The corporate world and had he first kind of fullblown lifestyle brands, which is an idea we all take for granted now, but these were companies that for the first time were declaring that their Business Model was not to sell products but to sell ideas, a lifestyle, a sense of belonging, they could then extend into kind of self enclosed brants cue couldnt and nike ways to first one to do this, didnt ever own their factories and the main thing learned when i was researching no logo is there was a relationship between the aggressive kind of marketing that was constantly sort of trolling Youth Culture to find the most cutting edge ideas, to get adds into places that had never had ads before, like schools, to cobrand with every like Music Festivals and so on. There was an inverse relationship between that aggressive marketing and the cutting good jobs on aufner the economy because the way that these companies were freeing up money to spend on this much more aggressive kind of Lifestyle Marketing was by divesting from their factories, from the idea they should be producers at all. So, nike kind of paved the way in this sense because they never owned their familiar tries in the first place. The made their Running Shoes through a web of contractors and subcontractors who they pitted against one another for who could provide their shoes for the lowest price and this was such a profitable Business Model that all the competitors started closing their factories and never reopening it. That was the key thing. Never reopened their factories. We talk about factories moving from north america to mexico or china or vietnam. But in fact it wasnt just that they were moving locations. They were never owning their factories and they didnt see themselves as producers. So, i think its intimately related to the dee industrialization and the precariousness of work that we sort of take for agreemented today. Brian as you point out, nike in particular getting a lot of criticism from its customers. Guest at the time because it was sort of it was new. This was still a america that remembered the kind of manufacturing model where you understood that the product that you were buying, the car you were buying you knew writ was made and understood this was economic anchor for that community, that the idea was that the people making the cars should have enough money to buy the car. And so it was culturally shocking for people to discover that these Companies Like nike or disney, who were spending so much money putting out images of themselves that were very progressive, or in the case dis disneys case very family friendlier, pull back the curtain and wait a minute its in some case children or people just a little bit out of being children, people in their early 20s, who are making these products under really abusive conditions, and so when that was exposed, it was a scandal, and 20 years late are i think people take it for granted that almost all the products in our life are made under conditions that are pretty dubious. You have electronic factoryies in china that he have suicide nets to catch White Supremacy than i the commit suicide because theyre so desperate on the job. One of the toughest things to think about, i think about what has changed since no logo is the sense of shock that i was tracking. My god, i cant believe these nike Running Shoes are method by 18yearolds in snow indonesia who are sleeping in camped dormitories and not getting paid for their overtime or having to p he ee in bottles under their sewing machines and they war scandals and there were movements responding to them. And think peoples sense of smock outrage has been dulled, and its almost like a joke, on late night television. A couple of examples, one is starbucks hugh coffee shown opened up inspired by starbucks but trying to as you but in the book run a. From the starbucks brand. Guest i think that was an example from the ten year never a edition of no logo inch the original edition, that came out in 2000, i had a fair bit about this then a relatively new company, starbucks, who told us that their brand meaning was that they were a what they called the third place, not home, not work, a place for people to gather, and they were really using the discourse of the publics sphere, that its almost like a town square, and it was interesting that this was happening in the 90s after you have this very aggressive kind of privatization of the public sphere, and so corporations had to come along and say, well, we are a pseudo town square which is what facebook is doing now. Its a sort of this corporate digital town square. In the 90s it was starbucks and a cup of coffee and you have your pseudo public space. When when i wrote an introduce for the tenth anniversary edition, starbucks just opened up a coffee shop in seattle that was completely unbranded. Didnt see their logo anywhere which seemed a bit of a marker for how far they had fallen if in order to recapture any sense of newness, they had to unbrand themselves. Brian the political sphere in the tenth never a edition of the book you talk but president obama and one questions did he live up to his hope and change brand . Guest right. Yeah. Did he . Guest yeah. It was early in the obama years when i wrote that. Well, i think there was always something a little bit nike about the obama brand in the sense it sort of just vague enough that its hard to pin him down to a clear political platform, and its another interesting measure of where we are now because i think that theres more of if you look at the democratic primaries right now, i think theres more of an expectation that candidates have a really, really specific and fully formed forecast, exec platform, labor policy platform, and environmental policy platform, is a think but the Obama Campaign of 2008, which i was writing about, it was pretty vague, im going recapture a sense of optimisms. Wont be ashamed of america. People are tired from eight years of bush and hope, change, feeling good, and i wrote about that as the fir Political Campaign that used the same tools that these Corporate Lifestyle brans had been using, to sort of bathe themselves in an aura progressivism, and the question, did obama live up to it . I mean its a complicate question in the sense it would never was very specific. So its hard to say whether he lived up to it or not because there wasnt that much there there but what he was promising, although he specifically prom mitt im going to revival main street and take on wall street and there was a huge amount of disappointment that didnt happen. People who hoped there would be a real reinvestment in small businesses, and maybe more factory jobs, were very disappointed by that and its part of a global phenomenon where the centrist liberal politicians come to power with sort of a veneer of progressivism and change, but the economy continues to make people feel excluded, disempeared, more precarious and more insecure and that sets the stage for the kind of right wing populism were seeing worldwide. Specific factors relating to obama being the first black president and a racial backlash in the United States, but it is also important to remember that there is a globalphone of this rise of rightwing populism we see everywhere. You can join us on twitter. Our guest for the Perfection Two hours on in depth, naomi klein and also give us a phone call, 2027488200 if you leave in the central time zone, and 202748 8201 for mountain and pacific time zones youre teaching at rutgers university. How do you fame this in the classroom in terms of your book, the original book, and then its ten Year Anniversary edition. Guest right. So, im actually teaching a course at rutgers called the corporate self and it looks at the integration of the human and the corporation, and sort of corporations trying to act more like humans, which the original brands were all about that, like putting a sort of a comforting face like uncle bensre ant jemima, racialized, harkening back to nostalgia got plantation life and look at the racial history of branding and then where no logo ends is remember this is written in the late 1990s, thursday then completely new idea that humans, like everyday im, not celebrities, needed to become their own brands in order to succeed in this newly precarious job environment. Nobody can expect job security so the way to get ahead is to find your inner brand and project it on to the world. This was after we had seen celebrities do this in the bike talk about Michael Jordan as the first super brand. But then we look at what is happening now with social media. When i wrote that 20 years ago, it was pretty notionable idea, the idea that anybody could be their own brand because anybody doesnt have the money to take out advertisements some actually do the work of projecting an image of ones self. But today, because of social media, everybody who has computer access, has the capacity to market themselves to are market an idea of themselves, to think about what is my brand, which is very different from who am i . So, what were unpacking i have a Wonderful Group of students is like first of all we talk about, even though they have grown up with this idea, it is relatively new idea. It was nat always the case. You would have been look atayou were mad 30 years doing say a 15yearold kid but not that do you want to be when you grow up but what is your brand . So, we try to make visible the things they take for granted and then think what does it mean to have to separate yourself from the idea of yourself . To have that distancing. And what does that do to friendships to relationships, and what does it do to social movements. Its been fascinating to unpack this with them because of course they in the a lot more about social media than die so theyre teaching me all the time, but then the sort of latest phase of this or intimately connected to the fact were living our lives online in this constant performance of our personal brand, is that the Tech Industry seize data as the new oil as is often repeated so theyre mining ourselves, all the information that were sharing for their Business Model that we are not getting any part of. Were not paid for the data that were providing for free, and so were looking at all these questions around surveillance, data mining, call surveillance capitalism, so its interesting to once again see how much has changed since i wrote that and how quaint book. Your newest book on the burning case for a Green New Deal. Let me frame this question in terms of the original new deal, because you write a lot about how that essentially transformed the country and the world. Guest sure. Yeah. I think theres inspiration to be taken in the original new deal and also some very, very important warnings to heed from that era, because so many people were excluded from the sort of sphere of protection under fdrs new deal. Many africanamerican work erred were excluded. Domestic workers, overwhelmingly women, were excluded. Agricultural workers were excluded and there was systemic discrimination and segregation in many of the new deal programs. It is also true that the United States transformed itself at a speed and scale that is comparable to the kind of speed and scale of change that we need to embrace if were going to lower emissions in line with what scientist are telling us. A year ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the for foremost gathering of scientific experts who advise governments on the state of climate science, issued a report a year ago saying that we need to cut global emissions in half in a mere 12 years, which is now 11 years, and they said this is a quote from the summary of the report said this would require unpress depended transform makes in virtually every aspect of sew, energy, transportation, agriculture, building construction. There arent many points in history when you can say, well this is a time when we saw that kind of scale of transformation. One is during the Second World War when you had americans planting Victory Gardens and agains 40 of their use. The way factories transform themselvesser rapidly but the new deal is another rear which is less top dawn and why its a useful historical precedent. We dont want governments telling everybody what hey should do. We should worry this that climbed authoritarianism and during the new deal you see ruralmer electrified, you see more than 10 million americans directly employed. A renaissance of publicly funded arts. All kinds of Public Infrastructure, schools, libraries, reservoirs, and much of americas Public Infrastructure today is a legacy of the new deal. Another part that ites relevant to think but a Green New Deal is fdrs civilian conservation corps was the most popular of the new deal programs, and its a reminder that the new deal was not only responding to an economic crisis, it was also responding to ecological crisis because of the dust bowl some the defor yesation so the ccc sent more than 2 million poor young people from cities to hundredofcamps in rural parts of the United States and they did things like plant 2. 3 billion trees which is more than half the trees ever planted. So, that kind of scale is really important, and its also the kind of thing we need to do to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. You write the following, from on fire bart of what make change so difficult to graft is we live in a sculpture of the propet to all present. One that deliberately separates itself from the past that created us and the future. We are shaping with our actions. So explain. Guest so, a lot of what im doing in this book is trying to make visible the Economic Systems and relative live new economic and social models born of the particular kind of capitalism we have had since the reagan era, which has been all about deregulation, privatization, and venerating the individual consumers, equating shopping with democracy and the good life, and that has priced an extremely accelerated culture which then people point to and say, well, its just human nature that we cant deal with the crisis like Climate Change because clearly we are just too selfish to individualistic, think too shortterm and this requires to us have a longer time frame, requires to us put the collective go ahead of something that you might just want right now, to satisfy an individual urge. And so theres been a lot written that has made this human nature argument about why we will never respond to this crisis and what i find when im talking about what we need to do in the face of this crisis, which i do a fair bit, i fine that the biggest obstacle that were up against is not Climate Change denial which is definitely on the wane, and its not the lack of technology or an understanding of what needs to be done. It is really the sense of doom that we are human beings are incapable of doing the things that are necessary, and that is why i think it is important to draw on these historical precedents that even if theyre not exactly the kind of thing we need to do now, they do show that there are different wives being humans and in the life span of people alive today, people were able to think longer term and were able to put the collective go ahead of their individual desires, and there are people Indigenous People in north america who teach their children to think seven generations into the future and seven generations into the past. So what im trying to do is i guess problemmize these sorts of appeals to human nature that we hear a lot of and im saying, actually, thats equating a particular relatively recent form of deregulate consumer capitalism with the idea of what it means to be human, and while we cap change the laws of nature, we actually can change the systems that we humans did create ourselves if they are threatening life on earth and in fact we need to do that. Not saying its easy just saying is a possible. Married with a son who is seven years oldwhen apple picking yesterday. Guest spilled the beans. You moved around a lot. Activist parents spend a mint to tell us your life story and then get to phone calls. Just a minute. Two minutes. Guest so, i was born in canada, born in montreal, and my parents are americans. My parents were peace activists in the 1960s. My father did not want to go to vietnam, and he had to choose between jail and canada, and like many of his peers, he chose canada so we moved to montreal. And later moved back to the United States for a few years when i was very young, before i was five years old ask they decide they liked canada better, so i sometimes say we left because of the war but we stayed for the universal Public Health care. And my mother is a documentary filmmaker, now retired. She worked for the National Film board of canada, at the first womens film studios, made films for the feminist movement so i grew up with political parents. My father worked in the Canadian Health care he can system, involved in doing things like bringing mid wives into hospitals and big advocate for natural child birth. Hes a family do, also retired. And,ey, so i wouldnt i grew up in a really radical i have friends who really had serious radical parents and who were home schooled and their parents really walked the talk. I kind of grew up between world with their values but going to regular schools in the 1980s, so i sort of felt very pulled between the culture of the 1980s, which was very shiny and appealing to me and my home life where my parents were say why do you want to hang out with your friend ted mall . Why would you ever want to do Something Like that . So maybe thats why i wrote no logo in the 20s. Our conversation with naomi klein, mike you have been patient from port c