Joe Rogan Experience Review podcast - A review of Episode 1196 Dale Earnhardt jr

Episode Date: November 19, 2018

Dale was a legendary NASCAR driver for many years and son to Dale Earnhardt another amazing driver who sadly crashed and passed from his injuries. Dale jr has a new book out talking a lot about how he suffered from concussions and his road to recovery. This was a great conversation between him and Joe so check it out!   Enjoy my review folks! Please email me with any suggestions and questions for future shows :   [e-mail]

Hello and welcome to another episode of the JRE review. For those of you that knew this podcast, like I say, every podcast, is that what I do is review the best parts and the best episodes of the Joe Rogan experience for the week. I'm kind of like the news is to current events. There's no affiliation. I just report on what I hear. Sometimes I have guests on. Talk about things that have inspired them, things that they like. They're always fans of the Rogan Show. Rogan Show has been around so long and there's so many thousands of hours of it. That I just felt like it was important that somebody kind of give a breakdown of some of the best parts of what went on in the week. This week, great episode, podcast 1196 with Dale Earnhardt, Jr. Pretty cool episode,

because I don't know a lot about NASCAR and the drivers, and it's easy, sometimes just to think that maybe they're just tailbillies or whatever, but like anything on Rogan getting a chance to listen to somebody talk for three hours or two hours or whatever it is you get to learn a lot about them and there's always some fascinating things that come out of it. Obviously Dale Earnhardt, Jr. is a famous NASCAR driver. His father, Dale Earnhardt was probably maybe more famous and his dad obviously got an accident in a race that Junior was in and ended up dying from his injuries. So he gets into that and also talks a lot about his new book that discusses some of the problems

that he's had with crashes and concussions and not taking care of himself through it. So really fascinating and a great conversation. He started off just saying that his dad got him into driving and he talks about a story when he was younger where he flipped his car really badly. He had a S10 pick up that he was making payments on, which was a cool thing because you know his dad would have been very wealthy and to have his son financing a truck himself while he worked at some sort of service station, changing oil. I mean that builds real character in a person instead of just buying things and spoiling them But anyway flips his truck

flips it many many times smashes at the pieces and his dad comes to pick him up and he thought he'd be in a lot of trouble I guess his dad was very strict and His dad just kind of laughed and said hey weird. I did the same thing at your age and he gave us 18 when he did it which was a cool sounding memory because well, it kind of points to the things that he really remembers and meant a lot from his dad and and having those moments of kind of compassion and connectedness. It just means means a lot to him. They talk a little bit Joe and Dale about having kids and how that changes. You like nothing can really prepare you for kids. There's just nothing else like it. And there's

no other place that you can find that kind of love as well. Like the love that you have for sure. Now I don't have any children. I'm sure plenty of you guys do. So you know this, but it's always a cool thing to hear. And it And always cool to hear how it changes people. It changes everyone, you know, especially if they're putting the work in. Dale's also an avid hunter, like Joe likes to bow hunting on some land hunting with a friend of his in Ohio, where they have really good white tail deer

and he likes to go out there hunting. Also loves working on his muscle cars. Probably no surprise there. I mean you'd imagine that a NASCAR guy likes to do that. It doesn't have as much time now that he has his kids but you know it sounds like he has a pretty good selection of cars which makes sense and he likes to work on some of the classics and get his hands dirty. He hasn't done a complete rebuild, but that's a hover project and maybe now that he's retired, he gets into his book, his new book out, which I'm really interested to take a look at.

It just sounds like a really honest portrayal of like the struggles that he's had and I think it's important information for anyone that plays a sport or is it or veterans or anyone who suffered from any kind of head trauma to look at and know that there are Doctors and help out there that will They can really improve your situation and just instead of just feeling anxious and feeling bad. It talks a lot about his concussions. He had a bad crash during a test, one time, so he blew out a tire at about 180 miles an hour

and hit the wall. And he felt like he couldn't shake it off. So they went off and went to a diner and he didn't feel well. He felt sick. He didn't really want to tell anyone. And then he was going to some, I think, a football game or something with his wife afterwards and he ended up going. But he was really struggling with it and feeling all for. And it really led to some emotional problems in a sense.

And these are the things that they don't talk a lot about with concussions. It's like, oh, you bang your head, you got a bruise, you'll be okay, but it can really mess with your hormones, mess with your behavior, it can make you, like head injuries can make you a lot more impulsive, angry, quick to lose your temper.

And those things really can mess up your life very quickly. So it's pretty brutal. But he ended up going to the specialist. And the specialist really dealt with everything with head injuries. He's knew a lot about it. And helped Dale understand what was happening in his brain, like pointing out certain portions of his brain that were injured and what kind of rehabilitation you need to do. So he did some interesting things. He had this string that had these balls on and he would hold one end to his nose and the

other end kind of how straight and he would focus his eyes on each level of these balls. And what it was supposed to do is kind of retrain and refocus your eyes and your ability to stay balanced because he was having problems walking and like moving around his environment. You get kind of dizzy and have to hang on to the wall. That's a real problem. I mean, that's really awful. And like any rehab, you know, whether you're fixing your knee or your ankle or you know, you've got to stretch it, you've got to move it. And in a sense, what's happening with concussions is you've got to retrain your brain and the things directly connected to that motor function. And in a sense, a lot of that is your eyes, you know, retraining that.

So he said that he had about a dozen concussions in two years, which is way too many. He couldn't walk well anymore and a concussed person often doesn't have good judgment overall. Judgment for distances but also judgment for making decisions. Like I said, you get more and more aggressive. He ended up missing half of 2016 driving and because he had really high anxiety so they gave him some meds to take. His contract was still going so he had to finish out.

I think he ended 2017 that he was very concerned about that and getting re-injured. And it really all he said after that, then he did retire but what he was saying to his doctors, he just wanted two things. He wanted to be better for two things because he was getting married. And because of these injuries,

he was forgetting a lot of stuff. He just couldn't remember a lot of what was going on and he really wanted to remember his wedding night. And not just remember it, but not think about his concussions, think about these headaches he gets all this like pain and kind of confusion and the balance issue he just wanted all that gone and the next thing he wanted was to be had a climb up into his tree stand for hunting without feeling like he was gonna fall out so that was it he set those goals

goal setting is important and good for him for doing that. He did talk about how he wanted his doctor to tell him he had to retire because I don't think he wanted to tell others that he was choosing to do it. I think he almost wanted and excuse, but his doctor said, listen, you don't have to. You don't have the same kind of trauma that a lot of other guys are having that I'm seeing that it's worse and there's a chance you can keep fixing it so if you want to keep driving you can so he didn't really have that excuse but he's got kids now, Dale does and he wanted to really be focused for them and he decided that he was going to retire anyway so Dale's

book is really just to educate not to discourage. He's not saying don't go out and do things that are dangerous to ban your head. Just be educated on what you can do if it happens. Rest the right way, see a specialist, get checked out, you know, you do what you want. Just don't suffer without getting proper help. And that also expands out to veterans that have got back from war, that have been near IDs or explosions, things that will cause the kind of shell shock that will mess up your head.

Knowing that when they get back, they should go and if they can, I guess to the VA or wherever, and get help from specialists to deal with concussions. So they don't have to suffer over the same depression and those sorts of things. He talked about the idea of getting back into driving, what Joe did, like oh if you wanted to get back into it, could you? Dale talks a lot about the technology, how the technology in the vehicles changes so much, you could be at

six months and you wouldn't even know a lot about how it works. You know, there's all these different functions in these NAS cars, like changing all the brake power from one side to the other and they're always making adjustments and, you know, he'd almost have to learn the car over again and it would take him a long time to get up into it. So the idea of him getting back into the highest levels of NASCAR is unlikely. An interesting thing that he talked about is I guess in Chicago and the summer they were racing. Inside the cars, it was getting up to 150 degrees and they're in there for like three hours.

So that's like being in a sauna. I can't even imagine how bad it's possible. It just does not make sense to me that someone could deal with that. I guess these guys are pretty hardcore and they've trained for it so you know that's how they roll. He talks later about his dad and then they get into his dad and Joe was surprised to hear that his dad didn't really tell him anything about racing. It was just more about being a man and being on time and taking care of the shit that he needs to and getting to his sponsors and treating his fans right. And I found that really fascinating. I guess probably Dale, Jr. was winning races.

So maybe senior didn't feel like that was necessary. He was like, I just need to make sure that he does things right and doesn't act like a child and all those things. And that really set the tone in a way for their relationship. And it was cool because after he started winning, he and his dad started to do publicity stuff together, sponsorship stuff, they got a huge Budweiser deal, which was cool, and really brought them closer together. And before that, he didn't really know where he stood with his dad. He didn't think that his dad

thought that he was going to amount to anything. So that was kind of tough. And what really got him into racing, because he'd been doing these like smaller races, he'd done like quite a lot of them over a hundred, and his dad never came to any of those, and even when each one trophies his dad would just say, oh, so-and-so couldn't have shown up that day because he would have beat you. So it was it was never massively supportive like that and and day of junior didn't really care for it but Joe did suggest was this maybe something that drove you on and pushed you further junior didn't think so. It probably is just a painful thing to think about but the like pit crew chief that Dale Senior had called Tony, Tony's someone and he suggested

to Dale Senior that Dale Junior race and they decided together without talking to Junior, they put the name, his name on the roof of the car, and when he came in to see it, Tony Sr. just laughed and said, hey, here's your new car. And Junior thought it was a joke. He thought he was playing a joke on them. And it wasn't until a few days later that he turned to his dad and said, seriously, am I getting this car? Am I racing? And his dad was said, seriously, am I getting this car, am I racing? And his dad was like, yeah, give it a shot.

And he just said his dad was the strangest dude, which I felt was really cool, you know, and probably confusing. But, you know, look, he became amazing at what he did. So you can't really say that, uh, Dale, I've seen Senior didn't have a plan and didn't know what he was doing being at that. Junior started to win races then and like I said they got back into how their relationship changed and then he got to the point when his dad crashed into the wall at a race and died and I think Dale Junior actually won that race and that was one of his first major wins I think

if I remember right late but that was obviously a very difficult time for him and he still chose to continue racing because a lot of people that worked for him had jobs and he felt responsible for it and it was a great conversation I really enjoyed it I think that Dale Jr. is a well thought out fascinating dude, humble. He wasn't arrogant, douchey, anything and Joe was really getting the best out of him. So hopefully he's back on the podcast again. I'd love to hear it and I'd love to hear what you guys think about it. So email me, link in the post, the podcast, and there be more surely. So thanks a lot and check this one out. Cheers guys!