Below is a lightly edited, AI-generated transcript of the “First Opinion Podcast” interview with Morgan McSweeney. Be sure to sign up for the weekly “First Opinion Podcast” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get alerts about each new episode by signing up for the “First Opinion Podcast” newsletter. And don’t forget to sign up for the First Opinion newsletter, delivered every Sunday.
Torie Bosch: When Morgan McSweeney, who works in biotech, first started doing science communication on social media during Covid, he sometimes felt a little embarrassed.
Morgan McSweeney: As a scientist, do I purchase antibacterial hand soap? The answer is no, and here’s why. Plain soap and …
Bosch: But now, as he wrote in a recent First Opinion essay on STAT, he’s found that “a casual one-minute video about immunology racks up orders of magnitudes more views in an hour, than my published research papers could accumulate in 10 lifetimes.”
Welcome to the “First Opinion Podcast.” I’m Torie Bosch, editor of First Opinion. First Opinion is STAT’s home for big, bold ideas from health care providers, researchers, patients, and others who have something to say about medicine’s most important and interesting topics.
Today, I’m speaking with Morgan McSweeney, aka Dr. Noc. He’s a social media influencer with 4 million followers across platforms and a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences and immunology.
I’m a social media scientist with 3.5 million followers. Here’s what I’ve learned about public health communication
Morgan McSweeney, welcome to the “First Opinion Podcast.”
McSweeney: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Bosch: How do you describe the work that you do on social media to someone, maybe one of your former grad school colleagues, who is maybe a little bit skeptical of social media?
McSweeney: There’s a term that I hated when I first heard it, but I’ve come to embrace more and more over time. The term is “edutainment.” It’s a mixture of education and entertainment, not always entertainment in like, you know, the cartoon funny type of way, but I think of it as entertainment as in, it feels like something you would typically watch on social media, which is pretty different from how you would typical communicate in scientific circles.
But the core idea is trying to get. Important topics in public health and health and current events in public help and turning them into a format that is actually engaging to watch. That feels digestible for people who aren’t necessarily in the field.
Bosch: So what does the name Dr. Noc refer to? What is Noc?
McSweeney: Oh, no, that’s a very embarrassing backstory. I actually don’t think I’ve talked about this before. What I usually tell people, this is the short answer, is at the beginning of Covid is when I started making content. I was looking for something that was kind of short, easy to remember, easy to spell, rhymed with TikTok was convenient at the time. So, you know, Dr. Noc is much easier to remember if you’re trying to type it in than Dr. McSweeney or something.
The real answer goes back a bit further than that. This is, you, more than a decade ago, I was playing some video games with some of my best friends and my handle on, you know, my video game account was Noc Turn. And then when I eventually got my Ph.D., some of friends who I didn’t know in real life were like, oh, now we have to call you Dr. Noc. And so then years later, when I was starting making content, I was thinking about like, what can I use as a pseudonym? I was like, oh, I’ll just use that.
Bosch: That’s fantastic. That’s sort of like digging up your old AIM screen name for someone my age.
McSweeney: It feels like that, yeah. And for the first few years of doing this, I would have been too embarrassed to ever say that, but now I’ve built up a shell of, I don’t know what you would call it, the shell of indifference to perception.
Bosch: The idea of maybe being embarrassed by it is something I’m really interested in. Like, do you have to kind of convince colleagues that what you’re doing is important? Or do you to do it less now than you did when you got started?
McSweeney: Much less now. At some point, you know, if you’ve got 50 or 100 million views per month on the content you’re making, you’ve a few million followers, you can do whatever you want. And people will be like, oh, wow, that must be, you’re the gold standard, whatever you’re doing, even if it’s actually very embarrassing what you are doing.
It feels very different when you have 200 followers and you’re just getting started and you like trying to keep it a secret because. You know, you don’t want people … it feels like an unserious use of your time doing this type of communication compared to what you could be doing, like actual rigorous science. So there’s a shift for sure.
Initially, I didn’t wanna talk about it whatsoever. And now I’m very happy to talk about. Of course, too, not just the proof of having the results. I think also my content, like I feel more comfortable making content now than I did when I first started. Because obviously in graduate training, there’s zero preparation for how to actually do this type of coverage, like in a public-facing format. You get a lot of training for how prepare scientific seminars and present data to that type of audience. Almost nothing for the public facing edutainment type of content.
Bosch: Can you describe a little bit for someone who hasn’t seen it, sort of what your content looks like exactly? Do you have several different modes?
McSweeney: That’s a great question. It is several different modes, and it does change over time, depending on sort of what’s working. One popular one is like a reaction. I’ll show like, initially it’s a split screen where somebody is saying something often deeply incorrect about science or health or something. And I’m kind of watching it in the screen at first and then it switches to just me. And then I’d talk about, this is a research paper that shows why that’s not true or why that is misleading. Here’s what you should actually think and this is how it applies to your health. That’s a common one right now, given the volume of high-profile incorrect statements that are currently being circulated. There’s no shortage of things to react to, unfortunately, in the current media environment.
Before that, I would also make content about like, this is how eating these types of foods impacts your gut microbiome and this is how your gut microbiome impacts your cardiovascular health. Eternally trying to convince people to eat more dietary fiber, for example.
But really the focus is trying to take some of that deeper academic science that I find to be really interesting and getting it into a format that people are actually going to see it, hopefully in a way that feels actionable that they can say, “Oh, I didn’t realize that doing just three minutes of vigorous physical activity has a measurable benefit for my health. This feels like something I can incorporate into my daily routine.” That’s kind of the goal for that type of content that I’m making.
Bosch: And how much do you think that the content you’re making is reaching people who already agree with you versus people who really do not agree with you versus people who are somewhere in the middle?
McSweeney: That is a critically important question, and there’s a core tension here that I think about a lot. It would be really, really easy if my goal is to get as big numbers as I can and as many followers and as much reach. What I would do is speak passionately to people who already agree with me, really rile them up about the other side. The problem, as I think you’re hinting, is you’re not changing people’s minds at that point, you’re just making them emotionally engaged. And so the tension is, if you actually want to help inform people who are kind of in the middle, those people probably really don’t want to see that sort of very charged disagreement, like contentious type of content, they’ll just swipe right past it. So if you want to actually help people feel better informed, you have to really bring some measure of nuance, really tone down the emotional engagement, which unfortunately, almost universally decreases the reach of your content.
And so what I don’t do often is sort of the third part of that, which is speaking directly to people who vehemently disagree with me. That I have not found to be a very productive use of my time. It’s a really, really small fraction of people who are passionately, personally, as part of their identity, anti-science or anti-vaccine. Making content, you know, addressing those types of videos directly and trying to debunk them, I found it to just be emotionally exhausting for me. I think that’s how you eventually get to burnout. And I don’t think it changes many people’s minds. It just is a source for argument.
So what I do instead is I spend a lot of time thinking about how do I speak to people who are just legitimately confused about what is true in public health right now, which is the huge group of people in the middle, I think. Think of the audience in that way. And really it is a story I’m telling myself, because when I’m sitting here making content, obviously I’m just here by myself in the room.
But if I have that type of person in mind, I don’t feel burned out. I don’t feel angry when I am making content. I feel like what can I do to give you the best information possible to help you feel confident in making this decision for your health or the health of your family.
Now the question of who am I actually reaching, not who am intending to reach, I get a little bit of insight into that. So, some of the content I make is not particularly polarizing. Like one of my most popular videos, I think it’s got 30 something million views now across platforms. It’s actually, where does urine come from in the body? And there’s some, apparently, I didn’t think the video would be this popular, but people thought maybe it comes directly from the intestinal tract and then to the bladder, and then it goes out. But the true answer of course is that it gets absorbed into your blood, the water, and then gets filtered by your kidneys, and then becomes urine. For whatever reason, hugely popular video, literally hundreds of thousands of followers just from that video.
And so what happens then is those people see the other content that I make. So they’re exposed to viewpoints that they may not otherwise be exposed to because they’re coming in through these sort of non-polarizing types of videos. And then they see when I make a video about the MMR vaccine does not contain a bunch of fetal tissue despite claims otherwise on media. So that’s reflected in the comments that I get.
It’s not always a bunch of comments that are agreeing with me. Clearly there are some people watching who don’t agree with me, which is I take as a good thing. It means that I’m reaching people who aren’t necessarily already, I’m not preaching to the choir.
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Bosch: So how do you, do you have like sort of a mathematical formula in your head? “I’ve done four videos debunking misinformation. It’s time to talk about kind of crazy body stuff again” or something like that?
McSweeney: Not at all. I probably should. I’m very not sophisticated. The process of figuring out what to talk about is literally usually me just sitting at my computer and like browsing, you know, recent comments or recent emails or DMs or recent news stories and being like, “Oh, I feel like this one would be a good one right now.” There’s no real substantive calculation that goes into like, oh, these videos performed very well. I’m gonna try to recreate that hook or something.
To be honest, I probably would benefit from doing that. I just don’t have that level of sophistication. Most of the way that I do this, so I work full-time in biotech. And then when I’m making content, it’s usually just an hour or a couple of hours at night. So I kind of very quickly figure out a topic, come up with a rough outline of a script and then sit down and record.
Bosch: So, you know, having mentioned current events or trying to decide what’s going on, we’re recording this on Sept. 23. So just yesterday was the Trump administration’s rather wild press conference on acetaminophen and autism. So how do you approach a story like that? You know, are you sort of already thinking about covering it?
McSweeney: Absolutely, yeah. When there’s something that high-profile, it’s guaranteed that I’m thinking about covering it. What I’ve found works best usually is to wait a little bit, a day, maybe half a day and see what types of questions start coming in, see what type of articles people are sending me and figure out, you know, is there one or two overarching themes that people have concerns or questions about? And then I address those things when I go on to make a video. I can do a pretty good job if I sort of blindly make a video and I figure out what I think people’s most pressing questions will be. I found it works the best though if there’s at least a little bit of time for me to either look at other videos, people like a lot of news organizations instantly create content. When this type of stuff comes out, I can’t work that fast. But that gives me an opportunity to look at the comments and say, oh, people are still not understanding these three things. There’s this gap that needs to be filled. That kind of helps me design the content a little.
Bosch: And so are there any ideas around acetaminophen and autism that you’re already starting to think about a little bit for some coverage?
McSweeney: Yeah, and this is actually reflective of a broader shift in how I’ve approached medical content over the past five and a half years I’ve been doing this. What I’ve come to appreciate is people really, really do have an appetite for nuance. People want to understand like, you can’t just tell them there are conflicting studies about the relationship of acetaminophen and risk for autism spectrum disorder. People want know: What are those studies? Why are they conflicting? Maybe there was a time in the past where you could just tell people, “No, that idea is nonsensical. Don’t worry about it. Listen to your doctor.” Increasingly, I think that’s not convincing enough. I mean, certainly some people already feel that way and are gonna listen to their doctor and discount what Trump says about what medications they should take during pregnancy. Other people, though, if they don’t already feel that way, they’re not going to start feeling that way if you just tell them, “Oh no, that’s wrong. Go listen to your doctor.”
And so what I’ve come to appreciate is those people really do want to learn the details. They want to see what were the small studies that reflected the potential benefit of leucovorin in some people with cerebral folate deficiency with autism spectrum disorder. What are the remaining gaps in questions and why are some people expressing that that may not be as much of a so-called cure for some people with autism as it’s pitched? What was the statement about the risk for acetaminophen and autism based on? You know, there was one big review study. It wasn’t a meta-analysis. What does that mean for how we can interpret the findings? What does the lead author of that review study say about the causality of those findings? Spoiler, they said there’s not enough info to say it’s a causal relationship.
But those types of details are what I’m gonna be thinking about working into a video where people feel like, “Oh, I actually learned one or two or three like true bits of facts and evidence that I can take away that I feel like I can share with a friend or family member.” Like if I just said, “Don’t listen to that,” they’re not gonna go to their friend or family members and say, “Oh, this guy in the internet said, ‘don’t listen to Donald Trump.’” What you really need is to be able to point to them for a reason to back up what you’re saying. And I used to think people didn’t want to see that level of detail, but they really do.
Bosch: Yeah, it’s something that we think about a lot in my background. So I do a lot of editing experts who aren’t accustomed to writing for the public, right? And I’ve definitely found that people think they need to “dumb something down,” but that’s a really pejorative way to think about your audience, I think. How do you approach that idea?
McSweeney: Part of it is I acknowledge I’m never going to speak to everyone. And this is why I think we need a much greater diversity of science communicators and researchers and experts making content is from the get-go. I know that regardless of how I try to structure the content, it’s gonna miss some segment of the population. There’s a difference between trying to make a very broad message that’s applicable to everyone and a very powerful message that resonates with some core group of people. I think the latter approach is more effective.
In this particular example, I care much more about speaking to people who are pregnant or who have friends who are pregnant than I care about convincing someone who has never been or never will be pregnant and doesn’t really care too much. And it’s more like a political issue for them. So I’m speaking to the people who feel this as it relates to their personal health when I’m framing the discussion.
But regardless, even within that sort of subset, there’s gonna be people that’s either too simple or too complex. And … I’ve just sort of resigned myself to the fact that that’s always going to be the case. Sometimes you have to make a couple different pieces of content addressing it at different levels or from different angles with different people in your mind that you’re speaking to.
But much more effective than that, I think, would be just to have more people doing this type of content in general. Because at the end of the day, there’s gonna be people who feel like they don’t trust me for whatever reason, just because of who I am as a person or they don’t feel like they, maybe not don’t trust me, but don’t feel like they can build a meaningful relationship with me for whatever reason. There’s really good evidence actually that people who get to choose their physician and if their physician shares more cultural identity with them in many ways, that those people trust their physician more. And they’re more likely to adhere to the recommendations of their physician if they feel like they have that almost sort of cultural connection with their physician in a way that builds that trust.
I think of it very much the same way in making content online. There’s always gonna be people who, even after just listening to me for 15 seconds, feel like, “I don’t know if I wanna get my information from him for whatever reason,” which I’m totally fine with. And the solution is not for me to become universally applicable to everyone. It’s for more people to make content so that everyone kind of finds their match for who they’re getting science information from.
Bosch: So you have this really, I think, sort of clear-eyed approach to your audience toward the information that you’re presenting. Do you ever get frustrated by seeing how much bad science there is out there and how you can’t kind of, as you say, reach everybody?
McSweeney: Absolutely. There’s a baseline level of frustration kind of at all times. I’ve never looked into a quantitative readout on what is the prevalence of misinformation versus evidence-based information online. I’m sure people have done these types of studies and that the number is like nine to one in the favor of not being made by credible experts.
And that is frustrating, but it’s also motivating because it feels like, you know, any incremental improvement in the amount of evidence-based content that we as a community can create is gonna be meaningful because there’s not that much of it out there right now. And compounding that is, if you just compare the numbers of like evidence-based content creators versus wellness creators, I think there’s that imbalance.
But if you also compare the reach of the resulting content, sort of the wellness style of content is gonna get way, way, way more views than content created by like the NIH account on Instagram or the WHO or whatever it might be. It’s gotta be, I would guess, 20 to 1 ratio of actual reach of sort of questionably evidence-based content to factual content.
Bosch: Yeah, and I’d like to talk about those reasons. I mean, why doesn’t the WHO make engaging content?
McSweeney: Two reasons. One is more politically correct and the other is I think more accurate.
The first one, and I think this is true, even though I just set it up to suggest it’s not true, is a limitation of resources. And so organizations like the WHO and the CDC and the NIH and the FDA and everyone has not put enough resources towards really getting good at an influencer-style communication. I think there’s a lot of vestigial, like, traditional media influence in all of these institutions. That’s a very top-down, like it was initially built for television advertising and like running things in newspapers and such. That hasn’t quite fully adapted to what is the requirement of the influencer landscape of how do you actually communicate effectively in a way that’s going to see organic reach. To do so would require pretty serious investments in hiring people whose job is to figure out how to do this, to work basically like influencers.
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But within the umbrella of an institution, it would require cutting red tape to let them actually go make content without requiring a two-month-long review process, which is always tough in any organization, but is what is required in order to compete organically with all the rest of us who are not tied down by those institutional bonds in making content. So the first part of the answer is that, that there hasn’t been enough allocation of resources I think among these big institutions to really, really invest in influencer style communication of public health and science related content.
The second part of the answer is, I don’t know how to say it other than that it’s really hard. Probably you have to make 300 or 400 videos before you’ll get good at making videos. And along the way, you’re gonna get a lot of very mean comments and you’re not gonna see very good performance and you gonna spend hundreds and hundreds of hours doing so. And so to whoever the individual is that is tasked with doing this within one of these institutions, it’s not a comfortable process when you’re kind of learning along the way. And to this day actually, most of my videos that I make, and I’ve made thousands at this point, are decidedly average or decidedly below average. It’s honestly like maybe one in 30 videos that I make that really drives a lot of attention and interest and reach and new followers and everything and I feel like really change people’s minds. The other 29 out of 30 videos are kind of like, it reaches a sort of a core group of people who typically watch my content, but they’re not really standout videos.
And it’s pretty tough to kind of grind your way through making 20, 25, 30 videos before you get a good one. And then another 30 videos before you get good one, so the second part of the answer is that it’s just, it’s legitimately hard. Like even if you spend a lot of money to try to do this, it’s challenging.
Bosch: And when you say that 29 out of your 30 videos are average, what does an average videos performance look like for you?
McSweeney: It has, well, it’s changed over time. Right now, an average video may be 500,000 to a million views, which is good. I mean, I don’t think that’s bad.
Bosch: So to change gears a little bit, you mentioned earlier that you do have a day job. How do you navigate having a day job with producing content that is, as you say, deeply science-based, but also pretty controversial?
McSweeney: I keep them separate for the most part. So for example, I don’t make content about what I work on in my job. I keep it totally sort of, I forget the word, there’s a wall in between the two. And that’s been effective. Obviously the content that I make is informed by my experience working in drug development and my experience in pharmaceutical sciences. I feel like I can better speak to what goes into preclinical studies. How do you interact with the FDA? How rigorous is their review? I speak to it better having experienced those things than if I was purely a science communicator and I wasn’t also working full-time. So I think it does give a layer of credibility that I couldn’t have otherwise. Not because people know that I’m doing that, just in the way that I speak about it and the way I feel about these topics that I cover. It kind of shapes the content that I do make.
Bosch: And do you struggle at all with your employer? Are they just totally hands off with you? I know some people who want to write, sometimes for First Opinion, ultimately can’t get permission because so many institutions are so concerned.
McSweeney: No, fortunately, we have a great relationship. It’s a very small biotech company. And so I’ve been working with my boss for now a decade. And I think if it was a bigger company with more of those layers of media and legal requirements and stuff, it would be harder. But being such a small company and being that I keep it kind of separate from what we do, there’s no tension there. I mean, this is one of the problems that a lot of health care providers face is when you’re working with a hospital, sometimes they’ll make you sign something that says you’re not gonna make content unless you get it approved by the hospital ahead of time. With the implication being like, “Oh, I’m scared, I don’t want to lose my job potentially. I’m not going to make any educational content, even if it’s totally evidence-based because I don’t want any form of backlash.” Which I think is unfortunate and I think it’s a major reason why we don’t have a lot more health care providers making content. They’re afraid of, what happens if my employer finds out?
Which is the exact opposite type of incentive that I think we should have. Employers should be incentivizing actual experts and health care providers to make good content that reaches people in a way that they actually get, whether it’s financial or not financial, just kudos. At the very least, not getting punished for making evidence-based health care content would be a good spot to start to have more people doing it.
Bosch: Do you ever think about leaving the day job and doing science communication full-time?
McSweeney: Thought about it. I could do it. Like in a financial sense, I could it. I don’t know if I want to do it. A lot of what we’re working on, yeah, I’ve been working on for a long time at this point. I kind of want to see it across at least the Phase 2 clinical finish line. The type of treatments that if they were to succeed could beneficially impact hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people. Of course, as you well know, the odds of success as you get through Phase 2 and Phase 3 get lower and lower. So it’s like a small-probability, high-impact type of thing that I’m working on, that I feel very personally invested in that I kind of want to see through.
But also at the same time, I feel like I could have a bigger impact on the social media side, obviously, if I did it full-time. I’d have more time to record more long-form content, to do more interview-type of content. And so there is a bit of that tension there. I think at some point I will switch to doing like this full- time, but not quite yet.
Bosch: Can you talk about what it is you’re working on? I understand if you can’t, but I figured I’d ask.
McSweeney: So mostly monoclonal antibody-based therapeutics, mostly for respiratory infectious disease, influenza, Covid, RSV, NPV. And so that level of detail, I do talk about my content sometimes, which leads to, sometimes, a perceived conflict of interest. Like, “Oh, he’s in the biotech industry and he’s talking positively about vaccines for influenza and he works on influenza. I knew it. He’s being paid off.” But obviously if you’re, and this is hard to explain quickly and succinctly, if you were working on treatments for influenza, if you are purely financially motivated, you would tell people, “Don’t go get the flu vaccine. It’s gonna do bad things to your body” because you wanna sell as many treatments as possible, obviously. So it’s kind of the reverse of a true conflict of interest. A lot of people understand that, some people don’t. I just avoid the issue entirely most of the time by not talking about what I actually do.
Bosch: Do those comments affect you? I mean, when people accuse you of being a pharma shill or whatever horrible things I’m sure they say, how do you handle the hostility?
McSweeney: You get a rich diversity of feedback.
Bosch: That’s a nice way of putting it.
McSweeney: When you get to scale. And it used to bother me. I read every single comment on every single video until I couldn’t anymore because now it’s thousands and thousands per day. I still spend probably 30 minutes per day just reading comments. And the vast majority of them are nice and supportive or neutral. But then some small fraction are deeply negative in some way or another, either casting aspersions on me for what I’m saying or my physical appearance or my ties to the industry. And those types of things used to bother me.
But over time, they don’t bother me whatsoever. What I’ve learned is it’s much more emotionally effective to just hide the comment or block the person or to delete it and not worry about trying to respond to them to defend my integrity or something in the comments for two reasons. One is I’m not gonna change their mind. It’s just gonna make me upset and engaging in that way. Number two. And I didn’t learn this until kind of halfway through. When you respond to someone’s comment as the video creator, you effectively pin their comment to the top of the comment section. So you give them an enormous amount of visibility that it would otherwise just be 500 comments down, no one would ever see it except for me. So it’s both strategically and emotionally a bad idea to engage with that type of stuff.
Bosch: One thing you wrote in your First Opinion essay a couple of months back that really stuck with me was you mentioned that you found that followers sometimes are less interested in your credentials than in learning about you as a human being. Can you talk a little bit about how briefly mentioning your wife can help make you seem more credible?
McSweeney: Oh yeah, so that what you’re mentioning is the most to this day, the most memorable DM I’ve ever received. And this was four years ago at this point, over four years. This was at the height of sort of Covid, early 2021. Vaccines were just starting to roll out. And so at the time, people wanted to learn about the Covid vaccines and the clinical data and everything. So I was doing a livestream at the same time, and I spent almost the entire time talking about the recent clinical data that had just come out and the study design, like all the boring sort of. Science-level stuff.
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But then at the very end, I said something like, “I’ve got to go. My wife is on her way home from the hospital. I’ve gotta go cook dinner” or something. And then I signed off, not thinking much of it. But then I got a DM a couple hours later, that same night that was basically to the effect of, “I didn’t know if I could believe you. I didn’t know if you were just like some sort of a shill for the pharmaceutical industry or if you really believed what you were talking about until you said you had to go make dinner for your wife. And then I realized like you’re just a normal person trying to communicate it to the best. You have a normal family. You eat food sometimes.” Basically to the effect of like, “Now I can kind of see who you are as a person. Now I can trust that you’re communicating what you believe to be true.”
And that really changed my perspective because initially, and let’s get back to the way that you are trained in science, the assumption is: If the data are high enough quality and the benefit-risk ratio is convincing enough and you show people the data, the decisions basically make themselves. Which is often true in scientific circles. That’s how we operate. People may have questions about the methodology you use to generate the results or did you use the right controls or is the benefit-risk ratio appropriate in different segments of the population? But at the end of the day, it’s all coming back to what did the data show?
What I’ve learned since then is that’s very, very much not how people make decisions in the real world. The emotional component of, you know, who is the messenger telling me this is equally, if not more important to the facts that are underneath is what I’ve come to learn. And so the question is, how do we address that? I think this is one of the core issues faced by big institutions like the FDA, the NIH, the CDC. Most people, if you think of the NIH, probably can’t think of a single face of a, well, maybe not true of people watching this video or listening to this podcast. But for the general public, right? You don’t know people at the NIH who are making recommendations or doing research. You don’t know what their family is like or what they had for breakfast or what like to do to burn off stress at the end of the day.
You do know all of those things about the people that you regularly watch on social media. Your favorite wellness influencers, you may know their kids’ names. You know what the inside of their house looks like. And so you build this relationship that almost, it’s called a parasocial relationship. You almost feel like you start to know this person. And when they eventually tell you something, it feels like a recommendation coming from a trusted friend more so than this faceless ivory tower, you know, that’s giving you this health declaration from on high. And I think we need to work more of that personal element into institutional communication. Certainly it gives me license to have more fun making content.
Unfortunately, I’m sad to say it now. I did a lot of like the science-based content. I tried to keep as much of myself out of videos as I could, but now I’ve learned it’s totally OK to do a silly, you know, dance video or a trend or show a video of my dog or something every once in a while. Not just is it fun to do for me, but it actually helps, you know, build a relationship to show people that I’m a normal person.
Bosch: Have you ever thought about teaching a class on this?
McSweeney: Every semester I put out an offer to any teachers or professors or anything that follow me that I’m happy to come do a seminar, you know, to talk to their students about this. So I’ve done bunches of those at this point, dozens, if not hundreds, and I love doing that. I’ve never thought about turning it into, you know a class like my own class, maybe at some point in the future. For now it’s sort of a good halfway point to go visit other classes, talk for 40 minutes.
Bosch: Well, Morgan McSweeney or Dr. Noc, thank you so much for joining the “First Opinion Podcast” today.
McSweeney: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Bosch: The First Opinion Podcast is produced by Hyacinth Empinado. Alissa Ambrose is the senior producer, and Rick Berke is executive producer. You can always share your opinion about the show by emailing me at [email protected]. And as always, please leave a review or rating on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m Torie Bosch, and please don’t keep your opinions to yourself.
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