531 FBF: The War on Football: Saving America's Game by Daniel Flynn

Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday. Your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past.

That Jason has hand picked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy.

Welcome to the Holistic Survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival show is your family's insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats, and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you'll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome Daniel Flynn to the show. He's the former executive director of Accuracy in Academia and the editor of a weblog, Flynn Files, and the author of a new book, the War on Saving America's Game. Now, lest you think this is a sports segment, and it will be a little bit, let me just tell you about some of Daniel's other books titled Blue Collar Intelligence Intellectuals, A Conservative History of the American Left, Intellectual Morons, How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall into Stupid Ideals, and a few more, including why the Left Hates America. So glad to have him on the show to talk about this rather important topic, maybe surprisingly to some of you. Daniel, welcome. How are you?

Outstanding. Thank you for having me.

Well, good. Hey, I always like to give our listeners a sense of geography. Where are you located today?

I am in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Well, what prompted you to write a book? I mean, is it fair to say that this is not exactly a book about football per se, or. No.

Well, football tells us a lot about America. I mean, they polled Americans, and about 2/3 of the American people cop to watching football. So, you know, there's not too many issues out there that you can get 2/3 of the American people to agree on, but football is one of them. And I think at a time when we're divided by race, we're divided by religion, we're divided by what cable news network we watch at night. The one thing that really brings us together is football. And people may think that's silly. They may wish that it was something more highbrow than an athletic contest that brings us together, but the fact of the matter is that it's football more than anything else that brings us together in America.

Yeah, well, very good point. And Our president.

Ran on the platform of being the great Uniter. And he said all this class division and racial division was going to heal. And it's gotten worse. It's worse than ever, at least in my lifetime. Just crazy. Malcolm Gladwell, he has a thesis that football should be banned because players are at a greater risk of dying. Now we saw that big NFL lawsuit about the concussions recently settled for an astronomical amount of money. What are your thoughts on this?

I think first of all, Malcolm Gladwell is just wrong. And Malcolm Gladwell and George Will, LZ Granderson and some other critics of the game have repeatedly made the point that football players die young, they die in their 50s. The reality is that science has rebutted this. The NFL Players Association a number of years ago, because this rumor was so rampant, they petitioned the federal government to conduct a study on retired football players. And the federal government looked at every player who played in the NFL from 1959 to 1988, who played in five or more years, pension vested players. And what they found rebutted what Malcolm Gladwell says. NFL players actually live longer than their peers in society. These scientists were expecting to find a death rate of 18% amongst these veteran NFL players. Instead, they found a 10% death rate. There was dramatically reduced levels of heart disease.

And all types of cancer, respiratory illness and even suicide, which is something that the media has really run with since the deaths of Dunya Seau and Dave Duerson and other star players. They've run with this myth that NFL players are prone to killing themselves. The reality is that NFL players, the suicide rate is dramatically lower than the societal suicide rate. If you read some of the accounts in the New York Times and elsewhere, they'll say that the NFL suicide rate is six times the national average. The truth is that the average amongst comparable males is two and a half times what it is in the NFL. So a lot of this anti football narrative that we've seen the last few years in the media, it's kind of like the Y2K bug or the shark attacks that happen every August or the killer bee story that was around when I was a kid. These are sort of stories that the media loves to run with, but they don't really bear out in reality. And it's the same thing with the NFL suicide story, that it's something that the media is all over. And every time an NFL player kills himself, there'll be endless amounts of articles and news coverage of it, but it doesn't really happen very often.

Well, you know what's Interesting about that is that there are so many other issues. And there have been, you know, there's been a decent amount of writing about how NFL players have higher bankruptcy rates or get into financial trouble after they've earned all this, this money and they just kind of blow it and mismanage it and, you know, maybe they get ripped off by their managers, too. But more than any other major sport where players are getting highly compensated when they're, when they're working, it seems like NFL players do have some financial problems. So if you want to look at like, suicide rate or, you know, even death rate in general because of maybe the cost of health care, accessibility to it, I mean, if, if you, if you have financial problems, there's going to be maybe another contributing factor. I don't know, you may say, well, the financial problem thing isn't true either, Jason, but, you know, that's what I've read.

Well, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of. That's mythical, too. But just leaving that aside, you know a guy like Junior Seau, who's probably the most inspected case of these NFL suicides, I mean, when the San Diego Union Tribune looked at him, you know, he was drinking five or six nights a week. He, you know, he had been divorced, he drove his car off a cliff about a year before his suicide. His restaurant, it was going out of business and actually went out of business a couple weeks after he died. So these guys have all sorts of problems that have nothing to do with football. Dave Duerson for the Chicago Bears, he killed himself and he had filed for bankruptcy. And that's one of the issues that you alluded to. So your point stands that these guys have all sorts of issues going on in their lives, just like everyone else does who doesn't play football. And so I think the, you know, because we watch what they do on the field so intent, intensely, we forget that they have private lives off the field. And some of these guys, private lives are really screwed up. And it has nothing to do with football.

Right, right. So, I mean, compare it to like skateboarding or theme parks. I mean, is football safer than either of those?

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that I do in the book, is that there are all sorts of dangerous activities that kids engage in that their parents don't really care about so much. They don't really think of them as dangerous. So last year, skateboarding killed 30 skateboarders in America. Football killed two players from football hits. So collision hits in skateboarding were 15 times the number they Were in football. There were more kids last year who died by getting struck by lightning on football fields than died by getting struck by other players. That should put into perspective how safe football has become. And I think the odd thing is, the safer football becomes for players, the more dangerous it's become for the game. Because it's not that the game has become more rough, it's that society has grown very soft and football really presents a culture clash with the kind of passive indoor society that we all live in.

Right. But in quoting those statistics, I just have to take issue with you. And maybe it's not an issue, but I just want to make sure it's considered in those statistics. I mean, don't we have to look at it like as a percentage, as a per capita basis? Don't more people skateboard than play football?

I don't think so, but it's possible. I mean, there are 4 million people that play tackle football every year. I have no idea how many people skateboard. But you can look at other activities like skiing or bicycling or swimming, and certainly more people swim or bicycle and play football. But you're talking about thousands of people who die from drowning swimming every year. You're talking about seven or 800 that die from bicycling, 25 or so that die from skiing collisions, and two that die from playing football. So I think we really have to put this into perspective and we've really lost perspective when it comes to football. I think the reason we've lost perspective is because the intent of football is very different from all those other activities. The intent of football often is to. To do violence and harm to your opponent. But I think we get too caught up in intent and we don't get caught up in outcomes. I know that the street doesn't intend to harm a skateboarder, or an oncoming car doesn't intend to harm a skateboarder. But the reality is the outcome is that street can be a lot more unforgiving than even a linebacker when it.

Comes to the Americana sort of aspect of professional sports or even non professional. What is America's game? I think most people think of it as baseball. You know, baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet. That's a pretty good ad campaign. Is it football or baseball?

Well, the last time that Harris poll surveyed Americans, the football beat baseball by about four times to one. And if you just look at professional football, it would be three times to one. But when you add college in there, it's about four times to one, four times as Many Americans say their favorite sport sport is football, as say, baseball. So I think the concept of baseball being America's game, that's maybe a 1950s mindset that's looking at that. When you look at the ratings right now, the ratings of just Sunday afternoon NFL games often beat the ratings of World Series games. So as far as a spectator sport, I think football easily beats baseball. It easily beats it in the revenue, it easily beats it in the ratings. So I don't know that people could say baseball is America's sport anymore, but certainly that once was the case.

How come football doesn't really happen around the world? I mean, they call soccer football, but why isn't football translated to other countries? Why is their game soccer and ours is football?

Well, I think it does in the sense that rugby is, you know, football is a rugby derived game. So you'll see like Celtic football for Australian Rouge football or Canadian Football League. But all of these games derived from rugby and they kind of went their own direction. And the direction that we went in the United States is American football. One of the weird things about football, and I think you touch on an important point. Every year, the ratings for the super bowl rivals the ratings for the Premier League game. Championship, the final championship game that they have in that premier soccer league. And the difference between the two is that people watch that championship soccer game in just about every country around the world. They're watching on every continent, everywhere they're watching that game. With regard to football, they're really watching it only in North America. And it tells you two things there that unlike say, Coca Cola or Disney World, football is not for export. It's a made in America only in America game. But beyond that, it tells you something about America, how intensely our devotion to football is. Because if the super bowl is getting ratings on par with the soccer championship game and the only people watching it are here in North America, it demonstrates you how devotional, how intense, how religious, how this has become our national religion in America, that you have that many people watching the game.

Yeah, I think that's, that's a very valid point that you make. It really is just to talk about a couple other quick things before you go. And I think they relate. But I mean, maybe a good segue to it is, is this whole attack on football just part of the kind of this nanny state mentality that we've got, or is it not related to the nanny state mentality? It's just a, it's just sort of a, a private thing. I mean, you know, where does the government, I guess what is the government's role in this? Is probably the right question.

Well, there has been some government activity, obviously. Earlier this year, the President United States commented that if he had a son, he would hesitate to have him play football.

Oh, I thought he was going to, you know, say if he had a son who looked like Trayvon Martin, but.

Ridiculous.

If, you know, there's been some other government officials who have been trying to take action. People like on school boards trying to ban football at high schools, or state legislators in Illinois and New York and Texas trying to restrict the game in various ways. In New York, the assemblyman introduced a bill trying to ban football for kids under 11 and for people that people don't understand. But of the 4 million people playing tackle football, about 95% of them can't even legally buy alcohol. So it gives you a sense of who's playing the game. It's kids. Football is a kid's game. The league that we watch the most is a league composed of giant behemoth men. The leagues that most players participate in are leagues of little boys. And these restrictions that are trying to cut off football at 14 or at 18, these are really just sort of back end ways to ban the game of football, because almost everyone who plays the game of football is a kid. So I think as far as the war on football is concerned, there are government officials who are trying to prevent kids from playing. And they're not having a huge deal of success legally, but from a sort of a guilt tripping perspective, they're having an amazing amount of success. Youth football was down 6% in its player population last year. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that the portrayal of football in the media is that if you sign your kid up for football, you're signing your kid up for organized child abuse. To me, football is the greatest game that there is. Nothing could be further from the truth. You're teaching a kid a lot of life lessons. And just to point out one, just on about every single play in football, some kid gets knocked on his butt and then he either gets up and he fights or he stays on his butt. And to me, that's a lot like life. That's. That is a metaphor for life right there.

Yeah, it is a metaphor for life, no question about it. Yeah. Those two deaths that you mentioned earlier, those weren't professional, were they? Or those were youth football?

No, the two deaths that happened last year were both in adult leagues, and one was an occasion of a guy's heart stopping after he got hit. He just got hit at the wrong time in the chest. And the other was from a helmet to helmet collision. I believe it was from a head injury. They both were adult leagues, and there's very few people playing in adult leagues that aren't professional leagues. But as chance would have it, there were no youth league players, no high school players, no college players that died from a football hit last year. So it was an extremely safe year as far as players were concerned. But obviously as far as the game itself was concerned, boy, the game was facing an existential crisis.

Yeah, very good point. So, hey, before you go, Dan, just tell us a little bit about some of your other books. You've got such great titles. You know, A Conservative History of the American Left. Just give us a couple quick points of interest, if you would.

Yeah, sure. You know, my first few books were on the American left, essentially, and more political in scope. And just the last few years I've gravitated more towards, you know, just cultural issues in general. I wrote a book a few years ago called Blue Collar Intellectuals about some of my heroes. People like Ray Bradbury and Eric Hart Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher Milton Friedman.

Will and Ariel Durant and some other folks came from very humble backgrounds, but because of those backgrounds were able to speak to a mass audience with their intellectual message. I wrote a book a number of years ago called Intellectual How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas. And I looked at both right and left in that book and just how people get wrapped up in abstract thinking and they don't really see reality because they're so wrapped up in the abstract thinking. And there's a lot of people like Peter singer in there, W.E.B. du Bois, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and a number of other thinkers that I profile in that book. And then of course, I wrote A Conservative History of the American Left, which is just a history of the American left from a conservative perspective. And so the left is always writing its own history. It's always writing the history of conservatives.

The left is revising history all the time. Yeah.

So I thought it would be neat to look at the Left using the same kind of perspective that they use. Understood everyone else.

Yeah, very interesting. Tell us about the on the Intellectual Morons book, How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas. It seems as though when you talk to these very intelligent leftist people, especially professors at colleges, for God's sake, they're just so wrapped up in details. Like the details obscure the story. It's almost like they should be looking at backing up from the painting and looking at the big picture. It seems like the left more than any other group is just very guilty of not understanding cause and effect, the bigger picture on things. They see this one little part of it and they think, oh, well, let's just fix that. And usually the fix is let's either print more fake money, let's tax people more, or create some more regulations and burdens to fix the problem. But then it creates a whole host of other problems that they never understand why.

Yeah, I think that's an intellectual kind of disease that you're describing. What I do in the book, it's almost the opposite of what you said in a way. I think that some of these guys get so wrapped up in big picture ideology that they don't look for the truth or the falsehood of individual events. And just to give you one example of this, in the late 1970s, when Cambodia was undergoing its genocide under Pol Pot, Noam Chomsky wrote an article for the Nation magazine where he described this as just a big hoax. It was almost like Holocaust denial in real time. You had a million people being killed by their government, over a million people. And he was saying it was just a, it was 1,000 people at most. And this is just a, you know, this is just a New York Times created media hoax is the way he described it. So to me, he looked at the big picture thing, which was his big picture was communism good, United States, capitalism bad. And he went with the side, you know, the people who were opposing the United States, rather than look at the individual details. And the individual details there were just horrific. They were killing people for not wearing the right clothes. They were killing people who were wearing glasses because they were considered vain young kids were being given guns and killing their parents. It was just probably, if you said, hey, Dan, I have a time machine, where do you want to go? Least on all of planet Earth, for all of history. I'd probably say Cambodia in the late 1970s. But Noam Chomsky was denying everything that was happening. And that's one of among many examples that I use to sort of illustrate the point in an intellectual moron.

Yeah, very, very good point. You know, it's interesting. I was watching a YouTube video with Noam Chomsky and Julian Assange the other day, and it was, it was kind of fascinating. One of the things he said that really interested me and I've been trying to think about this for the past few days. He claimed, and I don't Know, if this is true, it's certainly his view, but he claimed that the concept of democracy and capitalism were never historically intertwined. He said that the US Created that fallacy basically to combat the rise of communism during the Cold War. And I thought, really, I mean, how could you have democracy without private property rights and capitalism? You know, that's what the concept of freedom stems from. Property rights, in my view.

Well, that was the point of one of the writers that I profiled in, blue collar intellectual Milton Friedman, who wrote in his book Capitalism and Freedom that the two were intertwined. You couldn't really have freedom if you just had economic freedom or if you just had political freedom. At a certain point, not having the other freedom would erode. Not having political freedom would erode on economic freedom or vice versa. And I think there are a lot of people out there, Chomsky included, who think, well, we can get away with confiscating people's money and that kind of thing, all sorts of intrusions on their economic freedom, but we can still maintain political freedom. I think the lesson through history is that that's a very rare condition that they're describing. You know, it's something maybe that they had in some of the northern parts of Europe for a time in the late 20th century, but beyond that, it's not something you see very often whenever.

You have central planning danger ahead. I mean, that's the bottom line.

And that's what this Warren Football book is about. It's about giving people the freedom to do what they want. I mean, not every choice that we make is good for us. I happen to think playing football is healthy for you, but we should be free to make choices that other people wouldn't make. And I think part of the reason I wrote the War on Football is to educate people that they can make the decisions for their kids whether they want them to play football or not, based on facts rather than fear. And I think for too long, the decisions have been done based on fear mongering surrounding the game of football.

Yeah, last time I checked, no one was forcing anybody to play football.

That's right.

Good point, Dan. Give out your website. Sure.

It's flynnfiles.com and I blog there once a day or once every couple of days. And most of the stuff I write every Friday for the American Spectator, mostly on pop culture. And the big thing I have right now is the War on Football. And if anyone's interested in the book, you can pretty much get it at any bookstore or go to Amazon and just type in Daniel Flynn, the War on Football Saving America's Game. And it's pretty easy enough to Fantastic.

Well, Daniel Flynn, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you for joining us today for the Holistic Survival show, Protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Be sure to listen to our Creating wealth show, which focuses on exploiting the financial and wealth creation opportunities in today's economy. Learn more at www.jasonhartman.com or search Jason Hartman on itunes. This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, offering very general guidelines and information. Opinions of guests are their own and none of the content should be considered individual advice. If you require personalized advice, please consult an appropriate professional information deemed reliable but not guaranteed.