Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
Mon, 05 May 2025
Why is salmon pink? What is the shelf life of a Twinkie? What do almonds and peaches have in common? These are just a few of the fun food facts we cover to kick off this episode. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/food-facts_n_4788746 How many times would you guess the “Like” button is pressed by people every day around the world? You are about to find out and it is a lot! Where did the like button come from? Why is it so important? What does it do for the person who does the liking and for the person (or business) who gets your “like”? Listen to my guest Martin Reeves, who has explored the history of the like button and why it has become such a big part of our lives. Martin is chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, a think tank for developing new business ideas and he is co-author of the book Like: The Button That Changed the World (https://amzn.to/4cTgCUn). What is going on right now in your body is astonishing. Things like tears and your breath and even mucus. It is all fascinating and worth understanding. (And I promise we do not get really gross!) Joining me for this discussion is Cutter Wood, who has thoroughly explored and researched this topic and written a book called Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies' Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations (https://amzn.to/4lPEJHw) You have likely had the dilemma of owning a favorite pair of shoes that need to be repaired and the question is – do you fix them or just get a new pair? Listen as I reveal what the experts say that determines the answer to that question. https://www.businessinsider.com/should-i-repair-or-replace-my-shoes-2015-4 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure! Go to https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! QUINCE: Elevate your shopping with Quince! Go to https://Quince.com/sysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! 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! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What interesting food facts are discussed?
I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.
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Today on Something You Should Know, fascinating facts about the food you eat, like why salmon is pink, what's the shelf life of a Twinkie, and more. Then, the Like button. It's pressed billions of times a day. Why do we like the Like button?
When you click the picture of the Like button, it creates dopamine release, and it's the same dopamine release as actually being liked. It's the same dopamine release as actually liking somebody.
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Chapter 2: Why is the Like button so popular?
We don't have the money to pay for these things like the Michelin Guide would. So how do we do that? Another one was cleaning up content feeds. Most people, if you give them an opportunity to comment on somebody else's content, they'll make a trivial comment, right? They'll say, okay, or great, or well done. And if you've got a whole page full of that, that's That's not very captivating.
That's not going to keep users on your site. So if you can clean all of that and compress it into an icon with a little counter or something, that's another problem. So people are trying to solve these various tactical problems, and then they bumped into the idea that, hey,
You know, there's this perpetual problem since the beginning of time in advertising, which is half my advertising, as the joke goes, is ineffective. I just don't know which which half of my advertising is ineffective. And by enabling this sort of instant low cost response function, I like that. I like that person. I like that content. You know, essentially, you had the first effective product.
granular proof of the value of advertising um which was the lifeblood of social media becoming a a multi a multi-billion dollar business and the thing that turned the digital marketing and advertising industry upside down but that was not the original intention so it's literally the you know the strict definition of serendipity if serendipity is a search for x and actually bumping into y it was it was essentially serendipitous
So the like button isn't a thing in the sense that there's a patent, there's a patent owner, there's a diagram of how it works. The like button is more of a concept, isn't it?
Well, the like button, it looks like giving somebody a thumbs up symbol. And of course, that's not an accident. There was a very popular book amongst web designers at the time called Don't Make Me Think. And the idea of this book was that if you wanted ideas to travel and scale, you didn't want the innovative thing to look innovative, to look unfamiliar, complicated, clever, because...
Things that make you think, things with unnecessary friction involved, are hard work. You want to hijack something that's already there. And why the thumb? Why the thumbs up icon? Well, it was a gesture that already existed in human language. It's not actually a thumbs up. It's a piece of code in JavaScript with a visual appearance of a thumbs up.
But there is something. There's something about the like button that touches a nerve or something. If it's pressed 7 billion times a day, there's something pretty magical about it. What is it that makes it so effective?
When you click the picture and the piece of code of the like button, it creates dopamine release in the part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens in the reptilian part of the brain and releases dopamine. And it's the same dopamine release as actually being liked. It's the same dopamine release as actually liking somebody. It's as rewarding to like something and somebody as to be liked.
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