All right, here we go.

Welcome to the Other People podcast, a weekly program featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.

I'm Brad Listy here in Los Angeles.

It's nice to be with you.

I appreciate you tuning in.

Don't forget to hit the subscribe button wherever you listen. You can also subscribe on YouTube and you can follow me on Blue Sky

and Instagram. So my guest today is Jane Borden, author of a new book called Colts Like Us,

Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America.

It is available from Atria.

And it is a book about cults and cultish thinking and the general cultiness of America.

And the thesis of the book is that the tendency toward this type of communal arrangement, this kind of ideological arrangement has its roots all the way back in the original colonization of the Americas.

It goes all the way back to our Puritan days.

And it's a really riveting and fascinating work of pop history that helps to contextualize like the present day. What's happening now with far

right extremism and really intense religious movements that are kind of embedded into

political movements. It helps you make

sense of the chaos, which I think was maybe part of the impetus for Jane writing it, trying to

kind of sort this stuff out. So I had a really fascinating conversation with Jane about her very

fascinating book. Again, it is called Colts Like Us, Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America.

You will hear Jane and I talking to one another in just a bit.

Today's episode is brought to you by Penguin Press, publisher of Pan, the debut novel by Michael Clune.

Pan tells the story of a strange and brilliant teenagers, first panic attacks, and how they lead him down the rabbit hole. This is a very

hotly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds. Michael Clune is also

...