Turns Out Brains Are Important. Who Knew?

Hey, dream listeners, there's now an ad-free version of the dream that you can subscribe to, the dream plus at thedream.supercast.com.

Five bucks a month gets you every single episode of this show with zero ads, which you love and I love.

And we're hoping that this will help us pay the bills.

And the main goal being that we can keep making this show.

Go to thedream.supercast.com and subscribe.

To make it easy, we have put the link in the show description.

Just look down underneath this episode.

It says the dream.supercast.com and just click on that easy peasy you're gonna get a lot of extra stuff too we're working on all that another thing you need to do please subscribe to our instagram it's the dream x the letter x jane marie see you over there

ready to elevate your skincare introducing medicate a clinically proven dermatologist recommended british skincare brand known for age-defying results.

You may have heard about growth factors as the must-have anti-aging ingredient, and that's why Medicaid is excited about their latest innovation, the Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum.

This serum harnesses the power of Growth Factor Miniprotein, a cutting-edge technology that mimics natural growth factors but goes deeper, delivering visible, transformative results.

Studies show immediate improvement in expression lines in just 10 minutes and a significant decrease in deep-set wrinkles after eight weeks of use.

The Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum not only reduces wrinkles, but also gives a filler-like effect, smoothing out your skin's appearance dramatically.

Visit medicate.us.

That's M-E-D-I-K and the number 8.us.

Use code podcast20 for 20% off your purchase today.

Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

I'm Hannah Berner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage.

I like to call them my granny panties.

Actually, I never think about underwear.

That's the magic of Tommy John.

Same, they're so light and so comfy, and if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Yes, Lord knows the girls need to breathe.

Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night.

That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.

Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly.

Put yourself on to Tommy John.

Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John.

Save 25% for a limited time at tommyjohn.com/slash comfort.

See site for details.

Welcome back to the dream.

Last week, I almost let our guest, Meredith Lynch, go off on a tangent about how football, the NFL in particular, has been infiltrated by private equity.

I'll just add that it recently entered the NFL.

What?

Yes.

How do you gut the NFL?

Like,

how do you ransack the NFL?

NFL?

It's called CTEs, Jane Marie.

Unbeknownst to Meredith, we had already conducted the interview you're about to hear with a former player and current neuroscientist who's trying to make CTE not a thing.

My name is Chris Nowinski.

I'm a behavioral neuroscientist who got interested in studying the brain after I damaged mine from too many years of playing football and professional wrestling.

Why, you might ask yourself, does Jane care about football?

Well, first, I like to watch it.

I like football players' names and their butts.

They have the funniest of both.

I also like how thrilling it is.

You know, when players make a touchdown and they're doing a dance, I feel like I'm doing a dance the whole time I'm watching a football game.

You're also screaming at the screen.

and yelling about the rules.

Like an old man.

Well, because I'm right.

The rules don't make any sense.

And I am born of a champion football player.

My father played for Bo Schem Beckler at the University of Michigan until I was born, when he decided being a dentist was a better path than getting CTE.

It wasn't a thing yet, but he had an inkling.

He actually said that it was about his knees.

He had exercises with Bo at the University of Michigan where my dad had to stand still

and the entire team had to run at him and, quote unquote, try to break his knees.

What?

Like, that was an exercise he had to do.

These are the kinds of things that were still around when I played football.

Yikes.

Yeah.

And you were a baby.

I was too small.

to play the offensive line, but considered not athletic enough to play anything else.

And because I was always on like

JVB or whatever, we basically were the scout team for the for the actual football team, which meant I used to go up every day against this guy that was a grown ass man.

About your age?

No, no, he was a senior.

Well, I mean, in high schools, not used that a grown-ass man, but like

different from you.

Grown-ass man for a high schooler.

He would growl at me every single play and practice.

That's kind of sexy, though.

Sure.

If If you're not.

If you're not about to get run over, yeah.

It would have been super sexy if it was sexy.

But it wasn't sexy because you're wearing the itchiest, scratchiest, grossest clothes, and you have this man across from you who wants to destroy you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like it.

I don't know.

Like one of the best players on the team.

This all still sounds sexy to me.

My head didn't like it.

I can tell you that much.

Okay.

Dan,

we can't tell if you have CTE CTE yet, because as we'll learn from Chris,

you can only diagnose it after death.

That's true.

And I think that there are worse concussions that I've had since I stopped playing football.

Oh my gosh, you've made some really dumb decisions about what to do with your noggin.

Dan's dad is even more embedded in football.

The dude moved to Italy to coach American-style football and is basically every coach you see on a kid's movie about sports.

But there's an icky side of football that really grinds my gears.

And as we always say in every episode of The Dream, why is this a thing?

How is this a thing?

What's happening?

Chris might have an idea.

Should I create a little Grind My Gears drop?

Yes.

What show was it again?

Family Guy, Peter Griffin.

You know, that really grinds my gears.

Tell me, first of all, like how you got into playing football.

Yeah, I grew up outside Chicago, and I remember first getting excited about football in seventh grade because some friends were playing it.

It looked cool.

And my mother forbid me from playing until high school.

And why is that?

My mom was worried about injuries.

It wasn't necessarily brain injuries back then because we didn't talk about brain injuries in football, but she knew it was more dangerous than other sports for the rest rest of my body

but i i convinced her that i could do it in high school so i i signed up for you know football summer camp and then uh joined the freshman team and learned quickly that it was uh a fun sport and i had the right body type for it and so i was a two-way starter and captained to the team within you know a week within a week

Yeah, well, I mean, you have to pick the starters right away.

So I was the biggest, you know, one of the biggest guys in the team and I could run.

And I memorized the playbook in a day on defense.

And so the coach thought, hey, well, you're middle linebacker and you call the plays.

So tell me how your football career went.

My football career was modest.

As a recruit, I was a sort of low-level Division I, but also the Ivy League was interested and the academies.

And I ended up choosing to play at Harvard University.

where I had a decent career.

I ended up as a senior as a second team all-IV defensive tackle.

So you're playing football for Harvard.

And first of all, Harvard, you said the Ivy Leagues were looking at you.

So you were like the star football player and the smartest kid in your class?

I think I didn't end up number one in my class.

I was top 10.

Okay.

I slept my way through calculus BC and did not get an A.

So, yeah, so I mean, I was a highly recruited athlete.

I did care about school and I did try hard.

and I did have the scores to get into Harvard independently.

I was also recruited as a basketball player to play places, but I chose football

because I thought it looked, it was cooler.

So then you graduate college with what?

And what's the next plan?

What year was this when you graduated college?

So this is so we're so 1999.

I'm actually, you know, one of four guys on my team that are getting looks from NFL scouts.

And so we're all training together, all thinking one of us was definitely definitely going to be drafted.

The other three had a chance or to get free agent signings.

I ended up not getting drafted, not getting signed, which was a blessing.

And I had the consulting job lined up in the life sciences industry from a summer internship.

But the owner of that firm suggested to me over one conversation, like, hey, if you don't get drafted, this job's always going to be here, but I think you'd make a great pro wrestler.

And

it was spurred by the fact that we were both fans and we both watched it, but I didn't know that he had had this sort of weird history where he knew a lot of the people in senior levels of pro wrestling.

And so when I didn't get drafted, he immediately made some phone calls.

And suddenly I get a call from JJ Dillon, who used to manage the Four Horsemen and Ric Flair and those guys who ran talent for WCW.

And they said, hey, we want to fly you down to Atlanta and give you a tryout with Mr.

Wonderful Paul Orndorf.

And I was like, okay.

So literally two weeks before I graduate, I'm flying to Atlanta and getting beaten up by Mr.

Wonderful for a day, who at the end of it says, Yeah, you could probably do this.

You know, you should think about it as a career.

Did you think of it as a real sport at the time?

No, no.

So I had dabbled in theater.

There we go.

Yeah.

So I was in West Side Story in high school as diesel and

had fun doing it and then did a little bit of drama and sketch comedy in college.

So I did enjoy performance.

I really enjoyed the physicality of like how difficult it was to actually do what those people did in a ring.

So I sort of wasn't ready to give up on athletic pursuits.

And I was really bored sitting in a cubicle, you know, renting my brain to the life sciences industry.

And so I said, all right, I'll give it a shot because I had this nice golden parachute.

Can I ask you to talk about not getting drafted?

I feel like the dream of going to the NFL is very much a part of the American fabric fabric of

kids growing up in football and then getting this big payday.

Do you remember how you felt around that time?

I was fine with it.

So I never considered myself an NFL prospect.

And I didn't enjoy football as much because at that point in my career, it had gotten very painful.

Oh, like I was getting shots in my shoulder.

I played my entire senior year with a really badly sprained ankle and coming off of a wrist fracture where I couldn't bend it backwards.

And so I was fine not continuing, but I knew I couldn't turn down, like no one turns down the opportunity to go to the NFL.

You are attracted to the dream.

Like it's really hard to turn down.

You know, telling people you're in the NFL makes you a god in certain populations, but it had never been my lifelong dream.

I never thought I was good enough.

So that's not what you were aiming for?

No.

What were you aiming for?

I had no idea.

That's why I went into pro wrestling.

Tell me how that happened.

Yeah.

So, I mean, like, you know, you're when you're in college, you know, people have their jobs they go into, and I just never had a real plan.

I just didn't have something I was passionate about.

So I had this really nice consulting job, and I went and did it.

The reason I didn't sign with WCW right away is I needed shoulder surgery with a six-month recovery.

So they said, call us at the end of six months.

So I did the job and lost 50 pounds and, you know, found out I had abdominal muscles after being a fat line my whole life.

And

when I was ready to go, WCW was going out of business.

And so suddenly this door was closed.

Like they, within a year of that, they were bought by WWF.

So

I found out that Killer Kowalski ran a pro wrestling school 20 miles away north of Boston.

And so I started going to Killer Kowalski's nights and weekends while working.

Forgive me.

I know that name sounds a little bit familiar to me, but who is Killer Kowalski?

The killer, a killer, a killer was just a legendary wrestler from the

50s, 60s, 70s, 80s.

He was famous for tearing a guy's ear off with his knee.

It turns out it's an accident, but you didn't tell anyone that.

It was just legend.

But he was, you know, just a guy with a thick Polish accent who was just the nicest vegetarian you've ever met

named Killer.

So, yes, I went to Killer Kowalski School.

While I was trying to then pay my dues and work my way up through the Independence, WWF announced that they were partnering with MTV to do a reality show, sort of real world meet survivor, 13 people live in a house, fight for a contract.

And so I decided if the door was open, I might as well send it a tape.

13 wrestlers in a house looking for a WWF contract on TV.

When the last one standing gets a three-year contract with WWE.

And this was back when reality shows were real.

So you couldn't talk to anybody.

You know, you handed over your phone.

You never knew what the next day was going to bring.

It was kind of crazy.

But, you know, I was runner-up and being Chris Harvard was very interesting.

I saw that your wrestling name had Harvard in it.

And I was like, is he going to be one of those guys that went to Harvard and then everything is Harvard?

You know, like you try to find a way to say that you went to Harvard.

Yeah, no,

we love that and we play with that all the time.

You know, you want to, yeah, you want to, you want to know if a guy went to Harvard, you know, he'll tell you.

And when I started calling me Chris Harvard, I should have realized like, all right, as a wrestling character, Chris Harvard's never going to be the underdog.

uh you're going to be the bad guy then i learned the show started editing me as the bad guy oh and it gave me this nice boost into that future career because people actually thought i was a horrible person

what do you mean the boost into the career like because wrestlers it's better if you're bad

so wrestlers fans have to care about you and either have to really really like you or really hate you if you're in between they don't care about you right right so the world is divided into baby faces and heels good guys and bad guys

When you're a wrestling character, like The Undertaker, people knew he wasn't dead.

Right.

But with Chris Harvard, people didn't know if I was really that arrogant Ivy League jerk or I was an okay person.

Like, literally, even in the locker room.

I love the idea of this character, though.

Yeah, I mean, it was a great creative freedom

to just say and do whatever you want and just, you know, get a microphone and insult people.

You know, a friend of mine just made me realize that for the first time in history, Iowa State is being graced by an actual Harvard graduate.

That's true.

First time in history.

It's quite a little institution of higher learning you guys have going for you here.

You know, we had a little chat at Harvard for people like you.

That's all right.

That's okay.

You'll all work for us someday.

I love that one.

So you move on from that.

You're runner-up, but it sounds like you got a contract anyway.

Yeah, so I go do the Indies for six months traveling the world and then they gave me a tryout at WrestleMania.

S-U-C-C-E-S-S.

That's the way we spell success with commercials.

Back to school is a time when routines reset, and so does screen time.

With all the pickups, practices, and after-school logistics, kids need a way to stay connected.

But handing them a phone designed for adults with internet access and social media, that's where the real concern begins.

Teens already spend an average of nine hours a day on screens outside of school.

That's basically a full-time job just scrolling.

The U.S.

Surgeon General says that kids who spend more than three hours online daily are twice as likely to experience depression and anxiety, and most of that time is spent on social media.

It's staggering.

Nearly half of teen girls and a third of boys say social media causes overwhelming stress.

A quarter of teens say it makes them feel worse about their own lives.

Here's the good news.

Gab is doing something no one else is doing.

Their approach, called Tech in Steps, offers safe, age-appropriate phones and watches with no social media, no internet browsers, and GPS tracking built in.

From young kids to teens, each device grows with the child and helps build healthy tech habits.

Bottom line, you don't have to give a kid an adult device.

This school year, give them Gab.

Safe connection, no distractions.

I can't recommend GAB enough.

Use our code to get the best deal on something that gives peace of mind, whether you're a parent, a guardian, or just someone who cares.

Visit gab.com/slash the dream and use the code the dream for a special back-to-school offer.

That's Gab, G-A-B-B.

Ready to elevate your skincare?

Introducing Medicaid, a clinically proven dermatologist-recommended British skincare brand known for age-defying results.

You may have heard about growth factors as the must-have anti-aging ingredient, and that's why Medicaid is excited about their latest innovation, the Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum.

This serum harnesses the power of Growth Factor Miniprotein, a cutting-edge technology that mimics natural growth factors but goes deeper, delivering visible, transformative results.

Studies show immediate improvement in expression lines in just 10 minutes and a significant decrease in deep-set wrinkles after eight weeks of use.

The Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum not only reduces wrinkles, but also gives a filler-like effect, smoothing out your skin's appearance dramatically.

Visit medicate.us.

That's M-E-D-I-K and the number 8.us.

Use code PODCAST20 for 20% off your purchase today.

Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

I'm Hannah Berner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage.

I like to call them my granny panties.

Actually, I never think about underwear.

That's the magic of Tommy John.

Same, they're so light and so comfy, and if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Yes, Lord knows the girls need to breathe.

Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night.

That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.

Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly.

Put yourself on to Tommy John.

Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John.

Save 25% for a limited time at tommyjohn.com/slash comfort.

See site for details.

And we're back with Chris Nowinski.

So now you're achieving another American dream, being on TV.

Yeah.

Were you excited about that part of it?

But yeah, when I made debut on Monday Night Raw in June 2003,

it was very cool.

It was cool to be just in a building wrestling in front of 20,000 people, you know, walking the street and people recognize you and tell you they hate you.

It was great.

How long did you do that?

So start to finish, first time in the ring to the end was just under three years.

And I was just on TV for just over a year.

Why did you quit?

Because I got kicked in the head in a match.

It was really my fault, but his foot hit my head and I got a really bad concussion that I didn't realize was a concussion.

And I kept wrestling for weeks with a damaged brain that kept getting more damaged to the point that it never quite recovered.

And I couldn't actually perform the job because I couldn't remember matches.

And I, I couldn't give my heart rate up without feeling sick.

So I retired from post-concussion syndrome.

What did you feel like when you first got kicked in the head?

You said you didn't know you had a concussion.

Was it not painful enough?

No, I just, I just didn't know.

I mean, like at that point, like there was no such thing as concussion education for athletes.

And so a concussion was defined by a doctor telling you you had a concussion.

I was never knocked out.

I never had enough symptoms that I'd ever gone being seen by a doctor for a suspected concussion.

Okay.

When I got kicked, I blacked out.

Like I couldn't remember the rest of the match.

You know, so one of the important things about keeping a wrestling match safe is you know how it's supposed to end and you know when you're supposed to improvise and you know when you're supposed to hit marks.

And I couldn't remember the script.

And so I remember telling the other wrestlers, like, what's next, what's next, what's next?

And they just would tell me.

And so it was fine for the show's purposes, but I didn't realize that losing your ability to remember where you are and what you're doing was a concussion.

Right.

And then I had a really just massive headache that wouldn't go away.

Yeah.

I've had a head injury, just full disclosure, and I've talked it on our show before, but I had a, um, what they call a diving accident.

I fell out of an open staircase onto my head on a cement floor.

So same Z's.

Yeah,

part of the club.

How are you feeling today?

I'm good.

My, my big cluster migraines have gone away as I get older, but I still have ocular migraines.

But other than that, I'm okay, I think, for now, until we find out that I have CTE later.

Oh, I was a kid.

I was six or seven.

You're not going to get CD from that.

Oh, good.

Okay.

Well, don't tell me how you know that yet.

Okay.

So you

so you have this concussion.

How did you feel your prospects were going forward when you had to quit the WWE?

Well, my prospects in wrestling were good.

I mean, actually, looking at a magazine, I was named 2002 Newcomer of the Year by Raw magazine.

And that was a year where we were like, you know, Brock Lesnar's floating around, John Cena, you know, some real big stars.

That was my class.

I forgot John Cena was a real WWE guy.

And Batista.

I know, I know.

He's such a legend now, but no, back then he was a guy, you know, still trying to find his way like me.

So, no, I mean, they assumed that I would have a career like those guys had, but it didn't work out that way.

And what'd you do next?

You know, they're trying to send me doctors, put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

The eighth doctor I see is Dr.

Robert Cantu, who is the first doctor to help me appreciate that this was a concussion and it wasn't my first concussion.

And I'd had a ton of concussions over my career.

And I just, by not ever recognizing them or taking time off, I turned what would have been a recoverable injury into something that he's not sure if I'm ever going to get better from.

That was about three months after the concussion.

And I was like, wait a second, I'm a Harvard grad and I didn't know that every time I got kicked in the head and tackled somebody and the sky would change colors or I couldn't remember where I was, that that was a brain injury.

I needed to rest it like I would would any other injury.

That sort of insight blew me away.

And the fact that he didn't know what was going to happen to me long term either was also concerning.

And so I wasn't happy with the answers that I had.

And so basically I took what he told me and I led me to going to the Harvard Medical School Library and starting to read.

every study ever on concussions to try to find if there was something I could learn that would help me get better or figure out what was going to happen to me.

And that idea of the fact that there was all this knowledge out there that we weren't being told as athletes and the fact that I screwed up my own brain out of my own ignorance.

You know, I said, hey, Doc, like, why is no one telling athletes this?

And he was like, well, I've tried to tell people, but no one listens to doctors.

You have a platform.

Maybe you could convince them.

And so I decided to write a book.

That was my big idea is I, as a pro wrestler, going to write a book about complex neuroscientific and cultural issues around this injury.

I wrote this book, Head Games, Football's Concussion Crisis in in 2006.

And one of the things, so I sort of told the story of, hey, we're missing all these concussions.

Athletes aren't telling doctors

how they feel because we don't know any better.

And all the people who are retiring due to concussions aren't getting better when you go find them.

They're still struggling.

And there's this, I called it a concussion crisis.

Like we're just not acknowledging this invisible injury because it's invisible and no one's talking about it.

And as I did that research, I also learned after reading the studies that the NFL had gotten into the research game, but they were publishing big tobacco-like studies saying everything was fine while they were putting people who were knocked unconscious right back into the game.

And that really pissed me off.

And so I wrote a chapter calling them big tobacco and exposing how these studies were so stupidly designed.

And I got a $4,000 advance because no one wants to read a book like this.

And I had to buy $21,000 worth of liability insurance for my accusations I made against the NFL.

But it was something I believed in.

And I realized that people were actually dying because of this.

And I basically, my penance for damaging my Harvard educated brain was to try to take a stab at changing the culture on this.

Well, I've seen your story on TV about the book.

I mean,

I feel like it's a very well-known kind of expose.

Well, it did open up this criticism, though, of the NFL.

Can you tell me about that?

Yeah.

So what sort of happened next was sort of how things changed was the book comes out in October 06.

No one cares.

But I've learned that the way that you can see long-term effects from concussions was this disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, what we can now call CTE, that we used to call punch drunk because it was well known in boxers 100 years ago.

But no one ever looked outside of boxing to see what was going on.

And as somebody who was hit in the head 10,000 times at this point, I knew that your brain can't tell whether it's a football helmet or a fist that's punching you in the head.

Your brain's going to feel the same thing.

So

two NFL players have been studied.

I interviewed the doctor who did those, who was in the concussion movie.

And a month later, Andre Waters, who I grew up watching, strong safety for the Philadelphia Eagles, takes his life in his mid-40s.

He was known as being a hard hitter.

And so I ended up assuming that someone was going to mention CT, that it was known, but no one did.

So then I called the medical examiner in Hillsborough County, Florida.

got a hold of him and said, hey, are you going to study this guy for CT?

And he told me no.

And basically over a series of conversations, I convinced convinced him that he should be studied.

And he told me how you get someone studied, which was having to call their family and get permission.

And so I did that.

How was that call?

It was, I had a, wrote out a script and I was sweating profusely because I just, you know, couldn't imagine having to make this call, especially not being a doctor at that point.

But none of the doctors would do it.

I did ask everyone else if they would call.

And nobody was comfortable calling a mom who's in her 80s who just lost her son to suicide to ask, you may not be aware of this, but his brain is still available for study, even though you just left his funeral.

So anyway, you know, I think it took something to make that call, but the reason I keep doing it is because his family was so amazing.

They were actually just appreciative that somebody cared why Andre died.

Yeah.

And they saw his behavior changes.

They knew something was wrong with him.

And so after they vetted me and said, all right, we believe in what you're trying to accomplish here.

We'll let you study.

When you die from unknown causes,

they will keep tissue and blood for future analyses in case anything else is learned.

So basically, five parts of his brain were still available in the medical examiner's office while the rest of them was buried.

And so what did they find?

So Andre had CTE.

And he was the third of three NFL players to have CTE.

Two of the three had killed themselves in their mid-40s.

Mike Webster was famously known to be homeless and in terrible mental shape when he died of a heart attack at 50 or so.

So the deal I made was: look, if you know, these first two cases were published in the journal Neurosurgery, which regular people don't read.

And no one had known about it.

And it had never been a national news article.

But I knew the power of the media.

And I said, if people are killing themselves because they have this disease and the NFL is covering it up, people need to know.

And there's a reporter named Alan Schwartz, who at the time had written some columns on baseball statistics for the New York Times, who I'd been introduced to when I was writing the book by a mutual friend.

He took a great interest in what I was writing and had gotten me a literary agent and introduced me around New York because he believed that I had something.

I called him and I said, hey, I've got this.

CT case.

I think it's a really important story.

What do I do with it?

And he said, you're right.

This is something the New York Times should be interested in.

Let me make some calls.

And he calls me back and he goes,

The editorial staff's asked to see you in New York next week.

Oh, wow.

And so I hop a train from Boston to New York and I go with him to the New York Times building and sit down with the editors and say,

this is the story.

NFL players are getting this punch drunk disease and the NFL is covering it up and someone needs to say something.

And

Jason Stallman, who was a deputy sports editor at the time, what he said to me was, We're the New York Times.

How do we not know about this?

Right.

And I said, Well,

it's because it's being covered up.

I don't blame you because I didn't know about it either.

And I was out there banging my head for a long time.

So they went for it and they put it on the front page of the New York Times the week before the Super Bowl.

And they hired Alan Schwartz full-time to start covering this issue.

And he ended up writing 200 articles in the Times exposing this huge issue with concussions and CTE.

Amazing.

First of all, what do doctors see when they look at a brain that they suspect has CTE?

What's there or not there?

When someone has CTE, what you will see is a pattern of brain cell death that is specific to the disease.

You have a protein in your brain cells.

It basically holds your axons

open, you know, so there's tunnels inside that molecules are moving around.

Basically, what we've learned is that when you stretch an axon quickly and traumatize it, that protein can start to fall apart and it sort of crumbles, and then you find clumps of it.

The protein is called tau.

It's well known because it's one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease and about 15 other diseases.

But with CTE, it's in a peculiar place.

It's around blood vessels and it's at the bottom of the valleys of the surface of your brain.

It's called the sulcal depths of the cortex.

What we've learned essentially is that

because of the shape of your brain, if you rapidly move a brain that has these hills and valleys on the surface, the strain is most felt at the bottoms of those valleys.

And so basically what you're seeing is evidence of injury.

And

once the injury is there, for some reason, in some people, it just starts spreading spreading after you stop getting hit in the head.

Are these what we would call plaques?

They're not the plaques.

Okay, still aren't.

That's the other hallmark of Alzheimer's that people are learning how to treat or get out of the brain.

But we're talking about the other one, tau protein, which is much, much harder to deal with because it's inside the cells.

Fascinating.

How long had science known?

That that's what you look for in a head injury.

How new was that science?

Well, it wasn't really that well associated with head injuries.

It was known that acutely you'll see some elevated tau, but it goes away.

You know, tau, when we first discovered punch drunk, we didn't even know what tau was.

Punch drunk in the 1950s was

described as certain things you'd see in a brain, but it wasn't until the late 70s, early 80s that we even could find an antibody that stained this tau protein and made it visible.

So it was sort of a new thing.

There was no science on really what to look for.

There was an extrapolation from studies done decades before to say this is CTE,

but

when we're talking 2007 right now, it wasn't until 2015 because of our work that the National Institutes of Health actually first published this is what CT is.

So at that point,

we can look back and go, yeah, we were right, but it was speculative back then.

Can you quantify the problem of CTE or potential CTE?

Like how many concussions does your average football player or wrestler suffer in their career?

Great question.

So there's two things to quantify.

One is the disease and one is risk for the disease.

On the disease itself, there are Dr.

Ann McKee, who's really led all this work and is the neuropathologist that I send all our 1,600 brains to that we've helped recruit for.

She's created a four-stage system.

And so, you know, when you're in your teens or 20s and you get it, you have these tiny lesions in the frontal lobe and that's stage one.

And then they spread.

By the time you you get to stage four usually 30 to 50 years later it's everywhere throughout the brain

in terms of your risk that's something that we need to figure out so what we have learned is that it's not the number of concussions that predicts cte

and the reason it doesn't is because when you're getting hit in the head all the time

you are getting microscopic brain damage or subclinical traumatic brain injury that you can't feel.

And so, what correlates with who has CT is how many hits to the head you took and how hard they are, but not how many times did you feel symptoms and report it to a doctor and get a diagnosis.

Right.

So, when you survey NFL players while they're alive and then they die and you look at their brain, like, you know, most of them will say they've had, you know, between 20 and 100 to 200 symptomatic events that would be defined as concussions.

Yeah, I mean, when you talk to NFL players when they retire, they'll tell you weekly they're seeing double and they're, you know, can't remember stuff, but they play through it.

Other people will take the same hits and not feel much.

And I think that has a lot to do with just people's, like people have different thresholds for pain.

People have different thresholds for recognizing when a few of their neurons out of the 90 billion in their brain are broken.

So basically the point is that CT correlates very, very strongly with number of years you play contact sports, but not with number of concussions.

And so we have published that for football players, your odds of developing CT go up 30% per year.

We've published in rugby players, it goes up 14% per year.

We've published in hockey players

in December 2024 that it goes up 34% per year.

Whoa.

With the hockey study, it's probably the best example.

It was zero of six hockey players who played fewer than six years.

It was 19 of 19 who played 25 years or more.

Wow.

And those curves look a lot like smoking and lung cancer curves.

Yeah.

Essentially, one year of smoking, your odds are very, very long.

But if you smoke two packs a day for 30 years, your odds are considerable.

What about boxing?

We haven't published on that yet.

In general, there's a study published in 1969 that said the more years you box, the greater your risk.

And I'm sure that's the case.

We just don't have the good specifics right now.

What are other effects of CTE?

So,

I mean, we've we've barely touched on the idea of suicide rates going up.

What are the other consequences of having this disease?

So

what we now know about CTE as a progressive degenerative disease is that most people will eventually develop progressive cognitive impairment that leads to dementia if they live long enough.

That's pretty well accepted, and it's the tau destruction over time that is driving that.

We've accomplished that.

So for a lot of people, you you will see that Alzheimer's like fade over time.

But what we're also learning is that a lot of people, not everybody, have severe neurobehavioral problems.

So, you know, imagine like you're planting a disease in the brain in someone's teens or 20s, and it's in different parts of the frontal lobe for different people, but it's also in other places.

And so it's going to affect people differently.

based on a lot of different factors.

But some people seem to really go off the rails as early as their 20s, become a different person.

They develop addiction issues, aggression issues.

They can't hold down a job, poor executive functioning because the frontal lobe is compromised.

They make bad decisions.

So we do see a lot of that too.

But then layered into that is that CT is not the only type of brain damage that 10,000 hits in the head will cause.

So there's all these other types of brain damage that we pick up that could be contributing to some of those early stage issues.

But, you know, when you think about someone like Junior Seiao, who was having mental health issues and took his life, and that is a common story, but it's not the most common outcome.

The more common outcomes are the later stage cognitive problems.

Okay.

So, Junior Sayao, that reference might have gone by really quickly, but let's talk about him for a minute.

Dan.

Yeah, so Junior Sayo, I mean, he was an all-American linebacker at USC.

He played in the NFL for a very long time, 13 seasons.

That's a lot.

Yeah, it's amazing if you make it past three years in the NFL.

Anyhow, he shot himself in the chest in 2012.

Prior to that, he had been for quite a long time complaining about depression and a bunch of the symptoms that we would now associate with CTE.

And even then, obviously, it was 2012, so it was associated with CTE.

But yeah, it's just really important to remember how real this is.

Like

he probably wouldn't have done that.

Right.

If he hadn't been suffering with CTE.

So it bums me out the same way it bums you out that there's this really fun thing we like to watch together on Sundays.

Well, now it's like five days a week, but, you know, it's a tradition and it's fun.

And there's a reason to make seven layer taco dip.

And I love it.

And yet.

Every time someone gets knocked in the head, I mean, you've been there with me.

Oh, it's horrible.

It's horrible.

But the thing is, they get knocked in the head every play.

It's just most of the time we don't focus on it.

Anyway, it's thrilling and also sickening.

And I have a lot of cognitive dissonance around my feelings around football.

So yeah, Junior Sayo is a very famous case.

We really are concerned with these early, these early deaths.

of people with CT who have radical changes to who they are.

We actually just published within the last month that one of the predictors of who really struggles is family history of psychiatric and mental health diagnoses.

What we found is that when people have that sort of latent, so they have whatever environmental or genetic predisposition for mental health or psychiatric issues, if you also get CTE, it really unlocks it.

And between the ages of 40 and 60, we see in those people more aggression than we'd expect to see alone or just by genetics or just by having CT.

But when you combine those two things, you see really strange behaviors.

And so, you know, when I think about people like Chris Benoit, who was the third brain I coordinated, who was a wrestler I knew for five years, who seemed fine until he killed his wife, seven-year-old son and himself.

Oh my God.

He was 40 years old when that happened.

And we have a lot of those types of stories where people just radically change into their 40s.

And I, you know, at this point, I think a lot of that is due to they develop CTE and they have these other risk factors

waiting to become unleashed.

Here come the ads.

It's third down.

Did you see the game last night?

Of course you did, because you used Instacart to do your grocery restock.

Plus, you got snacks for the game, all without missing a single play.

And that's on multitasking.

So we're not saying that Instacart is a hack for game day, but it might be the ultimate play this football season.

Enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.

Service fees apply.

For three orders in 14 days.

Excludes restaurants.

Instacart, we're here.

Ready to elevate your skincare?

Introducing Medicate, a clinically proven dermatologist-recommended British skincare brand known for age-defying results.

You may have heard about growth factors as the must-have anti-aging ingredient, and that's why Medicaid is excited about their latest innovation, the Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum.

This serum harnesses the power of Growth Factor Miniprotein, a cutting-edge technology that mimics natural growth factors, but goes deeper, delivering visible, transformative results.

Studies show immediate improvement in expression lines in just 10 minutes and a significant decrease in deep set wrinkles after eight weeks of use.

The Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum not only reduces wrinkles, but also gives a filler-like effect, smoothing out your skin's appearance dramatically.

Visit medicate.us.

That's M-E-D-I-K and the number 8.US.

Use code podcast20 for 20% off your purchase today.

Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

I'm Hannah Berner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage.

I like to call them my granny panties.

Actually, I never think about underwear.

That's the magic of Tommy John.

Same, they're so light and so comfy, and if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Yes, Lord knows the girls need to breathe.

Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery soft and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night.

That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.

Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly.

Put yourself on to Tommy John.

Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John.

Save 25% for a limited time at tommyjohn.com/slash slash comfort.

See site for details.

Back to our conversation with neuroscientist Chris Nowinski.

We kind of skipped over going back to school and what your career became after you wrote the book.

Can you tell me about that?

So once the Andre Waters story went out, and then there was another brain, Justin Strelzik, that I tracked down, and he had CTE or four for four, I realized that CTE was going to get everyone to take concussions seriously because it made invisible concussions visible.

You could see the brain damage, but also we need to figure out what the hell is going on with CTE.

And so, in having these conversations with families, I realized that they were luckily trusting me to sign over the brains to me or the doctors, but there's really, this needs to be institutionalized.

So, I said, all right, we're going to create a charity that's going to do this outreach and families can trust that no one's profiting from their loved one's brain but then also we need to find the best medical scientific team out there at an academic center and create a partnership at a brain bank so that became boston university ct center so that was dr and mckee uh bob stern that we we partnered with and i said i'm going to get you brains will you study them and do all the work and luckily they said yes they saw the public health value so that was 2008 and then i have an office at the medical school where i'm literally spending most of my days tracking obituaries, tracking families down, making the pitch, trying to build this thing.

And then they mentioned to me, all right, well, as long as you're in the building, do you want to go attend some classes?

Basically, the idea was the shine was going to wear off of this late 20s ex-athlete figuring this out.

And if I wanted to make sure I was making the right choices and play a larger role in the research, I needed a doctorate.

And so I started doing a PhD part-time.

in behavioral neuroscience while still trying to build up the foundation.

And I'm glad I did because before I was just trusting what the smart people were telling me now I have some independent thoughts.

Oh, good.

And you were still right.

And I was still lucky I listened to the right people.

I mean, that was what it was, what it came down in the early days.

That's the one special thing that, since I haven't dropped Harvard in like 10 minutes, one special thing about Harvard is it did help you recognize who the true smart people were.

Because we all walk into that place thinking we're the smartest person in our high school.

Then you get to see what real genius genius looks like right and so i could tell who was real and who was fake and i i picked the real people and that's what made this happen because a lot of the other people who were around in those days are gone you know and so um anyway that's how i work in harvard there okay in a dream world in an ideal world what do you want to happen with this issue practically speaking what do you want to change

what i've what i've been working on today is we need to get to a point where we can diagnose ct in life

not just to help the families who are struggling and aren't getting answers, but so that we can get the life sciences industry off the sideline and actually running clinical trials trying to cure this thing.

So that is that is sort of what my five-year plan is: we're getting very close to learning how to diagnose the living people and what has to happen next.

And what's been hard is that along this way, I mentioned I was one of four guys who were training for the NFL in college.

One of those guys who did get to the nfl and was my roommate that summer died and he drank himself to death and we studied him and he had stage two ct and i was not able to help him when things got bad and the alcoholism was just too bad he wouldn't go into rehab we didn't have answers to what was happening but i you know i think we all knew he must have been young He yeah, he was 44, 45.

So I need to cure like my generation and hopefully we'll help some of the guys that that are older than me, but it's a race.

And then on the flip side is I hope we bring sanity back into youth sports where we actually think about what's best for the kids and we're willing to have those difficult conversations of, well, soccer's just fine for a 12-year-old without heading.

You know, they can still learn the game, be fine, play the ball off their chest.

Like, why do we need to start exposing them to brain injuries and potential CTE?

Right.

You know, just to get them more ready for their high school team and then more ready for their college team.

Like, we're doing sports wrong.

And the problem is we're fighting of the privatization of youth sports.

So, you know, if you join a club soccer team, like they're not going to tell you there's any risk to the game.

Right, right.

Because they're not affiliated with your school or the public school system or any of that.

Yeah.

And so I don't know how we win that battle.

Like, you know, we, we, you know, we, we've had certain wins here and there.

You know, we got heading banned before age 11 in soccer, but we are creating more CT cases now than we ever have before.

Because we have more people participating in sports or?

Yeah.

We have more people playing sports.

We have more people playing more sports.

So, you know, when I grew up, soccer was a one season a year sport, maybe two.

Now kids are playing four seasons a year on two teams.

I can't believe kids play in their high school team and a club team the same season.

Football is something that when in the 1960s, Pop Warner was not even a national organization.

Right.

And so there are very few kids, people starting at five.

Now we have tons of people starting at five.

And those people have a much greater risk of CT.

So the problem is we're playing more sports than we have before we're starting younger and we're only now starting to in some sports create age minimums to start hitting a kid in the head 300 times a year oh my god but it's not happening fast enough we now have you know

almost 10 college football players who died in their 20s with stage three cte that are worse than say they were the small hard-hitting tough guys on their teams who started playing in single-digit years and their lives were over by 20.

And they were just fought, you know, addiction, mental health, couldn't hold jobs, families.

So bigger, stronger, faster is also making this worse than it was before.

So we're facing a wave and we're facing an industry that doesn't want to acknowledge it.

There's a lot of people making a lot of money not to slow the party down.

Right.

So is the answer like Rihanna should not play the Super Bowl?

Even that, like, it's, that's not her battle.

I know.

Right.

Like, you realize like that's the, that's your opportunity as as an artist to be seen in front of the largest group in the world.

Like you're crazy to turn that down.

I mean, I, like, trust me, I think about all the time, do I ask people in those positions to risk their financial future to try to raise awareness of this tragedy?

And the answer is no.

I mean, it's like, and here's the hardest part.

The people that are most at risk for this, like current NFL players, right?

We've proven at least 10% of them have it.

It's multifold worse than that.

There's no question about it, right?

But not a single current NFL player is talking about CT or advocating for CT research or

really?

Not one?

No.

How do we find that person?

How do we, what do I we've tried over the years?

Uh, there have been people who've like pledged their brain during the season, or what they've learned is that no one you get punished for talking about CT because the coaches will start to think, oh, he's not going to stick his head in there anymore.

He knows too much.

Oh,

and so

you know, you find so gross.

I'm sorry,

so gross.

The players are punished for talking about it or for advocating for themselves outside of through their unions.

So, it's this weird, silent thing that the people most at risk are not engaged on this issue, and they're most of them are in denial.

Is it just toxic masculinity?

No, no, no, no, no, I mean, you know, I wrestle with my four-year-old son every day, but also with my six-year-old daughter.

Like, you know, there's right, there's nothing wrong with wanting to play a sport and collide with people, especially when it's not giving you immediate feedback that it's hurting you.

Your brain doesn't have pain nerves.

So you literally can't know that you're damaging your brain until it's too late.

Women are doing this too.

We just don't talk about it.

We've identified the first two CT cases in female athletes.

They were both 28.

They both died by suicide.

One played rugby and Aussie football in Australia.

One played soccer in the U.S.

We're not talking about that either.

Right.

And trust me that I've had conversations with high-profile former female athletes.

They don't want to be the bearer of bad news for this too, because this is finally the shot that women can make a great living off of sports.

And no one wants to suddenly bring this dark cloud of what are we doing to ourselves here.

But I once had a conversation with two women on the women's national team from the 90s.

One of them refused to head the ball in the 90s and was one of the best players in the world.

And she just said, yeah, I just knew it was a bad idea.

I didn't like it.

That wouldn't happen now, right?

Because now you would get pushed out.

Back then, because

there wasn't so much money on on the line, you had some autonomy.

Right.

So I don't know.

There's no easy answers here.

I don't blame anyone for what they're doing.

And they have also been fed misinformation their whole career.

Right.

Their whole career, they've been told this is safe.

Well, you're doing great work to try to fix that.

I feel like the conclusion here is money is evil.

And no.

Well, okay.

I'll call you back if I have any questions.

We didn't get into the concussion sign you need to look for, which is the

concussion.

Okay, tell me everything I need to know about identifying whether I'm having a concussion or whether someone else is having a concussion, especially if I'm watching a football game.

If you're watching a football game, what you're looking for are what we call signs of concussions.

Basically, concussions are defined by signs and symptoms.

Symptoms are what you feel.

Like, so when I got hit in the head and I would see double and my head hurt, that's a symptom.

But if I didn't tell anybody, no one would know about it.

And that's how concussions continue to skate by undiagnosed.

But there's signs that you see, like the fencing response, where someone gets hit and they're unconscious for their arms out, or they get up and they fall over.

That's a sign of a concussion.

Okay.

It's a sign that their brain's malfunctioning.

We just discovered a new sign that we've all known about for a long time, but was never in the protocols and we haven't been using to pull people out.

And that's when someone gets hit in the head really hard.

And a few seconds later or a minute later, they start shaking their head violently back and forth.

Okay.

That quick shake back and forth.

Shaking the water.

It's kind of reset in your brain.

It's been around forever, but we missed

that it needs to be one of those signs you pull people out and evaluate them on.

So Tua Tunga Vailoa did it twice, the famous concussion where they left him in the game and said it was his back injury.

And that forced me to stop complaining about it on social media about the head shake and actually do a study.

So we surveyed nearly 400 young former athletes, showed them video of it happening and say, did you ever do this head shake after getting hit in the head?

And what were you experiencing when you did it?

And 72% of the time, it was because they were having concussion symptoms and they were trying to reset their brain, stop the double vision, stop the feeling of floating, stop the ringing in their ears, you know, whatever it was.

And so we named this.

spontaneous headshake after a kinematic event or S-H-A-A-K-E.

And now we're advocating for everyone to put it in their protocols.

So anyway, so if you see someone get hit in the head and they shake their head back and forth violently, which is when you recognize it from cartoons and movies, that is usually a concussion.

Okay.

But it's not 100% diagnostic like getting knocked out.

And therefore, people are still playing through that all the time.

Oh my God.

So this is going to be a fun weekend of watching football.

Right, Dan?

Are we, did I miss anything else?

Is there something else you're itching to talk about or are we good?

Oh, on this, on this issue?

yeah, no, I think, no, I mean, you, you, you know what you're doing, you know what you need to hear your story.

So, I'm happy to, I appreciate you doing it, and I'm just, you know, happy to, happy to share my perspective and thank you for uh, yeah, giving this a little bit more visibility because it is a hard thing to convince people on.

Yeah, well, thank you for sharing your knowledge and coming on the show.

I appreciate it.

It was my pleasure.

Take care, Chris.

All right, thanks.

You too.

That's it for this week.

Hope you're loving the new format, just weekly chit-chatting and hearing me in your face a lot more often.

Thank you so much to Chris Nowinski.

I'm excited to see where his work takes us as a society.

We have a tip line open.

Call us at 323-248-1488.

323-248-1488.

And leave us a message about anything that you think is funky out there.

What's going on, guys?

Talk to me.

Ready to elevate your skincare?

Introducing Medicaid, a clinically proven dermatologist-recommended British skincare brand known for age-defying results.

You may have heard about growth factors as the must-have anti-aging ingredient, and that's why Medicaid is excited about their latest innovation, the Liquid Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum.

This serum harnesses the power of Growth Factor Mini Protein, a cutting-edge technology that mimics natural growth factors but goes deeper, delivering visible, transformative results.

Studies show immediate improvement in expression lines in just 10 minutes and a significant decrease in deep set wrinkles after eight weeks of use.

The Liquid Peptides Peptides Advanced MP Face Serum not only reduces wrinkles, but also gives a filler-like effect, smoothing out your skin's appearance dramatically.

Visit medicate.us.

That's M-E-D-I-K and the number 8.us.

Use code podcast20 for 20% off your purchase today.

Hey, I'm Paige DeSorbo, and I'm always thinking about underwear.

I'm Hannah Berner, and I'm also thinking about underwear, but I prefer full coverage.

I like to call them my granny panties.

Actually, I never think think about underwear.

That's the magic of Tommy John.

Same, they're so light and so comfy, and if it's not comfortable, I'm not wearing it.

And the bras, soft, supportive, and actually breathable.

Yes, Lord knows the girls need to breathe.

Also, I need my PJs to breathe and be buttery, soft, and stretchy enough for my dramatic tossing and turning at night.

That's why I live in my Tommy John pajamas.

Plus, they're so cute because they fit perfectly.

Put yourself on to Tommy John.

Upgrade your drawer with Tommy John.

Save 25% for a limited time at TommyJohn.com/slash comfort.

See site for details.

Is your cash working hard for you right until the very moment you need it?

It could be if it was in a Wealthfront cash account.

With WealthFront, you can earn 4% annual percentage yield from partner banks until you're ready to invest, nearly 10 times the national average.

And you get free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts 24-7, 365.

4% APY is not a promotional rate, and there's no limit to what you can deposit and earn.

And it takes just minutes to transfer your cash to any of Wealthfront's expert-built investing accounts when you're ready.

Wealthfront.

Money works better here.

Go to WealthFront.com to start saving and investing today.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member Fenra SIPC.

Wealthfront is not a bank.

The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.

The national average interest rate for savings accounts is posted on FDIC.gov as of December 16, 2024.

Go to wealthrunt.com to start today.

Hey, dream listeners, it's finally here.

The dream plus, where you can get every single episode of our show with no ads.

It's $5 a month.

It's the only tier.

No commercials.

Plus, bonus content.

This helps keep us independent.

And your contribution will help change the way every listener hears the dream.

We'll be able to take out the ads that we don't even know are getting put into this show, which is annoying to both you and us.

We're also going to have an amazing discussion board.

The interface has it cataloged under AMA, Ask Me Anything.

But I don't love rules.

So what I did is started a bunch of threads like ask Dan and I questions, general chit chat, just to make friends and stuff.

And every time I've been in charge of a discussion board, I've made a tab called women be shopping and it's there.

And we're just going to talk about what we bought.

It'll be fun.

That's the dream.superca.com.

Supercast.

Please, please go subscribe.

It's five bucks.

It's less than a latte if you live in Los Angeles.

See you there.