Doppelgangers

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0:44And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, doppelgangers. You know that moment when you catch a reflection of yourself before your mind is ready to believe that it is you? This is Naomi Klein. She's a best-selling author, a big thinker type who's written about climate change, corporate power, and feminism for over 20 years. She has made a name for herself. Or so she thought. We all want to believe that we have some control over how the world sees us. We polish ourselves and try to perfect ourselves and perform ourselves.

1:36And when you're being confused with somebody else on an industrial scale, you realize that you just can't control it at all. For Naomi, the mix-up started about 13 years ago during the Occupy Wall Street protests. And I was there because I was writing my book, This Changes Everything. And during one of those protests, I went to a public restroom and I was in a stall. And I overheard two women talking about me in very unkind terms. Basically, they were trashing me and saying, you know, did you read that article Naomi Klein wrote? Oh, my God, like she completely does not understand our movement.

2:22And I was just sort of mortified and it brought back every mean girl experience in high school. I had a lot of mean girls in my high school. And then gradually it dawned on me that they were not actually talking about me. They were talking about another Naomi nonfiction writer. So I came out and said to those two women, I think you're talking about Naomi Wolf. You have your Naomi's confused. So mistaking Naomi Klein for Naomi Wolf, it's not entirely surprising. Both are bestselling authors. Both have written sharp critiques of patriarchy, capitalism, global corporations. Naomi Klein even remembers idolizing Naomi Wolf in college when Wolf's debut book, The Beauty Myth, came out.

3:08She was 28 years old when The Beauty Myth came out. And she wore leather jackets and had amazing hair and looked like Valerie Bertinelli. And I just thought, you can make a career out of sort of trashing patriarchy. And I was inspired by her, to be honest. Yeah. And she was named Naomi. So I was like, could I do that? So, yeah. In the early 2010s, the Naomi's got mixed up a lot, especially on Twitter. And mostly it was kind of funny, maybe a little annoying. But then things took a turn for the weird. I think it had been happening gradually since 2014 in particular, where she started to have different conspiracy theories about Edward Snowden, about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, about chemtrails and clouds.

3:55The confusion was still relatively harmless. That is, until the pandemic struck. It accelerated a lot during the pandemic because my doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, is one of those people who really fell down what I see as a disinformation and misinformation rabbit hole about the pandemic, casting it as a bioweapon that was cooked up in a lab in order to destroy the West. then she said much the same about the vaccines and the vaccine verification apps and became a star on the far right. Dr. Naomi Wolf. It was suddenly on Steve Bannon's show every day. A coup situation, a police state situation, and that's not a partisan thing.

4:41And so people would scream at me about this and get very angry at me. What happened to you? Or else they would praise me and tell me how much they loved my appearances on Tucker Carlson. What has become, you know, the best idea since World War II for enslaving the world, you know, the Western world. What were some of the ideas that were being attributed to you? Do you remember offhand? that I thought masks were making children lose the ability to smile, that I thought that having to get vaccinated was a coup d 'etat, that people who'd been vaccinated no longer smell like humans. Someone was extremely upset with me because I had supposedly claimed that the vaccine verification apps were like Jews being forced to wear yellow stars under the Nazis.

5:46And so I just wrote, you know, this is, are you sure about that or keep your Naomi straight? I mean, to be blamed for that must have been really upsetting, not just creepy. The whole thing was a very strange experience. I think I felt one of the most like recurring doppelganger feelings, which is just helplessness, because you realize that you just can't control it at all. And that there's somebody out there who's doing all of these things that people think is you. And there's not a thing you can do about it. Anything you could do to try to set the record straight will just make it worse, will just increase the association in people's minds.

6:34I no longer felt that I could participate in the public version of me. And I just watched the idea of me merged with the idea of her in the ether, and it all just slipped away. The word doppelganger is German, literally translating to double walker, as in your ghost or shadow. We often use the term to describe two people who look similar in an uncanny way. But in our high-tech world, it can mean so much more. And so on the show today, ideas about doppelgangers. From the mirror world that our online virtual selves live in, to digital twins being built to predict and treat things like cancer. And the mystery of why the moon and Earth are in fact twinsies.

7:28So back to Naomi Klein. She ended up writing a book about her experience called Doppelganger. It's a cultural critique of the online world that commodifies our identities to dangerous lengths. It just struck me that having this confusion out there on the internet of people confusing me for somebody else who was not me was a way of talking about something that was much less specific to my Naomi problem and was more universal to the way we're all kind of confused about whether we have control over ourselves at all in the digital age, right? You know, one of the things that I did as part of this research trip is I watched a lot of films about doppelgangers and read a lot of novels about doppelgangers.

8:18And I was really struck that, you know, for filmmaker, everyone from Charlie Chaplin with The Great Dictator to Jordan Peele's films like Us that really work with the figure of the doppelganger, they're often used as a way to capture the menace of a society that is flipping into a doppelganger of itself. and specifically the kind of fascist double that exists on the, that always lurks on the edges of a liberal open society. We know that it can flip. We know that it has flipped. And I feel that fear, right? And the fact that my doppelganger has turned into a doppelganger of her former self, right, had changed so dramatically, had gone from being this prominent feminist, you know, a Democrat who had advised Al Gore when he ran for president, you know, had really been a big deal on the center-left, could now be palling around with Bannon and Carlson and, you know, really consorting with some nefarious characters.

9:27Like, people are constantly writing these articles. Whatever happened to her, as if she was visited by, became a Stepford wife, right? It just struck me as an interesting way to explore that sense of menace. It really is possible for us to turn into a collective doppelganger of who we think we are. There is a passage in your book where you start to grasp the reach that Naomi Wolf was having online. Would you mind reading that for us? Sure. I admit that when Wolf first started talking about vaccine passports as mass surveillance networks, I really didn't understand the effect it was having. I was focused on the many wrong facts she was sharing, as well as the true fact that her newfound celebrity on Fox was blowing up my own social media.

10:28What many of us who were cringe-following Wolf at the time missed was the extent to which her new messaging had struck a chord, Not only with Fox's audience, but also with a sizable cohort of people who identify as leftists or progressives and were terrified of the Black Mirror surveillance world she was describing. Tell us more about what you're writing there and how it what you started to understand was the reason why people who you would have agreed with or would have been fans of started to share conspiracy theories that felt outlandish. Yeah, well, in the book, I say that conspiracy culture often gets the facts wrong, but the feelings right.

11:19Right. And this really struck me when Wolf took her star turn on the right, it was when she started to claim that the vaccine verification apps that we all downloaded onto our phones and for a time were scanned to get into restaurants and concerts and things like that, that these were actually part of some kind of nefarious plot that involved the Chinese Communist Party and Davos and Bill Gates to bring what she called a a CCP, Chinese Communist Party, social credit system to the West, and that if we did this, it would be a fascist coup and our government would be able to listen to our phone, not our phone conversations, but our real life conversations in restaurants.

12:08We'd be under surveillance all the time. And she became a star on the right for this and a laughingstock on the liberal left for this. And the sort of snarky comeback about all of it was wait till they hear about cell phones. A lot of the conspiracies of the COVID era were about surveillance, were about the idea that this was the way to get us all tracked. They were tapping into this all-pervasive fear around a huge loss of privacy that we've all experienced because we've gotten addicted to our cell phones in this way. And we don't know what happens with our data. We don't really understand what happens with the data that's collected on Google Maps.

12:51And that is creating an opportunity for conspiracy to spread that really taps into those deep and latent fears. When we come back, Naomi Klein on how conspiracy theorists profit by tapping into those fears. On the show today, doppelgangers. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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14:27Yeah, she has a lot to say about all the boxes that she's been put in and what it was like when she finally did get to host late night. Wow. Anyway, that is coming Wednesday. If you're not a TED Radio Hour Plus supporter yet, please join your fellow listeners to get all kinds of bonus content and all our episodes sponsor free. Just go to plus.npr.org slash TED or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts app. And thanks. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, doppelgangers. We were just talking to writer Naomi Klein, who has spent much of the last decade being confused with the writer Naomi Wolf.

15:18I think I felt one of the most recurring doppelganger feelings, which is just helplessness. This mix-up started causing a lot of trouble for Klein, especially when Wolf began touting dangerous conspiracy theories. The World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization have united to create a new world order in which we are dead or disabled or sterilized. Why would ideas like these attract people like Wolf, who had never leaned extreme right before? I say that conspiracy culture often gets the facts wrong, but the feelings right. Klein says liberals and her fellow progressives failed to acknowledge all the pandemic fears from masking, vaccine mandates, surveillance, to rising inequality and corporate profiteering.

16:08This provided an opening. And I think the failure to do that really rolled out the red carpet for the right to do this kind of what I call a mix and match, right? Well, they take a few of traditional kind of left wing issues. There are days when Steve Bannon sounds like Bernie. There are days where he sounds like me, you know, and then he mixes it with anti-immigrant xenophobia, with anti-Black racism, with this whole very nefarious right wing agenda. and an authoritarian agenda. So I started listening to Bannon, but then found myself just interested in how he was creating what I call the mirror world of everything in the world that I recognize.

16:53Mirror publishing companies, mirror social media companies, mirror arguments, mirror currency. But I was also struck by how he would perform a certain kind of inclusivity and kindness, which I think would surprise people who only see clips of Bannon online where he's sort of roaring ferociously about how he's going to put the heads of his opponents on spikes, which is part of Steve Bannon for sure. But if you listen to him in greater depth, you see this other side where he is part of the opportunism, part of the way he defines himself against the liberals and the leftists is by talking about how mean we are to one another and how in his world, you know, if you come over, you're going to be treated with kindness.

17:46And that's why he was so, I think, attracted to Wolfe is that it allows him to perform this willingness to be in conversation with somebody who you would think he would be on the other side. So it sounds like you think the liberals, Democrats, middle, whatever you want to call them, missed a trick here. Oh, yeah. But I do think that it is within the power of the left and the center left to not hand over all of these other issues that are traditionally our issues, standing up to corporations and standing up against profiteering so that he doesn't have such a powerful cocktail to mix. do you have any idea what your doppelganger thinks of you does naomi wolf has she made any passing comment or mention of what she thinks of the book or you it's definitely more than a passing comment she's she's um she's posted quite a bit about it she even has a conspiracy about it um which i'm not going to go into um but she has said that she hasn't read it.

18:56So I do wish that she would, because I think that if she did, she would find that it isn't what she thinks it is, that it is kinder than she thinks it is, and less about her than she thinks it is. So the irony of you writing this book in some ways is, well, you started out by having a little bit of a brand problem, right? That people were confusing you with another Naomi. But this book, I mean, I Googled both of you and it's the book that comes up now. In some ways, you have drowned out mentions of the other Naomi, at least in my Google. Is it possible to ever really confront your doppelganger?

19:38I mean, was that your intention? Confronting your doppelganger in literature and art always ends badly.

19:48Edgar Allan Poe, Dostoevsky. Dorian Gray. Oh, my God. If you try to stab your doppelganger, you will end up bloody on the ground. You know, I think the only way out of a doppelganger tangle, from what I can tell, is really to earnestly believe that a mirror is being held up to you. That you have to look at with some honesty and willingness to see a side of yourself that you might not like to see. You know, I often say that sometimes when people describe doppelgangers, they say that it's like looking into a living mirror. But in my experience, it's much worse than that. It's like because you haven't been able to prepare your mind yet to believe that it's you.

20:34You don't have your mirror face on. You don't, you know. And you have to be willing to accept that that might actually be you. And that there's a reason that you're getting confused. That it might be trying to show you something. It might be a challenge to change if you don't like what you see, right? And I'm trying. I'm trying to learn from it. I guess I'm wondering, do you have advice for people who are listening about how to think of their doppelgangers or their different identities in the world? Should they beware? Should they be kind to them? My only advice is to cling a little less tightly to the self you think you are.

21:15Yeah. And, you know, at the end of the book, I quote Iris Murdoch, the British novelist and philosopher who talks about unselfing as almost a transcendent state where when we behold beauty, whether in the natural world or in a piece of art, when we allow ourselves to be transported by it, what we're doing is we are forgetting about ourselves. and and I think it's true that we can really only behold the the beauty and tragedy of the world when we are able to unself and not think what does this mean to me what can I post about it so that people think I'm the right kind of self but when we actually just get out of the way and unself and show up.

22:09Yeah, that's what my doppelganger journey taught me, and I have to relearn it about six times a day. That's Naomi Klein. Her latest book is Doppelganger, A Trip into the Mirror World. You can watch her talks at TED.com. And by the way, we reached out to Naomi Wolf for her comments and did not hear back. On the show today, doppelgangers. Hey, guys. Going to the moon. Good evening, America, and welcome aboard Apollo 13. On April 11th, 1970, the historic U.S. spaceflight Apollo 13 launched. Okay, Houston, we have limb extraction. Maybe you saw the 1995 movie about it. We copy that 13. With Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon.

22:57Houston, we have a problem. And remember that scene? The pivotal scene when the oxygen tank explodes on board. It's got to be the oxygen. Stranding the astronauts in space and sending the mission into turmoil. We've got a computer restart. I'm going to reconfigure the RCS. It was a disaster. The world watched as the astronauts drifted further and further away from Earth. How to get the spacecraft back on track and come home? Well, NASA had numerous simulators on the ground that were being fed data from the real spacecraft 200 ,000 miles away. Let's get to work. Let's lay it out. These simulators could replicate what was happening on board.

23:46Give me the exact same conditions we've got in there now. And strategize how to get the astronauts back safely. Let's not make things worse by guessing. It helped NASA predict and then execute the return mission that brought the astronauts home. Hello, Houston. This is Odyssey. It's good to see you again.

24:09Today, we have a word for a souped-up version of NASA's simulators, Digital Twins. These are computer simulations that are constantly being updated with real-time data. and the technology is getting much more advanced. Instead of the astronauts sending data back to mission control, aircrafts and their simulators, for example, can send data back and forth, mirroring and guiding each other. What really makes the digital twin special is that that virtual representation is connected to the physical world and there's a bidirectional flow between the virtual and the physical. This is aerospace engineer Karen Wilcox.

24:53And then that digital twin is now becoming a personalized, dynamic virtual representation, which in turn can be used to drive new decisions. You could have a digital version of your home and track how your energy costs would rise or fall if you went solar. Car companies are building digital twins of their new designs to see how they'll respond under different conditions. Karen says the applications for digital twins are endless. But remember, she's an aerospace engineer. And so she's pretty excited about how they're being used in her field. I want you to think about the digital twin of my aircraft.

25:32Here's Karen Wilcox on the TED stage. So as I create that digital twin, I'm going to be collecting data from the sensors on board the aircraft. I'm going to be collecting data from inspections I might make of the aircraft. and I'm going to be assimilating that data into the models. And what's really important is that I'm not building a generic model of just any old telemaster aircraft. I am building a personalized model of the very aircraft that is right now sitting in my garage down the road in South Austin. And so that digital twin will capture the differences, the variability from my aircraft to, say, my neighbor's aircraft.

26:12And what's more, that digital twin will not be static. It's going to change as my aircraft ages and degrades and gets damaged and gets repaired. We will be assimilating data all the time and the digital twin will follow the aircraft through its life. You can imagine in some future world that an operator, an airline, has a digital twin for every single one of the aircraft in their fleet. And that digital twin is being updated every day or maybe even every hour with data collected from its physical twin so that it is an up-to-date representation of everything that's going on with that aircraft. And it's now able to identify when a problem may be about to occur before you get all those passengers on the plane.

26:59And you can imagine the value in that, that first of all, that keeps us safer. Second of all, it leads to more efficient practices, which saves money. It keeps the engines running more efficiently, which has reduced environmental impact. So just a lot that can be done by having your fingers on personalized, dynamic, just-in-time information. And predictive, right? Like you could say, well, this time around the aircraft is going to be fine. But after six more flights to Minneapolis, we need to definitely check this particular part because the model has looked into the future and shown that this is a potential issue.

27:37That is exactly right. And the models are really, when combined with the data, what let us predict into the future and to make predictions about conditions that we haven't seen yet. And then that's really what drives decision making. Let's talk about another more personal way that digital twins are going to be in our lives, and that comes to healthcare. And my understanding is you have partnered with a group of oncologists to research how digital twins can be used in cancer treatment. That's right. So here at UT Austin, we started talking with the Center for Computational Oncology and the Odin Institute, who are really interested in the idea of digital twins as a way to move towards personalized cancer care.

28:27And as my group of aerospace engineers started talking with a group of oncology experts, began to really realize that even though the physics, the biology, of course, is very different, there's so many common challenges. So Karen says, picture a patient with a brain cancer diagnosis. The first step, taking lots of images of their brain. Where is the tumor? How big is it? How dense is it? Using all that data, scientists can build a virtual version of the tumor. We have very powerful models, mathematical models, that can represent a tumor and make predictions about how that tumor is going to grow.

29:12Is it going to end up pushing on different parts of the anatomy? But here's the crucial goal. Using the tumor's digital twin to predict which treatment it will respond to best, based on so many factors, like the patient's anatomy. her physiology on what's going on with her body, we think we would be better to front load some of her radiotherapy and then give her a break in the middle and then go back to high doses. The future vision is really having the digital twin work hand in hand with the human clinician to try to achieve the best outcomes for that individual patient. I mean, that sounds amazing.

29:51So you could create a digital twin based on what your cardiovascular strength is and your blood type? And then could you add variations to see how things would go? So for example, if you got chemotherapy and you quit smoking and brought your blood pressure down, we think we could predict that your outcome would be X. If you didn't do those things, here's what that could look like. That kind of thing? That's absolutely the vision. We're still a long way from being able to get to that point. And you can imagine that as human beings, our biological systems are so incredibly complex. And we still don't yet have the computational power to be able to model a full human where we could really start to connect all those different things you mentioned.

30:40But what you described, absolutely, this is the vision. So that's the health of a human. But explain how the same sort of modeling applies to improving the health of our planet. Yeah, absolutely. A future vision is could we one day have a digital twin of planet Earth? Being able to have a digital twin at the scale of full planet Earth goes well beyond what we can do today with our models and our algorithms and our data. But I think this is a fantastic vision because it also starts to think about integrating all those disparate pieces of our planet Earth that we know are connected so that we really start to make decision making in a holistic way as a planet rather than as individuals or individual nations.