The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Taking the Fight: A 62-Year-Old’s Incredible Journey to Win a Championship with Stewart Warren Dansby

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

Taking the Fight: A 62-Year-Old's Incredible Journey to Win a Championship with Stewart Warren Dansby Takingthefight.com About the Guest(s): Stewart Warren Dansby is an acclaimed executive producer and protagonist of the documentary "Taking the Fight." His life journey spans diverse achievements in both media production and martial arts. Taking on his first fight at the age of 56, Dansby has garnered recognition for his tenacity and skill, leading to screenings of his documentary at 25 film festivals and winning 31 awards. Despite facing significant health challenges, including complications with his ACL and degenerative disc disease, Dansby continues to inspire through his compelling story of resilience and determination. Episode Summary: In this riveting episode of The Chris Voss Show, host Chris Voss speaks with Stewart Warren Dansby about his extraordinary documentary, "Taking the Fight." Stewart's journey is a testament to courage and tenacity as he took on the world of competitive fighting at the age of 56, a time when many would consider retirement. The documentary has made waves, winning an impressive 31 awards and serving as an inspirational beacon for many. Stewart provides us with an intimate look into his life, detailing the rigorous six-year journey from his first fight against a 26-year-old to competing for a championship at the age of 62. Despite facing numerous physical challenges and overcoming bureaucratic hurdles, Stewart's story unfolds as a triumph of the human spirit. He emphasizes the importance of shifting perspectives—viewing obstacles as challenges rather than problems—and the pivotal role of a supportive team in achieving one’s dreams. Chris and Stewart dive deep into the themes of resilience and passion, exploring how Stewart's military upbringing and early love for fitness fueled his later-life achievements in martial arts. Stewart recounts stories of personal determination and highlights how a collective effort from his team and his unwavering self-belief helped him to succeed against all odds. Tune in to hear Stewart's motivational anecdotes and insightful advice on realizing one's dreams, irrespective of age or physical limitations. Key Takeaways: Age is Just a Number: Stewart's journey illustrates that passion and determination can defy age-related stereotypes. Overcoming Physical Challenges: Despite multiple serious injuries, Stewart continued to fight by focusing on his strengths and adapting his training. The Power of Perspective: Viewing obstacles as challenges rather than problems can significantly alter one's approach to overcoming them. Support Systems Are Crucial: The unwavering support from his team and family played an essential role in Stewart's success. Inspiration through Authenticity: Stewart's authentic and passionate pursuit of his dreams has touched and inspired many, transcending the boundaries of sport. Notable Quotes: "We all have things that hold us back from what our dreams really are…and it's how you put that energy into the world that attracts the people and the resources you need." "This is not a story of fighting…this is a story of love. It's the love of a dream, it's the love of the people that surround me." "The two most stressful words we have in the English language are 'problem' and 'obstacles.' If you focus anything in life as a challenge, you're going to find a way to get past that challenge." "Stop being a victim and beat them at their own game. If that's their challenge, find a way to get the test done." "People were walking up to me and stating, 'You're inspiring me,' and I would look at them and just say, 'I don't know what you're talking about.'"

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

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Thanks, guys, for tuning in. We have an amazing young man on the show with us today. We're going to be talking about his insights and his new movie that is out. Stuart Warren Dansby joins us on the show. He possesses a diverse range of talents and accomplishments. His journey encompasses both creative pursuits in media production and significant achievements as a fighter and in martial arts. He's an executive producer and protagonist of the documentary Taking the Fight. Stewart has garnered considerable acclaim. The film's impressive track record includes screenings at 25 film festivals

and winning 31 awards across multiple categories, such as Best Featured Documentary, Best Inspirational, Best Direction, Editing, and Best Original Musical Score. Its availability on major streaming platforms underscores its broad appeal and success in reaching audiences worldwide just came out in august of 2024 welcome to the show stewart how are you i'm perfect man i think the only part you didn't get accurate on that was introducing me as a young man but Oh, young man. We try and give people... I'll take it.

I'll take it. I'm perfect. How are you? We're all young, right? I am good, Stuart. Thank you for coming on the show. Give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you

on the interwebages? Anything about the film, you can find it. It's simple, takingthefight.com. And for me personally, Stuart Warren Dansby on Instagram and also Taking the Fight

is on Facebook as a Facebook page as well. So any of those places you want to reach out, please do. There you go. Give us an overview of the movie that you just put out. Okay. So Taking the Fight follows my journey, taking my first fight at the age of 56 against a 26 year old. And it follows me for six years, continuing to fight and finally having the opportunity to fight pursuing a championship and having that opportunity at the age of 62 against a 32 year old. And I do that with a right knee that according to the last

surgeon that was in there, medically speaking, I shouldn't be able to walk on. I don't have an ACL. I have grade four arthritis on bone on bone. My left knee, grade four arthritis, surgically repaired ACL. I have a degenerative disc in my neck and I have asthma. And I started fighting at obviously a much later age. But taking the fight is not a fighting documentary any more than Rocky is a boxing movie right we use fighting as the metaphor for every person to understand we all have a fight right we all have things that hold us back from what our dreams really are we're all told not as smart as that guy I don't have the resources of that girl I could never get that girlfriend or that boyfriend. We all have things that hold us back from what our dreams are. When taking the fight is, and I'm simply the

conduit to tell the story is, how do you get out of your own head? How do you understand what your dream really is? And some of us are really afraid to bring that dream to life, right? And then how do you put that energy into the world? And I call it the want it more than you want to breathe energy. How do you put that energy into the world to attract the people and the resources that you need? Because especially in this country, those people and resources are all around you, right? But until you give your dream that I want it more than I want to breathe, that's when they start coming forward. And if you give them a little bit more than what they thought they were going to get, they'll give you more.

And then everybody rises. So in a nutshell, we made sure that as we edited and told this story, that if the average person turned on and looked at this and said, I'm not a fighter, I'm not an athlete, they can still watch it and understand that message of how to lead their most passionate, achieving life. There you go. So tell us about your growing up. How did you go through your life? What was some of the things that shaped you and motivated you that got you to this point where at 56, you're like, hey, I'm going to take up something the young kids usually take up. Yeah, it sounds a little silly when you shape it up that way.

I was raised as a military child. My father was part of that greatest generation of 30-year military men. So I bounced around Japan, Greece, a lot of time in Canada. It's probably one reason why I live in Miami and I'm very comfortable living in Miami as a minority and why I'm able to appreciate and enjoy this culture, this diversity of this culture, right? But as a kid, I always got in fights, right? And my mom made the silly mistake of saying to me, you're small, so you're going to get picked on and make sure you punch somebody back if they punch you. And that was kind of given the keys to a Ferrari to a race

car driver, right? So I got in a lot of fights as a kid. It's just something I enjoy doing. But as you get older in life, that's stuff you kind of can't do or you're going to get in trouble. And it was always there in the edge in my teen years, getting into fights, early years of adulthood. But you got to abandon that. And I was always into fitness. But that urge, I think, was always still there. And I trained for years and had a friend of mine that was a kickboxer.

And I wanted to learn to take up boxing. So I said, hey, I don't know anybody, but I'll try this. And that first day he trained me, it was the most frustrating, humbling experience I ever had. And I truly didn't, I always thought I was an athlete until I did that. And then I just felt impotent, completely like a rock-em, sock-em robot. I couldn't do anything. And it was absolutely, I use the word humbly,

and I couldn't get over that. And I just knew at that moment, I'm like, I love this, though, and it can't beat me. I've got to be good at it. And just a passion, if you will, was lit inside me. Wow. There you go. And, I mean, you had definitely some health issues that we all kind of accumulated over a lifetime where we, you know, things happen to our bodies. I mean, I've definitely done a few things to mine, but did any thought go into that? Hey, you know, I like this passion. I, you know, I'm not sure I'm the right man for the job? Yeah, you know, that's an interesting question.

I think one of the things I've never looked at, and you might say it's stupid, but it's actually, in the long run, it's helped me. I never looked at the age difference of the guys I was fighting, right? So I never thought, I'm going against a guy who's 21, I'm 52, 53 at the time, right? I'm just looking at a guy going, okay, he's got a great low kick. He's got a great jab. What am I going to do to compensate for that? And I approached my injuries the same way. I always, you know, going into it, there were certain things I knew I couldn't do with my right knee. It doesn't have an ACL. That's what holds your knee stable from lateral movement. And so the guys that were coaching me, and as I got into more professional coaches,

we simply looked and said, all right, you can't do this. What can you do? And we never thought about it other than let's play to our strengths. What are we capable of? And that's how we looked at it. I think there's a point of view, and this is really important, and it's a message of the documentary that we as human beings, I think the two most stressful words we have in the English language are problem and obstacles. So if I walk up to you right now and I say, hey, Chris, we got a problem.

Internally, like, how do you react? Oh, shit. Like, you take a breath and your heart rate goes up a little bit. If I walk up to you and say, hey, Chris, we need to solve a challenge. It's a totally different internal reaction in your mind, right, of how we're going to function. And this is solvable. And so I think for us as a team, and this is definitively about the team of world-class coaches and fighters and my wife that have surrounded me with love and support and knowledge. We always looked at things as simply a challenge. We never looked at the

knees as a problem. We never looked at the degenerative disc in my back as a problem. It was simply how do we overcome these challenges? And if you focus anything in life on that, you're going to find a way to get past that challenge. Definitely. You know, if you look at things from a victimhood standpoint, oh, God, I can't do this. Oh, God, I'm not equipped to do this. I don't have the right skills. Yada, yada, yada.

Then you're going to have troubles and so you know how you what is it it's the perception of how you agree things that make all the difference in you know being successful or just failing and quitting basically yeah and it's i think it's so easy to fall into that victim mentality there were a couple of times within my fighting career when I did, and my team snapped me out of it, right, where I started thinking I'm a victim. Before my last fight, the state of Florida Boxing Commission did everything they could in their power not to license a 62-year-old trying to fight a 32- year old and and put me through hoop after hoop and i mean this went on for eight weeks wow first it was a physical that was three pages long unheard of but i went and got it sent it into the state two weeks go, the promotion calls me and says, hey, now they want proof of your previous fights. Send that into the state. Two weeks go by, promotion calls me. Now they want sparring video. This is unprecedented. I've fought already numerous times at this point. And for somebody

to ask me this is crazy. So I'm starting to get frustrated. And you've got to couple that with the stress of a training camp where you're training twice a day. You're literally getting beaten up as you're sparring. You're cutting weight. And your mind obsesses about the fight. And your body daily, your will is challenged on how far you can push yourself. And then you have that added layer of pressure of, what if I don't get my license? What if I go through all this and they don't give it to me? And then I remember this.

It was a Friday afternoon around 3 o'clock, and the promotion calls me and says, now the state wants an EKG stress test, and they want a bleed-out test, which is a test to find out how quickly your blood coagulates. If you get split open, this is a Friday, I'm weighing in on the following Friday. And I said, how long do I have to do this? And they said, Wednesday, Wednesday are the fights off. At that moment, Chris, I went into being a victim. I hung up the phone and I literally say to myself, this is ageism. They are discriminating against me because of my age. And I call my wife, Stella, to try and get some sympathy.

Unfortunately for me, Stella is a bad sympathizer and she's a really good teammate. And she says to me, she doesn't, she's like, oh, baby, I feel bad. She says, dude, if I'm the state of Florida and I see a 62-year-old trying to fight a 32-year-old on paper, I'm getting as far away from you as humanly possible. I'm looking at you as a liability that might die in that cage. And she said to me, they don't know you. They don't know how hard you train. They don't know the world-class, high-level UFC fighters you go against. They don't know your coaches. They don't know your heart.

Beat them. Stop being a victim and beat them at their own game. If that's their challenge, find a way to get the test done. Right? So even on that championship journey, my point is we all have moments where we can fall into that mentality, right? And that's the power of a team around you that won't buy into your BS. And I'll say to you, no, level up, get yourself together and find a way. There you go. What are your thoughts on the fight between Tyson?

And it looked like it was going to go down there. And then I guess it fell apart with something that happened with his health. But what did you think of the Tyson fight with that young man? I think, you know, Jake Paul gets wrecked by a lot of people because a lot of people still call him a YouTuber and just a guy who's looking for publicity. But I know fighters that I know that are high level that are his sparring partners, and he'll call in for this. And what I do know about Jake Paul is he takes this really serious. He might have started it for one reason, to make money in publicity, but he takes himself very seriously as a fighter.

And I know his skill level has grown dramatically. So he's a legitimate boxer. I'm not going to say that he's world class yet, but he is a legitimate boxer. I think the whole thing comes down to here is, you know, and everybody knows Tyson's power is amazing. How many rounds does it go? If Tyson can touch him in the first couple rounds, I think it's Tyson's fight. I think the longer it goes, this kid's a smart fighter, too. He's got a higher fight IQ than most people give him credit for.

And if it goes into the latter rounds, I think it's a six-round fight. Then I think it's going to favor Jake Paul. But, you know, people want to criticize him. Listen, boxing is called prize fighting, right? That's what it's called. So these guys are out here to fight to make money. So why would you criticize them? And why would you criticize Mike Tyson for still wanting to fight at this age? If I walked up to somebody in the corporate world and I said, hey man, you're 60. I think you should retire. They would be offended. But we certainly judge our athletes that way. And the reason we do

is because we want to see them go out in glory. And I get that. We want to see our athletes go out on the top, but it's not our choice it's that athlete's choice that's true and no one wants to see anybody get hurt too i mean that's that's one thing that yeah especially guys you might have idolized right yeah yeah no one wants to see when you know people go down for you know whatever so why do you think the film has won so many awards it's won a ton of awards why do you think it's been so endearing to people that have watched it a hundred percent it's because and i'll use the word successful we were successful in delivering the message and not having just a boxing or a kickboxing documentary a martial arts documentary. I think one of the

most compelling things for me as we went on this journey, and this was nine years in production. It was nine years this June. We went through four or five different editors. And every time we would see the first edit, it would be my nightmare, which is, this is just a clunky, narcissistic journey about me. And that was what I, it's the truth. I'm like, I don't want that. That isn't what this is for. When I had taken my very first fight, as I was going through that training camp, people were walking up to me and stating, you're inspiring me, you're inspiring me. And I would look at him and just say, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm trying to knock a mofo out and not get knocked out. What

do you mean? But it kept happening. People tell me you're inspiring me to lose weight. You're inspiring me to do this. And after my first fight, I fought in a tournament. I got to the finals. I lost in the finals to a six foot two, 20 year old. And as soon as the fight was done, he looked at me and he said, how old are you? The second it was done. And I told him and they held up his hand as the winner. And as he held up, they held up his hand. He grabbed my hand and he held it up. And Chris, he's crying. And he says, this is your champion. This is your freaking champion right here. And as he did that, as I started to walk off, grown men were coming out of the stands and holding me, guys I didn't

know, and telling me crazy stuff. And this is a true story. As I walked off, I said to myself, God blessed me with a journey I should not have at this age with these injuries. I'm going to pay it forward. There's a message here of how to overcome what you perceive as obstacles and problems and how to achieve your dreams. And I am going to deliver this message in the form of a documentary. And I sat down with my partner, Carlos Arrieta, who owns Roar Post. And I'd known Carlos for years. We'd done some other television together. And I poured my heart out to him on what I wanted to do. And he said, okay, first thing is, this is not a story of fighting. And I kind of sat back and I said, what do you mean? And he said, this is a story of love. And it instantly, I got that epiphany. I'm like, you're right.

It's the love of the dream. It's the love of the people that surround me. It's a story of love and belief of what you want to do. And so we set out at that moment to create this documentary. And after four or five edits, after obviously a lot of years, we finally had somebody that was close to us, both knew me and worked with Carlos as an editor that stepped up and said, give it to me. I know this story, I can do it. So we re-edited it. And I was blessed to do a lot of that editing side by side with another Carlos, Carlos Pita, where you get 10 minutes done, he'd say, sit down, tell me if this is good, tell me if this is the message. So we worked super hard to deliver a message that was universal for everyone. And the most compelling truth of that was as we did the film festival circuit, we probably did five or six or seven.

We'd love to have done them all, but you just can't afford to fly all those different cities. And people would come up to me that were screening it from the audience that I didn't know that were clearly not athletes, and they would say things like, I would never watch a boxing or a kickboxing or a fighting movie normally, but I watched the trailer, and this interested me, and they said, I get it. I get what I have to do to lead the life I want, and there was a moment we were blessed to also win the la documentary film festival and they send you a viewers critique six different viewers they have

that critique it they send you a video they sent me a video and they called me the next day they said did you watch the video and i said no and they said why not and i said guy because if they said bad things i can't change this is my life my mission i can't change it and they said watch the video dumbass it's it's okay right you just won you won the film festival just watch the video so i did and i sat down with my wife and we watched it and we actually teared up because again none of these six people were athletes or fighters and every single one in their own way understood the message of what they needed to do and would want to do in their life to achieve their dreams and to achieve their most fulfilled life.

So I think it was like everything, right? It's the storytelling. And this is factual. Don't get me wrong. It's a documentary. You can't, nothing's scripted. You can't make it up. I go to film with a fighter that I'm fighting. Trust me, he's not looking for the same happy ending I am, right? He's there. He's sure I'll sign a waiver for my image. Yeah. and I'm going to knock your ass out. So it's all real. But I think the storytelling and a little bit of maybe divine intervention in helping me tell the story because my mission has been to help others

in guiding my path I think is what got us there. There you go. There you go. And it's a great movie. People can watch it as a documentary. As we go out, give us your final thoughts to people on where they can go watch the movie, where they can see it online and dot coms. Okay, perfect.

Love to. So it's now streaming on Amazon Prime, on iTunes, which also is Apple TV. Not everybody knows that. And Google Play. So you can watch it on any of those channels, live also is Apple TV. Not everybody knows that. And Google Play. So you can watch it on any of those channels, live streaming anytime you want. Again, you can touch base with me at StuartWarrenDansby on Instagram.

And you can get all the information we just talked about from the trailer to direct links to where to watch it are on TakingTheFight.com. There you go. TakingTheFight.com. Everyone should check it out people love story of rebirth they love rising from the phoenix from the ashes you know they like they you know they like stories where you know it i think i think we all are heartened when we see people excel you know i i follow several bodybuilders who are in my age or older, you know, they're

working out and they've got their bodies in great physique. And I'm like, I want that for me at my age too. So there you go. I think it helps really inspire and motivate people. So thank you for coming on. We really appreciate it, Stuart. Absolutely, Chris. Truly my privilege and my pleasure to be here.

There you go. And thanks for joining us for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, forrestjesschrisvoss, linkedin.com, forrestjesschrisvoss, and all those crazy places on the internet. Check out the movie

wherever fine movies are sold that you can take and get involved with it there. Taking the fight and definitely inspiring. Share it with your friends and family. Won tons of awards. So 25 film festivals,

31 awards. You're definitely going to enjoy it. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be good to each other each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time