Why Books, Videos, And Lectures Are The Worst Ways To Learn (And What To Do About It)

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode one Oh three,

Whoa. You're listening to the six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode of [inaudible],

the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my bald, beautiful, amazing purple shirted cohost, Christopher J. Graham Chris. I do buddy.

Doing fantastic, man. I, we've had a little bit of a weird week. We're two weeks in the Graham household. Uh, I don't know if you guys saw on the television recently, but, uh, we're not gonna talk politics here, but I got to bring that are now just a little bit of politics here. The democratic debate for the presidency was like three blocks from my house in Westerville, Ohio close. Yeah, it was Susan Surandon came to town. I loved her in the stepmom. So

that's, that's fun because, um, I saw the, all the, all the hullabaloo. Hello? Halabaloo I don't know the word. [inaudible] Hubble space telescope. Hubble Ballou the hub. I know what I'm saying. I saw all of the hype around it. Uh, it was like 4:00 AM I'm sitting at the airport about to fly to Mexico for a vacation and they're talking about the democratic debates going on and I see Westerville Ohio screen. I'm like they're having this in Westerville Ohio like tech to change

[inaudible] yeah, it was insanity. All these, uh, no offense if you're a wackadoo but all these wackadoos left, right. The whole nine yards. And like I would, I tried to walk home from my office that day cause I'm just right up the street. I'm a stand. It was like Whoa, this terrifying up here. There's like people running around with like machine guns and shit like protesting and stuff and it reminded me,

no, these are just, just to clarify for our non American listeners, yeah, these were professional like

police, no armed automatic weapons, right? No, these were just normal people in America.

There's something called us. Are you serious right now?

It was a, in America, it's legal to, it's called open carry and you can bring a gun into public and most places you couldn't bring it like by a school or something like that. But people were just like arguing in the street.

Some of them like holding like a demonstration demonstration in there, like gun rights. So this is the like super, uh, conservatives showing up at the democratic, which is the left side,

which reminds me of a story I haven't told on the podcast. Um, when I was in eighth grade, we did the Washington DC trip. A lot of school districts do this. And then my Washington DC trip, um, this just going to come back to machine guns and people do this as well by the way. But I was too poor to go so I didn't go well. Anyways, so I went and I had a crush on this girl, Erin Elliott. And I had her friend, my friend asked her out for me cause I was in eighth grade and she really shot me down hard and I was like really depressed. She was cute, she was tall. And, uh, so I'm at Washington in Washington DC and like all kinds of like bummed about this and we go to tour the white house and I'm a freaking weirdo. Especially as an eighth grader. Yeah. You don't have to preface this. I can only imagine Chris Christopher J Gran in eighth grade. So weird now. So, uh, it got awkward because I was like, well, I'm going to be on the road. I probably should bring some screwdrivers just in case I need them.

I just love the thought process. So just in case I need some fucking in case I need to like fix something, this is like my me. And so I've got my backpack and I've got the screwdrivers in it. We walk into the white house, we put my backpack and everybody else's backpack on the X Ray machine and they're like, Whoa, what the hell? Why do you have screwdrivers? And I was like, fix stuff. And they're like, we're going to take these. And I was like, Oh shit. Damn Pat. So I'm like pissed. We're walking into the white house and I'm just like angry. Like, what are they thinking to do? Like steel up outlet cover or something like that. And so we get out of the white house and we're out in front of the white house lawn and we're like on the other side of the fence.

And I look through the fence and I can see this guy who I recognize. He's the guy who took my S my screwdrivers and he's like talking to these secret service guys who are all holding machine guns. Deutsche's like the, you know, it's like the little like handheld nine millimeter machine gun that you who SMGs. Yeah, little SMGs like a bond on in 64 it was like one of the best guns. This is what I imagined you were talking about when you said people with automatic weapons in the streets, not civilians. Well these, these were real government employees to America. Y'all who should have had machine guns. Yeah. And they're talking to this guy who took my screwdrivers and I can tell that they hate him. I can tell that they despise this man. I love that. In eighth grade, you have the insight to know that just by looking at the interaction into the body posture and all the, well I use this to my advantage.

So I yell through the fence at the white house to the guy and they say, Hey, I just got out of the white house and when I went in there, you guys took my screwdrivers, how do I get those back? And this asshole walks over to the fence. He was like, Oh yeah, we get this screwed over. So what kind of work do you do? And I can see that the guy that the secret service with the machine guns are like this asshole. And so I'm like, I think that these guys hate him and I think they'll have my back. And so I pause and I say to the guy, well, his question was, well, what kind of work do you do with these screwdrivers? And I said, well, you know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that mostly home repair and espionage and these dudes with machine guns lose it like belly laugh at this guy and, and he gets all dejected and he goes into the white house and he gets my screwdrivers and he brings him back some Timmy through the fence. And I was like, yes, yes sir. Got you. You grown up. It was awesome. It's like the highlight of my eighth grade year.

If I can't, I'm going to go back and add like victorious music that slowly builds off until your triumph there. But we'll, we'll have to see there. A side note I mentioned I just got, I was going to Mexico during the democratic debate, which was a while back. Uh, I spent a week in Mexico with my wife and it was just completely off the grid, didn't do any kind of work, was just, uh, an RNR week. And because of that, we are now four days away from this episode that we're recording today having to air my assistant is in Germany. And so this is going to be our first attempt at a completely live podcast with no editing whatsoever. So

I love it. I think this is going to be, it's going to be good for us. Brian, what was it you told me to do? You said you got to Willy Wonka if, yes, yes. So Andy J pizza, who I share an office with, uh, he's got the creative pep doc podcast. He's an amazing creature. What a great guy. He barely edits anything and what he's had to do is learn how to turn his mistakes into content when he's making his podcast. And he is, he's amazing at it. And uh, we've talked about this a lot and I've learned a lot from him and we kinda describe this as Willy Wonka. If you guys know the original Willy Wonka movie, Willy Wonka walks out of the factory and then he falls down the stairs and everyone's like, Oh my gosh, what do they walk up? And then he Springs up and like [inaudible] and everyone's like, Oh my gosh, what do you walk out? It's amazing. And it's this whole like, turn your crap. Uh, turn your mistakes. Integrate content. Yeah, turning shit to gold. Yeah, there it is. Which by the way, if you'd like to learn how to do that with your mixes, you can go from, you can go to

the URL is from shit to gold.com I have a mixing course. It's only for those who listen to having music, but that's not the point today. Let's move out of banter mode. And actually the first story I've heard from you in a long time that you haven't told multiple times on the podcast, your fun screwdrivers story. Let's move from that into valuable content for our podcast listeners. A mere eight minutes into the episode. Oh, so we are, as you can tell, where we have 102 previous episodes to this 103 now, and that is a massive amount of content in our backlog. And I would say probably most people would think that's an information overload. I know if I find a podcast it has like a a hundred episodes. I'm like, Oh God, let her rest. Where do I start? A lot of people have bins through all 102 episodes as well and if that is you, my best guess is that you've retained at best like 10% of the knowledge but also you

you because you also know more about us than our mothers do.

This is true. Yeah. We talked about this. We, we don't talk about, we don't go into this personal detail. Well I don't talk to my family that much anyways. I see them on holidays. I talk to them from time to time but I don't go into like personal dealings of like 100 hours. Yeah. Yeah. You've, you spent a lot of time with us but I want, I wanted to go and encourage you before we get into the topic today in a promise is this ties into the episode. Go back and re listen to whatever episodes cover things that you are currently struggling with. This is a side note, completely side note, but there is something that I try to practice which is just in time knowledge, not nice, nice to have knowledge just in time. Knowledge is, Hey, this is the thing I'm working on right now. This is the big thing that I'm trying to accomplish. What are the educational things that I can consume in order to help myself with the thing I'm working on right now? I think that I need to know in the future and so I think a lot of our listeners could take that to heart and go back to our, through our 102 are now 103 episodes and start going through and focusing on just those things that you are working with right now.

Totally. I, for me, I think there's a transition when you kind of have this like come to Jesus moment where you're like, I'm going to self-educate. I'm going to teach myself how to grow my own business. At first there's a lot of information that you're consuming. You're, you're taking like your one Oh one courses if you will. You're learning all sorts of broad strokes about business, but then as your business begins to grow and you begin to apply, I think most people, myself included, flipped to more of a just in time. I'm not going to read a book that I think might help me in five years. At least right now I'm trying to read stuff that will help me now and then eventually I would imagine there'll be some new stage of life in my own education, self education journey. But yeah, it is a normal thing to transition from. I'm trying to get the broad strokes. I'm trying to get though the whole picture to, I'm focused on what I need to move the needle today.

Yes, absolutely. So why do I bring up the past, the past episode list, the 102 episodes that we have out is because today's episode we're going to cover something called the cone of learning. And another name for it is the learning pyramid. And I'm going to give a quick overview of it before we dive into this. But a learning pyramid. It's kind of like the hierarchy of needs pyramid that we talked about several episodes ago where if you can visualize a pyramid or a triangle, really not a, not a 3d pyramid, but I triangle and there are different methods of learning and some are more effective than others. And we're going to go through each of these real quick and then we're going to go into depth to this. But at the top of the list, the very tippy top, the tiniest part of the pyramid at the very top is lecture.

That is like somebody just talking to you and you sitting there and being lectured to something that is the least effective way to learn things. Now, less than 10% of knowledge is, uh, retained, are retained to us. The word I'm looking for the next down is reading, which is surprising to see 10% of knowledge is retained when reading something and then further down. Is audio visual, so that's listening and reading at the same time or is it, no, it's looking, watching, and listening at the same time. So watching a video that's 20% uh, of, of knowledge is retained. Then we get down the list of demonstration. So watching someone do something, uh, I believe that's is that demonstration would be to you Chris?

Yeah. Yeah. It's like if you're in physics class in high school and the teacher's like, look, I'm going to do this thing. You know,

and there's like a, when you put the baking soda in the hydrogen peroxide or whatever it is, vinegar, O'Brien, baking soda and the vinegar. There we go. Thanks for, for cleaning up my shed. Nope, no bra. So that's 30% of knowledge is retained through demonstration and then discussion. So like a group discussion with people or even just a one on one discussion that is 50% of knowledge retained and then actually doing something surprise, 70% 75% of knowledge is retained when you actually go to do the thing. And then surprisingly, and this is the thing we're gonna probably talk about the most towards the end of the podcast is teaching others to do something. When you teach someone to do something, 90% of knowledge is retained. And again, this is something called the learning pyramid or the cone of learning is what I'm going to call it for the rest. The rest of this episode, and this is the source of this by the way, is the national training laboratory or liberal laboratory depending on where you're from and so this is research backed stuff. I don't know. To me I'm kind of sketchy on like the specifics like 10% exactly 20% exactly is retained, but I'd say in general this is the order of least effective to most effective learning methods and I think there's a lot that Chris and I can distill in this topic to take away for our listeners to this podcast.

Totally and here's why this is important to you. It's 2019 or at least when we recorded this episode of 2019 and never in the history of humanity has more information been available to you, listener. You're trying to grow a business, you're trying to win your freedom, you're trying to be gainfully unemployed, that cheesy, you know kind of phrase there. The way to do that is to self-educate. The way to do that is to take responsibility for what you know and to not outsource that to other people. And to start reading, to start listening to the podcasts. I started watching YouTube videos to start all the things, your ability to take information in and then keep it and then synthesize it into real world scenarios. Or I learned this thing and now I'm going to actually go out and do it. Or I learned these two things. I'm going to combine them into this other new thing to grow my business. This is the single best thing you can do, not just to grow business, but to become a better artist, to become a better husband, to become a better wife. Everything that you want to do is basically information in retention and then synthesis. So what if I wanted to become a better lover? Chris, is this the same thing? Oh yeah. Cause if you forget all the stuff that you learn when it comes time,

it'll be awkward. I was like, where's this going to go with this? Oh, not yet. I'm not gonna. I'm not going to push that to like where's he going to go with this? We're not editing this out of Chris. This is an unedited episode. So, uh, before we get into the, the, the meat of this episode, we're going to tell, I'm going to tell you the story, Chris. Uh, do you know, do you know, just by hearing the phrase, do you know what revision hell is?

Not only I, but

I also had a visceral internal reaction of fear. Oh, I'm thinking about one particular client right now. Okay. You don't have to go into details cause again, we're editing it out. So if you, if you release any personal information and piss somebody off, it's going to be in the episode and I'm not gonna do anything about it. So revision hell, this is a, this is a story of my, one of my biggest revision Hills and what I did to try to fix it. And ultimately what, what the best a result that came from that. So revision hell, I was working with a client, I was sending a mixed of them there. I'll, I'll, I'll say the country they're from. I won't say anything else. I've worked with a lot of bands from this country, so this is an Australian band I was working with years and years and years ago.

So this is long enough to take the sting out. And I sent them a mix. And what I got back was, um, the one of the, one of the biggest walls of texts I've ever seen in an email. And it's, it's always the type of person that sends this many revisions back. It's always a block of texts, no spacing, no formatting. It's just to stay long. 3000 word wall of text, which you only retain about 10% of as we previously discussed. And what's right. Breeding is a 10% not. Yeah. So thank you Chris for bringing this back to the, the episode topics. So I get a long list and I am like, I think it's impossible not to get this many revisions back and not be deeply offended as it makes an engineer. It's just absolutely impossible. So I, I do what any sane person does.

I copy those to eh, like an Evernote file or a Google doc. And I space them out and format them and arrange them so that I can actually tackle them in a, in a systematic fashion and I go through, I knock off revisions, I have to then copy and paste revisions that I had questions about back into an email, ask them what the hell do these mean? What do you actually want here? Please be more descriptive and go back and forth through three more email threads before I got to the bottom of that and then I sent them mixed to back. What do you think happens in mixed to Chris? Did they prefer mixed? One? They might as well have because they sent revisions that completely went against the things I had done in mixed one and two mixed two completely negating most of the revisions they asked for through another thick wall of texts that I had to then paste into a Google doc space apart, put into an organized fashion and then keep track through bolds or strikethroughs or underlines or whatever to know what revisions I did and didn't do and then copy and paste into an email asking for clarification on 10 of their vague revisions or timestamps that were wrong.

And then eventually you're hurting me. Brian and I, I'm going to tell you, I tell you this because this was over 30 pages if you just copied and pasted cause I still have these revisions. This is like over 30 pages or revisions in Google docs. Yes. Hitting me 7,000 words over a two month period. Seven revisions that I did on this [inaudible]. Yeah. Or the revisions from the drummer. There were some from their jumper. No context, no explanation for that. Please. So

let me just say this, this was my, my, my quote and improved revision system. It used to be like bands would message me through a bunch of different areas. Eventually I said one member sends me one email and that's all and I thought that would fix this revision. Hell problem. It didn't. And so fast forward, a couple things I did with that and I'm going to get to the resolution here. A couple of things I did first is I set a three revision limit to keep people from after. After the third set of revisions I could point back every single revision they sent after revision number three to things they specifically asked me to do and now they're asking me to undo. So there was no progress made. The mix is one of my least favorite mixes I've ever done. And so three revision limit, anything after that I charge four and I had never had to go past that since then.

Uh, I will do any revisions past that, that I mess up if it's something that I personally actually messed up. And then now we have a brand new app that has solved all of this revision hell for me. And that is file pass. We've talked about this on the podcast before. Now if I were to work with this band again, here's what I would have to do Chris. I would send them one link to their project and I would say, Hey, email me when you're done leaving me revisions. And now I could just go into file pass NC song by song, the exact timestamps of exactly where each revision should be. Not only that, I can simply check them off on our backend via checklist to know when I've done them and then for the ones that I didn't really understand what the hell they're talking about, I can just reply to the comment and start a thread. How much easier is that than revisional? Hell yeah,

that's the best pitch for file pass that I've ever heard. That was so good.

This was when we were making file pass in the early stages of it. This, this band is this, this revision help project is the exact one I had in mind. So that's my revision health story. Chris,

that's amazing. Well, in the spirit of the moment, I have a story. I got a shout out to my dude, Jesse Ray mix. He's on Instagram at Jesse. J. E. S. S. E. R. a. Y. M. I. X. He hit me up on Instagram. I'm looking him up right now. I'm sorry. He's dope. He's got a lot of followers. He's a very good mix engineer and he posted a story the other day.

Then I'm gonna pause you real quick. His, his Instagram will be in our show notes@sixfigurehomestudio.com slash one Oh three that's one zero three along with a, the the cone of learning. Just the visual reference for this episode too. So disarray mix. His Instagram handle will be there as well.

Can you also put the home phone number of the person who gave you the 7,000

word? Put his address, phone number, social security number, credit card. I'm going to put it all. I'm just going to put them on blast and ruin his life. No, I'm not going to do that.

Jesse is a new father. I'm from what I can gather. He just had his first kid and he posted something on Instagram. You tag me on it the other day. Uh, he had recently downloaded bounce Butler and uh, let me read this to you guys here real quick. Uh, I was so amazed at the feedback that he had for me here and I think it's, it's worth me reading because it's the exact scenario, uh, that I was looking for Brian stall for time since we're [inaudible].

Oh, I got it. I got it. Okay. I was going to say, I've got, I'm going to stall for time. He's got 11,900 followers on Instagram, which happens to be the exact same amount of followers that I have. So he's what? He's, he's my Instagram brother. That's amazing. Instagram brother. Yep.

Well, he posted a video of him using bounce Butler and he wrote the future's, now I just use an automated app called bounce Butler to bounce out an entire album of alternate mixes and stems. I left the studio to go hang out with my baby. When it finished, it texted my phone. There were no airs. Dad is sick. He got dad time and because of my app, Brian, that's the coolest thing I've ever heard. I was so pumped.

I'm seeing, I'm seeing him. He's got a, he's got a video on his Instagram of his, got the little like baby strap on thing where it's like the baby strapped to his stomach around his shoulders, like the reverse backpack and he's playing piano. Uh, which is cute. So definitely, uh, getting to spend more time with his kids. Thanks to bounce.

Okay dude, that's, I like made my day. I was like, that's the whole reason I invented this in the first place was so I could spend more time with my kids. It's been, and now to be able to help other people do that, love it. Uh, bounced Butler is in free beta. You can go download it and start having more time with your kids if you're a dad or a mom or something or your video games if you're single too. Anyhow, yeah. So bounce bella.com. Check it out. It's great. It's being used all over the world right now.

All right, well let's transition into the meat of our episode. We're going to go back to the cone of learning and that is, um, the levels of effective learning. And again, the reason we're talking about this because there's so much content out in the world, there's blogs, there's podcasts, there are books, there are courses, there are membership sites, there are live webinars. There's all sorts of things you can do to learn new things. But a, what's the, what's the most, at least effective way to learn these things? And B, what can we, what can we learn about this cone of learning and this learning pyramid? What can we, what can we take away from this to improve our own learning ability? Because I can't tell you how many times I've read a book and I couldn't tell you a single thing that I took away from that book.

Well, here's the thing that's so exciting about this. When you learn something and then you're able to apply it in your life and in your business, it's a foundational building block that you get to build on for years in advance. The reason I got obsessed with playing the guitar when I was 13 right before the Washington DC trip, eighth grade, I got a guitar for my 13th birthday and uh, uh, there's more, there's more to that story. I'll get to that.

I don't know. I mean, is this, is this that there's more to this story to come in the future, a cliffhanger or did you just forget the story and you're telling me? I did.

I was just, I didn't want to throw my family under the bus. It got weird right around this time of my life. Anyways, I got to get to our, and I remember learning a G chord and thinking to myself, cool, I play guitar now. I just learned a G chord. These seem pretty important. I bet I'll still be using this when I'm like 37 years old. I was right. I still played G chords all the time. And so you learn something at a young age and when it's good information and you retain it, you get to build on top of it. You can still learn G seventh chords and G sus chords and more G seven chords. But anyways, that's my point. So if you can optimize the way that you learn in the way that you retain what you stand to gain by optimizing how you retain information is banana cakes. You think about Neo in the matrix and you know, he's learning about the matrix and they plug them into the thing and he's like, I know Kung Fu show me, you know, like there's this something amazing in that movie about Neo's ability to learn so quickly through some sort of direct computer interface. But there's still the issue of retention. If we can figure out how to retain information building businesses, the reason you're listening to this podcast gets a whole lot easier.

Yeah, I like what you said, how it kind of stacks on top of each other because again, there is a minimal amount of knowledge you have to understand about certain things to learn the next step in that process. If, if, if you can continue on, uh, continually teaching yourself new things, but also doing it in an effective way. That's the key and effective way you can have a compounding effect to your, uh, to your education. So let's move into this, um, starting at the top of the cone of learning. Again, if you want to see a visual representation of this, just go to the six figure home studio.com/one zero three and you'll see the image of the, the learning pyramid or the cone of learning. And at the top of this is lecture. And this, this is really surprising to me and probably one of the reasons why all the, why the college education system is probably gonna implode sometime in the near future. Uh, partially because of the day bubble. Yeah, we're not gonna get into that right now cause that's way too long of a conversation. But part of this surprises me because this is one of the, the, this is one of the main ways people learn in college, at least from my understanding, is yeah, 10 college lectures, right? I didn't go to college, so I don't know. I've just seen it on movies.

Yeah. It's a lot of like sit there, take notes, listen, maybe ask them questions. Most of colleges lectures, most of it. Here's the funny thing about lectures. Let me kind of go off on a rant here. When you go to a lecture, pretty good chance that the person that you're listening to speak is not in the top 1000 people in their field. Very good chance. Unless you're like Harvard, Stanford, or Princeton or something like that. They're not in the top 1000 people in their field. Number two, you cannot optimize for time. Time meaning how you feel. Are you in a good mood? Are you feeling healthy? Are you well rested? Are you hydrated? Have you used the bathroom recently and during? If you're in college, the answer to all those things are no. It's a big no, no. You can't press pause on a lecture.

You're there. It's happening live, and if you're like, Oh, I need to go to the go to the bathroom, guess what? You can either hold it or miss part of the lecture, so this is why I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. This is the least effective method of learning. Yeah. What surprises me is that the most expensive form of education centers around this least effective method of learning hands down, but the catch there is it is the most expensive form of learning, but the lecture probably make some of the least of any educators percentage wise. Let's think about all the money that all the kids and you know, I would go to classes in college, there'd be 250 people sitting in a giant lecture hall, each one of them pain. I think what ended up being like hundreds of dollars per hour or something crazy like that, to have the right to attend this lecture and to get college credit for this course, which is funny because one student out of that 250 could more than pay for that.

That exactly. Gallery, yeah. Yeah. But the lecture is up there getting paid like $47,000 per year, but they're generating untold millions for the college. It's a really weird, antiquated, broken system. Not that their lectures have no point. I recently went and saw a lecture that Andy J pizza did. It was awesome. Andy is, without a doubt in the top 1000 people in his field as far as understanding how to integrate creativity in business without a doubt, and it was amazing. It was super fun. A lecture at its best when you're listening to somebody who is amazing is incredible. Now, we mentioned this earlier. There's a difference between the lecture and a podcast. Yeah, I was going to say, does this, does this put podcast in an electric category? Because essentially Chris and I, are we lecturing people right now? We kind of are a little bit more just talking through things in a, hopefully not boring method, but it's probably boring as shit.

Yes, but you can multitask while you listen to his talk. You're driving your car, you're walking some dogs, you're exercising, you're at the gym. That's great for convenience. Why does that good for learning? That's the question. They might even be less effective than lectures, but you made a good point. You made a good point. Point number one is you can, you can play pause and rewind podcasts so if you don't catch something you're able to like go back and hear it again. The second thing is you control the mental state you're in when you listen to podcasts, you got the same online lectures. Yeah, huge. Yeah. I tell you what man, I, I, I minored in music theory in college in the music theory class was at the top of a giant Hill at eight o'clock in the morning on, I want to say Tuesdays and Thursdays and so you'd have to wake up eight o'clock in the morning for a 19 year old, his real early, at least for me.

And so I would get there and just be like, I am not primed to learn sort of in the same way of like, if you're going to exercise, you should probably be primed to exercise. You should give enough protein, eat enough water, you've had enough rest and it'll go so much better and you'll get so much faster or stronger or more talented or whatever happens to be so much more quickly by being properly primed. That's sort of the problem with the lecturers. It's like, Hey, it's at this time, it's at this place and Oh yeah, it costs a ton of money. Oh, you don't have enough money, don't worry. We'll loan you the money, but if you don't pay us back, no matter what, we will come for that money. We will come for that student loan.

But again, I don't want to harp too much on colleges because this is not this episode, but okay, so that's the lecture. It's the least effective at least as of a resource which is national training [inaudible] Tories, they say that's the least effective and I would have to agree just based on my my own experience as someone who has learned through a lot of different methods. So let's move on down the pyramid here to a more effective method of learning and that is reading. This is still pretty ineffective in the grand scheme of things because they say the students' average retention rate is 10% through reading.

Let me put a little caveat here. This is average student retention rates. Here's the problem with big education. What the hell is an average student? Everybody has some weirdo special ability and some weirdo special issue. For some people they're going to retain a lot more than 10% and for others they're going to, yeah. Yeah. You can

quotes specific lines from books you read like five years ago. I have a hard time just giving you a rough summary of a book I'm reading

now. I don't know. I don't know what's up with that, but thank God. Yeah, it's, it's nice. So some of this, like we're talking about averages. There could be some problems in the research here and you could be different than average in some areas. For some people you might be like 100 out of 100 retention on certain systems and they talk, they talk about this as, as, as far as the learning styles go, but average speaking and this, so this should dictate somehow it should dictate some of what you learn. Um, but the reading thing, it is different. It is different than a lecture. You do get to optimize your time. One of the things I love to do, um, and man, I really need to get back into, I haven't been doing it much lately, but when I'm learning the most, I am optimizing for like I'm going to go read for 20 minutes or for 15 minutes and I'm going to read until I don't feel like I'm retaining and then I'm going to stop and then I'm going to go about my life and get, get back to 100% fill my gas tank all the way up.

I'm going to read a little bit more until I don't feel like I'm retaining anymore and then I'm going to move on with my life. I'm not gonna like push through and do this. Like, you know, I'm going to read until I fall over and pass out. That's silly. You're not retaining at that point.

Yeah. I have a similar similar routine where I have an hour earmarked every morning from eight to nine for my reading time and I don't always get to that full hour. Sometimes I'm 30 45 minutes in and I'm like, I'm done. So I think a difference for everybody, and I think I'm going to talk about some things that I do to improve my reading comprehension and retention, but it's it, it ties into some of the things later down this list, so I'm not going to get to him yet, but I just going to say there are things you can do and I would say that the content matters a lot. If you're reading a college textbook, I'm not, I'm not at all surprised that it's 10% or less on average, but if you're late reading like the Go-Giver or a parable, I'd be surprised if you're not at 75 80% retention on something like that because it's really just driving one main point and that's not to be a stingy bastard basically.

Well, and there's two big differences between reading and lecturing. Other than the obvious, like one speaking one's reading. When you're reading, you're probably reading something by someone who's in the top 1000 people in their field. That's how they got published. True. Number two, they have an editor also true. Huge. When you have a lecturer and they get up there, they're the only person who works for the university that's there. And if they say something totally untrue, there's no one there to call them on it except students. This is why it's so important that I'm your podcast cohost because I have to call you on so much. Shit. This is true. This is true. Well, vice versa. I mean like the fact that we have two people, we're so much smarter together than we are on our own. Well, I never say anything wrong in this podcast because one of the one time you've corrected me, uh, I can't do it.

Yeah, you're right. Make up words and shit on the time you notice Concentrix then you even say, I still don't know what I'm saying. Hullabaloo. That's a word. Hello Lu Bubba. That's what's all the hubbub, whatever. Let's move. Okay, let's move down the list here. So we talked about lecture, which is less than 10% retention reading, which is around 10% on average retention. Next we get to audio visual and there's two forms of audio visual. I think that one would be like YouTube videos or tutorial videos where you're seeing something. I think another one, which is very surprising that I didn't, I've never done this, and you mentioned this and I knew it exists on the back of my head, but it hadn't, I just hadn't done it yet and I think most of our listeners would be surprised to hear this. You can pull up the Kindle app on your mobile device.

Let me tell, let me share this one. Did just share it because it's your [inaudible]. Yeah. I don't know if you guys know this. We're not sponsored by audible though. Based on my experience listening to other media, we probably should be because they're like the number one sponsor of everything. Um, if you download a book on audible and you buy the Kindle book and you listen to the book on audible, while you have the Kindle version of that book open, it will show you which word is being read aloud in audible on your Kendall so you can read and listen at the same time. It's banana cakes. Awesome. Well, let me, let me touch on that. First of all, I think it's bullshit. You have to buy both. I agree. Book. I hate that, but I want to say we could kind of be sponsored by, by audible because if you go to the six figure home studio.com/audible that's my affiliate link that gets you thinking wanted that money though. Come on you one free download and I think it puts $15 in my bank account. I don't remember how much it is. Well, let me pause and say something cause I know some of you are like

by both the boat. I'll never do that. Oh, that's awful. Let me say I'm going to defend you defend after I talk about this. Okay. If it doubles your retention rate from 10% to 20% then call me. Call it a wash. However, let's look at, let's say you buy the Kindle version of the Go-Giver and you buy the audible version of the Go-Giver. We love the Go-Giver here. Yup. You're going to be in for what? 20 bucks, 25 bucks, maybe 30 at the most, and you're going to get four hours, three hours, two hours. I don't even know what it's going to be of. Absolutely. First rate business education for 25 bucks. Do you know how much lecture you can get for 25 bucks at a popular college? Not at all. Like I don't even know if you could get like what a couple of minutes maybe accuse me sir, do you, do you allow a lecture by the minute here?

So, um, yeah, so audio, visual, I love this hack. I want to say one thing. If you're going to go with audible, always do a cost benefit analysis. I think audible is like 15 bucks a month for a credit and you use credits to buy books, but sometimes it's cheaper just to pay for the book outright than it is to use one of your credits up. So if you're using multiple book buying multiple books per month, it's sometimes better just to outright buy the book on audible than it is to use your $15 credit. So make sure you're comparing the two. Yes. But keep in mind like let's, let's, let's zoom out here and let's look at like the past hundred years of history. Do you have any idea how freaking hard it was to get a book 100 years ago or even better? 150 or 200 years ago? Libraries are a pretty new thing, especially in our country like there.

They're only what like 200 years old, 150 years old Ricardo, he really started to fund them and really started to build a lot of them. Carnegie, for our listeners who don't know what the hell Carnegie is, it's the [inaudible]. It's the [inaudible] know the proper. You say the proper pronunciation is Carnegie, but no one says that Carnegie, therefore it's Carnegie. You're ready because that's what everyone says. I read it. Gang gang is Conan and Genghis Khan. No one says Genghis Khan, but that's the way you're supposed to say. Yeah, but my point here is that books are historically super rare and incredibly expensive. We live in one of the most desirable times in history because I can get an Amazon and I can either begin reading the book right now on my iPhone or I can buy it for almost nothing compared to what books historically cost and it'll be here tomorrow.

Yup. Crazy. Yup. So let's move on down the list here. We're going from audio visual, which is 20% retention rate down to the next most effective learning method and that is via demonstration, which is a 30% retention rate. I'm [inaudible], I don't know exactly what they mean by demonstration. I'd say YouTube videos could be demonstration or it could be audio visual. I think it depends on the content for do you have something to add to this Chris? Cause it's a little convoluted in my opinion. The next item on this list is discussion [inaudible] and what's funny about lectures, demonstration and discussion is on the size of the audience, the size of the classroom you're going to, you're going to skew towards the lecture, you're going to skew towards a discussion. If there's seven people in the class, that lecture is going to become a discussion. If there's 250 people in the class, it's a lecture.

There's not like a whole lot of room for like [inaudible]. What if in a scenario like there's not a whole lot of conversation about that demonstration I think is somewhere between lecture and discussion where there probably is some discussion going on. I had a teacher in high school named mr Mafi. Matthew was the freaking man. He was my pole vaulting coach as well as my advanced physics teachers senior year and he would do all kinds of great, great demonstrations. One time he took a a glove and he took a hot dog and he stuck it in the thumb of the glove and then he like brought out a thing of liquid nitrogen and then he pretended to dip his thumb in the glove into the liquid nitrogen and then you took a hammer and he smashed his thumb off and little bits of pink flesh, which were actually hot. Doug, unbeknownst to us, flew all over the classroom and all the girls,

you know, he broke his thumb off,

but that was a demonstration and they get really kind of brought home like, Oh wow, I'll never forget liquid nitrogen as long as I live because I thought mr mathy, uh, broke his thumb. It was great. So like that type of education can be stickier, if that makes sense.

Yeah. Because again, it's not a lecture. It is a demonstration and I think certain things lend itself better to demonstration than others. Like it's hard to give demonstrations on some of the principles we talk about on the podcast. But if I were teaching like golf, I could lecture you about golf, you could read about the golf swing, you could watch videos for audio visual about golfing. But until I demonstrate a proper golf swing to you, it's going to be really difficult for you to grasp how to properly swing a golf club. And until you actually, and we're going to skip on down the list here until you actually practice doing, I can't imagine you're going to be able to get any sort of effective golf swing. So something like golf really is a good way to visualize this entire learning pyramid, but it, you know, teaching business principles is a little more difficult to get to the demonstration portion of this. So again, it, some learning methods lend themselves better to certain topics than others. And that's part of understanding this entire learning pyramid is that not all things are going to be applicable here.

Yeah, well I would say in our industry, you know, if you're an audio engineer, and I'm aware that a lot of people that listen to this podcast aren't for some reason, there's a ton of people who listen to this podcast who are taking what we teach for audio and applying it to their own businesses. Yo, that's cool. That's super cool. I've had so many people reach out and mention that to me.

Yeah, a lot of video. We, I've gotten a lot of messages from like videographers or video people, people who do other free, I mean any freelance business can presumably the listen to his podcasts. We know what we're talking about right now. Learning pyramid, this is applicable to even college students. This is applicable to anyone who has to learn something.

Yeah. Well one of the things I would say in our industry, um, we complain about the issues in audio education from as far as college degrees all the time on this podcast, we are suspicious, uh, that times they are a change in slightly faster than education is. That being said, there is a L there's a lot of benefit to watching someone demonstrate compression. If you don't understand compression, it really helps a lot to have someone there that's actually doing it. Especially when there's discussion involved. Yeah. So demonstration can be really effective in our industry, especially with the sort of like technician skills that are required to have any sort of success. All right, so let's move on down the list now to the next level. The next most effective learning method and that is discussion. This is a 50% retention, average average retention in this study.

And no surprise here, the discussion allows you to really get to the bottom of things you don't understand. Whereas a lectures one way discussions two way and I think this is a no brainer here. How, how would you really take learning from business perspectives here and bring it to a discussion? Is that just hard to do? Most of us don't really surround ourselves with people to discuss stuff, but I think uh, I want it, I can say right now off the top of my head, a mastermind group is fantastic for this sort of thing. Absolutely. And I would say there's a couple different opportunities for this. One is mastermind groups to is coaching. Um, three three might be like mentorship. There's all kinds of different ways we're discussion starts to come into play when, when the problem is, Hey, I have a passion, I have a skill, I want a business when I'm doing business coaching.

Um, and I'll talk more about this later on in the episode. Um, I am going to be taking on some more people and working with them directly cause it's been a blast and I'll talk about why that is. Let me get to the very bottom of this pyramid but when it comes to discussion, I think a really good businesses coach, a really good business coaches job is to ask great questions and in a great discussion what's going on there is people are saying, well what about in this scenario? Well what would you do if this happened? Those questions start to stimulate you to think outside of the box to challenge you in a good coach or a good anybody. I would say not just coaching here because you can, you can, you can do all of this with somebody years having a coffee with someone who's in your industry that you've been wanting to connect with and you just form a friendship and you're just talking about the industry, whether it's you're talking about gear, hopefully you're not talking about gear too much cause that's not what makes this business work.

Or you're talking about different things you're learning on the podcast. I mean, this is hell, I didn't even think about this, but if I were starting from the beginning of my career right now, I would have a mastermind group or just a small friend group that met up weekly and discussed each week's episode of the six figure home studio podcast. [inaudible] kind of like a book discussion. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think that's some of the benefit of our Facebook group is that sometimes we say crazy stuff on this podcast like, Oh, you should have a call to action at the end of your record on Spotify, and then people discuss it and people raise opinions or they say, Oh, I love that. Or I don't know if that would work. Or, Oh, did you know that this one guy from the 90s used to do that?

Like there's all kinds of discussion. I think this is a perfect opportunity for us to pitch. If you've been listening to this podcast for a long time and if thought, I don't want to be part of the stupid Facebook group, I'm with you. I hate Facebook. It's terrible except for the six figure home studio community. And probably for make pop music as well. It's pretty, it's pretty dope. That's a good group. There's, there's actually a good handful of Facebook groups or the gen general Facebook groups are they like the Brightpoint of Facebook, right, because they're dedicated to discussion. Yes. Which is 50% average retention and so I, I do think about this before the episode, but yeah, if you are wanting to discuss things you learn on this episode or things you're working on or things you're trying to retain, bring it to a discussion in our Facebook community and you'll start having a much easier time recalling things down the road when you need to actually use that information.

Yeah. Here's one of the things I would say too, but our Facebook group, it's would you say Chris, it's pretty safe. It's not true. We, it's not a trollie. Yeah. I don't have a problem dropping the band hammer if I have to. I've seen, let me see here three times or I'd been like, what the hell is this guy talking about in our Facebook group? One of them was about a week ago. I made a post about something, I want to say what, and this guy like came in and was like, this is stupid. What are you? Okay, why are you here? And uh, so there, there isn't occasionally we get those people, but if you come in and say, Hey Brian and Chris said this, I don't know if I totally agree. What do you guys think about that? Nobody's going to jump on you. Nobody's, nobody's, it's not a truly area.

And I think that's one of the reasons I've always been hesitant to get involved in Facebook groups that are specific to a certain topic because some of the times there are certain Facebook groups where you know, you uh, these, they will remain unnamed, but there are certain like audio related Facebook groups where you go on them and you express an opinion and you would think that you are advocating for some sort of like, like mass incarceration or something like that. It can get really nasty. Not in our Facebook group. We don't allow it. We kick you out if you're being an asshole. So if you want to join that, just finally, just go do it on your phone right now. The six figure home studio.com/community or just search Facebook for the six figure home studio community. It's free. So let's move on down the list here. This is the next one. A practice doing. This is the biggest jump in uh, learning so far. We go from 50% which is discussion, 50% of average retention to 75% average retention if you actually implement the thing you're trying to learn. [inaudible] this is huge man. There's so much that's been written and discussed about this. Malcolm Gladwell popularized an idea called the 10,000 hour rule and his book the outliers and it's this idea that once you do something for 10,000 hours that then you achieve mastery and you a followup book sort

of called blink and after 10,000 hours you develop this like superhuman ability to like glance at something in your industry and be able to like divine all of these, you know, things about it and know things just that at a moment's notice. We've talked about this recently in the podcast where you can listen to a master and you'll know within seconds what that master needs. Yeah. It's not because I'm talented, it's because I've got my 10,000 hours. Yeah, so practice doing, so. This is why I advocated near the beginning of this episode. Going back and re listening to the episodes of the things that you are currently struggling with or the current things you're currently trying to implement your business just in time, education lends itself well to then go and practice those things you just learned so that you actually retain it longterm. If all you do is bitch through the episodes of this podcast or binge through a bunch of videos, intercourse or binge through an entire book without implementing anything or practicing doing anything, that is where you start to just hoard knowledge.

It doesn't get retained, and this is where I talk about things I do when reading to help retain knowledge. This is it I practice doing while I'm reading a book. I'm reading a book right now called obviously awesome. It's a book on positioning and as I'm going through the book, I'm actually taking notes and Evernote, which is audio visual or not audio visual. It's a, what would it be actually it's kind of visual reading, visual, I don't know. I don't know how to categorize the media in there. Multimedia. Sure. It's, it's taking it from one area, distilling it down to my own words onto a Evernote file and then working through actual things she's talking about doing in the book. So now I'm actually practicing doing while I'm reading, so I'm getting to this book very slowly, but I'm doing it as I go, which is great.

Well you left, you left out a piece of that. There is other things that you're doing to help yourself. But I didn't even think about that. So discussion, discussion. And I'm actually teaching, I don't even think about that. I'm teaching, so I don't know if any of us, any of the Facebook community has Marco Marco polo, which is like a, is it [inaudible]? It's just Marco, I think his website. So Facebook, Facebook. It's a, uh, it's a non Facebook, it's an app on iPhone, probably Android there. It's like a wa video walkie-talkie essentially where you can just chat back and forth via video and just to like to friends or to groups. And then you can play the videos back just whenever you get to your time. And so I don't know how else to put it, but I'll go through and Chris and I along with my co founder for file past Trevor.

Well, I'll go on there and I'll just teach as I'm reading this and discuss the things I'm taking away from this book chapter by chapter as I'm going through it. And it's actually got some really good discussion going in this little, yeah, it's been great. This little Marco community that you and I have a little Marco mastermind is, I'll call it. I'm literally doing reading and then a discussion and then writing down and practicing and kind of teaching at the same time because I'm like talking to how these things apply to you, Chris for bounce Butler and for studio. So it's very interesting how you can incorporate all this into one holistic thing.

Yeah. Well, speaking of Marco polo, um, I have recently began to incorporate Marco polo into the business coaching thing that I do specifically because of my experience with you and Trevor. It's been amazing. Like scheduling a time for a mastermind is a little bit challenging to find some time where it's like, okay, everyone's available, both Marco polo, you know, like you made a video this morning about like, Hey, you know, I'm trying to figure out how to position file pass, whether we should, you know, call it this or call it that and you made the video. And then, you know, a while later I watched it and made a ridiculous response of what I thought to it. And then, you know, there was this, a discussion around that it's so easy to kind of have like a mastermind going on in the background and you can listen at two X speed to the videos.

Yeah. It's so dope. So I've, when I've been doing the business coaching thing, the initial way that I launched it was via email. And what I've started to do, um, excuse me, I didn't launch it via email. It would be like we'd hang out over video chat and then there'd be follow up emails as a result. What I found is I don't, the emails ha weren't as helpful as they thought they would be to people and I think switching to more of a video chat via Marco polo model is much more interesting and much more engaging and makes it me a lot more accessible to ask a question, Hey, I'm trying to, I'm trying to build out the system that we talked about and I'm struggling with it. What should I do about this? So I'm obsessed with the Marco polo thing. I think Marco polo is one of the coolest apps I've ever used.

Yeah, I use it when traveling a lot just to stay in touch with friends and family, but I've never seen anyone using it for business coaching before. It sounds like it's brilliant. When you said that, I was like, that makes so much sense because think about it, it like takes, it takes forever to write up an email and spell check it like edited for not just you but your students and to type up a thoughtful reply. Like it said, it's just like they shoot you a video when they're struggling with something and you shoot a reply when they're, when, when when you find time to do it.

Yeah. There's also a component of with the written word with email tone is is difficult. Am I like is he being aggressive or is he being like, I can't tell from these words

why, geez, my wife and I have had since day one of our relationship, a no texting during arguments

rule.

We do not allow texts in arguments so it's only like on phone or in person. Everyone should have that exact reason. That's great advice. I think any couples should do that. So let's move on down to the final most effective way to retain information. And that is through teaching others 90% average retention when you teach others. And I think it goes without saying, I've already talked through this, but as I'm learning, I'm teaching and I think, man, I wish more, I wish more people did that. And I, I want to say one, one of my favorite things that I watch, like I see from podcasts I follow or blogs that I read regularly. These are not like guru style, like experts on the subject. All these blogs are doing or all these podcasts are doing is teaching the things they're learning as they're learning them.

And not only does that make for really good content and really good education for me as someone who's going through that same journey at the same time they are, but it helps those people retain information. And that's, that's what Chris and I get to do on this podcast too. As we learn new stuff, we're bringing to the, to the podcast and teaching it and therefore we're retaining it through our, so this is almost a selfish motive here. We're getting to teach the stuff we learned and that's helping us retain our knowledge as we're teaching it. So I think a good call to action for our community would be as you're learning stuff, do a long form post on our Facebook community teaching something you just learned and maybe a takeaway from something as you've practiced doing it, a takeaway you learned and that's going to help you retain information so much and it's gonna have a double a double good thing. And that's going to help our community learn as, as you're learning as well. Because it's good that Chris and I can teach on this podcast. It's good that there's blog articles and YouTube videos out there, but at the same time having, if we had hundreds of our community members teaching, as they learned, it's gonna. It's going to have an exponential effect inside our Facebook community for others to learn from others who are learning. So it's totally very virtuous.

Well, it's been this interesting thing. You know, we talk about the Go-Giver all the time. The reason Brian and I do this podcast is we're trying to to give, we're trying to give back to the community. We're trying to, to be generous and we believe that by doing that that it's good for us in the long run as well and it feels great. I have grown more this year than probably any year in recent memory, especially business stuff. Yeah, but interpersonal stuff as well. A big piece of that I'm positive has been us leaning into the podcast over the course of the last year or so. That goes really well with [inaudible]

with episode one Oh two where we talked about why you should start a podcast for your business. You don't have to be the expert we talked about in the podcast. You can learn, you can learn and then teach as you learn and as long as you are just teaching at whatever, whatever level you are, there's someone that is just behind you that will be happy to learn from you. Yeah.

Well, and this brings up an interesting point. I thought I told you guys I was gonna bring this back up. Um, my career, I'm a mastering engineer. That's what I spend. Yes. That's what I spend the majority of my time doing and I love it. However, over the past couple months I've been doing the business coaching thing and it's been awesome for a couple reasons. One, it's fun, but two businesses, never anything. It's not something you master. Business is something that you will, will always be a student of. And it's about personal growth. It's about learning more things, but it's also about facing your inner demons and figuring out, Oh, I fear has held me back in this way. Uh, this lie that I believed because my teacher, mrs in fifth grade told me this total bull crap thing and I've carried that with me and now I'm breaking through that.

Or someone told me, Oh, you're just not good at math. And I believed that there was nothing I could do about that. I had a fixed mindset. Coaching is one of these things. For me that's been a blast for me to learn more about myself and more about business by helping other people and it's been so healthy for me. Do I usually do it in the morning? I only spend about a couple of hours a week doing it, but to sit down with somebody and say, I'm not going to think about my business right now. I'm just going to think about theirs. I'm just going to try to ask them great questions. I'm going to try to teach them what I know to help them level up, not just in their business but personally as well to figure out what's there, what are their hopes and dreams, what do they want their life to look like and how can we build a business that's going to service that dream?

So here's my pitch. If you have been thinking about the business coaching thing with me, check out Chris Graham, mastering.com Graham is G. R. a. H. a. M. I did update the page, Brian. It does work. It was down for a few hours a couple of days ago. But go to Chris grand, mastering.com/coaching there's a really quick application. Um, we're relaunching that, uh, the coaching program cause I'm finally at a point with bounce Butler where I have a little bit more free time. Um, so that involves hanging out at least once a month. Uh, that involves video chat, uh, over Marco polo. It's, it's not really video chat, it's video messaging and involves email. Um, it's not as expensive as you might think. Most people that I'm working with, depending on the package they buy, they S they spend about 400 bucks a month, something like that. So if that's something that you're interested in checking out, Chris grand mastering.com/coaching, I'm looking for more fun people to hang out with that I can help, but that I can grow personally as I'm helping you.

So I've got two things to add to that. Number one, uh, compared to my business coach that I had last year, which was $3,500 a month, that's a steal. Um, second of all, um, just making sure people don't make the same mistake that I made just now and before. If you don't put the two AMS in Chris Graham mastering slash coaching, it will not work. You'll just get a blank white screen. So make sure you do the double M

link in the link down the description for that as well.

Exactly. Just go to the show notes for all the stuff we talked about in this podcast. Any, any last stuff as we,

yeah, I guess just one more thing with the business coaching thing, there's, there's an application for it. I'll only say yes to coaching you if I think that you'll make a lot more than what I charge. That's it. So check that out, Chris. Grant, matching.com/coaching you can apply. If it looks like it would be a good fit, we'll schedule a phone call. Uh, and then from there we'll decide where to go. So yeah, check it out.

Sweet. Well, uh, I hope that this learning pyramid framework helps our listeners to retain the knowledge as they're learning, not only from this podcast, but from the reading assignments we give out from what they learn in our Facebook community. Because again, I th I think this is something I didn't really understand until we did this episode until we taught this, which is hilarious that this stuff can be stacked together, reading with audio visual so you can read and listen at the same time, thanks to audible whisper sync, uh, demonstrating what you learn or discussing what you learn and then practicing and doing what you learn and then teaching others what you learned. You can just about do all of these for one thing that you're learning if you're diligent about it. And I think that's, that's something that I'm just now learning as, as an entrepreneur and just an overall knowledge seeker that I can do all of these things and retain so much more than if I just read or if I just watch a video. She had just listened to an audio book.

Well, let me go down a rabbit hole. The episodes pretty much over, but if you guys want to stick around for my nerdiness out, I want to talk about a book I read a couple of years ago called Moonwalking with Einstein and it really plays into this conversation today about how to optimize for retention.

So when you say Moonwalking, is it like the Michael Jackson movie?

Yes. Ants Moonwalking with Einstein. This is a book. If you guys have ever seen the BBC special Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and a,

I just started watching that like a few months ago and I love that show. I want to say the first episode was trash or maybe the second one, one of the episodes was trash early on and the rest have been incredible. Yeah, it's incredible.

It gets better and better and better in that show. Sherlock does this weird thing called a mind palace. A mind palace is this way where he retains a ridiculous amount of information and it sounds like fiction when you're watching the show and you're like, you can't possibly remember all that stuff. Here's the thing, it's not fiction, not fiction at all. It used to be a normal part of an education was learning how to build a mind palace. A mind palace is a really powerful thing that lets you memorize just about anything. There's little kids who have used mine, Palestine to memorize PI, you know that 3.14 yada yada yada to like 100 digits. And this book Moonwalking with Einstein, not like a, it's not a business book, it's just really damn interesting. It's about mine Palestine. And the way that you mind palace is, here's the thing that the mind is a funny thing.

It is really, really good at remembering specific locations and not so good at remembering any other type of information. And the reason for that is that creatures living things need to remember where to get water, food and define mates. So we're really good at it. Like a song bird, like a small bird that you'd see flying around has the mind capacity to remember about 10,000 different locations, like 10,000 different places where they could get bird seed or a bath or water or whatever. So what you do to build a mind palace in this book goes into great detail, is you take like your childhood home and you create images in your mind in the home that mean things. One of the things that's so cool in this book, I actually learned how to do it from reading this book is I would take this place that we used to go called Birch Croft.

It was like a vacation home that we went to for years and years and years. We recently sold it and as this huge house, enormous house, and I could take a deck of cards, shuffle it, and I could encode that information into really weird images that were related to, was it the King of spades? So I'd have an image of a King, so like Elvis digging a hole with a spade. And I would put that at the beginning of the driveway of the way into this house. And what you could do is by using the methods in this book, you could pretty easily learn how to memorize an entire deck of shuffled cards. And I did it. It was crazy. How long did that take you? I need to know, take me a while and you have to run through a couple of weeks, half in your brain a lot to get that to sink in for me.

Well you had to figure out, I didn't encode the information in a way that was sticky for you. So he would do shocking images. You know, sometimes they were violent or sometimes they were just weird and you would place them in rooms or in like, you know, transition spots in the house and then you would just walk a path through the house and you would see these images that you would build it kind of create a psychedelic experience for yourself and you can do crazy stuff. Now, a really great way to apply this in real life. I am really into remembering people's names because I'm naturally the worst at it of anybody I've ever met in my life saying I'm so bad at it. But what I find, there's a place down the street from my house called Northstar cafe. It's like my favorite restaurant on earth other than only mentioned it like 35 10 so good.

It's like being in a business book. It's one of my favorite places on earth and I love to meet people who work there and remember their name and then call them by name. The next time I come in. And one of the ways that this book would recommend that you do that is if you're standing at the register and you're ordering your food as a cafe like that, and someone says someone's new and you say, Oh, hi, I'm Chris, I'm a regular here. And they say, Oh, hi, my name is Phil. I would create an image in that spot at the register of Phil, like taking my money and taking my order. And then behind them is Phil Collins, the drummer playing the drum solo from [inaudible]. You know, I can feel it in the air tonight. That du, du, du du du du du du du du on Phil's head.

So there's this image of Phil Collins playing the drums on Phil's head. So the next time I see Phil, first thing I'm going to do is think, where did I meet Phil at the register. Okay, now I'm in my mind at the register. I'm, I'm picturing Phil. Now, what else is around Phil? Phil Collins play in the drum. So on Phil's head, this guy's name is Phil. You can retain so much information by associating a weird image with a location in this book is absolutely mind blowing. It's so fascinating. Couple of fun facts from that one you just taught, which helped you retain the knowledge a second. Um, I was at a conference, I've told this

story before on the podcast, but not everyone listens to every episode. I was at a conference in Dallas and there was a speaker there who was like, uh, a memory expert and he shook the hand and met in like in the hallway out there just about every single person at the conference. It was like 800 people. And he said, if I've shook your hand and you've told me your name in this room, stand up. And he was using mine palaces to remember hundreds of names and he would just point and call the name out and if he got it right, sit down and every single person in the room sat down except for one guy at the end. And I felt so bad cause he was like, I'm sorry, he must not be [inaudible]

one. I was like this little nerdy guy. I was like, Oh you [inaudible] man. Yeah, I'm fascinated by this stuff. The human mind is so much more powerful than we give it credit for. And a book like this is cool because when you, when you read this book and you learn how to memorize cards like this, it's mind blowing and be like, Holy crap, this thing, this brain is way more powerful than I thought. Also why the fricking crap didn't they teach me this in kindergarten and instead made me like memorize all the names of the States just by, but repeating them again and again. So yet another reason why our education system is in trouble because this sort of stuff, this mind Palestine stuff back in the day, like in Renaissance times it was reading, writing, arithmetic and mine Palestine. This was a normal skill I had.

That's crazy to me and I almost don't believe it. But what was the book called again? Moonwalking with Moonwalking with Einstein. It's by Joshua for an and kind of a little bit of a giveaway. Moonwalking with Einstein is an image he created to put in a mind palace to help them remember something to make sense. So visualize Einstein Moonwalking in your childhood bedroom that would help you remember something. One of the things I did, I'm not going to demonstrate it right now cause I've probably forgotten some of it. I memorized all the presidents of the United States of America and at one point in time I had the years they were an office and whether they were the number of years they were in office and whether they died in office, surely there's a better use for this. There is, it was just an experiment. But the fun thing about that is when you build a mind palace, it's just as easy to walk forwards through it as it is to walk backwards through it. Interesting. Fascinating stuff.

Maybe I can finally say my ABC's backwards.

Love it.

All right. That's, that's it for this episode, so you've got a little book recommendation for you. I love you guys. Bye.

[inaudible].

So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Some, some takeaways here. A one would be get a group of people together. Get your friends together, someone who a are hopefully going the same direction as you as an audio professional, home studio owner, commercial studio owner,

whatever it is that you do. Get them on Marco polo

the app. Make it a little either one on one or little small group of people who are like a mini mastermind, a Marco mastermind is what we're going to call him on the podcast. I'm coining that phrase right now. Margo mastermind creates your own little Marco mastermind and then study through something together. Either it's a weekly discussion of these podcast episodes or you're going through a book together or all three of you are just going through your own separate books and you're sharing your takeaways from the book as you're learning it. I think this can be a really easy, simple way to implement a lot of the things we talked about on today's episode so that not only are you reading or hearing lectures or listening to an audio book or watching videos, but you're discussing those things as you learn them and you're teaching those things as you learn them.

I think that'll help a lot when it comes to retaining the stuff that you are learning so that when it comes time to actually utilize the stuff you're learning, you will have no problem recalling instantly what that thing was. So that's my, my, my challenge to you is go make a little Marco mastermind and if you can't find one at all, just go to our Facebook community, the six figure home, studio.com/community and you can find people to join your little Marco masterminds in there. And it's a really good way. Just to have some, some people to talk to. And I think that this can be a really lonely industry sometimes, especially if you're a home studio owner and especially if you're doing mixing or mastering where you're never really working in person with your clients. So this would be a good way to get some FaceTime with some other people who are just like you.

So next week's episode, we don't, I'm not sure what it's going to be yet. We haven't recorded that one either. We are kind of like back to back on podcast right now until we get caught up. Uh, might be some interviews. We've got some really cool people we've been talking to, to get on the podcast for interviews. So next week will be a big surprise if was interview or it'll be another topical episode just like this. So you can discuss it with your Marco mastermind that you're going to form this week, right? That's what you're going to do, please. Yes. Okay, cool. So that is it for this week. Until next time, bright and early next Tuesday morning, uh, when the next episode comes. Thanks so much for listening and happy hustling.