Colin O'Brady

speaker

1,791 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Colin O'Brady’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The School of Greatness · 54 Days Alone in Antarctica, Pulling 375 Pounds | Colin O’Brady · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

So you've probably seen there's fire dancing and poi balls and all this kind of stuff.

And at 22 years old, when a bunch of people are jumping a flaming jump rope, I thought to myself, like, sure, why not?

That looks like fun.

And clearly hindsight is 20-20 because the rope, the flaming rope, wrapped around my legs, lit me on fire, sprayed kerosene the length of my body, lit me on fire completely to my neck.

I jumped into the ocean to extinguish the flames, which ultimately saved my life, but not before 25% of my body was severely burned, predominant in my legs and feet.

And I'm here, I'm in Thailand, I'm in the middle of nowhere on a beach on an island.

There's no hospital on the entire island, no ambulance.

So I'm on a moped ride down a dirt path to a one-room nursing station, like the size of this room that we're sitting in right now, basically, with like one bed.

And I have to go undergo eight surgeries there where there's a cat running around my bed in this makeshift ICU.

And the worst thing is the doctors are looking at me through this sort of broken translation of cultural and language barrier.

And they're saying like, you'll probably never walk again normally.

Like the damage to your ligaments, the knee joints, the ankle joints, that's the depth of the burn.

Like, honestly, you're probably not going to be fully functional, you know, full mobility back again.

And, you know, obviously super dark time in my life, just this downward spiral, physical trauma, emotional trauma.

I thought I was this young person seeing this world.

How could I be so stupid?

I'm down on myself, all these things.

And

The heroine of this story is my mother, who's just this incredible woman, and I don't have kids yet, although that's another adventure I'd like to go on pretty soon, I think.

But my mother comes in, and I can only imagine what it's like to be a mother, to see your kid on the other side of the world in this makeshift hospital, bandaged to the waist up, having doctors say this.

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