Something You Should Know - Favorite Food Origins You Never Knew & Why The Internet Creates So Much Outrage In People

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, where do you keep your loose batteries? I hope it's not in your junk drawer. Then, a fun look at some of your favorite foods, hamburgers, hot dogs, root beer, and the odd story of chicken fingers.

Starting point is 00:00:46 Human beings have domesticated chickens over 10,000 years ago. But we didn't have chicken fingers or chicken nuggets until the 1980s. And that really is like, why did it take so long? And it actually comes down to food chemistry. Also, when it comes to getting your groceries home on a hot summer day, time is your enemy. And a look at why and how the internet creates so much outrage and discontent. It turns out that there's very specific words that tend to go viral online. These are moral and emotional words. Words like shame, disgust, I'm outraged.

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Starting point is 00:02:03 Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. I would imagine that somewhere in your home is a junk drawer. You may even have more than one junk drawer. And there's a pretty good chance that in that junk drawer are some loose batteries. And that could be a problem. If metal comes in contact with both the positive and negative posts of a battery, it can cause a short circuit that generates enough heat to start a fire. And chances are, in addition to loose batteries, there's a lot of

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Starting point is 00:03:22 heating up and catching fire. And that is something you should know. Many of the foods we eat every day have a story. Why are hot dogs called hot dogs? Why is there no cream in cream soda? Where does vanilla come from? Why do we drink cow's milk? Well, Kim Zockman is a writer who decided to explore all these questions about food and get some answers,

Starting point is 00:03:50 which are in two books she's written. One is called There's No Cream in Cream Soda, Facts and Folklore About Our Favorite Drinks, and the other one is There's No Ham in Hamburgers. Hi, Kim. Thanks for coming on. Hi, Mike. I'm really excited to be here. So since it's the title of one of your books, let's start with hamburgers. Where'd they come from? Hamburgers have a long path to the United States. The most directly would be from Germany. German immigrants came over and they brought with them a recipe that was called

Starting point is 00:04:25 Hamburg steak, which was basically chopped beef with onions and cooked in a skillet, lots of different recipes. Some of them had tomato sauce and others. But the legend of the hamburger, I think, is so interesting. That goes all the way back to Genghis Khan and his golden horde. And supposedly, and again, this is legend, that the soldiers would put raw beef between their horse and the horse's saddle. And they would ride across the countryside, pillaging villages and stuff. And when they stopped to get something to eat, they would just take that hamburger, that ground beef that was between the saddle and the horse and eat it. It was like their lunch. And it would have tenderized it, all that friction from the saddle, and it would be nice and warm from the sweat of the horse. And apparently

Starting point is 00:05:17 they ate it. And they showed that method to some Russian armies. And the Russians, they added some onions to it. And that kind of is the legend of the Hamburg steak. But the Hamburg steak was a real recipe. And you can find them in old cookbooks around the turn of the century. Well, hamburgers may have come from Europe or other places, but it has become an all-American food. So how did it do that? And how did it take off the way it did here? It kind of took off in all different areas of the country. And it's interesting to me because there are several people who claim to be the very first person to put a ground beef patty on a bun and call it a hamburger. And then at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, there were some food vendors

Starting point is 00:06:01 actually selling hamburgers there. And some newspaper articles were written about this new sandwich, the hamburger. And it kind of started growing from there. And then White Castle was the first restaurant chain to open up. And that was in 1921. But it just sort of took off. But I think it also got popular because about the same time as cars became popular and people were enjoying driving their cars so much that they wanted to actually pick up food and eat in their car. And the hamburger is such a perfect thing to hold in your hand while you're driving around that it just took off, especially with the drive-thrus and the drive-ins and everything in the 40s and 50s. So French fries go along with hamburgers, and I don't think there's anything really French about them, is there?

Starting point is 00:06:50 They did start in France, although Belgium begs to differ with that. They came over really with Thomas Jefferson. He was a real foodie, and he was an ambassador to France before he became president and he loved them. And there is the first written record of French fries is when he requested for a presidential dinner that potatoes fried in the French manner be served. But they didn't take off right away, partly because grease was expensive, oil was expensive and it was dangerous.

Starting point is 00:07:25 Frying was dangerous and could cause kitchen fires. So again, it was around the 40s and 50s when drive-thrus started happening. Their restaurants started doing French fries, again, because they're so portable and great to eat in a car. And those two started going together, hamburgers and French fries. And that's when those 40s and 50s periods is when both foods really took off. But actually, french fries are popular and common in almost all countries. They're just called something different. So let's talk about cream soda. I've always wondered, because cream soda to me is kind of like, I've always thought of it as kind of a light root beer,

Starting point is 00:08:06 but there's certainly no cream in it. There isn't now. The original recipes from like the 1830s, 1840s, and this is when people made their root beer at home. They made it themselves and they made their cream sodas at home by themselves, did include milk. And then in the heydays of the soda fountains in the 1880s through the 1920s, ice cream sodas were extremely popular with a scoop of ice cream and then a flavored soda on top. When drink manufacturers started to bottle cream sodas, obviously the dairy had to get out of the recipe. And to fake that milky flavor, they added vanilla flavoring. And there's all kinds of different types of cream sodas. But the one thing that kind of makes them the same is the vanilla flavoring that gives

Starting point is 00:08:55 them that creamy taste. And it's a very popular drink, more in the northern part of the country. And it's not as popular in the south. I grew up in the south. I had never actually had a cream soda. Now I love them. They are very creamy and very smooth. So if you haven't had one, definitely go try one. Yeah. Well, in, in comparison to, you know, Coke, 7-Up, the others, cream soda has never had much of a visibility. I mean, even in places where it's popular, it's not that popular. No, it's not. It's never been a huge, big seller. And it's

Starting point is 00:09:34 kind of interesting to me that it's the longevity of it, considering it's never been a top seller. But Dr. Brown's cream soda has been around since the mid-1880s. So it's a long-living soda that has managed to have a presence through all these years, even though it's not a top seller. And root beer, I assume it has some sort of roots in it, but I have no idea what it is. I know what it tastes like, but I don't know what's in it but i have no idea what it is i know what it tastes like but i don't know what's in it well it's a generic term when they say root beer because originally people did make root beer at home and they did use kind of whatever roots they had in their backyard and berries and seasonings and so forth so every household had their own recipe for root beer. Charles Hires was probably the most inventive one because he came up with a

Starting point is 00:10:27 way, a dried powder, like an instant root beer. And people loved this idea. Instead of gathering up these roots and berries or buying ingredients to make it, they just had this pouch of powder and then they could just boil it in water and they had their root beer. So some recipes use sarsaparilla, some use sassafras, some there's birch beers. You might've heard of birch beers that use it. So root beer is kind of a generic term for a drink made with lots of different flavorings, usually some sort of a root. And the interesting thing about root beer is it was super popular in the United States for a long time until sassafras was outlawed. The main chemical in sassafras, which is saffron, apparently caused cancer in laboratory rats

Starting point is 00:11:17 and it was banned. So the popularity of root beer dropped a lot after that. And the other interesting thing about root beer is that it's pretty much only found in the United States. There's a few brands in Canada and a few in Australia, but the rest of the world not only has not really heard of root beer, but they don't like it. And that's kind of interesting to me that it's a very American drink. What's a chicken finger and who came up with that idea? You know, when I was researching, that was one of the most interesting stories to me because human beings have domesticated chickens over 10,000 years ago. So for 10,000 years, humans have had chickens, eaten their eggs, eaten the chickens and so forth. But we didn't have chicken fingers or chicken nuggets, commercial chicken fingers or chicken nuggets until the 1980s. And that really

Starting point is 00:12:13 is like, why did it take so long? You know, they're so popular now. You just, they're everywhere now. Why did it take so long? And it actually comes down to food chemistry. They, it was really difficult to figure out a way for for one thing, deboning chicken is is labor-intensive and they had to come up with a better way to do that. But then getting the batter to stick to the chicken through freezing and then a frying process so it could be mass-produced was also a real chemical challenge. And finally, the first person that did it was around 1960, and he was a Cornell University food professor.

Starting point is 00:12:57 And Robert, I can't remember Robert's name. He did it first, but nobody read the paper that he produced after he succeeded in doing it. Nobody read it. So then McDonald's in the early 1980s, late 1970s, they were frantic to come up with a chicken food for their menu because the United States government had just come out and said, eating too much beef is bad for your health. It's bad for your cholesterol. It's bad for heart disease. You shouldn't eat so much red meat. And they thought, we've got to come up with something else. So they wanted to come up with a chicken dish for their menu. And they came up with

Starting point is 00:13:34 chicken nuggets. But it did require some very innovative processing to make it happen. But when they did, boy, they test marketed their chicken nuggets in 1980, and they had to build a second factory within a few months just to produce their McNuggets. They were so popular. And then the chicken fingers, of course, are just a longer strip. And they were first showed up in some restaurants in the South called Chicken Fingers. I interviewed one of the restaurants in Savannah and one of the owners, I said, why did you call them Chicken Fingers? He goes, well, we're not going to call them Chicken Feet. That sounds disgusting. So hot dogs are certainly all American. And I don't think I've ever really known the story,

Starting point is 00:14:22 or if I did, I forgot of why they're called hot dogs. There are so many fun legends about the name of the hot dog. I had a great time reading them all, and they're all completely fabricated. It probably really is because they look like dachshunds. When the German immigrants came over and they brought all their sausages, it's estimated that there's a thousand different kinds of German sausages. They brought all their sausages over and they also brought their dachshunds. I mean that is a German breed and they brought their favorite little dogs with them and it really is because they kind of look like dachshunds. And that's the best reason any of the food historians can come up with,

Starting point is 00:15:10 is that they're named after dogs. We're talking about the history and stories behind some of America's favorite foods, and my guest is Kim Zachman. She is a writer and author of the book There's No Cream in Cream Soda, and also another book called There's No Ham in Hamburgers. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you and have a nice life.

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Starting point is 00:16:46 I mean, it just tastes terrible. And maybe that's conditioning as much as anything else. But somebody must have come up with this idea of carbonating beverages. Why, who, and how? Joseph Priestley is considered the father of carbonated beverages. He was a clergyman in England, but also a scientist, kind of an amateur scientist. He was a clergyman in England, but also a scientist, kind of an amateur scientist. He was fascinated with gases. And in the 1770s, they were still exploring gases. They kind of knew that air had more in it than just air, but they were still identifying oxygen and carbon dioxide and nitrogen and so forth. He was fascinated with the bubbles in beer. His house was right next to a beer brewery and he saw the bubbles coming out of the beer vats

Starting point is 00:17:33 and he was fascinated by these. And he wanted to capture them and put them into water because it was thought at the time that natural mineral springs, some of them are naturally effervescent, like Perrier, it was thought that those bubbles were medicinal and that if you drank that mineral water, that effervescent mineral water, or you bathed in it, it would cure whatever ailed you. So his goal in artificially carbonating water, His goal was to make medicine and he particularly hoped that it would cure scurvy. Well he wrote a paper about this after he managed to make some carbon dioxide and dissolve it into water. He wrote a paper about it and he submitted it to the Royal Academy, the highest

Starting point is 00:18:21 science academy at the time and this was like 1775, he won the Copley Award, which was the top science award for the year for making fizzy water because they thought it was a medical breakthrough. Now people, instead of traveling to these springs like Perrier and there's Piermont in Germany, instead of traveling there to get their treatment, they could make it in a lab and sell it at a drugstore, which they did. They were originally sold in drugstores as medicine. And that's where the idea for the bubbles came. Now, of course, obviously it's not medicine, but people loved it. So let's talk about milk and dairy and why we drink the milk of a cow and eat all these products, cheese and everything else that's made with cow's milk. Why?

Starting point is 00:19:17 They estimate that humans domesticated, started domesticating animals about 10,000 years ago. And some of the first ones were goats and sheep and cows. And the cows win just because of volume. Basically, a goat might produce a gallon and a half of milk a day, a sheep a little bit less than that. Well, a dairy cow is putting out seven to eight gallons a day. So that's just the obvious choice, right? I mean, who's going to go over a gallon and a half when you can get seven or eight gallons? Plus, they're fairly mild-mannered animals, you know, and they're fairly easy to raise. The interesting thing is they didn't use milk right away for beverages. They used it for cheese and yogurt. Those yogurts may be 5,000 thousand years old and cheese is two to three thousand years old

Starting point is 00:20:07 they didn't necessarily drink milk much yet because they were lactose intolerant and that's kind of the interesting thing when I was doing this research is mammals are supposed to be lactose intolerant. As infants, when they're still nursing from their mother, they make the enzyme lactase to break down lactose. But when their teeth come in and they can start eating solid food, a little switch goes off and they can no longer produce lactase and they can no longer break down lactose. That's the way it's supposed to be. And that's how mammals are, except for some humans. Around 5,000 years ago, there's a genetic mutation in some populations in Northern Europe, where that little switch to turn the lactase production off, quit working. And they kept

Starting point is 00:21:02 producing lactase their whole lives. And that was a little bit of a survival advantage. So most populations in the world, the people are lactose intolerant. It's United States is kind of different in that about only about 30 to 35% of our population is lactose intolerant because a lot of our population has that Northern European heritage. We seem, in this country, we seem to be big coffee drinkers. I mean, I think that's most people's perception. So I was really surprised to read in your book that we get left in the dust in terms of per capita coffee consumption. The Dutch drink an average of 18 pounds of coffee per person a year, putting them at number one in consumption. Americans drink an average of 7.7 pounds a year,

Starting point is 00:21:54 and actually we're ranked 14th of coffee drinking countries. In doing the research for all these foods, did you come across anything that surprised you or you found particularly interesting about a food that you know we all eat all the time but but maybe something about it we never knew yeah I think one of this this is so simple but yet it was one of the most surprising things to me is vanilla I mean you know that's such a common spice for us. It's in everything. You know, almost all of our foods have some vanilla in it. But what surprised me is to find out that real vanilla, the real spice, is the second most expensive spice after saffron. And I'm like, why? It's so common. Why is vanilla so expensive the real vanilla and I found

Starting point is 00:22:45 out that vanilla grows on an orchid type plant and I don't anybody gardeners out there orchids are pretty persnickety it takes four years for the vanilla plant to mature enough to produce a flower that flower blooms only once a year for a few hours. Workers have to hand pollinate it to make sure it gets pollinated since it's only there for a few hours once a year. And then that pod takes six months to grow

Starting point is 00:23:16 and they have to be hand harvested. And then it goes through a multi-step curing process before it's ready to be used as a spice. And I thought, well, no wonder it's so expensive. But that blew me away. I just had no idea. Vanilla, which is such a common flavoring for us, is actually so work intensive. I never knew that about vanilla. Well, a lot of these things I haven't heard. This has been a lot of fun talking about these stories behind some of our favorite foods. I've been talking with Kim Zockman. She is a writer and author of a couple of books. One is called There's

Starting point is 00:23:55 No Cream in Cream Soda, Facts and Folklore About Our Favorite Drinks. And another book called There's No Ham in Hamburgers. And there's links to those books in the show notes. Thank you for coming on, Kim. This was great. Oh, wow. Thanks, Mike. This has been so much fun talking about these foods. I really appreciate you having me on. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, Thank you. wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI,

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Starting point is 00:25:17 Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS

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Starting point is 00:26:12 in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I bet it wasn't all that long ago that you saw something on the Internet that upset you, made you angry, got you worked up, maybe even outraged. The Internet can do that, and does do that to people all the time, and it has likely contributed to the incivility that we see so much today. So why is that? Is creating all this

Starting point is 00:26:54 discontent deliberate? How do we deal with all this outrage? Well, that's something Tobias Rose Stockwell decided to explore. He is a writer and researcher whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, NPR, and the BBC. He's author of a book called Outrage Machine, how tech amplifies discontent, disrupts democracy, and what we can do about it. Hey, Tobias, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks so much for having me, Mike. So what's going on here? Let's start at the beginning of like, what's an example of the outrage that seems to get created by the internet that sets people off?

Starting point is 00:27:34 Like, where does this problem begin? It turns out that, I mean, I feel like most of your listeners probably have seen something online that makes them upset at some point in time. But it turns out that there's a very specific set of words that tend to go viral online. These are moral and emotional words. So words like shame, disgust, I'm outraged, I'm angry about this. Those types of words actually have a viral advantage online. And for each word that you use in a tweet or a Facebook post or anywhere else that you might post online, there tends to be a 17% boost per word used. So they tend to actually transit and go viral and capture more attention

Starting point is 00:28:20 online when we use these words. There's something inherent about moral and emotional language that just tends to be much more common in our online discourse than it is in real life. And are people using these words deliberately to create this outrage or it just happens that those words tend to do it? Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both. There are certainly bad actors that, uh, that try to go to viral by making people mad. Uh, but most of the time, I think it actually comes down to the process of us seeking audience, right? Like when we say things online, when we post things online, we are unconsciously trying to make sure our content gets views, make sure our content is meaningful to others. And we're inherently signal processing machines.

Starting point is 00:29:12 So if we're posting normal stuff, stuff about my day, stuff about a meal I ate, stuff about a new job posting, and then you post something about something you're angry about, right? You see something you're angry about in the wider world, and then you post it online, that tends to get more signal, right, that tends to get more virality, more traction online. So in that process of actually posting it, we get this tremendous feedback from our audiences, in which we are actually trained to some degree, to actually produce more of that content, right. So when you post something and all of a sudden there's this huge reaction, right? All of a sudden people are paying attention to you for this thing that you posted. A lot of the time, and that's not all the time, but a lot of the time that tends to

Starting point is 00:29:55 be stuff that is a little emotionally outrageous. And the data shows that the more we post this kind of stuff, the more we are likely to post it in the future. So it's like a snowball. And there's limits to it, right? You know, people sometimes get turned off by the amount of outrageous stuff that you post online, but there is a feedback effect there. When we post something and it gets a lot of, a lot of, a lot of support and a lot of views, we tend to try to do more of that in the future. And that's a subtle,

Starting point is 00:30:26 almost unconscious sort of reaction that we have to our content getting traction. What about the people who are doing the reacting? What is it doing to them that they see this and feel the compulsion to respond rather than go, Oh God, geez. Yeah. Well, unfortunately that is honestly one of these kind of natural impulses that we have, right? We are highly socially attuned creatures. Uh, you know, our, our, our ancestors were hyper-social creatures just like us. And it made sense for, uh, for our ancestors to be really attuned to social status, um, to who was doing the right thing and who was doing the right thing and who was doing the wrong thing in our broader communities. We're a very tribal species,

Starting point is 00:31:10 and that's the kind of foundation for it. And so this impulse to really know who is in what ranking in our society and who is doing the wrong thing, who is doing the right thing, that kind of moral framework is something that we are very just emotionally attuned to. Don't people tire of this? You just get worn out from it all. And pretty soon it doesn't impact you because you just kind of get used to it. There is definitely, I think, fatigue around this, right? Around seeing so much emotionally

Starting point is 00:31:46 disruptive behavior online. We do get a little bit overwhelmed and a lot of us start to tune out from these various conversations that are being had. And I think that's actually part of the problem that we're facing right now is that is that, you know, social media has done some really amazing things for connecting us to like like like minded communities. But it's also allowed for a small number of people kind of at the fringes of every debate to grab the microphone and really just kind of dominate the debate with their particular perspective. And I think for a

Starting point is 00:32:15 lot of the people in the middle who are just reasonable people trying to get along with their lives and are interested in solving problems and interested in, you know, fixing what's wrong in the world, when they see the extremes of these particular conversations that often happen online, they tend to check out and they throw up their hands and say, well, I guess this isn't worth fighting for. This isn't worth fighting about. This isn't worth my attention because it's just too much. And so a lot of people in the middle of the conversation just kind of remove themselves. And I think that's unfortunate because there is so much that's worth talking about and worth knowing about and worth trying to solve.

Starting point is 00:32:51 But when you remove the people in the middle from the conversation or they remove themselves from it because it's getting so crazy and kooky and polarized, then aren't you just left with crazy, kooky, polarizing people and who cares? Right. So unfortunately, social media is not really designed for thoughtful and meaningful debate. It's oftentimes designed to get our attention by whatever means necessary, whatever content actually tends to capture our attention, regardless of how thoughtful it is, that oftentimes will stick to the top of our feeds. And basic engagement algorithms, unfortunately, prioritize that. So yeah, so we do end up with

Starting point is 00:33:32 this noise, but it's not currently designed for nuance and for deep context. It's more designed for grandstanding. And when you talk about social media, I assume you mean, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the normal places people go. But there are plenty of other places on the Internet for thoughtful discussion. And don't thoughtful people go where the thoughtful discussion is? Yes and no. I think that, you know, we're very much prone to falling, you know, falling prey to the defaults, essentially, of these networks. So the way that they're designed, we don't really have a choice when we are there. We can completely check out of these

Starting point is 00:34:14 spaces. But Facebook is a really important place for a lot of people to find their friends. Journalists use Twitter so much, or X, or whatever it's going to be called in the future. Uh, you know, they use it to, to source stories. Uh, so much of our society is dependent upon some of these connection points that these networks provide. And so the defaults of these, of these places really do determine what the discourse, uh, ends up being. Do you think, is there evidence to support the idea that because these social media platforms are money-making businesses, that this is by design, that this is deliberate to drive traffic, to be able to sell advertising, and that this is all a big game? I don't think it was intentional. I think

Starting point is 00:35:09 that any media platform designed for communication and for so many people interacting with one another is going to have problems. I think this is an emergent property of these tools. And honestly, it goes back, you can look at honestly, every major media disruption in our history and see different kind of problems that come forth as a result of how tools are designed and the different affordances that technology has, right? So you can look back at, you know, the early days of newspapers and find, you know, a tremendous explosion of fake news during that time. And it took a lot of a lot of trial and error for consumers to figure out what they could trust and what they couldn't trust when they were seeing things in these in these early

Starting point is 00:35:55 newsstands. So so I think that social media particularly hasn't been designed explicitly to do this. But this is a byproduct of some just early design decisions. I think three specific early design features that came online between 2009 and 2012 fundamentally changed how we interact with each other. And I can speak about those three, which is just in real short form. The first is social metrics, the availability of likes, the number attached to every single

Starting point is 00:36:23 piece of content that we share, the algorithmic feed, so how content is rank ordered in our feeds that prioritizes certain types of emotionally outrageous stuff above other things. And then finally, the one-click share, how easy it is for us to share along information when we're exposed to it, which has brought about this kind of explosion of proliferation of fake news and outrageous content. And each one of these features was designed and implemented, I think, with really good intentions that made a lot of sense both for the consumer and also the engineers that were building it. But together, taken together, they've kind of created this toxic combination

Starting point is 00:36:59 that has really changed our relationship with each other online. The second of your three, how the algorithms prioritize emotionally charged content, how is that in the best interest of anybody? The reason we have algorithms rank ordering content is because of a very specific problem. We produce too much information. Now every day we produce terabytes. So if you're trying to feed updates to your friends, then it makes sense that you wouldn't want the most important stuff to be lost when you log in. You want there to be a rank ordering of how important that stuff is to you as an individual, right? So the earliest feeds were designed as reverse chronological feeds, right?

Starting point is 00:37:47 So you just, the most recent stuff you see at the top and the oldest stuff you see at the bottom. And that changed in about 2009, there was a couple of different algorithm changes that were deployable at Twitter and at Facebook to basically make sure that you didn't miss the important stuff. So it makes sense why we would end up

Starting point is 00:38:04 with some kind of rank ordering of our feeds that is in our best interest. And it turns out that that's a huge part. That's a huge part of why we come back to these tools so we can see the most important stuff first. It just turns out that there's also these problems with certain types of content being very sticky. It sticks to the top of our feeds because it grabs our attention. I think a reasonable kind of analogy here is you wouldn't explicitly say you want to see a car crash, but if a car crash happens, you're going to look at it. And so a basic ranking algorithm that is prioritizing for our engagement will rank order a car crash above other content because it's where our attention is going. So in some ways, these are just imperfect

Starting point is 00:38:51 algorithms right now, and we're trying to figure out how to actually make them more healthy for us as a society. So what do you think is the big picture harm here? Because my sense is, you know, even when I see something outrageous on social media, you know, it kind of, you know, what happens on social media stays on social media that I don't take it out into the real world and, you know, scream from the rooftops. You know, you kind of get it out of your system on whatever platform you see it on and life goes on. I think that one of the key things to recognize about social media is that the information that is on social media does not stay there, right? Information is inherently transitory. It jumps. You know, when you hear about a scary or threatening

Starting point is 00:39:39 or morally outrageous thing that happens on social media, that sticks with you. And then you might tell it to your friends around the water cooler or around the dinner table or at your congregation. These things come up and they stick with us. And more importantly, journalists love social media. They love social media for all the reasons that we just laid out. It's a very easy and powerful tool for finding what seems to be important, what people are talking about in the world. And they then write stories that end up in our broader news environment. So, you know, even if you're reading the New York Times or or whatever, you know, whatever kind of mainstream news source you go to, you're actually consuming information that was generated by social media a lot of the time. But again, so what?

Starting point is 00:40:26 What's the harm? What's the big harm here other than it just people get upset in the moment and they fire off a response and that. But what's the harm to the nation, to the culture, to the neighborhood? What's the big deal? Yeah. So I think it goes back again to this idea of kind of cynicism when we're overwhelmed with narratives that might counteract our ability for having a reasonable conversation about things, right? So if I'm exposed to a whole bunch of really threatening narratives, it does something

Starting point is 00:41:00 strange to our brains, right? If we experience and are exposed to a large number of threats to our groups, to the values that we hold dear, then we have this kind of trigger response thing that happens in which we feel called to default to this sort of kind of tribal disposition in which our identity groups become much, much more salient and much more important, right? So if, if we see someone threatening a group that we hold dear, right, or a group whose values we hold dear, we feel called to defend them. And that's very unfortunate because I think that does lead to polarization in a very real way. Um, because it's, it's very easy to, to kind of, uh, tap into this or default to this us versus them mentality when we are exposed to a lot of these threatening narratives.

Starting point is 00:41:48 And again, I don't think it's indicative of reality. Unfortunately, when we're seeing so many of these kind of problematic ideas in front of us, it actually distorts our perception of what is really happening in the world. And so having looked at this as closely as you have, are you shining a light on a problem or are you offering a solution? Because it seems like it's pretty tricky to fix this. It is. I agree. And it turns out that there are a number of different interventions. For consumers, I think it's really important to recognize context and when context is lacking from information online. So a lot of the time when we're exposed to triggering information, we feel the immediate

Starting point is 00:42:33 desire to share it onwards and to confirm our kind of initial impulse about what the other person said or what this kind of means about the wider world. And it turns out that actually fast flowing information, which is the kind of means about the wider world. And it turns out that actually fast-flowing information, which is the kind of information that we tend to see online much of the time, it tends to be lacking context, it tends to be emotional, and it tends to be inaccurate. So the faster the information travels, there's a strong correlation with inaccuracy, lack of context, and emotionality.

Starting point is 00:43:00 So it's important for us as individuals to recognize that most of that fast traveling information is actually not going to be the best reflection of reality. But do you think, or is there any evidence to suggest that people are tiring of this? Because I remember, you know, when I would see things online and would get all like, oh my God, it doesn't bother me anymore. I don't get out. Right. I don't just, I either don't believe it or I don't care. Like I, like I said earlier, I just, I'm tired of it. And, and I don't take, stop what I'm doing and take the time to

Starting point is 00:43:36 write a response. I just, is, is, is that a common reaction? Definitely. And I think that there's good things about checking out and bad things about checking out. You know, the good thing is that, yeah, like, you know, if there's too much heavily emotional information that we're exposed to, if there's too many people angry about things, then yeah, we're, you know, it's like, it's like, but there is a deeper cynicism with this that's problematic. And it's kind of a balance, right? You want to be exposed to good information on a regular basis. And unfortunately, as I said, these places, these social spaces are becoming so deeply important for our discourse and for how we get the news and for how we see

Starting point is 00:44:18 our neighbors and our friends and more particularly how we see our enemies, right? And how much we dehumanize our enemies, you know, how much we hate our enemies. And so there is this like cynicism, which unfortunately is a little bit antithetical to being in a democratic society. Like we need to be engaged around the problems that we're actually facing to know what is really broken so we can fix it. And that's very much the point of a democracy. You know, democracy itself is meant to be kind of like an outrage machine insofar as like, we're meant to get together, identify the problems, get outraged about those problems together, and then focus on electing representatives that can solve those problems for us. And when that process of parsing reality on our own is distorted, then we actually might solve the

Starting point is 00:45:06 wrong problems and make new problems in the process. One thing we haven't talked about is in this mix of social media and news and everything, we hear that there are bots, that there are robots that are posting things that really inflame. So you can talk about that. We have all, you may or may not know it, but we've all been exposed to bots online. There's literally millions of fake accounts that have been developed and launched, many by foreign actors, both Russian and Chinese bot farms that are built to kind of sway public opinion around certain issues. And I'll say this again to make people more cynical and more skeptical about this stuff,

Starting point is 00:45:49 because a lot of these platforms are doing their best. This is one thing they're really trying to do is reduce the amount of bots that are found on these platforms. But if I say something, if you want a certain message, a certain idea to get out there, what you can do is you can actually build a bot farm, or you can hire a bot farm, there's actually kind of dark web services that do this. And you can generate a whole large number of fake accounts that will amplify the specific message that you want to get out there. So you know, if you see a tweet online, then and it has, you know, has some kind of some outrageous statement in it or a news item that might not be totally true. And you see, you know, a huge number of retweets and likes on that.

Starting point is 00:46:33 Sometimes what can happen is they can seed that post and make it look like it's much more popular than it actually is. So that's a that's a boosting, a signal boosting of a certain type of information that is actually not accurate or reflective of reality. Well, this is certainly something important to think about, because as we discussed, I mean, this isn't going away. And in many ways, it seems the outrage on social media is only getting worse. So it's something important to address. I've been talking to Tobias Rose Stockwell. The name of his book is Outrage Machine, How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy, and What We Can Do About It. There's

Starting point is 00:47:13 a link to that book in the show notes if you would like to read it. Appreciate it. Thanks, Tobias. Thank you, Mike. This was awesome. Really appreciate it. Grocery shopping on a hot summer day is a completely different errand than grocery shopping other times of the year because of the heat. According to the FDA, you really need to get food home in the fridge within two hours if it's at room temperature. But on a hot summer day, like 90 degrees, the rule is one hour max. On a hot day, the interior of your car and trunk can be sweltering, as I'm sure you know. And one quick stop or traffic hassle on your way home can ruin that expensive food

Starting point is 00:47:57 and put you and your family at risk for food-borne illness. You might want to consider keeping a cooler or insulated bag in your trunk so when you're loading your car with groceries, you can take a minute to put the meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, and frozen food items in the cooler and buy yourself some time. And that is something you should know. Podcast listeners love recommendations because there's so many to choose from. It's nice to hear that somebody says, hey, I like this podcast. You might want to give it a listen. And I'm hoping you would take a moment to say that to someone you know about this podcast and recommend it. I'm Mike Carruthers.

Starting point is 00:48:35 Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures?

Starting point is 00:49:18 You got this. No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a... Cicada. I'm crying.

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Something You Should Know - Favorite Food Origins You Never Knew & Why The Internet Creates So Much Outrage In People

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