Paul De Gelder (Shark Attacks, Adaptive Athletes and Veganism) - Episode 417

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CEO Francisco Morales. Welcome to episode 417 of Behind the Shield podcast. As always my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show Paul DeGelder. Now Paul is a veteran of the Australian Army, the Australian Navy as a bomb disposal diver and it was during that time in a training incident he was attacked by a shark ultimately losing

an arm and a leg. Being the epitome of resilience, he overcame that injury physically and mentally and returned to duty before transitioning out and becoming one of the faces of Shark Week. So this is an incredibly powerful story. There are some real takeaways, including his near -death experience and how he found peace after that. Before we get to that conversation, please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback

and leave a rating. Every five -star rating truly elevates this podcast, making it easier for others to find. And this is a free library for you, planet Earth. So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women's stories so I can get them to everyone else who needs to hear them. So with that being said, I introduce to you Paul DeGelder. Enjoy. Well, Paul, I want to start by saying thank you so

much. I know you've had a crazy day today, so I really appreciate you coming on the podcast today. No dramas, mate. Thanks for inviting me. So where on planet Earth are we finding you today? I am at home in Marina del Rey, Los Angeles. Beautiful. That's a beautiful part of LA at least. Yeah, it's not too bad. My balcony doors look over a little marina beach and it's a pretty nice spot. There's no shops around here, so there was no rioting. Oh, really? They weren't tearing

up the boats in the area? All right. Well, then, obviously, from your accent, you are not a native Californian. So let's start at the very beginning. Tell me where you were born and then also your family dynamic, what your parents did and how many siblings. I was born in a place called Mornington Peninsula. It's about an hour and a half south of Melbourne, a little seaside town known for horse racing and wine. I'm the oldest of four

kids. There was me, my younger brother, two younger brothers, then my baby sister, and dad was a cop and mum was the traditional housewife. We stayed there until I was about 10 and then dad got posted and we moved to a place called Frankston, fondly referred to as Frankganistan because it had been... Very, very seedy areas. But we were only there for about a year. And then Dad got another posting with the Australian Bureau of

Criminal Intelligence. And we shipped off another 10 hours north to the capital of Australia, which is called Canberra. And so I spent most of my formative years there until I was about 21. Brilliant. Well, I want to get to Canberra in a second because I was there myself 20 years ago now, I think it was. Well, it was just an interesting moment. But before we do, so, you know, that's a very interesting profession that your dad did. Obviously, the audience listening, a lot of us are first

responders and military. So, what was your dad's experience with that profession? Did he ever kind of sit down and talk to you about, you know,

some of the stuff that he did? Nah, look, he comes from the old guard, mate, where you just get... taught to bury it down and not talk about it and not deal with it so i really didn't know anything about what he did i actually when um my um writer who helped me write the book No Time for Fear back in Australia, she interviewed my family and I actually found out more about my dad reading my own book than he ever told

me. Like in Melbourne, he was known as the siege man because every time there was like hostages taken or some guy on a roof with a shotgun, he always managed to track them down or talk the weapon out of their hands or something like that. So I really didn't know much about his job at

all except for it was. called the australian bureau of criminal intelligence they were posted in the telecom building up supposedly so that they could have access to people's phones um but yeah that's about it interesting well i when i was in canberra so i did i traveled i lived in manly you know by um sydney for a while and then did some traveling before i ended up getting a stunt job in japan and when i went to canberra the only way i could describe it was that the

city was built for far more people than actually lived there. So it probably looked a lot like the pandemic cities that we see. So what was your experience growing up there? Yeah, it's not like many other places except for small country towns. And it is fundamentally a country town. It's just a very big one. It's really spread out. Basically, on Sunday, everything shut back

when I was a kid. Everything. It was like a... ghost town you didn't see cars on the road it was very peculiar to look back on um and look dad was a swimming instructor in his spare time as well in the cops he held a lot of the um police olympic records for swimming and he had his own squad in melbourne and so a lot of the you know years From when I moved there, 10 to about 15 was getting up early in the morning, going swimming training in an outdoor pool, even in the middle

of winter where everything was frozen. Then training at another all boys Catholic school in the evenings. And, you know, that and school pretty much took up a lot of your time. And then you hit about 15 and you start to discover girls and smoking. and drinking. I got bullied a lot all through my school life because I was short, I had big ears, I had a face full of freckles, and I wasn't that athletic anywhere outside of the swimming

pool. I wasn't good at football. My dad was the coach sometimes as well, and I was the worst player on the team, so it must have been pretty embarrassing for me. I got picked on. I got bullied

a lot. didn't like school at all it was just very stressful an all boys catholic school where i got bullied a lot my own football teammates would bully me um and then i um it at home it was very stressful as well dad wasn't around a lot and so mom was the disciplinarian and she was very hard on us as well especially me because i was the oldest and so it just it all got on top of me and i was I guess I was depressed and I started self -harming and I used to slash up

my arms with an old hobby knife used for making model airplanes and stuff. And it wasn't like I wanted to kill myself or anything. I was a bit scared of God at that point. Parents made us go to church every Sunday and I knew that suicide was the cardinal sin and you go straight to hell. And so I was a little bit concerned about that. I didn't want to kill myself anyway. I just needed to have some semblance of control over my life. The only way I could do that was

by cutting myself open. The release and the pain sort of let out a lot of that frustration. No one ever knew. My family didn't know. None of my friends knew. Fortunately, it didn't last too long. I had a growth spurt around 16. I started doing kickboxing with a friend of mine and that kind of gave me a lot more confidence. And then one of the school bullies said something very nasty about my mum and I elbowed him in the head and knocked him out. And no one picked on me

after that. But then, you know, in Australia, unlike America, the drinking age is 18, which means you start drinking at 16. And so we go out underage drinking, stealing. goon bags of wine, you know, the boxes of wine. I don't know what you guys call it, but we call it a goon bag. And we go out and get drunk and then we get into these brawls all through the city centre. And it was a period where that's all it was on

the weekends. It was these rolling brawls of the Tongans fighting the Samoans, the Serbs fighting the Croatians, the Macedonians fighting someone else, the Aboriginals fighting everyone. And so that kind of became my life. I flunked high school. I wasn't home much. And then I hit 17 at the end of year 12, and dad kicked me out of home. So lead me through that because I've had many people on. I just had Chuck Liddell. He was bullied, and it was martial arts that

really kind of empowered him. And you hear Georges St -Pierre and Justin Wren. I mean, so many of the fighters that we revere now have similar

stories. but you know there's some that when they learn to fight they become protector and takes them down one path and there's some that for a while when they learn to fight they become almost become the bully for a while so was that where you found yourself almost overcompensating from being the victim to to kind of being the predator for a little bit not really i never picked on anyone smaller or weaker than me which is probably why i got my ass handed to me more

times than not um it was just about um using what I'd learned in a real -time environment and practicing my skills and things like that. So I never turned into the bully. I was just out with my friends drinking. We'd get drunk and we'd have a fight. And sometimes we got beat up and sometimes we didn't. But, yeah, I think you're right. There's a lot of Special Forces guys that are the same. They came from a bully background and then they turned into wanting

to be the protector. But at that point for me, I didn't really know much about that. I don't think I was given a lot of guidance into what was going to come next after I left school. You know, I thought, oh, my dad's a cop. Maybe I could be a cop or there's accountants or, you know, all the main jobs. I didn't get. guidance at school to tell me what was possible. I'm the sort of person that I want to know why I'm doing something. I go to class and they're teaching

chemistry. I'm like, why am I learning this? What this doesn't pertain to me, I don't care about it. And no one sort of sat down and said, well, look, you could get a job doing this incredible thing. You know, if you study science and you enjoy biology, you could become a marine biologist and spend your days out in the open water diving with sharks and having adventures. Or, you know, if you like economics, you could become an ambassador.

to Australia and you could get paid to travel the world so there wasn't any of that and so I really didn't focus at all on any of the school stuff that could have catapulted me into a great career instead I was just totally directionless I had no idea and so um I just after I got kicked out of home I was like sleeping on two friends of mine couches like there was these two sisters who their parents paid for them to live in australia they were from indonesia and so the parents weren't

there so they let me sleep on their couch for about a year and all i did was smoke weed and party on the weekend with my unemployment check and it took me quite a while to drag myself out of that rut right well what about um the music industry i read that you were involved with that for a while Yeah, that came after. So I finally started working in a kitchen and behind the bars

in Canberra. But hospitality doesn't always... uh give you the the best crowd to surround yourself with you know the the restaurant i worked in after 10 o 'clock on the weekends turned into one of the most popular nightclubs in canberra and so with that comes the hot girls comes the guys comes the drug dealers and so i became friends with this group of people that were probably definitely not that great for me and so just

before I turned 21. I was at a party for my friend who was getting kicked out of the country because of criminal activity. He was being deported. And I got jumped by 20 guys and really had my ass kicked. And I sat myself down after that and I said, Paul, look, if something doesn't change, you're going to be dead or in jail by the time you're 23. And even though I didn't know what I wanted to do, I knew that I didn't

want to do that. And so the only thing I could think of to do was leave, just leave this environment that I'd become a product of and start again. And so I had this tiny little car, tiny little Suzuki that I had no license for. And I threw everything I owned into it, which wasn't much. I drove 12 hours north to Brisbane. My friend Matt had moved up there the year before as a DJ. He got me a job working behind the bar in the strip club that he worked at. That was pretty

cool. Then I moved in with him and a couple of American dudes that were involved in the hip -hop industry. I became a bartender in a strip club and a rapper. How did that go? Look, it was good. It was long hours in the club, but all my friends were hot chicks. And the hip -hop was fun. We were running nightclubs. We were running a community radio station. We put out an EP. In 1998, we opened up for Snoop Dogg. So I thought, this is it. I've made it. I'm going

to be a rapper. But there's not a lot of money in rappers in Australia in 1998. And so the financial stresses took over. And as bands do, the band broke up. And I was kind of left wandering, working behind a bar again, not knowing where to turn. Well, I've still got this image because I heard

you talking about getting beaten up. is it sit rep i think is that the podcast um anyway one of one of the special forces um podcasts that you talked on and the image of 20 guys beating up a dude firstly just seems so unfair but secondly you almost have this image of they had to be very polite and like line up to kick your ass one at a time so they could all get a chance well one of their friends was like i guess he was i i he was a little younger than me and i

guess he didn't have any money and he was trying to get me to buy him a beer and i kept saying no and so he threw a glass of a glass at me and I jumped up and went at him and two of his friends jumped up beside him and one of them tried to punch me in the face. So I put my hand on his shoulder, blocking the punch and elbowed him in the head. It's my go -to move. And then all of a sudden, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, all his friends popped up and it was, you know,

it was 80 % Asian dudes. And so I'm six foot. So they all just came running at me and I backed out at, we're at a bowling club, you know, a lawn bowls club. And so I backed out onto the veranda and they all just surrounded me. And one dude tried to hit me with a chair and I front kicked him in the chest and tried to hold him

off as long as I could. But eventually I ended up in the fetal position, getting dragged out by the guy, my friend that was getting kicked out of the country was from Papua New Guinea. And so some of the big uncles, the big Islander dudes came and dragged me out. And I just fled and went home and looked at my beat up face. Yeah, it's not the same as the movies where they politely wait one at a time to come out. Oh, yeah. No, I wish I had some Jackie Chan skills.

All right. Well, then, so, you know, you'd peaked as a hip hop performer. So, lead me through into the military. I was working behind a bar in a restaurant. And, you know, there's a lot of minute stories within that as well. But I just... knew that I had more to offer. I didn't do well in school, but I was very well read. I was always reading. And I was always watching documentaries, Steve Irwin, David Attenborough, and all that

sort of stuff. So I knew that there was this amazing world out there with so much to see and do, but I just didn't know how to get there. And so being a barman in a restaurant just wasn't cutting it. And I was a bit lost. I turned to the one person you can turn to when you're lost, a cold mum. And she said, well, why don't you talk to your two younger brothers? They've joined the army. They're in artillery. And I thought, all right, I'll give them a call. And they said,

yeah, look, it's great. You get paid to travel, paid to blow stuff up, paid to play sport. But they said, whatever you do, Paul, we know you. Don't join infantry. You're not disciplined enough. You won't make it. And so I joined infantry. You can't have your baby brothers telling you what to do. It's that reverse psychology. They probably wanted you to join infantry. Yeah, maybe so. But yeah, it was one of the probably, at that time, the best choice I'd ever made in my

life. I'll be forever grateful to the army for not just teaching me how to be a valuable member of society and a real man. but allowing me to serve my country. And that whole thing about becoming the protector just enriched my life and fulfilled me and gave me value and purpose. And I joined, I put my hand up for Airborne. And so, you know, that special maroon beret, the signal of paratroopers all around the world, it felt like I was really doing something special.

And I was really proud. And that my life turned a corner as soon as I joined the army. Now, how did your conditioning serve you as you entered that program? You were a swimmer, then you were a martial artist. Did you feel pretty prepared during boot camp and beyond? Oh, hell no. I stopped kickboxing about 18. I hadn't done swimming since I was 15. At one point, I was a pack -a -day smoker and I was drinking and I'd done no exercise.

But the funny thing about... getting physical fitness into you in those early years is it doesn't take long for it to come back and so what I was still really skinny, but as you know, you can't you turn up to bootcamp basic training there's no drinking there's no smoking all you've got is people yelling in your ear telling you to run telling you to march and telling you to eat time it's just absolute control and so it was like i was back at school times 10 and i i didn't

like it whatsoever but i did have one thing in my corner i didn't have a choice There was nowhere left for me to turn. You know, I didn't have a great education to fall back on. I had no other skills. I didn't have any money. I didn't have a home. And everything I owned was locked away somewhere else on the base in one suitcase. And so I had to. Instead of trying to change my situation like I'd always been doing, I had to try a different tact and I had to change the way that I perceived

everything. And so there were things I hated, like marching on the parade ground and learning to iron and scratching my face off with a razor and cleaning toilets and all that crap. But I did. begin to enjoy the physical fitness aspect of it. And I did enjoy learning to throw grenades and shoot machine guns and rocket launches. And so I focused on the things that I did enjoy and just managed to get through the other crap. And very quick, by the end of basic training, I'd

been awarded the PT award. And so that's how quickly it can come back. And that gave me even more confidence in myself. Yeah, that's interesting. Very interesting. Yeah, so I've had some of the SEALs on here, the Navy SEALs. And, you know, that was kind of their thing is if you fail out of the, you know, BUDs or the classes after that, then you go back to whatever the Navy tells you you're going to do. So you could be turning wrenches somewhere. So I think for a couple of them, that

was exactly it. It wasn't so much. they had this strong mindset before, but the thought of being stuck on a submarine somewhere was the driving force for them to finish the course. Yeah, absolutely. And that came into the next phase of my career. Brilliant. Well, walk me through that. So was it East Timor that you found yourself with Airborne? Yeah. So I arrived in my battalion at the start

of 2001. And by, I think, April 2002, the uh sorry by by 1999 australia and a multinational force had gone into east timor and by 2002 was my battalion's uh rotation into east timor so we deployed for six months to east timor just providing security services watching the border all that sort of stuff by then all the the action was over so it really wasn't that exciting uh we did a Courses like signals course and pre

-selection for snipers and stuff. But at the same time, even though there wasn't any action, I felt like I was doing my job for real instead of being at home in the bush. You know, at night you can see the twinkling lights of Sydney and you're just thinking, geez, I wish I was in my bed and not in a muddy hole that's filling with

water that I've got to sleep in tonight. So it was that fulfillment of actually getting deployed and representing your country and protecting these people that had been getting slaughtered for the preceding decades. And so that was a really fulfilling period, especially because I'd never seen a third world country before. You know, most people that live in a first world

country never will. And so it gives you an appreciation for all of the incredible simple things that we have, like clean running water, a toilet, showers, food at the ready, electricity, TVs, entertainment. You know, we have everything at the tip of our fingers. And yet so many people are sad and depressed. And you go out to these third world nations and they've got nothing except their families and they're all happy. And so it really changed my mindset about gratitude.

Well, for people listening, I'm somewhat familiar because obviously I grew up with the BBC, which I would like to think was one of the best news stations out there because they actually report news. But we were aware of the genocide in East Timor and then some of the terrorism as well, aimed at Australians specifically. So can you just kind of give a backstory of that conflict and then some of the terrorism that your men

and women were fighting after that? Well, what happened was Indonesia, as they do, as they're currently doing in West Papua, had invaded West Timor and took it over and they wanted to move over into East Timor and take that as well. And so they were sending night raids of these, you know, they're all dressed in black and the locals called them ninjas and they'd send these patrols of soldiers in and militia and they'd just go around rampantly killing and murdering. And there

was a bunch of Australian journalists. There's

a really good movie about it. it actually called balabo where some aussie journalists some foreign journalists as well i think um got slaughtered by the indonesians and so in 1999 my brother who was attached to my unit he was uh airborne artillery so he that was his first trip there and that was when australia first went in and there was a lot of action then um but it's simmered over the years and then the um East Timorese militia, the Falentil, had risen up and they

were fighting back against Indonesia. Then the Indonesian special forces, the Kapasas, would come in and do raids. And then after my deployment, it had pretty much simmered, but then there was little outbreaks here and there. But it was actually quite a huge conflict. Yeah, I remember seeing it. Like you said, there's just a huge amount of people died. When it comes to the actual total population, the percentage of men and women and

children that were murdered was horrific. Yeah, and it didn't really feel like anyone, any nation did anything until they discovered, obviously, as always, oil. They discovered the East Timorese oil shelf, and then that was when the multinational force went in. They broke deals to get access to the oil. There you go. That's why we help out. There's a lot of places that are, like I mentioned earlier, West Papua, where the Indonesians are in, and they're stealing all the resources

and killing all the locals. But no one does anything because there's nothing there for them. And China basically just says, hey, Australia, mind your own business. And Australia does. So it's such, you know, we've all seen it now, the hypocrisy in government. This isn't a new thing. Yeah, no, and it's so sad. I mean, even I've had discussion before on here, even when you look at things like slavery. People go, oh, it's racist and it's about skin color. It's like, no, it's not.

It's a handful of assholes that bought human beings and made them work for them for free so they can make a shitload of money. It's about money and power. It's nothing to do even with race. It's just about free workforce. Absolutely. They do it in China. They do it in Africa. Around the time of the African slave trade was a huge slave trade in the Irish as well. And so it's not race specific by any means. This is happening and has happened all over the world to many races.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, so you had that deployment to Timor. Were you able to make it to the Middle East? No. I came back from East Timor around October 2002. We just went back to training and training and training. It was just very repetitive. My work ethic was slipping. My job satisfaction was slipping. Then all of a sudden, I was away

on an exercise in New South Wales. My CSM, my company sergeant major, came up to me with a mobile phone, which is... weird you know I'm a lowly private and my CSM comes up to me goes hey hey Paul the boss wants to talk to you and I'm just thinking oh no what have I done there is no good reason for the the major to want to talk to me and so I picked it up and I'm like yeah boss what's going on and he said hey Dutchie do you want to go to the sandpit And I was like,

hell yes, I do. And he's right. Pack your stuff. You're coming back to base. You're going on pre -deployment training. I was like, yes, this is the best news ever. And so I went back and there was only me and five of my mates that were going to deploy with a lot of the Pogues. And so we got all, you know, started learning Arabic, got our desert cams, all that sort of stuff, got

a lot of in -country briefings. And then four days before we left, we were in a meeting room and they said, you infantry guys, go back to your rooms and pack your bags. You're not going anymore. And so it was like getting left at the altar. Understandably, we went out to Bondi and got hammered that night and went back to work. And it was, you know, that just made my job satisfaction

slip even more. And I didn't want to, I didn't know what else to do because, you know, I thought I'd found my place and all of a sudden I'm not happy here. And I didn't want to become one of these crusty old sergeants that just seems to hate life. And it's just his only enjoyment is being at work, yelling at everyone. And so I thought, you know what? It's a big military.

Surely there's something else that I can just sort of sidestep into that's going to be better than being filthy and dirty and smelly all the time. And we went on a course called Hewitt. which is helicopter underwater escape training, where you learn to escape from a helicopter if it gets dropped into the ocean. And there was these two guys there on scuba gear acting as safety divers. And I'm like, how do you get that

job? Like, what do these guys do? And so I went over and I talked to them and they're like, oh yeah, we're clearance divers. I'm like, oh yeah, what's that? I kind of heard about it. I didn't really know much about them. I knew they were special. No one looked directly at them. Just sort of went, oh shit. There's those guys. And I thought to myself, what's stopping me from being one of those guys? What's stopping me from being someone that people within my industry

looks up to? And I feel like a lot of the times we ask ourselves these really hard internal questions and we don't give ourselves an answer. You know, we just kind of treat it as hypothetical. You know, what's stopping me? And you don't give yourself an answer. But those big, scary questions and decisions, they're the ones that we owe ourselves the most to answer. And so I asked myself again, I said, you know, what is stopping me? And I thought, nothing. Really, there's nothing except

for fear. And I'd already overcome so much of that fear. I thought, you know what, I'm just going to give it a go. And it took about 12 months for my paperwork to go through to get accepted onto the first phase, which is called Ships Divers. It's where you learn to scuba dive and search for bombs, both of which I'd never done in my life. So it was a pretty steep learning curve. And then learning all the Navy jargon as well. And I passed that course by the skin of my teeth.

By doing that, that gave me the opportunity to try out, to go to the selection course, SEEDAT, the Clearance Diver Acceptance Testing. And so my dog is the loudest drinker in the world. I don't know if you can hear that. That's okay. I've got a German shepherd that drinks like that too. There it is. Shut up. And so I went back

to my battalion for a little while. and went went into training because i knew what was to come i'd heard about this selection process and i wasn't disappointed by any means this was 10 days of pure mental physical and emotional anguish um you know swimming in the middle of the night

from 11 p .m till five o 'clock in the morning across sydney harbour pitch black waters like And then you get a couple hours sleep and then you've got to run half a marathon and then pack marches and stretcher carries and first aid stands and mind games and breath hold and on and on for 10 days. And I went into it like we were talking about earlier. There is no way I am going to go back to my army battalion as a failure because I don't want to be there. This is my

shot, my one and only shot to drag my ass. out of this place and achieve something that I never thought I could have done in my life. And so I went into it with a mindset where they're either going to kill me or I'm going to pass. And fortunately, I passed. And what was the attrition rate for that? How many did you start with? How many did you finish with? It's about, we started with about 36 and we finished with 10. Wow. Yeah, that's pretty significant. So it's anywhere from,

say, 40 % to 70 % failure rate. Right. And then just as a side note, because I had Dan Pronk on, I believe. Do you guys know each other? We don't know each other personally, but we've talked on and off throughout the years. Okay, beautiful. Well, he's obviously Australian SAS. So what made you choose the diving route versus that special operations route? I just didn't want to be a soldier anymore. I wanted to do something different. I just had a gut full of being in

the bush. i'd had enough um i'm not the sort of i've never done one thing for longer than than that in my life and so As much as that would have been another world, another avenue of growth, I really just wanted to do something totally different. Going from the air and the land to under the ocean felt like a natural progression for me, especially being such a good swimmer. With those divers, how are they used in warfare?

multi -faceted job because Australia doesn't have the population of say America where everyone sort of specializes we we have four main elements I believe they've changed over the years now but that the fundamentals are we do maritime tactical operations so o2 swimming you know reconnaissance brief reconnaissance diving attack diving And then we have mine countermeasures where you're looking for unexploded sea mines and bombs and

getting rid of those. And then we have underwater battle damage repair, which is hard hat diving using drills, chainsaws, explosive weapons. And then we have EOD as well. So land -based EOD, explosive ordnance disposal. So we do it underwater and we do it on land as well. And you have to be proficient in all of those. Once you pass, it's a 49 -week course to learn everything. And then you'll go to the – there's only two teams. There's Team 1 in Sydney, Team 4 in Western Australia.

They always say Team 1 for fun, Team 4 for war. So I got sent to Team 1. And then you get put into your element and you focus on that. But you can be called out to go and switch elements on any given day. So you have to be an expert in everything. Well, that's how the fire service is. In America, we do the EMS and the fireside. So we really are jack of all trades, master of none. And obviously, there are some men and women that specialize and are stronger in one particular

area. But that, to me, is the allure of the job and my journey. I wasn't supposed to be a fireman in England for whatever reason, according to the universe. So when I got here, I got to be, you know, fire and a paramedic as well. But that is the draw for the fire service is when the tones go off, you literally don't know what you're going to be doing. And it's very exciting. So

was that kind of the draw to you? Like you said, you were sick of soldiering specifically, and now you have this giant Swiss army knife to work from? Well, honestly, I went in a little bit blind. I didn't know all about that. I just knew that they went diving and they looked cool. I'm in. What's that old saying? If you don't know what you're doing, at least look cool doing it. There we go. So, yeah, I discovered a lot of it while I was going through it. But, yeah, that's

the reason that I loved it so much. You never knew what you were going to be doing on any given day. One day you might be out in a helicopter doing an aerial mine disposal. The next day you're searching the bottom of the Russian ambassador's ship for bombs. Or, you know, at one point I had to go out. I was the first person to dive on a lost Japanese midget submarine that had

been located off the coast of North Sydney. And so to dive down, you know, 57 metres, hard hat and film all that sort of stuff and collect sand for the descendants of those. submarine pilots that were still in the submarine, you know, you never knew what you were going to do. And that really was what kept me interested in it. Beautiful. Well, again, so you have the skill set now. Were you able to apply it during your time there? No, that's the thing. I left the army to go to

a deployable unit. And then I never deployed anywhere except on exercises. And all my army mates went to Iraq and Afghanistan like three

or four times. but i had the better job so why yeah exactly because you were doing all the fun stuff so team one um so lead me into february 2009 and kind of you know fill in the gap and then then let's talk about that day um so i'd been with the dive teams for about three and a half years and we got a job to pretend to be attack swimmers and divers for the r d department of the military who were testing out new equipment this unmanned video and sonar the goal was to

be able to put this equipment anywhere around the world on a ship on a wharf turn it on and you can walk away and the the video would detect automatically detect attack swimmers coming to put bombs in our ships and the sonar would detect attack divers under the surface of the water and so we were in sydney harbor uh right along the big navy base there and we were pretending to be the attack swimmers and so it was like six in the morning i had my new guy just swimming

basically from point a to point b this is this was a really boring day it was a basically counter -terrorism uh exercise but It wasn't as cool as that. We were just swimming in the water. After about 30 minutes, I pulled my new guy out and offered to take over. And I jumped in, rolled out the back of the Zodiac. And I had a pair of black fins on and a black wetsuit. And I was just swimming, what we call finning. I'm on the

surface, on my back, just kicking my legs. And I was only in the water for about four or five minutes. And then I looked over my left shoulder to make sure that I was going in the right direction still. And as I turned around, I got a really big whack in my leg. And at first I didn't panic because it didn't hurt. I thought maybe the guys in the boat got a little bit too close, but I knew they were actually quite far away. So I

didn't know what it was. I turn around and all of a sudden there's this massive shark's head attached to me. And I had no idea what to do. I'd never even seen a large, dangerous shark. Next to public speaking, sharks were my worst nightmare. And so it took a second for me to process what was going on. And then I realized, you know, I've seen Discovery Channel. I've seen The Crocodile Hunter. I'll jab it in the eyeball.

But when I tried, I couldn't move my arm. And I looked down and I could see the teeth embedded in my wrist. And every time I went to pull my arm, I could see the skin tearing. And so I reached over with my left hand to go for the eyeball, but I couldn't reach. So I grabbed it by the nose and I tried to lever it off me. But all that did was push the teeth of the lower jaw deeper into my leg. And that's when I got the first inclination of pain. But, you know, the

teeth on these animals are so sharp. It just went in like razor blades. And I cocked back, you know, last -ditch effort. The last thing I knew to do was punch it in the nose. So I cocked back to do that. But it must have decided that I was food. And it started to shake its head. And that's when all the fight went out of me. The pain was just so horrific. There was nothing I could do. It took me underwater and was just shaking me like a rag doll. And so I'm in panic.

I can't do anything. My lungs are filling with water. And you can watch the footage of it. It's actually on YouTube. It lasted about eight seconds. But when I go back and think about it, I break it down into minute detail. And I can remember everything that happened. I can remember everything that I was thinking. And I remember thinking at one point. I'm not going home today. I'm going to die right now. And our brains and our bodies are such incredible machines that they can process

things in these instances like lightning. And I thought to myself, am I ready to die? And I looked back on who I was. in the early days of my life to who I had become and all of the things that I'd overcome. And I thought to myself, I've lived 10 lives in these 31 years. I have no regrets. If I'm going to die, then I'm good to go. And I kind of just let go and was waiting to die. And then the shark's teeth had met all the way

in the middle of my thigh. and ripped out my hamstring and ripped off my right hand at the same time and because it wasn't attached to me anymore my wetsuit made me buoyant and I popped to the surface and I thought shit I'm not dead I better get out of here before it comes back and so I start to swim and I take my arm out of the water but my hand's missing and my arm ends at the end of my wetsuit And so my medical training kicked in and I thought, I've got to

keep that wound above my heart to stem the bleeding, not knowing what had happened to my leg. All I knew was I couldn't feel it. And so I was swimming back to the boat with one hand and one leg, just thinking this shark or another shark that smelt the blood is going to come in and attack me. And I was just waiting for that bite, those teeth to wrap around my leg and drag me under and kill

me. But I just kept swimming. And eventually the guys in the boat got near me and they said they saw I was swimming through a massive pool of my own blood. And they said it was so thick they could actually taste it in the air. And fortunately, they got to me first, pulled me out of the boat and instantly commenced first aid to keep me alive until the paramedics could get there. That's amazing. Well, there's such a powerful moment in that where you went from.

being at peace with your death, which must have been incredibly powerful. And I'm sure it's something that you carry to this day. But then when there's that absolute minute glimmer of hope that you're going to live, as you said, the brain completely switched gears and you went from, you know, submitting to fighting again. Yeah. Yeah, that was it. What coming that close to death did for me was it taught me that death really isn't that scary. I faced it in the most violent of horrific ways.

But right there at the end, I wasn't afraid because I had no regrets. And so it freed me from clinging to this mortal coil and being afraid of things and realizing that the only thing that I really had to fear was not making the most of my life and going to my deathbed next time with regrets.

And so now... I get to live this life where I'm free from the fears and all I get to do is focus on how I'm going to enrich my life, enrich the lives of the people around me and make sure that I go to my deathbed next time feeling exactly the same way I did that first time. Yeah. Well, that's so powerful. I had a palliative care hospice physician on. And a couple of times. And he's

actually a triple amputee himself. Very long story short, he touched the electrical wire on a cable car in Princeton and it arched through his wristwatch and he lost both legs and one arm. And, you know, so his kind of doctor focus went to palliative care because he was a palliative care patient, obviously a very long term one. But in the discussions about all the people he'd

seen pass, it was the same observation. If people felt that they had fulfilled and had achieved what they wanted to in their lives, their deaths were actually very peaceful. And he said the ones that struggled the most were the ones that hadn't had the courage to chase their goals. And it was the regret itself that was actually haunting them. Yeah. Or even not chasing your goals, but smaller things like unresolved issues

with your family and friends. where, you know, you'd wished for years that you'd made up with a family member you'd been fighting with, but you just never went ahead and did it. And you go to your deathbed with that one regret. I wish I'd reconnected with my dad, my daughter or something like that. And so my advice would be to never, ever let those things just stagnate because you never know what's going to happen. It could be tomorrow. It could be next year. It could be

10 years from now. But that's... The thing about life, you'll never know when it's going to come for you. So make sure that you do the right thing to fulfill your soul. And sometimes that's just by doing the hardest thing, which is asking for forgiveness or saying you're sorry. But it makes the world of difference to your soul. Yeah, beautiful. Well, thank you for that insight. Just from an emergency medicine point of view, were there

any... Any things that happened from when you were pulled up onto the boat onwards that you credit with saving your life? Any kind of takeaways for the medics and Corman and everyone else that's listening from a medical perspective? Yes, so much. We had an oxy -viva in the boat. We had a minimal med kit. We didn't have a tourniquet. And so the guys took their t -shirts off of their back. And so my whole hamstring was almost surgically

removed. And so while I, because I was headed towards the bow of the Zodiac and there's not a lot of room in that. And so I'm tourniqueting the end of my arm with my left hand as tight as I can. The guys in the boat had taken off their t -shirts, jammed that into the wound. and then strapped it down with straps from a life jacket. But by the time we got to the big wharf at the Navy base, which wasn't far away, it was 100 metres away, but it was towering 10

feet over the water. And so they had to build this whole ramp out of wood with these builders at an emergency rate to get me up there. The boat was an inch deep in my blood. My chief who was on the wharf with the scientists already thought I was dead. It wasn't until he saw me like move that he knew I was alive, but he could see that I was still leaking blood out of my leg and he took the strap off and there was an

artery squirting. And so he had to grab the new guy and get him to stick his hand inside my leg and pinch close that artery with his fingers and hold it for 10 minutes until the paramedics arrived. And by the time the paramedics got there, I was in total agony. And so they drug me up with morphine. But because I'd lost so much blood, they couldn't give me enough to get rid of most of the pain. And so I'm in the ambulance on the way to the hospital begging for more morphine,

but they couldn't give it to me. And then all of a sudden, the morphine hit, the pain went away, but I didn't have. enough energy to make my chest go up and down. And I couldn't talk louder than a whisper. So I had to try and communicate with the paramedic that I couldn't breathe. And so he coached me through it, basically said, Paul, save your energy, take small... Small, short breaths. Take as many as you can. And then when you've got enough energy, take one big breath

and fill your lungs with air. And so it kind of became a bit of a Lamaze class. Put your friend's finger up your junk. Yeah. And that really got me through because I actually felt like I was going to die because I couldn't breathe. But that really helped. By the time we got to the hospital, which is about 15 minutes away, I was fairly stabilized. I was stabilized enough to, the doctor was running alongside my trolley and I was trying to bribe him with a case of beer

to save my leg, as military people do. But after that, I blanked out. I was in an induced coma for the next two days. I think they put 300 donations of blood into me. So 150 liters, just as soon as I put it in, it would just squirt back out. And so they're just, you know, you could have the best doctors in the world, but if you don't have that donated blood by those amazing people, then you're not going to live. And so. Thank you to everyone that donates blood, donates plasma.

You are legitimately saving lives. It's taken me quite some time to repay those 300 donations, but I'm chipping away at it. You know what's really sad is being English, I can't donate blood. And I've got quite vascular arms, too. So you can tell that the blood bank people get a little tingle in their pants when they see me. But I got the mad cow. Exactly. Exactly. You know, it was I mean, it was a thing, definitely. But

it was a very long time ago. And I guess they've just never put enough energy in the research to to, you know, to take my blood and make sure it's OK. But, yeah, I physically have never be able to give a drop. And it's sad. You know, I would love to. I do it whenever I go home and I give plasma. Beautiful. Yeah, I guess I could do it if they ever let me to go home again when the borders open up. All right. So I live in Florida. I'm in Ocala, which is right in the

heart of the state. Gotcha. So, yeah, I moved over here about just almost 20 years ago. Great shocks over in Florida. Yeah, we've got some

super ones over here. we'll have to talk about that in a minute actually one of my guests was bethany hamilton too so yeah she's the second hamilton well oh you do yeah she's amazing amazing i mean as are you and this is a beautiful thing with both of you that i'm sure we'll get to that in a bit but you know the fact that you went back in the water and and you know all the people that haven't been bitten think they never would and the two that actually were both ended up

you know being advocates for sharks yeah i think that's a fairly common theme as well because the people that do get attacked by sharks are more often than not ocean people. And we go into the ocean knowing the risks and accepting them. And so you can't really get upset when something goes wrong. You know, every time you go into the ocean, it's a wild place. Anything could go wrong. And so you're signing this waiver really to say, okay, I accept this, whatever happens.

And so you don't blame the shark for being sharks. They're just sharks doing sharky shit. So, yeah, I think that's a pretty common theme amongst shark attack survivors. Yeah, I always find it weird, you know, when you did have an attack and then, you know, the fishermen would find a shark, they'd say it was the shark, and they'd catch it and kill it. And they'd be like, all right, problem solved. And I'm like, what, is it really? I mean, from what I understand, the

ocean is quite a big place. And I'm pretty sure that shark had mates and family. And I don't think you saw that you just made yourself feel better. Yeah, it's really a ridiculous mindset. It's all about, you know, the government does it a lot in Australia. They cull sharks. They don't call it a cull, but they put all these nets out all over the beaches and the nets don't go to the ocean floor. They only go a couple of hundred meters wide. They don't stop the sharks

from getting into the beach. It's just to make it look like they're doing something. Yeah. Well, with your journey, so you were obviously, you

know. an uber athlete in the military sense prior to this event tell me about your your journey physically but also your journey mentally because of you know your your identity had been forced to be changed yeah um look very early on i decided that if i was going to be able to mentally overcome this I needed to still have some semblance of value and purpose and the best way that I could achieve that would be by getting back to work and I was fortunate that because it was such

a huge media event you know no clearance diver had ever been attacked by a shark no one had been attacked in Sydney Harbour in 60 years so this was worldwide news and even bigger in Australia and so The chief of Navy, I don't know, I guess to save face, to make it look like they were doing something, he said as long as I wanted a job in the Navy, I would have one. I don't think he realized I wanted my old job back, but

that was the case. And so I went into my recovery determined to go back to the Navy clearance divers. And much of the time, I didn't believe that was possible. And a lot of people told me it was not impossible. But not all of your goals and dreams have to be possible in that moment. You just have to work towards them. You have to create small goals and challenges to get you on the road to that dream. And so it was really rough. I had so much drugs pumping into me. I had a

bulb of ketamine. um continuously draining into my bloodstream i had morphine on tap and so a lot of the time i was tripping out i was delirious um but day by day um you know and i was so lucky to have such an incredible group of friends and family that came to my bed they kept me company they kept my spirits up my buddy would sneak in a bottle of beer and i'd have a morphine shot And day by day, I started, you know, I could get up out of bed. And so I would hop around

the nurse's station. I'd go out into the hallway and I would see how fast I could hop around the Navy ward. And I freaked out a lot of the nurses. But my mates brought in protein. They brought in weights for me. I sweet -talked the nurses into giving me double rations because I'd lost. 10 kilos in 10 minutes. This is not a weight loss regime I would recommend, but I needed to bulk up and get strong. I needed to keep my mind

active. So I read a lot and I needed to know that there were tools out there that could help me achieve my goal. And so I spent a lot of time on this incredible thing called the internet. There's no reason for you not to know anything anymore. We live in such an incredible age where we have the wealth of the world's knowledge within a few keystrokes. And so I utilized that and I looked at videos of Paralympic athletes doing

incredible things in sport. I watched videos of these dudes with no legs climbing mountains on their hands. And so the more research I did, the more it dispelled the fear that I wouldn't be able to live the way I wanted to. And so that really buoyed me, just knowing that if these people can do it, there's no reason that I can't do it as well. And so after nine weeks. I went home. They wanted me to stay a little bit longer, but I convinced them that I would recover better

at home under my own steam in my own bed. I had a very good friend of mine, Brock, who moved in with me and acted as my carer. It didn't hurt that he was a chef as well. So he cooked and he drove me off to the army gym every day so I could learn to use my body again. And I had to, as the army taught me, I had to improvise, adapt and overcome. Because having one hand and doing bench press and push -ups can really mess with what you're trying to achieve. And so I

had to work out new ways to do things. And so I got on the internet once again. found this lifting hook that people use for deadlifts. And I could slip that over my forearm and I could put a dumbbell in it and I could do curls like that. Or I could put the hook into the cables and I could do flies and triceps. And so just by spending more and more time in the gym and just experimenting, I learned better and better ways to use this new body that I had to rebuild

it, make it stronger. And then as time went on, I also was given prosthetics, which helped. insurmountably because hopping sucks. My balance is good. My left leg strength is amazing, but hopping still sucks. It's much better to walk. Well, it's fascinating. I've had so many incredible men and women that are amputees. Some are military that were wounded.

Some were congenital amputees. And seeing the... the journey of the adaptive athletes, especially over the last five years, you know, with, you know, with the movements really becoming popular, with their having, you know, competitions for adaptive outside of, you know, the Paralympics that we had before that. What have you witnessed over the evolution of prostheses and just the adaptive community in general? Well, fortunately, I came into it in an era, sadly, where we're

in the middle of a war. But because of that, there were so many American soldiers coming home missing limbs that the American government had thrown billions of dollars into helping these prosthetic companies make better devices. And so I came into it with, you know, there's never been a better leg or hand prosthetic in the world, and I get the best. And so very fortunate in

that realm. But it's funny now that there's no, you know, no. surface war that people are talking about a lot of that funding has dried up and so has the the advances in those prosthetics they're very they're like apple iphones now whereas it's like it's a tiny upgrade on the next limb whereas before it was these huge upgrades like now now your prosthetic is waterproof now your prosthetic has a running mode now it's kind of stale But thank God for smart people being able

to make these things because if it was up to me, I'd make a great pirate at Halloween, but that's about it. So with all the things that you had to relearn, was there any that kind of spring to mind that were the most challenging, the biggest achievement when you finally got it? Yeah, the dumb things that you don't think of because I was right -handed. So now I had to learn how to do not everything just left -handed. but only left -handed and weird things like brushing

your teeth. Like I didn't have that fine motor movement and I kept jabbing myself in the gum, learning to drive and control the pedal with my left foot. You know, I was bunny hopping down the street for the first week because your left foot doesn't have that sensitivity. It's either on the clutch or it's just slowly coming off. But yeah, it's just little things like that. You know, having one hand. using a dustpan and broom still has it over me. That's always a pain

in the ass anyway, no matter who you are. Yeah, I just break out the vacuum cleaner. All right. Well, then you were hell -bent on, you know, obviously getting your old job back. So kind of walk me through that journey into the training side and then carry on to your decision to transition out. So after six months, six months after the attack, I felt like I was ready. I had my prosthetic leg. I had my prosthetic hand. I trained myself into a pretty ridiculous level of fitness. And

all I wanted to do was go back to work. Six months of not doing anything except just working out and being left with your own thoughts. And it can get really exhausting. And trying to overcome a lot of the self -confidence issues as well,

like every time I left the house. everyone was staring at me and so whether they knew I was or not it didn't matter because there's this there's this guy with one leg and a robot leg and a robot hand walking down the street and so everyone stares at you and so overcoming that was very hard that was the first step and I realized look I can't control whether they're going to look at me or not but what I can control to some degree is how they perceive me Now, I can walk

around feeling the pain and I can be worried about what they're thinking and my head would be down and my shoulders would slump and they'll look at me and say, oh, that poor guy. Or I could do the hard thing. I could walk and practice my walking to a degree where I look like I'm walking almost normal. I can pin my shoulders back. I can hold my head high. And if they look at me, I can just smile at them. and you'd be amazed how quickly that smile gets reflected

back. Or if I'm not feeling like smiling at anyone because I'm in a shit mood, I just won't look at anyone. And that way I learned to enjoy all the things around me. I was living at Bondi, so I'd look at the water, I'd look at the trees, I'd look at the dogs playing. And so that got me through the confidence issues to the point where I'm like, okay, I want to go back to work. And I went to the dive school. Sorry, I went to my team boss, and I said, hey, boss. can I

come back to work? And he said, no. He said, to go to the dive teams, you have to be deployable for war. And I said, look, I understand that. I'm not as fleet on my feet as I once was, and my trigger finger doesn't even work. So I get that. But there was one thing I learned from watching an old Navy diver staple of a movie, which is Men of Honor. Maybe I could go and teach.

And I said, why don't you let me pass on this knowledge to the next generation of divers and repay all of this information that you've given to me and maybe even inspire some of them as well. And so they thought about it for a while. And then they gave me this series of hoops I had to jump through. And I passed them all. I passed my physical fitness. I passed my medical. I passed getting on to the moving dive boats

and things like that. And they couldn't say no. They said, all right, Paul, you can work three half days a week. And so I just turned up five full days a week and just didn't go home until I had to. And, you know, I had something to prove to them, but I also had something to prove to myself that I could still mix it up with my buddies and do the job that I'm hired to do. And so I put my heart and my soul into achieving that.

Beautiful. Now with Bethany, obviously she. She went back in, I think it was her parents filmed the first time that she went back in the ocean. And again, with her mindset, she was offered the adaptive divisions and she was like, no, I'm a surfer. I'm going to surf in the regular divisions. Did you have a moment like that when you first entered the ocean specifically? Was there any hesitation or had you already that kind of making peace with death, taking that

trepidation out of it? Yeah, that was more the case. It was actually three months to the day after the shark attack. It only took me that long because I still had the stitches and staples in my leg and I couldn't go into the water with them. As soon as they were out, I grabbed my two buddies. We went down to Bondi with the surfboards and I hopped down through the soft sand and got to the water and everyone was staring at me and

the paparazzi were taking photos. It's difficult enough to hop through soft sand with an eight -foot surfboard, but then trying to hop down through the water as well was even harder. But I pulled it off without falling over and embarrassing myself. And I put my board down into the water and I whispered to myself, please don't let me paddle around in a circle. And I didn't. I got smashed by every wave for about 45 minutes. But eventually I got out the back. And I was in the

sun with my mates in the ocean. And I was living. And it felt so fucking good just to be out there. And it didn't matter if I got smashed. It didn't matter if I couldn't stand up. I just laid on my stomach and enjoyed the water and the sun. Beautiful. I mean, that's incredible. Because I mean, even myself, I love the ocean. It's definitely one of my happy places. And it's interesting. If you're distracted, if I'm playing with my son, if I'm, you know. Body surfing even, I'm

not thinking about it. But when you're out there and you're swimming around, you let your little mind start going, you know, there's that fear. But just like you said, it's completely out of your control. You're in their playground. You know, if it happens, it happens. But you can't let that fear dictate all the incredible swims that you could have on the what if scenario. Yeah, it's such a rare occurrence. You know, it's really, really, you got more chance of winning

the lottery, really. absolutely all right well then so you you know you achieved your goal of returning you ended up training you know the the people at the dive school so what at what point did you say all right it's time to it's time to move on and do something else um it was three years in so i was doing it for three years and i just you know the first year and a half was good But the second year and a half, it just started to kill me, really, because I was working

myself so hard trying to keep up with everyone. And when you're teaching these courses, you're at work sometimes at 5 a .m. and you don't leave until 2 a .m. And then you've got to be back again the next day. And so it was hard enough for me to get sleep. And I was trying to get myself off the drugs very early on. And so I wasn't taking anything. Because I didn't want to get drug tested and have opiates in my system

and things like that. So I had to totally stay off them and just deal with the pain mentally. But it was breaking me down piece by piece. And I was just tired and I was getting cranky and I wasn't being the instructor I wanted to be. I was being the instructor that I hated on course. And that wasn't fulfilling me. And, you know, the reason I did this was for fulfillment, for value and purpose. And I just lost that shine. All I wanted to do was go back to the teams.

And so I went to the dive school boss and I asked him what the chances of that were. And he gave it to me straight. He said, under this current administration, zero. And so I'd been doing a little bit of public speaking, but I'd already started to get paid basically my two weeks Navy wage in one hour of speaking. And so I thought, okay, what do I do here? Keep putting up with this. There's no more Paul being able to go sideways

into a new role. No one's going to take me. I'm only here at the dive school through the grace of the Navy. And so do I continue down this path and try to learn to love it and maintain my security blanket of a paycheck every two weeks? Or do I do something crazy? Do I do something really risky and really scary and go out and try and make a career out of this public speaking? And that was terrifying because. How I didn't know

how long I would be able to do that for. How long are people going to want to hear about my stupid little story? What if I'm not good at it? And all those things, doubts crept in. But I realized every single time I'd embraced one of those really big, scary decisions like leaving home, like joining the army, like changing to the Navy. It always worked out because I threw my heart and my soul into it. And they were the

best decisions that I'd ever made. And so I decided to stick with the routine and believe that I'd set a precedence. And if I'm going to do this, I'm going to go in wholeheartedly and I'm just going to make it work. And so I decided to leave the Navy and strike out with speaking. I got

a book deal. then as well which helped advertise me for speaking and the speaking work picked up and I started making more and more money and getting more and more work to the point where I was making my month's navy wage times three and so I was on cloud nine I'm working hardly you know a tenth of the time I'm making twice as much money And I get to spend all of my spare time doing whatever the hell I want. And I was like, this is amazing. This is the way to live.

And all it did was cost me an arm and a leg. Well, there's a lot of people that have been on here that struggle when they transition out, whether it's out of the military, fire, police, because the men and women that they serve with were their tribe. And also they identified as a police officer, a soldier. But the missing element, I think, with a lot of them is there wasn't something to immediately transition into.

So did you struggle at all with losing that group or was that speaking engagement powerful enough that you made the transition easily? No, what the speaking engagements did, and I don't suffer from PTSD as far as I know. I don't have depression and I don't have nightmares. I don't have flashbacks, nothing like that. And I think that is mostly due to the case of the public speaking because I didn't have any therapy. I didn't have any

counseling. But getting on stage and being able to offload all of those emotions to a crowd of people that I didn't know, I feel like that's

what helped me get it all out and overcome. what could have been many more dark days um but leaving yeah leaving the military was surprising it was like having the umbilical cut one day you're there and the next you're just not and they've just moved on without you and you have no connection to them um and i stayed in as part of the reserve diving team but they only had a job every couple of months sometimes and so i still didn't have

my tribe around me. I didn't have my mates. And so when I could, I would go to the Navy base in the mornings and I'd go into the gym when I knew some of them would be working out. So I maintained a minimal connection there, but yeah, it was like one second, I had this awesome crew of mates and we worked hard together and all, and then you don't, and you have to get, you really, really have to get comfortable in your own company. Which was easier for me because

I've never actually minded my own company. I'm not an overtly social person unless I've had a couple of beers under my belt and then I'm like super social. But I don't mind the quiet. But it does reach a crescendo where you get lonely. And even more so when you're traveling and speaking. It's flights by yourself. It's hotel rooms by yourself. You might get an hour on stage and then maybe an hour after talking to people, but then it's back to your hotel by yourself, back

on the plane, back home to yourself. And so you really do have to get comfortable with your own skin and your own thoughts. And I think that's really key to overcoming some of that stuff is.

utilizing that voice in your head that we all have and ensuring that that voice is telling you positive thoughts and you're practicing putting that positivity and the positive thoughts on a cycle in your head instead of feeding yourself the negativity you know that old story about you know the two two wolves that live inside you and the one that lives is the one that you feed and so you have to feed those positive emotions and those positive thoughts and i think a lot

of that comes by setting goals and challenges and then chasing after them so you have to you have to keep yourself busy beautiful yeah and with the speaking i can relate completely because i i haven't had anything you know as Not that it's a scale. I know that people talk about it all the time. You can't compare traumas. But, you know, I had stuff happen when I was young. I had stuff happen in my career. Nothing, you know, immense, but definitely things that, you

know, had a weight to them. But I've always dealt very well, especially recently. And it's the same thing. Like, here we are now. I get to have an incredible conversation with you. I ended up writing a book as well. So the power of conversation, the power of storytelling, I think, is such an undervalued tool. Yeah. The thing I like about what I do on stage is it doesn't matter if you're not in the military. It doesn't matter if you haven't been through a horrific experience like

me. The way that I've learned to tell it with the peaks and the troughs and the humor, especially the dark humor, there's parts of the story that will associate with other people in any part of their life, whether I'm talking about the things I went through as a kid. And showing parents that might be having that same drama with their kids that there is a light at the end of the tunnel if they just shower their kids with love and let them know that they're there and they'll

always be there. You can't always control what they're going to do or what they're going to go through, but you can control the love that you give them. Simple things like that. being able to make those big scary decisions to change the scenario of your life when you're not happy. There's no reason to be stuck in a life or a job or a relationship that isn't fulfilling you. Sometimes you have to make that big scary decision to step outside that situation to fulfill your

own happiness and fulfill your own dreams. And so I've had a lot of people come up to me over the years after my speaking job and people that have broken down in my arms because they've lost kids or because they've been through something insane as well, like cancer or losing loved ones or losing limbs or anything like that. So it is an absolute, absolutely fulfilling journey for me to get on stage and share these stories

with people. Well, I think it's incredible. So with that journey, how did you find yourself in television? Well, Like I said, the attack was such big news that a lot of Australian TV shows wanted to talk to me about it. So 60 Minutes were first. They were filming me from the time that I was leaving hospital to going into my home and overcoming stuff and then going to work. And then they did another episode two years later and they wanted me to introduce me to the shark

that nearly killed me, the bull shark. And so we went to Fiji and I learned to dive with bull sharks. And that was the first time that I actually hand fed one as well. And so over the years, I just got comfortable in front of the camera. And I think that showed, um, whenever there was a shark interaction in Australia, the media would come to me and ask me for some advice. And so out of the desire to not look like a dumb ass

on television, I had to learn about sharks. And I found that the more research I did into these animals, the more I realized how little we had to fear of them and how much they have to fear from us. And so one year Discovery Channel came to me for just simply an interview. They were doing a bunch of stories about people that had survived shark attacks. And I guess they liked the way I was on camera and they flew me out to LA to be on the live talk show at the end

of each night, Shark After Dark. And they liked that so much. The next year, they offered me a co -hosting job with a guy called Andy Casagrande, who's one of the world's best shark divers and cinematographers. And he taught me so much. And I had a really great showrunner called Matt Tomacheski. And they were just so incredible to work with. And I saw my first great white and I did my first cage dive with great whites. And I guess that

Discovery Channel just liked what I did. And they gave me another show the next year and then another show the next year. And then Nat Geo came to me and offered me my own TV show. And my managers went to Discovery Channel just to let them know because they gave me my start. And the boss of Discovery Channel at the time said, if Paul works at Nat Geo, he'll never work

on Discovery Channel again. So I got stuck in this horrible tug of war where I knew I had to make a decision and I was going to really piss off one group of very powerful TV people. But everyone I spoke to said stay with Discovery Channel. I stayed with Discovery Channel. My managers sweetened the deal. They got me a two -year contract, a two -year visa to live in America because that's something, you know, in Australia and probably the UK as well, we grew up on American

television. We grew up on American movies. And so it was back to that kid before I joined the military. There's this huge, big world out there. how do I be a part of it? And all of a sudden I was getting the offer to be a part of this bigger world like America with more opportunities and more avenue for growth. And so I moved out to America and I had a bunch of speaking jobs in Australia as well over the next 18 months.

And so for 18 months, I lived in Airbnbs. And this was, once again, really, really lonely time because I didn't really know anyone in America. All my friends in Australia were working. So I had a car in Australia, a car in LA, and my whole life was shoved into those cars. And I was just bouncing back and forth every few weeks. After, say, 18 months, I just I couldn't do it anymore. So I stopped taking any more Australian

speaking jobs. I got an apartment in L .A. and it was almost ceremonial taking my clothes out of my suitcase and hanging them in a real closet. And I started to put down roots. I flew my dog out from Australia that my mom had been looking after. And I really designated my mindset into making this a new home. And I'm on my third. Just starting my third two -year contract with Discovery Channel, I get to host three new Shark

Week shows a year. And then I get to speak out here and I get to do other cool things like little random things pop up. And I did an acting role in Australia for a miniseries. So I love it. It's like being a clearance diver again. I never know what's going to happen day to day. It's scary because... You don't know if you're going to have a job in time, but it's also really exciting. And I kind of thrive on that uncertainty. Well, did you have that moment? Or let me ask you,

when was that moment? Because I'm sure you did. When you realized that you were living the life that as a young boy watching David Attenborough, you dreamed of doing one day. Or no, probably didn't even dream of doing. You admired him doing, and now you're doing that very role yourself. I got an inkling of it when I was working on the first Shark Week documentary, Great White

Matrix. But then when I moved out to the US and aside from speaking, that was my main job, getting paid to fly around the world and go diving with sharks and sharing these amazing animals with the world and doing things. that I would literally pay to do and as would most people. Yeah, the first year of living out here on my contract

really was like that. I do all the cool LA things, go up to Runyon Canyon and a whitewater rafted down the American River and go hiking through Yosemite National Park, which I actually thought was Yosemite because it's spelled the same as Vegemite. And Marmite. Everyone was laughing at me. And I train, I get to train at Gold's at Venice beach. And, you know, I go, you know, the gym's been closed down for, for 10 months, but I turn up to the gym every morning and Arnold

Schwarzenegger says hello to me. And I have, I met Van Damme and I have that gym has turned into my little family out here. And it's, it's really quite a great place to be and work. And looking back at Australia, it's, it's home and I love it. And I miss the beaches so much, but. It feels so small now. Here, the opportunity is endless. Yeah. With David Ambrough, my sister actually has edited for BBC and those kind of

wildlife shows for years now. And he just did that documentary about his experience through his life, starting off as a naturist in the 50s and what he's seen with his own eyes. So with your experience, especially in the oceans, what are some of the things that we need to be cognizant and wary of as far as the environment in the oceans? Well, I always think people should think globally, act locally, as the saying goes. So think about your own little pocket. Think about

the trash. that is in your area or on the beaches or that are people throwing on the ground. I have some good friends that started a group called Recycle for Veterans and they get veterans together every week or every second weekend and they go out and they clean a beach around California. And so little things like that, the detrimental things we're doing to our planet and our ocean can simply be... fixed by humans not being such assholes and throwing our trash around and polluting

the waterways. It's really not that hard. There's so many groups out there that are working to improve our environment that they're looking for people to help them. And it can be anything from, you know, in Australia we had the big shark culls and we went out, hundreds of people, and we did a big protest on the beach to try and

stop the shark culls. And the government came and they started to implement small changes instead of... catching sharks on a drum line and killing them they started catching them on smart drum lines which would uh signal to the the workers they'd go out in the boat they'd take the shark off the hook they'd transport it out to sea and then they'll let it go instead so things like that like there are so many little things that we can do um you know small things consistently

are what are going to make the difference What about your observation of the last year? Because one of the most beautiful things that came out of 2020 was those first few weeks where everyone had just stopped. All the vehicles stopped pretty much and everyone was in their homes. And we saw the skyline in LA. I lived in Burbank for a few years, so I know how freaking awfully smoggy that place is normally. And the air was clearing

up. The Venice canals were clearing up. And it seemed like Mother Nature gave us this... massive like you know billboard like hey you know if you keep doing this i can fix myself and then through my eyes we the pendulum swung all the way the other way we all got back in our cars but now we wear gloves and masks and those are thrown everywhere every every piece of food is wrapped in plastic or stuck in a plastic bag and i feel like that message was completely disregarded

so through through your eyes you know what what messages do you think we saw and you know how do we actually persuade people to actually learn from some of those incredible moments that we saw early 2020 yeah we did see some amazing stuff you know china saw the sky for the first time in three decades but at the same time we destroyed countries we destroyed economies People lost their businesses, lost their homes. Suicide went

up in Australia, I think, 200%. And so somehow if we could find a middle ground there, that would be perfect. But people have to make a living.

means we have to drive cars and go to work and there has to be industry and so I don't think it's I wish it was as simple as us just going back to the early COVID days but also they were horrible days for a lot of people and so if we could find a middle ground if we can just find a way to do it better I totally stay out of politics out here in America because people are extremely passionate And I'm going to use that term as a very nice way to say it about politics out

here. And, you know, Trump was not good for the environment. And hopefully this next group, Biden and whatever, you know, it sounds like they've already implemented some great changes environmentally. And hopefully that will continue because as. Much as we can do the little things, it really is up to our elected officials to implement the legislation and the laws to save this planet that we are constantly destroying. And it wasn't

all roses either. In the middle of COVID. There was a Japanese fishing fleet, over 300 boats, some of these boats as big as football fields, and they can stay out in the ocean for years. They're called super trawlers, and they just fill their boats full of fish and sharks and whales and rays, and then other boats will come out, collect all of that, change out the crew, refuel, and then go back to China, and now that boat's got a whole new crew and an empty hull

to fill again. This massive 300 fleet of fishing trawlers were just outside the exclusion zone of the Galapagos Islands, you know, a beautiful untouched area full of life. And they sat in this border between the international waters of, I think it was Ecuador and the Galapagos,

and they just raped. everything that went through there and destroyed that whole area and i have a buddy that went out there to film some stuff and he said it was just ridiculous he said he went diving and there was barely anything there and everything was acting skittish and scared um and so there is a lot that needs to change if we're going to save this planet we're living on Yeah, no, and that's the thing. I agree that in the middle ground, exactly where we should

be. And I want to get just very quickly to your, you know, your plant based diet before we transition to some closing questions. But that's, you know, that's a takeaway for me. It's not about no one drives cars, but maybe we think about more pedestrianized areas and, you know, rail systems and buses and things that reduce, you know, the carbon footprint.

And we look at the way we farm. You know, the reason COVID was so bad is because we've got so many sick people in this country that they were dying from a virus they should have been. you know, mildly affected by. So the way we spray our food. Look at what they're putting into their face instead of on their face. Yeah, well, exactly. I mean, and that's it. So the middle ground is the conversation of both. You know, I get the

isolation. I really do. But that conversation about health and food and agriculture and air pollution has to be there side by side with masks, hand sanitizers and stay, you know, six foot. So in America, you know, it's like it's. You go, you drive past In -N -Out Burger and there's a line of cars around the block and there's these morbidly obese people shoving burgers in their face while wearing a mask under their chin. You're

not stopping anything. People need to start really taking stock of their own actions and their own health and their own well -being instead of relying on the government to come out with a vaccine. And I'm not saying, you know, I'm not. taking away anything from the horrific death toll that COVID has implemented around the world and in America. But at the moment, I think we're at 410 ,000 deaths from COVID, which is horrendous. But annually, there's 655 ,000 deaths from coronary

heart disease. So why are the tobacco shops open? Why are they essential businesses throughout

all of COVID? How are these massive companies putting all this horrible artificial sweetener into kids cereal to start the diabetes and start the coronary heart disease process when they're toddlers you know there needs to be better laws against these companies putting shit into our foods to help everyone understand that your health is your wealth absolutely i couldn't agree more well just very quickly then so your plant -based diet i actually switched to a plant -based diet

it was a few years ago now and Yeah, I was amazed.

I had a dwindling of... um energy and strength towards the end but that could have just been you know obviously my my physiology the fact i was a full -time firefighter better getting any sleep um and it but i have to attain that i had blood work done my blood work was good as ever been i felt great my poo looked awesome i saved a lot of money on toilet paper so when did you you know decide to make that change and i want to say thanks to james wilkes by the way

speaking of which the the mma fighter that made the game change because he was the one that connected us in the first place. So how did you come across that way of eating? And then what was your personal experience? It all started when I went to Africa, actually. Xbox had given me money to create a pilot for a series that we'd come up with called Fearless, where I was going to embed with all of these incredible groups of humans around the world that are risking their lives to make the

world a better place. So we shot the pilot in Africa with Damien Mander, who was on the Game Changers. And he was actually an Australian clearance diver as well, so we knew each other. And I got to go out and spend a couple of weeks in Zimbabwe embedded with his anti -poaching unit to learn how they do it and just really spend some in -depth time with these rangers that risk their lives to save what they call their family. And one night... In the beginning, the cook was making

food for everyone. And I saw Damien was eating from a separate pot. And I was like, ah, this guy is saving the good meat for himself. And I went over there all cocky going, hey, what's up with that pot, bro? And he goes, oh, well, I don't eat meat. The rangers eat meat. And I'm like, what? Damien's like six foot three or four, built like a brick shithouse. I'm like, what do you mean you don't eat meat? And he said,

well, I'm vegan. And I said, what's that? And he's like, well, I don't consume any animal products. I was like, why? And he said, well, I was going out into the wilderness to save these animals and then I was coming home and I was eating the animals and I felt like a hypocrite. And that struck a chord with me. because I dislike hypocrites immensely. The worst leaders that I've ever had have always been massive hypocrites, always do as I say, not as I do. And I always strive to

be the do as I do sort of person. And I was talking about saving the oceans and saving the sharks, but I was eating the animals that are a detriment to our environment at the same time. And so It struck a chord with me and I went home and I thought, you know what, I'm going to go vegan. And I lasted two days. I didn't know what to eat. And so I gave it away. But it just kept popping up in my world through people like John Joseph, through a very good friend of mine, Ian

Norrington. A lot of other people that I respected had come out as plant -based. I'm like, all right, I'm a firm believer that when the universe is talking to you, you need to listen because there's a very good reason for it. And so I listened and I did it incrementally this time around. I cut out, you know, I stopped eating kangaroo. Then I stopped eating beef. Then I stopped eating, you know, I didn't eat dairy anyway because I'm lactose intolerant. So that was easy. But over

a series of months, I cut everything out. And when I would remove one thing, I'd add more in because mostly I ate a lot of kangaroo, a lot of chicken breasts, some broccoli and sweet potatoes. And that was about it. And so. Every time I cut something out, I'd find a whole bunch of other foods and I'd add them in. And so I actually became a better cook. I became healthier because I was getting way more macro and micronutrients. I was enjoying my food more. And since that day,

I haven't had a serious injury. Now, I didn't have the better sleep or the better energy I've maintained fairly well. But I haven't had. serious injury since that day. And I used to get a lot from all the days in the army and the Navy. I had horrible tendonitis in my elbows. My shoulder always blew out. My lower back was always blowing out. And even if I do get something, it seems to heal up very quickly. And I guess that's down to the fact that I'm not eating these inflammatory

foods. Yeah. Well, I think that was the thing I talked with James about. I don't know if you heard, he had some conversations with Joe Rogan. I think it was Chris Kresser. And they basically tore his film apart. I think Joe Rogan's amazing. But this particular guest, this conversation, there wasn't any positive to it. It was like, this is why this is shit. And so when we talked, I'm like, well, here's my thing. I'm sold on plant -based. I kind of view my diet at the moment

as... Plant -based with a sprinkling of meat. So sometimes I eat meat, but there's definitely a lot of plant -based. I don't eat dairy. Again, it upset my stomach for years and years. And almost overnight when I removed dairy, I felt better after, you know, 40 years. But, you know, as you mentioned, I think the big thing that people miss is when you focus on plant -based, and it can be some of the other diet philosophies too, what you end up doing is removing the shit,

all the processed foods. and adding in a more diverse spectrum of plants. So even if there is some clean meat with it, you've still leveled up multiple times on what you were eating before. So to me, if you do no meat at all, no dairy, beautiful. If that doesn't quite work for you and you put a little bit of meat in, also beautiful. So the all or nothing arguments. I think, turn

people off. Whereas if you meet in the middle, like you said, you start chipping away, you might end up with 10 % meat, but you're still 90 % better than where you were before. And you're creating an amazing impact in the environment

as well. I just find, like you said, if something is not necessary, but it's creating harm, then why... partake in it why sponsor the suffering of these animals around the world that are living in factory farms they're being given hormones they're being given antibiotics to the point where now we have super bugs that these antibiotics can't stop and we're we're one super bug away from getting wiped out because none of our antibiotics are going to work anymore um you know and and

then the suffering these animals growing up in pens being tortured, their babies ripped away from them, female cows being raped with fists in their arses and then being inseminated at the same time. That's bestiality. If you walk down the street and some guy had his fist up a cow's ass, you'd call the police. But when you do it in the dairy industry, it's protected and you can't even speak out against it because of animal agriculture laws. Oprah got smashed.

All she said on her show was that she's going to cut down her meat intake. And the animal agriculture industry went after her with million dollar lawsuits and tried to destroy her. And that's the power of these industries that are trying to protect their billion dollar industry. And it's all through suffering and torture of these just innocent beings, really. So if you don't need to sponsor

that, then why would you? Yeah. When it goes back to the slavery thing we talked about earlier, you know, a handful of assholes, again, want to control all the food, all the farms, all the seeds, all the, you know, whatever it is. So even if, again, let's say you want a little meat. Well, if you're supporting local holistically

run farms. where the animals are out doing their thing and you know that particular farm um you know is one that process animals but it's all done in a humane way that's still so much better than these factory farms or these men and women wearing level two or level b hazmat suits spraying the food that your kids are going to eat in about two months time yeah well i don't i don't abide to the fact that there's any uh humane way to kill something that doesn't want to be killed

so the the humane thing is is off the table that doesn't even exist um you know if if i shot you in the head with a bolt gun would you say that's humane i wouldn't have a chance i'd be dead because you don't want to die these animals don't want to die either but they don't get given a choice and look i'm i'm all for um Less is better than

nothing. So if you feel the need that you've got to do that, then by all means, do it incrementally like I did or whatever you need to make yourself feel like you're healthy and strong and all that sort of stuff. But myself and so many of my friends have proven that it's not necessary. jacked bodybuilder friends. I've got elite athletes that do Ironman, just incredible people. Morgan Mitchell, the Australian Olympic runner. It's been proven that

you can do it. There's so many resources on the internet for you to get the information from in regards to getting all of your nutrients. People always seem to fall back on this. Oh, yeah, but you've got a supplement B12. Well, all of the... the meat that you're eating is actually supplemented with B12 because the animals aren't getting it. So they have to be fed the B12. So you're getting it secondhand from an animal anyway. So that's not a great argument

there. And if you're eating a good variety of foods, you're going to get all of the nutrients that you need anyway. And obviously not everyone's the same. Some people have had a horrific. experiences on the plant -based diet. Whether that's because of their genetic makeup or whatever, I don't know. I'm no food scientist. All I can say is it works for me. It makes me feel good in my soul that nothing is directly dying for me to survive. If I can do it, then I'm just going

to continue that way. Yeah, well, I think and that's exactly it. So, you know, I think definitely not allowing the propaganda to push you away from that philosophy. And then, you know, try it. And like I said, I can attest, just try it for two weeks and see how your guts feel, see how your guts act. I think that's huge. If you, you know, are starting to find some detriment, then again, as you said, make sure your nutrient

profile is where it needs to be. But I think that nutrition is a very strange thing because ultimately it's down to the person. It's like religion. It doesn't affect anyone else as long as you're not being an asshole with it. So, you know, it doesn't matter what anyone else does. Just try it yourself. But I do hate that negative propaganda that's around plant -based because… Like I said, I think it was one of the healthiest few months of my life and it's something that

I'm kind of pushing myself back towards. Yeah, I've got a lot of friends that won't even refer to themselves as vegans because they're sick of these militant vegans forcing it down people's throats. My friend Simon Hill actually who runs a podcast called Plant Proof and he's on Instagram as well. He's a really intelligent guy, has a lot of… very intellectual plant -based people on his podcast and always has a lot of science to back what he states and a lot of great articles

on his Instagram. So if anyone's looking into it and worried about nutrient profiles, I would definitely jump on to Simon's Plant Proof Podcast and jump on his Instagram. You'll learn a lot there. There's also, what's it called? Nutritionfacts .com. There's a podcast. There's a website. It talks about the dirty dozen, the fruits and vegetables that have the most pesticides on them, which

ones you should get organic for. There is just a wealth of knowledge on the internet for anyone that's curious about it, that wants to give it a go. If you're curious about it, just do it for a month. Just try it out. See how you go.

Make sure you do it right or do it like I did and do it incrementally so that you're not... all or nothing and it freaks you out and your body feels shit because you know you've been piling all of this garbage into your system for so many years sometimes it's going to take a little while for your body to uh process all of the goodness you're going to get from the fruit and veggies and grains and nuts absolutely i had dr gregor on the show actually that that

does the nutrition .org and then um uh rip esselstein who's a firefighter and son of uh you know famous uh plant based scientists and you know i think another area that people don't realize in my opinion is the healing power the disease reversal power of a plant -based diet as well yeah absolutely yeah um yeah rips rips a great sort of resource of information as well i've spoken at his events and um forks over knives a really great resource

as well. There's just, there's so many now. And there's, you know, you talked about, you know, you're getting all these processed foods out of your system, but obviously there's plenty of processed plant -based foods as well. So it's not like you're going to go without. I love the Beyond Meat burgers. I don't have them all the time, but they are pretty dang tasty. They are. We use them all the time. It has vegan ice cream

and you really don't have to go without. But if you can make sure you're eating predominantly plant -based, then I really do think people will notice a positive difference in their health and well -being. Absolutely. Well, Paul, I want to transition to some closing questions so I can let you go because I know we've gone over time. The first one I love to ask is there – actually, I'm sorry. Before I ask you this question, so let's talk about your books. I was going to

ask you about another book. So you have No Time for Fear. And then last year you released Tough AF. I'm assuming that's as fuck. So you're about to release another one. So tell me about that and then when it's coming out. Yeah, so the No Time for Fear was released in Australia under Penguin. But that came out in 2012. So obviously I have these eight years of... having worked with Discovery Channel all the years after leaving the military that wasn't updated and Penguin

didn't want to do a follow -up. And so in America, where I live now, and a lot of my followers are from, they couldn't get the book out here. And so I thought, well, I'll just redo it. I rewrote it with a very good friend of mine, Geraint Jones, who runs the Veteran State of Mind podcast. He's got a bunch of his own books. If you love historical fiction like the Romans fighting the Gauls, he's got three, nearly four books on that, really

good reads. So he helped me rewrite the whole story and then add all of the exciting stuff from Shark Week because 90 % of the stuff that happens on these shoots. don't even make it into the show. There's so much behind the scenes stuff that we're doing, catching crocodiles, people nearly dying, what it was really like to parachute into the ocean for 44 hours with no food or water surrounded by sharks. The first time I dove with four great white sharks at 110 feet with no cage,

like all of these cool stories. So I just felt

that. it would be best to rewrite it and re -release it so we've done that it's going through final editing now and it should be out around my birthday at the end of march beautiful is it the same title no time for fear no this one's going to be called uncaged uncaged beautiful all right the tough af book was just was um an ebook i released last year and that was to give people an idea of what it's like to go through physical training, getting into the army during the army,

getting into the clearance divers through the selection process, what PT we did to keep ourselves fit. So it's a really good resource for anyone that's thinking of joining the military or maybe is already in the military and wants to up their game or for anyone that just wants to give it a go. And I started it out. So it's very simple. It's easy for anyone at any fitness level to do and then ramped it right up to clearance diver

training. beautiful well thank you so the first question i have for you is there a book someone else has written that you love to recommend it can be related to what we've discussed or something completely different um yeah there's oh man there's so many um my my good friend john joseph uh lead singer of the punk rock band the crow mags he's 50 55 i think still doing iron man's fully plant -based he's got a series of books um the first one's called uh definition of a crow mag his

second one is meat is for pussies um the third one is the pma effect the positive mental attitude and he's got another one coming out soon but i don't know the title but the best thing i love about reading john's book is he's a loud unapologetic gruff speaking new yorkan and so if you can jump on his instagram and see his videos and listen to his voice then you can read the books in his voice and it just makes it way more entertaining. And they're just like, the gloves are off in

everything that he writes. So I love his brutal honesty in those. But like I said, Geraint Jones, his historical fiction books about the Roman Empire, fighting the Gauls, really, really interesting, totally brutal. He also has his own book about, because he's a veteran, a UK veteran from Wales. He served in Iraq. He served in Afghanistan. He's got a book called, I think it's Brothers in Arms, but it's the most honest book I've ever

read about being a soldier. From what you do when it's boring, which soldiers will know what I'm talking about, on deployment, to losing mates, to being in gun battles, to the hypocrisy of the military, and then what comes after when you get separated with the depression, with the drugs, with the credit card debt, all that sort of stuff. It's a really all -in -one packaged book. Beautiful. Sounds amazing. I'll have to

get a copy of that myself. All right. Well, then same question, but a movie and or documentary. Oh, well, man, my favorite movie of all time is True Romance, which is one, I think, Quentin Tarantino's first movie. Love that movie. It's so good. It's got so many superstars in it before they were superstars. from Brad Pitt to Christopher Walken to Michael Rappaport, Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, amazing movie. And what was the other one? Documentary. Documentary, that

David Attenborough one. I think it's A Life on Planet Earth. I think so, yeah. Yeah, that was an amazing documentary. The footage of him as a young man being a naturalist and everything he saw from when he was young to what it is now and the detriment we've had on the planet and how we really need to band together to take it back and regrow this beautiful planet, you know, our home. We've only got one, so why destroy it? Absolutely. Well, he's someone I'd love to

get as a guest one day. Obviously, he's a pretty tough person to get on. But my question is, is there anyone you'd recommend to come on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the world? Wow. I got so many mates that are really interesting, but Geraint, definitely one of them. He's like John. He's unapologetically honest. I've been on his podcast a couple of times. We have a really

good time. Oh, man. I did one very recently with, oh, I can't remember her name, but the podcast was called Brass and Unity. And it was a U .S. She's Canadian, but she served. I think in Iraq or Afghanistan and a lot of stuff happened to her. She got PTSD. It was a lot of breakdowns, but she's just a very good conversationalist and interviewer. And I had a really good time and she brought a lot of stuff out of me that I hadn't really spoken about in a long time.

And so, yeah, check out the Brass and Unity podcast. I can't remember for the life of me her name, but she's a really lovely person and has been through a lot. Beautiful. Thank you. All right. Well, then the last question before we make sure everyone knows how to find you online, what do you do to decompress these days? I go to the gym. Gym? Yeah, I go to the gym. I hang out with my dog. There's nothing like the love for my dog. It's unconditional. So yeah, going to the

gym is my therapy. I get a lot of people that say, hey, I'm coming to LA. Let's work out sometime. And I'm like, nope. Sorry, that's poll time. That's my therapy where I get angry and I get worked up. And it's just very simple. I get in my head, I listen to my music and that's poll time. So yeah, no one get upset if I say, no, I'm not going to work out with you. That's because

it's therapy for me. Well, you mentioned before we started recording that you bought a lot of stuff for your apartment so you could work out even if Gold's Gym is shut down. What's your favorite piece of home gym equipment? Well, I've got... A rower, I've got a treadmill, I've got adjustable dumbbells, I've got weighted vests, but my favorite one that I just got is the upright rower. They call it a ski erg. I love it because

it's simple. I live in a pretty small apartment, so I've got to fold down the treadmill, I've got to put on my running blade, or I've got to

fold out the rower. But with the ski erg, all I do is put on one of my weightlifting arms with a special attachment, and I just... pull the crap out of that thing and it works my abs it works my lats it works my triceps it works my shoulders and you know within two miles i feel all pumped up and jacked and alive so i really like that beautiful all right well then if people want to find your books if they want to find out more about you online reach out to you on

social media where are the best places um amazon's got the tough as fuck ebook um The new one, Uncaged, will be on Amazon, but it won't be out until the end of March. Anywhere on social media, whatever you like, is just my name, Paul DeGelder. I'm mostly on Instagram because I feel like Facebook is people basically always airing their dirty laundry. Instagram, if you accept it for what

it is, is extremely motivating. People get wrapped up in the thing that it's, oh, it's just people posing and showing their best photos of their life. And there's nothing wrong with that. That can be inspiring for you. I get a lot of my new workouts from there. I get inspired by fit people that might have some really good biceps that I want to get. I'm like, okay, I'm going to do their workout. And you can change it. It's always interesting. It's always evolving into something

else. So, yeah, social media doesn't have to be a bad thing as much as people hate on it.

yeah no i agree and i have mine you know i think of mine as a community you know people call to call it followers or whatever but i think that's bullshit it's a community of people so if you groom it that way and you get rid of the turds you end up with this very positive group of men and women and you share positive posts and they see them interacting and yeah i don't see what people talk about so you're in control of your

audience Absolutely. And people, especially over the last year, everyone's going through some pretty tough times and everyone goes through shit. So I find it rewarding just to put out some positive messages. I stay away from politics and religion and I try to make my platform just like it's fun. It's funny. It's motivational. It's exciting. I put on some of the Shark Week crazy shit that I do. And it's just fun for me. I don't really get too wrapped up around the

axles about it. Absolutely. Well, Paul, I just want to say thank you so much again. I know it's evening time and you've had a busy day, so I truly do appreciate you being so generous with your time and lending your story to us today. My pleasure, James.