Something You Should Know - How Smart People Can Make Dumb Choices & The Serious Dangers of Social Media

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

UPGRADE TO SYSK PREMIUM! To unlock ad-free listening to over 1,000 episodes plus receive exclusive bonus content, go to ⁠⁠⁠ https://SYSKPremium.com  Chances are, your home is full of things you don’t use, don’t need, and maybe don’t even recognize. Listen to the start of this episode and you’ll discover a simple list of household items you can toss out today — without a second thought. Clearing them out will free up space and make room for what truly matters. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/things-in-your-home-to-get-rid-of_n_4748455 Even the brightest minds can make surprisingly poor choices — sometimes with disastrous results. Panic plays a role, but there are also subtle psychological traps and quirks of human behavior that push smart people toward bad choices. Here to talk about this is Christopher J. Ferguson, professor of psychology at Stetson University in Florida and author of the book Catastrophe!: How Psychology Explains Why Good People Make Bad Situations Worse (https://amzn.to/3VKFHaF). Spending hours on social media can slowly reshape how you see the world — and it can even become addictive. That’s exactly what happened to Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler, MD, a social media influencer and author of Influenced: The Impact of Social Media on Our Perception (https://amzn.to/3EnuzsM). In this eye-opening conversation, Brian shares his personal journey through social media addiction and explains what happens in your brain every time you click “Like.” This is an essential listen for anyone worried about their own screen time — or concerned about how much time their kids spend online. What happens to your pets if you pass away before they do? The answer may surprise you — and it’s not as simple as putting it in your will. Listen and discover the essential steps to ensure your furry friends are cared for exactly as you wish, no matter what happens to you. http://pettrustlawyer.squarespace.com/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! SHOPIFY: Shopify is the commerce platform for millions of businesses around the world! To start selling today, sign up for your $1 per month trial at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! QUINCE: Keep it classic and cool with long lasting staples from Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! HERS: Whether you want to lose weight, grow thicker, fuller hair, or find relief for anxiety, Hers has you covered. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://forhers.com/something⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's code happy me at happy mammoth.com for 15% off your entire first order. Today on something you should know, some things you really need to throw out right now, and I promise you'll never miss them. Then we'll explore the reasons why really smart people can make amazingly stupid choices. Generally speaking, when we're in a period of experiencing heightened emotion, we tend to make worse decisions. The more frightened we are, the more angry we are. Even with positive emotions sometimes, the more excited, the more happy we are, we tend to make worse decisions. Also, what could happen to your pets if you die?

I don't think you really know. And too much social media can mess with your brain and it's not just a kid problem. The sobering statistic is that about 21% of adults admit to being addicted to social media. So it's definitely more pervasive than people think, especially in adults. All this today on Something You Should Know. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex.

your events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at mx.ca. slash yamex. Something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life.

Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. I know you have some things in your house. I know what they are. And I'm about to tell you to get rid of them. Hi, I'm Micah Rothers. Welcome to another episode of something you should know. So look, we all accumulate stuff.

We all accumulate the same stuff, and we all have the same tough time throwing it out, even though we don't need it or want it. And here are a bunch of those things that you almost certainly have that you can toss out right now and free up some space in your home. First of all, that extra pack of buttons that came with that shirt that you don't even have anymore. You can throw that out.

Old holiday cards, old Christmas cards, birthday cards, graduation cards. There's a pretty good chance in your freezer or your refrigerator, you have things wrapped in foil and you have no idea what's underneath that foil. Get rid of that. Old calendars. Promotional mugs or glasses that are way in the back of the cupboard that you never use. Ticket stubs to concerts, movies, or play. that you don't even remember going to.

Expired coupons. They can go. All of those half-scrawled lists, notes, and post-its reminding you of things that you don't even remember what they are. Old invitations. Hobby supplies for hobbies that you don't even have anymore. Paperback novels you'll never read again. DVDs that you'll never watch again.

And there's probably some old VHS video tapes. laying around and you don't even have a player anymore. Printed recipes that you've tried, didn't like, but you save the recipe anyway. Pends that no longer work. And then all of those chopsticks, duck sauce, ketchup, hot mustard, soy sauce packets, and pizza refrigerator magnets that you just don't need. And that is something you should know. It's Marie Antoinette Month on the Vulgar History Podcast.

Every week in September, we will be talking about the notorious French queen. Why is she still talked about today? Did she really say, let them eat cake? Spoiler, she did not. Why do people still think she deserved to have her head cut off? We're going to be taking a deep dive into Marie Antoinette's life and world to try to answer the question, how do you solve a problem like Marie Antoinette? Listen to vulgar history wherever you get podcasts.

You've probably noticed in your life, that when there's an emergency or a catastrophe or when something in your life goes extremely wrong, you have trouble thinking, you panic, and as a result of panicking, you can make some pretty bad decisions in that moment. Sometimes those decisions make the problem even worse. So why is it we do that? Well, here to discuss this is Christopher Ferguson. He is a professor of psychology at Stetson University in Florida, and he's author of the book Catastrophe, how psychology explains why good people make bad situations worse. Hey, Christopher, welcome to something you should know.

Thanks for having me on today. It's a real pleasure. So to get people on board here with what you're talking about, give me an example of how good people make bad decisions even worse. Actually, one of the instances that really caught my attention I thought was really fascinating, was the case of Air France 447, which is a flight that crashed in the Atlantic about 10 or so years ago. And a lot of things went wrong on the flight. There were some mechanical issues. But the basic issue that resulted in the crash is that the pilot misperceived what was going wrong with the plane.

The plane was losing altitude, and he believes that the right thing to do was to pull back on the stick, which is kind of normal sort of response and flying a plane to increase altitude. And what in fact was happening is he was putting the plane into a stall. And what's interesting about that is he kept trying the same thing over and over and over and over again rather than trying something different. And that's the kind of the example of the sort of error that interests me.

It's not that he was a bad person. It's not that he was a bad pilot. It's just in a moment of a panic. really, you know, when things were going wrong, he kind of got stuck in the situation of thinking that a particular behavior really, really should work. And as a consequence, wasn't able to think his way through and try something different that might actually have possibly saved that plane and the passengers that were on it. Well, I'm sure everybody's felt that panicky feeling and you know, you can remember how difficult it was to make a decision when you're in

panic mode. Absolutely. I mean, one of the things we find is that generally speaking, when we're in a period of experiencing heightened emotion, we tend to make worse decisions. There are a lot of things that happen that result in us making bad decisions, but the more frightened we are, the more angry we are, even with positive emotions sometimes, the more excited, the more happy we are. We feel like we're in love, for instance. We tend to make worse decisions. It makes it more tempting for us to look for evidence that supports the way we view the world already and ignore that which does not. And that can result in us making, you know, horrible decisions even though our intentions are good. And it makes you wonder

why human beings have this. It seems like it's fairly common, almost universal, that when panic sets in, people tend to do what appear to be in retrospect pretty dumb things. But at the time, seemed like a good idea. You would think that evolutionarily, that we would work that out of us. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what happens is with a lot of these situations, if you're feeling fear, if you're feeling anger or something negative in particular, you may be, at least evolutionarily speaking, in the situation of needing to make a very fast decision.

So if you think of the example of, you know, 20,000 years ago, you're an early human, you're in the Savannah or some other place, and you come across another human being. you need to make decisions about that person very, very rapidly and whether that person is going to kill you or not, basically. So you need to come to that decision very, very quickly. And so what happened is that we evolved a lot of cognitive tendencies to try to evaluate situations rapidly with limited data. Now, that might serve as well for being chased by Tiger, for instance, but those same adaptations don't always serve as well in a modern, complicated. multiracial, you know, both the ethnic society. So again, what we tended to do in the past is we tend to look for superficial differences to try to evaluate, is this person, you know, different from

my group? And knowing that was useful, you know, in terms of estimating how likely that person was to be aggressive. But it's not very useful to us, again, in the modern United States, where you now see the same types of cognitive biases result in ethnocentrism, racism, and other kinds of of problems that we're dealing with today. So give me some more examples of how this plays into our thinking and our lives and the decisions we make. Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, some of the kind of typical cognitive biases that we see include things like the, one is what we call the availability heuristic, which means that if it's easy for you to remember an event, you tend to overestimate how frequent that is and how big of a problem it is. So once again,

I mean, the example of plane grasses were kind of a classic example, that plane crashes tend to be very memorable. They get a lot of news attention. They're actually quite rare for the most part, and they've been increasingly rare over time. But what happens is people see these. They see them on the news, and they tend to worry more about traveling by air. So we see a lot more people who have phobias of air travel and things like that. People tend to overestimate how frequent air crashes actually are compared to. automobile accidents and what happened is a lot of scholars and of course the you know the air travel

industry spent decades telling people over and over and over again that you're actually more at risk traveling by car than by air and it's eventually kind of worked you know so i think people kind of know that now but it did take a lot of effort to present the data over and over and over over and over again to get past some of those cognitive biases involving the availability heuristic. We see the same kind of phenomena with things like people overestimate how frequent crime is, people overestimate how frequent a lot of bad things. We really have this kind of focus on bad things and if we can remember specific bad things like mass homicides or another good example, we tend to think they're a lot more common than they are. That's just one example

of a very common cognitive bias. I mean, there are others, but basically we tend to adopt particular beliefs about the world, and it can be very challenging, not impossible, but it can be very challenged to get people to challenge those beliefs by looking at data and actual evidence. But that's just how people are. I mean, we all do it, and that's the way human beings are. So what's the harm? What's the problem?

Well, oftentimes what happens is that we end up trying to fix. a problem, either fix a problem that doesn't actually exist, or we end up fixing the problem in the wrong way, or we fix the wrong problem. You know, so there may be an example of a real issue. So let's take, for instance, climate change, you know, so climate change, you know, most of the data suggests is a real problem that, at least in part, humans are contributing to this problem, and there are lots of different solutions that we may have to deal with that. One of these is this issue of nuclear energy, right? You know, so the evidence we have right now, you know, and I'm a psychologist, I'm not a energy researcher by any means, but, you know, I look through this evidence, you know, and considering this, but the evidence suggests that for the most part, nuclear energy is

pretty safe that the number of deaths attributable to nuclear energy is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction compared to, you know, coal-fired plants and, you know, even natural gas and things like that. But there's a lot of resistance, you know, from particularly the left in regards to nuclear energy. People are worried about the radiation. They're worried about contamination. They're worried about accidents like Three Mile Island, which, you know, continues to be brought up, even though that happened decades ago. And as a consequence, you can end up in situations like what Germany is facing right now. They are struggling to meet their energy needs because of the war in Ukraine. And they've been shutting down their nuclear reactors. And what we're seeing in Germany is

because of that sort of suspiciousness of nuclear energy, what they're doing is they're going back and firing back up their old coal plants, you know, to try to meet the needs that they need to get for energy over the winter. So there you see a situation where, you know, people are overestimating the risk. There's not zero risk, but people are overestimating the risk of nuclear energy. And it's actually causing people, at least in Germany, to move back into using a lot of fossil fuels, which is going to worsen the problem of climate change. rather than fix it. So again, you have a movement from the left that is worried about climate change. That's a good faith effort. It's a real problem. But their fears about nuclear energy

are actually making that situation worse rather than better. We're discussing how very smart people can make very bad decisions and get things wrong. My guest is Christopher Ferguson. He's a professor of psychology and author of the book Catastrophe. How psychology explains why good people make bad situations worse. Hi, I'm Adam Gidwitz, host of Grim, Grimmer, Grimmist. On every episode, we tell a grim fairy tale. Not the cute, sweet versions of the fairy tales

that your children have heard so many times. No, we tell the real grim fairy tales. They're funny, they're weird, sometimes they're a little bit scary. But don't worry, we rate every episode, grim, grimmer, or grimist, so you, your child, your family can choose the episode that's the right level of scary for you.

Tune in to Grim, Grimmer, Grimmist, and our new season, available now. Hey, it's Hilary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and, of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen.

If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories, about human relationships and, you know, periods, the Longest Shortest Time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at Longest Shortestime.com. So Christopher, what you were saying, what you were talking about, about nuclear energy, that's an example of something I've always found interesting, and that is nuclear energy has a reputation. It has an image that, you know, as you say, the left thinks it's horrible. and therefore, if you're on the left, you kind of have to adopt that stance. And a lot of people, if you ask them about nuclear energy, wouldn't even know very much about it.

They just adopt the stance because that's what their tribe does. Absolutely. Yeah, unfortunately, a lot of attitudes in our ways of thinking things do come from the sense of social conformity. So if you look at things like climate change, you'll see that. Neither Republicans or Democrats or the right or the left are necessarily any more educated on this issue. So Republicans tend to be more skeptical of climate change because that's what Republicans do. And, you know, Democrats make fun of that a lot. But the reality is that, you know, Democrats believe in climate change because that's what Democrats do.

You know, it's not really that they know more about climate change than Republicans. We tend to oftentimes adopt or attitudes about the world. world by looking around and seeing, you know, who also believes in something. And if they're people that are, quote, unquote, on our side or part of our tribe, as you said, we tend to be more likely to adopt that. It's actually fairly rare to find people who are, it does happen, but it's fairly rare to find people who are willing to kind of buck the social trend, to stand up to their own group and say that their own group may be wrong. And of course, when they do, they're usually immediately punished for, you know, for doing so. So certainly, you know, social conformity is a big part

of the problem we have in making in good decisions. I mean, I see a lot of the people that have these signs on their yard of, you know, we believe in science. And I actually tend to, you know, speaking as a scientist, worry about that because science really isn't a group of thoughts that are handed down from on high that are absolutely true. It's a process, you know, and that process is messy and complicated and nuance. And very rarely the science on most issues tell either the left or the right what they want to hear. So I think that, you know, those statements tend to be a little bit of a distortion of how science works. But there again, you can see that there's this kind of like moral element to it, that what they're hoping for is that science is going

to support their moral worldview of how the world should work. And it's very difficult. Once people start to wrap their beliefs in a sense of moral goodness, it becomes even more difficult to help people understand that things may be more nuanced or difference or that they might even be, again, in good faith, simply wrong. Talk about toilet paper. The toilet paper is a great example of how everybody kind of knows something is wrong and there's nothing you can do about it because of the way that like, you know, social processes inform people's decisions. So, of course, this is referring to the early days of COVID-19 when suddenly we were all without toilet paper and nobody could figure out why. So this is a kind of a behavioral phenomenon

that's called, you know, an availability cascade, you know, so basically once the ball kind of gets rolling on something, even if you know that it's misinformed, it's really does. difficult to do anything about it. So at the beginning of COVID-19, if people don't remember, all of a sudden there were these toilet paper shortages because people were hoarding toilet paper. Toilet paper had nothing to do with COVID-19, but essentially a few people started to hoard toilet paper. And we could kind of look at them.

I think initially people did it saying, well, they're irrational. What they're doing doesn't make sense. But once they begin to do it, then even if you recognize that hoarding toilet paper, paper is kind of silly, well, you begin to think, well, if they're hoarding toilet paper, then I should begin to hoard toilet paper too because the less informed people are going to have all the toilet paper if I don't, you know. So basically, even if a process has started by people who perhaps are less rational, they're less informed, they're responding emotionally to that, it sort of traps us all in the same pattern. We really can't resist it or else, you know,

you can be the smart person saying, like, look, it's actually very easy to make toilet paper even during COVID-19, so I'm not going to hoard anything. And you're going to end up without toilet paper because everybody else is engaging in hoarding. And so it points out how these social processes can make it very difficult for people to make good informed decisions when everybody else around them is not. So other than looking at this and finding it really interesting, is there any advice from all of this? Yeah, I mean, yeah, absolutely there is. So what you can do is, you know, start presenting the data.

So people do actually kind of listen to data. You know, I kind of use the example. I actually have done a lot of research on violence and video games. I've been involved in that for 20 years. And when I first started in this field, everybody thought that violent video games caused mass shootings. And now very few people do, you know, some people still do. And it still comes up, absolutely.

But there's been a real change in public attitudes around video games over the last two decades. And a lot of that has been, you know, scholars, myself being one, but certainly other people as well, presenting the evidence over and over and over. There really just is not data to link violent video games to mass homicide. And, you know, what I kind of tell people, and this sounds a little depressing, is it really was a 15-year process, you know, that if you kind of start with people having a really wrong idea, let's say nuclear energy is dangerous, whatever it might be, and you have good data, and you present it over and over again calmly and rationally, you can expect within 15 years to have sort of changed public attitudes in a more data-based direction. So it does take a while.

You mentioned that in Germany, the problem with coal and nuclear, has it changed minds now that these coal plants are coming back online? Have people gone, oops, we made a mistake, or are they going, or not? Yeah. So you have really two different groups of people that, you know, when presented with the oops moment, you know, tend to react very differently. So with any kind of issue like that, you're going to get a certain group of people who are highly invested in the mistake.

You know, they stake their reputations. They made big promises about that issue. And generally, what we see is that those people almost never back down. Sometimes they do. And I have been impressed occasionally by some, you know, there have been a few people that will say, you know, I dedicated my life to X and it turns out X is wrong. You know, so there are some brave souls out there. But generally speaking, like the people who are most invested, they're the loudest activist, they're the loudest politicians. very rarely back down off of, you know, a big claim like that.

But then you have the general public, you know, who's much less invested, you know, in this issue and aim the data at them and try to bring them around. So, I mean, I've seen a little bit of movement on nuclear energy, just in the last year or two, as I think people started to understand that maybe nuclear isn't so bad. And I think that part of that is these situations where, You know, we're seeing that solar and wind and geothermal are really not succeeding in meeting the immediate needs that people have with energy. You know, there's just no way that solar and geothermal and wind and water are going to meet the needs of the European continent. So we're seeing a lot of Europe shifting back to coal, which is not the direction we want us to go.

And so I think people are starting to understand that some of the promises that were made about renewables, maybe 20, 50 years from now, maybe that really, really will work. But right now they're not. Well, this whole idea of how our emotions and our beliefs affect our thinking and our decisions is something that, you know, people don't think about, that we think, we like to think that we make decisions based on the facts, that we know we can look at a situation and understand it. And it's really interesting to hear how, you know, what you believe is probably influenced by a

lot more than the facts. I've been talking with Christopher Ferguson. He is a professor of psychology at Stetson University in Florida. And the name of his book is Catastrophe, how psychology explains why good people make bad situations worse. And there is a link to that book in the show notes for this episode. Hey, thanks, Christopher. Appreciate you being here. Awesome. Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me on. And hopefully this was useful. over. The gold standard of online casinos has arrived. Golden Nugget online casino is live, bringing Vegas-style excitement and a world-class gaming experience right to your fingertips. Whether you're a seasoned player or just starting, signing up is fast and simple. And in just a few clicks, you can

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Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, but am I wrong, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. It's pretty clear that our preoccupation with social media and its influencers is having a strong impact on how we think, feel, and perceive everything around us. In some ways, social media becomes a lens through which we see the world. And what's a bit scary is that you might not even be aware of its effect. You may think you're immune to it, but you're probably not. You are about to hear a story about a doctor who is also one of the leading authorities on human perception. He was

sucked into the world of social media and his life completely changed. And it can happen to you too. Whether you're an influencer on social media or you follow other influencers, this is an important discussion I think you'll want to hear. Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler is an MD and popular influencer on TikTok with over 3 million followers, and he is the author of a book called Influenced, the impact of social media on our perception. Hi, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here, Mike. So tell the story of how you got pulled into the world of being an influencer and how it affected you and not for the better. Basically, it really started. My story is that when we started with the pandemic, I had a lot of unaccustomed time on my hands. And at the time, my daughters were

14 and they said, Dad, there's some really good doctors on TikTok. And if you're interested, we can help get you started. And so I found my niche pretty quickly as a doctor calling out health-related videos that had gone viral with hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. But the information in them was not accurate. So people were relying on faulty information, and I was calling out those videos. And that's where my following really started to explode. And eventually getting me into the several million follower range.

and becoming known as one of the people to go to for the community in social media in general for these health videos. But where things took a deep turn was when I got so involved and essentially addicted to social media because of that rush of dopamine when you have videos going viral one after the other. and, you know, people are wanting you, they're commenting for you to comment, and it's just this huge rush of being a sort of virtual celebrity. It's dopamine that's getting stimulated in our brain. And so even though I'm a doctor, this problem affected me, and ultimately I was able to get through it with the help of my family, but I learned and realized that if it could affect me, it could affect you too or affect anybody. So what is this effect? What is it? And it's

not just people who have a following, but I assume this relates to people who are just the ones who follow. Absolutely. Yeah, that's most people who are followers and users. And every time you scroll up on a video, what's happening is you're getting a little bit of that dopamine and you get more for some videos and less for others. But it's like you're pulling us. slot machine lever and you just don't know the next one is it going to be a really good one that makes you feel good and entertains you or you learn something and that's stimulating dopamine and so it's the unpredictable nature of the scrolling of the videos which is why they are so addictive and also why gambling is so addictive too because of the same unpredictable component so yes this is a

bigger issue than people realize and it's not just a teen or child issue with becoming addicted. And addicted means what? Because addiction to gambling has a price. It's a monetary price. Addiction to watching TikTok videos. I mean, I watch TikTok videos and I'm a sucker for, you know, because they can be so satisfying at some level. But it's not costing me much and I can stop, typically, stop pretty easily. So there's a difference between. watching social media and losing money at the gambling table and Mike the hallmark of addiction is that it's interfering with some aspect of your life so for social media in my case what was happening is I would come home and my daughters would be telling me about their day and as teenagers

wanting to do that with parents is already a rarity right so but I'm on my device I'm so engrossed with refreshing my screen, for example, seeing how many more views I got on the video I just posted, responding to people's comments, looking at videos that I'm getting tagged to look at, to see if that's a video that is gonna be one that I'm gonna react to or comment on. So it becomes so engrossing

that I was actually ignoring essentially my kids. And that was damaging the relationship I had with them. And that also spilled over to, my wife as well in our relationship because I became so engrossed. I was missing out on a lot of family experiences because of my involvement in social media. To the point one time at their volleyball game, I snuck out to go do a TikTok live in the car and brought my scrubs. I have a certain look I have on social media. I've got my scrub top, my hat, my mask around my neck. And I planned to do this. I popped out missing their volleyball game and actually got caught because during lunch their

friends said, you know, your dad's doing a TikTok live right now. And they're like, oh, that's why he's not at the game. So I was missing out on a lot of family experiences. So it wasn't a monetary cost, but it was a relationship cost. And so that's one of the hallmarks of social media addiction is people forget and lose sight of the real relationships, which are ultimately the most important in people's lives. But that's you. I mean, that's a struggle that you deal with, but that's a pretty broad brush that pain everybody else with. Well, that's when people get addicted, right? So lots of people, like you just said yourself, that you can just turn it off when you want. So that's not an addiction. An addiction is when it starts to interfere.

year with other aspects of someone's life. That's part of the definition. And so for a lot of adults and teenagers, you know, this is an issue and social media is just going to continue to grow. So it's not going away. It's not just videos though. I mean, if I post something on a, on Facebook or whatever, it just, I do like to look and see, you know, how many views it get, how many likes did it get but I don't post that much and you know after a day or so I don't check it anymore I kind of forget about it so and that doesn't seem to me to be a problem but I understand what you're saying that but people who post all the time are always checking you know how many likes and all that and other than sucking up half your day what's the

harm I mean if that's how you want to spend your day what's the harm well the harm potentially, like in my case was I was not paying attention to the real most important people in my life, which is my family. And I wasn't present, right? Like I'm present, but I'm not really present a lot of times. And so that caused a lot of stress. And to the point that they actually one time, the three of them basically had a TikTok intervention with me to explain like I've been out of control and not paying attention and not being present as a father and a husband. And initially, I was not open to this. I actually resented it because I thought, well, you know, you, my daughters were the ones

that got me started and here I have millions of followers. I have all this success. And now you're not being supportive. So again, when somebody is addicted to anything, a hallmark typically is they don't have insight that they are having a problem. And so I was in denial and I thought, well, I'm just going to double down my efforts and have even more success to show you. And then what happened once was one of my videos got taken down for a community guideline violation. And at that point on the platform, none of my videos could go viral for about two weeks. And so that really

forced me into a classic withdrawal situation, which also is a hallmark of addiction. When you don't get what you're addicted to, you go through withdrawals. So I had a lot of stress and anxiety and some mental health challenges during that period, but that was necessary because that allowed me to have the insight to, oh my gosh, like, what have I been doing with my family? Like I've been putting my virtual children ahead of my real children. And it gave me that realization of what I'd been doing. And actually, I felt really very guilty and remorseful and actually went to the bedroom and just cried.

And they forgave me after I apologize. But now I have a very healthy relationship with social media. And I'm still active. I'm still very active as an influencer. But I am existing with it in a much more healthy way now. And so do we have a sense, is there any sense of like how many people fall into that category of having trouble with it versus people who are users of it but can shut it off when they need to and live their lives the way they need to? Well, I think the sobering statistic is that about 21% of adults admit to being addicted to social media. So this is not really a teen situation.

and there's not at this point any official diagnosis yet, but it does, it's a real phenomenon. And it's definitely more pervasive than people think, especially in adults. And what about kids? And kids also. I was just visiting with a friend of mine who was from out of town with his teenage daughter. And, you know, she and he both admit like she's addicted to TikTok, for example. So we were talking about some of these things that she can do and he as a parent can do because a lot of parents also don't have the tools to even understand like where do you even start with your children to help modulate their behavior on social media. And the thing about children and teenagers is that their brains are still developing.

So the prefrontal cortex, which is our higher level of functioning in our brain, that's not going to really fully saddle and, cure if you think of concrete curing until about age 22 or 25. So they're really susceptible in the research that I did. We really discusses what those brain changes are and they're real. And the unsettling thing is in 10 years from now, 20 years from now as adults, nobody knows what the impact is going to be in the future until we get that time frame down the road and we can look back and see. So there's almost like a very large social media experiment happening right now with teens and children for that reason.

Well, it's hard to imagine preventing a kid from interacting with social media because all of their friends are. They would be so out of the loop if they were forbidden from participating. Well, there is a lot of pressure because friends are talking about the videos that they're watching and influencers that they're following. So there is a pressure and it makes it a lot of times challenging because remember, teens and children don't have the discipline, the critical thinking skills developed to be able to modulate it successfully as adults. And even adults, as we discussed, aren't great at it either for a certain percentage of them. When you look back

at your own experience, though. Do you, can you see it for what it was? And why couldn't you see it at the time that, I mean, did you really, what would you be thinking when you're in the car doing TikTok videos at your daughter's sports event? How do you justify that to yourself? I mean, what's the thought process? Well, at the time, I want to be of service. That's the whole reason I actually started on the platforms is because I wanted to be of service to help people understand in a public service way, which videos they can rely on and which ones they can't from a health point of view. So, and I'm also at the same point consumed by feeling the rush of that experience in being of service.

Essentially, it's like being a celebrity in the virtual world. So that clearly overrides. a lot of good decision making, which can certainly take responsibility for. But, you know, there's people who get addicted to all types of things and you look at them and you're like, well, how could that have happened? But again, because of that feedback loop in the brain for wanting more and more and more of that dopamine and what comes with it, that's the underlying cause that drives what's happening in terms of, you know, my behavior and other people's behaviors. And, you know, fortunately, my family forgave me, and now I've, and that's what I

developed, too, or certain systems that people can employ as users, as most people are users, not influencers, so that they can keep it under control and not have it affect their job and not have it affect their relationships and not have it affect their school. If you go back a couple of generations, you would have heard parents talking about how their kids are addicted to television. They're always watching television. How is this different from that? That's an interesting thought, except the one difference is you don't carry a TV around with you all day long. So once you leave the room, you're not watching TV anymore, whereas you go out, you go out to dinner, you go out for some event, you're just hanging

with friends or you're with family, your phone is with you all the time. So it's like, in that analogy that you discuss, it's like imagine if you could carry your TV with you, that's kind of the equivalent of what we have now. So it's a bit different than the TV situation, which is why it's much more of a concern right now. And so when people, I mean, when you go out to dinner, people are always checking their phones. I don't know what they're checking. Maybe they're checking voicemails or texts or social media or whatever i mean i sometimes will check to see if i've gotten an email or whatever but i don't go if i'm with other people i don't go on social media to see what's going on there because i'm in a room where stuff is going on here so when people do that

what what is it that compels them to do that largely it's phomo which is an acronym for fear of missing out and that's a very big driver for why people go to their phone or they hear notifications go off the dinging or a vibration or the screen lights up even if it's on lock screen that there's a notification and it's like being like Pavlov's dog right you get that notification you want to see what's happening and you go to the phone and you start checking so you know you have a good handle on it as you've described but unfortunately more and more people don't have that handle anymore and it's really difficult to self-regulate which um you know is part of the research that i did you know in putting putting this together and so what's the advice here what's the prescription to

to to help resolve this find a solution to recognize that social media is like fire it can be used for illumination, but you can also badly burn yourself. And you need to be aware of what the pitfalls are and then also understand what are some safeguards that you can even build in for yourself or for those around you. So give me some strategies here because, as you said, I mean, people wouldn't even know

how to begin to get a handle on this problem. So help me specifically take some baby steps to get a handle on this problem. Like one tip is turn off the notifications on your phone because that's what's a big draw. So if you have everything on silent, then at least you've eliminated the susceptibility to wanting to go pick up your phone. And then there's other things too that can stimulate dopamine in a more healthy way, like laughter, exercise, certain types of foods, certain types of aromatherapies.

and other activities that are dopamine releasing and make you feel good, but it's in a more healthy way. And you can also do that with other people and sharing the experience. Yeah. Well, it does, and listening to you, it just reinforces this idea that people have a sense that there's a problem here, I think, that they know they spend a lot of time on social media and they probably shouldn't and they probably feel a little guilty about it. But they don't stop they don't and and they've got all the triggers like the notifications and everything else on that's going to make it even harder to stop it's like i know there's a problem but maybe it's maybe nobody you'll notice or maybe it won't matter or maybe every oh everybody else is doing it

so it's okay for me particularly parents are just like they're out in the ocean without an or and without anything to try to help get back to shore with kids because parents aren't savvy like their kids are. So they don't really understand what they're doing. And because of that, they are at a real disadvantage, even though they want to help them. You know, they want them to not spend so much time that it interferes with school potentially and other things. But there's no tool set that's being provided to them. So open up that tool set. I mean, turn off notifications is fine, but that's a pretty mild strategy. What else can people do to, particularly parents do to tackle this? Well, one of them is, which is going to initially cause a lot of

anxiety is get on TikTok. If you're a parent, join it. Join the apps your kids are on. Because what research found is that when you are actually on the app and then discussing with your children, some regulation techniques, if you have the experience, you have credibility and you're talking to them from a position of credibility versus a parent who's just like, oh, we're just going to, you know, close it down and stop cold turkey. That's going to breed a lot of resentment. So not to say that parents, you need to start creating content on the platforms, but you should join them. You should see who the influencers, your children are following. And therefore, you can evaluate if that content is appropriate if those are good influencers, because not all influencers are good.

Well, your story is a cautionary tale, because if social media can affect you the way it did, it can likely affect anybody. And this is really important for parents, and really for anybody who uses social media, to understand what can happen. I've been talking to Dr. Brian Boxer Walkler. He's a medical doctor and author of the book, Influenced, the impact of social media on our perception. I'll put a link to that book in the show notes, and I'm reluctant, but I'll put a link into his social, to his TikTok account so you can see his videos if you would like to. Thanks, Brian.

Thanks for telling your story. Well, thank you, Mike. I appreciate being here with you. Have you ever thought what would happen to your pet if you died? Most people assume a friend or family member would step in and care for the pet, but don't count on it. In the eyes of the court, your pet is considered property. According to attorney Rachel Hirschfeld, author of the book Petriarch, there is a real chance that your beloved pet would be euthanized after your death without proper planning.

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One place I saw them, it was a website called Pet. trust lawyer.com. And that is something you should know. We don't ask for much, but one way you could show your support for something you should know is to tell a friend, ask them to listen and see what they think. It helps us grow our audience. I'm Micah Rothers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from the longest, shortest time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on right in the world of reproductive health, and we're covering it all. Birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy, menopause, consent, sperm, so many

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