Join us in our Online Campus (plus: The story of the Hag Capisco)

Sometimes you stumble on something amazing and free.

Maybe that's how you feel about this podcast?

That's how Annie felt this week when her dream office chair appeared outside her door...

You can buy good dog training (or great chairs). That's what School For The Dogs sells. But you can also get a lot of valuable dog training advice for nothing, if you're lucky. You, dear listener, just got lucky.

Transcript

This transcript was made automatically from the audio, so it may contain small errors.

You don't need to cause pain if you use your brain. Train your dog with love and science. Two little girls. My husband runs a student travel company, and a big perk of the job is that we get to spend a good deal of the summer in Europe. So I'm in the middle of getting ready to go.

But before I head out for the summer, I just wanted to drop in here. To talk quickly about luck. I was thinking about luck this week when I found a life-changing dream. Chair. So to back up a little bit, 10 years ago when School For The Dogs was being run out of my apartment, one night there was a huge fire and I ran out with my cat, my dog, my wallet, my phone and that was pretty much it and I lost a lot of stuff and you know some of that stuff Some was replaceable, some wasn't replaceable.

One thing I lost that was replaceable and I thought a lot about replacing was my office chair. I had a really great experience. I had gotten it because a few years before that I was writing for a Florida design magazine about sort of like famous and interesting design objects like, I don't know, the Arco lamp or the Barcelona chair sort of telling the stories of these usually pieces of furniture. And I got an assignment to write about the Aeron chair, which is a sort of famous design by Herman Miller of like an office chair has a sort of spidery look. And while I was writing about it, I spoke to like a chair sitting in.

Expert who told me that the Aaron was okay, but that the real chair to get was the Hog Capisco and the Hog Capisco is a sort of funny looking chair. It sort of looks like two plus signs and he explained that it puts like your knees in the perfect alignment with your hips and And you can, you know, sit on it forwards or backwards. And after doing this column for so many years, writing about things that I would never have the money to acquire, I was like, I am going to buy myself this office chair because God knows I am going to spend many hours at my desk. And so it was super expensive. I'd never spent anything, probably still haven't spent that much on furniture ever.

It was like $700. I had it for years, and I loved this chair. I loved sitting in it. I thought it was so cool looking, and I felt like, I don't know, I kind of like earned it in some way through this column. Anyway, lost the chair, and in the years since, I have thought about my chair a lot and thought, I guess, you know, I really could get another chair, but I just haven't been able to justify, now they're even more expensive, I just haven't been able to justify like spending a thousand dollars on a place to put my bum.

But every now and then I would like look on Craigslist and see if maybe someone was selling one. Anyway, the other night I'm coming home and right in front of my apartment, like like right in front on a trash heap is a Hag Capisco chair. It was like it fell out of the heavens. It's funny because I was with my friend. And I was like, this is the best day of my life.

She was like, I could tell she was like, I would pay to not bring this chair home. What if it has bedbugs? And I was like, I don't care. And it made me think about the value of the chair because I am so ridiculously excited to about this chair. I'm even more excited than I was about the first one that I actually paid for.

It's interesting how, you know, when you... Get something for free like that, it can feel sometimes even more valuable. And it really has to do with luck, right? I mean, I wouldn't have needed luck to just buy the chair. I could have just gone to buy the chair.

But luck brought me this, the exact same chair. I just had to pay the price of waiting 10 years and... Never knowing if I would find another one. Luck can be a lot more fickle than money. Another example that was making me think about luck and sort of the worth of things that we don't pay for.

I've been dealing with a bad back for about a year now and I have spent Tons of time with the chiropractor and physical therapy, time, money, energy. It's just, it's been a major, a major thing. A couple weeks ago, I had dinner with a friend who has also been struggling with back pain. Actually, Maria Skorabagatov, my friend who's a dog trainer who I've known since I was a kid. And we've compared notes on dealing with back pain.

And she told me about this podcast she listened to called Tell Me About Her Pain that had helped her tremendously. And I swear to God, I listened to exactly two episodes of this podcast and... I have figured out how to control my back pain. It's incredible. I am pretty much pain-free at this point using what I got out of two episodes of this podcast that I paid nothing for.

When I think about all the money I've spent on dealing with this, and I was just lucky that I had this friend who, and she was just lucky to find this podcast, so... So much value came out of this thing that is free and it's out there for everyone and I'm so grateful and it's worth so much to me. And I'd love to tell you the technique, but I didn't want to get into that today. I'm hoping maybe Maria can come on to the podcast and we can talk about it together because it actually relates to classical conditioning, which is one of my favorite topics. And I certainly suggest you go listen to Tell Me About Your Pain.

But I wanted to get to the part of this where I answer the question, what does any of this have to do with dog training? Well, I have had a very busy year. I just finished building out a CRM for School For The Dogs. I don't think I could have told you what a CRM was a year ago. And if you don't know, I won't bore you with it.

I wrote a book which will be out next summer. It's called How to Train Your Dog with Love and Science and it's being published by Source Books. And I've also been kind of obsessively trying to organize School For The Dogs content. We have so much amazing material we've created over the last decade plus of being a business, written material, videos, photos, tutorials, this podcast, but everything kind of lived all over the place and it has been a struggle for us to kind of figure out how to tie it all together. But now we have what we're calling School For The Dogs' online campus, and it is chock full of this content that we have been organizing from a robust and growing on-demand library of webinars and tutorials to the thing I'm probably...

Most excited about, which is a searchable library of people working with dogs, going through the kinds of exercises and protocols that we recommend. I know that before I got into dog training, I hadn't seen very many people train dogs. So I think what we're presenting is a really cool opportunity both for dogs And we're hosting it all on this platform that I really love called Mighty Networks where it's Really easy to reach out to other people through the platform to post questions and we are doing live office hours there throughout the week. And I love the fact that it's ours, you know, it's not something that we're doing on Facebook, nothing against people who have groups on Facebook, but personally I just feel like it's such a noisy space and There's so much misinformation out there and so many differing opinions that I kind of just like that we've been able to sort of create our own campus, our own digital space that's private and that you can find information that you are going to trust. That you know you can trust rather than scrolling through Google or YouTube videos and hoping for the best.

What we're trying to do is make it easier for our clients to have conversations with our trainers and other people in the community about dog training. And this is where it comes back to worth and luck. So first of all, Luck, you might say, brought you here. Luck certainly played a factor in me becoming a dog trainer, and I know maybe talking about luck is simplifying things, but I do think there's certainly an element of luck in all of our lives, and sometimes it... It means a designer chair showing up at your doorstep, and sometimes it means finding a podcast that's really meaningful to you, which I hope is meaningful to you.

I know it's been meaningful to some people because more than a couple podcast listeners have now become professional dog trainers going through our professional course. And they're really amazing people who I'm psyched to have connected with. And this podcast cost them nothing to listen to. A lot of what we're offering in the online campus is free. And that does not mean it is without value.

You see, like I was saying, if you can pay for some things, I think sometimes you can circumvent things. You can circumvent luck. If you can pay to have a trainer come to your home and work with you one-on-one, that's great. But otherwise, you might be left to luck in seeing what comes up in your scrolling. I feel glad that you are lucky enough to have found this podcast and that you will now take advantage of these free and low-cost resources that we have put in this special place.

That are just as valuable as things that you might pay a lot of money for. But you're lucky enough to have found these resources. So I'd love for you to give it a try. We are doing free office hours there every Thursday at 6 p.m. Eastern and we also have a training club which is $40 a month and that gives you access to 12 office hours a month, access to the video library and access to all the on-demand courses that do have a price attached to them.

And just for you, dear podcast listener, I have set up a plan that you can join and get the first month totally free, a $40 value. Just go to sftd.online.com. So the space is just starting out. I really hope that you'll be a part of it and take advantage of this huge amount of free and low cost value that we've packed into this virtual space. Virtual School.

Because dog training is out there for everyone and I think it can be really helpful to have guides to point you in the right direction. I feel like that's a lot of our mission at School For The Dogs is to help guide people to be the best dog owners they can possibly be to give their dogs the best possible life they can. And that does not mean that I am above charging for these services. Like I said, sometimes when you pay for something, it can be a little faster and easier. I would certainly love to be paying someone to help me train my dog.

But I don't believe that dog training is a luxury activity. You can learn about dogs and change your perspective and develop practical techniques and have a lot of fun doing it for next to nothing. So I hope to see you inside at online.schoolforthedogs.com. I probably won't be podcasting this summer since I'll be chasing two little kids around Europe, but I may repost some podcast episodes in the Online Campus. And if you do go check it out, please DM me there.

Please say hi. Sometimes with a podcast, I feel like I'm talking into a void. Occasionally people reach out, and I am so glad when they do. I have met some really incredible people. Incredible people.

So thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. I hope to be back in the fall with more new episodes. Thanks and have a great summer.