S7, Ep 16: Simplifying Complexity: Effective Teaching Strategies in Fly Fishing with Mac Brown

Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of the Articulate Fly. We're back with another casting angles with Mack Brown. Mack, how are you?

I'm doing great. How are you doing, Marvin?

As always, I'm just trying to stay out of trouble. And it's kind of funny you, you didn't even bother to come all the way back to the east coast after the Seattle show.

You're, you're hunkered down in a hotel in Denver watching the snow.

Yeah, I got in late at night and it was snowing when we landed at about one in the morning and it snowed all day today. And I was lucky. I had a lot of work, you know, with emails and things going on. So I've been kind of busy on the computer most of the day here.

Yeah, and it's, it's funny.

So you've got a couple more kind of like take it easy work days and then I guess Thursday you're going to teach your all day casting class with Gary and then you've got classes and presentations and demos for the entire weekend at the Denver fly fishing show, right?

Yeah, that's correct. And then I'll be back in the hotel room before we fly to San Francisco, do it all again the next weekend.

But yeah, I think I'm here 10 days in Denver, so yeah, it'll be fun. I'm really looking forward to the show.

Yeah.

So if you have a super fan in Denver, they should reach out to you on Instagram and take you out to dinner while you're hanging out in Denver waiting to get back to San Francisco, right?

Oh yeah, no, we're going to have 10 days. I'm going to call my sister in law nieces and maybe they'll come up from Colorado Springs when we're at the Gaylord.

Yeah. Well, there you go, you know.

Well, it's funny, before we started recording, you know, with you being on the road teaching and I'm working on the presentations I'm going to give in Denver this weekend, you know, we were kind of talking about, I guess really kind of our thoughts on kind of, you know, education. And this isn't really. Necessarily. Well, actually it definitely doesn't apply only to fly fishing.

But you know, one of the things I think we've done in fly fishing is in an effort to make things easy and accessible, we've actually kind of reduced them to the point where actually make it harder for people to actually learn and improve.

And if we would focus a little bit more on teaching people why they're doing what they're doing, they would be more successful learners, and they'd be able to figure out things on their own when they weren't with people to give them the answers.

Yeah, I think that's true in everything in life.

I mean, we can talk about it since it's a podcast for fly fishing, related to fly fishing, but it would relate to, you know, whatever, whether it's an elite runner or pole vaulter, whatever it is that people like doing, you know, to understand the where, when, what, how, and why's behind it. And that's kind of in fly fishing. I know it's definitely exploded that way just with the social media stuff.

And you can go to YouTube or Instagram and watch all these people doing something, and it's like, I feel like it's scary having kids these days. Like, my kids are 19 and 15 now, and they've, you know, they look at the bottom of the pyramid kind of stuff all the time. Which is.

Which is tough because, like, on. On something like that for relating it to, say, casting or whatever it is. If you hear a hundred opinions, how do you know the four that were good?

Or how do you know the four that were good to watch?

And I think that, you know, I'm not trying to harp on the social media stuff, but just we didn't grow up with it, and I think that that would make life much more difficult if we were back at that time period trying to learn what we do today. I think it would add to confusion more than skyrocket us forward.

So, I mean, I had really good mentors when I was a kid, and so I didn't have to go through all that. I got the pearls that were up towards the top right away from people that knew how to deliver it.

So I think that makes a big, big difference in education. And I just think that that's part of what. What education, you know, is about then, to help us learn to discern that of what was good and bad.

And so usually I look at it in casting and fishing stuff about results.

Like if somebody does it and looks like they have control of, say, a rod tip, and they can make the line do whatever they're talking about making it do, and it doesn't take them five or 10 tries. Chances are they understand how it's working.

Yeah, but I think too, you know, it's.

You know, it's really about giving people the framework as opposed to, like, kind of the example I always use is, you know, when you go to the river, do you really Want to take the Encyclopedia Britannica with you?

And a really simple example we were talking about before we started recording is if you know that the water at the surface of the creek or the river is moving faster than the water on the bottom, you can self solve for a lot of problems, right, like you and I were talking about, like, if you're nymphing and you know that that's true, and that's a law of physics, then you know, what does that tell you about how your indicator should be moving in relation to the bubbles and the leaves on the top of the water? And I think there are all sorts of little things like that as opposed to saying, well, why should I fish here or fish there?

I mean, you know this, Matt, because I think you sat in on the talk that I've given before about trout food and you. Right, and it's like people try to make it really too hard. And it's like, you know, what's the trout doing? What's the food doing?

So what should you do? And you know, that's right. Take that framework to the water.

And you know what, regardless of when and where you're fishing, with a little bit of basic knowledge about trout and food behavior, you're going to be way more successful.

That's right. I think that's really true. And I was excited to spend time with Maxine and her daddy, Glenn McCormick, up there in Seattle.

And she's a senior in college now, and she was telling me she's going to be a biology major. And Gary was standing right there, you know, he taught biology for a career at the college up there in Wisconsin.

And I told her, I said, what a wonderful thing, I said, because she loves to fish and cast, of course, naturally, she's one of the best, most successful casters in the history of the sport. And I thought, what a wonderful thing to work off that dichotomous chart.

Of course, Gary's early books, that's what they were always talking about in the nymphing books about simple, yes, no questions to put people where they need to be. So it helps establish process. And her eyes lit up and we started talking about the simple, yes, no, you know, questions.

And I think that she has totally the right framework because she's not looking at YouTube to go get that. You know, she's actually getting educated in how to apply that.

And so even though it's in biology, that will definitely catapult her, you know, really at a rapid rate as she gets more time to fish and stuff after she's out of college, you know, So I think that's a beautiful thing.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting, too, because it makes me think about that casting class we put together, how we didn't try to do everything right.

And we just worked on teaching a system for understanding casting in the vertical plane and understanding basically arm movement, shoulder movement and wrist movement and on the forward and the back cast has helped to help people establish that. Why baseline that. Then they can go and they can start varying things off of that.

But if you don't have that foundation, it's really hard if people are showing you. Well, like, this is how you do horizontal. This is vertical. This is slightly off vertical. This is curve cast because it's. There's no framework there.

Right, right. That's right. And they're all different body parts. And. Yeah, man, that's been part of the problem.

There's been way too much said probably in our sport about trying to explain, like, what does it take to form a nice loop and very little on what's the body supposed to move like.

And I keep thinking that all the older I get going, you know, golf or tennis or any other elite sport, they're going to have a coach to do what, go back and address body first, because it's all coming from the body. So. So maybe, maybe more emphasis on that down the road would help people a lot.

You know, talking about the simplicity of the movement, because the movement the body produces, of course, controls the rod. The rod controls the line. You mean it's. The rod tip is basically then the. The big player in all of this equation. And whatever the.

Whatever the rod tip is going to do, the line has to react to that, you know, so that doesn't mean. I didn't say the line follows a rod tip. The reality is, because that's been said a long, long time wrong.

But what we're saying is whatever the action you give a rod tip, the momentum you create with the rod tip, whether that's a curve cast with a mend during the stroke or after the stroke, that's what's going to dictate the overall result.

And that's really, really powerful once people realize that, because it opens up another 66% of the casts that exist other than the mentality of the person that listened to the saying that years ago. Well, the line goes where the rod tip goes. Well, if they'd believe that, they just lost the other 66%.

So you see the difference of understanding the where, when, high and what and whens. If they really understood that. Then they opened up another 66% of solutions to problems that they will come up with on the water.

Yeah. And it's amazing too, right? I mean, you know, you can't change the laws of physics. Right. And you generally can't change math either, right?

That's right. That's why I like those subjects because they're basically black and white. Right. There's right and wrong and there's not a lot of gray area.

Yeah. And so, you know, if you, if you'd like, you know, not to belabor the point on the casting front, but if you basically remember. Right.

That for each action there's an equal and opposite reaction, and if you remember that force equals mass times acceleration, you can solve a lot of casting problems with just those two little pieces of information.

Oh, yeah. Those really make a difference.

But yeah, there's just so much out there that over time, I think what happens is concepts that were unique to put into your game, the more and more they get overly simplified, then a lot of times they say nothing at all. Because we can also go. I mean, I like, don't get me wrong, I like simplicity. When I teach, everything's really, really in a very simple.

Said it in a very simple, understandable way.

But what I'm trying to say is if the stuff that like on YouTube and you're trying to take a complex type of thing and put it in a little YouTube video in four minutes and leave out all the other, then we really didn't get across what we're supposed to get across. We can oversimplify. And then sometimes that does more damage than good too.

Yeah, I think it's important, right. To understand. We were talking about this before we started recording, kind of the limitation of the models of the program.

So, I mean, if you kind of think about it, there's kind of, you know, the center, you know, if you had three concentric circles, you've got like, you know, beginning casting concepts, and then outside of that, intermediate and outside of that advanced. You know, that's a way, you know, to try to kind of think about things where, you know, you kind of, for lack of a better word, have dogma.

Whether it's casting dogma or other fly fishing dogma or dogma somewhere else. And you know, you say, well, I found an exception.

Well, that probably means you probably need to move to an outside ring and start understanding kind of more concepts. Right?

Yeah, Yeah. I think that's the way it usually works. Yeah, yeah.

So each time you starts to have some new Question come up that challenge one of your old belief systems. Chances are your old belief system was one of the too simplistic a model and it was wrong.

Then you understand the other one, Then you abandon the one you learned earlier, you know, so that's kind of how it works when the oversimplification starts to get challenged. But to do that also means to question, you know, question everything till it works in your world.

And it's like once it works in your world, chances are you're getting on a path, you know, of growth. But a lot of people just believe everything. And I'm like, wait a minute. What'd you just say, Marvin? I mean, I'm gonna.

If it didn't make sense, then it's okay to debate it, isn't it?

Yeah. And I would say, too, you know, it's not necessarily that the. The old way was wrong. It's just that it's limited and you found the limitation. Right.

And, you know, that's where the growth is, is by kind of understanding, you know, that limitation.

And that's kind of how you progress and kind of build, whether it's casting knowledge, tying knowledge, or something completely unrelated to fly fishing.

That's right. Yeah. It's in everything. I mean, it's. It's basically in every different sport.

But I think that a lot of lessons can be learned just by using the example just from angling, because there's definitely plenty of different avenues to go down, you know.

Yeah. So you're probably, what, two thirds of the way through your show schedule.

So you've got Denver this weekend, and then you head to San Francisco the following weekend, and then you're kind of back on the east coast. And I guess you're doing what, Lancaster, and then you're going to Minneapolis. Are those all the remaining shows on your dance card?

Yep, for right now, Lancaster, and then the Great Water show up in Twin Cities. And that'll. That'll be the. The show season for this year. I mean, there'll be a few club things.

I've got a couple of those in the summer fall to do some banquets, annual banquets. And other than that, though, I'm pretty much done with shows. After. After the one in the Twin Cities.

Well, there you go. And so you need to let folks know where to find you if they want to fish with you or go to one of your schools.

Yeah, that would be the easiest places to just go on the website@matt brownflyfish.com or. Because I check that, like, you get an email on that I'm going to see that every day.

A lot of times people will message me on something like Instagram and I don't look at that very often, to be honest with you. But I mean, you can message me there. It just might be a delay looking at it because I kind of stay away from that stuff more.

But email is the best way. Or call.

Yeah. And I will be in Denver this weekend and I always enjoy meeting podcast guests and listeners. So if you're going to be there, I've got two talks.

I've got one on Friday afternoon at 4:30 and then one Saturday morning at 11. But I will be at the show the entire weekend.

And if you want to catch up, just probably the best thing to do is probably DM me on Instagram and we can catch up. And you know, folks, as I always say, it's kind of got really kind of weird winter weather across the know.

If it's warm enough to get out and fish, you certainly should do that. If it's too cold to fish, I would tie flies. Or if you're close to a fly fishing show, you should definitely check it out. Tight lines, everybody.

Tight lines, Matt.

Tight lines. Marv.