 It's my great pleasure to introduce to you, Mark Sisson, another one of the people who got me involved initially into this whole movement and he's going to be talking about something that maybe you could appreciate following after Matt LaLonde's talk which made your head spin a bit. Now we can kind of try and take a little breather and lighten it a little bit and talk about the lost art of play. So, please put your hands together for Mark Sisson. Thank you. What a great looking crowd of people. Lean, fit, strong, robust, happy, healthy, hunter-gatherers, a roomful of cavemen and women. Can you feel the love? Can you feel the ketosis? I can. It's really, seriously, it's been a great opportunity to interface with a lot of you over the past two days. I've exchanged emails with most of you, many of you, Twitter's, blog exchanges, talked on the phone for the past several years. Many of you don't look like your gravitar, which is really kind of cool and some of you do. So it's really nice to finally put a face to a URL, as they say in the New Tech Age. It's kind of like a reunion of an online distance learning university or something, isn't it? It's the first time we get the chance to hang out together. When Aaron and Brent invited me to this symposium and they said, guess what, Mark? You get to talk about anything you want and I thought, well, that's cool. I'll talk about diet because I know a fair amount about diet, I think, and then they said about bear in mind that on the list there's going to be Lustig and Eaton and Eads and Taubes and Feynman and Lindbergh and Cordain and I go, well, these are all the guys I get my material from. I can't compete with that. And then there's always a possibility that Gary's going to stand up and ask me to defend my hypothesis or would I be willing to accept another one? So I kind of cast that aside and then I thought, well, I'll do exercise because I know a little bit about exercise and then I look at the list and there's MacGuff and O'Keeffe and LeCoy. So that was covered and I thought, well, you know what? I'll talk about play because that's something I know I need more of myself and I suspect that you probably do as well. So after I've selected the title of my talk, I headed out on my paddleboard to do some research and while I was out there, I was trying to formulate in my brain what this would look like and I thought, well, you know, this is a tough crowd. They're going to be expecting some hard science, some placebo-controlled, you know, double-blind studies, good data points and all that stuff. I got to step my game up here. I got to put together something that not even Denise Minger could tear apart. So I came up with this as my first slide and I think it fits in pretty well with the scientific nature of a symposium like this, but the reality is, of course, that play doesn't lend itself to the kind of science that we're used to hearing about and what we've heard about thus far. Play is more visceral, intuitive. The results of the studies often are subjective. How did that make you feel on a scale of one to ten, one being suicidal and ten being euphoric? The results are often anecdotal and I know how you guys feel about anecdotal evidence. No, play is more intuitive and that's what I'm going to talk about today. So I decided to scrap this whole meta-analysis concept and just more talk about the philosophy of play. But I did leave in my last slide on that particular track, which was my conclusion, which is play is great. I look at all of our behavior through the lens of evolution, as I know many of you do, and when I was researching the Primal Blueprint my intention was to find the commonalities in behavior that every human who's existed for the past two and a half million years has exhibited or done or eaten. And I came up with these ten Primal Laws that helped shape our genome. Things like eat lots of plants and animals, sprint once in a while, move around a lot, avoid poisonous things, get plenty of sun. And play was one of those. Well, it became clear to me, as I looked deeper and deeper into this, that play winds up being one of the more important aspects of our genetic makeup. Our genes expect us to play and that's going to be the theme of my talk today. All mammals play, birds play, most higher organisms play. It's a means of organizing the structure of the brain throughout, certainly throughout adolescence and in many cases throughout adulthood. In the case of humans, we're the champions of play. Humans play more than just about any other species. And again, we play beyond adolescence, where other species may stop play at adolescence and get down to the business of surviving and procreating humans, in addition to that, continue to play, or at least are supposed to continue to play, throughout their lives. And when you look at the breakdown of a typical hunter-gatherer, as many of the anthropologists have done over the past few decades, and you look at what sort of activities they're engaged in in the course of a standard day, you see a breakdown, something like this, a couple of hours of procuring food, a couple of hours regarding other necessities of life, shelter, things like that, ten hours of sleep or rest, and six hours of leisure time, play, dance, art, music, storytelling, and all of that. And in fact, if you ask a typical hunter-gatherer, you know, do you feel like you're affluent? The hunter-gatherer will say, well look, you know, I got a wife, I got a beautiful daughter, you want to marry her? I got a pig, I got food when I want it, shelter all over my head, smoked oak once in a while, and I play a lot. Is there something I'm missing? Is there some concept that I'm not getting here? I got it nailed. I'm affluent. So that, when we look at that, and we kind of parse this, we get that leisure time and play are kind of the common currency of the human being. Again, our genes expect us to play, and this is a result of millions of years of evolution. Play is an important part of the epigenetic influence on our genes, and creating a lean, strong, fit, happy, healthy, productive human body. So what is play? I went to that bastion of knowledge, Wikipedia, and I looked up play, and I printed out eight pages of a description of play. So there have been a lot of discussions into what constitutes play and all of the nuances and breaking it down into different categories, but the guy has probably done more work in play in the past two decades, Stuart Brown, wrote a book called Brain, the brain, or excuse me, Play and how it shapes the brain. Get that right for him. And he sort of distilled it down to these essential components that, at its essence, by definition, play is purposeless and all-consuming, and most important, it's fun. Now when you think about purposeless, one of the essential elements of being purposeless, is that you must have no attachment to the outcome. Right? There's got to be no reason for it other than for the sake of doing it at the time. It's all-consuming, which means that you're in the moment when you're playing, when you're truly playing. And we can talk about when we think we're playing, but we're just, you know, paying lip service to it versus when we're actually playing. So when we're actually playing, it's all-consuming, we're in the moment. So no attachment to the outcome in the moment. How zen is that? Huh? Play is zen. Brown goes on to say that life without play is a grinding, mechanical existence organized around doing the things necessary for survival. How many people here have a lame job? Excuse me. How many people here know of somebody who has a lame job and they're just grinding it out and they're just, you know, barely getting by and they're miserable and they slog it in, they punch it in, phone it in, day in and day out? Life is about the experience of enjoyment and fun, and this is where play comes into the picture. So, purposeless. Why would we engage in purposeless behavior? Particularly when you consider from an evolutionary point of view the notion that play kind of takes you out of the vigilance of looking for a predator or out of looking for food or out of building a shelter. Play is sort of a non-essential sequential movements that, again, that would seem in the short term to not have any survival benefit and maybe have a little bit of a cost. Well, it turns out that there is a long-term survival benefit to play. We develop emotional intent in, excuse me, intelligence through play. We can foster creativity and problem-solving through this laboratory, this experimental application of play, this thing that has no purpose, where there's little risk involved in failure. In fact, our friend, Art DeVaney, often says no failure-only feedback. Play offers that opportunity. It offers a chance to, for young people to experiment with emotions and maybe develop a sense of empathy, wrestling or, you know, monkeying around, rough housing, hurting some feelings, realizing what you've done. There's that opportunity to develop some emotions that you may not otherwise have an opportunity to develop until it's maybe too late. So play allows this. They say that, you know, life, they, I don't know who they is, but I'm one of them, they say life is 10% what happens to you, chance, and 90% how you respond, choice. Well, play gives you that laboratory in which to work out some potential solutions to some issues or problems or situations that arise in your life, and with, with non-human mammals that are involved in in play, otters and seals play in the presence of great white sharks. Some of them get whacked, but most of them develop strategies that will serve them well throughout the rest of their lives in alternative choices to escape routes or to other ways to avoid getting eaten or getting, getting taken, taken out. Play gives us an opportunity to explore our interests, storytelling. Do we want to be a, you know, a writer? Do we want to be an artist, a dancer? Do we want to help people? Do we want to find out more about ourselves? Do we want to be an inventor? Play allows all of these sorts of opportunities to, to hone in on what it is you might have as a special passion within you that otherwise would not come out and you might discover much, much later in life. Again, unlike most other species, humans have a capacity to experience play throughout their adult lives, and again, that's one of these things that, you know, if you really, if you really drill down, most of us don't play enough, and our genes expect us to play. Just like our genes expect us to eat certain types of food, to move around certain ways to get enough sunlight and, and, and sleep, our genes expect us to play. So what do we do? Well, we we follow the conventional wisdom and we downplay play. We put it into the category of frivolous or for kids only. We don't have an opportunity to, to experiment as adults the way we ought to be continually experimenting. We say it's you know, it's, there's too much work to be done and we can't, we don't have time to play and we got to get home from work. We got to do whatever we got to do. We got to do it now. We, we don't have time to play so we don't allow ourselves to play, even in those moments when we could actually be playing. There's opportunities to play in the office, you know, at work. We're caught up in this American dream. I know there are many people from around the world here, but we had this American dream which involves struggling and suffering and, and you know, trying to accumulate material things for somehow measuring up to you know, how the other hunter-gatherers living next next to you are measuring up and, and it's not working. Our friend and colleague, Art DeVaney, who couldn't be here this weekend has put it pretty eloquently when he said we are deeply unsatisfied with more and more because we're evolved for another life way in which material goods do not matter. It seems like our genes don't know what to make of all of our stuff. If you question whether or not we're genetically programmed to play, you will see that kids are the ultimate players and if you get ahold of them before they've found out about iPods, iPads, Wii's, big screen TVs, and all that sort of nonsense and you give them a cardboard box from an old refrigerator or a washing machine and you set them free and you know, it becomes a house, it becomes a fort, it becomes a ship, whatever it is, the kids will play freely for hours. Give them a mud puddle. You know, it's an ocean, it's a lake, it's a mud puddle. Whatever it is, kids will play and they will, they will exert that natural tendency to want to be creative and make something out of this and have fun and be in the moment and have no attachment to the outcome. If it fails, you just move on. Kids who are just starting out in t-ball or in AYSO Soccer and you notice they're getting into the skill sets and they're starting to, you know, move the ball around a little bit and they're starting to understand the concept of game and still, you know, you get them in that first game and there's the defense, Jason Butterflies, where there's the kid out in the outfield, hasn't seen any action for the last three innings, he's picking daisies, that's fine. That's what kids do. That's play. That's being in the moment. Rough and tumble play is fine and we don't do enough of it. We tend to, you know, discourage that as being, I don't know, politically incorrect or whatever, but you know, nobody's gonna put an eye out. Well, I mean, in the history of the world, how many people have really put an eye out during rough housing, it's part of a kid's experience to grow up and explore those boundaries. We know that playing in dirt can help improve a kid's immune system and yet, you know, what do we do? We take all that away. We, too much supervision, too much regimentation, we get the Purell that we carry with us all the time. We got to wipe our hands down and wipe the kids down because, God forbid, they'll get some germs. We've transformed into a society that used to walk everywhere and have fun doing it and enjoying the strolls to one that barely walks at all. An example that I have here of, you know, my own personal background, my daughter, when she started playing AYSO soccer, joined the team because all of her friends were playing soccer. All of her classmates, the girls that she hung out with, and they thought it would be so much fun to play soccer, and they did, and they did a great job. They learned the skills, and they'd play these games, and they'd have fun at the practices, and they'd empathize with each other. And they'd empathize with the other team, if somebody got hurt on the other team. It was fantastic. And over the years, because of their, the fun they were having in the playful, youthful spirit, they wound up getting pretty good, and they wound up having winning seasons. And one year, three or four years into this, they won the regionals. This little team of Malibu Barbies won the regionals against some pretty tough teams, and they went on to the state championships. Well, that changed everything. The next year, a new coach comes in, sees the potential and says, okay, we're going to win. This is about winning now. This is no longer, he didn't say this, but this is what's going through the mind. I see some raw talent here. We're going to mold it and shape it and regiment it. And now, as these girls are getting 15, 16, 17 years old, the sense of play is moving away. And now we start to see roster cuts. We start to see overtraining, burnout, hurt feelings. And my daughter came to me one day and she said, dad, this is not what I signed up for. I signed up to play with my friends, and it's not happening. And it chokes me up to this day to think about that because it was a seminal moment for me. So, you know, we have to maintain that youthful, playful exuberance in our kids and nurture it and then maintain it in ourselves as well. My own story, I was growing up in Maine, rural Maine, love to run. That was my thing, ran everywhere, ran to and from school, through the trails, through the woods, played games of army that lasted three days where we chase everybody all around. Kick the can, tag, you name it. We ran everywhere. It was fun. We loved to run. We ran hard. And when we got tired, we stopped. And then we did it again. And it was great. Well, in 1968, I read Ken Cooper's book on aerobics. And Cooper said, running is a cool thing. And the more you do, the more points you get toward living a healthier, longer life. Hey, I like points. And this whole running thing was my gig. So now I get to make running a game and accumulate points. And it's healthy. And this is so cool. So I started running more and more. And the more I ran, I started thinking, well, there's a race. I'll get into a race. I'll measure myself against somebody else. And I get in a race and I do pretty well. And over the years, I did better and better. And the more I ran and the more I raced and the better I did, the more I transitioned away from the fun, the youthful spirit, the enjoyment, the being in the moment, the no attachment to the outcome to the results. And now it was about the workouts. And it was about the training. And it was about the results and how hard could I push myself in a race. And I got really good at it. I became a national class endurance athlete. But the thing that had been played for me was now not only no longer play, I couldn't play anywhere else in my life. And so during the halcyon days of disco dancing, I'd go out with my friends and they'd be on the floor doing the hustle. And I'd be over in the corner with my flowered shirt and my satin bell-bottom pants, hanging out and agonizing over the 15-mile run I had to do the next morning. Didn't learn to ski until I was 30. Afraid I'd break a femur. Couldn't play a game of pickup basketball. So all of these opportunities to play, I passed them by because I was too involved in the outcome. I was too attached to the outcome. I was not in the moment. I wasn't having fun. What started out being play turned out to be a job. That's me. It's so cool because Rob Wolf the other day posted a picture of him at his peak. Peak fitness at 182 pounds. This is me at my peak fitness having fun, as you can see. 138 pounds there I think. Probably almost 30 pounds less than I weigh now. Same height. That was the end result of my, all of this process was that I became burned out. And for all intents and purposes I was the picture of fitness because I could run fast. But inside I had the typical osteoarthritis, chronic tendonitis, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic upper respiratory tract infection six or eight times a year. Does all that sound like fun to you? No. So I moved on. I wound up walking away from the sport at the age of 28, kind of a decrepit old man at least in spirit. So what, when we look at play, we realize that play can be subjective and it is. What works for some people does not work for other people. I have friends to this day who swear that they do marathons and triathlons for fun. I'm not going to judge but I mean, you know, whatever floats your boat I guess. It didn't wind up being that for me. We naturally gravitate to things that we're good at which is why play becomes such a great opportunity for kids to experiment and see what works and see what doesn't work. It's also an opportunity for adults to do the same thing. Your own brand of play. So I announced to my wife a while back that I was going to play golf. Seemed like it would be a lot of fun. Get to hang out with my buddies on a course on a great day. Go at a leisurely pace, hit a little white ball around. A lot of people think golf is the perfect sport, perfect game. It's a metaphor for life. Well, golf slapped me in the face. I couldn't get away from my attachment to the outcome, the score, my being in the moment. Geez, when is that force I'm going to get off the green? You know, all of these things in my life, a metaphor for my life, it really brought to the forefront for me and golf did not work that well for me. The best part of golf for me was when I'd slice a ball into the woods and then I'd spend the next 10 or 15 minutes looking for my ball and finding 10 or 15 other balls. That was really cool. That was the best part of golf for me. The real hunter-gatherer came out in me at that point. We know that a deficiency of play can have dire consequences. And Stuart Brown again has done a lot of research in this area. He's looked at thousands of what he calls play histories of people and tried to do correlation between their play history and outcomes later on in life. In one particular case, he had a positive correlation between severe play deficiency and mass murderers in Texas. I've been to Texas. It's not that bad, so it must have been the play deficiency that was really the issue here. But we see, again, we see increased stress, depression and tendency toward violence in people who don't play a lot, particularly people who never played as a child. People who don't play, even if they played a lot as a child, if they don't play as an adult, they tend to become more rigid and flexible, humorless, left without a sense of irony. We know that play benefits the brain from a lot of animal studies and from imaging studies on humans. Basically, there's a positive correlation between longevity and brain size with increased play. One study in particular that I'm referencing here with a photograph. Grizzlies that play the most live the longest and it had nothing to do with their ability to hunt, their learning to hunt. It had everything to do with total brain development. Play can benefit your career. We need a lot of linear thinkers. This is a world where we do need some very focused people, technology moves on at a rapid pace. I have this theory that whenever there's a new technological advancement, there are only 10 people in the world that actually know how it works and everybody else at tech support is reading off a script and that's it. But we do need linear thinkers. On the other hand, we're moving into an age, if you fall to Dow the last couple of days, we're moving into an age where we're going to have to be adaptable. Whether it's the job market or the economy or life in general, we're going to have to be adaptable. Play gives people an opportunity to experiment in a safe laboratory with other outcomes. It may give you an opportunity to take your skill set and apply it in a whole different area that you never thought was possible. We had at my event in Oxnard, PrimalCon, a three-day event every year. One of our team challenges, which lasts a couple of hours, we put these teams against each other, one of the challenges was to find three bags of puzzle pieces in a 400 square foot area buried in the sand. It was really interesting to observe that the people who succeeded most rapidly at finding these bags of puzzle pieces with a group set had no attachment to the outcome really. They were having fun and laughing and joking and they'd find their bags just like this. The team that was the most serious about winning this whole damn thing got into this arena first and found the two bags first and spent the next hour looking for the third bag because they lost their sense of play, they lost their sense of fun, they lost their sense of teamwork and camaraderie. They started getting pissed off and filling in each other's holes before they dug a few, one's digging over here and the other one's digging over here opposite and filling each other's holes in. It was really, again, a great metaphor for how some people can live their lives. The teams that, I just happened to be on the winning team on whatever, but I mean, and we were behind, we were the last team going into this event and we wound up winning because for some reason we had no attachment to the outcome. I'm going to give most of my teammates the credit for that because I had some attachment to the outcome. Play provides balance. You know, we're asked to sit at a desk and we're asked to keep our emotions in check and we're asked to do all these things that are sort of counterintuitive, that go against our nature as hunter-gatherers and as human beings with genes that want us to play. Play does offer an opportunity to go in the other direction, to move our bodies around, to get out of these linear brains and off of that spreadsheet and onto some much more expansive, open-minded approach to life. I go back to the concept of this Zen concept of be here now because it's, again, when we look at when we're playing, are we really playing? Because if we fulfill Stuart Brown's three ideas here that is purposeless, again we want it to be no attachment to the outcome. In the moment, you know, all consuming and fun, think about it. How often does your form of play involve all three of those? And this, be here now. That was a basic mantra of the awareness and consciousness movement of the 70s and 80s. But it's true, you know, we spend so much of our lives caught up in in in ruin mistakes that we've made worrying about the past, agonizing over the future, what's going to happen? How am I going to put my kids through college? I got to pay the bill here and pay the bill there. That we lose sight of the fact that we're living in the present moment, and that's all we have is now. Play gives us an opportunity to be in the moment. And again, it's a laboratory. It's an experiment. It's a chance to play and to practice being in the moment. The great philosopher John Lennon said, maybe it was Martha Stewart, I forget which, said, life is what happens when you're planning for the future. Play gives us a chance to get into it for right now. And one of my favorite paddling excursions involved going out with my friend, Eric, who's my typical paddling buddy. And we always look for dolphins and seals to kind of see if they'll hang out with us a little bit and play with us a little bit. And they always typically just go, hey, you know, not today, man. So this one day, we're out paddling for about 10 minutes, we come across a pod of dolphins, 12 dolphins, these great magnificent 600, 800 pound beasts, and they wanted to play. And it was magic. These beasts were paddling along and they're surfacing and right like six inches from the board. I mean, half the time we were like, oh, geez, are we going to be able to stay up on our boards? They're surfacing diving under the boards. The water was very the visibility was great that day. They're exhaling out their blowholes and we're just like giggling and laughing. This is so cool. This is unbelievable. This is like amazing. And then Eric, who's a little OCD ADHD, who happens to be a great photographer, goes, Oh, man, I, I got to go get my camera. Dude, we're out in the ocean. We're paddling with these great dolphins. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity to be in the moment. But we were right, he has a beach house in Malibu, we're right off his beach house. He goes, I can't take it anymore. He paddles in and he gets his camera. And he sets it and I mean, well, I'm trying to position the dolphins like right off the balcony, which is how we got this picture, which by the way, made it into some magazines and some newspapers. But it was so indicative of how we live our lives. And Eric, who is a sweetheart one of my deepest, dearest friends, you know, how he was he was willing to extricate himself from a beautiful moment, because he had to capture it on film, so he could remember it later. You know, how many times have you seen a kid go, Mom, this is so fun. This playing is great. I'm having a great time. Let's stop playing so we can take a picture of it and remember it later. So it's about being in the moment. Now, this whole idea about no attachment to the outcome is a it's a difficult one for me, which is why I'm I'm bringing it up to you. I'm sharing with you. And yet it becomes a pretty important life strategy. When you look at studies done on centenarians and you compare lifestyles and behaviors and, you know, all other manner of of data points that you can get, you find that there's it's weird. There's not a lot of correlation between diets, you know, some had a high fat, some had a high carb, some ate a lot of calories, some didn't eat much. Some smoked cigars, you know, some drank a fifth of whiskey every couple of days. But one thing that centenarians seem to have in common is an ability to roll with the punches, an ability to overcome adversity, an ability to move on. And again, calling upon Devaney's comment there, no failure, only feedback. It's the ability to move on after a loss, the loss of a loved one, a divorce, loss of a job. It seems like this is a particularly important strategy for living a long, healthy, happy, productive life. It's about going with the flow. It's about, again, just learning how to not have any attachment to the outcome. That doesn't mean that we don't play hard. It doesn't mean that you don't get into a game and go, I want to win this game and I really want to, or, you know, you go to a race, I want to, you know, win my age group. But it's the idea that after it's over, you move on with your life. You don't, you don't, no regrets, no, no ruin it, you just move on. Another thing that comes up as a result of this symposium is the notion that when you realize that 80% of your body composition is determined by how you eat. When you realize, and this is just the most empowering information, when you realize that you can manipulate hormones and gene expression through your choices of food, when you get that, it sort of frees you up to experiment with movement and play with no attachment to the outcome. In other words, it's no longer about, oh, jeez, I wore my bod pod or I wore my, you know, I had to, I ran up 475 calories on the treadmill because play no longer becomes about burning calories, it just becomes about the movement and the experimentation. And that's one of the most freeing things about this. And it's a, it's a unique concept to this day and age. So what does play for you? I say look to fulfill your personal void. I'd like to have you try and find some unstructured outdoor activity. That would be ideal. But if you can't, if your void is created because you're framing houses all day or picking strawberries in the field, you know, maybe going home and playing, you know, Grand Theft Auto is probably appropriate for a little bit. You know, it's whatever is appropriate for your mindset and for you and whatever void you need to fill. Competition, fine. Just release the attachment to the outcome. You know, I chose, I still can't release my attachment to the outcome of competing in endurance contests. So I don't do that anymore. But there are a lot of people who, who, that works for them. Great. Find out what works for you. And the toughest one, you know, abandon your ego and your self consciousness and get into some things that maybe test your limits. The best way to start is with following kids or pets. Get silly with them. Do whatever they do. If it's been a while since you abandoned that ego, if it's been a while since you let go of everything and weren't in the moment, there's a great way to, to see, you know, give yourself a little self-test evaluation. You know, can I actually do this? Can I actually play using Stuart Brown's three main criteria there? No attachment to the outcome. Be in the moment. Have fun. Try some, some many workouts. I take breaks throughout my day and I got a slack line put up in the backyard. So I, I'll do five, ten minutes of slack line with the idea that one day I might be good at this. But for the time being, I fall off all the time. No one's watching so it doesn't matter and I'm, I'm cool with that. But it's something that I can work out and it's completely absorbing. I mean, you can't, if you're on a slack line, you know, you can't be thinking about the, the mortgage payment at that moment. Plan some, some things that you haven't done before, some, what we call grand weekend outings. I love paddling. It's one of my favorite things and I don't just do it on the weekend. My family and I took a two day trek down the Grand Canyon. It was time to spend together. We had fun the whole time. We went at the pace of the slowest person with no attachment to the outcome. In other words, no attachment to when we got there or what else was going on. We made sure it was fun. My daughter, who was like, I cannot believe I'm doing this with my family, you know, she's 20, had a great time. It was, it was a revelation for her. My friend Brad Kearns, who's a editor on some of my books, he plays speed golf and the way he does this, carry three clubs and you run the entire course. You have no time to get into your head about the swing. You just stop and swing and move on. And it's a great lesson because a lot of, a lot of good golfers can have the same score playing golf in 32 minutes. An 18-hole course by running because they're not in their head. So Aaron, is Aaron, when you're ready? So yeah, so I'm just going to suggest that we have a, you know, we maintain a playful, youthful spirit. This is our genes expect us to do this. And when we don't, we encounter disease, we encounter depression, we become rigid in our thinking and that's not what we want. We want life to be about thriving, not about surviving. And that's the essence of play. So the more you can find time to play, I'm not suggesting you got to do six hours a day like hunter-gatherers, but the more that you can, you can do this, the better your life will be. I guarantee it. I'll take some questions now. The only rule here is that everyone has to touch the ball once. And if you want to ask any questions about the primal blueprint as well, go ahead. The success or failure of the, of the paleo movement. I think that, that this weekend is probably ground zero for the paleo primal ancestral caveman movement. I think it's a, this was a great opportunity and continues to be a great opportunity for everyone to kind of get their ideas out there and to have discussions about commonalities and discussions about, about other issues. I, I happen to think that this whole movement is going to become the way of life, but it's not going to be a result of regulation. It's going to come from, from individuals like this group having a chance to interact with other individuals who, who maybe see the results. So it's going to be an organic movement for sure. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, I'm going to, I'll touch on that more. There was a recent article in the New York Times that decried the loss of, of jungle gyms and, and monkey bars from playgrounds. And the idea was that it was not worth it for the, the municipalities to have them because the tort lawyers were looking at all of the potential injuries, the broken arm or the sprained wrist that could happen as a result of falling from a jungle gym. And the reality is the jungle gym is probably the last bastion of a kid's opportunity to test the limit. I mean the, the, the self worth, the self image, the ego boost that, that kid gets from achieving the next highest rung on a set of monkey bars or, you know, trying to wrap the swing around the swing set. How many people tried that, you know, or seeing how far you can jump out of the swing. These are critical moments in kids' lives. And, you know, every kid that ever lived up until 100 years ago had all kinds of experience. A tree became climbing up into the crow's nest of a pirate ship. I mean every chance a kid gets to climb is a chance that kid is going to work on self esteem, work on control of fear. One of the studies done on the, on the, on the jungle gym playground thing, as I recall, suggested that kids who fall at a young age are less inclined to get hurt when they're older because they've learned their limits. Whereas kids who are coddled or protected are the ones who later on in life become, they get injured more often. So I, I 100% agree with that. Yeah. The first thing I'd say is my, my personal example is I don't work out anymore for the sake of working out. I only work out to play. So my two reasons are I work out, I do as little as possible by the way in the gym. I reduce the, the work part of my work out. I do as little as possible in the gym and I do so, so I can play and so I can play uninjured. So a lot of my training simply revolves around how can I maintain physical competency to be out and go, to be able to go out and play ultimate Frisbee with 16 year olds and, and still keep up with them on a long run to the end zone. Or how can I get on my paddleboard and you know not run out of steam on my serratus, which is where most of your, you know, lats and serratus where, where most of your energy or strength comes from on a paddleboard. I would, I would almost recommend to somebody that, again, it sort of, it falls in sequence. If you understand that 80% of your body composition happens as a result of how you eat, then it unburdens you of having to train so damn much to burn calories or to build muscle. I mean we know that when we, when we build muscle, you know, we, we heard Dr. Oz say well a pound of muscle burns 50 calories. Not true. A pound of muscle burns six calories a day. So if you are a guy who, or a gal who lost, you know, 50 pounds of fat and gained 20 pounds of muscle, your net increase in metabolic activity is 20 calories a day. So it's insignificant. Most of your body composition happens as a result of how you eat. Understanding that, then it doesn't take much training to maintain a strong, lean fit, happy, healthy, productive body. It does not take much training. My prescription, one sprint will work out a week and two strength training workouts a week. So then the challenge becomes how can I play? How can I find an opportunity to employ the, the work that I've done in the gym in a play situation so I don't get hurt, so I have fun, so I'm, let's see, I wonder who is going to, I wonder who's going to do that. And, and, and that's, that's a tough one because again, people, grown-ups have a version to, to natural play, but when you can get them to finally see that and incorporate that, it opens a whole new world. Now play becomes, now becomes a challenge to find ways to play and it may be with your kids. I mean, if you, if you're a working stiff and you have kids, if you're not playing with them, you're doing both of you a disservice. So, right? So I hope, I hope that helps. Actually I have a colleague here who's an evolutionary psychologist and he studies play, he's already in CLA. He studies play behavior in children and he was telling me, this is a year ago, he was telling me a literature on this stuff that gives interesting literature, talking about some of the milestones that children go through, like when they, when they reach the age in which they can understand conservation of volume, because if you take a liquid in a tall cylinder, important to a short cylinder, and when do they recognize, when do they understand that it's the same amount, even if it looks different, in those, you know, there's a certain age in which children usually reach this. Well, that age, for things like that, has been creeping up, meaning it's taken later and later for children to reach these intuitive concepts of, like, of physics, like physics, they call it, like these kind of constants. And the, and there's a possibility that, and this is what my friends started to study, that is all this emphasis in academic academia and concept from a top-down perspective, rather than letting children intuitively play with things which they, part of the function of play, all of the purposes, is definitely functional, in the sense that you're building in the intelligence by playing, you're learning these constants, you're learning the full physics, you know, full psychology with social play. And it's so very important, and that's the challenge for the education. Absolutely. The list of, the list of business leaders and successful inventors who have come through Montessori play-based schools is is wickedly impressive. It's a, it's a great opportunity for that. Who hasn't touched the ball yet? Or Flunky either. Yeah. Okay, we got someone who needs to touch the ball before we, yeah, or we're Flunkies, right, right. So, yeah.