Chris Nowinski (Stop Hitting Kids in the Head, Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis, Concussion Legacy Foundation) is an author, retired pro-wrestler, and neuroscientist. Chris joins the Armchair Expert to discuss never forgetting the culture shock of wealth while studying at Harvard, his stint wrestling on Monday Night Raw, and not having ever really been in a real fight. Chris and Dax talk about why the violence in football is actually worse than WWE, his first instance of REM behavior disorder, and learning the preciousness of brain cells. Chris explains the supposed causes and physiology of CTE, why we have selective framing for how to think about the mental health of athletes transitioning out of sports, and how wrestlers now really appreciate how much safer the industry is.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: Who is Chris Nowinski and what is his background?
She said, this is for Peababy part two, for this space.
That's a deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep.
That is a real listener, a real armchair. It's so cute.
Oh my God, how does one get?
She probably invented it.
What do you call it when you commission? Oh yeah, yeah. She commissioned this? Yeah, it took years to build. Oh, and you have to pee in the tank because the lid doesn't open.
Of course. Oh, wow. That's so perfect for us.
She's going to be so happy with that reaction. Oh, my God. That is incredible.
Wow.
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Chapter 2: How did Chris transition from Harvard football to professional wrestling?
Yeah, the ice is way worse than any football hit. And you're going faster because you're skating faster than you run.
Yeah, those guys are flying and hitting the back of their head on the plexiglass. Yeah.
Why can't we look at the brain while the person's living?
You'd have to go in and do a brain surgery. We are trying.
I feel like scan technology has gotten so good and like fMRI, but no, we're not there.
The problem is no one's done the work. The CT stuff shut down in the 70s and we've 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 decade ago.
Cal's part of that as well.
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's bad if you take a lot of punches. There's also a dose response issue going on with that. So the reason why 97% 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.
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