Something You Should Know - The Microchip Shortage and How it Affects You & Why Smart People Make Bad Choices

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Still need to get some holiday shopping done? One of the biggest stressors is trying to find a parking spot. So, this episode begins with some smart holiday parking strategies to help you score a spot quickly in a crowded parking lot. https://jalopnik.com/how-to-win-the-holiday-parking-game-5963162 Over the last several months there has been a lot of talk about a worldwide microchip shortage. These are the semi-conductor chips that control the workings of cars, electronics and just about everything else it seems. Why are they in such short supply? How hard are these chips to make? What is it they do exactly? These are some of the questions addressed by Chris Miller. He teaches International History at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and he is author of best selling book called Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology (https://amzn.to/3ULP20k). Ever notice when conditions are just right – very smart people can make very poor choices? This happens a lot when people are panicked but it also happens because of some other interesting and uniquely human factors. Why does this happen? Joining me 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). If you have heated seats in your car, you need to be careful to avoid something called Toasted Skin Syndrome. Listen as I explain how it happens, what it looks like and what to do about it. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-beware-reports/beware-toasted-skin-with-heated-seats-reports-idUSTRE81M26P20120223 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Shopify grows with your business anywhere. Thanks to their endless list of integrations and third-party apps - everything you need to customize your business to your needs is already in your hands. Sign up for a FREE trial at https://Shopify.com/sysk ! If you think you’re okay to drive after a few drinks, think again. Play it safe and plan ahead to get a ride. It only takes one mistake to change your life, or someone else’s, forever. Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over.  PAID FOR BY NHTSA Did you know that driving under the influence of marijuana is illegal?  If you feel different, you drive different.  Drive high, get a DUI. PAID FOR BY NHTSA   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, how to quickly find a parking spot when the parking lot is mobbed. Then, microchips. And lately, there's been a chip shortage. It was often the case that car companies had cars that were 99% completed but couldn't be sold to customers because they were missing just one or two chips. And that really hammered home the extent to which the entire economy today is just fundamentally

dependent on access to the chips that they need. Also, if you have seat heaters in your car, there's something you need to hear. And why is it that very smart people can sometimes make such bad choices and decisions? 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. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. 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. you know that between now and Christmas, the stores are going to be mobbed. And I've always thought that the big stressor in shopping near the holidays is parking. It's always hard to find a parking place. So here are some effective holiday parking strategies for stressed-out shoppers. Plan ahead.

Instead of just hoping for the best, pick a time and a place. And generally speaking, the best times to find a decent parking spot are 8.45 in the morning for a store that opens at 9 and later in the afternoon. In fact, 4 o'clock is kind of the peak pooping out time for the all-day shopper. And spaces start to open up, giving you a jump on the evening shoppers who will be hungry for that spot after work. If you prefer the primetime hunt, prepare to circle your prey. Stay in close proximity to the entrance that you'd like to use of the mall or the store, and then keep your eye on the door, and try to make eye contact with exiting shoppers. You should even, you might even smile and wave.

If you get the nod, you've probably scored a spot. If a parking garage is an option, do yourself a favor and head straight for the roof. Not only are you more likely to find a spot, you're less likely to forget what level you parked on. That strategy happens to work any time of year. And that is something you should know. You may have heard stories in the news lately about a microchip shortage. It is one of the reasons why, in recent months, many cars have been in short supply. Certain electronics have been hard to get,

and the production of a lot of other products has slowed down. These chips are the brains in so many things today, and without them, the products just don't work. So why is there a shortage? Are the chips hard to make? Has the demand gotten too high? And what is it that these chips do exactly? And what are they? Here to explain all this is Chris Miller. Chris teaches international history at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and he is the author of a big best-selling book out called Chip War, The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology. Hey Chris, welcome to Something You Should Know. Great, well thank you for having me. So maybe first we should define some terms here. What is a microchip? How is that different,

if at all, from a semiconductor or an integrated circuit? What do these terms mean and what are they? So they're really used interchangeably and whether chip or semiconductor or integrated circuit, they all refer to a tiny piece of semiconductor material, usually a piece of silicon, that is inside of all sorts of devices that you depend on, whether you're a smartphone or your PC or also your automobile or your dishwasher. Today, almost anything with an on-off switch has some sort of chip inside of it. And what they do is they let devices think. Inside of each semiconductor are millions, or in some cases, billions of tiny circuits called transistors. Each transistor

either is on or off. And as they turn on and off, they create either a one or a zero. And these provide all the ones and zeros that undergird all digital computing. So we wouldn't have any sort of computing power today if it weren't for these chips. And what is it, can you talk about the development of this? Because I remember as a kid having radios in the house that had transistors and maybe they had, you know, six transistors or 12 transistors. So how did this get up to the numbers you're talking about? Well, the first chip that was commercially available sold in the early 1960s had four transistors on it. Today, if you go to the Apple store and buy a new iPhone, for example, it'll

have just on the main chip, 15 billion transistors. So that's been the trajectory from 4 to 15 billion over the past 60 years. And to fit 15 billion transistors on a chip, you need to make them extraordinarily small. So the first transistors made were big enough that you could see them with your bare eyes. Whereas today, transistors are so small, they're measured in nanometers or billionths of a meter. And the most advanced transistors today are smaller than a virus, and they're produced by the billions powering all the devices that we rely on. And so the evolution from four to billions on a chip, was it somewhat gradual, or was there like a big moment in time

where we went from 10 to 10,000? I mean, you know what I mean? It's just, was there some big event or it just grew and grew and grew and grew? It's been a pretty steady growth, but it's been the fastest growth rate of any major phenomenon in modern life. There's a scientist named Gordon Moore, who is one of the co-founders of Intel, the biggest US chip firm, who noticed in 1965 that the number of transistors on each chip was doubling every year or so. And that observation became known as Moore's Law. And since the mid-1960s, it has persisted. So every two years, we get chips that are twice as powerful.

And what that has provided is the advances in computing that we today take for granted. And I think it's worth putting in perspective just how radical a doubling every two years actually is. I mean, imagine if airplanes were to fly twice as fast every two years or houses were to become twice as large every two years at the same cost. There's almost nothing in the economy that changes with such a dramatic growth rate. And yet that's what's happened in semiconductors. And it's made possible the explosion of computing power and the application of computing to all manner of devices.

That's pretty amazing when you put it in that context of... And is this going to continue? Well, I can't continue forever, can it? The doubling every two years? Well, not forever. We've got a pretty clear pathway for it to continue through at least 2030 or so. But beyond that point, it's really hard to say.

Right now, transistors are measured in nanometers, as I mentioned, but pretty soon will be measured in just numbers of atoms. And at some point, they'll become too small to manufacture in a way that makes them any smaller. So at some point, Moore's law is going to become simply impossible to continue. But for at least the next couple of years, there's a pretty clear line of sight into how you can make transistors smaller. So who makes these chips? Where do they come from? So in order to manufacture chips with 15 billion component parts in them, you need to tap into

one of the most complicated supply chains in history. You can't make an advanced chip today without acquiring machine tools from the US, Japan, and the Netherlands without using software from a number of different US firms, without acquiring ultra pure silicon and very highly refined other chemicals from Europe and Japan. And then there's only a couple of companies in the world that know how to make the most advanced chips. And today, 90% of the world's most advanced processor chips can only be made by one company, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which today manufactures all of its most advanced chips in Taiwan. Well, that sounds a little scary. I mean, these chips that are such an important part of just about everything, how is it that they're only made or mostly made by just one company in Taiwan? produce, the more you can hone your production process, learn to produce more efficiently,

and thereby drive up your ability to produce lots of chips cheaply. And TSMC, the Taiwanese company that I mentioned, pioneered a new business model several decades ago, whereby rather than producing chips that are designed in-house, which is how most chips have historically been produced, they decided to do no design of chips and simply produce chips for any customer that wanted manufacturing services. And that was an appealing business model because it let them focus on what they did really well, manufacturing, but also let them manufacture for a large number of other firms. And so today they manufacture chips for Apple, for AMD, for Nvidia, for Qualcomm. Many of the world's biggest chip designers use TSMC's manufacturing services. So today they're the world's largest chip maker. And in part because of the world's largest, they're also the most advanced. And today no one can keep up with

their rate of innovation. Well, are there any plans or any way to change that? To have a single source of such an important product from just one place, as I said, it seems pretty scary. Well, it is. And it's particularly scary because their most advanced facilities aren't in Switzerland or in New Zealand, they're in Taiwan, the site of what I would consider the world's most dangerous geopolitical flashpoint. And this is something that all around the world, political leaders are focusing on and worrying about, whether it's in the US and Japan and Europe and India, there's a growing realization that the concentration of chip making in Taiwan presents too much of a risk, especially given the prospect of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, which is growing, unfortunately, more likely, it seems, as every year passes. We're talking about microchips, semiconductors, integrated circuits, whatever you want to call them.

We're talking about them because they're so important and there's been a shortage. And we're about to find out about the shortage. My guest is Chris Miller. He is author of the book Chip War, the fight for the world's most critical technology. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey, no, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches.

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issue? The chip shortages of the last couple of years actually emerged from a surge in demand rather than a problem with supply. The number of chips produced globally in 2020 was 8% higher than the previous year. And then in 2021, there was a double-digit rate of increase in the number of chips manufactured. But demand surged even more than that, in part because of the trend of working from home. Demand for new PCs jumped up as companies prepared to move more of their work online. They needed more data center capacity and so chips for use in data centers became more in demand.

And so as demand grew, chip makers simply couldn't keep up with the unexpected surge in capacity and that created a huge set of downstream effects in other industries. And so companies like car manufacturers, for example, which previously hadn't thought much about semiconductors, even though they rely on dozens or hundreds in each car they produce, found themselves unable to acquire the chips they needed. And their cars needed each of the dozens or hundreds of chips to be fully manufactured. And so it was often the case that car companies had cars that were 99% completed but couldn't be sold to customers because they were missing just one or two chips. And that really hammered home the extent to which far outside of what is traditionally considered a tech industry, the entire economy today is just fundamentally dependent on access to the chips that they need. So when they make these chips, do they make the chips to the customer's order specifications or are chips chips and you buy them off the shelf and you use them in whatever you want?

It depends on which type of chips you're talking about. Memory chips, the types of chips that remember data, are generally all pretty standard regardless of which company produces them. But for most processor chips, the type of chip that would run the operating system in your phone or in your PC, those are specially made for the manufacturer because they're designed to line up specifically with the types of software that they're going to be running. What that means is that if a company has contracted with one chip manufacturer to produce their chips, it's not easy for them to go to another manufacturer and get production started up right away, nor is it easy to slot in a different type of chip to run your smartphone or your PC. In some cases, it's doable, but it's not a seamless process. And that reduces the ability of companies to find alternative sources of supply in case

they can't get what they're expecting from their primary manufacturer. So what is it about this that, well, what is it about microchips that got you to write a book about it? I mean, what's so about microchips that got you to write a book about it? I mean, what's so interesting about this to you? Because to many of us, it's just a part. It's a piece of what makes this thing work. But people don't seem to think a lot about these things, except when there aren't enough of them. But why is it so interesting to you?

Well, when I started my research, I hadn't thought much about chips either, but I came to realize that the world doesn't work without them. And to me, what was striking was, I think, first, learning all the different ways in which we rely on chips, even though we hardly ever see them. Second, the way in which chips have structured the world economy today, such that today, China, for example, spends more money importing chips than it spends importing oil. That's not the image of globalization that you probably have in your mind, but that's the reality.

You couldn't have global trade as it exists today without semiconductors. And then third, I think most importantly, is the extent to which semiconductors are not only about consumer devices, they're also deeply tied up in the production of military power. And there's been a really extensive interconnection between military demands and advances in semiconductor technology. And so today, the most advanced chips aren't only used in consumer devices, they're also used in military systems. And one of the reasons why governments

are so focused on semiconductor is today is because they've realized the futures of their militaries will depend on the ability to marry the most advanced computing power with defense systems. So when I think back on the years of having PCs and whatnot, I think of Intel and that Intel made chips. That's what they did. Their little card that it's a little thing in the computer that made it work so well, the processor. Is that not this? Well, Intel does make these processors still, and they do a fine job at PC processors. But for Intel, the challenge is that PC processors are a market that's not growing much anymore. 10 years ago, people used to excitedly buy a new PC to be able to take advantage of the next generation processor inside of it because it would work so much faster and better.

Whereas today, that's a thing of the past for anyone who's not a hardcore gamer. Today, the growth markets for semiconductors where you really need the most advanced capabilities are in smartphones and especially in autos and in data centers. And it's really the data center that is the next frontier of semiconductor investment. And although most of us never see a data center or think about a data center, we rely on them in every part of our daily lives. Whenever we sign on the internet, we're using data centers. Much of the software we use today is actually based in a data center in the quote-unquote cloud, which is just a bunch of buildings

with semiconductors inside of them. Data centers are where many of the key advances in artificial intelligence are being realized. Because data centers are nothing but building upon building full of chips, the future of the data center will be defined by whichever company is able to produce the most advanced semiconductors to enable data center storage and data center processing capabilities. And so that's really the future of the chip industry is in the data center. So what does Intel make? They just make the processors for PCs and that's it? They do make some data center chips as well, but the type of chips that's growing most rapidly in

data centers, which are the types of chips that are optimized for AI applications, are made by competitors of Intel, like AMD and NVIDIA. And Intel's been late to this market, which is why they've been losing market share in data centers, especially with these high-value AI chips over the past couple of years. So what is the life of a chip? And I guess what I mean by that is, you know, when a chip comes out and it's the latest in chip technology, how soon before it becomes old school and that there's much better chips

available? I mean, is it a week? Is it a year or what? Well, if you look at smartphones, pretty much every new smartphone model released once a year will have a new chip inside of it. So that's a once a year upgrade, which will give you a meaningful increase in computing and memory power in each new generation of smartphone. For data centers, it's a bit of a different calculus because in many cases, you'll be willing to keep older chips online because you already paid for them. So even if they're slower, it might not be worth it to buy a new one immediately to replace

the old ones, even if you will buy new chips for any sort of new data center capacity you bring online. So it's a complex calculus, but there's a relentless demand for cutting edge chip making for both smartphone applications, for data center applications, as well as for PCs. And what we find is that the biggest customers of chip makers like TSMC, the Taiwanese firm, are focused above all on getting access to cutting edge chips. You mentioned that the shortage of chips is due mostly to a surge in demand. And so where do things stand now? Is it catching up? Are we always going to be in a deficit? Where are we on the timeline of this chip shortage? It really depends on which type of chip you're talking about now.

For certain types of chips, like memory chips, the shortage has completely been worked through and there's no shortages whatsoever right now. For other types of chips, like, for example, certain types of chips used in autos, there still are ongoing shortages. And just a couple of days ago, British company Jaguar Land Rover announced factory closures because they couldn't acquire enough of a certain type of chip. So there's a lot of differentiation in the chip industry in terms of where there are shortages and where in some cases there's actually overcapacity right now. And because not all chips are interchangeable and most are not,

you can have a situation where you've got overcapacity in certain types and undercapacity in other types. So I've always wanted to know, like in a typical car or a smartphone, I mean, how many chips are in there working to do what those things do? So a car could easily have hundreds of chips inside. Now some of the chips will be very, very simple, like the type of chip that will manage your power seating, moving your seat back and forth. You don't need much computing power to do that. But other chips will be quite complex.

Like if there's an entertainment system in your car or an automated driving system, these could use pretty close to cutting edge capabilities. And then if your car has more automated driving features, it'll also have more sensors like LiDAR sensors or motion sensors, which will also have chips that convert the analog signals they're receiving like light or optical images into data and funnel them into your car's main processing system. So one of the key trends in car making is to have more and more chips in each car that's produced. And in the future, cars will be a big growth driver for

the chip industry because of all the new demands for computing power in new cars. So are things going to get worse before they get better? Or what's the prediction here for the future? Well, I think for the supply shortages, we're actually seeing a really substantial improvement relative to where things were a year or a year and a half ago. And there's a lot of new investment coming as well that will alleviate some of the supply shortages. But as chips become even more widely used in everyday devices, our reliance on them will increase. And so even if this iteration of supply shortages is worked through, it raises the stakes when it comes to the question of are we confident in our ability to acquire chips amid a crisis? And as more and more devices require more and more chips. The answer to that question becomes more important. Well, given how these chips are in virtually everything,

our life kind of depends on them. It's really interesting to hear the evolution of them and what's going on with them and why we've had shortages. I've been talking to Chris Miller. He teaches international history at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. And his book is called Chip War, The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for coming on and explaining all this.

Great. Well, thanks so much for having me. 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.

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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, you know, 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 believed that the right thing to do was to pull back on the stick, which is kind of normal sort of response in 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 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, you know, 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 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 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's 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 us well for being chased by a tiger, for instance, but those same adaptations don't always serve us well in a modern, complicated,

multiracial, you know, multi-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 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 crashes 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 um compared to automobile accidents and what

happened is a lot of scholars and of course 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. 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 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 are. We really have this kind of focus in on bad things. And if we can remember specific bad things, like mass homicides are 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 challenging 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 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 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, I'm a psychologist, I'm not an energy researcher by any means. But, you know, I look through this safe, that the number of deaths attributable to nuclear energy is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction compared to coal-fired plants and even natural gas and things like that. But there's a lot of resistance 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 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 the situation worse rather than better. Well, that's a good example of a situation that I've always wondered about is that 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, 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 the Republicans, we tend to oftentimes adopt our attitudes about the world by looking around and, you know, 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 doing so. So certainly, social conformity is a big part of the problem we have in making 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, 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 nuanced. And very rarely

does 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 different,

or that they might even be, again, in good faith, simply wrong. Talk about toilet paper. 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 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 an availability cascade. So basically, once the ball kind of gets rolling on something, even if you know that it's misinformed, it's really 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 saying, well, they're irrational uh what they're doing doesn't make sense but once they begin to do it then even if you recognize that hoarding toilet 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 the process is 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 the social cross-disease 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 in 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. 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 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 sort of change 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, the people who are most invested, they're the loudest activists, they're the loudest politicians, very rarely back down off of a big claim like that. But then you have the general public who's much less invested 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 have started to understand that maybe nuclear isn't so bad.

And I think that part of that is the situations where 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, so that particular in Europe now, as they're going through an energy crisis over this winter, 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 it 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 people don't think about. 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 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. If you've got heated seats in your car, you could be at risk of something called toasted skin syndrome. Dermatologists see this on the backsides of patients this time of year, and in most cases, victims have cranked up their seat heaters on high for a long trip or a long commute, and then they wind up with this dark red web-like rash on the back of their thighs. The good news is that Toasted Skin Syndrome is not an actual burn. It's not really serious. It's more of a cosmetic thing.

Toasted skin will fade over time, but the concern is that an unusual rash may result in unnecessary testing if you're not aware of the source. Some toasted skin syndrome rashes have also cropped up on other body parts as well. The lap is at risk from resting your hot laptop there, as are your ankles and shins if you use an under-the-desk space heater. And that is something you should know.

You know, this is normally the time at which I ask you to share this podcast with someone you know, and you can also share this on social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. You can share it with all your contacts, and I'd appreciate it if you would do that. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial.

And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures? You got this. No, I didn't.

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