Offline with Jon Favreau - How Cognitive Bias Explains Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, and Internet Malaise

Episode Date: May 5, 2024

We all have a caveman brain—at least when it comes to navigating the internet. Amanda Montell, author of the new book The Age of Magical Overthinking, joins Offline to explain how the “cognitive biases” that we developed to make snap decisions in prehistoric times aren’t well suited to handle the volume and pace of the information era. She and Jon talk about biases like the halo effect, zero-sum biases, and declinism, and identify how these biases have supercharged celebrity fandom, influenced our news media, and made Democrats nostalgic for the George W. Bush era. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Is our attention the most reliable barometer for determining what is new and what is urgent and what is worthy of panic? And I think, you know, the answer is increasingly no. Like our fight or flight responses are not enough to determine what is worthy of our attention the way that they once were. Hey, everyone, I'm Jon Favreau. You just heard from today's guest, podcaster and bestselling author, Amanda Montel. Some of you may already know Amanda from her bestseller, Cultish, the Language of Fanaticism, or her phenomenal podcast, Sounds Like a Cult. And while I could have spent this hour talking to Amanda about all things cults, I invited her on to talk about something far more offline,

her new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, in which Amanda writes about what she calls irrationality in the modern age. Amanda offers an explanation for the illogical behavior permeating our lives, our culture, and our politics. She argues that cognitive biases, shortcuts our brains develop to make quicker, smarter decisions about the world, are unequipped to handle the volume and pace of the information era. According to Amanda, not only do our cognitive biases no longer serve us, they're actively harming us, especially when it comes to interacting with things online. Sound familiar? Yeah, same here. As soon as I saw the book, I knew I had to have her on the show.

We talked about cognitive biases, why Amanda thinks the internet has supercharged celebrity worship, why nostalgia now seems to drive all of our media and our politics, and what we can do about it. We're going to get straight into the interview this week. Max took the week off to go frolic in wine country. He'll be back next week to talk about the TikTok ban and anything else that comes up in the news. Now on to the interview. Here's Amanda Montel. Amanda Montel, welcome to Offline. Hey, thanks for having me. So one of the reasons I started this podcast was to help answer a question I'd been thinking about through most of the pandemic, which was, has the internet broken

our brains or is it just showing us how broken our brains have always been? And you've written a book that suggests maybe both things are true, that the fire hose of information that's now aimed at our brains is amplifying the cognitive biases we've always had in all kinds of harmful ways. Is that right? Really good description. Hell yeah. For people who don't know, what are cognitive biases? Yeah.

So the term cognitive bias was coined by the behavioral economists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and it describes these psychological shortcuts that we take to make decisions, these mental magic tricks that we play on ourselves and always have to make sense of the world enough to survive it. really helpful for managing the problems of our physical world have clashed with the information age and mass loneliness and this capitalistic pressure to know everything under the sun. And that has produced this era that I'm calling the age of magical overthinking. I love the book. I love the book. It was great because it is, you know, I'm obsessed with the internet all the time and what the internet's doing to our culture. And then when I read the book, I'm like, oh yeah, I hadn't thought about the like psychological evolutionary basis for a lot of this. What led you to sort of dive into the world of cognitive biases? Yeah. So the seeds for this book were really planted while I was

researching my last book, which is about the language of cults from Scientology to SoulCycle. So this wide spectrum of culty groups. The book is called Cultish. And for that book, I was researching the mechanics of cult influence and how they show up in those most notorious groups like Heaven's Gate and Scientology and Jonestown, but also how they emerge in our everyday lives in places we might not think to look like social media and like our fitness classes and things like that. And as I was looking into these tools of influence, I naturally came across mentions of confirmation bias and the sunk cost fallacy. These are a couple of the most well-known cognitive

biases, the ones that show up in headlines about politics and things like that. Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek out and notice and remember only the information which validates what we already believe while we dismiss and ignore and forget the information that controverts what we already believe. And you can easily see how that would apply to people's decisions to stay for 20 years in, I don't know, the moonies, much longer than made sense to anyone else on the outside, including the followers themselves. But I also couldn't help but notice how these biases applied to my own life. Decisions that I had made in my own personal

romantic life or my professional life or just scrolling on Instagram that I had made in my own personal romantic life or my professional life, or just scrolling on Instagram that I could never justify to myself. And they also really explained so much of the zeitgeist general illogic, like people with master's degrees basing their real life choices on Mercury's position in the cosmos, or, you know, my former neighbor deciding not to get vaccinated because a TikToker in Palazzo pants said it would downgrade her DNA or, you know, my former neighbor deciding not to get vaccinated because a TikToker in Palazzo pants said it would downgrade her DNA or, you know, the extreme cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement that I was noticing. And so I opened this well of cognitive biases because hundreds of them have been described. And so for this book, I basically chose my 11 faves, the 11 that I felt like were the most relevant and most urgent and could explain specific questions that I had had for a long time. And it sounds like some of these questions are the same ones

that you had about just why we are the way we are right now and why this, yeah, our decisions seem to clash with what we know to be true. And why does living in the information age not help the world make more sense? So, yeah, I had to put those questions and that fascination with cognitive biases to the side for the purposes of that book. But I knew right away that I wanted to explore how cognitive biases are colliding with the information age for this one. So I want to go through a couple of them sort of one by one and talk about some examples. You have a chapter titled, Are You My Mother, Taylor Swift, about the cognitive bias known as the halo effect. I'm a Swifty, but I'm also just like, I'm just fascinated by the parasocial relationships with her fans and how the whole thing feels very online and of this era. How does the halo effect explain the global phenomenon that is Taylor Swift? Yeah.

Yeah. So the halo effect describes our proclivity to admire one quality in a person and jump to conclusions that they must be perfect overall. So we like a pop star's music. admire one quality in a person and jump to conclusions that they must be perfect overall. So we, like a pop star's music, we jump to the conclusion that she must be sensitive, nurturing, educated, that she maybe cares about us as much as we care about her, that maybe she aligns politically with our values. Or, you know, say we enjoy an influencer's sense of style. We might jump to the conclusion that that influencer is worldly, updated on current events the way that she's updated on styling trends. And this cognitive bias has an evolutionary basis. You can imagine a time in human history when we were living in small groups

and we would clock someone in our community who had big muscles and intact teeth and we might jump to the conclusion that they were a skilled hunter or a really good fighter. They had avoided disfigurement from battle and thus they were a good role model to align ourselves with for survival purposes. This was a way that we, you know, made hasty decisions to clock role models for our own survival. But we are now mapping that same strategy onto these modern parasocial relationships involving celebrities and in combination with social media where those parasocial relationships are becoming more intimate and more hallucinatory than ever. This cognitive bias is really setting us up for psychological failure. It's setting these expectations that fundamentally cannot be met. It is setting us up for conflicts

that can't be mended because we're not able to work through some of the fallout from those conclusion, that conclusion jumping that we're doing in person because we will likely never get the chance to have like a one-on-one heart-to-heart with Taylor Swift or another celebrity who might do something that we perceive as a betrayal, whether it's not approaching her ticket sales the way that we might like or flying around in private jets. So this effect is not only applied to Taylor Swift, but she has provided so much fodder for fascination and questioning. And so she was one of the central characters in that chapter. I mean, I think about this around Taylor Swift's foray into politics. And again,

this happens with so many celebrities and the bigger the celebrity is, the more it happens, right? Which is for a long time, she didn't talk about politics at all. And then there were thoughts that she was like, you know, the Nazis loved her. And so maybe she was right-wing coded. And then finally, you know, we now know later, she felt like she wanted to say something and all her team was like, don't say anything about politics.

So she finally comes out, she says, you know, she endorses Biden. You know, she issues statements about LGBTQ rights. And then I've noticed people be like, okay, well, she did one statement. Why isn't she speaking every day on this kind of stuff? And I was like wondering where that comes from. Clearly, this is halo effect. But it's just, it's so funny that we assume that this perfect stranger must have our exact politics.

Yeah. Because she has the capacity to reach millions of people, which she does only because of her music, not because of her politics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's absolutely right. And I think what's also going on is that, you know, for the past several decades, we've really lost a lot of trust in some of these institutions that once provided us with support and authority messaging. You know, we don't trust the government as much as we did in, say, the 1950s. We do not rely on traditional religious institutions the way that we once did. We are gravely losing trust in the health care establishment, especially, you know, in the

COVID era. So we, since really the 1960s with Beatlemania and then increasing with the Reagan era, our first celebrity president, we are perceiving entertainers as folks who are not just here to dazzle us, they're here to save us. They are framed as these insurgent outsiders, a fresh kind of paragon for us to look up to in really tumultuous times. And so that, in combination with the halo effect and social media, which encourages performative personas and, you know, exacerbates that false intimacy where, you know, you can imagine, like, if you were a hardcore fan of the Beatles in the 1960s, you were really only interacting with that.

Well, you weren't actually interacting with them. You were perceiving them or receiving their craft through TV or through records. And now social media plants this seed that like, if you pray to your surrogate God, that being your favorite pop star, they really might answer your message in the form of, you know, hearting your comment or something like that. And if you, you know, demand political messaging from them, you know, they really might respond. And I don't have definitive answers about whether celebrities should swerve out of their lane to comment on politics without having, you know, the education or the background. I think sometimes that can be extremely positive and sometimes it can be extremely negative, you know, like the role of celebrities in political life can range

from Dolly Parton to Donald Trump. So, you know, we, we, uh, yeah, I think it's important to constantly question the role of influencers and celebrities in activism and in political life. I don't have the answers, but it's worth asking the questions. Well, you mentioned Trump, that's our, our president. And I think the halo effect, you can see how it applies to Trump in that a lot of people had known him as a rich, successful businessman and reality show host, so they thought, maybe he'd be a good president too, right? He's a builder. He makes money. He's successful.

Though the part of the halo effect you describe in the book where fans become disappointed and turn on the celebrity hasn't really happened with Trump. And if anything, his fans have become more like a cult, which I know you know quite a bit about. January 6th, all kinds of other stuff. Nothing loosens their grip on Trump fandom? That is a very good question. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind for me is that I am sure that there are people who have lost faith in Donald Trump. It's just they're not so proud of that because we are not incentivized to admit that we're wrong. We as human beings are pretty bad at that. We get quite embarrassed when

we've sunk costs into an endeavor like our loyalty toward a celebrity or a politician or when that person has two of those things at the same time. And when we, you know, actually internalize some information to suggest that we made a bad bet or we made a bad choice, most of us are not going to be loud and proud about that. So I would, you know, my optimistic side would venture to guess that there are some quiet defectors away from the quote unquote cult of Donald Trump. But the other thing that I'll say about, you know, some of those people who've really dug their heels in every time he does something objectionable, criminal, amoral, immoral. They double down on their loyalty. And what I would say in response to that is that it's very rare for only one of these

biases to take effect at a time. You know, normally you have so many of them flooding in. And so in the case of Donald Trump, I mean, I see constant confirmation bias. We are not incentivized to absorb like, well, we're not robots. I mean, that's truly what it is, is that we are really, really poor data synthesizers. As an efficient way of making decisions, we tend only to accept the information that validates our existing beliefs and the information that allows us to remain loyal to our tribe of sorts. And so if, you know, taking in information or questioning a tenant means betraying your group,

your community, these people that you've invested in, it's really not worth it to us. And so there's some confirmation bias there. There's also an effect called the backfire effect, where when one of our beliefs is threatened, we actually do tend to double down or dig our heels in. And then also flooding in would be zero-sum bias, which is our tendency to think that another person's gain means your loss. And that just doesn't apply to economics or money. That also applies to ideas. If another person makes a point that is a little bit right or very right, we internalize that as a threat to our ability to be right. And we don't want to feel threatened. And so we will respond to that on the offense or we will come up with some argument to make sure that we come out of that. What really

isn't even a competition might just be an interaction or an invitation for discourse. We want to come out of that the winner. And so that is also at play. I came across some really disheartening stat that I included in the confirmation bias chapter of this book, which talked about how research finds that science literacy doesn't actually make us better at internalizing real facts when we learn them. It doesn't make us better at like reading science literature or learning science better. It just makes us more skilled at using science to defend our existing beliefs. I mean, if anyone's, anyone who was on Twitter during the pandemic and followed COVID Twitter, absolutely. And, you know, there was comforting ourselves, people who were on the left

of like, okay, well, there's a bunch of anti-vax crazies and I would never fall for that and blah, blah, blah. But then there was also like, you could, even if you just wanted to know the truth, you could read every scientific research paper that came out during COVID and use it to either make your point or make the opposite point. Absolutely. Yeah. It was brutal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The, the novelist, Emily St. John Mandel, who wrote the book Station Eleven that the series was based on, I went and saw her give a talk a couple of years ago where she was talking about how there's a scene in Station Eleven where a bunch of people from a ton of different backgrounds watch the same news broadcast about a global pandemic breaking or striking, and they all heard the same message. And she was like, now, six years after that book was published, that plot point or that scene is no longer believable.

We have lost consensual reality, is what she said. And another bias that I think Donald Trump weaponizes pretty effectively is this bias called the illusory truth effect, which is this really potent bias describing our proclivity to think something is true just because we've heard it multiple times. It is this deeply ingrained mistake that we all make where we confuse what's called processing fluency or, you know, our ability to think that something rings a bell as a sign that that thing is accurate or reliable. And what's kind of sad about it is that even an awareness of this particular bias is not enough to resist its influence. Even if a piece of information is obviously dubious, like fish breathe water,

or even if, you know, participants in studies have been warned that the source of the information was dubious, if the statement is repeated enough, we will internalize it as true. And an awareness of that does not help us resist it. However, I also have come to the conclusion talking to so many psychologists and memory scientists and things like that, is that it is not just Donald Trump-esque, like ill-intentioned, power-hungry, populist disinformer types who get to weaponize the power of repetition. Like people who are interested in spreading real facts can harness the powers of repetition and rhyme and, you know, beautiful quote grams on Instagram to, you know, remind people of facts they already know, like that vaccines are safe and climate change is real. And so that is a little bit more encouraging. But

yeah, Donald Trump's presence has really triggered so many cognitive biases that already exist within us. Well, that I mean, I thought about that throughout the entire book, even when he wasn't mentioned and not just Trump. I thought about it just in relation to the way politics is right now. I'm a political nerd and I, you know, have worked on campaigns. You mentioned the illusory truth effect, like, you know, like rule number one on a campaign is like you've got to repeat the message over and over and over and over again. Now we try to make sure that message is true, some people. But it was funny because I was reading the book and I'm like, all right, illusory truth effect explains why or helps explain why disinformation works. Yeah. And then confirmation bias helps explain why fact checks don't necessarily work. Totally.

Totally. Which is a real, because there's a lot of, you know, you run into a lot of liberals that are like, well, we have the facts on our side. And if we just fact check Donald Trump and fact check these people, like everything will be good. And if people read the truth, then everything will be wonderful. And it's like, no, that's just not how we're, I guess it just not how we're i guess that's not how our brains work it's not how our brains work i know and it really it kills me and it causes a great deal of overthinking and thought spirals in me because i am of the delulu so to speak that if i can just come up with like the perfect synthesis of logic or the perfect little nugget of wisdom, then that can help me control a situation.

And it's just not how our brains work. We did not evolve for the culture that we've created. You know, there was once a time when the illusory truth effect was good enough. You know, there was once a time when we did not confront a bazillion headlines in a day. I'm a words person, not a numbers person, so I couldn't come up with a good number there. I don't have the stats there. But there was once a time when the only way to absorb information or wisdom was through oral repetition, was through storytelling, was through legends, jokes. And repetition was really all that we had. It was before the democratization of information, which is not something that I would take back. You know, it's a wonderful thing that we are all able to access

so much knowledge, or so, so many of us, more than ever. But it's a form of technological progress that has come with some serious downsides when we stop to recognize our cognitive limitations. The one other big one that connected to Trump that you write about towards the end of the book is a cognitive bias known as declinism, which you explain as the false impression that things are worse now than they were in the past. You also point out that, you know, before Trump and Reagan used to make America great again, Hitler used to make Germany great again during his rise to power. Why do you think we are first prone to declinism? And why are we more prone to declinism in the information age? Great question. Well, the human mind is really odd about time.

We tend to over-dramatize the present, romanticize the past, and dismiss or create great fear surrounding the future. So there are really fascinating brain studies reflecting that we conceive of our future selves as strangers, which is why we procrastinate saving for retirement or doing our homework. It's because we conceive of our future selves as these random nobodies. Like, why would I want to do anything for future Amanda? Like, who cares about her? Yeah. Yeah. That's why someone asks you to do something like two months from now and is like, hey, you want to get dinner? Or you want to have

a, can I have a coffee? I'm like, sure. Can I do a call two months from now and is like, hey, you want to get dinner? Can I have a coffee? I'm like, sure. Can I do a call with you? And you're like, oh, two months from now? Absolutely. Throw it on the calendar. Oh, I know. My parents are constantly weaponizing this tendency because they will like invite me to something that they know I don't want to go to six months from now.

They will throw it on my calendar. And then before you know it, it's freaking August. And they're like, okay, time to go to Conan O'Brien's live show in Santa Barbara. And I'm like, God damn it. No shade to Conan O'Brien. No shade to Conan O'Brien. No, no, no. But that was a very specific example that happened.

I enjoyed myself, but I didn't want to schlep up there. Anyway, yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think in part we do this because we don't have any relics from the future. The future is unpredictable. We don't have any artifacts to romanticize from that time period. We don't know what's going to happen from the future. fuzzy memories, even if those memories are of things that didn't really happen. Because nostalgia, which is the sort of effective analog to declinism, so many of these cognitive biases have a sort of emotional corollary. So it's like envy is to zero-sum bias, what nostalgia is to declinism. When the present feels really hard and really unmanageable, we have to go somewhere to help us cope. And the past is the easiest place to go. We tend to idealize not only our own personal memories, but, you know, visions of a far off past that maybe never existed.

I think that's why during the pandemic, so many folks adopted the cottagecore aesthetic. I know I did. I was like walking around in my hand-dyed apron, like cosplaying Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was like, I'm a little homesteader. Because it was a form of imagination or escapism or fantasy, I was sort of allowing myself to disappear into a vision of a simpler, more grounded past as a way to envision a simpler, more grounded future after, who knows, the apocalypse. It felt like a guy named Clay Rootlich, who's really brilliant, has reassured me that nostalgia is, you know, a really beautiful and effective coping mechanism, especially when we are creating nostalgia around our own personal memories, memories that are deeply social and relational and maybe a little bittersweet, you know, times that we spent with loved ones that are no longer

around or times when we pushed ourselves to go to an event that maybe made us anxious, but we were so glad that we went in the end. I am constantly reminding myself of the irony that I am spending so much time on my professional accomplishments, but I've never been nostalgic for a professional moment. I'm so interested in that. But nostalgia is a really beautiful and helpful and human coping mechanism, except when ill-intentioned populist leaders weaponize it for personal gain. So you will see so many politicians, not only Donald Trump, sort of catastrophize the present in ways that, you know, are not accurate as a way to glamorize the past as a means to sell us on a future that replicates the fantasy of that past.

And that's really easy to buy into when the present feels painful, when we feel like lost or a sense of unease or ennui. And Donald Trump has combined that declinism with the illusory truth effect and confirmation bias. And all of these things are sort of happening at once to set up a really, really unfortunate catastrophe. Yeah, there's this debate now about sort of why the polls show that people have fonder memories of Trump's term in office

than they do the last four years with Biden. And then everyone says, you know, like objectively, if you look at all the economic statistics and this and that and that. So it's like, yes, of course. But I've and you mentioned the pandemic. I've come to think that it's not necessarily nostalgia for Trump himself, though I'm sure there's some of that. I think it is nostalgia for life before we entered the pandemic. For sure. And, you know, we're past the worst of it, obviously. But like there are, you know, we could have a whole nother episode on this, but there's like entire, there's a lot of things that we haven't coped with yet post-pandemic life.

And I do wonder if some of the angst that's out there now is like, oh, if we could just go back to how things were before, which was when Trump was president. Yeah, because before is what we know. In theory, I guess it would make more sense to fantasize about the future since that's where we're actually going. But we don't have any photos or reminders from the future, obviously, to help us glamorize that time. We do have relics from the past. I am always horrified by the ways that people create nostalgia for George W. Bush. Like, they're like, oh, he's so quaint. He paints now. Remember that simple time? I think people are longing for a time before widespread iPhones. But I mean, I just was watching the Netflix Turning Point docuseries about 9-11 and the war in Iraq. And I'm like, that was not a great time. That was, good God, like the gaslighting of that administration.

But there is nostalgia on the left for George W. Bush. And I think it all comes back to declinism at the end of the day. Well, I was going to say, and it's not just nostalgia on the left, or at least more acceptance on the left for George W. Bush. When I think about the left and declinism, I think about doomslaying, which you have also wrote about, and you wrote a piece in Esquire about this too. Can you tell us about doomslaying? Because this is a very, this feels to me like a very more progressive Gen Z phenomenon. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. So doomslaying is a little phrase that I

describe this pattern of like apocalyptic flavored colloquialisms that have exploded online that I have noticed. And this has to do with my algorithm in my community. And doomslaying shows up differently depending on one's politics. But I have noticed this form of saying really show up in kind of like young, chronically online neoliberal spaces. It's a lot of talk of, you know, like bed rotting, a lot of rotting, doom scrolling. There are like little abbreviations like KMS, which stands for kill myself. So there and then there are, you know, pleasantries that just feel like polite everyday conversation now where you'll just be like, oh, how was your weekend? Other than like the slow heat death of the planet.

It just feels like civically irresponsible not to acknowledge all of the doomy horrors that we know are going on around the world that may be directly affecting us or not. And I went into writing that op-ed for Esquire feeling like a little pessimistic about it. Like, is doomslaying making us numb? Is it causing us to catastrophize? And then I spoke to some scholars of like catastrophe response. it is just a coping mechanism using humor. And sure, like there are downsides if we are becoming so sort of desensitized or making light of these moments. Some people will eventually fall down a sort of conspiratorial rabbit hole where they actually want to like invite in the end of the world, almost like an addict wanting to invite on rock bottom because at least they know it can't get worse. And there's conspiratorialism surrounding ideas of like a rapture or a paradigm shift or a great awakening. And there are people who actually want to invite on that, you know, death of America or that people all across the political spectrum.

And I don't think most people using doom slang sincerely want to invite on the end of the world. But I also found it quite interesting that during times of mass crisis, doom slang has always cropped up throughout the centuries. There's always been language to describe people who were quick to predict end times that didn't end up coming true. They were called doomsayers or screech owls. And so this doomslaying has been around for quite a while. But I definitely noticed that on social media, especially among progressives or people on the left who will glamorize not the Trump era, not the 1950s, but the like Paleolithic period. They'll be like, oh, my God, like, Paleolithic period, they'll be like, oh, my God, like, wouldn't it just be nice to be, like, a little caveman by a creek, just, like, eating berries, no capitalism? And it's like,

oh, I don't know. I don't know if it's that great. Well, I know you get this a lot with, like, the amount of times I've heard the phrase late-stage capitalism over the last several years. And I'm like, do you know what late-stage capitalism is? Are we in late-stage capitalism? But there's like this debate whenever people talk about phones being bad for you and too much screen time being bad, right? And especially for younger people or TikTok, right? And so someone will say like, yeah, it's just giving us a fire hose of bad news all the time. And so it's making us think everything's worse. And then the retort to that is, well, actually there is this horrible climate crisis, right? There is this horrible war in Gaza, right? And people are,

and costs are high and prices are high and people are feeling bad. And so, but I kind of think that both are true. And I think, I think it's the exposure to all of the bad news that is definitely new. Like, that is a new phenomenon. One thousand percent. No, and that goes back to the second half of the question that you asked before, and I'm glad we got back here, is that absolutely, and this is an argument that I try to make constantly in this book is that like we are living in a time when certain things are absolutely new. This onslaught of information, this pressure to know everything. There is this incredible, I think, egocentric, capitalistic-centric pressure that like you can optimize to know everything. Like you have no excuse not to ghoul your way to any answer. And this is

presented smugly by so many pundits and social commentators and people who wish they were those types of people who will say like, you have no excuse not to know X, Y, and Z. I don't have time to educate you. I do not have to exert the emotional labor to educate. It's like, okay, then don't. Well, then don't yell at me when I don't fucking know something for sure. But it's like, you know, so many of us, we don't have we don't have the energy to to exert on learning everything ourselves, you know. And at the very same time, like there is so much evidence to suggest that like we're really bad at changing other people's minds. Like it's actually not effective. It's not

that's not a good use of your time. We are much better at changing our own minds. And that is something that I try to emphasize as much as I can. I'm always trying to emphasize the message that like, I just want to generate compassion for other people's irrationalities and skepticism of my own.

I think that's like the only approach. Yeah, but no, it is absolutely true that there are things that are new and this climate crisis is urgent and new. And social media is new. And we don't exactly know the effect that it's going to have long term on our minds. But it is clearly causing stress. And there is much evidence to suggest that the exposure that young girls in particular have, teen girls have, to more identities than ever to compare themselves to is causing despair.

TikTok use disorder is a describable phenomenon. Yeah, there is a lot to suggest that there are new things creating anguish. And at the very same time, like, it isn't helpful to catastrophize or to, you know, sort of write off in a kind of defeatist way. That's what a lot of this doom slang has. It's like this defeatist flavor or a lot of, you know, the slogans that we hear as an excuse to disengage, like they have this defeatist flavor. And so, so many things are true at the same time and our cognitive biases are oriented toward assuaging that cognitive dissonance. So there's like a lot of internal conflict that we're navigating all the time.

You have this great quote from a writer named Aidan Narada. The internet has this dual effect of showing us an unprecedented array of horrors and also reminding us that we are in many ways powerless to stop them. Which I think is like just the best description of consuming the news. And it does go into, you were talking about how some of these things are new. I found it fascinating when you wrote about the cognitive bias of the recency illusion, which feels like it's very related to this. And the recency illusion, can you explain that a little bit? Yeah, that describes our tendency to assume that something is objectively new and thus urgent and worthy of panic because it's new to us.

And I noticed this in headlines. You know, I myself, I worked in digital media for five plus years at the start of my career. And part of my job would be to refresh old headlines to generate new clicks by taking an old piece of it wasn't even news. I was a beauty editor. So I, my job was to sort of like write about celebrity beauty routines and such. But, uh, when we would do these headline refreshes, we would frame, you know, Kendall Jenner's opinion about foundation or like some, I don't know, nutritionists comment about a sleep supplement, we would have to frame those like old soundbites or whatever as new, urgent, and thus engaging and profitable news, even though it was an old

piece of information and even though it was not urgent or important. So, you know, it's not just sort of like the BuzzFeed clickbait model. No shade to BuzzFeed. It's not just like the sort of clickbait model that is incentivized to operate this way. Like even legitimate newsrooms are. Especially. Especially. Especially.

And, you know, I really, I credit slash blame the 24-hour news cycle with turning news into entertainment. We need to make it engaging. We need to generate those clicks, those ad dollars. And yeah, and again, it is just like civically irresponsible to completely disengage from the news. I mean, I think of the couple from White Lotus season two, Daphne and what was the guy's name? They were like, oh yeah, we don't read the news. We don't watch the news. Yeah, it's great. And they're like so privileged and deliriously happy. So we don't, no one wants to turn into that. And a lot of people do not have the privilege

to ignore the news because the news is happening to them. And it is happening to so many different demographics in so many different ways. And yet, you know, it is worthy to ask the question, is our attention the most reliable barometer for determining what is new and what is urgent and what is worthy of panic? And I think, you know, the answer is increasingly no. Like our fight or flight responses are not enough to determine what is worthy of our attention the way that they once were. No, I look, I mean, this happens all the time in news. And, you know, our company sort of sits at the intersection of politics and news. And I've been on both sides of it now.

And even if you take the sort of like, we need a bigger audience to like stay afloat as a business aside, which is true, right? But if I just want to grow, like when we first started out, I'm like, I just want to grow the audience. I just want more people to listen to politics, right? But if I just want to grow, like when we first started out, I'm like, I just want to grow the audience. I just want more people to listen to politics, right? So then you're like, okay, well, I want to give good information. I don't want to, I hate the game of politics purely for entertainment, right? So I want to give people news, but that people don't want to hear

that. Totally. You're telling me. So you, so I'm like, you got to mix in some of the fun stuff. And then it's just a constant balance between like, are we giving people what they want? And we also giving them some of them what they maybe don't want, but should want. And then are we going to like make sure that they can have information so they can actually do something about it so they don't feel powerless, which is part of the problem with some of these biases. It's a real challenge. Even if you take the capitalism out of it. Oh, I know. It's a real tango It's a real... Even if you take the capitalism out of it. Oh, I know. It's a real tango.

I struggle with this too because, like, of course, I want my work to be supremely entertaining, you know, as a way to get people to want to engage with it. But sometimes, of course, you have to, like, sacrifice, you know, the full, like, most perfect data-driven picture

to make it more digestible. So yeah, it is like a constant tango. Yeah. It's also, it's, it relates to how people consume news too, because I had this thought while I was reading the book that the rare times I have been able to step away from the news cycle, which is very rare. Yeah. Like, I had something that I really had to do. And you come back after, like, a day or two, and, you know, I have friends and colleagues, like, talking about this story that's all this political drama and urgency, and we got to talk about this. And I'm like, and then you read about it, and you're like, it doesn't seem that important to me.

Because in the moment, when you're just constantly consuming the fire hose, you think it's important. That's right. But if you're not paying attention and then you look at it and learn about it with a little perspective, you're like, oh, compared to other huge problems, that's sort of a small thing. Yeah, but we're not able to prioritize very effectively when we're in fight or flight.

And when that fight or flight is engineered by media companies, and I don't want to even write them off as evil because to your point, like we all have like a directive from on high to of evaluate using what I call in the book as like an urgent versus important matrix to be like, is this problem or is this headline piece of news, you know, email from my boss, whatever, is this urgent or is it more important but not as urgent? Is it neither of them? And it's really hard to apply a matrix like that. But I think it's becoming increasingly important to try. No, that's a good idea. The last one I want to talk to you about is overconfidence bias. Because this is a pattern where people with the littlest knowledge on a subject consistently prove themselves likeliest to overvalue their expertise. Twitter. Okay, okay. I want to make a caveat to this, though, because what you just described is the Dunning-Kruger effect, or at least what most

people describe as the Dunning-Kruger effect. And when I went into writing this chapter, I thought I was going to write about the Dunning-Kruger effect. And I was all smug. I was like, surely, if I know what the Dunning-Kruger effect is, and it can't apply to me. And then as I started looking into it, I realized that the Dunning-Kruger effect didn't actually say exactly what so many of us thought it did. As it turns out, according to David Dunning, the study's lead author himself, we all, no matter if we're experts in something or not, tend to overvalue our expertise in a variety of subjects. And I'm not just talking about academic subjects. I'm talking about like driving, cooking, sex. Like so many of us evaluate our skills as

above average in these arenas. It's just that scholars might do it over a slightly narrower range. But the Dunning-Kruger effect is not just another excuse to feel supercilious over people who are less educated because we all tend to – or a great majority of us naturally tend to over-credit ourselves with positive outcomes. When we do something that yields a negative result, we are shocked. We're like, little old me? Like, no. I can't be wrong. Yeah. And I went into that chapter, you know, feeling like it was a really tough pill to swallow that I could possibly be overconfident. I was like, but I'm a reasonable person.

I hate myself. Or like, I have imposter syndrome. How could I be overconfident? And then I looked into some of these studies and I realized, like, not only are we naturally this way and not only are there upsides to overconfidence, like, you know, it helps us, you know, overreach ourselves enough to make progress, which is so important, not only for, you know, success, but for, for activism. Like if everyone engaging in sort of grassroots feminist movements needed a PhD in gender studies, we wouldn't have those movements. So, you know, overconfidence does have these upsides. There are downsides like, you know,

we really consistently fail to understand where our knowledge ends and where another person's knowledge begins. So there's a great book called The Knowledge Illusion, which opens with a Yale study that found that if you ask someone how a toilet works, they'll be like, oh, yeah, I know how a toilet works. And then you ask them to write a sort of like step-by-step breakdown of how a toilet works. And after engaging in that exercise, they'll realize like, oh, shit, I don't know. But it's other people's knowledge in certain subjects, whether it's plumbing or, you know, global politics, that makes us feel

like we know more than we do. And that's kind of annoying, but it's also amazing because it makes us these incredible collaborators. We can like mind meld and make progress with other people so well. And that's a sort of upside of overconfidence. But as you can imagine, in the hands of populist leaders who have access to buttons and policymaking, overconfidence can be really awful. But yeah, I'm constantly navigating that swing between the positives and the negatives. become this phenomenon where like people who are experts in one subject like they knew how to make a lot of money as a venture capitalist suddenly are like you know experts on in the ukraine war and then the next day the pandemic and then the next day yes gaza right and we really i mean i grew up hearing and i'm sure you did too the rhyming phrase speaking of the illusory truth effect fake it till you make it that is is considered conventional wisdom in the United States. And so I'm always like reckoning with the question of

like, when is confidence too much? When is it criminal? When do you go from Steve Jobs to Elizabeth Holmes? And you could argue that expertise is part of it, but it's not all of it. And so I, yeah, I struggle. I struggle with the confidence factor. I mean, I think one thing that helps with that is that I found is now that I have a toddler who has started to ask me questions that I think I would know, right? He's like, Dad, why does the tide come in? Why are there waves? And I was like, the moon. And he's like, so what do you mean the moon?

How does that work? And I'm like, oh, I have no fucking idea. I was like, the moon and he's like and he's like but he's like so how what do you mean the moon how does that work and i'm like oh i have no fucking idea it's like something about the moon it's like the moon and gravity and i guess they pull the waves back and then i'd like at some point you start saying something you're like okay just stop because you're gonna give him the wrong information about this you're like google google google but it feels it feels so good to have an answer you know even if the answer is wrong and we grow up wanting our authority figures to behave with overconfidence. And so I kind of in that chapter, I'm like encouraging us all to maybe expect less from everyone. I know this book isn't like a how to guide on overcoming these cognitive

biases. But as I was reading, I realized, okay, like, some of these I've definitely fallen for myself. Some of these I still fall for myself. but some of them I maybe used to fall for, but now recognize more. Like, is there anything you've learned about how and why some of us sometimes aren't tricked by these cognitive biases that might help us figure out how to overcome them? Yeah. Well, here's me pushing against the incentives to be overconfident. I don't really know. I mean, the human mind and human personalities are so mysterious. And so for whatever reason, due to your background or the particular things that you've studied, you might feel like a little more resistant to one bias versus the other. One that I for sure have become more resistant to having written this book is zero sum bias. Uh, you know, there was once a time when I would, you know, clock, uh, another person who was also, you know, like a young female, female writer. live rent free in my head and to think that their existence in the world dimmed my light and put my success at stake. And now whenever I start to get that impulse, I decide to make a connection rather

than a nemesis. And that has been really helpful and healing for me in so many different ways. Becoming aware of the sunk cost fallacy has been really helpful. But those are just the ones that really like clicked for some reason with me. And there are others that I'm sure I'll never really overcome. No, I mean, we didn't even talk about zero sum, but that was the bias that I thought explains political conflict and particularly populist political conflict better than anything I had imagined. Because you, I think, mentioned at one point that even if you go down by income level and people who are sort of economically more disadvantaged on the, on the spectrum are more likely to, uh, you know, buy

into zero sum bias because for them, the resources really are scarce. And so they're in competition, which is why you get like a lot of intense feelings on immigration and trade and just, and everyone's like, well, why do, why do people who are on the lower end of the income spectrum like Donald Trump and like this kind of stuff? Because that is exactly the cohort of people where that's activated the most on like a political social angle. Absolutely. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Zero sum bias shows up in situations from lower stakes to very, very high stakes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I do think that the first step is recognizing a lot of these biases.

I always say like, when you think that something's too easy or that you think that you're so right and you couldn't possibly be wrong, or like, that's always when you're like, I can just check this for a second. Red flag. Amanda Montel, thank you so much for joining Offline.

The book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, it's fantastic. Everyone take a look at it and appreciate the conversation. Oh yeah, The Age of Magical Overthinking, it's fantastic. Everyone take a look at it and appreciate the conversation. Oh, yeah. Thank you so much. Can I plug my new Magical Overthinkers podcast that I'm launching? You sure can. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. So I obviously can't stop talking about this concept of magical overthinking. So on May 15th and every other Wednesday, I am going to be airing an episode of my new Magical Overthinkers podcast where every episode is overthinking about blank, overthinking about blank, overthinking about blank.

Some zeitgeisty, confounding subject that's living rent free in the broader cultural consciousness from narcissism to nostalgia. And I'm interviewing all kinds of amazing expert guests from astrophysicists to philosophers. And so I really hope folks tune in. Oh, that sounds so cool. Everyone, everyone, check it out. All right. Bye, Amanda. Bye. Thank you so much. Before we go, some quick housekeeping. Ready to get into the good, the ad and the ugly? Oof. In the latest episode of Political Experts React, Dan is joined by MSNBC host Alex Wagner to break down viral political ads from Gavin Newsom, the Biden campaign, and Republican voters against Trump. To watch this series, type Pod Save America into the nearest YouTube search bar.

And from Trump's hush money trial to some pivotal Supreme Court hearings, the last few weeks have been a whirlwind. Want to keep up with it all, but have a life? We can't relate, but we've got you. Sign up for the What A Day newsletter and get a pithy, funny digest of the day's biggest headlines straight to your inbox. Everything you missed and why you should care five days a week. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Mixed and edited by Jordan Cantor.

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