seijun o says oh hi everybody adam savage here in my cave answering questions from
tested patrons and seijun o says hello from korea well hello korea
uh he says or she says i'm not really sure uh i read every tools hammer recently and
it changed my way of thinking about myself and the way to go in so many special ways
and so lovely then i got curious about what books you remember reading that changed
your way of thought in special ways if you have some i would really like to read those too
that's a lovely question because yeah and the way you phrased it is
terrific because you haven't asked for like what's your favorite book you've asked for
books that changed the way i thought so the first one that comes to mind is a book called
um the design of everyday things hmm my god uh hang on just a second um
yeah so i forgot the name of the author donald a norman the design of everyday things is a
absolutely critical book it is super super important this is the book that taught me
this super important life lesson which is when you are approaching two glass doors and you
can't tell whether they push out or go in it is not your fault it is the fault of the designer
when you can't figure out how something works it's not your fault
the designer didn't take your experience into account now this isn't a universal truth there's
all sorts of ways in which we can be dumb about how things work certainly to be sure but what the
design of everyday things really walks you through is the idea that design is about telling a story
see the throughput for me everything is about telling a story so in design when you're designing
a door you can actually help tell the story of whether it pushes out or whether it pulls in
you put handles on one side that tells me that maybe i want to pull you can put
arrows there's signage there's indicators you can use that help people to understand
and knowing what story you're telling with design is the most critical part of being a designer when
you see a designer like okay so this i designed this right sure i put it together i designed it um
let's say that its function is really important to me i might like hold it back and just see does
it can i really see can i really how clearly do i understand what's going on what i'm doing is i'm
i'm wondering about its ability to quickly tell me the story that i want it to tell
so when i'm designing a prop when i'm designing a spaceship for instance
and i'm adding in little details each one of those details is helping to tell the story the design i
am using for putting details on is altered by the story that i want to tell so the design of
everyday things is an absolutely critical book for any kind of designer in any medium there is
that was a really important book the inner game of tennis by tim galloway timothy galloway
i found this book okay way back in the in the 80s i played pool and billiards pretty seriously
not very seriously pretty seriously i played for a couple of hours a day for several years
and i amassed a uh i still have it a uh over 100 volume library of books about billiards going
back to the 19th century the late 19th century um and by the way the best book
ever written on pool is burns standard book of poland billiards robert byrne is it rubber burn
i think it's robert byrne it's actually up in marin or was up in marin um the seminal textbook
on playing pool and billiards that one totally changed the way i thought but somewhere in the
library i came across a book that suggested that the inner game of tennis was a terrific book for
getting better at playing pool and so i bought it and they were right the inner game of tennis is a
terrific book about getting better at anything and the reason is is because it's not about the
techniques of getting better it's about the mindset and the physicality of learning so
uh the origin story if i remember correctly in tim galloway's book was
that he was he was a tennis pro and taught and he had somebody who was very new and they were having
trouble understanding what he was saying about returning a serve and so he said or maybe about
just serving right and he said okay instead of trying to do all the things i'm telling you to do
try and clear your mind he said and just watch me do it watch me do it and threw up the mall sent
a couple home well send a couple home and this student threw up the ball and served a beautiful
serve after watching him a few times and what he said that he understood was there's a way in which
we can open ourselves up to the physical intuition of doing something if we're paying attention
and it's about more than just trying to log all the specific details and build this little brick
wall of details that you've got to remember when you're doing something it's funny because freud
talked about when freud was effectively inventing therapy uh one of the things he said to it said to
potential therapists was don't try and remember everything everybody is saying in a session
try and get yourself to this place of reception where what you're hearing what's going on but
you're trying not to form opinions about it you're trying not to store it in special places you're
just letting it come to you and then courses of action become apparent so tim gallery spends
the whole book sort of explaining to you how to get to this state of physical intuition with the
with the sport that you're playing in tennis he calls it falling in love with the ball
that in tennis your the whole reason you're playing it is because of that ball right that
ball is the thing you move it's the thing you keep score with and it can be your best
friend or it can be your worst enemy neither of those matter as long as you're in love with it
and i was able to transfer that kind of thinking of like falling in love with that thing to the cue
ball to to playing pool and to the to the table to looking at a table and understanding a an eight
ball table or an eyeball table as a gesture of moves rather than as a set of specific actions
and that was the loveliest moment that happened to me while playing pool was i started to i
eventually got to a place where yeah the the table was more of a gesture than a set of moves all of
that knowledge is gone i haven't played seriously in 30 years uh i still play occasionally my sons
i think are both better pool players than i am now which is a freaking delight the inner game of
tennis um that is definitely a book that changed the way i thought um a hundred years of solitude
by gabrielle garcia marquez that book changed what i thought literature could be like i and i mean a
reasonable american high school education could could ruin anybody's love of literature uh to be
totally clear uh it is a it can be a really difficult slog to work your way through the
pearl or the grapes of wrath under the under the the guise of our educational system um and i can't
even remember what made me pick up a hundred years of solitude except i think it was in my parents
house and i uh in the house i grew up in there was a downstairs bathroom that was also like a library
and so when you stood there peeing there was like books on all three sides of you and hundred years
of solitude was like right in the center and i remember picking it up and reading the thoughts
of a man who is about to be executed by firing squad that is the opening paragraph and i thought
that is far out and the book really rocked me it is there's a reason it won the nobel prize for
literature uh and it's it for for the longest time weirdly both jamie heinemann and i both said that
that was maybe our all-time favorite book i'm not sure that it isn't but i just haven't been asked
that question a long time so i haven't really thought about it um i also had my mind changed a
lot about the nature of reality by reading some of carlos castaneda now before you get your hackles
up i understand that he is not an anthropologist and those books that castaneda wrote are not
anthropology but they are beautiful allegories they are beautiful allegories about consciousness
and about the nature of being and the nature of being a human being with other human beings
um i mean there's seven or eight of the carlos castaneda books i'd suggest you read them in order
in the order in which they were written because they are a kind of a journey and i found them
really powerful they still stick with me weirdly enough jamie heinemann also read all those books
in high school yeah we have a really really similar reading history it's hard to fathom um
other books that totally changed the way i thought
noam chomsky famous linguist famous political activist um
chomsky's right that's all you need to know chomsky's right you may agree with
him or disagree with him it doesn't matter he's a scientist and he's pretty much right
uh i was radicalized by chomsky early on and i mean like at 18 or 19 and here i am at 53 my eyes
are still being opened in ways that he was banging the drum about 30 40 years ago his analysis of
american foreign policy is amazing and straight up the middles right on the money and it paints
a pretty bleak picture and here we are reaping the rewards of this brief of this bleak picture
but i didn't talk about this to get into politics but just you asked me books that changed my mind
these are some of them i'm trying to think of uh
i never knew i could read a book as long as the three books for lord of the rings until
i read them at 14 or 15. those definitely that was definitely a thing but as far as
like really changing the way that i thought that they they weren't they weren't that
wasn't that wasn't my origin story there i know it's a lot of people's but it wasn't
um i feel like there's one other that i am missing
there is a book called this is super esoteric the brutality of fact and it is a set of interviews
uh the interviewer is british art critic david sylvester and the interviewee is uh british artist
francis bacon and bacon is a very complicated guy in many ways a terrible terrible human being
i mean reportedly i don't know him personally i've never met i never met him one of my all-time
favorite painters truly i mean one of the darkest weirdest most disturbing painters but in these
interviews he has a way of talking about art and talking about and using words to talk about art
like truth that are you want to talk about art and you want to talk about truth you better be
really really specific because those words can get spongy in a hurry and everyone can have
different ideas about what they mean but he has a specificity of language in this book that i found
slayed me in my early 20s i still have this book i still refer to it from time to time i actually
read it in its entirety in preparation for writing my book because there were some specific aspects
about things he'd said oh one other book yes i knew there was one that was really important
okay this one requires a little backstory back in the mid 80s reeboks had a ad that said reeboks let
you be you re-box let you be you and uh and literally it said reeboks let you be you be
you you be you which is significant because if you've studied early 20th century art history
you know about pear ubu the first time anyone cursed on a stage perubu is this surrealist
masterpiece set of plays that were sending up the class the french class system it's a whole
thing so i was like wow and i was looking into art history at the time and studying it on my own and
okay ubu as a advertising that's kind of interesting but then that's not what grabbed
me what grabbed me was that these commercials had all these phrases in them who so would be
a man must be a non-conformist there comes a time in everyone's life when they discover that envy is
ignorance to know that what is true in your secret heart is true for all that is genius
and it was all against footage of people wearing reeboks but these phrases like they rocked me
and they stuck with me and a couple of years after this ad campaign came out i was working
on an animated commercial for somebody and i ended up meeting the two ad execs who wrote
this campaign and i said hey where did you get those phrases because like i used to compile
bartlett's quotations for a local public access channel and i've never seen any of those and they
really killed me and they're like oh we just found them in certain places they're all like
g willikers about it well here's the thing they were slow playing me all of the phrases from the
reebok commercials came from a book by ralph waldo emerson called self-reliance and it is a
really really super important book and because the all of those phrases are held within it and it is
about taking your own counsel about the things that you see and speaking the truth to yourself
about what they are rather than what you think others truth might be he has this part of like
imagine taking on somebody else's opinion about something like you see something and you realize
you think my opinion is not good enough i'm going to take their opinion you take their opinion you
express it and then somebody says to you the truth about the thing with a great good nature and you
have the shame of taking your opinion from another he says this specifically in the book
this is a shame i know deeply oh man that book just like it cracked open my skull in terms of
listening to your own counsel and that is really i think essentially what the what the book is about
it's it's public it's in the public domain if you search self-reliance by ralph waldo emerson
you can totally find it um oh now i'm on a roll because now there's zen in the art
of motorcycle maintenance by robert piercing which is a terrific book
that taught me a lot about the nature of quality and the intersection of things um
self-reliance uh no i think that's about it i think that's about as far as i could go right now
there's a few more subtitles in there but those are the definitely the highlights
thank you this is one of the longer q and a's i've ever done on a single question
we'll include links to all these books in the comments below uh and uh oh i'm so sorry i have
one more letters to a young poet by rainer maria rilke uh that is another book that totally changed
my world when i read it uh on the nature of creativity and your emotional landscape yep
that's a nice little for me that's what i got out of letters to a young poet there's a specific
translation that i prefer over any other and i will make sure that that translation is the one
we link to in the comments thank you as always for such great questions and i will see you next time