343. Parkour and Rough Play: Combatting Infantilization | Rafe Kelley

[0] Hello, everybody.

[1] I'm speaking today on matters psychological and practical, I suppose, and hopefully also, well, entertaining and fun, as well as appropriately serious.

[2] I'm talking to Rafe Kelly today, who heads an organization called Evolve Move and Play.

[3] And I'm very interested, have been very interested for a long time.

[4] time in the role of play in the integration and regulation, well, not only of aggression, but also in the fostering of pro -social behavior at an embodied level.

[5] And there's a literature that has emerged over the last several decades, indicating that rough and tumble play in particular is important for kids at very early developmental stages, probably from six months up to, well, who knows, up to what level.

[6] Till you're old, and then that pretend play, which scaffolds in on top of that is also of primary significance in the development of the ability to act in a truly reciprocal and social manner, a manner also that simultaneously fosters development.

[7] So we're going to talk about that today.

[8] So, Rave, why don't we start with a bit of your background?

[9] Yeah.

[10] Why don't you fill people in on your educational background, your interests and all that, and then we'll start talking about getting more to the nuts and bolts of play?

[11] Yeah, I think given that you started with kind of rough and tumble play, it would be good to start with my early childhood.

[12] So I was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia at an early age, and my dad had had similar learning disabilities that he'd really struggled with.

[13] And I was kind of raised in that counterculture, so my dad wanted to just take me out of the school system and just unschool me. And my mom didn't, so there was a big conflict there.

[14] And my dad kind of reacted that by just sort of pulling away from me and sort of emotionally neglecting me. So I was acting out in school and getting in lots of fist fights.

[15] And I got introduced to the martial arts when I was six years old, and that started helping me learn to regulate my emotions.

[16] And then I had a mentor who came into my life who actually took over my education and started homeschooling me after going into fourth grade.

[17] And he did a few things that were really helpful to me. He let me spend just two hours of the day doing homework and then the rest of the day I would be out running in the woods.

[18] But he also did Rough and Tumble play with me extensively, pretty much every day.

[19] And so we would wrestle all the time.

[20] And that became incredibly healing for me. So through the martial arts and through Rough and Tumble Play, very early on, I experienced that, physical practices could have this really transformative effect on me. How old were you when that started, that rough and tumble play?

[21] Yeah, so my dad did a lot of rough and tumble play with me when I was little, but then there was that period where it was more neglectful in our relationship.

[22] Then the second mentor who came into my life came into my life when I was eight years old.

[23] Eight, yeah.

[24] Yeah, well, you pointed out something very interesting there with regard to your father.

[25] I mean, I've actually seen that pattern in many families.

[26] You know, and it seems so, for example, I've seen within my own extended family, thinking of one couple in particular, where every time the father attempted to involve himself in the discipline, let's say, which is really the attention and regulation of his son, his wife would, in small ways and not so small, interfere.

[27] Yeah.

[28] In a rather punitive manner.

[29] treating her husband as if his interaction, his involvement was both inappropriate, inappropriate, ignorant, and dangerous, something like that combination.

[30] And my experience with that has been that what men usually do in that situation is pull away.

[31] And that's really devastating for the kids.

[32] You know, like the mother has to put up a bit of a barrier because there should be a little tension between the parents about how the kids, should be treated and the mothers tend to be more prone to provide security and comfort and fathers to provide encouragement and challenge.

[33] And getting that exactly right really depends on the temperament of the parents and the temperament of the child.

[34] And so there has to be some tension.

[35] But it's unbelievably easy for women to be overprotective of their children enough to stop fathers from interacting.

[36] And then what often happens as a consequence of that is the women then ask themselves why the hell the father isn't more involved with the kids and often the answer to that not always but often is well you punished it out of existence every time the father stepped forward to take it interest you put up a barrier that was non -trivial a moral barrier often and you do that a hundred times yeah that's that yeah so anyways that's that's that's a common pattern and so but you had a lot of interactions with your dad when you were young very yeah i had a very good with my dad.

[37] My dad's a really interesting and creative person.

[38] He's a famous natural builder.

[39] And he was very playful with me when I was young.

[40] He's a really, yeah, an interesting person in that way.

[41] But he, you know, he's a member of the counterculture.

[42] He grew up, you know, my father was actually in jail during my mom's pregnancy for selling marijuana.

[43] So there was real conflict.

[44] My mom had reason to be protective in some sense.

[45] And my dad was struggling with some of those things.

[46] But he and I have a great relationship now, but it did set me up for this sort of crisis at a very early age that then was resolved through getting access to rough and tumble play, and then epic literature, which was also really important to me. So this guy that started to play with you when you were eight, how did that come about?

[47] And why did your mother and father encourage that or even allow it?

[48] Because that's also a place where, you know, people can be skeptical.

[49] Yeah.

[50] Yeah, there's a whole story there, but basically we rented land.

[51] So my dad owned 12 acres.

[52] There was a kind of a hippie commune.

[53] And so we just rented a space to this couple.

[54] It was two men who had moved in.

[55] And my mom was desperate for babysitters, and he offered himself as a babysitter.

[56] And then over time, we just got closer and closer.

[57] So when my mom took me out of school, initially she was going to do some of the homeschooling.

[58] And then over time, it was like the demands on her for taking care of the family financially and taking care of my little sister were sufficient that it was very difficult for her.

[59] And he was just there and, you know, I was willing to do it.

[60] And so that's kind of how that worked out.

[61] So what I wanted to share was that as I kind of then developed, I was in this Red Seater Circle, which is a kind of Native American religious group in my early, my late childhood, early teens.

[62] And there are a lot of other young kids there whose, you know, whose families were part of it.

[63] They were two, three, four years old.

[64] And so by the time I was 12, I started really being kind of just being asked to babysit these younger kids.

[65] And I noticed that they all had this incredible hunger for a rough and humble play.

[66] It was like this deep, unmet need that I was seeing in children everywhere.

[67] And so I started just being the guy who would roughhouse with kids at any social gathering.

[68] And then people started asking me to come over.

[69] When I was 13, one of my closest friends died, unfortunately after a bike accident, he had a spleen taken out and he didn't get sewed up properly, so he hemorrhaged out.

[70] But he had a six -year -old brother and his brother started having a hard time falling asleep after he passed away because he used to roughhouse with his older brother every night before bed.

[71] So his mom called me and asked me to come over a couple nights a week and just roughhouse with this kid so that he could sleep.

[72] And so I developed a really close relationship with him.

[73] kind of through that same relationship.

[74] So I get to kind of step into that role in facilitating rough and double play for younger children, starting as a young kid, and then I went on to work as a mentor for kids and my teens, and then I became a gymnastics coach.

[75] So independently, I'd also developed just an interest in general athleticism, and I started coaching gymnastics.

[76] And again, I had these young, crazy boys with tons of energy and found that they really just wanted someone who was willing to wrestle with them.

[77] And so I've kind of done that repeatedly, and I've really seen how much of an impact that can have.

[78] And so when I first came across the play research through a man named Frank Forensic in his book, The Exuberant Animal, and I started digging into it behind that, and then came into Stuart Brown's work.

[79] And I'm not sure if you're familiar with Stuart Brown, but Stuart Brown was a psychological researcher as well.

[80] And he was looking specifically at spree killers, people who go.

[81] out and kill a lot of people in one go.

[82] And he was looking for any kind of common trait in their development that would explain this pattern.

[83] And what he found was actually inhibition of play.

[84] That if you look at spree killers, they almost always were prevented by their parents from playing.

[85] Their parents treated play as unnecessary and as something that had to be restricted.

[86] And that this, he believed, was the center of that.

[87] And then through Stuart Brown, I became aware of Yakupangsep's work.

[88] So later when I came into your work and started listening to you talk about Yack Panksep and the Rats, I was like, oh yeah, this is it.

[89] And then obviously you've written that paper on Rough and Temple Play and the Regulation of Aggression.

[90] And that paper was just like, yes, absolutely.

[91] For me, because I, you know, I was put in detention when I was in second grade because I actually bounced a kid's head off the concrete and like bust his nose open.

[92] and it was only because someone was willing to go really deep with me into that intense physical play that I was able to let go of that need to express the aggression in the actual social situation and to develop empathy.

[93] That's what I think is so incredible about what you've talked about and what I've seen is that we think that it's like just mocking out combat and building the skills of combat, but actually what you're really doing is learning the dance of recognizing how your touch and the way that you move with somebody, how that plays out in them.

[94] And then that's that kind of really building ground for him.

[95] Mirroring.

[96] Yeah, yeah.

[97] Well, there's, I have a great paper on my personality course website by, on the hypothalamus.

[98] The name escapes me at the moment of the author, but it'll come back.

[99] But it's on the hypothalamus.

[100] People can go to my Psychology 230 website on my home website under courses.

[101] And the gentleman who wrote that paper, who was a real genius, basically put a physiological scaffold underneath Jean Piaget's ideas about the expansion of reflex.

[102] And so, you know, we think of empathy as something like theory of mind.

[103] Yeah.

[104] You know, and that I can understand your pain.

[105] But that isn't, and it's conceptual, but that isn't really how it works because you use your body as a platform to run simulations of other people.

[106] Like, I had a friend when I was a kid, and he didn't have a father, and he used to come over when this was before I was in grade six.

[107] My dad actually stepped in sort of as a surrogate father for him.

[108] I used to wrestle with this friend of mine, and every time I wrestled, I got hurt.

[109] He'd stick his thumb in my eye or some damn thing.

[110] It was really awkward physically, you know?

[111] And I realized, even at that age, it was because he didn't know how to play.

[112] And that dance that you just, describe of that's part and parcel of extended rough and tumble play.

[113] The reason it develops empathy is because while you're wrestling and playing in that physical manner, you get to see, first of all, where you get hurt, you know, how far you can be extended and how far you can be pushed until the excitement and challenge turns into pain and there's a limit there.

[114] And you want to actually play right up to that limit, which is the exciting limit.

[115] then you learn that that's true of you and another person, but you learn it right to the edge of your fingertips.

[116] You learn it about your legs.

[117] You learn it about your back.

[118] You have to learn that about your entire body, or you can't map someone else onto you, because you don't know how it feels.

[119] Well, that's a fundamental issue.

[120] You don't know how it feels.

[121] And so in that rough and tumble play, you're laying a level of deeply embodied knowledge on top of emergent reflexes for motor control, and then you're learning to integrate them into an interpersonal dance.

[122] Panksep showed, this is research you made reference to, that if you deprived male juvenile rats of rough and tumble play, which they do spontaneously and they like to wrestle, then they play hyper -aggressively when you allow them to, like frenetically, desperately, and, you know, which sort of reminds me of what you were saying about, your expression of aggression.

[123] And their prefrontal cortexes don't mature.

[124] And you can suppress their excess play behavior with amphetamines, which is Drittaline, for example.

[125] And so what really seems to have happened, and this is an epidemic, and it's an appalling epidemic, is that we have all these boys who are likely high in extroversion and openness, so very exploratory boys, some of them more disagreeable.

[126] So that would make them also more, you know, less naturally empathic, who are absolutely deprived of play.

[127] And so they're desperately moving because they need to, and then that's medicalized because the goal is to sit down and shut the hell up, even though you're six years old.

[128] And, you know, then the medication, the amphetamine, suppress the play instinct.

[129] And this is really not a good solution.

[130] It's a terrible solution.

[131] It's a terrible solution.

[132] I wrote an essay on this for the Good Men Project back in, I think, 2016, it was just literally titled Rough Housing, Not Ritalin.

[133] And that was exactly the thesis.

[134] What you just said is that we need to provide cultural spaces for this rough -and -tumble play to play out for young children.

[135] And I experience it all the time.

[136] I have, I told you before we started recording that I have a five -year -old daughter.

[137] I also have an eight -year -old boy and a 10 -year -old daughter.

[138] And so I've been doing this rough -and -tumble play with them since they were little.

[139] And they've started training martial arts when they were little four years old.

[140] And so they have friends over, and the friends realize that they're in affordance to wrestle, which they don't necessarily have anywhere else.

[141] And so I get to see how a lot of these kids who are desperate for this opportunity become very poorly regulated in when they have an opportunity for it, right?

[142] And what happens?

[143] Well, they don't know how to control their force levels.

[144] They don't know that it's appropriate to, like, wrestle somebody and not to bite them or to throw things at them.

[145] Right, or they can't control their emotions.

[146] So, you know, like one thing I have to work on with my kids is because they've learned jujitsu since they were little.

[147] Like, they're used to doing chokes.

[148] And I have to, like, make sure they remember because, like, if you put a chokehold on a kid who's never been roughhoused with, they will, that will just destroy their emotional regulation completely.

[149] And so my kids, they don't under, you know, for them, all this stuff is very natural.

[150] Yeah, yeah.

[151] But they don't, but they have learned.

[152] they are learning and it's amazing to watch how well they can handle it.

[153] And so my son, who's eight years old, he's a little bit smaller for his age or he's a, he's a, he's a third grader and he's just kind of old enough to be a third grader.

[154] So he's on the bottom end of that class.

[155] So kids will kind of push on him because he seems like he's small, right?

[156] And it's amazing to watch him just not have an emotional reaction and be physically strong enough and and balanced enough that when a kid tries to punch him, he moves out of the way and he grabs them and holds them with his hand and just stops them completely.

[157] Right.

[158] So it's really an extraordinary power.

[159] Yeah, well, part of what you're pointing to there is that emergent tolerance for provocation, which is also really important later in life, say, if you're married, because you need to be able to regulate your emotional response.

[160] And, of course, the most direct provocation is going to be the provocation that you experience when you're directly physically challenged and to learn to stay within the bounds of acceptable play while you're being provoked, which is exactly what's happening when you're wrestling, does lay the groundwork for civilized interaction.

[161] You know, a lot of people, when they're married, they can't really have a serious conversation, eh?

[162] They can't go down into the depths where the real reparation work might need to be done because they're afraid that if they're provoked, they don't know what they'll do, you know, and what do people do?

[163] They break down in tears and have a fit or they get aggressive or they respond inappropriately in an aggressive manner and that can be physical very quickly.

[164] And then they don't know what they're doing so they're very awkward in their regression.

[165] They don't know how to calibrate it.

[166] And so because they don't have that underlying complex dance of, you know, provocation and response that's all calibrated, they can't ever risk provoking each other.

[167] Plus, the other thing they don't, learn, which is really important as well, is that, you know, if you're wrestling with someone and playing around, you kind of encapsulate the conflict and you give it a space to make itself manifest, but the rule is when you're done, you're done.

[168] And then you just return to normal life.

[169] And, you know, the other thing that people don't have often is they don't know how to bring a fight to an end.

[170] And so they won't start a fight because they're afraid that it'll never end.

[171] And then they can't talk about anything important.

[172] Like it's, yeah, it's amazing.

[173] how much of a catastrophe this really is.

[174] So, okay, so we got to the point in your life where you were about 13.

[175] Yeah, yeah.

[176] Starting to be hired out as a child whisperer in some sense, right?

[177] Yeah, yeah.

[178] Yeah, so that's, well, you see that also, that's a good analogy, because you also see that with dogs.

[179] If you're training a dog, a lot of what you do with the dog is physical play.

[180] And if the dog starts to misbehave, the easiest thing to do with it is just flip it on its back and hold it down.

[181] It's like, no, when I say no, I mean, stop doing that.

[182] And, you know, you don't have to do that with a dog very often before the dog clues in.

[183] Yeah, there's the parallels between, like, why play is so important in humans and dogs are the same.

[184] Like, one of the things that I found early on in my research into what became evolved move play was actually I was training a dog.

[185] And I read a book called The Serious Puppy Training Book or something like that.

[186] And they talked about bite inhibition in dogs.

[187] And I said that, you know, puppies have to bite because that's how they manipulate the world, right?

[188] Like puppies, like dogs, their hands are their jaws, and they want to use them and explore what they're capable of.

[189] So a puppy is going to want to want to jaw spar with you.

[190] It's going to want to put its teeth on you.

[191] It's going to want to put its mouth on you.

[192] And if you tell that puppy, no, every time that it tries to interact with you like that, it won't be able to map how its mouth interacts with you.

[193] So what he advised is that what you need to do is you let the puppy start biting at your hand.

[194] And every time that the force is too hard, you pull away and you deny the puppy what it's looking for, which is play.

[195] Right.

[196] And so now it's regulated and its aggression to, okay, I need to only bite hard enough that this human being can tolerate it and then he'll play with me. And over time, then the dog develops bite inhibition.

[197] So dogs that are not allowed rough and tumble play, it turns out, are much more dangerous as adults because they can't regulate the impulse to bite.

[198] When they bite, they bite fully.

[199] But a dog that's been played with extensively has a very fine -tuned capacity to control the level of force in its jaw.

[200] So it has a soft jaw.

[201] Yeah.

[202] Yeah, well, it's quite miraculous, you know, with dogs, given that they're essentially wolves, you know.

[203] Yeah.

[204] If your dog is well -trained, you can even play with him with one of his chew toys, or his bones, which is really pretty damn amazing.

[205] And a well -trained dog is unbelievably judicious with its bite force.

[206] And it will also play differently with little kids than it will with adults, which shows a tremendous amount of sophistication on the part of the dog.

[207] But that also assumes that, you know, you've batted the dog around and wrestled with it and harassed it and pushed it so that it's not easy to provoke.

[208] And that's also why, you know, people wonder why people tease and teasing is a form of more abstracted rough and tumble play.

[209] And it's the same thing.

[210] It's this attempt to push the object of teasing sort of to the level of their tolerance for provocation to see what the response is.

[211] It's part of the way that people assess each other profoundly.

[212] I told this story in my book about this guy, lunch bucket that came to work on the rail crew with us when I was working on the rail crew in Saskatchewan and he no one had ever played with lunch bucket that's for sure and it was pretty obvious to everybody that he was still under the unfortunate dominion of his mother because she had packed him his lunch bucket when the appropriate thing to do socially was bring a brown paper bag that wasn't too special which was also interestingly true of our high school and lunch bucket didn't take kindly to being teased about his lunch bucket and they level of provocation that the other guys aimed at him just increased and it got to the point where people were throwing rocks at him when he was on the crew.

[213] But the reason for that was because he couldn't, he couldn't be trusted, eh?

[214] If you provoked him, he would respond with too much aggression.

[215] Yeah.

[216] And that was an indication to everyone, even though no one really knew this, that he wasn't properly socialized and then could be a loose cannon if the, you know, in a dicey situation.

[217] Yeah.

[218] And the other thing, too, I think that teasing, it's also an attempt to initiate play.

[219] You know, like, one of the things you see with kids is that when they meet each other on the playground is they'll immediately challenge each other.

[220] You know, they sort of start out assuming the other kid is, like, younger and less developmentally able.

[221] Yeah.

[222] But they ratchet that up quickly to see if they're at a peer -to -peer level.

[223] And then they play on the edge, and that'll make kids friends.

[224] If kids can play as peers on the edge, then they become friends.

[225] and there's a lot of mutual provocation in that, and that's partly the extension of that capacity for emotional regulation, as well as the extension of capacity for creative interaction.

[226] Yeah, if we go back to that rough and tumble theme, like I made a lot of my closest friends after fistfights, and I was in school.

[227] It was like we had to provoke each other to that level before we could, say, drop into a point of trust with each other in the kind of redneck culture that I was growing up in, which maybe it wasn't so similar to where you grew up.

[228] I wanted to go back to something you said earlier because I wanted to reflect a couple of things that I learned from your work in specifically in this idea of how the rough and tumble play is this game that scales up that what I think is so profound about like J .J. Gibson's work and some of these people that we're referencing is you actually can't see the meaning in the world if you can't act it out, right?

[229] what we perceive is actually dependent on how we can act.

[230] And so when we engage with something like rough and tumble, we're actually mapping in the different potential meanings of touch.

[231] And when we don't get that opportunity to engage in rough and tumble play, what's actually happening is that we're losing the map of what a physical interaction can mean.

[232] And the other analogy of yours that I really love is the analogy of resolution.

[233] So how many pixels are in the picture that you, you have of physical touch.

[234] And I think what's happened in our culture is that we've denied people so much basic touch and so much basic rough and tumble play that we've sort of collapsed the picture of touch to sex and violence.

[235] And so you'll see kids engage in play and you'll see adults who are absolutely on the edge of their seats because they can't see the difference between healthy, productive play and violence because they don't have.

[236] right a refined map yeah no that's an extremely useful analogy and like everybody's map is complete of everything but maps differ very much in resolution and that you know the biblical term for uh sexual congress is knowledge yeah and that's partly because well sex is a form of play it's a high form of physical play and it's very properly practiced let's say it's extraordinary extraordinarily high resolution, and that's part of that detailed exploration of the physical landscape and the increase of the resolution of the map.

[237] And that's definitely all part and parcel of exploratory rough and tumble play.

[238] I mean, part of the reason that people are loathe to allow their kids to engage in boisterous play is because, as you said, their maps are so low resolution that they can't distinguish between true aggression and pretend aggression.

[239] And so there are often people who are afraid, for example, of dogs because they can't distinguish a dog with its tail wagging, its mouth hanging open, you know, that wants to play and is making maneuvers in that direction.

[240] They can't distinguish that from an aggressive onslaught.

[241] This is why you see in schools this idiot insistence that, you know, there should be no competitive play.

[242] because the teachers who push that doctrine have been played with so little that they think all play, which is a form of competition, it's cooperation and competition simultaneously, they think all that's just properly lumped into the category of aggression.

[243] And then they think all aggression should be suppressed.

[244] And it's, yeah, it's absolutely what's completely, it's awful for young boys, but it's awful for women too because the boys then end up awkward, with low -resolution physical maps and, you know, they can't dance and they can't move and their emotional regulation is volatile.

[245] And yeah, I think to quote Jordan Peterson, it's a complete bloody disaster.

[246] What's what I'm going to children?

[247] Yeah, yeah.

[248] Yeah, right.

[249] When I first started Evolmove Play, Mercer Island, which is one of the school districts that was near us, had banned tag, like completely, no touch -based game.

[250] And they had shortened recesses to seven minutes.

[251] And their justification for this was because children couldn't play for longer than seven minutes without experiencing conflict.

[252] And this is...

[253] Jesus, it's so absurd because it's like, how are they ever going to learn without these things?

[254] Oh, yeah.

[255] Well, the thing is people who do take that tack assume that enforced zero conflict equals peace.

[256] You know, when you talk, about this experience you had with your friends, that often you had a fight with one or more of them.

[257] And that's another thing that's quite different about boys and girls, because boys will often, even with their friends, push conflict to the point of an actual fight.

[258] And that generally does exactly what you said.

[259] It either, if two boys face off each other and are willing to fight, generally they won't pick fights with each other anymore.

[260] That usually brings it to an end.

[261] And it's not that rare for that to turn into a friendship, which is also very interesting and strange thing.

[262] Yeah, it is a strange thing looking back on it, but it was definitely a future of my childhood.

[263] And I wanted to go back briefly to what you're talking about with sexuality.

[264] And I wanted to touch on women in Rough and Tumble Play.

[265] So we teach Rough and Tumble Play.

[266] We take the basic kind of architecture of contact improvisation dance and mixed martial arts.

[267] And we build scalable games that are vary from totally cooperative to hyper -competitive.

[268] And then you can play a very competitive game that's very safe by scaling the way that the players can interact.

[269] And we teach this to men and women.

[270] And now my general observation is working with kids, the boys always want to roughhouse more, right?

[271] My son, roughhouses more than his sisters, for sure.

[272] But the girls love to roughhouse with me and have always requested being roughhoused with, being wrestled with, being thrown around.

[273] What I've noticed with working with adults is that it's often the women actually who have the most profound experience from the rough housing.

[274] And I think that what it is is that our culture in general is just suppressing rough and tumble play.

[275] but women are more likely to have accepted the culture's story of you can't engage in rough and tumble play and there are fewer cultural spaces that really give them the opportunity to do that so they don't necessarily play like football or get involved in a wrestling team and so it's often women who come to us who will say this was incredibly healing for me and one of the things that they say is it really changes the way that they feel about men and like helps the sort of gender conflict to be able to experience doing something very competitive and physical that has no sexual element with a man. And that is really healing for them.

[276] And to then bridge to the sexual aspect of it, obviously men and women have to figure that out.

[277] But there's also research that shows that if you deny rough and tumble play to juvenile rats, the male rats can't successfully engage in courtship behavior and mounting behavior once they become adults.

[278] So if you look at the...

[279] Oh, I didn't know that.

[280] Oh, oh, that's very interesting.

[281] Yeah, and you look at what's happening in our culture right now with the, you know, just complete collapse and the ability of people to form partnerships.

[282] This, I think, is part of the story as well.

[283] We're denying them the basic sort of sense of mapping and touch and connection that is fundamental to forming any sort of romantic relationship.

[284] Yeah, yeah.

[285] Well, this is also an interesting point to insert some observations about cell phones.

[286] Yeah.

[287] You know, people are often extraordinarily concerned with the content that's being delivered to kids on the cell phones.

[288] And I think the content is relevant to some degree.

[289] I spend a lot of time, for example, analyzing literature on violent video games and aggression among boys.

[290] And the link between violent video games and aggression is pretty damn minimal.

[291] What appears to be the case is that more aggressive boys like more aggressive video games.

[292] And there's not much of a causal loop there.

[293] And the reason I'm bringing that up is to indicate that content of what's being delivered on the cell phone might not be the primary problem.

[294] That might even be true for pornography.

[295] What is certainly a problem is the fact of the substitution of the screen for such things as direct rough and tumble physical play or even abstracted pretend play.

[296] You know, a lot of this identity confusion that I see a moment.

[297] in, let's say, junior high, high school, and university looks to me like late manifestation of pretend play that should have occurred at about the age of three.

[298] You know, because at three, kids will experiment with, well, I can remember when my son was a kid, his sister, he's a year and a half younger than his sister and her friends, and they used to dress them up like a princess or like with little fairy wings and, you know, just as a form of experience.

[299] And he got an opportunity to inhabit that feminine world while playing with these girls and to figure out what it was like to be a girl, which is a necessary thing to do if you're going to have some empathy for girls, let's say.

[300] But then you imagine if you suppress that and that play, even cross -gender play, is never allowed to make itself manifest, then why wouldn't it reemerge with a vengeance later when the stage is set to make it socially acceptable?

[301] Anyways, it looks to me, the furry phenomena, all that looks to me like repressed pretend play.

[302] That might even be the case for late -onset autogynophilia among the trans guys, you know.

[303] God only knows why that cross -sex impulse makes itself manifest, but the probability it has something to do with suppression of the physical manifestation of the feminine spirit, let's say, that could have been explored in pretend play.

[304] that seems to me to be highly probable.

[305] What the men are doing when they dress up in women's clothing is pretending, obviously.

[306] You know, now there's a sexual element to it, but that doesn't mean it isn't pretend play.

[307] Yeah, I mean, I think we can definitely agree that the suppression of play is really a problem and that there's a lot of cultural downstream effects that are going to be very hard for us to map, right?

[308] And just how much of that is.

[309] I'm particularly concerned, like, as you said, about video games, not so much because, as you said, of the content, but because of how they out -compete some of these other more traditional nourishments.

[310] This is kind of one of the fundamental areas of my thought is this idea that one of the most effective ways that we can kind of win in the capitalist system is to deliver something that is hyper -stimulating that's very cheap, right?

[311] So hyper -stimulating products, a friend of mine who's a neurobiologist who studies obesity, he said to me that what the food industry has effectively done is they've divorced flavor from nutrition.

[312] And when I thought about that, like I immediately had this chain of thinking, which was if junk food is flavor divorced from nutrition, then pornography is sexuality divorced from the context of relationships.

[313] Yeah, right.

[314] Video games are thrilled divorced from physicality.

[315] And so you take these boys who have this inherent aggression, and you let them play Fortnite, and they can play all day without any self -regulation from having the physical demands of actual rough -and -tumble play.

[316] They can practice shooting and running and jumping and all the things that I did as a kid actually physically.

[317] And that's probably not bad necessarily, it's not that bad necessarily on its own.

[318] The problem is that it's so easily out -competes the actual thing that we need, which is the real physical play.

[319] Yeah, well, I saw that just recently this week.

[320] I was out with some young people, relatives of mine, and I hadn't met them for years.

[321] And we were in a social situation for about 45 minutes, sitting around a couch and some living room chairs around a fireplace after dinner.

[322] and one of them was 13 and the other was 21.

[323] And they were just on their cell phones the entire time, the whole time.

[324] Yeah.

[325] And I thought, well, I felt very bad for the kids because I thought, well, first of all, I thought, it's like, what the hell are you doing?

[326] There's five of us around the fireplace and you're on your phones completely engrossed in them.

[327] And I don't know what you're doing on your phone, but whatever you're doing, you're not being here now with actual people.

[328] And I think their whole lives are like that, you know, and part of the reason kids are so confused about their identity is because their identity is never played out in the actual world.

[329] They're in these virtual delusions, you know, because what you're describing is actually a kind of delusion, right?

[330] It's an artificial world that isn't properly mapped onto the real world.

[331] So delusional landscapes of entertainment, and that certainly is the case for pornography.

[332] Yeah.

[333] So, yeah, so we, so I mean, this kind of gets to the center of my message, you know, like, I think that in order to address the meaning crisis, we actually have to kind of invite people back into their body and that there are fundamental reconnections that we have to make with the world.

[334] We have to renew that relationship with the world.

[335] So we've been talking a lot about the rough and tumble play.

[336] And I think of that as one of like four fundamental.

[337] or so let's say five fundamental connections we have with the world.

[338] And those are kind of the internal connections within the self, the body to itself, the body, mind, spirit, emotional aspects.

[339] So I think of it is like the somatic and structural layer.

[340] And then there's the body to the environment how we move through the world.

[341] And that's parkour or gymnastics or track and field.

[342] But parkour, I think, is the most kind of profound expression of it.

[343] It's the closest to the sort of exploratory locomotor play they'll find in every culture and in and really in all other animals almost.

[344] And then you have the object manipulation.

[345] Human beings, of course, are tool -using animals.

[346] So right away, kids want to play with sticks and balls and ropes and manipulate them and put them in their mouths when they're little and figure them out.

[347] And then there's other people, which is the rough and tumble aspect that we've talked about.

[348] And then the last is I think all of those things put us in relationship to something transcendent.

[349] When we go out and we do parkour in nature and we work with people, there's an emergent spirit that you can experience.

[350] There's a sense of the broader things that you're embedded within.

[351] And that in order to cultivate wisdom, we actually have to get all the way down into the body, all the way into, you know, like our friend John Brabicke, he would say that those lower three peas of knowing, the participatory, prospectival and procedural, those have to be played out through embodied practices.

[352] practices.

[353] And so that's, you know, that's the center of it.

[354] We are tempted all the time by these hyper -stimulating products that are designed to kind of grab onto those areas of the brainstem that, you know, that evolved to be rewarded and direct that behavior into something that isn't what we evolved with.

[355] And to recover the wisdom, I think we have to go back to those body practices.

[356] So let me ask you some practical questions because a lot of people who are listening, they might not even know how to initiate play.

[357] You know, like people have asked me to write a book on parenting, you know.

[358] One of the problems I have with that is, well, I don't have little kids anymore.

[359] And so I kind of forget what I know.

[360] It was never exactly explicit.

[361] Now, I was very fortunate when I was a kid because both my mother and my father paid a lot of attention to me. And my dad, in particular, is markedly good with little kids.

[362] And I think that was because he had a really, really good relationship with his grandfather and had a lot of attention paid to him.

[363] And so that was just an embodied practice, let's say, in our household.

[364] And so I know exactly what to do with little kids.

[365] You know, I'm not the least bit afraid of them.

[366] I know exactly how to play with them, even if they're timid.

[367] I know how to poke them and, you know, jolly them into a bit of a reaction and to entice them out of shyness.

[368] but I don't exactly know how to tell people how to do that.

[369] So when you're working with kids who are awkward and who have been deprived of play and you're trying to entice them into a game, you've obviously thought this through structurally.

[370] What do you actually do to get the kids to play?

[371] And how do you teach people to play with their kids or with other people?

[372] What are the practical aspects?

[373] Yeah, absolutely.

[374] So when we're inviting people to kind of begin play, there's a couple things that we can do.

[375] One is we can think about how we constrain the game, right?

[376] So all my teaching is sort of deeply influenced by the constraints -led approach and by the ideas of ecological dynamics.

[377] So rather than, say, trying to teach someone how to punch before we let them spar, we develop a game that doesn't require them to know how to punch yet.

[378] right so the first game that we introduced to people a lot of times in the competitive aspect of rough and tumble play is just like standing on a narrow surface and grabbing the other person's hand and trying to pull them and off balance them so this is a game that works really well to introduce competition because it's totally safe right I'm not I'm not manipulating your body in any way that could potentially hurt you so when they stay you say stand on a narrow surface.

[379] Tell me exactly what you have people do.

[380] So like a common one, this game was originally taught to me by a friend and we just did it on like curbs in a parking lot.

[381] But, you know, a lot of times at my workshops.

[382] You're on the edge of something.

[383] Yeah.

[384] So there's a reason why that works.

[385] It makes the wind condition a lot easier.

[386] But also it disadvantages larger athletes, which is important because the physical strength is obviously going to help the larger athletes succeed.

[387] But because a bigger athlete has a bigger moment of sway, their balance is actually a little bit easier to compromise.

[388] So you can take a small woman and a large man, and if they're both inexperienced, the gap that you had experienced introducing them to just wrestling is much lower in this initial game.

[389] And so people can get a lot of...

[390] So they just grab one hand?

[391] Yep.

[392] And they just pull each other off balance.

[393] Exactly.

[394] Oh yeah, that's cool.

[395] Because the conditions for victory are very, very clear.

[396] It doesn't require a lot of aggression to move forward.

[397] It shouldn't be intimidating to people.

[398] The rules are easy to learn.

[399] Oh, yes, that's a good one.

[400] That's something you can play.

[401] I often with little kids, like two, one of the games I used to play with my kids was just to step on their feet.

[402] And they try to step on my feet at the same time.

[403] You know, obviously, socks.

[404] And you can make quite a noise with your foot.

[405] And kids find that.

[406] And they can back off when they're, you know, they can back off real easily to get out of the game if they're feeling a little bit, you know, intimidated.

[407] But, oh, yeah, they'll laugh and cheer away at that.

[408] And so that's an analogy, I would say, or an analog to this off -balance.

[409] Okay, so that's a good place to start.

[410] So I was playing with my four -month -old granddaughter.

[411] She could actually play this game.

[412] Yeah, it was amazing.

[413] It's the earliest I'd seen someone engage in truly reciprocal play.

[414] She's really four months old.

[415] So I'd go one, two, three, hold her on my, so standing on my knee, one, two, three, and then bop her head on mine?

[416] Yep.

[417] And then one, two, three, bop.

[418] Yeah.

[419] One, two, three, bop.

[420] And then I started playing with the gap between the numbers.

[421] One, two, three, bop, you know, to add an element of surprise.

[422] And man, I'll tell you, after 15 repetitions, she got the game.

[423] That's one.

[424] And so that was really cool because it was, yeah, well, it involved that immediate touch, you know.

[425] So there's this, it's kind of like peekaboo.

[426] It's like there's a predictability and then a surprise, which is part of a game.

[427] But it was a harmless initiatory game.

[428] But it was really something to see that she caught on.

[429] You know, and it's theme plus variation too, which is something you see in musical play.

[430] Okay, so you have people trying to pull each other off balance.

[431] I imagine they're, so how do people react when you first introduce them to that idea?

[432] Like, what's the range of reactions?

[433] Well, what's interesting is we, in the past, more so in the past when people were less familiar with my work.

[434] I'd get a fair number of students, almost all of them women, who would say, I want to participate in everything, but I don't want to do the rough and double play.

[435] And we're like, okay, we'll get to it, and you can choose not to if you want to, but you'll, you know, if you see it and you want to do it, please step in.

[436] And what we find is that people will tell you, you know, I'm scared of this.

[437] I don't like, I've never liked physical aggression, anything like that.

[438] And you give them this opportunity to play a game that's highly competitive, that has a, that they have a, you know, like a relatively, a sufficiently high probability of winning, right?

[439] The 30 % that Yacht Pink's up says, right?

[440] And that it feels totally safe, everybody enjoys it.

[441] Without fail, for 10 years of teaching this drill, I've not had one person who's come to a seminar who has not been lit up and smiling and laughing by the end of playing that game.

[442] Yeah, I wonder what that laughing signifies.

[443] You know, When I used to go work out with my friends in Boston, one of our games was, especially during a bench press, was to crack a joke and make the person laugh because you lose all muscular control when you laugh, which is extremely interesting, you know, because laughter produces a physiological cessation of the ability to be aggressive.

[444] You just have no muscular tension.

[445] And so there's something about laughing that's indicative of genuine safety and peace, right?

[446] And it's indicative at a very low level because it's pre -conscious laughter.

[447] If you laugh consciously, it's forced and fake.

[448] It has to be spontaneous.

[449] And so you see people doing this competitive off -balancing game, let's say, and you get joy and laughter.

[450] And I think that's a deep physiological reflection of the observation that there really is safety and peace and play happening in this.

[451] space right it's the celebration of that yeah if we go back to the idea we were exploring earlier that that like these things are actually fundamental to how we attune and develop a real map with somebody right what you could you know the what i speculate now just off what you said is that the laughter is occurring because it's a signal of like really rapid attunement between two organisms where they're actually learning each other on a much deeper layer than even you know verbally is going to offer.

[452] But you'll find the same thing if you're meeting someone and you have a good dynamic in a conversation, laughter is going to start to generate.

[453] And I think it's a signal, yeah, of that sense of safety and that joy that you're experiencing, obviously that's telling you this is valuable, this is worthwhile, this is something that you want to come back to and repeat.

[454] And so that sense that there's a way to compete, a way to interact with somebody that's deeply, mutually affording of development.

[455] Yeah, right, exactly.

[456] That's the spirit of play, that mutual affordance of...

[457] I was remembering when my wife wasn't played with a lot when she was a kid, you know, she was a pretty good sense of sharp verbal play, and she was physically comfortable in a lot of ways because she did a lot of yoga, but she hadn't been played with a lot.

[458] And, you know, I can remember a couple of events.

[459] So we were mock fighting at one point, and she came at me with her fists, and I grabbed her hands, and I went like this.

[460] And it actually hurt her a little bit.

[461] And I said, well, you know, when you go like this, you open your hands.

[462] Don't you know that?

[463] She said, no, she'd never played enough to know that, you know, someone grabs your hands when you have fists and brings them together.

[464] You open your hands.

[465] Well, so I showed her how to do that.

[466] And then another time, she was sitting on the couch and I had a pillow and I went like this.

[467] Which means, look out, a pillow is coming.

[468] So I went like this.

[469] And then I threw the pillow and it got her.

[470] And she, you know, she was a little bit.

[471] what would you say it?

[472] Surprised?

[473] And I said, well, I showed you the pillow was coming.

[474] Why didn't you catch it?

[475] And she said, well, she had no idea that, you know, one, two, three meant, look out a pillow is your way.

[476] Now, her siblings were much older than her, eh?

[477] And so, and my siblings were very close and age to me. And so, you know, I had more of that intense play than she did.

[478] But a lot of these basic rules of physical engagement, she hadn't learned.

[479] And so, okay, so now, Now you're putting people on the edge, you're having them unbalance each other.

[480] Where do you progress from there?

[481] Yeah, so the basic structure is we think about what are the tools that we can manipulate somebody's body with?

[482] So the first tool that we allow is just the closed hand, right?

[483] And then what's the targets?

[484] What parts of their body can manipulate?

[485] So now we're just manipulating hand versus hand.

[486] So we have tools and targets, and then we have motion.

[487] How do we limit the motion?

[488] So that constraint of standing on the thing, it prevents them from moving fast.

[489] So if you think about a game like football, where you can spear someone with your head with a helmet on it running as fast as you can, there's a very unconstrained game with a lot of potential danger.

[490] So what we're trying to do is just find ways to scale in from there.

[491] So the first thing that we're going to do is just go from you can only manipulate their hand with your hand to now you have both your hands, and you can manipulate any part of their body below their neck, excluding their genitals, right?

[492] So all the safe parts of the body to manipulate.

[493] And now you're still trying to off balance them.

[494] And because you don't have to pick them up and throw them or anything, you just have to get them to step off.

[495] You still have a really safe game.

[496] And then as we progress up, we might play a game like the game that you mentioned, trying to step on somebody's foot, right?

[497] This is a basic tag game.

[498] It's a tag game of tagging somebody's foot.

[499] So you can play games like that where the target is something like just their foot rather than trying to kick someone in the head, as we would in Muay Thai.

[500] But we're starting to learn how to interpret somebody entering our space, somebody you know that gap closing the sense of rhythm the sense of timing that somebody has and all that's going to donate to these games as we move down the kind of the progression and then we think about the progression is working towards the highly competitive highly free unconstrained games like mixed martial arts but also moving towards the highly attuned acrobatic games like dance because we want people to be able to to have that sense you uh your next book i believe is called we wrestle with God.

[501] Yeah, yeah.

[502] And so I was listening to you, talk with John in one of your, your first interview with John, and you were talking about that idea of like, maybe the right relationship to God is to wrestle with him.

[503] It's something that you have to struggle with.

[504] And my thought was...

[505] Yeah, I never thought about that precisely in that embodied sense, you know, although obviously when Jacob wrestles with the angel, it's physical combat, right?

[506] But I hadn't put that extra piece in there, so that's very interesting and useful.

[507] I'll file that away.

[508] Yeah.

[509] So the question that I had when listening to that is, how can we become the type of people who can wrestle with God if we've never wrestled?

[510] Right?

[511] You have to build that.

[512] So I said this to one of my groups of students, and it was interesting, it was the women in the group who said, what if the right relationship to God is dance?

[513] And I said, it's both, right?

[514] It's got to be both.

[515] So in the way that we educate people physically, we want.

[516] to be exploring these two parameters of how can we can go deeper and deeper into attunement and the affordances that come with attunement and how can we compete and press each other right to our edge as much as possible well it's interesting that you've got two poles there a there's there's sophisticated dance as an extension of embodied play and then there's sophisticated combat as an extension of play and i wonder if if is that do you suppose the dance element of obviously maps more self -evidently onto male -female relationships and sex.

[517] Yeah.

[518] And the wrestling, per se, has more to do with, I suppose, something like the hierarchical organization of the social structure.

[519] There'd be more, because there'd be some dominance and submission associated with that and the attempt to build something like a hierarchy of competence.

[520] But it's interesting that you have those two end extensions that play makes itself manifest.

[521] in relationship to.

[522] And, yeah, I don't know exactly how to conceptualize that.

[523] Well, let me tell you something.

[524] This reminds me something of another way that I've kind of like taken some ideas that I got from you and extended them in my work.

[525] But you've talked about the idea that, you know, dominance hierarchies are older than trees, right?

[526] You can look across the animal kingdom and find that there's forms of non -lethal agonistic combat by which we determine the dominance hierarchy.

[527] So what's fascinating about, like, Yak Pankseps' rats We should call it the competence hierarchy.

[528] Yes, I agree.

[529] I agree, absolutely.

[530] So the competence hierarchy.

[531] So rats, when they wrestle, they pin each other on their shoulders.

[532] This is fascinating because it's almost a cultural universal that there's some form of wrestling that involves pinning the other guy on his back.

[533] And we see this across the animal kingdom.

[534] If guanas, right, like big lizards in, in in in Australia they wrestle and knock each other over and get on top of you know one's pushing the other one down on the belly even venomous snakes will wrap each other around the head and try to press the other one's head to the ground so I think that this that there's this central problem that animals had which was there are better places to be in worse places to be and we want to determine who gets to be in the better places and who has to be in the worst places and we want to do that in a way that's going to be minimally damaging to everybody.

[535] So we're going to develop a way of...

[536] It's the best way of coping with those occasions when the competition does have a zero -sum element to it.

[537] Yep, yeah, exactly.

[538] But here's the interesting thing is how the non -zero -sum evolves out of the zero -sum.

[539] So first we have this, we're going to kill each other first, and then that's really expensive, let's not do that.

[540] Is there a way that we can play where we're not going to kill each other?

[541] So a venomous snake doesn't bite with its venom.

[542] It doesn't waste that.

[543] It wrestles in order to determine the hierarchy.

[544] So now when we wrestle, once we have that, we have this capacity to exact that basic structure to say, hey, you and I, we can play this game when it's not about actually determining the competence hierarchy.

[545] It's just about building our competence for when the real problem happens.

[546] So now all these animals have this basic drive to engage in some kind of competitive wrestling because it helps them develop social competence.

[547] But now all these other things can get mapped into it.

[548] It can get exacted to be something that's building empathy.

[549] So as we become social animals, now we are actually going to this as a place by which we begin to map in a sense of what the other is.

[550] We develop theory of mind.

[551] That stuff about Yak Panksep's rats and the fact that the bigger rat has to be able to know that if it wins too often, the small rat won't play with him, that's the beginning of theory of mind.

[552] Yeah, well, I think the rats must be evaluating, you know, because imagine that in each game, there's a series of micro victories and micro -defeats.

[553] Yep.

[554] And if you keep the ratio of victory high enough for your opponent, ratio of victory to defeat, they're going to be enthusiastic play partners.

[555] And you're constantly available.

[556] Like when I was teaching my kids to play ping pong, you know, they weren't going to win, but they weren't going to lose 21 -0.

[557] Yeah.

[558] You know, I would just ratchet up my skill level so that I kept them on the edge of their performance.

[559] And that meant that, well, they'd gain as many points as I could allow them to gain.

[560] I still see that with my son, you know, because I taught him to play ping pong, and then he got better than me because he learned all my tricks and his new tricks.

[561] And, you know, it'll be frequently the case that I'm ahead of him, say, 17, 13, near the end of a game, and then he'll really kick into high gear.

[562] Yeah.

[563] You know, and it's very annoying because I've been working pretty hard on my edge trying to give him a good stomping, but he has some left in reserve, you know, but he's calibrating.

[564] We automatically calibrate if we're sophisticated players to keep our partner on that dynamic edge of development.

[565] This is also why it's so wrong.

[566] to think about competition as a zero -sum process because if you're competing optimally, first of all, you want a well -matched partner because otherwise it's not a fair game and it's no fun.

[567] But if you're competing optimally, your opponent has micro -victories the whole way along.

[568] And the rats must pick that up, you know, the big rat must understand that if he's dominating too heavily, the game starts to become no fun because the little rat gets demoralized and then won't put up a good scrap.

[569] You go to, and you do the same thing with puppies, you know, as you let them win as much as is appropriate.

[570] And it's the same with your kids.

[571] You let them win as much as is appropriate, but no more than that.

[572] And you do that while simultaneously scaffolding their mastery.

[573] Yeah, you're working to put them on that zone of proximal development.

[574] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[575] And so that's the key to good play.

[576] And that's what, you know, we think is so important.

[577] about like a actual rough and tumble curriculum is that it's about educating people about how to, in the deepest embodied sense, find that edge in mixed partnerships, right?

[578] Where there is a massive skill gap.

[579] How could I play as someone who's, you know, 6 '1, 220 pounds, has been training martial arts my whole life with a small woman and make the game such that she gets something out of it and I even get something out of it?

[580] Yeah, yeah.

[581] Well, how do you do it with, well, let's, take that as an example, so you have this large set of audience skills, and now you're playing with an opponent that is not matched at the edge of your skill set.

[582] Part of the way you do that, for example, is by imposing arbitrary limitations on the players, so they have to stand on the edge of a curb.

[583] What else do you do to limit yourself when you're dealing with a less able partner so that the game is still fun for you?

[584] Yeah.

[585] So in the play research, they talk about self -handicapping.

[586] A classic example, maybe anybody's seen, is a very large dog playing with a very small dog.

[587] So if you'll see a Great Dane playing with Chihuahua, the Great Dane will flop on its back so that the Chihuahua can jaw spar with it.

[588] So it's given up all its capacity to move just so that the game can play out in a way that works for both.

[589] So we're trying to educate people as well as we move them through these stages to learn how to self -handicap in ways that are.

[590] appropriate for them.

[591] So I work on this with my kids, right?

[592] So if my son is wrestling, my eight -year -old son is wrestling with my five -year -old, it's like how can you limit yourself in the game such that it's actually now a fair fight and it's useful for both of you.

[593] So for myself, if I was sparring with somebody, right, I could switch to my off -side.

[594] I'm a dominant, you know, left -hand forward.

[595] So now I have to fight with the other side.

[596] I can remove a hand.

[597] I can't use both my hands.

[598] I can create a set of techniques that I have to use.

[599] So I can only use, I only get a, you know, I only give myself a point if I do this thing, not some set of other things that I might be really good at.

[600] Right.

[601] Right.

[602] I can limit my motion.

[603] So you adopt a set of limitations until you're evenly matched, essentially.

[604] Yep.

[605] That's the goal is how do I find that level of limitation?

[606] So for my, my son and my daughter, they might have a race.

[607] And I might say, okay, you guys want a race, we can put her ahead or we can maybe have you run on all fours and she gets to run on her feet.

[608] And then they get something that's mutually rewarding.

[609] Right, right, right.

[610] So let's talk a little bit too about, okay, so we talked about the curriculum of development.

[611] And you use basically the equivalent of incremental behavioral exposure is that you're setting people in a non -threatening initial, highly structured situation, and then you remove a constraint at a time, essentially, as people scaffold up their ability to play.

[612] How does the parkour, we should define parkour for everybody, because not everybody listening will know.

[613] And why don't you introduce that into it?

[614] Because that's also the person against the world instead of the person competing against another person.

[615] Yeah, this is the perfect bridge.

[616] So I found parkour when I was 23 years old.

[617] And I'd been doing gymnastics for some period of time before that.

[618] And it's very interesting because I remember really clearly, I was very influenced by the Lord of the Rings.

[619] And I remember really clearly as a young, I'm like 12 years old, realizing that like there were no dragons to go out and slay physically.

[620] And so when I saw David Bell, the founder of parkour jumping between buildings, I had this really deep sense that like you can do something heroic in life.

[621] But the challenge isn't necessarily a dragon out there.

[622] it's the fears that are inside you that would prevent you from being able to do what you're going to do.

[623] And so I started practicing parkour and it completely, I fell in love with it and it had this transformative effect on me. And so over the years I've been like, what is happening with parkour?

[624] What is going on?

[625] Sorry, just to define parkour for a moment, parkour is a discipline of learning to overcome obstacles that came out of France in the early, or the late 90s.

[626] And so it's associated with jumping between buildings, but it doesn't have to be buildings, right?

[627] It's just finding obstacles in the environment, running, jumping, climbing, moving on a forest to try to surpass and overcome that obstacle.

[628] I can think of it as just playing with obstacles.

[629] And I think fundamentally what it is is actually just exploratory locomotor play.

[630] You've talked about the example of, again, the rat model, right?

[631] If you drop a rat into a new environment, it'll first freeze, and then it will explore the environment, but then we'll actually play with the way in which it moves for its environment.

[632] It will add you know, variation to how it moves.

[633] And by doing so, it's actually mapping all the potential pathways in that environment and increasing its behavioral flexibility.

[634] Mapping the affordances and the obstacles, you bet.

[635] Exactly.

[636] So that's precisely what we're doing with parkour.

[637] And I think it's so interesting because we're literally mapping meaning into the world.

[638] What you develop when you start doing parkour is something called Parkour Vision.

[639] So you've been walking through the world for years and you see a wall and a wall just means a place you can't go in, right?

[640] But now of a sudden a wall means a place that you can run up or a wall means a thing that you can flip off of or do any number of different techniques.

[641] So that wall is now much richer for you.

[642] It literally is a source of reward to see a wall because the relationship between the walls actually code movement that you can use.

[643] And so that's how it maps meaning into the world.

[644] And then there's this sense that you're acting out the heroic archetype.

[645] time that you go out to do parkour, right?

[646] It's, it is embodying that metameth because you, you'll be walking and you'll see a jump that calls to you.

[647] And that jump is some, it's, it's undifferentiated.

[648] You don't yet know what you can do and it has promise, right?

[649] Like if you do it, it's really cool.

[650] It's exciting.

[651] But if you fail, you might get hurt.

[652] And especially as you scale up your abilities, like the potential dangers can become very, very high.

[653] And so you get to play with and recognize what it's like to experience fear at a really deep level.

[654] And then you get to go through the physical process of how does my body handle this fear?

[655] What do I need to prepare myself?

[656] And then how do I make the commitment and make the jump to the other side?

[657] Right.

[658] Right.

[659] Well, it's a great form of play symbolically because, you know, it's, you're going to, the landscape is one of pathways, affordances, and obstacles.

[660] That's basically how the world lays itself out for us.

[661] You know, you can avoid an obstacle, but the highest art is to transform an obstacle into an affordance, right?

[662] This is no longer an obstacle.

[663] It's something that I can use in my, to facilitate my pathway forward.

[664] No, and that's the highest form of play.

[665] I mean, one of the things I've learned quite with some difficulty, let's say, over the last five years, is that the most adversarial obstacles in the form of, let's call them pathologically narcissistic and destructive journalists, are actually afford the most serious play because the more intense the attack, the more potential there is in making your ability to contend with it manifest.

[666] And that's a very strange thing to learn, but it's, you know, and it's not a game without high stakes, but man, it's something to think about is that the highest art of mastery, the highest form of mastery, is to turn the worst obstacle into the most remarkable affordance.

[667] Absolutely.

[668] There's something deep about that.

[669] You know that you may know this, you probably do, that we calibrate a lot of fine actions with opponent processing.

[670] Almost all of our fine actions are the consequence of two systems in opposition modulating each other.

[671] So if you want to move your hand really smoothly, you can do it like this.

[672] But it's still kind of jerky if you analyze it at the micro level.

[673] If you do this, you can move your hand with incredible precision, and that's an opponent process.

[674] And a tremendous number of the physiological processes that we undertake are opponent processes.

[675] And, you know, you have that opponent process dynamic within a marriage, and you have it within a debate, you have it within play.

[676] It seems to be a universal principle, the principle of properly balanced opponent processing.

[677] And you could think about that at the highest level is the most fundamental obstacle might be the adversary that affords the most serious play.

[678] That's a, well, that's a revolutionary way to conceptualize the world.

[679] Yeah, that's a, I love that.

[680] I want, the most challenging adversary that you can handle that affords you the capacity to play, that I think is really at the center of what provides that, you know, I love the term, allostasis, right?

[681] So we think that we're homeostasis, but we're actually in a continual process of development.

[682] And that continual process of development is always between these paired reciprocal opponent processing systems, right?

[683] So the parasympathetic nervous and the sympathetic nervous system.

[684] So as I was preparing for this discussion, I was listening to your last discussion with John Bravaki and talking to him a little bit.

[685] And I was thinking about how those connections that I talked about, the fundamental connections that a practice has to offer, it has to integrate the self better, right?

[686] It has to integrate the self with the physical world better.

[687] It has to integrate the self with the things we can manipulate better and with other social beings better.

[688] And then with this concept of the transcendent.

[689] All of those are also opponent processing.

[690] That's a full logos integration.

[691] That's, okay.

[692] Why are they all opponent processing?

[693] because you can you can you can split the self right you're a unity but you're also a multiplicity and when you can look at yourself and you've talked about this if you want to think deeply about something you have to argue with yourself you have to create two different dialogues in your head so there's this fundamentally dialogical process and you can you can embody that by just creating tension in your body between different systems and feeling how you know these two things now Now I'm playing that and how I can grow with it.

[694] And then you can think about, can my mind control my body better?

[695] Or can my body support my mind better, right?

[696] And all those things can be in dynamic composition.

[697] And obviously, once we get to parkour, right, that body environment practice, the environment is the opponent, right?

[698] And I'm learning to have greater and greater mastery, greater and greater affordances available to me through that relationship.

[699] And then the same thing when I learn to throw and catch and swing objects and then obviously do fine crafting things, which are kind of the developmental derivative of those basic play instincts to play with objects.

[700] And then obviously when I'm engaged in rough and tumble play, it's opponent processing.

[701] And so I think fundamentally we need an embodied set of physical practices that allow us to attune our relevance realization across these fundamental relationships in order to, act out the metameth that you described in Maps of Meaning.

[702] Yeah, yeah.

[703] Well, that seems right.

[704] How do you scaffold parkour for people?

[705] We talked a little bit about how you could introduce kids or adults, for that matter, who haven't played.

[706] I really like the curb game.

[707] I think that's, I'm going to play that with my grandkids.

[708] That's a good idea.

[709] You could do that by having people stand on their tiptoes, too.

[710] Yep, absolutely.

[711] So the defeat would be that you put your feet on the ground.

[712] Yeah, and that would be a good way of putting a larger person off balance.

[713] as well as you can fight with me, but you have to stay on your tiptoes.

[714] Yeah, so that's really good.

[715] So, but how do you, because I haven't done anything like parkour, you know.

[716] So I'm kind of wondering, how would you introduce someone or how would someone introduce themselves to that realm?

[717] Yeah.

[718] Well, if you think about it as exploratory locomotor play, everyone's done parkour, right?

[719] You've gone to an environment and been like, how do I get from here to there?

[720] That's the fundamental thing, right?

[721] It's just go out and do it.

[722] So you can just, you could, there was a group in the UK, the parkour dance company that did some really beautiful things on training parkour for adults in their 70s and 80s, right?

[723] And they had them like walking through a park, sitting down on a bench, spinning around and standing up on the other side of the bench.

[724] And then they could lay down on their stomach and spin around to the other side.

[725] Then they could vary.

[726] Maybe they feel comfortable spinning to the right and less comfortable spinning to the left.

[727] And then they can just get competent at both, right?

[728] Just getting up and down off of a chair.

[729] you could have thousands of variations that you can explore, getting up and down off of the ground.

[730] All of those things, we can expand our affordances.

[731] And children will inherently do this.

[732] I saw a documentary with Jack White when he was traveling through Canada.

[733] And Jack, he sets up his stage in a very interesting way.

[734] So first of all, he plays this really old beat -up guitar.

[735] Yeah.

[736] And it's just, he's had it forever, and it's just done, you know.

[737] And it never stays in tune.

[738] so while he's playing on stage, he has to tune his guitar non -stop.

[739] And then he plays a bunch of different instruments, you know, laid out on the stage, but he puts them in places that are awkward to get to so that he has to stay on the edge to play the damn instruments.

[740] And partly what he's doing in his live performance is he's modeling, modeling that ability to stay on the playful edge.

[741] And the way he does that is by setting up artificial obstacles in his environment, and then having to creatively transform them into affordances on the fly.

[742] And so that's really, he's very wise.

[743] And Jack White's a particularly interesting musician because, you know, he's got that real heavy metal edge, kind of Led Zeppelin -esque heaviness to him.

[744] But Jack is an extremely, his lyrics are extremely optimistic and positive, and he's extremely playful.

[745] And so he's a master of that transformation of the obstacle into the affordance.

[746] He's basically doing parkour.

[747] he's creating a locomotive challenge to be able to access his instrument so that he can get a deeper experience of play and share that with his audience.

[748] Right, right.

[749] So one of the things you recommend is like even if I wanted to get up out of my chair, I could use my left foot instead of my right foot, right?

[750] Just vary that so that, yeah, I see.

[751] That's very interesting.

[752] You could spin on your way up.

[753] Yeah.

[754] Right.

[755] What are the relationships?

[756] So, you know, just like contralateral versus ipsilateral.

[757] So I'm going to put my left foot on the ground on my right hand, and then I can switch to the other side.

[758] Then I can lean everything on one side, right?

[759] I can do a spin as I stand up.

[760] There's so many little fine -tuned variations that we can find once we take on this exploratory ethic in relationship to our movement.

[761] And as we do that, we're going to be refining and making more sophisticated the body.

[762] And I believe when we put that in dynamic relationship to these other sets of practices, we get to extract those.

[763] insights out and create a more coherent, complete approach to character development.

[764] Right, right.

[765] Well, we can think about that two ways.

[766] You know, one way is that you're mapping a broader set of possibilities onto any given object.

[767] Exactly.

[768] Objects aren't objects.

[769] They're affordances and obstacles.

[770] They're not objects.

[771] And so you're expanding your map of the possibility of the world in your relationship to it.

[772] And so that is an expansion of the meanings of the world.

[773] But the other thing you're doing, too, you know, we can imagine if I concentrated for a month on doing things left -sided instead of right -sided, I'm going to instantiate a series of neurophysiological changes, right?

[774] So I'm going to start building new motor maps, and that'll be a form of neurogrowth and neuro -regeneration.

[775] I'm going to redress the imbalance between the two sides of my body.

[776] But it's also the case that, you know, those physiological transformations cascade all the way.

[777] down to the cellular level.

[778] And if you put new stresses on yourself, especially voluntarily, you turn new genes on to code for new proteins.

[779] And so not only do you remap the meanings of the external world, but you also literally open up new physiological possibilities from the cellular level upward at all the levels of your organization, your internal physiological organization, and release new elements of your character.

[780] So it's partly an expansion of the map, But it's also an expansion of psychophysiological capability all the way down to the cell.

[781] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[782] Absolutely.

[783] So we map the meaning into the world, and the meaning that's available to us in the world is always contingent on the action capabilities within the self.

[784] But what was so beautiful about the way that you just said that it made me think so much of like the Jungian concept of the self, which again, you introduced me to.

[785] but right the self is that the highest potential that that second self that's laid out over time and so what you're pointing out is that when we engage with these physical practices we are actually in some sense being able to bring into the body a more complete representation of that self yeah you bet well you can think about you imagine that coded into the DNA the DNA is a repository of potential.

[786] But the potential won't make itself manifest without the requisite demand, right?

[787] It has to be, the stress has to call the potential into being.

[788] And so that play, you know, maybe it's left -sided play, it's going to produce a new form of stress.

[789] That's a new kind of demand.

[790] And that's going to unlock new potential.

[791] And part of that self, you know, Jung likened that self to the oak tree that's implicit in the...

[792] acorn.

[793] Yes.

[794] And so it's a potential that could expand itself out into space in a variety of different ways, but that there are many potential trees inside a particular acorn.

[795] You could think about it that way.

[796] The oak is going to develop differently depending on the soil that it's placed in.

[797] But that's the case for all of us at any moment, is there are still many potential cells that are locked into the potential of the DNA coding, and that can be enticed outward with the appropriate voluntary stress.

[798] The other thing that's interesting about that, too, is you imagine that not only are you calling on, as of yet, unrevealed physiological potential, right down to the cellular level, but you're also practicing the physiological instantiation of a particular spirit, and the spirit would be that of voluntary, challenge, right?

[799] So all the practices you're described of, you're describing are undertaken in the spirit of voluntary challenge.

[800] Yes.

[801] And so while you're becoming better at each skill, you're also becoming better at manifesting the spirit of voluntary challenge.

[802] Absolutely.

[803] And that's, that's like a meta spirit, right?

[804] And there's no reason to assume that that isn't encoded in genetic potential as well.

[805] And so that idea of communing with the heroic ancestor, you know, if that's part and parcel of the process of ancestral communication, ancestor worship, let's say.

[806] If that expands out to something like, well, it expands out in the Jewish writings into like apprehension of God himself, it's the realization of that implicit potential.

[807] It's the practice of the realization of that implicit potential that actually constitutes the union with that spirit.

[808] Yeah, that's beautiful.

[809] I was literally just reading, I read through all the, the beginnings of the chapters of Maps of Meaning yesterday.

[810] And the chapter on the hostile brothers, right?

[811] In the middle section, you talk about the idea that there's two sort of transpersonal archetypes that we can play out, right, at the individual level.

[812] There's the one, there's the spirit that takes on the idea that the world is inherently good and that I can reveal that good through interacting with it.

[813] And then there's the spirit that sees the...

[814] insufficiency of the world and falls in love with its own rationality and that that gives rise to a kind of tyranny and I was and I was thinking about you know I feel like the that the digital world view that were the mechanistic digital Cartesian world view that is is sort of predominant right now it is much more that that second spirit and that in order to to to step outside of it in order to re -ground ourselves.

[815] We actually have to physically embody what that is.

[816] And that's exactly what these practices do.

[817] They take you into acting out that heroic archetype, that exploratory heroic archetype.

[818] And as I've built my ideas over the years, what I've seen is that like parkour can be transformative, but it can also fail to transform because it's only one way in which we relate to the fundamental aspects of reality.

[819] But when we put it in dialogue with these other aspects of all of a sudden, that transformational capacity is increased.

[820] So why does it fail and why is it so necessary to put it in context with the other practices?

[821] Yeah.

[822] Or why can it fail?

[823] Yeah.

[824] When I started parkour, I felt like it had dramatically transformed me. And everyone around me who's starting parkour at the same time, we all had this, you know, messianic.

[825] I mean, part of this is just developmental, right?

[826] We're all late adolescence in some sense, early 20s.

[827] And there's, you know, you're going to be messianic about whatever collective identity that you take on.

[828] But nonetheless, we did have this feeling.

[829] And then over time, what I noticed was that people would talk about the changes, but I wouldn't necessarily see the change.

[830] Or then other people came into discipline who were hobbyists and they didn't really see the transformative power.

[831] So I started asking, how do we get that transformative power?

[832] And like the big one that I see all the time is, like, parkour is predominantly a young male sport.

[833] It's like 90 % young men who do it.

[834] And a lot of times they are kind of nerdy kids.

[835] They didn't have a strong sport background.

[836] They're small and not physically strong when they start.

[837] And they come into the sport and they develop these beautiful, incredibly strong physical bodies.

[838] They get healthier.

[839] They change their diets.

[840] Their skin clears up.

[841] And all of a sudden, they're literally physically beautiful young men.

[842] And they're hyper courageous, right?

[843] They can jump between buildings and do multiple flips, but they still can't talk to a girl.

[844] Right?

[845] Right, right.

[846] And it's like you talk so much about how this has.

[847] made you courageous.

[848] But in this very fundamental thing, you are not expressing that courage.

[849] So if we're practicing...

[850] Insufficient generalization.

[851] Exactly.

[852] So we, in any practice, I believe, we need to recognize that the local game is always kind of a distraction from what actually we're trying to accomplish, which is that general adaptation to the metagame.

[853] So if we take on Parkour as a practice and we think about it as a practice that builds us towards the meta -game, then that's automatically going to start, I think, potentating the transfer.

[854] But then we can ask, is there just a better way for me to cultivate courage right now?

[855] Maybe I need to go do Toastmasters.

[856] Maybe I need to go to a contact and prof class.

[857] And when you start to kind of schematize that you need connection and attunement across these fundamental axes, then you can start to piece together the areas of your character that are...

[858] Right, so how did you lay out the axes again?

[859] You talked about internal integration.

[860] Yes, internal...

[861] You talked about integration between people.

[862] You talked about integration between the sexes, let's say, and you talked about integration in relationship to the natural world.

[863] So those are all different domains of games.

[864] And you can think of the metagame as emerging out of all those domains, right?

[865] You have to be mapped to yourself, you have to be mapped to other people, you have to be mapped to the other sex, you have to be mapped to the world.

[866] Yeah.

[867] And you can't concentrate on any one of those at the expense of the other without becoming optimally...

[868] You're not optimally balanced.

[869] Yeah.

[870] So the five that I've been using are the relationships internal to the self, right?

[871] And those are structural and psychological.

[872] The relationship between the self and the physical environment as a set of obstacles and importance as we move through.

[873] And then you could nest this within that, But I think it's useful to separate out as human beings, the objects that we can manipulate, right?

[874] And you see this in play research as well.

[875] Play research talks about exploratory locomotor play, object -oriented play, and rough -and -tumble play.

[876] So if we take those fundamentals, so you have the first, the intrinsic.

[877] And if you look at like a little baby, how do they start playing?

[878] They're like, where's my toe, right?

[879] Where are my fingers?

[880] How do I move this body?

[881] What's rolling?

[882] That's like the somatic and structural layer.

[883] And then they're able to crawl and cruise and climb.

[884] And that's that parkour layer.

[885] And then they're able to pick things up and manipulate them.

[886] And that happens at the same time, but those are kind of two separate aspects of development.

[887] And then they're always interacting with their mother first and their father and their siblings and the rough and humble play is scaling up.

[888] And then all that in some sense is nested in these higher spiritual aspects, which I think are also, you know, you've talked about the development from exploration behavior to play, ritual.

[889] So you can see that development there.

[890] So those are the five axes.

[891] And then within obviously the interactive element, we have, you know, sort of like intrasexual, like how men learn to deal with men, how women learn to deal with women.

[892] And then you have the intrasexual, and then there's obviously the romantic and sexual aspect of that, which can, which obviously dance is an extraordinarily important aspect of that is, you know, you've explored.

[893] Does that all make sense the way I've laid that out?

[894] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, I like the, I like the idea of the, it's nice to lay out the different landscapes so that people have some sense of the different domains in which mastery could be pursued and accomplished.

[895] And it's also useful to point out that you don't want to allow the practice to become an end in itself.

[896] Exactly.

[897] I mean, the purpose of becoming great at basketball isn't to become great at basketball, it's to become great at being a human being.

[898] and that's going to involve a lot of teamwork and a lot of coaching and a lot of mentoring and a lot of fair play and maybe attention to the structure of the sport itself, all of that.

[899] Exactly.

[900] You don't want to make your discipline a dead end and that idea that it should be generalized is extremely important.

[901] Yeah, and so because otherwise you could get locked within your subculture and that's when things get kind of cult -like.

[902] Yes, and I've seen this repeatedly.

[903] Every practice that I've seen someone say is transformative, I've seen that there's a dark side to it.

[904] So in parkour, you can say, I'm going to go do this jump.

[905] And that's going to make me more courageous because I'm facing down my fear.

[906] And it can absolutely do that.

[907] But there's also this weird way in which you can become a place in which you can reinforce the image of yourself as courageous as you're failing to act out everywhere else in your life.

[908] It's like, no, I'm too afraid to talk to my parents.

[909] Well, that's a video game problem too.

[910] Yeah, exactly.

[911] Same thing.

[912] Same thing.

[913] Yeah.

[914] So then take something like meditation, Baphasana, right?

[915] You're learning to calm yourself down, to be focused.

[916] But then I've seen people who get trapped inside that state, and they can't access it outside of it.

[917] They can become even more fragile.

[918] Their equanimity can become more fragile through the practice.

[919] So, but if you take a parkour and you take a focus practice, the focus practice helps you actually attuned to and get into flow state within the parkour.

[920] And the parkour actually creates a arena in which you can test whether your meditative practice is actually having the effect that you're looking for.

[921] So by having these opponent processing relationships between all these different practices, that's why I believe that is fundamental to a real cultivation of wisdom.

[922] Right, right.

[923] So tell me about your enterprise per se.

[924] Like if people go onto your website, for example, what do they find?

[925] what do you offer, and how can people engage in this and duplicate it for themselves in their own lives?

[926] Yeah, so we have a website of allmoveplay .com.

[927] On there, you can find online courses.

[928] They can get you started.

[929] They start with parkour and then add in elements of other things.

[930] So we have our online courses.

[931] People can check those out.

[932] And then we teach retreats.

[933] That's really the center of what we do.

[934] So we're in the middle of kind of selling this year's retreats.

[935] We have some soft spots left.

[936] So if people see this and want to join us, They probably want to get on that first.

[937] In the retreats, that's where we're able to go deepest into this full experience.

[938] Because we talk about those five fundamental practices that I mentioned.

[939] It's four fundamental practices that afford five connections.

[940] But then we also go into the mindfulness practices, which are kind of a derivative of the somatic and structural layer, and then into the nature connection practices, learning about the world that we experience and being able to craft and use it, which comes out of the second two, and then into the dialogical, right?

[941] So this is something that John Burbaki, again, our mutual friend has really helped us with is, like, adding in some of these deep dialogical practices so that we're getting people in conversation and then doing circles and then in storytelling and even in theatrical elements to get all of these things sort of coming together.

[942] And there's a ritual aspect to it as well.

[943] So we have two five days...

[944] So what would people experience...

[945] Oh, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

[946] Obviously, you're going to lay that out.

[947] Tell me exactly what happens when someone comes to a retreat.

[948] Absolutely.

[949] So we have two five -day retreats and one eight -day retreat in the summer.

[950] And when you come, essentially, we'll pick everyone up.

[951] And then as they arrive, we will take them through a set of practices that involve both physical aspects.

[952] And they're very gentle, sort of rough -and -tumble aspects and dialogical aspects so that they can get as much of a sense of attunement to everyone else in the group as possible right away.

[953] then we'll have dinner and we kind of make as much local fresh food as we can to support people because the food element is a huge part actually of how people bond as well and doing that right is really important and then we'll have an opening ceremony and that opening ceremony is a way of creating commitment and bond in the group and of sort of exiting the world that we were in before we entered this so actually like used a piece of this so I had a bunch of really intense stuff going on with business and some political stuff in my community that was taking my attention when I got the news that you and I were going to have a conversation today.

[954] And so I was like, I need to let go of all of that so that I can be show up best for this conversation with Jordan.

[955] So I went down to the, there's a, there's a cliff with a beautiful pool of water underneath it.

[956] It's about 15 minutes from my housewalk.

[957] So I walked down there and I did a little mantra saying I'm going to let all that go when I hit.

[958] hit the water, I'm washing all that away, and I'm going to be focused on this one thing that's central for me right now.

[959] And so I did a mantra for like five minutes, and I did some like chigong practice standing on the top of this cliff, and then I jumped into the water, and I came out, and sure enough, like, I was so much more ready to be focused once I exited the water.

[960] So we'll do a similar type of process with someone when they arrive for this retreat.

[961] And then over the course of the retreat, we'll take them to a bunch of beautiful spaces.

[962] So there are spaces where we, as I mentioned, jump into water from cliffs.

[963] There's actually a tunnel through a waterfall that we have access to and can take people through.

[964] And that's a really intense rebirth experience to actually climb up through this tunnel where water is pouring down in your head is extraordinary.

[965] And then there's like driftwood on the beach that we teach parkour in.

[966] And there's sandy beach that we wrestle and do all the roughhousing practices.

[967] And we even play some like team sport type games going up this hill of sand.

[968] And it's very nice because it's safe because of the sand.

[969] And then we have these beautiful trees that we move through.

[970] Human beings are a descent of 60 million years of arboreal evolution.

[971] So we take people back into moving in the trees.

[972] And we take people up to alpine lakes and swim in the alpine lakes.

[973] We take people to natural water slides.

[974] And every day we're sort of weaving together the basic fundamental structural practices with learning how to move effectively through the environment, with learning how to move affected with other people and with playing games with balls and sticks and ropes.

[975] And then we also take them into those mindfulness practices, the dialogical practices, and learning like the language of the birds that we experience around us, learning, tracking, learning wild edibles.

[976] So they're more deeply connecting and mapping out the connection between the human being and the natural world.

[977] So I could go on and on.

[978] How long have you been doing that?

[979] This is the 11th year that we've been offering these retreats.

[980] Oh, yeah.

[981] And so how many people have you offered the retreats too about now?

[982] I'm not sure.

[983] So the first few years, we just did one retreat a year, and we take approximately 20 students per retreat.

[984] And in the last few years, we've been offering three retreats a year.

[985] So maybe 300 people, something like that.

[986] Uh -huh.

[987] And so what do people report?

[988] What's their experience?

[989] And do you have any sense of what the longer -term impact is in their life?

[990] Yeah.

[991] I mean, so John said it was the most, I think he said it was the most transformative experience of his life, which is extraordinarily.

[992] Oh, yeah.

[993] Yeah, that's an extraordinary feather in my cap, right, to hear that from John's for me. That's for sure.

[994] Yeah, yeah.

[995] Definitely.

[996] Definitely.

[997] And so why did he feel that?

[998] So if I can remember correctly, John and I had a whole conversation about this on his channel, but it was the sense of taking on those intense physical practices.

[999] and feeling like he was kept right at the appropriate edge for him through the whole time and then being able to have a group of people who was cohering and giving him a deep sense of connection at the same time, as well as the beauty of the nature in which we experienced.

[1000] And he, for him, because he and I had been friends for a long time online, but not having met in person, it was particularly powerful to have me support him through that process, something he talked a lot about.

[1001] Yeah, well, and I mean, John, like me, we operate a fair bit in an abstract realm.

[1002] And so doing something that's more physical, more embodied, but also aiming at something profound.

[1003] You can imagine that that would be a different kind of qualitatively deep experience.

[1004] When you were a kid, you were diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and also with dyslexia.

[1005] What behaviors were you manifesting do you believe that brought about the ADHD diagnosis, and how did that play out in your life?

[1006] What were you doing in class that you shouldn't have been doing?

[1007] Most things, probably, I'll tell you a story.

[1008] So my son is eight years old, and when he was maybe two years old, my mom said, here's not ADHD, right?

[1009] That's my son.

[1010] And I said, how do you know already?

[1011] And she's like, he closes the door every time he leaves a room.

[1012] and it's been clear since he was little that he didn't have the same attentional problems that I did so I but he's he resembles me in certain ways because he loves all the kind of athletic stuff he's very good at parkour very good at rough you know the wrestling and loves sport and so I was asking my older brother you know does Keir remind you of me at the same age and he said personality wise no right when you were a kid, your mom would take you to the bank and you lay on the ground and just wiggle in the middle of the line with everyone around you.

[1013] So that was the kind of behavior.

[1014] I was acting out.

[1015] I was uncontainable physically, right?

[1016] Like if you put me in a chair, I would just wiggle out of it.

[1017] You know, like a car seat.

[1018] You know, my mom told me that she sewed a, like a wool suit for me when I was little.

[1019] And she was like, okay, just don't get it muddy.

[1020] And I walked right out and sat down in a mud puddle.

[1021] I was climbing trees and getting in fights and everything when I was little.

[1022] And I really struggled with just the demand to sit still and try to absorb things in school.

[1023] I remember really clearly in, I think, first grade, we were learning addition and subtraction.

[1024] And I just read the book until it got to the Division of Multiplication stuff.

[1025] and then I just went and told my mom, hey, I can do division and multiplication.

[1026] And then I went back to school, and they made me write three plus four equal seven over and over again.

[1027] Yeah.

[1028] Wrote memorization.

[1029] And I wrote it, and then I got frustrated, and I'd get more frustrated.

[1030] And then eventually it felt like there was a black wall that would just descend, and I couldn't even see the numbers as real anymore.

[1031] And I just refused.

[1032] So in third grade, which is a grade that they took me out of, I read a full -length novel for the first time and I also tested as completely illiterate at the end of the school year.

[1033] So, you know, very frustrated.

[1034] So there's a lot of things we don't understand, we don't, we don't, our models of childhood temperament are relatively underdeveloped.

[1035] So I think it was Rothbart who developed the basic classification scene for childhood temperament.

[1036] There's definitely extroversion and neuroticism And I can't remember what the third category they used was, but it was kind of an intermingling of agreeableness and conscientiousness.

[1037] Some constraint, I think that's what it was called.

[1038] And maybe that differentiates out into the big five as adult development takes place.

[1039] Or maybe we're just not very sophisticated assessing the full five dimensions in childhood.

[1040] That's more likely the case.

[1041] But there is this overlay of childhood temperament investigation.

[1042] Yeah, it was extroversion neuroticism and constraint, if I remember correctly.

[1043] And the more, you know, the more behaviorally disinhibited kids who might fall into the ADHD category would be lower in constraint.

[1044] But I don't, I think we do a very bad job of understanding temperamental contribution to that because my student of mine, Colin DeYoung, and I worked on a two -dimensional personality model, which was plasticity and stability.

[1045] Yep.

[1046] And plastic people who are modifiable their personalities are quite modifiable.

[1047] They're extroverted and open.

[1048] That makes you hyper -exploratory, eh?

[1049] And so if you're an active kid, you're going to be extroverted, and if you're open, then you're interested in all sorts of ideas and possibilities, and the addition of those two makes you hyper -exploratory.

[1050] And then if you're lower in agreeableness, then there's less constraint on that.

[1051] And my suspicion is very strong that most of what we diagnose as ADHD is just temperamental variation and that boys in particular who tend to be more active, more assertive also, because you see that in adult males in relationship to extroversion, they're not going to be happy, especially if they're also disagreeable with sitting down and being constrained in classrooms.

[1052] We also know, I did some research at the University of Montreal that showed that agreeable kids got better grades than you would predict from their IQ.

[1053] And that's really relevant for disagreeable boys, because it puts a lot of them on the cusp of failure.

[1054] So imagine that you're kind of borderline academically, but you're disagreeable, so you're not very obedient.

[1055] Then you're a problem kid.

[1056] You're much more likely to be failed as a consequence of that.

[1057] Whereas if you're an agreeable kid that's compliant and easy to get along with, and then also not very exploratory, so it's easy for you to sit still, you're not ever going to cause any trouble in class.

[1058] You're going to get the benefit of the doubt when the class is oriented.

[1059] to having everyone shut up, sit down, remain silent for a long period of time.

[1060] Yeah, absolutely.

[1061] Lots of poise in particular.

[1062] They don't thrive in that environment.

[1063] We were talking about this a little bit last Saturday, and I can confirm for you that that's the description of my personality, because I've done your Understand Me test, right?

[1064] And so I, right, 99th percentile for openness to experience, 99th percentile for assertiveness, third percentile for agreeability, tenth percentile for conscientiousness.

[1065] So there you go.

[1066] That's what I score on your chest.

[1067] But I think there is something interesting about ADHD symptoms, the inattentiveness as being and hyperactivity as being related to like a late maturing or a difficulty maturing the frontal cortex.

[1068] And that play is developmental there.

[1069] because I can just look back at my life history and say there's a certain way in which I was very young, developmentally, fairly late, right?

[1070] Like some of the social graces didn't come to me really until I was close to 30 or even after 30.

[1071] And I had this dramatic experience of taking on parkour and finding that my inattentiveness problems were massively reduced.

[1072] And so it was like when I read that research that showed that if you deny juvenile rats play, their prefrontal cortexes don't develop properly, and then you can inhibit their behavior.

[1073] It's a major piece of research.

[1074] Yeah, and you can inhibit their behavior through amphetamines, but they're not actually maturing the cortex, right?

[1075] So it was like, parkour for me was the medicine that I needed to actually begin to mature.

[1076] There is evidence for the delayed maturity hypothesis, so here's the best evidence.

[1077] So in any given grade of change, children, there are some children who are about a year older than the youngest children in the class.

[1078] So there's a year gap.

[1079] Yeah.

[1080] So, you know, the oldest grade three child could be in grade four and the youngest grade three child could be in grade two.

[1081] That's my kids.

[1082] And that's a hell of a gap at that age.

[1083] Now, what you do see is that the rates of behavioral problem are radically elevated in the youngest kids in the class.

[1084] Okay.

[1085] So not only do you see that, so the youngest kids are much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, for example, but also the youngest kids are also much less likely to be athletically successful.

[1086] So, for example, if you look at NHL athletes, National Hockey League athletes, they're disproportionately older kids in their grade school class.

[1087] And because a year, like when you're eight, the difference between a seven -year -old and a nine -year -old can be quite great.

[1088] Yeah.

[1089] Like, substantially great.

[1090] And so, you know, if you're a kid who is a little immature in terms of neurological development, and then you're also temperamentally inclined to be exploratory and unconstrained, well, then you got a perfect storm there for hypothetically an ADHD diagnosis.

[1091] But one of the things people should know, too, this is very, very important.

[1092] So originally the marker for the neurological element of ADHD was that kids who were hyperactive had a paradoxical reaction to amphetamines.

[1093] So for most people, amphetamines hypothetically were stimulating, but for ADHD kids, it was paradoxical because it calmed them down.

[1094] And that was all not true.

[1095] None of that's true.

[1096] It's not true at all.

[1097] Amphetamines have the same effect on everyone.

[1098] They increase focused, focal narrow attention.

[1099] And that can suppress Well, Panksep showed it suppresses play.

[1100] Suppresses that excess of exploratory activity.

[1101] But that is not a paradoxical reaction, which is why so many kids in university, for example, will take Ritalin as a study aid.

[1102] Because that increase in dopaminergic activity increases the inhibitory capacity of focal attention.

[1103] But that doesn't mean that it's diagnostic of some underlying disorder.

[1104] I think that, you know, absent fetal alcohol syndrome or clear evidence for neurological abnormality, the notion that attention deficit disorder is a neurological syndrome is, I think it's preposterous, especially given everything we don't know about temperament.

[1105] Yeah.

[1106] I think that there is some association with the EDAR gene and attention deficit disorder.

[1107] And what's interesting is that EDAR, is it EDAR?

[1108] DRD4.

[1109] EDRD4.

[1110] EDAR is the gene that codes for lots of Asian traits.

[1111] But DRD4, my understanding is that DRD4 actually appears to be under positive selection in Hunter Forger cultures and pastoral cultures.

[1112] So there's something about the ability.

[1113] Or do you think about, like, John's model of relevance realization, we need to be able to, we're always having this competing need to focus in and the competing need to externalize the focus.

[1114] So the capacity to actually attune to lots of things outside of what the focal thing is could actually be very adaptive in certain situations.

[1115] When I was a kid, my mom called me the boy with big years because you couldn't say anything anywhere in the house without me picking up what you were saying potentially.

[1116] And I remember really struggling in my teens with this because I couldn't go into a social situation with a lot of people and have a conversation with one person very easily because I couldn't make the rest of the conversations irrelevant.

[1117] My brain would always be picking up pieces of conversations.

[1118] and so I was constantly sort of getting things that were inappropriate for a kid in some sense from adult conversations because they would think that they were safe from my attention in some sense but my attention was always defraying everywhere and it would pick up stuff but if you think about a hundred four -door situation that is potentially really useful in picking up where an animal is in the environment so even dyslexia seems to also be related to the ability to pick up certain types of patterns in the environment more effectively.

[1119] So you struggle with the patterns of things on paper, but something like mushrooms on a forest floor may pop out more clearly to you.

[1120] Well, the dyslexia, I mean, most kids show signs of dyslexia when they first start to recognize letters because the most common confusion in perception is P's, Q's, Bs, and Ds.

[1121] And all the, they only differ by orientation, And what happens is that you need massed practice to build the neurological circuitry that allows for the discrimination.

[1122] And my guess is that some people need a lot more mass practice than others.

[1123] Like I have the kind of mind, ever since I was a kid, if I look at a word once, I know how to spell it for the rest of my life.

[1124] And that was there right from the time I was tiny.

[1125] But I know my friend of mine, who's an unbelievable genius, was quite dyslexic, and he still has some trouble with P's and Q's and D's.

[1126] And obviously there's a threshold there for automatization.

[1127] And some people automatized perceptions very, very rapidly, say semantically, and other people need mass practice.

[1128] But, but, and how that's tied in with attention deficit disorder, that's a real tough one.

[1129] Now, you said, when we're talking on YouTube, you said that when you were very young, your father and you interacted a lot, hey?

[1130] And what do you remember about that?

[1131] Yeah, it's interesting.

[1132] My earliest memory is, I think I was about two years old and I was sitting on top of some stairs on our property that allowed us to look up at the sunset, a sunrise coming up over the hill and we're eating watermelon together.

[1133] And I had a really warm sense of my dad at that age.

[1134] And he particularly was really great at doing rough and double play.

[1135] My dad was a All -State wrestler and collegiate football player.

[1136] He played linebacker in college.

[1137] So he's very physically strong and capable and very confident.

[1138] So when we were little, he used to just, like, hold us overhead and run with us.

[1139] So, like, playing the airplane game with the babies is a Kelly tradition.

[1140] Oh, yeah.

[1141] That's insanely exciting.

[1142] Imagine being hoisted into the air by someone 18 feet tall and run down the field.

[1143] Yeah.

[1144] So he did that kind of stuff with us all the time when I was little.

[1145] And, you know, he took me out to catch frogs and, salamanders and introduced the natural world to me and helped me learn to swim by showing me how frogs swim.

[1146] So I was going to formal classes and I was really struggling in the formal classes.

[1147] And so my dad actually took me to a pond and we watched the frog swim.

[1148] And he like took me into the water and I learned to breaststroke by by watching frogs.

[1149] And so I had to, you know, my dad's a very kind of, my dad's name for anyone's interested is Sunray Kelly.

[1150] And he's kind of a pretty well -known natural builder.

[1151] His work's been featured in, you know, various TV shows.

[1152] And books um so he has a very magical strange world that he lives within that's pretty pretty great for a child in certain ways but he had a really really traumatic experience of school as well and when i started school and he saw me doing that i think it was very hard for him emotionally and so i think he'd sort of pulled back from me at that stage and then how old would you be then six years old So you had that underlying, so you had six years there where you built that physical connection.

[1153] So you got through that crucial developmental period with that paternal relationship, very functional and intact.

[1154] You know, one of the things we should point out here for any mothers who are listening, who are apprehensive about watching their spouses, their husbands play with their children.

[1155] Well, the first thing I would say is pay attention, like, watch, because you're going to be afraid and turn away and maybe want to interfere.

[1156] And so don't turn away and don't leave the room.

[1157] Watch.

[1158] And watch your kids, because if your kids are laughing, here's a rule.

[1159] If your kids are playing with their father and they're not crying, everything's okay, especially if they're laughing.

[1160] But, you know, they don't have to be laughing all the time.

[1161] They can even be looking afraid.

[1162] As long as they're not crying, the frame is intact and you don't have to worry.

[1163] And, you know, even if there are tears upon occasion, you know, as long as they're not screams of agony and outrage, a little bit of tears is also not indicative that something terrible has happened, because when you're playing, there's going to be mishaps from time to time, and the kid has to learn to deal with the mishaps, too.

[1164] You know, people are going to get hurt, they're going to get a thumb in the eye or whatever the hell it is, or be pushed a little bit too far.

[1165] to play properly with someone is going to mean that now and then you're pushed a little farther than you should be.

[1166] It's really necessary for women to learn to watch that and to learn how to discriminate what's fun from what's dangerous and not interfere.

[1167] Yeah, this is a big passion of mine, right?

[1168] As someone who grew up with the experiences that I had and who is the type of person that I am, like I've played with my kids really intensely, and my wife's very accepting of it.

[1169] And it's been very interesting to watch how the kids you talk about the idea that the male role is to encourage the child more and the female role is to nurture the child more.

[1170] And what's really interesting to me is how the kids self -select that, right?

[1171] Like if they are in a, when they need nurturance, they will come to me if their mother's unavailable.

[1172] And I will nurture them and I will do what they need.

[1173] But if she's available and they're hurt and they're crying or whatever, they don't want me to do anything.

[1174] She's their first choice.

[1175] They want mom.

[1176] It's like, my job.

[1177] is just to take them to mom if necessary, right?

[1178] But on the flip side, when they're excited and they want to play, they want me, right?

[1179] They want me to be that facilitator of this intense, encouraging play.

[1180] And what I, it's tragic to me because I feel like somehow in our culture, the value of that masculine role of providing the encouragement of the child, it's really been missed.

[1181] And I see all the time this kind of dysfunctional hyperfeminization of the way that we treat children.

[1182] When I go to the park, you know, I was at the park the other day, and you were talking about, you know, the kids doing the little competitive thing.

[1183] So my daughter's there, my five -year -old, and there's this other five -year -old boy, and so she's showing him things that she can do on the monkey bars.

[1184] And he's showing her stuff, and they're like, well, I can do more than you.

[1185] I can do more than you.

[1186] My dad can do more than you.

[1187] My dad can be more, right?

[1188] And she ends up, she's trying to do the monkey bars.

[1189] She just learned to do the monkey bars.

[1190] And she ends up hanging from one hand and just like spinning around her hand for a long time because she can't make the next grab.

[1191] And then the little boy gets up and he tries to just repeat what she did.

[1192] And his grandfather actually comes over and he's like, don't do that, don't do that.

[1193] That's bad for your shoulder.

[1194] I'm like, do you know that?

[1195] Right?

[1196] Like, why are you feeding that fear to your child?

[1197] All the time, like we're running, jumping, climbing in these public spaces with our kids and you'll hear people say, don't do that, you're going to get hurt.

[1198] Don't do that.

[1199] You know, that's dangerous.

[1200] And what I think is that our role is, as parents, is to grow children into highly competent adults.

[1201] And to do that, we need to slowly eradicate unnecessary fears and build resilience into the child.

[1202] Instead of inculcating them.

[1203] Exactly.

[1204] That's exactly the word.

[1205] We need to inoculate.

[1206] You should be neurotic and fearful instead.

[1207] And it's happening all the time.

[1208] And apprehensive.

[1209] It is.

[1210] It's happening all the time.

[1211] Yeah.

[1212] It's no wonder kids are demoral.

[1213] because they're bombarded with demoralizing messages all the time.

[1214] Don't do that, you'll get hurt.

[1215] It's like, yeah, well, you know, don't do that and you'll get hurt.

[1216] The hurt is unavoidable.

[1217] The question is whether or not you can master it.

[1218] And it is, it's a very sad thing to see that sense disappear.

[1219] And also to have it replaced by a kind of, you know, insistent moralizing too.

[1220] It's not only you shouldn't do that, if you facilitate it or allow it as a parent, you're somehow like criminally derelict in your duties.

[1221] And we're almost at that point in our culture now.

[1222] We're being bad examples when we go out and do parkour in public because some kid's going to try to do it and get hurt.

[1223] And it's like, that kid should be trying to do it.

[1224] He should be helped to understand the appropriate level of challenge for them.

[1225] Like when my kids try to do something that I'm afraid of, I try not to say, don't do that or just be careful.

[1226] What I try to say is, how can I help you do that, right?

[1227] Right, exactly.

[1228] How can we set this up?

[1229] Like, my son taught himself to do a backflip the other day, and he was just going to, he's learned it on a trampoline and decided he was ready to do it on the ground.

[1230] And I was like, okay, do you want me to spot you?

[1231] He's like, no. I was like, do you want me to give you some drills to prepare?

[1232] No. And then he was going to do it up onto a mat that was like eight inches high.

[1233] And so I was thinking, like, getting all the way around and getting onto this mat, that's not going to work.

[1234] So it was like, at least let me just put this block there for you so that it's level with the mat.

[1235] And then it was perfectly safe and I was confident.

[1236] I walked away and let him have his process of doing it.

[1237] And it's a challenge, it's a challenge as a coach, right?

[1238] I'm used to being in people's process.

[1239] But I have to be very careful with my children because there's this separation of role between the coach and the father.

[1240] It's very easy for the father to be overbearing.

[1241] And so I have to really like separate myself sometimes and say, I'm giving you that.

[1242] You take that space and if you get a little bit hurt, like, you know, as long as you're not injured, that's okay because you learn something.

[1243] Yeah.

[1244] Well, it's particularly hard for women, I think, because they go through that intense bonding process with the infant, and their primary concern has to be the bodily integrity and psychological well -being of the infant.

[1245] Like, everything is sacrificed to that, and that's really about a seven -month journey where everything is focused on the infant.

[1246] infants needs, and the infant's distress is always 100 % accurate.

[1247] And then women have to pull themselves away from that, and that's not an easy thing to do.

[1248] And then women are also more sensitive to threat and emotional distress, and so that also makes their proclivity to intervene more paramount.

[1249] And then they have to have trust for men, and that's a problem, too, if you have a wife who hasn't been exposed to rough and humble play at all, and who, doesn't understand play, it's easy for her to confuse that with aggression and carelessness and to inhibit it then.

[1250] And that can elicit negative responses on the part of the husband that look like aggression.

[1251] And so you get a terrible spiral developing there.

[1252] And the retreat from it, because if the central thing that you have, the most important gift that you have to offer a child is not accepted as valuable by your partner, Like, that's, that's, you know, like punishing people for their virtues is the worst thing you can do.

[1253] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1254] I saw that how I see that happening in families all the time.

[1255] The fathers end up alienated from the children because every time they try to interact, they get micro -punished.

[1256] And it just, and it just, after a hundred attempts, they just give up.

[1257] It's really not good.

[1258] Well, you also pointed out something very important, you know, you said that the children, if you watch your children, they'll calibrate their requirement.

[1259] So one of the things parents should know, because you might ask, well, how much should you be around your children?

[1260] And the answer is, well, it depends on the child.

[1261] And so that's problematic.

[1262] But the children will, like, for example, children who need to seek for security will seek out someone to offer them security when they need it.

[1263] And one of the things you want to be do as a primary caregiver is to be available for that.

[1264] So you say, go out, go out and play.

[1265] But if you need me, I'm here.

[1266] and then the kid will go out and play, and if something happens that's untoward, come back for a little bit of comfort, you know, from the mother, let's say, a pat and kiss, and then that'll sort of put them back together, reestablish that security, and then they can go out and play again.

[1267] But as you said, the child will choose whether it's time for some nurturance and security or whether it's time for some boisterous encouragement, and that does tend to be somewhat sex -segregated, which isn't to say that, you know, a father can play a maternal role, and a mother can play an encouraging paternal role, but it does tend to differentiate itself sexually.

[1268] Yeah, I think it's really important for fathers to cultivate their capacity for nourish, nurturance, and for mothers to cultivate their capacity for encouragement.

[1269] We need to be available to hold that bandwidth for our children as needed.

[1270] But we also have to recognize that we have unique strengths, right?

[1271] It's like, there's just things that, like, my kids, well, they're getting well -trained enough as martial artists that I can't really do this anymore, but I used to just have an open rule.

[1272] If they wanted to come up and punch somebody, they could just come and punch me, and it was fine, right?

[1273] And so, like, you know, my kids can belt.

[1274] And it's, I'm very proud of it.

[1275] Right.

[1276] Well, and even that, you know, even that's something that's frowned on.

[1277] Like, I taught both my kids to punch when they were very little, you know, and I taught them how to use their whole body to really, you know, to really give me a good whack.

[1278] And, of course, they really like that.

[1279] But the knee -jerk response to that is, well, your children should never have to resort to violence.

[1280] It's like, well, first of all, if they can resort to violence, they're much less likely to have to.

[1281] And because they're not intimidated when the local bully decides to determine if they're a target for harassment because they knew perfectly well that they had something at their disposal that was likely to be effective.

[1282] They also really enjoyed learning to punch.

[1283] And I would say that was even more true of my daughter than it was of my son.

[1284] You know, he was interested in it and into it, but my daughter was really into it, and she actually got pretty good at it.

[1285] And that ability to throw a punch and to take a punch, that's pretty necessary if you're, well, engaged in anything that's agonistic, and that's obviously going to happen to you when you're a kid because the bullies are going to come and test you out.

[1286] Yeah, I mean, I think it's my friend Rory Miller, who's a great self -defense thinker.

[1287] He says, you don't get to choose the bad things that happen to you.

[1288] You say you should never have to resort to violence, but violence can occur in your life.

[1289] It's occurred in my life, right?

[1290] I've been hit by caretakers when I was little, people who were supposed to be, you know, taking care of me when my parents weren't there and happened to not be the best people.

[1291] And then I grew up and I was a bouncer for three years and been attacked on basketball courts and stuff like that.

[1292] It's like being able to handle myself is great.

[1293] It also decreases the risk that something really terrible will go wrong, you know, because if you are capable of defending yourself, you can calibrate your response.

[1294] Precisely.

[1295] It's when people have no idea how to respond to aggression that really terrible things start to happen.

[1296] Yeah, that's the bite inhibition talk about with the dogs that we talked about earlier.

[1297] Right, right.

[1298] It's the same thing, right?

[1299] Like, if you, this is a big problem with the police right now.

[1300] We don't have well -trained, physically adept police who, actually have highly calibrated, high competency, and lower force levels.

[1301] So when they meet somebody who's actually physically dangerous, the only option they have is their weapon, because they don't have any lower level options at their disposal.

[1302] We need to actually build people.

[1303] And it's the same thing in your life, right?

[1304] Like I've, like I said.

[1305] Have you offered your move play?

[1306] Have you offered your retreats to police forces?

[1307] I haven't.

[1308] I just recently got interviewed by someone who works with the police, and I've spoken to a couple of local police departments about these ideas, but I would love to work with law enforcement.

[1309] Yeah, man, that sounds like a really good idea.

[1310] That sounds like a really good idea to bring that calibration in, well, especially for police.

[1311] Yes.

[1312] Yeah, yeah.

[1313] We need to calibrate people to the physicality.

[1314] And I'll tell you a story because I think this is a fascinating example of, like, the way that kids self -organized for these things.

[1315] I saw a video.

[1316] years ago of a, I think it was a Turkish man in his son, and the son was sitting in the boy of the man's lap, and he was slapping him in the face.

[1317] And then the father was slapping the little boy in the face.

[1318] And it was getting harder and harder.

[1319] They were exchanging harder and harder slaps.

[1320] And I felt really, really uncomfortable watching this.

[1321] But the kid was giggling and giggling and giggling.

[1322] And I didn't know how to interpret it at the time.

[1323] But then when my niece was seven years old, she was sitting in my lap, and she just slapped me out of nowhere.

[1324] And I remember really clearly this moment in my mind thinking, I'm going to slap her and that's okay because I don't feel angry.

[1325] And so I gave her a little slap.

[1326] I gave her a little slap and I was very careful that I hit her slightly less hard than she hit me. And she looked at me like, she was just like, wow, wow, what just happened?

[1327] And then she slapped me again.

[1328] And then I slapped her again.

[1329] And then we did this game.

[1330] And then for a few months when she saw me, she would initially this game with me and then it was over she doesn't even remember it but but that was that was very interesting so then when my oldest daughter was about 18 months she slapped me maybe it was a year or two years somewhere around there she slapped me and I did the same thing with her I was very very careful to calibrate the force so that it was less than what she she did but when she hit me harder she got hit a little bit harder and so she would do that with yeah and then she never hit Well, you know, what you're doing there?

[1331] Well, you think, okay, so you might say, well, you never have to resort to violence.

[1332] It's like, okay, fine.

[1333] In a utopian world, perhaps possibly that might be true, although it isn't, but in any case.

[1334] So you might say then, well, what does a slap mean?

[1335] Yep.

[1336] And what a slap means is this.

[1337] Right?

[1338] There's no explanation outside of the embodiment.

[1339] And so if a child slaps you, well, partly it's exploratory behavior.

[1340] I mean, what does this mean?

[1341] What does this mean?

[1342] And what it means is the response, and well, it means this, whack.

[1343] Oh, that's what it's like to be slapped.

[1344] Okay, well, that's interesting.

[1345] It's like, what's the acceptable limits to that?

[1346] Well, you do that by that playful calibration.

[1347] You know, and that can get pretty harsh.

[1348] And it should get pretty harsh because it should take you to the edge of pain, right?

[1349] Because that's where you have to see where, well, it's like teasing.

[1350] I had a rule in my house, which was, you know, you stay on the funny side of the joke.

[1351] because and you can push it right to the edge because that's where it's really funny but past that it's no longer funny are you funny or annoying and there's a fine line man and it's the same thing you're doing when you're calibrating slaps it's like when what exactly does this mean you have to play that out you have to play that at an embodied level to understand it yeah so so it was such a fascinating experience to do that with her and to see that and then like every Like, kids explore, they fight with each other when they're little, right?

[1352] They try to establish, you know, dominance or whatever.

[1353] She never had a problem.

[1354] She never had a physical conflict with another kid in school.

[1355] And I was like, I don't know for sure.

[1356] Obviously, it's speculative.

[1357] But I had this sense that, like, she got to explore these things at home.

[1358] So she didn't have the same, she didn't have the same curiosity.

[1359] She didn't have the same lack of recognition of what that context meant.

[1360] And then interestingly, my son did the same thing.

[1361] But it was different because he hit me so much harder than she hit.

[1362] and he wanted to play it way more intensely.

[1363] And it was very interesting because she would slap and then slap a little bit harder and then a little bit harder.

[1364] She was really like kind of grading up.

[1365] But he would get excited and then he would rear back and slap me really hard.

[1366] And then he would cringe.

[1367] He would know that he'd gone over the line.

[1368] And he'd be like, oh, you know, and he's just a small little kid, right?

[1369] And I would look at him like, are we playing?

[1370] Are you accepting that you're, You developed the any, and now you're going to accept it.

[1371] And he'd look at me, and he would relax and say, okay, no, I accept what I created.

[1372] And I would, again, always stay below his force threshold.

[1373] But then he got to sense that if you push, you'll get pushed back, right?

[1374] And if you play with the right partner.

[1375] And also, you know how big the push is, right?

[1376] Because you said he took bigger leaps.

[1377] Like, he wouldn't know what the scale of the leap is without playing with it.

[1378] You know, you can do that with dogs, too, if they're reasonably well -trained.

[1379] You know, a good way to initiate a game with the dog is to give it a whack.

[1380] Yep.

[1381] What the dog will do is bite, generally, in proportion to the force of the slap.

[1382] Yep.

[1383] And dogs find that extremely exciting, you know, and so it's a very quick way of getting a dog to play.

[1384] A stupid dog can't do it because it'll scare it or it'll startle it, or it'll bite, or it'll whine or something, or it'll pee, you know, it'll do something completely inappropriate.

[1385] A poorly socialized dog.

[1386] Halfway.

[1387] Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[1388] And it can't calibrate its responses.

[1389] But here's the problem, Jordan.

[1390] We're a society of poorly socialized dogs.

[1391] Yes, this is definitely true.

[1392] It's definitely true.

[1393] Yeah, yeah.

[1394] Well, I see that.

[1395] I see when I'm walking down the street.

[1396] You know, I see kids, because I watch kids all the time.

[1397] And I can just see kids lumbering down the street who haven't been played with.

[1398] And I can tell because their movements are low resolution.

[1399] they're blocky, they're inarticulate even in their physical movement.

[1400] There's nothing graceful about them.

[1401] And those are kids too.

[1402] You'll see a kid like that sort of standing like this in the corner.

[1403] You know, and you walk by and he doesn't even look at you because he doesn't know how to initiate attention.

[1404] You go up to a kid like that and poke him and he'll do this.

[1405] Like it's like a six -month -old response, say, he'll do this.

[1406] And then you poke him again, he'll do this.

[1407] And if you take a kid like that and poke him a dozen times, he'll look at you, right, and then kind of wondering.

[1408] And then once he looks at you, you know, then you can give him a little shove or something and get that going.

[1409] But you see kids like that all the time who've never been played with at all.

[1410] They have no idea.

[1411] They have no idea what's going on.

[1412] They're desperate for it, you know.

[1413] And the really sad kids, you'll see, might take you 30 forays before you can entice them out of their shell.

[1414] And you can tell that not only have they not been playing, with, but that their attempts to play have met with so much rejection that they're entirely demoralized.

[1415] It's so sad to see.

[1416] This is another, so we've taken away unstructured play from children, which is a disaster.

[1417] We have replaced it with structured play where we enforce win conditions that don't allow children to self -handicap so that they can actually maintain the game so that it's rewarding for all players.

[1418] So we are punishing out the play drive in every way that we can as a society.

[1419] So when you go to school and you're a highly active, high -movement kid like me, they're slapping you down as much as possible to try to instinctify that drive.

[1420] But then what's really sad is then you take a kid like me maybe and you put him in soccer and he's, you know, having a great time with soccer because he gets to run and be physical.

[1421] Maybe he's one of the more talented kids and he has success.

[1422] But then maybe you send him to select soccer.

[1423] Now maybe he's at the bottom of the pool of select soccer.

[1424] And now he's riding the bench.

[1425] Now he's not getting enough exposure.

[1426] Now he's not getting that 30 % success rate that creates that repeated bond.

[1427] And now what's happening is you actually punished him every time that he's engaging in physicality.

[1428] And we see this over and over again through the physical system.

[1429] We're putting kids where we're taking away their self -organized capacity to create a game that's self -sustaining an infinite type of game.

[1430] And we're sticking them in adult -imposed finite games that actually will inherently punish some percentage of them.

[1431] Well, what percentage of elementary schools don't have recess now?

[1432] It's a tremendous number.

[1433] A lot of that's insurance concerns.

[1434] Yeah, I know.

[1435] In the insurance industry.

[1436] Well, we don't really need, we don't really need recess.

[1437] It's like, I see, so the kids had a little bit of chance to play, and now you've made that verboten.

[1438] It's like it's beyond appalling.

[1439] So we should, let me let you wrap up, because we're running out of time on the Daily Wire segment.

[1440] Is there anything else we should talk about?

[1441] Sorry, I was just about to initiate a chat that I think is probably way too deep to get into about how we're simplifying people.

[1442] people's behavior to make them more predictable.

[1443] But let's say that for another time.

[1444] Okay.

[1445] You know, the big thing I want to say is just, it's been a huge pleasure.

[1446] You know, your work's been such an influence in helping me think out, these things that I was already experiencing, right?

[1447] Like, what I said to John was that there's this emergent thing that was happening within parkour.

[1448] And then for me, with parkour and nature and martial arts, when I, so I was teaching people.

[1449] And when I was teaching people, what I noticed was if I told them a study and I told them statistics about how this would make them better, it kind of went in one year and went out the other.

[1450] But if I told them a story about something that I experienced that was transformative, you'd see their eyes light up.

[1451] So I started to recognize that narrative had power.

[1452] And then I started recognizing that ultimately the purpose of the meaning practice had to be beyond the – or the purpose of the movement practice had to be beyond it, right?

[1453] It had to be meaning -oriented.

[1454] So when I saw that first interview with you and Joe Rogan, when you got to the port where you were laying out your archetypal and narrative thoughts, it was this ignition moment for me. And I just absorbed everything you put out, right, in 2016, 2017.

[1455] And I got to the end of that year, and I couldn't understand why I was so obsessed with what you were talking about at that stage.

[1456] But I went to teach.

[1457] And as I was teaching, the stuff that I kind of had already brood in my brain and the stuff that you were talking about, it was like, boom, me that came together.

[1458] And I saw that fundamentally we have to be nested in these narratives.

[1459] And those narratives have to be acted out physically.

[1460] And that's how we actually bring meaning into the world.

[1461] And it just, it feels like the physical practice, and it's not me alone.

[1462] There's other people who are evolving in very similar directions.

[1463] The physical practices and how they can impact us at these higher dimensions of ourself, they're emerging, they're emerging in a way that is reflective of the body of theory that guys like yourself and John have offered.

[1464] And to be able to bring that together and offer it to people is really just a huge pleasure.

[1465] And to have this conversation with you.

[1466] Oh, yeah.

[1467] It's really, yeah, that's it.

[1468] If people want to experience.

[1469] It's so cool to see this coming from the bottom up, it's to see this being laid.

[1470] out at the level of embodiment.

[1471] It's so cool to see these higher order, abstract, moral conceptions make themselves manifest at the, well, at the lowest physiological level upward.

[1472] It's a great thing to see.

[1473] That's the material world reaching up to the sky.

[1474] It is.

[1475] It is.

[1476] Architectically speaking, yeah, it's so cool to see.

[1477] It's lovely.

[1478] So it's a pleasure talking to you.

[1479] Yeah, absolutely.

[1480] Hopefully we'll get a chance to meet at one of these conferences that seems to be springing up.

[1481] And for everybody who's watching and listening, you can go check out Rave's site that's Evolveplaymoove .com.

[1482] Evolvemoveplay .com.

[1483] Especially if you're young...

[1484] Oh, sorry, Evolvemoveplay .com, especially if you're a young parent or you're dealing with young kids and you can find a community of play practitioners and maybe you can start thinking too about how you could integrate the spirit of play into your own life because, man, that's something you certainly want to do.

[1485] It's the highest form of action.

[1486] It's the real sign of mastery to do something difficult with the spirit of play.

[1487] It's a sign of, the highest level of neurological integration, as far as I can tell.

[1488] It's certainly the antidote to tyranny and probably to slavery.

[1489] So anyways, it was a pleasure talking to you today.

[1490] Thank you to everyone watching and listening on the Daily Wire Plus platform to the film crew here in Saskatoon.

[1491] And, well, we'll continue the conversation at some point in the future.

[1492] Maybe we can have a chat at some point with Jonathan Pajou and John Verveke.

[1493] That would be fun.

[1494] That'd be amazing.

[1495] Yeah, yeah, that'd be good.

[1496] Let's do that.

[1497] Thank you, John, or Jordan.

[1498] Geez.

[1499] Good.

[1500] Good to see you, man. Likewise.

[1501] I have a pleasure meeting you.

[1502] Yeah.

[1503] Bye -bye.

[1504] Yep.

[1505] Chow, everyone.

[1506] Bye -bye.