Nov. 7, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:53:08
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Four, three, two... | |
| Hello, Dale. | ||
| Hey, how you doing? | ||
| Thanks for doing this, man. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Yeah, I'm glad to be here. | ||
| Nice to meet you, man, and nice to find out that not only you're a race car driver, you're also a bow hunter. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I saw your archery equipment and all that stuff, but me and a buddy of mine own some land, and I try to get out there and... | ||
| At least go twice a year. | ||
| I just love being in the stands, sitting in the woods, just thinking about what's going on. | ||
| Yeah, it's brain cleansing, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| Everything before the shot, really, is what it's all about. | ||
| Yeah, that's a lot of it, right? | ||
| Hanging out, being with your friends and family, you know. | ||
| You need one of those techno hunts in your life, don't you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do. | |
| The techno hunt was pretty impressive. | ||
| Yeah, that thing is, all my friends who come over here just go, whoa! | ||
| That's a life changer. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| But it's also a giant time waster. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've got a golf sim at the house, so I've got to figure out where I can put that. | ||
| Golf's the one I've always avoided. | ||
| I've always avoided golf because I just saw it suck away people's time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I don't have the time and the patience to really block that whole day off to go play outdoors, but to go over there and just hit the driver for 30 minutes on the simulator is so fun. | ||
| Well, I would imagine with what you do for a living, I think what you do is one of the craziest, wildest, most demanding things a person could do for an occupation. | ||
| Boy, I don't know. | ||
| It's right up there. | ||
| You don't know? | ||
| Other than being a soldier or a firefighter or a cop or a fighter? | ||
| Yeah, fighter and bullfighting and bull riding, those type of things. | ||
| Those people. | ||
| Boxing. | ||
| Bull riders, that's on another level. | ||
| That's another level of crazy. | ||
| I've hung out with those guys and they are crazy people. | ||
| It takes a certain mentality to be able to climb onto a bull. | ||
| Yeah, they have a certain energy about them. | ||
| They got that I don't give a fuck energy and it's cranked up to 10. Exactly. | ||
| Have you ever been in Vegas when they have the big... | ||
| The finals? | ||
| I haven't, actually. | ||
| Oh, they're everywhere, and they're all crazy. | ||
| I know. | ||
| They are really... | ||
| I know a lot of those guys, and our paths have crossed several times, and every time you're around them, you're like, are we going to end up in jail tonight? | ||
| You know, just that's a real possibility. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they're throwbacks. | ||
| Yeah, they are. | ||
| They're real throwbacks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They are. | |
| Legit wild men. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, but driving a race car, I mean, you have a giant engine, you're strapped into a seat, you're hurling down the road at extreme speeds, right next to other cars doing the same thing. | ||
| Just the intensity and just everything being on nine at all times, like, that is a wild way to make a living, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, thanks. | ||
| When I was little, thinking about what the hell am I going to grow up and be, my father was really successful in the sport, so I would go to the races and I would watch him race and see him win and watch him go through victory lane and celebrate and all those things. | ||
| I thought, man, this is what I've got to do. | ||
| I've got to do this. | ||
| This looks fun. | ||
| This looks exciting. | ||
| People are in awe of the drivers, the race, my father, the personalities. | ||
| And I just wanted to do it real badly. | ||
| But I knew that the odds of making it are tough. | ||
| So there's only 40 guys in the field every weekend. | ||
| So there's 40 guys in the whole country that are going to get the shot to do it. | ||
| The odds of me, even with my dad being as successful as he was, I'd have a lot of doors open to me, but the odds of me actually getting there and being able to stay had the staying power and the success and talent. | ||
| I just knew it were tough, so I didn't know if I'd ever get that chance. | ||
| I remember the first time I went to a two-and-a-half-mile track. | ||
| It's Talladega, and you hold it wide open. | ||
| I was working at my dad's dealership, Changing Oil. | ||
| He owned this Chevy store in Newton, North Carolina. | ||
| And the phone rang and he said my dad was on there then. | ||
| And he was in Talladega for a test and he said, get your helmet and your suit and meet me at the racetrack. | ||
| The next day you're going to fly in the King Air to the track. | ||
| Don't ask questions. | ||
| Just do it. | ||
| And so I got there and I knew I was going to Talladega and I thought, man, I must be driving. | ||
| This is going to be crazy. | ||
| I'm going to go around this two and a half mile track full speed at 190 miles an hour. | ||
| I never went faster than 90 or 95 on a racetrack before. | ||
| I never drove anything bigger than a half mile. | ||
| I got there, he's like, you're going to test this car, get in, get ready. | ||
| He puts me in there and he's like, you got to hold it wide open. | ||
| If you don't hold it wide open, the motor's not going to work. | ||
| It'll hurt the motor. | ||
| You got to hold it. | ||
| The way they tune the motor to run wide open, it has to run at full throttle. | ||
| If you try to go around there at half throttle, it'll burn the pistons, it'll run too lean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| All those things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| He was saying that and I thought to myself, is he just telling me that just to make sure I hold it wide open because he thought I would be a pussy and not do it? | ||
| And so I was like, man, I'm a little nervous to hold it wide open, but I pulled out on the track and I mashed the gas full throttle and I'm going down the back straightaway and I was like, I'm looking down the back straightaway into the next corner, this long corner, and I'm like... | ||
| How's it going to stick? | ||
| You know, how's the car not going to fly out of the racetrack? | ||
| Like, I'm going so fast, it doesn't feel like it's going to stay in the track. | ||
| And I kept running that through my head about my dad saying, I've got to hold it wide open. | ||
| I'm like, well, dad said it'll go wide open around here. | ||
| So I don't think he would, you know, I believe everything he says. | ||
| And You go in the corner and you turn into the corner and there is more grip than you can imagine. | ||
| There's so much grip. | ||
| The car is stuck to the track with such grip that you've never felt this before in your life. | ||
| This grip. | ||
| You can't slide across that track. | ||
| The tires in the car hold of the track so tough and tight that nothing's going to make it. | ||
| It just goes around there like it's the craziest thing. | ||
| And so now, today, when I tell people, when we've got this two-seater car and we take people for rides and they get in there and I'm like, man, what am I going to do? | ||
| What are you going to do to explain to somebody what this is going to feel like? | ||
| I'm going to tell you things to pay attention to. | ||
| Pay attention to the grip. | ||
| You're not going to believe how much grip this car has. | ||
| Like, you're just not going to believe that it'll stick to the track the way it does. | ||
| So pay attention to that and pay attention to how bumpy and violent it is. | ||
| You know, you drive a Cadillac or any car down the street. | ||
| Well, it's, you know, six, eight inches off the ground, these big old inflated tires and big giant sidewalls. | ||
| It's going to feel nice when it hits little bumps. | ||
| Our cars are rigid and suck to the ground and don't have much travel in the suspension. | ||
| It's built to go fast, not to feel good. | ||
| It's rough as hell and shakes the hell out of you. | ||
| That's what I remember about that. | ||
| And as soon as I got over that initial fear, I think that was the only time I ever had any real fear of driving a car. | ||
| As soon as I was like, well, all right, anything, nothing else is going to be as scary as that was, right? | ||
| Driving a car. | ||
| And I mean, flipping, and when I flip for the first time, and the car's tumbling and flying, parts flying off the air, I thought to myself that I wasn't scared or I never was scared of flipping. | ||
| My thought was I just did something a lot of people are never going to experience. | ||
| You know, I did something that... | ||
| That only a few people know what that's like. | ||
| And I feel safe. | ||
| I've always felt incredibly safe inside the car. | ||
| Especially in the last 20 years, the safety stuff has really been focused on and improved and better and better and better. | ||
| But I look at the interior of our cars today versus 20 years ago, and I can't believe some of the stuff that we used to climb into. | ||
| So you felt calm while it was flipping? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh yeah. | ||
| I always... | ||
| Well, I've seen cars flip, right? | ||
| I've seen it for years, right? | ||
| So I know it's possible. | ||
| So I get in there and I got turned around at a race in 1998. I was racing at Daytona. | ||
| And I got turned around and the car... | ||
| So I'm flipping for the first time in my life. | ||
| And this car's like over 3,000 pounds. | ||
| But it flies up in the air like it's paper, man. | ||
| It's the craziest thing in the world. | ||
| It's so weightless, you know? | ||
| And what it felt like to me, so the car rolled on its side and came down kind of on its side. | ||
| It felt like somebody rolled a prop wall of grass up against the car. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| When I was on my side and I could see the ground, I felt like I was right side up because as you're flipping, the force pushes you down in the seat. | ||
| So you feel eternally, you feel gravity. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| As the car's flipping, you're pushed into the seat, so you feel weight of yourself in the seat. | ||
| That never changes. | ||
| You never come up out of the seat like that. | ||
| It's like somebody rolled a prop wall of grass up against the side of the car, and then against the roof, and then against that side. | ||
| It kept doing that. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| It's just the weirdest feeling. | ||
| And you feel completely safe. | ||
| You feel like, you know, nothing's going to harm me. | ||
| One of the things they always talk about is get your hands onto something because the spinning makes your arms just go like this. | ||
| And if you watch a lot of old wrecks from the 60s and 70s, you'll see the guy's arms come flying out the window and they're just kind of flopping around. | ||
| It's spinning so fast you can't pull it in. | ||
| And your arms will go like that. | ||
| So as soon as you know you're going upside down, you grab the bottom of the steering wheel and just kind of, you know, watch. | ||
| But I flipped my pickup truck one time on Christmas Day, and I wasn't holding on the steering wheel, and my arm went out the window. | ||
| You know, for like a split second, it banged around in the window sill. | ||
| And I was like, man, you know, I got it back in and grabbed ahold of the steering wheel with both my hands. | ||
| And so ever since then, I've like, you know, now I know, like anytime I'm in a crash, you got to have your hands ahold of something because that's the one thing that you can't control. | ||
| You're strapped in with your seatbelt and everything, but your arms are, you know, can go anywhere. | ||
| And in that moment when the car is rolling or barrel rolling or flipping, It's so fast. | ||
| Like, you can't. | ||
| Your arms just go this way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's the craziest thing in the world. | ||
| That's the only fear, I guess, is that your arm could get outside the window and get crushed or something. | ||
| Because the guys have had that happen. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How'd you flip when you were on Christmas? | ||
| On Christmas Day, my sister... | ||
| She knows this. | ||
| This won't be news to her. | ||
| It's probably not fun for her to hear every time I tell it. | ||
| I had a pickup truck with a tape deck in it. | ||
| She got me that Walkman CD with the adapter for the tape deck that you stick into your cassette adapter. | ||
| And she bought me the Walkman cassette adapter and I'm in my truck. | ||
| I got an extended cab S10. I'm driving from my house to my mamaw's house where family reunion is. | ||
| My dad's there. | ||
| Everybody's there. | ||
| The whole family's there. | ||
| I'm a little late. | ||
| And I'm driving down the road. | ||
| And I got to messing with that Walkman, and I drove off into the ditch, and I hit a driveway culvert, a pipe, drainage pipe in a driveway, and went like seven flips and destroyed this truck. | ||
| And in the middle of the flipping, I remember that happening. | ||
| And everything, all my change, jacket, anything that was loose in the car ended up down in the one corner, like floorboard. | ||
| Everything sort of collects into that one corner as it's spinning. | ||
| And it crushed the windshield down. | ||
| The mirror was down into the radio. | ||
| You know, it crushed the roof down real bad. | ||
| I was really lucky. | ||
| I had my hands on top of the steering wheel and the windshield kept slapping my knuckles and busted all my knuckles real bad. | ||
| And so then I let go and my hands went this way. | ||
| And then I finally got them back in and grabbed the bottom of the steering wheel. | ||
| The tires were broken and busted off the truck. | ||
| I got out of the truck, and I was fine. | ||
| I didn't have any injuries other than just the knuckles kind of being scraped up. | ||
| This newly married couple, they either got engaged or just got married, were driving the other way and saw the whole thing. | ||
| And they stopped. | ||
| And they were like, you alright? | ||
| I'm like, yeah. | ||
| And, of course, there's this line of cars behind me stopped on the road, and this one lady pulls up, and I was like, I need to borrow your cell phone to call my dad. | ||
| She's like, you're in shock. | ||
| You need to sit down. | ||
| I was like, no, I'm not in shock. | ||
| I just need to borrow your cell phone. | ||
| So I walked in the next car, and I got a cell phone from this person. | ||
| I called my dad, and I was like, Dad, I was like, man, I flipped my truck. | ||
| I had financed this thing for five years. | ||
| I was paying $100 a month. | ||
| It was perfect. | ||
| I was working at a dealership changing oil, probably making $130 a week. | ||
| And, I mean, just got this truck for probably two, three months. | ||
| And used truck, but it was good. | ||
| It's junk. | ||
| I called dad and I'm like, man, he's going to be mad. | ||
| Can't be too mad because I'm paying for the truck, but he's going to be mad at me because I'm screwing up family reunion and Christmas stuff. | ||
| He comes to get me. | ||
| I'd flipped this truck real close to where our farm was, so he ran over to the farm and got this flatbed truck, and he pulls out there with the flatbed truck. | ||
| And he pulls up, and as soon as he pulls up, a state trooper pulls up. | ||
| And the state trooper guy and dad talked for a minute. | ||
| And the state trooper's like, you know, one single car accident, you okay? | ||
| Yeah, everybody's okay. | ||
| Dad, are you going to put this on the flatbed and take it home? | ||
| Yeah, okay, okay. | ||
| I ain't going to investigate or anything. | ||
| Everything's cool. | ||
| Y'all just go about your business. | ||
| So he left. | ||
| He did us a solid there and didn't give me any kind of traffic ticket. | ||
| And so me and dad put the truck on the flatbed and we're driving back and he started laughing. | ||
| And I was like, man, I expected you to be really mad because he was a fiery kind of dad, you know, and pull the belt out and go to town, you know. | ||
| He was a rough, strict, tough, tough dude. | ||
| And so I thought I was going to get a good cussing at least, but he started laughing. | ||
| And I said, man, what's so funny? | ||
| And he goes... | ||
| I was 18 when this happened. | ||
| He goes, when I was 18 years old, I flipped my car. | ||
| He's like, I can't get mad. | ||
| He's like, I'm just glad you're not hurt. | ||
| I'm like, that's nice. | ||
| So we drove back. | ||
| I took a couple pictures of it and got insurance for it. | ||
| Got like 11 or 12 grand for the insurance to be able to buy another truck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So it all worked out. | ||
| So that was the first time you ever flipped something, or did you flip the race car first? | ||
| That was the first time. | ||
| No, the race car was next. | ||
| So the race car is like, oh, I've been here before. | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| And in the race car, it's not as bad as a passenger car. | ||
| You only got that strap. | ||
| You're moving around and banging around in there, and in the race car, you're in there pretty tight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you feel weird when you're in a passenger car, too, for the lack of support? | ||
| The lack of support and safety? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, I do. | ||
| Because compared to the way our cup cars are now, or the race cars are now, man, we're cocooned in there. | ||
| The seat and everything, the headrests, you got a six, seven-point harness. | ||
| I mean, in a street car, you really just got the strap. | ||
| I mean, it's... | ||
| I certainly, you know... | ||
| I'm much more cautious as I get older on the highway. | ||
| And people are like, hey man, how do you do it? | ||
| How do you drive a race car and then go 45, 55 on the road? | ||
| And it's real easy, actually. | ||
| You know, just kind of chill. | ||
| Does it get all your fast driving out of the way? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When I was younger, I was getting speeding tickets all the time. | ||
| But as I got older, I just didn't care to be in a hurry anymore. | ||
| Yeah, I would figure the way you drive for a living, you'd just get it out of your system. | ||
| I had plenty of high-speed action and hijinks on the racetrack. | ||
| I calmed down the road. | ||
| What kind of car do you drive in real life? | ||
| Well, it's funny. | ||
| I just bought a brand new Silverado. | ||
| I haven't bought a truck in a long time. | ||
| I still have my old Silverado I bought. | ||
| It's about an 0406, but this new one I like a lot. | ||
| The new ones are badass. | ||
| I didn't like the old ones that much. | ||
| They just look kind of basic. | ||
| The new ones are really sweet looking. | ||
| The character lines and the body lines, it's just a good looking truck. | ||
| So I bought that. | ||
| But what I was driving before that, I got a 48 pickup truck. | ||
| And it's all rough as hell on the outside and original faded all messy and ugly looking. | ||
| But it's got a Vortec motor and good drivetrain in it. | ||
| It drives good. | ||
| But it's easy to work on and I just love fooling with it. | ||
| I took the original bench seat out and put these old bucket seats in from an 80 Chevy Blazer. | ||
| And so I made it comfortable and just the way I wanted it. | ||
| So I drove that a lot this summer until I got this new truck. | ||
| And I got a 76 Chevy Laguna that I love to drive. | ||
| Yeah, that thing just kind of floats down the road, man. | ||
| And it's dark midnight blue tinted windows and just a... | ||
| Really cool car. | ||
| I love the 70s and the style of the cars in the 70s. | ||
| Even kind of the bigger ones like in the late 70s like the 442 Oldsmobile Cutlass. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those big, big, big cars. | ||
| There's something about those guys that I really dig. | ||
| Is that your car right there? | ||
| That's my car right there, yeah. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| I love that thing, man. | ||
| I had a 1973 Chevelle that reminds me of that kind of body style. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I got a 442 that's sort of the sister to that, Oldsville 442 that's red and kind of the same tinted one. | ||
| I did the same wheels, same tires, same tint. | ||
| I put a spoiler, like a NASCAR style spoiler on the back and the front because those cars were big in NASCAR. Oh. | ||
| See, those cars don't get as much love as the 60s muscle cars. | ||
| Well, we'll get there. | ||
| I think as we get older, what's cool gets older. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, like, I mean, nothing... | ||
| I mean, the 67 Camaro, those cars... | ||
| 69, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I got a 67. I thought... | ||
| I had a 69. But, like, the 55 Chevy, all those things will always hold their rightful place in history, but... | ||
| These cars, like that car right there, that wasn't very cool 10, 15, 20 years ago. | ||
| No. | ||
| But as we get older, that car becomes cool, you know. | ||
| And, you know, one day we'll be driving around in like 85 pickup trucks going, man, this thing's so awesome, so old school. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| I don't know about that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just think that car might just be cool because you own it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it's got these old character lines, man, that I really like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It does. | |
| It does have old character. | ||
| You know what's interesting? | ||
| I was just talking to a friend of mine about this. | ||
| In 1970, my mom bought a Barracuda. | ||
| And when I was in high school, in 1981, I was a freshman in high school, and she had this Barracuda. | ||
| And it was like a classic car. | ||
| And it was like a classic muscle car. | ||
| But that's only 11 years old. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, if you had a car today from 2007, that wouldn't be a classic car. | ||
| It's just a car. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It is weird. | ||
| It is weird. | ||
| Like a 1969, when I was in high school, in 1969, which was only an 11-year-old car, was amazing. | ||
| Like, whoa, people would stop and stare at it. | ||
| Dude, look at that 69 Camaro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Whoa. | ||
| I got an 88 S10. That was the first pickup truck I owned or had. | ||
| That was like the car I got when I was 16 years old. | ||
| And I got one and restored it, which was a terrible investment. | ||
| But it makes sense for me because it was my first truck. | ||
| And I didn't think anybody would give a shit about it, right? | ||
| Because it's an S10. It's like the bottom of the barrel in pickup trucks for Chevrolet in 1988. But I drive that thing around and people are like, Wow, that's the cleanest S10 I've seen in 15, 20 years. | ||
| That's it right there. | ||
| Oh, that's a nice car. | ||
| You think there's something about seeing one of those that's in great shape, that it made it through? | ||
| Yeah, there's not many of them left. | ||
| I mean, for good reason, but what was your first car? | ||
| My first car... | ||
| It was a 73 Chevelle, that one, but the engine blew out on it. | ||
| I got a 71. Chevelle is a good car, man. | ||
| Oh, I love Chevelles. | ||
| So would you get a 73 and restore it to a... | ||
| I would get a 70. That's my favorite year. | ||
| 69 and 70 are my favorite years. | ||
| I go back and forth between 69 and 70 with Chevelles. | ||
| They're both amazing years. | ||
| Yeah, I like those cars. | ||
| They're a big muscle car. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They are. | |
| It's a big ride. | ||
| It's bigger than the Camaro. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have a 1969 Nova. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, which is like a smaller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, like that right there. | ||
| Woo, daddy! | ||
| That's a good looking car. | ||
| That is as classic an American muscle car as you get. | ||
| It's a 1970 with silver with black stripes. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| They used to race Novas. | ||
| My dad raced a Nova. | ||
| Yeah, Nova. | ||
| I like Novas because they're light. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's a light car and because, you know, you put a big engine in it and new suspension and, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have a Nova... | ||
| A wagon that I just bought. | ||
| A 66. Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's my next project. | ||
| I bought it from a buddy for five grand, and it's in pretty bad shape, but that's my next project as soon as I get some time. | ||
| I had this little girl, Isla, and she's six months, so it's kind of made it tough doing any kind of projects. | ||
| I know what that's like. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| It's awesome, but it does eat up a lot of your time. | ||
| Everything is on the side right now. | ||
| And it will be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How long? | ||
| Forever. | ||
| It's just forever, until they move out, and then it's still a little bit on the side, because you've got to call and check on them. | ||
| It's awesome, though. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's like getting married and having a kid and all that stuff is nothing like I thought it'd be. | ||
| No one can explain it to you, especially the kid part. | ||
| They can explain it to you. | ||
| I've had friends that have kids, they just go, we'll talk after the kid's boy. | ||
| There's no way you're going to be able to figure this out until it actually happens. | ||
| I've had people, everybody tries to tell you, this is what it's going to be like. | ||
| Man, you ain't going to believe it. | ||
| Greatest thing ever. | ||
| Boy, you just don't even know. | ||
| It still doesn't help. | ||
| It don't sink in until you go through that experience. | ||
| When you go through that experience, you're like, damn, they were right. | ||
| This is the greatest thing ever. | ||
| It's a different kind of love. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's hard to explain. | ||
| If I come home, my daughters run up to me and jump in my arms, and I catch them, and they give me a kiss, and I'm hugging them. | ||
| There's a kind of love that doesn't exist in any other part of my life. | ||
| Nothing you could have ever felt before with anything or anybody else. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's just different. | ||
| I can't wait for that. | ||
| She's six months, and... | ||
| Everybody's like, man, and you'll probably agree. | ||
| They're like, it goes fast. | ||
| It goes fast. | ||
| It goes fast. | ||
| We're sort of in that moment where we're like, come on. | ||
| I can't wait for her to talk. | ||
| I can't wait to hear her voice. | ||
| What is her voice going to sound like? | ||
| What kind of voice is she going to have? | ||
| What is she going to like? | ||
| What is she going to want me to do with her? | ||
| Those kind of things. | ||
| Yeah, it's awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| But yeah, it does put your projects on the side. | ||
| Yeah, my projects are on the side. | ||
| Golf sim's on the side. | ||
| Hunting's on the side. | ||
| I ain't going to go hunting this year. | ||
| I was going to go. | ||
| I usually go in October or November, first of November. | ||
| And you guys have a spot in Ohio, which is one of the best whitetail spots in the country. | ||
| Me and a buddy of mine, Martin Trex Jr., he races too. | ||
| And we've just been buddies a long time, and he's hardcore. | ||
| He's heavy-duty into the hunting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so we got, I wanted to hunt, but not, you know, I'm not going to be going every week. | ||
| But I knew he was probably interested in probably buying some land and us managing it together and learning how that process goes. | ||
| So we bought this land and we've put the crop, we've put the, you know, we put the food plots in, not ourselves, but we've managed the land on how we want to change it. | ||
| And Sort of managing the herd. | ||
| It's been a really educational experience. | ||
| I think a lot of people who don't hunt don't even understand what we're talking about, the whole process. | ||
| If you buy a nice piece of land, people who, especially if you look at, there's a bunch of organizations that teach classes in how to manage a giant piece of property, but laying out food plots. | ||
| People buy these big chunks of property specifically for whitetail hunting. | ||
| Yeah, so we have about a thousand acres. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| All we do is bow hunt for whitetail. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| We'll go in there twice a year, maybe, or at least once a year for turkey. | ||
| And we eat what we kill. | ||
| We got a turkey last year and was eating it that night. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| That's amazing, isn't it? | ||
| It is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, when you can eat it and it doesn't ever touch the freezer, never goes in the refrigerator, just straight from the harvest right to the grill. | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| I love deer jerky. | ||
| It's probably my favorite. | ||
| And we fry turkey nuggets and stuff like that. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty cool. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's a cool little getaway for you, too, right? | ||
| A thousand acre, a little slice of heaven. | ||
| Yeah, and it's driving distance. | ||
| Because I love a road trip. | ||
| I mean, if I wanted to, I could fly up there, but I like the road trip. | ||
| The whole thing for me really is everything before the shot that you take on the deer. | ||
| It's the drive up there with your buddies talking about what you're going to do, what you can't wait to do, what's been going on with everybody. | ||
| Getting up there and getting everything laid out. | ||
| Looking at the map on the wall. | ||
| Get that big laminated map on the wall. | ||
| Be like, man, this big good stand. | ||
| Which way is the wind blowing? | ||
| Let's talk about the wind. | ||
| What's wind going to be doing tomorrow morning? | ||
| Where are we going to go tomorrow morning? | ||
| Everybody gets their hands into cooking dinner that night. | ||
| Everybody gets a side or something they're dealing with and managing. | ||
| It's just fun. | ||
| Just spending time with your buddies. | ||
| We don't take that time anymore. | ||
| We don't really make time anymore. | ||
| You're going to go do that for two days. | ||
| You're going to make time to be with each other and enjoy it. | ||
| I like taking my buddies and taking friends of mine that don't hunt or haven't ever hunted and letting them understand what that experience is like. | ||
| It's pretty cool. | ||
| It is cool, but it's tough to get someone who's never hunted before, who isn't in a hunting, sit in a stand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can't get my wife to go. | ||
| I wanted Amy to go. | ||
| She knows what hunting's about. | ||
| She's into it, but she don't want to go. | ||
| We even got the redneck blinds, you know, the real comfortable deals, and you're sitting there in a chair and move all you want. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You ain't got to worry about your scent too bad or anything like that, and she won't even go sit in that. | ||
| I'm hoping little Isla will want to go, so we'll see. | ||
| Yeah, maybe it's better that she doesn't go. | ||
| You need a little break. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| You need a little place where, like, if she wanted to go every time you were going, then it'd be like, oh, come on. | ||
| Well, you wanted me to like, honey. | ||
| Oh, but you like it too much. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I would imagine, again, with what you do for a living, having something that's peaceful and quiet and out in nature would be very important to kind of balance out just the wild, hectic nature of race car driving. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, for me, when I get in the stand and I sit down and I look out across the field and look at the land and everything, man, you ain't got to worry about... | ||
| You know, answering no email or getting back to this guy or setting up this appointment or answering this question or, you know, it's just, it's even better. | ||
| It's better than going on vacation. | ||
| Like, we go on vacation with my wife or with my buddies or whatever. | ||
| You still can't ever really disconnect from everything you're doing. | ||
| It seems like, though, when I go hunting, I can completely get rid of technology if I want. | ||
| Sitting in the woods is peaceful. | ||
| It's good for you. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's therapeutic. | ||
| Even though nothing's happening, it's kind of cleansing in a way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| In a weird way. | ||
| I think human beings have a certain amount of requirement for time and nature. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you don't realize you have that requirement until you're out there. | ||
| Yeah, you wouldn't know it until you go sit in a stand and you're like, wow, I needed a little bit of this. | ||
| I think even a park, you know, even people that go to Central Park in New York City, they go to that park and sit down by a tree and they just feel better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's exactly what it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, and your work environment is a concrete slab, you know, that you're driving. | ||
| What's the fastest you go? | ||
| 215. When that passes you, you realize how fast 215 really is. | ||
| Like, jeez. | ||
| You sit in that car and do it long enough, you forget. | ||
| Do you have apprehension about the horsepower wars with just modern consumer cars? | ||
| Because I look at some of these cars that they're putting out that are amazing, like the new Corvette ZR1s. | ||
| 700 plus horsepower right from the factory. | ||
| The Dodge Demon's like 800 horsepower. | ||
| They're putting out these insane race cars right from the factory that any dummy like me, I could just go to, if I have the cash, I go to a Corvette dealership and pick one up and all of a sudden I'm on the highway. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't have a problem with it now until it becomes a common occurrence where people don't know how to control it, you know, or don't know how to manage what they're doing behind the wheel or something like that. | ||
| But until that's like a common issue, I don't know that it'll need regulation. | ||
| Yeah, I don't necessarily think... | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised, though, that one day it may be regulated because everything gets governed at some point. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Maybe too much, right? | ||
| Maybe we should just appreciate the fact that you can do that. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I mean, I want to be able to build whatever I want to build. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And if I want that in production, I ought to be able to produce whatever they want. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| But I feel like the same way I feel about guns. | ||
| I'm very pro-Second Amendment. | ||
| I feel like... | ||
| I am a responsible gun owner. | ||
| I have a lot of friends that are responsible gun owners. | ||
| I've used guns for hunting. | ||
| I think you should have a gun for protection. | ||
| I don't think there's anything wrong with that. | ||
| But I don't think it would be a bad idea to have some sort of course that you have to go through so you understand all the aspects of safety and precautions that you should take and how to correctly load a gun and clean a gun. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But this is not really the case right now. | ||
| I'm not talking about gun control as much as I'm talking about gun safety and gun responsibility. | ||
| I feel like the same way about a car. | ||
| I feel like if you're going to go out and buy a Corvette ZR1, the kind of body-mashing acceleration, the G-forces you can get from something like that right from the factory, zero to 60 in under three seconds, that's an insane automobile. | ||
| Maybe someone should take you around a track a little bit. | ||
| That's a great idea. | ||
| I guess that would be the case. | ||
| If you were going to buy something like that or get in a car like that, you would need some kind of a trainer course that you would have to pass. | ||
| Three hours on a track. | ||
| If you have to have a particular license to drive 18-wheelers down the interstate, there should be a style or type of license that you need to achieve to have a certain type of license. | ||
| You want to go buy a Viper ACR and take it on the road? | ||
| Those crazy race car Vipers that you could just drive? | ||
| You should probably know how to drive that thing. | ||
| Especially the Vipers. | ||
| Those things are a little bit of a handful. | ||
| They're a little tail happy. | ||
| They're pretty tail happy. | ||
| They're so crazy too. | ||
| The race car one with all the vents and all the aero all around it. | ||
| That is just an insane thing that you could just go buy that and take that on the road. | ||
| Giant ass V10 in it. | ||
| It's pretty crazy. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you, so, do you drive, like, fast cars on the road ever, or do you mostly, are you just, like, just mostly driving normal, relaxed on the road? | ||
| So, I, um, I got a lot of speeding tickets when I was younger. | ||
| That's a shocker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I... And it seemed like it just never failed. | ||
| Anytime I got behind the wheel of a Corvette or anything like that, I would get pulled over for, you know, rolling through lights or rolling through a stop sign or reckless driving or whatever. | ||
| And I kept... | ||
| I mean, it happened as recently as two or three years ago. | ||
| I got pulled over for rolling through a stop sign and speeding. | ||
| And the guy's like, man, you don't need these tickets. | ||
| Like, what are you doing? | ||
| And I was like, you're right. | ||
| I don't know what the hell I'm doing. | ||
| I don't need to be driving this damn car is what's up. | ||
| I need to get out of this stupid car. | ||
| I don't need no Corvette with all this power. | ||
| And so... | ||
| And I've got this original... | ||
| I got this original 65 Impala that's been in my family since it was brand new. | ||
| It's kind of been the community car. | ||
| It was passed around, got banged up on the corner, right front corner. | ||
| A couple crashes here, a couple crashes there. | ||
| This guy needed a car because his was broke down, so he used it for a while and such. | ||
| And I finally got it. | ||
| I bought it for two grand for my dad. | ||
| And I've fixed it up. | ||
| It's got a two barrel, 283. Wow. | ||
| Doesn't go anywhere. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And I just as much rather drive that car as little of power as it has. | ||
| Knowing I won't get myself into any stupid trouble. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, being in a hurry or being impatient. | ||
| And so, that's, you know, that's what I try to do. | ||
| I actually, I don't care about as much what kind of power the car has. | ||
| I like a driver. | ||
| I want to, I like... | ||
| Nice cars. | ||
| I like, you know, frame off restorations, but I'd rather have a driver that's reliable and easy to work on. | ||
| And I think that's why I like that 48 pickup truck. | ||
| It's got the Vortec motor, which is just a, you know, it's not a powerhouse. | ||
| It's just dropped in out of a junkyard crash. | ||
| And it's easy to work on. | ||
| Me and a buddy of mine put an electric wiper motor in it the other day because it had the old vacuum on it and it just didn't work. | ||
| And it's easy to work on. | ||
| We put these seats in it and we got an old ammo box for a console and shit like that. | ||
| Do you just enjoy it because it's something that's sort of related to what you do for a living but then again not and kind of just a project. | ||
| Automobile? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think the reason why I like to work on cars is because it makes you a little invested in the car. | ||
| There was a point of time where I was just kind of like, that's cool. | ||
| I want to buy that. | ||
| I'll get that. | ||
| I'll drive that a year. | ||
| Now I don't like that anymore. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| I want to buy that. | ||
| I'll get rid of this one and get this one. | ||
| And that got old real fast for me. | ||
| And so I started to... | ||
| That's when I put a little more time in that 65 Impala and fixed it up. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm never selling that car. | ||
| Never going to sell it. | ||
| That 48 truck, I'll never sell it. | ||
| Just because of the work I put into it or the time that I've spent with it. | ||
| I've had... | ||
| I mean, you know... | ||
| There's people that are helping me work on these cars. | ||
| I've got a buddy of mine that actually helps me work on these cars. | ||
| But... | ||
| When I finish that Nova wagon, I'll probably never sell it, even though it's probably nothing special if someone else were to look at it, but it's what I put into it. | ||
| Yeah, you've got sweat equity. | ||
| And the more you work on these cars, the more confidence you get in trying to do more, getting into the jobs that you didn't think you were capable of doing. | ||
| Have you ever thought about a build-up straight from scratch? | ||
| That's probably what this little Nova wagon is going to be. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wanted a Nomad. | ||
| So my dad had a Nomad. | ||
| This thing had polished aluminum on the underneath floor pan. | ||
| He'd park it on a mirror in the shop so you could look underneath it and look how good the damn thing was. | ||
| It was frame off. | ||
| Hardly ever seen the road. | ||
| I mean, just clean as it could be from end to end. | ||
| And I love road trips. | ||
| The Nomad is the perfect road trip car. | ||
| But I just don't want to spend the money on a Nomad chassis and body. | ||
| They're just ridiculous to buy. | ||
| And I want to build the car. | ||
| I'm not an expert modder. | ||
| So this Nova wagon is perfect. | ||
| It's a wagon. | ||
| It's not a Nomad, but it's a little smaller, which I like. | ||
| And if I screw it up, it's okay. | ||
| If I screwed up a Nomad build, I'd be pissed. | ||
| Why are Nomads so expensive? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They're just rare, and it's like the old 55 Chevy wagon. | ||
| I'm trying to put into my head what a Nomad looks like. | ||
| What year? | ||
| Like a 55, 56, 57. Pull up like a 55 Nomad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| See, that to me is my ultimate car. | ||
| Uh... | ||
| But damn, man, I mean, they're just so high. | ||
| That's a beautiful car, though. | ||
| That's a different era, you know? | ||
| Like, when you look at the muscle cars of, like, the 1960s, and then you go to something like this, like, that's a whole different world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a different kind of thing. | ||
| I'd like to get, um, there was this one nomad, this guy chopped up and narrowed up, and he made, uh, one of those things, um, it's like a rat rod. | ||
| Out of it, yeah. | ||
| That was an idea for this Nova wagon, but I don't think I'm going to chop it up. | ||
| I think I'm going to keep it as it is. | ||
| When I was in high school, there was a man in the neighborhood when I was a kid that had a 55 Chevy, and it was the greatest thing anybody had ever seen in their lives. | ||
| And we would all wait while this guy drove by in his 50s. | ||
| 55 Chevy. | ||
| We just couldn't believe it was a real car that someone could own this. | ||
| It was black and mint. | ||
| It was a beautiful car. | ||
| Manual transmission. | ||
| He would just drive by in that thing. | ||
| We would all just have our jaws hanging out. | ||
| When I was a little boy, I had Hot Wheels. | ||
| My favorite Hot Wheel was the black 55 Chevy that had the flip hood with the flames on the front. | ||
| It was like an original Hot Wheel. | ||
| And ever since then, you know, that's kind of been my car, but I went from the regular, you know, sedan to the wagon. | ||
| I think that nomad's pretty awesome. | ||
| Do you have, like, a full garage set up where you can do repairs on things? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's kind of a farm shop, so it's dirty. | ||
| We fix lawnmowers. | ||
| We do some modding on our cars, whatever needs to be done in there. | ||
| I park my bus in there. | ||
| I got a bus that we take to the racetrack, and So, I mean, it's kind of just a big building. | ||
| We just got a sandblaster in there. | ||
| We got a big old, we got sheer in there. | ||
| We can do anything. | ||
| It's a man shop. | ||
| Yeah, whatever. | ||
| Man shop. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nice. | |
| So, tell me about your book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of the things that was surprising that I had heard was your experience with concussions. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Tell me about that. | ||
| I've had concussions. | ||
| In that flip I was talking about in 1998 at Daytona, I got a concussion from that crash. | ||
| I'd had concussions throughout my career at many different points and didn't think anything of them. | ||
| I thought when you got a concussion, you joked about it with your buddies, about how it made you feel, and you just rested until it was gone. | ||
| And you raced through it and eventually it'd go away and you were fine. | ||
| You know, it was just something that would go away and you never thought anything about, you never thought about seeing a doctor. | ||
| You never thought about getting treatment. | ||
| You didn't know there was even treatment available for a concussion. | ||
| You just thought it was something like a bruise, you know. | ||
| So this is going on throughout my whole career. | ||
| I was racing at, I was testing at Kansas Motor Speedway in 2012, blew a right front tire, hit the wall at 185 miles an hour, and it screwed me up. | ||
| And so that was a really not, you know, That wasn't a typical crash, not something that drivers deal with usually in their career. | ||
| This was something that was unique to me and it was just a terrible impact at a bad angle at a very, very fast rate of speed. | ||
| And I got out of the car and I knew something was wrong with me and I couldn't, you know, I couldn't I felt, you know, just like I'd been hitting the head with a bat, shocked and shell-shocked in a way, or just couldn't... | ||
| I couldn't... | ||
| Shake it off. | ||
| You just kind of wanted to shake your head and get it out, whatever it was, and you couldn't. | ||
| That's the way I failed immediately after that crash. | ||
| Our test was done because the car was killed. | ||
| So we went over to this place to get some lunch, and we're sitting there, and I started getting sick, nauseous, before we ever, you know, I wasn't eating. | ||
| We just ordered, we just sat down, and I started, I'm sitting with my team, all my guys, and I'm starting to, I feel like I'm going to throw up right there in front of them, and I'm getting nervous, and I don't, I haven't said to them that I feel this way, you know, so I don't want to tell them I feel this way. | ||
| But my crew chief, Steve LaTarte, is like a brother. | ||
| I was like, Steve, I am getting sick and something's wrong with me. | ||
| I don't know what's wrong with me, but I got to get out of this room. | ||
| It's lunch hour. | ||
| It's full of people, noises, talking, chatter, shit going on, and I got to get the hell out of there. | ||
| And as I was getting up to leave, my wife came walking in. | ||
| She was coming to get me. | ||
| We were going to Washington Redskins Monday night game and sitting on her box with Dan Snyder and whoever else was there. | ||
| So we had them plans to go. | ||
| I said, Amy, I'm going to go lay down in the car. | ||
| I just got to lay down in the car for a minute. | ||
| And I laid down in the car all the way to the airport. | ||
| I'm thinking, this is bad. | ||
| This is worse than I've ever felt anything, but hopefully it's going to go away. | ||
| And so we get to the game. | ||
| We went to the Redskins game. | ||
| We watched the game. | ||
| Did that whole thing. | ||
| And I went about four weeks of feeling bad and sick for about four weeks, and it finally went away. | ||
| And I knew that was unusual for it to be that long, but in my mind, I wasn't thinking doctor. | ||
| I wasn't thinking treatment. | ||
| I wasn't thinking anything like that. | ||
| It didn't even cross my mind to tell anybody or that I really needed... | ||
| I thought, you know, I thought that I had been dishonest and not... | ||
| I hadn't been honest with everybody about the way I was feeling, but I didn't ever think that it was going to cost me anything. | ||
| So I thought, alright, I'm feeling better. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| Go to this race. | ||
| I'd been racing the whole time, right? | ||
| Finally, four weeks later, I'm great. | ||
| I go to another race. | ||
| I'm racing. | ||
| I crashed. | ||
| And it all came right back. | ||
| Like, as bad as it was, if not worse. | ||
| And that's when I said, I've got to go to the doctor. | ||
| This is bad. | ||
| I can't even... | ||
| I can't keep crashing like this. | ||
| Just putting these concussions so close together is a bad deal. | ||
| This is dangerous. | ||
| And I couldn't bite my tongue. | ||
| My attitude and my emotions and shit was out of whack. | ||
| I couldn't control my anger. | ||
| And I was like, anybody say something I didn't like, I'm like... | ||
| I wanted to tell them to fuck off. | ||
| That was just not like me. | ||
| I couldn't keep myself calm. | ||
| Everything that I heard made me angry. | ||
| It was the craziest thing. | ||
| Even people just talking about stuff would just get under my skin. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| Real impatient. | ||
| And there were some new symptoms, but I finally went to the doctor and I went to this neurosurgeon in Charlotte, Dr. Petty. | ||
| He's like, I want you to meet this guy in Pittsburgh. | ||
| His name's Mickey Collins. | ||
| He works with the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Penguins. | ||
| And I'm like, alright. | ||
| I go up there and I'm thinking I'm going to meet this guy that works with the Penguins and the Steelers and he sees... | ||
| He's a doctor that sees anybody and everybody. | ||
| There's kids in there that got hurt playing on the playground. | ||
| There's workers, carpenters, housewives. | ||
| Everybody's in that damn waiting room to see this man. | ||
| He sees about 25 people a day. | ||
| He's an expert on head injuries. | ||
| He's on the cutting edge of whatever the hell the new shit is, he knows it. | ||
| His team and his people are investigating it. | ||
| He fixed me. | ||
| I go there and I'm like, this is what happened. | ||
| This is how it happened. | ||
| I crashed. | ||
| I hit it. | ||
| I didn't tell anybody about it. | ||
| I was sick for four weeks. | ||
| I got better. | ||
| I crashed in this race and I feel sick again. | ||
| And he was like, well, these are two different injuries, two different parts of your brain. | ||
| The first injury, you bruised this right front edge of your brain when you hit the wall. | ||
| He said this second crash, you twisted the base of your brain and injured some things in the back of your brain, and that's why you're having the emotional and different things like that. | ||
| But he went deeper into it than that. | ||
| He was like, you know, we did all these tests and visual tests and all kinds of stuff. | ||
| And I'd go back to, I mean, we did this thing. | ||
| I went through the gamut for a whole day of doing tests. | ||
| And then I went back every week before I, you know, and in two weeks I was back racing again. | ||
| I was clear. | ||
| And so he took an injury that I hid and took four weeks to heal and healed it in two weeks. | ||
| What did he do to heal it? | ||
| He gave me... | ||
| I never took any medication on this particular issue. | ||
| He gave me home exercises and eye exercises. | ||
| There was... | ||
| I had problems with focusing and making my eyes work, tracking an object like a bird flying across the sky or anything like that. | ||
| My eyes couldn't stay on it. | ||
| If I looked at you, my eyes would bounce off of you and they just wouldn't stay. | ||
| If you said, hey man, we'll take a picture and you held up a camera And I tried to look at the lens and smile. | ||
| My eyes would want to jump off of that object. | ||
| They didn't want to look at what I wanted them to look at and track anything, going anywhere. | ||
| What was the cause of that? | ||
| The brain has... | ||
| The ocular stuff, I mean, you can have injury to that part of your brain or you can have an injury to the vestibular part of your brain that may, like if you have bad balance, then your eyes and your balance work together. | ||
| And so if you have vestibular issues, that can create ocular issues. | ||
| That can affect your anxiety and depression and things like that. | ||
| You can have an injury to one part of your brain that affects four other areas. | ||
| And we talk about that in the book. | ||
| Mickey comes into the book and I'll say, this is what I was feeling, this is what I did, and Mickey will come in behind me and say, this is the medical science behind that and this is how we treated it and why. | ||
| I would have an injury to one singular area of my brain, but I would have four different symptoms affecting four different parts of my brain, four different senses. | ||
| And, you know, he would have to hone in on the one that was broken and then know to fix it. | ||
| And when he started fixing it, all the other ones would start communicating together. | ||
| The brain would start working again, balance and visual and all those things would start to work again and anxiety and all those things would, you know, begin to come back in tune. | ||
| No, when you said he fixed it, what is he doing? | ||
| Well, so he gave me physical exercises to do. | ||
| I had some balance issues. | ||
| Basically, if I turned my head or looked up and down, I would get dizzy and sick. | ||
| Like, my stomach would turn if I turned my head left to right, if I looked up and down, just sitting there. | ||
| Like, the best thing for me was to sit on the couch and not move. | ||
| Literally not move. | ||
| I felt fine then, but if I moved an inch, it would make your stomach nauseous. | ||
| I did a lot of exercises that created a ton of motion with my head, lifting heavy balls up. | ||
| And passing them over my shoulder this way or that way, taking a ball and turning around and hitting it this way, taking the ball, turning around and hitting it, just doing that for hours and hours and hours. | ||
| And so I would train, basically, I was training myself to balance again. | ||
| Training my body to balance itself again. | ||
| If I couldn't see a horizon or a flat surface, I couldn't tell which way was up. | ||
| It was so bad. | ||
| The visual stuff, there was these, I had a string with these balls on it, and I would hold the string on my nose and hold it out here, and I had to look at all those balls, and it would, my eyes are focusing, just, all it's doing is really just making my eyes change focus, from one to the next to the next, and back, one to the next, next, and back. | ||
| And there was this I-chart on the wall, and it had all these letters and all these numbers on it. | ||
| And I had to look at that I-chart and turn my head back and forth this way, but look at that I-chart and count from A to Z, but backwards. | ||
| Do the alphabet. | ||
| So I'd have to look for the letters. | ||
| Where's Z? You know, and go backwards. | ||
| Or one to twenty, you know. | ||
| All while you're shaking your head. | ||
| Two, three. | ||
| Yeah, and standing up and walking backwards and walking forward. | ||
| And what is this doing to your mind? | ||
| Like, how does this fix your mind? | ||
| What is the process? | ||
| You know, I don't know what the real... | ||
| I don't know what... | ||
| It's the... | ||
| I've had... | ||
| The problem with me was my vestibular system, so my ability to understand balance and understand horizons and... | ||
| So I was putting my mind in a complex environment or making my mind do complex things that you don't do every day. | ||
| And it's just firing up these parts of your brain and exercises them? | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of like stretching this muscle. | ||
| They used to say when you would get hurt to go into a dark room and hide, no electronics, no TV, just sit in a dark room and wait. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what they believe today is that exposure is what helps. | ||
| Pushing yourself into these complex environments and doing things that are really challenging for yourself. | ||
| Even doing that, if I put you in front of that eye chart and made you turn your head back and forth and walking two steps forward, two steps back, it would be difficult for you. | ||
| But for an injured person, it's super difficult. | ||
| It has to be really challenging. | ||
| But it just sort of tunes the mind or retrains the brain to balance. | ||
| It retrains the eyes to track on objects and to lock on objects and stay on them. | ||
| What's crazy is it sounds like physical rehab. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| Like if you had a knee injury or something like that. | ||
| Yes, there's a lot of physical rehab to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a ton of it. | ||
| We don't think about that when it comes to the mind, though. | ||
| We usually think of the mind as like something that needs to be healed with medicine. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| Probably 85% of the work that I did was physical therapy. | ||
| Did you change your diet or anything like that? | ||
| Because they say inflammatory causing foods or inflammation causing foods. | ||
| I did not change. | ||
| I strictly drank water. | ||
| I didn't drink anything other than water. | ||
| And I incorporated bananas and things like that into my diet that I never ate before. | ||
| Because of potassium? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What effect does potassium have on brain recovery? | ||
| I just hear that it's good for your brain. | ||
| It's good for your brain. | ||
| My doctor didn't say start eating this stuff. | ||
| When you go and get injured like that, you're going to get people texting you and giving you information here and there. | ||
| You kind of take what you want and go, I don't know about that. | ||
| Did you ever mess with CBD at all? | ||
| CBD. You don't know what that is? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| CBD is a non-psychoactive form of hemp, and it's a radical inflammation fighter. | ||
| And a lot of people that have some pretty significant injuries to the brain, a lot of fighters take it right after fights. | ||
| It used to be... | ||
| It's still... | ||
| No, I've actually read a little bit about that just a couple weeks ago because it controls anxiety. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it's helped a lot of people with that. | ||
| One of the problems that I face just on the regular every day is where my anxiety is. | ||
| Is that because of being famous? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it comes from your childhood and just things that you experience in life. | ||
| Like, what are you anxious about? | ||
| Just general social situations? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I would avoid... | ||
| I've gotten a lot better. | ||
| I would avoid concerts, even if I love the band. | ||
| I would... | ||
| Just because there's too many people there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But is it too many people that are going to bother you? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| And I like being bothered. | ||
| I don't mind people coming up to me and saying, Man, that's cool. | ||
| I know who you are. | ||
| I mean, that shit feels great. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was more about, like, am I going to be accepted? | ||
| Is it my scene? | ||
| Is... | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I just always had a lot of anxiety over... | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So, anxiety about whether or not you're going to be... | ||
| Fit in. | ||
| Fit in. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So, you felt like an outsider when you were younger. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, that anxiety... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I still feel... | ||
| I don't... | ||
| That shit goes away hard. | ||
| It takes a long time for that to go away. | ||
| Yeah, like my wife, she likes ashwagandha. | ||
| You ever heard of ashwagandha? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, so she likes that, and I take that every once in a while, and I think that shit works pretty good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Kind of keeps you calm. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, but I've never tried the, I've read about, when I was reading about ashwagandha is when I read about that stuff you're talking about. | ||
| I'll get you some. | ||
| All right. | ||
| It'll help. | ||
| CBD's amazing. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And you know what's really good? | ||
| There's some muscle balms that work really good on sore joints and stuff. | ||
| I mean, but like, and nothing I've ever used before. | ||
| Better than anything. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| CBD just gets right into the muscles and just relaxes all the inflammation. | ||
| And the best part about it is it's 100% natural and no side effects. | ||
| There's nothing. | ||
| But in terms of like, there's a bunch of different CBD oils you can take. | ||
| They chill you out. | ||
| But they don't get you high or anything. | ||
| You're not weirded out. | ||
| But they just calm you down. | ||
| And I wonder how much that calming down is because of inflammation, just reducing inflammation. | ||
| It seems that your body knows what to do with it. | ||
| Your body's like, oh, I know what this is. | ||
| This is good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I got Ted Nugent into it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Man, Ted Nugent, before he came on here, he was telling me how he's all anti-marijuana and this and that. | ||
| And we had this conversation about it. | ||
| It makes people lazy. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| I don't think it does, man. | ||
| I think people are just lazy. | ||
| And I told him, because I know he's got some serious knee problems. | ||
| He had all these knee surgeries. | ||
| He's a madman. | ||
| He used to jump off the top of the fucking stage and land on the ground and blew his meniscus out. | ||
| I got him on the CBD bomb now. | ||
| He texted me the other day and said, there's not a thing I've ever used that's helped me like this before. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, so now I'm having cases sent to him, like, every week. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Yeah, he loves the shit. | ||
| I mean, he wants to endorse it, which is hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, the Motor City Madman, Ted Nugent, super anti-marijuana, wants to endorse a cannabis product that's helped his needs. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But it doesn't do anything to you psychologically. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It doesn't affect you. | ||
| No, yeah. | ||
| Other than calm you down. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I read about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It doesn't have that part of the drug that makes you hot. | ||
| Well, my friend's son has... | ||
| It's a type of epilepsy. | ||
| Brendan, Chubb, and he started giving his kid CBD oil, and it stopped the epilepsy in his tracks. | ||
| Yeah, I think I read where it's been used for that for years. | ||
| Yes, yes, yeah. | ||
| Seizures and stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yeah, for seizures. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just a radical inflammation decreaser. | ||
| It just figures out a way. | ||
| It has some sort of interaction with your body where it just reduces inflammation. | ||
| But it's just, like I said, it also calms people down, alleviates anxiety, and no side effects. | ||
| That's the most important one. | ||
| Some people, it gives them a weird stomach. | ||
| They don't like the way, but I think they're probably taking too much or maybe it's expired or something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've never had those issues, but I'll get you something. | ||
| You should look into that too. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what else did they do with you? | ||
| Did you do any cryotherapy or anything like that that also would reduce information? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Basically I went and in 2012 we did basic physical therapy and eye therapy, eye tests and different eye exercises. | ||
| And in two weeks, I was back in the race car. | ||
| I raced for... | ||
| That was in 2012. I raced all the way to 2016. Two weeks you felt 100%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| So with all these crazy exercises you're doing, when did you feel like it had settled in? | ||
| Like, wow, this is really working. | ||
| Pretty, I mean, if it was a two-week period, it wasn't, you know, it was a day or two, I guess. | ||
| You know, I mean, I can't even remember. | ||
| I can't even remember that far back. | ||
| A day or two? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I imagine it was feeling pretty good after a couple days. | ||
| I'd have to, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if it affected me right away or, but I know I was, by the time we had, I take an impact test, which is basically kind of measures memory and things like that, all kinds of different stuff, and And my measurements had come back to my norm, you know, my basic You know, they kind of make you take the impact test beforehand, so that gets your blueprint of how you are. | ||
| And then whenever you get injured, you take it again, and they'll line that up against that and say, okay, yeah, you're deficient here. | ||
| This is a problem. | ||
| Maybe it's not diagnosing a concussion, but it's asking us to look in this area. | ||
| And so you have a baseline, and then you have whatever your injury or post-crash baseline is. | ||
| So I was matching all my normals on that impact test, and that was kind of the trigger for them to go, man, if you feel good, you look good here, all the things are saying that you're back. | ||
| And I wanted to go race, so I felt pretty good. | ||
| Is it a strange feeling knowing that you can't see what the damage is? | ||
| Like a brain injury is a strange one, right? | ||
| Because it's affecting everything in your body, but you don't see it. | ||
| Like if you have a broken arm, you're looking at it, you know it's in a cast, it gets fixed. | ||
| You know, you're aware of it. | ||
| You're doing rehab on it. | ||
| You're looking at it while you're doing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's something about the brain where it's all, like, you can kind of mindfuck yourself and say, eh, I think I'm okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's why, so in the book I talk about these notes I started taking. | ||
| After that crash in 2012, when I would wreck after that, I would get sick and I wouldn't tell anybody. | ||
| And so I started writing these notes in a journal in my phone. | ||
| And from 2013 all the way to 2016, I had this long journal of crashes and how I felt. | ||
| And I would crash on Sunday and I'd write in the journal on Sunday night, Monday morning, Monday at lunch, Monday at night, you know, three times a day every day until whenever I felt good, which was usually either Wednesday or Thursday of that week. | ||
| And I was writing these notes because I couldn't tell if I was getting better. | ||
| The brain injury or any type of head injury, I mean, if you said, how's it feel Monday, and then you asked me again Tuesday, I'd be like, I really don't fucking know, man. | ||
| It's there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know if it's better. | ||
| It just feels bad. | ||
| And so I would try to write as detailed as I could on a Monday and then try to write as detailed as I could on Tuesday and reread Monday and see, hmm, is it better? | ||
| I can see in the comments or, you know, I can't really remember exactly what I was feeling Monday, but in the comments it seems better and I would write these notes, right? | ||
| And so I kept doing this and I thought I was treating myself. | ||
| And eventually it caught up with me. | ||
| Like I had about a dozen concussions in a period of about two and a half years. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I got to where I couldn't walk. | ||
| And I called my owner and I was like, man, I need to talk to you. | ||
| I can't race this weekend. | ||
| I can't hardly walk. | ||
| And my balance is so bad that I can't get up off the couch without holding on to something and walking across the room without grabbing stuff as I go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| He was like, we got to go back to the doctor. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| He was mad. | ||
| He's like, you know, what are you fucking doing getting to the doctor? | ||
| Why aren't you at the doctor? | ||
| And I was like, you're right. | ||
| I need to go to the doctor. | ||
| I mean, a concussed person doesn't have good judgment and self-awareness, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're just in a freaking, you're in a, it's like being hungover. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like the worst hangover. | ||
| You can't make decisions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I went back to Pittsburgh and saw Mickey again, and I had to stay out the entire whole half of the year in 2016 to get better. | ||
| It took me five months to get well instead of two weeks. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And that time, they put me on medication that would drop my anxiety levels, so the anxiety levels would stay down so that I could concentrate on the injury. | ||
| What medications? | ||
| I don't know exactly the names, but it was very, very small doses, and it would take about three weeks for it to kind of kick in. | ||
| I'd have to take it for a while before it'd start working. | ||
| But it just made me real chill. | ||
| And it made me not analyze myself every single day when I got up. | ||
| When I got up, I wouldn't go, hmm, is it still there? | ||
| Is it as bad as it was? | ||
| Let me walk across the room and see how I feel. | ||
| Let me go do this and test this and try this and try this and try this all day long and see how I feel. | ||
| It made me stop doing that because I was driving myself crazy. | ||
| He gave me a lot more physical therapy, basketball, movements, anything that got my head moving. | ||
| I'd do those exercises for about two weeks. | ||
| Some of them would stop triggering symptoms. | ||
| I'd go back to his place in Pittsburgh. | ||
| We'd go through about 30 more exercises and I'd take home about 15 that made the symptoms trigger. | ||
| And I'd do them for about two or three weeks, and some of them would stop working. | ||
| I'd go back to him. | ||
| We'd go through more physical exercises. | ||
| Kept doing that process over and over and over. | ||
| I took the medication for about a year and a half. | ||
| And I had a lot of... | ||
| They gave me this computer program for my eyes and I was wearing these... | ||
| I would wear these 3D glasses and this computer program would try to take these 3D objects and go to 2D and back to 3D and my eyes would literally try... | ||
| It felt like it was trying to rip my eyes apart. | ||
| It hurt, like physically hurt when this object would try to go from 3D to 2D and it was going very very slowly and it felt like it was trying to rip my eyes apart. | ||
| And imagine your eyes are tethered together. | ||
| So when you look left, they both go there, right? | ||
| And they both go wherever you look. | ||
| They go together like they're supposed to. | ||
| And mine didn't want to do that. | ||
| You couldn't physically see my eyes towed out or going the wrong way. | ||
| You couldn't see that. | ||
| But when I try to look over here, they both didn't go to the same place. | ||
| And that action or that computer program was strengthening that activity of my eyes trying to do something together. | ||
| I would walk, so if I, I've got these buffalo on my property, and they're across the field, you know, 200, 300 yards out across the field, out the back window of my living room, and if I walked across the floor, every step I took would knock my eyes off of the buffalo. | ||
| Like, they're way out there, and I could look at them, but if I took a step, my eyes would shake, and I couldn't, I'd have to find them again, you know? | ||
| And so that computer program would strengthen my ability. | ||
| It's called gaze stabilization. | ||
| It would make it to where when I walk, if I'm walking or bouncing across the room, I can still look at you in the eyes like a normal person. | ||
| And when I was at my worst, I couldn't do that. | ||
| But that took a long time to fix. | ||
| The book basically is me admitting making those mistakes. | ||
| I should have went to him as soon as I got sick again the first time instead of trying to document it myself and hide it and manage it myself and trying to get to whatever the end of my career was, whenever that moment was, and retire thinking I was going to walk away without anybody ever knowing. | ||
| And I had to retire after that. | ||
| After that 2016 year of missing half a season and going through all that, I didn't want to go through it again. | ||
| I had one more year on my contract in 2017, so I finished that season, and that was that. | ||
| Were you apprehensive while you were finishing that season? | ||
| I didn't want to get hurt. | ||
| I didn't want to go back through that whole process again and go through that rehab again. | ||
| I didn't want to get sick again. | ||
| Me and my wife just got married on New Year's of 2016-17, so we are newlyweds. | ||
| She's pregnant. | ||
| We're going to have a baby. | ||
| I didn't want to go through any of that stuff sick. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I told my doctor, though, you'll like this, since now we know each other so well. | ||
| When I was ill in the hospital, or when I was with Mickey in Pittsburgh, my wedding was on New Year's, and this was probably around October. | ||
| No, this was probably in August. | ||
| I said, I need two things. | ||
| I need to be able to go through my wedding. | ||
| On my wedding day and my wedding night and that whole experience, I want to do it with a completely clear head. | ||
| I want to be able to remember everything. | ||
| I don't want to be on any drugs. | ||
| I don't want to have any symptoms. | ||
| I don't want to even be thinking about my head or reminded about it at any moment during that night. | ||
| I want my wedding to be perfect. | ||
| And I want to be able to climb up in my deer stand without feeling like I'm going to fall out of it. | ||
| And he said he'd fix it. | ||
| And I was hunting that October. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Or that November. | ||
| In doing these exercises and in fixing the issues that you were facing, were you concerned, though, about long-term effects? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Over the last five years, it's been hard for me to turn my back on articles, stories about NFL players and their history. | ||
| The whole lawsuit brought up so many stories about what these guys have went through, what their families have went through. | ||
| It's been impossible not to read that stuff and fear that, is that something that's going to happen to me? | ||
| Do I need to be worried about my long-term health? | ||
| It took me the longest time to watch that concussion movie because I just didn't want to know what it had to tell me. | ||
| And I... Eventually, I got to a place where I thought... | ||
| I talked to Mickey. | ||
| When I was hurt in 2016, I said, Mickey, why aren't you shutting me down? | ||
| He shut down some player. | ||
| I don't know the guy's name. | ||
| I don't know whether he was a hockey player or a football player, but the guy was making millions of dollars, and he was in his mid-20s, and Mickey had to say, you can't play anymore. | ||
| And I wanted Mickey to tell me that. | ||
| I didn't want to have to go out the room and say, y'all, I'm retiring. | ||
| I don't want to do this anymore. | ||
| I wanted to say, y'all, Mickey said I got to retire. | ||
| But he wouldn't. | ||
| And he said, you know, you're not where that guy is. | ||
| And I don't see what's going on. | ||
| I don't see anything going on with you that tells me you can't race if you want to race. | ||
| I said, well, what if I get hurt again? | ||
| He said, if you get hurt again, I can fix it. | ||
| It's up to you if you want to go through that. | ||
| He said, you're just as likely to get hurt as you were before the injury. | ||
| You're going to race in racing and racing is dangerous. | ||
| You got to make up your mind whether you want to go out there and risk getting hurt again. | ||
| And if you do, I'll fix it. | ||
| You can come right back here and we'll fix it all over again. | ||
| And I was like, alright, if you're not shutting me down, then you must not be worried about my long-term health. | ||
| And he's like, no, I'm not worried about your long-term health. | ||
| There's nothing going on here that I see that would make me concerned about your long-term health. | ||
| And so... | ||
| With all that said, I got married. | ||
| I had a little girl. | ||
| I'm sitting there on them days at home with them, and I'm thinking to myself, what if I'm sitting here worried about CTE or my mind, you know... | ||
| Going away, and it never happens. | ||
| You know, am I going to sit here and worry about that at 44 all the way through my 50s and my 60s and 70s and then one day wake up at 80 and go, damn, I lived a pretty good life. | ||
| Why did I worry about all that? | ||
| Why didn't I enjoy what was in front of me? | ||
| And so... | ||
| So I'm going to enjoy what's in front of me, not going to worry about CTE, not going to worry about my long-term health. | ||
| And there's another thing, too. | ||
| The conversation about concussions has really just skyrocketed into warp speed over the last five or six years. | ||
| And the way they treated me in 2012 to the way they treated me in 2016 was completely 180 degrees because they know so much more and they understand so much more about treating the injury. | ||
| And so if I do have any problems, whenever that is, I'm confident that there'll be something there for me, that there'll be something there to give me a good quality of life. | ||
| I had a hell of a run. | ||
| I had a lot of fun. | ||
| I raised hell. | ||
| I partied. | ||
| I won. | ||
| I lost. | ||
| And if it all ended now, I wouldn't have missed out on anything other than my wife and my little girl. | ||
| And so... | ||
| I'm content with where I am. | ||
| All I want to be able to do is just be a good father and be a good husband. | ||
| And I think I'm going to have that opportunity. | ||
| But if anything does happen to me, I think that there will be some technology, some information, some medicine, something that would give me a good enough quality of life that I would be able to enjoy those things. | ||
| I think you made the wise choice in retiring. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| And I think that, look, I'm very familiar with head injuries. | ||
| I'm around people that have had them all the time. | ||
| And I think it's something that we're understanding now more than ever before. | ||
| But someone like you, writing a book about this and your experience with it, I think is really important for people. | ||
| I think it's going to help a lot of people. | ||
| It's going to help a lot of people understand it. | ||
| And the more we talk about this, the more this gets out there in the public, the more it helps just regular folks that have had concussions understand what a significant thing this is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This book is to not discourage you from doing what you want to do. | ||
| If you want to race, race. | ||
| If you want to fight, fight. | ||
| If you want to do whatever it is, play football, I'm not discouraging anyone from doing that. | ||
| I'm encouraging it. | ||
| I'm just saying that whenever you are hurt, if you ever do find yourself with an injury, don't make the bad choices that I made. | ||
| That's really all I'm doing here is to share with people the mistakes that I made. | ||
| I never would have known about Mickey had somebody not taken me to him. | ||
| I would have never even considered the fact that there was treatment for a head injury had I not met Mickey. | ||
| I mean, there's people out there today that don't know there's treatment, that they're living with these injuries. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Our veterans that don't think that they can be healed. | ||
| There's people in my timeline all the time saying, man, I'm glad you're talking about concussions. | ||
| I had one and I'm dealing with it all the time. | ||
| Boy, it's just nagging me every day. | ||
| And the truth is that you don't have to even live that way. | ||
| There's a better quality of life with the information that they know today. | ||
| Even if this injury was 10 years ago or 15 years ago, there's stuff today that can help give you a better quality of life. | ||
| And so that's what the book's about. | ||
| It's an amazing time. | ||
| When you think about the fact that 2012, you had an injury and they treated you one way. | ||
| 2016, they had already advanced their techniques, and I'm sure they've advanced even more now in 2018. It's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, and we're living in this. | ||
| We're living in this big learning experience right now. | ||
| Yeah, I know they're starting to do some stuff with stem cells as well. | ||
| And, you know, there's a guy named Dr. Neil Reardon that I've had on the podcast before that he did wonders for Mel Gibson's dad. | ||
| And so Mel Gibson came on and wanted to talk about this. | ||
| They have to do treatment in Panama. | ||
| Treatments here in the United States because they're not legal yet But the effects that they're having on people that are they're bringing down to Panama. | ||
| I mean, it's just mind-blowing You know, and I'm hoping that's gonna also Help people with traumatic brain injuries and CTE and some other things as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I'm excited for them to find a way to detect CTE and the living human being and They already have. | ||
| They've figured out a way to do that now. | ||
| It's very, very recently they've started to do that. | ||
| It's a major concern, obviously, for fighters, but I would imagine that someone in your line of work, it's not thought about the same way. | ||
| If people think about it with football, they directly associate boxing with head injury. | ||
| They don't directly associate race car driving. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm hopeful that there aren't a lot of drivers that have experienced what I've experienced and crashed the way I've crashed. | ||
| And there's drivers that will race their lives without it, you know, without ever having that experience. | ||
| And I'm glad for that. | ||
| But for the guys that have, I've had veterans, retired guys call me, say, man, I've given my doctor's number to so many damn people ever since I've spoken up about this in 2012 to now in this book. | ||
| Mickey says there's at least three people a week that come in his office talking about me, and that's why they're there. | ||
| And so that's the whole mission, man. | ||
| Because Mickey gave me my life back twice. | ||
| I'm telling you, man, in 16, I was in bad shape. | ||
| And without my wife and without Mickey, I don't know that I would have made it out there then. | ||
| This book or anything else, this podcast, any opportunity to talk about this is only to push more people to Mickey so that he can do the same thing for them he did for me. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| There's a guy named Dr. Mark Gordon that's also been on this podcast before that does a lot of work with TBI and soldiers and football players and stuff like that. | ||
| So there's a lot of other doctors out there that are specializing in this and realizing this is a significant issue. | ||
| Just so happy that those people are out there. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, they're getting some good, you know, they're getting some opportunities to actually, you know, get up there and speak up about it and make it known. | ||
| I know, I have Mickey. | ||
| There's a bunch of Mickeys out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's a lot getting learned right now. | ||
| Well, there's just so many people that are silently suffering that don't want to open their mouth because they don't want to appear weak. | ||
| That's part of it, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of people don't want to... | ||
| There's some people that just don't know where to go, you know, or don't think that they can afford it or don't think that they're going to get that... | ||
| You know, like, when I first went to Mickey, I thought I was going to go in there and see just Steelers and NHL players. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's how ignorant I was about it. | ||
| And, you know, he sees every man. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, being a race car driver is such a wild, exciting, powerful way to make a living. | ||
| Do you ever get the itch now? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| I ran a race about a month or two months ago at Richmond, Virginia. | ||
| We have an Xfinity series that's sponsored by Xfinity. | ||
| It's basically our college level. | ||
| They race on Saturdays before the big show on Sunday at the same track. | ||
| It's an abbreviated race. | ||
| I own a couple cars that race in that every week. | ||
| I ran in a race at Richmond. | ||
| To scratch the itch a little bit and had a blast. | ||
| We ran great. | ||
| Led a lot of laps. | ||
| Had fun. | ||
| Accomplished everything we wanted to accomplish. | ||
| I'll probably run one more next year at another track and probably do that every year until I just don't feel like doing it anymore. | ||
| Just for fun. | ||
| Yeah, just for fun. | ||
| But no more than that. | ||
| And I never go back to the Cup Series. | ||
| So the Cup Series, people talk about it like, man, you can just go back. | ||
| It's like, you can't just go back. | ||
| It'd be like one of the fighters just taking a couple years off and then jumping back in for the championship match. | ||
| It's too elite. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Well, that just happened. | ||
| Conor McGregor just came back after two years off and fought Khabib Nurmagomedov and got smashed. | ||
| Yeah, so it's a good point you're making. | ||
| I mean, he probably would have lost anyway to Khabib. | ||
| Khabib's just a monster. | ||
| But who knows? | ||
| He might not have. | ||
| If I would go back, it would take me six months just to get up to speed, not even really even get competitive, just to get up to speed physically and mentally. | ||
| Bring yourself to your A game. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it ain't something you just get out of and go back in. | ||
| People on the outside looking at, well, you're steering, you're shifting. | ||
| What's the big deal? | ||
| Hit the gas? | ||
| Go! | ||
| It's such a... | ||
| Man, if you take a week off, you just get so behind. | ||
| What is it that you get behind? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What... | |
| Well, so our sport, I was talking about this with a friend today, and he made a good point. | ||
| He said, there was a guy, he says, our sport is the only one where the ball is governed, and the ball is inspected, like the race car, the car, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The physical car itself. | ||
| So technology is one of the things that is, like, what's fast today will be obsolete and slow six months from now. | ||
| You wouldn't even think about running it. | ||
| Six months? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's constantly evolving. | ||
| And somebody next door, the guy next to you and the guy next to him and the guy next to him is always constantly trying to build a better mousetrap. | ||
| And everybody's... | ||
| And what's new and badass today is going to be okay and not very good six months from now. | ||
| And... | ||
| They're constantly, so the teams are constantly working, and if you're not in those cars and current and in that flow, in that changing, in that cycle, in that wheel, then you can't, you're behind. | ||
| Like, when you get in the car and you get around the team, like, you're behind on what's in the car, what's happening with the car, and I don't know, it's just not something you just jump in and out of, because you're not really the The key component. | ||
| Like, your body as a fighter, you know your body, and your body is the tool. | ||
| A football player, same thing. | ||
| Quarterback, his arm's the tool, right? | ||
| In racing, it's the car. | ||
| And so, if you're not in it and around it every day, you will be behind on technology, understanding what's happening, what teams are doing, what you need to be doing. | ||
| The damn dash is full of switches with all kinds of shit going on, and this needs to be on, and this needs to be off, and this needs to be back on and off and on. | ||
| And there's, you know, levers, there's brake levers. | ||
| Some drivers have four fucking brake levers. | ||
| There's like a rear... | ||
| You can shut off the left front, the right rear, the right front. | ||
| You can put all the brakes from the back to the front, from the left to the right. | ||
| I mean, that's just the brakes. | ||
| And, yeah, I mean, there's just so many... | ||
| There's just a lot going on that... | ||
| It would take you a while to get back up to speed if you were to take some time off. | ||
| It's just not as easy as it used to be. | ||
| I had no idea there were that many brake options. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean you can have as many as you want or as little as you want. | ||
| Some guys really think that that stuff's a good tool for them to be able to adjust the brakes and change how the brakes work on all four corners of the car. | ||
| Some of them do. | ||
| They move them during the race, while they're racing. | ||
| They're changing them and fooling with them. | ||
| In an Indy car, you can adjust the roll bars and wings and all that stuff in those cars and stuff like that. | ||
| As a race car driver, there's a ton of stuff going on in that car that people don't even know about. | ||
| So it would just take you a while to get all that stuff automatic in your mind? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would get in the car and forget about those tools and forget that I have those adjustments and knowledge and getting beat by guys that are using it every day. | ||
| Now, how much time are you in a car in a race? | ||
| Three hours, probably three and a half hours. | ||
| Do you do anything or do you take anything to keep you concentrating at your full potential during that time? | ||
| Vitamins? | ||
| I never did. | ||
| I just mixed water and orange Gatorade. | ||
| So you have your electrolytes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 50-50? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jimmy Johnson, several of those guys do energy chews, different things. | ||
| A lot of Gatorade-oriented stuff. | ||
| Gatorade's a sponsor for Jimmy, so he's going to have the Gatorade chews or whatever, you know. | ||
| Just because you must be sweating like a pig in those things, right? | ||
| You sweat a ton. | ||
| You lose anywhere from around six to eight pounds a race. | ||
| It's all just water weight, and you just put it right back on in a day or two. | ||
| Is it really hot in the car? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, in Chicago this year, it was 150 degrees in the car. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| So it's a sauna. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We had these temperature gauges in the car, so we're seeing them from the broadcast booth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| We can see during the in-car camera, it'll be pointed at that temperature gauge, and all of the guys' cars were 150 degrees inside, all the drivers, and it was miserable. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So is there any fear of people blacking out from heat exhaustion? | ||
| You know, that's something that I've always kind of been concerned with. | ||
| I think that we don't have that concern today, but it is coming. | ||
| And we need to, like, if we have 150 degree in-car temperatures, I think that we need to think about how to try not to have that. | ||
| You know, try to do something to where, man, is that really necessary that we put the drivers through that? | ||
| Is it because the engine's in front of you, and as you're driving, the heat from the engine just blows into the driver's compartment? | ||
| Yeah, that and the brakes, everything. | ||
| The brakes? | ||
| Yeah, the brakes are going to be a thousand degrees on the calipers, and that heat's radiating into the car. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The drivers can open up these NACADUCs to allow air into the car, but that's going to hurt. | ||
| Slows you down? | ||
| Well, yeah, it's going to slow you down. | ||
| It's going to hurt the performance of the car. | ||
| And so the drivers try to trim the cars out so much that there's not a lot of air moving around in the car. | ||
| And it's so low to the ground, there's not a lot of air moving around under the car either. | ||
| So that air under the car is just kind of baking in there and just sitting in there. | ||
| So they're miserable. | ||
| They're a miserable, miserable, miserable car. | ||
| When I watch races and I'm like, you know, I'd love to get out there and do that for a few minutes, but damn, running three hours in a 150 degree race car. | ||
| It's miserable. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| It is the worst experience. | ||
| I can't imagine being in a sauna just sitting there for three hours. | ||
| Never mind... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Driving a car around a bunch of other cars. | |
| Everyone's going 200 miles an hour. | ||
| The worst part is when you slow down. | ||
| The caution comes out because it gets hotter. | ||
| When the caution comes out and you have to come in and change tires and you're sitting there and you go about 8 or 10 pace laps at 50 miles an hour, that's when you get to think about it. | ||
| That's when you're sitting there going, damn, this is hot! | ||
| While you're racing, you're almost so hyper-focused on what you're doing, it kind of doesn't bother you as bad. | ||
| It distracts you. | ||
| Is there anything they can do to cool you off with your suit? | ||
| Does your suit do anything? | ||
| There's these new vests that we wear that has a gel in it, and you plug into a little machine that pumps it, and so you unplug it to get out of the car. | ||
| Those work really well. | ||
| I actually used one the last year of my career, and it was very comfortable. | ||
| So there's some innovative stuff out there. | ||
| They have a helmet cooler. | ||
| There's a hose that plugs into the top of your helmet, and it blows some air in there. | ||
| It's a little bit cooler. | ||
| But those two things draw so much amps that the teams don't want to use them. | ||
| The drivers want to use them, but the crew chiefs don't want you drawing that many amps off the alternator. | ||
| They want to use amps for other things that are going to make the car go faster. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| That's why there's no AC. Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Man. | ||
| Now, when you think back on doing all that stuff that you did do, and think about those kind of races, and think about all the endurance and all the different aspects of it, does it ever seem kind of crazy that you did it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, that I raced? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, now that you're not racing, you're like, whoa, what a... | ||
| Wild way to make a living. | ||
| Yeah, like I can't believe it happened to me. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| My dad was sort of this I'm an invincible hero, and I wanted to do what he did. | ||
| I didn't think I was going to get to do that. | ||
| When I started doing it, I was thinking to myself, I can't believe this is happening to me. | ||
| When I started to win, I won a few races. | ||
| When I was 20 years old, I wasn't thinking, man, I'm going to be a champion. | ||
| I'm going to win 20 races. | ||
| I'm going to win 50 races. | ||
| I'm going to kick some ass. | ||
| I was thinking, I sure would love to do this and pay my bills. | ||
| I would love to do this just for a living, not have to work. | ||
| Changing oil wasn't the best, you know, wasn't where I wanted to be. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Working in the service department was fun, but damn, I wanted to be a race car driver. | ||
| And so when I made it, I didn't really... | ||
| I wanted to win, but damn, I just wanted to make money to afford to do it for a living, and that's all I ever wanted. | ||
| So the wins, Daytona 500s, and all that shit was a bonus. | ||
| And when I look back on it now, I'm like, man, I was so lucky. | ||
| Holy cow, was I lucky to do what we did, and do what I did, and win what I did, and... | ||
| Very lucky. | ||
| Do you think you had such great success, not just because, obviously, your dad is one of the greatest of all time, but also because your love for it was what propelled you? | ||
| It wasn't trying to seek fame or fortune. | ||
| You just truly loved racing, and that's why you became so great at it. | ||
| Yeah, my dad's... | ||
| The link to my father opened up a shit ton of doors for me, opened up so many opportunities for me. | ||
| Even today, it made my path much easier than some other fellows that I know. | ||
| But I think that my passion for it and my love for its history, my wanting for it to be healthy... | ||
| The sport, all those things is what probably made me make good decisions as I went along. | ||
| And when I would talk or get in a position to make a comment or say something, I always tried to think about how that would represent the sport. | ||
| I didn't understand what building a brand meant until way too late in my career. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| To people that are concentrating on that, it's always a mess. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I wish I'd have known a little bit about trying to build my brand, and I wouldn't have been such a hard-ass and hard to work with a lot of times. | ||
| There were some sponsors I loved, and I did everything they wanted, and there were some that I just wasn't as good as I should have been. | ||
| I wasn't... | ||
| I have regrets, but I'm just saying, as I was going through this career, I wasn't thinking about me, me, me. | ||
| I didn't even know how to build my own brand. | ||
| I didn't know what that meant. | ||
| I was thinking about, man, I love this. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| I can't believe I get to do this. | ||
| I can't believe I'm here. | ||
| I can't believe I'm... | ||
| Racing here, racing this person, driving this car, got this sponsorship. | ||
| Everything was the best of the best. | ||
| I had great sponsors, awesome equipment. | ||
| Everybody always nice. | ||
| Hey, how you doing? | ||
| Everybody's so nice. | ||
| My wife just hates that because everywhere I go, I'm like, everybody's so nice. | ||
| How was this? | ||
| Well, they were so nice. | ||
| She goes, everybody's nice to you. | ||
| You know, she gets so bent out of shape. | ||
| Why did she get mad at that? | ||
| Because she says, I don't know, she just says, us normal people, we don't get everybody nice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You live in a different world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That is interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You live in this world where everybody's happy to meet you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like a hot chick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Kind of, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, like you're a hot chick everywhere you go. | |
| People are like, hey Dale. | ||
| It's kind of similar, right? | ||
| I suppose. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I mean, hot chicks don't have any idea what the world's like. | ||
| Everywhere they go, everybody loves them. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| People are super, super excited to see them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They know there's danger out there in some of these men, but everybody's very friendly to them. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very similar. | ||
| But a large lady with unfortunate looks, she has a different view of the world. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How much did you learn about racing from your dad? | ||
| Hardly nothing, man. | ||
| I mean, I would get asked all the time what your dad taught you about X, Y, and Z, and we never talked about racing. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Never. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We never talked about racing. | ||
| Even when you started racing professionally? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We never did. | ||
| He was always, don't, you know, finish... | ||
| He was so worried that me and Kelly wouldn't finish school, that we would give up on school. | ||
| He gave up on school as an 8th grader at 16 years old. | ||
| He was 16 in the 8th grade and quit and never finished high school, never got no GED, nothing. | ||
| And people would come up to him and say, or people would talk about him, even while he was alive and ever since, and say, look what this guy made of himself, having quit the 8th grade. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| And he always hated that. | ||
| That was embarrassing. | ||
| He was embarrassed that he quit. | ||
| He knew how bad it disappointed his own father. | ||
| So he was always worried about where I was, who I was hanging out with, whether I was doing my homework. | ||
| And then even when I started racing, it was who I was hanging out with, what I was doing with my free time, what I was focusing on, whether I was thinking about what I was Whether I was on time for sponsor appearances and never, this is how you drive this corner. | ||
| This is how you get around this racetrack. | ||
| He never talked about that stuff. | ||
| It was always the personality, being a man, being right, being good to people, being on time, being ready to work, looking your best, general, you know, Morals and values. | ||
| We never sat down and talked about racing, like, I'm going to show you how to get around this corner and this is how you shift and shit like that. | ||
| Well, in that respect, it was probably brilliant of him. | ||
| Because look, the championships came. | ||
| And you also turned out to be a great man. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| I appreciate you saying that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I always felt like that when I was younger, I kind of let my father down because there was this one time, I was probably 12 years old, and there was this, me and my buddy, we were gonna play. | ||
| Man, we're here, we're outside, we're gonna play outside. | ||
| My dad's standing over there and there was a bucket full of shit. | ||
| And he's like, hey, come here. | ||
| Junior, pick that bucket up. | ||
| Move it over here. | ||
| And I went over there and tried to pick it up. | ||
| And I was like, I can't lift it. | ||
| And he got so pissed off at me because he knew I didn't try. | ||
| And he said to my buddy, Ryan, he goes, Ryan, come here. | ||
| Pick the bucket up and take it over there. | ||
| And he turned around and gave me this look of pure freaking disappointment. | ||
| And I felt like that set the tone for our relationship. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| One bucket. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I feel like that was our relationship in a nutshell for most of my teenage years. | ||
| He looked at me as... | ||
| You know, I don't know what he's going to mount to. | ||
| I don't know what this kid's going to do. | ||
| I don't know what skills he has or whether he's going to ever get his act together or whether he's ever going to figure himself out, you know? | ||
| And I probably didn't give him much reason to think different. | ||
| But then when we got... | ||
| When I started racing... | ||
| When I started racing at Late Models, I ran 159 races and he never came to one. | ||
| Through 94, 95, 96, 97, I raced at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina every weekend, and he never once came down there to watch me. | ||
| And so he didn't know whether I was a good race car driver or a bad race car driver. | ||
| He didn't know whether I was, you know, working on my car or understanding how to build the car, fix the car. | ||
| And when I would do good, I'd come home and I'd have a trophy and I'd say, hey man, I won! | ||
| And he'd go, well, who wasn't there? | ||
| And I'm like, shit. | ||
| He really did. | ||
| I remember coming home with a trophy, and I could not wait until he would walk. | ||
| I kept my car in this building that was his, and he put all his deer head up there called a deer head shop. | ||
| I'm talking 35, 40 miles in this place. | ||
| A couple elk. | ||
| And he'd come in there every Monday morning before lunch. | ||
| And I had that trophy sitting up. | ||
| We'd brought it home. | ||
| Man, it was right in view as soon as he walks in. | ||
| I got my car, working on my car. | ||
| And he comes in there and I'm like, he's like, so you won, huh? | ||
| Sees a trophy. | ||
| I was like, yeah, we did. | ||
| And he's like, such and such must have not been there. | ||
| Because there was this one guy named Robert Powell that used to beat us all the time. | ||
| And he goes, Robert must not been there. | ||
| I was like, no, he wasn't. | ||
| He wasn't there. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I was so pissed off, man. | ||
| I finally won a damn race. | ||
| I thought he was going to come in there and slap me on the back and give me a good talk. | ||
| Did it give you more motivation that he didn't do that? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I don't think it did. | ||
| I think it did not make me want to win more. | ||
| But then, one day, so right around the end of 1997, I was out of money. | ||
| He was like, hey, you know, you're out of money. | ||
| You ain't gonna race. | ||
| I was like, shit, my life's coming to an end as far as I know it. | ||
| You know, I'm not gonna... | ||
| I guess my racing career, this is it. | ||
| It's coming to an end. | ||
| 1997. He was sitting down talking to... | ||
| He had a car that races in the Xfinity series that I told you about. | ||
| On Saturdays, and his driver was leaving to go to a cup car, and he was talking to his best friend, Tony Sr., is the guy's name that actually crew chiefs that car, and he's like, who are we going to get to drive this thing? | ||
| Who should we get? | ||
| We've got to hire us a driver. | ||
| And Tony Sr. said, why don't you put Dale Jr. in there? | ||
| And he goes, what? | ||
| Are you serious? | ||
| You really think so? | ||
| He's like, you're going to spend a little money on this car, why don't you spend it on your own kid? | ||
| I can probably make a driver out of him, Tony Sr. says. | ||
| So they made the decision to put me in this car in the Xfinity Series. | ||
| You'd think that Dad would come tell me, or we would have a press conference, might be a press release at least. | ||
| I walked into, this is a month before the race season starts. | ||
| I think I'm out of racing, right? | ||
| I ain't even talked to anybody about what I'm racing or if I'm racing in a couple months. | ||
| I think that it's dried up, opportunities are gone. | ||
| I walk into the shop to get something where Tony Sr.'s race car was and my name was on the roof. | ||
| And I was like, I thought it was a joke, like a mean joke, a prank. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And they were laughing, Tony Sr. and some of the guys in the shop were laughing, and I'm like, man, that's messed up. | ||
| Man, y'all are dicks for putting that name on there. | ||
| This ain't no funny. | ||
| And they were like, it's true, man. | ||
| I was like, you mean I'm going to race this car? | ||
| I'm racing this car? | ||
| And they were like, yeah. | ||
| I was like, really? | ||
| And, I mean, obviously I was thrilled. | ||
| Like, man, I couldn't believe it, but this is the way I found out. | ||
| Not from my own dad. | ||
| And I'm like, Dad, I'm racing the car? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I mean, like, days later when I see him. | ||
| I'm like, so I'm going to race that car? | ||
| And he's like, yep, yep, sure. | ||
| Better get ready. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, I mean, he was the strangest dude. | ||
| He didn't really... | ||
| So I started racing that car. | ||
| I had great success. | ||
| We won six or seven races the first year. | ||
| We won another six or seven races the second year. | ||
| Championships in both seasons. | ||
| So the choice to put me in that car worked out better than he probably ever imagined. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| In 159 late model races that I ran from 94 to 97, I won four. | ||
| In 159 late model races, I won four. | ||
| So, he put me in this car on a whim and a prayer. | ||
| And we ended up winning a championship. | ||
| Two in a row. | ||
| So, he is thinking, damn! | ||
| This little shit can drive a car. | ||
| And that's when our relationship completely changed. | ||
| That's when I had his arm around me. | ||
| We were doing shit together. | ||
| We had sponsor deals and promotions together. | ||
| We were doing photo shoots together. | ||
| I saw him all the time. | ||
| And we talked about all kinds of, you know, we talked about life, girls, and everything but racing. | ||
| You know, we didn't talk about racing much, which is fine. | ||
| But it was awesome. | ||
| And so, 98, 99, and then 2000, I went to Cup. | ||
| He built a Cup team around me. | ||
| We had Budweiser come in for $10 million a year, which was the biggest sponsorship anybody had at that time. | ||
| wanted to start the season in Daytona 500. | ||
| So those three years, 98, 99, 2000, were as good as it could get. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That must have been amazing. | ||
| It must have been amazing for you to turn that corner. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was like a light switch. | ||
| He went from not really engaging with me, me not comfortable around him, feeling ashamed, not measuring up. | ||
| Because he's 10 foot tall, cowboy boots, black hat, tougher and shit, intimidator. | ||
| That was his nickname. | ||
| And I was blind, pale, short as hell, not a muscle on me, and had accomplished nothing, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so, but overnight, it was, like, completely changed. | ||
| We started running great, and people were coming up to me, like, dude, you're freaking, you're doing awesome! | ||
| And, you know, and he was real happy with that. | ||
| He was pretty proud. | ||
| It's crazy that he never talked to you about racing. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's just so strange. | ||
| I can't imagine. | ||
| There was only one time that he did that. | ||
| We were at a track called Bristol, Tennessee. | ||
| We were at a track in Bristol, Tennessee. | ||
| It's a half-mile, high-banked racetrack, and we run 15-second laps around there. | ||
| It's really fast, and it's kind of technical and tough to get around. | ||
| And I'm out there practicing... | ||
| And I wasn't doing it right, and he got up on one of the haulers and got on the radio and started talking to me. | ||
| And he was like, hey man, I'm going to tell you how to drive it. | ||
| And so this one day, one time, in this one practice for about five minutes, he's like, I'm going to tell you how to drive this track. | ||
| So I'm out there driving, and he's like, all right, lift right here. | ||
| And I lift, and he's getting the gas, okay. | ||
| Turn there, and he's just telling me how to drive the track. | ||
| And that was the only time he ever did that. | ||
| Just think of how much it would have improved you. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It really helped me there that day. | ||
| I mean, when he told me how to do it, I'm like, holy shit. | ||
| I would have never thought of doing it this way, and this is way better. | ||
| So, yeah, maybe he could have given me a few more tips on some things. | ||
| I mean, come on, man. | ||
| I mean, that has to be so crazy, because that's your profession, and your dad is a superhero. | ||
| Well, I think that, you know, I finally made it to Cup, and I think had he lived, he would have been in my ear all those years. | ||
| You know, do this, do this, don't do this. | ||
| This is the best decision today. | ||
| So maybe he just wasn't in a hurry to do it, because he didn't know that he wasn't going to be around for it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How hard was it to race after he was gone? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I thought about whether I should quit or not. | ||
| If it hadn't paid a lot of money and I didn't have partners and people that were depending on me or counting on me, I probably could have easily walked away from it. | ||
| But we had a great partner in Budweiser that was incredibly supportive. | ||
| I had a lucrative opportunity in front of me personally to be a race car driver for as long as I wanted to, which I wanted. | ||
| And I just had to go through missing him really bad for a few months. | ||
| I had to go to the racetrack, and everywhere I looked, there's Dad. | ||
| There were fans mourning. | ||
| There were signs and paintings and things. | ||
| There were just markings and acknowledgments and just shit everywhere for like a year. | ||
| And I appreciated it and I knew why it was like that. | ||
| But it took a while for me to sort of get to where I didn't... | ||
| There was a little period of time where I was real self-destructive and just like... | ||
| I was mad at everything. | ||
| It took me a while to calm down and get to work. | ||
| For a while there it was just sort of going through the motions. | ||
| I mean, you must have always known, I mean, everyone knows there's dangers involved in racing cars, but when it hit someone so close as your own father, that had to change what racing felt like to you. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure it would have completely been a different experience emotionally had that not happened. | ||
| Racing for me would have meant something completely different. | ||
| You know, I just was... | ||
| He was this invincible... | ||
| Guy that wasn't supposed to get hurt. | ||
| He was supposed to get hurt and drive hurt and be tough. | ||
| He wasn't supposed to get killed and leave us all. | ||
| He left the whole sport and no one knew what to do. | ||
| The whole sport was sitting there going, shit. | ||
| What do we do? | ||
| You know, he was the guy for everyone. | ||
| And even the competitors, you know, looked up to him like he was the guy. | ||
| Like, that's the man. | ||
| And so it was tough on the whole sport. | ||
| Big, giant void for the whole sport. | ||
| But I, you know... | ||
| We just huddled together, me and my team, me and our company. | ||
| I raced for my dad's company, so that whole company just kind of held itself together and everybody kind of pulled together and worked our way through it. | ||
| That first year in 01, just that year that he was killed, that was just kind of a tough year. | ||
| I don't even really remember anything much about what happened that year. | ||
| Won a couple races, but it was otherwise, you know, the races where we didn't win, I can't even, I don't even remember much about them, you know, just retaining too much from it. | ||
| It was just kind of a daze, you know. | ||
| 04 was a great year. | ||
| I think we kind of finally were coming out of the funk, you know, around 2004. Kind of coming out of the cloud of that. | ||
| I would imagine that being a race car driver and having your dad be who he was always carried a lot of weight. | ||
| But did he carry more weight after he was gone? | ||
| Were there more eyes on you? | ||
| Yeah, I thought so. | ||
| I thought he was tough. | ||
| He knew who he was to the sport. | ||
| He knew that he carried a big, massive fan base, and he knew that people listened when he spoke and all those things. | ||
| And so when he was gone, I think some people kind of looked at me to try to carry that same load and even be that same person, and I just wasn't going to do it. | ||
| I was like, man, I'm going to be me. | ||
| Like I said, he's this 10 foot tall black hat and I'm this short, scrawny, pale kid. | ||
| I couldn't be who he was. | ||
| I'd have been faking it. | ||
| And I couldn't be the intimidator. | ||
| So I just have always, ever since then... | ||
| And if that's good, if you like that, great. | ||
| I think I've been relatable, honest, genuine. | ||
| And the fan base that I gained when he passed away, I thought we nurtured that and grew that. | ||
| And I think we did a lot of great things in and outside the sport to do that. | ||
| So I'm kind of proud of all those things. | ||
| I thought I handled that well, considering there are a lot of different avenues to go at that time. | ||
| And I think I chose some good ones and certainly probably could have made some different decisions and have regrets. | ||
| But for the most part, I was able to, you know... | ||
| Add to his legacy a little bit. | ||
| That was something that was important to me. | ||
| I didn't go out there and win 90 damn races. | ||
| I didn't win seven championships. | ||
| But I didn't hurt his legacy. | ||
| I added to it. | ||
| Made a lot of people happy. | ||
| There was an Earnhardt on the track. | ||
| That was good for a lot of people. | ||
| Dale, you got a great perspective. | ||
| Well, thanks. | ||
| You really do. | ||
| In your book, it's called Racing to the Finish... | ||
| It's out now. | ||
| Go get it, folks. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Thank you, Dale. | ||
| Yes, sir, man. | ||
| I appreciate you having me on, dude. | ||
| I really appreciate you being here, man. | ||
| It's great to meet you. | ||
| Great to meet you, too. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We should do a hunt. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Let's do it. |
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