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Yourse is an to te michael sherworsheour sponsor of the podcast. The great courses are available through a subscription service, so you can do this exes through your computer on many different platforms. My guest today is andy norman who directs the humanism initiative at carnegie melon university. He studies how ideologies short circuit minds and corrupt moral understanding. And he develops tools that help people think together in more fruitful ways. We discuss mental immunity, infectious ideas, mind sites in the search for a better way to think. Then we go through his twelfth, twelfve step programme about adopting a more flexible mental attitude which makes you less susceptible to bad ideas.

Astonishingly irrational ideas are spreading. COVID-19 denial, anti-vaxxers compromising public health, conspiracy thinking hijacking minds and inciting mob violence, toxic partisanship cleaving our nations, the return of Flat Earth theory… What the heck is going on? Why is all this happening, and why now? More important, what can we do about it? Does our “right to our opinion” trump our responsibilities? Does the resulting ethos effectively compromise mental immune systems, allowing “mind parasites” to overrun them? Are conspiracy theories, evidence-defying ideologies, and garden-variety bad ideas all species of mind parasites, each of which employs clever strategies to circumvent mental immune systems? In this conversation, based on the book Mental Immunity, Andy Norman shows that minds and cultures have immune systems, and that they really can break down. Fortunately, he assures us that they can also be built up: strengthened against ideological corruption. Can his ideas revolutionize our capacity for critical thinking?