IDO
Age should be disregarded, but aging should be accepted and worked with

FRED
This is my conversation with world-renowned movement expert and thinker, Ido Portal

I first discovered Ido as a UFC fan, when Conor McGregor called him in for some help for a training camp – and like many others, I was super impressed with his virtuoso movement techniques and abilities.

But over the next few years, I listened to him break down his approach and ideas on various podcasts and documentaries, and it became clear to me that there was much more to Ido than just a series of impressive physical routines and exercises.

Ido talks about how rigid we become when we follow narrow performance goals, the fact that movement and stillness are always present in one another, and how learning to move gets us closer to the real core of who we are.

There was clearly an approach to life there, an ethos, that went beyond the benefits of one technique or another. He may be, in the words of Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, the “world’s foremost expert on human movement”, but his approach also transcends athletics and points to something else – a system of ideas, a way of being perhaps, that I felt could translate to other areas.

My goal in this interview was to better understand the ideas behind what’s known all around the world today as “the Ido Portal Method”, to really uncover the tenets of the Ido Portal philosophy.

In true Ido fashion, his answers were unusual and surprising, bringing in concepts and insights very differently from the way we usually think about these things, opening up new avenues of exploration.

Throughout, he offers a glimpse into what it means to go through life not as THINKERS or even DOERS, but as better MOVERS. In short, it’s about movement as one aspect of the art of becoming our true selves.

I hope you all enjoy it nearly as much as I did – this is Ido Portal.

Chapter 1: Ido’s Journey

FRED
Ido Portal, welcome.

IDO
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

FRED
Yes. So, I first came across your work years ago as a UFC fan, watching the whole Conor McGregor bring you in as the movement master and start including you and your techniques in his fight prep. And then, of course, started digging more and more into movement culture. This eclectic and amazing combination of things that you created around movement practices, workshops, but also a lifestyle and a whole sort of a culture really, that you’ve created as a result of this lengthy personal journey of experimenting with different forms of movement, like from capoeira to gymnastics to dance, martial arts, leading to your own innovations and philosophies that you’ve refined over the years. And it was clear to me from the beginning when I was hearing you speak, that you approached movement, and you spoke about movement in a very unique way, a very all-encompassing and exploratory way. I remember my wife and I listening to a lot of your interviews, and we both got a sense that there was something – It was not just about the physical side, it was not just about the physical movement, but it was almost like a different way of approaching life more generally – There was this philosophy that you have. And this, to me, is what I find so fascinating about your work. And so, first of all, I want to thank you for making some time and for agreeing to talk to me today.

IDO
Thank you so much. It’s my honour and pleasure and great to hear those words and that the message can travel and make such an effect on people’s lives.

FRED
Absolutely. So, I want to start on a bit of a personal note out of a bit of curiosity. I wonder how you found yourself engaged on this very particular journey, which is very kind of unique and very peculiar and detracts from the kind of general grooves that we have in society. So, you clearly deviated at some point from the standard route of, you know, go to school, find a job, do what your boss tells you, organized leisure. There are these kinds of grooves that a lot of us, most of us, kind of follow, at least early on. Your life is about as far from that as I can imagine. I imagine there were very many of these, but was there any key moment or realization growing up where this very peculiar path that you’re walking kind of revealed itself to you when you realized that what you needed and what kind of moved you internally was very different than what, let’s call it mainstream society, was proposing to you.

IDO
Wow, that’s a, it’s a great way to asking, to penetrate through it. And I’ve been asked this question in many ways, but not specifically in this way. And really, the heart of it, maybe, is related to my thinking process, which is very natural and intimate and individual to me. I don’t know any other thinking process, and it may be related to cynicism, may be related to kind of a penetrating mind that is not, I don’t mean in the essence, in the intensity of the thinking, but more in the never resting kind of penetration and what I’ve been offered until a certain point in life. I saw through that. It didn’t make sense they didn’t go the whole way. There were always kinds of pitfalls and issues, whether it was classical education or, you know, even marriage or organized practices, religion, anything that was there didn’t quite satisfy me. And sometimes what was offered was not really what I saw was occurring and happening. And other times, what was offered didn’t even make sense to begin with. So that slowly led me to look into my own thinking process, to look into my own evolution, my own discovery, and my own growth. And one of the first things that became very clear is that this up here is a big threat. And so, I actually grew up in an environment that allows a lot of the use of this. Jewish and Israeli, we have a lot of thinking, a lot of debating, a lot of science, a lot of analytical thought about that. That was the first realization that, okay, this doesn’t go beyond the certain, a certain glass ceiling. And that led me to the body. And the body lies a lot less. And it doesn’t, it’s, I think, it’s very frank, it’s very honest. Sometimes people say the body betrayed me, but the body also tells you the truth in many ways. And that slowly, slowly developed beyond the body into concept of movement, which is really not the body should be separated from the body and movement as a concept is also larger than physical movement. But even physical movement is larger than the bodies often confused. That was the beginning of the process, and that continued to give me discoveries, continue to give me evolution, continue to give me hope, continue to give me the next phase in my life. Every time when I needed that, it continued to give me a way to practice myself not being satisfied with who I am and not being offered also alternatives on how to work on myself in many ways, and that was the process.

Chapter 2: The Concept of Movement

FRED
So, it was really a thread that you see why I feel like when we’re dealing with ego, we’re dealing with a philosopher and not just a mover or a technician of this movement. That movement, people will try to reduce it to these different frames, but it seems like it’s really a thread around understanding the kind of over-analytical, overthinking, the traps of the mind. And then, it’s funny how you phrased it, because a lot of times when people think of transcendence or transcending the traps of the mind, they’ll think of a purely, let’s call it, divine spiritual thing. But entering the body is also transcendent. As you said, it confronts you to certain limitations, it confronts you to certain realities. And then, it’s a whole beginning of a whole other exploration. So you use this term a lot. So movement practice and just the way you said it, now, like it’s not just physical movement, it goes beyond physical movement. Of course, the way the mind moves will affect the way the body moves. The way you use it, is much more general than the typical, let’s call it, the physical activities we’re exposed to growing up, which are usually structured around more precise goals or performance objectives. You know, playing a sport or going to the gym or getting faster or even sports like gymnastics that appear to be more free and more open. They have kind of like set routines and certain moves that are considered proficient and that are considered like very virtuoso and that are kind of recognized in the field. You use the concept of movement in a much more open, multifaceted way. It includes performance, but it also includes play, it includes esthetics, it includes testing boundaries in different ways, playing with stillness, with rhythms. You’ve said that even using the word movement constricts you and that you like to let the practice define itself. You even said once that you see the inevitable end of the word movement for you that if you look at something and define it too much, it vanishes. But if you look away, it can function. So, because we’re kind of like we’re testing the limits of language here and how it constrains us sometimes, but it can also be a useful tool and help us kind of share a broader understanding of something. What would be a helpful, simple frame for us to think about what movement is in your terms in this kind of really general way? Because clearly, it’s not just about performance, it’s not about one particular goal. It seems to be all these different goals colliding and feeding each other all at the same time.

IDO
Yeah, that’s the million-dollar question. And in many ways, it’s impossible to answer because the entry point doesn’t matter. And any entry point should be used into this nebulous term. But then where it’s going to evolve to might not be anything related to your entry point. So, I entered this concept through very simple doors in a relatively younger age. And so, for me, it began with physical movement. It began with the body; it began with seeing the pitfalls of the mind and the intellectual and discursive thinking process and wanting to get deeper. But then it evolved to wow so many different layers and things. So, we should first separate where we start and where it can go, where it can go, we can discuss, but to have an experience of it, that’s something totally different, which will require practice, you’ve said, and that often people think of transcendence and being in a divine way. But actually, you cannot sink your way out of it thinking. So, transcendence is just another concept. But when you are in motion and when you are communicating by meaning in movement with a certain stillness, which is always informing the movement, then you are already unpacking an experience and non-verbal experience. And I say often that that’s what the doctor prescribes since the age of men, but especially these days, nonverbal experiences. The verbal experience is limited, and it’s always also, from its nature, non-coherent. It’s one of the weird phenomenons. The cockiness and the snobbyism of intellectual thinking is that things are going to make sense. But, of course, the nature of things, they’re not going to make sense. They’re non-coherent. Our knowledge is based on extrapolation, on simplifying something ungraspable and making it small. Those words. So, actually, our knowledge can never be very coherent. It can never really grasp the truth. It should be pointing, it should be facilitating, it should be helping us. But then the experience does not try to grasp anything, but it is much more honest with the nature of things as they are. So, movement is that, for me, is to be in the place of things. And that’s also, again, very much related to stillness. It’s almost the same thing. And whether you begin here or you begin there, or whether you don’t begin any place or you try to balance it out from the beginning, etc., But then how do we enter this big concept? Well, with simple practices wherever we are? Joe, Benny, Tommy, Timmy, whatever you think, you think something shiny in the beginning, and you start to work with it, and it can be the shape of your body, it can be a certain beautiful movement, it can be a technical approach, it can be improvised, and you start to unpack. The education will take you further. And thinking about movement in this general way will take you deeper and further, and it will start to pull you into these deep waters, at least in the way that I am approaching it and doing it. But I am fully aware that the entry point can be very simple, and I respect it as well because also most people, they also not only have a simple entry point, they also have a soon-to-be-discovered exit point. And this concept, you know, is entering this washing machine and working with it. And many people will not work with it beyond a certain point. And that’s perfectly fine. And it will give them whatever they’re willing to invest and take; others will take it further. So, for me, that is where it goes. It’s this very open, very nebulous, very undefined experiential embodiment. You can use the word embodiment, although it’s not in the body. I dislike this term; it’s more connected to the essence of movement and also the sensation of our selves. Not long ago, I had a little talk with Professor Huberman from Stanford University. And he said something to me. He said, I wonder, what is your experience of life as you are experiencing? So much you are targeting the experiential part of movement and whether that is actually closer to the nature of the nervous system, closer to the nature of life itself, to inside words, which is more the kind of predominant experience for. Right? So, for me, that is movement.

Chapter 3: Spiritual Growth vs Performance

FRED
Hmm. Interesting. So, there’s always the theme of a very authentic encounter. So, from the individual, right? So, even doing the same movement for me and for you will maybe mean different things or encountering different boundaries. But there’s also obviously the theme of openness and exploration that comes back over and over with you. It seems like almost an ethos for you, a way of being more than just about trying this movement or practicing this or that routine. You once gave the analogy, and I thought about it now when you describe, you know, one individual just starting to explore with their own body, you give the analogy: “We can learn to make better chairs, or we can learn to grow the tree,” right? So, growing the tree obviously is much more open. It corresponds to an inner logic, right, where it’s connected to nature. Whereas making the chair is more like we’re making nature fit into the shape of a functional mental model, which, of course, has some utility but, in a way, also violates a kind of inner nature of what the tree itself wants to become without any mental model at all. And it’s this idea of leaving it wild, letting it go more and more until you say an essence is revealed because it was already there. So, in the West, obviously, we live in a performance culture, right? And we’re used to being told what to do, how to do it, how to excel. That’s what everybody’s kind of very using all of their words around. A lot of times, it’s these performance standards and very early on in school and then in the workplace, but also in athletics. Right. Playing sports, like doing it the right way, in a sense. That’s what we’re all kind of trying to figure out what’s the right way, what’s the right way of building a company, what’s the right way of getting clients, what’s the right way of playing this sport or that sport? In a sense, the opposite of growing the tree. What does the tree want to become? Right? We just mostly want to become better chairs. And even then, sometimes our chairs are pretty bad and cheap. So, I want to ask you, how do we how do you approach this, this growing the tree as a tree? So, letting it loose, opening it up to its inner potential, is that something you can even train for or maybe invite in certain ways? Are there, maybe, a set of tools that you use yourself to keep kind of ready and open to allow things to unfold according to their inner logic? Or am I using too many words, and am I trying already to create the next prison of trying to define it?

IDO
Well, maybe it’s the best use of ambition and to turn ambition on itself, right? And be ambitious ourselves and to well, I think – Maybe the most important thing is a realization that just doesn’t – I think just most thinkers don’t go all the way through, you know, it’s also said in order to go beyond you must go through. And I think like very often in terms of thinking about things, especially now in popular culture, we have the deep thinkers, but not all the way through thinkers. So what we get is, we get an illusion of what I want to do, the goals, doing it right, etc. But none of this has any kind of connection to reality. It doesn’t matter what you want to do. And also, your goals don’t matter at all. What happens when you reach your goals? Well, Fred, I’m sure someone like you already discovered because those who actually reach their goals discover that the rat race of running after these goals is exposed in the moment of reaching them. And you can set other goals, but it will be limited. So, anyone who really goes through and train, you know, seemingly through doing some kind of a doing, which is another subject altogether. But anyone who had success sees the downfall of those goals, you know. Oh, I want to be an amazing musician. So, I end up like Kurt Cobain. We know how that finished. So, what is going to happen when you get the money? What is going to happen when you get the skill? What is going to happen when you get the wife? So, all of this really doesn’t work, which has been talked about and discussed by religions and by practitioners since the age of men. But we still don’t get the message. And then you’ve gone into empowering something other than yourself, a concept bigger than yourself that can provide you back with a certain power of evolution, expanding your boundaries. Because as long as the concept is within yourself, you are the one calling the shots. You’re all the time very limited, and you cannot grow as the tree grows. But when the tree is informed by nature around it, then this naturally unfolds. For me, that’s the concept of being in practice or being a practitioner. And that also relates to movement. But here, let’s say the most, the big focus is on the word “to practice.” To practice is not to do handstands, to practice is not to play the violin, to practice is not to bake bread. All of these are practices, and they can be used as a self-practice. But we are lacking something much deeper, a human practice, a Fred practice, an Ido practice. So, for me, that is what I am talking about. That is what I’m sharing; that is what I’m teaching: how to evolve ourselves, to grow ourselves by empowering the practice beyond ourselves. The first stage is to see our inner capacities, our weaknesses, our issues, the things that we believe we possess, but we don’t really possess, like the ability to do and, you know, really uniqueness and instability, you know. And these are things for us to connect to, to see that maybe they’re not there. Maybe we’ve assumed that they are there, and we were raised to think that they are there. But truly, even successful people like you or me, we know that we were allowed to succeed in certain scenarios. And if the scenarios were a bit different, we would not be allowed to succeed. And I’ve been in a lot of extreme scenarios that this became very clear. And I think of myself as a very hard worker. I think of myself as a doer. Well, I used to think of myself. But in reality, that’s far from the truth. And once you see that, you start to okay, you start to let go, to soften your approach, your hold of performance and goal setting, etc., and you start to look into something else and to soften into it, to be ambition in yourself, to start to receive those powers. And funny enough, what happens is you start to really do in relation to before, you start to really receive, you know, things just come to you. They unfold, and skills and success and people and whatever, and that is very powerful, and that is what I think we should teach our children and what we should give our, you know, our loved ones and ourselves.

FRED
It’s funny because, you know, when you ask these questions, you’re kind of hoping for the little checklist, a little clear checklist, but the thread, the thread that you just pulled was just so clear to me from step-by-step for, first of all, with so many things you said. But when you say about the success, when you achieve the success and then the experience that you have with it. I actually wrote a novel about ten years ago, and it was about this problem. It was the problem of not a failure because failure protects you because when you fail at the goal, you can always tell yourself, Oh, I haven’t found the answer, but that’s because I failed. When I do find the answer, I still have the answers. I’m asking the right question, and I still have the right goal. But what happens when you succeed, and you don’t get what you’re supposed to get? That’s the real existential despair. And it’s something that happened in my life over and over as a result of having the false goals or having just, let’s say, reducing life to maybe certain performance goals or career goals or just having the wrong goals, as you say, the self-contained goals. And for me, where that exploration led me is exactly when you mentioned the tree. When the tree starts to realize it’s part of the forest, let’s say, or part of a community, it’s the interdependence, it’s the contribution is being embedded in something way broader than just these little goals that we tell ourselves or that we received from a teacher that we receive from a school. And that’s the only place that that can go. And then when you say about starting with seeing our weaknesses and our inner capacities, I’ve often had this thought, it’s funny, you hit all those notes in that little, little exploration. It’s very hard to, I feel, to transcend the limitation if you’re not aware of it. So, for that reason, I’ve always felt that humility is the first rung of transcendence.

IDO
Yeah, it’s actually impossible because you believe you possess it. So how are you going to get it if you already think you have it right?

FRED
Exactly. Exactly. And so, I was literally getting chills when I was hearing you go through that exploration. And it’s very, very powerful in a way. The tree does not decide how to become a better tree as it’s becoming a better tree. It’s just fully invested in that inner process, and it’s not defining before being. So, there’s a clear approach there, I find.

IDO
Let me add something just because I believe people are going to, of course, immediately have some inquiries. I’m not suggesting something that turns into this passive thing. There is no, you know, no kind of activity. No, no, we’re not talking about that. We’re not talking about some kind of a new age. For example, I’m the guy who is out there. I’m training physically 8 hours a day. If you include my stillness practice, it’s like, I don’t know, 12 hours a day. I’m reading 3 to 4 books a week. And I have been for many, many years. So, seeming I’m not talking about some kind of a new age-y disconnect from whatever; I’m talking about not falling into the traps of thinking you are in control. So, it means I’m not sitting on the riverbank; I’m jumping in the water, but I’m also not trying to roll my way upstream because there is no chance to roll upstream because the stream is so strong moving down. So, I navigate my little boat downstream so it’s fully active, but it’s also aware of the powers that are surrounding us and our incapacities to really deal with it. So instead of falling into delusions of doing and delusions of achieving, etc., yes, you set goals in the traditional sense, but you are also involved with those goals in a much more deep and complex relationship. Then I’m going to do this. Many times, the goal will be taken away from you, another goal will be presented to you, etc.

Chapter 4: Aging as Becoming

FRED
Yeah, it’s much more of an additive. It’s as you’re adding colors to the palette. You’re not restricting yourself to these limiting goals. I have another frame to propose to you, and I wonder if this is something that you see in movement culture and with the people that you work with. Sometimes, I feel like what you describe is part of a let’s call it a developmental arc for people. So early on. We all have to fit in to some degree in society. We have to be recognized just to survive, to make a living. And so we make these big decisions on, let’s say, what we’re going to do for a living or who we’re going to be in the world. And then inevitably, and sometimes there’s a lot of utility to those decisions, you have to make those decisions. You have to turn yourself into something before you can explore being nothing. And then, what are you truly becoming? So, there’s like two stages of development, and then we inevitably end up paying a price for these decisions of what we’re going to be and how we’re going to be. We develop in Jungian terms, let’s call it a shadow, right? We become a little bit ossified. We develop blind spots. There are parts of our potential that we do not tend to. There are potentialities inside of us that we neglect as a result of the decisions that we’ve made of who we’re going to be and how we’re going to show up in the world. And then I think we maybe reach a point, and this is what I want to kind of investigate with you. Is this something that you’ve experienced personally or with the people that you work with where we start almost like hearing the call of our lost potential, of all the things that we’ve chosen not to be, of all the potential that we left behind, and we’re called to wake up that dormant potential. And we can’t just access that by doing more of the same, by performing harder, by putting your head down and working harder; you’re not going to get there by working harder. We have to get humble. We have to maybe like breathe through the belly a little bit. We have to open ourselves. We have to become a beginner again at certain things. We have to fail a little bit more than our egos are comfortable letting us fail. We have to suck a little bit, and then we could maybe start to enter a different phase of life where we can activate some of that lost potential that was made dormant by our survival decisions early on and maybe become a fuller person, even if that comes at the price of being a less good version of the performance you that you were, you got in the first half of the journey. Is this something that kind of rings a bell, something that you experience, something that the people you work with experience?

IDO
Yeah, Yeah. It’s a common journey and maybe related to be a lesser version of a very strictly defined and limited concept of yourself that was there before, but the much more fuller version of a closer idea of a real deep essential you, you can say. So, we tend to think in very constricted terms, especially earlier in life. That’s who I am. You have those titles: I’m Israeli, I’m a male, I am this age, and I do this, I do that. I’m short, I am tall, I’m, you know, muscular. I am not muscular. All these titles, keep on kind of, you place that in front of you, most people, you see them entering the room, these titles enter before them. And so when you let them go, you are letting go of that limited you. You get a much bigger gift, but that’s first unknown. So you keep on hanging on to that constricted thing. By the way, for me, it was something very much related to skill. And so, we’re talking about when I experienced it, I experienced it in relation to skill. So I have this skill, and then okay, is that skill who I am? I don’t want to lose the skill. I don’t want to lose the skill. But it’s like, okay, what am I losing by holding on to the skill, by maintaining the skill? What else am I losing? I’ll give you an example. In North America, you have those refuse to age older, usually gentlemen. Somehow, women are not so. Which is very interesting is our less common in this phenomenon. Recently but, all kinds of successful people males. I see the anti-aging, the fountain of youth or the old bodybuilders. The prune face with the 16-year-old body. And okay, so you can hold on to your muscle mass, and you do the hormone replacement, then you do this, do that. But what else are you losing? This is not for a moment, conceptualized, for example, to look yourself in the mirror and to see the aging process daily and to connect to it and see how many beautiful blossoms come from that, or to feel the fatigue of all their age and to practice and to work with it and to give birth to incredible things because you had to face it or to see the wrinkles in the mirror instead of performing another immediate Botox or plastic surgery. But by seeing that beauty, how the Japanese say the “sabi” connecting to a deep sense of beauty, but which is completely untapped in the West. Well, it’s tapped a little bit because people will appreciate, you know, or will De Niro, you know, I don’t know, Gary Oldman, but then for themselves, no, no, that’s not, you know, that’s not connected. So maintaining things also too strictly. I’m not talking about the alternative. I’m not offering an alternative of, you know, neglect. But I am talking about connecting to the flow, the flow around us, as you said, the nature around the tree. So that was a big thing for me. I didn’t really give; I didn’t have too many fucks to give about how I look or whether you know this. I have more white hair or less. But I did have a lot of relationship to my skill, which was hard-earned. I didn’t give too many fucks about the money that I made. I could very easily let go. But then I really cared about, you know, the health of my body when it was threatened, in some ways. This is another form of practice. So again, I don’t offer any kind of neglect, but I am offering to connect to this beauty and to empower yourself beyond disease and into death, even, in this beautiful way of exploration and being. For me, the practice should be the best step, the practice should not just offer more and more tools to maintain and to hold. This is great, and it does that. I still have my six-pack, and I still, you know, protect my joints, and my body moves well. But I’m also discovering deeper and beautiful things inside of myself and outside of myself, which I would have never discovered if I was holding on too tightly.

FRED
So, the tree is not trying to look like the young tree that it was at a certain age or the image of what a tree you keep evolving. And I always wonder, like these people that are heavy into the, let’s call it, the denial of aging or the desire to, you know, to stay young and to be how they were when they were young. I always wonder, you also see sometimes people that are, they maintain the discipline, they maintain, let’s say, healthy eating. They maintain a lot of movement. They seem to look like a more graceful version of an older person, let’s say, than some of these, like I’m in denial, and I’m trying to cover up the aging. There’s almost like an acceptance of what is, which is the chronological aging. But in a way, you can still stay in very good shape. But in a way, that kind of accepts the process of aging as opposed to trying to deny it. So that’s what I hear when I’m hearing you. And it’s almost like you’re now back on the path of exploration because now you’re in a place that you haven’t been before.

IDO
Yes, yes, yes. And I say to people, even in relation to age, I said before to people, I offered: “Age should be disregarded, but aging should be accepted and worked with.” So, it’s like to think of yourself in terms of “that’s my age.” That’s another definition that is now, “Now I’m not doing this because I’m older.” You’re again limiting yourself. You’re again setting yourself into arrears. But then, aging is a process that is unfolding in us; by the way, it’s not aging. It’s called the process here is not called living. It is called dying. That’s what we’re busy doing here. We are dying here. So, if this because the process called living is not so honest, and it hints at the way out which doesn’t exist. But the process called dying informs every moment. The end of the journey informs the journey. So, actually, we should call it dying, not living.

FRED
Yeah, yeah. I totally get the point. And I think part of the difficulty here is the reward loops that we’re exposed to in society for being a certain version of ourselves or being, let’s say, like having these restrictive definitions by, say, of what beauty is. So, beauty is this. So now I must be this if I want to be bestowed the feeling of being, let’s say, looking good or being good, this is what it is, and I have to comply. And it’s the same thing in your career as well. You know, when you were talking earlier, I was thinking of these like reward loops that we get. Like with that, you get with the skill. Let’s say a lot of people will be like, wow, wow. And, of course, it’s very difficult to attain that skill. And then, at the same time, you have the reward loops, and then that makes it so much harder to let go of. For me, it was, you know, being a lawyer, always being very precise and very logical and aggressive and being connected to these different outcomes. And the world, like the market, loved the certain version of me that was very good at achieving certain outcomes. And then I got caught up in those reward loops. And then it was like, okay, more and more and more and more and more. Like the business people discovered a tool that they liked, and then they just wanted more and more of the tool. And in a sense, you become instrumentalized by society’s definitions of what it looks up to or certain outcomes that are valued in society. And then it becomes then you become that version, right? Like you become the skillful ego that does the one-handed headstand. And everybody’s like, okay, that’s Ido. Oh my God, when is Ido going to do that move? You know? And then all of a sudden you become you become kind of imprisoned in that one version of yourself that is also an authentic version of yourself and takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears to achieve. But then, there’s all that lost potential. And as you say, it’s like, okay, but what are you not exploring? What are you maybe losing by staying attached to that?

IDO
And, you know, I’ll take your example as being a lawyer and being, for example, on time. And, you know, here is another this complex legal relationship. You, you know, you’re a successful lawyer, and you’re always on time. But what happened if you were not on time? Maybe you would have become a greater lawyer. Maybe it’s certain scenarios –

FRED
I’m very punctual, Ido. I’m very, very punctual. That is, you hit it on the head. It’s like. And when other people are not on time, it drives me crazy.

IDO
I fully understand. So, let me complete the thought. So maybe missing one train or bus would have gotten you to a place which is impossible to get by being on time. But if that becomes an excuse for weakness. That is an error. So, if you can be on time, be on time, work on yourself, practice yourself, cherish it. But also, if it is impossible to be on time and something happens, better to let go to enjoy that and this kind of fine line. I see 99% of the people falling on both sides, but very, very few people do their best not to use anything as an excuse like this New Age-y crowd and just be let it go. You don’t need to do anything. You’re already an immortal soul; you’re floating, you know? But on the other end, about the lack of working on oneself, dealing with the deep demons, hard work. You can be on time, be on time, make it important. But if you’re not allowed to be on time, the whole world does not collapse. And you might even discover that this is the only way to go to the next level to let go of that or to fuck up something, or to have a sky be jump. I call jump in the middle of a podcast. This is where we get to draw.

FRED
You hit something, you know, you hit something with me. I have to admit, you know, my wife is also my dentist, and she also always tells me, like, you’re like my worst patient because you’re used to being in control. You’re used to being in control. It’s like in my profession; I have to control every single micro detail in the chain. It’s a very subtle, you know, achieving these outcomes, very, very subtle. And so, there’s like a side of me that’s developed through that that is very much about the self-control, the discipline, the detail. But I like that sometimes you’re not allowed. So that’s good. It’s good. And then when it’s not there, also just accept it also like flow with it.

IDO
Yeah. Twenty years from now, Fred, you’re not going to care. You’re not going to care. And you know what? You’re not going to care about these little mishaps because they’re not important. But 20 years from now, you are going to care that you cared to be on time, that you worked hard on yourself, not caved to your weaknesses. That’s the balance. That’s the balance. And we can see it with the eagle’s eye, but sometimes, in the day-to-day, we forget.

Chapter 5: The Illusion of Mastery

FRED
So, I think we’ve revolved around this theme, but now I want to kind of tackle it head-on. I’m very interested in how your very open, exploratory approach to movement in all its forms. Clearly, we’re not just talking about the body or doing this or that. I think that you’ve almost used the body as a launching pad to a much broader, philosophical exploration of movement in all of its forms. Like we just explored it now with being on time or being punctual. I’m very interested in how it intersects in your mind with the concept of mastery. So, doing something usually a very limited set of things extremely well, right? In view of a particular goal or purpose. But when I think of your opposite, I think of someone like Jiro. I don’t know if you’ve seen the great sushi master in Japan who he’s got this little restaurant. And after decades of making some of the best nigiri in the world, he still makes it every single day; he’s dedicated to this one task. And he says, I still haven’t made the perfect nigiri. Okay. So, like that really, really narrow, narrow version of mastery as we’ve already explored, it’s great. We sometimes pay a price for it. We start acting in a narrow corridor. We can become over-specialized. True. But it seems to me that it can also be part of a broader process of gaining freedom. Okay, So, so the way I see it, there’s different kinds of freedom; there’s the completely pure freedom of the non-master, like the amateur having fun, like all childlike play, all exploration, and then there’s the freedom of the master. So, the person who has acquired a lot of skill, even in a very narrow area, and they’re like, not the same form of freedom. So you, for example, you’ve gotten to this point physically by mastering a lot of different disciplines. I know that you went really, really deep into capoeira, but you also studied dance; you also studied martial arts. There’s a freedom of motion that you acquired through that, that let’s say, I don’t have with my body, right, my more limited set of physical practices, the freedom of a rock climber on a mountain, right, or the freedom of a Picasso on the canvas. In other words, the structure can also provide us with freedom. It could increase our range of motion and our access to different potential moves on the chessboard. When I listen to your teachings, and I look at your life, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but your philosophy reminds me more of the Chinese concept of Wu Wei. I don’t know if you ever heard of that, but it’s the concept of not trying. So, something like skilled effortlessness, right? So, the effortlessness of the master who seeks self-expression maybe something like what people talk today about a flow state where you want to bring in more novelty and growth to an area where you’re already extremely skilled. How do you see this? This generally, this approach of exploration and novelty, inner playing with mastery like this, extremely precise, but also limited set of tools.

IDO
I think a lot of these concepts are distorted, also, in the West, when they’re translated and transmitted. And we should be very careful, and I’ll give you another thought that maybe that sushi master and me, we’re not so different actually. This is where the extremes connect. Well, you can study everything from anything. One thing, knowledge of one thing leads to knowledge of all things. This is a possibility. It’s installed in nature, in the essence of things. You can see it in the shapes of the galaxies and all the clichés, and you can approach it by making sushi or baking bread, and it becomes a self-practice. There is a possibility to do that. Now, even most religions are based on some kind of concept like that, especially the earlier ones, the more ancient ones, some kind of a door that leads to everything, very simple practice concept, master this, and you get, you know, riches. And then, this possibility is almost always never fulfilled or used, even by those who are offering it. And are depending on it as their livelihood, etc. But when you actually go to the heart of it, you discover that that sushi chef will be very unskillful in another life scenario. And that is very clear, I’m sure, to people, but it will not be so clear to them with their favorite spiritual teacher. Sometimes, I wish to expose some of that, not out of a desire or to harm someone, out of a desire to de-illusion this, to remove this illusion and to take the false hope that people are crashing upon daily.

FRED
I think Ido what you say there, it’s in behavioral psychology. They have the concept of the halo effect. When somebody is extremely good at one thing, will assume that they’re also extremely good at the next thing. And then, and sometimes just a little bit outside the corridor. They’re actually nothing special. You know, we see it in the professional world all the time. But like we see it in the world of politics, this person did this amazing thing, therefore, they’re going to be a great leader. It’s like, no, it doesn’t necessarily cross over that way.

IDO
Yeah. So and, you know, this is very easy to confuse people, but we all tend to think of ourself. We are not the average public. We cannot be confused. But in reality, almost anyone I ever met can be confused easily. And I have done it myself to test and to see often, many times with people. Any effect can be confused if you give them an effect. So this is very easy to do. And by the way, if just go to see some kind of a magic show, David Blaine, and you will see that you don’t see the beginning of it, the middle of it or the end of it. And this is just a little attempt, a little investment in convincing you of something, confusing you for an effect. So for sure, if it’s a documentary about veganism, it’s going to convince me if that is the goal there or, you know, there are these seminars in Israel by Orthodox Jews that, you know, we often challenge ourselves as teenagers go there for this weekend, I want to see you come out and then not go deep.

FRED
Yeah.

IDO
Because that’s all based on that, now, because of this and by the way, in fighting, for example, this still happens to this day, even though there is a laboratorio fighting and the laboratorio fighting is called MMA, but it’s also for the boxing and wrestling and judo and fencing, and it’s also called YouTube clips of gas station fights and street fights. And in all these laboratory, funny enough, all those traditional martial artists don’t do well. And there used to be no, no, no chances where they are showing that there are these truly there, yet there is still a huge market for this, and I can very easily present it. Take that martial artist talking about embodying the warrior and play ping pong with him. Forget about fighting. Play ping pong. And you will see that there is nothing there. Because if there is an inability to deal with the chaos of ping pong, what makes you think that there is an ability to deal with the chaos of a fight? But that this fact can be confused for any effect? So, if he makes me take a step or, if he shows me a certain technique or if he’s so fast that I can’t see him move, I assume this is the fighter. Now, at least in fighting, there is some kind of a down-to-earth Joe Rogan kind of approach of like, “Hey, come on, come on, guys.” But in other fields like spirituality, this is totally nonexistent.

FRED
Mm hmm. Do you feel Ido that – It’s funny because I ask you these questions that, you hit me with a concept that I wasn’t looking at – But it’s something that I’ve thought of very, very, very often. Do you think that sometimes what we will call expertise or what you call just now creating an effect, okay? Creating an effect. Do you feel that a lot of times it’s a function of – Because that’s what I’m hearing, but I want to get it from you – That’s a function of certain people or certain practices being protected by a set of rules. Okay. So, even the example of the magician or the example of The Mentalist or the example, there are always assumptions and rules that create a frame, an implicit frame around the activity. The classic example of this is in jujitsu, sports jujitsu, where Rickson Gracie says, you know, it’s not self-defence anymore when you can have, you’re trying to get somebody on top of you, and you intentionally put yourself in a position where they could give you five elbows to the head, but you have the advantage. It’s like it’s not real, right? It’s just a function of a set of rules. Do you feel that sometimes a lot of these expertise, these forms of expertise or these effects that we create are really just a function of the games, the bounded games that we play and the rules that we decide to put out, and the reality, sometimes you get hit with a little bit of chaos, and all of that just crumbles almost instantly.

IDO
That is part of it. There is other parts where if you take something and you show it, and then you present the idea that let’s take this and perform multiplications of it, it’s going to look the same, only multiplied, but actually, it transforms into something totally different. So, if I make $1, I can make $1,000,000. Actually, it doesn’t work that way. As you try to make more and more money, you’re going to be meeting totally different scenarios and set of rules, right? The same thing, for example, in fighting, I can perform something in slo-mo, and then I convince you if we accelerate, it is going to be still working. But at a certain point, the acceleration is going to transform it into something else. Now, having said that I’m going back to your original question. Sorry for the long duration. And so because of these, the nature or that I just described things, I gravitated away from putting all my eggs in one basket in terms of mastery of what you call. So, instead of yes, there is a possibility, there is an inherent possibility to split the atom and to have this effect. But in reality, this rarely happens. So, instead, I preferred a way that examines through many, many things the same essence instead of one thing that contains the essence. Examining the similarities in many different scenarios where that essence bubbles to the surface. That is my way of practicing. Now, it suits me very well, and it helped me evolve certain attributes inside myself, certain manifestations of myself, let’s say. I think this is like people very simplify, they took this thing that they talked about general-ism and specialism. But it is the generalist is another specialist, of course, it’s often, you know, mentioned, and the specialist must become a generalist in essence. So, really, what is at the heart of all this? The heart of all this is becoming, not trying to do, to master something but becoming an entity that is capable of doing that thing. That is closer for me to the word, the original intention behind the word mastery, than the actual word mastery, which I make fun of. You know, I make fun of this word because there is no mastery. I never mastered anything. And I don’t think highly of people who use the word master. And sometimes people call me “Maestry,” “Maestro.” But this is even better to be called Guru because of the original meaning behind this word. The remover of darkness. The one who sheds the light. But the mastery itself, this is really not honest. I never felt the master of anything. I never completed the journey. I am in an attempt to master myself, which means I am in an attempt of becoming myself.

FRED
Hmm. Okay. And I think some people may disagree with you and actually consider you a master of certain things. For me, the concept of mastery is hand in hand with the concept of specialization. It’s mastery at what, and I think the problem becomes when we want to start generalizing; when we do the master to guru move, I think that’s when we get into all kinds of the halo effect and those issues. You’re assuming that somebody who is perhaps a master at this very limited set of things, maybe you take Jiro and you put him in a traditional French kitchen, and he’s really nothing special, you know. I mean, we see it as lawyers. We see it in the professional world. You see it in even in the world of writing, somebody who is amazing at writing in a particular style, you just move them 30 degrees to the left, and they’re like, they can be lost, they can be like a child. It’s a completely different configuration.

IDO
But the other side would be that maybe that sushi chef who you would move him to a French kitchen and he will take all his meticulous details and his cutting skills that have been perfected. And he will make amazing French treats. So, I don’t want to present only one side of the picture. I’m just trying to balance things out.

Chapter 6: Learning by Peeling Away

FRED
Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s what the sense I’m getting. And I wonder to what degree this is connected to your approach to learning. You’ve talked about learning in a way that’s very different than learning – Learning, in general, is something that I’m very passionate about – You’ve talked about people talk about the difference between learning as the filling of a cup versus the lighting of a fire. But you talk about it in terms of de-concealing something. So stripping away the layers and it was the first time I heard that approach to knowledge because you’re assuming again, like the analogy of the tree, you’re assuming that there is an authentic, real natural process there happening as opposed to the tabula rasa of a very technical form of knowledge. You know, today we’re very in love with technology, we’re very in love with technique, we’re very in love with hacks and tips and that kind of stuff. And it suggests that you just have to learn about it. You have to learn the technique. Now, we have to learn about A.I., we have to learn about generative A.I. We are empty of the knowledge, and then we have to we have to fill the cup, right? That seems to be a kind of a modern approach to learning.

IDO
How sad – How sad is that?

FRED
It’s sad. So I like your words about this. You say that, in truth, secrets are everywhere. So you assume that there’s already something amazing inside of this. There’s already a universe of potentials inside of us, and it’s the process of de-concealing the secrets that is the actual practice. You say people want to spill the beans. Give me the truth. But this is useless because it does not contain the process of getting there, which is the real goal. So this is a very, very unusual, I think, and an original way to kind of think of learning as kind of maybe rediscovering something that is already there or perhaps lighting up a potential that has been muted. So what can you say about this process of getting there or the stripping away or the de-concealing about that whole approach to learning?

IDO
For me, it’s very usual, and, you know, none of these ideas are my original thoughts; it’s things that I think we’re just not exposed maybe to the right sources, and we’ve moved a little bit in another direction. I’m repackaging this stuff. I’m an information broker of sorts, which, yes, I have my thoughts on the matter and play with them. But for me, this is basic, it’s basic. You know what? We, the North Americans, complain about the Chinese “creativity” and the way of conducting things, but far are they really from that, you know, and then take something like the Jewish phenomenon in terms of, you know, thinking, creating, coming up with things. You know, the statistics are pretty substantial in that matter, Nobel Prize winners, the cut of the population. Where does it come from? Is it the genetic thing? I don’t think so. Not for a second. Well, we’re not really, we’re not really that blessed in our genome. But there is something very inherent in the religion and in the way of the people. What is that debate? Debate? They are two big debate cultures, the Jewish one and the Indian one. Both of them excel in terms of creation, thinking, etc. And, of course, there are many others. I’m just giving an example, and please excuse me for, you know, narrowing things down to there. It’s to make a point. So, I think this first: What’s the magic in learning something? I don’t know it; now you’re going to give it to me. Wow. Now I know it. But what’s the magic? The magic is that you are going to do it to someone else later. It’s a complex of superiority. It’s an aggressive action. And you know what? It’s a small, big action. It’s a way of being and doing, which is we should see further than that. But then real learning is about you going through a metamorphosis and coming out different on the other side. Now, what is really happening when we learn something deep? The sense is I always knew that already. That is why many people often don’t give credit because they even forget where they got it. It’s so makes sense that it’s theirs. And that’s the nature of things. So this is really exposing that concealed deep truth inside of us because something inside of us already knows and already made all the calculations. This is maybe close to the concept of Akasha if you know, or the Akashic Records, or at least I think it has been taken to an esoteric level. But there is a much more down-to-earth level of it, which we can start from. So learning through this playfulness, playful becoming is much, much more powerful than learning otherwise will share. Moshé Feldenkrais is known to give the example that a two-year-old child learns more in a year than all the career in high school, B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees put together in one year. If you look at how much a child needs to learn in the first two years of life in terms of all the movement capacities, eating, walking, talking, words, definitions, cross connections, and how is that done, Fred? Through play. There is no coffees late coffees to hold yourself studying for the test. This approach is low-level. High-level learning is Albert Einstein, is the playful man, is the Homo Ludens. So, learning is much more connected with that essence. And that is a much more powerful mode of us as a culture developing ourselves also. And you see it with good thinkers. It was always there from Edison, to, you know, Tesla and, excuse me, the two camps fighting each other, and to, you know, Rowan John and great mathematicians and thinkers and everywhere and even, you know, those practical thinkers that are like Russian inventors and things like that, which are really simple, simple and work.

FRED
Yeah, it seems to me also, you know, like when you say that the playfulness and the two-year-old, it’s also very – And the debating also – Very, very much connected to also to the ethic of like pragmatic learning. So experimentation, tinkering, like you’re saying, this works. Okay, let’s try it out. What if I do this? What if I do that? And then you can slowly, slowly kind of unearth like hidden assumptions or blind spots or things that work only because there’s another variable that was there that we didn’t fully realize was there. So this tinkerer approach of almost like having no sacred cows, right, not accepting the word of the master as the final say, but accepting the word of the master almost as a challenge. Right? It’s like, okay, you’re saying this. What about if this, what about if that, what about if I look at it from that perspective? What about this? What happened in this distant part of the world? Was it not another kind of concealed aspect of the social structure that was creating the conditions that this would be that so almost like this, not accepting things as they are not accepting the sacredness that comes from above, but saying, okay, you know what, this is revealing itself to us as human knowledge. We’re allowed to play with it, we’re allowed to deconstruct it, we’re allowed to challenge it. And if it is truly true, it will withstand the test of all of that pressure.

IDO
Yeah, yeah, that is allowed for a child. The child tries to eat yogurt, and they put the spoon in the forehead, and then the next spoon is on the chin, and then the next spoon is on the side of the cheek, and then finally eating it’s in their mouth. And that’s how the child learns so much more than us. And that is also connected because it’s allowed. But all of a sudden, at a certain point, we don’t allow ourselves, and we don’t allow others, God forbid, we experiment sexually. God forbid we experiment in this way or that way, or we, like you say, we break the balls, you know, like we need to, you know, we need to crash those cars. We need to crash those cars even with the price of injury and loss of life at a certain point because there is no other alternative. So, it’s, again, it’s not to be confused with neglect of life or with harm on purpose, but it is a calculated risk, a calculated thing inside the process of learning. You’re going to cut salads at a certain point in life; you’re going to cut a finger. This happened to all of us. So, does it mean that they stop cutting salads? Because if I look at it, statistically, no one can reach the age of 25 cutting salads without cutting a finger at least once. This is ridiculous. This is ridiculous. And you see it in the way that we deal with wars. You see it in the ways that we deal with all kinds of crises: natural crises, pandemics, etc. We are being led by who? This not going to work well for us. We need to compete. Yeah, we need to rethink this thing, and we to start with education because we’re not going get the solution so quickly. We need to think of ourselves, our loved ones. We to start from that. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to look inside myself and to be that change, as the cliche says. But to start, who is my own education, my own practice? And then from there, I widen to the bigger circle, the circle around me, and from there, onwards and onwards, trying to make my contribution. And I think if we all do that and we communicate well, as we’re doing now, me and you, you’re having this conversation recorded, we make another little contribution and maybe someone, some, one person out there will have a light bulb going on, and that will cascade things onwards. And I think it happens. You know, I don’t I don’t see things in a very pessimistic way. I think that things should reach a certain critical boiling point before they can. The pendulum swings the other way, but I think it can happen at any moment.

Chapter 7: The Practice of Walking

FRED
Definitely. You know, I know I words very, very, very, very well said. You know we’re coming up on time a little bit. I just have a couple of small ones for you.

IDO
Sure.

FRED
One of them is I’m going to use the fact you’re in front of me a little bit selfishly in terms of movement. You know, I grew up playing sports, basketball, boxing, you know, going to the gym. As you’ve noted, it could a very constrained space. And so I’m trying to go from traditional sports to a bit more, a bit more movement, a bit more exploration. One of the activities I love, as boring it sounds, is simply walking. I just find it’s obviously something that everybody does, but there’s so many modalities to it. There’s, you know, walking is a no extra time activity. You could do it while listening to music, listening to a pod. You could visit from one neighbourhood to the next neighbourhood. There’s different ways, different pace. You could push yourself a little bit. It’s such a beautiful, multifaceted practice. I know you’ve talked a lot about, you know, the hanging, the squatting, the squats challenge that you have. You’ve mentioned a couple of things in interviews. I’ve heard about walking, but I’m just curious to know what would be maybe a little bit a very quick advice or pathway that you can offer to the walkers out there, something we can do for our entire lives with, again, all these multifaceted modalities. I’ve heard you say a couple of hints, but I have you here. What can you offer us about a quick pathway or advice or a doorway to the world of walking for the walkers out there?

IDO
Good, good, good. Please feel free. Well, I love walking. Yeah. And it’s one of those deep, original forms out of which we really transcribe all human movements from. So if I can transform my walk, I can transform my tennis game, I can transform my fighting. Fighting is walking, dancing is walking. And so let’s talk a little bit. And this really depends nowadays on education, on getting good stimulus. That’s what I’m offering people when they come to me. I kind of give them a certain structure to work with one way. One of my favorite things to do when I used to spend a lot of time in Hong Kong in the past is if you were living in a crowded place like New York or Hong Kong, is to try to walk through crowds without touching anyone. And this in and of itself, we create a very interesting practice which will soften the body, makes you hyper-aware. It’s very playful, it’s fun, and it takes you from point A to point B while being, you know, undetected, not interrupting anyone and not looking weird, but they’re just enjoying, you know, a walk. And this is something I used to do. I used to strap my backpack closing and go through the crazy crowds of Hong Kong and just move like a ninja in between the people. So that’s one way that like one example, out of hundreds of practices of walking that I do. Another practice is a cyclical attention practice. And that’s another very interesting offering to hold your attention on a body part. For example, your right hand while walking and feel the arc of the right hand as it swings in space and little to your left foot, and then shift the attention again to your head. And after a certain amount of steps, 50 or 100 steps or even just 10 steps, shift the attention somewhere else. For example, what happens every time you shift the attention, you’re actually transforming and changing your walk, and you will see that you cannot walk the same way when your attention is placed in different places. And slowly, this will start to actually evolve your walk in all kinds of ways, but this requires already a certain skillful attention of the body. But it can be started by anyone. So that’s another example. I’ll give just another short example. And another example is the Japanese Namba walk, the samurai walk. So, the samurai used to walk with a different gait than the normal people. And that walk is more of an ipsilateral walk instead of the normal contralateral walk. And many years ago, I used to practice this for long stretches. So, you put your hands in your pockets in order you need like pants with pockets so to not look too weird. And whenever you are stepping forward with your right foot, you kind of press your hand on your thigh, gently inside, the right spot, the right hand inside the right pocket, so it makes the one side move forward and then the other side. Now, it will draw some attention if somebody is perceptive.

FRED
Are you pressing against the leg that’s moving forward?

IDO
Yes.

FRED
You’re pressing slightly against.

IDO
Just gently downwards just to connect that whole side. And what will happen if you do this for a while? First, all of the inner connections, the connectivity of your body, is going to completely shout: “Alarm! Alarm!” to people. You can get like back pains from it. You can get a lot weird stuff, but there is a can be on the other side. These pains are not going to be any injurious pains. They’re going to be a route, a calculating route, a recalculating route, the kind of things they help the body find new connections and new ways, new efficiencies so they can actually alleviate back pain later on. You might experience on the short term. And one little episode that I’ll tell you, when we used to do it many years ago, there was one student of mine here also with us. Her name is Mariana. She’s Mexican, very dear student of ours. And she was she had the baby and our daughter named Gali. Now she’s older, and when she was a baby and, she used to carry her in the carry on, and we used to go on this walk, five-mile walks. Every time she used to do the number walk, she would start to cry, the baby would start to cry. She would go back to a normal walk. She would relax, calm down and fall asleep so she would recognize something about the pattern is changing, and she would react to it. So those are some ideas I can give you more and more. This is endless. And I invite the world to investigate further.

FRED
Love it. Thank you so much, Ido. It’s always so insightful hearing you break down how you see life. Just the way you kind of frame things forces us to re-examine a lot of our static concepts and a lot of our kind of received ways of seeing our bodies and their relationship with our environments, but also our thought patterns and all the different connections within them. So, it was extremely fascinating, very educational to listen to you and opened up the lot, opened up a lot of doors and a lot of ideas to keep kind of getting deeper into these different practices and explore these different practices and get more and more committed to the journey, even if it’s not in relation to these traditional goals that we have. So, I want to thank you. It was a real pleasure and honour.

IDO
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What an absolute pleasure.