Kurt Andersen on How America Lost Its Mind

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Does it seem to you like America went crazy all of a sudden?

If so, you're wrong.

It wasn't sudden at all.

In fact, the groundwork has been laid over the past 500 years.

There's a conspiracy against reality, and it goes all the way up to the White House.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

Hello.

And I'm Jeff Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

Also, hello.

And a third hello to you both.

I'm Alex Wagner, contributing editor to The Atlantic.

In the fourth chair this week, we have Kurt Anderson.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello, Kurt.

Hello, Alex.

We're very excited to have Kurt here, aren't we?

people

are very excited that.

It's Kurt now.

Don't sound like you're making a joke about it.

No, no, no.

We're honestly very excited.

I'm excited for eight different reasons.

Would you like to know four of them?

Yes, please.

Thank you very much.

One, he's the author of our September cover story.

Two, he's a great writer.

Three, he's my first editor in magazines.

Really?

I just had, I'm like Rick Perrying this.

I don't really have eight reasons.

Yeah, he was,

my first magazine was New York Magazine when he was editor of New York Magazine in the mid-90s.

This is after he invented SPY.

Everybody knows that he invented SPY.

And this is before he began his career as a radio host and novelist.

And I don't want to do the whole resume because it's, you know.

The fourth reason you're glad is because he's goddamn Kurt Anderson, and we're happy to have him.

Indeed.

We're very happy that Kurt is here.

And we're talking about a couple of things.

We're talking about his cover story, and we're talking about his new book, Fantasy Land, which I think is one of the most extraordinary books I've read in recent times because it presents an alternative understanding of all of American history.

I'm not going to try to recite that for you since he's sitting right here.

I thought maybe we could start by you taking, I think you told me once that this started as a 200,000-word book and it's worked its way down to a more acceptable level.

Was 200 the right number?

No, it was closer to 240.

Oh, okay.

Sorry, I thought I was exaggerating.

I apologize.

No, it's a brisk,

it's a brisk 170.

No, it's actually, it's a quite, it's a quite good size right now.

But I want you to do the impossible and take your masterwork and boil it down into about 60 seconds.

And then we could jump off what you've done and talk about the book in light of our current political and social reality.

So go.

It's called Fantasy Land, How America Went Haywire, a 500-year history.

Now, it started as...

A set of questions that I've had for a long time.

Why is America so much more religious than the rest of the developed world, for instance?

Donald Trump wasn't even on my radar as I began this researching and writing this book in 2013, 2014.

But then

I went back to the 1960s.

I thought that was an important time.

And then I saw, no, no, no, there are threads here.

There is an American DNA that goes back hundreds of years.

And indeed, 500 before there was an America when Martin Luther nailed his theses on that door in Germany and started Protestantism.

So

how did America go haywire?

Because we were invented as the first design-built, made-up from nothing country, specifically a Protestant country, specifically by a bunch of

truly a cult of religious zealots, nuts, you could even say, up north in Massachusetts, and some people who desperately wanted to believe they could find gold in Virginia and the South and kept believing that for years, years, a generation without finding any.

So these two groups of fantasists started this country.

And

a combination of our extreme religion, by which I mean Protestant religion,

our extreme kinds of blue smoke and mirrors devotion to making money and business that was fairly unique in the world at the time, the entrepreneurialism and the

verging on con game that that entailed,

our love of and really invention of show business in mixing in that.

The religions kept popping from Mormonism through Christian science to Pentecostalism and beyond.

The hucksterism kept going from P.T.

Barnum to, oh, Donald Trump today.

And here we are.

And so I was writing this history.

And

as I was finishing the draft in the winter, spring of 2016, here comes Donald Trump sort of becoming my exhibite.

So, Kurt, you're the first writer in history, as far as I know, who's drawn a straight line from Cotton Mather to Donald Trump.

And that wasn't my intention.

Donald Trump was...

I can't imagine any writer having that as an intention.

No, Donald Trump wasn't in this book when I started.

I'm not sure Cotton Mather was either.

But the fact of America's extreme Protestantism, by which I mean you don't have to, we don't need your stinking priests.

We don't need your stinking Vatican.

We can figure out what is true and what is false based on our own communication with God and reading scripture.

That became central to American individualism, kind of epistemological, ontological,

I can think whatever I want.

And that was kept in balance for a few hundred years pretty nicely, and it worked out okay in this country.

And then it started not to, and then we got Donald Trump.

Well, let me just, I'm going to let everybody to jump in, but I'm just so fascinated by this because the book is in a way a history of America as a place shared by the grifted and the grifter.

Correct.

Right.

So,

And the true believers.

And the true believers, right, but magical thinkers.

But

my difficulty with the book, I think it's a brilliant book, but my difficulty is that I really like America.

Me too.

And I'm not testing this is not a patriotism test.

No, I really like it.

And I think some of the negatives that you've identified are also...

positives in the sense that the belief that you can do anything is very useful when you're trying to build a completely new country that's innovative and creative, et cetera.

And also the belief that that there is a god and that the god wants you to be just interpreted through certain people i'm sure you'd agree with like martin luther king jr by your standards your atheistic communistic standards kidding your standards is a magical thinker because he believed that god had a mission for him on earth but that mission turned out to be a useful mission and i don't think you're a commie you might be an atheist but i don't think you're a commie

you can go now yes jeff yeah now no no i finished lecturing no no of course that they're they're good things and again the argument of the book is that America is great, is exceptional in many ways.

But instead of just saying that a million times and not looking at the particular peculiar downsides of I'll believe anything, I can do anything,

I can be anybody.

Yeah, all those have good sides and have.

until, in my view, those aspects in all realms, economic, political, cultural, religious, and otherwise, were allowed to kind of get out of control about 50 years of imbalance.

It's a book about imbalances.

Can I ask a question, though, Kurt, in terms of our singularity?

I mean, this is a new moment for America, but I wonder if similar things haven't happened all over the world.

I mean, when we talk about sort of magical realism and the hocus-pocus society and the sort of conspiracy theorist government, I go back to my mom's from Burma, where at one point they outlawed a whole like section of currency based on an astrologist's report where they moved the capital city to Naypiada at six, I think 16 a.m.

on some certain calendar day because again, the astrologist said that's the right time to move the capital city up north.

And, you know, there are comparisons made between Donald Trump and plenty of other sort of banana republic rulers all over the world.

So, you know, isn't this something, is this, I guess my question is, are we really unique as Americans?

Are we uniquely nuts?

We are uniquely nuts in the countries that aren't, say, Burma or banana republics.

We are uniquely nuts in the developed world.

That is my argument about our uniqueness.

And of course, not unique.

There are, yes, there are conspiracy theorists and people who believe supernatural madness and new age craziness.

in all, even in other developed countries.

But it's us and the less developed countries, as opposed to what we used to call the civilized world.

Us versus Europe.

Us versus Canada and Australia.

I'm curious, where do you see this long trend manifesting most today?

Where have you seen, I mean, when you look around, there's a lot of stuff happening.

I mean, besides the White House?

Well, again, as I said, the book was done essentially when Donald Trump appeared as a plausible presidential candidate and then president.

So there are lots of places.

I mean, Alex Jones has been around for 20 years.

I had a whole chapter about Alex Jones.

Alex Jones, the paranoid radio host.

The paranoid Infowars, Texas-based radio host.

So there's that.

And again,

there is a history of this.

And one of my points is that Donald Trump didn't just pop into existence with all his nuttiness and alternative facts.

in 2015.

There was a history.

There was a book, for instance, called Behold a Pale Horse that came out in the early 90s that was incredibly influential in creating this conspiracy theory view of the world.

Of course, before that, two generations, there was the John Birch Society, which had also laid the ground work, especially on the right, especially in the Republican Party.

So today, yes,

there are the conspiracy nuts, the anti-globalists, the, oh my God, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Institute and the United Nations and

CBS and all of them are trying to put us in camps.

So that's been around.

And it's just, so it's been normalized.

It's moved over the last 50 years, especially from the fringes into

the mainstream and now into the White House.

So there's that.

There's, again, as a, I'm not an atheist.

I don't, I'm not a Richard Dawkins, even Chris Hitchens atheist.

I don't believe in a particular religion.

That's true.

And And you don't believe in an interventionist God.

I do not believe in an interventionist God.

I do not believe in faith healing.

I do not believe that I'm talking to God, that people talk to God.

I don't believe...

You believe that people talk to God.

You just don't believe that God talks to people.

Yes.

That's the correct.

That's true.

No.

And again, because

we secular infidels for so long have kind of like, let's just ignore that.

Let's only pay attention to the Pat Robertsons of the world and religious people when they involve themselves in politics.

Let's ignore what they actually believe and practice.

And I find it astounding.

I find it absolutely astounding.

One of the things I think is interesting, though, too, Kurt, in terms of the sort of institutional roots of all this, you don't just place

the onus at square like the feet of religion.

At one point, you write, that hated establishment, institutions and forces that once kept us from overdoing the flagrantly untrue or absurd, media, academia, politics, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate.

They have enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the last few decades.

What do you mean by that?

Tell us more about that.

Well, I mean, yes.

So

there is the extreme fantasist, supernaturalist wing of Protestant Christianity that has taken over Protestant Christianity.

So let's leave that aside.

But let's say, oh,

the television industry

and that over the last couple, several decades, cable channels put on quote-unquote documentaries about mermaids and monsters and all this stuff that are that are documentaries on the history channel on arts and entertainment on on national geographic and that is presented to 300 odd million Americans as oh this is true this is a documentary that's one example the book publishing industry has published all kinds of publishes a bestseller every year essentially about somebody who visited heaven and came back and tells us about it so that's

those are true stories Kurt Oh, you're right.

I'm just saying.

I'm kidding.

I'm kidding.

I know you are.

I know you are.

And, you know, the...

This is why we have fact checkers in the Atlantic, by the way.

And academia,

in its squishy academic way, has permitted, as it should, in a certain sense, all kinds of nonsense to be taken seriously and not stigmatized.

You know, and I go back to the...

And I repeat many times in the book, the great famous Daniel Patrick Moynihan line, everybody's entitled to his or her own opinions.

They're not entitled to their own facts.

And starting a few decades ago, Americans decided that they were entitled to their own facts.

Let me ask you this, Kurt, because this is, I think, one of the key arguments of your book.

This book is not a book about how the right wing in America is crazy.

The book is about how a lot of people across the spectrum are crazy.

And one of the things you argue, and I want you to sort of dilate on this for a minute,

is that the 60s,

the

relativism of the 60s, introduced by the the left, on the left, that everybody has their own narrative, everybody has their own feelings,

and all these things are legitimate.

That created conditions, I think you're arguing, for the rise of right-wing nonsensical thinking a little bit later on.

This is not necessarily an argument that's going to please your friends in Brooklyn.

No, many people will be angry about what I say.

And again,

as I've been thinking about this and putting this together and talking about it and writing in little bits and pieces about it over the years, people on the cultural left and political left both

don't like to hear what I say, which is exactly as you've summarized, Jeff, which is that starting in the early 60s with

the bohemian countercultural quote-unquote left, but Bohemian

counterculturalism.

more than political leftism

allowed, yeah, do your own thing.

Your truth is your truth.

My truth is my truth.

Your feelings are more important than any empirical facts.

All that,

together with a kind of

post-truth tendency and set of disciplines in academia and sociology and anthropology, all over the place.

All that,

I would say the greatest consequence is having enabled and empowered the American right to

do the same thing and also attain political power.

Right.

I found it really interesting reading your book right after reading Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, in part because the narrative that he spins, one of the things that he argues makes Homo sapiens, us humans, unique, is our ability to spin myths, to spin fables, to believe stories, to make systems that aren't necessarily empirically true, but that organize people in all sorts of very powerful ways, one of the most potent of them being money, finance.

In 2007, the economy is falling apart and the Fed decides to do quote-unquote quantitative easing.

They start just saying money exists where it hadn't existed before and we just all decide to believe it.

And that that ability to all kind of fall in line behind a myth is what enabled humankind to actually prosper.

Right.

I read Sapiens, I've read

many histories of religion, which make similar and adjacent arguments.

Another thing that happened in the 60s is exactly what he argues in that book, which is that all reality is socially constructed reality.

That became a commonplace consensus view of the academy, really.

Thank you, French postmodernism.

Well,

and Austrians and Germans and lots of people

whose ideas we imported and then adopted as true.

And okay, that's an interesting argument.

But once it becomes an argument that anybody can use to justify any belief that they want to impose on themselves, their family, their community, or the nation, it becomes very problematic.

So sure, nothing is real.

as the Beatles told us back then as well.

But once everybody is allowed to act on that belief, and that becomes part of our kind of American mental operating system in a way that I think it's more so here than elsewhere in the developed world, I think it gets problematic.

And it seems like all of that is exacerbated, and you write about this, by the sort of disruptive moment we're living through in terms of information and communication.

So you said that digital technology empowers real seeming fictions of both the lifestyle and entertainment kinds, as well as the ideological and religious and unscientific kinds.

So there's no escaping this craziness, is there?

Well, there isn't.

And that's why I pull in, in addition to connecting Cotton Cotton Matter to Donald Trump, I connect Joseph Smith and Mormons and all that, for instance, to Disneyland and to American show business and to our special knack for creating very realistic fictions in movies and video and now virtual reality and the rest.

And Sohos of the world that are, oh, look, it's a shopping center, but it's old.

It's not old.

It's new.

All that, which America is beautiful in many ways and extraordinary in many ways, but adds to the Americans all of our abilities to never, to be iffier about what's real, what's not.

What's authentic, what's not.

What's my truth?

What's my

and it works all together.

We are all in this soup of semi-reality and unreality, which into which not to return all the time to Donald Trump and alternative facts, but into which that really finds a place to root and spawn and spore.

So when we come back, we're going to talk about where this has all led us and namely one President Donald Trump.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

No.

Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

You almost single-handedly were out there questioning President Obama's background.

You said, how can you not show a birth certificate?

But Trump comes along and said,

birth certificate.

He gave a birth certificate.

Whether or not that was a real certificate, because a lot of people question it, I certainly question it.

You know, his father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald being,

you know, shot.

I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous.

This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.

Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts.

So, Kurt, I want to come back to this point of America being a country in part of a grifters and the grifted without stipulating, because I'm trying to be a responsible journalist, that the President of the United States is a grifter.

He shows signs, obviously, throughout his past of having taken advantage of poorly educated consumers.

He is more of a showman.

He's literally a reality TV star.

You are one of the great observers of Donald Trump going back 30 years, I think, when no one could have imagined that this man would be president.

I mean, two years ago, no one could have imagined that he could be president either.

But walk us through because it's totally fascinating.

How did you, when you were at SPY, is that when you noticed this very odd New York real estate character named Donald Trump who is larger than life and worthy of satire?

Yes.

Okay, thank you.

We started Spy Magazine in late 1986 when he was just

becoming a big deal in New York.

He'd just finishing Trump Tower, Building Trump Tower.

He was this young hustler who was a perfect character to obsessively report on and name-call and ridicule in this new satirical magazine that was initially all about New York.

And short-fingered Vulgarian was yours.

Short-fingered Vulgarian was, we invented lots of epithets to call various people we talked about regularly, like socialite war criminal Henry Kissinger.

And

it was an old Time magazine thing.

Time magazine used to have those things, and we sort of reinvented it in this way.

In a sardonic way.

In a sardonic way.

And every time we mentioned them, we liked to append that epithet.

So we went through a lot, several,

with Trump before we hit on the one that stuck, which was short-fingered Vulgarian in early 1988, actually.

And that was based,

again, empirical reality.

Graydon Carter, my partner in SPY, shortly before we started the magazine, had profiled Trump for GQ magazine, which led, in fact, to the owners of GQ publishing The Art of the Deal, but that's another part of

the SPY Trump scholarship.

He came back and said, this guy has such short fingers for a...

guy who's 6'2 ⁇ .

And so we just thought that was a funny, juvenile thing to attach.

It wasn't about his manhood or any of the stuff that he and Marco Rubio made it during the presidential campaign.

So anyway, we were watching him and reporting on him about his various lies, brags,

just all of the stuff that we now know as Trumpism was there

when he was 40.

Tell us about your own interactions with him.

Because you've had some weird things.

Not so weird.

I mean, letters sent to us on his very, very, very thick and fancy stationery, threatening massive litigation multiple times for

what we were doing.

But he never sued, of course.

And we, again, we saw the Trump that everybody sees now, this guy who blusters and threatens and barks and amounts to not very much.

Kurt,

was he more tethered to facts, figures, and reality when you first met him?

Well, yes and no.

He lied and

exaggerated a lot.

More tethered?

I don't know.

He was not, he was a joke.

He was a real estate dealer.

He was

an apartment building developer and a casino operator.

So, no,

he didn't tell the truth, but who cared?

It didn't matter.

And he wasn't saying the president is wiretapping me or 3 million illegals voted.

So he has become more conspiratorial and the sort of darker side is more prominent.

For sure.

For sure.

What was clear then, 30 years ago, was this absolute demand of loyalty in a kind of gangsterish way.

That was there absolutely.

That's the Roy Cohn piece, right?

I think it probably is the Roy and the Donald Trump piece.

I don't think we should blame Roy for everything that Donald is.

But Kurt Anderson, pro-Roy Cohn, Roy Cohn's sympathizer.

Kurt Anderson.

But so, no, it was, there's nothing new.

It's just more extreme.

You know, he seemed happier than...

He was more relaxed than...

So it was, he's just because he was...

He's now the same, only more so, and the president of the United States.

You described it as somewhat unimaginable from the vantage point of 30 years ago in New York that he would become president.

Was there any indication that he would ever want to become president?

And where in your three decade-long study of the man and his character did that aspiration spring from?

Well, weirdly, back then, when it was a complete joke, In 1987, he was talking about running for president.

And indeed, we did some national polls with the help of Mark Penn and Doug Schoen and Frank Luntz, people who became famous later about tendentious polls, but real polls, for instance, asking, who are you unhappy America that isn't running for president in the 1988 presidential cycle?

Donald Trump was one of the names we offered, and we found that some small percentage of Americans said they were unhappy he wasn't running.

And we had a whole article begging, pleading with him to run.

America wants to, because it was a joke.

So we have

to thank you, Spy Magazine.

Thanks very much.

But no, and you know, he talked about it, as we know, every four years.

I think he understood finally or sensed in his lizard brain feral brilliance that, okay, 2008, 2012, it's getting close to where

my sense of say anything I want and get away with it, including, for instance, that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States.

We're there now.

America is now ripe enough in this fantasyland way for me to have a shop.

Do you think without reality TV and the internet, this would even be possible?

I don't know that.

But I do think that key to my whole argument and key to Donald Trump as an avatar and embodiment of my argument, reality TV, news as entertainment, several cable channels, two of them without happy to be entirely partisan, and

more than all of those, the internet permitted this

epistemological free fire zone in which Donald Trump made his play.

Aaron Ross Powell, but Kurt, do you feel like the ascendance of Donald Trump to the highest office in the land has forever changed the American political appetite?

I mean, he may not be there in office in four years, eight years, 12 years, whatever.

I said 12 just because.

But do you think America has sort of been awoken to that kind of politician, someone who will indulge in the darkest fantasies and hand out sort of,

you know, the cotton candy sort of mirages about how things can just be so much better and easier and greater.

I mean,

as it dovetails with the theme of your book, I mean, is this an ADBC kind of moment?

Aaron Ross Powell, I think it probably is.

And I think the 64 gazillion dollar question is we don't know in what ways and to what degree it is.

I don't think that

there are going to be a lot of Donald Trumps following Donald Trump.

But I do believe, or I expect that the discourse and what is politically possible for candidates and the political discourse to be permanently changed, probably for the worst.

Even though, you know, those of us, we few,

we band of sisters and brothers can fight to say, look at this, we don't want this to happen again once it all comes acropper, once we're not all winning, once we all don't have the greatest, cheapest, best, fantastic health care that anybody's ever had, once people see that Donald Trump was a charlatan and a grifter, I would like to think, oh, well, everybody will decide, oh, that was just a momentary overdue, like we went to Vegas and got married.

But

I worry that it will change things for the worse, as well as waking everybody listening to this podcast to how we must avoid it in the middle.

Has the Overton window shifted permanently?

That's the question.

You know, this idea that he has created new space for disgusting, coarse discourse.

Or do we all somehow snap back?

I mean, I just, I can't imagine.

Once the Pandora's box is open, how do you get this stuff back in?

Well, no.

And that's, again, I've never been a declinist.

I've never been a real pessimist about America, but I don't know the answer to that yet.

And I don't know.

And I think my belief and kind of where I end the book,

what I end the book saying is that that I think it's possible that we can make it get no worse, that this is peak fantasy land and

that we can contain it and we can and as it in the real world, because not all Americans have lost all sense of reality, we can ratchet it back and people will say, okay,

that was, that was, we went overboard there.

But going back to the way it used to be in reality-based America, and again, I talk, I mean, it wasn't just with Trump.

Let's remember 2004, Karl Rove telling Ron Suskine of the New York Times, oh, what you people in the reality-based community may think.

It was there for a long time and being used cynically for a long time before this ultimate cynic used it to become president.

How do you see people like Karl Rove or to some degree, Kellyanne Conway, people who otherwise you'd assume have their feet planted firmly in the world of actual, you know, sort of reality facts, figures, but indulge and in some ways spin and further the sort of

alternative facts, the world of alternative facts.

I mean, where do they sit on the axis, in your opinion?

Kellyanne will go to a deeper level of hell, perhaps, than Karl Rove when the time comes.

See, I'm not an atheist.

He doesn't believe in heaven, but he believes in hell.

Exactly.

Yeah, that's great.

No, I mean,

they are spin doctors, right?

So, of course, their job is spinning the facts, as as are trial lawyers, as are lots of people.

And in the Trump presidency, because Karl Rove wasn't on the Trump train, he hasn't gone as far as, say, Kellyanne Conway has.

The really complicit people in this abandonment of factual reality have a lot to be held accountable for.

And again, the Karl Roves and the Nixon strategy, and it goes back farther than Kellyanne Conway, you know, have some confessing to do as well.

the fact that, I mean, again, I don't want to get, and I don't in the book get too strictly into what Mitch McConnell or Marco Rubio should or shouldn't do, but that this Republican Party is now Trump's Republican Party, which means a party that

doesn't care about factual reality, is a real problem.

One of the looming and unresolved questions, at least in my mind, about this election, which is the overwhelming support Donald Trump received from evangelical Christians, a group you write about extensively.

To my mind, it just doesn't compute.

I mean, yes, I know the argument.

They're strategic voters and they know that the Supreme Court, he would do what they wanted on the Supreme Court.

And that's a sufficient, it's not a sufficient

argument, actually.

Maybe it's part of it.

But how do you, as a religious person, and I'm not, you know, I'm going to assume that they're genuine in their feelings and they're genuine in their love of Jesus and all the things that Jesus said.

How do you possibly look at this person and

see a role model, see a leader?

Well, in lots of ways.

There's also, apart from any religious belief, there is an overlap with

what has been talked about a lot, obviously, which is the people who feel that the elite is contemptuous of them and feel resentful.

And that's a real strong thing.

And that's a real thing.

And it's a real thing that Donald Trump himself feels, and

they see it, that it's real.

He's not faking the fact that everybody in this podcast has always been contemptuous of him.

He knows it.

He resents it.

And people in Council Bluffs, Iowa feel, have felt for two years.

That's real.

He's a billionaire.

He's got this hot wife, but he's one of us.

But the truth is, the truth, I mean, I'm not speaking on your behalf, but the truth is, is that you might feel contempt for Donald Trump.

I don't actually think you, Nebraska boy, Kurt Anderson, you don't feel that level of contempt for the ordinary person in Iowa or Nebraska.

Not a bit.

Not a bit.

But that's what they have in common.

The other thing I would say that truly sincerely religious people, sincerely religious people who believe, I'm sorry, things that are so fantastical that

I am gobsmacked every time I

talk to people who believe these things.

So

if your religious life is believing in things that I would...

I would bet my life aren't true,

then how far of a leap is it to accept a guy whose own

grip on reality is as iffy and whatever he feels and whatever he wants to think is true, I think they have that in common.

So they recognize a characteristic?

I think they feel that, like, oh,

he has this, he may not have the facts, but it's true in some sense that Muslims were cheering when the towers went down.

Or it's true that

this thing he says, that three million illegals.

I don't know if we're three million, but it's true.

There's too many illegal immigrants from Mexico, and they are here.

So that sense of the fungibility and whatever you want it to be nature of factual truth, I think that is a thing they really have in common.

He has in common with charismatic and evangelical Christians.

The name that kept coming to mind as I was reading your book

is Dr.

John Romulus Brinkley.

This is a figure who was a very popular and influential in the first first part of the 20th century and who experienced something of a revival in the past year.

There's been a great documentary called Nuts that I recommend about the doctor.

The show Reply All did a fantastic episode called Man of the People about him.

But he was

sort of the original huckster quack.

doctor.

He developed a snake oil therapy by which he would take tissue from goat testicles and inject it into men to stimulate their fertility.

He had me at goat testicle, by the way.

And he also founded a radio network that was in many, many ways the foundation of modern talk radio.

He at one point

was so popular in Kansas, where he lived, that he ran for governor of Kansas.

And the powers that be, the bureaucracy of Kansas, the deep state of Kansas, if you will, had to engage in all sorts of chicanery to prevent him from actually ascending to the governorship, potentially averting some sort of greater trauma.

He finally had

his license reviewed by the Kansas Medical Board in 1930, and his tail sort of began to peter down from there, but the influence that he left stays with us.

And there's so many people.

I feel like I have to go rush back and do a quick chapter on Mr.

Brinkley because he belongs in fantasy land.

But

that is the American way.

And it's just truer here.

There are more of those people here than in any other developed country.

There just are.

And, you know, other countries didn't have their Joseph Smiths inventing a new lost version of the Bible and a new theology and all that became Mormonism.

Other countries didn't have a Mary Baker Eddy who believed that all illness was just an illusion.

It's true that most new religions come out of the United States.

I can't think of, can you think of other places?

We've got great imaginations.

Well, that's the point.

That's the point.

That's the point.

It's genius in all directions.

Well, and also, other places have had religions for a long time.

Well, I mean, you know, the Middle East is a pretty, by your standard, it's a nutty place.

Kurt, I'm just reminded of the start of this conversation when we talk about creativity and innovation.

And aren't they sort of bedfellows with conspiracy and delusion?

Which is to say, I mean, on one hand, yes, we have the Alex Joneses of the world and we have the strain of dark doom saying.

But on the other, I mean...

The sister to that or the cousin to that might be, you know, innovation and all the wonderful developments we see in places like Silicon Valley.

Aren't they necessarily twins?

Well, yes, they are twinned.

And the question is one of balance.

The question is the old Goldilocks problem of not too cold, you're not France, you know, not too hot, America.

You're, I don't know, Denmark, let's say.

But it's moderation.

And for hundreds of years, there was this reality check, this Yankee pragmatism and show me and I demand the facts and all that.

And an establishment that was confident in being an establishment and telling the charlatans of the world that they were charlatans and banishing them.

That kind of ended.

And we got out of whack over the last 40, 50 years.

And to read Kurt's full account of these past few decades and how they led us to this moment, check out the September 2017 issue of The Atlantic on newsstands and always at theatlantic.com.

And now at the end of every conversation, I ask you for your keepers.

What is it that you've recently seen, watched, heard, read, experienced, encountered that you want to keep that you do not want to forget?

What do you want to carry with you into the future?

Well, especially coming off this book that I've been working on for several years that is privileging, reprivileging rationalism and all that.

I had this moment a couple weeks ago being out in nature and realizing the things that happen in nature that are equivalent to magic.

I mean, fireflies being the most obvious one.

But then, and I wasn't high.

Then the,

you know, just

the wind, the breezes, I thought, wow, birds taking off.

I thought, wow, nature, it is magic.

And then you weren't high then, but you're high now.

I am not.

I am not.

I could be legally because I'm in Colorado.

This last week, I love great coincidences and synchronicities.

And I don't believe that they're signs from the divine or the nether world.

But on Monday, this last Monday, I'm getting off the subway.

I just heard a podcast by Ezra Klein in which he interviewed Al Franken, Senator Al Franken for an hour.

I was really impressed and I said, wow, Senator Al Franken is as close to a kind of Trumpian authenticity as big-name Democrats have.

He's funny.

2020.

I push send.

I walk into a building where I do a lot of work.

Somebody says, hey, Kurt, it's Al Franken walking toward me.

I go, whoa.

And again,

which makes me understand why people do believe in supernatural things.

Next day, I'm interviewing a big record mogul named Jimmy Iveen.

And I go, yeah, where'd you grow up?

Turns out this, this incredible billionaire Apple record mogul, Bruce Springsteen, John Lennon guy, grew up on my block, on my side of my block in Brooklyn.

And so we just spent half the interview talking about literally this block.

And I, and again, that gave me such a rush as running into Al Frankenhead.

I had, again, coming off this, no, we must all be rational.

None of the, there is no teleological.

order to life.

It's all random chance made me think like, man, it's great when it seems like it isn't.

So that's what I want to keep.

Kurt, you do believe in magic.

That's hard work.

I think, well, I have a predisposition toward teleological thought, so I'm with Kurt on this one.

I was going to offer up a book I reread for the fifth time, E.L.

Doctor O's Billy Bathgate, but I actually also reread another favorite book that pertains to this conversation, Fauden Brody's No Man Knows My History, the definitive, or one of the definitive biographies of Joseph Smith.

And in the context of this conversation, Joseph Smith is, in a way, the ultimate American, right?

The most self-created sort of

figure, goes into the woods, invents a new religion, and more to the point, gets people to follow it.

It's such an amazing story.

And her book is this

incredible deconstruction of his actual life, not the life that the church puts out for people.

The other thing I would say is this, and Kurt's probably going to be upset by me saying this, but all of this conversation about fantasyland,

all of this conversation about manufactured reality, I have very, very fond memories of taking my kids when they were small to Disney World and Main Street USA, which is the fakest thing ever, right?

But it's but it's charmingly fake.

And this is probably the reason I like Main Street USA is the reason I like, on a personal level, Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney himself and all these people.

They decided that reality isn't good enough, so let's just make a better one.

And I understand why people are susceptible because I myself like taking my kids down Main Street USA.

Alex, what besides magic and Disneyland do you want to get?

Well, those two things remind me of my, at the risk of becoming someone shilling for a company and putting product placement into our podcast, which I would never do.

Magic Disneyland, the thing that's missing from that is ice cream.

And I just want to tell you guys, I had a pint of the not personally, I didn't eat the whole thing.

There is a place called Trickling Springs Creamery.

I don't know if you guys have ever heard of it.

It's like my version of, I would imagine, Disneyland, and it's in Pennsylvania.

And I just want you to know that they make ice cream that tastes like you're already high.

It is that good, if anybody's ever been high.

And I had this and it literally set my week, which has been a bad week, I'm not going to lie, on the right path.

And I think that the lesson I learned from that is sometimes the simple pleasures really are the best.

So the thing that I would like to keep, there is a competition in the Philippines in which which 7 to 13 year old kids sing.

They compete like many of our singing competitions.

And a clip has been circulating not far enough of one of the judges on that show who brought three of the grand finalists into his nightly talk show to do a performance of Beyoncé's Listen.

I want you to hear this, and I want you to keep in mind that these are boys between the age of 7 and 13.

just

I found this clip thanks to the Twitter feed of Joshua Henry Jenkins at Josh Jenks who asked what is happening and why are these babies slaying my spirit and belting the edges right off my head?

So I don't know what that was a testament to, but man, humankind.

A testament to your fundamental weirdness.

Matt.

That's what it's a testament to.

And your very interesting internet habits.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Spends a lot of time in weird places on the internet.

Thank you very much, Kurt, for joining us this week.

My total pleasure.

Jeff and Alex.

Thank you.

Matt, thank you, Alex.

Kurt.

Thanks, Matt.

Thanks, Kurt.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Katie Green and Kim Lau.

Thank you to Paul Ruist and Jamie Rosenberg for audio support.

Thanks to John Batiste for our amazing theme music, including his incredible version of the battle hymn, which we will play in full once again after these credits conclude.

If you liked the show, please make sure to rate and review us on iTunes, and also send us your thoughts.

As always, you can find us at theatlantic.com/slash radio or facebook.com/slash radioatlantic.

You'll find those links as well as a link to our show notes in the episode description.

Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next week.

Oh

glory

My eyes see the warmth of the coming of the Lord.

He is trapped in the venting where the red and rattlesnake

cattle faithful lightning of the terrible Swiss war.

His troop is marching on.

Glory, glory,

hallelujah.

Glory, glory, high,

hallelujah,

hallelujah.

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