We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. In any particular sport, with well-defined rules, mastery is achieved through specialization. Taking a few skills and perfecting them. So naturally, most experts and teachers of movement are specialists.

Of skill sets like gymnastics, hand balancing, Olympic lifting, capoeira, jiu-jitsu, wrestling, judo, and other martial arts. So it's rare to come across a generalist. Someone who takes a holistic approach to movement. My guest today is Ido Portal. He is a guru of movement. A teacher with a large and quickly growing following.

As he says, "Movement is big. Bigger than any specific discipline." We're all human first, movers second, and only then specialists. I actually just finished reading a biography of Albert Einstein by Walter Isaacson. And the two of you have something in common. A desire to arrive at a unified theory.

In his case, it was a unified theory of physics. You know, like forces of nature. In your case, it's a unified theory of movement. Can you tell me the story of your journey to becoming a generalist? First, I'll just say that I'm no guru, you know. It's something that people use, but I have a really hard time with the word "master" or "guru." And I didn't arrive at the gospel truth, or I'm not sitting on any mountains.

I'm on my way. So people who join me as students are basically following, you know, in the same journey. Maybe in certain circumstances I'm a bit further ahead, or sometimes I'm a bit behind. But it's definitely a walk along and not walk behind kind of thing. Yeah, my journey.

I started as a mover first, and then I became a specialist. And then I went back to movement, basically. So it all started at a young age, and some Chinese martial arts developed into some physical sports and games in school, primary school and high school. And then I met Capoeira, and I was completely amazed, basically, by this art form.

And I pursued that for a good 15 years. In the middle, somewhere, military service and other physical pursuit. And throughout changing and developing and moving between disciplines and exploring, I just kind of got the same realization again and again that there is some thread through all these disciplines, and there is something that is attracting me back.

And basically it was movement, I realized. And the next thing was, okay, I want to learn movement, I want to get better as a mover in a general way. I seeked out movement teachers and went around the world and looked around and read a lot of books. And there were some people who mentioned the word movement.

And I went to them and offered myself as a student, and they kept on teaching me disciplines and other isolated approach and other speciality. And I was very disappointed. So eventually I decided, okay, I'm going to become that person. I'm going to become the movement teacher. And the next realization after years and years of trying was it's impossible.

And with that I stayed basically because I realized if that's impossible, it's a good goal to have in life. Something that will keep on moving myself and my students and anybody involved forward. That's where I'm at right now. I'm teaching and learning, moving around and trying to gain some more knowledge about this impossible task.

Yes, so you're still yourself or forever a student? I prefer to be a student any day of the week than a teacher. But being a teacher is part of human culture. We are all teachers. We teach all the time. Whether you want it or not, somebody asks you for direction in the street, you become the teacher.

You have a child, he looks at you, you're a teacher. Practicing, teaching and practicing to the student, the discipleship, both of them are extremely important for your development as a mover. What is the price of specialization? What do we lose when we specialize? We lose humanity first and foremost.

As humans we evolved to become humans as generalists. We are the most generalist of all animals. We're able to imitate the ape and imitate the tiger. We can hold our breath underwater and we can do everything just a tiny bit. We can't really run very fast. We can't really fight very well.

We can't climb as good as other animals. But we can do the most complex and generalized tasks out of all animals. No animal even comes close. Speciality, the price is humanity. The price is your happiness. The price is your fulfillment as a human being. It's deep, it's philosophical, but that's who we are.

Do you think there is some beauty in fulfillment, some value in specialization, in becoming the best at a very specific movement, at a particular sport? Giving your body to, dedicating it to that sport? That's an interesting thing because as a human race, we benefited tremendously from the work of specialists.

But those specialists suffered. That's a very, very important point. It's like without specialists we would never be here. We would never be Skyping right now on these computers and wearing these t-shirts and all kinds of stuff. But those specialists, those human beings suffered the result of their highly specialized nature.

And we become more and more specialized. There is a move towards being generalist again in the last few years, maybe the last decade. There is a bit more talk about that. But definitely we are also still pursuing highly specialized fields. I make a joke in my workshop and I say, nowadays you go to a, if you break your hand, you go to a hand specialist, an orthopedic surgeon.

In five or ten years, you'll go to a left hand specialist. And the most evident problem is also our leaders who are ex-specialists. But now they're required to be generalist leaders of a lot of stuff. And they're shitty leaders. We keep on having the same problems again and again because they are ex-specialists.

Whether it's a lawyer or a military person or an economist. These are not specialties that allow you the full grasp of running a country. Yeah, I think you put it beautifully that in my specialization, my lead to innovation, but you lose the humanity. What do you find is the most underdeveloped range of motion in athletes?

What movement is most restricted in high level athletes in your experience? Is there one that stands out? Shoulders? Any particular other joints? Well, it all depends on their speciality, of course, and habits. The shoulder, the glenohumeral joint, is the most hypermobile joint in the body. Even when it's restricted, it still offers tremendous range of motion compared to other areas.

But when it's restricted, even if it's just a little bit, it can cause huge problems. Because we are dependent on that range of motion and mobility around the glenohumeral joint. And the simple reason is because with the hands, humans manipulate. That's what we're meant to do with our hands.

And we need that complexity around the scapula. It's been a few years since I've said it first, that the scapula craves complexity. But this complexity around the scapula and range of motion is so important across the board. I've read of your concept of isolate, integrate and improvise. Can you describe the role of improvisation in movement?

Any profession, any speciality should arrive at improvisation in the top tier, the top level. Whether you play the violin or you box, you're going to reach improvisation. Improvisation above all is the human condition. It's the human ability. The highest form of living is improvisation. You improvise. Basically, life is improvisation.

You're born, you die and in between you improvise. A shitload of improvisation. Movement is no different. The thing is people started to isolate concept and some people went to the next level and integrated them. They present themselves as improvisation, but actually they're cheating people. It's just a bit more integration yet.

It's just another integration. Improvisation, open improvisation, real improvisation as we call it, that's very rare. And that's the most enjoyable state. It's also called the zone. It's also called the tunnel. You just experience this beautiful thing to be empty, just to let things happen through you. As Bruce Lee said, "I don't hit, it hits." It just happens.

And that is improv. That's what you need to do with movement if you aspire for the highest things. I like how a guy on Reddit described you as "Ido Porto may not be the nicest guy in the world, but he's a great coach." So that nicest guy part, I come from the wrestling world where the goal of a good coach and a good program is to basically make you quit, to break you.

There's zero patience for people who don't want to put in the work, to work hard. Do you find that tough love is the best approach to coaching people, whatever their level of ability? No, not necessarily. I don't like the term tough love because it kind of assumes that its importance is itself.

It's not enough for me. It's like, that's the best way. Why? That's the best way. But on the other hand, I don't think people are made of sugar. I really believe that we've lost a bit of sight of how resilient we are. And another is people don't like the truth.

It's dishonesty is above all. So when people describe me as tough love, it's not because I believe in tough love. 100% of the people who have had issues with me on a personal level or through coaching are people who couldn't accept criticism, what I offered, took it personally, who weren't able to deal with it, etc.

I can't even, you know, in my head find one example of a person I've been working with who received the criticism, worked with it and still complained. But it's always these complainers and who fucking cares? Complain first and do nothing, yes. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's like when you go mainstream, as we've went to a certain level, you deal with it because I'm not operating my elite unit, my special op unit anymore.

Now it's an army and I need to accept the fact that I'm going to meet a lot of slackers, a lot of fucking poindexters and all kinds of, you know, they don't want to work, they want to talk about it, they want to do this, they want to do that.

They don't want to hear the truth, they don't want to accept criticism or hear how much they suck. And I just don't do that. So, you know, I'll have to accept the fact that from now and again, you know, I'll have this issue and I'm sure it will continue.

You've traveled all over the world. Do you think there's a difference in this aspect, in attitudes in the United States, in Israel and other countries? Of course, big time. Yeah, there are many countries where I don't have this issue or very rarely. We have a word in Hebrew, it actually comes from German, I think, or Yiddish.

It says "tachles". It's like "down to it", you know, the heart of it. "Tachles" people are people who are like, "No bullshit, you know, directly, tell me as it is." And this "tachles", it exists in certain cultures. In other cultures, it's a lot of chit-chat and walk around and, you know, I didn't know how to chit-chat.

A few days ago, one of my students told me, you know, "I can't chit-chat." It's exactly how I felt, you know. When I first came out of Israel, started to teach around, it was Russia, thank God, and that was so similar to where I come from in many ways, so no problem.

But then when I went to the U.S. or Canada, I had a lot of issues with the chit-chat, with politically correct and walking around the bush and don't give it to me too harshly, you know, cover it with a lot of sponges around it, soften the heat, and yeah, it's definitely different between various countries and I need--nowadays, I need filters, which are my top students who are helping me teach, and some of them are great filters, and in certain countries, they'll do much better than me.

What does perfect practice look like for you? So do you believe in the value--maybe this applies more to specialized sports, but I come from Russia, actually, and from the wrestling world where repetition, putting in 10, 50,000, 100,000 repetitions on a specific movement is how you achieve success. Do you believe in the value of that repetition, even for a generalist framework?

Repetition is the mother of skill. There have been those that corrected and said, "Perfect repetition is the mother of skill." Well, those who usually say it are those who don't achieve heights, usually. So I'll be very frank. Again, I'll be very extremely honest. A lot of people talk about perfect, perfect, perfect, but life is not perfect itself.

Our surroundings are not perfect. And when I practice and when I move, it's never on the perfect conditions. It's never with the right optimal blood sugar level and under the specific height of I don't know what and riding the wave of super compensation in the perfect way. And usually, when people try to adhere to that concept in a perfect way, they end up falling off the wagon.

On the other side, don't be stupid. Don't just drill yourself into the wall and lose sight of everything. It's not black and white. The truth is somewhere in between, and it varies between people. For me, after 17 years teaching, 18 years now teaching, moving, seeing people, the hardest workers are usually the elite performers.

Of course, some of them are carrying a certain talent or this or that, but it's always with very dedicated practice. They have built up that work capacity through that dedicated practice, and they can then move that ability to other disciplines. True. In the grappling world, I'm not sure how much you're aware of it, but Marcel Garcia is one of the greats, and he believes boldly against the status quo, I think, that you should only train his sport, Jiu-Jitsu, and not do anything else.

To achieve success, train only that. But the majority of other athletes in the sport believe that you should do strength and conditioning programs around that, so they at least move slightly towards the more generalist framework. Do you think there's value for the generalist mindset for an elite athlete, or should they just focus on their sport?

To some level, to some level. Speciality can reach a plateau because of lack of general base of the pyramid in some cases, but it's not a very high level of generalism. Nowadays, you're practicing against specialists, and they devote more and more time to this speciality when you're doing other stuff.

So it's a complex riddle, and to each case, his own. I'll tell you something else. When you reach the top of your field, like Marcelo Garcia did in BJJ, you stop being inspired by your own scene. You can't gain inspiration, knowledge, and motivation from your own scene, because you are the leader.

You're on top of the mountain. You have nowhere else to climb. So what do you do? You look to other scenes. And that's where it's really, really valuable to become a bit more generalized. Yes. You mentioned in an interview related to that a very interesting point, that many people in the U.S.

in particular focus on learning more than doing. So focus too much on acquiring knowledge versus using that knowledge. Do you struggle with this yourself? How do you approach learning new things versus putting more time into old things that you've already mastered? It's a good question. It's not only a U.S.

thing or a North American thing. It's generally all across the globe, although there are more practical people and less practical people, and each country has its own orientation, habits, characteristics, but it's a good question. It's kind of being super intelligent and oriented towards the information, but then have this dumbed-down practical mind.

It's like, "Okay, now I need to work," and having a balance across that. And that probably means that a certain IQ, for example, will start to work against you in certain fields and vice versa. So when you become too much, as the Chinese say, "The man who lives inside his head," you start to have this issue.

You have a thirst for information, great thirst, but information is toxic. It's exactly like water. Water is toxic as well. Almost all compounds are toxic. And then we drink, we drink, we drink, we kill ourselves. We kill the process. The knowledge, it turns against us, and that's a serious problem, and that's the problem of the age of misinformation that we live in.

It's not only that the knowledge is toxic even when it's good knowledge. Now we also have bad knowledge, mostly bad knowledge, mostly shitty advice. The combination is lethal, and just people become paralyzed or just move from link to link to link with glazy eyes and just never actually do anything.

Yes. I know you advocate building a huge work capacity. So how many hours a day do you think--this is also a debate for specialists-- how many hours a day do you think is the most a person can train movement intelligently before it becomes not sustainable, before their mind becomes uninspired, maybe as you said?

24 hours. 24 hours. 24 hours a day. There is a choreographer in Israel, a very known choreographer called Dohad Naharim. He says when you wake up in the morning in bed between the sheets, you can practice movement, and he's not talking about with your partner. So even there you can practice breathing, moving.

It's all the time around you, but serious practice, practice oriented repetition and success and building skill and moving from isolation to integration to improvisation. In most disciplines, it's around six to eight hours a day. Some people go more and reach even the 10-hour mark, and I've done that for periods of time in the military.

You go even further than that. Other disciplines require less, and it's also a highly individual thing. So let's say even within the sports of gymnastics, you have a woman like Nastia who trains eight hours a day, and next to her in the same team, also winning gold medals, at the same level more or less, you have Shawn Johnson training three hours a day, and she reached the top of her field, gold medal in the Olympics.

So how highly individual? This is very rare to see, this three-hour gold medal thing, but definitely it exists. The difference there might be mental. So the question I have is out of the various elements like mind, breathing, developing muscular strength or joints, which is the biggest challenge to master as a student of movement?

Highly individual. It depends on the person, depends on his orientation. Some people never require any form of mental training, for example, or psychological training, especially in fields like sports and team sports. So that aspect is covered. They're winners, they're oriented, they're focused, you know, and other people require help in that regard.

Some people have great difficulty developing mobility and just the nervous system is panicked, it holds on, it protects them too much. Other people are hypermobile and have a difficulty creating tonus and strength, and that is a great challenge for them. And other people are, you know, great complex learners.

They can coordinate complex actions and learn movement very quickly, while others are highly limited. So it's very individual. So that process of learning, that journey is individual to everyone. So how does one take that journey? Just listen to your own body? No, no, you can listen to your body until tomorrow.

But, yeah, you're not hearing anything, you know. You're not hearing anything. You need to learn, you need to create a relationship with your body, and you need the help of teachers. There is only--you know, a lot of people say, "I'll do it myself." Then you deny collective knowledge, the most powerful knowledge that mankind holds, you know, because we're the only animal that have collective knowledge.

We've been able to move knowledge across generations, and that's how we have reached space, build the Internet, you know, do all these crazy surgeries, and, you know, solve, you know, genetic issues, et cetera. You're not going to do it by yourself. You are just one small person, and we have collected knowledge generations upon generations.

So listen to your body. That's nice to say. Most people don't hear shit. It's completely silent, and you need to start to decipher the signals that the body gives you, and that goes through practice and learning discipleship and exploring a lot of different stuff, and it's a highly individual thing.

Nowadays, we don't have so much anymore this mentor-student or teacher-disciple relationship, but I really believe in that. I wouldn't be here without my mentors and my teachers, the shoulders of giants that lifted me up. I still believe in it in a way. There is no other way. On that, do you think that training and learning movement, for the majority of the time, is a fundamentally solitary activity, or do we gain from, like, the presence of others?

So when you think of movement when you're training, is most of your training, like the repetitions, done alone or with others? Both. I've trained years, you know, alone and with my students, and I spend large periods of time alone, just training alone, but I also spend a lot of time being in a community, and movement is the best reason for gathering around in a community.

You know, people, for example, nowadays, they go do CrossFit or they do yoga or whatever, and then they have their yoga friends and they have their real friends. That's bullshit, you know? Your yoga friends can't be your real friends, because we've been gathering around movement since the age of time, creating communities around movement, around hunting, gathering, dancing around the fire.

We've been moving together. Nowadays, I can recommend move with your loved ones, move with the people around you. You know, you join a BJJ club, it's a community. You know, you go there, you meet, you move around. You go to a capoeira club, it's a tribe. You go to a CrossFit gym, it's a community.

You go to yoga, it's a community. You can move with your children, you can move with your dog in the park. I think it's important to move together, but it can also be done alone, and some things are better done alone, and some things are better done together. How do you think movement changes from solo movement, you know, that whole pattern of movement where you're moving alone, versus the pattern of movement where there's two people, either working together or against each other?

So together is like dancing, partner dancing, and against each other is like wrestling or jiu-jitsu. Do you think the principles of movement are different for when it's two people versus one person? Is this a whole other world? First, I spend more time moving with others against others in martial arts because I spend most of my life in martial arts, and less time exploring stuff alone.

But definitely there are some concepts that still exist, like the quality of movement, how you organize your body in space, not in relation to the partner only, but first a BJJ practitioner or a stand-up fighter, he needs to organize his body in relation to space first, and then in relation to the partner as well.

So some of the concepts exist in both, while others are very different, and you can train alone all your life, when somebody else is in the equation, it's going to change the game completely. A major reason why we are under the fight laboratory, we've departed in reality from a lot of traditional martial arts, and the delusions of training alone and doing forms, and repetitive movements alone, and then it's a shitstorm.

You can't apply anything, and you don't have any live practice. And now we see that definitely in the fight game. The practices that stayed very real, stayed very dirty in a way, but very real, they are the ones who are providing tools for the chaotic environment of a fight.

In terms of injury, how do you treat, recover, and work around injury? Injuries are a certainty, they're not a probability. Injuries and diseases, they are also required. As Nassim Taleb, one of my biggest inspirations these days, a great philosopher, in order to anti-fragilize, to become anti-fragile, to become robust, to become more than resilient, you must be able to enjoy volatility.

You must be able to grow from this stuff. First, I said it before and I'll say it again, I injure my students. This happens, and I can't do anything beneficial without it. Basically, we all get injured constantly, on a micro-level, on a macro-level, it's part of our lives. Of course, we don't want to push into meaningless injury, and we want to be able to grow from it and basically develop from it.

How do you train around it? How do you train around it? It's a hard question. It involves a lot of stuff. First, I'm a big believer in movement as a therapeutic tool. Movement itself, if it offers you adaptation, and it does, it's the way out, not lack of movement.

Rest, I don't believe in rest. I believe in moving. Which means, when I'm resting, I might help on the short term with certain aspects of the injury, but at the same time, I'm creating a new problem because the adaptive process is taking me somewhere else. I'm not recovering towards movement, I'm recovering towards no movement.

So, we have a problem here. Now, in some cases, you must rest, and then deal with the consequences later. But in most cases, there is a better approach than just resting, and that requires a lot more taking responsibility, which doctors don't believe in your ability to take responsibility for yourself.

To be intelligent, and to know the amounts and the levels, and that requires some form of knowledge and experience, and most people can't be trusted with it, so we offer them this advice of just rest. Rest, stop. But definitely, after years and years of working with people, and taking them through crazy injuries, my right hand, Odelia, she went through a car accident, she lost a kidney, she broke her back, she went through three knee surgeries, which my sister performed, by the way.

Nowadays, she can move like few people I know on this planet, and just the answer was always movement, movement, going back into movement. Beautiful. Continue, move. Continue to move, yeah. Don't move stupidly, don't hurt yourself. But that's obvious, no? I guess not, because when I say these things, people write a fucking comment.

The bot, the bot people, you know, "Yeah, bot, you're going to injure yourself." Yeah, genius. Don't go into the injury and again, deteriorate, escalate the situation. Of course not. You must move around it, and you must be smart in the way that you allow adaptation to take you out like a wave.

You need to ride the wave of adaptation out of the problem. And that's tricky, we know, and that's something that we need to educate people on, and we need to believe in people's intelligence and ability to take this responsibility. In China, they still have in some areas, and they used to have bone setters.

They didn't put you in a cast. You broke your hand or they did it through bone setting. And yeah, they didn't have x-ray. So that's a lot more complex to do and not as successful as nowadays. But having said that, they did achieve amazing rates of recovery because these reps that they use and the process allows some form of movement.

And that creates an adaptation. Now take an arm, a healthy arm, your right arm, put it in a cast for six months. Take down the cast. What do you see? The opposite of that. The arm is basically moving towards death. Yes, it's gotten good at not moving. The arm is gray.

You have weird hairs growing out of it. It stinks. It really smells and looks like death because movement is life. No movement, death. We know that. We like to just kill your arm a tiny bit so the bones can reform together and then we'll bring it back to life.

That's one approach. But in other cases, you can maintain the life and the demands on the tissue safely enough at the same time allow the recovery to happen. Yes. And diet. What are some diet principles you follow? Well, diet is a very individual thing. I've been personally following a Paleolithic, a caveman diet for a long time, long before it was called the Paleo diet and since 1997 or even '96.

I've been doing this for a long time. I feel great on it. Still growing older and older and functioning only better and being able to sustain, maintain, improve. But diet is very, very individual. There is a lot of exploration to be done there. What you can withstand, how resilient is your system.

Nowadays, there is a new movement towards not improving the fuel sources, not improving the quality and the quantities of the food, but actually making the system more resilient. So it's able to basically withstand almost any quality and source. And that's where we have been lacking. And we've been neglecting this area.

And that's something that I believe is the latest innovation, although it's still highly misunderstood. And a lot of folks are abusing this concept and giving really poor advice just to be different, just to say, "I'm not the Paleo guy." So that's a small addition that will get bigger and bigger, I think.

So it's almost like how you recommend in movement to go outside of "proper alignment." The diet version of that is going outside of some kind of proper framework of diet. To some level, but that was an obvious thing, you know, always. The problem is it's not enough because it's more what I'm suggesting with movement, to go outside of "proper alignment," it creates an adaptation.

But what if that adaptation cannot happen? For example, a celiac disease person, you'll expose him to gluten, and he'll have terrible consequences. Now, maybe if you can minimize enough the amounts and the dosages, you can actually train him out of celiac to some level. But that adaptation is not going to last very far down the road.

He's going to get some gains, and then he's going to plateau. But what if you could take that celiac disease person, put him in the garage, fix his mechanisms, change his tires, change his engine, you know, oil him up, everything, and then put him back on the track as a new animal?

And that is where a lot of stuff is happening nowadays. So the genetic part of it and the gut biome, our digestive tract that is so, so complex, and we discover that, you know, we live in symbiosis with all these microorganisms that just are all over our skin inside of us, and we live in combination with them.

And that's how you see some dudes in Brazil and in Russia walking around with, you know, 5% body fat, eating one cracker for breakfast, one cracker for dinner, and, you know, training BJJ all day long, high performance, fueling with Coca-Cola. And then at the same time, you see people doing everything almost perfectly and still having poor performance and inability, and they gain weight with any, you know, extra calorie or macronutrient they brought in because their system is different.

And it's not only about genetics. It's more about epigenetics, and it's more about what kind of system, besides your own DNA, what about these organisms that are supposed to help you and live in symbiosis with you, what kind of a system do you have there? And that's just two areas, and I think it's going to expand more and more and more, and we're going to realize that there is a lot to learn there.

Do you think technology and science is ultimately a positive force for-- you know, you look at movement as an element of our humanity. Do you think technology is taking humanity away or is adding to it? I'm not smart enough to answer you that, man. Yeah, it's a big question.

You know, I have no idea. It's just--it's a huge question, and I think we're going to struggle with that question for many generations to come still. It's definitely created a lot of positive stuff, but it's also brought tremendous suffering and problems, and perhaps will be the end of us.

So technology might have been the most terrible thing that ever happened to us. Who knows? Yes, on that beautiful note, how can people join the Ido Portal movement? Do you have a website, idoportal.com? Yeah, idoportal.com. We are on Facebook. You can find us on Facebook, the Ido Portal Method, Ido Portal, IDOPORTAL.

You can join the movement culture on our website, and that will lead to some updates coming up soon. You have a beautiful website, by the way, amazing website. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I've been very fortunate to have a great team around me that helped me with that.

I saw that you posted a couple of Tom Waits songs, and even a Bukowski reference on your Facebook page, and I immediately understood something that I think only another fan or maybe I should say student of Waits and Bukowski can understand. You don't shy away from the strange and the profound, wherever you can find it.

Maybe that's one way to put it. Is there a Tom Waits song that you find yourself returning to often in your life? So many, man, so many. It's just--Tom Waits, I can barely listen to anything else, frankly. It's been a real issue, and Tom Waits, his discography, it's a lifetime of discoveries.

It's been accompanying me for years now. It's not something you go through very quickly. I've spent a lot of time on Alice, for example, and yeah, just so much stuff, so much stuff you always discover. Also, I find that this weirdness, this eccentric part of things, it's so important.

It's the only thing, really, that can be you in many ways because as a culture, we're so bland. We're becoming this one thing. You walk around in London, it looks exactly like Hong Kong. It looks exactly like Tokyo. It looks exactly like Sydney. We have this huge human thing going on, which is great, and we communicate very easily, but then we lost a lot on our own stuff.

There is only one Tom Waits because of his eccentric part and because of his weird genius, and that's why it's so beautiful to me. I try not to shy away from my own eccentric side. When I was younger, I definitely hid that part more and guarded and tried to fit in, but that's definitely an important thing, I think.

So you recommend we cultivate the weird. Yeah, cultivating the weird is cultivating yourself because that's truly you. Everybody's weird. Everybody. There is no Homer Simpson. Everybody has this part. Everybody has this interesting stuff. That's what also interests me when I teach. I want to see that weird. I want to see that weird in your movement.

I want to see that weird in you, and then I really met you, but most people, they hide it, and they don't allow-- and they put this perfect picture, but it's-- I'm not stupid. I know it's not perfect, you know? So just allow the weirdness to come out. I think it's a great lesson from Waits and Bukowski as well.

So if you don't mind, I'm going to torture you with something. I would like to close by reading a Bukowski poem, "Roll the Dice," and I'm going to force you to listen to it. Go ahead. If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs, maybe your mind.

It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery, isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it, and you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds, and it will be better than anything else you can imagine.

If you're going to try, go all the way. There's no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is. Amen. Thanks, Ido. Thanks for talking to me, man.

Thank you so much, man. Appreciate it.