Ep. 315 - Real vs Google Knowledge

I'm going to pick about therapy, the podcast dedicated to your pickable improvement.

It's a podcast with you in mind.

My name is Tony Roy, I'm your host of this weekly podcast.

It's an absolute pleasure to be with you.

I hope you have a great week.

This week's podcast, we're going to dive into this idea of Google knowledge versus real

knowledge.

I think you're going to find a very interesting way of thinking about your level of knowledge

in the sport that you play in the sport that you love and perhaps give you a different

perspective on how to pursue that knowledge and how to think about how far you've gone.

And then in the riff, I'm going to speak briefly about this idea of there being too much

information out there and give you some ideas on how to drop some of that.

So you're not overwhelmed.

I came across this idea of Google knowledge through my prusing of the universe shout out

to Johnny Thompson, who has a channel dedicated to philosophy.

He puts out these videos where he talks about different philosophical concepts.

And he talked about this concept called Google knowledge, which was coined in 2016.

I don't recall right now who coined that, but it was coined fairly recently.

And the idea of Google knowledge is basically its knowledge that's kind of superficial.

Right?

The only goes to go so deep with it.

And the example that Johnny gave was basically this idea that there's two folks that are

discussing some sort of a scientific study.

Right?

So you have one person who says, I have a study that says so and so.

And then the other person says, I have a study that says something different.

Now both of those studies may very well be, it makes this right there.

Both of the studies are there.

But neither one of the two participants in the conversation have enough knowledge to go

deeper into the reliability of the study, whether the study is contradicted by other studies,

whether it's peer reviewed, what conditions were put inside the study itself.

Because sometimes those studies have a lot of assumptions and factors and things like

that.

And if you don't understand the beta of this or the statistical model that was used, you

can't really fully appreciate the depth of the study itself and have a deeper conversation

about it.

And it got me to thinking about how sometimes impeccable we have what's Google knowledge.

We basically, you know, players have this Google knowledge of certain parts of the game.

But perhaps don't have a deeper, what I'm referring to here is real knowledge of what's

going on.

And I think to frame it out for you a little bit, I'm going to use forehand in the middle

and respect the X, which is, you know, there's debate going on and middle cover between

forehand in the middle and respect the X.

If you follow me for any amount of time, you know that I'm a respect the X adherent.

In fact, created it back in the day.

The concept of respect the X and forehand in the middle is a concept that I have been fighting

or arguing against for years now.

In fact, I wrote an article fairly recently that was published by the kitchen and also

at our website about the myth about forehand in the middle.

And I've even done videos on where I've shown these are the difficulties or the deficiencies

I would say with forehand in the middle, which are not present with respect the X.

So you get these conversations between pickleball players about forehand in the middle and respect

the X.

And I'm not suggesting this as you.

I'm not suggesting this as every pickleball player out there.

But I'm going to suggest that there are many pickleball players who possess a what I'll

refer to as a Google knowledge of middle cover concepts.

And their Google knowledge is forehand in the middle, right?

They've either seen a video about it or read something about it or somebody else said

that to them.

So forehand in the middle on the surface sounds great.

I mean, it really does, right?

At surface level, you're like, hey, forehand strong, forehand hit ball.

Good, right?

So you know, you've kind of done with it.

But when you think about it a little more deeply, right?

When you look at, well, what about the player has a stronger backhand?

Because I'm bet you a few of you listening, feel better about your backhand than your forehand,

not uncommon in pickleball.

And so, and there's other reasons that I'm not going to dive into here because then

it would be a podcast about forehand in the middle.

The point of the podcast is that is about this idea of how deep do you go, right?

And if you're listening to this podcast, I know that your interest in pickleball is as

a deep one, right?

And what Johnny Thompson said in his content about or is an explanation about Google knowledge

was pick a subject that interests you.

And rather than just sticking at the Google knowledge stage, consider going deeper, consider

understanding the why of the thing.

And that's always been absolutely core to my coaching.

It's always about the why.

And I laugh, I laugh about it.

I'm old enough now to kind of like chuckle when I get these kind of comments on some of

the videos that I do, which is like less talking, more showing or something like that.

I get it, right?

I understand.

But that's by talking, this is how I communicate.

This is how I explain the concept in a way that my hope is the listener, right?

The player who's interested in that topic will walk away with a deeper understanding of

that idea and get closer to real knowledge and less and farther away, I should say, from

just Google knowledge about the subject.

And so I think it's just a different way of thinking about your interaction with this

sport.

I would submit to you again.

If you're listening to this podcast, I have no doubt that real knowledge of pickleball

should be your objective.

If that's something that we can help you with, happy to do it.

We have a lot of free mini courses and other materials, blogs and other materials at

24pcable.com.

You're welcome to all of those.

You're welcome to all the episodes of the podcast.

There's got to be, if there's not 400 by now, there's 360 or something like that, you're

welcome to all of that.

If you want to go further with us, then we have our online instructional platform as well

as our camps.

And we even have a pay what you can program with our coaching.

We'll do what we can to get you into our program so that you can get the coaching that benefits

you.

But I'm going to submit to you whatever you do, chase real knowledge and get away from

Google knowledge and just bouncing around from wanting to the other.

Go deep on it.

So you really start to see how the pieces of this game fit together because I'm going

to tell you the more you see how the pieces fit together, the more in all you are about

how this game is actually constructed and how this game is actually played in its most

pure form and its most ideal form.

So highly recommend you do that.

All right.

We're going to drive right into the riff because the riff actually ties into this idea of

Google knowledge versus real knowledge.

And this was what made me think about this was, well, there was a comment and then that

I saw which I'll share with you in a second.

It's a public comment that's on one of the videos.

And then some conversations that we've been having at Tony Rickleball about the amount

of information that players are receiving and feedback and back and forth that we're

having.

So the comment was, and this is no criticism of the player commenting.

I want to be clear about this.

It's a perfectly natural comment.

And I appreciate this.

The comment are acknowledging our videos on our YouTube channel.

But the comment was essentially to the effect of, I've been doing this, I've been learning,

right?

I've been using YouTube to learn essentially and there's a lot of stuff out there.

Basically, don't listen to all this other stuff.

Just listen to, watch these videos, meaning the videos on our channel and thanks for that.

But then it was like a laundry list of five other content creators in the same breath.

So these videos plus a bunch of others.

And I have nothing against those content creators.

I have nothing against any content creator.

Everybody's out here trying to do their best and good faith and deliver the best they

can.

But as I was thinking to myself, I'm like, I don't know how you would do that, right?

I don't know how you would navigate all of those videos, all of those different ideas

at the same time.

You know, maybe like one from this one for three, four months.

And then if you want to go to another one, okay, I guess if you know which ones to use,

no, there's nothing technically wrong with that.

But it just felt very overwhelming to me.

And then I, I, I layer on top of that.

You're inbox, right?

And listen, we, you know, we send the emails out as part of the, as part of the world,

we live in, okay?

So we send out every Tuesday and to our community, we send out a digest, we try and make

it actionable.

So like some of its, you know, stories and mental things and stuff like that.

Some of it's like very specific tips.

Some of it's, you know, linking you to other resources that you can use.

Some of it is announcing like, you know, we have new camp, right?

So that's kind of a mix into digest.

And then we'll send out special, special occasion emails if you want to call them that.

We have one of our policies is to be transparent on our emails.

What I mean by that is like the subject line will say, um, upcoming, upcoming camp or,

you know, camp spots open or upcoming camps or new camps at it, something like that.

So if it comes into your inbox and you see the subject line says new camps and I'm not

interested in camp, then we don't want you to open the email.

We're not looking for opens, you know, we're not looking for statistics.

We're trying to connect.

You know, we're not doing emails where it's basically like something that sounds like,

you know, you know, do you have a problem with the third shot drop?

You know, and then you click the email and it's nothing about the third shot drop.

It's, it's sign up for a course or something like that.

And you're like, you know, we don't want to do that.

But that said, we know that that you're probably bombarded with emails and bombarded with newsletters

and bombarded with videos shorts, not to mention all your friends giving you every single

piece of advice that they're receiving, right?

So it's very cumulative.

And so one of the, the question is like, what do we do about that, right?

And can that, is that just harmless or can that negatively impact your experience?

I believe it can negatively impact your experience with pickleball.

And in a few different ways, one is, it's just too much, right?

It's just, you know, just stressful and overwhelming pickleball shouldn't be that way.

The other thing is that you can't really, you don't really get to look at the stuff that

might matter, right?

It just gets lost in this, in this cacophony, in this, in this sea of stuff.

And so you may lose out on some helpful things that are actually in some of them that could

help you with your understanding, right?

Take you from Google to real knowledge and also with your play.

So I, I think there is a cost to allowing everything in.

And it's interesting how the universe works because these are concepts that like Google

knowledge, the overwhelm, and then this last piece, right?

All came together in the last week, right?

So maybe I was meant to do this episode, I don't know.

But the other idea, the other story that it came across was it was a person talking about

the Twilight Zone.

And what they submit, it was like the most important episode in the history of television

and it was a, and this is a very thoughtful content creator.

So I pay attention to this content creator when they speak.

But it was about an episode of the Twilight Zone, actually it's episode number seven.

I think you can find it on YouTube.

But it was about the, the man who read everything basically.

And so the premise is, it's a man who just loves reading and he reads every, literally

everything.

And there's like an apocalypse and he's the last, the last survivor of the human race

and the apocalypse.

But now he's happy because he gets to read whatever he wants now.

Nobody can bother him.

He can just read all day and, you know, no concerns.

But then there's like a twist because like his reading glasses break.

And so now he's, you know, it's that kind of a mess.

But, but rather than being, rather than the moral of story being something like be careful

what you wish for, right?

Because then like the glasses break.

It was more about the, the, the gentleman who was the reader was not discerning in what

he read.

So that was really the underlying message.

He basically read everything and he read everything just to distract them from his regular

life, right?

He couldn't work.

He couldn't deal with his family because he would just read anything.

He'd pick up any part of a newspaper.

He'd read any book.

It didn't matter whether the book was a good book or whatever.

It didn't matter.

He would read it.

And the content creator in this context was talking about social media really.

He was talking about how like, you know, we'll, we're basically just open to consuming

anything that comes through our phone, anything that comes through our television set, things

like that.

And we need to be more discerning about that.

I'm going to make the same suggestion to you, specific, now to pickleball, right?

To become more discerning about what you led into your world regarding the sport that you

love because again, too much will overwhelm you.

It'll flood everything out and you won't be able to focus on anything.

So you really can't see kind of any kind of benefits going from Google to real knowledge

or from even improvements in your play.

And so how do you, how do you make these decisions?

How do you discern, right?

Well, let me give you a big picture.

I'll give you a big picture.

I'll give you a long term and a short term.

Long term would be you're going to move from Google knowledge to real knowledge, right?

So you'll do what you can to move closer to real knowledge as close as you can.

The idea being the more, the closer you are to real knowledge of the sport, the more you

move away from Google knowledge, then the better you were able to discern, not interested,

not for me, not applicable, right?

You can make those decisions yourself, which I will tell you, like personally, I can make

those decisions.

I can see the information.

I can see that's not really applicable to this player.

That doesn't, oh, that one works.

That's pretty good.

Let's do that one, things like that, right?

So you can do that too.

You just have to move farther away from Google knowledge, closer to real knowledge.

And that's the long term goal.

In the short term, I would say to you, you're just going to have to trust.

And you're going to have to trust the coaches who you want to trust.

Now I will make the case that you can trust us at Tony Work Pickable.

I've been doing this for a long time.

I'm very thoughtful about the way that I go about it.

I'm not saying I'm always right.

I'm not saying I know everything.

OK, so let's not get confused about this.

But I am going to tell you that I'm always very thoughtful in how I try and put together

the information for you.

I'm very thoughtful in what I believe will actually help, right?

What's relevant, what's not relevant.

I'm always going to try and make it so that something that will be meaningful and actionable

for you.

All of that goes into the thinking before anything comes out the door here at Tony Work Pickable,

whether it's the digest, whether it's a video, whether it's a podcast, all of it.

So it's going to be thought out and it's going to be considered and it's going to have

you as its primary objective, meaning like your full development, your full experience

as a pickable player.

So I would make the case that we are reasonable want to trust.

You may want to pick a different content creator.

And that's OK.

That's your choice.

That's your journey, right?

But what I would suggest is that you find a source that you trust and trust that source

while you're working through this knowledge, you know, work of yours, right?

While you're moving away from Google into real.

And then the other thing I would do is I would either eliminate or significantly reduce

the other inputs.

OK, just you got it.

You got to whittle a down some.

Otherwise, the overwhelm is there, right?

So I'm going to challenge you, you know, maybe in the next week or 10 days, like unsubscribe

from one email list.

On follow one YouTube channel or one social media follower or when you see the videos,

if you're on there, just scroll pass them, don't watch them because they're going to

just then occupy your mind in a way that's not constructive for you.

OK?

Now, if it's, if you choose to unfollow us at Tonya Repigable, no hard feeling.

Because it's perfectly fine.

We'll be here even when you're ready in the future.

You want to come back.

We're going to be here.

We're doing what we're doing.

We know we believe in what we're doing.

We're passionate what we're doing.

So, and we're happy to be here.

But if you choose us, OK, you know, that's that that will be your decision.

And it's perfectly fine.

But just whittle down, right?

Who your who your voices are that are helping you with pickleball because too many voices.

You can't hear any of them, right?

So whittle that down.

Let's move from Google to real more and more.

And then you'll be able to to better discern in the future on specifics.

Like I'll take this tip from them and this tip from them.

And I'll build my own toolbox.

So here always to try and provide you the best information that we can about the sport

that we all love and help you grow in this amazing activity that we call pickleball.

So I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast.

If you have a minute to rate and review it, please consider doing so.

Also share it with a friend, a particular friend of yours who may be struggling with this

idea of too much information, too much overwhelm.

They just feel like it's too much coming at them.

This episode might help them navigate that and whittle down what's happening so that

they can then focus on themselves and their pickleball experience.

I hope you have a great week and I'll see you on the next episode.

I'll pick about there.