The Jordan Harbinger Show - 590: Andy Norman | The Search for a Better Way to Think

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

Andy Norman (@drandyno) directs the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, is the founder of CIRCE, and is the award-winning author of Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think. What We Discuss with Andy Norman: Like our bodies, our minds and cultures have immune systems, and they can break down under certain conditions. How the root cause of contemporary divisiveness is a compromise of these mental and cultural immune systems. What it takes for certain ideologies to weaken our mental and cultural immune systems. Why, if you want to effectively persuade others, you must also show your willingness to be persuadable. How you can inoculate your mind (and help others protect themselves) against divisive ideologies to build the mental rigidity to withstand their influence. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/590 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. It's like active listening, right? Where you say, okay, this is what I hear you saying. Am I getting you? Do I really understand you? You don't have any right to start tearing something down until you've really done the hard work of understanding it. And I see a whole lot in our culture right now where people are so eager to tear things down before understanding it.

And it's really, really not serving our culture well. It's one thing that's tearing America apart right now. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional journalist-turned poker champion drug trafficker or economic hitman. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works

and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about the show, we've got these episodes starter packs, which I recommend, of course. These are collections of top episodes organized by topic that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started. And you can find these on Spotify as well, aside from the website. Today, people have been manipulated to think beliefs needn't change in response to evidence, making us more susceptible to conspiracy theories, science denial,

extremism of all kinds, motivated reasoning, preconceived beliefs, agenda, and other cognitive biases are always at play here. Now, in today's world, closed-mindedness can get rebranded almost as a virtue when you're not supposed to question something. But just as physical health is not personal because we live in herds, cognitive health is also subject to these same demands.

Many ideologies, especially rigid ones, weaken our mental immune system, and today we'll be talking about a prospective antidote to this and how to strengthen our mental immune systems, so bad ideas and ideologies are slower to take, root. Mental rigidity is acquired. We aren't born being too stubborn or proud or diluted to change our minds, so we can acquire the inverse, the ability to change our mind based on reason. And today's guest, Andy Norman believes that if you want others to be persuadable, you must also be persuadable. So a heavy

dose of critical thinking, or as Andy Norman likes to say, definitely not critical thinking. But whatever, maybe that's just semantics. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing people on the show, it's about my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And most of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to that same course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong.

Now, here's Andy Norman. So on the show, we do talk about critical thinking all the time. It's right in the mission statement, as you and I talked about, pre-show here. And it's very apropos of our time of global pandemic here to argue that bad ideas are like a disease that actually infects our minds and weakens our thinking. So I want to start from the jump here.

What is mental immunity? Yeah, so mental immunity is resistance to the uptake of bad ideas. So each and every one of us has a bodily immune system and it protects us from infectious microbes. Turns out, based on about 60 years of research and psychology, our minds have immune systems too and they protect us from infectious ideas to one or another degree. And what we're witnessing today, if you want to understand or root cause of contemporary craziness, it's that mental immune systems have been compromised by ideas that actually disrupt their functioning. So that's the thesis of my book, and I argue that by developing the science of mental immunity,

a science of resistance to bad ideas, that we can actually enhance critical thinking and take it to a whole new level. So it sounds like immunity is kind of the opposite of susceptibility, both in terms of diseases and in terms of believing bad ideas or buying into bad. Exactly. Concepts. Immunity and susceptibility are just inverses of one another. The more immune you are, the less susceptible you are, and vice versa.

And I've noticed you can be immune or susceptible to many different things. You might be immune to Scientology, but highly susceptible to alien abduction stories. Or the tooth fairy, right? I think that's an example you give on either the book or somewhere else, maybe the scientific American article that you wrote where, you know, if you're a kid, you might believe in Santa Claus, but that doesn't mean that you're going to believe in something else. you are going to keep that belief forever, but that sort of goes beyond what we're, what we're touching on right now. Yeah, but I mean, I think we're born extremely trusting of the authority figures in our lives.

And so we believe what they tell us, even if it's nonsense, like the tooth fairy. I was talking about this with Joe Rogan a while back, and I actually had a mental, had a verbal slip, and I talked about the truth fairy. Oh, nice. He thought that would be probably a nice substitute for the tooth fairy. There you go. Yeah, it's like you wake up and there's a note under your bed that's like your breath smells and most of your friends hate you.

And you're like, damn it, I knew it. I don't know if that's good for kids, though. I think adults need that. I don't know about eight-year-old kids. That might be a little bit harsh. We'll see. I'm thinking about a kid's book called The Truth Fairy. The Truth Fairy?

Yeah. Yeah. Like, you leave your tooth out under the pillow and it's like, it's just your mom, but here's a dollar. Hey, I might work with that idea. You want royalties for that concept? No, no. It's all yours. We have it right here in the recording that I'm seating that.

over to you. It seems like bad ideas, we don't just have to keep them out at the door, right? There has to be, it's like a doorman. You don't just want to screen people for weapons at the door. You also have to have security inside the venue as well. Exactly. So ideas slip past our mind defenses, bad ideas slip past our minds defenses and some of them take root as belief. And if we don't have a capacity to spot them and remove them, our minds are filling up with bad ideas. And bad ideas attract more of their kind because other bad ideas fit in with the ones that are already on board. And so you need to get good not just at spotting new bad ideas, new disinformation, but also be humble enough to go after the ideas that some of which you've become quite fond of and be willing to rethink them.

So not just avoiding planting weeds, but pulling the ones out that show up there anyway, that's lit by. Exactly. I take some pride in having developed the idea, well, the meta, It makes sense to weed our minds of bad ideas and seed them with good ones. But the idea that our minds are like a festival of ideas that have bouncers at the gates that try to keep up the bad ones is a metaphor I owe to an immunologist whose name I'm blanking on at the moment. But I borrowed his metaphor there. Fair enough. With the news today we have, you mentioned this is called amygdala hijacking. And both sides have this, I think, where it's just, what's scary. And you can watch the news and it's like, the new variant of this disease is scary,

but maybe I'm not even as scared as I should be from that because yesterday it was murder hornets, which sound much scarier than they actually are. And then, but throughout the 90s, it was Africanized bees that I've never really had to deal with. So there's all kinds of things that people are used to being scared about it and it gets short-term clicks and short-term views on a news channel, but it also sort of makes a lot of people resistant to worrying about real stuff. Yeah, there are a lot of people out there right now that get attention by fearmongering, or they accumulate power by fearmongering, or they actually manage to brainwash a lot of people with fearmongering. So fearmongering is an age-old tactic for demagogues and propagandists,

tell people that immigrants are coming to take their lunch money and people get really fearful. And what happens in the brain when you get really fearful is that the part of your mind responsible for calm, rational, judicious thinking flips, switches off, and you go into fight or flight mode. There's basically two systems in the brain. It's called sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic nervous system basically prepares you to flee or fight. And when you're in that mode, you don't care about fairness. You care about winning. But if you want to learn how to think well, like a good scientist does or a skilled philosopher does or somebody who's really good at figuring out what's true, you need to learn to calm your sympathetic nervous system and turn on your parasympathetic system, which is the one that actually gets you to slow down and assess ideas carefully and judiciously. You wrote, when we fixate on the wingnut outrage of the day and nurse our own grievances, we suppress our own higher brain function. So that's what you're talking about now, right?

That's amygdala hijacking is what some brain scientists call it. One way to practice the insight here is to pay attention to your own sense that you're getting defensive. So we all have conversations, and sometimes we run into people who we disagree with on very fundamental things. When they say something, you start to feel defensive or a little bit angry or a little bit bothered, notice that and just calm that sense down, just saying, I'm not getting any good to anybody if I'm just going to be reactive to what this guy is saying. and give the guy a chance to spell out what he has to say. Delay the moment of judgment and ask clarifying questions. And a lot of times that's the road to a genuinely fruitful

dialogue rather than just mutual acrimony and fault finding. There's not just sort of the idea that we get resistant or defensive right away, right? I mean, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to know that in America we have this virtue or core value where we say, you know, I have a right to believe what I want. And that sounds good on its face, but then once you say, well, to your point, once you start to think about it, right, it becomes problematic because it touches on the idea that you have a right to your own opinion, but you don't really have a right to your own facts. But when we say beliefs, we're kind of incorporating facts inside that particular statement? Yeah, there's a famous statement that Daniel Patrick Moynihan,

the former Democratic Senator, said you're entitled to your opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts. I actually think that doesn't go far enough because the idea that we're entitled to believe whatever we darn please, that we're entitled to propagate any opinions we like, that idea is not serving us well. It's led to a culture where we all feel kind of entitled, cognitively entitled, it's almost like we've been emphasizing our cognitive rights to the exclusion of our cognitive responsibilities for so long, for so many generations in America. We've developed a decadent culture where people just believe what they want and say, to hell with you. It's my belief. Go away. And when you do that, you undermine the norms

that allow for the kind of dialogue that bring us back together and allow us to reconcile our differences. So I actually think that it's only half true at best that we're entitled to our opinions. We're maybe legally entitled to our opinions, but that in no way means we're morally entitled to our opinions. There are objectively morally bad opinions. Yeah, you wrote that rights belong to a category of things psychologists call sacred values. Things were not supposed to trade off against other things, but evidence and critical questioning can and should impinge on belief. and that makes them transgressive of something we're conditioned to see as a right. So in this way, we've made critical thinking about core values all but taboo.

So that's a big problem. Yeah. So if you take our belief rights to be absolute, then they override even your ability to criticize. Right? Because your criticism does in fact, can in fact interfere with my beliefs. If the right to believe is absolute, then criticism is transgressive. And you can see this in sort of the hyper-sensitive woke culture right now where you're making me feel uncomfortable. So you're doing something wrong.

Well, you know, deep conversations cause discomfort. And we need to get comfortable with that. The fact that you feel offended doesn't automatically mean that I've done something wrong. It might. But sometimes people are offended because they're being oversensitive or because they misinterpret what's actually being said. Yeah, some of that's deliberate though, right? I mean, there's a lot of, and I noticed this online, I don't, you know, now that it's a pandemic, especially, I don't talk to anyone in person, but not that I enjoyed it before. But you see this online where, and I think it was Adam Carolla who recently posted something where he goes, this is social media right now. I prefer oranges over mangoes. And the other person said, so what you're saying is you hate mangoes, you're a mango hater. I'm literally shaking right now. And it's a joke, but it's also, I've had this happen to me all. the time. I'll say something like, well, you know, let's explore the idea that maybe you're wrong here and someone will just absolutely implode. You can't tell me that my beliefs are wrong. And it's like,

well, but you are objectively mistaken on many things here. But you can't tell me this. You don't know. I have a right to, and I'm thinking like you're literally getting history wrong or, you know, in some very clear cases you are just objectively wrong. No fact check. No research would back up your opinion. It's just how you feel. That's right. If you say, I prefer oranges to mangoes, and I say you're a mango hater, I have misinterpreted and misrepresented what you said. I am objectively wrong in that characterization. Look, philosophers have been practicing the art of having difficult conversations about core values for thousands of years. And one of the things philosophers recognize very early on is those conversations just don't bear fruit. They can't be

productive if the participants don't bring what's called the principle of charity. I'm going to do my best to understand your words in the best possible light. You accord me the same courtesy, and then maybe we have a chance to actually make some headway in our conversation. If we just bring mutual suspicion and distrust and willfully distort what each other, the things the other person is saying, the conversation will go downhill fast. I think Sam Harris mentions this, right? You sort of steal man the other person's argument. So instead of taking the mango thing and saying, here's the weakest interpretation, the least charitable, the one that makes you look like the biggest a-hole. I'll take your argument instead and make it the strongest it possibly could be,

where I might say, instead of you're a mango hater, that makes you a terrible person, I'm literally shaking right now, I might say, oh, so there are some instances in which you prefer mangoes to oranges, and in those instances, it doesn't really mean anything about the oranges or your belief about oranges. It's really probably, in many times it's just your belief about mangoes, and it's only your personal opinion. in that instance. That's right. But by Sam's term, steel man is meant to contrast with straw man. So a straw man argument is when you misrepresent something in a way that makes it look silly, and then you shoot that down. It's like shooting fish in a barrel, right? Anybody can refute anything

if they're allowed to misinterpret it. The right way to do it is to actually assume that the person you're disagreeing with is trying to bring something valuable to the table and help them articulate it in the best possible way so that you can learn from it. Sam uses Steelman, which I think is a term that has gained some currency among logicians and argumentation theorists. But, you know, it goes all the way back to Socrates, who was really, really good at this. He would always characterize the other person's position as charitably as he could and saying, hey, do I have this right?

I'm not going to criticize you until I'm sure I really understand what you're saying. And then you'd say it back in his own words. It's like active listening, right? Where you say, okay, this is what I hear you saying. Am I getting you? Do I really understand you? you don't have any right to start tearing something down until you've really done the hard work of understanding it. And I see a whole lot in our culture right now where people are so eager to

tear things down before understanding it. And it's really, really not serving our culture well. It's one thing that's tearing America apart right now. The reason that this is important, a lot of us have, we probably covered this in parts before, but the reason that this particular subject is important is because when people lose what you call the meta belief that beliefs should change in response to evidence, they become more susceptible to conspiracy theories, paranormal beliefs, science denial, extremism, mind viruses, as you refer to them. Yeah, so a psychologist in Canada, and Gordon Pennycook, has a wonderful paper on that meta belief. He's basically been able to show empirically that when people start to let up or compromise their

commitment to revising their beliefs in the face of evidence, the moment you start compromising that for your religious faith, for your political ideology or anything, your mind becomes more susceptible to all kinds of mind viruses, essentially. In my own book, I actually characterize the same idea as, I call it Reasons Folkrum. It's the idea that we should always yield to better reasons. Reasons fulcrum is a way to make intellectual humility actionable. It's like, if you present a good reason, I have a intellectual duty to back down and acknowledge that you've made a good point. It may not mean I have to give up all my core beliefs, but I need to give them due weight and do what I can to learn from them. That attitude, I think, is sorely lacking in America today.

And the key to restoring a civic culture that works for all of us is restoring that commitment. We all need to be deeply committed to this meta belief or reasons fulcrum, and we can begin to dialogue in fruitful ways and problem solve again. Right. This is where identity politics becomes so toxic, right? Because I can't really yield to your better idea. Look, if you tell me that something is better, a better way to cook pasta, I don't really have an attachment other than just being right for ego reasons to my old way of cooking pasta.

But if me acknowledging that you have a better way to cook better pasta means that I can no longer hang out with everyone that are my friends in these activist groups that I'm in, or that all of the things that are talked about on my favorite news channels are wrong, that my podcasters that I've been listening to are also mistaken, and that my family that agrees with me or disagrees with me or whatever sort of identity I've built around this, is also, now the foundations of that are also shaken, then I have a really vested interest in making damn sure that you are not able to attack that particular method of cooking pasta. Well, and you're more likely to push back against this better way of cooking pasta if your identity

is all tied up in the result. Like, suppose you imagine that you're the greatest Italian chef ever, and I come along and say, hey, you're doing it wrong. You're likely to feel threatened. And this is true generally. The more you hitch your identity to a set of beliefs, the more defensive if you get when people raise questions about those beliefs. So the antidote to this kind of identity politics is to take a stand against it by refusing to identify with any one set of beliefs. In fact, think of your beliefs as house guests that are likely to wear out their welcome eventually. They might serve you well for a while. You'll eventually reach the point where the beliefs that are dear to you where you start to see their limits and their defects.

And when that happens, you need to be willing to let go of them. Otherwise, you become part of the problem instead of part of the solution. So that's the house guess heuristic, right? We're sort of thinking, all right, this idea is a guess, but at some point, you got to get out of here because you keep putting your feet on the furniture, and I've told you 100 times. Exactly. Okay. Gotcha.

That's it. How does some people resist toxic and radical ideologies and others just can't seem to do this? And maybe we need an example of these toxic ideologies as well, right? You give an example in the book, which is this synagogue shooter, but anybody, basically anybody who shoots people who are a different color or religion has fallen prey to this. So think about jihadi or Islamism, which is kind of a holy war worshipping kind of Islam. Almost everybody agrees that that's a destructive or harmful ideology, except for a few radicals. But there are similar things growing right here in America on both sides of the political divide.

We have toxic forms of conservatism and toxic kinds of progressivism that are simply take no prisoners, culture war, identity politics. And I see a lot of people pointing to the identity politics on the other side without seeing that it's also flourishing on their own side. And the fact is we need to call out identity politics and toxic ideologies of all kinds if we want to get out of this mess. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Andy Norman. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show. We recently redesigned the deals page where you can find all the discount codes and promo codes. Those do a great job of supporting the show, so please do use those codes.

And you can find them all in one place on our fancy new page at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. We've also got worksheets for many episodes. If you want the drills and the exercises talked about during the show, those are all in one easy place at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now, back to Andy Norman. Seems like some subcultures have evidential norms, right? So if I'm really into science or I'm a journalist that's a credible, I would say, ethical journalist, right? There are evidential norms.

There are expectations of me looking at other people's research and saying, okay, this person has done the work, they're also ethical, this is how they did it, they're transparent. This typically serves to make scientists less prone to false beliefs. I won't include journalists in that because it's a whole can of worms. But other subcultures have little, it's not that they don't. It's just that if I say that, people are going to blow up. But other subcultures have little infrastructure for slowing the spread of bad information. And you mentioned propaganda peddlers online that actively subvert mental immunity. Yeah. So I'm reading a book right now about, it's called The Storm Is Upon Us. It's the story of how QAnonon evolved as a set of beliefs. And one thing that's just patently obvious is that the most ardent Q&N followers, they don't care about evaluating evidence and revising their beliefs to get a more accurate picture of the world.

They're simply reveling in the tribal solidarity that their Q&on belief affords them. And it's so obvious that they're unhinged. Their grasp of reality has become extraordinarily tenuous. And their grasp of morality, their sense of right and wrong, has been deeply corrupted as well. If you don't maintain the habit of revising your beliefs in the face of evidence and good points from the other side, you will become gradually more unhinged over time and become somebody who functionally undermines the very values you hold dear. That should scare people who are in this camp, but somehow it doesn't, right?

And I think there's probably a whole psychology behind this. Of course there is. But a lot of it just comes down to, what, loneliness and isolation and feeling powerless. You know, we've done shows on conspiracy theories before, and a lot of it comes down to the guy on the block with no friends who wants to feel smarter than people for the first time in their entire life? That is a consistent theme. And it's always a combination of factors, right? Loneliness, isolation can be part of it, wanting to feel smarter than others. One of the features of many Q&ON believers highlighted by this guy Mark Rothschild who wrote the book. Oh, God, his last name's Rothschild. That's not doing him any favors, right? Well, exactly. He points out he's no relation to the Rothschild family, but... I'm sure the Q&N followers all believe that, too, yeah.

Anti-Semitic tropes against the Rothschild family go back. Generation, this was not something I knew until I read the... Oh, yeah. Yes, that was a coincidence. Should have had a co-author. Maybe it should have been. Yeah, poor guy. Wrong topic. Right. Yeah. Well, he just points out how frequently QAnon followers are lonely, are disaffected. they feel as though they've lost control.

Actually, this is the point I was coming at. When you feel like your life is out of control, you become more susceptible to sweeping conspiracy theories that wrap it all up in a neat bundle because then at least you can have hope that deposing the conspirators will solve everything. And all of us have this need to feel as though we're in control of our lives. And right now, the internet-connected world feels out of control

to a lot of people. And so more and more people become susceptible to dangerous ideologies like those propagated by Q. So it's not just about ideas disrupting mental immune function. Some attitudes also disrupt mental immune function as well. And one of those that seems really obvious is arrogance. I think if anybody who's ever argued online with an idiot, which we've all done, or at least I have, we've seen this, right?

You'll say something is incorrect, and it's just like Googlably false. And then they'll go, oh, well, you're using Google. Well, you should use Duck, Duck, Go. And I go, fine, here are my duck, duck go results. Here's the result. It's from Wikipedia or it's from an encyclopedia and it says this from scientific America. Oh, well, that's liberal of the propaganda. Okay, so what source would you pick for this?

Oh, well, the only source I would pick is one that says the thing that I'm telling you right now. And you're like, but the airplane wasn't invented in 900 BC. So you're asking me to find a source that says that and then says that that is not true. And you just can't argue with these people because the arrogance is there. They have decided to not believe you, and nothing can convince them otherwise. When you look at the way in which conversations break down, sometimes it's because people bring the wrong attitudes to it. And sometimes it's because they bring so many mistaken ideas to the table that there's

just you have trouble finding any common ground. So it's very important that we maintain the right attitude so that we can inquire and actually find out what's true and a problem solved together. I call that the way of inquiry or the attitude of the inquirer. Basically, always reason to find out. If you realize that you're reasoning to win, to beat somebody else up and win the argument, you've already sown the seeds of your mind's decay, because truly, people with strong mental immune systems make a habit of reasoning to find out rather than reasoning to win. And if you adopt the attitude, the aggressive, arrogant attitude of a culture

warrior, you will very likely lose your own moorings, your own intellectual moorings and your grasp with the truth. That is so tempting, though, right? I don't want to sort of sell this like I'm above this. I see this online all the time, and it's so tempting to be like, I'm going to rip this person a new one. It's going to be awesome. I have such a great comeback for this. And halfway through typing it, I go, you know what, I'm going to end up getting a bunch of likes for the shredding this nobody on the internet who probably lives in like Ohio. I'll never meet them, right? It's not somebody that I'm going to be able to sort of rib them about this at a barbecue. I'm just doing this because I can make myself, I can jump on their head, right, metaphorically. And it doesn't help anything.

It just reinforces them going back to their Q&ON buddies or their like, you know, flat earth friends or whatever and just saying, these guys, they hate us all. They're just trying part of the conspiracy. Look at this guy with the blue check mark pissing me up. And then I'm going to get nothing out of this. It just basically trying to prove that you were right and make somebody else look silly. It's a loser's game, right? All you do is kind of toxify your own mind. Think about the person most important to you, your partner, say. When you try to work out a difference with your partner, do you really reason to win and prove that you're right?

It depends, right? It depends. Highly dependent on the situation, but let's be real. No, probably not. I just want to be right once. I have a strong wife as well, strong-willed woman, and I love her to death. But I also have learned sometimes the hard way that when I just try to prove myself right and don't pay attention to the quality of our relationship and trying to instill trust

and actually understanding among when I do that, I always always regret it. Oh yeah, don't get me wrong. This has never done me any good. It's still something that I do. It's never been a good idea for me to do. I share the weakness and I don't always, I'm not always my best self, but I do try. Yeah, I try to remember in the moment. It's just very hard. So I have some sympathy for people who have succumbed to things that damage their mental immune system. And we've all seen

bad ideas that use people to proliferate, just like a disease would, right? Smoking. One of the examples you give in the book is suicide bombing, which totally makes sense. And an idea can benefit its host by being comforting, but still be bad because it's false. that's also from your book. I'd love an example of that because I feel like humans are full of ideas that are comforting, but that are not true, even a little bit. Well, I hope I'm not alienating your listeners by suggesting that a lot of religious beliefs have this character. I think that you probably are going to piss some people off, but it doesn't mean that all religious people are dumb or something, so maybe we should have them hear us out here. Clearly not. And if you,

if you're not ready to apply this idea to your own religious beliefs, at least think about another set of, I don't know, new agey spiritual beliefs. Yeah, let's pick a different example, because people are going to go, my religion is not false, click, done unsubscribe, right? Imagine the astrologer or the person who's into astrology who thinks that the alignment of the planets at her birth will always look out for her and make sure things work out for her. You know, we shake our heads, saying, that's silly.

Of course, the alignment of the planets has no capacity to keep you safe. That's just not the way the world works. But it's easy to imagine that ideas like that provide comfort, that they actually provide a kind of emotional stability. I think a lot of beliefs are like that. And if you're not ready to apply that, consider that possibility with regard to your most cherished religious beliefs. We'll take your time.

But think about whether maybe some subset of your religious or political or ethical beliefs are essentially there because they make you feel better. Or maybe they even make you better adjusted. Maybe they help you keep a positive frame of mind. Religions actually have their handle on a very important truth, which is that we need to fill our heads with ideas that keep us hopeful, that keep us maintaining a positive attitude. Now, when science comes along and says, you shouldn't believe anything except unless it has

enough evidence, defenders of religion want to say, yeah, but my beliefs serve me well. My beliefs impact my frame of mind. They affect my relationships. These things matter too. And I think religions are right about that. In the book I talked about the upstream evidence that either supports or fails to support a belief, but also the downstream consequences of belief. Because once you accept a belief, you behave differently. You feel differently. You interact with other people differently. And those downstream consequences matter too. So science has a piece of the truth when it talks about upstream evidence.

Religion has a piece of the truth when it says, hey, downstream consequences matter also. And I totally respect people who say, I need these beliefs to help me be a good human being. Yeah, I don't think it makes people weak. I'm often quite envious of people who are faithful because imagine the hardest time in your life and then being like, but I got this. Because the man upstairs is looking out for me. So everything's fine. Even if I croak tomorrow, this is just a part of a big plan. I would love to honestly and earnestly believe something like that.

I've said this on the show before. That's got to be the most comforting set of beliefs anywhere. Well, and when somebody uses that belief to develop a kind of equanimity that keeps them from, I don't know, flying off the handle or losing their cool or despairing, man, hats off to them. I mean, I think equanimity is a wonderful trait. And if you can induce that trait in yourself by believing certain things, that's okay as long as the beliefs aren't also indirectly harming others. and I do worry that evidence defiant beliefs.

So when you start down the path of believing things because you want them to be true, you start down that path and you begin to compromise your mind's immune system. So it's a complicated thing. We see this with flat earthers too, right? So first, I just could not wrap my mind around why anybody would care to believe this.

It just seemed like the dumbest way to embarrass yourself in public. But I started debating, this is years ago, I started debating with a few of them online. And these debates were three lines long because what would happen is I'd say, please just show me what evidence you have for this. And within a few lines, not all of them, but with many of them, within a few lines would say, look, the Bible says that above the sky is something called the firmament and above that are angels. And I would go, oh, okay, now I get it.

If you believe the earth is round, then this firmament thing goes away, which chips a whole in your belief in your literal belief in the Bible, which you can't have happened because you are. a literalist, maybe fanatic is a strong term, but you believe in these beliefs so strongly that I know tons of people who are faithful and religious, and they don't tell me that the earth is flat because of the firmament. They go, okay, the book's old, you know, blah, blah, blah. Exactly. There are people that don't do that, as you know, as you're aware. And you realize quickly that it just comes down to this. And so it sounds like what you're saying is when you harbor these

beliefs that say everything in the Bible is literally true, or any sort of literal belief that requires you to have something sacred where this Jordan guy, you can't even argue against this because it says in the Bible that there's affirmament and above that are angels and that means the earth is flat. You have a sacred belief that we can't even go in that arena. It's fenced off. And so now you're letting in whatever the hell else you want to put in there, Q&N or whatever. So I actually looked into the phenomenon of flat earth belief when I wrote the book and I actually found some research where, so I actually have a good friend, philosopher of science, who went undercover at a flat earth convention and actually tried to figure out how to talk to a flat earther

and persuade them. He's got a book coming out about it. It should be really interesting. But he found that number one is flat earth conventions are full of religious fundamentalists, people who are looking for ways to make their reading of the Bible consonant with their beliefs about reality. And they're willing to throw out evidence of I don't know, photographs of the earth from space, right, to write those off as hoaxes just to preserve their literalism with regard to the Bible. Now, I think this should seem just ridiculous to most of us. It's interesting that it doesn't feel ridiculous from the inside of the flat-earth or religious

fundamentalist outlook. You know, it makes me wish that I'd asked a rabbi or something like that. I used to know all these Hasidic Jews that are very, you know, extremely religious. You know, they won't let you sign a check or hold a pen or do whatever on Saturdays, and it's just like very, very fundamentalist, and they won't shake hands with women and all these things. They don't even believe that the earth is flat. And I remember talking about this, but I didn't ask enough questions because this is 20 years ago. Even they're like, well, you know, the Bible doesn't say the earth is flat.

It says there's a firmament and there's danger, but it doesn't say that the earth is flat. So it's really interesting to find somebody who's, you know, even more sort of conservative than a Hasidic Jew, but then also is like sleeping with two different women. It seems like we're still picking things in the Bible or in any sacred area. The reason we're picking on the Bible is because we're talking about sacred beliefs. They're still picking the ones that they want and rationalizing away the others. And I think that's what has a lot of people misguided and confused right now, is they think it's okay to accept certain things because you want them to be true

or because you feel like your faith teaches them to be true. and it's okay for you to accept those, but there's always blowback. There's always secondary effects, and it can affect your ability to see reality honestly, and it can affect your ability to understand the difference between right and wrong. There's lots of evidence right now that when you start to indulge in irresponsible believing about facts, you end up with irresponsible believing about values. This is important because it's kind of like Neil deGrasse Tyson mentioned about having some people be vaccinated and not, which is another thing I don't really want to get into right now because I don't need any more one-star reviews for having normal talks on the show.

But the idea that there's a section of the swimming pool that is the peeing section, right, and the rest of the swimming pool you're not allowed to pee in. This is kind of like what's happening with our beliefs too, right? So if I'm saying, look, there's this area where I don't want to hear it, this is what it is, you can't touch it. It's not up for discussion, period, because these areas are sacred. it sounds like what you're saying is that area can sort of gradually enlarge where convenient. Well, I came across a metaphor on Facebook just the other day that illustrates this nicely,

I think. Imagine the passenger in the next stateroom over on a cruise ship. And suppose you're on the bottom level right near the hull. And this guy decides he's going to just drill down through the hull into the ocean below so he can look at it. Right. He wants to see the fish. He wants to see the fish. And the people around start saying, hey, wait, you can't do that. You're going to sink the boat. He was like, hey, it's my stateroom. I have a a right to do what I like with my stayroom. I mean, how would you feel about that if you were somebody else on this boat, right? You'd go, we're all in the same boat, but that's what I want to say to the anti-vaxxers these days. We're all in the same boat. We need you to do the responsible

thing because if the delta variant continues to mutate, we could end up with a very seriously destructive next wave in this pandemic. It's inevitable though, right? Like even if every single person in the Western world got vaccinated tomorrow, which we isn't going to happen, we still have all these countries that even if everybody wanted to get vaccinated, they couldn't because they don't have the access to this. There's going to be incubators everywhere no matter what, right? I think you're right about that. Yeah. It's in some ways our failure to take a rational approach to this pandemic from the start. Well, part of it is just resource limitations, right? Poorer countries have not snapped up as many vaccines as the richer countries

have, but even here in among the richer countries, we've seen very poorly coordinated pandemic control efforts. Well, you're not going to find any argument for me there. I just, in the interest of being completely fair, even in the most strongest anti-vax communities here in the United States, we can't solely blame them for any sort of incubation of new variants. I would love to just be very black and white about it, but at the end of the day, even if the whole country was lined up like North Korea to get the jab, you know, no questions allowed, we still have, again, the peeing section of the swimming pool, unless we're going to close the borders off, we're going to have this happen no matter what. Back to beliefs, though, right? This can still

happen with our mind virus. Some ideas can benefit the host by harming others, for example, con men and swindlers. And a lot of these ideas that are bad have, they have short-term benefits, right? We get offended and we get woke points, or we get points from our tribe of political believers, but then long term, they cause problems because we enact a crappy policy to get votes, or we say something we regret to our spouse, going back to our previous conversation. Yeah, suppose you're like, I don't know, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and you adopt the most extreme views just so that you stand a better chance of getting elected next time around so that you can get Trump's endorsement. Yeah, that's a short-term political calculation

that might be aiding his political career, but it's tearing our country apart. We've got a lot of people who are indulging in irresponsible believing for short-term benefits, not caring about the long-term benefits, and not caring about the costs that they thereby put on others. Responsible believing pays attention to long-term effects as well as short-term effects, and it pays attention to the implications for others. It's not just you. If you're believing because you think it's the right belief for you, you're not being a responsible believer. If you're believing because it benefits you in the next election cycle, but not thinking about the long-term future of our country, you're not a responsible believer. Is there a such thing

as mental autoimmunity? It seems like if there's mental immunity, you must have thought of the autoimmune thing as well. Absolutely. So the body's immune system can be underactive and fail to fight off microbes, but it can also become overactive and attack the body itself. So when you have an allergic reaction to pollen, that's your body overreacting to something that is fundamentally harmless. So pollen won't hurt your body, but your body's overreaction to it can make you miserable. So that's an example of autoimmunity, the mind's immune system going hypervigilant and attacking things that should leave alone. The minds can do it the exact same thing. I'll give you an example. I grew up in a family that practically worshipped Martin Luther King. And when later in life,

I learned that Martin Luther King was unfaithful to his wife, I was like, no way. Not him. He's the saint, right? Yeah. No way. He's the saint, right? To me, that news threatened something that was almost sacred to me. And so I rejected it. I assumed, oh, you know what, I bet you Jay Edgar Hoover spread that rumor to smear Martin Luther King. Well, it turns out it was true, but my mind's immune system overreacted to the information and came up with a reason to dismiss it. And so if your mind immediately goes from zero to 60 and starts generating objections, before you even hear somebody out, that's a sign that your mind. that an autoimmune disorder of the mind is beginning to sink roots. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Andy Norman. We'll be right back. Now for the rest of my conversation with Andy Norman.

Cults do this on purpose, right? They give you an autoimmune disorder of the mind, right? Because then it's like your parents call and say, we just want to check in on you and you start singing some weird fake Eastern European sounding chant because you don't want them in your head, right? Actually, that's a really nice connection.

that I hadn't made before. Yeah, one of the things a cult leader has to do to keep his followers in line is to teach them not to trust almost all the other information sources out there. If a charismatic cult leader wants to keep you under his spell, he'll basically say, don't listen to the mainstream press. They'll just brainwash you. Don't listen to your parents. They'll brainwash you. And your friends, they're not your real friends, or they'd support you in your membership of this cult. That's a way you hijack somebody's mind and make it so. that they can't triangulate to find the truth. It's spooky to watch this happen.

I mean, even in these sort of self-help cults where you're in a three or five-day seminar, you have people say things like, this is my real family now. And it's like, whoa, where did you? How did that happen to you? You know, obviously, when I go to these, I'm the guy in the back with the crossed arms and everyone hates me because I'm like not buying it, you know? And the leaders are like, you know, you don't look like you're coachable. I stopped going to these for that reason, right?

Interesting. But they're not looking for people like me. They want people like me to recruit other people, so they start offering me things like money or trying to play to my ego. But they're looking for people who will dive right into this because the people who are trying to brainwash or cultify others,

they really do want to hotwire this mental immune system and have them just attack anything that says, are you sure it's a good idea to quit your job and go to a three-month-long program for $30,000 and put it all on your credit card? Are you sure? You just don't want me to grow.

you just don't want me to develop. You don't care about me. They said this would happen if I told you I was doing this. I think you're illustrating in a really nice way how powerful this idea of mental autoimmunity can be, right? Because there are many, many phenomena like this. Propagandists have been hijacking mental immune systems for centuries. When Alex Jones tells you the mainstream media, or Donald Trump decries the lame stream media, he's lumping together thousands of different organizations, each with their own agenda, and that there's no central conspirator. It's an oversimplification that allows you to throw out many reliable sources with some unreliable sources, and that's a way to cut you off from reality. So don't let somebody

poison your trust of the many reliable information sources there are. There are many well-meaning journalists and scientists out there who are doing their damnedest to give you the truth, and they're not the same people who are pushing disinformation on info wars. So we're talking about being a little bit too trusting or maybe being too skeptical, but it seems like there's a, there's a spectrum here, and we can both be too trusting and too skeptical, right? There's a middle ground where we kind of have to hit. That's right.

And it's not as though there's a single level of trust that's appropriate for every situation. You have to know when to be skeptical and when not to be. But the deep philosophical point you're raising here is that it's possible to be too skeptical for your own good. So the people who have been promoting critical thinking, like me. Well, you. Yeah, and I taught critical thinking for decades. And higher education has been talking about critical thinking as one of its central values for almost a century now. But the fact is, we haven't been able to put a stop to epidemics of unreason. And I don't think the critical thinking approach is actually doing its job. I mean, if you actually

look at standard critical thinking textbooks, they basically say, hey, there are a lot of of bad arguments out there. We're going to show you how to dissect them and find their flaws. And they say, and you need to be skeptical. You need to be critical. In fact, you need to be more critical than you would normally and now go out there in the world and dissect other people's arguments. When you teach people how to do that, they can easily become hypercritical. Or even worse, they become hypercritical of the arguments of their political opponents and uncritical of their own beliefs. They've become opportunistic critical thinkers as opposed to consistent, fair-minded critical thinkers. I actually think that the critical, what I call the critical

thinking paradigm, the approach to developing critical thinking skills that we've relied on for the last several decades is not doing enough to inoculate our minds against destructive and false ideas. Honestly, I can see this being quite a problem because I do, I love critical thinking. I love teaching people to debunk beliefs, but you're right. It's very often that we're aiming the canon at everyone on Reddit or in our family, you know, Thanksgiving. We're just blasting people out of the water with our logic and our reason. Then people want to do that to us. And we're like, well, wait a second. We're talking about you right now. What do you mean? You know? I love your use of metaphors here because I'd like to say the concept of critical thinking is a

very blunt instrument. It basically says, yeah, be a little more skeptical, be more critical, double check, triple check for faults. Well, a lot of people are rejecting that advice because they understand at a deep emotional level that if you run around finding fault with people, your relationships are going to suffer. So be more critical is bad advice. It's not that we shouldn't be critical of flatter theory or Q&on. There are lots of things we should be more critical of, but being indiscriminately more critical is not the recipe. What we need to do is actually understand how mental immune systems work to filter bad ideas and to pass through good ones and figure out why they malfunction so often

and learn how to strengthen them. By way of closing here, I would love some practical ways to think about this, some drills or exercises, right? One thing you mentioned earlier was paying attention to your mind when ideas enter. I don't think that's exactly how you phrased it, but it was, what's your reaction

when a new idea enters your mind? Are you rejecting it? Are you just gulping it down because it's from your favorite YouTuber? You know, where do you, what's your immediate gut reaction? Yeah, pay attention to the way your mind reacts with the kind of emotional valence your mind kicks up when you encounter new

information of different kinds. A lot of times just you'll respond negatively or positively, and that will govern your subsequent interaction with that idea or the person who's brought it to your attention. Instead, practice sort of conversational de-escalation. Just say, that may not sound right yet to me, but let me hear this guy out. So it turns out that doubts are the antibodies of the mind. When bad information enters your mind, a healthy mind will generate doubts and questions and objections and they'll swarm to the scene of the disinformation and try to neutralize it. Learn to listen to those doubts. If you ignore them, you'll train your mind not to notice the defects of ideas. The best thinkers in the world are ones who are sensitive

to the defects of even very seductive ideas, and they understand that becoming over-reliant on those ideas is a recipe for trouble. So listen to your doubts and listen to other people's doubts and objections. In fact, if somebody else raises an objection to an idea that is important to you, fight down the urge to issue a biting rejoinder and say, all right, maybe this guy's got something he or she can teach me. Tell me more. In fact, try the just a very simple, I call it the tell me more method. Just ask for clarification and give the guy five minutes to spell out his reservations about your ideas, really understand them, and then if you have an issue with it, gently try to explain why. Those are some habits of mind that I think we can all act on.

I mentioned earlier that it's almost always a mistake to reason to win. Pay attention to the way in which you're reasoning and arguing. If you're reasoning or arguing to win, rather than to find out, if you're bringing a combative attitude rather than a cooperative or collaborative attitude to conversation, you're going to screw up your own mind. This seems like the reason why we often rush to defend bad ideas or to attack good ideas, right? Because I'm just not even evaluating the idea. I just want to be right. Or I want to look smart in front of the group or whatever the reason irrational happens to be. And I think that wanting to look smart in front of others is a really underappreciated component

of why things are going haywire right now. With so many conversations taking place online where dozens or hundreds or thousands of others can view those conversations, everybody wants to look good in front of an audience. You know how young men are much more likely to shoot and kill other young men in front of a group of peers? I mean, I didn't know that, but it totally makes sense, right? Because if I'm just going to, if I get into a conflict with somebody and nobody's there to see it, I can just be like, this is so annoying. This person's just pissing me off. I'm out of here. But if like all of my, my girlfriend is watching and all my buddies are watching, they're going to be like, what's Jordan going to do? If I walk away, they're going to be like, oh, really?

But if I shoot somebody's leg, you know, then they're like, don't mess with Jordan. And I'm like, I get a lot of social capital for doing something like that, even if I end up in prison. That's right. It turns out that we're very, very sensitive to being disrespected in front of others. In fact, deep in our evolutionary programming is this idea is the understanding that if somebody tears down your reputation, in front of others, that can be hugely damaging to your evolutionary prospects. And so when somebody makes you look foolish online, you lash out, right? Because that's a public shaming thing, and you want to win by tearing apart their argument. So I would actually urge people to just to shut down their message boards

or their contributions to message boards and go have a one-on-one conversation with a friend, have more conversations with small groups of people who enjoy testing ideas in a non-combative way, and you can strengthen your mind and become a wiser version of yourself. Before we wrap here, there's, and I want to add these to the worksheet, there's this list of immunity strengthening replies to use for when people come at you with, I don't know, bad ideas or poorly thought out concepts. I'd love to get a quick handful of these because I think they're useful and we can put them in the worksheet for the episode.

So if you raise good questions about somebody else's value judgments, a lot of times they'll get testy and say, well, who's to say? Who are you to say that my value judgment is wrong? That maneuver, that conversational maneuver serves to protect cherished convictions when we're uncomfortable having to defend them. So the who's to say suggests that value, judgments are fundamentally arbitrary, we're all entitled to accept whatever value premises or axioms we want, and so there's no point in having a conversation about it. That's not true. We actually need to learn how to test our core value assumptions just as we test scientific claims. So philosophers have said for a long time that it's not enough to test our factual

beliefs. We have to test our value convictions also. And when we make a habit of that, We've become less defensive, more open, more flexible, more mentally resilient. But when you disdain those conversations and reject them as a waste of time and our culture has become hugely dismissive of philosophy as a discipline, then you start to see people dig into their ideological trenches and culture wars break out. The cultural war we're experiencing right now is the completely predictable consequence of our culture's disdain for honest value inquiry. One additional thought here. I've said a couple things to suggest that the critical thinking paradigm is very limited. It's a very kind of blunt instrument.

It's almost like a sledgehammer where we need a scalpel instead. I think the real alternative is this science, I call cognitive immunology. It's basically the science of mental immunity to bad ideas. And it's a science that goes back several decades. It's gathering together a whole bunch of insights about what allows us to think well and what harms our ability to think clearly and collaboratively. And the science of cognitive immunology, I think, can transform the human condition as profoundly as the science of immunology did.

Think about the human condition before the smallpox vaccine, right? just unbelievable suffering and millions and millions and millions of people killed by the smallpox virus. Then people figured out how the body's immune system works. We developed vaccines for smallpox, polio, tetanus, diphtheria, on and on and on. And we've created so much better human condition. I think we can do the exact same thing for the viruses that infect our minds. We can actually develop vaccines against conspiracy thinking, vaccines against science denial and divisive ideologies. And I imagine a future, maybe a couple decades hence, where basic instruction in how to keep your mind's immune system functioning well makes us dramatically less susceptible to cognitive

contagion. Right. And these will be skills like the ones we're talking about here today. Because right now people are like, I'm not letting them inject me with something that believes in science. No needles involved. No, okay. Just fun non-accusatory conversations can do the trick. Right, maybe a course or two in school and university that you can pull your kid out of because you don't want them to think critically or to have this mental immunity or the mind vaccine. Andy Norman, thank you very much.

Really interesting. You know, the idea of bad ideas or poor thinking as an immune disorder, very good timing on this. I assume that the recent events that have just made absolutely no sense to most people with two brain cells to rub together. is what sparked you thinking about this, right? Well, I've been worrying about this problem for about 30 years, but it certainly, the problem certainly seems to have come to a head. Just about the time the book came out, maybe that's good timing. But my friends tell me I should have published this years ago

before a country went crazy. Nobody would have read it, right? We don't need this. Everybody's pretty rational. Yeah, dot, dot, dot, 2020. Do continue to think about the potential of these ideas to help people develop next level critical thinking skills. And I'll think of you as an ally in this fight.

I hope you'll think of me the same way. Yes, of course, absolutely. It's something that more people need, and I worry, unfortunately, that a lot of the people who need to hear this the most are going to be the ones that go, oh, I'm rational. I don't need that. Right. Well, I think that's right. But what we do is we reach the people we can now, and the ideas will seep out by osmosis through

the culture. I think it'll happen given time. But hey, so if people who hear your show are interested in the science and its applications, type cognitiveimmunology. net. Maybe put this in the show notes. I did. I just did. It'll be linked in there.

Yeah, this is a cool website. I see synergies between what this nonprofit think tank is trying to do and your mission and the mission of your podcast. Likewise. Jordan, you're really good at this, man. I really admire your talent. You're extremely good at what you do. You have a manner that I think really draws people in.

And I certainly both trust you and even the first time I heard you. I was like, I don't want to trust this guy. Thank you. A good fight, my friend. It's a real pleasure to meet you, and I help we'll cross paths soon and often. Likewise. Thank you very much.

If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to sink your teeth into, here's a trailer for another episode that I think you might enjoy. There is a world out there, but we don't see it as it is. So this isn't philosophy. This is just laws of physics. So if a tree falls in the wind,

no one that's there to hear, it doesn't make a sound, no. It creates energy. But the same is it. Sound is a construct of your brain. So the tree exists, the energy exists, but your brain then turns that into something useful, which is sound. Light, all the light that's coming around us, right?

It's bouncing off objects, and then it's changing when it hits an object, and then it comes to our eyes. Right? But our retina has no access to the light directly, nor to the surfaces. All it literally has access to is energy. And that's where your brain is actually constructing a meaning. And it's that meaning that you're seeing. You're not seeing the energy. You're detecting the energy, but you're not seeing it.

Language is not a construct of the world. Think about perceptions of pain. Is pain an illusion? Of course it's not an illusion. It's a meaningful perception, but it's not something that exists in the world. There aren't painful things in the world. If we weren't here, pain would not exist. We can't hear the five sounds of A that people in Scandinavia use.

For instance. Right, right. We can't see certain shades of red that Russians can see. Really? Yeah. And it's only when you have awareness of why you're doing what you're doing that creates the possibility of doing it differently. Now, of course, if you don't have eyes, you can't choose to see.

You still have to function in a world that has gravity, right, that has light. But we have more freedom than we think we do. We have more agency than we think we do. So the world is always changing and complexifying, and we need to complexify with it. And we never could if we always just see it as it really. For more about how our brains produce vision and the constructs our brain makes to build our world, check out episode 177 with Bo Lato, here on The Jordan Harbinger Show. So it's one thing to tell people what to believe in another, to show people why something is true,

and obviously one is harder than the other. Identifying reasons to believe something are kind of hard to identify, let alone to identify a good reason. So it's important to define what a reason even is. And that's where this starts to delve from the practical, maybe even to the philosophical, We often think we have reasons to believe something, but we actually do not. It's better to ask what reasons actually support something. What do they support?

What do they refute? What's the function? People often use reasons that don't even support their argument. And most of the time, we don't even notice that this is the case. Right. If I give you a ridiculous example, like it's Wednesday because the moon is made of blue cheese, that's a reason. It's just not a good one that supports the argument.

Now, that example might be obvious, but we see this happening all the time. where bad reasons are given for beliefs, and we just don't even question it. In the end, the deep culprit here is not some shadowy government inside conspiracy. It's not an aspiring demagogue or a corrupt political party. The problem, if you trace it to its roots,

we find a compromised cultural immune system here, especially in the United States, but in the West in general, and astonishingly, irrational ideas proliferate because they're playing us. The ideas, that is, not some shadowy government conspiracy. Or did I just come full circle? You be the judge.

Big thanks to Andy Norman. The book will be linked in the show notes, and if you do want to buy it, please use the website links if you buy the book. It does help support the show. Those links are in the show notes. Worksheets are in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes.

And there's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or just hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with amazing people using the same systems, software, and tiny habits that I use every single day.

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This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millio Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who could use a little critical thinking tune-up or just agrees with a lot of what we're saying here,

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