Embarrassing

About 10 years ago, a company called MasterClass started becoming popular. It was essentially elevated YouTube aimed at helping people improve their skills in particular domains. Instead of watching some scratchy 720p video filmed on an iPhone by WokGod380 teaching you how to make a Pad Thai, you could have Gordon Ramsay in 4k teach you how to make Beef Wellington. They spent an enormous amount on production, finding masters in their craft (along with Gordon, they had Serena Williams teach tennis and Usher teach performance), and I thought they had a rosy future.

For $99 a year, it was always a bit too expensive for me to justify, so I never ended up becoming a member.

And now, I never will.

Masterclass may still have excellent production values and a cracked Social Media team, but their choice of guests has gone way downhill. I guess all the low-hanging fruit has been taken.

Exhibit One was asking Cal Newport, who is actually rather smart, to teach a class on time management while dealing with young kids, and balancing motherhood with work. Now, that doesn’t sound too obnoxious, until you realise Cal is, in fact, a man. Now, I think men can be experts on topics that don’t directly relate to them, but this feels so completely tone-deaf that you have to wonder what on earth they were smoking when they decided on this. Cal Newport has written some excellent books, including Deep Work which I would highly recommend, but man, they are just setting him up to fail.

Exhibit Two is even better. Grief is an issue that everyone, and I mean everyone, will deal with some day. Loss of a partner, a parent passing, a pet dying etc, is guaranteed to occur, and dealing with it can be challenging. Great, we have identified the problem, now who do you think we could ask, of the seven-plus billion people on the planet.

I have written before about Harry when I reviewed Spare. My thoughts remain the same; the first third of the book is rightfully focussed on a terrible tragedy that befell him, and I am genuinely sympathetic to that. Losing a parent is awful, and to have it occur in the public eye must have been horrible.

But besides that, Harry Windsor is a terrible choice:

1. His experience with grief is not relatable to anyone. Almost everyone experiences losing a parent, but only a sub-portion of those are young children when it occurs, and none are in the spotlight like their family
2. Harry has “lived experience”, but to my knowledge has no formal training or education on the matter. So I guess you just get to enjoy his “vibes”
3. Which may have worked, except that Mr Windsor is, and this is a fact, a complete and utter moron. That isn’t just my personal opinion, everyone from his school friends, to his teachers, to those he worked with or soldiered with, all came to the same conclusion: “Nice guy, fun to be around, mashed potatoes for brains”

I guess that’s an extra $100 a year I can put into index funds.