Ep.20 Michael Ellis와 함께하는 교육의 기술 Pt.1 - DTP

really hard for us to know that once upon a time like you weren't good at stuff and and you know there's a there's a lot of you know especially speaking for my own generation is there's a lot of impatience there's a lot of huge desire to want to get good really fast there's a lot of passion that kind of sometimes go misdirected and so you know we'd really like to dive into understanding a little bit more of your story how you started what your passions were who your mentors were etc etc etc because this is a journey I've been doing this now for 12 years myself Mariano almost ten years now and it's it is a journey and you would ask me when I was 18 years old I wouldn't have told you like yeah I'm gonna be a professional time trainer yeah no I didn't think that it was one of those things that you follow your passion you follow your heart as Tyler Muto said last week he said you know dog training can be very mentally stimulating if you allow it to be and I couldn't agree more so anyways let's go ahead and hand it over to you Michael again thank you so much for be on this podcast let's dive into the story that is Michael Ellis sure thank you guys again for having me I really appreciate that I think you hit on a couple of things that are really important right we live in a time where people are sort of enamored with instant gratification right you can get a lot of things fast and get information fast you can get lots of things fast but we all know that expertise there takes time period there's no short cutting it and we're in a good time in that you have access to lots of information that frequently took longer to acquire like I came up the dog training club system I'll talk about in a second through that club system and so you had to physically go to fields and meet trainers to see what was going on now there were no raining schools in the same way that there are now the internet was not active so there was didn't exist and so people were getting access to the same kind of information you cam now and so that is great we can you can jump-start certain things you can you can get an education faster than you used to be able to but you can't shortcut the the hands-on experience it just takes time you got to do it you got to be there you got to see it somebody can tell you something but regardless of and you may that may make sense to you but that doesn't mean you know it you know it in your body in your heart and like you've seen this I've done it I felt it I know what it should feel like all those kinds of things so so hopefully the passion that people have for training is what allows them to stay in long enough to get good

at it because there aren't going to be shortcuts there there are shortcuts to information but not shortcuts to true knowledge the real kind of college and so I came up I started inside I grew up in Southern California grew up in San Diego yeah bug bug the parents relentlessly as a kid to get a dog and they finally caved when I was about 13 and they let me get it I wanted a Doberman they said no Doberman but they let me get it from a Shepherd every week over once were vicious and I was enamored with them for all the wrongs of course as a kid because again whatever but bird and the parents demanded that I that I trained it if I was gonna have the dog I had to take care of it train it so I went to the local Derman Shepherd Dog Club and took an obedience class and that got me connected with people in the club and I started getting into junior handling and I can all sit for one of the older couples that ran a kennel and I got into showing dogs all through into high school and through high school and so it was a hobby and in high school I was 18 probably I was at a dog show and there was a police and shoots and demo at this dog show and I saw that and I'm like okay that's that's for me that's told me that I went home and immediately looked up with a local shits in club none of the dogs I had were even remotely suitable they weren't gonna be doing it so I started doing decoy work because I was young and able Bobby so they're like here put the sleeve on do this right work your way in kid good so I would I was involved in that I got in that way and I was involved in any case the obedience and dog shows and all that kind of thing no intention of turning it into a career at all right and so it was all hobby and as I went through college still a hobby and I thought like an obedience class for pet stores I worked a little bit for a friend's kennel to make money on the side part-time while I was going to school and stuff like that but I didn't envision this as a career sort of like you had said right no what did you envision as a career actually I was gonna be a biologist so I my degrees in biogeography so resource conservation rate like environmental planning that kind of stuff so yeah that's my girl I dated that was that's her major and still is become a world class dog trainer where life's gonna take you I can tell you not what you think it's gonna take you yeah I thought for sure I'd be like an environmentalist and involved in that stuff so so as I went into that it just happened that while I was in school one of the clubs that I'd worked with had some new members and they asked if I would come and help show

them the ropes a little bit so I did cut some kind of little weekend clinic for a group of trainers that when it shows in clubs that I've been going to and it went reasonably well and so another club nearby I'd asked about hosting a seminar type thing and they said well he did a good job he wanted to it and so I went I did another one and it literally started like that I was competing in dog sports and doing that stuff as my hobby and I would do a seminar here and there and over the course several years it started to pick up steam I was get I didn't advertise I didn't start a business clubs just started to ask me to do these things and at a certain point it started to really pick up and so or 14 years I guess it was I traveled and gave seminars to dog training clubs and organizations so police departments military Arius dog clubs from agility clubs and competitive obedience clubs and lots of bite sport clubs and that kind of thing and at some point in there I'm like well I guess this is my job but I'm like this is this is what I'm doing I guess and in that process I realized very quickly in the early seminars that I was doing that you can know how to do something but teaching other people to do it is a completely different skill set right and so my wife has actually has a teaching credential and I she gave me some strategies for teaching and I started paying attention to think about that I realized one of the first seminars I did I realized that people are gonna ask you about everything you do every little anything like how do you hold the tug exactly I wouldn't be standing on when you give it to the dog how do you do this and I'm like uh hold on a sec let me figure it's like as a dog trainer you if you're doing it for a long time in that sense then there are things that you just figured out and you don't remember when you figure them out and you're not I you just do it a certain way and so I started to pay attention to all that thing those things and I started to break them down I started to read about teaching strategies I started when I got up in front of people and talked I learned to pay attention to their facial expressions and whether they were understood what I said or not I spent thinking about different ways of saying the same things so I started teaching myself to be a teacher ultimately because I realized that's what the job was like you got to know your subject as a teacher but ultimately can I get other people to understand this and can I engage them in a way that makes sense to them and so that was a perfect laboratory for that while I was doing these seminars I got to land

myself in front of a new group of people a week every weekend I was in someplace different new group of people brand new group of dogs and you had to go in there you had to make sense to them you've got to watch them troubleshoot with their dogs and give them advice and the education I gained doing that this was his immense I no it would take five lifetimes to get that information to get that kind of education if I wasn't if I didn't have kind of dive into that right and at the end of that period of time when I was doing seminars a lot after mmm this was 2009 is when I open the school so 2007 and 8 those last couple of years I was doing about 40 to 45 seminars a year so I was flying someplace different every every weekend so I'd fly out on Wednesday or Thursday and I'd come home on a Monday and I'd fly out again somewhere else and at that period I was just I got to the point where I'm like I can't like I can't travel anymore I'm losing my mind and so I had a choice at that point to open up a dog training business I'm like certainly and I done that like while my wife was in grad school and we were in New York I did seminars but at that time I do you know one a month the kind of thing and so I pet dogs on the side and all that kind of thing so I figured I could start a training business but I'd really spent the last decade getting good at teaching trainers to be better trainers and so well let's open up a dog trainers at school and and so I did that in 2009 and started in a warehouse in Fairfield and it went right just before I opened the school I hooked up with leer Berg so actually Cindy wrote how did that happen tell us about that yeah Lee Rhoads adds significant because we used to think you were Leo Berg that is a misconception that says yeah that's no doubt know hey Ed's been doing this a long time and yeah what what we have on the internet now Edie had VHS tapes and when I came up in dog training like if you wanted to know if you wanted to see what K and Peavy was about or if you wanted to watch the the Bundesliga or whatever you either went to Germany or Holland or whatever or you bought a Lear bird VHS tape yeah nobody else was doing that so I have boxes of all the states somewhere in a storage because I saw a Belgian ring that way I saw KMTV that way the stuff through that right these these European dogs works and so he was hugely influential on me it was because that content was it just wasn't available the internet never exists yeah and so um I was doing a seminar in Minnesota and Cindy Rhodes Ed's significant other a very good dog trainer showed up at the seminar we really clicked and she went back and

told Edie and Ed came to the next seminar I did in that area and he's like hey you want to do videos and I said and I had said yeah I've been wanting to but I just I don't have time I like I can't stop what I'm doing now I go somewhere every weekend and find the time to film and script them and he's like okay we'll take care of it so he actually the initial videos he shot at seminars so he'd come to a seminar and he videotape and then he'd go back and cut it up that's why some of them are so long right so unruly we've gone back and redone a lot of them but some of the originals were just basically cut together footage from seminars right and then as we got further into that process then I I started scripting him ahead of time I I said okay I'll organize an outline and we'll do all that kind of stuff ahead of time but the original ones were just shot up at seminars but it was huge cuz that got me out there in a way that so that when the school opened people were already starting to know who I was due to that kind of stuff as well so it was hugely helpful and letting me get the school started in stopping traveling at that point in time right it's crazy so it's like it's the the internet really just I think you are I don't know if you were you though was there someone else who is Michael Ellis ish or were you the first one that just kind of you take off on the internet on you know I don't yeah I don't know cuz like I'm I'm on the internet' I'm terrible about all of the stuff so I use it like everybody else does but yeah right and so there were many other trainers that were spreading good information ahead of that so I've gone up and I came up around the same time he is a genius dog trainer he and I are friends and would train together at various times he he was making content and things barrier books and videos which I he's extremely gifted before that it was mostly done through seminars and things like that there were many good trainers that would go to clubs organizations and that kind of stuff for educational experiences or conferences and that kind of stuff but the the actual kind of established trainers it just happened that I've been doing that for a long time when the internet really started to kick up in and so that kind of allowed me where YouTube where YouTube started taking off yeah so that allowed that sort of slide out and I think like honest to be honest I still don't even remotely use it to the best of advantage I'm terrible about it if flerbert weren't throwing out the stuff for me then it would be that's cool so it sounds I like how you guys you guys connected you know yeah it

would do you think Leo Burke was a little bit of a launching pad because they kind of had yeah yeah there's no like so Edie had been he got on the internet very early so he'll tell the story but he have friend of his from college was a professor in computer science or something at one of the universities and very early in the commercial aspects of the internet right do you need to get in here and so Edie had a website up selling dog stuff way early one of the first commercial dog sites there and so he was well established and had a mailing list and all that kind of stuff so that when I slept he started to get my content out there and I'm positive there's no way the number of people would have seen me that have seen me without without Leo Bergen yeah they for sure have been great and I'm a terrible marketer like I don't want it like so kicking trainers to be professional trainers and they always ask me like so you know what's your strategy for marketing and my I say do do good work and people will notice you and they'll tell other people that's really like that's that's not really help oh yeah now nowadays it's just just have someone follow you with a camera and just do whatever you do yeah and that's marketing well that's crazy how marketing has changed these days I mean some of the biggest channels on YouTube for example they're just vlogs of people doing pretty much nothing but they get like 15 million views per video and it's just like hey I'm going to the store I'm going to the park and having nice shots and a bit of editing and some music and stuff and people eat that right up but it's it's such a weird thing we're like my little sisters at my mom's house to do this thing where they they watch videos of little girls playing with dolls they have toys of their own but they they watch these kids play with other toys and I'm like why is this so interesting yeah I should be concerned we should be concerned about his or her own but no way tell us about you man you have kids you have a family what I have a wife of 30 years now and that's amazing we have no kids lots of dogs and other critters we live in Sebastopol California which is in Sonoma at Western Sonoma County hour north of San Francisco in wine country there Wyatt hello place yep and yeah that's yeah that's it my wife was is a actress and theater director she an MFA from Columbia and acting and when the school took off and started get busy I stole her from her actual career and made her and made her administrator of the school so she doesn't get to do nearly as much theater these days as she would like is she's too busy helping

that um yeah it would not be happening without her by any stretch of the imagination yeah you having a good woman by your side man doing what you're doing that's everything that's everything um so let's dive into another little question about the past let's talk about you know like some people they remember some of their like first elements like their favorite elementary school teachers ain't know him by name and they remember them and they remember the impact that they had on them let's talk about some of the people in your journey that it really just impacted you where you were like I will this I say this because this person taught it to me when I was blank right yeah who are those impactful people so some of the some of them are schoolteachers for sure before I that have nothing to do with dogs so certainly mrs. Oscar Mayer a junior high English teacher okay there's some people that that really helped me with my intellectual journey and so as a teacher they helped me kind of organize how I think and be comfortable in front of people and they made me read a lot and maybe curious about learning and a lot of that kind of stuff so I had several teachers through through that when we start talking about dog people I have tons of them because again I came up through a club system so well there are people like many people I learned so the the people that got me into dogs originally that the people that I took the initial obedience class at the German Shepherd Dog Club there are a couple there Victor and Haga who owned von victor kennels in San Diego County forever long since passed but they kind of grabbed me and said like hey look there's this whole other world of dog stuff and they would let me kennel sit for them when they went on vacation all kinds of stuff that that that sort of hooked me into that that world I worked for a veterinarian while I was in high school when when I was going to dog shows that was in this showing dogs - in Pennsylvania and that was very influential but the dog people you when you train with a variety of people in clubs you wind up meeting a lot of people so there are a ton of trainers in the Southern California area when I was coming up that I spent something so al Banuelos was a well-known Shutts and trainer at the time I trained American Bulldogs and then eventually had Malinois I mentioned I while Obama was coming up at the same time and his way of thinking was hugely influential there's a woman I wish I knew her name when I had learned training initially like everybody else at the time that I learned training we learned straight up Keeler method pressure right

foot leash in a choke chain in a choke chain and there was a obedience club that shared one of the bite sport fields that we worked at and there was an AKC obedience trainer there and she had a border collie and she was out doing obedience one day and I wish I knew her name I would love to call her and say thank you but she at what I'm like her dog doesn't look like our dogs like what that dog looks happy doing right yeah I watched her train and talked to her a bit and it sent me off on a different journey right I had seminars that I went to look at Karen Pryor seminar back in the day when she's just starting and talking about clicker training and all that kind of stuff was like changed the direction of my way of thinking about training and and that kind of thing gosh Mitsy Robinson now she was Walker then was a woman that ran and shits in club and in northern Ramona in northern San Diego County when I'm when I grew up and I started doing helper work there and she showed me a lot Tommy a lot and when you're in the club system and I was young and unattached so we drove everywhere the people trained with Lisa Mays who was my partner in breeding dogs for many years we came into that that bite sport world around the same time 1989 I met her and she had an incredible way of thinking about training was highly influential on the way I thought about training as well what he what do you think the big takeaway was from that so for her she she was the she was the probably the original balance trainer in my opinion she we put like so she was a very good pressure trainer and she would learn pressure King like everybody else and when she got attached to reward-based training she did a very good job of blending it and hers was really balanced right so these days people talk about balance training a lot of people are using it as an excuse to use pressure right yeah oh yeah I get I did two days of food work and then I put an e collar on the dog yeah I'm a balance trainer kind of thing she really had a balance and she also had an kind of out of the box way of thinking about things so it wasn't specifically techniques she just got a read dogs well and thought about things differently there was an empathic side I do like so I'm very analytical and very step-by-step and she had a kind of feel and so she would approach a problem and sometimes she would say something to me in a way that I was like that's not the way I would have thought about it and it makes you come out a problem in a different way Ivan polivanov is also the very very much the same way like he is a dog training savant like he is a genius and every once in a while he would say

something or do something in that where I would say well that shouldn't work why does it work you know kind of thing and so it always made me pause and reevaluate things that I thought I knew which is essential to you becoming a better trainer right you have to be to say like we know things but can you modify that your knowledge and can you change your you're thinking about certain things and that gets hard the better you get at it and the more success you have the harder it is to sort of shake up the way you think about things a little bit right Stuart dr. Stuart Hilliard is a good friend of yeah yeah actually who talked to us about dr. Hilyard it must have been Tyler must have been Tyler yeah oh yeah because that was post yeah sorry go ahead yeah for sure Emma he's an amazing guy brilliant a very good dog trainer he was creating content so before if you want to talk early content that was him in the 80s he was doing videos for k9 training systems which was by clear Berg's competition making dog training videos they were a company in Colorado and he did some videos on shoots and and help her work and stuff in the in the 80s he was actually the person that hosted and brought French ring sport to the US oh wow very first ring sport seminar in the US was after Stuart made a trip to you or Europe and came back and brought French trainers back and did a seminar Colorado I don't say in the mid 80s 86 87 something like that did a seminar here and that kind of brought that to the US but watching his he still he there's a Kapaun protection work that he did and he was decoying and he was showing foundation protection work and as a decoy and i don't want to go too far down this road because lots of people don't probably don't know what I'm talking about but anyway the person getting bit by a dog in protection work is the person training the dog you tell people the training their dog and protection you're handling the dog the person getting bit is the one that's teaching the dog right right the decoy the helper the agitator whatever you want to call that person their skills drive your success if you're gonna be successful it's because they are doing their work right and um it's it's a kind of a reaction to the dog you observe the dog you read their body language and when they do something you need to react so that they can making an impact on you right and it's a huge thing and he was super dramatic in his reactions in this video I can go very dramatic but that's when it clicked for me like nobody explains it you watch people work the dogs and it doesn't look like they're doing anything you can't see from the

outside but his reactions were big reactions and I remember clearly at the time I'm like oh my god that's my job to make the dog feel empowered by yeah okay but his would be like he'd stare at the dog and the dog at work and then it was like a wave of water he'd throw his arms back like he was getting it big but it made it obvious to somebody that was starting in that world right upper work add a little bit at ryx do it a little bit into you reap you saw it clearly you saw hit worked as opposed to some little subtle reaction that I might make where the dogs fighting then I twist my arm a little in the Sun in the sleeve you don't even need that from the outside so I'm thinking oh and it was a game changer for me like right and so I felt I I felt like I knew him before I met him the first time right just from watching him and I and I want it was incredible so he had a big impact on the way I think about training and then there were just many trained of trainers from Europe that came over and did seminars of other friends people you meet along the way that you get a good idea here you get a good idea they're like watching good people train you pick up epic amounts of it you would you get your education to a certain point and you know the core principles going and watching good trainers do their thing which I had the luxury traveling around all the time of watching just scads of incredible trainers do their work and I pick up something here and something there now we're you the type that that learned the most from watching or would you straight up go to the person after with a bunch of notes and be like what about this what about that explain that to me like how would how was your process like watching definitely watch yeah yeah and then mimicking would you see me yeah and seeing it and kind of trying to figure out why what they were doing was working why would someone was doing wasn't working and that kind of thing and it was a process I would collect that information in and then and then deal with it that way but mostly from just watching I mean you have conversations and that well you know what they think and you know what their process is and all that kind of thing a little bit but most of it was just from being around and watching them work right that's always the that's always a big aspect of watching you work and watching your videos that has fascinated me as is how do you know exactly what pieces of information or I guess over time you've just kind of boiled it down to a science the tiny pieces of information that you know people need to know and an example was I was watching a video of you doing

food work with I think it was Rush and you were using food in your hand and you were explaining in in great detail the importance of you know vertically speaking staying the same height off of the ground with your hand and so you use that step in order to you know keep your body low to the ground because of course if you stand still your arm only goes so far before it ends up coming up yeah absolutely and that's all stuff that I got to once I started having to teach it okay I rely I figured out over and again I got to practice that a lot so when I would go out you realize people would ask you things and then you'd step away from that and I analyze and I started to think about okay why why is this work how come that dog keeps hit keeps hooking at the end or how come that biting my hand here what's great now I and so I started to break things down and then I started to think about it the way you would if you were gonna teach somebody a sport like nice in pieces instead like there's a lot of variables you put somebody out there with a dog they have to focus on the dog and how they're moving and too many variables at once when you're beginning and so if you fun thing you lose something else if you focus on that then you you can't hold them all in your head yet and so the idea of breaking things up into smaller pieces sort of like what we do for dogs right and if you're doing right I mean you break it down into little pieces and it's I sort of started to do the same thing a little bit for training and like watching people to see if they were processing the information if I was giving them too much that one of them things when you're beginning to teach training is what details to give somebody at what point in their development so if I take a total beginner I can't hit them with everything right right so which ones are the most important right and how fast can I give them the next Vista's and it's gonna be different with different people's though if you teach enough and you pay attention to people's reactions and you watch them you're like this person needs to stay here a little longer right the next piece they're not they're not going to process it even that's understand it but they won't process it and that particular piece of information is something that's always fascinated me and and I like that you liken it to sports because it's it does kind of make sense from a sport point of view and one thing that we talked about with Tyler and Brent and I have talked about this before is you know a sport that I like is Jiu Jitsu I practice it a la boxing I've been doing for a long time and and it's it is funny and I also

kind of wanted to tie this into the balanced training aspect of things because I do notice you're absolutely right when someone's very new at something they have to meticulously focus on the process to get something done but in the big picture it's not very much of anything an example being you know if I if I'm learning how to do a triangle choke it's hard to do in and of itself as it is so I'm putting hand here putting leg there but like in the grand scheme while you're sitting there slowly figuring things out you could lose around one of a million other ways and if I noticed that younger trainers do have that sort of thing to them to where if they focus on one thing obviously they should and learn it well but they can't lose sight of the big picture and to bring it back to balance training Tyler had a really interesting perspective which we kind of figured out before we even spoke to him but when we had a chance to finally hear his own words it was yes I mean if you're gonna work a dog you have to make sure that they're doing things right and you know but but also the overall momentum of the lesson itself matters more than a little hiccup here and there and you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot in order to make some point that that otherwise would be yeah yeah well they missed one mistake I made so sorry sorry one mistake my personal my personal growth was being too meticulous with the person and making them feel that they can't do it and I remember that was something that when I was a young teacher it was just I would be like nope what's wrong do it again no hands wrong do it again this and I would just break their confidence that absolutely can happen and then beyond that whew you you can get to a spot where they're so afraid to make a mistake there's life they're not willing to experiment and push right right yeah like you can get very good instruction but there's the interaction each time is a little bit different with the dog living creature right and so it's slightly different and the larger principles apply but the feel for when to push or when to try something new like when you're up against something and if I if you make people if you're too structured a little bit too soon people are afraid to make a mistake yeah yeah and so there are mistakes that you have to make to get better and you have to try so stuff like okay now you're stuck there you know wait yeah I don't know what what's funny is a tiny bit of our back history as Brent and I have been working together for a long time you know once about I'm in Arizona but I once upon a time I lived in LA and he and I worked the same kennel and he was

like the head training manager and I was I was learning how to be a dog trainer and they had an official like internship program and I I was never actually an intern I would just stay after my shift and just learn how to train dogs so I'd be there like I'd be there from opening to closing and then after that and he and I would go to the bar after a long day's training session and talk about things and well one thing that I notice about what I think just made us such good friends is Brent pushes a lot but I just don't take it personal I understand he's trying to make you better and and and you know something that I really found interesting was well you were you were like my Malinois like I could put pressure on you and you'd come back and be like do it again I'll do better next time right but it was a matter of perspective though it's like I understand so it's like okay a couple things that are clear you're smart you're you're tough you're you're like strict but also that you care and so on and so on so so the reason why I bring this up is to yeah so the reason why I bring this up is to say that when we had our other assistants so now we're talking years down the line and Brett and I are training and we had our training assistance they would learn their particular phase of training whatever that was at the moment we've got a dog that's two days in three days in and they know how to do food works it's downs and whatever else and and they know how to do the stuff that comes after but they would be a little reluctant to move from here to there and so we had to give them confidence sometime and coach them through like look I know you know how to do this and I know you know how to do that work from here to there and and show me how you do and kind of taking those training wheels off a little bit ya know it's essential part of it and there's there's developmental spots where people are ready to receive things that's the hardest thing and I still the teacher it's it's it's hard because people are different like the dogs are different too and so I know for sure I was given information at various points in my development that I wasn't ready to receive yeah yeah yeah he would say you and you nod like yeah yeah yeah that sounds logical but I have no place in my worldview to put that right right three years later five years later you're like oh yeah that was a good advice I'd be place to put it yet right yeah yeah a microcosm of that same kind of thing and that's gonna happen for the rest of your training life right you may have been exposed to an idea that didn't fit your whole methodology or worldview

yet but a place where it does right what do you give to people at various times and you wanted right mm-hmm yeah it tolls down first and so that's one of the things that's really challenging and of course excited dog trainers want to get to there right right right so right yeah one other one other thing we talked about Tyler so so it's a Tyler about then and I mean sorry no we're not comparing you guys you guys are two excellent speakers we're preaching I really like Tyler you're like Tyler sucks no Tyler is the man so one thing we talked to Tyler about is we were actually discussing I asked him I said okay dog training is an art form and if dog training as an art form and we're all to be artists what is our color palette right what is the color palette as an artist you need to know how to use your colors but then there's other variables as well as dimension there is you know you know other things like contrast there's all these different thing right there's all these variables and so I asked him I said let's if you were to paint me a picture of like a young and up-and-coming dog trainer what's his color palette that you need to start understanding right off the bat right are they methods are they techniques and he responded he goes principles it's all the principles and he goes understand your operant conditioning understand your classical conditioning I understand your reinforcement schedules I understand you know all of these different things he goes if you study those principles you at least now have the color palette understood right if we were if we were gonna elaborate on this what else would you add to like okay so that's kind of like our foundational stuff okay that's our theoretical it sits right in our mind what else would you elaborate like add the the mechanical stuff so I think there's two worlds and they're not always connected for people right and so that's the how dogs learn portion mm-hmm you have to understand what makes them tick how they work how we're going to communicate with them kind of the science behind it that understanding those principles are key right then there's the mechanical part the part is totally separate you can understand perfectly how offer and conditioning works but you can't hold a leash you can't execute yet you don't have timing you don't know how to move your body there's a lot between seeing and communicating that's learned that's practiced it like anything else and so all those things so the things that we break down the mechanical way so obviously this can be a very big topic but there are some basic ways in which we typically create behavior physically

right so we use conditioned reinforcers markers and clicker whatever kind of thing but the physical weights in which mean it's the height dogs luring facial pressure it's your prep or using the leash shaping stuff and so cut the mechanics of that stuff also needs to be broken down for people yes yes we're mechanic they can understand it and they get really frustrated so some students that have the biggest problems when they come to the school are very smart people that really understand the intellectual part of it they get it right they've read it all they've watched the video it all makes perfect sense in their head mm-hmm their mommy's not cooperating in the beginning yes hopefully those and then the other side you have people that naturally are very good talented physically they move well they've got good timing that just feels easier to them mm-hm but don't know the why or the how and that's right mistakes because they don't understand the other part of it so that's he panics is the big deal yeah right and that's huge because I feel so I've trained many trainers over the last twenty eight years and you know you get someone who comes from a different you know like a pure positive background who now is ready for something new right and as soon as you start introducing pressure hey there's always kind of this this aversion to pressure in general even if it's something as light as leash pressure like a front - he older yes something like that and there's this visceral response based on how much what they think and what they feel they understand that they don't even want to execute the physicality of it well but once they get over that hump they Oh super easy yeah yeah now and that's that in and of itself is a struggle that's that's great the technical skill okay you know I'm glad that you brought that up to start really quick I spoke to recently it's super hot out here by the way this is good old Phoenix Arizona so it's it's like alright yeah but you know but so I take my dogs out my board and train dogs when they were good enough you know my way of socializing and getting them outside is I take them places where they can be inside and one of the places I take him of course is like Petco just because they're super dog friendly and I ran into a couple trips ago but also today I was there a little while ago there one of their trainers and he was a really nice guy I mean obviously he's pure positive because I know Petco only does like all positive training and I you know I spoke to him a little and he's very nice very like personable and I invited him on so I figured we'll have him on at some

point but but I definitely think that it's important to talk to people from the different training ideologies and kind of get their perspective on things absolutely 100% and it's and it's weird to watch the evolution right so there are things that I learned when I was naive and young that somebody asked me to learn to do that now would I be able to nice there's a point I'm eight six sixteen and somebody says you know here's how you yank on a leash right yeah and you're like really I'm still seeing on the dog you know they're like absolutely that's what you do you you got to it it has to be this way and not knowing anything else right you commit mm-hmm you learn a skill as your for your journey progresses I learn better ways of doing that and I learned that maybe I was unfair at various times and a whole other stuff but by that time that skill was in my toolbox yeah although I don't use it as often I used to by any stretch its air and so yeah we have a whole generation of reward-based trainers who are very good at certain aspects of training like better than I was early in my my journey on reward-based training when I was discovering how to bat right and so they're exceptionally good at this but they can't handle leash right and they know enough that they're in their own way to learning it because you in orbit you have to commit to right right yeah you're gonna mistakes like you're along the way I say it all the time but like I I would love to resurrect certain dogs and apologize to them right back learned to do things on you and you're the one that suffered for my lack of skill and mechanics and my lack of understanding at that point in time I mean but if I hadn't gone through that would I be able to do that now in that way Ernie it's really it's challenging when you're trying to educate dog trainers which piece do I give them when right and that they don't get so in their head that they can't commit to learning the new skill because it feels uncomfortable right you'll write well one thing one thing I've seen is also like I remember when I came up I had a community of dog I worked at a kennel and then eventually I went from you know assistant trainer all the way to training manager and so I had trainers around me and I had mentors around me and I had people I could ask or see and you know you know shout-out to Edward VA one of one of my homies who is in Texas now and he doesn't even know I have a podcast but that guy taught me technique like such clean technique and I remember being like I want to do it like that where everyone else was cranking and yanking and doing all this other stuff that you know but but yeah

sometimes the support of the community that's around to the dog training community it's easier to fall into those good and bad patterns right so you can meet you could have a community of you know if you're positive or very heavy-handed Keeler method trainers and because that's the community it's like you're gonna you're that's easier for you to commit into that yeah right and so like one cool thing that you know you you look at like the holier bird crew or you look at like what Tyler's doing with consider the dog and we're creating communities of dog trainers with different platforms and how can we learn from each other and ultimately you know this whole yeah again I kind of agree with Tyler the term balanced dog trainer but the theory the concept of balanced dog training we need to create more of that right it's to polarize that we just need to kind of create we have more unities for people to feel safe to explore these ideas and theories and not and get coach not judged yeah and I think honestly the the hardest part about the balanced training is that it looks so different from dog to dog if you're really doing mm-hmm you really are embracing that ideal then it's the dog that's in front of you and one dog is going to be 90% roared based like it's gonna be 90% another dog it's gonna be 90% the other way I'm right just because their temperament in their situation and where you are in their development and those adjustments are hard for people right and he wants kind of a formula for it like I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna do a week of this and then I'm gonna do a week of that I think unfortunately you got like a pet dog trainers have it harder because a lot of in in a sense what they're asking dogs to do is typically easier than a working dog trainer would be like you but what they have is they have arbitrary timelines put on them by economic yep so they're constrained by the marketplace and so that what happening is until we sort of pull the general public along and get them to start understanding better dog training the fact that it's a process it takes time like whatever use expert one is with dog in a to weekend board right yeah right yeah I mean if you're training well how much are you going to accomplish right yeah way too much pressure on that dog to make it looks like it you accomplish something or the dogs gonna look like hey it looks at you it seems happy around you and it's it's but you earlier scratching the surface and so unfortunately some of the timelines and some of the formulas that trainers are asking for and like long should I do this before I do this and how long should I do this before I do this our

growth thrust on them by the economics of what our cabarrus you know exact word says he'll do it in four weeks so now I have to have offer that otherwise I don't get clients you know what's funny is with with this kind of latest push it seems at least to me of like advertising based dog training I see a lot of that like that two-week off leash trained you know any dog any age any stuff like that and and I've actually been pushing the other way and having a pretty good amount of success so instead of trying to like race these people to the finish i-i'll get a lot of phone calls that are like hey well I spoke to so-and-so and they were saying for this price in two weeks X right for my like four month old Dobie puppy and I'm like you know the reason why I take longer is because you just number one I mean could you theoretically teach the dog these things in that short amount of time possibly but at what cost I want the dog to not only learn their commands but I want them to learn to just enjoy training learn to enjoy working and paying attention and being with you but also the extra amount of time I mean sometimes there's just really all the time there's just no substitute for good ol just drills and just get it get it engrained into your brain and really give the dog time in order to like you talked about that even in it in a dog's training program I noticed this especially when we talk about socializing or when we do balanced training with the dog we're at some point or another you do have to put pressure on the dog I noticed that every dog's trajectory they're capable of more pressure the further they are in the program oh and and I wanted to say that to kind of speak to your point about just like a human student dogs you can try to teach them the lesson early if you'd like but they're not really gonna grasp the value of it until they're ready for it and until their fundamentals are down exactly yeah just like humans you know I always look at why I sucked at soccer I played soccer for many years but intermittently as a kid like 5 years old 7 years old 9 years old and I didn't pick up that sport that well because I was too busy figuring out how to dribble the damn ball I was doping sucker like you I talked to students about this all the time and talk to trainers about this all the time there's this idea that if you're a better trainer you can do things faster right right what are the best trainers do with their own dogs they're not that's time yeah your time they make sure all the fundamentals are beautiful before they worry about layering that on by they're like do I do I have an e-collar on my

six-month-old no yeah no I have plenty of other stuffs to do I have lots of grout work la ya get there right and so it too Mariano's point that's it right so that's the the deal the more you have in there then when you get hit the pressure point the dogs are like oh yeah I got this I'm right yeah or this I have a place to put this information right and that kind of thing you know what's funny go ahead I'm sorry sit so the way that I've always thought about it with the dogs is is the way that we were talking about our assistants and they know what to do it's just shifting from gear to gear is something that even if they know what those gears are they're reluctant to take that step dogs as they get better the reason why I think they're more capable of handling larger amounts of pressure which is exactly why you up everything right this inspiration distraction later on in the program that's why I don't take dogs out to Petco until they're like far enough along but I know that they can handle it but I think the reason that that is is because they already have these kind of preset pathways that they can take oh if I'm distracted I do this if they tell me do this do this even if there's you know so there's all these different routes that they can take they have all these different tools under their belt already so that they can access them more readily and then me as a trainer knowing that they know these things pressure is is less of an immediate option because I know that I can choose this tool this tool this tool as opposed to being kind of like a one-trick pony because earlier on in my training career I was definitely heavy with pressure really needed to to develop my food work and when I did that I've noticed I mean not only fundamentally speaking do the dogs look quicker and happier and everything like that but they they just enjoy the process more and so they're they're more consistent more of the time it's amazing to see that and they're more resilient to better right all the rest of that kind of stuff right right hope you have more in the bank to bounce back from stuff and handle things you have coping mechanisms the whole nine yards for sure what's the so like what's the solution as pet dog trainer so that's that's the majority would you would you say that there's more pet dog trainers and there are competitive oh yeah that's the bread and butter of the dog industry for sure there it is it is what what do you think I know I don't want to dive into like the polarities of methods and all that stuff anymore because I think we talked about it too much and all the other episodes but let's but

let's but what what could we you know what how could we solve that problem how could we solve that economical problem is it a club creating clubs or their smaller memberships is it you know is it creating more content like what is educate it's education so that I this is my mission in life right so since I get to access the trainer's that are gonna go out and access the general public who aren't trainer right then we have a huge opportunity to influence what people think about dog training and the average person that comes to a dog trainer doesn't understand dog training at all they don't know what it they have all kinds of misconceptions of what's possible what dogs are what good training is what it should look like TV doesn't help right like all that kind of stuff and so people have the conception so our job as trainers that the trainer's that would contact the general public is to educate them in a broader sense about what dog training is and we got to school them this way it's a process you have to you have you have to be involved I can't train your dog and hand it back to you and then we're done they're not yeah you can have it's not gonna end and you should like it we're cheerleaders for getting them excited like about what is this is fun we're cool you can have a relationship with a dog that we can't have with any other species it's really they're amazing and if you dive in you will be richly rewarded and so our job is to get them to take their time and participate in the process and so a little bits of little bits we all pull it and if people's initial II make oh oh that guy he couldn't tell me he wanted me to take six months to do this yeah you said that but if more and more trainers start giving them the same information and add becoming the norm where you come norm it pulls the whole culture that way and better dog training will be available to to everyone and people will really understand what dog training is yeah ultimately right how long do we go to school to get even fairly competent things right yeah it's true and in a strange way I kind of just get kind of getting to know a little bit more like your background of animal conservation and all that stuff it's like that would you say this mission and dog training kind of comes back to that intrinsic goal that you had initially I made you want to go back into conserving animals yeah I think for sure there's no doubt like my interest in critters in general like has been a little kid like I love that and I hate what we're doing to natural world and certainly dogs are part of that but I think more it's it's like anytime you get really into

something right so anything super passionate about it's very hard to interact with people who don't care about it right and that there's like you know somebody here something that you really think is amazing something you really care about and now you have this person that's like I don't got to know about any of that no I don't want to put that much work into it I just make my dog stop pulling on the leash make it right right yeah and kind of like I don't know if you remember off cuff of course you remember of course you remember your you were there but there was a there was a time in dog training in my career at least where you know I'd ask people what kind of dog do you have and they answer with it's a rescue and they'd say the word rescue as if it was a breed yeah right and so they're kind of they're kind of became this this this vibe socially where it was like if you weren't rescuing if you were buying puppies you're met you're messed up person right and so that came through you know a lot of media and a lot of you know social media stuff and just like the the vibe was just created rescues are the way to go if you're not rescuing your jerk right you're a jerk and always what my goal was was trying to try to figure out how can we make I don't notice I don't necessarily want to create that type of propaganda for dog training but to create a societal feeling of like you're not training your dog come on do you train you're a good dog like like like like where you get judged for not training your dog right it seems like it's so normal to not train your dog until they're destroying something being annoying or being aggressive right and I always tell people as are the difference between a good dog and a trained dog a good dog is just a dog who's now being aggressive or destroying anything if he can do it he can do anything else in the world and he's a good dog right so so I think it's it's all moving in this direction that we're trying to change the societal thoughts of like you should train your dog just like you should send your kid to school you should you know I don't know what's normal for kids I don't know yeah and it's getting better you're right like it is getting better more trainers or thinking like this mm-hmm are going out to clients they're not trying to design their programs strictly to compete with the other guy no the Te'o this guy says he's got a off leash three weekend board right and dog believe a strain of three weeks and people have stopped saying like I'm not gonna compete with that like I'm gonna create a program that's right and finds balance and helps people successfully long term because those

people are you they're gonna rely on an endless supply of new clients because that clients be happy down the road right I said you do that the dog goes back they didn't participate in the process at all it's gonna gradually erode and then two years later they're gonna say I paid this guy all this money and look look at this dog right so unless you get them connected and people are realizing that joiners that are out there are realizing that and they're they're extending their programs they're doing good work they're coming up with hybrid in board and private lessons including the people in the in board training like all that kind their people it's getting better for sure yeah and that's our continued mission it's and it's and it's all it's all in efforts to get the involvement of the owner if we can if we can make that so you know that more of that responsibility fall on the owner then yes then we will be more successful as is and they'll be happy to like when they come into a problem they'll go okay I think I know we're here because they were a participant in the process the whole way along you know it's funny because I've been working on this very recently I think you know you guys talked in the beginning a little bit about COBIT has really helped restructure programs that in a lot of ways from an intellectual standpoint it's been pretty good you know it makes you think and it makes you get creative and if for me it really helped because I started my online programs that's why I wrote up my homework and a little PowerPoint and it and it does sharpen you a little bit but there was a dog that I've been talking about for a while now Milo the the little dog that's so fearful he barks at airplanes in the sky you know he I swear he's actually afraid of his own shadow and that wasn't an exaggeration and so he's been he's been working with me I'm gonna have him for a total of four weeks and he's now three weeks in and what I've started doing with people is if the dogs doing you know three week four week whatever the case at about the two week mark I'll bring them in to visit the dog but we do a lesson the dog stays with me but we'll go somewhere do a little lesson I'll explain to them some stuff of what the dogs been doing and why and what they're going to be doing then for the next lesson when the dog actually goes home we dive into the normal fundamentals of okay so he's home now keep your routine in check make sure that all these things are in order and then we'll get fancy as we go and I found that there is there is actually a lot of value to that yeah the people feel a little more process right because

they go home and really have a week to chew on the information that you gave them and the dog it's been very valuable for me depending on the dog because of course they there are certain behaviors that a dog gives owners that they don't get the trainer and two weeks into the program we talk about the dog being able to handle certain pressures owner comes in and the dog goes oh you're right I am protective you know so so the owner goes home and I'm left with a dog that still has it is now showing me a little more of these things so that I can address them more directly now that we've got our foundations in place and it allows my momentum to stay peaked for the red for the rest of the program then the dog goes home looking as solid as possible absolutely you know I think that kind of things essential the last in boards that I did before I don't obviously don't do them anymore at the time I had factored in client involvement the whole way so I would didn't week and then they would come in at the end of the week and I would show them everything I did during that week I would literally walk them through this is how I started this this is why I'm doing it now you try what I just what I'm doing and then I didn't well I'll see you next week I take the dog I do the testing you come in a week later here you go right and then I wouldn't have in boards shorter than six weeks that's yeah yeah I'm at a month right now but I do have weeks early in total cases so even if they didn't do it themselves they knew what the dog looked like all those steps they've participated some money least an idea of what process will be like right well you know what and that really shows to the mastery of your skills because there are so many dog trainers who want to keep it all a secret or maybe they're ashamed of what they're doing and they don't want to put that in the forefront you know so yeah like that's that's that's a skill I had to learn teaching a lot of workshops and group classes was like I need to make sure that my skills are refined so I had I don't feel uncomfortable doing them in public isn't that the weirdest thing that people have that urge to keep things a secret like that yeah like I never understood it I mean there's lots of people that do and they're people that think you know that they're super gifted they have something special and they want to maximize what they can get out of it right it's we're all playing with the same principles real yeah right there's no new dog training and and a raising a rising tide lifts all boats right right right right that stuff's out there somebody else is gonna innovate off it you're gonna get

the feedback on that somebody else is gonna innate it and we all get better as a result of that so can I ask you a question then with it with exactly that saying right a rising tide lifts all boats I know that it's tough for younger trainers out there who may be listening at us too even it's tough to find the time to record your sessions and to make content but is it not absolutely essential these days not only not only to help get information out there but also I noticed that nothing sharpens you I learned this little trick in boxing nothing sharpens you like watching yourself back and you're like oh my god I make that mistake good that's one of the biggest benefits of the online classes that I've done for the students mm-hmm I have some where they have to shoot video homework every week like so I've now interactive a text they would get things and they'd have to shoot their video homework and so what they got in at the end of 16 weeks of that kind of thing or whatever it was going to be it was their habit to fill every time they practiced so of that their phone up every time they went out to practice and once that be you learned so much watching yourself back right after a training session turn around and watch yourself back you can go up there I didn't even realize I did that and I didn't so if you can get a part of your habit it's a great thing yeah and I've noticed too when it's you when you're watching yourself as opposed to all the other Graham because there's you online there's Tyler there's amazing trainers online but when it's you in particular making your own mistakes or whatever the case you have that is it first person or third person where you know the thoughts that are going through your head like it is interesting I'll watch myself with the same dog today versus yesterday versus the day before and I noticeably I'm weaker at something and I'm like oh yeah that was the day that I stayed up till like 2:00 huh and and so you you have insights that you're like man it's crazy how much of your active time with hands-on with the dogs revolves around everything else being in sync and and that's I think crazy insightful information for younger trainers to keep in mind to record yourself watch it back it will change you for the better and can't keep a training journal to like so oh really yeah absolutely with like we make all of our long-term students keep training journals so you basically you sit down and at the start of training a dog you write down everything you hope to do with this dog like aspirational like if this if everything lands well this dog is gonna be a pet dog he's gonna hang

out in my house he's asleep in my bed we're gonna go hiking I'm gonna take up search-and-rescue and agility or whatever that how I love that I'm gonna do that put it down and then make a list of all the behaviors that your dog would have to know and the skills they'd have to have in order to do all those things right I can reverse your reverse engineering the goal we have a template here of if I'm gonna get here what would my dog have to know so you can focus your direction in your training sessions so when you go in you say like okay wow I haven't started this skill I should start this skill or whatever that's gonna be it and the genius everything you do with the dog like how much exercise how much you fed it how long your training sessions were exactly like what your how much the dog played with the other dogs that day and your plan for a training session when you go into it and then what you actually did hands are good it's long yep as long as your abandon them when they need a banker what you did and then your impressions afterwards and if you videotape it to then that helps you with your impressions of oh my dog seemed a little flat today well listen you know we took the 10-mile jog this morning so probably shouldn't do that before I train on training day or whatever you're gonna be right right and patterns that you won't hold in your head otherwise you'll look back and yet notice the things like you said OOP that was the night I was up too late that's the night I kept my dog up too late he's lying right whatever that and you'll start to recognize those things and it helpful like you there's no way you're holding that all in your head all the time and especially you have multiple dogs so a trainer that's got multiple dogs in for training like you got to shift gears every time and that helps you sort of reset where you are with that dog all the time thank you for listening to the dog trainers podcast a podcast created by dog trainers for dog trainers or anyone who's ever fallen in love with man's best friend join us again next week for part two of the art of teaching voice Michael Ellis [Music]

Welcome to the Dog Trainers Podcast, a podcast created by dog trainers, for dog trainers, or anyone who's ever fallen in love with man's best friend. Hi, everybody. Welcome back. This is episode 20 of the Dog Trainers Podcast. My name is Mariano, that's Brent, and we've got our very special guest here, Mr. Michael Ellis. How are you, sir? I'm great. Thank you guys for having me on. Thank you so much for being on. Now, this here is episode 20 of the podcast, and we just want to thank you guys so much for the huge amount of support that we've been getting. I know I've been saying this for like the past five or six episodes, but we just ticked over 1,000 listeners. We got our first piece of fan email, what would you call it, the other day? We've got several little pieces, but this one was really sweet, and it made me kind of feel like Michael Ellis for a second, where someone was like, thank you so much for doing what you're doing because you've helped my business so much. Anyways, yeah, that was really sweet. It was great. Keep them coming, please. Thank you guys so much for listening. Now, in this episode, we figured what better way to absolutely maximize our time with Mr. Michael Ellis than to dive into the art of teaching because this is something that he's perfected over time. We were just talking, and he said he's been doing content online now for something like 12, 13 years, and we want to dive into a little bit of his backstory, a little bit of what it is that makes a good teacher in dog training, and everything in between. So before we dive into that, you can find us all on Instagram. You can find me at untameddogco. That's untameddogco, all one word. Brant's is all one word as well. It's canisbehavior, C-A-N-I-S behavior. Michael Ellis, you can find at Michael underscore Ellis underscore school, as well as at Learberg, and also don't forget to check out his website, michaellisschool.com. Over to you, Brant. Yes, sir. All right, everybody. So for those of you guys who do not know who Michael Ellis is, Michael Ellis is probably one of the best educators of our generation, of our time in dog training, right? He has provided us with wonderful content through Learberg and through his school for the last 12, 13 years, and I mean, we're just so grateful to have him on. And trying to kind of help give you a little bit of a prompt, the whole point of this podcast, in essence, is to provide value for up-and-coming dog trainers. And one of the big things that, to me, would really add value to people is understanding the journey, right? Sometimes when we look at a professional like

yourself and we see your content and your teaching ability, it's really hard for us to know that once upon a time, like you weren't good at stuff, right? And, you know, there's a lot of, you know, especially speaking for my own generation, there's a lot of impatience. There's a lot of huge desire to want to get good really fast. There's a lot of passion that kind of sometimes go misdirected. And so, you know, we'd really like to dive into understanding a little bit more of your story, how you started, what your passions were, who your mentors were, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, because this is a journey. I've been doing this now for 12 years myself, Mariano almost 10 years now, and it is a journey. And you would have asked me when I was 18 years old, I wouldn't have told you, like, yeah, I'm going to be a professional dog trainer. Yeah. No, I didn't think that. It was one of those things that you follow your passion, you follow your heart. As Tyler Muto said last week, he said, you know, dog training can be very mentally stimulating if you allow it to be. And I couldn't agree more. So anyways, let's go ahead and hand it over to you, Michael. Again, thank you so much for being on this podcast. Let's dive into the story that is Michael Ellis. Sure. Thank you guys again for having me on. I really appreciate it. I think you hit on a couple of things that are really important, right? We live in a time where people are sort of enamored with instant gratification, right? You can get a lot of things fast. I can get information fast. You can get lots of things fast. But we all know that expertise, there takes time, period. There's no shortcutting it. And we're at a good time in that you have access to lots of information that frequently took longer to acquire. Like I came up through the dog training club system, I'll talk about in a second, through that club system. And so you had to physically go to fields and meet trainers to see what was going on. Now there were no training schools in the same way that there are now. The internet was not active. So there was, didn't exist. And so people weren't getting access to the same kind of information you can now. And so that is great. We can, you can jumpstart certain things. You can, you can get an education faster than you used to be able to, but you can't shortcut the hands-on experience. It just takes time. You got to do it. You got to be there. You got to see it. Somebody can tell you something. But regardless of, and you may, that may make sense to you,

but that doesn't mean you know it. You know it in your body, in your heart. And like, you've like, I've seen this, I've done it. I felt it. I know what it should feel like. All those kinds of things. So, so hopefully the passion that people have for training is what allows them to stay in long enough to get good at it because there aren't going to be shortcuts there. There are shortcuts to information, but not shortcuts to true knowledge, the real kind of knowledge. And so I came up, I started in, I grew up in Southern California, grew up in San Diego. Um, yeah, bug, bugged the parents relentlessly as a kid to get a dog. And they finally caved when I was about 13 and, uh, they let me get a, I wanted a Doberman. They said no Doberman, but they let me get a German Shepherd. Oh, I got it. Everybody thought Dobermans were vicious and I was enamored with them for all the wrong reasons, of course, as a kid, because I thought they were talking again, whatever. But I got a German Shepherd and, uh, the parents demanded that I, that I train it. If I was going to have the dog, I had to take care of it and train it. So I went to, uh, the local Dermot Shepherd dog club and took an obedience class. And, uh, that got me connected with people in the club. And I started getting into junior handling and I'd kennel sit for one of the older couples that ran a kennel. And I got into showing dogs all through into high school and through high school. Uh, and so it was a hobby. And, um, in high school, I was 18, probably I was at a dog show and there was a police and Schutzund demo at this dog show. And I saw that and I'm like, okay, that's, that's for me. That's totally, I went home and immediately looked up what a local Schutzund club. Uh, none of the dogs I had were even remotely suitable for that. They weren't going to be doing it. So, uh, I started doing decoy work because I was young and able-bodied. So they're like, here, put the sleeve on, do this. Work your way in kid. Go ahead. So I was, I was involved in that. I got in that way and I was involved in AKC obedience and dog shows and all that kind of thing. Um, no intention of turning it into a career at all. Right. And so it was all a hobby as I went through college, still a hobby. And I taught like an obedience class for pet stores. I worked a little bit for a friend's kennel to make money on the side part-time while I was going to school and stuff like that. But I didn't envision this as a career, sort of like you had said, right? No. What did you envision as a career? Uh, actually I was going to be a biologist.

So I, my degrees in biogeography, so resource conservation, like environmental planning, that kind of stuff. So yeah, that's my one, a girl I dated that was, that's her major and still is. Yeah. She'll become a world-class dog trainer. Yeah. Maybe, maybe you know where life's going to take you. I can tell you not what you think it's going to take you. Yeah. I thought for sure I'd be like a, an environmentalist and involved in that stuff. So, um, so as I went into that, it just happened that while I was in school, um, one of the clubs that I'd worked with had some new members and they asked if I would come and help show them the ropes a little bit. So I did some kind of little weekend clinic for a group of trainers at one of the Schutzen clubs that I'd been going to, and it went reasonably well. And so another club nearby had asked about hosting a seminar type thing and they said, well, he did a good job. You want to do it. And so I went, I went and did another one. And, um, it literally started like that. I was competing in dog sports and doing that stuff as my hobby. And I would do a seminar here and there. And over the course of several years, it started to pick up steam. I was getting, I didn't advertise. I didn't start a business clubs just started to ask me to do these things. And at a certain point, it started to really pick up. And so for 14 years, I guess it was, I traveled and gave seminars to dog training clubs and organizations. So police departments, military, um, various dog clubs from agility clubs and competitive obedience clubs and lots of bite sport clubs and that kind of thing. Uh, and at some point in there, um, I'm like, well, I guess this is my job, right? It got busy. You're like, I'm still going to save the animals. Yeah. It got busy enough that I'm like, I, uh, this is, this is what I'm doing, I guess. And, um, in that process, I realized very quickly in the early seminars that I was doing that you can know how to do something, but teaching other people to do it is a completely different skillset. Right. And so my wife has actually, uh, has a teaching credential and I, uh, she gave me some strategies for teaching and I started paying attention to think about that. I realized one of the first seminars I did, I realized that people are going to ask you about everything you do, every little tiny thing. Like, how do you hold the tug exactly? Like what are you standing on when you give it to the dog? How do you do this? And I'm like, uh, hold on a sec. Let me figure it out. I was like, as a dog trainer, you, if you're doing it

for a long time in that sense, then there are things that you just figured out and you don't remember when you figured them out and you're not, you just do it a certain way. And so I started to pay attention to all that thing, those things. And I started to break them down. I started to read about teaching strategies. I started to, when I got up in front of people and talked, I learned to pay attention to their facial expressions and whether they were understood what I said or not. I spent thinking about different ways of saying the same things. So I started teaching myself to be a teacher ultimately. Um, cause I realized that's what the job was like, you got to know your subject as a teacher, but ultimately can I get other people to understand this and can I engage them in a way that makes sense to them? And so that was a perfect laboratory for that. While I was doing these seminars, I got to land myself in front of a new group of people every week, every weekend I was in someplace different, new group of people, brand new group of dogs. And you had to go in there. You had to make sense to them. You got to watch them troubleshoot with their dogs and give them advice. And the education I gained doing that is, was, is immense. I don't know. It would take five lifetimes to get that information, to get that kind of education. If I wasn't, if I didn't have kind of dive into that. Right. And at the end of that period of time, when I was doing seminars a lot after this was 2009 is when I opened the school. So 2007 and eight, those last couple of years, I was doing about 40 to 45 seminars a year. So I was flying someplace different every, every weekend. So I'd fly out on a Wednesday or Thursday and I'd come home on a Monday and I'd fly out again somewhere else. And, um, at that period, I was just, I got to the point where I'm like, I can't, I can't travel anymore. I'm losing my mind. And so I had a choice at that point to open up a dog training business. I'm like, certainly. And I'd done that like while my wife was in grad school and we were in New York, I did seminars, but at that time I do, you know, one a month kind of thing. And so I had pet dogs on the side and all that kind of thing. So I figured I could start a, a training business, but I'd really spent the last decade getting good at teaching trainers to be better trainers. And so, well, let's open up a dog trainers school. And, and so I did that in 2009 and started in a warehouse in Fairfield and it went well. And you're doing, you're doing okay.

Right. Just before I opened the school, uh, I, I hooked up with Learberg. So actually Cindy, how did that happen? Tell it, tell us about that. Yeah. So Cindy Rhodes, uh, Ed's significant. Cause we, cause we used to think you were Learberg. That is a misconception that that's no doubt. No, Hey, Ed's been doing this a long time. And what, what we have on the internet now, Ed had VHS tapes. And when I came up in dog training, like if you wanted to know, if you wanted to see what KNPV was about, or if you wanted to watch the, uh, the Bundesieger or whatever, you either went to Germany or Holland or whatever, or you bought a Learberg VHS tape. Nobody else was doing that. So I have boxes of old VHS tapes somewhere in a storage. Cause I saw a Belgian ring that way. I saw KNPV that way. The stuff through that, right. These, these European dog sports. And so he was hugely influential on me because, because that content was, it just wasn't available. The internet exist. And so, um, I was doing a seminar in Minnesota and, uh, Cindy Rhodes, Ed's significant other, uh, very good dog trainer showed up at the seminar. Uh, we really clicked and she went back and told Ed and Ed came to the next seminar I did in that area. And he's like, Hey, you want to do videos? And I said, and I had said, uh, yeah, I've been wanting to, but I just, I don't have time. I like, I can't stop what I'm doing now. I go somewhere every weekend and find the time to film and script them. And he's like, okay, well we'll take care of it. So he actually, the initial videos he shot at seminars. So he'd come to a seminar and he'd videotape and then he'd go back and cut it up. That's why some of them are so long. Right. So unruly we've gone back and redone a lot of them, but some of the originals were just basically cut together footage from seminars. Right. And then as we got further into that process, then I, we, I started scripting them ahead of time. I kind of said, okay, I'll organize an outline and we'll do all that kind of stuff ahead of time. Um, but the original ones were just shot up at seminars, but it was huge because that got me out there in a way that, so that when the school opened, people were already starting to know who I was due to that kind of stuff as well. So it was hugely helpful in letting me get the school started and stopping traveling at that point in time. Right. It's crazy. So it's like, it's the internet really just, I think you were, I don't know if you, were you the, was there someone else who is Michael Ellis ish or were you the first one to just kind of

take off on the internet? On the, you know, I don't, I don't know. Cause like I'm, I'm on the internet. I'm terrible about all of the stuff. So I use it like everybody else does, but to order pizza. Yeah. Right. And so, um, there were many other trainers that were spreading good information ahead of that. So I've involved on oven. I came up around the same time. He is a genius dog trainer. He and I are friends and would train together at various times. He, he was making content and things very early on. He has books and videos, which I, he's extremely gifted before that it was mostly done through seminars and things like that. There were many good trainers that would go to clubs, organizations, and that kind of stuff for educational experiences or conferences and that kind of stuff. Um, but the, the actual kind of established trainers, it just happened that I'd been doing that for a long time when the internet really started to kick up in that. And so that kind of allowed me to where YouTube started taking off. Yeah. So that allowed that sort of slide out. And I like, honest, to be honest, I still don't even remotely use it to the best of advantage. I'm terrible about it. If Leerberg weren't throwing out the stuff for me, then it would, it would be bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. I totally get that. Um, that's cool. So I like how you guys, you guys connected, you know? Um, yeah, it would, do you think Leerberg was a little bit of a launching pad because they kind of had some other stuff? Yeah. There's no, like, so Ed had been, he got on the internet very early. So, uh, he he'll tell the story, but he, he had a friend of his from college was a professor in computer science or something at one of the universities and very early in the commercial aspects of the internet. Right. You need to get in here. And so Ed had a website upselling dog stuff way early, one of the first commercial dog sites there. And so he was well established and had a mailing list and all that kind of stuff. So that when I started, he started to get my content out there and I'm positive there's no way the number of people would have seen me that have seen me without, without Leerberg and they for sure, um, have been great. And I'm a terrible marketer. Like, I don't like it. Like, so I'm training trainers to be professional trainers. And they always ask me like, so, you know, what's your strategy for marketing? And I, my, I say, do good, do good work and people will notice you and they'll tell other people that's really like, that's, that's true.

Yeah. It's true. Dude, that's not really helpful. Like Facebook ads or what? Yeah. Yeah. Now, nowadays it's just like, just have someone follow you with a camera and just do whatever you do. Yeah. And that's marketing. Well, it's crazy how marketing has changed these days. I mean, some of the biggest channels on YouTube, for example, are just vlogs of people doing pretty much nothing, but they get like 15 million views per video. And it's just like, Hey, I'm going to the store. I'm going to the park and having nice shots and a bit of editing and some music and stuff. And people eat that right up. But it's, it's such a weird thing where like my, my little sisters at my mom's house do this thing where they, they watch videos of little girls playing with dolls. They have toys of their own, but they, they watch these kids play with other toys. And I'm like, why is this so interesting? Yeah. We should be concerned. We should be concerned about it. They eat his or her own, but no way, man. So tell us about you, man. You have kids, you have a family. What's going on? I have a wife of 30 years now and we have no kids, lots of dogs and other critters. We live in Sebastopol, California, which is in Sonoma, Western Sonoma County. Our North of San Francisco in wine country, a yellow place. Yep. And yeah, that's it. Yeah. That's it. My wife was, is an actress and theater director. She had an MFA from Columbia and acting. And when the school took off and started to get busy, I stole her from her actual career and made her, and made her administrator of the school. So she doesn't get to do nearly as much theater these days as she would like, cause she's too busy, helping you out. Yeah. It would not be happening without her by any stretch of the imagination. Yeah. You have having a good woman by your side, man, doing what you're doing. That's everything. That's everything. So let's dive into another little question about the past. Let's talk about, you know, like some people, they remember some of their like first element, like their favorite elementary school teachers, they know them by name and they remember them and they remember the impact that they had on them. Let's talk about some of the people in your journey that really just impacted you where you were like, I will this, I say this because this person taught it to me when I was blank. Right. Yeah. Who are, who are those impactful people? So some of the, some of them are, are school teachers for sure before that have nothing to do with

dogs. So certainly Mrs. Ostermeyer, a junior high English teacher. There are some people that, that really, helped me with my intellectual journey. And so as a teacher, they helped me kind of organize how I think and be comfortable in front of people. And they made me read a lot and made me curious about learning and a lot of that kind of stuff. So I had several teachers through, through that. When we start talking about dog people, I have tons of them because again, I came up through a club system. So there are people like many people I learned. So the, the people that got me into dogs originally, that the people that I took the initial obedience class at the German Shepherd Dog Club, there were a couple of there, Victor and Harriet Gaga who owned Von Victor kennels in San Diego County forever, long since passed, but they kind of grabbed me and said like, Hey, look, there's this whole other world of dog stuff. And they would let me kennel sit for them when they went on vacation. And there was all kinds of stuff that, that, that sort of hooked me into that, that world. Um, I worked for a veterinarian while I was in high school, uh, when, when I was going to dog shows that was in this showing dogs too, in Pennsylvania. And that was very influential, but the dog people, you, when you train with a variety of people in clubs, you wind up meeting a lot of people. So there were a ton of trainers, um, in the Southern California area when I was coming up that I spent time. So Al Banuelos was a well-known, uh, uh, Schutzen trainer at the time. I trained American Bulldogs and eventually had Malinois. I mentioned I, Balabanov was coming up at the same time and his way of thinking was hugely influential. There's a woman I wish I knew her name when I had learned training initially, like everybody else at the time that I learned training, we learned, um, straight up Keeler method pressure, right. So choke, choke, foot leash in a choke chain, in a choke chain. And, um, there was a obedience club that shared one of the bite sport fields that we worked at. And there was an AKC obedience trainer there and she had a border collie and she was out doing obedience one day. And I wish I knew her name. I would love to call her and say, thank you. But she, uh, I want, I'm like her dog doesn't look like our dogs. Like what? That dog looks happy. What is she doing? Right. I watched her train and talk to her a bit and it sent me off on a different journey. Right. I had seminars, uh, that I went to like a Karen prior seminar back in the day when she was just

starting and talking about clicker training and all that kind of stuff was like changed the direction of my way of thinking about training and that kind of thing. Um, gosh, uh, Mitzi Robinson. Now she was Walker then, uh, was a woman that ran a, a Schutzen club in San, in Northern, in Ramona, in Northern San Diego County. When I, when I grew up and, uh, I started doing helper work there and she showed me a lot, taught me a lot. And when you're in the club system, uh, and I was young and unattached. So we drove everywhere. The people trained with, uh, Lisa Mays, who was my partner in breeding dogs for many years. We came into that, that bite sport world around the same time, 1989, I met her. Um, and, uh, she had an incredible way of thinking about training was highly influential on the way I thought about training as well. Um, what do you, what do you think the big takeaway was from that? So for her, she, she was the, she was the, probably the original balance trainer, in my opinion. Right. She was the queen of it. Like, so she was a very good pressure trainer and she would learn pressure training like everybody else. And when she got attached to reward based training, she did a very good job of blending it and hers was really balanced. Right. So these days, when people talk about balance training, a lot of people are using it as an excuse to use pressure. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I get, I, I did two days of food work and then I put an e-collar on the dog. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a balance trainer kind of thing. Uh, she really had a balance and she also had an kind of out of the box way of thinking about things. So it wasn't specifically techniques. She just kind of read dogs well and thought about things differently. There was an empathic side to her. I do like, so I'm very analytical and very step-by-step and she had a kind of feel. And so she would approach a problem and sometimes she would say something to me in a way that I was like, that's not the way I would have thought about it. And it makes you come out of problem in a different way. Ivan Kolobanov is also the very, very much the same way. Like he is a dog training savant. Like he is a genius. And every once in a while he would say something or do something where I would say that shouldn't work. Why does it work? You know, kind of thing. And so it always made me pause and re-evaluate things that I thought I knew, which is essential to you becoming a better trainer, right? You have to be able to say like, we know things, but can you modify your knowledge and can

you change your, your thinking about certain things? And that gets hard, the better you get at it. And the more success you have, the harder it is to sort of shake up the way you think about things a little bit. Right. Um, Stuart, Dr. Stuart Hilliard is a good friend of mine. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, uh, who talked to us about Dr. Hilliard. It must've been Tyler. Must've been Tyler. Yeah. Oh yeah. Cause we were, that was post. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. He's for sure. Yeah. He's an amazing guy. Brilliant. A very good dog trainer. He was creating content. So before, if you want to talk early content, that was him in the eighties, he was doing videos for canine training systems, which was like Leerberg's competition, making dog training videos. They were a company in Colorado. Uh, and he did some videos on Schutz and, and helper work and stuff in the, in the eighties. He was actually the person that, uh, hosted and brought, uh, French ring sport to the U S. Oh, wow. Very first ring sport seminar in the U S was after Stuart made a trip to you or Europe and came back and, um, brought French trainers back and did a seminar in Colorado. I don't want to say in the mid eighties, 86, 87, something like that. Did a seminar here and that kind of brought that to the U S. Um, but watching his, he still, he, there's a tape on protection work, uh, that he did and he was decoying and he was showing foundation protection work. And as a decoy, and I don't want to go too far down this road because lots of people don't probably don't know what I'm talking about. But anyway, the person getting bit by a dog in protection work is the person training the dog. So you tend to be able to people, the, of training their dog and protection, you're handling the dog. The person getting bit is the one that's teaching the dog, right? Right. The decoy, the helper, the agitator, whatever you want to call that person, their skills, uh, drive your success. If you're going to be successful, it's because they are doing their work. Right. And, um, it's, it's a kind of a reaction to the dog. You observe the dog, you read their body language. And when they do something, you need to react so that they think they're making an impact on you. Right. And it's a huge thing. And he was super dramatic in his reactions in this video, right? His video, very dramatic, but that's when it clicked for me. Like nobody explains that you watch people work the dogs and it doesn't look like they're doing anything. You can't see from the outside, but his reactions were big reactions. And I remember clearly

at the time I'm like, oh my God, that's my job to make the dog feel empowered. Yeah. But his would be like, he'd stare at the dog and the dog and then it was like a wave of water. He'd throw his arms back. Like he was getting hit. Big, but it made it obvious to somebody that was starting in that world of upper work. Right. Add a little bit of theatrics to it. A little bit. And you read, you saw it clearly. You saw it. It worked. As opposed to some little subtle reaction that I might make where the dog's biting, then I twitch my arm a little in the sleeve. You don't even see that from the outside. So I'm thinking, oh, and it was a game changer for me. Like a game changer. Right. And so I felt it, I felt like I knew him before I met him the first time. Right. Just from watching him and I, and I won. It was incredible. So he had a big impact on the way I think about training. And then there were just many trained trainers from Europe that came over and did seminars, other friends, people you meet along the way that you get a good idea here. You get a good idea there. Like watching good people train. You pick up epic amounts of it. You, once you get your education to a certain point, and you know, the core principles, going and watching good trainers do their thing, which I had the luxury traveling around all the time of watching just scads of incredible trainers do their work. And I pick up something here and something there. Yeah. Now were you the type that, that learned the most from watching or would you straight up go to the person after with a bunch of notes and be like, what about this? What about that? Explain that to me? Like how would, how, what was your process? Like watching definitely watching. Yeah. Yeah. And then mimicking what you see. Yeah. And seeing it and kind of trying to figure out why what they were doing was working. Why would someone was doing, wasn't working and that kind of thing. And it was a process. I would collect that information in my, and then, and then deal with it that way. But mostly from just watching, I mean, you have conversations and ask people, you know, what they think and you know, what their process is and all that kind of thing a little bit, but most of it was just from being around and watching them work. Right. That's always the, that's always a big aspect of, of watching you work and watching your videos. That is fascinated me as, is how do you know exactly what pieces of information, or I guess over time, you've just kind of boiled it down to a science, the tiny pieces of information that, you know,

people need to know. And, and an example was, I was watching a video of you doing food work with, I think it was rush and you were using food in your hand and you were explaining in, in great detail, the importance of, you know, vertically speaking, staying the same height off of the ground with your hand. And so you use that step in order to, you know, keep your body low to the ground. Cause of course, if you stand still, your arm only goes so far before it ends up coming up. Absolutely. And that's all stuff that I got to, once I started having to teach it. Okay. I realized, I figured out over and again, I got to practice that a lot. So, uh, when I would go out, you realize people would ask you things and then you'd step away from that. And I analyzed and I started to think about, okay, why, well, why is this work? How come that dog keeps hit, keeps hooking at the end? Or how come that dog keeps biting my hand here? What's right down? Right. And so I started to break things down and then I started to think about it the way you would, if you were going to teach somebody a sport, like isolating pieces instead of like, there's a lot of variables. You put somebody out there with a dog, they have to focus on the dog and how they're moving and too many variables at once when you're beginning. And so if you focus on one thing, you lose something else. If you focus on that thing, you can't hold them all in your head yet. And so the idea of breaking things up into smaller pieces, sort of like what we do for dogs. Right. And if you're doing right and you break it down into little digestible pieces and it's, I sort of started to do the same thing a little bit for training and like watching people to see if they were processing the information, if I was giving them too much, that one of the things when you're beginning to teach training is what details to give somebody at what point in their development. And so if I take a total beginner, I can't hit them with everything. Right. Right. So which ones are the most important? Right. And how fast can I give them the next pieces? And it's going to be different with different people. So if you teach enough and you pay attention to people's reactions and you watch them, you're like, this person needs to stay here a little longer. Right. If I give them the next piece, they're not going to process it. It's going to be different. And that's understand it, but they won't process it. And that particular piece of information is something that's always fascinated me. And I like

that you liken it to sports because it's, it does kind of make sense from a sport point of view. And one thing that we talked about with Tyler and Brent and I have talked about this before is, you know, a sport that I like is, is jujitsu. I practice it a lot of boxing I've been doing for a long time. And, and it's, it is funny. And I also kind of wanted to tie this into the balance training aspect of things, because I do notice you're absolutely right. When someone's very new at something, they have to meticulously focus on the process to get something done. But in the big picture, it's not very much of anything. An example being, you know, if I, if I'm learning how to do a triangle choke, it's hard to do in and of itself as it is. So I'm putting hand here, putting like there, but like in the grand scheme, while you're sitting there slowly figuring things out, you could lose the round one of the million other ways. And I noticed that younger trainers do have that sort of thing to them to where if they focus on one thing, obviously they should and learn it well, but they can't lose sight of the big picture. And to bring it back to balance training, Tyler had a really interesting perspective, which we kind of figured out before we even spoke to him. But when we had a chance to finally hear his own words, it was, yes, I mean, if you're going to work a dog, you have to make sure that they're doing things right. And, you know, but, but also the overall momentum of the lesson itself matters more than a little hiccup here and there. And you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot in order to make some point that, that otherwise would be. Yeah. Yeah. Well, one mistake I made, so sorry, sorry. One mistake, just my personal, my personal growth was being too meticulous with the person and making them feel that they can't do it. And I remember that was something that when I was a young teacher, it was just, I would be like, nope, foot's wrong. Do it again. Nope. Hands wrong. Do it again. And I would just break their confidence. That absolutely can happen. And then beyond that too, you, you can get to a spot where they're so afraid to make a mistake that they're not willing to experiment and push. Right. Right. Yeah. Like you can get very good instruction, but there's the interaction each time is a little bit different with the dog living creature. Right. And so it's slightly different in the larger principles apply, but the feel for when to push or when to try something new, like when you're up against

something. And if I, if you make people, if you're too structured a little bit too soon, people are afraid to make a mistake. Yeah. Yeah. And so there are mistakes that you have to make to get better and you have to try some stuff like, okay, now you're stuck there. You know what? Yeah. I thought you know what, what's funny is a tiny bit of our back history is Brent and I have been working together for a long time. You know, once upon a, I'm in Arizona, but at once upon a time I lived in LA and he and I worked at the same kennel and he was like the head training manager. And I was, I was learning how to be a dog trainer and they had an official like internship program. And I, I was never actually an intern. I would just stay after my shift and just learn how to train dogs. So I'd be there. Like I'd be there from opening to closing. And then after that, and he and I would go to the bar after a long day's training session and talk about things. And what, one thing that I noticed about what I think just made us such good friends is Brent pushes a lot, but I just don't take it personal. I understand he's trying to make you better. And, and, and you know, something that I really found interesting was, well, you were, you were like my Malinois, like I could put pressure on you and you'd come back and be like, do it again. Again, again, I'll do better next time. Right. Um, but it was a matter of perspective though. It's like, I understand. So it's like, okay, a couple of things that are clear. You're smart. You're, you're tough. You're, you're like strict, but also that you care and so on and so on. So, so the reason why I bring this up is to, yeah. So the reason why I bring this up is to say that, uh, when we had our other assistants, so now we're talking years down the line and Brent and I are training and we had our training assistants, they would learn their particular phase of training, whatever that was at the moment. We've got a dog that's two days in three days in, and they know how to do food work, sits downs and whatever else. And, and they know how to do the stuff that comes after, but they would be a little reluctant to move from here to there. And so we had to give them confidence sometime and coach them through like, look, I know you know how to do this. And I know you know how to do that work from here to there and show me how you do. And kind of taking those training wheels off a little bit. Yeah, no, it's essential part of it. And there's, there's developmental spots where people are ready to receive things. That's the hardest thing. And I

still, as a teacher, it's, it's, it's hard because people are different. Like the dogs are different too. And so I know for sure I was given information at various points in my development that I wasn't ready to receive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He would say to you and you'd nod like, yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds logical, but I have no place in my worldview to put that. Right. Right. And then three years later or five years later, you're like, oh, oh yeah, that was really good advice. I didn't have any place to put it yet. Right. Yeah. Yeah. A microcosm of that same kind of thing. And that's going to happen for the rest of your training life. Right. You may have been exposed to an idea that didn't fit your whole methodology or worldview yet, but there may be a place where it does. Right. What do you give to people at various times? And you want to get into the details of the dog trainers. Right. Mm-hmm. Yeah. ...dentals down first. And so that's one of the things that's really challenging. And of course, excited dog trainers want to get to there. Right. Right. Right. Right. So. Right. Yeah. One other, one other thing we talked about, Tyler. So, so to Tyler about then, and I mean, sorry, no, we're not comparing you guys. You guys are two excellent speakers. We're friends. I really like Tyler. You're like, Tyler sucks. No, Tyler's the man. Love Tyler. He's been so helpful. He's been so helpful. Pardon me. Um, so one thing we talked to Tyler about is we were actually discussing, I asked him, I said, okay, dog training is an art form. And if dog training is an art form and we're all to be artists, what is our color palette? Right. What is the color palette? As an artist, you need to know how to use your colors, but then there's other variables as well. There's dimension. There is, you know, uh, you know, other things like contrast, there's all these different thing, right? There's all these variables. And so I asked him, I said, let's, if you were to paint me a picture of like a young and up and coming dog trainer, what's his color palette that you need to start understanding right off the bat. Right. Are they methods? Are they techniques? And he responded, he goes, principles, it's all the principles. And he goes, understand your operant conditioning, understand your classical conditioning, understand your reinforcement schedules, understand, you know, all of these different things. He goes, if you study those principles, you at least now have the color palette understood, right? If we were, if we were going to elaborate on

this, what else would you add to like, okay, so that's kind of like our foundational stuff, right? That's our theoretical. It sits right in our mind. What else would you elaborate? Like, I'd add the mechanical stuff. So I think there's two worlds and they're not always connected for people. Right. And so that's the how dogs learn portion. You have to understand what makes them tick, how they work, how we're going to communicate with them, kind of the science behind it, that understanding those principles are key, right? Then there's the mechanical part. The mechanical part is totally separate. You can understand perfectly how operant conditioning works, but you can't hold a leash. You can't execute. Yeah. You don't have timing. You don't know how to move your body. There's a lag between seeing and communicating that's learned, that's practiced like anything else. And so all those things, so the things that we break down the mechanical ways. So obviously this can be a very big topic, but there are some basic ways in which we typically create behavior physically, right? So we use conditioned reinforcers, markers, clickers, whatever kind of thing, but the physical ways in which we manipulate dogs luring, spatial pressure, spatial pressure, using the leash, shaping stuff. And so the mechanics of that stuff also needs to be broken down for people. Yes. Yes. If the mechanics are bad, they can understand it and they get really frustrated. So some of the students that have the biggest problems when they come to the school are very smart people that really understand the intellectual part of it. They get it. Right. Right. They've read it all. They've watched the video. It all makes perfect sense in their head, but their body's not cooperating in the beginning. Yes. Both of those. And then the other side, you have people that naturally are very good, talented physically. They move well. They've got good timing. That just feels easier to them, but they don't know the why or the how and the right mistakes because they don't understand the other part of it. So that's huge. Panics is the big deal. Right. And that's huge because I feel, so I've trained many trainers over the last eight years and you know, you get someone who comes from a different, uh, you know, like a pure positive background who now is ready for something new. Right. And as soon as you start introducing pressure, a, there's always kind of this, uh, this aversion to to pressure in general, even if it's something as light as leash pressure, like a front to heel or

something like that. Um, and there's this visceral response based on how much what they think and what they feel they understand that they don't even want to execute the physicality of it. But once they get over that hump, they go, Oh, super easy. Yeah. You know, and that's that in and of itself is a struggle. That's, that's great. The technical skill. Okay. You know, I'm glad that you brought that up because sorry, really quick. I spoke to recently, it's super hot out here, by the way, this is good old Phoenix, Arizona. So it's, it's like, sorry. So, but you know, but, but so I take my dogs out, my, my board and train dogs when they were good enough, you know, my way of socializing and getting them outside is I take them places where they can be inside. And, uh, one of the places I take them, of course, is like Petco just because they're super dog friendly. And I ran into a couple trips ago, but also today I was there a little while ago. Um, they're one of their trainers and he was a really nice guy. I mean, obviously he's pure positive cause I know Petco only does like all positive training. And I, you know, I spoke to him a little and he's very nice, very like personable. And, uh, I invited him on, so I figured we'll have him on at some point, but, but I definitely think that it's important to talk to people from the different training ideologies and kind of get their perspective on things. Absolutely. A hundred percent. And it's, and it's weird to watch the evolution, right? So there are things that I learned when I was naive and young that somebody asked me to learn to do that now. Would I be able to, right? There's a point I'm eight, six, 16. And somebody says, you know, here's how you yank on a leash, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Like I could do that. And you're like, really, I'm supposed to yank on the dog. They're like, absolutely. That's what you do. You, you got to it. It has to be this way and not knowing anything else, right? You commit, you learn a skill. Then as your prog, your journey progresses, I learned better ways of doing that. And I learned that maybe I was unfair at various times and a whole lot of other stuff. But by that time that skill was in my toolbox. Yeah. Although I don't use it as often as I used to by any strength, it's there. And so now we have a whole generation of reward-based trainers who are very good at certain aspects of training, like better than I was early in my, my journey on reward-based training when I was discovering how to work that. Right. And so

they're exceptionally good at this, but they can't handle a leash. Right. And they know enough that they're in their own way to learning it because you, in order to learn it, you have to commit to, right. Right. And you're going to make mistakes. Like you're along the way. I say it all the time, but like, I, I would love to resurrect certain dogs and apologize to them. Right. I learned to do things on you and you're the one that suffered for my lack of skill and mechanics and my lack of understanding at that point in time. Right. But if I hadn't gone through that, would I be able to do that now? Right. It's really, it's challenging when you're trying to educate dog trainers, which piece do I give them when, right. And that they don't get so in their head that they can't commit to learning the new skill because it feels uncomfortable. Right. Right. You'll write. Well, one thing, one thing I've seen is also like, I remember when I came up, I had a community of dog, I worked at a kennel and then eventually I went from, you know, assistant trainer all the way to training manager. And so I had trainers around me and I had mentors around me and I had people I could ask or see and, you know, uh, you know, shout out to, to Edward Valle, one of the, one of my homies who is in Texas now and he doesn't even know I have a podcast, but that guy taught me technique, like such clean technique. And I remember being like, I want to do it like that where everyone else was cranking and yanking and doing all this other stuff that, you know, but, but yeah, sometimes the support of the community that's around you, the dog training community, it's easier to fall into those good and bad patterns. Right. So you can be, you could have a community of, you know, pure positive or very heavy handed Keeler method trainers. And because that's the community, it's like, you're going to, it's easier for you to commit into that. Right. And so like one cool thing that, you know, you, you look at like the whole ear bird crew or you look at like what Tyler's doing with consider the dog and we're, we're creating communities of dog trainers with different platforms and how can we learn from each other? And ultimately, you know, this whole, yeah, again, I kind of agree with Tyler, the term balanced dog trainer, but the theory, the concept of balanced dog training, we need to create more of that, right? It's too polarized. And we just need to kind of create more unities for people to feel safe, to explore these ideas and theories and not, and get coached, not judged.

Yeah. And I think honestly, the, the, the hardest part about the balanced training is that it looks so different from dog to dog. If you're really doing it, you really are embracing that ideal, then it's the dog that's in front of you. And one dog is going to be 90% reward based. Like it's going to be 90% reward. Another dog, it's going to be 90% the other way, unfortunately. Right. Just because their temperament and their situation and where you are in their development. And those adjustments are hard for people. Right. And he wants kind of a formula for it. Like, I'm going to come in and I'm going to do a week of this. And then I'm going to do a week of that. I think unfortunate you got like pet dog trainers have it harder because a lot of, in a, in a sense, what they're asking dogs to do is typically easier than a working dog trainer would be like you, but what they have is they have arbitrary timelines put on them by economics. Yeah. Yep. So they're constrained by the marketplace. And so that will wind up happening is until we sort of pull the general public along and get them to start understanding better dog training. The fact that it's a process, it takes time. Like. Yeah. You should start when he's small, not when he's small. With a dog in a two week inboard. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, if you're training well, how much are you going to accomplish? Right. Yeah. How much. Way too much pressure on that dog to make sure it looks like it, you accomplished something. Yeah. Or the dog's going to look like, Hey, it looks at you. It seems happy to be around you and it sits, but like you're barely scratching the surface. And so unfortunately, some of the timelines and some of the formulas that trainers are asking for and like, how long should I do this before I do this? And how long should I do this before I do this? Um, are thrust on them by the economics of what market bears, you know, that says he'll do it in four weeks. So now I have to have offer that. Otherwise I don't get clients. You know, what's funny is with this kind of latest push, it seems, at least to me of like advertising based dog training. I see a lot of that, like that two week off leash trained, you know, any dog, any age, any stuff like that. And I've actually been pushing the other way and having a pretty good amount of success. So instead of trying to like race these people to the finish, I've, I'll get a lot of phone calls that are like, Hey, well, I spoke to so and so, and they were saying for this price in two weeks X, right for my like four month old Dobie puppy.

And I'm like, you know, the reason why I take longer is because you just number one, I mean, could you theoretically teach the dog these things in that short amount of time? Possibly, but at what cost? I want the dog to not only learn their commands, but I want them to learn to just enjoy training, learn to enjoy working and paying attention and being with you, but also the extra amount of time. I mean, sometimes there's just really all the time. There's just no substitute for good old just drills and just get it, get it ingrained into your brain and really give the dog time in order to, like you talked about, even in a, in a dog's training program, I noticed this, especially when we talk about socializing or when we do balanced training with the dog, where at some point or another, you do have to put pressure on the dog. I noticed that every dog's trajectory, they're capable of more pressure the further they are in the program. Oh, and, and I wanted to say that to kind of speak to your point about just like a human student dogs, you can try to teach them the lesson early if you'd like, but they're not really going to grasp the value of it until they're ready for it. Until their fundamentals are down. Exactly. Yeah. Just like humans. You know, I, I always look at why I sucked at soccer. I played soccer for many years because, but intermittently as a kid, I, five years old, seven years old, nine years old. And I, I didn't pick up that sport that well because I was too busy figuring out how to dribble the damn ball. I was dope at soccer. Well, whatever, dude. All right. Well, where were we? Is that I got off topic? Like you, I talked to students about this all the time and talked to trainers about this all the time. There's this idea that if you're a better trainer, you can do things faster. Right. Right. What are the best trainers do with their own dogs? They're not. They take sweet ass time. Yeah. They take their time. They make sure all the fundamentals are beautiful before they worry about layering that on. Like they're like, do I, do I have an e-collar on my six month old? No, no. Yeah, no. I have plenty of other stuff to do. I have lots of groundwork to lay. We get there. Right. And so it, to, to Mariano's point, that's it. Right. So that's the, the deal. The more you have in there, then when you hit the pressure point, the dogs are like, oh yeah, I got this. I'm ready for this. I have a place to put this information. Right. And that kind of thing. Well, you know, it's funny. Go ahead. I'm sorry. So the way that I've always thought about it with the dogs is,

is the way that we were talking about our assistants and they know what to do. It's just shifting from gear to gear is something that even if they know what those gears are, they're reluctant to take that step. Dogs, as they get better, the reason why I think they're more capable of handling larger amounts of pressure, which is exactly why you up everything, right? Disinteraction, distraction later on in the program. That's why I don't take dogs out to Petco until they're like far enough long that I know that they can handle it. But I think the reason that that is, is because they already have these kinds of preset pathways that they can take. Oh, if I'm distracted, I do this. If they tell me to do this, do this, even if there's, you know, so, so there's all these different routes that they can take. They have all these different tools under their belt already so that they can access them more readily. And then me as a trainer, knowing that they know these things, pressure is, is less of an immediate option because I know that I can choose this tool, this tool, this tool, as opposed to being kind of like a one trick pony. Because earlier on in my training career, I was definitely heavy with pressure, really needed to, to develop my food work. And when I did that, I I've noticed, I mean, not only fundamentally speaking, do the dogs look quicker and happier and everything like that, but they, they just enjoy the process more. And so they're, they're more consistent, more of the time. And it's amazing to see that. And they're more resilient to bad experience, all the rest of that kind of stuff, right? Right. You have, you have more in the bank to bounce back from stuff and to handle things. You have coping mechanisms to hold nine yards for sure. That's awesome. What's the, so like, what's the solution? So as pet dog trainers, cause that's, that's the majority. Would you, would you say that there's more pet dog trainers and there are competitive? Oh, yeah. That's the bread and butter of the dog industry for sure. There's, it is, it is. What, what do you think? I know, I don't want to dive into like the polarities of methods and all that stuff anymore, because I think we talk about it too much and all the other episodes, but let's, but let's, but what, what could we, what, how could we solve that problem? How could we solve that economical problem? Is it a club creating clubs where there's smaller memberships? Is it, you know, is it creating more content? Like what is education? It's education. So that I,

this is my mission in life. Right. So since I get to access the trainers that are going to go out and access the general public who aren't training, right. Then we have a huge opportunity to influence what people think about dog training. And the average person that comes to a dog trainer doesn't understand dog training at all. They don't know what it is. They have all kinds of misconceptions of what's possible, what dogs are, what good training is, what it should look like. TV doesn't help, right? Like all that kind of stuff. And so people have these misconceptions. So our job as trainers that con, the trainers that would contact the general public is to educate them in a broader sense about what dog training is. And we got to pull them this way. It's a process. You have to, you have, you have to be involved. I can't train your dog and hand it back to you. And then we're done. They're not. Yeah. You're going to have to, and, and you should like it. We're cheerleaders for getting them excited. Like about what is this is fun. It's super cool. You can have a relationship with a dog that we can't have with any other species. It's rich. They're amazing. And if you dive in, you will be richly rewarded. And so our job is to get them to take their time and participate in the process. So little bits of little bits, we all pull it. And if people initially may go, oh, that guy, he couldn't help me. He wanted me to take six months to do this. Yeah. Yeah. The other trainer said that, but if more and more trainers start giving them the same information and it starts becoming the norm, it pulls the whole culture that way. And better dog training will be available to, to everyone. And people will really understand what dog training is. Yeah. Ultimately. Right. How long do we all go to school to get even fairly competent at things? Right. Right. Right. Yeah. It's true. And in a strange way, I kind of just get kind of getting to know a little bit more like your background of animal conservation and all that stuff. It's like that, would you say this mission and dog training kind of comes back to that intrinsic goal that you had initially that made you want to go back into conserving animals? Yeah, I think for sure. There's no doubt. Like my interest in critters in general, like has been there a little kid. Like I love that. And I hate what we're doing to natural world. And certainly dogs are part of that, but I think more it's, it's like anytime you get really into something, right? So anything you're super passionate about, it's very hard to interact

with people who don't care about it. Right. And that's what it is. Like you have somebody here, something that you really think is amazing, something that you really care about. And now you have this person that's like, I don't want to know about any of that. No, I don't want to put that much work into it. Just make my dog stop pulling on the leash. Make it right. Right. Yeah. Well, it's kind of like, I don't know if you remember, well, of course you remember, of course you remember you're, you were there. But there was a, there was a time in dog training in my career, at least where, you know, I'd ask people, what kind of dog do you have? And they'd answer with, it's a rescue. And they'd, they'd say the word rescue as if it was a breed. Right. And so they're kind of, they're kind of became this, this, this vibe socially, where it was like, if you weren't rescuing, if you were buying puppies, you're met, you're a messed up person. Right. And so that came through, you know, a lot of media and a lot of, you know, social media stuff. And just like the, the vibe was just created rescues are the way to go. If you're not rescuing, you're a jerk, right? You're a jerk. And always what my goal was, was trying to, to try to figure out how can we make, I don't, I don't necessarily want to create that type of propaganda for dog training, but to create a societal feeling of like, you're not training your dog. Come on, do go train your fucking dog. Like, like, like, like where you get judged for not training your dog. Right. But it seems like it's so normal to not train your dog until they're destroying something, being annoying or being aggressive. Right. And I always tell people, is that the difference between a good dog and a trained dog, a good dog is just a dog who's not being annoying, aggressive, or destroying anything. He can do, he can do anything else in the world. And he's a good dog. Right. So, so I think it's, it's all moving in this direction that we're trying to change the societal thoughts of like, you should train your dog. Just like you should send your kid to school. You should, you know, I don't know what's normal for kids. I don't know. Yeah. But like, and it's getting better. You're right. Like it is getting better. More trainers are thinking like this. They're going out to clients. They're not trying to design their programs strictly to compete with the other guy. Right. The, the, oh, this guy says he's got a off leash three weekend board. Right. And dog fully strained in three weeks. And people have stopped

saying like, I'm not going to compete with that. Like I'm going to create a program that's right. And finds balance and helps people successfully longterm. Cause those people aren't, you, they're going to rely on an endless supply of new clients because that client's would be happy down the road. Right. You do that. The dog goes back. They didn't participate in the process at all. It's going to gradually erode. And then two years later, they're going to say, I paid this guy all this money and look, look at this dog. Right. So unless you get them connected and people are realizing that joiners that are out there are realizing that and they're, they're extending their programs. They're doing good work. They're coming up with hybrid in board and, uh, right. Private lessons, including the people in the in board training, like all that, they're people we're, it's getting better for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And that's our continued mission. And it's, and it's, and it's all, it's all in efforts to get the involvement of the owner. Right. If we can, if we can make that, you know, that more of that responsibility fall on the owner, then yes, then we will be more successful as doctors. And they'll be happy too. Like when they come into a problem, they'll go, Oh, okay. I think I know what to do here because they were a participant in the process the whole way along. Right. You know, it's funny because I I've been working on this very recently. I think, you know, you guys talked in the beginning a little bit about COVID has really helped restructure programs that in a lot of ways, from an intellectual standpoint, it's been pretty good. You know, it's, it makes you think and it makes you get creative. And for me, it really helped because I started my online programs. And so I wrote up my homework and a little PowerPoint and it, and it does sharpen you a little bit, but there was a dog that I've been talking about for a while now, Milo, the little dog that's so fearful. He barks at airplanes in the sky. You know, he, I swear, he's actually afraid of his own shadow. And that wasn't an exaggeration. And so he's been, he's been working with me. I'm going to have him for a total of four weeks and he's now three weeks in. And what I've started doing with people is if the dog's doing, you know, three week, four week, whatever the case at about the two week mark, I'll bring them in to visit the dog, but we do a lesson. The dog stays with me, but we'll go somewhere, do a little lesson. I'll explain to them some stuff of what the dog's been doing and why, and what they're going to be doing.

Then for the next lesson, when the dog actually goes home, we dive into the normal fundamentals of, okay, so he's home now, keep your routine in check, make sure that all these things are in order, and then we'll get fancy as we go. And I found that there is, there is actually a lot of value to that. The people feel a little more in process, right? Because they go home and really have a week to chew on the information that you gave them. And the dog, it's been very valuable for me, depending on the dog, because of course, they, there are certain behaviors that a dog gives owners that they don't get the trainer. And two weeks into the program, we talk about the dog being able to handle certain pressures. Owner comes in and the dog goes, oh, you're right. I am protective. You know, so, so then owner goes home and I'm left with a dog that still has, is now showing me a little more of these things so that I can address them more directly now that we've got our foundations in place. And it allows my momentum to stay peaked for the, for the rest of the program. Then the dog goes home looking as solid as possible. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that kind of thing is essential. The last in boards that I did before, I don't obviously don't do them anymore. At the time I had factored in client involvement the whole way. So I would take the dog a week and then they would come in at the end of the week and I would show them everything I did during that week. I would literally walk them through, this is how I started this. This is why I'm doing it. Now you try what I just, what I'm doing. And then I said, cool. I'll see you next week. I take the dog. I do the dressing. You come in a week later. Here you go. Right. And then I wouldn't have in boards shorter than six weeks. That's like, yeah, yeah. I'm at a month right now, but I do six weeks for really intense cases. And so even if they didn't do it themselves, they knew what the dog looked like at all those steps. They had participated some and they had at least an idea of what the process would be like. Right. Well, you know what? And that really shows to the mastery of your skills because there are so many dog trainers who want to keep it all a secret or maybe they're ashamed of what they're doing and they don't want to put that in the forefront, you know? So yeah, like that's, that's, that's a skill I had to learn teaching a lot of workshops and group classes was like, I need to make sure that my skills are refined. So I had, I don't feel uncomfortable doing them in public.

Isn't that the weirdest thing that people have that urge to keep things a secret like that? Yeah. Like I never understood it. I mean, there are lots of people that do, and there are people that think, you know, that they're super gifted. They have something special and they want to maximize what they can get out of it. We're all playing with the same principles. Yeah. Right. There's no new dog training. And a raising, a rising tide lifts all boats. Right. Right. Right. Right. All that stuff's out there. Somebody else is going to innovate off it. You're going to get the feedback from that. Somebody else is going to innovate that. And we all get better as a result of that. So can I ask you a question then with, with exactly that saying, right? A rising tide lifts all boats. I know that it's tough for younger trainers out there who may be listening and us too, even it's tough to find the time to record your sessions and to make content, but is it not absolutely essential these days? Not only, not only to help get information out there, but also I noticed that nothing sharpens you. I learned this little trick in boxing. Nothing sharpens you like watching yourself back and you're like, oh my God, I make that mistake. Huge. That's one of the biggest benefits of the online classes that I've done for the students. So I have some where they have to shoot video homework every week. Mm-hmm. Like some live now interactive, but they would get things and they'd have to shoot their video homework. And so what they got in at the end of 16 weeks of that kind of thing or whatever it was going to be, it was their habit to film every time they practiced. Love that. So they'd have their phone up every time they went out to practice. And once that, you learned so much watching yourself back, right after a training session, turn around and watch yourself back. You can go like, oh, there, I didn't even realize I did that. And I didn't. So if you can make it a part of your habit, it's a great thing. Yeah. And I've noticed too, when it's you, when you're watching yourself, as opposed to all the other, I mean, cause there's you online, there's Tyler, there's amazing trainers online. But when it's you in particular making your own mistakes or whatever the case you have, that is it first person or third person where, where, you know, the thoughts that are going through your head. Like it is interesting. I'll watch myself with the same dog today versus yesterday versus the day before. And I noticeably am weaker at something and I'm like, oh yeah, that was the day that I stayed up to like two, huh?

And so you, you have insights that you're like, man, it's crazy how much of your active time with hands on with the dogs revolves around everything else being in sync. And that's, I think crazy insightful information for younger trainers to keep in mind to record yourself, watch it back. It will change you for the better. And, and keep, keep a training journal too. Like, so. Oh really? Yeah, absolutely. We like, we make all of our long-term students keep training journals. And so you basically, you sit down and at the start of training a dog, you write down everything you hope to do with this dog. Like aspirational. Like if this, if everything lands well, this dog is going to be a pet dog. He's going to hang out in my house. He's going to sleep in my bed. We're going to go hiking. I'm going to take up search and rescue and agility or whatever the hell. I love that. I'm going to do that, put it down and then make a list of all the behaviors that your dog would have to know and the skills they'd have to have in order to do all those things. Right? Now you reverse, you're reverse engineering the goal. You have a template here of if I'm going to get here, what would my dog have to know? So you can focus your direction in your training sessions. So when you go in, you say like, okay, wow, I haven't started this skill. I should start this skill or whatever that's going to be. Yeah. And then everything you do with the dog, like how much exercise, how much you fed it, how long your training sessions were exactly like what's your, how much the dog played with the other dogs that day and your plan for a training session when you go into it. And then what you actually did plans are good. As long as you're going to abandon them when they need what you did and then your impressions afterwards. And if you videotape it too, then that helps you with your impressions of, Oh, my dog seemed a little flat today. Well, you know, we took the 10 mile jog this morning. So that probably shouldn't do that before I train on training day or whatever you're going to be. Right? Right. Right. And patterns that you won't hold in your head. Otherwise you'll look back and notice the things like you said, Oh, that was the night I was up too late. That's the night I kept my dog up too late and he's right. Right. Right. Right. Whatever that is. And you'll start to recognize those things. And it helpful. Like you, there's no way you're holding that all in your head all the time. And especially if you've got multiple dogs, so a trainer that's got multiple dogs in for training, like you got to shift gears

every time. And that helps you sort of reset where you are with that dog all the time. Thank you for listening to the dog trainers podcast, a podcast created by dog trainers for dog trainers, or anyone who's ever fallen in love with man's best friend. Join us again next week for part two of the art of teaching with Michael Ellis.