Parkour and Rough Play ｜ Rafe Kelley ｜ EP 343 (Ay1KVzVXbjc)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Ay1KVzVXbjc

You should accept yourself just the way you are. What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I’m already good enough in every way? So am I done or something? Get the hell up. Get your act together. Adopt some responsibility. Put your life together. Develop a vision. Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within. Be a force for good in the world and that’ll be the adventure of your life. The link between violent video games and aggression is pretty damn minimal. What appears to be the case is that more aggressive boys like more aggressive video games. And there’s not much of a causal loop there. 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. I’m particularly concerned, like as you said, about video games. Not so much because, as you said, of the content, but because of how they out-compete some of these other more traditional nourishments. 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. If junk food is flavor divorced from nutrition, then pornography is sexuality divorced from the context of relationships. Video games are thrilled divorced from physicality. And they can play all day without any self-regulation from having to, you know, the physical demands of actual rough and tumble play. They can practice shooting and running and jumping and all the things that, you know, I did as a kid, actually physically. It’s not that bad necessarily on its own. The problem is that it’s so easily out-competes the actual thing that we need, which is the real physical play. [“The Star-Spangled Banner”] Hello everybody. I’m speaking today on matters psychological and practical, I suppose, and hopefully also while entertaining and fun, as well as appropriately serious. I’m talking to Rafe Kelly today, who heads an organization called Evolve Move and Play. And I’m very interested, have been very interested for a long time in the role of play in the integration and regulation, well, not only of aggression, but also in the fostering of pro-social behavior at an embodied level. And there’s a literature that has emerged over the last several decades, indicating that rough and tumble play in particular is important for kids at very early developmental stages, probably from six months up to, well, who knows up to what level, till you’re old. And then that pretend play, which scaffolds in on top of that, is also of primary significance in the development of the ability to act in a truly reciprocal and social manner, a manner also that simultaneously fosters development. So we’re gonna talk about that today. So Rafe, why don’t we start with a bit of your background? Yeah. Why don’t you fill people in on, your educational background, your interests and all that, and then we’ll start talking about getting more to the nuts and bolts of play. Yeah, I think given that you started with kind of rough and tumble play, it’d be good to start with my early childhood. 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. I was kind of raised in that counterculture, so my dad wanted to just take me out of the school system and just unschool me. And my mom didn’t, so there was a big conflict there. And my dad kind of reacted to that by just sort of pulling away from me and sort of emotionally neglecting me. So I was acting out in school and getting in lots of fist fights. And I got introduced to the martial arts when I was six years old, and that started helping me learn to regulate my emotions. 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. And he did a few things that were really helpful to me. He let me spend just two hours a day doing homework, and then the rest of the day I would be out running in the woods. But he also did rough and tumble play with me extensively, pretty much every day. And so we would wrestle all the time, and that became incredibly healing for me. So through the martial arts and through rough and tumble play, very early on I experienced that physical practices could have this really transformative effect on me. How old were you when that started, that rough and tumble play? Yeah, so my dad did a lot of rough and tumble play with me when I was little, but then there was that period where it was more neglectful in our relationship. Then the second mentor who came into my life came into my life when I was eight years old. Eight, yeah. Yeah, well, you pointed out something very interesting there with regard to your father. I mean, we’ve actually seen that pattern in many families. And it seems so, for example, I’ve seen within my own extended family, thinking of one couple in particular, where every time the father attempted to involve himself in the discipline, let’s say, which is really the attention and regulation of his son, his wife would, in small ways and not so small, interfere in a rather punitive manner, treating her husband as if his interaction, his involvement was both inappropriate, inappropriate, ignorant, and dangerous, something like that combination. And my experience with that has been that what men usually do in that situation is pull away. And that’s really devastating for the kids. Like the mother has to put up a bit of a barrier because there should be a little tension between the parents about how the kids should be treated. And the mothers tend to be more prone to provide security and comfort and fathers to provide encouragement and challenge. And getting that exactly right really depends on the temperament of the parents and the temperament of the child. And so there has to be some tension, but it’s unbelievably easy for women to be overprotective of their children enough to stop fathers from interacting. And then what often happens as a consequence of that is the women then ask themselves, why the hell the father is more involved with the kids? And often the answer to that, not always, but often is, well, you punished it out of existence. Every time the father stepped forward to take an interest, you put up a barrier that was non-trivial, a moral barrier often. And you do that a hundred times. Yeah. That’s that. Yeah, so anyways, that’s a common pattern. And so, but you had a lot of interactions with your dad when you were young, very- Yeah, I had a very good relationship with my dad. My dad’s a really interesting and creative person. He’s a famous natural builder. And he was very playful with me when I was young. He’s a really, yeah, interesting person in that way. But he, you know, he’s a member of the counterculture. He grew up, you know, my father was actually in jail during my mom’s pregnancy for selling marijuana. So there was real conflict. My mom had reason to be protective in some sense. And my dad was struggling with some of those things. But he and I have a great relationship now. But it did set me up for this sort of crisis at a very early age that then was resolved through getting access to rough-and-tumble play and then epic literature, which was also really important to me. And so this guy that started to play with you when you were eight, how did that come about? And why did your mother and father encourage that or even allow it? Because that’s also a place where, you know, people can be skeptical. Yeah, yeah, there’s a whole story there. But basically we rented land. So my dad owned 12 acres. There was a kind of a hippie commune. And so we just rented a space to this couple. It was two men who had moved in. And my mom was desperate for babysitters and he offered himself as a babysitter. And then over time we just got closer and closer. And so when my mom took me out of school, initially she was going to do some of the homeschooling. 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. And he was just there and, you know, was willing to do it. And so that’s kind of how that worked out. 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. And there were a lot of other young kids there whose families were part of it. They were two, three, four years old. And so by the time I was 12, I started really being kind of just being asked to babysit these younger kids. And I noticed that they all had this incredible hunger for a rough and humble play. It was like this deep unmet need that I was seeing in children everywhere. And so I started just being the guy who would roughhouse with kids at any social gathering. And then people started asking me to come over. When I was 13, one of my closest friends died, unfortunately, after a bike accident. He had his spleen taken out and he didn’t get sewed up properly, so he hammered out. 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. 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. And so I developed a really close relationship with him kind of through that same relationship. So I get to kind of step into that role in facilitating rough and humble play for younger children, starting as a young kid. And then I went on to work as a mentor for kids in my teens. And then I became a gymnastics coach. So independently, I’d also developed just an interest in general athleticism. And I started coaching gymnastics. 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. And so I’ve kind of done that repeatedly and I’ve really seen how much of an impact that can have. And so when I first came across the play research through a man named Frank Ferencich in his book, The Exuberant Animal, and I started digging into it behind that and then came into Stuart Brown’s work. And I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Stuart Brown, but Stuart Brown was a psychological researcher as well. And he was looking specifically at spree killers, people who go out and kill a lot of people in one go. And he was looking for any kind of common trait in their development that would explain this pattern. And what he found was actually inhibition of play. That if you look at spree killers, they almost always were prevented by their parents from playing. Their parents treated play as unnecessary and as something that had to be restricted. And that this, he believed, was the center of that. And then through Stuart Brown, I became aware of Yak Panksepp’s work. 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. And then obviously you’ve written that paper on rough and double play and the regulation of aggression. And that paper was just like, yes, absolutely. For me, because I was put in detention when I was in second grade, because I actually bounced a kid’s head off the concrete and like bust his nose open. And it was only because someone was willing to go really deep with me into that intense physical play that I was able to let go of that need to express the aggression in the actual social situation and to develop empathy. That’s what I think is so incredible about what you’ve talked about and what I’ve seen is that we think that it’s like just mocking out combat and building the skills of combat. But actually what you’re really doing is learning the dance of recognizing how your touch and the way that you move with somebody, how that plays out in them. And then that’s that kind of really building ground for empathy. Like mirroring. Yeah, well, I have a great paper on my personality course website on the hypothalamus. The name escapes me at the moment of the author, but it’ll come back. But it’s on the hypothalamus. People can go to my Psychology 230 website on my home website under courses. And the gentleman who wrote that paper, who was a real genius, basically put a physiological scaffold underneath Jean Piaget’s ideas about the expansion of reflex. And so, we think of empathy as something like theory of mind. Yeah. Knowing that I can understand your pain, but that isn’t, and it’s conceptual, but that isn’t really how it works because you use your body as a platform to run simulations of other people. I got 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. My dad actually stepped in sort of as a surrogate father for him. And I used to wrestle with this friend of mine, and every time I wrestled, I got hurt. He’d stick his thumb in my eye or some damn thing. It was really awkward physically, you know? And I realized even at that age, it was because he didn’t know how to play. And that dance that you describe, that’s part and parcel of extended rough and tumble play, 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, 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. And you want to actually play right up to that limit, which is the exciting limit. And then you learn that that’s true of you and another person, but you learn that right to the edge of your fingertips. You learn it about your legs, you learn it about your back. You have to learn that about your entire body, or you can’t map someone else onto you, because you don’t know how it feels. Well, that’s a fundamental issue. You don’t know how it feels. And so in that rough and tumble play, you’re laying a level of deeply embodied knowledge on top of emergent reflexes for motor control, and then you’re learning to integrate them into an interpersonal dance. Panksepp 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, like frenetically, desperately, and which sort of reminds me of what you were saying about your expression of aggression. And their prefrontal cortexes don’t mature. And you can suppress their excess play behavior with amphetamines, which is Ritalin, for example. And so what really seems to have happened, and this is an epidemic, and it’s an appalling epidemic, is that we have all these boys who are likely high in extroversion and openness, so very exploratory boys, some of them more disagreeable, so that would make them also more, less naturally empathic, who are absolutely deprived of play. 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. And then the medication, the amphetamine suppress the play instinct, and this is really not a good solution. This is not a good solution. It’s a terrible solution. I wrote an essay on this for the Good Men Project back in, I think, 2016. It was just literally titled, A Rough Housing, Not Ritalin. 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. I experience it all the time. I have, I told you before we started recording that I have a five-year-old daughter. I also have an eight-year-old boy and a 10-year-old daughter. 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. 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. And so I get to see how a lot of these kids who are desperate for this opportunity become very poorly regulated when they have an opportunity for it, right? And what happens? Well, they don’t know how to control their force levels. They don’t know that it’s appropriate to wrestle somebody and not to bite them or to throw things at them, right? Or they can’t control their emotions. So, you know, 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, and I have to make sure they remember, because if you put a choke hold on a kid who’s never been rough-house with, that will just destroy their emotional regulation completely. And so my kids, they don’t, for them all this stuff is very natural. But they have learned, and they are learning, and it’s amazing to watch how well they can handle it. And so my son, who’s eight years old, he’s a little bit smaller for his age, or he’s a third grader, and he’s just kind of old enough to be a third grader, so he’s on the bottom end of that class. So kids will kind of push on him because he seems like he’s small, right? 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, he moves out of the way, and he grabs them and holds them with his hand and just stops them completely. So it’s really an extraordinary power. Yeah, well, part of what you’re pointing to there is that emergent tolerance for provocation, which is also really important later in life, say, if you’re married, because you need to be able to regulate your emotional response. And of course, the most direct provocation is going to be the provocation that you experience when you’re directly physically challenged. And to learn to stay within the bounds of acceptable play while you’re being provoked, which is exactly what’s happening when you’re wrestling, does lay the groundwork for civilized interaction. You know, a lot of people, when they’re married, they can’t really have a serious conversation. 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. And what do people do? They break down in tears and have a fit, or they get aggressive, or they respond inappropriately in an aggressive manner, and that can be physical very quickly. And then they don’t know what they’re doing, so they’re very awkward in their regression. They don’t know how to calibrate it. And so because they don’t have that underlying complex dance of provocation and response that’s all calibrated, they can’t ever risk provoking each other. Plus, the other thing they don’t learn, which is really important as well, is that if you’re wrestling with someone and playing around, you kind of encapsulate the conflict and you give it a space to make itself manifest, but the rule is when you’re done, you’re done. And then you just return to normal life. And the other thing that people don’t have often is they don’t know how to bring a fight to an end. And so they won’t start a fight because they’re afraid that it’ll never end. And then they can’t talk about anything important. Yeah, it’s amazing how much of a catastrophe this really is. So okay, so we got to the point in your life where you were about 13. Starting to be hired out as a child whisperer in some sense, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, you see that also, that’s a good analogy, because you also see that with dogs. If you’re training a dog, a lot of what you do with the dog is physical play. 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. It’s like, no, when I say no, I mean stop doing that. And you don’t have to do that with a dog very often before the dog clues in. Inflation has consequences. 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That’s JORDAN to 989898 today. The parallels between why play is so important and humans and dogs are the same, 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 and I read a book called The Serious Puppy Training Book or something like that. And they talked about bite inhibition in dogs. And I said that, you know, puppies have to bite because that’s how they manipulate the world, right? Like puppies, like dogs, their hands are their jaws and they want to use them and explore what they’re capable of. So a puppy is going to want to jaw spar with you. It’s going to want to put its teeth on you. It’s going to want to put its mouth on you. 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. So what he advised is that what you need to do is you let the puppy start biting at your hand 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? And so now it’s regulating its aggression to, okay, I need to only bite hard enough that this human being can tolerate it and then he’ll play with me. And over time, then the dog develops bite inhibition. 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. When they bite, they bite fully. But a dog that’s been played with extensively has a very fine-tuned capacity to control the level of force in its jaw. So it has a soft jaw. Yeah, well, it’s quite miraculous with dogs, given that they’re essentially wolves. If your dog is well-trained, you can even play with them with one of his chew toys or his bones, which is really pretty damn amazing. And a well-trained dog is unbelievably judicious with its bite force 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. But that also assumes that you’ve batted the dog around and wrestled with it and harassed it and pushed it so that it’s not easy to provoke. And that’s also why people wonder why people tease. And teasing is a form of more abstracted rough and tumble play. And it’s the same thing. 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. It’s part of the way that people assess each other profoundly. I told this story in my book about this guy, Lunch Bucket, that came to work on the rail crew with us when I was working on the rail crew in Saskatchewan. And no one had ever played with Lunch Bucket, that’s for sure. And it was pretty obvious to everybody that he was still under the unfortunate dominion of his mother because she had packed him his Lunch Bucket when the appropriate thing to do socially was bring a brown paper bag that wasn’t too special, which was also interestingly true of our high school. And Lunch Bucket didn’t take kindly to being teased about his Lunch Bucket. And the level of provocation that the other guys aimed at him just increased. And it got to the point where people were throwing rocks at him when he was on the crew. But the reason for that was because he couldn’t, he couldn’t be trusted. If you provoked him, he would respond with too much aggression. 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 in a dicey situation. And the other thing too, I think that teasing, it’s also an attempt to initiate play. 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. They sort of start out assuming the other kid is like younger and less developmentally able. But they ratchet that up quickly to see if they’re at a peer to peer level. And then they play on the edge and that’ll make kids friends. If kids can play as peers on the edge, then they become friends. 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 capacity for creative interaction. Yeah, if we go back to that rough and tumble theme, I made a lot of my closest friends after fist fights when I was in school. 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. 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 plays this game that scales up, that what I think is so profound about, like J.J. Gibson’s work and some of these people that we’re referencing is you actually can’t see the meaning in the world if you can’t act it out, right? What we perceive is actually dependent on how we can act. And so when we engage with something like rough and tumble, we’re actually mapping in the different potential meanings of touch, 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. And the other analogy of yours that I really love is the analogy of resolution. So how many pixels are in the picture that you have of physical touch? 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. 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. Yeah, no, that’s an extremely useful analogy. And everybody’s map is complete of everything, but maps differ very much in resolution. And the biblical term for sexual congress is knowledge. And that’s partly because, well, sex is a form of play. It’s a high form of physical play. And it’s very properly practiced, let’s say, it’s extraordinarily high resolution. And that’s part of that detailed exploration of the physical landscape and the increase of the resolution of the map. And that’s definitely all part and parcel of exploratory rough and tumble play. 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. 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, that wants to play and is making maneuvers in that direction. They can’t distinguish that from an aggressive onslaught. This is why you see in schools this idiot insistence that 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. And then they think all aggression should be suppressed. And it’s, yeah, it’s absolutely, well, 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 they can’t dance and they can’t move and their emotional regulation is volatile and yeah. Yeah, I think to quote Jordan Peterson, it’s a complete bloody disaster. What’s going to children? Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. 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. 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. And this is just. Jesus, Jesus, oh man. It’s so absurd because it’s like, how are they ever going to learn without these things? Oh yeah, well, the thing is people who do take that tag assume that enforced zero conflict equals peace. You know, when you talked about this experience you had with your friends that often you had a fight with one or more of them and that’s another thing that’s quite different about boys and girls because boys will often, even with their friends, push conflict to the point of an actual fight and that generally does exactly what you said. It either, if two boys face off each other and are willing to fight, generally they won’t pick fights with each other anymore. That usually brings it to an end and it’s not that rare for that to turn into a friendship which is also very interesting and strange thing. During the season of Lent, we are called to abstain from luxuries and instead more deeply embrace our faith. Co-workers around the office have mentioned giving up coffee, alcohol and social media but how about using this time to start building a habit of prayer and meditation? Join me and thousands of others on Halo, the number one Christian prayer app in the US. Halo is helping me maintain a daily prayer routine from now until Easter and it can help you too. Download the app for free at halo.com slash Jordan. You can set prayer reminders and track your progress along the way. Not sure where to start? Check out Father Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year available on the Halo app for brief daily Bible readings and reflections or pray alongside Mark Wahlberg, Jim Caviezel and even some world-class athletes. With Halo, you can customize a personal prayer plan that works for you and listen anywhere you are with downloadable offline sessions. Get an exclusive three-month free trial at halo.com slash Jordan. That’s halo.com slash Jordan. I wanted to go back briefly to what you’re talking about with sexuality because and I wanted to touch on women and rough and tumble play. Because so we teach rough and tumble play. 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 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. And we teach this to men and women. And now my general observation is working with kids, the boys always want to rough house more, right? My son rough houses more than his sisters for sure. But the girls love to rough house with me and have always requested being rough housed with, being wrestled with, being thrown around. 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. And I think that what it is is that our culture in general is pressing rough and tumble play. But women are more likely to have accepted the culture’s story of you can’t engage in rough and tumble play. And they have fewer cultural spaces that really give them the opportunity to do that. So they don’t necessarily play like football or get involved in a wrestling team. And so it’s often women who come to us who will say this was incredibly healing for me. And one of the things that they say is it really changes the way that they feel about men helps the sort of gender conflict to be able to experience doing something very competitive and physical that has no sexual element with a man. And that is really healing for them. And to then bridge the sexual aspect of it, obviously men and women have to figure that out. 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. Oh, I didn’t know that. Oh, that’s very interesting. Yeah, and you look at what’s happening in our culture right now with just complete collapse and the ability of people to form partnerships. This I think is part of the story as well. 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. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is also an interesting point to insert some observations about cell phones. Yeah. People are often extraordinarily concerned with the content that’s being delivered to kids on the cell phones. And I think the content is relevant to some degree. I spend a lot of time, for example, analyzing literature on violent video games and aggression among boys. And the link between violent video games and aggression is pretty damn minimal. What appears to be the case is that more aggressive boys like more aggressive video games. There’s not much of a causal loop there. 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. That might even be true for pornography. 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. 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. Because at three kids will experiment with, well, I can remember when my son was a kid, his sister, he’s a year and a half younger than his sister and her friends and they used to dress them up like a princess or like with little fairy wings and just as a form of exploratory play. 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 gonna have some empathy for girls, let’s say. 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? Anyways, it looks to me the furry phenomena, all that looks to me like repressed pretend play. That might even be the case for late onset auto-gynophilia among the trans guys. God only knows why that cross sex impulse makes itself manifest, but the probability that 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, that seems to me to be highly probable. What the men are doing when they dress up in women’s clothing is pretending, obviously. Now there’s a sexual element to it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t pretend play. 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? 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 out-compete some of these other, more traditional nourishments. 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? 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. And when I thought about that, 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. Yeah, right. Video games are thrilled divorced from physicality. 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, the physical demands of actual rough and tumble play. They can practice shooting and running and jumping and all the things that I did as a kid actually physically. And that’s probably not bad necessarily. It’s not that bad necessarily on its own. The problem is that it’s so easily out competes the actual thing that we need, which is the real physical play. Yeah, well, I saw that just recently this week. I was out with some young people, relatives of mine, and I hadn’t met them for years. We were in a social situation for about 45 minutes sitting around a couch and some living room chairs around a fireplace after dinner. And one of them was 13 and the other was 21. And they were just on their cell phones the entire time, the whole time. Yeah. And I thought, well, I felt very bad for the kids because I thought, well, first of all, I thought it’s like, what the hell are you doing? There’s five of us around the fireplace and you’re on your phones completely engrossed in them. 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. And I think their whole lives are like that. And part of the reason kids are so confused about their identity is because their identity is never played out in the actual world. They’re in these virtual delusions. Because what you’re describing is actually a kind of delusion, right? It’s an artificial world that isn’t properly mapped onto the real world. So delusional landscapes of entertainment. And that certainly is the case for pornography. Yeah. So. Yeah, so we, so I mean, this kind of gets to the center of my message, you know, like, I think that in order to address the meaning crisis, we actually have to kind of invite people back into their body and that there are fundamental reconnections that we have to make with the world. We have to renew that relationship with the world. 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 let’s say five fundamental connections we have with the world. And those are kind of the internal connections within the self, the body to itself, the body, mind, spirit, emotional aspects. So I think of it as like the somatic and structural layer. 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. But parkour, I think is the most kind of profound expression of it. It’s the closest to the sort of exploratory locomotor play that you find in every culture and in, and really in all other animals almost. And then you have the object manipulation. Human beings, of course, are tool using animals. 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. And then there’s other people, which is the rough and tumble aspect that we’ve talked about. And then the last is I think all of those things put us in relationship to something transcendent. When we go out and we do parkour in nature and we work with people, there’s an emergent spirit that you can experience. There’s a sense of the broader things that you’re embedded within. And that in order to cultivate wisdom, we actually have to get all the way down into the body, all the way into, like our friend John Brevecki would say that those lower three Ps of knowing, the participatory, perspectival and procedural, those have to be played out through embodied practices. And so that’s the center of it. We are tempted all the time by these hyper stimulating products that are designed to kind of grab onto those areas of the brain stem that evolved to be rewarded and direct that behavior into something that isn’t what we evolved with. And to recover the wisdom, I think we have to go back to those body practices. So can let me ask you some practical questions because a lot of people who are listening, they might not even know how to initiate play. You know, like people have asked me to write a book on parenting, you know. One of the problems I have with that is, well, I don’t have little kids anymore. And so I kind of forget what I know, you know. It was never exactly explicit. Now I was very fortunate when I was a kid because both my mother and my father paid a lot of attention to me. And my dad in particular is markedly good with little kids. 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. And so that was just an embodied practice, let’s say in our household. And so I know exactly what to do with little kids. You know, I’m not the least bit afraid of them. I know exactly how to play with them, even if they’re timid. I know how to poke them and, you know, jolly them into a bit of a reaction and to entice them out of shyness. But I don’t exactly know how to tell people how to do that. So when you’re working with kids who are awkward and who have been deprived of play and you’re trying to entice them into a game, you obviously thought this through structurally. What do you actually do to get the kids to play? And how do you teach people to play with their kids or with other people? What are the practical aspects? Yeah, absolutely. So when we’re inviting people to kind of begin play, there’s a couple things that we can do. One is we can think about how we constrain the game, right? So all my teaching is sort of deeply influenced by the constraints led approach and by the ideas of ecological dynamics. So rather than say trying to teach someone how to punch before we let them spar, we develop a game that doesn’t require them to know how to punch yet, right? So the first game that we introduce to people, a lot of times in the competitive aspect of rough and tumble play, is just like standing on a narrow surface and grabbing the other person’s hand and trying to pull them and off balance them. So this is a game that works really well to introduce competition because it’s totally safe, right? I’m not manipulating your body in any way that could potentially hurt you. So when you say stand on a narrow surface, tell me exactly what you have people do. So like a common one, this game was originally taught to me by a friend and we just did it on like curbs in a parking lot. But a lot of times at my workshops- So you’re on the edge of something. Yeah, so there’s a reason why that works. It makes the win condition a lot easier. But also it disadvantages larger athletes, which is important because the physical strength is obviously going to help the larger athletes succeed. But because a bigger athlete has a bigger moment of sway, their balance is actually a little bit easier to compromise. So you can take a small woman and a large man and if they’re both inexperienced, the gap that you would experience introducing them to just wrestling is much lower in this initial game. And so people can get a lot of- So they just grab one hand and then they just hold each other off balance. Exactly. Oh yeah, that’s cool. Because the conditions for victory are very, very clear. Doesn’t require a lot of aggression to move forward. It shouldn’t be intimidating to people. The rules are easy to learn. Oh yes, that’s good. When that’s something you can play. I often with little kids, like two, one of the games I used to play with my kids was just to step on their feet. And they’d try to step on my feet at the same time. Obviously in socks. You can make quite a noise with your foot. Kids find that and they can back off when they’re, they can back off real easily to get out of the game if they’re feeling a little bit intimidated. But oh yeah, they’ll laugh and cheer away at that. And so that’s an analogy, I would say, or an analog to this off balance. Okay, so that’s a good place to start. So I was playing with my four month old granddaughter. She could actually play this game. It was amazing. It’s the earliest I’d seen someone engage in truly reciprocal play. Really four months old. So I’d go one, two, three, hold her on my, so standing on my knee. One, two, three, and then bop her head on mine. And then one, two, three, bop. One, two, three, bop. And then I started playing with the gap between the numbers. One, two, three, bop, you know, to add an element of surprise. And man, I’ll tell you, after 15 repetitions, she got the game. So that was really cool. Because it was, yeah, well, it involved that immediate touch, you know? So there’s this, it’s kind of like peek-a-boo. It’s like there’s a predictability and then a surprise, which is part of a game. But it was a harmless initiatory game. But it was really something to see that she caught on. You know, and it’s theme plus variation too, which is something you see in musical play. Okay, so you have people trying to pull each other off balance. I imagine they’re, so how do people react when you first introduce them to that idea? Like what’s the range of reactions? Well, what’s interesting is we, in the past, more so in the past when people were less familiar with my work, I get a fair number of students, almost all of them women, who would say, I want to participate in everything, but I don’t want to do the rough and double play. And they’re like, okay, we’ll get to it, and you can choose not to if you want to, but if you see it and you want to do it, please step in. And what we find is that people will tell you, you know, I’m scared of this, I don’t like, I never liked physical aggression, anything like that. And you give them this opportunity to play a game that’s highly competitive, that they have a, you know, like a sufficiently high probability of winning, the 30% that Yaak Pinksepp says, right? And that it feels totally safe, everybody enjoys it. Without fail, for 10 years of teaching this drill, I’ve not had one person who’s come to a seminar who has not been lit up and smiling and laughing by the end of playing that game. Yeah, I wonder what that laughing signifies. You know, when I used to go work out with my friends in Boston, one of our games was, especially during a bench press, was to crack a joke and make the person laugh, because you lose all muscular control when you laugh, eh? Which is extremely interesting, you know, because laughter produces a physiological cessation of the ability to be aggressive. You just have no muscular tension. And so there’s something about laughing that’s indicative of genuine safety and peace, right? And it’s indicative at a very low level, because it’s pre-conscious laughter. If you laugh consciously, it’s forced and fake. It has to be spontaneous. And so you see people doing this competitive off-balancing game, let’s say, and you get joy and laughter. And I think that’s a deep physiological reflection of the observation that there really is safety and peace and play happening in this space, right? It’s the celebration of that. Yeah, if we go back to the idea we were explaining earlier that these things are actually fundamental to how we attune and develop a real map with somebody, right? What you could, you know, what I speculate now just off what you said is that the laughter’s occurring because it’s a signal of like really rapid attunement between two organisms, where they’re actually learning each other on a much deeper layer than even verbally is going to offer. But you’ll find the same thing if you’re meeting someone and you have a good dynamic in a conversation, laughter’s going to start to generate. And I think it’s a signal, yeah, of that sense of safety and that joy that you’re experiencing. Obviously that’s telling you this is valuable, this is worthwhile, this is something that you want to come back to and repeat. And so that sense that there’s a way to compete, a way to interact with somebody that’s deeply mutually affording of development. Yeah, right, right, right. Exactly, that’s the spirit of play, that mutual affordance of, huh. I was remembering when my wife wasn’t played with a lot when she was a kid, you know, pretty good sense of sharp verbal play and she was physically comfortable in a lot of ways because she did a lot of yoga, but she hadn’t been played with a lot. And you know, I can remember a couple of events. So we were mock fighting at one point and she came at me with her fists and I grabbed her hands and I went like this. And it actually hurt her a little bit. And I said, well, you know, when you go like this, you open your hands, don’t you know that? She said no, she’d never played enough to know that, you know, someone grabs your hands when you have fists and brings them together, you open your hands. Well, so I showed her how to do that. And then another time she was sitting on the couch and I had a pillow and I went like this. Which means look out, a pillow is coming. So I went like this and then I threw the pillow and it got her. And she, you know, she was a little bit, what would you say it, surprised? And I said, well, I showed you the pillow was coming, why didn’t you catch it? And she said, well, she had no idea that, you know, one, two, three, man, look out, a pillow is your way. Now she, her siblings were much older than her, and so, and my siblings were very close in age to me. And so, you know, I had more of that intense play than she did, but a lot of these basic rules of physical engagement she hadn’t learned. And so, okay, so now you’re putting people on the edge, you’re having them unbalance each other, where do you progress from there? Yeah, so the basic structure is we think about what are the tools that we can manipulate somebody’s body with. So the first tool that we allow is just the closed hand, right? And then what’s the targets? What parts of their body can we manipulate? So now we’re just manipulating hand versus hand. So we have tools and targets and then we have motion. How do we limit the motion? So that constraint of standing on the thing, it prevents them from moving fast. 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, this is a very unconstrained game with a lot of potential danger. So what we’re trying to do is just find ways to scale in from there. So the first thing that we’re gonna do is just go from, you can only manipulate their hand with your hand, to now you have both your hands, and you can manipulate any part of their body below their neck, excluding their genitals, right? So all the safe parts of the body to manipulate. And now you’re still trying to un-off balance them. And because you don’t have to pick them up and throw them or anything, you just have to get them to step off, you still have a really safe game, right? 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? This is a basic tag game. It’s a tag game of tagging somebody’s foot. So you can play games like that where the target is something like just their foot, rather than trying to kick someone in the head, as we would in Muay Thai. But we’re starting to learn how to interpret somebody entering our space, somebody, that gap closing, the sense of rhythm, the sense of timing that somebody has. And all that’s gonna donate to these games as we move down the progression. And then we think about the progression as working towards the highly competitive, highly free, unconstrained games like mixed martial arts, but also moving towards the highly attuned acrobatic games like dance. Because we want people to be able to have that sense. Your next book, I believe, is called We Who Wrestle with God. Yeah, yeah. And so I was listening to you talk with John in one of your, your first interview with John, and you were talking about that idea of like, maybe the right relationship to God is to wrestle with him. It’s something that you have to struggle with. And my thought was- Yeah, I never thought about that precisely in that embodied sense, you know? Although obviously when Jacob wrestles with the angel, it’s physical combat, right? But I hadn’t put that extra piece in there. So that’s very interesting and useful. I’ll file that away. 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? Yeah. We have to build that. So I said this to one of my groups of students, and it was interesting. It was the women in the group who said, what if the right relationship to God is dance? And I said, it’s both, right? It’s gotta be both. So in the way that we educate people physically, we want to be exploring these two parameters of how can we can go deeper and deeper into attunement and the affordances that come with attunement, and how can we compete and press each other right to our edge as much as possible? Well, it’s interesting that you’ve got two poles there, eh? There’s sophisticated dance as an extension of embodied play, and then there’s sophisticated combat as an extension of play. And I wonder if, do you suppose the dance element obviously maps more self-evidently onto male-female relationships and sex. And the wrestling per se has more to do with, I suppose, something like the hierarchical organization of the social structure. It’d be more, because there’d be some dominance and submission associated with that, and the attempt to build something like a hierarchy of competence. But it’s interesting that you have those two end extensions that play makes itself manifest in relationship to. And yeah, I don’t know exactly how to conceptualize that. Well, let me tell you something, this reminds me of something of another way that I’ve kind of taken some ideas that I got from you and extended them in my work. But you’ve talked about the idea that dominance hierarchies are older than trees, right? 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. So what’s fascinating about like, Yaak Peng Seps rats is. We should call it the competence hierarchy. Yes, I agree. I agree, absolutely. So the competence hierarchy. So rats, when they wrestle, they pin each other on their shoulders. This is fascinating because it’s almost a culturally universal that there’s some form of wrestling that involves pinning the other guy on his back. And we see this across the animal kingdom. If a glanas, 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. Even venomous snakes will wrap each other around the head and try to press the other one’s head to the ground. So I think that there’s this central problem that animals had, which was, there are better places to be and worse places to be. And we want to determine who gets to be in the better places and who has to be in the worst places. And we want to do that in a way that’s going to be minimally damaging to everybody. So we’re going to develop a way of- So 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. Yep, yeah, exactly. So, but here’s the interesting thing is how the non-zero sum evolves out of the zero sum. So first we have this, we’re going to kill each other first and then that’s really expensive, let’s not do that. Is there a way that we can play where we’re not going to kill each other? So a venomous snake doesn’t bite with its venom, it doesn’t waste that, it wrestles in order to determine the hierarchy. So now when we wrestle, once we have that, we have this capacity to exact that basic structure to say, hey, you and I, we can play this game when it’s not about actually determining the competence hierarchy, it’s just about building our competence for when the real problem happens. So now all these animals have this basic drive to engage in some kind of competitive wrestling because it helps them develop social competence. But now all these other things can get mapped into it, it can get exacted to be something that’s building empathy. 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. We developed theory of mind, that stuff about Jak Peng Sip’s rats and the fact that the bigger rat has to be able to know that if it wins too often, the small rat won’t play with him. That’s the beginning of theory of mind. Yeah, well I think the rats must be evaluating because imagine that in each game, there’s a series of micro victories and micro defeats. And if you keep the ratio of victory high enough for your opponent, ratio of victory to defeat, they’re going to be enthusiastic play partners. And you’re constantly available. Like when I was teaching my kids to play ping pong, they weren’t going to win, but they weren’t going to lose 21-nothing. I would just ratchet up my skill level so that I kept them on the edge of their performance. And that meant that, well, they’d gain as many points as I could allow them to gain. I still see that with my son, because I taught him to play ping pong and then he got better than me because he learned all my tricks and his new tricks. And it’ll be frequently the case that I’m ahead of him, say 17-13 near the end of a game, and then he’ll really kick into high gear. And it’s very annoying because I’ve been working pretty hard on my edge trying to give him a good stomping, but he has some left in reserve. But he’s calibrating. We automatically calibrate if we’re sophisticated players to keep our partner on that dynamic edge of development. This is also why it’s so wrong to think about competition as a zero-sum process, because if you’re competing optimally, first of all, you want a well-matched partner, because otherwise it’s not a fair game and it’s no fun. But if you’re competing optimally, your opponent has micro victories the whole way along. And the rats must pick that up. The big rat must understand that if he’s dominating too heavily, the game starts to become no fun because the little rat gets demoralized and then won’t put up a good scrap. You go to… And you do the same thing with puppies. You let them win as much as is appropriate. And it’s the same with your kids. You let them win as much as is appropriate, but no more than that. And you do that, well, simultaneously scaffolding their mastery. Yeah, you’re working to put them on that zone-approximal development. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that’s the key to good play. And that’s what we think is so important about an actual rough-and-tumble curriculum, is that it’s about educating people about how to, in the deepest embodied sense, find that edge in mixed partnerships, right? Where there is a massive skill gap. How could I play as someone who’s six foot one, 220 pounds, has been training martial arts my whole life with a small woman and make the game such that she gets something out of it and I even get something out of it? We’ll be right back. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new documentary, Logos in Literacy. I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor’s home was the first school. And every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80% of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible, Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone. From Shakespeare to modern education and medicine, and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all of history, and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that. So you have this large set of embodied skills, and now you’re playing with an opponent that is not matched at the edge of your skill set. Part of the way you do that, for example, is by imposing arbitrary limitations on the player, so they have to stand on the edge of a curb. What else do you do to limit yourself when you’re dealing with a less able partner so that the game is still fun for you? Yeah, so in the play research, they talk about self-handicapping. You know, a classic example, maybe anybody’s seen, is a very large dog playing with a very small dog. So if you see a Great Dane playing with Chihuahua, the Great Dane will flop on its back so that the Chihuahua can jaw spar with it. 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. So we’re trying to educate people as well as we move them through these stages to learn how to self-handicap in ways that are appropriate for them. So I work on this with my kids. So if my son is wrestling, my eight-year-old son is wrestling with my five-year-old, it’s like how can you limit yourself in the game such that it’s actually now a fair fight and it’s useful for both of you? So for myself, if I was sparring with somebody, I could switch to my offside. I’m a dominant left hand forward, so now I have to fight with the other side. I can remove a hand, I can’t use both my hands. I can create a set of techniques that I have to use. So I can only use, I only give myself a point if I do this thing, not some set of other things that I might be really good at. Right, right. I can limit my motion. So you adopt a set of limitations until you’re evenly matched, essentially. Yep, that’s the goal is how do I find that level of limitation? So for my son and my daughter, they might have a race and I might say, okay, you guys wanna race, we can put her ahead or we can maybe have you run on all fours and she gets to run on her feet. And then they get something that’s mutually rewarding. Right, right, right. So let’s talk a little bit too about, okay, so we talked about the curriculum of development and you use basically the equivalent of incremental behavioral exposure is that you’re setting people in a non-threatening initial, highly structured situation, and then you remove a constraint at a time, essentially, as people scaffold up their ability to play. How does the parkour, we should define parkour for everybody, because not everybody listening will know. And why don’t you introduce that into it? Because that’s also the person against the world instead of the person competing against another person. Yeah, this is the perfect bridge. So I found parkour when I was 23 years old and I’d been doing gymnastics for some period of time before that. And it’s very interesting because I remember really clearly, I was very influenced by the Lord of the Rings and I remember really clearly as a young, I’m like 12 years old, realizing that like, there were no dragons to go out and slay physically. And so when I saw David Bell, the founder of parkour, jumping between buildings, I had this really deep sense that like, you can do something heroic in life, but the challenge isn’t necessarily a dragon out there, it’s the fears that are inside you that would prevent you from being able to do what you’re going to do. And so I started practicing parkour and it completely, I fell in love with it and it had this transformative effect on me. And so over the years I’ve been like, what is happening with parkour, what is going on? Sorry, just to define parkour for a moment. Parkour is a discipline of learning to overcome obstacles that came out of France in the late 90s. And so it’s associated with jumping between buildings, but it doesn’t have to be buildings, right? It’s just finding obstacles in the environment, running, jumping, climbing, moving all over the forest to try to surpass and overcome that obstacle. I can think of it as just playing with obstacles. And I think fundamentally what it is is actually just exploratory locomotor play. You’ve talked about the example of, again, the rat model, right? If you drop a rat into a new environment, it’ll first freeze and then it will explore the environment, but then it will actually play with the way in which it moves through its environment. It will add variation to how it moves. And by doing so, it’s actually mapping all the potential pathways in that environment and increasing its behavioral flexibility. Mapping the affordances and the obstacles, you bet. Exactly, so that’s precisely what we’re doing with parkour. And I think it’s so interesting because we’re literally mapping meaning into the world. What you develop when you start doing parkour is something called parkour vision. So you’ve been walking through the world for years and you see a wall and a wall just means a place you can’t go in, right? But now all of a sudden a wall means a place that you can run up, or a wall means a thing that you can flip off of, or do any number of different techniques. So that wall is now much richer for you. It literally is a source of reward to see a wall because the relationship between the walls actually code movement that you can use. And so that’s how it maps meaning into the world. And then there’s this sense that you’re acting out the heroic archetype every time that you go out to do parkour, right? It is embodying that meta myth because you’ll be walking and you’ll see a jump that calls to you. And that jump is undifferentiated. You don’t yet know what you can do. And it has promise, right? Like if you do it, it’s really cool, it’s exciting. But if you fail, you might get hurt. And especially as you scale up your abilities, like the potential dangers can become very, very high. And so you get to play with and recognize what it’s like to experience fear at a really deep level. And then you get to go through the physical process of how does my body handle this fear? What do I need to prepare myself? And then how do I make the commitment and make the jump to the other side? Right, well it’s a great form of play symbolically because the landscape is one of pathways, affordances and obstacles. That’s basically how the world lays itself out for us. And you can avoid an obstacle, but the highest art is to transform an obstacle into an affordance, right? This is no longer an obstacle. It’s something that I can use in my, to facilitate my pathway forward. No, and that’s the highest form of play. I mean, one of the things I’ve learned quite with some difficulty, let’s say over the last five years, is that the most adversarial obstacles in the form of, let’s call them pathologically narcissistic and destructive journalists, are actually afford the most serious play because the more intense the attack, the more potential there is in making your ability to contend with it manifest. And that’s a very strange thing to learn, but it’s, you know, and it’s not a game without high stakes, but man, it’s something to think about is that the highest art of mastery, the highest form of mastery is to turn the worst obstacle into the most remarkable affordance. Absolutely. There’s something, 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. Almost all of our fine actions are the consequence of two systems in opposition modulating each other. So if you want to move your hand really smoothly, you can do it like this, but it’s still kind of jerky if you analyze it at the micro level. But if you do this, you can move your hand with incredible precision, and that’s an opponent process. And a tremendous number of the physiological processes that we undertake are opponent processes. And you know, you have that opponent process dynamic within a marriage and you have it within a debate, you have it within play. It seems to be a universal principle, the principle of properly balanced opponent processing. You could think about that at the highest level is the most fundamental obstacle might be the adversary that affords the most serious play. Well, that’s a revolutionary way to conceptualize the world. Yeah, I love that. The most challenging adversary that you can handle that affords you the capacity to play, that I think is really at the center of what provides that. You know, I love the term allostasis, right? So we think that we’re homeostasis, but we’re actually in a continual process of development. And that continual process of development is always between these paired reciprocal opponent processing systems, right? So the parasympathetic nervous and the sympathetic nervous system. So as I was preparing for this discussion, I was listening to your last discussion with John Breveke and talking to him a little bit. 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? It has to integrate the self with the physical world better. It has to integrate the self with the things we can manipulate better and with other social beings better. And then with this concept of the transcendent, all of those are also opponent processing. And that’s a full logos integration. Okay, so why are they all opponent processing? Because you can split the self, right? You’re a unity, but you’re also a multiplicity. And when you can look at yourself, and you’ve talked about this, if you want to think deeply about something, you have to argue with yourself. You have to create two different dialogues in your head. So there’s this fundamentally dialogical process. And you can embody that by just creating tension in your body between different systems and feeling how these two things, now I’m playing that and how I can grow with it. And then you can think about, can my mind control my body better? Or can my body support my mind better, right? And all those things can be in dynamic composition. And obviously once we get to parkour, right, that body environment practice, the environment is the opponent, right? And I’m learning to have greater and greater mastery, greater and greater affordances available to me through that relationship. And then the same thing when I learn to throw and catch and swing objects, and then obviously do fine crafting things which are kind of the developmental derivative of those basic play instincts to play with objects. And then obviously when I’m engaged in rough and tumble play, it’s opponent processing. And so I think fundamentally we need an embodied set of physical practices that allow us to attune our relevance realization across these fundamental relationships in order to act out the metameth that you described in Maps of Meaning. Yeah, yeah, well that seems right. How do you scaffold parkour for people? We talked a little bit about how you can introduce kids or adults for that matter who haven’t played. I really like the curb game. I think that’s how I’m going to play that with my grandkids. That’s a good idea. You could do that by having people stand on their tiptoes too. Yep, absolutely. So then the defeat would be that you put your feet on the ground. Yeah, and that would be a good way of putting a larger person off balance as well. You can fight with me, but you have to stay on your tiptoes. Yeah, yeah, so that’s really good. 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? Yeah, well if you think about it as exploratory locomotor play, everyone’s done parkour, right? You’ve gone to an environment and been like, how do I get from here to there? That’s the fundamental thing, right, is just go out and do it. So you can just, 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, 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. And then they could lay down on their stomach and spin around to the other side. Then they could vary, 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? Just getting up and down off of a chair, you could have thousands of variations that you can explore. Getting up and down off of the ground. All of those things, we can expand our affordances and children will inherently do this. I saw a documentary with Jack White when he was traveling through Canada. Jack, he sets up his stage in a very interesting way. So first of all, he plays this really old beat up guitar. And it’s just, he’s had it forever and it’s just done. And it never stays in tune. So while he’s playing on stage, he has to tune his guitar nonstop. And then he plays a bunch of different instruments, laid out on the stage, but he puts them in places that are awkward to get to. So that he has to stay on the edge to play the damn instruments. And partly what he’s doing in his live performances, he’s, what would you call it? Modeling that ability to stay on the playful edge. 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. And so that’s really, he’s very wise. And Jack White’s a particularly interesting musician because he’s got that real heavy metal edge, kind of Led Zeppelin-esque heaviness to him. But Jack is an extremely, his lyrics are extremely optimistic and positive and he’s extremely playful. And so he’s a master of that transformation of the obstacle into the affordance. He’s basically doing parkour. 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. Right, right. 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? Just vary that so that, yeah, I see. That’s very interesting. You could spin on your way up. Yeah, you could. Right. What are the relationships? So just like contralateral versus ipsilateral. So I’m gonna put my left foot on the ground on my right hand and then I can switch to the other side. Then I can lean everything on one side. I can do a spin as I stand up. There’s so many little fine-tuned variations that we can find once we take on this exploratory ethic in relationship to our movement. And as we do that, we’re going to be refining and making more sophisticated the body. 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. Right, right. We can think about that two ways. One way is that you’re mapping a broader set of possibilities onto any given object. Exactly. Objects aren’t objects. They’re affordances and obstacles, they’re not objects. And so you’re expanding your map of the possibility of the world in your relationship to it. And so that is an expansion of the meanings of the world. But the other thing you’re doing too, 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? So I’m going to start building new motor maps and that’ll be a form of neuro growth and neuro regeneration. I’m going to redress the imbalance between the two sides of my body. But it’s also the case that those physiological transformations cascade all the way down to the cellular level. And if you put new stresses on yourself, especially voluntarily, you turn new genes on to code for new proteins. And so not only do you remap the meanings of the external world, but you also literally open up new physiological possibilities from the cellular level upward at all the levels of your organization, your internal physiological organization and release new elements of your character. 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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. 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, but right? The self is that highest potential, that second self that’s laid out over time. And so what you’re pointing out is that when we engage with these physical practices, we are actually in some sense being able to bring into the body a more complete representation of that self. Yeah, you bet. Well, you can think about, you imagine that coded into the DNA, the DNA is a repository of potential. But the potential won’t make itself manifest without the requisite demand, right? The stress has to call the potential into being. And so that play, maybe it’s left-sided play, it’s going to produce a new form of stress, that’s a new kind of demand, and that’s going to unlock new potential. And part of that self, Jung likened that self to the oak tree that’s implicit in the acorn. 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. You could think about it that way. The oak is going to develop differently depending on the soil that it’s placed in. 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. 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. And the spirit would be that of voluntary challenge. So all the practices you’re describing are undertaken in the spirit of voluntary challenge. And so while you’re becoming better at each skill, you’re also becoming better at manifesting the spirit of voluntary challenge. And that’s like a meta-spirit, right? And there’s no reason to assume that that isn’t encoded in genetic potential as well. And so that idea of communing with the heroic ancestor, if that’s part and parcel of the process of ancestral communication, ancestral worship, let’s say, that expands out to something like, well, it expands out in the Jewish writings into like apprehension of God himself. It’s the realization of that implicit potential. It’s the practice of the realization of that implicit potential that actually constitutes the union with that spirit. Yeah, that’s beautiful. I was literally just reading, I read through all the beginnings of the chapters of Maps of Meaning yesterday. And the chapter on the hostile brothers, right? 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. There’s the one, there’s the spirit that takes on the idea that the world is inherently good and that I can reveal that good through interacting with it. 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. 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. And that in order to step outside of it, in order to reground ourselves, we actually have to physically embody what that is. And that’s exactly what these practices do. They take you into acting out that heroic archetype, that exploratory heroic archetype. And as I’ve built my ideas over the years, what I’ve seen is that like parkour can be transformative, but it can also fail to transform because it’s only one way in which we relate to the fundamental aspects of reality. But when we put it in dialogue with these other aspects of practice, all of a sudden that transformational capacity is increased. So why does it fail and why is it so necessary to put it in context with the other practices? Yeah. Or why can it fail? Yeah. When I started parkour, I felt like it had dramatically transformed me. And everyone around me who’s starting parkour at the same time, we all had this messianic. I mean, part of this is just developmental, right? We’re all late adolescents in some sense, early 20s. And there’s, you know, you’re gonna be messianic about whatever collective identity that you take on. But nonetheless, we did have this feeling. And then over time, what I noticed was that people would talk about the changes, but I wouldn’t necessarily see the change. Or then other people came into discipline who were hobbyists and they didn’t really see the transformative power. So I started asking, how do we get that transformative power? And like the big one that I see all the time is like parkour is predominantly a young male sport. It’s like 90% young men who do it. And a lot of times they are kind of nerdy kids. They didn’t have a strong sport background. They’re small and not physically strong when they start. And they come into the sport and they develop these beautiful, incredibly strong physical bodies. They get healthier, they change their diets, their skin clears up. And all of a sudden they’re literally physically beautiful young men. And they’re hyper courageous, right? They can jump between buildings and do multiple flips, but they still can’t talk to a girl. Right? Right, right. And it’s like you talk so much about how this has made you courageous. But in this very fundamental thing, you’re expressing that courage. So if we’re practicing- Insufficient generalization. Exactly. So we, in any practice, I believe, we need to recognize that the local game is always kind of a distraction from what actually we’re trying to accomplish, which is that general adaptation to the metagame. So if we take on parkour as a practice and we think about it as a practice that builds us towards the metagame, then that’s automatically gonna start, I think, potentiating the transfer. But then we can ask, is there just a better way for me to cultivate courage right now? Maybe I need to go do Toastmasters. Maybe I need to go to a contact improv class. And when you start to kind of schematize that you need connection and attunement across these fundamental axes, then you can start to piece together the areas of your character that are- So how did you lay out the axes again? You talked about internal integration. Yes, internal. You talked about integration between people. You talked about integration between the sexes, let’s say, and you talked about integration in relationship to the natural world. So those are all different domains of games. And you can think of the metagame as emerging out of all those domains, right? You have to be mapped to yourself. You have to be mapped to other people. You have to be mapped to the other sex. You have to be mapped to the world. And you can’t concentrate on any one of those at the expense of the other without becoming optimally, you’re not optimally balanced. So the five that I’ve been using are the relationships internal to the self, right? And those are structural and psychological. The relationship between the self and the physical environment as a set of obstacles and affordances we move through. 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? And you see this in play research as well. Play research talks about exploratory locomotor play, object-oriented play, and rough and tumble play. So if we take those fundamentals, so you have first the intrinsic, and if you look at like a little baby, how do they start playing? They’re like, where’s my toe, right? Where are my fingers? How do I move this body? What’s rolling? That’s like the somatic and structural layer. And then they’re able to crawl and cruise and climb, and that’s that parkour layer. And then they’re able to pick things up and manipulate them, and that happens at the same time, but those are kind of two separate aspects of development. 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. And then all that in some sense is nested in these higher spiritual aspects, which I think are also, you’ve talked about the development from exploration behavior to play to ritual. So you can see that development there. So those are the five axes, and then within obviously the interactive element, we have sort of like intersexual, like how men learn to deal with men, how women learn to deal with women, and then you have the intersexual, and then there’s obviously the romantic and sexual aspect of that, which obviously dance is an extraordinarily important aspect of that, is you’ve explored. Does that all make sense the way I’ve laid that out? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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. And it’s also useful to point out that you don’t want to allow the practice to become an end in itself. Exactly. I mean, the purpose of becoming great at basketball isn’t to become great at basketball, it’s to become great at being a human being. And that’s going to involve a lot of teamwork and a lot of coaching and a lot of mentoring and a lot of fair play and maybe attention to the structure of the sport itself, all of that. But you don’t want to make your discipline a dead end. And the idea that it should be generalized is extremely important. Yeah, and so, because otherwise you could get locked within your subculture, and that’s when things get kind of cult-like. Yes, and I’ve seen this repeatedly. Every practice that I’ve seen someone say is transformative. I’ve seen that there’s a dark side to it. 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. And it can absolutely do that. 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. It’s like, no, I’m too afraid to talk to my friends. Well, that’s a video game problem too. Yeah, exactly. Same thing, same thing. Yeah, so then take something like meditation, Vipassana, right, you’re learning to calm yourself down, to be focused. But then I’ve seen people who get trapped inside that state and they can’t access it outside of it. They can become even more fragile. Their equanimity can become more fragile through the practice. 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. And the parkour actually creates a arena in which you can test whether your meditative practice is actually having the effect that you’re looking for. 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. Right, right. So tell me about your enterprise per se. If people go onto your website, for example, what do they find, what do you offer, and how can people engage in this and duplicate it for themselves in their own lives? Yeah, so we have a website of allmoveplay.com. On there you can find online courses. They can get you started. They start with parkour and then add in elements of other things. So we have our online courses, people can check those out. And then we teach retreats. That’s really the center of what we do. So we’re in the middle of kind of selling this year’s retreats. We have some soft spots left, so if people see this and want to join us, they probably want to get on that first. In the retreats, that’s where we’re able to go deepest into this full experience. Because we talk about those five fundamental practices that I mentioned, it’s four fundamental practices that afford five connections. But then we also go into the mindfulness practices, which are kind of a derivative of the somatic and structural layer, and then into the nature connection practices, learning about the world that we experience and being able to craft and use it, which comes out of the second two. And then into the dialogical. So this is something that John Barbecki, again, our mutual friend has really helped us with, is 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. And then there’s a ritual aspect to it as well. So we have two five days. So what would people experience? Oh yeah, sorry, go ahead. Obviously you need to lay that out. Tell me exactly what happens when someone comes to a retreat. Absolutely. So we have two five day retreats and one eight day retreat in the summer. And when you come, essentially we’ll pick everyone up and then as they arrive, we will take them through a set of practices that involve both physical aspects and their 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. Then we’ll have dinner and we kind of make as much local fresh food as we can to support people because the food element is a huge part actually of how people bond as well. And doing that right is really important. And then we’ll have an opening ceremony. And that opening ceremony is a way of creating commitment and bond in the group and of sort of exiting the world that we were in before we entered this. So actually like use a piece of this. So I had a bunch of really intense stuff going on with business and some political stuff in my community that was taking my attention when I got the news that you and I were gonna have a conversation today. 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. So I went down to the, there’s a cliff with a beautiful pool of water underneath it. It’s about 15 minutes from my house walk. So I walked down there and I did a little mantra saying, I’m gonna let all that go. When I hit the water, I’m washing all that away and I’m gonna be focused on this one thing that’s central for me right now. 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. And sure enough, I was so much more ready to be focused once I exited the water. So we’ll do a similar type of process with someone when they arrive for this retreat. And then over the course of the retreat, we’ll take them to a bunch of beautiful spaces. So there are spaces where we, as I mentioned, jump into water from cliffs. 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 to actually climb up through this tunnel where water is pouring down in your head is extraordinary. And then there’s like driftwood on the beach that we teach parkour in. And there’s a sandy beach that we wrestle and do all the rough housing practices. 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. And then we have these beautiful trees that we move through. Human beings are descendants of 60 million years of arboreal evolution. So we take people back into moving in the trees. And we take people up to Alpine lakes and swim in the Alpine lakes. We take people to natural water slides. 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. And then we also take them into those mindfulness practices, the dialogical practices, and learning like the language of the birds that we experience around us. Learning, tracking, learning wild edibles. So they’re more deeply connecting and mapping out the connection between the human being and the natural world. So I could go on and on. How long have you been doing that? This is the 11th year that we’ve been offering these retreats. Oh yeah, and so how many people have you offered the retreats to about now? I’m not sure. So the first few years we just did one retreat a year, and we take approximately 20 students per retreat. And then the last few years, we’ve been offering three retreats a year. So maybe 300 people, something like that. Uh-huh. And so what do people report? What’s their experience? And do you have any sense what the longer term impact is in their life? Yeah, 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. Oh yeah. Yeah, that’s an extraordinary feather in my cap, right, to hear that from John. That’s for sure, yeah, yeah. Definitely, definitely. So why did he feel that? So if I can remember correctly, John and I had a whole conversation about this on his channel, but it was the sense of taking on those intense physical practices and feeling like he was kept right at the appropriate edge for him through the whole time, and then being able to have a group of people who was cohering and giving him a deep sense of connection at the same time, as well as the beauty of the nature in which we experienced. 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. Yeah, well, and I mean, John, like me, we operate a fair bit in an abstract realm, and so doing something that’s more physical, more embodied, but also aiming at something profound, can imagine that that would be a different kind of qualitatively deep experience. Yeah. All right, and so that’s at Evolve Move Play, if people are interested. What’s the what? .com, EvolveMovePlay.com. And so if people who are watching are interested in following up on this, that’s where to do it. We’re running out of time here on the YouTube segment of this discussion. We’re gonna move to the Daily Wire Plus platform. We’ll talk for another half an hour. I’d like to walk through your developmental history a little bit more and understand, although we did some of that, so, but we’ll do a bit more of that on the Daily Wire Plus side. So for everybody who’s watching and listening, like this notion that our physical embodiment is the platform on which our spiritual development takes place, that’s an extraordinarily important thing to realize that all of that has to be integrated, and the bodily element of it is by no means trivial. The notion that that’s elaborated up past internal integration into the social world through play, that’s an absolutely critical, crucial, key realization, I would say, especially if you’re trying to do something like revivify the child you lost when you grew up, right? You rediscovered that in the spirit of play. Obviously, the practices that Rafe is leading people to adopt are centered on that rekindling of the physiological relationship, and so I find that extraordinarily interesting. It’s so nice to see some of the concepts that I was wrestling with 20 years ago on the play front make themselves manifest in practice. Anyway, so if people are interested, evolvemoveplay.com, that’s where you check this out, and you can follow us onto the Daily Wire Plus platform if you’re inclined, and thank you all for attending and listening. Thanks, Rafe, for talking to me today. It was extremely interesting, and to the film crew here in, where am I? I am in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. To the film crew here, thanks a lot for your help today, guys, and Rafe will head over to the Daily Wire Plus platform. It’s been a pleasure. Good talking to you. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on DailyWirePlus.com.