Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 955: John Brenkus- 6x Emmy-Award Winning Creator, Host, & Producer of Sport Science

Episode Date: January 28, 2019

In this episode, Sal, Adam and Justin speak with John Brenkus, an award winning producer, director, and television personality. John talks about his ‘robotic’ knee surgery. (3:14) How did he get tagged ‘The Sports Science Guy’? His background and the origin story of the show. (7:15) Were there any preconceived notions he had on these athletes before they were on the show? (12:46) Does he think NFL teams have started recruiting differently because of the show? (15:45) Did he have an athlete on the show that stood out above the rest? (18:34) What is the worst injury he has sustained on the show? (20:28) Are the athletes pumped to get these HIGH numbers on the show? (24:22) What if LeBron James played tight end in football?  + The greatest athlete of all time based on his metrics. (26:20) What is it that separates these great athletes from everyone else? (32:23) Can you improve your skills or are you born with them? The theory of ‘Morphic Resonance’. (35:32) Should boys and girls be competing together? The humbling notion of getting ‘weeded out’. (38:27) How does he feel about children’s sports today? The participation medal era. (51:28) What does the conversation look like with his daughter on this very topic? (53:36) How there is no shame getting ‘chicked’. (57:05) What is his opinion on ‘CTE’ and what strategies should the NFL implement? (59:40) How a gun is NOT the most dangerous thing in your house. (1:03:35) What things does he have in the works? (1:05:20) Does he feel the attributes in top athletes are the same we would find in the top business performers? (1:07:05) Featured Guest/People Mentioned: John Brenkus (@johnbrenkus_) · Twitter Website THE BRINK OF MIDNIGHT PODCAST Jerry Rice (@JerryRice)  Twitter LeBron James (@kingjames)  Instagram Ray Lewis (@raylewis)  Twitter Products Mentioned: January Promotion: MAPS Anabolic ½ off!!   **Code “RED50” at checkout** Why Girls And Boys Should Compete With Each Other In Sports | John Brenkus | TEDxUniversityofNevada The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology - Book by Ray Kurzweil Mako | Stryker Sport Science | ESPN Animal Logic: Home Fight Science - National Geographic Sports Science with Ndamukong Suh Sports Science: Vernon Davis Nutty Buddy on Sport Science Sports Science: Brandon Jacobs Ray of Hope Foundation Greatest Athlete Of All Time - sportsnation Topics - ESPN - ESPN.com You Don't Know Bo - ESPN Films: 30 for 30 - ESPN.com Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation – Book by Rupert Sheldrake The Weird Power of the Placebo Effect, Explained Mind Pump Episode 951: How to Fix Squat Imbalances, MAPS Programming Revealed, Greatest Mentors & MORE Soul and Science Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. That was a great episode. You know it's so clear. And I mentioned it in the episode with him is that we got, you know, we have our team that reaches out or communicates with like people that are reaching out as far as who want to be on the show and you know, sometimes we get so busy, we don't get a chance to like really dive deep into and we just approve or not right and there was somebody that I don't even know who approved it originally. And I remember looking it up and going like, oh shit, this is the sports science guide. I've seen like every fucking episode.

One of my favorite shows. Yeah. I should know this. Yeah, he hosted sports science, but his company, his production company also produced like fight science, which so I don't watch sports science. And I watched the fight one. I watched the fight science one too.

They both are great shows. Yeah, and this guy, this guy's brilliant. He's talking all about what makes great athletes great. He had a TED talk that was real controversial a while ago about how we should let boys and girls compete together in sports and he actually Made some very very good points in this episode. I thought I would disagree with him a lot more than I actually did I didn't disagree with him that much. He actually made some really good points. Great conversation. This dude was a really, really cool guy. I'm so glad we had him on the show.

I'm upset we didn't have more time with him. We're gonna get him back. Yeah. No, we'll definitely do another one. You can look up those episodes too. Those sport science ones and fight science ones on YouTube so you can kind of see some of the cool stuff that they did.

If you're at all a sports person, I can't imagine you don't know who this is. I mean, it is like it was one of the top shows. It's just cool stuff. Like I remember one episode of Fight Science, they were seeing which martial art produced the most power with the kick and they broke it down by the science. Like where how the force is generated, the contact point, you know, which one was the hardest.

They had Moitai and Taekwondo and Karate and it was just really cool. So if you're into, if you're into that kind of stuff, I think you'll love it. Now you can find this guy on Twitter. I think that's his biggest platform. It's at John Brankis, Brankis has spelled B-R-E and K-U-S underscore. So John Brankis underscore, that's where you can find him on Twitter, his website, johnbrankis.com. Yeah, great episode. Also I do want to remind everybody there's only four days left for the 50's. underscore that's where you can find them on Twitter his website johnbrankus.com Yeah, great episode. Also, I do want to remind everybody there's only four days left

for the 50% off maps and a ball exhale now the whole platform has been revamped. So the blueprints are brand new. The videos are brand new. It's out now to shiny. It's out. Yeah, it's easier to read. It's easier to follow. And it's 50% off. You have four days left. After the four days, the price goes back up to its normal rate. So here's what you do. If you want to get 50% off, go to maps fitnessproducts.com and use the code red50, RED50, no space for that discount. Now, if you want to look up any of our other programs, if you have different goals aside from building muscle speeding up your toes and getting stronger. We have a lot of other maps programs they can all be found on that site maps fitness products

dot com. So that's it. Here we are talking to John Brankas. Where are you flying to after? I'm going to LA. Oh, back home. Los Angeles. I actually don't live at live in park city now.

Utah. Utah. Do you do ski or snowboard? I do ski. This year I'm taking it off because I got my knee done. So this year's a no ski year. But it's all golf, man. Oh yeah.

It's all about golf. How'd you hurt your knee? So it's just bone on bone. And a bunch of bone flaked off. And rather than getting a knee replacement, I got this new awesome robotic surgery. It's called the MAKO and it basically chisels away your bone and replaces it with metal. It's pretty amazing.

It's much quicker recovery time than a knee replacement. I'm doing incredibly well despite my slow ganks to lean. You're going to turn bionic eventually? Eventually, when everybody says Ray Kurtzwile wrote a book called The Singularity is There. This operation was done by a robot. And my doctor's like, dude, I'm an amazing surgeon. This robot is 10 times better than me.

Wow. So is this the doctor operating the robot from another room, right? No. So the doctor essentially, you take a 3D scan of your knee. So you have three compartments to your knee. So two of my compartments had to be replaced. It scans it. And then it's using the software to say, this is what I want the bone to look like.

That's insane. No. Literally, the robot pins your tibia, pins your femur, puts it in place, you place the robot so it knows where it is in space and hit go. It's all automatic. It just goes,

GEEZING! Like chisels away the bone replaces it with metal and we've arrived. We have arrived and I mean, there's gonna be one of these robots. It's made by, it's made, it's called the mecha, like I said, and there's gonna be a ton of different competing robots to it. There's gonna be, it's literally gonna be like,

when you go in a car wash, they're gonna be like, do you want a new shoulder? You know, it's gonna take over the world. You have to imagine at some point, that's gonna lower the cost of surgery so much when you have, you can mass produce these machines and you don't need to pay them. Like you do a doctor. Yeah, it's pretty nutty.

I mean, it's pretty nutty. The magic in it is just diagnosing some incorrectly that there are a candidate for it. Right. Because I'm 47, my ACL, PCL, MCL and Meniscus are all intact. So it's on the perfect candidate to have this done. You know, if I had torn my ACL or something then you couldn't have this done. Sure.

So it's not yet at least. Not yet, exactly. But I mean, the robotic surgeries, I mean, they're coming and coming fast. Kaiser covers this. It is, it is, it is covered by insurance. Yeah, that's crazy. So yeah, the striker maker, there it is.

Look at that. Oh, wow, look at that. Johnny on the spot. The future is huge. That's what it is. It's unbelievable. If we could just take all the scientists that are working on sex robots

and just dedicated towards those things. We'd have them for everything else. They've been here forever. I don't know where you've been. Man, I'm really excited to have you on the show. You know, I don't know who it was on your team that reached out to ours and we get so many of those sometimes and you're named. I didn't recognize your name.

And you know, we have people that go through all this stuff and say, hey, this guy's a good fit for the show and he's coming on and we were looking at some of your stuff the other day and I was like, oh shit, it's the sports science guy, dude, I'm so excited to talk to you. I've watched like every episode, man. It's pretty funny. We had Bill Nye on the show, we did an award show

and I asked him for official permission, can I be referred to as the sports science guy? You should be able to. I have no, I'm like, very few people are like, brinkest. Everyone's like sports science. Yeah, sports science. Dude, what a great, let's start there and talk about

how much of a role did you play in creating it? Like, how did that all happen? So it all happened, my brother-in-law and I had a production company called Bass Productions and we literally had two different divisions. Now mind you, we started out of the basement of my parent house and we had two different divisions. One was the sports division and we did all of the programming for, they were even the

Washington Bullets back then. It was the Bullets and the Capitals. They were owned by Washington Sports Entertainment and we did the coaches shows, the PSAs, the player profiles, anything that wasn't the actual game we were doing. So we were killing it in that space because we ended up getting the Rangers and the Rams and the Coyotes and a whole bunch of different teams. So we were winning tons of awards,

MEEs and it's called IDEA Awards, and then the Discovery Channel, which was in the DC area there in Maryland, they decided to launch this crazy channel called the Science Channel. As a small production company, based productions was, we were just known for creating really cool hip stuff. The producer from the Science Channel is like, we want you known for creating really cool hip stuff. And the producer from the science channel is like, we want you to make science programming. Well, what kind of stuff are you producing then? So what were you guys doing for all these sports teams? So we, anything that wasn't the game. So if you were in the arena and you

saw anything on the jumbo tron, we created that. There was a commercial for the team. We created, there was a coaches show, we created their fan magazines that were video magazines. We created anything that wasn't the game. Excellent. So we were diving into player profiles and what made somebody special and whatever. So it was very hands-on in terms of sports. So then we get into the science aspect.

I mean, I'm a geek for sport and science. I grew up in the DC area with three super bowls of the Redskins, World Series with Cal Ripkin, NBA championship with Weston, Seldom and the Bullets. Like I'm just a total sports geek. So I'm also a science geek. So when we get a chance to work with discovery and making science live, the young scientist challenge, but put anything science and we were all over it. So we then became known as a production company of the Geyser Making Science. The big change came with a show called XMA Extreme Martial Arts, Clark Bunting, who was the GM of Discovery at the time, said, you guys are, you have a specialty in sport and

a specialty in sport and specialty in science Let's look at what the great masters of martial arts do because they're fading away and new martial arts are starting to Blossom let's look at the old martial arts So we teamed up with a company called Animal Logic out of New Zealand that had just finished this little movie called the Matrix Yeah, and they were on Hyatis. Little movie. And they're looking for something to do. And we're like, hey, we got a show.

We want you to do this thing that's this show's, you know, amazing Larshal Arts. Now that show was so successful on Discovery. Fox came along who owns National Geographic and said, we want you to do the X-May thing, but science it up. So we created a show called Fight Science. We brought in the world's greatest martial artist. Oh, I remember the show.

The show. The show. The show. The show. Yeah. The show. Exactly. It was awesome.

It was, you know, which style generated the most amount of force? I remember this. What a great show. You know, and it was top 10 of all time on National and Geographic. Then Fox owned geographic and the elsewhere in Fox. They put on fight science opposite the original paint manning versus Eli Manning's Sunday night football game.

It was their top three show of the year. No advertising, no nothing. People like, oh my god, the GM at the time. So it was like, people love this stuff. What else do you have? So we have this thing called sport science. We're gonna look at every sport, every athlete. They're like, wow, that's an amazing idea.

How are you gonna get the athletes? I'm like, they're gonna come in for free because they're bad asses. And they're not, when you're like, don't you'll never get them a roll out of bed for less than 50 grand. And I'm like, ah, if you're great at something and you give somebody a platform to show how great they are and measure it for them.

Exactly. And teach them something. They're all over it. So we started off and one of our very first guests was Jerry Rice. Then it was Larry Fitzgerald and Drew Brees and Ben Ralfusberger and Ray Lewis. And just went on and on and on. We ended up running, we were on Fox for two years, we were on ESPN for nine years, we ran 11 seasons that over 1,800 episodes.

And one six MEs were the New York Times bestselling book. It just went on and on and on and on. And I became the host because the GM at the time in Fox said who he can get to host it. They were licensing the property from us and I said, whoever you want, whoever you want, whoever you want, whoever you want to pay for, because you're licensing it from us, I'm not going to pay a host, so if you want to pay a host, knock yourself out. So you said at the time,

he's like, you're going to host. So you host it. I said, all right, I'll host it. If I suck, I'll fire myself. Right. You know, I own the company. I own the production company. We're making the show. So in terms of how involved, very involved.

You know, I was the creator, writer, producer, manager. Like I was doing everything. We hired a phenomenal team that carried us on for 11 years and it's been, you know, it was doing everything. We hired a phenomenal team that carried us on for 11 years and it's been, you know, it was an amazing ride. Now when you're doing it, when you were starting out with these shows, the fight science and sports science,

were there preconceived notions you had about these, just extreme athletes that were completely shattered? Like do you remember the first time you were, you had an idea like, oh I think the reason why, you know, an athlete is good at this is because of this. And then it just totally changed your mind. Absolutely. Jerry Rice actually is a great example.

So Jerry Rice, when everyone's like, oh, why is he the best receiver? People are like, he's big and he's strong and he's fast. You ask Jerry Rice. He's like, I'm not that fast. No, no. And he's like, he doesn't rank in the top 500. I don't even think he

was the fastest guy on his team during that time either. It wasn't the fastest guy at his own position. Right. Like he wasn't that fast. Now you say, so how can you be a great receiver without being that fast? There's a phenomenal staff that I love to point to. That is top five running backs of all time by yards gained. Can you name the top five running backs by yards gain? Emma Smith, very, very, very, very, there's amateurs is up there. Yep, LT. Okay.

Right, LT, Walter Payton, and Curtis Martin. None of them. No. No. No. None of them are taller than six feet. They're six feet in below. None of them were the than six feet. They're six feet in below.

None of them were the fastest on their team. Most weren't the fastest at their own position. So this gives you an example when you're like, well, bigger, stronger, faster is better, but it's not. Here's why there are two laws, two Newtonian physics laws that prove this. F equals MA, forces mass times acceleration. This means that the bigger the

mass, the bigger the acceleration, the bigger the force. So if I'm really small and really fast, I experience a tremendous amount of force because there's a second law. Two objects that collide, each experience the same amount of force. Wearing terror. That's that wear and tear. So you can't be Brandon Jacobs, who was the largest starting running back in the history of the NFL. He's not going to go down as one of the greatest of all time.

You just can't, you can't endure the punishment. You also can't be Java best, who was one of the fastest, he's one of the fastest athletes ever in the NFL. There's a stat that really supports this in the electronic, electronic timing era, the top 10 fastest 40 yard dash times, according to the NFL's electronic timing, top 10 fastest offensive players, eight of, or two of the top 10 have a thousand yards

in a season. The other eight don't have a thousand yards in their career. Well, and that means that if you're GM sitting back, if someone's like way high on the chart in terms of speed, you don't draft them. Now do you think that NFL teams have started recruiting different since your show? Like for example, I think it would be very, very normal for an NFL team to go to the combine look at speed as the number one thing that we're looking for because it's a wide receiver. And because of the information that you've put out on the show, do you know if teams are looking at different things instead of just that?

So I do know that, this is what I can say with confidence. We have changed the draft position of a lot of players. Really? So quarterbacks, wide receivers, DBS, running backs, I mean, especially the skill positions. I mean, you just, when what's interesting is, if you're drafting a team, look at the Patriots.

Right, their wide receivers are dudes who look like me. Right, like Bella check, Bella check might recruit me. You know, I'd be like, hey, come here, I need you, I just need you to run this route. You gotta have the courage to go across the middle. Brady's gonna get you the ball on time. Everything's great.

He's gonna have great protection in front of him. He's gonna have plenty of time to make a decision. He's gonna get you the ball. He's built the team the correct way, which is inside out. Like building it with the skill players around you. The truth is, and it was an amazing experience, and we did Monday night football forever, and we were doing segments for them.

And you had the analysts who were very good friend of mine and they would sit around and watch guys, you'd be like, wow, that guy's amazing. They'd go, nah, just another dude. There are tons of guys off the street, just as good as this guy. And you just, what happens is that someone makes an amazing play.

They keep making amazing plays because of the scheme they have, they develop a name and that name develops value. And all of a sudden you say, oh my God, that guy is so much better than this other guy. But the truth is, is they just got exposure and they're easily swapped out. So you see that often.

If you look at Antonio Brown in Smith's Schuster, you look at the, well, who's the better receiver? Well, Smith's Schuster is getting a lot of action because Antonio Brown was the main receiver. Yeah, double covered. So would Smith's Schuster be somebody if he was on a team where he was the number one? That's the question, isn't, is he good enough? Is Antonio Brown, so, and he's been on the show several times, he is a special, amazing, incredible receiver. But he also has a Hall of Fame quarterback.

They also have an amazing offensive line. They also had amazing running backs. Like all those things that fit together change your view in terms of one singular athlete of when you say, how great are they, especially in the sport of basketball football. Now you had the opportunity to have all kinds of the biggest baddest guys come through your show. Did you have one that just stood out that was like, holy shit, like just where's blowing numbers off of everything and you were like, I've never seen something like this before. Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is, so endomethonson.

I remember that episode. When he hit the dot, with a fast-distance dummy. There's four, I'm like this. Oh my lord. Everybody it was interesting because it was one of the first segments we shot for ESPN and it was literally the tackle heard around the world. The build the physical building

shook. I mean it was he was and anybody who knows him he is the nicest guy. Yeah. You have you've never read anything about endomethonsuit off the field field where it's a go He got in trouble. He got in a bar fight. He got what he's just a clean living awesome guy Which is funny because everybody thinks he's the opposite because of his attitude on the field right was stepping on guys and doing Whatever, you know and he and he and I definitely become very friendly and what's funny is he's like you know What's interesting is that here do you have in the NFL these stories of of like, oh, I've played dirty or I stepped on a player. And he's like, did anybody watch my college tape? Did anybody watch me almost kill quarterbacks in college? That's why you drafted me number two.

Like now you want to say, hey, you're at the professional level, stopping for a while. Yeah. Stop it. He's like, calm down. He's like, there's no different. You it. He's like, he's like, there's no different. You know, it's really, he's really a fascinating guy. And he's like, look, I'm on the field. I play incredibly, incredibly, I'm focused.

I'm determined. I'm super intent off the field. I know the rules are different. I need to be a nice human being and very kind. But you're paying, we can separate the two. Yeah, right. You can't imagine that.

It's pretty amazing. Yeah, I remember the first time I saw a professional athlete just running, just this big human being who you wouldn't anticipate to move that fast, and to see it in person is totally different than watching it on TV. But what did it feel like getting hit?

Because there were episodes where you get choked out by profiders, you're getting hit by professional football player. Was it totally different that way you could have expected? Yeah, it was generally speaking people are like, oh, what's the worst that you've been heard on the show? And I'll mind you, we owned a company that made the show, I was a host of the show. So I'm like, I became the crash test dummy

because I'm not going to assume myself. I'm like, this is a dumb idea, but I'll do it. So I, you know, Vernon Davis, Dragon Man, we were trying to hold Vernon Davis back off the line of scrimmage to, like, not just think of this. We're sitting around, I mean, this was actually, this was actually thought of ahead of time. We're sitting around going, let's see if we can hold Vernon Davis off the line with a water ski tow rope. That'll be amazing. We're like, yeah, wonder what's going to happen.

This is in the early days. So he launches me five feet off the air. I crash down on the ground. All the skid on my arm is shaved off. I'm like, no. This is, that goes into the file of not terribly well thought through. So there it is. I mean, this is like totally, it's up to a drag race car.

Yeah, it's totally ridiculous. We had a, there's an episode called the Nutty Buddy where I take a shot to the groin wearing a cup that's called the dundy buddy, not a 90 mile an hour fast. Oh, no. To the, you know, right to the area. And you know, where I'm standing there and I'm freaking out. And I'm saying, I'm like, this is the dumbest idea ever.

And the, you know, the guys who make dundy, they're like, trust me, we test this thing, it's gonna be fine. I'm standing four feet away from a pitching machine. And I'm saying to myself, what if it hits my bladder? What if it just somehow caroms off and isn't right? So I'm very worried, worked out all fine. Everything was great.

The one of the funniest episodes was we had Dwight Freany. I'm just standing there. I'm like, what would happen if I just stood there, just standing and Dwight Freany hits me? So I'm all padded up, I'm standing in my shoes. He literally hits me, wily coyote style, out of my shoes. You came out of your shoes. I came out of my shoes.

I'm just standing there. That's insane. That was just from a dead stopper. Was he running at you? No, he's running at me. Oh, gosh. He's running at me. And it was just a bang in about on my shoes.

That's good. Look at how hard you have to be hit. I had brain and Jacobs hit me. The clip I'm bringing in and Jacobs hitting me is ridiculous because he's the largest starting running back of all time. And he hits me so hard. It's the, if you look up on YouTube, it's so ridiculous. But what the hit that you see is hit number seven.

Oh, God. Because he's like retakeable. It was a, he's like, dude, I'm gonna kill you. He was actually afraid. He was afraid he was gonna kill me. Which, Oh wow, he was letting up on the first ones. Which was a legitimate concern.

I'm like, but even running half speed, you could kill me. So, let's see, if it's gonna happen, let's just get it over with. Let's get it over with. Let's get on camera. Right, because I'm like, I don't want, I don't want these tiny little numbers popping up So if it's gonna happen, let's just get it over with. Right on our camera.

Right, because I'm like, I don't want these tiny little numbers popping up on the screen on the biggest running back of all time. They've got to be real numbers. So nothing in the show was ever embellished. We always, like all the numbers had to be real because if they weren't real and word got out, then people would be like, ah, that's a bunch of questions. Now I would imagine to these athletes, I mean, they gotta be having fun doing all this stuff. So are they like trying, they gotta be back there

trying to do the best they can to improve their numbers, yeah? It's amazing, and I told everybody when they came a lot, I said, look, when you are doing anything, there's a true set, you can look up the amount of injuries that happen in practice versus games. Like when you're going 80% and your body is not entirely engaged, you're more likely to get hurt than if you're going 100%. That's interesting.

Because your body just isn't ready to absorb someone else's 100% effort. So in practice, they're just way more injury. So I'm like, look, we're setting up this test, this test is something that a lead athlete can do. So we set up a test where, like, look, if I can do the test and do it well, then it's not a very good test. It's gotta be something that an a lead athlete can do. Like if you go 100%, this is a one-take thing.

So guys get all amped up and all jacked up and they wanna show how good could I do? We had Martian Lynch and Dragon Tires and eating bowls of skittles and seeing how skittles end up affecting him. Doing blood sugar tests like Marcian is a trip. You asked about people who made a huge impression. Ray Lewis, a massive impression. It's one of my best friends.

I have a foundation with them called the Ray of Hope foundation. It's rayofhopefoundation.org. We're having a big event down at the Super Bowl. Yeah, this thing is having a Super Bowl party together, right? Yeah, I believe that we made that as a deal. If you're gonna come on the show that you get a three tickets, I think to go. I like your style.

Yeah, I like that, man. Are you guys gonna be down in Atlanta? Well, shit, we might have to. We might have to. I'll get you. If you guys get on to Atlanta, I'll get you in. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God, we're going now. Well, shit, we might have to. We might have to. I'll get you. If you guys good on it, land, I'll get you in. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God, we're going now.

Yeah, we have a hundred percent. You guys find a plane ticket in a hotel room. Good luck. Yeah, right. I'll sleep in a jet. I don't care. So we'll get you in the party. It's awesome.

So it raised amazing human beings. So you would be a fun person. My buddies and I, this is like, I mean, we've done it since we were kids. We loved to like look at these super athletes and then like, what if, you know, what if he did this? So like, when do the LeBron James played soccer? No, what if LeBron James played tight in in football?

What do you think? So let's do the math. Let's all just sit back and do the math on it. The question is, can he play tight in? And we all know the answer answer of course he could play tight Right, yeah, he's big. Yeah, he's really big. Yeah, no right he's he's drunk big He's big, right? I mean the dude we're not talking about a small tight end. So what do our equations tell us right and equals M.A Could he have played tight end sure?

Tell us right and equals MA could he have played tight end sure would he play 10 years without getting hurt Not it's the long game really right? It's like there's no way and that's why when you're a thinkin What God will it would sports that play for him? You're like look you might spray in your ankle and basketball You might spray in your wrist and something might happen, but you're but you're not gonna break your femur. You're not gonna just get destroyed like you can in football. So that's really, that's really a question. But LeBron is one of the greatest athletes of all time. And in fact, we did a whole, an eight-month study of the greatest athletes of all time.

Who's the greatest single athlete to ever walk the planet of all time? What are your stipulations? Now stipulations are. So this is what we did. We created a 30-category aggregate metric. So it means that you got ranked and you would add up all of the points based on your ranking in 30 different categories. The criteria was how good were you versus the competition you played? How good were you versus the competition that came before you? How good were you versus the competition you played? How good were you versus the competition that came before you? How good were you relative to the competition who came after you? And how good are you relative to the other people who were analyzing?

So where it was applicable. So you take somebody, you know, you take somebody as an example like Jim Brown, right? Is Jim Brown the greatest athlete of all time? You take Michael Jordan. Is he the greatest athlete of all time? So we created this metric and I created a category that was just durability because I wanted it to be the bow jacks and killer. I just said, you know what?

A lot of people are just going to go, well, bow jacks and the greatest athlete of all time. Right. That's an immediate thought. The immediate right. That's because he was an immediate thought. The immediate thought. Now, you think about it. People became, you played during, but before and after and against everybody else, right? Bo Jackson today in the NFL is a monster.

He still is amazing, right? So I said durability. After we spent eight months, just really, really fine-tuning this this metric turns out the greatest athlete of all time is Bo Jackson well, yeah, even though he ranked low in durability He was so high in speed and agility and power coordination and blah blah and as it as it turns out in durability and blah, blah. And as it turns out,

in durability, Jim Brown only played football for 10 years. Bo Jackson played baseball for eight. Right. So it wasn't that short of a career. Right, I mean, imagine him just playing football. Right. I keep thinking about that. Or just baseball.

I mean, he was in both really high demanding sports. And he's the only athlete ever to be an all star in two professional sports. So crazy. And everyone goes, no, Dion was not. Bo Jackson is the only person. Well, it's pretty crazy. So, Bo one, huh?

Bo one. Oh, wow. Bo knows and Bo came on the show. And I mean, I do not get star struck. I am like the, I've dealt with thousands of the greatest athlete. But when Bode Jackson comes on your show and sits down and you're honoring him as the greatest athlete of all time and you're, you know, you get free reign to be like, so how did this happen?

How does that happen? I'm like a kid in a candy store and I asked you know, I literally, this was actually before the 30th, 30 for 30, Erin, on a bow. Just a great episode. Which is a great episode. True story, I'm like, you know, how did you have, remember, his arm was unbelievable. How was that, how was your arm so amazing?

He's like, I stuttered his kid, I was small, I was bullied, and we had crab apple fights all the time. And I would have to pick up crab apples and throw it at my cousins and friends to defend myself. And that's how I developed a strong arm, was defending myself, throwing crab apples. And I'm like, how are you so fast? He's like, I had to run away from everybody. I mean, like real practical things.

And here's a crazy thing that people don't know about Bo Jackson the very first time. So in so he grew up in Alabama in the very first time in high school in a senior year. His coat he started obviously developed. He obviously was developed and was no longer you know the small kid. But he still you know he's still speech wise. He was like you know what? I you know I had a little bit of a stutter and I you know wasn't what you know, the small kid. But he still, you know, he's still speech wise. He was like, you know what, I had a little bit of a stutter and I, you know, wasn't, you know, wasn't great with the media. But I was, people were noticing me.

His track coach came to him and said, you know what, why don't you do the decaflon? And he's like the decaflon. He's like, what's in that? And they start listing off, or there's like the high jump in the hundred meters and then he gets to the mile. And he goes, mile.

He goes, I'm not running a mile. He's like, coach, I'll do the decafalon as long as I don't have to run the mile. And the coach said, well, you have to be ahead by so many points that if you get a zero in the decafalon, you still win. He's like, all right, I'll do it. And he won.

Shut the fuck up. He won. Without running. Without running the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. Literally was sitting here. He's just a natural. There was the last event.

And he was sitting in the stands. And he's like, I know I already won. Because nobody can score enough points to be me. Wow. Oh, that's hilarious. That's amazing. Talking to some of these extreme athletes and the best in the world, like, what is the, what would you say is the thing that really if it's not size and strength and speed, like

you had mentioned, you know, you talked about how the best running backs of all time were not the fastest, Jerry Rice. Right. Wasn't even close to being one of the fastest. What is it that separates these great athletes from everybody else? So there are two things. One is the audacity to believe you can be great. Now you think about that. Now when you show up and you're like,

you know what, I think I can be great at this. And have that, I call that superhero voice in your head that you actually believe with, you know, guys who are 300 pounds in front of you and you weigh in the average weight of the top five running backs is 215. So, say you weigh 215 and you're looking at a guy who's 100 pounds heavier than you. And you're like, you know what? It's nothing.

I'm going to crush this. I'm going to figure my way around it. The audacity to believe that. The second thing is that, great athletes, we did the study with men and women in special forces. They don't get nervous. You don't get nervous. And we had Travis Pastrana when he set the record for the longest car jump into Sedan,

down in Long Beach, jumping onto a carrier. His heart rate coming out of the tent was 85. Shut up. He gets into the deal as fuck. He gets into an extreme stuff all day. Right. He gets into the car, 85. Drives the car, 85.

Wow. launches 85 lands, 85. Get out of the car. It's 140. He's 85. Wow. Launches 85, lands 85, gets out of the car, it's 140, he's celebrating. Wow. It's just a, Jordan, do you think Jordan at the free-throw line is freaking out and his heart rate is like, oh my god, do you think Jordan's like, dude, I got this. And when if he doesn't make the shot, Jordan's not like, darn it, oh, I stink. Right? He's like, um, look, it was the ball. It was the balls fault. Yeah, it's the balls. I'm just not that, that

mentality of being calm. And I love to, to analogize it to, you know, you think of somebody who's a Navy seal, right? I mean, when, when, you know, everything's hit in the fan, are you calm? Or are you freaking out? And that's it. I'm like, look, you know, everything's hitting the fan, are you calm or are you freaking out? And that's it, I'm like, look, I'd be a terrible, you know, like, I wouldn't even qualify because I'd be the guy out of the room. Someone in the special forces, or, you know, a Jordan or a Tiger or a LeBron or whomever,

they're standing there and they're saying, I got this. Yeah, well, that's why you see the greatest emerge is when all the stakes are even higher. And then they're the ones that, you ones that pull through because they're so calm. Absolutely. Well I think we have a lot of evidence to show that that mental state is so important. Humans were so limited by these arbitrary limitations, these mental ones, four minute miles and obvious example everybody uses.

We've seen this in extreme sports, like the first guy to do a flip in a motorcycle. Next thing you know, in that same season, 15 other people do it and it's not that big of a deal. How do people, is there a way that people can improve upon that, or is that something that these guys are born with? So I'm gonna refer everybody to a book

and this is, I am not saying this is correct. Rise of Superman. But I am going to refer everybody to a book and this is I am not saying this is correct. Right, it's a Superman. But I am going to tell you it is an interesting, interesting theory and way to look at the world. There's a guy named Rupert Schelderick and the theory of Morphic resonance. And the theory of Morphic resonance is that thought does not originate from inside your head. Thought our DNA is a receptor to external messages that are being sent. So the messages that we receive as humans are the human signal, dogs receive the dog signal. And there are all of these animal studies that are done,

where they'll take ants, and ants will be building an ant hill. They'll take a half ants from the north side of one hill, swap it with the south side of the other hill, and the ants will continue to build in the correct direction. They'll switch. And the question is, well, how did they know? They don't even know they were moved.

They were moved in a pile. There are experiments with mice where they take mice from the same exact genealogy, put them in a maze and they put the half in London, half in New York and they solve the maze within a few minutes of each other. You take the four-minute mile as an example. The four-minute mile is an arbitrary distance, arbitrary time. It was the impossible, right?

Sirajor Bannister does it in 1954. 46 days later, it's broken again. Within the next, it's then broken 300 times in the next 10 years, that's once every 12 days. Is that because we, is that because we saw it? Or is it now just part of us of, oh, we can do that? When we started sports science, one of the very first segments we did was,

Sean White doing a double cork. Can you believe that, right? And now if you can't do a triple cork. Can you believe that, right? And now if you can't do a triple cork, like you're not even competing, it becomes part of us and becomes part of the accepted things that we can do. And you can think about this. And again, I started this by saying,

I don't think it's right, but there's something to the idea of it becomes a part of us that when some, you know, whether it's a mental or physical activity, we as a collective species believe, oh, I can do that, and I can do that even better. Well, yeah, you just, I mean, to your point of the two major things that make these super athletes is the audacity to believe that they can. Obviously seeing somebody else do it increases that for sure. 100%. So, you know, I want to get into your TED talk. You did a TED talk not that long ago in regards to, and I think it's a great conversation to have and potentially a debate over it because I don't even know if I fully agree. And you make the case that boys and girls should be competing against each

other from day one. Talk about that a little bit. So, so here's the idea. Look, I have a 10 year old, I have a 10 year old daughter and I have a 12 year old son. And as a parent and doing sports science and growing up, like, you know what, my daughter, she's a three, she's three time Utah State champion in gymnastics. She is, her powered away ratio, her powered strength ratio is unbelief. She has been the fastest not girl,

but human in all of her classes, right? So when they start separating out teams, they say, okay, we're gonna make a soccer team today. All the girls over here, all the boys over there, I'm like, why would you separate my girl, my daughter, from the boys, when she's way faster, way more coordinated, way stronger, like my daughter is better than any of the boys. My theory is, look, when we talk about

the greatness that humans can achieve, and you say, who's the better athlete a man or a woman? I always say, well, what sport are we talking about? The strongest man is always going to be stronger than the strongest woman. The fastest man is always going to be stronger than the strongest woman. The fastest man is always going to be faster than the fastest woman. But are those really the metrics that we're measuring? Because I just prove to you at equals M.A.

You don't need to be the fastest. You don't need to be the strongest. People immediately point to football and say, well, women aren't going to play in football. And I say, fine, men don't play football. The worldwide percentage of men who play professional football is 0.0002. That's zero. So men don't get to play it. I didn't get to play it.

You guys aren't playing professional football. So why not, from the get go, if we're gonna argue and argue about true equality, why not have boys and girls just play sports together? Girls will dominate until age, somewhere between age 12 and 14. They mature faster, they're more coordinated, they're smarter, they're everything, then boys,

up to that point. Now, boys will take over at age 14 until whenever, but isn't, don't you think if we line up billions of girls from day one? Now, this is, this can't happen today. You can't mix them together today. It would have to be day one. If you mix them together, I point to baseball, dart, bowling, golf, sports where you're like, where does a man really have an advantage? Yeah. If you take the billions of boys and girls, give them equal roles, equal access, and equal expectations, the number of women who make it at the highest level isn't zero.

I don't know what it is, but it's not zero. And for some reason, I haven't heard anybody else raise their hand on this. Why do we still have a T called the Ladies T? Like why is the Ladies T the closest T? What's the world record for men in the long drive championship? It's 417 yards.

What's the record for a woman? It's 407 yards. Like there's no biomechanical disadvantage that a woman has of swinging a bat or swinging a club. There's just no disadvantage. People who dissent about the article all say, well, you know, look, by college, there won't be any girls left. Like, well, look, right now we have a men's team and we have a women's team and then you have practice squads or whatever. My argument is let nature sort itself out. So more skill and kind of physics-based sports is what you're saying. I think the obviously the side where I mean, like what I say, well, no woman's going to

play offensive one. I can't even say that for sure. But you would say, okay, let's just throw that out. What my argument would be is looking basketball. What kind of could a woman play, play in the NBA if you started them from day one? I think a Maya Moore type plank guard would somehow break through and be just as good. We had John Wall and Maya Moore in the lab at the exact same time. They ran the exact same test and Maya Moore ended up, her through the agility drills, dribbling the ball. She was one one hundredth of a second slower than John Wall. And you're like, you know, it's some point card, not a center. And John Wall is one of the fastest point cards in the game. Yeah. Yeah. Right.. Ever he was the number one draft pick.

You're like, you know what? I think that if we have an open mind about it and if we don't get caught up, like I put out darts and bowling, why is that? Yeah, make no sense. No, you make it work. No, yeah, sure. And as a girl, if you're a girl growing up, right, today, you're like, I want to be a professional athlete.

I want to play tennis. You say, oh, will you know what, sweetie? You only have to play three sets. You don't have to play five, because if you play five, you're gonna die. Only men can play five sets. It's like, I wanna play basketball. Oh, you know what, the games are shorter,

and the ball is smaller. Like, I wanna play each. Like each, like, yeah, I wanna play basketball. Oh, you know what, the games are shorter and the ball is smaller. Like, I want to play, like each, like, yeah, I want to play golf. Oh, well, the T's, it's 50 yards closer. So, because you can't hit the ball as far as the boys. Like, that's what we're modeling. Where if you model for some, I mean, I'm 5'8, 160. I'm not a great athlete.

And guess what nature did? It weeded me out. I didn't get a chance to play at a high level I played youth sports, but if they're and they were and and even during my time there are plenty of girls who are You were better than I was and now I got into endurance sports and you look at when I talked about who's a better athlete When we talk about endurance sports talked about who's a better athlete. When we talk about endurance sports, who's the only person to win back-to-back bad water ultra-marathons, 135 miles through death valley?

Only human, Pam Reid, mother of four, is the only person, the longer a race goes, the higher percentage of women winning. Who's the only human being on the planet? 7,000 people have submitted Everest. There's one person who swam from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage, a 63 year old woman in Diana Niet. Right? So who's the better athlete?

You say both or Diana Niet, it's kind of apples and oranges. They're different sports. We can't just say, oh, this is the definitive. No, you're making a very compelling and actually brilliant case because I'll extend this to other things as well. I actually believe on your side, especially the way you're explaining it, where if, first and foremost, we just talked about the limits that we impose upon ourselves.

And you have to imagine that kids growing up being separated by gender probably imposes quite a bit of limits on the girls themselves. Now some sports I would argue probably will favor men at the higher levels, the ones that require more size and more strength. The ones with endurance, I think you made some great cases that women tend to, if we look at the extreme athletes,

they actually are a little bit better in enduring. It could be with their, because of their ability to store more body fat and that's more readily available fuel that you use in those types of things. It could be that they're maybe less anaerobic and so they burn energy at a slower pace, which is more beneficial. But I think you're making a really, really compelling case.

So rather than, you know, break up the sports, especially for kids, is, you know, boy and girl, maybe just make them like the best, the best players competing this league and then if you're in this, you know, ABC type of, type of deal. Totally. When people say, oh, it's not fair, it's never going to be 50-50. And like since, since when is 50-50? What, why is it supposed to be? Yeah, why do we want it? Yeah, why do you, why is that the right number? When you're like, well, it's, the world's half-women,

half-men, it's going to be 50-50. I'm like, not in every sport, in bowling, it might be. In football, it's, I love to say men don't play football. Other, that's some, that's a different category. It's true, you put me in football and I love to say men don't play football. That's some that's it's true. You put me in football and I'll die. I'll literally die probably within the first five minutes. Right. You can't play. And okay, so no women could play either. Fine. There's and I love the idea of being weeded out, like realizing so I as an athlete, I was the fastest kid in sixth grade. I set the record for VN Elementary,

for the 600 yard dash in the presidential physical fitness, which has a boys standard and a girl standard. The girls have to do fewer pushups. Girls have to do fewer sit-ups. The girls don't even dare do pull ups. They do a barhand, right? I'm like, how insulting is this to a little girl to say, I mean, when they're literally in second grade,

you're never gonna be as good as the boys. In fact, we're gonna lower the standards for you. That's insulting to me. If someone said, brinkets, you can join us, but we're gonna lower the standard, you're like, what? Yeah, I agree with you. You know, what really makes me upset is when the standards are changed

for certain physical jobs. There is actual police departments and fire departments and the military, where if in some cases, if you're a woman, you, in order to qualify to do this dangerous job, you have to do less pushups, run less with less speed, carry less weight, all in the name of, because I think it's the quality,

which is funny, that's the way we're chasing it. Yeah, because the real equality would be, here's the standards, if you can do it, then you're in, doesn't matter if you're a boy or girl or whatever. Total. I think it's extremely patronizing to say, no, you're a standard or lower,

because so I actually agree with you. I thought I would actually disagree with this point, but you're making some very, very good points. I think, and I love, there is why I'm most passionate about it, because I'm witnessing it with my kids. If you look, look at the sport of LaCrosse, it is exploding. I mean, it is unbelievable how many kids play LaCrosse to my son, you know, as an avid LaCrosse player.

You look at girls LaCrosse, it's not even the same sport. You wear no pads, you're not allowed to touch somebody else. You're not like, they don't wear helmets. They want, you can't hit anybody. I'm like, they like, huh? This is because women are weak and fragile. Like what, it doesn't make any sense to me that it's not even remotely the same sport.

And that modeling is bad. And in terms of politically, when we're sitting back and we're all, and if we're arguing about who gets to use which bathroom, I'm like, let's just start with, can't we all just play together? I mean, it's like, play together and I believe it's a good thing to be weeded out.

I think it is a very good thing to, you know what? I was the best in sixth grade, genuinely. It was the fastest kid. Seventh grade, I was like top 10. Eighth grade, I was probably top 30. Ninth grade, I was probably top 50. I just kept going down the totem pole. Like that was a good thing for me.

That's what inspired that when you look at sports science, I became an awe of the guy who played in front of me and football ended up playing professionally in the CFL. He was so much better than I was and I'm like, how is he like so much faster, so much stronger, so much better. That's a good thing. It is a humbling thing. It is a realizing what you can and cannot do. I didn't get any breaks. I didn't get any special treatment. I was just told, sit on the bench. Yeah, in reality, the argument you're making

isn't really, you know, men are better than women or women are better than men. Your argument is see what happens and there's a lot you can learn from being weeded out. I mean, there's, you know, and when I looked at your, I watched that TED talk and I read the comments underneath and it was very controversial. You had people going back and forth and people were bringing up like, there's been a couple cases where like professional soccer, female teams were playing the under 18 men's team, you know,

and losing by five points and, you know, as evidence that men are better athletes, and, you know, they can't even beat the under 18 men's. Well, you know, how would they compete against? But I like what you're saying about, what's the difference? Fine, if a professional league doesn't have any women, but, you know, from birth, they're allowed to compete together, that can only be a good thing.

And then you had mentioned how, you know, Bo Jackson got so good because of his adversity. And how do you feel about how children's sports are being done today where, gosh, when I was a kid, it started right around after I stopped playing sports as a kid where they don't want to keep score. They're giving everybody a trophy. They're not letting anybody lose. Like, how do you feel about that? Cause I feel like there's a lot lost in that. I think it, I think it's, I think it's an atrocity because losing, when you, when to lose something,

there are so many great lessons, right? Did you lose because you didn't pull your weight? Did you lose because the skin you were playing wasn't very good, even at an early age. You learn from losing, you learn from it. Failure, my wife has a great expression. Failure is a fun and interesting lesson. You get to learn like, how you know what?

This is why this didn't work. What if Michael Jordan had made his JB team? We all know you didn't. What, it was a good thing that he didn't. Why was if Michael Jordan had made his JV team? We all know you didn't. It was a good thing that he didn't. Why was that a good thing? Because he's like, why did I not make my JV team? And I've had a great opportunity to get to know Jordan. He, like, that fire. I'm coming back. And not only am I going to make the varsity team, I I'm gonna crush it. That idea of, look, I failed, I didn't work. Going off to play baseball. I mean, thank God he went off to go play baseball

and he's like, I'm not that level. You know, I tried, I wasn't. I need to go back to the thing where I can dominate. That's a good thing. And in any career, when you sit back and say, am I great at this and do I love doing it? That's, when you fail at a job or fail at an occupation, it's a good thing because you now have eliminated something

you shouldn't do. Go find something that you're better at, no matter what it is. Yeah, I think we're, I think it's a huge problem. And I think the bottom line is life is gonna make you, you're gonna lose it shit anyway. Even if you try to protect kids as much as you want, at some point life is gonna hit them really hard

and they're gonna have to figure out how to deal with it. So how do you talk to your, how do you talk to your daughter about this? Cause I'm sure she's grown up in this, this era of, you know, we all get trophies that we lose. So what does that conversation look like? So we're at, you know, she's at that, she's at that TED talk. And what's interesting is in gymnastics, it's in gymnastics, as she, you know, we're,

why not? She's level six, like, you know, college, Olympian level is level 10. So she's in level six now and she's 10. So she's doing really well. She, they give out the doing really well. They give out the top some needs will give out like top 10 medals. And she will say, that's pretty ridiculous. I mean, do you see like 10th place at the Olympics? Now she'll be first. And she's like, well, I'm first no matter if they're people have 10 or people whatever, but giving out all those

medals is really encouraging kids. Keep going, keep going, you got a medal, you did really well. It's in where my daughter will just say, you finished 10th. You know, like, I don't know, is that good? There were 12 girls in the meat. I'm not sure that's so good.

And I say to my daughter, say don't ever let somebody tell you that you're going to lose because you're a girl. If you're running against somebody, if you're playing soccer against somebody, if you're playing lacrosse against somebody, if you're skiing against, I was like, don't let anybody tell you that. And there's that there is the Heidi Volker, you know, had this, never let the boys beat you phrasing this last Olympic sheet, you know, it's skied long goes, it's good, and it's a very good friend of mine, and Michaela Schifflin is the,

now like the baller in skiing. And there's not a whole lot of advantage that a man has. What a man has is greater mass. So coming out of a turn, you can have greater G-force, and you can get chewed out of it, but you know, Lindsay Vaughn's not a small person, right? She could dominate because she wasn't tiny, right? So like, let them ski together.

And Heidi is totally on board. And the comments and the Ted talk about, oh, well, we couldn't be the 18 year old, whatever. I'm like, because you guys weren't playing together since day one And if you were playing you guys divided it up by gender I bet if you would started playing from day one those teams wouldn't have been all boys all girls It's it's an interesting theory and you're making me think about like if you've ever watched Basketball in the 50s like one ever watched basketball in the 50s, like professional basketball in

the 50s, it's really John Wooden area. It's really like slow and fundamental and it looks like the women's professional team could probably beat these guys. And you know, we over time, you've seen the game evolve. I mean, now when you watch basketball, you know, compared to the 50s, it's like, oh my God, the best team I don't think could handle the best team today because of just the way the ball moves and how fast and how much science has

evolved, how much we've learned and play call everything. So it makes me think like, wow, maybe if girls had that ability to be playing professional basketball since the 50s, where would it, where would they be? And I've seen the evolution of it just in the last 10 years. I remember the first time that, you know, the WNBA came on and I kind of like, I scoffed at it. Like, oh, God, this looks boring.

And I don't want to watch this. But I've already seen in 10 years the evolution of their game. It's fascinating to see how much better they are and how more skilled they are today than they were just 10 years ago. Did you want, wasn't it? You conn Notre Dame that was just on? Didn't Notre Dame just upset? No, I didn't see that.

Oh, yeah. It was, I mean, I flipped it on. I couldn't stop watching. I'm like, this is just amazing basketball. One thing for your audience, I'm sure there are tons of people who have, I think actually might have been bail or not, not a, not a Notre Dame. But for your audience, have you ever run a marathon?

Have you ever done an Iron Man? Have you ever run a 5K, and has a woman ever finished in front of you? And when guys are like, and it's called getting checked, like there is no shame in getting checked. In realizing, like I can say in all sincerity, my wife is a 10 time better athlete than I am.

She's so much better than I am, no shame in it. Right? For first half marathon, she runs a 125. I could never, I like my legs would fall off to run a one-two. She's better. Like it's just that simple. You know what it is.

It's funny because what we try to do, we forget that we're individuals in the sense that we try to claim the victories of some group that we feel like we fit in. Like, for example, I have a buddy who's Greek and my family's from Italy. And so we're getting these debates over. The Romans did this and the Greeks did this and I didn't do shit. He didn't do shit either.

You know what I'm saying? So when you look across the spectrum and we can do this, we can generally look across the spectrum and we can see that men tend to make up the larger percentage of the extremes. Like there's more crazy criminals that are men and there's more super extreme, you know, certain types of performers that are men. But's more super extreme, you know, certain types of performers

that are men. But does that, just because I'm a man, does that mean that I get to be like, yeah, you know, we're, what did I do? We're all individuals. Right. You know, if you put me in, you know, I did your Jitsu for a long time, you put me on the mats against Ronda Rousey, she's probably going to kick my ass and even, it doesn't matter if the best men in the world could beat her, because that's really,

I think what it boils down to is just look at the individual and it's funny when we talk about these mental limits that we place on ourselves, I think you're right, it's almost impossible to see how deep they are and how far they are, like how much they've impacted us until we just did an episode where we talked about the placebo effect and just how incredibly powerful it can be. In fact, they have to add, you know, in studies, they have to account for it. So I think you're making a very compelling argument.

I want to take you back to the sports science in CTE, in football, and I want to get your opinion on, or actually find out what kind of strategies like the NFL's implementing, or like how they're really going to address this massive problem. So I'm going to say, this is quasi-controversial. So we know, let's call it CT.

It's a new thing, right? What is CT? We don't really know exactly what it is. We don't know exactly how you get it. We're piecing together a cause and effect that may or may not exist. Are we looking at the cross section of brains of an 86 year old woman who never played sports at all to see if she has CTE? We're taking athletes, right? And if we then argue, we then argue that, you know what,

these combat sports, these collision sports are, and you have a higher risk of getting CTE. You have a higher risk of breaking your leg. You have a higher risk of getting your eye poked out. You have a higher risk of getting all kinds of stuff. And if we're to really be serious about this, and really, truly say, I care about CTE so much that I'm not gonna let my child play a sport if there's a risk of them getting it.

What sports are we left with? I mean, the number one on the list of where you can't let them participate is any kind of extreme sport that's in the X games. They can't skate board, they can't, they can't ski, they can't snowboard, the rate of concussions and the age of the concussions is out of control. The NFL, I think, did a very poor job

of getting out in front of the message and saying, look, there's a new piece of evidence out there that collisions cause CTE. We're gonna look into it across all sports. We are going to lead the way, and we're gonna look at with the NHL, and we're gonna look at rugby, and we're gonna look at boxing,

and we're gonna look at the UFC, and we're gonna look at everything, because we're that concerned. So my answer to it all is, I think as a species, as a general, consuming public of sports, I don't think we care all that much. I don't think we're not gonna watch the Super Bowl

because we think someone might get a concussion. The high, in my proof is, so it's the highest grossing pay-per-view event ever. Yeah, may weather. May weather, Mcgregor, right. What were they fighting for? Yeah. Like, may weather. May weather. MacGregor, right. What were they fighting for? Yeah. Like, bragging rights.

Bragging rights. Like literally, it was a glorified backyard brawl. And was anybody saying, oh my God, one of them might get a concussion. Like, nobody cared. It's just a, so while it's a problem and while I think, yes, we absolutely should look into it. It's just like anything else. We should look into it. We should see if there's the cause

effect relationship. Yes, absolutely. But once we find that out, are we really going to change the rule? Are we going to say no tackling a football, no tackling in rugby, no, you can't skate board. Are we really going to say that? Yeah, they were doing, I don't think we are. They were, I read an article where they were speculating on CT and soccer players just from heading the ball. No, I think you make a really good point. I think the big challenge is gonna be because of public perception.

I don't think professional sports will change, but I think a lot of parents, especially nowadays, were so afraid of our kids getting hurt. I think you'll start to see maybe some lower numbers of children playing tackle football, just like you saw with boxing, you know? Yeah, so, but other than that, I think you make a really good point

in the benefits of sports, I believe outweighs some of the negatives. The outweigh the risk, right? I broke my femur when I was little playing football, like, okay, right? But I learned a whole lot. You're just like, I get injured. You get injured doing a whole lot of things.

I love to point it to the stat. Everybody can look this up. You wanna know what the most dangerous thing in your house is? People are worried about guns, they're worried about pools, they're worried about the most dangerous thing, steps. Yeah. Oh my God, yeah. Debs, I mean, your foot clears each threshold.

We just show on probability. And it was all about like, you clear steps by a quarter of an inch with your foot. Like, you just know your brain knows, oh, I need to barely clear it. My aunt, thankfully who lived this on Christmas Eve, fell backward down her stairs. And she broke her C5 and C6.

Had to have a emergency surgery. It was awful. And I keep telling everybody, when they're like, man, football is dangerous. And I'm like, your stairs are. Dude, your stairs? Look at the stats. They're gonna get you.

How many people get her stairs, curbs, thresholds, things that are just a little bit off that your brain didn't anticipate, they're really, really dangerous. Are we gonna ban stairs? I doubt it. Yeah, it's true. Our humans are pretty irrational when it comes to fears.

It's because the number one killer in Western societies is heart disease, but you can see people fleeing McDonald's because they're so scared of it. Exactly. But they want a band, every single gun, which the odds of getting killed by one of those is so much lower. Exactly.

That's hilarious. Well, John, before we let you go, because I know you got to hop on a plane and stuff, you said you alluded to, you got some things in the works. What do you got going on right now? So we have a lot of, so you're going to see a lot of offshoots of sports science that are coming up. So I did it, we did a whole bunch of stuff with Trento for called Soul and Science.

You know, our soulandscience.com. We looked at all the quarterbacks that are in the draft last year and panned out pretty well in terms of our analysis and we did self-authorizing at football. In this upcoming year, I have a new venture that I'm gonna be launching that will be announcing soon. That's all taking what I've done and building upon it, right? Like not being complacent and, you know, sort of saying,

hey, you know, like sports science, I would love that when we started sports science it wasn't even a real term in our vernacular. I think that we, humbly, opened people's eyes, put a little dent in the sports universe, just did something that was different, I want to raise that bar and just keep doing something that's different and looking at things Through a different lens To allow people to have a new perspective that they you know, I never thought about it that way because I think the Making people think and giving people real facts to really debate over

And to me that's it's all about right right? You really want to learn and you want people to try to poke holes in your own argument, because maybe I'm wrong. And I could be wrong on something. We did 1800 segments. There's no one in the athletic or academic community that said, I don't think that's true because we made really solid arguments.

I want to keep raising that bar on pushing those limits. That's, you know, I do want to ask you one of the things. Sorry, that leaves so quickly. Do you think the same attributes, those mental attributes in top level athletic performers? Do you think those are the same ones that we would find if we were testing top business performers and top academic performance surgeons? Yeah, I mean, 100%. I mean, think about, academic surgeons. Yeah, I mean, 100%. I mean, think about, think of the audacity of, you know, think of this, the Steve Jobs,

or Tim Cookdown, like think of the audacity. I mean, jobs is like that great profile of, do you think he was nervous when he was making the Macintosh or the iPhone, which was the iPad, can't actually before, but he then said, wow, this could be a phone. When he's like, I wanna make a single piece of glass. It's just glass, that's all.

No buttons, I don't want anything. Think he was scared? Where do you think he was just, he had the audacity to believe he could be great. That, I keep using that phrase because a lot of people like, you know what, I think that I wanna make invention X. Nah, that's stupid, right? And the great things happen by those who are,

use your word, whether it's stubborn or brilliant, enough to be audacious and to be like, don't be scared, my message to everyone is don't be scared to be great. Like the greatness is inside of you. Just don't be scared to be great. Like the greatness is inside of you, just don't be scared to be great. Just keep pushing the limits. Great way to end the episode. Thanks for coming on.

Awesome. Thank you. You guys are awesome. Thank you. So appreciate it. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB

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