https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ew759KqGK1Y
So welcome to Voices with Verveki. I’m joined by my good friend Rafe Kelly. Some of you have seen Rafe before on this channel. We did the discussion about building an ecology of practices, something I talk about a lot theoretically, but Rafe is out there actually putting real time and talent into making it happen. And then I’ve posted about a really excellent discussion, in fact, theologos that Rafe and I had had about the hero archetype. And I’ve been on Rafe’s channel a lot too. And so it’s great that you’re here, Rafe. So welcome very much. Thank you very much, John. It’s a real pleasure to be here. So Rafe, tell us, I mean, I just mentioned, you know, tell us a little bit more about yourself and especially I often hold you out and I’m proud to do so as an exemplar of somebody who’s out there building an ecology of practices, who’s in discussion with, you know, good cogsci about this, you know, and is, you know, familiar with issues around meaning and the meaning crisis. So yeah, tell us a little bit more about yourself. So you know, my base is parkour. And before that martial arts and really a lot of movement arts, but parkour is where I kind of went deep and where a lot of these things started to gestate for me. But, you know, I guess maybe a good place to start is that as I reached kind of the end of my 20s, I had adopted a very much a kind of a professional idea of what is archetypal, right? Like what you should be aimed at was to be aimed at like the professional athlete model of being a parkour athlete. And that didn’t take me where I needed to take me. And I started getting injured and had a few other issues with that. And so I started asking this question of like, you know, I had a competition I was training for in 2013. And I tore my rotator cuff prepping for the competition. And then I was almost able to compete. I finished third in qualification. But the only way I could complete one of the courses was to do this 16 foot running jump where I had to catch with both my hands. And I just knew my shoulder wouldn’t be able to take it. And so I’d had a series of injuries at that point. And I kind of looked in the mirror and I said, Do you tape yourself together to try to compete for a couple more years? Or do you change the way that you practice such that it can be sustainable for life? And that really came down to like, why do you do this? Is it because of because you’re trying to reach these specific goals? Or is it because this does something for you that’s deeply meaningful? And I chose that it was the meaningful thing. And, and I had been trying to compete and go, you know, and all the competitions were indoors. And I found that what I was really loving, though, was playing outdoors in nature. And so I went deep into that. And I was really influenced at the time by the work of Stuart Brown on play, and in how important play and unstructured play is and Frank Forensic, his work with Exuberant Animal. And so I was I was I was digesting those ideas and thinking about how they interacted with what we were seeing with the growth of parkour and how parkour everyone in parkour talked about the idea of a philosophy of parkour. But nobody could articulate what it was. And so I started diving into this and I really went deep into play and I started, you know, interestingly, Stuart Brown’s work talks a lot about pink steps, rats, but he doesn’t, you know, yuck pink step in the research on rats, but I didn’t recognize it and go back to pink step directly through Brown wasn’t until I found Jordan Peterson that I was introduced more deeply into that. But I was researching rough and tumble play and and Mark back off and, you know, my wife actually did her her master’s thesis on parkour as a form of adult play. So play took me somewhere really good. But there was something about it that wasn’t quite complete because play was sort of a just about the momentary experience. And it wasn’t taking you further than the momentary experience. I see. And so I had had all this progress just from letting go of the structure that I had had of thinking of being an athlete. Right. And but then and I was but then I started kind of falling apart. It was like there’s too much structure, which caused stagnation and actually overstress. And then there was too little structure. And it was sort of like, I started getting injured because I just wasn’t taking care of my body enough to do the things that I wanted to do. And it was like my attention was dissipating across too many things. And so the idea of having very specific goals came. And there was this interesting thing that happened. I’ve been teaching, you know, for many years and I was teaching these workshops where I was putting all these together, these ideas together. And the basic ideas, we evolved from movement and we evolved to move to learn movement through play. And I and in 2016, I found Jordan Peterson’s work. Well, let me back up for a second. What I noticed was when I was teaching, I could I could spout scientific literature at people as a justification for why they should adopt the training things. And people respected that. But when I told them stories about my own experience, they were moved by it. Right. And so I started to think that that within narrative, there was something incredibly powerful. And I wanted to understand more about it. And so when Pearson showed up on Joe Rogan, you know, there was the whole political preamble, but somewhere in the middle of the conversation, it switches to being about narrative and about meaning. And that was when I was like, this is this is what I was looking for. Right. Right. Right. And so I ended up then layering in all these ideas around narrative. And the other thing that was happening in parallel to that was I started teaching these events where I took people from took people out to the family property that I’d grown up on. And then we would travel out from there to to train in these natural spots. And so we’d have three day events. So before that, all my teaching was in group class settings. And in the group class setting, there’s wonderful things that can happen. But there was something completely different that started happening when you had three days with somebody. And then we went to five days. It was even deeper. And I started listening to my students and I would ask them at the end of the seminar, like, what was what did you get out of this? What was the most important thing about this? And I expected it to be a jump that they did. Right. I expected it to be movements that they learned. I expected to be like knowledge that they attained. But they always talked about feeling deeply connected, feeling connected to a tribe and feeling all these things. And so I started to pay attention to that. And I was lucky enough also to have students who came from the Wilderness Awareness School, which has been, you know, this wonderful place of developing nature connections, sit spotting meditative practices through John Young’s work. And so they started coming and they were initially students. Kyle Cock, who’s been on my podcast recently, was one of them and Jamie Mock and Kyle’s really come to work with us very deeply now. But they started introducing all the nature connection practices and the sit spotting and the tracking and all these things into that work and seeing how it paralleled the work with movement. And I also ran into my friend Simon Tacker’s work and also Mark Walsh, who invited me and they, you know, Mark basically said, you’re teaching embodiment, you just don’t know it yet. And Simon had spent 10 years in Asia learning different meditative traditions and martial arts traditions and then had the same kind of ancestral approach. And so I got to learn meta meditation and focus meditation from these guys and see how they were deeply interconnected to a movement practice. So over time, what we realized was that essentially there was a need to, what people were coming to the events for was because they felt deeply alienated and disconnected from the things that give meaning to life. And there was a layer of that that is just like the momentary experience of the connection. But then there was a layer of it that is that continued development of the human being. That’s what we thought of as like the cultivation of the heroic self. And so having, you know, having goals like I need to be able to lift 500 pounds, deadlift 500 pounds, it’s specific, it’s actionable, it’s realistic, it’s time sensitive, whatever. But why do you really want to do that? Right? It’s not actually motivational in itself. It’s just an arbitrary number. It’s because it represents this archetypal sense of the self as being capable and powerful and, you know, whatever it is that you’re looking for. And so what I found was that the specific, smart, measurable, actionable, realistic goals, they weren’t broad enough umbrella. And there was this conflict between, there’s this potential for conflict between goals and what was actually deeply motivational and meaningful to you. Right, right, right. And so then we ended up thinking, okay, if we are aimed at the most heroic development of the self, if we’re aimed at self-transcendence, that’s what this should be about. And then we found through the work that movement has that, right? Parkour was the genesis around the sense of self-transformation. And then it’s like, well, what would a philosophy of parkour look like? And then nature connection practices and then mindfulness practices, and then noticing that the community was what people were really coming for. And then seeing that there are actually practices that deepen community and that we don’t have an articulation or respect for them. Right? So it’s like singing songs together, dancing together, spending time in a sauna together, doing hard physical things together, right? Struggle, like hiking for a long time with a bunch of people. All those things foster a deep sense of bonding that people are desperate for and don’t have. So that’s a bit of the history of how this has all come together. And then when I found your work, the understanding of how this connects to embodiment, being embedded in the environment, having an enacted practice. I remember before I interviewed you for the first time, I was listening to a podcast you did. I wish I could remember the name, but you said something like, the question that you would have for Jordan is, you have this proposal of Christian pragmatism and you have this theory and it’s beautiful, but where’s the practice? And that hit really home with me. Right? And so I’ve viewed you as this extraordinary articulator of the role of practice and how we bring practice together in the College of Practices. So I said a lot and I don’t know if I said enough, but I want to see what’s come up. You were very eloquent. That was fantastic. Yeah, I like that. And it’s interesting because I sense that there is this turning and it’s being accelerated by the COVID crisis towards the centrality of practices that have real transformative power and real aspirational impact. And you can see it on platforms like Rebel Wisdom, where there’s a reorientation towards the centrality of practice, or even maybe practices is better because it’s a whole network of practices. It’s becoming very clear. And even trying to, even in these conversations, some of the work I’m doing with Guy Sandstock and Christopher Master Pietro and Peter Lindbergh, Jordan Hall, is trying to turn these conversations into a deep kind of transformative and aspirational practice as well. So I think that you put your finger on something very interesting. Well, you and I have talked about this. In some ways, the work I’m doing is very sort of top down. It’s theory and science, and I’m reaching down to try and figure out what would this look like in practice. And in a very complimentary fashion, your discovery has been very bottom up. You’re in there doing stuff, and then you work your way up towards theory. And so there’s like this, I think this is one of the ways why we resonate so well together. Because part of the argument I’ve made is we need both of those. We need the top down and the bottom up, and we need them into deep dialogue with each other if we’re going to afford what you said was at the core of this, which is giving people real transformation in their meaning of life that has a long-term trajectory to it. I think that’s the key thing. And I think what’s happening now with the COVID crisis is that the foregrounding of the need for meaning as deep and long lasting connectedness I think is just being pronounced precisely because people have lost a lot of connections in a certain way. And this brings up a topic that you and I thought we might discuss, which is the idea that one of the things the COVID crisis is doing is exacerbating the meaning crisis by inflicting a kind of domicile on the world. And this is a notion that I got from Brian Walsh, he gets it from Fortius and Smith, and we made use of it, Chris and Philip and I, in the zombie book, and I’ve been talking quite a bit about this in some of the videos. And then, you know, and there’s been other periods in history where there’s been these kinds of, so domicile is, you know, the loss of a sense of home. And of course, that’s happening with people very much. Their sense of where they feel safe, where they feel at home, right, and sort of the scope of their identity in the world is radically shrunk. People are feeling disconnected. They’re feeling disconnected, of course, from a lot of their loved ones, relationships are ending, there’s loneliness. Many people are describing their experience using the adjective surreal, the sense of connectedness to reality is disappearing. And so I think, I mean, one of the things I’m trying to do is I’m trying to, I’m doing a live, I’m putting on a live streaming of the meditation and contemplation course that I offer to try and give people some tools. And I wanted to hear your thoughts around domicile, and what you think and like how your ecology of practices might be specifically relevant to that issue. Is that fair enough? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is something I’ve been thinking about talking to you about for a while now, this idea of how does parkour, zombies and everything interrelate with domicile. When I read your book, the story of the grassy narrows, Ashinaabe, I believe, was extremely striking to me. And it ignited something from a previous conversation. But to summarize that, right, there was this tribe of people who were living and they had a sense of how far apart their houses should be. And they had a sense of the meaning in the landscape. And they were moved to a new reservation under good intentions, right, because it had access to things that they thought would improve. But then we saw this massive, massive suffering in their culture, right? Can you tell me just a little bit, do you remember it’s something like rates of domestic violence went up, rates of drug addiction, suicide goes up? There’s two aspects to it. One, of course, is biological, physiological. We mentioned this in the book. The movement did subject them probably to some kind of mercury poisoning. Yeah. But what Brian’s work was trying to show is that the capacity, and that, of course, is horrific, right? And the Canadian government bears responsibility for that. And so I’m not trying to be dismissive. And we didn’t try to be dismissive of that in the book. But what Brian was trying to show is, yeah, but the capacity for the culture to try and respond and deal with the impact of this and sort of deal with the movement, them being, as you said, moved to a different housing location, was deeply undermined by the fact that the government had given them a new kind of arrangement of their living space. So you’ve got a culture that, these people are being culture shocked, they’re being moved, ostensibly for good reason. Then they’re being put under a physical stressor of poisoning, right? And then what happens is, right, their ability to respond to this is dramatic because they lose their sense of home because, and this is Brian’s point, houses become homes when they become basically tools, very complex sets of tools, by which we symbolize, inhabit, enact our worldview, how we fundamentally are making sense of who we are, what the world is, and how we relate to each other. And by changing the housing structure, all of these processes of making sense were massively disrupted. So at the time when these people most needed to sort of feel really connected to themselves, to the world, right, they were suddenly, all of this was torn apart. And so they get huge increases in violence and domestic suicide, substance abuse, et cetera. So what occurs to me is that a home, not the physical structure of a house, but a home is where, it’s kind of like the central place from which attunement between the agent and the arena begin to take place. You disturb the meaning system around that home, then you potentially disturb that entire agent-arena relationship. And it’s relatively invisible. It’d be very easy to say from like, you know, as a white Westerner who’s used to living in an apartment block, the meaning system in which a traditional home and the land around it and the way that it’s used is embedded is very invisible to us. And so we can disturb and destroy something that is very central to somebody and not even know that we’re doing so. Oh, totally, totally. And we also, you know, we also can do it to ourselves without realizing it. People often, when they consider moving, they often are focused on, of course, I’m not saying they should dismiss, but they’re focused on the socioeconomic factors. And they forget, I remember when I first moved to Toronto, and I was hit by this, and it was like, what? And it was like culture shock. It was like profound culture shock. And I felt, you know, sort of a deep anxiety. And then you realize you start doing all these homing things that have actually no functionality to how you’re making use of your dwelling in a socioeconomic fashion. But what you’re doing is you’re trying to make your home, you’re trying to make your house a home by doing all this symbolic, all this symbolic work in it to try and alleviate that weird sense of displacement. So I think we can also, like we, I think it’s not only, we can be blind to how we might be affecting other people. I think we’re also blind. We don’t pay enough attention to how we are affecting ourselves. Yeah. I mean, so this is, this is a little bit farfetched, but you know, I was an anthropology student. So this is something that I’ve always been interested in is like culture and diversity and how these things interact. And so there’s, there’s kind of two big narratives that, or there’s a big narrative that is dominant in academia now, which in many ways is just an inversion of a previous narrative. Right. The early narrative was there, there is a hierarchy of culture, right. And white Western culture is at the top of that culture. And whether we do things is right. And that essentially we’re trying to get the rest of the world to catch up. Right. So when we impose our culture, when we take the Native American children, you know, here in the Northwest, we, we had these forced schooling of the residential schools in Canada as well. Horrible, horrible. Okay. So we take them out of their system and, you know, sometimes people are being cruel, right. There’s, there’s absolutely racism and hatred and all these things that are in there. But even if it’s well-intentioned, you don’t know what we’re disturbing. Exactly. Exactly. Now, so, so we see that, you know, visible minorities are still suffering in many ways. Right. And so now if you take the, the, the old white agency allows everyone to achieve civilization, it’s kind of been reversed. And now it’s white agency oppresses everybody. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. And I think that, that shouldn’t be entirely dismissed. Right. But I do think that there’s another way that we can look at it, which is along the lines of cultural change disturbs our meaning structures. And that’s disruptive for everybody. And the bigger you’re, the larger the gap that you’re being asked across, the harder it’s going to be. Right. So in many ways, what you’re describing with the meaning crisis is, is the disruption of the underlying cultural network. Oh, yes. Everybody’s suffering from it, but the people who’ve, who’ve, the people who’ve been on the hockey stick the longest, yeah, are suffering the least because they’re better prepared. And, and so, so like we are, the reason that the, that a native American might be suffering from domicide is actually the same reason that so many white kids are committing suicide. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s just that we’ve got more cultural technology to help us wind through those waters. Right. Right. This is kind of the way that I’ve been thinking about that. No, this is good. I want to, I want to unpack this more. Before we do, can I just say one more thing? Oh, please. This was the thing, actually, let me, can I tell you a story? Of course. Because I think that this is, this is interesting. So parkour, right? This is the art that was the genesis of this. This was a, this was an art that was developed by a, by visible minority kids who are largely the families of immigrants, in immigrant families in the banlieues of Paris. Right. So a banlieue is, is really a lot like this grassy narrows thing. Right. These were these houses, these, you know, France did the opposite of North America, right. Instead of turning their city centers into the housing projects, they put the housing projects in the outskirts of the cities. Right. Right. Right. And so you have these massive housing developments that are all brutalist modern architecture that are absolutely oppressive of people. Right. And everyone was packed in there and this was supposed to be good and everyone was going to develop because all of the resources were tight. So then, you know, you have this group of people from North Africa, from West Africa, and from Vietnam, mostly, who are all coming into, to these banlieues in Paris. So the story of parkour, you know, the story you get out of Julie Angel’s book, Breaking the Jump, you can kind of say it starts, one starting point is Jan Hennatschwa, whose, his family’s from New Caledonia in Micronesia. Like a couple generations ago, his family were headhunters. Right. Right. He runs into David Bell. David Bell’s, is like, his father was Franco-Vietnamese and his mother was French. And they’re at an arcade and they almost get into a fistfight. David’s 15, Jan is 17. But then Jan realizes that they have a shared friend and Jan’s sort of like, if you’re friends with my friends, you’re my friend. So they become friends, but there’s this intense thing about their friendship, right? They’re both really physical kids, right? They both compete in track and gymnastics and interested in martial arts. And so they start challenging each other to, who can do a thousand pushups, you know, who can be hit in the stomach, who can jump this. And then David’s cousins get involved. And then their whole little circle of friends, right? And so the, there’s approximately nine guys who are kind of viewed as the founders of this. There’s, but there’s more who were involved at some level, but it’s Grian. He’s West African, Charles Pereira, West African, Malik Diol, West African, William and Chau Bell, who are Vietnamese, and Jan and David, and Laurent, who’s Italian and French. But these guys, they start doing this, right? And they come from, like, there’s abuse in their families, you know, they come from trauma. Like David’s father was basically raised by the French military after he was separated from his family. Mm-hmm. And a lot of the kids that they grew up with go on to be in gangs, going to have all of these, you know, be drug addicts, you know, have all the dysfunction that is typical of these communities, these immigrant communities. The domicile community is what you’re saying, right? Domicile community, right? They came from meaning systems in Africa, in Micronesia, in Vietnam, that were disturbed by war, by immigration. And they were put in these liminal spaces, right? They weren’t integrated fully into French society. They were put over there to kind of be ignored. Many people went dysfunctional. But these kids, they found somehow, if I challenge myself, if I burn this energy through taking on challenge, and if I make overcoming challenges central to who I am, that can help me grow. So I think this is a really powerful story. And it is. And I was talking to someone who works with Alaskan Native kids. And it struck me that often when people are in this place between where they’re, like, it can be hard. You can be stuck in a place where the arrival of guns and sugar and snowmobiles and whatever has in many ways made your previous culture technology kind of obsolete, right? It’s hard to update to. And then you have this dominant culture over there, but you don’t feel fully welcomed in it either. You’re put in this liminal place, yes, very much. Stuck in this liminal place. And what’s your identity? Am I Alaskan Native or am I a Haida or am I, you know, am I Vietnamese? Am I French? And it struck me that not just parkour, but many movement arts and other practices as well, but they can act as bridges. They’re liminal spaces in which you can have an identity that’s shared between the subculture and the dominant culture. – So this sounds like the argument I’ve made that, you know, when we’re in these liminal spaces, and there’s lots of argument right now, like Zach Stein is making, culture as a whole is in a liminal place, right? A lot of people feel that way. Surreality is an adjective that comes, is prototypical when people are in liminal spaces, individually and collectively. And I’ve made the argument that serious play is the way in which we learn, in which we can appropriately navigate these liminal spaces. And that we used to have, of course, places of serious play, like religious institutions, but that largely collapsed for a lot of people. And it sounds to me like the people that you’re talking about, they didn’t turn to religion, they turned to something more primordial in order to address it. – They turned to Jackie Chan and Dragon Ball Z, you know, martial arts movies. And Raymond, so… – Which have a huge mythic component to them, of course. – Absolutely. But there’s something physical, and, you know, something that’s been interesting to me as I’ve explored the space of meaning and movement is how appropriate is this marriage, right? Like, am I getting outside the scope of practice of what I should be looking at? But when we look back, we see that very frequently in the past, these things were very tightly interwoven. So martial arts traditions were developed by monks. – Yep, very much. – And, you know, when you practice Tai Chi, you’re practicing a Daoist art. – Yes. – Specifically a Daoist art. – Or the role of gymnastics in the Neoplatonic tradition. – Or sumo. Sumo is a Shinto art, right? All the temples had sumo. So this integration of self-transcendence, of spiritual life, and of physical expression is actually, I would say, quite native to human beings. And I think that… Yeah, so I think that there’s something interesting there, and I think there’s something, to me, there’s something very powerful about the idea of, you know, if parkour can be a bridge for an immigrant kid to an identity that is stable, right, and meaningful, that helps them resolve this tension between, you know, I’m not fully Vietnamese and I’m not fully French in a positive direction. These movement practices, they can be, I think they can be, these identities that help us bridge between this sense of domicile that we have in general in our culture. That’s the thesis I’m working with. – It’s a good thesis. So maybe I can add to it a bit. So right now you’re talking about the transformation of identity in the agent, but it sounds to me, and I know you’ve talked to me about this before, parkour is also transforming the arena. – Yes. – Transform, I mean, you mentioned how they’re taking basically this brutalist, dead-end, you know, landscape and they’re revitalizing it and they’re turning it into an arena that affords them, right, all kinds of growth and self-transcendence and connectedness because, you know, they’re interacting now with their environment is now affording them rather than just containing them. – Absolutely. I mean, it’s very interesting from a socio-cultural perspective, right, because where is parkour born, right? Kids everywhere all over the world have jumped off things, have flipped off things, have done things, but it sparks into a thing, into a worldwide phenomenon where steel levels explode beyond anything we’ve ever seen before and it starts in this brutalist, end-of-the-mill nightmare in a way, right? I mean, every isn’t that terrible, but there’s something of that and that brutalist architecture is kind of interesting, right? Like, brutalist architecture, you know, a lot of people, like, I think it’s horrible to look at and it’s pretty oppressive to be around all the time and it was designed in a way as, like, blind to human aesthetics. – Yeah, yeah. – Like, parkour kids love it. It affords tons of movement. – Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a brutalist, a Lawrence Halperin fountain in downtown Seattle called Freeway Park. It’s just blocks of concrete and it’s world famous, right? So there’s something that’s really interesting about that, about this idea that, you know, I talked about this, I think, in our last podcast, this idea that when I first encountered the kind of Petersonian perspective, it was like, ah, breaking the jump, like, the process of going out and finding a jump, that’s a mini hero’s journey, where you’re looking at the chaos around you, you’re finding a piece of chaos, basically, and then you’re bringing order to it through overcoming it. But it was only more recently that I saw that it’s actually also the inverse of that aspect of the hero’s journey, because the opposite side of the confrontation with chaos is the stagnation of order and the need to bring chaos back into the system, the waters of life. And so what those parkour kids had done was they hadn’t just imagined themselves as the type of person who can confront something, they’d imagined the environment as suddenly containing all of these potentials, all of these anomalies that were not previously there. They created an entirely new agent-arena relationship. Reciprocal opening in a very powerful way, very, very powerful way. And so they’re integrating mind and body together, practice, and then they’re reintegrating, right, in an enacted, imaginal way, the arena and the agent, and getting the reciprocal opening. And then you have had the idea of taking that and then situating it in nature as adding an increased dimension. Could you unpack that a bit, please? Yeah, I mean, on one level, I think that what happened for me is I just was a kid who grew up in nature and was attracted to it, and that I had to stack these things. Right. From another perspective, the way that I’ve looked, well, actually, let me back up for a second. Those kids who grew up in France and started this, they trained in nature and in the city. Ah, I didn’t know that. So, yeah, if you go to the earliest interviews with David Bell, he says, whether in the man-made or the natural environment. And the earliest videos, they feature every en-lis, which are families outside Paris. But they also feature Sorcelles, which is a rural area that his cousins lived in. And they feature Fontainebleau. This is kind of a really funny piece of history, but Lys and Evry, which are the birthing grounds of parkour, are about 20 minutes by car from Fontainebleau, which is where the modern sport of bouldering was developed. The modern sport of what? Bouldering. So, bouldering and parkour are basically born 20 minutes away from each other. Oh, okay. What’s bouldering? Rock climbing. So, traditionally, you have mountaineering, and then mountaineering gives rise to rock climbing, where you’re just focused on going up faces. But you do ropes, right? And you go off big faces. And then people start training to be better at doing that by just climbing boulders where you don’t have to be roped in. Oh, wow. We have these gyms all over the world now where you have rock climbing holds on walls that are boulder problems. So, the distinction between bouldering and rock climbing is generally that in rock climbing, you are roped in. Right. Also bouldering, you’re just finding these problems. So, that separates out in a lot of ways in Fontainebleau. So, anyway, so they’re there. And then in the documentary, Generation Yamakaze, I can’t remember which one of it is, but one of the other founders, he says, the body of parkour is born in Evry, which is urban, but the spirit is born in Sarcelles. Oh, right. So, they found things that would transfer between the two and flow between. So, they were there with both. But now an interesting thing happened when it went internationally. It became very strongly associated with just the urban environment. Ah. People would call it urban obstacle coursing. And I think that part of this may have been that the earliest popularizers in the UK, the urban free flow group, they were called urban free flow. There’s a start, right? Yeah. This was the first big group and the first big website for parkour was urban free flow. And they didn’t have a really good understanding of what was happening with the French guys. They didn’t have access to them. They couldn’t speak the language. There was not good communication between these two areas. And urban free flow in a lot of ways modeled parkour as kind of like skateboarding versus very strongly associated with the urban terrain. So anyways, it’s not original to me to take parkour into nature. But the way that I looked at it was that these physical capacities that we were exploring in the city, they evolved in the natural environment. We can only do these things because we have a heritage as tree climbing animals at a very basic level. And I felt that there was something deeper that we learned that or that I got when I went into nature, that there was more information in nature and it was a more powerful trigger for the flow state. Right, right, right. And then it was kind of there was a, let’s say there’s, I think parkour in some sense is like a radical reimagining of the urban world as available for play. It’s like the tree within the building. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that. That’s really cool. But when you go back to nature, you’re actually, you’re recovering the place where that is actually more intuitive and more natural. Right. So you’re probably tapping into some deep evolutionary machinery, which would really be conducive to getting people feeling very connected. Yeah. And then we find that it naturally brings in that curiosity about connection to nature in a broader way, right? That a tree as a living thing, it invites a curiosity about it. Right. That is maybe different from a building. So does that mean it’s easy then? So I’m trying to get a sense, because unfortunately I have not been able to come to, you’ve invited me, but for health reasons I haven’t been able to come. I hope that changes someday. So I’m getting, like people are doing the parkour and then you have the practice, I forget what you call it, where you people are sitting and they’re basically doing a contemplative practice like on the natural environment. What’s it called again? It’s called sit-spotting. Yeah. That’s something that we get from the John Young wellness administration. But it is a contemplative practice where you learn to essentially attend to the information coming at you from the landscape. Okay. So you’re really trying to attune to it very deeply. So that would of course create a sense of connectedness. Do you find that it sounds like these, I mean, I understand that it sort of evolved very organically for you, but these practices have all been chosen also it sounds like because they sort of like it’s easy for people to move from one of these practices to another. They sort of naturally afford and complement each other. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, that’s not so much intentional. It’s emergent, right? It’s like I have a base practice, let’s say, parkour and then parkour in nature. And then I go out and I find all these things and then some of them stick and adhere to that. And so sit-spotting has been really wonderful. And then also like, I like focus meditation, body scanning meditations and meta-meditations or meta-contemplations as adjuncts to this. Yeah, I can see that. And then you also get like a campfire practice that’s very similar to some of the stuff I’m trying to do with dialectic and dialogo. So although right now we’re doing these digital campfires instead, where you’re getting something like an intersubjective, like you’re telling narrative and people are literally circling around a campfire. Yeah. So after my encounter with Peterson’s work, at the end of our seminars, even the non-retreats, like at the end of the first day, I would tell one of the dragon stories. And then I would ask people like, why would I tell a story like that at a movement retreat? What does this have to do with being able to jump or do vaults? And then we’d have a discussion about it. And I’d reveal that for me, fundamentally, the dragon story was an archaic type of representation of the hero’s journey and that our movement practice was a way in which we could intentionally go into that. And then when we saw it that way, we could start to generalize the insights from that process more effectively into the rest of our life. Yeah. Always the intent to integrate with your life. So it’s supposed to be life transformative. It’s not a vacation. It’s not a retreat in that sense. Let me tell you the story because I think this is important. Like we’ve talked about this a little bit before, but I think it’s really important thinking about those original guys. So they were all training and they were training intensely and they felt that it was transforming them. And they were doing just physical stuff and they were doing martial arts, but they started doing these jumps. And the jumps seemed to be unique, jumping between buildings, jumping at height. And one of the guys is considered one of the founders, Williams, he’s much younger. He was only six years old when this process started. So he’s 11 years old. He’s kind of training with like the baby group, right? There’s the older kids and then there’s him and he gets to tag along sometimes, but not all the time. And he sees this jump that the older kids have done, right? And he works up to it and he finally does it. And it’s like this profound transformation for him. And then he asked one of his friends to come and do it. And his friend does it. And as his friend lands and comes down, Williams has the sense that whatever that jump had meant to him, it didn’t have the same impact on his friend. And that at 11, he seems to have realized that the thing that mattered wasn’t the jump, it was the way that it transformed. And so what I’ve noticed over the years is that every practice that you hear people raving about is a tool and it’s a hole, right? It affords action or it affords transformation or it affords hiding, right? So you can go to a jump because you learn something and then you take that inside into your life. Or once you become comfortable with the jumps and it feels like you have that catharsis and a sense of having overcome something, that can become your place to get that so that you can avoid facing all the other places in your life. That’s an important difference. The Buddha talked similarly, I was talking about this in one of the classes about people who are using meditation and contemplative practices in order to pursue awakening versus those who are trying to hide from the world and try to become content and feel, right? Yes, very much. I’ve seen exactly the same thing in meditation where there are people whose meditation practice opens the world to them. People whose meditation practice becomes a place to avoid the world. So I have this slogan I often use when I’m teaching my students and I’ve used it in the meditation class that I’m doing online. I say that meditation is an education, it is never a vacation. Yeah, yeah. So when people are talking around the campfire, I’m just interested, does that mean that they sort of start to reflect on not the event itself? I mean, obviously they’re going to talk about the events of their day, their human beings, but part of what’s happening there is that they’re reflecting on this transformative meaning itself and there’s discussion about that. Does that come out? Yeah, so the campfire and practice. A lot of this thing, again, it’s emergent, right? Yeah, I get it. It’s a work in progress, which is great. Yeah, so you’re camping, right? You don’t know why. You’re just camping in some sense so that you have a place to keep people so that they can then go do stuff, they can teach them. But it’s not part of the teaching, it’s just the hanging out after, right? That’s the way it is. So then we go from three days and that’s great and then we go to five days. And the year that we went to five days, I contracted Lyme disease teaching in Denmark. So on the third day of the seminar, I hit the cycle of the Lyme disease and I was puking and feverish and all of this stuff. And we had, so I let, Kyle, the teacher I mentioned, he was a wilderness awareness school teacher, I left him in charge and went and spent the night at my mom’s because I couldn’t camp, right? And that night they played songs. We had two caporistas who were playing capoeira music and then we had another person who had songs. And so there was this, there was this, something had happened when I came back to teach the next day. Oh, I see. And the people were a tribe in a way that I hadn’t experienced before and it was deeply, deeply meaningful to them. That was in 2016. So the next year we tried to recapture it and it was still strong but it wasn’t quite as strong, right? And so then we start thinking, what is this? This isn’t just this song thing or this campfire time thing. It’s not just a place for me to give a lecture, right? It’s not just recreation time. It’s actually part of the transformation. And last year I went and did Mark Walsh, our mutual friend Mark Walsh’s EYP work. He taught me this technique of having people stop after a certain period of time training a movement practice and have them do a dialoguing practice where they speak for one minute about what their core insights were. So it’s an insight farming practice. Right, right, right. And so we started introducing that and then we introduced the idea of asking the students to tell their story and introducing, you know, this has happened over time and the dialogues that have come out, you know, we’ve had people share some incredibly deep stuff, some traumas that, you know, people have never shared outside of that and incredible conversations and people who come to our workshops now, they’re staying in contact even though they’re all over the country because they have this group of people who they trust and they can communicate with in a way that very few people are available to. So you sort of retooled the, I think that’s the right word to use here, you retooled the campfires to be sort of, you know, insight and transformation centric. And then that sort of caught, that allowed you to recapture what had spontaneously happened when you were sick. Is that what you found? Yeah, so we use music, so we teach songs, we use storytelling, I tell stories, but we also ask the students to tell stories. We did this, we did this last retreat that we did for the first time where we asked the students to get together in groups and compose a narrative myth basically of their experience at the event and then present it to the group. Do they still share their insights from their practice throughout the day too? What they found most interesting? Around the campfire, not as much just around the insights from the day, that’s kind of summed up at the end of the day, right? So we, so after each section we have a sit down and a dial. So you have a couple of different practices that I see. And then you mentioned you also, and I’ve seen a couple of the videos, you also do some lectures and so what role do they play in all of this? So the idea of the lecture is to give the philosophical framework, right, behind it and the science behind it to justify them, right? It’s like here’s your justification for the practice and you give people insight into how they can continue practicing and then those also form, they form a foundation for continued dialogues. Right, right, right. So you’re providing kind of a, what I often call a conceptual grammar for people. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, you’re my friend so you know I mean this as a compliment. You kind of reinvented church, like, but maybe something, you know, proto-church that was, you know, more present in maybe hunter-gatherer societies. But you invented a lot of the machinery of religion is what I’m trying to say. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s true and I also find it uncomfortable. I know you do, but you know I’m not trying to just make you uncomfortable. Like I said, we’re friends. Well, it’s a funny thing. So, you know, when we started Parkour, like we were all like, you know, like my nickname was like the Parkour preacher, right? Yeah, yeah. Because I could quote David Bell, right? You know, David Bell of 2028, right, he says this and it was like a religious transformation for those of us in the beginning, right? It was like something had come into our lives that had completely changed us and that was profound and we wanted to be able to share it, we want to proselytize it in a sense. And but then there was, it was like, I think there are people for whom the movement kind of self-organizes the understanding at least sufficiently. But there’s also a sufficient level of kind of depth when you’re 21 and a different level of depth that you need as you continue that process to have it continue to give meaning to you as you age. But my business partner was always joking that we should just rebrand Parkour as a church so that we could get free taxes. But then also I wanted to share that one of our students at the retreat, you know, everyone was talking about how special the retreat was. He was like, you know, what it brought him back to was church camp, right? Yeah. And he’s going out and he tells the story of basically like a friend, I think that one of their, they went on this long hike and someone actually sprained their ankle and they had to carry them back and then they had to like take them on a canoe across a lake with like high chop in the middle of the night to like get them back and get them treatment. Now this was like one of the most transformative experience of his life when he was like 13 years old. So in some sense we’re rearticulating that and I think that, you know, what I’ve talked about you before is that, you know, if you can, if you like, I’ve had to accept that to a degree, right? That spirituality and physical practice can and maybe need to have a co, a sort of dynamic, right? Yeah, they’re wedded together. They mutually support each other in powerful ways. And then at the same time I don’t want to, you know, I tell stories that I got from Peterson and I talk about their relationship to the Christ archetype, but I always tell people like I’m not a devout Christian. I’m not asking you to be, to get the meaning out of this. Like I think that one of my favorite things that you say is that I’d be a religion without a religion or I like to think of it as religio. Right? Yes, yes, very much. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have it, right? Like if you want to, if you, if you’re a devout Christian, you’re welcome. If you’re a devout Buddhist, you’re welcome. If you’re a devout Muslim, you’re welcome. There’s, there’s machinery within religion that, that is deeply necessary. But my approach to that is, is definitely, I think it would be a service to what we’re offering if it became too attached to that. Well, you don’t attach it to any particular religion. And like I said, I think it’s, of course I was teasing you a bit to try and poke you. Yeah, I think it is much more about, I mean, you’re creating, you know, you’re creating, in these terms, I mean, seriously, you’re creating ritual and mythos for enhancing religio. And I think that’s really, really important within an aspirational program of trying to make people wiser, more connected. Yeah, which is cool. And it’s funny because now it affords me talking to you, right? But I just fell into it, right? That’s the funny thing about it in a way. Yeah. And I, but I mean, but that, I mean, it’s funny, but it’s also, it also, it also, sorry, I don’t want to make this self-serving, but it legitimates, or at least provides evidence for an argument I’ve been making about, A, how, how this is fundamental to us and how this can be built bottom up. It doesn’t have to be belief centric. You didn’t come in with this whole metaphysics and belief structure in order to create a mythos and a set of rituals that afford the enhancement of religio and the transformation of agent arena. You just, this just emerged and yet it’s effective and it’s powerful. Yeah. Yeah. It emerged in some sense despite me. Well, but I mean, in a lot of ways, in the beginning of this process, I would describe myself as a very hardline atheist, extremely skeptical of religion. And, and also, like I always say that I had to be a little bit of a lone wolf personality wise in order to go into this place that nobody else was there. Of course, of course I get that. I get that. And so the, the creation of the community has been so much self-organization of the people who’ve taken on the work around me. Yeah. Yeah. Just interesting. Yeah. That logo. So I love that. I love that. So you’ve, I mean, you did this spontaneously in a couple of other, other dialogues. You know, I now hear you sort of self-describe as a non-theist. So there has been a shift. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, encountering Peterson’s work was, it was, it was really, it was really powerful to me. And it was quite confusing because I knew that I was looking for narrative, but I didn’t understand quite why I was so obsessed with it and why I was taking my time away from studying more specific stuff around physiology and adaption to exercise and, you know, motor learning. And I was like, why am I studying this guy’s stuff so much? But, but yeah, it was profound. And, and I, I, you know, I remember when he started the biblical series, I told him, my wife, like, I might be a Christian when this ends. Yeah. But I wasn’t, you know, I love the stories and I love the meaning and it’s, it’s profoundly shifted. Like I just finished Harry Potter with my daughter, right? Right. And, you know, when Harry sacrifices himself, right. And the evil is killed and all that. It’s like, this is, this is an extraordinarily well done retelling on the Christ archetype. Very much, very much. And missed on certain types of Christians. Sorry, if I can just interrupt, that’s a, I remember a story from CS Lewis, a little girl came to him reading the Narnia Chronicles and this shows you something about the depth of CS Lewis. And she said, she comes up and she’s confessional and she says, I like Aslan better than Jesus. And he turned to her and what insight, and he said, that’s fine. That’s okay. Like he got it that if, you know, that she was actually connecting to what really, really mattered about that. Beautiful. Yeah. I’m actually reading Chronicles of Narnia now after Harry Potter. It was again, quite an interesting cause when I read it as a kid, I had no idea that it was meant as a direct Christian allegory. And I didn’t understand the Christian story. Well, there’s two things there. There’s the Christianity, but remember what the, what is it the professor says, it’s all in Plato. I don’t know what they’re teaching children these days. There’s also, there was a lot of Platonism running through that, those, that’s still in a lot of powerful way. Yeah. So, you know, in one of your debates with Peterson, you said, you know, pragmatism is parasitic on an objective sense of truth, right? Yes. But I think that there’s something profound about the idea that we can’t ever know objectively everything, right? We’re always viewing the world for the Salience landscape. And in some sense, from a Darwinian perspective, all we ever have is good enough. Yeah. I think that struck me as profound. And and that, like in the past, you know, I would make a parsimony argument for why, why God didn’t exist, which was basically that it doesn’t, it’s just an ad hoc hypothesis that doesn’t add explanatory power. Right, right. But now I think it’s a really weak argument. I think it’s kind of an abusive parsimony. It’s like, these questions are too big for that. And I don’t personally have a sense of, of a divine in the sense that I think a lot of people talk about God is having. But I do have a very strong sense of the sacred. Yes, I would. That’s clear to me. That’s very clear to me. And you have a sense of the shape, the sacred, that’s not some impotent aesthetic, you know, experience. You have a sense of the sacred that you share with others in that affords them transform transformative growth. It’s a powerful, evocative and provocative sense that you have. Yeah. Tell me what you think about this. If I’m reading what you’re saying correctly, but for me, when, when you talk about non theism, it’s almost like the question of the objective existence of God is just the wrong question. Yes. The core of the non theist position is rejecting the shared, so it rejects the shared presuppositions of both the theist and the atheist about how to best understand this phenomena that you and I are clearly exists, which is the experience of the sacred that is really transformative of people. So, right. And what I think is the idea that, you know, trying to make, trying to frame this in terms of the existence or non-existence of a being, and that it’s primarily the way we understand that is by manipulating beliefs, and that we can sort of nail down, get some final answer about the most appropriate symbols for that. These are all things. And so, the theist says yes to all of those, and the atheist agrees that that’s the right framing, and then says no to all of those, and the non theist says no, I reject that framing. That framing is, I think, actually mis-framing the phenomena and the meaning that is afforded by that, you know, the connectedness that the phenomena is pointing to. So, the non theist, yeah, rejects that question. The non theist says, can we come up with framing that puts, that, well, I once described this to you, that affords us to fall deeply in love with being once again. It’s very like, that’s a Nietzschean thing almost, right? It’s Nietzschean in some way, but I think it’s Heideggerian, because, I mean, I think the problem, I mean, this is a critique that Heidegger made of Nietzsche, that Nietzsche basically is still locked into, Nietzsche basically inverts Christianity, so he’s still locked to it. So, I think the atheist just inverts theism, and they’re still locked to it, and I want to break out of it. It’s kind of like the white supremacy versus white oppression narrative, right? It’s like the first way that you, a narrative that doesn’t serve, the first response to it is just its inverse. Yes, exactly, and you have to try and break past them, which is what you were trying to talk about with your example of parkour, that neither the white supremacy or the white oppression model explains what actually emerged and was created in that situation. Yeah, by these kids who, you know, yeah, and they had agency, they created this, and it works, it works as a tool to bridge, right? And I think that in some ways, like, you can almost view parkour as a kind of analogy or a potential precursor to how can we build these tools that function. It’s like, you know, God doesn’t, whether God exists in a sort of external metaphysical objective sense, it kind of doesn’t matter because the representation of God or the meaningfulness of those things has to exist for us on some level. Yes, and if we’re not addressing that, and if we can’t address it in a way that can invite in the believers and the non-believers, then we’re just stuck with war, I guess. Yeah, but that’s why I think what’s, that’s why I’m so attracted to your project because, you know, as much as I love and respect what Peterson’s done, he kind of flirts at the edge of saying, it’s neither. Yeah, yeah. He rejects the atheism, and he describes Christianity in such a way that it’d be very easy to be non-theistic, but he doesn’t go to the point of saying, I’m actually approaching this as a non-theist. Yeah, and I’ve, as you know, I’ve criticized him for not doing that because I think you can make a very clear case that Young is a non-theist, for example. Yeah. So, yeah, so that, I mean, I’ve been trying to articulate this with this notion of transjectivity and the notion of this. This is extraordinarily valuable, like that just blew my mind when I first encountered the idea of transjectivity, that, you know, there’s the object, there’s the observer of the object, and then there’s the relationship, right? And that so much of where we get stuck is reframed once you recognize that there’s a reality within the relationship. Yeah, well, that’s exactly, and, you know, and I think I’ve been helped by people like Corban and the imaginal as not the subjective image or just the objective thing, but as the enacted image schema that actually allows us to afford, you know, find transjectivity, find that connectedness. And I see a lot of, like, I see a lot of what you’re doing in parkour is exactly that kind of enacted imaginal work, imaginal play, I should say. Yeah. So one last question, and then maybe we’ll wrap it up. So a term that I often use, I don’t hear you use it as much, but I don’t think you’re hostile to it to a degree. But I’ve felt it sort of sneaking around the corners, like when you talked about tool and whole stuff, and this is, you know, wisdom. And where does wisdom fit into this whole program that you’re talking about? There’s definitely now sacredness and spirituality, there’s aspiration, there’s transformation, you know, there’s, people have to have the, you know, they have to have the right insight, they have to discern, use this as a tool, not crawl into the hole. But like more explicitly now, more folkily, how does wisdom fit into this for you? I suppose the first response I have to that is I’m 38 and I jump between trees. Like, wisdom is such an interesting word. Like, I’ve been insightful for most of my life, I guess. My mom tells stories about like, going on walks with me and like, finding me discussing the nature of God with people when I was four years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s clear. Yeah. And so at 16 years old, I actually, the first religion that I got involved in, the only religion I’ve really been involved in was a was a Native American sort of recovery. I don’t know how to describe it, right? There’s a bunch of white people following this Native American leader, Johnny Moses, doing something called sewis. So it’s in this community. And I was talking about my ideas, whatever those ideas were at the time, and a lot of people would tell me that I was wise, right? And it just stuck in my craw, because how could a 16 year old be wise? I had no experience. For me, wisdom was experience married to insight. Yeah, yeah. At the time. I love the way that you’ve articulated wisdom. I don’t know that I’ve integrated into the way that I’m thinking about what I’m doing. I want to afford people insight generation, which is very deeply connected to that. And I think, I mean, there’s this, one of the things that I ask is, do people do the right, it’s the Nietzschean question, right? Most of morality is just cowardice. Yeah. Right. I feel like we’ve lived through the easiest times in human history. And maybe that’s ending. Yeah. But people, most people behave well in these nice times, not because they have a well cultivated virtue and wisdom and ethics, but because the game is set up so that that’s what’s rewarded to some degree. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think that if you can set the game up to reward good behavior, that’s great. But you want to build also the people such that even when the game shifts, when things change, that’s still what’s rewarded. And I have this, or at least rewarding, I don’t see wisdom, right? I don’t, I don’t see our political class as wise. I don’t see our academic class as wise. And I also see, I mean, I’m getting a little passionate here, but I see cowardice everywhere. I see people who, who, who have, who are not willing to look deeply at themselves, who are not willing to try hard things, who are not willing to take on difficult questions, who, who, who are not guys that I want beside me in a shield wall. Right. Right. Right. Right. And I think it’s because, because they haven’t had the chance to test themselves and to grow themselves. And because, or because there has to be something, you know, more, there has to be something we’re aspiring to. And there has to be systems that give us that opportunity for serious play, but also a necessity for discipline. Right. And that, that’s, that’s ultimately what I’m interested in is that, that, that, that cultivation of virtue through practice. And, and one of those is, is, is wisdom. But I would say that in the, in the ecology of, of, of, of the cultivation of virtue, my role and what my work has been about is more about courage. And your role is more about wisdom. That’s fair. That’s fair. But I, I, I want, and I’m very attracted to the idea of the synthesis, but I think that if I’m a, at least at this stage of my life, right, if I’m going to, to lead people on a path, I feel like the path around courage is the path that I’m most, most, most informed with. Right. Most resonant with. Yeah. I, I, I, I feel I have a, a subject matter expertise that I can fairly put myself in front of people there. And if people get wisdom from what I’m doing and perhaps they do, then that’s great. But to take on wisdom as at the center of it feels presumptuous. Yeah. Fair enough. Well, I mean, we’re all, we’re all, we are always and only supposed to be loved. Any better show. I think that I love the idea of philosophy. You know, we were talking about who, who is the avatar of the person who comes to the work that we’re doing. And it’s like, it’s the philosophical movement person, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you and Mark are those kinds of people. Yeah. I think that’s very clear to me. That’s why, you know, I enjoy so much spending time with both of you. Yeah. So that, that seems like a good place to close. Rafe, this was really wonderful. I really want to thank you very much for, for coming. Of course, please, I, I, I’m going to say it right now. I, you know, I think Rafe does really important work. And I always am recommending what he’s doing. I hope this video shows you the depth and the seriousness of what he’s doing and why it’s so pertinent and relevant to the meaning crisis and to the way in which right now the domicile aspect of the meaning crisis is really being exacerbated in ways that I think are going to have some pretty serious mental health impacts. And there are, there’s a way, there’s an alternative way to go forward. We do not have to just sort of suffer domicile and the, the mental health deterioration that comes from this exacerbation, the meaning crisis. There’s alternatives we can make use of and they work. And Rafe is here to show you and to tell you and to exemplify the fact that they do work. And so I want to thank you very much. I think what you, what you’re doing and, and what you’ve said today is a, is good reason and good evidence for good hope. Yeah, thank you so much. I, I’d love to maybe even have a second one where we go deeper into the idea of the domicile because I think that, I think that, I think that people still have not grappled with just how disruptive this might be. The world that we, you know, I think people are sort of thinking that they’re going to come out of their bunker and it’s going to be the same world. No, this is like after the Great Depression and World War II. These are the, we have to remember that this is, this is the first world encompassing, world challenging event we’ve come. The analogs are the Great Depression and World War II and went through. Wars, pandemics. We haven’t seen this in 80 years. That’s right. And so, and after the Great Depression and World War II, we did not go back to the way things were before those events. We did not go back and I don’t think we’re going back either. Eric Weinstein calls this the awakening from the great nap. It could be and especially, and I think you agree with me too, that I, I, I, I strongly suspect that this is not the only pandemic we’re going to be facing. So there’s a real worry about that, that if we don’t change factory farming, wet markets and a lot of other things. Also, you know, and also melting the permafrost and sloshing your rainforest and ocean currents and air currents. Like we’re doing a lot. We’re messing around with a very, very complex system in a really haphazard way. Absolutely. So I think that if, if the thesis is correct, that the, that, you know, essentially, let’s say we, we had an identity, we had a, we had a home to some degree. Yeah. And that has been deeply disturbed and we need bridges to the next home and to, to be able to start building it. And that means that we can’t be those comfortable people in our shells anymore. We have to cultivate virtue and we need those bridges to the cultivation of virtue and the capacity to create the next home. Well, I’ll build on your metaphor slightly. I think we had a home, but it was, it was actually seriously deteriorated. It was. Process so that it, like when it, when it’s disturbed, it has a very great chance that it’s going to in some significant way collapse. And I think, yeah, building bridges is exactly what we need to be doing right now. So, so yeah, so I offer my work as a, as a potential bridge for people. If it’s, if it’s interesting, if it feels like it might help them sustain and, and, and, and cultivate something that will take them into this potentially very new world. Well, yeah, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll definitely talk again about a follow up on this. And I really do think you should get on with talk about Paul Van der Kley because that bit we were talking about the shift in your spirituality and your attitude towards God and religion. I think he, he and his viewers would find deeply, deeply interesting. Cool. Well, yeah, I mean, I can ping him. Maybe you can send him this. Yeah, I’ll send him this and I’ll send him an email about this. So thanks again, Ray. Thanks very much. Yeah, it’s always, it’s always an immense pleasure. You know, I look forward so much to these conversations. Me too. I assume you’re going to just end, not, you can stop the recording. I’ll stop the recording. I don’t think you did send me your number. I think you’re going to send me your number so that we could communicate more easily.