I was 15 when Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998. At the time, I lived in Vargas State, which borders the Caribbean. In 1999, torrential rains caused flash floods that left thousands of people dead. I lost several friends, and my school was buried in the mudslide. The importance of resilience has been etched into my soul ever since.

In 'Fighting With My Family,' there's a scene where I have to wrestle; I have to do the famous fight between Paige and AJ Lee. We actually did perform it in front of all those thousands of people. And just beforehand, we had a little dress rehearsal, and there were all these famous wrestlers going around and watching as well. Terrifying.

There are still thousands of people dying every year in Laos, mostly children and farmers, from unexploded anti-personnel ordnance that the U.S. simply saturated much of the land with, especially in the Plain of Jars. There actually is a British engineering team trying to remove some of these things, which are much worse than land mines.

We were trying to get all of the planes down out of the sky. And we watched as the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed - something no one expected and anticipated. And you could sit there and see and be aware that thousands of people were at that moment being killed as a result of the terrorist attacks that struck the United States.

When you're out there in the octagon and you've got thousands of people, millions across the world, either cheering for you to win or cheering for you to get knocked out, the adrenaline is going, so it doesn't hurt while you're out there. Now fast forward to about an hour and a half to two hours after the fight? Oh yes. It's pretty painful.

In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that's international terror, and we can go on and on.

Share This Page