Revisionist History - Burden of Proof

Episode Date: May 24, 2018

“He called to wish me ‘Happy Birthday.’ Then he said, ‘I’m failing everything.’” Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before we begin, a warning. This episode contains material that may be upsetting to some listeners. What was, tell me a little bit about what Owen was like. When Owen was born, he was screaming and his neck veins were out and the doctor said, this is a Viking. And I think that's kind of the way he lived a lot, you know, that kind of passion. So that's the way he lived. The man speaking is Tom Thomas. He's sitting with his wife, Kathy Brearley.

She's English. Both she and Tom are United Church pastors. They met when they were missionaries in Zambia. They have a son named Morgan. And we're all at Morgan's house just outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, a bungalow in a tidy subdivision. There are two little children

running around and a big friendly dog being big and friendly. Everyone has gathered to talk about Owen, the Viking, the son and brother who isn't there. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

This episode is about Owen Thomas, a young man I never had the chance to meet, about what happened to him and why we shouldn't forget about it. I went to see Owen's family on a cold winter evening. We knew that he was kind of feeling down, feeling depressed. In the last, what would you say, last month or so. I didn't know that. I didn't know he was depressed. I knew he was stressed. He was stressed. I knew he was stressed with school, finals. Owen went full out all the time at everything. His older brother Morgan says

he couldn't keep up. Yeah, so we were sort of like opposites. I was real good at giving like 80%. That's right. 75%. And he was, not in everything, but just like, for example, school, schooling. He would not take anything less than an A+. A-, he was pissed. He had to get that A+. But now we don't know

if he was having difficulty remembering things, because we never even asked. We never asked him that. We never even thought that there might be anything cognitive. We just thought this was somebody who's a type A person who's kind of like demanding so much of himself. In retrospect, I guess, when things like this happen, in retrospect, you can always try to look back and say,

oh, I should have seen seen this I should have seen that but the Sunday night he called he really sounded depressed then he really he really did and you know now you look back we should have just got in the car gone right down what did he talk about in that last call well it was my it'd be my birthday so he was he was my, it'd be my birthday, so he was wishing me happy birthday. I don't know, what did he talk to you about, Tom? He said, I'm failing everything, that's what he said.

When I said at the beginning that we shouldn't forget about Owen Thomas, I'm talking about this, that we shouldn't forget that he went from clarity and purpose to failing everything. In 2013, I was invited to give a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Welcome. It is my great pleasure on behalf of Penn's 450 Benjamin Franklin scholars to welcome you to the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Lectureship.

The talk was in a big auditorium at the Penn Museum. I had been assigned a theme, proof. That's obviously a big topic, so I thought that this afternoon I would start by asking a relatively simple question, which is, what level of proof do we need about the harmfulness of some activity before we act? I decided to tell the story of a man named Frederick Hoffman, a remarkable man. Born in 1865 in Germany, immigrated to the United States, Hoffman rose to the position of senior statistician at the Prudential Insurance Company. At the time, that was a hugely important job.

This was in the years before Social Security or Medicare. Private insurers were the safety net. And because they had to figure out what to charge for life insurance premiums, they had to closely monitor the health of Americans. And that was Hoffman's job. He set out and he would cover the entire country and he would go and visit towns and cities and villages all across this land. And he would interview doctors and hospitals

and funeral directors. And he would visit all the major employers, and he would go to the cemeteries, and he would talk to people, and he would walk around the town, and he would try and get a sense of what people are dying of. Hoffman was one of the first people to sound the alarm about smoking. He was one of the first to describe the terrible health conditions on Indian reservations.

But perhaps his most important work concerned what was known at the time as miners' asthma. I give a fair number of talks, and one of the things that you can usually tell is if you've lost your audience. And I remember that day at Penn thinking that I had no idea. Twenty minutes in, I began to panic a little, because I'm going on and on, about Hoffman, about coal mining, about how big a deal coal was at the turn of the century, about how much dust

the process of coal mining created, about how coal miners would have coughing fits and spit up this black inky substance. And they would cough more and more of it, the more they mined, the more time they spent in the coal mines. That was absolutely beyond question. The audience is incredibly quiet and I couldn't figure out if that was because they found the subject as fascinating as I did or if they were

thinking, what on earth? The thing that no one could agree on was whether that was dangerous. Did it harm the health of someone to inhale all of this dust from coal mining? Miners' asthma wasn't bothering the medical community and the mining companies. They said, look, miners have lower rates of tuberculosis than everyone else. TB is a respiratory disease, so maybe coal dust is protective in some way. Another argument was, if miners were coughing up dust particles, then their lungs were functioning as they should. So for years and years and years, nobody paid particular attention to the problem of coal dust

because they had all of these arguments that they used to convince themselves that it wasn't a health risk. And then along comes Frederick Hoffman. Prudential insured a lot of miners. And if they're dying young, then that was a real problem for Prudential. So Hoffman investigated. And in 1918, he publishes this famous report.

It was called Mortality from Respiratory Diseases in the Dusty Trades. And it comes out, it was published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics by the government, federal government, in 1918. Hoffman was methodical. First, he looked at the government's statistics on tuberculosis. He found no evidence miners had lower rates of TB. Then he looked at asthma death rates. They were five times higher for coal miners than for other working men. Hoffman looked at census data. Who was still working after the age of 45? For farmers at the time, almost a third

were still working. For miners, it was a fifth. If mining was so healthy, why were all the miners disappearing from their profession? So he adds all this up and he says, look, I don't buy it. I think that this miners' asthma thing is something that we should be concerned about. So here we have the senior statistician from one of the most powerful and important institutions in the country, publishing a report on the health of workers in one of the most important and critical industries in the country, and saying there's a problem. So what do you think happens? Nothing happens. Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. And why does nothing happen? Because all kinds of people stood up and read Hoffman's report and said,

you've got no proof. Let's give the students at Penn credit for their patience, because this part of my talk went on for a very long time. But I was trying to answer the question at the core of proof. At what point do you act? People argued after Hoffman published his report that we still didn't know quite enough, that he had a lot of suggestive evidence but not definitive evidence. And that was true, but it was also irrelevant, because if you wait until the evidence is perfect and complete, you'll never act. It was not until the 1970s that people suddenly realized that tens of thousands of miners were dying horrible deaths, vastly prematurely,

because of the dust they inhaled while working in the mines. Now, I think we can all agree that that is an appalling story, right? That should never have happened. We should have acted on this in 1918. Instead, we acted on this in 1975. We look around the room and we say to ourselves, we would never do that would we? We're much too educated and sophisticated and empathetic to ever look at the suffering of someone else and say, oh we're not going to act until we have proof. But we do do that. All of us do that. Everyone in this room is doing that, even as we speak.

Now, what am I talking about? I'm talking about football. Owen Thomas, the red-headed Viking, was a football player. So was his father, Tom. It was the 1960s. Yeah. So I was a fullback, which in the backfield, if you know anything about American football. Owen's grandfather played for Millersville University.

His older brother Morgan played offensive tackle for East Stroudsburg University. And then Owen played. So I guess we're kind of a football family. On the dining table right in front of me are Owen's helmets from middle school and high school and college, all scratched and battered, lined up in a row. It's hard for a lineman to be a star. You know, like running back, quarterback, those are really the stars. But he was definitely a feared player from all angles. And people knew who he was, so he was definitely one of the stars.

He couldn't wait for the season to begin. You know, most of the football players say, oh, I just don't want to get hit. The first day of practice would just be like putting on the uniform and running. But he'd say, I just can't wait to hit somebody. I just want to hit somebody. And that's his own team.

That's his own team that he couldn't wait to hit. When it came time for college, Owen Thomas went to the University of Pennsylvania. He was just the kind of guy that on a bad day when they had to wake up at 6, 7 o'clock in the morning to do a workout and everyone had class and everything,

he was the kind of guy that would get everybody motivated to complete the workout and then go on with your day. He was named captain of the football team. 76 out of the 80 players voted for him. Then one day, out of the blue, in the

spring of his junior year, he hung himself in his apartment. Tom sent me a text message, except I was listening to a lecture, so he kept saying, call me, there are all these messages, call me, call me, call me. They drove down to Philadelphia. They went to identify their son's body in the hospital.

And in the car on the way back, on this terrible, terrible day, they got a call from someone named Chris Nowinski. Nowinski is a former college football player with a Ph.D. in neuroscience who runs the Concussion Legacy Foundation. He works with a group of researchers at Boston University. For more than a decade, they've been autopsying the brains of people who have, in the course of their lives, suffered repeated blows to the head, looking for something called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE.

Getting hit in the head causes your brain to twist and bruise. If you get hit enough times, that bruising causes the accumulation of a protein called tau. And that tau slowly works its way through the brain like a poison. So far, Nowinski's group has autopsied the brains of 111 former NFL players. 110 had CTE. Seven of eight former Canadian Football League players had it. So did 9 of 14 semi-pro players, 48 of 53 college players, 3 out of 14 high school players. The symptoms of CTE include It's not pleasant.

One of the first pro players diagnosed with CTE was Mike Webster. He was a Hall of Fame center with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He died at 50. In his house, his family found page after page of scribbled notes written by Webster to document his mental state. Like this. Deep, confusing, twisting, fishing line, tangled up mess of confusing things go on all the time. Or Junior Seau and Dave Durson, two of the great football players of their generation,

both shot themselves in the chest at the ages of 43 and 50. Why in the chest? To make sure their brains were intact for autopsy. To make the pathologist's job easier. Now, are cases like this absolute proof of a connection between CTE and football players getting hit in the head? No. The research group at Boston University has just published a study which looked at players who had started playing tackle football before the age of 12. I'm quoting, youth exposure to tackle football may reduce resiliency to late-life neuropathology. May reduce. Remember, they're working from a non-representative sample, autopsies conducted on players whose families believe something was wrong.

Proof would be if you identified 2,000 people, half of whom play football and half of whom do not, followed them over the course of their lives and compared the autopsies of their brains at death. Did the football players have, on average, more of the protein tau in their brain tissue than the non-football players? The problem is that the average American male life expectancy is 75 years. If we start that study now, we'll have definitive proof somewhere around the turn of the next century. The much, much harder question is what you do in the interim. And the answer is that you do what Chris Nowinski of the Concussion Foundation does. You plug away. You call people up at the height of their grief and ask them for brain tissue

before the body of their loved one is buried or cremated, you call up people like Owen Thomas' parents. This is a day when it was like poured and poured and poured with rain the whole day. And so we were going back. It must have been about like 10 o'clock at night, right? Driving at the turnpike. And suddenly I get this phone call from this person whose name I can hardly understand.

The Thomases were too stunned to say no. But he still had to do quite a lot of work because he had to then call the undertaker and get the undertaker to get the brain matter which had been just like dumped in a bag by the medical examiner. Yeah, he has something to answer for.

Well, the medical examiner did an autopsy, right? So this was a football player who had committed suicide and he didn't make any attempt to preserve the brain matter, which now I look back on it and I think, how crazy is that? That the brain matter was just like all mixed up with all the rest of the bits and pieces and just thrown in a bag.

Owen Thomas died in April. The following September, his parents got a second call. Owen had CTE. And suddenly it all made sense. Why their focused, joyful, high-spirited son had suddenly called and said, I'm failing at everything. How did that news change you? I mean, what was the impact of it on hearing that? You said you were relieved in some sense.

That there was a contributing factor, that it wasn't just depression, that there was a cause, a medical cause, that you could maybe say that contributed to it. Well, it gave us a... Something to hold on to. It gave us a purpose. Not an answer, because there's still too much unknown for that.

A purpose. Now what am I talking about? I'm talking about football. What do we know about football? We know about football approximately what Frederick Hoffman knew about coal dust in 1918. So there I was in the Harrison Auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania. It was 2013. Owen Thomas had been dead for three years. There were students in the room who had known him, who remembered him. So I told the story of how he was found hanging in his apartment, and I asked them, is that enough proof for you? Is the death of someone you went to school with, who was the captain of your football team, enough evidence to walk away from the game? I sometimes think about that moment

when I'm at Bobst Library at New York University. I do a lot of my research there. The library has a massive multi-story atrium at its center. And a few years ago, a student jumped over one of the railings overlooking the atrium. And immediately, immediately, and at great expense, the university put up high plexiglass screens in front of every railing. Then, a few years after that, a student found a way to wriggle over the plexiglass and jump to his death. So the university installed an even more expensive and elaborate and foolproof

metal screen that was impossible to get around or over. Two suicides, and they spent millions of dollars. Why? Because the job of a university is to watch out for the welfare of the students under its care, and NYU didn't need any more evidence to act. Here is what Penn did in response to the suicide of Owen Thomas and the results of his brain autopsy. They honored him with 40 seconds of silence before the season opener the next fall against Lafayette. Owen's jersey had been number 40. His teammates wore decals on their helmets with the number 40 on them. And here is the statement the university issued upon hearing that Owen Thomas had been diagnosed with CTE.

I read it to the audience when I was at Penn in 2013. While we will never know the cause of Owen Thomas' depression and subsequent suicide, we are aware of and deeply concerned about the medical issues now being raised about football head injuries, and will continue to work with the Ivy League and the medical community in addressing these issues. Owen's untimely death was a terrible tragedy, and we continue to work with the Ivy League and the medical community in addressing these issues. Owen's untimely death was a terrible tragedy, and we continue to grieve for his loss. Where to start? Let's start with the statement, we will never know the cause of Owen Thomas' depression and subsequent suicide.

Are you kidding me? What is there more to know? A healthy young man with no previous history of depression hangs himself in his apartment, and when they do an autopsy on his brain, they find he has the beginnings of a debilitating neurological disorder caused by taking too many hits on the football field. And then the statement, We are aware and deeply concerned about the medical issues being raised about football head injuries. We are so aware and deeply concerned about the medical issues being raised about football head injuries that three years after Owen Thomas' death, Penn continues to play football. In my book, that does not count as concern. That is moral indifference.

Not long ago, I went to see Al Bagnoli. He's the head football coach at Columbia University. Before that, he was at Penn. He was Owen Thomas' coach. And he reminded me I'd left someone out. Owen Thomas wasn't the only one. We had two of them. We had Kyle Ambrose, too. They were both traumatic, but Kyle's was unbelievable because that happened right in midseason.

So it happened after he scored two touchdowns and we beat Bucknell 51 or something. Kyle Ambrosie, star running back on the Penn football team and a student at the Wharton School of Business, just like Owen Thomas. He shot himself at his mother's house in October 2005. There wasn't an autopsy on Kyle Ambrosi's brain. In 2005, CTE just wasn't on people's radar in the same way that it is now.

So we'll never know whether he suffered from the disease the way we know with Owen Thomas. We don't have proof. But what happened to Kyle Ambrosi sounds very much like what happened to Owen Thomas. All his life, a young man plays a sport that involves repeated blows to his brain until suddenly he fell apart in a way that looks an awful lot like the way people fall apart

after they've had repeated blows to their brain. You know, there was even physical changes, like his eye color got lighter, and you could just see that he was fighting demons and he couldn't explain them. That's Kyle Ambrosi's brother, Greg. I asked him and he, you know, would try to explain them. That's Kyle Ambrosi's brother, Greg. I asked him, and he would try to explain them, and he just would run out of words. He would open his mouth, and nothing would come out, and I would just look at him, and I didn't know what the hell. Yeah, the only thing he said to me is,

Mommy, it's so dark, it's scary. And it was very frightening to him because he was always used to being in control, and this is an out of control feeling. Kyle's mother, Donna. Listening to the Ambrosies was like listening to the Thomases. Someone you know becomes someone you don't know right in front of your eyes. And they haven't done anything. They haven't been in a terrible accident or overdosed on drugs or squandered their life away. They've just played a game, played it well.

And if you're always, like I said, the internally driven, you know, never had to say, Kyle, do your homework, go practice, go whatever. He always had it done ahead of time. That was him. This is what he wanted to do. So if you're used to being in control and your mind is, you're having thoughts that you don't have control over, it's very scary.

Had anything you'd done as a coach prepared you for, I mean, that's a really tough position to be in. No, no, no. Nothing you can't do. What did you say to your players? Basically, we're here for you. Yeah, I mean, you know, anytime you get that kind of trauma, you have to deal with it because, again, it kind of brings you back to,

okay, what's really important and what isn't important? You know, you put so much premium on, okay, you got to win this game, you got to win that game, you're trying to win a title, and yet when it comes to human life, that's rather trivial. I'm assuming the full team went to the funerals in both cases. Yes. That must have been unbelievable. Yeah, it's sad. funerals in both cases. That must have been unbelievable. It's very sad because again,

it's hard to explain. Not that it's any easier to lose somebody in a car accident, but you can explain it. Or someone who suffers from terminal cancer. It's just as traumatic, but you can explain it. When you're a teammate of a kid who commits suicide, you're, you know, could I have, why didn't I see this? Could I have done something? You know, I think you always question yourself, what could I have done that maybe in some other ways

of death, you kind of accept. I've thought a lot about that talk I gave at Penn. I'm not sure I won them over. The students listened politely and at the end asked thoughtful and skeptical questions. I talked about the costs of football.

Why didn't I talk about the benefits? They asked, doesn't everything come with a risk? Shouldn't people be free to make their own choices? A student who was on the football team stood up and said, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for football. When I met with Coach Bagnoli, he talked about rule changes, how they are now much more vigilant about concussions, how they don't tackle in practice like they used to, how he doesn't believe that little kids should play tackle football. I got the sense that a lot of students were thinking about those things too.

Maybe we can just manage this problem, reduce the risk to some more acceptable level. After the speech, as I walked to the post-event reception, one of the big deans at Penn looked at me and shook his head. He said, we're not stopping football. Of course not. And it won't stop. At least not until the third suicide, or maybe the fourth suicide, or the fifth, at which point the students and alumni of Penn will finally say, that's an awfully high price to pay for a game. Al Bagnoli brought up one more name. It's unfortunately becoming more and more prevalent, and I just saw the kid from, you know, Washington State, whose brother actually was here. The name of the kid from Washington State was Tyler Helinski.

He was supposed to be the 2019 starting quarterback for the Washington State Cougars. A few days before my interview with Begnoli, Helinski borrowed a teammate's rifle and shot himself in the head. A bright, outgoing kid with a big smile. No motive. It's unfortunately becoming more and more prevalent. But I guess we don't have enough proof. Well, it's your classmates who are dying, right? It's your classmates who are putting their lives at risk by playing this game. I think all of you has to think about, has to consider boycotting football games at Penn.

And I think you have to convince your friends to boycott football games at Penn. And I think you have to picket outside football games at Penn. And I think you have to go to the administrators of this university and you have to ask them, why is a world-class institution, one of the finest universities of higher learning in this planet, exposing its own students to the risk of injury and death? And if they ask for proof, tell them you don't need proof. Sometimes proof is just another word for letting people suffer. Thank you. Revisionist History is a Panoply production. The senior producer is Mia Lobel, with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton.

Flan Williams is our engineer. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson. Original Music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Suicide is a difficult topic. It can be hard for people to talk about suicide or get help Thank you. confidential, and available 24 hours a day. The number in the U.S. is 1-800-273-8255. 1-800-273-TALK.