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Just vaguely. There is a sense that if u don't join in & say: Rodtang is incredible (!) or ONE Championship is GREAT Muay Thai, or this female fighter is "the most dangerous woman in the world", u r somehow betraying the (marketing) cause. U can LOVE Muay Thai & not agree. 1/
If you just keep printing money you will experience Inflation. If you just keep making belts, you will experience Inflation. If you just keep slapping "great" on things...Inflation. There are plenty of ppl inflating things, it doesn't need unanimity... 2/
marketing works by inflation...but sometimes it's good to have other voices too. It doesn't mean that you are betraying the cause. It's kind of intense how everything has to be great, the BEST. We lose all the nuance, & nuance is what gives things value...ultimately. 3/
I get it, we live in an age where anything and everything has to shout over the noise factor. All is competition for eyeballs. The temptation is for everything to POP, jut out or escalate. It's the language medium of our day. 4/
But I also feel that all of that noise, all that jostling makes us genuinely thirsty for true greatness, the nuance of real capabilities. An authentic separation between a thing and all else around it. This - anyway - has been our driving force. When we started it was about 5/
finding REAL Muay Thai. We looked around and saw that all of the female belts were bunk. They were just manufactured bull to hype a scene, a promotion, a fighter. So we turned away from it all and set very different goals from any other fighter. The very same thing is what 6/
motivated us to uncover, document, detail and preserve the true greatnesses of the past, things that are literally dying away. It wasn't to diminish present day fighting, it was a hunger for authentic separation of wheat from chaff, or at least what felt like it. 7/
It doesn't mean that my judgement, or our judgement is the right one. But, it does mean that even in disagreement it is out of a LOVE for Muay Thai. If by off-chance that something is preserved which is not the dominant "on brand" message, then that is a good thing. 8/
I am by nature a skeptic. If everyone unanimously agrees on something, in particular, "greatness" my first impulse is to question it. It doesn't matter if it is Michael Jordan or William Shakespeare. I think it's a good thing to question Greatness. To take a gentle hammer 9/
to the pedestal. If everyone did this, maybe not a good thing. There might be too many smashed pedestals, but that some do is good. It's part of the love for a thing. 10/
