Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Don't Eat Tide Pods

Episode Date: January 19, 2018

This week, we devote an entire episode of our medical podcast to discouraging people from eating detergent pods. 2018 is off to a great start. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We were shot through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

Some medicines, some medicines, the escalant macaque for the mouth. Hello everybody and welcome to Salt Bones, a marital tour ofis guy medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy I said hi Justin. I'm excited about this episode this week. Well, thank you. I am too Last week if if you listened to our episode last week if you listen to them in order Which Justin would probably insist you do you like to watch TV shows in order? I bet you, do you consume podcasts in order too? Not with stuff like this, like with 99% visible stuff you know, I'll skip around, yeah.

Well, if you didn't listen last week. If something looks boring, like if my boys check in Josh or my homey Roman, posted a Brock, and I'll just be like, sorry guys, that looks like a rock. You posted a rock. You put it on glass. Get it. Skip it.

Well, last week wasn't, no, of course not. Of course not. Last week wasn't boring because we had a very important episode where we told everybody to not drink dirty water. And apparently we had to do that. Because people drink dirty water. Well, this brought up another interesting topic. A lot of a lot of you out there in the internet took to Twitter and Facebook and email and even

some people in person to tell me that there was another problem, another new trend that is plaguing our nation's youth. It's not dirty water. That's reserved for people who have enough money to pay for dirty water. No, no, no. This is a teen problem. And that's teens are apparently eating laundry detergent. Oh, teens. Tell me at least, just tell me they're at least getting high. Are they getting high on it? They are not getting high on it. And I also will say we're going to record this episode today and I'm going to tell you about how teens are eating tide pods.

But you can't find this now because I saw the YouTube and Facebook are refusing to post these videos anymore. It's a cover up of kids eating tidepods. You can spear as well. I think you were afraid of YouTube. I think to try to stop the epidemic. Hey, Papa Mark, what are you so scared of? So yes, of course, that's always part of it.

It's not enough to just eat a tide pod. You have to put it on the internet. If you eat a tide pod in a load for no one, you, I don't know, maybe a pie guy. I don't know. It's possible. Well, thank you, everybody. There were two, I mean, really, it was too numerous to name everyone who suggested this topic.

I didn't think that we would need to tell people not to eat laundry detergent, but here we are. Here we are. And it isn't the only weird social media dare that has medical implications so we can get into some of those two, but let's start with tide pods. So little plastic containers, little teeny pod looking things. Yes, of laundry detergent. Right. They do look like candy. They look delicious.

But like candy. Not as much as the finish dishwasher tabs that we have, like literally 100% looks like it has a spree and like a cherry spree embedded into the top of it. It looks delicious. Yes. And even the wrapper apparently does because that was the first thing Charlie said upon seeing the container of these little wander or of these little disdetergent tablets was, is that candy? Can I eat it?

With the dish. We keep them away, by the way, where it responds. Do you squeeze those into the detergent dispenser or do you throw them in with a wash, do you think? No, I think you throw them in. You throw them in? I see. Because my understanding is that the way that people are ingesting these laundry detergent

packets are by putting them on their tongue and letting them dissolve in their mouths. They're not, I don't think you actually eat that. I think the dare is kind of how long can you let it sit in your mouth and dissolve. Okay, so this is, would you classify this on the big, sitting macroeconomic scale of ideas as a good one or a bad one? I would say this is a bad idea. Okay.

And I think most of us know not to eat laundry detergent. I mean, intuitively because it's called laundry detergent and it's used for cleaning clothes. So that's probably enough. But if you are interested and you want to know why maybe you shouldn't scientifically, so the laundry detergent, and it's really easy to find the ingredients of laundry detergent, by the way, this is not a secret. I'm certain

that it's on the packaging for tide pods. We don't have them, but I'm certain it is. You could also Google what's in the tide pod and the tide will tell you they have all their ingredients listed on their website. It's very clear and what they all are. It's not hard. The ingredients are edible. I'm assuming. None. I would say there are many ingredients none of them are food none of them provide any nutritional benefit many of them are not food, but probably not

Not food dangerous They're just not beneficial, but there are few specifically that are dangerous So one thing is- The only thing that separates food and on food is believing in yourself. No, in this case, it's like gastrointestinal irritation and bleeding. So they do contain typhods and detergent in general, contain surfactants, which are things that help to kind of bind grease and create like these super molecules with grease inside to get it off of your clothing, right? That's how it's lifting the dirt and grime

and greasy stuff off of your dirty clothes. Well, they will also bind fats and water that are naturally inside your intestines, and this will cause a lot of irritation to the lining of your stomach and your intestines and your softagas and everything else, which is why you're not supposed to eat it. And that's the best case scenario. You could also have massive vomiting as a result of this. There have been cases of people like foaming at the mouth.

You can have obviously severe abdominal pain, diarrhea, and it can cause some severe inflammation of your intestines if you eat enough. We should mention, by the way, and we should mention this upfront, but we'll mention it here. This is not going to be a particularly historical episode of solvones. No. Because YouTube was just invented fairly recently in the grand scheme of things. This is more I would describe as a public service episode of solvans. Sure. If you wanted to, for example, we don't encourage this with any of our other shows,

but or episodes of this show. But if you wanted to split this one up into discrete YouTube videos that you could upload to YouTube to try to just push back the tide a little bit, you are, could upload to YouTube to try to just push back the tide a little bit. You are, you are more than welcome to do so. You have our official legal permission for this episode to just like spread the word. However, you can go for it. Yeah. No. Plenty of the elder has nothing to say about tide pods. No.

This is all. Plenty of the elder probably would have said don't eat. Even plenty, even plenty would have told you not to do this. Yeah. Probably what have said don't eat. Even plenty, even plenty would have told you not to do this. It also has a form of bleach, which it's bad to drink bleach. I knew there was something about drinking bleach. I remember, thank you.

It's a caustic substance. It mean it could erode the inside of your soft gas for your intestines. Please don't eat or drink bleach. It contains alcohol and polyethylene glycol, both of which will make you, if you drink enough, or eat enough of these, make you go to sleep and not wake up. Like permanent sleep. And also, because of all the irritation to your stomach and the esophagus and the vomiting that can happen, you can aspirate these substances, meaning that you accidentally inhale them into your lungs,

and it would cause a lot of damage to your lungs, inflammation, and damage to the tissues of your lungs. So, they're dangerous, don't eat them, that's bad. And also, there's hydrogen peroxide in there, by the way, just throw that out there too. You can't eat that either. And if you don't, I mean, if this is not proof enough that I'm telling you these substances are bad

for you and you should need them, there have been cases of people accidentally ingesting tide pods and unfortunately, dying as a result of that. Because tide pods and other, I mean, I keep saying tide, but I guess any kind of laundry detergent pod, they do kind of,

they're colorful, they look like candy. Because of this problem, there have been cases of toddlers and older persons who have dementia eating these, thinking that they were some sort of food and actually perishing from that. So we know that they can kill you. Please don't put them in your mouth. Please don't eat them. Hey, Todd, like, I don't want to lay a lot of the blame at your feet, broadly speaking, but like, could we just maybe stick with the bottle? The bottles seem to be good for a long time. Maybe we just stick with the bottle, right? Well, they did things the after that, they were complaints because they look so much like candy. And so they initially put them in different, like the entire package became opaque.

They used to come in like these clear plastic things so you could see all of the candy looking substance inside and that made it more attractive looking. And then they put warnings to store them in places where kids couldn't get to them. So they tried to make attempts to stop people from accidentally eating them, but I don't know how you stop people from intentionally eating them. Yeah.

Thank you. I mean, there's no, even if they didn't look so, I don't know. All right. So what's our next shot? So the final statement on that one is donate tide pods. Donate, please donate tide pods. Don't drink dirty water. Donate tide pods.

There are some other challenges that you can find us. A lot of these are on YouTube because if you're gonna do these things, why not show your friends and all of the internet as well. Specifically aimed at teenagers, one is called the Cinnamon Challenge. This is not new. This has been around for a couple years now. Quite a lot. I disappointingly, my sister has taken part in the cinnamon challenge. She told me she's very good at it.

I don't know. Yes. So the cinnamon challenge basically means you're going to eat a tablespoon of cinnamon within 60 seconds. Great. And of course, you want to put this on YouTube because what is supposed to happen is you

can't because that's such an irritant that to try to eat that amount, that quantity of cinnamon, that quickly. Usually you'll sort of choke, vomit, expel a big dust of cinnamon, a big cloud of cinnamon dust into the air. I've seen people do it. It looks very funny. I will say. Right. I've seen people do it. It looks very funny. I will say right the problem is

that you can aspirate that cinnamon Into your lungs and it is an irritant and it will do damage to your lungs and you can end up in the hospital with basically I'm adding to chemical burn sort of on your lungs new monitis inflammation And this has happened kids have been hospitalized Because of the cinnamon challenge Okay, so no on the so have been hospitalized because of the cinnamon challenge. Okay. So, you're in the cinnamon challenge. Yes, I'm in the cinnamon challenge. I know it seems funny. And if the worst case was made your stomach upset a little bit, and so maybe you threw up later, I guess that wouldn't be so bad, except no, you might aspirate that into your lungs and get seriously else. So please don't do this. Back a long time ago, a guy whose name sadly escapes me at the moment,

because this was like five or six years ago, when we first had my brother, my brother, and me T-shirts available for sale, we, a guy got on a Tosh.0, doing the cinnamon challenge, wearing my brother, my brother, and me T-shirt, and it was like, Tosh.0. Doing the cinnamon challenge wearing, uh, my brother, my brother and my teacher, and it was like the bad, I like the best thing that it ever happened. I did.

I did. Yeah, it was huge. I didn't know he was risking, uh, uh, burns to his lungs. So for that, I'm sorry. Please don't do. Please don't. I'm a personal plea to my sister Riley. Please don't do the cinnamon challenge ever again.

Please don't do this. Uh ever again. Please don't do this Uh The next one that I found and I had I cross refer I double checked all these with my with my 17 year old sister to make sure these were real Yeah, yeah, because you are gonna be doing sort of a a crossover episode right exactly on our on my other podcast still buffering that I do with my two sisters We're talking about the teenage experience. We're going to kind of get into some of these challenges and why in the world are psychological take. Yeah. Why do teens do this? So another one that again seems pretty obvious is I saw it called the hand sanitizer challenge, also called the fire challenge. This one sounds like pretty obvious. This gives you an idea of where the, what might be happening.

Basically, it's videos of people squirting hand sanitizer on themselves and then catching it on fire because it's that alcohol in it. And it looks like you're holding fire, which I guess makes you look cool until it burns you because it's fire that you're putting on your skin. Got it. This seems like an easy one. This is a slam dunk. And there has been at least one case of a child who ended up in the hospital with second

and third degree burns to a third of his body as a result of taking part in one of these challenges. Because it's it don't you shouldn't set yourself on fire. Man, it's it's more I can't decide what's worse. The people are doing this are people that doing get hospitalized. So you can't even make hilarious jokes about it. We don't feel like a dirt bag. Well, how about this the frostbite challenge, I think,

for the most part, while it is doing damage and it is not intelligent to do this to yourself, I would say. I don't think there were as many cases of people in the hospital, the frostbite challenge entails taking some salt and pouring it on your arm and then putting an ice cube over it. I guess you put it on any part of your body, but arms seem to be very popular in the YouTube videos I saw. And it lowers the temperature of the ice so that it precipitates frostbite in that area of your skin. And I imagine it is uncomfortable.

It's the same way, it's the same theory behind putting, when you're doing an ice cream maker, where you add salt to it to bring it to like zero degrees. Exactly. Exactly. And so you can induce frostbite on your skin. I saw videos of people actually doing this in bath tubs, putting salt nice and bath tubs in the air. That's a terrible.

I know you could, you could do some major damage if you did that for a sustained period of time. Please don't do this at all though, because at the very least you end up with these areas of frostbite on your skin that are painful. I mean, you've damaged your skin. Your damage your skin is frostbite. Yeah. Come on. Robert Falcon Scott and Amanson, when they were headed after the sap hole.

You know how much work they put in, trying to avoid this exact situation that you've invited on your soul. You're just doing it. You're just doing it. The next one that I found was called the Condom Challenge. And when I asked my sister about the Condom Challenge, she said which one?

No. No. So one, apparently there is one version of the Condom Challenge that involves like filling a condom with water and then throwing it at a friend or something which didn't seem particularly dangerous. That's water bling that one's all right. Yeah that was I mean I guess unpleasant but that's about it. That's that one didn't didn't merit an mention. But the other condom challenge that I did find pretty concerning was you, I guess you sort of insert

a condom into your nose and try to kind of snort it up your nose. Okay. And then reach into the back of your mouth and pull it out of your mouth. Does that work? Well, I mean, you can do this, but the fear is that as you're trying to inhale the condom,

you will inhale the condom and choke on it. And can you imagine a more embarrassing emergency room visit or 9-1-1 phone call? No. Then I have intentionally inhaled a condom and it's stuck in my throat. Or my friend has intentionally inhaled a condom and it's stuck in his throat and I don't know what to do. My friend and how to condom, we're still on Twitch though. So we have to keep the stream running. We're getting a lot of subs. And if you could just hurry, that'd be a great end to the video. So that would be my advice, not only is this very dangerous

because you don't want to aspirate anything, like any piece of latex. But yeah, also, really do you want that? And I mean, you know what that's going to look like when you show up in the ER and they put your chief complaint on the list, on the board. And here we've got all the other people with like their stomach illnesses and their flu and all that and yours says inhaled condom inhaled condom. And held condom.

Don't do it. There was one that I found called the compressed air challenge, which is you know those cans of compressed air that you can like clean off your keyboard with or whatever. It's really cold. Oh, yeah. If you turn it upside down. Yeah. So you just spray it on your arm for as long as you can like clean off your keyboard with or whatever. It's really cold. Oh yeah, if you turn it upside down. Yeah, so you just spray it on your arm for as long as you can tolerate. I did this one. You've done this one?

This one when I was the thing when I was a teen, we did this one. We would, it was not, maybe we didn't do it for like a sustained period of time. It was more weaponized. So like you would sneak up on somebody who didn't know you're going to do it and then like blast them. See, the video where I, as I had had I didn't know what exactly they were doing So I did see the video and and they were like hold still see how long I can spray this on you and you can like tolerate it

Which is dangerous against super cold and you can damage your skin. Yeah, so So that's a bad idea and then Another one which I probably will not for the most part cause lasting damage, but is still a form of, I mean, you're hurting yourself is the Kylie Jenner challenge. I'm sure you've heard of that one. That one was pretty popular. Were you take like a shot glass and you put it over your lips and then you apply suction so that you're exactly. And then it makes your yes.

And it makes your lips very large and swollen and it hurts and they look bruised and it's bad. It's bad. This is bad gang. Don't don't. And what is your what is the plan after that look? Now I look like Kylie Jenner is that a few minutes I mean well, I mean people are doing this and they're I mean that they've create they do enough damage that it lasts for a couple days Yeah, yeah, there's not good excess tragedy on that no and what why would you I was doing it because it was funny because it's sort of like I Did it for the vine no I did it for the vine It's like I say said I did it for the vine. No, I did it for the vine. It's all I guess I said. I did it for the vine. Even the vine doesn't exist anymore, but it will come back. We all know this in our hearts. I know you have to have more for me.

I've got a few more for you, but Justin, before I tell you about these, why don't we head to the The medicines that ask you let my God for the mouth. So you had some other challenges said you're going to hit me with. That's right. Justin, some of these, I think are a little older and they even kind of remind me of things. I feel like we may have done when we were younger. Like you mentioned, you had tried the compressed air challenge. The eraser challenge, which is just rubbing an eraser on your skin for, like, it's usually,

you have to do some sort of thing and rub the eraser on your skin for the entire duration of it, like reciting the alphabet or something like that. Right. So it's like, again, it's like an endurance challenge. Can you do it for that length of time? And I feel like that kind of thing

used to happen in class sometimes. Sure, yeah. A lot of skin friction based entertainment. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Obviously this does damage to your skin. If it's deep enough other than like bleeding and things, you can cause you can cause permanent scarring. It can also lead to infection. If you have a big open wounds that you've just ground a dirty eraser into. Gross. There's better ways to spend your day. Exactly. Along those same lines, I found the deodorant challenge.

This specifically is spray deodorant like aerosol deodorant, which I haven't used that in a long time. You know what? I'm assuming that's still around. I don't know about you, listener, but I don't like a wet deodorant Mm-hmm. I like a cake like a stick a stick a powder I don't I can't do the gels. I can't do the sprays It just it doesn't feel like I'm protected down there. No, it's like the beginning of an ad for powder deodorant on the show

But like no No, I'm with you. I'm with you. I just like the stick just give me a stick. I don't even know what brand it is I just know what the thing looks like that I've been buying since like middle school It's what strong enough for a man huge balance for woman I just get kind of locked into things and keep using them, but anyway spray air shall do it I'm a chum because it says strong. I've strong enough to skip a day. That's not true Mitchum, but whatever I skip a day. That's not true, Mitchum, but whatever. I'm into it.

It's no. Spray aerosol the other way. You just spray it on your skin. That's the whole thing. I didn't know that this would happen, but you end up with like a lot of little abrasions and bruises on your skin. If you spray a close range for a sustained period of time,

it's not like the aerosol as much as just the pressure or the impact. Okay. Oh, of it hitting your skin. Weird. I saw some, yeah, and I saw videos of this of people with kind of like little little bruises and abrasions all up and down their arms from spraying themselves for a long periods of time with spray deodorant. God, we'll just find anything, huh? You just can't leave any daylight there. We'll just find whatever we can. It just, we started off with eating laundry detergent. So where did you think that's what's gonna go?

That's true, it's all sort of downhill from there. One that I guess was pretty popular for a while, like that I even read was done on like late night talk shows and things was the gallon challenge. Did you ever see anybody do this? No. You've had to drink a gallon of milk in an hour and Not throw it up. Oh, those are the general rules any kind of milk will do. I saw that mentioned several times 2% scam

Vitamin D whatever your preference is thanks, but skin right You're gonna do it. It doesn't matter because this is a volume problem. You're going to do it. I wouldn't do it. OK, but if you're going to do it, I wouldn't do it. Skin or whole? What would you do? I'm not even going to commit to that.

I wouldn't do it. I would never drink a gallon of milk in an hour. If you're going to do it, would you do skin or whole or? No, I will say this. OK, if we're going to do this thought experiment, part of the problem is the volume. Your stomach holds about a half gallon generally speaking.

So this is a problem. You cannot hold a gallon of milk in your stomach. So it's got to go somewhere. It comes up and out. Uh, wait. Now you're, you throw up. Well, your suggesting is that it's impossible. There's, it's got to be able to go other places.

Here's the problem. You, you start to break down the milk in your stomach, but it doesn't, it actually because of like the fat in it, it doesn't immediately pass through to the small intestine. Is it's being broken, broken down? It actually, the volume slightly increases. And these materials take longer to pass into the small intestine. So I mean, I guess if you're asking about head to head different kinds of milk, it would make skin milk a more ideal substance and full fat milk. Chocolate or not? No, I think chocolate would

only make it worse. Okay. Just the end of the sugar, I think that would be, I think then the yuck factor, just the gagging would go. Yeah, every tough. But the point is, I think it's, I'm certain people have managed to achieve this, I guess, achieve. Is that the word I want to use? I'm sure people have, but generally speaking for most of us, it would be impossible. Your stomach isn't going to hold that much.

You're going to get sick and you're going to throw up. to hold that much, you're going to get sick and you're going to throw up. Now, I guess other than it's not good to throw up, like don't... You can always run a risk of like rupturing a blood vessel or something. Exactly. You can get little tears in your esophagus. And again, if you're vomiting violently enough, we worry about aspiration about you sucking that back down into your airways. But I did find specifically one incidence of fraternity

that did a gallon challenge for new recruits, and they did it on a bridge, and they ended up puking into oncoming traffic below and causing a traffic accident. So. It's serious. Unforeseen consequences. No, it's serious. From the gallon challenge. I think this was very

popular a few years back, but not so much nowadays. I don't think kids are doing this as much. One that also is older was the choking game. Did you ever do this with your friends? I did this one. Yeah, I did. I did too. I'm a little embarrassed to admit. I have done this. In retrospect, it did too. I'm a little embarrassed to admit. I have done this in retrospect. It does seem pretty Buck Wild of Maintive done. It as I began to think I did this once I was I was a little shocked and disappointed in myself. I've never experienced anything quite like it. No, so the version that I had that I remember was you like bend over and hyperventilate. Like you try to breathe really fast. And then somebody kind of like grabs you from behind

and you hold your breath all at once. Yeah, that's exactly. Yeah, and then you pass out. Yeah, that's the goal. Yeah, that's the game. That's the game. This was before, like on the one hand, the first half of the show, I was like,

oh, YouTube. But now like the longer this part has the show, I was like, ugh, YouTube. But now, like, the longer this part has gone on, I've been more like, thanks YouTube, forgiving teens something else today. I mean, like, this is really speaking, maybe it's better, I don't know. I don't know if it made us worse that we did this kind of thing

and we didn't have an audience, we did it for fun. Yeah. I mean, we did it for fun. I mean, it was, for me, it was like a slumber party activity so it was not like you did it just like you and your buddy. It was like a group of people, but this is not a wise thing to do. If you deprive your brain of oxygen long enough, you can get brain damage.

So I'm not saying that that's highly likely, but I'm saying it's possible and why do you need to pass out? So don't you don't need to pass up. Don't do this. Some scarier ones I found some more recent ones that I was a little disturbed by. One is called the 48 hour challenge. I guess there was a version of it originally. I think in France somewhere in Europe, it was the 72 hour challenge. And I don't know, we're lazy here in the US, so it's 48 hour challenge for us. But basically the idea is you go missing for 48 hours. Great.

Intentionally. And you try to see how much social media heat you can generate with your absence. Oh, God. How many posts, like where are so and so, and like your parents are scared and posting about you. And that's the whole thing. This one isn't really medical.

It's just like, as a parent of a three-year-old, please, every kid ever, please never do this. Don't ever do this. Please, this is horrible. You're somebody's kid, please don't do this. Don't do this. This is a horrible thing to do. Don't do this thing.

Another one that sounds silly, but it actually has resulted in a lot of injuries. The duct tape challenge. So you duct tape somebody to a pole and by, and by duct tape to a pole, as I had, I was reading about the injuries, I'm like, they're off the ground. You duct tape them not like not just to the pole but like off the ground High up on the whole Well because then you have to get down on your own and

People have fallen and injured themselves All right, I knew you were gonna say that like skull fracture injured themselves All right, that's a bummer So please don't do this because it's hard to All right, that's a bummer. So please don't do this because it's hard to unduck tape yourself from a pole in midair and not fall and injure yourself. Sydney, why do teens do this?

Why does this happen? So I can't give you a complete answer. There's theories. People have actually studied this. And the idea that teens engage in risk taking behavior that adults typically wouldn't, that's not new. No. And usually, historically, these studies have been done on drinking or using illegal drugs or that kind of risky behavior, maybe high-risk sexual behavior, those kinds of things.

Not so much like YouTube challenge. Eating lots of pizza. Exactly. Well, I mean, things that as adults, we choose not to do because we know they will harm us or make us sick. Right. And give us heart. And they also teens don't have heartburns. That's, it's so unfair.

They did one study. This was actually, I think, a little disappointing. And if I were a teenager, I'd find it a little insulting, where they tried to figure out if basically the idea is how teens are more comfortable with uncertainty than adults are. So to use Tide Pods as an example, I don't know what will happen when I eat a Tide Pod.

I am comfortable with that uncertainty, so I will eat one and see. Or as an adult, I don't know what will happen when I eat a tide pod. It might hurt me. I don't think I'm okay with that. And the next step was, so in the study, they talked about different probabilities of winning this prize money, and like they had teens take various chances to try to win this prize money. And then part of what they did was offer them more information on like the nature of the prize and their chance of winning and things like that

by like just clicking on a link to find out more information. And what they found is that teenagers are much less likely to even find more to go seek out more information even when it's readily available to them than adults are. So as a teen, you are much less likely to Google what happens when I eat a tide pod, even though that information is readily available to you. As adults, we are much more likely to go try to figure out what are the risks of this behavior.

We're less comfortable with the ambiguity. Yes. figure out what are the risks of this behavior. We're asked to control the ambiguity. Yeah, so kids are more comfortable with ambiguity and less likely to try to resolve the ambiguity. That's part of the, and that's true for any risk taking behavior. That's part of the problem. And the other part of the problem is that they have found that those hits you get on YouTube

when you do these challenges and post them, they, you are getting literal hits of dopamine for that as well. Yeah, of course. It's addictive in a sense. It's a reward seeking thing. It's just like, again, other addictive behaviors like smoking or alcohol or drugs or winning at a video game or some other kind of game of chance, you know, challenge a lottery or, you know, slot machines, that kind of thing, you get that same kind of dopamine reward every time you get more views and more likes and more comments.

So there's an addictive quality. You begin to seek out more opportunities to get that kind of attention no matter how negative they are. What I'm hearing you say says maybe doing it for the vine. Is it doing it for such a great reason at all? No, because at the end of the day, I think it is I think that it's very positive that these outlets are taking down these videos because there is nothing, it is there is no glory in eating a tide pod and living to tell the tale. No one will want to hire you for a job more

because of it or give you a scholarship or date you or be your buddy. So. So. There you go folks. So there's no glory in it. Teen's have always done risky things. We did when we were younger. We've always done things that are new. Right. I think the only problem now is that with social media, there is a new reward for doing risky things, especially risky things that are risky enough to be visually upsetting and disturbing because then you can post them on the internet and not just tell your friends about them.

So maybe that just incentivizes even worse kind of risks. So I'm closing Donny Tidepods. Please. Please. That's going to do for us folks this week. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to you at home for taking the time to hang out with us every week.

It really does mean the world. Thank you to some folks who sent us some stuff in the PO box. So we got, you can find the address for that at McQuarrieShows.com if you want it. Angela sent us giblets the bunny, which Charlie just loves the bunny with a bunch of stuffed organs. Yeah, she does love it. Wendy sent her book Emma sent some burger cookies. Thank you, Kathy for bookmarks, Shay sent pins and buttons, Margaret sent beautiful baby blankets and Quinn made soap that we just adore. So thank you to all of y'all for that stuff.

Yeah, thank you so much. It's a kind of you. And your cards and letters and everything. We obviously can't respond to all those, but we read everyone and it really means the world to us. So thank you so much for doing that. Thank you. I think the taxpayers for what?

Not yet. She's just on medicines as the injury and out your program. Now you did. Now I did and folks that's gonna do it for us. So until next time I'm just Macroi. I'm City Macroi and as always don't drill a hole in your head Alright! Maximumfund.org Comedy and Culture, Artistone, Listener Supported. and are supported.