The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 156 - Mike Hingson and Keri Wyatt Kent

DON

Today on the Musical Innertube, we say hi again to our old friend Mike Hingson. Mike attended the University of California Irvine, graduating with honors and receiving a Masters degree in physics. And despite all that academic prowess, he still chose to hang out with John and me during our time at KUCI, something I'm sure he hasn't forgiven himself for. He's also the best-selling author of Thunder Dog, the true story of how he and his guide dog, Roselle, escaped from Tower One on 9/11 - you may remember we talked to him about that on a previous episode. He's an internationally acclaimed public speaker, the chief vision officer for accessiBe, a company that creates products to make websites more accessible to people with disabilities, and is also the National Federation of the Blind’s ambassador for its National Braille Literacy Campaign.

MIKE

And just got inducted, by the way, at UC Irvine as an alumni member of Phi Beta Kappa.

JOHN

My goodness. Congratulations, Michael.

MIKE

Thank you.

DON

Yeah, John and I just got a letter saying if we ever come back to KUCI, they’re gonna sic the dogs on us. So that's where we are.

We also have Keri Wyatt Kent. She is the co-author of the book that we are talking about today, that Mike has written with her, called Live Like A Guide Dog. True Stories From A Blind Man And His Dogs About Being Brave, Overcoming Adversity And Moving Forward In Faith. Keri is the author of 12 books and the co-author of 13 titles. She is the founder of A Powerful Story, a company that provides editing, collaborative writing, ghostwriting, and assisted self-publishing services. She is the author of the Substack newsletter Welcoming and Wandering, which explores hospitality and travel as spiritual practices. So welcome to Michael, Welcome to Keri.

MIKE

Thank you.

KERI

Thank you. Great to be here.

DON

Mike, this is another one of your shameless biographies. We go through your life and find out what you've done, and it's connected to each of your guide dogs. How many guide dogs have you had so far in your life?

MIKE

I am on number eight, Alamo. I got my first one in 1964, so it has now been 60 years for a dog. So we're actually doing pretty well at getting over the statistical norm - that is, guide dogs usually work 6 to 8 years, and now we're up to an average of eight years per dog, and I expect it to be higher because Alamo, who is the current dog, is doing really well.

DON

Great! How did the two of you get together, Keri, to write this book?

KERI

Well, as you know, you've interviewed Mike before for his best-selling book, Thunder Dog, which was about his 9/11 experience with Roselle and getting out of the towers. He co-wrote that book with my friend, our mutual friend, Susy Flory, and Susy and I are - I call her my writing bestie. We're both writers, we both are collaborative writers, and she let me know that Mike wanted to do another book and contacted me - she's working on a PhD, I guess it is now, and she was in school, grad school, and didn't have time to work with Mike on a book. So, she entrusted that to me. We met each other through Susy, started talking, and I was like, this is a great project. I'd be honored to be a part of. It so that's how we ended up together.

MIKE

And we've been doing this now for pretty close to three years. And just on the 20th of August, Live Like A Guide Dog was finally released to the public.

KERI

Quite a process. It was a lot of fun, though, but it took a while.

JOHN

I'd like to talk about the process a little bit. And by the way, I am also a freelance editor and writer. So, it's lovely to see and welcome a sister in the art. It's a fun job if you can hold on to it. And I wanted to ask how did the idea come about? Did Michael have the idea before he spoke to you? Or did it arise out of story conferences? Either one of you can talk about it.

KERI

Go ahead, Mike.

MIKE

Well, it kind of evolved. We, actually, kind of, were looking at a couple of different ways of going with it. And it was sort of an evolutionary process and absolutely a collaborative process. And we had originally thought about having a book that would include other people's stories of their dogs and so on. But as it evolved and working with the publisher, Tyndale House, and so on, it just kind of moved to really being a lot more of the story of me and my guide dogs. The whole idea behind the start of the book was that I wanted to start to talk about helping people learn to control fear. When the pandemic began, I realized that I had talked for 20 years basically about getting out of the World Trade Center and being calm, but I had never really done anything to teach people how they could learn to control fear rather than letting fear, as I would put it, blind them or overwhelm them. Whenever something unexpected happens, especially something horrific, people just go into a panic and the reality is you don't need to do that. You can learn to use fear as a very powerful tool to help. So that kind of was the basic premise of the book, but the way it got presented, and so on evolved over time. Keri, you might want to add to that.

KERI

I think Thunder Dog was about what happened to you and what you did. And this book, as it turned out, like, you know, like, correct, there was a lot of evolution, a lot of collaboration, even with our editor at Tyndale. But it's the how. So Thunder Dog was the what, Live Like a Guide Dog is the how. How to be brave. How to manage your fear. How not to let fear blind you. How to move forward in faith. Those sort of things. And so, it really offers, it tells like a story, but that then that's sort of the narrative. But along the way you get a lot of practical help with, what are some things I can do to not be blinded by fear, to not let fear cause me to panic. Fear’s a normal thing and we say that in the book it's a normal reaction that keeps us safe sometimes, but we can use our fear to live courageously.

MIKE

You can use, and learn to use, your fear reaction in a in a very powerful way. And one of the ways the book evolved, what we decided to do was to use examples that I learned from working with eight guide dogs, plus Karen’s service dog - my wife, who passed away two years ago - Fantasia, and we decided to use lessons that I learned from each of those dogs about fear and about life. We use those lessons to teach people about controlling fear. For example, one of the things that happened after - well, at the end of September 11th is we went home. And as soon as we got home, I took off Roselle's harness. I took her harness, had removed it, was going to take her out, she would have none of it. She immediately just shot off, grabbed her favorite tug bone, and started playing tug of war with my retired guide dog, Linnie. And the thing about that is that when I talk to the people at Guide Dogs, Guide Dogs For The Blind, they put it in perspective, they said, “Did anything threaten Roselle during the terrorist attacks?” And I said, no, nothing directly threatened her. And they said, well, there you go, because I had called to ask, in part, how this might affect her. And they said, well, since she wasn't threatened directly in any way, nothing affected her. When it was over, it was over. And we as people are always doing “what if?” about everything. Dogs live in the moment. And that's a really important and powerful lesson to learn. We focus on trying to control everything that we see, hear, do, or think about, rather than recognizing that what we ought to do is just worry about the things that we can control and not worry about the rest, and stop trying to do so much “what if?” And if we learn to live more like a dog, we'd probably be a whole lot better and we'd have a whole lot more saner world. But that's one of the lessons we talk about in the book. This whole idea of doing “what if?” in the right places but not doing it everywhere cause all that's going to do is drive you crazy.

KERI

Right. It's a bit about mindfulness. There is a chapter on mindfulness, and that's sort of an example of that. Another thing was, when Mike was working at the World Trade Center, it's a big place. And it had actually an attack years before that, there was a smaller one. And so, Mike, when working there, said I need to know how to get out of the building. I need to know the emergency procedures. I need to know where everything is. So, when he started working there, he went around and memorized, sort of like, where everything is. Where's the cafeteria? Where's the stairwell? Where’s the emergency exits? He knew that. So that preparation is a strategy that if you prepare, you're less afraid. I mean, you know, the military does this, you know, if you prepare when you face the unexpected, you've actually prepared for it, and you're not as fearful. You're able to, like, channel that fear energy into positive action. And so that's another strategy that we talk about in the book. And it's just ways to not be scared.

MIKE

People talk all the time about, well, how could you possibly train your dog to deal with what happened on September 11th? The response is you don't, but you train the dog how to not be distracted by things that go on around them. You train the dog to follow commands. You also train yourself to let the dog do its job as well. But it's all about preparation and training and knowledge, as opposed to worrying about reading signs and other things which may not work if you are in a smoke-filled environment where you can't read the signs. Knowledge is always power.

DON

In reading the book, I was gonna mention the fact that you're always prepared, that you go out and you figure out the layout of the city where you're living in, or the building that you're in, which is necessary for you in order to get around. But something else happens and you're able to work around it, and I'm thinking specifically of when you were in Boston, and you're down on the street and you know the streets, but now you walk into a snowbank, because the plows have thrown the snow back, which all of us deal with, sighted and unsighted believe me. But you and your guide dog at the time had to find that opening that would get you past this snowbank and into the streets. So again, it's a situation where, as well prepared as you can be, when something throws you a curveball, you've got to be able to roll with it and deal with it.

MIKE

Well, the other part about it is, at first, I didn't even know that there was - make sense, of course - but I didn't even know there were openings not knowing about snowbanks, and then some...

DON

Yeah, sometimes they're not. Sometimes in some cities you have to climb over the snowbanks.

MIKE

In some cities, there aren't any. Yeah. But, that was the that was the whole point. And so, then you learn to look for it.

KERI

And I think in that situation, you know, that was when he first moved to Boston and there was, you know, snow, there was ice, there was all these things that he didn't know about. And so sometimes, we when we get scared, we shut down and we don't ask questions. We're like, oh, no! And in that example in the book, you know, Mike asked people, you know, he was not afraid to, like, ask passersby. Hey, what's going on here or, you know, or they offered to help. And he accepted that help, you know, like it's OK to ask questions to get more information in whatever way possible.

JOHN

Can you tell us a story, Michael, about? Just to give an example of something that a guide dog did for you. Let's skip the really big one, you know, the one that we always talk about on this show when you're on, which is, you know, 9/11 - which, by the way is one of the great stories you'll ever read, folks, and you should read that book of Michael’s. But give us another example of a dog doing something that taught you. About a way that you could change your attitude or some other living strategy.

MIKE

So, one example that comes to mind immediately is a few years after September 11th, I was now working partly at Guide Dogs For The Blind, and I was at the Oregon campus to speak to students and do some things. And I got there in the late afternoon and stayed at an apartment downtown in, I guess, in Boring, OR, and wanted to go out to dinner. And I had asked directions to a particular restaurant and followed the directions, got to the restaurant. But then when I was going home for some reason - and I still to this day, don't know why - in retracing my steps, we deviated somewhere, and I didn't end up back at the apartment. And again, when we did it twice  - so I was able to retrace my steps to the restaurant, but then I couldn't get back to the apartment - and I knew that what I had to do, though, was to not get nervous for the dog because if I had just gotten all nervous and panicky and so on, poor Roselle’s going to go, what's going on with you? And she's going to try to comfort me and so on. But it was my job to figure that out because the job of a guide dog is to make sure we walk safely, not to know where we want to go. And people are always saying how the guide dog LED you out of the World Trade Center, how the guide dog leads you. No, guide dogs don't lead, they guide. Their job is to make sure that we walk safely. My job is to know where to go and how to get there. What I finally did was I suddenly remembered, I've got in my pocket and have access to GPS, and I actually used GPS to get back to the apartment. It was very primitive in the in the stages of making a talking GPS for blind people, but nevertheless it was there, and I I realized that, and I turned it back on and we got back to the apartment and everything was fine. But the point is that because I was working with a guide dog and I had understood that I don't really dare panic, because then the dog's not going to know what to do. I have to focus as the team leader. I have to be the one to take that responsibility of getting us where we need to go from a command standpoint. And I was able to continue to do that. But it's a very personal story because it really happened there, and it happens a lot, where you go somewhere and maybe there's a surprise or whatever. But what you gotta learn to do working with a guide dog - and I think that we all should learn a lot more - is how not to panic just because things don't go the way you want. But I had to be responsible for the dog. And keeping the dog sane too.

DON

There’s a way that the book ties each of your different guide dogs into a particular idea or trait, I want to say, as far as being persistent or being courageous and that sort of thing. So, between you and Keri, who had the idea to tie the guide dogs into those particular traits as you go through the book.

KERI

It was really a collaborative sort of effort. I think, Mike, when we first started this, he had some, like, training materials, he was sort of in early development that talked about various ways to not be blinded by fear, and they did include some of the strategies that then became the chapters, like perseverance, preparation, awareness,  mindfulness, those sort of things. And so, you know, part of my coming in as, as a writer and also the people at Tyndale were, we had to find a structure, a way for people to, like, glom on to each of them. And we wanted to tell more about the dogs. And so each of those dogs actually fit with some of these things that we were wanting to share. Mike, how about you? What do you think?

MIKE

Well, you know, the reality is, books about dogs are things that people like. But even so, it really was not a magical overnight, oh we're going to do it this way. It evolved because we had started learning some stories from other people and doing some other things, and Keri had talked to guide dog trainers. She talked to some people from other schools, Canine Companions For Independence, and a few other things like that, but just over time it just evolved that this is probably the best way to go and I think that it was the best way to go. We both kind of came to that realization and put it into practice and I think it's worked out really well. But yeah, you're right. Every chapter - first of all, every chapter is about another dog. So each dog did teach lessons and that's what we try to bring out in in each chapter. So the chapter on my third guide dog, Klondike, in part was interesting because one of the things that happened with Klonnie was that he developed this fear when we were going into San Francisco to do training while we were at Guide Dogs For The Blind. Like the third weekend, they would usually take us to San Francisco and we would walk around and have a chance to really work in very crowded city environments. Klondike had developed this phobia one day and just was shaking and shivering and wouldn't leave the bus. And what the guide dog trainer said was just work with him, encourage him and just do your best to work through it and I said, well, maybe he needs to retire and not be a guide dog and the trainer, Terry, said no, just, just be patient. And what a powerful lesson because I encouraged him and worked with him and just, slowly, he got off the bus the first time it happened, slowly got off the bus the second time it happened, was a lot more comfortable the third time when we got off the bus, and by the fourth time there was no fear or anything, he was fine again. Have no idea where it came from, but those things do occur, and the reality is that. That that he was fine.

KERI

I think Klondike teaches a great lesson, and Mike’s handling of Klondike, you know, to persevere, to be patient, to not beat yourself up. You didn't get angry at Klondike. He just said, OK, I've got to be the calm one, and we need to do that to ourselves when we're in a fearful situation and we don't even understand our fear, to be patient with ourselves and go, OK, take it one step at a time. Go slow. Encourage, you know, think positive. Those are things. And so learning how to do that for Klondike gives the life lesson on how we can do that for others and for ourselves.

MIKE

For ourselves, yeah.

KERI

I have to say that my favorite part of researching this book, even though we didn't end up using it, was going to a puppy class at Canine Companions and getting to meet a bunch of future guide dogs who were like 8 weeks old! I was in heaven! I was like, this is work? I love it.

MIKE

Well, not guide dogs, but companion dogs. But yeah, and Canine Companions deals with a variety of other kinds of disabilities, not blindness, but they have a number of campuses around the country. So Kerry got to go to the one in in San Diego, right?

KERI

Yeah, I went to the one in San Diego and they're trained for all sorts of different people, you know, you're right. It's not guide dogs, service dogs.

MIKE

But she got to play with the puppies, which is of course always a good thing.

JOHN

Yeah. It's one of the great success stories under the rubric of trans-species connections, isn't it, that between human beings and dogs? In fact, there really isn't anything like it that I can think of. We are very close to cats, but I don't think that anyone would say that cats are as sociable as dogs? We're very close to horses, but it's not the same thing. Dogs have, over the 20,000 years that they've been with us, they have gotten rid of their adult stage and sort of focus themselves on us. They do actually care about our emotions, about our state of mind, when we get in trouble, they get distressed. When we get in - we had a dog, a really beautiful sheepdog, who, if two members of the family were getting into fights - and in my family that happened all the time - that dog would get in the in between the two combatants, the two would-be combatants. And I'm wondering. Michael, looking at dogs in general, looking at the kind of dogs that you've lived with. They are very special, almost uncanny animals if taken as a whole, aren't they? That they are a real, I don't know, an opportunity for us in that sense that you know, to have a relationship like this.

MIKE

Well, you know, I believe very firmly that what people say about dogs is true, that dogs love unconditionally. I think that's absolutely true, unless they're just so traumatized by something that we do to them that they turn off that love. We actually had a dog that we adopted that was somewhat like that until we broke through that barrier. But what I also think is that dogs don't trust unconditionally. But the difference between dogs and people. Is that dogs, generally speaking, are open to trust. They want people to be the team leader. They want to know rules, they want to know what you expect of them, and those are all things that you need to teach in a positive way. You don't do it by punishing the dog when they don't do something the way you want. You reward the dog and you praise the dog when they do something right. They're bright. They catch on to that.  And they want to be the, the teammate, and they want you to be the team leader. And it's just so unfortunate that most people with pet dogs don't understand that. One of the things I learned when we were living up in San Rafael working at Guide Dogs and then for years after just continuing to speak, we were like a mile from one of the most well-known Humane Societies, Marin Humane Society, in the world. And one of the things that they constantly teach people is, when you go to a class and you're taking your dog for training, 90% of the training is human training, not dog training. And there's so much value and so. Much truth to that.

JOHN

We'll return to the Musical Innertube in just a minute, but first, this soothing musical interlude...

DON

Keri Wyatt Kent is the author of twelve books and the co-author of thirteen titles. She is the founder of A Powerful Story, a company that provides editing, collaborative writing, ghostwriting, and assisted self-publishing services. She is the author of the Substack newsletter Welcoming and Wandering, which explores hospitality and travel as spiritual practices.

JOHN

Mike Hingson attended the University of California, Irvine,graduating with honors and received a Masters degree in physics. On September 11, 2001, MIke -- a blind man -- escaped the World Trade Center by walking down 78 flights of stairs with his guide dog, Roselle.  He is the chief vision officer for accessiBe, a company that creates products to make websites more accessible to people with disabilities, and is also the National Federation of the Blind’s ambassador for its National Braille Literacy Campaign.

DON

Keri's website is Keri Wyatt Kent - A Powerful Story Writing Services - Author - Speaker

JOHN

Mike's website is Michael Hingson

 DON

 And now we return to the Musical Innertube, already in progress

DON

As you said, Mike, we're colored with what will happen. Like yesterday for example, the local pool where I have a membership has at the end of the season a dog dip where they open the pool, and everybody can bring their dogs, and the dogs do a swim for about an hour. And all of the people who go to the pool love this and  look forward to it every year. So, before we were going to go yesterday, I looked at our dog Cocoa, who is a German Shepherd/Collie mix, and she's just sitting there and I'm thinking to myself, in about 20 minutes, you'll be in a pool and having fun, but right now you have no idea that that's going to happen. But I, as a human, do. So, what's what is the thing that dogs teach us about not worrying about the future, about being in the moment a little more than we than we usually are.

MIKE

Well, let’s use that example. Some people may have dogs that they view as not being as sociable as other dogs, and they're going to worry about. when I take my dog to the pool, how's my dog going to behave in the pool? What's my dog gonna do with all the other dogs, and worry about so many things that probably will never come to pass, which is part of the whole thing that we talk about with fear. The reality is we get afraid of everything and well over 90% of the things that we're afraid of, were never going to come to pass anyway. But we worry about, how is that dog going to behave, what's going to happen, rather than expressing confidence, rather than encouraging the dog and, over time, making sure that you train dogs to be more of a of a sociable and not an antagonistic animal. And those are things that you can teach. Dogs do take on oftentimes the characteristics of the people they live with. And so, when you've got a pretty obnoxious dog, you got to wonder about the person that owns the dog.

But you know the reality is that that dogs really do live in the moment, and there's so much more to learn about that. You, I assume, took Cocoa to the pool and you didn't worry about it - or much - and it all went really well, but other people might have concerns, and the dogs can sense that. And when they do, they're going to act out in some ways where they don't need to.

KERI

Working on this book and Mike and I had a lot of great conversations about mindfulness and living in the moment. And how that can help us when we're feeling afraid, because a lot of times our fear is either, it's we're living in the future, worrying about what's going to happen, or we're living in the past and regretting what happened before. But when we're in the moment, then we are in a place where much of the fear that we live with every day isn't there. And so, you know, focusing on what we're doing in the moment and how dogs do that, you know, when the dog is guiding, it's not thinking, oh, I wonder if I'm going to have a treat later or, I wonder if somebody's going to bother us, they just are in the moment, dialed-in, what's in front of me, what do I have to deal with? How do I keep my handler safe? And we can learn from that to just hey, tomorrow will take care of itself and I need to not worry by focusing on the moment.

MIKE

One of the things that I used to - well, I still do - when I give a speech, I like to record it so I can go back and listen to it. And when people say, why do you do that? I used to always say I'm my own worst critic. And I realized literally over the last year, and thinking about it - wrong thing to say. That's negative and what I really have learned to say is, I'm my own best teacher. And it's such a difference when you look at it in a positive way. And working with dogs, it's all about or ought to be all about dealing with things in a positive way. When the guide dogs are being trained, they're encouraged with food rewards and then using a device called a clicker, A clicker is a little thing that you carry, and when you push it, it clicks, and the purpose of the clicker is to be a demarcation, when the dog does something, you want it dog to do, if you immediately click and then follow it up with a food reward, they very quickly learn that the sound of the clicker means, oh, I did it right. That's great! And that's exactly what you want to do. You don't want to use negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement works a whole lot better.

JOHN

Michael, I'm wondering.

MIKE

And the reality, and the reality is that the training of guide dogs has become much more efficient. Guide dogs typically are now trained in like three, maybe four months. Used to be six months or more, because of that. I'm sorry John go ahead.

JOHN

No, don't be sorry. I never have much to say. Now I'm thinking you've had a long career with these dogs, they've trained you, you've trained them. Do you think you're a better person for it?

MIKE

Oh, I think so. Absolutely. I think that the, the real reason for that is that dogs aren't pretentious, right? And I think that the reality is...

JOHN

That's such a good point! Dogs can't have airs! Dogs can't condescend! They can't! That's one of the things I like about dogs is they can't treat you like you were yesterday's garbage. I mean, you're like, right, human beings could do that!

DON

We leave that up to cats to do that!

MIKE

I was just gonna say, cats on the other hand. No, but dogs are not pretentious, and that's important. And again, that's part of the lessons of Live Like A Guide Dog is that that there's so much that we can learn. I tell people all the time, I've learned so much more about teamwork, trust, leadership and so on, from working with guide dogs and my wife's service dog - who was actually the mother of my seventh guide dog - but I've learned so much more about teamwork, trust, leadership and so on from working with these dogs that I've ever learned from Tony Robbins, Ken Blanchard and all those guys because it's all absolutely personal and real working with a dog ,in a way that it isn't when you're just talking about it with other people.

KERI

I love what Mike said that instead of being his, his own worst critic, he's his own best teacher. And I think that is a key right there to not being fearful. If you're always like, oh, I'm really going to mess this up, I know I did it bad, I could do it bad again. Just say, what have I learned and what can I do better in the future? Like I go forward in a positive direction and that alone can keep us from, you know, we're not afraid of failing. We're eager to learn. And the same thing can happen in both those situations.

MIKE

And it's not easy to adopt that mindset because we're so used to not adopting that mindset. But the reality is when we learn to do that and we are able to put it into practice it makes such a difference in our lives, because then you realize there's no such thing as failure. There are things like oh, that didn't work out the way I expected it to. But then the next thing you logically learned to do is to go why? Or even when something works out really well, could I have done it better? And maybe the answer is no, I did it as well as I could possibly do it, but you really look at that and you learn to analyze those things. And the more you practice it, the better it becomes. And those are things that you literally can learn in a snap to be able to make the right decision. But it takes practice to do that, and it takes effort.

DON

There's another character in the book that we haven't mentioned. There's Mike and his guide dogs, and of course, Mike’s late wife Karen, and all of the other people that have helped out, Mike, all of the employers and the people at the Federation for the Blind and the Guide Dogs. But there is another important character in there and that is God. And he's brought up a number of times, but not in a religious way, but more in a spiritual way, wouldn't you say?

MIKE

Well, I think that that it's important to do that because what we don't want people to say is, oh, this book, it represents one religion. It does represent God - so atheists, sorry - but the reality is that God is with us, and you can define God however you want. But God is there, and we do want to recognize the whole concept of faith in God and how all of that works together and helps us if we choose to let it. My favorite example of dealing with God is still Trivial Pursuit. How many times do you play the game Trivial Pursuit, and somebody asked a question and instantly you think of an answer. But then you go, no, that was too easy. It can't be it. You overthink it. Suddenly you come up with a different answer and that's the answer you give. But the reality is that the correct answer was the first one that you thought of, that you decided not to use. That happens so often because we don't listen to that inner voice like we should.

KERI

The parallels between a guide dog and his handler and  human beings and God, if we are open to it, is that God is not a punishing God. God is - you know, Mike and I believe anyway - that God, if we listen to the voice that is inside of us, that God speaks, can speak to us and communicate with us and help us, and we can work together with God to make the world a better place. Like that's kind of the message of it. And then there's so many beautiful, like parallels between the relationship of a dog and a human. Especially a working dog and then, you know, human beings and the creator.

MIKE

God gave us free will. God gave us choice, and so we can choose to ignore all that Keri just said. But we're not better for it. If we do, we're the better for it. If we really listen to God, if we try to understand and follow the teachings and listen to all those inner nudges that we're given on a regular basis, we're much better for it.

JOHN

Michael, following on my earlier question about whether dogs have made you a better person, I imagine you were a person of faith all along, but do you think that dogs have made God more real for you?

MIKE

Oh, I think so. But I think again that is a question that is answered because I've thought about it, and I've allowed myself to be very self-analytical and look to communicate with God.  And what I've learned, of course, is the big problem with prayers is we're always telling God what we want, but I thought that we were supposed to believe that God is at all omniscient creature, and so God knows what we want already. The issue is, are we learning to listen, to get what we need, to get what we what we desire? And so, for me, learning to work with a dog, another one of God's creatures, is such an awesome thing because they don't, you know, dogs don't speak the same language that we do, but they figure us out as we need to learn to figure them out. And when that process works, and we truly become a bonded, well-running team, there's nothing better.

JOHN

And Don will remember with me when we took our catechism courses in Catholic school, one of the ways of thinking about God that was suggested to us is that God is always in the present. For God, too, there's not a past or future, there's a now without beginning or end and God's always there. And that God is all apt for that reason, that God doesn't have to worry, God has no worries, but God is right there in the present, much like - oh, the dogs.

DON

And Mike, God gave us dogs, but he also gave us cats. So, could you be really - would you tell him how passed off we are next time you’re talking to him?

MIKE

Now I can't really do that too much because I have a rescue cat that we got in 2015 and she is still with me and she sleeps with me. So you know she's adopted me, and she's decided I'm OK. So that's OK. And we've learned to communicate with each other. Whenever she wants to eat, she comes and yells at me or pushes up against me until I go in and pet her while she eats. So she's trained me. But we've worked out a deal, because I've told her you can do that once during the night, but I'm only going to get up once during the night, and I guess she has understood that because she'll wake me up sometime, usually between 1:00 and 3:00 in the morning. I go over and I pet her, but she leaves me alone for the rest of the night. So that works out pretty well.

DON

OK, so once again, it's a case of we train dogs, but cats train us.

MIKE

Dogs have masters, cats have staff. There's no way to get around it.

KERI

Precisely.

DON

Well, Mike and Keri, thanks for being on with us today and talking about the new book. Once again, the book is Live Like A Guide Dog. True Stories From A Blind Man And His Dogs - and his cat, too - About Being Brave, Overcoming Adversity And Moving Forward In Faith. You guys, it's a terrific book, and anybody who picks it up will be much the better after reading it.

MIKE

Well, I appreciate you saying that, and I would also say that anyone who reads it, we would be very grateful if you would then go to Amazon or wherever and review it. And of course, say nice things about it because that will help other people read it and it will show the publisher and the world that it's a book that people read and that they like. So we really appreciate you taking the time to review the book.

DON

Alright. Thanks, guys, for being here today.

MIKE

Thank you.

KERI

Thanks for having us.