Host lovely to get the chance to interview you on a book i found just fantastic. I read it in one long sitting and it sounded absolutely fascinating. My first question is how in the world were you able to write this so quickly because you reference things that just happened in april, may and the book just came out. Guest thank you. Im glad to speak with you and that you enjoyed the book. It was a bit of a frenzy writing this book. I usually take about five years to write a book. Thats been my average. I publish a book about every seven years and give myself a break. I wanted to get this out as quickly as possible. There are a couple chapters focus on what to expect if there is a crisis in the united states, an an economic crisis or major security crisis and i felt so passionately that there needed to be a political Disaster Preparedness among progressives that i just wrote aevery speech ive frankly never written before and i worked with a publisher committed to getting it out quickly because the Publishing Industry can be quite slow. You finish a book and then it sort of creep along the production process for another four months and in this case everybody works hard to get it out in recordbreaking time so im lucky to have worked with a publisher to get to this political moment. Host i think it is a great contribution to the millions of people looking at our political situation right now thinking what do i do and obviously from the title you give it away that no its not enough that i also see it as a coming together of your work that begins with the logo and branding into the shock doctrine it seems like you are the quintessential antitrump and everything opposite of what he stands for silly begindoublequote and you truma new trumpas a quintessent. Guest the truth as you know is that so many of us have been on this journey. Some of my early work as a journalist before i published any books at all was focused on what i would call the underside of branding and Transcendent Marketing as it got better and better in the 1990s and turned into art in the era of nike and Michael Jordan but behind those as companies of tnt they divested from the world of work and sold out their factories and started outsourcing to contractors into giving them to whomever was willing to produce the products. Weve been on this journey a long time because of course your work at the Global Exchange in the 90s was part of this process of exposing the conditions under which some of the most valuable brands in the world of nike and disney were making their products. So i look at trump as a hollow brand that adopted the paradigm of we are not in the product business. This was a big shift i was tracking that it used to be up until the 80s the iconic brands in the american marketplace where manufacturers first they made products and branded them and marketed them but in the 90s the orders list and they were marketers first, they were in the ideas business and projected big ideas onto as many extensions as possible and started building self enclosed branded cocoons. Disney opened up a branded count in florida. He started off as a Real Estate Developer of quickly went into the stratosphere of the superbrands and the apprentice was an enormous breakthrough for him where it became less about building buildings and more dot building his brand and selling his name, his brand for high prices to other developers who wanted to have his name on the side of the tower or resort and like the other brands i mentioned earlier, this came at the expense of workers. Weve heard many stories of terrible conditions for the workers of his properties and making their branded clothing around the world. So here you have a guy that can make millions of dollars in one building by allowing them to put his name on it and then he becomes president and as you say in the book it is impossible to separate out trump and his family and the Family Businesses including of course the clothing line in the president now. Guest i dont think they can separate it. Host i love the line in the book you cannot disentangle chump the man from the brand. The two entities merged a long time ago. Anything he steps foot in the beach club, the white house, hes increasing his overall brand value which allows them to sell more memberships, read more rooms and increase fees so how can you separate him from the brand . Guest the challenges that he enters politics not playing by the traditional rules of the game at the branding is to stay true to your brand so in the 1990s, there were many activists exposed that were betraying the power of their brand, or a familyfriendly and kid friendly ethos because the products were being made under conditions that were abusive to young people in their factories and so they were vulnerable on that part and had to be responsive, but donald trump is a different kind of brand because the idea hes always sold was the idea of absolute power through wealth