S4 E3: Chris Nowinski

The Dream

Little Everywhere

Health & Fitness, Business, Society & Culture

4.6 • 15.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We've known about it for almost 20 years and yet there is still very little being done to combat Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy - more commonly none as CTE. And if you think this only affects NFL players, think again. CTE is available in all shapes and sizes - whether it's youth hockey, high school football, club soccer leagues, or professional wrestling, so many of our young athletes are in the line of fire. Thankfully, for most of those twenty years, former college football player and professional wrestler - turned anti-CTE advocate and head of Boston University's CTE center - Chris Nowinski, has taken it upon himself to stare this issue down and make sure parents, coaches and athletes have accurate information about what happens when someone suffers continual head injuries. Chris even managed to get a Phd in behavioral neuroscience along the way, so that he could understand and further the science behind CTE research. Today he joins host Jane Marie to talk about his career, his advocacy and what we know about the current state of CTE in sports.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Dream.
0:03.1	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.
0:13.3	I'll just add that it recently entered the NFL.
0:16.4	What?
0:17.5	Yes.
0:18.1	How do you gut the NFL?
0:20.3	Like, how do you ransack the NFL? It's called CTEs, Jane Marie.
0:28.9	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.
0:40.0	My name is Chris Nguinsky.
0:42.5	I'm a behavioral neuroscientist who got interested in studying the brain after I
0:47.7	damaged mine from too many years of playing football and professional wrestling.
0:53.9	Why, you might ask yourself, does Jane care about football?
0:58.2	Well, first, I like to watch it.
1:00.6	I like football players' names and their butts.
1:03.0	They have the funniest of both.
1:05.3	I also like how thrilling it is.
1:07.5	You know when players make a touchdown and they're doing a dance? I feel like I'm doing a dance
1:12.4	the whole time I'm watching a football game. You're also screaming at the screen and yelling about
1:18.3	the rules. Like an old man. Well, because I'm right. The rules don't make any sense.
1:25.4	And I am born of a champion football player.
1:29.0	My father played for Beauchamp Bechler at the University of Michigan until I was born,
1:33.9	when he decided being a dentist was a better path than getting CTE.
	...

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