I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

Building up a sense where people start to know who you are as a person, I think is the critical element.

So I learned this lesson early in the pandemic. When I first started making content, it was very much that here's the data, here's what I think, this is what you should think. That was doing a live stream one time, and only at the very end of the live stream did I say something like, I've got to go. My wife is on her way home from the hospital. I've got to go make dinner. A couple hours later, then I came back and I was checking my messages and I saw one from someone who said, I didn't know if I could believe you. I didn't know if you were an industry shill being paid by big pharma. But then when you said you had to go make dinner for your wife, I realized you're just a regular person. You're communicating to your best knowledge, and I felt like I could trust you.

That was a big turning point for me of this lesson of kind of, it's not just telling people here's the data.

You also have to build trust in who you are.

That's Morgan McSweeney, better known to his millions of followers on social media, as Dr. Knock.

In the almost six years since the beginning of the pandemic, he's developed an online personality that's an exuberant mix of expert and next-door neighbor.

It's expressed in engaging videos on YouTube and Instagram and TikTok, and his goal is to counter the online influencers who peddle misinformation about science and medicine with attention-grabbing videos of their own.

Talk about communicating. Talk about a star communicator. It's really amazing. The last I heard you had

three and a half million followers on social media. Has it gone up since then? It's about 4.3 now.

Yeah. Wow. So now here's the interesting thing. You're communicating about real science and you get so many people

interested in hearing you tell them about it. Why is that? How are you able to do that? First,

I should say it is an uphill battle, as I think your initial impression suggests. It's not,

it's not the default outcome from science communication, I should say. It's not the default outcome from science communication,

I should say. It's not the way that we're trained to present science in graduate school. My PhDs

in pharmaceutical sciences. In graduate school, you get a lot of training on presenting mostly to

scientists. And the assumptions are if the data are high enough quality,

if the studies are high enough, you know, the methods are good enough, that basically

decisions will make themselves. And often that is true, if you're speaking to an audience of

scientists or physicians or whatever it might be. It's a totally different ballgame once you

step into what I think of now as the real world.

People very obviously make decisions based on, you know, emotions and stories in their own lives

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