Good morning, peeps, and welcome to wok F Daily with Meet your Girl Daniel Moody. Pre recording from the Home Bunker. Folks, it is time for rest and respite, and so I'm very excited to bring you a lot of pre recorded fantastic interviews and solo combos that I will be having while wok F is out on break and today I am super excited for you all to hear this conversation with Andy Norman, who is an award winning author of the book Mental Immunity. He is also the co founder
and CEO of Mental Immunity Project. What is that you ask, Let me tell you. The Mental Immunity Project aims to reduce the public's susceptibility to bad information, extremism, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and more by equipping them with skills they need to identify and reject misleading or manipulative content. Doctor Norman is the award winning author of Mental Immunity, Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites,
and the Search for a Better Way to Think. His work has appeared everywhere from Scientific American Psychology Today, Free Inquiry, the Humanists, and other places. I was so excited to delve into this conversation with doctor Norman because I mean, this is the conversation that we needed to be having
back in twenty fifteen. This is the conversation that needed to be pervent across the media about how to deal with an entity like Donald Trump that the truth clearly abates him at all times, What to do in order to protect yourself from habitual liars and an entire party that would create an entire apparatus that included one of the most widely watched networks, to create a feeder system for their lies right that would then expose millions upon
millions of people to what doctor Norman refers to as mind parasites, These things that kind of get into your brain and begin to eat at your ability to decipher between right and wrong, to be able to decipher between truth and fact. When you plant seeds as Donald Trump and the Republican Party has done to destroy faith in agencies in what you see with your own eyes, you begin to believe nothing, which makes it easier for an
authoritarian to take over and just take back control. Because as doctor Norman and I will begin to discuss, is that it is very hard right in an open society, which a democracy is right where we are having conversations about how we want our society to look as opposed to it being dictated to us from up on high.
But when you have those avenues of communication and information corroded and eroded with series after a series of lies in gaslight and misinformation, discerning the truth becomes really difficult, as we have seen, and so here in this book and with his project, doctor Norman really talks about the ways that we can protect ourselves and the ways that we can protect those around us. Check out this conversation
coming up next with doctor Andy Norman. Folks. I am very happy to welcome to WOKF doctor Andy Norman, who is the award winning author of Mental Immunity, Infectious, Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think, and is the co founder and CEO of Mental Immunity Project, which aims to reduce the public susceptibility to bad information, extremism, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and more by equipping them with the
skills they need to identify and reject misleading or manipulative content. Um Doctor Norman, let me say this that your work is needed now more than ever, which I'm sure you are well aware of and know. Yeah, thank you, And I want to ask you, I guess to start off with. You know, we are living in such a polarized time and such a dangerous time as it pertains to the
information silos that we live in. Yes, the information silos, meaning that we are able to find whatever quote unquote truth aligns with our own feelings and desires depending on what platform that we decide to go to. We no longer live in a time when there are four channels that we're all watching to get the same news from. You can get whatever news that you want. And so first off is that doesn't seem to be changing. It
only seems to be increasing. That's right, talk to us, what is at stake if we don't have the agility to be able to create mental immunity when it's coming, the disinformation is coming at such an expedited rate.
Yeah, So the more scholars study the way misinformation spreads through societies, through cultures, the more they realize it behaves an awful lot like a disease. And our minds actually struggle with missing disinformation and pretty much the same way that our bodies, immune systems struggle with pathogens. In fact, people now experts now take the analogies so seriously that they're starting to think of bad ideas as minded parasites
of a sort. And by bad ideas here I just mean misinformation or falsehoods, or even you know, ideas spread hate and disnction. Those ideas too can be thought of as parasites of the mind. The good news is that our minds evolved in a rich stew of problematic ideas, and we actually have the capacity to become very good at discriminating between the good stuff and the bad stuff. So our minds actually have evolved immune systems that, under the right conditions, can do a really good job of
keeping our minds relatively infection free. It's important to note that nobody has a mind completely free of mind infections. We all harbor bad ideas, and if we don't take that to heart and bring the kind of humility needed to unlearned things, then we're going to have it. We're really going to struggle. In this day and age, we think that what we call subtractive learning, learning to let
go of ideas that probably don't measure up. That's as important as inputing new information that's that should be added to the mind's knowledge stockpile.
Let's dig into the idea of mind parasites for a minute. As somebody who loves sci fi like I do, it conjures ideas in my mind. You know, of aliens, I'm pretty and pretty creepy. So can you just explain what you mean by by the concept and and the term so that people get to get a get a better sense of what that is.
Yeah, well, so I think the first thing, well, I'm glad that concept is different enough to catch your attention. Second thing I'll say is don't don't don't be too freaked out about it that the bad ideas that have crept into your mind all these times are aren't suddenly going to come alive and you know, get the way through your brain. It's nothing like that. But the fact is ideas don't always serve the host the minds that
host them. They don't always serve them well. And to really reflect on the So philosophers have been reflecting deeply on this fact for a long time and trying to develop methods to better weed out the problematic ideas from
the good ones. And some of the most powerful methods involved just learning to ask good questions, learn to listen to your doubts, express them with questions, and especially common use of clarifying questions, and that can go a long way towards improving your thinking and helping you make better decisions.
You know, right now, I think that what makes me excite but also nervous about the work that you do is that it requires a desire to want to think and be better. Right, It requires a desire, like you had said earlier, to unlearn and a humility to unlearn bad ideas. And we are living in a time of strong men, right that are spreading disinformation, and humility is not a part of that package, right It toxic masculinity
and aggression is actually a part of that passage. So to say to myself, hmm, let me ask myself questions as opposed to I know everything that there is to know is almost like the first step in order to get to the place of mental immunity. And so how do you how do we navigate that? Because for someone like me and listeners to this show, they are about expansion, right, they are about learning more and being curious.
And my guess is most of your listeners bring a fair amount of.
Humility to right right, right, And I think that we're out of time of there being a lack and almost as celebration of the lack of intellectual curiosity. Let me just follow like sheep.
Yeah, yeah, I mean you can see how I mean. For example, Rush Limbaugh was a radio host who would use bombast and overconfidence. His overconfidence, his lack of humility was really appealing to people because it seemed like I imagine it felt to some as though it was there's a way of orienting yourself in a confusing world. I mean, this guy at least has strong opinions and they don't waiver, and he sticks by his guns, So I want to be like that. That's can be really disorienting, both morally
and practically. That the people most worth emulating, the people most worth listening and learning from, are extremely humble and are willing to rethink things. And as our world grows more and more complex in terms of the information that bombards us, we all need to learn to rethink things and also and to bring the kind of open mindedness and humility that allows people to do that. Philusphers have noticed for thousands of years that the least humble people
are often society's biggest problems. Right, So if you want to be on the side of the angels, so to speak, instead of say yeah, I know this for sure, say I think that's true. I mean, last time I checked it seemed like so. One thing really good thinkers do is they try not to think in black and white, are in absolute terms. They think in shades of gray.
So if you realize, I mean, if you're considering saying something or asserting something, it's tempting to just want to say it in very stark terms because you sound confident, you sound decisive, and people admire that. But if the truth is better served by saying, you know, I'm like eighty five percent confident this is true, but of course there are there's a possibility I might be wrong. Learning to say that to yourself and even saying it to others can make you part of the solution instead of
part of the problem. We're at a moment in history where our entire culture needs to move away from sort of absolutist thinking and become more sensitive and actually better listeners. Almost the more. One of the most important skills in all of this is learning how to listen with humility and learn from people who's used different from ours.
You know, I often say on this show and others that from the political perspective, the foundation of a democracy is based in critical thinking, right. It is based in the citizen turie's ability to think critically about who they are choosing to represent them right, and how they are going to be best served. Yes, and what I see now is a society, not just here but globally that is really being driven by fear. And I think about fear honestly, Doctor Normans as a different kind of mental parasite.
I think that's right. So emotions can spread by contagion. Right, if somebody in your room, in the crowd where you are starting to freak out and ask act scared, you can actually contract that fear. It can spread through a crowd almost like a disease. And so emotions can spread virally, so to speak. And fear is one of the most Fear doesn't bring out the best in people. No, Fear, hate, resentment, these are the emotions that tend to make us the
worst versions of ourselves. Compassion, sympathy, patience, these are the qualities that tend to bring out the best in people, and our fast moving information world seems to reward people who are quick and decisive and confident rather than people who are careful and cautious and slow.
I wonder, then, if fear two spreads like a virus, and you have a political party, for instance, that has weaponized that fear in order to control the masses, would be that it isn't just enough to shut it off right, that there has to be a formulation that looks like deprogramming, because you've already if it is a virus and I've already come into contact with it, then it's already spreading around my system. Just shutting down doesn't stop the virus
from moving. And so I'm wondering, you know, what does it look like once you vite because again this comes with awareness and consciousness. You have to be aware that you've caught the cold before you can rid yourself of it. So I'm really curious as to what it looks like then for those people, let's say I'll use this for reference of this show, the January sixth people who were convicted when asked, now, there many of them are just
like they didn't know what they were doing. They got caught up right, is the the defense that they have, whether or not they believe that, or whether or not they're using it as a way to lessen sentences. There are some that have testified about needing to deprogram themselves, so I'm just curious as to what that looks like.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things we're learning is that it's a lot harder to deprogram, say a cult member, than it is to prevent somebody to give people the skills they need to prevent from being seduced by the cult leader in the first place in the first place. So prevention, an ounce of prevention, is worth a pound
of cure. A little bit of effort can go a long way to prevent people from being exploited by, say, manipulative messaging, But it's much harder after people have bought into that manipulative message and formed an identity around it, and then they fight like heck to main the sucker or the dupe of the person who's manipulating them with information. The astrophysicist Carl Sagan once said that you know, once you give your belief or your credulity to a charlatan,
you almost never get it back. That propagandists and conspiracy theories and cult leaders have ways of hacking into your mind, winning your allegiance, preventing you from really thinking for yourself. And of course we can't run a democracy if people are falling prey to disinformation peddlers left and right. And of course this is one of the deepest challenges for any democracy because in an open society, we believe that people should be able to speak their minds, should be
able to raise criticisms. But right now people are we've treated that idea as so sayrid that we're allowing people to weaponize information in ways that harm others. Right, So, in just the same way that it's not okay to I don't know, hypnotize and brainwash somebody, it's not okay to set up an info Wars platform and brainwash tens of millions of people. In fact, if the former is problematic, the latter is even millions of times more so.
So, what does it look like then? You know, with the time we have, what does it look like as we're heading into an election year, right, I can't stress enough that it's going to be the most consequential of our lifetimes about whether we hold on to democracy or America falls to authoritarianism? And what does it look like
when people know? Right, I'm I'm talking to the seventy percent because I personally believe that the thirty percent that have become hypnotized by trump Ism magaism, that they are not coming back right, That is my that is my They are very hard to reach, that is my belief. But there are seventy percent, the majority of people. How do they prepare themselves to be mindful of the disinformation and not fall prey to it?
Let me offer what I think is maybe the most highest, highest impact thing that we as a nation need to realize. There are people out there who are peddling counter narratives just to create confusion and to make people feel resignation and to just give up and then not vote. So if you feel like, yeah, the Dems say this, but the Republicans say that, who's to say it's all bullshit? And then you just don't even exercise your right to vote.
If you do that, the disinformation peddlers have won because they've manipulated you into not exercising your judgment, into not using your ability to think for yourself to help protect our freedoms in our democracy. So I would urge your listeners to realize that there will be a crazy lot of inflammatory information flying around as we approach the twenty twenty four election. Tensions will run high. People will be fearful, angry, resentful, All of these emotions will run high. Realize that you
don't have to let that information trigger you. Keep your calm, keep your cool, be a good citizen, Get out and exercise your right to vote for the party, the one party in our nation anymore that is actually trying to do the best for all of us than just try to glorify a leader who will take advantage of anyone and everyone. So don't despair is the main thing. Stay strong,
get out there, help your neighbors vote. If you can, donate to a political cause so that I mean Trump was raising lots of money to get reelected, and if he takes if he takes the White House again, I'm not at all sure our democracy will survive. And we who care about our democracy need to rise up in
huge numbers on election day. And it's time to prepare yourself to do that now, and not to let all the bullshit that's going to overwhelm us for the next few months deter you from doing the right thing.
I mean, I can't, I can't agree more. This is the This is the drum that I beat on this show every single day because I do think, you know, And the the last question that I have for you, because I do think like fear, despair and hopelessness too, is can be viral.
Yeah, absolutely, And I wonder for you, you know, to offer to the audience that by plugging in every single day, seeing violent, horrific wars, seeing death, and just feeling like they cannot hold this grief anymore, they want to shut down, right, they want to not discuss I don't want to talk about politics.
I don't want to talk about these things. And it's the conversation that allows us the ability to expand. So what do you offer to those people that are that are struggling with hopefulness?
Well? I have to remind myself almost every day that the newspaper is a bias sample of stories about problems mostly right, Yeah, And when people quietly resolve things and solve problems, a lot of times it doesn't make the news. And so our information diets tend to make us more pessimistic and despairing than we probably ought to be, So it's worth just remembering that, stepping back from it and saying, yeah, if all I read is the news, it's natural I'm
going to feel kind of down. But there are lots of things going on behind the scenes that are pushing humanity in the right direction. So stay, stay strong, keep hope alive.
That was a perfect place to end on your call to action to keep Hope alive, folks. I will say that the book Mental Immunity, Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think, is absolutely worth the read for those of you who are trying to stave off disinformation but also raise your levels of hopefulness. And also do check out Mental Immunity Project because I think that it is absolutely worth the discussion, particularly during
this season when we're gathering with other folks. Doctor Andy Norman, thank you so much for making the time for WOKF. I appreciate you.
Thank you, Danielle, keep up the good work.
That is it for me today, dear friends on WOKF. As always, power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.