Remembering ‘The Man Who Listens to Horses’

candidate, Abdul Elsayed, one Michigan Senate primary campaigning on affordability, health care,

“and ending U.S. military aid to Israel. Join us as we break down his victory and what it”

could signal for November's midterms on the NPR Politics podcast. Listen, on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm David Bean Kooley. Monti Roberts, the internationally acclaimed horseman who used trust instead of intimidation to train horses, died last week, he was 91. He defied the conventional method of breaking horses, something he watched his father do, and created his own general approach, known as "join up." He based it on the non-verbal language

horses used to communicate with each other. It was a language he observed as a teenager, watching Wild Mustangs in the Sierra Nevada. Roberts was born in Salinas, California in 1935.

“He grew up around horses, could ride confidently at three, and by the time he was eight,”

said he spent 10 hours days working with horses, competing on weekends. He became a champion rider, and was a stunt rider in about a hundred movies, including as a young boy, the Elizabeth Taylor film National Velvet. He's trained thousands of horses, including wild horses, race horses, and problem horses. Roberts became internationally known after Queen Elizabeth II brought him to work with her horses in 1989. She supported his controversial general approach to horse training,

and urged him to ride his memoir, the man who listens to horses, which became a best seller in 1996. Their 30-year friendship was the subject of the 2023 Andrea Neven's documentary The Cowboy

“and the Queen. From his California Ranch, Monty Roberts introduced his techniques to horse owners,”

trainers, and students from around the world. He also traveled widely giving demonstrations. Terry Gross spoke to Monty Roberts in 1997, shortly after his memoir was published.

Roberts first learned about horses from his father, who ran a riding school at the massive

salinas rodeo, but Roberts' father used pain and punishment to break horses. Well, I suppose you'd say my father was a very traditional horse trainer, working in the conventional manner, and the main concept is, you do what I tell you to, or I'll hurt you. What it is is that whether I hurt you a lot or a little, it's dealing with negative reinforcement, the use of pain or corporal punishment, acting out in violence, to train the animal, not to do

that thing that you're against or you're working to avoid. So what approached to discipline in negative reinforcement that your father used? Well, he would tie legs up on horses and tie them down on the ground. He would tie them to posts and work in such a way so as to frighten them and cause them to test those tethers to the maximum degree, which would bash them very violently. Often times they were on the ground, often times there was blood in there was injury. It was all done in the vein

that that's necessary to do to break this horse. And break is a very good word. It's been used for about 6,000 years now to describe the procedures used to cause a horse to accept saddlebryle and rider and training, if you will. What do you call your approach? Starting, the approach itself is titled "Join Up", but the procedure, I say, starting the horse rather than breaking the horse, because I don't use any pain or restraint and I request that the horse do the things I want.

I don't demand it. I ask the horse to do them. So as to cause a state of mind whereby he wants to do them, not because he's forced to do them. Your basic principle in training horses is to try to use horse language to communicate with the horses, to use horse, horse behavior in horse language, which you learn from being with horses in the wild, which we'll get to in a few minutes.

Describe your "Join Up" method of asking, basically, asking the horse first to go away

and to then join up with you. Yeah, well, it's their language and they use this business of sending the animal away. That is, they use it interspeasy, as well as interspeasy. So they use this business

isolated, the flight animal, the animal who provides meat for the predator, is very concerned about that and they want to come back in the worst possible way. So that's the most severe punishment that you can deal a flight animal. Well, the wild horse is more vulnerable to being preyed on when it's on its own than when it's with other horses. Exactly. The isolated grayser or flight animal is smorgasport for the lion or the tiger or the grizzly bear and that's

sort of thing, even coyotes but wolves certainly. And so they're very upset with that. And I discovered this language going on in the wild, watched how they communicated with one another, and then utilized those responses in order to request their compliance or their cooperation.

So how do you first send the horse away? Which the horse doesn't lie? Well, that's easy because

“they're a flight animal and if you're dealing with undrained animals, all you have to do is”

use the aggressive phrases in their own language and the animal goes away. That's the easy part. What aggressive phrases in the horse language do you use? Well, first of all, it would be eyes on eyes, piercing the eyes. That does not draw the animal in as it would the grizzly or the great white, but it drives the horse away. Then shoulders square, all movement square, fingers open, and extended drives the horses away. There's lots of motions and positions of the body,

which mean go away. And how do you get the horse then to come back? Well, once the horse has gone its flight distance, then they begin to communicate that they would like to come back.

And they do that with basically four statements. One is with the ear to say I respect you.

“I don't know what this is all about, but I'll give you my respect. And then two that they'll”

try to come closer to you, just physically bending and trying to come closer to you. Three that they lick and chew, they stick their tongue right out and then chew. And it's my opinion that they're saying I'm a grazer, I'm a herbivore. I'm eating over here, and if I'm eating, I can't fear you because if we had any adrenaline or fear in us, we would have to stop eating. And then four, the dropping of the head down and bouncing the nose

right along the ground, which means if we could have this meeting to renegotiate the deal, I would let you be the chairman of the meeting. So when the horse does all these things that you just mentioned, what signals are you giving like come back? Let's get together now. Well, after those four,

“then I go passive from aggressive. Those earlier ones that I mentioned, and passive means to take”

the eyes off the eyes, to lower your gaze, to put your shoulders on a 45 degree angle to the horse's body axis, to face slightly away and to round all your movements, inviting the horse to come in. There's dozens of movements, but those are the basic ones. You grew up on the grounds of erodio,

your parents ran a riding school, and you basically grew up in the erodio, you won the national

intercollegiate erodio bulldogging championship. You won all kinds of like horse, horse metals over the years. You started learning about horse language through observing wild moustangs in Sierra Nevada. And this relates to a wild horse race that used to be part of the erodio. And when the wild horses were done with this race, the horses at the time year young were taken to the slaughterhouse to be made into dog food, something that you found very upsetting. So I want you to tell the story of how

this wild horse race, in which the horses would later be taken out and slaughtered, how that relates to your observing of wild horses. Well, yeah, okay. The opportunity came up for me to go to Nevada and capture and bring these wild horses back to Salinas. My idea was that after the horse race was over, if I could put these horses through a program to cause them to accept saddle bridal and rider, that they could go through a sale and be usable by people and therefore save their lives.

And not only that, but that they would pay more for them than the people at this slaughterhouse. And I convinced the president of the association that this might be true. And he let me go and do this

you know, it became the normal thing. Now, that's all ancillary to what was really important in

“all of this as we look back on it because what actually happened that was of much more importance”

to me was that it was a university. They were my teachers. The wild horse? Yeah, it was just an incredible

adventure in learning where I learned their language spoken in the raw, spoken in the rarest form of freedom and completely without human intervention. What were the first signs you picked up on that made you realize there was a horse language that you could understand. First sign I picked up on was how the dominant female was running the family group. She was the controller of the sociological aspects of the family group. And as a very young

child I'd seen the movies. I thought the black stallion was the one that ran all show, you know, well the black stallion doesn't have any decisions to make at all except how to get the mayor's pregnant and how to keep some other black stallion from taking them away. It's the mayor who educates the young and who communicates who decides where we'll eat in which direction we'll travel

and that's the first thing I noticed was that the matriarch was the decision maker of the sociological

“group. And then what did you notice about communication, how horses used the language with each other?”

The first thing I noticed in the forms or expressions of communication was the mayor squaring up and isolating the obstreparous teenager or adolescent. And then and forcing them out of the group for a while, forcing them out of the group and holding them out of the group until they'd paid a price for their deed or whatever it was and then how they allowed them back in and so forth and so on as you go through all of the expressions of their language. You also studied horses

ears and what they communicate. Indeed the ears are very expressive and you can read pretty much the intentions and the concerns of a horse by his ears. And what do the ears tell you?

“Well they tell you everything. I mean they tell you whether they're angry, whether they're happy,”

they tell you whether they're tired or fresh. Depending whether the ears are back or forward or yeah depending on their positions and their movement and the speed of their movement will tell you a lot of things about their concerns and their adrenaline levels and all of those things. Over the years a lot of people have brought problem horses to you horses with serious behavior problems horses who can't seem to be trained or who actually attack people. How do you adapt your

technique to work with horses who have behavior problems? Well first of all Terry there's no such

thing as a problem horse on the face of the earth. There are horses who have problems with people but yes you're right there are a lot of horses that people term problem horses and yes you're right they do bring them to me and generally after they've run the gamut to its maximum and the horse is absolutely you know given up on by everybody else and they call me in an example of that certainly is Lomitas in Germany and more recently here in the United States a Philly called

Song of Africa who started her career in Ireland, Thorebred for racing and in her first race she had a very serious time of it at the starting stalls or the starting gate just prior to the race and she wound up being injured and crashing the gates all apart and being disqualified from the race and it was a mess and then she was put into some very harsh training to fix her you know and then the next thing you know she was fighting people and she had scars all over her and it was in desperate

shape and the trainer in Ireland suggested that she'd be taken to the United States where they claim they have greater expertise in this kind of thing and she landed on the east coast of the United States to be trained for another year or approximately that before the trainer said you know take her home and shoot her she's just hopeless and then I got the call and at that moment in time she

the most incredibly beautiful but confused young female that you could ever imagine and I worked with her for four days mind you it had been two and a half years that they had gone the other way and in four days she simply said this will be fine I will do this and she's racing and winning she's one of the best fillies in the United States today. What do you think it is that you were

able to do the turned her attitude around to give her trust in the human being she never had

“trust before because she'd been beaten up she'd been caused pain by human beings to say you must do this”

or I'll hurt you. So when you handed her back to her owner did you have to convince her owner to never use punishment on the horse again. I never would have left California if I hadn't had an agreement to give me a young person from their organization who would learn all of the techniques that I used with this particular fillet. Now I can't teach that person all that I know in four days but I can specifically deal with the problems of this fillet and teach them enough to handle the problems of

this one individual horse and they handed me a young man oddly enough coincidentally from Ireland by the name of David Duggen and he has continued to do my work to extend my communication with this fillet so that successfully she's been able to go on and do a racing. As a child you are a stunt writer and you I think doubled for Elizabeth Taylor and National Velvet. You did some work in my friend Flika. You doubled for Roddy McDowell. Make you Rooney Charlton has to tap Hunter to name a few.

Do you have a favorite stunt that you had to do in the films? I suppose they they move these makers tend to categorize you and they say oh we're going to do this that guy Robert he does that about as about the best of anybody. It seems to me that my spot became most famous in the riding of horses down very steep hills. Rocky sandy hills where you blast straight down into the river and stuff like that. I've seen that in a thousand westerns.

Yeah well that was me that is to say if you saw one made in the 40s or 50s I was probably involved if there were rocks and sand flying and you went into the trees or into the river that was

“probably me. So what were some of the things you have to do to be stay on the horse and”

make that work. I always said you get high that is to say you get light on the horse you get high

above him and you try not to interfere with his own movements so that he has the best chance of of keeping his feet and then as you approach let's say the river that you separate from him and get distance enough so that he can't hurt you when you go into the water and you basically leaving alone as much as possible. Did you do any of that fancy showing showy stuff like side saddle riding and when you're holding onto the saddle and your your your body is

suspended on the side of the horse while you're dodging bullets from the bad guy who shooting from

behind the rock. That was one of the first stunts they asked me to do and he said can you

gallop left to right and make yourself invisible by hanging off for a side yeah I did a lot of that jumping on from behind yes and I used the mini trampoline a lot. Oh wait wait what do you

“use that for? Well so that you thought I could jump eight feet high when I could go. Oh so that's how”

it's done. Oh I didn't realize that. Little trampolines are very handy for that kind of thing and yeah I had to do all that the vaulting you come out of the bar and grab the saddle horn and the horse runs down the street and you hang on his side and then vault into the saddle so that you can catch up to the bank robbers or whatever. Yeah I did all those kind of things. Jump the horse through the bar room window up to stairs and into the saloon or whatever. Monti Roberts speaking with Terry

Gross in 1997. After a break we'll continue their conversation. Also Martin Johnson reviews Jason

I'm David B. and Cooley and this is fresh air. This week on here and now any time a family

“escapes the Spokane wildfires just in time. The garage door opened at 250-3 and we have video”

of the house on fire at 350. And contractors in New Mexico have stopped drilling new wells but they're still pumping ground butter to build Trump's border wall. All that and more on here and now anytime on the NPR app and anywhere you listen to podcasts. Well Ellington it seems like everything is being called a recession indicator these days. Yeah like the box of hamburger helper in my pantry.

Or the new Apple Neo book. Or the resurgence of press on nails or lipstick or no lipstick I've

lost track. There is only one way to know if these are actual economic warning signs though. Listen to the indicator from planet money on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. I'm TV critic David B. and Cooley. We're remembering Monti Roberts, the horse trainer who pioneered and advocated a more general approach to training horses. His philosophy was embraced and supported by Queen Elizabeth II beginning a friendship

that lasted 30 years. When she died in 2022 at age 96, he was one of the invited guests at her royal funeral. Monti Roberts died last week at age 91. Terry Gross spoke to him in 1997. When you were a young man, you worked in rodeos and one of the things he did was the bull riding events. You've won a championship in that area. You described that as the most dangerous event in the rodeo why. Yeah, I won a couple of small championships in bull riding. I won my major

championship in bull dogging. But bull riding is a very dangerous event and it's dangerous because the bull generally weighs between 1,400 and 2,000 pounds and they move with unbelievable agility and they don't want you on their back and they can be very dangerous and what they do to you oftentimes flings you through the air for 30 or 40 feet and bashes you up against some wall or fence or throw you down and jump on top of you kind of thing. It's just really dangerous

and virtually everybody that goes into it suffers significant injuries at one point or another.

Well here's what I want to know. Here's somebody who has such a strong

canship with horses. Try to communicate with them in their own mind. Do you feel any empathy with the bulls? Yeah, I love bulls. You do love them to death and my son became a very good bull rider later and he was absolutely in love with bull. I mean we had bulls in training programs to teach them to buck and I have great empathy for the bulls and don't ever feel that those bulls are being mistreated. They get the best treatment you could ever imagine. They get the best of feed and care

and they're protected by their owners to the maximum degree and they have great fun and what they do.

“They have the upper hand every single day. What does it feel like to be thrown by a bull?”

It hurts a lot and it's loud noises when your head hits the ground and stuff. It's stupid. It's really stupid for anybody to go into that. What are you going to ask you? What is the point of event? It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy but when you're raised around it and you watch your peers accomplishing something so incredibly overwhelming by riding this particular bull. There's some kind of urge within us, crazy human beings, to try to do that too. I really didn't like my son going into it.

He's a practicing lawyer. He's a 3.7 graduate from Stanford in Econ. Why would you put that brain in such great de jeopardy? But it ran its course and he got out of it without serious injury and I'm very pleased for that. As we discussed earlier, your father was a horse trainer and he tried to whip horses into submission, to beat them into submission. I guess he used brutality on you too to try to keep you in line. I'm wondering if that's related to the fact that you

“have adopted, I think, about 47 foster kids over these years for different intervals of time.”

Kids who had been abused or who had run into problems with the law. Do those two things relate? Oh, sure they do. I didn't know they did when I began to do it. You see, I went through

project that they had and I really found myself enjoying this

“parent and children relationship and the psychology of children. So after I left university,”

people in the county and the state agencies saw great value in what I was doing and they began to give me calls and recommend that there was a child locked up in past Robles, California that they felt had great potential if just given a chance. Why don't you go meet them, you know, they knew I was a sucker and I'd go meet these kids and bring them home and what can you do, man? I had to try to help and my life was going pretty well. My horses were making me a little

money and I never asked for any money for these foster children to stay with me and it just began

and Odyssey that went on for about 35 years and those 47 foster children span about 35 years.

“So, you know, it wasn't like we had so many at one time but it was a very gratifying thing to do”

and there's about 40 very positive stories to tell in all of this and seven very negative stories to tell with no gray areas and that's just the way it is. It either took or it didn't but those odds are incredibly good when you consider kids between 11 and 13 coming to me already incarcerated in words of the county words of the state type thing. Did you use any of the principles that you had learned working with heart horses when you were working with your children? I used all the principles,

the same principles, it's the same psychology, give them a chance to fail so they can have that chance to succeed when they fail they're responsible for their own actions but when they succeed they're also responsible for their own actions and they must get the most positive rewards that you can possibly think of to give them generally love, generally exaltation, moving upward, giving them advancements, giving them a chance to learn something new when they achieve something.

Not too many years ago, maybe you could tell me the year because I don't really remember you had major back surgery and your back had basically given out because of all of the falls you've taken

over the years, the impact of all the riding and horses and bulls. And the doctor told you you'd never

“ride again, I think they would have been happy if you walked but you ended up being able to walk”

and ride. However, I'm sure you're much more fragile than you were before your back problems. When you're working with a horse now, are you just a little more self-protective of your own body than you were before and is that affecting your technique with horses? Yes, I am more protective now, more careful than I was when I was young, I think that's a kind of a natural evolution for most people but for me it's a good deal more serious because I was in a wheelchair

for a while and they didn't know whether I'd get out of that and then I was on crutches for about a year and they didn't know whether I'd ever get off of some support system and I'm just one accident away from the wheelchair if you will so I'm much more protective now and it does affect my work with horses, not all that negatively because sometimes I just go that bit slower and maybe it's even more effective and I'm teaching my young people now to go that bit slower and to give

the horse a little more opportunity to get ready for things and to slowly come into things. I often say to my students if you go at something with the horse, as though you have all day to do it, it might take you about 15 minutes but if you go at it like you have 15 minutes it might take you all day and it's truly a tortoise and hair situation in the real I mean that story of the tortoise and hair isn't very plausible but this is a plausible story with the same techniques.

Tell me about your favorite horse? My favorite horse, Johnny Tivio. A horse that I won four world's championships with, a horse that was abused as a as a young horse, I got him in a very sad state but I knew his talents. I had seen him with an abusive trainer as a very young animal

trusting the human being he turned his life around and became so productive it was unreal and

“you just had to get out of his way to allow him to win championships. He was a cutting horse and rain”

cow horse. He was an extension of me. He was like a brother like a very close brother would be but I have a lot of favorites and song of Africa's rising quickly on the list. Monti Roberts speaking to Terry Gross in 1997. He died last week at age 91. His memoir is called the man who listens to horses and the recent documentary about him is called the cowboy and the queen. Coming up Martin Johnson reviews Jason Moran plays Duke Ellington. This is fresh air.

This week on Consider This. Virginia thought her criminal record would follow her forever until

a few minutes with an AI app that told her she could clear her felonies. You'll never find a harder

worker than someone who has something to prove to themselves how AI could help millions of Americans with criminal records find work. This week on Consider This from NPR. Hey there, I'm Brittany Loose and I don't know maybe this is a little out of pockets to say but

“I think you should listen to my podcast. It's called it's been a minute and I love it and”

I think you will too. Over the past couple months over 100,000 new listeners started tuning in.

Find out why. Listen to the it's been a minute podcast from NPR today.

This is fresh air. The music of the great Duke Ellington has been a staple of jazz repertoire for decades. There even are big band competitions built around his formidable songbook. But lately as much as Ellington is rightly revered, there are recordings coming out where artists both build on Duke's extraordinary music and find midway points between the legend and themselves.

“One of the best examples of this is from pianist Jason Moran who does a solo rendition of mostly”

Ellington compositions on the band camp only release. Jason Moran plays Duke Ellington. Jazz critic Martin Johnson says the commonalities are as striking as the innovations. . The music of Duke Ellington has a cornerstone in jazz but lately musicians are building unique structures with it. That's the Ellingtonian classic I got it bad and that ain't good from Jason Moran's solo presentation of Duke's music and the difference is immediately

apparent to jazz fans. It's denser, more rhythmically insistent. Essentially it's as much Moran as it is Duke, which is Jason's style. In the past 20 years he produced tributes to the music of the Lonious Monk, Fatsballer and James Rees Europe, not by presenting faithful renditions of their songs, but by showing the common ground he shares with these greats and by making the music a little more fun.

Ellington's music is often known for its regal elegance but Moran values its grit and he demonstrates this on black and tan fantasy. Also Ellington typically worked with an orchestra and Moran seeks to communicate the depth and force that comes from having more than a dozen musicians on the bandstand. Moran thinks of the dream state of the black and tan fantasy and dives deep into the lower register of piano to communicate it with a rumble.

he lightens his typically heavy touch and he allows the music to breathe more with an austere

rendition.

“No survey of Ellington's work is complete without touching undies, frequent collaborator,”

Billy Strayhorn. Moran includes Strayhorn's lotus blossom and he uses the lighter approach

but he also references the way Ellington presented it on the album in his mother called him Bill,

Duke's renowned tribute to his sidekick. There's a stately grandeur to Ellington's music that was especially well captured by his orchestra

“but Moran nails it on the piano on Jeep's blues while retaining his trademark rhythmic insistence.”

The piece features a remarkable solo by Ellington's legendary autosaxophone is Johnny Hodges and Moran seems to nod to it here. These days, musical tributes often feature originals that reflect on the meaning of the subject. Tai Shonsori's Tribute to Max Roach, Steve Leiband's Oat Anthony Braxton, and Dave Douglas gifts ensemble, Ellington Tribute are examples of this trend.

Moran includes his original tone means which demonstrates the influence and fascination that Ellington has had on his own music. Jazz critic Martin Johnson writes for the Wall Street Journal and Downbeat. He reviewed Jason Moran plays Duke Ellington. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews Tony, the new film by Oav Anthony Bourdain. This is fresh air.

These days, it feels like the news changes every hour. Well, NPR has a podcast that does that too. NPR news now brings you a fresh five-minute episode

every hour of the day with the latest most important headlines in episodes that are clear,

fact-based and easy to digest. Listen, NPR news now on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast.

“Have you ever been so upset that you can't even think straight?”

When we're distressed and in high anxiety, we tend to breathe from our chest, which is actually more hyperventilating and is the opposite of relaxing. So we want to breathe from our belly area. This week on LifeKit Podcast tips for those painful, stressful moments. Listen to LifeKit on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

decision. On its been a minute, we discuss how the many depictions of abortion have shifted

“with the politics of the times. Watch the full of its been a minute episode on YouTube or”

listen to the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. Anthony Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018, was an internationally known chef, writer and television star. The new movie Tony, starring Dominic Sessa, Leo Woodall and Antonio Bandaris, follows the young Bourdain's discovery of the culinary world that would make him famous. Our critic at large John Powers says

that this fast, funny, touching film is none of the things you fear it could be. A couple of decades ago, I live free here in Singapore. The question I was asked most often was, do you know Anthony Bourdain? He was an idol there, but not only there. Because his TV shows

“aired in almost every country, people everywhere knew him and saw him as an embodiment of what they”

liked about America. Bourdain was indisputably cool, with an aura of disreputable fun, but also generous and open to different cultures. Genuinely worldly, he didn't treat other society's food as weird, but as delicious and rooted in things that matter. We see the blossoming

of that openness in Tony and amusing new movie based on a few pages from his breakthrough book

kitchen confidential. Taking the splinter of Bourdain's life, the mid-1970s summer when he was 19, director Matt Johnson sidesteps the touch all the bases sledge of the biopic. Instead, Tony captures a few telling moments in the life of a wine-dark soul who was, as Homer said of Odysseus, the man of twists and turns. When we first meet Bourdain, played by Lanky Dominic Sessa, he's an annoyingly brash, deeply insecure vassar student. A would-be writer, he's trying to

BS a literary fellowship committee and defending a novel that's a dialogue between Jack Carawak and George Orwell. He calls the book a "Building's Roman", the German term for the literary genre that tracks a person's moral and emotional growth. Naturally, his Tony's own growth will be watching. When the fellowship doesn't pan out, he heads off to a strangely unguided province town in hopes of romanceing a fellow student, Nancy. That's a merely a jones from coden, but he soon finds

himself broke and alone. He's rescued by a man known simply as chef, played by Antonio Banderas, whose slice sneaky deep performance may well win him and Oscar. Chef lets him sleep on a hammock outside his house, and when Tony lies that he knows about kitchens, hires him to work in the back of his bare bones seafood restaurant. Away from work, Tony falls under the sway of his coworker's cell,

played by thuggish penash by rising star Leo Woodle, whose the move is exemplar of the bedboy chef. Sal steals, beats people up, collects notches from the doorframes of women he sleeps with, and gives Tony cocaine in the kitchen. Tony's summer becomes a dialogue between the sociopathic sound, who pulls him toward the self-destructive darkness that eventually claim him, and the humane almost saintly chef, who helps him tap into the big hardedness that would make him

be loved. Along the way, Tony finds a calling. He discovers his love of kitchen culture, with its culinary rituals, jocular camaraderie, and fedamine rush need to get the dishes out, and underlying sense that there's something hallowed in the communal act of eating.

Here, on his first day at the restaurant, Tony pretends he knows how to cook,

and his co-workers let him have it. You know, I can cook too. Excuse me? She says he's a cook chef. Yeah, wonderful. Not a cook.

“I'm a writer. I said I could cook. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't understand. That's what the”

my dad's like, one of the best chefs in New Jersey. Oh, you're dead. Why don't you say so? Whatever. As an origin story, Tony is a tad too neat. Yet vastly better than you get in comic book movies, whose heroes are transformed by bytes from radioactive spiders. From the start, we realize that Tony's surface privado has no weight. Grouping to find his identity, he has the uncoolness of a kid pretending to be cool.

This is nicely pulled off by Sessa, a terrific young actor, who you may know as Paul Jamaati's

if the rock star, Bourdain will become, while also showing he's not yet there.

“Johnson and his co-readers Todd Bartels, Lou Howe and Matthew Miller do a nifty job”

of giving Bourdain's transformation and arresting shape, pulling us into a propulsive rhythm of recurring scenes. Tony working in the kitchen, chef-waking Tony with water in the face, salacting psycho, chef-dragging the godless Tony to weekly mass. Of course, real life lacks the

clean arc of a story. Bourdain himself was known for embroidering his tales, and Tony takes similar

liberties. In reality, he didn't go to province town to win Nancy. He didn't go there alone. He didn't work at just one restaurant. He didn't have a boss as handsome as Antonio Bandiris.

“There was no sal, and the actual Tony Bourdain was not the innocent the film makes him seem.”

No doubt the filmmakers would reply that while not literally true, Tony is emotionally true. Maybe so. In any case, the film is emotionally satisfying. Perhaps the highest praise I can offer is that it doesn't depend on Bourdain's fame to keep us interested. I would have enjoyed this movie, even if a T-Rot didn't have TV shows that play on every airline in the world. John Powers reviewed the new film, Tony. On Monday's show, journalist Gil Doran, he spent years

following a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires and says they are at war with American democracy and winning. His new book is called The Nerd Right. Hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/this is Fresh Air. We're rolling out new videos within studio guests behind the scenes shorts and iconic interviews

from the archive. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Chorot. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Julian Hurtsville and Adam Stanichewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Philis Meyers and Ray Baldonado, Lauren Crenzel, Theresa Matten, Monique Nazareth, Saia Challner, Susan Yucundi, Annabalman, and Nico Gonzalez-Wister. Our digital media producer

is Molly C. Benesfer. For Terry Gross and Tony Amosley, I'm David B. Inkel. The midterms are coming and that means the new cycle which is already intense is about to get more intense this fall. So this summer is a perfect time to make sure your news diet is calibrated.

I'm Leila Faldon on up first. We unpack the three biggest stories every morning so you can

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