In this episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson speaks with Rafe Kelly, founder of Evolve, Move, and Play, about the role of play in the development and regulation of aggression and the fostering of pro-social behavior at an embodied level.
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00:00:57.420Hello everybody. I'm speaking today on matters psychological and practical, I suppose, and hopefully also entertaining and fun, as well as appropriately serious.
00:01:20.560I'm talking to Rafe Kelly today, who heads an organization called Evolve, Move, and Play.
00:01:28.620And I'm very interested, have been very interested for a long time in the role of play in the integration and regulation,
00:01:37.020well, not only of aggression, but also in the fostering of pro-social behavior at an embodied level.
00:01:43.200And 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,
00:01:57.100probably from six months up to, well, who knows, up to what level, till you're old.
00:02:09.260And 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,
00:02:23.660a manner also that simultaneously fosters development.
00:02:26.480So we're going to talk about that today.
00:02:28.340So, Rafe, why don't we start with a bit of your background?
00:02:31.880Why don't you fill people in on, you know, your educational background, your interests, and all that,
00:02:36.840and then we'll start talking about getting more to the nuts and bolts of play.
00:02:41.120Yeah, I think given that you started with kind of rough-and-tumble play, it'd be good to start with my early childhood.
00:02:48.100So 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.
00:02:55.260And 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.
00:03:01.960And my mom didn't, so there was a big conflict there.
00:03:04.320And my dad kind of reacted to that by just sort of pulling away from me and sort of emotionally neglecting me.
00:03:08.640So I was acting out in school and getting in lots of fistfights.
00:03:13.840And I got introduced to the martial arts when I was six years old, and that started helping me learn to regulate my emotions.
00:03:22.240And 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.
00:03:29.700And he did a few things that were really helpful to me.
00:03:34.040He, you know, let me spend, you know, just two hours a day doing homework, and then the rest of the day I would be out running in the woods.
00:03:40.060But he also did rough-and-tumble play with me extensively, pretty much every day.
00:03:44.800And so we would wrestle all the time, and that became incredibly healing for me.
00:03:49.240So 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.
00:03:59.420How old were you when that started, that rough-and-tumble play?
00:04:03.120Yeah, so my dad did a lot of rough-and-tumble play with me when I was little.
00:04:06.000But then there was that period where I was more neglectful in our relationship.
00:04:09.260Then the second mentor who came into my life came into my life when I was eight years old.
00:04:14.600Yeah, well, you pointed out something very interesting there with regard to your father.
00:04:19.160I mean, I've actually seen that pattern in many families.
00:04:23.400You know, and it seems so, for example, I've seen within my own extended family, thinking of one couple in particular,
00:04:30.560where every time the father attempted to involve himself in the discipline, let's say,
00:04:36.660which is really the attention and regulation of his son, his wife would, in small ways and not so small, interfere in a rather punitive manner.
00:04:50.960Treating her husband as if his interaction, his involvement was both inappropriate, ignorant and dangerous, something like that combination.
00:05:01.360And my experience with that has been that what men usually do in that situation is pull away.
00:05:09.400And that's really devastating for the kids.
00:05:12.900You 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.
00:05:20.800And the mothers tend to be more prone to provide security and comfort and fathers to provide encouragement and challenge.
00:05:32.300And getting that exactly right really depends on the temperament of the parents and the temperament of the child.
00:05:39.080But it's unbelievably easy for women to be overprotective of their children enough to stop fathers from interacting.
00:05:46.940And 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.
00:05:54.060And often the answer to that, not always, but often is, well, you punished it out of existence.
00:05:59.660Every time the father stepped forward to take an interest, you put up a barrier that was non-trivial, a moral barrier often.
00:06:41.260My mom had reason to be protective in some sense.
00:06:44.980And my dad was struggling with some of those things.
00:06:48.320But he and I have a great relationship now.
00:06:50.280But 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.
00:07:01.860And so this guy that started to play with you when you were eight, how did that come about?
00:07:07.580And why did your mother and father encourage that or even allow it?
00:07:12.580Because that's also a place where, you know, people can be skeptical.
00:07:31.440And my mom was desperate for babysitters.
00:07:34.940And he offered himself as a babysitter.
00:07:36.420And then over time, we just got closer and closer.
00:07:39.600And so when my mom took me out of school, initially, she was going to do some of the homeschooling.
00:07:45.800And 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.
00:07:54.780And he was just there and, you know, was willing to do it.
00:07:58.440And so that's kind of how that worked out.
00:08:00.460So what I wanted to share was that as I kind of then developed, I was in this Red Cedar Circle, which is a kind of Native American religious group in my late childhood, early teens.
00:08:16.740And there were a lot of other young kids there whose families were part of it.
00:08:23.940And so by the time I was 12, I started really being kind of just being asked to babysit these younger kids.
00:08:28.720And I noticed that they all had this incredible hunger for a rough and tumble play.
00:08:33.100It was like this deep, unmet need that I was seeing in children everywhere.
00:08:36.620And so I started just being the guy who would roughhouse with kids at any social gathering.
00:08:42.800And then people started asking me to come over.
00:08:44.900When I was 13, one of my closest friends died.
00:08:48.760Unfortunately, after a bike accident, he had his spleen taken out.
00:08:51.400And he didn't get sewed up properly, so he hemorrhaged out.
00:08:53.620But 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.
00:09:05.440So 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.
00:09:12.460And so I developed a really close relationship with him kind of through that same relationship.
00:09:17.460So I got to kind of step into that role in facilitating rough and tumble play for younger children, starting as a young kid.
00:09:24.240And then I went on to work as a mentor for kids in my teens.
00:09:35.720And 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.
00:09:44.800And so I've kind of done that repeatedly, and I've really seen how much of an impact that can have.
00:10:15.060Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:10:24.360And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:10:27.240With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:10:35.020Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:11:34.640I first came across the play research through a man named Frank Francich in his book, The Exuberant Animal.
00:11:40.220And I started digging into it behind that and then came into Stuart Brown's work.
00:11:43.640And I'm not sure if you're familiar with Stuart Brown, but Stuart Brown was a psychological researcher as well.
00:11:49.400And he was looking specifically at spree killers, people who go out and kill a lot of people in one go.
00:11:54.680And he was looking for any kind of common trait in their development that would explain this pattern.
00:12:02.180And what he found was actually inhibition of play.
00:12:07.000That if you look at spree killers, they almost always were prevented by their parents from playing.
00:12:11.900Their parents treated play as unnecessary and as something that had to be restricted.
00:12:16.760And that this, he believed, was the center of that.
00:12:19.080And then through Stuart Brown, I became aware of Yak Panksepp's work.
00:12:21.880So later when I came into your work and started listening to you talk about Yak Panksepp and the rats, I was like, oh yeah, this is it.
00:12:29.960And then obviously you've written that paper on rough and tumble play and the regulation of aggression.
00:12:34.320And that paper was just like, yes, absolutely.
00:12:37.780For me, because I, you know, I was put in detention when I was in second grade.
00:12:42.520Because I actually bounced a kid's head off the concrete and like bust his nose open.
00:12:49.160And 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.
00:13:05.500That's what I think is so incredible about, you know, what you've talked about.
00:13:09.220And what I've seen is that we think that it's like just mocking out combat and building the skills of combat.
00:13:15.180But 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.
00:13:25.600And then that's that kind of really building ground for empathy.
00:13:41.920People can go to my Psychology 230 website on my, on my home website under courses.
00:13:48.120And the gentleman who wrote that paper, who's a real genius, basically put a physiological scaffold underneath Jean Piaget's ideas about the expansion of reflex.
00:14:01.620And so, you know, we think of empathy as something like theory of mind.
00:14:40.180And I realized even at that age, it was because he didn't, he didn't know how to play.
00:14:44.020And that dance that you describe of, that's part and parcel of extended rough and tumble play.
00:14:51.940The 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.
00:15:02.600You 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.
00:15:11.980And you want to actually play right up to that limit, which is the exciting limit.
00:15:16.320And then you learn that that's true of you and another person.
00:15:20.700But you learn it, you know, right to the edge of your fingertips.
00:15:36.800And so in that rough and tumble play, you're, you're laying a level of deeply embodied knowledge on top of emergent reflexes for motor control.
00:15:48.460And then you're learning to integrate them into an interpersonal dance.
00:15:52.860Because Panksep showed, this is research you made reference to, that if you deprive 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.
00:16:08.780Like frenetically, desperately, and, you know, which sort of reminds me of what you were saying about your expression of aggression.
00:16:16.820And their prefrontal cortexes don't mature.
00:16:19.420And you can suppress their excess play behavior with amphetamines, which is Ritalin, for example.
00:16:26.440And 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.
00:16:37.340So very exploratory boys, some of them more disagreeable, so that would make them also more, you know, less naturally empathic, who are absolutely deprived of play.
00:16:49.300And 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.
00:16:59.740And, you know, then the medication, the amphetamines, suppress the play instinct, and this is really not a good solution.
00:17:12.040I wrote an essay on this for the Good Men Project back in, I think, 2016.
00:17:17.500It was just literally titled, Rough Housing, Not Ritalin.
00:17:20.140And that was exactly the thesis, what you just said, is that we need to provide cultural spaces for this rough-and-tumble play to play out for young children.
00:17:31.880I have, I told you before we started recording that I have a five-year-old daughter.
00:17:36.160I also have an eight-year-old boy and a ten-year-old daughter.
00:17:38.420And so I've been doing this rough-and-tumble play with them since they were little, and they've started training martial arts when they were little, four years old.
00:17:44.600And so they have friends over, and the friends realize that they're in affordance to wrestle, which they don't necessarily have anywhere else.
00:17:52.540And 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?
00:18:17.400So, you know, like, one thing I have to work on with my kids is because they've learned jujitsu since they were little, like, they're used to doing chokes.
00:18:25.900And I have to, like, make sure they remember because, like, if you put a choke hold on a kid who's never been roughhoused with, they will, that will just destroy their emotional regulation completely.
00:18:35.540And so my kids, they don't under, you know, for them all this stuff is very natural.
00:18:57.560And he's just kind of old enough to be a third grader.
00:18:59.940So he's on the bottom end of that class.
00:19:01.640So kids will kind of push on him because he seems like he's small, right?
00:19:07.860And it's amazing to watch him just not have an emotional reaction and be physically strong enough and balanced enough that when a kid tries to punch him, you know, he moves out of the way.
00:19:17.040And he grabs them and holds them with his hand and just stops them completely.
00:19:21.640So it's really an extraordinary power.
00:19:23.520Yeah, 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.
00:19:33.100Because you need to be able to regulate your emotional response.
00:19:37.040And, of course, the most direct provocation is going to be the provocation that you experience when you're directly physically challenged.
00:19:43.620And 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.
00:19:54.960You know, a lot of people, when they're married, they can't really have a serious conversation.
00:20:00.020They 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.
00:20:26.640And 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.
00:20:39.820Plus, 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.
00:20:49.320And you give it a space to make itself manifest.
00:20:52.880But the rule is, when you're done, you're done.
00:20:55.760And then you just return to normal life.
00:20:57.440And, you know, the other thing that people don't have often is they don't know how to bring a fight to an end.
00:21:03.100And so they won't start a fight because they're afraid that it'll never end.
00:21:06.960And then they can't talk about anything important.
00:21:09.100Like, it's, yeah, it's amazing how much of a catastrophe this really is.
00:21:13.080So, okay, so we got to the point in your life where you were about 13 and starting to be hired out as a child whisperer in some sense, right?
00:21:21.680To, yeah, so that, well, you see that also, that's a good analogy because you also see that with dogs.
00:21:27.740If you're training a dog, a lot of what you do with a dog is physical play.
00:21:31.820And if the dog starts to misbehave, the easiest thing to do with it is just flip it on its back and hold it down.
00:21:37.240It's like, no, when I say no, I mean stop doing that.
00:21:41.400And, you know, you don't have to do that with a dog very often before the dog clues in.
00:21:46.160Yeah, there's the parallels between, like, why play is so important in humans and dogs are the same.
00:21:53.400Like, one of the things that I found early on in my research into what became Evolve Move Play was actually I was training a dog.
00:22:00.580And I read a book called The Serious Puppy Training Book or something like that.
00:22:06.400And they talked about bite inhibition in dogs.
00:22:08.860And I said that, you know, puppies have to bite because that's how they manipulate the world, right?
00:22:15.440Like puppies, like dogs, their hands are their jaws.
00:22:20.320And they want to use them and explore what they're capable of.
00:22:23.700So a puppy is going to want to jaw spar with you.
00:22:26.260It's going to want to put its teeth on you.
00:22:27.860It's going to want to put its mouth on you.
00:22:29.220And 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.
00:22:39.380So what he advised is that what you need to do is you let the puppy start biting at your hand.
00:22:44.520And every time that the force is too hard, you pull away and you deny the puppy what it's looking for, which is play, right?
00:22:52.020And so now it's regulating its aggression to, okay, I need to only bite hard enough that this human being can tolerate it.
00:23:01.760And over time, then the dog develops bite inhibition.
00:23:04.940So 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.
00:23:25.560Yeah, well, it's quite miraculous, you know, with dogs, given that they're essentially wolves.
00:23:30.200You know, 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.
00:23:38.320And a well-trained dog is unbelievably judicious with its bite force.
00:23:43.160And 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.
00:23:50.960But that also assumes that, you know, you've batted the dog around and wrestled with it and harassed it and, you know, and pushed it so that it's not easy to provoke.
00:24:00.200And that's also why, you know, people wonder why people tease.
00:24:05.040And teasing is a form of more abstracted rough and tumble play.
00:24:11.680It'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.
00:24:23.040It's part of the way that people assess each other profoundly.
00:24:27.980Like, I told this story in my book about this guy, Lunchbucket, that came to work on the rail crew with us when I was working on the rail crew in Saskatchewan.
00:24:37.280And he, no one had ever played with Lunchbucket, that's for sure.
00:24:40.980And it was pretty obvious to everybody that he was still under the unfortunate dominion of his mother because she had packed him his Lunchbucket when the appropriate thing to do socially was bring a brown paper bag that wasn't, you know, too special.
00:24:54.520Which was also interestingly true of our high school, you know.
00:24:58.300And Lunchbucket didn't take kindly to being teased about his Lunchbucket.
00:25:03.180And the level of provocation that the other guys aimed at him just increased.
00:25:08.540And it got to the point where people were throwing rocks at him when he was on the crew.
00:25:11.820But the reason for that was because he couldn't be trusted, eh?
00:25:17.500If you provoked him, he would respond with too much aggression.
00:25:21.220And 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.
00:25:32.800And the other thing, too, I think that teasing, it's also an attempt to initiate play.
00:25:37.920You 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.
00:25:45.520You know, they sort of start out assuming the other kid is, like, younger and less developmentally able.
00:25:51.800But they ratchet that up quickly to see if they're at a peer-to-peer level.
00:25:55.280And then they play on the edge, and that'll make kids friends.
00:25:59.780If kids can play as peers on the edge, then they become friends.
00:26:03.560And 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 the capacity for creative interaction.
00:26:14.760Yeah, if we go back to that rough and tumble theme, like, I made a lot of my closest friends after fistfights when I was in school.
00:26:21.360It 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 wasn't so similar to where you grew up.
00:26:32.780I wanted to go back to something you said earlier because I wanted to reflect a couple of things that I learned from your work, specifically in this idea of how the rough and tumble play is this game that scales up.
00:26:44.180What 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?
00:27:00.020What we perceive is actually dependent on how we can act.
00:27:03.440And so when we engage with something like rough and tumble, we're actually mapping in the different potential meanings of touch.
00:27:11.160And 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.
00:27:21.080And the other analogy of yours that I really love is the analogy of resolution.
00:27:25.820So how many pixels are in the picture that you have of physical touch?
00:27:31.460And 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.
00:27:48.840And 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 a refined map.
00:28:02.240Yeah, no, that's an extremely useful analogy.
00:28:05.620And like everybody's map is complete of everything, but maps differ very much in resolution.
00:28:11.160And that, you know, the biblical term for sexual congress is knowledge.
00:28:31.240And that's part of that detailed exploration of the physical landscape and the increase of the resolution of the map.
00:28:38.620And that's definitely all part and parcel of exploratory rough and tumble play.
00:28:45.840I 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.
00:29:03.400And 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.
00:29:15.840They can't distinguish that from an aggressive onslaught.
00:29:19.200This is why you see in schools this idiot insistence that, you know, there should be no competitive play 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.
00:29:42.700And then they think all aggression should be suppressed.
00:29:45.080And it's, yeah, it's absolutely, it'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 and, yeah.
00:30:06.400Yeah, I think, to quote Jordan Peterson, it's a complete bloody disaster.
00:30:14.500When I first started Evolve Move Play, Mercer Island, which is one of the school districts that was near us, had banned tag, like completely, no touch-based games.
00:30:25.080And they had shortened recesses to seven minutes, and their justification for this was because children couldn't play for longer than seven minutes without experiencing conflict.
00:30:54.080You know, when you talked about this experience you had with your friends, that often you had to fight with one or more of them.
00:31:01.240And, you know, 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.
00:31:11.320And that generally does exactly what you said, if two boys face off each other and are willing to fight, generally they won't pick fights with each other anymore.
00:31:25.200And it's not that rare for that to turn into a friendship, which is also a very interesting and strange thing.
00:31:34.160Yeah, it is a strange thing looking back on it, but it was definitely a feature of my childhood.
00:31:38.600And I wanted to go back briefly to what you're talking about with sexuality, because—and I wanted to touch on women in rough-and-tumble play.
00:31:48.080Because—so we teach rough-and-tumble play.
00:31:51.260We take the basic kind of architecture of contact improvisation dance and mixed martial arts, and we build scalable games that are very—from totally cooperative to hyper-competitive.
00:32:04.520And then we kind of—you can play a very competitive game that's very safe by scaling the way that the players can interact.
00:32:14.480And now, my general observation is, working with kids, the boys always want to rough-house more, right?
00:32:20.480My son roughhouses more than his sisters, for sure.
00:32:23.700But the girls love to rough-house with me and have always requested being rough-housed with, being wrestled with, being thrown around.
00:32:30.760What 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.
00:32:41.260And I think that what it is is that our culture, in general, is just suppressing rough-and-tumble play.
00:32:48.640But women are more likely to have accepted the culture's story of you can't engage in rough-and-tumble play.
00:32:55.860And there are fewer cultural spaces that really give them the opportunity to do that.
00:32:59.580So they don't necessarily play, like, football or get involved in a wrestling team.
00:33:03.800And so it's often women who come to us who will say, this was incredibly healing for me.
00:33:09.240And 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.
00:33:25.720And to then bridge to the sexual aspect of it, obviously, men and women have to figure that out.
00:33:32.460But 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.
00:33:44.380Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, that's very interesting.
00:33:47.760Yeah, 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.
00:33:54.540This, I think, is part of the story as well.
00:33:56.800We're denying them the basic sort of sense of mapping and touch and connection that is fundamental to forming any sort of romantic relationship.
00:34:12.760You know, people are often extraordinarily concerned with the content that's being delivered to kids on the cell phones.
00:34:19.720And I think the content is relevant to some degree.
00:34:22.420I spend a lot of time, for example, analyzing literature on violent video games and aggression among boys.
00:34:29.920And the link between violent video games and aggression is pretty damn minimal.
00:34:36.920What appears to be the case is that more aggressive boys like more aggressive video games.
00:34:41.920And there's not much of a causal loop there.
00:34:45.760So, 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.
00:34:55.700That might even be true for pornography.
00:34:57.520What 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.
00:35:12.020You know, a lot of this identity confusion that I see among adolescents 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.
00:35:28.380You 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.
00:35:38.800And they used to dress him up like a princess or like with little fairy wings and, you know, just as a form of exploratory play.
00:35:46.080And 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.
00:35:59.580But 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?
00:36:15.840Anyways, it looks to me, the furry phenomena, all that looks to me like repressed pretend play.
00:36:21.900That might even be the case for late onset autogynephilia among the trans guys, you know.
00:36:27.460God 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.
00:36:43.820That seems to me to be highly probable.
00:36:46.140What the men are doing when they dress up in women's clothing is pretending, obviously.
00:36:52.160You know, now there's a sexual element to it, but that doesn't mean it isn't pretend play.
00:36:59.040Yeah, 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?
00:37:10.980And just how much of that is, 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 outcompete some of these other more traditional nourishments.
00:37:25.980This 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?
00:37:40.640So 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.
00:37:57.640And 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.
00:38:11.920Video games are thrill divorced from physicality.
00:38:16.280And 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 to, you know, the physical demands of actual rough and tumble play.
00:38:27.420They can practice shooting and running and jumping and all the things that, you know, I did as a kid actually physically.
00:38:34.880And that's probably not bad necessarily.
00:38:38.080It's not that bad necessarily on its own.
00:38:40.120The problem is that it's so easily outcompetes the actual thing that we need, which is the real physical play.
00:38:48.500Well, I saw that just recently this week.
00:38:50.740I was out with some young people, relatives of mine, and I hadn't met them for years.
00:38:56.760And we were in a social situation for about 45 minutes, sitting around a couch and some living room chairs around a fireplace after dinner.
00:39:06.820And one of them was 13 and the other was 21.
00:39:10.240And they were just on their cell phones the entire time.
00:39:14.200And I thought, well, I felt, I felt very bad for the kids because I thought, well.
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00:40:28.260First of all, I thought, it's like, what the hell are you doing?
00:40:33.060There's five of us around the fireplace, and you're on your phones, completely engrossed in them.
00:40:38.660And 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.
00:40:46.400And 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.
00:40:56.120They're in these virtual delusions, you know, because what you're describing is actually a kind of delusion, right?
00:41:01.300It's an artificial world that isn't properly mapped onto the real world.
00:41:05.060So delusional landscapes of entertainment, and that certainly is the case for pornography.
00:41:10.680Yeah, 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.
00:41:30.780We have to renew that relationship with the world.
00:41:34.480So we've been talking a lot about the rough and tumble play, and I think of that as one of like four fundamental, or so let's say five fundamental connections we have with the world.
00:41:45.240And those are kind of the internal connections within the self, the body to itself, the body, mind, spirit, emotional aspects.
00:41:53.680So I think of it as like the somatic and structural layer.
00:41:56.040And then there's the body to the environment, how we move through the world, and that's parkour, or gymnastics, or track and field.
00:42:05.200But parkour, I think, is the most kind of profound expression of it.
00:42:08.240It's the closest to the sort of exploratory locomotor play that you find in every culture, and really in all other animals, almost.
00:42:19.080And then you have the object manipulation.
00:42:22.000Human beings, of course, are tool-using animals.
00:42:23.740So 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.
00:42:31.100And then there's other people, which is the rough and tumble aspect that we've talked about.
00:42:35.240And then the last is I think all of those things put us in relationship to something transcendent.
00:42:38.860When we go out and we do parkour in nature and we work with people, there's an emergent spirit that you can experience.
00:42:45.720There's a sense of the broader things that you're embedded within.
00:42:48.560And 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 Berbeke would say that those lower three Ps of knowing, the participatory, perspectival, and procedural, those have to be played out through embodied practices.
00:43:09.020And so that's, you know, 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.
00:43:30.560And to recover the wisdom, I think we have to go back to those body practices.
00:43:36.080So let me ask you some practical questions because a lot of people who are listening, they might not even know how to initiate play.
00:43:44.680You know, like people have asked me to write a book on parenting, you know.
00:43:48.800One of the problems I have with that is, well, I don't have little kids anymore.
00:43:52.120And so I kind of forget what I know, you know.
00:54:35.460But we're starting to learn how to interpret somebody entering our space,
00:54:39.940somebody, you know, that gap closing, the sense of rhythm, the sense of timing that somebody has.
00:54:44.460And all that's going to donate to these games as we move down the kind of the progression.
00:54:49.500And then we think about the progression as working towards the highly competitive, highly free, unconstrained games like mixed martial arts,
00:54:56.420but also moving towards the highly attuned acrobatic games like dance.
00:55:00.960Because we want people to be able to have that sense.
00:55:05.780Your next book, I believe, is called We Who Wrestle With God.
00:55:38.580Yeah, 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, right?
00:56:04.580So in the way that we educate people physically, we want to be exploring these two parameters of how we can go deeper and deeper into attunement
00:56:13.140and the affordances that come with attunement, and how can we compete and press each other right to our edge as much as possible.
00:56:20.320Well, it's interesting that you've got two poles there, eh?
00:56:22.880There's sophisticated dance as an extension of embodied play, and then there's sophisticated combat as an extension of play.
00:56:32.660And I wonder if—do you suppose the dance element obviously maps more self-evidently onto male-female relationships and sex?
00:57:15.780This reminds me of something of another way that I've kind of, like, taken some ideas that I got from you and extended them in my work.
00:57:21.720But you've talked about the idea that, you know, dominance hierarchies are older than trees, right?
00:57:26.860You can look across the animal kingdom and find that there's forms of non-lethal agonistic combat by which we determine the dominance hierarchy.
00:57:48.020So rats, when they wrestle, they pin each other on their shoulders.
00:57:52.860This 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.
00:58:00.800And we see this across the animal kingdom.
00:58:02.840If guanas, right, like big lizards 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.
00:58:13.880Even venomous snakes will wrap each other around the head and try to press the other one's head to the ground.
00:58:19.160So I think that this—that there's this central problem that animals had, which was there are better places to be and worse places to be.
00:58:30.080And we want to determine who gets to be in the better places and who has to be in the worse places.
00:58:34.460And we want to do that in a way that's going to be minimally damaging to everybody.
01:09:27.020I 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,
01:09:43.920are 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.
01:09:58.960And that's a very strange thing to learn, but it's, you know, and it's not a game without high stakes.
01:10:04.280But, 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.
01:10:16.280There's something deep about that, you know, that you may know this, you probably do, that we calibrate a lot of fine actions with opponent processing.
01:10:25.360And almost all of our fine actions are the consequence of two systems in opposition modulating each other.
01:10:32.920So if you want to move your hand really smoothly, you can do it like this.
01:10:36.100But it's still kind of jerky if you analyze it at the micro level.
01:10:39.320But if you do this, you can move your hand with incredible precision.
01:10:59.860It seems to be a universal principle, the principle of properly balanced opponent processing.
01:11:04.640And you could think about that at the highest level is the most fundamental obstacle might be the adversary that affords the most serious play.
01:11:14.260And that's a, well, that's a revolutionary way to conceptualize the world.
01:11:21.480I want the most challenging adversary that you can handle that affords you the capacity to play.
01:11:29.200That, I think, is really at the center of what provides that, you know, I love the term allostasis, right?
01:11:35.380So we think that we're in homeostasis, but we're actually in a continual process of development.
01:11:40.460And that continual process of development is always between these paired reciprocal opponent processing systems, right?
01:11:48.820So the parasympathetic nervous and the sympathetic nervous system.
01:11:51.920So as I was preparing for this discussion, I was listening to your last discussion with John Brevakey and talking to him a little bit.
01:11:58.980And 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?
01:12:10.640It has to integrate the self with the physical world better.
01:12:13.220It has to integrate the self with the things we can manipulate better and with other social beings better.
01:12:19.920And then with this concept of the transcendent, all of those are also opponent processing.
01:12:25.900Okay, so why are they all opponent processing?
01:12:29.320Because you can split the self, right?
01:12:33.880You're a unity, but you're also a multiplicity.
01:12:36.660And 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.
01:12:42.160You have to create two different dialogues in your head.
01:12:44.920So there's this fundamentally dialogical process.
01:12:47.700And you can embody that by just creating tension in your body between different systems and feeling how, you know, these two things.
01:12:56.400Now I'm playing that and how I can grow with it.
01:13:00.260And then you can think about, can my mind control my body better?
01:13:04.080Or can my body support my mind better, right?
01:13:07.200And all those things can be in dynamic opposition.
01:13:09.920And obviously, once we get to parkour, right, that body environment practice, the environment is the opponent, right?
01:13:17.860And I'm learning to have greater and greater mastery, greater and greater affordances available to me through that relationship.
01:13:24.780And then the same thing when I learn to throw and catch and swing objects.
01:13:29.060And then obviously do fine crafting things, which are kind of the developmental derivative of those basic play instincts to play with objects.
01:13:37.640And then obviously, when I'm engaged in rough and tumble play, it's opponent processing.
01:13:43.120And 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 metamyth that you described in Maps of Meaning.
01:14:29.760So, but how do you, because I haven't done anything like parkour, you know, so I'm kind of wondering, how would you introduce someone or how would someone introduce themselves to that realm?
01:14:40.260Yeah, well, if you think about it as exploratory locomotor play, everyone's done parkour, right?
01:14:45.540You've gone to an environment and been like, how do I get from here to there?
01:14:48.720That's the fundamental thing, right, is just go out and do it.
01:14:52.280So 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?
01:15:02.060And 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.
01:15:08.960And then they could lay down on their stomach and spin around to the other side.
01:15:12.720Maybe they feel comfortable spinning to the right and less comfortable spinning to the left, and then they can just get competent at both, right?
01:15:18.720Just getting up and down off of a chair, you could have thousands of variations that you can explore.
01:15:23.780Getting up and down off of the ground, all of those things, we can expand our affordances, and children will inherently do this.
01:15:32.120I saw a documentary with Jack White when he was traveling through Canada, and Jack, he sets up his stage in a very interesting way.
01:15:40.640So first of all, he plays this really old, beat-up guitar.
01:15:48.840So while he's playing on stage, he has to tune his guitar nonstop.
01:15:52.780And then he plays a bunch of different instruments, you know, laid out on the stage.
01:15:56.800But 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.
01:16:03.480And, you know, partly what he's doing in his live performance is he's, what would you call it, modeling that ability to stay on the playful edge.
01:16:13.560And 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.
01:16:22.120And so that's really, well, he's very wise.
01:16:25.680And 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.
01:16:33.940But Jack is an extremely, his lyrics are extremely optimistic and positive, and he's extremely playful.
01:16:39.880And so he's a master of that transformation of the obstacle into the affordance.
01:16:48.580He'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.
01:16:58.680So 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?
01:17:26.800There's so many little fine-tuned variations that we can find once we take on this exploratory ethic in relationship to our movement.
01:17:33.980And as we do that, we're going to be refining and making more sophisticated the body.
01:17:39.100And I believe when we put that in dynamic relationship to these other sets of practices, we get to extract those insights out and create a more coherent, complete approach to character development.
01:18:07.300And so you're expanding your map of the possibility of the world in your relationship to it.
01:18:12.980And so that is an expansion of the meanings of the world.
01:18:15.520But 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?
01:18:29.300So I'm going to start building new motor maps, and that'll be a form of neural growth and neural regeneration.
01:18:34.900I'm going to redress the imbalance between the two sides of my body.
01:18:39.300But it's also the case that, you know, those physiological transformations cascade all the way down to the cellular level.
01:18:46.760And if you put new stresses on yourself, especially voluntarily, you turn new genes on to code for new proteins.
01:18:54.340And 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, you know, your internal physiological organization, and release new elements of your character.
01:19:12.480So it's partly an expansion of the map, but it's also an expansion of psychophysiological capability all the way down to the cell.
01:19:21.340Absolutely. 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.
01:19:31.820But 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.
01:19:39.560But, right, the self is that highest potential, that second self that's laid out over time.
01:19:45.960And 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.
01:19:58.460Yeah, you bet. Well, you can think about, you imagine that coded into the DNA, the DNA is a repository of potential.
01:20:35.460And so it's a potential that could expand itself out into space in a variety of different ways, but there are many potential trees inside a particular acorn.
01:20:49.160The oak is going to develop differently depending on the soil that it's placed in.
01:20:53.040But that's the case for all of us at any moment, is there are still many potential selves that are locked into the potential of the DNA coding, and that can be enticed outward with the appropriate voluntary stress.
01:21:07.820The other thing that's interesting about that, too, is 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.
01:21:25.380And the spirit would be that of voluntary challenge, right?
01:21:29.920So all the practices you're described of, you're describing, are undertaken in the spirit of voluntary challenge.
01:21:47.900And there's no reason to assume that that isn't encoded in genetic potential as well.
01:21:53.640And 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, if that expands out to something like,
01:22:05.080well, well, it expands out in the Jewish writings into apprehension of God himself, it's the realization of that implicit potential.
01:22:16.640It's the practice of the realization of that implicit potential that actually constitutes the union with that spirit.
01:22:24.800I was literally just reading, I read through all the beginnings of the chapters of Maps of Meaning yesterday.
01:22:32.320And the chapter on the hostile brothers, right?
01:22:37.560In 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.
01:22:45.780There'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.
01:22:55.640And then there's the spirit that sees the insufficiency of the world and falls in love with its own rationality and that that gives rise to a kind of tyranny.
01:23:04.300And I was thinking about, you know, I feel like the digital worldview that we're, the mechanistic digital Cartesian worldview that is sort of predominant right now, it is much more that second spirit.
01:23:23.620And that in order to step outside of it, in order to reground ourselves, we actually have to physically embody what that is.
01:23:31.900And that's exactly what these practices do.
01:23:34.160They take you into acting out that heroic archetype, that exploratory heroic archetype.
01:23:38.820And 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.
01:23:45.780Because it's only one way in which we relate to the fundamental aspects of reality.
01:23:50.820But when we put it in dialogue with these other aspects of practice, all of a sudden that transformational capacity is increased.
01:23:58.460So why, why does it, why does it fail and why is it so necessary to put it in context with the other practices?
01:24:11.060When I started parkour, I felt like it had dramatically transformed me.
01:24:16.300And everyone around me who's starting parkour at the same time, we all had this, you know, messianic.
01:24:20.980I mean, part of this is just developmental, right?
01:24:22.560We're all late adolescents in some sense, early 20s, and there's, you know, you're going to be messianic about whatever collective identity that you take on.
01:24:30.460But nonetheless, we did have this feeling.
01:24:32.640And then over time, what I noticed was that people would talk about the changes, but I wouldn't necessarily see the change.
01:24:38.980Or then other people came into discipline who were hobbyists, and they didn't really see the transformative power.
01:24:42.780So I started asking, how do we get that transformative power?
01:24:45.060And, like, the big one that I see all the time is, like, parkour is predominantly a young male sport.
01:25:32.620So 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,
01:25:44.660which is that general adaptation to the metagame.
01:25:47.960So if we take on parkour as a practice and we think about it as a practice that builds us towards the metagame,
01:25:55.360then that's automatically going to start, I think, potentiating the transfer.
01:25:59.820But then we can ask, is there just a better way for me to cultivate courage right now?
01:27:00.600So the five that I've been using are the relationships internal to the self, right?
01:27:07.520And those are structural and psychological.
01:27:11.140The relationship between the self and the physical environment as a set of obstacles and affordances we move through.
01:27:17.100And 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?
01:27:24.440And you see this in play research as well.
01:27:27.780Play research talks about exploratory locomotor play, object-oriented play, and rough-and-tumble play.
01:27:34.280So if we take those fundamentals, so you have first the intrinsic.
01:27:40.660And if you look at like a little baby, how do they start playing?
01:27:55.240And then they're able to pick things up and manipulate them.
01:27:57.560And that happens at the same time, but those are kind of two separate aspects of development.
01:28:01.280And then they're always interacting with their mother first and their father and their siblings and their rough-and-tumble play is scaling up.
01:28:08.140And 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 to ritual.
01:28:19.740So you can see that development there.
01:28:24.460And 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.
01:28:37.960And then there's obviously the romantic and sexual aspect of that, which obviously dance is an extraordinarily important aspect of that, as you've explored.
01:28:47.120Does that all make sense the way I've laid that out?
01:28:50.980Yeah, well, 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.
01:29:02.260And it's also useful to point out that you don't want to allow the practice to become an end in itself.
01:29:10.440I mean, the purpose of becoming great at basketball isn't to become great at basketball.
01:29:14.620It's to become great at being a human being.
01:29:16.480And 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, you know, maybe attention to the structure of the sport itself, all of that.
01:29:58.660But 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 it out everywhere else in your life.
01:30:07.260It's like, no, I'm too afraid to talk to my parents.
01:30:08.920Well, that's a video game problem, too.
01:30:32.120So, but if you take parkour and you take a focus practice, the focus practice helps you actually attune to and get into flow state within the parkour.
01:30:41.780And the parkour actually creates an arena in which you can test whether your meditative practice is actually having the effect that you're looking for.
01:30:50.140So, 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.
01:31:37.600So, if people see this and want to join us, they probably want to get on that first.
01:31:41.620In the retreats, that's where we're able to go deepest into this full experience.
01:31:47.640Because we talk about those five fundamental practices that I mentioned.
01:31:52.540It's four fundamental practices that afford five connections.
01:31:55.480But then we also go into the mindfulness practices, which are kind of a derivative of the somatic and structural layer.
01:32:03.100And 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.
01:32:12.420So, this is something that John Barbeke, 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.
01:32:32.280And then there's a ritual aspect to it as well.
01:32:43.120So, we have two five-day retreats and one eight-day retreat in the summer.
01:32:46.780And when you come, essentially, we'll pick everyone up.
01:32:50.260And then as they arrive, we will take them through a set of practices that involve both physical aspects, 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.
01:33:04.360Then we'll have dinner, and we, you know, kind of make as much, you know, local, fresh food as we can to support people because the food element is a huge part, actually, of how people bond as well.
01:33:15.340And doing that right is really important.
01:33:17.920And 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.
01:33:30.500So, actually, like, use a piece of this.
01:33:32.760So, 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.
01:33:44.120And so, I was like, I need to let go of all of that so that I can show up best for this conversation with Jordan.
01:33:49.600And so, I went down to the—there's a cliff with a beautiful pool of water underneath it that's about 15 minutes from my housewalk.
01:34:00.460So, I walked down there, and I did a little mantra saying, I'm going to let all that go.
01:34:03.900When I 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.
01:34:08.660And so, I did a mantra for, like, five minutes, and I did some, like, Qigong practice standing on the top of this cliff, and then I jumped into the water, and I came out.
01:34:16.700And sure enough, like, I was so much more ready to be focused once I exited the water.
01:34:21.420So, we'll do a similar type of process with someone when they arrive for this retreat.
01:34:25.420And then, over the course of the retreat, we'll take them to a bunch of beautiful spaces.
01:34:29.700So, there are spaces where we, as I mentioned, jump into water from cliffs.
01:34:34.620There's actually a tunnel through a waterfall that we have access to and can take people through, and that's a really intense rebirth experience.
01:34:42.500To actually climb up through this tunnel where water is pouring down on your head is extraordinary.
01:34:48.540And then, there's, like, driftwood on the beach that we teach parkour in, and there's sandy beach that we wrestle and do all the roughhousing practices.
01:34:56.300And we even play some, like, team sport-type games going up this hill of sand, and it's very nice because it's safe because of the sand.
01:35:03.660And then, we have these beautiful trees that we move through, you know.
01:35:06.960Human beings are descendants of 60 million years of arboreal evolution, so we take people back into moving in the trees.
01:35:17.240And we take people up to alpine lakes and swim in the alpine lakes.
01:35:20.160We take people to natural water slides.
01:35:22.000And 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 effectively with other people, and with playing games with balls and sticks and ropes.
01:35:35.920And 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.
01:36:45.880So, if I can remember correctly, John and I had a whole conversation about this on his channel.
01:36:50.460But it was the sense of taking on those intense physical practices and feeling like he was kept right at the appropriate edge for him for 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.
01:37:13.140And 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.
01:37:25.840Yeah, well, and I mean, John, like me, we operate a fair bit in the abstract realm.
01:37:30.380And so, doing something that's more physical, more embodied, but also aiming at something profound, you can imagine that that would be a different kind of qualitatively deep experience.
01:38:21.760And she's like, he closes the door every time he leaves a room.
01:38:26.780And I was like, and it's been clear since he was little that he didn't have the same attentional problems that I did.
01:38:32.880So, I, but he's, he resembles me in certain ways because he loves all the kind of athletic stuff.
01:38:37.740He's very good at parkour, very good at rough, you know, the wrestling and loves sport.
01:38:42.760And so, I was asking my older brother, you know, does Keir remind you of me at the same age?
01:38:50.340And he said, personality-wise, no, right?
01:38:53.120When you were a kid, your mom would take you to the bank and you'd lay on the ground and just wiggle in the middle of the line with everyone around you.
01:41:52.880And so, if you're an active kid, you're going to be extroverted.
01:41:58.000And if you're open, then you're interested in all sorts of ideas and possibilities.
01:42:01.640And the addition of those two makes you hyper-exploratory.
01:42:04.720And then if you're lower in agreeableness and lower in conscientiousness, then there's less constraint on that.
01:42:11.240And my suspicion is very strong that most of what we diagnose as ADHD is just temperamental variation.
01:42:17.940And that boys, in particular, who tend to be more active, more assertive also, because you see that in adult males in relationship to extroversion,
01:42:27.380they're not going to be happy, especially if they're also disagreeable with sitting down and being constrained in classrooms.
01:42:34.680We 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.
01:42:43.880And that's really relevant for disagreeable boys because it puts a lot of them on the cusp of failure.
01:42:49.380So imagine that you're kind of borderline academically, but you're disagreeable, so you're not very obedient.
01:42:54.760Then you're a problem kid, you're much more likely to be failed as a consequence of that.
01:42:59.720Whereas 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,
01:43:07.860you're not ever going to cause any trouble in class.
01:43:09.820You're going to get the benefit of the doubt when the class is oriented to having everyone shut up, sit down, remain silent for a long period of time.
01:43:19.440Lots of boys, in particular, they don't thrive in that environment.
01:43:22.560We 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?
01:43:34.360And so I write 99th percentile for openness to experience, 99th percentile for assertiveness, third percentile for agreeability, 10th percentile for conscientiousness.
01:43:50.880But I think there is something interesting about ADHD symptoms, the inattentiveness as being, and hyperactivity as being related to like a late maturing of the, or a difficulty maturing of the frontal cortex.
01:44:09.180Because 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?
01:44:18.920Like some of the social graces didn't come to me really until I was close to 30 or even after 30.
01:44:24.220And I had this dramatic experience of taking on parkour and finding that my inattentiveness problems were massively reduced.
01:44:35.640And 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.
01:44:43.780And then you can inhibit their behavior.
01:45:37.340So not only do you see that, so the youngest kids are much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, for example,
01:45:43.380but also the youngest kids are also much less likely to be athletically successful.
01:45:49.260So, for example, if you look at NHL athletes, National Hockey League athletes, they're disproportionately older kids in their grade school class.
01:45:59.280And because a year, like when you're eight, the difference between a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old can be quite great.
01:46:08.160And so, you know, if you're a kid who is a little immature in terms of neurological development,
01:46:14.880and then you're also temperamentally inclined to be exploratory and unconstrained,
01:46:21.280well, then you've got a perfect storm there for hypothetically an ADHD diagnosis.
01:46:25.900But one of the things people should know, too, this is very, very important.
01:46:30.180So originally, the marker for the neurological element of ADHD was that kids who are hyperactive had a paradoxical reaction to amphetamines.
01:46:42.600So for most people, amphetamines hypothetically were stimulating, but for ADHD kids, it was paradoxical because it calmed them down.
01:47:18.600Because it does, like, that increase in dopaminergic activity increases the inhibitory capacity of focal attention.
01:47:27.220But that doesn't mean that it's diagnostic of some underlying disorder.
01:47:30.700I 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.
01:48:00.940EDAR is the gene that codes for lots of Asian traits.
01:48:04.280But DRD4, my understanding is that DRD4 actually appears to be under positive selection in hunter-forager cultures and pastoral cultures.
01:48:11.760So there's something about the ability.
01:48:13.400Or if 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 a competing need to externalize the focus.
01:48:23.660So the capacity to actually attune to lots of things outside of what the focal thing is could actually be very adaptive in certain situations.
01:48:33.420When I was a kid, my mom called me the boy with big ears because you couldn't say anything anywhere in the house without me picking up what you were saying potentially.
01:48:41.440And 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.
01:48:51.940Because I would, I couldn't, I couldn't make the rest of the conversations irrelevant.
01:48:56.600My brain would always be picking up pieces of conversations.
01:48:59.620And so I, I was constantly sort of getting things that were inappropriate for a kid in some sense from adult conversations because, because they would think that they were safe from my attention in some sense.
01:49:12.100But my attention was always defraying everywhere and it would pick up stuff.
01:49:16.000But if you think about a hunter-forager situation, that is potentially really useful in picking up where an animal is in the environment.
01:49:22.480So even dyslexia seems to also be related to the ability to pick up certain types of patterns in the environment more effectively.
01:49:31.440So you struggle with the patterns of, of, of things on, on paper, but something like mushrooms, you know, on a forest floor may pop out more clearly to you.
01:49:42.160Yeah, well, the dyslexia, I mean, most kids show signs of dyslexia when they first start to recognize letters.
01:49:49.100Because the most common confusion in perception is P's, Q's, B's, and D's.
01:49:55.600And all the, they only differ by orientation.
01:49:58.720And what happens is that you need massed practice to build the neurological circuitry that allows for the discrimination.
01:50:07.780And my guess is that some people need a lot more massed practice than others.
01:50:11.740Like 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.
01:50:57.520My 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 coming, sunrise coming up over the hill.
01:51:44.860So he did that kind of stuff with us all the time when I was little.
01:51:50.900And, 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.
01:52:00.000So I was going to formal classes and I was really struggling in the formal classes.
01:52:03.520And so my dad actually took me to a pond and we watched the frogs swim.
01:52:07.020And he like took me into the water and I learned to breaststroke by watching frogs.
01:52:12.320And so I had to, you know, my dad's a very kind of, my dad's name for anyone who's interested is Sunray Kelly.
01:52:17.580And he's kind of a pretty well-known natural builder.
01:52:21.620His work's been featured in, you know, various TV shows and books.
01:52:24.720So he has a very magical, strange world that he lives within that's pretty great for a child in certain ways.
01:52:34.100But he had a really, really traumatic experience of school as well.
01:52:38.560And when I started school and he saw me doing that, I think it was very hard for him emotionally.
01:52:44.320And so I think he sort of pulled back from me at that stage.
01:53:04.740With that paternal relationship, very functional and intact.
01:53:07.860You know, one of the things we should point out here for any mothers who are listening,
01:53:11.820who are apprehensive about watching their spouses, their husbands play with their children.
01:53:18.240Well, 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.
01:53:27.960And so don't turn away and don't leave the room.
01:53:47.460As long as they're not crying, the frame is intact and you don't have to worry.
01:53:52.340And, you know, even if there are tears upon occasion, you know, as long as they're not screams of agony and outrage,
01:53:59.460a little bit of tears is also not indicative that something terrible has happened.
01:54:05.700Because when you're playing, there's going to be mishaps from time to time.
01:54:09.380And the kid has to learn to deal with the mishaps, too.
01:54:12.060You know, people are going to get hurt.
01:54:13.380They're going to get a thumb in the eye or whatever the hell it is or be pushed a little bit too far.
01:54:17.300Or to play properly with someone is going to mean that now and then you're pushed a little farther than you should be.
01:54:24.800It'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.
01:54:33.500Yeah, this is a big passion of mine, right?
01:54:35.920As someone who grew up with the experiences that I had and who is the type of person that I am.
01:54:40.640Like, I've played with my kids really intensely and my wife's very accepting of it.
01:54:43.860And 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.
01:54:52.640And the female role is to nurture the child more.
01:54:54.800And what's really interesting to me is how the kids self-select that, right?
01:54:58.340Like, if they are in a—when they need nurturance, they will come to me if their mother's unavailable.
01:55:03.820And I will nurture them and I will do what they need.
01:55:06.580But if she's available and they're hurt and they're crying or whatever, they don't want me to do anything.
01:55:16.220It's like, my job is just to take them to mom if necessary, right?
01:55:20.020But on the flip side, when they're excited and they want to play, they want me, right?
01:55:24.860They want me to be that facilitator of this intense, encouraging play.
01:55:29.160And 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.
01:55:40.260And I see all the time this kind of dysfunctional hyperfeminization of the way that we treat children.
01:55:47.300When 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.
01:55:54.420So my daughter's there, my five-year-old, and there's this other five-year-old boy.
01:55:57.600And so she's showing him things that she can do on the monkey bars.
01:57:25.560The question is whether or not you can master it.
01:57:27.420And it is—it's a very sad thing to see that sense disappear.
01:57:32.040And also to be—to have it replaced by a kind of, you know, insistent moralizing, too.
01:57:37.420It'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.
01:57:45.760And we're almost at that point in our culture now.
01:57:48.300We'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.
01:57:53.780And it's like, that kid should be trying to do it.
01:57:56.200He should be helped to understand the appropriate level of challenge for them.
01:58:02.180Like, 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.
01:58:10.040What I try to say is, how can I help you do that?
01:58:32.200And then he was going to do it up onto a mat that was, like, eight inches high.
01:58:37.280And so I was thinking, like, getting all the way around and getting onto this mat, that's not going to work.
01:58:40.720So I was like, at least let me just put this block there for you so that it's level with the mat.
01:58:44.480And then he was perfectly safe, and I was confident.
01:58:46.820I walked away and let him have his process of doing it.
01:58:50.580And it's a challenge as a coach, right?
01:58:53.880I'm used to being in people's process.
01:58:56.080But I have to be very careful with my children because there's this separation of role between the coach and the father.
01:59:02.660It's very easy for the father to be overbearing.
01:59:04.280And so I have to really, like, separate myself sometimes and say, I'm giving you that.
01:59:10.120You 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.
01:59:19.500Well, 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.
01:59:32.980Like, everything is sacrificed to that, and that's really about a seven-month journey where everything is focused on the infant's needs, and the infant's distress is always 100% accurate.
01:59:46.000And then women have to pull themselves away from that, and that's not an easy thing to do.
01:59:50.960And so, and then women are also more sensitive to threat and emotional distress, and so that also makes their proclivity to intervene more paramount.
02:00:04.000That's a problem, too, if you have a wife who hasn't been exposed to rough-and-tumble play at all and who doesn't understand play.
02:00:13.220It's easy for her to confuse that with aggression and carelessness and to inhibit it then, and that's, you know, and that can elicit negative responses on the part of the husband that look like aggression.
02:00:26.580And so you get a terrible spiral developing there.
02:00:29.000And 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, you know, like, punishing people for their virtues is the worst thing you can do.
02:00:58.960Well, you also pointed out something very important.
02:01:01.260You know, you said that the children, if you watch your children, they'll calibrate their requirement.
02:01:08.240So one of the things parents should know, because you might ask, well, how much should you be around your children?
02:01:13.700And the answer is, well, it depends on the child.
02:01:15.560And so that's problematic, 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.
02:01:28.260And one of the things you want to be, do as a primary caregiver is to be available for that.
02:01:38.240And then the kid will go out and play.
02:01:39.620And 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.
02:01:45.880And then that'll sort of put them back together, reestablish that security, and then they can go out and play again.
02:01:51.300But 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.
02:02:00.560And 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.
02:02:10.460But it does tend to differentiate itself sexually.
02:02:13.560Yeah, I think it's really important for fathers to cultivate their capacity for nurturance and for mothers to cultivate their capacity for encouragement.
02:02:22.000We need to be available to hold that bandwidth for our children as needed.
02:02:26.920But we also have to recognize that we have unique strengths, right?
02:02:30.160It'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.
02:04:12.160I'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.
02:04:24.340And then I grew up and I was a bouncer for three years and been attacked on basketball courts and stuff like that.
02:04:30.860It's like being able to handle myself is great.
02:04:33.320It 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.
02:04:54.980Like if you, this is a big problem with the police right now.
02:04:59.800We don't have well-trained, physically adept police who actually have highly calibrated, high competency and lower force levels.
02:05:07.860So 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.
02:05:31.120I 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.
02:05:37.960But I would love to work with law enforcement and military.
02:05:40.600Yeah, man, that sounds like a really good idea.
02:05:42.380That sounds like a really good idea to bring that calibration in.
02:12:13.900And the really sad kids you'll see might take you 30 forays before you can entice them out of their shell.
02:12:23.100And you can tell that not only have they not been played with, but that their attempts to play have met with so much rejection that they're entirely demoralized.
02:12:34.860I, this is another, so we've taken away unstructured play from children, which is a disaster.
02:12:44.860We 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.
02:12:57.360So we are punishing out the play drive in every way that we can as a society.
02:13:05.960So when you go to school and, like, 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.
02:13:15.700But 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.
02:13:24.580Maybe he's one of the more talented kids and he has success.
02:13:30.360But then maybe you send him to select soccer.
02:13:32.240And now maybe he's at the bottom of the pool of select soccer.
02:13:39.640Now he's not getting that 30% success rate that creates that repeated bond.
02:13:44.740And now what's happening is you actually punished him every time that he's engaging in physicality.
02:13:51.460And we see this over and over again through the physical system.
02:13:54.540We'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.
02:14:03.520And we're sticking them in adult-imposed finite games that actually will inherently punish some percentage of them.
02:14:12.140Well, what percentage of elementary schools don't have recess now?
02:14:34.460So we should, let me let you wrap up because we're running out of time on the Daily Wire segment.
02:14:40.780Is there anything else we should talk about?
02:14:43.280Sorry, 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's behavior to make them more predictable.
02:14:57.360You know, the big thing I want to say is just it's been a huge pleasure.
02:15:01.540You know, your work's been such an influence in helping me think out these things that I was already experiencing, right?
02:15:07.080Like what I said to John was that there's this emergent thing that was happening within parkour.
02:15:13.100And then for me with parkour and nature and martial arts, when I, so I was teaching people.
02:15:22.100And 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 ear and went out the other.
02:15:32.040But if I told them a story about something that I experienced that was transformative, you'd see their eyes light up.
02:15:38.500So I started to recognize that narrative had power.
02:15:41.360And 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?
02:15:52.560So when I saw that first interview with you and Joe Rogan, when you got to the port where you're laying out your archetypal and narrative thoughts, it was this ignition moment for me.
02:16:02.680And I just, I absorbed everything you put out, right, between 2016, 2017.
02:16:08.740And 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.
02:16:15.340And as I was teaching, the stuff that I kind of had already brewed in my brain and the stuff that you were talking about, it was like, boom, they came together.
02:16:22.840And I saw that fundamentally we have to be nested in these narratives.
02:16:27.060And those narratives have to be acted out physically.
02:16:29.500And that's how we actually bring meaning into the world.
02:16:31.800And it just, it feels like the physical practice, and it's not me alone.
02:16:40.160There's other people who are evolving in very similar directions.
02:16:44.020The physical practices and how they can impact us at these higher dimensions of ourself, they're emerging.
02:16:52.420They're emerging in a way that is reflective of the body of theory that guys like yourself and John have offered.
02:16:59.380And to be able to bring that together and offer it to people is a really, just a huge pleasure.
02:17:05.540And to have this conversation with you.
02:17:16.840It's so cool to see these higher order abstract moral conceptions make themselves manifest at the, well, at the lowest physiological level upward.
02:17:50.020Especially if you're a young, 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.
02:17:58.740And maybe you can start thinking too about how you could integrate the spirit of play into your own life.
02:18:03.080Because, man, that's something you certainly want to do.