All of the videos that involve working with shaders kinda feel like it's going in one ear and out the other for me. Is this part meant to be copy and pasted or am I just dumb when it comes to working with these nodes?
With CGC content, unless otherwise noted, the copy-and-paste method of teaching is a no-no for us. We don't believe in that method. We always say it's better to teach the why over the how.
That said, being an advanced course, the shader creation demonstration here does assume the viewer knows a bit about creating materials. If you find this info going over your head, I recommend starting with these courses in order:
Ahh, thank you! I did go through the fundamentals but I missed the shader forge and the texturing a stylized character. Iv been mostly following the modeling learning flow so those flew by me I suppose.