I want to be fair to magical thinking in that it has existed for thousands of years, and I can understand the logic of trying to make sure that people engage in more positive thought than negative thought, because it would make sense that positive thoughts would create a more positive outlook, and surely that's healthier for all of us. I'm English, so we are obviously born with the most negative outlook on earth. I can't even imagine it. But I want to give due respect to this cultural thing that has existed for a very long time, but the explosion of magical thinking in the last sort of maybe, probably since the 60s, it started to erupt, but it feels like because of social media now, it has fully taken over. And you have so many people talking about manifesting. I think the book The Secret was the first time it became very, very mainstream and a bestseller where it's like you are the master of your own fate, which I think a lot of people at the time didn't realise was then also saying that people who get cancer or are born with HIV, or are born into poverty, or have a car accident. So those people are then inherently being blamed for their own circumstances, right? It's like, well, these people were not positive enough, and so that's why they live culturally in dire circumstances. And so that's the moment at which I was immediately like, no, when it came to The Secret and that form of manifesting. But I think because social media and the internet and the news cycle, everything feels more out of control and more intangible, that we're not supposed to be, I guess, exposed to this much information, this many world events, right? People feel like they are spinning out in a way that we have never spun out before. We're not in our little villages, we're not living little lives. We are exposed to the whole world all of the time. And so there's a sort of need for some form of autonomy, right? A feeling of self-determination. So you're like, okay, I can think my way out of this. I can crystals and chanting and moon ceremonies and all these things. And they don't mean this at all in a patronising way. I'm totally open to any of these things within reason. It's just that how much it has now kind of crossed into capitalism, right? I think has been the coolest for concern, right? You've summarised the whole thing so perfectly. Oh, good. Sorry. No,

I'm trying to... No, oh my God, please, I'm like so thankful for that. Yeah, I found that our brains developed our decision-making tactics in a culture that does not resemble the modern world, right? Like we're not built to process limitless identities in the course of a single scroll. We're not built to contend with an onslaught of traumatising news, some of which affects us directly and some of which doesn't. And so we respond to this overwhelm of information and challenges and traumas with the decision-making tactics that developed when all we had to contend with was survival.

20,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago. What are those decisions what were those decisions supposed to look like? It would be like this berry poisonous.

Is this berry poisonous? There's a rustling in the bushes. Should I run? You know, like someone in my community is competing for a mate that I also want. Like, how should I treat that person? How should I behave? Or like, I need to seek out a role model so that I don't die of starvation. Like, who in my community should that be? We are applying these same decision-making strategies to much more complex, abstract, disembodied challenges. And we're doing that subconsciously, like without being aware that we're doing it. And so like we as innately mystical, sort of irrational human beings are experiencing the fallout of that, which is like really miserable as it turns out. And so I just want to sort of highlight those things so that we can become a little more skeptical of ourselves, but also compassionate toward irrational behavior and others. Yeah,

because that irrational behavior is something that you yourself have noticed in your past, right? So you refer to your own, you know, sort of conspiracy theory existence. Can you tell me about that?

Yeah. Yeah. So there's a chapter in the book that I opened with the line, I was a conspiracy theorist once, which I just thought was kind of like a poetic line. Yeah. But what I want to communicate in that chapter is this idea of proportionality bias, which is a cognitive bias. This book is dedicated to 11 different cognitive biases, which are like these mental magic tricks that we play on ourselves in order to make decisions. And we do so unconsciously. Proportionality bias is this one that underlies a lot of really destructive conspiratorial thinking, but it also shows up in our everyday lives in ways that we might not think would be similar to conspiratorial thinking. So proportionality bias is basically this penchant to think that a big event or even a big feeling must have had a big cause. So, you know, in the context of a classic conspiracy theory, it might be, oh, Princess Diana passed away. That is such an epic, insane tragedy. That could not have just been the product of like this random car accident. The royal family must have killed her. Like we make these sort of misattributions of cause and effect because they make proportional sense. It's like we like harmonious proportions as a species, you know, we like.

It makes us feel safer, right? Yes. It gives us some idea that then we have the ability in our brains being built to predict and protect means that then we're creating a pattern that gives us this sense that like, well, I'll be able to see this coming next time. You know, so again, when we see like Meghan Markle, or indeed recently, like Kate Middleton, you know, she's subjected to that same sort of like public like scrutiny and bullying. It's so interesting that we're sort of like being like, well, we've seen this before and that makes us feel safe. We feel like we're in control because we can identify the patterns. We just want to identify the patterns, right? Totally.

And that becomes especially important to us during times of crisis, turbulence, mass confusion. During times of private tragedy and grief, we sometimes get a little bit irrational. Like if you're really afraid of flying, you might, you know, do a little ritual, like a superstitious behavior before you get on a plane every single time because you want to feel like you're in control of that situation. And we're engaging in those sort of superstitions on a huge collective scale. Now, as a result of living in the time of excess information and social media. So yeah, I think you're absolutely right. We want to feel like we have agency. We want to feel like we can make predictions that will help us move forward. Like the future is scary. It's unknown. So if we can make those cause and effect conclusions, even if they're totally irrational to our brains, it doesn't matter. It's like good enough. You know, I get to feel like I'm in control. And that's actually okay. Like engaging in a certain amount of delusion and your everyday life, like doing your vision board or whatever. Like, I love a little deluloo. It helps us cope with like the mass confusion of life on earth. It's like, why are we here? And I get that. It's when exactly what you said, we're living in this like hyper-consumerist, hyper-capitalistic social media driven age. When there are more than a few people who are willing to take advantage of those innate superstitions and mysticisms for their own gain. So it's one thing to make a vision board, you know, with your friends at home and do that with like a grain of salt, a skeptical twinkle in your eye, you know, like if these vision board dreams don't come true, I don't have to blame myself. And it's another thing to see a manifestation guru type figure online take those pretty pure aims and say, actually, I have my own bespoke manifestation technique. And if you pay $30 a month for my course, then I can guarantee your success. And if that success does not come to fruition, well, that can't be because

of me. You just did it right. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. And the thing is, is that the reason it's important to be vigilant about this, the reason that the book is so well timed is that. God, especially now that chat GPT has entered the race and AI and deep fakes are so deeply accessible. It means that we are in a misinformation age that I've never witnessed before. This is beyond anything I've ever been able to comprehend because it's not just institutions ready. You know, we've had huge eras in every country in the world has experienced some era of a dictator, you know, controlling the media and putting up propaganda. And that's the only access to information, you know, that you have. But what's different here is that this isn't media institutions anymore circulating this news. So we can't be like, well, I'm skeptical of the news because now it's people that you know or people that you follow or people that you respect or it's scientists and doctors or former members of the FBI coming out and saying all of these things. And so we are in a hyper overstimulated state. We are completely terrified and there's we don't we can't tell anymore what is real and what is fake. So of course we are going to grip onto anything that makes us feel like we are even vaguely able to

make sense of stuff. Yeah. And you know, like talking about it like this, it sounds really doomsday. It sounds really sort of apocalyptic, but I actually don't feel pessimistic about the current age and how are you managing that? Well, you know, great question. I do sound a cold plunge. I'm just kidding. I actually know I do do that. But that's not what helps me talking to scholars, like talking to the academics who I interviewed for this book was randomly so healing because they are all actually really cool. And they are all actually really optimistic about the future. There's this one chapter of the book that talks about nostalgia and the cognitive bias that kind of goes with nostalgia is called declineism, which speaks to our penchant to believe that life is just getting worse and worse and worse and worse. And it's all downhill from here. And we like naturally think that way. We naturally lean on the past as this like idealized romanticized moment, even though all of these scholars reflected that like, actually objectively now is the best time for civil liberty and for access to for the democratization of information. Like, of course, the democratization of information has come with a double edged sword. Like, there's a lot of misinformation too. But I would not rather live in a time when like the only people who could know things were like high priests, you know, and it's hard to recognize that when the present feels painful. And we lean on nostalgia during times of present misery as a coping mechanism, like sort of sinking into that warm bath of fuzzy memories helps us kind of envision a better future, which is nice, which is good. It's again, that weaponization of it when a populist figure comes down and has us catastrophize the present and then makes up some illusion of a past we never knew in order to sell their vision of the future. Like, that's when it becomes dangerous. But every scholar I spoke to for this book, philosophers, folklorists, psychologists, like really smart cookies, they were like, dude, I know life feels bad right now. It really does. We feel on we, we feel languishing. We feel traumatized every time we open our phones. That sucks. But you and I are having an exchange of ideas from across the world and we're able to talk about how we feel. And that wasn't even true 20 years ago. 20 years ago, we had to just like suffer in silence. We were just as irrational 20 years ago. It's just the world is becoming more complicated. And that's okay. And so like talking to these really, really smart people always makes me feel better because it makes me feel like there's hope.

Well, that's the experience I'm having right now with you. And then the started thing is so interesting because the way that we watch it be weaponized and you know, like American politics at the moment, the tagline make America great again, which I think is assigned to Donald Trump, but is back from like Reagan and Nixon like this, this existed throughout presidential campaigns. Totally. And so there is this ability when you just say that sentiment for people to remember the most innocent time of their youth. You know, we always categorize it as like people wish that there were slaves again. And I don't think that's necessarily what is happening with these people, right? They are just remembering a happy time riding on a bike with an ice cream where they weren't bombarded with the news and we didn't talk about politics all the fucking time and yeah, and the world felt like a simpler place. Totally. What they mean really is, master make America simple again. Right. I think

I love that.

But that's what I think is happening and it's being not I'm sure some people wish for a terrible, terrible time in history where women and people of minorities and gay people have no rights, but I think the vast majority of people are just just longing for a time

that didn't look like this. For sure. And like, let's even simplify the acronym like it's not make America simple again like America was never simple. It's maybe like, maybe it's MLS make life simple. You know, I think like I was talking to this really smart nostalgia scholar named Clay Rutledge recently, who has written a whole bunch about this topic and he referenced a study where participants across the spectrum of generation were reflected that they long for iPhone's gen Z long for time for iPhones boomers long for time for iPhones. And actually the majority of survey participants also responded by saying they think that life was better in the 1950s if you just ask the general question. But then when you get more specific about it and you ask things like, well, would you rather your daughter have to go back to a time before she get a credit card or like, would you rather go back to a time before like current cancer treatment. Advancements like would you actually rather live in the 1950s once you get a little bit more surgical about the questions people walk it back. They're like, actually, no, thank you. But the reason why we're nostalgic for a time before iPhones is because more specifically we are realizing that there is something in these phones that's making us stressed. That's making us feel isolated from our communities not more connected. That's making us feel like brutally hallucinatory like there is something going on there. And so we're longing not for a time necessarily in the past where we were more connected. We're actually longing for a future where we can like eat whole foods and commune with our family. And like, there's something in our phones that's preventing us from doing that. So when you apply like a more specific and thus a more generous lens to the equation, it's like, oh, I'm not actually nostalgic for like a trad wife era. I just want life to be a little better. Yeah.

Talk to me about an amoia.

I loved this. Oh my God. And amoia, I wish I coined this frickin term. This is from the dictionary of Obscurusaros, which is a beautiful chef's kiss of a book written by a dude named John Koenig. And it describes nostalgia for a time we've never known. And I am so susceptible to this. The other day, I spent $130 on this LED candlestick that I walk around the house holding in like a little nightgown pretending that I'm not going to be able to get a little bit more comfortable. But I'm so susceptible to this red indescribable kind of looking at a black gown pretending that I'm a tuberculosis ridden child being like, which didn't well, my tea because I'm just like. I do fantasize about the 1800s. I don't want to go back there. I do not want to go back there. But

I do. I'm like, I just want

to live a simple life where I like, don't do podcasts. Thank you so much for having me. to fantasies of a simpler time, a time we've never known. And that can be a really beautiful thing, that type of fantasy and imagination. That's what nostalgia is. But I find it ironic that like, I'm using tools of the present, like this literal LED lamp to fulfill that fantasy, which is so funny. I'm interested in creating nostalgia for the present. I can't determine for that, which is called temposer. But yeah, I'm just interested in like, how we can take these deluloo habits of hours and actually use them for good.

And tell me about your one, break it down, break down the mountain.

Well, I am fascinated by the upside of nostalgia. It's use as a coping mechanism. And I was thinking like, if nostalgia is such a beautiful tool for managing the unpredictability of the present, like what if we could actually create nostalgia for the present as a way to express gratitude or even like optimize our life such that when we look back on it, we are able to very easily and sort of rationally idealize. So I was talking to that guy, Clay. And he was like, it's a very interesting exercise to try to create nostalgia for the present because sometimes what I'll do is when I feel stressed about getting older, I'm like looking in the mirror and I'm like, she's tired. And I start to think about my adolescent years as better somehow, which is so deluloo because I fucking hate it being a teenager. I will do this exercise where I imagine that I'm actually 72. I'm 72 years old. And someone tells me all of a sudden, guess what? At the snap of my fingers, you get to go back and be 32 again. And then suddenly I'm like so grateful to be only 32. I'm like, oh my God, I have my whole life ahead of me. And we can sort of optimize our life for nostalgia based on what science says about memories that we tend to perceive as warm and fuzzy, time spent with family, highly social connections, even if they're not fully positive. Like, going and visiting with a loved one who's unwell, reconnecting with a friend who we once cut out as being toxic. And some people are meant to be cut out, but I think we're very quick to cut people out these days. Nostalgia is bittersweet, right? And like, we love the feeling of nostalgia, but when we think back on those memories, they're not wholly positive. And so I love that idea because I'm like, I am truly spending too much time on memories that I will not look back on fondly. Like, no one ever is nostalgia for like all that time they spent making amazing Instagram reels. Like, you're nostalgia for time that you spent with those who mean a lot to you, like looking

at the sky. So- It's so funny you say this, this is literally my life. In the last few years, I've become obsessed with looking back on my life later. Because, you know, I've said this a few times on the podcast, I got incredibly sick at the end of 2022. And it was after an incredibly successful run in my career. And I should have been on cloud nine, but my body was fucked, my brain was fucked. I was lonely, I was sad, I missed my friends, my friends missed me. And I was like, what if this is all over now? What if my life is over or my life as I knew it is over? Would I be thrilled about the way that I spent the last few years or the last decade? No, I'm very grateful for the adventures I got to have. But I don't think that on my deathbed, I'll take those memories with me apart from meeting Keanu Reeves. You know, apart from that one, that was actually worth it. It was worth all the time. But I, it sent me into a spiral of existential, I don't even want to say crisis because it was like an existential breakthrough. Where I was like, oh, no, okay, I'm making all the memories. And I have started taking like a one second videos throughout the day when something really wonderful is happening, like a moment of friends laughing or googling gossip together or eating a really good pastry with my boyfriend or going for a beautiful walk in France. I've started to live my life intentionally. And I don't put these videos out publicly, they're just private videos for us to be able to remember at the moment. And I watched these videos shortly after because I realized how quickly I've forgotten everything I did that week or a month ago. So I constantly watch these videos and I get that immediate tingle, that dopamine rush that comes with the nostalgia. And I have become obsessed with doing this and obsessed with living a cheaper life that means that I have a richer existence, right? We've completely shifted the idea of what rich means. And we think it's just having money and we don't talk about what you have to do and sacrifice to get that money. I'm now obsessed with having a truly rich life. And that involves looking into the eyes of my dog, not looking at my screen, looking at my friends, being there for the big moments that I can be there for and letting them into mind. And my big moments are a ones of true, like emotional transition rather than an award that a movie studio paid for for me. I know, isn't that wild?

Like I am working so hard to achieve these career milestones. But when I think about it, I've never been nostalgic for a career moment, you know? Like those aren't the memories that I cherish. And it's so validating to know that there is a cognitive bias underlying why we sometimes over romanticize the past or why we allow people with nefarious intentions to weaponize that like really pure thing that we do, which is declinism, that cognitive bias. And it's so inherent to us. And this also reminds me of another study that I quote in this book because it's such a lie that by like achieving some capitalist milestone or by, you know, making more money or posting more online, that that will somehow make you feel fulfilled. But I think that ties to this, oh God, the study that lives rent-free in my head that talks about additive solution versus subtractive solution bias. So there's a chapter in the book about the sunk cost fallacy, which is our penchant to think that resources already spent on an endeavor just by spending even more. So not just money or time, but sometimes emotional resources like hope.