Hey there, I'm Jason Gots, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Started back in 2008, Big Think is a kind of online think tank of big ideas from some of the most creative thinkers on the planet.

On the Think Again podcast, we revisit these ideas in new and unpredictable ways.

Our producers surprised me and my guests with short interview clips from Big Thinks Archives,

ideas that we didn't come here expecting to discuss.

I'm very, very happy to be here today with writer and media polymath Kurt Anderson.

Kurt is the New York Times best-selling author of the novel's Hayday, Turn of the Century and True Believers,

and he's the host and co-creator of the Peabody Award-winning public radio show Studio 360.

Kurt's latest book, Fantasyland, How America Went Haywire, is a 500-year history of a different kind of American exceptionalism.

Welcome to think again, Kurt.

Happy to be here.

So you are making, you sir, are making a very bold claim in this thoroughly researched and vivid

account of zaniness in America, which is that we are exceptional among the nations of the

world in our tenuous grasp on reality.

Fair enough.

Can we talk about that?

Yeah, we are.

And again, not unique.

And everything that I talk about in this book is not, almost everything, it's not unique to America.

But in the rich world, in the developed world, we are different. We are an outlier. We are weird.

And it's not just that we got weird in 2016 or 2000 or even 1969. It's been a long time coming as I realized when I started thinking about

and researching this book. We have a long history of insisting, passionately, insisting that

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