The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:57.420 Hello everybody. I'm speaking today on matters psychological and practical, I suppose, and hopefully also entertaining and fun, as well as appropriately serious.

00:01:20.560 I'm talking to Rafe Kelly today, who heads an organization called Evolve, Move, and Play.

00:01:28.620 And I'm very interested, have been very interested for a long time in the role of play in the integration and regulation,

00:01:37.020 well, not only of aggression, but also in the fostering of pro-social behavior at an embodied level.

00:01:43.200 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,

00:01:57.100 probably from six months up to, well, who knows, up to what level, till you're old.

00:02:09.260 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,

00:02:23.660 a manner also that simultaneously fosters development.

00:02:26.480 So we're going to talk about that today.

00:02:28.340 So, Rafe, why don't we start with a bit of your background?

00:02:31.420 Yeah.

00:02:31.880 Why don't you fill people in on, you know, your educational background, your interests, and all that,

00:02:36.840 and then we'll start talking about getting more to the nuts and bolts of play.

00:02:41.120 Yeah, I think given that you started with kind of rough-and-tumble play, it'd be good to start with my early childhood.

00:02:48.100 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.

00:02:55.260 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.

00:03:01.960 And my mom didn't, so there was a big conflict there.

00:03:04.320 And my dad kind of reacted to that by just sort of pulling away from me and sort of emotionally neglecting me.

00:03:08.640 So I was acting out in school and getting in lots of fistfights.

00:03:13.840 And I got introduced to the martial arts when I was six years old, and that started helping me learn to regulate my emotions.

00:03:22.240 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.

00:03:29.700 And he did a few things that were really helpful to me.

00:03:34.040 He, 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.

00:03:40.060 But he also did rough-and-tumble play with me extensively, pretty much every day.

00:03:44.800 And so we would wrestle all the time, and that became incredibly healing for me.

00:03:49.240 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.

00:03:59.420 How old were you when that started, that rough-and-tumble play?

00:04:03.120 Yeah, so my dad did a lot of rough-and-tumble play with me when I was little.

00:04:06.000 But then there was that period where I was more neglectful in our relationship.

00:04:09.260 Then the second mentor who came into my life came into my life when I was eight years old.

00:04:13.880 Eight, yeah.

00:04:14.600 Yeah, well, you pointed out something very interesting there with regard to your father.

00:04:19.160 I mean, I've actually seen that pattern in many families.

00:04:23.400 You know, and it seems so, for example, I've seen within my own extended family, thinking of one couple in particular,

00:04:30.560 where every time the father attempted to involve himself in the discipline, let's say,

00:04:36.660 which 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. 0.64

00:04:50.960 Treating her husband as if his interaction, his involvement was both inappropriate, ignorant and dangerous, something like that combination.

00:05:01.360 And my experience with that has been that what men usually do in that situation is pull away.

00:05:09.220 Yeah.

00:05:09.400 And that's really devastating for the kids.

00:05:12.900 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.

00:05:20.800 And the mothers tend to be more prone to provide security and comfort and fathers to provide encouragement and challenge.

00:05:32.300 And getting that exactly right really depends on the temperament of the parents and the temperament of the child.

00:05:37.840 And so there has to be some tension.

00:05:39.080 But it's unbelievably easy for women to be overprotective of their children enough to stop fathers from interacting. 1.00

00:05:46.940 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. 1.00

00:05:54.060 And often the answer to that, not always, but often is, well, you punished it out of existence.

00:05:59.660 Every time the father stepped forward to take an interest, you put up a barrier that was non-trivial, a moral barrier often.

00:06:07.520 And you do that a hundred times.

00:06:09.900 Yeah.

00:06:10.380 That's that.

00:06:11.400 Yeah.

00:06:11.700 So anyways, that's a common pattern.

00:06:14.660 And so, but you had a lot of interactions with your dad when you were young.

00:06:18.400 Very young.

00:06:18.720 Yeah.

00:06:18.960 I had a very good relationship with my dad.

00:06:20.440 My dad's a really interesting and creative person.

00:06:22.840 He's a famous natural builder.

00:06:26.000 And he was very playful with me when I was young.

00:06:28.100 He's a really, yeah, interesting person in that way.

00:06:30.740 But he, you know, he's a member of the counterculture.

00:06:32.800 He grew up, you know, my father was actually in jail during my mom's pregnancy for selling marijuana.

00:06:39.720 So there was real conflict.

00:06:41.260 My mom had reason to be protective in some sense. 0.98

00:06:44.980 And my dad was struggling with some of those things.

00:06:48.320 But he and I have a great relationship now.

00:06:50.280 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.

00:07:01.860 And so this guy that started to play with you when you were eight, how did that come about?

00:07:07.580 And why did your mother and father encourage that or even allow it?

00:07:12.580 Because that's also a place where, you know, people can be skeptical.

00:07:16.940 Yeah.

00:07:18.160 Yeah, there's a whole story there.

00:07:19.700 But basically, we rented land.

00:07:22.220 So my dad owned 12 acres.

00:07:24.980 There was a kind of a hippie commune.

00:07:26.940 And so we just rented a space to this couple.

00:07:29.700 It was two men who had moved in.

00:07:31.440 And my mom was desperate for babysitters. 1.00

00:07:34.940 And he offered himself as a babysitter.

00:07:36.420 And then over time, we just got closer and closer.

00:07:39.600 And so when my mom took me out of school, initially, she was going to do some of the homeschooling.

00:07:45.800 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.

00:07:54.780 And he was just there and, you know, was willing to do it.

00:07:58.440 And so that's kind of how that worked out.

00:08:00.460 So 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.

00:08:16.740 And there were a lot of other young kids there whose families were part of it.

00:08:21.360 They were two, three, four years old.

00:08:23.940 And so by the time I was 12, I started really being kind of just being asked to babysit these younger kids.

00:08:28.720 And I noticed that they all had this incredible hunger for a rough and tumble play.

00:08:33.100 It was like this deep, unmet need that I was seeing in children everywhere.

00:08:36.620 And so I started just being the guy who would roughhouse with kids at any social gathering.

00:08:42.800 And then people started asking me to come over.

00:08:44.900 When I was 13, one of my closest friends died.

00:08:48.760 Unfortunately, after a bike accident, he had his spleen taken out.

00:08:51.400 And he didn't get sewed up properly, so he hemorrhaged out.

00:08:53.620 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.

00:09:05.440 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.

00:09:12.460 And so I developed a really close relationship with him kind of through that same relationship.

00:09:17.460 So I got to kind of step into that role in facilitating rough and tumble play for younger children, starting as a young kid.

00:09:24.240 And then I went on to work as a mentor for kids in my teens.

00:09:27.700 And then I became a gymnastics coach.

00:09:30.820 So independently, I'd also developed just an interest in general athleticism.

00:09:34.100 And I started coaching gymnastics.

00:09:35.720 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.

00:09:44.800 And so I've kind of done that repeatedly, and I've really seen how much of an impact that can have.

00:09:54.400 And so when I...

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00:11:34.640 I first came across the play research through a man named Frank Francich in his book, The Exuberant Animal.

00:11:40.220 And I started digging into it behind that and then came into Stuart Brown's work.

00:11:43.640 And I'm not sure if you're familiar with Stuart Brown, but Stuart Brown was a psychological researcher as well.

00:11:49.400 And he was looking specifically at spree killers, people who go out and kill a lot of people in one go.

00:11:54.680 And he was looking for any kind of common trait in their development that would explain this pattern.

00:12:02.180 And what he found was actually inhibition of play.

00:12:07.000 That if you look at spree killers, they almost always were prevented by their parents from playing.

00:12:11.900 Their parents treated play as unnecessary and as something that had to be restricted.

00:12:16.760 And that this, he believed, was the center of that.

00:12:19.080 And then through Stuart Brown, I became aware of Yak Panksepp's work.

00:12:21.880 So 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. 0.80

00:12:29.960 And then obviously you've written that paper on rough and tumble play and the regulation of aggression.

00:12:34.320 And that paper was just like, yes, absolutely.

00:12:37.780 For me, because I, you know, I was put in detention when I was in second grade.

00:12:42.520 Because I actually bounced a kid's head off the concrete and like bust his nose open.

00:12:49.160 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.

00:13:03.160 And to develop empathy.

00:13:05.500 That's what I think is so incredible about, you know, what you've talked about.

00:13:09.220 And what I've seen is that we think that it's like just mocking out combat and building the skills of combat.

00:13:15.180 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.

00:13:25.600 And then that's that kind of really building ground for empathy.

00:13:28.320 Yeah, that mirroring.

00:13:29.200 Yeah, yeah.

00:13:29.840 Well, there's, I have a great paper on my personality course website by, on the hypothalamus.

00:13:36.700 The name escapes me at the moment of the author, but it'll come back.

00:13:40.780 But it's on the hypothalamus.

00:13:41.920 People can go to my Psychology 230 website on my, on my home website under courses.

00:13:48.120 And 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.

00:14:01.620 And so, you know, we think of empathy as something like theory of mind.

00:14:06.600 Yeah.

00:14:07.100 Knowing that I can understand your pain, but that isn't, and it's conceptual, but that isn't really how it works.

00:14:13.340 Because you use your body as a platform to, to run simulations of other people.

00:14:20.920 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.

00:14:28.460 My dad actually stepped in sort of as a surrogate father for him.

00:14:31.560 And I used to wrestle with this friend of mine.

00:14:33.780 And every time I wrestled, I got hurt. 0.99

00:14:35.820 He'd stick his thumb in my eye or some damn thing. 0.98

00:14:38.060 It was really awkward physically, you know? 0.99

00:14:39.940 Yeah.

00:14:40.180 And I realized even at that age, it was because he didn't, he didn't know how to play.

00:14:44.020 And that dance that you describe of, that's part and parcel of extended rough and tumble play.

00:14:51.940 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.

00:15:02.600 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.

00:15:11.980 And you want to actually play right up to that limit, which is the exciting limit.

00:15:16.320 And then you learn that that's true of you and another person.

00:15:20.700 But you learn it, you know, right to the edge of your fingertips.

00:15:24.300 You learn it about your legs.

00:15:25.620 You learn it about your back.

00:15:27.060 You, you have to learn that about your entire body or you can't map someone else onto you.

00:15:31.860 Because you don't know how it feels.

00:15:33.700 Well, that's really a fundamental issue.

00:15:35.520 You don't know how it feels.

00:15:36.800 And 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.

00:15:48.460 And then you're learning to integrate them into an interpersonal dance.

00:15:52.860 Because 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.

00:16:08.780 Like frenetically, desperately, and, you know, which sort of reminds me of what you were saying about your expression of aggression.

00:16:16.820 And their prefrontal cortexes don't mature.

00:16:19.420 And you can suppress their excess play behavior with amphetamines, which is Ritalin, for example.

00:16:26.440 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.

00:16:37.340 So 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.

00:16:49.300 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.

00:16:59.740 And, you know, then the medication, the amphetamines, suppress the play instinct, and this is really not a good solution.

00:17:08.500 It's a terrible solution.

00:17:09.520 It's not a good solution.

00:17:10.560 It's a terrible solution.

00:17:12.040 I wrote an essay on this for the Good Men Project back in, I think, 2016.

00:17:17.500 It was just literally titled, Rough Housing, Not Ritalin.

00:17:20.140 And 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.

00:17:30.580 And I experience it all the time.

00:17:31.880 I have, I told you before we started recording that I have a five-year-old daughter.

00:17:36.160 I also have an eight-year-old boy and a ten-year-old daughter.

00:17:38.420 And 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.

00:17:44.600 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.

00:17:52.540 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?

00:18:02.500 And what happens?

00:18:04.260 Well, they don't know how to control their force levels.

00:18:07.540 They don't know that, like, it's appropriate to, like, wrestle somebody and not to bite them or to throw things at them, right?

00:18:14.240 Or they can't control their emotions.

00:18:17.400 So, 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.

00:18:25.900 And 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.

00:18:35.540 And so my kids, they don't under, you know, for them all this stuff is very natural.

00:18:39.620 Yeah, yeah.

00:18:40.260 And they don't, but they have learned.

00:18:43.700 And they are learning.

00:18:45.460 And it's amazing to watch how well they can handle it.

00:18:48.860 And so my son, who's eight years old, he's a little bit smaller for his age.

00:18:53.040 Or he's a third grader.

00:18:57.560 And he's just kind of old enough to be a third grader.

00:18:59.940 So he's on the bottom end of that class.

00:19:01.640 So kids will kind of push on him because he seems like he's small, right?

00:19:07.860 And 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.

00:19:17.040 And he grabs them and holds them with his hand and just stops them completely.

00:19:21.200 Right.

00:19:21.640 So it's really an extraordinary power.

00:19:23.520 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.

00:19:32.960 Yeah.

00:19:33.100 Because you need to be able to regulate your emotional response.

00:19:37.040 And, of course, the most direct provocation is going to be the provocation that you experience when you're directly physically challenged.

00:19:43.620 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.

00:19:54.960 You know, a lot of people, when they're married, they can't really have a serious conversation.

00:20:00.020 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.

00:20:11.620 And what do people do?

00:20:13.160 They break down in tears and have a fit or they get aggressive or they respond inappropriately in an aggressive manner.

00:20:19.760 And that can be physical very quickly.

00:20:21.460 And then they don't know what they're doing.

00:20:23.180 So they're very awkward in their regression.

00:20:25.260 They don't know how to calibrate it.

00:20:26.640 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.

00:20:39.820 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.

00:20:49.320 And you give it a space to make itself manifest.

00:20:52.880 But the rule is, when you're done, you're done.

00:20:55.440 Yeah.

00:20:55.760 And then you just return to normal life.

00:20:57.440 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.

00:21:03.100 And so they won't start a fight because they're afraid that it'll never end.

00:21:06.960 And then they can't talk about anything important.

00:21:09.100 Like, it's, yeah, it's amazing how much of a catastrophe this really is.

00:21:13.080 So, 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?

00:21:21.140 Yeah, yeah.

00:21:21.680 To, yeah, so that, well, you see that also, that's a good analogy because you also see that with dogs.

00:21:27.740 If you're training a dog, a lot of what you do with a dog is physical play.

00:21:31.820 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.

00:21:37.240 It's like, no, when I say no, I mean stop doing that.

00:21:41.400 And, you know, you don't have to do that with a dog very often before the dog clues in.

00:21:46.160 Yeah, there's the parallels between, like, why play is so important in humans and dogs are the same.

00:21:53.400 Like, 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.

00:22:00.580 And I read a book called The Serious Puppy Training Book or something like that.

00:22:06.400 And they talked about bite inhibition in dogs.

00:22:08.860 And I said that, you know, puppies have to bite because that's how they manipulate the world, right?

00:22:15.440 Like puppies, like dogs, their hands are their jaws.

00:22:20.320 And they want to use them and explore what they're capable of.

00:22:23.700 So a puppy is going to want to jaw spar with you. 0.98

00:22:26.260 It's going to want to put its teeth on you. 0.95

00:22:27.860 It's going to want to put its mouth on you. 0.99

00:22:29.220 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.

00:22:39.380 So what he advised is that what you need to do is you let the puppy start biting at your hand.

00:22:44.520 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, right?

00:22:52.020 And so now it's regulating its aggression to, okay, I need to only bite hard enough that this human being can tolerate it.

00:22:59.860 And then he'll play with me.

00:23:01.760 And over time, then the dog develops bite inhibition.

00:23:04.940 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.

00:23:14.160 When they bite, they bite fully.

00:23:16.300 But a dog that's been played with extensively has a very fine-tuned capacity to control the level of force in its jaw.

00:23:23.780 So it has a soft jaw.

00:23:25.560 Yeah, well, it's quite miraculous, you know, with dogs, given that they're essentially wolves.

00:23:30.200 You 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.

00:23:38.320 And a well-trained dog is unbelievably judicious with its bite force.

00:23:43.160 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.

00:23:50.960 But 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.

00:24:00.200 And that's also why, you know, people wonder why people tease.

00:24:05.040 And teasing is a form of more abstracted rough and tumble play.

00:24:09.700 And it's the same thing.

00:24:11.680 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.

00:24:23.040 It's part of the way that people assess each other profoundly.

00:24:27.980 Like, 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.

00:24:37.280 And he, no one had ever played with Lunchbucket, that's for sure.

00:24:40.980 And 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.

00:24:54.520 Which was also interestingly true of our high school, you know.

00:24:58.300 And Lunchbucket didn't take kindly to being teased about his Lunchbucket.

00:25:03.180 And the level of provocation that the other guys aimed at him just increased.

00:25:08.540 And it got to the point where people were throwing rocks at him when he was on the crew.

00:25:11.820 But the reason for that was because he couldn't be trusted, eh?

00:25:17.500 If you provoked him, he would respond with too much aggression.

00:25:20.980 Yeah.

00:25:21.220 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.

00:25:32.640 Yeah.

00:25:32.800 And the other thing, too, I think that teasing, it's also an attempt to initiate play.

00:25:37.920 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.

00:25:45.520 You know, they sort of start out assuming the other kid is, like, younger and less developmentally able.

00:25:51.580 Yeah.

00:25:51.800 But they ratchet that up quickly to see if they're at a peer-to-peer level.

00:25:55.280 And then they play on the edge, and that'll make kids friends.

00:25:59.780 If kids can play as peers on the edge, then they become friends.

00:26:03.560 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 the capacity for creative interaction.

00:26:14.760 Yeah, 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.

00:26:21.360 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 wasn't so similar to where you grew up.

00:26:32.780 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, specifically in this idea of how the rough and tumble play is this game that scales up.

00:26:44.180 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?

00:27:00.020 What we perceive is actually dependent on how we can act.

00:27:03.440 And so when we engage with something like rough and tumble, we're actually mapping in the different potential meanings of touch.

00:27:11.160 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.

00:27:21.080 And the other analogy of yours that I really love is the analogy of resolution.

00:27:25.820 So how many pixels are in the picture that you have of physical touch?

00:27:31.460 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.

00:27:48.840 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 a refined map.

00:28:02.240 Yeah, no, that's an extremely useful analogy.

00:28:05.620 And like everybody's map is complete of everything, but maps differ very much in resolution.

00:28:11.160 And that, you know, the biblical term for sexual congress is knowledge.

00:28:17.120 Yeah. 0.59

00:28:17.340 And that's partly because, well, sex is a form of play. 0.54

00:28:22.740 It's a high form of physical play.

00:28:25.120 And it's very properly practiced, let's say.

00:28:29.320 It's extraordinarily high resolution.

00:28:31.240 And that's part of that detailed exploration of the physical landscape and the increase of the resolution of the map.

00:28:38.620 And that's definitely all part and parcel of exploratory rough and tumble play.

00:28:45.840 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.

00:29:03.400 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.

00:29:15.840 They can't distinguish that from an aggressive onslaught. 0.81

00:29:19.200 This 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. 0.96

00:29:42.700 And then they think all aggression should be suppressed. 0.97

00:29:45.080 And 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.

00:30:06.400 Yeah, I think, to quote Jordan Peterson, it's a complete bloody disaster.

00:30:11.020 What's going to children?

00:30:12.540 Yeah, yeah.

00:30:13.640 Yeah, right.

00:30:14.500 When 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.

00:30:25.080 And 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.

00:30:38.320 And this is just—

00:30:38.840 Jesus.

00:30:39.440 It's so absurd, because it's like, how are they ever going to learn without these things?

00:30:45.440 Oh, yeah.

00:30:45.880 Well, the thing is, people who do take that tack assume that enforced zero conflict equals peace.

00:30:53.940 Yeah.

00:30:54.080 You know, when you talked about this experience you had with your friends, that often you had to fight with one or more of them.

00:31:01.240 And, 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.

00:31:11.320 And 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.

00:31:23.360 That usually brings it to an end.

00:31:25.200 And it's not that rare for that to turn into a friendship, which is also a very interesting and strange thing.

00:31:34.160 Yeah, it is a strange thing looking back on it, but it was definitely a feature of my childhood.

00:31:38.600 And 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.

00:31:48.080 Because—so we teach rough-and-tumble play.

00:31:51.260 We 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.

00:32:04.520 And then we kind of—you can play a very competitive game that's very safe by scaling the way that the players can interact.

00:32:12.780 And we teach this to men and women.

00:32:14.480 And now, my general observation is, working with kids, the boys always want to rough-house more, right?

00:32:20.480 My son roughhouses more than his sisters, for sure. 0.66

00:32:23.700 But the girls love to rough-house with me and have always requested being rough-housed with, being wrestled with, being thrown around. 1.00

00:32:30.760 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.

00:32:41.260 And I think that what it is is that our culture, in general, is just suppressing rough-and-tumble play.

00:32:48.640 But women are more likely to have accepted the culture's story of you can't engage in rough-and-tumble play. 1.00

00:32:55.860 And there are fewer cultural spaces that really give them the opportunity to do that.

00:32:59.580 So they don't necessarily play, like, football or get involved in a wrestling team.

00:33:03.800 And so it's often women who come to us who will say, this was incredibly healing for me.

00:33:09.240 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.

00:33:22.380 And that is really healing for them.

00:33:25.720 And to then bridge to the sexual aspect of it, obviously, men and women have to figure that out.

00:33:32.460 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.

00:33:43.420 So if you look at the—

00:33:44.380 Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, that's very interesting.

00:33:47.760 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.

00:33:54.540 This, I think, is part of the story as well.

00:33:56.800 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.

00:34:04.840 Yeah, yeah.

00:34:05.600 Well, this is also an interesting point to insert some observations about cell phones.

00:34:12.500 Yeah.

00:34:12.760 You know, people are often extraordinarily concerned with the content that's being delivered to kids on the cell phones.

00:34:19.720 And I think the content is relevant to some degree.

00:34:22.420 I spend a lot of time, for example, analyzing literature on violent video games and aggression among boys.

00:34:29.920 And the link between violent video games and aggression is pretty damn minimal.

00:34:36.920 What appears to be the case is that more aggressive boys like more aggressive video games.

00:34:41.920 And there's not much of a causal loop there.

00:34:45.760 So, 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.

00:34:55.700 That might even be true for pornography.

00:34:57.520 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.

00:35:12.020 You 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.

00:35:28.380 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.

00:35:38.800 And 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.

00:35:46.080 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.

00:35:59.580 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?

00:36:15.840 Anyways, it looks to me, the furry phenomena, all that looks to me like repressed pretend play.

00:36:21.900 That might even be the case for late onset autogynephilia among the trans guys, you know. 0.99

00:36:27.460 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.

00:36:43.820 That seems to me to be highly probable.

00:36:46.140 What the men are doing when they dress up in women's clothing is pretending, obviously. 0.86

00:36:52.160 You know, now there's a sexual element to it, but that doesn't mean it isn't pretend play.

00:36:59.040 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?

00:37:10.980 And 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.

00:37:25.980 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?

00:37:40.640 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.

00:37:56.820 Right.

00:37:57.640 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.

00:38:10.640 Yeah, right.

00:38:11.920 Video games are thrill divorced from physicality.

00:38:16.280 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 to, you know, the physical demands of actual rough and tumble play.

00:38:27.420 They can practice shooting and running and jumping and all the things that, you know, I did as a kid actually physically.

00:38:34.880 And that's probably not bad necessarily.

00:38:38.080 It's not that bad necessarily on its own.

00:38:40.120 The problem is that it's so easily outcompetes the actual thing that we need, which is the real physical play.

00:38:48.240 Yeah.

00:38:48.500 Well, I saw that just recently this week.

00:38:50.740 I was out with some young people, relatives of mine, and I hadn't met them for years.

00:38:56.760 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.

00:39:06.820 And one of them was 13 and the other was 21.

00:39:10.240 And they were just on their cell phones the entire time.

00:39:13.180 The whole time.

00:39:14.060 Yeah.

00:39:14.200 And I thought, well, I felt, I felt very bad for the kids because I thought, well.

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00:40:28.260 First of all, I thought, it's like, what the hell are you doing?

00:40:33.060 There's five of us around the fireplace, and you're on your phones, completely engrossed in them.

00:40:38.660 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.

00:40:46.400 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.

00:40:56.120 They're in these virtual delusions, you know, because what you're describing is actually a kind of delusion, right?

00:41:01.300 It's an artificial world that isn't properly mapped onto the real world.

00:41:05.060 So delusional landscapes of entertainment, and that certainly is the case for pornography.

00:41:10.680 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.

00:41:30.780 We have to renew that relationship with the world.

00:41:34.480 So 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.

00:41:45.240 And those are kind of the internal connections within the self, the body to itself, the body, mind, spirit, emotional aspects.

00:41:53.680 So I think of it as like the somatic and structural layer.

00:41:56.040 And then there's the body to the environment, how we move through the world, and that's parkour, or gymnastics, or track and field.

00:42:05.200 But parkour, I think, is the most kind of profound expression of it.

00:42:08.240 It's the closest to the sort of exploratory locomotor play that you find in every culture, and really in all other animals, almost.

00:42:19.080 And then you have the object manipulation.

00:42:22.000 Human beings, of course, are tool-using animals.

00:42:23.740 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.

00:42:31.100 And then there's other people, which is the rough and tumble aspect that we've talked about.

00:42:35.240 And then the last is I think all of those things put us in relationship to something transcendent.

00:42:38.860 When we go out and we do parkour in nature and we work with people, there's an emergent spirit that you can experience.

00:42:45.720 There's a sense of the broader things that you're embedded within.

00:42:48.560 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 Berbeke would say that those lower three Ps of knowing, the participatory, perspectival, and procedural, those have to be played out through embodied practices.

00:43:09.020 And 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.

00:43:30.560 And to recover the wisdom, I think we have to go back to those body practices. 0.72

00:43:36.080 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.

00:43:44.680 You know, like people have asked me to write a book on parenting, you know.

00:43:48.800 One of the problems I have with that is, well, I don't have little kids anymore.

00:43:52.120 And so I kind of forget what I know, you know.

00:43:55.100 It was never exactly explicit.

00:43:58.680 Now, I was very fortunate when I was a kid because both my mother and my father paid a lot of attention to me.

00:44:04.660 And my dad, in particular, is markedly good with little kids.

00:44:09.380 Oh, wonderful.

00:44:09.780 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.

00:44:15.960 And so that was just an embodied practice, let's say, in our household.

00:44:20.220 And so I know exactly what to do with little kids.

00:44:22.760 You know, I'm not the least bit afraid of them.

00:44:24.500 I know exactly how to play with them, even if they're timid.

00:44:26.980 I know how to poke them and, you know, jolly them into a bit of a reaction and to entice them out of shyness.

00:44:33.640 But I don't exactly know how to tell people how to do that.

00:44:37.300 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,

00:44:46.380 you've obviously thought this through structurally.

00:44:50.080 What do you actually do to get the kids to play?

00:44:53.840 And how do you teach people to play with their kids or with other people?

00:44:57.660 What are the practical aspects?

00:45:00.100 Yeah, absolutely.

00:45:00.620 So when we're inviting people to kind of begin play, there's a couple things that we can do.

00:45:07.300 One is we can think about how we constrain the game, right?

00:45:10.080 So all my teaching is sort of deeply influenced by the constraints-led approach and by the ideas of ecological dynamics.

00:45:16.800 So rather than, say, trying to teach someone how to punch before we let them spar,

00:45:22.440 we develop a game that doesn't require them to know how to punch yet, right?

00:45:27.020 So the first game that we introduce to people, a lot of times in the competitive aspect of rough and tumble play,

00:45:33.640 is just like standing on a narrow surface and grabbing the other person's hand and trying to pull them and off-balance them.

00:45:40.140 So this is a game that works really well to introduce competition because it's totally safe, right?

00:45:48.560 I'm not manipulating your body in any way that could potentially hurt you.

00:45:53.760 So when you say stand on a narrow surface, tell me exactly what you have people do.

00:45:58.320 So like a common one, this game was originally taught to me by a friend,

00:46:01.400 and we just did it on like curbs in a parking lot.

00:46:04.420 But, you know, a lot of times at my workshops—

00:46:07.340 So you're on the edge of something.

00:46:08.460 Yeah, so there's a reason why that works.

00:46:12.380 It makes the win condition a lot easier.

00:46:15.240 But also, it disadvantages larger athletes, which is important,

00:46:19.380 because the physical strength is obviously going to help the larger athletes succeed.

00:46:23.660 But because a bigger athlete has a bigger moment of sway,

00:46:26.620 their balance is actually a little bit easier to compromise.

00:46:29.320 So you can take a small woman and a large man, and if they're both inexperienced, 0.98

00:46:33.520 the gap that you would experience introducing them to just wrestling is much lower in this initial game.

00:46:40.520 And so people can get a lot of—

00:46:41.400 That's cool.

00:46:41.940 So they just grab one hand—

00:46:44.200 Yep, it's hand versus hand.

00:46:45.520 —and they just pull each other off balance.

00:46:47.220 Exactly.

00:46:47.640 Oh, yeah, that's cool, because the conditions for victory are very, very clear.

00:46:52.720 It doesn't require a lot of aggression to move forward.

00:46:55.480 It shouldn't be intimidating to people.

00:46:57.500 The rules are easy to learn.

00:46:59.600 Oh, yes, that's a good one.

00:47:00.500 That's something you can play.

00:47:01.700 I often, with little kids, like two, one of the games I used to play with my kids

00:47:06.420 was just to step on their feet.

00:47:08.280 And they try to step on my feet at the same time, you know, obviously with socks.

00:47:12.180 And you can make quite a noise with your foot, and kids find that.

00:47:15.940 And they can back off when they're, you know, they can back off real easily to get out of the game

00:47:20.440 if they're feeling a little bit, you know, intimidated.

00:47:23.260 But, oh, yeah, they'll laugh and cheer away at that.

00:47:26.240 And so that's an analogy, I would say, or an analog to this off balance.

00:47:30.440 Okay, so that's a good place to start.

00:47:33.100 So I was playing with my four-month-old granddaughter.

00:47:37.500 She could actually play this game.

00:47:39.340 Yeah, you're—

00:47:39.760 It was amazing.

00:47:40.360 I did—it's the earliest I'd seen someone engage in truly reciprocal play.

00:47:46.140 She was really four months old.

00:47:47.600 So I'd go one, two, three, hold her on my—so standing on my knee.

00:47:53.840 One, two, three, and then bop her head on mine. 1.00

00:47:56.560 Yeah.

00:47:57.180 And then one, two, three, bop.

00:47:59.960 Yeah.

00:48:00.260 One, two, three, bop.

00:48:01.680 And then I started playing with the gap between the numbers.

00:48:07.380 One, two, three, bop, you know, to have an element of surprise.

00:48:11.140 And, man, I'll tell you, after 15 repetitions, she got the game.

00:48:16.360 That's wonderful.

00:48:16.700 And so that was really cool because it was—yeah, well, it involved that immediate touch, you know?

00:48:20.640 But so there's this—it's kind of like peekaboo.

00:48:23.540 It's like there's a predictability and then a surprise, which is part of a game.

00:48:26.940 But it was a harmless initiatory game.

00:48:29.900 But it was really something to see that she caught on.

00:48:32.580 You know, and it's theme plus variation, too, which is something you see in musical play.

00:48:37.040 Okay, so you have people try to pull each other off balance.

00:48:40.180 I imagine they're—so how do people react when you first introduce them to that idea?

00:48:46.360 Like, what's the range of reactions?

00:48:48.780 Well, what's interesting is we—in the past, more so in the past when people were less familiar with my work,

00:48:54.420 I'd get a fair number of students, almost all of them women, who would say, 1.00

00:48:57.420 I want to participate in everything, but I don't want to do the rough-and-dumble play.

00:49:00.720 And they'd be like, okay, we'll get to it.

00:49:03.160 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.

00:49:08.820 And what we find is that people will tell you, you know, I'm scared of this.

00:49:14.340 I don't like—I never liked physical aggression, anything like that.

00:49:17.660 And you give them this opportunity to play a game that's highly competitive,

00:49:21.440 that has a—that they have a, you know, like a relatively—a sufficiently high probability of winning, right?

00:49:26.900 The 30% that Yach Panksepp says, right?

00:49:30.500 And that it feels totally safe.

00:49:33.260 Everybody enjoys it.

00:49:34.180 Without fail, for 10 years of teaching this drill, I've not had one person who's come to a seminar

00:49:39.720 who has not been lit up and smiling and laughing by the end of playing that game.

00:49:44.340 Yeah, I wonder what that laughing signifies.

00:49:45.900 You know, when I used to go work out with my friends in Boston, one of our games was,

00:49:51.180 especially during a bench press, was to crack a joke and make the person laugh

00:49:54.580 because you lose all muscular control when you laugh, eh?

00:49:58.720 Mm-hmm.

00:49:59.280 Which is extremely interesting, you know, because it's—

00:50:02.220 laughter produces a physiological cessation of the ability to be aggressive.

00:50:08.920 You just have no muscular tension.

00:50:10.860 And so, there's something about laughing that's indicative of genuine safety and peace, right?

00:50:18.440 And it's indicative at a very low level because it's pre-conscious laughter.

00:50:23.080 No one—if you laugh consciously, it's forced and fake.

00:50:26.280 It has to be spontaneous.

00:50:28.060 And so, you see people doing this competitive off-balancing game, let's say,

00:50:33.120 and you get joy and laughter.

00:50:35.400 And that's—I think that's a deep physiological reflection of the observation

00:50:39.540 that there really is safety and peace and play happening in this space, right?

00:50:44.960 It's a celebration of that.

00:50:47.020 Yeah, if we go back to the idea we were exploring earlier,

00:50:49.540 that, like, these things are actually fundamental to how we attune

00:50:52.900 and develop a real map with somebody, right?

00:50:56.060 What you could—you know, the—what I speculate now, just off what you said,

00:51:01.300 is that the laughter is occurring because it's a signal of, like,

00:51:04.400 really rapid attunement between two organisms where they're actually learning each other

00:51:09.900 on a much deeper layer than even, you know, verbally is going to offer.

00:51:14.680 But you'll find the same thing if you're meeting someone

00:51:17.140 and you have a good dynamic in a conversation.

00:51:20.140 They're going to—laughter is going to start to generate.

00:51:22.340 And I think it's a signal, yeah, of that sense of safety.

00:51:25.680 And that joy that you're experiencing, obviously that's telling you,

00:51:29.020 this is valuable, this is worthwhile, this is something that you want to come back to and repeat.

00:51:34.280 And so that sense that there's a way to compete, a way to interact with somebody

00:51:38.080 that's deeply, mutually affording of development is—

00:51:42.760 Yeah, right.

00:51:44.060 Yes, exactly.

00:51:45.020 That's the spirit of play, that mutual affordance of—

00:51:47.680 I was remembering when my wife wasn't played with a lot when she was a kid, you know?

00:51:52.760 She's a pretty good sense of sharp verbal play. 1.00

00:51:55.300 And she was physically comfortable in a lot of ways because she did a lot of yoga,

00:51:58.760 but she hadn't been played with a lot.

00:52:00.580 And, you know, I can remember a couple of events.

00:52:03.480 So we were mock fighting at one point, and she came at me with her fists, 1.00

00:52:07.480 and I grabbed her hands, and I went like this.

00:52:09.940 And it actually hurt her a little bit.

00:52:11.960 And I said, well, you know, when you go like this, you open your hands.

00:52:15.100 Don't you know that?

00:52:16.160 She said, no, she'd never played enough to know that, you know,

00:52:21.380 someone grabs your hands when you have fists and brings them together.

00:52:23.820 You open your hands.

00:52:25.260 Well, so I showed her how to do that.

00:52:27.200 And then another time, she was sitting on the couch, and I had a pillow, and I went like this.

00:52:33.780 Which means, look out, a pillow is coming.

00:52:36.620 So I went like this, and then I threw the pillow, and it got her. 1.00

00:52:40.040 And she, you know, she was a little bit, what would you say it, surprised?

00:52:44.880 Yeah.

00:52:45.060 And I said, well, I showed you the pillow was coming.

00:52:48.700 Why didn't you catch it?

00:52:49.680 And she said, well, she had no idea that, you know, one, two, three meant, look out, a pillow is your way.

00:52:54.900 Now, she, her siblings were much older than her, eh?

00:52:57.900 And so, and my siblings were very close in age to me.

00:53:01.200 And so, you know, I had more of that intense play than she did.

00:53:05.320 But a lot of these basic rules of physical engagement, she hadn't learned.

00:53:10.040 And so, okay, so now you're putting people on the edge.

00:53:13.780 You're having them unbalance each other.

00:53:15.180 Where do you progress from there?

00:53:16.880 Yeah.

00:53:17.240 So the basic structure is we think about what are the tools that we can manipulate somebody's body with.

00:53:22.000 So the first tool that we allow is just the closed hand, right?

00:53:25.700 And then what's the targets?

00:53:27.760 What parts of their body can we manipulate? 0.84

00:53:29.920 So now we're just manipulating hand versus hand.

00:53:32.540 So we have tools and targets, and then we have motion.

00:53:35.120 How do we limit the motion?

00:53:36.660 So that constraint of standing on the thing, it prevents them from moving fast.

00:53:42.380 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,

00:53:47.900 this is a very unconstrained game with a lot of potential danger.

00:53:51.120 So what we're trying to do is just find ways to scale in from there.

00:53:54.920 So the first thing that we're going to do is just go from you can only manipulate their hand with your hand

00:54:00.160 to now you have both your hands, and you can manipulate any part of their body below their neck, excluding their genitals, right?

00:54:06.500 So all the safe parts of the body to manipulate.

00:54:09.260 And now you're still trying to off-balance them.

00:54:11.360 And because you don't have to pick them up and throw them or anything, you just have to get them to step off,

00:54:16.040 you still have a really safe game, right?

00:54:18.500 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?

00:54:24.740 This is a basic tag game.

00:54:26.260 It's a tag game of tagging somebody's foot.

00:54:28.220 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,

00:54:34.020 as we would in Muay Thai.

00:54:35.460 But we're starting to learn how to interpret somebody entering our space,

00:54:39.940 somebody, you know, that gap closing, the sense of rhythm, the sense of timing that somebody has.

00:54:44.460 And all that's going to donate to these games as we move down the kind of the progression.

00:54:49.500 And then we think about the progression as working towards the highly competitive, highly free, unconstrained games like mixed martial arts,

00:54:56.420 but also moving towards the highly attuned acrobatic games like dance.

00:55:00.960 Because we want people to be able to have that sense.

00:55:05.780 Your next book, I believe, is called We Who Wrestle With God.

00:55:11.460 Yeah, yeah.

00:55:12.520 And so I was listening to you talk with John in one of your, your first interview with John,

00:55:17.100 and you were talking about the idea of like, maybe the right relationship to God is to wrestle with him.

00:55:21.580 It's something that you have to struggle with.

00:55:24.500 And my thought was—

00:55:25.940 Yeah, I never thought about that precisely in that embodied sense, you know,

00:55:28.680 although obviously when Jacob wrestles with the angel, it's physical combat, right?

00:55:33.200 But I hadn't put that extra piece in there.

00:55:35.600 So that's very interesting and useful.

00:55:37.640 I'll file that away.

00:55:38.580 Yeah, 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?

00:55:48.340 Yeah.

00:55:48.580 We have to build that.

00:55:50.000 So I said this to one of my groups of students, and it was interesting.

00:55:53.400 It was the women in the group who said, what if the right relationship to God is dance? 0.66

00:55:57.540 And I said, it's both, right?

00:56:01.420 It has to—it's got to be both.

00:56:04.580 So 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

00:56:13.140 and the affordances that come with attunement, and how can we compete and press each other right to our edge as much as possible.

00:56:20.320 Well, it's interesting that you've got two poles there, eh? 0.98

00:56:22.880 There's sophisticated dance as an extension of embodied play, and then there's sophisticated combat as an extension of play.

00:56:32.660 And I wonder if—do you suppose the dance element obviously maps more self-evidently onto male-female relationships and sex?

00:56:43.920 Yeah.

00:56:44.620 And the wrestling, per se, has more to do with, I suppose, something like the hierarchical organization of the social structure.

00:56:52.640 There'd be more—because there'd be some dominance and submission associated with that,

00:56:57.960 and the attempt to build something like a hierarchy of competence.

00:57:00.880 But it's interesting that you have those two end extensions for—

00:57:06.820 Yeah.

00:57:06.880 That play makes itself manifest in relationship to.

00:57:10.840 And, yeah, I don't know exactly how to conceptualize that.

00:57:14.840 Well, let me tell you something.

00:57:15.780 This 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.

00:57:21.720 But you've talked about the idea that, you know, dominance hierarchies are older than trees, right?

00:57:26.860 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.

00:57:37.500 So what's fascinating about, like, Yak Pengsep's rats is— 0.61

00:57:41.060 We should call it the competence hierarchy.

00:57:43.620 Yes, I agree.

00:57:44.940 I agree, absolutely.

00:57:46.880 So the competence hierarchy.

00:57:48.020 So rats, when they wrestle, they pin each other on their shoulders.

00:57:52.860 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.

00:58:00.800 And we see this across the animal kingdom.

00:58:02.840 If 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.

00:58:13.880 Even venomous snakes will wrap each other around the head and try to press the other one's head to the ground. 0.76

00:58:19.160 So 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.

00:58:30.080 And we want to determine who gets to be in the better places and who has to be in the worse places.

00:58:34.460 And we want to do that in a way that's going to be minimally damaging to everybody.

00:58:38.060 So we're going to develop a way of—

00:58:39.160 It's the best way of making—it's the best way of coping with those occasions when the competition does have a zero-sum element to it.

00:58:48.300 Yep. Yeah, exactly.

00:58:49.880 So—but here's the interesting thing is how the non-zero-sum evolves out of the zero-sum.

00:58:55.900 So first we have this—we're going to kill each other first, and then that's really expensive.

00:59:00.500 Let's not do that.

00:59:01.140 Is there a way that we can play where we're not going to kill each other?

00:59:03.280 So a venomous snake doesn't bite with its venom.

00:59:06.000 It doesn't waste that.

00:59:07.000 It wrestles in order to determine the hierarchy.

00:59:09.680 So now when we wrestle, once we have that, we have this capacity to exact that basic structure to say,

00:59:16.960 hey, you and I, we can play this game when it's not about actually determining the competence hierarchy.

00:59:21.840 It's just about building our competence for when the real problem happens.

00:59:25.900 So that—so now all these animals have this basic drive to engage in some kind of competitive wrestling

00:59:36.060 because it helps them develop social competence.

00:59:40.300 But now all these other things can get mapped into it.

00:59:43.640 It can get exacted to be something that's building empathy.

00:59:46.660 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.

00:59:55.640 We develop theory of mind, that stuff about Yak Pengsep's rats and the fact that the bigger rat has to be able to know

01:00:02.680 that if it wins too often, the small rat won't play with him.

01:00:06.700 That's the beginning of theory of mind.

01:00:09.320 Yeah, well, I think the rats must be evaluating, you know, because imagine that in each game,

01:00:14.400 there's a series of micro-victories and micro-defeats.

01:00:18.660 Yep.

01:00:18.840 And if you keep the ratio of victory high enough for your opponent, ratio of victory to defeat,

01:00:24.900 they're going to be enthusiastic play partners.

01:00:28.400 Yep.

01:00:28.620 And you're constantly available.

01:00:29.920 Like when I was teaching my kids to play ping pong, you know, they weren't going to win,

01:00:35.800 but they weren't going to lose 21-0.

01:00:38.540 Yep.

01:00:38.980 You know, I would just ratchet up my skill level so that I kept them on the edge of their performance.

01:00:44.280 And that meant that, well, they'd gain as many points as I could allow them to gain.

01:00:48.160 I still see that with my son, you know, because I taught him to play ping pong,

01:00:51.880 and then he got better than me because he learned all my tricks and his new tricks.

01:00:55.620 And, you know, it'll be frequently the case that I'm ahead of him, say, 17-13 near the end of a game,

01:01:03.740 and then he'll really kick into high gear.

01:01:06.540 Yeah.

01:01:06.680 You know, and it's very annoying because I've been working pretty hard on my edge trying to give him a good stomping,

01:01:12.320 but he has some left in reserve, you know.

01:01:14.520 But he's calibrating.

01:01:16.560 We automatically calibrate if we're sophisticated players to keep our partner on that dynamic edge of development.

01:01:23.000 This is also why it's so wrong to think about competition as a zero-sum process,

01:01:28.020 because if you're competing optimally, first of all, you want a well-matched partner,

01:01:32.520 because otherwise it's not a fair game and it's no fun.

01:01:35.280 But if you're competing optimally, your opponent has micro-victories the whole way along.

01:01:41.080 And the rats must pick that up, you know.

01:01:42.940 The big rat must understand that if he's dominating too heavily,

01:01:47.180 the game starts to become no fun because the little rat gets demoralized and then won't put up a good scrap.

01:01:53.820 You've got to—and you do the same thing with puppies, you know.

01:01:56.580 You let them win as much as is appropriate, and it's the same with your kids.

01:02:01.900 You let them win as much as is appropriate, but no more than that.

01:02:05.420 And you do that while simultaneously scaffolding their mastery.

01:02:09.320 Yeah, you're working to put them on that zone of proximal development, right?

01:02:15.520 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:02:16.120 And so that's the key to good play, and that's what, you know,

01:02:20.000 we think is so important about, like, an actual rough-and-tumble curriculum

01:02:24.100 is that it's about educating people about how to, in the deepest embodied sense,

01:02:29.460 find that edge in mixed partnerships, right, where there is a massive skill gap.

01:02:35.220 How could I play as someone who's, you know, 6'1", 220 pounds,

01:02:38.960 has been training martial arts my whole life with a small woman

01:02:42.180 and make the game such that she gets something out of it,

01:02:45.160 and I even get something out of it.

01:02:46.460 Yeah, yeah.

01:02:48.640 Well, how do you do it?

01:02:50.660 Well, let's take that as an example.

01:02:52.400 So you have this large set of embodied skills,

01:02:55.700 and now you're playing with an opponent that is not matched at the edge of your skill set.

01:03:04.060 Part of the way you do that, for example, is by imposing arbitrary limitations on the player,

01:03:10.900 so they have to stand on the edge of a curb.

01:03:13.440 What else do you do to limit yourself when you're dealing with a less-able partner

01:03:18.220 so that the game is still fun for you?

01:03:20.460 Yeah.

01:03:20.860 So in the play research, they talk about self-handicapping.

01:03:25.140 You know, a classic example maybe anybody's seen is a very large dog playing with a very small dog.

01:03:30.200 So if you see a Great Dane playing with a Chihuahua, the Great Dane will flop on its back

01:03:34.480 so that the Chihuahua can jaw-spar with it, right?

01:03:37.600 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.

01:03:42.960 So we're trying to educate people as well as we move them through these stages

01:03:46.980 to learn how to self-handicap in ways that are appropriate for them.

01:03:51.860 So I work on this with my kids, right?

01:03:53.800 So if my son is wrestling, my 8-year-old son is wrestling with my 5-year-old,

01:03:59.060 it's like how can you limit yourself in the game such that it's actually now a fair fight

01:04:06.600 and it's useful for both of you?

01:04:08.580 So for myself, if I was sparring with somebody, right, I could switch to my offside.

01:04:13.000 I'm a dominant, you know, left-hand forward.

01:04:15.720 So now I have to fight with the other side.

01:04:17.000 I can remove a hand.

01:04:18.240 I can't use both my hands.

01:04:20.200 I can create a set of techniques that I have to use.

01:04:23.040 So I can only use—I only get a—you know, I only give myself a point if I do this thing,

01:04:29.620 not some set of other things that I might be really good at.

01:04:32.300 Right, right.

01:04:33.720 I can limit my motion.

01:04:34.920 So you adopt a set of limitations until you're evenly matched, essentially.

01:04:39.360 Yep, that's the goal is how do I find that level of limitation?

01:04:42.100 So for my son and my daughter, they might have a race, and I might say,

01:04:46.440 okay, you guys want to race, we can put her ahead, or we can maybe have you run on all fours 1.00

01:04:53.280 and she gets to run on her feet.

01:04:55.140 And then they get something that's mutually rewarding.

01:04:58.840 Right, right, right.

01:05:00.600 So let's talk a little bit, too, about—okay, so we talked about the curriculum of development,

01:05:06.180 and you use basically the equivalent of incremental behavioral exposure,

01:05:11.160 is that you're setting people in a non-threatening, initial, highly structured situation,

01:05:18.500 and then you remove a constraint at a time, essentially, as people scaffold up their ability to play.

01:05:25.600 How does the parkour—we should define parkour for everybody, because not everybody listening will know.

01:05:30.360 And why don't you introduce that into it?

01:05:32.400 Because that's also the person against the world instead of the person competing against another person.

01:05:37.700 Yeah, this is the perfect bridge.

01:05:39.480 So I found parkour when I was 23 years old, and I'd been doing gymnastics for some period of time before that.

01:05:47.180 And it's very interesting because I remember really clearly—I was very influenced by the Lord of the Rings.

01:05:54.480 And I remember really clearly as a young—I'm, like, 12 years old, realizing that, like,

01:05:58.980 there were no dragons to go out and slay physically.

01:06:01.040 And so when I saw David Bell, the founder of parkour, jumping between buildings,

01:06:05.420 I had this really deep sense that, like, you can do something heroic in life,

01:06:10.040 but the challenge isn't necessarily a dragon out there.

01:06:13.560 It's the fears that are inside you that would prevent you from being able to do what you're going to do.

01:06:18.520 And so I started practicing parkour, and it completely—I fell in love with it,

01:06:22.180 and it had this transformative effect on me.

01:06:24.460 And so over the years, I've been like, what is happening with parkour?

01:06:26.980 What is going on?

01:06:28.120 Sorry, just to define parkour for a moment.

01:06:30.440 Parkour is a discipline of learning to overcome obstacles that came out of France in the early—or the late 90s.

01:06:38.460 And so it's associated with jumping between buildings, but it doesn't have to be buildings, right?

01:06:43.260 It's just finding obstacles in the environment, running, jumping, climbing,

01:06:47.360 moving on a forest to try to surpass and overcome that obstacle.

01:06:50.720 I can think of it as just playing with obstacles.

01:06:52.600 And I think fundamentally what it is is actually just exploratory locomotor play.

01:06:56.480 You've talked about the example of, again, the rat model, right?

01:07:00.860 If you drop a rat into a new environment, it will first freeze, and then it will explore the environment,

01:07:07.280 but then it will actually play with the way in which it moves for its environment.

01:07:10.840 It will add, you know, variation to how it moves.

01:07:14.940 And by doing so, it's actually mapping all the potential pathways in that environment,

01:07:18.940 increasing its behavioral flexibility.

01:07:20.420 Yeah, mapping the affordances and the obstacles, you bet.

01:07:22.880 Exactly.

01:07:23.200 So that's precisely what we're doing with parkour.

01:07:26.160 And I think it's so interesting because we're literally mapping meaning into the world.

01:07:29.900 What you develop when you start doing parkour is something called parkour vision.

01:07:33.820 So you've been walking through the world for years, and you see a wall.

01:07:38.060 And a wall just means a place you can't go in, right?

01:07:41.460 But now all of a sudden, a wall means a place that you can run up.

01:07:44.980 Or a wall means a thing that you can flip off of.

01:07:47.560 Or do any number of different techniques.

01:07:50.560 So that wall is now much richer for you.

01:07:53.060 It literally is a source of reward to see a wall.

01:07:57.020 Because the relationship between the walls actually code movement that you can use.

01:08:02.280 Right, right.

01:08:02.860 And so that's how it maps meaning into the world.

01:08:05.960 And then there's this sense that you're acting out the heroic archetype every time that you go out to do parkour, right?

01:08:13.680 It is embodying that meta-myth.

01:08:15.420 Because you'll be walking, and you'll see a jump that calls to you.

01:08:21.020 And that jump is undifferentiated.

01:08:24.060 You don't yet know what you can do.

01:08:26.600 And it has promise, right?

01:08:27.800 Like, if you do it, it's really cool.

01:08:29.080 It's exciting.

01:08:30.140 But if you fail, you might get hurt.

01:08:32.820 And especially as you scale up your abilities, like, the potential dangers can become very, very high.

01:08:38.280 And so you get to play with and recognize what it's like to experience fear at a really deep level.

01:08:44.880 And then you get to go through the physical process of, how does my body handle this fear?

01:08:51.140 What do I need to prepare myself?

01:08:53.740 And then how do I make the commitment and make the jump to the other side?

01:08:57.060 Right.

01:08:57.740 Right.

01:08:58.140 Well, it's a great form of play, symbolically, because, you know, the landscape is one of pathways, affordances, and obstacles.

01:09:06.960 That's basically how the world lays itself out for us.

01:09:09.880 And, you know, you can avoid an obstacle, but the highest art is to transform an obstacle into an affordance, right?

01:09:18.280 This is no longer an obstacle.

01:09:19.680 It's something that I can use to facilitate my pathway forward.

01:09:25.180 And that's the highest form of play.

01:09:27.020 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,

01:09:43.920 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.

01:09:57.960 Yeah.

01:09:58.960 And that's a very strange thing to learn, but it's, you know, and it's not a game without high stakes.

01:10:04.280 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.

01:10:15.400 Absolutely.

01:10:16.280 There'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.

01:10:25.360 And almost all of our fine actions are the consequence of two systems in opposition modulating each other.

01:10:32.920 So if you want to move your hand really smoothly, you can do it like this.

01:10:36.100 But it's still kind of jerky if you analyze it at the micro level.

01:10:39.320 But if you do this, you can move your hand with incredible precision.

01:10:43.680 And that's an opponent process.

01:10:44.980 And a tremendous number of the physiological processes that we undertake are opponent processes.

01:10:51.920 And, you know, you have that opponent process dynamic within a marriage, and you have it within a debate.

01:10:58.360 You have it within play.

01:10:59.860 It seems to be a universal principle, the principle of properly balanced opponent processing.

01:11:04.640 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.

01:11:14.260 And that's a, well, that's a revolutionary way to conceptualize the world.

01:11:19.440 Yeah, that's a, I love that.

01:11:21.480 I want the most challenging adversary that you can handle that affords you the capacity to play.

01:11:29.200 That, I think, is really at the center of what provides that, you know, I love the term allostasis, right?

01:11:35.380 So we think that we're in homeostasis, but we're actually in a continual process of development.

01:11:40.460 And that continual process of development is always between these paired reciprocal opponent processing systems, right?

01:11:48.820 So the parasympathetic nervous and the sympathetic nervous system.

01:11:51.920 So as I was preparing for this discussion, I was listening to your last discussion with John Brevakey and talking to him a little bit.

01:11:58.980 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?

01:12:10.640 It has to integrate the self with the physical world better.

01:12:13.220 It has to integrate the self with the things we can manipulate better and with other social beings better.

01:12:19.920 And then with this concept of the transcendent, all of those are also opponent processing.

01:12:23.980 Full logos integration.

01:12:25.900 Okay, so why are they all opponent processing?

01:12:29.320 Because you can split the self, right?

01:12:33.880 You're a unity, but you're also a multiplicity.

01:12:36.660 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.

01:12:42.160 You have to create two different dialogues in your head.

01:12:44.920 So there's this fundamentally dialogical process.

01:12:47.700 And you can embody that by just creating tension in your body between different systems and feeling how, you know, these two things.

01:12:56.400 Now I'm playing that and how I can grow with it.

01:13:00.260 And then you can think about, can my mind control my body better?

01:13:04.080 Or can my body support my mind better, right?

01:13:07.200 And all those things can be in dynamic opposition.

01:13:09.920 And obviously, once we get to parkour, right, that body environment practice, the environment is the opponent, right?

01:13:17.860 And I'm learning to have greater and greater mastery, greater and greater affordances available to me through that relationship.

01:13:24.780 And then the same thing when I learn to throw and catch and swing objects.

01:13:29.060 And then obviously do fine crafting things, which are kind of the developmental derivative of those basic play instincts to play with objects.

01:13:37.640 And then obviously, when I'm engaged in rough and tumble play, it's opponent processing.

01:13:43.120 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 metamyth that you described in Maps of Meaning.

01:13:57.520 Yeah, yeah.

01:13:59.000 Well, that seems right.

01:14:00.960 How do you scaffold parkour for people?

01:14:03.120 We talked a little bit about how you can introduce kids or adults, for that matter, who haven't played.

01:14:08.560 I really like the curb game.

01:14:10.160 I think that's, I'm going to play that with my grandkids.

01:14:12.200 That's a good idea.

01:14:13.480 You could do that by having people stand on their tiptoes, too.

01:14:16.880 Yep, absolutely.

01:14:17.840 So then the defeat would be that you put your feet on the ground.

01:14:21.140 Yeah, and that would be a good way of putting a larger person off balance as well.

01:14:24.840 You can fight with me, but you have to stay on your tiptoes.

01:14:27.720 Yeah, yeah, so that's really good.

01:14:29.760 So, 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?

01:14:40.260 Yeah, well, if you think about it as exploratory locomotor play, everyone's done parkour, right?

01:14:45.540 You've gone to an environment and been like, how do I get from here to there?

01:14:48.720 That's the fundamental thing, right, is just go out and do it.

01:14:52.280 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?

01:15:02.060 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.

01:15:08.960 And then they could lay down on their stomach and spin around to the other side.

01:15:12.080 Then they could vary.

01:15:12.720 Maybe they feel comfortable spinning to the right and less comfortable spinning to the left, and then they can just get competent at both, right?

01:15:18.720 Just getting up and down off of a chair, you could have thousands of variations that you can explore.

01:15:23.780 Getting up and down off of the ground, all of those things, we can expand our affordances, and children will inherently do this.

01:15:32.120 I saw a documentary with Jack White when he was traveling through Canada, and Jack, he sets up his stage in a very interesting way.

01:15:40.640 So first of all, he plays this really old, beat-up guitar.

01:15:43.800 Yeah.

01:15:44.060 And it's just, he's had it forever, and it's just done, you know?

01:15:47.060 And it never stays in tune.

01:15:48.840 So while he's playing on stage, he has to tune his guitar nonstop.

01:15:52.780 And then he plays a bunch of different instruments, you know, laid out on the stage. 0.99

01:15:56.800 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. 0.82

01:16:03.480 And, 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. 0.82

01:16:13.560 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.

01:16:22.120 And so that's really, well, he's very wise.

01:16:25.680 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.

01:16:33.940 But Jack is an extremely, his lyrics are extremely optimistic and positive, and he's extremely playful.

01:16:39.880 And so he's a master of that transformation of the obstacle into the affordance.

01:16:44.140 He's basically doing parkour.

01:16:48.580 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.

01:16:57.720 Right, right.

01:16:58.680 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?

01:17:05.120 Just vary that so that, yeah, I see.

01:17:07.840 That's very interesting.

01:17:09.040 You could spin on your way up.

01:17:11.980 Yeah.

01:17:12.660 Right.

01:17:12.980 What are the relationships?

01:17:14.680 So, you know, just like contralateral versus ipsilateral.

01:17:17.100 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.

01:17:21.520 Then I can lean everything on one side, right?

01:17:24.100 I can do a spin as I stand up.

01:17:26.800 There's so many little fine-tuned variations that we can find once we take on this exploratory ethic in relationship to our movement.

01:17:33.980 And as we do that, we're going to be refining and making more sophisticated the body.

01:17:39.100 And 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.

01:17:52.160 Right, right.

01:17:53.900 Well, we can think about that two ways, you know.

01:17:56.080 One way is that you're mapping a broader set of possibilities onto any given object.

01:18:03.360 Exactly.

01:18:03.780 Objects aren't objects.

01:18:04.900 They're affordances and obstacles.

01:18:06.280 They're not objects.

01:18:07.300 And so you're expanding your map of the possibility of the world in your relationship to it.

01:18:12.980 And so that is an expansion of the meanings of the world.

01:18:15.520 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?

01:18:29.300 So I'm going to start building new motor maps, and that'll be a form of neural growth and neural regeneration.

01:18:34.900 I'm going to redress the imbalance between the two sides of my body.

01:18:39.300 But it's also the case that, you know, those physiological transformations cascade all the way down to the cellular level.

01:18:46.760 And if you put new stresses on yourself, especially voluntarily, you turn new genes on to code for new proteins.

01:18:54.340 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, you know, your internal physiological organization, and release new elements of your character.

01:19:12.480 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.

01:19:20.980 Yeah, yeah.

01:19:21.340 Absolutely. 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.

01:19:31.820 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.

01:19:39.560 But, right, the self is that highest potential, that second self that's laid out over time.

01:19:45.960 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.

01:19:58.460 Yeah, you bet. Well, you can think about, you imagine that coded into the DNA, the DNA is a repository of potential.

01:20:09.880 Yeah.

01:20:10.080 But the potential won't make itself manifest without the requisite demand, right?

01:20:14.360 Exactly.

01:20:14.400 It has to be, the stress has to call the potential into being.

01:20:18.320 And so that play, you know, maybe it's left-sided play, it's going to produce a new form of stress.

01:20:24.440 That's a new kind of demand.

01:20:26.440 And that's going to unlock new potential.

01:20:28.520 And part of that self, you know, Jung likened that self to the oak tree that's implicit in the acorn.

01:20:35.120 Yes.

01:20:35.460 And 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.

01:20:47.420 You could think about it that way.

01:20:49.160 The oak is going to develop differently depending on the soil that it's placed in.

01:20:53.040 But 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.

01:21:07.820 The 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.

01:21:25.380 And the spirit would be that of voluntary challenge, right?

01:21:29.920 So all the practices you're described of, you're describing, are undertaken in the spirit of voluntary challenge.

01:21:37.820 Yes.

01:21:38.180 And so while you're becoming better at each skill, you're also becoming better at manifesting the spirit of voluntary challenge.

01:21:45.460 Absolutely.

01:21:45.860 And that's like a meta spirit, right?

01:21:47.900 And there's no reason to assume that that isn't encoded in genetic potential as well.

01:21:53.640 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, if that expands out to something like,

01:22:05.080 well, well, it expands out in the Jewish writings into apprehension of God himself, it's the realization of that implicit potential.

01:22:16.640 It's the practice of the realization of that implicit potential that actually constitutes the union with that spirit.

01:22:23.800 Yeah, that's beautiful.

01:22:24.800 I was literally just reading, I read through all the beginnings of the chapters of Maps of Meaning yesterday.

01:22:32.320 And the chapter on the hostile brothers, right?

01:22:37.560 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.

01:22:45.780 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.

01:22:55.640 And 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.

01:23:04.300 And 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.

01:23:23.620 And that in order to step outside of it, in order to reground ourselves, we actually have to physically embody what that is.

01:23:31.900 And that's exactly what these practices do.

01:23:34.160 They take you into acting out that heroic archetype, that exploratory heroic archetype.

01:23:38.820 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.

01:23:45.780 Because it's only one way in which we relate to the fundamental aspects of reality.

01:23:50.820 But when we put it in dialogue with these other aspects of practice, all of a sudden that transformational capacity is increased.

01:23:58.460 So why, why does it, why does it fail and why is it so necessary to put it in context with the other practices?

01:24:06.080 Yeah.

01:24:06.740 Or why can it fail?

01:24:08.120 Yeah.

01:24:11.060 When I started parkour, I felt like it had dramatically transformed me.

01:24:16.300 And everyone around me who's starting parkour at the same time, we all had this, you know, messianic.

01:24:20.980 I mean, part of this is just developmental, right?

01:24:22.560 We'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.

01:24:30.460 But nonetheless, we did have this feeling.

01:24:32.640 And then over time, what I noticed was that people would talk about the changes, but I wouldn't necessarily see the change.

01:24:38.980 Or then other people came into discipline who were hobbyists, and they didn't really see the transformative power.

01:24:42.780 So I started asking, how do we get that transformative power?

01:24:45.060 And, like, the big one that I see all the time is, like, parkour is predominantly a young male sport.

01:24:50.860 It's, like, 90% young men who do it.

01:24:52.940 And a lot of times, they are kind of nerdy kids.

01:24:55.960 They didn't have a strong sport background.

01:24:57.860 They're small and, you know, not physically strong when they start.

01:25:00.660 And they come into the sport, and they develop these beautiful, incredibly strong physical bodies.

01:25:04.960 They get healthier.

01:25:05.700 They change their diets.

01:25:06.720 Their skin clears up.

01:25:07.820 And all of a sudden, they're literally physically beautiful young men.

01:25:10.640 And they're hyper courageous, right?

01:25:12.700 They can jump between buildings and do multiple flips.

01:25:15.640 But they still can't talk to a girl, right? 0.96

01:25:19.540 Right, right.

01:25:20.160 And it's, like, you talk so much about how this has made you courageous.

01:25:23.820 But in this very fundamental thing, you are not expressing that courage.

01:25:27.980 So if we're practicing—

01:25:29.640 Insufficient generalization.

01:25:31.660 Exactly.

01:25:32.620 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,

01:25:44.660 which is that general adaptation to the metagame.

01:25:47.960 So if we take on parkour as a practice and we think about it as a practice that builds us towards the metagame,

01:25:55.360 then that's automatically going to start, I think, potentiating the transfer.

01:25:59.820 But then we can ask, is there just a better way for me to cultivate courage right now?

01:26:04.760 Maybe I need to go do Toastmasters.

01:26:06.940 Maybe I need to go to a contact improv class.

01:26:09.240 And when you start to kind of schematize that you need connection and attunement across these fundamental axes,

01:26:17.600 then you can start to piece together the areas of your character that are most—

01:26:22.780 Right.

01:26:22.980 So how did you lay out the axes again?

01:26:25.560 You talked about internal integration.

01:26:27.740 Yes.

01:26:28.120 You talked about integration between people.

01:26:30.620 You talked about integration between the sexes, let's say.

01:26:33.560 And you talked about integration in relationship to the natural world.

01:26:38.440 So those are all different domains of games.

01:26:41.480 Yeah.

01:26:41.720 And you can think of the metagame as emerging out of all those domains, right?

01:26:45.100 You have to be mapped to yourself.

01:26:47.340 You have to be mapped to other people.

01:26:48.780 You have to be mapped to the other sex. 1.00

01:26:50.280 You have to be mapped to the world.

01:26:52.320 Yeah.

01:26:52.660 And you can't concentrate on any one of those at the expense of the other without becoming optimally—

01:26:59.120 You're not optimally balanced.

01:27:00.180 Yeah.

01:27:00.600 So the five that I've been using are the relationships internal to the self, right?

01:27:07.520 And those are structural and psychological.

01:27:11.140 The relationship between the self and the physical environment as a set of obstacles and affordances we move through.

01:27:17.100 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?

01:27:24.440 And you see this in play research as well.

01:27:27.780 Play research talks about exploratory locomotor play, object-oriented play, and rough-and-tumble play.

01:27:34.280 So if we take those fundamentals, so you have first the intrinsic.

01:27:40.660 And if you look at like a little baby, how do they start playing?

01:27:42.900 They're like, where's my toe, right?

01:27:44.780 Where are my fingers?

01:27:45.780 How do I move this body?

01:27:46.740 What's rolling?

01:27:47.400 That's like the somatic and structural layer.

01:27:49.500 And then they're able to crawl and cruise and climb.

01:27:52.500 And that's that parkour layer.

01:27:55.240 And then they're able to pick things up and manipulate them.

01:27:57.560 And that happens at the same time, but those are kind of two separate aspects of development.

01:28:01.280 And then they're always interacting with their mother first and their father and their siblings and their rough-and-tumble play is scaling up.

01:28:08.140 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 to ritual.

01:28:19.740 So you can see that development there.

01:28:23.280 So those are the five axes.

01:28:24.460 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.

01:28:35.780 And then you have the intrasexual.

01:28:37.960 And 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.

01:28:47.120 Does that all make sense the way I've laid that out?

01:28:49.740 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:28:50.980 Yeah, 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.

01:29:02.260 And it's also useful to point out that you don't want to allow the practice to become an end in itself.

01:29:10.140 Exactly.

01:29:10.440 I mean, the purpose of becoming great at basketball isn't to become great at basketball.

01:29:14.620 It's to become great at being a human being.

01:29:16.480 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, you know, maybe attention to the structure of the sport itself, all of that.

01:29:28.200 Exactly.

01:29:28.640 You don't want to make your discipline a dead end.

01:29:32.460 Precisely.

01:29:32.760 And the idea that it should be generalized is extremely important.

01:29:36.060 Yeah.

01:29:36.440 And so, because otherwise you could get locked within your subculture.

01:29:41.120 And that's when things get kind of cult-like.

01:29:43.140 Yes.

01:29:43.460 And I've seen this repeatedly.

01:29:45.080 Every practice that I've seen someone say is transformative, I've seen that there's a dark side to it.

01:29:50.560 So, in parkour, you can say, I'm going to go do this jump, and that's going to make me more courageous because I'm facing down my fear.

01:29:56.460 And it can absolutely do that.

01:29:58.660 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 it out everywhere else in your life.

01:30:07.260 It's like, no, I'm too afraid to talk to my parents.

01:30:08.920 Well, that's a video game problem, too.

01:30:10.660 Yeah.

01:30:10.840 Yeah, exactly.

01:30:12.020 Same thing, same thing.

01:30:13.460 Yeah.

01:30:13.740 So, then take something like meditation, Vipassana, right?

01:30:16.080 You're learning to calm yourself down, to be focused.

01:30:19.500 But then I've seen people who get trapped inside that state, and they can't access it outside of it.

01:30:25.760 They can become even more fragile.

01:30:28.320 Their equanimity can become more fragile through the practice.

01:30:31.820 Mm-hmm.

01:30:32.120 So, 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.

01:30:41.780 And 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.

01:30:50.140 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.

01:31:00.020 Right, right.

01:31:01.280 So, tell me about your enterprise per se.

01:31:05.380 Like, if people go onto your website, for example, what do they find?

01:31:09.880 What do you offer?

01:31:10.960 And how can people engage in this and duplicate it, you know, for themselves in their own lives?

01:31:17.460 Yeah.

01:31:17.980 So, we have a website of allmoveplay.com.

01:31:20.100 On there, you can find online courses that get you started.

01:31:23.060 They start with parkour and then add in elements of other things.

01:31:27.540 So, we have our online courses.

01:31:29.040 People can check those out.

01:31:30.020 And then we teach retreats.

01:31:31.180 That's really the center of what we do.

01:31:32.580 So, we're in the middle of kind of selling this year's retreats.

01:31:35.940 We have some soft spots left.

01:31:37.600 So, if people see this and want to join us, they probably want to get on that first.

01:31:41.620 In the retreats, that's where we're able to go deepest into this full experience.

01:31:47.640 Because we talk about those five fundamental practices that I mentioned.

01:31:52.540 It's four fundamental practices that afford five connections.

01:31:55.480 But then we also go into the mindfulness practices, which are kind of a derivative of the somatic and structural layer.

01:32:03.100 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.

01:32:10.340 And then into the dialogical, right?

01:32:12.420 So, 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.

01:32:32.280 And then there's a ritual aspect to it as well.

01:32:34.860 So, we have two, five…

01:32:36.120 People experience…

01:32:37.400 Oh, yeah.

01:32:37.800 Sorry.

01:32:38.060 Go ahead.

01:32:38.520 Obviously, you're going to lay that out.

01:32:39.640 Tell me exactly what happens when someone comes to a retreat.

01:32:42.420 Absolutely.

01:32:43.120 So, we have two five-day retreats and one eight-day retreat in the summer.

01:32:46.780 And when you come, essentially, we'll pick everyone up.

01:32:50.260 And 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.

01:33:04.360 Then 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.

01:33:15.340 And doing that right is really important.

01:33:17.920 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.

01:33:30.500 So, actually, like, use a piece of this.

01:33:32.760 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.

01:33:44.120 And 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.

01:33:49.600 And 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.

01:34:00.460 So, I walked down there, and I did a little mantra saying, I'm going to let all that go.

01:34:03.900 When 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.

01:34:08.660 And 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.

01:34:16.700 And sure enough, like, I was so much more ready to be focused once I exited the water.

01:34:21.420 So, we'll do a similar type of process with someone when they arrive for this retreat.

01:34:25.420 And then, over the course of the retreat, we'll take them to a bunch of beautiful spaces.

01:34:29.700 So, there are spaces where we, as I mentioned, jump into water from cliffs.

01:34:34.620 There'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.

01:34:42.500 To actually climb up through this tunnel where water is pouring down on your head is extraordinary.

01:34:48.540 And 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.

01:34:56.300 And 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.

01:35:03.660 And then, we have these beautiful trees that we move through, you know.

01:35:06.960 Human beings are descendants of 60 million years of arboreal evolution, so we take people back into moving in the trees.

01:35:17.240 And we take people up to alpine lakes and swim in the alpine lakes.

01:35:20.160 We take people to natural water slides.

01:35:22.000 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 effectively with other people, and with playing games with balls and sticks and ropes.

01:35:35.920 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.

01:35:45.140 Learning, tracking, learning wild edibles.

01:35:47.980 So, they're more deeply connecting and mapping out the connection between the human being and the natural world.

01:35:53.480 So, I could go on and on.

01:35:55.120 How long have you been doing that?

01:35:57.060 This is the 11th year that we've been offering these retreats.

01:36:00.080 Oh, yeah.

01:36:00.360 And so, how many people have you offered the retreats to about now?

01:36:04.140 I'm not sure.

01:36:05.700 So, the first few years, we just did one retreat a year, and we take approximately 20 students per retreat.

01:36:11.520 And then, the last few years, we've been offering three retreats a year.

01:36:14.820 So, maybe 300 people, something like that.

01:36:18.240 Uh-huh.

01:36:18.780 And so, what do people report?

01:36:22.240 What's their experience?

01:36:23.860 Yeah.

01:36:24.000 And do you have any sense of what the longer-term impact is in their life?

01:36:28.700 Yeah.

01:36:29.680 I mean, so, John said it was the most—I think he said it was the most transformative experience of his life, which is extraordinary.

01:36:35.980 Oh, yeah.

01:36:36.260 Yeah, that's an extraordinary feather in my cap, right, to hear that from John McGee.

01:36:40.720 That's for sure.

01:36:41.300 Yeah, yeah.

01:36:41.720 Yeah.

01:36:42.220 Definitely.

01:36:43.000 Definitely.

01:36:43.420 And so, why did he feel that?

01:36:45.880 So, if I can remember correctly, John and I had a whole conversation about this on his channel.

01:36:50.460 But 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.

01:37:13.140 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.

01:37:25.840 Yeah, well, and I mean, John, like me, we operate a fair bit in the abstract realm.

01:37:30.380 And 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.

01:37:44.680 Yeah.

01:37:45.320 When you were a kid, you were diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and also with dyslexia.

01:37:51.800 What behaviors were you manifesting, do you believe, that brought about the ADHD diagnosis, and how did that play out in your life?

01:38:03.160 What were you doing in class that you shouldn't have been doing?

01:38:07.160 Most things, probably.

01:38:09.080 I'll tell you a story.

01:38:10.180 So, my son is eight years old, and when he was maybe two years old, my mom said, here's not ADHD.

01:38:18.560 That's my son.

01:38:19.280 And I said, how do you know already?

01:38:21.760 And she's like, he closes the door every time he leaves a room.

01:38:26.780 And I was like, and it's been clear since he was little that he didn't have the same attentional problems that I did.

01:38:32.880 So, I, but he's, he resembles me in certain ways because he loves all the kind of athletic stuff.

01:38:37.740 He's very good at parkour, very good at rough, you know, the wrestling and loves sport.

01:38:42.760 And so, I was asking my older brother, you know, does Keir remind you of me at the same age?

01:38:50.340 And he said, personality-wise, no, right?

01:38:53.120 When 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.

01:39:00.940 So, that was the kind of behavior.

01:39:02.460 Right, right.

01:39:03.020 I was acting out.

01:39:04.200 I was, I was uncontainable physically, right?

01:39:07.080 Like, if you put me in a chair, I would just wiggle out of it, you know, like a car seat.

01:39:12.320 You know, my mom told me that she sewed like a wool suit for me when I was little.

01:39:17.260 And she was like, okay, just don't get it muddy.

01:39:19.500 And I walked right out and like sat down in a mud puddle. 0.96

01:39:21.780 So, I was climbing trees and getting in fights and everything when I was little.

01:39:28.540 And I really struggled with just the demand to sit still and try to absorb things in school.

01:39:37.760 I remember really clearly in, I think, first grade, we were learning addition and subtraction.

01:39:44.900 And I just read the book until it got to the division and multiplication stuff.

01:39:48.260 And then I just went and told my mom, hey, I can do division and multiplication.

01:39:53.100 And then I went back to school and they made me write three plus four equals seven over and over again.

01:39:58.660 Yeah.

01:39:58.980 Rope memorization.

01:40:00.540 And I wrote it and then I got frustrated and I'd get more frustrated.

01:40:04.120 And then eventually it felt like there was a black wall that would just descend.

01:40:07.000 And I couldn't even see the numbers as real anymore.

01:40:09.700 And I just, I just refused.

01:40:11.780 So, in third grade, which is a grade that they, they took me out of, I read a full length novel for the first time.

01:40:20.320 And I also tested as completely illiterate at the end of the school year.

01:40:25.140 So, you know, very frustrating.

01:40:27.960 So, there's a lot of things we don't understand.

01:40:30.400 We don't, we don't, our models of childhood temperament are relatively underdeveloped.

01:40:37.560 So, I think it was Rothbard who developed the basic classification scene for childhood temperament.

01:40:44.060 There's definitely extroversion and neuroticism.

01:40:46.380 And I can't remember what the third category they used was, but it was kind of an intermingling of agreeableness and conscientiousness.

01:40:54.040 Some constraint, I think that's what it was called.

01:40:56.820 And maybe that differentiates out into the big five as adult development takes place.

01:41:01.820 Or maybe we're just not very sophisticated assessing the full five dimensions in childhood.

01:41:06.980 That's more likely the case.

01:41:08.680 But there is this overlay of childhood temperament investigation.

01:41:13.000 Yeah, it was extroversion, neuroticism, and constraint, if I remember correctly.

01:41:17.040 And the more, you know, the more behaviorally disinhibited kids who might fall into the ADHD category would be lower in constraint.

01:41:25.780 But I don't, I think we do a very bad job of understanding temperamental contribution to that.

01:41:33.340 Because my student of mine, Colin DeYoung, and I worked on a two-dimensional personality model, which was plasticity and stability.

01:41:41.240 Yep.

01:41:41.720 And plastic people who are modifiable, their personalities are quite modifiable.

01:41:49.180 They're extroverted and open.

01:41:50.820 That makes you hyper-exploratory, eh?

01:41:52.880 And so, if you're an active kid, you're going to be extroverted.

01:41:58.000 And if you're open, then you're interested in all sorts of ideas and possibilities.

01:42:01.640 And the addition of those two makes you hyper-exploratory.

01:42:04.720 And then if you're lower in agreeableness and lower in conscientiousness, then there's less constraint on that.

01:42:11.240 And my suspicion is very strong that most of what we diagnose as ADHD is just temperamental variation.

01:42:17.940 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,

01:42:27.380 they're not going to be happy, especially if they're also disagreeable with sitting down and being constrained in classrooms.

01:42:34.680 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.

01:42:42.800 Yep.

01:42:43.600 Yep.

01:42:43.880 And that's really relevant for disagreeable boys because it puts a lot of them on the cusp of failure.

01:42:49.380 So imagine that you're kind of borderline academically, but you're disagreeable, so you're not very obedient.

01:42:54.760 Then you're a problem kid, you're much more likely to be failed as a consequence of that.

01:42:59.720 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,

01:43:07.860 you're not ever going to cause any trouble in class.

01:43:09.820 You'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.

01:43:18.560 Yeah, absolutely.

01:43:19.440 Lots of boys, in particular, they don't thrive in that environment.

01:43:22.560 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?

01:43:34.360 And so I write 99th percentile for openness to experience, 99th percentile for assertiveness, third percentile for agreeability, 10th percentile for conscientiousness.

01:43:47.020 So there you go.

01:43:48.560 That's what I scored on your test.

01:43:50.400 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:43:50.880 But 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.

01:44:06.420 And that play is developmental there.

01:44:09.180 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?

01:44:18.920 Like some of the social graces didn't come to me really until I was close to 30 or even after 30.

01:44:24.220 And I had this dramatic experience of taking on parkour and finding that my inattentiveness problems were massively reduced.

01:44:35.640 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.

01:44:43.780 And then you can inhibit their behavior.

01:44:46.400 It's a major piece of research.

01:44:47.560 Yeah.

01:44:48.100 And you can inhibit their behavior through amphetamines, but they're not actually maturing with the cortex, right?

01:44:53.200 So it was like, parkour for me was the medicine that I needed to actually begin to mature.

01:45:00.240 There is evidence for the delayed maturity hypothesis.

01:45:03.960 So here's the best evidence.

01:45:05.840 So in any given grade of children, there are some children who are about a year older than the youngest children in the class.

01:45:15.400 So there's a year gap.

01:45:17.000 Yeah.

01:45:17.420 So, you know, the oldest grade three child could be in grade four and the youngest grade three child could be in grade two.

01:45:24.000 That's my kids.

01:45:24.820 And that's a hell of a gap at that age.

01:45:27.540 Now, what you do see is that the rates of behavioral problem are radically elevated in the youngest kids in the class.

01:45:37.100 Okay.

01:45:37.340 So not only do you see that, so the youngest kids are much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, for example,

01:45:43.380 but also the youngest kids are also much less likely to be athletically successful.

01:45:49.260 So, for example, if you look at NHL athletes, National Hockey League athletes, they're disproportionately older kids in their grade school class.

01:45:59.280 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.

01:46:05.640 Yeah.

01:46:06.080 Like, substantially great.

01:46:08.160 And so, you know, if you're a kid who is a little immature in terms of neurological development,

01:46:14.880 and then you're also temperamentally inclined to be exploratory and unconstrained,

01:46:21.280 well, then you've got a perfect storm there for hypothetically an ADHD diagnosis.

01:46:25.900 But one of the things people should know, too, this is very, very important.

01:46:30.180 So originally, the marker for the neurological element of ADHD was that kids who are hyperactive had a paradoxical reaction to amphetamines.

01:46:42.600 So for most people, amphetamines hypothetically were stimulating, but for ADHD kids, it was paradoxical because it calmed them down.

01:46:50.780 And that was all not true.

01:46:53.000 None of that's true.

01:46:54.160 It's not true at all.

01:46:55.960 Amphetamines have the same effect on everyone.

01:46:58.380 They increase focused, focal, narrow attention.

01:47:02.960 Yeah.

01:47:03.180 And that can suppress, well, Panksep showed it suppresses play.

01:47:07.480 Exactly.

01:47:07.740 It suppresses that excess of exploratory activity.

01:47:10.160 But that is not a paradoxical reaction, which is why so many kids in university, for example, will take Ritalin as a study aid.

01:47:18.360 Yep.

01:47:18.600 Because it does, like, that increase in dopaminergic activity increases the inhibitory capacity of focal attention.

01:47:27.220 But that doesn't mean that it's diagnostic of some underlying disorder.

01:47:30.700 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.

01:47:45.680 Yeah.

01:47:46.780 I, you know, I think that there is some association with the EDAR gene and attention deficit disorder.

01:47:54.760 And what's interesting is that EDAR, is it EDAR?

01:47:59.420 No.

01:47:59.980 DRD4?

01:48:00.360 DRD4.

01:48:00.940 EDAR is the gene that codes for lots of Asian traits.

01:48:04.280 But DRD4, my understanding is that DRD4 actually appears to be under positive selection in hunter-forager cultures and pastoral cultures.

01:48:11.760 So there's something about the ability.

01:48:13.400 Or 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.

01:48:23.660 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.

01:48:33.420 When 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.

01:48:41.440 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.

01:48:51.940 Because I would, I couldn't, I couldn't make the rest of the conversations irrelevant.

01:48:56.600 My brain would always be picking up pieces of conversations.

01:48:59.620 And 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.

01:49:12.100 But my attention was always defraying everywhere and it would pick up stuff.

01:49:16.000 But if you think about a hunter-forager situation, that is potentially really useful in picking up where an animal is in the environment.

01:49:22.480 So even dyslexia seems to also be related to the ability to pick up certain types of patterns in the environment more effectively.

01:49:31.440 So 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.

01:49:42.160 Yeah, well, the dyslexia, I mean, most kids show signs of dyslexia when they first start to recognize letters.

01:49:49.100 Because the most common confusion in perception is P's, Q's, B's, and D's.

01:49:55.600 And all the, they only differ by orientation.

01:49:58.720 And what happens is that you need massed practice to build the neurological circuitry that allows for the discrimination.

01:50:07.780 And my guess is that some people need a lot more massed practice than others.

01:50:11.740 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.

01:50:19.100 Yeah.

01:50:19.680 And that was there right from the time I was tiny.

01:50:22.140 Yeah.

01:50:22.340 But I know my friend of mine, who's an unbelievable genius, was quite dyslexic.

01:50:27.700 And he still has some trouble with P's and Q's and D's.

01:50:30.780 And obviously there's a threshold there for automatization.

01:50:34.240 And some people automatize perceptions very, very rapidly, say, semantically.

01:50:39.640 And other people need mass practice.

01:50:41.180 But, and how that's tied in with attention deficit disorder, that's a real tough one.

01:50:46.720 Now you said, when we're talking on YouTube, you said that when you were very young, your father and you interacted a lot.

01:50:53.780 Mm-hmm.

01:50:54.040 And what do you remember about that?

01:50:56.620 Yeah, it's interesting.

01:50:57.520 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 coming, sunrise coming up over the hill.

01:51:08.300 And we're eating watermelon together.

01:51:10.200 And I had a really warm sense of my dad at that age.

01:51:13.280 And he particularly was really great at doing rough and double play.

01:51:16.900 He was, my dad was a, was a all-state wrestler and collegiate football player.

01:51:22.800 He played linebacker in college.

01:51:24.400 So he's very physically strong and capable and very confident.

01:51:28.040 So when we were little, he used to just like hold us overhead and run with us.

01:51:31.740 So like playing the airplane game with the babies is a Kelly tradition.

01:51:37.260 And, yeah.

01:51:37.720 Oh, yeah.

01:51:38.120 Yeah.

01:51:38.280 That's insanely exciting.

01:51:39.620 Like imagine being hoisted into the air by someone 18 feet tall and run down the field.

01:51:44.160 Yeah.

01:51:44.860 So he did that kind of stuff with us all the time when I was little.

01:51:50.900 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.

01:52:00.000 So I was going to formal classes and I was really struggling in the formal classes.

01:52:03.520 And so my dad actually took me to a pond and we watched the frogs swim.

01:52:07.020 And he like took me into the water and I learned to breaststroke by watching frogs.

01:52:12.320 And 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.

01:52:17.580 And he's kind of a pretty well-known natural builder.

01:52:21.620 His work's been featured in, you know, various TV shows and books.

01:52:24.720 So he has a very magical, strange world that he lives within that's pretty great for a child in certain ways.

01:52:34.100 But he had a really, really traumatic experience of school as well.

01:52:38.560 And when I started school and he saw me doing that, I think it was very hard for him emotionally.

01:52:44.320 And so I think he sort of pulled back from me at that stage.

01:52:50.620 And then.

01:52:51.620 And how old would you be then?

01:52:52.880 Six years old.

01:52:55.340 Five and six.

01:52:55.800 You had that underlying.

01:52:57.020 So you had six years there where you built that physical connection.

01:53:00.900 Yeah.

01:53:01.200 So that's, you got through that crucial developmental period.

01:53:04.500 Yeah.

01:53:04.740 With that paternal relationship, very functional and intact.

01:53:07.860 You know, one of the things we should point out here for any mothers who are listening,

01:53:11.820 who are apprehensive about watching their spouses, their husbands play with their children.

01:53:18.240 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.

01:53:27.960 And so don't turn away and don't leave the room.

01:53:31.020 Watch.

01:53:31.880 And watch your kids, because if your kids are laughing, here's a rule.

01:53:35.540 If your kids are playing with their father and they're not crying, everything's okay, especially if they're laughing.

01:53:42.560 But, you know, they don't have to be laughing all the time.

01:53:45.420 They can even be looking afraid.

01:53:47.460 As long as they're not crying, the frame is intact and you don't have to worry.

01:53:52.340 And, you know, even if there are tears upon occasion, you know, as long as they're not screams of agony and outrage,

01:53:59.460 a little bit of tears is also not indicative that something terrible has happened.

01:54:05.700 Because when you're playing, there's going to be mishaps from time to time.

01:54:09.380 And the kid has to learn to deal with the mishaps, too.

01:54:12.060 You know, people are going to get hurt.

01:54:13.380 They're going to get a thumb in the eye or whatever the hell it is or be pushed a little bit too far.

01:54:17.300 Or to play properly with someone is going to mean that now and then you're pushed a little farther than you should be.

01:54:24.800 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. 1.00

01:54:33.500 Yeah, this is a big passion of mine, right?

01:54:35.920 As someone who grew up with the experiences that I had and who is the type of person that I am.

01:54:40.640 Like, I've played with my kids really intensely and my wife's very accepting of it.

01:54:43.860 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.

01:54:52.640 And the female role is to nurture the child more. 1.00

01:54:54.800 And what's really interesting to me is how the kids self-select that, right?

01:54:58.340 Like, if they are in a—when they need nurturance, they will come to me if their mother's unavailable.

01:55:03.820 And I will nurture them and I will do what they need.

01:55:06.580 But if she's available and they're hurt and they're crying or whatever, they don't want me to do anything.

01:55:14.280 She's their first choice.

01:55:15.240 They want mom.

01:55:16.220 It's like, my job is just to take them to mom if necessary, right?

01:55:20.020 But on the flip side, when they're excited and they want to play, they want me, right?

01:55:24.860 They want me to be that facilitator of this intense, encouraging play.

01:55:29.160 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.

01:55:40.260 And I see all the time this kind of dysfunctional hyperfeminization of the way that we treat children.

01:55:47.300 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.

01:55:54.420 So my daughter's there, my five-year-old, and there's this other five-year-old boy.

01:55:57.600 And so she's showing him things that she can do on the monkey bars.

01:56:00.560 And he's showing her stuff.

01:56:02.100 And they're like, well, I can do more than you.

01:56:03.380 I can do more than you.

01:56:03.940 My dad can do more than you.

01:56:04.980 My dad can do more than you, right?

01:56:06.720 And she ends up—she's trying to do the monkey bars. 1.00

01:56:10.460 She just learned to do the monkey bars. 1.00

01:56:11.960 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.

01:56:18.460 And then the little boy gets up and he tries to just repeat what she did.

01:56:22.360 And his grandfather actually comes over and is like, don't do that.

01:56:26.480 Don't do that.

01:56:26.840 That's bad for your shoulder.

01:56:28.840 I'm like, do you know that, right?

01:56:31.940 Like, why are you feeding that fear to your child?

01:56:34.060 All the time, like, we're running, jumping, climbing in these public spaces with our kids.

01:56:38.780 And you'll hear people say, don't do that.

01:56:40.560 You're going to get hurt.

01:56:41.500 Don't do that.

01:56:42.160 You're, you know, that's dangerous.

01:56:43.240 And what I think is that our role is, as parents, is to grow children into highly competent adults.

01:56:52.220 And to do that, we need to—we need to slowly eradicate unnecessary fears and build resilience into the child.

01:57:00.560 Instead of inculcating them.

01:57:01.900 Exactly.

01:57:02.300 That's exactly the word.

01:57:03.380 We need to inoculate. 0.89

01:57:04.120 You should be neurotic and fearful instead.

01:57:06.960 And it's happening all the time.

01:57:08.300 And apprehensive.

01:57:09.480 It is.

01:57:09.940 It's happening all the time.

01:57:11.060 Yeah.

01:57:11.340 It's no wonder kids are demoralized because they're bombarded with demoralizing messages all the time.

01:57:17.380 Don't do that.

01:57:18.060 You'll get hurt.

01:57:18.800 It's like, yeah, well, you know, don't do that and you'll get hurt.

01:57:24.200 The hurt is unavoidable.

01:57:25.560 The question is whether or not you can master it.

01:57:27.420 And it is—it's a very sad thing to see that sense disappear.

01:57:32.040 And also to be—to have it replaced by a kind of, you know, insistent moralizing, too.

01:57:37.420 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.

01:57:45.760 And we're almost at that point in our culture now.

01:57:48.300 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.

01:57:53.780 And it's like, that kid should be trying to do it.

01:57:56.200 He should be helped to understand the appropriate level of challenge for them.

01:58:02.180 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.

01:58:10.040 What I try to say is, how can I help you do that?

01:58:13.380 Right?

01:58:13.980 Right, exactly.

01:58:14.780 How can we set this up?

01:58:16.480 Like, my son taught himself to do a backflip the other day.

01:58:20.720 And he was just going to—he's learned it on a trampoline and decided he was ready to do it on the ground.

01:58:25.780 And I was like, okay, do you want me to spot you?

01:58:28.040 He's like, no.

01:58:29.140 I was like, do you want me to give you some drills to prepare?

01:58:31.360 No.

01:58:32.200 And then he was going to do it up onto a mat that was, like, eight inches high.

01:58:37.280 And so I was thinking, like, getting all the way around and getting onto this mat, that's not going to work.

01:58:40.720 So I was like, at least let me just put this block there for you so that it's level with the mat.

01:58:44.480 And then he was perfectly safe, and I was confident.

01:58:46.820 I walked away and let him have his process of doing it.

01:58:50.580 And it's a challenge as a coach, right?

01:58:53.880 I'm used to being in people's process.

01:58:56.080 But I have to be very careful with my children because there's this separation of role between the coach and the father.

01:59:02.660 It's very easy for the father to be overbearing.

01:59:04.280 And so I have to really, like, separate myself sometimes and say, I'm giving you that.

01:59:10.120 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.

01:59:19.260 Yeah.

01:59:19.500 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.

01:59:32.980 Like, 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.

01:59:45.860 Yep.

01:59:46.000 And then women have to pull themselves away from that, and that's not an easy thing to do. 1.00

01:59:50.960 And so, and then women are also more sensitive to threat and emotional distress, and so that also makes their proclivity to intervene more paramount. 0.68

02:00:01.340 What's real?

02:00:01.740 And then they have to have trust for men.

02:00:03.860 Yeah.

02:00:04.000 That'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.

02:00:13.220 It'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.

02:00:26.340 Yeah.

02:00:26.580 And so you get a terrible spiral developing there.

02:00:29.000 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, you know, like, punishing people for their virtues is the worst thing you can do.

02:00:44.420 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:00:45.400 Well, I saw that how I see that happening in families all the time.

02:00:47.960 The fathers end up alienated from the children because every time they try to interact, they get micro-punished.

02:00:53.340 And it just, and it just, after a hundred attempts, they just give up.

02:00:57.540 It's really not good.

02:00:58.960 Well, you also pointed out something very important.

02:01:01.260 You know, you said that the children, if you watch your children, they'll calibrate their requirement.

02:01:08.240 So one of the things parents should know, because you might ask, well, how much should you be around your children?

02:01:13.700 And the answer is, well, it depends on the child.

02:01:15.560 And 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.

02:01:28.260 And one of the things you want to be, do as a primary caregiver is to be available for that.

02:01:34.120 So you say, go out, go out and play.

02:01:36.220 But if you need me, I'm here.

02:01:38.240 And then the kid will go out and play.

02:01:39.620 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.

02:01:45.880 And then that'll sort of put them back together, reestablish that security, and then they can go out and play again.

02:01:51.300 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.

02:02:00.560 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.

02:02:10.460 But it does tend to differentiate itself sexually.

02:02:13.560 Yeah, I think it's really important for fathers to cultivate their capacity for nurturance and for mothers to cultivate their capacity for encouragement.

02:02:22.000 We need to be available to hold that bandwidth for our children as needed.

02:02:26.920 But we also have to recognize that we have unique strengths, right?

02:02:30.160 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.

02:02:38.080 But I used to just have an open rule.

02:02:40.100 If they wanted to come up and punch somebody, they could just come and punch me, and it was fine, right?

02:02:44.480 And so, like, you know, my kids can belt, and I'm very proud of it.

02:02:52.020 Well, and even that, you know, even that's something that's frowned on.

02:02:56.440 Like, I taught both my kids to punch when they were very little, you know?

02:02:59.680 And I taught them how to use their whole body to really, you know, to really give me a good whack.

02:03:04.580 And, of course, they really liked that.

02:03:06.180 But the knee-jerk response to that is, well, your children should never have to resort to violence.

02:03:11.100 It's like, well, first of all, if they can resort to violence, they're much less likely to have to.

02:03:18.940 And because they're not intimidated when the local bully decides to determine if they're a target for harassment.

02:03:25.180 Because they knew perfectly well that they had something at their disposal that was likely to be effective.

02:03:30.580 They also really enjoyed learning to punch.

02:03:33.060 And I would say that was even more true of my daughter than it was of my son.

02:03:36.620 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.

02:03:44.400 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.

02:03:52.020 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.

02:03:56.640 Yeah, I mean, I think it's my friend Rory Miller, who's a great self-defense thinker.

02:04:01.940 He says, you don't get to choose the bad things that happen to you.

02:04:04.480 You say you should never have to resort to violence, but violence can occur in your life.

02:04:10.900 It's occurred in my life, right?

02:04:12.160 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.

02:04:24.340 And then I grew up and I was a bouncer for three years and been attacked on basketball courts and stuff like that.

02:04:30.860 It's like being able to handle myself is great.

02:04:33.320 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.

02:04:42.760 Precisely.

02:04:43.420 It's when people have no idea how to respond to aggression that really terrible things start to happen.

02:04:49.020 Yeah, that's the bite inhibition talk about with the dogs that we talked about earlier.

02:04:53.020 Right, right.

02:04:53.620 It's the same thing, right?

02:04:54.980 Like if you, this is a big problem with the police right now.

02:04:59.800 We don't have well-trained, physically adept police who actually have highly calibrated, high competency and lower force levels.

02:05:07.860 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.

02:05:19.340 We need to actually build people.

02:05:21.060 And it's the same thing in your life, right?

02:05:22.780 Like I've, like I said.

02:05:24.620 Have you offered your move play?

02:05:26.440 Have you offered your retreats to police forces?

02:05:30.400 I haven't.

02:05:31.120 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.

02:05:37.960 But I would love to work with law enforcement and military.

02:05:40.600 Yeah, man, that sounds like a really good idea.

02:05:42.380 That sounds like a really good idea to bring that calibration in.

02:05:46.300 Well, especially for police.

02:05:47.600 Yes.

02:05:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:05:48.440 We need to calibrate people to the physicality.

02:05:50.760 And I'll tell you a story because I think this is a fascinating example of like the way that kids self-organize for these things.

02:05:59.720 I saw a video many years ago of a, I think it was a Turkish man and his son.

02:06:03.920 And the son was sitting in the man's lap and he was slapping him in the face.

02:06:07.580 And then the father was slapping the little boy in the face.

02:06:10.440 And it was getting harder and harder.

02:06:13.900 They were exchanging harder and harder slaps.

02:06:15.820 And I felt really, really uncomfortable watching this.

02:06:18.980 But the kid was giggling and giggling and giggling.

02:06:22.240 And I didn't know how to interpret it at the time.

02:06:25.980 But then when my niece was seven years old, she was sitting in my lap and she just slapped me out of nowhere. 0.99

02:06:31.780 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.

02:06:38.180 And so I gave her a little slap. 1.00

02:06:40.880 I gave her a little slap. 1.00

02:06:42.080 And I was very careful that I hit her slightly less hard than she hit me.

02:06:46.800 And she looked at me like, she was just like, wow, wow, what just happened?

02:06:52.500 And then she slapped me again. 1.00

02:06:54.300 And then I slapped her again. 1.00

02:06:55.900 And then we did this game.

02:06:57.680 And then for a few months when she saw me, she would initiate this game with me.

02:07:02.360 And then it was over.

02:07:04.540 She doesn't even remember it.

02:07:05.380 But that was very interesting.

02:07:08.660 So then when my oldest daughter was about 18 months, she slapped me.

02:07:12.520 Maybe it was a year or two years, somewhere around there.

02:07:14.500 She slapped me.

02:07:15.280 And I did the same thing with her.

02:07:16.580 I was very, very careful to calibrate the force so that it was less than what she did.

02:07:22.700 But when she hit me harder, she got hit a little bit harder. 1.00

02:07:25.680 And so she would do that with me.

02:07:27.260 And then she never hit any.

02:07:29.100 Well, you know, what you're doing there, well, you think, okay, so you might say, well, you never have to resort to violence.

02:07:34.900 It's like, okay, fine.

02:07:36.220 In a utopian world, perhaps, possibly, that might be true, although it isn't.

02:07:41.320 But in any case.

02:07:42.760 So you might say then, well, what does a slap mean?

02:07:46.280 Yep.

02:07:46.480 And what a slap means is this, right?

02:07:49.460 There's no explanation outside of the embodiment.

02:07:52.480 And so if a child slaps you, well, partly it's exploratory behavior.

02:07:57.240 I mean, what does this mean?

02:07:59.520 And what it means is the response.

02:08:01.420 And, well, it means this.

02:08:02.540 Whack.

02:08:02.880 Oh, that's what it's like to be slapped.

02:08:04.920 Okay, well, that's interesting.

02:08:06.360 It's like, what's the acceptable limits to that?

02:08:09.840 Well, you do that by that playful calibration.

02:08:12.540 You know, and that can get pretty harsh.

02:08:15.480 And it should get pretty harsh because it should take you to the edge of pain, right?

02:08:19.080 Because that's where you have to see where, well, it's like teasing.

02:08:23.040 I had a rule in my house, which was, you know, you stay on the funny side of the joke.

02:08:28.400 Because, and you can push it right to the edge because that's where it's really funny.

02:08:32.720 But past that, it's no longer funny.

02:08:34.920 Are you funny or annoying?

02:08:36.560 Yeah.

02:08:36.820 There's a fine line, man.

02:08:38.140 And it's the same thing you're doing when you're calibrating slaps.

02:08:41.280 It's like, what exactly does this mean?

02:08:46.860 You have to play that out at an embodied level to understand it.

02:08:51.180 Yeah.

02:08:51.580 So it was such a fascinating experience to do that with her and to see that.

02:08:56.220 And then, like, kids explore.

02:08:59.320 They fight with each other when they're little, right?

02:09:01.460 They try to establish, you know, dominance or whatever.

02:09:04.300 She never had a problem.

02:09:05.260 She never had a physical conflict with another kid in school.

02:09:07.540 And I was like, I don't know for sure.

02:09:09.600 Obviously, it's speculative, but I had this sense that, like, she got to explore these

02:09:12.840 things at home.

02:09:13.460 So she didn't have the same, she didn't have the same curiosity.

02:09:16.020 She didn't have the same lack of recognition of what that context meant.

02:09:20.560 And then, interestingly, my son did the same thing.

02:09:23.060 But it was different because he hit me so much harder than she hit.

02:09:28.780 Uh-huh.

02:09:29.260 And he wanted to play it way more intensely.

02:09:32.300 And it was very interesting because he would, she would slap and then slap a little bit

02:09:37.360 harder and then a little bit harder.

02:09:38.560 She was really, like, kind of grating up.

02:09:40.440 But he would get excited.

02:09:41.580 Yeah, yeah.

02:09:41.820 And then he would rear back and slap me really hard.

02:09:44.480 And then he would cringe.

02:09:45.580 Right.

02:09:46.160 He would know that he'd gone over the line.

02:09:48.680 Right, right.

02:09:48.800 And he'd be like, oh.

02:09:50.260 You know, and he's just a small little kid, right?

02:09:52.240 And I would look at him like, are we playing?

02:09:55.980 Are you accepting that you're, you've up the ante and now you're going to accept it?

02:09:59.480 And he'd look at me and he would relax and say, okay, no, I accept what I created.

02:10:06.600 And I would, again, always stay below his force threshold.

02:10:11.120 But then he got to sense that if you push, you'll get pushed back.

02:10:15.540 Right?

02:10:16.180 Yeah.

02:10:16.460 And if you play with the right partner.

02:10:17.680 Yeah, well, and also you know how big the push is, right?

02:10:20.360 Because you said he took bigger leaps.

02:10:22.420 Like, he wouldn't know what the scale of the leap is without playing with it.

02:10:27.420 You know, you do that with, you can do that with dogs too if they're reasonably well trained.

02:10:31.600 You know, a good way to initiate a game with a dog is to give it a whack.

02:10:34.800 Yep.

02:10:35.300 What the dog will do is bite generally in proportion to the force of the slap.

02:10:41.360 Yep.

02:10:41.620 And dogs find that extremely exciting, you know.

02:10:43.820 And so it's a very quick way of getting a dog to play. 1.00

02:10:46.840 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. 1.00

02:10:52.260 Or it'll pee, you know, it'll do something completely inappropriate. 1.00

02:10:55.040 A poorly socialized dog.

02:10:56.700 Halfway.

02:10:58.280 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

02:10:59.720 And it can't calibrate its responses.

02:11:02.260 But here's the problem, Jordan. 0.93

02:11:04.840 We are a society of poorly socialized dogs.

02:11:08.540 Yes, this is definitely true.

02:11:10.680 It's definitely true. 0.57

02:11:12.040 Yeah, yeah.

02:11:12.820 Well, I see that.

02:11:13.520 I see when I'm walking down the street, you know, I see kids, because I watch kids all the time.

02:11:18.080 And I can just see kids lumbering down the street who haven't been played with.

02:11:23.100 And I can tell because their movements are low resolution.

02:11:26.240 They're blocky.

02:11:27.400 They're inarticulate even in their physical movement.

02:11:31.360 There's nothing graceful about them.

02:11:33.260 And those are kids too.

02:11:34.560 Like, you'll see a kid like that sort of standing like this in the corner, you know.

02:11:38.820 And you walk by and he doesn't even look at you because he doesn't know how to initiate attention.

02:11:43.080 You go up to a kid like that and poke him.

02:11:45.180 And he'll do this.

02:11:46.740 Like, it's like a six-month-old response, eh?

02:11:49.440 Yep.

02:11:49.680 He'll do this.

02:11:50.780 And then you poke him again and he'll do this.

02:11:52.620 And if you take a kid like that and poke him a dozen times, he'll look at you, right?

02:11:57.540 And then kind of wondering.

02:11:59.020 And then once he looks at you, you know, then you can give him a little shove or something and get that going.

02:12:05.200 But you see kids like that all the time who've never been played with at all.

02:12:08.760 They have no idea.

02:12:10.120 They have no idea what's going on.

02:12:11.760 They're desperate for it, you know.

02:12:13.900 And the really sad kids you'll see might take you 30 forays before you can entice them out of their shell.

02:12:23.100 And 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.

02:12:33.340 It's so sad to see.

02:12:34.860 I, this is another, so we've taken away unstructured play from children, which is a disaster.

02:12:44.860 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.

02:12:57.360 So we are punishing out the play drive in every way that we can as a society.

02:13:05.960 So 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.

02:13:15.700 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.

02:13:24.580 Maybe he's one of the more talented kids and he has success.

02:13:30.360 But then maybe you send him to select soccer.

02:13:32.240 And now maybe he's at the bottom of the pool of select soccer.

02:13:34.640 And now he's riding the bench.

02:13:36.800 Now he's not getting enough exposure.

02:13:39.640 Now he's not getting that 30% success rate that creates that repeated bond.

02:13:44.740 And now what's happening is you actually punished him every time that he's engaging in physicality.

02:13:51.460 And we see this over and over again through the physical system.

02:13:54.540 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.

02:14:03.520 And we're sticking them in adult-imposed finite games that actually will inherently punish some percentage of them.

02:14:12.140 Well, what percentage of elementary schools don't have recess now?

02:14:16.760 It's a tremendous number.

02:14:18.300 A lot of that's insurance concerns.

02:14:20.340 Yeah, I know.

02:14:21.060 Insurance industry.

02:14:21.800 Liability concerns.

02:14:22.520 Well, we don't really need recess.

02:14:25.140 It's like, I see.

02:14:26.500 So the kids had a little bit of chance to play and now you've made that verboten.

02:14:31.200 Yeah.

02:14:31.500 It's like it's beyond appalling.

02:14:34.460 So we should, let me let you wrap up because we're running out of time on the Daily Wire segment.

02:14:40.780 Is there anything else we should talk about?

02:14:43.280 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's behavior to make them more predictable.

02:14:52.980 But let's save that for another time.

02:14:56.900 Okay.

02:14:57.360 You know, the big thing I want to say is just it's been a huge pleasure.

02:15:01.540 You know, your work's been such an influence in helping me think out these things that I was already experiencing, right?

02:15:07.080 Like what I said to John was that there's this emergent thing that was happening within parkour.

02:15:13.100 And then for me with parkour and nature and martial arts, when I, so I was teaching people.

02:15:22.100 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 ear and went out the other.

02:15:32.040 But if I told them a story about something that I experienced that was transformative, you'd see their eyes light up.

02:15:38.500 So I started to recognize that narrative had power.

02:15:41.360 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?

02:15:51.060 It had to be meaning oriented.

02:15:52.560 So 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.

02:16:02.680 And I just, I absorbed everything you put out, right, between 2016, 2017.

02:16:08.740 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.

02:16:13.420 But I went to teach.

02:16:15.340 And 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.

02:16:22.840 And I saw that fundamentally we have to be nested in these narratives.

02:16:27.060 And those narratives have to be acted out physically.

02:16:29.500 And that's how we actually bring meaning into the world.

02:16:31.800 And it just, it feels like the physical practice, and it's not me alone.

02:16:40.160 There's other people who are evolving in very similar directions.

02:16:44.020 The physical practices and how they can impact us at these higher dimensions of ourself, they're emerging.

02:16:52.420 They're emerging in a way that is reflective of the body of theory that guys like yourself and John have offered.

02:16:59.380 And to be able to bring that together and offer it to people is a really, just a huge pleasure.

02:17:05.540 And to have this conversation with you.

02:17:06.960 Oh, yeah.

02:17:07.720 It's really, yeah, that's it.

02:17:09.660 If people want to experience it.

02:17:10.640 It's so cool to see this coming from the bottom up.

02:17:12.640 Yeah.

02:17:12.960 To see this being laid out at the level of embodiment.

02:17:16.700 Yeah.

02:17:16.840 It's so cool to see these higher order abstract moral conceptions make themselves manifest at the, well, at the lowest physiological level upward.

02:17:25.360 It's a great thing to see.

02:17:26.860 That's the material world reaching up to the sky.

02:17:29.540 It is.

02:17:30.140 It is.

02:17:31.300 Archetyptically speaking.

02:17:32.280 Yeah, it's so cool to see.

02:17:33.520 It's lovely.

02:17:34.260 So it was a pleasure talking to you.

02:17:35.720 Yeah, absolutely.

02:17:36.640 Hopefully we'll get a chance to meet at one of these conferences that seem to be springing up.

02:17:41.400 And for everybody who's watching and listening, you can go check out Rafe's site.

02:17:46.920 That's evolveplaymove.com.

02:17:49.200 Evolvemoveplay.com.

02:17:50.020 Especially 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.

02:17:58.740 And maybe you can start thinking too about how you could integrate the spirit of play into your own life.

02:18:03.080 Because, man, that's something you certainly want to do.

02:18:05.900 It's the highest form of action.

02:18:07.740 It's the real sign of mastery to do something difficult with the spirit of play.

02:18:12.120 It's a sign of the highest level of neurological integration, as far as I can tell.

02:18:17.740 It's certainly the antidote to tyranny and probably to slavery.

02:18:21.080 So, anyways, it was a pleasure talking to you today.

02:18:23.460 Absolutely.

02:18:23.660 Thank you to everyone watching and listening on the Daily Wire Plus platform, to the film crew here in Saskatoon.

02:18:30.100 And, well, we'll continue the conversation at some point in the future.

02:18:34.380 Maybe we can have a chat at some point with Jonathan Paggio and John Bervecki.

02:18:41.020 That would be fun.

02:18:41.760 That would be amazing.

02:18:42.240 Yeah, yeah.

02:18:42.600 That would be good.

02:18:43.240 Let's do that.

02:18:44.280 Thank you, John.

02:18:45.200 Or Jordan.

02:18:45.760 Jeez.

02:18:46.620 Good.

02:18:47.460 Good to see you, man.

02:18:48.500 Likewise.

02:18:48.700 I have a pleasure meeting you.

02:18:49.880 Yeah.

02:18:50.380 Bye-bye.

02:18:50.480 Yep.

02:18:50.840 Ciao, everyone.

02:18:52.240 Bye-bye.

02:18:52.600 Bye-bye.

343. Parkour and Rough Play： Combatting Infantilization ｜ Rafe Kelley [1000606133684]

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