Jake shares the intense journey of building his Foundations of Excellence program, centering on a wild story about debugging code at 4:30 AM, that led to a breakthrough "fever dream" about invisible architectures in both programming and horsemanship.⁠

After spending hundreds of hours fixing a $2 billion ed-tech company's broken "premium" software, Jake discovered that horse training problems often mirror coding problems: both involve hidden structures and legacy "spaghetti code" that sabotages progress. He explains how bad training ideas create mental architecture that actively fights against learning, using a real example of a dressage student who couldn't grasp the concept of allowing horses to make mistakes as teaching opportunities.

The episode dives deep into diagnostic horsemanship; the ability to see the load-bearing structures that are often hidden from view, understand first principles of how horses think and respond, and escape the "intermediate no man's land" where most riders get stuck fighting invisible problems they don't understand.

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Many riders chase surface-level appearances and miss what true collection actually feels like: lift at the withers, hindquarters engaged, front end light. In this episode, Jake explains why face-checking cycles fail and how true self-carriage emerges when softness and steering fuse together through the neck rein. The key moment to introduce this concept to the horse is what he calls the "turning point" —a subtle give at the withers in response to indirect rein pressure, where guiding and gathering become one. If you can recognize and reward that shift, you stop babysitting your horse’s frame and start cultivating collection that carries through transitions, circles, and straight lines without constant nagging.

"Feel and timing” is a mysterious concept for many riders because no one ever explains what it actually is, or how to grow it. In this episode, Jake breaks it down into what he calls the "four-factor awareness model" — Softness, Acceptance, Balance, Rhythm (SABR). These four layers act like tumblers on a combination lock: at first you just reward basic physical compliance, then mental relaxation, then true balance, and finally rhythm as the capstone. SABR gives you a roadmap, both for teaching any maneuver and refining your own feel in the saddle. If you’ve ever wondered how expert trainers seem to “just know,” this episode decodes the structure behind that awareness.