The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Neuroscience of Good Journalism: How Constructive Journalism Uses Information to Empower with Maren Urner

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

The psychological effects of media consumption and keeping up with the 24-hour news cycle are vast. It can sometimes feel impossible to stay educated on current events without also feeling hopeless, disempowered, or even enraged. Worse, the incentives and structures of modern media outlets seem more and more geared towards capturing our attention at any cost… including our mental health, trust in one another, and even open societies themselves. Given this, is there a way to get back to a form of media and journalism that helps us feel empowered, and if so, how do we do it?  Today, Nate is joined by neuroscientist and best-selling author, Maren Urner, to discuss the critical role of journalism in democracy, the importance of rebuilding trust in media, and how neuroscience can inform our understanding of media consumption. Maren makes the case for constructive journalism – a more balanced and solutions-oriented approach to reporting – as a powerful antidote to the relentlessly negative tone of traditional media. She also highlights the urgent need for systemic change in the way journalism operates if we want to foster a more informed and empowered public. How do our deeply ingrained cognitive biases shape the way news is produced and consumed? Could journalism evolve to become a force for collective action and positive change, rather than just another profit-driven industry competing for our clicks? And in a world where our attention has become one of the most valuable – and contested – resources, how can we take greater ownership over the media we choose to engage with? (Conversation recorded on March 31st, 2025)   About Maren Urner: Maren Urner is a neuroscientist and, since September 2024, Professor for Sustainable Transformation at Münster University of Applied Sciences and Head of the new Master's program in Sustainable Transformation Design. In 2016, she co-founded "Perspective Daily," the first ad-free online magazine for constructive journalism. She led the editorial team as editor-in-chief and served as managing director until March 2019. After her time at Perspective Daily, she taught as a professor of media psychology at the Media University of Applied Sciences in Cologne until August 2024. Maren has been a columnist for the Frankfurter Rundschau since September 2020. Her three books, End the Daily Doomsday, Out of the Eternal Crisis, and Radically Emotional: How Feelings Make Politics are SPIEGEL bestsellers. She is the winner of the 2023 BAUM Environmental and Sustainability Award in the science category.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

And the worst thing you can do to people is make them feel that whatever they do, it doesn't matter. What we call in psychology, helplessness or even stronger learned helplessness. But we also know psychologically the antidote is self-afficcacy. That's the feeling that we have when we do something and see that it actually creates change. And there can be something really small. When we sign a petition, when we go to a demonstration, when we raise our voice, when we talk to other people, and have the idea that it changes something. You're listening to the Great Simplification.

I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. Today, I'm pleased to be joined by Marin-Earn.

who is a neuroscientist and a professor for sustainable transformation at Munster University of Applied Sciences in Germany to discuss the role of traditional media and journalism during the coming years and decades as the challenges journalism faces to remain relevant and helpful to humanity at large amidst global turmoil and growing disinformation. Mern is the head of the new master's program and Sustainable transformation design, and is also the winner of the 2023 BAUM Environmental and Sustainability Award in the category of science. In 2016, she co-founded Perspective Daily, which was the first ad-free online magazine for what she calls constructive journalism, where she led the editorial team as editor-in-chief, as well as manager-director until 2019. Going into this conversation, I was skeptical of what role journalism could play alongside this moment of broad information overload

and confusion. Instead, I discovered a greater understanding of how journalism has played into the dynamic of what I call the economic superorganism historically. And I see the value of Marins and others work using neuroscience to reinvigorate thoughtful, constructive, and empowering journalistic practices in service of life and humanity. If you are enjoying this podcast, I invite you to subscribe to our Substack newsletter where you can read more of the system science underpinning the human predicament, where my team and I post special announcements related to the Great Simplification. You can find the link to subscribe in the show description.

With that, please welcome Professor Marin Erner. Mara Nurner, great to finally have you on the program. I'm so thankful to be here. So at long last, you were here after a couple of delays and tech snafus. Your background, which I was very interested in when I was in Berlin last year, takes on the combination of neuroscience and journalism from which you have become an advocate for how the media delivers information. And I invited you on the program to discuss not only the ways in which we as individuals can be better consumers and receivers of media, but also the ways that journalism can change to better contribute to the pro-social future that many of us see is going to be essential to navigate through the upcoming times.

but given events since I first invited you on the show, I'd like to start with a relatively difficult question. During what might be called the age of social media with a growing portion of adults, especially where I live in the United States, I can't speak for Europe, who get their news from socials and are increasingly distrusting the media due to financial and political interest, why is traditional media and journalism still important? Start with a big bite. Well, it's a question we could rather last, or we could rather probably talk a whole podcast about. So I'll try to, let's say, at least get into certain bits and pieces there.

It's important because the backbone of any democracy is free information. And if we don't have that, well, we're risking of losing or we already then, then in the middle of losing democracy. And I mean, I'm not a historian, as you said. I'm a new scientist by training. But when I look at history with this, let's say, new scientific glasses on, I usually observe always the same pattern.

Wherever democracies failed, the first thing dictators and autocrats did or implemented was basically get rid of free press, get rid of free information because that's, I mean, we can call it education, we can call it press freedom. It's all interrelated, of course, science, research, everything we now observe, and we probably come to that in a bit. In your home country is at stake, and it is at stake because it is the backbone of any democracy. And everybody who wants to destroy democracy or democracies knows that.

We're going to get into journalism and neuroscience, but you've said the word democracy several times already. Do you distinguish between democracy and open societies more broadly? Well, I'm not a political scientist either, neither. So I'm not sure what a formal or whether there is a formal distinction. And probably it depends on whom you ask, as it's usually the case with social sciences even more than natural sciences. That's why I often prefer natural sciences, like neuroscience.

science. But on a more serious note, I think any democracy requires an open society. Whether it's the other way around, I'm not sure. And I would have to be honest, I would have to think about it more deeply and would like to talk to me more people about how we define then. What do we mean by open society? Whereas with democracies, we kind of know that's how we define it. So let me asked the question from the other spectrum them. In an authoritarian closed society, is there such a thing as journalism? Well, my brain's bleeding when I would say yes. I usually don't talk about the heart too much because that's just a muscle or pump, so to say, because it's all happening in the brain. That's why I say not my heart, but my brain's bleeding

when I hear that because of course there is information going from one brain. into other brains, like usually we call that propaganda, for example, right? And we have certain state or whatever controlled media, and they like the people who control these media outlets, then they like to call it still media or journalism or whatever. But I'd say, as also somebody who worked and is working in journalism a lot and work with journalists a lot. I would say that isn't journalism in the, let's say, clean definition, because that means that people are allowed to research what they want to research on, that they are allowed to report what they find out and that somebody is doing censorship

and then decides whether it's going to the printing press to use an old-fashioned technique or to the internet or not. So I'm starting this conversation with the hardest questions in some way. How can journalism writ large remain relevant and regain trust in the face of growing populist and authoritarian trends around the world? Well, now we go more into my realm because we're talking about trust, right? And trust, of course, is a deeply psychological concept and thereby also a neuroscientific concept. So just to get those two terms straight, maybe right from the start as well, psychology is basically looking at neuroscience from outside and talking. about what is happening in the brain, whereas the neuroscientific perspective is kind of the more raw biological perspective on the same phenomena. For example, when we talk about journalism or,

let's say, language, we can call it language, and then we can look into the brain like what's happening while we use certain words, for example, or why we talk in a certain language. So when we talk about trust, we know for many neuroscientifics and now looking at the biological side, neuroscientific studies, that there's a lot of happening in the brain. Like there's different areas involved in the brain and it's really an emotional state. And from psychological research, we know that trust is usually the, let's say, basis for people. And now we come to journalism to listen. What do I mean by that to be interested?

To put, like to give people or media in any form our most valuable resource. And that's not money. That's our attention. That's our time. That's why attention is more valuable than anything else on this planet at this point in time in the human history. So when we talk about trust and asking the question like how do we gain or get trust back into journalism in order to make it stay relevant, well, we have to talk about how do we make people listen? How do we make people pay attention?

And then a lot of journalists during the last year said, well, by going to the curious, going to the crazy, to the negative things because we know people click on that, right? What bleeds that leads? We all know these things in journalism. That's like you put the bad things, the really awkward things, the crazy things. You put them on the, again, old-fashioned language here, first page. There's no longer any first page in the digital age, of course. But you put them front first.

And that is true. It catches our attention. Why? Because it deeply affects our most, let's say, relevant survival instincts. What do I mean by that? We basically all have this stone age brain in our head still. And that's perfectly programmed or optimized to make us survive. So if we miss a negative event, negative news, that might mean we are in danger and we might not survive. So we will always, even if we say the opposite, we will always click on the negative news first.

So it's shortfall risk. It's, and loss aversion. Loss aversion. Loss of version. historically. It's exactly that. If we lost a meal, we would die, but if we had extra a little bit more calories, it wouldn't really make a difference. So we're hyper vigilant to negative things. Exactly. And you mentioned lost aversion.

That's a bias. That's well researched. And we know, for example, was money that, for example, the value losing a certain amount of money, say $50 or euros, kind of same in terms of a negative consequence. compared to double, like we have to double it on the positive end in order to have the same result in our brain on the positive side. So we have to gain 100 euro to get the same distinction from, let's say, neutral state on the positive side compared to losing 50. But in a journalism sense, how do you double the positive without breaking the link to truth and objective reality? Now we come to constructive journalism.

And that's really a key point that I'm trying to put forward since, starting in 2015, really, let's say professionally and consciously. Probably I did it before already, but then really started doing it consciously. Because that's when I got to know there is something that's called constructive journalism. And that sounds very technical. It is somehow because it changes the whole idea about journalism compared to to the traditional, traditional, I mean the last decades, picture of being a journalist, like of being, for example, the one who's reporting in a neutral way.

As a neuroscientist, I can just say that's, sorry, that's BS. You can't report in a neutral way because you always affect people. You always change brains and thereby people when you send a certain information, independent of how neutral it is. So just like Inuits have 19 different words for snow, would there be different words for journalism? Because a total objective reporting of the facts, there's got to be a name for that. And then there's a spectrum of which you're just starting to describe. Sure.

But even if I would just tell you, look, Nate, I learned today two plus two equals four. And we could agree that's rather neutral, right? But my body was feeling your voice and how you said it and reading your eyes and all those, like what my friend Nora Bateson would call warm data. And that's all that info. And the context. Look, if you were reading about that, if somebody else would be saying it, if you would listen to it on the radio, if you would see the person, if you touched the person while talking to the person, it all makes it different. There is no neutral conversation. And plus, I used that time.

to make it even more, and that might sound really dramatic, but just to get that point across, I could have said almost endless, different other things in that time when I used your most valuable resource, your attention to tell you something you probably knew before, meaning two plus two equals four, right? And I could have said a million, a billion, endless number of other things,

and thereby, because I selected a certain information and deselected, so to say, all the other possibilities, I changed your brain. So as events in the world with war and finance and climate and biodiversity and social issues become more dire, there is a default in our current institutional setup that people, a lot of men, a lot of older, confident white men, in how I see things are really testosterone, dopamine, confident, yelling, fear-based. And that sort of journalism, by definition, is going to make us worse off than better off. And that often then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That's one aspect of what you just described. And the second one is they are creating reality. They are creating, and that's why I'm emphasizing this 2 plus 2 equals 4, this kind of trivial example, right? Because that is easy. We can say, well, we all agree on that. But what happens if I would have said freedom is important? Or I think everybody should love whomever they want to love. And that creates a different, let's say different levels of reality because it's about how we live together.

whether you're going to still trust me or not, right? As a neuroscientist, tell me what's happening in my brain when I hear you, who I like, and given that we've just met, I trust you a decent amount already, how my brain responds to you saying two plus two equals four or you can love whoever you want. What's going on? Yeah. So many things. I'll try to, and this list is not going to be complete, disclaimer.

So if I tell you a mere fact, like which year Napoleon was born, that's often used as a classical example, or who invented the light bulb, yeah? Then you go like kind of independent of whether you like me, like all these aspects you mentioned, or whether you trust me, you go like, okay, fine, I guess I learned something new. Why? because it's just a mere fact, right? Unless you're really a Napoleon or lightbulb guy, that really it's shaping or it's part of your identity. Whereas if we go into topics like love, like more related to politics,

like how do we want to live together, whom do we trust, whom am I going to vote for, it makes such a big difference because we tap into all these cases of, what we call them psychology biases, and I'm pretty sure you've talked a lot about biases and talked to many people about biases before. And one of the most important ones that is relevant here is the confirmation bias. So it's sometimes also called the father or mother of all the biases. And basically in one sentence, what it means is we trust people more whom we already trust. Like if you vote,

let's say, for a certain party and somebody from that party, we, repeat. presenting that political party tells you something that is related to your identity, you will trust that person more. The source is an important aspect when it comes to trust what you asked two questions before, right? How do we get trust back? It's the most important aspect, maybe. It's tricky to judge, right? As a scientist, I would say, okay, how do we analyze most important, right?

We can look into the brain and they'll go like, okay, it's definitely very important. I wouldn't go into like, okay, first, second, third rank here because as a scientist, I'm very curious and how do we going to research that. But it's definitely very important. And we know from so many studies that it makes such a big difference. I'll give you an example from the UK during the corona pandemic. The politicians there are new and also kind of a bipartisan system there, that depending on who is going to like either the choice of labor are going to talk about the new, let's say, rules that people had to live. accordingly to because of the pandemic, they were like, okay, we can't do that. Because then if somebody from one party will tell the population about the new rules,

the people who support that party will do it and the others will go like, I don't know. So then they changed their policy and ask medical personnel to deliver those messages. So the people who are experts and now we come to the trust aspect, right, and coming back to journalism, whom are people going to trust when they send certain information? And we come to all these questions of influencers and social media and who's really sending the information and can we trust sources because professionality is no longer the most important indicator. And that's really dangerous for democracy.

Well, it's like there's another bias, which is authority bias, that people will trust someone that is wearing a medical doctor thing. No, they won't. They'll trust someone who's really confident and charismatic over someone who has scientific credentials. Exactly. And that's what I was just referring to. Exactly. Because how we define authority is kind of changing.

It used to be the medical doctor and it still is in certain context, right? We know these study results like when people wear like usually it's a in Germany. I don't know. Is it in the US also a white kind of gown? Yeah, usually. So usually the white gown. I don't want to say something wrong here, talking about trust. And if people put that on, even if they have no medical background, and then they give certain information to patient, that information is trusted more. If you give people pills of a certain color, that pill has a bigger result in the improvement of their condition. depending on the color.

And if you use syringy, it is even higher. So is there a placebo effect with journalism as well? Yes, I would say so. I'm actually not sure whether there's studies there. That's an interesting question. I would have to do the research there in order to answer that. But my expectation would be yes, given from what I know and what I've observed anecdotally and kind of half empirically, so to say.

Yeah, yeah. this is all fascinating. Can you now discuss some of the primary issues that you're observing in your work with modern day journalism, especially as you alluded to early, the overreporting of negative news, like what are the impacts on mental health and well-being of people who consume this media? Yeah. This is not only my research, but for many people, just to hear full disclosure as well. So we know from many different countries, many different regions that we have an increase in the negativity. So for example, what people have been done and what I've been doing with my own students as well is, for example, analyze headlines for negative words, fraternality, sentiment, these kind of like content analyses of headlines and also texts. And what we see is we have an increase of negativity. and there's one huge study that has been done on English-speaking, a UK, American,

and I think also Australia in New Zealand, but I'm not sure, like, from different political directions. So it includes Fox News, it includes the Washington Post, includes the Guardian, so on. And they've analyzed it using AI, so a very, let's say, complex study using millions of headlines. And they found that negativity increased, neutrality, so more, less as again neutrality. There's no neutrality, but neutral words. That amount decreased. And that is important here to mention talking about negativity,

that the negative emotions increased way more than the positive emotions in headlines, especially, and I think you mentioned that shortly earlier, that emotion, anger and fear, or those two, right? Is this because... The hypervigilance and loss aversion in our evolved social primate minds results in sitting in a capitalist growth-based system. More clicks equals more dollars. And it's just from the top down that we want, let's not make everyone angry. That's not the objective.

No, make money. Let's make more money. Exactly. That's where we come to the attention economy, right? And that's easy. And we just can talk about this honesty. And that's amazing, right? We can still talk about this.

Honestly, doesn't mean that it's going to change tomorrow. Probably not. I would be really happy because that would mean this podcast would have had an impact, right? But that's what we know. And we have to talk about it more openly because it's just, I'm so tired of not talking about that elephant in the room that it's all about money. Like you just said, right? I'm so tired that journalists meet on conferences and then they go like about quality. And fine, yes, fair enough.

But the most important thing that's kind of deciding, or not only kind of, but most in the case is deciding of what's printed or not, is money. And I mean, we see that now, right? We see the heads of the big companies that are shaping where we spend our attention, what they are doing and how they are changing their political attitude. So I don't know how much you know about my work, but I've told a story of, humans found energy. Yeah. Yeah. So we've kind of become this emergent metabolic force that's no one's fault. It's emergent from optimizing for profits at all categories. And what the result is, we've outsourced our wisdom to the financial markets. And we are all downstream causation from this Mollochian dynamic that's going on. And it sounds like that the source. And the

superorganism has also eaten media and journalism so that there's the profit is the main thing and being real good conscientious journalists to help open societies is a secondary goal which they're kind of at at cross purposes. So my question is how could a fourth estate press and news media as a watchdog of government and information to the public co-aggot. exist or thrive in this era of money captures all? That's exactly what we have to change in order to have this trustworthy, true fourth estate. We need to change the incentive.

And that's what you just described, right? And I'm just using that work here, because that's ruling. Whatever people come together, it's very important to talk about incentives. But as I said before, we often treat that, especially if we know that, for example, money is the most important, let's say, decision criteria. We kind of pretend that that's not the case, which is just really weak and sad and annoying. And you can use many adjectives here because it's also self-destructive, as you described just now in the story. So we need to look first, honestly, at what's really the incentive. here, why are people doing certain things?

Our brain is programmed to do certain things in order to make us survive. It's very simple, right? When it comes, let's say, down to us or down to brains, it's all about survival. And maybe we have a bit of fun in between, but other than that, that's what life is about. So we decide sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, often unconsciously, according to the most important criteria, which is always, is it going to be beneficial for me or not? And now, as you described in your words, we created during the last decades certain decision criteria that are in the short term beneficial for a certain amount of people, but not for, let's say, the majority of humanity. Or the other creatures on the planet.

Exactly. Or the whole, let's say, basis that makes us as a species survive, right? Because now this is what I just wanted to say. So our brains are aligned now, perfectly aligned, because I just wanted to say this is going or has been going so off that now we had a point in history where we crossed six out of nine planetary boundaries, which means we are destroying our own life support system. full stop because we created certain incentives that are really short term, that are really short-sighted, so to say, if we want to come back to the glasses example, right? So that is not sustainable. That is not future-oriented or whatever work we want to use here. And I can say as a new scientist, okay, fine.

I have certain understanding for that because I know that the brain is, let's say, better programmed or organized towards short-term things compared to long-term things. And that makes biological sense, right? Because if I'm kind of trustworthy of what I said before that our brain wants to make us survive always and all the time, well, it's first and foremost important to keep me alive now and then I can start to think about, let's say, in five or ten years, right? If I only think about five to ten years and then the saber-toothed tiger comes along and I go, like, wait, let me make that plan for in five years.

Well, I'm dead. But we know that, and that's where I go crazy. We know that since decades. And we haven't changed the system. We just played along. That's a question I asked my students when I taught Reality 101. Can knowing about our cognitive biases change our cognitive biases? I love that question.

Yeah. So it's almost like social media, the way it is today, especially turbocharged with AI and algorithmic shifts and everything, it's almost the perfect monkey trap for a social primate like us to just be captured by. Yeah, totally agree. Because it plays into those biases, into the confirmation bias, the loss aversion, the short-sightedness, the authority effects, and so on. We are, and this is maybe the hopeful.

Maybe we can go now, try to, let's say, walk also according to the quote you mentioned, right, not talking about the destruction and the hell, but where do we talk about the solutions? Because the solutions are there, right? We don't have to come up with them. We don't have to research them. We can stop every research today and could walk a different sustainable future-oriented path because we have all that knowledge. The only thing that's really truly missing is the change in the heads of a big enough end. so a subset of human beings that are going to implement these different kind of incentive structures. What do I mean by that?

Yes, I would answer. If I would be a student of yours and you would ask me the question, can it help to know about the biases, then change them? Yes, if we are smart enough. If we really take the time to sit down and truly understand it. But that takes time. And that's again opposite to this hyperattention. digital, what we talked about before.

Okay, I have so many questions, and I'm totally going off script now. That's fine. So we're going to get to your constructive journalism and your ideas, but let's just recognize that the fourth estate is going to need some structural changes. It's going to need some incentive changes. It's going to need some new creative things. But let me read you another quote based on what you said earlier about the, importance or the most important thing in our world today is, is attention.

So this is a quote that Sir Ian McGill-Chrys and I talked about in our podcast. It's a quote from Victor Frankel who says, between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom. So on the path to a better fourth estate, on the path. on the path to constructive journalism, what is the responsibility for us as individual humans alive today during these times,

being aware of the negativity bias, being aware of the problems with social media to pause and reflect and have the little Maren or the little Nate on our shoulder talk to us in quiet words, shifting our awareness to what matters and to the present. Do you have thoughts on that? Yeah.

Actually, I know that quote, that's why I was smiling so much and I love it. Because it's exactly this black box, like neuroscientists used to call it the black boxes. It's like we don't need to know what's happening between stimulus and response when it was all about behaviorism, right? Because the idea in the past when behaviorists were determining what we were supposed to think about psychology and neuroscience was that you put any stimulus in and you decide them about the response. Like give me any child and I could either make a thief or a successful banker out of that person, right? And then people understood, well, no, it actually matters because even though we don't understand the black box fully, in brackets, the brain and the human, there is definitely a lot of things happening between stimulus and response. And that also brings me back to the question that you're asking your students and maybe going down the past of, of class. kind of an answer of what we could do or what I think everybody can do starting today or yesterday.

And that is shaping the conversation, changing the conversation, because as you rephrased my words from earlier, that attention is our most valuable and most important resource. We all have the same of that. 24 hours minus certain time of sleep, minus certain time of silence, whatever, eating, yeah? We have the same amount at least given every single day. Of course, people die earlier and some people get older and so on. So whether I'm somebody who owns a media company or whether I'm somebody living in the forest talking mostly to myself and some deer passing along, right? because I affect more or less no brains compared to I affect many brains if I own the media company.

So my responsibility, and that's where it becomes important on the individual level, is so much bigger if I own a media company. And now we come also back, now I'm trying to put everything together, or at least more things from the beginning of the podcast as well, it comes to democracy. Because whom do we trust to be in charge of a media company, is a democratic question. Because if we know as a species

or let's say a certain set of members of that species who are organized, for example, in the country or company or family or any kind of group, that's how we call a bigger than one in psychology, a group, then we have to ask who is in charge, who's responsible for what? And responsibility, talking about incentives again, is something that we've attributed in a wrong way in many, many areas.

And that is important now. So what are we in charge or what can everybody do starting today, starting latest tomorrow and maybe already started yesterday, is change the conversation. Change how and whom we talk to about these topics. Make your voice hurt because this is what people take. take for granted. This is, again, coming back to the history books, what people thought is normal when they have a certain level of safety and trust in, for example, authorities, in structures

until it's no longer there and then it's too late. Because then it becomes a danger to talk out. Then you are prosecuted, for example, or killed if you raise your voice. So now is the time to be loud. So another thing that Sir Ian said to me is that our civilization values certainty over truth. And so how does journalism deal with the complexity of all the things in the world when people don't want complexity and they don't want uncertainty? They want, you know, all this stuff. Just give me the bottom line. I just want this answer. But that's not how we evolve.

really. And so journalism is necessary, but we have to meet it halfway. And so what percentage of the population seems to me to be becoming smaller and smaller that can access this full spectrum, open society, uncertainty, complexity, prosocial, what are your thoughts on all that? And so thankful you that you're asking that question, because that also gives me the chance to answer or to give the second aspect of the question before, which is when you ask about this little Nate or Maren on the shoulder, right? What do we need for that being loud and speaking up? We need self-awareness.

And that's an interesting aspect of the English language compared to the German language. You have self-awareness and self-conscious. But it's only one word in German. We don't distinguish between those two aspects. of being aware or conscious about yourself. Self-awareness and self-conscious is the same word in German. Exactly. What's the word?

Self-bevust. I was about to say beautiful, but that wouldn't have been honest. But that's why I'm doing this little linguistic mumbling here because it's important, because what I'm talking about now is the self-awareness aspect of the self-bevust or self-bevust-sein in German. which or what I want to, the point I want to make here is that the vicious circle that you just described comes with fear and anger. So coming back to those two and uncertainty plays along here as well, to those two key emotions that we shortly mentioned earlier.

What do I mean by that? If we are independent of our IQ or education or whatever, if we are in a state, of anxiety, fear, uncertainty and kind of this mixture, we are no longer able. Our brains are no longer able to deal with complexity, with uncertainties, with, oh, maybe this or that. Why not? Well, because think back about what I said, what is the most important task of the brain, keeping us alive.

If there is fear, we don't have the time and literally, new scientifically, we don't have the resources, the areas of our brain that deals with, complex answers that takes into account what we've been learning in the past are blocked. They are no longer accessible. And in English you have the three Fs then fight, flight or freeze, right? Yes. And there's a fourth one, fawn. Or flock, yeah.

Yeah. But, oh, yeah. So modern journalism is disregulating our vagueling our vaguel nerve and our. Oh. Exactly. And now talking about solutions because now I only talked about the challenge, right? So what do we need? Well, we need to kind of deal with that visual circle. Like first make it obvious. That's what we just did. And then say, okay, stop. I don't want that. And we don't need that. And we can't afford that to make it an economic case here as well, talking about destroying our own life support system here, having crossed six out of nine boundaries. And we don't need that. And we can't afford that to make it an economic case here as well, talking about destroying our own life support system here, having crossed six out of nine boundaries. And. And we don't. And we can't. And and so on, planetary boundaries. So what do we need? Well, we need in this hyper-chaotic crisis, multi-poli crisis time, we need rest. And that's, of course, kind of absurd, right?

Because people go like, look, you can't ignore this. There's a war here. There's inflation there. There's this there. You have to deal with it, right? But then we have to be really strong and say, no. one thing after the other. And this is not about the escapism that a lot of people then do and they go make bread and plant their flowers in the garden,

which is fine if you do that sometimes, but not all the time. But I'm really talking about making sure that you are self-aware of what you can do, what you want to do, and what's enjoyable talking about incentives for you. And that's kind of a van diagram then with three kind of circles where you have that street spot in the middle where the street areas may be overlapping. And a podcast is a perfect example. If you realize, okay, you can talk, you can ask questions, you're interested in a certain topic, and you enjoy that, well, maybe then a podcast is just the thing for you. Maybe so. What is it for you, the overlap of those three diagrams?

Well, I'm not sure whether I found a perfect answer, but one thing I definitely enjoyed doing, and I see a certain impact, and I think it's a relevant topic, is what we are kind of doing here as well, is talking to other people in different settings about my fascination and also frustration of the human brain related to being in this absurd situation where we kind of know so much,

we know more than we've ever been knowing before in history about how we function, but still being on the self-destructive path, and how we can finally and forever change that path. And that is a lot of pain. Pain is often helpful because it tells you again, like what is important and what isn't, but it's also a lot of fun and a lot of joy.

It's joy talking to you now. It's joy talking to all these initiatives who are working on solutions, talking to people who don't want to play along, who don't want to behave according to the incentives that other people decided are best for them, even though they know they aren't. And it also gives me then the power and strengths to continue. So let me ask you this a bit personal on my end. I think I used to be that sort of journalist five or ten years ago talking about oil depletion and clobesion and clobesion. climate change and there was a bit of righteousness in my tone because there was righteousness in my heart and in my body. And now that I've understood more the nuances and the complexity

of how everything fits together, I'm a little bit less left brain, a little bit more balanced on the heart versus the head, maybe a little bit less masculine dopamine testosterone and a little bit more serotonin, oxytocin. Just to add that site, Murak, you changed your incentives. I did. Yeah. Because what you just described, sorry, I didn't want to interrupt, but that was just the perfect example, your description of what I tried to explain on a more theoretical level. And you gave it a case, an example, because you said, I'm more listening to this compared to what I was listening to beforehand. And that's the switch. And you were only, you were only, able to do that, I'm pretty sure, because you became more self-aware.

Okay. Yes, I think that's true. Self-aware and self-conscious both. And I've had help, you know, and where I was going with my comment is I've been blessed to have lots of, you know, co-pilots on this route the last decade. Of all different stripes, a lot of them recently have been women. that in dialogues about the metacrisis and the polycrisis, there's a softness or a wide boundary gaze with which to view these things. And so somehow the tenor of how I'm describing and thinking about these things has changed and maybe softened.

But that leads me the question is there is there's something there that rhymes. in journalism that more of the right brain versus left brain, more of the listening as opposed to preaching, is there a larger role for the feminine writ large in a future pro-social fourth estate? Yeah, I love that question. First about the definition of feminine, what does it mean? coming back to the black box or not black box, we know by now that it's always a mixture, right? The nature-nurture debate hasn't come to an end,

but we know, or everybody who's sincerely dealing with those questions, agrees on it is a mixture plus, but we nature and nurture, plus they are interacting, which makes it very complicated, talking about epigenetics and all these kind of fields, or mostly about the, let's say, overarching field of epigenetic. So when we talk about famine, I first want to ask the question or make sure that we're all aware of this aspect.

Like, what in the famine definition is cultural, nurture, and what in the feminine definition is actually biological, so nature. And I'm not sure nobody can be sure, because how are we going to, again, asking this scientific question, right? How are we going to investigate? Well, we need different, let's say, laboratories and that's not going to happen, hopefully, where we put certain groups of humans and so on and so on. But we know, of course, from different cultures living on this planet right now

and haven't been living on this planet before, that it depends, right? certain values that we attribute to the famine side differ between cultures, differ between times and so on. That's just because I'm making that point because I think it's important because we also, when we talk about feminine stuff, stuff, we often attribute it in our cultural world. and now I combine the US and Germany as kind of the similar-ish cultural work when it comes to these questions as to kind of the weaker side, right? The more emotional, less rational. And that really gets me, let's say, hyperviginal, because I go like, wait a second, right? And I become very emotional what people say then, because it's so wrong. It's so wrong to say that emotions are weak. and I think that's what you're kind of partially referring to if I got that right in the question as well.

Because I wrote this, unfortunately it's only in German, but hey, use an AI to translate it. In my last book, which is called Radical Emotionally, so to say, how feelings make politics, if I freely instant translate the title and subtitle here, is all about how everything we do, everything we decide, everything we talk about is an emotional question because it always goes down to the question what we value. We talked about trust earlier already. What we think is right or wrong, basically. And that's the most political question you can ask at all, I'd say, right, talking about right or wrong. And now asking that or answering that question a bit more precisely that you ask like, okay, is it going to be more important that

famine side, I think it's going to be so fundamentally important that we learn to be more self-aware, and that means, in neuroscientific terms, that we become more emotionally educated. We need a new education that is truer to our biology than what we have right now. Yeah. Let me pin what you just said a minute ago. So, you know, if we were to do this again, let's do this again. Let's have you come back and I'm going to have a whole different set of questions because we're talking about journalism today and constructive journalism in your work.

But I really, since you're aware of all these other issues, I have a ton of actual neuroscience questions for you. Here's one. You mentioned our brains perceive right and wrong and that relates to our value system, which is primary. When we see some action or statement or issue in the news, what's fundamental? Our value system and from that, then we determine whether it's right or wrong, or is there something deeper where we know we feel that that's right or wrong? And that's underneath our value systems are created over that.

Do you have any insight to that? Well, how, again, asking scientifically, how would we investigate that? Question to you. Yeah, very difficult. Well, but it is possible. Think, whom would we ask whether we want to check it's nature or nurture? A priest and a biologist? Interesting answer.

Very young children. Oh, right. Okay. Yes. Who are less culturally influence than you and me are, right? So now we are entering the field of developmental psychology slash neuroscience. And what we know, for example, from studies there is that, for example, it's deeply ingrained. And that's what I meant was we need to be truer to our biology.

It's deeply ingrained that we are helping other people. And not only kin, the kin selection, right, but total strangers. And what people are doing, for example, in these studies is they take very young children, they can't talk yet, toddlers, like kind of not even walking yet. and then accidentally somebody let something fall or there's some food that they can get but I wouldn't be able to get and then they shared with complete strangers

not even of different skin color but also different age, different gender and so on and that's nature not nurture. Exactly and that is so fascinating and that's what I mean I researched those studies I didn't do those studies myself. It's probably a lot of fun, but also a lot of pain because, I mean, you can't control very young people very well. You can't tell them sit down.

I mean, you can, but that's so good to work. Those experiments like that are so hopeful about future pathways, right? Because the carbon pulse has separated us from who we really are. It's like this Las Vegas smorgasor junket that we're all on. And that's what I meant with the wrong incentives. The incentives that we built our trust and society on in the last decades slash centuries are just completely gone off the rails. They are not what we really want and not because it's my opinion, but it's not true to our biology. How is social media and our journalism with the negativity bias affecting our well-being and loneliness?

maybe explain that. You asked about the mental health earlier, so that brings us back there. So what we know from the studies, let's say, building on the ones that I mentioned earlier where I said that negativity and especially negative feelings

are increasing in headlines and texts and reporting, there's also a body of research that's looking at the mental health effects and what does it do to the people. And what do people say, for example, when, also talking about the trust that you mentioned earlier,

when they turn away from the news. The most common arguments, and that's always done once per year from the Oxford or in the digital news report from the Writers Institute in Oxford, and they look at many different countries, including the West and Germany. And the most common reasons that people then give is, I don't trust, they are not talking about solutions, this is all too negative, I have the idea I can't do anything about it. And especially the last three are all related to what we call in psychology helplessness or even stronger learned helplessness.

And that's the feeling, talking about feelings again, conviction, if we want to make it stronger or if I want to make it stronger, that independent of what I do or what I say is not going to change anything. The people on top or whatever they are are going to decide anyway, right? But we also know psychologically the antidote to helplessness and that conviction and that passive feeling and state, maybe even leading to mental disorders. That's also, let's say it increases the probability. It's not make sure, but increases the probability. The antidote is self-afficcacy. That's the feeling that we have when we do something and see that it actually

creates change. And it can be something really small. It can be literally this nail that we put with the hammer or hold it on the wall and then we use the hammer and it kind of holds and we can hang a frame. Right. But it's also when we sign a petition, when we go to a demonstration, when we raise our voice, when we talk to other people and have the idea that it changes something. And the worst thing you can do to people is make them feel that whatever they do, it doesn't matter. That makes people sick. I think that's a real risk in the coming decade.

That apathy in checking out is going to be the default path of least pain for people, but also least effectiveness in pro-social futures for us in the biosphere. So what about that is when people, if there's not a constructive journalist, journalism path or a revised fourth estate, I think there's a real risk that a lot of people out of self-protection, and I know friends of mine who have not watched the news in 10 years, it's not that they don't care about the world,

is that it was too toxic for them, and that's good. They're healthier because of it, but they also don't have a clue what's going on in the world and the different things. So how do you parse that? That is, let's say, even more, or let's say, making the argument stronger that we've been developing or we're kind of relatively sure about right from the start that it is so important to have what I would call responsible journalism, right? Because it's the task, let's put it frankly and really clearly, if you open a journalistic handbook, it says the most important task is to inform people and leave them in.

the state so that they can act. When was that handbook written? I think 70 something. I have to check. Before the superorganism took over the reins of our global system. Definitely. But that's what I mean. We know it all, right?

Yeah. So the question is, how do we make sure that that's happening or that we kind of go to a state where your friends wouldn't have to protect their in brackets mental? I think there's only one health. we should stop this thing. Should we mental and physical health. But anyway, their health and especially what we these days still call mental health by not watching the news.

Well, then we have to build that system. And again, everything we need to know is there. We don't need to do any additional research. We don't need to invent anything. We don't need to spend endless amounts of money. We just have to create the change by, and that's an aspect we had earlier, by putting people in charge who are really. responsible, who are behaving in a responsible way. So it's not this toxic self-destructive system.

Tell me some examples of how constructive or positive journalism is, any seeds that are planted or things that are working and what are you hopeful for. Yeah. Well, there is some research. It's still a young field, but there's some research and there is, for example, indications that people, in terms, interact more and in a deeper way with constructive reporting compared to non-constructive. Let's put it very general here. And that's very, like from a biological perspective, I would say, well, that's kind of a no-brainer, right? Why? Because we go into those checkmarks of going away from the short term, okay, I'm going to be safe after clicking on the negative news.

dopamine kind of Kching machine doomsday scrolling, doom scrolling and so on mechanism into what we talked about earlier this kind of more relaxed but joyful self-afficcacized filled up space

of oh wow this is a topic I understand something about I hear about solutions I can talk to other people about it you mentioned your path of all these co-pilots right it gives me co-pilots, it gives me other organizations, people, ideas, also coming back to the first

quote that you mentioned, yeah, that are going away from this hellish path and going towards a pass where I feel what I do actually matters. And people have more the urge to then share it with other people. That's all research results there, early days, but it's kind of promising. Okay, I have several, several thoughts here. One is just a, hypothetical abstract question. Let's just assume there's a thousand media companies in the world. I have no idea how many there are. Would it be better if we were able to find five constructive journalists and add them to each of these journalists media companies?

Or have a new positive journalist media conglomeration with 5,000 employees that are doing this type of work? And I guess the answer to that gets to the incentives of our culture and the incentives of whoever is starting those initiatives, right? Because they're going to have to get paid and have livelihoods. I don't know. It's a strange question, but that came to mind. Do you have any thoughts on that? It's not strange at all. Because that's exactly the question I was asking, together with some other crazy enough people in 2015-16, when I founded my own online magazine after I finished my online magazine. after I finished my PhD and kind of said, well, science, nice, but now I'm going to start a company

without any money, without any rich family or anything like that. And we said, look, we want to change the narrative and the way people talk about things because we had the idea that that's the most important ingredient if we want to stop destroying our life support system, planetary boundaries and so on. And then we discovered the constructive journalism. And then we had this exactly that question to answer. are we going to knock on a lot of doors of media companies and say, hi, we are these crazy scientists. And we want to do constructive journalism, which is completely off what you've been doing so far.

I'm exaggerating a little bit. But that's kind of how we were treated. Or we start our own company and doing just that, doing just constructive reporting. So what do we do? Well, solution-oriented thinking applied. we talk to other people around the world, including, for example, David Bornstein from the Solution Journalism Project. If you haven't talked to him yet, please invite him on the show, who also wrote the Fixes column in the New York Times and who was kind of starting the whole movement of solution journalism in the US and Canada. And we talked to people from the Netherlands who had just started a company called The Correspondent, where they were doing,

constructive reporting and we talked to some Danish people who are doing it and so on. So to cut a long story short, we asked other people what did they do and why did they do it and did it work or did it fare and so on. And basically the summary was, look, right now, if you're going to media companies that already exist, you're going to lose so much of your energy on convincing those people like changing the internal structures in our land. here now, the incentives, that you're not going to have a lot of energy left to actually do what you want to do. So I think it's better you start your own company. And that's what we did.

Right now, 10-ish years forward, at least in a lot of German-speaking areas slash countries, that's not so many, but mostly Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where I've been talking a lot to journalists and I've taught students about it and I'm still talking to some of the editorial rooms and so on. And I just talked to a student of mine who's now working at the public media which is not constructive by definition, but she's the constructive voice there. And she did a master's with me. So this is so great to see now it's actually possible. She's happy, right? She's not depressed because her work is actually paying off and she's not losing. I mean, she still says it's a lot of work.

I have to convince people, but I have a team. And I have, let's say, a critical mass of people inside who work with me and who maybe slowly are changing culture, are changing the feelings around constructive journalism. Let me share a rhyming story with you, Marin. So this podcast, my organization is largely funded by the viewers and the listeners of this show. And so the incentives that you mentioned for me have changed. Not doing this to make money. I'm doing this to change the future and meet the future halfway and change the initial conditions of what I perceive to be a bad.

default outcome. And I've just recently learned that, and you see the sensationalist testosterone, angry, clickbait, stimulative titles. And I've never liked that. It made me feel like I needed to take a shower or something. Oh, want to run away? Yeah. And so I'm consciously, I don't know when this episode will air,

but I'm just saying this to the viewers right now. I'm happy to have fewer viewers as long as I can pay for my staff and the production and everything. If a higher percentage of the viewers really roll their sleeves up and play a role in our collective future, and I would rather have a smaller amount of those people

spread out around this blue-green earth than a lot more dopamine doom-scrolling people who want the next hit on, bombs and blood and Bitcoin and beans and bullion and whatever. I mean, not that I still want to paint a picture of the biophysical macro situation, but I could really sensationalize this content and the great simplification is going to be a collapse of some variety and we need to prepare. That is true, but that's not helpful to the world because it's more of the hell described

in what I said earlier. So the incentive for me, as long as my bills are paid, of course, which is always an asterisk, is to inform and inspire more humans to play a role in our collective future. That's my goal. So in a way, this is a sort of constructive journalism. Sure, certainly is. And again, you talked about a change in incentives. And you mentioned awareness. And what I would call this new emotional.

education because you asked yourself, and I don't know, let's say a couple of years ago, and it's always a process. When people say, this moment changed my life, well, yeah, that's the story they tell themselves, but it's always a process. That's the one moment that kind of consciously felt it. That you became aware of, okay, what do I really want to do? Contrary maybe to the stories that I've been told about what means to have success. And that's where it comes to feelings and values, because that's what I like to call the stories we tell. We are these telling stories species.

I mean, not only in movies and podcasts and I don't know, bad time stories, but also in politics, it's always a story behind it. That's why I mentioned this term values right from the beginning. or talking about laws, even though they might sound super dry. It's about stories and values. So tell us a story, Marin, a story of how humanity navigates the next few decades and makes it through the risks that we all see. Tell us a story.

Well, the story in my head, and that's the pretty crazy one, the head and the story, of course, as it kind of maybe goes like this. I haven't prepared this, so it's going to be very raw. I get up every morning in order to make that story become a bit more alive. And the story is going to involve

a lot more pain for now because people unfortunately sometimes only learn by disaster. You have to touch the heart of an or whatever it is you have to touch in order to freely feel it that way it comes down to the that's where it comes down to the feelings in order to really acknowledge and realize with your whole body as sometimes people say right I felt it in my whole body yeah that's what we need in order to change because whatever changed people's life and whatever will change people's

life in the future is because they felt something, not because they hurt something or read something. It's always what we feel. So the story will involve more pain because there will be more people needed who felt that it's really necessary to change the incentives right now. But, and that's where I try to focus on, and as I said, it's often painful, but it's also often joyful. There is already a certain number of people who really feel it and who are kind of understood with their whole body that we really have to change almost everything if we want to have a future on this planet. And one proof for this my story that that's the case is the backlash we observe globally right now from the elite, right, from the people who made those wrong incentives

and their ancestors who made those wrong incentives. because they're getting really nervous. And that makes them really angry and that makes them fight because they want to defend their belief system, coming back to values. And that makes me hopeful. And that makes me hopeful that we are not going to destroy on the individual level more and more of our personal lives

by getting addicted to the things we talked about earlier. The testosterone kicks, the success story, that we tell each other that means success, but they actually don't, because they don't make us happy or content or healthy, and that it's worthwhile to keep, and I'm very consciously using that word now, fighting, because it is also a fight, keep fighting for that success story of humanity.

If I wouldn't be convinced about it, I wouldn't be able to get up in the morning. Why would I? No, I feel the same way. The day that I'm no longer convinced that there is that chance, I won't be doing this work. I'll be planting trees. I want to be respectful of your time, but I do have so many more questions. So I will formally, in a social contract on camera sort of way, invite you to come back for another episode in the future.

I'd love to do that. Maybe as a round table with some others. One more question, though, before I get to the closing questions, is a future of constructive journalism and positive journalism the way that you've described? Is that a global thing or can it happen nationally and regionally? And I ask that because there's been a lot of changes in my country in the last few months and how is Europe responding or Asia or like, please give me your opinion there. Yeah. That's a really interesting, another big one, of course, because change, if what I said earlier is still resonating with you and the people who are listening, always starts with the individual,

right? That means if a certain amount of people or group, as I said earlier, come together or comes together, that's the most powerful thing that can happen. So that's what we see, for example, where is the energy transition or the food transition or the media transition and you can put basically every noun now in front of the word transition happening it's on the kind of local level and that's what a lot of organizations like meta organizations like for example organizations that group cities together like the c40 for example like a group of cities that decided we really want to be sustainable. We want to change how people move inside us,

how people go from A to B, how we eat, how we live, how we work and so on. Because it's not going to be on the state level. That's too big. Talking about trust, it's too disconnected. How do I know what these people in Parliament or wherever they meet will decide for me? I have no idea. I can't talk to them. Maybe I can send them in email they're not going to read.

But if it's about my community and the people I meet, maybe on the market even, on the street, on the bus or I don't know, some kind of physical encounter makes it more direct and makes it also more accountable. And thereby this self-afficacy compared to the helplessness that we often have on the state level when it's too far away and we don't know how to trust becomes more valuable. that doesn't mean the state level is unimportant. Of course it plays a role if certain countries then say or also communities of countries like the EU say, look, we connect and we make certain decisions together in order to be big enough to face also dangers and threats to democracy or our value system together. Of course that is important. So trust starts with one, then two, then four, then eight, then 20, then 100, and scales from there. Exactly. Yeah.

So what advice do you have for our viewers who have followed along and agreed with the logic and heart of your argument of positive and constructive journalism? What advice do you have for individuals and their awareness after this podcast? It's a three-step way. It's always three steps because we often forget the middle and we remember the first and the last thing. Our brain is kind of programmed for that. So if we only have three, there's only one middle. So the first step is start with yourself. Ask yourself honestly, like you described so beautifully about yourself, what is important for me? Like when I try to outline that story, what works for me and not what other people expect of me or what some people try to tell me I should be or should do or should have been doing or being, but what is it that really, really resonates with me?

And that's a painful journey. It's not easy. And it never ends as far as I know. The second step is talk to other people. like we are just doing now. Talk to other people whom you trust, whom you want to trust, who are worth your trust, and make your voice heard in, let's say, communities where you feel at least half safe because it will resonate with you.

And often I try to explain a bit like this picture with a bus, right? Be the bus driver who picks up the people who have been all waiting for that bus. and you say, hey, come on, hop off. It's going to be a joyful ride. And find that smallest common denominator with the people who are all waiting and kind of searching for somebody or something, or maybe just you and that bus, to come along because they've been lost. And then the third thing is find really in your professional and private life,

not only the bus and the drive, but structures or build them that can support you. like you mentioned your co-pilots. Don't look for the people who can hurt you. I mean, watch out for them. That's important to stay in life, of course. But really focus on what am I for and not what am I against. That changes the whole narrative. So that's constructive and positive living, not journalism.

Exactly. It's not only journalism, but it's also journalism. Yeah. No, they apply the same concepts of constructive journalism to your own life with large. I love that. Yeah. So I originally came across your name from people, my friends in Berlin, that you care very much about climate and the natural world. So you're aware of the polycrisis and all the things.

So taking off your neuroscience and journalism hat for the moment, do you have any personal advice to the listeners of this podcast who are a lot? during this time. Yeah. Stop ruminating about whether you drink the soy or the old milk. I'm serious. Because that's, I mean, it's also fun. I love those discussions sometimes. I mean, I'm in a good mood.

But seriously, don't waste your time on it. Again, your attention is your most valuable resource. So when people ask me, what's the most useful thing I'm? can do. Is it like buying a bike? Is it like stop eating meat? Is it like this? The most important thing you can do is talk about it. Talk about planetary boundaries. Talk about that we have to do everything, almost everything different in order to keep our beautiful life support system called the Earth as our life support system. Educate yourself about it and talk to other people and you will realize it's so much fun.

It's so much fun because it is a beautiful planet. And it gives me a goose skin when I now go outside and see how spring is starting and how I can smell and feel and touch it. Do that. Feel it, touch it. Talk to other people about it. Go outside and talk about it. Thank you for that.

It's about to be spring here today, but we had snow this morning. But there's still the spring bird sounds. do you're a professor you have students how do you uh and also a neuroscientist what advice do you have for young humans in their late teens or or 20s being alive at this time it's such a pleasure and also i'm feeling very honored to be able to talk and work with all these young youngish they're in the mid-20s they're master students um people um because It always makes me realize how much, and of course this is kind of a selected crowd, right, because they want to study sustainable transformation. I'm now in charge of this master's degree.

It started in last September. It's called Sustainable Transformation or Design of Sustainable Transformation. And they're, of course, already very interested in all those topics. But still, to make me realize how much they are searching, how much they are waiting for this bus, how much they actually want to do some good and are looking so almost desperately for the right answers. I love these moments when they go like,

now I don't know what's to be right or wrong because that's this moment of irritation. That's this self-awareness. That's what we talked about earlier when I said, we need time for that, we need rest for that. We need sleep in between. the really basic human needs. We need to talk about it to other people.

We need to make it resonate with other people. The first thing I tell them, mythologically, is fun fact now to say this on a podcast, where we've been talking all the time, is to active listen, actively listen. Active listening is by now also a research area.

It's a skill you can learn, but we are no longer taught, or most of the times we are not taught to really, really listen because we are programmed to have the better argument and not to understand the other person, again, talking about incentives, but to be louder than the other person. Can journalism help with active listening? Yes. How?

Invent new formats, talk in different ways, use the constructive language or the, let's say, constructive skill set by asking different questions. This is where it all starts. It goes through the whole journalistic process. Asking different questions, really doing your research, really talking to different people, really searching for people who are already working on solutions, creating formats that engage with people, all these kind of things we know how to get the brain hooked, not only by the negativity, but also with other forms of engagement.

Can you either right now list some? or off-camera give me a list that I can share with the viewers of examples of media that exists today that is operating

on these things? Certainly. I can set in your list. That's fine. And then you can put it in the show notes. A few more questions, Marin.

What do you care most about in the world? That's maybe the most difficult question at all. What do I care most of? Okay. I'm going to make it abstract, of course.

I mean, I'm going to give you a concrete answer. and an abstract run, okay? It's too fine. That's fine. Okay. I care most about that people love each other and love in the most basic understanding,

meaning I want to understand you. What I care most about on a basic life support system is chocolate. Okay. And as a neuroscientist, there's probably a Venn diagram overlap between those two. I hope so. I'm still searching for that one. If you had a magic wand and could do one thing that would change human and planetary futures for the better with no risk to your reputation or status or anything, what is one thing you would change? I would give every human being on this planet an experience.

It's more like a magic wish, where they feel connected because I think that's the most. valuable experience connected to not only other people, but this connectivity that I call radical connectivity to understand, I depend on clean air. I depend on the fact that it rains. I depend on food. I depend on other people. That kind of connectivity. Because I think that would really change our conversation. Professor Marin-Earner, it's been a joy to connect with you in real time. Thank you for your work and thank you for your time today. Thank you. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification,

please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit The Great Simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann and Lizzie Siriani.