0:00 Murphy CM wants to know why this book is here and it is a great book and I want to answer a question about it. Oh, there it is. That is the Okay. So Somebody was asking me about teaching. >> [snorts] >> Rod Pop, almost 60 years old Rod Pop is and they find themselves a lot of knowledge acquired from experiences over the years and would like to pass that along to a younger generation. How do you personally approach approach teaching? Um Personally, I approach teaching from a very humble place.
0:45 Um I really really get into the headspace of remembering what it's like to not know how things work. Um And I'm I also recognize that everyone has different amounts of visualization abilities in their brains. Um I I'll admit to you I don't do a lot of teaching directly of people. I am more inclined to let my shop assistants figure out what they need to know on their own. I am a very hands-off supervisor, extremely hands-off. Um I don't want to know how the problems get solved. I And if you want my advice, I'm happy to give it. Uh but I'm hands-off with that. However,
1:31 this book is here because I came across it while I was obsessed with billiards in my 20s. I grew up with a pool table and that didn't make me a good [laughter] player. I grew up with this beautiful pool table. My house, the house I grew up in in Tarrytown, New York in Sleepy Hollow, specifically in the neighborhood of Philipsburg Manor, was a a part of five houses built The neighborhood I grew up in was gridded out by Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller, for executives of his company. That's what I understand. And then he had an architect built five houses in my neighborhood, of which mine, the one my parents bought, was one. Um and then
2:17 uh that house was built in 1910 and it was built with a billiard table and a set of billiard equipment in it. All circa 1910 Brunswick Balke-Collender, top-of-the-line stuff. It was beautiful. But I didn't really start playing seriously until my late teens, when uh my dad had a friend, Bob Clatworthy, come by and Bob Clatworthy and I were playing pool and he beat me and then he looked at me and he said, "It's not really your game, is it?" And I took the insult. The insult It hurt. It stung and I thought, "I'm living with a pool table." And I was I had I had moved back I was older than 19 cuz I'd moved back into my parents' house for about a year. And I started that year getting obsessed with pool and buying books on pool and running practice drills downstairs in my
3:04 parents' basement on the pool table. And I started buying books. Now, there is billiards happens to have one godhead of books and it's Robert Byrne's Standard Book of Pool and Billiards. Robert Byrne is an absolute giant in my head in playing pool and his Standard Book of Pool and Billiards is a If you are at all interested in pool, you should get yourself a copy and read it cover to cover. It has practice drills. It has all sorts of amazing practical knowledge, but also wonderful history of San Francisco and what an incredible billiard town it was in the '60s and the '70s. Um and I think it's Robert Byrne who said that in his opinion, the best book about pool is Tim Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis. And Timothy Gallwey is a
3:51 tennis player and a teacher. And he had an epiphany and he writes about it in this book. And his epiphany was about embodied learn I think of it as about embodied learning. So, he was trying to teach someone how to hit a ball in a specific way and they weren't getting it and they weren't getting it and they weren't getting it. And it occurred to him to instead of tell what he was doing was giving them specific details, but each one was overloading their brain of things to know and they were just like the form was all over the place. We've all had this experience. And Galloway realized he maybe I should try it this way. And he said, "Listen, I'm going to do five of these shots and I just want you to watch me and I don't want you to try and learn anything from me. I just want you to watch my body as
4:37 I do it. Watch me as I do it." And he did it five times. And then they did it and they nailed it. And I get chills telling that story cuz to me that's how I learn absolutely everything. I learn it with my body first. And I think that's why often times when you try something like darts for the first time, you like boop hit a bull's eye and then you try again and you can't even hit the the target. Um I think that first pass that we make is just with our bodies cuz our brains are like, "We're sitting this one out. We don't know any of this stuff." And your body also, I learned this from juggling, your body also remembers things. So,
5:24 I would practice a juggling trick back when I was practicing juggling all the time and I wouldn't be getting it. I wouldn't be getting it. Couldn't get it. Couldn't get it. Couldn't get it. I'm trying try try drop drop drop. And then I'm like, "All right, diminishing returns. I'm getting worse at this. I'll put it away for today." And then I pick it up the next morning boop and the move is in my hands. It's like my body was gestating it. The same thing for pool. Practice drills is all just about burning iterate Actually, I'll give you this. What I learned while practicing juggling is that when you are practicing juggling, all you are doing is running through the infinite number of arcs an object thrown between your hands could take and prepping your hands for every possible outcome. It is literally like a large language model. You are you are
6:10 feeding all of this data. Toss toss toss toss toss. Every toss is a is a data point. Um And the same thing with practice drills in pool, lining up five balls and shooting them all into the corner with a little bit of reverse and left English so that they line up for each shot. Those are those are critical. And you can read about it and someone can tell you about it, but you have to do it and you really have to do it and fail at it to in order to get it. And this book is all about that kind of embodied learning. Um so, it's always been I managed to find a I think this is a first edition. This has always been one of the most important books in my billiard library. Yeah, it is a first edition, 1974.
6:55 Um terrific book. Terrific book in general. Jonathan Borup gifted a super chat. Thank you. And asks, "Hello from Denmark." Hello, Denmark. Uh I love your videos and was wondering if you had any favorite 35 mm film cameras and if you've ever tried developing your own film. Yes and yes. Um My first camera My first 35 mm camera my parents bought for me when I was 15 and it was an Olympus OM-1. Um that I shot with that for about a year and a half and then it got stolen from me. Yeah. Um and then my dad gave me his old Nikon F1 that he had had from the '60s. Um and I love the early Nikon Fs. The early Nikon F series, they're bulletproof.
7:44 truncheons of cameras. They are just they're so amazing. They're so sturdy. They're they've they've they've gone to every corner of the world and come back. Um Uh so yeah, I love I love the I love the early Nikons. Look, I meet many many people would like a cameras and those are also really beautiful. There's just no part of me that's going to spend $7,000 on a camera. It's about seven grand, right? Give or take. Maybe more, maybe less. I don't know. The amount of money a Leica camera costs is not an expense I'm going to treat myself on. I I I just won't use it enough. Um But have I ever tried developing my own film? I have actually in the
8:29 early Sorry, in the mid '80s I worked at a graphic design firm and back then this was literally before copy machines could change the size of stuff. That's how early this is. Copy machines you couldn't choose a percentage. It was just all one to one. >> [gasps and sighs] >> And when that happened, you had to if you had a graphic design firm where you had all sorts of images you needed to size up and down, you had a stat camera, which is basically like a film camera with a giant paper sized camera plate, right? The ground glass at the back of your camera. This one was like an Ilford probably 11 by 16 or 11 by 17
9:16 photo paper size. And I would be given an image. I'd put that at the bottom of the stat camera. There'd be lights on it. I'd focus the lens on it and then I'd be given a size, which would be to raise the lens on this giant conical bellows stat camera. Look up Google the size of a stat camera. They're huge. And then I would spend hours every day in the stat room inhaling photo chemicals. Not on purpose. Not like Not like the master. No, but just like inhaling photo chemicals and developing developing images. And it is um watching an image appear on paper is totally remarkable. It's you you instantly feel connected to the
10:01 last 200 years of photography. And we are almost 200 years into photography. The first photos somewhere in the 1830s or late 1820s. Um it's magical. We did We did it on stage. We Norm Chan arranged a physical development of a wet plate photograph on the stage at the Castro Theater for a Tested Live event, and it was spectacular. The crowd gasped. It was great. We used all red light, which totally worked despite the light leaks. Um yeah, I would recommend trying film developing if it at all tickles your fancy cuz it is it's amazing to watch.
10:47 It's When I was like 9 or 10 years old, I bought an old chemistry set at a garage sale, and I never did anything with it except I brought it home from the garage sale, and my dad was like, "Let's make gunpowder." And I was like, "What?" AND HE'S LIKE, "YEAH, SALTPETER, CHARCOAL, AND SOME SULFUR. Let's do it." And we mixed up a little gunpowder, and we lit it with a Like that. Didn't blow up. It was like And I WAS LIKE, "WOW!" AND MY DAD SAID, "Can you imagine being the first person to do that?" Just a Just a lovely frame to give me. That's what photography feels like every time I see an image appear on the blank paper. Like imagine Imagine being the first person to see that happen. And again, you might not know this, but photography was a problem that was solved in
11:32 multiple parts of the world all simultaneously. Um it's a very cool thing like that. Um so yeah, I have developed my own film. Want to ask me a question during a live stream? Become a tested member by clicking the join link >> [music] >> right around there somewhere.
