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From the NFL to Advocacy: George Visger on Brain Trauma, Mental Health & Resilience · Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman, sponsored by the Mac Parkman Foundation, where we look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma from repetitive head impacts that uh are impact the the lives of our veterans, I mean our athletes and kids, and repetitive blast exposure, which impacts the brains of our veterans.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: And what these conditions are doing to the brain health and the mental well-being of our children, our athletes, and our veterans.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: And why is this important?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because this is not trained in any nursing, uh, medical, suicide, prevention, or psychological curricula in this country.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: So you have to be well informed.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: So we bring on, you know, players and doctors and researchers and authors so that you get that 360-degree look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma so that you can make informed decisions about those that you love and those that you know that might be struggling, so we can identify them, get the help they need in order to get back to their lives.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: Today, another amazing guest, George Visker, who's coming to us from Idaho, where he's out there building a duck pond right now.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: George is a former NFL defensive tackle who played for the San Francisco 49ers and developed hydrocephalus water on the brain from repetitive concussions during the 1981 Super Bowl season.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: After enduring nine brain surgeries in a series of legal battles, including becoming the first NFL player to win a working workers' cop case in 1986, George has rebuilt his life through resilience and determination.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: He went on to earn a bachelor's of science in biological conservation from the Sacramento State, from Sacramento State, despite severe short-term memory loss and dyslexia.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: Later working as a wildlife biologist, educator, and environmental consultant.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: In 2003, he founded Visca and Associates Environmental Consulting, and in 2010 launched the Visca Group, Traumatic Brain Injury Consulting, using his experience to advocate for brain injury awareness and athletic safety.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: George is the author of Facing Giants, my 38-year battle, a powerful memoir chronicling his journey through adversity, recovery, and purpose.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: George, thank you so much for being on the show.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: Really appreciate you, sir.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate you guys being patient with me.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Ah, man, come on, dude.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: We got three businessmen on this phone.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know it never works out.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: It never works out, man.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: We got phones and texting, everything's going on.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: So no, no biggie, man.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: So how you doing, Mr.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: Fisker?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: How are you doing now, man?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: Everything good?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: I've been blessed, man.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: I've been blessed beyond my wildest dreams.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um truly.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: Gratitude is so important as we go through life, man.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it really is.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: It is uh, you know, as I as I get older, I I find being grateful every day really helps me get through, you know, a lot.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I mean I I was in some dark years for for quite a while, but uh man, the sunlight I'm standing in now in my life is is beyond what I could have dreamed of.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Seriously.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: Dude, I am so happy for you.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: Let's talk about those dark days.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: What uh so talk about your early childhood.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: How'd you get into contact sports and how long did you play?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: And how'd you end up in the NFL, man?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm the fifth of six kids.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up in Stockton, California, Northern Cal.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh my dad drove a beer truck.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Mom stayed home and raised us in a two-bedroom, one-bath, zero air conditioned home.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, Stockton, it'll get 110, 114 during the summers, right?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, no, it it cooks.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: So um, you know, uh, we were just raised, you know, uh my folks were salt to the earth, hardworking, you know, raised with belief in God, you know, you do the best you can.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the old man always had a saying, shoot your best shot.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: And he used to tell us kids, he goes, I don't give a damn if you grew up to be a shit shoveler.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: He said, You'd be the best damn shit shoveler there ever was.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the way we grew up.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we grew up being grateful as we were just talking, you know.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: I can remember as a young kid, you know, driving downtown Stockton.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: And when I grew up in Stockton, it's still, I think I looked the other day, it's like the sixth most dangerous city in America above New Orleans and New York.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's a rough place, but we're right on the edge of agricultural out in the Delta.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: So we grew up hunting and fishing, and and but there was a lot of crazy stuff going on.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: But as a kid, I can remember driving down through Skidrow and my mom looking out the window and saying, Look, you kids complain about holes in your shoes.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: Look at that poor person.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: They don't have any shoes.
• 5:07
  unknown: Right.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: And those lessons stuck in my mind when I grew up.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: I was always very grateful, you know.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so um, I started both my older brothers played college football.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: I started playing football in seventh grade uh on the West Stockton Bear Cubs Pee-Wee Pop Warner team.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, now this is incredible.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: 29 kids on the team, three of us signed NFL contracts in 1980, and our safety went on to a Major League Baseball All-Star career and came in fourth in voting in Major League Baseball uh most valuable player, uh Von Hayes.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: So we had four future professional athletes on this 29-man squad of Pipsqueaks, and uh I was skinny and spawny and slow, and the coaches nicknamed me Clang because I was so knock-need when I ran.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: They said they they could hear my knees clanging.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I went both ways.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: I was just a tough kid, you know.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we came out of the blocks, I mean kicking butt and taking names, and our first five games I ever played, we scored 241 points to our opponent's zero, and I was going both ways, tight end, defensive end, and I'm like, oh, I love this game, you know.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and then I and I I truly loved it.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: From my first day at Pads, I decided I want to be the greatest NFL player to ever been.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I always knew I wanted to be a biologist, I wanted to be the next Jacques Cousteau.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Those were my dreams as a little kid.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so that first year in Pop Warner, I knew I needed to get big and strong and get to college, so I started lifting weights.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: And our our bedroom, it became, it was known as the boys' room.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: So it was actually a one-car garage.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: That one day one of my dad's buddies came over.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, old Sam Culler says, Damn it, Jack, you keep having all these kids.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: You need another bedroom.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: And they went out and they tore out the garage door and they framed it in and put in a window, and they put three silts in dressers, sheetrocked it, glued linoleum to the concrete, and then took three sheets of plywood, stained them, hung them on rollers, and put a closet rod across the back.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: So each one of us had a had a four by eight foot sheet of door.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, I grew up out in the boys with my two older brothers, and I started lifting weights out there.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: I built a little bench press out of our picnic bench and two by fours, and I, you know, I I heard about you know raw eggs, and I was eating six, eight, ten raw eggs a day, you know, milkshakes, and I kept pounding it, right?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: So four years later, I get into high school at Amos Alonzo Stag High School.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: It was a three-year school, so my sophomore year, after lifting weights for three years, I get into high school, I'm 6'2, 148.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: After four years of lifting.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I ran a blazing 5'740.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: I could, I mean, people in wheelchairs can could beat me in the 40s.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, I was telephone, I went both ways, and I just there was no doubt I was gonna be the greatest NFL player to ever lived.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I kept hammering the weights, and um uh but between my sophomore year, 148, I come back my junior year, I'm 215.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm 6'3, 215.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: And every year I just kept hammering it.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: I started slowing down growing up, but I started putting some husk on.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: And by my senior year, I was about 235.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: I had good grades, I was a 3.0 student, and I knew my dad couldn't afford to send us to college, so I knew I needed to earn a scholarship, and I had scholarship offers all over the country, and I was gonna major in oceanography, and uh I took recruiting trips to the University of Washington, University of Hawaii, they had great schools of oceanography, but my number one priority wherever I went, I wanted cold weather, two, I wanted hunting and fishing, and three, I wanted a good football program.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: So Hawaii was out too hot for me, right?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Even though they had a great school of oceanography.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so I ended up signed at Colorado, and uh, I'll never forget the first words out of the old man's mouth were, what the hell kind of school of oceanography does Colorado have.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: I go, I'm major in fisheries biology.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I was I was a fisheries biology major.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh my freshman year, my goals, I wanted to make the traveling squad, which I did.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: We ended up winning the big eight.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: We beat Oklahoma that year and played uh uh the old Woody Hayes, Ohio State Buckeyes in the 77 Orange Bow.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then I won a starting position that spring ball.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started three years there.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: And um by my senior year, you know, I was up to about you know 259, and um you know, I've been starting for three years, and then I just, you know, it was like, okay, next step, make it in the NFL, and I worked myself up.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: I was 275 by the time I got drafted.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: I was originally drafted by the James.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: Boy in the 70s.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: 275 in the 70s was a lot of work, man.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know what?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it was it because we didn't really have we didn't have anybody 280 when I was at the jets.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I take it back.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: Gastino was 283 and the guy ran a 4440.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Dang.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: What I mean he could beat.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: We had two Olympic gold medal spinners and one other guy on the team that could beat him in the 40.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: The guy weighed 282, 283.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: Massive.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: But fast.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: But there weren't there weren't these giant 300 plus pounders back then, you know?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I was I was big, but then um uh I was benching like 460, I was in great shape, and um had never planned on getting cut, and I got cut at the end of preseason.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that just I hadn't even uh that wasn't that never even crossed my mind.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden it was like bam, you know, a wake-up call.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then the Niners picked me up uh early in the in the 80 season, and um uh the first game I'm with them, we're playing the Cowboys, it was a a Saturday game, so it was a short week.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: And they flew me in on Tuesday, worked me out, and then um or I went on Tuesday, and then I practiced Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we fly to Dallas, and Saturday I'm lined up you know playing the Cowboys, and um first play I'm in, I get year hold on a Dallas tight end trap by Jay Saldi.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and I don't remember that game.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: I don't remember playing the Rams the following week, and a week and a half later, the trainers and doctors laughingly tell me that I went through 15 or 20 spelling salts during a Dallas game to keep me on the field.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'd come off sideways, they'd give you a couple, go back in.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it was a joke.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: 28 years and then and then this I took a second shot later on in the game, the other temple by Doug Cosby, their other tight end.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like 28 years later, Cosby and I crossed paths and we become very good friends.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd never seen the game, right?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so when we're talking, years later, basically we became very good friends on our battle with the NFL to provide benefits for guys and to acknowledge what they knew and what they're hiding.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: So he came to me, they were looking at doing a documentary, he and a film producer friend of his, and we got to talking, and I'd never met him, we're on the phone.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Hey, Cause, I said, you know, my last concussion was against you guys in 1980.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I've never seen the game.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, he goes, he goes, I've got all I've got DVDs of all my game.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: So he sends me the disc, right?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: I plug it in that night, and I call him the next day.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: I go, hey, cause this is Visker.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, I go, hey, I watched that game last night.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: I go, guess who?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Guess who who blindsided me in the temple that caused my my last concussion, it caused my nine brain surgeries.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, Who?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Jay Staldi?
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: I go, no, you did, asshole.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: We have been very good friends ever since.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: Dude.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, dude.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: So this was like Yeah, good.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I I mean I continued playing the game and I that season, and then um early in the following 81 season, I blew my knee out early in camp and I had knee surgery, and I was coming back from that when I started developing all kinds of major pounding headaches.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'd get a ball of light in front of each eyeball.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: When I had the headaches, my hearing would come and go at the beat of my heart.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'd go see the team docs, and they tell me it's high blood pressure.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: Take these pills, Visc.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm 22 years old at the time, prime of my life, athlete, you wouldn't expect high blood pressure.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm I'm taking these pills, and every night, man, I'm getting worse and worse.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, projectile vomiting every night, which I found later on that's a symptom of intercranial pressure.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: And they call it projectile vomiting because literally, I was telling the docs, I said, when I puke every night, I can hit the bowl from like 20 yards out and and chip porcelain.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it would just, it's like a volcano.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: So they kept telling me high blood pressure.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I'm rooming with two guys on the team, and we played Chicago that day, and I was like, So you're still practicing, you're still playing ball.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: No, I was on injury reserve, thank God, because I just had knee surgery.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't banging heads then.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: And um the the last night, on top of all my symptoms, my eyesight gone, my hearing going, my roommates Terry Totolo and Scott Stouch kept coming in, checking on me.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, let us take you to the hospital.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going, ah man, it's just you know, high blood pressure.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you got that warrior mentality.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, hey, you know, and um middle of the night, I mean, my head's gonna explode, I can't see, my right arm curls up like a like an uppercut punch, and my fist just jams up under my chin.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I grab my arm and I pull it out, and I'm thinking, that's a weird cramp.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: But when I grab my arm, that right arm that I'm holding, I couldn't feel it.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: There was no feeling in it.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: And every time I let go of it, it would just curl back up under my under my chin.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm laying in bed, it's like, I don't know, three or four in the morning, and I'm going, okay, I'm dying.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and Terry and Scott had come in two or three times.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: I kept blowing them off, so I'm laying there, I can't see.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: My hearing's coming and going with the beat of my heart, my head's ready to explode.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: I've been puking my guts out so much I'm empty.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: But now all I'm puking is bloody foam because I tore something, and now I've got this paralysis thing going on.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I start praying, literally.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, God, don't let me die like this.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: And please, God, let Terrier Scott come in and check on me.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'll let him take me to the hospital, but I'm not going to be a pussy and go wake him up.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, Swirsty, you know.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: And you can understand the mentality.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: I I know, I feel you, bro.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: I feel it.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's the guy warrior thing, you know.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: You don't admit that you're hurt.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'd finally passed out for a couple hours in the morning.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Days after games were really light days.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: You go in, everyone on injured reserve, you do your treatment guys.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: They got dinged to the treatment.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's a couple of meetings, you know.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we do uh a quick little workout break of sweat and you're out of there.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's a light day.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I go in, I do my rehab on my knee, and I'm pissed.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now I can move my arm in the morning, but I mean, I I I could barely lift a cup of coffee with it.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so I go in, I do my rehab on my knee, and I wait till the team dock sees everyone who got dinged the day before.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: This guy was a butcher.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Three guys from that 81 Super Bowl season successfully sued him for malpractice.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Paul Hofer, our Len Eshmont award winner, which is the highest award you can get at the 49ers, operated, never never played again, multiple surgery.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: We had three guys successfully take him down.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: And this was our orthopedic surgeon that we had to go see.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's the one that's telling me high blood.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: He's so I go in and see him after he saw everyone that got dinged.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: He's in his little uh examining room in our in our locker room, which was in Redwood City, that's where our facilities were at the time.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: I walk in his little room and he looks at me, he says, What now?
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: I go, U S O B.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Don't tell me it's high blood pressure.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: My arm went paralyzed last night.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: And he rolls his eyes, he goes, sit down, I sit on his little table, he grabs one of those little flashlights, they're called retnoscopes, I come to find out, flips it on, leans over, looks in my right eye, and this is how my book starts.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: And he says this, Oh my god, your brain's hemorrhaging.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: I jump off the table.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is how my book starts, I jump off the table ready to kill him.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: He's going, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: He's fumbling around, and I'm just going, you know, he reaches by himself, he grabs a phone while I'm just mad dogging him and reading him the right act.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: He starts dialing a couple numbers, he scribbles something on a piece of paper, hands it to me at arm's length, and in my book I wrote, he acted like I was radioactive.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't want to get too close to me.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, here, he says, here, go home, lay down, and drive yourself to Stanford Hospital this afternoon and see this Dr.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: Adornado, this neurologist.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: So again, in my book, I wrote, my first thought was, must be one of those mild brain hemorrhages, or he would have called an ambulance.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, what do I know?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a 22-year-old knucklehead, you know.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: You can't even scroll hammerage, right?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: I don't even have a taller's degree.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: This guy doesn't, you know.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: I drove back to my our apartment that I shared with Terry Totala, who was a six year vet, and Scott Stouch was a rookie that year.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: I drive back to Foster City, I lay down, and my symptoms were such that every morning I would wake up with a killer head.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: Headache and it would get worse and worse as the day progressed.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: And by evenings, I would start that projectile vomiting.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: I start losing my eyesight.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: I go back to Redwoods to Foster City, lay down that afternoon.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: I drive myself through Bay Area traffic 30-something minutes to Palo Alto to Stanford Hospital.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, see this neurologist.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: He takes one look at me.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: They want to do a CT brain scan, but the machine was booked up for he said a couple hours.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: I told him, and again, this is all this is in the bus out of the bookstores.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: I said, hey, Doc, I said, I'll come back.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'm getting close to my puking time.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, You drove here?
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, You can't drive like this.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Doc, I've been driving like this for weeks.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we argue, he goes, You're not driving.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I'm not.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: So he convinces me to hang out in a little room for two or three hours, a couple of hours.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: They take me and do a CT brain scan, rush me in emergency brain surgery.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I had developed hydrocephalus water on the brain.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: They drill a hole in my skull.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: This is all permanent.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: They've done it nine times now.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: There's a tube that goes in the middle of my brain.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: They put a pressure valve in the back of my head behind my right ear, and there's a little pump on it.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: I can feel it right now as we're speaking.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's a tube from the bottom of the pressure valve that goes down the side of my neck through my right pectoral muscle.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: And they made a slice of my abdomen.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: It goes in my abdomen.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: And as we're speaking, it's draining spinal fluid out of my brain right now.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: To this day?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: To this day.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: And when it blows, when it plugs up, I'm in a coma within 24 hours and I'm dead shortly after.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: I've had nine of them over the years.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: I had nine in 12 years.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: So they still replace replacing them?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: Is that what it is?
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: And there's no telling when.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm in intensive care for 14 days at Stanford.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: What do the 49ers do?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: Oh F.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: We can't let this out.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: When I had knee surgery, that was in the paper, right?
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm laying in intensive care.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: The only people from the filly from the facilities to come to see me were Terry Totolo, my roommate, and Scott Stouch.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: They're coming in telling me, hey, Bill Walsh told the team at a team meeting today you had a spinal test done and you're at your folks' house in Stockton recuperating.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Stockton, where I grew up, is only about two hours from the Bay Area, right?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm laying there with tubes coming out all over.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking, wow, I'm getting phone calls.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm getting phone calls from the trainers and our our docs.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, Visc, we're looking at having a special made helmet to protect your shunt.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: You can keep playing.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm thinking I'm still playing, right?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: Before I get out of the hospital, and Terry and Scott know what that they're telling them, and they know what's really going on.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Before I get out of the hospital, they cut Terry.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: The day I get out of the hospital, Scott is being sent to New Orleans.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: We're literally passing each other as I'm going in the door of the apartment.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Where are you going?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, They're shipping to New Orleans.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Where's T?
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, They cut him last week.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: The only guys on the team that knew what was going on are gone.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now they're telling me I can still play.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I come back, I'm working out.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Now keep in mind, my rookie year in 80, I think we were like six and ten or seven and nine, something like that.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we were like mediocre.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: All of a sudden, 81 is the year we we draft Ronnie Lott, Hall of Fame, Eric Wright, Carlton Williams.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: We have three rookie DBs starting.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: 81 was the year Dwight Clark made the famous catch.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Suddenly we're freaking rolling, and they don't want anyone rocking the boat.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: So nothing's being said.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm thinking, okay, it's just in your mind, man.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: They're not covering anything up, but they're treating me weird.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: As we keep winning, winning, winning, winning, it's getting to where I'm like, man, I feel like I'm headed for a fall, but I don't know what it is.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: I want the story out.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: The day we're leaving for the for the and they've inter they're introducing me to people coming through the facilities.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: George Fisker, veteran defensive lineman.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: He's on injury reserve.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: He had two knee operations this year.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I corrected our general manager, John McVeigh, one day in front of these couples.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: I said, This woman said, How'd you have two?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: I said, No, ma'am, I had a knee surgery, brain surgery.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: McVeigh looked me right in the eye with a look like, keep your mouth shut or you're gone.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: He says, No brain surgery, you got two knee operations.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: Now they could cut you, and to this day, they can cut you at any time.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: And this isn't baseball or basketball where there's guaranteed contracts.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: You sign a 10-mere, 10-year,$100 million contract, you play one game and they cut you, they owe you 118th of that first year's salary, and the rest is all bullshit on paper.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: They don't owe you anything.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that hangs over your head.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: My rookie year, we made 26 roster changes my rookie year after the final cut day.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: The 16-game season, that's an average of one and a half guys a week are gone and new guys in.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: Where's Paul?
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, he had a crummy game.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he's gone, even though he played her for five years.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Where's Mike?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: Every week it was just a revolving door.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: So that hung over your head.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: You'll do anything to hang on to your job, you know.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you will.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: So we're getting ready to go to the Super Bowl, and I'm like, I don't know what I'm headed for.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: Keep in mind, I had no idea that I was headed for a 38-year legal battle where I would be forced to win five work comp hearings, eight work comp appeals, and three times they took me clear to the California Court of Appeals to keep me from getting into doctor-prescribed treatments.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: I had no clue what I was headed for.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: Injured at 22, I settled my case when I was 61 years old in 2019.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: They fought you that long, huh?
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's the title of my book is Facing Giants, my 38-year battle.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: 38 fricking years through nine brains.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: The knee surgery did on me, they botched that.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: I had to have two more in 84, including an experimental Gore-Tex ACL transplant.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: I've had decades of grandma seizures.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they fought me tooth and nail.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because I had no idea until 2010-ish.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I won my case in '86.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: I was the very first NFL player to ever won a work comp case, and I had no idea about this.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I was the only one until about 210, 2010.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: So every time something with Visgird came up, I was under crosshairs.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: We cannot keep losing to Visger.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: If word gets out, we're screwed.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: If word gets out, guys know they actually have medical benefits, we're screwed.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: So they fought me, they spent millions fighting me over the years.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: And you know what?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: God had his hand on me, man.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: And he pulled me through so many dark times.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, in uh 2019, we were still standing a nine and a half hour mediation hearing to settle my case.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Nine and a half hours.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: What?
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, it's a machine.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's a machine.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: There's no doubt about it.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: So they they you know, they so they just decided that after the, I mean, there's there's no other probable cause of your brain condition, right?
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: You didn't get in a car accident, nobody punched you in the head.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's nothing but football.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: And instead of the case.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this was this was their claim.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: It was congenital.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: It took 22 years and 12 years of football for me to miraculously on with hydrocephalus.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: Which adult onset is very rare.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: Children were when I was a kid, kids were born with it, and and they had these big giant waterheads.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I remember, yeah.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Remember those before they came up with this with this shunt thing, which is a pretty primitive valve.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I just remember a couple kids growing up, you never knew what was wrong with them.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then you don't remember them third grade on, you're going, oh, well, they they died, they passed.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: Once the brain started to solidify as you got older, those kids didn't didn't live.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, but it for me, it was uh it was congenital, it just didn't show up till I was 22 years old.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, dude.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, man.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: A 38-year battle.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_02: All right, you must have some pretty inexpensive lawyers or something, man.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, to keep going.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: What I mean, and so the whole time you're battling, you know, darkness, mental illness, a lot of the the, you know, the the you can't have an impacted brain without impacted mental health.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: Talk about your mental, your mental illness struggle, your mental health struggles, if you don't mind.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll I'll go back because I kind of jumped, but like so when I got a pop horn, I was played at Stag High School and played on a, like I said, the all-American, I mean a uh um Hall of Fame high school team.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: I went on to University of Colorado, uh, you know, played there, and then um 23, suddenly the rugs, and my my game plan, I was going to take care of my family.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to buy my folks a home, I helped my brother with my my$15,000 signing bonus.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: My older brother, who's 10 years older than me, had just started a general contracting business and he had three small boys, my nephews.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: I took my$15,000 signing bonus, of which I I cleared 10.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: I took$7,000, and I bought my sister-in-law Andrea a brand new four-door Honda because their car had gone out and all they had was my brother's truck.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I drove, I drove my 63 Chevy longbed stepside pickup, my rookie year, 1908.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it didn't even have a window on a driver's side, and it was green at one time, and it it became known as the phlegm mobile because it oxidized a phlegm color.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I drove that my rookie year.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like what were the pay scales like that back then, like in the 80s, man?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: What do you that back back in 80 or 81, the the average salary was I think 65 or 75,000?
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: The highest paid player was was Walter Payton.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think he made 600, and there was no one even making 500.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: He was just in a class by himself.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, great player for making two and three hundred thousand a year, which is nothing to sneeze at.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: So back then, yeah.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: When I was the 149th overall pick in 1980 by the Jets.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: I went in the sixth round, I signed for a$15,000 signing bonus, and I signed a three-year contract, which had I made the team, I would have made$35,000 my first year,$45,000 my second, and then I would have made a whopping$65,000 my third year.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: Beaten the hell out of your body, bro.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: God damn.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: Even with playoff money, I made$106,000, including bonus, Super Bowl page, in two years, and it freaking damn near killed me.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: And my whole life I've dealt with it.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, man.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you I mean it would it would seem so much simpler just to say, yeah, football caused this, let's settle this thing.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, let's kind of be act like men, right?
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we we caused this, this happened on our watch.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I think a lot of people don't know.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_02: I even today in the NFL, I think uh you have to do four years before you get any benefits at all.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: You got to be four, and you want to hear something funny.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: The average career is 3.2.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: They got they're the house, man.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: 67% of anyone who ever even makes it, and it some crazy number is out with injuries, but never qualifies for benefits.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: Never qualifies for the foreign.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: You don't think they have that set up intentionally?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: They're the house, bro.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: They're the house, man.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: They yeah, yeah.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, a lot of a lot of people don't know that.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: And then I guess with the collective bargaining agreement, one of the reasons that, you know, they I guess the players could have gone for more is that folks from your generation really never made any money at all, like, you know, the last these guys in the last 10 years.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, you know, you're talking you're talking NFL players, you know, Hall of Famers out there, you know, getting pennies now.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, for and then living, you know, you've got damage from you know, your brain, they've got, you know, whatever they got, right?
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: Knees, back, and they got all the the the CTE-related, you know, the the mental illness as a result of all those repetitive impacts all the time that will end up with a CTE diagnosis.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it's um and you're dealing with the injury.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'd had I never had a surgery till my last year playing.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: I had in my 12th year of football, you know, I had a knee surgery and a brain surgery.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: Two, three years ago, I think I had my 15th or 16th surgery.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now I had I had my lenses replaced, I had cataract, so that it wasn't a football related.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I've had like 14, I've had three on the knee they operated on.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: I had to have two more in 84 trying to repair what they screwed up.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: I had torn my ACL, which they never fixed.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: They took all my cartilage out in 81.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: I've been bone on bone since 81.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: I had my right shoulder reconstructed, I've had nine brain surgeries, I've had elbow surgery, you name it.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: And we're still paying the price, you know?
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I got a I got a good friend.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_02: He's uh he wor he's one of my buddies at church, and he played with the Patriots back in the 70s, and he don't get anything, dude.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: Great guy, wonderful dude, you know, and he's he's dealing with, you know, I mean, just arthritis are all over his body, man.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: He had to move to a first-floor house because he can't do stairs.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: And it'd be nice to know that, you know, the machine cared a little bit more about you players, man.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_02: And when it comes to the brain, I mean, you're talking every one of you has to have, you know, you know, the the the damage, you know, that we know now we know from repetitive ed impacts.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: None of you escape.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: You play 12 years of hardball at that level, right?
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: State championships, college win, you know, going to the top and then heading to the Super Bowl.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: You play at that level.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: And you just think, it, I mean, the the damage to the brains wasn't even understood until 2006 to 9 when you know Bennett Omala discovered what he what he calls CTE.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: That entire generation of players, and up until the CT agreement, is is out there just floundering.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: Every NFL player I meet right now, and I'm not kidding, right?
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_02: Every one of them has had has had mental health problems.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, here's yeah.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: I don't mean to cut you off.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, good, sir.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: So here's the thing.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: So my my worst, you know, I had a history of concussions, you know, starting in Pop Warner.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: This isn't an NFL disease.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: So my worst concussion was my third year Pop Warner.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: In a stupid, worthless bull nearing drill, I knocked myself totally unconscious and I was hospitalized.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: I played games in high school, I don't remember.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: I played games in college at Colorado.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: I was defensive player of the week one year against Oregon, where I had my only interception of my entire career, two sacks, player of the week.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't remember the game.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: I literally did not and late and 25 years later, and one of my best friends was playing for Oregon.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: We grew up together in Stockton, and 20, uh, maybe, maybe almost 20 years later, we crossed paths and we got to talking about that game.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, Yeah, I remember.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, early in the first quarter, you made a tackle and you were face down.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: They came out and they helped you off the sidelines, you came back in.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's the first time I ever heard of that.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Chris, I don't even remember the game.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I was player of the week.
• 36:37
  unknown: All right.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: She goes, Oh, yeah, you were laid out.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so let me ask you something real quick.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, you know I lost my son, right?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: Suicide and a lot of contact sports, and uh, you know, and what we're finding out now is that you think, you know, back in that day, right?
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: Where you, when you were in high school and you were 148 or 170, 180, these kids are in middle school at that age.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, at that size.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: And they are big and they are fast.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_02: And what's your opinion on children playing contact sports while you know they got a highly developed brain, I mean, developing brain.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's not mature.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what I mean, now that you know what you went through, right?
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, and and how that impacted you later on, what's your position on children, you know, playing contact sports?
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: Should we be waiting and promoting more brain-safe activities?
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: That is a great question.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the thing.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I played on championship Pee-Wee Pop Warner teams, championship pop warner teams, undefeated nationally ranked high school team, played in the Orange Bowl, played on the Super Bowl, and my own son never played the game that I loved.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: I never let he he won, I said, you know what?
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: When he was younger, he wanted to play pop warner.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: I said, No, no, no, wait till you get in high school.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then by the time he was getting into high school, uh, I went down to Dr.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: Ammon's clinic.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he was doing a big brain injury study on NFL players, probably in like 2010 or 11.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: Everything really blew up for me in that time frame.
• 38:06
  unknown: Yeah.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: I go down there and like contacted him.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: He says, We need you, not for one day.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, We need you for a three-day full-blown neurocog evaluation.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: So we flew down to Eamon's clinic and I took my wife at the time, who got divorced 17, 18 years later.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: She couldn't handle all this stuff, and God bless her.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: And and I took my youngest child, Jack, my third, my third child.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I wanted, he was maybe, I don't know, 10 or 12, I can't even remember, but 12.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I wanted them to talk to the doctors when I wasn't in the room.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because you ask us ball players or vets or men in general, how are you doing?
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm doing good, Doc.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: And people behind us are shaking their head, going, No, he isn't.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so I wanted them to talk to the doc.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: We do a three-day neuro evaluation, and we sit down with Dr.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: Eamon and his main doc, Dr.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: Willemeyer.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: He has my SPEC scans, which I use in my talks, and my brain spec scans are just full of holes.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: He says, He says, It's a miracle.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: He said, You can even function with the amount of brain damage you have.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it is a miracle, I'm telling you, God has blessed me.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: And we're walking out of this Eamon's clinic after three days.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: We don't even get to my truck.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: And my wife, Chrissy, at the time, looks at me, and my son Jack is walking next to me.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: She says, Jack will never play football.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: And he looks up at me, and I look down at him.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: I said, You know what, bud?
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: I cannot argue with your mom.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: I said, You will be great at whatever you put your mind to because you have it.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: You have a brain, right?
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, you have yeah, you you you have that drive.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: I said, You don't need to beat your out.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: No, no.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: And he went on to he went on to letter and four sports in high school, scholar, athlete, you know, a amazing kid.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: And never played football.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: And he's healthy.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_02: You know what, George?
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's Ratfield.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I, you know, I'm a semi-pro rugby player.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, I didn't know that with all my veteran stuff, all my green brace stuff was hurting my brain.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_02: So my son said, hey, dad, I want to play football.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: I had no, you know, I'm like, all right, you wrestle, but they have pads that hit the mat.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not thinking about the brain moving.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_02: Then football, I'm like, are you going to have helmets and all this stuff?
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_02: And you're on a good, you and I told him, get on the line.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_02: He goes, why, Dad?
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_02: I go, well, everybody wants to be a quarterback or a running back, bro.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody wants to be on the line.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_02: You'll be able to start every game.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: He goes, okay, Dad, well, hell, I didn't know the line was the worst place for the head smashing, you know?
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, every single play, you lose the biggest.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'm making all these stupid decisions, you know, bro.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I, because I never had that, you know.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, you know, you've you're be able to pass that on to your son because you've been harned, man.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you have been hurt.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_02: And thank God the Lord's been looking over you to get you to this point.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I I just never had anything, any comparison to say, bro, pick one or the other.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_02: I had no idea that the two together was going to blow him up like this.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and then of course we went snowboarding after that.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_02: So you're talking 10 and a half months, and now we know it's these little ones.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's the risk.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's not the risk, it's the repeated something.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and so that's when I'm working.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: I am so sorry about your son, too.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh believe me.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: My heart goes out to you.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: God bless him for the demons he was battling.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: I just lost, I law, I've I've lost two very close friends that I worked with for years.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: If you're familiar with Kuyu, K-U-I-U, you see hunting and apparel, or you see it all over the country.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_02: Dude, those are great, great.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I couldn't afford it back then.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: They were as high in the world.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: So Jason, Jason Harrison, who founded that, played on the Niners 15 years after he played on the Niners practice squad in 95.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: He played on the Broncos practice squad in 96, went on and founded Sitkageer, sold that, built Kuyu up to$50 million, and four years, several few years ago, he called me up and he was a hunting buddy of mine.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm an avid hunter.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: He says, George, I took a shotgun to bed with me last night.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm driving, I turn around, I have him meet me down at the hyperbaric clinic in Sacramento.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: I've had 270 some odd hyperbaric treatments over the years.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: Those have saved my life.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: I heard that Barry Sear stepped in years ago and started sending me gallons of his omega-3 fish oils and natural antioxidants.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I drive down to the clinic, I meet Jason there.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: I said, hey man, you're not going down that rabbit hole, introducing to Mike Greenhall, my buddy that owned the clinic.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: I call him Brother Mike.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: He treated me for years for free when the travelers quit paying.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: I slept on the floor there for two and a half years when I was homeless.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: Brother Mike Greenhall is an amazing guy.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: He starts treating Jason.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm back into these giant legal battles.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm finally into Center for Neuroskills getting treatment.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: Four years later, one of my nephews calls and he says, Uncle George, Jason took a shock on the bed with him last night, blew his brains out.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, dude.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_02: With his kids in the house, and he loved his kids.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_02: You know what?
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_02: When that was published, I and I remember this now because I was hunting a lot back then.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_02: I took down a grizzly.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_02: I went on some really, I was on some hunting hunting.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: And they never mentioned he played football.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_02: They never mentioned, I cannot remember them saying football.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: And that, you know, that now, now that suicide, because that's the thing, George, is we never have, we don't have closure unless we understand the whole picture.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_02: When my son took his life, until that corner asked me if he played Contact Sports, we had no clue why that young man ran off a goddamn cliff.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: And then when you say, oh, he played Contact Sports, or yeah, he was a very successful businessman, took it up to 50 million, but he took his life.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_02: You know, oh, but he played football for 15 years.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: Well, now we have, you know, we might have a little bit of closure here, a little bit of rationale as to why he that man was suffering, you know.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: It it helps the you would know better than anyone.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: It helps the family a little bit.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't ease anything, but at least it gives you it wasn't your loved one doing that.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll tell you what, George, and I believe in this wholeheartedly.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_02: The reason that men like him, Junior Seao, my son, Vincent Jackson, Dwight Jones, right?
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_02: All these players are not here is because they suffer schizophrenia, which is like my son.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: And you're being told to do some of the most horrific, immoral things going.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: And these men are moral, and they struggle with these thoughts to the point where they say, you know what?
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_02: I am not going to do that.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_02: And guess what I'm going to do?
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_02: I'm fixing this.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what my son did.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what that man did.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_02: They were protecting their families and their loved ones from these crazy thoughts that are caused by the damage done to our brain by these contact sports and repetitive blast exposure in our military.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: I lost another one on June 2nd last year.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm standing in Silver Creek, Idaho, fly fishing with one of my old Colorado teammates, uh, one of my closest hunting and fishing buddies from Colorado, uh, Brian Rodeo Bo McCabe.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: He played linebacker literally right behind me.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: My part of my job was to protect him and keep the old lineman off of him so he could make tackles, right?
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: And we had this little thing before games.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we he would just look at me, he would tell me, man, just watching you get mentally ready, he would get pumped up, you know.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we had this little thing, we would just stare, we wouldn't say a word before games, we would just stare at each other, and I'd just be shaking my head like, you know, let's go.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: Let's freaking go.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so about five years ago, five or six years, I'm up in Seattle, where where Rodeo was living with his with his family, and another one of our teammates, uh, Pat, the ton of Dunn, Pat Dunn, uh, on that on that dinner with these guys and their wives.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't drink, I had to quit drinking in '82 after I was arrested three times after my first brain surgery.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: We they found out brain seizures from alcohol.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I quit drinking, I quit drinking.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: Not a bad move.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: So Rodeo's looking at me with this weird look in his eye, and I think he's at dinner, and I think he's giving me the look, right?
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm like, this man, I got the brows going, I'm just shaking my head.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm eating my my meat, and I'm just going, I'm thinking, let's go, bring it on.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, umbonose me was having a stroke.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that night after I just thought he'd been drinking a lot, and he was starting to slur and his face.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: And like I said, I don't drink, so we we kind of broke it up soon after that, and everybody went their way, and that night his wife Lisa called me.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: She says, George, this is Lisa, we have Brian down at the hospital, he's having a stroke.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: So ever since then, Rodeo he lost his business.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: He can't read, he can read like one sentence at a time.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: He vertigo, he loses.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: So June 2nd of last year, I'm standing in Silver Creek, Idaho, with my with my buff brother Rodeo Bo right by my side, so he doesn't fall over in the current.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: We're fly fishing.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: I get a phone call from Mark Davis.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_01: Mark Davis, I played Pop Warner in high school with.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's as far as he ever went.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_01: Back in Stockton.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_01: Two, three years earlier, he had called me up this man.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: My brain's all effed up.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: My brain's effed up.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: I said, hey brother, this is what I do.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: I've done hyperbarics, I've done I told him all my non-pharmaceutical stuff.
• 48:05
  unknown: Yeah.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_02: He was really non-pharmaceutical.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: Non-pharmaceutical stuff.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: So he was really, really struggling.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so I even drove down with a buddy of mine.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh every year, our football team at Stag High, they have a big crab feed fundraiser to raise money for the whole athletic department, but a lot of them goes, and so, you know, I'm kind of a big deal down there.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I go down and I sign pictures, and I'll and so I I said, I said, hey bud, I said, we're going to the crab feed this year.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm driving down to Stockton, I'm picking you up, got him a ticket.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: I said, you need to be around the family.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: Our our team we played for was we t we named ourselves the family.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: We were so damn tight.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I take him to the dinner, and um man, two years later, when I'm standing in Silver Creek with my brain-damaged Colorado buff brother, I get a phone call.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, Mark Davis, how you doing, brother?
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: I heard this strange voice.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: No, George, this is Sean, his son.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I go, yeah.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: He says, My dad hasn't been answering the phone.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: I came over here today.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: He killed himself.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: He's sitting in his in his recliner with his phone in his hand.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: I see he's been trying to call you.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: I've lost a couple close guys that I literally worked with.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: Not to mention all these other guys that we know about.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: The Junior Sale, this Justin Strelzick, the Mike Doerson, Hall of Fame.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, all these guys.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: And he was he was NFL PA head, you know, when they tried to shut down that CT shit.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: And they're shooting themselves in the chest so that brain can be tested.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: They can think that far out, but they can't think what they're doing to their families.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: They're hurting, man.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: That is what how horrible this disease is, as you well know.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: Better than anyone you know.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we've got we've got we got so far to go.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then you look at the collective bargaining agreement, it covers dementia and all these old age.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yet every NFL player I have talked to, I had one guy that said he wasn't hurt after 20 years of offensive linemen.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm looking at him and he's very slow talking to me.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, yeah, but he's trying to get a coaching job, right?
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_02: And who can blame him, right?
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm like, yeah, buddy, you're dinged up, man.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_02: You cannot hide this, man.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_02: And the longer you hide it, you know, and and pretend that it's not there, the worse it's gonna be.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_02: And we gotta, you know, it just it's just crazy because everybody I've met that's played that long, and I'm not, I'm talking even D1, they're all effed up.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_02: And they and they need, they don't know where to go.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_02: I I I I one of my buddies is a coach.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_02: He tried coaching, he's a big, massive lineman.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_02: And he he had four NFL players that were, you know, coaches on his team, every one of them struggling.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, most of them, I think, didn't make the four years, right?
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: So they didn't have the benefits, right?
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_02: And he's like, Bruce, you need to talk to every one of my men and help them.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_02: You're the brain guy.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, all right, dude, where do I start?
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and and we'll do it.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_02: We'll do it.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: But it's uh Can you you see these?
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: Can you see what I'm holding?
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, sir.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_02: I can't read it, but I see, yeah.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: I have 40 something years of this is every day of my life.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: I can tell you what I did today.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: I write notes down, I get up in the morning, I drove here, I'm speaking with so-and-so.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: If I don't do this every single day and then read through the prior week or two to reinforce things, it's gone.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: I have cases of this.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: And people can ask me a question.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, Visc, you know, when you were a wildlife biologist with Jones and Stokes, uh, did you ever do, you know, kit fox surveys?
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd go through my notes and I'd go, oh yeah, 95, 96, May, June.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: Seriously, and I can give them day by day what I did, even though it may not be here in my mind.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I learned many, many years ago that one thing I've learned is nobody remembers like they think they do, because I have had people call me when I was running my own businesses, environmental consulting businesses and things, I'd have clients call up and just totally livid.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, you were supposed to do this survey for me, blah, blah, blah.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then we can't, we can't break ground yet.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going, whoa, timeout.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I called you like a couple weeks ago, and I'm and I'm panicked, right?
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going through my notes.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: I go, Oh, you called me 17 days ago at 11.14.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: I would literally do this.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: My phone rings, I'll write 11.14.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_01: As I'm talking, I'm taking notes.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we're done at 1129, and then and I'm pulling up the conversations I had with clients.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_01: This is what you said to me, this is what you asked me to do, and this is what I did.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I've had so many times where people go, Well, that's not what I meant.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know what?
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know what this is what you told me.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: It has saved my good for you.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: And when I summoned out, I need to do this.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody does.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because nobody remembers like they think.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_02: I don't remember anything.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's CRS, man.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I got, bro.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember anything.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: I guarantee you, nobody does.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: No one thinks when they remember like what they think they can.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I mean, I have tons of these boxes.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, good for you, man.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_02: Then it's uh you're good, man.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_02: I can see and hear you.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_02: You're good.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: You got it?
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you're good.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_02: You're good.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, man.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_02: That is uh what an amazing story, man.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, George, I I I am so happy you came on this show, bro.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_02: I cannot tell you.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_02: No, dude, this is amazing.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'd I'd I'd I'll come out there and drink a nearbird with you any day, man.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: Would love to have you.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: We've got a tiny home on the property.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: We love having folks out here.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, dude, I'm an army guy.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'll bring a sleeping bag and a Gore-Tex punch.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, out hunting or fishing, yeah.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_02: Ah, dude, I'll bring I got a bunch of rifles rusting in my safe.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_02: I got to do something with them.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_02: I got a bird gun in there.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_02: I got to do something with it.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: Last Saturday, I just got back from a five-day, 26-mile backpack deer hunt.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: I killed a big old big-bodied buck.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: I was seven miles from my truck.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: I boned it out.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: I packed out, I weighed it.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_01: I had 80 pounds of boneless meat, a 24-pound day pack and pack frame, my seven-pound rifle at 67 years old, and I hiked seven miles back to my truck.
• 54:35
  unknown: Good job.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_02: And butchered it myself when I got home.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, at this age, if we're not doing that, like I still rucksack March and my neighbors, I'm 63.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, what are you doing?
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_02: Why?
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, it feels it's low impact.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, we got to keep going, man.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and dude, what an amazing story, what an amazing journey.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I am so thankful the Lord has been the presence he's been in your life, sir.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm telling you, man, he has had, and he's had it, he's got me, I he I there's no doubt in my mind, he has put me through these storms for a reason, and that is to help other folks dealing with what I've had to deal with, and to pass on what I've learned.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: I have I have the three E's I uh that I try to do.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's educate, empower, and uh the third one, man.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_02: If I have a list of three, I can never remember the third one, bro.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_01: Educate, empower, oh, and encourage.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: So those are my three E's when I'm talking with people dealing with brain damage.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I try to educate, empower, encourage.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know what?
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there's help out there.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's not all this freaking the in 2010 they had me on four different dementia medicines, anti-seizure pills, and sleeping pills all at once.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't find my way home from work twice.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: A town that I had driven to for 17 years, an hour from my office, I had no idea how to get there.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: The doctors in 2010, you know what they told me?
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, George, you know you have frontal lobe dementia, there's no cure.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: You need to turn in your driver's license, file for disability, and get your finances in order.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_01: 2010, I go, what are you telling me?
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_01: I had three small kids.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: I was running, they said, Well, you're never gonna get any better.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: I got into hyperbaric oxygen treatments, high dose.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: I was doing 18 grams a day of omega-3 fish oils to reduce inflammation, ammilarate inflammation in the brain.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_01: I was doing natural antioxidants like cranberry juices, blueberry.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: I started working my brain like a muscle, doing memory games, puzzles.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: I got back in shape physically.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: I started meditating, I started praying, and after every 40 hyperbaric treatments, I would go back down to hype to Dr.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: Amon's clinic and do a seven-hour neurocog evaluation.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: And after my 160th hyperbaric treatment, I was in my late 50s, my neurocog memory scores had improved 14.3%, and I quit all my damn dementia meds.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_02: Dude, thank you.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: Here I am, 67 now.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: Ten years later, I take one little tiny dose of boost par.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: And other than that, and I stayed on my anti-seizure stuff.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: I can't afford to have a seizure.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you gotta, yeah, you gotta do that.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_02: That's all I take.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_02: Except for natural supplements.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_02: Dude, this non-pharmaceutical approach to brain health is absolutely what we need to do for our athletes, our veterans.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_02: Hold on here, baby.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_02: Dog's gotta go out.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, come up here.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_02: We'll put you on TV.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_02: There you go.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_02: Ah, she's a little beast, man.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_02: She's like this was, yeah, she's uh she was our, you know, she's been around since we lost our boys.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_02: She used to sleep with him and stuff, man.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_02: So she's getting old.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_02: But uh, yeah, I'll tell you what, sir.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_02: Let's keep driving on.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_02: I I do want to uh we'll do what an amazing show, man.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, for you to come on and and talk has been a blessing uh to us and our audience.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_02: And uh we look forward to not only encourage you, let us know what we can do for you because we serve others.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's what we do here at this foundation.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I that's what I do.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_01: My mission is to help others so people can go online and order my book.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's coming out.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_02: So right now, I this is what I'd love to do.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_02: So the next five minutes are yours, George.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_02: Take it, talk about George.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_02: Where do they find your book?
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_02: How do they get a hold of you for speaking events or whatever?
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_02: The floor's yours, sir.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: But so here's what we're doing.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: So you can go to George Visger.com, uh, the limited edition uh personally signed hardcover.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: They only made 200 of those, those sold out.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_01: So now uh coming up in another probably week, another week or two, probably two weeks, uh the paperback and hardcovers will be available at Amazon, Barnes Noble, Ingram Sparks, and you can go to georgevisger.com.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: You can pull up all my info for I do speaking engagements, I'll do fundraisers for folks, I'll go sign pictures or whatever.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: My books, I'm donating 50% of the profits to anyone that posts a link to my book to either their own nonprofit, or let's say it's a high school athletic group, or the brain injury recovery group of their choice.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I have 40 some odd years of valuable information that I have gleaned and over the years on my own.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_01: Hard fought.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I wanna I want to pass it on, and that is my mission in life.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_01: So go to georgevisger.com and you can order the book and it's coming out.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: And um we're gonna go, we're gonna be doing book signing tours around the country coming up soon, as soon as I get them in my hands.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_02: If you come across, if you come even close to Florida or North Carolina, let me know, man.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_02: I will meet you.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_02: I will.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna stay in touch.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_01: I was out, we actually did a I did a week, two weeks, two years in a row with uh Ricky, Ricky Woods.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: Williams, you know, Heisen Trophy one.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: So he did a special week long at the Eplinger Clinic in Florida several years ago.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: He invited seven former players to undergo this intensive cranial sacral therapy for multiple days.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then he I was the only one he invited back the second year.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: But um uh I made some good connections out there in Florida, and we did seven hours a day of intensive cranial sacral therapy.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_02: No, it can't hurt, that's for sure, bro.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_02: It can't hurt.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: So you know what?
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: I've I've tried all kinds of stuff.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: If it works for me, I use it in my toolbox.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_01: If it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't work for someone else.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_01: I have made I have done electrostimulation, cranial sacral, near infrared light therapy, hyperbarics.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you name it.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so hey, whatever I can do to help you guys out, let me know.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_02: George, really appreciate it, man.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: Open invitation to come out in Hemmon, Idaho, and uh, I'm running a head of dude.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_02: I gotta do something with these guns.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_02: They're just sitting around here waiting for looters after a hurricane.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: Plus, we're running ahead of chickens.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: We got our own eggs every day.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_02: Dude, yeah, man.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_02: Well, me and my boy, we raised chickens and pigs, dude.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_02: He was a pig, he was a pig feeding dude, man.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_02: We love pigs.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_02: All right, we're coming out your way, George.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_02: And thank you so much.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_02: And may God bless you and your organization, man.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_02: God bless you too.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_02: All right, thank you.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_02: All right, folks, another great show of uh broken brain, uh broken brains.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_02: Really appreciate it.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_02: What a show, man.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_02: Come on.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_02: This is why people watch this podcast.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_02: Don't forget, free book, go to the website, Youth Contacts, Broken Brains.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_02: Get informed on why your children need to wait before they start, you know, becoming like me and George, right?
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_02: You know, football's cool later on in life, man.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_02: And then don't roll that dice.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, don't forget our app, our headsmart app on uh Apple and Google store, or HeadSafe app on uh Apple and Google store.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, from from all of us to all of you, like us, subscribe us, push us out, and don't forget, if you got children, they only got one melon.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_02: Take better care of it, become informed on this issue.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_02: We'll talk to you soon.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_02: God bless you all.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_02: Take care.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_02: Then we'll see you next time on Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_02: We'll talk to you later.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_02: Take care.