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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. If you want to know about something, really anything, all you have to do is take out your phone and do a

quick search. We think almost everything in this world is knowable. But our guest

today argues that all of this information at our fingertips has created a society of

overanxious overthinkers. In her new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking,

Amanda Montel writes that our brains are overloaded with a gluttonous stream of constant

information that's up against our innate tendencies as humans to believe conspiracy theories

and mysticism, like believing that we can manifest our way out of just

about anything.

Amanda Montel is a writer-linguist and host of the podcast Sounds Like a Cult.

She's also the author of two other non-fiction books including

cultish and Word Slut, a feminist guide to taking back the English language.

Amanda Montel, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thank you so much for having me.

So I really love this book and I can't wait to get into this conversation because you have this quote at the start of the book by the late famed philosopher Franz Fanon, which says,

each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill or betray that mission. And what you're asserting is that for us faced with all of this

information at our disposal at all times our mission has to do with our minds.

That's right.

Yeah, I mean, a crisis of the mind, really.

I'm just wondering, when did it become aware to you that this is what we were in the midst of and that you needed to write about it.

Well, over the past few decades, I would say, I've been developing this incredible cognitive dissonance surrounding the idea

...