Fresh Take: Amanda Montell and the Age of Magical Overthinking

Margaret: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Margaret.

Amy: And this is Amy and today we are talking to Amanda Montell. Amanda is a writer and linguist from Baltimore. She is the author of the acclaimed bestseller "Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism," which our listeners will recognize as a book that Margaret and I quote very often, particularly Amanda's discussion of thought-terminating cliches and everything about being in cults.

Amanda is also the creator and host of the hit podcast "Sounds Like a Cult." Today we're going to talk about Amanda's new book, "The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality" and her new podcast called "Magical Overthinkers." Amanda lives in Los Angeles with her partner, plants, and pets.

Welcome, Amanda.

Amanda Montell: Oh, thank you so much for having me. What a warm, room. Oh, yeah. We're excited.

Margaret: A warm welcome for our, we've been, awaiting you as a guest. We've just been sitting here for all this [00:01:00] time awaiting you. Manifesting. That's right. We manifested you. That's right. Manifested you.

Amanda Montell: I feel it. I feel manifested.

Amy: Love it. Let's start by telling us, Amanda, what magical thinking is and how that's broadly defined and then how you define magical overthinking.

Amanda Montell: Sure. Okay. So magical thinking on its own is an age old human quirk. It's something we've always done. It's our penchant to believe that our internal thoughts and feelings can affect external events.

So it's the idea that, I actually tell a tiny anecdote in the book where I got a free éclair from my local coffee shop and my initial reaction to that was, Oh my God, it must have been because I let someone merge on the drive over here. We make these sort of false cause and effect misattributions because it helps the world feel more manageable, more predictable.

And our magical thinking increases during times of grief or misery or just [00:02:00] general tumult. When we feel out of control, we start to magically think a little bit more, and that's always been the case. I argue in this book that magical overthinking is a product of this specific age. It's a product of mass information overload combined with widespread loneliness, in addition to this capitalistic pressure to know everything under the sun.

So I couldn't help but notice that living in the information age didn't necessarily make life make any more sense. And it certainly didn't make life feel any better. So I've been calling this clash of the information age and our innate irrationalities as human beings, the age of magical overthinking.

Margaret: And, the idea, because we always try to start on the podcast with the question, is this a problem? And there are, is there a spectrum of belief on this magical thinking? clearly there [00:03:00] are people, including famous talk show hosts, who believe you can manifest realities to come into your life. And how do you deal with this as a spectrum of people? There are lots of people who believe that their thoughts create reality.

Amanda Montell: Yeah. So this idea of magical thinking is a tenant in so many belief systems. It's really deeply ingrained in us.

Margaret: So I guess prayer in some ways is magical thinking.

Amanda Montell: 100%. Yes. Or even more secular delusions. That thing about my free éclair is not connected to any religious ideology, but that's magical thinking.

All right. And it is not necessarily bad. Even engaging with ideas of manifestation can be a good and positive thing. It is true that our mindset can affect outcomes in various ways. It's when you start to get dogmatic about it and [00:04:00] absolutist about it. It's when TikTok manifestation gurus are weaponizing people's feelings of unease because of the pandemic or something tragic that they might be going through in their personal life or the unpredictability of an election year, there is a lot of chaos. In our society right now, we are exposed to more information and more human identities in a day than we were ever really meant to, and so our minds can't handle it. And as a bid to reclaim some agency, we're starting to magically think a little bit more and there are plenty of nefarious figures who are more than willing to cash in on that.

So that TikTok Instagram manifestation guru, your platform of choice might then lure you into signing up for their $30 a month.

Margaret: If you spend money, even better. You'll get it even faster.

Amanda Montell: Yes, if you spend money. Exactly. Then you will learn my sort of [00:05:00] proprietary manifestation technique.

And if it doesn't work, that's fine. Your fault, because I am all-knowing and manifestation at its most extreme really implies that, any suffering you experience is your fault and your fault alone. It is not a product of systemic issues or random bad luck and so it can be very sort of victim blaming and spiritual bypassing is a term that gets thrown around, so there is certainly a wide spectrum of magical thinking, magical overthinking. And I like to delve into the nuance as much as I can, because I don't want to completely write off our innate irrationalities. They are there for a reason and it's fun to be a little "delulu" here and there but it's about having as much self awareness as possible so that we can be more skeptical of our own minds and compassionate toward other people's minds.

Amy: There's another way that I think this is [00:06:00] getting suddenly worse, right? Why is it different than when I used to watch Oprah after school and believe I could manifest the adulthood that I wanted for myself, there was a thing I just thought over the last week. It. TikTok cuckoo, whoever she was, talking about how she healed her kidney infection with her mind, but she was doing it in a rhyming rap song. And she was talking about the aliens and the pyramids.

Margaret: Amy, you got lost on TikTok.

Amy: Well, this is the point. I'm not on TikTok. I don't even have TikTok. However, I was shared this cuckoo lady's video six times over the weekend on Facebook and Twitter, the social media I do go on. And I thought to myself, this is interesting in reading this book, getting ready for this interview that this woman, everybody was sharing her to be like, can you believe this lady?

But you're also sharing her to all your followers. She just had a huge national platform to tell people you could solve kidney infections with your mind.

Amanda Montell: Yeah. It's pretty destructive. And I'll say this, what is unique about [00:07:00] today's approach to manifestation is not only that on social media, someone who no one knew about yesterday could be the celebrity of tomorrow, and celebrity is combining with these inherently addictive devices, social media is objectively more addictive than any other form of media, I can venture to say, and so you have celebrity in combination with an addictive device in combination with

some ingrained delusions that have always been appealing to us, but are now dialed up to an 11 because of all these other conditions. And then, of course, we're all trying to make a buck. We live in capitalism. And so if you can combine celebrity, spiritual "delulu," social media, and money-making endeavors, that's the perfect storm, and again, it doesn't have to [00:08:00] be life ruining, earth shattering, however, a lot of these manifestation gurus are operating it within the same cognitive bias as some really really nefarious conspiracy theorists. And so I have this one chapter in the book that we're discussing now called "I Swear I Manifested This." And it talks about proportionality bias, which is our deep seated proclivity to think that big events or even just big feelings must have had a big cause.

So it's: Princess Diana could not have died because of some random tragedy or a sequence of unfortunate events. She must have been killed by the royal family. That's the only way that this massive catastrophe makes proportional sense. And that can explain a lot of the conspiracy theories that were surrounding what just happened with Kate Middleton.

And that proportionality bias explains so much. Not only hardcore conspiracy theories, QAnon [00:09:00] or Holocaust denial or some of those really bad ones, but also, on a more positive note, ideas of manifestation, because it is that very same misattribution of cause and effect. It's: I used to have no job and no love life and now I met the paramour of my dreams and I'm making more money because I bathed my crystals and I read The Secret and I manifested it. So that mentality, while it may start out on a more positive level with ideas of manifestation can easily be weaponized to send someone down the wrong path. A rabbit hole that could get much more nefarious because it cracks your trust in logic and critical thinking or in institutions that you always believed in.

It fractures that trust in the beginning and says either, Oh yeah, no, you can't trust anything because an elite cabal is controlling the sociopolitical order, or you can't trust anything. You can only trust your own mind with the help of this guru. And both of [00:10:00] those mentalities are a little bit dangerous.

Margaret: And you talk a little bit in the book, not a little bit. You talk in the book about the science and how our brains seek this information out. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, I want to talk about that. We are talking to Amanda Montell, the author of "The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality."

And we'll be right back. So it struck me, Amanda, in this book, I am a person who has OCD and has since I was a young child and my brain constantly is in this mode of, I didn't touch the light switch three times. And that is why I got an F on my paper, right? Since I was six or seven years old, I've been doing that.

And I find what's weird about it is as I've become an older person and my worldview has expanded and I have sought therapeutic care and all of this stuff. I still believe on a very fundamental [00:11:00] level that I am controlling the outcome of the Giants game by eating the cupcakes in the correct order with the numbers of the players on them.

And I don't know, it, I understand rationally that my brain is only seeking evidence that reinforces that. I've read the books, I've talked to the doctors, I get it. But why are our brains hardwired to make sense of the world in a very individualistic way that somehow I skipped past the Kate Middleton story, so I didn't have any part in her being ill. I don't know what my brain is up to, but why am I involved in everything?

Amanda Montell: Okay. So how fascinating is it that we are the only species on this earth that narrativizes our life in order to make sense of it? We tell fictional stories about ourselves in order to quote unquote make sense of life.

It just goes to show how fundamentally confusing being a human on this earth is. And [00:12:00] it's always been confusing. we sometimes romanticize, I say we, let me speak for myself. I sometimes fall into the trap of romanticizing the distant past. And this is something that I even talk about later in the book.

There's a chapter that dives into nostalgia and the cognitive bias that goes with it. So I will sometimes fall into the trap of romanticizing the distant past because I am so frustrated with the present. And this is a habit that a lot of humans have, when the present feels uncomfortable, painful, unpredictable, we sink into a romanticized bath of warm fuzzies from either our own memories or made-up memories from a time we never knew.

And so I'll think oh, how simple it was to live in the hunter gatherer period when you know, everybody was just picking berries and had no iPhones, but of course life was not better then, people were getting attacked by bears and dying of starvation at the age of 35. I would not rather live during that time.

And yet [00:13:00] that time was still really overwhelming, there were mythologies that people made up even then, there were legends and jokes and their equivalent of memes that people spread in order to understand why we're here, where we're going, what is the meaning of all this?

And so that is the period in which we developed our cognitive biases to make sense of the physical world enough to survive it. Fast forward millennia upon millennia. Our problems now are a lot more abstract. Sometimes they're totally disembodied because they're arguments that are happening with people that live, say, 2000 miles away, say, that we've never even met.

And so we're applying these deep-rooted mental magic tricks that once proved net positive, net useful for us. We're applying them to a culture that has really outpaced our own minds. [00:14:00] And that is really the summation of magical overthinking. And you're exactly right. That we can't fundamentally uproot these psychological shortcuts.

They're there. They've been there for thousands of years, but I think it's really important to become aware of them because then at that point we can allow them not to control our life and we can allow them not to write off other people as hopelessly delusional and evil. It's so easy to see someone behaving in a way that doesn't make sense to you and think Oh, that person is defective.

I'm cutting them out. I don't understand them. They are bad, but really oftentimes what is motivating them as a combination of these cognitive biases, which is not an excuse, but it is an explanation that has provided me with a lot of healing.

Amy: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So this book, chapter by chapter, you go through cognitive biases, which are as you were saying, biological imperatives, another thing we love to talk about in this show.

Why is this happening? Why [00:15:00] is a two year old a picky eater when a one year old isn't a picky eater? There's a biological imperative. So the book in such an entertaining way, goes through sort of chapter by chapter some of the cognitive biases we've all heard of and some that were new to me at least. And so let's start with one that we definitely talk about on the podcast, the sunk cost fallacy. I'm going to quote you here. "The sunk cost fallacy is the conviction that spending resources that you can't get back, like money and time, or emotional resources, like secrets and hope, justifies spending even more of those things. And you tell a very funny story in the book about your own sunk cost fallacy in your life.

It isn't always about what's on the internet. Sometimes it's about our personal lives. And tell us a little bit more about the sunk cost fallacy and where we have to watch it tipping into excess.

Amanda Montell: Yeah. So I had heard of the sunk cost fallacy. This is one of the better known cognitive biases that gets a lot of airplane headlines and [00:16:00] stuff.

And I started reading about it a little more when I was looking into cults for my last book, because it helped explain how you could end up 20 years in Scientology, knowing deep down that the promises that were made to you are not going to be fulfilled and that this is maybe a big mistake or at least something that you should not be involved with anymore, and yet you can't accept that loss.

You are falling victim to sunk cost fallacy because it is this, again, deeply ingrained mental magic trick. And as I was reading about sunk cost fallacy in the context of cults, I couldn't help but notice how directly it applied to my own life in so many contexts. In the book I write about it in the very personal and high stakes context of ending up for many many years in a cult-like, cult of one romantic relationship that really did not serve me.

And I justified it for so many years resisting the idea that it would not go back to how things were at the beginning or to how things were promised. I was like, [00:17:00] surely a win is just around the corner. I've put this much into it. I can't give up now. And I beat myself up really badly for years after I got out of the relationship for being so irrational.

I was like, of course spending more time and resources and going on more vacations and adding more into the relationship was not going to change it. That doesn't make sense. But as it turns out, we make bets on ourselves and on our lives in this very specific way. And again, while it wasn't an excuse, it was an explanation.

And being aware of that has really helped me make decisions moving forward, even in really small ways. So there's this one study that I quote in that chapter that talks about the related idea of additive solution bias versus subtractive solution bias. Okay. So this is one study that continues to live rent free in my head in a good way.

We as human beings, naturally, but [00:18:00] especially growing up in consumerist society, we aim to solve problems by adding variables to the equation. So when something is going wrong, whether it's a relationship or a business problem, or even just something in your house is out of sorts, your closet is messed up.

We think: you know what I need to do? I need to buy something or hire someone or add something to this issue in order to solve the problem, when oftentimes the much more effective but less intuitive solution is to take something away. The study that I quoted referenced a puzzle that was presented to different study participants involving colored blocks, and the participants were invited to solve this puzzle by either adding colored blocks or subtracting colored blocks.

The vast majority of participants solve the problem by adding a whole bunch of color blocks to the equation, when the much simpler, but less intuitive solution was just taking one single block away. And I find that [00:19:00] I am so attracted to additive solution bias in a way that does not serve me. Down to situations as simple as I was looking at my junk drawer the other day and it's such a mess and I was like, you know what I need?

I need to go to the container store and I need to buy a really aesthetic drawer organizer.

Margaret: The solution is always one decorative basket or organizer. We all believe in this.

Amy: This is the decorative basket fallacy.

Margaret: Yes, the decorative basket fallacy.

Amanda Montell: Completely.

Margaret: There's your next one right there, Amanda. Decorative basket fallacy.

Amanda Montell: I know, honestly, one could write a whole book just about how this applies to our homes.

But it did not occur to me until I was literally on the container store website that I should just go through that junk drawer and throw things away. I should just throw that junk away, and so that's a really low stakes example, but it can be applied to so many other things. I am in this book [00:20:00] launch process right now. Thank you so much for having me. It's really stressful, and sometimes I'm feeling out of control of things 'cause I worked so hard on this book and I want people to read it. And I want people to love it. And there are just some things that I have to release. Readers will find the book. I can't force it into their hands. I just have to let go. But when I'm feeling stressed, I feel, you know what you need to do? I need to make one more newsletter post, or I need to do one more linked story on my Instagram or whatever, and none of that, all of that, it's diminishing marginal returns, not to sound like a girl boss, but l'm just like, you know what I need to do in order to feel better? Just take something away, scale back, slow down, it's too much.

And so, yeah, I return to that study all the time because whether you're talking about cults or your junk drawer or your career, it's so useful to be able to understand the fallacies that are informing our decisions because they're not our [00:21:00] fault, but we do have some agency.

Margaret: I want to underline that particularly as so many moms listen to us and that the idea that moms are constantly presented with this fallacy, which is that there is somewhere out there a mysterious box called child self-esteem and someone has a map and someone has a class that will lead you there and you will open it and then your children will have self-esteem and that this fallacy is constantly presented to moms - classes and camps and extracurriculars and are you making the bento box lunches that have little compartments where fruit is shaped like flowers and that there is so much language in motherhood that is: you are not doing enough.

You need to keep adding things. It is your job. And, especially for special needs moms, I think sometimes the idea of: you're the warrior, you're the savior, you're the [00:22:00] Superman who can make it all turn out. Okay. That's not true. Your kid may have things going on that are way out of your control. And I think this is something for the moms listening to really keep picturing that puzzle. And that the world is always telling you more color blocks, super mom. You can figure it out. If you just pour this giant tub of color blocks onto it. And that: is it maybe taking something away?

Putting less pressure on yourself? Because I feel those goosebumps popping up. That speaks to me as a mom, of: you don't have to always do more, but there's a lot of people making a lot of money telling you that you have to do more.

Amanda Montell: Cause they want you to do more in their direction and will directly benefit them.

As we were talking, I just wanted to mention that, I got to work through a lot of stuff regarding my relationship with my own mom in this book, [00:23:00] because the opening, so the opening chapter is about these increasing, intensifying cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement that we see in our culture these days, where a lot of stars, a lot of fans of pop stars, young fans are starting to project almost a maternal child relationship onto their favorite celebrities.

And that's becoming more intense in our society these days. And so that chapter is called, are you my mother, Taylor Swift? And it's about the cognitive bias that underlies these cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement. And what's interesting about that bias, which is called the halo effect, is that as I started reading about it, I realized that I am the unhinged Swifty to my mom's Taylor Swift, or at least I was when I was growing up.

The halo effect describes our tendency to admire one single trait in a person and jump to the conclusion that they must be perfect overall. And this stems from ways that we used to find role [00:24:00] models in our physical communities as ancient humans for survival purposes. But we're now mapping those jumps to conclusions onto our modern parasocial relationships and that is proving pretty destructive for both the subject of our worship and for the fans ourselves. But the original subject of the halo effect was our parental figures.

And so when I was reading about these fan idol dynamics, and I swear I have a point that comes back to motherhood, I was thinking, this reminds me so much of how I treated my mom when I was an adolescent, where I built her up as this perfect god figure. And as soon as I realized she was fallible or didn't live up to these expectations that she didn't even imply, she didn't do anything to suggest that she was perfect.

But I built her up in my head and so many of us build our parents up as perfect in our heads, particularly our mothers who have [00:25:00] a slimmer margin of error in society in general. And the same thing goes for female pop stars. And so when I was an adolescent and she would make some kind of mistake or just human error, I would cancel her like an upset Swiftie essentially. And I'm saying this with love. I have so much respect. I'm literally wearing a Taylor Swift sweatshirt.

Margaret: You're like, Mom, you're problematic, Mom.

Amanda Montell: Yeah. Mom, you are problematic. Why couldn't I get a ticket to your Eras tour, Mom? So while I was writing that chapter, I came across this sentiment that some of your listeners are probably familiar with: the idea of the "good enough mother" that was coined by Donald Winnicott.

That was saying that hypothetically, even if there were such thing as a perfect "bento box kiwi in the shape of flowers" mother who did absolutely everything right, the result of that would be a child who was overly sensitive, overly fragile, not set up for disappointments in life because all they had ever known was this [00:26:00] perfect mom.

And I was thinking, maybe our celebrity mothers, or celebrity pop stars, also just need to be good enough. We need space for our mothers, the subjects of our worship, whether we're talking about our family or, the public eye, we need to make more room for people's fallibility and that goes against this deeply ingrained halo effect.

We humans have done a lot of things that go against our nature that would otherwise be really destructive. So I think in this day and age, when these dynamics are getting more intense because of pop stars, but also because of momfluencer culture, that we need to practice holding space for others' fallibility.

The moms that we see online - momfluencers, female pop stars, whatever, we just need them to be good enough. And that will save us all a lot of suffering, I think.

Margaret: We can all [00:27:00] breathe a little bit easier. We are talking to Amanda Montell and we'll be right back.

Amy: Amanda, let's talk about some takeaways because, as we like to say, we're soaking in it. We get it. So my husband and I, just over the weekend, we were talking about the tragic bridge collapse in Baltimore. And I had already seen, because I am on the internet a little bit too much, immediately, Oh, there it is. There it is. This proportionality bias, because I had read your chapter in your book saying, this is what we do.

It's a huge event. It can't just be a weird accident. And there it was, and then the conspiracy theories are just, "I'm just doing my homework. I'm just asking the questions. You just have to wonder," started to come in and so is the first step in doing a little bit less magical overthinking, noticing that sooner, do we need to resist it actively? What do you think?

Amanda Montell: A hundred percent. So much of it is just simply awareness. [00:28:00] And I find, I'll speak for myself that awareness immediately helps me forgive. It helps me forgive myself. It helps me forgive others because when we don't have an explanation for something that is rooted in facts or empirical studies or critical thinking of any kind.

We do tend to assume the worst. So, many of the chapters in this book were written because I personally needed to work something out for myself because I couldn't understand why I respond to say, clickbait headlines with a fight or flight response that would be more appropriate for getting chased by a predator in the woods.

I was like, what is going on with me? Am I unwell? Am I out of my mind? Or is the world really this scary? Are headlines really this threatening? That was just something that I needed to work out for myself. Same with that sunk cost fallacy chapter. [00:29:00] Same with the halo effect chapter.

Every single chapter of this book, I was just very selfishly being like, I need to understand myself. Because life on earth feels inexplicably painful. I'm okay. I have food in my fridge. I have a warm bed to sleep in, I'm a writer. I'm okay. No one's trying to hurt me. And yet I feel nervous and dreadfilled all the time. And so I just wanted to square that. And I have. I've implemented a lot of the little fun facts and more actionable pieces of advice that I came across while writing the book into my life and that's been helpful, but what's been more helpful than all of that is just simply knowing that there is not something evil about the world.

There is not something inherently nefarious about literally everyone I encounter online. There is not something [00:30:00] truly bananas about me. There is just this clash between our cognitive biases and the world we've created. And so being able to identify even just the 11 cognitive biases in the book, which I think are the ones that are more prominent and having the most negative impact on us right now, that alone has just let me breathe a sigh of relief.

Margaret: Can you talk a little bit about the time meaning matrix? I was just thinking about this as I was... I have all of these same anxieties and panics. And I'm in New York City today and walking around and I had seen there's TikToks about people getting punched in the face and I had seen and I just spent an hour walking around New York City looking at every single person, this is the person who's going to punch me.

This is the person who's going to, and I'm realizing yeah, this is not an abstract thought, the things that you're talking about. I saw two stories about people being punched and I have wasted my entire day [00:31:00] dodging people who I think are about to punch me. Although no one punched me and I bet no one ever thought about it, and so how do we actually break from that?

Amanda Montell: For most of human history, our attention was a perfectly good enough barometer to tell what was dangerous. But now there are just a bajillion more things attempting to claim our attention. We're living in the literal attention economy, so we can't always trust ourselves to know what to panic about anymore, which is just good to know.

So you mentioned the time meaning matrix, which was based on this business writer named Peter Drucker, who wrote many books throughout the 20th century on business management, time management, including 1966's The Effective Executive.

And he coined this idea of the urgent versus important matrix, but specifically in the context of the workplace. [00:32:00] So it can be really hard to know what to prioritize. Is this task urgent, but not important, meaning I need to address it right now, but I don't need to put all of my effort into it. Is this task maybe important but not urgent, so I don't need to address it right away, I can postpone it for later.

So many tasks you'll find are actually neither urgent nor important. Something that can be delegated, or something that doesn't even need to be addressed at all. So I find that coming up with a diagram or a matrix like this can also just be helpful for your daily life. For me, I think about it in terms of urgency and importance, but more so in terms of will this be a good expenditure of my time?

And will this make my life feel more meaningful? Yeah, a news story might be urgent. It might be if it's happening in your town or if it's happening [00:33:00] on your block, but maybe not because as to your point, that punching in the face story, that's clickbait. So that is a sexy story for headlines.

But it turns out that might not be urgent or important. So what is important is to slow down and be able to evaluate instead of just listening to your most instinctive impulses about headlines, because our instincts were not built for headlines. They were built for real threats, physical threats.

So this is, also about trauma too. The word trauma is getting a lot of airplay right now, which is its own double edged sword because while it's amazing that people are talking about pain and mental health, we're also using trauma to describe things that maybe aren't trauma.

So it's, all of these things are a double edged sword, but I guess what I'm trying to get at is that, we are having these really [00:34:00] painful responses that developed for a survival purpose in reaction to things that actually don't affect our survival. And so being able to break that down and think more slowly and think: is this urgent?

Is this important? Is this both? Is this neither? It's just a good tool to be able to move through our ever complicating world.

Margaret: For sure. So when you're having the chased by a bear panic reaction on the subway because you saw two TikToks, it's just, I really thought of it today. This is an example of, let me slow down my thinking and think, the statistical likelihood feels one in one.

But it's probably one in a million, but TikTok has got me thinking it's one in two, at least it's either me or the woman next to me, not the case.

Amanda Montell: BEcause the TikToker is incentivized to make you feel that way, because we are more likely to engage in threatening content, right? if something is negative, because [00:35:00] negative negativity feels more novel. Someone who shares something negative seems like they're in the know. That's according to MIT research. We are naturally gravitating toward things that make us feel scared for a good reason, because historically things that made us feel scared were probably things we needed to pay attention to and react to.

And so, consciously or unconsciously people in media know this, and they want you to engage with their content. And the easiest way to do that is to make you feel scared.

Amy: Amanda, this book is absolutely as entertaining on every page as you are to talk to. It's fascinating. It's the perfect blend for me. There's research, there's studies. Margaret knows how much I love a good study.

Margaret: Lights Amy up, lights Amy up.

Amy: Super funny stories. Taylor Swift stories. Every page is oh yeah, I recognize this. And then you just see the world through new eyes. I love this book. Tell us about your new [00:36:00] podcast.

Amanda Montell: So the new podcast is launching in May. So about a month from now. And I was just not ready to stop talking about the subjects that I can't stop overthinking about, so to speak. And so the podcast is called "Magical Overthinkers" and every week I'm going to choose a sort of buzzy, zeitgeisty, very confounding, potentially anxiety provoking topic from the culture, whether it's narcissism or monogamy or cannibalism.

And I'm going to chat with a brilliant and charismatic scholar, philosophers, psychologists, astrophysicists, asking them the sorts of questions that over only an overthinker would ask. So these sort of thought-spirally type questions that maybe might make me look nuts, but that I ultimately just really want to know.

And fortunately, everyone I've been talking to for this podcast is more than willing to entertain those thoughts. Thought spirals. I'm also [00:37:00] bringing to them thought spirals from my magical overthinkers club, my listeners, my followers on social media. And every episode of the podcast is going to be "Overthinking About Blank," "Overthinking About Blank," "Overthinking About Blank," and it's going to be a lot of fun, really informative, and it launches in mid May.

Margaret: Fantastic. And Amanda Montell's new book, which is called "The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality" is out now. And I assume as they say, you can find it wherever books are sold?

Amanda Montell: That's correct.

Margaret: We know. It's 2024, people. We know how to buy a book. Go do it. Amanda, thanks so much for talking to us today. This was a great conversation.

Amanda Montell: Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for having me.

Amy: Thanks, Amanda.