MasterClass is using celebrity and production value as an attractant, but accomplishment in a field does not necessarily equate to expertise and certainly doesn't imply any significant teaching ability.
MasterClass brings you close to recognized greats, but to an extent your learning will be more about _them_ and only tangentially about the field of interest. There are some MasterClass episodes conveying very practical knowledge - typically the cooking ones - but again I'd call this a different thing than really learning about cooking (theory, law, etc).
Systemically understanding a field of interest is a different endeavor requiring more rigor. The Great Courses product is probably the more rigorous (categorically similar) educational tool in comparison to MasterClass. It has less production value (though more than sufficient) and the lectures are from obscure though academically recognized authorities rather than curated celebrities.
_IF goal is to:_
Really learn a new field or skill during the pandemic = The Great Courses.
Watch autobiopic on recognized authority = MasterClass.
For the record, I have both and am affiliated with neither.
One of the biggest things I learned from the Photography with Annie Liebowitz MasterClass is that Annie very seldomly presses the shutter or even looks through the viewfinder - she has an assistant that does camera operation, hooked up to a monitor. Then she has a digital editor that does all the post-processing and editing.
She'd more accurately be referred to as a creative director. In the class, she even says, "I don't even know what camera or lenses I use." You don't have to be a gearhead, and there's very little to photography that should consider the gear important, but unless exaggerated for effect, this says something.
"Learn photography from someone who couldn't tell you the camera her assistant operates for her".
"Learn photography from someone who couldn't tell you the camera her assistant operates for her".
If you had a couple of hours with Paul McCartney teaching you how to play a guitar you wouldn't want to waste time getting him to teach you how to tune it. If you had a few hours with Da Vinci you wouldn't want him to spend the first half an hour on mixing paint. The same is true for all the Masterclass courses. If I could spend some time with a world-renowned expert in anything I don't want them to waste time teaching me the basics. I can get that anywhere. I want to know the thing that elevates them above everyone else.
Most photography courses have the opposite problem. When a course is basically "Learn what an F stop is and use the rule of thirds for everything and then you'll be an amazing photographer!" it's often not teaching people what they want to know. People already know how to use their camera. When you pay money to take a photography course you want to know how to compose an incredible picture.
Masterclass is not about teaching people the basics. The expectation is that students are already knowledgable to some extent, want to become a master at their chosen skill, and want to learn from people who have perfected it.
> If I could spend some time with a world-renowned expert in anything I don't want them to waste time teaching me the basics. I can get that anywhere. I want to know the thing that elevates them above everyone else.
In my experience, the thing that usually elevates experts above everyone else is their mastery of the basics. You can’t really let your creativity have free reign until the basics are so ingrained that they always go right, and usually intermediate practitioners’ failures can be traced to technical rather than conceptual issues.
> You can’t really let your creativity have free reign until the basics are so ingrained
Generally advice around art I have seen tended to be quite opposite. You need to train creativity as a skill itself. Plus you need to experiment and train courage to "just do it even if imperfect".
If you focus on basics only, you will quit out of boredom and never challenge yourself.
The experts know basics. But you are not supposed to be doing only basics until you achieved some kind of perfection.
Your argument assumes great performers also make great teachers.
I don't think it does. It assumes that people can pick up something useful from listening to someone who's perfected their art regardless of how good or bad they are at speaking about it, which might not be true, but I don't think it assumes anything about quality of the 'teacher'.
I would hope that Masterclass filter out the people who are genuinely bad at teaching. I would also hope that they don't just stick the person in a room with a camera and let them get on with it. They presumably have people on hand to help the celebrity make a good series of teaching videos.
I was slightly interested in Jimmy Chin's Adventure Photography class and so googled around. One of the Reddit comments described the ingest/review procedure as basically having an assistant do the cull. Obviously you can easily adapt to a single-operator environment, but it does kill the charm a little when part of the lesson is "This bit is so mundane I get someone else to do it for me."
There is a lesson there, even if it’s unintentional: successful photographers don’t obsess over the technical details. Photography is sometimes better thought of as ‘image-making with a camera’ than ‘pointing a camera and pressing shoot.’
Successful photographers attract TALENTED photographers who are willing to lend their talents and knowledge in the pursuit of the overall artistic vision.
Ultimately, SOMEONE needs to be around who DOES understand lenses, and post-processing. You're not going to luck out into a great image just by having a great eye.
> You don't have to be a gearhead, and there's very little to photography that should consider the gear important
But "I can't even tell you what camera it is" and then some questions arise about who is making all those decisions about things like depth of field, composition - her, camera operator, combination, etc.
If you just bought the latest Canon body whenever it came out you probably would lose track of the spec sheet pretty fast, other than having a line item in your budget to buy a $5000 body every now and then.
Disclaimer: to be quite clear, while not a full-time photographer, and certainly not a world class one, I do make five digits a year from my photography on the side, and while I may not remember how many fps a body is, or whether it's 26 megapixels or 28, but I could tell you about each of the 8 lenses I own, focal range, f-stop, and whether a given body's high ISO performance compares to another. I think at this point I probably have $40K of camera gear. Whilst it's not about the camera, as such, it is a known aspect. It'd be akin to a developer not knowing whether his computer had an SSD or hard drive, or how much memory
Until you can afford to employ someone to look after your cameras you aren't in the category where you'll start ignoring the specs.
It'd be akin to a developer not knowing whether his computer had an SSD or hard drive, or how much memory
Beyond the fact it's a 2015 Macbook Pro I couldn't tell you the specs of the laptop I'm using right now. It just doesn't matter to me what the specs are. So long as it's fast enough to do what I want when I ask it to I don't care. Plus I'm old and forgetful.
Not really the point I’m making. Plenty of successful photographers have become successful by taking interesting photos, not by being a technical wizard of their camera.
Still not really my point. Leibowitz is a good example. Certainly she knows how to use a camera, but she is mostly famous because of her subject matter: celebrities. She took John Lennon’s photo five hours before he was killed.
That's a great quote but you have to remember that he said it a long time ago, long before the advent of digital photography. It's more like "Your first million photographs are your worst" now.
We all see great things. Life is full of amazing spectacles. The art of photography to me is how you capture it and that inherently depends on what you capture it with.
A lot of people try capture what they see on holidays with their phones. The outcome is usually mediocre that’s not to say that was their desired outcome. They themselves are directors and are let down by their ability to use their gear properly.
You may not need to be a gear head but selecting the correct lense and settings is part of photography art itself.
For example capturing the stars, this is a long trial and error process of getting your shutter speed right. I can imagine the photo looking great and directing someone else to capture it but the art is matching the photo to your vision and that comes with using the right settings and using the appropriate post processing.
This is a good example of why learning from a master is not necessarily a good thing. Liebowitz has no doubt pressed the shutter and fussed over lenses a lot in her her life, but she's at the point where she has transcended those details.
However, as students, we need to learn about those details ourselves so we can cross the chasm and make it over to her side. So for nearly everyone, it would be way better to save some money and just read Light: Science and Magic if they actually want to learn how to take a descent picture.
The lesson to learn is that stardom is about branding (marketing/advertisers) and being the boss of workers, putting your name on it to fake authenticity and singular genius in what is a team effort.
Steve Jobs feels relevant here. The first iPhone wasn't built by Steve. He didn't design components in CAD, he didn't write software, he didn't create icons in photoshop. He was the art director with the vision that made the phone a revolutionary device.
I recently heard an anecdote about how Steve didn't like the plastic screen on his prototype, only a couple of months before the phone would go on sale. So he said it would go on sale with a glass screen. There was no glass available in the market at that time which would work. Fortunately Corning had something in their research department which worked out perfectly. Steve's (unreasonable at the time) demand, ended up being the seed for gorilla glass being in pretty much every phone now. He didn't invent the glass, he didn't get in touch with Corning, he just got the right team put together to make his vision become reality.
I honestly don't think that teaching ability is that important for MasterClass, because I think the videos are primarily consumed for entertainment and creative inspiration, and less for earnestly learning a skill. Charisma and/or starpower, along with excellent production values, is probably exactly what they want and what they need. It's not Khan Academy.
That's certainly how I consume lots of similar educational content. I watch lots of videos of people who are passionate and experienced in some discipline simply talking about, demonstrating, or teaching that discipline, even when I have little or no interest in actually learning the discipline myself. For me it's cooking, 3d modeling, filmmaking and photography, musicianship, home construction, electronics, bushcraft and wilderness survival, and many more that I can't recall at the moment.
I would agree with that, and think it is valuable in itself. But the pedant in me gets frustrated at that, combined with the whole "I'm X, and I'm going to teach you Y".
+1 for The Great Courses, at least the few that I’ve picked up on Audible. I listened to a course entitled Law School for Everyone that is 25 hours of four different law professors giving a very clear and coherent introduction to law. It was worth at least 10x the cost of the Audible credit, and I probably only used 1/2 credit after picking it up during a 2-for-1 sale.
+1 Great Courses. Often taught by university professors and academically respected people.
I just went through the Hinduism course and it was an amazingly deep insight into how the country of India works and worked in the past when it comes to social fabric as religion is quite tightly weaved into the culture.
It is muchmuch better than any of this fancy high production value celebrity tabloid thing we call "MasterClass". Nothing masterful about it.
I don't know about this particular course but almost anything on Hinduism comes with huge biases from western institutions. This is explained in the book 'Academic Hinduphobia' available recently as a free PDF.
I would recommend reading the book 'Being Different' by Rajiv Malhotra to balance out any such courses on Hinduism.
I don't think this deserved to be downvoted. Foreign analysis of a local phenomenon always has a slant. It can't be avoided.
Explication of local culture in a foreign language for the benefit of foreigners will also have a slant. But it will be a very different slant, and it's a lot more accessible than the native materials. If the goal is "deep insight into how India works [today]", then Being Different is probably a pretty valuable thing to read even if the scholarship is shoddy. (On which question I have no opinion whatever.)
I think when the comment said basically "[I have no exposure to or experience with the course you're referring to but let's assume it's biased]", it attracts downvotes. This isn't "foreign analysis", in context it's just a proudly uninformed opinion.
I'm quite skeptical that any kind of deep insight can come from reading a prototypical Bharat Tyagi[0]. Reading Swami Vivekananda or even Gandhi would be a far better use of time.
I'll chime in for The Great Courses too! I have learned history, how to cook, literature, music theory, among other topics from it. I highly recommend them.
They also have a Roku channel and an iPhone app. The iphone app lets you do audio only to cut down on BW. But with a course like Understanding Greek and Roman Technology (one of my all-time faves), the video is pretty invaluable.
https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/understanding-greek-and-...
Wow, same here. I have an audible membership and several unused credits. After browsing the great courses (which I hadn't heard of before this), definitely going to try one.
Agreed that Great Courses has a sweet spot... they bring in great professors who are particularly engaging and good at teaching. So, much more engaging than Coursera on average but still a high level of expertise. For a tough technical subject, the lack of exercises makes GC a poor fit, but for high-quality "edutainment," I think it's a perfect balance. (I particularly liked this class on the Etruscans https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-mysterious-etrus...)
If an author/artist/celebrity you particularly love is on MasterClass, it may still be worthwhile to pay for access to their bit. But you learn much less. I took the Annie Leibovitz photography class and absolutely enjoyed it. I still think about a few things she said. But I don't think it improved my photo portraiture skills at all. If anything, it sort of demoralized me to see the incredible level of input required for portraiture at her level.
Yes I agree - this sounds exactly like what you get from e.g. a master class in music. There's no promise that the person you watch is any good at teaching, but they're gonna be pretty good at doing the thing.
A master class isn't supposed to give you foundational or comprehensive knowledge about a thing. A master class is supposed to
a) give you some random-ish insights from an expert
b) be marketing for the expert
You don't go into a masterclass not knowing how to do XYZ and then leave knowing how to do it. You go into a masterclass with a fairly good base knowledge of XYZ, and then leave knowing a few neat expert-level details about a particular subset of XYZ, but without any practice on actually doing it yourself (unless you're the demo student, but in that case you're probably also nearly an expert yourself).
I agree very much. I am an amateur club chess player and watching the Garry Kasparov MasterClass was painful. It’s a bunch of self-aggrandizing bluster meant to make it seem like a genius is at work, with all this hemming and hawing and grunting and pointing obtusely at this square then that square. Absolutely no connection to the way a skilled player calculates moves, not even Kasparov himself when he played competitively.
On top of this, in most of it, he’s surrounded by children who are clearly instructed to act like their mind is blown by some epiphany if grunting and pointing at some squares.
> but again I'd call this a different thing than really learning about cooking
This is one of the things that has baffled me a bit. I’ve really gotten into cooking lately and learned a lot about the techniques of Michelin starred chefs. Things like cooking vegetables sous vide in aromatic court bouillon followed by searing over binchotan. Or A/B testing the optimal number of days to grill a beet over low heat. Or even starch retrograding potatoes at a precise temperature in their skins followed by passing the final result through a lab grade #60 sieve for ultra smooth pomme purée.
I watched the Masterclass snippet for Thomas Keller and nothing like that is in the video. Instead, it’s “add herbs to the water and brine the chicken”. I can find this anywhere on the internet. I want the real stuff. Surely Thomas Keller doesn’t want people to think his life’s work is so easy that it can be learned overnight. It’s the same with Gordon Ramsay. Almost all of his popular videos for how to cook are different than what his restaurants actually do. He even has two YouTube videos with conflicting instructions on how to cook a steak.
I’m not sure if it’s just specific to cooking, but it seems like the experts massively tone down what they are best at for the masses, and it’s a bit disappointing because I want to learn how they actually do it in practice. My best attempt to learn is to instead dig through archive.org for old blog posts from some of these world renowned chefs before they became famous; you can often find some insight into how they actually think about cooking.
Serious Eats, Cooks Illustrated, and Chefsteps are also good resources, but I’m not sure they go quite to the obsessive level of world class cooking (Chefsteps used to, but their recent work seems scaled back a bit for some reason.)
You may be interested in a long series of YouTube videos put out by Chicago Reader called Key Ingredient. In each video a different pro cook from Chicago makes a dish with a different key ingredient chosen for them by the previous episode's cook.
Each video is short, maybe 5min, but is pretty dense with info about coming up with a dish. And you get to see little snippets of pro cooks putting stuff together in quiet hours outside of service, how they move and what they do without time pressures, experimenting with execution. Even better: most of the cooks are not yet famous.
Chris Voss' negotiation class has easily justified the $100 per year subscription. Kasparov's chess class is valuable, but it wouldn't be worth it on its own. Paul Krugman's economics class is interesting but pedantic. It only serves as a basic introduction, but does so in a field in which the introduction is barely useful. Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution University course fills the gap between beginner and intermediate economics for free.
> The fact MasterClass ranks first in Google for "what is a shallot?" is pretty surprising.
No more surprising than this MasterClass ad from the nytimes. We know companies hire PR firms to get their products in articles/ads in newspapers and favorable "SEO" rankings.
If you're Googling "what is a shallot," it means you don't know much about cooking and are trying to learn more. Seems like the perfect target market for an online cooking class.
I agree with GP though, if you don't know what a shallot is, it's not likely you have sufficient interest to pay money to learn about cooking.
Obviously it's regional, but from my UK perspective shallots are not exotic.
I'm not aware that they even suffer from multiple names as do spring/salad/green onions/scallions. Echalions of course, but that's a subcategory.
If shallots are unfamiliar, again, UK, you've spent little time even in supermarket vegetable aisles or restaurants and, surely, are therefore unlikely to actually part with cash a cooking class?
Absolutely not. I am willing to bet that 90%+ of queries are about the confusion between a shallot and an onion. Nothing to do with the desire to learn how to cook.
Seems like there's two possible answers where this makes perfect sense:
- maybe many people who don't know what a shallot is would drop $80 for a Ramsay masterclass (kind of like how Gyms primarily profit from non-users).
- that many people who search for "what is a shallot" in fact do already know what a shallot is and are interested in gaining advanced/deeper information about the subject.
I think you may have modeled the situation a bit inaccurately. To rephrase, "How many people who don't know what a shallot is and are searching Google for answers would pay $80?"
MasterClass is somewhat paradoxical in my opinion. They’re attempting to reach a wide audience (people who aren’t technically proficient in the respective fields of say cooking or music) but they’re framing it as a “masterclass” which is a class given by a master of a topic to students who are proficient in their topic. Seems like more entertainment than an actual masterclass which I would prefer
I've seen similarly named classes taught by university professors who were former highly respected practitioners. They're often taught as light intro/survey lectures, usually a couple hours of lecture. I think that's the type of "masterclass" that the brand is named after. In the context where I saw these classes, they're very much a sort of "edutainment" to either market the university or to give alumni a taste of the college academic life they remember.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think having an unfamiliar subject presented to you in an enjoyable and understandable way is actually a really good thing for expanding your perspective. But that's very different from taking a class to gain proficiency.
Of course there's also the other type of "master class" where a master teaches the nuances that set the masters apart from the "merely proficient".
> but they’re framing it as a “masterclass” which is a class given by a master of a topic to students who are proficient in their topic
But they're not?
They're using the word as a trademark, sure, but the actual service is obviously intended for people of a variety of skill levels, as thematically connected by being taught by well-known 'masters' (such as the Penn and Teller magic lessons).
In other words, when I buy an Apple computer and it doesn't include any apples in the box, that's not 'paradoxical'.
I don't think that's quite the same. Apples are very obviously not computers, while MasterClass's offering is extremely similar to what a "masterclass" is, which leads me to read it as meaning "we offer a service that maps to what our name is".
There not much point in having a famous practicioner teach the class if you're a beginner. Masters have littler reason to be great teachers, so the reason to learn directly from them is if you're so proficient that normal teachers can't teach you much.
It's clear in this case that the reason they have famous people is because of the celebrity value.
Yeah, I think a true master could technically teach anyone, though that isn't always true. Also, if a master teacher teaches to a novice it would be widely different than to a professional, so, like you, I too have the question who is this targeted to? I personally haven't taken a masterclass so I wouldn't know. (Not that I wouldn't like to though.) I would believe it's the novice though they could have different classes for different levels, but you couldn't really prepare someone from novice to master in the manner of a few classes. I think you can be somewhat proficient, if not highly proficient in a new skill quickly say like 80th to 90th percentile of the whole world, but to get any further and really excel and be one of the best (keywords here are being a master) at something takes a lot of skill, knowledge, and determination. I'd say a master is generally quite well above 90th percentile of people in their field (notice I didn't say the world there).
>I too have the question who is this targeted to? I personally haven't taken a masterclass so I wouldn't know. (Not that I wouldn't like to though.) I would believe it's the novice though they could have different classes for different levels, but you couldn't really prepare someone from novice to master in the manner of a few classes.
I've had a subscription for about eight months now.
Most of the classes are at the same level that "prosumer" hardware is marketed at: advanced amateur or beginning professional.
For example: Daniel Negranu (a poker pro) has a very good class on poker. At no point does he explain how to play the game or what terms like "on the button" mean - that's all assumed knowledge. The target user is a player who can play a solid game already and hold their own in tournaments, perhaps without actually winning the final table.
Thomas Keller's (a famous chef) masterclass is similar: at no point does he explain what a shallot is or how to hold a chef's knife (obscure, seldom-used hooked knives ARE explained if they come up), but he does go into a lot of precise detail about how to cook certain dishes and exactly how to identify the freshest produce or tell when the lamb shank you are braising is done.
>I'd say a master is generally quite well above 90th percentile of people in their field.
The quality of instructors is truly amazing - easily the top 0.1% - most are world-famous masters of their art. Things like acting lessons from AAA celebrities, dancing lessons from the lead ballerina at one of the top companies in the world, music lessons from multi-platinum artists etc.
This sounds like a giant ad for masterclass. I just happen to really like their content and am definitely not paid by them in any way :)
I liked Thomas Keller's lectures the best out of all the MasterClass content I've seen. Great balance of practical knowledge, context and insight. Explaining that what he's doing is about refinement for its own sake puts the steps he takes into context in terms of what you can leave out vs incorporate. He's low-key. The lack of ads and zaney edgy music make it FAR more enjoyable than any cooking show you'll see on TV, IMHO.
Those are good examples. Annie Liebovitz is a counterexample. A lot of the Class is video of her in a circle with students talking about her experiences, or giving feedback. Critique is important, but it's similarly not integral to the process. She even boasts about not knowing what equipment "she" uses. I say it that way because you watch her on a "photoshoot" ("Accompany Annie on an actual photoshoot!"): She is standing back, talking to the subject. Someone else is operating the camera and pushing the shutter. Then they're in a studio and someone else is editing the photo as she oversees. That's creative direction, not photography.
> The quality of instructors is truly amazing - easily the top 0.1% - most are world-famous masters of their art. Things like acting lessons from AAA celebrities, dancing lessons from the lead ballerina at one of the top companies in the world, music lessons from multi-platinum artists etc.
FWIW, the best talent usually do not make the best teachers. This is a fact widely remarked upon in the world of sports. Knowing how to get your body to do something well is a very different skill from being able to get another person's body to do something well.
Also, understanding the various ways in which people learn a specific subject is an underappreciated ability possessed by a good teacher. Knowing how various people get hung up on conceptually on different elements of a subject is something that comes from experience and outside review of your teaching that a "master" probably never gets.
The corollary is that good teachers are rarely great in their field.
A true master can teach anyone but not necessarily at the same time. This is the same problem that plagues even school teaching. Pairing someone who groks the content at a rapid pace and comes up with derivative insights with someone who struggles to understand the basics is a waste of both people's times.
Ironically Ramsay would be my example of a master who's too detached from being a beginner to be a good teacher.
I absolutely love his shows and youtube videos as entertainment, but he will frequently not mention measurements, temperature or cook time, not mention WHY he's doing something, just that it should be done.
He has a video along the lines of "Cheap simple dorm room meals for college students" that requires expensive ingredients like Saffron and fresh mozzarella, lamb shanks.
> I absolutely love his shows and youtube videos as entertainment, but he will frequently not mention measurements, temperature or cook time, not mention WHY he's doing something, just that it should be done.
As Alton Brown's videos demonstrate, this takes up a LOT of time on air.
The problem, I suspect, is that most of Ramsay's videos are time constrained. When he doesn't seem to be time constrained, he's absolutely delightful to watch.
I've watched him teach things like "how to cook scrambled eggs for breakfast" that are absolutely wonderful.
And watched him screw up the timing of the toast. :)
Given his ability with kids and the times I have seen it shine through in videos, I suspect he is a very strong teacher.
Have you watched his Home Cooking series, with his family? I can't remember the details intricately, but it did seem far more grounded and specific than his other work (which, to be fair, Master Chef and his others are aimed at dissecting people who should be accomplished cooks and need honing and refining).
I’m also a huge fan of Ramsay and have watched many of his shows. There was once he mentioned that be never gives you the measurements because that should be up to each person to decide. He only does so when it’s chemically important like in his baking videos.
Every MasterClass series I’ve watch (I’ve watched about half a dozen), they seem to be more of an entertainment thing than a professional class. There is a general lack of rigor and details that just can’t be conveyed in a single course.
I think that's what a masterclass is. If I see a flyer saying some X professional musician is giving a masterclass I'm assuming it's going to be 2 or 3 hours of just ideas, tips, methods and his general vision about music.
They're charging close to the same fees as Netflix, yet their production costs are very little. They don't need to bet millions on some show or pilot and become a flop.
They can quickly churn out classes with very limited budget compare to Netflix's budget and keep their paying customers happy.
I bet most of their creators sell their services as part of a profit sharing agreement too. Gordon Ramsey already creates content for YouTube, because he has to in order to stay relevant. For him, Masterclasses are (probably) just better paying YouTube videos.
MasterClass in the past has benefited from famous/accomplished people feeling they want to "give back" to the world some lessons they've learned.
The standard model is something like $100k up front + 30% of sales. If someone's net worth is in the dozens of millions or more, this really isn't moving the needle, so the major incentive has to be the altruism.
However, will people continue to choose to be altruistic on this platform, when it is turning the creators into the ultra wealthy? One might be less inclined to altruism if you're actually giving a +1 to the world but a +50 to a random company who hosts a website. Many of the people that have done Masterclasses could make an arbitrary individual wealthy and famous (e.g. Spielberg could just say "<random no-name filmmaker> is my protege and all films I work on will be co-directed by them"). The question is how many people are going to make that choice for Masterclass when they could just as well host it on their own website, or put it on their own channel on youtube, etc.
I don't actually think the celebrities are contributing purely out of an altruistic desire to 'give back'. I think that's _great_ marketing by Masterclass, but the primary thing celebrities get by associating themselves with Masterclass is helping continue to build their own brand. Masterclass has positioned its self as "the best in the world teaching their craft", so by agreeing to be on their platform a celebrity is getting publicity that reinforces the idea that they're the best in the world at that thing, and that they're still socially/culturally relevant.
Not purely. But there are 1000 things they could be doing. Taking the time to create thoughtful instructional videos is hard. I admire them for sharing what they know.
Well, remember it's their agent that's managing the brand. It's not as if the celebrity is picking it over 1000 other things. Their agent thinks that out of a 1000 avenues for strengthening the celebrity's brand, Masterclass would hit the right demographic and get the best return on effort (and it's their job to make those determinations).
You're forgetting that people want to be in an exclusive club, and if masterclass is able to really get 'masters' instead of jokesters, then being selected is worth the ego trip; plus if you get 30% of revenue, and you feel like you're god's gift, then you assume that number will be super duper high as well.
Personally I just love their name. Brilliant marketing. I'm starting to see it used outside of their product.
Sorry, no. The major incentive is keeping one's name relevant/established. Think about the Masterclass as an advertisement for their personal brand and it will make a little more sense to you.
Interesting article worthy of a discussion. But I also have a selfish motive – I've been really intrigued by some of the teasers and I'm wondering if people have done any of the courses and have an opinion on whether or not it was worth the money.
Depends on what you want to get from the class and what that amount of money means to you.
For example, the violin class by Perlman that I took. Judging by the content alone, I wouldn't say it's worth $90, since it's not that deep, and a lot of the information is online for free already.
On the other hand, I can comfortably afford it. I'll happily pay that 90+ bucks just to hear Perlman talk about violin for a few hours, regardless of the depth.
I'd say the same for the writing courses. Not deep, no special secrets, not going to make you a master. But if you just want to hear them talk about their own crafts and processes, it's also a bearable price.
Which teasers/subjects in particular pique your interest? As an amateur musician, I've found it's been well-worth the subscription I split with a friend during a recent pricing special due solely to having certain classes inspire me through some ruts. Otherwise, I'd imagine it'd be a hard sell without having a field you're wanting to dig into in mind that doesn't already have a bevy of content on the site.
I’ve watched the Judd Apatow one with my wife a bit, so it’s the only one I can comment on, but here’s where I think it shines:
1. Exposure to his story. How did he get there. What did it take? How long? How did he pay his dues? How did he get lucky? How did he make his luck?
If I were a teenager, this would’ve been HUGE. It isn’t a blue print, but it gives you an idea of what these people go through, and how many years it takes to get where they are.
2. Exposure to his methods. How does he come up with jokes? How does he shape a story? How does he harness inspiration? How does he workshop and develop those ideas?
This is valuable to anyone interested in doing what he does. It’s a playbook for getting started. It has the potential to shatter the whole, “I don’t even know where to start” barrier.
“Start writing down funny things that happen” is obvious as hell, but hearing that’s exactly how one of the best in the world does it, from the horses mouth, gives it a different weight.
3. It’s entertaining. Even if you’re not intending to write comedy, it’s kinda like watching an episode of VH1 Storytellers. You get to hear great stories about how things, that you’re intimately familiar with, happened.
4. Pro-tips. This kinda goes with 3, but there are some real gems. He’ll say something casually about how he does X, and you just think, “duh. Of course that’s how I should be doing X. Can’t believe I never thought of that.”
Think about times in your life when you’ve learned something small from a peer and had your mind blown that you’ve not been doing it that way your whole life. Those are peppered throughout.
5. Demystification of the “master”. I actually think this might be the important thing in all of this. These people are just people. They worked hard and put themselves out there. They fail a lot; probably more than most.
I had the same feeling arriving in a start up office in Silicon Valley from a Texas childhood. I had pulled back the curtain, and it was just more people. Sure, they know a lot about machine learning, but that’s not because they’re superhuman, it’s because they spent the last 10 years (PhD) studying that extremely specific topic.
Seeing how human these people are makes me feel like there are a lot of people I know who are every bit as capable of writing funny things as he is. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy for them, or that they’ll ever reach his level, but it makes it feel like if they just reprioritized a few things and did it — they might surprise themselves.
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So, will he teach you the intricacies of script structure, dialog, timing, etc... no.
Will he spark enough creativity and interest that you get off your butt, start writing some stuff, and go find the content that will teach you those things? I think so.
In my mind, Masterclass is like a tasting menu of hobbies / alternative professions. It gives you a feel for what’s involved and what it takes, and then the person can decide if that’s the rabbit hole they’d like to go down.
As others have alluded, the quality varies significantly. But, with the sales they run regularly, being able to get a $90/ year subscription that covers all these classes, chances are you will more than get your monies worth (and can then cancel in year two).
I took Gordon Ramsay's MasterClass on cooking and it helped me in some small but surprisingly useful ways. The knife skills part helped me be safer and faster in the kitchen, for example. It was also a good refresher on certain ingredients. In some ways, I learned more basic and fewer skills than I expected, and there was some random stuff in there that you won't really need unless you plan on opening a restaurant. Yet, at the same time, it was refreshing to have a high quality, practical course that I could pause, rewind, and re-watch until I had mastered all of the little details. My cooking has definitely improved because of it and it was worth the cost.
For knife skills, I enthusiastically recommend this free online course. It was recommended to me by a professional chef, and I'd bet most professional chefs would get something (or many things) out of it: https://shop.mybluprint.com/cooking/classes/complete-knife-s...
Few years on and I still use what I learned in Ramsay's "How to Cook the Perfect Steak" video on YouTube. Maybe cooking is just inherently more practical even without all the theory (?).
I learned a lot about writing better _software_ and product development from David Mamet's masterclass on writing _screenplays_.
He has a no-bullshit, get to the point, approach that I liked. He has points on what should a story accomplish, where the responsibilities of a character end, and the nature of the job being to entertain, not inform or lecture. It can directly be transferable to feature creep, single responsibility, etc.
Chapo Trap House had an interesting take of MasterClass. In their view it's basically a way of alleviating imposter syndrome. It's real function is to give people some sort of credential, and thus permission. Watch a MasterClass on photography, now you have permission to be a photographer.
Celebrity teaching such as Masterclass reminds me of unsubstantiated self-help teaching promises. It's all about marketing, about luring customers with supposedly easy-to-achieve results such as "Rewire your brain in 7 days" or "Learn how grand master chess players think in 12 easy lessons". Or - God forbid - "Teach yourself expert Go/Rust/Python/C++ programming in 21 days".
Problem is: It is never easy to achieve a high level, at anything.
And that in turn leads one to Peter Norvig's (posted here many times) excellent Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years blog post https://norvig.com/21-days.html
What I don't understand is just because someone is highly skilled at something (Ron Howard) doesn't make them as good a teacher of said something. Maybe Masterclass is helping them put their teaching information together? But they sell it like they're putting together the best of the best teachers, and I don't know if that's the case.
I had a chance to watch ~half of Kasparov’s class on Masterclass. For casual player (1850 lichess in blitz and bullet, 77 percentile), it was close to useless. Too high level and pretty unstructured.
My experience watching carlos santana's class on guitar was similarly disappointing. He just keeps talking about "finding your sound" then plays a few notes. Not really helpful.
The only person I have seen do really good videos for guitar is Jimmy Bruno.
And, eventually, even he gave up.
Doing really good videos for training is really hard and takes a lot of work. Fundamentally, most people good at it conclude that online isn't worth it and that meatspace pays better.
Covid has flipped that around for a bit, but I suspect it will hold true again within a couple months.
Actually I find it the opposite: the material for this particular class is too simple and helps nothing if you already have some good chess knowledge and want to bring to expert/master level.
(Granted there are plenty of other resources for such, including a number of Kasparov books)
Not quite the right place for this comment, but it's timely, and I wanted to share it. Over the long weekend, I started bookmarking and closing my months-long collection of browser tabs. The number of "to read" and "to watch" links vastly outnumbered the "to dos" (I don't mean that like it's a chore, but related to an activity). I accidentally focused too much on learning over doing.
Don't watch these classes just to watch these classes. Watch them to enrich an active part of your life.
Will admit to bing one of those that watch some of the adverts to the end. It’s certainly compelling and engaging filmmaking.
The content is good. Criticisms that the content is often shallow and more about the person than the topic are fair and valid. Your won’t really learn much actual skills apart from maybe the cooking ones. It’s interesting and inspiring content regardless.
You can find comparable stuff on YouTube if you know where to look and are willing to filter though things (lots of great biographic speeches on there and such) but I get their biz model and it makes sense. It’s basically super premium YouTube. They’ve attracted a very diverse and impressive mix of talent too.
FWIW, I learned quite a bit from deadmau5' MasterClass, in terms of "general approach", "inspiration", and "very specific, immediately applicable techniques that I probably wouldn't find elsewhere". Maybe he's an outlier?
I had been producing music for 12 years when I took the class, and I had 30+ years of musical and recording experience to draw from. Also, I use the same software (Ableton Live) as deadmau5 did in the tutorial, so most of the technical elements were immediately usable.
I've nearly subscribed multiple times to MasterClass, then I watch a demo again.
We all have different needs for affirmation to information. My fear from what I've seen is that MasterClass is too heavy on affirmation. I already know I can do it, that's not what I need.
Well, you could either go the route of a Nobel laureate in literature that you've never heard of, or for a guy with commercial success.
From Wikipedia: His books have been translated into 57 languages and, as of 2012, have sold over 200 million copies. Three of them, Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and Inferno, have been adapted into films.
It all depends on what your goals are. No-one is forced to take any of the offered classes.
They have a LOT of writing classes. Neil Gaiman, David Mamet, Judy Blume, Joyce Carol Oates, Billy Collins, Margaret Atwood... Yes they have Dan Brown, but if you want to study writing there are some fantastic ones (Gaiman, Mamet, JCO, Billy Collins, Balldacci were all fantastic)
Being a highly lauded author doesn't make you a good teacher either. The best writing teachers are probably relatively nameless individuals out there at various colleges and universities, or maybe even high schools. But no one is going to pay for a "masterclass" from them.
Sorry, that was exactly my point.
And to your "no one is going to pay", that's pretty much exactly what The Great Courses Plus subscription is doing - using relatively nameless individuals in academia to do real teaching. People (including me) pay for it.
depends on how you view writing. he might not be your average book nerd's cup of tea, but his astonishing success is nothing to balk at. i love all sorts of authors, and maybe he might not write the best literary works of art, its entertaining as shit and i devoured his books in my teenage years.
I kind of suck at reading but I can whip through a Dan Brown book fully entertained and not constantly struggling. But then I try some "real authors" as you would say and I have a bit of a hard time.
So which author is better? Not necessarily the one that is more difficult to read...
I'm not disagreeing with you, but on the other hand.. why? Not sure I understand why something more difficult to read is supposed to be 'better' from a technical standpoint.
The (good) point was made that not a single "Masterclass" teacher isn't already a well known celebrity. Surely that is the focus of the appeal, not a happy coincidence.
MasterClass brings you close to recognized greats, but to an extent your learning will be more about _them_ and only tangentially about the field of interest. There are some MasterClass episodes conveying very practical knowledge - typically the cooking ones - but again I'd call this a different thing than really learning about cooking (theory, law, etc).
Systemically understanding a field of interest is a different endeavor requiring more rigor. The Great Courses product is probably the more rigorous (categorically similar) educational tool in comparison to MasterClass. It has less production value (though more than sufficient) and the lectures are from obscure though academically recognized authorities rather than curated celebrities.
_IF goal is to:_
Really learn a new field or skill during the pandemic = The Great Courses.
Watch autobiopic on recognized authority = MasterClass.
For the record, I have both and am affiliated with neither.