The Brain Collector: Meet the Ex-Pro Wrestler Fighting the NFL's Concussion "Cover-Up"

Chris Nowinski was a WWE heel. Then he got in on a secret the NFL allegedly has been trying to hide for more than a decade: There may be nothing worse you can do to your brain than play tackle football. In the wake of a landmark study of CTE, the neuroscientist sits down with Pablo about his war with the league, the effectiveness of the Guardian Cap, the last word on O. J. Simpson's brain and, yes, some good news on the horizon. Further content: • "Study's Alarming Finding: At Least 1 in 4 N. F. L. Players Gets Brain Disease" https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/us/nfl-cte-brain-disease.html(The New York Times) • "The Life and Death of Chris Eitzmann" https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/3128081/2022/03/10/from-small-town-nebraska-to-harvard-captain-to-tom-bradys-housemate-the-life-and-death-of-chris-eitzmann/ (The Athletic) • Previously on PTFO: How We Forgot About CTE, with Domonique Foxworth https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjhmOTJkZWQ1Mzk3ODk4OWFkODRjMDhl • Plus: Submit your confidential tips to Pablo https://www.pablo.show/tips (If you're dealing with a recent concussion, symptoms or concerns about CTE, contact the Concussion & CTE Foundation's help line https://concussionandcte.org/helpline/.) (Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by Apple Card.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:56Pablo Torre?

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• 1:39Pablo Torre?

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• 1:58Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, brought to you by Apple Card. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  There's nothing worse you can do to your brain than play 16 years of tackle football, if dementia is the endpoint you're thinking about.

• 2:12Pablo Torre?

  Right after this.

• 2:20Pablo Torre?

  You called me over the summer? It feels like a million years ago. But you called me to talk about what I think is one of, quietly, the biggest stories of the entire year, one of the biggest stories ever in terms of the biggest sport in this country. And I want to get to that, but thank you for being here in person, Chris Nowinski.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me, Pablo Torre. Big fan.

• 2:41Pablo Torre?

  Well, we'll do the formalities here because for those who don't know you and your background, I want you to explain what the [bleep] your resume is.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  It starts with, yeah, so I was lucky enough to play football at Harvard, and afterwards, like most Harvard graduates, I decided to join the WWE and go run around on Monday Night Raw.

• 3:02Pablo Torre?

  And your name in that profession was?

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Well, so I came in with John Cena and Brock Lesnar and Randy Orton. It was real name year because UFC had just started, and they wanted us more realistic.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  Introducing first, weighing in at 260 pounds, Christopher Nowinski.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Chris Harvard came off of Tough Enough from MTV, because there were two Chris's on the shows, and it was so early in MTV that we only had first names. So I became Chris Harvard. And tonight, in this school of hard knocks match, I'm going to outthink him. Because in the end, brains always wins out over brawn. And I had no idea how that would affect my wrestling career at the moment. I should have realized I will be a heel for life.

• 3:53Pablo Torre?

  Shocking to everybody listening, as we put up the days since I have mentioned Harvard counter on the screen somewhere, that that would be how that felt. Your finishing move, though, I want to establish, you do not only wear khakis, which I believe makes you a pioneer.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Thank you. But I had the honor roll, which, yeah, I loved playing Chris Harvard, just running around the country insulting everyone. Basically, it was every worst conversation you had at Harvard, I got to be that guy. Well, you know, we had a little chant at Harvard for people like you. That's all right. That's okay. You'll all work for us someday.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  We had another one. Five, 10, 15 bucks. We'll own the company, you drive the trucks.

• 4:38Pablo Torre?

  And you were convincing.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 4:40Pablo Torre?

  A method wrestler. But look, you come in, and you're wearing your blue blazer and your white shirt, and the presentation of what you might be as Harvard-educated Chris Nowinski, who was this guy, for those who watched Monday Night Raw and/or MTV and/or any of the other places that they might have encountered you as the heel, you present superficially as representative of the powers that be, of the corporation, of the shield. And why I wanted to just start there is because, in fact, you might be the embodiment of the opposite in the world of football.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  I would call it more of a mission, right? Like, it's sort of felt like, once I was in on the secret that we were all damaging our brains and everyone was hiding it from us, I thought, I gotta take a shot at trying to change the culture. And I'm glad that we changed part of it. You know, concussions are different now. But now this CT thing is such a bigger battle.

• 6:01Pablo Torre?

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• 7:14Pablo Torre?

  So yes, it is true that former defensive tackle Chris Nowinski became a wrestling heel with the catchphrase "brains over brawn," and then, years later, became an actual neuroscientist who wants to tell America about the impact of brawn, so to speak, on the brain. But what you should know upfront here is that he is not trying to end or outlaw or ruin football. What Chris Nowinski wants personally is evidence. What Chris Nowinski wants is brains.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  So what is happening to the brains of football players? If you get hit in the head enough, you get a disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. I've always been the person who did outreach to families to get brains for brain donation. We got really good at it.

• 7:59Pablo Torre?

  And we'll get to the particulars of those conversations in just a minute, but Nowinski and the nonprofit Concussion Legacy Foundation, which he co-founded with Boston University, started with a sample of just 11 brains that they collected from former NFL players. And 10 of those brains, it turned out, showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which you may know as CTE. That's over 90% of that first sample. And so they set out to collect and test a lot more.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  And then we were 110 out of 111, and now we're over 400, and it's still over 90%. And what the NFL and everyone who wants to dismiss this has been able to say is, well, it's a biased sample, you're getting the worst of the worst.

• 8:44Pablo Torre?

  Because you're getting them in the first place, they might be more likely to have CTE, neurodegenerative conditions. And to that, you have long said what?

• 8:57Speaker 03

  They're right that you have what's called a registry bias. If someone's donating to a brain make that has CT in the name, they're more likely to have CT because the family thinks they're connecting those dots.

• 9:07Pablo Torre?

  Which now brings us to the study that Nowinski had called me about late this summer, that got published in one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, the British Medical Journal, in which they were able to calculate that from 2016 to 2021, a total of 878 NFL players had died for all sorts of reasons.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Because we also got the death records of everybody.

• 9:32Pablo Torre?

  You're doing investigative reporting.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, there it is.

• 9:35Pablo Torre?

  Documents.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  There's a lot of numbers and documents and really smart people, statisticians, figuring this out.

• 9:41Pablo Torre?

  And phone calls.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  And phone calls, yes.

• 9:44Pablo Torre?

  And of those 878 NFL players who died for all sorts of reasons...

• 9:49Speaker 03

  235 gave us their brains, 215 had the disease.

• 9:54Pablo Torre?

  Which is, once again, more than 90%. But it also signaled something even more disturbing, perhaps, mathematically speaking, at least in the eyes of the study's researchers, which is that at least 215 out of those 878 deceased NFL players, about 25%, had this terrifying disease.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  And what that meant is that a minimum 1 in 4 NFL players who died over that six-year period had CTE, but because we don't know who we didn't study, it still could be as high as 98%.

• 10:31Pablo Torre?

  And so we here at PTFO went to the NFL itself and we requested comment about this study that first appeared above the fold in the New York Times in August, before inevitably being obscured by the football games themselves. And in addition to highlighting the league's commitment to research and improving the safety of the game, an NFL spokesman told us in part the following, quote, "The NFL remains committed to ensuring that the NFL community has access to a robust and expanding set of resources to enhance their physical and mental well-being. We encourage former players to utilize these resources to identify and seek treatment when they are concerned about their health," end quote.

• 11:15Pablo Torre?

  But one other thing the league wanted us to know was that this study, in their view, did not seem all that different from previous studies that Chris Nowinski and Boston University had published already.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Well, they weren't surprised by this. I think that's the reality. I think they know how bad it is, as we know how bad it is, but it's a sort of a game we're playing with the public about when to panic about what's happening to football players.

• 11:43Pablo Torre?

  And so when do we panic?

• 11:44Speaker 03

  I'm panicked. And I'd say that with all the caveats of if you're an ex-football player, I don't want you panicking too necessarily. If you are struggling, though, I do want you to reach out to our foundation, the Concussion CT Foundation. But to put this in perspective, we had a publication came out in July that showed that NFL players are dying with dementia at four times the rate of the public. And what's interesting to me about that, when we were trying to communicate that to the public, I was trying to figure out like 4X doesn't sound that bad. But 4X doesn't sound bad until you review the literature of every other environmental exposure ever for the brain. And you find that there's been nothing that has ever reached 4X, whether it's lead exposure,

• 12:27Speaker 03

  whether it's pollution, whether it's alcohol, whether it's severe traumatic brain injury, there's no environmental exposure that's ever led to 4X. And so one way to say this is there's nothing worse you can do to your brain than play 16 years of tackle football, if dementia is the endpoint you're thinking about. And that's just a rephrasing of some scientific information, but I would panic about that.

• 12:52Pablo Torre?

  I've been reading and knowing about your work, because I've been working in sports media since 2007, when I graduated from the aforementioned institution in the Boston area. It looked for a while like panic was going to be almost a common sentiment. There were movies.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:13Pablo Torre?

  Will Smith playing Dr. Ben Adamalu in a movie titled Concussion. Tell the truth.

• 13:22Pablo Torre?

  Tell the truth. There were predictions, we've talked about them on the show before. Malcolm Gladwell prophesizing football may not exist anymore.

• 13:32Speaker 05

  And at a certain point, you have to ask yourself as a fan, or as anyone who is in any way connected to football, is that, is it appropriate in the modern day and age for us to support and participate in a game that has such a serious risk of physical harm to its players?

• 13:51Pablo Torre?

  What happened since that moment when it felt like panic was perhaps a dominant reaction to today, as we have never seen the NFL become more dominant, more economically seemingly invulnerable?

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think this is a great exercise in like human psychology, right? Like, people were very concerned at the beginning, and it's oftentimes too concerned, right? So football's gotta end, right? Because even I would say, look, I used to let people hit me in the head with folding chairs. Dangerous jobs are allowed in our culture.

• 14:25Pablo Torre?

  Yes, consenting adults.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:26Pablo Torre?

  Knowing the risks.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  Firemen, police, military, like, it's hard to compare football to that. So the NFL never had to go away, but the NFL had, in my mind, had to be honest. Not only just for the players that they employed, but also because they're the top of a big pyramid where there's millions of kids being recruited to this game. And I've always really been bothered about the fact that we're lying to parents and kids about what this might do to them.

• 14:52Pablo Torre?

  My personal feeling as I watch football, as I identify as a football fan, has always been, I just want everyone to tell the truth, to quote you and the movie. Not to be so on the nose about what we're doing here in this studio all the time, I hope. We want people to know what's actually happening. There are things that people behind locked doors, who control lots of money, actively withheld from you. All I want is for people to understand, you can decide to love this, to participate in it, to do whatever you want with it, give it your money, all of that. But we just gotta know what's really happening. And you are kind of the battering ram into and beyond those locked doors. I mean, you're now a neuroscientist.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Yes, sir. You haven't addressed me as Dr. Nowinski.

• 15:40Pablo Torre?

  I'm sorry, Dr. Nowinski.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 15:42Pablo Torre?

  If I can commit a couple of HIPAA violations with you right now, I do want to know what's inside your sort of thinking here, as you are not the most popular guy, as the most popular thing is the thing that you are investigating. How does that feel?

• 15:57Speaker 03

  When I started doing this in my late twenties, I was in the midst of like a 15-year headache with post-concussion syndrome. And so at that point, I truly had nothing to lose. Like, I basically looked at it as like, the only thing that is getting me out of bed and not thinking about how much my head hurts and how much I've lost through this is this issue.

• 16:16Pablo Torre?

  I want to explain what it's like when you wake up in the morning. Again, to be invasive, because in front of you on a given day, my understanding is, you're gonna be doing a bunch of calls. You're gonna be doing research. How does your day start?

• 16:32Speaker 03

  So for the last 20 years, since the 20th anniversary of me getting Andre Waters' brain, November 2006, I have started the day sadly reading obituaries. I have the worst Google alerts you could imagine with various keywords, and I start the day going, did someone pass away overnight or yesterday that I now need to call?

• 16:56Pablo Torre?

  And what's your criteria for, I'm gonna make this call? What are you looking for? What keywords are you looking for?

• 17:02Speaker 03

  So it has been, and the reason we got so many NFL brains is I would pursue every NFL brain. We basically have 72 hours from the moment they pass to get it into the formalin solution to be studied.

• 17:16Pablo Torre?

  So the clock is a posthumous biological clock, in that sense?

• 17:20Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. The cells are literally breaking down. And if you don't put it in solution, you can't diagnose this disease. And so it's a race against the clock. And in the early days, before this was a normal thing, I used to have a script because I was nervous calling people. I mean, you gotta imagine those first few calls of calling a widow or a mother within 48 hours and losing their loved one. I'm just very lucky that the initial families are all so wonderful about it, you know, because they saw what happened and they were so thrilled that someone else cared about why their loved one died. So I got the script and I've got to figure out how to get to them, because most people don't like answering their phone.

• 18:00Pablo Torre?

  I can relate to this part. Hard to get people to pick up the phone.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  But then when someone dies, you know?

• 18:07Pablo Torre?

  The hardest version of this.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Yes. And so I would often like try to connect like, okay, this guy was a teammate with this person, I know this person. We'd like just play this game of trying to get me to talk to somebody in the orbit of the family as fast as possible.

• 18:22Pablo Torre?

  Andre Waters, for people who don't remember how his brain wound up in your possession, can you remind people what his story was?

• 18:31Speaker 03

  I don't even know if I've ever told the full story. But so Andre Waters had been struggling, he was a D2 football coach, but he's getting the stories we heard where he's getting lost, going back and forth places he's familiar with, some real mental health struggles. He took his life. I remember reading about it, and at that point, I was so naive that I thought other people were aware that Mike Webster had been diagnosed with CTE.

• 18:51Pablo Torre?

  Former Steelers.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  Who was the first ever NFL player by Ben Adamalu. Reading the paper every day and no one said anything. And so eventually I called the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner's Office and said, hey, are you gonna study him for CT? And the guy had never heard of it. And so I ended up emailing him, you know, like a bunch of articles, saying, no, this is a real thing. And then I see Andre's been buried, and I think like all hopes lost. But I still wanted to find out if I was right. I still wasn't confident enough that I wasn't on this fool's errand chasing windmills. And so I had a two-week dialogue with this guy. And eventually he said, you know what? I think there is something to this. And I did keep part of his brain per Florida state regulation. And if you can get family permission and get someone to study it, I will release the

• 19:37Speaker 03

  brain to you guys.

• 19:39Pablo Torre?

  So for those who also don't remember Andre Waters, the back of his trading card, I mean, safety for the Eagles, for the Cardinals, famously one of the most physical players in the league.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Yes. Dirty Waters.

• 19:53Pablo Torre?

  Dirty Waters, which is a nickname you earn in a couple of ways, it turns out, that are relevant to what you end up finding.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Right. All right. And so the moment that sort of defined my life was that the doctor said, you have to call his mother, she's 88. And I'm like, geez. And I tried to get a bunch of other doctors to call, and no one would call, because no one was comfortable making that call. And that's the only reason why I became the guy. I didn't want to make the call, but I also didn't want to be the guy who never called. So I called, and his family was so wonderful. But Andre, I remember reading, what convinced me was finding a quote where he said, "I stopped counting my concussions at 15. I would just grab smelling salts and I'd keep playing." And I had the sense that it was real, and it turned out it was.

• 20:36Pablo Torre?

  The way that in real time figuring out, actually, there might be a process here. And then you have the script that you referenced, you have now a network that's growing, and at this point, when someone hears from you, do they know to expect you? Or are you still introducing yourself as if you're cold calling someone, selling them, you know, steak knives?

• 20:59Speaker 03

  That's a great question. People figured it out pretty fast. So I remember like one of the first 10 brains I called was Virginia Grimsley, the first one we did with Boston University. And a friend answered, and I explained who I was, and she goes, it's Chris Nowinski, he wants to talk to you about John. And she goes, tell him I know who he is, I know what he wants, and tell him the answer's yes. And I was like, whoa, that was, that was wild. So luckily, most people now do expect my call.

• 21:27Pablo Torre?

  That's, by the way, John Grimsley, the Houston Euler.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  Houston Euler, 45 years old, stage 3CT. Yeah. So yeah, so it has been great. So much of this work sees the dark side of humanity and the cover-up and everything else, but doing this work, you get to see the best part of humanity. You get to see these families who have lost everything but still want to help the next family and say yes.

• 21:57Pablo Torre?

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• 22:32Speaker 00

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• 23:04Pablo Torre?

  One of the brains that I was always curious about on a zillion different levels, and the latest one being your attempt to get it, is OJ Simpson's.

• 23:17Pablo Torre?

  They said no.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:20Pablo Torre?

  Why?

• 23:22Speaker 03

  I can't speak to why, and I usually don't talk about families who said no, but this one sort of everyone understands. There's one thing about this that people don't appreciate, and that is, this is often the last word on someone's life. And sometimes people don't want that to be the last word on their life.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  I mean, you can imagine for OJ, all the things that would have come from a, I mean, we can say with 99.9% certainty, he had it. But without the 100%, it's not a news cycle, it's not the last thing we ever hear. So I don't know. But there's also a lot of complicated families. A lot of these families, because of CTE, it's not an Ozzy and Harriet life.

• 24:03Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  And so, it's not a simple thing.

• 24:07Pablo Torre?

  Even just for people who are listening who aren't sure about what exactly this is, but are trying to imagine, now, we've mentioned a bunch of proper names that they may recall, some more than others, but just the idea of what symptomatically may have been obvious to families, and what may not have been. We mentioned a bunch of guys with nicknames, famous for violence. But then there are also people who, by virtue of just playing the sport, on, on what you might call an uncontroversial, unremarkably physical level, also clearly are in this sample, too.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what we now know is that CTE is, causes dementia, like Alzheimer's and any other disease. And so that's usually been the number one indicator, is that usually these players are misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's, or have some abnormal dementia where the behavior is bizarre. So that's like the end stage. Along the way, though, it can be quite a journey. Some people are not much affected at all until the end. We think about the worst-case scenarios, but I think of people like Nick Bonacani, who was just like crushing it until he was in the 70s, and then things got very bad. But you can, so the message to everybody out there, you could still live an awesome life for a long time, even if you have this. But the number one thing families will describe is personality change. They became a different person. That's not a diagnosable condition, but is the number one thing they say.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  And then, where we now know that short-term memory impairment is a huge symptom, executive dysfunction, so their ability to follow through on their goals, to hold a job, to do complicated tasks, that gets impaired. We see huge emotional lability and disinhibition. A lot of them die from substance abuse, because you're literally starting with frontal lobe brain damage, right? And disease that just keeps spreading. And it's gonna change the decisions you make, and your ability to make good decisions. So, there's a remarkable number who retrospectively realize, they died with dementia, but when they were 30 or 40, they were told they were bipolar. And they weren't really bipolar, it's just the best term we can describe for this frontal lobe brain damage early, or CTE symptomatology.

• 26:18Pablo Torre?

  I remember the part of the research scientifically that opened my eyes in a way, that have been hard to close them again. The sort of cliche was, you get this because, you remember that ESPN segment, Jacked Up?

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Jacked Up, yep.

• 26:34Pablo Torre?

  Remember that one?

• 26:34Speaker 06

  Let's get to our lucky Week 13 hit list on Jacked Up. We're gonna start off with number five, the Steelers and the Jaguars, off of a punt return. David Allen gonna be catching the ball. Ike Taylor gonna be coming at him right down the gun barrel. Oh my, David Allen got jacked up!

• 26:53Pablo Torre?

  Guys who got jacked up remain jacked up beyond retirement. Then, what the science begins to tell us, is that it's often subconcussive hits. It's the stuff that happens just by virtue of existing on a football field, essentially. The physics of line play. Again, those unremarkable actions that seem undramatic.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 27:18Pablo Torre?

  But accumulate. And, and for people who don't understand, how is it both jacked up, but also not?

• 27:28Pablo Torre?

  What do you begin to explain?

• 27:30Speaker 03

  So that's actually changed a little bit in the last two months. And so let me reframe this for you.

• 27:35Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, please.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Because we have been saying it's the smaller repetitive hits, but I no longer believe it's the smaller hits. Right? This is a physics injury. It's your brain violently rotating and ripping apart and causing these tiny lesions. So, we actually wrote an article in a medical journal saying, let's stop using subconcussive, because it's confusing, because an impact either causes concussion, or it doesn't. But then we also understand, it's either causing a brain injury that causes symptoms, or it's causing a brain injury that doesn't cause symptoms. And the piece of evidence that's connected to this altogether is this dementia study from July, which showed that linemen who take more hits have half the risk of dementia in this NFL study than non-linemen.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  And that goes along with the idea of the physics is, it's actually the hard hits. It is the hard hits, but the study out there say, a college football player, for every one concussion they have, they will take 340 hits harder than that concussion. The concussions are not the hardest hits. They are just the ones that cause symptoms that we can see, because you wobble off the field. And so, if we're trying to prevent CTE, it would be, let's first attack that top 10% of hits. That's the one that's ripping brain tissue apart.

• 28:53Pablo Torre?

  So I'm already finding out so much. So just to clarify, no, no, this is really important.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, now, now help me restate it in a way that's not so confusing.

• 28:59Pablo Torre?

  Well, what it sounds like is, let's leave aside the subconcussive hits, let's leave aside the minor ones, and we're gonna talk about things that are definitionally concussions, and things that are hard hits.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Yes, and so if you think about it as a spectrum, that we start counting hits at 10Gs of acceleration, concussions are happening at an average around 100. Up to some number that we don't know, maybe 20Gs, maybe 30Gs, you're probably not damaging brain tissue, maybe even higher. But once you get over that maybe 50G mark, everything up there is very risky. So when we, when we're managing concussions now, that's great, that's the ethical thing to do, but it's not gonna prevent CTE. Cumulative G-forces, and there's probably a number of hits over a certain level would be most predictive, if we could actually do that. We have published that the number of concussions that are deceased, brain bank folks either had diagnosed or thought they had, does not correlate with, with CTE.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  It's not number of concussions, but years of play, number of hits does.

• 29:59Pablo Torre?

  One of the key things about why it is you're collecting brains, people who are not familiar, is because there is no test for this. Can you explain that? Because that itself sounds like, so what, what are you, what are you saying?

• 30:11Speaker 03

  The reason we get brains is because the medical community neglected this disease entirely. So, 1928, there was a big article in a big journal saying, boxers get punch drunk.

• 30:22Pablo Torre?

  Harrison Martland.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  Harrison Martland. Very nice pull. And so, everybody knew it, and so you actually, you realize that information spreads so fast, if you go find 1950's comedy skits on television, Red Skeleton is playing a boxer named Cauliflower McPug, who is punch drunk and making stupid statements.

• 30:40Pablo Torre?

  Would have been awesome on Monday Night Raw.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, exactly. So by 1950, everyone knew boxers get punch drunk, and I think the medical industry just said, alright, well, you shouldn't box, that's obvious.

• 30:49Pablo Torre?

  Well, it was in the name, it was dementia pugilistic. Pugilists evoking boxing, it felt like a boxing disease.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Right. When we started the Boston University CTE Center in 2008, it was the first academic center in the world to study this. There were only 45 confirmed cases in the world before we started this. So therefore, to diagnose a brain disease, you actually have to study people over time, and then look at their brain after they die, and try to figure out what's different from the many dozens of types of brain diseases you can get. And no one did the work. So we're just doing the work. The good news is, science is a lot better now, and so we are gonna be able to diagnose CTE during life very soon.

• 31:27Pablo Torre?

  And how are you gonna do that?

• 31:28Speaker 03

  It'll probably be a blood test. You get a breakdown of the blood-brain barrier, and bits of your brain start floating in your blood, and you can go draw blood, and take these very sophisticated assays, and find certain types of proteins that say, oops, you have this.

• 31:44Pablo Torre?

  Is that something you expect the NFL to embrace?

• 31:48Speaker 03

  No. And just to give the history of it, it's over 10 years ago now that the NFL was exposed for trying to do CT research that was designed in a way that was only going to find the outcome that everything's fine. And New York Times wrote a nice story about it and they cut it off midstream. They said, you're right, it was a bad study, our bad, we're going to give $30 million to NIH and let them choose who gets it. That money got directed to BU first for the brain bank and then they had a merit-based system for a clinical study and BU wanted again and the NFL said, no, we're not giving the money to the government to give to BU. And so that study actually continued because NIH found the money. They weren't going to be embarrassed by the NFL. But then the NFL took that money

• 32:33Speaker 03

  and said, no, we were always going to give it, but we're giving to these people. And what they did is they only studied concussions. They never studied anything that would advance our ability to diagnose CT during life that is necessary to find a cure for this disease. So they chose to redirect that money to helmets and the concussions and essentially to keep this diagnostic slow because the one thing I've realized is that the data's not going to convince anyone to change, right, of dead people. But the moment a living person can say, I have this and now you're not helping me, that's going to be powerful.

• 33:08Pablo Torre?

  And for what it's worth, the NFL told us that they, quote, "had no input on how those grants were spent by BU or other research institutions that receive them," end quote. There are so many things I want to follow up on there. One of them, though, is the idea that the NFL's approach to this, over time, the evolution of it, it has evolved, to your point. I mean, you were referencing the helmets, those are the Guardian helmets.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  That was part of it, right? Yes.

• 33:36Pablo Torre?

  The things you have seen that seem to indicate the NFL is taking this seriously, it's in the padded helmets, the Guardian helmets, and to that innovation, you would say, what, how helpful is actually a Guardian helmet?

• 33:51Speaker 03

  How do I say this concisely? Much of this Guardian helmet story appears to be a bit of a scam. Okay, so one of the things to appreciate is this Guardian cap was existed, it was created by this, you know, independent people thinking, well, maybe more padding is the answer. More padding is not the answer, right? We already, we already know, like, your brain is jello floating in fluid, putting more padding out will help in some situations, but it's going to hurt in other situations, especially rotation.

• 34:26Pablo Torre?

  The G-force stuff we just talked about.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  Right. Bigger, heavier helmet, bigger radius, more rotation. So the NFL studied the Guardian cap as it sold to high school players. They called the XT. And they said, this isn't very good, but there's an idea here. Let's go take it to our lab. What they did is they made something twice as heavy with different materials and that's what the NFL players wear. It's only sold for NFL players, called the NXT. And apparently nobody realizes that what the NFL players are wearing that is okay in lab tests is different than what your high school players are wearing, which doesn't work in lab tests. So there's 500,000 Guardian caps have been sold to high school and college players and

• 35:07Speaker 03

  youth players that in Virginia Tech lab tests, two kids wearing Guardian caps get a 2% reduction in rotational acceleration, the thing we think is most correlated with CT. So Guardian caps don't work in high school. They might work in the NFL a little bit, but what's been most fascinating is that the, their ability to confuse the public that what the NFL is wearing and mandates is safer is what the kids are getting, and it's not.

• 35:36Pablo Torre?

  So the, the thing the kids are getting is what version of this?

• 35:41Speaker 03

  It's the version the NFL rejected, the XT.

• 35:44Pablo Torre?

  So the kids, the kids got the thing that the NFL said, that's not good enough.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:49Pablo Torre?

  And the thing that the NFL players get is even in that way, not good enough.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  If we're talking about, is the Guardian cap going to prevent CT cases? No. Remember when they first sold it to us, they said, well, 10% reduction in lab, you know, in the lab, if two people are wearing it, maybe it'll be a 20% reduction. And then, and they actually published on it, they said, look, it actually created a 50% reduction in concussions, 52%. It was magic. And that was the headline. And that created a race for everyone else to buy them. It turned out that 52% reduction wasn't real. When they actually tried to get that published as a peer-reviewed study and they used video, they found out it didn't work. When they isolated hits to the padding, face mask hits magically were down. So it was like a small sample, random thing. They got the data they wanted. They went to the press. And then when it was studied and it needed to be corrected, they did not correct it in the public.

• 36:39Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, so it's 2023 and one of the headlines, this is Pro Football Talk, "NFL says positions wearing Guardian caps saw 52% decrease in concussions." And yeah, Jeff Miller, who is the NFL EVP, Executive Vice President overseeing player health and safety, said, yes, significant decrease in concussions. We're going to do more of these. We're going to wear them longer into the preseason. And in fact, when we reached out to the NFL for comment, they pointed us to a November 2025 newsletter written by the league's chief medical officer, Dr. Alan Sills, affirming their approximately 50% concussion reduction data from the preseason. And what you're saying is that the scientific rigor behind that...

• 37:20Speaker 03

  Their own published study showed it wasn't true. They haven't retracted it. They haven't done, made the same effort to pull those headlines back. It's very clear from their behavior and the conversations I've had with them. They love that the public sees the Guardian caps because it's, it's basically virtue signaling.

• 37:35Pablo Torre?

  I was going to say, it is the end racism spray painted in the end zone of CTE.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:42Pablo Torre?

  It is a theatrical gesture that seems quite dramatic because by the way, when you see these Guardian caps, as a fan of sports myself, you're like, this is so lame looking that it seems like the only reason you would do that is because they would work.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  You're exactly right. It's sort of like what the monster, Red Bull tasting bad and therefore you think it works, right? It's the same idea.

• 38:08Pablo Torre?

  This is medicinal.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 38:10Pablo Torre?

  It's so uncool that it must be medicinal.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  Right. That's so ugly that it has to work because who else would wear that?

• 38:15Pablo Torre?

  But this, we are talking about public relations at all times when it comes to this stuff. And you are, again, on a mission to sort of cut through what the NFL wants us to think and what they actually know and the gap between. And I want to also explain that when the NFL is trying to figure out, I'll put it this way, can we make a safer cigarette? It does feel like you're saying, we're not calling to prohibit the cigarette. We are calling for reforms and tests so that we know the medical research such that we can then propose the things that might allow you to keep playing this game with something

• 39:00Pablo Torre?

  like full disclosure to those participating and supporting it, AKA perhaps a cleaner conscience. Do you think, though, there is a safer cigarette?

• 39:11Speaker 03

  You could play this game dramatically safer. You're not going to eliminate CT by any stretch of the imagination. But if you wanted to prevent CT in football, the Guardian caps and the tweaks to the rules are all a percent here, a percent there. The two big ones that no one wants to talk about are, now that youth football is so popular, half the career of probably most every American football player is youth. And if you use a cigarette analogy, if you're going to let people smoke because they understand the risks they're getting into, great, but we don't sell cigarettes to kids. And the longer I do this, the more I see, like, that analogy is perfect for this. Like, five-year-olds are going to get, you know, if you hit a five-year-old in the head enough, you can

• 39:55Speaker 03

  give them CT. There's nothing magic about being five. You know, the studies will show when you put sensors in the helmets of kids, the average football hit is the same as college players because they're tiny bobbleheads. It's not because they can run 4540 and take, it's because their head, they can't stop their heads from whipping around. So the idea would be if you just banned tackle until high school, you'd cut out half of years of exposure and you might cut half of CT risk. That policy would be so simple. And then if the other change would be if you just reinvented practice, because when I played 70% of the hits for practice, you don't need them. Buddy Tivens and other guys have shown.

• 40:34Pablo Torre?

  Dartmouth.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  At Dartmouth and John Gagliardi at St. John's in Minnesota, D3, always won, never hit in practice. It's doable, but no one wants to do it. Because now that Buddy Tivens has passed, God rest his soul, no one is taking up that mantle of, I respect my players, I don't want them to get CT and I'm going to change practice. And I think it's in part because no one wants the responsibility of going, oh, gosh, I, I am the person who controls how much CT is out there as the football coach. But that is, that is a fact. And if there are any football coaches listening, just appreciate, your job is not just teaching football. Your job is preventing CT in your kids and it is your choice by how you design practice. So we're not talking about the kids and we're not talking about changing

• 41:15Speaker 03

  practice. And if you did those two things, you might talk about 75% reduction exposure and you would push the age up of when people get CTE. And suddenly it would be the only people who got paid, right? If you didn't, if 93% of people only played four years in high school, there'd be very little CT there and never hit in practice. So the answer is like right in front of us. But the NFL, my perception is that, and you tell me if I'm wrong, I remember there's a great New Yorker article on this in the 90s that always stuck in my head. Every sport is fighting for kids' allegiance in elementary school, right? Like, the data's very clear.

• 41:53Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  The sport you pay money on as an adult and, you know, buy the season ticket packages is the sport you best understand and affiliate with. And that is because it's a childhood connection. And so everybody is fighting to get our kids playing their sports young.

• 42:08Pablo Torre?

  So we're jumping around in the timeline here, but bear with me because Roger Goodell, he's used to the whole, he's used to the dance steps here. He's called to testify before Congress. Do you remember what that testimony was like? Do you recall?

• 42:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was in the room.

• 42:25Speaker 07

  We welcome you all and invite you, Mr. Goodell Commissioner, to begin our discussion.

• 42:35Speaker 05

  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

• 42:37Pablo Torre?

  Well, it's September of 2009, you're there, Roger Goodell is there, and Congress is asking questions, and this is the league being asked about the findings of its own study, which, quote.

• 42:50Speaker 07

  A follow-up study in 2005 showed NFL players suffering concussions had five times the rate of cognitive impairment, and retired players were 37% more likely to suffer from Alzheimer's than the population as a whole.

• 43:12Pablo Torre?

  And what Goodell does, or does not do, is he does not acknowledge a connection between head injuries on the football field and later brain diseases while in front of Congress.

• 43:24Speaker 07

  Commissioner Goodell, is there a link between playing professional football and the likelihood of contracting a brain-related injury, such as dementia, Alzheimer's, depression, or CTE?

• 43:41Speaker 05

  You're obviously seeing a lot of data and a lot of information that our committees and others have presented with respect to the linkage, and the medical experts should be the one to be able to continue that debate.

• 43:53Speaker 07

  I just asked you a simple question. What's the answer?

• 43:58Speaker 05

  The answer is the medical experts are no better than I would with respect to that, but we are not treating that in any way and delaying anything that we do. We are reinforcing our commitment to make sure we make the safest possible field for our

• 44:12Speaker 07

  Okay, I've heard it.

• 44:14Pablo Torre?

  He's also making these pledges of, "We're only gonna let you return to play once you're symptom-free."

• 44:20Speaker 05

  "We know that concussions are a serious matter and that they will require special attention and treatment, and in this area, I have been clear. Medical considerations must always come first. Decisions regarding treatment of players with concussions, and when they can resume play, must be made by doctors and doctors alone."

• 44:43Pablo Torre?

  What stuck out to you as you were hearing what the league was willing to do and not do at that moment in the timeline?

• 44:50Speaker 03

  I guess what stuck out to me is they were playing it very well for their goals. They could give ground on concussions.

• 44:57Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Because everybody, immediately once they realized what was happening, it was gross to watch them put people who are unconscious back in the game. They used to brag that no one died when they knocked out people back in the game, and therefore it was safe. They quickly shifted on that, but they very strategically avoided giving any ground on the CT front. They were forcing us to prove it, forcing us to do another 17 years of research to get there.

• 45:23Pablo Torre?

  The reason I bring up the "on the field, return to play" stuff is that, you know, the question of when is a player gonna die on the field feels like the biggest lever on public relations that is sort of lingering in the air, that everybody is kind of aware of. And Damar Hamlin was not a CTE story at the point at which he collapsed. That was a heart failure story. But I just remember thinking at the time, if an NFL player dies on national television during a nationally televised game, that can shake people awake. What do you think about that threshold?

• 46:05Speaker 03

  I do think the NFL was worried about that back then, because players do die on the field in football every year from second impact syndrome, from getting hit in the head after they've had a concussion and that has not fully resolved. And so, that was part of the argument for concussion protocols, is we don't want someone to die in the field. And I think, I think you're right. It would scar a lot of people to watch somebody die, especially now when they knew that person shouldn't have been out there.

• 46:31Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  That was the issue. But now that I'm a little older, a little wiser, if someone did die in the field, I don't think it would matter. I just, I think that they would have a story, because now it would be, because of this work, they now have a bazillion doctors on the sideline, and they really would have done everything possible, right? Like, Hamlin, there was a discussion at one point of, like, all those people wouldn't have been there had not the concussion issue forced them to ramp up medical.

• 46:57Pablo Torre?

  Absolutely.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  So that's, that's a good thing.

• 46:59Pablo Torre?

  We wouldn't also have "go to break, but use the sad music."

• 47:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:03Pablo Torre?

  Use the piano-only version.

• 47:08Speaker 06

  We'll see where the ball is spotted, as Jimmy Ward is checked by the medical staff for San Francisco. Back after this.

• 47:17Pablo Torre?

  Get the blue tent. Show that we're gonna sort of put it behind a privacy curtain.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  No, you're right. Like, all of this is, like, let's push this off the screen. Because when you watch a game, the announcers have to talk about the concussions, but they're never gonna say CT, because it's just too far down in the future. So it just never comes up. So, yeah, it was all, it was all very smart of them to keep this about concussions.

• 47:39Pablo Torre?

  The reason I ask about their research, the reason I ask about their strategy is because they have such a massive lead in public opinion.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:46Pablo Torre?

  What is the thing that you think is the next sort of shift in how this is maybe publicly understood?

• 47:55Speaker 03

  Great question. And, and I want to say, I think the other part that we haven't discussed is I think they've baked in CT to the formula now, where, I guess Peter King actually said this in promoting his new book, who was, who wrote great stories about this in the early days.

• 48:06Pablo Torre?

  Yes, he was the illustrated dean of NFL writing for a long time.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he said, "Well, now we sort of understand that, you know, the guys are compensated, and it's a choice, and it's informed consent, and so now we're okay with NFL players getting a CT."

• 48:16Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Right? And it's like, it's true, that's what the public looks at now. They're getting paid. The problem is, the kids aren't getting paid, right? And so, there's always gonna be this, this, the next conversation we have to have is, if we're okay that the NFL players are getting it because they're getting paid and they have informed consent, how do we let kids do it? And they don't have informed consent, they're not getting paid. But the thing that really matters is testing it in living people. The other problem we have with that is that it's gonna start with older people. Like, all these tests, the more disease you have, the easier it's pick up. So it'll be older people diagnosed first, but the day we can tell a 15-year-old has it, will that be the day that people realize, like, there's something wrong with this? Like, kids should not be getting a

• 49:01Speaker 03

  brain disease. Like, we've already proven they're getting it, but we're not proving it in real time, and I think that's what we're missing.

• 49:06Pablo Torre?

  I am one of those people, by the way, who is like, if there's informed consent, if you give us all the disclosures, it is our responsibility as adults to read the fine print, even if it's buried in a medical journal, even if it's in an article on the New York Times or on a weird podcast, that I gotta do the work to actually listen to. It's there, they're telling me, "You should consider that," and then decide, you wanna sign on the dotted line. Make that cost-benefit analysis, that risk assessment for yourself. And that is how I wake up on Sundays, and I'm like, "Time to enter my own vegetative state on my couch." That is what I am saying to myself. I'm realizing, what I'm finding out talking

• 49:45Pablo Torre?

  to you, is that the research and the statistics around what the risks are, are still not nearly well enough understood, even if we directionally know the gist.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 49:58Pablo Torre?

  That is what the British Medical Journal findings were to me. It was, here's a reminder that this number is the lower bound of what might actually be happening. And now, there might be a study that tells you in real time, before Chris Nowinski calls your mom, or your relative, or your next of kin, asking for your brain, you might know whether you're at risk as soon as, I don't know, puberty?

• 50:29Speaker 03

  Well, it's not even at risk, though, that's the thing. We're only gonna know, like, when you have it. And once you have it, it's not necessarily good news that you have it, but the, if we can detect it early, basically, I think what's gonna happen over the next few years is you're gonna watch a thousand ships get launched looking for that cure. Because what's gonna change is that CTE is gonna go from not being on the chart of curable diseases, and not being on the chart of diseases that are, that are prevalent, to it's probably number two or number three brain diseases. Right? Because if, even if you just sort of extrapolate out if 25% have it, that have played at

• 51:10Speaker 03

  the NFL level, that means it's a significant enough percentage of high school players that it's probably more than a million men in this country that have CT right now. And then Parkinson's is 1.2 million. So this is a big disease. And so, if it's a big disease, we can get people excited about making money curing it. That's what, that's what my hope is.

• 51:30Pablo Torre?

  Well, this is now, now the NFL and you are speaking the same language. This is the gravitational force that, that they do abide by, is, wait a minute, this is actually gonna make us money? This could actually secure our future? This can keep us safe in our jobs, in our empire? I mean, I don't wanna be too cynical, but that is something that, of course, my next question is, why wouldn't they be doing that right now?

• 52:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think their strategy has been, push this day off as long as they can for us diagnosing the living people, keep building the brand and the billions. But the day we can diagnose the living people, I'm hoping they switch. They realize, oh boy, we can't pretend this isn't real anymore. We don't want 10,000 ex-NFL players shaking their fists at us in the media every day going, "Why aren't you helping me? I got this playing for you." And then they might go, "Okay, the fastest way for us to secure our business is to find a cure as fast as possible." I don't know if it's gonna happen, but there's that small part of me that hopes, like, "Oh, God, if we really showed how big this was and made it a better business choice for them to find a cure, we might have a cure in my lifetime."

• 52:46Pablo Torre?

  Well, this is, this is, this is the thing that fills me with an optimism that I can only describe as cynical in its optimism, because everything I've reported and, and experienced in sports has led me to think about incentives. Forget about whatever moral principle or anything else as, like, the driving force. It's, what is the carrot at the end of the stick? And you've now described, the carrot at the end of the stick is the only choice they have left.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  Right. For this study right now, they're saying, "Well, that's the old game, it's not the new game." They still have plays, but once we can diagnose the living people, and once we could diagnose NFL players today.

• 53:27Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  With a blood test, when they're young. And if we have that blood test while they're young, pharma can measure the impact of a drug and say, "We've stopped this tau protein from increasing, and in fact, it's reversing, and now you have less disease." And all this is a reality, and it's all just, it's just off the horizon here.

• 53:54Pablo Torre?

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• 54:35Pablo Torre?

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• 56:17Pablo Torre?

  And so, one of the things that I am thinking about, and you put it in those terms already, is your lifetime. For people who don't know your personal familiarity with head trauma, it started as a first-person concern.

• 56:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, for 20 years, I've been up and down about, do I have this? Because at the beginning, we didn't know, and now we have the data to show guys who play as long as me, and I have my wrestling to add on top of it, it's a good chunk. In our brain bank, it's probably more than half. Our brain bank is biased, so I'm hoping I'm not 50/50, but it's somewhere probably in that ballpark for me. And the data points that bother me even worse on multiple levels are the fact that two of my teammates from our '99 Harvard starting team have already been diagnosed with it because they are deceased.

• 57:07Pablo Torre?

  And by the way, these guys, not necessarily the big names that an average person should know, but I would like them to know about them.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, if you ever get a chance to look up Chris Eitzman and who he was, and again, we might set a record for mentioning Harvard in an interview, but...

• 57:25Pablo Torre?

  It's maybe the most defensible version that we've ever done on this show, frankly, so please proceed.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Harvard has one football captain every year, selected by their teammates. And you've got to imagine, like, these people who get selected are really special people, great leaders, you know, would do anything for you. And so Chris Eitzman was voted as our captain '99, and then went off and played in the NFL, and shared a house with Tom Brady with the Patriots, and then said, "I'm done." He had a leg injury, got his MBA, was crushing, and then decided that alcohol was the only thing that mattered to him, and he drank himself to death. And died in 2001. He was actually the last person in that BMJ study. And he had stage 2 CT in frontal lobotomy. And for all of us who knew him, going, why did the guy who had never had a problem, who

• 58:12Speaker 03

  was Superman, friends called him Superman, well, how did this guy choose alcohol over his four kids and amazing wife? I believe it was his brain. And then our strong safety, Mike Brooks, who was the sweetest guy, hard-hitting, skinny kid, just, he developed type 1 diabetes after he got out, and he just didn't manage it. Even though he was a personal trainer and was health-focused every day, would not take care of himself, and died in his sleep. And he had stage 2 CT, and he had, so he was actually the youngest person ever to have a certain type of brain damage that we're studying. So when I see two great guys who weren't the guys we were worried about on our team as being the guys who should have gotten this, it does make you worry. Like, I do think that people will be shocked when we're able to show them the college

• 58:57Speaker 03

  football CT percentage. And again, I don't want to make everyone overly concerned, but we also have to acknowledge the facts. When you see the number, it's going to scare the crap out of you. And I'm hoping we can just turn that stress... Basically, I look at, if you can see my passion for doing this every day for more than 20 years and reading obituaries every day, and I'm ever coordinating a brain donation from the delivery room when my son was born, I jumped into the bathroom, because I still had half an hour before it was popping out.

• 59:26Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  Like, that sort of commitment is in part because I turned the stress of, is my brain going to go bad, into, well, if it does, I hope I'll have a cure.

• 59:36Pablo Torre?

  It is not lost on me that you yourself, in this episode and your work, you are an embodiment of what is possible, even if you may have experienced head trauma.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  That too. I was actually in an interview the other day where the guy said, "Well, you know, you hear what people say about you." And I'm like, "What?" They said, "Well, he went back to school, got a PhD, he can't have CT, like, he's a fraud." And I'm like, "Hmm, that's interesting."

• 1:00:00Pablo Torre?

  He's like, "Thanks?"

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. It's a weird backhanded compliment, but...

• 1:00:05Pablo Torre?

  But the point is that it's because all of this, there are lots of ingredients that drive us towards whatever outcomes we have in our lives. You mentioned even in the story of your teammates, there are other concerns, it's not just CTE, maybe, there are other things. Because we're all spinning the roulette wheel that is individualized to us in our personal station. The point, though, is that at a certain point, you want to know, why is this variable in so many [bleep] stories? And what if we could actually control that and tamp it down? And would that help?

• 1:00:46Pablo Torre?

  And I guess the last question I have, might be the most obvious question I have, but you can't call your next of kin, God willing, may it be many, many, many, many, many years in the future. What happens to your brain?

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  Oh, I've already got a spot in the brain bank. I've picked out my freezer and my jar. Half goes in the jar, half goes in the freezer. Yes, my brain will be studied. I already, and in fact, I'm already part of the study, if anyone wants to look up bankcte.org, because I'm still recruiting for it. I've given blood, it's sitting in a lab, and then my brain will meet it later. And if I die young, I'll be one of those people who helps us figure it out. If I don't die young, I will benefit from the other great people that have signed up for the study.

• 1:01:33Pablo Torre?

  Man. Chris Metzger, at the end here, what I have really found out, among many things, is that I am very thankful for your brain and what you decided to do with it.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Thank you, Pablo. That means a lot.

• 1:01:55Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

• 1:02:21Speaker 05

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