Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qh20XWwxMY
alrighty Jane what's happening I'm here I'm you are here you made it I'm excited too thanks for doing this appreciate it so your story is a very fascinating story um you got a brain injury and you decided to make a game to help your brain recover mhm now what led you to even attempt something like that I've never heard of anything like that in the past well I had been designing games professionally and researching them for 10 years by the time I hit my head and it was not my first instinct oh I have a brain injury let me make a game but you know about a month into the recovery I wasn't getting any better I was really depressed and anxious uh I I mean I was it was like the lowest point of my life and I knew from my research that when we play games you know we have more optimism we're more determined we're better able to ask people for help right to team up with us be your allies and I just figured well uh this is like the worst I've ever felt in my life maybe if I can bring some of that gameful Spirit to recovery I could kind of jump start my brain back into healing so what was the nature of your injury uh I mean it was it started out as just a normal concussion and how did you get it uh so this is my public service announcement for the episode I was standing up from underneath an open cabinet and I'm a runner so I've really strong legs and I was just in a hurry and I full force right up into the corner of the cabinet um hit my head and it was like classic you know my husband was joking around you know who's the president and I couldn't remember who the president was and I was like oh [ __ ] that that bad yeah after you got hit in the head you couldn't remember this is Barack Obama this is it was and all I could remember was it's not George Bush anymore but I couldn't remember who it was wow so just standing up and hitting the edge of the cabinet it was an an open cabinet cabinet so this the PSA is you know shut cabinet doors because apparently I've now learned after this happened to me that this happens to a lot of people and you can get a serious uh head injury as like a football player by doing this so ow wow so just standing up so you stood up quick bam whacked your head did you go unconscious or I did not go unconscious you know saw stars and everything but like you know a lot of
concussions it takes a few hours the brain starts to swell and it's not until later that day that you really start to feel like something's really wrong so um is that what happened to you yes yeah um and you know it it was there's no internal bleeding or anything um and so you the doctor said oh you'll be fine and you know give it a week maybe a couple weeks I come back after a month they tell me oh you know some people if it doesn't heal in the first month it takes three months and if it doesn't heal in 3 months it might be a year and if it's not a year maybe you're stuck like this forever will you experiencing the classic symptoms like you couldn't like stare at the Sun the sunlight would bother your eyes loud noises oh I mean all light like if I I I would try to go into like a a Whole Foods the thres and lights would feel like I was like under Fire from weapons I mean I couldn't I was I was in bed basically for three months everything like all stimulus would make me nauseous and um migraines and everything so it was it so it started out normal concussion but then it just kind of unraveled into what they call post concussion syndrome which is um which is a thing that I didn't know existed but a lot of people the concussions take up to a year to heal yeah they can well I uh from working for the UFC I've seen people that neglect those yes and it it gets really ugly I've also seen people that were great Fighters there's a guy named TJ Grant who was in line for a UFC title shot uh got a concussion um not even from getting kicked or punched it was from from a grappling exchange just bonked his head on something I I believe it was somebody's knee or someone's hip or something like that and then was never the same again and has never fought again and it's been like I think almost two years yeah and I mean that's something I've gotten actually pretty active in the research community and trying to share information so it turns out like the first week of recovery uh can really determine if you're going to go into this extended you know it's going to take you 3 months 6 months a year um if you're not if you're not resting enough in that that first week so the first week it's critical that you just do nothing I mean they they call it cognitive rest and basically you want to
not do anything that is that feels difficult for you and so for me I couldn't read I could only watch TV shows I'd already seen before because having to process plot new plot was not uh was not helpful so I was like rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer cuz I'd seen them all like a million times um and and yeah you know keep the lights off if they you know keep sunglasses on indoors um but the first 48 hours and then after that the first week uh if you can avoid over stressing your brain you have a much better chance to recover within the one to two week period as people yeah and people don't know people like they try to go I tried to go right back to work I was in the middle of writing my first book and it was due in a couple months and I'm like I can't miss my deadline I've got to do this I got to power through me I could barely I'm like can't even see the screen and but you're when you're you know when you have a concussion you're not thinking clearly you are not a rational person you're you're just like I have to do this I have to try and other people will look at you and be like what's wrong with you you are you know totally out of it why are you trying to work but you're not you don't have that same kind of rational decision- making ability so sometimes you know a friend or you know a loved one needs to take you aside and say I'm not letting you do anything for this first week you've just got to let your brain he and this is correct me if I'm wrong but it's relatively new our understanding of what takes place after concussion and what you have to do to recover yeah no there's just last year there was a big study that came out showing that four months after concussion your your brain is still different there's still uh it's like a kind of a scarring that happens like a scab um that certain parts of the brain will still be thickened um for months after even if you think you're feeling fine which means that you're still vulnerable you know if you were to get hit again it would be more dangerous and um and if you're still feeling symptoms after 4 months you know that's why it's like when you you know cut yourself open and you get the scab uh you can't be picking at the scab by doing things that are triggering your symptoms yeah wow so who was it that told you you got to
settle down oh well my you know my doctor said that and of course I'm a I mean I'm a science geek that's I have a PhD it's like my background um and I was having my husband Google do Google Scholar searches for traumatic brain injury research because I couldn't use the computer like you got to figure out is this normal I'm like I started feeling suicidal that was uh that was new for me and I'm like literally having him Google Suicidal Thoughts Jes concussion because I'm like is this am I really suicidal like am I rationally thinking I'm never going to be able to work again my husband's going to have to take care of me I should just end it which is what I was the voices in my head were saying but it didn't feel you know it that didn't feel like myself and so fortunately he was Finding articles like wait one in three people with a concussion have suicidal thoughts and that is actually a reaction to the neurochemistry um when you have a concussion you don't have dopamine in the reward pathway reward Pathways which means your brain can't anticipate anything good in the future you become like completely unable to imagine that you'll feel better that good things will happen for you and that's just like a perfect neurochemical foundation for suicide so you were able to remember how you used to think and so you knew this is not the way I think yeah I mean it was I had I had like a I was able to distance myself a little bit from the thoughts where you know I would I would I you know because I was just at home I wasn't going anywhere I would say to my husband like I feel like I have this voice that's saying you know you should kill yourself and I would I would talk about because I didn't it I mean I think if you talk about it it it becomes less you know this feeling that you have that you have to really believe and and more like the thing that you can look at and try to figure out and right um and uh and so it's was like it just felt so weird to me because I'm like why I don't know I had never I never had that before um and once I knew that it was a symptom of concussion rather than oh Jane has figured out that her life is terrible and logically she wants to kill herself I was able to live with it and you know the research literature says they go away as the brain heals so I just
thought okay you know it might still I might still hear that voice for you know a few weeks or a few months but I know that that's a symptom of healing and not how I actually feel so I'm just going to get on with it now is there medication that you can take while this is going on anything that speeds up the healing or anti-inflammation medication nut this is what's so hard about post concussion syndrome is there's nothing that's been shown to speed it up I mean I was offered really powerful anti-anxiety meds depression meds um I chose not to take them because I just didn't want to go down that road I never taken them before yeah um and uh and there's no known therapies people have tried to do Like Oxygen deep oxygen therapy and like hypobaric chambers that kind of thing yeah yeah um did you try any of that I did not try that um but but uh actually this is sort of very exciting for me um I because there's no good treatment for this when my game worked so well for me and I other people started using it it worked well for them we were able to get a grant from the NIH to test this with young athletes um through Ohio State University Medical Research Center we just released our findings last week that the game that I invented did improve the postconcussion syndrome and 100% of the people who used it compared to only 50% of people who didn't didn't play so this is one of I mean this is one of the first validated treatments that can you know reduce the headaches and the nausea and the confusion and the you know difficulty so how did you get to the point where you wanted to experiment with a game you were you recovering slowly like I mean how slow is this taking like how many months afterwards were you still kind of well it was 34 days which I will I will never I don't like it it was it's emblazoned into my memory 34 days after I hit my head um that I was I mean I was completely desperate I mean I literally was saying to myself I'm going to kill myself or I'm going to turn this into a game because I mean I those two options are so strange I know but you might be the only person in human history that's ever said that I'm going to kill myself or I'm going to turn this into a game yes yeah well you know so I was in the middle of
my first book which was all about the psychology of games and I just thought to myself I should I got to prove it you know I I'm writing this book saying that playing games makes us happier and stronger and more resilient I I got to prove this Theory I mean there's all other kinds of proof in the book but I'm like I'm going to live it um and and and that was just I just I didn't know how else to provoke the positive emotions and when we play games I there's a whole list of positive emotions that we feel when we play games like curiosity and excitement and awe and wonder and pride and it's just like I got to get some of these emotions because my doctor had said The more depressed and anxious you are that can actually slow down the healing process it is actually uh detrimental if you if you fuel if you can feed depression anxiety detrimental in in terms of measurable effects or detrimental in terms of the way you feel like that that from uh the brain's ability to heal the the neurochemistry of depression is not conducive to that so literally being depressed can slow down the physical healing of the brain itself yes and and so so they're like you know so try not to worry and I'm like oh Jesus I know I was like I I can't get out of bed my books due I can't write my husband had lost his job a few months earlier and I'm like I may never work again I'm going to be like a barista now this is like maybe if I can stand you know yeah so uh so the 34 days what what is the 34 days were when it was at its worst is that it just I mean it just everyone kept saying oh you'll be fine in a few days you'll be fine in a few weeks and then I went and saw my doctor after 30 days and then the doctor said uh oh yeah by the way some people don't get better in a month those people it often takes three months and uh for people who don't get better in three months then it often takes a year and if you're not better in the year then you might be like this forever and I was like oh my God it just it it made me it kind of freaked me out so did you experiment with things during this time like what what when you're researching I mean lit the only thing that I really experimented with was uh trying to eat things with uh like omegas you Omega 3 omega 6 which are supposed
to be good for for brain healing and there is some scientific literature on that where I mean doctors will say eat Walnuts you know walnuts yeah cuz that's a good like uh it's it's it's available chew them up real good it's I mean as suppose it's taking like a capsule you can absorb things better from food and what what is Walnut walnut's Omega 3 omega 6 um better than fish oil uh I'm one of those weird vegans so oh how dare you I know what about uh hemp oil does that have certain amount hemp is good hemp is really good too yeah but at the time I don't know the only thing I could kind of get it together to do was walnuts okay so walnuts were at do you know who Bill Romanowski is uh what do I football well he a football player uh he was a famous football player and uh he suffered a lot of concussions and created something called neuro one and uh it's a a neut Tropic blend and um he created it to deal with uh some of the symptoms that he had had or some of the repercussions from all the head trauma that he had uh I was wondering if he had ever tried anything I have not I know there are a lot of that sort of neutraceutical like interest in experimenting with that I did not try that because of the dopamine I was wondering like serotonin is like 5 HTP is really good for yeah rebuilding serotonin or building blocks with serotonin yeah I didn't get it together to try any of that so you were just really struggling I I was struggling I mean I would I would like I would sit on the bathroom floor and like cry for hours but quietly like I didn't want my husband to freak out nice very polite in your depression it seems counterintuitive to someone who doesn't know anything like me that you're saying that you could only watch like Buffy the Vampire Slayer because you'd already seen it before but playing a game like isn't part of yeah stimulating right no and actually I couldn't play video games I would try to play like Pagel I was I was like Pagel will be easy it's like a it's like a kind of pinball game uh where you shoot little pinballs around pop pegs and it's uh and they play like the Hallelujah core every level you complete so it's like Yay I'm I'm successful they're like playing a parade for me right uh I'm like that'll I'm like that'll really help help me um but
even that was too stimulating um so I couldn't play video game so the game I invented was not a video game I we did eventually make an app and a web version so people could could other people could play but it was more uh like just a set of rules that I would follow um you know like you would like oh how do you play hide-and-seek or how do you play poker you just like learn the rules and play uh so I just started making up rules for myself about doing things that you would do in a video game like collecting powerups or spotting like making list of the bad guys and all the ways like where they would show up and what my strategies were for fighting them and um coming up with a quest list so like what's something I can do in the next 24 hours to feel better uh like something concrete that I can accomplish and so just starting to approach my recovery with these really concrete gameful strategies um and really the the you know the first thing I did was I adopted this secret identity like my avatar I was going to have an avatar in my recovery and that was Jane the concussion Slayer because I'm like oh I'm gonna be like Buffy and Buffy did not choose to be the Slayer right like they just told her you're the Slayer you have to save the world and I'm like I did not choose to hit my head so I'm going to be like her and just rise to the heroic occasion um and kind of try to tap into my sense of determination and being a badass and so what did you do like after you took on this Persona or adopted the idea of this Avatar like what did you do like what were your powerups like who were the bad guys like yeah um and bad guys were anything that would trigger my symptoms um so you know Bright Lights a crowded space um you know conversation I mean everything um but the thing with with bad guys and like you know in a video game like oh there's there's a monster you don't run away you got to figure out how you're going to tackle it or get past it so and the same is true with recovery from any kind of injury or illness you have to keep testing the limits right because otherwise you wind up never getting better you kind of convinced that you're just flat on your back forever and this is sort of an aside but as I was doing all the research for this new book I found out that the number one predictor
of disability after a back injury is avoiding things that make your back hurt early on during recovery so you would think like oh you have to you know don't don't do anything that will make your back worse but the longer you keep that mindset that's the number one predictor of who becomes chronically disabled you not able to work or they their life is affected in a major way and it's not the severity of the injury it's not the severity of the pain um and so with all kinds of injury and illness now because you get stuck in that pattern you never really so you get stuck thinking yourself is injured yes yes and uh so you know it's like but with all of these things it's a careful balance so you have to recognize that the bad guys are bad I can't I can't go out and be in a crowded space for three hours I can't go to Like a Lady Gaga concert which I really wanted to do I'm like you're not going to do that uh I said that it's kind of like a I'm like the next time she comes through that'll be like one of my epic wins when I can go see her um but like you can do little things to test let me go into the Whole Foods and see how many minutes I can make it before the symptoms come back so you're kind of like testing oh today was 30 seconds I got to leave maybe next week it'll be five minutes and then you kind of start to get your life back because you don't want to get on that course towards seeing yourself is is kind of chronically disabled so so that's you know you come up with these ways to to battle the bad guys you know every day and in in the version that we tested with the NIH that's the game is activate three powerups a day so for me that might have been eating walnuts or like cuddling my my dog cuz that made me feel like safe and happy so anything that provokes a positive emotion if you're depressed you have to really find what are the things that can get through that depression and and still make you feel good so you know I'd cuddle my dog I'd eat Walnuts do you do three of those a day one bad guy battle a day where you really test the limits to see if you're getting better um and one Quest a day which is the smallest possible thing you can do that will kind of move you in the direction of your goal or recovery or just feel like something productive that you want to do so remember one time I my
quest I decided to bake cookies uh for the Baristas at the coffee place down the stairs I'm like I I cuz I felt like I couldn't do anything for myself so I'm like I'm going to bake cookies for someone else today and uh as a result randomly I wound up getting free coffee for a year because they were like could not believe somebody came like down with this giant plate of like cookies fresh out of the oven um but I did not did not expect that um but that was just like you know find one thing I can do today that will have a positive impact um and that's that's the sort of there's other stuff you know in the game but that's sort of the main you're you're basically using game game models to kind of structure your life to make sure that you're staying engaged not hiding you know actually making progress to getting better this sounds really difficult like like more difficult than I think most people would ever imagine recovering from a concussion would be I think most people would think that I wouldn't don't want to say most people just say what I would think I haven't had a concussion I think since I was probably 20 and I would think that what it would be like would be like oh my head feels like [ __ ] let me just lie down here I'll put ice on my head I'll watch TV or something I'll just go to I'll take a lot of naps right like you think it'll feel like a hangover or something the problem is that your thinking becomes muddled too so it's not just that you have these physical symptoms you're not able to think clearly you're not thinking like yourself and that can really lead to uh a lot of confusion bad decisions you know people uh they they try to hide the severity of the symptoms because they think that uh it will you know other people will judge them or they're like there's a lot of it's that's very common I've now learned with concussions people hide the severity of symptoms because it's like you just you're you're not thinking clearly and you think it's important that other people not really see um but I've I've become sort of weird spokesperson Guru for concussions because of my TED talk about it so every day literally I hear on Facebook or Twitter from someone who's like just been concussed and they're like what do I do um and I actually uh I mean I you know I like okay I'm your Ally and I'm
like always you know sending direct messages to like random people I don't know checking in on them to see um if they're doing right thing because it's not even like if your friends and family will not understand they will think oh you'll be out on the couch for 3 days and they expect you to be back to normal and they don't understand why 3 months 4 months later you're still struggling PE it's not I mean it has not been discussed enough although I think that's changing now people especially with so many soldiers coming back with long-term uh symptoms of of the concussions now the other thing that's confusing to me with this is that in the beginning the the first stage of your concussion it's critical you do nothing right but then after a while you're like pushing it like how how much time can I spend in Whole Foods before I freak out right yeah like many people would think that that's sort of counterintuitive yeah yeah yeah well in the beginning is when the brain needs the most resources right so you don't want very early stages like how how many days so depending on the studies you read it'll say between 48 hours to one week is the most crucial stage where you want you want the most cognitive rest and you want to avoid um it basically just exhausting the brain because blood anything you do that's cognitively demanding it directs blood flow to different regions of the brain you don't want your brain spending time trying to figure out your email instead of you know because there's only there's only so much blood to flow around um and you don't you don't want it to be spent and and and trying do an email will require so much more effort from you than it normally would so it's a sort of like vicious cycle um now eventually the brain kind of gets into this sort of I don't know stasis where it's like okay now we're working or you've got your you've got kind of your thickened up um lesions that's going to take you know four months to kind of dissolve and and and be back to normal um so you can you can test and you can stay engaged and and not being engaged will fuel depression and anx so partly it's like you're trying to balance the mental health with the cognitive health I mean you can't if you were to do cognitive rest for a month it would be like being
in solitary confinement and we know that that has really bad mental health effects right so um you're kind of figuring this out as you go along there's really not a road map that's set out no one's ever done this before and you just sort of take your game designing skills and and apply what you know about the positive effects of games MH and you experiment on yourself like a guinea pig yeah I was were you worried at all you might be [ __ ] your brain up or not no I'm like what could be worse than what was already happening um and I mean I like literally within 48 Hours the that fog that like super black you know you want to die fog was gone and it was it none of the the symptoms didn't go away I mean it was as concussed as I was but that that feeling of hopelessness really went away and um because of the fun of the game you but it's so this is this is why I wrote the book because I didn't really understand why it worked I knew it worked for me and then I put the rules online and people started writing me from all over the world that they were using it and not just for concussions I mean people were writing for you know I have cancer I I just had knee surgery someone you know who was just diagnosed with ALS starts playing it and uh I'm it it it seems to be it seemed to be extraordinar effective at treating depression and anxiety and also making people feel just stronger just like better versions of themselves and I did not understand it and this is I say this all the time to people because there can be a lot of skepticism that a game can be helpful during a really serious uh challenge in your life it sounds like trivial it sounds stupid um so I freely acknowledge I didn't understand why it worked it seemed kind of absurd to me for people with much more serious problems than I had too um so that's why I wrote the book it's why I started doing you know our clinical trial and the studies we've been doing for the last few years to try to understand because I didn't all I knew was that it seemed to be having all these positive effects and that uh that was it was I mean even to a game designer like myself who believes in the power of games I was really taken off guard so how did you structure it like did you
you first start off just uh coming up with things like power pills or walnuts and bad guys or depression and how did you like put this whole thing together yeah I mean I just started making YouTube videos which is really funny you can go back and look at like the First YouTube videos of me it's like I don't I think it's called like why I'm making a game for my concussion or something like that the first YouTube video you made were you still suffering oh yeah yeah yeah like how many months was it into I this is like I think on day 34 this is like the day I'm like I'm making a game I'm going to make a YouTube video explaining the game what's it like to you when you watch that video now oh it's crazy because I can't you can see I can't think of words I I I I play it yeah yeah yeah what is it what would it be under find it why I'm making a game concussion something like that Jamie will find it yeah because it's like you can see I can't I I mean you see how fast I talk I'm like talking really slow and how long ago was this uh 5 years ago yeah and how long do you think it was before you felt like 100% you again I mean so I'm like 99% maybe yeah I mean there you're still not 100% no there's yeah there's still some things like certain lights I can't be around W like it's it creates it's like it feels like I'm having five years later yeah well let's let's play this real quick oh there I am I am making this video to explain a new project some volume J the project is a game to help me with the recovery uh process that I'm dealing with after I hit my head and got a concussion and that was about 5 weeks ago and the recovery has been very slow and hard so um it's getting to the point where I feel like I need a game to help me get through it um I was doing some research today about postconcussion syndrome which is what I definitely weird artifact where trouble concentrating trouble oh I mean I'm probably just sitting there with my laptop in my lap um you know serious planning mental problem solving um that would give me in particular I'm having a very hard time a pro I'm also breeding um and uh I get dizzy a lot um I get headaches and nauseous that kind of things well you
could really see clearly you're you're moving way way slower you're talking way slower you can see you're struggling there yeah yeah unless you're on meth right now you're not on meth right I am a naturally very energetic person it's fascinating to me that you're not 100% still yeah I mean you know it and I'm not sure entirely why I was knocked out once when I was younger like knocked out for like five minutes um what happened I fell off a sliding board what's a sliding board is it like a Philadelphia thing I don't know uh like a slide like a like at the playgrounds that you go down at the slide I think in Philly we called it sliding boards um and I fell right off the side and hit my head on a cement block oh yeah that I was really young that was my first concussion so that's probably what's going on too is repeated concussion right no no what's interesting is I was so young I did not I was like I don't know if like four or something I actually didn't know that I'd had a concussion I thought this was my first concussion in 2009 and the doctor's like oh if you had a concussion por no um because obviously everyone knows now if you have more than one it can start to the healing will take longer I didn't know until like a month into my injury I'm talking to my parents and they mentioned well you know the last time you had a concussion you were feeling better much faster and I'm like what what what last time oh you remember when you fell off the sliding board when you were you know who remembers anything when they were four I know I know uh my 5-year-old doesn't remember anything when she was four no like you know when you broke your collar bone I'm like oh I do remember like wearing a sling for collar bone but I didn't know that I had a concussion so uh so even though you were four and then the next one you were an adult it's still maybe I mean it's I people like re the science does not quite understand how this works yet like if if the cumulative knocks have to be all within the same few years or if it can stretch out over lifetime I try not to think about it too much because I'm like you know God if it happens again then I'm really you know but I'm actually I like walk around like this sometimes covering your head like if I'm if I'm like at a you know like a concert or like in a CL you want wear a helmet
if you go to a conert I literally if I'm like at a nightclub or something I want to wear a helmet I'm like wondering if I can bring that back I used to date a girl that used to go to mosh pits she was crazy and uh she got headbutted by a dude once she came over my apartment after she had been moshing and she was like holding her head and I'm like what are you doing a she I think she went to see some crazy [ __ ] band I'm trying to remember the is there a band called the creeps yeah it was yeah it was in Boston in like 88 8 89 so we should be wearing helmets you definitely don't get headbutted in a mosh pit yeah but I would think like there's certain [ __ ] like drunken dummies when you go out to places you you know no and I'm short so I'm always worried about the elbows uhhuh someone's like reaching for something yeah like some big dude will just I mean even like on planes when people are taking down their luggage I like cow by the window Power by the window seats smart yeah that's um the the recognition of vulnerability is an issue with people that get hurt because then all of a sudden you realize you can get hurt and sometimes you just walk on eggshells all the time it reduces the quality of your life yes exactly and that's I mean that's sort of that gets to that idea of you know spotting the bad guys things that could hurt you and then you decide kind of how how comfortable you are you can't just run away you can't just hide you have to kind of push your comfort limits a little bit um but I'm not going to go skiing I've I'm done don't ski not going to ski yeah wow I like certain there's certain things now that I feel like it's not worth the risk to me a third you know I can only imagine I I just started skiing at 45 it's my first time skiing I [ __ ] wiped out hard last year but that's fine just didn't hit my head good and I'm pretty good at falling I know how to fall so I tumbled and rolled with it but I was like dude I was going fast when I wiped oh yeah there's a video that's online today that I just retweeted earlier to today this [ __ ] kid is in Colorado and he's on a skateboard and he's going 70 miles an hour down a hill and uh you just watch it and like every part of my body is like tingling with fear you know that
anticipation of an injury is just like well you tweeted that didn't you tweet the roof topper like the guy in Russia who goes hangs off so that's you know I'm really interested in like neuro hacks how you can do little things to like you know change like how your brain is working right now um and that video it seemed to me would be really good for people to get a little bit of adrenal and going if you're like on your couch and you're like having a hard time getting yourself out of bed oh my God he's going 70 miles an hour down this crazy Hill with horrible music play I mean it looks like a video game right I mean it's just crazy that this kid is doing this cuz you can't stop I mean actually he's really good so there's a a point where he uh he turns the skateboard sideways to slow it down like at the the very end uh but and there's a couple little Wiggles there where it looks like he's about to go down and if he goes down dude you're breaking everything oh yeah you're going 70 miles an hour I mean he is flying I there's no way I mean they're not faking this unless this is some sort of advanced CGI no I was going to say I mean it almost could be a video game like watch when he reaches his hands down he has some kind of crazy gloves on and when he reaches his hands down there's certain parts in the video where he's uh touching the Sparks look at the Sparks see the Sparks look at that Jesus [ __ ] Christ that guy he almost fell I mean he's getting like really close to Falling like there's a a couple times there where there's like this intense wiggle and he's tucking himself like a a speed skater so that he can go faster crazy [ __ ] like what is wrong with kids I mean I get it this is an adrenaline rush but when you see this knowing what you suffered from standing up under a cabinet yeah does this freak you does he have a helmet on is that a hat it's a helmet it's a helmet hope it's a helmet holy Mo I mean what what is that hel going to do well a little I guess like look at this look at that that kid is crazy that's how he slowed down so now he's he's down to a reasonable Pace but but when you see him he'll do it again to slow it down he grabs the board and look at this that is
nuts were you figure out how many hours of I mean cuz he's like a virtuoso out there so there like thousands and thousands of hours yeah he's put the 10,000 hours in yeah yeah yeah but good Lord when you see something like that knowing what you went through like anything like when you see like dirt bike riders doing flips I actually have a really I stopped watching professional football um after I used to you know I mean go 49ers right but uh I can't I can't watch football anymore like I just I mean I can but uh I don't enjoy it in the same way because I I just feel I feel bad for the players when I see when I see like a really hard hit I just I just feel bad so I think that's something that a lot of people were struggling with these days with all these you know the real Sports story that they did on traumatic brain injury and the issues of people were having and the all the stuff I've seen from Fighters over the years is has definitely affected my enjoyment what's this retiring after concussion next hit to my head could possibly kill me W I mean this is a thing now right people are yeah they're they're retiring one two years into their career yeah well there's more of that now than ever before because guys are realizing first of all at the end of uh at the end of their career they're most likely going to be debilitated I mean almost all of the players that take a lot of hits suffer from serious injuries for the rest of their lives and so when you're young and you're looking at your future you're going look I could put all my energy into this and you know be a mess or I could say you know what I'm still young I'm 23 I could do anything I want like look I've been in the NFL I've experienced it let me just get the [ __ ] out of here go try something else it makes you worry that the future of the sport is going there's going to be a big socioeconomic divide were the only people who who really want to play and are willing to take that risk are people who feel like they have nothing to lose you know um that and there's the people that want to watch it like we we've experienced that with the UFC too there's uh there's a bunch of people that want to watch the the head injuries they just they don't know what they're seeing yet they don't understand like
when you you watch somebody get ko'ed like really badly when you see someone get head kicked or dropped in their head or something like that you you just see excitement you see like oh that guy just beat that guy yeah yeah no I know and it's uh yeah I can't watch I can't watch fights either for the same reason and I have friends who are so into it and you know you just because I mean so right I love games I understand a good game a good sport is a good game um and uh you admire people's ability to be so good at this you know this thing that we've created to test human potential but um but you know if I've sort of started drifting to sports where there's fewer concussions although you know like I'm a big tennis fan and one of the big stars just got a concussion this weekend at the US Open so um she slipped uh in the in like the locker room after doing like the ice bath after like a a really match um and uh it's interesting they showed her coming to the court to see if she could practice with her sunglasses on and the hoodie pulled up and she just has that that look that like now I saw her I was like oh my God I mean she's like right in the that zone of where she thinks she's going to play because she's not thinking clearly but you can see her I mean she's like a a shell of herself um so when you see something like that do you want to reach out to her oh yeah no I know and people have been tweeting at her too be like you have to get super better you know they just finish their clinical trial you like what the [ __ ] you talking about I'll be better but what is super better yeah yeah yeah I know uh do I do I I do want to reach out because um because I know how hard it was and how how so few people I mean just the the general public conversation about this is not caught up to kind of the reality of of what people experience well that uh those ice baths that's uh one of the problems with that that form of cold therapy is that you get out and your legs are like rubber yes you know you're everything's not working so good that's why you can't do that stuff and then work out like there's some forms of therapy that you can do and you can work out after it but not those ice baths I know I have done I I run marathons so I
have done some ice bath and yeah have you ever done the whole body cryotherapy where you step in the chamber and you go to 250 degrees below zero for 3 minutes no it's awesome is it really oh it's the best is there like a Mind Body element like do you kind of is there like a mental state that is changed oh yeah well your brain produces something called neopine phrine and cold shock proteins and all these different things when you hit 150° below zero M yeah um there's also something that someone just invented one of the reason I brought this up something called a cryo helmet like you put it on over your head it's like a gel pack thing like a it's almost like a hoodie and you put it on and it's like they they really recommend it for people that have had hen injuries that's really interesting I have massive reduction and swelling right I could I mean I could see that if you're trying to treat the inflammation yeah because it's like a whole thing like like like a frozen helmet you know like those little jail packs one of those but it's a helmet put on your I don't know might I course that's it yeah now you got to pull up like Google Scholar though for me I want to see like is there any literature on this yet um CU I'm so I'm like pull up don't pull it up I'm I'm fairly conservative with telling other people what to do like for myself you know I was like oh I'll make a game but for telling other people what to do I'm like wait till there's a peer reviewed yeah for sure um but Fighters you know boss routon who's a former UFC heavyweight champion great fighter was talking about that that's uh it's important like when guys get hit to ice their head after it's over and and his rationale was like look if you hurt your knee what's the first thing they do they put ice on it why don't they put ice on your head and I was like that actually makes a lot of sense yeah I know that's really interesting I was just reading about you know you probably know this they say like 5 minutes after you stop breathing supposedly you have like brain cell death have you heard somebody's drowned and you can't get them breathing again in 5 minutes um then supposedly it's too late and they're now finding that if you cool down the body and the brain that they can come back you can be not breathing not you know heart heart
beating for more than five minutes now if you get the body temperature low enough pack them with ice that's what they're doing now they're starting to do that it's like a first uh Frankin I know and I was like I was just telling my husband I'm like we need to we need to read this literature so cuz I want to know if I'm supposed to do this or wait till like the EMT shows up like if something happens should I start packing ice or yeah I'm not sure uh I'm not actually sure with the Practical implications of this yeah as you get older you realize more and more how damn vulnerable people are yes we're so physically vulnerable yes well this is really interesting because you know I in doing what I do I have confronted a lot of skepticism and I would even say I mean people who are really quite sarcastic they hear about this oh I'm going to adopt a secret identity and it's it's going to make me not depressed you know usually it's people not suffering from depression who say this cuz if you're really suffering from something debilitating like clinical depression you will try anything so people who are pretty happy and healthy and they'll they'll say this sounds ridiculous um but but you're talking about bloggers right yes well yeah and the New Yorker just ran a big like giant piece uh about about super better um uh sort of you know it was both positive but also like still this sounds kind of ridiculous well it does sound ridiculous but but then it's like but it still can work and sound ridiculous exactly and that's why it's like I I uh when you realize how vulnerable people are and how much is out of our control I mean those are the people who are the first in line to try this and who benefit the most so we had half a million people play an electronic version like logging their power ups and their bad guys and Quest so that I could get data on it and see what are the most effective powerups like how often do you have to you know check in to to get better and we found that people with the just the the most painful and difficult situations were the ones that were benefiting the most it's like sort of the more you realize how vulnerable you are the more open you are and the more this kind of concrete purposeful positive action can actually make a big difference that makes sense
once you feel the vulnerability you you CU it be it becomes real whereas when you look at someone who has a broken leg and you go oh I can intellectually understand that that person broke their leg but I don't know what it feels like right you know if you've never broken your leg you don't know that feeling you're like ah [ __ ] I can't even stand on this stupid thing is that that feeling where like okay now what what do I have to do what do I have to do tell me what I have to do and then the reality changes and the reality of you having that head trauma and trying to figure out like there's got to be a way to get out of this swamp this mental swamp that I'm stuck in uh let's [ __ ] make a game like let's do like you're just I mean it makes sense to me it a person who's been through a bunch of surgeries and injuries and stuff it totally makes sense to me because there's a reality that every time I've really badly injured myself like where I need knee surgery or something there like a just an acceptance just go all let's just go deal let's go do it cuz now this thing's broken and until that happens there's a bunch of people that tell you well why don't you try rehabbing it why don't you try doing this like no it's like I don't think you get it no and a lot of times you'll have an injury and you won't know if it will get better um what if you'll be able to get back to what you were doing before which is actually where the name super better comes from because I wasn't sure I would ever have the same cognitive capabilities I had and I at that time I was you you know I was you know I just gotten my PhD I was doing research I was you know I was used to being able to have an intellectual profession um and so I everyone's like get better soon and I'm like well what does that mean that means get back to who you were before this happened and I didn't know if I would ever be able to do any of that again so I thought well I'm not going to get better I'm going to get super better I'll just be different I'll be like this new super version of myself like Spider-Man uh you know he got bit by the radioactive spider and this concussion is my radioactive spider and I don't know who I'm going to be but it'll be someone different and uh and instead of just trying to you know CU Anytime
you're have an injury or an you don't know who you're going to be at the end of it it might be back to normal it might be different and you want it to be the best different that it could be yeah there's been many stories of people that have gotten knocked on the head and all of a sudden had musical Talent OR mathematical Talent were you hoping that that was going to I had the weirdest experience um so I'm a very introverted person by Nature I I you know I like if my phone rings I won't answer it like even if you're my friend or like you're my mom like oh it's too much social interaction like I get anxiety I can't answer it so uh that's been like my whole life but um we what we know about like the difference between introverts and extroverts is introverts tend to stimulate themselves with internal thinking they're always they're always thinking and they don't need other people to kind of get them excited extroverts respond much more positively to external stimulation it it's like a it's like they're just primed if they see someone smiling at them it's like a cocaine hit you know so when I had the injury I couldn't think to myself anymore I couldn't like entertain myself with my own thoughts and I became like this super extroverted person and I started like calling everybody in my phone like contact list and which people I would never I mean I wouldn't even pick up the phone and I'm like please talk to me cuz I couldn't I couldn't literally could not be an introvert anymore but that only lasted for like a couple months and then when I started to get better I went back to being introverted and I still today I I try to keep some of that because I actually discovered wait I I really like it's nice to talk to people it's not not actually a burden you know but but that's so that was that was that was one of the sort of super better you know changes for me as I realized and there you know we know from psychological literature extroverts really are happier they live longer they're psychologically healthier it is if you can convince yourself to be social it's it's really good for you um but introverts should still have a different brain chemistry so their brain's telling them H people scary like you know too much stimulation uh yeah well that's the one of the
weirdest things about online interaction is that it's kind of a combination of both introvert behavior and extrovert Behavior because even though you are interacting with people you're not them no it's controlled and that's it's it's the face to face can be really uh daunting yeah yeah like you like just the the energy it takes yeah I mean it's not it's not the same thing as being I mean just cuz you're introvert doesn't mean you're I don't know like socially unable like I you know you're not you're not a misfit well obviously you you're very capable of keeping a regular conversation going yes I mean you're not me you could say you're an introvert but you're easily you know you're easy you you like you're just talking no problems you're not I've had some introverts on this podcast before and they're it's obvious they're like everything's an effort you know yeah yeah it's probably more of an effort for me than it looks H but I I think it's more of an effort for everybody than it looks maybe well that's a good point yeah I think that um one of the issues with online interaction is that you don't see the people and you don't you know you just it's just like my intention is it's kind of ambiguous you know like you write something or you you put something out there and it's it's not completely clear like if you say something I get the tone I can tell if you're being sarcastic and I if if some if you say something mean to me like we have to look at each other I'm like [ __ ] really you know like and there's this weird thing to it whereas if you do that online there's like none of that and I think that there's there's something very strange that's going on in our culture right now with so many people spending a giant amount of their time only interacting with people through text absolutely well that's one of the areas of research that I was diving into so you know because I don't just you know research brain injury stuff I typically research video games and how they change how we feel and think and act in what did you get your pH in uh this the field was called performance studies so I was just basically studying how people perform um in video games and as a result of video games sort of collaboration skills their sort of psychological performance um things like
that at at UC Berkeley was where I studied and uh so one of the things that we know that's happening in video games is that there's a really big difference between playing a video game in the same room with somebody and playing online um so like if we're playing Call of Duty and I'm trying to kill you if we're playing in the same room we actually undergo really great uh it's kind of they call it synchronization so our heart rates will sink up our breathing rates sink up we get a kind of mirror neuron process going on where it's like blood flow is mirroring where it's flowing the patterns of activation are mirroring each other and all of that's associated with more compassion more empathy we like each other more we trust each other more even if the game is violent even if we're competing um all of this happens and it happens because you know when you're playing a game with or against someone you have to try to get in their brain like what are they going to do next what's their next move um so your brain starts to mirror what you think they're doing so it's this this really uh intense Mind Body mirroring that goes on what triggers the mirroring the the observance of the character on the screen uh well no it's it because it only works if you're in the same space physical space with them but you're still looking at a screen yeah but you're trying to think what are they doing and there is just something about if you're the you may think you're looking at the screen but there's also just a general awareness like when you're sitting next to someone right you're aware of sort of what's going on and the and cues that you're picking up body language cues and if you like turn to look at them you you'll even just in a split second you'll get the sort of facial expression queue um and that doesn't happen in online games um so what we it's been measured oh yeah yeah yeah so what we've seen is if you take the same game and play it you know against somebody in the room you wind up with these positive impacts uh like you know more compassion more empathy you like each other more if you play the same game online you're not able to see their facial expression you're not able to get the same uh sinking phenomenon you actually dehumanize the opponent you your testosterone goes up you feel less
empathy towards them um and so it's one of the reasons why in the book I talk about how you know unless you're actively trying to change your personality to be more aggressive and you want to I don't know for some reason you feel like you want to be kind of more of a have like aggressive hostile personality uh you should not spend more than half your time trying to beat strangers online um because of the because it's just not half your time is a lot of time half your half your gaming time oh okay Jesus Christ what are you recommending 24 hours in a day you should never spend more than 12 hours killing strangers and actually it's 21 hours a week is where you start to see the benefits of games reduce and negative impacts increase so there's another Public Service Announcement um what if you have you done it in layers where you know you like I used to do uh land parties with my friends we used to play Quake land parties um and it's really fun you know there a lot of camaraderie and stuff but if you put a barrier up yeah but they're in the same room or if they're in a room that's right next door but you know they're there and maybe you can hear their voice or if you shut that door and you can't hear their voice if you changed have they seen like what what if the mirroring is consistent yeah um the studies that I've seen show that you have to be in physical proximity so if there was a barrier and we were unable I was unable to look over and get those cues from your body language or from your facial expression that it would not Happ what if it was like a cubicle thing and I could just like reach up yeah yeah yeah then you then you probably would I like I like this idea of the saging the thing I'm really curious about is with twitch and now YouTube is if you can watch somebody playing and and now you're seeing their face um while they're playing a game um Studies have shown that watching someone play a game that you know how to play will trigger the same mirror neurons because your brain can kind of emulate uh if you're playing a game I don't know how to play I don't know the controls I don't know the goals my brain will just be like I don't know but if I know how to play the game like oh I know what she's trying to do I know what a
strategy whatever it where everybody knows get away from the yeah yeah so one thing I'm interested in is if I can see someone's face you know while they're playing the game they're playing a game I know could you get some of the benefits but it would only be unidirectional because if you're like live streaming your gameplay you can't see me of course so uh but it would be interesting because we know that if you get this mirror neuron effect um it makes people want to help each other more like each other more I'm like thinking like being a powerful you know twitch streamer or YouTube game streamer like could make you really cultivate a large community of people who really want to help you what seems like like if I were building an empire of like a new kind of community I feel like that would be what I would be building because they would be really um it would be like a really tight Bond you know that's fascinating you know this twitch thing has caught a lot of people by surprise because I think a lot no one would have ever thought that it would be so popular to watch someone play video games right and the mirror neuron thing helps explain it because it's not like watching TV where it's just passive if you know how to play the game your brain starts working to sort of process it and anticipate you know what they're going to do next trying to figure out what what decision they'll make or or where they'll go um and so you're actually getting a lot of the same stimulation as if you were playing the game yourself and that's the thing people don't understand um we this with musics too if you know how to play a musical instrument and you watch somebody playing that same musical instrument your brain starts to you know activate as if you were playing it yourself which is why it can be more interesting for you someone who knows how to play the piano to watch someone else play the piano or listen to someone else play the piano versus somebody who doesn't know it totally makes sense when uh I used to play Quake we used to watch these uh things uh they they call them demos and what it was was a game that they would record and so you'd see it through a player's eye so you get to see how good a player moves and then it would make
you play better you would you play better after you saw that absolutely yeah they were really popular like demos were super popular you would download them and you would play them in game like in your game yeah I remember that yeah do you remember that I do I was like in a Counterstrike a little bit well that's the case with Athletics too um a lot of people tell me that when they watch like a really good basketball player play that it makes them play better basketball I know it's the case with pool I play pool and when I watch really good players play like I can kind of emulate what they do and but I feel like it's not just like copying but I kind of tune in because your brain is practicing it I I find that after a Grand Slam in tennis because I'll watch the only reason why I'm not watching tennis right now is because we're here doing this I oh there something going on oh yeah the US Open my favorite player is playing like literally right now your favorite player Joe willly S who I named my puppy after I have a dog named s and he's playing right now to get get to uh the semis um but no spoilers because I'm recording it um but I know that so I'll go like two weeks watching hours and hours of tenis a day then I go to play tennis and I'm better I'm absolutely I I see the ball better I get to it better um I absolutely because my brain has spent two weeks mirroring everything I see but if you don't know how to play if you've never played your body won't do it so you have to have you have to have a model for for this to work totally makes sense yeah is like something like tennis like I've maybe played once in my whole life when I was in my early 20s I played so you wouldn't get as much benefit I wouldn't get anything because I'm not going to play again I don't think I just not enough time in the day but I I totally understand that that totally makes sense I think that probably is the case with pretty much everything that people do it's one of the reasons why uh a sense of community amongst people that are all involved in the same sort of endeavor is so important cuz you kind of push each other and Inspire each other and also so you kind of feed off of each other maybe one like if we were all comedians maybe you would have like a certain kind of style that I don't have
and I would see your style I go oh Jane's got this crazy thing she's doing well that's kind of cool and then like maybe I would do something that you didn't do and you're like maybe I need to like be more this or me more and sort of tune into how people are doing to the point where a lot of comics when they're around each other um it becomes an issue sometimes because they kind of mimic each other's personas or or just the Cadence you would think you'd start picking up well there's a guy named David tell it's like one of the funniest guys ever and uh he's got a way of talking that's really fun and when he talks like there's so many young guys that come up that start talking like Dave AEL and it's like it became an issue where there was like all these little uh like Patrice and used to call them AEL babies there was all these AEL babies that were run around it but it really they're just young Comics that admire his sort of c and they're trying to do it too and they're like super inspired because they're young and they're just trying to make it and then they're seeing this guy who's just you know like fantastic comedian like God and then they don't even realize it but they're just adopting it yeah no that makes perfect sense I mean you just uh it becomes a template yeah nobody exists in a vacuum right I mean everybody sort of there's everyone influences everyone around them to a certain extent we all want to believe that we're some Rogue independent operator that exists out in The Fringe of society and lives in a [ __ ] wooden house in the woods somewhere that sounds nice yeah sounds sounds nice but it's a it's a it's a creation of fiction oh yeah no and it's funny I somebody um uh someone I me Clive Thompson he writes a lot about technology for like wired and New York Times um and he did a book out recently uh about you know is technology changing our brain and the opening chapter says you know news flash everything changes your brain this sentence you just read it changed your brain and so I mean on one hand it's sort of silly to to look at reseearch that says oh games change your brain like this or you know music Chang your brain like that um because everything you do everything you're exposed to changes your brain you're making a memory or you're you're sort of
activating a pattern um so I mean like even this conversation you know congratulations like you have changed my brain today yes um but this is just something to think about like a lot of responsibility in how we interact with each other it is and well that's that's one of the the weirdest things about doing a podcast is how many people will tell me after they listen to podcast for 500 episodes dude you changed my life oh yeah like that's a lot of responsibility but it we really are changing each other's lives I mean the podcast has changed my life just being able to talk to all these different people it's why it's important not to have [ __ ] in your life cuz if you're around people that are just constantly [ __ ] up and constantly making the same mistakes over and over again like that pattern affects you too that pattern will creep into your mind yes well they say you know it's it's it's really good to surround yourself with people who inspire you because they they talk about having a cognitive model for Behavior change like if you're trying to get better in some way uh if you can visual if you know somebody who's already done it or doing positive things in their lives it's it requires less energy for your brain to imagine yourself doing it like if you're if if you don't if you're not surrounded by anybody who's trying to get healthy or trying to get fit or whatever it is um you're it's like it's literally harder to imagine and so it's like more exhausting for you to try to imagine yourself getting getting better whereas if you're surrounded by people who are doing it it becomes familiar to your brain there's all sorts of examples that your brain can call on um and literally takes less energy for you to imagine yourself actually doing it and weirdly they found at Stanford University using uh like avatars if you can see an avatar that is designed to look like you like doing the sort of things you want to do like you know being really physically fit like working out in the game world if you just watch an avatar custom designed to look like you doing that it uh lowers the cognitive threshold for you to do it and then you will do more in real life you like you know you will work out more you'll um spend more time committed to those goals just by having
watched the sort of mirror version of yourself having done it that's fascinating that that's fascinating because that seems to open up a whole new realm of possibility for people creating virtual realities yeah like virtual realities where you're watch like one of the big things that they say it's in important for progress in sports and and in pretty much anything is visualization visualize yourself doing things it's a big thing with martial arts they uh take a lot of Fighters they they they talk them through their scenarios they they will sit down and they'll close their eyes and meditate and visualize uh themselves getting out of bad situations visualize themselves winning and do it over and over and over again to the point where it becomes like a part of this is your reality your reality is you win you know it seems like if you could watch a video of you doing all those things an artificially created you y absolutely jumping higher than you've ever jumped before scoring in tennis or and what's so it's like it's it's there's a little bit of nuance to it that's really interesting so um for example if you are like walking on a treadmill while you're watching a custom avatar of yourself and the Avatar you know starts running faster and is getting fitter you will run faster you will you will work harder if if you are engaged in an activity it can really uh get you moving so it's like it would be good to tie it to when you're actually working out like it might not be it might not last for you know I watched this movie today and a week later I'm still feeling more powerful you kind of want to do it in the moment um or they the one study at Sanford found for 24 hours they were they sort of were more physically active like taking stairs or doing more push-ups or whatever um but uh but I do like the idea of using it purposely like that the one thing they know is like for positive visualization I don't know if you've seen there's been new research coming out that you have to visualize the effortful action and not the outcome like if you're visualizing getting you know lifted up on people people's shoulders like I'm the Champion um that actually seems to sometimes have a counterproductive effect because your brain can imagine it so vividly you kind
of feel like you've already had that payoff and you're you put in less effort that there' been stud for a few years that show this um so uh but if you're visualizing the effortful activity that it takes to get there you're picturing you know here's what I have to do on game day and you're thinking about um the the things that require effort on your part techniques or you know the the actions you're going to take um that is helpful so you just don't want to think about you know I can't wait till they you know call me up and say that I won whatever you have you can't think about just you have to be visualizing the things that are going to require effort and energy on your part that's the that's that seems to be the most helpful it's so fascinating because like just that statement right there that seems to be the most helpful there's so much weirdness in all this there so much it's like magic like what the [ __ ] is going on like what with the visualization process what's the mechanism like what what what is it inspiration I mean how much of inspiration how much is inspiration uh a factor in success I I would say probably gigantic right so is that all it is I mean there's there's so many different Avenues I am I focus on self-efficacy as what you're trying to increase uh as opposed to inspiration so self-efficacy is when you feel like you have the skills and abilities and resources you need to achieve your goal and it's it's it's different from self-esteem self-esteem is like Oh I'm a good person you know I sort of like like myself self-efficacy is very specific like if I have self-efficacy about running a marathon it means that I have done you know at least a few 20 mile runs I know how hard it's going to be I've got my res I know how to you know fuel during the run I know how much I had to sodium I have to take at different points I know what the course looks like so I've got a mental plan having that sense of reasonable optimism and focusing on visualizing what you'll do successfully that's focus on your skills and abilities that in all of the scientific literature is linked to better outcomes whereas if you're imagining things that are outside of your control it just doesn't because how is it might inspire you and maybe you'll you know get out of
bed and put more of an effort as you you know picture something good happening to you but the the mental model that seems to be most powerful is when you're focusing on things that you have Direct Control if that makes sense yeah the selfefficacy how much of all that is just a little like what you're we're talking about is just focus is just thinking about what you're doing and the more you think about what you're doing and the more energy you put towards what you're doing makes you better and how much of this is just I mean is it possible that all these ideas of just visualization is what what you're doing is really just focusing more and loving more what you're doing I think that could be be a big part of it I mean the the focus attention you're you're able to perform better you learn faster I think part of it is also something to do with the dopamine system um you know in video games so if some so I've talked to lots of neuroscientists um for this book and um a lot of them will say if you want to increase someone's self-efficacy you have them play a video game because uh in a video game you're constantly required to take action and then wait to see you know I I try to fire my weapon I wait to see if I shot successfully I try to orient around an obstacle I'm going to see I'm going to get information every time that your brain expects information about your performance it gives you a little dopamine release and dopamine feels good so you get excited um but increased dopamine also allows you to pay closer attention and to learn faster right so anytime you're trying something where you're constantly taking actions getting feedback and you have to kind of learn and improve uh you'll get all this dopamine going and that is associated with the ability to build self-efficacy so uh I think that there is a I mean I think there's a neurochemical process that's underlying this it's not it's not just um I mean it's not just a matter of of what you think it's also about changing what is going on in your brain so that the brain is primed to learn faster to improve and that's um that's the that's why you know that's why there seem to be so many cool applications for video games because if you can get a cancer patient who feels really
powerless and overwhelmed to play a video game about chemotherapy and it starts building self- advocacy and getting all the dopamine going there was a clinical trial that showed that kids who played a video game about cancer were for two to three months later missing fewer doses of their medicine taking more antibiotics they were more engaged um which leads to more cases of cancer being going into remission right but isn't that just more Focus it's just focusing and thinking I mean it's using it as a mechanism to focus and think about your illness focus and think about your recovery but it's focus with the dopamine hit and the increased dopamine is going to it it it changes so what's we now we'll get really deep here um every time that you consider a goal your brain stops and says is it worth it because your brain's trying to conserve your body's energy and you know your your cognitive energy and we'll say if I if I do this goal am I do I really want it am I'm going to put the energy to do it and what researchers have found is the more dopamine you have in your reward Pathways the more you focus on the positive outcome and the less you think about the effort required so if I give you a bunch of dopamine hits you're going to be thinking about I might be cured someday I don't care care how many side effects there are to this medicine I'm swallowing this pill you know and and I'm going to do it um because you're focused on the positive outcome not all the other things that stress you out about it or make you you know the nausea and the the energy that it takes and this is true if you're doing push-ups you know like do I really feel like doing 100 push-ups right now um if you have more dopamine going you're going to be more likely to say this is important to me it's important in my training um and if you are low dopamine which is when you're clinically depressed you have really low dopamine so everything seems too hard oh why am I going to bother getting out of bed there's like the effort required seems so much more important than the goal so there is a neurological underpinning to self-efficacy is sort of this combination of really wanting to achieve your goal and having that increased attention so you learn faster so there's
but you have to it's I mean it's not it's not it's not just a matter of saying I'm going to pay attention now you have to be priming your brain to increase the dopamine in your reward Pathways right and but the dopamine hit what is the mechanism that creates the dopamine hit is it just simply loving what you're doing and being enthusiastic about goals it's it's goals it's anticipation well specifically it's anticipation of feedback so the fastest way like you wanted to increase your dopamine right now I would say make a prediction about something that's going to happen today um it could be anything like I I predict that s will win today in four sets whatever it is you make a prediction about something every time you make a prediction your brain's like oh I might be right I'm going to and and and that'll feel good and if I'm not right I'll learn something why did he lose in five sets or whatever so I make a better prediction next time that gives you a dop me so in a video game when you fire your weapon you have predicted that it's going to successfully shoot that guy over there and you're waiting for to see on the screen did I miss or did I hit that's why you get a dopamine hit so every time you make a prediction your brain gears up to either celebrate that you were right yay success or I got to learn so that I can do better the next time that's why I think I I you know I have friends I have one friend in particular that didn't grow up with any healthy sense of competition and he's actually talked about that like if there's one thing that he could go back and do again like he thinks his parents didn't really instill any sense of competition in him and he's one of those guys if he's playing a game it's not going his way he'll pull the plug he'll flip the Bo over he's that guy yeah yeah right well you know what's going on in the brain so this is you have this reaction but to him losing is just devastating and games are only if you can win right well and and it's probably what's going on is his brain is saying you know it's starting to realize no amount of effort is going to turn this around and so he just walks away there's well not only that there's no there's no history of figuring things out and getting better like everybody who's ever started anything and gotten really good
at it knows that in the beginning you suck and it's some it's kind of exciting like um you you pick something up say uh tennis you know like if I started playing tennis today I don't know how to play tennis I would suck and it would be exciting cuz I would get my ass kicked and I'd be like okay I have to figure this [ __ ] thing out what makes that ball spin like that how's that guy whack that ball oh I see he's no he knows he's number crunching he's he's like data he knows he's got he's chunking information he knows that if I move left the ball's going to go there and he's going to go here and oh okay and I don't have that so and that experience of getting better I mean that's the basis for self-efficacy um so it's like sometimes people ask me like parents will say what kid should my what game should my kids be playing for learning experience but I say every game is designed to be a learning experience because you're supposed to be bad and that's why games feel so good is that you're you're every time you play a new game you're figuring it out you're learning how it works you're getting better that experience of constantly getting better and proving to yourself I can figure something out I can improve I can Master something um that's I mean that's one of the reasons this a fundamental reason why people like playing games and why they don't play the same game forever I mean sometimes you do if the game that you can never Master like chess or something you know but most people will will really get into a game for a while and then feel like they have stopped improving and so the brain gets you know wants to keep learning wants to keep getting better the dopamine hits are only going to come if you aren't sure how to be successful right so you have to play a new game that's why we don't play tic tac toe as adults right no no dopamine hits with tic tac do because you know exactly what's going to happen every move [ __ ] game I keep trying to tell my 5-year-old we're going to it's going to be a draw every time kid this is [ __ ] um what there's there's like elitism attached to chess where chess is the only game that's considered a a worthwhile Pursuit I know it's terrible what is that because parents will tell kids that are playing video games that
they're wasting their time but if you came home and your kid was playing chess silently with his friend and they're just looking at the you'd be like oh my kid is up to a good thing oh sure I mean first because Einstein played chess so well I think that's part of it although you know it's really interesting if you read letters that he used to write hat yes no he loved but he wrote to people that he was worried that he was addicted to it he talked a lot about how how he had this game addiction which is fascinating when you think about today how many people worried about I'm addicted to World of Warcraft or whatever game so like even Einstein worried about being addicted to his favorite game it is real game addiction is absolutely real it is it is real um uh it is absolutely real and uh there are techniques for breaking that pattern by the way if you would do you want a quick technique for how to break sure okay there's a whole chapter in in the super better book about game addiction and how how to stop it how to reverse it um and what tends to lead people into it so the biggest I wish my friend Duncan was here right now uh he's the biggest addict I know when it comes to video games yeah it makes me feel normal uh the biggest predictor for uh who will become addicted to games and feel like it kind of gets out of control spirals out of control is if they're playing for Escapist purposes to try to block other feelings like I have these all these problems I'm going to play the game instead I'm I'm feeling anxious I'm going to play the game instead um so the way you reverse it is you you have to I mean I talk about is playing to get better you are instead of playing to avoid something you focus on what you're doing that is making you better even if it's just to start getting better at this game then you focus on you know what I'm playing with you know my friends it's like improving my relationships or I'm focusing on strategy building my teamwork skills or whatever it is you start to think about um other goals outside the game that the game is connected to because the biological process of addiction is the narrowing of goals that the brain responds to is this true for for drug addiction I mean all forms of addiction pornography narrowing of goals that the
brain responds to right so you know I said you get like this dopamine hit when you anticipate something good um in in addiction the brain starts to believe that the only source of the next dopamine hit is the thing you're addicted to and you can't imagine other things that are going to make you feel that good or feel that excited and one of there's this great new book called the biology of Desire that lays a neuroscientist kind of lays out all the new thinking on addiction and the way that you break one of the the ways you break out of cycle for any addiction is to start climing the brain to anticipate success or pleasure from other things so you have to they talk about like widening the scope of what is going to provide that dopamine hit so in gaml you have to stop um you have to stop thinking about the game as the only source of that that that good feeling so you have to start thinking about other goals that you have besides just the sort of sense of relief that the game is going to provide um H so that's something that they tell addicts that or drug addicts use channel that addiction into something else so that's essentially what they're saying they're saying what you need to do is find something else but that's positive that you can get addicted to so you're seeking out that weird chemical reaction in the mind when you're stimulated by something else right instead of chasing crack you'll Chase exercise yes but and what we're seeing with games is because games AR inherently dangerous you don't have to quit playing games and in fact it can be dangerous to just go cold turkey on games because it's like taking someone off an anti-depressant without tapering them because games have such a powerful impact on our our happiness you know how kids are going to listen to this go Mom it's dangerous for me to quit this game it it well you I mean list to Jane there are like suic I mean there are cases of kids who have killed themselves when their parents turn off the game those kids would have killed themselves over anything I I think I think it is likely related to it's the same thing when you take someone off an anti-depressant and the brain is no longer having that uh it's like you you you lose your ability to
imagine is the term positive is the term addiction like is that a flawed term like because it seems like it's so limiting and and and so narrow in its scope we we think of addiction we think of oh he's on the heroin you know like you just automatically think but really what is it that you're brain has locked into these Pathways of achieving desirable effects absolutely um and that's there's a lot I've I've done some work with some rehab rehabilitation centers recovery centers for addiction where they're starting to be more aware of this the new sense of what addiction is um but if people are interested the book that just came out this year about that the biology of Desire does a really good job of explaining it because it's I mean the it's a pretty provocative argument it says that addiction is not a disease it's it's a f it's the brain is functioning absolutely perfectly it's just focusing on it's like hyper focusing on one goal but if you had that same brain chemistry about runting a startup company I mean Mark Zuckerberg was addicted to his startup in the same way that someone can get addicted to a video game or addicted to a substance you get hyperfocused on one goal it's your only source of of pleasure and anticipation of um these positive feelings so it's the brain is working properly it's not broken it's not it's not a disease in that sense it's that uh it has just gotten stuck it's got stuck on something non productive yeah that that is maybe ultimately not good for you physically or not good for your the life that you're trying to Le good for your career good for your family life or I had a buddy that was addicted to um one of those role playing games trying to I guess it was EverQuest m and uh he he had this really profound statement we were at The Comedy Store once he was one of the managers and uh he said I am so good at making money in my online life and so bad at it in my real life yeah yeah and like he was like he was sitting there like a broken man and I'm like how often you play he's like 8 hours nine 10 hours a day every day I go every day and he goes yeah um I can't not play it and then that's when he said that like um it was like this this rare break from the game on during his free time he wasn't working and he came down to The Comedy
Store to hang out he was pasty white pale almost gray skinned yeah yeah because he was just like just drained malnourished sitting in front of a monitor all the time clicking and moving and clicking and it's like the intervention for that you know if you were to sort of follow the guidelines uh of of how you tr get people to sort of focus on other goals is you would just start by asking him why are you good at making money in this game what what what does it take in terms of skill or you know commitment or resource what are you what are you doing and and and start to think about strengths and abilities and then um when you are thinking about yourself and what you're good at and what you're capable of It kind of takes you out of you own it it's not the game right the game isn't making you successful or happy it's your own skills and abilities and that seems to be if you look at scientific literature just talking about what you own and what what is a result of your skills and abilities that that helps you broaden that so you realize you can apply that elsewhere there might be other venues it's not the game that's giving this to me this is something that I own right that's so hard to intellectualize though when you're in the grips of addiction know I know it's why there's like questions in my book that like literally you can ask someone or you can ask yourself so you don't have to intellectualize it I mean just do the so the there are 100 quests in the book you just do what I do what I tell you to do they're all designed like little game missions um because it is it is it is hard to change your mindset I mean it's definitely hard but what we know from studies of all kinds of mindset interventions is that once you do it it sticks so unlike a lot of forms of therapy or medication you have to take this pill for the rest of your life you have to be in therapy for years if you can do a mindset intervention it's done benefits are there it's locked in and you can have a five minute mindset intervention and and instead of taking you know prescription for the rest of your life what I found to mitigate my addiction problems or my addictive Tendencies is just do a bunch of different things y i I have a bunch of different activities that I do and the reason why I do them so many different
things is to keep from locking on one exactly so you've like intuitively figured that out already well I figured it out from trial and error over a long life of addiction I I grew up being a addicted to a bunch of different things at first it was Art and then it became martial arts and then as I got older it became standup comedy and it became a pool I had a real problem with pool to a point where my manager thought it was ruining my career oh my gosh I was I was playing 8 10 hours a day I was playing in tournaments all I wanted to do was play pool I would go do my comedy sets and then I go play pool till 3 4:00 in the morning and then I would get up in the morning I'd go work out I'd go uh you know go do my comedy and do the same thing every night and but all I was thinking about was the game I was thinking about like knocking the balls into the whole like the the the dopamine effect or whatever it is of of winning of or of being successful of running out the table of having the ball do what you want it to do and because it's so difficult the reward is so much like anything that's really like if you play a game it's really easy when you win it doesn't mean anything but when you play a game that's really hard to do that reward is so [ __ ] exciting yeah but this is interesting because like you become a more interesting person as a result of having all the things that you do like you're like this really I mean it's like unusual that you have all of these things instead of you know being hyperfocused on one aspect um so it's probably I mean it seems like a good strategy I'm just a broad spectrum junkie that's it it's just have a bunch of things that could be like a recipe for a good life though I mean I this is kind of kind of interested in that idea now like what you should that should should be like a thing broad spectrum J I mean it works right now but it could go off the rails you got to keep you got to keep you got to keep that Circle wide yeah I've gone off the rails several times in my life but it's just like even I like with running like I I definitely use running for my mental health um and if I get an injury that is really hard for me I have to replace it with something or else you know you go into a depression it's a big thing with jiu-jitsu guys it's very
difficult for them them to take the time off before they go back and train again once they get injured and I I have a couple chronic injuries that I have because one particular of a back injury that was a bulging disc that I just would I would ignore I would I would I would hurt it pretty bad and then two weeks later I'd be sparring again yeah because I just needed that rush until it got pretty chronic and then I had to take a long stretch off and really let it heal up but it gave me that perspective it feels like I mean just hearing you say that makes me think really how important it is for people to understand like how this system works so that you can say look my brain's telling me to go back and work out now even though my doctor said don't do it and I can Google and it says stay off it for six weeks um and to understand your brain is telling you that because it wants that dopamine hit if you really want to rehabilitate properly you need to start doing other things that produce dopamine hits and that's I mean fantasy sports for example do get really into that for the season that you're taking off um because that's you're making predictions so that's really that's not going to work it wouldn't work for you no chance works for a lot of people play poker then not I need to be active yeah oh Physically Active yeah there there's has to be actual physical movement in CU nervousness is a big part of my adrenaline junkie thing it's actual nerves it's like playing poker is was never exciting to me even if like people are gambling for a lot of money whereas playing pool is extremely exciting because there's the execution physical extion of things so you're going into Flow State yeah that's what that is right it's too much well I think my brain was wired with martial arts and competing which is ex extremely exciting but dangerous and thrilling and the Thrills are so high yeah like the Thrills of competing are just beyond anything that you can ever get from something that's non-physical non-threatening it's it's high level problem solving with dire physical health consequences right so there's all sorts of craziness involved in it and the intensity and the focus that you need so you understand that guy on the skateboard really well then actually oh
yeah too well that's what's scary about it to me that could have [ __ ] easily been me when I was 17 or 18 years old I I I understand all that [ __ ] that's why one of the things that freaks me out most about those people that are tight RPP walking and doing all jumping those squirrel suits where they jump off of cliffs and fly around oh yeah yeah yeah that doesn't always what freaks me out is that I get it that's what freaks me yeah race car driving all that [ __ ] is like I understand what this guy's doing he's feeding that monster in his brain that needs to be shocked and scared and thrilled and what's next and you know it's like you're you feel alive I mean yeah not just feel alive but hyper alive yeah hyper alive in a very high but it's funny because you were asking about Focus earlier and obviously when you go into that like that intense state where there's high stakes high risk your attention is so super focused right time slows down and you're able to see more and process more so that could be part of I mean you're interested in in Focus because that's a part of that experience at high which you don't get there I mean there's lots of highs where you're not going to have a that's kind of heightened focus and attention there's that and there's the state of Peace that's achieved when you've overcome almost insurmountable obstacles and fear and nervousness everything else like whatever weird problems that you might be uh dealing with with your personal life they seem so inconsequential like uh like when I would have like a relationship problems like a girl was dating some craziness about to break up I would go Spar and I would be like who gives a [ __ ] you know and and you know I would I remember one time having this conversation with this girl I was dating it was like so dramatic and nonsense I'm like so then I guess we're breaking up I mean like what what are we going to do like [ __ ] I can't do this like either we like each other or we don't like each other either we're going to hang out and have fun or we're not going to hang out anymore like I don't want to do this anymore like oh you're so cold you're so this sounds like my early 20s I remember that you [ __ ] you really you gain perspective instead of wallowing around in this cuz I think there's an addictive aspect of
relationships too of the breakup makeup thing of the the highs and the lows of like there are some people that are addicted to arguing in relationships oh falling in love is an addiction I mean I mean it's literally the same process it's the narrowing of attention on one thing only that person gets you that excited gets you that um with a bunch of biological tricks engage too because your body's trying to get you to breed yeah and what's really then you get the really problematic relationships when that happens for one person and not the other and that's why you get yeah well you get like but like it's why it's why somebody seems you don't understand even if you're dating and you kind of like that person but they're already they're down the road they're phys like they are they're they in love they are addicted and then your behavior might seem totally crazy to me because I'm not there yet and even though I liked you because you're further along in that process and that narrowing of attention yeah uh I freak out whereas if you know maybe if I had waited a few more weeks I might have been that I might have been far enough along that it actually doesn't scare me off you know like people who fall in love at different rates it's not it's not that you're a crazy person and I'm a normal person and therefore I shouldn't date you it's just you're further the biochemical processes look a little faster for you um I I think like there couples who break up too soon because one of them came kind of got further along in the addiction process and the other what a weird way to look at it but yeah I mean and also it's like the same exact person you could meet them six months later and they're perfect right yes you meet them right now because maybe they have enough going on in their life that they fall in love slower sure right cuz you'll fall in love faster if there's nothing else getting you excited in your day right what's also that term fall in love like what what exactly is going on there like what does that mean you know you're just sinking up whatever personality aspects that you have holes and square pegs and round holes and everyone's trying to figure out where everything fits in and then there's also a weird thing where uh we've all had friends that alter who they are when they start dating someone
it's very strange to see too yeah you know like they'll stop talking to some of their friends or they change their behavior pretty radically and like whoa what's going you're like fitting in this mold that the other person requires like one person is either more dominant or you're both like super [ __ ] codependent so you need each other all the time yeah like I have a friend this [ __ ] can't go anywhere without his girlfriend he doesn't do anything without her I mean and he invite him over for a podcast boom brings his girlfriend you know come on over for the game oh she's here too great you know like he doesn't go to the movies doesn't do anything like does he is he happy that he's a [ __ ] mess no he's a mess but the two of them are a mess together and it's like inescapable pair gotcha gotcha but maybe they're happy messy happy maybe maybe I don't know I don't know either well what is happiness that's strange I mean it's like they're not depressed they're not jumping off bridges yeah you know they're bolting they're not shooting heroin good you this all sounds good yeah like what what is it that makes people addicted to each other cuz they most certainly get addicted to each other like the feeling when someone breaks up with you when you can't believe they're gone like that is like a like someone stolen something from you like they've stolen your happiness by taking off and just simply leaving you alone yep yep like you they they are a part of you like your whole is your your your whole is missing a slice yeah like the whole of you I know that I mean all the metaphors that people use it really does feel that way yeah well but isn't that a biological trick just to get us to breed like you stick around long enough to make a baby and then you know fall in love with the baby so that you raise it so that that baby can go and have a baby and the sense of community that you have all sort of is addictive and it keeps you together which ensures survival oh yeah I mean that's why cooperation feels good it's why kindness feels good I mean so tricky it is and like I don't know you can I mean I'm a very practical person I mean I think I try to help people feel good I want to feel good you know cooperation and kindness you know those things help
society and help Evolution and like we're stronger together yeah and it feels good uh like that's that's practical you I don't mind that you know evolution is kind of tricking me I mean I have two babies I have uh seven month-old twin daughters and uh you know if if this is is a trick of biology how I feel about them I'm totally cool with that because it feels good yeah that's biology's trick to me it tells me it feels good I like it thank you biology for giving me these feelings I never had before yeah I mean you can kind of intellectualize it down to the point where it's no longer enjoyable cuz like isn't life itself a trick in a sense because it's really temporary no matter what you can accumulate all the Audi and and beautiful houses and boats you want but at the end of the day it's over you know like you you the sun rises and the sun sets and you got a certain amount of time and that's it so you can intellectualize that to the point where you're like what's the [ __ ] point I'm just going to end it now and some people do do that they almost get to this thing where they can't be in the moment because they don't know how long the moment lasts and the anticipation of the moment ending is just too freaky so they're like [ __ ] this I'm out it's sort of the same thing as my friend who can't play the video game if he's going to lose and he pulls the plug I mean really there's a lot of a lot of the same sort of qualities and characteristics of that kind of thinking like this over intellectualizing or overanalyzing to the point where you can't even enjoy what it is I feel like I really want to work on this friend of yours like like video game therapy to like well it sounds like an interesting project he's a egomaniac you know what I'm doing too much problems I like but like I like the idea of like how would you help somebody who can't lose like who's who's a bad loser you should be so happy that you're trying to help him because that means you're talking about him it's like you're focusing on him there's a lot a but no I mean he's alive he lives in America he's not in Ethiopia living in a grass house you know it's like he's lucky as [ __ ] yeah you you got to think I I at a certain point in time that there's there's there's levels to to like happiness and Harmony the
harmony that you achieve with the environment that you find yourself in and the more chaos that you create in the more problems that you create just to solve those problems it's got that that energy keeps you from doing something else and that energy is going to block you from the other Pursuits yeah absolutely yeah I mean you need to take committed action towards positive things and in a sense the entirety of your life is a game of course yes it is I have a I have a kind of funny story about that um you know I did the colar report a few years ago and when you did that does he break character so well well he comes not no not well not exactly so he comes into the dressing room beforehand and they don't do a pre-show interview because they want you to be kind of offg guard and off balance and he comes in and he says you know have you seen the show okay I'm going to be in character and uh I'm going to be really stupid and stubborn and your job is to disabuse me of my stupid and stubborn ideas um and they said now let me ask you a question uh is you know is Life a game and I was like is this is he like is he practicing you know is this like a am I are we practicing some kind of witty Rapport for the show or whatever so I'm like I'm trying to go into that mode and I'm like well you know yes of course it is and he's like if life is a game we spend all our time playing it why are we so bad at it and I'm like I'm like totally thrown off I'm like is he being like Phil I don't like anyway it turned out he was actually being quite philosophical and he he had all of these you know sort of thoughts about out you know I mean you start mentioning philosophy books he'd read and everything and I was like okay this is like not like a not like a you know witty like banter practice he was like really thinking about that and I always uh I I I mean to return to that question and try to come up with a better answer for him someday well it's a complicated game and there's no instruction book that's why we're so bad at it I mean it's not everybody's bad at it you run into people you go wow this person is a really cool game going on yeah you know and but it is just a game me essentially what what the problem is that there's loaded words like the the word Addiction
is a loaded word it's a loaded term uh I think the word game is a loaded term too it's a complicated series of events that you're trying to manage and you're trying to manage risk and reward and benefit and the positive and negative aspects of behavior essentially it's exactly the same as a game they're completely indistinguishable it's one of them is just open-ended and there's you know there's no clear pathway it's a game that literally you're standing in the middle of the universe bam and especially in 2015 if you have the means you can get on a plane and go to another part of the game you know you can just hop on a plane and you know we were talking before this podcast started about uh the Radio Lab uh podcast that's out today um about that guy who was on my podcast Cory Nolton who shot that Rhino like that's a guy who took the game and decided to go to a [ __ ] place he totally doesn't belong or is never you know never he's not born there or whatever not shouldn't say doesn't belong but a completely different area of the game and he's doing something over there and everybody over in this part of the game is like what the [ __ ] are you doing over there like some guy gets on a boat and decides a sail across the world like whoa whoa whoa what are you doing well he decided that he's going to go to a different part of the board and he's going to get in a boat and he's going to drink rainwater and try to catch fish and travel across the [ __ ] ocean this is interesting like people are playing different kinds of games so like the guy wants to kill a rhino that's a combat game and the person who wants to sail around in the boat is doing exploration it's an adventure game and other people are doing the you know collection game you requiring resources um I think the Rhino guy is doing the collection game too in a weird way he's collecting bodies yes yeah you know yeah and I think the the guy who's on the boat is doing the collection game too cuz he's collecting accolades you know I made it across the ocean oh right you make it across yeah the real way to do it is go across the ocean don't tell anybody right where you been for the last six months you know just chilling trying to find myself you know while you're on a boat when I started training
for Marathon I was like I'm not telling anybody because I don't I want it to like just be internal yeah I want it to be for well you know cuz it's like this weird bias some people have about Runners that like they brag about it a lot or like they do it to like show off you know who says that people who wish they were running I really believe that CU if you run like I have my friend Cameron Cameron Haynes he's run two ultra marathons and he'll you know post about it on his Instagram or he'll show you his time or something like that but he's trying like he's an athlete and he's sponsored by a bunch of companies and part of his gig is that he and Ires people and he really feels good about that a genuine thing that he does takes people running up these mountains but you'll see these people that like [ __ ] about it like these guys run he run 100 miles in 24 hours if that's not impressive then you need to go look in the mirror and find out what the [ __ ] actually impresses you yes I mean you post a picture of your breakfast you can't get mad about posting that they ran yeah at my eggs I mean it's like what why do people get upset that you say you're going to run a marathon why would anybody get upset it's hard to run a marathon you're going to run for three and a half four hours or whatever the hell your time is that's a [ __ ] long time yeah it's hard for me to do 20 minutes on the elliptical machine and not get bored I could keep going for a lot longer but at 20 minutes I'm like [ __ ] am I done Jesus Christ get this over with when someone says they ran a a marathon you start to question your own resolve yes which is like one of the reasons why they do it you're showing score you're showing your game score and people are getting pissed yeah to high score [ __ ] showing her high score alth sometimes sometimes I will post a terrible run cuz I like you don't want to be too inspiring that people feel like they can't do it like [ __ ] those people no it's like I'll do I'll do a slow run so that people will see like hey if you're no that it's they're tricking you into doing shitty scores they're tricking you that's true that's also true well there's definitely that there's there's a lot of people who when someone will accomplish something I I will I'm fascinated by watching The
Observers and one of the Instagram observers are the most fascinating because whenever I go to someone's page someone's done something cool like you know my friend Cameron running 100 miles I'll look at the the the negative comments and I go to their Instagram page and they're almost always blocked it's always always private like locked like you you have to you have to be one of their accepted friends in order to comment on their pictures because they're hiding right they're not putting themselves out there they're not showing their life which and which means they don't understand the vulnerability involved like if you were if you had the experience of having other people write on your stuff the same way that you were doing on someone else you might not be doing that well they're playing the low they're playing Tic-Tac toe where someone else is out there playing chess yeah you know that's got to be like the new like Zing like man you're playing Tic-Tac-Toe that's like Tic Tac Toe playing [ __ ] yeah I mean it is kind of what it is if life is a this really super complex open-ended game where essentially if you live in a free culture like we do you know we're not living in North Korea where you're assigned a job and if you don't cry when something happens you know you go to jail you your your game is essentially open-ended it's not that's one of the reasons why when people get out of jail they find themselves like institutionalize is the word but they find themselves so trapped in the game of jail that that's how their brain is wired it's really extremely difficult for them to deal with the open-ended Game of Life yeah I mean even for you see it with when someone graduates college kids who have been from the top colleges who have been taught to play the game of achieving and achieving in this really rigid structure and then they get out into the world and nobody's telling them here here are the things you have to do to be considered a good student or be successful and then they just lose it mhm tooo much yeah because they don't they are not they have not been directing their own game mhm right it's like you if you if you haven't been designing the game now you have to suddenly acquire that skill for yourself it's also one of the problems that some
people have with career academics people that never participated in the real world they went from college to teaching college and then they also they require these rigid standards of behavior and thinking I heard that about the Atlantic article fascinating yeah that is well it's interesting because I've been so steeped in Psychology literature um and uh a lot of the folks who play Super better are traumatized and they've they've been through PTSD um and it is absolutely true that avoiding triggers prolongs the problem I mean so I I mean I can look at the scientific literature and say trigger warnings are actually not they're not going to help they're going to make you weaker over time it's like we were talking about you know oh I'm so scared of the bad guy I have to avoid everything that is a trigger um we we know that that's not true so when I you know when I hear about that I you know I wish and I try to talk to people you know I tweet when that article came out I tweeted about and I have a lot of people who follow me who are you know have PTSD and they're very conflicted about whether they're supposed to avoid triggers and they like trigger warnings because they think it's going to keep them safe but for everything we know is that you need to get better at controlling your reaction to the trigger avoiding it doesn't help so I can I can see why that's so frustrating to people well the one of the most frustrating aspects of that article in particular was that what's going on in colleges today is it's it's a control issue yeah it's the they're controlling behavior in such an extreme way that they're they're they want to penalize people for microaggressions which is like you say something and I go all right which is just part of a [ __ ] human interaction with you like if I say something to you and you give me a sarcastic response I have to decide you know what I don't enjoy communicating with her because she she makes me feel bad or I have to say maybe I'm [ __ ] douchy and maybe people react to me in a negative way and I should think about not what I want to say or how I want to say things but rather how people might view what I'm saying and how they take it in and maybe I'm just an ineffective communicator and
maybe what's going on here is just you know there's there's like two people playing soccer okay they're both trying to hit the ball and they Collide into each other whose fault is it it's well they're both it's just nonsmooth movement Y and that that sort of interaction that you would get when you're trying to hit a soccer ball it's very similar to the interaction that you have when two people communicating with each other you're the colliding people one person is not necessarily totally responsible for that Collision they're both sort of responsible for it and there's a there's a whole dance going on with poor decision making in the moment and lack of experience and collisions and lack of an understanding of the consequences of those collisions all that is a part of going to college yes all that is a part of growing up and when you have people that are shielding you from microaggressions M all that [ __ ] is just a part of being a human and dealing with your hormones and emotions and you're separated from your family for the first time and now you're in Michigan and some [ __ ] crazy University and you got some fat stupid teacher never even existed outside the real world and they're dictating your behavior patterns and telling you you're not allowed to use male and female pronouns anymore and all I like I like the teachers I mean you know I have a lot of friends who are who are you know they teach a university so as do I I will remove the fat stupid teacher part let's let's say skinny smart brilliant or whatever it's I'm fat stupid I don't even mean like physically what I mean is just like this this bloated sort of lazy entity that is creating this environment where you're you're establishing this artificial realm my guess is looking at what's going on this is not coming from instructors or faculty that this is coming from the students that this is a phenomenon I mean it certainly it certainly was uh I mean it it it's this is definitely a younger phenomenon it's isn't like something like deeply entrenched people who came up I mean my professors are totally weird like friends who are professors are totally weirded out by it don't know how to handle it they're not creating that culture I mean it's definitely something
coming from the students who have been raised in this culture of you know I mean it's that it's a very protective culture and you don't nobody should have their feelings hurt and everybody you know nobody should experience failure or rejection I mean I I feel like it's more from that culture than from anything related to like contemporary Academia or thing because isn't contemporary Academia Academia overwhelmingly liberal and Progressive uh I mean I think so I think on the political Spectrum yeah when you have something that's moving in one very particular direction often times people will try to outdo themselves but the faculty are not in control I mean this is this is I think the reason why a student culture would have so much impact on this is because universities are now like business models and the customer is always right I mean that's not the professor is not the one who is uh who is going to like the professors more often than not resist it's really more at the level of uh the the business side of the college that is trying to make you know this a make make this a good customer experience for the student I mean I think that is that is more of the Divide I don't think the the political affiliations of Faculty is not I mean none of that is really what's going on it's really more about the students pay so much money for college now and they expect lots of perks and they expect they're they're paying for certain experience um I think that is really where you're seeing a lot of the friction come because this particular younger generation is um seems to be if you look at you know what a lot of the experts are saying they want they don't want the things that feel painful or feel like failure or feel like stress well if that's the case then why are they pointing out all these flaws in all these other people's behavior to control them and flaws in the way people uh Express themselves flaws yeah yeah but I mean it's part of it is obviously things need to change right I mean like like what needs to change well I'm like for instance I'm a woman I play games if I log into an online video game I don't want to be called a [ __ ] every time I log in to play does that happen a lot yeah of
course and do you think that happens a lot because of what we talked about earlier where there's the the interaction of just dealing in text is very strange and the interaction without people being right there with each other yes I mean absolutely um seems like totally unnatural right yes yes and people I mean I don't that doesn't happen to me in real life right that's what I was going to ask like how many people in real life say those things to you nobody nobody like how bizarre right all of a sudden you enter into this world so isn't that a function almost of the world itself being completely unnatural more so than than the people being any different in that world I'm not sure but I mean so all of that is to say there are things that people say and do in everyday life that are legitimately offensive sure and uh I mean I don't use the terminology microaggressions I don't use that the trigger warning terminology so I think we're like in this period where on one and things do need to change in some ways you know you have Nobel laurate scientists giving speeches where they say that it's he doesn't like to have women in the lab because either they fall in love with you or you fall in love with them and then you can't work together I mean when some when a Noel laurat says that to a conference of you know young scientists that that's not helpful I don't think you know that that was taken out of context you know the full extent of his phrase was a joke and he was also talking about his wife and because he met his wife in the lab and and he was also making himself to be a fool it it was very self depra do you know the I did I did read some sort of re reassessment of that yeah Dawkins printed the uh a full version of what he said and it's very different also everyone read the full I read the full version yeah um but so it's like so this is actually perfect example because so if he was joking right so his intentions are totally good is it possible that it's still not helpful to make that that kind of a statement that's I think that's what people are talking about right uh when if if on one hand there's a lot of interest in trying to increase the number of women in science and
technology is it possible that somebody would hear that and still be kind of demotivated by it or kind of let have that sink in so I think people are when they're when we're discussing these things uh I you don't have to police other people's language but I think it's I still think it's useful to say that might not be helpful yeah the there's an article on the leaked transcript uh the leak transcript what what happened was the people that saw it thought it like at least some of them thought was funny and but there were aspects of what he said that were probably clumsy or or you know he was trying to be funny and he's really just sort of an odd guy who's a scientist and uh people decided that this is an awesome Target like let's go after it right and should make an example which happens on the on I mean the whole people get shamed on the internet now that's that's what happens um I mean my you know I don't have any expertise in this area so it's probably not you know worth me hiding about it this is official quote he says it's strange is such a chauvinist monster like me me has been asked to speak to women scientist let me tell you about my Trouble With Girls his Trouble With Girls three things happened when they were in the lab you fall in love with them they fall in love with you and when you criticize them they cry perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls now seriously I'm impressed with the economic development of um second this is [ __ ] up here of uh K see it was it was him joking yeah but he's definitely he's joking playing on stereotypes that girl cry and girls can't handle criticism I mean I'm just saying it's it's I I'm not going to say that I it's I think it's totally fine to say hey when you say these things it might uh result in some girl thinking wait maybe I'm not going to be a good scientist be because people say the girls aren't good in the lab or whatever it just I I wouldn't say it that's yeah I wouldn't say it I try to be I try to be know even when we say things like about people who play games a lot you know um oh they're they're wasting their lives you know why don't you go out and do something real um I don't think that's useful to say either I think that that's
actually uh can be really damaging to people you generalize you know men do this and women do that and girls aren't good at being in the lab and it's it's it's it's damaging and I think now he understands that a joke like that as innocent as uh he might have intended it to be when you're reading it in a text form especially and you're taking some of it out of context it can be it can be uh offensive it can be hurtful for someone who's con considering like how many girls were reading that that were considering a possible career in science went I don't have to deal with [ __ ] people like this like I don't want to I'm not going to cry in your lab [ __ ] I just want to do work I want to be a scientist yeah so we don't need to like police people to have this conversation of you know so it does sort of expose in some ways it exposes uh prevalent attitudes um that this guy who is this esteemed Nobel winning scientist has this attitude you know that he thinks it's funny to joke around about it like even if he's not a sexist or a bad guy him making this joke about himself being some chauvinist monster yeah and it's be one of the things is because his wife is a prominent feminist and so he jokes around about him being a chauvinist monster yeah yeah you know well that Mak sense yeah I mean that's it's all out of context and it's all also you're dealing with a guy who whose real focus is his research not social interaction right he's not like a nuanced speaker he's not a guy who is a carefully considered uh speaker who gets on stage and thinks about everything in the impact of all I mean he like we were talking about like the awkward interaction that people might have in college well this guy's awkward interaction is him being forced to write a speech like if he did this a bunch of times he'd probably get really way better at it and you if you sat down with him alone and you guys were just talking over a glass of wine maybe you'd understand how his brain works better yeah maybe I would would have been more useful I mean it if if something offends you it's more useful to have a conversation about it than to just start you know yeah but it's fun to blog and [ __ ] all of this guy this guy he's old
and he's white he's somebody will write a book about the neurochemistry of outrage soon because it's it's its own high you know it's recreational recreational outrage is without a doubt a real thing right now and I think that that's what's going on in colleges and that people are finding when you're in college it's like when you were talking about the addiction that people have to video games and one of the things that sort of stimulates that addiction is if you're trying to avoid things in your regular life well if you are in college the the overwhelming anxiety of being a young person who has gone from being living with her parents going to high school now you're in college and you just a couple years away from the Cliff of real world like you're [ __ ] sliding towards it you're trying to Define it and redefine it and change it and establish yourself and then along the way comes things that you can be angry at well you will Point your [ __ ] Fury that are really unmeasured or unbalanced Fury at those things where it doesn't necessarily make sense but it makes sense to you because what you're really doing is you're avoiding The Angst of social anxiety of of sexual rejection and all the all the [ __ ] that makes a person feel weird things and you channel that towards microaggressions or you channel that towards someone treat you know deciding to address you with a male or a female pronoun you know there's like there's a lot of weirdness to being a person and that that but you know the last thing I want to say about this is part of it is I think people are just trying to make new rules for the game right you know and and when you're trying to change the rules of a game that is really upsetting if you're in the middle of the game you playing a game and some's like wait totally you can't do that now it's he and she we've always been he and she yeah yeah yeah yeah it's like oh you're playing soccer you can't kick the ball anymore with your feet like and you're in the middle of the game you know right right so but that it doesn't mean as a game designer would say it doesn't mean that isn't a better game that actually could have different rules but it's really upsetting to be in the middle of a game and have somebody say wait those
aren't the rules so you know maybe we should maybe we should um I don't know I don't know how to do it better because I mean look I'm a progressive person and I'm glad that things are changing in society in lots of ways you know that I'm excited about like what makes you happy like what what do you think is good about the changes in society in in a Progressive Way well I'm I'm really glad that we have marriage equality now I'm really excited about that I'm glad that um I mean paternity and maternity leave you know becoming more people having longer maternity leave and the same length paternity leave for dads as a new parent I you know really excited to see companies doing that um and I like I like you know uh I like that we're starting to talk about income inequality I mean optimistic that there will be changes in that direction and I I think that uh I think the black lives matter it's hugely important movement I think so I think there's a lot of conversations going on right now where people are angry or have struggled or feel like they've been playing a rigged game and uh so it's not it's not going to be pleasant and not all the tactics are going to be effective or good either but uh but the general attitude is definitely moving in a more Progressive Direction I think so and even it's somebody who has been you know know I've I've had Twitter you know hordes yelling at me because they thought that I was breaking one of the new rules of how we're supposed to like what did people yell at you so my one of the big inst I had was uh about uh my recommendations for playing Tetris after a trauma so there have been multiple randomized control studies now of Oxford University showing that if you play Tetris within 24 hours of a traumatic event it will reduce the flashbacks you have the severity of flashbacks and other PTSD symptoms because because it occupies your brain and prevents your brain from kind of locking in an obsessive compulsive way on the trauma right so this is I think this is incredibly important advice that everyone should know kind of like stop drop and roll you know if you catch on fire you know what to do um everybody should have Tetris on their phone and have it available to them if if because I know having
suffered flashbacks from my own head injury how I mean I would have nightmares and be of which I was hitting my head and I would feel it as if and I'd wake up and I'd be convinced that I had hit my head in the middle of the night um and was going to have this experience all over again um just nightmares constantly so I know how bad it's going be I won't be able to do it when I started tweeting about it people I got told that there needed to be like trigger warnings on my tweets because I was mentioning PTSD and I might make somebody think about like a trauma that they'd experienced and um well they're trying to change the game yeah so it's like I UND I don't you know I've I've been on the other side of it where people have said that I'm doing it wrong but at the same time I recognize there are people who are suffering or angry or they have been at a disadvantage because of the way the game is rigged and so I'm okay with this they're being like we're all going to be uncomfortable for a while as these things change and that's you know so you're uncomfortable with being unjustly accused of being insensitive when you're bringing out the scientific research that shows that a game can help you with trauma yeah I mean I i' I'm going to keep doing it you know but I understand that the people who say it are hurting the people who who are telling me that I'm triggering them but that's so irrational I think that all irrational Behavior like that should either be ignored or [ __ ] on I really do I just think it's dangerous I think it's dangerous when it gets pointed out like you're you're science you're pointing out the scientific aspects of a very specific activity that's very good for trauma and they're saying that you shouldn't talk about this that's nonsense well that's why I I still talk about it but I don't have to get into a fight with them about no you certainly don't you should ignore them or [ __ ] on them if you depending on how you feel but I think that there's there's definitely uh I I like how we're defining life as like a giant game or is equal to a giant game CU I think that that's what's going on also with the reaction the negative reaction to Progressive thinking now like uh I was tweeting something about um this woman
in uh Kentucky that was trying to stop people from getting gay marriage licenses and uh I really I took a few days where I wasn't paying attention to Twitter that much and I didn't know that there was this giant movement supporting this woman and I went to Mike huckaby's [ __ ] Twitter page and saw that this crazy old [ __ ] was like saying that there's a war against Christians and that like Rel hash religious liberty and so I was like that doesn't have religious liberty doesn't mean you enforce your religion on other people like that's so crazy and there was so much blowback I got so many people tweeting at me angrily tweeting at me for saying like and I tweeted something about Ted Cruz about how ridiculous his views are on gay marriage and like that he's probably gay and I'm like if you listen to the way that guy talks he's super feminine like this like how many times we have to see this where these men because I have a bit that I used to do in my ACT there's two types of people that hate gay marriage it's either you're really dumb or you're secretly worried that dicks are delicious those are the people and like this guy is like there's something going on here like why does he care so much about two people that are in love that but watching the people that are angry that the game is being redefined and there was all this it was all this Christian stuff that was attached to it like well guess what guess what else it says not to do in the Bible it says not to get divorced like this lady the same lady has been divorced three times she's on her fourth marriage guess what else it says you're not supposed to have tattoos okay all these people are tattooed with religious symbols on them you got a cross on your arm and you tattooed it [ __ ] you got to read the whole book this is crazy like the things that they choose and it what it is is they're trying to they're trying to define the world that they're playing in they're trying to define the game and I think it's important because even though I might disagree I mean I I vly disagree with people whose perspectives seem to be fueled by hate but I think it's important to still try to have the empathy or the the mental insight to understand why why does this make them
feel so bad and I think what you just said you the feeling that you thought you understood the rules I mean religion is a set of rules you thought you understood it you're you're playing the game right you're doing it right um and it is it is psychologically distressing to have somebody else tell you we're playing a different game yeah you know your game sucks um and you're not going to be able to play it anymore uh I I try to understand where those feelings are coming from because if you're going to change people's minds you know you have to I think you have to acknowledge that they are in a real they are really in distress about this you know they're not doing this just to be jerks I mean they this is changeful to them but why are they in distress about something that doesn't directly affect them that's where it because of what you just said because it is it is it feels it's they have committed to a framework a set of rules and and and and put that's once you're in it you're in it and and you know when you're playing a game you always try to stop the cheaters and you protect the boundaries of the game that's that's the mindset you get into and they're just they think they're just doing country that was established by Christian values the [ __ ] game's locked okay you can't change the rules that's that's it it really does seem like we we've kind of touched on something here yeah this is uh this has been a really good one for me as the the overall looking at the the whole existence as instead of defining it by the word game but looking at it with almost the same sort of uh attitude or approach that you would look at a game yeah is uh very beneficial good it's worked for me you your eyes got big like saucers like you like you did it you did it you scored you made it happen yeah I think um also um like the the the the e flow of culture like the things that are seem to definitely even even though I resist like this nonsense about microaggressions and Trigger warnings and stuff like that I'm very happy that things are moving in the direction of acceptance very happy that you know like you can be whatever the [ __ ] you want you decide you're a woman today go ahead as long as you don't hurt anybody who cares this guy wants to wear
dresses and you want he wants you to call him Jane now fine okay you know these two guys want to get married to each other terrific you know these two people want to stop wearing makeup and they want to what do you give a [ __ ] who cares who cares or they want to dye their hair blue that's fine too like eventually we'll all figure out that we are all just Unique Individuals that are a part of G this gigantic superorganism and the most conducive way or the most harmonic way harmonious way for us to interact with each other is to [ __ ] with each other's path the least whatever path you're on your way in your game as long as doesn't like negatively affect people as long as you're not a destroyer you're not out there your path is to burn down other people's houses your path is to steal your path is to to hurt people as long as that's not going on why care and and then ultimately once that is established I think then we will focus on okay well what are our real real issues our real issues aren't gay people getting married to each other our real issues are the people that actually are burning houses down the people that are stealing like these are the real issues that people have people that are not microaggressions but actual aggressions people that are actually committing crimes against each other people that and why are they doing that well what is wrong with their game what happened to them like what what series of events have placed them in this sort of position yeah yeah because it's not I mean people don't get into that in a vacuum no I think that's also something you realize once you have children like you have now and as a father one of the things that's changed radically in my life is seeing people now like when I meet people I see them as babies that have grown up like I don't see them as being in a static State yeah you know and it's it's very strange like even [ __ ] that I meet I look at them and even go that guy's a [ __ ] [ __ ] I think of them as like what happened to that person well you know that's like a that's I I practice in Buddhism and that's like one of the big Buddhist meditations is to picture people as babies like when you feel hate for somebody try to visualize them all the way down to their little baby self and
picture what they look like as a baby and to think about who they were when they were that baby before all of life happened to them to make them into somebody that has now triggered these you know hate feelings of anger it's also in the womb you know I was talking to Michael Irvin who's a famous pro football player who's talking to me um about kids that grow up in horrible environments dangerous volatile environments where the mother has all this cortisol in her brain while the child's in the womb and the the kid literally grows up like with a short temper they literally they're they're developed out of the womb like constantly worried about stress and danger yeah hypervigilant yeah all of that I've had feral cats I had a cat that was feral that I raised and uh he was [ __ ] terrified of everything from the time he was a baby and uh I locked myself a room with him when he was a kitten cuz it was the only way to like bond with him I stayed with him for like I just put a bunch of books in the room and cat food and a litter box I'm like you and me D were hanging out and when I'd come near him and he'd be like he'd just jump on the walls and like you'd never seen anything like a feral kitten I mean he was really little too just a couple months old and uh when but when I would get to him and pick him up he would start purring like finally somebody loves me like like but then when you put him down like the same cat would just be because his brain was programmed from the time he was a little baby and there was not a lot he could do I couldn't say that cat's [ __ ] well no that [ __ ] cat was born under an apartment building you know and his mom was like running away from traffic and trying to eat rats or whatever the [ __ ] they could kill yeah well I think this is one of the reasons why game thinking is so powerful because you just zoom out and see the bigger structure that it's it's there's always a bigger game and more pieces in play and you're getting other people's you know strategies or actions are are you know or the rules you know um and being able to zoom out and see that makes you feel I think will you have more perspective more wisdom and maybe more compassion for other people that's also why people like to rightly so
criticize very narrow-minded small town thinking small little environments insulated environments that are very you know very crit criticizing or very you know just just have their their way set and they don't have a wide variety of experiences they can draw upon or they don't have a broad nuanced view of the board that they're playing on yeah so this is like this is giving me a lot of a lot of food for thought about I mean the links between social change and gameful thinking there's something there there's something there I think also as time is going on and uh this is one thing the the positive aspects of social media and of the internet itself is that we're getting more and more information instead of just accepting these preconceived notions that we have about different groups of people now we're being exposed to so much data it's just inadvertently or uh inarguably changing the way we view those groups yeah and that you're forced to like when you see like this black lives matter thing you see all these peaceful protests where these people are talking eloquently and speaking and showing video after video of police brutality and then I've had I had a cop on Michael Wood who was a Baltimore retired Baltimore Police officer that talked about very openly talked about the institutionalized racism and about how they had found uh papers from the 1970s that were describing how to behave in certain environments that were exactly the same as what's going on now he's like this is a [ __ ] system yes it's and I don't think that attitude existed just a few years ago I think people are looking at all that data now and they go it's slowly coming around and even the hardliners are dropping you know if they were at a 10 now they're at a eight or a seven well [ __ ] kids you need to go to go to school or something you know it's like everyone is sort of slowly recognizing the pieces that are in play it's a lot more complicated than we want to you know just narrowly sort of Define them and these these really simplistic terms where it's not simple there's a a series of interactions that are going on all over the globe where human beings are trying to find their way and they're also realizing somewhere along the line that their parents weren't these all all
knowing creatures neither were their parents neither were the President Roosevelt or [ __ ] Abe Lincoln they were all people that were trying to find their way as well and this is a group effort it's a group effort that's still going on and it's not even remotely done it's not even close yeah so it's okay so instead of seeing the bigger picture we will see the bigger game and that will be that will guide us yes bring it all right back to Super better all right you got to get out of here you got to catch a flight so thank you very much I'll put your video up on Twitter and we'll put your the link to your book which is available right now right uh well it drops next Tuesday but you can buy it now oh you can buy it now and but you can get it next Tuesday all right well thank you so much really really appreciate it all right and uh what's your Twitter address again it's Avant game AV v n t g m e you can just search for my name Jane games it'll come up all right beautiful thank you so much awesome time [Music] [Applause] [Music] that