The Age of Magical Overthinking: Why Our Minds Keep Doubling Down with Amanda Montell

In this episode, Amanda Montell explores the age of magical overthinking and why our minds keep doubling down. She discusses how cognitive biases and irrational thinking shape our perceptions and behaviors in the information age. Amanda also explains shine theory, zero-sum and sunk cost biases, and the allure of manifestation and conspiracy thinking. Through personal stories and humor, Amanda and Eric discuss how understanding these mental patterns can help us navigate modern life more consciously and compassionately.

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Key Takeaways:

• Exploration of cognitive biases and their impact on modern thinking.
• Discussion of irrational thinking in the information age.
• Examination of the parable of the two wolves and its implications for personal behavior.
• Analysis of the shine theory and its relevance to social dynamics, particularly among women.
• Insights into the sunk cost fallacy and its effects on decision-making in relationships.
• Critique of manifestation beliefs and their parallels to conspiracy thinking.
• The role of storytelling in human cognition and its influence on self-perception.
• The relationship between overconfidence bias and self-assessment.
• Challenges of navigating modern life with evolved cognitive shortcuts.
• The impact of social media on decision-making and personal narratives.

Amanda Montell is a writer and linguist from Baltimore. She is the author of the acclaimed books Wordslut, Cultish, and The Age of Magical Overthinking. Along with hosting the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and more. She holds a degree in linguistics from NYU and lives in Los Angeles with her partner, plants, and pets. Find her on Instagram @Amanda_Montell.

Connect with Amanda Montell: Website | Instagram | Podcasts | Facebook

If you enjoyed this conversation with Amanda Montell, check out these other episodes:

Why You Can’t Think Your Way Out of Overthinking with Adam Mastroianni

The Purpose of Emotions and Why We’re Not Wired for Happiness with Anders Hansen

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Episode Transcript:

Amanda Martell 00:00:00  Even smart people totally overestimate themselves. They just do it across, maybe like a slightly smaller spectrum of subjects. But people of all intelligence levels and levels of expertise are out here over crediting themselves with positive outcomes and predicting that they know more than they do.

Chris Forbes 00:00:28  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:13  A lot of modern self-help is basically this promise. If you think the right thoughts, everyone will finally make sense. And when life doesn’t cooperate, we don’t stop. We double down. In today’s episode, Amanda Montell  helps us name what’s happening underneath that urge. We talk about how manifestation can slide into the same mental machinery as conspiracy thinking. Our need for proportional, satisfying explanations. We also dig into sunk costs, why we stay in bad situations, keep defending old stories, and reach for additive fixes when the real solution might be subtraction. Amanda brings humor, nuance, and a really steady lens for the chaos of the information age, especially if you’re someone who overthinking everything and still feels like you’re missing the point. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Amanda, welcome to the show.

Amanda Martell 00:02:09  Thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:10  I’m excited to have you on. I’ve admired your work in your podcasts and your previous books for a number of years, so it’s great to finally get to catch up. And we’re going to be discussing your book called The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality. But before we get to that, we’ll start in the way that we always do with the parable.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:32  And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who is talking with their grandchild. They say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. I think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Amanda Martell 00:03:06  Oh, well, I could take this in a number of different directions. The first thing that comes to mind is the fact that this parable has been mummified so extensively. I see all the time, and in fact, I do believe that I have shared a meme along the lines of like within every woman there are two wolves. It tends to be like pretty feminine coded.

Amanda Martell 00:03:31  The memes that that I see, I don’t know if that’s my algorithm or. Yeah, just I don’t know the irony of like putting a wolf inside a woman, I don’t know, but,

Eric Zimmer 00:03:39  My favorite is you have two wolves inside of you, and they’re both depressed.

Amanda Martell 00:03:44  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I love was it, Walt Whitman who said that? Like, everyone contains multitudes, and I love the meme that’s like. And most of those bitches are gotta go, like, you know. So I love taking, like, a pretty earnest parable and twisting it. And the meme community, I mean, many folklorists that I’ve interviewed would say that memes are our new legends and parables. And so, yeah, this one has been a spread in pretty funny and ironic and hyperbolic ways, which I enjoy. And yeah, and it also makes me think of how oftentimes our legends and idioms and cultural expressions will divide things into binaries, which isn’t necessarily how life naturally is. But we we do that in order to make sense of it, to make life feel orderly and manageable and easier.

Amanda Martell 00:04:43  On our decision making skills, I also think about how it is true that we get better at what we practice. And so if we practice feelings of bitterness and greed and lean into cathartic anger more than positive feelings than we will get better at expressing ourselves in those ways. And Freud’s catharsis theory was wrong. And if you, you know, rage about something, you’re you’re not going to get it out of your system. You’re just going to get better at raging. And yet, you know, we can’t be positive all the time. So it’s both and both and and sort of overcoming those binaries. And that split between logic and emotion is part of my personal life’s work and my professional life’s work, and definitely a huge theme in the age of magical overthinking.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:37  Yeah, everything you said I relate with so much. I mean, I started this 11 years ago, so if I was starting a podcast today, this is not the way I would start it, because I almost avoid binary thinking to such an extreme in the way I process the world that it’s almost like a personality tic.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:55  And yet here I have this parable right behind me. I’ve got these two wolves. But the other thing that you said there that I had highlighted is somewhere in the book you were just talking about, like this idea like of, of raging gets the rage out and you say somewhere in the book, there’s no evidence to show that you ever feel better for acting badly.

Amanda Martell 00:06:15  Yeah. Yeah. Well, I talk a little bit about this in chapter in the book called The Shit Talking Hypothesis. I guess I’ll give like a little bit of context. The book is about irrationality in the modern age, in the information age, and the way I approach it is that every chapter is kind of themed around a different cognitive bias, some of which are really well known, like confirmation bias and some cost fallacy, and some of which are lesser known, but have these cool names like the Halo effect and the Ikea effect. Hundreds of cognitive biases have been described over the years by psychologists, behavioral economists. But I essentially picked, you know, my faves and To use them as a lens to explore various irrationality that are a product of the information age, both from the zeitgeist and my own life.

Amanda Martell 00:07:02  Whether I’m talking about, you know, the extreme cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement that we see in society so often, or in the case of this chapter, which is about zero sum bias, this sort of scarcity minded, deeply, deeply ingrained intuition that once developed in order to help us survive and hoard important resources like food and mates during a time when those things really were limited. Now we sort of map those zero sum intuitions on contemporary occurrences that our intuitions are so savvy about, like cloud and followers or beauty, you know, all kinds of abstract forms of currency or resources. And sometimes we attempt to correct that scarcity minded urgency or rage by talking people or disparaging them or, you know, finding flaws in them as an attempt to elevate our own clout. And yet, you know, research into gossip and shit, talking and emotions and catharsis has shown that when we speak negatively about other people behind their back in real life, that accomplishes something called spontaneous trait transference, where we actually adopt the qualities that we’re critiquing in that person.

Amanda Martell 00:08:22  And yeah, like if we continuously shit, talk and rage in, you know, unproductive ways, it ends up just kind of, negatively impacting our own self-esteem and our own perception by others.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:36  Stay with this for a second. Then I’m going to zoom back out to, to the book. But we kind of dived into one chapter. But while we’re here, I loved something that you talked about in here called the Shine Theory, because you’re talking about how you would do this, right. You would talk people who you were perhaps envious of. And I think we all have a tendency towards that. The shining theory is kind of the opposite. Tell me about that.

Amanda Martell 00:09:00  Yeah, well, this term shine theory was coined by An Fridman and Aminata Sow and piece that wrote together. They they’re these two, like, writers and best friends and they’re they’re amazing. But there was this fantastic viral 2013 piece in the cut where Anne Friedman spoke about how women, in particular are famously pitted against one another in society.

Amanda Martell 00:09:24  And there are a number of reasons for that. One of which is that, you know, there are actually fewer positions in, in public life and powerful rooms for women. And so we often get really, really competitive with one another. And that can apply to, you know, like social situations in high school or, you know, professional situations for adults. And it can also apply to social media situations where, you know, I think a lot of people can probably relate to this super uncanny experience where, you know, we’re chilling on our phones and our algorithm serves us an account of someone who makes us feel immediately inferior. You know, it’s someone who, like, literally doesn’t have any effect on our life whatsoever. It’s a perfect stranger, but it’s someone who, you know, has our haircut, but a little shaker or, you know, a similar style to us, but more aspirational. Or, you know, their career seems to be going a little better. And I have had this experience, so many times.

Amanda Martell 00:10:23  And at first, my approach to those feelings of scarcity and competition and inferiority would be to like, doom, spiral and go down a rabbit hole of like stalking this person’s background and credentials to see how, like, I’m actually better than them. I would sort of yeah, like word vomit about them to my loved ones and inside of my own head. They would live rent free in my head. And then, you know, I started writing this chapter and learning more about cognitive biases for this book. And, you know, embarking on my own sort of psych psychology journey and journey of self-reflection. And I realized based on an Friedman’s shine theory, which suggests that if you come across a woman who’s like, smart, cool, stylish, whatever. Don’t try to beat her. Try to befriend her. And she has this great line where she’s like, If Michelle Williams knows that, she shines brighter because of her proximity to Beyonce and is not instead dimmed by her proximity to Beyonce, then there’s hope for the rest of us.

Amanda Martell 00:11:23  It’s like this analogy where, you know, if you turn on a bright lamp and a slightly dimmer lamp next to it, like the whole room gets brighter. So if you come across a woman who you know you feel intimidated by, try to combine your light with hers and then it’s a win win. which really sort of goes against our zero sum intuitions. All of these behavioral economists found that we have this, like, really deeply ingrained win win aversion. Like, for some reason, like when we engage in monetary transactions or just like, move through life, we tend not to see situations as a win win, even though buyers or like buyers, yet rarely pay more for things than they really want to. And sellers rarely sell things for more than they’re worth and, you know, whatever. So it’s it’s just this, like, weird intuition that we have, but we can move past it. And that has been really impactful for me in my life. Now, when I come across a woman who I think is doing amazing instead of shame spiraling about her, I’ll like slide into her DMs and see if she might want to collaborate or get a coffee or, you know, and it doesn’t always lead to anything, but I’ve actually made some very real friends that way, and that feels a whole lot better.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:40  Do you ever do that? And then you DM them and they never reply and you end up disliking them even more on the other side of it.

Amanda Martell 00:12:48  No, it doesn’t backfire. You would think that. But oddly, like when I DM them, there’s like an immediate release of that because I’ve, like, done something about it. I’ve, like, exerted my agency somehow, you know, I’ve like taken the situation into my own hands and then it’s like, well, if they don’t respond, you know, maybe we’re really not meant to be. It’s a led to a successful outcome. Enough times that my morale is high enough to tolerate no reply.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:14  Yeah, 100%. I just had a long conversation with Faith salie about envy and this. It kind of ties very closely to this. And she talks about something called like inert envy. This is kind of the opposite of that, right? You’re moving that envy somewhere in some way. You know, you’re doing something with it. And my experience is almost always when I take a small, positive action about whatever is spinning around in here, I immediately feel better.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:42  It doesn’t always solve the problem. It doesn’t. But but there’s some relief in doing something useful.

Amanda Martell 00:13:48  Yeah, because I think in part it’s because it makes us feel like we’re a little bit more in control of our destiny and that life isn’t just happening to us. And yeah, we’re like building. We’re building who we are. And like, I want to be a person who makes lemonade out of lemons or whatever. so even if, you know, the lemonade comes out tasting a little weird or I don’t yield like a big, delicious carafe of lemonade, then it’s still worth it. I’m still on that journey.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:19  So let’s zoom back out for the book for a second, because you talk about magical overthinking and you say, basically, we simultaneously overthink trivial matters. And I think complex ones say more about that.

Amanda Martell 00:14:32  Yeah, well, the sort of thesis of the book is predicated on this idea that our once useful cognitive biases, these deeply ingrained decision making shortcuts that developed in earlier human brains to help us understand the world enough to survive it, are now clashing with the information age and this hyper capitalist age, our consumerist age, the age of social media, when we’re forced to contend with more ideas in a day than most humans would ever encounter in a lifetime, and more human beings.

Amanda Martell 00:15:09  And it’s just a really, really psychologically overwhelming time. And we don’t even realize that these mental magic tricks, these cognitive biases that helped us for so long are at work, and we certainly don’t notice how damaging they can be. They’re helpful to, you know, moving through life with no confirmation bias or, you know, even no zero sum bias wouldn’t be realistic or good. We would, you know, agonize over every decision and probably just like, act really strangely and not very human, but I think becoming more aware of how these biases are creating conflicts in our lives where conflict need not be or are, you know, causing us to lose our critical thinking. I feel like critical thinking is such a buzzword now, but it’s been really helpful to me because it’s helped me feel less confused about my own irrational behaviors and less angry at other people’s irrational behaviors. But yeah, I think one side effect of this clash between our cognitive biases and the information age is that sometimes we overthink small matters to death, but we like blitz past complex deliberations that really deserve more care.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:41  I love what you said. You talk about some of these. Irrationality has had an evolutionary benefit at one point, maybe not so much now. And you call them a cognitive wisdom tooth, which I think is so funny because that’s exactly what it feels like. Or the other, you said, is it’s a legitimately useful trait that came along with or an inconvenient side effect. Scientists who say, call these a spandrel. I’d never heard that.

Amanda Martell 00:17:06  Yeah, I’d never heard of that either. But yeah, spandrels are just like leftover evolutionary quirks, I guess. But I think there’s a footnote that says the human chin is one example. Like when we used to have, like larger jaws that needed to be capable of like chomping on harder material. we we were, you know, our skulls were shaped differently, and there’s no longer a need for this, like, little piece of bone that makes up the human chin. But we have it anyway. And, yeah, it’s to say that like our bodies and minds and those are the same things I need to keep reminding myself.

Amanda Martell 00:17:48  yeah. They’re not perfect. You know, there are these, like, Darwinist experiments that are just kind of like, reacting to our environment. But our environment has changed technologically and psychologically so much in recent history that, we have more spandrels than we know, and sometimes they can affect us in invisibly detrimental ways.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:12  Yeah. And I’ve always thought cognitive biases are interesting to look at because once you understand them, you can see them, right. Like if you just asked me right now, like what is not correct about the perspective you’re taking, I have no idea. I don’t there’s no place to answer that question because I’m seeing through what I see through. I can’t not do it. But a cognitive bias gives me a chance to say, well, hang on, is that happening here? Is this happening here? Because obviously our brains take huge shortcuts. And what we’re perceiving is reality is not that there’s not reality out there, but we are constructing an enormous amount of it.

Amanda Martell 00:18:49  It’s true.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:49  So you always are taking some perspective.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:52  There’s no view from nowhere. But cognitive biases allow us to look at that perspective from different angles more effectively, I think, than just wondering what we might be missing.

Amanda Martell 00:19:04  Yeah. And the cool thing about learning about these cognitive biases is that it allows me to feel more curious and skeptical about the way that my mind works, as opposed to defensive and judgmental. That goes for me and other people as well. And I was humbled by the process of writing a lot of these different chapters. For example, when I wrote up my book proposal for this book, because non-fiction books are so long proposal, not fully written manuscripts. one of the chapters I thought I wanted to write was about the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is this like concept where, you know, the the people who know the least about a subject think that they know the most. It’s like this thing that pundits always like to call upon to make themselves sound smart. It’s like, oh, that that person just is falling to the Dunning-Kruger effect, that doofus.

Amanda Martell 00:19:59  But then I started looking into it, and I came across a piece of reporting in like a McGill University publication that went and revisited the original Dunning-Kruger study and found that it actually didn’t say what we thought it said because in fact, like, even smart people totally overestimate themselves. They just do it across, maybe like a slightly smaller spectrum of subjects. But people of all intelligence levels and levels of expertise are out here over crediting themselves with positive outcomes and predicting that they know more than they do. And so instead, I rejigged that topic or that chapter to be about this phenomenon of overconfidence bias. And that was really humbling, because at first I was like, oh my God, overconfidence bias. I surely that does not apply to me. I’m a normal person, I hate myself, I’m an idiot. But as it turns out, like most people exhibit some level of overconfidence, even if it’s just moral overconfidence. Or, you know, we watch reality TV characters on screen and we think like, oh my God, I would never behave that way in that environment.

Amanda Martell 00:21:10  But really, we have no idea. And, you know, there have been really fascinating studies conducted. There’s this great book called The Knowledge Illusion. And there was a fantastic study in in that book. And I also cited where study participants were asked if they knew how simple objects worked, like zippers and toilets, and they were all like, yeah, I’m not an idiot. Of course I do. And then they were asked to write these, like step by step breakdowns of how the objects actually worked, and asked to reevaluate their level of knowledge of those objects. And they realized like, oh my God, I actually don’t know how toilet works or like, I don’t know how super works. And so they were kind of like showing their own tosses. And I think that happens all the time. And that happens to me too. And it definitely happens more in the information age, because there’s just more to know and more to convince ourselves that we know. And so, yeah, it was a humbling experience writing this book.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:04  Yeah. There’s so many things in what you said there that I relate with. The last piece is I don’t know what I was reading, but it referenced an essay from the 50s called Eye Pencil, and the person in it basically said, there’s no human alive. That can tell you how. One human could tell you how to make a pencil, because there are so many different subsets of knowledge that go into all the stuff that has to come together, that no one person has it all. And that’s a pencil. I mean.

Amanda Martell 00:22:35  Totally.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:36  You know, that’s a very useful and humbling way to see the world.

Amanda Martell 00:22:40  100%. And I remember while writing that chapter, I also learned that, ironically, it’s actually other people’s expertise that makes us feel like we know more than we do, because humans are so good at learning from one another and collaborating. That’s one of the reasons why our species has, I want to say, thrived. To put it optimistically, I’ll say thrive. grow so much.

Amanda Martell 00:23:05  And yet it sort of like, blurs these cognitive boundaries where like, because, you know, I might work so harmoniously. My, my husband’s a film composer, and I have collaborated with him in the past, and our collaborations have been so close and so intimate that sometimes I think I know about film composing, because he does. And, you know, sometimes we think we know things just because we’ve googled them, but we’ve, like, forgotten everything we learned when we googled them. So it’s actually like that very thing where like, it takes, you know, a hundred different types of expertise to put a pencil together. But all of those people think they know how to put a pencil together because they helped do it.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:47  When my partner and I, when she and I listen to an audiobook, she is frequently stopping and asking questions. And it’s stuff that I’m going right by because I think I know. But when she asked the question, I’m like, well, I got you. I don’t really know how to.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:02  I’m not, I don’t know exactly like and if I’m not, I’ve shared it with her that like sometimes I get irritated by that because I think I think as a child I was praised. I think we all are to some degree by knowing, you know, the answer. You know, I was I was a smart child. I was supposed to do that. And so when I don’t know the answer, I don’t like it.

Amanda Martell 00:24:23  Right? Right. It affects our self-esteem.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:25  Yeah, exactly. And so I’ve kind of noticed this. Like, why am I getting irritated with her asking questions and I’m like, oh. And so now it’s kind of an open conversation between us. She’ll be like, am I asking too many questions? And I’m like, yeah, I’d just like to listen to the book. It opens up that idea of knowledge. And then the other thing that you were saying I was thinking about is that our brain spins up stories so fast that we’re convinced we were right. And I was able to watch this in Jenny’s mom, who had Alzheimer’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:52  And we took care of her for six years. And what I watched was she has no idea about a whole lot of things, but when you would ask her a question about something, she would spin up a story that had no relation to reality because you could see it. But she believed it instantly and completely, and it was just wild to watch it. Sometimes when you you see something in the extreme, you’re able to be like, oh, look at that process and know that I’m doing the same thing. My brain works a little bit better than hers, but it doesn’t work perfectly. I don’t, you know, like I’m doing that all the time, too. I just think it’s fascinating.

Amanda Martell 00:25:30  Oh, definitely. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean, I say in the book and this has been said so many times by so many brilliant people, but human beings are like the only species that makes up stories about the world in order to understand it. You know, like, we are narrative people.

Amanda Martell 00:25:47  We we tell ourselves stories in order to remember things, in order to make sense of things, in order to convince ourselves that we understand. Even if, you know, the nuts and bolts of those stories are like totally fictitious, like stories make us feel like we know things.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:25  Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately. You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this. And I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self-control. Things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at one eufy Dot net and take the first step towards getting back on track. So I’d like to move to a chapter called I swear I manifested this because a this sort of thinking kind of drives me a little bit crazy, but I’d love to talk about it, because the thing that you were really talking about is that even this concept of manifestation is a form of a conspiracy theory, and you describe conspiracy theories as a sense making narrative that offers satisfying explanations for confounding turn of events.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:44  Talk more, because framing it like that changes a whole lot of ways of thinking about.

Amanda Martell 00:27:48  Yeah. Well, as I was thinking about the topics that I wanted to cover in this book because I could have written, you know, 200 chapters, about 200 biases, I kept coming back to this, this story that I had done some reporting for a few years ago when I was promoting my second book, cultish, and the story was about this kind of cult followed manifestation guru, sort of new agey pseudo therapist on social media. And I was really fascinated by this, because her popularity was really on the rise during Covid and during a time when the conspiracist movement was really emerging. And that’s a portmanteau of the words spirituality and conspiracy theorist. And it describes this sort of unlikely crossover of believers who subscribe to both the idea that we’re on the brink of a paradigm shift in consciousness, which is this like new agey concept, and also the conspiratorial idea that there’s this like evil cabal of elites that is secretly controlling the sociopolitical order.

Amanda Martell 00:28:57  And so the conspiracy theorists are the sort of people who, like, I don’t know, you might see wearing boho clothing, but also like marching shoulder to shoulder with hardcore, you know, MAGA, QAnon. And again, it seems unlikely, but they like, share some ideology. And, some of those types of believers were really subscribing to this manifestation guru online. And I was so curious as to what was going on psychologically with them. And then I came across this cognitive bias called proportionality bias, which describes our tendency to think that big events, or even just big feelings, must have had a big cause. The only way for an epic tragedy to make proportional sense would be for it to have had this really, like, big on purpose, cause it’s this misattribution of cause and effect in order to make sense of the world. So, you know, it’s when conspiracy theorists say that Princess Diana’s death had to be on purpose by the British government or the royal family, it couldn’t have just been the result of this, like freak accident or, you know, Covid had to have been engineered on purpose.

Amanda Martell 00:30:13  It couldn’t have just been the result of, like, this accident or small misfortunes or whatever. It just it doesn’t feel good to imagine that the universe doesn’t operate in this proportional way. We like harmonious proportions as human beings. Again, we tell ourselves these stories. And proportionality. Bias is the bias that is most commonly used to explain traditional conspiratorial thinking. But I couldn’t help but notice that it also completely justifies ideas of manifestation or, you know, the law of attraction. This idea that, like you were once, you know, financially struggling and romantically unlucky and now you’re, you know, thriving financially and have a spouse was because you, you know, vision boarded your way to it or, you know, you, you kind of did like a reverse conspiracy theory, like you, you know, attracted this, positive outcome on purpose. and so, yeah, I kind of I made this argument in, in the book that these misattribution of cause and effect can be helpful in a way of like psychologically managing the world, but also can be taken too far and exploited by, you know, capitalistic, selfish gurus online to a cultish end.

Amanda Martell 00:31:30  And conspiracy theories aren’t always exactly the sort of like weird guy on fortune in your mom’s basement stereotype that you might think, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:31:39  I mean, I think it’s all bound up in this idea that everything must have a reason or a purpose. Yeah, and it’s deeply disconcerting to think that’s not true. Totally. I don’t know if you know Brian Klaus in his book called fluke.

Amanda Martell 00:31:56  Oh, I’ve heard of it, yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:57  Yeah. You you would love it. You would love it. He’s a he’s a great writer, but he starts off with the. And I’ve told this on the podcast about eight times now. He starts off by telling the story of Hiroshima and the bombing. And originally Kyoto was on the list.

Amanda Martell 00:32:12  I know the story.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:13  Yeah, you know the story. And it didn’t happen because the guy who had just been elected to be minister of the war went with his wife there like 20 years ago. That is a deeply disconcerting thing, to think that that is the reason that one group of people were bombed and another was like, I think that’s the way the world actually works.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:34  But he says that there’s a way that that offers peace. And I think in some ways it does. But I also think it’s deeply disconcerting.

Amanda Martell 00:32:40  Yeah, it feels unjust and disproportional. It’s like, how can this massive calamity have come about in this place, this very specific, important place for all the people who live there because of this sort of capricious decision that does not feel good to us. And so, so many belief systems are actually predicated on making, you know, proportionality, bias front and center, unconsciously, of course. I really wanted to share some of that reporting that I had done on that particular guru and discovering how this bias applies to not only traditional conspiracy theories, but also ideas of manifestation felt like the right way to do it.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:26  And what’s really interesting is the flip that you make is that traditional conspiracy theory points outwards. Right. If somebody else did this thing, but some of this manifestation and Law of Attraction stuff flips it inwards. Right. That’s right. You’re the cause of things.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:44  And you talk about how trauma has been one of those things. It has a useful frame, it has some value. And it’s been, you know, used kind of way out of proportion. But it’s an explanation.

Amanda Martell 00:33:58  That’s right. Yeah. Something that this figure that I was reporting on but also so many sort of like new agey pseudo therapist types online will say is that the reason why you’re suffering is because you have unresolved childhood trauma. You have not done enough to heal yourself. And it really connects to this kind of toxic, positive meritocracy myth that has existed since the dawn of this nation. You know, like these. Law of attraction. Kind of self-help ideas really resonate here in the land of the American Dream for a reason. but yeah, it it can be empowering to a point to know that, like, we we do. We do. I mean, we can have a debate about free will, but we do. We do have some control of our lives and things like mindfulness meditation and reframing and taking action.

Amanda Martell 00:34:53  Those things do work, of course. But to a point, some of these figures will exploit people’s victim blaming and will communicate things like, you know, only, only you and your internal metaphysical journey can change your circumstances. And I am the only person who can shepherd you through that journey. And that’s what I think is exploitative and problematic. And it’s, again, this clash between this once useful cognitive bias of proportionality bias, which, you know, developed for a sensible reason, like there was once a time in human history where like, yeah, big things were caused. You know, it’s like a big rock falling from a cliff was probably because there was a big storm, you know, like it was it was that simple. And things aren’t, aren’t so simple and physical anymore. So yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:46  Things are are definitely not simple. Is there a bias for just wanting a simple answer? In general, across the board seems to be a default thing. Like give me the easy answer.

Amanda Martell 00:36:02  Yeah, definitely.

Amanda Martell 00:36:04  And the weird thing is, is like sometimes the easy answer is the answer. What what bias is that? I’m going to look it up right now. What cognitive bias can explain our desire for easy Yeah. I mean, it’s a combination of like availability heuristics, simplicity bias, confirmation bias. It’s very rare that any of these biases will work so low. there’s normally like a lot of them going on at once.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:37  They travel in packs.

Amanda Martell 00:36:39  They do, they do. They’re they’re pack animals, these biases. And they, there’s like a domino effect too. Or like, if you’re zero sum bias kicks in, then your confirmation bias will enter the picture. And it’s a whole big unfortunate party of irrationality.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:55  Yeah, yeah. The point you make in there that I think is a really important point, and you just set it a little bit. I’m going to read what you wrote just to really kind of drive it home, because I think it’s important. You said, you know, we were talking about these mental health influencers.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:09  Most of them mean well enough. And they’re right about a lot of things. Beliefs about yourself do influence outcomes. Spirituality is shown to increase resilience. You can alter your reactions to certain stressors. You then go on to some big pharma things. I don’t need to go, but but I really like that because yes, yes, there are definite ways that we can change and improve our mental and emotional health, and there’s a whole lot sometimes that you can’t change. There’s a whole lot that there are bigger forces happening. You talk about this a little bit too. There’s a systematic factors, right? And and this show has been guilty, I would say to a large degree of we talk about the systematic factors, but then we come back to practical things that a person can do, because I feel like there’s something you can do with that.

Amanda Martell 00:38:04  But people like actionable takeaways that they can do, like tonight.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:09  But I think what I at least hope to do is continue to stress like none of it’s easy.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:16  None of it fixes what it is to be a human. None of it solves the human condition. There’s no fix for life.

Amanda Martell 00:38:23  Exactly. And sometimes when I come across these, like, little self-help nuggets of wisdom or even share them, because I do my Magical Overthinker podcast, which is kind of like an extension or a spin off of the book at the end of every episode. I always like to provide a little, you know, piece of evidence based advice for how we over thinkers can get out of our own heads that week. And sometimes it feels a little silly to share a story about how, like, looking at trees helps, you know, like slow down your heart rate or whatever. I’m just kind of making that up. But, there are some of these out there anyways. That is not going to cure systemic issues, medical racism, like all the all these like deeply, deeply problematic things that are keeping so many people unwell and and unsafe and unhappy. And yet I would venture to say that looking at a tree never hurt.

Amanda Martell 00:39:21  And so it’s both. You know, it’s both at once.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:24  Yeah, it is both. And I feel conflicted about this sometimes because I look at, like someone like, you know, we are drawn to people like Viktor Frankl, right? Who shows that even in the worst circumstances, the way he approached the world did make a difference in his experience of it in the worst conditions. And he’s a little bit of an outlier, right?

Amanda Martell 00:39:47  Like, totally. And we love those outlier stories.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:51  Exactly.

Amanda Martell 00:39:52  Yeah. They give us hope. I mean, it’s interesting because my earlier work is about cults and identifying cultish influence in everyday life. And part of the inspiration for that was that my dad grew up in a cult, and he has this, like, totally epic, like rags to riches, oppression to enlightenment type of story that I think is fascinating to hear. And, you know, maybe inspiring to some. But his story is is not like replicable. You know what I mean? Like he he had this like totally just like amazing tale.

Amanda Martell 00:40:30  And I don’t think anybody can like, vision board their way to what my dad experienced. And yet I don’t want to not share his story just because it isn’t easy to replicate. So these things are tricky.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:45  Yeah. I mean, my own story has a little bit of this because the, the, the narrative and you know, I’ve got a book come out. So we’re talking about the narrative more is, you know, at 24 I was a homeless heroin addict. I weighed £100. And now I’m in a very, very different place. And so there’s something there. And I also know that I got offered diversion instead of prison because I was a white man. Right. What difference would that have made? When I came out of treatment, I had places to go that weren’t back to a house full of drugs. I didn’t have children and I needed child care. On and on and on and on. Right. There are reasons we know that people recover. That helps. And of course, we see people who have all those things not recover.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:32  And we see people who have none of those things recover. And so there’s an element in there of okay. Yeah. Person is doing something. It’s not like I didn’t do anything, but I also I like what you said. It’s not replicable. Exactly.

Amanda Martell 00:41:46  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:46  Because my situation is different.

Amanda Martell 00:41:49  This is why I take such issue with some of these cult followed self-help gurus online. Because they’re selling a system or like whatever. Yeah, a bespoke manifestation practice that I mean, it’s not the answer. and when someone is feeling vulnerable and is and is hoping that there is that simple answer that, you know, magic bullet or whatever it is. Sometimes the the people who have the most knowledge and nuance their their message is not rewarded by the algorithmic overlords and whoever else. And so, yeah, we have to be kind of vigilant out there.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:34  Yeah. Well, I’m the living proof of it doesn’t work. Nuance doesn’t work. It’s not an it doesn’t work on algorithms. I’ve tried and yet got to be who you are.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:45  I’m curious. Your book cultish made me think of Alcoholics Anonymous because I got sober in in a 12 step program, and I didn’t have time to read your your whole take on it. So I did what modern people do, and I asked ChatGPT what you believe about AA? Would you like to hear?

Amanda Martell 00:43:04  Yeah. What do I believe about a yeah, let’s hear what ChatGPT thinks I believe about AI. I don’t even know how it would know, but okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:11  ChatGPT believes that you have had conversations with people about some of the aspects of AA. Appear a little bit cultish. There’s the jargon that is used all the time, the oversimplification, all of that, and yet that it does turn out to be a relatively useful thing for people. Certain people?

Amanda Martell 00:43:30  For some people, yeah. Oh, this is a tricky one because UN sounds like a cult. My other podcast, years ago, we did do an episode on the cult of 12 step programs, and it was really hard to find a guest because, you know, these are like anonymous programs.

Amanda Martell 00:43:46  And the podcast was like smaller than and it was just so hard to find a guest. And then we finally did find someone who was willing to come on and talk about his experience. And his personal experience was quite favorable about the particular program that he was in, which, like, is valid for him. And that’s great. But we received feedback from people who who certainly did not have that experience in AA or other 12 step programs who felt like they were sexist and like all of the I mean, there’s no like unifying organizations. So every group is going to have like a different vibe and a different hierarchy and, you know, like different unspoken rules and rituals and whatever. And so we ended up doing a part two that brought the kind of counterargument. But yeah, I think AA is cultish, for sure. and it’s, you know, soft theology and certainly in the lingo, I mean, AA lingo was like the impetus for me writing my entire book about cult language. So, you know, it causes those, like, cult spidey senses to tingle in me.

Amanda Martell 00:44:57  But I also know that it has had a wildly positive effect on people that I know in my life, and that there are others who had a totally opposite experience. Is that what was represented in that chat?

Eric Zimmer 00:45:11  Pretty much, I don’t know. Yeah, pretty. Pretty much pretty much. I talk about it a lot because I don’t go to 12 step programs anymore. But they saved my life twice and so they were very beneficial. But in my book, I even have a little bit where I’m writing about like the cliches like, oh God, having to sit through it, it just again and again the repetition and the and yet some of them turned out to actually be pretty useful, which makes the intellectual enemy hate. But the alcoholic and addict in me that needed to stay alive, they were good for. And I think that the problem with trying to say anything about something like AA is that, as you said, it’s this huge thing. Every group is autonomous, which stops it ultimately from being a true cult.

Amanda Martell 00:45:59  Yeah, yeah, every individual group is.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:02  Within a group. You can get the cult penis. But the organization.

Amanda Martell 00:46:06  I mean, a cult can just be to people. Like, from the way I see it, like, it doesn’t. it? So if there’s an AA group that, like, really goes off the rails, then then yeah, I mean, I again, I conceive of cults as like on this spectrum and like something can be cultish without being, you know, the Manson’s. And that might be a group that, you know, you don’t want to be a part of. But exactly. AA is is a wiggly concept and very sensitive. And I don’t remember the statistics that we found on like what its actual success rate is. But it is curious to me and unfortunate and I guess just reflects like the taboo that addiction still is in our society, that it’s kind of like the only mainstream option for people who want to get sober. I know myself if I were in that position, I would really struggle with AA, just like the God stuff I would.

Amanda Martell 00:46:55  But but if my life was on the line and this was my option in front of me, I guess I would just have to freaking bite the bullet.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:02  So yeah, it’s tricky. There’s a whole lot more, I think, is the way that culture as a whole has become more spiritual, not religious. I think aa the same thing has sort of started to happen, but I’m not defending AA, actually, because I do think it’s nuanced. I think part of it also is that there’s just no one thing that’s going to fix an addiction. It is a complex multivariate syndrome that’s caused by so many different factors and so many different things to think that one organization could solve.

Amanda Martell 00:47:35  It has the answer. That’s right. Yeah, that’s a really good point.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:38  And the world’s come a long way in that there are more alternatives. AA is still the one. It’s free. It’s everywhere there. Yeah. But comparative me getting sober in 1995. I mean, it’s a different world out there right now.

Amanda Martell 00:47:52  Yeah, yeah. And I hope it continues to improve. I mean, especially with the fentanyl epidemic and everything. It’s just so unfortunate. And yeah, I, Oh, I had just a thought fly out of my head. It was a good one, and I don’t remember it. I don’t recall it. Maybe it’ll come to me. Oh, I was going to say. Do you want to know a fun fact I do. It’s actually not that fun. When I wrote cultish, when I was drafting that book, which was in like 2019, 2020. It was true that traditional religion was declining in the United States, but spiritual proclivities were as high as ever. But more recent Pew Research has found that actually, there’s been this sort of chilling re embrace of traditional religion which can be chalked up to, I don’t know, any number of factors from just like the increasing rise of conservatism and like the manosphere and specifically men are more young men are more religious than young women, which is like a curveball, because historically that’s not been the case.

Amanda Martell 00:48:55  also like people who had atheist parents might be, like rebelling against their atheist parents in an ironic turn. And and then, yeah, just like the longing for community and this loneliness epidemic. It’s it’s weird. It’s weird how, like, you know, there are, like, hipster Catholics and Mormons and evangelicals and Protestants now it’s like, what’s happening.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:14  That is very interesting. There’s always been hipster evangelicals. They’ve they’ve been true. They’ve been lurking, you know, for I bump.

Amanda Martell 00:49:22  Into.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:23  Very often,

Amanda Martell 00:49:25  Don’t.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:25  I know it? But I do think it’s very interesting. Okay. Before we run out of time, though, I want to turn to a chapter called A Toxic Relationship is Just a Cult of one. Back to your point about a cult can be two people. It’s about the sunk cost fallacy, and I want to hit a particular part of this, even though I’d love to hear you. Why don’t you tell the basic story and then I’ll get my point in.

Amanda Martell 00:49:45  Sure.

Amanda Martell 00:49:46  Yeah. Well, this is probably the most sort of memoir, mystic, vulnerable chapter in the book that attempts to understand through the cognitive bias of the sunk cost fallacy, my decision to spend seven of my formative years in a romantic relationship that was quite cult like and that I knew logically was not serving me and not making me happy or fulfilled in any way whatsoever. But I kept doubling down and hoping that the the wind that I had invested in was coming in just around the corner. And I came across a philosophy paper about the sunk cost fallacy, sort of defending it by this philosopher named Ryan Doody. We won’t laugh too hard at his last name, but, you know, he was defending that. The sunk cost fallacy is actually not that fallacious. When you think about human beings as social creatures who want to create, you know, a positive impression of their decision making track record. And if you’re constantly, you know, going back on decisions that you made, it might make you seem like this erratic loose cannon.

Amanda Martell 00:50:53  And yeah, there might have been benefits to me staying in that relationship for so long and seeming really stable, even though I really wish I hadn’t. And, I, yeah, I sort of moved through the story of that relationship, referencing that study and others about related concepts like additive solution bias. And yeah, that chapter has a really helped me process my own personal experiences.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:17  Yeah, it’s beautifully written. It’s sad that you went through that. And I think you you worked your way through a lot of the pieces of it here. That idea of the sunk cost bias being it goes back to what we talked about before. We’re narrative creatures, right. And so you say we’re each tasked with a creative challenge to weave the many choices we’ve made over the years into a cohesive and flattering story about who we are. We do this almost automatically. We can’t help ourselves. Come to think of it, I do it throughout the whole book, which I love, but I never thought of the sunk cost theory in that way.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:54  And I do think there’s a social benefit, but I also think there’s an internal benefit. Like it’s very hard to live in a state, and I’ve done it where, Are. You know you’re making the wrong decision all the time.

Amanda Martell 00:52:07  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:07  I mean, I’ve got years of this in different domains in my life of there’s a deep knowing. And yet on the surface, there’s a whole lot of scurrying to try and make the story make sense and, and why and justify it to myself.

Amanda Martell 00:52:22  And yeah, we human beings do not like to look our bad decisions in the eye and are clearly willing and eager to do a lot of psychological gymnastics to justify our choices. It was interesting writing that chapter, because most of the literature that I came across about sunk cost fallacy talked about it in sort of an economic context, but it’s so obviously explained this decision to stay in this relationship that had never made sense to me before. I was really, I would like, kick myself for staying for so long in this clearly bad thing that was like causing, actually causing other people to judge me in certain ways or be confounded by my behavior.

Amanda Martell 00:53:07  You know, that’s one of the chapters in the book that, like I felt most healed by and even in a, you know, lower stakes context, I now think about the sunk cost fallacy and additive solution by us all the time. The definition of sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to think that resources already spent on an endeavor justify spending even more. And it’s related to this additive solution concept where we as human beings naturally, but especially growing up in in consumer society, think that in the face of a problem, the solution often involves like adding stuff like a person or a gadget, or a new outfit or whatever, or when sometimes the much more efficient solution is just to take something away and, you know, like as I was going through the most painful parts of that relationship, it like literally never occurred to me to just like, take the relationship away, like it’s ended in a lower stakes context, you know, now when I’m, I don’t know, Say, like cleaning my house or like, doing a little spring cleaning or decluttering, whatever.

Amanda Martell 00:54:07  Sometimes I’ll, like, look at my junk drawer and be like, oh, I just need like, I need to go to the Container Store. I like, buy some drawer organizers.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:14  It’s like, right, right.

Amanda Martell 00:54:16  You know.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:16  You just throw some things away. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amanda Martell 00:54:19  And I think there’s there’s even more of an incentive to double down on our decisions in the age of social media when, like so many people are watching us make decisions online, we might feel more social pressure to stick by that story that we’re weaving with our decisions.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:37  Yeah, I spent a lot of years in a really bad marriage, and I’m not blaming anybody. It was just objectively a bad marriage. And there were a lot of complicating factors. There were children involved. There was there was all sorts of stuff. There was me back into alcoholism, a whole lot of things. But when you had this part about the sunk cost bias, I was like, that makes sense, right? Because the whole time, Again, like I said, there’s a part of me that knows this.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:03  No no no no no. And yet I’m working really hard. And there’s also this idea that this goes back to the self-help Western idea. There’s a fix for this. There’s a way to fix this. And you say in one of my favorite parts of the book, you’d say what I’d say to my teenage self though, is that no one in history ever transformed from an asshole to a dreamboat just because their girlfriend really wanted them to. And that’s the magical thinking, right? That’s the magical thing, right? Which is that, like, something is going to change.

Amanda Martell 00:55:36  Yeah. I mean, all these concepts are related. You know, the sunk cost fallacy, manifestation, zero sum bias. You know, like, oh, if there’s like a scarcity of love, you know, it’s been amazing to understand or to be on this journey of understanding how imperfect our decision making shortcuts are and how badly they sometimes mix with the the pressures of today.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:04  But on a positive note, you were recently married, right?

Amanda Martell 00:56:07  Oh yes, yes I was.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:11  Congratulations.

Amanda Martell 00:56:12  Thank you. This past summer, the sun was not a factor in this decision, despite the fact that he and I have known each other for 20 years. Wow. We met in middle school during doing community theater together, and then we had, like, a little fling in high school that was very controversial because he was my brother’s best friend and it just wasn’t meant to be. So we parted ways, but then we reconnected in an unlikely way as adults. And, life had had brought us, you know, closer. And we yeah, we got married. And, that has been a very nice thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:45  And had you been dating a long time again now.

Amanda Martell 00:56:49  Before we got married. Yeah, we we were together for six years, okay. Before we got married.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:55  That’s not terribly long. Meaning? Like, if you had said to me like we’d been together 20 years and we decided to get married. I’d be like, why? Like what prompted a marriage? At this juncture, my partner and I.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:06  Jenny and I are kind of at this point where, like 11 years and we can’t. Neither of us really thinks it’s something we particularly care about doing.

Amanda Martell 00:57:14  Oh my God. I mean, I have a whole I have made many podcast episodes, including a magical overthinker episode about weddings and like me, working through my thought spirals about marriage and weddings and problems, using it and then finding my way back to it, but in a bespoke way. I’ve it has been a whole it has been a process, like wrapping my head around why this needed to happen and or not needed to, why we wanted it to happen. but it ultimately the way that we did it and the way that we have done it, it has ultimately been a really good thing and has meant a lot to my partner. Specifically, I actually proposed to him and like, he was kind of like the bride, if you will. That was, like, really key in making this whole thing feel right. I’ve told the story of of this whole thing on a couple podcasts in the past.

Amanda Martell 00:58:10  So it was not a decision made on a whim. I’ll put it that way.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:13  You wouldn’t happen to be an overthinker, would you?

Amanda Martell 00:58:17  Know, I don’t know why you would ever think of that about me.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:22  Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created The Six Saboteurs of Self-control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now. At once you get. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. One Eufy. Net book. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really did enjoy the book. It’s it’s beautifully written and it’s very insightful in a lot of places.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:14  We only got to touch on a very little of it. But thank you.

Amanda Martell 00:59:17  Appreciate that. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. This has been such a great conversation, I appreciate it.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:22  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.