MasterClass is seizing its moment

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/style/masterclass-secrets.html

by gdubs • 6 years ago

185 173 6 years ago

gdubs• 6 years ago

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.

Jac21• 6 years ago

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.

thrav• 6 years ago

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.

—— 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.

powersnail• 6 years ago

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.

poulsbohemian• 6 years ago

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).

fermienrico4• 6 years ago

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.

donretag• 6 years ago

I really do not think the Chris Hadfield series on Space Exploration will help you become an astronaut.

fermienrico4• 6 years ago

Yea! I watched it on a plane and thought it was more of Educational Entertainment than anything else. It had a place but not as a source of learning.

diehunde• 6 years ago

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.

thundergolfer• 6 years ago

It really looks just like infotainment in a new fancy wrapping.

psychometry3• 6 years ago

The fact that they chose Dan Brown of all people to do a writing workshop does not inspire confidence.

volkk• 6 years ago

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.

lovegoblin• 6 years ago

Who? The renowned author Dan Brown?

kleiba• 6 years ago

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.

runevault• 6 years ago

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)

ulisesrmzroche2• 6 years ago

I haven’t seen the other ones but the Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman ones are great.

oh_sigh4• 6 years ago

You don't sell 80 million copies by mistake.

aksss10• 6 years ago

doesn't make you a good teacher, only an exceptional anecdote. Which has value, but it is what it is.

mrlala2• 6 years ago

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...

psychometry3• 6 years ago

Frankly it sounds like you just need more experience reading literature.

kinkrtyavimoodh2• 6 years ago

Why? He is an extremely successful author (whose success is not due to gimmicks but literally because of his books being read and loved by millions).

I'd love to learn from him.

psychometry3• 6 years ago

Fine, learn how to sell books from him. Just don't learn how to write.

surfpel• 6 years ago

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

munchbunny• 6 years ago

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".

crooked-v• 6 years ago

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'.

mandelbrotwurst• 6 years ago

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".

jessriedel2• 6 years ago

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.

bsder3• 6 years ago

Seems like more entertainment than an actual masterclass which I would prefer

Teaching is hard. Just because you are an expert in a field doesn't mean you can teach it.

Probably the only one I would actually trust is the Gordon Ramsay one. He knows his stuff, and it's clear he can teach it.

squeaky-clean• 6 years ago

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.

johnsonjo• 6 years ago

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).

kinkrtyavimoodh2• 6 years ago

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.

alasdair_2• 6 years ago

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 :)

Hope this helps!

ipnon2• 6 years ago

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.

medell• 6 years ago

What does Voss' class have that's not in his book?

ipnon2• 6 years ago

Live demonstrations

The book was too abstract for me. Seeing Voss in the act allowed me to imitate him.

hckr_news• 6 years ago

Hmm will check out the Chris Voss course

benatkin• 6 years ago

I'm curious why "getting your cup of coffee at Starbucks is a negotiation". https://www.masterclass.com/classes/chris-voss-teaches-the-a... (first time watching it there, been shown it 100+ times on YouTube)

blub• 6 years ago

What $100 subscription? In Europe it's 200 EUR per year and it's not possible to buy individual lessons.

galkk• 6 years ago

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.

seppin5• 6 years ago

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.

bsder3• 6 years ago

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.

ssttoo• 6 years ago

Same with Hans Zimmer. Useless.

However Tom Morello’s was cool. Both technical and nerdy as well as inspirational. And I’m not a big Rage against the machine fan or anything.

ll931110• 6 years ago

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)

andygcook• 6 years ago

I thought this thread on MasterClass's coordinated distribution strategy was interesting and worth reading: https://twitter.com/TheCoolestCool/status/126538262872474009...

The fact MasterClass ranks first in Google for "what is a shallot?" is pretty surprising.

oh_sigh4• 6 years ago

How many people who don't know what a shallot is are going to drop $80 or whatever on a Gordon Ramsay masterclass?

esrauch• 6 years ago

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.

luhn• 6 years ago

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.

decker• 6 years ago

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?"

dntbnmpls• 6 years ago

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.

seppin5• 6 years ago

I would have thought that MasterClass would struggle because of the cultural "anti-expert" zeitgeist we have right now. Glad i'm wrong.

heisenzombie• 6 years ago

What happens when an immovable "anti-expert" zeitgeist meets an unstoppable "pro-celebrity" culture?

ternaryoperator• 6 years ago

You get the Kardashians

seppin5• 6 years ago

Good point. These are more celebrity interviews (that make you feel like you're spending your time wisely by learning) than they are expert lesions.

dicytea• 6 years ago

Can elaborate more about what you mean by "anti-expert" zeitgeist?

prawn3• 6 years ago

Propensity of the public to latch on to celebrity ra-ra (shock jocks, influencers, etc) before they listen to a category expert.

Of course, these Masterclass identities are as much celebrities as they are experts.

Cyclone_• 6 years ago

Why on earth does the headline on NYTimes say "only school left" as if there are no other online schools running.

superhuzza• 6 years ago

It’s the Year 2120. MasterClass Is the Only School Left.

It's a joke prediction about the year 2120, not 2020.

arielserafini• 6 years ago

"It’s the Year 2120. MasterClass Is the Only School Left."

oh_sigh4• 6 years ago

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.

ybot• 6 years ago

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.

JoeAltmaier• 6 years ago

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.

aksss10• 6 years ago

the major incentive has to be the altruism

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.

0898• 6 years ago

The Kevin Spacey one is genuinely brilliant. They've taken it down, but older accounts like mine still have it.

davidsawyer• 6 years ago

What was it about?

kecupochren• 6 years ago

There is also this ...bay

Jugurtha• 6 years ago

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.

aksss10• 6 years ago

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.

jkhdigital2• 6 years ago

+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.

mlacks• 6 years ago

Thanks, didn't realize the great courses were available on audible. Reduces the friction just that much more.

fermienrico4• 6 years ago

+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 much much better than any of this fancy high production value celebrity tabloid thing we call "MasterClass". Nothing masterful about it.

dpau• 6 years ago

One offering from The Great Courses that the HN crowd might appreciate is "Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature":

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/great-utopian-and-dy...

The professor is excellent.

kop316• 6 years ago

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.

loco5niner• 6 years ago

My local library has tons of Great Courses available as audio books. Check the Libby app and Overdrive (same company).

chrisseaton• 6 years ago

It does literally call itself 'master class' - a class with a master - so it's pretty upfront about this.

dmoy• 6 years ago

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).

zetazzed• 6 years ago

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.

8note• 6 years ago

They do have Tony Trishka for banjo, who's known as the banjo teacher

baddox• 6 years ago

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.

FireBeyond6• 6 years ago

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".

lonelappde2• 6 years ago

Like Colbert's truthiness, MC is educationaliness. Infotainment.

xtiansimon• 6 years ago

There is a pedagogical precedent for working professionals sharing their craft.

mlthoughts2018• 6 years ago

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.

sitkack• 6 years ago

But I do that with code, am I the Kasparov of Cloud?

jedberg• 6 years ago

but accomplishment in a field does not necessarily equate to expertise and certainly doesn't imply any significant teaching ability.

This is interesting, because you could make the same assessment about famous professors at famous institutions.

There were definitely professors that I had that were well known for their research, but were awful at teaching.

jankyxenon• 6 years ago

What I'm hearing is: Great Courses for technical content and MasterClass for motivation.

Progress may require different weights of the two for different people.

dpeck• 6 years ago

Spot on.

Though I’d say for the cooking masterclasses they meld a little closer towards the middle.

FireBeyond6• 6 years ago

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".

keiferski3• 6 years ago

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.’

lonelappde2• 6 years ago

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.

antigirl• 6 years ago

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.

prawn3• 6 years ago

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."

onion2k5• 6 years ago

"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.

alangibson2• 6 years ago

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.

aiscapehumanity• 6 years ago

Great courses or brilliant honestly

Xcelerate2• 6 years ago

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.)

papeda• 6 years ago

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.

Michael Carlsen's episode is one of my favorites: https://youtu.be/3hTW9jfoCBU

aksss10• 6 years ago

Cooks Illustrated rocks. If you want to go deep on modernist stuff, of course this is a classic: https://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Art-Science-Cooking...

HumblyTossed2• 6 years ago

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.

sholladay• 6 years ago

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.

ddoolin• 6 years ago

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 (?).

dub• 6 years ago

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...

polytely• 6 years ago

For anyone else reading this I highly recommend Ramsay's youtube videos where he tries to cook a meal in 10 minutes, while his daughters film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gwk0e3wgoM

Syzygies• 6 years ago

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.

salimmadjd• 6 years ago

Masterclass is such a brilliant business model.

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.

mywittyname• 6 years ago

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.

kevindeasis• 6 years ago

I'd like to see how much they're paying the actors and how they make the courses

dehrmann• 6 years ago

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.

madballster2• 6 years ago

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

alangibson2• 6 years ago

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.

badrabbit• 6 years ago

You should be familiar with "survivor bias" before paying for their service.

code4tee• 6 years ago

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.

Optimal_Persona• 6 years ago

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.

MasterClass is seizing its moment

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