Read Nicholas Quah’s interview with Sounds Like a Cult hosts Amanda Montell and Isabela Medina-Maté.

Sounds Like a Cult is a playful take on that perspective, but in that playfulness, it gets at something fundamental about the world: No matter where you are, you’re never too far from the brink of cultishness. The podcast broadly serves as an extension of Montell’s work in her recently published book Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, which examines how language is central to the cultivation of cultlike dynamics and how that manipulation of language has been replicated in the other, seemingly banal aspects of our culture, such as the corporate life. The premise is deceptively simple: In each episode, the duo takes a different phenomenon floating about in the culture - theater kids, minimalism, Trader Joe’s, and so on - and compares it to the framework of a cult.

You can squeeze a whole lotta juice out of a good concept, as evidenced by Amanda Montell and Isabela Medina-Maté in this enjoyable chatcast.

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