148 - Play is the Way (Showmanship & Play 30 of 30)

 What if imagination isn't a distraction from truth, but our only reliable path to experiencing it?

In this episode we conclude our 30-part exploration of showmanship through the lens of play. Using a personal case study of creating a plate-spinning poetry act, we witness how true artistic creation evolves organically—not as random elements slapped together, but as a cohesive vision that transcends its individual components.

The journey takes an unexpected turn when the pandemic transforms both the physical performance and its meaning. Standing amidst twelve wobbling plates with a flaming book of poetry, we discover that sometimes the most powerful moment comes not from triumphantly saving everything from collapse, but from creating a sacred space for what matters most while the world metaphorically burns around us.

We explore the wisdom of foxes—both from Ylvis Brothers' viral hit and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince—about establishing meaningful ties that make each of us unique in all the world. The real-life Lord of the Flies story reveals how six shipwrecked boys thrived through cooperation rather than descending into savagery, challenging our often-cynical views of human nature.

At its heart, this exploration reveals play as the compass that guides us through life's overwhelming possibilities. By pursuing activities that satisfy the five criteria of play, we unlock not just enjoyment but all human behavioral needs—from creativity and wonder to love and friendship. The world changes when we view it through the lens of play, revealing better ways of being with ourselves and each other.

Take some time to play with yourself and those you love. After all, play might just be the most serious undertaking we can pursue.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Play and Showmanship
• 10:49 Plate Spinning Act Creation Process
• 17:44 Pandemic Changes and Artistic Evolution
• 26:34 Art, Imagination, and Audience Connection
• 35:08 The Fox's Wisdom on Human Connection
• 46:44 Play as Life's Ultimate Compass

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

Greetings, fellow travelers, and welcome to the way of the showman, where we view the world through the lens of showmanship. I am Captain Frodo and I will be your host and your guide along the way as we step into the final 30th episode, exploring the relationship between showmanship and play. And, to sum it all up, I believe showmanship is an aspect of play. So there you have it. I could have said it as shallowly as that, but through the last 30 episodes I hope 29, and today will be the last one I do believe that if you look at any aspect of play and you study it and you understand it, you understand aspects of what it means to be a performer, what it means to be an artist, what it means to create something means to be an artist, what it means to create something and, as we have boiled this down to the five criterias of play, those are five aspects that should be included in everything that you do. Every time you perform an act, these criteria should be touched on and if you ever are working on a new act or a new piece of anything, any kind of performance, whether it's a poem or it's an act of juggling, having this in mind, does it have these five criterias. If it does so, then it will stand stronger and be more beautiful and interesting to watch. That is my firm belief, and if I can ask one thing of you, it would be please click, subscribe to the podcast. It's free and it's awesome, and then you won't miss a single episode, and it makes me feel really good about myself having people that likes it so much that they consider having it delivered into their podcast downloader of choice. All right, folks, let's jump straight into the world of ideas. All right, let's crack.

Speaker 1: 2:11

This started with a quote about art from Leo Tolstoy, the author, who apparently said this sometime in the end of the 1800s, 1897. End of the 1800s, 1897. To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and, having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling, that others may experience that same feeling. This is the activity of art. So because I've been you know it has been very lofty and philosophizing these last episodes I thought that it could be valuable to try and make this a little bit more concrete and I, in trying to work out how to do that, I have decided to make a use, as an example, the sort of creation process that I had of one of my lesser known acts, though I hope to illuminate through this. I hope to illuminate this sort of playful, imaginary process involved in bringing a feeling or inclination into being as a work of art.

Speaker 1: 3:26

Now, at some point, the idea entered me that I wanted to do an act based around plate spinning, and plate spinning is where you balance a spinning dinner plate or bowl or whatever on a stick. So the stick is sort of wobbling around, spinning in a circle and you have the plate balancing on top of it. The centrifugal force can keep this plate balanced and, of course, it being made of ceramics or whatever, it could fall down, which is makes it quite exciting for the audience. So I thought I could master this discipline relatively easily due to certain skills that I already possessed in balancing and whatnot, certain skills that I already possessed in balancing and whatnot. So I decided I wanted to learn how to spin 12 ceramic plates, dinner plates, on as many sticks mounted into some wooden stands that my dad helped me make.

Speaker 1: 4:15

The nature of these kinds of acts is that it can get a little predictable, because each spinning plate needs to be re-spun as their speed gradually slows down to stop them from falling, and each additional plate that gets spun makes it more frantic and exciting. But despite this, the climax is rather predictable Twelve sticks or twelve num twelve plates in your stack. This sort of telegraphs the end of the act. Telegraphs the end of the act, and hiding the number of sticks or plates doesn't really bring about a surprise more exciting than oh. I wonder how many he will spin, only to end with oh 12. Oh, that's cool. So 12, that was the end of that. He didn't have any more sticks or whatever.

Speaker 1: 4:59

So this means that these kinds of acts often have the performer do a few other tricks or skills, sort of in between the frantic work of getting all the plates up whilst constantly saving plates from wobbling to a crash on the floor. This does make the acts less predictable, but has the danger of feeling slapped together just a bit of fancy, as Coleridge would have said it, a string of things that holds our attention but which does not add up to anything more than what actually happened, this straw man version of a plate. I mean straw man. It's sort of like when it's a misrepresented or exaggerated version of an opponent's argument, often created to make it easier to attack and refute rather than addressing the actual position. So I'm not claiming that most people or the people who do this in their play, spinning acts aren't awesome examples of entertaining. But, to pick up the thread where we left off last week, this is an example of what Coleridge called fancy, as in bits that are added together.

Speaker 1: 6:18

Now my idea, which had led me to want to pursue the skill of plate spinning, had to do with a second layer. I wanted what I did in between each of the plates going up onto the stick. I wanted that thing to be the main point of the act, making the plates a distraction from the important in-between stuff. And on the surface this might not sound very revolutionary, and I'm sure it isn't, but that there are plenty of examples out there of people who have managed to do this and made a great living and whatever, but I don't know about them off the top of my head right now anyway. But whether this was not revolutionary or not didn't stop me from feeling that this was an idea worth pursuing. It was a feeling that I had and you know that was basically this thing that Tolstoy says in the beginning. Here is that to evoke in oneself a feeling that one has experienced and then express it through lines, colors. That's the activity of art. So that was sort of where I was at. I like this idea and why I felt this strong enough to realize the idea, as in working through it, realizing and both having the idea and to make it real, I don't really know, but I believe this to be the nature of inspiration for artists of all kinds. We don't always know exactly why we dedicate huge amounts of time and attention on bizarre undertakings and guess. To my defense, I would say that I was following the edicts of the first and second play criteria of wanting to pursue it to realization merely for the fun of doing it. In short, I was being a good showman.

Speaker 1: 7:59

This idea was percolating in me whilst living in Las Vegas in 2020, just ahead of the pandemic, and during this time, my interest in poetry had gotten a new wind. So a new wind. One night, sitting by the pool of our pink house, looking at a wrinkled brown pomegranate bobbing about in the waters of the little waves in the pool, as the dry winds blew over my fence from the desert, I came to think that the in-between bit should be a poetry recital the seriousness of reading a proper, deep and powerful poem and the chaotic interruptions of the precarious plates on the tall floppy sticks. I thought that would create an enjoyable juxtaposition and I love to play in the intersection of the silly and the sublime, the fun interaction between the idea of presenting a serious poem which would be interrupted and then hurried along by the excitement and urgency that would ensue once I spun more and more plates up on my wobbly sticks. I thought that would be good as each plate sort of slows down and catastrophe becomes imminent.

Speaker 1: 9:10

It would be a real, actual interruption which is really good to have when you're doing clowning, I think, like you got an idea the clown wants to sit on the chair and the clown act becomes great when you know what is it that gets in the way of the clown. I remember Gareth actually Gareth Bealden, that has been on the podcast. A few episodes ago he talked about this. He said I can't remember when we were doing some work, maybe with Tom Flanagan's show, kaput or something, and he just threw that out there Like the clown wants to do something and we just want to ask what gets in the way and I love that Anyway. So this kind of reading a poem and being interrupted, genuinely interrupted. If I don't stop and spin these sticks, the plates are going to go smashing.

Speaker 1: 10:04

I thought this seemed to me to be a great structure for an act, and when I you know, when I tell you here the process of coming up with this, I guess it seems sort of straightforward and easy. But that's only through the benefit of hindsight, because the reality of the lived experience was neither straightforward nor inevitable. There is always elements of randomness and, ultimately, mystery involved in creative processes, particularly when they go beyond mere fancy, as Coleridge called it. So, sitting there by the pool later it wasn't at the same time when I had that idea, but I then brought this up sitting by the same pool in Vegas. I sat there with my friend, magician and hand shadow master, paul Dabeck, and explained my idea to him, and he immediately got it and helped me shape out a bunch of gags that could happen along the way, before even getting to the reading of the actual poem, we came up with the idea that I could read a poem from a book, which would mean that I needed to find the right page in the book.

Speaker 1: 11:07

Whilst flipping the pages, I could get interrupted by the wobbling plates and then have to put the book down real quick and get back and spin the sticks. And then when I get back to the book, then I'd sort of lost my spot and had to look for the spot in the book, the page in the book again, and since when I got there that would. So that would kind of yeah, be, that would be one of the gags. And then, returning to the books, I could get there and I realized that oh, I haven't spun the plate enough, so I have to put the bookmark in. And then accidentally I, when I go back, I'm having I have to hurry back, and then I read a bit from the book, but I read like two liters of milk, six bananas and a bottle of cod liver oil, and I pulled the bookmark out which turns out to be a shopping list and I'm throwing it on the floor, but then I've closed the book again. So we had a few sort of simple, cute little gags for me to like to what happens when I get back to the book and that. So I've just added this one more prop, the book, which is now kind of the what do you call it? It's the kind of wheelhouse or it's the instigator of the poem. It's also like it shows me. You know, standing there with a book is a good image of the poet. I thought so.

Speaker 1: 12:28

The other more sort of important structural discovery afforded by the introduction of the book and these gags along the way was that now the actual poem didn't need to be interrupted. So the first idea was that what was interrupted was the reading of the actual poem. But the thing is, if you start interrupting a poem, then it loses its impact because you can't remember it and then the poem becomes more of a joke. The plates are still then somehow the main thing. So with this idea here that I was trying to get the book ready so that I could read a poem kind of pushed the poem further and further back in the actual plate spinning act, because what was being interrupted was the preparation to read.

Speaker 1: 13:21

You know, the whole plate spinning and the book stuff was turning out to be just a build up to the reading of the poem. And it felt like these discoveries were really growing organically and I couldn't help shake the feeling that, rather than making it up, we were really discovering, or even remembering, something which already existed. I didn't think of it in these words then, but adding a book of poetry to a poetry reading was a step of secondary imagination, maybe a small step. But importantly, it was not just randomly a slapped-together idea for a new prop that like, ok, we could have a spatula in here. Whenever I flipped a spatula then people would go like it wasn't. It seemed like this thing, that it came organically out of the idea. Okay, the idea is spin the plates and recite a poem.

Speaker 1: 14:16

So to introduce the book really comes out of this idea and it is hard in hindsight to see that it wasn't already part of it. And this is that thing that Coleridge talked about of secondary imagination. And for as much as I ended last episode with going, I don't know. You know it's almost impossible to tell exactly how it was. But how the idea came about, was it just two things slapped together or did it organically kind of come out of a digestion of and a out of the idea itself, so to speak? And anyway, I think this really feels like the idea of reading a poem from the book and that the joke comes out of that, that that is an organic kind of yeah, way, that's a. It feels like an organic start to it.

Speaker 1: 15:07

So, anyway, as me and Boulderbeck sat there imbibing fine gin and tonics by the pool, both sharing the enthusiasm of the unfolding idea, it became clear to me that the final poetry reading would happen only after all the twelve plates were up and spinning. I would arrange the three wooden stands, each with four sticks that were about as tall as myself, in a sort of U-shape, with the bottom of the U being towards the audience, four plates in front of me and four plates on each side of them, which sort of led me a space to stand inside the 12 spinning plates. If you want me standing inside you, facing the audience and stepping into the middle of the 12 fragile ceramic plates spinning and wobbling right at my head height, I would then recite the poem now with a clear and definite deadline. I needed to finish the poem before the plates fell. I had a ticking clock, which is a technique which is often used in page-turning airport fiction. You know, a doomsday device gets activated with a clock ticking down the seconds to a total annihilation, and the hero and I will have a definite deadline.

Speaker 1: 16:16

So this, I thought this made for an exciting situation. I got to get up there and read it and, of course, the part of my situation I gotta get up there and read it. Then, of course, the part of my imagination or memory went back to Casey and the Bat, where Penn and Teller is in a straight jacket upside down and and Penn Gillette is reciting Casey at the Bat, which is a sort of poem about baseball or whatever, and he reads it faster and faster. So you know, this was kind of okay. This is territory that exists. So Paul Debeck and I, we finished our drinks by the pool and we were both sort of excited of how well this jam session was turning out and it was a great structure and it would have me as the hero, with a sort of gradually and eventually frantic speed, would finish the poem up and scoop up 12 plates just as the countdown on the ticking clock or doomsday device, bomb slash, end of poem. And when that arrived and I would finish the reading and run and grab the plates just in time to save the world from a crapload of broken crockery. And then the pandemic hit the world and smashed crockery became the least of my worries as 12th of March 2020 became the day showbiz died in Las Vegas and soon the whole world.

Speaker 1: 17:37

I wrote about this in episode one. I didn't write about it, I speak to you about it, but anyway, things fell apart quite quickly. After that. The show I was in. They paid me for two more days of shows after we closed, and then after that, since I was the sole breadwinner of my family in a country where my visa was about to run out amidst the first worldwide pandemic since the Spanish flu of 1918.

Speaker 1: 18:07

Not long after this, though, in response to the situation, my family and I moved to Norway. There, due to the cancellation of international acts, a slot opened up for me to do a solo performance at our local theatre, festiviteten, in early December 2020. I gratefully accepted the opportunity and decided to name the show From Las Vegas to Haugesund and, emboldened by the exceptionally great feedback that I had gotten for the recently completed first part, or first season, in fact, of my podcast the Way of the Showman, which you are currently listening to, I decided to do two blocks of spoken word, as well as a brand new five-minute spoken word addition to my sword swallowing act, where I spoke about sword swallowing as a manifestation of Rudolf Otto's concept of the sacred, as the sacred being always inspiring both fear and fascination. You know I like lofty ideas whilst doing ridiculous things, so I mention this because this spoken word stuff was the kind that you have actually been listening to for these last 30 episodes and 140 something as well, anyway, but this was at the time 2020, brand new territory for me and thus brand new material in the show. But I wanted to push myself to present more new stuff than my just talking to people, and I also wanted to present new physical skills, which, of course, led me to think of my never actualized plateized plate spinning act, dreamt of by the pool with Paul Lebec.

Speaker 1: 19:47

So, during the dark days of the pandemic, I set about to learn how to spin plates. I spent countless hours in my father's ice-cold garage spinning plates on sticks and smashing them, and my father, always excited to help me with my prop building, made a simple stand and together we worked out the perfect thickness and length of the sticks to get the maximum wobble without making the plates fall off. Unexpectedly, it turns out that the skill of keeping the plates on the sticks was within my reach. I hadn't quite expected to have to reach quite that, you know. I just hadn't quite expected to have to reach quite that. You know, I just hadn't quite expected to have to reach quite that far to master it. It it was tricky, you know. Getting one is, you know, not so hard. But the more you do it and the more of them comes up there, the more chance it is that it's going to go wrong. And it's. Yeah, it took.

Speaker 1: 20:41

The hours flew by anyway and I had to wear gloves, so that the plates were, many of which were actually partially covered with gaffer, because after I smashed them on a cold concrete floor and I I decided I haven't got because it was the pandemic, I didn't have enough money, so I actually taped all of the plates back together again when they fell on the ground, chucked away all the small little bits and then taped them as well as I could. So they were like half gaffer, half plate, so that I could use them again and again. But the, the that meant that there was like sharp edges and and bits on the plate, so I had to do the plate spinning with gloves, and it was also because my hands were kind of cold. So in the beginning I would grab the plates and then realize that I had cut myself because it was so cold and they were all taped together. Anyway, since it was the pandemic and social distancing was all the rage, I went through the entire creation almost completely in isolation, and recent additions to the restrictions on public gatherings that meant that I could only sell a lot less than half of the seats in the theatre, which at that time did not bother me at all, since any loss of income was in significance against the tremendous gratitude that I felt for finally getting a chance at once again standing facing an audience. Getting a chance at once again standing facing an audience. I had missed it to the point of all-encompassing existential crisis, and this podcast here was actually one of the things that kept me sane, still is.

Speaker 1: 22:14

It was in this dark winter time on the morning, when the light fallen, snow had blown in underneath the garage door, forming a partial carpet of white right up against my plate-spinning rig, that I knew that the act could not end with the triumph that I had envisioned whilst sitting poolside in Las Vegas. The world had changed and so had I, and in the cold, I pictured myself having gotten all twelve plates up on their stick spinning, which I could do consistently by this time, but instead of reading the poem faster and faster, thereby lessening the impact of the words but managing to save the plates in time. I now saw the end differently. I saw speeding up. You know that does not do justice to the poem and also we kind of it's like watching a car race. You kind of want there to be a crash, you don't want people to die or catch fire or whatever, but it is pretty exciting, so that also. I felt that as well. It's like we have all these plates there now, wouldn't it be exciting?

Speaker 1: 23:28

So in this moment, standing there with snow coming in under the garage door, I saw myself standing amidst the 12 wobbling plates with a book of poetry defyingly held in my hands, and the music would then change from the band finally held in my hands, and the music would then change from the band. Like I've had this fast band I really like called Igor. That's like this they got an industrial version of Jean-Philippe Rameau's hectic piano piece Le Cyclope, the Cyclopes, and that would then swap into a beautiful rendition of Bach's organ sonata number four. And swap into a beautiful rendition of Bach's organ sonata number four, and after this, everything just increasing panic of getting all the plates up into their precarious balance. I would then imagine myself fully relaxing and I would drop my shoulders for the first time in the 11 minutes and then take a deep breath. I calmly opened my book of poetry and it would burst into flames. And from deep inside those flames I would begin reciting the poem, calmly and with all the pathos I could muster, for in this stolen moment, as the world wobbled, I would carve out an exceptional space, an area of interest, a sacred place where I'd have all the time in the world to do what mattered most. I would rage, I will rage. I will rage against the dying of the light and reciting my poem as the world burns and crashes down around me, which would now be pictured in the form of twelve large ceramic dinner plates shooting sharp shards in all directions, as my fingers, after so many hours in the wintry cold in my father's garage, for once are warm from the burning heart of poetry that I hold in my hands. So this, this idea that I would have to have the plate smashing all around me and reading the poem in defiance of the flames of the world, this indeed became the ending of that act which, I am happy to report.

Speaker 1: 25:37

I managed to perform flawlessly to a half-full theatre, in a time where it felt like any chance I had to stand on a stage could be my last. And in this moment, in this peculiar time, the coming together of sticks, dinner plates, centrifugal forces, fire and the power of poetry fused to wholeness. It was not experienced as a simple slapping together of disparate bits and pieces. I don't think that this was a flight of fancy. It was no escape from reality, but rather a creation of imagination, affording us all all 158 people present, myself included to enter deeper into reality, like so many cave dwellers gathered around a flame to share the kind of stories that really matters, when we sit around a circle, in a circle around a flame, with our backs against the dark. I have been told that I wasn't the only one to wipe away wetness from my face as that poem concluded.

Speaker 1: 26:41

So an artwork is only fulfilled, only fully brought into being, when it's presented for an audience that's ready to receive it imaginatively. The heart of art is relational. My presentation is a midwifing of a work of art into existence, but the infant artwork can only live if it comes into a world made from the attentive imagination of strangers. I need an audience that is receptive to my expression, a group of fellow human beings ready to engage in imaginative co-creation. This is the true birth of the art of the showman. Inception, creation and then the first realization before an audience of an artistic idea is like the conception, pregnancy and birth of a child. This birth and rebirth continues with each successive performance.

Speaker 1: 27:39

What exactly each of the spectators take from my act is beyond my control. It will vary, but not completely randomly. It is steered and restricted by my idea needing to manifest through my skills and presentation. But the final part, the imaginative reception, will happen in them and be unique in each instance. All seeing all of them would be seeing different facets and variations of the work, all simultaneously, as true as each other.

Speaker 1: 28:09

My art is imagination made flesh. It's an encounter with imagination and the flesh that it is made into is kind of the flesh of the people watching. To make the art come alive, I must always be prepared to improvise. I have my ideas about what I want to show and what I want their experience to be, but sometimes there are obstacles. That gets in the way. I need to be able to improvise to make sure that my ideas and a specific experience that I have in mind is received as best as I can. Here, I am completely in accordance with Leo Tolstoy's understanding of art that I quoted at the beginning of this episode.

Speaker 1: 28:50

Now, if a spectator, for whatever reason, fails to imaginatively connect to the plate spinning act, they will probably perceive what I do as fancy Stuff just slapped together. The spectator will see plates spinning on sticks and a man running back and forth between the swinging sticks to a little table with a book on it, and he will see objects and actions, each which he knows and recognizes, but he will not experience it as a new whole, merely as one thing after the other, chaotically stacked on top of each other. Maybe he's probably never seen a plate spinning on a stick, let alone twelve. But although the combination of actions are novel, it will not be anything but novelty, a combination of known things. He will not encounter a soul in the artistic organism.

Speaker 1: 29:42

If my act is successful, though, the combination of elements plates on sticks, flaming book poem and the struggle to keep the many plates spinning and the oration of the poetry will be experienced by my audience as a whole. So what they then perceive from my performance is a fusion of what happens in my act and what's alive within themselves. If the act is doing its artwork, it will be experienced as one seamless process, a single duration, event possessing its own soul, which is recognized as such by a mirroring of feeling in each spectator, which is recognized as such by a mirroring of feeling in each spectator To the imaginative spectator. We'll see the act just like he sees a living, breathing being. For all creatures, great and small, are enormous conglomerations of cells. Even the amoeba, the single-celled organism, is made up of countless organelles and processes like metabolism and endless transmutations of RNA into proteins. Every organism is also multitudes, yet we perceive them as individuals and particular wholes.

Speaker 1: 30:49

The imaginative spectator does not experience a consciously combined sequence of elements or combination of elements, but it um describe a sort of experience. Is that as an unconscious, involuntary experience of unity? For, as coldridge sees it, the power of imagination is to, as he said, mold into unity. Imagination connects things together. Like we talked about last week, the white and black patches of color around the trunk of a tree tells you that this is part of what makes it into a birch tree. So, through the imaginative act, we experience holes, not a hole as in hole in the ground, but a hole, a gestalt we might be able to pick it asunder into parts with our intellect, but we see the whole with our faculty for imagination. Much like we see the hair, nails, flesh, clothes and shoes of our friends and we know of their cells, organs, glands, yet we see them as wholes. The organs and parts are vital, yet they are distortions from the most important thing, not distortions. There's distractions from the most important thing, namely how they all come together to be our friends whom we know and love.

Speaker 1: 32:13

So in his monumental two-volume work called the Matter with Things, ian McIlchrist says my contention is that imagination, far from deceiving us, is the only means whereby we experience reality. It is the place where our individual creative consciousness meets the creative cosmos as a whole. To see is not just to register sense data, but to see into the life of what is seen and, through it, to the greater picture that lies beyond it. It's actually implicit in it and makes sense of it in the terms of the total experience. So that's just a fancy way of better express what I might have just said there.

Speaker 1: 33:07

So, viewed in this way, the imagination we know from our fifth and last criteria of play is not about something frivolous and less than it is about the core capability necessary for human beings to understand reality. And this, I believe, is the grandest project there is, and this is the project we show folk are engaged in. It lies at the heart of the playful process we engage in with our shows and we create genuine imaginative experiences where our audience seizes to see tricks, skills and actions and instead encounters depth meaning, profane as well as profound, somewhere beyond our tricks. At its best, our craft presents true and valid images in which human beings not only recognize themselves but from which they can learn about themselves, or from which we can learn about ourselves about themselves, or from which we can learn about ourselves. And I guess what I sort of was hinting at there but didn't quite sort of bring out is that whether something is fancy or whether something is an act of secondary imagination, as we spoke about last time, is I'm hinting at here that the grasping of it as one or the other is also relational, that the validity of it and the judgment of which one it is might be up to the individual spectator. So hopefully this has sort of given you some sort of ideas of how you can or how it, how I let some I can give you an insight into how I think about these uh, grander ideas of fancy and imagination, first or secondary or whatever, and how that relates specifically to creating an act, and how the ideas sort of grows out from each other and and still, at the end of the day, maybe I am never to be the judge of that myself, so play is the way I call this episode, so let's pull this into the final bit here.

Speaker 1: 35:12

So, in a 2013 Norwegian song by the Ilves brothers, they, they asked what does the fox say? And you know they say that dogs go woof and cows go moo. Why don't we know what the fox says? And, as it turns out, the world really wanted to know what the fox says, and the song has, as of writing this in 2025, 1.1 billion views on YouTube, with a further 200 million listens on Spotify, which proves our desire, people's desire, to know what the fox says.

Speaker 1: 35:49

In folklore, the fox is a cunning creature, always clever and sly, with a chance of deception on the side. The fox is often portrayed as a trickster, mischievous and funny, and not so unlike a showman. We intuitively know he must have something of vital importance to share with us. A billion people wanted to know and tuned in, but the secret shared by the fox in the Ylvis song was as mysterious as our desire to know it us mysterious as our desire to know it. Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow, said the Elvis fox, followed by joff-choff-to-toff-cho-choff-choff, which leaves us rather puzzled and still seeking answers, because if that's what the fox said, we all want to know what it says, but if that's what it said, we are left still wanting to know what it actually means, and perhaps at this lies the heart of the popularity of this Ylvis Brothers song. You know, in best JJ Abrams style, the elusiveness of the Ylvis Fox and its funky yet incomprehensible geckering, which is apparently what den noise that foxes do. That's what it's called. The fact that we don't know is what keeps the mystery alive. Luckily, though, for us who want to know what the fox says, there is another fox, which shared his secrets with a great deal more clarity and eloquence than the Ylvis fox, which shared his secrets with a great deal more clarity and eloquence than the Ilves fox, and we have already heard one of this fox's penetrating insights earlier on in these 30 episodes, and it is described by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, I think I don't really know how to say his name, but he wrote this book about a meeting between a little prince and a fox, and I will read who are you?

Speaker 1: 37:48

Asked the little prince and added you are very pretty to look at. I am a fox, said the fox. Come and play with me, proposed the little prince. I am so unhappy I cannot play with you. The fox Come and play with me, proposed the little prince. I am so unhappy I cannot play with you. The fox said I am not tamed. What does that mean? Tame, said the little prince. It is an act too often neglected, said the fox. It means to establish ties. To establish ties, just that, said the fox. To you, I am nothing more than a fox, like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me you will be unique in all the world. To you I shall be unique in all the world. I am beginning to understand, said the little prince. So the little prince is unhappy and wants the fox to play with him. And the wise little prince knows play will fix his mood. But the fox claims they cannot play for they have not yet established ties. They don't know what or whom they are to each other. The two of them start spending time together and each day they look forward to meeting up and they begin to miss each other. When they are apart, they form bonds, they become connected, they become friends and they play, and the little prince is no longer sad.

Speaker 1: 39:17

To make others unique and to be made unique by others is to make ourselves friendly and to make others into friends. Making the general specific and seeking the individual in the groups is an antidote to stereotyping. It's how we can see the world in a grain of sand. When each grain no longer is one hundred thousands of others like one hundred thousands of others, but one unique, particular one, it immediately stands in a different relationship to you than all others. You have tamed the grain of sand. In times when we feel unhappy, it's well worth remembering the fox's advice, and we do happy, it's well worth remembering the fox's advice, and we do. A significant example of us needing to realize taming of each other on a really large scale was after the atrocities and holocaust of the Second World War, when we came upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations on the 10th of December 1948. The Declaration set out the basic rights and freedoms that apply to all people and although it does not specifically mention play, the conditions it creates make fertile soil for play to sprout.

Speaker 1: 40:33

And when we deal with specific incidents and individuals rather than a fictionalized account, we might also become pleasantly surprised. An example that flies in the face of those that focus on the darker sides of human nature is a real example mirroring the fictional story told by William Golding in his novel Lord of the Flies. Now in an article for the Guardian newspaper, let's see that came out in Saturday 9th of May 2020. The article is called the Real Lord of the Flies. What happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months? And it was written by Rutger Bregman, and he also writes about this in his book A Hopeful History. It's called Humankind, a Hopeful History, and Rutger Bregman legs out how this group of boys stranded for 15 months on a rocky islet, protruding out of the Pacific Ocean somewhere around the Isle of Tonga, rather than going into destruction mode and fulfilling the fantasies of William Golding about the darkest depths of the human condition, it shows that it actually went completely in the other way.

Speaker 1: 41:48

But in writing the novel, william Golding had wanted to know whether the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in World War II, if that was something that could only be done by those Nazis or whether there actually was a Nazi inside us all, and Golding decidedly leans towards the latter. In this story, golding said that he'd always understood the Nazis because he knew himself to also be of that sort of nature, and he held back. He was whatever. Let's not go there. But the story, though, of the six real teenage kids that shipwrecked like when we go, because he made up this story and they kill one of the kids, and it's also made into a great movie, it's worth it. If you don't know the Lord of the Flies, it's a great story and it captures our imagination. But the Lord of the Flies, it's a great story and it captures our imagination. But the story of the six real teenage kids that shipwrecked was, in fact, the complete opposite of Golding's inner Nazi fiction.

Speaker 1: 42:48

The islet, which goes by the name of Atta, apparently, is considered uninhabitable. Yet when Captain Peter Warner found the boys that he found them, they had managed to make it inhabitable and, to quote this guy, peter Warner, the boys had set up a small commune with food gardens, hollowed out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire. All from handiwork, old knife blade and much determination. That's what Captain Warner said. He continued, he said while the boys in Lord of the Flies come no, this is Bregman that says while the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire.

Speaker 1: 43:32

Those in this real life version tended their flame so that it never went out for more than one year, writes Bregman. They tamed each other. Their ties were tied even stronger and they cared and looked out for each other. And even when one of them broke his leg after a bad fall, they managed that too. They set his leg with sticks and leaves and the others took on the chores of the injured so that he could heal. And when it really mattered, the six-stranded boys found a mode of being that was needed to survive Cooperation, the hallmark of civilization, the play instinct, kicked in and guided them towards survival. When tempers rose, they worked it out and helped taming each other, keeping each other close, as suggested by their badminton rose. They worked it out and helped taming each other, keeping each other close, as suggested by their badminton court. They certainly found also time for actual play within this, and one of them apparently even fashioned a kind of guitar which he played to keep everyone's spirits up and whatever, and this guitar to this day has been hanging on Captain Warner's wall.

Speaker 1: 44:41

So earlier we spoke about the story of the great fox experiment undertaken by Dmitry Belyaev and Ludmilla Trot, which demonstrated how the pursuit of one particular feature brings with it a whole suite of related features. Dmitry Belyaev and Ludmilla Trot selectively bred foxes based only on the criteria of friendliness, and when they selected the least aggressive fox, even if it was only marginally more tolerant to humans, and let them mate with other, marginally more friendly foxes, their offspring became a whole lot friendlier. That this happened just within a few generations is in itself not so surprising, but the significant thing was all the other changes that came along for the ride. The initially astonishingly ferocious silver foxes began wagging their tails when human came near Ears, become floppy snouts, shorter, playful they stayed playful for longer and essentially turned them into dogs by extending their juvenile or childlike features into adulthood. Like the fox and the little prince, they wanted ties. They wanted to deepen their ties to their human caretakers. The survival of the friendliest fox did not just give us friendlier foxes, it gave us a different species, one we know and love, they had begun their way to become another species, another version of man's best friend, and this is not a process exclusive to foxes.

Speaker 1: 46:24

Foxes Belayev believed that this process was our story too, that we are the friendliest primates and perhaps the subtle less than two to three percent difference in DNA between us and our closest living ancestors, the chimpanzees. Maybe this came about because we were ultra-cooperative. And now, as I'm recording this today, of course we are living in a world now that is not doing so well A lot of aggression and everything. So it's more important than ever to just remember that this antagonism and bipartisanship and us against them. It does not have to be like that. All right, let's talk about the wonder of creation, because anything that we say about the world, we'll name it too small, but that does not stop us giving it our best go.

Speaker 1: 47:19

We tell stories, and these stories we tell about the world and about ourselves, and about people, animals and things. Every story is also multiplicitous. The stories have multiple meanings and interpretations. So the things that we talk about have multiple meanings and are interpretations of the stories of the things. So reality is a combinatorial explosion of possibilities. The compass to guide our way through it all is play.

Speaker 1: 47:49

Through it, each living thing is able to unfold in their own way their autonomy. It is like something to be a human. It is like something to be a bat. This something is particular for a species and for the individuals. The human and the bat both have an interior experience that are mediated through the bodies that they are. The particularities of their bodies and their interiority shapes the choices they can and, to some extent, will take. But each being is in a constant flow of choices and decisions. It acts in accordance to its needs. The needs of the bat are different from mine. My needs are mental, emotional, bodily and spiritual, and each of them exert a constant influence on the choices that I take. But it is my firm belief that these choices are not dictated by necessity like the actions of a machine. We and life are not machines. What's learnt through play comes from ourself, when you truly do what you want and want what you're doing.

Speaker 1: 48:59

I believe that we are at the heart of what a human free action is. We see the world through our needs as an organism, but we see the world never quite as it is. We will always just see parts of it and in this process, our imagination makes the facets we see into a whole. What really exists for us is something which grows together with the ways we imagine our relationships with the rest of the world. Such is life. This is the condition of being alive to be constantly in changing relations to everyone and everything. Reality is everything simultaneously and all of the time, always richer than we can grasp and express. Each utterance we make will always be a partial of the truth.

Speaker 1: 49:47

When I describe something, no matter how long I go on about it, I will not exhaust it and capture it. Whatever is described is always in potential and in the real world. That's more than what gets captured in my description. A description will always be a map that catches certain aspects but leaves out other aspects in the endlessly complex territory. Maps are not the territory, but they do get you to your destination.

Speaker 1: 50:18

The question I've grappled with in this 30 episode exploration is not what our destinations are, but how we choose them and how we conduct ourselves on our way to these destinations. Each of us have to find our own unique version of the way. Through this exceptionally rich and never-ending depth and expansion, we can't think, be and act out every inclination, desire, want or dream that we might have. We could go anywhere, bush, bash through the undergrowth, scale the cliffs or swim the rivers, but we can't go any which way, be any which way and act any which way at the same time. We can't walk every path. We must make many, many choices. As our choices accumulate, we inevitably find them like a trail behind us, forming a way, our way. Looking back, it appears inevitable and naturally flowing, but we really what we really see behind us, like the path left behind as we walk through it. That's what we see. It's like if we walk through a field of tall grass and it's trampled under our feet. That's what we see when we're looking back. It's like the sum of our choices taken. Had we at any point taken a different choice, walked a different track, our hindsight trail would look or appear just as inevitable and natural flowing.

Speaker 1: 51:51

To function in the world, we must constrain the multitudes of possibilities into individual choices. Each one of the actions we take forges us into that person who took this particular step as opposed to any other that we might have taken in that moment. Who we are is constantly becoming, constantly unfolding as we participate in reality. To be human is to have an unprecedented ability of freedom. We make ourselves to a greater degree than any other species in the animal kingdom. How we view ourselves, how we see humanity, how we choose to interact, is open for interpretation personal whims and inclinations. We participate in our own creation as we respond to our environment through play.

Speaker 1: 52:41

The ways to relate to the world are many, and not all are playful. Of course there are hateful, greedy, violent, oppressive and all kinds of other ways to relate, and of course I am deliberately polarizing this for simplification. But for me, painting playful relations versus conflict relations seems completely reasonable. I believe that the five criteria that we have used as our guiding stars for much of the way through all of these 30 episodes really are prescriptions for a better life. Any relationship can be improved by being founded in play. We have better lives if we give in to our play drive. Any relations are improved if undertaken and nurtured in the spirit of play.

Speaker 1: 53:31

If stuff you do regularly, like work, haven't got all, or at least some, of these five criterias of play, you should seriously ask yourself what steps can be taken to change that. If this is not possible, it's even worth pondering whether you should continue that activity. Can something else offer the same outcome in a more playful manner. If you are feeling down, then seeking out activities which elicit the five features of play, you will improve your situation. We mentioned earlier Ashley Montague's book Growing Young in one of the early episodes and he lists no fewer than 27 criteria of what he calls human behavioral needs and, not surprisingly, play is one of them.

Speaker 1: 54:17

But what I would argue is that play is a key that will unlock, satisfy and stimulate all those other 26 behavioral needs. It is the one simple hack to a better life as a person and as a performer. By focusing on just a few simple features, like the fact that you simply like doing it for its own sake or that you're pursuing fun in what you're doing, then the whole suite of 27 behavioral needs will become visible for you. The world is filled with troublesome features, with negativity, war, aggression and the like, but all the good things in life are also there. Looking into the world through the lens of play will reveal a better world, which is the first and necessary step to live the world differently, to be in the world differently. It's the bit that changes it by following our hearts, guided by our own motivations, sustained by enjoyment and the love of actions in and of themselves, we will discover rules that will afford new, wonderful, imaginative creations and ways to relate to each other and the world. We will, with great wonder and interest, improvise our ways within them, and when we discover ways that the rules can be improved so that the game will be even better, then we will. Then we just change them. But we need to go through the game and play the rules and go. These rules are not working. What can I do to change them?

Speaker 1: 55:56

In short, play is the way to set our destinations and the best way to conduct our journey to reaching these destinations. When you deliberately seek out the qualities of play, you will be able to find them. Sometimes we need to be fastidious in our quests, in circumstances beyond our control, or perhaps our own doing can lead us so far away from the play mode that we need to re-learn how to find and engage playfully again. Once we rediscover the lost spark of the play instinct and kindle it into a reliable flame, it will light the way and spread into a veritable conflagration of beneficial experiences. Montague's behavioral needs like honesty, truth, flexibility, sense of humor, learning, knowing, wonder, creativity, open-mindedness, singing, dancing, optimism, laughter, tears, love and friendship. They are values which are actual features in the world. Knowing and naming them eases our ability to find them all around us. By actively pursuing these aspects of reality, we will not only improve our own lot, but our communities as well. The world is made up of communities, and as they improve, so does the world. Play becomes the way to a better world, and after this long journey that we have undertaken together in this series, I hope that you feel like the little prince felt after talking to the fox, that you too are beginning to understand. I am happy to report that I think I am beginning to understand.

Speaker 1: 57:39

It might here be appropriate to reveal that one of the primary reasons I wanted to tell you all of this and to write all of this down was for myself to understand what my own lifelong preoccupation and unarticulated belief in the value and supreme importance of play actually was.

Speaker 1: 57:58

We all go through our lives with beliefs and inclinations that might be important parts of our foundations as persons, and at some point, at least some of us are called to examine these. I was, and this has been my examination of one of these, and from it I have come to make conscious what I only vaguely glimpsed that play is the particular human mode of being which affords us the most reliable access to the best aspects and ways of being human, not just in our individual quests but in our relations to others and the world. This means that I am now firmer in my beliefs and stand stronger, for having made my unconscious beliefs more conscious, and that I now more than ever, believe that play is the most serious and important undertaking that we can pursue. I have no more to say. I have no more to say. Nothing more to say than take care of yourself and take some time to play with yourself and those you love along the way, and I hope to see you and get to play with you somewhere along the way.