Listen: Big-wave storyteller Mark Mathews on the intellectual dark web, kicking opiates and the extravagance of evil, “There’s darkness in you and if you don’t manage your life and frame it with meaning, you can become bitter… very fast.”

Crippled innumerable times, told he'd never walk again, now a keynote speaker of considerable note…

Today’s guest on Dirty Water, Mark Mathews, presents, irresistibly, as a keynote speaker of considerable fame and even a little fortune who came from the bruising circuit of Maroubra, Sydney, via the cutthroat athleticism of professional big-wave surfing.

He is a ruminative man, as you’ll soon hear.

Give him one little opening for the point he wants to make and down he comes upon you, in under your guard, flashing and relentless as a rapier.

Mathews has been crippled and winged innumerable times,

Told he’ll never surf again,

Never walk again.

A cracked plate that can never be warmed on the stove nor brought out for company. Good only to hold crackers late at night or to go into the fridge under the leftovers.

But where a lesser man might sink into the velvet lazy chair of opiates and pity, descending, eventually, into a hell of despondency, he is optimism radiant and roaring.

Faith vindicated.