Demetrious Johnson may be the best MMA fighter of all time, and he now fights for ONE Championship, after a trade for Ben Askren, who was retired, but remained under contract. During a recent media conference call, Johnson detailing his reasoning for wanting to go.

I think for me going back and trying to regain my title there was nothing there for me,” he said, as transcribed by Alexander K. Lee for MMA Fighting. “Because if I look at it as the standpoint as a martial artist, it was something that I’ve already beaten Henry Cejudo and I truly felt that I’ve been beaten a lot worse. When I fought Dominick Cruz, I felt like I truly was the smaller guy. I mean, he suplexed me three times for God’s sakes. So with that I thought if I went back and fought [Cejudo], who knows how the fight could have went?

I could have won it the third time, or I could have lost again, and I took a step back and I was like, ‘Okay, what do I truly want? Like ask yourself that, DJ, what do you truly want?’ And I was like, I wanted something different. I wanted to mix it up. I wanted to do something different. I want to be able to walk out to the cage and feel butterflies, or if it’s the ring, I want to face a different type of competition and I knew if I went back and I would have won that belt again, then I knew that I would be staying in the exact same organization, fighting the exact same athletes — which, they are phenomenal athletes — but I’ve beaten pretty much everybody on that roster so far and so I felt this was a perfect opportunity to me. I wasn’t held by being the champion anymore.

For the longest time, a lot of people in North America wanted a new champion. They see they can really push that pay-per-view model, they really didn’t care about how my skill set was. They really wanted somebody who is going to be brash, who is going to disrespect — and not that Henry Cejudo did that — but they wanted somebody else.

I feel like they wanted somebody else, and when I say somebody else, not the UFC, I felt like the public wanted somebody else to try to take that mantle to somewhere I couldn’t. Like, for numbers, or bringing notoriety or whatever. So I felt like, this is my perfect time for me to go pursue something I want to pursue and let those guys handle that.

For me, I’m not the smallest guy in the organization anymore. … In America, everybody always looked at me as ‘a child’ as you could say, and I won’t have that issue when I’m in Asia competing.”

I was never the biggest fan of the way people went about promoting their fights over in North America. I saw some athletes use it as a way of bullying, a way of trying to gain followers. When an athlete says on Twitter, ‘Why haven’t you signed the contract yet?’ to another athlete, for me I see that as a form of bullying because all that’s going to do is stir people to go to that person’s Twitter or social media and say, ‘You’re scared, you don’t want this, you’re a chicken,’ and when I see professional athletes doing that, that are trying to embody the spirit of martial artists, it just puts a bad taste in my mouth.

I think the flyweight division in North America and in the UFC is a fantastic division. I think as me being an athlete and a martial artist, I think it’s not always about ‘Does this division make money?’ I think they should keep that division, my personal opinion. They have a new champion, a lot of new fresh matchups they can try to sell. They can work it out.

And that’s up to the athletes. If the athletes want to follow, they all have their own passions and their own goals that they want to pursue and there’s many organizations out there. But I truly believe that ONE Championship is the best one for all those guys because it embodies martial artists.