 I'm Rusty Komori and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. My books Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game are about leadership, personal growth, and creating a superior culture of excellence, which is what this show is all about. My special guest today came super close to death, surviving a shark attack near the Lanikai beach area, and he's truly inspiring, and you'll see why. He is Tony Lee, and today we are going beyond adversity. Hey Tony, welcome to Beyond the Lines. Hi Rusty. Now Tony, I know that you grew up in Tennessee and you came to Hawaii around 10 years ago, but tell me about the sports you played growing up. Well, when I was growing up, my father's originally from Argentina, so I grew up playing soccer, and soccer was, you know, it was my whole being all the way through high school, and then I was able to go to door to tech and play soccer at door to tech. And so, up until even after door to tech, I had hoped to go, you know, to something beyond that, to try to proud for some proteins, but as soon as I got to door to tech, you know, Tennessee is a small state, and all through high school, I was, you know, I felt I was a very good player, but then once I got to door to tech and started to play with some of those Division I athletes, I started realizing that I had no chance of going pro, which, you know, so after college, I went on to a career in biomedicine, but yeah, soccer was my whole life when I was growing up. Oh, that's so cool. You know, I did soccer too. It's a ton of running, I mean, and you mentioned about, you know, biotech, and you founded a company called Igenics. What does that company do? So, Igenics, we have built a biosynthetic cornea. So, there are about 15 million people in the world who are blind due to only the corneas, and the only solution to restore sight to those folks is up until our company was transplant, but transplant has a lot of difficulty to it. You know, first of all, the corneas have to be harvested within one hour of death, and they can only be sustained for about a week, sometimes two weeks. But either way, because of that, there were only about 60 to 70,000 transplants available per year, and so you can see if there's 15 million people who need transplants, but only 60 to 70,000 available, that leaves a lot of people in the dark, figuratively and literally. And so what our company did is we found a way to grow a corneal lab. We're using recombinant gene technology, and we have built a scaffold of collagen and which we can plan to the patient, and the patient's own cells grow into it. So, this becomes a part of the patient, and the long-term results are very, very promising. Wow, that's super interesting. And Tony, you know, let's go right into that big, the day in October of 2015. Can you take me, tell me about what happened on that day? Sure. My friend, Maz, and I had, we were training for a triathlon, and so as part of our training, we would swim to the moat. The Mokolele is our two islands that are about a mile offshore from Lanakai Beach, and so we swam to the island, and we were on our way back. When you leave the island, there's a really good cross current, and so the key is you can't stop while you're coming off the island, otherwise you get washed downstream. So, you have to wait until you get to the middle channel. And so, Maz and I had gotten separated. We were probably about 100 yards apart coming off the island, and I made it to the middle channel first, and so I was just kind of hanging out in the middle channel waiting for Maz to catch up. And, you know, I was swimming at a really slow pace, and just kind of looking at the coral and hanging out when I felt just a very violent grab on both my legs. And at first, you know, I honestly thought it might have been Maz, you know, catching up with me and just grabbing my legs. And then I felt just a horrendous pain. I mean, it's hard to describe how it just shot through my legs, and I looked back and I just saw teeth. And the shark just hadn't pulled my legs in her mouth. And I remember I was trying to punch, you know, using my fist to punch behind me. And I grabbed a good breath of air, and she started to force me deep into the water. I remember my eardrums shattered because we just dove so fast. I didn't have time to clear my ears. And I kept punching and punching, but it wasn't doing anything. Eventually, one of my legs came off. And so it allowed me to turn around and face the shark. So I grabbed her by the snout and tried to keep her away from me while I was punching her and punching her gills. And I can tell you, punching doesn't really work. It's not going to stop a shark. And then I saw her eyes. And, you know, I told you about my business, we do by us at that corny is one of the things we do and when we have any prototype, we take pig eyes and we practice the surgery on the pig eyes and we practice inserting the corny is there. And the pig anatomy is very similar to the shark anatomy. They have what's called a nicotate membrane, which is a third eyelid. So the eyelid's closed and then there's a third eyelid that goes across. And this eyelid's for protection. That's why, like when dogs try to chase pigs through the brush, the pig is never hurt. And sometimes dogs lose their corny eyes, you know, because the brush tears away at their eyes. And so, and I knew that the nicotate membrane is very strong if you push it this way, but you can just slide it like this and it slides right off. So I did just as we did to the pigs. I just opened her eyes, slipped the nicotate membrane and pushed my fingers into the medial aspect here and the eyeball popped right out. So I just ripped her eyeball right out and then she left me alone. So I started swimming back to the surface and I, boy, I didn't realize how deeply we were. I just remember it taking, you know, I'm stroking and stroking and trying to get up, trying to get up and the surface was so far away. I, it's hard to tell how deeply we were, but when I finally got to the surface, I remember I was treading water and yelling for help and looking around and I couldn't see anyone. And all of a sudden a foot floated next to me and I thought, oh, somebody lost a foot out here and I realized it was my own foot. And so I just put it into my swim trunks and then started to, and I realized there was no one around. So I started to swim back to shore, but I knew I needed to, I knew I wasn't gonna make it because we were over half a mile from shore. So I needed to swim backstroke so I could keep yelling while I swam. So I swam backstroke and was yelling the whole time, help, help, help. And just miraculously out of the blue, Charlie Liberton and his son, or Julia Liberton and son Charlie heard me and they were out on these race kayaks and they came by and picked me up. Julian picked me up and you can see from the picture that that's Julia, that's me on Julian's boat. And then Charlie went to go pick up my friend, Maz. And we're really lucky Charlie was there that day because Julian and I kept struggling with breathing and those boats are so tippy that, and I didn't have legs at the time. So we kept falling over, we kept capsizing the boat, but Charlie was able to grab Maz and they headed to shore immediately. Later on I heard from the paramedics that there's only a few ambulances on the whole west side, on the whole east side of the island. And the last ambulance had, or the second to last ambulance had been called out. And when they received that one call from Julian, they only had one ambulance there. And two minutes later, that ambulance was called to the North Shore. And so if Charlie hadn't made it to shore that much earlier, then that ambulance would have been head to the North Shore. And I would, I'd be dead for sure. So yeah, it's amazing. Charlie was only 14 years old at the time. And he was really able to save my life. I mean, by getting to shore so fast. Tony, how much blood did you lose during that whole time and then during the time in the ambulance going to Queens? Yeah, as soon as I got to shore, they were able to put a tourniquet on me. But by that time, I was having a lot of trouble breathing. And the doctors in the ER said that a guy that's normally my size has about five and a half liters of blood in him. And they put nine liters of blood in him. So I guess I was almost completely desagminated by the time I got to the ER. You know, when I was in the hospital, when I was in the ambulance, I, you know, there's statistics out there that when you're in an accident, the minute the ambulance arrives, your chance of survival goes up to 50%. And the minute you make it to the ER, your chances of survival goes to 95%. And so I knew those statistics and I knew that the key to my survival is just to stay alive until I got to the hospital. And so the whole time, you know, when I was waiting for the ambulance or when I was in the back of the ambulance, I remember I just needed to stay awake and cognizant. So I was doing number sequences and a Fibonacci sequence is what I used to do to kind of, you know, just run my brain. And so I just kept running Fibonacci sequences through my head because I knew I just needed to stay conscious and need to stay awake. As soon as I saw the awning at Queens, I just passed out then. And I just let the dark to stake me because I knew that I had 95% chance of survival at that point. So Tony, you know, what was it like when you're lying in the hospital bed? What was your mental state like when you're in that hospital room? The first two weeks were kind of tough. I had a lot of dudes running in and out of me and they were keeping me sedated. So I was just kind of in and out of consciousness. And then the next three weeks, they had done a lot of fixation. They had taken the foot that I recovered and they reattached it to my leg. And then they put metal bars in there to kind of fixated to hold it all in place. And so for the first three weeks, I had to stay very still because any movement would cause, you know, the leg to misalign. So that was by far the toughest time. Sitting there for three weeks, not being able to move at all. But once I got out of that, I was able to get into a wheelchair for the first time. And I remember after five weeks of just being in the hospital and, you know, looking at the roof or the ceiling there, it was so amazing to be able to see the sunlight. And it just, it was, it was amazing. Yeah. And what am I good? And so we got back to the hospital bed and one of my good friends, Del, he had met a guy a few years early, a guy named Tom Lee. And Tom was a soldier in an army in the army. And his Humvee had been hit by an IED in Iraq. And he had lost one of his legs and partially and his other leg was salvaged. And Tom walked into my hospital room and, you know, and he started chatting with me and then he pulled up his hand leg and showed me his prosthetic leg. And he said, you know what? It's not so bad. You could, I, you know, I live a really normal life. You can too. And that was, that was so important to me. I was at such a rough part of my life. And just wondering what my life would be now that I didn't have legs and seeing Tom that day and knowing that there was life after amputation. That was a really important day. Tony, you're the father and son that rescued you. They came to visit you in the hospital. What was it like seeing them again in the hospital this time? It was, it was great to see Julian and Charlie. And over the years, we've kept in touch. We've, you know, been a, oh, the person on the right of that photo, that's, that's, that's mad. That's the guy that was swimming with me that day. And Julian and Charlie are just great people. They live, they still live in Manukai. Well, I actually, Charlie's off to college now, but they're, they'll be seeing contact a few and a few months ago, we, we all went up to the North Shore and the Ocean Ramsey runs an amazing shark swim, swim with the sharks program up there. Her and her partner Juan are conservationists and shark enthusiasts. And they brought us up all up there. And we got a chance to swim with, with a lot of the different sharks. And it was really an amazing experience. And to be able to share that with Julian and Charlie was wonderful. Oh, you know, I had Ocean Ramsey on my TV show a few months ago. And yeah, what her and Juan are doing, I mean, it's, it's incredible. Just the education about sharks and how they're really not interested in humans. But what did, Tony, what did Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors do for you while you were in the hospital? Well, you know, it was, it was great that I was back in 2015 and was doing one of their championship seasons. And I've been a season ticket holder for a number of years and I've just been a really big Warriors fan. And when the, the Warriors heard of what happened to me, that was fantastic. They just sent me a jersey, a signed jersey, and he sent me a whole box of, of shirts and of your warrior shirts. And so I was able to spread them around the floor because it was right around the time where they were, the season was starting. And so, so every time a Warriors game came on on the, on the hospital floor, we, the whole floor would just stop and we'd all go watch the game together. We'd all put on our shirts and it was, it was great that, yeah, I really appreciate the Warriors reaching out to me. And it was really nice to step to sign a jersey for me. Oh, that's so cool to hear that they did that. I mean, I like hearing things like that. And, and Tony, I want to ask you this, you know, while, you know, after being in the hospital, were you experiencing any PTSD at all? Yeah, right, right after, during, while I was in the hospital, my company's, my company was a startup and it was undergoing a funding round. And so we were, we were very busy at that moment. And immediately after the hospital, I had to get on an airplane pretty, pretty soon after that and, and go see some of my investors and try to, try to close that funding round. And so it was so busy that, that I really didn't have time to really kind of process a lot of it. And it wasn't until almost a year, maybe two years later that I started having some pretty bad nightmares. And, and, and, you know, I would wake up sometimes and just, you know, and just be stretched with sweat. And I could relive the shark attack in my, in my nightmares. And it took a little while to get over that. One of the things I tried was, was, was try, a friend of mine at Stanford had a program where they, they were using LSD to kind of try to look at or try to, to help people with PTSD come to terms with some of the, the memories and some of the bad feelings. And I tried it out and it actually worked very well. It's, it's really interesting how, I guess when it's properly used, it allows you to, to kind of separate you from the emotion and the, and I guess the panic and the, the fear that's, that's involved in that moment. And so it allows you to kind of relive those moments or remember those moments without feeling the emotion that's attached to it. And because a lot of times that emotion can, that emotion, that, that, that, that primal fear can really, really just overwhelms everything else. And so when you start thinking back on the attack, when I started thinking back on attack, that emotion would just overwhelm all the other feelings and it made it very difficult to kind of analyze what was happening. And so, so LSD really helped that. And we, we did it one time and it was, was very useful and it allowed me to kind of relive the, or we remember and relive the entire attack without having that, those intense emotions attached to it. And it really helped me process what happened. Well, that's fascinating to hear that. And, and Tony, I know that you just finished reading my book and what, what stood out to you when you're reading it, when you're reading the books. You know, I'll tell you, one of the biggest things that, and it was pretty early on in your book, you talked about the three cons. And I can tell you, one of the biggest things in the, out there is consistency. It's building daily habits. And when you're coming back from, from getting knocked down, and that's what I feel like when, with the shark attack, I feel like I was just knocked down pretty hard. And, but when you're coming back, it's, it's not the, you know, everyone likes to see when, you know, when you have a really good result. But what they don't see is, it's the day to day. It's the, all the little, it's, you know, being able to, to get off the, you know, the bed, get out of your bed, it's able to stand up. It's when your leg is hurting and it's, it's that day to day, every day that really leads to those big moments. And that's something that, that is not often seen. But that's what makes all the difference. And I'm, and it, it makes a difference not just in recovering from a, from an injury, makes a difference in sports and makes a difference in life. It makes a difference in your career. It's that day to day consistency. Get out there. And, and then you edited your book with saying that you're 1% rule. Try to be 1% better every day. And that is, that's a, that's a great thing. You know, I've never heard of put like that, but I think that is exact, that is a great way to put it. You know, you're just trying to be just a little bit better each day and, and keep striving, you know, I'm not into those big accomplishments. What I'm into is that day to day, you know, striving and keeping things moving, keeping things, keeping things going forward. And that's how those big accomplishments occur. You know, if you just keep your, your mind all the time on the big accomplishment, sometimes you'll be disappointed because they, they meet the big things may not happen, but it's that day to day that, that really makes, makes it all worth it. Yeah. It's a little victories lead to big victories right there. Yeah. And then that's how you do it is through the 1% principle. I love that, that that stood out to you. And Tony, I know that you, you know, since the shark attack, I mean, you do a lot of surfing. I mean, how often do you go surfing? I'm probably asking me, I'm out of, I'm usually out of Queens or canoes. Mostly canoes, probably about three to four days a week. And now with the, with the swells on the North Shore. So we, we probably get up to the North Shore, Vannies or Chuns, probably once a week. It's a little bit of a drive, but, but it's really great to be out there. You know, as being, being outdoors, being, doing sports, doing athletics has always been a really important part of my life. It's, it's a part and part of my mental health. And so right away, you know, my background is as an engineer. So right away, I started designing different legs to be able to do different sports. I started realizing that the amputee community was all about being able to walk. And being able to walk is very important because it's, it's, it's really important for daily life. But I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to be able to rock climb. I wanted to be able to surf. I wanted to be able to ski. And I realized that there really weren't legs out there for that. And so I started with a couple of engineering friends. We started designing different legs to do different things. And so, you know, in that surfing picture, you can kind of see it. It's a little occluded by the wave, but you can see that the leg, the surfing leg that I designed back there, you know, it's a, it's more of a bare metal kind of leg and allows me to turn the surf board and kind of turn that, turn the board into the wave. And then I have, I have skiing legs and legs for rock climbing. Yeah, it's been kind of a hobby of mine to kind of try to, try to make all these different legs. And, and, you know, and then I have other friends who are amputees and being able to share these legs with these, with my friends. Oh, so I know that you do a lot of hiking and rock climbing, like you said, where have you gone to do a bunch of these, these adventures? Well, for the last, you know, six months with COVID and everything, rock climbing week, we often go to Makapu around near the lighthouse over there. There's a, there's a, there's some anchors set up on the rock wall there and it's a great place to climb. Hiking, we hike all over the island, you know. I try to stay away from the really, really rough hikes. That picture there is from Antelope Canyon in Utah. I took some time. This was in 2019 before COVID hit up. And I just spent some time hiking and camping in Utah and Nevada and, and, you know, we're up on Bryce Canyon and, and Mount Zion National Park. It's, it's really gorgeous out there. I recommend to all your viewers that they get a chance. It, you know, it's, it's, cause I know everyone in Hawaii goes to Las Vegas and Las Vegas is great. But if you rent a car and you just start driving north for about two hours, you're going to, or three hours, you're going to hit a Zion National Forest and it is so worth it. It is gorgeous. And if you just keep on another hour more to the east, you're going to hit Bryce Canyon. Another thing that's absolutely amazing. And so on your next trip to, to Las Vegas, hopefully you can take a day or two off and, and get up there and see some of God's wonderful creation. Tony, you mentioned earlier that, that you also did do skiing and how, how easy or hard was it for you to really learn how to adapt to ski again? Actually skiing was pretty easy because when you ski, you wear ski boots that, that fix your ankles. So my biggest problem is that, that I don't have ankles or anymore. My, so my, both of my, with my prosthetics, my feet stay at like a 90 degree angle. And I'm not able to, and so skiing, that's kind of perfect because, you know, having your ski, having your legs locked in one angle, actually benefits you. And so what I did is I removed, I took, that's one of the early prototypes, my newer prototypes, I've removed the boot completely. So I just have a leg that just clicks directly into the, to the ski boot. And that makes things lighter, it makes things easier, it makes me more agile out there. You know, actually surfing was a little harder than skiing because with surfing, you actually need your ankles to be able to move the board. And so I try to adapt to that by having, by, instead of being able to move my ankles, now I've moved my feet. And that's how I'm able to turn the board. It's a little bit slower, it's a little bit more cumbersome, but it still allows me to make turns and control the board. Oh, that makes sense. And, and I know that, that you also do cycling as well. Yeah. Yeah, they, you know, I, there's a great, the Honolulu Bike League, HBL has two great races every year. They do a North Shore metric century, and then they do a South Shore, a full century. And so that picture is taken from a century that was done. That's in Coffee Lining Park. And, and yeah, I trained for that. This was about two years after I got out of the hospital, 18 months after I got out of the hospital, I started training for that. And I developed a special leg that were, that allowed me to clip right into the cycle. The challenge there is with most people, if you look at the cleats on a cycle, they're put where the toe box is. And that's because cycling counts on a lot of calf muscle work. And if you look at like professional cyclists, they have huge calf muscles. And that's because the calf does a lot of work as you're trying to get up hills. But with amputees, you don't have that calf. And so the problem with having the cleat, the pressure point over at the toe is that you're pushing from here and the weight is being translated here. And so you're losing a lot in that. And so the key was to move the cleat underneath where your ankle comes down. And it's much more efficient, especially if you don't have calf, that's probably I think the most efficient way to ride a bike. And so I had to design my own leg for that. But my first few iterations of that leg were rough because it was just a cleat on the end of a stick. And it was like a peg leg, like the old pirates. But that turned out to be really slippery. And I ended up falling on my butt numerous times whenever I got off my bike. And so I had to develop a toe and a heel to go behind it. So every one of these legs that you have designed takes a couple of different iterations. You have to design one, play with it, test it out for a little while and then go back to the drawing board to make the changes you need and then bring out the next generation. But it's a lot of fun and it allows me to get out there and do things. Lucky thing you're an engineer. And Tony, I want to ask you one more thing before we wrap up. What advice do you have for all of us? Well, I'm just gonna say a few things that when I was in the hospital or when on the day of the attack, I had lost a lot of blood. And they put nine liters of blood in me. That's nine people who had donated blood that saved my life. And so if you get a chance and if you're able to, please donate blood because it really does save lives. I mean, it saved my life. And on a side note, if you hear that ambulance coming on the road, get out of the way. I mean, yesterday I just saw some people just, you know, trying to erase that ambulance and get out of the way. There's someone in there that really needs to get to the hospital. But more general advice, I think a lot of the concepts that you laid out in your book, and I really adhere to the consistency and that 1% rule, the battles are always won before the war starts. And it's won because of preparation, because of all the things that you do on a daily basis that gets you to that mount point. It's not the glory moment. It's the moment that you're by yourself and fighting through your own issues as you need to. But it's those moments that win the day. And so that's the advice that I give folks. It's that day-to-day consistency. Tony, great advice. And I wanna thank you for sharing your story on the show with me today. Oh, I'm happy to do it, Rusty. And thank you for watching Beyond the Limes on Think Tech, Hawaii. For more information, please visit rusticamory.com and my books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope that Tony and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.