Chris Nowinski (on CTE)

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard Episode: Chris Nowinski on CTE Release Date: May 14, 2025

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, host Dax Shepard sits down with Chris Nowinski, a neuroscientist, author, and retired professional wrestler, to delve deep into the pressing issue of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). The conversation navigates through Nowinski's unique journey from the wrestling ring to the forefront of concussion research, shedding light on the devastating effects of repetitive head injuries.

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Chris Nowinski's Journey: From Harvard to Wrestling

Background and Early Life

Chris Nowinski hails from Chicago, where his father worked in hotel restaurant management, allowing Chris to immerse himself in the football culture from a young age. "My dad worked at Northwestern in food service. That’s actually my first love—football," Chris shares [00:50].

Despite excelling academically with a remarkable GPA, Nowinski chose Harvard University not only for its prestigious education but also for its football program. "I was a student first," he emphasizes, highlighting his commitment to academics over athletics [07:03].

Transition to Professional Wrestling

After Harvard, Chris ventured into life sciences consulting but found himself yearning for the excitement of wrestling. "I took a plane ticket before we even graduated to Atlanta, to the Power Plant where Mr. Wonderful Paul Orndorff just beats me up for a day," Chris recounts [12:47]. His stint on MTV's Tough Enough reality show marked his entry into professional wrestling, although he initially faced challenges, including a significant shoulder injury [13:55].

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The Dark Side of Wrestling: Concussions and Their Aftermath

Experiencing Repeated Head Injuries

Chris's wrestling career was cut short due to multiple concussions, which he initially mistook for mere headaches and dizziness. "I thought as long as my vision went normal or the headache went away, I was okay," he admits [19:03]. However, persistent symptoms like REM behavior disorder and chronic headaches forced him to reassess his future in wrestling [20:16].

Understanding CTE

Transitioning from athlete to researcher, Nowinski pursued a Ph.D. in neuroscience to uncover the truths about CTE. "CTE is a degenerative brain disease caused by repetitive traumatic brain injuries," Chris explains [27:14]. He outlines the complex biochemical processes involved, emphasizing that while the brain can repair itself to some extent, damaged neurons do not regenerate [21:19].

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Research Breakthroughs and Discoveries

Establishing the Concussion Legacy Foundation

Chris co-founded the Concussion Legacy Foundation, aiming to advance CTE research and promote brain donation among athletes. "We have a brain bank now with 1,600 brains, close to 500 former NFL players," he states, highlighting the extensive research efforts underway [53:15].

CTE Prevalence in Sports

In his studies, Chris found an alarming prevalence of CTE among professional athletes:

• NFL Players: Out of 111 brains studied, 110 exhibited signs of CTE [37:48].
• NHL Players: 18 out of 19 brains showed CTE, even exceeding rates in NFL players [46:14].

He contrasts this with lower incidences in other sports but cautions that data is still emerging, especially in global sports like rugby and Australian rules football [58:01].

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Impact on Athletes and Broader Implications

Behavioral and Cognitive Decline

CTE manifests through cognitive decline, memory loss, and severe behavioral changes. "The number one thing you see is personality change," Chris notes, underscoring the profound personal and familial disruptions caused by the disease [40:25].

High-Profile Cases

Chris shares the tragic story of wrestler Chris Benoit, whose battle with CTE preceded his horrific actions. "He gave me his phone number. He goes, call me next week... and then months later, he killed his wife and son," Chris reveals, highlighting the dire consequences of untreated brain injuries [42:02].

Beyond Sports: Other Affected Occupations

While sports like football and hockey are primary focus areas, Chris acknowledges that other professions involving repetitive head trauma, such as the military and firefighting, are also at risk. "We’ve seen it in some military people who do not play sports but were exposed to explosions," he explains [70:23].

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Advocacy and Future Directions

Preventative Measures and Policy Changes

Chris advocates for significant changes in youth sports to mitigate CTE risks. "Let's not repetitively hit, hit kids in the head probably till 14," he urges, advocating for earlier intervention and protective measures [59:45].

Brain Donation Campaigns

To advance research, Chris initiated a pledge for athletes to donate their brains post-mortem. "We have 13,000 people who've pledged to donate their brains," he announces, emphasizing the crucial role of brain donations in understanding and combating CTE [54:11].

Global Research Expansion

Expanding beyond the United States, Chris has established brain banks in Australia and Europe to study CTE in a variety of sports globally. "We diagnosed the first cases in Australian Rules football and rugby league," he states, indicating the international scope of their research efforts [56:35].

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Call to Action

Chris Nowinski concludes with a heartfelt plea for support and participation in the fight against CTE. "Go to concussionfoundation.org or find us on social media. We are always looking for support, brain donors, and advocates," he urges, emphasizing the collective effort needed to address this epidemic [72:25].

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Notable Quotes

• Chris Nowinski: "CTE is a degenerative brain disease that is caused by repetitive traumatic brain injuries." [27:17]
• Dax Shepard: "It has some value that needs to be acknowledged." [59:16]
• Chris Nowinski: "It’s not just CTE. Brain injury itself in the absence of CT can cause a lot of this stuff." [44:31]
• Chris Nowinski: "We need to make reasonable reforms. Start later and hit less." [59:45]

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Conclusion

This episode of Armchair Expert provides a profound exploration of CTE through the lens of someone deeply affected by the condition. Chris Nowinski's transition from athlete to advocate underscores the urgent need for awareness, research, and systemic change to protect athletes and individuals in high-risk professions from the long-term consequences of head injuries.

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Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondri in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Leslie Stahl. And today our guest is Chris Nowinski. He is a neuroscientist, an author and a retired professional wrestler. We've been just accumulating bizarre origin stories, but bizarre might not be the right word. Super fascinating origin stories.

[Monica Padman]

Unusual.

[Dax Shepard]

Unusual. Which is probably the definition of bizarre if you look it up. Price as unusual.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I've been thrilled thrilled to have Chris Nowinski on. I've been wanting to have someone on to talk about CTE for a long time.

[Dax Shepard]

You love cte. It's your favorite topic. The dream scenario would be a CTE episode of the Pit.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God. I'm surprised they didn't do that.

[Dax Shepard]

They will Season two.

[Monica Padman]

I hope so. It got a season two. It's like rushing a season two.

[Dax Shepard]

Of course, John Wells is a legend, okay? He has a book called Head Games Football's Concussion Crisis and if you want to get involved with the Concussion Legacy foundation, concussionfoundation.org this is a really, really interesting episode and his story is second to none. Please enjoy. Chris Nowinski we are supported by ZipRecruiter. Go get recruiting Finding the right match is hard. Like with dating, some people get lucky and marry their high school sweetheart, but others of us spend years in the dating trenches trying to find just the right fit.

[Monica Padman]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

I love an egg that you can like. The yolk is so bright.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I like a dark orange yolk. When that dark orange, you know, it's high quality. This restaurant we go to all time for breakfast. Breakfast place. Yes. Yes. So good. I always think there's cheese in the scrambled eggs, but it's just the yolk.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Chris Nowinski]

He's an upchurcher. He's anchor.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you know that author David Sedaris?

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Our greatest gift this whole show has given us is we've interviewed him like six times and he sends us postcards and that postcards from Sedaris is like he writes them from all over the world.

[Chris Nowinski]

Such a throwback to a better life.

[Dax Shepard]

Where are you coming in from?

[Chris Nowinski]

I live in Florida now. Oh, you do?

[Dax Shepard]

What city in Florida?

[Chris Nowinski]

Boynton Beach.

[Dax Shepard]

Where's Boynton Beach?

[Chris Nowinski]

It's north of Boca, south of Palm Beach.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Chris Nowinski]

Near my wife's family so that I can be living the dream on the road.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you have kids?

[Chris Nowinski]

Six and four. Kenzie and Charlie.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So yeah, you definitely need grandma and grandpa around.

[Chris Nowinski]

They're doing a great job helping.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, we did it without a grandma and grandpa, but thank God my sister lives next door. So yeah.

[Monica Padman]

God, this is incredible. She said this is for Peaby part two. For this space.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a deep. Deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep.

[Monica Padman]

That is a real listener. A real armchair.

[Dax Shepard]

It's so cute. How does one get?

[Monica Padman]

She probably invented it.

[Dax Shepard]

What do you call it when you commissioned. She commissioned this?

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. It took years to build.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, and you have to pee in the tank cuz the lid.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow, that's so perfect.

[Chris Nowinski]

She's gonna be so happy with that reaction.

[Monica Padman]

God, that is incredible.

[Dax Shepard]

And does it say explicitly for pee baby?

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God. You wouldn't know the story behind Peaby.

[Chris Nowinski]

I gotta explain to you, I don't go back that deep.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, of course I don't expect very early Days, Peaby.

[Dax Shepard]

We barely go back that deep. Sometimes we completely forget.

[Monica Padman]

We forgot.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So where did you move from to this area of Florida?

[Chris Nowinski]

I was in Boston for 25 years.

[Dax Shepard]

But you're from Chicago.

[Chris Nowinski]

From Chicago, right? Yeah. Suburb.

[Dax Shepard]

Have you already bonded with Robbie about this?

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes. Yeah. I grew up in Oak park and in Arlington Heights. Was right by him in Offman Estates.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. What did mom and dad do there?

[Chris Nowinski]

My dad worked in hotel restaurant management. So when I was growing up, he's at Northwestern in food service.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, the college.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes. That's actually my first love of football was going on Saturday mornings, he'd have to work and I'd get to go sit with the football team while they had breakfast. Can you imagine, like, all the cereals being lined out like it was like a dream?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And watching guys probably consume, like, 7,8000 calories before practice. You're very Chicago.

[Chris Nowinski]

Thank you. Yeah, I thought I lost it.

[Dax Shepard]

No, right. He could be standing next to Ditka and look like his son, maybe, you know, that very Midwestern.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's a nice big white boy.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I'm from Detroit. So we have our variety as well. Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

We consider ourselves brothers statewise, Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Absolutely. Also, high rate alcoholism is standard.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. Well, my dad's family's Milwaukee. My mom's family's East Lansing.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. So deep Michigan. A lot of time in Kalamazoo. Grown.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my goodness. I just. I won't bore you with it, but. No, I'm gonna bore you with it. I drove around with a homeless guy for an hour and a half interviewing him, and the only reason he trusted me to get him was because he was from Kalamazoo and I was from Michigan.

[Chris Nowinski]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

What was in Kalamazoo?

[Chris Nowinski]

Just great aunts.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so you.

[Monica Padman]

Such a weird thing you just said with no context.

[Dax Shepard]

I know. I kind of like it that way. Just leave that hanging until maybe one day the mystery's revealed. Okay, so you played a lot of sports. I'm sure mom and dad were supportive of all the sports.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And you excelled at football.

[Chris Nowinski]

I did.

[Dax Shepard]

And then you ended up going to Harvard to play football.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, walk me through the selection process. Like, would you have been good enough to go play at Notre Dame? And then you decided, no, I really want the education.

[Chris Nowinski]

I wish it was that good. I was good enough to play at Eastern Michigan.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Correct.

[Chris Nowinski]

In Northern Illinois. The Mac was interested, and luckily my high school coach said, listen, if Harvard invites you to come, you don't turn them down.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Smart.

[Dax Shepard]

What kind of Grade point did you have coming out of high school?

[Chris Nowinski]

5 and change. I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

Wait, you can get a 5?

[Chris Nowinski]

We had a 5 point scale. Grade inflation was happening.

[Monica Padman]

You were a really good student.

[Chris Nowinski]

I was a student first.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, five and change sounds nuts.

[Dax Shepard]

I've never heard it go to 5. I've heard like 4.4s with all the.

[Chris Nowinski]

AP classes because of a. Yeah, it's inflated by AP.

[Dax Shepard]

Always a ton of AP.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Classes. Yeah. Okay. You're likable, right? Did you pay any penalty for being that smart? Were you like a nerd? Were you getting shoved in the hallway?

[Chris Nowinski]

No, luckily I got big, so I was a jock and I was a nerd. I don't want to go that deep. I had a high opinion of myself in high school.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, good, cocky.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you have this thing? Because I was in a few AP classes, and I definitely think that first day of the AP class, a lot of the kids were like, oh, God, how embarrassing. He's in the wrong class and he doesn't know it. Do you think you were getting any of that when you would walk into these AP classes? Like, oh, fuck, the center of the football team's in the wrong class.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, no one on the football team was in my AP classes.

[Dax Shepard]

This is what I will say, for.

[Chris Nowinski]

Real, the highest honors. I remember looking in my high school was all women in me. It was like 31. That was weird. So I think it was just accepted that I was there. I did get that at Harvard, though. So I do remember football shows up two weeks early as practice, and then the rest of the students show up and we're in the dining hall and we're last because we came from practice with boisterous. And I hear somebody say, a couple people, part of me. Oh, I thought we left those guys behind in high school.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. If I were them, I would be like, they have jocks here, dude. Isn't that why we work so hard? Gonna get shoved into a locker in college.

[Monica Padman]

Sorry. Nerds. They're always.

[Dax Shepard]

What was the Harvard experience like? Was it incredible?

[Chris Nowinski]

It was the best. You're just around the most motivated, talented people you can imagine. And so it's just infectious.

[Dax Shepard]

And is the football team competitive? I don't know anything about it.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Forgive my ignorance. I never see them in, like a Rose bowl or anything.

[Chris Nowinski]

No, no. We haven't won since 1909.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, boy.

[Chris Nowinski]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

So don't be mad, appalled that I'm asking how good they are.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes. At that point, we were one aa and that Was part of a big turnaround to the Harvard program. Now they're one of the best perennially in. Now it's called fcs.

[Dax Shepard]

Don't jump out of the couch and tackle me. Are they Division One?

[Chris Nowinski]

So there's no more Division One?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, there's.

[Chris Nowinski]

That's the thing. Like, they totally screwed up football. So it's football bowl series, FBS and football championship series. Fcs. The old one, Double A. There's a tournament at the end versus bowl games.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. And Harvard plays all these teams I'm familiar with.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

No, we didn't play them.

[Chris Nowinski]

How familiar are you with Lehigh? So not to knock on Lehigh, but let's do it.

[Dax Shepard]

What is Lehigh?

[Chris Nowinski]

It's a nice school in Pennsylvania if you can't get into Harvard.

[Dax Shepard]

An equestrian first school.

[Chris Nowinski]

Squash program.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, there was a really interesting.

[Chris Nowinski]

Who?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, Malcolm Gladwell just recently wrote about the absurdity of the numerous sports at Harvard. They have more sports than any other school. So that there's so many routes in.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Anywho. All right, so you loved it. What degree did you pick up at Harvard?

[Chris Nowinski]

Sociology. So I saw you were an anthropologist. I love it.

[Dax Shepard]

The same distance between Detroit and Chicago. Really academically between. It's very close.

[Chris Nowinski]

I started sociology because my perception was I was trying to figure out what was important in the world and sort of strip down what I was told was important growing up outside Chicago versus what it really is. What do I really care about? What are my values?

[Monica Padman]

Was it culture shocky at Harvard? I mean, I guess you're around Northwestern.

[Chris Nowinski]

The kitchens.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Chris Nowinski]

I didn't have to deal with classrooms.

[Dax Shepard]

What? Honors program.

[Monica Padman]

Right. That's true. Never mind. You were a shoo in the culture.

[Chris Nowinski]

Shock for me was wealth.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, right. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you have friends that were like, you want to get on the jet and go to Martha's Vineyard with my family?

[Chris Nowinski]

I wasn't invited, but I heard about. Was talking about that. Taking the helicopter down to Newport, Rhode island, for the weekend to the mansion. The first time you're asked, where do you. Summer?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, Summer's a very.

[Chris Nowinski]

You never forget that feeling. You don't know how to answer it. Then they pity you.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Okay. So how on earth do you get on this MTV show? Oh, another thing we have in common.

[Chris Nowinski]

Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. What's. What's the timing? Crossover.

[Dax Shepard]

He's much younger than me. Nine years maybe. Are you 41?

[Chris Nowinski]

No, but thank you. I'm 46.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Monica Padman]

Only not that year.

[Dax Shepard]

Still in the 70s. You were born 79.

[Chris Nowinski]

78.

[Dax Shepard]

All right, we're doing good. Okay. So. Yeah. How do you end up on mtv?

[Chris Nowinski]

So I took a real job out of Harvard. Life sciences consulting, working for pharma, biotech companies, drug development stuff. Intellectually challenging, but not what I was looking for. I was working for them during senior year making side money. And we would talk wrestling. I became a really big fan that year.

[Dax Shepard]

Growing up, did you love wwf? Hulk Hogan?

[Chris Nowinski]

It wasn't allowed in my house, so I had two sisters and I was the only boy. So my mom could control that. You're not watching wrestling.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Chris Nowinski]

We go to the cousins, I'd catch it or the cartoon. So I knew a little bit, but it wasn't a childhood thing. But summer of 99, I lived with five guys in like a two bedroom, one bath for football. And we watched Monday night Raw and smackdown. And I got hooked because it was like the rock and stone cold golden age. Yeah, it was amazing. So a lunch conversation says, you know, if you don't get drafted in the NFL. Because I was a distant prospect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you'd make a great wrestler. Would he ever try that? He knew people because he'd consulted. I think when Vern Gagne was trying to sell the AWA out of Minnesota, deep cut. He's like, all right, if you don't get drafted, let me know. You don't get drafted. He said, I'll make a call. He calls Jerry Jarrett, who ran the Memphis territory, who calls J.J. dillon, runs talent for WCW. And they say, hey, we got this six, five, Harvard guy. I think it'd be good.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Chris Nowinski]

And so suddenly I've got a plane ticket before we even graduated to Atlanta, to the power plant where Mr. Wonderful Paul Orndorff just beats me up for a day.

[Dax Shepard]

Just to train you, like a tryout. Okay, great. Not in front of anybody.

[Chris Nowinski]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

I gotta imagine you're appealing. You have the size. Great. You have the athleticism, but what a story. You're from Harvard, they're gonna hate your fucking guts. It's like a built in story.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes. Although I didn't realize at the beginning I was only gonna be a heel if they found out I went to Harvard.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Chris Nowinski]

Okay. That's where the reality show part comes in. Then the test was they would just make you run the ropes till your side's bleeding. They would just see if you're tough.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

That wasn't even like performance or anything. And I passed it. I needed shoulder surgery. They're like six months. When you're healthy, give us a Call.

[Dax Shepard]

By the way, you're 22.

[Chris Nowinski]

I'm 21.

[Dax Shepard]

You're 21. You need your first shoulder surgery.

[Chris Nowinski]

Second.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, Lord.

[Dax Shepard]

AC separation.

[Chris Nowinski]

No. Impingement syndrome.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Chris Nowinski]

I was getting shots while I was doing my training.

[Dax Shepard]

Another thing, I've had three shoulders. Yeah, you beat me. I hope we fuse at the end of this. Okay, so you needed surgery.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Maybe you two should make a pee.

[Dax Shepard]

Baby, we should. It'd explode out of the toilet. The first trimester, it'd be £12.

[Chris Nowinski]

So WCW is going out of business. By the time I'm healthy, hiring Freeze and Ted Turner, all thing falls apart. So I'm working part time in this consulting firm. I find Killer Kowalski's wrestling school. I'm gonna go in old school. I'm going nights and weekends. So then WWE and MTV partnered to create Tough enough to sort of bring in the MTV crowd to wwe. And it was just after Real World season three. But it's hot. And Survivor's hot. This is so early in reality show that we had no last names. In the show. 13 people live in a house, train with WWE for 13 weeks.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my.

[Chris Nowinski]

And have their whole life filmed. But old school, 24 hours. Surveillance cameras. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you have a romantic. No. There's no women there. Right.

[Chris Nowinski]

Of course.

[Monica Padman]

They have to.

[Chris Nowinski]

It's empty. They wanted that. So it was eight guys, five girls.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Date two are on the wrestling track.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And was there any romance happening in the house?

[Chris Nowinski]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, they didn't get you drunk enough? They probably hadn't cracked the formula yet.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Chris Nowinski]

The prize was a three year contract. And so everyone sort of knew if you're spending your time not focused on the business.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but there's always romance. Even when there's.

[Chris Nowinski]

As people smartened up to reality show, they might have realized it'd be good for TV for them to do that.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what I'm saying. They would have gotten you hammered on the introduction and then. Oh, everyone in the. Everyone in between.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

This is what year? 99.

[Chris Nowinski]

So this was 2001.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. What was the value of a three year contract at that time with WWE.

[Chris Nowinski]

We had no leverage. So I think it was like a hundred thousand, $150,000 a year deal or something.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Chris Nowinski]

Nothing crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

30 to 50 grand a year?

[Monica Padman]

A year?

[Chris Nowinski]

Per year.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Chris Nowinski]

They paid us 600 bucks a week to do the show. And then one person dangled.

[Dax Shepard]

When you're 21, you're gonna make 450, 000. That's great.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Of the People that were on this show, how many got that contract?

[Chris Nowinski]

Two. One male, one female.

[Dax Shepard]

And you got. You didn't get the contract. Wait, but you did end up in wwe. Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so you didn't get the contract. What then happened?

[Chris Nowinski]

And the only reason why, now that we look back.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

Is because the show was meant to bring in the wrestling crowd. And so third week of the show, there's two Chris's on the show. They can't differentiate us, so they tell everyone, start calling him Chris Harvard, because everyone just called me Harvard. I was the only Harvard guy they'd ever met. And I didn't realize that that would be your heel for all.

[Dax Shepard]

I want to be a dick, but maybe the only college grad there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that would be my guess. I'm glad you said it. I'm glad you said it.

[Dax Shepard]

Elitism. This is why we lost.

[Monica Padman]

You said it. You're the one that said it out loud.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so the show ends. How big was the show? Were people recognizing you and stuff?

[Chris Nowinski]

It was the number one show on MTV that year.

[Dax Shepard]

It was.

[Monica Padman]

I'm really upset. I missed it.

[Dax Shepard]

Were you going to bars in Boston? And people were, like, so excited.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, what a fun time.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. But I was the bad guy in the show. They added me to be a total villain, so I didn't get that kind of reaction. It was more like, oh, that guy's here.

[Dax Shepard]

You're in Boston. Are dudes trying to challenge you at the bar? No, thank God.

[Chris Nowinski]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

Were you ready?

[Dax Shepard]

You weren't ready.

[Chris Nowinski]

Well, I mean, I survived, as we'll learn.

[Dax Shepard]

You have a big injury. Is that your fault or his?

[Chris Nowinski]

I'll take the blame.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a dance.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. But it was multiple hits over time. So some of them are my fault, some of them are not. And they accumulated.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so this is a question that's been really eating me alive. And you're one of the Few people that can really answer this. So we were in Mexico City over Christmas and we went to the wrestling down there.

[Chris Nowinski]

Lucha libre.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Chris Nowinski]

It was night and day. Football is way worse.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Chris Nowinski]

Because football, you're actually colliding in wrestling. You're trying not to hurt anybody.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Chris Nowinski]

But I was also there at the time where we're as safe as we are today. And so real chair shots to the head. And don't put your hand up anymore. You're a coward.

[Monica Padman]

That sounds worse.

[Dax Shepard]

And there's high flying stuff that goes wrong all the time. This is what I was seeing, Monica. Guys were running and leaping out of the ring onto the cement floor that would at that point be probably 10ft below them with a fucking 2 inch mat on the ground. Good luck.

[Chris Nowinski]

Very small margin of error. It's like a million stunts in a row. But you don't rehearse it. And you just sort of hope because they're all improv. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

All these matches, which I think is fascinating. Did you watch the McMahon documentary?

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

What a doc, huh?

[Chris Nowinski]

I think I didn't it.

[Dax Shepard]

Were you in it? Oh, this is embarrassing, D. It's not too embarrassing. There's about 150 guys in it. We hadn't met.

[Chris Nowinski]

No, that's right. I'll connect dots for you. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, no. You were in for the CTE stuff.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes. Don't worry. Nobody cares about my wrestling career. I mean, this is the most I've been asked about in a long time.

[Dax Shepard]

I know you've seen the cte. Yeah. So I guess that was a stupid question. Did you watch it? But did you deal with McMahon at all in that period? Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

I mean, he was the guy who hired me.

[Dax Shepard]

And was he just a good time Charlie? Was he fine to work for?

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah, if he liked you, it was fine. Yeah. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so you cut to the point. You get a pretty gnarly concussion. You get kicked in the head and what happens?

[Chris Nowinski]

So I got a bad concussion, but it didn't get better. So I learned later on I've been getting concussions playing sports and wrestling for a long time. I didn't realize they were concussions. I wasn't educated on them. So I thought like, as long as my vision went normal or the headache went away, I was okay. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

What was the conventional measure of whether someone was concussed or not? Very blizzard. Blurry Blizzion was one.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes. Speech impediment. Back then it was if you were knocked out, that was a concussion. And then if you weren't knocked out, it was a gray area. You know, you didn't take it too seriously. If you'd still play, you'd never go tell a doctor. It would never get into the system them, so it wouldn't count. But this last one, my head was just throbbing all the time. I couldn't remember anything. And so I kept wrestling for a few matches until they sort of realized something really wrong with you. Why don't you take some time off?

[Dax Shepard]

Your balance fucked up and your coordination.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So you're now a liability to yourself because you're not functioning correctly.

[Chris Nowinski]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So where did that take you?

[Chris Nowinski]

I took a few weeks off, and then apparently I learned I was accidentally put on the roster for the next weekend shows. And I thought that was a test of, like, get back to work. I went to the doctor, and I'm like, I'm fine. Even though I wasn't fine.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Tell me about this. Tell me.

[Chris Nowinski]

You know how when you're dreaming in your mind, you're moving around all that stuff, but your body turns off your limbs? That broke, and so it turned back on. And so I would act it out. My first dream girlfriend I was with at the time was in the room, Said she woke up to me standing on the bed, trying to climb the wall. Couldn't wake me up. And I remember that in my dream, something was falling. I had to catch it. And she watched me go head first in the wall, do the nightstand, and not wake up for another two minutes. Then I woke up, and I'm like, that's chaos. And she's crying and screaming, and I'm scared to go to sleep. I woke up the next day, I went and told Mickey, man, what happened to me. And I thought, you're not wrestling until we figure this out. And by then, I'd just done too much, and it didn't get better.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Not to spoiler alert. You become a Neuroscientist. I'm miramarking that, but let me just ask you really quick. As I recall from Biolo College, I was told that all the cells in your body are somatic. They go through mitosis, but your brain cells do not. They're gray cells and they don't repair. Is that still what we think? Tell me what happens with the cells in your brain.

[Chris Nowinski]

They can repair, but when they die, they don't come back.

[Dax Shepard]

They are different from the rest of your somatic cells.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah, well, I only know brain. I don't care about the body, what's down here. But the idea is you don't get new brain cells. Now we know you do get some new brain cells. There's some neurogenesis, but it's not nearly as much as we would want it to be. Yeah. So when you get like a severe brain injury, you don't come back. You might build new pathways, new dendritic connections to compensate.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. You're going to relocate to a non damaged area of your brain. Some motor control or some other thing.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. You build a new network to take over. The neuron is going to get eaten up by the brain is gone. A new neuron is not coming into its place, filling and making those thousands of connections.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so given that, what was the method to repair the condition?

[Chris Nowinski]

You had that back in 2003, we didn't really do concussion rehab. It was just sort of like sit in a dark room until you feel better. We've now learned that doesn't really help. And so I just never got better. So I basically would act out my dreams every other night and it was chaos. I was taking medicine to be sedated and I had a chronic headache all the time. And so after this 12 months of hell, I told them, even if I do get better, I'm probably not coming back to wrestle. If I actually can get rid of this pain, I don't want to lose it.

[Dax Shepard]

You're really knowing now, unfortunately, the preciousness of that.

[Chris Nowinski]

Exactly. Now I'm the idiot who went to Harvard and then destroyed his brain. He wanted to have some fun being a pro wrestler.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I did have a really gnarly concussion. Wakeboarding and I had amnesia for like 14 hours.

[Chris Nowinski]

Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

And I was on like a three minute loop and I had the MRI and looked in there and yeah, it was gnarly.

[Chris Nowinski]

What was the question you kept asking?

[Dax Shepard]

I would see, I'm in Michigan, but I know I live in California and I'm with my then girlfriend of nine years. And I would say, why am I in Michigan? And then my mom was there too, because they were all taking me to the hospital. You're home for my birthday. Why don't I remember that? You were wakeboarding. You hit your head. And then I would say, oh, so it's like the episode of Gilligan's island where I get hit in the head with a coconut and I just gotta get hit in the head with a coconut again. No laughing. And then I go, that's kind of funny. Have I said that before? Yeah, you've said that like 40 times. Crying. Then why am I in Michigan? Come out of the crying and straight back. And I was just on this loop for like 14 hours. And then it stopped. And then all those memories that had been been happening during that 14 hours were becoming clear.

[Chris Nowinski]

That's a very common thing. I'll share a similar story because it's actually in that book I just gave you. Just because it's so wild. They're having a Bubba Ray Dudley, a wrestler Table's Ladders chairs match. He forgot his mother died. Yeah, Recently. And apparently was going around the show asking people, how's my mother doing? And they all knew she died. He kept reliving his mother's death over and over again till someone figured out, guys, stop answering the question.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so when do you decide that you're going to go back to school and get a PhD in it?

[Monica Padman]

Ever get better?

[Dax Shepard]

That's a good point.

[Chris Nowinski]

Thank you for asking. I am feeling a lot better.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm presuming it's better.

[Monica Padman]

You said it never got better.

[Chris Nowinski]

I still have the REM behavior. Once in a while I wake up, think I'm choking to death. I always think something's wrong with my throat. The headaches are mostly gone, but it's more than a decade. I'm doing better, thank you. So the reason I shifted.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm so happy you're better, Chris. Thank you, dx.

[Chris Nowinski]

The reason I shifted is because. So there's a doctor played a very important role in my life. Dr. Bob Cantu. He was the eighth doctor W sent me to, but the first one to help me understand what I was going through. Because every other doctor would ask me. This concussion you had a few months ago, your first one, I'm like, yeah. Cause I'd never been told by someone in a white coat I had a concussion. He was the first one to say, well, how many times have you been hit in the head? And you saw stars, you forgot where you were. You're dizzy, you're confused. And I was like, oh, that happens all the time.

[Monica Padman]

Like every day.

[Chris Nowinski]

Every couple weeks, we have a bunch of stories of wrestling matches and football things. So he goes, okay, well, if you had a lot of concussions, it sounds like you didn't take any time off because they weren't diagnosed. I'm like, no. He goes, those two things are bad, and they can lead to what you're going through post concussion syndrome. And I'm like, really? How am I, a Harvard grad who'd been banging my head for 19 years, having no idea what a concussion was? That bothered me. And he was like, I don't know what that really means. Long term, the data is questionable. So I'm like, all right, well, I'm going to figure this out. So I took what I'd learned from that consulting job and I went over to the Harvard Medical School library and I started reading every study ever published on concussions to look for the secret.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Chris Nowinski]

And as I'm digging into that, I'm realizing, oh, we've actually known for 100 years that concussions are bad. We used to take care of them much more seriously than we did before. In the 1950s, the Harvard team doctor for the football program said, Three concussions in your lifetime and you can't play here anymore. You should retire. Oh, that's how serious was in the 50s.

[Dax Shepard]

So what happened?

[Chris Nowinski]

The thing that I could pick up was the NFL was orchestrating a nice big tobacco coverup about it. It had sparked many times throughout their life. But in the 90s, when Steve Young and Troykin both had problems, they said, all right, we're gonna take care of this. And they started a concussion committee full of friendly doctors who were now publishing research in the medical journal Neurosurgery, saying, there's nothing wrong with concussions. We put half our guys back in who are knocked unconscious. None of them had. Therefore, there's no long term effects, and no one's ever developed any problems long term. And I knew how to read the studies. And I was like, well, these studies are designed to show that finding if you had to retire mid season from a concussion, they couldn't follow up with you legally because you were no longer part of the NFL. You would just drop out of the study. You died on the field. You wouldn't fall out of the.

[Dax Shepard]

All undesirable data would be jettisoned from the study.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. So I got pissed. And so working with Dr. Candu, learning about all this, I said, all right, I'm Gonna write a book about this. And that became this book, Head Games Football's Concussion Crisis. That said, A, concussions are much worse than realized. B, there' things CT. Two cases have been found. And by the way, the NFL is covering this up. So that was 06 when that came out. Got a $4,000 advance.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Chris Nowinski]

I paid $21,000 for libel insurance.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

Because what the NFL was doing. But luckily I was right.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so when do you pick up.

[Chris Nowinski]

Your PhD in 2017. So it's a long leap. And it's because I started nonprofit, started the research center, Boston University School of Medicine. But I was the guy who just got brained for a brain bank. And literally they had an office and they were like, hey, as long as you're in the building, why don't you just go down the hall and get a PhD? Because the shine's going to wear off. Of the interesting ex athlete. Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Okay. So what is a concussion?

[Chris Nowinski]

A concussion is a traumatic brain injury that changes the way your brain functions.

[Dax Shepard]

And does it have to require swelling? How would one test for it?

[Chris Nowinski]

There is no objective test. It's still a clinical diagnosis. But basically there's two things happening. One is there's a chemical cascade and metabolic changes that happen from the energy going through your brain or from your neurons stretching or axon stretching and all these things happening. And then there's also, in probably most cases, physical damage, but not stuff that we can pick up on a standard mri.

[Dax Shepard]

Will you tell me more about the chemical aspect?

[Chris Nowinski]

The great work was done at ucla.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not shocked. Some say it's much better than Harvard.

[Chris Nowinski]

It's interesting. I hadn't heard that. Just to explain, you have 80 some billion neurons in your brain. They'll have long projections. Some of them go from your brain down to the bottom of your spinal cord, and they're 1/20 width of a human hair. When they stretch, they get injured and they open up your channels. So you get too much calcium flooding inside of your neuron, potassium flooding outside your neuron. It's not operating.

[Dax Shepard]

It's becoming porous through the stretching. So now all these chemicals that are inside of it and outside of it start dancing around. Yes.

[Chris Nowinski]

And the calcium is affecting your mitochondrias. You can't produce energy. The electrical signals aren't working right. You get restricted blood flow. The whole thing just sort of is malfunctioning. But it all depends on where it's malfunctioning and how much your brain's impacted to determine symptoms. Okay, so that's why some concussions, you can't remember things because parts of your memory are impaired. But other times it's because you can't see because your visual cortex is impacted.

[Dax Shepard]

Are there regions of the brain that are more prone to this damage? When you see concussions, does any area over index?

[Chris Nowinski]

Well, your frontal lobe is more sensitive to the trauma.

[Dax Shepard]

It's big, it's right in front.

[Chris Nowinski]

If your brain was a sphere, you'd be a lot better off. But because it's not quite shaped like that and your frontal lobe is sort of hanging off to the front, when your brain moves violently, those axons are more likely to get stretched and twisted. Not well designed for trauma. And it's also tethered in the back down to your spinal cord and your brain stem, so it's flopping around in there.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Now when I got mine, they put me in the MRI or the C scan or whatever the I got. And what they were looking for particularly is they told me, well, your brain has swollen and the swelling has probably caused some pressure against the area of your brain that has these short term memories or that's why until it unswells, that's what's going to go on. And then we're looking for bleeding.

[Chris Nowinski]

They're looking for bleeding for sure. To make sure you don't die.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, because if you're hemorrhaging in your brain, you can't. They gotta get in there, right, and.

[Chris Nowinski]

They gotta release that or else you're gonna have some real long term problems or could die. So that's what you're usually looking for. But your brain doesn't swell too much from a standard concussion. Most people will never swell.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so maybe mine. They just were scaring me.

[Chris Nowinski]

Trying to convince you not to go wakeboarding the next day.

[Dax Shepard]

I haven't been since. They didn't have to say much.

[Chris Nowinski]

Ye, but no, it definitely can swell a little bit. You just wouldn't pick it up much.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so for people who've had. And we don't know the number, obviously at some point in your study, as we accumulate more things, maybe we'll get some kind of predictive sense. But some multiple concussions result in this cte.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, I'm obsessed with ct. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Monica, I don't know if you know this coming in.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah, no, I appreciate you guys mention it a lot.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, Monica mentions it. Me, I bring it up a lot. To Dax's chagrin.

[Dax Shepard]

This is her pork belly.

[Monica Padman]

I do. People don't know enough about it.

[Chris Nowinski]

We need to have a conversation about it.

[Monica Padman]

Really don't.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned for more Armchair expert if you dare. We are supported by Addie Flanserin, the Little Pink Pill. Ask your doctor if the FDA approved Little Pink Pill. Addy is right for you. See full prescribing information, medication guide and boxed warning regarding severe low blood pressure and fainting in certain settings at a d d y.com PI or call 844-PINK PILL. We are supported by Quince. One day it's cool, the next you're sweating through your clothes. That's how you know it's time to switch things up. Quince is gonna have exactly what you're looking for as we move through spring. Lighter layers, better fabrics and prices that don't make you think twice. I've been in the market for shorts short sleeve shirts. I'm getting prepped Monica and Quince is the place.

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It's time to do a little ref. Gosh, this is such a good place because it's a really good price, but it's really good quality.

[Dax Shepard]

Super high quality. Quince has all the things you actually want to wear, like organic cotton silk polos, European linen beach shorts, ding ding ding and comfort pants that work for everything from backyard hangs to nice dinners. Quince keeps prices down by working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen giving you luxury pieces without the crazy markups. In this economy, making the most of your dollars is a priority. Quince gets that. Elevate your closet with quince. Go to quince.comdax for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C E.comdax to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comdax we are supported by Shipstation. Boy did they bail us out. We had an incredible merch drop recently. Thousands of orders came in. Carly would have been buried without Shipstation because life can be unpredictable and if you're in charge of order fulfillment for an E commerce business, you know that it's its own special kind of chaos. Shipstation is the partner you can count on to help your day to day stay as calm as possible. Save hours and money every month by shipping from all your stores with one login, automating repetitive tasks and finding the best rates among all the global carriers. You can focus on other parts of your business because Shipstation takes the worry out of your shipping and fulfillment processes. You'll never need to upgrade. Shipstation grows with your business no matter how big it gets. Seamlessly integrate with services and selling channels you already use and manage orders on one easy dashboard. Calm the chaos of order fulfillment with the shipping software that delivers. Switch to ShipStation today. Go to ShipStation.com and use code Dax to sign up for your free trial. That's shipstation.com code DAX. Instacart is on a mission to have you not leave the couch this basketball season because between the pre game rituals and the post game interviews, it can be difficult to find time for everything else. So let Instacart take care of your game day snacks or weekly restocks and get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes because we hear it's bad luck to be hungry on game day. So download the Instacart app today and enjoy zero dollar delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees apply for three orders in 14 days. Excludes restaurant. Okay, so what is the full arc of the condition? And Mike, what are the mechanisms that are happening in the brain?

[Chris Nowinski]

CTE is a degenerative brain disease that is caused by repetitive traumatic brain injuries. Right. So it's only seen in association with a lot of hits to the head. So one of the important things to say right away is that one concussion is not causing CT in almost anybody. Because now we've looked back at brain banks and even ones where people have had a severe brain injury from a car accident or something, and you just almost never see it.

[Dax Shepard]

Although you did say one concussion doubles your outcome for suicide. Yes, that's up. Really?

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

One concussion I know I've had. Not the only one I've ever had.

[Monica Padman]

That's horrible.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Although the incident rate for suicide in a group of 100,000, it's still quite low. So even double it, it's still a low number. Don't get too worried.

[Monica Padman]

A lot of people have had concussions.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And so that's interesting to know that.

[Chris Nowinski]

Data is usually from hospitalized concussions, which you had. And the theory is there's sort of two things going on. One is that maybe it's changing the way your brain functions and maybe you're in chronic pain. Headaches is very much associated with suicide, so maybe there's some of that going on. And then on the other side, though, it might affect your life in a big way. It might affect your job, your relationships, your circumstances have changed.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

But then also we get into a correlation causation problem, which is, I'm sure there's something we could say about people who accumulate concussions. People that are drawn to that lifestyle are probably doing a whole suite of behaviors.

[Chris Nowinski]

It is complicated to unravel so we don't want anyone to think suddenly you got one concussion, you're going to kill yourself.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Okay. So you get multiple injuries for some.

[Chris Nowinski]

Reason, football being probably the best example. I took 10,000 hits to my head. One of those hits was hard enough to spark this inflammatory process around a blood vessel. At the depths of the sulcus in my frontal lobe is where we usually find the beginning.

[Dax Shepard]

Is that generally, if you have ct, that is where it's.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes, that's where the first lesions will show up. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which, again, we think is part of the physics issue. That part of your brain is most likely to stretch like rats don't get CTE because they don't have that fold. So the depths of the sulcus, the energy of a rapidly rotating brain, causes it to go to that bottom of the valley, and that's where you see the initial lesion. And then for some reason, that lesion will keep spreading in the absence of further hits. We think, in most cases.

[Dax Shepard]

Explain that.

[Chris Nowinski]

We don't exactly know atroph, gats, atrophy. Misfolding proteins can act like a virus and can continue to spread. So you have a protein called tau in your axons, neurons, that's sort of a structural element. And when the axon stretches, that tau can misfold and then sort of like a crack in a windshield, that it just keeps spreading and it can actually jump the synapse and go to another neuron. And so we don't understand. We can't diagnose this during life, which is why we're trying to get brains for study. So we only have these windows into at the time of death, what do we see? But now we pick up these small lesions in teenagers. If you look at now over 15 dead teenagers. Dead teenagers, yes. You see that the older people have a lot of it. The younger people have these tiny lesions, and you can see the spread.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, just to be a skeptic, what is our control group? What are we making this relative to? We have other brains, but we don't totally know the history of their impact. Are we seeing? Most people don't have any of these lesions.

[Chris Nowinski]

Right. The good news is, at the beginning, we were a little more in the dark. But one of the great things at Boston University, where we have this brain bank led by Ann McKee, she leads five other brain banks, and one of them is the Framingham Heart Study. Have you heard of this?

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Chris Nowinski]

So the town of Framingham outside Boston, has been followed it for generations, and now they're old enough where they're dying, thank God. And that's where.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm just joking.

[Chris Nowinski]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Now, let's jump really quick to the first 111 NFL brains. You looked at how many heads CTE?

[Chris Nowinski]

110.

[Dax Shepard]

So one out of 147 versus 110 out of 111.

[Monica Padman]

I'm sorry, I've been saying this.

[Chris Nowinski]

That should be enough for people who.

[Dax Shepard]

Have not seen the images. They're taking these thin slices of the brain and they're putting them next to each other. And a healthy section of this brain would be kind of just white. And then if you have a mild case of ct, you're seeing some discoloration, but in an extreme cta, you're seeing like it's been dipped in coffee. And then there's just pockets of saturation of this dark stuff. It looks like the lung of a smoke.

[Chris Nowinski]

That's what I compare it to when I show healthy lungs and diseased lungs to help people appreciate how abnormal this is. When the NFL used to bring in international experts to tell us this was all fake, one of them would refer to as the gingerbread brain for this hall of Famer who died in his 90s whose brain had shrunk to like, almost half its size and was all brown. This is just impossible. Like, they must be faking it. That's actually how sad it is.

[Dax Shepard]

And he made it to 90.

[Chris Nowinski]

Well, he's in his institution for 20 years.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh. And then I. This is relevant to bring up because we're in the early explanation of it. So this was observed. And I grew up here hearing this because my dad loved boxing. We called people punch drunk.

[Chris Nowinski]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And so just talk about what that was.

[Chris Nowinski]

So Punch Drunk was first published in a major Medical Journal in 1928.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow. That long ago.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. They figured out very early.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

That boxers were getting very strange. Slurred speech, movement disorders, bizarre behaviors. There's a lot of literature from the 20s, 30s, 40s about punch drunk. Then dimentrapugilistica. They didn't really start looking at brains as much until the 70s. There was a famous case series of it where they sort of talked about all these abnormal brains from boxers. But the problem was no one really dug into it. What defines CT is this abnormal tau protein. We didn't know how to see the protein until the late 70s. We didn't have the. So it wasn't the original part of the diagnostic criteria because we hadn't invented the antibodies that make it show up. So it's a lot of reasons why that didn't happen. But also in 1984, the American Medical association said boxing shouldn't exist. It's too barbaric. It was sort of at that point that research on boxing, boxing stopped. And so it was like, yep, boxers get punch drunk. Well, end of story.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, occupational hazard.

[Chris Nowinski]

Nobody connected the dots to the fact that all these other sports.

[Dax Shepard]

You're also looking at a pretty small group of people versus high school football, which is millions of people. It's not like that many people go into boxing.

[Chris Nowinski]

I agree that the social part of it is like they're punching each other in the head. They really don't expect to have problems.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And they signed up for it.

[Monica Padman]

That's the problem.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not an epidemic.

[Chris Nowinski]

And it wasn't like there was the sun of doctors off doing it, you know, so it's just like this other part of the culture.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so what are the symptoms that people with CTE experience?

[Chris Nowinski]

This has evolved over the last 15 years as we figured this out. But basically the one thing that is best predicted when you have CT pathology is cognitive decline. It'll start with executive dysfunction, meaning you're no longer making good decisions, your career goes to hell.

[Dax Shepard]

Make dumb investments, very common.

[Chris Nowinski]

So executive function goes to then memory, short term memory first, but start to lose episodic memory, long term memory that is very frequent with end stage cte. And then we also see neurobehavioral dysregulation, impulse control problems, anger issues.

[Dax Shepard]

This is the stuff that seems to get the headlines. And I'll say that anecdotally, we know someone that was married to a very successful football player and they had a total personality shift.

[Monica Padman]

They died.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, he died. And you hear about this. I see it on real sports. There's violence. All of a sudden people who have never been violent are getting violent to their family. They're getting violent around town. There's self harming, the addiction is spiraling. You're seeing a real tornado of depression and just the personality shift. I think that's the scariest thing.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

People are married to these men that they love that were so Kind. And all of a sudden they're erratic and impulsive and scary.

[Chris Nowinski]

Well said. Because one of my talking points is often that the number one thing you see is personality change, but that's not a diagnosable condition. So it's like in our data. But they always say he's a different person.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, because you go like, okay, memory loss, to what degree? You can live with that. But that aspect. And then I have to imagine the suicide rate for people with CT has got to be among the highest.

[Chris Nowinski]

Actually not true. That's something they're actually trying to help. Really part of it is that a lot of the early cases were suicide cases. The third brain I ever procured was Chris Benoit, the wrestler who killed his wife and 7 year old son himself.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God. Tell us that. I mean, you guess you did this tell.

[Chris Nowinski]

It's a complicated story. When I was writing that book, he was the only guy in the locker room. I'd show up for shows once in a while. Half people welcomed me, half people thought I was lying and stealing a check and faking my injury. But he was a guy, took me seriously and sat me down and said, what are you learning about concussions? How many have you had? I asked him how many he had. He said more than I can count. I'd known him for five years. He gave me his phone number. He goes, call me next week, I want to talk about it. I called him. Sounded like he was in the middle of an argument with somebody. He's like, I'll call you back. And he never called you back. And then months later, he killed his wife.

[Dax Shepard]

He killed his entire family.

[Chris Nowinski]

Killed his seven, killed himself over 48 hours. Left Bibles and strange statements and then more USA. I've talked to. He was falling apart. He wouldn't plan matches anymore because he couldn't remember them. So he would just say, let's wing it.

[Monica Padman]

So sad to me. He knew though something wrong.

[Chris Nowinski]

He knew something was wrong. He knew something was wrong and I didn't help him. And that sort of sparked. Now I have five full time people just to deal with. People reach out to us. We make sure we do everything we can to help them. Because this keeps happening.

[Dax Shepard]

If someone were to recognize in a moment of clarity that this was happening to them, are there medications that could help? Yes.

[Chris Nowinski]

The advice for everybody is treat the symptoms. So whatever the symptoms are, there's probably medication to work and make your life better. So on the suicide front, even though that's all the high profile stuff and Dave Duerson Jr. Sales.

[Dax Shepard]

You hear these wild cases where the dudes shoot themselves in the heart because they know they want their brain studied.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. That's something we discourage. We don't need those brains anymore. That was a troubling trend that started, I've now learned. It was like a conversation that a bunch of them had together. Yeah. Because they were all mad at the NFL for lying about everything back then. And so let's show them. So everyone's shooting those chests. We're trying to say, look, CT symptoms can be treatable. We can't stop the disease.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

We need to work on that. There's health and there's hope. Yes. So anyone struggling? That's why we have a helpline. Reach out to the Concussion Legacy foundation helpline. We will find you something, and we will help make your life better. But we do keep seeing these suicides. But the actual overall rate of NFL suicides is not that much higher than the population.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, OJ Definitely had it, right.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. I think it's impossible that he didn't. And I think it sort of puts his life in perspective.

[Monica Padman]

It does. I don't know what would have changed with the trial, but I do think if we had known then that that's clearly at play here, we would have looked at it much differently.

[Chris Nowinski]

We would have looked at it differently. Like, doesn't mean that you don't go to prison.

[Dax Shepard]

You're not allowed to kill your ex wife. Ye.

[Monica Padman]

Well, apparently you are, because he got off. But it would have been an interesting part.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It forces you to look at a lot of the things we've seen with a lot of the people we've seen them with. Mike Tyson, a lot of these boxers that have had episodes that are inexplicable. You have to imagine there's a lot.

[Chris Nowinski]

Going on and it's not just cte. Brain injury itself in the absence of CT can cause a lot of this stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

What positions in football do you track those? Obviously, the kicker has very low risk of getting this.

[Chris Nowinski]

The kickers haven't been exempted from this because in the old days, the kickers were former position players, and in the new days, they're all former soccer players. They've had the ball too much. But actually, we cannot find CT trends by position. Even though linemen get hit, may be twice as much as other positions, but the average hit is bigger for those positions. But there's also a missing piece of data that people didn't realize. This sort of explains why we don't see it by position. Can you Guess what that is maybe.

[Dax Shepard]

Because they've all played different positions before they landed in those positions.

[Chris Nowinski]

That's part of it. What you played in the NFL is now what you played as a kid.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You see all these stories. This was a layer of racism where these incredible black quarterbacks will come into the league and they're like, you're not going to be a quarterback because you don't have the brain to run an offense.

[Chris Nowinski]

Right. They all became wide receivers and running backs.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

The other part is special teams. Kickoffs and punts are actually the most violent plays. Oh. But it's random. Who goes on those? And it's not tracked. When I did my interview, because I'm going to be donating my brain, it's like, so how many weeks were you on kickoff, your junior year of high school? And I'm like, I don't remember. Like, I was on this week. I was off this week. Kickoff's very fluid. Special teams changes all the time. Only in the NFL are the handful, handful of specialists to do special teams. Otherwise, it's usually the backups.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

I think that is actually skewing our data. Some linemen are gunners or wedge busters in the old days and all these things that were very violent.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Now, how did the sports compare to one another? Is football the worst? Where's NHL? Where's boxing? Where's soccer?

[Chris Nowinski]

We don't have enough data, and especially because we can't diagnose living people. But for football, we've looked at now over 400 NFL brains and 93% them have had it. But we just published our first study of NHL players, and it was 18 of 19. So it was actually a higher percentage.

[Dax Shepard]

I grew up around hockey more than football. Concussions are standard because you're falling, you're hitting the ice.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. The ice is way worse than any football hit. And you're going faster because you're skating faster than you run.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Those guys are flying and hitting the back of their head on the plexiglass. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Why can't we look at the brain while the person's living?

[Dax Shepard]

You'd have to go in and do a brain surgery.

[Chris Nowinski]

We are trying.

[Monica Padman]

I feel like scan technology has gotten so good in, like, fmri, but now we're not there.

[Chris Nowinski]

The problem is no one's done the work. The CT stuff shut down the 70s, and we started the first academic center back in 2008. So there's no research on this for Alzheimer's. None of these diseases can be diagnosed Definitively during life only until very recently. We started imaging beta amyloid plaques, which was a breakthrough a little over a.

[Dax Shepard]

Decade ago's part of that as well.

[Chris Nowinski]

Right. So we've been piggybacking off of a lot of Alzheimer's research to try to catch up. So we don't even know the pattern of atrophy to distinguish it from Alzheimer's. Right. It's frontal, it's temporal, but we don't actually know. So we will figure this out probably much sooner than we realize, but we can't right now. So soccer's bad if you're a prolific header. Boxing was bad if you take a lot of punches. There's also a dose response issue going on with that. So the reason why 90 some percent of NFL players have it because they've all played 20 more years. The fewer years you play, the less risk. So when we study the high school football players brains, it's a minority of them, although it's still far more than I'm comfortable with.

[Monica Padman]

And I did hear once, maybe it's sort of the opposite of what you're saying, that you think if you haven't gone to the NFL that you're in the clear, but you may have started in rec league, you may have started when you were five years old and so you've still had a long time playing.

[Chris Nowinski]

That's exactly right.

[Dax Shepard]

And wasn't one of the things that we've learned since we started studying this is it's not these big concussions necessarily that it's also just repetitive smaller hits.

[Chris Nowinski]

It's repetitive hits, but not smaller. So actually a talking point I've been trying to drive into our team for the last year is that when you actually look at the sensor studies, what we find out is that the average concussion with linear acceleration is happening at about the 90th percentile. So let's say it's 100 GS if that's what's happening. If you're a football player, you take a thousand hits over a season, that means you took 100, 100 hits harder than that concussion, that other 10%, I think that's what's causing a lot of the CT risk. It does take hard hits to cause physical damage to your brain.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that's comfortable.

[Chris Nowinski]

But most of them you can't feel because you don't have pain nerves in your brain. And so when one neuron dies, you can't feel it.

[Dax Shepard]

So you just said 100 GS. Is that the scale we're looking at?

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah, 100 GS in a few milliseconds.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. Because you think of these F1 drivers are pulling five GS and their necks are this thick because they're dealing with five GS.

[Chris Nowinski]

That's over a much longer period of time.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah. Some of those impacts can create a hundred G's.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. Now, is the onset period of this condition, do we know is it age related or is it duration from impact related?

[Chris Nowinski]

There is a delay between when you get the damage, when you start having symptoms, and there's a lot of variables that contribute to that, including your overall brain health and aging and vascular disease, cognitive reserve. So if you're smarter, you'll have delayed symptoms versus other people because your brain, brain's wired better and so you can lose more neurons before you start showing functional problems.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Chris Nowinski]

So we don't actually know when the onset of symptoms is from ct, especially because everyone who gets CT has taken these thousands of hits and also has other types of brain damage in there, like frontal lobe white matter damage. That would be obvious for some of these symptoms. When you think about there's four pathological stages of ct, Stage three and four, everybody's got some symptoms. The more you have, the worse off you are. Stage one and two, you're usually younger than 40. You also have white matter damage. You also have all these other things. And we don't know if it's the CT lesions themselves that are contributing to everything or the white matter damage or these other types of brain damage that we see. So the onset of when CT starts affecting you is a little bit unknown.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, now I want to say, so you took it upon yourself once learning about this, and at the time, I think you said There was only two or three brains that have been studied for CTE.

[Chris Nowinski]

There were two NFL players, and there were 45 brains in the world where they'd found CT. And you kind of.

[Dax Shepard]

Appointed yourself the person that was going to have to try to go out and get more brains to be studied, which meant that you were in a position to start calling family members of people, mostly football players who had died, to ask the family if you could have their brains. Yeah, I want to know a few of these stories. I mean, if there's one in particular. But I wrote down Aaron Hernandez, Demaryus Thomas, Vincent Jackson, Ken Stabler, any of these. I would love to hear someone's personal story.

[Chris Nowinski]

Not everybody's on that list. Did I call? Part of what I'm doing is trying to set up a systems they call us. Maybe just start with the first conversation because it's on public record. These are all very sensitive, intimate conversations. The first call was the family of Andre Waters. So do you remember him from the Eagles Strong safety?

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Chris Nowinski]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I'm sure a lot of people do, but we.

[Dax Shepard]

I know from research he knew he had a great nickname.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes. Dirty Waters. Cause he liked to lead with his head. Yeah. Oh, my God. So for my 85 Bears in the late 80s, he was a nemesis. The Eagles were beating him. So Andre Waters takes his life. I just wrote the book, and no one cares about the book. And I'm trying to think, like, I walking away and moving on with my life, or am I going to stick with this? And so he dies by suicide. He's still Division 2 football coach. He's employed. There's nothing obvious on the surface. I called the medical examiner in Hillsborough County, Florida, and I said, hey, you should study his brain. And he's like, no, this is crazy. He'd never heard of this. But after multiple conversations over many weeks, because I was just trying to see if I was right, I was like, can I convince this guy that I'm right? He said, well, it just so happens that I know Waters is buried two weeks ago, but we kept part of his brain, and I will give it to you. I'm now convinced that this is worthy of study if you can get someone to study it and you get his family's permission. And I'm like, all right. So I called. The only doctor I knew at the time was the doctor from the concussion movie, Benedemalu. So I called him and I said, we studied his brain. He said, yeah. I said, all right, here's his mother's phone number. She's 88. Give her a call. And he goes, no, he wouldn't make the call. There are other doctors we work with. No one wanted to make that call. So that's how I got stuck making the call.

[Dax Shepard]

You're calling the mother of someone who just died, son to suicide.

[Chris Nowinski]

She doesn't even realize that not all of them's buried. That's even a revelation itself. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

What do you mean, yeah?

[Chris Nowinski]

The medical examiner keeps tissue. Like, what? I just remember, like, I can't be a coward about this. And so I cold called his mother. Luckily, she didn't answer because I just had this vision that she would just, like, listen to me and, like, just drop dead.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

And instead, his sister answered. I had written a script, and I'm like, hey, I'm just this guy, you've never heard of, and I have no medical credentials, but I think his brain should be studied first. His sister answers, and she looks, listens, she goes, hold on. I'm not the right person in the family. She got somebody else on his niece. And his niece had some medical training, and over a couple days, I convinced him to do it.

[Dax Shepard]

I would imagine, as scary as that call is to make, any family member of someone who just died by suicide would love an explanation.

[Chris Nowinski]

They were so happy that someone cared to find out. Maybe there's more to this.

[Dax Shepard]

It's almost like finding the killer of someone who was murdered.

[Chris Nowinski]

Right. And then they started saying, well, you know, he was getting lost, driving to the house, he bought his mother to his own house. All these things weren't adding up for them. So luckily, they were so nice about everything and so appreciative that I was like, all right, I can keep calling families. And so now I've called a lot of families.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. How many NFL brains? I guess college, too. You've gotten a lot of those.

[Chris Nowinski]

Our brain bank now has 1600 brains. We're getting close to 500 former NFL players. What was actually most interesting is this is not widely known, but since a certain date, we've gotten one in four NFL players who died.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. And then you get the idea to start a pledge. Tell us about that.

[Chris Nowinski]

I also realized, like, I don't want to be calling people within 48 hours of their loved ones passing for the rest of my life.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How did they get out of this?

[Chris Nowinski]

Is what you were motivated by? Keep doing this. I don't do this anymore because I still read the obituaries every morning out of habit. It's, like, really terrible. It's a weird way to start your.

[Dax Shepard]

Day, although it could fill you with gratitude.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. Well, it does make you appreciate that you're alive that day. So. Yeah. So I started asking all the athletes I knew if they would pledge their brain, Basically trying to create a culture of brain donation in America among famous athletes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

So that they would realize that this stuff, it's important and it's happening. And so it started with people I all knew very well. And now we have 13,000 people who've pledged to donate their brains, probably more than we could ever take.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's incredibly successful. And then throughout many other sports, like Dale Earnhardt Jr. Has agreed to do it.

[Chris Nowinski]

But I should pause here and ask. Part of my gimmick is I ask everybody. Now that you guys are part of an Alzheimer's study, have you Also considered donating your brain.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I'd be happy to.

[Monica Padman]

I would totally donate.

[Dax Shepard]

We just did a moral dumbfounding question by John Jonathan Haidt of someone having sex with a corpse. And I was like, I really don't care what happens to my body afterwards. So if I'm willing to have that happen. Yeah, absolutely.

[Chris Nowinski]

That went a different direction than I was expecting.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm showing you how low the bar is for me. No, absolutely.

[Monica Padman]

My brain could be of any help. Why wouldn't I?

[Dax Shepard]

Monica was a high flying cheerleader.

[Monica Padman]

I was about to say that might be a group that needs to study. Obviously a lot of those are girls and women. It might even present differently. So that would be interesting to see.

[Chris Nowinski]

There's a huge concussion problem in cheerleading, especially the Flyers. Or if you're the one catching, you were flying.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you watch that cheerleading doc? That was popular. It's called Cheer on Netflix. It's incredible. And you go, oh, these gals are doing something more dangerous than the football players.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And no one even is noticing what's happening.

[Chris Nowinski]

It's clearly not thought through. Right.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

There's no regulation.

[Dax Shepard]

They don't practice with helmets on. We got in a fight about.

[Monica Padman]

I'm like, they gotta practice because aerodynamics. But I know, I know, I know.

[Dax Shepard]

You can't tell the football players they got to have.

[Monica Padman]

I know. But even more than stunts, you're tumbling and you fall. The time I fell on my head so many times trying to do a backflip. Just learning you fall.

[Chris Nowinski]

Okay. I'm very interested in this brain.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I got to get my.

[Monica Padman]

You can have access to it.

[Chris Nowinski]

We've never seen CT in a cheerleader. We haven't had many brains donated. It's a new phenomenon. So we don't have 70 year old cheerleaders who are doing this, which is a whole another issue. So it's something we got to look into. But I'm hopeful it's not a huge problem.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I'm delighted to donate my brain. Do I have to officially go to a website or something? Y tell me how to do it.

[Chris Nowinski]

I think it's donate your brain dot org, but I'll send it to you and I'll make sure I get that right.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Okay.

[Chris Nowinski]

But we'd be honored to double check.

[Dax Shepard]

My children have no plans for my brain. Once they sign up, most people say.

[Chris Nowinski]

Let me check with the wife and they'll never get back to you. So I appreciate my wife.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, get that fucking brain.

[Monica Padman]

What are they going to do with your brain?

[Dax Shepard]

Reanimate me when the technology exists.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, all right.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, sorry.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so you've gotten this pledge. What's happening in Europe? And obviously rugby, Australian rules football, soccer is global. It's not like this is an American issue. The rest of the world think about all this.

[Chris Nowinski]

Well, they tried to frame it as an American issue. So one of the tricks the NFL played is they brought in Australian doctors and British doctors who would say, this isn't in our country, so this is not real. So I went and started brain banks around the world. And so one of them was in Australia because that was the big bad guy who was coming in and saying, this is fake, this is fake. So we, we started brain bank in 2018. And by 2020 we diagnosed the first cases in Australian Rules football, the first case in rugby league. We now have a brain bank at Oxford. It's been seen now in rugby.

[Dax Shepard]

Is it a comparable. I shot a movie in New Zealand for four months and I got super into watching rugby and I was like, well, this is the ultimate gladiator sport. I mean, these guys have nothing on. They must have enormous rates of this.

[Chris Nowinski]

We don't know because we just started the rugby research and are you aware that it's only been professional for a little while?

[Dax Shepard]

No. As you've learned, I know very little about these masculine sports.

[Chris Nowinski]

I didn't know this either until recently.

[Dax Shepard]

I know about BMX and skateboarding.

[Chris Nowinski]

So rugby was like a gentleman's thing until turn of the century. Everyone's £180 and they're sort of tackling, hugging each other. But since then, they've all, all become 280 pound monster football players who train constantly and they're fast as hell. The professionalization of rugby has made CT a huge problem. We still see it in the older guys. By comparison, we've looked at nearly a thousand American football players brains. And we've looked at 50 rugby brains, but it was about half. And it was how long you played. Your odds went up 14% per year you played. We just diagnosed the first New Zealand rugby case two at our brain bank, University of Auckland.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so now we can get into a fun liberty question. And what is the future? And what would you advise? Because obviously for children. That's one conversation we have about children. We would agree they're not old enough to make this Faustian deal.

[Chris Nowinski]

I would agree.

[Dax Shepard]

And there are a lot of people that I couldn't argue back if they go, yeah, my life fucking sucks without this thing. And I'm an adult and I want to do it, and I take on the risk and fuck you, I have liberty, and I can't really stand in the way of that. I am of that mind. How do we deal with all these facets of the problem?

[Chris Nowinski]

I'm of the same mind. When people ask me, do we end football? I said no. I used to let people hit me in the head with folding chairs for a living. And I thought it was fun. And that wasn't nearly as dangerous as cops and firemen and people going to military service. If you want to do a dangerous job to support your family, great. But let's not lie to you about the risks, and let's take reasonable precautions and let's give you a voice to negotiate those precautions. Unions, that's why the NFL has gotten safer, is there's a union so totally fine with the NFL continuing as a business and players having informed consent. But you're right, the problem that we cannot reconcile is that everybody who played in the NFL made that choice to start playing as a child. And once you're on the train, we all know it's really hard to get off in a culture that says quitters are terrible.

[Dax Shepard]

And let's be honest, it might be the greatest part of someone's whole time on planet Earth.

[Chris Nowinski]

It might be.

[Dax Shepard]

I still know people. It's like the greatest years of their life were being on that team and doing that. So it has some value that needs to be acknowledged.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes, team sports are amazing for the connections and the physical health, but getting hit in the head, there is nothing good about that. And so the question becomes, when and how do you get into this?

[Dax Shepard]

So they've done a lot of cool things, right? Like practices have changed at the highest.

[Chris Nowinski]

Levels they have, but they have not gone all the way to the bottom as a umbrella. Our campaign to change these sports is called Stop hitting kids in the head.

[Dax Shepard]

Stop hitting kids in the head.

[Monica Padman]

I love that.

[Chris Nowinski]

There's just no reason, like, do you hit your daughters in the head?

[Dax Shepard]

Not intentionally.

[Chris Nowinski]

You can probably count how many times they've ever been hit in the head.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[Chris Nowinski]

Because it's really abnormal for kids to get hit in the head outside of sports. Even in old cases of abuse, if you hit your in the head a lot, they would stop showing up. So I think it's safe to say we're hitting children in the head more than we ever have in the history of time.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Chris Nowinski]

A thousand hits to the head in a year is hard. So let's make reasonable reforms. Driving is actually a really Good analogy for this. I think it's sort of like, when do you start driving a car? Well, there's no age at when it magically starts becoming safe. And so in some states it's 16, some states 17. We've looked at data, we think about brain maturity, we think about all these things. And so we should think about that for all the sports. We shouldn't repetitively hit, hit kids in the head probably till 14. That is a good neuroscience perspective for brain development. And a little bit uninformed consent. It sort of becomes more reasonable to start taking risks at that age. But the idea that you take a five year old and put a five pound helmet on him and have him get hit in the head two, 300 times a year doesn't make sense to me. Because the risks are serious. You are actually increasing risk of CT and the rewards. You can get that from flag or some other sport and then have your period of time where you get to play the rough sport. Football is not the problem. It's too much football. One season might be too much for some people, but usually it's double digits is when you start getting into real risk of cte. So start later and hit less.

[Dax Shepard]

Would one bit of advice for soccer be like no heading the ball until a certain age?

[Chris Nowinski]

In 2015, we got U.S. soccer to say no heading until 11. So that's a thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Chris Nowinski]

We asked for 14, we got 11. We'll still push for 14 as the data accrues. Yeah, but there's limits at 11, 12 and 13. Only supposed to do like 20 a week, but even 20 a week, it's a thousand a year. Still can be.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, what the hell, right?

[Chris Nowinski]

We're actually saying let's actually start counting it. Which we might be able to start doing with like AI and two dimensional video. It's analogous to pitch counts in little League. If you're a coach, when your kid pitches, you have to count each one and you have to send it to the league office. Because they were realizing it was destroying elbows with Tommy John surgery. Right. The response to that was pitch counts. So we count how many times kids throw a ball to protect their elbow. We do not count how many times any child is hit in the head in sports.

[Dax Shepard]

That's wild.

[Chris Nowinski]

And now that soccer's, you know, you can play four seasons a year now. It used to be in high school, it was one.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, my daughter is buddy. Some of them are four leagues all year round.

[Chris Nowinski]

We're not monitoring that. Could be getting more exposure in soccer than you are in football. My kids play soccer. They can't head now, but when they can start heading, my advice could be don't head.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly, coach.

[Chris Nowinski]

No, it's not for me. I'm going to play it off my chest. I'm going to control it better. Anyway. This whole idea, that projectile coming to your head you should knock back is very abnormal.

[Dax Shepard]

You're using your head as a baseball bat, basically. Stay tuned for more armchair experts if you dare.

[Chris Nowinski]

This is a mini meditation guided by Bombus. Repeat after me. I'm comfy, I'm cozy.

[Dax Shepard]

I have zero blisters on my toes.

[Chris Nowinski]

And that's cause I wear Bombus the softest socks, underwear and T shirts that give back. One purchased equals one donated. Now go to bombus.com wondery and use.

[Dax Shepard]

Code wondery for 20 20% off your first purchase. That's B O-M-B-A-S.com wondery and use code wondery at checkout.

[Chris Nowinski]

Why are there ridges on Reese's peanut butter cups?

[Dax Shepard]

Probably so they never slip from her hands. Could you imagine? I'd lose it. Luckily, Reese has thought about that. Wonder what else they think about.

[Chris Nowinski]

Probably chocolate and peanut butter.

[Dax Shepard]

At 24, I lost my narrative. Or rather it was stolen from me.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

And unrecognizable names about the way that.

[Monica Padman]

People have navigated roads to triumph.

[Dax Shepard]

My hope is that people will finish an episode of Reclaiming and feel like they filled their tank up, they connected.

[Monica Padman]

With the people that I'm talking to, and leave with maybe some nuggets that help them feel a little more hopeful. Follow Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Reclaiming early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

[Dax Shepard]

So what we see too, and it has to be acknowledged, is the demographics of the sport are changing because educated white people with means are not letting their kids do this. And we're seeing it change pretty dramatically. Who's actually playing the sport is disenfranchised, disadvantaged kids more and more.

[Chris Nowinski]

That's true. HBO Real Sports did a nice piece with us. Yeah, that was part of that piece where they said the percent of kids on food stamps who were playing tackle football in Illinois was starting to dramatically go up. Changed by 10% over only a few years because people with options started to realize, my kid could do another sport, get the same benefits without the risk. It is a cultural conversation needs to be had because then that quickly goes to. But it's their way out, right?

[Monica Padman]

That's always the next sentence.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a legitimate argument.

[Chris Nowinski]

It is, except for my next response is, but no one's getting recruited off their film when they were seven.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Chris Nowinski]

So you could go flag into that. I think people aren't thinking about it deeply enough to realize that, yes, it can be a way out, but it doesn't become here is still high school.

[Monica Padman]

Also, if there's just a regulation that that can't happen until you're 14, then everyone is still starting on the same playing field.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Chris Nowinski]

One of the ways to look at that. There was a study by CDC showing in white communities, you're more likely to have both flag and tackle and you have a choice. But in black communities, you only had tackle. You don't have the option. You're either playing tackle or you're not playing football at all. Which in some cases might be worse for various reasons.

[Dax Shepard]

It's one thing to say, oh, they were told the risk and they may a decision, but if you acknowledge that some people are in a worse position and they're more incentivized to make that decision, that has to be accounted for.

[Chris Nowinski]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Chris Nowinski]

Brain injury can lead to these other problems down the road. So don't take our most vulnerable people and layer on 5,000 hits to the head for that Tiny chance to. They can turn into a living.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, yeah. What is that percentage? Do you know it off the top of your head? I mean, it's under 1% of kids who enter the football in their school are going to end up in the NFL.

[Chris Nowinski]

It's 0.1 or something so small.

[Monica Padman]

This is such an important topic.

[Chris Nowinski]

I appreciate all your research on this too. I know it's a dive.

[Dax Shepard]

I like it.

[Monica Padman]

So this is like a really maybe bad question. Do you think you have it?

[Chris Nowinski]

That's not a bad question. I have to wrestle with that every day. It waxes in a way. And some days I'm like, yes, maybe not my problem is it got very real a few years ago because one of my college roommates died. He was the Harvard football captain my senior year. We shared that room when we were all watching wrestling. In 99, he played three years in the NFL. He was Tom Brady's housemate when they were rookies with the Patriots and then didn't work out for injuries. And so then he went and got his MBA from Dartmouth and then he ran hedge fund. The perfect life. Marries high school sweetheart, four kids. And then we found out he had a secret drinking problem. And it got so bad that it killed him. Even after interventions and everyone becoming aware. So the perfect guy, the Superman, ended up drinking himself to death. He had stage 2 CT. We played. Basically had the same sports experience. He played 11, seven years of football. I did my eight years of football and my wrestling. And the fact that more of those guys seem to have it than don't. The guys who have my history, definitely more than 50% in our brain bank have had it. Then I just have to ask the question of how biased is our brain bank right now? I don't think people look at me and think I have it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it doesn't seem it maybe only.

[Chris Nowinski]

My wife, so I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, you have to acknowledge that same stimulus input results in some different output because we're so variable. So like tens of millions of people smoke same amount of cigarettes in some percentage, get small cell carcinoma. I don't. There's a lot of factors in there.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah, you're right.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not so predictive of the symptoms.

[Chris Nowinski]

Well, not predict symptoms. The pathology for sure.

[Dax Shepard]

The condition, but not the symptoms per se.

[Chris Nowinski]

Correct. I think there's a very good chance I have it. If I showed you my MRI from 20 years ago, that does not look normal, but I don't have symptoms or at least ones that are overwhelming me. Yeah, but that's part of my passion race to find a cure. It's like I still might have 10, 20, 20 years before it clubs me over the head to find something that actually stop it so that I can just have what I have.

[Dax Shepard]

Your best defense is that you have a wife that's highly educated on this and is an outside observer. I think it gets hard to observe yourself, but you have a partner who's hip to all these things to look for, presumably.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah. But she's also got to be completely in denial to choose to marry me.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, she hasn't proven to be.

[Chris Nowinski]

We had that talk, though, when I proposed. I was like, now look, I don't know where this is going to go because this was born 10 years ago ago now. We had even less knowledge. And I'm like, I might have this. I might lose my mind. Here's Benoit thing. It happened a couple years prior. It's like, I don't know where I'm going to be at 40 now. Past that, I don't know where I'm going to be at 50. It is scary to think about sometimes.

[Monica Padman]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So that did bring me to the final thing I want to talk about is this isn't just for athletes. Right. There are occupations that over index in concussions. All my friends in the movie business are all stuntmen. I can't tell you how many concussions these guys get. It'll go unnamed, but yeah, there's one friend that we've had where a few of us have talked and I'm like, these feels a little loopy. Was anyone else noticing this? And we know of many, many concussions. Anyone who's doing like motorcycle shit, you're going to deal with that. So what occupations? Military? Fire and rescue.

[Chris Nowinski]

So we're starting to look into that. CT's been seen in some military people who do not play sports but were like artillery or Special Forces. A lot of explosions. So it can happen. It's much more rare than football, but it's definitely there. We are looking to more first responders. We have gotten some firemen and police who've had a of lot, lot of concussions, but I don't think we have a case yet. So hopefully it's not as bad. We actually seen it in people on the autism spectrum just bang their heads all the time.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.

[Chris Nowinski]

But it is probably out there. I'm hoping it's rare. There are some jobs where you're getting hit in the head quite a bit, but it's not anywhere near boxing and football.

[Monica Padman]

Well, also because probably you don't start those jobs till you're older.

[Chris Nowinski]

That's a great point. Your brain's not as protected against those hits when you're young. The sheath around your accent, this type of cell that grows there, it's isn't there when you're young. And so those stretches are worse. But we have diagnosed the stuntman with cte. He was also a football player.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, again, most of these stuntmen are coming from a different high risk.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Chris Nowinski]

Be happy to help your friend if you want to connect us. He's open.

[Dax Shepard]

That's interesting. Yeah. I wonder how open he would be to that. That's a vulnerable thing to acknowledge, a.

[Monica Padman]

Hard thing to bring up to people.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Chris Nowinski]

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

[Monica Padman]

I think for some reason, hearing that it's connected to the brain, that really scares people, obviously. But like you said, it's still a matter of just treating the symptoms, though. And you should, especially if you know it's something happening in your brain, then you can't just think your way out of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Chris Nowinski]

And sometimes we do a little bit of selective framing where we say, for something like that, transition can be really hard from careers. And so a lot of guys go through this depression, actually, let's go see this doctor to try to help figure it out. They'll do the cognitive test. It'll give us a window into actually could see part of this.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, right. So everyone who leaves the NFL is going to get depressed. They had a purpose, they had a schedule, they had teammates, they had community. But CBT or therapy will help with those. And if that doesn't help with those, then you're going, well, there's probably some kind of structural issue that's probably not going to respond to that type of treatment or therapy. Okay, so if people want to get involved or help. Concussion Legacy foundation is your organization. Is there any place people should go to support or is there any call to action?

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes, thank you for asking. Go to concussionfoundation.org or find us on the social medias. This is one of the more neglected areas of research. And so we are always looking for support. We're always looking for brain donors. Thank you both so much for your brain and people participate in clinical studies. You can also be an advocate in your community to try to keep your kids safe. So we have various programs you can get involved with, but the key is get involved. The sad thing is CT should not exist. Almost all of it is voluntary and those choices start as children. And we can change this culture and it's. But in the meantime, we have to dramatically sell out our research so that we have cures for all the people we grew up watching are now all the people who are friends.

[Dax Shepard]

Are you in the unique position where when you go to a football game, the players love you and the upper brass can't stand that you're there?

[Chris Nowinski]

The upper brass definitely can't stand there. They don't give me access to the players. So it is hard. And then when you are a player, most of them, I'm finding, live in a bubble where they don't even appreciate what we're trying to do because it's really hard to go do your job job when you're thinking about your brain.

[Monica Padman]

Of course.

[Dax Shepard]

But they have been motivated as a union. They have pushed internally for these changes.

[Chris Nowinski]

And so the ones I know through, like the executive committee, who are actually in those meetings, they do love us. I spent time with one of them yesterday. Those guys are great. The only place this really happens, actually, when I go back to wwe, the wrestlers really appreciate how much safer wrestling is now.

[Dax Shepard]

They made a lot of big changes.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Shockingly, that was part of the doc. I was like, yeah, humans are so complex. Yeah, this guy's doing this, but then he's open to that.

[Chris Nowinski]

Triple H was on our board for six years, and he really gets it. And so it's amazing, now that he's in charge, the influence that has over the whole safety.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Well, Chris, you're radical. What an incredibly weird story that brought you here. I love it and I'm grateful for the work you're doing, and I hope you're effective in making sure little kids don't get hit in the head over and over again.

[Chris Nowinski]

Thank you very much.

[Monica Padman]

It's been a long cost.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Thanks for coming.

[Chris Nowinski]

Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. I had a rare occurrence and I would do also. This is great. This dovetails nicely into what we did a week ago.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Delta's play. There was two showings of Delta's play. 1:00pm, 5:00pm yeah. You went to the 1:00pm yes, I did not, and I regret it deeply. But while I wasn't at that play, I was like, oh, my God, I can finally go get my shingles vaccine. Oh, when you turn 50. This is a public service announcement.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

You are now eligible to get the shingles vaccine.

[Monica Padman]

Interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, maybe they'd give it to you before, I don't know. But when you. I was at my physical this year, and he's like, okay, so now you gotta get your shingles vaccine. Which sign me up.

[Chris Nowinski]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you know anyone that's had shingles?

[Monica Padman]

Well, that's a ding, ding, ding. That comes up in. Not this week, but if you're on listening to Wonder plus the episode.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that is a real. That's crazy. Anyways, I've had a friend who had it. It's miserable.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's really bad nerve pain.

[Dax Shepard]

And as our lovely pharmacist, we share our pharmacist Rosalyn.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

She was saying, like, opiates don't block nerve pain. Which I didn't understand that or know that or whatever, but, yeah, just agonizing pain. I don't. I don't want that. Also, I've complained about this in the past. What a gross name for a disease. Shingles.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

It makes me think of shingles on a roof and that your skin starts.

[Monica Padman]

Of course, that's what we all see.

[Dax Shepard]

Flaps and then tearing off and stuff. That's not what happens. Is it just adult chickenpox shingles?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but it is. I think it's more nerd. Yeah. It's nerve pain. And then for a percentage of people, it never goes away. Oh, I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So I was in there, and I don't. I never go to the pharmacy, but I get all my pharmaceuticals from R D. This the cutest. We talked about it once before. It's the cutest pharmacy in all of Los Angeles. It is at Hillhurst and Franklin. And because I was there for a vaccine, she had to help a couple people before me, and I felt like I was in Mayberry. Everyone that walked in, she knew by name.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Knows everything about them. It was like a town haircutter or I guess, town pharmacist.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Yeah. She's so, so nice. Maybe people will remember if they've listened for a long time. Her and I had a beef originally.

[Dax Shepard]

What was that about?

[Monica Padman]

We had a beef when she used to work at Rite Aid and I had to pick up a prescription for Kristen and she wouldn't let me get it on her behalf. And there was a hole to do and we were in a beef, sure. But then we made up and now she's one of my favorite people. I love her.

[Dax Shepard]

You squashed it, as they say in beefs.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, we squashed the beef.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Now, do you want to tell folks about the. The play on Saturday?

[Monica Padman]

Sure. So I went to Delta's play. It was at 1pm Alice in Wonderland. It was Alice in Wonderland. She was Tweedledee, of Tweedledee and Tweedle Dum.

[Dax Shepard]

Her best friend was Tweedledum and.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, well, we've discussed. Sometimes we've discussed the plays at your kids school and it's no shade. But it is shade. That's why, like, there's no way to.

[Dax Shepard]

Tell it's not shade. I'll tell you why it's not shade. Every movie you see with plays for kids, this is how plays for fourth graders are. So there's like, there's no shade. They have like three rehearsals.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I did walk out and there was a man talking to his daughter who obviously had gone to that school. And he was like, I don't remember yours being this bad. So I'm just saying they're all like this. But yes, there's always technical difficulties. There's always memorization issues. A lot of memorization issues. Which. That, yes, that I can.

[Dax Shepard]

I thought that's what you were referring to.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

The, like, the play itself, the sound, the mics not being on for this and that. The light being here when it should be there. Like it's a mess. Yeah. And it is very funny and fun to go. And it's what you want. It is what you want.

[Dax Shepard]

I guess that's why I'm saying it's actually a success.

[Monica Padman]

It's part of the appeal.

[Dax Shepard]

It's what you want. Because I then went to five and they had figured it all out. Like they really, really. What it seems like is they just needed one more rehearsal.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, sure.

[Dax Shepard]

That 1:00pm Rehearsal. Cause I had heard that like, you know, no one has their lines. People are nudging the narrator. I mean, and that's what you live for. With fourth graders on stage, Delta's barking orders at people.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, she's breaking the fourth wall a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

There is no fourth wall for Delta. People started clapping. Explain that. Well, first of all, she saw you and then put her tongue out, like provocatively and crawled on the ground.

[Monica Padman]

I was like, well, no, no, that's not.

[Dax Shepard]

No that was Lincoln's reenactment of it.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

That's not what happened. She was already in. They were in the dance. She was in a position where she was sort of squatting. She wasn't getting down, she was like down and she was doing her move. And then she just like looked up, up at us and gave us a little. I don't remember, remember it being, like, nasty, but Kristen and Lincoln think it was nasty and that it was like.

[Dax Shepard]

Directly to her soulmate.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Me and Anna, I think she was like, to both of us, like a little like, hey, I see you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, wag my tongue at you.

[Monica Padman]

And I was really happy she did that because I will say it was the first time as soon as she came out. Yeah, she. It was a dance thing or a song. And Kristen was filming the whole time, you know, she was filming and. And Lincoln was cheering really, really, really, really loudly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And Delta, like, looked over at us and just, like, shook her head too loud. It was just like an overall, like, shaking her head. And I was like, oh, she's mad. And we just started. We just started the plane. She's not happy.

[Dax Shepard]

I love too that those two could find a way to get into a little power struggle. Not even in the same exact reality.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. And so then every time she came out, she was clearly, like. She was pretty annoyed by the way, like, this play was going. And so then later when she did that, like, winky thing to me and Anna, I was like, oh, maybe it's lifted. Maybe she's happy now, she's having fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yes, she came out, she had like, they had this big scene and Lincoln was cheering again, like really loud, but also like screaming her name.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Delta said, the song isn't even over yet. And then they did their thing. But then something happened with the mic. The mic. And so she was upset about that. I think she said this sucks out.

[Dax Shepard]

Loud after she got off stage. Yeah, this was fun. This was more of a detective thing that followed me going, which is some kid, when they walked off stage, said, well, that sucked. And they still had their mic on, right? And that was the last thing the audience heard. So I heard that from a parent at the 5 o' clock, like, oh, my God. The funny, the funniest part of the whole thing was at the end, one of them just said, well, that sucked. And I go, that sucks. Sounds like my kid for sure. And then I'm telling Delta later, I go, yeah, I guess someone said, well, that sucked. And she goes, Boy, that I feel like I might have said that. And I go, good. Cause I really felt like it would definitely be something you would say.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I think it was her. I think it was her. But also while she was still on stage, there was a snafu with, like, the mic situation. And then she was like. She got upset about that. Then she did say. She did say, like, no, you're supposed to say this. You know, there was a lot of people saying no. Now you say this. Now you say this. You say this. There's a lot of that going on.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, there's nothing better.

[Monica Padman]

It was really funny. It was really, really funny.

[Dax Shepard]

So I got the report from everyone that that's what had gone down. And so I was so excited to go to five o' clock.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And five o' clock went off with almost out a hitch that everyone knew their lines, all the mics were working. I was delighted that she still was fully breaking the fourth wall.

[Monica Padman]

What'd she do in that one?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, she saw me and I was like, you know, cheering and waving, and then she started waving at me. And then she was doing the I love you hand signs to me. And then she was doing the heart thing to me and. And just really blasting me from the stage.

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

And I just. It made me so happy. And I was laughing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So hard. And it was. God, was it fun. And I'm gonna commit commend them on this, too. They kept that thing under an hour. And that's. That's incredible for these kids. That thing that came in at a, you know, just under or about an hour. A lot of times these plays have an intermission.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And it's. It's a long time.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

This was a perfect amount of time.

[Monica Padman]

Also for this place specifically. I guess not enough people signed up, so they opened it up to, like, the young, young kids. So there was some really small kids involved.

[Dax Shepard]

There were some super cute.

[Monica Padman]

So cut.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm telling you, one of the kids was definitely Ralphie from Christmas Story.

[Monica Padman]

The Wolf.

[Dax Shepard]

Yep.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. The Wolf was so cute. I know.

[Dax Shepard]

I couldn't keep my eyes off a couple of those kids. Yeah, There was a little girl, too, with glasses that was. I just. She was. She. When you see someone, like, she was in it.

[Monica Padman]

Right. That's. Okay. So this is where. This is where I have some trouble. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I get it. This is like a school play. No one's really. I guess they are picking, but not really. They're not really up picking, picking. They're just, like, doing it so the level of commitment is so varied.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, right. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I. I think my sense of justice sometimes starts flaring up.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Monica Padman]

During the play. Because I think, look at this kid. This kid is here to perform.

[Dax Shepard]

They put a lot of energy.

[Monica Padman]

They care so much.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. They practiced a ton.

[Monica Padman]

They practice their memory. They're off book. And like, then there are other people who haven't done anything, clearly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And they're ruining the play for these other people who have put in a lot of work.

[Dax Shepard]

And, you know, it would make sense that you have that point of view and I have my point of view because I didn't want to be an actor in school.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And clearly you're not going to find 35 kids who are trying to become actors. We're in LA. Five or six of the kids are on that stage are probably going on auditions.

[Monica Padman]

Right. For sure.

[Dax Shepard]

But 98% are just trying to be social after school.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And so I love. So for me. Because I. I wasn't trying to do that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm going. I'm so glad. They're just having fun. Like, what a memory of horsing around and fucking the thing up and.

[Monica Padman]

But when I was in fifth grade, we had a play.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And we did have to, like, kind of audition for it in the way that they're. They're doing the same thing. And it was like this weird message mashup of. Of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Taming of the Shrew.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Wow.

[Monica Padman]

I didn't want to be an actor.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

At that point, I didn't know anything about that. But I auditioned and I got the part of the haberdasher.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

That's someone who sells stuff. Yeah. And she. It was not a good part. And it was. I had one line, okay. And I was very shy. Like, I was so shy at that time. But I like the amount of times practice. That one line, it had nothing to do with wanting to be an actor. It was just like, you want to.

[Dax Shepard]

Do the right thing.

[Monica Padman]

I just knew, like, this requires commitment.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I nailed it. Here is the hat your worship ordered is the line. I'll never forget it.

[Dax Shepard]

He's barely even a line. Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

Just a few, few words.

[Monica Padman]

I presented the hat. Here is the hat your worship ordered.

[Dax Shepard]

It's really good. I hope everyone clapped. And then you said, it's not. Not over. So what's. What's immediately great about. For me, Delta's interest in it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

She doesn't want to be Alice. She auditioned specifically to be Tweedle D with her friend Tweedle. She just wants to be in the play if she can be with her best friend as Tweedle D. Tweedle Dum.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

The kids that want to do it, they want the bigger parts.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So it's like I already love it cuz it's just about her and her friend doing this thing together.

[Monica Padman]

I agree.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Also.

[Dax Shepard]

And they were good, by the way.

[Monica Padman]

And so. But that also for me a tiny bit. I was like, Delta, don't do that because you're good. This is cute and good. Like the Tweedle D. Tweedle dumb back and forth is a real like kind of tongue twister.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And they nailed it.

[Monica Padman]

And they nailed it. And it was really, it was really good and impressive. And I was like, man, like I wish we hadn't had that. I mean it was funny for me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I liked it, you know, Know, I just enjoy any time she's doing anything. But I was like, like it did, it did take away from a very impressive thing that these, these two little girls were doing together.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I thought it was all very true to who she is. Which is all I want for her.

[Monica Padman]

If that makes sense. Yeah. She was so cute in her little. In our little makeup and her outfit.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And their little exchange was tricky.

[Monica Padman]

It was hard.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

I, that's what I picked up. I was like, this is fast and tricky because they're getting names wrong.

[Dax Shepard]

Tweedledom is dumb presumably and doesn't know their name. So it's like they keep introducing themselves and Tweedledum keeps introducing herself as Tweedledee. And then they have this back and forth kind of who's on first thing. And it's very confusing.

[Monica Padman]

It is. It's a lot to keep in your brain.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I, I was like, that's really good. And I wasn't, I was like, no wonder she got that part because she is able to hold. Hold a lot in her. No. I don't know if any of these other. I mean, whatever. Maybe they could. But like seeing what was going on with people not being able to memorize, like very basic. Yeah. Here's the hat. Your worship ordered.

[Dax Shepard]

That's hard because you had worship in there.

[Monica Padman]

No. Now I'm nervous.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh no. You blew your line.

[Monica Padman]

If you can't get that, you can't do what they did.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And so I was, I was impressed.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm gonna admit too. I'm just, I'm probably just too in love with Delta. Whatever she does, I think I like.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And I reverse engineer why that's Perfect for. Because I just see her being herself and I'm. And she. I'm wrapped around her finger. So I'm just. I guess I'm trying to acknowledge that.

[Monica Padman]

I love her too, so much. And it's not. It wasn't like, oh, she shouldn't do that. It was like, oh, she doesn't have to do that.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

She's just good enough.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Like, she's good enough. They were good. And like, it didn't. And oh, I guess also for me, I was like. I was like, don't let your. Don't let your sister get in your head rattle you. Exactly. I was like, now you're rattled and now you're doing this and you're in the middle of, like, a really cute thing that you're doing that you know how to do. Well, that's impressive. Don't let the impression emotion interfere here.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right. Sure, sure. There's a bigger fun world view here, which. Right. Is like, if the. If the show is good.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I will not remember it when I'm 65.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, of course.

[Dax Shepard]

So it's like, it's just interesting. Like, if you can fast forward what in life you'll enjoy and care about and remember and all the parents there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, I'm. What I'm saying is I'm bummed. I went to the five and up.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

And I bet most parents that went to the one had the most amount of fun.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

It was so fun. I'm glad. I'm glad I went to that one and I didn't go to the five.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's hilarious.

[Dax Shepard]

And. And that's just funny. That about life.

[Monica Padman]

Let's say your kids in soccer. I guess Lincoln was in soccer.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But she was in soccer. So I probably. I've had this experience.

[Monica Padman]

She was in soccer, but everyone was kind of not very good.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, they. They had a perfect record.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, they lost every game. And even more so I don't. They never scored a goal.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's flawless.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Which we love. But, like, let's say you're watching her and this is probably just my personality and how I grew up, how my parents parented.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

If Lincoln, if you're watching and she's like, good. Like, really good.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

But something's happening that's not allowing her.

[Dax Shepard]

To, like, realize her goals.

[Monica Padman]

Realize her goals and her potential. Do you think it's good, bad, or just personal? I guess to say it to them.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, this is a huge, endless debate. You have in your head the whole time.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So two things are really relevant. One is the inclinations you have right now about Delta. I don't have. When I watch Delta, I have them towards Lincoln. Interesting, because Lincoln and I have similar characters. Character defects. And additionally, I would probably be less forgiving of the chaos watching a Lincoln play. Cause she really takes it serious and wants to do great, and she's put.

[Chris Nowinski]

Her heart into it.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And so Delta's not betraying herself and she's not getting further from her goal.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And on the soccer team, all this stuff's going to. And now what I'm feeling bad for is my friend Scott's daughter is an awesome soccer player, and she's on this team with, you know.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

People playing for the first time.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And so I do. I'll observe that, and I'll go like, oh, she deserves a much better team. Look how hard. I mean, literally, she's. She's carrying the entire team.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then the thing I have with Lincoln while watching is like, I don't want to give her a tip about passing or about kicking or scoring. Boring. Or any of that. But I'm fighting the urge to tell her, I expect nothing from you other than you run at that person and run dead into. You got to get over your fear of a collision. And you. Minimally, what you have to be is. I'm not asking you to be skilled and have all these skills, but I want you to right now acknowledge it won't hurt if you decide to confront. Because that's so much of these young soccers is like, someone's coming with the ball and the other. The defender runs up, and they're just so afraid of locking legs or just confronting the way you have to. And so. And that's my age. Old. I want her to be brave. I don't want her to get taken advantage of or I want her to be fearless in defending herself.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So when I'm watching all. I don't care if she scores. I don't all. I just, like. I don't want her to be afraid to confront that runner with the ball. And then I. Then I spend the whole game debating whether I'm going to bring that up in the car or not. And for six games, I don't bring it up. And then on the seventh game, I bring it up, and then I don't know if it was the right or wrong decision.

[Monica Padman]

Everyone has different beliefs about the world. And then I guess you're just Imparting it on your kids. So, like, each kid is going to get a different thing.

[Dax Shepard]

And I can totally acknowledge both sides of it. There's like a group of people that are taking life really serious and they're trying their ass off, and it's very unique. Unfair to them that some other people are just here to have a blast.

[Monica Padman]

Well, it's not unfair. No, no, no. I don't. I don't think that's the problem. The problem is if you do care. Right. Like, if. If she's like, I really want to be good at soccer and then she isn't practicing. Right. Like, I think that is something to say. Right. Like, if you want to be good.

[Dax Shepard]

Can't get good by thinking about something.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. Or if you're on the field. If you. You're on the field and there's like an issue. You have an issue. There's like a thing you're not good at.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I think it is okay to say, hey, let's work on this, because this is where we have, like, trouble. If you want to be good. Yes. If you're there to just run around and who cares?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Your thing is bravery. And I think my thing is, like, commitment.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And both are legit. And I feel bad for the serious people that are annoyed by the people off. And I feel bad for the people having a great time in life.

[Monica Padman]

Life.

[Dax Shepard]

Who people are mad at. You know, Like, I. I see it all like, you know, is life a big farce? I think so.

[Monica Padman]

Well, you don't. You don't think so. When you're in Costco and you're trying to get your scene done and somebody's around and it's. It's interfering with you.

[Dax Shepard]

Great point. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Cuz you care about that, right? Like, that's the In. In. It's.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, yep. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It's just.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, it's that we've all. We've all flown to New Mexico to execute this thing. It's not like you can't. You can't wander in onto a film set.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, you. But you're right. You're right.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's the same. The. It's the same idea that this person's like, I'm here to have fun in this life.

[Chris Nowinski]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And you're like, I'm here to do a job.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And the first time I was like, I get it. I might have done the same thing if I had a smaller role in the movie and I wanted to pop. And then when I said, hey, if you keep doing this. What? We're never going to get the scene because. Because my character can't be interrupted in this race. And then you choose to do it. Yeah. Then I'm the person who wants to get the job done and someone else is around. So yeah, I'm, I'm.

[Monica Padman]

We're all on both sides of it at different times.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So I guess it's like, what point in time are you evaluating these things? Is also really relevant. Is it in the moment? Is it five years later? Is it on your deathbed? Is it as you know.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, Yeah. I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Tricky.

[Dax Shepard]

And the world can't be. The whole world can't be thinking this whole thing's a joke because things gotta get done.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Science has to be done. And I get it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Stay tuned for more armchair extreme expert if you dare. Lamont Jones world is shattered when his cousin dies in custody just weeks after entering prison. The official report says natural causes, but bruises and missing teeth tell a different story. From Wondery comes Death County, Pennsylvania, chilling true story of corruption and cover ups that begins as one man's search for answers, but soon reveals a disturbing pattern. Lamont's cousin's death has just just one of many. And powerful forces are working to keep the truth buried. With never before heard interviews and shocking revelations, Death County PA pulls back the curtain on one of America's darkest institutional secrets. This isn't just another true crime story. It's happening right now. Follow Death County PA on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Death County PA early and ad free right now by joining. Joining Wondery.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my gosh. I guess it's a ding, ding, ding because this is for a Chris Nowinski and we were talking about soccer.

[Dax Shepard]

I have a quick David Chang update if you want to. Oh yeah, David Chang update.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my gosh. I hope it's about the bread.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, here we go.

[Monica Padman]

Wildflower Bakery in Freestone. We were coming back from visiting some friends and they said the bread there was great. And it was.

[Dax Shepard]

And it was Wildflower Flour Bakery.

[Monica Padman]

Wow. Shout out.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you did a whole graphic here, Rob. I did. I Had a little more time for this one.

[Monica Padman]

Nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, Rob, how do you deal with. Because, Rob, you do everything right. It's something I am so grateful to you for. You are such a meticulous planner and just a great manager of all things that need doing. Does it drive. Did it drive you nuts growing up when people just were fucking off and didn't give a. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. On behalf of us, I'm sorry. I mean, I was also the one doing it, so. Depending on what it was for too, right?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris. Show me those creamy hamstrings. I used to be able to do that voice, but now I've lost my registered. It's a Family Guy character. He always wants Chris to come in his basement and show him his creamy hamstrings or creamy thighs. I mean, he's clown. Clearly a pedophile, but they find a way to make it quite cute and.

[Monica Padman]

Funny in the cartoon.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Wow. Okay. So I said that no one on the football team was in my AP classes. And that's not true. There at least was. There was at least one Doug Sellers shout out. I remembered him after the fact. And there might have been more. I don't know. When was Tough Enough the TV show on? And how many seasons of Real World had there been? There are six seasons starting in 2001. And the first episode of Real World was in 92.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, nine years.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So it was in its 10th season when tough Enough started.

[Dax Shepard]

And as I told you, in 96, I partied with Pedro.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, you did.

[Dax Shepard]

Who was season one? San Francisco Real World.

[Chris Nowinski]

Wow.

[Monica Padman]

Since pass.

[Dax Shepard]

Sweet, sweet guy. What a fun night we had.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. How many people currently play high school football in the United states? In the 2324 school year, over 1 million high school students in the US participated in 11 player football. This number includes 99 boys. For boys, it is the most popular high school sport with over a million players.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, do you think that remaining 1%. That's girls. That's. Do they have a girl league or there's girls playing on the board football team?

[Monica Padman]

It's a great question.

[Dax Shepard]

You wanna know something I'm embarrassed to admit?

[Monica Padman]

What?

[Dax Shepard]

So I'm deep in my Friday Night Lights rewatch. I cannot recommend it enough for people with kids. It's such a fun family show. We've never had more fun watching a show together. It's just. It's a drug. We love it. We fight every night about when to turn it off. It never occurred to me that they can Practice that. Of course, they can just play games in practice because the team is split into two teams.

[Monica Padman]

The defense.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know why that never crossed my mind. Like, we're watch Friday Night Lights and they practice a ton on the show, and I'm like, oh, duh. Yeah, they can play a real game endlessly.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Because they have everyone they need.

[Monica Padman]

True.

[Dax Shepard]

You can't do that in basketball. I mean, you're. You're just. You'd be splitting up.

[Monica Padman]

You split it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It just. It's very. I don't know why that number crossed my mind.

[Monica Padman]

It is hard, though, because you aren't playing, like, the best. Like, you're not playing unless your team.

[Dax Shepard]

Has the best defense.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Then you almost have your offense. Almost has an advantage because they're being forced to play against.

[Monica Padman]

Against the best defense.

[Dax Shepard]

It's probably like a. A virtuous cycle.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, probably.

[Dax Shepard]

Hockey gets that a little bit because you've got four offensive lines and three defensive lines. Yes. But then you're going to have, like, the goalie is going to be half as good. Talk about a position I would not want to have. There's all these things where consistency is important. Those are not good things for me.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Or everything. Your whole job boils down to. To one second. Like, I need a lot of time and I need to be intermittently good, and I'm gonna be bad intermittently. That's kind of how I can operate. Does that make sense?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. You. You think you can't, like, make the shot when it counts.

[Dax Shepard]

But even when you make the shot, you've been dribbling for a while and you made a couple moves and you're in your rhythm. This is just. You're standing dead still and you're up, and here it comes.

[Monica Padman]

Right. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, you gotta be perfect.

[Monica Padman]

That's true.

[Dax Shepard]

With no lead up.

[Monica Padman]

That's true.

[Dax Shepard]

You need lead up. That's. I don't. That's why, like, driving is, like, anyone will tell you, like, it's very rare that a. Unless you're in F1.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

There's 21 turns on a track. You're not acing all 21 turns on the track. You've blown one. You're recovering on a couple. And that's standard.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So now it's just like a percentage of how good you. So that works for me. You have a lot of time to make mistakes. Mistakes and recover and be perfect and then not good. But these jobs that require you to be excellent every time.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Scare the bejesus. Out of me. A symphony orchestra player.

[Monica Padman]

So, so impressive.

[Dax Shepard]

I need to be a jazz. Like, improv.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like some of it's like. I don't know. Is that okay? And that. Whoa. That was a nice lick.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Did you hear Skype is done?

[Dax Shepard]

What?

[Monica Padman]

Skype.

[Dax Shepard]

It went away. It lost out to Zoom.

[Monica Padman]

It did.

[Dax Shepard]

Was Skype owned by something?

[Monica Padman]

Microsoft.

[Dax Shepard]

Microsoft. It's hard to feel bad for Microsoft.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but it's just like, I feel so bad for Skype. They. They really shit the bed during the pandemic.

[Dax Shepard]

Take off. It was already there.

[Monica Padman]

It was there. It was there. It could have been.

[Dax Shepard]

That might speak to, like, if you didn't catch the learning curve initially, you think it's insurmountable and you'd rather just learn the new thing that came your way. And everyone's very. Figuring it out. Well, this will comfort you. I just weirdly stumble. I don't know why. I read an article about quarterly profits.

[Monica Padman]

Huh.

[Dax Shepard]

And Microsoft's quarterly profit was $70 billion.

[Monica Padman]

They're quarterly pretty good.

[Dax Shepard]

That's nuts.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's nuts.

[Dax Shepard]

280 billion is what they'll profit this year.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I just feel like the story of Skype is a sad one. They were in leading position to take the PA Pandemic, and they didn't. They let this, like, this little. Like, Brando.

[Dax Shepard]

Isn't that the story of the Internet? It's like you had Yahoo, you had aol, all these things that seem like in, you know, institutions.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And some of the AOL bought Warner Brothers in Time Warner and just vanished.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I mean, there was so at the beginning of the pandemic, it was. We were saying, like, we'll Skype you now. We'll Skype you. And we. We were using Zoom.

[Chris Nowinski]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Like the verb was Skype.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And it wasn't even being used.

[Dax Shepard]

It didn't work out.

[Monica Padman]

I guess it's an underdog story, too. Which we like.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I have friends who invented a very popular one. And I had to. And I even had to talk to them. I was like, I don't want to use yours. I want to use Zoom.

[Monica Padman]

Ouch. Okay. The percentage of high school football footballers who make it to the NFL, of.

[Dax Shepard]

The million we just learned that play football.

[Monica Padman]

Right. Okay. A tiny fraction of high school football players, rough 0.023% make it to the NFL. This means that for every thousand high school football players, 23 will. About 23 will eventually play in the NFL, which I thought was kind of like, a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what the article says.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

God, that seems. Yeah, that seems really, really high. Because how many people get into the NFL every year? Let's see how many people, like how many are drafted? 250. 257.

[Monica Padman]

57.

[Dax Shepard]

So that would mean there was only a hundred thousand players of age.

[Monica Padman]

Well, yeah, exactly. Senior year.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. I guess there's the million playing football. Might include junior high football players and youth football. And maybe it includes definitely nine through 12.

[Monica Padman]

Definitely includes nine through 12.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And then nine, 10, 11 obviously aren't drafted.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It says there's approximately 77,000 college football players. So a fourth of those are probably of age to then go get drafted. And then. Did you say 300 get drafted? 257. Wow. God. I mean that's. That just seems. Seems really impossible, doesn't it, that a few hundred will go every year.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Out of 77, 000 that are already playing in college. So hard to. It's almost impossible to play college football.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I know. Really hard to do.

[Dax Shepard]

Again, Frant Light smashes. He thinks he's going to the NFL. Everyone thinks they're going to the NFL.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, well, you gotta. You gotta dream big.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, you gotta go for it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I think that might be it for Chris. I loved this episode. Obviously.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm trying to think of the equ Episode would be for me.

[Monica Padman]

It's a very important topic and I'm glad we covered it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, me too. Can you think of an obsession of mine that might be fun? It would be car related, I guess.

[Monica Padman]

Well, no, this isn't shopping.

[Dax Shepard]

Mine's total wolf.

[Monica Padman]

Well, that would be Anna Wintour. This is like, what's your car like? What do you care Is is being talked about? That's not being talked about.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, we've had a couple people that their main concern was that we're not listening to each other.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

That was really rewarding.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So Chris and he was very cool and nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, very cool.

[Dax Shepard]

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