Something You Should Know
Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?
Mon, 24 Feb 2025
Did you know that Philadelphia Cream Cheese doesn’t come from Philadelphia? Or that marshmallows were originally medicine for kids? This episode begins by looking at some fascinating and unusual origins of food names. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/tagged/health/at-home/odd-facts-7-iconic-products-164000529.html Despite the human need for social interaction, we keep shying away from it. People are less social than before and there are real consequences for that. Listen as we discuss why people are less connected, what the impact of that is and what we need to do to intervene and fix it. My guest is Jeffrey A. Hall is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kansas and co-author of the book ok The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us (https://amzn.to/417F1jc). When you hear someone talk about nuclear power – what do you think? Nuclear power has a bad image. People think it is unsafe – but is it really? A lot of environmentalists are jumping on the nuclear bandwagon. And the fact is there are almost 100 nuclear reactors in operation in the U.S. with no problem and France actually gets 70% of its power from nuclear. Listen as I discuss all of this with Marco Visscher, an award-winning journalist, who has written extensively about climate policy and clean technology and is author of the book, The Power of Nuclear (https://amzn.to/4b2MgxD). Why do people say umm, ahh and ya know? And have they always said them? Listen as I reveal how those “speech disfluencies” are likely only about 100 years old – and why they are so common now. Source: Michael Erard, author of UM... Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (https://amzn.to/42VSGN4) PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off DELL: Anniversary savings await you for a limited time only at https://Dell.com/deals SHOPIFY: Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the intriguing origins of popular food names?
Today on Something You Should Know, the interesting origins of food names you've wondered about but never knew. Then, we have a problem. Humans are social creatures, but we're not being very social.
Basically, since the 1990s, we have seen a steady decline of people spending time being social. We're actually looking at a roughly 40% reduction. People aren't going to places like parties or inviting friends over for dinner or hosting events where they host family or visit other family or friends.
Also, why people only recently started saying um, ah, and you know. And the renewed interest and push for nuclear power.
There is quite a growing group of pro-nuclear activists. Most of them are environmentalists, very much concerned about climate change. They recognize that leaving up renewables like wind and solar will always fall short.
All this today on Something You Should Know. For a long time now, I've been recommending The Jordan Harbinger Show as another podcast you might want to listen to. The Jordan Harbinger Show is different than something you should know, but as you'll see, it aligns well with this audience. Meaning, if you like this podcast, you're probably going to like that one. The Jordan Harbinger Show.
Each episode is a conversation with a different, fascinating guest. Recently, he had on Amanda Ripley talking about how to survive an unthinkable disaster, which strikes close to home for me, having just been... through the fires and mudslides in California and evacuated twice. He also spoke with Jay Dobbins, who's a former ATF agent who went undercover with the Hells Angels.
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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.
Every food has a name, but where some of those names come from will surprise you. Hi, and welcome to Something You Should Know. Food names are fascinating. For example, Philadelphia Cream Cheese. You would assume it must have started in Philadelphia, but it did not. Philadelphia Cream Cheese started in New York.
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Chapter 2: Why are people becoming less social?
So basically, since the 1990s, we have seen a steady decline in the United States and across a lot of Western countries of people spending time being social. We're actually looking at a roughly like 40% reduction of time spent being social, just conversing for the sake of conversation, for the sake of being social around one another.
One of the areas that it's declined the most is actually one that's kind of hard to see because people aren't about doing it. People aren't going to places like parties or inviting friends over for dinner or hosting events where they host family or visit other family or friends.
So what's interesting is the people that you see out and about who are actually on their phones are one example of people not necessarily spending time talking to each other. But there's a bigger issue here, which is that people are not prioritizing time with one another across Western Europe and in the United States and have not been doing so for 25 years.
But that took a major hit during the pandemic. A lot of folks actually went down dramatically in their face to face conduct and a good number of people haven't recovered since. Really, it's that that was the that was the tipping point right there was covid. It's sort of think about the idea that it accelerated an existing trend, right?
We were already on our way to a less social world and it pushed things further. And one of the reasons that it really pushed things further was for younger adults. And during that time of development, you know, people want to spend a lot of time in the company of their friends. They fall in love. They spent a ton of time outside of their family of origin, building their new families.
And during COVID, a lot of that time was restricted. So for a lot of folks, they don't have the kind of friends and connections they would like to have simply because they didn't make them to begin with. So COVID created the conditions that accelerated an existing trend and made things slightly worse.
But if that's your way of being and you know no different, you don't even know there's a problem. So how do you even begin to want to fix it if you don't know that this isn't normal?
That's a really great question. One of the hardest things is actually to direct the messages that the Surgeon General has and other people have about trying to focus on sociality to raise awareness about the problems associated with loneliness to people who need it the most.
So one of the things that my co-author Andy and I talk about a lot is that as professors of communication, as people who actually have very rich social lives, and we're both parents and we're both married, we actually, even in our situation, we still, through all the research that we get, have to be reminded to be social.
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Chapter 5: Is nuclear power a viable solution for climate change?
Chapter 6: Why do we use speech disfluencies like 'um' and 'ah'?
They also become less comfortable with doing it when they're expected to. So those moments of sort of like bottle of water, please, as you meant before, also are for people who are uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the very process of day-to-day interactions and transactions.
Every opportunity to have an interaction with another person, just acknowledging the dignity of that person and that role that they're playing plays an enormous difference in our sense of well-being and connection to the community. So that means looking me in the face and say, thank you.
That means actually acknowledging the presence of a shared moment, whether it's the weather or if you lived in Los Angeles like I did, bad traffic. Whatever it is that you share together is a thing that you can exchange with a person near you. And these small moments of connection build up the possibility of a greater sense of well-being in general.
But how do you convince people of that? Again, if they don't notice, if they don't see it, if they think what they're doing is fine, what are the benefits that you can point to and say, well, maybe if we did it this way, it would be better? How would it be better?
Yeah, well, I'll give you five that are all research backed empirically supported. Number one, right? The number one predictor of longevity is social connectedness, right? This is actually the equivalent. Having being lonely is equivalent of smoking 20 pack of cigarettes a day or 20 cigarettes a day, right? We also number two, what's interesting is it doesn't just mitigate harm.
So being social and having strong relationships doesn't always make you live longer. It makes you happier while you're alive.
The Harvard men's study found that if you make a change in your sociality in the middle of your life, so maybe you weren't a very social person when you were younger, but you make a commitment to being more strongly connected to your community, your friends, and your family at your middle age, you will be happier later. So you can change at any time. So that's the second one.
The third is your days are better. If you look at these what's called time use studies, which basically is how do people allocate their time, where does it go, on any given day, a more social day is generally a better day. It's a day that people feel more connected to one another. They feel happier. They feel a greater sense of purpose and meaning.
Number four, meaningfulness is actually very difficult to derive from a lot of the sort of pursuits that also might make people feel satisfied in the moment but not happy in the long term. Media is a great example of that. Lots of media is very pleasing in the short term, but not very satisfying in the long term.
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