Podcast Transcription: Amanda Montell

Apr 16

Apr 16 Podcast Transcription: Amanda Montell

This episode, bookseller Bex (they/them) interviewed Amanda Montell (she/her), author of The Age of Magical Overthinking⁠: a deep dive into Big Thoughts. Ever feel like you think too much? Here’s a book about it.

The two talk about cult language, capitalism, and gossiping about your frenemies.

Bex

I'm so thrilled to be talking to you about your newest work, The Age of Magical Overthinking, which I have been describing to my friends as “Thoughts on Thoughts”.

Amanda Montell

Accurate, yeah!

Bex

Right? Yeah, it's all about, you know, thoughts, anxiety, irrationality.

Amanda Montell

It's very meta because I'm overthinking about overthinking.

Bex

Exactly, and I cannot wait to overthink together.

My first question though is very little thinking-necessary, which is what are you reading right now?

Amanda Montell

Ooh! Well, I just finished reading Sloan Crosley's Grief Is for People because I'm actually interviewing her immediately after this call for my podcast! So that's cool.

Bex

I am so excited for you.

Amanda Montell

Thanks, thanks, yeah. She was like a hero of mine, still is for sure. She's like the writer that made me feel like I could write books. So that will be thrilling. I hope I don't say something embarrassing. Anywho, so I just finished reading that. And then the other book that really sticks out to me that I finished reading like a month ago was a galley of Miranda July's new novel [All Fours]. Which was I mean…

Bex

Oh yeah. I read it, too, and oh my god.

Amanda Montell

Listen! Listen! I'm in The Cult of Miranda July, hardcore. I got to go to a preview party in LA for that book where everyone came home with a little PR bag with a galley in it, and I just about died and went to heaven. And it was like a very sort of intimate friendly event, but when I went I brought my copy of No One Belongs Here More Than You, her short story collection, because I was like, “maybe there will be an opportunity to ask her to sign it.” And indeed there was, or at least I created one. And this is so clever: I don't know if you have a signed copy of Miranda July's short story collection, but what she does is when she signs the title page, she puts a comma after the title of the book and then your name. So it says: “no one belongs here more than you, Amanda.”

Bex

I love her. A friend of mine has all four colors that they published that book in.

Amanda Montell

Oh wow.

Bex

And we're doing her event in May and they are like racing home to their parents' house in Delaware to make sure they have all four copies on hand.

Amanda Montell

Oh, that's huge. That's huge. That's Swifty energy.

Bex

It is and you know, who doesn't want to be, as you said, in The Cult of Miranda July. But the Sloane Crosley book, it's so good. I read her first collection of essays in my freshman year of high school and I was like, “oh, I want to move to New York.” And not until we did her event for Grief Is for People did I pull out my high school copy and I remembered that. And I got to tell her that and it's just been a highlight of 2024.

Amanda Montell

Yeah! Dude, totally. I gave myself 60 seconds to fangirl at her, and then, you know, I don't wanna freak her out. So, no, wish me luck.

Bex

She's very cool. Yeah, no, you'll do great.

Amanda Montell

Totally, I mean, Lord knows I've met her in signing lines at book events like, five times. It's just the person that she's always met has been a real geek. So I'm hoping to remedy my reputation with her in exactly one hour!

Bex

I'm sure she'll love you. It's going to be amazing.

I'll just lead into my second first question, which is directly about your own book. And so the subtitle, as we know, is Notes on Modern Irrationality. And it's a lot about cognitive biases, for example: proportionality bias, sunk cost fallacies, zero sum bias, confirmation bias. And one of the first things that struck me while reading about all of these was how so much of that language comes directly from economists and even more so that of capitalism and colonialism. And obviously, you know, anxiety existed well before capitalism. But I'm wondering if you think the language of capitalism helps define anxiety because that's just the language we have or if there's like an alternate blurring of lines between all these different ideas and definitions.

Amanda Montell

Yes, ooh, that's a fun question!

So interestingly, this whole entire field that I'm using as a poetic framework for this book, this field of behavioral economics is just that: it's framed as economics. So when we engage in decision-making, we are constantly making judgments about resources based on our limited time and memory storage and just cognitive abilities.

But it is fascinating that the field is known as “behavioral economics,” and you're absolutely right that so much capitalistic language is applied, maybe even out of turn, to the ways that we make decisions or to the ways that we perceive our own existence. I mean there's one chapter in the book that talks about survivorship bias, or this propensity to focus on successes. Already, we have some capitalistic language there, or positive outcomes while ignoring accompanying failures, and that can skew our perceptions of everything from life and death to results from fitness programs. It applies in so many different contexts. But while writing that chapter in which I document a story of my best friend, who's a young adult cancer survivor, I do talk about how I noticed right away that the language of success and failure, this very capitalistic language, to your point, is so often applied to life and death. If someone is battling cancer – first of all, think of that warlike language. It's framed as a battle that you, you know, survive or fail or surrender to. And if you somehow, you know, if you die, that's perceived as giving up, as waving the white flag. And so, yeah, there's a lot of hyper competitive capitalistic and even warlike language built into so many arenas of life.

In another chapter in which I chronicle overconfidence bias, I talk about how war language so often shows up in the ways that we talk about entertainment. I live in Los Angeles where there are a lot of aspiring entertainers and so you hear so much rhetoric surrounding people “shooting their shot” or “crushing it” and “killing it.” So yeah, no matter what pursuit we're discussing, a lot of the language surrounding it is competitive, capitalistic, and sometimes violent.

Bex

Yeah, that all tracks. Especially just the world, as it always continues to be a reflection on language, which is unfortunate but also interesting.

So speaking of unfortunate things, there was an article on The Cut not long ago that went viral about a financial advisor who fell for a horrifying scam and lost $50,000. Did you read about this?

Amanda Montell

I did not, no. I missed that one!

Bex

Okay, well, so basically that's what happened. She's a financial advisor and got scammed out of $50,000. She details how they scammed her, and it’s pretty terrifying, but no one had any sympathy for her. They were so cruel in the comments, which is not surprising because it's the internet, but I was so surprised because as I was reading it I just had so much empathy for her, and I associated that so specifically with your three books, to be honest. With Wordslut, Cultish, and now The Age of Magical Overthinking, which for the listeners are respectively about the languages of feminism, cults, and irrationality. And thinking of the three of those together honestly made for a really easy connection to understandings of empathy for me. Like, if I could understand the languages across all three of those subjects, I can also understand the language of a scam and of isolation and have empathy for its victims. And I especially think Cultish is the biggest one. As I was reading, I was like, “oh, wow, all these other cults I've fallen for.”

And so I was wondering if you could talk a bit, both how these languages are in dialogue with each other and if studying them has altered your own understanding of empathy.

Amanda Montell

Ooh. I've gone into every single one of my projects feeling completely different about my relationship to the subject matter than I felt once I finished writing. I feel at first I always felt a little bit smug, especially with Cultish and The Age of Magical Overthinking. You know, I went into writing this book about the language of cults from Scientology to SoulCycle feeling like, “oh I would never be susceptible to a group like this.” People in NXIVM or other sort of new agey metaphysical cults or financial cults, any kind of cults that you can think of those really classic, “get the fuck out level cults,” as I would call them on my podcast, Sounds Like A Cult. I thought to myself, I would never fall to the charms – the linguistic charms of one of these pernicious gurus. And then as I continued my reporting, I realized there is a cult for everyone, and it's not just these sort of, you know, gullible ignoramuses that fall prey to these groups. It's truly all of us in some capacity, no matter where we are along the cultish spectrum, especially during this time of intense tumult and social turbulence.

One of the most humbling discoveries I made while researching that book that I got to dive into much more in depth in The Age of Magical Overthinking was this notion of The Cult of One. I myself have not been involved with a lot of cult-like groups in my life, but I keep finding myself in these sort of toxic cult-like one-on-one relationships in which the language and the techniques of influence are so, so similar. And so I was able to explore that from a more personal angle, a behavioral economics angle, in my latest book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, talking about how you could end up staying for years longer than makes sense to yourself or anyone else in a relationship that doesn't serve you because of the sunk cost fallacy, which is our penchant to believe that resources already spent on an endeavor justify spending even more, which you could imagine can apply to both cults and one-on-one relationships that might be considered cult-like. And so as I, you know, continue sort of – oh my, god, I came across this meme the other day that was like, “the most fun a girl can have is making connections, drawing parallels, crafting venn diagrams.” You know, I'm just like, “yup, there I am at home.”

But yeah, you know, I think each of these books has allowed me to make more illuminating connections between language, culture, and power. And I find that being able to understand these concepts from an empirical perspective, to be able to read through the literature on language and gender, or cultish language, cultish influence, human decision making, how our innate mysticisms, these cognitive biases are clashing with the information age, it's just helped me understand seemingly irrational or misogynistic or cult-like behavior that I could otherwise write off as evi. And being able to understand what's motivating it culturally, psychologically, linguistically has just helped me see the humanity in us all and in myself. I'm constantly reckoning with this balance between logos and pathos, like how scientific studies can actually help me be more of a feeler, more empathetic, more human. And that's a process that I don't think I'll ever tire of.

Bex

Yeah, oh, well I love that. Speaking of tumult, I don't mean to keep doing transitions based on unfortunate things. But the chapter that I think I've been thinking about the most, the two chapters are honestly, are about sunk cost fallacy and also “Time to Spiral”, which is about the recency illusion, which just to use the definition you put in your book was a term coined in 2017 by Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky, and is basically the tendency to assume that something is objectively new because it's new to you. And I really loved the example used in the book from back in 2021, when we got confirmation that UFOs are real and could come for us any day now. And everyone was like, “oh my, god, their presence is imminent and must be prepared.” And then nothing happened. And we only thought it was urgent, despite the footage being decades old, because it was suddenly new to us.

And then conversely you discuss how movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter brought a new sense of urgency to the ever-present issues of misogyny, racism, police brutality, and colonial violence, which have all existed for millennia but were given a new and necessary life because to some people, i.e. the people in charge, they felt recent.

So I've been thinking about this cognitive bias in particular several times a week because I feel like it's so relevant to our current predicament which is The Doom of the World. And I mean like climate change, war, genocide, more police brutality, reproductive rights, trans health care, the list is infinite. I'm wondering if understanding this recency illusion has been helpful in demarcating senses of urgency across the issues because just because they've always been here doesn't mean they're not urgent, and just because they're urgent doesn't mean they've always been here.

Amanda Montell

So I think there's an incredible amount of stress and restlessness surrounding how to process so many of these collective traumas that we're exposed to on a day to day basis, some of which are more abstract because they're happening far away, even though they're violent and awful. And our systems of empathy can fully appreciate that they are far away. And then there are tragedies that are much more immediate and directly affecting us. And it can feel really difficult and confusing to know how to direct our attention.

This very validating 2019 study by some scientists at the Technical University of Denmark found that over the last century, the sheer quantity of knowable information has actually caused the global attention span to shrink. One of the study's authors, the scientist named Sune Lehmann, said, “It seems that the allocated attention time in our collective minds has a certain size, but the cultural items competing for that attention have become more densely packed.” So this sort of cognitive exhaustion paired with our attraction to newness, novelty, like you mentioned, our proclivity to panic in the face of a piece of news that might not even be objectively new but is new to us, these things in combination cause us to flip-flop between topics at quickening intervals. So after an initial rush of pressure, a headline, a piece of breaking news, people tend to let go of the last issue that seemed that seemed important as quickly as they embraced it, as quickly as they latched onto it and panicked about it. The tricky thing is that not everyone has the privilege of redirecting their attention to the most sort of au courant problem because the previous one might still be an active emergency for them.

The point in all of this is essentially that not simply to survive, but to make the best of our ever complicating world we have to remember that when assessing the salience of some kind of contemporary concern or trauma or tragedy, we can't always trust our attention as the most reliable barometer. Because tragedies have become news. And that wasn't always the case. It was really only in the 80s and 90s with the dawn of 24/7 news cycles that tragedies and crises became not simply something to address and prepare for, but something to latch our attention onto. And so, not to sound conspiratorial, but media companies -- media companies that I've worked for-- know this, even on an unconscious level, and they will exploit clickbait strategies and the like to take advantage of our innate biases toward panicking and toward newness. And that can be certainly destructive to our mental health and also counterproductive when it comes to assessing what our true priorities are and how to help in crisis-ridden situations.

So I hope that meandering answer provided some clarity. But yeah, the recency illusion is something that I will never stop thinking about, either. I find that it's constantly coming up. Even when I log on to YouTube, there's a section on YouTube that just says, “new to you.” It's like this algorithmically suggested row of videos that's all old, like 12 year-old videos about something tragic that happened in a foreign place. I was about to say before I was born, I'm older than the age of 12! But I have the same panic response when I see those videos and YouTube knows that. And so yeah, it's fascinating and I think helpful to become aware of the ways that say our penchant for seeing something that is new just to us, but that we perceive as objectively new and thus worthy of panic, how those innate mysticisms are guiding our behavior.

Bex

Yeah, that is helpful because that was one thing when I was reading this whole thing, I was like, “okay, but, what do I do with this? Now that I'm aware. This is not just me. I'm not that special,” in the best way.

Amanda Montell

Yeah, totally. No, I actually think that's really important because learning about these cognitive biases has been soothing for me because in a way I have something to blame, you know? I'm like, oh, it is these ancient mental shortcuts, these mental magic tricks that were once really, really useful in another time, another set of circumstances in helping us make psychologically efficient decisions that are now just not working so well anymore all the time with our ever-complicating, hyper-technological and yet disconnected world.

And yet, just because they're not necessarily our fault doesn't mean that we should surrender to them, you know. There are plenty of natural human habits that are not good for society that we learn how to mitigate. And I think this is one of them. And I was careful not to pitch this book as self-help, and I would never attempt to write a self-help book because I don't know the answers all the time, but I did try to provide some sort of serviceable nuggets of wisdom in each chapter so that we can know how to move forward with this awareness of these biases.

Bex

Yeah, and I think you absolutely did that. As I call it, “Thoughts on Thoughts.” I've been having so many thoughts and just moving forward, like, truly I've been thinking about recency illusions so much because it's like, “oh yeah, the world's been doomed for forever. I don't have to have a panic attack about it every day.”

Amanda Montell

Yeah, it's been doomed for forever in so many different ways. It is so helpful for me to zoom out on humanity whenever possible, because I feel like looking backwards can help us make predictions, it can help us cope with the present. And, you know, certainly looking backwards on how the human mind has responded to its surroundings has made today's circumstances make a lot more sense.

Bex

Yeah, for sure.

Bex

I am interrupting myself to bring you the Overthinking Thoughts of My Coworkers!

Alexa, what do you overthink?

Alexa

I overthink every email I have ever sent to somebody older, smarter, cooler, better, more literary, and just superior to me in every way.

Bex

What’s your favorite sign off?

Alexa

It really depends. There’s so many and there’s so many ways to be bad. I love a “cheers,” but that’s really British and who am I? So… If I really want the person to be close with me or to think that we’re already close, like some subliminal messaging, I’ll do an “xx”.

Bex

So only kisses? No hugs?

Alexa

I mean, I’m very professional! Obviously!

Bex

Josie, what do you overthink?

Josie

Okay, let’s go. My purpose. Am I enough? Am I doing enough? Am I working enough? Am I resting enough? You know, just the dailies.

Bex

Arianna, what do you overthink?

Arianna

I’m currently overthinking the answer to this question.

Bex

I am overthinking the fact that I even bothered asking it to my coworkers at this point, so…

Arianna

Yay!

Bex

So my last question is one that comes up a lot at work, which is a chapter on “The Shit Talking Hypothesis,” where you discuss zero sum bias and spontaneous trait transference, which I will very quickly define for the listeners at home (and please interrupt me if I get these wrong):

Zero sum bias is the false assumption that another party's gain directly results in your own loss.

So the idea of someone else is succeeding, you are inherently failing. And spontaneous trait transference (and again, I'll use your example from the book) means if you are shit talking about someone in person, and not on the internet, for being tacky and unfunny, the listener will start thinking of you as tacky and unfunny. And there's so many studies that back that up, which I think is so fascinating. But the reason this comes up a lot at work, of course because it's retail, we're gossiping. You talked a bit about this on an episode recently of Normal Gossip, which – the store is a big fan of that podcast and just loves the gossip of the plebes of the world.

But as the foremost expert on shit talking, at least between the two of us, do you know of any ways to combat this transference bias while maintaining the ability to talk shit?

Amanda Montell

Oh 100% yes, yes, yes. Okay, well first of all, I love the idea of throwing people under the bus in the service of a bit, you know? Like, it's all for the bit, but the first person I always aim to throw under the bus is myself. And I find that the art of self-deprecation and sort of gossiping in a way that frames yourself as sort of the village idiot of the story tends to be my favorite strategy. But also, you know, gossip-- I wrote about gossip from a more linguistic-y and empirical perspective in Wordslut, and gossip obviously has a negative connotation, and there are gendered undertones there. Gossip is seen as sort of frivolous, something that the girlies engage in the bathroom because they have nothing else to talk about.

And truthfully, gossip, whether you call it that or whether you call it locker room talk, it serves so many different purposes. And among women, it's often there to circulate information, establish in-group values, establish those who might be violating in-group values, to keep others up to date, whisper network, you know? And so it's not always truly there to disparage a third party for no reason. And so I find that, you know, we don't have to be truly too hard on ourselves for shit talking because it does have all of these sort of like pure and more practical, it does have all of these sort of more pure and practical motives.

But yeah, no, I absolutely love a gossip moment, clearly. You will notice though, that on that episode of Normal Gossip, when asked to bring a piece of juicy, spicy gossip to the table, I did bring one in which I was the dumb ass in the equation and sort of everyone else looked great. And so yeah, I do find that you know, in Mean Girls, what does she call it? Word vomit. As [Cady] was constantly word vomiting about Regina George, she just looked increasingly plastic. And so when we feel the need to shit talk – particularly [about] people who we aren't even in competition with, right? Like this is something that I talk about in that chapter is sort of the patriarchy, in a very insidious way, setting up a zero-sum bias game for women and marginalized genders. You know, there's this idea that women and other, you know, minoritized genders are constantly in conflict with one another. There are only so many spots for them to succeed in this world, and that, you know, leads to the classic sort of Real Housewives idea of, like, women being pitted against one another. But there's some truth there, you know, women often — well, actually, all of us, we tend to feel the most competitive and the most sort of zero sum, scarcity minded when it comes to people who we have the most in common with. And that's kind of ironic because those people realistically could be our closest friends, the people that we have most in common with. We don't actually need to see them as our direct competition the way that we might have seen them 20,000 years ago within a small community where mates and food really were zero sum, really were in limited quantities.

So, yeah, I do find that gossip is fun. It serves a great purpose, but we don't, you know-- it is important to sort of interrogate why you're sharing a certain piece of word vomit in any given moment. Is it an attempt to, you know, boost your own light by dimming another person's light, to use a sort of the new agey cliche, or is it to trade information? Is it for the bit? And those questions are worth asking yourself.

Bex

I love that. I love not only an excuse to keep talking shit, but like, it's my right to keep [doing so]. It is my evolutionary right to continue.

Amanda Montell

Yeah, well, and also, we love books, we love language. Language is our power tool. Some people like to get into the gym and box together and that's their connection, that's their catharsis. If we're sedentary reader-writer types, what do we have? Our boxing gloves are the tongue.

Bex

I love that. Thank you so much. This was incredible. I can't wait to have this book come out and make everyone else read it and talk about it. So besides The Age of Magical Overthinking, is there anything else of your own work or of other people's works that you'd like to plug at the end here?

Amanda Montell

Oh, yeah, of course. Oh my God. Well, I actually am collaborating with a lot of people whose work I admire for this book tour. I keep joking that it's the Overthinkers Book Tour because I was like, no, a little traditional bookstore event, that's boring. I wanna throw this extravagant variety show with podcasters and drag performers and musical guests.

And so I do want to plug that because if anyone listening lives in or around Brooklyn, Boston, or Philly, I'm throwing this hullabaloo where much gossip will be spilled, so much pop culture gossip. I'm giving a PowerPoint presentation on parasocial relationships and we're going to spill some tea about celebrities during these shows, but I'm having so many exciting special guests for the Brooklyn show. I'm having Kira and Griff from the podcast, Petty Crimes, which is such a fun show, as well as some drag and burlesque performances. And then speaking of Normal Gossip, in Philly, Kelsey McKinney from Normal Gossip is gonna be my special guest. And I have some incredible guests for my Boston show as well, including the brilliant science writer Sasha Sagan, the podcaster Meredith Goldstein, more drag, more burlesque, more music. So if anyone is interested in having a real hootenanny with me on this tour, you can find info for it at amandamontell.com/events..

Bex

I'm a sucker for a PowerPoint at an event. I'm just like yeah, let's Where are the transitions? I want them.

Amanda Montell

LISTEN. Oh, listen, this is gonna be good. The aesthetic is very like 90s-Lisa Frank-collage vibes. It's gonna be really cute, really spicy. I would love for anyone listening to come hang.

Bex

Well, thank you so much for being here and chatting and deep diving and it's been such a pleasure.

Amanda Montell

Oh, the pleasure is exclusively mine.

Sources Mentioned:
The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley
All Fours by Miranda July
Amanda Montell and Isa Medina’s podcast Sounds Like A Cult
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
The Cut article “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed it to a Stranger”
Wordslut by Amanda Montell
Cultish by Amanda Montell
A meme about the most fun a girl can have
Technical University of Denmark’s study titled “Abundance of information narrows our collective attention span”
The podcast Normal Gossip
The 2004 film Mean Girls, directed by Mark Waters and written by Tina Fey, based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalnd Wiseman
The podcast Petty Crimes
The science writer and podcaster Sasha Sagan
The writer and podcaster Meredith Goldstein