Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowWhat's the longest amount of time you've spent away from social media? For many of us, the answer is "not long." Across the planet, billions of people are caught in an endless cycle of posting, reposting, commenting, liking, and reacting to a constant stream of ephemera -- a never-ending barrage of news, updates, hot takes, memes and viral videos inundating our brains with one shiny thing after another. Most people consider these pursuits harmless... but, as Ben, Matt and Noel discover in tonight's episode, a growing number of experts are concerned that this continual short-form theatre may have serious consequences for the human brain. Tune in to learn more about how the age of social media may be affecting your brain in dangerous, often-unacknowledged, and lasting ways.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nolan.
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Andrew the try Force Howard. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Shout out to whatever social media app you're on right now, if you're in a chat, tell them you're listening to our show.
You know what I mean.
Why don't weaponize it?
Oh man, you might as well s already weaponized against us.
Yeah as well. Turn the tables, flip the script.
Yes, yes, just so we we were talking about this just a little bit off air. A question I've been asking a lot of people recently. What is the longest you have gone without checking your phone?
No more than a day? I mean a day is nearly impossible.
I fully copped offline to being an absolute phone junkie, and I've had to initiate some kind of self imposed phone restrictions, like keeping it charging in a different room while I do things around the house or work on projects. But I'm absolutely addicted to the damn thing.
Yeah, we're going to talk about an author, Johann Harry, who did a little experiment with that whole thing. But when I think about vacations I've taken with my son or my family's, those are the times I've put it away the most. But I am still constantly checking for work stuff, checking for conversations and a text thread, checking social media, performance of a video, all that stuff.
And shout out to Hari Graceland doesn't make it easier either. I remember, I think we're talking about the same article there too, for a lot of us, or I should answer this as well. I've been trying, like you guys, to be more intentional about this, I think for a lot of us in the audience tonight. Technically, the longest you've been without your phone was the first few years of childhood and adolescence before you got your own phone.
Right Well, yeah, I mean, and now it's like you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Kids expect to get a phone at a certain age. If they don't have one, they feel excluded. It's not impossible to deprive them of that. You almost would be looked at as some sort of monster by society. How dare you not give your kid a phone at age thirteen or whatever?
You'd be in an out group and that's not good for social networking. Quick question, just curious here. What is the like, what's the going wisdom now for parents on the appropriate age for a kid to have some kind of phone, even if it's restricted access like a learner phone.
Yeah, Matt, wouldn't you say that? There's always the argument of the safety.
That does seem to be a thing that comes up, and then of course all the other stuff that follows along because you can't really, you know, pick and choose. Once they have the thing, they kind of have the thing. But what's your philosophy on that?
Well, we are all connected, and you do want to know where your child is right and we have these institutional programs like school and daycare that you send your child to and you just trust that the adults in those places are doing their jobs and doing them well. But in the times between it is it is weird to think about the transit between school and wherever they're going to or you know that as they get a little older, going to a friend's house, you want to be able to connect to them, and if they don't have a personalized device. We don't have landlines and houses anymore. You can't call Chris's house anymore and say, hey, Chris, is my son doing okay? But I guess you could call the parent, which is nice. But yeah, so sorry, long witted answer, just to say, I think as soon as a child can kind of go out and do things on their own, you were going to want as a parent to have some sort of direct connection to them.
Yeah, I agree with that. I think that's a solid rubric. You know, in most countries it's absolutely normal to constantly refer to your phone. And I love the point you made. Know that there are safety concerns too. We're talking about people growing up moving into the wide world. For some of us adults, you might constantly need to do it for your job, emails, text right. Like you were saying, Matt, A ton of people are constantly clicking on social media apps your TikTok, Instagram, Facebook x, Snapchat, we chat, all the apps. Reddit is social media as well, and it's weird how quickly it became normalized. We have to remember being normal doesn't necessarily mean a thing is good. So as we're looking into in tonight's episode, there are serious concerns that social media has become a kind of accidental conspiracy against your brain, particularly your attention span.
I'm sorry what.
We'll be back after a word from our sponsors. Here are the facts. I guess first, we have to explain the term social media. It seems like it came out of the blue, you know, and no one really questioned what it was because we all understood what it was. But I think it's worth us digging into it just a little.
For sure. Social media is something we've covered a lot on this show, and it is weird to think that the text app on your phone is kind of social media, A little bit to email, Gmail, that's kind of social media. But they but a lot of companies, individuals figured out ways to connect human beings even closer to basically, it's all a conspiracy to make you overshare on the internet and then get some attention for oversharing.
I mean, the currency is your time, and these apps are designed and psychologically designed to make you spend as much time as humanly possible and you know, this is capitalizing on a very common human need, the idea to have a peer group, the idea to be connected with others, making clubs, for example. We've been doing that since you know, time immemorial. For most of human history, people have gathered in groups of shared interests, like minded individuals, you know, chopping it up, sharing ideas.
Yeah, I love that point. No, social media and social networking are ven diagrams. They're two related, overlapping yet distinct concepts because, as you said, people have been so social networking since the days of tribes, right, what we have in common, and the first thing was the thing we have in common is we're related and we want to survive. The only thing that has changed about social networking as a group of tactics over time was what a giving group prioritizes, your tribe, your religion, the state, a career interest, who you want to date, et cetera. And then when we see the advent of the age of information mass communication technology, now social networking just has new vectors in group the outgroup. That's not going to change for the foreseeable future. Social networking is a way to build communities. Social media is a way to build an audience, or that's why a lot of people are there. The platforms need the user generated content for now until the AI slops through, and those users are often hoping to garner the large audience possible, which can then be monetized.
Oh it's interesting.
I mean it's we're almost entering an era where social media celebrities are more powerful or just as powerful than traditional celebrities, movie stars, pop stars.
I mean, a certain generation.
Cares way more about YouTubers and Instagram influencers than they do about you know, film actors for example.
Yeah, you don't have to look forward to see the sudden sea change here. I think about this whenever I'm doing a career day. Children of past generations, you know, wanted to be president or a famous athlete, right. I want to be the next Lebroad or the next Michael Jordan. I want to be a rock star. More and more kids now dream of being a social media celebrity or an influencer. And it was really interesting series of studies won by a group called Morning Consult that found social media star is the four most popular career aspiration for kids these days.
Yeah, it makes sense. My kid saw our George Washington videos, and after that we had a couple more talks about what he really likes, what he's into, and he said, I want to make videos like you, Dad, And I went, oh crap.
And I think it's.
Sort of easy to be dismissive of influencers and social media stars and all of that, but you know, we can tell you firsthand that there's a lot of work that goes into it. It does require a constant vigilance of posting and creating content and kind of never sleeping on it because you can lose that audience as quickly as you can gain it. But there is a certain sense of frivolousness around this type of celebrity. I would argue, it's like you're famous for being famous, you know, yeah, Art Dashian level, Right, it's the argument there.
In the end, it depends on what ideas you're putting forth into the world, right, what ideas do you generate right in the people that look at your sixty second video? And often it is as you know, we kind of slid that in there, that is about monetization. Social media influencers get used as a way to have ads get thrown in people's faces, even if they don't realize it.
There was a great South Park episode about that, a real brutal one. I don't know if you guys remember so. And I also love the point that, yeah, it can seem frivolous to some generations or some demographics, but it makes sense to aspire to these digital heights. You know, for a lot of younger folks. Most of the success stories you see, most of the media you encounter, it's on a platform you enjoy. It's you know, a twitch streamer you really like, or if you're into aviation, you can go to a certain agglomeration of hashtags and you can meet tons of people who will give you short form, dense, accurate scientific information about aviation. So we're not trying to throw the digital baby out with the bathwater. But it's so weird. This is a funny story. Did you guys know nobody knows who made up the phrase social media?
Hmm.
I guess I would have thought that it would have been associated with somebody, like a coined kind of moment, but.
Some kind of influencer maybe, Yeah, I guess so.
I mean, it's it's pretty cut and dry though, right, I mean, media, it is a medium. It is the conduit for digital socialization. So certain terms like that just kind of almost invent themselves, like with a form of parallel thinking.
Yeah, I think that's an accurate way to put it. If we go to if we go to some great conversations Forbes journalist Jeff BERKOVICI had he talked to a lot of tech executives from the nineties, right the days when AOL was still sending you a CD so you didn't run out of Internet. And one of the most prominent contenders claiming to create the phrase social media is Tina Sharky, who is a former executive at I Village and AOL and BabyCenter dot com. And she described it kind of the way you said. No. When she's talking this journalist back in twenty ten, she says, it's not service media, it's not quite informational media. It's social media. It wasn't media we were creating, it was media we were facilitating. And I think that's a big point, right, because you are, if you were using these products, you are making the stuff that they want to cycle through in between the ads.
So that's like in the nineties, ninety fourish times.
Yeah, that's when she said we know the origin. I feel like at OED, we know the origin starts popping up in the early nineties. No one's quite sure when, and probably one of the I know you guys love this. One of the favorite contenders for the crown of coining social media is another AOL guy, or a couple of them. Ted leons I'm not sure how to pronounce that, and Steve Case. They said they were throwing it around, and Ted has the best line where he says, uh, yeah, if it really mattered, I'm sure we can find a deck somewhere that talked about social networking and social media from that time. But what does it matter?
Okay, weird flex.
Steve, Yeah, well, Ted, just everybody who doesn't know a deck is like a PowerPoint presentation.
Yeah yeah, techy kind of business type presentations. He's basically saying, we did it, but I'm not gonna lie. It's not worth my time to show the receipts, you know what I mean.
There's another guy named Darryl Berry that has kind of a similar thing that he's like, yeah, we were throwing around the term back in the day, in around ninety four.
I think everybody was yeah, yeah, yeah, and these folks are right, by the way, there is no official award for coining that phrase. It'subiquitous. Nobody owns it. What you get are bragging rights. But still, a rose is a rose is a rose. Right. Social media, whatever you call it, is one of the most successful communication phenomena in all of human history, and you don't have to look far to see it. The statistics are crazy, and we're also all of us in full disclosure recording this. Now we are part of those statistics, folks.
Hell Man, the app we used to record could in some way be considered like a facilitator of social media at the very least.
Yeah, let's count. Let's count that app riverside in this conversation. As of October.
Twelve, guys, was Dungeons and Dragons the first social media media?
It could be Yeah, that's yeah, I guess. Yet we don't have to. We should then carve out the definition. We're talking about current electronics social media, social media that uses the Internet. If you're looking at that, then I don't think this statistic surprises anybody. As of October twenty twenty four, kind of the best time we have recent numbers for there were five point five two billion people somehow using the Internet across the globe. That's more than a two thirds of the global population overall.
Well it's interesting too because in the really early days, AOL type days they were talking about I remember having a friend whose mom was super online, early adopter, and she was into all of these kind of chat rooms, and there was this whole thing. There's a thing called the Palace that I remember, where you could have a little avatar that you could create with like a rudimentary photo editing you know, Photoshop type graphic editing app. And they were all just like these little avatars on these backgrounds. They were like kind of like you know, think of like wallpaper, like old school like desktop wallpaper. But it was like, you know, some sort of weird clue style mansion and theme, different rooms, a tiki party, whatever the heck, and you would be these little JPEGs and there would be speech bubbles coming out of your you know, little jpeg And that was a form of social media, but it was a lot more niche and you had to kind of be in the know to find those groups.
Yeah.
I remember Ultima Online in nineteen ninety seven when I could chat and hang out with my friends in an online environment that was in game, right, yes, and we could hunt monsters together fun.
Yeah.
Yet I remember earlier things like the BBS stuff, the bulletin boards right where you would post for specific forums. A lot of those got weird, you know what I mean. This is all presidential right, This is a sets a precedent for the more than five point two zero bill users of social media networks across the globe. So the vast majority of people who are on the Internet in the first place are on a social media network. That's sixty to sixty four percent of the entire human population. And no matter what people might say about, hey, I'm quitting meta or whatever, those numbers keep on rising year after year after year.
Do you think that accounts for individual users or people who have you know, different social media accounts or you know, like somebody who has two or three Facebook accounts, or somebody who has you know, multiple Instagrams or multiple stuff. I mean, I just I wonder if you could designate it.
Out depend on the nature of the metric, like who's doing the measuring, Like if it's an industry thing, then it would probably benefit the industry to count each of those as separate, like the way downloads are counted kind of unusually in pot casting.
Yeah, cough cough, I didn't. I didn't pull the specific numbers from like a marketing place because to your point, no, I think they would be more incentivized or a private company would be more incentivized to as Homer Simpsons said him big in their numbers. So I believe this statistic is just counting individual people, no matter how many accounts they have. So one tick mark is a person with five different Instagram accounts or five different Reddit accounts where they argue with each other, and it's counting them the same as one person who just has their one Snapchat or what have you.
Still a pretty staggering number, however, it's counting. I think people should try to be more like Christopher Walkin. Have you seen the news making the rounds lately. He's never owned a cell phone, he doesn't have any streaming. He has to watch episodes of Succession on like DVDs that they send him in the mail. I just don't know there's something charming now about that kind of unplugged off the grid attitude, because it is increasingly more and more difficult to accomplish and to just not be kind of like ostracized by society.
Yeah, it also gives him, uh, you know, it gives us a chance to shout out, Christopher Walken, you know, good on you for getting up getting on board with DVDs man for.
Sure keeping keeping keeping physical media alive.
Well, for him, it might be new. He might have said, look, a VHS was good enough for me.
This is this guy is the only new piece of technology that I will touch.
And great, d answer that guy.
And look for some of us, this massive proliferation of social media and online existence is great. Podcasters are part of that. It guarantees folks like us can have increasing potential avenues for sharing our work. The nutso thing is that all of the big social media apps or platforms kind of have their own shiny statistics and specialities. Right. We know that Facebook, even though here in the US a lot of us might say Facebook, that's for old people, it has the lie and share of active social media users. If you're just you know, again going one person counts for whatever they're doing. It has three point zero seven billion active users across the globe in twenty twenty four. Matt, again, you know, we'd have to get under the hood of the metrics. That's pretty impressive, but the methodology could be suspect. And that's not for Instagram. That's just for Facebook. And we have to remember, especially in developing countries, Facebook is the Internet. A lot of people are only interacting on their I have of course right by me. A lot of people are only interacting on their phone, and they're only really going to stuff through Facebook. Well.
Yeah, Facebook is the first one that popped up and so popular, and it became a place for families to connect. I know my family used that way. A lot of my friends they still keep up with their families via Facebook. I know that using that like if I jump on and check it, and I don't do it very often. There are people that I went to high school with that are still on Facebook active doing that thing. And it is so strange for me, just because I kind I gave up that ship a long time ago because I kind of felt like I had to. And it's exactly what we're talking about today, the addictive nature of this stuff and where your attention goes. But it does feel like you will be missing out if you do not have a Facebook account to keep up with the folks that you knew around the time when Facebook came about.
I keep the Messenger app on my phone just in case somebody who's more of a Facebook person hits me up that way, but I don't ever look at it, and I've exclusively kind of migrated to Instagram. This is more of like a visual form, I guess of social media, which I enjoy. I follow a lot of like graphic artists and designers and things like that, but there's also a lot of good reposts from other social media platforms end up on there. But of course it's also owned and operated by Madass, so you.
Know, and it just feels like one of those things that has been around for so long. That's why their numbers are so crazy. It's not because it's superior or something like that. It has just been around. It kind of reminds me of bud shows.
And yeah, just to add to like the personal experiences that we're sharing here, I don't trust Messenger enough to have it on any phone that I would use, so I keep one computer with desktop access to Facebook and Messenger. And I'm a little sour on it too.
Man.
It's it's a first of the post thing, But also you kind of have to thread that needle of you want to meet people where they're at. Right, if there is a loved one that is more active on this thing and you worry about them or you want to check in with them, then you naturally are going to go the easiest route, right, the best way to find them and interact with them. So there's a give and take to all of these things. For example, TikTok has only nine hundred million users in twenty twenty four, but those users spend an average of fifty eight minutes and twenty four seconds on it every twenty four hours. That works out that twenty three hours thirty minutes or so each month. Again, it's why ballpark average, but that's almost a full day out of each month when you add it up.
Yeah, and I'm you know, I am no exception.
I don't use TikTok, but I definitely scroll some Instagram reels and stories, you know, pretty chronically. And when you do see that screen time adding up, if you dare to check the stats on your device, it can be pretty staggering.
Pretty arrowing, especially if you're twenty two percent of US teens who spend two to three hours per day on average on TikTok. Look, on the surface, is a huge success story right now. Imagine we're social media execs. Our platform has replaced so much older media for other people, TV, radio, long form film, reading newspapers. But the problem is for the critics the way that they teach you to encounter and interrogate and digest information. So the big question, could regular social media use like we all do, could it actually make you less intelligent?
We'll find out after a quick word from our sponsors.
Here's where it gets crazy. Collect sigh of relief at our cliffhanger. There. No, it's not going to automatically knock your IQ down twenty points.
Or whatever, not like the long term effects of leed exposure to the Roman Empire.
But it can make you less effective at using your intelligence.
It can knock down your performance on tests including IQ test for sure. It's because it appears to have over time, clear and damaging effects on things like comprehension, memory, retention, and most troublingly and most well researched at this point, attention span.
Well, the thing about social media in that respect is, at least as far as I'm concerned, is it sort of promotes this idea that you can do all the things at one time right equally well, and that's just not true. It's this like myth, this kind of lie that we've been sold that you can like multitask by you know, looking having fifty tabs open, looking at different articles and also scrolling your social media and watching a movie in the background. And the reality is we only have a finite amount of attention to give, and when we start cutting it and cutting it and cutting it, it's almost like we're not giving anything to any one thing. It's all so far flung that we're kind of not really doing anything. It's like a jack of all trades, master of none kind of mentality.
Yeah, well said, do you want to We'll get into that further in depth in a little bit, nol, Do you want to introduce us to Tessa Nussenbaum.
Absolutely writing for The Standard in December of twenty twenty three, like so many other folks over the past few decades, she anecdotally noticed something kind of disturbing that she was having a hard time reading, researching, and writing. Just every couple of minutes, it would seem she had almost unconsciously this urge to stop what she was working on, actively working on, pickup her phone for a quick break, and then boom, before you know it, you're just locked down to that doom scroll.
Yeah, and let's talk about why this is so important coming from Tessa specifically, she is writing for The Standard, which is a school paper for the American School in London, which means that she is a student giving you direct access to a basically a teenager's mind as they are going through this. And it's a teenager that's intelligent enough to write this kind of paper and have the self awareness right as she's actively going through it. It's not no offense, guys. It's not us looking back on our teenage years and thinking about it. This is somebody in that moment knowing what it feels like.
In situ immedia arrests. Yeah. And no matter what Nussin Bouten does, no matter how many times she attempts to scope in and focus she finds, she continually returns back to the apps before any significant amount of time is passed. So this leads her on a disturbing journey of discovery, and it's one that we see echoed by momultiple other students, multiple other journalists, as well as a small army of researchers, marketers, and academics and of course social media giants. This is what you find from all these reports, anecdotal and quantitative. Social media is purposely designed to be addictive. You didn't get a dopamine rush from that last post or real or interaction that you know, that singing raven didn't quite do it for you, No worries, don't bother thinking too deeply. There's a shiny other video about a raven. It's also short. Just scroll down.
So much good COVID content.
I mean, you know what it reminds me of, guys, is the time that we all went to Vegas together and sort of, you know, strolled the casino floors and honestly I got sucked in to some of those bright and shiny and noisy video you know, gambling machines. It's a very similar thing. You're chasing that. When you're chasing that as the effects and the the graphics that explode across the screen, it's very similar to chasing that piece of content that scratches just that right psychological edge.
You could call it over simulation.
Yeah, oh for sure, it's rapid fire novelty. I think there's something to that, and.
It's not how the human brain evolved to digest information, not necessarily, not at this level and not at this cadence when you don't have access to frenetic, fast moving cavalcades. This endless ephemera, that's what a lot of it is, right, mixed in with things of note. Then you're forced to really think about information you encounter. You analyze it, you synthesize it, you digest, you connect it with other pieces of information you have encountered and assimilated before. That's why you're able to think more critically. It also allows you the superpower of sniffing out false claims and bs uh. It's pretty big and it's a muscle, rights, That's only a cliche because it's true. Your brain is a collection of different cognitive muscles. What happens when this set of muscles the ability to analyze and exercise critical thought. What happens when it gets atrophied or muted? You get a processing issue?
Right, Well, you're not actually doing anything.
I mean, you mentioned the terms of the word simulation, Ben, It's like it's stimulation simulation, you know, you're actually just getting all of this. You're living this whole kind of internal you know, life without leaving your couch or without looking up from your phone. So it's almost like you're you're living but not really living. It's it's a very matrix y kind of you know, proposition.
It also codifies the ways of which you can participate in information, right, the ways you can respond to a thing. And you have you know, like comment, et cetera. You don't have the same ability to imagine or interrogate a response as you would if you were, say, reading a book.
Well, yeah, think about how exciting that activity is, right, having something new hit your face, your mind, your ears, everything, your you know, your eyes that quickly something new, something different every time you do it. Take one little action with your finger, and something new happens.
You don't have to work for it. You don't have to like really put in that much effort. It's just kind of right there, presented to you on a silver platter, and it learns what you like to Sorry, no.
Yeah, no, you're right. But that versus as you're saying, bent reading a book, sitting there and going through words and synthesizing those words into ideas and thoughts and images in your own head that those two things compared. One is so easy and exciting. The other is could be exciting if you really thought about it, but it it is less exciting on the surface, and the immediacy of the excitement that you get isn't there when you're thinking about a book or doing chores or you know, just doing anything else.
Yeah, let's talk about let's talk about this as we hone in on that. There's a somewhat controversial study where people will tell you what's controversial in twenty fifteen by the eggheads of Microsoft, and they found the following. You can clock an overall trend as we step through this in two thousand in the year two thousand. Excuse me, it's the awkward as that that's what I always think about. I feel like you need to add someone on there anyway, the straight up two thousand, Microsoft found the average human attention span and their estimation was twelve seconds. That does not sound impressive, honestly, So try it at home. Turn on a timer, don't look at anything, don't listen to anything, maybe just close your eyes and breathe, wait and see how long twelve seconds really is, which is why we're not going to do it on the show, because we hate dead air. Twelve seconds so long for us. That's the idea I had originally.
Yeah, I think you should use your original idea.
Let's meditate, guys, let's take it. Come on as the least we can do. We owe it to David Lynch okay, in his memory. Let's meditate for twelve seconds.
We should put some sound in there, right, all right, ocean waves.
Perhaps I'll count down to from three and then I get to one. Give us a beep. I'll start a timer here for twelve seconds.
If you're driving, obviously, you know, maintain your eyes, your eyes open.
Yeah, all right, do this when you're not operating machinery.
All right?
Three to one?
Interminable?
God, what a waste of time. No, I'm getting it's important. Still in this is important. Mindfulness is important. We have to claw that back in lives.
How long did that twelve seconds feel for you, folks, assuming you weren't, you know, hopping on your phone, how did your thoughts fly in that short length of time. It's interesting, especially we consider again the Microsoft study, which people say is imperfect. In twenty thirteen, the same study found the average attention span had dropped down to eight seconds, as Nisenbou pointed out, and as a lot of other people clocked as well. According to Microsoft, that attention span was shorter than that of the average goldfish. These little lunatics can stay focused on something for about nine seconds if it interests them that if it's food.
Could last, that thing be a goldfish. The idea of like, you.
Know, that is as a superpower, not a bug, you know, being able to clear your mind and not remember the past.
Which is maybe a maybe good advice. It depends, you know. There are other studies that find different specific nuts and bolts numbers, but they all kind of map out that same trend. Like doctor Gloria Mark you can listen to you could read her work, and you can also listen to a couple of podcasts she's done. She found that in two thousand and four, the average attention to just any kind of screen was about two minutes and thirty seconds, and then years after that it declined to like seventy five seconds, and then by about twenty twenty three to twenty twenty four the number drop to forty five seconds, so much less weird right, but also still the same trend.
Well, let's talk about just reading an article that is on a phone or on a screen of any kind, like when we're doing our research. Think back ten years ago, guys, Think about the ads that would show up if you were reading an article on a place like CNN or Fox News, any of that stuff. Think about the ad space that would be taken up on the screen and how it functioned on that screen. Sure, then think back to early you know, if you were on AOL news or something like, when you're getting it a full article that you're reading. The experience, at least in my mind, was that of reading a book with every once in a while and ad showing up on the sides, on the rails, or an ad showing up in the center between paragraphs, but every once in a while.
Not inundated all around, not where you had to actually search for the thing you were trying to read on the page.
Yes, not only that, though, I mean it just feels like the content has just overall been tailored to that experience and just gotten shorter, like each piece of content is an ad in and of itself, and rather than having like long form writing journalism obviously there's still folks out there that do that. It's about having tons of little nuggety bits to serve these ads.
Well, okay, so just but just I had that experience reading a Guardian article today where this article was written by Johan Harry that we mentioned at the top of the show. It is written in actual paragraphs, and then I realized, why does this feel so strange to me? Because I then looked at some of the other articles that I had opened my other tabs, and they are literally sentences, then a break, then sentence, then a break, then a break, then a break after sentence after sentence. And these companies, a lot of them, are putting ads between every third sentence or something, and in the paragraphs you get at least three or four paragraphs before you get an ad break. And just the way content is being tailored to not it's not to make you understand the concepts that are written in the article or anything like that. It is to get those ads hitting your face as rapidly as they can, and you only if you can break it up by sentence. You only need, you know, three or four paragraphs worth of thought in order to sell the same number of ads that this huge Johan Harri article had.
Yeah, and that's why some people will go toward ad blockers, which becomes its own argument, right, because then are you making it ultimately impossible for those journalists to do that same level of work you.
Know exactly well.
And it also creates an environment where there are fewer And maybe this is just conjecture on my part, but it would seem that it creates an environment where the demand for that real, hard hitting long form stuff, at least online is significantly diminished because it does not fit that new or rubric to maximize sales dollars.
Do you mean demand from an audience or readers or do you mean demand from corporation?
Corporation the people that are paying the journalists, the people that are filling the pipes.
Yeah, well, the and the ads just one last thing here. The ads are not your standard two thousand and eight. You know a picture right that has some information on it that is trying to.
Product sound videos.
It is it's like scrolling through social media as those ads load, and you're going through and try again. CNN. I'm sorry, but I cannot read stuff on your page unless I alter your page so that I can read it it sucks.
Sorry, and so yeah, it's perfect and it's honest. And going back to what we're saying about, you know, Harry's work, which we'll get into later, and then also Mark's work. Harry is a journalist, right, but heavily researched into this and as well as you know, even the controversial Microsoft study. We see that this overall trend has come about. Now, why do the numbers seem to differentiate and why do we say their commonalities are more powerful than their differences? Will tell you after a word from our sponsors and we've returned. All right, First, it's important to note not all of the numbers agree. That's I would argue you, guys, that's probably likely to the nature of the sample size, the demographics of the people in a sample size, where they are life, the types of media they are consuming, their education level, and so on. You know, if you went and you asked a group of a group of people who are academics and all they do is study the Old Testament, their attention span ratings are going to be, you know, a little bit higher than average.
Wouldn't you also say that for generations that like grew up completely online, like there's really nothing to measure that change with. It's just brains have been wired from the start. And then the quest and then becomes like, is it just a new way of dividing attention?
Yeah, and you're measuring the effectiveness of the platforms as well with those folks, right, how effective has Instagram become?
Yeah, and you would you would be able to compare gen Z. You would just need to take a group of people of the same age who were not from a part of the world where this where cellphal technology was ubiquitous, right, So you could maybe see it that way. But then it becomes who's going to fund the study?
I guess what I'm saying though, is like, you know, my kid is gen Z, and my kid's best friends got to twin brothers who are the most gen alpha of kids I've ever seen brain rod digit exactly. But it's like they are also intensely creative and weird with their creativity. So there's something to be said about that too, Like I don't want to just completely demonize this stuff and say the kids there's no hope because of this toxic internet culture. Like there's something about the way the brain is wired and these folks that are like online from birth. That is different and is interesting. I don't know what it means, but I've witnessed it, and there is something going on with these kids.
Yeah, that's a similar argument to the older one about Indigo children, which is a whole different bag of badgers. And also it's a great tip. It reminds me of the second aspect that we have to talk about with these studies, which is attention is also not necessarily across the brain and across the world hardwired to the media you're encountering so much as it is hardwired to the task at hand. If you like reading in general, you're going to stick with the text longer than someone who doesn't really like reading. If you are playing your favorite video game, you might experience a similar level of focus. If you're studying for a test on a subject that you really dig, then you're probably not gonna have as tough a time focusing as in like, let's say you hate what's a subject? People hate? H math?
Okay, you know.
I love it.
Some people love it and are great at it, and some people are inherently great at it and has an aptitude and a type of attention that is very well suited for that kind of analysis, you know. I mean, I know, I'm stating the obvious. Some people are better at some things than others. But for me, I'm so bad at math. But when I work on music and I'm engaging with like sound design or synthesis, it's a way of interacting with math, which is a subject that I hate. I just had to find a different path to it.
You know.
I just experienced this with my son. We were studying for a test on Indigenous Americans and all, like all the aspects like a social studies test that he was working on, and he wanted to sit with me and study and just go over stuff, and he wanted to learn it at all. But then we sat down to learn about pollution, and he did not like that subject because it made him feel a little scared and uncomfortable and all of that. So that that anxiety that he felt is what caused him to lose focus when we were attempting to study that one. And I wonder if overall generalized anxiety has anything to do with the desire to move to these social media things versus you know, actually studying what's happening in the news or something.
Like that, right, the brain wants to uh, well yes, yeah, okay.
So here's the brain and the heart want what they want.
A task accomplishment is really what it is. And the immediate gratification of learning something easy that is not hard to your brain, You're still accomplishing a task, right. And I think anxiety to that point does play a role in it. I'm not going to get into an anecdote, but I've definitely encountered what you're talking about.
Well, in this in case, it was a subject that was hard, that had a ton of dense information, but he was into it. And the other thing was a ton of generalized information but it made him nervous.
Yeah.
And the idea here regarding anxiety, it kind of speaks to the level of there are certain things people may be more comfortable learning, right, and the brain hates tackling something and then having to get it wrong and go back and redo it. That's another big part of it. So the brain is naturally incentivized to look for easily accomplishable task and seeing a video and reacting to it and hitting that like button is an easily accomplishable task, and the brain response and says boom, we just did something. Here's a little shout at dopamine. Now it's on to another task. We are killing it today.
Yeah, stimulation, simulation. It's weird, man, and we're all totally subject to it. You know, there's really very hard to escape, you know, sort of completely unplugging, and that's just not very practical anymore.
Right, And I wonder too, if there's some attention span alarmism. Right to which degree is this really affecting people? I mean, is it hyperbolic? A we are we overdoing it? With concern?
Well, I mean, I'm with you, Matt, and I will say that I do have a hard time sitting and focusing and reading a book, reading a novel. We do a ton of short form reading and papers and things like that for the podcast. But I have really struggled with maybe it's that multitask culture that we've sort of become a part of, you know, against our will maybe at times, but that's not great. I'd love to be able to enjoy a book and enjoy a moment of stillness and meditate. But I'm also very high functioning, and I enjoy my job, and I spend good time with my family, and I don't feel like I'm living some sort of existential nightmare.
So I don't know. I think results may vary.
I think I think my own I don't know. I think I've read a little too much to Yoan Hari. He wrote a book called Stolen Focus, Why you Can't pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. And I am on board the guys arguing basically, we need to start a revolution against this stuff, because how do you solve hard problems if you can't focus on a hard problem for years? You know? And I don't know.
Would you guys argue that in some small ways social media could be considered an existential threat, Yeah, I would say.
Not to maybe an individual, but to an individual's abilities, and perhaps to a civilization's capacities or capabilities.
Yes.
And and secondly, are we not, especially in this country, especially with some of the oligarch type situations that are creeping into politics and government, you know, living in a society where the knock on effects of this stuff are more or less ignored, and the research into how this will affect people down the road is absolutely not part of the conversation when it comes to figuring out how to get the most eyeballs on a product or Yah.
It's not part of maybe the more the wider public mainstream conversation, but I do believe the downward trend and intention span does have what we could call knock on consequences. You know, cognitively, look, and I think this is so important because I hate when people are condescending about this kind of stuff. Cognitively, you're not less intelligent for using social media. It is more difficult for you to do certain things to become engaged in long term focused to what we call deep thought. We've mentioned it before. But the theory I always like to I've made this up, so I okay, you know what my opinion then not. A theory unpublished is if you think of learning on an X and Y axis, learning anything right, and the Y axis above and below that X that is the depth of knowledge, right, So the deeper you go on the why, the more you know about a single thing. The X axis is how many different kinds of things you know? And to the jack of all trades master of none concept proposed earlier people used to have very deep knowledge about very specific things, and now we kind of all know the first paragraph of Wikipedia on a thing but how.
Does the person who knows the first paragraph on Wikipedia build a rocket? You know, yeah, I guess what I mean is like I do. I mean, I don't mean to be condescending to anybody, but I do feel like the use of this stuff does cause our intelligence to flatten, maybe like that the way you're saying, rather than get those spikes that I think humanity needs.
They do. But it's recoverable. And that's why I'm saying, like your base and intelligence has not changed the ability of engaging, but the information can be lost and regained, kind of like getting out of shape and then doing your push ups again.
Absolutely such, it does make complete sense.
And again I would just say, you know, when I was trying to fumble out earlier is like, you know, I definitely think this is something that I need to curtail in my life, and it's something that I am making some steps towards. But I also spent the last like two and a half days really locked in and focused on working on this remix of a song for my friend's band, and I feel like it's one of the best things I've ever done. And I've like absolutely focused in on every single detail, and I was completely able to stay locked in.
So I'm just saying, like, I'd love to hear it. No, I I'd love to share it.
And it's and it's task specific. Again, that's something that you care about that already kind of scratches behind your ears cognitively. So you can lose, you can get lost in the sauce of that beautiful moment.
You know.
That's that helps you.
Get But that's the thing. Social media simulates a flow state without you actually having to accomplish anything.
Oh, it's a synthesized flow state, and.
The brain is reacting the same way, kind of like how your brain doesn't really on some levels, doesn't really know the difference between a fake laugh and a real laugh. It encourages some of the same physiological mechanics to occur. That's those feel good chemicals that you get. We have to tell you your brain is not the villain here. If anything, your brain is just again trying to accomplish checklist and rewarding itself when you when it feels like a task has been accomplished. So the short term stuff is immediate. It's the immediate rush of feel good chemicals as you build a tolerance. But finishing a book, attending to lecture, working on an album. That's a lot more time for that shot of feel.
Good watching a movie at home without multitasking, without looking at your phone. Executives that now Flicks and other streamers have openly talked about, or at least maybe it's more of an open secret kind of thing that they make movies the green light movies that have a second screen appeal, meaning that you don't have to be locked in because they know ninety percent or whatever high percentage of viewers are gonna be half paying attention and looking at their phone. And I would argue that a lot of that stuff really set in deeply during COVID.
Sure, yeah, well it's also time. Do you have an hour and forty five minutes to dedicate to one thing, to sit in one place and focus on one thing.
Especially when you're fighting a fomo war on multiple fronts.
Oh yeah, for sure. It took me three sittings to watch Saturday Night recently, three sittings. I had to start it, and then I had know I had to stop and go away and do some other stuff because my brain said, oh, we got to go do these other things. I can't just sit here and watch a movie.
Yeah, God, help us try to get through the brutalist y'all right.
The last time I watched I was thinking about that too. So when the last time I watched the film without a second screen was in a theater, because I didn't want to be rude. For another biological comparison, think of it this way. Tell me what you think, guys, I really like this one. I don't know how accurate it is, but lifting from you know, the old analogy test in l SAT or SAT or whatever, social media is to attention span as smoking is to lung capacity. The more you use the one thing, the more you lose of the other. But you can regain it with you know, a little bit of moderation, a little bit of self care. So let's talk about these knock on consequences as your detention span lowers. First, you begin grabbing multiple inputs. And I remember in the Brain Stuff Days did a video that pressed a lot of people off. It was about multitasking. You're mistaken about it. Nobody can actually multitask. No human being can multitask on these conscious focus like pay attention to kind of pursuits because your brain is already multitasking and keeping your blood flowing, keeping your heart pumping, all this others, making sure you don't automatically crap yourself. Your brain has so much to do and we don't acknowledge it. When you are trying to focus on conscious things multiple at once, you're switching your focus, and every time you do this, your brain has a little reset and it says, oh, what was that thing that was just doing? How did I feel about it? Where did I leave off? What do I want to go to next. That happens every time you're like, let me pick up my phone for a second, Oh, let me get back to this email.
Well, that's the thing.
I mean.
This technology.
I mean, look at like you know, Apple Vision pro whatever, like the idea of having fifty virtual screens surrounding you, you know, Minority Report style. It's this technology and these technology companies that have us believe that this kind of multitasking.
Is possible through technology extensions of our meat bodies.
But it's just not true, right, Yeah, the average human being absolutely cannot multitask. Your brain is just so good at switching between discrete tasks that from far enough away in your conscious mind, it looks like you're doing it at the same time, and that's how the grift works.
Well, it's like having too many tabs open in your browser. All of a sudden, your whole computer crashes.
Well in every time you switch that task, your brain has to reboot that task it is not and that means you have to remember what you were thinking about when you were doing that task, right.
Remember what you just did, how you felt about it, and where you left off.
It's almost like existing in this fugue state where you're sort of between things all the time.
I know that feeling, specifically when doing the voicemails for this show, where I will get into a minor flow state doing that, and then all of a sudden I have the need to check Instagram and I do. It throws me off completely, and then I will leave and go do something else because I got out of flow state before having to find my way back there somehow.
Yeah, I think we've all encountered some versions that all of us in the audience tonight as well. So I want to go back to this Netflix thing, you guys, because this is really If you notice this, you're not crazy, NOL you had mentioned it earlier. I think we all clocked it up. This is part of why you see more and more characters putting in exit exposition of what's happening at that moment. And it reminds me a little bit of weird improv, but it's in a very serious way. Someone's going ethan you've just walked in. Yes, and I know about Bolivia, which you mentioned earlier.
Indeed, it's like the way soap operas operate is not conducive to good quality writing and art.
It's super pandery and like not very interesting, not very creative.
Yeah.
No, I don't want to que people of lazy writing, but it is a way to get stuff across without having to show anybody anything. You just tell them real quick.
Yeah. It also helps, you know, for the people who maybe have a favorite character in an ensemble cast of some sort. Like let's say there's a modern version of Lost and you only like trying to remember Lost characters Flock, the Man in Black or Lock. Yeah, no spoilers, but but then you uh, you're you're on your phone, right and you're kind of listing, kind of not listening, and then you hear them say the name of the character you like. Phone down for a second, I'm tuned in.
Er that time I accidentally spoiled Lost by telling a bad joke, like about what it wasn't supposed to be, and then people got mad because of anything.
I don't It was a long time ago. It was on this show, but people wrote in and were angry that I even at that point the finale had been.
Because I said Lost. The writers of Lost spoils I.
Think I just said something to the effective it was all, which is not a spoiler, because that's not true, and it's something the writers said would they would never ever.
They would never do that.
Guys, I just want to say one last thing that comes directly from you and Harry. I'm sorry I've become a Haryeite. And this. You can read this in the Guardian title is your Attention didn't collapse, It was stolen. It was written January second, twenty twenty two. This is just a quote from the end of the article. Read it though, and get to this quote.
He says.
At the moment, it's as though we're all having itching powder poured over us all day, and the people pouring the powder are saying, quote, you might want to learn to meditate. Then you wouldn't scratch so much. Meditation is a useful tool, but we actually need to stop the people who are pouring itching powder on us. We need to band together and take on the forces stealing our attention and take it back.
I really like that.
Yeah, I agree, because we oh, we've got to tease this, We've got to deliver on this tease. That same article as one of my favorite beginnings that are read in the way these things are introduced as concepts. It's all about talking to his godson and taking him on a trip to Graceland. And it's amazing. Please do check it out. It's it's a banger stem disturn. But that's what we're talking about when you said grace Land at the very top of tonight's show, And can I just.
Really quickly just give a shout out to I think someone that we all admire who recently passed away, David Lynch, who is an incredible painter, artist, polymath, filmmaker and thinker, and you know he is a huge was a huge proponent of transcendental meditation and the idea of needing that stillness in order to be able to kind of pluck these ideas out of sort of the cosmic ether, and I think we can learn a lot from him, And if anybody out there isn't super familiar, I do recommend you know, looking up some of his interviews on the subject, because you know, people like him and like at Heart Polly, for example, are our folks that I think are really important when it comes to thinking about mindfulness and being able to kind of like shut off that part of our brain that craves that dopamine hit that we've been talking about.
Dude, dude, Johann ends it with. The more our attention degrades, the harder it will be to summon the personal and political energy to take on the forces stealing our focus.
And that's why they're stealing it, isn't it. That's that's the whole point. I mean, it is a conspiracy in many ways. I don't maybe I don't know if it started that way, but the way the technocrats are now like in league with the government, it just seems like that's just they're going to push it even further and the idea of taking over TikTok using it as a propaganda So I don't know, it's it's I was not I would.
Say that's a I would call it again an accidental conspiracy. The first conclusion social media is not going away for many people. It is the internet from many people, it is they're also their prime method of interacting. And then second the science continues, how relatively new is this stuff. We have to remember widespread online social media comms are a little young to have true longitudinal studies. It's going to be difficult to account for all the differing variables involved. But as everybody is wrestling with this, we can say for sure, no matter how the science works out, it's great to put your phone down once in a while a long time if you can manage it. Slow day, weekend off, go outside, do something fun. Your brain will consider this exercise and with each iteration, just like lifting some dumbbells, your attention SPAN's going to get stronger. And I really don't think social media tycoons care if you know about this, not yet, because they say people are already addicted. From their perspective, you're never going to get so fed up that a large number of people actually leave for good. And this is where we once again want to sho shout out the various authors and scholars and journalists that we've mentioned here. We also want to ask you, since you're the most important part of this show, what's your take on this? What's your experience? We raised a lot of questions that don't quite have answers yet outside of people's personal experience, so please share it with us. After we talked about how dangerous social media is, guess what, you can find us online?
Right and Ben, you had also mentioned being interested in folks writing in about their experiences with flow state, you know, like tell us about a positive way or that you've counteracted some of the damaging effects of social media. You can find us all over the internet. We are conspiracy Stuff on YouTube or we have video content Calora for your enjoyment. We also exist at that handle on x FKA, Twitter and on Facebook with our Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy on Instagram and TikTok. However, we are conspiracy Stuff show and we're also people. You can find me on Instagram at how Now Know Brown?
How about you? Ben?
Is it an individual or a group effort? There's one way to find out. Go to app ed all wherever people use apps, or go to the website Ben and bullet. Hey, if you don't like to sip the social beads. There are other ways to find us, but Matt, the masses are dying to know an any update on social media.
My name is Matt Frederick and we have a phone number. It is one eight three three std WYTK. Why don't you call in and tell us what you think about a social media tycoon gaining full access to the federal payment system like you did yesterday. As we record this, that makes me nervous. What do you think when you call? Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if we can use your name and message on the air. You've got three minutes. Say whatever you want, just you know, do make it fun and exciting. If you've got something else to say, if you want to write it out, if you want to send us a link or maybe a picture, why not send us a good old fashioned email.
We are Oh, let me hold off there for a second. Folks, Please please please write in as well with your opinion on what kind of qualifications someone needs to create or destroy a federal department, and especially if you work on the frontline. We want to thank everybody who wrote in to us with some of their experience with the recent let's say changes here in the US. To the degree that you are comfortable, let us know if anonymity is key. We are the entities that read every email we receive. Be well aware, yet I'm afraid. Sometimes the void writes back, join us out here in the dark conspiracy. At iHeartRadio dot com, everyone have a great day.
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