Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Imagine the Possibilities. My name is Skip Pogue. Today we're going to talk about the Internet and at least one way we search that I feel we need to think about a little bit. But first, the Internet. I think the Internet's great. I think it is boundless in opportunities for information, seeing things that we might not be able to see. You know, watching podcasts, just generally looking at all kinds of different stuff. I go back to when I was in high school and college and I had a term paper due or something I needed to report on. I'd have to go to the library, look up books that applied to the subject, get all the books out of the racks, and then go over to the table and sit down and take copious notes. And then I had to put all the books back, or maybe I could get somebody to put them back for me. But then I had to take my notes and go and write my term paper. Today, it's a whole lot easier. We go to wherever our desktop or laptop computer's hooked up. We sit down, type a few words in, and in 1.3Ns, we have a million places we can look. And as we look, we can download the pages, copy them, do whatever we want to do. We don't have to write everything down, and then we write our term paper. And I believe that a term paper on the same subject from when I was in college till today is significantly different. There's probably more information, more facts and stuff presented in it, and they were much easier to find. So there's that part of the Internet that's really good. We can do all kinds of stuff from the house that we used to not be able to do. We can do our banking. We can pay for stuff, we can order stuff.
[00:01:44] I keep Amazon real happy because I order a lot of stuff. So there's that. We can shop. So that's really cool. Part of the Internet, we can video chat with family members that maybe are hundreds or thousands of miles away. We can even have, with Zoom, we can even have conferences with a whole family at one time. Or if you're in business, you can have conferences with your team or with the organization or however you want to use it. There's that. That's important with Internet, and it goes on and on. There's just a plethora of stuff we can do that we couldn't do a while back. And it's not been that long ago. The funny part, and I'm going to date myself, but when I first started to Use the Internet. I used CompuServe and a telephone modem that ran at 300 baud. Today I use a super Internet provider that gives me a gigabit down and a gigabit up. And it's pretty close to that all the time. And it's just so much different. It's kind of like the technology itself, but went from a 300 baud modem. You can't imagine if you didn't live during that period of time or didn't do that, how slow it really is. It's painful. It's really painful when I think back to those days. But it worked. Now, you know, everything's available. I think a lot of people have access to high speed Internet, which is great. We can stream movies and TV shows and stuff too now over the Internet, which is great. So there's a problem though that I see with the Internet and in particular social media. On the Internet now I belong to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Substack, Twitch X and Discord and probably three or four that I don't use very often. So I don't even know what they are, don't recall what they are. But the problem is especially with like Facebook, Instagram, a little bit on LinkedIn, I don't see it very much. And some of the other ones is that you go post something, maybe you look something up or you have something that's bugging you and you just want to get it out and see how people feel about it. So you do, you post it on Facebook. Let's just use Facebook as an example. You post on Facebook and in just a few minutes, usually if you're sitting there looking at it, you'll see somebody typing a response. What they're actually doing is opening up a case and getting a chainsaw out and starting it up because they're fixing to cut you up. And people will, for no reason other than, I don't know, maybe it brings them joy. Maybe they just want to feel better about themselves and the only way they'll do that is put other people down. I don't know their real motivation sometimes, but they will start or comments with derogatory comments about you. They'll make fun of you the way you. Maybe you misspelled a word, maybe you used the wrong word or something so that automatically qualifies you as being stupid. Maybe it was just a spell checker put the wrong word in for you. But anyway, if you respond to them, they'll keep on and I don't know if the right word is Getting your feelings hurt or triggered or whatever, but it will get where it gets on your nerves and aggravates you. And if you decide to try to defend yourself, you're going down a road that leads to nowhere, because they're not going to give up. They figure they got you hooked right then and there and they're just going to keep on. So the only thing you can do is stop when you see the first response from them. If it has something derogatory or something that makes fun of you or something that's not even involved in what you typed about, just stop. Don't respond to it. Just leave it sitting out there. Don't even go back and look at it ever. And if the person has kept on because you responded and they keep on, the simplest solution is to block that person. You don't need negative people. You don't need people that are not going to respect you. You don't need people that, when you make a valid comment, feel like. Want to make you feel like you did something wrong. You don't need them in your life. We're trying to be positive about stuff, and negative people like these people won't do you any good. So I usually wind up blocking them, and I think that's the best thing to do. Now. I think it's 30 days. You can kind of put them in a jail for 30 days if you want to on Facebook, But I just go ahead and block them because there's so many good people out there in. On the Internet, on Facebook and everything that the negative people, you don't need to talk to them. I've said before, and I keep saying it, we need to surround ourselves with positive people. The pure, the positive, the powerful. That's what we need to do, and that's what we need to do in these cases. When they're going to go sideways on spot, let's just block them, move on. Don't pay any attention to them from that point forward. And that's the best thing you can do for yourself. So just keep that in mind. Use the Internet the way it's meant to be used, I think. Don't waste it.
[00:06:51] It's a great tool. Number one, it's a great place for social media. I'm not saying all social media is bad. It's a good place. You know, we can do all kinds of stuff. When you get down to it, with our family, our friends, we can do video conferencing. We can go, if we belong to Zoom, we can set up a whole thing with the whole family, no matter what part of the country they're in, and have a video conference once a week if we want to. The whole family, everybody can talk, see each other, and everything else. So there's a lot of really cool stuff you can do, and we don't need to let the negative stuff drag that down. Enjoy it. Okay, enough said about that. The other thing that I wanted to talk about is called conformational bias. And depending on how we view things and by not paying close enough attention, we can let conformational bias enter our search arguments. When we're looking for information, basically what we would do is type something in Google in a way that would support our argument or our discussion point or the way we feel about a particular thing. We're trying to prove we're right. And in some respects, that's if we're just simply looking for information to back up what we said to start with. But the thing is, when we're looking for information on various subjects and things, we need to try to eliminate confirmational bias and look at both sides of the coin. Doesn't matter.
[00:08:25] It's a touchy subject and I'm not going to talk about it. But politics, religion, all kinds of stuff we need to look and not to verify, but look at things to understand. And this has nothing to do with politics, religion, or anything else. But I'll give you a good example. Father's Day just passed. My birthday's coming up, July 4th, and my wife didn't know what to get me, so she asked me if there was something I really wanted. And I said, yeah, there is. But I said it's kind of expensive. And she's like, I don't care. It's going to be your birthday present, your Father's Day present. And unless it's, you know, unless you want a new Mercedes or something, I'll buy it for you. And I said, okay. So I knew what I wanted. I wanted a rogue road caster duo for this podcast. I really felt like Rode makes some good products. I had done a bit of research, but not a lot on the Rodecaster duo, and I felt like that would really help me do the podcast, make some of the things in creating audio for the podcast easier and make sure it was the same and has a lot of feature and functions that I thought I could use. But I did what I'm what I think we all should do. Even though I kind of decided on it, I didn't want confirmation bias to keep me from finding out the negatives of it. So I did a search basically, of why should you buy a Rodecaster duo? Hit the enter key. All kinds of good information popped up. Well, I bought it because of this. I bought it because of that. It does this, it does that. YouTube videos, which I watched some of. So I looked at about the first 10 things that popped up, went through them and everything, and they supported the fact I wanted to buy, but I decided I needed to do what I'm talking about, and that's eliminate my confirmational bias. And the way I did that, I did a second search, and the second search was based on the question, why shouldn't I buy a Rodecaster duo? And just like the first search got a bunch of hits and everything, I went through the first 10 or so, and there's a lot of valid reasons. There's. It's not a perfect thing for everybody. It does a lot of function. And to learn all the functions, especially when you're just starting out in podcasting, is an issue. You're spending a lot of money, but you're not able to take full advantage of everything it's capable of doing because you don't know how to use it. So I looked at the negative part of it, and I looked at the positive part of it, and after I did that, I decided that it would. Where it starts out would be a big help to me, where it can end up would be a tremendous help to me, and I decided I was going to buy it. So I went and told my wife. I said, I figured out what I want, and I'd already told her about the road caster duo and how much it cost. And she said, fine. She said, you ordered, I'll pay for it. And I said, okay. So I ordered it, and it came in and I did an unboxing. I didn't do a video of it or anything. I just took it out of the box, hooked it all up the way the instructions said. And I will give road credit for one thing. The setup of it, original setup of it, is really easy. It's kind of like following the bouncing ball. And I got everything hooked up and decided to try to record my first podcast. And other than the fact that I sometimes stammer and stuff, it was great. I listened to it and I thought, boy, this isn't really nice. The things it does, just in the default mode, let's say, really helped me improve some of the stuff I was looking to improve on. And part of it's the sound. And hopefully you'll agree that it sounds better or sounds Good. And plus it's got a.
[00:12:12] It keeps certain noises from being heard, which is really cool, actually. I did a. I did a recording, forgot the ceiling fan was on in this room. And when I listened to it, I happened to turn around just as I got done, just as I hit the stop button on the recorder, I happened to turn around and I saw the blades turning on the fan, ceiling fan. And I thought, oh. But when I listened to it, the noise wasn't there. And that's really cool because if it does get warm in this room, which it doesn't often, but if it does get warm in this room with the door closed and everything, I can turn that fan on and it won't pick the noise up. So that was a cool part of it. But anyway, I wound up buying it, unboxed it. I'm using probably 10% of the capability of it right now. And. But I'm learning. I'm watching YouTube videos and stuff. I'm learning. So as far as buyer remorse, I don't have any. I think I'll get to the point. I'm pretty. I'm reasonably technical still. And I think I will learn enough about it that it will be a true benefit. And some. And it's got some fun options that I think, you know, at some point I'll use anyway. That's that. That's what confirmational bias is that we want to prove. I could have very easily decided, okay, that that's what I want. And I could have told my wife, here's 10 papers on it. She'd tell me she didn't want to read them. But I said, all of them are positive. Everything about is perfect. You can't buy a product better than this. There's nothing on the market better. But I knew better than that. So when I did the other search, the negative side of the search, there were problems with it. And I, after seeing it and listening to people talk about it, you know, some of them been fixed because obviously they weren't that this month. They occurred back in the past. And firmware updates have fixed a lot of the problems and stuff. And I'll be a while before I get to where some of them are, and they'll probably be fixed by then. So anyway, enough on the road. Caster. But it's just that when we're looking for information to figure out something that we want or something. Politics today are terrible. I think I'm just going to say that. And I said, well, I'm going to get political. I'm not. But if you're looking to vote for someone, do the positive, negative research and take the confirmational bias out of it. See what happens if there's a TV show you might want to watch or you're not sure you want to watch it. Do the same thing. A book. Do the same thing.
[00:14:40] Information about any subject, look at it from both sides. We have a opportunity now, because of all this stuff, to really look and try to figure out what's best, what will help make us more positive, make us more knowledgeable on a subject and everything else. But we have to look at it from both sides. I could see you somewhere and we could be talking about, let's eat at this restaurant or that, that restaurant. And you say, I say, let's flip a coin. Heads, I get to choose. Tails, you get to choose. And I flip the coin. It comes up heads. And so we go to the restaurant I chose. A little bit later we're talking about something else and maybe going out and have a drink. So I tell you, let me flip a coin. Heads, I get to choose where we go. Tails, you get to choose. I flip the coin, comes up heads again. You never question the coin. You never look at the other side of it. Because I happen to have a coin that has heads on both sides. So I'm always going to win. Or if I want you to do the picking, I can tell you, heads, you win, tails I lose. And you're going to get that. But that's what I'm talking about. Let's look at both sides of a discussion. Let's look at both sides of things and try to figure out which one is best. Not for everybody, but simply for us. Which one will keep us more positive, which one will give us the greatest opportunities, which one will allow us to accomplish remarkable thing. That's all we want to do. We want to keep ourselves positive. So it's just something that I want you to think about. I'm not telling you have to do it or anything else. I'm not going to be that bold about it. But I think if you look at it and do it a couple times, it doesn't take but a few minutes to do it. On any subject, any piece of equipment, a vacation spot, a restaurant, you know, it doesn't take but a couple minutes to look at it and see what people are saying. And if there's negative people, you can always tell whether they're negative because of what they're saying or it's what they're saying just messing with you. Because there's People do that. Like I said, on the Internet, you run into it same thing in reviews and everything else. So anyway, I think I'll wrap this up. So I really, I really appreciate you listening to these podcasts. This is something I thought about and I've told people. It took me two years to get to the point of recording my first podcast. I enjoying it tremendously and I've had a few comments that indicate that some of the stuff I'm saying is helpful. My wife asked me what would make me happy with the podcast and I said just to know. I'm helping people and if I help one person, that's great because that one person's better off because of something I said, then that's fantastic. If it's a hundred people or a thousand people, that's even better. But I just want to help people get better in their personal, professional and spiritual life. That's all. I have no other motivation for it or anything else just to help people because at my age, I feel like I've got some stuff. I stumbled and fell enough going through my entire life to know things that I can tell you that will help you. And I can guarantee you one of them is staying positive. That's the biggest motivator of all, is simply making sure you stay positive. Anyway, thanks for listening. Always remember that your future belongs to you. Be kind, stay humble, love deeply, and laugh often. I hope that you have a super day and I pray that God blesses each of you in a super way.
[00:18:25] Thanks again.
