#1018 Mental Immunity - Dr. Andy Norman

Good day to him, it's Harps and Melissa welcome to another installment of the you project Dr Annie Norman's coming up in a moment Melissa bloody hell to 803 on a Tuesday and we've got one of the greatest minds on the planet on the show. How did you wrangle that? We do, don't we? I'm a bit excited. Are you excited? I'm a little bit excited because when I saw he's because obviously we do one every day and I don't, I don't chase guests, you chase guests and I saw Andy's name come through on when fuckety fuck is that, is that that Andy Norman and then because you also, yeah, you're that, you're that the, sure, you're not here yet. Anyway, it is he, it is he, Dr Annie Norman wrote an awesome book called Mental Immunity Last Year, which kind of set the world on fire and opened lots of doors and started lots of conversations and he was on Rogan now, I just want to tell you because I know what's going to happen is you're going to hear this and then you're going to want to hear more of him. So episode number 1653 on Joe Rogan, it went for a lazy three and a quarter hours. So we're just going to give you an on tray and you can go over to Rogan for the main course. So if you like, what we're talking about or your curiosity is sparked or peaked, then go listen to part two, three, four, five and 67 on Rogan morning dock. How are you? I am quite well. Thank you. Although it is late afternoon here. What's the opposite of down under up over? Yeah. I can hop the top. Sorry. What, so what time is it there? It is 4 p.m. in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and I got to tell you, Craig, I have never received an introduction like the one you just gave me. Wow. Greatest minds of the planet. You've just given me a major upgrade and I'm, I appreciate the promotion. You're a big deal, dude. Don't, don't be old fucking humble. You're a big dude, right? So you're a big deal. So, so you need to put that in your bio at, you know, one of the greatest minds on the planet. You can put that on the back here next book and then my name in brackets and everyone will go, who the fuck is Craig Harper? This is quite given this quote. I don't think so. All right. Let's start. Let's start at the beginning. What's a, what's a mind parasite, Andy? Yeah. So I think we have been living alongside mind parasites for as long as human beings have, have been human beings almost, we, we tend to call them by the word, by the phrase, bad idea or misinformation. But the fact is harmful information can, can create copies of itself and spread and leap from mind to mind and essentially infect minds. Our minds end up hosting all kinds of bad ideas. And it's tied. I think I recommend reframing them as mind parasites so that we can actually begin to use the science of immunology to protect our minds from infectious information. I love the way that you explain that and I was, was listening to you chat with Ragan and I was thinking, is, is mind parasite and mental immunity, are these just metaphors that you're using or these terms that are actually used in science and research now? Beautiful question. So you certainly won't get a consensus among scientists that it's more than a metaphor. Yeah. But I've been talking to some leading scientists to work in this space over the last year. And I've convinced almost all the ones I've talked to that it's more than a metaphor. So often in the history of science, something will start off as a metaphorical usage and then it'll prove to be so useful, it'll just become normal. And all of a sudden it's treated, treated and thought about as literal. Think of the term meme, right? Yeah. It was a brand new coinage that was deliberately formulated as an analogy with the gene. And everybody originally used it with scare quotes because they assumed it was just a metaphor, right? But we now watch memes spread like wildfire around the world all the time. And the word has gone from figurative to literal. Yes. And this happens all the time in scientific history and I predict with great confidence that the same thing is going to happen to the concept of mind bugs and the concepts of mental immune systems. But there's a lot of similarity between like a biological parasite and a cognitive or a mind parasite, isn't there? Because as you, as I heard you talking about on another chat that you did, like they both, you know, the biological and the mind parasite, they both need a host and they both can spread and it makes sense. You got it, right? And of course there are good ideas, ideas that help their hosts thrive. I think about the idea, say, that human beings have rights. This is an idea that spread from mind to mind in the early modern period and transformed human well-being by extraordinary ways. And so I would call that not a mind parasite, but a mind common saw in other words, little microbes that live in us and help us, like I've got microbes. We call those common saws, because they help us instead of parasites. So I think good ideas are mind common saws and bad ideas are mind parasites. And if they harm us, so ability to infect minds, ability to spread from mind to mind, and the ability to harm, and the tendency to harm their hosts, those are the three things you should look for before you label something a mind parasite. And you should double-check that before you use the concept. Like one of the things I find interesting, you know, like thinking about thinking, right? Metacognition, right? It's like, I can't be objective about me because I'm me. So you know, the Craig experience of the world is completely subjective, despite the fact that I tell everyone how open-minded I am, which is bullshit, because I can't be open-minded because I'm not a clean slate, because I have pre-existing beliefs and ideas and values and bias and prejudice, despite the fact that I don't want you to know any of that, right? Right. So how do we get to this place of objectivity and self-awareness? Yeah. So you can use the term mind parasite as a weapon. You can simply label the ideas of your opponents, mind viruses, right? And call your own ideas, you know, nothing but what, you know, wonderful. Yeah. Well, we call my ideas truth. Yes. Yes, exactly. My idea is just in case everyone hasn't picked this up. Whatever I say is truth, and anyone who doesn't align with my truth is clearly fucking misinformed or stupid. But whenever I'm trying to determine the fact, I always just check with Greg Hyper, because that's my. My love is done. Yeah, forget Google, just got to make. Well, I mean, the idea, the concept of a bad idea can be used to tar good ideas. Yeah. And the concept of a mind virus can be used to tar good ideas, also. Just today, Elon Musk posted on Twitter that the mind virus of walkeness needs to be retired. Wow. So he's using the concept of mind virus to characterize walkeness as a bad idea. Hmm. He may or may not be right about that with regard to whether walkeness is a bad idea. I didn't think there are aspects of walkeness that are beneficial, but also aspects of walkeness that are harmful. Hmm. But quite apart from that particular concept, the fact that one of the most influential people in the world is now using the concept of mind virus without apology is interesting. Yes. What I'm not sure Elon understands is that it's not okay to just sling the term mind virus around to win your partisan battles. You can't just use it as a weapon against your cultural opponents. What I'm advocating is a scientifically responsible way of using the concept. So ideas have objective properties that make them either true or false or useful or harmful. And in the same way that we can look at anything else carefully and with efforts to subtract out our biases and our subjectivity, I mean scientists learn this, right? This is part of their training. To become a scientist, you learn how to assess the truth of something using relatively objective criteria and no individual scientist is perfectly objective, any more than you. But there are mechanisms in place in science to mitigate our subjectivity so that we can arrive at conclusions that are more objective. And we need to do the exact same thing when we study the problem of missing disinformation as well. We can't just slap the word misinformation on everything we disapprove of and the word good information onto all the information we approve of and assume we've solved anything. We've just validated our own biases that way. There's probably nobody that doesn't have a modicum somewhere between a one out of ten and ten out of ten. There's probably nobody that doesn't have. and elements of confirmation bias in their thinking or world view. That's nicely put. I think that's absolutely right. And I love the fact that you're putting that on a scale, because the tendency these days is to just say everybody's biased, everybody's equally biased, so what the heck? Why even bother striving for truth? Why even bother striving for objectivity? And that's a compound, right? That's giving up the whole game. The fact is we can be more or less right, and we can be more or less objective. And if we can make incremental progress on those continuo, that matters. And I think part of that, Andy, has to be, well, this is what I think anyway, I could be wrong, is the willingness to acknowledge that, look, this is what I think and why, here's my reasoning, here's my theory, but I could be wrong or I could be partly wrong. Like, the older I get, the more I research, the more I study, the more, you know, I realize, I don't fucking know anything. Like, I know bits and pieces, there's some stuff I'm pretty confident about. And some of the stuff that I used to be lock stock, barrel, yeah, unequivocal, now I'm like, ah, fuck off, got no idea. Yeah. Being willing to be wrong and okay with it, like genuinely okay with being wrong, it's, it's crucial for growth and learning and unlearning. Absolutely. Yet, almost philosophers going back thousands of years have said, squirted the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know, the more humbling you become. So it turns out that the least humble people in the world are the people who know the least. So people who know the least are prone to think that they know the most. Also, having your, like your beliefs, what you think, your mindset, your opinions, your theories tied into your identity, like what you believe and who you are is intertwined. Yes. So how the fuck can you be open-minded? Because if I'm wrong, then you're actually shattering my identity or challenging who I am. You know, especially when it comes to religious things and cultural things. And like who we are is defined by our beliefs. And if my beliefs are wrong, so yeah. Well, religion and politics are kind of the two areas where this really becomes a, so there's a psychologist at Yale named Dan Cahan who came up with this wonderful concept called Identity Protective Cognition. Wow. Think about that for a second. The whole idea here is that when we identify with certain ideas or beliefs and anybody comes along in questions or challenges those ideas or beliefs, we immediately get defensive because it feels like an attack on our person. Yes. So for people who hitch their identities to a religious idea or a political idea or a political ideology, even worse, they're asking to have their mind work less well. Then in fact, they are, they're sowing the seeds of their mind's destruction. The way I like to put it is that if you identify strongly with a set of your beliefs, you're actually compromising your mind's immune system because you can no longer think clearly and in a fair-minded way about a whole bunch of questions that touch on your identity. So true. So true. The way of the solution, the solution to that, of course, is to learn how not to identify with our beliefs. So think of individual beliefs as kind of like bits of a worldview that can help you cope with the world. And it's natural to kind of like and trust the bits of the worldview that have gotten you this far. So we're all kind of fond of the ideas we have. But if you get too fond of them, you become reluctant to part with them when the evidence seems to suggest that it's time you rethink things or rethought things. Does that make sense? 100%. When this idea of mind parasites and mental immunity and understanding or opening the door on this, when was that a thing for you? When did you start thinking about this stuff the way that you now do and explaining it and teaching it and putting this beautiful language around it? Oh, thank you for putting it that way. I think it was article written by the bad boy biologist Richard Dawkins in the early 90s, the OG, the original gangster, yeah, well, I was briefly on that in that gang and drawn to his article called viruses of the mind. So he kind of floated this idea early on, but he got in his essay on this subject, he basically says Catholicism is a mind of virus and boy did that ruffle feathers. But I didn't want to use the concept of a mind virus to just hack away at the beliefs I disfavor. I wanted to be an equal opportunity concept for helping us all a better our thinking. So it took me literally like two decades of hard work to kind of gain enough clarity. So I knew I could talk about it without being terribly biased myself. But I've been working hard to convert some of Richard's ideas into ones that we can all use to become better thinkers and that's the purpose of my book. And I think one of the challenges in talking about concepts and constructs like a mind virus or mental immunity or even with my PhD research, self awareness and meta perception and all of these things is that the moment that you go a mind virus, oh mind virus, that's an interesting term. Oh okay. What's a mind virus? Well Catholicism. Fuck you. I'm out because I'm a Catholic. The moment that you label something that you know millions, billions of people intertwined with, well now you've just diminished your potential students, you know, you've diminished your classroom. Yeah. And if you really want to learn how to think better, you have to kind of get used to this concept on the easy cases, on the non-controversial cases. So the way you sort of build up your understanding on this is to say, look, we all know that certain ideas are clear examples of mind viruses, except for a very misguided few, the idea that, you know, I belong to a superior race. I mean, I belong to a superior race, I would argue is a clear cut case of a mind virus. Yes. You know, I can sit down with somebody on, with a very different religious outlook and get them to agree on a handful of examples of mind viruses and we could sit down and come up with a handful of examples of, you know, clear cases of good ideas like human rights or, you know, the golden rule, right, treat other people the way you'd like to be treated. There are a whole bunch of ideas like that that pretty much everybody in good will will agree to. And you start with the easy cases and you build a common ground around those and then you look at the slightly harder cases and you work out your differences and you add those to the common ground and you grow slowly, slowly approach the really hard cases that tend to be really divisive. That's the way you bridge these ideological divides, but it takes patience, right? It takes time. It takes listening, a skill that many people have don't have the chance to practice. Would you suggest that I don't want to throw you under the bus? Would you suggest that America thinking it's the greatest country on earth is a mind virus? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that idea is sets you up for arrogance, right? And it tends to destroy the humility needed to be a good person. And when the members of a large country think that way habitually, I think it's a bad thing. Why are we so the collective way, not everyone, of course, but why are so many of us enamored with conspiracy theories? So conspiracy theories offer simplistic solutions in confusing times. So if I live in a really complex world, just made mammothly more complicated by the internet and all of the new games that that's introduced, and things aren't going well. And it feels like I've been left behind in many, many Americans, I think, do feel this way. Then you want to convenient explanation for why your life hasn't gone according to plan, why you haven't been more successful or why people don't recognize your wonderful qualities. But the idea that some cabal of people is conspiring to keep you down has a very powerful emotional pull for people who are in that difficult situation. So I think we live at a very disorienting time right now when a conspiracy theory is offer kind of a psychological lifeline. It's a delusion. And most conspiracy theories are delusions. I mean, people do sometimes conspire. Yes, so some conspiracy theories are true, but the term conspiracy theory is usually used to refer to Delusional beliefs about conspiracies, and if we use it that way, it's clear that you know, it's there are major problems They impact right now conspiracy theories are threatening nations. I believe there was just a huge Plot to overthrow the German government that was inspired by the QAnon conspiracy Yeah, that's true. Yeah, so so these conspiracy theories which often just seem like fringe things that aren't worth worrying about have real-world consequences, and they're actually threatening the viability of longstanding democracies and and I think many of the things we care about hinge on whether or not we can get these Line viruses like killing on under control I've got a few conspiracy theory friends, and it's it's hard to God bless their little socks. It's hard to have a conversation like even Even try and get some of the emotion out of it and and not to try to win or lose or debate, but just to Like their mind is so closed to anything that doesn't echo What they think it's it's like it's impossible You you become Unteachable like when you when you know in inverter commas know then Everyone who doesn't agree with you is is wrong Yeah, and you're one of my philosophical heroes. Socrates the ancient Greek sage would I argued that false knowledge right just false confidence is the biggest obstacle to learning because You're not interested in learning if you think you already have the Have all the answers So Socrates has and developed this famous method of asking people gentle questions to get them to think more Reflectively and it serves to humble People who are Irrigantly filled with their own false knowledge and help them see that they still have some learning to do and unlearning to do Of course that that didn't always go over well as we know from the Socrates story. Yeah, yeah, we love the Stoics Was it Socrates? It was that I actually used in in one of my things for uni who said The beginning of wisdom is to know thyself right which is part of self-awareness. I think that's the rate I think and often and often knowing yourself means knowing your own limitations knowing how much you don't know as you were Conversing it takes a lot of courage to be You know, I think sometimes people confuse self-awareness some people call it self-knowledge With self-loathing, you know, it's like I can be aware that My ego's getting in the way here or I can be aware that I make decisions with our odds with my alleged values Or I can be aware that I sometimes behave inconsistently, you know based on who and how I want to be but But like if you can't acknowledge without beating yourself up But if you can't acknowledge the your own bullshit. You can't get better. You can't grow. You can't if you are If you always need to be right You're in trouble as a as an organism in the middle of this bloody experience of life Absolutely, so I went to graduate school in philosophy and this is an Environment where people throw really hard questions at you constantly yeah, and and it's not for the faint of heart You you end up questioning almost everything central to your identity and I remember going through some really tough years after that because I Might myself confidence myself assurance had been shaken by By these very deep questions that I was being forced to think about really rigorous ways I went through a depressive period after philosophy grad school And I think that the hypercritical mindset I learned in graduate school was part of the problem Yes, I was so hypercritical that I couldn't know when to stop questioning right wrong And my research since that point was has been to try to understand when it's okay to stop questioning When when it's okay to say, you know what? I've thought that through enough. Like think about there's some people who defend dogmatic beliefs by saying I don't I don't want to question that and I don't have to question it That's just an article of faith for me. I have no I don't have any sympathy for that position because it's just an excuse for close Mind in us in the end But what happens when every what it's easy to generate the conclusion that if everything is questionable Then everything is up in the air. Yeah, and then don't really know anything at all. Yes And and that's the opposite of of sort of supreme certainty. That's called extreme skepticism And both of them are problematic because extreme certainty is dogmatic and extreme skepticism is is so self-effacing or so self Denigrating that that it's not healthy. So we actually need to figure out what's Everything needs to be opened to question, but not everything needs to be open to question all at once Yeah, and I think I think one of the challenges is that we In the moment like we think that our reality our personal reality is the reality Yeah, you know, we don't have that awareness between External stimulus and internal story because we go oh well, that's offensive and because that for us it's offensive and so that that That statement is true. Well, it is offensive for me But for the next person. It's funny for the next person. It's confusing for the next person It's curious for the next person. It's whatever and they're all being truthful in the moment You know, but there's this because we we bring our mind and our version of what is real into that And so while we're all being truthful. We're all saying different things But it's also true Craig. I would argue that um you can develop the mental habit of saying This is true Well at least from my perspective. Yes, I think earlier on you said You know, as a young man you had lots of very confident beliefs, but at the older you get the more you think oh You know, I don't know anything or I Even some of the things you were used to be certain about is you're willing to say I could be wrong about 100% Yeah, so so the humility it implicit in G, you know or I think this is true, but I could be wrong The humility implicit of that expresses a Uh, an open-mindedness a flexibility Um, that is admirable Um But but imagine applying Imagine Climate scientist who basically refused to ever make up his mind about climate change saying Well, I think climate change is real, but But I could be wrong like you can you can be too Critical for your own good. Yeah, just as you can be too certain or confident for your own good. Yeah How long in terms of our human evolutionary timeline? How long have we been thinking? How long have we been reasoning and thinking critically as a species? I don't know if you know I'm sure you know the answer to that, but um That's a that's a wonderful question. And I'm not sure that we have a science knows the answer to that I did write one paper speculating on the origins of reasoning as a practice like yes so Suppose you and I are hunting uh Water buffalo. Yeah, and and uh my fiber passed on Yeah At all, you know, paragliding mountain climbing. Yeah So let's say we're hunting down the down the river valley, right? And I'm giving up hope that we'll find this this water buffalo Uh in this river valley, so I propose that we continue the hunt on the other side of the ridge And you disagree you want to continue down the river, but then all of a sudden you spot a hoof print A water buffalo's hoof print in the mud down by the river without even saying anything you can go You can point to it. Yes, have me look at it and convince me that oh yeah, I guess I guess we should continue the hunt down the river valley So what you've just done there even without you uttering a word just using a A gesture what you've done there has given me a reason why we should go this way rather than that way So it's possible that our ancestors were giving each other reasons Why they should do this rather than that right before that could even vocalize Words and sentences Um, so as soon as you can begin drawing one another's attention To relevant considerations. I think you're reasoning on I think that's when reasoning began and it probably began More than a hundred thousand years ago in the in the primate And the homo lineage of of the primate um Family but it wouldn't surprise me at all if we went back a lot further than that as a philosopher and racing researcher and explorer of the mind and human behavior, when you went back whenever that was or when you started to open the door on reading the stoics, were you blown away at how fucking smart they were about human behavior in the mind and all of these things 2,000 plus years ago, like we think we're genie, where fucking dummies that think we're smart sometimes. There are some, there's some amazing wisdom from generations long ago and I went into the philosophy business in part because I realized that we can learn a great deal from our distant ancestors. In fact, the ancestors who didn't spend all their time doom scrolling on their smartphones probably had time to develop, develop a little more wisdom than we do, right? I think we're becoming dumber by the year, I think there's directly a correlation between the iPhone and the iPhone and IQ. So what do you think? So by the way, Andy's book is called Mental Immunity, why do you think that resonated the way that it did both with the in academia and in the general public? Well, I think there's a growing awareness that we have a serious disinformation problem, also misinformation and disinformation problem, especially with internet connectivity and social media, bad ideas can spread like wildfire. And I think there's a growing awareness that we need to protect our minds better. And my book basically says, you know what, we already have a defense system built in to our Nogins that is designed by natural selection to spot bad ideas and weed them out and to spot good ideas and let them in. But of course, they don't always work properly, right? They work well enough to have allowed our ancestors to reproduce. But we see examples all around this of people who buy into crazy delusions, if you're not right, or climate tonight, climate tonight. Yeah. So the question really becomes is, how can we help our minds immune systems work better? Yeah. What do we need? So think about the way of a vaccine works. A vaccine actually teaches your body's immune system how to spot a pathogen. It never, it can't be recognized so that it can manufacture antibodies and clean them up. Yeah. We can do the exact same thing with our minds. We can actually expose our minds to lessons, to instructions, to instructional interventions that allow us to become better at spotting mind bugs. Can we do an example? Yeah. So I have a friend who teaches scientific reasoning at a community college in Massachusetts. And she gives her students this wonderful assignment where she says, well, all right, let's generate a list of half a dozen conspiracy theories. And so the students will throw them out. And then they'll study those conspiracy theories and they'll pick out the common features. So these are the things that conspiracy theories do. This is the way they work. So the group, the class will generate a shared understanding of roughly of how conspiracy theories work. And then she challenges them to design their own conspiracy theory. Oh, the students go off into little groups and they cook up these really wacky theories and they figure out ways to make them really infectious and seductive. And then they present them at the end of the week and everybody has blasts doing it. And then she leaps them with the thought, now that you've actually designed your own conspiracy theory, what are you going to look for to make sure other people aren't fooling you? And the students just all of a sudden have all of these ways of spotting manipulative messaging that they didn't even have before. You can do the same thing with manipulative advertising. You can do the same thing with propaganda. You can do the same thing with science denial. I think it's a wonderfully fun way to inoculate our minds against some of the nasty mind bugs. It's so funny that you said that, like, when I don't know if you can see in that, oh, it doesn't matter. I just wrote literally as you were talking, I wrote marketing and advertising as you were talking, like literally marketing and advertising is about manipulating your mind to produce a favorable outcome for the person that's selling whatever they're selling, right? There's a lot of that. I would argue, I would have agreed with you wholeheartedly until recently when I've realized that I, that's a little bit too general. I'm very insecure. So I play as a girl with me. I think there's a great deal of advertising out there that's manipulative. And I think some advertising is, is closer to being just like a friendly informing somebody of something, right? So there are non-dracony and non-mocky of alien ways to advertise, even if there are many mocky of alien ways to advertise. We should all carry around with us, the skepticism that you're channeling there when you say advertising is manipulative. But I'm also aware that there are some well-meaning mom and pop companies that tell you about their products without trying to manipulate you. They're simply trying to bring them to your attention. Yeah, 100%. Is one of the barriers to the level of objectivity and open-mindedness that we would like, apart from all of the mind parasites of confirmation bias and religion and conspiracy theories, is that when you're in a group, you don't want to rebel in that. A lot of groups teach you what to think, not how to think, right? And so now I'm in a group and to stay in this group, or to be valued in this group, or respected in this group, I need to think like they think. And if I question anything, I could be out of the group or I could drop through if all rungs in the group. That's brilliantly said, correct? That's right. And it appears that our minds evolved to sort of maintain our social standing. And maintaining our social standing is more important to us than getting at the truth often. And so oftentimes we'll buy into the group delusion just to get along with folks. And this can lead us down deep, deep rabbit holes. And also we hate confrontation, right? We don't want to argue. We don't want conflict. I just want to get along. I want to be valued. I want to be part of the team. I don't want to be on my own, fuck being on my own. That's invulnerable and it's shit and I hate it. So yeah, I believe that sure. Sure. Go along to get along. Yeah, absolutely. And look, so let me ask you to consider a subtle conflict, a subtle contrast. Not all conflict is unpleasant or unproductive. But I think about the kind of conflict that goes on in a beautifully played World Cup game match. It's conflict, but there's camaraderie between the competing teams and there's, there might be at least, there's goodwill, there's sportsmanship. So not all conflict, Gandhi was big on this point. Conflict itself isn't bad. It's the wage conflict. That is problematic. So if you can learn to wage conflict in a constructive way, it actually becomes an enlivening thing rather than a depressing thing. Yeah. And I like to think of, you know, good critical dialogue. Let me take the word critical out of that. Good, good dialogue where you're really gently testing one another's ideas. I think that's marvelously, marvelously fun and illuminating and uplifting, if done right. And if you learn how to have those constructive dialogues where you're actually taking criticism without getting defensive and learning from it and the criticism itself is so soft, you don't, it doesn't even feel like criticism. It just feels like a gentle encouragement to to broaden your view. When that happens, you can do, we can do all of that without endamaging our relationships. Right. So the real sweet spot here is to belong to groups that engage in this kind of a deep collaborative idea testing in ways that deepen their, their respect for one another, but also encourages, encourages to let go of the beliefs that aren't serving as well. Yeah, agree. And also, like I think even in social groups, you know, like some people, it's like if you don't think like me or believe like me or support me, agree with me, align with my thinking, we can't be friends. Now you're in a thought, now you're in a social cult, where it's an echo chamber where we all think the same and believe the same. I'm trying to remember where I came across this recently, but there's some evolutionary thinkers now that think that the ability to kind of rally around a set of shared ideas or shared ideology was critical to mass cooperation. So if you want an entire society to cooperate or an entire tribe to cooperate or an entire corporation to cooperate towards one end, it really helps to have a shared ideology. It's kind of like a glue that keeps the keeps the group together, keeps it all pulling towards the same ends. But of course we've seen the darker side of that, right? It can result in zealous partisanship. It can result in group think and dogmatic close mindedness. And I think it's, yeah, I think that's the challenge is to belong to a group obviously is not bad and to have a similar value system or vision perhaps, right? But within that, you still need to be able to think critically and arrive at your own conclusions and not feel threatened or intimidated to be able to share that. Beautiful Greg, yeah, I feel like we're definitely on the same way of length here. I'm actually part of what I'm trying to do with this mental immunity talk is to say that although we've all gotten used to the idea that critical thinking is a good thing and I'll validate that. There's little recognition in the way we teach critical thinking that you can be too critical for your own good or even too critical for the sake of the truth. And so I'm actually trying to replace the concept of critical thinking with the concept of mental immune health. So a well functioning bodily immune system walks this tight rope between being aggressive and it has to be aggressive enough to weed out the coronavirus and the smallpox. But if it's too aggressive, it attacks the body's own tissues and then you end up with something called an autoimmune disease. Well, it turns out the mind's immune system has to walk a similar tight rope. It has to be critical enough to spot all the conspiracy theories and falsehoods out there. But if it's so critical, it starts to attack even your good ideas. Like if it makes you feel as though the mainstream media is one giant big conspiracy, then you've got an autoimmune disorder of the mind. Your mind's become hyper critical. I know we've got to wind up soon. So many questions. So little time everyone. I'm so excited. Talk to me a little bit about the role of fear in terms of mental immunity and mind parasites or that as a variable in the picture. I love your questions, Craig. You're really good at this. Thank you. All of the evidence I've seen suggests that our mental immune systems don't function well when we're scared. And so in my country, Donald Trump, former president, hijacked the minds of millions of my countrymen by pedaling fear. And if you make people feel threatened like they're like the immigrants are coming to steal your lunch money, then you can warp their thinking and distort their thinking and pick advantage of them. And I think Conn and throughout history have been doing this. So one of the things we have to do to think well together is create spaces that are I hate to use the word safe spaces because that has unpleasant connotations. But a really good dialogue takes place in a space where nobody feels threatened, where you can, where you're okay with contemplating letting go of an idea because your basic self feels safe. Yeah. Yeah. Just to put a quick ribbon on that, I would argue that fear is a mental immune disruptor. Yeah. Have you heard of the term psycho-neuro-immunology? No. Tell me. Tell me about it. So it's essentially it's a P and I psycho-neuro-immunology is essentially kind of a bit of a, a term referring to the relationship between what's happening in your mind are good or bad loosely and it's impact on your immune system. Yeah. So the correlation between the like, dumbing it right down, that the cognitive stuff, the emotional stuff and the biological stuff and the way that that's all linked. And we know that thought, we know that thought, you know, this better than me, but thought has a biological end result. You know, if I think something right now, if I'm in my studio and I'm not in danger, there's no risk, there's no threat, but I think there is, and I believe there is, there's a biological consequence to that, a physiological elevated heart rate, breathing adrenaline, sympathetic nervous system, all that stuff. So yeah, that's a really interesting area too, is what's happening in my mind and what that does to my body? So psychosomatic, I think, is a term used for the general connection between mind and body there, but you're calling it now to a very particular link between what you're thinking and its effects on your immune system. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating. I'll have to look into that. Okay. Thank you for mentioning that. Well, you're a superstar. Now, just quickly give us a couple of minutes. Do I pronounce it? Cirque? We call it Cersei. Cersei? Okay. Just give us a quick snapshot of what that is. Yeah. So I now run a research institute dedicated to promoting the science of mental immunity and applying it to our world is disinformation problem. So we want to, we have as a mission, we've gathered a few dozen of the world's top scientists on this and we're basically working together to answer the question, how does the mind's immune system work and how can we make it work better? So it would be nice to kind of crack that, well, it would be nice. One way you might approach the disinformation problem is to infringe on the speech rights of all of the, the liars and the cheats and the propaganda that's out there. Yeah. But nobody wants to give away our speech rights that easily. A real solution here is to help everyone boost their immunity to nonsense, their immunity to bullshit, so that those blowhards can continue to peddle their nonsense, but nobody listens to. Yeah. I think that's our mission. I think that's a good mission. So Andy's book is called Mental Immunity. How do people find you and follow you and connect with you, Doc? Thanks for asking. Have a website, AndyNorman.org, and I definitely encourage people to check out the Cersei website. Sorry for the URL here. It's cognitiveimmunology.net. But lots about the science there and we're actually launching in a couple of months, something we call the Mental Immunity project that's going to have, it's going to take all the science and make it really dead simple to kind of strengthen your own mental immune system. So we're going to make it easy for parents to protect their kids and for teachers to protect their students and for friends to protect each other. And I think if we spread the basic knowledge of how to boost our mental immune systems, I think we're all going to be a lot less susceptible to the mind manipulators out there. Hi, Melissa. I told you he was a big deal, didn't I? You did. You did. You were correct. You love him a little bit. Definitely. You guys, hey, you're going to have to let me buy you guys beers. You have to get it out. Andy, stay there. We'll say goodbye on air. But then we'll say goodbye off air. Dr. AndyNorman, we appreciate you. Thank you so much for being on the you project. My pleasure, Greg. 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