Something You Should Know - The Fascinating Ways Things Spread & How Technology Controls You – If You Let It

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

Have you ever wanted to get someone to disclose more about themselves? This episode begins with a very simple strategy that will loosen someone up and get them to tell you a lot more about the details of their life. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12110-015-9225-8#page-1 How do things spread? By that I mean not just viruses like the flu or corona virus but also rumors and viral videos or fake news stories – why do some of these things gather steam and spread like wildfire? And then, why do they stop? Every year people catch the flu and then in the summer, it just stops. What stops it? Listen to my guest Adam Kucharski, he is an epidemiologist and author of the book The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread and Why They Stop (https://amzn.to/3f7oJh5).  What’s the connection between arguments and hunger? Well if you want to get along better with the people or person you live with – you need to hear me explain this interesting science. http://www.independent.ie/style/sex-relationships/are-you-rowing-with-your-partner-you-might-just-behangry-30191887.html You know that feeling of being a slave to your phone or to email? That feeling of always being available is taking a toll on you whether you know it or not. Journalist Ian Douglas has studied this extensively and has written a book called Is Technology Making Us Sick? (https://amzn.to/3f65wfX)  Ian joins me to explain how you are being manipulated into always staying available and what it is doing to your health. He also has some excellent strategies to deal with the problem without having to turn all your electronics off.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, we start with a simple way to get people to open up and reveal details about themselves. Then an explanation of why things spread. Not just things like viruses, but also videos, rumors, and fake news. People have a tendency to value novel information, which completely makes sense, just that new

information is often something that's valuable to us. By definition, if something is false, it's more likely to be new to us. So actually, there are these inherent characteristics of misinformation which might be helping them spread more than other sources. Also the fascinating connection between the arguments couples have and how hungry they are. And a lot of us are addicted to our phones and technology. And in fact, the thing that you need to know is that this is something that technology is designed to do. It's not simply neutral delivery of messages. It's trying to form a habit. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. something you should know with mike carothers

hi you know i subscribe to this service that once a week sends me an email with like a synopsis of the latest reviews on apple podcasts about this podcast and lately there have been some very nice kind complimentary reviews complimentary reviews. If you left one of them, thanks. And if you'd like to leave a review, I invite you to do so at Apple Podcasts or wherever else you listen, but there's always a place to leave a rating and review, and they are appreciated. First up today, you ever want to get somebody to reveal more about themselves?

Well, a good way to do it is to make them laugh. People who were shown videos of stand-up comedy routines were much more willing to share intimate details of their lives than people who watched neutral videos, according to a British study. The study's authors hypothesized that laughter is a social coaxer, making people feel more relaxed about the details they communicate. This could potentially explain why you think your best friends are also your funniest friends. Because laughter makes people more at ease, letting their guard down, which makes them feel more connected. Laughter and general playfulness are linked to stress relief, healthy blood sugar and blood pressure levels, as well as a stronger immune system.

And that is something you should know. Have you ever wondered how things spread? Not just the coronavirus or the flu or any other disease, but also things like rumors and viral videos. How do they spread? How does anything spread? And then those things that spread, what causes them to stop spreading? Adam Kucharski is an epidemiologist and an expert on how things spread. He's author of the book, The Rules of Contagion, Why Things Spread and Why They Stop. Hi, Adam. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Thanks for having me. So you talk about, you write about, the name of your book is The Rules of Contagion, implying that there are rules, that things spread according to a certain set of rules. Yet, as we look at things like the coronavirus, it seems that it's so hard to predict what's going to happen, where it's going so hard to predict what's going to happen, where it's going to happen, when it's going to happen, that there are no rules. I think there's a couple of things that make diseases and, I guess, contagion in general quite difficult to predict. One is that, you know, unlike sort of a weather system where, you know, if you're pessimistic

about the weather, that won't change the weather. but if you are pessimistic about what's going to happen about a disease if people are kind of concerned about it that will change behavior and that will kind of change the outcome um that we see and that's that's true whether you're talking of biological infections whether you're talking about content online that people might introduce policies to change whether you're talking about financial crises and what central banks do. I think another feature is often a lot of the contagion itself is undetected. Actually observing that moment where someone becomes infected is very difficult. We can try and piece it together from data later on. And again, this isn't just limited to biological viruses. In other fields, in the study of social behavior, a lot of debate around characteristics like smoking behavior or mental health or obesity.

How do these things spread? And it's very hard to observe the exact moment that an idea goes from one person to the other. We really have to take these quite patchy data sets and try and piece together what it means. So it's always looking back at what happened, not looking at what's happening right now. That's really been the case that we've had to kind of take data and try and work out what was going on. And there's good reasons for that. And if you want to study something like smoking, you can't get a lot of people to take up smoking and see how it spreads you know ethically that's just not a study you can run um but we are seeing with uh online content increasingly that kind of detailed analysis being done i mean a lot of companies will do a b testing they'll try out different ads online and see how people respond to them and see how they get uh picked up so i think

really the emergence of online content has enabled a lot of these theories and hypotheses about how things spread to be tested and to be studied in detail. Because obviously, if people are sharing and retweeting stuff, you can see that network, you can see from one person to another, how that's actually spreading, unlike a disease where you can't observe that process, and you have to try and estimate it. But when you look at a video that goes viral, isn't it just a lot of individual people sharing it? I mean, there's no other way it could be viral. It's just lots of people share it, right? I think one of the perhaps surprising things about online content is how it's spread doesn't really line up very well, I think, with the mental model a lot of us have

of how things go viral. So I think we have this picture that one person shares it to a couple more and they share it to a couple more and they share it and you get this exponential growth. It's doubling, it's tripling. But lots of videos and other popular bits of content don't tend to spread like that.

Often there's a single big amplification event in the center of it so we it'll be one individual it's got into their news feed and they've shared it widely or it'll be a news outlet and somehow it's got the attention of a journalist and studies of things that have gone viral online often find that there's this central major amplification event um at the heart of really anything that takes off. And I kind of ended up being on the end of this myself a few years ago. I gave a public lecture in London and it went up on YouTube and it got modest, got a few hundred views a day over a year or so.

And then suddenly it was getting thousands and thousands of views accumulating. And I went back to the people who had organised the event and asked them have you got any idea what's happened here yeah I can't work out how this is becoming popular and it turned out that somehow the YouTube algorithm had picked it up and just displayed it on the homepage so actually it wasn't really going viral it just been massively amplified by that single algorithmic action of one platform so it's usually some something promotes it widely rather than the i told two people and they told two people and they told two people exactly and i think there are there are examples of things that have become popular through that mechanism i mean something

like the ice bucket challenge is a good example because that was very much nomination based that you were nominating two people and they were nominating others. But overwhelmingly, when things become popular, typically we have these application events. And we see the same in disease outbreaks. We call them super spreading events where you have one big gathering or one big event that drives this transmission. And increasingly with online content with misinformation, we're seeing people trying to manipulate that process. We're seeing people trying to target high profile individuals or outlets and try and get these fringe messages into the mainstream by exploiting the fact that a lot of this transmission is very concentrated. In the case of a disease like the coronavirus, why is it so hard to put the genie back in the bottle? Is it because we find out about it just way too late? And if we had known sooner that people were spreading this virus, we could have stopped it?

Or at what point is the genie out of the bottle and there's nothing anybody really can do to stop it? I think the features of the coronavirus in particular made it very, very tough. There's been other viruses, obviously, that spilled over from animals into human populations. I mean, bird flu over the years, and there's been outbreaks in Chinese markets. But because initially and still those viruses don't transmit so well between humans, there's been time to intervene and shut down the markets and shut down those sources of infection. But when you have something like the coronavirus, where a lot of transmission is happening when people have mild symptoms or perhaps even before they develop symptoms, by the time you're getting

those severe cases and by the time you're getting people with pneumonia turning up in hospital, you've probably got a huge amount of community transmission. And so really, certainly in the early stages of this, the signals that countries were using to identify whether they had a problem, those signals would only be triggered by the point where you already had hundreds, if not tens of thousands of infections already. And obviously, when you're at that stage, dealing with 10,000 infections is much, much harder than dealing with perhaps a few dozen where they've got much clearer symptoms and easier to spot.

Why does it happen, for example, with the flu, when there's a flu outbreak, that at some point in the summer, it just dies off, it goes away, it just, people stop getting the flu. Why does that happen? There's a couple of reasons that viruses like flu have this pattern where they kind of emerge and then fade away. One is it sees an effect that viruses, their ability to persist in the environment will depend on the conditions, on the temperature, on the humidity.

And that obviously varies between different countries. There is also, during a flu season, quite a lot of accumulation of immunity. I mean, we've done a lot of analysis trying to estimate how often people get flu. And that's by using kind of antibody data and then working out these undetected infections. And really, there's evidence that particularly younger groups get flu probably every year or two. I mean, probably about half the population of kind of younger age groups get flu every year, but most just won't show symptoms. Yeah, well, we hear that with the coronavirus,

and I'm not sure I really understand it when they say people have the disease, but they have no symptoms, because isn't part of getting a disease to have symptoms? If you don't have symptoms, you may have been exposed to the disease but you didn't have the disease because to have it is to have it and get sick that's an important distinction to make uh so yeah having having the disease and being a case of disease uh would require you to meet a clinical definition for that disease. But if we're talking about the transmission of an outbreak, so if we're talking about why a flu outbreak might decline, if people are getting infected and building an immune response, then even if they're not showing

symptoms, they're still important to the outbreak dynamics. But as you said, they won't show up in the statistics for disease burden. And I think that's really, for many infections, an important distinction to make, because if you have a lot of infections, but very few people showing disease or being severely ill, that's a very different situation to something where pretty much everyone who gets it has a severe response. And certainly in the early stages of this outbreak, understanding which of the situations we were in was crucial. With the spread of the coronavirus, I mean, the virus has been around and amongst the population for six, seven, eight months now.

And it does seem that the experts haven't really been able to hit the nail on the head as to how it spreads, where it's going to spread, how it flares up. And maybe it goes back to what you were saying earlier, too,

is it really depends on how people behave, because it's people who give it to other people. And if we all did, you know, sit in the closet for six months, there probably wouldn't be very many cases. But why can't we get a better sense of what's going on? I think there's a lot of uncertainty. I mean, I think in part, there's been some misinterpretation about what people are trying to suggest is going to happen. I mean, we've certainly produced worst case scenarios and other groups have in a situation where you don't do anything and countries obviously have done a lot and that's changed the outcome. It goes back to that challenge of predicting these things things when policies are coming in so i think anyone who says they're confident of what the next six months is going to look like um you know really probably hasn't

thought this through but there is still a lot of uncertainty and that's why a lot of experts can't give clear answers to things like how much exactly the children contribute to transmission how much do people with um with no symptoms contribute know, if people have an antibody response, how likely is that to protect them against infection or getting severe disease later on? I think in part that's because of data collection, because a lot of the studies we have of these kind of detailed cases come from early countries that had the outbreaks under control. So obviously, by definition, if you have undetected transmission and you lose control of an outbreak, those are undetected bits of data that you're not going to have to study. So unfortunately, we do still have some pretty substantial gaps in how this thing spreads when you don't have these really stringent measures in place. Our conversation today is about how things spread. And my guest is Adam Kucharski. He is an epidemiologist and author of the book, The Rules of Contagion, Why Things Spread and Why They Stop.

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and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and 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. So Adam, I want to go back because I'm not sure I fully understood it.

Why does the flu stop in the summer? Why does every year the flu comes and it stops? Flu dies off for a combination of two reasons. One is seasonal effects in terms of the ability of the virus to survive because of things like changes in temperature, changes in humidity, perhaps changes in how people interact because if it gets warmer, people will be outside more. But I think there also is an accumulation of immunity that during a flu season, a lot of people get exposed to it, but don't develop symptoms, which means that it can't spread further in those groups. And those two things combined act to reduce the size of the outbreak

later in the season. And when you say changes in temperature and humidity, the change could be either way or you're specifically meaning it gets hotter? So in changing temperature, it gets hotter, but then also gets more humid. And there's been a very long and very active debate in the flu community of exactly what combination of those things are important, because we do get flu circulating and flu outbreaks in the tropics every year. So it's not a simple case of it circulates in the winter, but can't circulate anywhere warm. But it's likely to be this interaction of a few different things happening. And then every year when the flu comes back, it's a different flu, or it's often a different flu,

or it's a different strain of the flu or whatever. What happens? Where did it go? How does it come back? And why is it different than it was when it left? There's been a lot of nice work using genetic data looking at global circulation of these viruses. I think what tends to happen is that you might get a virus causing outbreaks in one population. And that obviously creates this pressure on the virus to pick up these mutations and try and elude that immunity. And then through international air travel, through various kind of routes, the virus will get into other populations

who wouldn't have had that specific newly mutated virus last year. So that population is more susceptible. So it causes outbreaks. And then it will start to, as you get immunity, it will get pressure on the virus to change again. And it's really that complex network of virus mutation, of outbreaks, of international travel that keeps this sequence of outbreaks going over time. Well, what I find really interesting and would like to get you to talk about it is how like false information spreads like rumors and fake news stories. How do they spread? Because they're kind of like a bad virus, but not a medical virus, but a virus of information. And it does seem like it's somewhat similar.

There's been a few studies in recent years of um false information online and one of the features that the research has noted is that people have a tendency to value novel information which completely makes sense just even from an evolutionary point of view that new information is often something that's valuable to us for for survival reasons or social reasons. By definition, if something is false, it's more likely to be new to us than something that's true. Because if it's true, we may well have heard it already. So actually, there are these inherent characteristics of misinformation, which might be helping them spread more than other sources.

Can you think of examples where that happened? I mean, early on, certainly in the the coronavirus outbreak we saw a lot of speculation about its origins and some of them got really bizarre i mean there were i know in the uk headlines about snake flu um that it was someone had speculated it was from snakes and obviously it's not a flu virus um but i think because that was if that was true it was such a new surprising bit of information that people felt very, very keen to share it, even though actually based on even what we knew at the time, it really didn't line up at all with the evidence that we had. concept of how things spread what in all the research did you find that you found really interesting or surprising that that that i would also that i would also one of the things that i thought was fascinating was people who study um evolution of fairy tales um and and using these similar ideas of of looking as you would a genetic sequence of a virus looking at characteristics of stories or

perhaps elements of um of cultural tradition and thinking of it in the same way that you have components and bits of a story that will mutate over time as it spreads from one culture to another for example one was goldilocks and that's in the original iteration it was a completely different character it was a really kind of angry, sweary old woman who was essentially harassing some bears. And then it's kind of evolved over time to be the story that we know today. So I think those insights into our history and our behavior and beliefs are really fascinating. I wonder what that's about. Is that just like the old, you know, telephone game that if enough people repeat a story story they change a little

bit a lot everybody changes it a little bit and by the time the thousandth person has retold it it's a whole different story i think there's certainly an element to that and there's been a lot of really nice experiments actually getting people to play that telephone game and finding which bits of information they retain and often it depends on people's backgrounds um so for example if you tell someone with a military background a story with a lot of technical information on you know perhaps locations or timings or this sort of thing they'll retain that information because that that's obviously what they're they're trained to identify as important information um but in many cases i think with the the spread of stories

and tales often they will be adapted to reflect the values of the society they're spreading in, because often there's an element of a moral lesson or information on how society ought to be structured. And so some of these variants do reflect perhaps the focuses and the values within the societies they spread. When you look back at other epidemics and pandemics, typically, how long does it take to get back to normal when the whole world has been disrupted the way we've been disrupted now? It really depends on how people respond to the outbreaks. For example, the Spanish flu pandemic circulated for a couple of years in some cases. There were multiple waves, in some cases three waves. But ultimately, that outbreak ended because immunity was accumulated. So some countries in the US, for example, did introduce social distancing early on in that pandemic, and it reduced the curves in some cases, suppressed transmission. But then these waves came

back and eventually populations developed some immunity. For other diseases like SARS, there were quite big shutdowns in Asia and quite stringent measures like contact tracing and quarantines. But that managed to bring it under control in a matter of months. I think the challenge we've got with the current coronavirus is the point we would need to build immunity based on what we currently know would take us so long to get to if we don't want to have overwhelmed health systems. Pretty much every country is doing all it can to contain it. I think some countries haven't contained it and probably won't. So it may well be that some immunity is accumulated that eventually slows down their outbreaks. But I think we're in a situation where countries don't want to let this take off and cause large outbreaks. But keeping it at a low level, we're really looking at a change in our

lifestyles until we get a vaccine or until we get better treatments that mean this is less of a threat. Otherwise, even if we manage to get rid of it in a local area, there's always a risk it can come back in from another country. So I think we're going to have to have that level of stringency, whether it's at a local level within communities, or whether it's having strict border restrictions, or what scale we want to do is really up to governments. But I think life is going to look different, certainly for a considerable period of time yeah because and i guess what i was also getting at was that even if a vaccine showed up today and everybody took it and we all knew it was it was 100 effective i still think i'd be very less likely to shake somebody's hand or to i mean

the the lingering effects of this pandemic seem like they're going to be around for a long time, even after, if we ever get a vaccine that works, it's going to change the way we interact with people. I think it's certainly going to have some long effects. And I think also just the length of time that we've had to already live under sort of very different lifestyles, I think a lot of

those habits probably will embed within populations. And even if we get a vaccine that works, I mean, we've only ever managed to fully eradicate one disease, now smallpox, back in the 70s. And that was an infection that had a very good vaccine. It travelled very well. It could get out into very rural areas. And it was an infection that came with very clear symptoms. So actually that kind of contact tracing based approach would really help identify a lot of these clusters of infection. So I think even if we get a good vaccine, it is going to take some time to get it out to people, to get people to deal with the risk. And depending on how many people accept the vaccine and are happy to have it and how well it works, we may still get some flare ups afterwards. Wait, did you say that we've only cured one disease? We've only wiped one disease fully off the face of the earth for humans in that smallpox. That's, when you say it like that, it's kind of surprising, because there's plenty of diseases

that we don't see much anymore. German measles, measles, those kind of mumps, those kind of things. But to realize that only one has actually been eradicated, that's kind of amazing, isn't it? It is. And there are a few other infections so measles is another one that only circulates in humans so if we were to manage to get rid of measles it's very difficult because it's far more contagious than um uh than covid is when people are susceptible um but that again is a human infection that you could wipe out the challenge with obviously coronaviruses unfortunately like other coronaviruses like flu, it circulates in animal populations as well. And we can't guarantee that there won't be another one. Well, it's interesting not only how things spread, but also that things

that seem to have nothing to do with each other seem to spread in the same way. Epidemiologist Adam Kucharski has been my guest. He is author of the book, The Rules of Contagion, Why Things Spread and Why They Stop. Thanks for joining me, Adam. Yeah, well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's good to chat. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong?

Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting 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 podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney?

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. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney countdowndown wherever you get your podcasts. People have always wondered, I think, whether or not technology affects our health. In the early days of television, there was concern that people just sitting around the house watching hours and

hours of TV was bad for us in a lot of ways. And now people are probably even more concerned that all the technology at our fingertips is likely not so good for our health or our happiness. Ian Douglas has been looking into this. Ian is a journalist who has written widely on science, technology, health, child development, and the ways in which they all collide. He's former digital development editor for The Telegraph in the UK, and author of the book, Is Technology Making Us Sick? Hi Ian, welcome.

Hello, nice to be here. So when you ask the question, is technology making us sick, what kind of sick are we concerned about all right so i'm mostly we're we're talking about stress here we're talking about uh stress has apart from uh sort of mental illness problems there are things like heart disease and obesity and diabetes when it affects our sleep you can add alzheimer's disease strokes some cancers that sort of thing losing sleep is disastrous to health. So that's the extreme end of it.

But it's mostly thriving and mental well-being that we're talking about for everyday people. But there's a particular way that modern personal technology endangers our well-being. But there are fortunately very simple and straightforward ways to alleviate that. So explain how this works in detail, how this technology is causing all these problems. Okay, so there's a cycle. So personal technology is based around, it has been for some time, based around the idea of habit forming. All of the big technology companies want to induce habits in you. There's a cycle, it's called the hook cycle. It's used by of the big technology companies want to induce habits in you. There's a cycle, it's called the hook cycle. It's used by all the big technology companies we use every day. It's essentially trigger, action, variable reward and investment. Say a friend of yours, Bob,

uses the same social networks as you. So you're in touch quite a lot through these social networks. And one day he posts a picture, his daughter's been in homeschool and she's done a wonderful project on something and he's very proud to post a picture. Now when that happens, a little red dot appears on your phone screen. That's a trigger. With Bob and you, it's Facebook and it's a little red dot caused by Bob's picture. So you tap on the icon. That's your action. Trigger action. And then you cement the habit by the networks encourage you to give something of yourself. So you hit like on Bob's photo. You had a comment saying this looks great. The habit is becoming more and more ingrained and you're more likely to act on it when you see that little red dot

again. So this is great. Work also comes into this. So the big work management tools also use this cycle. So email or Slack or Basecamp or Microsoft Teams, all of those things. A message or an alert arrives from your project manager or your boss. That's the trigger. So you follow the link.

Your action is acting on the message that you've received. You feel job satisfaction in various ways from being able to do the things you have to do. So there are your variable rewards. And then you send off an email of your own. You propose an improvement. You work on your appraisal that's coming up. All that sort of thing. It builds the habit. It builds a positive habit. It's not as fun as you and Bob, but it is still a good habit to have. These are ways that technology helps us. But, and then we come to the but, they encroach on each other. Each of these habits, each of these applications just tries to get as much attention for itself as it can.

And so they get into each other's way and you end up with more than one call on your time, what psychologists call the double bind. Now, this is a direct route to stress. And so you get work triggers at home, friend triggers when you're with your family and domestic things going on when you're in a meeting. So the sociologists say always on, never done. That sums up how we feel when we have tasks set for us by conflicting people and organizations that we're always available to. And with this personal technology, we're always available. Well, I think everybody's experienced that.

But, you know, life is full of stress. I mean, if it isn't this, it's something else. What is so special what is so unique or so harmful about this technology stress habit forming technology is designed by very clever people in order to form habits those habits are things that you do without thinking and it's very easy to get to the point where you have these habits and you don't think of turning it off because you have an internal compulsion to follow the demands of the triggers that you're getting from your technology it's it sounds easy to turn things off and in fact

if you're conscious of the triggers and you're conscious of what's happening here then it is easy to turn it off and we can go through ways of doing that but it's it's really the thing that you need to know is that you realize that this is something the technology is designed to do it's not simply neutral delivery of messages it's trying to form a habit. Some might listen to your description of the stress and say, if I turned it off, if I didn't have those things on, if I couldn't keep my eye on everything, that would be stressful because I'd be worried about what I'm missing. Yes. Another distinction psychologists make is between integrators and segmenters. Now, an integrator tries to do everything all at the same time. So they bring their work home,

they are aware of everything that's happening at home while they're at work. Now, while a segmenter takes chunks of time, like being at work, for example example or being at home and completely blocks everything out from all of their other little realms now each person decides how much of a segmenter or an integrator to be the key to feeling uh feelings of competence is being able to juggle all of those and it's the it's the taking control of your technology that allows you to do that otherwise it can run away with you and so what's so what's the solution here what's the answer okay so the answer is uh that i mean that with any uh project anything you want to do then there are three levels to it, right?

Objective, strategy and tactics. The objective is thriving with technology. Strategy has to be to understand it and learn how to control it, because otherwise it can control us. And the tactics are what we're actually going to do to control that. The first thing, the first thing I'd like everybody to do is you talk about being able to turn things off it's simply doing that but turning everything off as you say uh cuts you off from all sorts of things and it's very stressful in itself so what you do go to your phone uh it's settings alerts on ios and settings apps and notifications on Android. And you can set a level for every single app.

So if your boss needs to get in touch with you or your child's school needs to send you a message, then you get an alert. But if the app you downloaded on a whim six months ago and have never used since decides that it needs your attention, it can't get through to you. And that is transformative in people's lives, just being able to go in and turn everything off like that. But keeping the ones they want is very, very positive step to take on the road to having less stress in controlling your technology. What the idea of of turning everything off at least for a while like you could probably turn everything off for an hour maybe two hours and probably not get too stressed out yes and there are apps that can help you do that things like anti-social and self-control and then they just block everything for a while and that's great but it's a crutch it's using it's using blocking rather than control

um if you if you you then get to the end of your hour and you're in exactly the same position that you were at the beginning of it you just had a tiny break so they you can use those and i would recommend using those particularly at the beginning uh when you're just feeling overloaded. But really, it's finding your own level and feeling in control of the alerts and the triggers that gets you in a better position. It seems though, that people who have this problem, that they have all this technology that's interrupting and competing for their time and all the things you've been talking about. That people know it, that this is something that this has become part of their life. It's kind of like, you know, telling somebody who smokes cigarettes,

you really should stop because it's bad for your health. But, you know, they're really not going to stop because there is something about it. There is something about getting those notifications of being connected all the time that is, I guess, perversely in a way satisfying and people are hooked on it. the way things are designed and but it's not necessary and it's not even necessary to be in all of your technological loops all the time in order to stay connected people feel it's true because it is true it's it is the case that uh they have an onslaught of information and they can then pick and choose which bits of it they're going to act on, which is a stressful and difficult way of managing things. It can be easier than that and it can be easier than that with the tools we already have. So the basic message here I think is that there's no reason to feel the level of stress that we do simply to stay in touch.

The technology is more sophisticated than that. It can allow us to set priorities for ourselves and our families and our work without taking away any of the effectiveness of the communication that we enjoy and rely on. Yeah, well, I think everybody's had the experience of, for whatever reason, being unattached to everything, either on vacation or just, you know, there's a blackout and there's no power that somehow it's kind of pleasant. It's kind of comforting to know that nobody can find me right now. Yes, long flights are a very good thing for that too. Yes, it is wonderful to cut off completely every now and then. Being in control of that is the key to it, I think.

They're in a cabin in the mountains with no reception whatsoever. It's a wonderful place to go to once in a while. But our society couldn't function if we just cut ourselves off completely. But we do know, if we've had that experience, that there is some benefit to doing that, because it feels good when you do it, when you have to do it. It does, and there are levels of it there's unfettered all of my screaming for my attention all of the time which is the way an awful lot of people live and then there's completely cut off can't speak to anybody but there's there's a look there's a very big

spectrum in between uh that we can inhabit and and it's up to us which bit of that spectrum we live on. What's your sense of the best way to start? If somebody's thinking, all right, well, I can give this a try. So do what first? First of all, set your app notifications. That's the really transformative thing that everybody should do. And then after that, go through your emails. Email has been around for nearly 50 years now and but it's still the primary method of electronic communication and digital marketing

in particular so there's an unsubscribe link on all of your uh sort of regular emails and there's a tiny little cognitive load for each one even if you ignore it and scroll past it or delete it there's a little bit of your brain a little bit of your attention that's given to it um so there are some that you'll be able to unsubscribe straight away and you won't care about and it won't matter and then there are some that you'll have to think about and some you'll definitely want to keep and again it's about keeping the useful ones uh it's not a detox. You're taking control of what you do. And then there's a thing called Inbox Zero, which is also found very useful by a lot of

people where you set aside a few minutes every hour and say, this is my email time. And then you do it and you get through everything and you don't leave anything undone. And that's it's such an incredible feeling when you when you know that you've dealt with all of your tasks. You haven't given yourself too many tasks, but you've dealt with all of your tasks in that time you've allotted. And then find yourself free after that. It's an incredible feeling. Well, you know, I get that feeling when I when I am connected, when I have got my email on and my phone is on and I know people can get to me and I clear everything out.

There's no notifications. There are no messages. There's no emails. I like that feeling. It's a good feeling. It doesn't last long. It doesn't last very long. Well, that's the thing.

It's much easier to achieve it and to keep it lasting a bit longer if you control the number of triggers you have coming in in the first place. If you edit the number of hook cycles that you're in, then that good feeling is far easier to achieve and hold on to. I think, too, there is some sort of, well, there's a lot of individualness to this. Because, you know, I've heard other time management people say, don't check email first thing in the morning. If I didn't check my email first thing in the morning, I would just sit here and worry about it. So telling me not to check my email first thing in the morning, that's just never going to fly. That's never going to fly. Absolutely. And that's something that we all have to learn is how we feel in control of this. Because you're absolutely right. The feeling of not being in control can result from having far

too much information and alerts throwing at us. And also, it can come from having far too much information and alerts throwing at us. And also it can come from having blocked them all out, knowing that there's a whole world of work and family and relationships out there that we've somehow cut ourselves off from. And that can be just as lonely as being on the mountaintop. And yet we know we've done it to ourselves. Now, I would say it's very stressful to take any hard and fast rules about this. It's purely about finding your own level and what you're comfortable dealing with.

I think that what's interesting and also troubling about this is that people sort of know this. We've heard that there's a problem with being connected all the time, but I think the problem's getting worse. People aren't stepping up and saying, all right, I mean, some people are probably, but generally speaking, people are ignoring the advice and staying as connected as they can be because that, I don't know, it helps alleviate some of their anxiety or whatever that is. But it doesn't seem like this problem is getting any better.

That's because the technology companies are so very good at what they do. Remember, the five biggest companies in the world are entirely dependent on this hook cycle. All of the Google and Amazon and Facebook, these companies, there are trillions of dollars at stake. And so they work incredibly hard at making sure that their habits are very well embedded in your daily life. But they're also incredibly easy to break as long as you're aware of the fact that they're simply a habit induced by certain very simple steps that we all go through every day

well it's good to hear this and it's good to know this that when we're feeling stressed out because we're getting notifications on our phone and emails in our inbox this is all deliberate this is all habits that we've that we've grown accustomed to. And when you realize that, then you can do things to undo them. Ian Douglas has been my guest. He is a journalist. And the name of his book is

Is Technology Making Us Sick? You'll find a link to his book in the show notes. If you'd like to get along better with your spouse, partner, or really anybody that lives in your house, don't let people get too hungry. It turns out that hunger can trigger and escalate arguments and discontent. That's because when you're hungry, your blood sugar is down and your anger levels go up.

An Ohio State study put the theory to the test. They followed 107 married couples for 21 days. The couples were asked to record their satisfaction with their partner, along with their levels of anger and number of arguments. They also had to measure their blood sugar twice a day. At the end of the study, they found a direct correlation between low blood sugar and arguments. And that is something you should know. If everyone listened to this podcast, well, that's just a dream I have,

but you could help make it come true by just sharing this podcast. Well, you could share it with everyone you know. But really, if you would just share it with one person, and that's not asking much, that would make my day. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced.

She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions,

and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate.

We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run. 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again.

And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several

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