Lifestyle
'Magical Overthinking' author says information overload can stoke irrational thoughts
Amanda Montell hosts the podcast Sounds Like a Cult. She’s also the author of Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism.
Kaitlyn Mikayla/Simon & Schuster
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Kaitlyn Mikayla/Simon & Schuster
Amanda Montell hosts the podcast Sounds Like a Cult. She’s also the author of Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism.
Kaitlyn Mikayla/Simon & Schuster
How is it that we are living in the information age — and yet life seems to make less sense than ever? That’s the question author and podcast host Amanda Montell set out to answer in her new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking.
Montell says that our brains are overloaded with a constant stream of information that stokes our innate tendency to believe conspiracy theories and mysticism.
“We grow up hearing certain legends and myths and lore repeated ad nauseum, and we perceive them as true,” she says. “It’s the reason why … I genuinely thought, until I was an adult, that it took seven years to digest gum.” (Despite what you may have heard, bubble gum typically digests the same way as food.)
Montell, who co-hosts the podcast Sounds Like A Cult, says this cognitive bias is what allows misinformation and disinformation to spread so easily, particularly online. It also helps explain our tendency to make assumptions about celebrities we admire.
“We see a pop star whose music we enjoy, and we assume that they must also be worldly, kind, nurturing,” Montell says. “Or we enjoy someone’s fashion sense and we jump to the conclusion that they’re gregarious or maybe they speak other languages — we jump to these conclusions for which there is little or no evidence.”
Montell says that in an age of overwhelming access to information, it’s important to step away from electronic devices. “We are meant for a physical world. That’s what our brains are wired for,” she says. “These devices are addictive, but I find that my nervous system really thanks me when I’m able to do that.”
Interview highlights
On why humans developed cognitive biases
Cognitive biases are these deep rooted mental magic tricks that we play on ourselves. … Cognitive biases developed to help us reconcile our limited time, our limited memory storage, our limited cognitive resources, and our distinct craving for events to feel meaningful during a time when most of the problems that we were contending with every single day were physical. They were less abstract, less complex, less disembodied. And that was true for most of human history. So we developed these shortcuts unconsciously to help us make sense of our environment enough to survive. But now survival is, for the most part, taken care of. At least we’re not being attacked by saber tooth tigers anymore in the way that we were when these biases developed. And yet we’re still relying on them to confront much more complex and cerebral concerns, and that clash is causing a great deal of existential pain. I really think that our innate mysticisms are clashing with this onslaught of information, mass loneliness and almost a capitalistic pressure to know everything under the sun. And this is all happening without our conscious awareness.
On the “halo effect,” in which we jump to conclusions that celebrities are perfect
Once, when [human beings] were living in smaller communities, the halo effect prompted us to make decisions, like seeing someone with large muscles or intact teeth and thinking, “Oh, that person must be a skilled hunter or a skilled fighter, because they’ve avoided disfigurement from battle. That would be a great person to align myself with for survival.” But we’re now mapping this halo effect onto modern para-social relationships involving celebrities, and that’s setting everyone up for psychological failure, because we’re uplifting these celebrities onto a pedestal so high up in the sky that we can’t perceive their humanity anymore. … So when they post something or behave in a way that contradicts the expectations that we’ve cultivated of them, we feel the need to dethrone them, to punish them.
On “thought terminating clichés” and the notion of manifestation
It describes a sort of stock expression that’s easily memorized, easily repeated, and aimed at shutting down independent thinking or questioning. … So a new age thought terminating cliché might sound like something like, “Well, that’s just a victim mindset.” Or “you need to sit with that.” Or “don’t let yourself be ruled by fear.” …
[Manifestation] is its own kind of conspiracy theory, which is an edgy point to make. … We tend to believe naturally, as humans, that big events or even big feelings must have had a big cause. It just makes proportional sense to us. … Where manifestation starts to get a little sketchy, a little grift, a little culty dare I say, is when public figures on TikTok, on Instagram projected the language of capitalism onto it. When you start to take an absolutist approach to this subject matter and make it an ideology, it gets a little sinister. Because then when you start to think about it more surgically, if the fact that you are now gainfully employed and have a romantic partner whereas before that was not the case, is because you manifested it, you created a vision board, you bathed your crystals, you know your mind was in the right place.
Well, the inverse of that is that if you’re sick, poor, unemployed, unlucky in love, well then it must be your fault. And in the post-pandemic era, during this time of incredible tumult, socio-politically, globally, we’re craving someone to tell us how to reclaim some agency. And so I have noticed a generation of grifting manifestation gurus on TikTok and Instagram sweep into the market and promise, “Actually, I have a bespoke proprietary manifestation technique, and if you’re seeing this on your free you page, then it was meant for you. All you have to do is sign up for my $30 a month course, and I will impart this manifestation wisdom onto you. It will change your life. And if it doesn’t, well, that’s your fault.”
On the power of nostalgia
During times of present pain, we tend to sort of bathe in a warm bath of positive past memories as a coping mechanism. Excess nostalgia is a bad thing. It’s what’s causing everyone from Disney adults to MAGA zealots to go blackout drunk on nostalgia and have these complete delusions of the past. That can be really dangerous. But as I continued talking to nostalgia scholars, I realized that what’s called personal nostalgia, or when we romanticize memories from our own life, that’s a really positive thing because it helps us generate hope for the future. It’s engaging us in imagination. The future is unpredictable. We don’t have any artifacts from [the future]. … We do have relics from the past, and that helps us. We cling to those things in order to imagine a future that could feel that good. At the same time, we’re experiencing a glut of this cognitive bias called declinism, which is our proclivity to think that life is just getting irreversibly worse and worse and worse. And it’s all downhill from there. And again, that’s something that we do naturally.
Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
Nephi Craig’s mother is White Mountain Apache and his father is Diné Navajo. He grew up on both reservations.
Ari Carter Craig/Penguin Random House
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Ari Carter Craig/Penguin Random House
Nephi Craig, the founder of the Native American Culinary Association, credits eating, cooking and teaching about Indigenous food with saving his life.
Craig became addicted to alcohol and drugs at an early age. After his first DUI, the judge gave him the option of three months’ probation if he agreed to get a job or go to college. That’s when he enrolled in cooking classes at Scottsdale Community College.
Craig says he initially felt like an “oddball” in the classes because he was unfamiliar with terms like “bistro” and “vichyssoise.” But he also credits the classes with igniting his interest in cooking — and teaching him more about Native foods, including the tomato.
“[When] I came across this info that [the tomato] was native to the Americas, it just brought this really big smile to my face,” Craig says. “As a Native American in Arizona, you don’t really see yourself represented in really anything, let alone cookbooks and culinary school curriculum. So that was a neat point of validation for me that grew into many other interests.”
Craig eventually landed a job at one of Phoenix’s top fine dining restaurants, a goal he’d been working towards for years. But after a period of sobriety, a relapse ultimately cost him the job. He wound up in jail, where he worked in the kitchen and learned to design meals with whatever food was on hand.
“I was bunched in with the other Native Americans. And in jail, we call ourselves ‘chiefs,’” he says. “Banding together to feed, I think it was 7,800 inmates a day, was really eye-opening. It showed me that I was not above or below any style of cooking.”
Over the years, Craig completed nine rehabs and ran away from five others. Now sober, he works as the nutritional recovery program coordinator at the White Mountain Apache tribe-owned Rainbow Treatment Center in Whiteriver, Ariz., which serves people recovering from substance abuse. In 2021, he opened Café Gozhóó, a restaurant on the reservation that’s a place for the community to eat and talk. His new memoir is Our Knives Will Save Us: Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef.
Interview highlights
On the ubiquity of Native American food
For major American holidays like Thanksgiving, everyday staples like turkey, corn, squash and cranberries — those are all important Indigenous foods. And when people ask me what recipes or what ways do we prepare Native foods differently, or the question comes up, how come I haven’t heard of a Native American restaurant, or why are there no Native American cookbooks? I usually will say, “Well, you’ve been eating Native American foods and cuisine since as long as you can remember. It’s just that the stories are not told.”
All of American cuisine, every region in the United States is built on the landscapes or the ancestral terroir of Native American food and food traditions. So you can say Boston baked beans, barbecue in the American Southwest. … The hunting and fishing and agricultural bounty of the Northwest. All of these landscapes inform our diets as everyday Americans. So when we think about how we prepare different ingredients, I think it’s pretty straightforward and simple. We like to roast them, simmer them, turn them into pies just like everyone else sometimes. But Native foods have been there the whole time.
On why frybread isn’t Indigenous
It’s not an Indigenous food. It has this lasting legacy with us and when you study how foods were distributed once people were imprisoned, and foods that were distributed required a ration card, and you might get flour, some dried beef, maybe some rice and potatoes, maybe some coffee and sugar. Ration lists varied from place to place, but they were pretty much always going to contain flour and lard, and so frybread emerges, some say in the Southwest. And there’s big debates about where and who did it first, but if you look across all of Native America from Florida to New York to the Great Plains to the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest, every tribe has frybread as a result of military food rations and that grows into these food traditions that are a part of our reality today. I teach it in a way that hopefully can promote responsibility and food choices, not to take it away, but to be aware.
On working at Mary Elaine’s, a high-end French restaurant in Phoenix
That place really built me up into a very strong, young chef. I was an entremetier on the meat station, which means I cook all the vegetables and do all the garnishes. And I became the saucier and the guy that cooks the meat on the meat station. And to be in Arizona, a very meat and potatoes state, it was the busiest station in that kitchen. And I realized how strong I was. And it was beautiful, best of everything. … So it really meant a lot to me. And when I lost that opportunity because of a relapse that crept in and took over, it was heartbreaking. I did not have the words to say it then, but it was a debilitating loss. That I took maybe five, 10, 15 years to process.
On selling his prized Japanese knives for alcohol
Addiction strips away everything slowly. It’s this terrible, terrible affliction that just causes you to devalue yourself and all of your belongings. … These knives were special because I had got them on a trip to Japan in 2007, where I prepared a seven-course tasting menu of Western Apache cooking and cuisine at the Imperial Hotel of Osaka. So I cherished these knives because they were like samurai swords. They were made by a knife maker whose ancestors made samurai swords and were samurai. And I brought them back to the States with me and I still have one of them with me, but I sold those other ones and it was terrible.
On experiencing sexual abuse as a kid
I included this part of my life not as the sole cause of addiction and dependency but a contributing factor. … I never told anyone about the sexual assault I encountered when I was 10 years old. I was just a little kid. My worldview was that it happened to me and it was my fault. My worldview is that no one’s going to believe me. So I just kept it in. And when I kept it, it festered and grew into this rage and anger and shame. And so when I talk about sexual abuse in my story, it’s not to point the finger at it, but I had to really take a long time to come to terms that I was a victim of that, and it doesn’t determine who I am.
On seeing a lot of alcohol addiction on Native reservations
As Indigenous people, we experience oppression differently. We experience being an American citizen differently. We experience capitalism, imperialism and colonialism differently. The systems that enable those three monsters were not designed and built by us. And as Native American peoples, we’ve inherited a legacy of historical trauma and colonial violence. So it’s not that we are different biologically, it’s that we have a different legacy in encounters with colonial violence in America. That’s what I feel is one of the root causes of this multi-dimensional monster that is addiction.
On why he has a Mormon name (Nephi)
All my life, I always encounter these really big, complicated web of American history and our lifelines as Native American people. So how my family encounters organized religion and the LDS Church is when they were small, my dad is out in the Navajo Nation, there were Mormon missionaries trying to convert people all over the Southwest and on the Navajo Nation, and the same thing in Whiteriver on the Apache rez. And so my parents were both placed on the placement program, which is where in the ’50s and ’60s and into the ’70s, young Native American kids were taken from their homes and placed in Mormon homes in Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, anywhere there was a high population of Mormon families. And my parents were essentially raised in the Mormon church in a Mormon community till they graduated high school. And that’s a big part of our life. And so when the three of us, me and my brothers come, into the picture, they decide to name me Nephi. … It’s a lot of complicated elements in how identity forms and for me that’s one dimension of how it contributes to substance use but also freeing myself from it, too.
Anna Bauman and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
A gold-colored item embossed with the word “President” sits on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office of the White House on Nov. 10, 2025.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
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Jacquelyn Martin/AP
The New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan has spent the past 11 years covering President Trump through three political campaigns, his first, and now second, term in office and the ongoing war with Iran. Swan says aside from the COVID-19 pandemic, he can’t remember a time where Trump looked “as stuck as he looks right now.”
“It’s pretty clear he realizes that this war [with Iran] has not gone well, has not played out the way that Netanyahu pitched him or that Trump himself thought [it] would play out,” Swan says. “Trump is someone who is naturally given to hubris, but I think we saw a very extreme version of that with this war.”
Swan and his co-author Maggie Haberman spoke with more than 1,000 sources for their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. The book paints a picture of an unrestrained president remaking the American government and its international relations in profound ways.
Swan notes that the president, who sat for an interview for the book, has been particularly fixated on becoming a “great man of history” during his second term. During one interview, Trump showed Swan and Haberman a document that compared him to notorious historical figures like Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.
“[The list had] nothing to do with morality, all just about pure power projection. And Trump was relishing being in their company,” Swan says. “Maggie and I talked about it afterwards, and it really occurred to us that when you look at it through that lens, his second term makes a lot more sense.”
Swan says the president’s fixation on power is reflected in his decisions to go to war in Iran and implement regime change in Venezuela. But he also sees it manifested in Trump’s White House decor, which leans on what Swan calls the president’s “inner Louis XIV” style.
“He’s gilded almost every corner of the Oval Office,” Sway says. “The history of the Oval Office in the White House has been of modesty when it comes to design and decoration, reflecting the fact that America is a republic, not a monarchy. Trump has no use for that history.”
In a post on Truth Social, Trump referred to Regime Change as “mostly made up, Fake News, largely fiction, as have been most of the things [Haberman] has written about me for so many years.”
Interview highlights
On how Trump’s second term differs from his first
This term is unrecognizable from term one. And I still think a lot of people view [this] administration and government through the lens of the first term. It just couldn’t be more different. One of the ways in which it’s different is the team around him.
I remember in term one covering Trump, and you would have so many conversations with senior officials, including senior national security officials, and the overwhelming impression that you would receive from talking to these people was, A, they thought they were working for someone who was dangerous. And they saw their own roles as protecting the country and the world from the person that they were ostensibly working for. Those types of people don’t exist anymore in this administration. …
At a senior level, it’s really a group of people who believe in him, are loyal to him, in some cases went through the campaign with him. Many of them were radicalized on the campaign through the investigations and the efforts to prosecute Donald Trump. Many of them received some subpoenas themselves and viewed the stakes of the 2024 election as not so much about policy, but about staying out of prison.
So that’s the mindset of Trump and his inner circle. And it’s created a situation where there’s very little friction between a Donald Trump idea that might’ve just leapt straight from his internal monologue out of his mouth, with no filter, to an effort to make it actual American policy and execution.
On Trump’s meeting style
Meetings have no beginning, middle or end. There’s almost no delineation. And what often ends up happening is it’s essentially one meeting that just rolls throughout the afternoon with different people joining and leaving. And Trump [is] engaged or not engaged, people who have no business being in the meeting sometimes joining, whether it’s a pro wrestler, or a crypto investor, or foreign somebody from a golf monarchy, or a CEO. …
The New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are the authors of Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
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Doug Mills/The New York Times
The conversations are non-linear. Trump will get fascinated about one thing that has nothing to do with the topic and that can derail a meeting. We have a scene in the book where he’s having a conversation, a very small meeting, which is highly classified about a defense program, and this guy comes in, just walks into the Oval, salt of the earth, kind of country looking guy, and he’s holding stone samples for the Rose Garden … and the two go off and sort of start conferring, looking out the window, talking about the paving and the stone and this and that, gets on the phone with another contractor. And before time’s up, the meeting’s ended, they haven’t actually resolved the issue they were going to resolve.
On the higher level of secrecy in Trump’s second term
When there are issues that Trump really cares about, or his team wants to keep secret, they can be incredibly secretive, to the point of great frustration across the government. And when it comes to the weightiest issues like the planning of going to war with Iran, we found that very, very senior people in the government were, A, completely cut out of the loop and, B, had no idea about what was being discussed in the Oval Office.
On Trump’s focus on decorating the White House
I traveled with President Trump to the Middle East, palace after palace. And it was really instructive to watch him with these Middle Eastern rulers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Emirates. He was just in a state of absolute pleasure, going from one palace to the next, admiring the marble, looking at most rarefied displays of state wealth on Earth. And that’s essentially what he’s trying to create at the White House. … He’s building this grand ballroom. He seemed to almost be competing with Melania as to who had had the better bedroom. They have separate bedrooms and he was taking objects that she had placed in the center hall of the residence and putting them in his bedroom.
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On the challenge of interviewing Trump
An interview with Trump requires an enormous amount of preparation if you want to hope to come out of it with any level of success. He’s a really difficult interview… He’s an overwhelming presence and you are confronted with a sort of tidal wave of words. Many of the words and the sentences are detached from reality or completely false. And you have to make judgments in real time about what you let go. You can’t fact-check everything. You just can’t. You can pick your moments.
I see my role in every interview as the representative of the people in that chair. You’re the one who’s lucky enough to be sitting in that chair interviewing the president of the United States. What would regular people want to know and want me to do in that situation? And I think that when you’re interviewing a president of the United States, you want to find the balance between letting them explain themselves and not cutting in every two seconds, but finding moments that are really important to puncture the bubble. Trump creates an unreality bubble. It’s the way he operates. … Tucker Carlson actually described it publicly as like being under a spell and I certainly wouldn’t ascribe a supernatural dimension to it, but I know what he’s getting at.
Thea Chaloner and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
The real spectrum of housing insecurity
Annika McFarlane/Getty Images/Getty Images
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Annika McFarlane/Getty Images/Getty Images
Who counts as homeless in America?
If you ask the Department of Housing and Urban Development, around 750,000 people are homeless in America. If you ask the Department of Education, that number shoots up into the millions. What does this discrepancy tell us? And how do our cultural ideas about homelessness shape who we see as homeless, and who gets help? To find out, Brittany talks with Dr. Margot Kushel, Director at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, and Dr. Molly Richard, assistant professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Rhode Island’s College of Health Sciences.
Want more deep dives on cultural taboos? Check out these episodes:
The truth about men on the ‘down low’
Why can’t we be normal about polyamory?
Support Public Media. Join NPR Plus.
Follow Brittany on Instagram: @bmluse
For handpicked podcast recommendations every week, subscribe to NPR’s Pod Club newsletter at npr.org/podclub.
This episode was produced by Corey Antonio Rose. It was edited by Neena Pathak. We had engineering support from Josephine Nyounai. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.
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