the question arises because it seems to suppose that political violence of this kind comes exclusively from the right and can't come from the left, which I worry might lead to a blind spot. - We are writing a book about the world that we live in and the governments that are rising. And if there was a totalitarian government that had, you know, I'm a democratic socialist. I oppose authoritarianism of all times. - You made that very clear. Now I wanna talk about AI and because you spend a lot of time about-- - But I just wanna point out to you that you're spending a lot of time fighting over words. - Well, no, I'm trying to move on to AI. - Okay, you know I'm an AI, but I think words are important. - But I do think that I just wanna observe that we live in a very radical time. - So it's a big time for folks to podcast on radical. - And good time for radical solutions. That's why we have people like you. - But we, in elite spaces like the BBC and the New York Times, a lot of time is spent talking about the words that we use to describe-- - Because words. - Very radical reality and banning certain words and tying people's tongues in knots. - I'm not trying to ban them. - No, I'm just saying that it is a trend that I've observed where rather than speaking about the thing itself whether it is the early stages, as you just quoted me saying, a fascist and the point of naming it in its early stages is so that you can fight it before it reaches its late stages. - At Verbo, we understand that even the best of plans sometimes need a little support. So we plan for the plot twists. Every booking is automatically backed by our Verbo care guarantee, giving you confidence from the very start. Whenever you need help, it's ready. before your stay through the moments in between and after your trip. Because a great trip starts with peace of mind. And maybe a good playlist. But we've got the peace of mind part covered. Food's taking forever. Ready to tang-luck? Tang-luck. What's that? The ultimate free social casino games. Huge collection of slots, instant fun, and real prizes up for grabs while we wait. Count me in. Join Tang-luck today and let's win together. I hope you're enjoying my conversation with Naomi Klein. And so far as you can enjoy a conversation about the end of the world. But if you do like this kind of stuff, then you might want to check out an episode I recorded with Geo Engineer David Keith about his plan to reflect the sun's rays back into space to help cool the planet. That episode is called "Engineering the Climate" can injecting chemicals into the sky helps save the planet. Subscribe to the Radical Podcast on BBC Sounds and you'll find it there. But now, back to Naomi Klein. Let us talk about the things. And the thing is AI, right? And AI, I think we will all agree. Even the people who are producing these fantastically powerful AI programs will agree is a threat. Potentially an existential threat. Potentially one that could lead to end times. Gone, you wanted to say something. Like, we use the word end times to name the narrative that a lot of the people we're writing about are advancing, right? The religious text and the template, the way it plays out in secular forms. I don't believe that history moves in a straight line like that. Like, I don't think we are headed towards the end times. Right, because, you know, well, I mean, that pretty-- But existential risk, right? That's kind of the same thing. Anyway, we're arguing over some-- I think we're both, like, I think, ever so much. But you say in the book that apocalyptic prophecies get your exact wording. I mean, I do think the left has had a very dangerous millennial streak in the past, and we write about that. So, you know, apocalyptic prophecies can clearly be self-fulfilling you, right? They're not in the precise way initially imagined. I mean, isn't your book kind of an apocalyptic prophecy? How do you mean? Well, you know, the climate disaster, the AI disaster that is-- Well, the context in which we're saying that is that when you have fanatics, like Ben Gavir, again and again, making incursions onto Alexa, making declarations, like we now own it because of Gaza, violating what's known as the status quo, which is the bar on Jewish prayer, on Temple Mount, because it's the third holiest site in Islam, and he brings, you know, first five people, and then a hundred, and then more than a thousand to go pray in public. We don't believe that he's right, that if he rebuilds the temple, that the Messiah will come, but we do believe that in the process of trying to fulfill his prophecy, he could unleash Armageddon for the rest of us, because that's why it matters that there's powerful as they are, because they are, you know, at the helm of states with nuclear weapons. Let's get onto AI, right? So, you write about this conspiracy theory that-- You know what? Honestly, people are already scared. Like people who read the book are thankful that we're giving them a framework and analysis and some language to explain reality. I'm not out here to scare people. I'm not the basis. I live through a summer of terrifying heat in Europe, 16,000 excess deaths in one week. Like, I don't think they're scared because I wrote a book. I'm not saying this. I really tried-- I really tried before you came to this studio. I tried to orient people. Like, I'm interested in when I wrote the shock doctrine, it was about how vulnerable we become when we're encountering things that we haven't encountered before, a major shock. We lose our story, we lose our orientation, and that's when we can lose a lot of rights and public assets. And when people are bewildered as I think lots of us are, and I would include myself in this world where we don't know what's happening, people reach for conspiracy theories. You know, we had QAnon that animated the January 6th, Salt on the Capitol. You write a lot about this great replacement theory that is animating the right at the moment, the extreme right, which is this idea that white Christians in America and Europe will be replaced by black and brown Muslims. Essentially, that's basically it, isn't it, to boil it down? The racist conspiracy theory, yeah. And in parallel to that, you write about AI, which seems to me to be a very real threat of people being replaced, not so much ethnically, but certainly in the sense of class, working class and middle class people whose jobs and livelihoods are literally going to vanish. So I wonder whether, when you look at these conspiracy theories, like the great replacement theory, do you just dismiss them, or do you look at them as a metaphor that tells you something powerful about something real that is happening? Well, when I wrote doppelganger, which was the book before this one. Which was fantastic, by the way. I really loved that so much. I was deep in the kind of conspiracy reporting at the time, and it was incredibly nuanced, and I really recommend it to anyone. Well, I had a line in that book about how conspiracy culture gets the facts wrong, but the feelings right. And what I was writing about specifically was the way a lot of the anti-lockdown movements, anti-vaccine movements were tapping into very real, and I think really legitimate fears of living in a surveillance state, of living where we're not sure what exactly our phones are tracking, and who gets that data, and whether they're such a thing as privacy. And so all of it during COVID was being projected onto the vaccines first, where there was some idea that Bill Gates was trying to inject people with little tiny cameras to track them, tracking devices, and then it was all projected onto the vaccine verification apps on people's phones. And it was greeted by a lot of people in the political center, and even on the left with "derision," and one of the jokes that circulated at the time was, "Wait till they hear about cell phones," and I always thought that that was really telling, because what are we saying exactly? That we know our cell phones are tracking us, and we're cool with it. Because what that said to me, and what I wrote at the time, is that there really is an opportunity to build a cross-partisan coalition against that surveillance. So here's my question, because you quote some people who have very much on the other side of the barricades to yourself, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman who's gone on quite a journey. She's on a journey. I'm interested in people who are on a journey. Where is she going to come next? Where is she going to go next? But she does agree with you on a lot of things about Gaza and Iran. She has been quite vocal in her condemnation of what is going on there. But you also quote Joe Allen, who works for Steve Bannon on his war room, who calls AI the greater replacement, with obviously a nod to that conspiracy theory. But should you, as a democratic socialist, are you ready to make common calls with people like that? Yeah. Yeah. With Joe Allen? Yeah. Okay. Marjorie Taylor Greene. I mean, I would certainly speak to her. What I've been seeing at the grassroots level is an amazing kind of coming together. And I mean, I'm telling you that the data centers are healing the political divides in America because all these neighbors who had been at each other's throats over vaccines and masks and drag branches and books they wanted to get banned are coming together and saying we all agree that we don't want this very noisy data center. I mean, there are these confusing rifts and shifts. And I'm not going to speak for Marjorie Taylor Greene because I honestly don't know where she's going with this. Yeah. But what, you know, the argument that Astra and I are making in the reason why we kind of make this map of this, you know, fascism, always a coalition. And it is inherently vulnerable because it's always this kind of awkward alliance of strange bedfellows. And we think there are real political opportunities to go into those rifts and peel people away from a really dangerous ideology. Somebody who's done that very, very well is Zoran Mamdani. He went and talked to Trump voters the morning after the election. He went to the areas that had flipped most dramatically for Trump. And he just stopped people in the street and said, "Who'd you vote for last night?" And many of them said Trump. And he asked, "Why?" He listened. And then he said, "Well, what about if somebody was promising to freeze your rent?" And he got not all of them, but 10% of Trump voters. And this is about not demonizing people, right? Absolutely. Can we just talk a little bit about, we've talked a lot about critique. But can we talk about proposed solutions? Like, what do you do about it? Well, that's one, right? I mean, not talk to people. Be open. run and win elections and then deliver for people because I think that that the I don't think it's only electoral politics that is a solution but the crises are real it's not in our imagination and a feeling that the establishment the center has is not on your side is never going to come through for you is working for the globalists or for Israel or for the tech companies like that's just so widespread but what we've seen certainly in New York but not exclusively in New York we've seen some really dramatic primary wins in the sort of vein of Zaron Mamdani if people speaking to Trump voters and addressing those material concerns. So using this this kind of coalition of end times fascists can be defeated at the ballot box. I think it can as long as the elections are happen and are defended. I mean like election integrity isn't that a sort of a right way idea they're very good at that look I think that Donald Trump has already shown very clearly that he doesn't respect elections I don't know why you'd be looking at me like that about saying that he already tried to overturn one election I think we should expect him to not take losing well and he now has many more masked men to at his disposal. Can you write in the book that this end times fascism as you describe it is a counter revolution against a revolution that hasn't happened yet. Are you the revolution that hasn't happened yet because you've been writing about this stuff for more than a quarter of a century. I think that there have been attempts on the left to do what I'm describing I was part of two two attempts by Bernie Sanders to to run for president and he came closer than anyone expected so yeah I would say that the left that I have been a part of which has made you know many mistakes and it's far from perfect is what they are most afraid of because we can provide people with the real thing that they are only proposing a counterfeit for which is improving their lives I mean people most people are not voting for a Donald Trump out of just sadism and a desire to see people suffer they're angry they want their lives to be better they are feel betrayed by the political center and then somebody comes along promising to shake things up and return a little bit of dominance and dignity to them and they go for that but if there's a better offer and that you know that's why the Zoraan example really matters and it matters look when I first interviewed Zoraan he was at one percent in the polls nobody thought he had a chance you describe it in the book as doing a favor for absolutely I was like I have no idea you're talking about okay and he said he's really smart we had a great conversation in the next thing yeah but can I just like taking away my take but it matters that Zoraan Mamdani and Bernie Sanders are the two most popular politicians in America today and when we knocked doors for Bernie in 2016 and in 2020 we met a lot of people who were either going to vote for Bernie or vote for Trump there was no way they were going to vote for yeah in QAnon spaces I met a lot of people who who were disillusioned Bernie guys who who ended up being you know QAnon as and yeah Trump supporters these are volatile times but but look if I with to try and distill the sort of essence of your writing over a quarter century and more it seems to be that the system as it's currently run cannot put community well-being over corporate profit is that I would go further I would say that the system is driving us off a cliff okay doesn't that mean essentially that your revolution means overthrowing the system I mean I have been part of movements that have attempted to transform revolutionize the system um Bernie called it a political revolution a democratic socialist revolution but it is a it is it is it is a deep transformation is that the end of capitalism I think that's that it is the end of capitalism as the system that is deciding everything else I think that there can be markets within that but I think it has to be a much more deliberate economy and there has to be much more that is outside of the profit motive and it has to start with meeting people's most basic needs and we live in an an economy that equates economic growth without question that means good news no matter what the source of the environment inflating the balloon and I hear all of those arguments I suppose the reason why a lot of people think that you know ending capitalism in its current incarnation feels incredibly radical is because they feel like that means ending America in the way it was conceived this this idea of this place that people could go to and still want to go to because of its dynamism and it's promised that you can make it there does it feel like it's interesting in America you know there's a people are losing faith in capitalism I mean democratic socialism is polling almost as well but people are still coming right that's that's what's fueling this whole kind of stuff at the borders and it is all this rhetoric about immigration people are still coming because of that perceived dynamism that made America people are coming because their homes have become uninhabitable and they can't live for the most part it isn't that's the push but there's also a poll and they're not only going to the United States you know they are seeking safety in in in lots of places and and the responses to fortress the nation and to to turn the nation itself into a bunker look you know what one of the feelings of urgency that that we had in writing this book we you know we wanted to get this sort of framework out before the midterm elections we wanted to give people some tools to get oriented really understand the stakes and just how radical the folks were up against are that we don't think they are trolls we think they use trolling as a political tactic and we should take them very very seriously and they are already having very seriously dangerous impacts on our lives whether that's expanding wars in Iran and Palestine and Israel or you know whether it's the impacts of the climate crisis or whether it's ice agents on the streets so we wanted to do that but we also you know in writing about AI and the radicalism of this dream of a technology that is Trump keeps saying whoever wins AI wins it all it's bigger than the industrial revolution a great many serious market watchers you don't have to trust me believe that this is a larger bubble than we have ever seen and even if you believe that one or two of these companies are going to quote unquote win the race we have about seven of them racing right now so the entire U.S. economy and indeed global economy is being held up by this stock market bubble and when that bubble pops it's going to be a lot worse than the 2008 financial crisis and so I think whether or not you like American dynamism or an idea of of what it could be it's going to be a moment when we're going to have some really big decisions about whether that bust is going to further enrich people who are already obscenely wealthy or whether the price of their reckless gambling is going to be paid again and even more deeply by people who had nothing to do with that crisis and are already under serious stress so we want to we want to get prepared because the radicalism is coming whether we want it or two or not and I hear your urgency and and you can read it in the book you can feel the urgency in the book and times fascism nami Klein thank you very much thank you so much yeah enjoy it that's it for this episode there'll be another one popping into your feed very soon until then keep your mind open your critical lens switched on and stay radical let's tang luck I've tried so many slot apps but tang luck is by far the best other games make it impossible to cash out but tang luck is fair smooth and fast to withdraw real money straight to your bank card exciting slots frequent rewards I play every day download tang luck now support comes from wise the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe fed up with losing out to hidden fees when you send money abroad with your everyday bank choose the smart way wise you can count on the exchange rate you'd usually find on Google no one welcomes surprises plus ditch that wears my money feeling most transfers arrive in under 20 seconds join millions saving billions on hidden fees be smart get wise download the wise app today tease and seize apply