Something You Should Know - The Untold Stories of the Foods You Love & How the Internet Runs On Outrage - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

UPGRADE TO SYSK PREMIUM! To unlock ad-free listening to over 1,000 episodes plus receive exclusive weekly bonus content, go to ⁠⁠ https://SYSKPremium.com⁠ You probably have a drawer where you keep spare batteries for when you need them. But if some or all those batteries are loose and floating around that drawer, it could be dangerous. This episode begins with an explanation and a better way to store batteries. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/612670/never-store-batteries-your-junk-drawer Just how French are French fries? Why are frankfurters also called hot dogs and why do we have 2 names. Why is it called cream soda when there is no cream in it. And since chickens don’t have fingers, where do chicken fingers come from? These are some of the questions we explore as we look at the interesting origins of some favorite foods with Kim Zachman author of There’s No Cream in Cream Soda: Facts and Folklore About Our Favorite Drinks (https://amzn.to/3QA1bay) and There’s No Ham in Hamburgers (https://amzn.to/47pasrQ). It is not an unusual experience to log in to social media and see something that outrages you. It happens frequently but is it deliberate? Why do we allow ourselves to be triggered by these things? This online outrage affects all of us and sometimes in very surprising ways. Here to explain how is Tobias Rose Stockwell. He is a writer and researcher whose work has been featured in The Atlantic, WIRED, NPR and the BBC. He is author of the book Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy―And What We Can Do About It (https://amzn.to/3QxXLVs). Have you ever left the grocery store on a hot summer day and worried about getting the food home quickly? After all, you don’t want things to thaw out or go bad. So realistically, how much time do you have before you need to worry? Listen and I’ll tell you what the science says. https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/keep-groceries-food-safe-in-hot-car/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! SHOPIFY: Shopify is the commerce platform for millions of businesses around the world! To start selling today, sign up for your $1 per month trial at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! QUINCE: Keep it classic and cool with long lasting staples from Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! HERS: Whether you want to lose weight, grow thicker, fuller hair, or find relief for anxiety, Hers has you covered. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://forhers.com/something⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and the odd story of chicken fingers. Human beings have domesticated chickens over 10,000 years ago. But we didn't have chicken fingers or chicken nuggets until the 1980s. And that really is like, why did it take so long? And it actually comes down to food chemistry. Also, when it comes to getting your groceries home on a hot summer day, time is your enemy. And a look at why and how the Internet creates so much outrage and discontent. It turns out that there's very specific words that tend to go viral online.

These are moral and emotional words, words like shame, disgust, I'm outraged. All this today on Something You Should Know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the longest shortest, time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at longest shortest time.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. Hi, welcome to something you should know. I would imagine that somewhere in your home is a junk drawer. You may even have more than one junk drawer, and there's a pretty good chance that in that junk drawer are some loose batteries, and that could be a problem. If metal comes in contact with both the positive and negative posts of a battery, it can cause a short circuit that generates enough heat to start a fire. And chances are, in addition to loose batteries, there's a lot of metal in your junk drawer. Paper clips, hardware, coins, keys, tacks, steel, wool, pens, aluminum foil, all these things. can pose a threat. Add to that a book or two of matches or maybe an old lighter sitting in that

drawer and now the fire danger multiplies. It is best to store batteries in their original package. If they are loose, cover the ends with electrical tape and take special care with 9-volt batteries. They pose the most danger because both the positive and negative contacts are on the same end of the battery, and they can easily come in contact with something metallic, like eating up and catching fire. And that is something you should know. I want to take a moment to tell you about something very special. We have a new subscription offer for our listeners called SY-S-K Premium.

You can access all the episodes ad-free, all the new episodes, all the back episodes, ad-free plus bonus content each week for only $3.99 a month, even less with an annual subscription. Go to sysk Premium.com to learn more and sign up now. There's a link to SYSK Premium in the show notes, and signing up couldn't be easier. That's Sysk Premium.com for 100% ad-free listening and exclusive episodes each week. Many of the foods we eat every day have a story. Why are hot dogs called hot dogs? Why is there no cream and cream soda? Where does vanilla come from? Why do we drink

cow's milk? Well Kim Zachman is a writer who decided to explore all these questions about food and get some answers, which are in two books she's written. One is called There's No Cream and Cream Soda, Facts and Folklore about our favorite drinks, and the other one is there's no ham in hamburgers. Hi Kim, thanks for coming on. Hi Mike, I'm really excited to be here. So since it's the title of one of your books, let's start with hamburgers. Where'd they come from? Hamburgers have a long path to the United States. The most directly would be from Germany. German immigrants came over and they brought with them a recipe that was called Hamburg Steak,

which was basically chopped beef with onions and cooked in the skillet, lots of different recipes. Some of them had tomato sauce and others. But the legend of the hamburger, I think, is so interesting, that goes all the way back to Gingas Khan and his golden horde. And supposedly, and again, this is legend, that the soldiers would put raw beef between their horse and the horse's saddle. And they would ride across the countryside, pillaging villages and stuff. And when they stopped to get something to eat, they would just take that hamber, that ground beef that was between the saddle and the horse and eat it. It was like their lunch. And it would have

tenderized it, all that friction from the saddle, and it would be nice and warm from the sweat of the horse, and apparently they ate it. And they showed that method to some Russian armies, and the Russians, they added some onions to it. And that kind of is the legend of the Hamburg steak. But the Hamburg steak was a real recipe, and you can find them in old cookbooks around the turn of the century. Well, hamburgers may have come from Europe or other places, but it has become an all-American food. So how did it do that and how did it take off the way it did here? It kind of took off in all different areas of the country. And it's interesting to me because there's several people who claim to be the very first person to put a ground beef patty on a bun and call it

a hamburger. And then at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, there were some food vendors actually selling hamburgers there. And some newspaper articles were written about this new sandwich, the hamburger. And it kind of started growing from there. And then White Castle was the first restaurant chain to open up. And that was in 1921. But it just sort of took off. But I think it also got popular because about the same time as cars became popular. And people were enjoying driving their cars so much that they wanted to actually pick up food and eat in their car. And the hamburger is such a perfect thing to hold in your hand while you're driving around that it just took off, especially with the drive-thrus and the drive-ins and everything in the

40s and 50s. So French fries go along with hamburgers, and I don't think there's anything really French about them, is there? They were, they did start in France, although Belgium begs to differ with that. They came over really with Thomas Jefferson. He would, he would, was a real foodie and he was an ambassador to France before he became president. And he loved him. And there is the first written record of French fries is when he requested for a presidential dinner that potatoes fried in the French manner be served. But they didn't take off right away partly because Greece was expensive, oil was expensive, and it was dangerous. Frying was dangerous and could cause kitchen fires.

So again, it was around the 40s and 50s when drive-toos started happening, that restaurant started doing French fries, again, because they're so portable and great to eat in a car. And those two started going together, hamburgers and French fries, and that's when those 40s and 50s periods

is when both foods really took off. But actually, French fries are popular and common in almost all countries. They're just called something different. So let's talk about cream soda. I've always wondered, because cream soda to me is kind of like, I've always thought of it as kind of a light root beer, but there's certainly no cream in it. There isn't now the original recipes from like the 1830s, 1840s, and this is when people made their root beer at home. They made it themselves, and they made their cream sodas at home by themselves, did include milk.

And then in the heydays of the soda fountains in the 1880s through the 1920s, ice cream sodas were extremely popular with a scoop of ice cream and then a flavored soda on top. When drink manufacturers started to bottle cream sodas, obviously the dairy had to get out of the recipe and to fake that milky flavor, they added vanilla flavoring. And there's all kinds of different types of cream sodas. but the one thing that kind of makes them the same is the vanilla flavoring that gives them that creamy taste. And it's a very popular drink more in the northern part of the country, and it's not as popular in the South. And I grew up in the South.

I had never actually had a cream soda. Now I love them. They are very creamy and very smooth. So if you haven't had one, definitely go try one. Yeah. Well, in comparison to, you know, Coke, 7-Up, the other. There's, cream soda's never had much of a visibility. I mean, even in places where it's popular, is that that popular?

No, it's not. It's never been a huge, big seller. And it's kind of interesting to me that it's the longevity of it, considering it's never been a top seller. But Dr. Brown's cream soda has been around since mid-1880s. So it's a long-living soda that has managed to. to stay, have a presence through all these years, even though it's not a top seller. And root beer, what, I assume it has some sort of roots in it,

but I have no idea what it is. I know what it tastes like, but I don't know what's in it. Well, it's a generic term when they say root beer, because originally people did make root beer at home, and they did use kind of whatever roots they had in their backyard and berries and seasonings and so forth. So every household had their own recipe, for root beer. Charles Hires was probably the most inventive one because he came up with a

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

and it was banned. So the popular root beer dropped a lot after that. And the other interesting thing about root beer is that it's pretty much only found in the United States. There's a few brands in Canada

and a few in Australia, but the rest of the world not only has not really heard of root beer, but they don't like it. And that's kind of interesting to me that's a very American drink. What's a chicken finger? And who came up with that idea?

You know, when I was researching, that was one of the most interesting stories to me because human beings have been, have domesticated chickens over 10,000 years ago. So for 10,000 years, humans have had chickens, eating their eggs, eating the chickens, and so forth. But we didn't have chicken fingers or chicken nuggets commercial chicken fingers or chicken nuggets until the 1980s. And that really is like, why did it take so long? You know, they're so popular now. They're everywhere now. Why did it take so long? And it actually comes down to food chemistry. It was really difficult to figure out a way, for one thing, deboning chicken is

labor intensive, and they had to come up with a better way to do that. But then getting the batter to stick to the chicken through freezing and then a frying process so it could be mass produced was also a real chemical challenge. And finally, the first person that did it was around 1960, and he was a Cornell University food professor. And Robert, I can't remember Robert's name. He did it first, but nobody read the paper that he produced that when he, after he succeeded in doing it. Nobody read it. So then McDonald's in the 1980, early 1980s, late 1970s, they were frantic to come up with a chicken food for their menu because the United States government had just come out and said, eating too much beef is bad for your health.

It's bad for your cholesterol. It's bad for heart disease. You shouldn't eat so much red meat. And they thought, we've got to come up with something else. So they wanted to come up with a chicken dish for their menu, and they came up with chicken nuggets. But it did require some very innovative processing to make it happen. But when they did, boy, they test marketed their chicken nuggets in 1980, and they had to build a second factory within a few months just to produce their McNuggets.

They were so popular. And then the chicken fingers, of course, are just a longer strip, and they first showed up in some restaurants in the South called Chicken Fingers. I interviewed one of the restaurants in Savannah, and one of the owners, I said, why did you call them chicken fingers? well we're not going to call him chicken feet that's that sounds disgusting so hot dogs are certainly all-American and and I don't think I've ever really known the story or if I did I forgot of why they're called hot dogs there are so many fun legends about the

name of the hot dog I had a great time reading them all and they're all completely fabricated it probably really is because they look like doxins when they the Germans immigrants came over and they brought all their sausages. It's estimated that there's a thousand different kinds of German sausages. They brought all their sausages over. And they also brought their doxins. I mean, that is a German breed. And they brought their favorite little dogs with them. And it really is because they kind of look like doxins. And that's the best reason any of the food historians can come up with is that their name. after dogs.

We're talking about the history and stories behind some of America's favorite foods, and my guest is Kim Zachman. She is a writer and author of the book, There's No Cream and Cream Soda, and also another book called There's No Ham and Hamburgers. Hi, I'm Adam Gidwitz, host of Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmist. On every episode, we tell a grim fairy tale, not the cute, sweet versions of the fairy tales that your children, have heard so many times. No, we tell the real grim fairy tales. They're funny. They're weird.

Sometimes they're a little bit scary. But don't worry. We rate every episode, Grim, Grimmer, or Grimmist. So you, your child, your family can choose the episode that's the right level of scary for you. Tune in to Grim, Grimmer, Grimmist, and our new season, available now. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast Disney Countdown. I'm making in 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 list of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney theme 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 Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. So Kim, we were talking about soda a moment ago, and I wanted to ask you, whole idea of putting bubbles in drinks, where did that come from? Because soda without the bubbles is, anybody who's had a flat soda knows, it just tastes terrible. And maybe that's conditioning as much as anything else. But somebody must have come up with this idea of carbonating beverages. Why, who, and how? Joseph Priestley is considered the father of carbonated beverages. He was a clergyman in England, but also a scientist, kind of an amateur scientist. He was fascinated with gases. And in the 1770s, they were still exploring gases. They kind

of knew that air had more in it than just air, but they were still identifying oxygen and carbon dioxide and nitrogen and so forth. He was fascinated with the bubbles in beer. His house was right next to a beer brewery and he saw the bubbles coming out of the beer vats and he was fascinated by these and he wanted to capture them and put them into water because it was thought at the time that natural mineral springs some of them are naturally effervescent like Perrier it was thought that those bubbles were medicinal and that if you drank that mineral water the effervescent mineral water or you bathed in it it would cure whatever ailed you so his goal is in artificially carbonating water,

his goal was to make medicine. And he particularly hoped that it would cure scurvy. Well, he wrote a paper about this after he managed to make some carbon dioxide and dissolve it into water. He wrote a paper about it, and he submitted it to the Royal Academy, the highest science academy at the time. And this was like 1775.

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

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

three thousand years old. They didn't necessarily drink milk much yet because they were lactose intolerant. And that's kind of the interesting thing when I was doing this research is mammals are supposed to be lactose intolerant. As infants, when they're still nursing from their mother, they make the enzyme lactase to break down lactose. But when their teeth come in and they can start eating solid food, a little switch goes off and they can no longer produce lactase and they can no longer break down lactose.

That's the way it's supposed to be, and that's how mammals are, except for some humans, around 5,000 years ago, there's a genetic mutation in some populations in northern Europe where that little switch to turn the lactase production off quit working, and they kept producing lactase their whole lives. And that was a little bit of a survival advantage. So most populations in the world, the people are lactose intolerant.

It's United States is kind of different in that about, only about 30 to 35% of our population is life-coast intolerant because a lot of our population has that Northern European heritage. We seem, in this country, we seem to be big coffee drinkers. I mean, I think that's most people's perception. So I was really surprised to read in your book that we get left in the dust in terms of per capita coffee consumption. The Dutch drink an average of 18 pounds of coffee per person a year.

putting in number one in consumption, Americans drink an average of 7.7 pounds a year, and actually were ranked 14th of coffee drinking countries. In doing the research for all these foods, did you come across anything that surprised you or you found particularly interesting about a food that, you know, we all eat all the time, but maybe something about it we never knew? Yeah, I think one of this, this is so simple, but yet it was one of the most, surprising things to me is vanilla. I mean, you know, that's such a common spice for us. It's in everything, you know, almost all of our foods have some vanilla in it. But what surprised me is to

find out that real vanilla, the real spice, is the second most expensive spice after saffron. And I'm like, why? It's so common. Why is vanilla so expensive? The real vanilla. And I found out that vanilla grows on an orchid-type plant, and I don't know if anybody gardeners out there, orchids are pretty persnickety. It takes four years for the vanilla plant to mature enough to produce a flower. That flower blooms only once a year for a few hours. Workers have to hand pollinate it to make sure it gets pollinated since it's only there for a few hours once a year. And then that pod takes six months to grow and they have to be hand harvested and then it goes through a multi-step curing process before it's ready to be used as a spice and I thought well no wonder it's so expensive but that

blew me away I just had no idea vanilla which is such a common flavoring for us is actually so work intensive why did I never knew that about vanilla and well a lot of these things things I haven't heard. This has been a lot of fun talking about these stories behind some of our favorite foods. I've been talking with Kim Zachman. She is a writer and author of a couple of books. One is called There's No Cream and Cream Soda, Facts and Folklore about our favorite drinks. And another book called There's No Ham and Hamburgers. And there's links to those books in the show notes. Thank you for coming on, Kim. This was great. Oh, wow. Thanks, Mike. This has been so much fun talking about these foods. I really appreciate

you having me on. Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa DeMontz, for don't blame me, but am I wrong. Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. And 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 listener 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 podcast.

New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I bet it wasn't all that long ago that you saw something on the Internet that upset you, made you angry, got you worked up, maybe even outraged. The Internet can do that and does do that to people all the time. and it has likely contributed to the inscivility that we see so much today. So why is that? Is creating all this discontent deliberate? How do we deal with all this outrage? Well, that's something Tobias Rose Stockwell decided to explore.

He is a writer and researcher whose work has appeared in the Atlantic, Wired, NPR, and the BBC. He's author of a book called Outrage Machine, How Tech Amplifies Discontractors, content disrupts democracy and what we can do about it. Hey, Tobias, welcome to something you should know. Thanks so much for having me, Mike. So what's going on here? Let's start at the beginning of like, what's an example of the outrage that seems to get created by the internet that sets people off like, where does this problem begin? It turns out that, I mean, I feel like most of your listeners probably have seen something online that makes them upset at some point in time. But it turns out that there's a very specific set of words that tend to go viral online. These are

moral and emotional words. So words like shame, disgust, I'm outraged, I'm angry about this. Those types of words actually have a viral advantage online. And for each word that you use in a tweet or a Facebook post or anywhere else that you might post online, there tends to be a 17% boost per word used. So they tend to actually transit and go viral and capture more attention online when we use these words. There's something inherent about moral and emotional language that just tends to be much more common in our online discourse than it is in real life. And are people using these words deliberately to create this outrage or it just happens that those words tend to do it?

Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both. There are certainly bad actors that try to go viral by making people mad. But most of the time, I think it actually comes down to the process of us seeking an audience, right? Like when we say things online, when we post things online, we are unconsciously trying to make sure our content gets views. make sure our content is meaningful to others. And we're inherently signal processing machines. So if we're posting normal stuff, you know, stuff about my day, stuff about a meal I ate, stuff about a new job posting,

and then you post something about something you're angry about, right? You see something angry about in the wider world and then you post it online. That tends to get more signal, right? That tends to get more virality and more traction online. So in that process of actually posting it, we get this tremendous feedback from our audiences in which we are actually trained to some degree to actually produce more of that content. So when you post something and all of a sudden there's this huge reaction, right?

All of a sudden people are paying attention to you for this thing that you posted. A lot of the time, and that's not all the time, but a lot of the time that tends to be stuff that is a little emotionally outrageous. And the data shows that the more we post this kind of stuff, the more we are likely to post it in the future. So it's like a snowball. And there's limits to it, right? You know, people sometimes get turned off by the amount of outrageous stuff that you post online.

But there is a feedback effect there. When we post something and it gets a lot of support and a lot of views, we tend to try to do more of that in the future. And that's a subtle, almost unconscious sort of reaction that we have to our content getting traction. What about the people who are doing the reacting? What is it doing to them that they see this and feel the compulsion to respond rather than go, oh, God, geez. Yeah, well, unfortunately, that is honestly one of these kind of natural impulses that we have, right?

We are highly socially attuned creatures. You know, our ancestors were hypersocial creatures just like us. And it made sense for our ancestors to be really. attuned to social status, to who was doing the right thing and who was doing the wrong thing, our broader communities. You know, we're a very tribal species, and that's the kind of foundation for it. And so this impulse to really know who is in what ranking in our, you know, in our society, and who is doing the wrong thing, who is doing the right thing.

That kind of moral framework is something that we are very just emotionally attuned to. don't people tire of this that you just get worn out from it all and and pretty soon it doesn't impact you because you just get kind of get used to it there is definitely i think fatigue around this right around seeing so much emotionally disruptive behavior online we do get a little bit overwhelmed and a lot of us start to tune out from these various conversations that are being had and i think that's actually part of the problem that we're facing right now is that is that you know social media has done some really amazing things for connecting us to like like mighted communities but it's also allowed for a small number of people kind of at the fringes of every debate to grab the microphone and really just kind of dominate the debate with their particular perspective and I think for a lot of the people in the middle who are just reasonable people trying to get along with their lives and are interested in solving problems and interested in you know fixing what's wrong in the world when they see the streams of these particular conversations that often happen online, they tend to check out and they throw up their hands and say, well, I guess this isn't worth fighting for. This isn't worth

fighting about. This isn't worth my attention because it's just too much. And so a lot of people in the middle of the conversation just kind of remove themselves. And I think that's unfortunate because there is so much that's worth talking about and worth knowing about and worth trying to solve. But when you remove the people in the middle from the conversation, or they remove themselves from it because it's getting so crazy and kooky and polarized that then aren't you just left with crazy kooky polarizing people and who cares right so unfortunately social media is not really designed for thoughtful and meaningful debate it's oftentimes designed to get our attention by whatever means necessary right whatever content actually tends to capture

our attention regardless of how how thoughtful it is that oftentimes will stick to the top of our feeds. And basic engagement algorithms, unfortunately, prioritize that. So, yeah, so we do end up with this noise, but it's not currently designed for nuance and for deep context. It's more designed for grandstanding. And when you talk about social media, I assume you mean, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the normal places people go.

But there are plenty of other places on the internet for thoughtful discussion. And don't thoughtful people go where the thoughtful discussion. is yes and no I think that you know we're very much prone to falling you know falling prey to the defaults essentially of these of these networks right so the way that they're designs we don't really have a choice when we are we are there we can completely check out of these spaces but you know Facebook is a really important place for a lot of people to find their friends journalists use Twitter so much or x or whatever it's going to be called in the future uh you know they use it to source stories so much

of our society is dependent upon some of these connection points that these networks provide and so the defaults of these of these places really do determine what the discourse uh ends up being do you think is there evidence to support the idea that because these social media platforms are money-making businesses, that this is by design, that this is deliberate to drive traffic, to be able to sell advertising, and that this is all a big game? I don't think it was intentional. I think that any media platform designed for communication and for so many people interacting with one another is going to have. problems. I think this is an emergent property of these tools. And honestly, it goes

back, you can look at honestly every major media disruption in our history and see different kind of problems that come forth as a result of how tools are designed and the different affordances that technology has. So you can look back at, you know, the early days of newspapers and find, you know, a tremendous explosion of fake news during that time. And it took a lot of a lot of trial and error for consumers to figure out what they could trust and what they couldn't trust when they were seeing things in these early newsstands. So I think that social media particularly hasn't been designed explicitly to do this, but this is a byproduct of some just early design decisions. I think three specific early design features that came online between 2009

and 2012 fundamentally changed how we interact with each other. And I can speak about those three, which is just in real, real short form. The first is social metrics, the availability of likes, the number attached to every single piece of content that we share. The algorithmic feed, so how content is rank-ordered in our feeds, that prioritizes certain types of emotionally outrageous stuff above other things. And then finally, the one-click share, how easy it is for us to share along information when we're exposed to it,

which has brought about this kind of explosion of proliferation of fake news and outrageous content. And each one of these features was designed and implemented, I think, with really good intentions. It made a lot of sense both for the consumer and also the engineers that were building it. But together, taken together, they've kind of created this toxic combination that has really changed our relationship with each other online. The second of your three, how the algorithms prioritize emotionally charged content, how is that in the best interests of anybody? the reason we have algorithms rank ordering content is because of a very specific problem we produce too much information you know now every day we we produce you know terabytes and so if you're if you're trying to feed updates to your friends right then it makes sense that you wouldn't want the most important stuff to be lost when you log in you want there to be a rank ordering of how important that stuff is to you as an individual right so the earliest Feeds were designed as reverse chronological feeds, right? So just the most recent stuff you see at the top and the oldest stuff you see at the bottom.

And that changed in about 2009, there was a couple of different algorithm changes that were deploy both at Twitter and at Facebook to basically make sure that you didn't miss the important stuff. So it makes sense why we would end up with some kind of rank ordering of our feeds that is in our best interest. And it turns out that that's like a huge part. That's a huge part of why we come back to these tools. So we can see the most important stuff first.

It just turns out that there's also these problems with certain types of content being very sticky. It sticks to the top of our feeds because it grabs our attention. I think a reasonable kind of analogy here is like you wouldn't explicitly say you want to see a car crash, but if a car crash happens, you're going to look at it, right? And so a basic ranking algorithm that is prioritizing for our engagement. will rank order a car crash above other content because it's where our attention is going. So in some ways, these are just imperfect algorithms right now, and we're trying to figure out

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

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

harm here other than it just people get upset in the moment and they fire off a response and that, but what's the harm to the nation, to the culture, to the neighborhood? What's the big deal? Yeah. So I think it goes back again to this idea of kind of cynicism when we're when we're overwhelmed with with narratives that might counteract our ability for having a reasonable conversation about things right so if I'm exposed to a whole bunch of really threatening narratives it does something strange to our to our brains right if we are if we experience and are exposed to a large number of threats to our to our groups to the values that we hold dear then we have this kind of trigger response thing that happens in which we feel called to default to this sort of

kind of tribal disposition in which we, in which our identity groups become much, much more salient and much more important, right? So if we see someone threatening a group that we hold dear, right, a group whose values we hold dear, we feel called to defend them. And that's very unfortunate because I think that does lead to polarization in a very real way because it's very easy to kind of tap into this or default to this us versus them mentality when we are exposed to a lot of these threatening narratives. And again, I don't think it's indicative of reality, unfortunately. When we're seeing so many of these kind of problematic ideas in front of us, it actually

distorts our perception of what is really happening in the world. And so having looked at this as closely as you have, are you shining a light on a problem or are you offering a solution? Because it seems like it's pretty tricky to fix this. It is. I agree. And it turns out that there are a number of different interventions. For consumers, I think it's really important to recognize context and when context is lacking from information online.

So a lot of the time when we're exposed to triggering information, we feel the immediate desire to share it onwards and to confirm our kind of initial impulse about what the other person said or what this kind of means about the wider world. And it turns out that actually fast-flowing information, which is the kind of information that we tend to see online much of the time, it tends to be lacking context, it tends to be emotional, and it tends to be inaccurate. So the faster the information travels, there's a strong correlation with inaccuracy,

lack of context, and emotionality. So it's important for us as individuals to recognize that most of that fast traveling information is actually not going to be the best reflection of reality. But do you think, or is there any evidence to suggest that people are tiring of this? Because I remember, you know, when I would see things online and would get all like, oh my God, I get nothing, it doesn't bother me anymore. I don't get out right. I don't just, I either don't believe it or I don't care.

Like I said earlier, I just, I'm tired of it and I don't stop what I'm doing and take the time to write a response, is that a common reaction? Definitely. And I think that there's good things about checking out and bad things about checking out. You know, the good thing is that, yeah, like, you know, if there's too much heavily emotional information that we're exposed to, if there's too many people angry about things,

then yeah, we're, you know, it's like, it's like, ugh. But there is a deeper cynicism with this that's, that's problematic. And it's kind of a balance, right? You want to be, you want to be exposed to good information on regular basis. And unfortunately, you know, as I said, these places are, these social spaces are becoming so deeply important for our discourse and for how we get the news and for how we see our neighbors and our friends and more particularly how we see our enemies, right? And how much we dehumanize our enemies, you know, how much how much we hate our enemies. And so there is,

there is this like cynicism, which unfortunately is a little bit antithetical to being in a democratic society. We need to be engaged around the problems that we're actually facing to know what is really broken so we can fix it. And that's very much the point of a democracy. You know, democracy itself is meant to be kind of like an outrage machine. And so far as like we're meant to get together, identify the problems, get outraged about those problems together, and then focus on electing representatives that can solve those problems for us. And when that process of parsing reality on our own is distorted, then we actually might solve the wrong problems and make new problems in the process.

One thing we haven't talked about is in this mix of social media and news and everything, we hear that there are bots, that there are robots that are posting things that really inflame. And so you can talk about that. We have all, you may or may not know it, but we've all been exposed to bots online. And there's literally millions of fake accounts that have been developed and launched many by foreign actors, both Russian and Chinese bot farms that are built to kind of sway public opinion around certain issues. And I'll say this again, to make people more cynical and more skeptical about this stuff because a lot of these platforms are doing their best. This is one thing they're really trying to do is reduce the amount of bots that are found on these platforms.

But, you know, if I say something, if you're, if you want a certain message, a certain idea to get out there, what you can do is you can actually build a bot farm or you can hire a bot farm. There's actually kind of dark web services that do this. And you can generate a whole large number of fake accounts that will amplify the specific message that you want to get out there. So, you know, if you see a tweet online, then and it has, you know, has some kind of some outrageous statement in it or a news item that might not be totally true. and you see a huge number of retweets and likes on that. Sometimes what can happen is they can seed that post and make it look like it's much more popular than it actually is. So that's a boosting, a signal boosting of a certain type of information that's actually not accurate or reflective of reality. Well, this is certainly something important to think about because as we discussed, I mean, this isn't going away.

And in many ways, it seems the outrage on social media is only getting worse. So it's something important to address. I've been talking to Tobias Rose Stockwell. The name of his book is Outrage Machine, How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy, and What We Can Do About It. There's a link to that book in the show notes if you would like to read it. Appreciate it. Thanks, Tobias. Thank you, Mike. This was awesome. Really appreciate it.

Grocery shopping on a hot summer day is a completely different errand than grocery shopping other times of the year because of the heat. According to the FDA, you really need to get food home in the fridge within two hours if it's at room temperature. But on a hot summer day, like 90 degrees, the rule is one hour max. On a hot day, the interior of your car and trunk can be sweltering, as I'm sure you know. and one quick stop or traffic hassle on your way home can ruin that expensive food and put you and your family at risk for food-borne illness. You might want to consider keeping a cooler or insulated bag in your trunk

so when you're loading your car with groceries, you can take a minute to put the meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, and frozen food items in the cooler and buy yourself some time. And that is something you should know. Podcast listeners love recommendations because there's so many to choose from, it's nice to hear that somebody says, hey, I like this podcast, you might want to give it a listen. And I'm hoping you would take a moment to say that to someone you know about this podcast and recommend it.

I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on right now in the world of reproductive health. And we're covering it all. Birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy, menopause, consent, sperm. So many stories about sperm. And, of course, the joys and absurdities of raising kids of all ages.

If you're new to the show, check out an episode called The Staircase. It's a personal story of mine about trying to get my kids school to teach sex ed. Spoiler, I get it to happen, but not at all in the way that I wanted. We also talk to plenty of non-parents, so you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the Longest Shortest Time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at Longest Shortestime.com.