On today’s episode Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu shares the journey of consistency and balance as a Muay Thai fighter. Listen in as Sylvie and I explore how she became passionate about the sport, the biggest challenges of living and recording a life-long legacy, and the intense regimen she uses to overcome Adversity one fight at a time. Sylvie also shares how she found the beauty in Muay Thai, and insights into how she connects with her opponents.
Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu is an American Muay Thai fighter living, training, fighting, and documenting her legacy in Thailand. Currently Sylvie is working toward a world record with more than 471 professional fights.
You can watch her journey here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgFe05f-DrPpaunE4Gaz3cQ
Episode Transcript
Sylvie Mui is a 275 veteran in the sport of Muay Thai. She is living, training, fighting, and documenting this living legacy in Thailand. And she is aiming to surpass WIC wars world record of 471 professional fights. Sylvie, there’s so much to begin with. There’s so many places that I would like to start. First of all, because the record you’re trying to beat is professional record. It’s not just for Muay Thai. It’s for boxing and everything together. Is that correct?
01:30
Yeah, so the thing with Glenn Whitmore is that his record is recorded. Like he actually has a record of all of his fights and they’ve actually, from when we were first looking at his record to now they’ve like added four fights. I had to increase how many I was going to do to beat him. But it’s one of these things where when I first came to Thailand, people would actually lie about the number of fights they had down in order to like be a protege or something. Yeah. Like.
01:58
crazy. People are like, oh, 500 fights in all disciplines. And I’m like, because I’ve actually done 270 fights in eight years, nine years, I know what that entails. I’m like, no, you didn’t. Like, you definitely didn’t. And it’s nothing against you. Like, it’s not like you didn’t achieve something else. But don’t lie about what you achieved. So choosing Glenn Wickmore was because he actually has a proven record. Like you can actually see all the documentation of all of his fights. So choosing him was because I’m
02:28
also the most documented fighter because just out of pure chance, I started filming and documenting myself before I ever dreamed I would be anything that I am now. And so he and I have something in common and that the documentation is there. That’s what’s so incredible. And just like you said, even in the 60s, 70s and 80s, there were fighters in all over that part of the world where they wouldn’t document things, but they would round sort of general. Does this person have 300 fights or in weight divisions, right? There may be an eight pound weight difference.
02:57
And they say, well, this person has 200 fights, but the wider guy has 300. Therefore let them fight for the purse, right? They’re trying to find opponents where they can make money. The professional fighters. Lots of times that’s what put on the table. So it’s not always as easily documented as we would think it is in the United States. For example, there’s also no reason to document it because ties. Don’t think about records the same ways that we do. Like if you asked me how many soccer games I played as a kid, I have no idea. Like, okay.
03:23
How many did I win? I don’t know. I played, you know, like I was playing soccer. That’s how Thai fighters think of their fights is like when they’re really little, those fights don’t even really matter. You don’t even gamble on them yet. So they actually start paying attention to their record when they enter the stadium of Bangkok or when they start being able to place bigger side bets because they’ve achieved a level of skill that they can provide more from their fights there. So it’s a little bit like the Muhammad Ali. You start counting the sit ups when they hurt. I think it’s like those are the ones that matter.
03:50
Yeah, I absolutely agree. And you have completely submerged yourself into the culture. You speak Thai. If you want to know more about her, go to Sylvie Moy, go to the Muay Thai Library, and we’ll talk about all these things. But she has genuine Thai tattoos. And it’s not like she went to an American shop and got the ink done. She’s literally had the bamboo put onto her, had it tapped on with the ink. And she has beautiful work here on her back all over the place.
04:20
how a warrior decorates their body because it’s a temple, it’s a testament to what they’re doing. Even for a lot of people that don’t understand, there’s a lot of Buddhism in Muay Thai, the components there. Could you tell us a little bit about what that looks like? Because to people that don’t see anything that it looks like human cock fighting or people just throwing punches and stuff, but there’s so much more to it when it comes to that philosophical idea. I found it really interesting the more I learned about the Buddhism of Thailand is Theravada Buddhism, which comes directly from India. And there’s also an animism.
04:50
in Thailand that predates the Buddhism. And so it kind of just got absorbed together. So you’ll see these spirit houses, the rules around the ring of going over the ropes or under the ropes and talismans and monkhans and all of these things are animism, but they get kind of pulled into a whole understanding of the Buddhism as well. And when I first came to Thailand and didn’t understand as much about that kind of estuary of religion and practice in that sense.
05:19
I kind of understood when people said that it seemed that it was in conflict to have a Buddhist nation have such a violent sport. And the longer I’ve been here and the more I’ve come to understand Buddhism and come to understand real Muay Thai, not broke, came to Thailand for two months and fought, they totally go together. Like the rules about becoming a man in Thailand and part of what I love so much about Muay Thai is it is a practice of masculinity. It’s completely a dedicated and concerted effort towards a type of masculinity.
05:49
It’s the same masculinity that novice monks are expected to understand for themselves too. You control yourself first, you don’t get out of hand, you don’t get super emotional. A really good Muay Thai fighter is always trying to achieve this thing called Ming. Ming and Thai is like still water, it’s this kind of like unmoved, unperturbed. It doesn’t necessarily mean passive, you’re fighting, but if you can’t control yourself, you absolutely can’t control an opponent. And so it’s this whole practice that blends beautifully
06:19
Buddhism. So now when people who don’t really know are like, Oh, it’s so weird that it’s a Buddhist country and it has this violent thing. I’m like, you don’t know. Sorry. They totally go together. Like it’s totally maps together in this really beautiful way. So some of the practices, I think when people come to Thailand, they mistake them for being Buddhist. And those practices themselves are not Buddhist, it’s that the people doing them are Buddhist. And so they have this kind of overlap there. But so for example, the Ram Mui, which is the dance you do.
06:48
in the ring before the fight, dudes on Reddit like to really argue about whether this is religious or not, or whether you’re doing massive air quotes, what is it, cultural appropriation, if you’re a white person doing this. No, you’re participating in the traditions of Muay Thai, it is not Buddhist. If you are Buddhist, you are thinking of the things that are important to you in Buddhism while you’re doing it. But if you’re not Buddhist, if you’re Muslim, if you’re Christian, if you’re whatever, you’re thinking about…
07:15
those powers that you believe in as you’re infusing yourself with your own belief system to prepare yourself for a spiritual, physical battle, basically. And again, that very much resembles what warriors were doing before they would walk into battle centuries ago, where they would think of a deity or they would look at something outside of them to give them maybe additional strength. People don’t understand the history of Muay Thai between the idea of the elbows and all this stuff. This is very much from a martial standpoint, very much from a warlike standpoint where…
07:44
whether it be the way that they were drawing a weapon, the way that they would use the elbow, maybe a blade on it, even the way that you would hit the spear and then as you withdraw your spear out, the knee comes in, it’s the natural body mechanics for a knee inside the clinch. All these things make a lot more sense the more that you study it, but like you said, as an American on the outside, or even if you’re an American that watches the UFC and you say, oh, this person does Muay Thai, what you see them doing, there’s a big difference. The Muay Thai that you’re doing in Thailand, that you’re living, breathing.
08:12
And then there’s what we see over here, which is a person that does a sloppy tee, tries to go jab cross hook and then throw a round kick. And then all of a sudden you think that that’s kind of what it is, but there’s a lot more to it. So we’re talking about this as if people already know what it is. So if you could please give us an idea. You had your first Friday in 2010, is that correct? That sounds correct. In Thailand. Yeah. I’ve done some, as you know, research on you, but it’s not like you just decided, you know what? Let’s just go to Thailand this summer and I’m gonna live there and I’m gonna.
08:40
commit myself to this huge dedicated idea of being the spy record. You saw Ambak, which was what brought a lot of Muay Thai sort of the forefront for Americans. Tell us what created this incredible journey that you’re on right now. Part of it has to do with the relationship my husband and I have is that when I show interest in something, he’s like, let’s figure out how to make that happen. So I’m a very introverted, quiet, kind of like, I like to stay in the background shadows of things.
09:09
And he kind of likes to shine a spotlight that I can move along the wall in that space without feeling super exposed. It’s crazy that I’ve gotten to this point in my life where I’m very much online. People actually recognize me. Like, if I go to Chiang Mai and I’m like sitting at an outdoor table, people will be walking by and they’re like, oh, my God, it’s Sylvie. Like, I answer my own emails. I’m not a celebrity by any extent. It’s crazy that where I started, I’m still very much like…
09:38
introverted, quiet person. I need a lot of time to recover after I do something kind of public or big. I would never have done Muay Thai on my own. Like having seen Ong Bak, I had this response to the movements where I was like, I’ve never seen anything like that and I want my body to do that. I’ve not thought that about many other things in my life. Like I’m the only girl in my family. I have three older brothers and my oldest brother really wanted me to be girly. Like he was like, you should do ballet. You should dress like a cool girl. You should be like.
10:06
not a fourth brother. It’s failed in that. So the way that he wanted me to be attracted to these artistic, kind of more feminine things, I was drawn to Muay Thai because of this very artistic masculinity, but with this very beautiful fluidity that’s like dance that’s in it. So I first started, we were living in the middle of New York, Bear Mountain is kind of up by West Point. So it’s way outside of the city. It’s a pretty long drive and
10:34
We couldn’t find any gyms, so we were actually driving down to New Jersey. And I won’t name it, but we found the shittiest gym. It was basically like a strip mall gym that put Muay Thai on the window, but it was basically Taekwondo with someone pretending that he knew something about elbows. He was crazy. But his teacher, like the man who taught him was Master K, who became my first real adjunct. He’s a Thai man who was teaching Muay Thai out of his basement in New Jersey.
11:05
And he had been kind of like a mid-level fighter in like the 40s. And then right when he was kind of entering the stadia of Bangkok, where he could have taken off as like, this is your career as a Muay Thai fighter, or you can follow your wife who’s a nurse moving to America and become like a banker. I’m not really sure what he did. He went that way. So he stopped doing Muay Thai and went to America, but he continued teaching it. When I met him, he was like 70 years old and he was still
11:32
kicking things in his basement at like 3 a.m. and his wife was like yelling at him. He’s like for her to leave to the store and he’d be like, okay, now we can kick the post. So he’s the one who made me just completely fall in love with Muay Thai because he loved it so much. And he’s the reason we came to Thailand. He had to have angioplasty. I can’t believe his heart was as closed as it was because he had so much energy. He would wear me out like crazy.
12:01
And he had to go have this angioplasty and it was just this kind of like having to face his mortality was like breaking my heart. And I felt like I owed it to him to come to Thailand and see the moi that had informed him that he had fallen in love with where he had grown up. And so we came out to Thailand in 2010 for the first time. And one, it was incredible to see all of these little like
12:27
things that seem to be very unique about Master K were actually just Thai. There were tons of Master K qualities everywhere, which was very sweet. But also just the way that Muay Thai is practiced in Thailand is really beautiful and refreshing, and then it’s actually a way of life. It’s very performative, but it’s not posturing. There’s no posturing to it, even though you’re performing. And America doesn’t have that. Even really good American jim’s doesn’t have that.
12:54
everything’s very built up. I’d had one fight before coming to Thailand and it was this whole performance of this one moment of your life has to mean whether you have any value in the sport or not, whether you’ve learned anything, all of these things that I just can’t imagine being in that world. So basically transplanting. Once we had seen Thailand and I fought three times in that short trip when we came out, we went back to America and saved up for two years with this like, we just have to get back to Thailand. We thought we’d come for maybe six months.
13:24
And in April, it’ll be 10 years. So that worked out well. That’s so incredible. So you’ve done this and you’re starting to fall in love with this. And this is becoming, like you said, this is just your life. This is what you do. There’s no posturing. And I love how you talk about, you know, you’re very transparent about feeling introverted, but in many ways, the fighter’s journey is a hero’s journey. It is introverted. It takes a village to get you in the ring, but once the music starts and they ring the bell, it’s just you and the opponent.
13:54
And the only thing between you is fear and error. So we have to be in that place of, okay, what am I made of? Where is this going to take me? And that’s why I’m so impressed with what you’re doing. What made you decide, okay, three heights is great. I want to live in Thailand, absolutely. When did you decide that you put this huge undertaking of beating this foreign and some odd record? When did you set your sights on that? And was there like a moment where you were like, I can do this, I need to do this? I was climbing in the back of the truck.
14:23
The reason we showed Jim that we first came to in Chiang Mai when we came out on our first trip was that there was another girl named Sylvie from Canada who’s my same size who was training at this gym. I think the way we found her is that my husband was Googling me because I had this YouTube channel where I was posting my training with Master K and I think he was Googling me. She had been living in Thailand for I think five years or something and she was going to retire on her
14:52
So we came out to the same gym that she was at, because we’re like, if someone, my same size and a woman can get fights there, obviously I should be able to as well. And so our new school had 50 fights and she actually retired right as I was coming. As I was climbing into the back of the truck, after either my first or my second fight, I said to Andy Thompson, who was the Western owner of the gym, he had, I was like, I think I want 50 fights. Bless Andy. He was the coolest guy. He had this like.
15:19
knee-jerk reaction where he looked at me like maybe he had misheard me for a second. And he looked at me and he just goes, all right then. It was like, that was the first goal that we set that was like, this is absolutely impossible. Like how am I going to get 50 fights when we think that maybe we can come back for six months. And when we first moved here, my fight rate was so high. I was fighting like every 11 days for the first three years. By the time I got near 50, we’re like, let’s do a hundred. Messed stupid 50s anymore. We just launched to 200.
15:49
because every time we set an impossible goal, we were hitting that impossible goal. So it was like, let’s just be totally crazy. And when we found with war, we were like, nobody’s heard of them except like boxing fanatics, it’s a way to honor him, but also competitively surpassed. Yeah, absolutely. And you just had your 275 that you’ve won. Congratulations. You’re on a very large winning street, but as you were saying before,
16:16
especially on this journey, the win is not nearly as important as the process as the fighter that you become, as the medal that you gain from being in the crucible of that existence. There was a fight on 269 that you had where you wrapped your hands in rope. Yeah, that’s the part I was telling you about. Yeah. Where it’s knockout or draw. And so for those that don’t understand, the hands are
16:38
wrapped in rope. Tell us about the history of that. What else was put on top of the rope at some times in history and all that. It’s like retro coming back into popularity right now, this karchuk thing. Karchuk literally means to bind with rope. So that’s what those two words mean. And it predates sport muay thai, like ring muay thai. So back in the day, there weren’t like referees and scoring and things like this. So it was basically, there weren’t really rounds. You would just go until someone collapsed, which is a little bit more like cock fighting, I guess.
17:08
But the lack of points, not scoring it, is actually something that I really like about it becoming popular again now. I had been fighting in traditional Muay Thai for a really long time before I ever entered into Karchuk. And I was actually, me and my opponent at my first fight were the first women to ever fight Karchuk on this promotion on TV. That’s cool. It kind of has this, oh, that’s so brutal. That’s so badass, whatever attitude towards like, oh, no, no, that’s crazy. The thing that
17:36
I noticed when I first started fighting professional Muay Thai in Thailand, where you’re not wearing like elbow pads and things, is that elbows, they make you be really honest about your punches. Like you can’t swim at someone when they’re coming at you with elbows. Like you have to actually control yourself and like understand distance. The same goes true for when you’re like basically bare knuckle with just these ropes on.
17:59
is that I loved the feeling of freedom. It’s the same thing of when you take a shin pad off and you’re not wearing weights anymore and you’re like, this just feels awesome. It feels equally awesome on your hands to just basically have these weights on the end that aren’t pillows. And it makes you really honest. So how you start the fight versus how you end the fight matters in Thailand in terms of how you’re actually telling the story of a fight. You’re having problems at the beginning that you better cash in on at the end. Otherwise you can be doing really well and invert yourself.
18:28
I love that about Muay Thai, but when you take all of that away and you go back to this older form of karchik where it’s not points, it’s just you and your opponent and like, can you put them down or are they going to put you down? There’s a kind of honesty to that process that to me is really beautiful because in Muay Thai you’re performing for people that are kind of adjacent to what you’re doing in karchik between you and your opponent. Like it is like eye contact. That’s an interesting thing about
18:56
Karchuk is that you can’t fake your way through many situations, whereas you can kind of fake your way through in a performative judged element of Muay Thai where you’re like, that didn’t hurt me, because you’re lying. But in Karchuk, you can’t lie as well. And then Karchuk, especially when your hands are more free, it makes the clinch even more interesting, yeah? Yeah, it’s just less spurry. The ropes kind of like stick to each other. You were alluding to old days, you would like stick them in tree sap and then you could like put crushed
19:25
glass and snarls and things that in it. We don’t do that in the cart chuck that I fight, but the rules is the first woman I ever fought in cart chuck, she’s a champion in boxing, like Western boxing. It was a draw the first time we fought, but it beat her up a little bit. I did really well in that fight and neither of us knew the rules of cart chuck. We were both really surprised that it was a draw. I rematched her in cart chuck maybe a year later and her-
19:53
trainer who wrapped her hands tied little knots on the end of each knuckle. So it was like a site, but made of rope on the end of each knuckle. And she, she cut me so bad behind this ear. Like she just split open behind my ear over here. So we don’t dip our ropes in anything anymore, but you are totally still allowed to like tie those little knots on the end to create spikes in your gauntlet and stuff like that.
20:22
Well, like you said, I mean, it’s a fight where it wars, so we have to be aware of those things. And that’s just incredible. Are headbats allowed in Karcher? No, that’s a lot way. They don’t do that here. That’s Siamese boxing, yeah. I think they do it in Burma. Burma, Burmese, yeah, I’m sorry. We were talking before we recorded how the land used to be called Cambodia land. And then it was this is Thailand and this is Burma and this is different parts of it. But this culture and this warrior spirit, this existence has been around for as long as.
20:50
human beings have been breathing. They were saying that even on some of the temples, you can look from 1200 years where you can see these movements, you can see the elbows, you can see this part of that martial spirit. And something else that I think would surprise people is that you do this very high level performance, professional fighter, living a legacy, and you are a low carbohydrate fighter. And people are probably saying, how in the world can you do that? Aren’t you worried about your blackage in stores?
21:17
Don’t you need to recarb? You know, don’t you need to carb load? What about the weighting process? How do you cut weight before that? And all these things we’re saying, she and I are sort of giggling, but the reason is because in the fight game, a lot of people will walk around at say 170, drop 15 pounds the week of, be miserable, try to rehydrate and then step back into the ring. And then they have the audacity to be surprised when their performance is uneven. But you’re walking around almost at your fight weight at all times. Well, for me, I’m always at my weight because I fight up.
21:46
So I don’t weigh what my opponents weigh. They’re all bigger than me. So the times that I have weight, it sucks, but just because it’s a nasty process, not because I struggle with it. Like it just sucks to be dehydrated. Yeah, it’s brutal no matter how you cut it. Yeah, but when I first started being keto, which I initially, the thing that interested me about it was that it seemed like it could make my mental game, like my emotional game more even keel. It’s really hard to do what I do. Like I train twice a day.
22:16
I was fighting every 11 days. I’m a woman in a male dominated sport in a country that isn’t mine. There’s a lot going on. So my emotional roller coaster can be pretty steep. And so just having any kind of way of leveling that out was something that was interesting to me and actually willing to take a hit endurance wise because I thought we’re all taught about carbohydrates. So I was like, okay, maybe I am kind of a cardio monster. Maybe it’ll take a little bit out of that. But I have a bit to spare and I think it’s worth it.
22:45
I don’t want to be like crying all the time. When I first went keto, I was amazed at how fast felt different just in terms of going for like the even keel came really fast. And I was also shocked by how. Uncult it was in terms of my energy. I felt no different eating keto versus the way I was eating before. And then about a year into keto, I started doing the alternate day fasting. So I am not eating anything at all. And again, felt.
23:15
absolutely nothing different in terms of energy. But just because I was eating every other day, it was a 50-50 chance whether I would be eating on a fight day or not. On days when I was fighting fasted, it was so convenient to think about when I was eating or how close to my fight. It was just like taking it off the table was actually really nice. On top of that, I felt I had a level of clarity that I didn’t necessarily have on eating days. I just felt like I wasn’t battling myself as much in the ring.
23:45
At the same time, someone’s trying to, which was nice. It is nice. You want everybody on your team, as opposed to your own internal dialogue telling you, Oh, you got caught with that job again. What are you doing? That’s not what you need. It slows you down. And even as a fighter, for me, the low carbohydrate diet, I’ve had some injuries and it made the inflammation that I had go away, I would say 90%, which allows me to actually do the things that I want to do now. So again, as a fighter, there is some impact. There’s a lot of inflammation that can.
24:15
accumulate so you be in that place. It allows you to have much more of an opportunity to perform at your best as opposed to feeling like you’re behind trying to catch up. And that’s what I found too. I told you before, I, last year when I did David Goggins four by four by 48, I did it fasted, I just consumed water and breath. And it was a very introspective place as well because you’re doing that and you’re really kind of isolated, but people would say that’s impossible. I even had people on social media that would come at me.
24:44
I call it bullshit. It’s like, have you done it before? Have you tried fasting? First of all, have you tried keto? Because when you’re in that ketosis, your body uses body fat, primarily ketones as your energy. So unless you’re like at 3% body fat all the time, that’s kind of what our bodies were designed for. If you look at our ancestors, if we were chasing buffalo or whatever, it’s like there were times they didn’t have a chance to eat. There were times that there was no fresh vegetables or easy animals to hunt down. So you had to sometimes…
25:13
walk or run for days at a time just to get a shot on a buffalo or whatever. And it’s just interesting and again, the social media. So it’s not real in some ways. There’s also to me something that was really interesting about people’s responses to it is that everyone suddenly was a nutritionist who knew like what you’re supposed to meet or whatever is that I kind of have this response around like crack a book, like every single culture has some kind of fasting in its spirituality. You know, there’s like in Thailand, we actually get
25:42
quite a few people training through Ramadan, and those people are hardcore. They can’t even have water. It’s something that if you’re looking for something that’s going to give you, it’s like everything’s very, very loud. You have a radio going and the TV going and all of these things, and you just wanna kind of like shrink it down to a focus. Fasting does that. That’s what fasting is for when people go on meditation retreats or.
26:04
40 days in the desert, whichever example throughout history you want to use. Whichever. There’s a lot of them. They’re all similar. We see a pattern forming here. And that’s the thing. It’s like, if you want to push yourself, and again, I think it’s interesting too, not all high performers are low carbohydrate, but all low carb people that I know, they’re usually pushing, they’re usually the best in their, whether they’re an entrepreneurial spirit, whether they’re an athlete, whether they’re somebody that’s really trying to take things to the next level. So.
26:34
There’s a certain sort of self-selection that goes into that. And when I heard you on Robert Sykes Keto Savage’s podcast and heard your incredible story, I was like, not only is that amazing, that’d be amazing if you were eating rice every meal, like they usually do in Thailand, they just keep pushing that on you. But it’s even more impressive to me that you’re doing it and you have the courage to do that. Again, in the middle of her flight career, she decides she wants to completely upend her nutrition and go backwards in some people’s minds. And.
27:00
I agree with you as well, the clarity that you get mentally, it’s like you’re on caffeine without being on caffeine. It’s consistent. And then like you said, when you go into those places where you’re really got the introspection, it’s almost as if the way that you think is different. It’s more empowered, it’s more optimistic, it’s more courageous, I would dare say. I know it’s me personally, I assume I’m not the most unique person on the planet and other people have this experience too. But my inner coach is nasty. My inner coach is a bitch.
27:30
when you can tone that down, the experience I actually have with it in terms of like during my training, quieting my mind down from that element to kind of focus it a little bit is I can know, this is very Buddhist meditation, I can know what I’m doing without judging it. So like, know I made a mistake, but don’t judge the mistake. I was always judging the mistake before. So I was like backwards in time. I was like dragging ass behind myself where I’m like, oh, why was that kick wrong? And I’m already like getting kicked in the face, it’s having…
27:59
been judging my kid on to that point, it pulls you into this ability to like, okay, I know that I stepped in the wrong spot. I know that so I can keep moving rather than like judging what it means to bash the person or the whole day is wasted or anything like that. And I think that part of it is just the maturity of the experiences that I’ve had in Muay Thai and how long I’ve been doing this. And it must be a somewhat coincidence of how long I’ve been doing this and where I am in that path. But there is a distinct like before and after.
28:27
in terms of like when I started changing the way that I eat, being able to observe these things and be more self-corrective without so self-judgmental and beating myself up about things like that, just, it allows you to actually grow more rather than kind of harping on things. Yeah, like you said, almost like with Buddhist meditation, as long as in practice or anything where the observer, you allow it to come and go, you don’t sit there and placate to it because that’s what we feed into is what grows and sticks around. Just like she was saying,
28:57
If I’m checking that kick and I’m blocking it appropriately, but then maybe I miss the opportunity, like you say, I’m wasting energy and mental focus and yelling at myself that I didn’t knock the person out there or that I didn’t turn my head appropriately. And that makes it impossible for me to be present to the opportunities now that may be unfolding before me if I bother to pay attention instead of trying to tell myself, I can’t believe you missed that. How long do you have to be trained that? Keep your hands up.
29:25
Why do we select these certain things to like go crazy about like, I trip sometimes, you know, like I don’t see the rock and I kind of trip. I’m not like, I suck at walking. Like, it happens, you know, I stutter, I forget the word I’m looking for. I don’t think I suddenly suck at English. You know, it’s weird. I coughs and I can’t breathe now. I’m just going to stop breathing. I’m done with this. This is bullshit. How have people survived on this? I’m going to find a bunch of stuff online to corroborate why breathing is bad. I’m going to create a movement. Hashtag stop breathing.
29:54
I’m going for it. This is my destiny. I’m in. You’re in. Keto, aerobic capacity. It’s awesome. And then you’ve done something amazing with the Muay Thai library. And I’ll let you tell people more about that. But in Thailand, there are literally all these champions, all these living legends, pretty much all over the place if you’re willing to drive to them. So the analogy that you use would be like, imagine being able to drive to where Mike Tyson has a gym and spend an afternoon with him and learn how to throw.
30:24
the hook, the uppercut coming to the body. Imagine going to see Leon Spinks. Imagine going any amazing boxer that you can think of. Just being able to drive up there and do that. And that’s essentially what you’re doing. Is that close? Yeah. So the phrase that we use for it is preserve the legacy. This is natural Muay Thai is a living legacy. It’s a living sport. So it changes like that’s just how it is. But it’s changing really rapidly. Like it kind of has accelerated and how fast it’s changing in the past 10 years or something, 15 years.
30:54
What do you think that is? I think it’s partly that it’s becoming more globally recognized. So the influences and the powers shifted within Muay Thai also. So it’s not entirely this like the West came and ruined Muay Thai. It’s not like that either. The golden age of Muay Thai, there was a silver age, which was kind of like the seventies. And then there’s the golden age, which was kind of mid eighties to like mid nineties. It was incredible. It was so good. There’s a lot of mafia. There’s a lot of
31:21
you know, like the best fighting the best. It was totally like, you know, the kind of movies I grew up on of like the ultimate champions having to pit against each other and stuff. So it was like iron sharpening iron. Now the power dynamics have shifted quite a bit. So, so who has money, who has control if the fighters has changed. So they’re not pitting themselves. Well, the promoters are not putting the best against the best anymore. They’re kind of feeding B class to A class stuff like this but the techniques are changing a lot too. So.
31:51
when you watch a Golden Age Muay Thai fight, it’s not only the act too, but the fighters have charisma. It’s like how a movie star has this star power that you know that actor, regardless of what role they’re playing, or you know that it’s Freddie Mercury, regardless of whether you’re listening to a Queen album, like that’s Freddie Mercury, you’re gonna hear it. It’s not like that anymore. Like the fighters nowadays don’t have the same kind of charisma or star power. It’s a little bit watered down.
32:18
gambling has influenced the way people fight such that they’re a little bit more, not a little bit, they’re a lot more constrained. They won’t take risks the way that they used to. So because Muay Thai is changing so fast, we kind of have this like sense of urgency of filming with and documenting the silver and golden age fighters and their Moi because that is disappearing from what you can see now and a lot of these guys are like aging out of being able to teach even so.
32:44
some of these incredible guys that we’re filming with in 10 years, they won’t even be able to teach it anymore. We filmed with someone named Siri Malkan. He was called the Executioner. That was his chaya, they call it the alias, because his second fight, he knocked his opponent out and his opponent died in the ring. And so this poor man had to, he was like 17 years old. He had to have this nickname, the Executioner, follow him into Bangkok. And then everyone was like,
33:12
him against monsters because listen to his name, he killed a guy in the ring, but they found out a little while later that he had been given a portion of his fight purse of every single fight that he fought to the widow of that man who died in the ring with him to send their daughter through primary school. And so they changed his name from the executioner to the pious boxer and that became the name that stuck. He was 72 years old when we met him and he was pretty sharp, we interviewed him,
33:42
He would do like two moves and stuff. It’s just like, it wasn’t there. He died of a heart attack like four months after we filmed with him or something. And that is this sense of urgency that like, there is no Siri Moncon other than this like 20 minutes of video kind of thing. We’re going around trying to get all different kinds of moi. In the West, people only know what they see on YouTube, right? So they’re like, Bookow’s the greatest fighter who ever lived. And I’m like.
34:09
name four other fighters and I might believe you, but they can’t name four fighters. So that’s the Preserve the Legacy Project, is trying to actually preserve the legacy of Muay Thai, but also show all the beautiful Muay that there is in Thailand, because it’s not one thing, it’s not a monolith. People have their own styles and they have their own lineage and there’s also a kind of pedagogy that you can see in how people learn from their masters and then how they’re training their kids and stuff like this. So I love it, I’m way into it.
34:39
It’s my favorite thing. No, I can tell. I can tell like you live it, read it, you’re bleeding. It’s also an incredible opportunity for you, though, because now you get to see these legends, you get to learn from them directly. And so you have this smorgasbord of, wow, look at the way that they check this. Oh, look at the way that he puts his hand on the knee here. Oh, wow, look at the way that he blends with that. Oh, he goes southpaw here. All these things are tremendous. So for a person who loves it like you do.
35:05
Just that in and of itself is edification, but now you’re able to see these pieces. And I know in the United States, at least, we believe that more material means that we master more things, but I know that you, as a true artist, understand there’s a lot of these things, and you’re like, wow, I would love to be able to implement that, but that may take me a little while. But you said even in this Fight 270, a lot of things came together for you. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about that? One of the things that’s been so enlightening in
35:33
the way that we film for the Muay Thai library. We do long form sessions. We don’t cut together highlights. And it’s not like a video game where you’re like, and now I have the ax. It’s in context. People often ask me whether I get confused because this person will tell you to check a kick this way and the sprints and tells you to do it that way. Someone says to lean back on a kick. Someone says not to lean back, all these things. It makes sense under the context of that fighter. So it would be like if you learned a word.
36:01
And you’re like, you have to set it up with and, not always. Sometimes you can say that word in other contexts. And so it’s like, it’s the way people speak, right? So you’re like, this is the way that person speaks. I’m not fully formed yet, I feel. So I’m very dedicated. I love it. I have my own instincts and I’m very tough. Like given how bad I am at being outside in fights, I’m very brave for fighting people who are like…
36:30
four inches taller than me and stuff like that, but I just have to like cram my way in. And in my last fight, I was finally able to kind of like see and feel this space in a way that I kind of would just leap through before. And it’s a lot like when you’re learning a second language and you just want to get to the words you know. So you just kind of like push past what someone said to you. You’re like, I know how to talk about water or something. Is that you’re able to kind of like actually hear what someone’s saying to you and engage with it.
36:58
at this distance and then you can move into the thing that you know a little something about and then you can kind of pop back out and it’s this like freedom of movement within a greater space that I was really excited about because I’ve been working on things that should make me able to do that for quite a long time. But again, it’s like language. It’s one of those things where you study, study, study and you speak with people. But then one day you’re just actually having a conversation. And a lot of that has to do with losing.
37:26
I don’t mean to sound too like airy about this, but like losing self-consciousness allows you to kind of just have this freedom. So not trying to fight well made me fight well, finally. I was going to say that is very Buddhist, but it is true, like you say, especially when you’re present and it’s almost this flow state of people want to talk about that, about triggering ultimate performance or whatever. But it’s this idea that, like you said, you’re completely present and completely focused, but you also have this like 10% of just letting it go, not being attached to it. Again, observing.
37:56
And how many times have you caught yourself throwing the technique because the opening is there, you’re not cognizant of it. Your body is just reacting because it’s trained it so often, like you said, just like the distance when she talks about fighting outside people, she doesn’t mean like being outside, although she has fought in the ring outside many times, she means being a shorter fighter, a smaller fighter fighting on the outside where that round kick can really get to you is very dangerous. But if she can hold her ground on that, that means that now she has a better idea of when this person’s going to throw this kick.
38:25
how this person reacts when they throw the jab. When the teep comes up, do they keep their hand down or do they leave it up? And now she knows where the entry is so she falls to kick back in. Now she can get inside. But being able to do that without fear, like you said, now it’s almost like you’re this 360 fighter without any fear. If they wanna stay on the outside and keep you out there for two rounds, no problem. Let them get tired. That also shows us what, if it’s this hall fighter, they’re probably not as good with the clinch because they really don’t want it, right? Exactly.
38:53
And you’re like a bulldog. Once you get in there and you just get that, that grip, it’s time. And so it’s about again, this dance, this martial ballet, if you will. And it’s beautiful to behold. I call it the atomic squirrel. My version. I like get inside your box of just like mess things up in the gear. I’m just going to kind of hop in here with the knee and I’m getting a whole lot of things. So it’s huge. So people know about you.
39:21
You’re the celebrity in Thailand. You’re recognized on the streets. I’m sorry. I’m kidding with you a little bit, but you must just be fearless. You have no fear whatsoever. You walk around, you walk to the ring, they’re, they’re playing the music and the instance is going and I’m being sarcastic, obviously, but the soul woman was trying to get this sort of like, get out of my way, but that’s the thing. I think that people had this misconception that fighters are fearless or they’re automatons or they’re just barbarians, but clearly.
39:50
this conversation I think people can take from you that you’re very well read and you’re very intelligent. How do you deal with fear? I’m going to imagine from the Buddhist standpoint that you don’t try to suppress it, you just sort of acknowledge it and let it go. But what is the way that you deal with it and have you noticed that your ability to deal with it has gotten better, I guess, with your experience going into the ring? I think that my work with Vipassana meditation
40:16
has really helped in that the short version of this is that a lot of meditation you focus on the breath. That’s where you’re focusing is like taking a deep breath and you kind of try to reach into a kind of Zen or trance state. But Pasadena is the opposite of this. You want to find this kind of soft focus of the mind. So if you’re Zen out, you’re too far out and then you don’t want to be like super following any train of thought because then you’re hyper focused. So you want this kind of like soft focus and you take as your objects.
40:43
to be monitoring rather than your breath is the mind and the body. So basically there are four positions right now sitting. You just sit there and you’re like, Roop sitting. That is the position of the body. It’s not I’m sitting, like my butt hurts, like any of these things. You just basically like feel, how do I know that Roop is sitting as I can feel pressure under my legs, I can feel the posture. And then when you hear something, that’s the mind hearing something because you have ears sound.
41:12
makes a sound and your ears intercept it. So there’s no like, I shouldn’t be hearing that, I’ve lost my focus. It’s like, it was heard, now we get back to what we’re working on. That’s the way you deal with fear, is that fear is a natural state of the mind. And if you’re going to be doing something like jumping out of a plane, getting into a fight, if you’re a soldier, any of these things, fear is a very good thing to have in those situations because it keeps you alert, it helps you protect yourself.
41:41
If you’re fearless going into a situation, you’re probably gonna get really badly hurt or like shot. You’re like the first guy shot off the line. You need to have an element of fear. So you wanna understand it as a natural state of the mind and let it have space, but you don’t give it significance or priority. So fear comes with me into the ring. Fear comes with me as I’m walking in, but it doesn’t get to like…
42:09
tell me what to do. It doesn’t get to tell me like how things should be. It doesn’t get to like take control of the ship kind of thing. It’s like okay we’re all going in together you keep quiet over here because we’re working on something. I think that’s not really hard for people to get to. I think the reason people struggle with fear or with doubt or any of these things when they’re going into a fight is that they’re not acknowledging that that is a natural state of the mind. And so they’re like oh shit I’m scared. This means I didn’t prepare. This means I’m going to get my butt kicked. This means that I can’t get in there.
42:37
I always use this example when people are actually afraid of being nervous. I’m like, you should be nervous is that you want the nervousness to be able to keep moving. If you let it go in where you’re like, I don’t want anyone to know that I’m nervous, I don’t want anyone to know that I’m afraid I’m going to deny that this is happening. You’ve put yourself in an iron maiden with the spikes coming straight at you, which is not good when you’re going into a situation like this. So the recognition that I have two arms.
43:06
My opponent has two arms. Like that’s not so scary. It’s kind of getting to this neutral place. So my mind won’t let me think things that I don’t actually think. So if I’m like, I’m much smaller than this person and I’m a little bit afraid of them and it looks like she kicks really hard, I can’t make my brain think I’m the best. I can beat anybody. A neutral statement, like I can fight anybody. Like she can be bigger than me and I can still fight her. I can do that. I can bring my mind to that neutral state because I believe that. That is a fact.
43:36
And I’m like, I’m not better than anybody, but I train really hard. I do the things that are necessary to put me in a position where I can handle all kinds of different things. I might not be able to walk out with a win. It might be really difficult. I might lose the fight, but I can fight whoever’s in front of me. And so I think that that’s the kind of, from the outside, that might appear fearless because it has a stoicism or it has that name that you’re supposed to get when you’re in the ring, but that’s not actually what’s happening. It’s just kind of an…
44:05
equanimity of these are natural states and these are neutral things to be thinking rather than grandiose or damaging things to be thinking. It’s so true in the people that I’ve worked with or even in my own experience, when you’re trying to push it away as if it doesn’t exist, and you’re walking out to the ring or you’re getting ready to get into the cage or step on the mat or give that presentation, it ferrets its way out and still says, I’m right here, like right before you step out. So if you don’t have a way to deal with it. Now as you step on there and
44:35
people are sharing some for you, some against you. Now this becomes this thing that, like you said, now you can’t breathe, now you’re having a hard time doing what you need to do. So it’s sort of a fool’s errand to hope that you can just stifle it, put it in a box and not deal with it. But again, it’s there for a reason. It’s telling you this is important. It’s telling you to be aware. And if we can channel it in such a way that actually serves us. Now there’s the fear where we’re talking about fear that we see what’s going on, the anticipation of all these things.
45:03
If somebody jumps me and comes in with a gun, that’s a different kind of fear and it’s a different kind of mechanism because I don’t have the luxury of doing that. But what you’re talking about, people also don’t understand that as a fighter, there is always this, and you’re used to it by now, you may not even feel it, but it’s almost this heaviness because there’s this urgency knowing that sometime soon, or even right now as we speak, there’s somebody fighting right now in preparation to do battle with you. And if you let that become heavy, then it becomes a burden and now you can’t perform.
45:33
you just say, this is my destiny, this is what I’m supposed to do as a fighter, as a warrior, to live this tradition, this is what it’s like. It very much makes everything else. That reframe changes the way you do pretty much everything from the way that you hydrate and take care of your shin after the fight to the way that you do your meditation. Yeah. There’s a weird fantasy that people are very practiced in, in the example you’re giving of like worrying about someone else’s training and what they’re doing to get ready to come after you, which
46:01
necessarily distracts you from what you’re doing, preparing to stand in front of them. When you’re watching a movie, you’re not like judging everybody. You’re not judging every scene. You’re watching how it progresses so that you understand the story. And that’s what you have to do is like in the real time, when you step in front of someone and you’re touching gloves, and you’re about to start, that’s when it matters what that person does versus what you do. It doesn’t matter at all.
46:26
whether that person ran with a tire, whether that person hit the bag as much as you did. None of that stuff matters. Like, Kara Haat’s one of my favorite fighters. He’s unbelievable. He’s like a conspiracy of movement masquerading as a man. He’s just like unbelievable. He said that if he trained really hard, he would be too bold and he would try to battle it out with people, but he’s little, he’s like my size. So he’s like, I needed a little bit of fear. I would undertrain.
46:52
so that when I went in, my instincts were, I don’t wanna get caught in the clinch. I don’t wanna battle back with him. I’ll be a little bit more like evasive. And so his process of preparing for someone was not, long as one’s really great at clinching, I have to clinch all the time. His was, it matters when we get in the ring. Like when I’m standing right in front of him, my body will know what to do because I don’t want to engage with him like this. And that’s, I’m not saying that people should like, not train, people should train, but train the way that gives you confidence to be able to solve.
47:22
someone else standing in front of you, not solving what they’re doing two weeks before the fight. That doesn’t exist. It’s imaginary. That is an illusion. I absolutely agree. I’ve never met a person who’s been at a high performance level or a fighter for that matter that hasn’t gone through any sort of adversity in their life. As a matter of fact, there’s usually a direct correlation to how much adversity they encounter, deal with, and then overcome that shows their level of prowess. Can you tell us about time in your life? And it can be in fighting. It can be outside of fighting.
47:51
Can you tell us about an adversity that you faced in your life where at the time you didn’t think you were going to be able to get through it or you were questioning how you would get through it, but when you were on the other side of it, looking back, you found these gifts and these, this knowledge that you wouldn’t have gained any other way. I’m sure there are many, like, I’m sure that these are kind of like marks throughout someone’s life and then you kind of smooth over them. Like you kind of forget about them because you’ve just become who you are on the other side of it and it doesn’t have the same.
48:21
bearing or significance to it. I don’t mean to get super dark, but people are listening to this and people have these experiences too. I was sexually assaulted when I was 11. At that age, I didn’t even know words for what that was. And so I just hid it from my family. Like I just didn’t even tell anyone in my family that it had happened. And it ended up coming out when I was like 19. So my mom was experiencing the fact of this having happened to me.
48:51
like eight or nine years later, and I was so far beyond that. So it was this weird, like kind of mixture of being pulled back into it, but also kind of being in my own place. And I don’t think that that made me a fighter. I feel like I must have already been a fighter to have made it through that. But in the way that you frame that question of like how something shapes you in that experience, in that moment, in order to literally
49:20
survive it mentally. I was just like hacking off pieces of my body. I was like, those legs are not mine. Anything touches my arm, the arm’s not mine. Like how a lizard loses its tail, like just fucking out of there. And I think that metaphorically, emotionally reassembling myself for 20 years, you know, has been an endless process from that process of like reforming myself and
49:49
the way a invertebrate can become vertebrate as it kind of forms itself and solidifies. And it’s like, no, this is me now. Like when I’m in the ring and I’m like going against someone rather than like that arm’s not mine, it’s gone. I’m like, that’s fucking my arm. And it’s coming after you. Like you want to hit it. I remember maybe like my 20 something fight, fighting this woman named Nang Mam and she was going after my leg. She was going to knock me out with leg kicks. And I was…
50:17
not badass about it. I was not like, look, you are not going to get knocked out. I was so embarrassed. I was so ashamed of the possibility of being knocked out in front of my trainers that I just turned into a wall and she lost faith in how bad that was hurting me. So she just stopped kicking me. I ended up winning that fight, which was crazy. But that’s what I’m talking about. Is this like, instead of this leg is so damaged, I’m going to fold. It became.
50:47
that’s mine, like it’s getting harder every time you hit it. Like it’s becoming steel every time you touch it. And my experience in Muay Thai early was that I had never had anything in my life where the fear of getting hit became less and less and less every time I got hit. And it’s been like that. Like I pretty chill about most things now. Like a lot of stuff.
51:12
that would really bother me before. I’m just kind of like, yeah, like I am upset about it, but there’s no kind of like outward upset about it kind of thing. And I feel like I’m just more through the process of really filling every inch of my body. Whereas that experience when I was so young was this kind of like recoiling into the smallest part of me that was safe. And now I’m just kind of like expanding, which as a woman is unusual. We don’t expand very much. We’re very similar. Like.
51:41
told to be very small and take up very little space. So even as girls are raised, boys will be boys, but girls are supposed to, that’s not ladylike. Yeah. Be helpful and convenient. Let’s speak when you’re spoken to them. Exactly. First of all, thank you for sharing that because I know that that’s crazy. I’m so sorry that that happened. But at the same time, if that hadn’t, I wouldn’t be speaking to the woman in front of me now. And the fact that you own yourself, your space, that you’re allowing yourself to be seen.
52:09
and you’re showing up the way that you want to show, not the way that somebody else’s or the way that you’re reacting or hyper-compensating at all, you’re able to really just embrace who you are. And I’m so impressed with the warrior that I see before me and the fighter that you’re becoming in the process as well. Thank you. I hope this is the beginning. I hope there’s a lot coming after this. There absolutely is. And you’re halfway to the goal now, unless they keep adding more fights to this guy’s record.
52:36
slowed me down so much. Yeah. But if they don’t find any hidden fights, like war and I get back. Yeah. It’s like, Oh, we found some more. Sylvia, thank you so much for everything. Where can our listeners learn more about you? How can they support you with Patreon? Tell us all the links about the Muay Thai library. Tell us everything. I am very easy to find. If you just Google Sylvie and spell my name correctly and Muay. And spell it for us, please. It’s S Y L V I E.
53:06
So Sylvie Moy will find me everywhere on the internet, but I have a massive YouTube channel that has lots of free content, it has lots of interviews. So part of the Preserve the Legacy is for free on there. We have a lot of excerpts from the Muay Thai library. So if you see something there and you’re like, this is awesome, I want more of that, you can decide to become a patron. Patrons cool in that it has tiers. So you can start at a very, very low, even $1 a month gives you access to some of the library and lots of different content. And then,
53:34
I’ve been told by many people that $10 tier, which gives you the entire library, which is more than 120 hours of long form instruction. Now people are like, I cannot believe that $10 gets me this. I want people to see it. I want people to really get into it and people will watch legends in the Muay Thai library and really identify with them. And then they’ll make a trip out to Thailand and get to train with them. It’s very cool. I’m on Instagram, Facebook as Sylvie Moy, as you’ve said.
54:03
And I also have a blog, 8limbsus, that I’ve been writing for the past 10 years. So you get like nascent baby Sylvie having lots of thoughts before coming to Thailand. And then kind of my process of understanding gender and violence and things like that in the process of understanding Muay Thai over the past 10 years. This is such a powerful, it’s truly like just a biopsy of her life, of her journey. And with that library, they’re constantly adding to it. There’s constantly more material coming.
54:33
So if you want to learn more about traditional Muay Thai, this is the place to do it, because it’s happening in real time. But even if that isn’t your main focus, just to follow Sylvie, just to see her evolve, just to see her ascend as a fighter, as a human, as a woman, as a warrior, this to me is worth following just for that alone. And if you learn some Muay Thai in the process, then everybody wins. So that’s the goal. So thank you so much for everything that you do. Thank you for being the warrior and the champion that you are. And I look forward to interviewing you.
