Neil Dudley: The Cowboy Perspective, well, it might be hard to define, but I guarantee if you’ll think about it, you’ve got one in mind. Whether you’re building a legacy, an empire, or a fan base, I bet when your friends look at you, they see some cowboy in your face. Y’all come along, let’s talk about this or that. Maybe when we’re done, you’ll go away with a different perspective to put under your hat.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Cowboy Perspective. It’s me the Keto Cowboy, aka Neil Dudley. And on today’s episode, I’ve got, well, my biggest hero. I think a lot of you will relate to that – your parents turn out to be your biggest heroes. As life goes on, you realize they really knew something when they were teaching you these things, and they put their blood, sweat, and tears into raising you up. And so welcome to the show, Dad.
Harry Dudley: Glad to be with you.
Neil Dudley: We’re sitting around the living room table – and I say living room table – dining room table at Mom and Dad’s house. I’ve got my youngest daughter here. So, it could get kind of wild. But until that happens, we’re going to just talk about some things. I gave Dad a few questions, and who knows where the conversation will go. Sometimes we get off into all kinds of different things. And like I always say, my idea or goal with the podcast is to bring value to those that listen and try to offer some perspectives that cowboys have, that I’ve learned from living with a cowboy and working with cowboys in my life. So, we hope you enjoy it, and well, let’s just get started. First question, where’d you meet your wife?
Harry Dudley: We went to school together in Comanche. She started sixth grade here. She grew up in Priddy and moved to Comanche for sixth grade. And then of course, we went on to high school together, and so a senior in high school, and we started to date a little bit. That developed nicely. And then we both went off to Texas Tech and stayed dating one another through our time at Tech and ended up getting married in 1976.
Neil Dudley: It’s kind of funny because I know that story. It’s not news to me, but I just thought I’d give them a little introduction to really you and Mom, and that’s a pretty good way to do it. If I was to explain them, they were just always a real. Not always the easiest to please, not always the hardest to please. I mean, just all in all, they did a good job of raising me and Brian, which is my brother, we’ve really never talked about Brian on the podcast prior. So now we know how you and mom met, and we are all caught up on that. Let’s get into some serious or more probably meaningful questions. Although I think it’s pretty cool that my daughters get to grow up with grandparents that are all still together. As many divorced households as there are in America these days and relationships that don’t work out, I’m happy they get to see two sets of grandparents that did work out. So that’s a pretty cool piece of the pie, too. I’ve been talking about ranching and different things, all kinds of different stuff on our podcasts. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about just growing up in a ranching family, and making a business, a family business like that work and how that dynamic really works out?
Harry Dudley: Well, you’ve been around long enough to kind of watch how it works out. The way it worked out for me growing up on the ranch, my dad and his two brothers started a ranching operation, Dudley Brothers Ranch. Their father and grandfather, actually, was the one that came to Comanche County to start ranching. So, we’ve been around here a long time, since 1887, I believe.
Neil Dudley: Thinking back to when you were like, what are the parts you just loved about it?
Harry Dudley: Growing up, I love being raised on the ranch. It just seemed like everything around me was interesting.
Neil Dudley: Does that sound familiar? That’s what I say all the time, too, just that it was just a lot of fun living in that world, growing up in that world, hard work and those things, but also nature and the animals.
Harry Dudley: Well, the people, and of course there were ranch hands, cowboys, farmers employees of the ranch that I spent as much time with them as I did with my dad. Really, I learned a lot of what I know about cowboying and farming and ranch type life, I learned from just cowboys and employees who worked on the ranch. They were like second fathers to me.
Neil Dudley: Didn’t you used to go running out in the field and to ride the tractor with one of them?
Harry Dudley: Oh yeah. I could see them down in the field plowing. I’d find my way down to the field and stand at the turn row until they got there, and then maybe they’d let me on the tractor to ride with them. And same way with the cowboys – if I saw them outside, I’d go out there where they were. I just wanted to be around them, hang around with them.
Neil Dudley: That’s one cool thing about cowboys, I think is, as a kid – which I wish kids these days would get this a little more, maybe they do, and I just miss it – if you’re around a bunch of cowboys and you want to learn and you’ll try hard, they’ll give you a chance. It’s just almost ever scenario, that’s one of those cowboy things. You got to kind of get out there and show them you want to, and that you’ll try. But if you’ll do that, they’ll give you a chance, and they’ll try to help you along. I really appreciate that about maybe whatever you might call it, the cowboy code. But I think there’s a lot kids can learn from doing that in any industry, because everybody’s got a little bit of cowboy in them. And I’m the same way in the bacon business. If there’s a kid there that looks excited and wants to get out there and try, I like to try to at least help them – “Hey, you could do that in about 30 minutes, if you think about doing it like this, instead of spending two hours back there sweeping,” whatever the job might be.
Harry Dudley: Well, you’ve jogged some memories for me as a kid growing up, I wasn’t big enough to really go out and get the cattle a lot of times with them, but it was just a highlight for me to have one of them pull me up, throw me behind the saddle, and I’d just hang on to their belt loops or something and ride the pastures with them. They knew how important that was to me, I guess, or maybe they didn’t realize that they were just absolutely making my day, that those were memories that would hold with me all my life. The time sitting behind the saddle, holding onto the beltloop, looking around that cowboy to see what was ahead of us or what was off to each side, maybe another one of the cowboys was pushing cattle or whatever. It was just an enjoyment that has stayed with me all my life to just be in that environment. Obviously, I’ve always enjoyed nature, cattle, livestock, and I enjoy people.
Neil Dudley: It’s surprising, you’re not a real big hunter.
Harry Dudley: No.
Neil Dudley: You like to do that, but you don’t get into the hunting as much, and kind of in turn, I never did. I’m doing a little bird hunting, but not nearly, like you might- I’ll get in situations and talking to people, and they’re like, “Wow, you grew up on that ranch. You must’ve been just hunting. Golly, it had to be the most fun.” And I’m like, “No, I never really did hunt.”
Harry Dudley: Well, what a lot of people today that are in our area don’t realize is when I was a kid, there weren’t any deer to speak of. It was a rarity to see a deer. So, the deer population kind of moved in. We used to run a lot of sheep and goats. And the sheep and goat population was always challenged with predators, coyotes. And so, once we kind of got out of the sheep and goat business, just strictly because of predators, the deer began to move in. And the deer population has grown now to where deer hunting is a very big part of our ranch.
Neil Dudley: Well, and I can parallel that with wild hogs. There weren’t wild hogs when I was younger, and now they’re everywhere, and it’s a whole bunch of fun for a lot of people to go out there and trap them or chase them. Anyways, the sport of it is certainly an entertainment for a lot of people, certainly a thing that I can relate to just maybe different things. Like I really enjoyed rodeo and that kind of thing. That was just what I wanted to spend my time doing. I think everybody is very similar. It’s just depends on what actually scenario you might’ve grown up in. But everybody has fun – almost everybody, everybody is a hard thing to actually be right – but almost everybody or a lot of us have good memories of our younger years and things we did. And I think that goes for a lot of these executives in high-rise New York City apartments. They might’ve grown up out in the country and did some hunting with their granddad or their dad. And now, man, that is an escape for them. And it’s awesome that it can be that. Would you say you have a thing like that, or have you just been lucky enough to never need it or kind of always just got to do the thing you like?
Harry Dudley: Well, the hunting, I’ve always enjoyed hunting dove, bird hunting, and did that through high school. Did some coon hunting and where we used to get the furs and sell the furs. Those were the popular thing to do when I was growing up. The deer hunting, we had to drive somewhere. We had to go to the hill country. And I was really, when I was younger, my brothers might get a chance to go with Dad down to the hill country and do some deer hunting. And I just never got to, and somehow it disappointed me, but it didn’t really, wasn’t something I was just dying to do. I enjoy watching wildlife. I enjoy watching the deer as I feed cattle and stuff now. It is fun to watch.
Neil Dudley: I almost want to just grab people and let them go feed cattle. So, just to go ride around with Dad for a morning, four to six hours at a time, just going and pouring out feed to the cattle out in the pasture and then go to the next one. There’s a lot to be learned, a lot of cool conversations to be had, a lot of just God’s creation to be seen. It really can be a real spiritual thing. I don’t know how many times I’ll catch Dad out there on his feed route and we have a three-hour conversation about how are you going to deal with this kid, or what am I going to do about this marriage right now, man, this is tough stuff. But it’s a great place to get back to peace and quiet.
Harry Dudley: You find the basics of what the world designed. Or at least for me, when I’m outside, I’m in nature, I’m out feeding cattle, man, that’s my element. That’s where I can, my mind clears the best. I’m kind of a little bit of a loner. I like my time alone. It gives me a chance to think, and you know that. You kind of understand that that’s how I’m built. But then at times, it’s really fun for us to get together, ride out into the pasture, and just have conversations about life and the challenges we run into, your age, my age, my dad’s age. I now think more about the things that I would get an opportunity to talk to Dad about, we’d just be out on the ranch maybe sitting in a pickup, going to look at the goats or the cattle. He loved to look at the little herd of goats we had. And we’d talk about the economy, we’d talk about how money’s important to ranching operations, how it’s important to making a living and having the ability to survive as a family and the ranch industry. So, yeah, to me, those were the best educational opportunities I ever had was to be out among the people I respected, trusted. And I think you’re that way. I’d take you with me everywhere we went. I mean, I couldn’t get out of the house without you, because you wanted to go, too.
Neil Dudley: I love telling that story. I used to crawl into Mom and Dad’s bedroom, get right beside Dad’s side of the bed, and I’d try to get as quiet as I could because if they woke up, they’d send me out of there. So, I had to sneak as hard as I could. I never have really figured out if they knew that I was there every time or if I was really that sneaky. But I’d get by the side of the bed so they couldn’t get out of the house without me. I was just like, if he gets up, he’s going to step on me. I’m going to get up, I’ll go with him. It was funny though, I think some of the value this kind of conversation can have to a kid that’s 15, all the way to me, to everybody, is you don’t know what conversation you’re in right now today is going to be worth to you tomorrow, five years from now. There’s so much learning you get and opportunity you get to learn that you just don’t sink it in right at the time when it’s happening. Later down the road, I know it’s true for me, I think a lot of things you did as a parent for me as a kid, either just trying to teach me something or not teaching me something and giving me a chance to fail and learn how to get along with that too, all those things. Now, I was just oblivious to the importance of them at the time. And now, I’m highly in tuned to the importance of that. I’m just saying, if you’re listening and you aren’t in life where you want to be, practice listening a little more and think back to people that have been mentors to you in life, your parents. I’m fully aware not everybody was blessed with the kind of parents I have, and so that’s a leg up for me. Now, I need to go ahead and take that opportunity and leverage it and let it be a plus because those guys that, there’s guys and gals out there that didn’t have that. And they got a little more hunger in their eyes than what I might just because they’ve been through some things I hadn’t had to, not battles I had to fight. So, I just think it’s really cool to think about, you know what, you can learn a lot, and even if you haven’t caught it right now, it’s plenty fine to catch it when you catch it and grab it and go ahead and use it a lot. It took me a long time to get that maturity. I always thought, man, if I don’t know it now, I’m never going to know it. Which we’ve battled over that throughout the years, even just my impatience with things.
Harry Dudley: Well, I think that’s just part of growing up. I struggle with the same thing. I thought, gee, how am I ever going to know everything that I need to know? The amount that I don’t know is so much greater than the amount I do know, and where can I learn that? And so, growing up on the ranch, being around the people that I had the unbelievable opportunity to be around, listen to their stories, talk about my dad, talk about your granddad, talk about the Depression and the struggles they went through, and the old guys that we worked with down the fence line, old Keeler that worked the fences. Hard work was, they didn’t know- That wasn’t their way of life. They enjoyed it. They wanted to see you as a young guy have to get a blister on your hand. They wanted you to learn what work was. And sometimes they would sort of build a situation for you to fail, to make a mistake. They never wanted you to really get hurt bad, but they were willing to let you get in a little bit of danger just so you’d learn something significant. And the cowboys were the same way. We were working some cattle, and I’ll never forget the day we had a bunch of pens, and we had one old cow that she was a little bit rough. She would flat chase you in the lot. And I wasn’t paying attention very close. We were pulling the calves off, separating the cows. One of the guys said, “Hey, be careful of ol’ Hooley? We don’t want her to be the last one in the lot.” And I said, “Well, who’s Hooley?” They all laughed at each other and said, “You’ll find her in a minute.” And sure enough, we got down to about three cows, and here was this old cow with her head in there. You could tell she was a real excitable cow, a little bit, and they said, “Go in there and get her out.” So, I thought, shoot, I’m 18, bulletproof, and can jump tall fences and climb high mountains. I’ll run in there and get her. And pretty quick, she had me headed for the fence, and I went right by my uncle who was standing in the gate. I cleared about a six-foot fence, just put my hands on it and went right over the top. And that cow ran right by my uncle, didn’t hit him, but nearly knocked him out. Oh, did I get a good talking to, he said, “If you’re going to run to the fence, don’t come towards me.”
Neil Dudley: Yeah, well, we try to make this a family show, so we won’t say exactly what all was said, but I’m imagining, I imagine you can, too. Those are great stories, and that’s stuff that, man, it’s so fun to just remember and talk about.
Harry Dudley: Well, nobody got hurt. It was like watching some kind of sporting event where somebody could get hurt bad here, but nobody did. And everybody got a lot of laughs out of it.
Neil Dudley: I remember that a lot about working. That’s one of those leg ups you gave me or just God gave me, being born into a ranching family, is work, hard, hard work was a lot of fun. And it was, it was just fun, sweat, tired, thirsty, all of those things. But the people would just keep it fun. You learned how to get razzed and raz somebody. There’s just really no way to replace it.
Harry Dudley: Well, I would never promote or advocate, I guess what I’d more use is the word bully, but you’ve got to learn to toughen your hide a little someway. And growing up as a kid on a ranch, you’re going to get hoorahed one way or another, and they’re going to make you build a thicker skin. They’re going to make you tolerate a little bit of that type stuff. But it’s never with the intent to hurt. Now, a lot of what goes on in young kids and they think any kind of-
Neil Dudley: Well, they’ve got no system for dealing with it because they never- There was a reason, that’s what I love, the cowboy thing, or being just raised in a bunch of cowboys, seemed like helli gellie craziness at times, but it was always intentional. And I’m not sure even the men and the cowboys knew it how intentional it was, but there was a lot of life lessons and tools being put in my tool belt, so longer down the road, I was going to be able to deal with the kids jerking my pants down to my ankles and dragging me out to the football field. Wasn’t the end of the month, wasn’t the end of the world for me. And then I also knew what it felt like if I did that to somebody else. You got that great perspective on-
Harry Dudley: It taught you how to treat somebody else. It made a big impression on me. We had different, all guys that worked around here, they had different personalities. But they would kind of hoorah you, is what I’m trying to say, just to kind of get your hair up a little bit. But then pretty quick, they’d let you know, hey, we got you covered. If say that bad cow gets off to you, we’re going to get you out of that situation. And it built a confidence in the people around you. And today’s world, I look at kids – and I love kids, you know that, I certainly love you and Brian endlessly, but I like kids period. And I like being around them. I like trying to teach them soccer, teach them football, teach them anything. I want to help them get along in life. And to me, that’s just an opportunity to help somebody down the road that maybe just is no relation of any kind to me, but I want to help them feel like they’re a part of this world and to be ready to take it on. And sometimes it’s going to be tough, but you can always elevate yourself above it if you keep your attitude right. And attitudes, I’ll often hear people say, “Who complains more than a farmer and rancher?” They always want rain, or they want sunshine, or they haven’t got this, or they haven’t got that, or they wished they’d do this. But who deals with as many elements in the world and life as a farmer and a rancher does? How much of their livelihood is exposed to risk?
Neil Dudley: Yeah, and even completely out of their control.
Harry Dudley: Yeah, exactly, completely out of their control. And yeah, they complain a little bit about it, but they deal with it. It’s life and they make it work.
Neil Dudley: About every one of them, if you get them talking to them long enough – I’m going to try to sneak these recorders around every chance I get just to catch some of the conversations – they’ll get around to the basic premise that ain’t nothing consistent but change and problems. And if you can’t get that in your head and deal with that and learn to enjoy that kind of what change means and how to fix problems, then you’re going to have a little bit of a tough row to hoe. Alright, let’s try another question or give me your thoughts or perspective on, we talked about this a little bit the other day, these protests of the National Anthem in the NFL, and how does that strike you, being a baby boomer? And I’ll give a little bit of my thoughts on it. And even the idea that how open are we, or able are we, or capable are we to or of empathy for others?
Harry Dudley: Well, the kneeling at the NFL football games is, my first impression on that was, man, what a disrespectful thing for a nation that provides so much opportunity to everybody. Now, I, admittedly, am a very blessed person. I have opportunities and things at my disposal that not everyone has. And maybe only a limited number of people have had life as good as I have.
Neil Dudley: What do you think Papa Eltos would have said about that? Speaking of which, Dad’s dad’s name was Eltos, and if you listen to this and you know somebody named Eltos, spelled E L T O S, please contact me. I’m not sure there’s another person in the world or ever has been named Eltos. What’s the story on that? Wasn’t there a story to how he got named?
Harry Dudley: Well, the story that I remember, they put letters in the hat, and they drew out five letters, and just made his name out of it. There’s no family connection.
Neil Dudley: He didn’t have a middle name or anything?
Harry Dudley: No, no middle name, just Eltos. And if there’s ever been anybody else with that name, I’ve never heard of them. Now, there’s Eltons and Altus and similar pronunciations, but the actual spelling, the only people I know of are in our family.
Neil Dudley: Yeah. And they’re all probably second names. Anyways, it’s just another piece of this. What were we talking about? Oh, NFL. I wonder what he would think about his opportunities and life in comparison to others.
Harry Dudley: Well, Dad grew up in the Depression, and he didn’t talk a lot about it. I doubt he talked to you at all about it, and he didn’t talk about it much to me, except that I could see in his lifestyle what an impression that was on him as a young man growing up. He was in his teens when in the deepest part of the Depression. His dad had died kind of unexpectedly. And so, he was having to work hard and make a living when it was tough to make a living and there wasn’t any money. And so, money and the dollar, the value of a dollar was, if Grandpa Eltos was just going to talk to you about something, it probably had to do with money and how to survive without it and how to survive with it, and what money can do and how money can make money. I guess he used to always tell me that your best spent money is when a dollar will turn another dollar. It’s not on spending a dollar for something that loses value. You need to spend that dollar on something that will generate more dollars.
Neil Dudley: Right there, he’s giving advice that ol’ Tony Robbins and Robert Kiyosaki, these guys are writing multi-multimillion dollar books on that simple concept, which is if you’ve got money and you want to have more, don’t buy things that aren’t going to turn more money. It was a pretty simple thing. He understood it, and he ended up having a pretty successful career at employing that thought.
Harry Dudley: Of course, he grew up without it, or he grew up with not much.
Neil Dudley: That scares me a lot of times too, because I never, I mean, just facts of the matter are I never was without it. Probably, you and mom might’ve been without it more than I understood, but I don’t feel like ever in my life, I was like looking around thinking, where am I going to get my next meal? Or where am I going to get my next pair of pants? Or what’s going to happen if this rain don’t come? I mean, just thoughts that he certainly had in the Depression years, you probably had more so as a kid than I ever did. And that really exposes me to what I was talking about a little bit earlier is those other people in business that are my competition, etc., to beating me because I don’t have that perspective, and I don’t maybe worry about it enough.
Harry Dudley: Right. And I often tried to think about that, too, when I’d be talking to Daddy about, he’d want to tell me, “Son, and if you do that, money, you just can’t find money to do that. It’s going to cost too much.” He’d have a long laundry list of things that would say spending money on that’s going to cost this, this, this, and this, and I know you hadn’t thought about it. And he was right, I hadn’t thought about it. And so, he was very good at challenging me, but sometimes almost saying you’re just not thinking clearly, Son. You got to think more about what the end results of this. And I guess one example is my house. When Rhonda and I decided we wanted to build a house up here, and I was thinking about, well, we’ll build this size house, we’ll put it on this piece of property. And my dad looked at me and he said, “You’re not ever even going to be able to pay the electric bill on that house.” And I thought, well, yeah, sure, I can. “Well, no, you may not,” he said. We could hit a drought. And I was in the ranch at that time. He said markets could fall on us for an eight to ten year period. He said we could go into a ten-year drought. He said, “Things can get a lot tougher. All you see is a sunrise and a beautiful day ahead.” He said, “I’m telling you, it’s not always that way.” And I’ve had multiple people and who were older, tell me, when I was in my financial advisory office, I had a guy come in, L.D. Cox, matter of fact, he was one of the survivors of the Indianapolis ship. And he was just sitting in my office visiting one day and talking about investments and this and that, and he said, real estate, everybody said, do you sell much real estate stock? And I said, “Oh, well, no, not really. I’ve got ways to invest in real estate, but,” I said, “I don’t really exactly, I’m not a realtor.” And he said, “Well, let me tell you,” he said, “right now everybody thinks land, when there’s no end to how valuable land will be.” He said, “I got into a deal where land was on the upscale. It was selling, and every year, it got more valuable, more valuable. So, I had a friend talk me into, hey, let’s go buy this property.” And it wasn’t actually a ranch, it was just some more recreational type property. And he said, “Let me tell you something, Harry.” He said, “Land don’t always go up. It can go down.” And he said it did, it went down, and I lost a bunch of money. And he said, “So, you just remember,” he said, “You’re not my age.” And of course, he was more like my dad’s age, but he said, “You just understand that whatever goes up can come down, and it can come down quick. And there’s no telling how long it will stay down.”
Neil Dudley: Yeah. Well, I listen to this guy, Gary Vaynerchuk pretty often. He’s a podcaster. I think I might’ve told you about him a time or two. Just right now, that’s the guy I’m listening to a lot of. I agree with a lot of his thoughts and things. And he says, the entrepreneurs or people starting businesses today are a different breed because none of them have ever really been socked in the face by the market and had to, I mean, I probably qualify – no, I don’t probably, I certainly qualify. We’ve battled a struggle or two, but nothing big market scale failure. And the banking thing, the real estate bubble, I skirted it because I wasn’t exposed in that market. But something like the Depression is all markets just go dead. So that’s going to be- he says a few things about that that I really like. It’s like, that’s when we’re going to see the real cream rise to the crop, there won’t be any fakers out there making it there. Today, there’s a lot of fakers making it and pretending like they’re getting something done, and they’re really not. It’s an interesting thought for me.
Harry Dudley: Well, if you remember, in 2005, I went into an investment office, and the market was going up, going up, and doing well through 2007, and then in 2008, the bottom fell completely out of it. We had investment banks going broke and the government trying to step in, save the auto industry, trying to save the banking industry. It looked like the money system was in dire jeopardy. We were losing value in all areas of the economy. And so, in 2008, that thing, I would have never believed the kind of failure of the economy in America that we were looking at at that time. And like you were saying, if you weren’t involved in it, you probably didn’t pay much attention to it. And the people who didn’t have something in the market or they weren’t directly involved, I talked to people at times and would kind of recall some of the crashing that was going on during that period. And they were almost unaware of it. They were “Oh, really? Did that happen?” “Yeah, it did.” “Oh yeah. I didn’t know that happened.” And they said, “Well, how bad was it?” And I said, for somebody who had only been in the business five years, I quickly believed by talking to people who had been in the business a long time, that our economy was going off the cliff, that we were just fixing to fold up our economy, our treasury bills, and everything, looked like we were going to be going into a reduced value. I said, “I really thought we were going off the cliff.” “Oh really? I didn’t know it was that bad.” You made a good point there that when the real estate bubble blew up, if you didn’t have real estate, nobody knew the bubble blew.
Neil Dudley: Only just reports, but they didn’t experience the bubble blowing.
Harry Dudley: They didn’t feel the spear.
Neil Dudley: Yeah. That’s the thing that I try to, or at least in business, it worries me is what are things that, and you try telling me and I try hearing it, but it’s like the real experience of it, that’ll be the real day where you can figure out if the rubber meets the road, or if your preparation for it has been sufficient. Although I’m a real kind of dreamer type, so I don’t spend probably anywhere close to the amount of time thinking about, well, insurance or risk aversion that I might, could, or should.
Harry Dudley: During that period, it was kind of, and you remember the circumstances that drove to it, but that was an experience that I wouldn’t take far because the people who thought they were prepared – they had 401ks, they had retirement funds that they thought would carry them, that they were prepared – well, that preparation went away. It almost folded up completely. In many cases it did. And so, I’ve also learned that preparation is more or less an element of our mind more so than a reality, that being prepared and being secure is something we like to feel confidence in our mind about. But the reality is the risk is probably more enormous than we can imagine. And when something really fails, none of us are going to be prepared. I mean, some better than others, but the insurance companies were failing.
Neil Dudley: It might be a great idea to figure out how to use your God given talents to build from zero. You know what I mean? When it goes off the cliff, we’re all going to be down at the bottom, and who’s going to stand up quickest and start climbing again? Or who’s going to lay down there and cry about, well, I’m at rock bottom. I’ve never been here before and now I’ve got a broken leg on top of the fact that I’m at the bottom. That’s what you got to build in yourself somehow is this resilience to say at least some way, I think it’s a good, you can see it in a lot of successful people. They have the self-control to just say, “I’m fixing to take off on this path here,” whatever it might be, “and I’m going to stick with it,” whether it’s working out or diet or even just mentally preparing for things consistently.
Harry Dudley: Well, this kind of brought me back full circle in my thoughts, anyway, what you’re talking about, we started the conversation about the people kneeling in protest to what’s fair and what’s not fair, or the injustices in American society.
Neil Dudley: Well, is there even a way to know for sure what everybody’s kneeling about?
Harry Dudley: Well, I think we had to have that conversation and getting back to it, as you said, and I agree, I’m a generation older, but I had a good life. My life has been relatively easy compared to almost anybody. Now, Dad, he came through the Depression. When he did, it brought everybody down to a certain level pretty much. And then everybody had to see what kind of constitution and character they had as an individual to come back and to survive that. Well, when I think about the people that are kneeling on the field at an NFL game, my first reaction was it bristled me up a little bit, and I said, man, I can’t believe they don’t see the value and the opportunity they have to be on that field, to make the salary that they’re probably making, to play a game that they probably would rather play than any other thing in life. And that opportunity is provided by this country for them and being backed and supported and secured by our military, the economy, and the financial strength of our country – the opportunities, and the level of at least some freedom. And so, it really did bristle me up a little bit about all that, but then I worked myself back around to say I need to understand why those individuals are doing that. And I realize they’ve come through a life that’s very different from mine. And they found their self on a platform where they can tell somebody, “Hey, this country is not as free and opportunistic for people like me as it is for Harry Dudley.” And so, I stopped, and it made me soften my opinion a little bit. It didn’t change it completely, but it at least softened it to say, you’ve got a right to say this is not a perfect country. And I give you that right. You have that right to say it verbally, to present it on this platform, if that’s what you, if you think that’s the only platform you can do it. But I want to see some example out of you that says, this is also the best country in the world to live in, and I know it. Because in my mind, if you don’t know that, I don’t want to see you out there.
Neil Dudley: Or would it be worth thinking about it like this, your protest gets a lot more powerful when you’re also talking about how great it is too? I think it gets more powerful to me if the guy kneeling is the guy that’s also saying I wouldn’t trade this for anything, but I’m going to take a chance and an opportunity to raise my hand and say, look- I do know this much, I can’t fathom discrimination. I’ve never experienced it. If I have, I was oblivious to it. I guess I can say I probably have employed discrimination and might even argue it’s impossible not to. There’s discrimination of everything in some way or another, just because humans are opinionated. But to say I’ve been discriminated because of some reason – my skin color, the way I walk, my gender, any of those things – I can’t fathom it. It’d be like me trying to say I know what it’s like to give birth. I just don’t. I’ve never been there. I can’t say I experienced it. So, I’m trying to just leave the perspectives out there of everybody. A lot of times it’s tough in that scenario to do that because the guy on the other side has no way, the discriminated person has no way to know where I really come from because they just can’t, it’s happened to them so much or even once, it changed them forever. There’s no way to go back to that never happened to me.
Harry Dudley: Well, and I didn’t see this, but there was, and I think Rhonda saw it on TV perhaps, a game where one of them during the NFL game, maybe after the game was over, one of them, and I don’t know if he was a protester or not, but he went over and shook the hand of a veteran that was in a wheelchair, and he did two or three, just a couple of things and said, “Hey, I respect you. I have respect for other people. And I have respect for the fact of what others have paid for my opportunities.” And boy, does say, that speaks volumes. It speaks as loudly, as you said, if they’ve got a platform and they want to express their feeling, if they would also mix that with the fact that, yeah, it’s not a perfect world. And that’s something Grandpa Eltos would oftentimes try to at least get it in my head that this is not a perfect world. We are not a perfect society. It has never been and never will be, but we have to continue to work to get the best we can of what we have. And of course, the more opportunities we have. Where in the world are there more opportunities to do strive for perfection than in America? I don’t know, I’m not a world traveler.
Neil Dudley: Well, this Gary Vaynerchuk I was talking about, he’s an immigrant, his family immigrated from Russia, or Belarus, I guess it was. So, there’s another perspective I’ve got no way to- I can empathize with that idea or maybe his life a bit, but I can’t really, I just can’t get in that mind space real good because I don’t have the tools. So that thing is, I think, a tough, but also a daggum, it’s almost an advantage in some cases.
Harry Dudley: I can generally go back, when I try to struggle with an issue like this, and I think how could this be solved? I’m a little, I’m upset about this. They’re upset about it. The fans, the NFL, the world it seems is focused on this when we’re not focused on some other political problem, where you seem to be focusing on all of our differences. And I think how could we solve differences? And to me, it’s just what I try to do personally, as an individual, is have compassion for the other person, have compassion for a different ethnic group. I cannot understand a lot of things in the world today. I don’t understand where there were some of those who are protesting, you hit it on the head, there’s no way I’m going to fully understand what they’re trying to tell me. But if they believe and they know I can have some compassion for their problem, maybe they can accept me a little better, and we can have a discourse that says let’s try to improve it. Let’s not say we’re going to completely fix it, but let’s improve it. Let’s find ways that we together can find a better understanding of each other without getting mad about it. Without me hating you and you hating me.
Neil Dudley: Well, that makes me think, isn’t life from now forward, I mean, you can’t roll the clock back and fix it because there’s no fixing life. There’s only how am I going to act now and tomorrow and the next day? There’s no fixing it. There’s no-
Harry Dudley: And see, and that’s the part that I don’t understand.
Neil Dudley: You can always say God tried to fix it by sending Jesus down on the cross, so we got some salvation and grace, but it is still just a big, old mess. Everything behind me is a big old mess. How can I go forward and at least try to make it better?
Harry Dudley: Well, and I’m not knowledgeable enough about history to speak intelligently about it even, but to me, just in my life in general, when something that I perceive as it really goes against my basic nature or my values, I want to understand it. I want to hear somebody explain to me why they feel that way. And if they can explain it in a method that is palatable and acceptable to me, I’m certainly willing to listen. And I can watch TV, and this channel is politically motivated by the Republican party. These channels are politically directed towards maybe a more liberal or progressive thoughts. I personally like to hear every one of those. And so, even if they’re at the farthest end of that spectrum, I want to try to understand why they’re thinking like that. And I probably will never, ever agree with them, but I want to know, how did you get there? What’s taken you to that extent? And then as they follow the scale all the way back to the middle, where I feel like I reside, and then I can look on the other side and then go all the way to the far extreme Right, and I don’t agree with them either. I think they’re off course. And generally, those at the very ends of the spectrum are the ones who just flat hate each other. Now if they can- And the ones in the middle, we don’t want to hate anybody, and we want to kind of figure out why you’re thinking like that. We’re more malleable.
Neil Dudley: That’s the trick. If anybody can dream it up or come up with it is how to get their perspective changed a little, on both the way outside viewpoints, way left, way right, whatever. They get out there and they just dig a trench so deep they’re never coming back. I mean, this is I got to be out here. There has to be somebody out here in this thing to ever get this world right. The world is not right; it’s never going to be right. Let’s all try to get along together in the best way we can.
Hello girls. We’ve had the entrance. Albany Rose, come over here. I want you to talk to the people on the podcast a second.
Albany Dudley: No.
Neil Dudley: Why not? Come over here and just tell them who you are. Like talk right here at the speakers and tell them who you are. Are you going to do it? Alright, well go ahead.
Albany Dudley: My name is Albany, and Dakota has a pet puppy, and I like him. And I always play with him, and we pet him.
Neil Dudley: What is his name?
Albany Dudley: His name is Stretch.
Neil Dudley: We will just pause a minute, and we’ll go ahead and interview Albany. So, tell us about Stretch a little bit. What color is he?
Albany Dudley: Black.
Neil Dudley: Okay. Alright, well, we’ll see you later. She’s ready to go, folks. She’s got [Ro-ro] by the hand and they’re going to go to the yard. And then you get that sweet little voice come walking and just talking, you just want to just protect her from all this stuff we’ve been talking about, the good, bad, and ugly of our world. And man, if you can find a spot to just let her experience it and build some systems for dealing with it and being loving and open, and that’s the real success.
Harry Dudley: There are a lot of things in this life that we’ll never understand, never have a clear answer for, or at least I have not been able to get the clarity that I want, and I’m always, I’m a very analytical person. I strive to break things down to where I can understand them. But a lot of things, even in religion, and I’m a Christian and I feel like I’ve been saved. I understand what it is because I’ve felt the spirit. But to say that I understand it and I’m clear on it and there’s just no confusion would be an inaccuracy that I wouldn’t want anybody to know. It’s kind of like when I was in the financial world and as an advisor, financial advisor, people are looking for defined, clear, safe, secure, known, just almost perfection in what they want. I have learned in my lifetime, there is nothing, that doesn’t exist. It’s not available. So, what we find is the things that we can best understand and mold our life to follow those paths. And so, I look at it like Albany here and Savannah and Dakota, I’m sure Dad and the older generation would look at me the same way, and I’d think, man, I just want to protect you from every evil thing in the world. And yet, I understand they’ll never be able to grow up like that. They’ve got to grow up in the environment and in the world we live, and some fear and some failure, mistakes. My dad almost ruined me to the extent that I was afraid of always making a financial error, a mistake, or tearing up a piece of equipment because I didn’t want to cost him anything. And I’ve known kids that they don’t care what it might cost, they’ll just tear it apart. And I think, oh man, don’t you know what it’ll take to fix that? You don’t have any idea of what you’re tearing up. But they don’t have any fear about it. So, how do you appropriately build fear, whether it’s financially, living every day of life, the fear of your health problems, or fear that kids can have nightmares about everything in the world. And if they watch TV at all, they’ll be scared every day of their life. As an adult, if I watch TV, I can be scared every day of my life. So, we have to learn to deal with the fears and the problems that we want to protect our children from. You send them to school, there’s going to be a bully in the class. There’s going to be some, you’re going to make a failing grade. They’re not going to be the champion of the football team.
Neil Dudley: Yeah. Well, I think that’s one of those tools the cowboys put in my toolbox that I grew up with, and you and mom, that tool of pay attention and figure it out. Yeah, there are things that can go bad for you, but be awake, pay attention. You didn’t just do that for me one time and I got it. That’s a cowboy thing. If you’re in the pasture, keep an eye, try to remember where you came from in case you get lost, you got to get back. And hey, this is a system. See that cow trail, that’s probably going to lead you to water. If you get lost, find a cow trail, you’ll probably go to some water and then you’re lot will be able to get your bearings from there. I want my girls, and really anybody listening, to just take a little time and think am I paying attention to my life and what’s going on around me, and just trying to think, why is that happening? Like, I think that’s been really good for me in life is just awareness and putting some logic to what I am experiencing in the world. Driving, anything – if you’re looking up there and you see some brake lights starting to come on, you think, oh, well I’m going to slow down. That’s just a piece of the cowboy code that I really picked up on luckily or got drilled into me. That’s the other thing, I think parents, and even me, I have to talk to myself about this, is I’m like, well, I know all this stuff, but that was because Dad and Mom spent years and still spend time drilling it into me and giving me a chance to learn it and pick it up and take it. That’s so unfortunate for kids, humans, adults that never did have anybody spend that much time just drilling them on the simple things that over time you build up a pretty good system of operating.
Harry Dudley: Well, paying attention to your surroundings is a huge deal, from a young child, getting them to do that, your experiences and figuring that out. If we went to the pasture together, cattling, and you were with us, I was always trying to keep an eye on you. I tried to know where you were. But I also wanted you to know how to get out of there if something, if we got separated. I remember the day that we were gathering cattle and the yellow jackets got after you, and your horse took off running. Well, I had Brian with us, too. So, I was trying to stay up with both of you, and you were both scattered, and I knew you were allergic to the wasp stings. And we were trying to pin the cattle, and man, it was just, it was like, oh man, this whole thing is just blowing apart bad right here. And I find that in life, a lot of times, when it looks like things are just blowing up poorly and it’s all going to come apart, if somebody is prepared, I’ve told Rhonda a lot of times when we were raising y’all, she’d say, “Oh, we can’t let that happen.” I said, “Yeah, we can. We’ll watch it from a distance. And we’ll kind of watch it, and they’ll learn from it. Let them learn from those mistakes.” It didn’t matter if it was in school, in the classroom and something happened and you didn’t make that A. Well, man, that’s horrible. No, it’s not. They’ll learn from that. They will learn from that situation. And so, I guess for people listening, I don’t know who listens-
Neil Dudley: Nobody yet. There’s only about three people that listened so far. So, we don’t have to worry about the audience being too mean.
Harry Dudley: –who’s particularly going to listen, but even if this is only for my grandkids someday, I want them to know that failure is not an end, it is merely a setback that gives you another step to come on up. And you’ve challenged me in so many ways that were good for me. Raising you has helped made me grow in my own skin.
Neil Dudley: Me too. I’m experiencing it right now with my girls. I want things for them, and I need to be a better man, a better Christian, a better dad, all these things, to have a chance to give it to them. And they’re just challenging. I mean, they are not the same. So, you have to think, I have a tendency to just want to be the boss, and “Hey, do this and get to it.” And I got one that does not respond to that, I mean, just, ain’t going to take it. And it’s probably a good lesson for me that I need to learn and start trying a lot harder on because that piece of her personality has got a whole lot of value to it, too. Anyways, I’ve got to go pick the kids up from school.