Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World with Naomi Klein
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Welcome to the Jan Arden podcast and show. We have such a great show for you today. Sarah Burke is here. Caitlin Green is here. Her child must be sleeping or modeling and we will get to that because he's edible and I'm going to put salt and pepper on his toes and eat them. This is the Jan Arden podcast and show. Here we go. We got so much to talk about. Caitlin, hi, welcome. Hello. How's it been going? I'm back. He's not sleeping. He's not modeling. He's currently at daycare.

Okay. But you did get him signed to a modeling agency and that's what we want to hear about. Okay. So yes, this did happen. And it's really because of my friends who saw, had like obviously seen so many photos, videos of him. And one of my friends at work at the radio station, her close friend is a casting agent.

And so I guess she showed her photos of him and she was like, oh my God, this baby, you have to get him an agent. Truth. She speaks truth. So we were like, oh, well, like, haha, that's funny. Like it was just like her being sweet. And then she was like, no, this is the name of the best agency for kids that I would recommend. And you should reach out to them. So my husband did. He just like sent in like a little handful of like photos from our iPhone.

and said, this woman recommended we reach out to you. And they got back to us and said, yeah. And he's now cast in Home Alone 13. Amazing. I wish. I'm telling you, he really is cute. I'm not just saying this because I love you, Caitlin. Like...

Will is super, he's just got this chunkiness to him. And you see, I don't know why that's not folding over into me. Like I have a chunkiness to me. Like my legs have little folds on them and I've got little folds on my neck and on my elbows, but that's not perceived cute. I'm past that. At 61, I've outgrown it. No one's offering me modeling stuff, but I'm glad

I'm glad for him because listen, university, a secondary education is not going to be cheap by the time he's 18. And who knows like what happens with it? Like maybe nothing happens with it, but yeah, maybe hopefully fingers crossed he gets like a TV commercial and there's some residuals and then maybe one day he can afford like, I don't know, one foot of a condo in Toronto or bank Uber. Planning ahead. Yeah, that's the thing. It would all just go into a trust for him. But so we'll see, we'll feel it out and see how the whole situation goes. Do you have any,

Any trepidation. We hear about child stars. We hear about kids going into show business. Maybe modeling's not the same as acting, but will it lead to that? Will he be saying on Entertainment Tonight that, yes, my mom got me into modeling when I was 18 months old. And then I got my first speaking role at three. It could be wrong, but Tana doesn't feel like that.

Do you know what I mean? So I feel like because we're here, it's just sort of not ever that way, I don't think. But I mean, yeah, you would have to contend with it. If he has a performative streak in some way and decided that he wanted to pursue something, I think like any parent, you're like, well, I have to accompany them to everything and become a full momager. You'll be a momager. You will be there. He is awesome.

also like a bit of a ham. He liked making people laugh and he had bits that he already does where he'll like be in the middle of drinking a bottle and he'll pull the bottle out and look at you and like spit milk everywhere. And then the second people laugh, he knows to do it again. Yes. So he's on, he knows, he understands the dopamine hit.

of having the likes. And we're going to be talking about that in the show today. I have to tell people who our guest is. I'm so excited. Yeah, Naomi Klein is just a brilliant writer. She's written nine books. She has been a champion for climate change. She talks about all the right things with all the right information. She's a meticulous researcher. Her new book, Doppelganger, A Trip Into the Mirror World,

Probably offered quotes from 50, 60, 70 different researchers, writers, political analysts, scientists. She's so well-researched. She never just pulls crap out of the air and goes, blah, blah, blah. And just a little bit of a backstory, Naomi's going to tell you, but she basically has had a doppelganger for years, a woman named Naomi Wolfe.

who was never really in her realm. She started out in the 90s writing a book called The Beauty Myth and was quite well respected by the left and by, you know, by women, certainly by feminists. She really fought hard. You know, women having to look great and lose weight and be sexy all the time. And, well, she's now...

Naomi will tell us has dropped into the, a very dark side of, I think COVID has spurned it on, but she's our guest today. And I'm so excited. I, I lobbed out a request on Instagram. Yeah.

I'm not going to hear back. Well, we heard back. And never mind that. They went to great trouble back and forth, probably five, six times to find a slot that would work for everybody. So she's our guest today. She's so lovely. And I remember seeing the first few times on social media that she was mistaken for Naomi Wolf. And you know what's happening. And I thought this must be so weird for her to have somebody represent you to a certain segment of the population and misrepresent you in terms of...

of what you stand for and probably what you think. And now because of social media, like nothing can really be, it doesn't feel like it can be corrected in the same way. So it's fun that we'll have her today because like Twitter, you know, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter has become more and more filled with misinformation and no corrections whatsoever. Well, the more we defend ourselves, the more we're attacked. Yeah. So she felt in her book that

which she reads herself, she's saying she felt like she was making it worse for herself. And I kind of agree.

But yeah, just a really, really great writer. I laughed a lot. And anyway, we were speaking of your child. Let's stay on that child. We've got lots of time with Naomi. But I think it's cool. I think it's cool that you're doing that. I hope you can plug some money away. I wonder back in my day, because I was that kid too. I loved singing and doing all that stuff. I was in drama. Like anything I could do at school, I was hand in the air singing.

Sign me up, whether it was sports, anything I could participate in that involved a group of people that I could talk to. Yeah. I mean, when I've seen your concerts, I would say it is sort of a combo pack of obviously musical performances, but also almost like stand-up comedy, like storytelling. So there's like multi-level.

very performative aspect. And I had a little bit of like a desire to perform only when I was in high school. I was so shy and introverted until then. And then I got into high school and I just I became obsessed with we had a really beautiful auditorium in our high school. And we had some drama classes that people took because they thought it was going to be easy, like an easy A. And the teacher was actually very, very into it. And he sort of brought the best out in all the students. And

And so just the environment being so different from a classroom where you just sit there and are talked at. And then you go into an auditorium and it's much more, I don't know, it was Mean Girls. The movie was filmed at my high school in parts. What? Yeah, the big auditorium and stuff was at the high school that I went to in Toronto. It was cool. It was this environment that I couldn't get enough of. And once I had a few successes on stage. You get that bug.

And so and I wish because at the time, you know, guidance counselors were always telling you what to do and what to go into school for. And nobody said to you like, oh, well, you know, you can go into university for performing arts. It was it was very different. And I wish that I had pursued that a little more. Well, it's never too late.

I always talk about I wanted to be a teacher, right? That's what I grew up wanting to be. And I have so many kind people that are like, oh my God, go take some online classes in literature or whatever. There's no end to the stuff. Like if you want to pay your...

1200 bucks, you can get a couple of classes and take them online. And I, you know, I might still do that. Maybe this winter, I've got January, February looks pretty. I mean, I don't know, can I do anything in eight weeks on an online program? I'm sure you could or even just take a masterclass. Like, you know, they're just like extra things you could do that might not result in a certificate that you might find like professionally or personally enriching.

I'll make my own certificate. Yeah, I'll just take that to Michael's and get a certificate. And one of those things that makes the paper bumpy, like a little seal presser. Sarah, I don't want to put you on the spot. Can we talk about the dating thing?

Yeah. Okay. I told both of you. You're fine. Okay. I live vicariously through you. So Sarah sent me a nice picture of a guy. His little catchphrase was short-term fun. But yours is short-term fun too, isn't it? What's yours? It's not like your tagline. It's just like what your dating expectations are. Feels very taggy to me. You know, and I had sent the same picture to my mom. And like right away, she was like, Sarah, be careful. He says short-term fun. And I was like...

Like we went to our first date on the golf course. Which is long term. That's like nine hours. I know. That's a time commitment. I was like, mom, there's no funny business on the golf course. Pretty safe. Lots of people around. Like everything's good. But I will say before the golf, he asked me to dinner and I said, well, why don't we

see how the 18 holes goes first. If I hate you, I don't want to already have a dinner plan after. But yeah, it went really well. It was yesterday. Did you play well or did you have dating anxiety? I didn't play my best. I haven't been out much, but he was great. He was like, oh, try this. At one point, I was like, oh, are you mansplaining what to do with this? And he laughed hysterically. He thought it was so funny that I gave him a little hell. We got along great.

Okay, good. So we'll see what happens. He's very attractive and he's got a lovely body. I mean, that's really superficial of me to say. Did I not see a picture of his chest? That was the Greek guy. Oh, God. Sarah sent me that photo too. I'm really sorry. So we haven't seen short-term fun body yet. No. Short-term fun, if you're listening, I just want to apologize for any derogatory comments

It was complimentary. Yeah, we're trying to be complimentary. But if you do have the Greek guy's body, then I think you're in a good position to move forward in this...

in this dating world. You can use me as a reference. What if I used you as an excuse to get out of dinner? I was like, oh, I have to go edit the Jan Arden podcast. I bet you did. You did, didn't you? He was like, oh, okay. Well, I hope I get a good review on Jan. And I was like, let her know. See, and there we are. And here we are reviewing you. I'm going to just call you short-term fun for the time being. STF. Oh, I like that. STF. Okay. STF. Let's hope.

If this goes sideways, mister, you're going to be on like a national podcast that's listened to by over 200 people on a weekly basis. So yeah, anyway, I'm on my way to Portugal. So I'm glad that I was able to get this

podcast going. I'm glad we've heard about modeling. You're dating. I'm very excited about the food. I've heard there's amazing vegan food in Portugal that is, you know, on the Mediterranean. Isn't it kind of Mediterranean-y diet-ish? Am I being completely geographically stupid right now? No, I think it is. I think it's a lot of olives. I think, I mean, you're not going to have seafood necessarily, but it's a lot of seafood and a lot of vegetables and grains. And every single one of my friends seems to have gone to Portugal in the last two years and they all absolutely adore it. Okay.

That's so great. I'm really looking forward to the dips, the pita breads, mocktails. I'm looking forward to a good mocktail. I'm going on a scenic river ship. Scenic. I'm doing the job for scenic. I'm over there singing a concert for 96 people that are on a Jan Arden scenic cruise. And this is, I think, my sixth cruise. And we have the best time. And there's so many repeat people now.

that, you know, I've slept with most of the people on the cruise. Little STF never hurt anybody. No, but seriously, I'm really looking forward to it. And don't think for a second that I don't feel overwhelmingly grateful. And it is a weird time because, and I was talking to my friends, we had dinner at my place and we were talking about the guilt of joy in these times, the guilt of joy.

And literally it strikes you, you're having a laugh with friends and you're having a nice meal or you're out and the snow's falling outside. And all of a sudden I am profoundly struck with, I shouldn't be happy, I shouldn't be happy. And contrary to fighting that feeling off, I think it is important to pursue joy. It's important to pursue those moments of absolute happiness with your friends and family.

There are terrible things going on in the world. There always will be somewhere profound injustice, racism, the lack of equality. Like let's face it. This is not something we're not going to solve it next week. So I think we have to remind ourselves. Yes. To be empathic, to do what we can, to give when we can, to support when we can, but please do not negate yourselves and find joy with your little son. That's modeling and, and, uh,

The STF golf round and to find moments because life is singular and we are

For all accounts and purposes, have one kick at this and please find the joy you can and don't feel bad about it and don't feel like you shouldn't be. That's no way to live a human life. We have to find that balance. You can care and it's still okay to laugh with your friends. So I'm telling you that because I know exactly what you feel like. So that's my friendly reminder. I needed that right now. Thank you.

Amen. Well, coming up next is an amazing writer, Naomi Klein. She's coming up next. She's fantastic. Doppelganger is the book we're going to be talking about. You don't want to miss this. We'll be right back. You're listening to the Jan Arden Podcast and Show.

We are so excited to welcome another new sponsor, our friends at Cove Soda. Have I pestered Cove enough to come and join us here at the Jan Arden podcast? I love them so much. They are Canadian, first of all. They are a natural, certified organic, zero sugar soda, which includes, get this, one big

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while putting a gut-friendly, guilt-free drink in your body. Cove Soda is available in 12 delicious flavors all over North America. So for our American friends, you can find it. They've got this fruity lineup that's fantastic. I drink those all the time. They've got the classic lineup if you like

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The one, the only Naomi Klein is here with us. In case you've been living under a Tupperware container somewhere on the prairies, she is a brilliant writer. She is a Canadian author, social activist, filmmaker. I think she could be a comedian because I have laughed freaking out loud in her new book, Doppelganger, more times than I can even tell you.

This is required reading. Please welcome Naomi Klein to the Jan Arden Podcast and Show. Thank you so much, Jan. It is amazing to be with you, and I'm so glad you laughed. That was one of my goals for this book, a little bit of comic relief. Thank you.

I did laugh. Sarah, a couple of days ago, she goes, oh my God, how far along are you in the book? And I'm like, I'm tearing through everything. She goes, I'm just, I'm absolutely hooked. Now, how do you feel about doing the audio book versions? I mean, you could have had Judi Dench. You could have had Jennifer Aniston. You could have had me, but you do them yourselves. And that's amazing. Well, it's the first time I've done my own audio book.

And it was hard work. I have new respect. I learned a ton. I had a great director, Simone Barrios. And I think it's made me a way better... I mean, I've done... I think we did 17 stops on this book tour. And I did readings and they're way better than they... My public performance is so much better because I had this intensive practice and coaching and like...

Yeah, I loved the audiobook experience. And I'll tell you something, Jen, like, the really best part about it is I'm getting these letters from people. It's my ninth book, you know, like, I get letters from readers, I know what it's like. But the thing about reading print, and I don't want to diss it, because it's my life, you know, is that you can't really multitask while you're reading a book.

And that is both wonderful and also a problem for people who need to multitask because they have very busy lives. So I'm now getting these letters from people who are describing, like, they're like, I took you with me to X. We went together to here. And they're describing these very physical experiences. And I love it. We go on hikes. We walk dogs. We unload the dishes, you know?

It's fun. Well, it is really something being directed, reading your own material because you have to cross your T's. You have to mind your S's. I don't know what it was like for you, but I had to go back and fix the most mundane things like chairs creaking or my stomach was growling a couple of times. I had these notes and then I would listen to the playback before I did like one line and it would be like, I'm like, oh, that is so embarrassing. Yeah.

But it is a very personal, tactile experience. Like you've been in my car for days just driving around and then you've been in my bedroom with me. So I know what your listeners are saying and your readers are saying. This book, I don't even know where to start.

The social media thing, we'll just dump in there because it's something we talk about on this show a lot. Caitlin and Sarah and I are touching on this all the time. The fact that social media in all its wondrous forms has turned into a form of currency that none of us expected to happen. And even the bad guys, the perceived bad guys,

are winning at a game that sometimes the good guys don't know how to play with quite as much aplomb. Tell us about it. Well, I'll just say that it does start with this...

true experience of mine where I have a doppelganger. I have somebody who, a lot of people, much more than I fully realize, because as I've been on book tour, I've talked to a lot of journalists who are like, yeah, I did it. I thought you were her. So there is another Naomi, nonfiction writer, Naomi Wolf, who I have been getting confused with for years now,

It didn't happen as frequently when we had clear writerly lanes, right? Like I was writing about economics and climate, and she was writing mostly about feminism. But at a certain point, particularly during the pandemic, she started writing about COVID and

In a way that reminded people of my book, The Shock Doctrine, right? Because I wrote a book about how states of shock and states of emergencies do often get exploited by elites to push through a agenda that they couldn't push through during normal times, right? So I've written about this in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of tsunamis and so on.

So Wolf started writing about COVID as if it was a plandemic, as if it was cooked up by, you know, George Soros, Bill Gates, and I mean, whatever. Like we've all heard versions of this conspiracy. But it was sort of structurally similar enough to the arguments that I made in the shock doctrine with like all the facts and evidence removed that people were like, has Naomi Klein lost her mind? Right.

And this happened thousands upon thousands of times online. But this is where it comes back to what you're saying about social media. They were not exactly confusing me and her. They were confusing our avatars. They were confusing the thumbnail version picture of us, the way in which we all perform an approximated version of ourselves online. That's our personal brand. But

there's so many, we're swimming in this sea of personal brands, right? I don't know. Do you, has it ever happened to you, Jen? Like, do you, do you have a doppelganger? Is there somebody who you get confused with? I've certainly heard, you know, hundreds of times over the years, and I'm not exaggerating. You look exactly like my sister-in-law. Um, I saw you in Winners today. My daughter went up to say hello to you and you were an asshole. I'm not exaggerating.

And I'm like, I, A, don't live in Ontario. I wasn't in the winters in Ontario. And I said, I'm sorry that your daughter had that experience. But I honestly, I was in my bathroom.

You know, I wasn't there. So to that extent, yes. And I've been hearing about marketing and my brand in every meeting that I've been in with in the music business for 30 years. So this was very much a precursor, the branding idea of musicians, artists. And you did speak to that, that

Regular everyday people are monetizing a brand and they don't have to be singers or actors or sculptors or dancers or politicians. You spoke about Lilly Singh, you know, just really capitalizing on, you know, a brand that she had.

Right. And, you know, she's an interesting case because she's one of many people who has been very good at the influencer game. You know, I mean, she's funny, she's a great performer and there are great things about it. Like there are ways in which it's been very democratizing and

particularly people who don't have connections in the entertainment world or the journalistic world have been able to set up little cameras in their bedrooms and just out of their sort of sheer talent and force of personality have been able to gate crash these like predominantly opportunistic

upper middle class white spaces, right? And just get in there. But then it becomes its own logic. And she's one of many people who've talked about just the pressures of the algorithm to perform a particular version of oneself and to keep feeding the machine. And if you don't feed the machine, then people are going to turn to the...

people who are now imitating you, your doppelgangers, right? Who have seen your success. And now the algorithm is serving up, not just your videos, but videos of somebody who looks kind of like you and sounds kind of like you and is churning it out faster than you. And so now you're competing with your own, your own doppelganger, your own avatar. And then,

Add AI and you're literally, if you're an artist, I mean, it's so intense for musicians, for visual artists that you can just type into one of these programs, you know, serve me up in the style of Jan Arden or whoever it is.

And, you know, you're now competing with a doppelganger version of you who is producing it for free. And it was trained on your work without your permission. So this is the way in which I use my particular and very specific doppelganger experience as a kind of a portal into this world of doppelgangers, the way we all create doubles of ourselves and are now having them created for us. It's a mirror world. It's a house of mirrors. And we have to find our way out.

I would be remiss if I didn't ask you if...

Naomi Wolf had had some kind of commentary to this book, to Doppelganger. You know, what it's like writing to a person and quoting a person in a book and making the arguments that you're making about how she has shifted to that mirror world of herself. That she started out seemingly a real champion of young women. I mean, the beauty myth. And where she began in the 90s, she was heroic. I mean, I remember...

reading that book and thinking, wow, little girls everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief because there's someone out there who understands them. And so to see her take this turn and to have you write about it, I mean, even with the mere comparisons, when you're talking about your doppelganger and these comparisons, your partners, for one thing, Naomi Wolf's partner and your partner. At a certain point had the same name. Yeah. Like it's, that's the uncanny. That's the shutter, the Freudian uncanny.

hit pause at that point and I'm just like okay this is so fucking weird I don't even know what to say yeah I was just wondering if you'd heard anything from her I haven't heard anything directly and I did reach out to her to interview her for the project and never heard back

I think that she is somebody who feels so victimized by the world she used to travel in, right? I mean, she was somebody who could get a piece placed in the New York Times and wrote regularly for the Guardian and had all these New York Times bestsellers.

And she has been dabbling in conspiracy land for a long time. Then she made this foundational error in her 2019 book, Outrages, which was found out live on the air. So she was doing an interview with the BBC and she made this claim that gay men had been getting executed in Victorian England long after it was previously understood. And her...

Her interviewer, who's a historian, was like, actually, you misunderstood the historical record. Those people where it said death recorded, they were actually sentenced and released.

And so it was just like every writer's worst nightmare. She's live on the air, on the BBC, and she realizes that a central piece of her evidence is wrong. And it's understandable that she misunderstood the historical record, but why didn't she have fact checkers? Why didn't her publishers actually make sure that it was correct? At any rate, after that...

She became like a subject of ridicule, right? And in the book, I have this formula for understanding people who really fall down the rabbit hole and go far right. And then she's not the only one. There's a lot of people who've made this migration. And my formula is narcissism and grandiosity, which having met her in the 90s, it was always there.

plus social media addiction, plus midlife crisis, or I haven't done the formula in a while. Yeah, throw that in there and menopause maybe. Divided by public shaming equals far-right meltdown. And so I think that that public shaming piece is pretty important, that it isn't just that she made the mistake, it's that she became entertainment on the online platform.

you know, left. Like it was just fun for a lot of people to just wallow in that moment of shame for her. And I know because a lot of them thought it was me. So I felt it too. I got, you know, I got 5% of what she got and it wasn't fun just because people confuse me with her. So yeah, I mean, I think that she didn't want to talk to me because I stand in for this whole world that she feels betrayed her.

But she has responded, you know, like in a way like on Twitter, and she sort of folded it into this broader conspiracy theory of how she has been taken off the chessboard because she is a truth teller. And so in her narrative, she's telling so much truth that there has to be this huge plan to silence her. And my book is part of that. Oh, very much so.

It's so thought provoking, Naomi. Every chapter, like every page that flips over, there was something that profoundly made me think about my own journey, my own curation of my social media and how I have approached it. I actually breathed a sigh of relief.

Because I really feel like, and I still feel like it having read Doppelganger, that I'm on the right track as far as how I represent myself, how I represent my life, how I represent the music that I've made, the catalog that I've made over the last 40 years. And I think that's important.

For people to read. I don't care how old you are. Young women in particular, you talk about the whole idea of dopamine, like Naomi Wolf getting this hit off people liking her. She would rather have people liking her in an arena that she probably didn't really want to see herself in.

But the desire to be liked and to have those little red hearts floating up is too tempting. A hundred percent. Yeah. And she goes on Steve Bannon's podcast, for instance. Oh, God. Well, the first time she went on his podcast, she said, I used to think you were the devil. But now I'm so happy we're in this struggle together, right? So-

By her own admission, she is in bed with people who she previously thought represented, you know, the worst of humanity. But the gratification, she says really extreme things, you know, like recently, even since my book came out, she posted that she,

She stands by her claim that vaccinated people shed onto unvaccinated people and that they start to have, particularly women, they start to have like uterine cramping, right? But then she even went further and said that

you don't even need to be next to someone who's been vaccinated to have these, you could just sleep in the same hotel room that they had slept in. So Jan, next time you're on the road, you know, be careful because you have to find out if the person who had your hotel room before you may have recently been vaccinated. So anyway,

The point of this is not to laugh at her, although it's hard not to. It's absurd. If you look underneath this claim on Twitter, you will see hundreds, perhaps thousands of people thanking her for her courage because they have been waiting for someone to make exactly this claim. And so it is this feedback loop. And it isn't just that she's getting laughed at. She's also getting a lot of positive encouragement in the mirror world. There's no end. The girls know all too well the...

All out brawls that I'm in on Twitter on a very regular basis where I have Anne Murray texting me. She did a couple of years ago. She's like, Jan, please stop.

please, as your friend, I'm worried about you. I said, Anne, don't worry about me. I have blocked, because I checked yesterday, knowing that I was coming into this conversation, you had been talking about muting, kind of versus blocking, that you prefer muting. I have blocked 13,000 plus people. Wow. There's some days when I was in battle mode that I was blocking 300 or 400 people a day. And yes, it is very time consuming.

sensitive. Like I'm sitting there literally blocking people that

Why do you like to block as opposed to mute? Because they love to do the screen grabs and be like, look, I got to her enough that she blocked me, but they never know if you mute them. I know. I find that with the new X, my mutes are still showing up in my feeds. I know. So I've tried to be kinder and nicer. I'm not kind. I just don't want to give them the satisfaction. I'm actually meaner than you. I don't find you mean at all. Intelligent women are always perceived as bitches.

You know, intelligent men are perceived as powerful and all-knowing and great leaders. Women who are smart, women who are assertive, women who have an opinion are bitches. That's the story. But I do like a good Twitter battle because it doesn't bother me. Some people are defeated by it. They lose sleep. They're up at night. I just was talking about Pierre Polyev.

talking on WestJet and kind of doing his little spiel up there. And I was so mad. I just, if you're going to be nonpartisan company, like you can't have people grabbing the microphone and saying, make Canada great again or whatever the hell he was saying. And I was just like, WestJet, you've lost the plot. And I'm sorry. If I was on that plane, I would have like, I don't know. I was so mad. I had thousands, might've been tens of thousands of

of you fat see you word. You're so not relevant. And I always like, buddy, if I wasn't relevant, then why are you writing me? You know, you're just making me more relevant. And then it drives them crazy. And then I would ask them out for coffee. Let's go for coffee and think about it. Is this what dating is like now in the new world? Like, are you asking me out? And they'd get so mad. So I do enjoy it. No, that is, that is good. That is God's work. Thank you for that. Um,

You don't write about easy things like climate change, capitalism, Israel, Gaza, and The Guardian recently. How do you keep your voice, your opinions clear of what you think you should be saying rather than what you actually want to say from your heart? Well, are they different? I don't know. I've tried to be guided by a set of principles regardless of whether or not I'm going to get attacked for them.

Because in a particular moment, we're just supposed to choose sides, right? I mean, this is what I'm trying to get at with defining this relationship between us and them as a kind of a mirror world, right? We're reactive. So, you know, if people in the world that my doppelganger now lives in are for something, then we're automatically against it. You know, we're just, we're defining ourselves against one another as opposed to being guided by a set of legible principles. And I think that that's become commonplace

It's becoming our undoing on many, many fronts, this sort of us and them thinking. And so we have to get out of that. I call it like the doppelganger effect or the doppelganger dance. I don't want to react just by choosing a side, just by choosing a team. I wrote that article that got a lot of pushback because people wanted – it was a choosing teams moment.

But I don't frankly use social media very much to express my opinions. I just try to amplify work that I think is worth amplifying or link to articles that I write. There are rare moments where I use it to actually express myself, but mostly I try to use other more in-depth forms and just use social media as a tool to like, please read this piece. But the problem is then people don't read beyond the headline and often the headline sucks.

And then it just fits within a certain us-them narrative and then you just have to wait it out. But I think it's getting so bad that more and more people realize that we need to be guided by clear ethical values. Like we actually have to be more pro-free speech people.

even when we don't like the speech because, you know, we're seeing a lot of censorship right now and you're not going to fight censorship just by saying, let this person, but not that person speak. Like you actually have to defend freedom of speech. And we haven't done a good enough job of that on the left. Right. So I'm just going to be more outspoken about these things because I think I've actually, even though I am outspoken and, and,

Thank you for saying that the work seems to be me just saying what needs to be said every time. I do self-censor. I've self-censored more than I'm proud of.

And I'm going to do less of that. I am doing less of that going forward. And this book is part of that, right? There's a lot of criticism of my team in this book, right? But I try to implicate myself in that. So it's not just me wagging my finger and saying, you all screwed up. It's like, no, we're all fucked. Like we're all screwing up all the time. No, you absolutely do. I think you take so much ownership.

of mistakes and, you know, the missteps and maybe not doing exactly what you should have done in a moment. But isn't that just so human? And I think we have to recognize that in each other. Like I, you know, we were talking about blocking and muting. I think I just block because I don't even want it on my feed. I don't want them to be able to see what I'm saying anymore. And I had a woman that came up to me in a grocery store a couple of years ago. This was before the height of

of social media becoming so filled with vitriol. And she literally looked at me, she was standing beside me, staring at me. She goes, I know who you are. And I said, oh, hey, yeah, I guess my disguise isn't working today because I had a mask on. And she said, yeah, you blocked me from Twitter. And I said, well, I must've had a very good reason.

And I left it at that. And I said, I'm sorry, but, and then the conversation went out into the parking lot and she was nice. She said, is there any way that I can be reinstated? And she got her phone out.

And I'm just like, all right, get your phone out. I got my phone out, standing there with my cart. Naomi, I'm not kidding you. And she gets out, my handle is blankety blink block. And I'm like, okay, open up, open up. I could see I blocked her. I found it. I hit unblock. And I said, this is a trial basis.

So whatever you did, don't do it again because I don't mind opinions, but you must have said something disparaging to me or to somebody else on the page because that's the only reason I really do it. Anyway, so it's so funny, but I love it, Ren, that virtual world that you have spoken so eloquently about. I'm telling you, it's required reading because it'll really make so much sense of why people are doing the things they're doing.

But to have those two worlds collide was such a weird day. Yeah, because I think online, I mean, part of what it means to create a brand version of yourself, of an avatar version of yourself, is you're creating a thing version of you, right? And that's what a brand is. It's not a human. It's a thing. It's a commodity, right? And so I think a lot of the just

disgraceful ways people treat one another online comes from the fact that we don't believe each other are fully human. And we don't believe each other are fully human because we are performing a thing version of ourselves. And things don't bleed. Things, you can throw hard objects at things and they're fine, right? But we're not things. We are impersonating things. We are not meant to be brands. We are meant to be human beings.

And so like I've had similar moments where somebody has just been foul to me online, someone who I know. And then I reach out to them. I'm like, hi, still here. And they're like, oh, no, I still love you. I'm like not acting like it. So it's confusing out there. And I think a lot of it just comes from a rush to perform the thing version, commodity version that these algorithms are assisting us to do.

But listen, I really think muting is better than blocking. I have to, I'm just going to reiterate this because I love the idea of people having years long arguments with me that I never see and they don't know. They don't know. I'm going to try it. I'm going to try muting instead of blocking because 13,000 is excessive. Okay.

I'm not going to lie. But I, you know, X has kind of taken a bit of a turn. The former Twitter has taken a bit of turn. I really enjoyed it. Like when I signed up in 2009, I don't think any of us really knew what we were getting into because I did enjoy getting news from there. I did enjoy getting kind of a condensed sort of look at the day and headlines. And I'm on my phone and I'm traveling. And now I'm like, I don't trust anything.

anything I'm reading on here, I need to really make sure that I don't retweet this unless I actually know what this is, because I could be completely lobbing something out there that's not real. And I also have to be careful too, because I'll tweet things and

And because of a brand or my little avatar, I can be sitting on the couch watching CBC or CTV and I can see the banner of my tweet going along the bottom of the screen within 15 or 20 minutes.

If you would have told me that in 2009, I would have been absolutely gobsmacked by it. But I still find it enjoyable. I like that it's a gathering of like-minded people sometimes. I love Instagram. It's really kind of banal. Once in a while, there's a selfie. And I don't ever have anyone coming up to me saying, you should do more selfies. They're like, I love the deer in your yard. It's such a balm for my soul. So I'm glad of that part of it.

Anyway, I just want to swing around because I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about No Logo. Your first book, it came out when you were 29 years old. I wasn't even a fully developed person at 29. I mean, you were writing this profoundly successful book internationally, well over a million copies now.

Did you have any idea, and just speak to that book a little bit, what that must have been like at 29 years old on the verge of 30, writing something that the world really embraced? I was just so fortunate. I mean, it completely, it opened up the world to me in so many different ways. But I think the most wonderful way was I was editor of this magazine, a small little left-wing magazine in Toronto, right?

I wrote for the Toronto Star occasionally, but I was not a known person. And all of a sudden, my life just changed so dramatically. And in particular, in places like Italy, where it occupied a cultural space that was unlike anything I've experienced since. And because Italy is so weird. I mean, you're a celebrity. But I was like a kid writer. The thing about being a writer is that

you need to be an introvert to do it. I wrote that book in my 20s. Most people were having fun. I was going to sweatshops and locking myself in a room for months on end in order to write it. The thing about...

about when a young writer achieves that level of kind of fame, and it was fame, like it was, there was actual paparazzi, you know, in Italy. It's like, it's so incredibly weird because if you're a musician, like you have an extrovert gene, you know, like there's something about you that wants to get on stage and be like, hello, I'm here. But if you're a writer, you live, you have the opposite. You have the, you have a keen ability to not deal with people at all.

But this book changed that for you profoundly. I was so bad at the extrovert part. And suddenly I was being asked to give speeches to huge crowds of people. And I was so bad at it. So I had to learn how to be a public. The first time I gave a speech, I looked down and didn't look up for an hour. But you did it. But.

But, you know, what was fun was that I would go to like Milan and it was like having the back door to every city, not the front door, but the back door. So like a bunch of like- The back door is better. Much better, you know, and they would take me to their squat and they would feed me and give me beer and just like, you know, I would see the underground of every city and it was so amazing.

So I'm so grateful to that book for just a trust. Like people didn't need to know me. They were just like, well, I read your book. Come on, let's go. You know? And that was the best. But I was so nervous about it that I didn't fully, like I couldn't really enjoy it.

Because I was just, I was so freaked out by the whole experience. But now as an old person looking back, I'm like, oh my God, you were so lucky. You're not an old person. You're just getting started. But I like the fact that there was bootleg t-shirts and there was a restaurant, a no logo restaurant. And I just, you know, things like that, you really need to pat yourself on the back because I certainly will cheer you on, you know, to be that, a young woman of that age and to write something

a book that did open a lot of doors. And sometimes people write one book in their lives. That's it. They have that moment. They take it. They enjoy it. It won't hold the door open. You know, that, that is going to only be defined by the work that you continue to do. Every time I have a record coming out and I'm out there promoting it, people are like, so Jan, and the record came out that day. What's next? I'm like, oh my Jesus God. I hate

I hate that. I hate it too because I know you get asked that because I've seen clips and it's just like, so what are you working on now?

And I'm wondering how you feel about that question. And is it frustrating? I can't see you taking a break, but you have kids and you're living in such a great part of the world. I don't even want to tell people where you are because I don't want them showing up there. But it's just, you know, the sky's the limit now. You've got such a legacy of what you've written. And you've written about so many diverse, hard things. They're not easy things. Like you're not talking about makeup brands. I always...

I always have a year after writing a book where I swear I'm never going to write a book. I'm in my never going to write another book year, and I make no apologies for that. There's always a never going to write another book year, and sometimes two years. So I feel absolutely no pressure to know what the next thing is. Although I do have writer friends who

make sure that they have already started their next book. So they're less attached to the reception to the book and more power to them. Like I'm just not that person. No, I actually am in some conversations with,

with folks to do like, this was a different kind of book for me. It was much more creative, uh, nonfiction. And it was fun. It's a fun thought provoking book. You should be really proud of it. I was surprised. I was so blown away. I was trepidatious going into doppelganger, a trip into the mirror world. Cause I thought, am I even going to have the academic sense of anything to really understand the

what Ms. Klein is saying. And I was so invested in the stories and the personal, the vignettes and how it related to me as a person on social media, as a person who's dealing with branding. And I guess, I don't know, I just loved it. I really loved it, which is going to make me go back to other things that you've written. And-

Take another swing at it because I learned a lot. So thank you. I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about being a better version of myself and how I don't need to be on the attack. I loved your empathy towards Ms. Wolf and your kindness that you did offer her at many points in this book.

saying that I know what this feels like because I got 5% of the vitriol that she was getting. So I thought you were very fair and very measured. And I really look forward to whatever the hell happens

you want to take on next because we are all learning from you. So thank you. It's going to be a musical. I'm in. Can I play the, can I play the nun? Absolutely. This was such a pleasure. Thank you so much, Jen. Thank you for being on the show and, and continued success. Look after yourself out there and I will be stalking you on, on all your social media platforms now. And I will never block you or mute you. Or mute me. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Doppelganger is a new book by Naomi Klein. If you're on social media, you've got to read this book. It's fast. It's funny. It's intelligent. And if you don't want to sit and read, honest to God, get the audio book. It is beautifully read by the author. Either read it or listen to it because it's great. Doppelganger, a trip into the mirror world. You're going to learn something. We'll see you next time. Toodly-doo.

This podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at womeninmedia.network.