Joe Rogan on CTE & Contact Sports

Be careful and walk this line between just completely bringing them in but not trying to change them into who you are. Did the six-year-old already have things he was really into or sports or activities? Yeah, he was. Well, the funny thing is my son is really athletic and I'm really not. So I know you guys are, but I'm so not. Thomas. Me especially. He's an acrobat. You saw what I was doing yesterday. He's an animal. Because an animal. But no, he's really athletic and he's just always been good with all of that stuff. And it's funny for me because I wasn't that kid at all. But it's great for me because I'm like, he's able to do the stuff that I wanted to do so badly. When I was little, I sucked at sports and I so wanted to be good at sports. And he's really good at it and it makes me... What does he play? Well, I mean, whatever he plays, he just tends to be pretty good at it. So he played flag football for a while and he's playing lacrosse now and he's played soccer. Dude, keep him away from lacrosse and football. We were just playing it with Brendan Schaub the other day. I had no idea how many people get knocked the fuck out playing lacrosse. Really? Oh my God. Oh, lacrosse is fucking violent, man. Violent. We were saying, there's a difference between this, even in football in that they're striking each other. You're allowed to. They're allowed to hit each other with a stick, but they're also striking each other with elbows. They're running in and they have the stick in their hand and they're elbowing each other in their face as they're running. I mean, whoa, shit. It's a crazy amount of force that they generate. Oh, yeah. They're getting flatlined. I'm like, that's because I had Dale Earnhardt Jr. here the other day on. Really nice guy. Great guy. Suffered 12 concussions over a period of four years. Racing? Yes. And has some significant brain damage because of it that he had to go through therapy for to help him, to the point where he was walking and he had to hold on to things because his balance was so fucked up. He couldn't just walk. He couldn't get off the couch and walk to the bathroom. He had to hold on to a table and a chair and hit him make his way through. All of this from concussions. What they're getting in lacrosse, what they're getting in football, it's all the same shit. It's all head trauma. It's head trauma, yeah. So I'm a terrible parent? No. My kids go to a very nice school. It's a great school. And we went to a football game the other day where the older kids are playing football. And I'm just sitting there. All the other parents are having a good time. And I'm like, brain damage, brain damage. There's some brain damage. There's some brain. I'm like, Jesus fucking Christ. These are kids. They're kids running at each other full clip, smashing and falling to the ground. They see the kid get up slow and put his hands on the ground. He's all fucked up. I'm like, this is crazy. You guys are teaching people. I always felt like lacrosse because my high school had lacrosse too. And I always felt like it was way crazier. Because I didn't know about it and then I'm at the school and they have it. I'm like, this shit is nuts. Yeah. And they're just, oh yeah, of course. Yeah. If you're a football player, you can become some Herschel Walker type character and become a huge baller. Yeah, that's true. But you got no shot. If you're a lacrosse player, I live when they interview like all the guys, the NFL, they're like the young guys. They're like, you know, all this evidence is that your lifespan is going to be way shorter and it's going to be probably horrific at some point because of the impact of what you're going through playing football. You know, what do you think about that? You're like, shit's worth it, man. This is an awesome lifestyle. Nobody is like, yeah. I mean, you're getting some guys that you see retire early, which was unheard of 10 years ago. Right. Guys, one guy came out, played his rookie year and retired. You know, you're getting guys early retirement. Some guys play, finish out a contract. They're up for a big contract and they're out. Yeah, that's happening. But there's still, you know, there's no shortage of guys who are like, I'll take the guarantee, whatever my signing bonus is and take some brain damage with it. I mean, look, that's how our brains work. Our brains are designed to not have that kind of foresight until you get much older. Of course. When you're young, you can't satisfy me now. Yeah. And I don't know what that is, but you can tell people, hey, whatever it is you're doing right now, this is really going to cause you irreparable harm. When? Like today? No. Well, fuck it. Well, it's the same way we deal with climate change. Yeah. It's literally the same thing. People are driving around with cars blowing smoke out. Like, yeah, one day, fuck, yeah, yeah. It's going to be a real problem. You tell someone to be a real problem here on earth in like 300 years and they're like, that sucks. Whatever. Yeah, whatever. I won't be here, bro. Or even 40 years. Sadly, it will be like, it's also the issue with people that get a lot of head trauma. They get very impulsive and they don't make good decisions anyway. So even if they could have the foresight, they probably wouldn't make good decisions. They're not thinking rationally. And they did some study. What was that study, Jamie? We've referenced this before where they looked at kids that play football literally from Pop Warner all the way through college and how many of them have CTE. Really? Oh, Jesus Christ. It's stunning. See, I always felt like my point of view on it was always like I played football. Fourth grade through high school. And I always was like, man, that's why you're so fucked up. I know. I know. But I just feel like you have definitely some big in an amateur career. You have some you can think back like, man, I got my bell rung. How many times you get your bell rung? I don't know. I mean, probably. I mean, here's the thing in fourth grade and fifth grade, you're like, that doesn't happen. Really. I mean, kids are like walking up and like wrapping up slowly. You're playing with kids who will eventually not play football even in sixth grade. So it starts to be you might have like a stud on a team in middle school and still a bunch of guys that won't play in high school. And then in high school, yeah, there's definitely some athletes that stand out for sure. I mean, those are the kids that will eventually go on. But you play teams and there's weeks where you're just like, no one is really good on this team. And you'll have a game where you'll feel like, yeah, I mean, there's a couple I got a couple good hits and there was nothing really of impact. And then something will stand out like you'll play a school that has like an all state or all American player. You're like, holy shit, that guy fucking fucked me up bad. And you remember it. I mean, I remember it to this day, some of those like really stand out guys. And you're like, that hit stuck with me. But that's once a year that you play that guy, right? Or that you remember a school that good. And then if you don't go on to play in college, really feels like kind of a, I don't know, a risk assessment where you're like, I didn't feel like that was, you know, do I have damage? I don't know. But I mean, once you get into college football is where I feel like that's where you're really playing with really good athletes. A friend of mine, a guy in his neighborhood, a kid who was 21 committed suicide. And he was a college player who was about to go into the pros. He was 21 years old. Really? Yeah. And the significant CTE like just really ravaged. Every year a player played tackle football under the age predicted the early onset of cognitive problems by 2.4 years in behavioral and mood problems by 2.5 years. Yeah, but there's a study. This is okay. The average study found that 211 players who were diagnosed with CTE after death who played tackle football before age 12 suffered from cognitive behavioral and mood symptoms earlier than those players who didn't start to play till after age 12. They're saying that, okay, study included 246 former players, 211 of whom were diagnosed with CTE after death. That's insane. Well, in college there's definitely, there's no such thing as getting around real high impact hits. That's it. Those are all people that know how to play. They're all athletes. You're going to get rocked. What they're realizing now is that sub concussive trauma is what's responsible for the majority of brain damage. What's sub concussive? You're not getting a concussion. Oh. Yeah, you're just getting rattled. Yeah. So getting rattled where it's not even fucking you up, but over time. Over time that over and over. Multiple hits that are just not, they're not knocking you out. They're just jostling you. You can even- That was happening a lot. Yeah. You even get it from getting hit to the body. Right. You get hit to the body and your head snaps back and you don't even get hit in the head and you're like throwing up and your head's all fucked up and you're trying to figure out what's going on. It's because your brain's been moshing around inside your head. Yeah. The thing that I remember too is the thing that stands out is when you, because such thing is like bracing for a hit and then feeling it and you're like, fuck. But when you don't see someone coming. Oh yeah. That's, that's, I mean it's like a fight where you don't see a punch coming. Oh yeah. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's dangerous. You guys are saving my child's life right now. I'm telling you right now. He's good. It's funny because I, I don't know that much about lacrosse. I had to actually like YouTube lacrosse to be like, how do you play this? Jamie, some of the- Pull up the video. Cause there's some videos of some fucking hits that we were watching the other day and Brendan played lacrosse in college. He played lacrosse in college? And football. Jesus Christ. And then he fought in the UFC. And then his brain looks like a walnut. It's gotta be man. And you talk to him, you kind of know. Yeah. It's a, it's a crazy fucking sport. Oh. Watch these guys just over and over again. These guys getting KO'd. Boom. Boom. See that? I mean, they're smashing each other. The impact is horrific. Oh, look at that. Boom. This, these are strikes. This is like me kicking somebody in the head. This is not much different than a kick in the head. You're just hitting them with an elbow. But the amount of force. So these guys are getting kicked in the head with these helmets on. Yeah. And if you think the helmet's protecting your head, that shit ain't protecting anything. Boom. Look at that. Boom. All right, look, I don't know anything about this stuff, but I've thought for a long time, hard helmets gotta just make it worse, right? Well, it makes you more confident that you can slam your head into somebody and then you don't realize how bad you're getting fucked up from that. You know, it's your head. When you get hit in the head, even though you have a helmet on, it's not gonna crack your skull. Your brain still subs- It's hitting the sides of your skull. You get serious punishment. Smashing around in there, all the connective tissue. It's awful. It's awful. Boom. Bam. And this is coming from a guy who's probably seen, I've probably seen more people get fucked up than 99.9% of the people that have ever lived. Right. In terms of being there live when someone got the fuck beaten out of them, I've probably seen more people get the fuck beaten out of them than almost anyone that's ever lived in history. Yeah. There's probably a small handful of people that have seen more. Sure. See, I'm still in there. How many fights have you called? Hundreds. Thousands. Thousands. At least more than a thousand, probably 2,000, but then I've seen more. I've seen a bunch live, and when I was competing, I saw a bunch of people get fucked up. I mean, it's just, I've seen it a lot. When you can avoid that, avoid it. Especially something like lacrosse, you can't make a career out of it. Get out of there. Right. Because it actually just started, because right now I'm used to kid's soccer, where they're just running around and just chasing the ball. It's cute. It's fun. Soccer's great. It's actually really fun to watch. And yeah, my son just got into lacrosse, and we play catch with the lacrosse stick, and it's great. We have a good time playing catch with it, but no, I haven't seen him get in my tennis, man. Even soccer, which you think, you know, who's getting hurt in soccer? Soccer from heading the ball. Just heading the ball. The ball flying out, you hit it with your head. Soccer players are suffering from CTE to the point where they're starting to minimize the amount of heading they do in practices. Really? Yes. This is what we're finding out about brains. There's a good friend of mine, Dr. Mark Gordon, who specializes in CTE. He deals with a lot of soldiers coming back, and a lot of them that are like my friend Andrew Marr, where they would blow open doors. So they'd set up a charge on a door and step back and boom, the door would blow. These guys, I mean, he didn't even get hit with anything, or maybe IEDs that are nearby. Those guys suffer significant brain damage. It's just from the impact of just getting shook by an explosion, not even anything actually hitting them in the head. Which high school sport has the most concussions? Is it soccer? Girl soccer. Girl soccer. Isn't it cheerleading? Had rates exceeded boys' football by 2015. Wow. I know. When you stop and you look at those, like when they're going to commercial on a college game and they throw that girl up in the air and you're like, man, to get that right. I saw a documentary about it. It's one of the most dangerous sports in the world is high school cheerleading. These girls fall on a gym floor and just smack their heads on the floor. It's crazy.