Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 83 - Paul De Gelder

Episode Date: July 12, 2018

Paul De Gelder is an adventure seeker who lost two limbs in a brutal shark attack. After leaving the Navy and the Navy Divers, Paul now travels the world as a motivational speaker and stopped by Mark Bell's Malibu beach house to hang out and record a podcast. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

We're here with the Australian who nearly got eaten by a shark. We're going to try to find out what the hell happened here. It was a big day at work. I took the next day off. You tried to fight a shark is what happened. He tried to fight me. I was not the instigator. So what is he missing?

I hope he choked to death on my hamstring. According to Charles Glass, but then again, what does he know? Old dummy Charles. How old are you? I might be choked to death on my hamstring. According to Charles Glass, but then again, what does he know? Yeah, right. Old dummy Charles. How old are you? 41. Oh, okay. We're the same age.

Oh, really? December 10th. How about you? March 23rd. Oh, would you look at that? So I was just using the bathroom, and I don't know if this happens to you, but this has been happening to me more and more. We're getting close.

We are. We're becoming friends. We're talking about bathroom. I think so. Yeah pee i do my business and i go to put it back and i still end up pissing myself i thought i was done and i you know i'm like i know what you mean business is over with i peed and then i just totally walk away from the toilet and i piss myself really just a little bit Really? Just a little bit. Yeah. Just a little bit comes out.

Yeah. It doesn't happen all the time. Occasionally, you shake it enough times, especially after sex. Oh, yeah. It's just like, I don't know what's going on with muscles are too tight, can't get it all out. But generally, for some reason, I just forget to do my fly up. You can't. I don't know why.

I don't know if I'm getting older and it's just like common sense is going out the window. I forget to do my fly up. You can't. I don't know why. I don't know if I'm getting older and it's just like common sense has gone out the window. I forget to do my fly up a lot. Yeah. And after sex, you can't aim. Yeah, no. Like you might as well just face the wall. You just lay flat on the toilet with your doodle down. Yeah.

Just pee like that. Oh, yeah. If you have a boner, you have to do a handstand. Yeah. Or in the shower. That gets to be really. Against the wall, then you got to take it off. That gets to be really difficult. But yeah, I got to figure this out. So I got to stop. I got to stop a handstand. Yeah. Or in the shower. That gets to be really. Against the wall, then you got to take it off. That gets to be really difficult.

But yeah, I got to figure this out. So I got to stop. I got to stop pissing myself. This podcast interview just went in a direction I did not expect. It's going straight up. Yeah. We're going, we're starting out on the top. That's the way we do it.

Anyway, how long you been training over at Gold's Gym for? Gold's Gym. Oh, man. The Mecca gym bodybuilding i've been coming out to california and america in general for a couple of years probably since about 2015 when i started doing shark week um but it was just intermittently whenever they they paid me to come out or had a show for me or something um and i started going to gold straight away just because it's the mecca of bodybuilding did you kind of hear about it you

hear about it through some friends and stuff like that or were you already into like lifting and stuff and i was somewhat into lifting um arnold schwarzenegger obviously you know he's trained there and he started um his huge bodybuilding career out of Gold's as well as a lot of other people. So you hear all the stories and it's just, you know, it's a name that's associated with the weightlifting and fitness and California in general, I think. So as soon as I came out, I'm like, well, I got to train. Where am I going to train?

I'm going straight to Gold's. And the thing I love about it is it's not what people think it is. It's not this spot where it's just full of juiced up power lifters and bodybuilders. It's every walk of life. That's juiced up. Yeah. Well, you get that, but you also get the older people.

You get the younger people. You get the unfit people. You get the fit people. You get the tourists. Every walk of life goes there for differing reasons there's just a lot of energy in there yeah it's a very inspiring and motivating place to train there's a lot of positive energy in there when i was in there a couple days ago got the opportunity to train with mike o'hearn that's always a lot of fun yeah that 4am crew and robbie robinson was in there robbie robinson is 67 years old wow he's a still

a professional bodybuilder oh 72 years old he still competes and uh he's still shredded still in really good shape but uh when i was training with mike robbie robinson came over and was hyped up because we were banging out heavy incline presses and he's over there in the corner doing his thing and it's like you see the 72-year-old guy there, that alone hypes you up. And you're like, man, I hope I'm still moving well. I hope I can still do a lot of this stuff when I'm older. And then he's getting hyped up

by seeing us pushing those big weights around. So it gives everybody a lot of momentum. Yeah, exactly. That's what I end up loving about it. How'd you end up getting into like entertainment and getting it? Is that something that you wanted to do as a kid growing up? How'd you get on TV? I guess I always had a sense of adventure,

which is why I got into so much trouble when I was younger because it was misdirected energy. What kind of trouble? Dude, so my dad was a cop, but he was away a lot for work, and I was also brought up in an all-boys Catholic school going to church. So they're the holy trinity of trouble-making kids. Your dad's a cop and you're at Catholic school. So we didn't have a lot of money, so I found ways to get the things that I needed

and wanted to keep up with all the other kids. I just stole them. And I got picked on as a young kid because I was skinny and short and had freckles and big ears so um that kind of makes you a little disgruntled at the world and so you know i used to slash up my arms because discipline at home was so bad discipline at school was so bad and it felt like the only control i had over my life was inflicting this pain on my body and i didn't want to kill myself or anything like that. It was just, there was this sense of control. You'd hurt yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. I would cut my arms with it. Just with a knife or something? With a hobby knife that you use for cutting up models, like model planes and things like that. But I did that for a little while and no one knew about it. But the thing that helped me get past that was doing Muay Thai boxing. I started going and doing kickboxing with one of my friends, one of my only friends.

So it wasn't a prescription drug. It was exercise. It was exercise, exactly. That was your RX. There wasn't a lot of thought about teenage depression when i was a teenager when we were teenagers we were at the same age uh you know that wasn't a thing there was no add there was no none of that shit there was no riddle it was hey get over it yeah it was like shake it outside and play why are you depressed stop being a bitch you're right um and so but i had to find all this out myself i

didn't have like my dad was a swimming instructor. So we grew up swimming and swimming was a big part of our lives and running and all that stuff. So I found it very hard to put any weight on because I was an endurance athlete. And so that just kept me skinny and kept me getting picked on. But I hit about 14, 15 and swimming and running didn't seem to be that cool or that fun anymore. I just got sick of it, and I discovered girls and smoking and drinking. And where I grew up in Australia, marijuana was decriminalized.

There was a lot of weed floating around. So I started doing that as well. And obviously, they're just ingredients for unmotivation, for an unhealthy lifestyle. But I was doing kickboxing at the same time. So me and my friends would go out and we were learning to fight. So we'd take it to the streets. And I got my ass handed to me more times than I won any fights. But that was what we'd do.

We'd go out, we'd underage drink, drinking boxes of wine in the back alleys. And then we'd go out and pick fights. And it was just such a bad cycle. And I continued down that path for a really long time until I got kicked out of home at 17 and ended up living with a couple of friends that took me in. And very slowly found my way. I was selling weed, but I was also working as a kitchen hand,

washing dishes. So I started to learn about making money um legitimately instead of being stressed out people turning up to your door at 12 o'clock looking for a bag of weed um and I was very lucky that I didn't get caught doing anything terrible we were breaking into cars and stealing and fighting and drinking and doing drugs. So I was very fortunate that I got put in a jail cell once for smashing a window at one point. But that was about the extent of me getting busted for trouble. And it could have gone a very different way.

But I was fortunate. And then one night I got jumped by 20 guys. Just before my 21st birthday, I was working behind a bar at a few clubs. I was still selling weed. And I got jumped and just got my ass kicked really badly. And that night was kind of a turning point where I realized that I had to get the fuck out of this city. I was living in Canberra, which is the capital of Australia.

Not a lot going on in Canberra at that time. Before that incident happened, were you maybe looking for some change at that point were you kind of already thinking about it a little bit or not really dude i was always looking for change i hated my lifestyle but i just didn't know how to do it it um did it go against the grain too much of maybe the way you were brought up and the catholic lifestyle and uh your parents were you kind of like migrating back toward, like almost like in your head, like this is wrong. Did you kind of always think that?

Were you always worried about that? You wanted to get into a different lifestyle perhaps? I think as you get older, the lessons that your parents instill in you become more prevalent. Oh, that's why they said that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But when you're young, you're just like, oh, I don't want to listen to that.

You know, I know everything. I'm fucking 19. I know the world. But as much as I didn't do well at school through my teenage years, I still was very well read. And, you know, we had the full selection of the Encyclopedia Britannica. My dad always bought me books when he came home from his travels with the police. So I knew about the world and David Attenborough was my idol and all of these guys having adventures like Steve Irwin. That was what I wanted to do. But I didn't know

how to get to that point from little old Canberra where I'm selling weed. It seemed like an impossible dream. But after getting my ass kicked, I knew something had to change because it was just a downward spiral from there. It was just drugs and fighting and drinking and stuck in a circular life of that shit, and I hated it. I wanted so much more, but I didn't know how to achieve that. So I realized that the first step was to remove myself from this environment that I'd become a product of so I threw everything I owned into a tiny little car that I had no license for and I left Canberra I moved to Brisbane and

try and start again and it worked somewhat for a while I was working behind the bar of a strip club, and I was a rapper, as you do, as a white Australian. That's amazing. A little side note that we didn't know. It was kind of cool. We put out a CD. We opened up for Snoop Dogg in 1998. That's great.

I'd quit the strip club because I thought you know i'd found my future career as a rapper but not a lot of money in white rappers in brisbane in 1998 so the financial struggles there came into play and everything collapsed and i was living in a house with one of my best friends with no electricity no running water um we had to shower at the local pool just to get clean to go out and try and find work you know i'm putting two dollars into the car for fuel and eventually i found another job working behind a bar and that was just so unfulfilling right you know it was just what am i gonna do am i gonna that lifestyle feeds into that it feeds into more of that because of the the nightlife you know my dad has always said and other people have said this over the years

nothing good happens past 11 p.m many times and and as kids me and my brothers were like i think everything good happens after 11 p.m like isn't that when you get laid and stuff like you know when all the fun stuff happens um but yeah it can cause a lot of trouble and then just in general uh you're not as productive because the next day you know what what time is your day starting at 12 or 2 or something right and then it's just it's a very repetitive lifestyle what was something that helped you transition out of that lifestyle was was there a single thing because you know you got uh jumped um but i know that the next day it didn't look like a rocky montage of you like training and like being like i'm gonna be a badass and i'm gonna totally change my life

and and you went to god and ran away so yeah so what happened yeah um so yeah so what happened yeah um man honestly probably calling mom just asking for advice like my last vestige of hope right call mom and ask for some advice and that's awesome i think yeah yeah well you know there's always someone there for you right it might not come in the most expected of places and sometimes it is sometimes it's just calling home and i'd somewhat rekindled my my relationship with my family at that point not so much with dad but with mom you know he's like you're still a punk bitch i'm not talking to you um so i called mom just saying hey look i don't know what to do. I've left home. I've started again.

I've tried to rebuild. And I'm in a worse spot now than I was before. That takes a lot of strength. Yeah. Sometimes it's the last hope. Right. I didn't know where to go from there. Because I still had this dream of my life being something special.

But I didn't know how. I was looking down the barrel of following the career path of my life being something special, but I didn't know how. I was looking down the barrel of following the career path of my bar manager, sitting at the bar smoking a cigarette, all skinny and pale and going home to his house in the suburbs. And I was just like, is that what I want? That's my future. Fuck no, that's not my future. That is not what I want.

So I called mum and she said, why don't you talk to your brothers because my brothers were in the army and i just thought oh that could be my way out and so i called them and they're like they just laughed at me like there is no way you were gonna make it in the army they didn't think you're gonna be able to change no way they just thought the military lifestyle is definitely not something for you. But if you do decide to do it, it's a pretty good lifestyle. You get paid to travel, to play sports, to shoot cannons and all that stuff.

They were in artillery. They said, just don't join infantry because you're not going to make it. So I joined infantry. You took that challenge. You were like, okay. Yeah. Well, it's kind of like when you think of the army you think of soldiers you don't think of the logistics officer as as much as an admirable job as that is right i wanted to be a soldier and so um that was a really hard transition yeah

there's got to be literally millions of tasks to do in in any form of military right not just uh being a maniac running around with a gun, which is what you're picturing. You're like, oh, it's going to be great. Yeah, which is something I probably should have done, like found a trade or where I learned to be useful in the world. Instead, I just thought, yeah, I'll just go and learn to shoot a machine gun and fire rocket launchers.

And it was a lot of fun, but that was hard. That was a hard transition too. But the thing I did have in my corner was I didn't have another choice. By that point, I didn't have a great education to fall back on. I had no other skills except being a bartender and being a shitty rapper. Do you think you had some good discipline going into that? Were you typically a person that would show up to work on time? Were you dependable and reliable in some ways that you had at least something going in to where it wasn't such a shock that you had to do this at this time?

Look, at that point, I was very honest. I was very loyal. There was no way that I would steal from my employer or be late or not earn their trust. Yeah, there's got to be some qualities there. Otherwise, you will not make it, right? Yeah, exactly right. And over time of going through basic training and not having that alcohol

and not having time to smoke those cigarettes or smoking that weed, my fitness came back from all those years of swimming and running. And so I went from being mediocre in the fitness area of being a soldier to excelling. And then I felt that sense of pride not just

in my the uniform that i'd started to wear but in my fitness and the fact that i could inspire the rest of the people that i'm training with and working with to do better as well i think sometimes the things that you don't do and the things that you uh the things that you um things that you don't do can be detrimental sometimes so something like swimming or something like running that you had from when you were a kid you didn't really probably realize all the different things it was doing for your brain you know it's doing stuff for you physically it was also doing stuff for you mentally yeah and when you got back to it it sounds like it exactly opened up more opportunities for you well when i stopped it i just went down

the gurgler but as soon as I started doing that fitness again, and that's why it plays such a prevalent part in my life. And all of the good things that I do in my life are based around health and fitness. And they really have turned my life into something pretty amazing. So when the army, you know, I spent five years as an army paratrooper and I got to. Jumping out of planes?

Jumping out of planes with a big machine gun. You're a crazy bastard. I would never do that. Would you still do that now? Oh, yeah, yeah. There's a spot down in San Diego that does accelerated free fall. So I want to go and get my civilian ticket. Damn.

I just got to work out how to do that, missing a hand and a leg. I'm such a pussy. I don't think I could do that. I think maybe I was younger. Somebody could have maybe. You've got kids though, yeah? see it because i think it becomes i can barely fly now yeah when i have kids you know when you have kids it's like it's not it's not being afraid of death you just you don't want to leave them alone you don't want to die unnecessarily yeah right so i don't have to worry about that you know i've got my dog and i care about him. This guy's got a huge head.

Yeah, he does. Big head, paws. He's a big boy. So what was the transition from there? How long were you in the military for? I did five years with the army, did some really cool stuff, sniper's course, worked as a United Nations peacekeeper in Southeast Asia.

And then the army taught me a lot about myself being a sniper sounds cool yeah i didn't get to work as a snipers but doing the course was pretty amazing learning to really shoot um but the army taught me how to push past my own um limit limitations yeah and so i thought you know i missed out on a trip to iraq they they canceled my trip four days before I left, and I just got the shits with the army. I was like, fuck this. I'm going somewhere that gets deployed.

Just for a second, do you think that there's any other way to get your brain in the same place that you could get through fitness and through being pushed above and beyond what you think you're capable of in other words do you think uh like you could read a book or see a movie or do drugs or do you think there's anything in the world that compares to you don't have anything left and you're being pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed. And there you are doing more and more and more because the guy next to you is doing more and more. Is there anything like that? Is there anything remotely close to that?

I think it helps if you, if it's a multifaceted approach. So if you can harness a lot of those things all at once, or, um, you know, for me, it was the fact that I didn't have an option. You have to do this or we will just punish you. Yeah, what are you going back to? Nothing. I didn't have anything to go back to. So instead of fighting against the discipline and trying to change my circumstances like I normally would in life,

I tried to change the way that I perceived the situation, the way that I approached the situation. I didn't like a lot of stuff about being in the army, so I focused on the things that I did enjoy, like shooting a machine gun and firing rocket launchers and throwing grenades and hanging out with my mates and the fitness side of it. And I just got through the other stuff

because you find out that you're not always going to enjoy everything in life so healthy competition is an amazing motivator even now people always ask me how i stay motivated and positive and all that stuff and i use things as simple as youtube clips or clips on Instagram, social media. I follow people that motivate me and inspire me. Going to Gold's and seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger, the machine next to me, and he says hello. You had a chance to meet him? Yeah, many times. Oh, awesome.

He waves at me most times when I see him, and that's a huge motivator. This is the Terminator. When I was in hospital and I still had my leg after the shark attack, and the surgeon came in and he gave me the option as to whether I was in hospital and I still had my leg after the shark attack and the surgeon came in and he gave me the option as to whether I was going to keep it or whether I was going to have it taken off. And I just looked at him, drug to the eyeballs and said, Doc, just take my leg and turn me into the Terminator.

And so that guy had such an inspiring place in my life growing up as the Predator and the Commando and all that sort of stuff. To see him. It was the arm that was left behind in the first Terminator, right? Exactly. You know. Now I have one. Yeah, that's crazy.

Probably not quite as good. How in the hell did all this happen? That's what we've got to get to now. Yeah. So I changed from the Army to the Navy. I heard about these guys called the clearance divers. No one really looked directly at them. They're kind of a very special group within the side of the military.

And the Army, having taught me how to push past my limitations, made me believe in myself a lot more than I had previously. So I thought, well, what's stopping me from being a badass like these guys? What's stopping me from being someone that other people look up to? Right. just have nothing i'm just gonna give it a go just your own mind i made it into the army you know if this is the next step then let's give it a crack and i went into training and selection processes um really really freaking hard stuff like 10 days of mental physical and emotional anguish swimming through sydney harbor in the middle of the night for six hours followed by a half marathon pitch black

pitch black shark we know there's bull sharks all through there we really know that they're there now um five hours of pt on the soft sand at the beach and mind games and breath hold and just all that shit so 70 of my course quit on the first day uh and but i had this motivation whereby i am not going back to the army they'll either gonna they're gonna have to fail me because i'm too dumb or they're gonna have to kill me and so i went into it with that mindset giving it all and i passed and i discovered this amazing lifestyle amazing job amazing friends where we were traveling the world shooting guns blowing up mines doing pure oxygen oxygen rebreather combat swimming and using almost any handheld tool you can think of but underwater a picture or maybe a video david goggins i'm sure you've heard of him before.

His hands are like tied behind his back and his feet are tied and he like jumps in the water. I was like, oh my God. Drownproofing himself. I'm kind of claustrophobic and things like that are just an absolute nightmare for me. So I was watching that.

I was like, oh my God. That's a pretty crazy thing to get used to. And that's why so many people fail because they just don't have that self-belief or that self-confidence or just that determination to either pass or die and sometimes you have to go into things like that um so i made it the key to some of that stuff just not to overreact yeah yeah well it helps if you're comfortable in the water like i was because i grew up swimming and why i i'd never spent a huge amount of time in the ocean.

I felt comfortable knowing I could hold my breath, knowing I could swim to the surface and all that sort of stuff because I'd never scuba dived in my life. So I was learning from the ground up. But just, yeah, sometimes you've just got to not care if you die. And it's funny because later I found out that death is just nothing to be afraid of at all. And that frees you up, frees you to believe in yourself a lot more. I think you ever got close to it.

To dying? Yeah. Dude, I was within a minute of dying. Yeah. So when I was working as a Navy clearance diver uh 2009 i've been doing it doing it for uh four years and we were doing a counter-terrorism exercise in sydney harbour alongside the navy base which is a place where we worked all the time hundreds and hundreds of hours in the water there and i was on the surface that day swimming on my back pretending to be an attack swimmer

and they had this equipment that was tracking me with video and sonar and I was in the water for about four minutes I just pulled out one of the new guys and I was on the surface on my back and a bull shark attacked me it grabbed me by the right hand and the back of my right leg in the same bite and decided that it wanted them more than I did. And so before I'd even had breakfast, I was breakfast. Wow. Yeah, it was a crazy day.

I nearly died. I didn't so much fight it off as swam away while it was swallowing my limbs. And the boys in the boat got to me before the shark came back. Do you remember what happened exactly? Or has it kind of been told back to you type thing? A bit of both.

Some of the things. Imagine like your mind just, you know, pass out, right? Well, I think the fact that I travel and I speak. And I do a lot of motivational and inspirational speaking for corporations and things like that. And the fact that I've had the opportunity to retell this story over and over and over again and even write a book about the story that helped me remember it and while what's the name of the book no time for fear um it helped me to remember it and process it a lot more uh i only passed out for less than a minute during the whole sequence.

And it's kind of, you know, I never did counseling at all because I just didn't feel like I needed it. I knew how I felt. I felt like shit. I didn't need to talk about it. What I needed to do was find that sense of value and purpose that I'd had previously because I was looking down the barrel of losing my whole career. So instead of talking to some person I didn't had previously because I was looking down the barrel of losing my whole career. So instead of talking to some person I didn't know about how I was feeling, I decided

how I was going to feel and I worked towards goals and giving myself challenges to try and achieve this impossible dream of going back to work. So I cut my leg one time, right? And I have a little scar right there. It's about an inch or maybe, yeah, it's about an inch. I was throwing out some trash. I worked at a bar and there was a bottle of vodka in there that was broken and I went to twist the bag and to tie it up to throw the trash out and it went and it just sliced just sliced me and blood went you know right all over the side of the

bag and i looked at it i was like oh my god it's disgusting right and so my brother uh took me to the uh emergency room and it was just a couple stitches wasn't it wasn't a huge deal but as they clean it up and stuff i'm kind of looking at it i'm like oh my god that's and i'm not really queasy you know so i'm looking at it i'm like that's kind of gross i'm like what is that yellow stuff and they're like that's your fat i'm like oh my god even my knees are fat but you know i i kind of looked at it and i was like man i kind of like mutilated my leg right this is a at the time was probably like a three or four inch cut because it's the scars gotten smaller

whatever right um what was it like you know looking at your hand or your arm and it's fucking completely gone or what did it or what the fuck did it it was crazy i mean you just start crying or like like what i don't understand how what that would look like i guess the military just trained me so well that i uh i tried to control the situation as much as i could so um after the shark had bitten off my hand and my hamstring i I popped to the surface and I'm like, shit, I've got to get out of here before that comes back. So I start to swim and I go to take a stroke, but my hand's gone and my arm ends at the end of the wetsuit.

I'm like, fuck, okay, I've got to keep that wound above my heart to stem the bleeding. So I'm just thinking logically in this. My greatest fear, aside from public speaking, was sharks. So I've just faced my worst nightmare. And I don't know how I was doing it, but I was just thinking logically. I've got to keep that wound above my heart to stem the bleeding. And I've got to swim back to the boat.

I've got to get out of the water. And I had three of my buddies in the safety boat. Your swimsuit is there, but your arm is pretty much gone. My wetsuit came all the way down to my wrist. And my hand was gone from the wrist down. Wow. Now that I have the surgery photos, and there was part of my hand left.

There was the tendons that are inside your hand, one finger, I think my thumb, but the thumb was just shredded. And I couldn't see it, because it was dangling down my arm by skin, so it was sort of hidden behind my forearm. All I saw was just the end of my wetsuit with no hand. In the cartoons, they always punch the shark in the nose.

Did you try that? I tried that, yeah. I tried to go for the eyeball, but it had my hand in its mouth. So I tried with the left hand, but it had me by the back of the leg and I couldn't reach it. So I tried to push it off by the nose, but all that did was push the lower jaw deeper into my leg. And so I cocked back to punch it in the head.

And as my fist was coming in, it started to shake me. And all the strength went out of me because that's when the pain came in. Yeah. And it was just so excruciating. There was nothing I could do. Yeah. You're in the water with this 600-pound monster made of muscle, and you have no power.

Yeah, they're so fast and so strong. And the video is on YouTube. You can actually watch it. Oh, my God. And it lasts about eight seconds, and you can see it. That's a long-ass time. Yeah. That's a bull ride right there.

Yeah, it was not fun, I've got to tell you. Holy shit. And towards the end there i was underwater just thinking i'm gonna die i'm not going home today this is it and the the first things that came to mind was well it's it's almost not even in word form it's just thoughts and i was just thinking am i ready to to die? And I thought, yeah. You know what? If I'm going to die now, then yeah, cool.

I have no regrets. I've lived 10 lives. I've had so many adventures and more life than I could have ever thought possible. I'm ready to die if that's going to happen. And a calm came over me, and then the next second i popped to the surface because the shark wasn't attached to me anymore my wetsuit made me buoyant and i popped to the surface my head came out of the water and i realized i wasn't dead the shark's tail splashed water in my face and i saw my safety boat and i just thought i gotta get the fuck out of here so i started to swim and i swum through a

pool of my own blood back to the boat the guys got me out of the water and that that was the only time I passed out when I was in the boat I was safe I wasn't going to be attacked anymore and I just relaxed and my eyes rolled back in my head and my buddy Tomo his training taught him that I was going into cardiac arrest so his training told him he had to stimulate my heart so he straddles me he starts starts pounding me in the chest, and it works. It wakes me back up. I look over, and my hand's gone freshly eaten by a shark. I look up, and Tomo's beating the shit out of me.

I'm just thinking, today sucks. I look at him, and I get all my priorities in order. I say, Tomo, can you make sure someone looks after my motorbike? I'm dying, and I'm worried about my motorbike. Things that happen to you in those moments are so weird. How were those guys in that moment? Dude, the training just came into play. They all played their role.

Tomo was over the top of me, keeping me focused, trying to keep me awake. One of the other guys. When those guys are talking to you in that moment, I've seen some really minor things, people choking and different things like that. Someone having a heart issue and things of that nature. And when somebody talks you through it,

hey, you're going to be okay, we're right here for you. It just really levels a lot of things out. I knew as long as I could hear his voice and as long as I could see his face i was still alive so that's all i focused on but you know imagine pulling your buddy out of the water and the whole back of his leg is missing you know and saying those words is one thing but i've got the surgery photos and to see the open gaping shark wound in the back of my leg would have been horrific one of the guys never dove again i mean what would be worse to get bit

by nothing right i mean i think so maybe a an orca it's just gonna bite you in half yeah but yeah it was a shit day at work man um nearly died a couple of times uh one of the guys had to stick his hand inside my leg and pinch close the artery to keep me alive, stop me from bleeding out. But the paramedics got there within about 15 minutes. They pumped me full of drugs, took me to… Just right there on the boat? Yeah, right up. Now, we were alongside the pier.

Okay. So the guys in the boat got me up to the pier and tried to stabilize me as much as they could up there while they were waiting for the paramedics. there uh while they were waiting for the paramedics and then the paramedics came they pumped me full of drugs because by that stage the pain had really kicked in and like it was so agonizing i was just begging them for drugs and in the ambulance i i started to think i was going to die again because my blood um levels were so low I was white as a sheet. And they pumped me full of morphine and I couldn't breathe. I physically couldn't make my chest go up and down. So I started to think I was going to die all over again from not being able to breathe.

So they coached me through that. And it basically turned into a bit of a pregnant Lady Lamaze class in the ambulance. Because you're panicking. Yeah. Well, you can't breathe. Yeah. Well, I was just, yeah. Well, you can't breathe. What do you do? Yeah.

I'm like, I'm trying to whisper to them, I can't breathe. And so they coached me through it. They kept me calm. And thankfully, you know, they got me to emergency surgery straight away. And I went in and the next couple of days were a bit of a blur. I woke up at one point and looked down and saw my foot was still there. And I went in and the next couple of days were a bit of a blur. I woke up at

one point and looked down and saw my foot was still there. And I was just thankful for that. You know, I knew my hand was gone. I'd seen that. I'd processed it. Nothing I can do about that. But if I can keep my leg, maybe I can keep this job that I love so much. And that was all I was concerned about, just keeping this job that I had fought tooth and nail to get into because I didn't have anything else. And the things that were running through my mind was, I'm going to have a worthless life. I'm going to be in a wheelchair and people are going to pity me and I'm going to have this horrible rest of my life. I'm still, I'm only 31, 30. What am I going to do for the rest of my life? I was terrified. And that fear eventually turned into a very powerful motivator for me.

When you're like in the hospital and stuff, I would imagine you go back and forth between being angry about the situation and then also probably being grateful that you're still alive, right? That battle must have went on for a long time and the healing process for this must have taken a long time. Look, to be honest, I never really had a lot of anger about the situation. It wasn't like I would slay my bed fuming. The only time I was angry

was when they couldn't control the pain because I realized the situation that i was in and i never blamed the shark because i chose a dangerous life i don't think people know that about pain makes you pissed makes you grumpy yeah it makes you really angry older people that uh you know somebody in their 70s it's just you got a grumpy a grandpa or whatever sometimes people are just mad because they're they're in a lot of pain you know um and it's hard to deal with that especially over long periods of time um but it wasn't a lot of to and fro because like i said i'm very logical person um and i just thought

you know i had my leg taken off and that was a very easy decision because the doctor broke it down for me and he said, look, we can take it off. And we can have you running and walking on prosthetics within six to 12 months or we can keep the leg. You'll never be able to move it. You'll never be able to feel it. You'll carry it around like a lump of wood and your life will suck. You'll never be able to feel it. You'll carry it around like a lump of wood and your life will suck. So when you give a logical person a logical choice like that,

it's very easy to make the right decision. So I had the leg taken off and for the next 20 hours I was in agonizing pain. But eventually, to the point where I asked my mum to find me a gun so I could kill myself. That bad. I just wanted it to end. I wished that the shark had killed me. And that was the hardest point. But I think all of the trials

and tribulations that I'd been through in life previous to that, the depression and slashing my arms up to the kickboxing training and learning to be strong to being strong enough to leave my hometown and start again and then being at the bottom of the barrel or everything going through everything in the army it was almost like training and preparation for this and so i knew i was still alive that was the main thing i'm still alive i'm not exactly grateful for it but this is the situation so So what do I do about that? I'm going to be alive for quite some time. So I need to make the most of this situation because I can't go back to what I had before. I can't go back to being poor and having an unfulfilling life

and doing nothing. I lived that life when I was stoned out of my brain for weeks on end. So I don't want that shit. So what am I going to to do i'm going to use the tools and the lessons that the military has given me and i'm going to look at the great things i still have in my life like my friends my family that amazing support network the fact that the military is going to pay for my prosthetics and all that sort of stuff fully functioning arm a fully functioning leg on the other side semi-functioning it it's it's never going to replicate a real hand, a real leg, but it doesn't. Right, but I mean on the other side. Yeah.

Well, I got half of good stuff. So I decided that I'm going to turn a very complicated situation into a very simple choice. And that choice was, what do I want? Do I want a good life or do I want a shit life? And it's that simple sometimes. We overcomplicate that too much. Do you get frustrated now sometimes? Like how long ago was that?

2009. You still have days where you just get frustrated? Like not necessarily like down, like, oh man, you know, this happened or whatever. But like just frustrated. Like we went to the gym like two days ago and we saw he had the trap bar and you're like i'm doing some farmers carries and me and my brother like that crazy bastard man he's fucking getting after it but like i mean there's you know it's probably situations here and there where you're just like you know this it's bumming you out i guess i'd say you know there's moments right there's not days there's

not weeks you know a very good friend of mine gave me um a very important lesson he just said never feel bad about feeling bad it's natural it's okay just don't let it ruin your whole day your whole week or your whole life so work out why you're feeling bad and try and deal with it try and solve it you know be proactive about your problems and so when you guys saw me um it was i was frustrated because i know that we actually sensed it because uh my brothers you know talked to you many times before yeah and he's like that was a little weird he's always so fired up he's always so nice i was like well maybe he's just in the middle of his workout maybe he's focused i i did just have fourth of july as well so um probably way too much

yeah yeah motivation was not at peak level well that's a big thing too being frustrated with yourself yeah can be really not frustrated with uh what with what happened but frustrating like you you knew you knew that you were going to train the next day and you knew you probably should have backed off and maybe not had as many beers or whatever it was right yeah that's annoying yeah like that'll that'll make anybody frustrated but also for the fact that i know that my body is capable of more but there's certain things about the weight lifting arm or this leg which limit me so i what i was doing 245s and a 25 on the bar and I could carry more, but the weight pulling on my elbow was hurting my elbow so much that I just couldn't do anymore. So that frustrates me. But I'm a firm believer that if there is a problem, there is a solution.

Sometimes with the right tools and sometimes that right tool is just the right mindset okay so i'll find another way to do it i'll find another way to work that muscle i'll find another way to train and get stronger or i'll adjust the prosthetic somehow now you never accept the fact that this is it this is how it is and i've just got to put up with it maybe it'll be better tomorrow exactly right yeah with what happened to you do you view it as like an event, a tragedy? Like how do you label it in your head? You know, you getting the crap kicked out of you by 20 people versus the shark. I love it when I get questions that I've never been asked before.

Like smart questions like that. Because that's a big thing, how you view the situations in your life. And it's exactly like that. It's just an event. It was, and people laugh at me because. Well, let's, you know, you break it down, right? You obviously didn't invite that situation, but you did kind of sign up for it. They did tell you there's sharks in the water.

Yeah. And other people chose a different route. 70% of the people said, you know what, man? Like this training is really hard. There's sharks in the water yeah and other people chose a different route 70 of the people said you know what man like this training is really hard there's sharks in the water i heard what you said i'm getting the fuck out of here exactly right dude i chose a dangerous life right because that was fulfilling for me i felt i felt like i was a badass but i also felt a sense of pride in my uniform in the fact that i was serving my country i was a representative of my country and i was physically doing things that a lot of people can't do so jumping out of planes shooting guns and rocket launchers traveling the world being a peacekeeper diving playing with

bombs underwater in water that you can't even see the hand in front of your face and putting together bombs and mines and all i chose that life so you can't get see the hand in front of your face and putting together bombs and mines and all. I chose that life. So you can't get upset when something goes wrong. Why would you do that? Don't be a dick. You chose that situation. Things can go wrong. And so if it does, you just deal with it.

So for me, it's an event. It's something that happened. It's an event. It's something that happened. I don't anchor my whole life off that day, even though a whole new career and a whole new lifestyle has come out of that turning point in life. Does it ever get to be too much? People asking every day, like little kids and stuff,

man, what happened to your hand? Or like, I mean, sometimes probably just like, you know, like my brother and I, we had our oldest brother pass away years ago. And, you know, people still, because they see bigger, stronger, faster. And sometimes people don't know. And so they'll come and sometimes they'll come at you sideways. You're not thinking about it.

You're not paying attention to it at all. And someone will say, oh, how's Chris doing? I'll say, oh, Chris is doing great. Lives in LA and he's having a good time. He's getting in better shape. He's made some big changes. And they'll say, oh, how's Chris doing? I'll say, Oh, Chris doing great. Lives in LA and he's having a good time. He's getting in better shape. He's made some big changes and they'll say, Oh, how's Mike?

And it's like, Oh, like that just, you know, hit me, you know, hit me out of nowhere with your thing. It's very visual.

Yeah. You know, I'm sure you get questions all the time. Does that ever get to be beat you up a little bit? It does. Yeah. I'm totally honest. Yeah.

Kind of the weird jokes too. Sometimes. Yeah. Really insensitive people, just stupid questions. I think sometimes maybe it gives you better perspective on people joking around about race and people joking around about things they can see. Yeah.

Like, oh, they make a black joke because the guy's black or they make an Asian joke because the guy's Asian. Does that make you a little more sensitive to some of those things where you're kind of like i kind of think i always was yeah i'm not a super insensitive person i think i am anyway you know i would never do that about someone my mom always said when i was a kid there for the grace of god go i so there's you you could be in their shoes all it would have taken is a tiny little change of circumstances and you could be that person going through what they're going through so why would you ever judge someone

else friend that's heavy or you got the friend that's short and it's like oh you're short and every other joke's a short thing and every other joke's a fat joke and it's like just give it a goddamn rest for a second you know exactly right um so yeah i i understand at the same time that if I saw a half robot dude walking down the street, I would be curious as well. And I'd probably have a look and I'd probably be a little sensitive. I try and not look too long. Um, wearing sunglasses, it's almost like people think I'm blind. Like they can't see where your eyes are looking.

So they just feel readily, you're readily available to them to be stared at. And they're just like, oh shit. Have you told anybody about the penis? the penis the the mechanical penis that you have dude luckily it was a cold morning and i'm a lefty okay and i had some shrinkage going on otherwise i would have been a triple amputee so yeah you know small blessings um but you know i never get upset with the kids because they're usually quite funny. It's grown adults that just open mouth stare at you, which I'm just like, are you for real? I've had council workers like this old Asian woman back in Sydney yelling at me from across the street.

Just going, hey, come here. No. What happened to your leg fuck off and it's like you walk away from that so angry but you just gotta breathe let it go and realize sometimes people are just fucking that you can't do anything about it some people are just they have no idea don't let it get to. Go and do something that makes you happy. You can't let it weigh you down too much, right? Obviously, they've got their own issues. Right.

And I have, you know, I trained myself into being, generally speaking, very happy, very positive, very motivated. And it just came through practice. Do you remember a moment where you started to make some progress with the recovery from all this, and you started to be able to maybe run or swim or do something at the gym, and you're like, oh, this is kind of cool, or did you communicate with other people that were amputees

or something like that that got your spirits lifted? Yeah, yeah. There was actually some of that. There was times where the effect was opposite to what people wanted. So when I was in hospital, there was some that lifted me up, some brought me down. There was this guy who was a double-leg amputee, a single-leg amputee, and he was a doctor,

and he came into my hospital bed, and he thought that meeting another amputee might help me. And so I'm drugged to the eyeballs on ketamine and morphine. I'm tripping out a little bit, and I'm just going through this terrifying process. And he comes in, and he's just like full of beans he's like bouncing around the room and he just like takes his leg off in front of me and shows me his horrible scars and i'm i'm like this is the fucking worst thing he possibly could have done

and it just crushed me and i'm like oh great like it's a little early on yeah a little early early early for this things like you know know, I'm finally training. I'm back in the gym. I did it all myself. I had no rehab hospital, nothing like that. It was just me and my buddy who would drive me to the gym. And I'd get in there and I'd try and learn to use my body again. And I'd start to get stronger and I'd start to get fitter.

And then all of a sudden, I've got bone spurs growing out the end of my leg, digging into my flesh to the point where I can't walk and the pain is killing me. And I've got to go back in for another round of surgery to have that removed. Then I've got to wait for that to heal up again before I can walk again. And that happened three times. And then I had a bursa removal in the end of my arm. So it's like every time I get to a certain point and then I've got to go in for surgery and I come back down and I can't train. I can't work out my arm.

I can't work out my leg. And it's really demotivating. But what I realized was, yeah, that sucks. I can't walk. Get your fucking crotches. Go back into the gym because you've still got an upper body to train. Just because you don't have two legs to do squats doesn't mean you skip leg day. You just get really good at pistol squats.

I got a really bad tendency to focus on stuff that i don't have yeah you know like just for example like i'll be in the gym i get my own gym i make a lot of my own products and stuff and so like i'll like search around for a specific pair of elbow sleeves that i feel like using for the day but it's just i don't i don't need them you know but i i have a tendency to focus in on uh things that i don't really need things that i don't really actually even want a lot of times and i've noticed that about i recognize that about myself so a lot of times i'll just say you know what focus on the shit that you can do focus on the things that you do have yeah exactly right be happy with those things and just get the shit done yeah because you can spend 10 15 minutes

trying to figure out how to shortcut something or you can be 10 or 15 minutes ahead right by just by just doing it yeah exactly just move along get get your ass going that's one of the things that a lot of people can't do that you seem to be good at is the fact that you realize what your mind is doing to you so you almost trick it back into working the way you want yeah and a lot of people just don't get that they feel like this is what my brain is making me feel like and that's just how it is whereas you are the fucking boss of your body and the boss of your brain it will do what you want it to if you are firm with it and that's what the military taught me and then going through all of this dealing with pain and dealing with having to rehab and start from scratch again, that was a really

powerful lesson to find out that, no, no, I don't have to feel like shit. I don't have to be angry with that person. I don't have to be upset that I can't do something. I will just find another way to do it. I will not worry about that that person i will not work out my leg today because it's hurting me even though i want to train legs so bad i'll go and do something else i'll go i'll go for a swim i'll go and get in the ocean because i know that makes me feel amazing and it's finding out all these little tricks to to remind yourself that you are actually in control and going into the ocean is one of those big ones for me it sort of has this way to wash away stresses and you still like to do that a lot

oh yeah i was back in the water three months to the day after the shark attack as soon as my staples and stitches came out of my leg i was like eight foot male under my arm down at bondo with my two buddies hopping down the soft sand everyone was staring staring at me. They're like, he hasn't learned his lesson. No, he's really dumb. Sometimes I think that stupidity is actually a benefit. Yeah. Too dumb to quit. So yeah, I know what works.

Some people that may not have direction, it seemed like you started to figure out direction through not living the life that you wanted and then talking to your mom and then the military gave you obviously gave you a lot of direction the event that happened with the shark gave you a lot of direction how can other people find their direction you know how can they how can they kind of figure out how do i get on the right path like is there something that you learned along the way uh that maybe some people are missing out on that they're

not paying attention to that they should be practicing or doing yeah i think i think a lot of people are afraid to make the big scary decisions the things that will change their life forever. I learned to do that no matter what, from leaving home, to joining the army, to changing to the navy, to a couple of years ago, leaving the security umbrella of the military, which was my guaranteed paycheck. Some people are too afraid to make that really big life-changing decision i've learned that those are usually the best decisions you can make as long as you are dedicated to pouring your heart and your soul into that decision because if you're not happy or if you're not where you want to be in life are you just going to be comfortable in your misery?

Or are you going to get uncomfortable, make a big scary decision, maybe take a pay cut, maybe move to a new place, take a career change, something like that, because your happiness is worth it. What is the point of – and I meet people when I travel and speak all the time. They come up to me after my presentation and they break down because they're just living they're so unhappy and they're so broken and they hear this story and it touches them i guess but there were there were more unhappy broken unmotivated people out there in the world than i thought possible well you're not going to change the you know here in malibu and we're on the beach and you're not going to change these waves that are coming in you know i, I was, I was laying out there a couple of nights ago and I was looking up at the stars and it's like, it doesn't matter how much money I make or how much money I don't make or how much money I lose or, uh, how much strength I gain or like none of these things matter. It's

not going to change the position of where those stars are right there's things that are just they're just a certain way they just are the way they are so you may as well try to make yourself as happy as possible and in my opinion one way to be happy and it doesn't have to always be this way you don't have to be a maniac with it but i think that the only way to have happiness is a lot of time to have progress. Yeah. Growth. You know, it doesn't always, you can do mindless stuff and you can just hang out and you can just play a video game and it doesn't have to be a lot of progress with any of that because we need to, we need to relax, right? And we need to kind of calm down every once in a while. But other than those couple of things that you do here and there, there, there always

has to be steps forward, right? Yeah. There's always got to be some progress going on. Otherwise, you're going to be stuck and you're not going to be very happy with what you're doing. Damn straight. And if you are happy, if you can sit down and look at yourself and go, I am truly happy just doing what I'm doing, something simple. Not everyone has to go and risk their life joining the freaking military to to find reward and growth if you are truly happy in in maybe the simplest thing you know as a housewife as raising a family you

know doing you feel happiness and fulfillment in that then amazing good for you that's freaking incredible but if you're not then make some changes it's it's not that hard to make that big scary decision and then jump in head first. I ended up going back to the Navy for three years working as an instructor. But I was working sometimes 70, 80-hour weeks trying to train the students under me, trying to keep up with my buddies, trying to keep my fitness level at the same time while instructing these guys. And it was killing me. I bet. But I didn't have anything else. You know, I wasn't trained to do anything else. So

when I decided to leave the military, that was terrifying. So I just knew that it was worth it. I think one of the strongest pulls is, uh, you know, it always goes back to your own identity and our identity is like, uh, not necessarily necessarily who you think or you feel that you are but it's uh your perception of the way other people think of you sometimes and it's a weird kind of jacked up thing to really try to sit there and think about what the hell that means but you're the military guy you're the guy that got half eaten by a shark and that's your you keep getting you keep getting pulled back to that and for you to distance yourself from the military and move into other aspects of your life was a very difficult

thing to figure out yeah how did some of that come to be how did i mean you're on the discovery channel you're on shark week which is one of the greatest television programs in the history of tv i think i love watching that yeah me too um it started slowly it started by doing something else that i was absolutely afraid of public speaking and i was asked to give presentations for companies a few times when i was in the navy and i was terrified i just no thank you very much i'm not comfortable with that and then it's insane too because here's a guy jumping out of planes yeah i don't want to talk in front of you i just want to shoot people and bad people and shoot the bad people not just people um you know i'm happy

with all of that that my role in the world but don't ask me to speak in front of you um but then a cancer camp for kids asked me to speak. How do you say no to kids with cancer? You can't do that. My job is about service. This is just another way for me to serve. So I went along and did it, and I just felt this incredible sense of reward for making these sick kids laugh,

to make them forget that they grew up in a hospital. I walked out of there just feeling on top of the world. Oh, that's awesome. And so I thought, okay, maybe I can do this. And it started really slowly, and the Navy wouldn't give me leave to do it. So I was using all of my annual leave to go and do this. And it got to a point where I didn't have any leave left.

And the speaking engagements had started coming in, and I was getting paid for them. And all of a sudden, I was making my two weeks Navy wage speaking for one hour. And I thought, okay, what do I do here? Do I stay with my security blanket? But if I go and do the speaking, how long is this going to last? How long will I be the flavor of the month? So that was a bit of a conundrum there. But I remembered what I was telling you about earlier sometimes making those big scary decisions is the best way to grow and progress it had always worked out in the past so let's just jump in headfirst so I left the military

and a couple years later I was making more money than I could have thought. I was doing so much speaking. I had so much time off. Life was just really great. But after a few years of that, I didn't feel like there was much more growth. And a few jobs that I'd been to, people were like, oh, this is the third time I've seen you speak. And I'm just thinking, I don't want want this to happen I don't want to be that guy living off old glories for the next 10 years right so that was when Discovery Channel came knocking and they offered me uh it started small I'd done a lot of TV interviews and stuff so I was comfortable in front of the camera and then they just asked for an interview and that turned into a live talk show in the next year that turned into a co-hosting job. And they just seemed to like me and they liked my story and the way that I energetically jumped headfirst,

literally, into the water with sharks because I realized there was just nothing left to be afraid of. So that turned into a whole new career to the point where I decided to leave Australia. And I didn't have a working visa at that point, but I could have a three-month visa. And so I came out to America on and off for the next two years. I had no home.

I had a car in each city. And I was Airbnb-ing for nearly two years. And it was a really hard period doing that 14 hour flight backwards and forwards 20 times in two years but that was the sacrifice i had to make for growth and i could have stayed at home and kept making a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year basically standing on stage telling a story but right there was no growth in that so i took the pay cut i used the money that i'd saved off doing all of that to try and grow again. And eventually it paid off and a contract came through with Discovery Channel for a

two year visa, three Shark Week shows a year, development money for my own series. And it's all now two years down the track starting to turn into this lifestyle that I could never have believed would have been this good. That's awesome. to turn into this lifestyle that I could never have believed would have been this good. That's awesome. Is it a pain in the ass with getting the visa and all that kind of stuff, or is it not that? Luckily, Discovery Channel took care of that.

There was a bit of a to and fro because I was being offered my own show by National Geographic as well. So Discovery Channel really didn't want the talent that they'd grown to be given to a competitor. So my managers did a really good job of getting the best deal for me. So they took care of everything, which was great. So now I think on this visa, I can stay here as long as I want, as long as I renew it every year and I'm working in the field that I said I was. So I love it out here. I love the American hospitality.

I love the country. I love the opportunity and the growth and the way that people lift you up here. And I love the gratitude for the work that I do here. I've started working in the county jails. I've started working in the juvenile detention centers. I've started working for big corporations, doing motivational speaking for them. i get to do shark week and it's just it's that sense of growth that i didn't have in australia and a sense of a new environment new people and i just love it and i'll stay here as long as i'm welcome when you go into some of these prisons that's got to be a lot different than the motivational talks right yeah it's it's much harder to win these people over um so i never try and compare my situation to them because you know what everyone has a story you have a story chris has story i have a story my story is no bigger or better than anyone else's it's just a little bit different so i try and tell it with that in mind it's just this is just a different story and i try and weave some of the lessons that i've learned over time through the story instead of going in there and going, you need to do this.

And this is how you should live. And here's the five factors of growth that I've learned. It's a story. And everyone likes a story. So I just tell that and weave the lessons through it. And eventually, at some point, people are going to get it. Well, they're going to identify with you, right? There's going to be the one guy that was abused by his parents all his parents all the time no no no my parents never i'm saying i'm saying it doesn't

relate to you right yes yes and then there's gonna be the guy who you know went to catholic school and he's starting to play through some of the things and he's like oh check you know that's me that's me i'm kind of like that you know you always kind of we're fighting against the grain it sounds like right yeah a little bit and And I find that really interesting because that's what people are fascinated with, is just go up there and just give them your experience. Just tell them about your experience. But if you go up there and really preach, they'll be like, who's this guy? People just switch off.

This guy's never been in my shoes. He doesn't know what happened to me. And it took a long time to learn how to do it as well. I was terrified of public speaking. So a lot of the times when people were giving me advice i would just shut my mouth and listen i still do that on on the shark week shoots from a lot of the the people that have been in the industry for a very long time because they know what they're talking about and the one thing that they might say might save my life when i go 110 feet down and swim with great white sharks without a cage so i just shut my mouth and i listen to people giving me advice and some of it's bad advice

some of it's good advice but you get to choose what you take on board and one of the the most powerful things was when I was told by a very famous Australian woman that I'm just too damn military and she's like this happened and this happened and this happened. You just, you give it a military story. You need to give more vulnerability. You need to give more of yourself. And I went away from that just thinking, what the hell does she expect?

Like be vulnerable? I'm a soldier. I'm a clearance diver. I've been trained not to be vulnerable. What does she want me to break down and cry? I'm like, I don't know how to do any of that shit. But then I thought about it and I got on stage and I just tried to give more of myself.

Like the really, I tried not to just be the tough military guy. This is what happened. This is what happened. All the things that you were talking your brain out of going into, you just tapped into some of that. Exactly right. Because there was those feelings, but you suppressed them because you're a savage.

Yeah. The sense of vulnerability of wanting to die and telling that story of being in so much pain, all I wanted to do was die. And people started to cry. Yeah. And that was an amazing feeling, not to make them cry,

but to be able to take them on this emotional rollerco with me and then people started to pass out so i started showing the surgery photos and talking through all of that scenario and now i've had 54 people pass out wow 52 men they're just like only two women yeah wow um so it's become this really fun thing for me to do. I get to share the absolute lowest points, the absolute highs and everything in between and all the little tools and lessons I've learned along the way. And it works. I know it works because social media is an incredible tool of communication and people write to me and tell me and they go home and they tell their kids and

their kids look me up and follow me. And it's just such an incredible feeling to be able to reach people and help their lives that I might never get to meet. It's an incredible feeling. When you're doing motivational talks and you're on TV, people have a different perception of you. They're just looking at you and like, oh, man, guy's life, like is it privileged or however they want to, however they want to view it. Maybe there's a view that you're super determined, you got there, but they don't relate it to them, you know? And when you show, uh, all the things that you went through to get there, everybody's been, like you said, everyone's got a story. Everybody's been through something. Maybe it's not as crazy as some of the things you've been through, but everybody has been through something. so they can at least relate to that on the surface yeah and they kind of identify uh with that a lot better when it comes

to your prosthetics um so so this happened uh almost almost 10 years ago right how has uh the technology advanced um or or you kind of have the same setup you've had for a long time at the top of the line which is what i have i'm very very fortunate the military looks after my prosthetics and they give me the best um i've had three legs three leg upgrades um the original was the c leg the second one was the x2 this is the x3 so it's gone from not being waterproof and just a very good walking leg to this is fully waterproof it has a running mode um the balance is better what's the functions running mode so does it assist you're running a little bit yeah yeah it it it has um a lockout mode a free swing mode so i can ride a push bike. But I can just get up and I can run on this leg.

The only problem is this foot isn't a running foot. So I kind of look like an old grandpa chasing his kids around. You'd have to change. Flat footed, yeah. You've got to change the foot. But the arm has also changed.

I've only had, this is only one upgrade. The old hand I had, it was just very flimsy. It looked very robotic and i used to break it every week and so i upgraded to this one which is called the michelangelo so people that can't see what's going on right here he his his hand is in like this black glove that goes all the way up to his elbow and uh how are you able to actually move the hand? Because you don't, like, where are you missing your hand from?

From below the wrist? Yeah, just above the wrist. So is it the same way you would normally move your hand? It's not. So how I do it is inside the hand is a lot of the electronics. My arm comes down to just there, just above my wrist, and the socket holds the batteries, what they call the brain, which is like the CPU. It also has the on and off switch there, which doubles as a magnetic charging port.

So I have to plug that into the wall every three days or so. And then there's a sensor on the bottom here. There's a little hole just there on the bottom of my forearm. And then a sensor on the top. So what I do is instead of opening and closing the hand that sort of motion it's almost like making a fist and drawing the bottom of your fist towards your elbow and flexing that bottom forearm muscle and that will close the hand if i want to flex it open i flex back and the sensor on the top of my forearm picks up that muscle activating and the handle open.

So I'm just basically doing that backwards and forwards with my wrist. If I want to change the grip, I give it a little flick like that. So this is neutral grip at the moment. I give it a little flick. You can hear it beeps, and then it goes to beer drinking grip. This is like, I call it man grip or beer drinking grip. So this is how I shake a man's hand because it's very firm. Men have bigger hands, so it's got a wider grip, and it sort of clenches down.

And then there's the girl grip or neutral grip, and I don't like to hurt the girl, so I give it a little bit softer. But it's a $90,000 holding device. I'm never going to play the piano with it. I can't lift weights with it because the fingers will snap. But it's amazing can you pick up like 30 40 pounds with it like yeah yeah it's enough i can carry a bag and i can hold a beer and i can shake hands and it looks much better than having nothing hanging out of

your sleeve to have this you know it looks cool it looks like a hand in a badass black glove so we went to shake hands at the gym you had your you had your lifting uh hook on what what what is that what's uh involved with that thing so i've got um two weight lifting arms which are much more durable than this one uh one is for pushing so it ends um below the elbows so i can push to full extension and that's you know for bench press and all that sort of stuff and there's an attachment on the elbows so I can push to full extension. And that's for bench press and all that sort of stuff. And there's an attachment on the end. So you can do almost every exercise in the gym. Yeah, basically. Except for I can't do heavy deadlifts and I'm not very good on the free bar at squats

because I can't rely on my right robot leg to stop it from bending. So if I lean on it, it'll just keep collapsing. So I use the Smith machine. I just don't do heavy deadlifts. But basically everything else with the right tool. I've got another weightlifting arm that goes above my elbow, a bit like this one, and that holds all the weight. I can do chin-ups with 45-pound weights,

and the arm won't come off. So it's just the right tool for the right job. Do you have to bring all that stuff with you to the gym? Every day. Switching out your arms and your hands. And then when I'm traveling for Shark Week, I've got this leg I've got to carry, the robot arm, the two weightlifting arms. I've got my diving leg.

I've got running blades. Are they checking that at the airport? So heavy, man. Yeah. And so my luggage isn't over. I carry a lot of the stuff in my carry-on. So I go through the x-ray machine, and I get pulled up every time.

They start pulling all these crazy limbs out of my backpack. Everyone's standing around staring. Like, bro, that's my leg. Yeah. Sometimes it's a realistic-looking rubber foot that I use for diving, and I just pull that out and put it on the bench, and then they run that through the x-ray machine.

Just throw a giant dildo in there, too. They'll be like, whoa. This is my dildo arm. So I get a tack on an extra 20 minutes when I'm going to the airport. As far as the leg goes, where is the bottom of your leg end? My leg goes down to just above the knee. Oh, okay. But my hamstring isn't my hamstring.

What they had to do, because if they removed above the wound, which normally they would, like in an amputation, they would have had to take my leg off just below the hip, which makes you a hip disarticulate amputee, makes life really hard because you don't have a limb

to put a prosthetic socket on. So they worked out a way to salvage the limb. They cut off my foot. They sliced open the back of my calf muscle all the way up to where the shark bite started in my hamstring peeled all of that muscle off the bone took out my shin bones cut out my knee joint cut the end of my femur off and then folded all of that calf muscle into the back of my leg where the shark bite was and stitched it up. So now my calf muscle is where my hamstring used to be.

And it's non-functioning. It doesn't do anything. It's just sort of there to fill the gap. Holy shit. Yeah. It makes life kind of hard. Probably a little harder than a normal above-knee leg amputee because it moves a lot.

It's not really attached to the bone um it atrophied a lot because i can't you know the muscles are non-functioning so you know it it's it's hard but that's just life i gotta deal with it like i get up in the morning and i put my leg on i go to bed i take it off how do you train that leg so it doesn't aren't really oh yeah there's there's not much i can do the part of the quad you can move you can move the hip a little bit um yeah i i do leg raises i can lock out the knee on this prosthetic leg so i do a lot of leg raises i do crunches and how you're able to do that how are you able to swing that leg well i if i stand up and i kick back i can make i can lock it out by going one

two three four and then it beeps and then it goes into free swing mode so I can ride a bike. If I do it three times, then it'll go into lock mode, and the knee will lock out so I can just do leg raises like that. Right. All that sort of stuff. You just find a way, man. There's always a way with the right tool. Like I said, sometimes that tool is just the right mindset.

It must take a long time to start to figure some of that out yeah i spent a lot of time in the gym in the early days just going in there and i didn't even have a leg or a weight lifting arm at that point so it was just a matter of getting in there and learning how to use my body again right having a butt still helps you know how you got you got your butt muscle that can kind of help you still get around even that atrophies because i'm not pushing through it doing a lot of squats and stuff so i've got it i mean i spent a lot of time on the leg kickback machines working my glutes you know doing the the booty doing all the all the lady all the lady exercises everyone walks past me on the kickback machine going hey working that butt palm here you're gonna work the butt

so there's a lot of advancements in technology. People are, you know, I see people, they're growing like ears and they're growing all these different kinds of things right now. They're getting better at hand transplants and things like that. Hands and feet are kind of complicated. Do you think or care or, you know, I mean, obviously you care, but do you think anything like that may be in your future? I hope the technology and the surgery gets to the point where you can do that,

whether it's prosthetics that can be embedded into the body like a cyborg instead of having this socket on all the time or getting a hand transplant or a leg transplant. I hope the technology gets to the point where it actually works and it's non-dangerous, but at this point in time it's just not there um you the anti-rejection drugs you have to take a terrible on your body um just the recovery time and the fact that it's not guaranteed the nerves are going to grow so at this point i'm not going to be a guinea pig i'll i'll let other people do that yeah let people

other people try it out what's coming up for you uh now like what do you got going on in the next couple weeks shark week bro yeah shark week starts july 22nd uh three new huge shows um really can't wait for them to come out we um i did two back to back just in the last couple of months um the first one was it's called shark wrecked and they took me and a british special forces guy off the coast of the bahamas two and a half thousand feet deep water they blew up our boat and then they they chummed the waters so it's kind of simulating where we're in wetsuits and fins we have masks and snorkels sort of simulating two guys coming back to their boat after spearfishing they've got all their bait and fish on the boat and then it blows up yeah what do you do how do you survive surrounded by

sharks so we spent two days and two nights in the water uh in the ocean drifting through the atlantic no water no food um surrounded by sharks they intermittently chum the waters to put the sharks into a predatory mode um my buddy had a short pole i had nothing um but at night time we did have a netted pen we could get into when it was just too dangerous too dark we couldn't see anything uh and it was really lucky we did too they'll see in the show the sharks got super aggressive at night they actually woke me up at one point when in my not even sleep but stupor by ramming the cage oh yeah it was it was pretty crazy so that was one way to wake up sorry a hell of a way to wake you up right dude like so i didn't even i was just sort of feeling this bumping at three

o'clock in the morning it's pitch black i can't see anything except like two feet away from me and i wake up and the cage is still knocking and then this fin comes up right next to my head because i had my head on the the edge of the the pen like not again just to rest my head on something so i could try and sleep this freaking fin comes up right next to my face so i didn't really sleep much after that yeah and then we we took ronda rousey down to fiji and cool put her through some crazy shark experiences and she's never even dived in her life so sounds like you're ready for some action movies with all these uh guns and rockets and stuff that you've been jumping out of planes trying to convince them to give me flamethrower arms or some wolverine claws that's made me a bond villain i

don't just put me in coach yeah very cool uh where can people find it and uh you know you mentioned you had a book earlier maybe tell people where they can find the book. So it was really hard to get out here in America, actually. So I started a Shopify store. It's written in Australian. So yeah, there's some slang words you might not understand. But just get onto the Australian dictionary, the Australian slang dictionary, and that'll sort you out. So I got a stack shipped over.

I started a Shopify store where i'm starting to sell a lot of shark type stuff um people just seem to be so into shark we're like 20 million viewers um so i want to help people get their shark stuff and the book's on there it's called the shark shacks shark shack dot store um you can pick up the book i can personalize it because i'm in control of stock so you can get it there and just you can personalize it because I'm in control of the stock. So you can get it there and just, you know, come on, come along for a ride on the Instagram. You know, I usually try and put a bunch of stuff on there. They put clips from shark week and all the crazy stuff that I'm doing in my own life.

Some of the training and nutrition stuff that I'm doing. So yeah, come along for the ride. Very cool. Strength is never weakness. Weakness never strength. Catch you guys later.