Rob Is Left On His Own, Again

Recording alone wasn’t the plan, but it turned into a blunt, honest talk about the one thing that explains almost every skill I’ve picked up: repetition. If you’ve ever watched someone play guitar, code smoothly, build things with their hands, or look “naturally good” outdoors and thought you were missing some secret, I lay out what it actually looks like from the inside. It’s awkward reps, slow progress, and the willingness to fail repeatedly without letting that failure turn into a story about who you are. 
 
I use learning guitar as the clearest example of how the brain builds coordination, timing, and accuracy only through practice, not motivation and not endless YouTube tutorials. From there I zoom out to other real-world skills like construction and programming, where tiny mistakes can wreck your output but also teach you faster than perfection ever will. We also hit a practical nutrition topic people ask us about a lot: sweeteners. Sugar, artificial sweeteners, and “natural” alternatives aren’t magic or poison by default, and the most reliable answer is still moderation and avoiding overconsumption. 
 
The back half gets more personal: why I’d rather do live streams than answer DMs, how loneliness shapes my preference for real-time conversation, and what I’m trying to build on Twitch. I also share a brief update about my dad, as much as I’m comfortable saying publicly. If you like honest talk, practical mindset shifts, and a little chaos, subscribe, share this with a friend who’s learning something hard, and leave a review with the skill you’re practicing right now.

Transcript

How Skills Are Really Learned

Sweeteners And The Moderation Rule

Live Streams Over DMs

Loneliness And Why I Stream

SPEAKER_00 0:18

So here we are again, and Mike and Liam did the one thing I asked them not to do, which was make me record another episode on my own, at least for a year. I didn't mind doing it in January, but I put all I had into that episode. And frankly, I'm not a very exciting person. Uh don't have much going on. I don't really know what to talk about. Um, I need a a year to get more material to talk about. That's why I have Liam. I am the boring smart one, and Liam is the loud excitable one. Let's go with that. Let's go with that. Um and then Mike is the guy who's lost 110 pounds and managed to keep it off. If you're interested in learning how to lose weight and keep it off and being kinder to yourself, go check out Mike Needs a Plan at school.com. That's S-K-O-O-L. It's something like Mike Needs, it's something like school.com slash Mike Needs a Plan. Um I don't remember the exact address. But Mike, you're not here to stop me from promoting you, so I'm promoting you. But in all seriousness, I'm not really sure what to talk about. Um I guess one thing that has been brought up to me uh in my occasional attempts at live streaming is as people have gotten to know me, they've gotten to know that I have a lot of skills. Um they've seen me people have seen me hiking, camping, um fishing, all the outdoorsman stuff, the carpentry, plumbing, all that stuff. I I've written mods for games. I haven't made it in a game, but I've written extensive mods for games, including um many more monsters for Baldur's Gate 3, uh, which is a mod that adds 150 summon counters to the game. I build my own computers, all these things. Um, yeah. Suffice to say, I I have an extensive skill set. And people always want to know how how do you learn things? And the thing I always have to say to them is practice, and it's the most boring possible answer, but it's the real one. Practice and not being afraid to fail, because you will fail, you will absolutely fail over and over again. If I go grab that guitar on the wall, and hopefully this thing isn't too loud in the microphone. When I pick this up, I did not know how to play. My brain did not know how to play. No matter how many YouTube tutorials I watched, or anybody watches, your brain does not know how to accurately do the fingering on the fretboard. It does not know how to properly strum the strings. Those are things your brain has to actually learn how to do. And so I, of course, would say, you know, when you can learn from somebody else because that expedites the entire process. I'm some sort of freak that likes to uh teach myself everything. But the process for learning this was not glamorous. There were days where it was literally me just plucking one string, looking at my hand, sliding it up the fretboard, plucking another string. And from there, I advanced to simply doing that faster. And that's how it looked. And it felt like I was getting nowhere. I wanted to play fancy things, I wanted to do all these fancy things, and all I was doing was playing one string and having to look at my fingers every time I moved them. And after about a week or two of that, you look at it and you're just like, What am I doing? I'm not getting anywhere, and you have to push past that, you have to realize that that is part of the process, that is how it's going to feel for a while, because your expectations, especially with social media and stuff, your expectations are greater than your adaptations. Just like a child is not born knowing how to walk. If you ever watched a baby, a toddler learning how to walk, it is a constant, constant battle of them getting wobbly, holding on to things, falling over, bonking their head. How long did it take a child to learn to walk? It's not overnight, it's not a month, it takes a long time. And that's the same with learning everything. It's not because you suck at it, it's not because you can't, it's because your brain needs to actually learn how to do it. And the only way to do that is by repetition, is by not being afraid to fail. Because even those failures teach you what not to do. Going back to the guitar, there were days where I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere. And I didn't want to practice, but I would still get the guitar, and for five minutes, even if it was something simple, I would just sit here and listen to every single note and just listen to how they sound. I didn't have to play something, but I just move through the notes. And then sooner or later, I I started learning what to expect when I strummed any given note. And slowly, without even realizing it, you start to not have to look where your fingers are going. And you go from just using your thumb to suddenly you're doing two strings, just something simple. And you might be doing one, two, one, two, two, one, two, one, two, two. That reinforces it in your head. And this we're talking about guitar, but this could apply to anything. Reinforce it in your head with something. Think about the numbers. If you're doing construction, get used to the numbers, get used to the way the laser lines up on your chop saw. If you're doing coding, get used to putting the commas in the right place. Oh my god, putting a comma in the wrong place just absolutely fucks everything up. But mistakes are gonna happen. And when you lower your expectations and realize that the process is going to take time. It is going to take time for your brain to learn to do something. It is going to take time and a lot of mistakes. That's when you can start to learn more things. Because you'll sit down and you'll go through the process of learning one thing. And you won't stop when that achy feeling that nothing is progressing sets in. You'll keep going with it, even if it's just five minutes a day, until suddenly, next thing you know, you're doing it. And then as you continue to practice that, you can add another skill in and start from the start again and learn how to do that. And that is how I've learned a lot of skills over my time. It's just a long process and the ability to accept that it takes time. And I'm telling you, this is going to be our shortest episode ever just because I don't know what to talk about, because I've already used all my material in January. Um, you know, one of the things we're often asked about is, of course, the various sweeteners. And regardless of what set sweetener is, whether it's sugar, whether it's artificial sweeteners, whether it's the alternative natural sweeteners, the answer for everything is basically coming down to it depends on how much you're consuming. And everything we've put extensive research into a lot of things. We're still researching a lot of things, but over and over again, what the research consistently shows is that overconsuming any given thing is bad. Having it in smaller amounts, in moderate amounts, seems to be perfectly fine. It's overconsuming that is the problem. It is overconsuming that is the problem for pretty much everything. So if you want to use a little bit of sugar in this, go ahead. If you want to use a little bit of artificial sweetener, if you want to have a diet coke or whatever, go ahead. If you want to use allulose or whatever, go ahead. Just don't go nuts with it. Don't drink 50 diet sodas a day. I don't know who you are that's drinking 50 diet sodas a day, but don't. Actually, it's probably Liam. Liam's probably the one drinking 50 diet sodas a day. But also on the topic of people asking us stuff, you are entirely welcome to come to live streams and ask questions there. Um one of the reasons, one of the things when I started getting into social media and everything was getting into live streams because, well, I hate messaging. And I'm sorry to everybody that I've never responded to, but I fucking hate messaging of any sort, phones, all of that stuff. I hate it. Um, I know there's there might be some people that have messaged me and I've never replied to them or take forever to reply to them, and they think that maybe um they're not important or they don't matter or anything. And it's like, no, no, it's not you. It's not you. It's the fact that I fucking hate it, and I will do absolutely whatever I can to avoid it. I will do, I will clean the bathroom before I have to go through my messages. And that's saying a lot because I also fucking hate cleaning the bathroom. So while I hate all that, I don't mind, and I prefer answering things face-to-face or, you know, reasonable facsimile, which would be live streaming. I get to sit here, I get to express myself better, I get to hesitate and pause when I'm thinking and take my time to answer, and you can see that, and all these things. It just it just feels so much more comfortable for me than messaging. And every so often somebody will wander into a live stream and they will they will act like they are doing bothering me with any question. It's like they're apologizing for asking anything. Um they would they want to get the question over and done with so that they stop bothering me. And part of the reason I live stream is, of course, as I said, I prefer that over other messaging. I prefer whatever face-to-face interaction. The closer to face-to-face interaction, the better. But the other reason is that I've spent a lot of time gaming on my own, um, living on my own, being on my own in general. I'm fucking lonely, is what it comes down to. Uh, I don't have a lot of I live in a small town, I don't have a lot of friends here. And so online is the one place where I'm able to like get sit down and talk to people and game and well, game while talking to people and uh sharing all this stuff. And so when somebody comes in and asks something and they're acting like they're doing me a disservice and bothering me, I'm just like, no, no, no. Ask, ask everything, ask what you want, talk to me. I don't care what it's about, just ask. Feel free to ask as many questions as you want. You are not bothering me. It doesn't matter if I'm sitting here playing the most intense Metroidvania game ever where it's super hard and I'm supposed to be focusing on the game and trying not to die. I don't care. I'm more interested in the conversation. Ask. Feel free to jump in and ask. And and don't worry about bothering. It's it can even it's sometimes it's really hard to do the live streaming because there are often times where there's nobody there, it's nobody's talking. There's some people that they come in, they show up, they say hi, and I don't want to make those people feel like they're not important because they are. But when the chat goes absolutely silent and I'm just sitting there talking to myself, it's hard to keep going because it it goes back to you're you feel like you are at a party and you're sitting in the corner and nobody wants to talk to you. That's what it feels like, and that I'd rather I'd I'd be better off just playing games in bed where I'd be more comfortable than sitting in this chair. Although, like I said, I would much rather be answering your guys' questions if that's what people want. I try to keep going with the streaming, and but some days it's just like, um, but you can find me over on Twitch. I I've pretty much exclusively started doing Twitch because Twitch is the only goddamn platform that pays Canadians, fucking other platforms, except YouTube, but I should work on YouTube some more. But the other platforms, I'd love to help you guys, but it's hard when you're sitting here fucking broke and worried about where your next meal is going to come from. So yeah, I mostly do stuff on Twitch now at Rob Lapham there. Uh I recently became Twitch partner. And on April 17th, I'm hesitant to say this because I don't know if Mike and Liam are going to be, well, let's just say it responsible enough to show up. Um, I'm giving you guys a side glare right now, but if they show up April 17th, uh 4 p.m. Pacific, till, well, whenever they get done, um, I'll be going for eight hours because I will be on the front page of Twitch. And hopefully, I've already told them that this is happening. Again, I'm hesitant to be saying this because they're supposed to be here right now doing this podcast, but I can't even sh trust them to show up for that. We will hopefully be doing an in-moderation group run of Baldur's Gate 3 for the Twitch live uh front page. And so you will absolutely be able to bombard us with all the questions you want during that. But at this point, okay. At this point, I'm not sure what else to talk about. For those of you, um for those of you that have been kindly wondering about my dad, um, without going into much detail, uh it is terminal. We don't know when it's gonna happen, but it will be sooner than later. That's all I've got. Um, or that's all I really want to say on a public broadcast anyway. Um, so there's a bit of focus there on, you know, uh trying to get what time we can with him and I am killing myself driving out to see him in the mornings and then coming back here and getting work done in the afternoons and then live streaming in the evenings. But hey, at least I'm hopefully trying to avoid feeling lonely, I guess. I don't know. I've lost the plot at this point. Why am I here alone? Where are Mike and Liam? Oh my god, uh DeLorean something, something. I don't know. Come back next week. Liam and Mike, you absolutely owe me a solo episode each for this. And um, don't be your worst or do I'm not your mom. Okay, bye.