#1653 - Andy Norman

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Hello, Andy.

Nice to meet you, man. Thank you very much for coming here, and thank you for bringing me a signed copy of your book, Mental Immunity, Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites in the Search for a Better Way to Think. Boy, could we all use this, afforded by the great and powerful Steven Pinker.

Andy Norman (0:31)

Yeah, I was a lucky guy to get that.

Joe Rogan (0:33)

That's very nice. That's very nice.

Boy, but we could all use that, right? It feels like the last year has been incredibly taxing.

Andy Norman (0:43)

Sounds like you get the basic premise. Mind parasites are spreading over the internet like crazy, and we need protection against them. We need resistance.

Joe Rogan (0:51)

How do you define mind parasites? We were actually talking before the podcast started, and we were talking about a few things, and I was like, we got to stop. We got to stop talking because I don't want to waste any of this. But one of them we were talking about was UFOs.

And now until recently over the last few years, I would have put that in the mind parasite category. I would have said most of that's nonsense.

Andy Norman (1:11)

But new information has changed your view on it.

Joe Rogan (1:13)

Yeah, it has. There's a big 60 Minutes piece last night that aired, and talking to Christopher Mellon, who used to work for the Defense Department, talking to Commander David Fravor, who is the guy who piloted that jet that I was telling you about, that encountered that craft off of the coast of San Diego in 2004 There's been quite a few of these pretty spectacular videos that have come out that were released by the...

Well, I don't know. Some of them were leaked, and then confirmed by the Pentagon.

Andy Norman (1:41)

Well, that's the kind of evidence that should change your attitude from skeptical to, you know, hey, maybe there's something here, right? I mean, I think...

I mean, you've already indicated that you get the basic premise, one of the basic premises of the book, right? Falsehoods are mind parasites. And more generally, bad ideas, all kinds of bad ideas are mind parasites. And I can tell you why, if you like, but...

Joe Rogan (2:05)

Yes, please.

Andy Norman (2:06)

But it takes kind of a shift in the way you look at things to get it. Once you get this idea, it can change your entire worldview.

So think about what makes a parasite a parasite. It requires a host.

It infiltrates, let's say, a regular parasite, right? Infiltrates your body, creates copies of itself, induces something like an infection-spreading sneeze so it can get to other bodies, and it's often harmful of the very thing that hosts it. Now go down the list with bad ideas. A bad idea requires a host, a host mind, right? It can infiltrate a mind, it can get that mind to spread it to other minds, and it can actually harm the person that carries it. So basically, bad ideas check all the boxes for parasites, and there's kind of a worldview shift going on, even within science, that basically says, you know what, this has always seemed like a kind of a crazy analogy, but there's actually more here than meets the eye. Mind parasites might just be real.

Joe Rogan (3:14)

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense, and isn't that kind of what voodoo is?

Like what voodoo is, you tell a person that they're cursed. You hex them, and then they believe it, and it changes the way they think, and they're terrified.

Andy Norman (3:29)

Kind of like a negative placebo.

Joe Rogan (3:30)

Yes, or a nocebo. That's what that is.

Andy Norman (3:34)

Actually, I think that's the official term for it, right?

Joe Rogan (3:37)

Which is, nocebo is very real.

Andy Norman (3:40)

And powerful, too, right?

Joe Rogan (3:41)

There was a guy that got administered. He was a part of a test for SSRIs, and he went to the hospital and said he mistakenly took the whole bottle of these pills, and he dropped the pill bottle on the floor. His heart was racing, blood pressures through the roof. They're like, oh my god, this guy's dying. He's pale.

And they checked the bottle of pills, found the physician on the bottle, contacted the physician, and he told them he was a part of the study.

The physician came down to the hospital and informed him that he was actually in the placebo group. Within five minutes, his heart rate came down to normal, his blood pressure came down to normal, and he relaxed and he was subsequently released from the hospital. He thought he was dying.