In this episode I talk about how hard it is to learn how to play the drums online, and why it's better to have a human teacher than to learn it on YouTube. I also talk about some of the things I've learned over the years about drumming.
00:00:26.160I would love it if Periscope could fix that bug, so that once I start a live Periscope, I can remember to invite guests, but it's too late.
00:00:36.860Alright, well we've got stuff to talk about.
00:00:40.400For example, let me tell you what I found out about drumsticks.
00:00:46.780I've been trying to learn drums and mostly online.
00:00:49.480I had an online teacher for a while, and now I'm going through online self-teaching through YouTube.
00:00:57.940And here's one of the things I've learned.
00:01:00.760Man, is it hard to learn anything from YouTube videos.
00:01:05.240Let me give you the beginning of every YouTube video.
00:01:11.560And hi everybody, and we've got notes at the bottom, and here, you know, 10 years ago I heard this thing, and then I met a guy, and in 15 minutes after I'm done droning, I might show you the one little nugget of information you want.
00:01:29.760So the first thing is that the people who make these very well, they look well produced, meaning the lighting's good, the sound is good, the camera work is good, but they don't know anything about teaching.
00:01:45.200I'm talking about the full body of YouTube videos about how to play the drums.
00:01:51.100Now, that just happens to be this one domain I dug into, but imagine all the other domains.
00:01:57.660Let me give you an example of how incredibly bad it is trying to teach yourself just by looking at videos.
00:02:06.140So I found out after two years of noodling around and not being able to produce any kind of good sound, and also never being able to drum fast enough, I found out that there's a way to hold the sticks that's completely different than anything I've been exposed to so far, and that if you didn't know how to do that, nothing else works.
00:02:27.660So for two years, I've been holding the sticks wrong, and if you do that, you just can't progress.
00:02:36.560And all I knew was that you held them light, you know, sort of in your fingertips like this, and that, you know, you were supposed to hold them light.
00:02:58.540And I thought, am I just old that I can't get the speed?
00:03:03.340And I'd be like, ah, ah, I'm drumming as fast as I can, but I'm not.
00:03:08.240I feel like I'm maybe a quarter of the speed of the people doing it on every YouTube video at every age.
00:03:14.920It's like everybody in the world is faster than me.
00:03:17.680And it turns out that it's not speed per se, it's technique.
00:03:23.060And specifically, you know, if you're trying to hit it three times in a row, let's say fast, you sort of whip it down, and then the stick comes back.
00:03:33.520But the next two hits, you're not using your arm and your wrist.
00:03:37.500You're actually just using your fingertips to slap it down again as it bounces back the other two times.
00:03:43.840So you're using the bounce back and slapping it with your two hands.
00:03:49.180Now, I learned that today, after two years of looking at videos, in which this was never mentioned.
00:03:56.860Not once have I seen it, and I even took lessons online for a while.
00:04:01.760And not once was this critical thing, which makes everything else possible, didn't show up anywhere.
00:04:10.840I just, I just, I wasn't even looking for it, I just chanced on it.
00:04:15.040All right, so the point is, it's not about drumming, it's not about me.
00:04:19.420The point is, do you know how much better online education could be if I could go right to the thing I wanted,
00:04:27.540and it was in the order that I wanted to see it?
00:07:51.120How much would you know about the world if those were your three sources?
00:07:55.560And it turns out that he was unaware that somewhere around 2016, the news stopped even trying to be anything like news, at least for the political stuff.
00:08:07.820And it became just full out, you know, team play.
00:08:13.720He just thought, well, there's crazy people on the right of Fox News and stuff, and I don't look at that.
00:08:18.800And then there's these completely reasonable people who just try to get it right, the CNN, MSNBC, New York Times.
00:08:27.060And he argued especially that the New York Times plays it right down the middle.
00:08:30.980I mean, they're like just good, legitimate news.
00:08:34.580And I tried to tell him, Josh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't use his name.
00:08:38.800I said, hey, guy, you know, you're a little bit behind the news because these major publications stopped being anything like news in 2016 or so.
00:08:56.940So I asked him specifically some questions to test his knowledge.
00:09:02.400And if you didn't see my pinned tweet on this, it's got like 3,700 retweets already, so people are relating to it, I guess.
00:09:12.640So here are the following things that my friend, and keep in mind, he's well-informed.
00:09:19.160This is somebody who reads the news every day, follows the news, you know, follows those news sources.
00:09:25.500And here are the following things that he'd never heard of, okay?
00:09:28.740He didn't know that you have to pair the hydroxychloroquine with zinc or it doesn't work.
00:09:35.760And that the studies that were showing hydroxychloroquine by itself wasn't working shouldn't surprise you because it wasn't with the zinc, which is the active part.
00:10:05.960He was unaware that something like a quarter of doctors, at least according to a poll, said they would prescribe hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and zinc.
00:10:16.940So he didn't know that a quarter of doctors would say, yeah, I'd do that.
00:10:26.840Didn't every one of you know that there are real doctors prescribing it every day?
00:10:33.180Literally, didn't every one of you know that?
00:10:35.560Because the people who are sort of Trump supporters, mostly that's who's watching this probably, you see the mainstream news, but then you also see Fox News and other sources.
00:10:49.060But if you're only watching the left and you just can't stand to look at anything else, look at the things you wouldn't know.
00:11:04.600He didn't know that the doctor can prescribe something even though it was only approved for a different use, as long as the doctor has some good rationale.
00:11:15.280But legally, ethically, and even as a normal process of medicine, it's very routine.
00:13:24.500And I said, nobody who's seen them thinks that they influenced the election because it looks like a sixth grade project that didn't go well.
00:13:31.580I mean, you just have to look at them to know that they couldn't have possibly.
00:13:35.380I mean, not in your wildest imagination.
00:13:37.300Could these lame little, it would be sort of like saying, I influenced the election because I sent somebody a hallmark greeting card that one time.
00:13:47.440I mean, it's just so insanely not likely that that had any effect on even one vote.
00:19:22.060Did my intelligent friend bend at all?
00:19:26.660Oh, yeah, let me give you the punchline to that.
00:19:29.940So he is, you know, mentally agile, meaning that he can change his mind if the argument has been presented and it's solid.
00:19:41.840The argument I presented was sort of mind boggling in the sense that I was telling him that everything he thought he knew about politics was wrong because he'd been listening to sources that he trusted and were literally just lying to him for years.
00:19:58.100And how easy is it to accept that that that's happened?
00:20:03.600I did tell him, you know, after I filled in all that information, I believe that he trusted me that the information I gave him was both available on other news sources and true and also highly relevant to the conversation.
00:20:19.020So I do think that I shook his confidence.
00:20:23.040I do believe that he he will rethink the sufficiency of his news sources.
00:20:33.220I don't know if he'll change them, but I think he'll at least have that bug in his head that there was a whole bunch of stuff that was relevant to the headlines that I knew and he didn't.
00:20:44.400And I don't think he's going to forget that.
00:21:20.300I'll tell you, I think the stock market has already voted, don't you?
00:21:24.460I feel as though that we're going to see nonstop goodish news from now until victory.
00:21:34.840So it's not that well, it's not that we won't have any bad news, of course, because the death count is going to rise, etc.
00:21:40.400But I feel like the news cycle went from one bad thing after another for a few months to we're more likely to hear about a new therapy or a new vaccine or a new technique.
00:21:55.120I feel like the news is going to turn unambiguously positive.
00:21:59.580I also feel that if we can get through this next two weeks without the death curve going up, and I think we're going to, actually.
00:22:11.020Because everything that we're hearing about where all the problems are, I think we've largely identified.
00:22:17.200So we know you don't want to be in a choir in a closed space.
00:22:20.480You don't want to be in a cruise ship.
00:22:22.060You don't want to be in a nursing home.
00:22:23.980You know you don't want to be in a sweaty crowd.
00:22:25.920And there aren't that many people who are going to be in those situations now.
00:22:31.780So the odds that we're going to flatten this thing just by being smarter is really good.
00:28:04.000But they're not going to be selling themselves.
00:28:06.520So you don't want to be selling yourself too much.
00:28:09.540But if you're saying, you get me plus these extra benefits, and that might be valuable to you,
00:28:16.720then you've told your employer what's in it for them.
00:28:20.220So you want to show that you're agreeable, you're easy to work with.
00:28:27.100And by the way, sometimes I say that directly.
00:28:30.360Actually, almost all the time I say this directly.
00:28:32.820When I get into a business arrangement with anybody for anything, I generally tell them directly and up front that it's my philosophy to give extra.
00:30:03.920So you might use language that's sort of hunting related because it almost certainly will work.
00:30:11.340So you might say, well, you know, I was locked and loaded and, you know, I was just walking down the trail.
00:30:19.640I was, you know, I got off a good shot or something like that.
00:30:23.780Those are terrible examples because they sound too violent.
00:30:25.980But the point is, if you can get a read on the person, you can adjust your language to use the type of words that would be most comfortable to them.