Parkour and Rough Play | Rafe Kelley | EP 343

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.

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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 a 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 outcompete 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 thrill divorced from physicality, and they can play all day without any self-regulation from having to, you know, meet 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.

Um, actually physically, it's not that bad necessarily on its own. The problem is that it's so easily outcompeted by the actual thing that we need, which is the real physical play.

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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 Play, and I'm very interested—have been very interested for a long time—in the role of play in the integration and regulation—not only of aggression but also in fostering pro-social behavior at an embodied level. 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 going to talk about that today. So Rafe, why don't we start with a bit of your background, huh? What do you feel people in on, you know, your educational background, your interests, and all that? 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 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 fistfights, and I got introduced to martial arts when I was six years old, and that started helping me learn to regulate my emotions. I had a mentor who came into my life who actually took over my education and started homeschooling me after going into fourth grade. He did a few things that were really helpful to me. He, you know, let me spend, you know, just two hours a day doing homework, and then the rest of the day I would be out running in the woods. But he also did rough and tumble play with me extensively, pretty much every day. 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 this second mentor who came into my life came into my life when I was eight years old.

Eight? Yeah, yeah. Well, that—you pointed out something very interesting there with regard to your father. I mean, I've actually seen that pattern in many families, you know, and it seems so. For example, I've seen within my own extended family, thinking of one couple in particular, where every time the father attempted to involve himself in the discipline—let's say, which is really the attention and regulation of his son—his wife would, in small ways and not so small, interfere, treating her husband as if his interaction, his involvement, was both inappropriate 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. You know, what? 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. Getting that exactly right really depends on the temperament of the parents and the temperament of the child. 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. 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 interesting person that way. But he, you know, he's a member of the counterculture. He grew up—my father was actually in jail during my mom's pregnancy, first 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.

Yeah. So this guy, the 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, 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'd moved in. My mom was desperate for her babysitters, and he offered himself as a babysitter. And then over time, we just got closer and closer.

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, um, what I wanted to share was that as I kind of then developed, I was in this register circle, which is a kind of Native American religious group in my early, my late childhood, early teens. There were a lot of other young kids there whose families were part of it—there 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 rough and tumble 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 soda properly, so he hemorrhaged 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 tumble 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. When I first came across the play research through a man named Frank Francis in his book "The Exuberant Animal," I started digging into it behind that and then came into Stuart Brown's work. 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. 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 sprinklers, I 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 Jacques 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 tumble play in the regulation of aggression, and that paper was just like, "Yes, absolutely," for me because I, you know, I was put in detention when I was in second grade because I actually bounced a kid's head off the concrete and like, bust his nose open.

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, you know, 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 kind of really building ground mirroring.

Yeah, yeah, well, there's—I have a great paper on my personality course website by—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's a real genius, basically put a physiological scaffold underneath Jean Piaget's ideas about the expansion of reflex. And so, you know, we think of empathy as something like theory of mind—knowing that I can understand your pain—but that isn't, and then 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—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 of—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; you know how far you can be extended and how far you can be pushed until the excitement and challenge turns into pain. And there's a limit there, 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 it, you know, 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 with 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, you know, 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 souls that would make them also more, you know, 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, you know, then the medication, the amphetamines, suppress the play instinct, and this is really not a good solution. This is a terrible solution. It's 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 "Roughhousing 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 told you before we started recording that I have a five-year-old daughter; I also have an eight-year-old boy and a ten-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 an 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? They, yeah, what happens?

Well, they don't know how to control their force levels. They don't know that, like, it's appropriate to wrestle somebody and not to bite them or to throw things. Right? 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 jiu-jitsu since they were little, like they're used to doing chokes, and I have to, like, make sure they remember because, like, if you put a chokehold on a kid who's never been roughhoused with, that will just destroy their emotional regulation completely. And so my kids, they don't—understand? For them, all this stuff is very natural.

Yeah, yeah, they don't—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 smaller for his age or 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, you know, he moves out of the way and he grabs him and holds them with his hand and just stops him completely.

Right? So, it's really an extraordinary 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. You know, 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 aggression; they don't know how to calibrate it. And so, because they don't have that underlying complex dance of, you know, provocation and response that's all calibrated, they can't ever risk provoking each other. Plus, the other thing they don't learn, which is really important as well, is that, you know, if you're wrestling with someone and playing around, you kind of encapsulate the conflict and you give it a space to make itself manifest, but the rule is, when you're done, you're done!

Yeah, and then you just return to normal life. And, you know, the other thing that people don't have often is they don't know how to bring a fight to an end. 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. Like, it's amazing how much of a catastrophe this really is.

So okay, so we've got to the point in your life where you were about 13.

Yeah. Yeah, starting to be hired out as a child whisperer in some sense.

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 know, you don't have to do that with a dog very often before the dog clued in.

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The parallels between, like, why play research, play is so important in 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 Sirius Puppy Training Book or something like that, and they talked about bite inhibition in dogs. I said that, you know, puppies have to bite because that's how they manipulate the world, right? Like puppies or, 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 spars 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 it's—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 yeah, 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, you know, with dogs, given that they're essentially wolves. You know, 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. 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 know, you've batted the dog around and wrestled with it and harassed it and, you know, and pushed it so that it's not easy to provoke.

And that's also why, you know, people wonder why people tease, and teasing is a form of more abstracted rough and tumble play. 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, yeah, assess each other profoundly. Like 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, you know, too special.

Which was also interestingly true of our high school, you know. 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 be trusted. Eh? If you provoked him, he would respond with too much aggression, yeah, and that was an indication to everyone, even though no one really knew this, that he wasn't properly socialized and could be a loose cannon in a dicey situation.

Yeah, and the other thing too, I think that teasing is also an attempt to initiate play. You know, one of the things you see with kids is that when they meet each other on the playground, they'll immediately challenge each other. You know, they sort of start out assuming the other kid is, like, younger and less developmentally able, yeah, 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 of the capacity for creative interaction.

Yeah, if we go back to that rough and tumble theme—like, 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 want to go back to something you said earlier because I want to reflect a couple of things that I learned from your work in—specifically in this idea of how the rough and tumble play is this game that scales up. What I think is so profound about, like, JJ 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 res—the picture that you have of physical touch? Yeah, and I think what's happening 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 will 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 like everybody's map is complete of everything, but maps differ very much in resolution and that, you know, the Biblical term for sexual congress is knowledge. Yeah, and that's partly because, well, sex is a form of play, it's a high form of physical play, and it's very properly practiced, let's say. It's 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, you know, 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, you know, there should be no competitive play because the teachers who push that doctrine have been played with so little that they think all play, which is a form of competition, it's cooperation and competition simultaneously, they think all that's just properly lumped into the category of aggression. And then they think all aggression should be suppressed, and it's—yeah, it's absolutely. It’s completely—it's awful for young boys, but it’s also for women too because the boys end up awkward, then end up awkward with low-resolution physical maps, and you know, they can't dance, and they can't move.

And they're—they're emotional regulation is volatile, and yeah, yeah, I think, to quote Jordan Peterson, it's a complete bloody disaster.

Yeah, right! When I first started Evolve Move Play, Mercer Island, which is one of the school districts 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, Jesus, 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 attack 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 they, you know, that generally does exactly what you said. If two boys face off each other and are willing to fight, generally they won't pick fights with each other anymore. That usually brings it to an end. And it's not that rare for that to turn into a friendship, which is also a very, very interesting and strange thing.

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Um, I wanted to go back briefly to what you're talking about with sexuality because, uh, and I wanted to touch on women in rough and tumble play because 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 vary 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.

Now, my general observation is, working with kids, the boys always want to roughhouse more, right? My son roughhouses more than his sisters, for sure. But the girls love to roughhouse with me and have always requested being roughhoused with, being wrestled with, being thrown around. What I've noticed with working with adults is that it’s often the women who have the most profound experience from the roughhousing. And I think that what it is, is that our culture in general is just suppressing 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 and 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 bridge to 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.

So, if you look at the—oh, I didn't know that. Oh, oh, that's very interesting. Yeah. And you look at what's happening in our culture right now with the, you know, just complete collapse in the ability of people to form partnerships, 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. You know, 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, and there's not much of a causal loop there.

So, and the reason I'm bringing that up is to indicate that the 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. You know, a lot of this identity confusion that I see among adolescents in, let's say, high junior high, high school, and university looks to me like a late manifestation of pretend play that should have occurred at about the age of three. You know, because at three, kids will experiment with—well, I can remember when my son was a kid, his sister—he's a year and a half younger than his sister—and her friends used to dress him up like a princess or like with little fairy wings, and you know, 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 going to have some empathy for girls, let’s say.

But then imagine if you suppress that, and that play, even cross-gender plays, is never allowed to make itself manifest, then why wouldn't it re-emerge with a vengeance later when the stage is set to make it socially acceptable? Anyways, it looks to me like the furry phenomena. Oh, that looks to me like repressed pretend play. That might even be the case for late onset autogynephilia among the trans guys, you know? God only knows why that cross-sex impulse makes itself manifest, but the probability it has something to do with suppression of the manifest, 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. You know, 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 in that there's a lot of cultural ground streamer facts 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 outcompete some of these other more traditional nourishments. It gives us, 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—they—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 right, and when I thought about that, like I immediately had this chain of thinking, which was if junk food is flavor divorced from nutrition, then pornography is sexuality divorced from the context of relationships. Yeah, right? Video games are thrills 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, you know, meet 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.

Um, 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 outcompeted by 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 had met them for years, and we were in a social situation for about 45 minutes sitting around a couch and some living room chairs around a fireplace after dinner, and one of them was 13, and the other was 21, and they just said 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 I was 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 no one—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. You know, 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 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, um, we've been talking a lot about the, 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 there's like the somatic and structural layer, and then there's the body to the environment—how we move through the world—that's parkour, um, or gymnastics or track and field; but parkour, I think, is the most profound expression of it. It's the closest to the sort of exploratory locomotor play that you find in every culture and in, um, 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, you know, like our friend John Vervaeke would say that those lower three P's of knowing the participatory, perspectival, and procedural—that have to be played out through embodied practices.

Um, and so that's, you know, that's at 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, you know, that evolve 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, 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, yeah, 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 was 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—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 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 can strain 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 introduced to people a lot of times in the competitive aspect of rough and tumble play is just like standing on a narrow surface and grabbing the other person's hand and trying to pull them and off-balance them. So this is a game that works really well to introduce competition because it's totally safe, right? I'm not—I’m not manipulating your body in any way that could potentially hurt you. So when they say—so 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 you know, right? A lot of times at my workshop, 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 athlete 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—

So they just grab—what do they do?

They grab one hand and try to pull each other off balance!

Exactly, oh yeah, that's cool because that's—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 a good one! That's something you could 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 then try to step on my feet at the same time. You know, obviously socks, and you can make quite a noise with your feet, and kids find that—and they can back off when they're feeling a little bit, you know, intimidated, but, oh yeah, they'll laugh and cheer away at that! And so that's an analogy I would say 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. Yeah, it was amazing! I did—it was the earliest I'd seen someone engage in truly reciprocal play, which is really four months old. So I'd go one, two, three, hold her on my knee, one, two, three, bop her head on mine, yeah? And then one, two, three, bop, one, two, three, bop! And then I started playing with the gap between the numbers!

One, yeah!

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? But 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 exactly—and you see a 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 than 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 tumble play." And 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 has a, that they have a, you know, like a sufficiently high probability of winning, right? The 30 that Yak Panksepp says, right? And that it feels totally safe.

Everybody enjoys it. Without fail, for ten 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, yeah, 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. No one—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 that's, 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 exploring earlier that that like these things are actually fundamental to how we attune and develop a real map with somebody, right? What you could—you know, the—what I speculate now just off what you said is that the laughter is occurring because it's a signal of like really rapid attunement between two organisms where they're actually learning each other on a much deeper layer than even, you know, verbally is going to offer. But you'll find the same thing if you're meeting someone, and you have a good dynamic in a conversation, laughter is going to start to generate.

And I think it's a signal 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, yes, exactly! That's the spirit of play—that mutual affordance of—I was remembering when my wife wasn't played with a lot when she was a kid. You know, a pretty good sense of sharp verbal play and she was physically comfortable in a lot of ways because she did a lot of yoga, but she hadn't been played with a lot. And, you know, I can remember a couple of events. We were mock fighting at one point; 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?"

Yeah.

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, uh, what would you say? Surprised.

Yeah.

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 one, two, three meant 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 as 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 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 that constraint of standing on the—thing, it prevents them from moving fast?

So we think about a game like football where you can spear someone with your head with a helmet on it running as fast as you can, there's a very unconstrained game with a lot of potential danger. So we're trying to do is just find ways to scale in from there. So the first thing that we're going to do is just go from you can only manipulate their hand with your hand, so 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 manipulate, and now you're still trying to 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, you know, that gap closing, the sense of rhythm, the sense of timing that somebody has, and all that's going to donate to these games as we move down the kind of the progression.

And then we think about the progression 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.

Um, you, 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 first interviews with John, and you're 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 I never thought about that precisely that embodied sense—a whole, 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. You 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, "It's both, right? It has to be both!"

Um, so in the way that we educate people physically, we want to be exploring these two parameters: how can we 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.

What'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 the—do you suppose the dance element obviously maps more self-evidently onto male-female relationships and sex?

Yeah, yeah. And the wrestling per se has more to do, I suppose, with something like the hierarchical organization of the social structure. There’d be more, because there’d be some dominance and submission associated with that and the attempt to build something like a hierarchy of competence. But it's interesting that you have those two extensions for that play that 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, you know, dominance hierarchies are older than trees. You can look across the animal kingdom and find that there are forms of non-lethal agonistic combat by which we determine the dominance hierarchy.

So, yeah, what's fascinating about like Yak Panksepp’s rats? You should call it the competence hierarchy. Yes, I agree! I, I agree absolutely. So the competence hierarchy. So rats, how, when they wrestle, they pin each other on their shoulders. This is fascinating because it's almost a cultural universal that there's some form of wrestling that involves pinning the other guy on his back. And we see this across the animal kingdom. If iguanas, right, like big lizards in Australia, they wrestle and knock each other over and get on top of—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—right?

So 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? Yup, 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 confidence for when the real problem happens." So, 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 develop a theory of mind that that stuff about Yak Panksepp’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, you know, 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—the 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, you know, they weren't going to win, but they weren't going to lose 21 to nothing, you know? 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, you know, because I taught him to play ping pong, and then he got better than me because he learned all my tricks and his new tricks and, you know, it’ll be frequently the case that I’m ahead of him, say 17-13 near the end of a game, and then he’ll really kick into high gear, you know?

And it’s very annoying because I’ve been working pretty hard on my edge trying to give him a good stomping, but he has some left in reserve, you know? But he’s calibrating—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. You know, the big rat must understand that if he's dominating too heavily, the game starts to become no fun because the little rat gets demoralized and then won't put up a good scrap. You’ve got to—and you do the same thing with puppies, you know, as mm-hmm, 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 while simultaneously scaffolding their mastery.

Yeah, you're working to put them on that zone of proximal development. Yeah, right!

Yeah, and so that's the key to good play. And that's what, you know, we think is so important about like 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, you know, 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 and Literacy. I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jumpstarted 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 percent of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. Amazing! Here we have a Gutenberg 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 players, 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 a Chihuahua, the Great Dane will flop on its back so that the Chihuahua can jaw spar with it, right? 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, right? So 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, right? 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—I can’t use both my hands. I can create a set of techniques that I have to use—so I can only use like—I only get a, you know, I only give myself a point if I do this thing, not some set of other things that I might be really good at, right?

I can limit my motion, so you adopt a set of limitations until you exactly evenly matched essentially.

Yeah, 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 want to 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?

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 right? 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've 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—and, like, 12 years old realizing that there were no dragons to go out and slay physically. And so when I saw David Belle, 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 early or 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 on the forest, to try to surpass and overcome that obstacle.

I could 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 will actually play with the way in which it moves to its environment. It will add, you know, variation to how it moves, and by doing so, it's actually mapping all the potential pathways in that environment and increasing its behavioral activities, the affordance and the obstacles.

You bet, yeah, 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 where 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 wall actually codes movement that you can use.

And, right, right. And so that—how it maps meaning into the world. And then there's this sense of 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 some—it's 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, right? 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, right! Well, it's a great form of play symbolically because, you know, it's—you’re going to—the landscape is one of pathways, affordances, and obstacles; that's basically how the world lays itself out for us. And, you know, you can avoid an obstacle, yep.

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 deep about that, you know? That you may know this; you probably do that. Oh, we calibrate a lot of fine actions with opponent processing, and almost all of our fine actions are the consequence of two systems in our position 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 important 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. And you could think about that at the highest level is the most—the most fundamental obstacle might be the adversary that affords the most serious play.

Naxa! Well, that’s a revolutionary way to conceptualize the world, yeah. That's—I love that one. 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?

Um, I love the term allostasis, right? So we think that we're in homeostasis, but we're actually in a continual process of development, and a 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 Vervaeke 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 all of those integrations.

Okay, yes, 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, of course, when I'm learning 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, yeah, 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 meta-myth 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 introduce new kids or adults, for that matter, who haven't played. I really like the curb game. I think that's—I’m going to play that with my grandkids; that's a good idea. That’s really good!

So how do you—what would you say to someone who hasn’t done anything like parkour, you know? And so I’m kind of wondering, how would you introduce someone, or how would someone introduce themselves to that rail?

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? It’s just go out and do it.

So you can just—you could—there was a group in the UK, the Parkour Dance Company, that did some really beautiful things on training parkour for adults in their 70s and 80s, right? 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.

And Jack, he sets up his stage in a very interesting way. So first of all, he plays this really old beat-up guitar, yeah? And it’s just, he’s had it forever, and it’s just done, you know? 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, you know, laid out on the stage, but he puts them in places that are awkward to get to so that he has to stay on the edge to play the damn instruments.

And, you know, partly what he’s doing in his live performances is he’s, um, 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 well—he's very wise.

And Jack White is a particularly interesting musician because, you know, he’s got real heavy metal edge, kind of Led Zeppelin-esque heaviness to him, yeah? But what Jack is, 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.

It’s, uh, it’s—he’s basically doing parkour. He’s creating a locomotor challenge!

Yeah, yeah, to be able to access his instrument so that he can get a deeper experience of play and share that with his audience. That’s, uh, right, right!

So, one of the things you recommend is