In Search Of Excellence - Devon Larratt: The World’s Greatest Arm Wrestler | E63

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Welcome to another episode of In Search of Excellence! My guest today is Devon Larratt, one of the greatest arm wrestlers in the world.Devon is a Canadian professional arm wrestler and a former member of the Canadian Army Forces. He has won multiple world championships and is considered to be one of the best arm wrestlers of all time. He is also a fantastic person and one of the most entertaining and charismatic sports figures!We talk about this very unusual sport, his grandmother who was “the best arm wrestler in Alberta," underground arm wrestling competitions, his military career, and more!Time stamps:00:00 Is arm wrestling really a sport?Arm wrestling is a very simple sportIt has federations with rule setsIt is done on a professional tableThe size of the arm wrestling tableThe elbow must stay on 7” plain surfaceWhat does it take to winNeutral position startTake a grip, ready go, pin your opponent, win the match Advantages and disadvantages of different anatomiesHow Sylvester Stallone influenced arm wrestlingThe movie Over the Top09:39 How popular is arm wrestling in US?It is very popular, but doesn’t have government support3 prominent professional leaguesArmors, King of the Table, East vs. WestAmateur arm wrestling – WAF and IFAArm wrestling as a sport is growingWorld Arm Wrestling LeagueThe deciding factor is does it bring moneyToday it does have sponsors13:50 Devon’s backgroundGrew up in Big Island, Ontario on a farmHe was a high energy kidHis grandma was an arm-wrestlerNever beat his grandma in arm wrestlingHis brother showed him The Pumping Iron bookWas fascinated with Arnold SchwarzeneggerIdentified strength with being a manObsessed with strength, fitness, performanceTraining from a very young ageAfter high school worked in oil fieldTon of young man worked thereHe arm wrestled with them and beat everybodyDion Angel was unbeatableAt the time, arm wrestling was completely underground25:08 Are mentors necessary for success?A goal is a light in the distanceSometimes you meet people who have been where you are goingThey can be amazing guides Dion was one of those peopleMentors provide guidance and save you timeWith Internet mentors are much more available27:30 Joining the Canadian MilitaryJoined the army in 1996Combat tours are scaryIt takes time to develop psychological strength to fight Spent 20 years in arm forcesComplications from arm wrestling made him leaveYou chose to serve your country and fightBeing shot you realize how lucky you areStuck for 4 days, had to take extremely strong antibioticsDestroyed gut flora and was sick for 6 monthsBeing a follower and a desire to be the best41:49 Devon’s vision of war and sportsLife is a gift and one of our jobs is to be happyOne key to happiness to find things that make you happyDevon was always attracted to fightingSponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

Where were you shot? And on a scale of 1 to 100, how painful is it? It was a bullet that went through the side of the helicopter. The bullet hit my hand. That really upset me. I was like, hit me in the head, don't hit my right hand. I talk about arm wrestling, and arm wrestling is absolutely my passion, and I love arm wrestling. When I was a kid, I just wanted to be the most awesome fighting machine that I could imagine myself. Arm wrestling requires greatness on so many levels. There are people who need to be able to promote, who need to be able to do the business side. For me, my only desire is to be the greatest fighter I can be on the table.

Welcome to In Search of Excellence, which is about our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be. To learn, educate, and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential. It's about planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication, and perseverance. It's about believing in ourselves and the ability to overcome the many obstacles we all face on our way there. Achieving excellence is our goal, and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings. We all have different routes and hope on how we want to get there. My guest today is Devin Larratt.

Devin is one of the greatest arm wrestlers in history. He has won multiple world championships. And as we're going to see today, Devin is also one of the most charismatic and fun people to watch in the sport of arm wrestling. Devin, welcome to In Search of Excellence. Thank you so much, Randall. It's quite an honor. So I think the question on most people's minds is, is arm wrestling an actual sport? I don't think 99% of people in the world would ever consider it a sport and

didn't know it was a sport. So can you tell us what the sport is, the size of the table, and the rules and regulations on how it all works? Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, it definitely now has become a sport. So I mean, how do you define a sport? I think maybe 20 years ago, it didn't tick all the boxes. But now, yeah, we have many full time guys all around the world who make a living doing this crazy thing. For me, it's an absolutely full time gig. So it's what I do every day. It's how I feed my family. It's my passion. It has been that to some degree since I was a kid. I started when I was young. Arm wrestling is a very simple sport. It's a very simple, probably one of the most base sports that there is. Probably one of the most ancient of all sports. It's like a super handshake. Basically, you come together. There's a lot of details that I'm going to bypass, but we take a grip. We start the match, and one of us pins the other one to the tabletop,

and thereby is the winner. So it's a very simple sport at its base. But of course, like all things, the deeper you look at it, you'll find that there's tons of rabbit holes and intricacies. There are many federations with slightly varying rule sets, but what I've already described is the base. It's typically done on a professional table, but you can do it everywhere. I mean, if you look at where is most arm wrestling done,

it's probably done on tables. But yeah, I mean, yeah. The sport of arm wrestling has really changed its trajectory a lot. And that's probably one of the reasons why I'm talking to you now. I'd say over the last 10, 15 years, the trajectory has really changed to a point now where we are, you know, are we household?

We're pretty much household at this point. I think that years ago, nobody knew arm wrestling. Now, I feel like at a minimum, we've been seen. So baseball has a diamond. There's 90 feet between the bases. Football has a 100-yard field. What is the size of an arm wrestling table? Is there a standard table? Is there a standard size? And I noticed in some of the videos I was watching that you don't have to

be both flat on the same surface. So how does that work? And what are the rules? And how do you actually win a match? Is it two out of three? Is it six zero? Is it one zero winner take all? So where do people compete? How do they compete on a table? What does a table look like? A standard arm wrestling table is about three and a half feet wide. Okay. I think it's, I think it's 42 inches across. Your playing surface is two inches from the edge. And there's a seven by seven pad. So seven inches long and seven inches wide. And this is where your elbow must stay.

Depending on the league, sometimes they give you a bit more. Sometimes they'll give you like eight inches. Okay. But typically we're talking about a seven inch playing surface and the pads are slightly offset, I think by four inches. Okay. So, so if you have your center line, two inches shift to the right, two inches shift to the left. Okay. So we're slightly offset. The pin pads are raised two inches above the top of the elbow pad. So in most leagues, you do not have to pin right to the table. There's like a plane that you have to break.

So it's any part of the wrist to the fingertips goes below that plane. You don't actually have to touch the pad. That's considered a win. There's also fouls, like you're not allowed to lift your elbow up or slide your elbow off the pad. So much of this sport is getting a fair start. So there's a neutral position start. So in the neutral position start, you have to see the person's thumb knuckles. The wrist has to be straight. Shoulders must be square and it must start in the center of the table. The referee will initiate the match with a go or a ready go. You can't false start. Some fouls are considered stop fouls. Some fouls are considered running fouls. It depends on the league.

The more you arm wrestle, the more you'll find splinters. And arm wrestling is actually, you know, there's a wider sport. You know, there's arm sumo, there's freedom, there's standard arm wrestling. The arm wrestling is split in rule differences among leagues. But the standard, the rules don't change too much. The real base is take a grip, ready, go, pin your opponent, don't foul, you win the match. There's straps too. If the hands come apart, you get tied together.

And this is very normal, okay? Most arm wrestling nowadays takes place in a strap. What if your arm is six inches longer than the next guy or shorter? You're at a disadvantage because you can't compete. You get to raise your arm up to the same level as your opponent. Because if you're six inches shorter, you're going to have a serious disadvantage right out of the gate. There's advantages and disadvantages to any number of anatomies. Okay. Like there are advantages that a short arm has that a long arm doesn't have.

Typically, I'd say, yeah, a taller arm, a bigger hand typically has some advantages. However, you see champions of all shapes and sizes. And there's quite a variety of techniques that you can use that will take advantage of these differences in anatomy. However, there is a fair grip that will be negotiated at the start. And what they do is they make the webbing of the palms be level. One of the things that's very important is the thumb knuckle is showing. Okay, so when we take a grip, if both people can see the thumb knuckle, that is considered to be an even grip.

There are advantages and disadvantages to different anatomies. And that's one of the things that makes an arm wrestling champion. Typically, arm wrestlers have very large and strong hands. This is normal. But there have been great champions in the past who have smaller hands and still today. It's not that simple. So arm wrestling is a sport you can essentially do your entire life. And some people think it's the most basic test of strength that we can find. Is it all about strength?

And what's the technique to get stronger? If you talk about actual techniques that you need and how important they are to win an arm wrestling match? Arm wrestling is thought of as a strength sport and a combat sport.

In all combat sports, strength is extremely vital. I would equate it the same way you would to a fighter, but probably more so because of the size of the ring, because of the size of the fight. Absolutely, there's tons of factors that are going to help you win an arm wrestling match. Strength is a humongous factor, especially strength that's trained properly. So the combination of strength and technique are at times insurmountable. Technique is many things. Technique in arm wrestling, it's a miniature martial art. So the hand can move many different ways. The pressures counter each other.

What will beat one move will not beat another. There's adjustments that can be made to beat another one. It's like rock, paper, scissors. There's reaction time and adjustment. Everything comes into play. For something that looks so simple, it's surprisingly complex and flexible. There's a lot of adjustments that'll get you the win. I'd say there's probably, there's division points in the sport. There's forward and back.

There's attacking the hand. There's attacking the arm. The main movements in arm wrestling would be what you would call rising. So this lifting ability, this lift. Sometimes it's called creation. So it's an ability to get a higher hand. This rise, it's similar to a jab in boxing. It's like one of the first things you do to kind of set your position.

The next two movements are kind of coupled together when you talk about controlling a hand. We call it cupping. And basically, that's just a wrist flexion. Everything is a chain. It brings the match to your center. You cup the person. The exact opposite of that motion is pronation.

So you could imagine that the cup attacks someone's pronation. It'll turn the palm over. So you need to be able to rise. You need to be able to cup. You need to be able to resist the cup. You need to be able to pronate. So this rising cup

and pronation, this is how you attack someone's hand. When you attack someone's hand, they lose control. They lose the ability to control angles, advance. There's a whole world of technique that is achieved when the other person's holding onto you and the ability to slide your hand higher. There's also the shoulder supination. Supination attacks shoulder line. When the hands come together, one of the hands and the shoulder, so when you make a line from the shoulder to the hand,

that line may cut into the other person's arm or their angle may cut into your arm. Whosoever person's angle is cutting into the other one's arm, this is considered to have the shoulder advantage. And that strength is defined through supination primarily. And then once you have it, then there's this forward driving ability that's through another part of the cup. There's grip involved.

There's kickback. But it's like the opening in chess. You never want to get too far from the opening because the opening, if a person's good technically, they'll control the whole match right from the onset. So the, the two main division points are, are the ability to rise and the ability to get the match inside. Okay. This is the base of the whole inside,

outside technical flow. Yeah, it's, it's simple and it's very fascinating. It happens very quickly. It's a very, very fast sport. It can be. It can be very quick.

Most matches are decided in really less than a second if the strength is at all different. High-level matches, when the strength is close, you're looking at longer, you're looking at 20 seconds, sometimes much longer. But're looking at longer. You're looking at 20 seconds, sometimes much longer. But yeah, fast sport. Fast sport. We say test your frame. Test your frame because there's muscles, there's joints, there's bones. It's not just a simpler muscular movement where you're testing your muscular capacity, your entire

frame will come into question. Your entire structure will be tested in an arm wrestling match. Sylvester Stallone is one of the greatest actors or highest grossing actors of all time. Can you tell us how he materially influenced the sport of arm wrestling? You know, the crazy

thing is that movie over the Top was actually based off of a real event. A lot of people don't know that. That entire movie was actually real. You know, minus Sylvester Stallone. But the

Over the Top tournament actually was a real tournament that they filmed. A lot of the cuts from the movie, they're right out of the tournament. Yeah, it took place in the 80s and was actually won by a guy called John Brzenk in the truckers division. First place guy actually won a real truck. Great time in the sport of arm wrestling. It's one of the highlights of the early days of the sport.

Yeah. Uh, over the top was a huge boost. It's before my time really. But it really put our wrestling on the map. A lot of people didn't know it was a thing and people became interested in it at the time. And you can fast forward to today.

There are world championships that feature a thousand competitors from 47 countries around the world. Interestingly, in terms of popularity, the most popular countries are Kazakhstan, Turkey, Sweden, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Moldova, the U.S. It's 16th. Can you talk to us about the international competition and is arm wrestling going to become more popular in the United States and what are you doing to make it more popular? It's hard to say what country arm wrestling is most popular in. Depending on what metric you look at, depending on what statistic, arm wrestling is very popular in the U.S. It's just it's on

different levels. It's just it's on different levels. It does not have government support in the US. When you mention countries like Kazakhstan, Bulgaria, a lot of the countries from Eastern Europe, Turkey, you have government support to some degree. And there's none of that in North America. So the sport looks different as a result. But make no mistake, there is a lot of arm wrestling in the USA.

There's a lot of initiatives to grow arm wrestling. I think that the biggest pushers of arm wrestling right now are the highest level of the sport. So you look at East versus West. You look at King of the sport. So you look at East versus West. You look at King of the Table. You look at Arm Wars. These are right now the three prominent professional leagues. They represent the highest expression of the sport of arm wrestling.

You also have the World Arm Wrestling Federation, WAF, and IFA. There's a divide. However, these two represent the highest expression of amateur armwrestling, particularly WAF, where the medalists from WAF get compensation from their countries. The WAF and the IFA tournaments are well attended. Arm Wars, King of the Table, and East versus West, the athletes are selected and invited. This is the best guys on the planet. There's a lot of grassroots initiatives.

Armbet, for example, gives people a way to access the sport, find each other. The sport is growing on a grassroots level. I think when kids think something's cool, they do it. Arm wrestling is easy to find. It's very easy to find arm wrestling. There are contracts now. ESPN signed a contract for arm wrestling. It's on ESPN and ESPN2, which is pretty cool.

That's where I actually saw it for the first time probably years ago. And they run it in an unpopular time where they need to fill programming. I saw it a lot during COVID as well when ESPN wasn't doing a lot of live events. Yeah, that's right. The World Arm Wrestling League, which was just incredible. And right now they're still kind of in hibernation. Yeah, they were successful in getting our missing on ESPN. That was a big boost for us, a massive, massive boost. Yeah, fantastic times. That was from about 2014, 2015 till about 2017.

So it was actually only a couple years that we were on ESPN. We may get back on. We may. But arm wrestling is always kind of just beneath the surface right now. I think that

really the deciding factor for anything is does it make money? Does it have the fans to generate financial... Does it make sense financially? And I think that we're now at a point where it does make sense to the bigger companies to come in and help out and take a piece of the action. In my podcast, I always talk about family, where we come from, our family, help shape, our values, preparation for our future. You were born in Victoria, British Columbia, but moved later in Ontario when you were two years old. You grew up on a farm.

Can you tell us about your grandmother and the influence she had on your life and how you got into the sport? So I was a kid. I was just a super energized little kid. And I just had a lot of need to fight, a lot of need to run around and break stuff. I was just a really high energy kid.

And my grandmother, so the fables have it, she was like Alberta champion of the women's division in arm wrestling. And she and I would arm wrestle from a very early age. So she would come to our house on the farm and she'd do stuff like she'd bake us pies and stuff. She'd get me to go and get her apples to bake pies. And my reward for helping her was that we would get to arm wrestle. So ever since I was a kid, all these things kind of formed in my mind. Apple pie, arm wrestling, spending time with my grandmother was really great for me. You know, arm wrestling was one of those things right away that I found that I could go as hard as I could. I could fight as hard as I could. And nobody got in trouble and everything was good. So it was a beautiful way for me to express that desire, even from a very young age. How old was your grandmother? You were five years old at the time.

I guess she probably would have been probably at that point in her 50s or 60s. I couldn't do anything with her. I think even when I was like 10, she would still be me. No, I never still beat me. You never beat her? She's the one who... No, I never beat my grandmother. When I moved out west, I actually stayed with my grandmother

for a short while before she passed. But no, I never beat my grandmother in arm wrestling. So let's talk about your childhood a little bit. You read Pumping Iron. You want to be like Arnold Schwarzenegger when you were younger. What were you like as a kid when you were growing up and including high school? And can you just tell us a little bit about that? I think I was probably around that same age, probably five or so.

We had a big library in my house. My father was quite a reader. Big library. We had actually separate houses that were filled with books. And my brother would kind of go through the books, my older brother. and there was only a couple books that he ever showed me and one of them was pumping iron and i like i was just a kid like really young like probably five or so and it was the only book i ever looked at the library and whenever i snuck away to the library i always i always went to pumping iron and i didn't even really read that much right i just really looked at the pictures there's a picture section in the middle of pumping iron and i knew right from a young age i was like i just thought it was so cool i thought it was so cool to see arnold you know in all his glory you know naked woman on his shoulders uh i was like wow you know like when i'm

when i'm this is where i want to go like this is i i already loved being strong. I identified strength as a sign of what it meant to be a man. I saw strength in my father and it was something that I wanted. Seeing it in Arnold just so clearly, I was like, wow. I knew that you had to lift weights. I knew that you had to train. From a very young age, I've been completely obsessed with strength and fitness and performance. I remember every single year asking my parents for a weight set, you know, and they're like, no, it'll stunt your growth. It'll stunt your growth. And now we know that that's completely false. But I was finding any way I could to train. I'd go out on the farm and I'd find wood and I'd lift logs and I'd throw rocks as far as I could.

I was training from a very young age, from a very young age. After high school, you went west, you moved to Ontario, you worked in an oil field, and you're getting pretty strong at that point. Then you met a professional arm wrestler. What happened at that point? Yeah, so I was to about grade 11 or grade 12. And that's when my strength started to kick in. And around the end of high school, I was kind of the best arm wrestler that I knew, that I was aware of.

I'd beaten everybody, but everybody was, you know, really, really nobody in the world of armrest. I went out West and I was working in the oil field and everybody is like between the age of 18 and like 23, just a ton of young men from Canada just trying to make their living at the beginning of their lives. And I arm wrestled everybody. That was one of the things that we did. We arm wrestled and we worked on the oil field. And I could beat like everybody. I was really fit.

By the time I was 18, 19, I was a very, very fit young man. But the answer after every victory was always, yeah, but you can't beat Dion. And Dion Langell was probably my first real mentor. he was the first person in my life, like that I knew that I just completely idolized that I completely just looked at and just wanted to replicate. The guy was, uh, like, like a Canadian Wolverine. The, even to this day, the energy that I have seen out of that human being, incredibly rare. His metabolism, his energy was just... At that time, he was 32 and I was like

18, 19. At that time, the guy was such a, he was such a physical, just beast, only like 165 pounds, but he was stronger than any man on that oil field. Um, insane level levels of athleticism. Nobody could beat him in an arm wrestling match or, or, or a fight. Um, Complete animal. And I used to harass him all the time. Hey, Dion, let's go. Let's go. I want to try. And he just brushed me off, brushed me off. One night I caught him just as he was wrapping up work. And I'm like, hey, Dion, let's go. And so he's like, okay, let's go. So we went on the cafeteria table, and I could do nothing with this guy. But I'm completely just killing myself trying to beat him,

and I think he was worried that I was going to break my arm. So he let me have one. So the next day, I told everybody that I beat him, and that didn't go over so well. But I think that he saw something in me. And he was actually the first professional arm wrestler that I'd met. So that meant that he was going to competitions. He was traveling the world, doing the sport.

And he was my first entry point. So he taught me arm wrestling technique, how to train for arm wrestling. He brought me to my first tournament. He was my first coach. And from there, the world opened up. It's very different from what it is now. Back then, arm wrestling was completely underground. Completely. It was in bars. People handed each other flyers. You'd get a letter in the mail. There was no internet. The community was completely unconnected. Arm wrestling technique, the training methods, everything was like Stone age compared to what it is now. But yeah, this was my start. This is how I started with the sport.

And I've been completely hooked ever since meeting Dion. I just couldn't believe how a guy that much smaller than me, that I could do nothing with it. Nothing with him. Like he took all my strength, all my power, and I just knew that I needed to learn what was going on. Regardless of what we're doing with our lives or what careers that we have, are mentors necessary for our success? I think that when you have a goal, it's a light in the distance, one that can be seen clearly, or sometimes it's obscured.

Sometimes you meet people along your journey who are going in the same direction or have been to where you're going, and these people are amazing guides, and they're gifts to your life. Dion was and had been to where I wanted to go. He was ahead of me. The things that I love about life,

the things that I pursue, he had pursued. He was more experienced than I was. Mentors provide experience. Mentors provide guidance. When you're walking on a path and it's new, you're going to make many mistakes. If someone can guide you, it will save you so much time. It's a fast-forward button.

Mentorship is much easier to find now. When I was a young man, mentorship took often years. You know, a lot of luck. I feel like now mentorship is a click of the button away. You know, mentorship, the power that we have in the information that we have on computers, the internet, YouTube, where you can find a subject

you're interested in, search it, and the world just opens up for you without the requirement for physical travel, connections, experiences that will get you to a place. You can become a master of things now without ever having met somebody, really. There's a lot of experience that will be mandatory for you to take steps forward,

but mentorship now is so much more widely accessible. You leave the oil field, you join the Canadian Armed Forces. You were in the Armed Forces for four years, then you joined the Special Forces, and you were deployed in Afghanistan seven times. And you were shot your first time in there and were wounded. Can you talk about your first tour and what happened when you got shot

and what motivated you to keep staying in it for another six years after that. I joined the reserves first. I joined the reserves and I transferred to the regular force. And then from the regular force, I eventually joined the special forces. My first tours with the regular force was very quiet. Very quiet, very uneventful. It was not until I deployed with the Special Forces that they were what you would call combat tours.

And yeah, I mean, that's why I signed up. I signed up to fight. I signed up to do exactly that job. It's super, super scary. Like it really is. There's a lot of things about it that psychologically take time to develop so that you can do it and be able to perform. It's a process. It doesn't happen overnight for everybody.

There's some special people out there, but I wasn't one of them. It takes time to develop the psychological strength required to go into combat and be okay with that. But it's what I always wanted. You know, like I talk about arm wrestling and arm wrestling is absolutely my passion and I love arm wrestling. But when I was a kid, you know,

I also wanted to be a fighter, you know, just to make it very, very broad. When I was a kid, I didn't say, I'm going to grow up to be a professional arm wrestler. When I was a kid, I just wanted to be the most awesome fighting machine that I could imagine myself. So that ultimately is what brought me to the military, the special forces, and it's what kept me there for my 20-year career. It was actually the complications caused by arm wrestling that actually made me leave the forces. yeah, it was that conflict between my hobby and my, I don't even like to call it my job because I don't feel like it was ever a job,

but it was that conflict that actually made me have to leave the forces. I don't regret a day I spent there. Many days I wish I was back. It's an incredible lifestyle and a very fulfilling one. But those days are done for me and now I am a full-time sportsman. Can you tell us what happened when you got shot? What tour you were on?

And after that, did you go back? And what motivated you to go back instead of saying, I'm done, I was shot, time to go home? So, yeah, I was shot in Afghanistan. I did many tours after that. I was... What goes through your head when you're shot.

The thing is, you accept your mortality long before you get shot as a Special Forces soldier. I mean, if you are going to be a soldier who fights at the front, you accept that you are giving your life for your country. It's just part of the process. You have already accepted your death and you're okay with that. I mean, nobody wants to die, particularly, you know.

But the action of getting shot, really, if you've gone through the process, should not be a deterrent. Because you've already chosen to go and serve your country. You've already chosen to go and fight at the front. Um, so it should come as no surprise. And it wasn't a surprise for me. I, I was actually surprised that I've made it through.

Um, very thankful for that because I'm happy with my life. But, you know, I think if you were to do a poll of guys who did the job that I do, I think that a great percentage of them find that it will be likely that they might not survive their career. And I think that most of them are totally okay with that. I think that most of them have accepted that and considered a gift if they make it through. And that's, I think, the boat that I was in. I mean, being shot,

you realize a lot of things. You realize how lucky you are. In war, there is so much luck i mean there's people talk about skill and training and these are for sure factors but there is a a portion of that luck that is so much bigger than all those other things the bullets you don't see where they're coming from. You don't know who's shooting. Sometimes you're trapped. You have no decision in the outcome. So a lot of deciding to go back really is decided by your belief in your country? It's politics. Do you believe in the mission?

Do you believe it's a cause worth the sacrifice? So long as you believe in the actions of your leaders, then as a soldier, you will go back. And by no means am I anything special. There's people who have received far greater wounds than me and gone back and still continue to go back. I know people who have basically died, come back to life. Spent months, years in recovery. Gone back on multiple tours. Yeah. Where were you shot? And on a scale of 1 to 100, how painful is it?

The first time I was shot, it was a bullet fragment. It was a bullet that went through the side of the helicopter. And the bullet broke into pieces. The bullet hit my hand. That really upset me. I was like, hit me in the head, don't hit my right hand. My right hand's very important to me.

It splashed the right side of my body but all of the pieces were quite shallow so it more or less just stung me some of the pieces are still in me but the next one happened when I was exiting the helicopter

it passed through my leg the thing I'd say about getting shot, I would say it's probably a very different experience for everyone. I would say that the way I was shot was very minor. Mine were flesh wounds and relatively shallow. I'd say that what you realize, what I realized about being shot is that we actually do not live

in the present. We actually live just slightly in the past. And you'll learn that because of how fast a bullet moves. When the bullet hits you, you do not realize that it's happening. When you are in a fight, you get hit with something, it happens to you. You're living the moment of receiving a blow or a strike. A bullet is a bit different because of the speed that it travels, it's so fast that it's in and out of you before you realize it. And then you realize, oh, I've been shot.

You know, like it happened to you. Being shot is not something you kind of live through. It's something that has happened to you. Yeah, I mean, the really, probably the worst part of me being shot was we were stuck out there for like four days because our helicopter, it was just a total mess of a mission. I had to take these super broad spectrum antibiotics for like four days

just because we were like totally in the worst place in the world for bacteria. And, you know, me having a, I wish I hadn't taken them. Looking back, I wish I would have just taken the freaking infection seriously. But it totally wiped my flora completely, wiped it right out.

And then my gut flora, my entire being has been rebuilt from Kandahar. So the base of my gut is constructed in probably one of the nasty places on the planet, which made me very sick for a long time, for probably about six months afterwards. I was just completely ill. Like I had diarrhea for like six months. Like it took a long time for my body to recover. Not from the gunshot, not from the bullets, but from the antibiotics. I love all the guys I serve with.

They're all people I look up to. Everybody that I ever worked with is kind of a hero of mine. I feel that I'm very lucky and I got to work with some really amazing people. You said that you trusted them with your lives and that you didn't mind being a follower. But that's a little bit different than your personality and your desire to be the best and to enter something that's highly competitive. So how do you balance between those two fields? I don't think it's different at all. The desire to be the best and being a follower,

I don't see a difference there really. I think that following is, I think it's a sign of respect a lot, you know, and it doesn't mean that you cannot pursue greatness as a follower. I always wanted to be the best at my job. Very much. Very much. That doesn't mean that I didn't fully understand that there were people who understood parts of my job better than me and that I needed to be able to listen. I think so much of what the military teaches you is about being an expert in your field and being part of a team. I was a huge fan of just the fighting part of being in the military. I never wanted to do anything more. I just wanted to be a fighter.

I just wanted to be the guy who went in and fought. And I wanted to be the best that I could be at that particular piece. But you are not one thing. Like when you go to fight as a country, you are just a small part. But that doesn't mean that you cannot be as excellent as possible.

And it's the same thing in the world of arm wrestling. Arm wrestling requires greatness on so many levels. There are people who need to be able to promote, who need to be able to do the business side, who need to be able to understand the technique, understand how to train. For me, my only desire is to be the greatest fighter I can be on the table. We've already talked about, you've said that your whole life you wanted to fight and that was your sole focus, but you've also said that's been a personal failure of yours.

Can you talk about why that is? One of the things that I'm learning is life is such a gift and I think that one of our jobs is to have the most happiness that we can have in this life. And I think that one of the keys to happiness,

one of them, is to find the things that make you feel a certain way. One of the things that we're also supposed to do is to make the world a better place. And I don't think that I make any big difference. And I knew that, well, it was my belief going into the military that it was a contribution to hold civilization together. I thought that that was one of the roles that the military played was stabilization.

And I thought, you know, as a fighter, as someone who loves fighting, that this was a worthy contribution of what I had to offer as a human being to our collective. As this went on, you see the grayness and the murk that is in war. It became less clear to me that potentially I was overall having the positive effect that I was really seeking. And the more I saw the overall goodness and light that sport had, the effect that sport had on the world. One of the things that I believe strongly is

that humans do better when they're together. The more you can bring people together, the greater things that we can achieve. And that's one of the greatest gifts that sport does for humanity is it brings people together, forms relations these relations carry over into your life