Amanda Montell explains why everyone is guilty of "Magical Overthinking"

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Kat Johnson: Hi, listeners. This is Audible Editor Kat Johnson, and my guest today is Amanda Montell. Amanda is a bestselling author, linguist, and podcast host whose new audiobook, The Age of Magical Overthinking, explores modern day delusions—from manifesting and misinformation to celebrity worship and astrology—as only she can. Welcome, Amanda.

Amanda Montell: Thank you so much for having me.

KJ: Thank you so much for being here. I'm such a big fan of your work, from your first audiobook, Wordslut, to your 2021 bestseller, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, which certainly shares some themes in common with The Age of Magical Overthinking. I think part of the reason I'm drawn especially to these last two books is that you have a fascination with these kind of zeitgeisty obsessions, but you're not quite a true believer in them yourself, and I trust you to guide me through the looking glass in this very grounded, critical way, while also being very entertaining at the same time.

AM: I really appreciate that. I'm so glad that that's how the book comes across. That's definitely what I hoped listeners would get from it.

KJ: Absolutely. I'm curious if you consider yourself a skeptic when it comes to this stuff, or if there's another way you like to put it. What's your relationship to these phenomena?

AM: You know, it’s so funny, whenever I go into one of these projects, especially Cultish and this book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, I always do go in with sort of this sense of smugness, you know? I think a lot of us like to think that we aren't susceptible to misleading information or the charms of a cult leader or cognitive biases. We somehow go in thinking that we're the exception, or some of us do. And all of these books and the research process, it humbles me every single time, because by the end of Cultish, I was more certain than I'd ever been in my life that I am just as susceptible to cultish influence as anyone else. It just might have a different flavor or a different aesthetic when I'm attracted to it. And then at the end of this book, I realized that my mind works just as mystically and irrationally as the next person that I might write off as some kind of delusional dingdong [laughs]. And so, that whole process has been important and humbling and very grounding.

But also, yeah, I do still consider myself a skeptic. I grew up in a household of scientists, so I always have that skeptical wink or twinkle in the back of my brain telling me, “Question all things at all times,” while at the very same time, knowing that the human experience is about surrendering and engaging in things that aren't perfectly rational sometimes. So, it's all about that kind of balance of head and heart.

KJ: I'm so glad to hear you say that, because I had the same experience with Cultish that I did with The Age of Magical Overthinking, where I was drawn in by a little bit of a salacious topic. I felt like, “Oh, I'm going to get smarter and I'm going to find out how other people fall into these situations.” And then the deeper I got, the more I was like, "Wow, none of us are exempt. This affects all of us." And I was curious if that's something you do purposefully as you go or if that's just my experience, and it sounds like we're on the same page there, so that's really fascinating and good to know.

AM: I really enjoy the feeling of bringing the reader along for the same ride that I've gone on. And it's so funny, whether I'm writing these books or doing my podcast, I've found that listeners tell me with love, or readers tell me with love, that they feel a little bit hashtag “attacked” by some of the subject matter that I cover by talking about the cognitive bias underlying cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement, and talking about that in the context of Swifties. I do talk about behavioral economics and psychology and linguistics in not the safe remove of academia, but in the intimacy of pop culture and everyday life. And so it's at once relatable but sometimes a little too close. But hopefully in a good way.

KJ: Absolutely. Your writing is very engaging and funny, and you make these kind of social-psychological concepts very accessible. What I also think is great is your work is often so personal. I know in Cultish at least part of your interest in cults comes from your father's experience living with Synanon. And in The Age of Magical Overthinking, you share a lot of personal anecdotes, but I was especially interested in your boyfriend that you call Mr. Backpack in the chapter “A Toxic Relationship Is Just a Cult of One.” I'm curious, especially as someone who lives in LA and is so close to all this stuff, what was the personal experience that drove you to explore magical overthinking? Was it one piece of contemporary irrationality that you couldn't stop thinking about, or was it a confluence of all these things where you started to notice a pattern and thought, “This is a book”?

AM: It was really a combination of everything you just named, because on a sort of high level I was thinking, “How strange that we're living in this so-called Information Age, and yet life and other people only seem to be making less sense?” You know, life certainly doesn't seem to feel any better with more information. And that clash or that tension was really curious to me, and at the very same time, I found that I had engaged in so many behaviors and decisions that didn't even make sense to me. So it's like, other people's behavior in this day and age seems inexplicable. My own behavior seems inexplicable. What is the root of all this?

"I always have that skeptical wink or twinkle in the back of my brain telling me, 'Question all things at all times,' while at the very same time, knowing that the human experience is about surrendering and engaging in things that aren't perfectly rational sometimes."

Really the idea to write about irrationality through the lens of cognitive biases came from some of the research that I was doing for Cultish. So, that book is about the language of cults from Scientology to Soul Cycle, as you know, and so it's exploring this idea of cultishness along a wide spectrum. But as I was kind of looking into the linguistics of that, I kept coming across all of this really fascinating psychology and behavioral economics research that made mention of some of the more well-known biases, like confirmation bias and sunk-cost fallacy. And that stuff was certainly explaining the cultish behavior that I was looking into for that book, but sort of more urgently and more relatably, it was definitely explaining some of the more everyday behaviors that I was witnessing in other people, in the zeitgeist, and my own life.

You mentioned me living in LA, and yeah, I couldn't help but notice how odd it was that people with master's degrees, like really respectable people in this town, still truly and sincerely base their social calendars on Mercury's position in the cosmos. I think a lot of us are neighbors with or related to people who might, I don't know, opt not to get vaccinated because someone on their TikTok For You page wearing billowy pants and a crocheted top said that that would downgrade their DNA.

And so that type of behavior that I was noticing was really odd. But then, you mentioned that “Toxic Relationships” chapter—having engaged in so much irrationality in my own life, like my decision to spend seven formative years of my life in a relationship that I knew was bad for me, that felt like a cult of one, of sorts. And yet I kept justifying it to myself. And after I got out of that relationship, I beat myself up about that for years. And as it turns out, all of these behaviors, from the broadest to the most personal, could kind of be explained with cognitive biases.

KJ: As someone who kind of came to your work through Cultish and through my love of true crime, I think this is so interesting too. Because I think true crime is shifting a lot, but I think toxic relationships are kind of the new true crime in general. And so this is a great overlap for your audience, and something that can really help people, because that's so relatable.

AM: Totally! And there's obviously been a mainstreaming of therapy language, for better and for worse. There are pros and cons to that, of course, but I think on the positive side, people are finally able to recognize and label their own pain or mistreatment that they're experiencing, and that's why terms like narcissism have become more popular and entered everyday discourse. I think people are interested in examining their relationships and seeing how they can feel better in life in general. That's what I hope to do with this book is use empirical studies and science and things like that in a more personal context to just help soothe all of the ennui and confusion and languishing that so many of us are feeling right now.

KJ: Right. I mean, yeah, these neologisms like “gaslighting” and “love bombing,” these are buzzwords, but they really do help label feelings that people are sharing and enable them to talk about them. You brought up Cultish and how it explores cults as a spectrum, which is a really interesting facet of that audiobook and also your podcast, Sounds Like a Cult. I'm curious, you have kind of defined cults as, some can be bad enough to have that “Get the F-- out” label that you give them on the podcast, while others are more benign. I'm wondering, are the delusions that you explore in this book something that you would put on a spectrum, and if so, what are the most dangerous ones?

AM: Yeah, so the reason why these cognitive biases, these like mental magic tricks that we play on ourselves, developed in the first place is because they help us make efficient decisions. The human mind is not perfectly rational—we're not robots. Rather, it's resource rational, so we make the best of reconciling our finite time and limited memory storage and distinct craving for events to feel meaningful. That is very, very human and a key goal of our brains. We reconcile all of these things by jumping to conclusions. And so that process of jumping to conclusions might involve, I don't know, finding a role model by seeing one quality in them and then assuming that they're perfect overall and that that would be a good person to align with for survival purposes. And that developed into a cognitive bias called the halo effect. Or we might jump to a conclusion that, because something is new to us, because something is claiming our attention and we're noticing it, that it must be objectively new, and thus urgent and worthy of panic. That would develop into a cognitive bias called the recency illusion.

So, back in the day in human history, our hunter-gatherer era, these cognitive biases were really, really helpful at making sense of the world enough to survive it. But these cognitive biases haven't gone away, and they're clashing with the Information Age in a way that can be really painful and sometimes super destructive. I think some of the cognitive biases that I write about in the book that have the most high-stakes and deleterious consequences might be something like overconfidence bias. You mentioned you're a true crime fan. I cover overconfidence bias in a chapter called “The Scammer Within.” Because overconfidence bias is, again, one of these biases where we're like, "Oh, other people enjoy overconfidence. I'm a normal person. I loathe myself" [laughs]. But we actually all systematically overestimate our abilities, overcredit ourselves with positive outcomes, and in a really high-stakes context, like business or government or space travel, overconfidence can have really crushing effects, really devastating life-or-death effects. So that's one that comes to mind.

"That's what I hope to do with this book is use empirical studies and science and things like that in a more personal context to just help soothe all of the ennui and confusion and languishing that so many of us are feeling right now."

But even something as pedestrian as confirmation bias can, during fraught times like election seasons and during times when social media platforms are algorithmically serving us only what we want to see, and sometimes that's misinformation or even disinformation, these cognitive biases just combine with technology and modern life in ways that aren't always so helpful.

KJ: Yeah, that overconfidence chapter, specifically, I was feeling like I have often thought maybe I'm drawn to these con artist stories because I have imposter syndrome and I want to role-play as someone who doesn't deal with that. But then the more I got into that chapter I was like, "Huh. We all have overconfidence bias. Now I get it." The audiobook also makes the point that even when people are very aware of the biases at play, they find them hard to avoid. You talk about your experience creating viral content as a beauty editor and how recency bias plays into making those stories feel more urgent and clickable. And then you note that even the people who are behind the content are susceptible, and you write—I love this sentence—you say, "No one fretted more over bloat and buttne than the beauty website CEO" [laughs]. And I just think that's funny because of the word buttne. But also, what hope, then, does the average person have to evaluate this kind of content more rationally when everyone is feeling these primal biases?

AM: Well, human beings have actually become really good at resisting our worst impulses. I'll say this, while I was working in beauty and generating these clickbait headlines and framing truly non-problems like wrinkles and, yeah, buttne, acne on your butt, like framing these total non-issues as these urgent perils worthy of addressing and buying products to solve—like totally, it was my job to do that. But I wasn't actually aware of how clickbait exploits our deeply ingrained cognitive biases like the recency illusion. I actually didn't know. It was my job to take advantage of such science but I didn't know that I was doing that. Now that I am aware, even though these biases are so deep-rooted that I couldn't eradicate them, it is really, really helpful to have the awareness because then you can sort of take a pause, notice that impulse in yourself, and maybe decide to make another choice.

One example of how I've really, truly, actionably applied some of these biases to my decision-making is in that sunk-cost fallacy chapter, the one about my ex-boyfriend and toxic relationships. I discovered this really interesting study about additive versus subtractive solutions. So, we as human beings, especially those of us who grow up in consumerist societies, are wont to solve problems by adding variables to the equation. So, let's say you open your junk drawer and you're like, "Oh, my God, this is such a mess. There's so much detritus in here." Your instinct might be, “You know what I need to do? I need to go to the Container Store or I need to go on Amazon and order myself some drawer organizers or a beautiful acrylic drawer situation for my office. That'll help me organize all of this junk so that it's not ruining my life.” When truly the much simpler and more effective solution would be to just throw that junk away. As humans, we are naturally inclined to want to add, add, add gadgets, apps, products, human beings to our life in order to solve our problems, even though a much simpler and more efficient solution would be a subtractive approach.

I encounter this all the time. I mean, I am confronting this right now planning my book tour and doing press and stuff like that. Whenever I'm feeling insecure about my career or how everything's going, I'm like, "You know what I need to do? I need to add another moderator for this one event, or I need to add this to my plate." When sometimes the best solution is to scale back, you know? Like, focus more, in a more considered way, on fewer things. Less is more. And that ends up actually being more effective. Literally businesses have been undone by adding too many cooks to the kitchen, by adding too many employees, scaling too quickly. Again, this is also influenced by growing up in a capitalist society, but being aware of that additive versus subtractive bias and that study has had a real effect on my life.

KJ: That's so interesting. I would have thought it was our capitalist tendencies, but a lot boils down to this additive subtractive bias. You have a background in linguistics, as your fans will know. So much of your work is about the sneaky power of language to reflect social dynamics and quite literally shape reality. And you yourself are such a lively and engaging writer. I just want to know what drew you to linguistics and how it's shaped your own writing.

AM: Well, gosh, I'm not even sure, because I was such a chatty kid. My parents are these lovely but demonstrably less talkative academics. And then I came out this just explosively loquacious, dramatic kid, and I was always really interested in language and how the use of a certain word or even a certain dialect or register could completely change how people perceived you. I was a theater kid, so I loved mastering different accents. And I was attached at the hip to my thesaurus. When I got my first thesaurus it was literally for my 10th birthday. I was like, "This is my religious text."

I was just always really drawn to language. It felt really magical to me. I didn't know that linguistics was a formal field of study until I got to college. And it was really when I started taking sociolinguistics classes, where the intersection of sociology and language lies, that I really kind of came alive, because that's the formal study of how language affects the ways that we move through the world, and how the ways that we move through the world affect language. And those patterns were just endlessly enrapturing to me. So, I feel like even as I move slightly away from the linguistics writing, I hope that my love of language still comes through. And there are some linguistics fun facts in this book, for sure.

KJ: For sure. It's great to talk to you on these topics, because I feel like when you're speaking, I can hear your enthusiasm. And in the audiobook as well, you're narrating. You came back to narrating. You narrated Wordslut, and now you've returned to record The Age of Magical Overthinking yourself, and I'm so happy you did. I really did love Ann Marie Gideon, who read Cultish. I thought she did a fabulous job. But you're very engaged, obviously, in these subjects. And hearing your emotion and hearing what you choose to emphasize has enhanced my experience of the audiobook. I wanted to know if you could share any details about your process and how it went for you.

AM: I would love to. Recording my Wordslut audiobook was like one of the highlights of my whole life. I loved doing that so much. I mean, as I mentioned, and I'm normally more ashamed of this, I was a theater kid, and so I love to be able to bring my writing to life that way. Also because reading my work aloud is a huge part of my writing process. Like, I want each of my sentences to have a certain music to them. I want them to sound right. And I find that if I read a sentence aloud and it doesn't fit right in the mouth, then it probably doesn't work on the page either. I just want the sentences to really move at a clip and sound beautiful and have like a lovely balance of Germanic-rooted words and Romance language-rooted words. I love that aspect of it.

"When I got my first thesaurus it was literally for my 10th birthday. I was like, 'This is my religious text.'"

When it was confirmed officially that I would be able to do my own audiobook for The Age of Magical Overthinking, I was just over the moon. And I had been practicing for so long because, again, I read my work aloud as I write it. And so it really just felt like this full-circle moment. And the process was so much fun. I mean, my audiobook director, Randy, was like a hoot, and Tim was my engineer and we just had a blast together. And the studio where I recorded in LA has been graced by so many people that I admire. Like, Jennette McCurdy recorded her audiobook there, and Miranda July recorded her audiobook there. So many actors that I admire had done ADR stuff there. So it was really cool to be in that space. It was a really cozy, fun space. I just couldn't have loved that process more. And this is a short book, so it's like a little snack of a listen. I think the audiobook is like six hours long, so you know, three road trips and you're done kind of thing.

And then the other really, really special tidbit about the audiobook is that my partner, Casey, who's a character in the book in certain chapters, I write quite a bit about him and I dedicated my whole book to him, he is a composer. And he actually wrote that intro music that you hear at the very start of the audiobook, that really cool, sparkly, witchy minute-long bit of intro music, he composed that, so that was really special too.

KJ: That's so cool! Shoutout to Casey. Great job. He's featured throughout the audiobook, but that is a great tidbit to know. That music is amazing.

AM: He composed my Sounds Like a Cult theme music also. He has such an incredible style musically, and so I love to be able to incorporate that into my audio projects.

KJ: That's awesome. So many writers do read their drafts aloud to hear how they sound, and I love to know you do that too, because it definitely helps it sound very natural and it goes hand in hand with narrating.

AM: Yeah. It's so fascinating to hear how different authors read their work, because some authors are kind of more like whispery and ASMR-ish, and some authors do voices. I feel like my books are so sort of conversational. The audiobook is interesting and very different from the podcast because there's a certain formality to book writing, of course, and so you want to really slow down and treat it with the reverence that it deserves while also making it feel colloquial and like you're kind of just listening to a friend.

KJ: Right. Did you ever feel like when you're recording you want to like ad-lib on the spot, or no?

AM: I spent so much time perfecting every sentence of the book, I would never want to go off the script. I like a good script.

KJ: Yeah, no, agreed. One of the great pleasures for me of The Age of Magical Overthinking is getting even more great recommendations for further listening and reading. You actually introduced me, through this book, to John Koenig's incredible audiobook The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. He invents new words for emotions that are previously unnamed or unrecognized. One of them you talk about is anemoia, the feeling of nostalgia for a time you've never experienced, which is so cool. Can you share with our listeners any other books or podcasts that you're into these days that your fans might want to know about?

AM: Oh, yeah, of course. There are so many books that had a strong influence on this one, and so many that I'm reading and enjoying right now. I guess some of the books that I read while writing The Age of Magical Overthinking that had a big influence on it were, well, tonally, I would say John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed. Probably a lot of listeners have already read that or listened to that. But that one is also a really enthusiastic kind of ode to humanity and the social sciences, but shared in a really personable and funny way. So that book sort of tonally informed some of The Age of Magical Overthinking.

And then there are more academic psychology books that I read that I really enjoyed. Like, there's one called Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by these psychologists named Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris, and I read that for source material for the confirmation bias chapter of the book. And then, oh gosh, I mean, my favorite writer who has had the biggest effect on my writing style in general is Mary Roach. Her books like Stiff and Bonk and Fuzz are some of my favorite books in the whole world. I actually think Stiff, whose subtitle is “The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” and it's a very, very funny science exploration of the science of dead bodies, that's probably my favorite book ever.

Mary Roach actually blurbed this book, which was such a thrill. I really shot my shot with her, and it was so funny. She responded via email in a very voicey email, mind you, like even Mary Roach's emails are a pleasure to read. But she responded to me and she was like, "Amanda," and she says it very, very kindly, but she was like, "You know what? I am so busy right now and have so many commitments right now that I was totally about to turn you down." But I had attached the PDF to the email when I sent my inquiry. She was like, "But then I opened the PDF and I read the first page, and I really like it and I'd love to blurb it." So, that was like so, so exciting. I just really have to shoutout Mary Roach because not only was getting a blurb from her a total thrill, but her writing, I feel like if people read it, especially her style of footnotes, they'll see how much inspiration her writing has had for me.

And, gosh, what podcasts am I listening to right now? Well, I just finished that New York Times and Serial Productions podcast The Retrievals. The one about the nurse who was like stealing morphine and all these women were going through egg retrieval processes without any pain killers and, ah! I just really appreciated the way that that podcast was reported. I don't really listen to podcasts in the style of my own. I listen to like really intense reported podcasts.

But, actually, I am launching a new podcast in conjunction with The Age of Magical Overthinking in the middle of May. It's called Magical Overthinkers, and every episode is going to be like overthinking about blank, overthinking about blank, overthinking about blank. Some very buzzy but thought-spirally topic that we as a society can't stop overthinking about. And I'm interviewing so many fascinating experts, like Dr. Ramani, who's a narcissism expert, and Dr. Ellie Anderson who has a podcast called Overthink. She's a Simone de Beauvoir scholar and we talked about monogamy. I interviewed Sloane Crosley about grief and death in the Information Age, pegged to her new book, Grief Is for People. So, I'm interviewing so many incredible humans for that podcast, and that comes out in May.

KJ: That sounds incredible. I will absolutely listen to that. And I feel you have an infinite number of topics there. I mean, people overthink about everything.

AM: Oh, my God, tell me about it. The spreadsheet of topic ideas is already very long.

KJ: Speaking of that, I love how your work moves so seamlessly between the book and podcast worlds, and you have a book tour coming up that is a great example of that. Tell us more about that.

AM: I would love to invite anyone listening to my book tour. I keep joking it's like The Overthinkers book tour because I was like, "Traditional book tour events, oh, those are so yesterday.” I'm putting together this like extravagant live podcast book variety show. So, yeah, if anyone lives in or around Brooklyn, Philly, Boston, I'm putting on this really, really fun live variety show where there's going to be like drinks and drag burlesque performances and musical guests and podcasters and it's going to be so, so fun. It's kind of like, again, it's the theater kid coming out in me. And I would love to see as many listeners there as possible.

"We have a really, really hard time at changing other people's minds, but we're actually pretty good at changing our own minds. And I think starting there is really where we can generate hope."

KJ: That sounds amazing. I want to go back just to one topic because, early in the conversation we talked about the idea that your work can often kind of sneakily introduce people to the idea that they are also susceptible to these biases or these topics. And you said sometimes people say they feel attacked, and I want to share what I felt attacked by, because I was kind of going along and feeling like, “Okay, like maybe I am subject to overconfidence.” But the one that really got me was the chapter you had on nostalgia, because I'm a person who loves all things old and romanticizes the past. And I know nostalgia is not itself a cognitive bias but it's tied to something called declinism that I learned about through this book. So, I would love it if you could tell us a little more about that and why that's so powerful, especially maybe right now.

AM: Yeah. So, declinism is this bias describing our penchant to believe that things are just getting irreversibly worse and worse and worse in life and it's all downhill from here. And a lot of these cognitive biases actually do have an effective analog, so an emotional equivalent. So, there's a chapter on zero-sum bias. You could equate that to envy. In that way, declinism is connected to nostalgia, which, of course, is our penchant to idealize the past, and like John Koenig said, sometimes we romanticize a past that we never even knew. And, actually, what psychologists who study nostalgia have found is that nostalgia is a really positive and effective coping mechanism. When the present feels painful, we naturally sort of sink into a warm bath of positive memories, and that allows us to generate hope for the future. And that's actually a good thing. But it's really only a good thing when we're romanticizing memories that we actually hold. Memories that are our own.

The trouble is when public figures, politicians, attempt to weaponize something called historical nostalgia or a nostalgia for a time that never even existed, maybe a long-ago time before anyone was born, and they will sort of catastrophize the present in order to paint a picture of some era that was ostensibly the nation's glory days. And then they promise that they and they alone can help to restore the country back to that time. And when the present feels chaotic, unpredictable, painful, even miserable, it becomes much easier for populous leaders, but really folks along the political spectrum, to harness that and then promise that they can return us to a time that we might be nostalgic for, but that time really never even existed.

And so that declinism and the nostalgia that goes with it is responsible for so many phenomena that we see right now, including like the tradwife movement, this very alarming trend on social media that has extended into a lifestyle, an ideology suggesting that women should adopt a more submissive, I guess a stereotypically traditional gender role where they really belong in the kitchen and should serve their husbands. And, you know, the aesthetic of that can actually look really alluring on the surface. Like, you talked about romanticizing the past. I do the same thing, especially the sort of Laura Ingalls Wilder cottage core aesthetic, baking your own bread. Stuff we were doing in the pandemic to sort of return to the earth. But I don't think any of us would realistically rather live in the 1800s or even in the 1950s, but a lot of these tradwives are really perpetuating that false perception of those times in history and suggesting that we really should live as if it were those times. So, you know, nostalgia is a double-edged sword, just like all of the biases I talk about in the book.

KJ: So, as we enter another contentious presidential election, and declinism or not, it does feel like we're in this very volatile environment where the topics that you cover in the audiobook feel even more relevant than ever. What do you ultimately hope listeners take away from The Age of Magical Overthinking?

AM: You know, something that I found while writing the book that seemed discouraging at first but then had a positive side to it, was that we have a really, really hard time at changing other people's minds, but we're actually pretty good at changing our own minds. And I think starting there is really where we can generate hope. So, I like to say that this book has really helped me feel more skeptical of my own irrationalities and compassionate toward other people's.

And I also think that I hope that people walk away from this book feeling more comfortable stomaching the sense of irresolution that has become such a profound part of humanity and may have always been. There's this capitalistic pressure to know everything under the sun, to be right about everything, to solve problems with perfect rationality right away and not have any uncertainty. But that's just impossible. We're human beings, you know? There's always going to be unpredictability, there's always going to be irresolution. We're always going to be a little bit right about things and a little bit wrong about things, and that's true for other people as well. So, I think being able to tolerate cognitive dissonance at times, being able to tolerate irrationality in other people at times, have compassion for it in others and in ourselves is a huge thing I hope people take away from the book. I've seen readers say that the book helped them feel sort of validated during a time when it just feels so hard to exist as a human in the world, but we don't know why. The book kind of helps us understand why.

KJ: That's such a great thought, and it's a great thought to end on. One of the things you talk about in the book is how our desire, our craving, to find meaning is behind a lot of these things. And sometimes that may be an illusion, but there is so much meaning to be found in love and in art, and I think that really comes through in this new book. And I'm so excited for people to hear it, and I'm so glad we got a chance to talk about it today.

AM: Oh, my gosh, thank you so much for having me. This was so much fun. I loved recording the audiobook. I hope people enjoy it.

KJ: I definitely think they will, and it has been such a pleasure to talk to you today. Listeners, The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell is available on Audible now.