 It was a straight line going up. There was no you, the you is sort of like, well, maybe at really low levels of social media, there's more depression, and at really high levels of social media, there's more depression, and there's a sweet spot in the middle. That's not what we found. What we found was basically a straight line. What's up, everybody, and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week, and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified, and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell, and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Now, if you've been a super fan of the show, you know that Johnny and I have railed against social media, and the negative impacts our clients have seen in their lives, but we didn't have much more than anecdotal evidence to go on, so we're so excited to have Brian Primmick with us today to talk about what that real impact is at a scientific level of social media. Many of us may fall in the trap of comparison, we're just overdoing it on social media, and I'd love to kick off today, Brian, but just talking a little bit about what got you interested in studying the impacts of social media. Yeah, it's a great question, and I wasn't so interested at the beginning. We had been studying a lot of other media types, video games, films. I mean, always interested in the impact on health, but social media and mental health really came about very organically. I was a family practitioner for 18 years, and whenever there was an emotional health condition, there almost was always a story that had something to do with social media, and so I think that the research questions came about exactly the right way, which is that in a very authentic, organic way. Yeah, kind of like how social media is now propagating in our lives very organically, and there's almost so many platforms, you can't even keep track of them all, and we're gonna dig really deeply into a lot of the research, but I'd love just at the start here to know what surprised you the most in all of the research that you did in social media. Well, when we first set out to look for associations between media and social media exposures and mental health outcomes, things like depression and anxiety and loneliness, we did not expect there to be sort of a direct linear relationship like what we found. We expected there to be more of like a U-shaped relationship. In other words, we expected there to be sort of a Goldilocks spot in the middle, that perfect little dip of the U, which is the, if you use just 47 minutes a day, then you're maximizing your likelihood of depression, you're minimizing your likelihood of anxiety, and so that's what we set out to do was to find where that sweet spot was, but when the data actually rolled in, it was a straight line going up. There was no U, the U is sort of like, well, maybe at really low levels of social media, there's more depression, and at really high levels of social media, there's more depression, and there's a sweet spot in the middle. That's not what we found. What we found was basically a straight line that every increase of social media was associated with a consequent or some type of increase in depression, anxiety, loneliness, just about any outcome that we looked at. So that was a surprise. Absolutely, and I think we were all sort of searching for that Goldilocks moment where we could just get 15 minutes a day or 20 minutes a day and not have any negative impacts on our mental health. Just something to add there, and with waiting for that Goldilocks moment, the power of social media, I think, became relevant to everybody in the last few years, and with that came a giant fight over the control over that power. And not only that, I think there's a lot of folks that are trying to fix everything that has went wrong with it as well. And what we're all feeling is somewhat of a tug of war between the powers it be of controlling it, fixing it, how to use it for the betterment of mankind and civilization. We're faced with all of these different forces and the effect that I seem to see and think about is everyone come running into help or to take advantage of the situation. And because of that, we're all dealing with that tug of war, and it's getting increasingly more and more out of control. Yeah, no, I completely agree. It's one of these things because we absolutely want to try to find the positive because conceptually, theoretically, of course, there should be some possibility for positive. I mean, absolutely, we've all had moments of connection on social media. Certainly there can be opportunities for warmth and for generosity, but at the same time, it's this double-edged sword. It can also breed feelings of depression, anxiety and isolation. The question becomes, how do we balance the challenges with the benefits? And I think just because we found that using more social media, at least in our sample, was pretty much always associated with at least an increased risk. It doesn't mean that every single person who used social media became depressed. It just means that that was certainly a risk factor for them. That doesn't mean that there isn't a possible positive way to use it for society. At one point, we're not there yet as a society. So that's why the book came about, was saying, well, we need some practical, evidence-based, as much as possible, suggestions on how to maximize that value. And then hopefully we can redo the study later on and see if people are using a better, if it's less of the Wild West and everyone's just kind of doing everything, if people are doing things with a little bit more guidance if that is going to ultimately be positive. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. I mean, I'll just say one more thing. I realize I'm kind of going on here a little bit, but it's kind of like a giant buffet, right? If you just put out every food in the world and you just let people loose on it, right? They're probably not gonna make the best choices, especially when it's brand new and they don't even, oh my gosh, this is so exciting. This is so amazing. And of course we've got all of the marketers and we've got all of the platforms trying to make us stick as much as possible to exactly what is going to pad their pockets, which is more time on and more engagement with larger numbers of people for individual users, that very well might mean more chance of a gaffe, more chance of a misunderstanding, less real positive emotional work. However, that's what people are doing these days. So we need to figure out a way to get better suggestions and ideas to people so that they can potentially use this for benefit. I think that's one of the most important things for everyone to realize, and it goes back to the Calhoun experiment. The rat utopia, you have everything you need. I mean, what's going to happen if you put all of us in front of a buffet without any discipline? So now we have an abundance of information and look at what it has done to us without thinking about using any discipline towards it. And now I think we're all reeling back on, okay, well, that running up to the buffet and gorging as much as possible certainly didn't help our situation whatsoever. And now everyone's trying to figure out what is the best way to discipline ourselves and use it. And certainly your book goes in much depth in all of those situations. I was just gonna say the title of the book is You Are What You Click. And I don't know that everyone in our audience has a firm grasp on how the algorithms work and what this attention economy is that you're talking about. So if you could share a little bit around how these algorithms work and how this is different than traditional media and what you mean by you are what you click. Yeah, no, it's a great question. So some people will open a social media page and they'll look at it and they'll just sort of experience it. And they'll think, oh, well, that message came up first. So that must be my best friend or that must be the message that is, you know, the most relevant to me and the one that's going to make me the happiest and the most satisfied. But it couldn't really be more far from the truth. In other words, when we teach media literacy or social media literacy to young people, we want them to understand when they open their social media platform that if it's a shade of blue, that shade of blue was like determined in very precise experiments. If there is a little thing that accompanies like a message coming on, the pitch of that, the decay of that, the kind of waveform that it is was determined very, very precisely. And when we are, you know, it's not like you turn on a television and it's the same message that's coming to everybody, you know, who's watching CBS at 9 p.m. Eastern time, you know, it is extremely different and it is very much tailored, not just to the individual, but to the individual in a way that will maximize profits. So for example, if there are a couple of messages that are being sent at one point, and one of them is a really good friend of yours that you care about and want to hear what's going on with them, but they don't have a lot of contacts and what they put in the message doesn't have any words in it like car or computer that can be used to match an advertisement to it or sell something. That message is not gonna come up first. The message that pops up first is going to be the one that is more likely to have you either going down some kind of a rabbit hole so that you stay stuck to the platform longer. That idea of stickiness is a very, very important social marketing and social media marketing idea. Anything to increase stickiness. We want people to stay as long as possible. That moment that they're thinking of leaving, you know, I mean, we've all been on a website before and like literally you start to move the mouse toward the X and then all of a sudden it says, wait, wait, you know, and that kind of thing is going on all the time on social media. And so a truly social media literate person is realizing that. They're experiencing this platform not just as like, oh, this is the way it is in the world. They realize that there is a lot of algorithm and a lot of science behind that. One of the things that you had put in the book was some questions to ask when you are seeing some of this advertising just to help you through it. And I think we've reached a point with media that I think that everyone should take a marketing class so they understand the depths at which they can reach. And I've talked to people about this before and even when I've talked about predictive marketing or any of these other things, they're mind blown and they don't even realize just how deep it goes. But because AJ and I have to do marketing for our company and we work with marketers, we're always fascinated and not only the depth but at what levels it is reaching certain emotions. And most of the time, you're not even consciously aware of them. And at least if you've taken a marketing class you can sort of understand some of the mechanisms that are at play. You can look at them for what they are and then know when you're triggered emotionally and when the ads imagery has worked to invoke such emotions to fire you up and then the enhancement of those emotions through the text. And at the end, now that you're riled up here's what we would like you to do. Donate, vote, buy, whatever that might be and know what that call to action was put there because they had done the research to know that you would be at your most heightened and most susceptible to that call to action.