Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Chris Nowinski (on CTE)

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Chris Nowinski (Stop Hitting Kids in the Head, Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis, Concussion Legacy Foundation) is an author, retired pro-wrestler, and neuroscientist. Chris joins the Armchair Expert to discuss never forgetting the culture shock of wealth while studying at Harvard, his stint wrestling on Monday Night Raw, and not having ever really been in a real fight. Chris and Dax talk about why the violence in football is actually worse than WWE, his first instance of REM behavior disorder, and learning the preciousness of brain cells. Chris explains the supposed causes and physiology of CTE, why we have selective framing for how to think about the mental health of athletes transitioning out of sports, and how wrestlers now really appreciate how much safer the industry is.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Experts on Expert, I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Leslie Stahl. And today our guest is Chris Nowinski.

He is a neuroscientist and author and a retired professional wrestler. We've been just accumulating bizarre origin stories. But bizarre might not be the right word. Super fascinating origin stories. Unusual. Unusual, which is probably the definition of bizarre if you look at it, probably says unusual.

Yeah, I've been thrilled to have Chris Nowinski on. I've been wanting to have someone on to talk about CTE for a long time. You love CTE, it's your favorite topic. The dream scenario would be a CTE episode of The Pit. Oh my God. I'm surprised they didn't do that. They will, season two.

I hope so. It got a season two, it's like rushing a season two. Of course, John Wells is a legend. Okay, he has a book called Head Games Football's Concussion Crisis. And if you wanna get involved with the Concussion Legacy Foundation, concussionfoundation.org.

This is a really, really interesting episode and his story is second to none. Please enjoy Chris Nowinski. If you're like me, you're always craving that specific comfort food your grandma makes, and I finally found it. Nana's products just there, in the deli section at the grocery store. Samosas, toasties, and so much more, just like my Nana makes them. And you can tell from the taste that they're made with love. So good that,

you know, I gotta go. I need to call my Nana and tell her I love her. Visit yournannaskitchen.com for more info. Nana's proudly Canadian. I'm F. W. Hirsch. I'm Peter Francopone. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we're talking about Joseph Stalin, a murderous dictator who saved the world from another murderous dictator.

The man who defeated Hitler, but also the man who oversaw the deaths of millions of his own people. How did he get away with it? And why is he so popular in Russia today? He is such a singular character for the scale of his brutality, for the psychopathic desire for power. What do you think, Peter? I'm not completely convinced about the glories of the socialist revolution, but we're going to take Stalin from the streets of Gori in Georgia, right the way through to the centre

of power as Russia transforms into the Soviet Union and then into a global superpower and to see how Stalin did it, how he got away with it and what his legacies look like today. Follow Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad free on Wondrary Plus. He's an object expert. He's an object expert. He's an object expert. Do you know that author David Sedaris? Yes. Our greatest gift this whole show has given us is we've interviewed him like six times and he sends us postcards. No. And that postcards from Sedaris is like.

That he writes. He writes them from all over the world. Such a throwback to a better life. Where are you coming in from? I live in Florida now. Oh you do? What city in Florida? Boynton Beach.

Where's Boynton Beach? It's north of Boca, south of Palm Beach. Okay. Near my wife's family so that I can be living the dream on the road. Do you have kids? Six and four, south of Palm Beach. Okay. Near my wife's family so that I can be living to dream on the road. Do you have kids? Six and four, Kenzie and Charlie. Okay, so yeah, you definitely need Grandma and Grandpa

around. They're doing a great job helping. Yeah, we did it without a Grandma and Grandpa, but thank God my sister lives next door, so. Yeah, we need to be honestly happy. This is incredible. No. She said this is for P-Baby Part Two.

No. For this space. That's a deep deep deep deep deep deep deep deep. That is a real listener, a real armchair. It's so cute. Oh my God, how does one get? She probably invented it. What do you call it, when you commission? Oh yeah.

She commissioned it? Yeah, it took years to build. Oh and you have to pee in the tank because the lid doesn't open. Yeah, of course. Oh wow. That's so perfect have to pee in the tank because the lid doesn't open. Oh, wow. That's so perfect for us. She's gonna be so happy with that reaction.

Oh my God, that is incredible. Right here, wow. And does it say explicitly for pee baby? Yes. Oh my God, you wouldn't know the story behind pee baby. I gotta explain, I don't go back that deep. Yeah, of course, I don't expect that. Very early days, pee baby.

We barely go back that deep. Sometimes we completely forget. Okay, so where did you move from to this area of Florida? I was in Boston for 25 years. But you're from Chicago-ish? From Chicago, right, yeah. What suburb have you already bonded with Robbie about this? Yes, yeah. I grew up in Oak Park and in Ogden Heights, which is right by him in Offman Estates. Okay, what did mom and dad do there?

My dad worked in hotel restaurant management, so when I was growing up he's a northwestern in food service oh the college yes that's actually my first love of football was going on saturday mornings he'd have to work and i'd get to go sit with the football team while they had breakfast you imagine like all the cereals being lined out like it was like a dream yeah and watching guys probably consume like 7-8,000 calories before practice. You're very Chicago. Thank you. I thought I lost it. No, right? You mean like nice?

He could be standing next to Ditka and look like his son maybe. You know, that very Midwestern... Yeah, it's a nice vibe. Big white boy. Yeah, yeah. I'm from Detroit, so we have our variety as well. We consider ourselves brothers, state-wise, right? Absolutely. Also So we have our variety as well. Yeah, we consider ourselves brothers Right. Absolutely. Also a high rate alcoholism is standard. Yeah. Well, my dad's time is Milwaukee. My mom's family's East Lansing Oh, oh, yeah, so deep Michigan a lot of time in Kalamazoo growing up. Oh my goodness

I just I won't bore you with it, but no, I'm gonna bore you with it I drove around with a homeless guy for an hour and a half interviewing him and the only reason he trusted me to get It was because he was from Kalamazoo, and I was from Michigan. Wow. What was in Kalamazoo? Just great ants. Okay, so you... Such a weird thing you just said with no context.

I know, I kinda like it that way. Just leave that hanging until maybe one day the mystery's revealed. Okay, so you played a lot of sports. I'm sure mom and dad were supportive of all the sports. Yes. And you excelled at football. I did and then you ended up going to Harvard to play football Yes, now walk me through the selection process. Like would you have been good enough to go play at? Notre Dame and then you decided no, I really want the education. I wish it was that good I was good enough to play at Eastern Michigan. Okay Northern Illinois. The Mac was interested and luckily my high school

coach said, listen if Harvard invites you to come you don't turn them down. Right. What kind of grade point did you have coming out of high school? Five and change. I don't know. What you can get a five? We had a five point scale. Great inflation was happening. You were a really good student. I was a student first. Okay five and change sounds nuts. I've never heard it go to five. I've heard like 4.4s with all the AP classes. It's because of, yeah, AP.

Yeah, it's inflated by AP. Always plus a ton of AP classes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, you're likable, right? Did you pay any penalty for being that smart? Were you like a nerd? Were you getting shoved in the hallway? No, luckily I got big, so I was a jock and I was a nerd.

I don't wanna go that deep. I had a high opinion of myself in high school. Okay, good. Cocky, a little cocky. Did you have this thing, because I was in a few AP classes, and I definitely think that first day of the AP class, a lot of the kids were like,

oh God, how embarrassing, he's in the wrong class and he doesn't know it. Do you think you were getting any of that when you would walk into these AP classes? Like, oh fuck, the center of the football team's in the wrong class. I mean, no one on the football team was in my AP class. This is so real. I will say, for real.

The highest honors I remember looking in my high school was all women in me. It was like 30 women. That was weird. So I think it was just accepted that I was there. I did get that at Harvard, though. So I do remember, football shows up two weeks early as practice, and then the rest of the students show up, and we're in the dining hall, and we're last,

because we came from practice with boisterous, and I hear somebody say, a couple people in front of me, oh, I thought we left those guys behind in high school. Yeah, yeah. If I were them, I would be like, oh, fuck, they have jocks here, too? Isn't that why we work so hard? Gonna get shoved into a locker in college?

Sorry, nerds, they're always around. What was the Harvard experience like? Was it incredible? It was the best. You're just around the most motivated, talented people you could imagine and so it's just infectious. Is the football team competitive? I don't know anything about it. Yes. Forgive my ignorance. I never see them in like a Rose Bowl or anything. No, we haven't won since 1909

Yes, we at that point we were one double-a and I was part of a big turnaround to the Harvard program now They're one of the best Perennially in now what's called FCS. Don't jump out of the couch and tackle me. Are they division one? So there's no more division one. Oh's the thing, they totally screwed up football. So it's football bowl series, FBS. And football championship series, FCS. It's the old 1AA. There's a tournament at the end versus bowl games.

Okay, and Harvard plays all these teams I'm familiar with. No. We didn't play them. How familiar are you with Lehigh? Not to knock on Lehigh, but let's do it. What is Lehigh? It's a nice school in Pennsylvania if you can't get into Harvard. An equestrian first school. Maybe some LaTros.

Wash program. Okay, yeah. Well, there was a really interesting, oh, Malcolm Gladwell just recently wrote about the absurdity of the numerous sports at Harvard. Yes. That they have more sports than any other school. So that there's so many routes in. Yes, exactly.

Anywho, all right, so you loved it. What degree did you pick up at Harvard? Sociology. So I saw you were an anthropologist, I love it. The same distance between Detroit and Chicago, really. Yeah. Academically between you. It was very close.

I started sociology because my perception was I was trying to figure out what was important in the world and sort of strip down what I was told was important growing up outside Chicago versus what it really is, what do I really care about, what are my values. Was it culture shocky at Harvard? I mean, I guess you're around Northwestern. The kitchens. Right.

I didn't have to deal with the classrooms. What honors program? Right, that's true. Never mind. You're a shoe-in. The culture shock for me was wealth. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. Did you have friends that were like, you want to get on the jet and go to Martha's Vineyard with my family? I wasn't invited, but I heard about it. It was happening. Like, they had taken a helicopter down to Newport, Rhode Island, for the weekend to the mansion. The first time you're asked, where do you summer? Yes.

Summer's a verb. You never forget that feeling. You don't know how to answer it, then they pity you. Right. Okay, so how on earth do you get on this MTV show? Oh, another thing we haven't discussed. Yeah, man. Oh, yeah, oh my God.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. What's the timing crossover? He's much younger than me. Nine years maybe. Are you 41? No, but thank you. I'm 46. Oh, only four years.

Not that much, yeah. Okay, fuck me. Still in the 70s, you were born in 79? I'm 78. All right, we're doing good. Okay, so yeah, how do you end up on MTV? So I took a real job out of Harvard. Life Sciences working for a pharma biotech companies drug development stuff Intellectually challenging but not what I was looking for

I was working for them during senior year making side money and we would talk wrestling I became a really big fan that year growing up. Did you love WWF and Hulk Hogan? It wasn't allowed in my house So I had two sisters and I was only boy so my mom could control that you're not watching wrestling. Okay. I'd go to the cousins, I'd catch it, or the cartoons, so I knew a little bit. But it wasn't a childhood thing. But summer of 99, I lived with five guys in like a two-bedroom, one-bath for football.

And we watched Monday Night Raw and SmackDown and I got hooked because it was like the rock and stone cold. Oh wow. Oh yeah, golden age. Yeah, it was amazing. So, a lunch conversation says, you know, if you don't get drafted in the NFL, because that was a distant prospect. Yeah.

Yeah. I think you'd make a great wrestler. Would you ever try that? He knew people because he'd consulted, I think when Vern Gagne was trying to sell the AWA out of Minnesota, deep cut, he's like, all right, if you don't get drafted, let me know. They don't get drafted. He said, I'll make a call. He calls Jerry Jarrett, who ran the Memphis territory, who calls JJ Dillon who runs talent for WCW,

and they say, hey, we got the six five Harvard guy, I think it'd be good. And so suddenly I've got a plane ticket before I even graduated to Atlanta to the power plant where Mr. Wonderful Paul Orndorff just beats me up for a day. Just to train you. Like a tryout. Okay, great, not in front of anybody.

No. I gotta imagine you're appealing, you have the size, great, you have that lettuces, but what a story story you're from Harvard They're gonna hate your fucking guts. It's like a built-in story. Yes, although I didn't realize at the beginning I was only gonna be a heel if they found out I went That's what the reality show part comes in then the test was they would just make you run the ropes to your sides bleeding They would just see if you're tough

Performance or anything and I passed it. I needed shoulder surgery. They're like six months when you're healthy, give us a call. By the way, you're 22? I'm 21. You're 21, you need your first shoulder surgery. I know. Second. Oh, Lord.

AC separation? No, impingement syndrome. Oh, okay. I was getting shots while I was doing my training. Another thing, I've had three shoulder surgeries. Oh, no, you've had three? Oh, wow, you beat me. This girl's Rocky Mattel-y.

I hope we fuse at the end of this. Okay, so you needed surgery. Maybe you two should make, you baby. Oh, wow, you baby. This girl's rocking a tally. I hope we fuse at the end of this. Okay, so you need a surgery. Yeah, so. Maybe you two should make a pee baby. We should. It'd explode out of the toilet. First trimester, it'd be 12 pounds. So, WCW is going out of business by the time I'm healthy.

Hiring freeze and head turn and all, things falls apart. So, I'm working part time in this consulting room. I find Killer Kowalski's wrestling school. I'm going to go in old school. I'm going nights and weekends. So then WWE and MTV partnered to create tough enough to sort of bring in the MTV crowd to WWE.

And it was just after real world season three, but it's hot and survivors hot. This is so early in reality show that we had no last names in the show. 13 people live in a house, trained with WWE for 13 weeks. Oh my God. And had their whole life filmed, but old school 24 hours surveillance cameras. Yeah. Did you have a romantic,

no there's no women there right? Of course. They have to, it's MTV. They wanted that, so it was eight guys, five girls. Okay, date two are on the wrestling track. Yeah. And was there any romance happening in the house? No.

Oh. They didn't get you drunk enough. They probably hadn't cracked the formula yet. Yeah, exactly. The prize was a three-year contract. And so everyone sort of knew, if you're spending your time not focused on the business. Yeah, but there's always romance,

even when there's not any at all. As people smartened up the reality show, they might have realized it would be good for TV for them to do that. That's what I'm saying. They would have gotten you hammered on the introduction and then, oh, everyone in the pool for the next meeting. Everyone in bikinis, yeah. This is what year?

99? So this was 2001. Okay, what was the value of a three-year contract at that time with WWE? We had no leverage, so I think it was like a 100,000, 150,000-dollar-a-year deal or something. Okay, so 30 to 50 grand a year. A year.

Per year. Per year, okay. That's not bad. They paid us 600 bucks a week to do the show and then one person gets dangled. When you're 21, you're gonna make 450,000. That's great. Of the people that were on this show,

how many got that contract? Two, one male, one female. And you didn't get the contract. Wait, but you did end up in WWE. Okay, so you didn't get the contract. What then happened? And the only reason why, now that we look back, is because the show was meant to bring in the wrestling crowd.

And so third week of the show, there's two Chris's on the show that can't differentiate us. So they tell everyone start calling him Chris Harvard. Because everyone just called me Harvard. Oh, shit. Because I was the only Harvard guy that ever met. And I didn't realize that that would be your heel forever. That would be a dick, but maybe the only Harvard guy that ever met and I didn't realize that that would be your heel I don't get dick, but maybe the only college grad there

Okay, so the show and how big was the show where people recognize you and stuff it was the number one show on MTV that It was I'm really upset. I missed it. Were you going to bars in Boston and people were like and stuff? It was the number one show on MTV that year. It was! I'm really upset I missed it. Were you going to bars in Boston and people were like so excited? Yeah. Yes! That's so cool. Oh what a fun time.

But I was the bad guy in the show. They added me to be a total dead. So I didn't get that kind of reaction. It was more like, oh that guy's here. You're in Boston, are dudes trying to challenge you at the bar? No. Thank God.

Yeah, thank God. I haven't been in a lot of real fights. So yeah, I went and worked the wrestling scene, went back to the old job, and then I get a call like, all right, come do a tryout match around the WrestleMania stuff in Toronto. And so I go work some matches and they're like, all right, yeah, move to Cincinnati. You're going into the minor leagues. So I got the contract and then two months into that they're like, all right, you're going on the Monday night Raw. And I'm like, okay, I've only had 30 matches in my life, but I'm ready. Whoa.

Yeah. Were you ready? You weren't ready. Well, I mean, I survived. As we'll learn, you have a big injury. Is that your fault or his? I'll take the blame. It's a dance.

Yeah, but there's multiple hits over time. So some of them are my fault, some of them are not, and they accumulated. Okay, so this is a question that's been really eating me alive. And you're one of the few people that can really answer this. So we were in Mexico City over Christmas,

and we went to the wrestling down there. Lucha Libre. I mean, it is wild. I'm watching one match and I'm like, these guys, there's no way they can walk for like two weeks. It's over and over onto the concrete. It's so violent. So what was the violence level in WWE compared to football?

It was night and day. Football is way worse. Oh, okay. Because football, you're actually colliding and wrestling You're trying not to hurt anybody, right? But I was also there at the time where we're in as safe as we are today And so it was real chair shots to the head and don't put your hand up anymore. You're a coward That sounds worse and there's high flying stuff that goes wrong all the time

This is what I was seeing Monica guys were running and leaping out of the ring Guys were running and leaping out of the ring onto the cement floor that would, at that point, be probably 10 feet below them with a fucking two-inch mat on the ground. Good luck. Very small margin of error. It's like a million stunts in a row, but you don't rehearse it, and you just sort of hope.

Because they're all improv, right? All these matches, which I think is fascinating. Did you watch the McMahon documentary? Yeah. What a doc, huh? I think I did, didn't it? Were you in it? Oh, this is embarrassing, Dak.

It's not too embarrassing. There's about 150 guys in it. We hadn't met yet. No, that's right, I'll take the dots for you. Oh no, you were in for the CTE stuff. Yes. Don't worry, nobody cares about my wrestling career. This is most of it asked about in a long time.

I know you were in the CTE. Yeah, so I guess that was a stupid question, did you watch it? But did you deal with McMahon at all in that period? Yeah I mean he's got hired me and was he just a good time Charlie was he fine to work for yeah If you liked you it was fine Okay, so you cut to the point you get a pretty gnarly concussion you get kicked in the head and what happens? So I got a bad concussion, but it didn't get better. So I learned later on

I've been getting concussions playing sports and wrestling for a long time, I didn't realize they were concussions, I wasn't educated on them, so I thought like as long as my vision went normal or the headache went away I was okay. Yeah what was the conventional measure of whether someone was concussed or not? Vlury-blision was one. Yes, and speech impediment. Back then it was if you were knocked out. That was a concussion.

And then if you weren't knocked out, it was a gray area. You know, you didn't take it too seriously. If you'd still play, you'd never go tell a doctor. It would never get into the system. So it wouldn't count. But this last one, my head was just throbbing all the time. I couldn't remember anything. And so I kept wrestling for a few matches until they sort of realized,

something's really wrong with you. Why don't you take some time off? Was your balance fucked up? And your coordination? Yeah. So you're now a liability to yourself because you're not functioning correctly, right? So where did that take you? I took a few weeks off and then apparently I learned I was accidentally put on the roster for the next weekend shows and I Thought that was a test of like get back to work I went to the doctor and I'm like, I'm fine

Even though I wasn't fine and I went wrestled again for a few more weeks. And I sort of went into the ground. I stopped only because the match I was supposed to do, my manager on the road, Teddy Long, called ahead and said, he's not making sense on the plane. Don't let him wrestle. And then that night in the hotel room, I had my first instance of REM behavior disorder. Do you know about this?

Tell me. You know how when you're dreaming, in your mind you're moving around and all that stuff, but your body turns off your limbs? That broke. And so I turned back on. And so I would act it out in my first dream. Girlfriend I was with at the time was in the room, said she woke up to me standing on the bed trying to climb the wall.

Couldn't wake me up. And I remember that in my dream, something was falling, I had to catch it. And she watched me go head first in the wall, do the nightstand, and not wake up for another two minutes. Then I woke up and I'm like, that's chaos. And she's crying and screaming. I'm scared to go to sleep. I woke up the next day.

I went and told Mickey Man, what happened to me? And I thought, you're not resting until we figure this out. And by then I had just done too much. And it didn't get better. Okay, not to spoil or alert, you become a neuroscientist. I'm earmarking that, but let me just ask you really quick. As I recall from biology in college, I was told that all of the cells in your body are somatic,

they go through mitosis, but your brain cells do not. They're gray cells and they don't repair. Is that still what we think? Tell me what happens with the cells in your brain. They can repair, but when they die, they don't come back. They are different from the rest of your somatic cells. Yeah, well, I only know brain, I don't care about the body. Anything below that, what's down here?

But the idea is you don't get new brain cells. Now we know you do get some new brain cells, there's some neurogenesis, but it's not nearly as much as we would want it to be. Yeah. So when you get like a severe brain injury, you don't come back. You might build new pathways,

new dendritic connections to compensate. Right, you're gonna relocate to a non-damaged area of your brain, some motor controller, some other thing. Yeah, you build a new network to take over. The neuron is going to get eaten up by the brain that's gone. And the new neuron is not going to be in its place filling and making those thousands of connections. Okay, so given that, what was the method to repair the condition you had? Back in 2003, we didn't really do concussion rehab.

I was just like, sit in a dark room until you feel better. We've now learned that doesn't really help. And so I just never got better. So I basically would act out my dreams every other night and it was chaos. I was taking medicine to be sedated and I had a chronic headache all the time. And so after this 12 months of hell,

I told them, even if I do get better, I'm probably not coming back to wrestle. If I actually can get rid of this pain I don't want to lose it. You're really knowing now Unfortunately the preciousness of yeah exactly now I'm the idiot who went to Harvard and then destroyed his brain right he wanted to have some fun being a pro wrestler Yeah, I did have a really gnarly concussion wakeboarding and I had amnesia for like 14 hours Oh wow, and I was on like a three minute loop

and I had the MRI and looked in there and yeah, it was gnarly. What was the question you kept asking? I would see, I'm in Michigan, but I know I live in California and I'm with my then girlfriend of nine years and I would say, why am I in Michigan? And then my mom was there too

because they were all taking me to the hospital. You're home for my birthday, Why don't I remember that? You were wakeboarding, you hit your head. And then I would say, oh, so it's like the episode of Gilligan's Island where I get hit in the head with a coconut and I just gotta get hit in the head with a coconut again. No laughing.

And then I go, that's kind of funny. Have I said that before? Yeah, you've said that like 40 times. Crying. Then, why am I in Michigan? Come out of the crying and straight back, and I was just on this loop for like 14 hours, and then it stopped.

And then all those memories that had been happening during that 14 hours were becoming clear. That's a very common thing. I'll share a similar story, because it's actually in that book I just gave you, just because it's so wild. They're having a Bubba Ray Dudley wrestler, table's ladders, chairs match.

He forgot his mother died. Yeah. Recently, and apparently was going around the show asking people, how's my mother doing? And they all knew she died. He kept reliving his mother's death over and over again until someone figured out, guys, stop answering the question. Yeah.

Yes, yes, yes. OK, so when do you decide that you're going to go back to school and get a PhD in this? Well, did it ever get better? That's a good question. Thank you for asking. I am feeling a lot better. OK. Okay, so when do you decide that you're going to go back to school and get a PhD in this? Well, did it ever get better? That's a good question. Thank you for asking. I am feeling a lot better.

Okay. I'm presuming it's better. Yeah, but you said it never got better. I still have the REM behavior once in a while. I wake up thinking I'm choking to death. I always think something's wrong with my throat. The headaches are mostly gone, but it's more than a decade. I'm doing better. Thank you.

So the reason I shifted... I'm so happy you're better Chris. You're a dick. The reason I shifted is because... So there's a doctor who played a very important role in my life, Dr. Bob Cantu. He was the eighth doctor WD sent me to, but the first one to help me understand what I was going through, because every other doctor would ask me, this concussion a few months ago, your first one? I'm like, yeah, because I'd never been told by someone in a white coat I had a concussion. He was the first one to say, well, how many times have you

been hit in the head and you saw stars, you forgot where you were, you're dizzy, you're confused, and I was like, oh, that happens all the time. Like every day. Every couple weeks. We have a bunch of stories of wrestling matches and football things. So he goes, okay, well, if you had a lot of concussions, it sounds like you didn't take any time off because they weren't diagnosed. I'm like, no. He goes, those two things are bad and they can lead to what you're going through post-concussion syndrome. And'm like really how am I a Harvard grad who'd been banging my head for 19 years And having no idea what a concussion was that bothered me and he was like

I don't know what that means long term the data is questionable So I'm like all right I'm gonna figure this out so I took what I'd learned from that consulting job And I went over to the Harvard Medical School library And I started reading every study ever published on concussions to look for the secret wow And as I'm digging into that I'm realizing and I started reading every study ever published on concussions to look for the secret. Wow. Right. And as I'm digging into that, I'm realizing, oh, we've actually known for a hundred years

that concussions are bad. We used to take care of them much more seriously than we did before. Oh, really? In the 1950s, the Harvard team doctor for the football program said, three concussions in your lifetime and you can't play here anymore.

You should retire. Wow. That's how serious it was in the 50s. So what happened? The thing that I could pick up was the NFL was orchestrating a nice big tobacco cover-up about it. It had sparked many times throughout their life. But in the 90s when Steve Young and Troy

can both had problems, they said, all right, we're going to take care of this. And they started a concussion committee full of friendly doctors who were now publishing research in the medical journal Neurosurgery, saying there's nothing wrong with concussions. We put half our guys back in who were knocked unconscious. None of them had died, therefore there's no long-term effects.

And no one's ever developed any problems long-term. And I knew how to read the studies, and I was like, well, these studies are designed to show that finding. If you had to retire mid-season from a concussion, they couldn't follow up with you legally, because you were no longer part of the NFL. You would just drop out of the study. You died on the field, you wouldn't fall out.

All undesirable data would be jettisoned from the study. Yeah, so I got pissed and so I worked with Dr. Kandu, learning about all this. I said, all right, I'm gonna write a book about this. And that became this book, Head Games, Football's Concussion Crisis, that said, A, concussions are much worse than realized. B, there's this thing CT, two cases have been found. And by the way, the NFL is covering this up. So that was 06 when that came out. Got a $4,000 advance.

I paid $21,000 for libel insurance. Because of what the NFL was doing. But luckily I was right. Okay, so when do you pick up your PhD? In 2017. So it's a long leap. And it's because I started the nonprofit, started the research center,

Boston University School of Medicine. But I was the guy who just got brained for a brain bank. And literally they had an office and they were like, hey, as long as you're in the building, why don't you just go down the hall and get a PhD? Because the shine's gonna wear off of the interesting ex-athlete. Yes, yes.

Okay, so what is a concussion? A concussion is a traumatic brain injury that changes the way your brain functions. And does it have to require swelling? How would one test for it? There is no objective test. It's still a clinical diagnosis, but basically there's two things happening.

One is there's a chemical cascade and metabolic changes that happen from the energy going through your brain or from your neurons stretching or axon stretching and all these things happening. And then there's also, in probably most cases, physical damage, but not stuff that we can pick up on a standard MRI Will you tell me more about the chemical aspect the great work was done at UCLA. I'm not shocked It's interesting I hadn't heard that Just to explain you have 80 some billion neurons in your brain

They all have long projections. Some of them go from your brain down to the bottom of your spinal cord, and they're 1 20th width of a human hair. When they stretch, they get injured, and they open up your channels, so you get too much calcium flooding inside of your neuron, potassium flooding outside your neuron.

It's not operating. So it's becoming porous through this stretching, so now all these chemicals that are inside of it and outside of it start dancing around? Yes, and the calcium's affecting your mitochondria, so you can't produce energy, the electrical signal's not working right, you get restricted blood flow, the whole thing just sort of is malfunctioning. But it all depends on where it's malfunctioning and how much your brain's impacted to determine symptoms. So that's why some concussions you can't remember things

because parts of your memory are impaired, but other times it's because you can't see, because your visual cortex is impacted. Are there regions of the brain that are more prone to this damage? When you see concussions, does any area overindex? Well, your frontal lobe is more sensitive to the trauma. It's big, it's right in front. If your brain was a sphere, you'd be a lot better off,

but because it's not quite shaped like that and your frontal lobe is sort of hanging off to the front, when your brain moves violently, those axons are more likely to get stretched and twisted. It's not quite shaped like that and your frontal lobe is sort of hanging off to the front. When your brain moves violently, those axons are more likely to get stretched and twisted. It's not well designed for trauma and it's also tethered in the back down to your spinal cord and your brain stem so it's flopping around in there.

Okay, now when I got mine, they put me in the MRI or the C-scan or whatever the fuck I got and what they were looking for particularly is they told me, well, your brain has swollen and the swelling has probably caused some pressure against the area of your brain that has these short-term memories, or that's why until it un-swells,

that's what's gonna go on. And then we're looking for bleeding. They're looking for bleeding for sure to make sure you don't die. Right, because if you're hemorrhaging in your brain, you can't feel it. They gotta get in there. Right, and they gotta release that or else you're gonna have some real long-term problems

or you could die. So that's what you're usually looking for But your brain doesn't swell too much from a standard concussion most people will never swell okay, so maybe mine They just yeah scary me Trying to convince you not to go wakeboarding the next day Yeah, but it definitely can't swell a little bit you just wouldn't pick it up much okay, so For people who've had and we don't know the number obviously, at some point in your study as we accumulate more things, maybe we'll get some kind of predictive sense,

but some multiple concussions result in the CTE. Yes. I'm obsessed with CTE. Yeah, Monica, I don't know if you know this coming in. Yeah, no, I appreciate you guys mentioning it a lot. Yeah, me, me. I bring it up a lot to Dax's chagrin. This is her pork belly.

I do. People don't know enough about it. We need to have a conversation about it. They really don't. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. I'm Indra Varma, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Hardy Amis, the spy who dressed the Queen. Fashion designer Hardy Amis is a star of Savile Row, dressing Hollywood actors, sports heroes and royalty.

But in the shadows, Amis plays a central role in Operation Ratweek, a campaign of assassination in Nazi-occupied Belgium during World War II, his instincts extending far beyond the cut of a suit. As the Allies prepare to invade Belgium, one man, Prosper de Zieta, the man with the missing finger, slips through their grasp and aids German intelligence in hunting down British agents. The question is, can Amy's tailor a plan sharp enough to find Dezita? Follow The Spy Who on the Wondry app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who Dressed the Queen early and ad-free with Wondream Plus. At 24, I lost my narrative, or rather it was stolen from me.

And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes, and politics. I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately you triumph in finding it again. So I think listeners can expect me to be chatting with folks, both recognizable and unrecognizable names about the way that people have navigated roads to triumph.

My hope is that people will finish an episode of reclaiming and feel like they filled their tank up. They connected with the people that I'm talking to and leave with maybe some nuggets that help them feel a little more hopeful. Follow Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Reclaiming early and ad-free right now

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["Wonderful Music"] Okay, so what is the full arc of the condition? And Mike, what are the mechanisms that are happening in the brain? CTE is a degenerative brain disease that is caused by repetitive traumatic brain injuries. Right, so it's only seen in association with a lot of hits to the head. So one of the important things to say right away is that one concussion is not causing CTE in almost anybody. Because now we've looked back at brain banks

and even ones where people have had a severe brain injury from a car accident or something, and you just almost never see it. Although you did say one concussion doubles your outcome for suicide. Yes. That's fucked up. Really?

Yeah. One concussion, and I know I've had it. That's not the only one I've ever had that's horrible Yeah, although the incident rate for suicide, you know group of 100,000 and still quite low So even though rare, it's still a low number. Don't get too worried Yeah, a lot of people have had concussions Yeah And so that's interesting to know that data is usually from hospitalized concussions which you had and the theory is there sort of two

Things going on one is that maybe it's changing the way your brain functions and maybe you're in chronic pain. Headaches is very much associated with suicide. So maybe there's some of that going on. And then on the other side though, it might affect your life in a big way. It might affect your job, your relationships. Your circumstances have changed.

Right. But then also we get into a correlation causation problem, which is I'm sure there's something we could say about people who accumulate concussions. People that are drawn to that lifestyle are probably doing a whole suite of behaviors. It is complicated to unravel So we don't want anyone to think suddenly you got one concussion you're gonna Right. Okay, so you get multiple injuries for some reason football being part of the best example

I took ten thousand hits to my head. One of those hits was hard enough to Spark this inflammatory process around a blood vessel at the depths of the sulcus in my frontal lobe is where we usually find the beginnings of it. Is that generally if you have CTE that is where it's? Yeah, that's where the first lesions will show up, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which again we think is part of the physics issue. That part of your brain is most likely to stretch. Like rats don't get CTE because they don't have that fold.

So the depths of the sulcus, the energy of a rapidly rotating brain causes it to go to that bottom of the valley and that's where you see the initial lesion and then for some reason that lesion will keep spreading in the absence of further hits. We think in most cases. Explain that. We don't exactly know. Atrophy, begats atrophy. Misfolding proteins can act like a virus and can continue to spread. So you have a protein called tau in your axons and neurons that's sort of a structural element. And when the axon stretches, that tau can misfold. And then sort of like a crack in a windshield that it just keeps spreading.

And it can actually jump the synapse and go to another neuron. And so we don't understand, we can't diagnose this during life, which is why we're trying to get brains for study So we only have these windows into at the time of death What do we see but now we pick up these small lesions in teenagers if you look at now over? 1500 brains dead teenager that teenagers. Yes, you see that the older people have a lot of it The younger people have these tiny lesions and you can see this right now just to be a skeptic. What is our control group? What are we making this relative to?

We have other brains, but we don't totally know the history of their impact. Or we see most people don't have any of these lesions? Right, the good news is at the beginning, we were a little more in the dark, but one of the great things at Boston University where we have this brain bank led by Anne McKee, she leads five other brain banks,

and one of them is the Framingham Heart Study. Have you heard of this? No. So the town of Framingham outside Boston has been followed for generations. And now they're old enough where they're dying. Thank God. No, I'm just joking.

That's where we learned all about how high blood pressure has later life implications for stroke and other things because we were following this town. So when we first published that group, there were 164 people who'd passed away in the study. One of them had CT. And we also went back to everyone and asked about

sports history, brain injury history. That person was a college football player. Now let's jump really quick to the first 111 NFL brains you looked at. How many had CTE? 110. So one out of 147 versus 110 out of 111. I'm sold.

I've been saying this. That should be enough. For people who have not seen the images. Jesus. They're taking these thin slices of the brain and they're putting them next to each other and a healthy section of this brain would be kind of just white

and then if you have a mild case of CTA you're seeing some discoloration but in an extreme CTA you're seeing like it's been dipped in coffee and then there's just pockets of saturation of this dark stuff It looks like the lung of a smoker That's where I compare it to when I show healthy lungs and diseased lungs to help you will appreciate how abnormal this is

When the NFL used to bring in an international Experts to tell us this is all fake one of them would refer to as the gingerbread brain For this Hall of Famer who died in his 90s whose brain had shrunk like almost half its size and was all brown This is just impossible. They must be faking it. Oh my God. That's actually how sad it is. And he made it to 90.

Well, he was in this institution for 20 years. Oh. This is relevant to bring up because we're in the early explanation of it. So this was observed, and I grew up hearing this because my dad loved boxing. We called people punch drunk. Right.

And so just talk about what that was. So punch drunk was first published in a major medical journal in 1928. Wow, that long ago. Yeah, they figured it out very early. That boxers were getting very strange. Slurred speech, movement disorders, bizarre behaviors. There's a lot of literature from the 20s, 30s, 40s about punch drunk, then dementia pugilistica. They didn't really start looking at brains as much.

Until the 70s, there was a famous case series of it where they sort of talked about all these abnormal brains from boxers. But the problem was no one really dug into it. What defines CT is this abnormal tau protein. We didn't know how to see the protein until the late 70s. So it wasn't the original part of the diagnostic criteria because we hadn't invented the antibodies

that make it show up. So it's a lot of reasons why that didn't have to have it. So it wasn't the original part of the diagnostic criteria because we hadn't invented the antibodies that make it show up. So it's a lot of reasons why that didn't happen. But also in 1984, the American Medical Association said boxing shouldn't exist. It's too barbaric. It was sort of at that point that research on boxing stopped. And so it was like, yep, boxers get punched drunk.

Well, end of story. Yeah. Occupational hazard. Nobody connected the dots to the fact that all these other sports You're also looking at a pretty small group of people versus yeah high school football, which is millions of people Right something that many people go into boxing I agree that the social part of is like they're punching each other in the head. They really don't expect to have problems

Yeah, yeah, and they sign up for it, right? It's not an epidemic and it wasn't like there was the sons of doctors off doing it. Yeah. So it's just like this other part of the culture. OK, so what are the symptoms that people with CTE experience? This has evolved over the last 15 years as we figured this out. But basically, the one thing that is best predicted when you have CTP pathology is cognitive decline.

It'll start with executive dysfunction, meaning you're no longer making good decisions. Your career goes to hell. Make dumb investments. Very common. So executive function goes and then memory goes. Short-term memory first, but start to lose episodic memory, long-term memory. That is very frequent with end-stage CTE. And then we also see neurobehavioral dysregulation. Impulse control problems, anger issues. This is a step that seems to get the headlines. And I'll say that anecdotally, we know someone that was married

to a very successful football player and they had a total personality shift. They died. Yeah, he died. And you hear about this, I see it on real sports. There's violence all of a sudden. People who have never been violent are getting violent to their family.

They're getting violent around town. There's self-harming. The addiction is spiraling. You're seeing a real tornado of depression and just the personality shift. I think that's the scariest thing. People are married to these men that they love that were so kind and all of a sudden

they're erratic and impulsive and scary. Well said because one of my talking points is often that the number one thing you see is personality change, but that's not a diagnosable condition. So it's not like in our data, but they always say he's a different person. Yeah, because you go like, okay, memory loss,

to what degree, you can live with that, but that aspect, and then I have to imagine the suicide rate for people with CT has got to be among the highest. Actually not true. That's something I'm actually trying to help shift. Oh really? Part of it is that a lot of the early cases

were suicide cases. The third brain I ever procured was Chris Benoit, the who killed his wife and seven-year-old son themself. Oh my god Tell us that I mean you guys you did this tell us that it's a complicated story when I was writing that book He was the only guy in the locker room I would show up for shows once in a while half people welcomed me half people thought I was lying and stealing a check and Faking my injury, but he was a guy took me seriously and sat me down and said what are you learning about concussions? How many have you had? I asked him how many he had. He said, more than I can count. I've known him for five years. He gave me his phone

number. He goes, call me next week. I want to talk about it. I called him. Sounded like he's in the middle of an argument with somebody. He's like, I'll call you back. And he never called you back. And then months later, he killed his wife, killed his seven year old, killed himself over 48 hours, left Bibles and strange statements. And then, the more Russ I've talked to, he was falling apart. He wouldn't plan matches anymore because he couldn't remember them. So he would just say, let's wing it. So sad to me. He knew though, something was wrong.

He knew something was wrong and I didn't help him. And that sort of sparked. Now I have five full time people just to deal with people who reach out to us. We make sure we do everything we can to help them because this keeps happening. If someone were to recognize in a moment of clarity that this was happening to them, are there medications that could help? Yes. The advice for everybody is treat the symptoms. So whatever the symptoms are, there's probably medication to work and make your life better. So on the suicide front, even

though that's all the high profile stuff, Dave Duerson Jr. say- Do you hear these wild cases where the dudes shoot themselves in the heart because they know they want their brains studied? Yeah, that's something we discourage. We don't need those brains anymore. That was a troubling trend that started. But I've now learned it was like a conversation that a bunch of them had together.

Really? Yeah. Because they were all mad at the NFL for lying about everything back then. And so let's show them. So everyone's shooting themselves in the chest. We're trying to say, look, CT symptoms can be treatable. We can't stop the disease yet.

We need to work on that. There's help and there's hope. Yes, so anyone struggling That's the way we have a helpline reach out to the concussion legacy foundation helpline We will find you something and we will help make your life better But we do keep seeing these suicides, but the actual overall rate of NFL suicide is not that much higher than the population I mean OJ definitely had it right? Yeah, I think it's impossible He didn't and I think it sort of puts his life in perspective. It does I don't know what would have changed with the trial But I do think if we had known then that that's clearly at play here

We would have looked at it much different. We would have looked at it differently Like doesn't mean that you don't go to prison a lot of kill your ex-wife. Yeah. Well, apparently you are cuz he But it would have been an interesting part Yeah It forces you to look at a lot of the things we've seen with a lot of the people we've seen them with. Mike Tyson, a lot of these boxers that have had episodes that are inexplicable. You have to imagine there's a lot going on.

And it's not just CTE. Brain injury itself in the absence of CTE can cause a lot of the stuff. What positions in football, do you track those? Obviously the kicker has very low risk of getting this. The kickers haven't been exempted from this because in the old days the kickers were former position players and in the new days they're all former soccer players. They've had the ball too much. But actually we cannot find CT trends by position. Even though linemen get hit you may be twice as much as other positions

but the average hit is bigger for those positions. But there's also a missing piece of data that people didn't realize that sort of explains why we don't see it by position. Can you guess what that is? Maybe because they've all played different positions before they landed in those positions. That's part of it. What you played in the NFL is now what you played as a kid. Yeah, you see all these stories.

This was a layer of racism where these incredible black quarterbacks would come into the league and they're like, you're not going to be a quarterback because you don't have the brain to run an offense. Right. They all became wide receivers and running match. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other part is special teams. Kickoffs and punts are actually the most violent plays. Oh. But it's random who goes on those and it's not tracked.

When I did my interview, because I'm going to be donating my brain, it's like, so how many weeks were you on kickoff for your junior high school? And I'm like, I don't remember. Like I was on this week, I was off this week. Kickoff is very fluid. Special teams changes all the time. Only in the NFL are there a handful of specialists who do special teams. Otherwise it's usually the backups. Oh interesting. Yeah I think that is actually skewing our data. Some linemen are gunners or wedgebusters in

the old days and all these things that were very violent. Yeah. Now how did the sports compare to one another? Is football the worst? Where's NHL? Where's boxing? Where's soccer? We don't have enough data, and especially because we can't diagnose the living people, but for football we've looked at now over 400 NFL brains and 93% of them have had it. But we just published our first study of NHL players and it was 18 of 19, so it's actually a higher percentage. I grew up around hockey more than football. Concussions are standard.

Because you're falling, you're hitting the ice. Yeah, the ice is way worse than any football hit. And you're going faster, because you're skating faster than you run. Yeah, those guys are flying. And hitting the back of their head on the plexiglass. Yeah. Why can't we look at the brain while the person's living? You'd have to go in and do a brain surgery.

We are trying. I feel like scan technology has gotten so good, and like like FMRI, but no, we're not there. We're close. The problem is no one's done the work. The CT stuff shut down in the 70s and we've started the first academic center back in 2008, so there's no research on this. For Alzheimer's, none of these diseases can be diagnosed definitively during life. Only until very recently we started imaging beta amyloid plaques, which was a breakthrough a little over a decade ago.

Tell us part of that as well. Right. So we've been piggybacking off of a lot of Alzheimer's research to try to catch up. So we don't even know the pattern of atrophy to distinguish it from Alzheimer's, right? It's frontal, it's temporal, but we don't actually know. So we will figure this out probably much sooner than we realize, but we can't right now. So soccer's bad if you're a prolific header, boxing was bad if you take a lot of punches. There's also a dose response issue going on with that. So the reason why 97% of NFL players have it, because they've all played 20 more years. The fewer years you play, the less risk.

So when we study the high school football players' brains, it's a minority of them, although it's still far more than I'm comfortable with. And I did hear once, maybe it's sort of the opposite of what you're saying, that you think if you haven't gone to the NFL that you're in the clear, but you may have started in rec league. You may have started when you were five years old. And so you've still had a long time playing. That's exactly right. And wasn't one of the things that we've learned

since we started studying this is it's not these big concussions necessarily, that it's also just repetitive smaller hits. It's repetitive hits, but not smaller. So actually a talking point I've been trying to drive into our team for the last year, is that when you actually look at the sensor studies What we find out is that the average concussion? With linear acceleration is happening at about the 90th percentile

So let's say it's a hundred G's if that's what's happening if you're a football player You take a thousand hits over a season that means took a hundred hits harder than that concussion that other 10% I think that's what's causing a lot of the CT risk. It does take hard hits to cause physical damage to your brain. But most of them you can't feel, because you don't have pain nerves in your brain. And so when one neuron dies, you can't feel it.

So you just said 100 Gs, is that the scale we're looking at? Yeah, 100 Gs in a few milliseconds. Oh my God, because you think of these F1 drivers are pulling five Gs and their necks are this thick because they're dealing with five Gs. That's over a much longer period of time. Yeah, yeah, some of those impacts can create 100 Gs.

Yeah. Oh my God. Now, is the onset period of this condition, do we know, is it age related or is it duration from impact related? There is a delay between when you get the damage when you start having symptoms, and there's a lot of variables that contribute to that,

including your overall brain health and aging and vascular disease, cognitive reserve. So if you're smarter, you'll have delayed symptoms versus other people because your brain's wired better. And so you can lose more neurons before you start showing functional problems. Right. So we don't actually know when the onset of symptoms

is from CT, especially because everyone who gets CT has taken these thousands of hits and also has other types of brain damage in there, like frontal lobe white matter damage, that would be obvious for some of these symptoms. When you think about, there's four pathological stages of CT, stage three and four, everybody's got some symptoms.

The more you have, the worse off you are. Stage one and two, you're usually younger than 40. You also have white matter damage. You also have all these other things. And we don't know if it's the CT lesions themselves that are contributing to everything or the white matter damage or these other types of brain damage that we see.

So the onset of when CT starts affecting you is a little bit unknown. Well, now I wanna say, so you took it upon yourself once learning about this and at the time I think you said there was only two or three brains that had been studied for CTE. There were two NFL players and there were 45 brains in the world where they'd found CTE.

And you kind of appointed yourself the person that was going to have to try to go out and get more brains to be studied, which meant that you were in a position to start calling family members of people Mostly football players who had died to ask the family if you could have their brains Yeah, I want to know a few of these stories. I mean if there's one in particular, but I wrote down Aaron Hernandez Demarius Thomas Vincent Jackson Ken Stabler any of these I would love to hear someone's personal story with this Not everybody's on that list that I call part of what I'm doing is trying to set up a system they call us. Maybe to start with the first conversation because it's on public record. These are all very sensitive, intimate conversations. The first call was the family of Andre Waters.

So do you remember him from the Eagles? Strong safety? No. Okay. I'm sure a lot of people do, but we don't. I know from researching you he had a great nickname. Yes, Dirty Waters because he liked to lead with his head. Yeah So for my 85 Bears in the late 80s, he was a nemesis the Eagles were beating him So Andre Waters takes his life I just wrote the book and no one cares about the book and I'm trying to think like I'm a walking away and moving on With my life or am I gonna stick with this? And so he dies by suicide to still was still a Division II football coach, he was employed, there was nothing obvious on the surface.

I called the medical examiner in Hillsborough County, Florida and I said, hey, you should study his brain and he's like, no, this is crazy. He'd never heard of this. But after multiple conversations over many weeks, because I was just trying to see if I was right, I was like, can I convince this guy that I'm right? He said, well, it just so happens that,

I know Watters was buried two weeks ago, but we kept part of his brain. And I will give it to you. I'm now convinced that this is worthy of study. If you can get someone to study it and you get his family's permission. And I'm like, all right. So I called the only doctor I knew at the time

was the doctor from the concussion movie, Ben Adomalu. So I called him and I said, we studied his brain. He said, yeah. I said, all right, here's his mother's phone number. She's 88. We were calling. He goes, no, he wouldn't make the call. There are other doctors who work with,

no one wanted to make that call. So that's how I got stuck making the call. You're calling the mother of someone who just lost their son to suicide. She doesn't even realize that not all of them's buried. That's even a revelation itself. Yeah, what do you mean? Yeah, the medical examiner keeps tissue?

Like what? I just remember like, I can't be a coward about this. And so I cold called his mother. Luckily she didn't answer. Cause I just had this vision that she would just like listen to me and like just drop dead Yeah, and instead sister answered I had written a script and I'm like hey This guy you've never heard of and I have no medical credentials But I think his brain should be studied first his sister answers and she listens she goes hold on I'm not the right person family. She got somebody else on else on, his niece, and his niece had some medical training, and over a couple days I convinced him to do it.

I would imagine as scary as that call is to make, any family member of someone who just died by suicide would love an explanation. They were so happy that someone cared to find out maybe there's more to this. It's almost like finding the killer of someone who was murdered. Right, and then they started saying, well, you know, he was getting lost driving to the house

He bought his mother to his own house. All these things weren't adding up for them So luckily they were so nice about everything and so appreciative that I was like I can keep calling families And so now I've called a lot of families. Yeah, how many NFL brains? I guess college to you've gotten a lot of those our brain make now is 1600 brains We're getting close to 500 former NFL players Brains, I guess college too, you've gotten a lot of those. Our brain bank now is 1600 brains. We're getting close to 500 former NFL players. What was actually most interesting is this is not widely known, but since a certain date,

we've gotten one in four NFL players who've died. Okay, and then you get the idea to start a pledge. Tell us about that. I also realized that I don't want to be calling people within 48 hours of their loved one's passing for the rest of my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do I get out of this is what you were motivated by.

I keep doing this, I don't do this anymore. Because I still read the obituaries every morning out of habit, it's like really terrible. It's a weird way to start your day. Although it could fill you with gratitude. Yeah, well it does make you appreciate that you're alive that day. So yeah, so I started asking all the athletes I knew

if they would pledge their brain, basically trying to create a culture of brain donation in America among famous athletes so that they would realize that this stuff, it's important and it's happening. And so it started with people I all knew very well and now we have 13,000 people who've pledged to donate their brain, probably more than we could ever take.

Yeah, it's incredibly successful. And then throughout many other sports, like Dale Earnhardt Jr. has agreed to do it. But I should pause here and ask. Part of my gimmick is I ask everybody, now that you guys are part of an Alzheimer's study, have you also considered donating your brain? Oh, I'd be happy to.

I would totally donate my brain. We just did a multi-founding question by Jonathan Haidt of someone having sex with a corpse, and I was like, I really don't care what happens to my body afterwards. So if I'm willing to have that happen, yeah, absolutely. That went in a different direction than I was expecting.

I'm showing you how low the bar is for me. No, if my brain could be of any help, why wouldn't I? Monica was a high-flying cheerleader. I was about to say that might be a group that needs to study. Obviously a lot of those are girls and women. It might even present differently, so that would be interesting to see.

There's a huge concussion problem in cheerleading, especially the flyers, or if you're the one catching, you were flying. Did you watch that cheerleading doc that was popular? No, it's called Cheer on Netflix. It's incredible, and you go, oh, these gals are doing something more dangerous than the football players.

Yeah. And no one even is noticing what's happening. It's clearly not thought through. Yeah. There's no regulation. They don't practice with helmets on. We got in a fight about, I'm like, they gotta practice. Yeah, because you can't, because aerodynamics, but I know, I know, I know.

But you can't tell the football players they gotta have these. I know. But even more than stunts, you're tumbling and you fall all the time. I fell on my head so many times trying to do a backflip just learning you fall, okay? I'm very interested in this brain. Yeah We've never seen see teenager leader we haven't had many brains donated It's a new phenomenon, so we don't have seven-year-old children who are doing this which is a whole nother issue So it's something we're not looking into but I'm hopeful. It's not a huge problem. I'm delighted to donate my brain

I have to officially go to a website or something? Yes. Tell me how to do that. I think it's donateyourbrain.org, but I'll send it to you, and I'll make sure I get that right. Yeah, okay. But we'd be honored to have you.

Double check my children have no plans for my brain. Well, say sign up on it. Most people say, let me check with the wife, and I'll never get back to you, so I appreciate it. My wife will be like, get that fucking brain out of me. What are they gonna do with your brain? Reanimate me when the technology exists. Oh, all right.

Yeah, oh yeah, sorry. Okay, so you've gotten this pledge. What's happening in Europe, and obviously rugby, Australian rules, football, soccer's global, it's not like this is an American issue. What's the rest of the world think about all this? Well, they tried to frame it as an American issue. So one of the tricks the NFL played

is they brought in Australian doctors and British doctors who would say, this isn't in our country, so this is not real. So I went and started brain banks around the world. And so one of them was in Australia because that was the big bad guy who was coming in and saying, this is fake, this is fake. So we started a brain bank in 2018. And by 2020, we diagnosed the first case is Australian rules football, the first case in rugby league.

We now have a brain bank at Oxford. It's been seen now in rugby. Is it a comparable percentage? I shot a movie in New Zealand for four months, and I got super into watching rugby. And I was like, well, this is the ultimate gladiator sport. I mean, these guys have nothing on. They must have enormous rates of this.

We don't know, because we just started the rugby research. And are you aware that it's only been professional for a little while? No, as you've learned I know very little about these masculine sports. I didn't know this either until recently. I know about BMX and skateboarding. So rugby was like a gentleman's thing until turn of the century. Everyone's 180 pounds and they're sort of tackling hugging each other. But since then they've all become 280 pound monster football players who trained constantly. And they're fast as hell. The professionalization of rugby has made CT a huge problem.

We still see it in the older guys. By comparison we've looked at nearly a thousand American football players' brains and we've looked at 50 rugby brains. But it was about half and it was how long you played. Your odds went up 14% per year you played. What did we do? We just diagnosed the first New Zealand rugby case too at our Brain Bank at University of Auckland. Okay, so now we can get into a fun Liberty question

and what is the future and what would you advise because obviously for children, that's one conversation we have about children. We would agree they're not old enough to make this Faustian deal. I would agree. And there are a lot of people that I couldn't argue back if they go, yeah, my life fucking sucks without this thing,

and I'm an adult and I want to do it, and I take on the risk and fuck you, I have liberty, and I can't really stand in the way of that. I am of that mind. How do we deal with all these facets of the problem? I'm of the same mind. When people ask me, do we end football? I said, no.

I used to let people hit me in the head with folding chairs for a living, and I thought it was fun. And that was nearly as dangerous as cops and firemen and people going to military service. If you want to do a dangerous job to support your family, great. But let's not lie to you about the risks and let's take reasonable precautions and let's give you a voice to negotiate those precautions. Unions. That's why the NFL has gotten safer is there's a union. So totally fine with the NFL continuing as a business and players having informed consent. But you're right the problem that we cannot reconcile is that everybody who played in the NFL

made that choice to start playing as a child. And once you're on the train we all know it's really hard to get off. In a culture that says quitters are terrible. And let's be honest it might be the greatest part of someone's whole time on planet Earth. It might be. I still know people it's like the greatest part of someone's whole time on planet Earth. It might be. I still know people, it's like the greatest years of their life for being on that team and doing that. So it has some value that needs to be acknowledged. Yes. Team sports are amazing for the connections and the physical health, but getting hit in

the head, there's nothing good about that. And so the question becomes, when and how do you get into this? So they've done a lot of cool things, right? Like practices have changed. At the highest levels they have, but they have not gone all the way to the bottom. As an umbrella, our campaign to change the sports is called Stop Hitting Kids in the Head. Love that.

There's just no reason, like, do you hit your daughters in the head? Not intentionally. You'd probably count how many times they've ever been hit in the head. Yeah. Right? Because it's really abnormal for kids to get hit in the head, outside of sports. Even in old cases of abuse, if you hit your kid in the head a lot,

they would stop showing up. So I think it's safe to say we're hitting children in the head more than we ever have in the history of time. Wow. A thousand hits to the head in a year is hard. So let's make reasonable reforms. Driving is actually a really good analogy for this. I think it's sort of like, when do you start driving a car?

Well, there's no age at which it magically starts becoming safe. And so in some states it's 16, some states 17, we've looked at data, we think about brain maturity, we think about all these things. And so we should think about that for all the sports. We shouldn't repetitively hit kids in the head probably till 14.

That is a good neuroscience perspective for brain development and a little bit of unformed consent. It sort of becomes more reasonable to start taking risks at that age. But the idea that you take a five-year-old and put a five-pound helmet on him and have him get hit in the head two, 300 times a year doesn't make sense to me.

Because the risks are serious. You are actually increasing your risk of CT and the rewards, you can get that from flag or some other sport and then have your period of time where you get to play the rough sport. Football is not the problem, it's too much football. One season might be too much for some people but usually it's double digits when you start getting into real risk of CTE.

So start later and hit less. Would one bit of advice for soccer be like no heading the ball until a certain age? In 2015 we got US soccer to say no heading until 11. So that's a thing. We asked for 14, we got 11. We'll still push for 14 as the data accrues. Yeah. But there's limits at 11, 12, and 13. Only you're supposed to do like 20 a week. But even 20 a week is a thousand a year.

That's still too many. It still can be. Yeah, what the hell? Right. We're actually saying, let's actually start counting it. Which we might be able to start doing with like AI and two-dimensional video. It's analogous to pitch counts. In Little League, if you're a coach, when your kid pitches, you have to count each one.

And you have to count each one, and you have to send it to the league office, because they realized it was destroying elbows. Yeah, Tommy John surgery. Right, the response to that was pitch counts. So we count how many times kids throw a ball to protect their elbow. We do not count how many times any child

is hitting the head in sports. That's wild. And now that soccer, you know, you can play four seasons a year now. It used to be when high school was one. Yeah, my daughter's buddies, some of them are in four leagues all year round. We're not monitoring that. You could be getting more exposure in soccer than you are in football.

My kids play soccer. They can't head now, but when they can start heading, my advice could be, don't head. Yeah, exactly. Tell your coach, no, it's not for me. I'm going to play it off my chest. I'm going to control it better anyway. This whole idea that projectile coming to your head,

you should knock back, it's very abnormal. Yeah, using your head as a baseball bat, basically. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. So what we see too, and it has to be acknowledged, is the demographics of the sport are changing because educated white people with means are not letting their kids do this. And we're seeing it change pretty dramatically. Who's actually playing the sport? Is this enfranchised disadvantaged kids more and more?

That's true. HBO Real Sports did a nice piece with us. Yeah, that was part of that piece where they said the percent of kids on food stamps who were playing tackle football in Illinois was starting to dramatically go up, changed by 10% over only a few years because people with options started to realize

my kid could do another sport, get the same benefits without the risk. There is a cultural conversation needs to be had because then that quickly goes to, but it's their way out. Right, that's always the next sentence. It's a legitimate argument. It is, except for my next response is,

but no one's getting recruited off their film when they were seven. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you could go flag into that. I think people aren't thinking about it deeply enough to realize that, yes, it can be a way out, but it doesn't become serious till high school. Also, if there's just a regulation that that can't happen till you're 14, then everyone is still starting on the same playing field. I guess the reason I bring it up is to say,

yes, there is liberty until you observe that only certain people have liberty and don't have liberty. Like when you're seeing that some people don't have an option and other people do have an option, there is some societal obligation to protect the people that are most vulnerable. That's what I'm getting at is these are necessary because you're asking people who are in a position where they've got a risk at all to make these decisions when they have much bigger fucking fish on their plate, you know, whatever the goddamn thing.

Fish to fry. Fish to fry. One of the ways to look at that, there was a study by CDC showing that white communities, you're more likely to have both flag and tackle and you have a choice, but in black communities you only had tackle. You don't have the option,

you're either playing tackle or you're not playing football at all, which in some cases might be worse for various reasons. It's one thing to say, oh, they were told the risk and they made a decision, but if you acknowledge that some people are in a worse position and they're more incentivized to make that decision, that has to be accounted for.

We also have to add, when people say yes, it's their way out, because they're vulnerable, they need the pathway, it goes yes, but you're talking about vulnerable people who already have problems. Let's layer on brain injury? That doesn't make any sense. Right.

Brain injury can lead to these other problems down the road, so don't take our most vulnerable people and layer on 5,000 hits to the head for that tiny chance they can turn into a living Well, yeah, what is that percentage? Do you know it off the top of your head? I mean it's under 1% of kids who enter the football and their school are gonna end up in the NFL It's 0.1 or something so small. This is such an important topic. I appreciate all your research on this, too I know it's a dive. So this is like a really maybe bad question.

Do you think you have it? That's not a bad question. I have to wrestle with that every day. It waxes and wanes. Some days I'm like, yes, maybe not. My problem is it got very real a few years ago because one of my college roommates died. He was the Harvard football captain my senior year.

We shared that room when we were all watching wrestling in 99. He played three years in the NFL. He was Tom Brady's housemate when they were rookies with the Patriots and then didn't work out for injuries and so then he went got his NBA from Dartmouth and then he ran the hedge fund. The perfect life, married his high school sweetheart, four kids and then we found out he had a secret drinking problem and it got so bad that they killed him. Even after interventions and everyone becoming aware. So the perfect guy, the Superman, ended up drinking himself to death. He had

stage 2 CT. We played basically at the same sports experience he played 11 years of football I did my years of football in my wrestling and the fact that more of those guys seem to have it than don't the guys who have my history definitely more than 50% in our brain bank have had it then I just have to ask the question of how bias is our brain bank right now I don't think people look at me and think I have it. Yeah, it doesn't seem it. Maybe only my wife, so I don't know. Well, you have to acknowledge that same stimulus input

results in some different output, because we're so variable. So like tens of millions of people smoke the same amount of cigarettes, and some percentage get small cell carcinoma. I don't know, there's a lot of factors in there. Yeah, you're right. It's not so predictive of the symptoms. Well not pretty good symptoms the pathology

Yeah, for sure the condition but not the symptoms per se correct. I think there's a very good chance I have it if I showed you my MRI from 20 years ago, but that does not look normal But I don't have symptoms or at least ones that are overwhelming me. Yeah. But that's part of my passion race to find a cure. It's like, I still might have 10, 20 years before it clubs me over the head to find something that actually stop it so that I can just have what I have. Your best defense is that you have a wife that's highly educated on this. And you are. And is an outside observer.

I think it gets hard to observe yourself, but you have a partner who's hip to all these things to look for, presumably. presumably yeah but she's also got to be completely in denial to choose to marry me proven to be we had that talk though when I proposed I was like now look I don't know where this is gonna go because this was born ten years ago now we had even less knowledge and I'm like I might have this I might lose my mind Chris Benoit thing it happened a couple years prior I don't know where I'm gonna be at 40 now past that I don't know where I'm gonna be at 40. Now, past that, I don't know where I'm gonna be at 50. It is scary to think about sometimes.

Right. Okay, so that did bring me to the final thing I wanna talk about is this isn't just for athletes, right? There are occupations that over index in concussions. All my friends in the movie business are all stuntmen. I can't tell you how many concussions these guys get. They'll go unnamed, but yeah, there's one friend that we've had

where a few of us have talked, and I'm like, this feels a little loopy. Does anyone else know to see this? And we know of many, many concussions. Anyone who's doing like motorcycle shit, you're gonna deal with that. So what occupations? Military, fire and rescue?

So we're starting to look into that. CT's been seen in some military people who do not play sports, but were like artillery or special forces, a lot of explosions. So it can happen. It's much more rare than football, but it's definitely there. We are looking to more first responders. We have gotten some firemen and police who've had a lot of concussions,

but I don't think we have a case yet. So hopefully it's not as bad. We actually seen people on the autism spectrum just bang their heads all the time. Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course. But it is probably out there. I'm hoping it's rare. There are some jobs where you're getting hit in the head quite a bit,

but it's not anywhere near boxing and football. Well, also because probably you don't start those jobs till you're older. That's a great point. Your brain's not as protected against those hits when you're young. The sheath around your axons, this type of cell that grows there, isn't there when you're young. And so those stretches are worse. But we have diagnosed a stuntman with CTE.

He was also a football player. Well again, most of these stuntmen are coming from a different high risk background. Exactly. Be happy to help your friend if you want to connect us. It's open. That's interesting, yeah. I wonder how open he would be to that.

That's a vulnerable thing to acknowledge. It's a hard thing to bring up to people. Well, it is a hard thing to bring up because as you say, there's no cure. There's no cure for things. You're really disincentivized to even know about it because why? So you can worry more about it?

Right, and the studies have shown that with genetic studies for Alzheimer's. Some people respond of, okay, I'm gonna use this and take the time I have and really enjoy it. Other people can't handle it. And it just becomes their obsessive thought that, oh my God, I'm gonna get this and take the time I have and really enjoy it. Other people can't handle it. And it just becomes their obsessive thought that oh my god, I'm gonna get this. I think for some reason hearing that it's connected

to the brain, that really scares people obviously. But like you said, it's still a matter of just treating the symptoms though. And you should, especially if you know that something's happening in your brain, then you can't just think your way out of it. Right, and sometimes we do a little bit of selective framing where we say for something like that,

transition can be really hard from careers. And so a lot of guys go through this depression, actually let's go see this doctor to try to help figure it out. They'll do the cognitive test, they'll give us a window into actually could see part of this. Well, right, so everyone who leaves the NFL is gonna get depressed.

They had a purpose, they had a schedule, they had teammates, they had community, but CBT or therapy will help with those. And if that doesn't help with those, then you're going, well, there's probably some kind of structural issue that's probably not going to respond to that type of treatment or therapy. Okay, so if people want to get involved or help Concussion Legacy Foundation is your organization,

is there any place people should go to support or is there any called action? Yes, thank you for asking. Go to concussionfoundation.org or find us on the social medias. This is one of the more neglected areas of research. And so we are always looking for support. We're always looking for brain donors.

Thank you both so much for your brain and people who participate in clinical studies. You could also be an advocate in your community to try to keep your kids safe. So we have various programs you can get involved with, but the key is get involved. The sad thing is CT should not exist. Almost all of it is voluntary,

and those choices start as children, and we can change this culture. And at the meantime, we have to dramatically sell out our research so that we have cures for all the people we grew up watching are now people who are our friends. Are you in the unique position where when you go to a football game,

the players love you and the upper brass can't stand that you're there? The upper brass definitely can't stand them. They don't give me access to the players. So it is hard. And then when you are a player, most of them, I'm finding, live in a bubble where they don't even appreciate what we're trying to do.

Because it's really hard to go do your job when you're thinking about your brain. Of course. But they have been motivated as a union. They have pushed internally for these changes. And so the ones I know through like the executive committee who are actually in those meetings, they do love us. I spent time with one of them yesterday.

Those guys are great. The only place this really happens actually when I go back to WWE, the wrestlers really appreciate how much safer wrestling is now. They made a lot of big changes. Yeah. Shockingly. That was part of the doc. Yeah. Humans are so complex.

This guy's doing this, but then he's open to that. Triple H was on our board for six years and he really gets it. And so it's amazing now that he's in charge, the influence that has over the whole safety. Yeah. Well, Chris, you're radical. What an incredibly weird story that brought you here. I love it. And I'm grateful for the work you're doing and I hope you're effective in making sure little kids don't get hit in the head over and over again. Thank you very much. It's been an honor. Thanks for coming. Thank you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately they made some mistakes. I had a rare occurrence and I would do also, this is great. This dovetails nicely into what we did a week ago. Okay. Delta's play. There was two showings of Delta's play, 1pm, 5pm. Yeah. You went to the 1pm. Yes.

I did not and I regret it deeply. But while I wasn't at that play, I was like, oh my God, I can finally go get my shingles vaccine. Oh. When you turn 50, this is a public service announcement. Okay. You are now eligible to get the shingles vaccine. Interesting.

I mean, maybe they'd give it to you before, I don't know, but when you, I was at my physical this year and he's like, okay, so now you gotta get your shingles vaccine, which signed me up. Do you know anyone that's had shingles? Well, that's a ding ding ding that comes up in, not this week, if you're on Listening to Wondering, plus the episode.

Well, that is a real, that's crazy. Anyways, I've had a friend who had it. It's miserable. Yeah, it's really bad. Nerve pain. And as our lovely pharmacist, we share our pharmacist Rosalyn, she was saying like, opiates don't block nerve pain, which I didn't understand that or know that or whatever.

But yeah, just agonizing pain. I don't want that. Also, I've complained about this in the past. What a gross name for a disease, shingles. I know. It makes me think, shingles. I know. It makes me think of shingles on a roof and that your skin starts getting. Of course, that's what we all see. Flaps.

When we hear it. And then tearing off and stuff. That's not what happens. Is it just adult chicken pox shingles? Yeah, but it is, I think it's more nerve, yeah, it's nerve pain. And then for a percentage of people, it never goes away. Oh!

I know. Okay, so I was in there and I don't, I never go to the pharmacy. But I get all my pharmaceuticals from R&D. This, the cutest, we've talked about it once before. It's the cutest pharmacy in all of Los Angeles. It is. At Hillhurst and Franklin.

And because I was there for a vaccine, she had to help a couple people before me. And I felt like I was in Mayberry. Everyone that walked in, she knew by name, knows everything about them. It was like a town hair cutter, or I guess town pharmacist. Yeah, yeah, she's so nice. Maybe people will remember if they've

listened for a long time her and I had a beef originally. What was that about? We had a beef when she used to work at Rite Aid and I had to pick up a prescription for Kristen and she wouldn't let me get it on her behalf and there was a whole to do and we were in a beef. Sure. But then we made up and now she's one of my favorite people. I love her. You squashed it as they say in beefs.

Yeah, we squashed the beef. Okay, now do you wanna tell folks about the play on Saturday? Sure. So I went to Delta's play, it was at 1pm. Allison Wonderland. It was Allison Wonderland, she was Tweedledee, of Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

Her best friend was Tweedledum. And, yeah, well we've discussed, sometimes we've discussed the plays at your kids' school. And it's no shade, but it is shade. That's why like there's no way to talk. I'll tell you why it's not shade. Every movie you see with plays for kids, this is how plays for fourth graders are. So there's like, there's no shade.

They have like three rehearsals. Well I did walk out and there was a man talking to his daughter who obviously had gone to that school and he was like, I don't remember yours being this bad. So I'm just saying, they're all like this, but yes, there's always technical difficulties, there's always- Memorization issues.

A lot of memorization issues, which that, yes, that I can- I thought that's what you were referring to. No, the play itself, which that, yes, that I can. I thought that's what you were referring to. No, the play itself, the sound, the mic's not being on for this and that, the light being here when it should be there, it's a mess. And it is very funny and fun to go and see. It's what you want.

It is what you want. I guess that's why I'm saying it's actually a success. It's part of the appeal. It's what you want. I guess that's why I'm saying it's actually a success. It's part of the appeal. It's what you want because I then went to five and they had figured it all out. Like they really, really what it seems like is they just needed one more rehearsal. Yeah, sure.

That wouldn't be a rehearsal because I had heard that like, you know, no one has their lines, people are nudging the narrator. I mean, and that's what you live for with fourth graders on stage. Delta's barking orders at people. Yeah, she's breaking the fourth wall a lot. There is no fourth wall for Delta.

People started clapping, explain that. Well, first of all, she saw you and then put her tongue out provocatively and crawled on the ground and was like. Well, no, no, that's not, no. That was Lincoln's reenactment of it. Yes, that's not what happened. She was already in, they were in the dance.

She was in a position where she was sort of squatting. She wasn't getting down. She was like down and she was doing her move and then she just like looked up at us and gave us a little, I don't remember it being like nasty, but Kristen and Lincoln think it was nasty. And maybe it was directly to her soulmate.

Yeah, me and Anna, I think. She was like to both of us. Like a little like, hey, I see you. Yeah, like I'll wag my tongue at you. And I was really happy she did that because I will say it was the first time, as soon as she came out, she, it was a dance thing or a song

and Kristen was filming the whole time, you know, she was filming and Lincoln was cheering really, really, really, really loudly. And Delta looked over at us and just shook her head. Too loud. It was just like an overall shaking her head and I was like, uh-oh, she's mad. And we just started, we just started the play

and she's not happy. I loved too that those two could find a way to get into a little power struggle, not even in the same Reality exactly and so then every time she came out She was clearly like she was pretty annoyed by the way like this play was going And so then later when she did that like winky thing to me and on I was like, oh, maybe it's lifted Maybe she's happy now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, But yes, she came out, she had like, they had this big scene and Lincoln was cheering again like really loud, but also like screaming her name.

Yeah, yeah. Delta said, the song isn't even over yet. And then they did their thing, but then something happened with the mic, the mic. And so she was upset about that. I think she said this sucks out loud. Well, after she she was upset about that. I think she said, this sucks out loud. Well, after she got off stage. Yeah. This was fun.

This was more of a detective thing that followed me going, which is some kid, when they walked off stage, said, well, that sucked, and they still had their mic on. Right, exactly. And that was the last thing the audience heard. So I heard that from a parent at the five o'clock, like, oh my God, the funniest part of the whole thing was at the end one of them just said, well, that sucked.

And I go, that sounds like my kid, for sure. And then I'm telling Delta later, I go, yeah, I guess someone said, well, that sucked. And she goes, boy, I feel like I might've said that. And I go, good, because I really felt like it would definitely be something you would say. I feel like I might have said that and I go good because I really felt like I think it was her but also in while she was still on stage There was a snafu with like from a mic situation And then she was like she got upset about that and then she did say she did say like no

You're supposed to say this, you know, there was a lot of people saying no now you say this now You say this you say this a lot of that going on. Oh, there's nothing better. It was really funny It was really really funny, so I got the report from everyone that that's what had gone down And so I was so excited to go to five o'clock Yeah, and five o'clock went off with almost how to Everyone knew their lines, all the mics were working. I was delighted that she still was fully breaking the fourth wall. What'd she do in that one?

Well, she saw me and I was like, you know, cheering and waving and then she started waving at me and then she was doing the I love you hand signs to me and then she was doing the heart thing to me and just really blasting me from the stage. Sure. And I just, it made me so happy and I was laughing so hard. And it was, God was it fun. And I'm gonna commend them on this too.

They kept that fucking thing under an hour. And that's incredible for these kids' plays. That came in at just under or about an hour. A lot of times these plays have an intermission. Yes, yes. And it's a long time. This was a perfect amount of time. Also for this play specifically,

I guess not enough people signed up, so they opened it up to the young, young kids. So there was some really small kids involved. There were some super cute. And they were so cute. I'm telling you, one of the kids was definitely Ralphie from Christmas Story. The wolf?

Yep. Yeah, the wolf was so cute. So cute. I know. I couldn't keep my eyes off a couple of those kids. Yeah. There was a little girl too with glasses that was, I just, she was, she,

when you see someone, like she was in it. Right, that's, okay, so this is. So this is where I have some trouble. Okay. Yeah. And I get it. This is like a school play. No one's really, I guess they are picking, but not really. They're not really picking. They're just like doing it.

So the level of commitment is so varied. Oh, you're right. Yeah. And I think my sense of justice sometimes starts flaring up during the play. Because I think, look at this kid. This kid is here to perform. They are.

They put a lot of energy. They care so much. They practiced a ton. They practiced, they're memorized, they're off book. And like then there are other people who haven't done anything, clearly. And they're ruining the play for these other people who have put in a lot of work.

And you know. It would make sense that you have that point of view and I have my point of view. Because I didn't wanna be an actor in school. And clearly you're not gonna find 35 kids who are trying to become actors be an actor in school. And clearly you're not gonna find 35 kids who are trying to become actors. We're in LA, five or six of the kids on that stage

are probably going on auditions. Right, for sure. But 98% are just trying to be social after school. Yeah, exactly. And so I love, so for me, because I wasn't trying to do that, I'm going, I'm so glad they're just having fun. Like what a memory of horsing around

and fucking the thing up. But when I was in fifth grade, we had a play and we did have to like kind of audition for it in the way that they're doing the same thing. And it was like this weird mashup of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Taming of the Shrew. Okay? Wow.

I didn't want to be an actor. Okay. At that point, I didn't know anything about that, but I auditioned and I got the part of the Habitasher. Okay, great. That's a hat maker. Someone who sells stuff. Yeah, and she, it was not a good part,

and I had one line. Okay. And I was very shy, like it was, I had one line. Okay. And I was very shy. Like I was so shy at that time. But I, like the amount of times I practiced that one line, it had nothing to do with wanting to be an actor. It was just like.

You wanted to do the right thing. I just knew, like this requires commitment. Yeah. And I nailed it. Here is the hat your worship ordered is the line. I'll never forget it. So it's barely even a line. Yeah, it's just a few words.

I presented the hat. Here is the hat your worship ordered. Oh, it's really good. I hope everyone clapped and then you said, oh, no, that's not over. So what's immediately great about, for me, Delta's interest in it? Yeah, she doesn't want to be Alice She auditioned specifically to be Tweedledee with her friend Tweedledee

She just wants to be in the play if she can be with her best friend as Tweedledee Tweedledump Yeah, the kids that want to do it. They want the bigger parts, right? So it's like I already love it because it's just about her and her friend. Yeah doing this thing together I agree. Yeah, because it's just about her and her friend doing this thing together. I agree. Yeah. And they were good, by the way. They were, but that also, for me, a tiny bit, I was like, Delta, don't do that,

because you're good, this is cute and good. Like, the Tweedle Dee Tweedle Dum back and forth is a real kind of tongue twister. Yeah, and they nailed it. And they nailed it, and it was really, it was really good and impressive. And I was like, oh man, like I wish we hadn't had that, I mean it was funny for me. Yeah. And I liked it, you know, I just enjoy anytime she's doing anything. But I was like, like it did, it did take away from a very impressive thing that these, these two little girls were doing together.

Yeah, I thought it was all very true to who she is, which is all I want for her, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. She was so cute in her little makeup and her outfit. Yeah, and their little exchange was tricky. It was hard. Yes. That's what I picked.

I was like, this is fast and tricky because they're getting names wrong. And this- Because Tweedledum is dumb, presumably, and doesn't know their name. So it's like they keep introducing themselves and Tweedledum keeps introducing herself as Tweedledee. And then they have this back and forth kind of who's on first thing.

And it's very confusing. It is. It's a lot to keep in your brain. Yeah. And I was like, that's really good. And I wasn't surprised. I was like, no wonder she got that part I wasn't surprised. No wonder she got that part, because she is able to hold a lot in her.

No, I don't know if any of these other, I mean, whatever, maybe they could. But seeing what was going on with people not being able to memorize, very basic. Yeah, here's the hat your worship ordered. That's hard, because you had worship in there. No, now I'm nervous. Oh no, you're bleeding your line.

If you can't get that, you can't do what they did. And so I was impressed. I'm gonna admit too, I'm probably just too in love with Delta, whatever she does, I think I like. And I reverse engineer why that's perfect for her, because I just see her being herself and I'm wrapped around her fingers. So I guess I'm trying to acknowledge that.

I love her too so much and it's not, it wasn't like, oh, she shouldn't do that. It was like, oh, she doesn't have to do that. Right. She's just good enough. Right. She's just good enough. Right. Like she's good enough, they were good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like it didn't, and I guess also for me, I was like, don't let your sister get in your head, rattle you, exactly. It was like, now you're rattled and now you're doing this and you're in the middle of like a really cute thing that you're doing that you know how to do well, that's impressive. Don't let the emotion interfere here.

Right, right, sure, sure. There's a bigger fun worldview here, which right, is like if the show is good, I will not remember it when I'm 65. Yeah, of course. So it's like, it's just interesting, if you can fast forward, what in life you'll enjoy and care about and remember.

And all the parents there. What I'm saying is I'm bummed I went to the five and not the one. And I bet most parents that went to the one had the most amount of fun. Yes, it was so fun. I'm glad I went to that one and I didn't go to the five. Yeah, it's hilarious.

And that's just funny about life. Let's say your kid's in soccer. I guess Lincoln was in soccer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was in soccer, so I probably, I've had this experience. She was in soccer, but everyone was kind of not very good. Well, they had a perfect record.

Yeah. They lost every game. And even more so, they never scored a goal. Yeah, exactly. It's a flawless season. Yeah, flawless season, which we love. But like, let's say you're watching her, and this is probably just my personality

and how I grew up, how my parents parented. Right. If Lincoln, if you're watching and she's like, good, like really good. Yes. But something's happening that's not allowing her to like. Realize her goals. Realize her goals and her potential.

Do you think it's good, bad, or just personal, I guess? To say it to them? Oh, this is a huge, endless debate you have in your head the whole time. Yeah. So two things are really relevant. One is, the inclinations you have right now about Delta, I don't have when I watch Delta,

I have them towards Lincoln. Interesting. Because Lincoln and I have similar character defects. And additionally, I would probably be less forgiving of the chaos watching a Lincoln play because she really takes it serious and wants to do great and she's put her heart into it. And so Delta's not betraying herself

and she's not getting further from her goal. Yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense, yeah. And on the soccer team, all this stuff's going on, and now what I'm feeling bad for is my friend Scott's daughter is an awesome soccer player and she's on this team with, you know, my kid and that. People who don't care. Yeah, people, playing for the first time.

Right. And so I do, I'll observe that and I'll go like, ah, she deserves a much better team. Look at her heart, I mean, literally, she's carrying the entire team. And then the thing I have with Lincoln while watching is like, I don't wanna give her a tip about passing or about kicking or scoring or any of that,

but I'm fighting the urge to tell her, I expect nothing from you other than you run at that person and run dead into them. You commit. You've got to get over your fear of a collision and minimally what you have to be is brave. I'm not asking you to be skilled and have all these skills, but I want you to right now acknowledge

it won't hurt if you decide to confront. Because that's so much of these young soccers. It's like someone's coming with the ball and the other, the defender runs up and they're just so afraid of locking legs or just confronting the way you have to. And so, and that's my age old, I want her to be brave, I don't want her to get taken advantage of,

I want her to be fearless in defending herself. So when I'm watching, oh, I don't care if she scores, I don't, I just like, I don't want her to be afraid to confront that runner with the ball. And then I spend the whole game debating whether I'm gonna bring that up in the car or not. And for six games, I don't bring it up. And then on the seventh game, I bring it up.

And then I don't know if it was the right or wrong decision. Everyone has different beliefs about the world and then I guess you're just imparting it on your kids. So like each kid is gonna get a different thing. And I can totally acknowledge both sides of it. There's like a group of people that are taking life really serious and they're trying their ass off.

And it's very unfair to them that some other people are just here to have a blast. Well, it's not unfit, no, no, no. I don't think that's the problem. The problem is if you do care, right? Like if she's like, I really wanna be good at soccer and then she isn't practicing, right? Like I think that is something to say, right?

Like if you wanna be good. Can't get good by thinking about something. Yes, or if you're on the field and there's like an issue, you have an issue, there's like a thing you're not good at, I think it is okay to say, hey, let's work on this because this is where we have like trouble, if you wanna be good. Yes, if you're there to just run around and who cares,

your thing is bravery and I think my thing is like commitment. Yeah, and both are legit and I feel bad for the serious people that are annoyed by the people fucking off and I feel bad for the people having a great time in life who people are mad at, you know Like I see it all mm-hmm like, you know is life a big farce? I think so Well, you don't you don't think so when you're in Costco and you're trying to get your scene done and somebody's fucking around and it's interfering with you. Great point, yeah. Because you care about that, right?

Like that's the, and it's... Well, yeah, yeah. It's just all... I mean, we've all flown to New Mexico. What's that mean? To execute this thing. It's not like, you can't wander onto a film set. Right.

You know, you, but you're right, you're right. Yeah, it's the same idea that this person's like, I'm here to have fun in this life. Yeah. And you're like, I'm here to do a job. Yeah, and the first time I was like, I get it. I might've done the same thing if I had a smaller role in the movie and I wanted to pop.

And then when I said, hey, if you keep doing this, we're never gonna get the scene because my character can't be interrupted in this race. And then you choose to do it. Yeah, then I'm the person who wants to get the job done and someone else is fucking around. So yeah, I'm- We're all on both sides of it at different times.

And now, God bless him for giving me that experience. Because I've done a million scenes and a million movies, and I remember very few of them, and that is so memorable, and it's one of my best stories. And it's like, ultimately, in the game alive, I'm delighted he fucked that up so many times and all the shit happened. So I guess it's like, what point in time

are you evaluating these things? It's also really relevant. Is it in the moment, is it five years later, is it on your deathbed, is it as, you know. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. Tricky stuff. And the world can't be, the whole world can't be thinking this whole thing's a joke,

because things gotta get done. Exactly, yeah. Science has to be done. And I get it. Yeah. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. ["Ring the Bells"] Oh my gosh, I guess it's a ding ding ding

because this is for Chris Nowinski when we were talking about soccer. I have a quick David Chang update if you want. Oh, yeah, David Chang update. Oh gosh. I hope it's about the bread Oh, here we go Wildflower bakery in Freestone We were coming back from visiting some friends and they said the bread there was great and it was and it was Wildflower bakery Wow shout out. Yeah, you did a whole graphic here, Rob? I did.

I had a little more time for this one. Nice. Now Rob, how do you deal with, because Rob, you do everything right. It's something I am so grateful to you for. You are such a meticulous planner and just a great manager of all things that need doing. Does it drive, did it drive you nuts growing up

when people just were fucking off and didn't give a shit? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry, on behalf of us, I'm sorry. I mean, I was also the one doing it, so depending on what it was for too. Right. Yeah. Okay, Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris Chris Chris Chris Chris Chris Chris Chris

Show me those creamy hamstrings. I used to be able to do that voice, but now I've lost my registered It's a family guy character He always wants Chris to come in his basement and show him his creamy hamstrings or creamy thighs I mean clearly a pedophile, but they'd find a way to make it quite cute and funny in the cartoon. Oh my God, wow. Okay, so I said that no one on the football team was in my AP classes, and that's not true. There was at least one, Doug Sellers, shout out.

I remembered him after the fact. And there might have been more, I don't know. When was Tough Enough the TV show on and how many seasons of Real World had there been? There are six seasons starting in 2001 and the first episode of Real World was in 92. Okay, nine years. Yeah, so it was in its 10th season

when Tough Enough started. And as I told you in 96, I partied with Pedro. Yes, you did. Who was a season one, San Francisco real world. Wow. Since past. Sweet, sweet guy. What a fun night we had.

Okay, how many people currently play high school football in the United States? In the 23, 24 school year, over 1 million high school students in the US participated in 11 United States. In the 23, 24 school year, over one million high school students in the US participated in 11 player football. This number includes 99% boys. For boys, it is the most popular high school sport with over a million players.

Now, do you think that remaining 1% that's girls, do they have a girl league or there's girls playing on the boys football team? That's a great question. You wanna know something I'm embarrassed to admit? What? So I'm deep in my Friday Night Lights rewatch. I cannot recommend it enough for people with kids.

It's such a fun family show. We've never had more fun watching a show together. It's just, it's a drug. We love it. We fight every night about when to turn it off. It never occurred to me that they can practice. That of course, they can just play games in practice because the team is split into two teams.

The defense, I don't know why that never crossed my mind. Like we're watching Friday Night Lights and they practice a ton on the show. And I'm like, oh duh, yeah, they can play a real game endlessly. Because they have everyone they need. You can't do that in basketball. I mean, you'd be splitting up.

You split it. Yeah, it's just, it's very, I don't know why that number crossed my mind. It is hard though, because you aren't playing like the best, like you're not playing against. Unless your team has the best defense. Right.

Then you almost have, your offense almost has an advantage because they're being forced to play against the best defense. It's probably like a virtuous cycle. Yeah, probably. Hockey gets that a little bit because you've got four offensive lines and three defensive lines.

Yes, but then you're gonna have like, the goalie's gonna be half as good. Talk about a fucking position I would not wanna have. There's all these things where consistency is important. Those are not good things for me. Or your whole job boils down to one second. Like I need a lot of time and I need to be intermittently good and I'm gonna be bad intermittently.

That's kind of how I can operate. Does that make sense? Yeah, you think you can't make the shot when it counts. But even when you make the shot, you've been dribbling for a while and you made a couple moves and you're in your rhythm. This is just you're standing dead still and you're up. And here it comes.

Right, right, yeah. Oh, you gotta be perfect. That's true. With no lead up. That's true. I need lead up. That's why I like driving is like's like, anyone will tell you, it's very rare that a, unless you're in F1,

there's 21 turns on a track. You're not acing all 21 turns on a track. You've blown one, you're recovering on a couple, and that's standard. So now it's just like a percentage of how good you are. So that works for me. You have a lot of time to make mistakes and recover and be perfect and then not good.

But these jobs that require you to be excellent every time scare the bejesus out of me. A symphony orchestra player. So impressive. I need to be a jazz like improv-er. Some of it's like, I don't know, is that okay? And now, whoa, that was a nice lick. Yeah.

Did you hear Skype is done? What? Skype. It went away? It lost out to Zoom? It did. Was Skype owned by something else? Microsoft.

Microsoft. It's hard to feel bad for Microsoft. I know, but it's just like, I feel so bad for Skype. They really shit the bed during the pandemic. It's weird that it didn't take off. It was already there. It was there. It was there.

It could have been. That might speak to like, if you didn't catch the learning curve initially, you think it's insurmountable and you'd rather just learn the new thing that came your way and everyone's figuring it out. Well, this will comfort you. I just weirdly stumbled,

I don't know why I read an article about quarterly profits. And Microsoft's quarterly profit was $70 billion. They're quarterly. It's pretty good. That's nuts. Yeah, that's awesome. 280 billion is what they'll profit this year. Yeah, I just feel like the story of Skype is a sad one.

They were in leading position to take the pandemic and they didn't, they let this like, this little rando. Isn't that the story of the internet? It's like you had Yahoo, you had AOL, all these things that seem like institution. And suddenly AOL bought Warner Brothers in time, Warner, and just vanished. Yeah, I mean, there was so,

at the beginning of the pandemic, we were saying like, we'll Skype you now, we'll Skype you, but we were using Zoom. The verb was Skype, and it wasn't even being used. It didn't work out. I guess it's an underdog story too, which we like. Yeah. I have friends who invented a very popular one,

and I even had to talk to them, and I was like, I don't wanna use yours, I wanna use Zoom. Ouch. Okay, the percentage of high school footballers who make it to the NFL. Of the million we just learned that play football. Right, okay, a tiny fraction of high school football players,

roughly 0.023% make it to the NFL. This means that for every 1,000 high school football players, 23 will, about 23 will eventually play in the NFL. Which I thought was kind of like a lot. That's what the article says? Yep. God, that seems really, really high. Because how many people get into the NFL every year?

Let's see. How many are drafted? 250. 257. 257. So that would mean there was only 100,000 players. Of age. Well, yeah, exactly, senior year. Right, I guess there's, the million playing football

might include junior high football players and youth football and- Maybe it includes- Definitely nine through 12. Definitely includes nine through twelve it definitely includes nine through twelve okay and then nine ten eleven obviously aren't drafted yes there's approximately seventy seven thousand college football players so fourth of those are probably of age to then go get drafted. And then, did you say 300 get drafted?

257. Wow, God, I mean, that just seems really impossible. Doesn't it? That a few hundred will go every year? Oh, I know. Out of 77,000 that are already playing in college, so hard to, it's almost impossible to play college football. Yeah, I know, really hard to do. Again almost impossible to play college football. Yeah, I know.

Really hard to do. Again, Friant Lights, smash this, he thinks he's going to the NFL. Everyone thinks they're going to the NFL. Yeah, well you gotta dream big. I mean, you gotta go for it. Yeah, I think that might be it for Chris. I loved this episode, obviously.

Try anything with the equivalent episode would be for me. It's a very important topic, and I'm glad we covered it. Yeah, me too. Can you think of an obsession of mine that might be fun? It would be car related, I guess. Well, no, this isn't shopping. Mine's Total Wolf. Well, that would be Anne Wintour.

This is like, what's your car? Like, what do you care is being talked about that's not being talked about? Yeah, we've had a couple people that their main concern was that we're not listening to each other. That was really rewarding. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So Chris, and he was very cool and nice. Yes. Yeah, very cool. All right, thanks, I love you. Thank you. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey.