Joe Rogan Talks Football and Brain Damage with Jon Reep

Do you watch sports? I watch football. That's it? Yep. Do you worry about brain damage? Well, yeah, because it's going to ruin the NFL. Do you look at it differently? Let's go take my sport away. Do you look at it differently than you did like before that concussion movie? Well, I played high school football. I've got hits so hard that I've seen stars and that kind of stuff, but I think that could happen. I don't look at it differently to answer your question. No. No. They might change the helmets, and they've tried that over the years. Do you remember, like, it was just leather helmets. There was less concussions because you would not lead with your head. Exactly. Now you have a weapon on your head, and people have used it as such. And so I would love, you know how they do throwback uniforms? I mean, let's go throwback equipment. You'd have to change- Let's put the leather helmet back on. Take that stupid face mask off. You really should, but you'd have to change so much. You'd have to change so much in the way people... There's so many different factors. The way they practice, the way they set up plays. It would have to be a new game. I don't think it's going to happen. I think the perception of the helmet being safer fucked the game up. I really think it did. But you know, I used to think that bare knuckle boxing, like they should have bare knuckles in the UFC, but then I've been watching this bare knuckle boxing stuff, and people get cut up so bad. Now I'm thinking, you know what? It's better to have padded knuckles. It's better. It's better for the fighters. The leather helmets were padded. They just weren't like a hard shell. And the shell is what made it, you know, used it as a weapon. So that's literally the only way you're going to be able to stop some of this brain damage. And you're still not going to be able to stop it all. They're still colliding into each other. They say these guys are getting brain damage from getting hit in the chest. They're getting hit in the chest, and their head snaps back, and their brain's swashing around inside their skull. Well, they're changing, I think, maybe like a younger... Like little league now. You can't do tackle football until a certain age. So now everyone's... It's all flag football until a certain age, I think. That'll probably happen. Yeah. And then the practices will be different. We only do pads once a week. Save it for the real game. Well, it would be amazing if they ever came up with something that definitively fixed it, like some stem cell treatment or something like that that regenerated brain tissue and bring you back to your normal state. If they do that, then we don't have to worry about it anymore. But until that, man... Well, that's gotta be around the corner. That's close. I think that's a very complex question of how to regenerate neural tissue, brain tissue, how to get rid of all those abscesses and all those things that you see in those people's brains that have CTE. They develop these holes in their brain. It's serious shit. It's wild ass sport, though. Did you play football or... No. No. No, I wrestled in high school. I wrestled 134 pounds. Yeah, but you could have been a good runner, Ben. Fuck the fuck out of here. There was another dude... Oh, cuz all the fastest guys are small and just... I wasn't that fast a runner. I was fast kicking and punching and stuff, but I wasn't really that fast a runner. I didn't do a lot of running. But when I was in high school and I was wrestling, they were trying to tell me, like the coach Murphy, he was also the wrestling coach, he was also the football coach. And he's like, oh, come on. You're a sick fuck. You should play football. Yeah. And I was like, dude, that guy plays football. We had this... our heavyweight, his name is Bobby Baker. He was 300 pounds. He was enormous. He was so big. I was like, he's not squashing me. The fuck out of here. The hardest I've ever been hit was by a little dude in practice. Probably like 5'7". And he just... he was a DB. And it was a practice, so I was like third string running back in there, like I was just running up the gut. And I was falling into the end zone, right? It was over. He had a running start, like 20 yard head start. And it was like he came up from out of the ground and went, wow, it didn't knock me back up. Whoa. And that's the hardest I've ever been hit was by a little guy. So you know, just think about speed and momentum. You know, like a human torpedo. Yeah. With a hard helmet on. And that's what he led with that helmet. But you know how fast, like a really good athlete can run and just think of all that mass behind them and just, oh, crash. Yeah. Yeah. The way those guys get hit and the amount of force behind them getting hit is probably unlike anything in sports other than a car accident. Right? Other than like NASCAR. Yeah.