Naomi Klein discusses the dangers of data centres, Steve Bannon’s hip hop musical and why our tech overlords want to be edgelords

Louis sits down with writer, activist and filmmaker Naomi Klein. They discuss Steve Bannon’s hip hop musical, why data centres are so dangerous, and the tech overlords/edgelords that inspired her latest book, End Times Fascism. Warnings: Strong language and adult themes. Links/Attachments: Book: End Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor (2026) https://naomiklein.org/end-times-fascism/ Book: Doppelganger, Naomi Klein (2023) https://naomiklein.org/doppelganger/ Interview: The full-length interview with Elon Musk, The Economist (2026) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuoqKYxDHVc Play: The Thing I Am, Steve Bannon (1996-1997) https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/17/opinion/sunday/steve-bannon-hip-hop-shakespeare-rewrite-coriolanus.html Podcast: Bannon’s WarRoom (2019-present) https://open.spotify.com/show/0WyF2LaTcrpWfrTIeKjs1L Book: No Logo, Naomi Klein (1999) https://naomiklein.org/no-logo/ Song: Heart of Glass, Blondie (1979) https://open.spotify.com/track/4v2rkl1mC3zVAz0nXMx9r4 Documentary: Bowling for Columbine (2002) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0310793/ Credits: Producer: Tom Fuller Senior Assistant Producer: Maisie Ellen Williams Junior Production Manager: Rosie Pender Production Executive: Francesca Bassett Original Music: Miguel D’Oliveira Video Editor: Scott Edwards Audio Editor: Tom Guest Series Producer: Millie Chu Executive Producer: Arron Fellows A Mindhouse Studios Production for Spotify. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Hello there, welcome to another episode of the Louis Theroux Podcast.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Today, I'm joined by Canadian journalist, author and activist best known for her writing on capitalism, corporate power and the climate crisis, Naomi Klein. Naomi has a new book out called End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, co-written with Astra Taylor, and it looks at what they see as an increasingly powerful alliance between Christian nationalists, Silicon Valley billionaires and the far right. All things I'm interested in and have even made a few programmes about. We discuss the book and the urgency of its manifesto in the chat. We also discuss the themes of Naomi's previous book, Doppelganger, in which she follows her namesake, feminist author turned conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf down the rabbit hole.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  I mean, she basically explores the ways in which Naomi Wolf, who's also a feminist author, did I say that, has come unglued politically, ideologically, come to associate herself with or promote conspiracy theories. And that becomes the jumping off point for an exploration of what she calls the mirror world, this world of populist conspiracy theorists, defrocked political commentators, cancelled celebrities, Russell Brand springs to mind. In Naomi Wolf's case, what happened was she had a book out and she appeared on Radio 4 and it was unmasked live on air. Well, unmasked is a strong word, but she, a significant factual inaccuracy at the heart

• 1:44Speaker 00

  of the book was disclosed to Naomi Wolf. And then alongside that, or possibly partly because of that, she became more and more fascinated in conspiracy theories and fully embraced, well, conspiracy culture and became a kind of fellow traveller to aspects of the MAGA verse. And then because Naomi Klein kept getting confused with Naomi Wolf, that put it on her radar and was, you know, awkward and then and weird that there were two Naomis. She was constantly coming up against this mirror version, funhouse mirror version of herself. If you're struggling with your Naomis, there is a mnemonic. If the Naomi be Klein, then you're fine.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  If the Naomi be Wolf, oh buddy, oof. Oof's weak, it doesn't rhyme with Wolf. That's the number, I didn't make up the mnemonic, if you could think of a better one. Klein fine, Wolf oof. There you go. The book also features former aide and strategist to Trump, Steve Bannon. Naomi Klein found herself endlessly listening to Bannon and finding that Naomi Wolf was popping up on Steve Bannon's show. So we talk about that. Naomi grew up in a Jewish family in Montreal and we discuss her views on Israel and Zionism. We also talk generally, well, more about the American political scene and the rise of fascism, what she calls fascism, others may disagree, the politics of the end times

• 3:12Speaker 00

  and much, much more. We recorded this interview in September this year at Spotify HQ, Naomi came by as part of her promotional tour, Astra Taylor was not here and I think that's all you really need to know, other than the warning that this conversation contains adult themes as well as much else besides, all of that coming up.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  Louis.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Naomi.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Welcome.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Thank you for joining. We're just gonna roll straight in.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Alrighty.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Make the most of our time.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Sounds good.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  You know, I wanted to speak to you maybe even a year ago, after I read the previous book, Doppelganger.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  And then it didn't happen for whatever reason, and then the new book came out, so then I thought, perfect. Or, I don't know how it worked, but anyway, we hooked it up. So I'd like to talk to you about both of them.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  If that's alright.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  I see them as connected.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  They're kind of connected, one is more personal, like the first one, Doppelganger is a story about, I guess, the populist right who've taken on the garb of some aspects of progressivism and who you have your own counterpart in, in the form of a namesake, Naomi Wolf. So that's a kind of personal story that also is a political story in a sort of sense of making, you know, reading the runes of our times. The new one is, in a way, a more straightforward polemic about what you describe as end times fascism. Some people have taken issue with the word fascism.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, they have. You know, I've been struck that it's easier to talk about words than talk about what the words describe, like there's a way in which we get bogged down in these definitions and it's fine to debate definitions if we eventually talk about what we're talking about. But if you only are just debating what to call something, then you end up running out the clock before you can talk about the thing.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  I agree, I think that's a good way of putting it. There's sort of three main strands to the so-called or the designated fascism, religious, kind of religious part, a techno-libertarian part and then a sort of ethno-nationalist kind of militarized bunker mentality part. The, so can we talk, can we start by talking about the apocalypse ball? Because it's a scene-setting event early in the book and it kind of crystallizes who parts of this new coalition really are.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yes, sure. Right, so just to back up a little bit, like what I was trying to understand in the book, what my co-author and I, Astra Taylor, were trying to understand is like, what is this kind of Frankenstein coalition that brought Trump back to power, right? And these were all important parts of Trump's coalition, right? So my interest in them isn't just academic, it's that they are a real world coalition that despite huge differences, came together and agreed Donald Trump is the guy who should be president of the United States. And some of them were with him the first time, but, and some of them were, were new,

• 6:46Speaker 01

  like at the inauguration, there was a lot of surprise to see the titans of Silicon Valley lined up, you know, with better seats than the members of cabinet. So that wasn't true for his first administration, in fact, he was in conflict with a lot of these guys. So, but yeah, so that ball took place four days before the election of Donald Trump. It was a ball attached to a conference that was convened by Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist, founder of Palantir. He likes the secret society, Peter Thiel, so there's a lot of, it's, it's kind of half secret, like there's a website, but people don't put their real names on the programme,

• 7:31Speaker 01

  they can have blank name tags, they can use pseudonyms, they don't share the whole, the programme, so it was sort of semi-public. And then they had something called an apocalypse ball and it was at a fancy hotel in Miami called the Faina. And the tagline was, if you aren't trying to destroy the world, maybe you aren't trying hard enough. So it was kind of trolly, edgelordy was the vibe, you know, it was very, kind of we're so edgy. People who went to the apocalypse ball were encouraged to dress up, you know, in risque costumes, so there was somebody who's dressed up as a Haitian chef and he had like cats

• 8:13Speaker 01

  and dogs, stuffed animals hanging from his apron, so that was a reference to the Haitians are killing, are eating cats and dogs.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  They're eating our dogs, this famous Donald Trump lie that he told at one of the debates.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, but so the idea was just like, here we were leaning into how not just anti-woke we are, but just like we, we're gonna say the unsayable and really flirt close to the edge with fascism, like if you've got a session called, you might be a eugenicist, you're, you know, you're, you're pushing the envelope pretty far. Brian Johnson was there, teaching people how to live forever.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  He's been on the podcast, if I'm not wrong.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I don't know, what caught your attention about it?

• 8:55Speaker 00

  Oh, well, it's one of those things where it's so weird and ludicrous that you're not quite sure, well, I as a reader, I'm never quite sure how seriously to take it.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  And clearly, as you acknowledge, mixed in with it is a kind of trolling urge, like, we're gonna be exactly as creepy and bizarre as you think we are, therefore undercutting or thereby undercutting any, preempting any critique you may make because you're taking us too seriously.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Right, so, so in the book, we say they, they wanna be, they wanna be both our overlords and our edgelords. And, and so, yeah, it is destabilising and it's clever because, because you, you feel a bit foolish taking them seriously.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  But of course, four days later, Donald Trump is elected and many of the people at the ball end up, you know, with real influence in the Trump, in this new Trump administration, and no one more so than Peter Thiel. And by the way, unlike most of the tech oligarchs who have lined up behind Trump, Peter Thiel did support him in his first term. He backed him and, you know, he has been openly talking about giving up on democracy since 2009. Yeah, it's taking the libertarian story that I've been writing about for a long time about sort of privatizing, you know, you privatize every part of the state until there's nothing left but to like, start your own private country. And so he, he has funded

• 10:21Speaker 01

  various projects where people try to start their own corporate city-states. There was, he had an idea called seasteading.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  I remember that.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Right? Start your own country on an oil rig.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  I feel like that hasn't gone that well. The seasteading?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Seasteading? It turns out, rich people don't actually want to live on oil rigs. They like it on land. So then he's, he's been part of a project to, it's kind of like a free trade zone in Honduras. It's called Prospera. So it's a beautiful island that they have, they, they've started their own sort of country. It's basically like a, basically a gated community with a deregulated med spa in it.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  It's confusing because, and there's a tension in the book, between these guys, these tech bros, tech oligarchs, and their urge to remake nations, right, to kind of be subcontractors in some new project of American renewal. And, and, you know, many of them have contracts with the government. And as you said, turned up at the inauguration to support Trump. But then there's this secessionist, quote, exit kind of dimension where they're like, you know what, we're going to just either live in bunkers or go into space. Those feel they're at odds, those two things.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  They are at odds, definitely. And, and this is why there's a tension, I mean, in that they're presenting themselves as, as, as heretics, you know, voices in the wilderness. No one's listening to them. But then they're not marginal. They're, they're very powerful. They, they lead multi-billion dollar companies, you know. I can't make sense of it. I don't think it's my job to, to make it make sense. So there is this dream of Exodus, like leaving the state. But on the other hand, they are, are clearly extremely interested in states and the infrastructure of existing states. They want contracts. They, they're interested in impunity, in immunity, which is something that states can grant.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  And in fact, maybe the bunkers and the rockets are a hedge, right? Because they think, well, maybe civil society will function and everyone will be happy. But maybe it won't, in which case there'll be total social and political collapse and we will need to retreat into bunkers in Argentina and Maui, where in fact, I think some of them are being built.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yes. Zuckerberg's in Hawaii. Ellison's in Hawaii. Yeah.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  And, and I think Thiel's, Thiel, from, from choosing New Zealand, has switched his, his prospects to Argentina, I guess.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  I think some people have multiple bunkers because you don't know where, where, where will be safe.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  More than, yeah, if one's good, then two is better.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  But, you know, the, like, I, I think when I, we started writing the book, I thought there would be a lot more about the bunkers.

• 13:17Speaker 00

  The bunkers are a distraction.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  I think they are a bit of a distraction. Like, I'm more interested in the dream of AI.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Go on.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Itself as a kind of a rapture fantasy, like.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Well, I was interested in that. So Musk is quoted, I think he might have been on Joe Rogan's podcast, saying, increasingly, it appears that humanity is a biological boot loader for, I wish I could do the accent.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  That was a tweet.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  Was it? He said, increasingly, it appears humanity is a biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. A boot loader, I think is a computer term, right? You put some software in in order to.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  We're grist for Grok.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  We're grist for Grok.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  We're machine food. It's like the Matrix.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  It does matter that he was mad that day. He was mad because there were a lot of protests against Doge.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  Okay, so he was in a bad mood.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  He was in a bad mood because people were, I think, quite smartly, expressing their anger at the fact that he was shutting down federal agencies and laying off huge numbers of workers by protesting at Tesla. And the Tesla stocks were starting to go down. So he was quite angry that day.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  That feels like important context, because he's also on record getting into a feud with another tech guy who accused him of speciesism because he said, I prefer humans over AI. So he kind of speaks out of both sides of his mouth in terms of where he stands on the future of humanity.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Well, look, he used to be very, he used to be very doomer about AI. And so he's, he has this longstanding feud with Google because they were ahead in the AI race. And so he and Sam Altman teamed up to start OpenAI. And the reason they did that was because they couldn't let Google be the first to reach AGI or superintelligence, because that would end the world, in their view. So they needed a nonprofit. And, and they needed to do it to make sure that it was good. And, and, and Musk talked about being worried that they would summon a demon.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  And then, and then Altman decided, no, OpenAI is just going to race Google. And they're going, it's not, it's going to be for profit, too. And then Musk was like, damn you, and started XAI, which is also for profit. So the end result is they're all calling each other evil. And they're all for profit, companies racing each other to, to the same goal, which many of them have said, yeah, is very, very dangerous. But not so dangerous that they're not doing it. So.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  We, I mean, just to be, it would be boring if I just agreed with everything.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, please don't.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Okay. So did you, did you, did you watch Elon Musk's interview with Zanny Minten Beddoes?

• 16:14Speaker 01

  No.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  It's worth a watch. It's not that long. And in the interview, he said, AI will create, quote, "an age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they think of." Blah, blah, blah. "If you have vast numbers of robots with vast amounts of digital intelligence, you have a sort of quasi-infinite economy."

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. I did see excerpts.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  Money won't matter in 2036.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Work will be optional. That's the one where he said.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  He's almost painting this kind of Marxian utopia where people just chill out and have fun all day because there's superabundance.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, it's heaven, actually. I mean, that's why, you know, I'm interested in the, in the parallels between the vision of the future that in one of their rapturous moods, the tech folks will paint, and the similarities with, you know, if you were to speak to a, somebody like a messianic Jew on the West Bank and ask them what heaven was like, it would all just be lolling about around, reading the Talmud with the secrets of the universe unlocked. And also like that, like that, that religious story, the, the dream, you know, there's the Jewish version, there's a Muslim version, there's, it's in all the Abrahamic religions. It's at its most literal in the, you know, Christian

• 17:35Speaker 01

  evangelicals who literally believe in the rapture and this idea that there's going to be like, a moment when suddenly the faithful get magicked into a golden city in the sky and leave their clothes behind and stuff. But even if you don't believe in that extreme vision, a lot of, of what organized religion has taught is, is, is a hatred of the material world, or at least like, an association of the material world with sin. And so one wants to dematerialize, to be free of the prison, the prison of the material, of the animate, of the body. And I think there's an argument that can be made that, that idea, that, that

• 18:19Speaker 01

  the goal is ascendance from the material, from the animate, has not helped us be good caretakers of this earth. That, that, you know, I happen to believe, you know, our duty as humans is to, is to protect life, you know, and to enhance life. So, yeah, so there is this tension. But what I think what is striking about Musk, what, whatever, you know, he believes different things on different days. But I, but what we do know is that he is building data centers that are enormous. So his, like, the race to AI, whatever stories they're telling, is in fact, like draining our physical material world. It is not good

• 19:03Speaker 01

  for the earth that in this very consequential moment in, on the clock of the climate, as we're seeing disasters spread globally. That's not our imagination. We really are, you know, saying goodbye to the potential to keep warming below 1.5 degrees. We've had UN reports, this is real, you know. They have found a new way to burn a whole of a lot, a whole lot more fossil fuels in a race that we haven't asked for. And nobody, nobody asked whether we, we believe this race of the Titans is the best way to spend these really consequential years. So I guess I'm interested, not just in the stories, but

• 19:45Speaker 01

  how the stories justify a real world attack on our one and only planet.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Just to be, again, take it to a very basic place. What would be so bad about having a data center in your neighborhood?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Um, well, they are absolutely massive.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  I mean, they're several football stadium size. And I think the problem is that people are not convinced they're doing some good, right? And, and I mean, even, even in the, in the battles over like an oil pipeline, right? Um, and it's interesting because we, we have a chapter about Memphis and the, and the battle over Elon Musk building. He built a huge dat- the world's largest supercomputer and called it Colossus after this science fiction novel and film where, where the AIs take over the nukes. Um, and it doesn't end well, so it's, it's, it, it, it seems like a strange decision to, to name it.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  There's some Musk all over, isn't it?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  And then, then he opened another one, then he opened another, now he's opening a fourth. So, um, what's the problem? Okay, the problem is noise. The, they're very loud, they never turn off. Um, in Memphis, the trouble is they are powered by methane gas. And he's built his, oh, he's rigged together his own power stations. So they're just spewing methane into the community. And the problem is that when they don't rig together their own methane and they just tap into the grid, it sends people's electricity prices soaring because they are using so much electricity. Um, there are also concerns about water and there's debates about how much water they use.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  But then there's also concerns about the end product, right? So, cause like if, for, for, if it were, the reason why, um, it was interesting around Memphis is that the group that organized to fight the data center is called Memphis Communities Against Pollution. But originally that group was called Memphis Communities Against the Pipeline because they formed to oppose an oil pipeline that was planned to go through the same community. And they won that battle. But what was interesting was that when this pipeline company was trying to convince the community that they should accept this oil pipeline running through their backyards. They made this presentation where they had a table and on the table

• 22:13Speaker 01

  were a bunch of products produced with petroleum products, like, they had like Lycra clothing and they had baby diapers, things like that. And the message was, we all use products made from oil. So you might not want the oil in your backyard, but you want the end product. And I think what's, the reason why we have this data center uprising is because people are really not sure they want the end product, right? They may use it, it may be, you know, kind of convenient, but they also have questions about what, what this is doing to mental health and they don't love the idea of AI teaching their kids or being their nurse. Um, they don't love what it's doing to our ability to differentiate, differentiate between what is real and what is fake.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  And so the end product is, is, is under question. And, you know, Musk originally decided to go to Memphis because there was an empty building there that he, which would allow him to move faster and catch up faster um, to the companies that had started before him. And the, the reason why there was an empty building there was because there was, there had been an Electrolux factory. Electrolux makes home appliances. Yeah, this one was making ovens. And when Electrolux, Electrolux had moved to Memphis a few years earlier and promised to create thousands of jobs, in the end, they only created 700 jobs. And then they ended up closing and I think moving to Mexico or somewhere else.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  But now in that building is just a bunch of computers and a few security guards, right? So you really see how little they're offering, like, because they're moving in, that, that building used to employ 700, um, people. And, you know, even if it was producing pollution, those people had jobs and they had wages and the wages stayed in the community. But they're really breaking the kind of basic deal of industrialization, which is, okay, there's some pollution and there's some noise, but you get the jobs and we're making products you use and you like. And now it's like, you don't like the product, you don't get the jobs. We're looking into ways of replacing the security guards with robot dogs.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  For real?

• 24:18Speaker 01

  For real, yeah.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  It's just a bad deal, you know?

• 24:24Speaker 00

  I'd like to have a robot dog.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  No, you wouldn't.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  Do you use AI?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  At all?

• 24:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  In so far as you can avoid it, you don't use it. I, I, I, you know, sometimes I have it switched on if I'm doing a Google search.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  And then an answer pops up.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  You can disable that.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  I know you can.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  I know you can. I, I, I, I, I, there's a part of me that wants to understand it a little better and sometimes using it can help you to understand it, you know, a bit like Twitter or Facebook or these other platforms where it's, but, you know, certainly the infinite scroll, you know, that phenomenon of getting narcotized by an endless entertainment feed.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  I feel like I understand a little better why that's not healthy from being exposed to it.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Does that make sense?

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I do think, like, I'm glad I understand social media, but I feel like it's had a pretty negative effect on my time management and, and, and I think as somebody who

• 25:24Speaker 01

  works in the realm of ideas and thought, like, I, I don't want to go down that road. I understand why people use it as a time-saving device. I think that, that there are uses of it that are, you know, less insidious. But when it comes to like thinking and I, and, um, research, like I, what, what I worry about with, with, with what Google is doing, with Google embedding it in all the searches is, I mean, it's, it's, it's already having such a negative impact on journalism. Um, like these tech companies have already had, like, taken a lot of the traffic away from news sites. And now what those, what those embedded searches do is mean that you don't click on the link

• 26:08Speaker 01

  and you don't go to a news site and it's one more thing that is driving, you know, journalism into the ground. So I, yeah, I, I, I don't want to be part of that because I, I, because I think it's part of a process where, where, where these companies gain a monopoly on truth, on where, where we're able to get information. Like there's this ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI from the New York Times and a couple other journalistic outlets. I mean, and at one point, I think it's a Microsoft executive who says this is, will probably be seen as the greatest theft of all time, like, they knew that. So, so, yeah, so I, I think, I think it's, uh, we shouldn't.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  The, um, one of the people who wants more regulation of AI is Steve Bannon. This is my segue.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Uh huh, okay.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Why don't you tell the listeners and the viewers who Steve Bannon is? And, and it kind of relates to your previous book, doesn't it?

• 27:06Speaker 01

  So Steve Bannon, um, is, uh, he, he, he came to prominence when he was Donald Trump's campaign manager in his first, um, election campaign. And then he was his chief strategist.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  He wrote a hip hop musical, did you know that?

• 27:23Speaker 01

  He has had a life.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  Did you know about the hip hop musical?

• 27:26Speaker 01

  No, I didn't.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Because I've got research on that.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Okay, let's hear it.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  I think it was based on Coriolanus, the Shakespeare play. And the, one of the lyrics was something about, uh, my peeps are chilling at the crib. It was very basic, it was very route one hip hop speak, uh, cringe to the max.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Well, he also has a podcast called The War Room.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's more relevant.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Which has its, its theme music is a sort of a rap song sung by a, a Chinese billionaire. The main lyric is, let's take down the CCP.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  But, uh,

• 28:00Speaker 00

  I have a theory that Steve Bannon, I'm going to road test it, I've never said it in public before, but he's kind of the mirror world Michael Moore.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  Because he, he presents somewhat similarly, they've both got slightly schlubby, scruffy, all-American uh, presentation, Michael Moore's always got his baseball cap, Steve Bannon's always got this khaki jacket. And actually makes a plausible fist of railing against elites and like speaking for the regular man. And I don't want to mix with those Davos, you know, liberals.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Davos class, yeah.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  The Davos class people. And, um, and in fact, as you say, like, there's a part of it that kind of, if you squint at it, is reminiscent of aspects of progressivism. And he, he doesn't like the tech oligarchs, right?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Right, so yeah, so I, I, so I started listening to Steve Bannon a lot when I was writing my book, Doppelganger. I listened to hundreds of hours of him during the pandemic. It was a very unhealthy habit because he's on every day for quite some time. But yeah, I was on like, whatever, that book. I was, I was following my own doppelganger down the rabbit hole and she became a, a regular guest on that show. She was on every day sometimes, um, they did a book together.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Naomi Wolf.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, and he was interested in her because during the pandemic, he was a major platform for people who believed that the vaccines were a plot, the vaccine verification apps were part of bringing Chinese style social credit to the United States. And that this was all, like, there were various contradictory conspiracies that, that he platformed. Um, but there was certainly a through line that, that big tech was the enemy. And so when Trump, um, aligned himself with these tech companies at inauguration, I was very curious to try to, to know how this was going to go.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  And what was your fascination with it? Why do you think you felt the, the urge to listen to so much? It was, there was, it sounds like almost like a kind of, um, what is it? It's psychological, like some kind, it was, it's not just research, is it?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Well,

• 30:19Speaker 00

  It felt like a guilty pleasure.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, I really felt that I was witnessing a new political formation find itself in real time. I was interested, when Trump won the first time, Bannon played this really, really important role in, in delivering a lot of union guys over to Trump who felt, who were furious from the Rust Belt, who were furious about how free trade had destroyed their industrial towns and factory jobs, right? And, you know, for me, I came up in the, in, in the ultra-globalization movement,

• 31:03Speaker 01

  you know, my first book, No Logo, was about these big protests that started happening outside the World Trade Organization, and a new kind of anti-corporate politics that, that's, that kind of showed up in the late 90s. And so, I also thought that the Democrats and a lot of the, like, New Labour had sold out their base by signing these corporate deals that deindustrialized our countries and rolled back environmental laws. And what Bannon did in 2016 is he harvested all of that anger that was directed at, at the time, and said, like, you can, you know, you can trust

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Trump, he's gonna make America great again. And it was all this kind of nostalgia, bring the industrial jobs back. And so I thought he was a pretty smart, uh, political strategist and operator, and I knew how resonant these issues were, because, like I said, these, this was like my political, you know, when I was in my twenties, this was like my first political awakening, I suppose. And so what was interesting during the pandemic was watching Steve Bannon harvest the anger, project it all onto the vaccine verification apps, but he also had a correspondent, who was, um, named Joe Allen, who was just talking about, like, transhumanism, and how these guys

• 32:32Speaker 01

  don't really believe in humans anymore, and they want to merge with the machines, and that the anger was mostly like, from a Christian perspective, like, like, this is, this is un-Christian, this is, this is messing with God's plan. Um, but once again, it sort of felt like Bannon is taking something that should, by all rights, be the purview of the left, like, the left should be taking on Big Tech. But because there was a vacuum, and, and the Democrats were in bed with them, he was running away with it. And so, I, yeah, like, I, I, I thought it was inevitable that there would be a rupture within Trump's coalition, when he decided, after railing against

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Big Tech, suing the tech companies for deplatforming him, um, that it was inevitable that there would, that this coalition would, would, would have some trouble. And that was part of the reason why, a big part of the reason why I wanted to, to write this book, was, I, like, to better understand and help people better understand where they're vulnerable, uh, because I, I thought that people maybe didn't understand how much anger there was on the right, against Big Tech.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Part, part of the narrative as well is the idea that, uh, while getting in bed with Big Tech, the Democrats also just became overly focused on culture issues, um, and, uh, you know, forgot about the working class, and also, uh, became overly censorious. And, do you, do you see, I mean, you've, there's a couple of nods towards that in your books, is that, is that an analysis you share? There was sort of policing of language to the extent where

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  um, people felt excluded and estranged. And, and one of the observations in your book is that if you make someone, maybe this is tacit rather than explicit, but if you make someone ashamed, they'll find company where they don't feel ashamed. And specifically, Naomi Wolf is ashamed because she's exposed as having made this huge academic blunder in one of her books. She feels, presumably, humiliated, embarrassed, and, in a sense, although I don't like to use the term canceled, and, um, and then pops up in the shadow world, when no one's worried about it. And that across the board, I think, maybe in small ways, people felt like they were being judged or censored,

• 34:58Speaker 00

  and went to a place where they were feeling less judgment. And that explains a lot about political migration.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I wrote about it a lot in Doppelganger, um, and it is something that I, I was struck by when I was listening to Bannon, was the way he was building this very broad tent, the way he was sort of welcoming people who clearly had very different views, uh, than him, like Naomi Wolf, who was like a longtime feminist, and obviously, they disagreed on abortion rights, but they were sort of putting all of that aside for the, the battle, um, against the vaccines. Uh, um, but, but, but more than that, he created an, a sort of a culture where, if you're on the team, you're on the team, you know, and that, that's enough. Um, there weren't all kinds of litmus tests. And the other person he did that with was RFK Junior.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Right, who's another guy who sort of popped up on the other side of the, of the fence. But do you think, recently, AOC was quoted as saying, you know where I'm going with this, woke one was crazy, which I think speaks to this, maybe, an, an aspect to the same issue. Uh, do you think people got lost in, in the kind of certain aspects of the debate at that time? At that time, they were talking about, do you remember ACAB?

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  It stood for All Cops Are Bastards. And I remember hearing that and thinking like, whoa, that doesn't sound, that doesn't really, I can't, I don't think I'm lining up behind that.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think that there were, like, there's always going to be slogans that are extreme, you know, on the left, like, that's not, I don't think that that's new. I think part of it is that it's playing out in social media and getting amplified, and, um, and these, these algorithms are, like, attracted, like, they, they amplify the most extreme positions, and, and they go where the anger is, right? So, the things that get the most response, whether denunciation, or, or, or just, like, I, I don't know, I just think that some of those slogans got more attention than they would have. Like, I think there've been slogans like that the whole

• 37:08Speaker 01

  time I've been on the left, but most people probably didn't know about it, because they were fairly marginal. Um, so, but, but I do think that the culture of expulsion, of just, um, of litmus tests, of just everybody feeling like they have to watch themselves all the time, as opposed to, like, building what my friend Kianga Imanu Taylor calls a welcoming left, like, a, a culture where people feel like they might build the community that they need, um, because lots of, you know, we're not very good at building community anymore, so you join an organization, or you get involved in a movement, and it's gonna, it has to be a place you'd want

• 37:52Speaker 01

  to spend some time, and not a place where you're constantly afraid of, of making a mistake that leads to you losing everything. Um, and so I, like, the only reason I'm hesitating is that I think that, that some of it is the left, and some of it is social media, and the fact that so much of this was playing out on platforms that we weren't fully in control of, that were accentuating our worst habits, and then the pandemic made it a lot worse, because we were all at home, and that was our whole world. And then we kind of forgot how to do anything else after the pandemic. So, I do think that we're talking about an intersection of a tendency and a technology that, that, that intensified it. But I think, I think big mistakes were made. Um,

• 38:34Speaker 01

  the quote that you're referring to about woke one, I think it was an unfortunate choice of words on AOC's part, as an elected official, that, but I think that this is, there needs to be introspection.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  You know, if I was going to be super real, and maybe this is just very basic, and, and you might find this embarrassing, that I'm going so route one, I feel like the progressive agenda on the environment, most people can get behind, uh, in terms of social welfare, most people can get behind, in terms of care of the elderly, most people can get behind infrastructure, buses, trains, all those sort of democratic socialist

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  basics. I think when it comes to open borders, people are like, wait, what? And trans women in sports, which I know it seems like, wait, that's such a relatively small issue, but those last two, I think, got a lot of people off the bus.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  So, what, clearly, but what's interesting about what's happening now with this backlash against AI and data centers, is we are now seeing the bipartisan left and right coming together, agreeing, maybe not agreeing on, you know, trans kids and sports, and, um,

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Open borders, whatever, like agreeing, we have a common platform. We are like, there's all kinds of reporting about people in neighbors apologizing to each other. You know, the last time town councils had this much, many people coming, you know, to come line up behind the mic. It was over trans athletes and or it was over book banning. And now it's, we don't want this data center driving up our electricity costs. And you have neighbors apologizing to each other and going, God, I used to think you were

• 40:32Speaker 01

  the devil, you know. And now it's not that they're agreeing, it's not that they, it's not that they agree on everything, but they have decided that this battle for, you know, self determination in their community, because this, these, you know, the data centers are being foisted on them without their consent, and they're being told that they, you know, even if the city council votes against it, they still have to have it, that this is more important. Right. So I think, you know, we are in a moment where there is an unraveling, there are real crises, and it's a kind of battle over whether the anger is going to go up, or it's going to go down. And what somebody like Trump or Bannon is really good

• 41:16Speaker 01

  at is sort of saying, you have a right to be angry, that world's going to hell, and it is all the fault of trans women in sports. It is all the fault of immigrants at the border, and don't talk about any of these systemic crises. Certainly, don't talk about the banks. And I'll, I know you're mad at the tech companies, but somehow, I'm going to make that about trans sports, you know, I'm not actually going to go after the tech companies, right. And as we saw with Trump, it was the ultimate bait and switch. He was not mad at them at all. They are his very best friends, you know, they're at the White House all the time. So, you know, you hardest the anger, but you don't actually direct it at the larger targets. You always find a scapegoat. So now it seems that people

• 42:00Speaker 01

  are coming together. They're not agreeing on everything, but they're agreeing that they have a broader agenda. And I think that's the most we can ask, because we're not going to agree on everything.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  While we're on the hot button topics, would you call yourself an anti Zionist?

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Um, I, yes. I oppose Zionism. I am a non Zionist.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  This is a great, I don't mean, this is a great example of the progressive and then the, whatever you want to call it populist or ethno nationalist, kind of symmetry, because some people would say Zionism is racism. Some people would say anti Zionism is racism. You hear both quite frequently.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 43:20Speaker 00

  I'm gonna unpick that.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Um, you know, I've always thought that we should kind of measure projects based on their, like, real world effects. And, and so I'm looking, like, I think the debates about Zionism can get very academic, because people have an idea of what they were told Zionism could be when they, when they were a kid. But I'm looking at how it's actually played out in, in, in the real world. And, and there were many people at the time who

• 44:04Speaker 01

  had, like, I mean, I think that there were, there was cultural Zionism, there was a form of Zionism that did not want to be a state, which was what Hannah Arendt believed, that believed in a kind of a binational project from the beginning. But once it became fused with the state, and I guess I would say that I'm against any fusing of religions with state projects. I think that is a very dangerous combination. And, you know, whether it's Christian nationalism, or the state project that is Zionism, I think it will necessarily end badly. You will start counting babies. Once you start counting Jewish babies versus

• 44:48Speaker 01

  not Jewish babies, and making sure that you have a demographic majority, you are an ethno state, and that is not going to end well. And it is, it is, it is worse than I ever imagined. But I've always seen that and believed that to be a danger.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  I've done a little bit of reporting from the West Bank.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Yes, you have.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  So I've seen,

• 45:09Speaker 01

  You've seen the worst of it.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  I've seen, what is de facto ethno cleansing, ethnic cleansing, up close. But just to present the case,

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  You, what you hear a lot is, well, this feels selective. We're hearing calls for boycotts of Israeli cultural institutions, Israeli sports people, athletes, much more loudly and frequently than we do of, say, Afghanistan, where there are obviously also horrific things, you know, gender apartheid in Afghanistan specifically. Is there anything in that, do you think?

• 45:43Speaker 01

  I mean, I always find it to be a strange debate, because the principle that I try to follow is that when people are oppressed, and Palestinian people have been under military occupation since 1967, in the West Bank and Gaza, have not had control over movement and borders, you know, and I've reported from both Gaza, you know, one of the, like, few Western journalists who've been able to get in and report, it's been a long time,

• 46:25Speaker 01

  but when the siege was, was on. So the idea that they've withdrawn from Gaza is, like, they never withdrew because they maintained control over, over access. And what, what got in and who got out. And so, so I think that, that people have, that that needs to end. And, and, and that, that boycott, that, that people who are oppressed have a, have a right to call for solidarity, right. And so, this comparison of, but what about here? What about there? There, there, in most of these cases, there is not a boycott divestment

• 47:10Speaker 01

  and sanctions movement that has been identified by the people affected by these policies that our governments are generally supporting, saying, this will help us, right. I mean, South Africa is a good analogy, because that was a call that came from the ANC, and that was a call that came from people under, living under apartheid, saying, this will help us end this apartheid, right. And so, if, you know, if there was an equivalent campaign

• 47:46Speaker 01

  in another country, I would support it. And I have supported in the past. So, so that's why I've supported that call.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  Do you see the idea of a, of two states as realistic at this point?

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Do you?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  You've been to the West Bank more, more recently than me.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  I don't see either scenarios being very realistic, which is a strange thing to reflect on. The idea of two states, the two, the two populations are so intertwined, the settlement project is so far advanced,

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  that it's, there's no line you can really draw.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Which there's been a very deliberate strategy.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  And the idea of a single state, I don't, feels in theory more equitable, but I don't know how realistic it is politically.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  And then you're in the position of saying, well, I guess, if someone's,

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Well, this is what political Zionism has produced, you know, and those settlers weren't just like doing it on their own. They, they, you've seen it, they're guarded by soldiers. And this is a strategy, the political strategy of, of, of the Israeli state has been to extinguish a horizon, a political horizon for a Palestinian state. And the settlers are just doing the work for them.

• 49:17Speaker 00

  I think there are many parts of the Jewish community who still see themselves as connected with Israel. There's, I feel that there's a sense of nervousness in the Jewish community. There's a lot of fear. And, and, and it's said that there are many Jewish people moving to Israel because they no longer feel safe in the West. I don't know what those numbers are, even if that's true.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  I'd love to know the numbers, yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  But it doesn't seem like a very safe place.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  Do you, what do you say to those people who say, look, well, you know, antisemitism is on the rise, what we, and what you often hear is like, what we have,

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Let's fight antisemitism.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  And we have, you know, Jewish Israelis will say, like, we just have one country. This is, you've probably heard this a lot. It's a, it's a, it's a common conversation piece in, in, in Israel, where they say, we have one country, they have, I don't know what they say, they, meaning Muslim countries, they have 12 or 14, I don't know the number. So those, just to sort of, how, how do you respond to that?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Um, I live in Canada. I am a dual Canadian-US citizen. I'm not an Israeli citizen, and I'm not a Zionist. I want to fight antisemitism where, like, I live. I believe that my elected politicians and the movements that I'm a part of should fight antisemitism alongside all forms of discrimination, because I believe that all people are equal. And I believe that my safety will, and Jewish safety, is best guaranteed by supporting

• 51:05Speaker 01

  human rights and religious freedom, and that we need to do that here. And I don't think that has anything to do with Israel. And I think that it's just, it's a different conversation, you know, like whether Jews feel safe going to synagogue, they should feel safe going to synagogue, and that Jews should feel safe logging on Twitter, or X, or whatever it's called, without facing a barrage of antisemitism, as happens every time I go on that site, you know. We've got lots of work to do to fight racism, antisemitism.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Antisemitism is a form of racism, and I think that it's best fought in multiracial, multi-faith coalition, which is what the whole infrastructure of human rights is about, which is why it makes me very sad that Israel and its supporters are leading up a campaign of vilification against the United Nations and the whole infrastructure that guaranteed human rights after the Second World War. That was part of how we were supposed to, like, I grew up in a religious Jewish tradition of, like, never again means never again to anyone.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  These are kind of hallowed documents that say we are all equal, and we have a responsibility to defend each other's humanity. And there's a cruel, cruel historical irony in the fact that the loudest voices against that whole edifice of international humanitarian law are defending Israel, because their idea of never again is, we get an armed ethno-state, and we protect ourselves in this bunker. And I think we're seeing that idea now proliferating and strengthening around the world. Everyone wants to be an ethno-state. The Christian

• 53:10Speaker 01

  nationalists want to be an ethno-state in Europe and in the United States. And as things get worse, and this is what Astro and I are writing about, is, you know, this kind of fascism is a fascism in response to a feeling of collapse and the idea of, you know, being in a sea of enemies and invaders, and rather than trying to address the underlying reasons why things really are much more unstable, and we are facing more and more shocks and disasters, we just respond by bunkering. And if you want to see how that goes, take a look at Israel. That's a really good example. To me, it looks like hell. I think the idea

• 53:54Speaker 01

  of every person being enlisted into a military machinery where you defend the garrisoned ethno-state, at which requires more and more violence in order to protect itself, whether it's the hand-to-hand combat, you know, hand-to-hand house theft in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, or the remote AI-enabled genocide from the air in Gaza, that is an apocalypse. And it is that it is being done in the name of Jewish safety is a great shame to me as

• 54:37Speaker 01

  a Jewish person. That has nothing to do with my safety. That's not how I define, that's no safety I want to be a part of. And no one should have the right to get their safety that way. You've got to find another way.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  You were born in 1970.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  How about you?

• 55:01Speaker 00

  We were born the same year, 1970. We could probably talk about Duran Duran, haircut 100.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  It's always, it's always easy to know how old you are.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Go on.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  When you're born in 1970.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's nice, because you sort of bought yourself into a decade just by the skin of your teeth. Do you know what I mean? I'm so young compared with those 60s.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, interesting.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  You know what I mean?

• 55:21Speaker 01

  I never thought of it that way.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  Because we're part of that grouping.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  But yet, like, I remember, I had this drama teacher, Mr. Myers, who, when I was in high school, he, you say drama?

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  I had a drama teacher, and he would yell at us, he was really strange. He would yell at us about how we were, we were children of the 80s, and it was, and the last, it was like, he had this thing about how the real, like, we were born in 1970s, but were not children of the 70s.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Because the people who were teenagers in the 70s were, like, really, in the view of this drama teacher.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  That's fair, because we were too young to really live the culture.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, they were, like, really genuinely cool and more kind of 60s.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  But being a teenager in the 80s.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  We got Duran Duran, we got...

• 56:14Speaker 01

  And Blondie.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  The first song I ever heard on a Sony Walkman was Heart of Glass by Blondie, and you just like...

• 56:19Speaker 01

  So good.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Your parents were political, you've talked a lot about that. You grew up in Canada, partly as a result of your dad wanting to avoid the draft, because he was American and he would have got conscripted.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  He was conscripted.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  Was he?

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:34Speaker 00

  And so, what, and he just decided not to go?

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Not to go to jail.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of Americans came to Canada rather than go to jail.

• 56:44Speaker 00

  My dad joined the Peace Corps.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  For the same reason.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  That wasn't an option.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  Why not?

• 56:52Speaker 01

  You were drafted.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  I guess this was later, because my dad was, well, maybe not. Either way, he avoided the draft by joining the Peace Corps. I don't know, that's what he said.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so then, then they stayed, because my dad was a doctor, and he was, he liked working in the public healthcare system. We went back to the States for a little while, and then he decided that we should go back to Canada.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  And you made it sound as though, I mean, this is based on listening to your appearance on Desert Island Discs on the way here.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  We talked about Blondie on that one.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  There was Blondie, but I was thinking, like, there's going to be a lot of new wave, a lot of synth pop on these discs.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Oh, did I fail the music test?

• 57:31Speaker 00

  There was, there was, well, it was, it was, it wasn't, there's no test, and there's no pass or fail. It just was, it was Pete Seeger and Manu Chao, and it was, I shouldn't have been surprised, it was political, largely in bent. But what I was struck by was the sense that your parents, in some respects, there was a time when maybe they were, I don't know, maybe not concerned, but they wanted you to be political, and perhaps they saw some of your pursuits as trivial, you had an understandable interest in gold, golden leggings, or something, some...

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Satin pants, because of Blondie.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Right, or Olivia Newton-John.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, her too. They both had satin pants.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  And then, this is the narrative, and you can disagree, or Adam Bray, or Amplify, in 1989, you had a political awakening, and I'd never heard of this, the Montreal massacre. This was news to me, that this played a role, you would have been 18 or 19, this played a role in you coming to some kind of new way of seeing the world.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Well, I was in first-year university, and this was a mass shooting in a Canadian university, and it was very political. He was, it was a young man who believed that he had, he was a victim of affirmative action, that's what he believed. So he wanted to study engineering, and he had not gotten in, and he had decided it was because the engineering schools were letting in too many women. So he went into an engineering school, the University of Montreal, and he separated the men from the women, and he said, you're all a bunch of fucking feminists, and then he shot 14 women. So it was a big political awakening for a lot of women of my generation, my cohort. And so, yeah, like, and I think,

• 59:23Speaker 01

  you know, this still happens, and it still makes me so sad that you have, like, like the Parkland students, you know, it kind of birthed a whole generation of people organizing around gun control. When you, when you are the generation where this stuff is happening, it gets you into politics, and it did for me.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  Was there a changing of the laws at that time?

• 59:46Speaker 01

  There was a new gun control, piece of gun control legislation, but it was more like it led to a kind of new generation calling themselves feminists.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  Did you, do you remember Bowling for Columbine?

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  The Michael Moore film? And do you remember there's a whole bit where he goes to Canada and his point is, oh, they have the same gun laws there as we do here, more or less, but they're not going around shooting each other.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, we laughed a lot about that scene in Bowling for Columbine because he claimed that most Canadians, like Canadians don't lock their doors, which is, I mean.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  Was there anything in that? I mean, I worked with Michael for a couple of years.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  He had it coming from the, you know, from Michigan, which parts of which are actually north of parts of Canada. So there's this sort of strange.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  They're like twins of a sort.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think there's some truth to it. I mean, I'm happy I live in Canada, not the US, and I am there by choice. I, I've lived in the States as well and chose to come back. And it's part of why I do believe in the importance of politics and policy, because, you know, here we are, we, we are very similar nations, you know, similar demographic makeup, not identical, but yes, for the most part, speak the same language, except in Quebec. As Trump says, it's just a line on a border you could, you know? But the thing that makes us different is that we've decided to have more of a social

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  safety net, like we have universal healthcare and we have a public broadcaster. Both of those are embattled, but the, the decision to have, to, to invest in this idea that everybody should be able to get healthcare regardless of whether you have money or not. And just having something of a net to catch people, I think, does make us less brutal. And it, and it's not like we're better or worse, it's just that those decisions really

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  change a culture and, and they make a huge difference in the kinds of choices you feel you can, you can make, like, like leaving a job you hate. I mean, in the States, it is so hard because everything is about healthcare and whether or not you're going to lose your healthcare. You know, the fact that our universities don't cost a fortune, you know? So those things really matter. And my friends in the States at DSA are fighting really hard for the basics, you know, and are getting called socialists for just trying to do some stuff that we have in Canada.

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  DSA is.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Democratic Socialists of America, yeah. But yeah, I think like somebody like Abdul El Sayed, who's running in Michigan, and even Bernie, like being in Vermont, these are border states where you are just aware that just across the border, and it's quite porous, right? That there's a place that is very similar to you, but different because, because of these social investments. And a lot of that is also because we have a third party. It's not a two-party system.

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  We have a, we have a Democratic Socialist Party, the NDP, which my husband's the leader of.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  Do you think, do you feel optimistic looking to the future?

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  Taking, zooming out, looking at the big picture?

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  I.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  Not really, right?

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Um, I think we are in a moment pregnant with possibility for the, like, I, I think that, uh, I think there are opportunities to build a really broad coalition of people who want to stay here in this world, in this domain, and don't want to exodus, don't want an exodus.

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  And that, that, that, I do feel hopeful about that. Because I think that what we're describing in this book is a minoritarian position, like even like the stitch together, like whether it's the ethno-nationalists or the religious end timers or the people who want to upload their consciousness to the AI cloud. They are, like, these are powerful factions that have gotten more powerful, but the reason why it's useful to kind of expose their ideology to the light is that most people, when they hear about it, are like, that's nuts.

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  Uh, thank you so much for coming by.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you. It was a pleasure to meet you.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  Um, and likewise, I, I could have kept going and going, but, um, you know.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Bristol calls.

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Thank you for listening. So, things I'm picking up on. One is Steve Bannon's hip hop musical, based on Shakespeare's Coriolanus. I was going to find a funny quotation from it, I couldn't find one. It's set during the 1992 riots, it's not supposed to be funny. Um, I don't know, I think we should applaud creativity and genre hopping.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  What would you write a hip hop musical about?

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  Well, uh, I have thought about, thank you for that great question, Millie. Did you hear Millie's question? Have you ever read A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov? It's set in the early 19th century, it's a classic of Russian literature, and it's got dueling in it. It's the height of the dueling craze. You remember like muskets at dawn or whatever?

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  Um, upon my honor, sir, I demand satisfaction, is what they would say. And then you'd have a second and you'd go out, it became a thing. And I often thought, often, I thought once or twice, well, that's a bit like, it's not a drive-by shooting, but it is gun culture and gangs using weapons to settle beefs, right? And I was like, well, you could set A Hero of Our Time in modern day, uh, I don't know, Los Angeles or in, you know, with a backdrop of hip hop. So that would be a good hip hop musical, I think. You weren't expecting an, an actual answer. If you're out there and you're ready to fund a hip hop musical that the author of Jiggle

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  Jiggle, uh, could get behind and be a writer on, or maybe a producer, then, um, contact us in the comments. That's it for today. Thanks so much for watching. I'll be back next week with John Cooper Clarke, Mancunian poet, raconteur and genuinely funny man. See you then.