In this episode of ‘Before We Get There,’ host Nicholas Braman interviews Michael Thompson, a Canadian game designer who has lived in Singapore for over 15 years. Michael discusses his extensive career in the gaming industry, working on major titles like FIFA and NHL for Electronic Arts and Ghost Recon for Ubisoft. Currently, he is the course chair for the Department of Game Design at DigiPen Institute of Technology in Singapore. Michael also shares his experiences and insights from over 20 years of training in Brazilian Jiujitsu, touching on the growth of the sport in Singapore and how to stay fit as you age. The conversation delves into the challenges and rewards of both fields, highlighting the parallels between them. Michael also offers advice to those aspiring to enter the gaming industry.
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Nicholas: Welcome to Before We Get There. The podcast where we explore people’s journeys, how they got to where they are, what keeps them pushing forward, and where they eventually want to get to. I’m your host, Nicholas Braman, and today I’m joined by Michael Thompson, a Canadian who’s been living in Singapore for over 15 years.
Michael’s career includes working on games like FIFA and NHL for EA, Ghost Recon, and many more titles for Ubisoft. And currently, he is the course chair for the Department of Game Design at DigiPen Institute of Technology in Singapore. Michael is also a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt who has been training since the early 2000s.
In this discussion, we talked about the gaming industry and misconceptions people have. What Jiu Jitsu training was like in the early days. How to stay fit. As you age, the growth of jujitsu in Singapore and much more. Enjoy the show. Thanks so much for joining me today. Yeah, I’m glad to be here. So actually we haven’t talked about this before, but I think we grew up very near each other.
Yeah. You’re from Vancouver, right?
Michael Thompson: Yeah. Technically it’s Vancouver is like one of those places that people say they’re from Vancouver, but it’s like being from New York. Hardly anybody’s actually from Vancouver. I guess Ryan Reynolds is, he’s the only guy. Right. So then how long have you been in Singapore?
So I’ve been in Singapore since 2009. I think I came over the end of 2009.
Nicholas: And how did you end up here? Did you know much about
Michael Thompson: Singapore before you got here? No, no, nobody knows much about Singapore. So yeah, I was working for Electronic Arts, the video game company. And so I’d been working for them, I think quite a few years at that point.
I’d say seven or eight years. And I just wanted to change Vancouver is a rainy city. It’s like same as Seattle, right? So it’s great for about two weeks in the summer. Amazing, right? That’s when they take all the pictures and then the rest of the time, it’s mostly rainy. I think it was October and I got this invite.
Hey, do you want to, we have a job opening for a lead UX UI designer. So that’s my background in the gaming world. And yeah, they said, Hey, we want to fly you over. We’ll pay for everything. We’ll put you up in a nice hotel. And pay for all your food and drive you around. And if you don’t want the job, that’s fine.
And I thought, that’s, that seems great. So I did that and I thought this is a unique opportunity and I get some international experience. And, and yeah, I came over then for, for EA.
Nicholas: Wow. That’s cool. Had you ever been to Asia prior to that trip?
Michael Thompson: I’ve been to California and I’ve been down to Seattle a bunch of times.
So I have relatives down in, scattered throughout Seattle, down in Olympia. Uh, And, uh, in Vancouver, Washington, uh, but that was about as far as, uh, it went.
Nicholas: And that’s a huge move for the first time. So you were by yourself or? Yeah, yeah,
Michael Thompson: no, by myself, single guy coming to Singapore and I have no idea what’s going to go on and, uh, just thought I’d take a shot, see how it goes.
Nicholas: That’s cool. And did you have any culture
Michael Thompson: shock? How was the adjustment like? Yeah, definitely. There’s some culture shock. Obviously Singapore is often called like a kind of link between sort of Western and Eastern. So it’s not like you’re moving to, I don’t know, Northern Cambodia or something. Like it’s not going to be like that, but definitely there’s culture shock.
And
Nicholas: so actually my story of how I got here is a bit similar. I was actually living in Shanghai, uh, which my wife, we’d just gotten married. So I’d spent a total of five years off and on, uh, living in China. And then she’s the one who got the opportunity to come here. But same thing for me. I had no idea, uh, anything about Singapore.
We’d visited KL the year before, and that was my first time in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia area. So we just took the leap and we’ve loved it ever since. Just like yourself, settled down here now and no, no plans to move back to the U S. Thanks. The first few years, I thought that eventually we’d move back, but then the way things have been going in the U.
S. and how much we love it here, there’s no reason to
Michael Thompson: go back. That’s it. I look at the weather and then I think about the chaos. And I think, nah, maybe I’ll wait a little while. We can wait. It’s fine.
Nicholas: So going back to your career and working here, what got you over here in the first place? I think gaming sounds like a dream field for many people.
If you’re somebody who likes to game, what are maybe some misconceptions that people have? There’s definitely a lot
Michael Thompson: for sure, because I’m teaching now as well. So I see a lot of the people that come in that want to be in the games industry. I’d say the main misconception is that it’s, it maybe is something of a dream job that all you do is play games all day and fool around and then maybe have Nerf gun fights or something.
But it’s a serious business and it’s no different really than the, the project management and development of any software. It’s. Tech and software. At the end of the day, end of the day, you’re running a business or you’re participating in the running of a business that business needs to make a profit.
You have release dates, you have certain milestones that you have to meet. There’s a lot of those. And so just, it’s a serious business. The main thing, maybe that separates it from a lot of sort of standard corporate environments is that you probably don’t have to wear a suit. That’s it. You can wear a t shirt and jeans or whatever.
I saw people come to work in pajamas. None of that matters, right? You just do the work and you’ll be fine. It’s a real business. So if you love playing games, but you really don’t like making them, you may discover that it’s not the, it’s not the career for you.
Nicholas: Is that casual relaxed atmosphere the same in Singapore as you saw in Vancouver?
Michael Thompson: I would say so. Gaming in general is pretty much like that. Maybe in Singapore, there’s not so many dogs, um, the EA offices, especially in Burnaby. Are there’s just dogs everywhere. I don’t know how they get there. Everybody has a dog. You can bring them to work, let them sit under your desk. That’s no problem.
So maybe it’s a little more casual there.
Nicholas: And so you focus on UI, UX for people who don’t know, uh, what does that mean? And what part of their games are you working on?
Michael Thompson: Right. For me, mostly it’s, uh, sort of user interface aspects. So all the screens that, uh, any player would interact with in order to customize characters, make decisions, input that information into the system.
As well as HUD. So that’s a heads up display. So. Any data on screen, other than the game, right? Uh, health bars, mini maps, alert messages, anything like it’s coming up. That’s the stuff that I did.
Nicholas: And so what are the most important factors that you’re thinking about when you’re designing a system like that?
Michael Thompson: So with gaming, the UX aspect and the UI aspect is a little bit different because games are so heavily branded, right? There’s a mythos, there’s a world, there’s a fictional environment, and oftentimes there’s lore in place. So it’s Really something that has a lot of narrative attached to it, which is a lot more, is a lot different than something that might be a banking app or some piece of software that’s just a tool like a Photoshop or Illustrator, right?
There’s no narrative to Photoshop, whereas there are narratives to games, so you’re always thinking about, okay, how do I align with the brand vision? How do I align with the visual direction? If this is a game where it is like maybe an RPG style game, how do I make it look like it’s suitable for that genre, right?
So you really need to know your genres quite well. Uh, so you’re concerned about that. And at the same time, you’re really concerned about standard UX stuff, which has to do more with, uh, making sure the needs of the players are met. So the, the users and what is their age range? What are their. Capabilities, what games are they familiar with previously?
Is this a younger audience game? In which case you probably going to have to make things pretty simple. Is this maybe a more serious or adult oriented game? You can go more complex. And then how are you going to test those things without going too far down the rabbit hole of investing in code? Code is always expensive.
So you want to really start coding things when you’ve made a lot of final decisions already. And so how are we going to map out our usability testing, making sure this whole system works for people before we actually get to the point where we’re really developing things and putting things in the game that are in any way final, but you’ve got these two things that you have to think about that in, in sort of normal UX practice, like website design or app design, you don’t have to think about it so much.
The branding there is pretty minimal and secondary. Whereas with games, branding and the narrative is huge.
Nicholas: Right. It’s part of the experience of playing a game.
Michael Thompson: A huge part of it.
Nicholas: So on that point, I’ve definitely played some games that were frustrating, or maybe I just didn’t gel with the interface as much as others.
Is from a, from your expertise, is that they ran out of time? Is it just personal preference? They ran out of budget or what could be the reason? I mean,
Michael Thompson: it’s, there’s a very good chance that it is a budget issue because development takes time and testing takes time. And getting people in to test costs something.
And so a lot of times studios have hard deadlines. Like we are dedicated to, let’s say a late November release, because we know that upscale, the sales are going to have an uptick just before Christmas. So we got to hit that date. A lot of times when I did box products at EA, because they’re sports products, we make one every year.
We really have to get that thing shipped and ready to go by November, mid November, because by early December, we have to start seeing sales. So it has to be either on shelves or distributed through the online distribution. All of that is, there’s always pressure. So a lot of times, yeah, companies, developers, designers, they know what they’re supposed to do.
Is there time and budget to do it? Yeah, maybe a lot of times. No, a lot of times. No.
Nicholas: So yes, you’ve worked on some super well known games that I think a lot of people have played and being alive, need for speed a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So those games. Are they the type of game that you enjoy yourself? Uh, to some
Michael Thompson: extent, definitely.
I played a lot more need for speed. The one I had a little bit of contact with was need for speed underground, the first underground. Um, and I definitely play them sometimes. I’m Canadian and I understand I’m betraying my nation here, but I actually am not a huge hockey fan. So I didn’t really play NHL all that seriously.
Mostly. I like like FPS, first person shooters. Like I always tell my students, if you have a game where you’re shooting grenades, killing zombies, setting zombies on fire, and there’s canisters that blow up, in fact, the more things I can blow up, the better, basically. I want more explosions. There’s never enough.
That’s the kind of game I like. Narratively based campaign modes. Kind of old school shooters.
Nicholas: So what is that experience like having worked on the project and then going on steam or back in the day, having a disc that you put into your PS4 or whatever. What’s that feeling of seeing your work come to life and all completed and playable?
Michael Thompson: Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing. It’s a, it’s a huge part of what. The appeal of working in the games industry is because I think a lot of times if you’re working on in general software, I don’t know, you work for whoever and you release a piece of software and it goes commercial and that’s great. You definitely, you want to see the profits and you want to see, you have a nice bonus and have some vacation time and stuff, but yeah, when you release a game, considering how hard it is to make a game, it really is so difficult and especially if you’re trying to hit a hard deadline.
And you, people are working, there’s crunch time. There’s probably some illegal hours going on. I don’t want to say there’s been some lawsuits in the past. People can look that up, but you work, work, work like a crazy person and you sacrifice your weekends. A lot of times you come in during your breaks and then finally you release it.
And you see your name in the credits. Okay. I distinctly remember it would have been 2002. That’s a long time ago and seeing my name come up on the credits and feeling like holy cow like I’m a made up mom and dad. It’s an amazing feeling because you really do band together as a team and there’s so much struggle and disappointment and heartbreak along the way and then you release this game and it’s a really amazing feeling.
It really is.
Nicholas: So, I don’t know if they still have these, but I remember some of my favorite things to watch back a long time ago on DVDs is they used to have the director’s commentary or the actor’s commentary on some of the big films. And I think, like Lord of the Rings, I watched not just the movie a bunch of times, but also the director’s commentary another five or ten times.
In addition to that, it was always, if you hear behind the scenes and, and like you said, people there, it’s a, a once in a lifetime experience that they have this bond together, that they go through this experience and the story behind the making of the movie is, can be a whole nother movie in itself. Yeah.
Are there a lot of parallels to something like TV production or, or movie cinema? Yeah. Yeah. I,
Michael Thompson: I definitely think it’s probably like TV I’ve never worked in, in movie or TV production, but I think it’s probably alum like that because you are creating something that. It has a shelf life, right? You’ve started the project on this day and you need to ship the product or be done by this day.
And you bond together and create something that is in many ways fictional. And there’s arguments and there’s discussions and there’s plans that you go on and we’re definitely going to do this. And then you do some early testing, some market research or some data comes back. You’re like, Oh, we’re not doing that.
We’re shifting. And so it’s this big, crazy, creative endeavor. That is a lot more than just solving technical and or user problems. There’s something about it that is deeply creative. Right. And so when you release this thing, it is, yeah, it is like, you’ve become a little, it’s like a little battalion. It’s almost like a military experience.
We went through hell together, boys. And, and then you finally shipped the thing. You’re like, you’re spent, right? You’re like, wow, that was, that was crazy. What we did.
Nicholas: And what was your favorite? Project or game that you worked on? Right.
Michael Thompson: So, strangely enough, the project that I, I worked on that I enjoyed the most, that was probably the biggest failure, I think, was uh, a game called Ghost Recon.
Phantoms. So that was a, a sort of tactical online third person shooter built, made by Ubisoft. And I think what made it unique was that the team really bonded around playing the game. It was the first game where that I’d ever worked on that I really loved to play. I’d like playing NHL and I worked on FIFA online and that’s fine.
But that game really, we loved it. And it’s strange because It’s been like many years since I worked on that game and most of the people that were the original dev team, I’m still Facebook friends with them. I’m friends on LinkedIn with them. If they need a job, I’ll help them out. If I need a job, I’ll, I’m, I know I can count on them.
It’s really like we, we made a family and no matter how far we go in the world, some of them are in Sweden and Finland and Germany, and they’re over in the U S now, we honestly still have that bond that we work on this little side project together. And the fact that it didn’t ever make money and eventually got canned is just, you know, a bit disappointing.
But at the end of the day, like it was just such a great group of people to work with. Everybody was so committed. Um, so that was definitely the, the most fun experience I’ve ever had developing a game.
Nicholas: So what is that feeling like when you yourself love to play the game, you’ve been putting so much effort, so much work into making an amazing game and the reception isn’t as good as you hoped it to
Michael Thompson: be?
Yeah, so it doesn’t feel great, but you always have to take the audience feedback with a grain of salt. I remember reading reviews on Steam and, uh, the people who are the most negative or the most toxic or just have the most complaints and gripes in any scenario, it isn’t just true in games, it’s every scenario is like this, but the people that have the most complaints will speak up and the people who actually are just having a great time.
Tend to not speak up so much. So you just look at your numbers versus the number of negative people. And no, our total numbers are solid, even though there’s this virulent group of people who maybe are being negative or whatever. Uh, I think in terms of the sales, it’s a very hard thing. I think we had a vision of what you could do with a.
Cooperative, very tactical shooter. So to get very sort of game genre, game industry ish. It’s really difficult. The truth is it’s really difficult to get human beings to cooperate. Most of the time in complex ways. You understand why the military does so much training on just getting people to follow instructions and cooperate.
Because you’d think it’s easy. Oh, you can get kids to cooperate. No, you can’t. You can’t get adults to commute, to cooperate, uh, especially when you have a complex set of goals or the, the requirements of the task are multistage. It’s going to be really hard to get people to cooperate in ways that support the goal and aren’t just about them, maybe one upping each other.
And so we built a game that required a great deal of very military like cooperation. And it turned out that it was just too hard to get people to do it.
Nicholas: That’s interesting because now you have. Ultra realistic military scenes, I think Arma, Helmet Loose, yeah, those kind. So do you think just the timing was wrong?
Yeah, I think, I think the
Michael Thompson: timing is wrong. I think Ubisoft, it was an Ubisoft game. I think we weren’t really sure and the leadership wasn’t really sure how to make this kind of game. Ubisoft is known for open world narratively based campaigns. Right? Not multiplayer, not co op, not so much hardcore military sims.
Even though this had a sci fi angle, uh, the tactics were very much based on real world military action. And so there’s just a lot, not a lot of experience there. It was a bit of an experiment. The game itself is strange enough. There’s a Facebook group that I’m, I’m a part of, uh, that’s all former current fans of the game who still.
So these aren’t devs, right? These aren’t people who were involved in the development. They’re just people who played it. This very small cohort of people that still love the game and still talk about it. I think of it almost like a cult classic for that particular genre. Not a lot of success, but there is this group of hardcore fans that, that still talk about how great it was.
And that actually really makes me feel good about it.
Nicholas: Yeah, that’s super cool that this amount of time later, there’s, there’s still people who are into it. So then you, a few years ago, you moved into teaching, how did that come about?
Michael Thompson: So I think at that point I’d been, I was at EA for around 10 years and then I was at Ubisoft for another six and I was just burned out from the games industry.
The truth is it is a demanding industry and you, the hours can be very long, uh, especially during crunch time when you’re about to release a game, so that can get very tough. So And I wanted to have a, just a shift, just a change of pace. And so I, I applied first for a teaching job at Singapore Poly. So I taught there for a year and DigiPen, which is the company I work for now, which is a local, what we call overseas university.
We’re very close to us. And I knew some people who were there and there was a job opening up. I applied and fortunately was lucky enough to get it. So I’ve been there since then.
Nicholas: And how did you find the transition? Cause that’s a pretty big career transition from doing it yourself to. Yeah, so
Michael Thompson: I, along the way, fortunately at EA and Ubisoft, I taught sort of one off courses and done some internal sort of corporate training, um, sort of leadership, more leadership style roles.
And so it wasn’t too bad. I think the main thing is to, when you move into teaching, especially at the poly level, these are not working professionals, right? These are mostly kids, right? They’re pre in Singapore. They’re pre NS. So you can’t expect a level of professionalism. Part of what they’re learning is professionalism.
Yeah. So they’re not coming it to it as a 28 or 30 or 32 year old working professionals who’ve been in an industry and they’re serious and whatnot. You have to approach it with some of them are going to have a better attitude. Some of them are not, but you have to try to teach everybody. So adapting to that, that there’s going to be some varying levels.
Some of them are going to be super enthusiastic. And they just can’t wait to get to class every day and learn more. And some of them, quite frankly, are probably regretting the program that they went into. A Singapore poly system is an odd system anyway. Um, so it shoehorns kids pretty early. And so a lot of them, I think maybe I shouldn’t have gone into this.
Nicholas: And what advice would you give somebody who hopes to
Michael Thompson: get into the gaming industry? So I think that the main thing is figure out what you want to do in the industry. It’s an industry, so there are many roles, not just game designer or not just programmer. A lot of times when I tell people, Oh, I was in the gaming industry and now I help teach game design.
They say, Oh, were you an artist or a programmer? No, I was actually neither of those things. I was something different. But there’s project managers and producers. There’s all sorts of different software engineers, many different types of software engineers, but there’s human resources people. There’s marketing, so mark on people, there’s sales people, there’s research people.
There’s so many different kinds of roles in the industry that figure out what you want to do, right? It doesn’t mean that you have to be, Oh, I’m not very good at programming, so I can’t be in the game industry. That’s not true at all. Um, so I would say, yeah, find out more about the gaming industry, how really diverse it is, and then start moving yourself towards that.
Certainly in terms of game design, play and analyze games. Don’t just play games. A lot of students come on board, even now at where I am now, and they apply because they love playing games, but they don’t necessarily love analyzing and then creating their own games. That’s a very different practice. And so for some of them, it’s probably better they do something else and just keep their gaming as a hobby, right?
They will enjoy it more. Something I do tell students quite frequently is. Look, I’m here to ruin games for you because after this, you will never look at games in a naive, this is for fun. I’m playing cause it’s cool. I like this character. He or she is awesome. You’re never going to look at games like that ever again.
Now you’re going to look at it and you think, you know what? I think that animation timing was a little bit off and actually that jump, the jump physics are clearly flawed. The controllers really need to be retuned. I don’t think they did any user testing on this interface. It’s completely messed, uh, complete mess.
You’re going to become an analyst and you’re going to pick apart and critique everything, because that’s what you have to do as a designer. And yeah, you’re never going to be able to enjoy a game ever again.
Nicholas: Out of all those things, when you put them together, do you, how do you feel about what makes a special game, like a game that just
Michael Thompson: hits it on all fronts?
For the dev team, the people who are actually designing and developing the game, yeah, at the end of the day, you do have to be a little bit cold about it. Right. It’s not. Really a baby, right? You do feel like, Oh, that’s our baby. But at the end of the day, you’re going to get some things accomplished that you really wanted to get accomplished and that are really going to work out.
And there’s going to be some decisions you had to make that you wish you didn’t have to make them. And there’s going to be some decisions you make that were probably not the best decision. And you just didn’t have time to reanalyze, to think about it too much. By the end, I, we always imagine you’re like, you’re shoveling, right?
You’re just shoveling this thing. Is that a bug? Okay. Yes, it is. But what’s the priority? What’s a P0 bug? No, not getting done. Not getting fixed. Sorry. We have P5s. We have crash bugs we’re dealing with. We have art not rendering properly. We have all sorts of crazy stuff going on. And so you have to focus on those.
And then you just be proud of the things that you worked on that are good. And you try to learn from the things that were not so good and try to prevent them as much as you can in the future. And that’s it. Right. You got to let go at the end of the day. Strangely enough, it’s a lot like jujitsu.
Nicholas: Yeah. I was just thinking that as you were saying it.
So similar,
Michael Thompson: so similar.
Nicholas: Let’s segue into that because that’s how we met, right? A few open nets and some seminars around Singapore. And you’re of course, a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt. So they tell me, so they
Michael Thompson: tell me. How long have you been training? Right. So I’ve been training since I think 2002. So, uh, I, I did stop for a couple of years and so I won’t count that, but it’s over 20.
I try not to think about it too much. I always think when I tell people like, oh yeah, over 20 years, they’re probably like, man, this guy must be some deadly super ninja, like just the most amazing guy. And then actually I feel like I’m quite mediocre to be honest. But no,
Nicholas: you definitely feel like a super ninja when I rolled.
Michael Thompson: That’s my goal is super ninja.
Nicholas: And so that Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has been getting a lot more popular in the past 10 years or so, and Singapore, there’s gyms all across Singapore now, all kinds of people training, but what was it like when you first started? Yeah,
Michael Thompson: so because I started in 2002, and actually the first gym I started with was Colson Gracie gym run by a guy named Marcus Soares in Vancouver, but they moved away really quickly.
So I only got one class in there. Yeah. And I, but I absolutely got destroyed. Like I remember very distinctly the next day I couldn’t walk. Thank God it was a Saturday, I think, or a Sunday that I literally couldn’t walk down a set of stairs. I had to maneuver myself very slowly down. And so another gym opened up really close to me that was called Cocoon Athletics and it was a actually a JKD, Jeet Kune Do school.
But, and that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to do like street fighting and Muay Thai and that kind of stuff and striking. As part of my membership, there was also jujitsu. So I, I just started doing that to squeeze as much out of my limited funds at the time as possible. So yeah, just started training.
Jujitsu then was not very good. Absolutely hated it. Sucked for a long time. And, and so, yeah, if anything, jujitsu has taught me hits, it’s just keep going. Right. You, if you keep going in any endeavor, whether it’s a career based endeavor or just investments or some, something you’re doing in your life, most people, most of the time will quit.
If that’s not, you’re going to be the successful people at the end. It’s just that simple. Even if you’re not the most brilliant or talented person at the beginning, you will definitely see people come in and man, they’re just amazing. And you’re like, why can’t I be like that? I go to class, I get my butt kicked.
I go home. I come back to class the next day. I get my butt kicked. I go home. And that happens month after month, year after year. And you think, why am I even doing this? Very commonly, those very talented people have a few upsets along the way, right? They enter a competition and they don’t do that well, or they have a bad class.
They can’t stand it. Um, whereas if you just keep grinding away, like, you’re like, I’m a loser, but I’m going to keep going. I often think of it like climbing up a glacier coated in broken glass. I’m just going to keep going.
Nicholas: Yeah. That’s. I think most, not most people, but a lot of people feel like they suck at jujitsu.
I’m definitely one of them. And that’s the mantra I’ve given myself as well, because I’ve only been doing it for five years, but I’ve certainly, first of all, seen tons of people that are super gung ho for a few months or even a year, and then they disappear, they bring themselves out or they just have other priorities in their life.
And then also other people that come in and. Look like they’re naturals again, maybe behind the scene, they’re watching Instructionals. Yeah, three hours a day or stuff that you don’t know, but they certainly appear to be learning a lot quicker than I’m able to but again, it’s just keeping going and Not comparing yourself to others to make yourself get down feel bad.
So at that time training in Canada It’s I’m guessing from what I know of the history of this the sport that it was a pretty niche
Michael Thompson: So very few people train even knew what it was. Um, yeah, it was mostly security people, police bouncers, MMA fighters, actual gangsters, and then a few weirdos like me that just showed up and started trading.
I had no idea how I got there. And the classes would be five or six people. They were definitely rough. I think at that time, in terms of the progression of jujitsu out of Brazil, mostly out of Rio, it went out of Rio into Southern California, and then it drifted up the West coast in NorCal, and then made it up into Pacific Northwest in Vancouver, and that’s where it first branched out from that Brazil to California space, and so we were very much connected, still connected to the idea that this is for MMA.
This is for street fighting. And we just kicked the crap out of each other. This is no other way to say it. There was no sense of letting white belts work. Never heard of such a thing. The job of white belts was to get your ass kicked. That’s it. And it, the test was, if you keep showing up, then we’ll teach you something.
But your main job here is just to be meat. You’re just in a meat grinder and you’re going to have to figure out how to take it. And yeah, we had bloody ears and bloody noses. And I remember my neck would just be covered, especially ghee, right? My neck would be covered in bloody marks. I had marks down my face.
I’d go to work, right? And people would be like, what are you doing? What’s going on? Did you get in a fight? No, it’s this thing I pay for. Yeah, but I pay for it. Like, you got some weird hobbies, man. So it was very neat, definitely. And still very much connected to MMA and, and street fighting, street self defense.
Nicholas: So one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about jiu jitsu here is the community and the bond, again, that you have with people you train with. Was that part of it then, even though they were going hard on you and they weren’t necessarily trying to let you work, was there still that camaraderie after the role was over or was it?
Michael Thompson: I think maybe even more because it wasn’t, wasn’t a family activity. There’s no kids classes. Nobody knew what a kid’s class was. Classes were an hour and a half. Yeah. I, I remember the transition when all of a sudden classes started being an hour. I was like, what’s going on here? Classes were an hour and a half and more, right?
Because people would just stay and roll or train techniques, talk about what had happened. And so it was much looser in terms of the scheduling. And, and definitely there was, I would say more of a bond because you felt like it’s a little bit fight club esque, but you felt like you were in a fight club because you had really like brawled.
You’d just come and brawled with each other. And so you had this bond of we’re the rare few crazy weirdos that are willing to put ourselves through this.
Nicholas: And so was that part of the reason that you kept doing it, even though you were getting beat up and didn’t feel like you were progressing? Um,
Michael Thompson: I don’t know, for whatever reason, I was never into competitive sports.
I’m, I suppose I’m average size in Asia, but I’m tiny in Canada, 173 centimeters. What is that? Five? I’m like five, six, 65 kg. Right. And that’s, that’s big. That’s me eating a lot. Definitely sports, hockey and stuff was not an option, really. Having that experience, I was still very competitive. And so the idea of me not training while everybody else that was kicking my ass was getting better.
I, I just, it would eat me a lot. So I’m like, don’t want to go to class. I would have anxiety attacks. I would feel sick before class. Very frequently. I think I’m going to throw up for class, but I couldn’t not go because I was so irritated by the idea that people would be getting better and I would be at home, not getting better.
So that’s still, to be honest, motivates me sometimes. Ah, that guy gave me a lot of trouble last time and I think he’s going to be at class. I better go. I better go.
Nicholas: I think one of the things that’s interesting about Jiu Jitsu is, That it is difficult to measure your progress because you’re turning it.
Everybody else is basically advancing at the same time as you are. So I, you know, I think it’s quite common to give people advice. Hey, think about yourself when you first started or a year ago. Could you beat yourself from then over such a long period of time that you’ve been training certainly now for me, even at this stage, which of course I have a young kid, uh, work’s been busy, so I’m not training as much as I did the first two or three years, but.
I don’t see myself. I don’t see progress. I’m not able to measure the progress that I’m making. And so over an even longer time frame, how do you think about that at all? No, I mean, I
Michael Thompson: think so. Especially once you reach something of an advanced level, you can’t necessarily come to class and have an instructor teach you something that you have never seen before, right?
It really very rarely happens. Every once in a while, there’ll be a small detail added. By an instructor, but in general, I’m probably going to go to an average jiu jitsu class and they’re going to show something that I have seen before 15 years ago and that I’m quite familiar with. So what you need to do is take ownership of your own learning and set yourself mini tasks.
So that really sustains me a lot. I’ll take a particular move. Maybe it’s a particular sweep and I decide I’m going to learn this sweep. And I’ll watch videos on it. I will visualize it in my mind. Think about it. I’m I’ll imagine that I’m teaching it to somebody, even though nobody’s there. I’m just, I’m on the bus and I must look out of my head sometimes because I’m literally doing it.
And people must look at me like, what is this guy doing? I’m, I’m doing a, I’m going to a two on one, right? I’m doing a Russian. Um, so I do those things. And then when I get to class, whatever the teacher or the instructor teaches that day, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do my move and I’ll keep doing that.
And against everyone, white belts, blue belts, brown belts, black belts, purple belts, all belts, I’m going to try my move. And my goal for that class is to try my move, not to make it work, because probably regardless of your belt level, if you’re a black belt, who cares? If you’re trying to move that really is new to you, like the really new technique, you’re still a white belt.
You’re a white belt at that technique, maybe a blue belt, if it’s something you’re familiar with, right? You do develop the ability to learn more quickly as you progress, but you’re still very low level. So chances are white belts and blue belts are going to smash you. You got to say, you know what, I don’t care.
That’s fine. I’m not investing my ego in proving that I’m really a black belt by kicking the crap out of every blue belt and purple belt and brown belt. You have to do your move, you force yourself to do your moves. And then you set that as a project. And when it starts working, uh, against white belts, and then it starts working against blue belts, and then it starts working with purples and browns.
And maybe you even catch some black belts in it. Now, you know that you’re making progress. Um, but you have to do it on a sort of technique by technique basis or move by move basis. Um, and it has to be proactive.
Nicholas: We should talk about how you keep healthy and are able to still train for such a long time.
Michael Thompson: People say, listen to your body. I admit, I’ve been told by many people like coaches and black belts and stuff like, man, you’re 38 now. You better slow down. You’re 40 now. You better slow down. You’re 45. You really can’t train like this. You roll like you’re 20 years old. Don’t do that. Uh, I’m 49. I’m 49. I still sometimes get told like, man, you, you roll like you’re 25.
Um, I never claimed to be intelligent. Um, I never claimed to be a genius about this stuff. The truth is, yeah, you, you need to listen to your body. Right. So I had a pretty hard training session yesterday. Did a lot of standup rounds with some bigger guys, a hundred kg plus guys. And so today I went to train at SG Grappling and you know what?
I let people pass my guard and I reguarded and I tell myself, you know what today? I’m re guarding, that’s all I’m doing is I’m working on re guarding, I’m going to let you all pass or almost pass, then I’m going to work my way back to guard, and then I’m going to let you pass, then I’m going to almost pass, or I’m going to work on escapes today, I’m going to let people take cross sight, and then I’m going to escape to my feet, and then I come back down again and I let you pass and we just rinse and repeat, and that way I don’t have this brawling, hard, intense session, other people can go as hard as they want, it doesn’t really matter.
I make sure that I don’t put in so much effort that I’m trashed. I am really careful about my diet. People are like, Oh, you have a cheat day. No, you have a cheat meal, man. A cheat day, a cheat meal. And, and that seems to keep me going.
Nicholas: Right. And so is that level of discipline something you’ve always had? No, no, no.
Or can you start to miss it? I
Michael Thompson: mean, it’s definitely something I developed over time. I find that if you make some concessions, once you get into eating a really clean diet. Based around larger goals. That’s the main thing is you have to think about, okay, well, what do I really want here? Do I want to feel healthy?
Do I want to have enough energy, but I don’t want to feel sluggish. Do I want to go to jujitsu and perform well and not be sucking wind half a round in? I want that, or do I value eating a Snickers on a Tuesday afternoon? Which do I find better? Some people want the Snickers. They want a donut and a beer, whatever it is they want.
But at some point I decided as I was in my late 30s, you know what? I really like being able to physically perform pretty well at jujitsu, and I was doing a lot of Muay Thai and stuff. That’s, man, cardio intensive. I like going to class and performing well. I like rolling with people and not getting completely gassed.
And so I like those things more than I like indulging in food all the time. So I just partition it. You just make decisions.
Nicholas: And how have you seen the sport in Singapore grow since you? Yeah,
Michael Thompson: when I first came here, I came here probably about three months before Evolve opened. And this is Evolve by the one by Doby Gawt.
The first gym, there was no jujitsu in Singapore at this point, or very little. Maybe there have been like one small club somewhere, maybe a Singapore BJJ maybe had been around. I’m not sure, but there were definitely no large gyms. And so I looked up online before I even got here. I was like, I got to find somewhere to train.
And so I went to the Evolve location there and they were just building it. They had the space, but they were just building it. And I said, Hey, like I’m a brown belt. I was a brown belt at the time. And so, yeah, the scene is really blown up. And, and like I said, it’s followed the same pattern, I think that DJJ has elsewhere.
You have these much bigger and much more diverse group of people who are trading. And it’s not just a bunch of dudes who want to fight each other. There’s families, there’s family classes, a lot more girls involved, which is amazing. There’s way more people who are, you know, not necessarily competitors, never really want to compete.
Yeah. But they love learning. They love the culture. They love the fitness. They love the self defense aspects. And so it provides a lot of value for them in their lives. And so jujitsu as a way of improving your life is definitely something that wasn’t as much emphasized when I started. It was mostly jujitsu as a way of beating the crap out of somebody that wants to beat the crap out of you.
That’s what it was for.
Nicholas: And so do you think that has been because of people like Jocko Willard and Joe Rogan, who’ve been talking about BJJ, or do you think it’s because people realize it’s could be a profitable business?
Michael Thompson: All, all of the above. When I started, we were a Gracie Umeda school. We were under Megaton Diaz, those of you who know these guys.
And so he was our, kind of our main guy that would come up from California and teach us. And the instructor there was Tim Shears. Tim Shears is now a Gracie Baja black belt. Eventually we transitioned to Gracie Baja. And people have called Gracie Baja Starbucks of jiu jitsu. They have this jiu jitsu for everybody mentality.
And I think they can be credited with actually doing a lot of positive things to grow the activity of jiu jitsu. Let’s not call it the sport of jiu jitsu because although they’re certainly a big part of the competition scene, what they’ve really done is open up jiu jitsu to be something that moms can do, right?
Dads can do, kids can do, older people can do. And also 22 year old hyperactive competitors that want to brawl every time can also do. So it’s much more diverse. So I think we have to give Gracie Baha a lot of credit there for universalizing jujitsu. And so in Singapore, the same thing has happened. It’s gone from being a very niche thing where it was like some weird MMA fighter guys, and they just wanted to fight with each other to something that’s really potentially a very healthy family activity, which now that I have kids, honestly.
When that sort of movement first started happening, I thought this is, what is it they call it? Nutella jiu jitsu. This is not, no, you better have cauliflower ears your first month, okay? This is how it is. This is jiu jitsu. It’s not ballet. But, but now that I have kids and I see, it’s hard to keep kids in a sport.
It’s hard to keep busy working people in a sport. Especially if you really believe that it’s truly good for them. They’re busy. They’re stressed out. They, they don’t want to come to class. And feel like I often did, which is like, Oh my God, I’m gonna get elbowed in the face today, right? I’m going to come away with the big cuts on the inside of my mouth.
I’m going to come away with tears in my ears. I’m, I’m definitely bleeding a hundred percent. I’m going to bleed. They don’t want to go to a class and have that. And yet they can also still really learn very effective jujitsu and have a great time and get fit. I think that’s a big improvement. I’ve seen that happen in Singapore as well.
Nicholas: Yeah, that’s, I think it’s an improvement as well. Thank you so much again for, for joining me. Uh, it was great to have you on. Anything else you’d like to share or where can people find you? Right? Yeah.
Michael Thompson: I’m on Instagram on my asana, which is a reference to, I also do yoga and I fall down a lot, so I do fall sometimes a lot.
That’s true of jujitsu as well as yoga, I guess. And, uh, it’s true of life as well. So yeah, I’m there and I train at FAMA. Usually the old man BJJ or the, the old man nogi classes. I mostly do nogi these days and I think it’s easier on my joints. I’m fast, but I’m not strong. So Nogi is actually good for that.
Just be faster. That’s the secret for Nogi. Just be faster than everyone. And so I’m training at FAMA. And then of course I trained at SG Grappling. So come on down.
Nicholas: Right. Awesome. Thanks so much. All right. Thanks. Have a great day. Thank you for listening to Before We Get There with your host, Nicholas Braman.
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