Full transcript: Just Move
0:00 I don’t know about you, but something just doesn’t feel quite right. Sometimes I look at the world and wonder, why am I really here? I get anxious. I feel lost and confused. I have more friends than ever, but I don’t really feel connected.
0:50 I have all this information, but I can’t find the truth. The more I seek pleasure, the less I find happiness. I don’t remember the last time I played. I don’t remember the last time I was scared. I don’t remember the last time I felt human. Maybe the answer is right in the mirror. Maybe it is something that I took for granted my whole life. Maybe the answer is inside my own body, the only thing that connects me with who I really am.
1:59 If I can understand that, maybe I can understand myself. So I’m travelling to the oldest place in the world to learn the oldest lesson known to man, from the only person who can teach me.
2:19 So who is Ido Portal, and what does he teach? Well, where do I begin? In 2014 a man walked into my studio carrying all of his possessions on his back. He was a nomad, relentlessly touring the world, city by city, teaching his message one person at a time. What I thought would be just another interview instead changed everything, because I began to think of my body in a completely new way. You see, Ido is a man obsessed with human movement, who has spent his entire life in the pursuit of this knowledge.
3:29 His subject: movement. His mantra: move. Move more, move better, move with more freedom, move with more understanding. Move, move, move. His teachings would attract a new tribe of practitioners with their own unique ideas, values and character. Ido would call this movement culture. Then in 2015 everything would change, when he began training the UFC fighter Conor McGregor. Suddenly both Ido and his culture were elevated to a global stage, where the world would learn of lizard walks and spinal waves from one of the most well-known fighters on the planet.
4:20 This was incredible for me to watch in real time. It was like some kind of a strange YouTube dream. Months later Conor would be crowned a UFC champion, with Ido Portal right by his side. But for me, Ido was always the same person, just a man obsessed with finding the master key of human movement. And yet the more I understood of what Ido taught, the more I became confused. With more answers came more questions, and I soon found myself lost again in this concept that was so simple, but so complex. So when Ido invited me to Israel, I jumped at the chance.
5:15 As a kid from the beaches of California, the Middle East had always fascinated me: a place with so many cultures and countries and languages and traditions, where people created religion in search of salvation, looking for answers outside of their own body. Like many of you, I had watched the news. I had seen the violence. I had heard the politicians speak. But I wanted to see what it was really like for myself. So here I am, in the land of the soul, to learn about my body.
7:51 Try your best to keep going. Keep going, keep going. Don’t stop, never stop, never stop. There is no reason to rest, let’s keep going deeper. You’re frustrated? Keep going. “Oh, I’m shit”? Keep going. “I want to kill myself”? Keep going, keep going, keep going. Keep going to work. Just turn, it gets used to the freshmen. I’m making a crest here, and, you know, it’s like the first graph that you make in primary school. You brought your mother, some obsessive… “Oh well, I love what I do. This is a lot.” A beautiful three ages of creative, like afterwards your dead project in the garbage because you hated it. Some leftover. So here we are, first, we’re just getting used to that. Shitty, I am not yet good at it.
8:34 The shoshin, the beginner’s mind. Then we go into the beginner mode, and I try to sustain the ball on the wall for as long as possible by placing myself in front of these, tightening my feet and moving my body. If I miss it, I miss it. I think it’s a cup, I go back into it. Let’s do it. Are you okay? Okay? You think about it? Maybe this is a little bit playground. That’s what it is. It is playground for a goal, and there is no bigger reason for community, together around play.
9:21 I remember the first thing Ido ever told me: it’s not about what you want to learn, it’s about what the teacher wants to teach you, and people hate hearing it. If you find the real teacher, and if you find a real process, it doesn’t matter what he teaches, what it teaches, what she teaches. It just matters that you found that thing. So if I found a real violin teacher, I’ll study violin. Mastery of everything is the mastery of mastering the matter of yourself.
10:08 Ido was born in Haifa, Israel, a beach town near the border with Lebanon. As a young man he was always obsessed with the physical, and at 15 years old he fell in love with Capoeira, the seductive Afro-Brazilian martial art and dance that introduced him to movement, music and rhythm. For the next 16 years Ido would master the art. But this dance was not enough, and Ido longed for more. So he travelled the world in search of a true movement teacher, learning from anyone in any discipline along the way: athletes, yogis, dancers, gymnasts, circus performers and fighters. He studied nutrition, health, anatomy, physiology, mental training and more.
11:12 Unable to find a movement teacher, he returned with one conclusion. “I didn’t make the next mistake of being an acrobat, being, I don’t know, a dancer. I realised I love movement in all of its shapes: utilitarian movement, artistic movement, breathing, any form of mind-body connection.”
11:37 Boom. One, two, balance, feel it, place. Balance, feel it, down. Don’t drop down, everybody sees that you’re shitty. If you spent days on the rail, you would become the cat. But we stop challenging ourselves like this, and we start to feel shitty, hence we don’t like it. I challenge you to not like it when you’re good.
12:41 Let’s face it, I am not a mover. In middle school I won the science fair. At university I got the engineering degree. Now I’m surrounded by proper athletes, all of them 20 years younger than me. And what’s with the tennis balls and handrails? When are we going to get to the good stuff?
13:14 If it flops and I give you a traumatic experience, you’re not going to go back into it, and then we encapsulate the fear, and inside the capsule it grows until it takes over your life. We’re touching it in the right moment, it’s okay. Here is the control. Terrific. Yeah, you can probably, somehow, if you’re a real idiot, catch your foot inside of it, fall to the other side and crack your head open, and make serious mistakes. But without it, what will happen? Yeah, like, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. Okay, I need this. I step on it. I need here for the world. Whoa, whoa, whoa, where am I? Okay, I’m stepping here. I need oil. I’ve fallen down. Oh, if I come down here, it’s nothing, but it looks much different when you’re up there. Yeah, try again.
14:08 And breathing now, and a small smile as well. Yeah, this smile relaxes you, it’s connected with the mindset. Yeah, just a small stretch of the lips, a fake smile. Faking it until we are making it. Small smile and breathe. Release the leg. Standing on two legs is the hardest thing yet. Now you can use it for balance, the right leg. It’s a huge part of your balance, and now you place it when you’re ready. Breathe. The fear comes in, wants to make contraction. You manage it. Don’t eliminate it. You’ll never eliminate it, but you play with it. You dance with the fear.
14:55 Don’t overuse me. You did it. Now you did it, you took that step. Nice, nice, nice. Stop. Go back one step. You’re good. Okay, we’re gonna send, put the right foot, squat down slowly. Oh. Squat down slowly again, you’re good. Push it back, release it, good. Slowly come down onto the foot. Yeah, your process now. You broke it, but this is your project: mounting, walking alone,
15:42 this mounting, coming down. And if maybe not today, but before you leave, capture it, okay? And then next time you try it, it’s a completely different beast. But you have to step away from it to feel the difference. Now you broke it. You broke the fear. This is what the parkour kids call breaking the jump. It’s actually breaking the fear of the jump, or breaking the fear of the element. All of a sudden it was possible. Did you feel it? Yeah? What was impossible before, what was paralysing, all of a sudden… But I dared. I know. Oh, it’s not so difficult, and it happened. Yeah, but I had to trust that process and make the leap when my brain was saying don’t do it. Yeah, and as a teacher, that’s the interesting part. I can hold your hand to the edge of that cliff,
16:30 but when it’s time to jump to the other side, I cannot occupy your hand. I ask you, you can only do it yourself. I can teach you a jab and a cross and do all the drills, but eventually you’re all alone. The ring is the loneliest place. Now it’s the same here. I can give all the tools and instructions, but you have to deal with that emotional, hormonal dump, depth, focus. That’s fear. So it’s a beautiful moment of self-discovery and evolution. You’ve just made a huge change in your neurological makeup. You’ve rewired yourself around the fear, around the possibilities. You’re not the same person as you were. This is beautiful. We need more of this in our lives.
17:14 It’s uncomfortable, but this creates huge changes. It’s a narrow discomfort, and fear is an arrow. It’s here. This is where the gold is, X marks the spot. It’s here. But we go with the pleasure; that’s not where the arrow points, and that eventually is not pleasurable anymore, and it kind of can destroy our lives. But where fear resides, this is where real growth is, and discomfort and pain is part of it. Thank you. Good, guys.
18:07 My name is Odelia. I practise movement for a living. I came across Ido’s work in Capoeira, and I directly recognised there’s something different about the approach, about the quality of the work. I had to learn from this person, so I just started to train with him.
18:30 Then we shifted into other worlds. I had a car accident around 10 years ago. I was just driving the car on my way to Haifa to meet Ido and the guys, and someone ran into the car behind me, and I nearly died. I broke four vertebrae in the lower back, at one, two and four. I was lying in the hospital bed, and I was thinking, I wonder where will I be in five years from now? Will I be able to walk? Will I be able to do this? And then after a few weeks, these questions… I still remember the days I was lying in, thinking about it, because I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t move. And I realised that doesn’t matter. Try to live every day. Like, I know it’s a bit cheesy, but it is mellow, but it really is pretty good.
19:54 I have a 10-month-old boy, and I think I told you he’s crawling now, and he’s about to walk, and you said to me, you said, “Brian, he’s closer to the source than you are.” Yeah. He’s operating tools that are superior to yours in many ways: tools of intuition, tools of connection, without yet terminology and language, taming the process. Fears are not categorised yet as fears. How does this work, like, as a child? Like, right, like you need to learn how… You learn how to walk. You figured it out. You know who taught you how to walk? Not your parents.
20:39 Nobody teaches his child how to walk. That’s not true, that’s not honest. You learned how to walk. It can only be learned and figured out, and that’s the beauty of the struggle. Yeah. The Sisyphus approach: the struggle, pushing that rock up the mountain, is enough to fill our hearts. That’s the nature of being alive, evolving, increasing awareness, enjoying this reality that nobody fucking knows what it is. So I think it’s a good thing that we have to struggle. Once we eliminate the struggle, great emptiness hits, and it happens on a micro level for us all the time, reaching goals.
21:24 It’s a very emptying moment, which brings us to another very important thing. Success is not a good orientation. It’s a filthy word. It’s a nauseating word. I hear it a lot: “Yes, how did you become successful? How to succeed?” That’s a wrong orientation. The orientation should be to learn something about this body, this mind, the nature of our awareness through those tools. But it does not mean you don’t do them very intensely. I practise like a madman, but with complete detachment from the result. At the end of the day, it’s about being a craftsman and not being the success story. Sit down and do your fucking work. You still do hanging work and everything? I do it in the gym now, and I just think about you all the time. Oh, good, good.
22:31 I’m in there to hang a little bit. And how often do you prescribe the hanging? Daily. Daily, and then for what kind of a time interval? Five, seven minutes a day total time, but they build it up in small sections. Maybe 30 seconds, maybe 20 seconds, maybe a minute. And it’s kind of like a cat stretch for us, but we’re not moving on all fours, so we rarely… Kind of the modern lifestyle, where you compress the body, and we’re rarely extended, and this is kind of a very nice extension. It runs through you. You let gravity do the alignment for you, and what better,
23:12 what better modality to use than gravity? We’re living with gravity, we have a constant relationship with it, although many don’t realise it. And then the other thing, the compression, is the squat, which we’ve talked about before, and just compressing the lower body, and just down here, spending time. And this is what I would recommend for everyone, these two basic things. You have to really think what kind of legs do you want to be. I don’t want tree trunk legs. I want bamboo legs, a wine, wine, wine, wine. Flexible, strong. If the wind comes, it bends, but it doesn’t break, and it can bounce me out. It’s elastic.
23:37 I do this now in a suit when I’m waiting for my breakfast in London, and people walk by and they just don’t understand. I also hang in the subway. I’m the thing, and it freaks the English people out, I’m sure. I do think Germany, and I get some weird looks. I think many people are, they’re much stuck in their own world, in their own lack of movement.
24:21 What we’re trying to bring is movement to the public, and to make people join us, to the rail outside, and the people, like, see what we do, to bring movement into life and everything that we do out there, like, as many people as possible, not to become couch potatoes and, like, eh, I would say, a Homer Simpson.
25:17 Send it up, end it up.
25:52 We start with millions of the final, starting with the wall. She will stand very close to the wall, facing the wall actually, and come, come closer. She will touch the wall with the nose, and then she will touch the wall with the chin, and then with the chest, and with the chest to the ribs, with the ribs into the abdomen, abdomen into the pelvis. By the time she touches the pelvis, the nose is the farthest back. And now she initiates again: nose, chin, chest, ribs, abdomen, pelvis, nose again, and that is very, very slowly, lightly.
26:38 And little by little it will start to form a wave, and she comes close to the wall, but she does not touch it anymore, and she starts to wave her spine. Wave her spine. We’re going to do this five minutes straight, non-stop, everyone across the wall. This is about fine motor control, terminology, movement terminology, the control of the body, the articulation, the separation for the sake of integration later on, for the sake of improvisation later on.
27:33 Why was the yoga teacher, I would say, one way? Is whole world, or something like this? But it was one way, it’s the same way, and you can use it in a multitude of ways, the Baleno. And you don’t have mastery of that way unless you can actually use it in a variety of ways. The archaeological way here: where do we come from? And where you should not… yeah, from there, life started there. So evolutionarily our spine is coming from there. We still have that fluidity. We have it. There’s a reason you have it. That’s it. But people don’t respect the fact that they receive something. Nevertheless, I use it. I have a spine, I use it. Most people don’t respect it. So when do they respect it? They hit the wall. You fuck up your spine by sitting, by not moving, by not relating, by the sign. It’s fucked up. Now you want it back.
28:39 Life does this to you. Life has to do… I have something in my eyes. You’re not going to get it, too late. Yeah, and the biggest depression can be resolved with a near-death experience. So now it killed all the… it’s the project. You know, a small accident, like a car accident, an appreciation of your spine. Odelia broke her back. Like, okay, I will have that back. I thought I didn’t need it. Now I need it.
29:28 Because I’m interested in the ability, in the content inside the container, in the liquid inside the cup, and not in the cup. The tennis ball game is the container. What is the content? Rhythm, agility, footwork, sense of distance, accuracy. That’s my man. It’s not easy to touch that ball, okay? Yeah. Ido was teaching us to deal with unexpected situations. The randomness of the ball and the unpredictability of our feet forced the brain and body to move and react in new ways.
30:18 Ido once told me, “I don’t plan, I react.” He was teaching us to embrace chaos, to be antifragile, to grow stronger with randomness. The problem is, the more you play this game, the less it does the magic, and at the same time, the more you play the game, the better you become at it. These move in inverse correlation. Because the more you get good at it, the more you like to do it, but the less it is for you, because now it becomes a specialised tool. “Wow, I can do this game really well because I trained it.” Good. So it’s a beautiful game. It’s also playful, it’s also enjoyable,
31:04 and it brings us back into a little bit this juvenile approach of learning through play, through craftsmanship. And the child, you don’t go into the competitive mindset right away. You’re more in a playful mind: let’s play. You don’t think, “Oh, he’s better than me,” when you’re 2 years of age. You just play. You’re not orienting yourself toward success, and when you fail, you’re done, you’re over. You’re not orienting yourself toward things that are temporary, but you’re interested towards something bigger: craftsmanship, self-mastery, self-discovery, evolution. My movements are beautiful today, but maybe tomorrow my movements are not beautiful anymore. But I’m not basing myself in views. It’s not about just moving beautiful, looking beautiful there. And I did the eyebrows for the shoot. I don’t base myself in that, because that is going to go. Your teeth are going to get down here.
32:09 The ball sack is decreasing one millimetre every year of a male’s life. Yes, when I walk with it on the floor, you’re dragging it behind. So we are here declining. We are destroyed. The body cracks, we get injured, we age. We age now, not tomorrow. We age, we are born into the grave. So let’s base ourselves on something else: to play.
32:36 Let’s discover. Even if it’s a dead-end street, this game is already a beautiful way to pass an afternoon. And make sure you are feeding yourself, not food, but movement tests that are essential for us. And that’s not respected. The adults, Luca didn’t like… Very displays just being a kid, yeah, it’s being human, more human than all of them, where that play, man. We must play. It’s our way of being, it’s our way of developing, surviving, everything. Animals play, and they precede mankind, so play is bigger than humanity. Not like you become old, so you stop playing. You grow old because you stopped.
33:49 I think that the real disabled people are the people that don’t move. And it’s like, if you see around, usually in big towns and everywhere in the world, Europe, in the space, in Israel, everywhere, you see most of the people don’t move. They walk? We sit in a car, they eat stuff, we’ll start, usually they look at TV. I mean, Debris Steve found it. They don’t move, don’t try to challenge their body, and so they don’t try to challenge their mind either. I mean, it’s all together, you know.
34:36 I was injured in a train accident in France; it was 32 years ago. I met a lot of people at first, people that didn’t do what I can do. I found myself in front of people that have such big problems, you know, and I said, like, okay, I don’t have any problem. Okay, I’m sitting in a wheelchair because I have no legs. The teacher for me, well, can be on the floor. I can try, I can do everything. I’m like a monkey, you know. And then I have the feeling that I have to move for those who can’t. The guy who can’t move, I am moving for him, my arms, because I think it’s like a… oh, great privilege I have. I have to use it.
35:21 And I don’t think everybody has to do poses at a high level. I think everybody has to move. Meaning, you have lifts and you have stairs. The biggest fear you have… I don’t know, you have a car and a bike, take the bike. A electric bike, you know, no, the normal bike, the very tiring one. And you can run, you can jump, you can dance. Just do it.
35:52 Okay, I’m given this body. That’s enough reason for me to respect that tremendously. I’m not going to be degrading this body, I’m not going to destroy it. But because I was given this, it’s enough reason for me to go full-on with it, to learn about it, to operate it and to work with it, and put flow rate, and to understand it.
36:22 But the hard work is to remind yourself that, and to continue to explore. But if I take your leg, you immediately know, “I need my leg.” Like, the body is us. And we kind of know it, but we also fall into, call this, the Cartesian split, living up here, and by the time we are realising it, it’s too late, and we lived in a suboptimal way. And maybe it doesn’t matter, like I said. Maybe ultimately it’s the same end result, aim and resolve. But somehow, again, like I said, it makes sense right now to go full-on with what I received. I have this breath, so I use it to communicate with the most passion the idea to you, not just wasting it away. I have this leg, okay, what can I do with it? I have this spine, what can I do with it? I have this brain, what can I do with it? It’s a good reason to go for it, and it fulfils you back because of that. I think it gives you so much, because of… it feels right, it’s the right thing. Clearly this is it. That’s enough of the reason. Respect it. Why do you think it’s there?
38:46 Who is this gentleman over here who seems to be enjoying himself? That’s inspired by Ben-Gurion, the very legendary prime minister of Israel, who, the story tells, was a student of Moshé Feldenkrais, who created the Feldenkrais method. There is a very famous photo of him practising headstand. I think there was a lot of movement happening here back when I was in each in my dirty stance, not even. Why is movement like that in Israel? Is it the climate? New ideas, new ways of thinking, new people. A major part of it is surviving the horrors of Europe 80 years ago, and
39:33 a major part of it is the climate that is supportive of more movement. Definitely, colder countries, less movement. Constant threats, terror, wars. And then also people’s bodies, which come from different climates and arrived here with a certain gene pool, and they have problems, health issues and joints and pains and aches, and all this is contributing something. So it’s a country of immigrants, and it’s a crucible of cultures.
39:56 On my flight over here, they gave me a pillow and they gave me a blanket, and it was just about the right temperature. I had water, a little bit of food. I was extremely comfortable, and I’m curious what you think about killing people with comfort, and are we a little bit too protected now as humans? The common issue, the common problem: we’ve taken the road of satisfaction, protection, safety and pleasure, comfort, to a ridiculous level. We are oversensitive and over-alarmed by certain things, and that fear creates its own problems and pains and issues around it, sometimes more than the actual condition.
41:03 Fear is an extremely powerful thing in our lives. It’s one of the most primal, basic inputs that we use. But it took over our lives because we come from an environment with many dangers and risks, and it was a very potent protective tool. But now it became a hindrance. And I think happiness is not a good orientation, but fearlessness is a much more powerful thing. You will never be fearless, but the orientation might be good for us nowadays: less fear, and more awareness of how do I perceive things. Everything, we are creating this environment by how we see it and the narrative that we make of it. But the narrative is the story, the story that you tell yourself.
42:05 Brian… Brian is the story. If you take it down into the most tiny bits, Brian doesn’t exist. It’s a collection of stories. Hence, what really happened to you is not as powerful as what you tell yourself happened to you. Old-school psychotherapy, Freudian, was dealing a lot with that: what really happened there, let’s dig into it. It’s not as powerful as the stories that you tell yourself.
42:26 We are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves. What story had I been telling myself? For 40 years I’ve pursued money and success, my twisted version of the American dream. It brought me emptiness. So I created a new story: London Real. It was scary, but worth it.
43:10 Now I am the student, always learning, always beginning. I was starting to see Ido as much more than a teacher of movement. Instead, he was using his tools to connect us to what we really are: our pure essence, our original nature, helping us to understand ourselves in order to understand everything else. To abandon what we’re good at and embrace what we suck at. Shoshin, what the Japanese call the beginner’s mind.
43:59 Doing this, it was considered the weirdo. Now it’s a whole culture doing it, and I’m so happy to hear people come in, languages from all over the world, like, why? Because now it’s a fashionable way of training, of being, of moving. And you’ve done the same with London Real. All of a sudden it’s like, here, to record some conversations and publish them by yourself, it’s cool. It’s opportunity. So we took the system to break the system, and abusing what’s there, what they really want, which was told to them that they shouldn’t be doing, the things which is play and real conversation. I’m not a serious trainer, you’re not a serious journalist. Journalists would make fun of you, and trainers and PhD physiology experts make fun of him. But it’s too powerful, you can’t ignore it anymore, and it goes… Yeah, they have to respect it eventually.
45:20 Then you would need to catch the stick as close as possible to the floor, using your legs to launch, to move, to play. When I go to minute one, opportunities the other, by that time you should warm up your legs really. I can… you walk in and I can use robot games of all kinds, and I warm up my legs in a real way. It’s not like you’re preparing this way and then you go to a judo match and you’re in a perfect…
46:09 Life looks weird. Cause the tennis game on YouTube, what do you see? So this is a much more real way to prepare the legs, because if you do prepare the legs in this perfect position, you can’t move for shit. These are the worst neighbours on the planet, fitness people. They are the people who invest the most amount of time into their physical practice and move the poorest. Of course the couch potatoes are worse, but for the amount of time invested in movement, they’re the worst.
47:03 Very important nowadays is to empty the arms. The arms are too full, your arms are locked. People are moving around the same thing with their calcified arms, and then they have to try to get this, and we need to empty the arms with a little bit of movement, just to remind yourself.
47:25 Notice how I bend my knees to catch the motion a bit, and I feel a rush of blood in my head. Rush of blood, rush of blood, rush of blood. When I go be real with Conor, he says, “I feel like an orangutan.” If he finishes, “I’m ready, I feel like an orangutan,” and that, all this originated from, yeah, the Vinnie Mac. My moonwalk was more cocky, but she added this a farm. So, getting a little bit longer. I hope you feel this now, you’re already too long. Where are you? As well, generally, remember what I said: these are transmission cords. But what am I doing now? I’m trying to make this the engine, not the transmission. Strong arms mean shit, because the power is not here. Show you the real power now. Yes, capture it. Observe, this is the real power. How you unclog the hole.
48:49 This is nothing. This is not here. It’s not here, it’s here. Turn around. You could… this is the sign of power. Look at the Lava Kusa, the thickness of the low back. It’s a lot more in the extremity, at the end of the chain, and the end of the chain… It’s here. That’s why we’re obsessive. Yeah, then this is that engine that makes the power, but we became focused on…
49:48 I’ve always been fascinated by movement, and bringing Ido in this week was phenomenal. It re-centred the mind, it changed training. It was movement-based, there was no contact, to be able to go into certain positions and balance on one hand, or in unusual positions. To be able to do that, you don’t just have control over your body, you have control over your mind. So it’s always been something that’s fascinated me.
50:19 What do most people do when they are the very best in the world at something? They keep doing it. And why wouldn’t they? It brings fame, money and success. But what if success is the wrong orientation? What if being fearless is a better approach? Well, it seems with this tournament, McGregor is about to find out. Considered the very best mixed martial artist in the world, he’s decided to enter a completely new arena: boxing. No kicks, no elbows, no chokes. His 20 years of martial arts training cannot be used in a sport where he has zero professional experience. This takes the beginner’s mind to the next level. But there’s more. His opponent is a man considered to be one of the greatest boxers of all time: Floyd Mayweather.
51:25 There’s a flawless 49 and 0 record. So how can Conor win? You must use something unorthodox. Use something unexpected. Use something counterintuitive. Use Ido Portal. There are more rules, which means if you could introduce some new movement principles that Floyd’s never seen, it could really be that master key, or mega principle, you’re talking about. We meet through different animals, kind of like an octopus and a lion. There are a few ways to approach it for Conor, and I’m not sure where it’s going to go. One of the ways is to box with the boxer, and that, of course, is a very difficult thing to do. Another thing is to not box with a boxer, to find loopholes inside possibilities, scenarios, which are still allowed within the boxing rules, and above that as well, just confidence and fighting spirit and heart is a huge factor here as well.
52:39 Of course, and both for Vesta. You might say it’s impossible. But that’s the point: go to where the fear is. And all the world will be watching, because deep down inside, every single one of us knows this is what life is truly about. It’s the essence of being human. Conor has already won.
53:04 What’s the biggest thing you learned about yourself with all of that focus and criticism? And you’re, you know, you’re on a different level now, working with people like Conor. Yeah. I learned that I’m not about… I’m not about being loved by everyone, which once I believed. Like, I’m a good force, I want to do good, I’m a hard worker. I built myself really with those skills, that I worked so hard. Like, why shouldn’t it be accepted well by everyone? And I learned that no, that’s not what I’m about. The bigger the star that you work with, the bigger the tale that is told about you, right? Yeah. Because you said to me, if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen, right? I said it to myself at a certain point, because I realised, like, oh shit, what did I get into? And then I reminded myself, like, okay,
54:15 do you want to do it or don’t you want to? Can you stand the heat or not? Take the criticism, work with hatred, with the haters, you know, like, that’s the next level. Okay, what does it do to the ego? How you operate with that. You should really not take criticism from the general public, from comments or talkback, from critics that never met you, don’t know nothing about it. They’re not providing criticism from an expert point of view. Their egos are screaming, their own jealousy, their own insecurities, or they’re just lack of understanding in the subject matter.
54:58 But if you never met me, you never took a class with me, how do you want to criticise what I’m doing? What do you want to talk about? Movement? It took me 20-plus years to begin to understand this. I don’t understand. So what do you understand? You didn’t spend a moment trying to understand. You watched some clips, you watched an interview. What did you do? You saw a handstand or a crawl, and then a moment after, playing with the ball, and then a dance routine, and then a fight exercise. And again, what did you know about it? So nothing about you… So all the team: don’t take the criticism, but don’t avoid criticism altogether. Have the people in your life providing you that feedback for growth or self-development.
55:48 You are doing it out of some kind of love, then? What did you conclude? I’m doing it from my own self-discovery, being interested, it’s discovering, it’s growing, and it’s passing time in that way, because all we can do is just pass time. That’s all we’re doing, right? Like, people ask me, why are you doing it? To pass time. So it’s a Buddhist, right? One said it for me, a martial arts teacher.
56:46 I’m always trying to figure out what it is that you do, what it is you’re all about. And the best example was yesterday. I went through Israeli immigration, and they’re like, “Why are you here?” “I’m here to see Ido Portal, one of your national treasures.” And, you know, they said, “What is he?” I said, “He’s a mover. He’s not a specialist, not an expert.” If I called him a guru, he would be looking for me. And yet when I pulled my phone out and showed them literally 15 seconds of you on YouTube moving, they got it. Not only did they get it, they were excited and they wanted to know more about it, and they were pulling the other immigration officers in to look at your video.
57:33 Why does this happen? It’s like all paradigm shifts, in a way, I think. It’s so simple. You know, there is the side of people who said, like, it was always there. Of course it was always there, we’re living in a body. Of course people were always moving, movement was always there. I don’t have any new insights. There is nothing new under the sun. It’s just I spin the perspective. I turn them to look at it from a different perspective, and then it just happened. Bruce Lee said it very well, and he repackaged the philosophy that was known from before: absorb what is useful, disregard what is useless, and add what is uniquely yours.
57:57 And tell me about the subsequent development of movement culture, as we know it, Ido Portal Movement Culture. Me? Yeah, it’s just you… You can’t do it alone. You have to move inside a culture. You need a culture to move in, which you’re starting to… you will start to feel it, if you don’t feel it already, very soon, just because you are already now practising in a more open way. But you kind of have to find locations and friends to play with, and teachers. But then imagine you have a culture to move in. Imagine you have a community, and you meet regularly, and it supports that, and you do it together.
59:02 We are social beings, and movement cannot be separated from the structure that occupies it and the cultural context around it. So for me that was obvious. We need a tribe.
1:00:24 All the pressures, all the cameras, all different, all the egos, all the reputation. Oh, oh, oh, what’s next? Oh, and pressurised. “I have never done this in front of blah blah blah.” Oh, the sun. Oh, the floor, the cracks in the floor, all the repetition. “Oh, I forgot what I want to do.” Excellent, thank you. She just started, she can do it. You ask yourself, can you do it, or what are you thinking? What are you doing? You can do a perfect tense that we plan to walk with, and you can do it. It’s easier. But it shows you how addicted you are to the formal practice.
1:01:32 Look at my best trick. I’m going to do it now. This is my best trick. Are you ready with the camera? You ready? My best trick, and now I’m… When do you do that? When now there is a crowd? Wait, they’re not looking. It never comes. There is not this moment. It’s a delusion. You never have your best performance in the right moment. So guess what? Start to perform every moment of your life. This is it. That’s the performance, now, now. We’re moving, but what happens? This doesn’t seem like the real thing. When is it? Is it tomorrow? What are you waiting for? Are you… because you give 70%, hence I think for myself, so, ah, it’s not his true capacity, his potential is unfulfilled.
1:02:19 Tomorrow it will happen. No, the next, next year, next year, and we’ll be really good. These are the people who never reach the mark. They’re never good because they didn’t take the opportunity to be good inside the toilet, taking a crap, in those moments. Every moment, now, perform. Do it with the maximal seriousness. I drop a ball and I try to catch it, I’m there. I’m not disrespecting the situation, because that’s it. That’s the performance. You don’t have to wait until you’re 70, 80, 90 to realise, “Oh shit, I missed the mark. It was all performative moments, and it was a life not well lived. I didn’t go, I didn’t go with it, I didn’t use what I could. Anyways, now it doesn’t matter.”
1:03:06 You know, this moment, there, now, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to say this. I don’t want to fall into this trap. So I give you a stage, whether the camera is here, Brian is here. That kodesh, how do you say? The fear of God in you. Yeah. We say in Hebrew, do it with the fear of God. So, like, the stick falls, not because the camera is there, because every damn day, the same fucking thing. I don’t want to drop the fucking stick. You want to touch my shoulder, I want to say, sure, shoulder. I don’t want you to touch my shoulder. So every Friday I stop it. I go with it. I go with the emotional content, I go with the breath, I go with the vocalisation. You hear it.
1:03:52 There is no camera, but I’m there with full intent. And then someone else is playing. Now, you must take the playful approach. For a shitty approach, it’s a shitty playful approach. You can have a serious playful approach, you can have a shitty playful approach. But being playful doesn’t mean you don’t do it full-on serious till you bleed.
1:05:01 I’ve been thinking, you know, the last few days here, and, you know, I travelled all the way to Israel to learn about movement and learn about my body, but it feels like I’ve gotten a lesson in people. I was spending time with you and your community, and they’ve really welcomed me in like I was family, and it’s been really blatantly obvious to me. I walked into your movement centre, and the energy in there, there’s something about it. And there was a guy, 2 metres tall, 2-metre-wide wingspan, one of the most incredible athletes I’ve ever seen before, next to a 50-year-old woman with no legs, next to a 9-year-old girl, next to a veteran who probably got shrapnel scars from, you know, jumping on a terrorist attacker. But yet there’s this kind of energy and love in there that it’s hard to explain. I was wondering if you could explain to me, is this the movement culture you’re talking about?
1:05:45 And I think it’s related to many different layers, and part of it is the movement practice, part of it is the teachers who are teaching in that centre, and the energy that they attract, this community. This is something that will really last through our lives, because the rest of it is more temporary. You know, our bodies get destroyed. We are social creatures. It’s not happening alone on some mountain. You’re not going to become the person that you want to be. You’re not going to make it, you’re not going to develop the skill set, you’re not going to develop yourself. You need people.
1:06:50 Ido, the genius, is a crazy person, the artist, is a thinker, the philosopher, is a good friend, is the best teacher I know, is a practitioner with no talent in many things, is a hard worker, and I think this combination is something very rare and special. I will still, and like, I never met someone like you. Like, you’re just a weird, like, entity who’s just a special combination of things.
1:07:39 For a nomad, Ido has built a very big family, full of people who have connected with themselves and with each other. I wonder how the world would look if everyone did this. Sounds like a place I want to be.
1:08:19 I’ve lived in London for over 17 years, but something feels different on my return. I see things in a new way. I see challenges. I see purpose. I see humanity. I see myself. You can call me crazy, but I know how we can save the world. We start by saving our own bodies. Movement makes us human. It connects us to our higher self. Movement is life. You might say this is not for me, but you have a body, right? You know what to do.
