Doctor Mike

It's not even selling.

It's a lot of it.

It's also popularity.

It's also power.

And so what activists do as a general rule, like political activists, is they create moral panics.

And the reason for that is when you activate the limbic system of people's brains to produce negative emotionality, negative affect, they're gonna do what you want.

Yeah, totally.

If you freak them out, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, they're putty in your hands.

Yeah, well, social media is, I mean, I land pretty much where you'd expect me to land.

I'm an old colleague and friend of John Haidt and his work on this.

I'm not an absolutist.

I think social media can be really good.

I think we will wind up having it as something that's as beneficial for us as telephones.

I mean, if you go back to the 1950s, when telephones started to become ubiquitous, people were abusing them all over the place and not going out of the house.

And even when I was a kid in the 80s or 70s, my mom would say, it's a beautiful day.

Hang up the phone and go outside.

And because the result, the technology, technology, it tends to be, it's amazing and then harmful and then just okay.

And then we go back to who we are as people, living and loving and learning and eating and dying and doing what we do.

we will have that period of adjustment.

It's just that there's going to be more casualties during that period.