 Thanks to the internet, the world has a wealth of information available to it. And that's created a lot of know-it-alls. But how come most of the know-it-alls I run into, they're dumb as a box of rocks? Hey there, NJRoot22.com here with another hardly edited first run stream of consciousness chat today. And this has been on my mind a lot lately. And it's about how people become informed, how they become experts in something, and the effect that the internet is having on this phenomenon. I can imagine 100 years ago or even longer before general information was available to the populace, before libraries and media and the internet of course. A lot of people got their information firsthand from experience. You know, whether it's working in a shop as an apprentice or from your parents who passed down their knowledge. And your knowledgeable sphere was always very limited. We had some, what are they called, polymaths that knew a little bit about everything or a lot about everything, but no one could ever know everything about everything. It's just physically impossible. You don't have the time or the brain power to learn about every last thing in the world. But what got me thinking about this was like one particular aspect was diet and how there's so much information out there. There's like a million sources online, on TV, magazines, social media, and a lot of it's hype. There's all this trending stuff, you know, whether it's fitness regimens, like CrossFit or the other type of fitness things that are happening. And a lot of this is just mainstream information. And what a lot of people do is they jump on a bandwagon before really trying it out. And I broke this whole information thing down into four kind of like logical steps. You have your information. It could be someone proclaiming to have a solution to something or it could be anything, a book, an instruction manual that says, hey, 90 days to a better body. What I think most people skip over before they follow a particular set of information and parrot its benefits, its self-experimentation. And that means it's sort of like a trial and error situation. You know, it's like you can follow a program or you can custom it your own way. And it's also, you know, questioning what they're teaching in these particular programs. And it's also following your instinct to some degree based on your own prior experience, which is why the older you get, the more you can either decide right away that a program is not going to work or otherwise. And then the next step, of course, after you've entered the experimentation phase, that's where you validate whether the information that you received is good. And if you can repeat successfully something over and over and over and over again, that means that the information you received is good. And if you try and fail and you try again and it doesn't work, and you tweak it and try again and it doesn't work, then you know that your experiment has invalidated that information that you receive. And over time, after various forms and flavors of trying something, you get true knowledge. I don't think true knowledge can truly ever be claimed just by reading something. I mean, you have to be able to repeat that information. I mean, obviously this takes different shapes and forms. You know, you have scientific information, you know, four cups equals a pint or whatever. Four cups equals a half, a quart, okay? That's valid scientific measurement. And politics is a whole other thing which is garbage in my opinion because politics is wrong to begin with and all these forms of government and laws that we have. But there are things that work. And I'm really fascinated with things like the diet industry because I read these low-carb diets and a lot of people are still peddling sweet things. And I've determined over many years, many years of, you know, I was like my own personal lab rat that one thing that finally stood out after many, many years of eating low-carb and trying to get my appetite and hunger under control and I realized that sweets, anything sweet, even the good sweeteners that they're proclaiming now like xylitol and erythritol are not smart to eat because they mess with your body and they knock you out of the rhythm that you're in. So I really think that when it comes to true knowledge you have to have time and experience with that particular thing, whatever it may be. And, you know, firsthand information. I did it. It was my experiment and I can prove it to you. And one other benefit about not just believing wholeheartedly the things that you read even if it works for just a short period is that by using the time and experience you get to fortify your resolve, so to say, like I can resist sweets now because I'm plain and simply unhappy with the way I feel when I eat them. It's not because a book told me so and I'm sure I could find a book that says avoid all sweets but even, you know, like I can write a book right now about things that work but if I was me in a separate body reading this book I would have to find out for myself, like stumbling on your own it creates a real experience and that's that. And a couple other things you can do to vet out your information is just observe the world in general. You know, like again with diet you could see what people are eating and like you see these overweight people eating healthy things in their car and you could tell that the one aspect of their cart that's out of place is carbs and you could see it right away. It may be organic, it may be gluten-free, it may be free range or sustainable or whatever and they don't realize that it's their blood sugar that's messing up. And there's some other good ways to get information quickly without having to vet it out and that's establishing trusted sources, people who have proven themselves to be right many many many times or shared their mistakes and explained why they made their mistakes in like a very transparent process and then you can start building up a little personal network of knowledge like a mini personal hive mind where you can share your trials and errors. But that's it. I just wanted to ramble on a little bit about how people get their information these days and I see so much of it out there where people jump on some sort of belief and it happens a lot with politics and other internet culture where they just, they're in a camp for some stupid reason. They really really don't understand why and they don't really believe in that. I mean they didn't belong in that camp. They should be doing something else with their time. It's a big waste to get involved. So that's it. A random non-New Jersey related philosophical and psychological discussion. I'll talk to you guys later in the week.