 We were, you know, exposed to a dangerous event, and we would get a little high from that dangerous event, right? You know, like all of a sudden, the lion is attacking, right, my village. And, you know, we've got to do something about that, and it's natural to sort of get that little adrenaline high that comes along with, you know, that attack so that you can avoid the attack. But that system that, you know, evolved over millennia was not evolved to deal with the lion attacking every four minutes. What's up everybody, and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week, and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to 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. Well, I want to frame this. There's sort of two conversations here that are important. Number one is this idea that it's researched. We are the research subjects. We just don't know it. So when we say research, people think, oh, white lab coats, and there's probably a group of volunteers in a room. No, that's not what's actually happening. They're gathering all this data in real time. And they're using the data to diagnose behaviors, to guide behaviors in a way that makes them more money. So our attention is being used in this experiment. We haven't opted in. We just signed up for the site. It's a free platform and we are giving them our attention. And through that, they're able to tell a lot about our behavior. That's an important point. The second part in this is that many of us interacted these apps, and especially in the beginning when Facebook came out, it was the timeline. We interacted these apps thinking that it's just a logical progression and what we're seeing in front of us is sort of in a real timeline as if that's how the world works. And what you're saying is that's really not the case any longer. This isn't happening in real time. The algorithms are feeding us the information that they hope will keep us on the site longer because the more time we spend on the site, the more likely we are to interact with advertisers who are paying for our attention and therefore these platforms can monetize us and make money off of it. Exactly. And so then the magic question becomes having this kind of awareness that you're talking about right now, which is kind of fun to hear about. It's kind of cool. It's kind of interesting. But does it really make me more likely to make better choices or not? And that's one thing that we've been studying in our research for years now because we've been studying social media and things like tobacco advertising. And media literacy and things like tobacco advertising. So for example, if I'm the kind of person that just kind of lets the advertisement wash over me and I just kind of have this sort of subconscious feeling like, you know, smoking is cool and refreshing and X, Y and Z. Versus somebody who looks at it very specifically and says, oh, I know why the font is so slim because they're subconsciously trying to make me feel. They know that people in my age group want to be thinner. And so that's why the font of the letters is thin. And when I look at the, you know, Virginia Slims, I know that there's actually no company called Virginia Slims. The company is called Philip Morris and they've actually changed their name to Altria because they want to sound more altruistic. And so all of a sudden, you know, I've got all this magical knowledge back there. But am I any less likely to actually want to smoke? And it still is an open question. I mean, we certainly have found some successes in media literacy and we do find that people can learn media literacy and that sometimes their attitudes and norms change and they're not as likely to say, hey, wait a second. But the question is if you and I know that the message that's put up for us is, you know, not the number one message we should be seeing, if we know that every single person out there is putting one in a thousand photos up and that that is not their real life, this is just, you know, a very, very curated situation. Does it make us OK now or do we still feel inferior and do we still do social comparison even though we have that knowledge? So this is one of, I think, the critical questions because I'm always thinking about solutions, you know. I want to be able to have the positive things but then I also want to, you know, not be as likely to fall down rabbit holes of depression and comparison and anxiety and all that kind of stuff and we still haven't really figured that out but that's an important task. So the two things that we can control as users is our attention as in when we log in and when we log off and also what we're actually interacting with when we are logged in and getting back to the title of the book with a level of intentionality you can control the amount of usage and you could also control what the algorithm starts to interact with and show you so that you can start to pull out some of the positive impacts but we are fighting an uphill battle on this. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and that is where the specific three elements of the pyramid came from. You know, it's actual instructions, you know, positively framed. Be selective, be positive, be creative and the attempt is to say that, you know, yes, selectivity for example in part it's about the amount of time I guess that you use but it's also how you engage that time. So for example, we've conducted a study and we looked at does the number of platforms you use independently predict things like depression even if you take out of the equation the amount of time that you're spending so let's say for example you spend two hours a day on social media and I do also. So we use exactly the same amount of time but you divide that among two platforms and I divide that among seven platforms, right? I mean it really was an open question as to which of these situations is, you know, better which is more problematic. I mean you could think well maybe seven platforms is just too much to handle on the other hand you might say seven platforms I, you know, maybe I'm going to have more benefit I'm going to find, you know, a larger group of, you know, people or be more likely to find the right people or, you know, whatever but what we found in that study was even when you control so exactly the same amount of time the person with seven platforms using, you know, over the course of a standard week versus focusing on two more than three times as likely to be depressed and so the idea is that it's not just the amount of time it's also what specific activities are we doing when we get there so selective selecting those particular platforms as an example is something that, you know, you can do that's a little bit more nuanced and right there you're reducing your risk of certain things. Now it doesn't mean that it goes down to zero and of course there's a lot of other things to figure out and then of course we also need to figure out why I mean, you know, what is it about seven platforms versus two well, you know, it's probably that each platform is very idiosyncratic and, you know, you kind of get to know it like you get to know a group of friends and, you know, in high school it's really hard to be friends with seven groups of people, you know that's why it's, you know, people generally have a couple groups of people that they know well they're less likely to make a gaffe they're more likely to know sort of what those unwritten rules are and so I think that that may be partially what's going on here but we as scientists, you know we want to figure out why and then we want to try to make people's lives better as quickly as possible. Yeah, no, it's a really good question. Well, I think sleep is probably a big deal because we're learning more and more about sleep and how connected it is with, you know just so many emotional things and physical things about our lives and we, for example, found in a separate study that we published yesterday and I think it's a really good question and I think it's a really good question and I think it's a really good question and I think sleep is probably a big deal because we're learning more and more and we published in the top sleep journal just called Sleep that those last 30 minutes before bedtime if you're using during those last 30 minutes you're significantly more likely to you know, have bad sleep but interestingly, it also is a predictor the amount that you're using during the day, aside from those last 30 minutes however the the effect was about the same like the all-day effect or the last 30 minutes so at the very least we say to people try to, you know, avoid those last 30 minutes take those 30 minutes and put them somewhere else that way you're still having some time but it's not doing things to your sleep centers that might be problematic and you know, there's arguments all the time on what exactly those challenges with the sleep centers are you know, some people say oh, is it the blue light that's being emitted from my you know, device that says that signals my pineal gland to wake up at exactly the wrong time yes, you've heard that, but see the thing is like part of that might be propagated by the industry because what they're doing is now putting a little filter on the thing and saying hey, what we're doing is automatically after, you know, a certain time we're gonna shade everything more toward the red-orange side of the spectrum Donnie, don't worry, you can do as much social media as late as you want, you know whereas it might actually not just be the blue light it might also just be that it's hyping us up I mean, it's making us anxious about things it's, you know, getting us worried about things right before we go to bed yeah, we have the benefit of scrolling to be stimulated we're not scrolling to bore ourselves or to go to bed or scrolling to get enticed to define something that stimulates us and certainly when you understand how important the attention economy is to the folks on the other side of that who are building these things whether it's malice or not it still affects us and they want it and they're fighting over it and the thing to understand is well, if one social media site decides to lay off they're just giving that time to the other social media sites who are gonna be a bit more advantageous about that and even traditional media knows this I mean, even before the advent of social media if it bleeds, it leads there's no newspaper world saying it was an average day and tomorrow's gonna be slightly more average that cell, that to get our attention and this concept of doom, scroll, getting riled up you know, many of us felt it during the pandemic we wanted to use instantly we were going to some media to find and we were all thinking ourselves spend more time on this form because we worried about this world pandemic so this concept of the mean world syndrome you introduced in the book it's been in traditional media and now we have social media amplifying it so part of the argument is based on human nature we want to give our attention to things that are outrage filled to have some stromotion to it don't go to the movies, watch a boring average we're not gonna tune to social media if they're average the argument is they're just feeding human nature so how much are we lame in all of this with the mean world syndrome and now so we get amplifying so they're feeding human nature however, think about humans and nature you know, ten generations ago right, I mean we were you know, exposed to a dangerous event and we would get a little high from that dangerous event right, you know, like all of a sudden the lion is attacking, right, my village and you know, we've got to do something about that and it's natural to sort of get that little adrenaline high that comes along with, you know, that attack so that you can avoid the attack but that system that, you know, evolved over millennia was not evolved to deal with the lion attacking every four minutes and that is what it is like so for example, there was a study right after 9-11 it was in the Journal of the American Medical Association and what they did was they looked at what were the biggest predictors after 9-11 of actually getting post-traumatic stress disorder and some of the variables they looked at was was it having lived in New York City or Washington DC was it actually having been in the building was it being, you know, when, you know, collapsed was it having a family member in the building or in the police, you know, department or something like that and what they found was the strongest predictor of who would get post-traumatic stress disorder was how much television you watched in the two days following the incident in other words, if you were in the middle of Iowa and, you know, had nothing to do with, you know didn't know any individuals who were actually there in the building but you watched 48 hours straight of television, right you were actually more likely to get post-traumatic stress disorder than people who really experienced it because those people experienced it once they experienced a horrific event but you experienced it over and over and over again in Technicolor with audio with, you know, the titles flashing wait a second, we have new news and new information so I think that there's something parallel here is that yes, you know, we are evolved to, you know our human nature it's normal to, you know, get a little bit of an adrenaline high from a challenge it's just not normal to have those, you know constant stimulating messages whether it's negative stimulation if it bleeds it leads or whether it's positive stimulation hey look at all of these perfect bodies and perfectness around me and I'm just not as good either way, we're just not made for that