The Brain Collector: Meet the Ex-Pro Wrestler Fighting the NFL's Concussion "Cover-Up"

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out brought to you by Apple Card. I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is There's nothing worse you can do to your brain than play 16 years of tackle football if dementia is the end point you're thinking about Right after this You called me over the summer it feels like a million years ago But you called me to talk about what I think is one of Quietly the biggest stories of the entire year one of the biggest stories ever in terms of the biggest sport in this country And I want to get to that, but thank you for being here in person Christy Winsky Thank you for having me Pablo Torre big fan. Well, we'll do the formalities here because for those who don't know you and your Background I want you to explain what the fuck your resume is it starts with Yeah, so I was lucky enough to play football at Harvard and afterwards like most Harvard graduates I decided to join the WWE and Go run around Monday night Raw and your name in that profession was well So I came in with John Cena and Brock Lesnar and Randy Orton. It was real name year because UFC just started and they wanted us more realistic Chris Harvard came off of tough enough from MTV because there were two crystals on the shows And it was so early in the real TV that we only had first names. So I became Chris Harvard and tonight in this school of hard-knocked match I'm going to outthink him because in the end brains always wins out over Braun and I had no idea how that would affect my wrestling career at the moment I should have realized I will be a heal for life Shocking to everybody listening as we put up the days since I have mentioned Harvard counter on the screen somewhere That that would be how that felt You're finishing move though. I want to establish you did not only wear khakis, which I believe makes you a pioneer Thank you, but I had the honor role Which yeah, I loved playing Chris Harvard just run around the country insulting everyone basically it was every worst conversation You had it Harvard. I got to be that guy You know, we had a little chant at Harvard for people like you. That's all right. That's okay. You'll all work for us someday 5 10 15 bucks. We'll own the company you drive the trucks And you were convincing. Thank you a method wrestler But look you come in and you're wearing your blue blazer and your white shirt and the presentation of what you Might be as Harvard educated Chris Noinsky who was this guy for those who watched my night raw and or MTV and or any of the other Places that they might have encountered you as the heal you present superficially as Representative of the powers that be of The corporation of the shield and Why I wanted to just start there is because in fact you Might be the embodiment of the opposite in the world of football I would call it more of a mission Right like it's it sort of felt like once I was in on the secret that we were all damaging our brains and everyone was hiding it from us I thought I got to take a shot at trying to change the culture and I'm glad that we changed part of it. You know concussions are different now But now this CT thing is such a bigger battle We all are constantly trying to find ways to save ourselves time whether it's eating breakfast on the commute to work delivery services instead of grocery shopping and cooking or hiring people for help around the house But if you're a business owner, how can you save time hiring? Zippercruder Zippercruder has a new feature that quickly lets you see the most interested qualified candidate's first So you save time by meeting the right people faster and right now you can try it for free at zippercruder.com slash p t f o at Zippercruder not only can you find candidates quickly, but candidates can tell you in their own words Why they are interested in your job? It's no wonder that Zippercruder is the number one rated hiring site based on G2 So save time and meet great candidates sooner with Zippercruder Four out of five employers who post on Zippercruder get a quality candidate within the first day Try it for free at zippercruder.com slash p t f o that is zippercruder.com slash p t f o meet your match on Zippercruder so Yes, it is true that former defensive tackle Christian whiskey became a wrestling heel with the catchphrase brains over brawn and then Years later became an actual neuroscientist who wants to tell America about the impact of brawn so to speak on the brain But what you should know up front here is that he is not trying to end or outlaw or ruin football What christian whiskey wants personally is evidence what christian whiskey wants is Brains so what is happening to the brains of football players if you get hit in the head enough You get a disease called chronic traumatic and cephalopathy I've always been the person who did outreach to families to get brains for brain donation. We got really good at it And we'll get to the particulars of those conversations in just a minute But nowinsky and the non-profit concussion legacy foundation which he co-founded with Boston University Started with a sample of just 11 brains that they collected from former NFL players and Ten of those brains turned out showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which you may know as CTE That's over 90% of that first sample And so they set out to collect and test a lot more And then we were 110 out of 111 and now we're over 400 and it's still over 90% and With the NFL and everyone who wants to dismiss this has been able to say as well It's a bias sample you're getting the worst to the worst because you're getting them in the first place They might be more likely to have CTE neurodegenerative conditions and To that you have long said what? They're right that you have what's called a registry bias if someone's donating to a brain-baked at a CTE in the name They're more likely to have CTE because the family thinks they're connecting those dots Which now brings us to the study that Nowinsky had called me about late this summer They got published in one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world the British medical journal In which they were able to calculate that from 2016 to 2021 a total of 178 NFL players had died for all sorts of reasons Because we also got the death records of everybody. You're doing investigative reporting. Yes. Yes, there it is documents There's a lot of numbers and documents and really smart people statisticians figuring this out and phone calls and phone calls. Yes And of those 878 NFL players who died for all sorts of reasons 35 gave us the brains 215 had the disease which is once again more than 90% But it also signaled something even more disturbing perhaps mathematically speaking At least in the eyes of the studies researchers Which is that at least 215 out of those 878 deceased NFL players about 25 percent Had this terrifying disease and what that meant is that minimum one in four NFL players who died over that six-year period had CTE But because we don't know who we didn't study it still could be as high as 98 percent And so we here at PTFO went to the NFL itself and we requested comment about this study that first appeared above the fold in the New York Times in August before inevitably being obscured by the football games themselves And in addition to highlighting the lead's commitment to research and improving the safety of the game And NFL spokesman told us in part the following quote The NFL remains committed to ensuring that the NFL community has access to a robust and Expanding set of resources to enhance their physical and mental well-being. We encourage former players to utilize these resources to identify and seek Treatment when they are concerned about their health and quote But when other thing believe wanted us to know was that this study in their view did not see all that different from previous studies That Christian Winsky and Boston University had published already Well, they weren't surprised by this. I think that's the reality. I think they know how bad it is as we know how bad it is But it's a sort of a game we're playing with the public about when to panic about what's happening to football players And so when do we panic? I'm panicked and I'd say that with with all the Coviots of if you're next football player, I don't want you panicking too Necessarily if you are struggling though. I do want you to reach out to our foundation the concussion CT foundation But to put this in perspective, we had a publication came out in July that showed that NFL players are dying with dementia at four times the rate of the public. And what's interesting to me about that, when we were trying to communicate that to the public, I was trying to figure out like 4x doesn't sound that bad, but 4x doesn't sound bad until you review the literature of every other environmental exposure ever for the brain. And you find that there has been nothing that has ever reached 4x, whether it's lead exposure, whether it's pollution, whether it's alcohol, whether it's severe traumatic brain injury, there's no environmental exposure that's ever lead to 4x. And so one way to say this is there's nothing worse you can do to your brain than play 16 years of tackle football if dementia is the end point you're thinking about. And that's just a rephrasing of some scientific information, but I would panic about that. I've been reading and knowing about your work because I've been working in sports media since 2007, when I graduated from the aforementioned institution in the Boston area, it looked for a while. Like panic was going to be a almost a common sentiment. There were movies, Will Smith playing Dr. Bennett Omalu in a movie titled "Concussion." - "Dial the truth." - "Dial the truth." - There were predictions we've talked about that I'm on the show before. Malcolm Gladwell, prophesizing, football may not exist anymore. - Football. - And at a certain point you have to ask yourself as a fan, or as anyone who is in any way connected to football, is that is it appropriate in the modern day and age for us to support and participate in a game that has such a serious risk of physical harm to its players? - What happened since that moment when it felt like panic was perhaps a dominant reaction to today as we have never seen the NFL become more dominant, more economically, seemingly invulnerable? - Yeah, I think this is a great exercise like human psychology, right? People were very concerned at the beginning and it's oftentimes too concerned, right? So football's got to end, right? 'Cause even I would say, look, I used to let people hit me in the head with folding chairs, dangerous jobs are allowed in our culture. - Yes, consenting adults, firemen, the risks, police, military, like it's hard to compare football to that. So the NFL never had to go away, but the NFL had, in my mind, had to be honest. Not only just for the players that they employed, but also because they're the top of a big pyramid where there's millions of kids being recruited to this game and I have always really been bothered about the fact that we're lying to parents and kids about what this might do to them. - My personal feeling as I watch football, as I identify as a football fan, has always been, I just want everyone to tell the truth, to quote you and the movie, not to be so on the nose about what we're doing here in this studio all the time. I hope we want people to know what's actually happening. There are things that people behind locked doors who control lots of money actively withheld from you. All I want is for people to understand, you can decide to love this, to participate in it, to do whatever you want with it, give it your money, all of that, but we just gotta know what's really happening. And you are kind of the battering ram into and beyond those locked doors. - I mean, you're now a neuroscientist. - Yes, sir. - So you haven't addressed me as Dr. Noinsky. - I'm sorry, Dr. Noinsky. - Thank you. - If I can commit a couple of hippo violations with you right now, I do wanna know what's inside your sort of thinking here as you are not the most popular guy as the most popular thing is the thing that you are investigating. How does that feel? - When I started doing this in my late 20s, I was in the midst of like a 15-year headache with post-concussion syndrome. And so at that point, I truly had nothing to lose. Like I basically looked at it as like the only thing that is getting me out of bed and not thinking about how much my head hurts and how much I've lost through this is this issue. - I wanna explain what it's like when you wake up in the morning again to be invasive because in front of you on a given day, my understanding is you're gonna be doing a bunch of calls. You're gonna be doing research. How does your day start? - So for the last 20 years, since the 20th anniversary of me getting Andre Waters brain November 2006, I have started the day sadly reading obituaries. I have the worst Googlers you could imagine with various keywords. And I start the day going, did someone pass away overnight or yesterday that I now need to call? - And what's your criteria for I'm gonna make this call? What are you looking for? What keywords are you looking for? - So it has been and the reason we got so many NFL brains is I would pursue every NFL brain. We basically have 72 hours from the moment they pass to get it into the formal in-solution to be studied. - So the clock is a posthumous biological clock? - Yes, yes, the cells are literally breaking down. And if you don't put it in solution, you can't diagnose this disease. And so it's erased against the clock. And in the early days before this was a normal thing, I used to have a script because I was nervous calling people. I mean, you gotta imagine those first few calls of calling a widow or a mother within 48 hours and losing their loved one. I'm just very lucky that the initial families were also wonderful about it. 'Cause they saw what happened and they were so thrilled that someone else cared about why their loved one died. So I got the script and I've got to figure out how to get to them because most people don't like answering their phone. - I can relate to this part. Hard to get people to pick up the phone. - But then when someone dies, you know. - The hardest version of this. - Yes. And so I would often like try to connect like, okay, this guy was teaming with this person. I know this person, we'd like just play this game of trying to get me to talk to somebody in the orbit of the family as fast as possible. - Andre Waters, if people don't remember how his brain wound up in your possession, you remind people what his story was. - I don't even know if I've ever told the full story. But so Andre Waters had been struggling. He was a D2 football coach, where he was getting the stories we heard, where he was getting lost, going back forth places he was familiar with, some real mental health struggles. He took his life. I remember reading about it. And at that point, I was so naive that I thought other people were aware that Mike Webster had been diagnosed with CTE. - Warmer Steelers. - Who was the first ever NFL player by Benedict Mallow? Reading the paper every day and no one said anything. And so eventually I called the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner's office and said, "Hey, are you gonna study him for CTE?" And the guy had never heard of it. And so I ended up emailing him like a bunch of articles, he said, "This is a real thing." And then I see Andre has been buried and I think like all hopes lost. But I still wanted to find out if I was right. I still wasn't confident enough that I wasn't on this fool's air and chasing windmills. And so I had a two week dialogue with this guy. And eventually he said, "You know what? I think there is something to this." And I did keep part of his brain per Florida state regulation. And if you can get family permission to get someone to study it, I will release the brain to you guys. - So for those who also don't remember Andre Waters, the back of his trading card. I mean, safety for the Eagles, for the Cardinals. Famously, one of the most physical players in the league. - Yes. - Dirty Waters. - Dirty Waters, which is a nickname you earn in a couple of ways. It turns out that are relevant to what you end up finding. - Right. All right. And so the moment that sort of defined my life was that the doctor said you have to call his mother. She's 88 and I'm like, geez. And I try to get a bunch of other doctors to call and no one to call because no one is comfortable making that call. And that's the only reason why I became the guy. I didn't want to make the call, but I also didn't want to be the guy who never called. So I called and his family was so wonderful. But Andre, I remember reading what convinced me was finding a quote where he said, "I stopped counting my concussions at 15. I would just grab a smelling salt and I'd keep playing." And I added the sense that it was real and it turned out it was. - The way that in real time figuring out, actually there might be a process here. And then you have the script that you reference, you have now a network that's growing and at this point, when someone hears from you, do they know to expect you, or are you still introducing yourself as if you're cold calling someone selling them steak knives? - That's a great question. People figured it out pretty fast. So I remember one of the first 10 brains I called was Virginia Grimsley, the first one we did at the Boston University, and a friend answered. And I explained who I was and she goes, "It's Chris Noinsky, he wants to talk to you about John." And she goes, "Tell him I know who he is, I know what he wants and tell him the answer is yes." And I was like, "Whoa, that was wild." So luckily most people now do expect my call. - That's by the way, John Grimsley, the Houston Oiler. - Houston Oiler, 45 years old, stage three CT. - Yeah. - So yeah, so it has been great. So much of this work sees the dark side of humanity and the cover up and everything else, but doing this work, you get to see the best part of humanity. You get to see these families who have lost everything, but still want to help the next family and say yes. (upbeat music) One of the brains that I was always curious about on a zillion different levels and the latest one being your attempt to get it is O.J. Simpsons. They said no. Right. Why? I can't speak to why and I usually don't talk about families who said no, but this one sort of everyone understands. There's one thing about this that people don't appreciate and that is this is often the last word on someone's life. And sometimes people don't want that to be the last word on their life. I mean, you could imagine for O.J. all the things that would have come from a, I mean, we can say with 99.9% certainty he had it, but without the 100%, it's not a news cycle. It's not the last thing we ever hear. I don't know, but there's also a lot of complicated families, a lot of these families, because of CTE, it's not an Aussie and Harriet life, right? And so it's not a simple thing. Even just for people who are listening who aren't sure about what exactly this is, but are trying to imagine now we've mentioned a bunch of proper names that they may recall some more than others, but just the idea of what symptomatically may have been obvious to families and what may not have been. We mentioned a bunch of guys with nicknames, famous for violence, but then there are also people who, by virtue of just playing the sport on what you might call an uncontroversial, unremarkably physical level, also clearly are in this sample too. Yeah. So what we now know is that CTE has caused this dementia like Alzheimer's and any other disease. So that's usually been the number one indicator, is that usually these players are misdiagnosis Alzheimer's or have some abnormal dementia where the behavior is bizarre. So that's like the end stage. Along the way though, it can be quite a journey. Some people are not much affected at all until the end. We think about the worst case scenarios, but I think of people like Nick Bonacani, who was just like crushing it until he was in the 70s and then things got very bad. But you can, so the message to everybody out there, you could still live an awesome life for a long time, even if you have this. But the number one thing families will describe is personality change. They became a different person. That's not a diagnosable condition, but it is the number one thing they say. And then where we now know the short-term memory impairment is a huge symptom, executive dysfunction so their ability to follow through on their goals, to hold a job, to do complicated tasks. Like it's impaired, we see huge emotional ability and disinhibition, a lot of them die from substance abuse because you're literally starting with frontal low brain damage, right? And disease that just keeps spreading. And it's going to change the decisions you make and your ability to make good decisions. So there's a remarkable number who retrospectively realized they died with dementia, but when they were 30 or 40, they told they were bipolar. They weren't really bipolar, it's just the best term we can describe for this frontal low brain damage early or CTE symptomatology. I remember the part of the research scientifically that opened my eyes in a way that have been hard to close them again. The sort of cliche was, you get this because you remember that ESPN segment, jacked up. Jacked up. Yep. You remember that one? Let's get to our lucky 13 hit list on jacked up. We're going to start off with number five, the Steelers and the Jaguars off of the part return. David Allen going to be catching the ball. I tell you we're going to be coming at it right out of the blue. Oh my, David Allen got jacked up. Guys got jacked up, remained jacked up beyond retirement. Then what the science begins to tell us is that it's often sub-concussive. It's the stuff that happens just by virtue of existing on a football field, essentially. The physics of line play, again, those unremarkable actions that seem undramatic but accumulate. For people who don't understand how is it, both jacked up but also not, what do you begin to explain? So that's actually changed a little bit in the last two months, and so let me reframe this for you. Because we have been saying it's the smaller repetitive hits, but I no longer believe it's the smaller hits. This is a physics injury. It's your brain violently rotating and ripping apart and causing these tiny lesions. We actually wrote an article in medical journal saying let's stop using sub-concussive because it's confusing because an impact either causing a concussion or it doesn't, but then we also understand that it's either causing a brain injury that causes symptoms or it's causing a brain injury that doesn't cause symptoms. And the piece of evidence that's connected to this altogether is this dementia study from July, which showed that linemen who take more hits have half the risk of dementia in this NFL study than non-linemen. And that goes along with the idea of the physics is it's actually the hard hits. It is the hard hits, but the study out there say a cultural player for every one concussion they have, they will take 340 hits harder than that concussion. The concussions are not the hardest hits. They are just the ones that cause symptoms that we can see because you wobble off the field. And so if we're trying to prevent CT, it would be, let's first attack that top 10% of hits. That's the one that's ripping brain tissue apart. So I'm already finding out so much. So just to clarify, no, no, no, no, this is really important. Right. Yeah. That's so confusing. Well, what it sounds like is let's leave aside the subconcussive hits, let's leave aside the minor ones. And we're going to talk about things that are definitionally concussions and things that are hard hits. Yes. And so if you think about it as a spectrum that we start counting hits at 10 G's of acceleration, concussions are happening in average around 100. Up to some number that we don't know, maybe 20 G's, maybe 30 G's, you're probably not damaging brain tissue, maybe even higher. But once you get over that maybe 50 G mark, everything up there is very risky. So when we're managing concussions now, that's great. It's the ethical thing to do, but it's not going to prevent CT. Cumulative G forces and it's probably a number of hits over a certain level would be most predictive if we could actually do that. We have published that the number of concussions that are deceased brain-wing folks either had diagnosed or thought they had does not correlate with CT. It's not number of concussions, but years of play, number of hits does. One of the key things about why it is you're collecting brains, people who are not familiar, is because there is no test for this. Can you explain that because that itself sounds like, so what do you, what are you saying? The reason we get brains is because the medical community neglected this disease entirely. So 1928, there was a big article in a big journal saying, "Boxers get punch drunk." Harrison Martin. Watson Marland, very nice poll. And so everybody knew it. So you actually realized that information spread so fast. If you go find 1950s comedy skits on television, Red Skeleton is playing a boxer named Color Flower McPug, who is punch drunk and making stupid things. What have been awesome on Monday Night Raw? Yes. Yes, exactly. So by 1950, everyone knew boxers get punch drunk and I think the medical industry just said, "All right, well, you shouldn't box, that's obvious." Well, it was in the name. It was dementia. Helicitica. You just evoking boxing, it felt like a boxing disease. Right. When we started the Boston University CT Center in 2008, it was the first academic center in the world to study this. There were only 45 confirmed cases in the world before we started this. So therefore, to diagnose a brain disease, you actually have to study people over time and then look at their brain after they die and try to figure out what's different from the many dozens of types of brain diseases you can get and no one did the work. So we're just doing the work. The good news is science is a lot better now. And so we are going to be able to diagnose CT during life very soon. And how are you going to do that? It'll probably be a blood test. You have to break down to the blood brain barrier and bits of your brain start floating in your blood and you can go draw blood and take these very sophisticated assays and find certain types of proteins that say, "Oops, you have this." Is that something you expect the NFL to embrace? No. And just to give the history of it, it's over 10 years ago now, that the NFL was exposed for trying to do CT research that was designed in a way that was only going to find the outcome that everything's fine. And New York Times wrote a nice story about it and they cut it off midstream. They said, "It was a bad study. Our bad. We're going to give $30 million to NIH and let them choose who gets it." That money got directed to BU first for the brain bank. And then that merit-based system for a clinical study and BU wanted again, and the NFL said, "No. We're not giving the money to the government to give to BU." And so that study actually continued because NIH found the money. They weren't going to be embarrassed by the NFL. But then the NFL took that money and said, "No, we were always going to give it, but we're giving to these people." And what they did was they only studied concussions. They never studied anything that would advance our ability to diagnose CT during life that is necessary to find a cure for this disease. So they chose to redirect that money to helmets and the concussions and essentially to keep this diagnostic slow because the one thing I've realized is that the data is not going convince anyone to change, right, of dead people. But the moment a living person can say, I have this, and now you're not helping me, that's gonna be powerful. - And for what it's worth, the NFL told us that they, quote, had no input on how those grants were spent by BU or other research institutions that receive them. And quote, there's so many things I wanna follow up on there. One of them, though, is the idea that the NFL's approach to this over time, the evolution of it. It has evolved to your point. I mean, you were referencing the helmets. Those are the Guardian helmets. - That was part of it, right? Yes. - The things you have seen that seem to indicate the NFL is taking this seriously. It's in the padded helmets, the Guardian helmets, and to that innovation, you would say what, how helpful is actually a Guardian helmet. How do I say this concisely? Much of this Guardian helmet story appears to be a bit of a scam. Okay, so one of the things to appreciate is this Guardian cap was created by this independent people thinking, well, it may be more padding as the answer. More padding is not the answer, right? We already know, like your brain is jello, floating, and fluid, putting more padding out will help in some situations, but it's going to hurt in other situations, especially rotation. - The G4 stuff we just talked about. - Right, bigger heavier helmet, bigger radius, more rotation. So the NFL studied the Guardian cap as it sold to high school players, they called the XT, and they said, this isn't very good. But there's an idea here. Let's go take a tar lab. What they did is they made something twice as heavy with different materials, and that's what the NFL players wear. It's only sold for NFL players, called the NXT. And apparently nobody realizes that what the NFL players are wearing, that is okay in lab tests, is different than what your high school players are wearing, which doesn't work in lab tests. So there's 500,000 Guardian Cap's been sold to high school and college players and youth players, that in Virginia Tech lab tests, two kids wearing Guardian caps get a 2% reduction in rotational acceleration the thing we think is most correlated with CT. So Guardian caps don't work in high school. They might work in the NFL a little bit, but what's been most fascinating is that their ability to confuse the public, that what the NFL is wearing in mandates is safer to what the kids are getting, and it's not. - So the thing the kids are getting is what version of this? - It's the version the NFL rejected. - So the XT. - The kids got the thing that the NFL said, that's not good enough. - Right. - And the thing that the NFL players get is even in that way, not good enough. - If we're talking about is the Guardian cap gonna prevent CT cases, no. Remember when they first sold it to us, they said, well, 10% reduction in lab, you know, in the lab, if two people are wearing it, maybe it'll be a 20% reduction. And then, and they actually published on it, they said, look, it actually created a 50% reduction in concussions, 52%, it was magic. And that was the headline, and that created a race for everyone else to buy them. It turned out that 52% reduction wasn't real. When they actually tried to get that publishes a peer-reviewed study and they used video, they found out it didn't work. When they isolated hits to the padding, face mask kits magically were down. So it was like a small sample random thing. They got the data they wanted. They went to the press. And then when it was studied and it needed to be corrected, they did not correct it in the public. - Yeah, so it was 2023. And one of the headlines is a profile talk. NFL says positions wearing Guardian cap soft, 22% decrease in concussions. And yeah, Jeff Miller, who was the NFL EVP executive I president, overseeing player health and safety said, yes, significant decrease in concussions. We're gonna do more of these. We're gonna wear them longer into the preseason. And in fact, when we reached out to the NFL for comment, they pointed us to a November 2025 newsletter written by the league's chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Cills, affirming their approximately 50% concussion reduction data from the preseason. And what you're saying is that the scientific rigor they're on that. - Their whole net. - Published studies showed it wasn't true. They haven't retracted it. They haven't done made the same effort to pull those headlines back. It's very clear from their behavior and the conversations I've had with them. They love that the public sees the Guardian caps 'cause it's basically virtue signaling. - I was gonna say, it is the end racism spray painted in the end zone of CTE. - Yeah. - It is a theatrical gesture that seems quite dramatic because by the way, when you see these Guardian caps as a fan of sports myself, you're like, this is so lame looking that it seems like the only reason you would do that is because they would work. - You're exactly right. It's sort of like what the monster red bull tasting bat and therefore you think it works, right? It's the same idea. - This is medicinal. - Yes. - It's so uncool that it must be medicinal. - Right. - That's so ugly that it has to work 'cause who else would wear that? (laughing) - But we are talking about public relations at all times when it comes to this stuff. And you are, again, on a mission to sort of cut through what the NFL wants us to think and what they actually know and the gap between. And I wanna also explain that when the NFL is trying to figure out, I'll put it this way, can we make it safer cigarette? It does feel like you're saying, we're not calling to prohibit the cigarette. We are calling for reforms and tests so that we know the medical research such that we can then propose the things that might allow you to keep playing this game with something like full disclosure to those participating and supporting it. AKA, perhaps a cleaner conscience. Do you think, though, there is a safer cigarette? - You could play this game dramatically safer. You're not gonna eliminate CT by any stretch of the imagination. But if you want to prevent CT and football, the Guardian caps and the tweaks to the rules are all a percent here, a percent there. The two big ones that no one wants to talk about are now that youth football is so popular, half the career of probably most ever American football player is youth. And if you use a cigarette analogy, if you're gonna let people smoke 'cause they understand the risks they're getting into. - Yeah. - Great. But we don't sell cigarettes to kids. And longer I do this, the more I see that analogy is perfect for this. Five-year-olds are going to get, if you hit a five-year-old head enough, you can give them CT. There's nothing magic about being five. The studies will show when you put sensors in the helmets of kids. The average football hit is the same as college players because they're tiny bobble heads. It's not 'cause they could run a four, five, 40 and it's 'cause they're head, they can't stop their heads from whipping around. So the idea would be, if you just band tackle until high school, you'd cut out half of years of exposure and you might cut half of CT risk. That policy would be so simple. And then if the other change would be, if you just reinvented practice, because when I played 70% of hits for practice, you don't need 'em. Buddy Tevens and other guys have shown-- - Dartmouth. - At Dartmouth and John Gagliardi, at St. John's in Minnesota, D3, always won, never hit in practice. It's doable, but no one wants to do it. 'Cause now the Buddy Tevens has passed, God rest his soul, no one has taken up that mantle of I respect my players, I don't want them to get CT and I'm gonna change practice. And I think it's in part because no one wants the responsibility of going, oh gosh, I am the person who controls how much CT is out there. As the football coach. But that is a fact. And if there are any football coaches listening, just to appreciate your job is not just teaching football. Your job is preventing CT and your kids. And it is your choice by how you design practice. So, we're not talking about the kids and we're not talking about changing practice. And if you did those two things, you might be talking about 75% reduction exposure. And you would push the age up of when people get CTE. And suddenly it would be the only people who got paid, right? If 93% of people only played four years in high school, there'd be very little CT there. And never hit in practice. So the answer is like right in front of us, but the NFL, my perception is that, and you tell me from wrong, I remember, there was a great New Yorker article on this in the '90s that always stuck in my head. Every sport is fighting for kids' allegiance in elementary school, right? The data is very clear. To sport, you pay money on as an adult and buy the season ticket packages is the sport you best understand and affiliate with. And that is because it's a childhood connection. And so everybody is fighting to get our kids playing their sports young. - So we're jumping around to the timeline here, but bear with me because Roger Godell, he's used to the whole, he's used to the dance steps here. He's called to testify before Congress. Do you remember what that testimony was like? Do you recall? - Yeah, I was in the room. - We welcome you all and invite you, Mr. Godell commissioner to begin our discussion. - Thank you, Mr. Chairman. - Well, it's September of 2009. You're there, Roger Godell is there, and Congress is asking questions, and this is the league being asked about the findings of its own study, which quote. - A follow-up study in 2005 showed NFL players suffering, concussions. had five times the rate of cognitive impairment. Retired players were 37 percent more likely to suffer from Alzheimer's than the population as a whole. And what Gidele does or does not do is he does not acknowledge a connection between head injuries on the football field and later brain diseases while in front of Congress. Commissioner Goodell is there a link between playing professional football and the likelihood of contracting a brain-related injury, such as dementia, Alzheimer's, depression, or CTE. You're obviously seeing a lot of data and a lot of information that our committees and others have presented with respect to the linkage and the medical experts should be the one to be able to continue that debate. I just asked you a simple question. What's the answer? The answer is a medical expert who are no better than I would with respect to that, but we are not treating that in any way in delaying anything that we do. We are reinforcing our commitment to make sure we make the safest possible to feel for our okay. I've ever heard it. He's also making these pledges of we're only going to let you return to play once you're symptom-free. We know the concussions are a serious matter, and that they require special attention and treatment, and in this area I have been clear. Medical considerations must always come first. Decisions regarding treatment of players were concussions with concussions, and when they can resume play must be made by doctors and doctors alone. What stuck out to you as you were hearing? What the league was willing to do and not do at that moment in the timeline? I guess what stuck out to me is they were playing it very well for their goals. They could give ground on concussions. Because everybody immediately once he realized what was happening, it was gross to watch them put people who are unconscious back in the game. These were the bragg that no one died when they put knocked out people back in the game and therefore it was safe. They quickly shifted on that, but they very strategically avoided giving any ground on the CT front. They were forcing us to prove it, forcing us to do another 17 years of research to get there. The reason I bring up on the field return to play stuff is that the question of when is a player going to die on the field? Feels like the biggest lever on public relations. That is sort of lingering in the air that everybody is kind of aware of, and Dwarhamlin was not a CTE story at the point at which he collapsed. That was a heart failure story, but I just remember thinking at the time, if an NFL player dies on national television during a nationally televised game, that can shake people awake. What do you think about that threshold? I do think the NFL was worried about that back then because players do die on the field in football every year from second impact syndrome, from getting hit in the head after they've had a concussion and that has not fully resolved. That was part of the argument for concussion protocols is we don't want someone to die in the field, and I think you're right, it would scar a lot of people who are somebody die, especially now when they knew that person shouldn't have been out there. That was the issue, but now that I'm the older to the wiser, if someone did die in the field, I don't think it would matter. I just think that they would have a story, because now it would be because of this work, they now have a Brazilian doctorate in the sideline, and they really would have done everything possible, right? Like, Hamlin, there was a discussion at one point of like, all those people wouldn't have been there had not the concussion issue forced them to ramp up medical. Absolutely. So that's a good thing. We wouldn't also have go to break, but use the sad music. Yeah, use the piano only version. We'll see where the ball is spotted. As Jimmy Ward is checked by the medical staff for San Francisco back into this. Get the blue tent show that we're going to sort of put it behind a privacy curtain. No, you're right. Like, all of this is like, let's push this off the screen, because when you watch a game, the the announcers have to talk about the concussions, but they're never going to say CT because it's just too far down in the future. So it just never comes up. So yeah, it was all very smart of them to keep this about concussions. The reason I asked about the reason I asked about their strategies because they have such a massive lead in public opinion. What is the thing that you think is the next sort of shift in how this is maybe publicly understood? Great question. And I want to say, I think the other part that we haven't discussed is I think they've baked in CT to the formula now, where I guess Peter King actually said this and promoting his new book, who was a cool, great stories about this. We're illustrated Dean of NFL writing for a long time. Yeah. And he said, well, now we sort of understand that you know, the guys are compensated and it's a choice in its form consent. And so now we're okay with NFL players getting CT, right? And it's like, it's true. That's what the public looks at now. They're getting paid. The problem is the kids aren't getting paid, right? And so there's always going to be this the next conversation we have to have is if we're okay that the NFL players are getting it because they're getting paid and they have informed consent. How do we let kids do it? They don't have informed consent. They're not getting paid. But the thing that really matters is testing it and living people. The other problem we have with that is that it's going to start with older people. Like all these tests, the more disease you have, these years pick up. So it'll be older people diagnosed first, but the day we can tell a 15 year old has it, will that be the day that people realize like there's something wrong with this. Like kids should not be getting a brain disease. Like we've already proven they're getting it, but we're not proving it in real time. And I think that's what we're missing. I am one of those people, by the way, who is like, if there is informed consent, if you give us all the disclosures, it is our responsibility as adults to read the fine print, even if it's buried in a medical journal, even if it's in an article on the New York Times or on a weird podcast that I got to do the work to actually listen to. It's there. They're telling me you should consider that and then decide you want to sign on the dotted line. Make that cost-benefit analysis, that risk assessment for yourself. And that is how I wake up on Sundays and I'm like time to enter my own vegetative state on my couch. That is what I am saying to myself. I'm realizing what I'm finding out, talking to you, is that the research and the statistics around what the risks are are still not nearly well enough understood, even if we directionally know the gist. That is what the British medical journal findings were to me. It was, here's a reminder that this number is the lower bound of what might actually be happening. And now there might be a study that tells you, in real time, before Kristen Winsky calls your mom or your relative or your next of Ken asking for your brain, you might know whether you're at risk as soon as, I don't know, puberty? Well, it's not even at risk. That's a thing. We're only going to know when you have it. And once you have it, it's not necessarily good news that you have it. But if we can detect it early, basically, I think what's going to happen over the next few years, is you're going to watch a thousand ships get launched looking for that cure. Because what's good to change is that CTE is going to go from not being on the chart of curable diseases and not being in the chart of diseases that are prevalent to, it's probably number two or number three brain diseases. Right? Because even if you just sort of extrapolate out of, if 25 percent have it that have played at the NFL level, that means that's a significant enough percentage of high school players that it's probably more than a million men in this country that have CTE right now. And Parkinson's is 1.2 million. So this is a big disease. And so if it's a big disease, we can get people excited about making money curing it. That's what that's what my hope is. Well, this is now the NFL and you are speaking the same language. This is the gravitational force that that they do abide by is wait a minute. This is actually going to make us money. This could actually secure our future. This can keep us safe in our jobs and our empire. I mean, I don't want to be too cynical, but that is something that, of course, my next question is, why wouldn't they be doing that right now? Yeah. So I think their strategy has been push this day off as long as they can for us diagnosing at living people, keep building the brand and the billions. But the day we can diagnosing people, I'm hoping they switch. They realize, oh boy, we can't pretend this isn't really more. We don't want 10,000 X NFL players shaking their fist at us in the media every day going, why aren't you helping me? I got this playing for you. And then they might go, okay, the fastest way for us to secure our business is to find a cure as fast as possible. I don't know if it's going to happen, but there's that small part of me that hopes like, oh god, if we really showed how big this was and made it a better business choice for them to find a cure, we might have a cure in my lifetime. Well, this is, this is, this is the thing that fills me with an optimism that I can only describe as cynical and it's optimism because everything I've reported. and experienced in sports has led me to think about incentives. Forget about whatever moral principle or anything else as like the driving force. It's what is the carrot at the end of the stick? And you've now described the carrot at the end of the stick is the only choice they have left. - Right, for this study right now they're saying, "Oh, that's the old game, it's not the new game." They still have plays, but once we can diagnose the living people and once we can diagnose NFL players today. - Right, with a blood test, when they're young. And if we have that blood test while they're young, Pharma can measure the impact of a drug and say we've stopped this towel protein from increasing and in fact it's reversing and now you have less disease and like all this is reality. And it's all just, it's just off the horizon here. (upbeat music) - And so one of the things that I am thinking about and you put it in those terms already is your lifetime for people who don't know your personal familiarity with head trauma. It started as a first person concern. - Yeah, for 20 years I've been up and down about do I have this because at the beginning we didn't know. And now we have the data to show guys who play as long as me and I have my wrestling to add on top of it. It's a good chunk. In our brain bank it's probably more than half. Our brain bank is biased, so I'm hoping I'm not 50/50, but it's somewhere probably in that ballpark for me. And the data points that bother me even worse on multiple levels are the fact that two of my teammates from our 99 Harvard starting team have already been diagnosed with it 'cause they are deceased. - And by the way, these guys not necessarily the big name is that an average person should know, but I would like them to know about them. - Yeah, I mean, if you ever get a chance to look up Chris Eitzman and who he was. And again, we might set a record for mentioning Harvard in an interview, but. - It's maybe the most defensible version that we've ever done on this show, frankly, so please proceed. - Yeah, so Harvard has one football captain every year selected by the teammates. And you gotta imagine like these people who get selected are really special people. Great leaders would do anything for you. And so Chris Eitzman was voted as our captain, 99. And then went off and played the NFL and shared a house with Tom Brady with the Patriots and then said, I'm done. Yeah, like injury, got his MBA, was crushing and then decided that alcohol was the only thing that mattered to him, any drink himself to death. And died in 2001. He was actually the last person in that BMJ study. And he had stage two CT in front of low battery fee. And for all of us who knew him, going, why did the guy who had never had a problem who was Superman, friends call him Superman? Well, how did this guy choose alcohol over his four kids an amazing wife? And I believe it was his brain. And then our strong safety Mike Brooks, who was the sweetest guy, hard hitting skinny kid. Just he developed type one diabetes after he got out and he just didn't manage it. Even though it was a personal trainer and was health focused every day would not take care of himself. And dimestly, and he had stage two CT. And he was actually the youngest person ever to have a certain type of brain damage that we're studying. So when I see two great guys who weren't the guys we were worried about on our team as being the guys who should have gotten this, it does make you worry. Like I do think that people will be shocked when we're able to show them the college football CT percentage. And again, I don't want to make everyone overly concerned. But we also have to acknowledge the facts. When you see the number, it's going to scare the crap out of you. And I'm hoping we can just turn that stress. Basically, I look at it like if you can see my passion for doing this every day for more than 20 years and reading obituaries every day and I'm having a coordinated brain donation from the delivery room when my son was born and I jumped into the bathroom 'cause I still had half an hour before his popping out. - That's right. - Like that sort of commitment is in part because I turned the stress of, am I as my brain gonna go bad into, well, if it does, I hope I'll have a cure. It's not lost on me that you yourself in this episode and your work, you are an embodiment of what is possible, even if you may have experienced head trauma. - That too. I was actually in the interview the other day where the guy said, well, you know, you hear what people say about you and I'm like, what? They said, well, he went back to school, got a PhD. He can't have CT. Like he's a fraud and I'm like, it's interesting. - He's like, thanks. - Yeah, exactly. So weird backhanded compliment. - But the point is that it's because all of this, there are lots of ingredients that drive us towards whatever outcomes we have in our lives. You mentioned even in the story of your teammates, there are other concerns. It's not just CTE maybe, there are other things because we're all spinning the roulette wheel that is individual highs to us in our personal station. The point though is that a certain point, you wanna know why is this variable in so many (beep) stories and what if we could actually control that and tamp it down and would that help? And I guess the last question I have might be the most obvious question I have, but you can't call your next of Ken. God willing, may it be many, many, many, many, many years in the future. What happens to your brain? - Oh, I've already got a spot in the brain bank. I've picked out my freezer and my jar. Half goes in the jar, half goes in the freezer. Yes, my brain will be studied. I already, and in fact, I'm already part of the study if I want us to look up bankct.org 'cause I'm still recruiting for it. I've given blood, it's sitting in a lab and then my brain will meet it later. And if I die young, I'll be one of those people who helps us figure it out. If I don't die young, I will benefit from the other great people that have signed up for this study. - Man, Chris Mezci at the end here, what I have really found out among many things is that I am very thankful for your brain and what you decide to do with it. - Thank you, Pablo. That means a lot. (upbeat music) - This has been Pablo Tore finds out a metal-like media production, and I'll talk to you next time. (upbeat music)