Evolve Move Play and Parkour: Rafe Kelly on Movement, Philosophy, and Personal Growth

World-renowned movement expert Rafe Kelly joins us to unpack the profound philosophy behind Evolve Move Play, a concept that seeks to rekindle our connection to the environment through parkour and holistic movement. Learn how Rafe's appearance on Jordan Peterson's podcast highlighted the transformative power of rough and tumble play for physical and mental development, from parenting to law enforcement training. With insights into how gymnastics, martial arts, and mindfulness blend to foster self-expression, you'll discover new ways to engage with your surroundings and enhance your physical readiness.

Our discussion takes a personal turn as we delve into the emotional and philosophical journey of martial arts training, including Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and CrossFit. We share stories of humility and vulnerability, emphasizing the need for adaptability and balance in both competition and personal growth. By focusing on both the outer game of technique and the inner game of character development, we highlight the importance of safety and mutual improvement, steering clear of a win-at-all-costs mentality. These reflections offer a glimpse into martial arts' potential for character-building, often overlooked in the pursuit of technical excellence.

Finally, we explore the practical applications of parkour, especially for first responders, and the role of general athleticism across various sports. Rafe breaks down parkour into simple, accessible tasks that enhance agility and readiness for real-world challenges, proving its value beyond the realm of extreme sports. Additionally, we discuss the intricate relationship between proprioception and parkour landings, revealing why traditional strength training isn't enough to handle the dynamic forces involved. This episode promises to equip you with a deeper understanding and appreciation of movement's role in personal and professional growth, leaving you inspired to explore new pathways in your own fitness journey.

Chapters

• 0:07 Movement, Play, and Wisdom
• 15:55 Emotional and Philosophical Perspectives on Training
• 23:35 Martial Arts and Youth Sports Discussion
• 34:01 Training and Application of Parkour
• 39:15 Development of Athletic Skills Through Locomotion
• 55:05 Training for Parkour Landings

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Hey, welcome back to the Heroic Nation podcast from Heroic Industries, and today's show is awesome. It's like legitimately the best show ever in the history of this podcast, and I'm not even joking this time. So I had the opportunity and the privilege to talk with Rafe Kelly. Uh, rafe Kelly is the founder of Evolve Move Play and was on one of the greatest episodes of Jordan Peterson's podcast. Uh, about two years ago I believe. Uh, and we talked about that during this. You know, talked about the podcast itself as well, as you know different topics that they addressed on that show, on that episode, and they talked about so much that that's one that I've been playing on repeat. So for the last two years I've probably listened to it a dozen times.

Speaker 1: 0:58

I would strongly recommend you check that out, that out, and then also, rafe's background is really, really interesting, coming from gymnastics, martial arts, meditative, mindfulness and then, most most relevant, parkour right, parkour. I was really interested in seeing how that connected with law enforcement and how to utilize some of those principles in parkour, because a lot of times, like you know, we think parkour and we think of two things one, crazy stunts where people are falling off of buildings and making, you know, jumps out of trees and shit like that. And then secondly, the episode of of the office, which is known as hardcore parkour. So there's that, but it's really just using the environment around you to effectively navigate right, and you know that leads into communication and how you express yourself and your fitness in the world around you, how you see things, you know your framing of things. So it's really, it's really a deep practice once you get into it, right.

Speaker 1: 2:05

We talked a little bit about all that as well as like parenting and law enforcement and how some of these principles related to law enforcement. So it was a really fun episode. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. And, yeah, check it out. I really wanted to reach out to you for probably about what? How long has it been since you were on Peterson's podcast about a?

Speaker 1: 2:29

year year or two. Yeah, that podcast was so awesome of all the podcasts that I listened to him all the time and, like yours, is probably my top one that I listened to on repeat. I don't, I don't know. I don't know what it was about it. I think it was what you talked about with him at length about rough and tumble play. I think that, really, that really struck a chord with me as a cop, as a parent, you know, like so so much of what I do is physical that I think that everything you talked about was just so impactful for me physical that I think that everything you talked about was just so impactful for me.

Speaker 2: 3:12

Thank you, yeah, it was definitely. You know, prepped hard for that one. Obviously, it's a big opportunity when you get a chance to speak with Jordan Peterson. So I'd followed his work for many years so I thought I was it helped that I was very conversant in his ideas so I could kind of preempt some of his more persistent tropes and be like okay, I understand, let's go deeper, let's take it to the next level and, you know, feed it, feed the idea back to him in a way which was, which was yeah, so the one.

Speaker 1: 3:45

You just kind of mentioned it in passing towards the end, but like you, you were talking about like competency and law enforcement. And then he kind of asked you like hey, have you ever promoted like the uh, evolve, evolve, move, play or uh to law enforcement? So what?

Speaker 2: 4:01

I have not. Um, we've had a few students who've come from law enforcement. We had one of our students came up for a workshop was special forces. He was trying to get me. He was involved in some some some kind of organization for training for her special forces and he told me he was going to try to make that happen, but it kind of petered out. I'm not sure why I I don't tend to sort of try to push my stuff into any particular place. And then I also worked with I've worked with a couple of local police officers who are involved in training other police officers.

Speaker 1: 4:38

So they've come out and done privates with me or taking group classes that I've taken and they've been sort of, I guess, taken back to the departments but I haven't gone in to the department and worked directly with the students, yeah, and honestly, that's probably better because we're working with government agencies on stuff like this is like bashing your head against the wall, but but I I guess let's, let's kind of dig into, if you don't mind, like what is evolved move, what are kind of what's the mission behind it and what are kind of the concepts around it.

Speaker 2: 5:07

Yeah. So I'll tell you kind of what it was, what it started as, and then what it has become, because it's evolved a lot in a decade plus that we've been doing it. So initially the idea was simply I come from parkour and I was really interested in how parkour engaged people in a deep sense of play and it was something that people were very intrinsically motivated for. But parkour didn't seem like a complete expression of human play to me. So I was like, well, what would it look like if you kind of looked at the whole of human movement from that sort of parkour lens? And at the time I was, you know, interested in what's going on with health and fitness and the ancestral movement hypothesis or ancestral health hypothesis, and and you just know that, like as a culture we're, we are disembodied, we are falling apart physically, we are, healthcare is spiraling out of control, et cetera. So the hypothesis was something like we evolved to move right.

Speaker 2: 6:06

One of our fundamental problems is that we lack movement in our life, but we didn't evolve to develop movement primarily through some kind of extra drudgery of work. Right, it wasn't like the fitness perspective. The exercise paradigm sort of treats the body like a machine and then fixing the machine or building the machine is like going on a factory floor and going through a series of circuits where you build yourself up and most people find that very boring and don't want to do it. If we understand the human nature and we can build a way to to really develop overall general fitness, that's true to our evolutionary nature. We do it through movement as our primary paradigm, not exercise, and we do it in a play-based manner.

Speaker 2: 7:00

So that, that was that was the, the origin, origin of it. And then over the years, as I've kind of developed, my interest has shifted, say, from fitness or physical tasks directly to more of a. How do we become virtuous in the metagame of life? How do we develop wisdom? How do we become human beings who can operate well in the world? We become human beings who can operate well in the world and this sense that that, actually that our education, has to start in the physical, it has to start in embodiment. So we'd say now that Evolve Move plays a kind of ecology of practices for the cultivation of virtue and wisdom, starting in the body.

Speaker 1: 7:40

That's awesome.

Speaker 1: 7:41

That's something that I'm really big on, like my background in psychology. I have a master's in psych and that's that's. That's something that I I'm really big on, like my background in psychology. I have a master's in psych and that's. You know, when you talk about mental health, especially mental health with first responders, stuff like that, like I'm very, very like driven that mental health starts physically because it's the lowest hanging fruit, like you can always do something physical that'll impact your mental health. I think that's kind of what you're doing there, with movement and stuff, and that's that's really cool.

Speaker 2: 8:08

Thank you. Yeah, I think, um, I'm a. I'm a big fan of Jordan Peterson, who we mentioned. You know, his book is called maps and meaning. I'm also a big fan of his colleague and I'm a good friends with his colleague, john Rebecki, and John has put out a series of long YouTube series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and he describes this problem that we are stuck in a kind of meaning crisis.

Speaker 2: 8:34

We don't really think that we can't ground our actions in the world as having a real sense of meaning and without that people, increasingly, you know, nothing makes sense. We experience things as surreal, we experience things as meaningless. We, we are trapped in nihilism, hedonism as a response, um, and it's, you know, it's having this massive mental health problem. So what I've kind of recognized. Well, like John would say, you know, if you survey the literature, meaning in life not the meaning of life, that's a philosophical question, but as a scientific question, if you ask people do their lives feel meaningful, you find that what makes life meaningful is how connected people feel.

Speaker 2: 9:39

And what we've sort of mapped out is that there's five kind of layers of connection that we like to address through practice.

Speaker 2: 9:43

So the first layer is the body itself or the mind body, right, you have ways of interacting with yourself or you have coordination systems inside you. So you may not be able to coordinate your shoulder very well with your hip, and if you could all sorts of options open up for you, you can throw a baseball, throw a punch, and if you don't have that, then all of a sudden you don't have a lot of options and then at the same time it's like you always sort of have an emotional and cognitive layer that are interwoven with the motor layer. So movement is a emotional act and we get to know ourselves through our physical practices. So we can be very intentional about that. So we talk about a structural, so like building up the capacity of the physical structure and somatic, you know, becoming aware of all of the things that arise from within the body, becoming aware of all of the things that arise from within the body. So I'm working with a somatic therapist and I had a really you know kind of remarkable experience with that.

Speaker 2: 10:52

My father passed away last year and I found it very hard to let myself fully grieve that experience. And so I've been working with a somatic therapist and he said to me kind of at the end of our session last time that grief is a physical skill. Right that your, you know that your vagus nerve essentially controls this experience, and it happens in relationship to your eyes and that's mostly involuntary, but then it arises in your mouth, in your throat, in your chest, and a lot of times we swallow it down and we suppress it, and so we develop a skillfulness to not feel that thing. And then you could have a skill of actually allowing grief to move through you and being physically capable essentially of tolerating, in the same way that you know if you take someone and you have them do a bunch of pushups, first time they do a bunch of pushups it's like they won't actually get close to their limit of pushups. They're not going to damage their body from pushups, but they're going to feel like they might. They're going to feel overwhelmed by how much effort it takes because their body is just like no, no, no, no, no. We don't want to hurt ourselves, so we're going to set the limits super low.

Speaker 2: 12:05

So a lot of us have those same sort of inhibitions, that sort of a central governor on our emotional capacities. And those emotional capacities are actually expressed in the body. They're not simply mental things, they're actually body things. And so if we can address that, then you know we open up really the whole experience. Right, like, what makes life meaningful is actually. You know, it's a sensation, it's not an abstraction, it's not something you write down on a piece of paper, it's a way of experience in the world. And so when we open our emotional capacity, the world of course is much more intense and much more powerful, much more beautiful. So that's the structural, somatic layer. Then of course there's this layer of what I call the landscape layer, which is what we are accessing through parkour.

Speaker 2: 13:01

So in a very simple sense, the meaning of a tree is very different for somebody who doesn't think about trees at all and just sees a green object. Somebody who maybe understands trees is like important because they give us air and you know they stabilize the soil. And somebody who gets into the tree and swings through it and is like, ah, that's a jump, I've done, that's a swing, I've done. I'm stronger and faster and more capable, because I have a relationship with this tree. That's another layer of meaning we can also go to like can you gather fruit from the tree? Do you gather timber from the tree? Do you know that that kind of timber is useful for making ax handles or something? Those are all layers that are available of meaning in the tree.

Speaker 2: 13:45

And when we live in our super, you know, modern lives in front of our computers, we become blinded to that. We become insensitive to all the meaning that's out there, and so we have a meaning crisis because we're not relating. And then the next layer would be the world is a set of tools. You know how many of us can't change our own oil, me included? How many of us can't? You know hit a nail with a hammer? How many of us can't you know throw a ball right and catch a ball? Swing a rope around, play with a stick right I have a kid, of course, does this.

Speaker 2: 14:20

Naturally, human beings are tool-using animals.

Speaker 2: 14:22

So this is that layer of the world is a set of tools landscape tools, other humans, other and other living things in general horses, dogs, cats.

Speaker 2: 14:31

But how adept are you at being in physical relationship with somebody else, whether that's shared work, whether that's affection, whether that's, uh, combat, dance, sexuality, all of it is in this layer of interaction. And then we, right, I think you know, purely scientifically, without invoking anything you know outside of science, we can recognize that we live in relationship to sort of transcendent forces. Right, your life, a lot of your life, is determined by Google, you know, and Google is a disembodied agent that moves in very strange ways through the world and you don't know why it's happening, right. So you know, you got to have a respect for and understanding of how much your life is really determined by these disembodied things. And then that's, that is, the relationship to the transcendent. So those are the five layers of relationship that we think are fundamental to a good and well-lived life. And then there are practices that you can do that take you into a greater depth of capacity for relating, and that's ultimately what we think is the solution to the meaning crisis.

Speaker 1: 15:55

So there's a couple of things that really jumped out at me and, granted, I see everything through the lens of, like, law enforcement. Obviously, that's where I spend most of my time, but, like you said, you know's where I spend most of my time. Um, but, like you said, you know, movement is an emotional act and I immediately thought of, like my first, like when I really started training jujitsu, um, and and CrossFit to an extent, but when I really started training jujitsu, it was, uh, you know, it was probably, you know, six years ago at this point, maybe seven, but I remember going in as like a uh, a, uh, you know, 30 something swap cop and just getting annihilated and my and my ego was smashed. I was getting like beat up by, you know, accountants and regular dude in the street, like like what happens in jujitsu, and not just like beaten but like knee on belly crushed and like pressure tap stuff like that, where it's like it evokes such an emotional reaction, like this guy would have killed me. He could kill me, uh, and he did it in a way that literally crushed me.

Speaker 1: 16:51

I would have been crushing me to death and uh, and just that whole, that whole process. It was like I, I want to cry right now. I've not felt this way since, like, I was like like an eight year old in the playground, you know, and and so that's. That's really like that visceral emotional reaction. Uh, what you said really connected with that. And then with CrossFit, when I had my gym, um, you would see the, the movement, even like PR movements, not just like lifting massive weights or whatever, but like, especially people that never really trained. They would come in and they would start to do these things and they would make the connection with the movement and do stuff that they didn't think they could ever do and and it would just it would bring them to tears and it was so emotional with that and you know, it was very, very powerful stuff absolutely yeah.

Speaker 2: 17:42

So yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of hilarious with jujitsu. Actually, I love, I love jujitsu and I also think that it's um, it's a little bit like uh, it could benefit from a little bit more understanding of these embodied layers. Right to walk into a room and like slap hands with somebody that you've never met and then, like immediately have them placing you on a choke hold, takes a certain kind of person and everyone thinks like, oh, everyone should do jujitsu and we should all benefit from Jesus. Like well, if you want everyone to do jujitsu, you're going to have to learn some skills in in helping people actually prepare there should be, just like crossfit in any gym, like there should be an unremitting process yeah, a lot of times, isn't it, but yeah so you, you know, um, we're in an interesting position because we teach people who are predominantly not martial artists.

Speaker 2: 18:43

They're not coming to us specifically for the martial arts side of what we do, like the parkour and nature side is much more sort of visually obvious as part of what we're doing. So we get these groups and we just have had a different way of kind of approaching it Because we look at it as a play thing, right, and so we might progress all the way to an MMA kind of role. But, as we're on the way, we're really focused on these layers of of how we um prepare people to handicap themselves properly, so that you know, you're, you know how to play the game well, so that the game works for both people, right? Do you know rocas uh, rocas linovacius, martial arts journey? He was a former aikido uh practitioner, like really, really deep in aikido um, he, he went over and did a like a, an mma uh spar, to see how his aikido would, would do, and got his butt handed to him, right, um, as expected. So he he took it seriously. He first, he like was like how would I make aikido work?

Speaker 2: 20:03

and he like traveled all around trying to find all these, you know coaches to help him make an aikido work and eventually he ran into matt thornton uh from stray blast gym and matt was like if aikido worked it would be called brazilian jiu-jitsu. Like just do brazilian jiu-jitsu. So he did right, and he's focused on brazilian jiu-jitsu for a long time. In May and he went to a Jiu-Jitsu gym, you know, a little while ago, and someone jumped for a scissor. It's called Chisora in Capoeira. I actually can't remember the Jiu-Jitsu name, but it's a scissor takedown, so you jump and catch and got his knee completely obliterated, right yeah jump and catch and got his knee completely obliterated, right, yeah, and this is the type of thing that can happen in jiu-jitsu gyms and often is not well controlled, for Right?

Speaker 2: 20:52

What I would like to see is more of a of an understanding of building. We talk about the outer game and the inner game, right? The outer game is like okay, I'm here to choke you out, you're here to choke me out. The inner game is how do I play such that we can both get as good as possible over a prolonged period of bouts, right? So if I, if I optimize for winning this bout to the nth degree, you play that, that game repeatedly and something like that happens, right? Yep, if you're, if you're like, okay, I'm going to subtly change the game. It's like, yeah, I want to win today, but better, but better than winning against you is both of us being prepared to win against the bad guys, right, and? And so I'm going to play the game such that, hopefully, I'll win, but also, you're not going to get hurt, I'm not going to get hurt.

Speaker 1: 21:52

Right, yeah, and you know, on that, on that podcast I think you guys talked about, like dogs and rats with that, and that immediately went to, like you know, I'm thinking about jujitsu and that like directly because the upper belts, you know, if you train with good upper belts, like you know, they're going to give you what you give them.

Speaker 1: 22:09

But more likely than not, like if I'm a blue belt and I'm rolling with the brown or black belt, he's not going to just beat me so unmercifully that I never want to go back to class because then he doesn't have any training partners. You, you know. So, like, usually with that, with that type of attitude, I mean, even in ultra aggressive gyms that I've been to, it's, it's like that's, that's like white belt, blue belt, beginner level dudes just beating the crap out of each other Cause they don't know any better. And then you know, obviously, as skill progresses, then you start to expand your understanding of not just jujitsu but competition in general and uh, and really look at it from a long game versus the short game, and then start getting into a lot more of this existential stuff, um, that that you're discussing. And that's when it's like man, what's wrong with these black belts that they're talking about all this spacey crap. I just came in and learned an arm bar and it's like, oh, I, I get it the more I stay with it.

Speaker 2: 23:03

I'm just like I, I'm starting to get it, I'm starting to see it, yeah you know if, if, if, all you get out of jiu-jitsu is an arm bar, you're not going to stay for with it very long.

Speaker 1: 23:13

I don't think you're going to be the disappearing blue belt.

Speaker 2: 23:15

Yeah yeah, and that's, and that's. You know, I think that's true of parkour, that's true of every art, right, like eventually, if they're not affording you that kind of positive self transformation, um, it's not, uh, uh, it doesn't. The our motivation tends not to sustain itself over time and I think we're missing the point. Anyways, I always talk about the idea of a dough versus the, the dough versus the jitsu of, of of a movement, a martial art. So jitsu in Japanese means essentially technique, right? So you know, jiu-jitsu is something like the technique of yielding. People call it the gentle art, but it's more like technique. So you could have jitsu. You could have good jitsu, like as a cook. You could have good jitsu as a law enforcement officer, you could have good jitsu as a firefighter, and we can think of, like, any of these skills as as forms of jitsu, right, like being able to, to, to move a bunch of uh hose around really quickly and attach to a fire hydrant, throw a ladder up, like that's a jitsu.

Speaker 2: 24:26

Dou is dao, right? So aikido, judo, budo, that dou is the same as the Chinese word dao, which of course is the way. So judo is the way of yielding. You know, budo is the warrior's way and when you talk about way in that sense, obviously, because you know Japan has a Zen tradition, it has a huge Taoist influence. Way, of course, is a spiritual component. Right, it's a way of self-cultivation. So you can go experience the way the Tao through archery or martial arts or flower arrangement, and those are all traditional pathways to sort of like open up the capacity for self-transformation. My sense is that something weird has happened with the martial arts in the last like 80, 90 years, where the arts that have recognized the potential of the martial arts to, to, to affect deep transformation have gotten lost in the abstract and they've lost the jitsu, which is actually the foundation.

Speaker 2: 25:43

They don't they don't fight anymore and they, they get lost in these sclerotic patterns and and this sort of like la la fantasy land, right, uh, math or, and again calls them fantasy based martial arts. Um, she over with my chi, right. But then there's. Then there's the, the jitsu based martial arts, which often have this real capacity for self-transformation, but they don't tend to know how to orient it really directly or how to access it very early. It's like it's something that happens kind of natively but it's not happening consistently enough. And my sense is we know that it doesn't work consistently enough. Because John Jones is not a good human being, conor McGregor is not a good human being, right, the best fighters in our culture are not showing anything like a, you know, higher capacity for wisdom or virtue, and so our martial arts preparation is, um, is failing at like, a very deep level, like, say what you will about the martial arts, before ufc there was at least the theory that you were teaching somebody something more than the jitsu, than than how to choke somebody out. So now you, like, you stay in it and you're excited about it, because the jiu-jitsu, the black belts, they, they sense this and they want it. Um, but is it being done? Is it being done well? Is it being done consistently? Is there, is there a ability to deliver it?

Speaker 2: 27:23

John Ravicki said something in an interview with Rodney King. You might know Rodney King. He was the developer of the Crazy Monkey system of defensive blocks that were picked up by like Rampage Jackson back in the day. But he's a real old veteran of the martial arts community self-defense, jiu-jitsu, all that stuff. But in a conversation with John, john said it's irresponsible to teach martial arts if you're not teaching them as a wisdom cultivation thing. Right, it's like. It's like teaching people to use firearms and not teaching them firearm safety.

Speaker 1: 28:02

Yeah, no, I, I totally agree and I think you actually mentioned something about that. It was one of those, one of those quick little things in passing when you were talking to Jordan in that podcast. But, like you mentioned, that sport is sport can't be a dead end. You know, and this goes with every sport and like it has the point of doing a sport is not to be good at that. Sport, as as as hard as that is to understand, it is to become transformational, it's to become the next version of of of who you are and where you're going.

Speaker 1: 28:30

And, uh, you know, like, I coach my son's high school football team. I, you know, I'm an assistant coach there and a strength coach there and, like man, that is because 1% of high school kids go on to play at any level of college football. So it is way more important that we understand, like, that aspect, like why do you do this game for four years in high school? Why why do you go and smash your head in and risk injury and head injury? And you know, like, why do you do these things?

Speaker 1: 28:55

It's because this sport teaches you things that you will not learn anywhere else, that you need to be a man. You know, and and that is lost in so many aspects of everything because everybody is just concerned with that short term. I think you said the beginning, that hedonistic view of like I want to be good at this because I want this thing, I want to be, I want to get a college scholarship, I want to make a bunch of money, I want to have a bunch of ego driven stuff, and it's we just miss it. And it's it's like being able to see the big picture of the forest from the trees.

Speaker 1: 29:26

You know, and I don't know, I don't know what the what the solution to that is, other than you know, continuing to mentor and hand these lessons down, uh, but it is so hard when you talk about like especially going, uh, and you know parenting or coaching high school kids that don't have the cognitive capacity to understand. You know, like, like a plus b equals c consequences like their, their frontal cortex isn't developed enough to understand that, so teaching them delayed gratification is like, oh god, you need so much consistency with it, you know yeah uh, my my I have a son who's 10 years old right now.

Speaker 2: 30:02

He just did his first season of flag football and, uh, this is, he's eligible to um to grade up to the u12s uh, as a rugby player in the spring and play tackle football and he really wants to, but he's small for his age. He's actually average size for his age, but you know he's like 75 pounds and you know when I was 12 years old which some of these kids are 12 years old I weighed 140 pounds. He's going to be on the field with kids who are literally twice as big as him. I understand why you want to experience tackling people so bad and, at the same time, I'm protecting your brain. You're you're a really bright kid. I do not want to see you absolutely claw cleaned by some guy who hit puberty early and is, you know, 75% of a physical adult while you're still, you know, a child.

Speaker 1: 31:04

Right, right, that's a, I think, tackle my, my personal opinion. I didn't play tackle football till fifth grade and I think that was even like on the super young end for needing to do it. So many, you know again, parents like they don't see the big picture, they just see, if they they get sold on these ideas that I need my kid to play this sport, or he's not going to be good and at like in high school, or like I want him to be the best fourth grade football player possible. It's like when do we want to peak for athletics here? Like I don't, I don't want my kid to peak in fourth, fifth grade. I would like to have them peak when they're 19 or 20, you know like that's like so they don't, they don't see that.

Speaker 1: 31:44

But the good news is there's not a whole lot of kids that can produce enough force at 10, 11 years old to make it a serious, serious risk. But you do get those outliers once in a while where it's like is this kid 15 years old? He just clobbered my 10 year old. What happened here?

Speaker 2: 32:01

Yeah, I mean I was. Yeah, I was five, eight, I guess probably 125, 130 pounds at 12 by 14.

Speaker 1: 32:08

I was six feet two, right, so yeah, you get that big discrepancy, especially freshman. Freshman high school is such a weird age, especially for football, because you get some kids that are still like you know, they look like elementary school and then some kids look like, hey, this kid's ready to go to college. It's like, oh man, how do you even, how do you even coach these guys? But uh, um, so I'm interested. So your son's playing football and he used you said he, he's done parkour right.

Speaker 2: 32:37

Yeah, yeah, so he's. I mean, I've, I've been. I pretty much exposed my all my kids to parkour from the day they could walk Right, like when they were, when they were babies, they'd be like crawling and I'd pull their legs to make them better at taking falls, yeah, generally, and they thought it was hilarious and it was fun. So you know, don't send CBS after me, but yeah, like I was, you know, I'd have them hang from my fingers when they were little and I'm like, so as soon as they could grasp my fingers, I'd be like pulling them up until all of a sudden, their weight would actually come up all the way and they could hang from my fingers. So, by come up all the way and they could hang from my fingers.

Speaker 2: 33:24

So by the time they were four years old, they could all do a pull-up on my fingers, um and and uh, yeah, so then you know, they would swing on things that would climb trees, like, as soon as they wanted to climb a tree, they were welcome to climb trees. I took them to places where they would get to climb trees and then, um, they've been all the like. They've come to a bunch of retreats that I've taught and workshops that I've taught and done stuff. But I also started my son in particular in jujitsu when he was four years old, and we've done a bit of capoeira, we've done some Muay Thai and he's played rugby since he was seven and now he's picked up flag football and then so uh, so my.

Speaker 1: 34:01

So my question kind of is like, how do you start parkour, the? And like I have several questions here, like, how do you start it? Uh, like, is it something that needs to be done when you're, when you're small? Like hockey, like you want to, you want to be a good hockey player. You got to start when you, as soon as you can walk, you need to skate, maybe before, but, um, so like, how do you start it when? When should you start it? Um, and then are those, how transferable are those skills into other sports? Um, and then, if you miss that window, you know, like I'm trying to think, like, all right, I'm talking to a bunch of 30, 40, 50 year old cops that have never done this stuff or haven't done it since the Academy, like 20 years ago. Like, how do you start to layer in these skills that they should have been doing when they were two, but they haven't been doing for the last 40 years?

Speaker 2: 34:50

Well, I mean, if you're talking about law enforcement officers, yeah, all of them should train parkour and they should start now and they should have started before, like that's right because, because parkour is just is just moving yourself through environments, right, and it's dealing with complexity and challenge in moving yourself to an environment.

Speaker 2: 35:15

We've all seen lots of video of suspects just running away from officers because the officers can't deal with it. Can't run with them, can't run. A fence could be a. If I can jump over a fence and you can't jump over a fence, then that affords me the potential to easily escape you. It's pretty, pretty simple. So, um, you know, it's as simple as go over a fence. Like the fundamental I've.

Speaker 2: 35:51

I've been working on a kind of like grading system for parkour right now, um, like, and so I'm looking at different layers. So one layer is you could think of it as a set of tasks that you have to overcome, right? So we're not thinking about skills right now, we're thinking about tasks, so like. If we think about a jujitsu analogy, right, we could say that passing a guard is a task, right, you know. And an over under um pass is a skill. So, specific skill, right? Or a crush pass is a specific skill. Um, you know, sweeping somebody is a task, you know, scissor sweep is a skill. So what are some fundamental tasks?

Speaker 2: 36:34

The first physical task that every human being basically needs to have is just can you get up off the ground? Can you get down to the ground? Can you roll on the ground? Can you walk, can you run, can you jump? And so many people are already struggling. I have very few options for just getting up and down off the ground. Can't do it powerfully and explosively. Can't do it well, right, like a burpee is like. To me is actually a basic parkour skill, right, boom, explosively moving yourself off the ground and being able to put your weight over your limbs, compress your body. So then the next thing is like well, what are the kind of basic levels of obstacles? So our first thing would be like a waist high barrier right, can you get over a waist high barrier? Right, can you get up and over a, you know, head height barrier? Can you go under something effectively? Can you go over a gap of space? Right, so we have some basic standards, right, like a healthy person, I think, should be able to go over a waist-high barrier without a lot of breaking their stride, without a lot of difficulty.

Speaker 2: 37:57

They should be able to go under a waist-high barrier without a lot of difficulty. They should be able to pop up and pull themselves over the top of something that is as tall as they are. They should be able to jump a gap. That is as long as they are tall, right, so you have really basic stuff right. And then, as you expand, it's like can you go over a, you know, a sternum height barrier? Can you go over a waist height barrier that's like half your length? Can you go under something that's mid-thigh? Can you go up and over something that's like, you know, know 1.2 times your height? Can you, you know these kinds of things? And it's like, well, the functional relevance of this to any law enforcement officer, any, you know first responder, any military, should be really obvious. Right, you know, what are you going to do if the bad guy doesn't say sure and lay down, right, what if?

Speaker 1: 39:01

they run. What if?

Speaker 2: 39:01

they, you know, run up a wall? What if they jump through a window? Like how you got to be able to respond in kind? Um, and of course these are fundamental skills, that that you know.

Speaker 2: 39:15

Locomotion is the connective tissue of essentially every other physical sport that we do, right, unless you know you're doing something see a sitting down. But, like, as a martial artist, the fact that my, that my feet and legs are so powerful and I can move so quickly from one place to another, is consistently really hard for other strikers to deal with. Right Like, I'm not as refined in many ways as someone who spent more of their time doing kickboxing, but my, my measure messes with everybody that I work with because one, I have very long arms. But in addition to having very long arms, I can cover space much more quickly than most martial artists cover space. So I'm doing the same kind of full work that anybody else is a shuffle step or a slide step, but my shuffle step and slide step generally can move me much further than they're used to. They're just not used to dealing with an athlete who has the pure put put on ground, move fast capacity that I have from doing parkour. Um, and I I found that very interesting.

Speaker 2: 40:30

Right like I like, at a certain point I took nine years off of training martial arts and one of my friends was training really consistently. He was teaching martial arts at the time. He went to Thailand to study Muay Thai and he came back and we sparred and he was incredibly frustrated because I was a little bit better than him nine years ago and I was a little bit better than him nine years later. Right, I was a little bit better than him nine years ago and I was a little bit better than him nine years later. Right, and he could see that I was technically not on the level with him. Right like, technically I had degraded a little bit and technically he had advanced. But the upgrade in my general athleticism and sort of ability to move through space was so much that it overrode all the technical capacity that he had in an advantage over me yeah, yeah, and going, going back to football, um, like that's, that's a big thing.

Speaker 1: 41:24

That that I say about youth is like that exact situation. Like you don't need trained specifics here. We need to make you big, strong, fast and durable in order to be a generally better athlete, so that we can give you the skills when you get the coordination and the age and the maturity to do what we need you to do. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 41:46

So my son, he trained parkour with me. So we started training parkour out of a ninja gym, right, and so he did his first ninja competition and he won his first competition, despite having never really trained on the ninja obstacles, just from the strength and capacity, right. But over time, like he was seven then he was training with seven and eight year olds, now it's 10, 11 year olds and those 10 and 11 year olds who've been like really focused on ninja, now he can't keep up with them, but he, you know, he's still much, you know, he still has a huge amount of donor potential as he moves around. When we came over to rugby, it's like, well, you know, he's the fastest kid on the field, he's durable, he hits the ground and gets up really easily, he's doesn't have a lot of fear, right, um, so yeah, he excelled right away, interestingly, coming over into football kind of later. Now he's 10 years old, he's training, he's coming into football with a lot of kids who have like three, three years of football experience. Um, there were certain things that he translated really easily and then certain things that he translated really easily and then certain things that were quite challenging. It was really interesting.

Speaker 2: 42:58

So he was when they let him rush the quarterback. He was incredibly good at rushing the quarterback right Cause he he can dodge around people really fast and he's quick and he's strong. You know, he he's really good at flag pulling from rugby. If I give him a handoff, he was killer right Cause he's really good at flag pulling from rugby. Um, if I give him a handoff, he was killer right because he's caught a ball, like he's been given, given a ball basically, and run through people in rugby. It's essentially the same skill set. Um, the vertical passing game was very strange for him, right, like he didn't have the ability to like kind of match himself to the ball. So you'd see him open, they'd throw the ball to him and he would get a bad break on the ball a lot, right. So there was a very specific perceptual skill that has to do with like watch it, like how you intercept a ball moving in the vertical right, uh.

Speaker 2: 43:53

And and then initially he wasn't good at the pass defense either because he would kind of, you know, over-focus on the quarterback. He'd let people get behind him. He didn't know how to do that matching. By the end of the season he was very good defensively. He could really track people down and, you know, get in front of a lot of passes, but he was still struggling to kind of like get his hands to to consistently pull the ball in as a receiver. And so there's a. You know, I think next year he'll do great and I can just go in the backyard and throw the ball with him. And obviously you know, all those underlying characteristics that he has are really valuable for the football context. But if he doesn't put this one piece together, given his size, he's not going to be a lineman. He's got to play skill positions. If he wants to play on offense, he's got to catch the ball.

Speaker 1: 44:50

If he doesn't play quarterback, just throw it On offense. He's got to catch the ball. If you're going to play quarterback, just throw it.

Speaker 2: 44:54

Yeah, Also, generally being a smaller guy is not so great at quarterback either. You've got to be kind of tall usually, but it's changing these days.

Speaker 1: 45:06

Yeah, he'd probably be a great option. Quarterback, all right. So you mentioned you were way more explosive when your Muay Thai buddy came back, like you sparred your explosiveness, your ability to cover ground, and then your son, also with the history and parkour, has the same skill set, obviously the same genetics. That comes into play, no-transcript, in order to create and and generate the force needed to either jump or not fall off something, or or like that proprioceptive awareness of like balance, produce force, like that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 45:54

Absolutely. I mean, I don't know how familiar you are with, like the ecological dynamics approach to motor learning and this idea of perception, action, coupling, no, nothing.

Speaker 2: 46:06

So this has been a big part of my. My journey as a teacher is essentially coming from a gymnastics background which has a very top-down sort of linear approach to skill cultivation, very atomized approach to skills, to taking my parkour training into nature and recognizing that a lot of times you can get people to learn a skill without sort of explicitly breaking it down into pieces, by putting them in the right environment and just giving them a task. So rather than say we're going to teach you this vault, we'll say I want you to do, I want you to get over this thing and then connect it to this jump, and then they'll sort of search the space for what actually allows them to do that and they'll do it. Well. In the jujitsu world, I think I may have actually had some role in starting to popularize this in the martial arts world.

Speaker 2: 47:02

I was interviewed about this. I was doing it with some of my local gyms here in Bellingham, I guess about three years ago, and I was interviewed by Rob Gray, who's one of the most influential sort of people in the motor learning space. Um, and uh, along with a guy named scott seabright. Scott works a lot with greg sauders, who's become the biggest uh sort of influencer in that bring the ecological approach to jujitsu, so you can check him out if you'd like. Um, so I've got a little loss there with the the background. So, when you're, when you're running okay, sean mishka is one of the main guys. He's talking about that specifically within the within football. So, uh, he runs emergence, but he's been talking a lot about how important it is to not have.

Speaker 2: 48:00

If you're going to play on a variety of surfaces, you need to practice on a variety of surfaces. If you're going to play in a variety of conditions, you need to practice in a variety of conditions. So if you think that throwing a football is a kind of singular skill, right, and then your success at throwing a football is simply about how dialed in the motor program of the skill is. You can imagine it's like a software that you just install and you just have to keep installing better upgrades on it. Um, then you think, okay, well, it's, it doesn't particularly matter you, you just do it in a nice, comfortable indoor facility all the time. But actually, your ability to throw a football in the rain is specific. Your ability to throw the football in snow is specific. Your ability to throw a football moving on a soft, wet turf, like grass surface, is different, right? Um, the motor control, the motor patterning that will allow you to actually put your foot in the ground and effectively turn your hip and throw, is not actually the same depending on the surface, right?

Speaker 2: 49:22

So they did some interesting research on this. So the traditional linear pedagogy prediction would be that variability is generally not good. You don't want variability in executing a motor program, you want consistency. You want repetition over and over and over again, and you can see how we drill this in many, many different places. We want to make things as consistent as possible.

Speaker 2: 49:53

However, they looked at someone like Steph Curry and they found that there's more variability in how his muscular system essentially like which muscles are fired in what order. Like expert performers have more variability because it turns out that variability stabilizes the performance capacity of the system, because actually he never shoots the same jump shots, right? Because sometimes he's moving forward, sometimes he's moving backwards, sometimes he just got bumped by a guy who weighs 260 pounds. Sometimes it was a guy who weighed 180 pounds, right? Sometimes a guy has a hand on his hip, sometimes a guy has a hand on his shoulder, sometimes he's having to shoot over Victor Wembyn Yama, so he has to make adjustments to everything.

Speaker 2: 50:38

So his ability to utilize his entire system and his system is changing all the time. He's at a different level of fatigue and different local muscular groups, different metabolic systems. He's not even using the same metabolic system to the same degree every time that he takes a shot. So all of those things have to be um. He has to be exposed to all of those variables regularly in order to become highly attuned to solving the specific problem. You know there's a you know consistency in certain things about his shot and obviously you want consistency in it going through the hoop. But then there's all this variability that actually supports that consistency.

Speaker 1: 51:19

Yeah, that's the same as CrossFit to an extent. That's ideally. That's how that should be trained. Now there's a whole lot of like randomness that people do. It should be structured and the variations should be like thought out. But I think a great example of that too is from powerlifting the conjugate system. So the conjugate stuff is so variable there. You know that's why they change the bars, you change the lift, you change the stimulus. You know there's you listen to. You listen to guys like the old school guys talking about like prepping for competition. They would even change the environment to the point where it's like it's not a perfect everyone's quiet or it's everybody like all your dudes are around the music's on, like they would have, like some of these kids running around, like smacking them in the leg while they're trying to lift and like creating chaos so that they have exposure to all these different scenarios.

Speaker 2: 52:11

Uh, in, in order to just be ready, you know yeah, of course, because essentially, what you're trying to do is create someone who's good at solving a problem, and you don't become good at solving, uh, that problem simply in isolation. You have to solve that problem in relationship to all the other things, right? So it's like, okay, you might be the best quarterback in the world in a quiet gym, right, can throw it yards, but if you break down when you know you're, you're getting booed loudly in a stadium, then what does it matter, right? Um, so we're trying to create, you know, robust problem solvers. That's a big part of what we do. So, within the parkour context, right, like I train I do train in the gym a lot during the winter and I notice when I go back out into training in nature that that I have to adjust to, um, different types of surfaces and that if someone who trains predominantly in a gym comes out to nature, they don't know how to read what the traction level is going to be and what the small micro variations of surface are in the environment and how to put their foot down safely onto, you know, a sloped rock which is a different slope than you know a series of rocks.

Speaker 2: 53:38

So there's a, you know. You think, okay, it's running, you're just running across the environment. But it's not right. Like that service substrate, the variations on it, the visual aspect of it like what are you picking up informationally from the ground is very much more complicated in an environment like a forest, running across a series of rocks, than it is in a gym with flat light coming from overhead and a perfectly flat surface with a perfectly consistent level of traction yeah, that's uh.

Speaker 1: 54:09

I mean I saw that last year, like in our conference, not to keep harping on high school football but in our conference there's only one team with a grass field. Everybody else has turf. So now the kids don't know how to run on grass and cut appropriately and they're all losing it. They can't run their big routes and their out routes. They keep falling down. Coach, you've got to throttle a different man. This is grass. This isn't turf. It's not the the same environment. They don't, they don't know, they don't get exposed to it yeah, I mean they can't know.

Speaker 2: 54:35

You can't fix it in the game. You have to train them on turf if you want to like, or at least variety, right, they have to know that they're not going to that there be. Their nervous system is being trained to treat that as consistent when it's not going to be consistent, and that's you know. That's not going to prepare them for what the actual games are going to be like yeah, um, so, if I'm sorry, go ahead well.

Speaker 2: 55:05

So this all started with you talking about, like, that ability to feel the ground, the proprioception, specific feeling the ground. So you have your proprioception right and you have the whole perceptual system right. So it's about your visual perception, it's about your auditory perception and then, yeah, like the kinds of landing forces you're dealing with in parkour are tuning the body to sort of you know know, a specific relationship right, like people often talk about, you know we need to weight lift and we do, like I weight lift, I do squats. But the idea is, at some point was like if we just squat enough, we're going to be able to take huge drops and not hurt ourselves, and it's like nope, that's not how it works.

Speaker 2: 55:47

Like, you can strengthen the muscles, you can increase the tendon resilience and stuff to a certain degree, but the forces that we deal with in landing are way higher than we can. You know, the transient forces are way higher than we're going to be able to develop with, uh, with weightlifting, and the way that the force moves through the body is completely different. So the coordination pattern is going to have to be completely different.

Speaker 1: 56:08

Could you do? Could you train that? So, if you're, if you're talking about training drops, right, so, uh, could you train that? So, if you're talking about training drops, right, so I would think that you could go with a weighted drop from a lower height. Does that simulate a drop from a higher height?

Speaker 2: 56:21

I mean, but I'm not entirely sure. Like you know, it's going to feel different, right, if you're going to change your, your organization. Right, because if you wear a weight vest, your body does not have the normal weight distribution that it would have, right? So when you hit the ground, you're actually not experiencing your body as having the same, the same parameters that it would have. So it's a good source of variability, but it's less specific than just taking a job from a higher height.

Speaker 2: 56:59

But just like you don't you know, like you would never put 400 pound on someone's back on the first time that they trained like it's just, it's just people, people for some reason really struggle to understand how parkour has a system of graded exposure, just like weight training does. But it's really the same, right, you, you don't jump jumps that you can't do, like now you could, of course, like you know it's, it's kind of it is a danger. You could look at a jump and be like, hey, oh sure, I can take a 12 foot drop, and it's like, well, you can't take a 12 foot drop, and that that's probably more of a danger in parkour than it is in weightlifting, but it happens in weightlifting too. Some days you think you can bench 315 and you cannot bench 315 for whatever reason you know, or your bicep pops off in the middle of it.

Speaker 1: 57:46

Bad day. Yeah, you get folded over and blow a disc.

Speaker 2: 57:49

That's a bad day, you know know, um, I've dumped bars lots of times, right, you know, especially if you're doing olympic weightlifting, like you know, you don't, you don't, you don't set prs in olympic weightlifting unless you're dumping the bar pretty regularly. So same thing in parkour, um, so so we don't start with jumping from 10 feet, we start with jumping from two feet and then you move up right and you know, you give yourself variation. You can do drops to one leg. You can do drops to different kinds of surfaces. Right, take a drop to, uh, to sawdust. It feels really different than the same drop to concrete. Yeah, we can expose ourselves to variability. We can expose. You know you can get used to the. The speed right, like so you're gonna be moving at a given speed when you hit can expose, you know you can get used to the speed right, like so.

Speaker 2: 58:35

You're going to be moving at a given speed when you hit the ground, whether you know whether the ground is concrete or sand, so you can get a feel for what it feels like to be moving that fast when you hit the ground. And then you can alter or over time increase the intensity of the surface that you're having to solve when you hit the ground. So we have these scalers available to us. They're just not scalers that most people have sort of prepared in their mind yeah.

Speaker 1: 59:07

so how would you say? I'm just trying to think like if I were going to add this in to my training, if I were to start to add parkour in, where would you start? Like what's like the lowest barrier to entry? Like what would an example workout be? I guess?

Speaker 2: 59:25

I mean, like I've taught it at CrossFit gyms, crossfit gym. So if you have a little space, like you know, you can start with uh, take a couple of bumper plates, put them on the ground and see how far you can jump between them, right, see how far you can jump off two legs to two legs. Then try to jump from one leg to two legs, one leg to one leg Right. Then you can put multiple bumper plates on the ground and try to pop. You know, jump, play, hopscotch on it, right, you can swing from your pull-up bars and land on one of the bumper plates.

Speaker 1: 1:00:02

See how far you can do that right.

Speaker 2: 1:00:05

You can jump from a bumper plate. Right, instead of just doing your muscle-ups, you can add a jump into it. So now you have to jump all the way to the bar from, say, six feet. Do a muscle up, come down, swing back. That's a little part of the workout. Add another jump right there. Take one of your benches, throw it down and vault over your bench, crawl under it. Repeat, right, it's stuff we all actually did as children. It's you know, it's there. You just have to start thinking how do I scale this? How do I make it available? How do I use the tools that are around me? Go outside, find a wall, jump over the wall, vault over the wall, climb along the wall, climb up the wall Right.

Speaker 1: 1:00:49

Yeah, yeah, it's not. I mean, it sounds exactly like how we did our kids' classes in CrossFit you just create full obstacle courses and then just you know, come up with whatever you want and run around it for time. You know, like there you go.

Speaker 1: 1:01:03

Okay, that's the beginning of the court, right yeah, yeah, no, and I liked what you said earlier about you know. I'm just trying to think, like, how do we get, you know, you know cops and firefighters, like people that are like sedentary but work in a profession where you can't be you know? Uh, you know and like from on the back end of it. So even if you make it through the job you know for, through the 20 or 32 years, whatever you make it to your pension, the stats aren't good on the back end for for cops or firefighters, uh, like, you know cops, five years and they usually die. You know that that's a stat.

Speaker 1: 1:01:35

Uh, so one of the number one ways to push off you know all cause mortality and going into nursing home, assisted living is just being able to get up off the floor. So I really like what you said about that earlier, like, hey, just get on the ground, crawl around, stand up, or just get down, sit down and then stand up, and can you do that with, like, no hands? Like that's a drill that I used to do in warmups for my CrossFit gym was just like stand up, standing, sit on the ground, don't use your hands, stand up, don't use your hands to solve the problem.

Speaker 2: 1:02:04

Yeah, yeah, we have a program called the daily practice which is kind of focused on the somatic layer, but one of the practices is just get up and down off the ground in various ways and roll on the ground in various ways. You know, it's really good for the body too, like moving lymph. It's very healthy, um. So yeah, before you climb over, you know a box, but you know it's. It's funny, like I. Uh, you can check out an essay I wrote about CrossFit and movement culture and what I call the ultimate, you know, the ultimate athletic movement blueprint, crossfit.

Speaker 2: 1:02:46

When it started it was much more diverse actually in the skills that were part of the wads right Used to have wads that included things like back extension, rolls to handstands, balance, beam work, et cetera, and over time, as it became the sport of fitness, it actually dumped a lot of the skill component out of it. So it's really funny because you can add so much parkour to cross it so easily. It's like, okay, you have boxes, don't just box, jump right. Like, use two boxes and jump across them. Jump all the way over the box, hurdle the box, put your hands on the box Vault to the other side, over the box. Hurdle the box, put your hands on the box, vault to the other side Like there's no reason.

Speaker 2: 1:03:37

Any of that isn't something you could program into a workout and add more coordination potential, more general movement variability, more adaptability, right? It's like how many athletic disciplines involve jumping? Right? How much variability of jumping patterning is showing up in a CrossFit workout? Right? Are people competent? Jumping off one leg? You know jumping off. You know weaving around jumping off, you know a two-foot plant, the way that you're going to jump off for a volleyball or a football. Spike it like it's. It's not actually that hard to adjust it to start to bring these things out, or to add some playfulness and games that start to bring things out I love like austin yocum.

Speaker 2: 1:04:23

If you follow austin yocum's work, he's got a kind of like uh movement facility or, sorry, fitness facility that adds a lot of these stuff. Uh, jeremy fr Frisch does amazing stuff like this for kids. There's people who are picking it up and doing it in these spaces and I think it's far more available than people realize.

Speaker 1: 1:04:47

Yeah. So Jump around a little bit here. I want to go into like rough and tumble play and and kind of like what I'm seeing with recruits, right. So I got 17 years on and I'm looking back at rough play. Like it doesn't look like it, it doesn't seem like it when I'm seeing them on the mats and then and you know so, like can you dive into some of the benefits of rough and tumble play and how to do it effectively? And also like the difference of rough and tumble play for women? I think that's a big one and as a as a father of a daughter, like how do you, how do you, how do you utilize that appropriately for women?

Speaker 2: 1:05:40

Yeah, so in general, every mammal at least engaged in some kind of rough and tumble play, like a lot of. It is very similar, like interesting, though if you look at rats, rats pin each other on the shoulder on, pin their, each other's shoulders to the ground. Right, it's like okay, almost every human culture has a form of wrestling and usually you know you win by either throwing someone down or by pinning them down, you know submission wrestling exists, but it's actually less common cross -culturally.

Speaker 2: 1:06:14

Kids everywhere love to wrestle. Every little kid, you know. If you start roughhousing with them, you're wrestling with them. They love it, and so do dogs and cats, horses. It's a fundamental thing. In part it probably originates as sort of ways of solving dominance conflicts between animals without engaging their lethal capacities. So if you look at venomous snakes, venomous snakes will meet and they'll decide there's a dominance conflict and they'll try to pin each other's heads down. They don't bite each other, they're not wasting their lethal weapons on each other. They're trying to figure out who's bigger and stronger without having to do that. So it starts as a you know basically a way to do that. It's like you can imagine you meet a group of other kids, you guys all wrestle and it's like you realize one kid is the biggest, strongest kid and then it kind of like solves some problems of who's going to be dominant, but we keep wrestling and we wrestle more because it actually develops the strength of the body. So it's like well, maybe you know Joe is the strongest kid in the group, but you might have to conflict with some other group, so you want to wrestle all the time. So you guys are ready to win when conflict with some other group, so you want to wrestle all the time. So you guys are ready to win when you, when you, face some other group, and it just generally builds the physical strength of the body, but also, interestingly, it's been really shown to have a huge impact on empathy, because you can imagine, like you know, we wrestle, one of us is stronger and wins the first round right Now. We'll both benefit if we keep doing it right in future conflicts, however, if the person who's stronger just completely dominates the other person, they don't get anything out of it and so they don't want to come back.

Speaker 2: 1:08:13

So Yak Peng's up to this research on rats. He showed that if you make one rat 10, you basically like select little rats bit and you have one be 10 larger than the other. Essentially, a 10 size thing means that in the first bout the larger rat will win every single time. If you then have them play repeatedly, what you'll find is that the smaller rat always invites play. So the smaller rat comes up to the larger rat and says hey, you know, he does a play bow, just like a dog does a play bow. Right, you do the same thing when you go up to a kid hey, you want to play, right, and so the smaller rat will initiate the play with the larger rat and the larger rat will say yes, and they'll play and they really like it. They're super motivated to do it. However, if the larger rat doesn't allow the smaller rat to win at least approximately 30% of the engagements, it doesn't handicap enough for that to happen. The smaller rat will lose its motivation to invite play. So this implies something crazy. It implies that there's some level of theory of mind here, and that is empathy. Right, the bigger rat is like I want to win, but I want to have the opportunity to play in the future more than I want to win right now, so I'm going to make myself weaker than I am such that this other player can win.

Speaker 2: 1:09:39

So then Jordan Peterson did research that showed that for antisocial little boys, the most profound thing you can do to shift their behavior towards basically being good, empathic citizens is engage with lots of rough and tumble play with them. So there's a paper called Play and the Regulation of Aggression. So we learn it's one of the most powerful things you can do to just map your own body. What is my body like. What does it feel like to feel some level of pain, discomfort, right. Where do I end? How does my body like? What does it feel like to feel some level of pain, discomfort, right. Where do I end? How does my body move?

Speaker 2: 1:10:18

All of that is getting, you know, a huge amount of stimulus when we wrestle or we engage in rough and humble play, but also it's really mapping our ability to interact with other people, both at a competitive level but also a cooperative level, because by choosing to play the game in a specific way, specific variation, we're actually learning cooperation and communication, even though it's a competitive game. This is a great point that Jordan Peterson makes as well. It's like people think that team sports are just competitive and maybe competition is bad, but like nobody shows up to a football game with a tennis racket or a hockey stick racket or a hockey stick, right. Like actually there's a lot of cooperation that goes into playing that game and that type of cooperation is a big part of what is valuable and that we learn through sport, and all of that is really rooted in these kind of small games that we play in rough and tumble play. So it's true that young people today have been essentially restricted from engaging in this kind of play and it's very bad for their development. It makes them less likely to be empathic, more likely to be narcissistic, more likely to be psychologically fragile, more likely to be physically fragile.

Speaker 2: 1:11:29

On mink, which showed that if you deny juvenile mink opportunities for rough and tumble play, they don't develop sexual competency as adults. So the males won't initiate and the females, when initiated, won't be able to resist. Resist. So the females become passive to initiation, wherein their ability to kind of push back is critical, right, um? And the males just don't know how to. They won't engage in in mounting behavior. So I think the same thing is in some sense playing out in our culture.

Speaker 1: 1:12:11

Lots of young men essentially just are terrified to try to approach a young woman, and women don't have the kind of strength of character to, once they're in a room with a man, say, well, maybe I don't want to do this, and then people end up pretty hurt in both circumstances, right well, yeah, and then I think if you tie that with what peterson said, with the uh I don't know, I haven't read that that uh, that research, but playing the regulation of aggression with the antisocial, so you you combine the, the sexual dysfunction, basically with that, and then you're going to get all kinds of sex offenses, rape, you know, uh, batteries, sexual battery, stuff like that would explain a rise in any and all of that. I would think.

Speaker 2: 1:12:58

Yeah, so, um yeah, I don't know if the statistics say that there is a rise in those things. I think they're relatively turning down. But people are just having sex less but, but, uh, but people are. But men and women are really not happy with each other. They're not getting along well in our culture.

Speaker 1: 1:13:19

Well, you know, on a, on a lesser loan, no, even if, even if that's not the case, I wonder, I wonder if you could go, I wonder if you could look at the offenders and then trace that back to rough and tumble play. I would, I would imagine that would be?

Speaker 2: 1:13:32

That's an interesting question. I'd love to look into that. I don't know anything about that. What is interesting is we know that spree killers are almost always children that were denied play. Stuart Brown did the research on this.

Speaker 2: 1:13:46

You can look into this but he was trying to find a pattern for why spree killers were, and I don't know if this generalized to serial killers. I think it was specifically spree killers, like you know, guys who go and shoot up a mall, right, there was an incredible consistency across all of their biographies that they had been denied physical play as children, which I think actually makes it very hard to experience the realness of somebody else, which makes it very easy right To do something like a spree killing. Right, because you essentially don't, your brain can't actually represent the moral value of these other human beings. So there there, I don't know about a specific connection between between rough and tumble play and, uh and rape. It's very um, it's very plausible to me, right, like, because, if we think about this, well, one thing that's interesting is, you know, our culture doesn't really have a tradition. Well, maybe we did right. And then I remember in the 80s and 90s we had tom tom boys right, which were the girls who played with the boys, you know, um. So I think for a lot of boys you had a little bit of experience roughhousing with a girl, but a lot of girls didn't participate in the kind of rough and tumble play and there was certainly a sort of sense that, like, it was not properly girly to engage in that kind of play. Now it's, I think, just mostly looked down on entirely. Right, we used to say boys, woo boys. Now we say that's sexist and then we just don't want anyone to be able to do these things.

Speaker 2: 1:15:34

Whereas, you know, my experience is that teaching rough and double play to adults, women have, like, really profound experiences with it. They really, really love it. They love, in particular, feeling like they can fully express their strength with a man, right Like, and they love being able to engage in playful interaction that doesn't have a sexual component, right, being like okay for for women when what? What we experienced when teaching adult women is that when they get into a playful interaction with a man and um, and that's really forceful and sort of, you know, restly One, they've often been very inhibited in their ability to express physical force in their life in general and having the safety of this larger, more powerful male to work with allows them to actually push as hard as they can, and that feels really rewarding. It also produces a sense of safety, like I can go as hard as I want and this person is going to be able to keep me and themselves safe, and that is really really, really rich for women and increased trust between men and women.

Speaker 2: 1:16:42

And then the last thing is that we're in this really intense physical interaction and he's not putting his hands on my boobs or my butt and he's not doing anything weird, and I didn't know that I could have this level of intimacy and connection with a man, um, and be able to trust him to not take some kind of sexual advantage of me, um, and that is a huge wound for many women that they don't feel like they've had that or they had it stripped away, like a lot of women maybe wrestled with some people early in their life and then, when they're around puberty, somebody took advantage of the situation and it really inhibited them. So I'm a huge believer that rough and double play is for boys and for girls. We should also accept that boys are probably going to play harder and want it more regularly when they're young, um, and when we educate adults, we still, we want to open this to everybody, um, so I have three children. Right, my son is the I have two daughters and my son.

Speaker 2: 1:17:42

So my oldest daughter is the most like super feminine girl, but she loved rough house with me when she was little, but now that she's 12, like she's not interested, all right, um. But now that she's 12, like she's not interested, right, um, but uh. And then my son, like, was just rougher and more intense from the moment he could walk Right. And then I have a younger daughter who's kind of she's a little bit more of a tomboy type. She she's I call her the universal donor of play, cause she plays just as well with girls as with boys or vice versa, whereas both Audrey and both my oldest and and my boy they really like just prefer to play with their own sex and have from their very young age.

Speaker 2: 1:18:27

But my youngest is really good at playing with everybody and she can really enjoy rough and tumble play and she also equally, can enjoy, you know, princess, dress up. So it'll be interesting. She's six and a half and she's actually starting wrestling, uh, next week. So this is the first time I've been able to get her to commit to doing a martial art. Yeah, but she's a stud athlete. She can do eight pull-ups already and she's ripped and I'm very excited to see what she does in wrestling, so the young, the young ones.

Speaker 1: 1:19:01

They always just kind of go wild. That's my.

Speaker 2: 1:19:05

Yeah, she's had to keep up, so.

Speaker 1: 1:19:08

So I mean, we'll listen to you talk about that. You know I'm I'm here in rough and tumble plays as a style of communication. That's what I'm taking from it is the style of communicating, uh, how I see the world. You know, if I'm a boy and I'm, and I'm more aggressive and more, you know, like high energy, like I'm going to express that more, uh, readily and more comfortably than obviously, like verbally talking about my emotions.

Speaker 1: 1:19:32

But we teach boys and my oldest is like this, where it's like you got to drag it out of a man, like what's wrong? Nothing, you got to drag it out and it's a pain in the ass. But if you want to go wrestle with him all day long, like he'll throw me around, like he's, you know 16 now. It's like under hooks every day trying to do the dishes. I'm like, dude, how was school? Fine you. But if you want to wrestle and throw me down, like all right, show dad, how tough you are, that's all good. And then my daughter is the opposite, but like I've had to really work with her, especially when she was younger, like you have to know how to communicate physically well so that you have boundaries and you understand all of the aspects of everything else. And it's like you know, uh, what? How do you communicate with the masculine if you're engaging with a boy who's rough and tumble play and that's his style, like you have to know what that at least looks like.

Speaker 2: 1:20:26

You know, and I think that's part of what you mentioned earlier, with the like, the mink studies and stuff like that, when we apply that to like human behavior, I think there's a whole lot of like nobody's really trying to learn the other language yeah, I mean, I was just reading a, a substack article they're talking about like, um, there's a, because we've sort of stripped back a lot of the barriers around sexuality, a lot of women are finding that they don't feel like they have a good reason to say no, and then they find that on the other side of the sexual experience, they didn't like it and they're not happy about it, but like it was like well, they're already at the apartment. You know this had happened. Then it happened. It's like what you know, and I think that that part of that is that, yeah, they don't have that, that quality that the female mink has, that she, when she's had rough and double play, they have the capacity to assert a boundary and that's being developed in this kind of play in a really, really powerful way.

Speaker 2: 1:21:29

Um, yeah, my son, when he was two years old, when he started, he would turn away from me when he got upset, right, instead of coming to me to get comfort, he would, as soon as I like recognize that he was upset and tried to like comfort him, he run away Right, turn away Like don't, don't mess with me. Right now I'm feeling my feelings, right, and it's still, but you know, know, it's like to this day. It's like getting him to sort of open up is hard. But on the other side, like I, uh, we play a game where I try to like really sneak up and just gently stroke the side of his face and he tries to do the same thing to me and we're trying to like catch each other off guard. So the outer game is you got to touch the other guy's face, but the inner game is how, how gently can you do it? Um, so it's a good little kind of coup game, but uh, but yeah, they're. You know, my, my oldest daughter has no interest in playing that kind of game.

Speaker 2: 1:22:27

But she wants to come to me and talk to me about you know, everything that happened at school every day you know, and that's great.

Speaker 2: 1:22:34

Um, so we do have to work with people, but I also, like I've always thought that like I'm trying to give my, my daughter, my oldest daughter, like a little bit more masculine strength, right, I think it's a useful thing to have in the world and I want my son to have a little bit more, you know, feminine openness and capacity to experience his emotions, capacity to be open about it. Like, just, I'm always telling him like it's okay to feel things. You know, it's been a hard lesson for me. Uh, it took me a long time to work on through that myself, so I'm trying to to give that to him.

Speaker 2: 1:23:07

Earlier in life you get to, you get to have emotions and you get to talk about them and you know there's nothing shameful about it. But, uh, definitely, you know, I think obviously there's a lot of variation. I think that my two oldest children are like super gendered, right, like my, my daughter is a really really feminine girl and my son is a really really masculine little boy, and so some some kids are going to end up a lot more in the middle. Um, but that's the directions that I tend to see and I think that all the work that we do really helps balance the person to create more potential for virtue, which is the goal.

Speaker 1: 1:23:52

Yeah, so something that you just mentioned. I thought about what you talked about moving. We initially started. So you mentioned grief is a physical skill, and you talked about the vagus nerve, right, and, and I wanted to come back to that uh, and I don't want to keep it too long, I know we're we're about an hour, um, so I think this might be a good place to kind of finish up with it. Um, you talk about, like, mental health. Grief is a physical skill.

Speaker 1: 1:24:15

The way you described it. It sounded to me like compartmentalizing, you know, but it's learning how not to just stuff stuff down. And actually, sean Ryan I don't know if you listen to Sean Ryan's podcast ever, but he was a Navy SEAL. He was talking to another SEAL about like hey, you know, when they say just shove it down, like where does it go, and even Navy SEALs are talking about it. So when you said like yeah, I don't know the way you described the vagus nerve and the grief as a skill, I was like, oh, like we understand how to stuff it down, but we don't understand the skill of dealing with it. And that's where it's like, well, where does it go? We don't know, but it definitely goes somewhere. But if you work on it as a skill, I imagine that like you can put it away and then get it back out, you know, and deal with it as you need to.

Speaker 2: 1:25:06

Yeah, exactly, I think that's that's kind of the evolution I'm working with right now. So there's kind of layers to it. A lot of times when you have pain and grief and you don't let yourself feel it especially for men, I think a lot of times that's going to end up coming out as anger. So it'll be a lot of like, just you know, small things that seemingly shouldn't bother you that much, just really getting under your skin and like resulting like big blow-ups. And I think that you see this a lot in, uh, military and leo people. Right, you're traumatized a lot that this shit is hard. You get good at compartmentalizing it and then it leaks out and you know that. You know that that often erodes relationships in really powerful ways.

Speaker 2: 1:26:02

When you suppress your anger, a lot of times what you get is anxiety. So anxiety attacks, so anger suppressed anger often is expressed as anxiety I experienced it also is often kind of triggering fatigue. Fatigue is a way that I kind of like down tune my system such that it's not going to explode at people and then I just feel tired a lot, um, and then you can start to somaticize it, you can start to actually get it into your body. It's the patterns of tension, it's chronic pain, it's irritable bowel syndrome. That's one of the big ones that I have really struggled with. So that's been kind of my journey, working with my somatic therapist His name is Scott Nichols and my my talk therapist, who also works a lot in somatics. His name is chandler stevens, but he kind of worked with me a lot on some of the suppressed angers, because I had some pretty traumatic things that happened to me growing up. Um, and it's like, yeah, I was good, I was doing, really great, except for that, you know, I uh, I had stretches of intense, chronic fatigue and I was going to the bathroom 12 times a day. It's like okay, you know.

Speaker 2: 1:27:14

And then I had these little blow ups at my wife, right, I was really great with just about everybody, but like, for some reason, you know, in the most intimate relationship, that's where the dysfunction tends to arise and so, yeah, so like sitting there. So I've, I've, I've really done a lot of work over the last year, basically through somatic, through talk therapy and through psychedelic therapy, where I've been able to mostly pass through sort of the suppression of my anger. So I've had some pretty intense experiences with that and that's better. But then the last kind of piece that I'm working with her I think it's the last piece is that I'm really struggling to let myself grieve and um, and so, yeah, I'm like being there in that moment.

Speaker 2: 1:28:04

It's like the you can feel that welling up of the tremoring and the sobbing and, like you know, and that's uh, that's very hard to tolerate for me and I think for a lot of men, especially men who've kind of been in warrior situations, who needed to play that role for whatever reason. Right, it's like that. It's like, man, you're not, you're not ready to jump into the. You know, jump into the foxhole when you're in that state. And so if you're, if you always feel like you need to be ready to jump into a foxhole, then you don't ever get to go to that place.

Speaker 1: 1:28:43

Right, yeah Well. And then you know I wonder too and this is related kind of, but like the connection between grief and empathy. Because I know, like you know, you see so many things on the job where it's like how many you know dead kids and murders and that kind of stuff, so you just kind of absorb it over time. But uh, if you have a high level of empathy, you look at the people that that you're dealing with and it's like man. I see, I can see myself here. And those are the days where it's like man. This shit feels real heavy, you know. And uh, I wonder if there's a higher, higher connection between, like like ptsd um, empathy and grief. You know if those are all kind of connected, you know yeah, yeah, I mean it just speaking from personal experience.

Speaker 2: 1:29:30

I I had complex ptsd and I reacted to that by becoming pretty adept at sort of shutting empathy off. So I, I, I was never a sociopath, but I could play a sociopath, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 1:29:47

Yeah, well, that's, I mean to an extent, on the job. We we have to do that, we have to, we have to embody parts of of that in order to get through the what we have to do, that we have to, we have to embody parts of of that in order to get through the what we have to deal with.

Speaker 2: 1:30:00

You know, exactly, absolutely, and uh, so you, there's a way in which, well, my experience of that is that you can over generalize. In fact, it's very difficult not to over generalize, especially when you're learning those skills at a really young age, right like for me I'm I'm like sort of learning that there are people I need to cut out emotionally and I need to be able to not be affected by when I'm like six years old and so, even though I'm still trying to love and still trying to be a good person and still trying to do that, there's a certain distance that I hold everybody at for, you know, the rest of my life because of overgeneralized that skill and I think I would imagine that in the populations you're working with that.

Speaker 2: 1:30:59

That's the issue, right, the issue is like okay, like you know, I've been writing this essay about what a good man is and a friend of mine was like what's the difference between saying someone is a good man and someone is a good person and, like my first, my first response was like well, a good man is someone who I trust, beside me, in a shield wall and a foxhole right, and I was thinking about that, like you know, of course, if I met a woman who I would trust in those ways, I would admire that too.

Speaker 2: 1:31:32

Right, it's not a bad thing for a woman to be strong and brave and courageous, but we don't tend to make that a necessary part of success at being a female personality in the same way that we do for men, and I think it's deep right. I don't think that's cultural, I think that you know, we just know, that for millions of years of evolution, like you know, you had to rely on other men to to help you deal with violence, and much less so other women and women knew that they had to rely on men for that.

Speaker 2: 1:32:06

So they select men for that capacity. So so I've been thinking about that, and then I was thinking about the sense of like well, well, you, you, you also want to be able to trust that man with your daughter. Right, like a good man is a man who you trust, beside you in a foxhole and with your 12 year old daughter, yeah, and, and that's actually hard. That's like there's a paradox of the capacity to move from that place, of when necessary, I can shut it down and I can be unemotionally affected by the most traumatic and terrifying shit possible, because I need to make it work, I need to survive, I need to help my people survive, and then I can turn around and open my heart to somebody. I can have empathy. I cannot take sexual advantage of the 12-year-old girl because I can see her as a real human being.

Speaker 2: 1:33:10

There's a, there's a historical, there's a Cherokee chieftain named Ridge Major Ridge who I read a book it was a book about the Trail of Tears, and I talked about this character, major Ridge, and he always struck me as like one of the most exemplary men that I read about in all of history because he he's this great war leader right and the, the chieftain of the Cherokee at the time starts going crazy and having lots of people murdered and eventually, like Ridge is like, gets together with a bunch of other guys and they're like well, somebody has to do it about it and he volunteers to do it. He walks in, basically kills the chief, walks out, doesn't try to grab for power and doesn't even keep fighting.

Speaker 2: 1:33:58

He just goes home and starts a farm and starts, you know, taking care of his family and I was like violence scars us so easily, um and, and it kind of constrains us and it's like, once you're used to operating in that environment, in some sense it's like it's more comfortable because you know like here's, here's another way of thinking about pdst. It's like once you've adopted the no empathy stance and you have to go back to the place where you have empathy, it's like, well, all that shit that you didn't get to feel before it could start to arise, yeah, um, and then maybe it's more comfortable to go back and be in a traumatic environment because, because you're you're, you know how to operate there and you're good at operating there, and then you don't have to deal with what operating there actually means, when you get to go back to that place where grief is actually welcomed or at least, or even necessary.

Speaker 1: 1:34:53

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, and I think you can go into the uh, the whole set, like I've talked to. I talked to a guy at work about this and he said you know, I remember this guy said two things right is, I love the chaos, the chaos of being in a, in a crazy domestic that you know you're trying to get in control of, and people are fighting and there's holes and walls and we get called to deal with that problem. Right, uh, and it's like he said I, he goes, I love the chaos. And I was like I do too, you know, and I think there's there's a, there's a reward center, that's, that's activated because it's exciting. You know what I mean. It's like how do I fix this problem? This is, this is crazy. I got to calm it down.

Speaker 1: 1:35:31

I might have to fight somebody, you know, like all these things are going on and it's really fun, yeah, and and when you work in really busy parts of the town, of the city, like whatever city you work in, like you're going to get that all the time Now, as you get older, like that was, you know, and I'm talking to this dude, he was in my same class, so we got 17 years on now and we were talking the other day and he's like, yeah, he goes now, since we don't work in the same busy areas of town, kind of like slowed down a little bit because we're, you know, in our 40s, and uh, and he's like, yeah, now it's like we, we see shootings and it's like it affects us way more than it did when it was once. Now that it's once in a while, versus when we saw it every other day, and it's like you get that space to, I think, deal with it where you didn't before.

Speaker 2: 1:36:16

And yeah, yeah, space, and it's also maybe age right. Yeah, you know, like when your testosterone's running really high in your early 20s, it's like we're just kind of different creatures we're made for made for war, I, you know, I I worked as a nightclub security in my 20s, so you know I didn't have to see anybody get killed or anything, but I I got, I got to be in the chaos and that's chaos, man, that's.

Speaker 2: 1:36:43

I got to throw a bunch of people out of bars. And I loved it, man, I hated being in bars. I didn't. I worked at a gay club, so it wasn't my culture. And they like played house music all the time and I hated house music but, uh, every saturday night it would attract a big crowd of young straight guys because that's where all the girls wanted to come, because it was the best place to dance, right, and you know that, uh, that that all you know, we kept it tight, we ran a tight ship. So I was, I was tossing people right when they got handsy, you know, and there was a lot of guys who didn't want to get tossed. So you know, that got fun. That was, uh, and it was, it was.

Speaker 2: 1:37:24

It was such a funny experience for me because, right, like a lot of people who work in those things, they're like they want to be in the nightclub anyways, I didn't want to be in the nightclub at all. I hated being in the nightclub. So my, my whole life was just like, just waiting, like just somebody starts some shit so I can have some fun. Give me a reason, give me a reason. Exactly. There's got to be a reason. I'm in this club because I'm not enjoying it.

Speaker 1: 1:37:49

I don't even like being here, but I know I like fighting, so I'm gonna be yeah, that's, that's it, that's it yeah, um, well, man, I I don't have much else.

Speaker 1: 1:38:02

Uh, I think you know just kind of wrap things up. I think it's awesome how you've connected like movement and play and like all the stuff that I look at with like weight training and force production and like in manipulating your environment and but using it in such a good, extensive personal philosophy of evolution, like and the and the way you, you, the way you titled Evolve Move Play is is absolutely perfect for for what you're doing and it's, it's fantastic. So I don't know if you got anything else you want to throw in.

Speaker 2: 1:38:35

Yeah, no, folks can follow. Check out evolve move playcom. Rafe Kelly is my YouTube. I've got my own podcast. Um, it hasn't been updating recently but we'll start soon. And uh, we got you know retreats and workshops that will be coming out next year. People can jump on the newsletter for that. So it's pretty much the that's the pitch, but thank you very much for the conversation. I always appreciate I I have a big soft spot in my heart for for warriors and, uh and I I'd love to see a better, healthier class of warriors at the level of, you know, being able to physically do the job actually would be nice. Um, um, having skills to do it safely, um, and and then having skills to to actually grow as human beings through it instead of being broken, um and uh, that's a I think that's pretty, pretty big quest. But uh, it's not. It's not my quest, but it's a quest I'd like to see people taken up and I'd like to be able to contribute to it if possible.

Speaker 1: 1:39:35

Well, I love the way that you phrase that. You know, just being broken Cause that's, that's honestly how how a lot of us feel, especially towards the end of our career, which you just get broken and discarded and uh, and then you're, you're left physically broken, financially usually not, not super well off because you don't make that much money and uh, yeah, and we have to, it's and it's our jobs to fix it, not the department's, not the government, it's, it's, it's people like you know me and you and you know the connection and the relationship.

Speaker 2: 1:40:04

yeah, we, you know, we, we rely too much on this. The state we are, we just think that the, you know, having such a, when we have systems like this, it makes it too easy to be like well, somebody else is responsible. So saying you know what, like, ultimately it starts here right. The moment of power is now. The relationships that you can affect are the ones that are right next to you. So start.

Speaker 1: 1:40:31

I love it. When's the next? When's the next retreat that you get, you have, and where is?

Speaker 2: 1:40:37

it. So we will have our spring retreat in sometime in May. We don't have that one scheduled yet, but we do have our July retreat, which is our longest retreat, which is eight days, which runs from July 20th to the 27th. So, yeah, if you're interested, hit me up about that. Be great to see some of you, great to see you, some of your audience, there.

Speaker 1: 1:41:02

Awesome. Well, I appreciate it so much. I really truly do Thank you for your time today.

Speaker 2: 1:41:07

Yeah, absolutely have a good one, Anthony. I got to go have some breakfast.