Wes Kao: evaluation

Transcript context

…Can you speak to that? Yeah. So if you imagine a pyramid, triangle, at the bottom, there's more room for BS, and at the very top of the triangle, there's less room for BS. So what's at the bottom of that triangle? Twitter, podcasts, short articles. It's basically situations that are one directional where people can't really challenge what you're saying. Keynote speech is another great one for lots of room for BS. So those are situations that they're more one directional. With Twitter at least, it's 280 characters. It's something short that you're saying that's a little bit of a mic drop. You just say it, you leave it there, and then you get to walk away without needing to defend it, without needing to share your rationale or think about counter points, and so there's more room for BS, right? The format encourages or allows it. Let's say it allows it. But as you move up the triangle of the content hierarchy of BS, there's less and less room for BS. So long form in-depth articles, less room for BS. You have to defend the idea, you have to convince your reader. Books, also less room for BS. And at the top of the triangle, courses, one directional courses like video courses on Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, but especially cohort-based courses where there is live and async interaction, there's very little room for BS. So if you think about a webinar or a keynote talk or a book, you say the thing and that's it, but in a cohort-based course where your students are right there with you, where they can ask questions, when they can have conversation in the Zoom chat box, if you're saying something that doesn't really make sense, there could be a whole conversation happening in Zoom chat saying, "This doesn't make sense for X, Y, Z reasons. " And so you have to be able to defend what it's that you're saying and make sure that what you're saying is rigorous. And I think that thinking about that content hierarchy of BS is great for holding ourselves to a higher standard, to make sure that we are not allowing ourselves to spew BS, just because a format might allow it. A book, for example, obviously the content of that book, the contents matter more than just the format. And so there are books that could be 10 page blog posts, and there are books where every page earns its real estate. So there's still a little bit of nuance in the hierarchy, but in general, as you move up that hierarchy, there's less and less room for BS. I think this framework explains a bit why Twitter's so cringe to a lot of people is these threads that just sounds so wise, but yeah, there's not a lot of depth to them if you really think about it and it's easy to sound smart. So one thing I'll add is people are listening and they may be like, "Oh, of course courses are at the top, Wes runs a course company." But having run a course and created a course, I 100% agree that there's just no room for BS in a course, because one, there's just so much content because there's so much time that you have to cover. And so you can't just like, "Here's a wise thought, let's move on." You have to actually get into it and people hold you accountable to that kind of thing. And then to your point, people are going to ask questions and you're like, "Oh, shit, that's all I got. I have nothing more to add." That's not going to cut it. And so I totally agree. And that's why courses I think are so powerful and probably a much better way to learn than just reading a blog post or listening to a podcast if you really want go deep on something. So I love that concept. Anything else you want to add on that idea before we move on to the next concept?…

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