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Welcome to episode 267 of Behind the Shield podcast.
My name's James Gearing, and I am so excited
to finally be able to release my interview
with Buck Braneman.
Now for those not familiar with Buck,
he is basically a real-world horse whisperer.
In fact, he was actually the advisor on the movie they made.
But more importantly, his life story really parallels
a lot of people we had on the show.
So he went through a pretty traumatic childhood,
but was able to retain the kindness and compassion
that he believed in, which then ultimately made him
an incredible horseman.
So I got to watch him work at one of his clinics in Georgia.
So you will hear about the 40-minute mark,
the quality of the conversation will change
as far as the audio quality.
That's because the first 40 minutes was face-to-face.
We ran out of time.
So he was kind enough to agree to a second part
of a conversation so he could make it
the full hour and a half.
So an incredible conversation.
The parallels between what he's seen with horses
and what he's seen with people are striking
and pertinent not only just to us, the first responder,
military, medical community, but basically every person
on planet Earth and their horses and their dogs.
So an amazing conversation.
So before we get to the interview, as I always say,
please take a moment and go to whichever app
you listen to this podcast on and subscribe to the show.
Leave a rating, the more five-star ratings we get,
the more visible we are to people looking for this podcast.
And then feedback, if you've got something to say,
please, I'd love to hear your feedback too.
And then most importantly, social media, email,
word of mouth, share these incredible episodes.
Buck's alone is gonna be so moving to people
in the horse community and then everyone else outside
as well as you will hear.
And the more I can get you guys to share,
the more ear holes his story gets to.
So with that being said, I introduce to you
Buck Braneman, enjoy.
All right, well, I wanna start by saying thank you
for inviting me here.
It was awesome to watch you work.
I'm just gonna do a little kind of shout out
at the beginning.
So I was referred to you by Josh Brolin,
the actor, he'd watched your movie.
His daughter Eden, he's very, very into horses as well.
Navy Seal friend of mine, he and his wife
have come to attend.
And my sister who has her horse Tornado in England,
she also adores you.
So being a fireman and coming from all these
different places, it's not just the horse world
that you've touched with the movie.
So, yeah.
So, all right, so very first question.
Where are we right now on planet earth?
Well, you know, I've been doing this,
these clinics for 37 years now.
And gosh, it's taken me all over the world
to places that I never imagined
I'd ever get to experience or see.
And all of that I owe to the horse.
I would have never done all these things I've done
if not for what the horse did for me.
So, and where it goes from here, gosh, I don't know.
I still love what I'm doing.
In a couple of years, I may cut back
a little bit on my clinics,
but it doesn't mean I'll work less.
I may start doing a few more clinics at home
at the ranch so I can be home with my family.
I guess if there was one thing left to do,
and I've been sort of working on it off and on
for a few years, I want the faraway horses
to be made into a movie.
Just because I think it's a good story
that has a good message for people
that may be living at a really dark place in their life.
And I wrote that book to encourage people
to believe that just because you might have
a really tough family situation,
that it's not a foregone conclusion
that your whole life is gonna be a failure
and that you're gonna follow the same path
as maybe the people you were forced to live with,
not by choice.
And the book became a best seller
with the publisher putting in zero money
to promoting it.
It's sold now almost 200,000 books by word of mouth.
So the story has been a meaningful story
to a lot of people.
And I just feel like I'll be finished with it
when we get it made into a film.
We've got a script and everything now
and it's just, it's really hard to get a movie put together.
Even though sometimes I'll watch TV a lot
when I'm on the road and I'll see a movie
and I'll think, somebody green lighted that movie
and that is one of the worst pieces of junk
I have ever seen.
But it still cost millions of dollars to make it
when it was just garbage.
And I just think, gosh, how many doors do I have to knock on?
But I'll just keep knocking on doors.
One will open up one of these days.
Absolutely, I think there's a paradigm shift as well
where I think people are actually wanting
those kind of stories now.
They remade.
You hope so.
Yeah, I mean, I grew up in the eighties.
They remade almost every movie
that I watched when I was a kid.
So that's already been made, don't need to remake it.
But I think that even the Horse Whisperer,
I mean, some of Robert Redford's other movies,
those are stories that people want.
So I don't think it's if, it's definitely when.
It's amazing to me that we did the Horse Whisperer in 97.
And it got released in 98.
So 21 years ago, that movie came out
and it was kind of a big deal.
I didn't realize it was that big a deal at the time
because I was so busy working on the film.
But 21 years later, people still remember that movie.
That's just, that's amazing to me.
And even younger people, they'll say,
oh yeah, I know that movie.
And it's like, you do?
Yeah, well, I mean, and it's so powerful.
So I was introduced to Buck, the documentary originally.
And as we said before we started recording,
as a firefighter, I just saw the absolute parallel
between not so much my life,
because I've been very blessed.
I had a very non-traumatic life,
but so many people I've had on the show
that have really been through some horrible things
as innocent kids, just like you were.
And that parallel, whether it's horses,
whether it's, whatever the outlet is.
And that's kind of what I really wanted to explore with you
because people just assume everyone's fine.
And then you pull the curtain behind,
look behind the curtain, excuse me.
And then you realize, oh my God,
some of these people grew up in the most horrendous ways.
Some of them spiral downwards
and some of them were lifted up.
And that's obviously what you did.
And it's a story I think that needs to be heard.
Yeah, you know, it's a,
I try to encourage people to not just accept things
the way they are, that there's a point in time
that regardless of your background,
that you do have the opportunity to make choices.
And there's a point to where it's no longer okay
to blame your circumstance on somebody else.
Whether it's your mother or father or aunt or uncle
or grandpa or your siblings, there's a point to where
I just think it's not okay, it's not healthy
to just continue to be excused for where your life is
and blame it on someone else.
Yeah.
What if I'd love to then just kind of revisit.
So where were you actually born?
I was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Okay, so if you wouldn't mind,
tell me your family dynamic,
how many siblings and what your parents did.
We didn't live there very long.
I just have one brother, Smokey.
And it wasn't too long after I was born in Wisconsin
that my folks moved to California to around Thousand Oaks.
And my dad was kind of a jack of all trades.
He was a union electrician, he was a union cable splicer,
saddle maker, boot and shoe repair person,
worked construction and oddly enough,
and of course you read in my book
that he was a fairly dark person, not a good guy.
At one point when we were in California,
he worked for the LA County Sheriff's Department.
Really?
I didn't know that bit.
Kind of like the fox garden, the hen house, so to speak.
And we weren't there very long
and then we moved to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho
and spent quite a long time there.
Right, so we're gonna obviously hear about
why your dad was a dark person,
but, or what he did, should I say,
but do you now look back, see any reason
why he ended up becoming so cruel?
You know, it's a couple of reasons
that I've tried to come up with.
You couldn't blame his parents.
His parents were, all their life,
they lived in Vietersburg, Indiana
and they had a farm on the Wabash River
and they were the kindest, most normal,
wonderful people ever.
I got to know them, they were pretty late in life
when I got to know them.
And every kid in the community
was at their house all the time.
They just were adored by every kid
that ever grew up in that town.
So that obviously wasn't the reason.
My dad was in World War II
and I never have been able to confirm it.
One thing I did confirm at a very early age,
my dad was a pathological liar,
but he was brilliant because he could remember
every lie he ever told.
So he could connect them and he could convince you
that anything he said was absolutely true
and you'd have a hard time tripping him up.
So he said that he was a prisoner of war in World War II.
I know he was in World War II,
but I don't know if he was a prisoner or not.
He said he was, but I don't know.
I really don't know.
But at one time, my dad was working in Alaska
putting in the big high voltage towers across Alaska.
That's what he did.
He was a lineman as well.
And he got electrocuted.
Two other guys died in the accident.
They were on a 90-foot tower
and he got electrocuted and fell to the ground
and was in a hospital for probably five or six months
that I didn't see him.
I was real little, second grade or so, first grade.
And then when he came back home,
he had terrible headaches for years after that.
And maybe the trauma of that changed him.
But in a way, I thought to myself,
there was never a time in my life ever
that I wasn't scared of my dad.
But after his accident, then I became more scared, I think.
But I think that was already there before he got hurt.
Yeah, if you don't have a memory of it being good
and then all of a sudden that-
And that may have triggered it and made,
maybe he was just the way he was,
but the accident made him more so.
And so he really suffered from headaches for years.
And it was kind of a funny thing.
He would, like in a week,
he would have a whole full huge ball of blood
full huge bottle of buffering.
He would consume it all in a week.
And I mean, they were bad
because there would be tears rolling down his cheeks,
24 hours a day.
And my dad was very mean to horses.
We always had horses because we were trick ropers
and rodeo entertainers, as little guys.
Again, he made us do that
because he was living vicariously through us.
That's another story in itself.
But he was very mean to horses.
And there was this mare,
Pinto mare that he was working with
and he was very abusive all the time.
And the mare finally got tired of putting up with him
and she pawed him right in the forehead.
And that instant his headaches stopped.
Oh really?
He never had them again.
Oh my God.
Isn't that something?
That's like, that always makes me think of a title of a book
that I was always very amused by the title.
And the title was, When God Winks.
Just like weird little things that happen.
That is kind of God's sense of humor, you know?
Yeah.
God, that's crazy.
Absolutely crazy.
Well, you mentioned the roping.
So if you wouldn't mind kind of just lead us down the road
of how you got into that
and the kind of the cruelty that was the undertone of that.
Well, when we lived in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho,
my dad as a younger man
had just become literally obsessed
with an old rodeo star named Monty Montana.
He was very famous and worked a lot in the movie business
during the singing cowboy's days
of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.
And biggest celebrity the rodeo business has ever known.
And he wore the nudie suits and the whole deal.
And he was a trick roper.
And a very charming guy.
And my dad saw him and he just always wished
that he could have been that guy.
And so my dad decided we were going to be that guy,
me and my brother.
My dad couldn't trick rope at all.
I was gonna say, so he didn't even learn himself.
He just put it on you.
He could spin a little flat loop in front of him,
which I could show you how to do in 10 minutes.
Right.
And we had a couple of books,
of illustrated books of little stick men doing rope tricks
and a little explanation how to do it.
And he started us roping.
And I was doing rope tricks at three years old.
And I became professional status at six.
I got my PRCA card and was getting paid to do it,
doing it for a living.
Well, between three and six, you had a choice.
And this was, you know, winter country.
Corleone gets cold in the winter.
We had no place indoors to practice,
but you'd have to shovel off a bare spot.
If it's winter, you go out and practice.
And the choice was, you're gonna get whipped
or you're gonna practice.
Well, practice looked pretty good to us.
This is like five, six years old, even less than that.
From three, four, five.
From three, you were getting whipped.
Oh yeah.
But we'd practice and we sort of enjoyed it.
We didn't really know, we were too young
to even know what the heck it was all about.
But it made our dad happy when we'd practice.
And that's really all we wanted.
Because when he was happy, we weren't quite as scared.
So we figured that out and we got pretty handy doing it.
And then at six, we started going to rodeos and things.
And met a lot of people that I knew, you know,
over the years, years later.
But, and at seven years old,
we did a Kellogg Sugar Pops commercial.
And we were on the cereal box, you know,
and we were known as the Sugar Pops kids.
That's kind of a big deal to us, you know.
By that time, we had moved to Montana.
And my dad had a shoe repair shop
in a town called Whitehall, Montana.
And things just got worse and worse.
And he was always abusive, never a time where he wasn't.
But if you're raised in that,
and you're fairly isolated from other people,
you don't know you're being abused.
You think that's how everybody lives.
But he was a very cruel person.
And it was very hard on my mom.
He never abused her physically.
But she would always kind of protect us
and the best she could.
And it was never really life threatening.
You never thought he was gonna kill you.
But boy, he had such a cold side to him.
My mother, when we were living at Whitehall,
we didn't have much money.
And so she drove clear over to Ennis, Montana,
which was probably over an hour's drive.
And she worked in Betty's Cafe every day.
And he worked in the shoe shop.
Well, she would drop me off after lunch at school,
and then she'd head to work.
And every day I'd cry.
And I'd tell her not to go to work.
Because it meant that I was gonna be home
for four or five hours, me and my brother alone
with our dad after school.
And that's when things would really go south,
when she wasn't around.
And of course, he'd tell us,
if you ever say a word to her, it's all over for you.
And every day, I can only imagine
how hard I made it on my mom.
Because every day I'd cry and beg her not to go.
And every day she'd cry and say she had to.
And about that time, 71, no, 1973,
she died of diabetes.
And she'd had a, I guess us boys
probably always held it against our dad.
Because he always thought he was smarter
than everybody else.
And she'd had lots of diabetic reactions
when we were younger.
She was a very severe diabetic.
And we would call the ambulance
and they would get her in the hospital
and get all of her blood sugar back in balance.
And she'd come home.
It was almost like you got used to it.
And of course, in those days,
they didn't control diabetes like they do today.
They can do so much more for diabetics
than they ever could then.
Well, my mom had had the flu.
And so she'd been in bed all day.
Well, if you're not eating,
you don't need to take insulin.
Well, my dad, he gave her a bowl of soup that night.
And me and my brother, we're just little guys.
You know, I was maybe 10 or nine or 10.
And we said, dad, will mom need some insulin now?
After having a bowl of soup?
And he just dismissed us.
And he said, you little bastards mind your own business.
I'll take care of my wife.
So he scared us and we went to bed.
And in the middle of the night,
she had gone through the stages
of what would be a diabetic reaction,
went through the stage of delirium.
Next is a coma.
And by the next morning, she was in a coma.
And my dad woke us up.
He realized it then.
And rather than call the ambulance,
he hauled her to the hospital in Ennis,
which was a little nothing hospital,
about twice the size of my horse trailer.
When there was perfectly good healthcare in Bozeman,
a bigger town or Butte, which is a big town,
could have probably helped her.
And my mom was six foot tall.
She's a big lady.
And we had to all three of us put her in the pickup.
And she was pretty far gone
because the last thing I remember
is urine running over my hands
because I was picking up her feet to put her in the truck.
That's my last memory of my mom.
And so, you know, we were really small.
I was fourth or fifth grade.
My brother was in the seventh or eighth grade.
And he just headed to the hospital and he just left,
never said a word.
And there we were for four days.
No call or anything from my dad.
Nobody come in and checked on us.
We just kind of scrounged around and ate what we could.
And didn't go to school.
We just stayed home and worried, you know?
It's kind of a cool story in a way at the end.
But anyway, my dad came home four days later
and he walked in the house and he said,
well, boy, she's gone.
He just walked out of the house.
He didn't hug us or comfort us.
We're like, what do you mean gone?
He said, she's dead.
And that's it.
And it was a hell of a thing.
But years later, I got to be friends with a lady
who was a nurse in that hospital.
This was probably 30 years later.
She said, I was your mom's nurse in the hospital,
just so you know.
And she said, she'd been in a coma the whole time
for over three days.
And she said they had a TV going to try to stimulate her
back to consciousness.
And she said, you boys' sugar pops commercial played on TV.
And after it played, she died.
Really?
We're talking about when God winks, it's another moment.
30 years later to meet that lady and hear that.
And that's amazing.
Yeah, yeah.
So that was pretty cool.
That was kind of her way of saying goodbye, I guess.
Incredible.
Right, well, I mean, obviously you told us
about the cruelty though.
Let me make sure I get the names right.
So I'd love to hear where Coach Claverley
and then Sheriff Johnny France got you out
and then Forrest and Betsy Shirley took you guys in.
Well, after that, things got bad in a hurry with my dad.
It went from just abuse to,
most people that have been around domestic violence,
they know that it always escalates.
They always go to another level each time.
And this got to the point to where
over the next couple of years,
my dad had started really drinking a lot
and he was never an alcoholic,
but he became one in a few months
because he wanted to die.
And that was his way of committing suicide,
just drinking himself to death,
kind of a bit of a coward's way of going about it.
But that was what I reckoned
because he was never a out of control drinker.
Well, then the more he drank,
the more violent he became, of course.
And it had escalated to the point to where
every day walking home from school,
my brother and I would have the same conversation,
which is a pretty sick thing to do
when you're in the seventh grade.
We would ponder whether we would live through the night
and walk to school the next day.
And we would ponder that if he killed one of us,
would he then feel compelled to kill the other one
so nobody would talk?
And that was our daily conversation.
That's a hell of a thing for our little guy to have to
think about every day of his life.
Well, anyway, there'd been some pretty good beatings
to where it was kind of noticeable at school.
But in those days, law enforcement
didn't interfere much in domestic things like that.
That was a family issue.
And our teachers kind of reported it.
And the sheriff just said, no, stay away from it,
except Johnny France, at the time he wasn't sheriff,
he was deputy.
He became sheriff years later.
Johnny France was good buddies with Coach Cleverly.
And Coach Cleverly talked to Johnny and he said,
we gotta do something.
We gotta get those kids out of there.
And Johnny, my dad had, over the past year,
had married this mail order woman
that came from Indiana.
She answered to add for a housekeeper
and it wasn't too long.
My dad had married her and she had a son.
Well, she too had seen the latest beating.
He was on pretty good behavior for a couple of months
after he married her.
And then he went back to his old ways.
Well, she was worried her son was gonna die in the process.
So she split.
So between her and Johnny France and Coach Cleverly,
they decided we should be taken away from there.
And Johnny defied the sheriff as deputy.
He said, if it's my job, it's my job.
I'll get another one.
I'm gonna get those boys.
And at first he put us with this lady who was,
I guess you could call her our stepmom
because she'd married my dad.
She's split and she's gonna leave.
So she, and we were reluctant to leave
because in a situation like that,
if you leave, you know there's no going back.
And if you leave, we figured we're dead.
And she said, don't you worry,
I'll raise you boys just like you're my own.
So you'll be okay with me.
And I was friends with her son.
So we stayed with her for about a week.
And she said, get in boys, we're gonna take a drive.
And she drove to the Madison County courthouse
and said, get out.
She said, I'm sorry boys, I don't have any money.
I can't raise three boys.
I can hardly raise my own.
They'll take care of you here.
And we were sitting on the front steps of the courthouse.
Had nothing.
At least we'd had a dad a week before.
Now granted, he probably would have killed us,
but that was more than we had at that point.
And a guy named Emory Smith walked out of the courthouse
and nice old guy, he was a social worker for Madison County.
And nice old fella, he come out and he said,
I heard you boys were coming.
He said, come on into my office.
He said, we got it worked out.
He said, you know Johnny France,
he's gonna take you boys for a little while.
And we think we got it figured out where you're gonna go.
And we got to talking to him and he said,
do you have any family that would want you?
And we were like, no,
because my mom's side of the family,
they all knew what we were going through
and none of them stepped up and said, we'll take the boys.
None of them, my mom's sister never said a thing.
And we said, well, we kind of have an aunt and uncle
in California, they're not really an aunt and uncle,
but we've always called them that.
They seemed like they liked us pretty good.
So he contacted them and they said, yeah, we can take them,
but we're gonna be gone all summer.
We can't take them till fall.
So Johnny France said,
we're gonna take them to the Shirley Ranch for the summer.
They can be there all summer.
They'll be on a ranch and they can just be ranch kids
and help and work for being there.
And they've taken in a lot of kids.
So we stayed there and time was coming up,
school was gonna start.
And gosh, we didn't wanna go to California
because our fake aunt and uncle,
they lived in a trailer park in Navajo, California.
He worked for the city water department
and she just kind of sat around,
smoked cigarettes and drank, typical,
kind of a real cliche thing you'd see in the movies.
And we told Betsy, our foster mom,
we said, can we stay?
We don't wanna leave.
And she was, gosh, little bitty lady about five feet tall
and Forrest was about six, four.
And he was a tough guy, stern old guy, but fair.
But when it comes to things about kids, she was the boss.
And she told Forrest, she said, called him Papa.
She said, Papa, those boys are staying.
So that was actually the first time,
I remember the night.
It was the first time I ever felt safe in my life,
as far as when I went to sleep at night.
And I remember I fell asleep on a little bench.
Forrest was there and we were watching TV,
watching football or something.
And there was a stack of Navajo blankets right there
and I finally just laid over and put my head on it
and went to sleep.
I had mentioned I had to get up and go to bed,
but I went to sleep and I went to sleep so easy
because I just thought tonight,
I don't have anybody to be scared of.
It was the best sleep I ever had.
And what age was that?
12.
See, that's hot, right?
My son's 12 right now.
And, but I, in a way, I know it sounds kind of weird,
but to have that, to experience that feeling of
the first time in your life being absolutely safe,
having seen the dark side my whole life up to that point,
I wouldn't trade that feeling for anything.
I wish everybody could feel how euphoric that was
to be free from all of that fear.
It's an amazing feeling.
And if you never went through that,
you'd have a hard time kind of relating
to how good that felt to me.
Yeah.
And the gratitude just for what we all take for granted.
Yeah.
Amazing.
So, well then, so I'd love to kind of explore then
how after watching your dad be brutal to horses
and basically you were a child version
of what he was doing to the horses,
how you found your way discovering the compassion side
of the relationship between a human and a horse.
I was always,
I was always really tender-hearted, always was.
Yet I wasn't a wimpy kid.
He had to be tough for I grew up,
but I was always really tender-hearted.
And my brother wasn't, he wasn't.
And when we went to live with the Shirley's,
he would be kind of mean to me at times,
but you know, nothing where I thought
he was going to kill me or anything.
But I would have thought we'd have been closer than that
after having lived through a lot of near-death experiences.
You know?
But it made my brother hard.
It made my brother hard.
The circumstances of our lives, it made him hard.
Made him hard on the inside.
And yet he eventually got out of high school
and went into the Coast Guard for a career
and had a successful life in the Coast Guard
and was well respected.
I've rarely seen him just really happy.
Maybe never.
He became very stoic and introverted.
And he wasn't really that way when he was a little boy.
But he'll never be any different than what he is.
But he's a good guy.
And he's a good man and he raised three kids.
And he never did anything to his kids
like what happened to us.
So that circle was broken with us.
So he learned enough from it
how to be a better dad than what ours was.
But he never, never has found true happiness.
And I don't suppose he will, really.
And that's what's interesting,
watching the documentary,
you talk about your foster parents
and your daughter and your wife,
but there's not really a mention of him.
So I was kind of curious as to what that is.
And then that's two different reactions
to the trauma that you guys had.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it's the choices, like I said,
you get to a point in your life where
it's all about free will.
How are you gonna deal with it?
Or maybe the right answer is,
is you don't really have to deal with it.
Because you know, you'll hear a lot of stuff on TV about,
did you find closure with this?
Or a lot of that's just a bunch of BS.
You don't always find closure.
You don't always reconcile all these things
that have happened to you.
Sometimes you just have to move on and go,
that was then, and this is now.
And I live in the moment.
Because it's not always gonna be wrapped up
with a tight little bow on it
to where everything's all okay now.
You know, all the damn therapy in the world.
Well, this'll probably ruffle some feathers.
But I've known some therapists
and some of them were kind of nuts.
Which may have been what got them into psychotherapy
in the first place, the self-analysis.
Yet I've known some that are really helpful
and can change lives that are legit.
But there are some people that I meet just in this business.
Oh, I do therapy on this and therapy on that.
And it's like, yesterday you couldn't spell it
and today you are one, right?
Yeah, that's true.
And that's the problem we have with our community too,
is that you'll have a firefighter or a soldier
sent to a therapist who then breaks down in tears
because they've never heard it before.
They don't know what these people do.
And so they're not equipped to deal with that kind of trauma.
Right.
Yeah, in reality, and we've talked about this a little bit,
but in reality, it's getting to be very popular.
They'll probably find out in the end
that horses are a hell of a lot better therapists
than any human ever started to be.
Mm-hmm, I think dogs are too.
Yeah. I really do.
Yeah, there's something to it.
And I'm not saying you do it without a human,
they're kind of helping the person to understand
what was taking place in the interaction.
Maybe between the dog or the horse
and the person needing help.
But they're just something pure and good
about the animals and how that applies to people
who are just trying to get their act together, you know?
About the time,
about the time we were taken away from my dad,
we went into a foster home.
And my foster dad was a rancher, but more so a cowboy.
And he was really kind of the first,
I'd say probably the first man
that I ever really thought I wanted to be like.
And that's where I kind of got inspired
to want to be a cowboy and learn about horses.
And this was, I was still in high school then,
but it seemed like for me,
the horses were sort of a refuge for me.
And I rode young horses all through high school
because my foster parents, they didn't have much money,
they were poor.
They gave us plenty of love,
but we had to work and pay for our food and our clothes
and anything that we needed in the world.
So my foster dad told me,
not too long after we moved there,
he said, listen son, he said,
I don't know if you're ever gonna amount to much,
but he said, so I'm gonna show you how to shew a horse
and I'm gonna show you how to ride a colt.
And then that way, you'll always be able to eat
and I won't have to worry about you.
And that's kind of where it got started for me.
I rode colts all through high school
and I'd get up at four in the morning
and ride a couple of horses before we'd go down
and get on the school bus.
And in the nice weather, nice parts of the year,
I'd ride a colt with him in the evenings as well.
So I was making a decent living
while I was still in high school.
And that's where I first heard the name Ray Hunt.
And that was from my business math teacher
and typing teacher.
They didn't teach typing, I suppose, anymore in schools.
But her and her husband had a little ranch
and they raised horses and she had been to a clinic
that Ray Hunt put on in the Madison Valley.
And she knew I was kind of a local colt starter
and thought I was kind of a bunk rider
and kind of had a bit of a reputation locally.
So she tried to tell me about this Ray Hunt
and the amazing things that he could do with horses.
And I just sort of brushed it off.
Teenager, kind of cocky.
I said, oh, he's probably just some horse show guy.
And so she said, well, I'm not gonna argue with you,
but maybe if you ever get a chance to run across him,
you should look him up, he could do you a lot of good.
And then flash forward and that was year two
and then I'm out of high school.
And it just so happened that I was looking
for a cowboy job out of high school.
That's really all I wanted to do was be a cowboy on a ranch.
And initially when I left home,
I got a job for the summer putting up hay and irrigating
and doing all the things I hate to do.
And I've been all summer long,
I've been talking to this cow out there
but I knew they had a cowboy crew
and I wanted them to hire me.
And they kind of kept putting me off and putting me off.
Well, finally I had a small accident with a swather.
I don't know if you know what a swather is,
but what you can't pay with.
I'm distinguished as being the only guy
in Madison County, Montana that ever rolled a swather.
It kind of ran off with me.
Had a big wreck, I didn't get hurt.
But needless to say, the boss wasn't too happy
when I walked into the headquarters.
But it was interesting, this friend of mine, Monty,
that I used to play basketball with,
we're both working on that hay ranching.
That morning I rolled my bed roll.
Well, we were having coffee and he said,
what the hell are you doing?
I said, I don't know, I just felt like
I needed to roll my bed this morning.
And so by the end of the day,
I had wrecked the guy's swather.
It was kind of his fault because he didn't maintain it.
You know, it malfunctioned.
But nevertheless, I was dragging it.
So as I walked by the shop at headquarters,
he asked where his beloved swather was
and I said, it's up there in the field.
And he said, what's he doing up there?
I said, it's arresting.
He tried to kill me when I won.
He didn't see the humor at the time.
So he said, well, you can just pack your,
I said, oddly enough, it's already packed.
I said, I'll be seeing you.
And five minutes later, I was driving away in my pickup.
So I stopped at the bar in Harrison
and I called that cow out for it.
And I said, listen, I need a job now
because I just left this one.
I said, so if you want a cowboy,
you got to hire me right now.
And they said, well, come on down.
We don't really need anybody right now, but come on down.
And the boss met me there and he said,
you see that pen of horses over there?
I said, yeah.
He said, well, every one of them have
you can run away, buck somebody off,
lift over backwards.
Every one of them been ruined by one cowboy or another.
And if you can prove to me
that you can make a living on those horses,
you got a job, you can stay.
And if you can't handle it,
you might as well keep right on going.
And I said, yeah, no problem.
They looked fine to me.
And well, they weren't, they were some tough boogers.
But it just so happened, you know, I was,
I wasn't super skilled, but I was pretty tough.
I rode those horses for a couple of months
and lo and behold, that ranch is the ranch
that was kind of hooked into ray hunt.
And since I'd survived a couple of months,
not necessarily doing ray hunt stuff,
but just kind of gripping it out,
they sent me to a ray hunt clinic
and that's the rest is history.
I rode with them for the next 35 years
and got to be like family to Ray and Carolyn.
In fact, that's who I'm going to see tomorrow in Australia.
Me and Carolyn are doing an advanced area.
So yeah, it's, I just landed at the right place
at the right time.
And I often thought that because of all the dark things
that I went through when I was a kid,
almost like God one day just thought, you know what?
Maybe we ought to throw the little bastard a bone.
Maybe we ought to give him a break.
Well, when in the documentary,
they show the clips of, you know, people,
old clips of people breaking horses, you know,
whipping them and all the cruelty that goes along with that.
Going back to Ray's early life,
so what was it that kind of enlightened him
to using the polar opposite,
using the kindness and compassion into not breaking a horse,
but getting a horse to trust the person that is with?
Well, Ray had also grown up kind of doing it old school,
you know, and, you know, in fairness,
a lot of the old timers,
they weren't all just cruel barbarians either, you know.
Some were worse than others.
And of course, you know, that looks more dramatic
to see old videos of people just molesting a horse,
but not all of them were that way.
But it was most certainly rough
and there wasn't much of the psychological part
coming into play with the way they worked horses.
But Ray, he had become a really well-known
and renowned cowboy in the Great Basin.
And he had a horse that he just couldn't get along with
named Hondo, which was a pretty famous horse later on.
And he had heard about this guru named Tom Dorrance.
And, you know, Tom Dorrance was, you know,
like Yoda or something, you know.
He was a genius with horses.
And Tom, in his early life growing up in Oregon,
had devoted himself to finding a way to work with horses
that as if maybe the horse got to help you make up the rules,
how you get him to understand.
And he spent his whole life studying the horse.
And I got to know Tom in later years.
And I said, how did you do it, Tom?
How did it all start for you?
And he said, well, I grew up a very small kid.
I couldn't overpower horses like the other kids did
that were bigger and stronger and more athletic.
And he said, and plus, I just didn't like
how they worked with horses.
I didn't think a horse should have to go through that much
trouble to be able to do a job for you.
And he said, so I, he said, I know it sounds crazy,
but I just started everything I do with a horse.
I would just do the opposite of what everybody else was doing.
No matter how outlandish it seemed, I'd do the opposite.
And he said, more often than not, it worked.
He said, sometimes it didn't.
But he said, that's where my experimenting began.
And he said, I would try things and fail and try again
and succeed and remember it.
And it just so happened that Tom Dorrance
had a photographic memory.
He told me one time, he said, I remember every moment of my life.
And I thought, oh crap, I can't remember what I had for breakfast.
I was thinking the same thing.
But so because of that, he was able to acquire so much knowledge
in the 94 years that he was here.
And the first person that he really shared it with, to a great extent,
was Ray Hunt.
And Tom always said that Ray Hunt was his greatest student.
And it was like a perfect storm, because Ray was at a desperate time
in his life to find a way to work with this horse.
So he met Tom.
And then they spent almost nonstop the next nine years together.
And without Ray Hunt bringing this style of horsemanship to the world,
nobody would have ever heard of Tom Dorrance.
But likewise, without Tom Dorrance, Ray Hunt
would have just been another cowboy in the Great Basin
and would have remained in obscurity.
So it was a divine meeting that the two of them became friends.
Now, so you've got Ray as Tom's student and then you as Ray's.
Do you see any similarities in personality of that young person
who first went in and met that mentor, knowing that probably there
were many others that went there and just weren't the right fit?
Yeah, yeah, I do.
Like I was kind of looping back to the personality differences,
say, between my brother and I and how we dealt with some
of the more difficult things in our childhood.
I was always a really tender-hearted kid.
And that was part of my makeup.
And so it was almost like that was so much a part of my being
that no matter what happened to me, that wasn't going to change at all.
And yet I think some people are, from a series of unfortunate events,
some people are changed by it.
That they may not have been that person had things not gone wrong in their earlier life.
They might have been someone else.
So then when you're working with Ray, to turn it around the other way,
what was it he saw in you that made him realize that you were the right person to walk through the door?
Well, first of all, he saw right off that I'm capable of working really hard and being absolutely focused.
And he noticed when he was teaching, there was never a word I missed.
There was never a time where he picked up on a rein or moved a foot that I didn't see it.
He knew how focused I was.
And he knew how bad I wanted it.
He got a sense of that pretty early on.
And I think that made him feel like investing his time with me was worthwhile.
Yeah, and I remember looking at noticing that when you were teaching at the workshop that I got to sit into,
that even though it was a pretty big arena and people weren't exactly right next to you,
that you were picking up on too much pressure and a spur or just a little bit too much pull on the rein or whatever it was.
And I know it's the same thing.
Like you, even though they were all circling around you,
you were able to notice even the tiny little mistakes that some of these riders were making.
Yeah, yeah.
But of course, you know, that's experience.
You know, I'm just starting my 38th year since my first clinic.
So, yeah, I've had quite a bit of experience at it now.
I believe I'm the old guy doing this.
I'm starting to believe that myself.
Trust me, I'm 45, which is not old.
But yeah, you start thinking that this movie came out at this time.
You're like, oh, my God, that was 30 years ago.
That's crazy. Yeah.
So what I'd love to do then is just transition to, you know, as the quote unquote horse whisper,
you know, the principles that Tom taught Ray and Ray taught you.
What are some of the common mistakes you see now with these horse owners?
Because, I mean, again, I've had some canine officers and members of the military
and they talk the same thing. It's usually the owner of the dog that's making the mistake.
So what are some of the most common things that you've seen over this entire, you know,
three plus decades with these horse owners?
Well, you know, it does harken back to, of course, I wrote the line for Redford in the horse whisper
when he said, I don't help people with horse problems, I help horses with people problems.
Of course, Redford didn't ever tell anybody I wrote that.
It's a world exclusive now.
It got his attention, you know, he was like, I get what you're talking about.
And really and truly, it's that people don't understand the nature of a horse.
They don't understand why he does what he does, what he's thinking, what he's really feeling.
They don't and they don't understand how to approach a horse with a feel.
And I don't mean in that physical sense. I do partly, but with a feel that fits the horse,
that can be reassuring to the horse, that can give comfort to the horse.
You know, there an extreme version of it is, I was talking about a person that's a kind of a mutual friend of mine
and another friend and how he struggles with working with horses.
And he said, what is the deal with him?
And I said, you know what, if you poke the wire up his body, he could light half a Vegas.
And it's his nature that needs to change in order to fit horses and he's working at it.
But it doesn't come easy for him.
And but anybody can really learn this, but it's going to take some knowledge
and it's going to take a lot of hard work, a devotion, and it takes a hell of a lot of humility
because there's going to be a lot of times you're going to have to admit you're wrong.
That's not easy for people.
A lot of times what happens is if a horse is doing something that the owner thinks is wrong,
well, it's right to the horse or he wouldn't be doing it.
But they take it personally and it's not personal to the horse.
He's doing the best he can to survive.
Another thing that I really kind of resonated with in the documentary was the whole concept of fear.
And, you know, we talk about even when I was little, I said if my father was a horse vet,
a veterinarian, so I was around horses my whole childhood.
But, you know, you could see even as a small kid that when someone was scared of horses,
same with dogs, they pick up on that, you know, and then that the anxiety seems to project back onto the horse as well.
So what are your philosophies when you're teaching these clinics on fear?
Well, number one, it all goes back in the clinics to helping the person to understand
that the thing they first and foremost need to communicate with the horse is,
look, you're a herd animal and you need to understand about me that I'm capable of moving your feet.
I'm capable of getting you to yield to me.
But you need to know I don't want you to yield to me because you're afraid.
I want you to yield to me because it's the easiest thing for both of us.
Both of us will feel relief through that.
So that's why I'll have people work with horses on the ground first.
On the end of a lead rope to start the dance.
What's going to be a great dance their whole life?
That's where the dance begins.
And when a person feels like they they absolutely do have some influence on how that horse moves his feet.
That gives them confidence that when they get on, they can expect the same thing.
Yeah. So when there's when there's trust and the fear starts to diminish, then it's it magnifies.
That relationship with every single time they're getting back on.
Sure. And and they'll through working with them on the ground before they ride them,
they'll start to recognize the horse actually turning loose to them, giving to them,
giving everything and giving up his his fear or his inclination to defend himself.
And that that moves people and moves them in the right direction to where they to where they're
inclined to to offer the horse something very fitting when they get on.
But fear can be here can be paralyzing for the human and the horse.
Well, speaking of that, have you got any stories that kind of popped to mind of some broken horses,
slash people that you've worked with that have had an incredible journey together and a lot of healing?
Well, you know, actually, no, I can't single out one person.
But I'll tell you this, I if I had.
And I have quite a few, but I've kept some some letters over the years, but.
If I had kept them all, it would fill my hotel room.
I'm sitting in right now of people that in one way or another,
through working with the horse and becoming acquainted with me,
how it profoundly changed their life in a way that another human couldn't have given them that.
I mean, there there are thousands of stories and.
Every one of them is is really important to the person that wrote me the letter, you know, it's.
And I wouldn't say that every single person that goes to a clinic is going to have a life changing experience.
Some are going to go home just thinking, well, I'm getting along a whole lot better with my horse.
I can get him to do some things I never got him to do before, and I know more than I did last week.
But there is always going to be a percentage of them.
That the horse will profoundly change their life for the better.
And and those are the those are the stories that you really like to hear about.
Yeah, well, I've heard like several of my peers in a first responder and military community
have such a powerful response to equine therapy when they've, you know, we're dealing with things like PTSD.
What is it you think the about the horse and that relationship that's healing for a human
that maybe hasn't even ridden much before?
Well, you know, I think and I'm no expert on PTSD, but again, I've often pondered that maybe maybe I have that as a kid,
because, gosh knows, I dealt with life and death every single day through my childhood.
But we didn't even know what it was then. So maybe I do know something about it.
I'd say so. I really would.
But I do. But I do know this, that there's something profoundly comforting about the horse when he does respond to you.
And then all of the possibilities of negativity that could come out in a person from having endured really traumatic things in their life.
Every one of those negative characteristics will guarantee you fail with horse.
The horse won't cover for you. He won't respond in spite of that. He just won't.
And frankly, dogs are not always that way.
Sometimes dogs will respond really positively to people that you just think, why would that dog even like that person?
It's a different animal. The dog is a different animal. And yet they can be so beneficial in helping people.
But the horse is a little more choosy. There's something really unique about the horse that when the horse responds to a person,
like I've often said to people, if your horse says you're a dirty SOB, well, you are.
And yet if the horse, by the way, responds to you, he says you're a good guy, you are. You don't need me to tell you that.
The horse just did. And I think that might be why the horses are so profoundly effective in helping troubled people.
Well, it seems like it's almost like a great mirror, like you were saying. It's showing you what you are.
But then as you improve as a person with your emotional journey, as long as you haven't destroyed the trust at the beginning,
it's then going to come along with that journey. And when you realize the horse trusts you,
I'm assuming that then that individual is going to have realization that they are at a certain point way further than they ever were before.
Absolutely. I've said it a million times over the years. The horse is a mirror to your soul.
So kind of transitioning from that for a moment, you obviously had a very rocky childhood.
What was it like for you when you became a father? Because I know we talk about the cycle with you and your brother breaking that.
And that's absolutely something that we talk about on this a lot, where even if you came from alcoholism or abuse, whatever,
it's up to that generation to say, you know, this is where it dies as a dad now. What was it like when you first became a dad?
You know, it was I'd had years to think about it, and it was pretty much the opposite about it,
pretty much the opposite of what I grew up experiencing as a little guy.
I had a really good idea what kind of a dad I wanted to be, because I had a really clear idea what kind of a dad I didn't want to be.
And so honestly, I didn't struggle that much with it.
I've got an amazing relationship with my daughter and always have had and always will.
And not the kids still can't be difficult. Anybody who's a parent gets that, you know, they're going to give you a hard time at times.
But, you know, that's just part of the experience of being a parent.
But I guess for a while when Riyadah was small, I sort of, sort of always had it in the back of my mind to sort of police my behavior,
just trying to make sure that I noticed if even a little bit of my dad surfaced in me,
that I would know it right away and do something about it.
And I guess I sort of lived a little bit in fear of that for the first few years.
And then I realized, well, that's not going to happen. So I should over quit worrying about it.
Because that's something that's not spoken about. You know, we talked about the horse being a mirror to your soul.
I think that our children are as well. And obviously there's two parents involved at minimum, you know, unless one is completely left.
And I think that's something that we need to pay attention to as well, is if your child is acting a certain way,
then you need to also look in the mirror and see if that's something you're projecting on your child as you would a horse.
Yeah, well, it's like that old saying goes, they have the rocks, the cradle rules the world.
Yeah, exactly. Now, very kind of tangent question, but I know when I was watching you,
I don't know why this popped into my head, but so you're using kindness and compassion and blowing everyone's minds when it comes to the horse world.
You know, and these people that are clearly been in the horse world for a long time, you know,
are attending your clinics and having these amazing breakthroughs.
And it made me think about, for example, the way we do the prison system here.
We take broken humans and they are broken because obviously no one is born and becomes a laughing little toddler.
And it's like one day I'm going to rob banks or I'm going to deal drugs. You know, they're taking down that road.
So what if you were able to just completely reimagine the law enforcement and the prison system,
knowing what you know about kindness and compassion with horses?
What would be some of the things that you think you would put into that so that we actually were able to turn these men and women around from the trauma of their past and turn it into positivity?
Well, you know, I think there's that's been dabbled with a little bit in some of the prison programs out west here have done the Mustang thing,
having them start horses and work with horses. And I think that has been amazingly enough a government program that actually succeeded.
Brilliant.
Which you don't get to say that very often.
But I think that has been a really good thing. And I think there could be a lot more of that.
And, you know, I'm not Pollyanna either. I understand that some people are they are destined to be criminals and they're going to be criminals their whole life, no matter what we try to do.
But there are some that aren't. And I think there's probably quite a few that slip through the cracks that through the right things happening could have found some redemption.
And again, I think the horse can be a big player in that. And it has proven every time they've ever done it in the prison system, it's proven to be a success.
Brilliant. I love hearing that. And they have dog programs in the prisons, too.
Like, there's just there's some things that we don't do.
You know, we use the school, the Philadelphia model, where we just lock them up into buildings with no windows.
And, you know, I'm not picking on us.
I mean, England does it and a lot of the world does the same system. But you think about all the healing elements, you know, the just being in the outdoors, seeing the sun every day, being around animals.
You know, these seem to be so so easy to use and incorporate that maybe, like you said, that middle 50 percent that maybe we can steer might actually leave and then become functioning members of society.
Sure. Well, there's actually a few prisons I'm aware of out west here.
Frankly, one in Montana, Deer Lodge, Montana, they have prison ranches and they learn how to cowboy.
They learn how to shoe horses, drive tractors, eargate, put up hay.
It's just like a regular working ranch. They just happen to be inmates.
And, you know, and that's based on, you know, good behavior, getting to work on the prison ranch.
And they so they learn so many things about agriculture, not just working with horses like I do, but they they end up a lot of them leaving the Deer Lodge penitentiary and going out on ranches and having a job and being productive.
And yeah, so there's some of that that's possible out west here that wouldn't be possible in, you know, in a more urban type setting.
Yeah. Yeah, it's very interesting to me.
I know we have one of our prisons here.
They I know they certainly grow food and I believe I'm told it's for the prison.
Well, that's fantastic.
It's not only do the inmates get to be out there growing it, but they actually get nourishing food to eat rather than, you know, whatever the process alternative with, which I think in turn is then going to help them feel more vibrant and want to do something with their life.
Yeah, I agree. Yeah.
Right. Well, then one other thing.
So, like you said, you've been doing this 38 years with the clinics.
You have one element of this whole project is is wellness, you know, mental wellness that we've talked quite a lot about, but also physical wellness as well.
What is it that you attribute to being so fit and be able to ride and be able to to rope and cowboy, you know, as when you're not a young man anymore?
Well, you know, it's I think it's a discipline, it's a self discipline that I've acquired through working with the horses that that I think that discipline just becomes how you live.
I think it just kind of takes takes your life over here.
You're not going to be a certain way when you work with horses and then, you know, worthless piece of junk when your when horses aren't present, you know, it's the the change just happens in you as a person.
And then I've always been I've I've always recognized the value of being being disciplined in yourself.
And it's odd that people will talk about they want their horses to be disciplined and obedient.
OK, I get that. But it has to come from the human first.
Yeah, so so not to demonize people that struggle with their weight, but if they're they don't have discipline in their eating, their exercise.
And again, there's probably going to be some carryover in how they are as a horse person.
Oh, absolutely. And, you know, everybody knows there are different reasons for people to have problems with eating too much.
Sometimes it's just they're not physical. They're lazy.
They're just flat, lazy. And it doesn't take a whole lot.
If you're living a real sedentary life, it doesn't take a whole hell of a lot of calories to keep you alive.
And most of the time they take in about a hundred times more than what they need.
That's that's part of it. But for some people, it's it's a mental illness, too, I think.
It's there. It's it starts in your brain. That's where it happens.
And, you know, some people say, well, he can't help it or she can't help it.
Well, I'm not Pollyanna about that either, because you know what?
I'm a I'm a real World War Two buff. I watch all the documentaries on World War Two and just love all the stories and the history of it.
And of all the film clips I've seen in photographs, I've never seen a fat POW.
That's very true. I mean, in those era, not even a fat soldier. You think about it.
Right. They were thin. All right. Absolutely. Even the soldiers.
So, you know, I just think the discipline thing and and that could be something that goes right back again to the parenting.
And if you don't believe me, go to Wal-Mart and start looking up and down the aisles and look at the parents.
Yeah. And then you look at how they look at how they're shopping.
They want their kids to. It's like an alcoholic trying to get their kid to drink with them.
So true. I had a dear friend. I had a dear friend in South Carolina.
I met him out west here cowboying, but he was from South Carolina.
His mother was a horrible alcoholic. His dad, who knows where the hell he went.
And he came out west and was kind of doing pretty well as a cowboy and drank a little, but not a problem.
And he eventually moved back home to South Carolina and his mother turned him into a full fledged alcoholic because she wanted to drink and partner.
And she was a very domineering woman psychologically with her son.
And he actually hosted some of my clinics, early ones in South Carolina, North Carolina.
And I got a phone call one night that he was found in a ditch that.
Overdosed on alcohol. And his mother killed him.
She lived another 10 years and it's terrible to say it, but it would have been a blessing if she had died 20 years before.
He'd still be around today. And, you know, just that kind of stuff.
And it goes back to the parenting thing again. Yeah.
And even with I talk about as a few times on the show, the schools like don't get me wrong.
The parents have to be parents first. And I totally understand that.
And I try and do my part in my son's lives. But, you know, when we're feeding these children,
the process crap that they have in the schools now, you know, what is that telling them?
Like, hey, this is normal. And, you know, we don't want to fat shame.
So it's OK if you're getting obese at the age of 12. And that's not the way it should be.
We should be giving our kids the best food. We should teach them how to cook and letting them already understand
the health problems that come with obesity and some of these other areas.
You know, and it's something that, you know, people are so oversensitive about being politically incorrect.
And it doesn't mean that that you don't love people who are overweight or someone who is handicapped in some way.
Being morbidly obese, you're just as handicapped as you would be if you were born without a leg.
It is a handicap, but some of it is created by bad choices, just like what you said in the schools,
what they're feeding kids and telling kids it's all right to put into their body.
I know this, that the stereotypes that go along with someone who is overweight and been overweight their whole life,
I'm not saying it's right. It's not right.
But if you're looking at a thin, fit, energetic person and then you're looking at someone who is overweight,
you know which one you're going to hire.
You know which one you're going to hire because there are stereotypes that go along with someone who has a weight problem,
that they're slothful, they're not motivated, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Yet they might be way more qualified than the thin person.
So just given that, that that's reality, whether you like it or not, that's reality.
Why would you handicap your child?
So he's going to be the last one out of the blocks in this race of life and he's going to lose.
Because you didn't even know how to feed your child.
Yeah. And then it sounds like it's coming from a cruel place, but it's the complete opposite.
It's the kindness and compassion.
You know what you can do with a vibrant body.
You know, I mean, you can ride, you can climb, you can surf, you can swim, you can do all these amazing things.
So it's, you know, wanting a nation, a world to be nourished properly,
for it to come naturally from farms where animals are raised holistically and not cruelly.
And men and women are around about the right way.
And no one needs to walk around with a six pack or Arnold Schwarzenegger's physique,
but the ability to use the body the way it was given.
And it's kind of been turned around where you can't say that because that's cruel.
It's like, no, what's cruel is that these people are being lied to about all these medications and these foods that are killing them.
And the most cruel thing you can do is is create an environment where someone's children are actually going to die before they do,
because that's for the first time we've actually got a point where our kids are dying younger than their parents, which is unacceptable.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely right.
But sometimes you have to be brutally honest about the cause and effect of things.
And people consider you to be, if you are honest in that, that they consider you to lack compassion or that you that you really don't care.
And I think it's quite the opposite, to be honest with you.
Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. Well, I want to just cover one more topic and then go to some closing questions so I can let you go.
So I'm sure you're exhausted from your journey, but traveling.
So you have circumnavigated the globe probably scores of times and you've done clinics in the Middle East and the Australia region and Europe.
What are some of your favorite places and also in those journeys,
were there any areas where you found that there was a greater natural understanding of the way you do horsemanship, you know, innately, for some reason in that culture?
Well, you know, a lot of times people will ask me, what's my favorite place to go?
And honestly, I guess it's home because I've spent way less time than anywhere else.
But it's not really the I've been traveling so much and for so long.
Every place is kind of unique. What makes me enjoy being at a certain place is really the the really dear people that I've gotten to be friends with over the last almost four decades.
I just told some people last fall at a place where I was, I said, listen, to be honest with you, I've seen about all of your state.
I need to see and I live in a lot more desirable place than you guys do, but you're here.
And I said, the only reason I come back is because I really love spending time with you guys.
I said, because I'm not going back for the scenery anymore.
I've seen it all. And that's that's what it is from one week to the next.
You know, I'm going to Australia tomorrow and it's one hundred and five there and the whole place is burning up.
And would I rather be home? Yeah, I would.
But I'm going to see some people that are really dear friends and that are really like minded people that are their whole year kind of revolves around.
Riding with me and Tamworth, Australia, you know, so with that comes quite a bit of responsibility.
But as far as far as a place to where it's just like an anomaly, a unique culture.
In a way, I guess this should be reassuring.
There really isn't one in that.
People are pretty much the same all over and they'd probably get along a hell of a lot better if they all understood that about each other.
They're not that different.
You know, I guess if you took organized religion out of it, there'd be quite a few million people still here that that aren't.
I mean, the reasons for people killing each other.
And it just doesn't seem to make much sense to me.
No, I couldn't agree more. I absolutely couldn't agree more.
Well, where I live is Ocala.
And when you look at the sign for Ocala, it says horse capital of the world.
So my question to the city of Ocala is why Brannerman hasn't been to the horse capital of the world in the last 36 years?
Well, I was in Wellborn, which is not very far from there.
Right. A few years ago.
Yeah, I was there.
Just I've just there's only so many places I can go a year.
I'm just in a lot of the places that I'm still going to.
I have a loyalty to them because they're the ones that brought me to the dance.
So until somebody says, well, I don't want to do a clinic anymore, put one on for you, then I don't really have a an open date to do it.
And I've been doing 40 clinics a year for a long time.
But just a little sidebar, there are a few other places that call themselves the horse capital of the world, too.
Yeah, I was thinking that because I'm from England.
I know we had a shitload of horses there, too.
So we go to Lexington and they'll tell you the same thing.
They have a sign horse capital of the world.
Well, we're greedy. We're also lightning cap to the world.
So I guess we have all the horses and lightning, which sounds dangerous.
But that is a beautiful area of Ocala.
And gosh, there are a lot of horses there.
Yes, that's really it's a neat place.
And I may get there one day.
It'd be a good place to come and do a clinic.
And I'm sure there'd be plenty of people show up because I've sure had a lot of people ask me to come over the years and just haven't had an open date.
But I'll get there eventually.
Good Lord, will. And if I live long enough.
Yeah. Well, they just built or a building.
It's not done yet. Some ridiculously huge horse arena venue complex, whatever you want to call it.
I mean, hundreds of thousands of square feet.
So it's it kind of when the construction happened, some of the horse farms obviously sold and they put communities on.
I'm sitting on one right now. So I'm not going to be a hypocrite about that.
But I think they're really trying to pull the horse community back to our town.
So, you know, you might find yourself through through that.
We'll see. But I mean, you always have somewhere to stay if you ever come here.
I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you.
All right. Well, then let's go to some closing questions so I can let you go.
So firstly, tell me about your books.
And I want to also pick your brains about other people's books that you love.
Well, the you know, the the very first book that I ever wrote was was really more of an instructional book just called Groundwork, the first impression.
And it was my first attempt at writing.
And it really just was a sort of a study aid for people that have been to my clinics that have been learning this groundwork that I talk about so much.
And I actually when I sat down to write the book, what inspired it was there was a really cool book called The Little Red Book on Tennis.
And it was short, to the point, very simple, but really was a phenomenon at one time.
And so that's why my book is read.
Interesting. But when I sat down to write it, and this has been twenty five years ago, maybe more,
I wrote it in three hours. Really? And I never rewrote.
I had someone go over it for spelling and punctuation. And that is it.
I wrote one one draft and twenty five years later, I wouldn't change it.
I could maybe add a couple of chapters and stuff that I've that I've maybe learned in the last twenty five years that I wouldn't change a thing.
So after that, I got to thinking about some of the stories that I've told over the years in the clinics about horses and people and different things that stories that moved me and even some stories that were.
They were kind of hard for me to tell because of my feelings I have for the horses that.
I was in a place called Mabane, North Carolina, and at that time, my wife was with me and a fellow named Kip, who was working for me.
And we were at this bed and breakfast out in this beautiful meadow and kind of in the middle of nowhere, if there's such a place.
And my wife was getting all dressed up and they were going to head into town and go shopping or something.
And she said, what are you what are you doing? Why aren't you getting ready? I said, oh, I'm not going to go.
You guys go. I got some I want to work on. And she said.
What would that be? I said, I'm going to write a book. I'm going to start writing a book.
And she said about what I said, well, it's going to be part autobiographical,
and then I'm going to sort of change gears about midway and move into stories about horses and people that I think have a really interesting lesson to them, life lesson to them.
And I want it to be a book that is a book of encouragement to people who may be very well living at a really dark place that they understand that sometimes you make the right choices, you can make a happy ending out of it.
So I said, that's sort of my goals on this book. And of course, Mary said, well, you don't know how to write a book.
You're not an author. And I said, yeah, but I'm going to be in a few hours.
And she said, well, how are you going to get it published? I said, I'm just going to tell you this.
This is going to be a good book. And I will tell you this. The first publisher I take it to will publish my book.
She said, do you know how many people write books that can get them published?
I said, yeah, but that was them, Mary. And she just shook her head.
Well, I was wrong. It was the second publisher that I took it to that that published my book.
The first one was St. Martin's Press. And I'll bet you years later, they were thinking, why did we pass on that book?
Because my and that book was The Far Away Horses. It was the first serious book that I wrote.
And it basically it was sort of a small niche publisher, never put much money into it at the time.
It was Globe Pequot. And they would take people that were kind of specialized in their field.
It could be a fly fisherman or it could be, I don't know, a tennis player or something.
And they would the person already had a bit of a name and a reputation.
So they knew there was a built in audience and they would put basically no money into the book and they would print it.
And then all the people that recognized the person's name would buy a book and they make a quick million dollars on the book and give the author nothing.
And they move on to the next guy. There's lots of publishers work like that.
Sounds like a hell of a deal.
Yeah. So so anyway, they never put any marketing or or anything behind the book because that just would lower their profits.
And now it's sold over 200,000 copies.
It's you know, and of course, the the the milestone is 100,000 copies makes it a bestseller.
And since in the last few years, I get contacted fairly often from them that they wonder if I have another book in me.
Oh, brilliant. Well, you got a lot more stories.
So you had that and then you had the belief as well.
What made you write Belief? Yeah. Yeah.
I wrote Belief after that. And then I wrote a couple other, you know, more specialized books on on ranch roping and handling livestock
and things like that that would be, you know, the demographics pretty small for that.
But it was something I wanted to do to just kind of have it on record, have it be somebody behind someday.
Brilliant. Well, faraway horses, I've got I'm going on a cruise with my family in about 10 days.
We bought it last year and we waited a year to actually pay for it.
But we're we're leaving in a couple of weeks and that's one of the ones I'm taking with me.
So I can't wait to read that. Oh, good.
Yeah, that's my. I haven't quite finished the faraway horses project yet.
I've I've wanted for years to have it end up a feature film or maybe a cable film because and and you tell me after you read it.
But it's a it's a story that I I don't feel like I've told the whole story until I do a film on it.
And and we even have a script.
I've finished the script and just kind of wait around for the right person to to help us do the film.
And I'm still waiting, but I'm a patient man.
It'll happen eventually. But it's it's hard to compete with, you know, Marvel characters and
Spider-Man 65. Yeah.
But there are still people out there that that like a good story.
Yeah, but I know we were talking about at the beginning of the interview, actually, when I went back.
So for everyone listening, we split this into two.
This is over the phone now. But, yeah, when we were and I agree, 100 percent like you get to my age,
you know, middle middle age, the story's been told over and over again.
They literally took my 80s movies and remade the same damn movie.
So I crave, you know, original story, which is what's so amazing about this podcast medium,
is you get to hear these people and their stories.
But I know some of the amazing people that we mentioned in the beginning that that are looking forward to hearing this episode.
Hopefully, some of them are connected and maybe that will, you know, help push it forward.
But you never know. No, you never know. Exactly.
All right. Well, that's that's your book. So what about other people's books?
Are any books apart from the little red book on tennis that that you've loved and recommended to other people?
Well, there was one that Tom Dorrance and Ray Hunt recommended to me that sort of surprised me.
I read it and enjoyed it. It was.
It was called Kinship with All Life.
And it was written by J. Alan Boone. And it's not a not a huge book, but a really thought provoking book.
And one also that I that I read that, you know, it's a bit of a dry read.
But if you're really looking at self-improvement, it really it did something for me.
And it's called Psycho Cybernetics.
I don't know if you've ever heard of it. No, I haven't, actually.
But it's a it's it's an it's an amazing book.
It really helps you understand the human mind.
And in ways that you just maybe never thought of it before.
And and honestly, based on our conversation and your questions, you would be intrigued by that book, Psycho Cybernetics.
Excellent. Well, I have to get that, too.
That's not going on the cruise with me. I've got enough books to read as it is.
But but I'll get it for for down the road.
So thank you. I've never had either of those two recommended.
So that's two more to add to the list. All right.
So then on the lighter side, I'm probably going to spend my day tomorrow reading reading a Mitch Rapp novel.
Mitch Rapp. Is that the author or the character?
It's the character in it.
The lead child in Vince Bland, they do the spy novels and stuff.
OK, brilliant. I kind of enjoy escaping to that sometimes.
Excellent. Well, yeah, that's the thing. You got to you got to have the fiction thrown in, too.
Well, speaking of fiction, are there any any movies that you love?
I want to talk about documentaries in a moment with regular movies.
Oh, you know. I like to laugh.
I like good movies that that there'd be movies that you probably wouldn't expect that I would like.
Now, going back the way as you'd be in British, you'll appreciate this.
A Fish Called Wanda was one of my favorites.
Yeah, the Monty Python guys.
Yeah. And the Big Lebowski, I think that pretty much connects with about everybody.
Yeah. My wife just rolls her eyes.
She rolls her eyes. She is not amused by it.
I just know. I said, you know, you you just you just simply don't understand that humor, Marriott.
Oh, we'll have to watch it together.
And she's like, not a chance.
Did you ever see Fargo? The Coen brothers did. Fargo.
I saw that. Yeah. That was a great film, too.
And, you know, there was a movie a few years ago and the title of it evades me right now.
But it's something something lions and Robert DeVall did it.
And who was the other guy that starred in it?
And they were a couple of old bachelors that lived together in farm country,
and they had been very famous agents and adventurers and military heroes, secondhand lions.
That's the name of it. I saw that.
It's a great film.
Oh, that is just that was just one of my favorites.
What a neat, neat film.
Was that Michael Caine was the other one? Is that right?
Michael Caine. Yes. Yeah.
You got it. Excellent.
All right. Well, you mentioned World War Two documentary.
Excuse me. Documentaries.
Did you ever see Band of Brothers when it was on?
I did and loved it. Yes.
So any other documentaries that you could recommend?
Um, there's some kind of on the spot.
So actually, I'm going to draw a blank on that.
But I do, you know, I do enjoy documentaries that are but I have to say the documentaries that I enjoy mostly are the ones that are not politically motivated.
Yeah. Documentaries that just tell you a story that you wouldn't have otherwise heard in the mainstream.
Those are the kind of documentaries I'm more drawn to.
I'm not I'm I'm a little bored with the documentaries being just a political infomercial for whomever is putting it out.
Yeah, absolutely. Brilliant.
Actually, have you seen the Ken Burns war ones?
I'm watching the Vietnam one at the moment. It was amazing.
I mean, again, it doesn't seem to sway in any particular side.
It's just saying how it is. But the history of that conflict is fascinating.
I just started the Vietnam one and my wife has seen it and she said it is amazing.
Yeah, I'm on I just finished episode one.
So we're probably right there at the same place.
Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant.
All right. So then next question, is there a person that you recommend to come on this podcast as a guest to speak to?
The first responders, military and emergency medicine personnel of the world.
Well, if you could get him.
Tom Brokaw is a really unique man.
And he was the kind of the head man at NBC for years and years.
Tom Brokaw would be a very interesting person to talk to.
Just because of his years and years in the news business, he is a he's a really neat, neat guy.
Did you ever meet him?
Yeah, I did clinics at his ranch in Montana for many years, know his whole family.
Oh, brilliant. Good people.
Excellent. All right. Well, yeah, I'm another great person.
There's another journalist, Lisa Ling, who's one of the the modern ones now.
I heard an interview with her with Tim Ferriss.
She's another person I would love to get on because all her journalism, again,
seems to come from a kind of kindness and compassion route as well.
So another person I'd love to get on. Yeah, yeah, you bet.
All right. So the very last question before we make sure everyone knows where they can find the books and your clinics and reach out to you.
Aside from writing, if there's anything else, what do you do to decompress?
I play golf. I love playing golf.
I started that about well, I started playing golf at 50, which turns out you probably should start it sooner.
But I play golf everywhere I go, and I'm just nuts for it because it's it's a really hard game.
I always loved basketball. I was always passionate about that.
But it's not a game you can play when you travel.
But golf is. And gosh, I'm just I'm just nuts about the game.
Now, what is it about golf?
Because I know there's a couple of other people on the show.
And to them, they're I think I want to say they're soldiers or athletes or something where,
you know, there's kind of organized chaos in their world.
So the golf for them was just there's this ball.
I have to hit it a certain way and get it into this this area.
And this the simplicity and the the being present element that was it for them.
What what's it about?
It, you know, I guess a little bit similar to fly fishing, which I'm a passionate fly fisherman, too.
But it's a it's kind of a zen like thing that you have to everything else in your world has to disappear
for a few hours if you plan on being a good golfer, you have to.
You have to just put everything else aside and take a mental vacation from everything.
But hitting that damn ball and and it's it really is a mental vacation for me.
And yet I I don't dabble at it. I don't dabble at anything.
Everything I do, I try to be good at it.
So, you know, I I work at that when I'm golfing.
I am working at golfing and being a good golfer.
And, you know, now I'm going to be 58 next month.
And and I'm a five handicap, so I can play.
I'm no Tiger Woods, but for an old guy that started at 50, I can play.
Brilliant. Now, what elements of the horsemanship do you bring to your golf game?
Feel. Physical feel.
There it's not just a mental thing.
It's also its coordination, its timing, its balance.
The physical, the physical attributes that would make you a good hand with horses
certainly apply to playing golf and the and after you read Psycho Cybernetics,
you'll get that, too,
because it's visualizing what you want to have happen and make sure that happens.
Excellent. All right.
Well, then the very last question, if you want to reach out to you,
want to find all your work, what's the best place to go to online?
Well, Brandemond.com would be the best bet.
That's my website, and it kind of steers you in in the right direction.
And something that is going to be coming up in 2020,
late in 2020 is is and I want to I'm not very technical.
I'll call it an app or a platform that's going to be launched called Three Rain,
spelled like a bridal rain, R E I M.
And this three rain is going to open up a a new thing for me in terms of education.
It's going to make it possible for people to go to that app
and download to their phone little vignettes of me five minutes,
10 minutes and full length videos if they want to where you don't have to buy DVDs
anymore and wait for them to show up in the mail.
It's going to make the education part of it.
Just it's going to revolutionize it for me.
And over the years that I have left,
I'm going to put as much content on that as I possibly can.
And so it would be something to look for in the fall of 2020.
Three Rain. Brilliant.
You're literally about 30 years too late, because if you see me ride
when I was a small child on the farm I grew up in,
I think I needed the entire encyclopedia.
But it seems like a great app for for everyone now.
And again, I was telling my wife just just a moment ago
how this this podcast has been so incredible
because I get Josh Brolin who recommends your documentary.
I watch Buck and then a few months later,
I'm sitting in the arena watching you do the clinic and then now we're talking again.
So, you know, it's so amazing to to talk to you face to face.
But watching you work, anyone out there who who rides and I grew up with horses.
I was not a not a good horseman, just, I guess, brave.
It was the only thing and I had a very big helmet.
But it was incredible to watch and seeing the different
personalities that were circling that arena.
Some you could see had humility, some you could see were peacocking
and trying to show everyone how they already had it.
And it was it was kind of interesting to see how those personalities
reflected in the horses, reflected in in the instruction that you were giving.
But, yeah, I cannot speak highly enough of attending one of your clinics.
I hope that Ocala one day is able to bring you here.
But I just I thank you so much for your vulnerability.
I mean, telling your story of a very sad, traumatic childhood.
But being that beacon of life, excuse me, of light,
taking that trauma and doing this incredible thing with it.
And as you said, stopping that cycle is inspiring to me as an Englishman
and a firefighter that tripped over your, you know, your work.
But I mean, anyone in the horse world, anyone that owns an animal of any sort,
that they need to to look into your work.
And I can't wait to read your book.
So thank you so much for being so generous and coming on this podcast.
Well, it's kind of you to say all those nice things.
Sounds like you'd be talking about someone else.
I don't know that I deserve all that.
Well, I look forward to our paths crossing again, James.