We are in midtown manhattan where branding and marketing is a big business. What did you learn about nike and microsoft, starbucks . Guest its great to be with you and to have this time. When i was writing a logo it came out at the beginning of 2000, soso it is almost exactly 20yearsold and when i was researching it for years before that, it was a period where a lot is changing in the corporate world and there was a full blown lifestyle brand that we all take now, but these were companies that for the first astime were declaring the busins model wasnt to sell products but did so ideas or the sense of belonging that they could then extend into kind of selfimposed branded cocoons and so everything as long as it was branded this logo. So nike was the first one to do this. They didnt ever own their factories in it and the main thing i learned when i was researching is that there was a relationship between this aggressive kind of marketing that was constantly sort of trolling thely Youth Culture to find the most cutting edge ideas to get them in places that they never had before like schools, to co brand with Music Festivals and so on. Buthi there was an inverse relationship between that aggressive marketing and the kind of good job offered in the economy because the way the the companies were freeing up money to spend on this much more aggressive kind of lifestyle divesting fromy their factories. From the idea that they should be producers at all. So they kind of paved the way in thisn sense because they never owned their factories in the first place. They made it there running shoeo through contractors and subcontractors they put against one another who could provide the shoes for the lowes lowest e and this was such a profitable Business Model that all of the competitors started closing their factories and never reopened it. We often talk about the factories moving from north americawe to mexico or china or vietnam but in fact it wasnt just that theyve been moving locations. They didnt see themselves as producers so it is related to the deindustrialization and precarious work that we sort of take for granted today. Host nike in particular is getting criticism from its customers. Guest at the time because it was sort of new. This was still an america that remembered the board of manufacturing model where you understood the product youre buying, the car you were buying was an economic anchor for the cmmunity and the idea is that people making the cars should have enough money to buy the cars. It was culturally shocking for people to discover that Companies Like nike or disney who were spending sog much moneyputting out images of themselves that were very progressive or in disneys case, very Family Friendly that you pull back the curtain and wait a minute, in some cases its children or people a little bit out of being children, people in their early 20s that are making these products under abusive conditions and so when that was exposed, it was a scandal in the 20 years later people take it for granted that almost all the products in our lives are made under conditions that are pretty dubious. Youve got electronic factories in china that catch people because they are so desperate on the cbe job, so i think it is of those things to think about and what has changed since is the sense of shock that i was sort of tracking like i cant believe that these Running Shoes are made by a 18yearolds in indonesia that are sleeping in cramped dormitories and not getting paid for their overtime or are using bottles under their sewing machines in all these scandals were coming out and they were genuine. They were movements responding to them, and i think people sensed a shock and outrage about this. And its almost like a joke on latenight television. Host theres a coupleup examples in the book and one is starbucks in how the coffee shop opens up inspired by starbucks trying to essentially as you could ruputit run away from thes brand. Guest that is an example from the addition of no logo where in the original that came out in 2000 i had a fair bit that told us the t grand meaning is what they called a third place, not home or work for a place for people to gather and they were using the discourse of the public sphere almost like a town square and it was interesting that this was happening after you had thisf very aggressive privatization so corporations had to come along and say we are a pseudo town square which is what facebook is doing now. In the 90s it was starbuck. But when i wrote an introduction for the tenth anniversary starbucks had just opened up a coffee shop in seattle that was completely unbranded. Hi you didnt see their logo anywhere which seemed a marker for how far they have fallen in the sense of it in order to, you know, recapture any sense that they had to unbranded themselves. Host in the tenth anniversary of the book you talk about president obama and one of the questions is did he live up to his hopen and change brand. Host guest there was always something a little bit nike about the obama brand but its vague enough to pin him down to a clear political platform and res another interesting measure we are right now because i think theres more if you look at the democratic primaries right now, i think theres more of an expectation that the candidates have a really specific and fully formed platform, economic platform, labor policy platform and environmental policy platform. If i think about the Obama Campaign of 2008 which i was w writing about, it was like im going to recapture the sense of optimism, youve are not going to be ashamed of america. People are tired of eight years of bush and thats why i wrote about that as the First Political campaign that uses the same tools that these Corporate Lifestyle brands have been using this sort of base themselves in the progressivism and so the question david obama lived up to it its complicated that it was nevenever specific so its hardo say whether i he lived up to itr because there wasnt that much better about what he was promising. Although he did specifically promise im going to revise main street and take on wall street. And i think there was a huge amount of discipline that didnt really happen and people hoped that there would beea a reinvestment in Small Businesses and you know, maybe more factory jobs. Its part of a global phenomena where the politicians come to power with sort of a progressivism in change but the economy continues to make people feel excluded, disempowered, more insecure and that sets the stage for the rightwing populism that we are seeing worldwide. Obviously there are the specific factors relating to obama being the first black president in a racial backlash in the United States, but its also important to remember that there is a global phenomenon of this rise of rightwing populism that we see everywhere. Host you can join us at the tv. Our guest foror the next two hours, naomi klein. 202 7488200 in eastern or central time zone, 202 7488201 for those in the mountain and pacific time zone. You are teaching at rutgers university. How do you frame this classroom in terms of the book, the original and its tenyear Anniversary Edition . Im teaching a course called up the corporate self, and it looks at the integration of the human and corporation and the corporations trying to act more like humans, which is the original brands were all about that, like putting a sort of comforting taste like uncle bens or aunt jemima, much of it racialized and hearkening back to the nostalgia. So, we look at this sort of racial history of branding. And then where no logo and, remember this was written in the late 1990s, this than completely new idea that humans, like everyday humans, not celebrities needed to become their own brands in order to succeed in this newly precarious job environment with job security as a way to get ahead is to find your inner brand and project it w onto the world, and this was after we had seen celebrities do this. In the book i talk about Michael Jordan as the first super brand, then we look at whats happening now with social media because when i learned about 20wr years ago, it was a pretty notional idea of the idea that anybody could be their own brand because anybody doesnt havesn the money to take out advertisements and do the work of projecting the image of oneself but today because of social media, anybody that has computer access has the capacity to market themselves, m to market an idea of themselves and to think about what is my brand, which is very different from who am i . So what we are unpacking, and i had a Wonderful Group of students that first evolved we talk about how this even though they have grown up with this idea, it is a relatively new idea it wasnt always the case you would have been looked at if yothey were mad 30 yearsrs ago o say to a 15yearold kid not what you want to be when you grow up, but what is your brand. As we try to make visible some of the things they take for granted and then think about what does it mean to have two separate yourself from the idea of your self, to have that distancing and what does that do to friendships and relationships and what does it do to social movements. So, it is fascinating to unpack ouis with them because they know a lot more about social media than i do so they are teaching me all the time, but this m sort of elitist phases were intimately connected to the fact we were living our lives on the line in a constant annoyance of our personal brand is that the Tech Industry sees data as the new oil as it is often repeated so they are mining all the information we are sharing for their Business Model so we are looking at all these questions ofng surveillance and data mini. Its interesting once again to see how much has changed since i wrote that now claims book host let me frame this question in terms of the original new deal because you write a lot about essentially have transformed the country anr the world. Guest sure, yes. Therehis inspiration to be takn the original new deal and warnings to heed because so many people were excluded from the protection of the new deal. Many africanamerican workers were excluded, women were excluded, and there were systemic disaggregation and it is also true that the United States transformed itself at a speed and scale that is comparable to that kind of speed and scale of change that we need to embrace if we are going to lower emissions in line with what scientists are telling us. T gathering scientific experts that would advise 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 coming into this i, andthis is y of the report this would requiro unprecedented transportation and transportation, agriculture, Building Construction and so there are not many points in history where you can say we saw the scale of transformation one is in these Second World War whn you have americans planting Victory Gardens. We saw factories transform themselves very rapidly that the new deal isde less topdown whih is why it is a useful precedent for us to look at because i dont think we want government telling everybody what they should do. We should worry about the authoritarianism so you saw grow America Electric side more than 10 million americans directly employed, a renaissance of public art and much of the infrastructure today another part is thinking of the conservation corps was probably the most popular of the new deal program, and its a reminder that the new deal was not only responding to an economic crisis but responding to an ecological crisis because of the dust bowl and crisis of deforestation. So, they sent more than 2 Million People from cities to the hundreds of camps in rural parts of the United States and they did things like plant 2. 3 billion trees which is more than half of those ever planted sole that kind of scale is important and its also the kind of thing we need to do to pull carbon out ofed the atmosphere n the face of a Climate Crisis. Host in the book you write the quote part of what thinks Climate Change difficult for many of us asra we live in a culture of the perpetual prese present, when the deliberately severs itself from the past and created usth in the future. A lot of what im doing in this book is trying to m make visible the Economic Systems and sort of relatively new economic and social models born of the particular kind of capitalism that we have had since the reagan era which has been all about deregulation, privatization and venerating the individual consumers, a clay thing, shopping with democracy and that has produced an extremely accelerated culture which then people point to and say its just human nature that we cant deal with a crisis like Climate Change because clearly we are just too selfish, too individualistic, think to short term and this requires us to have a longer timeframe and to put the collective good ahead of something that you might want to justst write 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 this crisis, which i do a fair bit, t find that the biggest obstacle that we are up against is not Climate Change denial which is definitely on the way. And its not the lack of technology or the understanding of what we to be done. It is this sense of doom that we as human beings are incapable of doing the things necessary. And thats why i think it is important to draw on these historical precedence even ifly they are not the kind of thing that we need to do now, they do anow there are different ways of being human and in the lifespan of people alive today, people were able to think longer term and were able to put the collective good ahead of their individual desires. And there are people, you know, Indigenous People in north america who teach their children to think seven generations into the future or into the past, so what i am trying to do i guess this problem and ties the sort of appeals to human nature that we hear a lot of and say actually that is equally thing a particular relatively recent form of deregulated consumer picapitalism with the idea of wt it means to begin with and while we cant change the nature we can change the systems that we did create ourselves if they are threatening life on earth and in fact we need to do that. Not saying its easy but just that its possible. Host a son that is 7yearsold you moved a lot though. Activist parents, for those who dont know, spend a minute till your life story and then we will get your phone calls. Guest just a minute . Daaughter] so, i was born in canada, in montreal. And my parents are in american. 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 and they decided they liked canada a better, so i sometimes say that we left because of the war of thbutwe stayed because of the universal public healthcare. My mother is a documentary filmmaker now retired who worked for the National Film board of canada at the first womens film studios so she made for the feminist movement. So i grew up with political parents. My father worked in the canadian Healthcare System involved in doing things like bringing olmidwives into hospitals and bg advocate for natural childbirth. Hes a family doc are also retired. I wouldnt say i grew up in this really radical i had friends that have serious radical parents that were homeschooled and you know, their parents really walked the talk. I kind of grew up between the world with their values but going to regular schools in the 1980s. So i sort of felt pulled between them and then my home life where my parents were saying why do you want to hang out with her friends at the mall, why would you ever want to do something wlike that . Maybe thats why i wrote no logo in my 20s. Host mike, youve been patient from florida welcome to the conversation. Caller nice to speak with you. My main problem with the whole thing through these methods of technology that are not going to be there to this pie in the sky type of thinking there is no doubt about it for the foreseeable future. I would urge you to look up the work of Mike Jacobson at stanfordk university. He is a professor of engineering whos got a big team and hasas been doing specific research about how it is possible with the existing Technology Ticket to 100 Renewable Energy very rapidly for electricity first and transportation afterwards in line with what scientists are telling us we need to do. Thereve been breakthroughs in Battery Storage and price breakthroughs as well. Like i said im not saying that its c. But i think the barriers are muchre more political than they are technological and that is precisely what the panel on Climate Change said when they were having global emissions in 12 years in that report and i waniwant to stress that is a ret around 6,000 sources of the peerreviewed science of it isnt just a oneoff paper. Its coopted by almost 100 officers and receivers. So it is a stateoftheart finance and they said we can meet these targets with existing technologies. Theres a few factors. This is why sometimes in my opinion you have quite frankly g. Zero engineers talking about one way we can deal with climate disruption as imitating the High Altitude spraying sulfur into the atmosphere reflecting more of the suns rays away from earth. So, that is one of the main reasons behind the