We All Hallucinate Reality: Turi Munthe on Why We Think What We Think

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Yesterday, we had the eminent Washington DC based psychiatrist, Sally Satel on the show. She's also at the American Enterprise Institute. And she one of the things we talked about was how people of different ages and political affinities thought about mental health. They imagined their own mental condition very differently depending which side of the political aisle they were on. And this idea that even mental health is thought of relatively is actually supported by an interesting, piece in the Financial Times last week about what's really going on in mental health, that left and right leaning young people show different trends. They even imagine, their condition quite differently according both to political ideology and age group. In other words, what we think we think is a reflection not so much of what we'd like to think, but perhaps we're somehow programmed by our politics and our age. That's certainly a theme, of our conversation today. Turi Munthe is, a British-based, Anglo-Italian, French-based journalist, investor, thinker, writer. His new book out is Why We Think What We Think: The Unexpected Origins of Our Deepest Beliefs, and he's joining us from Miami in Florida of all places. Turi, congratulations on the new book. It's been very well received. Are you extreme.

00:02:19 Turi Munthe: Thanks for having me.

00:02:21 Andrew Keen: In terms of this book, Turi, is it an extreme form of relativism that everyone thinks differently, that it reflects our political ideology, our age, our geography, our cultures, so that there really is no truth?

00:02:40 Turi Munthe: Oof. Good to start with a bang, Andrew. Thank you for the question. Thanks for having me on the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here and to connect with you. I really think not. And I wanna pick up with, Isaiah Berlin, Anglo-Russian philosopher, long time at Oxford, who, who made the point very loudly that, relativism and pluralism are not the same thing. And I think that the point of my book here is a is to drive forward a pluralist agenda, which reminds everybody how important it is to register the sincerity, and value of opinions on all sides of the political, religious, ethical spectrum, because they are sincere, because they're natural, but it doesn't relativize truth. And, there are a couple of things I wanna unpack here. One one is, what my book looks at truly is opinions, beliefs, values, things which are not based in which cannot be factually proven. So the I mean, the way to think about this is that, you know, Charles Windsor, right now at least is king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and defender of the faith, and god knows what other titles he's got. That is a statement of fact. Whether you like that state of affairs, whether you're a republican or a monarchist is a is where opinion lies. And so what I'm not talking about is, is facts. What I'm talking about is, in this book, is I'm trying to unpack what the nonrational influences on our beliefs, values, and opinions are, what our predispositions are to, to think certain things.

00:04:31 Andrew Keen: So let's go back to something different. Yeah. Let's go back to this issue of mental health and, what Sally Satel was talking about yesterday. Why do people of different political persuasions and ages think differently about their own mental health? How does this fit into your narrative in your new book?

00:04:57 Turi Munthe: So if we take generations, there are a bunch of different things which impact the fact that generations think differently. Look, we should also start with the fact that it's kind of a weird idea, right, that generations should think differently, that there should be generations, that we shouldn't all broadly function as humans depending on I mean, the kind of the fundamental biological nature of who we are. But generations are affected by a bunch of different things. One, major events. Right? So the Second World War will have a major impact on the behaviors and attitudes of a particular generation, just with major economic shifts and turns. Technology has a massive impact, so, people born before smartphones, people born before the Internet engage with the world in different ways, and these technologies impact our culture just like they impact the ways we think. So that sort of that explains, I think, why different generations think differently about major issues. As for psych as for left and right, one of the things that my book looks at is the very different the very big differences between left and right almost at a not almost, at a neurological level. So, what I am not trying to do is to play a kind of a Mengele game here and say, you know, the left and the right are have got fully different brains, and they function in completely different ways. But if you look at the margins, there are averages which are different. So, people who tend to lean right wing, very slightly on the average, more readily surprised by loud noises. They are sort of more attendant neurologically more attendant to things like threat and danger. People who lean left tend on average to be, to have all those neurological dials wound down on some level. So at a neurological level, left and right are very slightly different political phenotypes, and those different phenotypes help explain a lot of the political attitudes and the policies that left and right support.

00:07:10 Andrew Keen: Books tend to be autobiographical whether or not the author acknowledges them or not, especially, I'm guessing this kind of book, Turi. Tell me a little bit about yourself. What did you discover from writing this book about the unexpected origins of some of your deepest beliefs? What do you believe deeply in, or what did you believe deeply in that maybe having written this book and thought about this subject for a while, that you're a little less committed to, a little more ambivalent, a little bit more skeptical?

00:07:45 Turi Munthe: Great question. And, yes, there's a heavy dose of autobiography in this. And so far as, I was brought up in the seventies by, by parents who followed a Sufi guru. I don't know whether your audience knows what that is, but there's a mystical branch of Islam. My mother's Jewish. My father was Christian. But both found themselves with an Afghan guru who, so, and I remember at 14, 15 realizing that I didn't buy any of this stuff. We're always brought up in a quite serious way in this kind of mystical tradition, and I really didn't buy it. And I remember, you know, fighting it, fighting it, fighting it. And then finally, age 18, 19, I broke out of it and went full atheist. And, and I finally seen the light. This is different. And then I looked at it again. I was like, hang on. But my parents used to be nonreligious when they were growing up, and they became religious later. So what it did is it kind of it made me less convinced, really, of the truth of my perspective because this major sort of intellectual shift that had happened for me, I knew had also happened for my parents. So I think I've always lived on sort of epistemologically slightly shaky ground. I've always lived in a place where I wasn't convinced that I could fully trust my opinions. And, and maybe this book just reinforces that. But it's been a sort of a deep dive into what that, I suppose, sense of sort of existential intellectual unease that I've always lived with, which maybe comes from, you know, being from you joked earlier, multiple cultures, French to English, brought up in different religions. That sense of sort of unease, I think I've calmed it now because I think what I've realized is that, a lot of our opinions, the opinions that we hold on to most deeply, our deepest convictions, the some of the deepest convictions which we think are integral part of ourselves, and which we hold like kind of swords in front of us as we approach the world, many of those are arbitrary. Many of those are the results of completely random influences from, you know, the ancient the geology of our ancient forefathers through to, you know, thousand year old history, through to different brain shapes, different genes, that these opinions that we and beliefs that we would love to think of as rational, agentic, intellectually independent, free, in many ways are profoundly conditioned. And, and therefore, in a sense, a certain kind of degree of skepticism about one's own beliefs and thoughts is healthy but also right.

00:10:30 Andrew Keen: In the introduction, I said you were an entrepreneur and a journalist. I think you're the founder or the cofounder of, an online network called Parlia.com, which, is an en cycle which defines itself as an encyclopedia of opinion. The o word opinion, in some people's minds, has low currency because it's just opinion. But I'm guessing from what you write about in this book, Why We Think What We Think, opinion is really interesting and important, not only because of what it says in itself, because it's a kind of mirror or a door to, our deepest beliefs and why we have those beliefs. So for you, Turi, as a journalist, as a writer and philosopher, is opinion the thing in itself?

00:11:27 Turi Munthe: Yeah. No. Absolutely. It absolutely is a thing in itself. It's like it's a as you say, it's a sort of a it's a well. You could through it's a looking glass. And I think that the opinions that we

00:11:41 Andrew Keen: It's a peephole.

00:11:42 Turi Munthe: Hold. You do. Peephole. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly that. It gives us insight, deep insight into who we are. And from the but I contest the first, which is that, yeah, maybe opinion is a word of low currency in certain circles, but I also feel and you've written about this, Andrew, yourself a lot, which is that in many ways, opinion has come to take over in a world of facts. I mean, in the context of what you've written about, you know, concern that everybody gets to be their own foghorn, everybody gets to be their own spokesperson, and that opinion matters more than fact. Your perspective is more important than what than the facts on the ground. And so I think for many people, opinion is all is everything, and opinion has been relativized. But therefore and therefore, looking at where our opinions come from, trying to understand what these nonrational influences are behind it, how we're predisposed to those opinions becomes all the more urgent in a world in where in which opinion is kind of everything.

00:12:46 Andrew Keen: And in a way then, I don't wanna turn this into a conversation about philosophy, but in a way, this book, Why We Think What We Think is deeply anti-Platonic. Of course, Plato's Republic was the first book that addressed this distinction between opinion and what at least Plato or maybe Socrates was thinking of truth. I don't wanna turn this into another boring conversation, Turi, on the Republic, but I'm assuming I'm sure you've read the book, and you know what Plato and Socrates were arguing, that this distinction between opinion and truth, which Plato lays out in the Republic and the famous metaphor, of course, of all of us looking at, reflection in the cave, that this was a mistaken foundation of western thought. Is that what you're arguing in Why We Think What We Think?

00:13:51 Turi Munthe: Where I land is that we all, and we know this, we all hallucinate our own particular unique version of reality. We come from backgrounds. We come from cultures. We come from, we come from agriculture. We come from their climates, which profoundly predispose us to a particular views on the world. In addition, it looks as if genetics influences up to 50%, maybe a little more, of our political persuasions, for example. It looks as if our brain shapes, our neurologies, have a profound impact on the ways in which we see the world as well. And therefore, what interests me here is to understand how these various different hallucinations of reality work when we bring them together. Because I think, Andrew, the reason I wrote this book was really it in response to what feels like growing and violent polarization, political polarization. And, and let me frame that slightly more precisely, which is that we've had long periods in politics where we were much more politically polarized. You just think of the seventies, for example, when you had, you know, campus was left, right, and center, left and right with very, very different conceptions of how the world should be managed. But they remained political. It was political polarization. And what we're seeing now is what social scientists called affective polarization, which is to say that we've taken all this super personally. There's an interesting data point which I find terrifying, which is if in the nineteen fifties, you'd ask a Republican family what they thought about their darling daughter or darling son bringing back a Republican [sic — presumably a Democrat], to marry. And they'll be like, fine. No problem. Three or 4% thought they'd be problematic, but otherwise, no. Today, you do this you ask the same question, and it's around 45% would be outraged. Republican and Democratic families would be outraged if the other if their beautiful kid brought back somebody of the wrong team to marry. And that, I think, is super dangerous. And so that affective polarization is something which can properly pull societies apart. And in my slightly nerdy way, the way to think about this was, okay, if we all hallucinate our different versions of reality, is there any value in all of us disagreeing on these profound ways? Is there any value in conservatives seeing the world a particular way and responding to it politically in a way and Democrats doing the same. And, and the thing which was so striking for me was to realize two things. One, it looks as if all the best the most functional societies express the spread of political, of political perspectives because it turns out sometimes one is more adaptive to the circumstances in which we find ourselves than the other. And those change, and that's why we have voting. But two, and this is sort of a more personal pleasure of mine, is that, one of the most interesting pieces of research around the nature of reason, which has emerged in the last few years, is by these two French cognitive scientists called Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier. I'll send you a link for the, for the show notes, where they argue that, in fact, reasoning is a collective sport. It's not, in other words. The image that we have of reasoning is Rodin's Thinker with his head on his hands thinking solitary thoughts in a solitary way. In fact, the image that we should have is, exactly that one.

00:17:30 Andrew Keen: We have the image, in your FT report. And you not just a collective sport, but you talk about thinking as a contact sport. What does that mean, thinking as a contact sport?

00:17:45 Turi Munthe: Well, I mean, let me maybe start let me start this off at a personal level. We've all had conversations in which, when they're going well, it feels like your mind almost sort of takes independence from yourself. You find yourself taken to places that you never imagined you could get to by yourself. There's something in really great conversations which feels sort of othering. It feels like you're you've somehow broken free of the constraints of your own mind. And it turns out that experience that I think all of us have had is a, is a is an experience which can be tracked and which can be measured. So it turns out that, as I was saying, Sperber and Mercier believe that we evolved not to reason alone, but to reason in opposition with others. So the idea is that, the reason that we have reasoning at all is because when I come to you, Andrew, and say we should go off and hunt the buffalo in that yonder field, your natural instinct is to say, is to say why? What ask me to reason it out. And, for me to convince you to come do something super dangerous with me, I need to come up with reasons which are good for you as well. I need to come up with reasons which start to look objective. And so their theory is that's exactly how we evolved to reason. And it's borne out by the data insofar as, you know, the academic the most impactful academic papers by h-index, much more often written by pairs or groups of researchers than by single researchers. The, the many of the best university towns are quite small because they are able to create what's called creative density, that you get lots of very smart people together bumping into each other arguing. But I really love this idea that actually we evolved to argue and that reasoning is done in conflict with others because what it tells us is that pluralism is the most is the state we should all be looking for at all times, that we need the other side to force us to think better. And therefore, it kind of, from my perspective at least, it dials down. It's it explains why we should dial down this brutal affective polarization where we think of the other side as the enemy rather than as a partner. Or, you know, there's this lovely phrase in British politics where we talk about the loyal opposition on the opposition benches. And I think that's the way to think about the people you disagree with. They are loyal opposition to you, not just because they're ideally loyal to the principles that you're both arguing about, but also because they improve your thinking. They're better for you. They help you get out of yourself.

00:20:22 Andrew Keen: So we always people always bring up the socials, the foundations of why we are, what we are. But your definition or the research you're using in this book, you seem to be suggesting that it's social, but it's the disagreement of the social where you're not talking about some sort of kumbaya culture where everyone agrees and that what's defines us, which is maybe a collectivist or a communalist, kind of ideology that, we are why we are because we disagree, but we disagree in a consensual way. Is that what you're saying? So it's this, distinction that you began the conversation with, Berlin's distinction between pluralism and relativism, that we're pluralist but not relativist in as a species somehow.

00:21:24 Turi Munthe: Yep. That there's no suggestion that we are or should be relativist when it comes to facts. And there is a strong argument that when it comes to morality or values, we should also not be relativist. So far as it's important to super important to stick to our guns. And one of the reasons it may be so important to stick to our guns, whether you're a left, you're a righty, or you believe in god, or you don't, or, you're a collectivist or an individualist or whatever it might be, is that actually the value may not be that you may not be right, but in the clash with others, you're representing a part of humanity which is really important and, as your opposite number is as well. So you are representing a system of values which is adaptive, which is, which is evolved on some level as people on the other side are. The real value comes in when these two things clash. And when values different values, different opinions clash over different things. Because in the process of, of clashing, we create this thing called reason. We are forced to properly reason because the other side disagrees.

00:22:37 Andrew Keen: So there's a Hobbesian quality to it, but, of course, sticking to your guns means not getting your guns out. That there's that's one thing to stick to your guns. It's quite another to get them out to shoot the other person if you don't agree.

00:22:50 Turi Munthe: Precisely. And I think one of the great things

00:22:52 Andrew Keen: Is that our the Hobbesian sort of foundation of your argument that it's in our interest on the one hand to stick to our guns, but it's also in our interest not to get those guns out and shoot people with different opinions.

00:23:05 Turi Munthe: Precisely. And I don't think of myself as Hobbesian or Lockean really in this sense. I think that, there's a professor at Brown called Rose McDermott who says, who says, you know, if the world gets tougher, we become more Hobbesian. If the world gets, gets gentler, we'll become more Lockean. We'll allow ourselves to trust in an optimistic future. And I think we swing between those. We've got both options. But I think mine, therefore, is a Lockean, hopefulness, which is to say that, actually, if we can remember that, ultimately, we're on the side we're on the same side. It's the side of humanity. It's the side of progress. It's the side of the improvement of all our lots. And in a political context, if we can remind ourselves that both teams, both sides, all sides are really trying to fight for what they think is better for the country in which we vote, then we come to argument, not shoulder to shoulder, but kind of, you know, at three quarters. Do you know what I mean? You're not fighting directly opposite the other person to crush them, to destroy them, but you're kind of at three quarters trying to push this conversation forward to ensure that you're coming out with the best policies to take the state forward. You're coming out with the best policies to improve a lot of everybody else. But that's the key thing. You gotta believe that you gotta trust that the other person is working on some level towards the same in the same direction as you, even if they have different goals. At that point, you can achieve stuff. And the problem, I think, politically over the last wee while, this kind of radicalization of politics, is that increasingly we've started to think of the other side as wanting to destroy the premise of, of the things that we're working on. So, you know, Democrats look at Republicans and see what they what happened at, you know, at the Capitol and say, these people are really trying to tear down democracy. They wanna win at all costs. Indeed.

00:24:56 Andrew Keen: So, yeah. And, of course, you think of January 6, 2021 in these contexts. Before this show, I went to the White House website, and there's all these arguments about thousands of Americans paying the price for political failures they did not create, and Nancy Pelosi gets vilified. I'm not quite sure what she had to do with January 6. So, in a concrete sense, Turi, what does your book suggest about America that's profoundly divided on so many fronts, particularly in their interpretation of January 6? On the one hand, some people think it was an insurrection, a challenge to the very foundations of American democracy. On the other hand, people see it as a legitimate response to, political phenomenon. How can America if Americans read this book, and I know the book's is coming out in the US early next year. It's already available in the UK, so you can get it on Amazon. But if they were to read this book, what would they conclude about how to interpret January 6?

00:26:06 Turi Munthe: I have a section on January 6, and it's around the impact of social thinking that an enormous number of our ideas are more important for what they do than for what they say. And, anyway, I hope you'll read this find that interesting, but in a sense, the more the proclamations of the right and the aftermath of January 6 that the election had been stolen, that it was that Biden did fudge the details of the election. This despite the fact that Trump's the person that Trump hired himself to investigate this turned around and said there was absolutely no fraud. You've got to understand that in a social context. You wanna understand that people have decided to believe in a lie as a commitment to a social cause. And there's reason behind that. There's a lot that's rational so far as it's often more important to believe what everybody else believes than it is to believe the truth. There's an old line. People prefer to be wrong together than right alone. But from an evolutionary perspective, that's intelligent. If, you know, if we all live in Andrew, you and I live in a village which believes that god is a giant rock at the end of your field, and I turn around and go, no. No. I think god is a man with a beard who lives on a carpet in the sky. I'll be ostracized in the community. I'll be they'll lose the protection of the group, etcetera. So there is very good reason to believe what other people believe in you if it's not right. But that's, I think, broadly not the question you're asking. I think the question you're asking is, you know, what do we do with all this stuff? If we are influenced, if we are predisposed to our different opinions, political and otherwise, and those predispositions push us to very different places, take us to very different places, how do we then come back together in some way? How do we create the basis for a conversation? And, because I think, as I said at the beginning, pluralism is the most beneficial state to humankind. Democracies, places where people can express themselves just move faster. They're able to, to process good and bad stuff better. And, maybe this is a slight thing to say. Maybe this is a small, what am I what's the word? Small medicine for a big problem. But I think one of the things which has always struck me in conversations with people who I really disagree with on topics in which I know something about is that quite quickly, if they disagree with me strongly on something, I stop believing that they're sincere. If you we've all had this experience. Right? You really know a topic, and you're talking to somebody who disagrees with you fundamentally on where you get to. Because we think of other people as the same as us, when they disagree with us on a big topic on which we know stuff, we think, well, hang on. They can't have possibly got here.

00:28:57 Andrew Keen: So give me an example of something you think you know a lot about that someone would disagree with you on.

00:29:03 Turi Munthe: But, I mean, the thing which I still find quite hard to has always found quite hard to swallow is the idea of, of gun rights in the US, for example. And for the longest time, I just couldn't get my head around the fact that anybody would support gun rights. So I so, you know, I'm talking about my twenties. So I think, wow. They've they must have been bought or they must have been or they must be dumb or they must not have read the research or I saw people on the other side as a broken version of me on some level. I saw them as, either intellectually corrupt or morally corrupt or something when actually you do enough work. And I now know I fully understand where gun rights come from in the US, and I think it's, in many ways, very beautiful and heroic, and there is a deep, admirable tradition behind it. I understand it. But you gotta do the work to get yourself onto the other side to understand where it comes from. And I think this key thing, which is that if you can only explain the arguments of the other side because they're mad or dangerous or dumb, the problem is with you. And here, what I hope this book does helps you to helps us to understand that the people who we are arguing with are not broken or corrupt versions of ourselves. They are deeply different from us. They, to repeat this phrase, hallucinate a different version of reality to the version of reality that we're hallucinating. They see things from a different perspective, a perspective that we literally will never be able to share. And once we get into our heads that we are genuinely different political phenotypes, it makes it a lot easier to trust the sincerity of the other side and therefore to have an argument which is based on, on a principle of trust. That is the basis for conversations which take you somewhere when you

00:30:55 Andrew Keen: And maybe that's the basis of a new kind of Berlin-style pluralism. I know your book rights have been sold in Poland. An old friend of the show is Maciej Kisilowski. He teaches at some Central European University in, in Vienna. I was just there a couple of weeks ago. His book, Let's Agree on Poland, and Poland, of course, has gone through the same kind of divisive politics as United States, Hungary, United Kingdom, of course, Western democracies, in fact, perhaps more radical in many ways, given the complexity of Polish history. But what he argues in Let's Agree on Poland is he sees a new world coming where, in a way, he's very much on the same page, except he's coming at this in a very different kind of way. He's seeing a Poland where everyone agrees to disagree, that the people of Warsaw and their liberal progressive ideology is simply not reflected in southeastern or southwestern Poland in the countryside, and that what's happened in Poland is that, basically, everyone's agreed to disagree and that for the Polish state to exist without violence and without the kind of nastiness perhaps that happened in Hungary or certainly in Russia, people have agreed to disagree. So, Turi, I'm not sure if you know, Kisilowski's book. I think you'd find it particularly interesting, and maybe

00:32:27 Turi Munthe: I'd love

00:32:27 Andrew Keen: to have the two of you on a show because you seem to be beginning to understand or imagine the future. But do you think he's right that for the viability of western democracy, we need to remind ourselves of the value of pluralism, of going back to Berlin's notion of pluralism, and that a pluralist state will be like contemporary Poland where different groups of people in different parts of the country just think profoundly differently, and they accept those differences.

00:33:03 Turi Munthe: Yeah. Not just because, hey, we all like, we all like variety, and variety is the spice of life, But also and fundamentally, because we can never know for sure that our version of the world is the true one, is the right one. Ours brings a certain kind of value, and then our political opponents also brings a certain kind of value. So, one, we can't know that we're right, one. But, two, what we can do is we can see that perspectives that we bring do good things. It turns out that a left wing perspective, and I'm simplifying radically between left and right, but broadly a kind of a liberal perspective does an enormous amount of good things for society, and a conservative perspective also does amazingly good things for society. And therefore, having both in the mix allows us to and here, let me radically simplify. It allows us to, protect the weak in society while also making sure that we are, we're striving for growth and staying competitive at international level. It allows us to I mean, it's you know, as one the evolutionary psychologist nicely put it, we need both left and right because, the left, the left fixes inequality, looks after the poor, looks after the weak, and we need the right to go off and defend us when the next door village starts getting a little bit spear shaky. And I think societies need both. What that doesn't say what I'm what I wanna be clear here is what I don't wanna say is that, all values are somehow okay. Right? And that nor do I wanna say that the center ground is always what's right. In fact, not at all. Was there any

00:34:53 Andrew Keen: arguing there is no center ground. You're arguing that we just have to accept that you can't muddle opinion, that some people think one thing, some people think another, and the idea of splitting the difference is unthinkable. That's

00:35:03 Turi Munthe: the problem. That's exactly right. And I think a lot of people make that mistake, and I broadly identify as a sort of centrist politically. I am I'm constantly kind of tempted into saying, well, let's split the difference. Come on. You negotiate with the hard right and the hard left, and we'll find ourselves in a nice little middle ground. Was there any middle ground on slavery? Was there any middle ground on the Holocaust? Was there any middle ground on a whole raft of evils that, that we've, eventually over time worked out how to squash. But I think the point here is that, the societies are improved by the presence of both sides, and therefore, enjoying the great diversity of opinion across our societies is fundamental. We need to protect the spaces where they get to disagree, not just because, each side brings real value as themselves, but also that in the conflict between both sides, we help society think better.

00:35:58 Andrew Keen: In your biography, you define yourself as a journalist. You've worked for all sorts of publications, The Economist, The Guardian, The Nation, The Spectator, Nation being on the left, The Spectator on the right. A lot of people, as you know better than I do, Turi, analyze our current situation and say the problem is we don't have enough journalism, that people don't trust journalists, that they only go on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram, and that the fewer the journalists there are, the more truth suffers. On the other hand, conservatives tend to argue that journalism has been taken over by progressives like the news, like the universities, and so the commanding intellectual heights of society are controlled by just one group. What does your book as a former journalist, as an investor in new journalism? What does it tell us about journalism? Do we need more or less of it? Is it the problem or the solution?

00:37:01 Turi Munthe: What a question. I've sat on the boards of a lot of news organizations, some very, very, very large ex public companies and some very small ones that I wear, across I mean, all over the world. Journalists are fundamentally important insofar as they've, you know, as they've always described themselves. They write the first draft of history. And when journalists are no longer there to report on stuff, we end up with news deserts. We end up without the records. And that's a catastrophe. And we've seen it in certain specific areas, particularly local journalism, which has tremendously suffered. And I think there's a strong argument to suggest, at least in Europe, which I know better than the US. But I got friends who work in local journalism in the US who tell me it's a similar situation, which is that, accountability falls off a cliff when you lose your local newspaper because there's people. There's no longer people kinda reporting on stuff. Nobody feels like they're being they've got, you know, eyes over their shoulder when they behave badly. So that's, I think, terrible. But what I'm not sure is that fixes this broader problem, which is that, this kind of radicalization of affective politics. Right? So this fact that we really now properly live in very, very different camps as a hard left and a hard right and difficult to see and to see how those two visions of the world can coexist in a similar polity. That, I think, is a different that's a different game. And I don't think that's necessarily the fault of journalists. Although I also hear the conservative lament that academia and journalism have been taken over by the left. They

00:38:35 Andrew Keen: And it's a fair point,

00:38:36 Turi Munthe: isn't it? It's totally fair point. It's a totally fair point. But one of the questions is why? Turns out academia has almost always been the preserve of the left for a bunch of reasons which I go into in the book, which have got a lot to do with brain shapes of leftist and rightists. Leftists tend to have a slightly larger anterior cingulate cortex, which sits in the middle of the brain a bit behind the eyes, is where we process ambiguous information. It's where we, where we look at new ideas, etcetera. Turns out people who have a slightly larger and more active anterior cingulate cortex tend to lean left. They also tend to be academics. They're the one they're the it's where we do our hair splitting. Right? It's where we complicate things without any, you know, hope of, of resolution. It's where we like ambiguous ideas. All quite lefty approaches. One reason they go into academia. And media, you know, there's an extension of the same idea. Although, if you're a conservative 22 year old, you just left you just finished your degree in, I don't know, history or English at one of the big universities in the US, and you're a conservative. Do you really wanna go and join a newsroom where 80% of people are gonna think very, very differently from you? I mean, so you do end up with these kind of monopolies of thought in very important cultural institutions. So I buy the conservative argument, and it's particularly true in the US. It's quite true in the UK as well. But what's happened here is that, we've seen an evolution of journalism or we've seen a evolution of the media landscape, which is increasingly putting paid to this because the big old legacy media organizations are crumbling, you know, beneath our very eyes. And, from my perspective, I think that we should expect that the revenues available to mainstream media over the course of the next five years or so will have one I mean, the biggest shift here is the shift away from the web to chat. Right? So all the revenue which came from advertising on the Internet is gonna disappear in a puff of blue smoke. So I think we're gonna see huge damage to traditional media there, which may not be the end of the world, but it needs to be picked up. And, the gauntlet of proper reporting and figuring out what's happening in the world needs to be picked up by small organizations, which we're already seeing. Right? So there's been a variety of new Substacks or Substack groups or local news organizations, which have just emerged out of nothing, which would hopefully come and take the space that mainstream the big old established media players used to have. So this is a moment of where I feel both very depressed on this on the level that a lot of journalists in large organizations, I think, are gonna lose their jobs, and then we're gonna lose a lot of big old media organizations. But I'm also super excited and optimistic by what this new space how this new space will develop, new news organizations emerging all over the place. So I think it's a time for a lot of entrepreneurialism in journalism, but, but also a lot of disruption.

00:41:35 Andrew Keen: Finally, Turi, I think it was the former British prime minister Harold Macmillan when somebody asked him why he changed his mind on something, maybe in the Middle East. We all seem to be changing our mind on the Middle East, and, Macmillan famously said, when the facts change, dear boy, my mind changed too. [note: this quote is generally attributed to John Maynard Keynes; Macmillan's famous line was "Events, dear boy, events"] What does your book tell us about why we change our thinking? Can we change our thinking, and is that healthy? I mean, is Macmillan's remark that when the facts change, we think, is that true, or is that just another delusion that we comfort ourselves with?

00:42:17 Turi Munthe: Great question. And, my book is a kind of a whistle stop tour of all the nonrational influences on why we think what we think, you know, from the agriculture of our ancestors to our brain shapes, our deep we have deep predispositions. But humans are also profoundly rational creatures. We've achieved extraordinary things with our reasoning capacities. And, and despite what a lot of people say about, you know, the backfire effect, which is when you show somebody evidence which contradicts their worldview, they retreat into their worldview all this all the more. That happens a little bit, but for the most part, it doesn't happen. For the most part, we are able to change our mind. But to change our mind, we've gotta go we gotta go and put ourselves into we gotta put ourselves in the way of intellectual discomfort. We've gotta go and rub up against ideas that we disagree with.

00:43:08 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Thinking as a contact sport.

00:43:11 Turi Munthe: Thinking as a contact sport. And I think that's so there's I think there's a personal commitment that we've gotta make to go and talk to people we disagree with. And there's a political commitment that we've gotta make, which is to make sure that we are doing everything we can to protect the spaces in which people get to say the things that they think. And I mean that, really, from the right and from the left, and ensure that we remind ourselves that I'm not insured [unclear]. And remind ourselves that we think best when we are in conflict with others and therefore ensure that left and right are continually bashed against each other because that's how we do our social thinking best.

00:43:46 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I think the value of your book, why we this new book, Why We Think What We Think, is indeed, to change people's minds. The unexpected origins of our deep deepest beliefs is maybe in some ways to challenge those deepest beliefs. Turi Munthe, excellent conversation. Congratulations on the new book, and, gives us a very interesting way of thinking or rethinking our politics. And, certainly, this comparison with, Kisilowski's book, Let's Agree on Poland, I think is really interesting. Thank you so much.

00:44:23 Turi Munthe: Andrew, great to talk. Thanks so much for your fantastic questions.