What did you learn about nike, microsoft and starbucks in branding . Guest its great to be with you and to have this time. When i was writing the no logo it came out at the very beginning of 2000, so its almost exactly 20 years old. The period when i was researching which was the four years before that it was a period where lot was changing in the corporate world and you have the first kind of fullblown lifestyle brand, which is an idea we take for granted now, but these were companies that for the first time were declaring that their Business Model was not sell products, but ideas, a lifestyle, a sense of belonging that they could then extend into kind of self enclosed branded cocoons and sort of sell everything along as it was branded with this logo. Nike was really the first one to do this. They didnt ever owned their factories and this the main thing i learned when researching no logo was that there was a relationship between this aggressive the marketing, it was constantly sort of trolling Youth Culture to lot by the most cuttingedge ideas to get ads into places that had never had ads like schools, to cobranded with every like a Music Festival and so on with an inverse relationship between that aggressive marketing and the kind of good jobs on offer in the economy because the way that these companies were free of money to spend on this more aggressive kind of Lifestyle Marketing was by divesting from their factories, from my did they should be producers of all. So, nike paved the way in this sense because they never owned their factories in the first place or did they made their Running Shoes through web of contractors and subcontractors who they pitted against one another for who could provide their shoes were the lowest price and this was such a profitable Business Model that the competitor started closing their factories and never reopening. That was the key thing they never reopened their factories. We often talk about factories moving from north america to mexico or china or vietnam, but in fact it wasnt just that they were moving location, its that they never owned their factories and didnt see themselves as producers, so i think its intimately related to the you know deindustrialization and precariousness of the work we sort of take for granted today. Host as you point out, nike in particular getting a lot of criticism from its customers. Guest at the time because it was new. This was coming this was still a america there remember the kind of manufacturing model where you understood that the products you buy in the car you were buying you knew where was made and understood it was economic anchor for the community, that the idea the people making the cars should have enough money to buy the cars and so it was culturally shocking for people to discover that these Companies Like nike or disney who were sitting so much money putting out images of themselves that were very progressive or in the case of disneys case very Family Friendly that you pull back the curtain and wait a minute in some cases children or people just a little bit out of being children, people in their early 20s who were making these products under really abusive conditions and so when that was exposed it was a scandal. 20 years later i think people take it for granted that almost all the products in our lives are made under conditions that are dubious you have electronic factories in china that have suicide nets to catch people when they commit suicide because they are so desperate on the job, so i think its one of the toughest things to think about. When i could about what has changed since no logo is the sense of shock that i was tracking like i cant believe these nike Running Shoes are made by children in indonesia who are sleeping in cramped dormitories and not getting paid for their overtime or having to urinate in bottles under their sewing machine and they were genuinely scandals and movements responding to them and i think people shock and outrage has been doled almost like a joke, in a television. Host couple examples in the book and one is starbucks and how a coffee shop opened up inspired by starbucks, but trying to edge you put in the book run away from the starbucks brand. Guest i think that was example from the 10 Year Anniversary edition of no logo where in the original edition that came out in 2000, i had a fair bit about this then relatively new company starbucks, that told us their brand meaning was that the what they called the third place, not home, not work, 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 this was happening in the 90s after you had this very aggressive kind of privatization of the public sphere and so corporations had to come along as a we are a pseudo town square which in a sense is what facebook is doing now, that corporate digital town square. And the 90s it was starbucks, cup of coffee and your pseudo public space, but then when i wrote an introduction for the 10th Anniversary Edition starbucks just opened up a coffee shop in seattle that was completely unbranded. You didnt see their logo anywhere which seemed a bit of a marker for how far they had fallen in a sense that if in order to recapture any sense of newness they had to end a brand themselves. Host lets look at the political sphere because in the 10th anniversary of the book he talked about president obama and one question is did he live up to his hope in change brand. Did he . Guest it was early in the obama years when i wrote that. There was always something a little bit nike about the obama brand in the sense that it was just a vague enough that it was hard to pin him down to a clear political platform another interesting measure where we are now because if you look at the democratic primaries right now i think there is more of an expectation that candidates have a really 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 writing about, it was pretty megan like im going to recapture a sense of optimism, you wont be ashamed of america, people are tired from eight years of bush and change feeling good so thats why wrote about that as a First Political campaign that used the same tools these Corporate Lifestyle brands had been using to sort of base themselves in an era of progressivism, so the question did obama live up to it, i mean, its a complicated question in the sense that it never was specific, so its hard to say if you lived up to it or not because there was not that much there there, but what he was promising although he did promise i would revise mainstreet and take on wall street and i think there was a huge amount of disappointment that it didnt really happen. People who hoped there was going to be a real reinvestment in small businesses, in maybe more factory jobs, we are very disappointed by that and i think its part of a global phenomenon where sort of centrist liberal politicians come to power with sort of a veneer of progressivism and change but the economy continues to make people feel excluded, disempowered, more precarious, more insecure and that sets the stage for the rightwing populism we see worldwide. Obviously there are specific pack factors related to obama being the first black president and the racial backlash in the United States, but his support to remember that there is a global one im in on of rightwing populism we see everywhere. Host you can join us on twitter book tv in our guest for the next two hours is naomi klein and also give us a phone call. You are teaching at rutgers university. How you frame this in the classroom in terms of your book, the original book and then its 10 Year Anniversary edition . Guest im actually teaching a course called the corporate self and it looks at the integration of the human and the corporation sort of corporation trying to act more like humans, which is the original brands we are all about that like putting sort of a comforting face like uncle ben moore and jemima, much of it racialized sort of nostalgia about plantation life so we look at the racial history of branding and then where no logo ends is remember this is written in the late 1990s. This thing completely new idea that humans everyday humans, not celebrities needed to become their own brand in order to succeed in this newly precarious job environment. No one can expect job security so the way to get ahead is to find your inner brand and projected onto the world and this was after we seen celebrities do this in the book i talk about Michael Jordan as the first super brand and then we look at whats happening with social media because when i wrote that 20 years ago it was a pretty notional idea, the idea anyone could be their own brand because anyone doesnt have the money to take advertisements and actually do the work of projecting an image of oneself, but today because of social media everyone who has computer access has the capacity to market themselves, to market an idea of themselves, to think about what is my brand, which is very different from who am i. What we are unpacking and i have a Wonderful Group of students its like first of all we talk about even though they have grown up with this idea its a relatively new idea. It was not always the case you would have been looked at if you are mad 30 years ago to say you know 15year old kid, but not what you want to be when you grow up, but what is your brand, you know. So, we try to make visible some of the things they take for granted and really think about what is it mean to have to separate yourself from the idea of yourself, to have that distancing and what does that do to friendships, what is it due to relationships, what is it due to social movements, so its been fascinating to unpack this with them because of course they know more about social media than i do so they are teaching me all the time. But, then the latest phase is this or intimately connected we have our lives online in this constant performance of our personal brand is that the Tech Industry sees data as the new oil as is often repeated, so they are mining ourselves, they are mining the information we are sharing for their Business Model that we are not getting any part of and we are not paid for the data that we are providing for free and so we are looking at these questions around surveillance, data mining which is called surveillance capitalism, so its interesting to once again see how much has changed since i wrote that now coming to book. Host your newest book on the on fire the burning case let me base this on terms of the original new deal because you write about how that essentially transforms the country in the world speech you i think there is inspiration to be taken in the original new deal and also very important warnings to heed from that era because so many people were excluded from this sort of protection under fdrs new deal took many africanamerican workers were excluded, domestic workers, women were excluded, our Cultural Workers were and there was systemic discrimination and segregation in many of the new deal programs. Its also true that the United States transformed itself at a 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 sciences are telling us. A year ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, our foremost gathering of scientific experts who advised governments on this data 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 and this is a quote from a summary of the report that it would require unprecedented transformation in virtually every aspect of society, energy, transportation, our culture, building construction. So, there are many points in history when you can say well, this is a time when we saw that skill of transformation. One west during the Second World War when you had americans planting Victory Gardens and getting 40 of their use from the gardens. We saw factories transform themselves rapidly, but the new deal is another era which is last taught down which is a useful allstar copresident s for us to look at because i dont think we want government telling everyone what to do. I think we should worry about that. During the new deal era he saw a rule america electrified. You saw more than 10 million americans directly employed, 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 here to another part this thats quite relevant in thinking about a Green New Deal is that fdr civilian conservation corps was probably the most popular of the new deal programs and its a reminder that the new deal was not only responding to an economic crisis, but also an ecological crisis because of the dust of all the crisis of d4 station, so the ccc spent more than 2 million is that more than 2 million poor young people to cities to hundreds of camps in rural parts of the us and did things like plant 2. 3 billion trees which is more than half the trees of her planet, so that kind of scale is important and its also the kind of thing we need to do to pull carbon out of the atmosphere in the face of the Climate Crisis. Host in the book you write, part of what makes Climate Change so very difficult for many of us to grasp is that we live in a culture of the perpetual present, when that deliberately severs itself from the past that created us in the future we are shaping with our action. Guest a lot of what im doing in this book is to make visible the Economic Systems and the relatively 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 of the good life and that has produced an extremely accelerated culture which then people point to and say well, its just human nature that we can deal with the crisis by Climate Change because clearly we are too selfish, too individualistic, think to shortterm and it requires us to have a longer timeframe, requires us to put the collective good ahead of something you might just want right now to satisfy an individual urge. 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 i am talking about what we need to do in the face of this crisis which i do a fair bit, i find the biggest obstacle that we are up against is not Climate Change denial, which is definitely on the wayne and its not the lack of technology or an understanding of what needs to be done, its really the sense of doom that we as 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 they are not exactly the kind of thing we would need to do now, they do show that there are different ways of being human and in the lifespan of people alive today people were able to think longerterm and were able to put the collective good 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 im trying to problem with ties this source of appeals to human nature that we hear a lot of it saying actually, thats equating a particular relatively recent form of deregulated consumer capitalism with the idea of what it means to be human and while we cant change the laws of nature we actually can set change the system that we humans did create ourselves if theyre threatening life on earth and in fact we need to do that. Not saying its easy, just that its possible. Host married with a son whose seven years old and you went apple picking yesterday. Guest spilled the beans. Host you move around a lot for those of you who dont know naomi klein im a spend a minute them your life story. Guest just a minute . Host two minutes. Guest i was born in canada in montreal. My parents are american. My parents were peace activists in the 1960s my father didnt want to go to vietnam and he had to choose between jail and canada and like many of his current 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 and they decided they liked canada better , so i sometimes say we left because of the war, but stayed for the universal public healthcare. My mother worked for the National Film board of canada. The first womens film studio. She made films for the feminist movement. I grew up with political parents. My father worked in the Canadian Health care system involved in doing things like bringing midwives into hospitals and a big advocate for natural childbirth. Family doctor also retired. Yeah, so i would say grew up in a radical you know i have friends who really had like sears radical parents and were home schooled than their parents you know really really walked about talk i kind of grew up between worlds with their values, i suppose, but going to regular school in the 1980s, so i felt pulled between the culture of the 1980s which was shiny and appealing to me and my home life where my parents were saying why do you want to hang out your w