Hello and welcome to a fantastic episode of Iway with Jamila Jamil, a podcast against Shame.

I hope you're well and I think I're going to love this chat because it's right up your alley.

My guest is Amanda Montel.

She's been on this podcast before when she'd written a book called Cultish,

which is a fascinating book about the language used by cults and how we can see that same language

in advertising and media and social media and

from celebrities and injustice and social justice and largely in politics. And what I love about

her work is that what she does is she breaks down these huge, this huge societal chaos that we

find ourselves in. And she makes it easily relatable and digestible

so that we're then armed by being able to spot manipulation when we see it and she's done it again

with an amazing book called The Age of Magical O overthinking and it's all about overthinking and

neurosis and the chaos of media right now and the ways in which manifesting

can be abused and weaponized by people online, why we're so obsessed with celebrities, to the

point where we'll actually almost fight each other over it, talking about the importance

of nostalgia and how that can impact our mental health and how that can also

be weaponized against us, for example, with slogans like make America great again.

We talk all about cognitive bias and just all of these fascinating things that are going on

all around us, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time online, a lot of time

on social media. She's talking about the changes in our brains and the impact on our mental

health of digesting this much information all of the time that we're being waterboarded with

facts and stories and headlines constantly, and we are just simply not designed to take in this much information per day.

And so I think a lot of us have this feeling of like, am I okay?

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