You know that feeling, maybe in college - you’re suuuper chilled out, maybe chemically-assisted, and you’re like, how do we know we’re even in the same reality, man?

That’s what the world has been feeling like, except, not so chill. Were reports that the President leaked classified intelligence fake news? Or was it real, but totally NBD? Was Comey pressured to drop the investigation into Flynn, or not? Was Spicer in the bushes, or among them? Is everything terrible and going to hell, or is America finally great again? Basically, how do we even know what reality IS any more?

This week, we investigate reality itself, with our friend Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC’s On the Media and author of a new book, The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time.

The trouble with reality, Brooke says, is that it’s different for everyone. Facts and experience—those don’t bring us all to the same conclusion. So here we are, in an America with two sets of people with realities so far apart they’re like universes whose round edges barely touch.

Manoush and Brooke were not zapping their brains during this interview, but they do get pretty far out. Huxley and Orwell, Le Guin and Philip K. Dick and Thomas Paine. Sit back, relax as you will, and come along for the ride.

Oh, and that article Manoush mentioned in the interview, by Farhad Manjoo? It’s here.