The Playbook with Colin Jonov
Formerly The Athletic Fortitude Show.... Colin Jonov’s Athletic Fortitude Show has rebranded to The Playbook with Colin Jonov, evolving from a sports-centric podcast to a universal guide for mastering life’s challenges. While retaining its foundation in mindset and performance excellence, the show now expands its scope to empower everyone—athletes, entrepreneurs, professionals, and beyond—to live life to its fullest potential
The Playbook with Colin Jonov
Dr. Mitch Abrams - Why Anger Is Actually a Performance-Enhancing Drug (And How to Control It)
What if anger isn’t a problem to erase but a resource to master? I sit down with Dr. Mitch Abrams, Author of "I'm Not F*cking Angry," for a candid, no‑evasion conversation about relationships, performance, and the messy middle where emotions live. It starts with alignment in marriage—knowing your non‑negotiables around faith, kids, money, schooling, and independence—and why “healthy dependence” actually fuels independence in the world. We talk jealousy, security, and the courage it takes to support a partner’s growth without shrinking your own.
From there, we move into the arena. Anger becomes a dial, not a switch: enough heat to compete, not so much you lose the play. You’ll hear simple, practical tools athletes and high performers can use today—hassle logs to spot triggers, portable rituals with music and breath to manage arousal, progressive muscle relaxation to take the edge off fast, and consequence forecasting to prevent the mistake you’ll regret. We challenge coaching practices that punish with conditioning, replacing them with systems that protect reps, reinforce process goals, and develop emotional intelligence. Great coaches are quiet psychologists; they read people, tailor standards, and celebrate effort, not just outcomes.
We also take on the broader ecosystem: media sensationalism, the NIL and transfer churn, and the fragile trust that legalized gambling tests every weekend. Integrity isn’t a slogan; it’s the backbone of competition. When fans doubt the level playing field, everything cracks. Real reform requires incentives: assess character risk, attach penalties to behavior, and invest in treatment over optics. Through it all runs a simple thread—name what you feel, use what helps, drop what harms, and choose respect when the whistle stops. Subscribe, share this with a teammate or partner who needs it, and leave a review to tell us where your anger dial sits today.
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We've been together for 13 years now.
SPEAKER_01:12 years.
SPEAKER_00:12 years.
SPEAKER_01:So are you surprised that she can still put up with you? Oh, yes.
SPEAKER_00:You know, I you know, I talk about this in like because social media can be very fake. And fake book, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, I somehow wish I could portray or like show that my wife and I have a now we're young, obviously, and things change as we grow, but we have like a really, really good marriage. And like, like there is like, you know, we're deeply in love with like one another. And like, I don't know how to like make it authentic other than just be like, it really, it really is. Like, we have healthy arguments, like we're aligned on things that we believe are really important and like non-negotiables. Like there was no like compromise. It was just, yeah, we're aligned here. That's the name of the game.
SPEAKER_01:If people are aligned on the non-negotiables, the rest is just details.
SPEAKER_00:And it's most people love being together.
SPEAKER_01:Most people don't even know what their non-negotiables are.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And and I would say that, like in the Orthodox Jewish community, they like meet and get married very quick. And I'm like, you should spend more time on knowing who you are and figure out what you need. So a lot of times, in fact, it's surprising there's not more divorce, but I think divorce happens most often because either the person didn't really know themselves and they weren't ready, they didn't know what they could tolerate or what they couldn't tolerate, or people grew in different directions. And when you are aligned with someone on the core things, and if you have more than all it's only about four or five things that are non-negotiable. So if you have more than that, you should be in therapy. But if but if your core things you're aligned with, then everything else you can work out.
SPEAKER_00:Hey, we we we probably don't even have four. We probably do. It's like faith, it we're aligned perfectly in faith, which was non-negotiable for both of us. And to be fair, we've had the opportunity to grow for a long period of time. We we met when we were 15, 16.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. I didn't, I knew that you were long, I mean, you do the math, you say 13 years, but I didn't realize high school, even in early high school sweet.
SPEAKER_00:Early high school, yeah. So it's like people I joke with people because there's like half of me that's like a total evolution of myself, and the other half of me is the exact same I was when I was 15, 16. And like those things, unless something catastrophic changes, like I'm always gonna be that person. Like the the joking side of me, it will always be that way. The like faith side of me will always be that way. Like the I would say the intense side of me will always be that way. And then the evolution of me in other ways and being more empathetic and understanding and willing to, or really the the recognition I don't there's a lot I don't know. Uh-huh. Right. And like all these like other ways that I've progressed. Um, but like my wife and I, since we were 15, 16, really just like aligned. Like the stars aligned, we met, and it's really awesome.
SPEAKER_01:The big ones, the big non-negotiables, and when I say them, you're gonna go, of course. The big non-negotiables are faith, children. If so, how many?
SPEAKER_02:Yep.
SPEAKER_01:And related to that is private or public school, spend or save, vacation, staycation, yeah. Um, supporting each other's independence. Uh you know, I I often say I am dependent on my wife for a lot of things. She's not in a room when I'm doing this stuff. People have made codependence a dirty word. Yeah. It's bullshit. You cannot be uh in a healthy relationship if you can't depend on one another. Codependence does not have to be unhealthy. Healthy dependence is when you know that you can rely on them so well that it gives you the confidence to be independent in the outside world. But that also requires you, not you, one, to be secure enough to allow them to be their full self. So insecurity, sorry, insecurity, everybody has a little bit of jealousy. If you don't have any jealousy, it means you don't care about losing what you have. But jealousy is also proportional to insecurity. So the and the and the sad part about this, for all of you monsters out there that that hear these stories, the more insecure you are, the more controlling you are. The more controlling you are, the more you're gonna push her away. And you're gonna make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. So it takes courage to support your spouse's independence. But when you're aligned in all these things, it's like it's why I never win a fight with Christy, because she gets to a point and she's like, Well, I'm done arguing. But I still got more to say. She goes, doesn't really matter. I love you, you love me, we've been together a long time. We're not even going to remember this in three weeks. And I you know, and she and she's right, but because if it's important, I'll circle back and try to win the argument another day and I'll lose that too. That's okay.
SPEAKER_00:But I want to lose or something. Nah, it's uh yeah, it's it's interesting because it I will say it makes in some ways giving like relationship or like advice unrelatable. I always say the people who have the most successful or healthy dynamics, whether it's relationships or other domains, I say they're the most qualified to give advice, even if they're not in your specific shoes, because they're able to see things from different angles. And so even if I haven't been in someone's specific shoes, there's an element of where you can offer a different perspective or a lens or hey, this is what works really, really well that should be able to test the adversity of other situations that aren't the same.
SPEAKER_01:I agree with you. So long as there's receptivity. Yeah. Right. So there are sometimes, as I say it in therapy all the time, I say, look, I'm gonna throw shit against the wall. Sometimes it's not gonna stick.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Um, and sometimes Doc, that was like real I took a shot. It was wrong. What do you want? So, so it it's I agree with you, and it's not instead of, and it has to do with how receptive people are to considering other perspectives. Like you can say, yeah, I understand what you're saying, but that doesn't work for me. And there's nothing wrong with that. Um one of the reason why I got into psychology was because I knew that it was impossible to be right. There's just too many factors, there's too many interaction effects. So you're always learning. And the easiest way to be wrong is to be certain that you're right.
SPEAKER_00:Tell sports media that right now.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my God.
SPEAKER_00:Keep pulling mic a little closer to you, by the way. Good? You're good.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Yeah. Well, whenever you see another story, another athlete, I'm always wondering what's the real story. And um and I get it, you know, uh, I think it was Denzel Washington who was talking about how media now doesn't even care whether they're right or wrong. It's be the first. And there's no responsibility for reporting bad things or wrong things or inadequate things or inaccurate things. And so you could have people's lives destroyed based off of what's reported in the media. Like I was uh my my wife and I were talking about several high-profile cases, Diddy and all the rest of the stuff. I said, the thing is, is that we're not getting the whole discovery. We're getting what is sensational. And we eat that shit a time. It's like, how is Kim Kardashian still relevant? Because we eat all that shit up. And so I don't often quote Elon Musk because he's got some issues, but I think that one of the things he said that was brilliant was in the old days, people were shielded from information. In fact, it's one of the reasons why a lot of religions, even Catholicism, kept everything in Latin so that the common person wouldn't know what's going on. The elite kept it away from the common. And the purpose of going to school, getting educated, was to get access to information. That's no longer an issue. Because of the internet, information is everywhere. It's super abundant. Education should be about teaching critical thinking to help you figure out what information is makes sense, is reasonable, is right, and what should be discarded. The problem is that sometimes the things that are reasonable and right are actually not true. So logic isn't a great rubric either. So we're constantly trying to figure this shit out.
SPEAKER_00:That's a really good point in this current area of abundance of information. We don't know who the real experts are. And people who are supposed to be experts sometimes turn out to not be experts. And so, how do you guide or navigate that space to understand one, developing critical thinking skills, but then two, really understanding what at least has the highest percentage chance to be right when you're deciphering this information?
SPEAKER_01:Look, uh my work is a perfect example of that because there's nobody in the sports psychology world who has done more work in anger management than me. I don't think there's anybody that's done more treatment of domestic violence or sexual violence or treated more offenders. But who's gonna say, by the way, I went to Dr. Abrams for domestic violence? Right? And so even how people find things is shielded by the context. And I think that one of the cool things about 2025 is there's greater awareness and discussion about mental health amongst athletes than ever before. But we're still only scratching the surface. There's a lot of dark things that people don't want to talk about. People will talk about anxiety, people will talk about depression, even maybe considering suicidality, but you're not going to hear someone talk about when they were contemplating beating the crap out of their wife or when they're arrested for child abuse or soliciting prostitutes, even if there might be a culture that supports misogyny. And so there's so much more for us to do, but I think that when we think about the information that's available, we should be mindful that it's not really an open book. And I think that the reason why I wrote this book and the title of the book is what it is, is because people have so much shame about things that they won't be honest. Someone gets referred to me for an anger management issue, and I say, Well, why are you so angry? And what's their response? I'm not fucking angry. Veins bulging out of the head and all the rest of that stuff. And then you break it down and you ask them, Well, tell me about what's going on. And every single thing they tell you, you go, sounds about right. I'd be pretty pissed if that happened to me, too. I go, hate to break it to you, but you're not as crazy as you think. We're all angry. Or we're all crazy. And so now that we've discussed it, we can own it, we can validate it, we could do something with it. But there's so much shame in honesty that it creates this problem that we can't talk about things, can't talk about emotions, right? So some people can't label their emotions. You can't manage an emotion if you can't label it. And that's kind of where we're dealing with with society. And while simultaneously we're dealing with a time that there is such intolerance for disagreement, it's crazy. If I disagree with you, I don't have to want you dead. Imagine that. I mean, right after the Charlie Kirk murder, I had all kinds of criticisms. I'm a white supremacist, I I uh I'm a racist, because I thought that the idea that Charlie Kirk was willing to go to college campuses and argue points with people, having discourse, sometimes, I mean, I'm Jewish. He's Christian. I don't agree with a lot of the things that he said. But I love the fact that you're willing to go and have discourse with people. And I thought it was horrible that someone was murdered in front of their kids and people are celebrating this. It's horrible. I can disagree with you. In fact, I think it's it's the only way you don't disagree with people is if you don't listen. I've been married to my wife a long time. I'm sure if I didn't listen to her, I would agree with her all the time, and vice versa. So it's it's disagreement is a requirement. And we are so fragile and so precious that we cannot disagree without wanting to destroy the person. I think it's horrible. And the more we can examine things and consider other people's perspectives, even if we don't share their opinions, we don't share their perspective, that's how we grow. That's how we get better. But nowadays, I don't like your opinion, so I need to kill you. That's not evolution.
SPEAKER_00:There's few things, and this is the first time I've really talked about this. I'm glad it's us talking about it. There are a few things in my life that I'm not directly connected to that impact me. If something happens like far away, like in California or whatever, like I'll be like, oh, that's like really sad, like whatever that makes me angry, but like, okay, I'm quickly back to my day-to-day. Is there a moment of thank God that's not me? Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Okay. And but like the Charlie Kirk thing was like the first one of like the main things in my life where I saw it. It was not me. It wasn't someone I religiously followed. It wasn't literally or metaphorically. Yeah. I'm Catholic. He spoke out against Catholicism. Right. And but like it was the first time I had seen something where I was like deeply like impacted, where I was like, like I felt sick. Yes. And I it was hard to work the next day in the day after, in the day after that, where I'm still, I would sit there and I'm really good at being disciplined in my feed, and I would just scroll and read and look at all the things.
SPEAKER_01:You mean your humanness took over?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it was Imagine that. And I I just I couldn't. It was hard for me to fathom that someone just because they had basically Christian values, was conservative, was willing to go disagree with people in what at least I viewed as a very humble way, like didn't degrade people. Like having fair conversations.
SPEAKER_01:Some of his positions were certainly skewed with very conservative views.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I never heard him curse, never heard him yell, never, I mean, he said some things were condescending, but never like nothing that would shut the conversation down. I think it was about attempted growth.
SPEAKER_00:That's scary to people. It just I like it's hard for me to label the emotions that I felt because I was like, this like I honestly felt like it could like selfishly from my own fantasy, I was like, that could have been me. Like just someone coming up because I have a podcast. You know, obviously I'm not as big as Charlie Kirk, but like Yet. Yet. I'm with you, brother. And it's like, what's stopping someone from just doing that because not because they want to steal from me, not because I have something they want, but because of certain beliefs that I have that they may disagree with.
SPEAKER_01:I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, there's the the added issue is all of the hypotheses of some dark operation that was politically driven. And I am always willing to consider a good conspiracy theory. I remember the main. I mean, the history of the United States has been misinformation. So that is always possible out there. Why did he need to be murdered? This is like the JFK assassination. Why did these I don't know all the reasons. I just know that this man was killed in front of his kids. That's horrible. And people were celebrating that he was killed in front of his kids instead of saying, you know, I really did not stand for the things that his opinions were based off of. But I respect his right to do it. One of the best speeches I ever saw, which was fiction, remember the movie The American President?
SPEAKER_00:I know that we've never seen it.
SPEAKER_01:So Michael Douglas is playing the president, and he's in a very slander-filled campaign. And he was talking about how hard American citizenship is. He goes, you know, if you want to run this comp this country, this company, whoops, if you want to run this country, you're going to have to really want it. Because freedom is not just about the American flag. It's about someone having the right to burn the American flag. It's the right for someone who stands in opposition to the things that you are most invested in and them having the right to say it. That takes great tolerance. It takes maturity. And we don't always get it right, and we regress and sometimes show that we're a fairly self-destructive species. But but there's something really powerful about it. We forget how hard it is for people to just just coexist. But the example that I think of, Colin, whenever I think of that, I juxtapose it with walking down a street like near Wall Street in New York City in the middle of rush hour. Why aren't more people bumping into each other? Because we're able to read subtle cues and navigate in ways that we can coexist and get things done. How are football teams able to run plays when the other team is going to do whatever they can to try to sabotage it? Because our brains are basically pattern recognition tools. And we are really sophisticated to do those operations, except when emotions run too high. And when emotions run too high, our brains turn off, and then we tend to do what we feel instead of what's best for us. And that's when things get dangerous.
SPEAKER_00:In the realm of the book, I'm not so fucking angry. Is it actually possible to be able to turn a switch on and off with your anger where you have control over it?
SPEAKER_01:The answer is yes, but no. I'd like to think of it more as a dial than a switch. Because, well, I think everyone's had the experience, like maybe a surprise party, and you walk in, you didn't know what's happening, and bam, instantly you're happy. Or something can happen and provoke you, and instantly you get very angry. So, yes, you can have quick, spiked reactions to situations. But I think that the best way to think about it is thinking about it like a dial. And so there are a few things that make me happier than a good steak. And the key to making a good steak is not just heat, but high heat. You have to be able to turn that flame all the way up. What happens if you can't adjust the flame? Well, you get a baseball mitt, you get leather, you don't get a steak. Anger is just like that. Like just like that fire. If you can adjust it without going over the top and overcooking so it's too high for too long when bad things happen, then you could use it for fuel to get a lot of good stuff done. Anger is absolutely a performance-enhancing emotion. And the secret that people don't want to talk about is anybody who's ever been pissed knows that when they were angry, it felt great. It was when they did something stupid afterwards that that didn't feel so great. But what if we could get all of the positive benefits of anger without being over the top and leading to problems? And so adjusting the flame is about getting right up to that red line without going over it. Now, why that becomes difficult is because each person's tolerance for anger is different. Different tasks require different amounts of uh emotion. We have different tools in our toolbox. But when I'm working with teams, I want everybody to be emotionally intelligent. We're on the same page. I want everyone amped up. Nobody's ever won a game when they're asleepwalking around, right? We need energy, we need excitement. But if anybody goes over the top and they're making bad mental decisions because they're too hot, they're compromising the whole team. As far as I'm concerned, tap your helmet. You are not able to help us now. A few years back, who is the uh cornerback that Odell Beckham was playing against in Carolina? But they were drawn back and forth. Josh Norman? Josh Norman, yes. Was he on Carolina or Washington at the end?
SPEAKER_00:I know what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_01:The reference. So and and and Josh Norman was a good quarterback, but Odell was at the top of his game. And you're that hot. You got to be sit down. You have to be removed because you're gonna get ejected, and then you're not gonna be able to help us. We have to have a collective responsibility to say we're gonna play at a certain level. And if any of us are too hot, we have to agree. It's almost like sign a contract ahead of time. You're too hot, you have to be removed. Now, sometimes in sports, you don't have that option. Someone, if you're a baseball player and someone throws at your head, they don't go, by the way, I'd like uh someone to come pinch hit for me. So there's different availabilities in sports at different times, but adjusting the flame is all about being in that sweet spot, that optimal zone of functioning, and that includes the right level of anger for the task at hand. You know, if you're playing golf, for example, you can afford to have a little bit more anger if you're driving the ball than if you're putting the ball. If you're playing football, defensive linemen. Remember the old days when they used to say dumb linemen? Never said that about offensive linemen. They were always the highest IQ on the team, right? But it used to be defensive linemen's job was as simple as this throw a man in front of you out of the way, kill guy with ball. Then they started doing zone blitzes and twists and all the rest of the stuff, and you had to make more decisions. But one of the things that I think most people would agree is if you're a defensive lineman, you don't have to make as many decisions as a defensive back. So defensive linemen can play with more anger than a defensive back can, because you don't need the same processing. But if you're playing with rage and fury and you're dripping with saliva and all the rest of stuff, and you jump off sides, what's your coach going to do? Sit his ass on the bench. You just cost me yards. And so this is all around us, and we can get a whole lot better at it, whether it's performance in sport or in performance in life. And I think we're just scratching the surface with what we could do with this stuff.
SPEAKER_00:What's step one to getting yourself to the optimal level of flame?
SPEAKER_01:Self-awareness. Self-awareness. I mean, have you ever noticed that you're the last person to realize how pissed off you are? Most people don't know where the red line is until you go past it. But that absolutely is a skill that we can improve on. And it starts, you know, it's interesting because I try to take stuff from the clinical literature and clinical practice and apply it to athletes, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work. So the easiest way to teach someone to increase their awareness about how they're doing emotionally is pay attention to the way your body changes. So when you're angry, by the way, the way your body changes when you're angry is it's almost exactly the same as when you're afraid. Okay? Um it's all sympathetic nervous system kicking in. Muscle tension, breathing rate increases, um, it gets faster and shallower, heart rate increases, blood pressure increases, the urge to urinate increases. Most people don't realize that. People go, what are you talking about? If you ask people if if they ever remember the urge to urinate when they're afraid, everybody knows that. They go, I was so scared I'd pee myself. But what's another way of saying someone's angry? They're pissed. Think that's coincidence? It's not. This is what your body's doing. And also increased perspiration. So all of these things happen because your body's getting ready. Your brain is not recognizing that football is a game. It's a simulation of survival. And so all the things that happen are geared to help you survive. Well, if you're gonna run or you're gonna fight, you're gonna need to use your muscles, right? So they're getting microcontractions because they're getting ready to go. You're not gonna be able to use them long if you don't get more oxygen in your body. So your breathing rate increases. Oxygenated blood has to get to the muscles, and create blood pressure and uh heart rate. So all of these things happen and you can pay attention to the changes in your body and then identify what emotion is happening. The problem is you can't do that with an athlete during competition. Because if I say to you, Colin, I want you to pay attention to when your heart rate's starting to get faster, because it might be mean you're getting angry. I just ran 70 yards after a running back. Of course, right? My muscles are tense. No shit. I just ran into a truck, right? And so what you start to realize is that the way you teach people to increase their self-awareness depends on what the realm is. So you always start with the physiology because when you explain the physiology of what happens when you're anger, it's in it's intuitive. Most people know, but it doesn't work while you're playing. So if you're playing, you don't pay attention to changes in your body, you pay attention to changes in your cognition. If you're more interested in killing that guy than executing the play, you're too hot, right? But you also want to be able to teach people to recognize their triggers. What are the things that I walk off that cliff every single time? So if you want to be able to adjust the flame, yes, you have to have a toolbox, but you can't do anything until you increase their self-awareness. And the more they do this, the more it becomes habit. We even use something called a hassle log, where it's all it is is just an index card and said, I want you to fill one out after every time you had a bad interaction, a situation that you got a little pissed. Who, what, where, why, when, and how? Give me the data. And what you start to notice is you start to realize that there's certain trends. Who pisses me off? Where does it happen? What time of day is it when you should have ate lunch about three hours ago and you're a little bit hangry? And so there are many things we could do to increase self-awareness. If we don't do that, then we can't do all the other things to de-escalate. So that's where it all starts.
SPEAKER_00:How do you get people to actually do these exercises? Is it I have to want it, or can you bring it to someone and be like, hey, start doing these things?
SPEAKER_01:Great question. The answer is no, I cannot make you do it. When I first started with anger management with athletes, most coaches were afraid I was gonna turn them into a bunch of wusses. Because they didn't understand what I was talking about. I mean, I'm a linebacker from nature by nature. I'm all about aggressiveness. I'm not interested in making players soft, but I think what people forget is that the opposite of aggressive is passive. You are not gonna be successful in sport, being passive. Success is not gonna drop into your lap. So I want you to be aggressive. I want you to go after it. But I can't make you do it. You have to want to do it. So what I started to realize was if people think that anger management is just preventing you from acting like an idiot and doing bad things, they're not gonna want any part of it because they don't own the fact that they do anything wrong, right? What do you think? It's just one family in Wisconsin that's creating all the psychopaths? No, it's all over the place. It's not how it works. But what I started to realize is that it was two sides of the same coin. We can prevent transgressions, which is a good thing, bad penalties, arrests, all of these things. I mean, coaches know the most important ability of an athlete is availability. And if you're in jail, you ain't helping us, right? But the other side of it is that if we can teach people to not just prevent the transgressions, but also learn to use their emotions to enhance their performance, now we're talking about secret sauce. And I think that there are not enough people that talk about that, but I don't know anybody that that can't relate to times in their life that they used anger to motivate them to get things done that other people would have quit.
SPEAKER_00:I often think about as an athlete, the role that, you know, anger played in my own life and how there's like an optimal level of anger that I needed to play at and finding ways to create. I think about it now, I didn't think about this at the time, the systems in place to get me to said level. Yep. And it is addicting, like you said, that anger because you feel the adrenaline, you feel the anger. And to be honest, sometimes when you get the perception of someone who gets to a certain level and you feel yourself rising and you see the reactions from people where it's like, it's like a fear-respect thing. And it's like you feel that I don't, I don't know if conquer is the right word, but dominance over people. It gets addicting. But then, like you said, that come down, when you cool off and you realize I said things I shouldn't have said, I acted in ways I shouldn't have, you get a sense of embarrassment.
SPEAKER_01:Hopefully. But but there's also the possibility that there's stimulus differentiation. One could argue that one of the reasons why sports are so popular is because you can do things in sports that you're not allowed to do anywhere else in society. You know, the same thing you did in a football field that you did in the parking lot, that's an assault.
SPEAKER_00:Correct. And the where I was going with the question was is the demonizing of certain emotions the problem.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. It's complete horseshit. It is complete horseshit. No one has ever said, all right, we're gonna, we're gonna send you to happy management or confusion management. There is no emotion except shame itself that carries more shame with it than anger. And I think I understand why, because people at the high levels of anger, they sometimes do really horrible things. Stuff that you should be embarrassed of, things that you should have known better. I mean, let's not forget that that where do we learn anger management skills, right? I think we forget a lot of athletes have tremendous anger management skills. They're provoked all the time. And by the way, to me, that's the definition of toughness. Toughness is when you cannot be provoked. I was just at a sports psychology conference up in Montreal and someone was presenting, it was a keynote on trash talk. Loved it. It's really good stuff. But I reached out to him, I said, but you didn't talk about anger. He goes, Yeah, well, I said, anger is everything that trash talk is about. Because what I tell athletes I work with is if someone starts trash talking, you should smile. It means they know they can't beat you physically. They're trying to take you into the gutter and beat you on their own turf because they're gonna try to knock you off your game, piss you off, make you make mistakes. You should know that. So when someone starts trash talking, you should be smiling to yourself or looking up at the scoreboard and reminding yourself who's winning and who's not. But this demonization of anger is what stops the conversation. And in my estimation, it's also what stops people from harnessing their anger. Instead of realizing that this is uh it's no different than a gun or a knife. It's not that these tools don't have any utility. You just need to use them responsibly. Anger can be a weapon, or at least it can manifest itself in behavior that's like a weapon, can do damage. But demonizing the emotion, look, you could be pissed off right now, and I don't know it because there's no behavioral analog. No one's ever got in trouble for being angry. Ever. I set kids up all the time when I'm doing presentations. I say, all right, should Show of hands, how many how many of you got in trouble for being angry? They all raised their hands. You're all wrong. None of you got in trouble for being angry. So if you've never gotten in trouble for being angry, why do people have to deny it? Why do people have to say, I don't get angry? Why do people have to not I mean, and and I can tell you, it's often anticlimactic. You ask people why they're why they're angry, and they tell you, and you go, sounds about right. I was in that situation, I'd be probably be angry too. Question is, how long do you want to stay angry? And is that anger helping you or not? It's not what, it's the why and the how. And if I said, all right, what if we could use that anger to motivate you? I mean, you know, you remember the old Nike commercials with while you're sleeping, there's someone else working the stairs? You want someone beating you? Well, you might be a little bit pissed off and working harder, or a coach that doubts you. Is there anything more motivating than someone telling you you can't? What's the response to someone telling you that? Fuck you, watch me. Exactly. I don't think there's anything more I think it's the most consistent, motivating tool of every human, certainly in America. Fuck you watch me. And it doesn't mean it's the only way people get motivated, but it's a real good way. And that's all about you have a perceived insult, you're angry about it, and you're gonna have your comeuppance. And when you start thinking, I'm tired, I can't go anymore, and you hear in the back of your head, shit, you can't do it. You remember um Invincible with uh with uh Mark Wahlberg as every time he'd go look at the paper, what his wife said to him, and that he was never gonna be anything. Boy, you want to be in front of that guy after he read that? I don't. And I think that we don't appreciate all of the things that people use to motivate them to get really, really hard things done. And when we talk about athletics, as the level gets higher and higher and higher, we're talking about the top people in the world. They have to. Have to. I mean, it's Rocky III and Eye of the Tiger. You can't lose your edge. And keeping that edge, because there's always someone that's going to try to catch you from behind. So you're either clawing up to try to get there or you're trying to prevent the person to get you. And if anger's not in your toolbox, I think you're vulnerable.
SPEAKER_00:How do you properly use anger? I know we talked about self-awareness, but now it's we've got all these different moving parts because there are so many different ways to stay motivated, different tools, healthy ways to approach things. Because if you keep that flame on the whole time, you're gonna be drained. I experienced this. And it's figuring out what's the right dose and what's the right taste. When do I need this? When do I need that? What's the depths of self-awareness that you can really build?
SPEAKER_01:Excellent point. You know, you don't want to flame out too quick and then you got no juice left in the fourth quarter. One of the things that I think helps is that I always talk about the 150 rule. Any athlete I'm working with, I want them to be trained to be physically and psychologically ready to compete at their highest level for 150% of the maximum amount of time that they need. And you'll often see that's why athletes are overconditioned. So it goes to overtime. You know, I think it was Gino, or I think it was Gino Oriema who said, you know, great players kick the shit out of good players when they get tired, right? Well, that's not just physical tired, that's psychological tired. So we have to think about it a couple of different ways. One of the things that I try to use is what is my goal and when am I going to need it? So it is not uncommon for people to peek too early. Like, did you have a routine before you played? I did have a routine. And what kind of music was on that routine playlist?
SPEAKER_00:So it's funny. I'm actually different than most people. So I liked, even though I don't dance, I loved listening to music that made me feel like I wanted to dance. So I was like an EDM pop, some country kind of guy before I played, actually. Country. Yeah, through some country in there.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. So one of the things about music and mood is it is a very personal thing. A very personal thing. I've seen kids listen to gangster rap and that cools them down and gets them ready to play. And I've seen kids listen to Metallica and they're ready to run through a wall. So it's a mistake for the outsider to presume that they know. But we do know certain things with science. Usually more beats per second and heavier bass is tends to be more activated. And so I advise all athletes to have playlists, uh, an amp-up playlist that you can use for training, pregame, et cetera, and a cool-you out playlist. The thing about that that's funny, though, is that very often people will put like love songs on their cool out list, and it doesn't work, and they don't know why. Well, if you just listen to the music, you'd be fine because softer sounds, less beats per second, and then there's lyrics. And then you listen into the words, and now you boo-hoo it. And now you're getting upset. I can't believe she left me and all the rest of that stuff. So the interesting thing is that I'm always trying to figure out how people are preparing themselves emotionally to perform. Guess what? It's almost never that I have to ask an athlete whether or not they have a preparation ritual. They've developed it themselves. And so I want to know what that is because I don't want to change it. I want to enhance it. And one of the things that I would ask exactly for this reason is um, how long before actual game time? Do you do this when you train? Do you do this when you practice? And do you do, or do you do this when you uh have competition, or do you do the same thing all the time? And what's the time fact? Do you have your headphones on when you're in warm-ups? Do you sit by your locker right before you're walking out? Because I want to know already what is their curve. We got to make sure that they're able to maintain their curve. Now, one of the cool things about anger is that you can self-stimulate anger. I mean, all it takes is for you to think, I can't do this. I can't do this. When I see uh a group of players that are playing defeated, they're on their heels. First thing I'm thinking to myself is, where is your personal pride? Are you fucking kidding me? This is my field. I might not, my team might lose, but I'm not losing this battle. I'm or I'm you're not getting out of here without scars. I'm gonna give you everything I have. And this is where society's really gone to shit, I think. We have so trashed competition that people are almost ashamed to say, I love to compete. I love to dominate. But the highest achievers know it's it's their life blood. So I want to know before I try teaching them any skills, I want to know what's their already their arousal patterns and how they manipulate it before they get to the field. Because, very simply, if you're even playing high school sports, if you didn't know how to get yourself amped up, you would have already flamed out. And do you know what the average age is that kids drop out of sports? I would guess like 12, 13. You're about right. Why do you think that is? Give me the answer. Well, there's not one answer, and I'll give you my answers. One of them is the puberty fair fairy.
SPEAKER_00:I was gonna say that. I should I should have just answered that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, yeah, come on, you know, you were an adolescent a couple weeks ago. Right. One of the things is is the puberty fairy, and so your body's going through all kinds of changes. You're starting to get more interested in social life instead of so that is a factor. But I think the bigger issue is this. When you get to about 12 or 13 years old, the competition level starts getting a lot bigger. And now you have to make a conscious, intentional decision of whether or not you want to invest your time in this. Because if you don't, people are gonna pass you. Where I think it's dangerous is for the athletes that are so athletically gifted, they don't have to do work. They can dominate everybody. Don't worry, they all find their come up in it. It usually happens in high school, sometimes in college. Rarely, you'll get someone that gets to the pro level and they're still so much better than everyone else. You go, that's a physical specimen. But more often than not, they still crash and burn because you'll always hear this phrase, they don't know how to be a pro. They don't know how to take care of their body, they don't know how to rest, they don't know how to watch film. And so invariably the mental skills will always catch up. So my mentor, uh Shane Murphy, who is the first full-time sports psychologist for the United States Olympic Committee, when I first met him, I said, Why do you think the Olympics is where sports psychology really got born? Got born? Where where were why that was where it was born in the United States? He said, at that level, the physical differences are so small that the mental differences become a lot bigger. So when you talk about adolescence, it's this time that you either have to commit or the other thing is that around 12 or 13, people become more invested in what's going on socially. And so um the trajectory is now you have to make a decision. A student athlete's life is a full-time job. And so there's not always a great uh appreciation for future orientation. So there are some kids that are playing pop one or who think they're gonna be NFL players. Statistically, they're not. Probably not even gonna play in college, but there's these competing issues, and you have to really want it. It also depends on who's around you. What are your parents' or what are your parents' expectations of your athletic career? What are the quality of the coaches that you're around? Is your coach someone who's losing their minds all the time? That's a big issue. You know, we when we want athletes to maximize their anger is, Harry, listen, we don't want you to go over the top. And you have a coach that's yelling and screaming. I mean, you can't watch ESPN without someone punching a player or grabbing him by the face, masking all the rest of stuff. Now, coaching is really, really hard, but it's difficult to ask an athlete to maximize their emotions when coaches don't always. So I want athletes to be able to control their moods. Oh, we're uh, I'm sorry, now I know where we're going. I was talking about the issue of timing their emotional arc, if you will. There's always things that are going to piss us off. We can also regenerate that. All it takes is for us to feel threatened. And especially for males that are very insecure to begin with, all you have to do is question something about yourself. But I don't know many athletes who have difficulty amping it up. I really don't see that very often. I mean, did you find that over the course of your career that you had difficulty getting amped up?
SPEAKER_00:So my question was going to be like, well, what part of this is like innate? I think it's in, you know, revisionist history, you don't know exactly how much you're articulating accurately, but my entire life, I can never remember a time where I didn't love competition, where I didn't think I was going to play in the NFL or MLB or whatever. And like I never remember anyone having to like motivate me to play. Yes, there were times I needed my parents to motivate me to practice, work hard, things like that. But when it came to like the competition part, when it came to lining up across from someone in a game, it was I want to dominate you. And I don't know where that came from, what part of that's genetic, what part that was from when I was a kid that I don't remember. But it was always I was going to be relentless out there. And I think if you talked to most of my coaches or teammates or people I played with, like relentless and like competitive is going to be one of those things that always comes out.
SPEAKER_01:And you were rewarded for that. Oh, yeah. So wherever it came from, it was perpetuated and grown by the accolades that you got as a result. So and I think that that's similar for most people. Most athletes love the thrill of competition. In fact, it always makes me laugh when an athlete does something wrong and coaches make them run.
SPEAKER_00:I hate that personally.
SPEAKER_01:When I say it makes me laugh, it makes me laugh because it's stupid. Any exercise is an opportunity to get better.
SPEAKER_00:And that's the reframe I talk about with like a lot of like coaches is like, why are we making exercises or things like that punishment? Because those should be things that are rewards. If you do the right thing, you get to work harder or you get to do things that make you better. Not you were, you did something dumb. Here's a physical exercise punishment that you're gonna do. I just he gets it. A million percent right.
SPEAKER_01:What is the purpose of punishment? The purpose of punishment is to decrease the likelihood of behavior happening again, right? What is the life blood of the athlete competing? If you fuck up, you're gonna sit and you're gonna watch. The person who's not even as good as you get your reps, right? Because that's gonna get them thinking. That's gonna be, I don't want to be here. I want every rep. You know, I these athletes that the coach has to literally pull them off the field. No, I want one more time, right? I'm the last one, or the last one that leaves the gym. I'm the last one that leaves practice. No, you do something, you take a bad penalty, you sit. You sit and you watch. It's not you sit because you're a piece of shit. You can't do that. If you do that, you're not about helping our performance. I'm gonna punish you by removing your reward, your opportunity to compete. If I send you to run, what I'm saying is you did something bad, so I want you to get faster because of it. Or I want you to build your stamina because of it. There's no learning that happens there.
SPEAKER_00:And what you do is you create resentment around the thing that makes you better.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So now they don't see pun uh exercise or training as a tool to get where they want to go. It's obnoxious. And by the way, what's what's the worst is when you get sent to run by yourself. Because now we were saying before about shame, it's not punishment, it's shame on top of everything else. There are too many coaches that use fear and shame as motivators. There are so many other ways to do it. I mean, all you have to do is to get people really into a good SNID is to say, listen, these guys think that they're gonna wipe the floor with you. They're here on your turf with all the work that you put in, all of the skills, all the training, they're coming here and they think that they're gonna wipe the floor with you. You're gonna let them do that? Every good halftime speech, that's what it's about. It's about re-energizing, it's redirecting. Now, some of it's tweaking and strategy and all the rest of that stuff, and good coaches know how to adjust strategically at halftime. But it's the reason why hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. It's always have something in the tank. And if you don't think getting good and pissed is not going to find you gas in the tank that you didn't know that you had, it is. And so I don't find that there's a lot of difficulty getting athletes amped up. I think that what's more difficult is getting them to realize that it's anger and learn to have skills so that they could just tweak it down. I'm not looking for you to do downward dog at the free throw line. Right? I'm not looking, all right, and and by the way, certain sports allow for it more. I mean, LeBron James is doing uh imagery exercises and deep breathing on, okay, nice. You know, if you if you don't come out at all, you're not gonna have time to do that. But we can either use deep breathing exercises, you just need one or two to take control of your body again. Something called progressive muscle relaxation, which is a system where we teach people to contract their muscles really, really hard because the harder you contract your muscles, the more relaxed they will be afterwards. Now, you go muscle group by muscle group by muscle group. No one's gonna do that in the middle of competition. But when you become so proficient in turning your body down, you can relax one muscle group and your whole body will chill. Like, so for me, it's my traps. So if you, if you, if you email me or call me at the wrong time, you're gonna, my ears, my shoulders gonna be up by my ears while I'm looking at emails because I'm pissed. And I know that if I contract the muscles and then roll them, they'll relax and I'll get a chill through my whole body. Now, I've also been doing PMR for like 25 years. But the goal is don't want you to take a nap. I just want you to take the edge off. And when you do that and you feel empowered, all of a sudden you realize I have influence over my emotions. Yeah, because I want you to be in charge of your own domain. There was a movie. Uh, do you remember the movie The Program? Yeah, right? That Alvin Mack, the linebacker, great movie. It was people used to criticize how bad of a movie it was, and I took offense to it. The reason why I took offense to it was, first off, it's a fucking movie. Yeah. It's they took poetic license. But what they did was, well, let me do it a slightly different way. When I first started working in the prison system, the show Oz was still on. And people were like, is the show Oz real? And I was like, well, kinda. And they go, what do you mean? I said, well, at the time we had 14 prisons in New Jersey. I said, if you took what happens over the course of a full year across 14 prisons in New Jersey and put it all into one hour, then yeah, it's it's accurate. All of this happened in what they took poetic license. So the problem with the movie, the program, they took pretty much every problem that could exist in college sports and put it all in one place. And so it was such a comedy of errors, it seemed like fiction. But every single one of those issues was a real issue. There was a quarterback dealing with alcoholism and under the pressure of perfectionism of running for the trying to win the Heisman. You had uh a steroid using sexual assaulter, you had um uh a big Texan-looking offensive lineman who was kind of goofy, that that was really my doggies who go into the end zone and got real. You had Alvin Mack. Alvin Mack was a linebacker who would create stories in his mind. This was actually the precursor to the Water Boy, of course. He would create stories in his mind about his opponents, and then he would enforce justice on them. So he would convince himself that the running back maybe was someone who robbed his mother or someone else raped his sister. He would get himself, I mean, scary. Now, of course, you saw earlier there's a scene in the film room that he knew how to read everything. He knew his assignments, he was a heat-seeking missile, unbelievable linebacker. And he'd use the anger to amp himself up. What happens in the movie? He talks himself into focusing on this running back, and he forgets that an offensive lineman that he was talking smack about earlier comes around, blindsides him, upends him, compound fracture, and his college career is over. It was a perfect example of what anger management is. You can use it to focus you where you're going, but if you are over the top and in a rage, you lose your ability to read the periphery. And that's what happened. In the water boy, Adam Sandler did the same exact thing, right? You start thinking about all the different people that hurt you, and that's your tackling fuel. Tackling fuel, tackling fuel. I don't know, open a can of whoop us. And and so we see these things play out over and over again. So we can find an endless supply of tackling fuel or motivation to get ourselves amped up. This the secret is knowing how to calm ourselves down. So whether it's progressive muscle relaxation that we could use to turn it down a little bit, imagery or visualization, prediction of consequences. Like um, if you punch a cop, what's gonna happen?
SPEAKER_00:I'm gonna get arrested.
SPEAKER_01:If you're lucky, that's all that happens. You punch a ref, what's gonna happen? At the minimum, right? So are you sure you didn't have to study for that? No. You're you're pretty confident in that. Pretty confident. A lot of things in life are predictable. And so at the end of the day, I'm pretty sure if your star quarterback is not playing, you're gonna be at a disadvantage. You know, everybody remember Bounty Gate when everyone was talking about how horrible it was that a defensive coordinator would say, if we take the head off, if we could injure that quarterback, we have a better chance to win. Go for the head, the body will die. Exactly right. Now, there's no doubt there's a moral dilemma there. But there's also no doubt that that's true, also. If you injure their best players, they're gonna be at a disadvantage. Now, now when we start dealing with anger and violence in sport, invariably at some point, we have to impose ethics and sportsmanship. Where that line is, it depends. But at the professional level, we're talking about people that are making millions of dollars to play a game. And so, but by the way, who do you think the kids are watching? The players. Right. So when you see a pro act like an animal, and then the kid wants to act like him, there you go. So we want to increase their tools to be able to turn the flame down a little bit. They have to want to, they have to understand that this is an opportunity to become better. But when you start imposing it on them and say, well, you have an anger problem and we want to get rid of that, it's very hard to get an athlete to be motivated. But if the coach says to them, Listen, you're like an eight from a talent point of view out of ten. You could be a 15 out of performance point of view if you learn how to harness your emotions. Then they see it as a performance enhancement tool, and then off we go. But you don't get people to do things the same way as you're not going to get an athlete to stop taking penalties by running laps. You're not going to get someone to better control their anger by telling them they're a piece of shit. And by the way, that's what happens when athletes get jammed up in domestic violence. Um there it is very common. I don't know anybody in a relationship that hasn't had an argument that thought, that person needs to be smacked right now. That doesn't mean it's okay to do it. It's but people have this feeling. Then when an athlete does that and they get sent to anger management, what's the first thing that starts happening to them? You're a piece of shit. You shouldn't do that. You have no respect for women. You think guys really want to respond to that? Versus, hey, listen, relationships are hard. Relationships are hard. I'm sure that in this situation something happened and you got really angry. I don't have a problem with getting angry. Even if you don't care about her, you obviously don't care about yourself. Because you got so amped up that you engaged in behavior. Forget about what I think. Forget about her. You are putting yourself in a vulnerable position. You are about to throw everything away.
SPEAKER_00:Have you ever seen the Bill Burst get on this? So I forget how many years ago.
SPEAKER_01:I think so.
SPEAKER_00:He does his comedy sketch on renew it for me. And he says, he's like, I'm not saying hitting women is okay. He's like, but people who say they can't understand why anyone would want to hit a woman, he's like, they're idiots. They're lying. He's like, of course. He's like, there's plenty of times I want to smack wife. He's like, I'm not gonna do it. He's like, it's not okay. Well, what about the other side?
SPEAKER_01:You think that the wives don't want to smack the husbands? Right. Yes, but this is more about the shame, Colin. We can't talk about things, right? So we stuff it. So you wake up in the morning and you're in an okay mood, and all of a sudden you realize, oh shit, I'm running 15 minutes late. My alarm didn't go off. Now, this is your normal mood. You just went up to here. Now, a healthy thing to do would be like, all right, shit happens. What are you gonna do? Relax, cool yourself down, take some deep breaths, put on some music, get back down to baseline. But we don't do that. Then we spill coffee on ourselves a little bit higher. Again, don't get back down to baseline. My wife on the way out has some comment about me forgetting something again. And the body keeps track of all this stuff because there's shame. There's no, if if it was able to say, and by the way, I do this and I think it's very important for people to do it. When you're in a crappy mood, it's important to own it in advance. If I come home from work and I've had a bad day, I'll tell my wife and kids, listen, I'm irritable right now. I don't want to take it out on you. You didn't do anything wrong yet, right? I know I'm irritable. Give me a few minutes to decompress. Own it, recognize it. But what happens is that we don't often own it. And then it gets higher and higher and higher. And then invariably, the straw that breaks the camel's back is always something that's so stupid and makes you look like a complete moron. And people are like, Really, Colin? That's what pissed you off. And you're like, you don't know all the other shit I dealt with. There's, I think, something refreshingly human about being able to say, I was so angry at her, I felt like I wanted to hit her. But I know I don't want to hit her. I know that's wrong. I will stop myself from doing it. When we don't have that conversation, then we're actually increasing the likelihood of something bad happening because we're not owning the emotion and managing it. But think about this. Think about football players, especially defensive linemen. Their milieu is the phone box, right? The telephone booth. Everything they do is in very tight quarters, hand fighting, grabbing, all the rest of that stuff. That's what makes them a they can make a lot of money. Why don't we have more defensive linemen arrested for domestic violence? They are completely reinforced for the behavior on the field. Why don't we have more of that? The reason is because most athletes have pretty good anger management skills. Most of them were raised pretty well. Most of them have an idea of what's right and wrong. And they also have a stimulus differentiation. There was an officer I used to work with at Northern State Prison, and when he got off shift, he had to go home and immediately take a shower, take his uniform off, take a shower, and wash that shit off of him. That's not who I am anymore. And you have a lot of athletes that it is perfectly fine and encourage to be an animal on the field. And then when you get off the field, it's a different set of rules, different set of circumstances. But if we can't talk about that honestly, then how are we going to get anywhere? And when someone does transgress, are you going to decrease the likelihood of them doing it in the future by treating them like they're a piece of crap who should be ashamed of themselves? Versus saying, listen, I understand and I can appreciate why you felt that way, and maybe even why you thought that way. Behavior is not acceptable any way, shape, or form. Whether we look at it as she didn't deserve it, whether we look at it as you're better than that, whether we look at it as you're going to ruin your life, there's many different ways to use it. The behavior is unjustifiable no matter what. But when I'm working with inmates, I'm not the judge or jury. I don't get to say, I've decided you're not so bad, so I'm going to excuse the behavior. I don't have that authority. But I want to understand what were the circumstances that led to this. Because if we can understand the explanations, then we can attack those explanations and have a different trajectory in the future. That only happens if we have this conversation. Think about you've been in this space for a while. How many people in the sports world are talking, honestly, about anger issues in sports, athletes' transgression because of violence? I don't think I've seen any. Why? So guess what, guys? You guys are all stuck with me because I'm the only idiot talking about it. And I'm not saying anything that isn't obvious. It's not rocket science. What I'm doing is I'm kind of resonating with the part inside of you that loves that fury. Own it. It's a beautiful thing. You can do great things, but also have respect for the danger that goes along with it. That's what we're talking about. And it doesn't have to be a character assassination. In prison, I don't find a lot of very evil people. A few, a few, but most people are decent, decent people who have done bad things. I don't know anybody that can say, if you followed me around with a camera, everything I've done throughout my whole life, I'd be proud of. I mean, could you imagine? I don't I don't know about you, but if there was social media when I was a kid, it'd be a very vulnerable feeling.
SPEAKER_00:I was like right on the verge where social media became popular. I think I was a freshman when like Twitter came out in high school. Okay. So like I caught the tail end. Now there was like MySpace and like Facebook started when I was a little bit younger, but they weren't as like prominent or popular. I always say like things aren't really good or bad determine whether they become good or bad. And so I empathize with a lot of younger athletes and athletes in the professional world today because it has only amplified everything. It's I don't have to deal with that as much because I'm not an athlete competing anymore where everything is amplified, good, bad, ugly.
SPEAKER_01:But you're in the social media space, you know, everybody's a keyboard warrior. Yes. They're gonna, you know, the the the power of anonymity. And it takes great courage. You know, people don't understand influencers, people are doing podcasts, they're putting themselves out there. There's a vulnerability. You are judged, and and there's no backseats. You, you know, what you know, so people oh, Snapchat, it'll go away. Click there forever. That's right. And and that is even the scarier part. So when you were younger and it was just developing, you still had these fantasies that this is just temporary. And now there are professionals that are dealing with stupid tweets that they wrote when they were a teenager.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I think about that stuff too. I'm like, what the heck did I say 15 years ago that I would adamantly disagree with or condemn these days? Uh I do think about that stuff. One thing back back to the point that I think is really important when you said, like, hey, I'm irritable, I come home. I have begun to do my best to implement. When I walk through that door and I use the door as a symbol, I'm no longer calling the worker, what you know, whatever I've been doing. Transgressions are things that have made me angry today or irritable. I'm leaving that there. When I walk through the door, I'm calling the husband, I'm calling the dad, and I bring a joy and smile on My face. So when my girls run up to me, I see my wife. I give her a hug and a kiss. And then the new part I'm adding to this is when I put my girls to bed, I say, hey, instead of like reading a story or a book, I'm like, you know, daddy today was really angry and this is how I overcame it. You know, I was really, you know, frustrated today, this is what I did, or I was really happy today and this was why.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. And you're building emotional intelligence.
SPEAKER_00:In what I'm exactly what I'm doing my best to do is say, hey, one when I come home, I want you to just know that I'm happy to be home with you and see that joy that you give me. But then on the back end, be able to say, hey, I'm not just happy all the time.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:And there's a process in understanding your emotions and things that come in, hey, how do I utilize this? How do I overcome it if it is perceived negative or a feeling that I don't want to feel? This is how I work through it, and this is how I use it.
SPEAKER_01:Love it. I love it for two reasons. One, you use a visual cue as a set point to change a trajectory. We do this a lot in sports psychology. I mean, I do this with baseball players. I'll also have them like, because you know, nowadays there's all these uniform rules. So I'll have them like just with a tiny Sharpie write a letter on each hand under batten gloves. Sometimes it's like S and E, smooth and explode, right? Because I'm while I want them to have a visual cue. Ken Revisa, who was he's passed away, but he's one of the most prominent sports psychologists for a long time. He worked with Evan Linguria and and told the story that he would step out after every and Evan Linguria was known for having such smooth mechanics that he looked like he was almost sleeping at a pla at the pleat until the ball met bat and then it was explosive. But he would use the left field foul pole as the visual cue. Why? Because every field has one. So it's not just having cues, it's also making your routine portable. So I love the fact that you use a cue to kind of set this is going to be a clear demarcation of where we're going. I also think it's great that you're sharing the language of emotion with your kids. What I try to do, which is similar but not the same, I screw up more often than I'd like. I think it's critical that we apologize to our kids. Yes. You know, I don't like apologizing. It's no fun. Because there's shame that goes along with it. I mean, I guess you could say, I'm proud to have the strength to be honest that I fucked that up, right? Okay. But it's not a fun feeling to say out loud, I didn't do good. Right. But if we want our children to be well-developed, grounded, emotionally intelligent adults, then we have to own our humanness and model it for them and say it's okay to screw up. I mean, if you apologize and you don't change your behavior, then it's not an apology, it's an F you, right? It's like, I'm so fine, I'm sorry. And then you go right back to you, and everyone knows that's bullshit. That doesn't count. But when you are genuine, this happens a couple of times. I was talking to my son and saying, look, Logan, I gotta tell you, I know that I was harder on you than you deserved earlier. That was not on you. That was that was me. I was angry, I was irritable, I know what I was angry and irritable about. I did not want to take it out on you, and I did, and I'm sorry. You did that, I didn't like that, but I gave you a 20 when it needed a three. That was not being a good dad. Or that was not my best parenting. And so I'm gonna work harder to try and not make that mistake again. And this is actually one of the secrets to anger management that people don't talk about. I think it's important to demonstrate the effort, meaning the next time that situation happens and I feel myself angry and about to snap on him, to point out to him, I want to let you know. Remember we talked about this the other day? Yeah. I'm irritable right now. I almost overreacted to you. I remembered the conversation. I don't want to disappoint you. I don't want to disappoint me, and I consciously made the decision. And so this could have been a repeat of that, but this is I want to show you that I'm being intentional about improving things. This is why anger management work is so hard. Let's say I have some difficulties and I'm snapping at my wife ten times a week, for argument's sake. And I go see Dr. Abrams, because he's so wonderful. I go, I go see an anger management uh expert and and I start to increase my self-awareness, recognize my cues, learn to calm myself down, put things in perspective, and I stop myself from reacting or overreacting seven times out of the ten that would normally happen. So I used to be exploding ten times a week, and now I exploded three times this week. You think I get a trophy for that? Nobody sees the times that you catch yourself and you censor yourself and you adjust yourself. Because how, and in fairness, I'm not saying, oh, my wife or anyone else is bad. How do they recognize a non-issue? But if they do, I think it's really important. I've said this to my wife. I say this, I tell anybody that listen, when you know someone's working on something and they're not getting it right all the time. I mean, people sometimes joke, oh, really, you're an anger management expert, Doc? Hey, man, you follow me around. I don't get it right all the time. I don't make the same mistakes over and over, but I'm constantly improving. And I'm better than I used to be. And I also can tolerate anger better than a lot of other people and better than I used to. But I think it's really important when someone's putting effort in that you reward them for that effort. Say, hey, listen, man, I know it's hard. You're clearly dealing with a lot of shit right now. I can sense the energy off of you. Last week you would have reacted to that. You didn't. I appreciate that. Thank you. It goes a long way because I think that the two hardest conditions in life are loneliness and feeling misunderstood. And what's the cure to both of them? Being seen. Being seen, being acknowledged, being valued. And I don't think we do enough of that. We don't do enough out of boys and out of girls. Someone does something wrong, we're all over them. And which is unrealistic. It's like if you're fucking perfect, then you could start with everyone else. None of us are. So when people are working in the right direction, I think we need to reward them. And I would even say it's the most chronic problem I see in athletes. They don't know how to celebrate. They don't know how to enjoy their victories. Because you see someone on the gold medal platform and they're crying and everyone's saying, oh, tears of joy. Nope. They're thinking, I got three weeks and I'm starting to train again. And some of that is self-inflicted, right? I'm so driven to success. But it's hard. We need to celebrate. We need to and it's not just the big victories. Sports psychologists often talk about the importance of process goals. You do the process right, the goals, the product will take care of itself. Well then you have to reward for the process, not just for the results. I mean, haven't you had those times that you played the best game of your life and you lost?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And other times that you played like crap, but you got the W. Yeah. What do they call the person who graduates last from medical school? Doctor. Right. So we gotta, we gotta take our successes when we can.
SPEAKER_00:A couple of different things. The piece of I want to make sure I word this correctly because it's something that I struggle with a lot in my own life that I'm getting better at. And the when I screw up apologizing, that's one thing I say to my daughters all the time. If you are wrong, I'm still gonna tell you, but I'm also gonna apologize when I'm wrong. And like you said, hey, you acted in a certain way, I gave you a 10-level aggression, should have been a three.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Right? So your action was not okay, but I was wrong in the way I handled it. Right. Even at young ages, I'm really my my daughters are four, 18 months, and then my son's three weeks old. So him, I I don't really parent yet. Don't worry, you'll be losing those arguments too. And so, you know, but the humility to say, hey, I was wrong. But on the flip side of that, it's really important for me in like the the way like my eternal dialogue to constantly remind myself that my kids are watching, my peers are watching, people are watching me, and I have to have a higher level of responsibility where I don't get the same grace that other people do, that they have a mistake, right? Because I do know how to manage myself. I do know certain tools that I have at my disposal that I can use to turn it down, or you know, what said emotion. And it's a constant reminder to myself that those with privilege have greater responsibility because I do believe, you know, you know, working that space of like humility, confidence area, like I do believe I have, I've been given a lot in my life. Like personality traits, athletic traits, like I was given a lot of amazing things. And with that comes a level of responsibility that other people weren't innately gifted or had the ability to have it nurtured through them. But I'm sorry to interrupt you, but let me ask you, do you feel that you have to? I want to. I want to. It's I do feel I have. I think there's like honestly, I think so. If if if you watch The Avengers, and we were talking a little bit about this concept earlier about do I have a responsibility to do so? And I was thinking about the Avengers in Endgame when Thor, okay, has like his setback and his mom tells him, like, stop being who you think you need to be and stop being like who you are or whatever. And I think there's a good point in that. But where I think it is wrong is I do believe, like, and it's a desire, I want to do these things, but like, like to whom much is given, much is expected. And I I do believe that to be true in my own life because I have a responsibility to myself and others to hold myself to a higher standard. And like I said, I do want to, but I do believe I have responsibility as well.
SPEAKER_01:Well, but to what judge do you answer? Myself. And is there a harder critic? No. Right. And and that, but that's part of the reason why you understand greatness. See, that's the issue. Real confidence can't exist without humility. And real humility without confidence is meekness. Yeah. Right. And I I think that's I think that's great. People need, should have, want a moral standard, a code, and they comport themselves in a certain way. You know, I use the phrase with my kids. We're we're Abrams. We stick together. We do things a certain way. There's a time you do things the right way because it's the right way, not because you expect a certain thing because of it. Like I'm not a big believer in altruism. Altruism is the idea that people do things really for nothing.
SPEAKER_00:Nothing in return.
SPEAKER_01:I think that's bullshit. We always get something in return. It's not a tangible thing. It feels good to take care of people. It feels good to do something that you're proud of. It feels good to do things the right way, work through something, right? And so there's no shame in it, but we need to try to act like we're selfless. None of us are. In fact, even the studies on altruism find that animals that we thought are altruistic actually are not altruistic when you move them out of their genetic set. So if you take a prairie dog that screeches like a lunatic when there's a bird flying, it turns out that the reason why that happens is because they're genetically connected to all of them in their pack, whatever their group of. And if you take them and you move them into it where they don't have anything genetically in common with that one, they're quite as a as a church mouse. Something I wanted to respond to that I think is really growth point is have you ever have you ever noticed that what you've said is right, but the way you say it is wrong?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, of course.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And so this is why intentionality is so important. Perfect communication is when someone hears what you're saying exactly the way you intend it. I don't know any perfect communicators. I would prefer to be understood and disliked than misunderstood and liked. But when we think about how we the standard that we set for ourselves and what we try to model for the people that we care about, there are also times that you realize my word selection, my volume, my tone, my timing. The thesis was a billion percent right, but everything else about it was shit. And this speaks to the complexities of human interactions. I mean, you're trying to take this little ball of cells and make them better than you. It takes work and it takes humility and patience and I think kindness. You have to forgive yourself for getting it wrong and also being intentional about not doing things that you regret. I think that that's that's the part that no one that's the easy part about anger that everybody knows. Everybody knows that anger out of control leads to things that you will regret. So, therefore, anger is bad. No, oversimplification. I want to avoid things I regret. I'm right with you. No problem. Can you be angry without doing things you regret? Absolutely. That's the sweet spot we're talking about.
SPEAKER_00:I think one thing for myself, in just like the realm of emotions, again, we were talking about this earlier, is really the struggle to, and you talk about celebration, the struggle to acknowledge that you've accomplished some really incredible things, but because they weren't up to what your goals were or what your expectation was or what some of your peers were, that you can't appreciate them. And that's something I've like, I really like, and it goes back again to that humility and that confidence, that irrational confidence. Like anytime, like you talk about getting angry, like where I'm challenged or I'm getting angry, it's like I will throw out the phrase, I'm a one percenter from the level I played at. And I hate when I do that because it feels so arrogant. But I use that. But is it true? It is. But it's and that's like, what? Because like, but the thing is, I don't appreciate it. Like I don't actually like appreciate it until someone makes me mad. And I do my best to say, like, when I'm trying new things that are, you know, you certainly challenging. I'm like, I'll I'll remind myself, like, you are you are capable, you are one percenter, you can do things that are hard. Well, is that because you're fighting off the insecurity?
SPEAKER_01:That's you know, and that's a question I ask myself. I I think that I think you probably are as we all are. If we're humility is a it look, humility is is not announcing your weaknesses, it's knowing them. It's not a good survival strategy. I sometimes joke, I only have one weakness. I'm not gonna tell you what it is. My wife knows that it's got 17 chapters, and each chapter has 200, and she can push the buttons, right? I'm not gonna advertise my weaknesses. That's a bad survival strategy. Humility is accepting the fact that I have them. And instead of embracing them and realizing that's part of what makes my story unique, we're like, oh shit, we got to make sure no one knows it. I'm a 1% of mother. Yeah. And you want to know something? Yeah, yeah. Because I think that that's one of the things that also drives us. It's our insecurities. It's not just our fear that everyone's gonna find out about our insecurities. I think we're secretly worried that our insecurities are gonna overtake our achievements. That's why when you talk about high achievers, I mean, my Michael Jordan would would you know cut you for, you know, over who can open a banana quicker, right? I mean, compete about everything. And there's this slippery slope because if you're gonna be a high achiever, you have to have a certain amount of perfectionism, you have to be stubborn, you have to be detail-oriented, you have to be driven, you have to be able to be emotionally volatile, but you also have to knock it over the top over all those. Well, if you have someone who's perfectionistic and perfection is impossible, how is that not a recipe for insanity? People are gonna drive themselves nuts. So I think you, like most people, are doing this dance of, I know I've done a lot of good shit. Oh, tell me I can't. And maybe it's it's you're you're fighting with yourself. You're saying, well, maybe I can't. Oh, bullshit, yeah, I can. And I think that that's that's cool, that's honest. And but the truth is, is that there are a lot of people who never are a one percenter, but they don't have to be. The question is, to what degree are you comfortable in your own skin? And how do you define happiness? A lot of people divide define happiness by the amount of money in their bank account, the clothes that they wear, at 40 time. And it's interesting to me because I I don't have a lot of experience working with people who don't have children, but I imagine it's true for them as well that the real predictor of happiness and richness is the quality of your relationships.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'm actually really glad you said that. Sorry to cut you off. My grandmother just passed away on Friday. Her funeral was yesterday. We uh predominantly me, joked about my grandma and said they need to do a study on her for how she was able to live as long as she did when she lost mobile, really lost mobility. We started, you know, pushing around in a wheelchair and she kind of just sat there from like 83 to 93. For the last decade, she has really hasn't been able to physically move. And typically, and she doesn't like do a ton of reading or you know, mental exercise as well. See Hill Bloom, I don't know if you know him, he wrote his book, Five Types of Wealth. He talks about social wealth, and the number one predictor of longevity in life was actually not physical exercise, was not cognitive ability, but the quality of your relationships. And when I read that and I applied it to my grandmother's life, it just made all the sense in the world to me. I was like, my grandmother hasn't done a physical thing, and honestly, probably like 50 some years, if you knew my grandma, probably longer. She doesn't do cognitive word puzzles, things like that. But she was the most relationship-oriented person and was deeply in love with her relationships. And her will to live was unlike anything I've ever seen. And like when people talk about like happiness, the quality of relationships has to be up there for what I think to be healthy. Now, it might not be for everybody, but what I think most. Most.
SPEAKER_01:Well, obviously, I'm sorry for your loss. I think it's wonderful that you're able to talk about this because grieving is hard. Having lost people in my life as well, I've come to appreciate that there's certain realities of grieving that that make it really difficult. Probably the most painful is the realization that there will be no more memories made. The pain doesn't go away. And the the sad joke about that is, oh, it'll go away as soon as you forget her. You plan on forgetting her? No. So then the pain will never go away. So what happens is that it may decrease in intensity and there might be larger intervals in between, but you'll smell like her tomato sauce or uh a joke that she said. And I think that the greatest honor we can give to the people that have passed is to immortalize them. And the way we immortalize them is we internalize them and we live with their lessons. I mean, there is no surprise to me at all when you're talking about your grandmother, what I know about you. It's you value relationships. Now, whether she said, listen, relationships are important, you better pay attention to this stuff because I'm gonna kick your ass. You've appreciated it and you've internalized it, and that's how grandma's gonna live forever. I don't think we spent enough time uh appreciating those things. 17-year-old daughter, last year was a sweet 16, and um my wife was not happy with me because well, my daughter had a little bit more extravagant of a party than my wife wanted to budget for, which didn't go over well. But I said, listen, I hope to see all of our children get married and have grandkids and do all that great stuff, but none of that's promised for us. And on that night, everybody is going to hear how much I adore her. And I'm not going to wait until some other day. And and I think that that that's I've done a lot of things over my career and relationships. I think the thing that I am most proud of is that people that really matter to me have no confusion about how I feel about them. It's not always reciprocating. I'm kidding. Kidding um, but I think that that's that emotional intelligence is so critical to how we build high-quality relationships. And for that matter, there's a ton of research that shows arguing in relationships is not a problem. It's how people argue that's the issue. And and whether it's done with respect, self-respect, and respect for the other person. And I mean that on the whole. You know, the you know, it's the long ledger, not that was not my best day, and I, ooh, I shouldn't have said that one. Um but we teach people how to treat us. And when we have a pretty good relationship with ourselves, it's easier to have a good relationship with other people. And when we have good relationships with other people, we aspire to be the best version of ourselves. And so um, I can only imagine how lucky your children are for all the things that you learned from your grandma.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, and you know, going down like the path to her husband, my grandfather, he passed away a couple years ago. Honestly, in one of the lowest points of my life, I had just gotten major knee surgery. You go back to that loneliness piece, I'm one of the worst feelings in the world. I was in my basement alone for eight, six, eight hours a day in a machine moving my leg. And then, you know, I wasn't allowed to walk for six weeks. And three weeks into that surgery, I get a random phone call. I had just seen my grandfather on Christmas. The week it was a fell on a weekend. So, like that Monday, I just get a random phone call from my mom. And my mom never calls me. And I just get a pit in my stomach because I know something's wrong. Right. And she's clearly like fighting bacteria, and she's like, Your grandfather died. Okay. And talk about grief. Like, I still not love my grandma to death. Like, my grandfather, my biggest fan, came to all my games, all my practices. When my parents divorced when I was young, we lived with my grandparents for a little bit. And like, one thing I do with my kids now when I used to get really angry, he'd rub my head. My uncle nicknamed me Rugrat. Nobody ever calls me that except for my grandfather and my uncle. And he'd be like, You got a tight head, Rugrat. And he'd rub my head. And I started doing that with my daughters now. But it's like, that was the hardest loss for me I've experienced to the state because of the impact he had on me. And you, you talk about like, you know, the relationships I value, you know, from my grandmother that I, you know, learned through. She never told me. Similar to my grandfather, he was the toughest SOB in any room. Like, you know, he was in the Korean War, loved like the military lifestyle, but he was also simultaneously like the most loving person. And every the love he showed for my brother with Down Sunshine, the love he showed for me, my younger brother, and my sister, and everybody, like, and he never had to say, I love you. Right. But the way that like he lived, I don't know if I ever actually heard him say I love you.
SPEAKER_01:But you do it.
SPEAKER_00:But I knew it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I knew it how much he loved and cared about us, which was the craziest part.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'm sorry, go ahead.
SPEAKER_00:No, I was just saying, like, and so like to your point, like I encourage a lot of people and a lot of athletes that I speak to, like, the people who've impacted you most in your life, the greatest way that you can engineer yourself is live out those things that have impacted you the most. And so when you said that, you know, it strikes you like lightning.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Well, your grandfather also, interesting, a Korean war vet is the role model for this, but it just goes to show that sometimes stereotypes don't apply. I think what you're talking about is healthy, a new healthy version of masculinity. We we've gone too far to the other extreme. I think that men, we we're not socialized to be very socially intelligent. You know, girls, you give them dolls and they immediately start role-playing, right? This is the mommy, this is the daddy, this is the doctor, this is the patient. Our dolls are called action figures. We throw them against the wall, right? So no wonder that we're idiots about understanding relationships until much later. And and I do think that there was a great room for improvement for boys' understanding of social intelligence. But I think that there's a risk that we've become so sensitive that we've lost the appreciation of the need for stoicism. You're storming the beaches of Normandy. I know Normandy was World War II, not Korean War, but you're storming the beaches of Normandy. You don't want some guy who's talking about, I don't know, his feelings. We got shit to do. And frankly, too much emotion is going to get in the way. When I'm working with different athletes, each athlete, each sport has different cultures. One of the things that's really interesting about baseball players is their relationship with emotions is different than other athletes. And I believe the reason why is because baseball is actually two different sports going on. It's a one-on-one sport, pitcher versus batter, and then everyone else gets to play afterwards. And the amount of time that you have to make a decision is so short that emotions will gum it up. Where in other sports there's plenty of places for this to play out. So we start to understand different athletes, different emotional barometers, and all the rest of this. But there's simply not always time and place for emotion. And the I think the healthy man is able to live along that continuum. There's a time to be the stoic. Um I tell my kids if if I yell, you should listen. If I whisper, you should worry. Because now I'm not angry. My brain is fully engaged, and I'm gonna decide how your life is gonna be. And they're like, what the hell is he talking about? And then I, you know, had my sons watched a godfather with me, and then they understood a little bit better, right? So there's a time and a place for being strategic and cold and and and decisive and not dripping with being out of control with emotions. And then there's the other side of like when you're holding an infant or a puppy, right? It's like, what are you, an animal? Like, let yourself be human. Right. And I think healthy people, women get this more than men. Men don't allow themselves this. They find themselves, I think men find themselves dealing with, yeah. I don't say polarized because then it sounds like they're bipolar. Yeah. I was thinking bimodal, right? There's two modes. There's I'm a tough guy and I'm a family guy or a softy. And I think healthy masculinity is when you're able to go across that, depending on the relationships and what the tasks call for. I mean, it's similar with coaching. You know, there's some kids that, you know, some kids need the stick, some need the carrot. There are some kids that that need to be worked hard, need to kick in the ass. That's how they're wired. And there's others that need the put your arm on their shoulder and say, hey, man, it's okay. Keep doing what you're doing. You're on the right path. I believe in you. Um, and the best coaches, the ones, first off, the best coaches are the ones that have the social intelligence. We've talked about this in the past that I don't, I don't think enough coaches have good social intelligence and good understanding of developmental psychology, so they know what a kid needs at a certain time. But just like teachers, if you think over the course of your life, the teachers that you've had, you've had teachers that they may not know shit, but they were so connected they could teach you anything. And then there were content experts. You're like, I wouldn't learn anything from that. I don't even want to listen to them, I've fallen asleep. Coaches are the same way. There are times that coaches are content experts. They know exactly where your foot is supposed to be on that block, right? I know exactly how you're supposed to turn out of that pivot when you're playing basketball. That coach shouldn't be around humans. All right. There's a phrase, athletes talking about coaches. Nobody cares what you know until they know that you care. And by the way, knowing that you care does not mean that you're dripping with emotion all the time. Just like your grandfather. He didn't have to say, I love you. You knew it. There are ways to communicate support and loyalty. Well, loyalty is an even longer conversation, but the reason why loyalty is so valuable is because it's so rare. Yep. Um, I've no doubt about that. Loyalty is very hard to find. But we don't need complete loyalty on a team. We can we can be okay if we have a combined shared mission. And good coaches know each player well enough, know what they need, know what makes them tick to help them be the best version of themselves, to help do their best on the field. And then there are other coaches that they just don't get it.
SPEAKER_00:And this is this is where I have empathy for coaches because they haven't been given the proper resources. Or it's not that they haven't been given, it's they haven't been taught to them because the resources are out there. There's like we talked about, there's an overabundance of information, but there's no systems, processes, people in place to Teach a lot of these guys the proper emotional or social intelligence. I don't think that's true, Colin. You don't. I don't. Tell me. I think. Well, why do you think it is they don't know? Well, I just think there's a lot of guys who just had, like you said, they knew the game of football, and that's what makes them good. And they never knew all of the other elements were going to come with the head coaching job, with the general manager job. I agree with you.
SPEAKER_01:You know, now I'm gonna kind of switch teams with you and take the Catholic approach, right? Good leaders are servant leaders. Yes. Right? What's missing is humility.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:There's a lot of ego involved. Right. And not good ego, right? Bad ego. Right. So the issue is there are a lot of sports psychologists out there and coaching education experts that would be more than happy to teach coaches. Most coaches are not interested in that. That's the issue. And the ones that, I mean, the to me, the coolest thing in the world is when you have a coach that's won everything and they're sitting in your class and they're trying to learn more. It's like, man, how do I bottle this guy or woman? And the best coaches are the ones that are constantly trying to get the edge, constantly trying to learn something more. I think that there are not enough coaches, and this is actually interesting. I want to say something about female coaches in a second. I think there are not enough coaches that have enough humility to recognize I'm good, but I could be better, and I want to learn. Too many coaches coached the way they were coached, and they might know more than the average bear, but they're never going to be as good as they could be. And if we want our athletes to become the best that they could be, they have to be willing to continually improve. And I think that there's not enough coaches, especially at the youth sport level. Now, I have empathy for coaches also because they're volunteering a lot of their time to take care of my kid. God bless you. I'm a big believer in a lot of thank yous. I always tell my kids you go thank your coach, give them a gift at the end of the year, because they're volunteering their time and it is hard. And what makes it even harder is more often than not, they don't really know how to do the job as well as they could. So I have empathy for coaches, but I think that if you're going to be in a leadership role, you have a servant leader responsibility, and that requires the humility to go find out how to be the best leader you can be. The thing I wanted to say about female coaches that I found out by accident, probably about 15 years ago. It was just serendipity. I was talking to a bunch of D3 female athletes, and the conversation kind of came up organically, and I asked them what their impression was of female coaches versus male coaches. And I thought, I was expecting to hear a sense of relief. She gets us. She understands all of the things that we're dealing with. She understands the physical things, she understands menstrual cycles, she understands how girls respond to things, the social. And instead, they said, No, most female coaches stink. And I said, What? Why? And they said, because everybody believes that coaching is a man's world. And so a lot of female coaches are trying to compete with men and be like men. And it hurts them. And I said, Well, what about like Pat Summit or Tara Vanderveer? That doesn't count. I said, why doesn't it count? I said, because they know they were good enough that they walk to their own drummer. I said, okay, I can appreciate that. But it just goes to show that even something I would intuitively think, well, this will be an improvement. Not necessarily. Coaching is a thankless job. I have a and don't get me wrong, coaches are paid very well when you get to the higher levels. But think about that. Your career, the money in your bank account is completely based off of nothing that you do. It's all based off of what you get other people to do. I mean, they're really like puppet masters. And you tell me how you can do that without being a sports psychologist. Well, that's the worst kept secret. Good coaches are sports psychologists. They just don't always use the same language, and they don't necessarily know all the nooks and crannies. But from motivating people and understanding what makes them tick, you can't be a good coach if you don't understand people.
SPEAKER_00:How much of that is genetic, do you think?
SPEAKER_01:12%. I I don't know. I don't know. It's so hard. Russell Barkley, who's one of the top uh ADHD researchers in the world, he has a a clip on YouTube where he talks about how hard parents are on themselves when they have ADHD kids. And he said, This is this is the interesting thing. Your children have a couple of hundred different psychological characteristics that are largely influenced by the whole genetic mosaic of everyone above them. It's not just you, not just your spouse, it's your uncle that's the alcoholic, it's your aunt that's the high-achieving CEO. And so you don't get to engineer your kids and who they are, it's not your fault and not completely your doing. And what he said, which I saw was brilliant, he said, we don't get to engineer. I see it more as we're shepherds than engineers. We don't get to engineer the sheep. We get to decide what pastures they feed in. We get to decide where they get to exercise, we get to decide where we can protect them from predators. Shepherd is a very important job. But when you take yourself off the hook and realize that you are not the complete engineer here, now you can relax a little bit and go, my kid's a little different. I want to enjoy the show. Because is it true that attention deficit disorder is a learning disability? Without a doubt. Is it also true that people with learning disabilities, including ADHD, can do shit that a lot of other people can't? Also true. And so, you know, it goes to show it's not just what you get, it's what you do with it. So I don't know how to answer how much of it is it a coincidence that there's certain coaching lines that this person is junior and this person's the third? Well, maybe they had more opportunities because their dad was in it. Maybe dad exposed them to the coaching side of the game because he knew early on that you were going to be a player. I don't know. But I do think that if you have a fair amount of social intelligence and a fair amount of humility, you could always become a better coach. Same is true for athletes, but athletes tend to be assessed under physical abilities before they're psychological ones. And I think coaching is the other way around. I mean, the best coaches that we think about in the history of the sport were not star athletes.
SPEAKER_00:You have this quote in your book: there isn't a more extreme spectrum than professional athletes and prisoners, yet anger connects them both. Can you explain that?
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell People ask me all the time, what do they have in common? My answer is so anticlimactic. It's like when I give the answer, people almost are embarrassed that they asked a question because it sounds so elitist to say, professional athletes. Actually, it's interesting. Sometimes they do the professional athletes and inmates. Or sometimes they'll go, professional athletes are just as bad as inmates. What they have in common is that they're human. And I think that we forget that. We put professional athletes up on a pedestal. We give them a different set of rules. And my experience working with athletes, and I I think some of them have said it overtly, some of that, some of them have said I love you without saying I love you. There's great appreciation when I treat them as, hey man, you put your pants on the same way as I do. You're not better than me. I'm not better than you. I have some things that you might benefit from. Can we just talk like two people, square? And I think the same thing happens in the other direction for inmates. People forget the humanness of. And most people in prison are going to get out. And so I think that the other thing that they have in common is their lives have been significantly impacted on their by, let me rephrase that. Their lives have been significantly impacted by their ability to modulate their emotions. The margin for error is way smaller for an athlete. But I think that that's the key. It's that the human, even though we forget the people are human, and emotion regulation, especially anger management, is very difficult because when people act out on their anger and it becomes violent, everybody sees it. But here, this is the thing. Let's say I'm driving down the street and I get pulled over for DUI. You think that's going to be on Sports Center tonight? With you? No. No one's going to give a shit. Well, maybe after this podcast. Everyone's going to, oh, I know Abrams now. No, but but the thing is, is that when an athlete transgresses, it's all over Twitter before anyone even corroborates things. I developed something called Entourage Training a long time ago. The concept was that professional athletes, besides the fact that I think that on your first rookie contract, you should not be allowed to manage your own money ever. It has to be a family member, hopefully one that you could trust, or a money manager. Everyone, that's one thing that should happen. The other thing is that we're going to take one person from your entourage and we're going to teach you to keep your ass out of trouble. And so youth is often wasted on the young, and so professional athletes are afforded with these opportunities. And entourage training was about helping people recognize de-escalation techniques, gang identification, where you go, where you don't go. How do we keep you on track? They're human. Like, just like you and me. And sometimes their worst mistake is going to become big news, whether it's a big deal or not. And and look, there's there's no lack of interest. Social media eats this stuff up. Yum yum, no, like that. They're just eating it. And the truth is that athletes are not more violent, we're more likely to be criminal than non-athletes. There's only there is one subset of the population that looks like they do have higher levels of criminality. MMA, mixed martial artists, do seem to have a higher arrest rate than non-athletes. But other than them, and by the way, that research is skewed too, because how do you define an MMA fighter? Is it anybody who goes to a gym or is it professional fighters? That's a little bit wonky. But overall, you take a look at the statistics of athletes, NFL players, no matter how you break it down, athletes are not more violent than non-athletes. But when they do transgress, nobody cares about Abrams getting a DUI, but someone of prominence gets pulled over, it's going to be all over social media before anybody even finds out the facts. And when I talked about Entourage Training, the goal was to keep people from avoiding trouble. Even if you don't like that type of approach, at the very least, you need to understand that contract. And by the way, it's not just professional athletes. NIL has made this.
SPEAKER_00:That's where I was about to go.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so we'll we can go deeper into it. But now, if you are revenue athlete at any level, you have a bullseye on your back. Look, there's a reason why America's funniest home videos is one of the longest-running TV shows ever. Because few things make people laugh more than someone falling down, right? We root for them. We put them up on a pedestal, and then we fall down, oh, or they're a piece of crap, or this. And it's usually more complicated than that. And so I think that there's not enough appreciation for athletes being an at-risk population, especially professional athletes. Because the truth is, if the Mickey Mantle used to deal with groupies waiting in his hotel room before he got there. This is not a new thing. Athletes have been targeted, and I think they need to drive defensively. And that's not just for pro athletes anymore. NIL makes it so that everybody's a target. And just as I was saying, the importance of developmental psychology, just work it backwards, reverse engineer it. The younger the athlete, the less likely they are to have the maturity to make good decisions, thinking about how this is going to play out down the road.
SPEAKER_00:Getting into that human part before I transition into some of the entourage conversation, I think about some of my friends who are professional athletes who have been cut, talking about the human element. Does not matter that they're millionaires. Getting cut on a human level, someone's telling you you're not good enough to play here or you're not worth your price tag, cuts you. I don't care. And it's the same thing for coaches. You get fired, you're getting paid tens of millions of dollars a year, whatever. What are you complaining about?
SPEAKER_01:You had a$50 million buyout. Right. I was just told I'm not good enough to be here.
SPEAKER_00:And now my family has to move, my kids have to go to a different school, potentially, or I have to live separately from my kids if I go coach somewhere else and I want to keep them where they are. And the complete removal of human elements gives me great concern for where our media age is. Because again, you just talked about it. We're going to build you up to break you down. Two of the best coaches in the NFL right now, D'Amico Rhines, Kevin O'Connell. I have read, I'm going to throw Sean McDermott in there because I love Sean McDermott. You look at local journalism, local media, tearing those three guys down, saying they should be fired. The first sign of struggle. Buffalo has won 12 games, like seven straight years. Who the heck were look where the Houston Texans were before D'Amico Ryan's got there. Look at what Minnesota was before Kevin O'Connell got there. What are we doing?
SPEAKER_01:Well, what does the NFL stand for?
SPEAKER_00:Not for long. It's insane, though. Like, can we let guys and girls have success and understand they're not going to be undefeated all the time? Why do we have to build people up just to bring them down? It's almost intentional. You look at Jaden Daniels right now, everyone was the greatest rookie season ever. Well, now he's been banged up and injured a little bit, and everyone's like, he stinks. He's not as good as Drake May. And those same people were saying last year Drake May sucked. And that's what's happened with CJ Stroud right now. It's unbelievable.
SPEAKER_01:I'm like, can we just let people be and have objective analysis? No, because it's not about humans. You know, people very often, I remember I was at some presentation where people were talking about racism in sports. And I'm just sitting there, I'm kind of shaking my head, and they're like, What, you don't think there's racism in sports? I said, Of course there's racism in sports. Everything that exists in society exists in sports as well. So I said, Why are you shaking your head? I said, You're focusing on the wrong color. It's green. The NFL, NBA, these are businesses. They're businesses. And there's been a lot talked about over the years about it being gratuitous slavery. There's something to the argument. They're seen as commodities. And by the way, that's not just on a pro level. I mean, come on, you're recruiting high school kids to colleges that they have no business being there. I mean, look, you have Duke, you have Stanford, you have some schools that still northwestern to a degree, that try to do a more rigorous job of not dropping their academic standards too much for their athletes being there. But they have accepted that in exchange for the money that's brought in, even if we have to give some of it back for NIL now, there will change our standards. This is business. This is not about the human aspect of it. And that's the problem. As a sports psychologist, I completely agree with what you just said. It is horrible. Nobody stops and thinks about the humanity of any of it. Even when things go well. I mean, that's the thing. What you just said is yeah, you're sitting there with your heart in your hand because you just got cut. Now you're a competitor and you basically just got cash trade and you're holding your nuts in your hand. How bad does that feel? Well, guess what? The other side is also true. When you succeed, you also have to uproot and move your family. A coach's life, and for that matter, an athlete's life, is going to be based off of hiring cycles. How hard is it to be married and raise a family with any type of stability, with that type of constant injunctions? There are things about the system that are not good for humans.
SPEAKER_00:This is exactly why I actually didn't go into coaching. Because there was a period of time where I was like, I'm going to be a college or NFL football coach. I had my eyes set on it. And my uncle's a head football coach at a Division III school locally here. Um, and he constantly advised me, don't do it. And so I went with him to Nashville for a coaches convention, ironically, right before COVID hit. And ironically enough, my pit coaches were on that fight and they're like, Colin, what the hell are you doing here? And I was like, Isn't that scary?
SPEAKER_01:People, members of the gang are saying you don't want to be a member of this gang.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. And I'll never forget one of the tight ends coach at the time. He was like, he was like, he held up his phone and he was like, this makes this job nearly unbearable. He's like, I'm working 24 seconds.
SPEAKER_01:I can't turn this shit off no matter how I try.
SPEAKER_00:And like, they were like, you're too smart to do this. Go do something else. And I, of course, just like ignored him, ignored him. But then you get to Nashville and you see the lifestyle. And I was like, I don't really want to do this. I don't want to move my wife around, you know, a thousand times, even though she would do it for me. Right. I was like, I don't want to do that. That the there is a lack of humanization as a player. But player, I didn't mind it as much because I was like animalistic in that sense. I love football, I love competing.
SPEAKER_01:As a coach, I'll go wherever I have to to do what I need to do.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. As a coach, it's different. Because, like you said, I'm, it's not about me, it's about influencing others. And do I want to base my life situation around 18 to 22 year olds in what their ability to receive my information is.
SPEAKER_01:Fascinating. So I think that you know how many times am I going to say youth is wasted on a young? I think the issue, I think you're brilliant, very, very in tune to this stuff. I think it has to do with fear. The reason why you don't care as an athlete is because you don't experience fear the same way. You can't. First off, you're a kid. What do you know? I'm invincible. Put that shit aside. On top of everything else, if fear was the lens that you saw the world, you wouldn't be effective as a football player or a baseball player, right? So there has to be a certain ability to turn that part off. Coaching is the exact opposite. Fear is ever present and you can't show it. So now you see this dichotomy of coaches that are like machines and see people as commodities. They almost have to because their vulnerabilities are based off of these folks. I think it has to do with how people are honest about what they're afraid of. I think there are a lot of qualities that you have that would make you a great coach. But the fact that you're not sure that you want to do it actually makes you potentially an even better coach. I sometimes joke that the best way to know who the best candidate for a job is is the people who don't apply. Like if you applied for this job, you know so little about the job, you disqualify yourself as a good candidate.
SPEAKER_00:Right? Yes, that was a fantastic insight, actually.
SPEAKER_01:So what do you do with that? Right? And now, now, I think that there are some coaches that do very well because they go in with informed consent. I know what that lifestyle is, and I'm willing to do it in exchange for. But then the question is, well, what's your ultimate goal? As a coach, what's your ultimate goal? I mean, is it a winning season? Is it keeping your job? Is it moving from D3 to D1? Is it winning it all? Is it becoming a pro coach? How many great college coaches became pro coaches and sucked? Nick Saban is arguably the best college coach of all time. Top five for sure. He sucked on the Dolphins. Why? You're not dealing with kids anymore. It's a different culture that you have to deal with. And do I think that Nick Sabin all of a sudden forgot everything he knew about coaching? No. He forgot more about coaching than most people will ever know, right? But he's also a leader of men. He also understands that there's a way of doing things a certain way. But you have to be dedicated enough and good enough to call your own ticket. And if you realize I don't want that lifestyle, well, first off, it's much better that you know that now than if you're doing it for 10 years ago and I don't know where I'm going from here. Yeah, it's the risks of the job. It speaks even more to the fragility of sports. You know, you talk about players getting vilified, coaches.
SPEAKER_00:It's like sankless. I don't think there's a job, and like I love sports. There's not a job I want less right now than being a college coach. I want no part of NIL. I want no part of the transfer portal.
SPEAKER_01:Transfer portal. A lot of people say the transfer portal is even worse than the NIL. Although they're looking to try to adjust it because of the NIL thing.
SPEAKER_00:I hope they they make uh changes because it's there's like you take job stability aside, it's how do you develop relationships? Everything, and like that's why like I wanted to coach, is like I love the relationship side. I when I was getting my MBA um from Pitt after I finished playing, I coached one year of my alma moderate. It was one of my favorite experiences in the world developing those relationships with those kids. But I think about it in the college room, and I was like, how do you have any relationships? It's all transactional. It's and I hate that, you know? And I think the one thing that is really interesting about some of the other conversations I've had, like I had a conversation with Eric Jorgensen on here and seeing like the parallels between like entrepreneurism, athletics, life, and how they're all interconnected in like different ways. What I don't think people ask themselves enough and truly reflect on and build awareness around is I say I want XYZ to be the goal. I want to be a head NFL coach. Am I really willing to pay the price for what that cost is? And for better or for worse, that's something I've gotten significantly better at in my life answering that question as I build awareness around the things that I want, truly want versus the things that I may kind of want, and understanding, do I really want to pay for that? Probably not. So I'm gonna direct my attention elsewhere.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean, the first person that comes to mind is Mike Tomman, right? How many coaches have weathered the storm? Now it's also a legendary organization, the Steelers, with very stable ownership, you know? Um I just actually, it's funny. I saw on the flight out here, I was looking at um something on, I think it was on Twitter, on X, where they showed the NFC North and all the quarterbacks in the last 20 years from Minnesota Vikings. Yeah, I just saw that today, too. Right. And then it's the Packers and it's Favre, Rogers, Love. How crazy is that? Well, it speaks to culture, yeah. And um and Mike Tomlin may not be everyone's cup of tea, but guess what? He's been able to figure out the formula to be successful in one place with an ownership for a long period of time and started very young. Yeah, now Pittsburgh also Pittsburgh also hasn't had many head coaches because they're an organization that thrives on stability. But yeah, it it why why why would you want that? Who's been looking I'm a Jet fan all my life, right? You don't have to talk to me about resilience. All right, you're gonna pick on me, I'm sure. But listen, I remember watching Aaron Glenn as a player. I remember the fake spike when Merino threw it against them. You have a coach that wants to be there, understands the culture of the Jets, even if there's been ownership issues and all the rest of that stuff. He says he's going to turn the ship around. He wants to change the culture. They're 0-7, and everybody wants them gone. Like, what do you know about leadership? Do you know teams are like, are like aircraft carriers. You can't turn them on a dime, they tip. You gotta navigate where you're gonna go. And so, unfortunately, like we said, NFL stands for not for long, and people lose patience. It's easy for everybody to be, you know, impatient when it's not your job to do it. I want immediate results. Good luck. How many times do you see someone catch lightning in a bottle? They're very successful, and they crash and burn versus no. I mean, we're going back to Sabin for a second. I mean, if we take a look at what happened with Sabin, including that LSU versus Kelly, you're talking about sustained greatness. Everywhere he went, he had was there for a long period of time. Why? Because he had a system, it was based on structure and relationships. You got to have your shit together, have a lot of skills, and be willing to invest in it. And there is no shame. When I have people come work in the prison system, there are times that they're there. I will fail people on probation if I'm not sure they're the right fit. And there'll be times that they'll be like really upset. Say, listen, this is not the right place for you. There is no shame in it. When I first came to work in prison, I said to myself, All right, I don't know about this. I'll try it for six months. If I don't leave, I get, I'll leave. I'm there 25 of them, 26 years. Certain personalities work different ways. Sometimes the best thing you could do is find out when it's not a fit. Gary Vanderchuk, Gary V, talks about how important it is to fire people quickly. And everyone sounds like, oh my God, you're such a horrible boss. It's really about humility. I know that I'm not as good of an interviewer as I think I am. Everybody can put on a good show for a little while. When you realize that this person is poisoned to your culture, you gotta pluck them before it starts spreading all over the place. Now, imagine you're talking about an NFL team or college team, dozens and dozens of players. I mean, you're talking well over a hundred people when you're talking about roster and equipment managers and coaches and all the rest of stuff, and you have one schmuck at the top whose head is on the chopping block whenever things don't go right. Very, very difficult. And then you'll see people play the role in order to try to endear themselves, but then they lose who they are and they've lose what got them where they are. So if you're saying to yourself, I don't know if I want that, good for you. Because even if you did know that you wanted it, it still would be very hard. People don't realize, I mean, you're going into an industry that, yes, if you consider all sports and across all divisions, there are a lot of college coaching positions. But football, now there's less. Division one, now there's less. FCS versus FBS, now there's less. And so now you have a lot of people competing for a few jobs. And I mean, you have look, I was not a huge James Franklin fan for a long time. But I did not think that Penn State would just go, how much was his uh buyout? 50 million, something like that? Yeah, 50, 54, something like crazy. Check. Buy. If a university can just say goodbye and pay someone 50 plus million dollars to not coach here, you're talking about serious money. This is a business. This is not about people.
SPEAKER_00:Nope.
SPEAKER_01:And I think that the challenge, this is why I I often, you know who I think are the most valuable people in any sports organization? Athletic trainers. They're the most underpaid. They have to be humanly connected. They hear everything. I mean, they they're like the bartenders of the sports world, right?
SPEAKER_00:I say strength and condition coaches as well. They're they pair they're paid well.
SPEAKER_01:You can make that argument, but I group them in together. Okay. I can see that. The difference is, I mean, look, you maybe two sides of the same coin. One's getting them on the table either when they're rehabbing or taping up, the other one is building their bodies. But in both situations, they're dealing with humans and hearing them just spill because they don't realize they're being listened to. And it's very rare that you'll find a trainer or strength and conditioning coach that doesn't really know the heartbeat of the team. 100%. Where coaches, especially in big power programs, may not, because I mean, listen, uh, you think they go to school. How many of you have an MBA? How many of them have an MBA? You need to have people that are going to manage your budget, what attendance looks like, where NIL goes. It is really a CEO job. In fact, what's happening is like Andrew Luck. I mean, I've I've I've been partial to Stanford for a long time. I liked Stanford since Harbaugh was there. I love David Shaw. Brilliant coach.
SPEAKER_00:Very I can't believe David Shaw's not there. They fired him, right?
SPEAKER_01:Or did he He resigned. He resigned. Which was I think. I mean, he also was looking at a couple of college positions. I mean, he's been around for a long time. Great guy.
SPEAKER_00:I played against him my final game.
SPEAKER_01:Really? What a guy. I mean, it's har it's very hard to not like him. Very balanced guy. But I love this idea of intellectual aggression, brutality. You know, the idea that you could be smart and tough at the same time. Stanford's struggled since Shaw left, but bringing Andrew Luck back as the CEO, and that's the direction that they're going, whether it's CEO or GM, they're coming up with different titles for people that are going to be the overseer of the organization. I mean, Andrew Luck is, you know, he's got both the lineage, the experience. I mean, he's a bright guy. He could do whatever he wants to do. But I think that that's what you're seeing more and more because there are fewer and fewer head coaches in the college football world that are able to do all those things. And so I think you're going to see more of that. And by the way, that'll just be another position. It costs a lot of money. And uh another reason why beers are so expensive, even in college stadiums.
SPEAKER_00:I'm not a James Franklin supporter by any means. I loathe Penn State. As a pit guy, I loathe Penn State. I could not believe maybe I could believe that they fired him after the year. I can't believe they fired him when they did. You would have thought he built It was what?
SPEAKER_01:It was three consecutive losses in Big Ten.
SPEAKER_00:Three consecutive losses. Yeah. That's all it took. First time that's happened in however many years.
SPEAKER_01:Well, so if you want to do something unprecedented, let it start with something that's unprecedented.
SPEAKER_00:It's, you know, it's it's unbelievable. Like, I think so. Josh Pade is one of my favorite college football guys right now. And I listened to him talk about this. And he was like, and I agree. He's like, there are maybe five to Six coaches better than James Franklin right now in terms of win-loss record, rankings over the years, recruiting, yada yada yada. Not alone. They're all employed. He's like, so you're betting that you can go find the Knicks without having an immediate contingency plan. You do not have an immediate plan to replace him right now. That was my argument about the Knicks firing Thibodeau. I agree that this I said the same thing about Tibbs. I understand if you want to move on, but to not have an immediate contingency plan is a recipe for disaster. Absolutely. I do think they got like I think Mike Brown's a great guy.
SPEAKER_01:I think they they hit it out the park. He was the best option because he's offensive-minded. He loves youth. He loves being aggressive. He plays a deeper bench. But I'm right with you. Absolutely. I mean, Alan, if you think about it, you don't fire someone unless you have someone better that's available. But this is also how bizarre the world is, right? So James Franklin was not popular with people because he one of the things that he did was he used to run up scores for ratings, right? Kind of through sportsmanship out the window. But regardless of whether or not you like James Franklin. You know John Gruden's being considered for the Virginia Tech job?
SPEAKER_00:I did not know that. I knew he was trying to get back into coaching. I didn't know he was being considered. But Virginia Tech, the hokies, really?
SPEAKER_01:You got Penn State's available, LSU is available, and they're talking about John Gruden, Super Bowl champion coach for Virginia Tech. That's how, you know, man plans God laughs. As soon as you think you have it all figured out, there's there's ghosts in the machine, there's something wrong with the algorithm, the matrix is screwed. It doesn't make sense. And and I agree with you. I I understand why Penn State wasn't happy with the direction of I wonder if they would have fired him before the end of the year if Drew Alar didn't get injured.
SPEAKER_00:That's a good question. You know, he's an like on a serpent, he's a guy that I have a lot of empathy for.
SPEAKER_01:Alar? Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Any any I have more empathy for quarterbacks in general because they don't ask for the outside expectation.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:And any quarterback or competitor, no one's going to have a higher standard for themselves than themselves. And so because other people deemed Drew Aller, in particular the Penn State, I call him a cult, the Penn State cult anointed him as their program savior. Because he wasn't that, people crossed the line and go over objective analysis into death threats and personality attacks. And tearing this kid down who, by all, you know, information you hear, did nothing but do his best. Yes. Okay. And had probably some where he could use like a sports psychologist or a performance coach, help him with some things that he was probably struggling with. Right. That came with the pressures that he probably wasn't prepared for.
SPEAKER_01:Well, but but isn't it the most basic thing, though? I mean, this is this is so simple. It's almost insultant, huh? You you're gonna tell me, except for that. I mean, we did just have a big gambling scandal and the question of what how much the mob influenced things.
SPEAKER_00:I mean I can't wait to see how that plays out.
SPEAKER_01:We could talk about that. But except for that on the side where there might be reasons that people are doing things like. Now, there are times that they put too much pressure on themselves, and that winds up making it more difficult, pressure from outside. But, you know, you everybody's literally an armchair quarterback. Bro, you can't throw the ball 10 yards, and you have criticism that the ball placement was two inches off. What? I mean, this is like, you know, like Greg Maddox. Greg Maddox was like unbelievable with his placement. And he would, he would set things up so that, you know, I forget um, I just saw a clip recently that he called a pitch inside so that I have to go back and hit the story, but he basically threw a home run pitch early in the game to set up the pitch so that he could throw a slider and get the guy out later in the game when they would need it more. I mean, playing chess when everyone else is playing checkers, right? Now, so you're talking about college kids with great talent, no doubt about it. Margin of error is tiny. And if you want to say, I don't like how you performed, no problem. No problem. But it turns into character assassinations and death threats, and it's like it's the negative underbelly of sports. But I'll tell you something. It's one of the reasons why I love you giving me the opportunity to talk about these things here. This is not talked about at all in sports media, except for the the blip on the screen, and it comes and it goes. I was just at a major sports psychology conference, not a lot talking about deviance in sport. There was what there was one panel where they were talking about there was the guy talking about trash talking, and there was also another person talking about, or four people talking about dominance in combat sports. And it was so pure and real. I went up to I knew all the guys, I was like, look, man, you guys hit out. There's not enough of this stuff. And so, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so you have these kids, and they are kids, even if they're employees, that they have to worry about their lives being threatened, whether they're credible or not, because they didn't perform the way people demanded them to. It's like, talk about biting the hand that feeds you. It's horrible. It's horrible. And sports psychologists are not standard staff at all universities. We might get there. And there are a lot of sports psychologists that are really more about performance enhancement and they don't know how to deal with clinical issues. And so the pressures are at an all-time high. And yeah, I worry about a lot of these guys. And frankly, it's, you know, to what degree are athletes that are struggling with mental health struggling with internal things versus external stressors? We often say in the treatment of trauma, abnormal reactions to abnormal situations is normal behavior. How many of these guys, and women for that matter, are struggling because they have a set of pressures that the rest of the world doesn't know about?
SPEAKER_00:And the hard part is thinking about like the threats on life is you don't know what's credible and what's not. I've going back to the deviant behavior, not even just athletics, but towards athletes, you look at Caitlin Clark just had a stalker go to prison. And he said, I'm guilty. Guilty. Yep. Like just straight up, like cut off the judge, said I'm guilty. Like you don't know what's credible and what's not. And people say, Oh, like you just need to brush that stuff off. It's like, okay, well, let me tell let me send 30 messages in your direct inbox saying, I'm gonna kill you. I know where you live, and tell me how easy you sleep at night.
SPEAKER_01:That's exactly right. People dismiss it because they don't have to live it. It's insane. It is. But this is, you know, some people will say, and I do agree with it a little bit, it is the price that you pay for the perks that you get. The annoyance of having a camera in your face after every bad performance, I understand. That's the price you pay. People threatening you, people slandering you in all kinds of ways, blackmailing you. I mean, now you got all kinds of scams going on in the internet. I mean, these people don't want to talk about. Like, I think that athletes are at risk for two major reasons. One is the most basic reason is because people presume that because they're physically healthy, they're psychologically healthy. And that's just simply not necessarily true. The other thing is they have a set of stressors that the average person never has to deal with. You know, it's like, you know, it's the frog in the pot of boiling water, right? And you turn the heat up and they don't jump out. And the reason is it gets hotter and hotter and hotter. They acclimate, acclimate, acclimate. And by the time they realize it's time to jump out, they're dead. Well, I want to be involved in sports. I like to compete. I want to win. All right, NIL, I'll take money, no problem. Oh, well, let me tell you what we're getting from you for that. Well, I didn't sign up for them. There's no backseats. You know, if you want to talk a little bit about all the scandals with the point shaving, it's not rocket science how the mob leverages these people. It starts with a gambling debt, almost always. And they say, look, we're getting our money one way or the other. And they will, because they're now afraid of going to prison. That's that's a job hazard. So you could do this or you could do that. People are very influential. People are very influential. How hard is it to say, oh, I pulled my hamstring, and next thing you know, everyone puts a quarter million dollars on the under for your prop bet for the day. It ain't hard. And this stuff is all around us.
SPEAKER_00:I have a theory on not in terms of like what's going on, but in terms of the outcomes of this current gambling indictment going on in the NBA specifically. I think it's gonna be one of those things. If you remember a few years back, I can't remember exactly when, there was a massive scandal that broke out amongst college basketball coaches. And it was the reports were wait till you see some of these names that are involved in the illegal, whatever activity going on. It's going to tear down and still be basketball. Quickly went away. You look at Diddy, Epstein, whatever you want to call it. Okay. I think this is either going to be catastrophic for the NBA or it's going to get quickly swept under the rug. And there's going to be a couple people who are the faces of this who get everything thrown on them and it's wiped away. If you listen to who's the NBA ref, Tim Donnahue was it'd Donnahe. He came out recently and said he doesn't think the NBA will be able to sweep this under the rug like they did with his case. He said with my case, he was like, I was painted as one bad actor. He was like, I was the face of it, they pinned it all on me, I went to jail. He was like, no, he's like, hearing what I'm hearing about this case, they're not going to be able to do that.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I used to say that when I talked about athletes and arrests, that guilt was not the determining factor of whether or not they went to prison. You could take uh Kobe Bryant, you could take a lot of people that were involved in things. And you listen to forget about anything behind the scenes, just the information we got. There's a difference between being guilty and being convictable. And and by the way, for anybody who doesn't know, the burden of proof for a civil case is pretty much 51%, the preponderance of evidence. Way easier to prove than a guilty conviction for a criminal offense, right? So the people will say, well, you weren't found guilty of the criminal offense. Why were you going for the civil? Well, for one thing, it's easier to prove. And second, I would be more likely to throw a settlement in your way to make this go away. But my point is that I think that people don't realize that one of the things that leads athletes to not be convicted and in jail is the quality of the representation that they can afford. So athletes should be compared to other celebrities, not the average person. So if an athlete can afford good representation, what can a sports league afford? An immense amount. Right. And so guilt and innocence is not the issue here. It's provability. Provability. And what people are willing to pay in order to make perceptions go away. I think Donnie has a good point. I do think point shaving is a very different thing than being involved in illegal poker games. I'm not trying to split hairs on morality, but the sports rest on the level playing field. You um doing things, faking injuries, refs giving too many calls, putting them on the bench. That's a different dance than being involved in illegal activities. I'm not saying that being involved in illegal poker games is not criminal. I'm not saying it's fine. But the essence of competition requires a level playing field. And when that gets corrupted, fans are gonna start questioning if it's a rigged game. Now, there is a somewhat comical side of this. If someone would have told me in 1980, for argument's sake, WWF wrestling is going to help make everything make sense, I would have been like, what the hell are you talking about? As soon as WWF became WWE and they said this is entertainment, now the wins and losses didn't matter. The question is, were you entertained by the match? The only way this is not a big issue is if people start seeing sports as sports entertainment instead of sports competition. If it's sports competition, and I'm betting on who I think is better to win the game, the whole thing's gonna. And that's the irony of it. The House of Cards of Gambling will collapse on itself. All the money that they made by fixing these things is small potatoes. If people stop betting because they think it's all rigged and there's no real competition here. So careful what you wish for. I didn't think about it that way. Well, and look, I think that a lot of times, you know, if you've ever heard the phrase it's common in business and in the underworld, the pig gets slaughtered. Right? Yep. Don't be greedy, take your piece, do what you gotta do, live in the shadows, and people all can operate that way. There's there's rules of engagement, but invariably someone wants to take a bigger, bigger bite, gets careless, everybody sees it, and all of a sudden you realize, holy shit, I didn't just, you know, I won a quarter million dollars. There's a billion on the line here. B yeah. Yeah. And and I think that people forget that so much of what we deal with with sports is based off of a premise of trust. That's one of the reasons why I I'm a big fan of sportsmanship. I don't have a problem with trash talking. I think trash talking is useful, but I'm also uh an appreciate I I really appreciate trust because as a competitor, you cannot dominate someone unless they choose to come to the arena with you. Whether they beat you, you beat them. Sorry for the play of words. You're not beating yourself. I mean, masturbation is not as good as that. And so so if you are purist and love competition, then you have to respect the arena, your competitor, the equipment, everything. It all's part of it. And I think that that's not appreciated enough. And that's a shame. You know, I mean, look, there's nothing better than beating someone who you respect and you go, that person is the best, and I want to be better than it. And if you work hard and you beat them, that's the other reason why athletes should always play up. If you play up, you cannot lose. Because if you struggle, you're supposed to. You're right. And if you do well, now you hit it out the park, and all of a sudden you start to realize that most of the limitations that we have on us, we put on us.
SPEAKER_00:I get very upset at the lack of what I perceive to be sportsmanship. You know, I'm cool with trash talking, whatever it may be. I think that there is a higher need for sportsmanship, and some guys display it really, really well. I think quarterbacks coming in, you know, to the middle after the game, just making sure they dab each other up is awesome. Yep. Right. I just I there is something to be said for the respect factor. No doubt about it. When that whistleblows, that final whistleblows, yes, it sucks. Yes, I'm hurting, but that respect for the person across from you.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:And I really don't like there are athletes out there in different sports and different domains that will further like dig the knife in after a win. And I hate that. Well, because it's amateurish. Yeah, and I just I don't like it. Uh I think there's a respect level, like, hey, this was not personal, may have been personal on the field, field's over, court's over. I understand what you put into it, what I put into it. There's a respect level, I'll see you soon.
SPEAKER_01:Hey, and there's always more that you don't know, right? So Aziz Shaheer, uh linebacker on the Texans, who is arguably, not arguably, has been identified as one of the dirtiest players in the game right now. I did not know this until this past week. And all of a sudden you start to hear all of the things that he's saying when he's playing. And he's congratulating people for how good they are. One of the coolest things I knew when I heard Andrew Luck did it, I thought it was the best. He got, when he'd get rocked, he'd tell the guy, hey, that was a great hit. Keep playing, buddy. And so Shaheer, who's identified as one of the dirtiest players, fairly or unfairly, right? I mean, that's another thing that the outside observer doesn't appreciate. You have a split-second decision like that to determine let up or not. And that's going to determine a big play. So, what makes a clean player versus a dirty player is often one of timing. Very hard to do. But when I heard that his trash talk to other people was not trash talk. Like he was talking up CMC about, wow, you're such a great runner, keep doing what you're doing. I'm like, so the public perception doesn't match reality. Here we go again.
SPEAKER_00:And so it's so funny you bring that up because I know some people in that organization. They say he's the nicest human. And if you remember Nick Casario, in he doesn't talk much as a GM. Came on and said, hey, I'm gonna address this that he is everything that you want in a person, a teammate, someone in your locker room. He is like the highest of standard of person. And it's people frequently can't separate player from like person. And even then, as a player, he's in between the whistle. Right. Great guy. Right. And it's again, the state of the media does really like I have genuine concern about the state of the media, how worse it may get, can it get better? And maybe an unfair question to ask because it goes right along the lines with domestic violence, with gambling, with suicides or suicides, suicidal thoughts, and things of that nature. Is will we ever get to a point where morality and ethics actually matter? Not we don't, we don't just say they matter, they actually matter in massive organizations.
SPEAKER_01:The answer is absolutely yes, but only under one condition, when it's fiscally advantageous.
SPEAKER_00:Is I should include that in the question without the fiscal element of it.
SPEAKER_01:I don't know. I mean, look, the truth is uh I think it was Bill Parcells who said way back when if if Charles Manson could play, someone would sign him. Right? We're here to get W's. And sometimes people don't care how they get W's. We deify these people who sacrifice their bodies and their brains to do all kinds of crazy things. You want to get rid of character problems in the NFL? It's really very simple. It's it's I'll lay it out for you. It's as simple as this. Every person that's considered for the draft has to have a look, this is I get to talk, I'll tell you how to do it. Everybody who's considered for the draft has a psychological evaluation. The psychological evaluation that's done right now is a very brief interview and some tests that really aren't very reliable or predictive of anything. But one of the things that we're pretty good at is predicting criminality. You're high risk for criminality, you drop down to boards automatically. You sign someone that commits a crime, you're penalized with penalty of money and draft picks. Right? It's not hard to do. I mean, what was the penalty for deflate gate? Basically nothing. Right. And if you smoke marijuana, right? Yeah. But you beat your wife, you're playing in three days. And they play the game. They play the game. The attorneys know, okay, we're going to ask for continuance so that this uh hearing doesn't happen until the offseason. This is not hard to fix if people wanted to. The problem is, and this is this is a mistake. The problem is people think that angry, violent, criminal-like people are better athletes. And the answer is maybe. Sometimes, but not always. No one gave a shit when Eli Manning was giving out Thanksgiving turkeys and nobody knew about it. Tons of athletes do great charity work and things in their community, and they're doing it because they actually care, not because I want to get a check mark for I'm doing good community service. These behaviors are not hard. And by the way, let me take it one step further. It's not just about punishing the team. This is something I saw a long time ago because I do risk assessments for athletes that are involved in sexual assault or domestic violence incidents on college campuses, right? So let's say you have a D1 athlete that you've invested a fair amount of resources in and they get arrested. You're gonna just cut him? No. Well, this is this is where it gets hairy, right? If you cut him, he's gonna go across town to your competitor and wipe the floor with you. You're basically praying that either he magically finds God, or this was just an anomaly and it won't ever happen again. How about assessing his risk to re-offend? How about determining what the factors that contributed to his offending are and determine whether or not he's suitable for treatment? And it's not instead of punishment. Let the criminal justice system do what they want to do. If you actually want to say that you give a shit about people, you want to prevent victims, right? You know how you prevent victims? You identify a potential perpetrator, you assess them, and you provide them treatment with the hope of decreasing the risk of recidivism. You're actually protecting your investment. How many colleges are doing this? Very few. And another problem, if we're going to talk about saving the world, there aren't too many colleges that don't have Swan Law Enforcement as their police force, security officers, and they report to the dean of students. So now, are you going to protect the brand? Or are you reporting this to a prosecutor's office to determine whether or not there should be prosecution? There is so much that could be done if people really can't. I mean, listen, Colin, I love the question, but there's just zero fucking evidence that anybody gives a shit about morality. People look the other way. Sports are big money. And by the way, it does not have to be either or. Let's say you have an athlete that's got high risk for criminality. We talked about it earlier. The best ability is availability. You ain't going to have them available if they're in jail. Wouldn't it do you a service to get them as right as you could get them so are available to play for you? This is where it's hard not to consider athletes commodities. I'll take them for as long as I can, then it's next man up. I'm not optimistic that things are going to change until money is attached to it. Look, you want to make domestic violence an issue, then you handle perpetrators of domestic violence differently. You punish the organization. I mean, alcohol sales at, I mean, come, I mean, you can't turn on social media without seeing another fool playing the fool at a stadium. But you don't want to stop selling alcohol because it makes you a ton of money. Alcohol doesn't make you an asshole. Alcohol makes it impossible to hide the fact that you're an asshole. Right? So, so here you go. And and by the way, people often consider their team, their fandom is an extension of them. And so if my team loses, I have to kill you. Because I told you before we said we can't disagree and respect one another. Whatever happened to, you know something? I love my team. I think we have a better team than you. You beat us today. Good for you. Next time, we're gonna get it back. So rivalries are about, but there's just a stunning lack of morality that goes through all of this. And I would even say there are people that are of good moral uh character that lose it because they become slaves to the money game. You know, when we teal about um like uh date rape, not date rapes, uh like gang rapes on college campuses, and you'll often hear grandma say, Timmy would never do something like that. You're right. Timmy wouldn't do something like that if Timmy was by himself. But is Timmy part of a team or a fraternity that has a culture that believes that women should be objectified? And in order to prove you're a man, you have to have sex with this many people, regardless of whether or not they're conscious. You're right. He may not do that normally, but if you're in a culture that's toxic, it's risky. And so how do you protect the integrity of sports? I mean, because there's so many great things we get from competition. So many great things we get from sports. And and you have academics that have been complaining for years, we shouldn't be supporting sports. Meanwhile, sports is what's building the buildings, it's what's keeping the place financially solvent. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00:Even go look at a school like Vanderbilt, tremendous academic institution, the success of their football team. Go look at how high their admissions have gone this year.
SPEAKER_01:It's you know and I think when Bill Jackson was in Auburn, they had to in they had to build a whole new section of stands because that's how many people got there. I did not know that. I think it was I think it was also true when Patrick Ewan was at Georgetown.
SPEAKER_02:I believe that.
SPEAKER_01:You know, so there is absolutely no doubt that athletic performance has a dollar sign attached to it. I mean, look, what is it now? Six wins gets you to a bowl game? You know, I mean, there used to be less bowl games. Bowl games have millions attached to them.
SPEAKER_00:The funny thing on not funny thing, but the ironic thing with the gambling, going back to that is tell me the last time you turned on a sports channel and it wasn't sponsored by FanDuel, DraftKings, whatever other betting apps are out there, you know, BetMGM. Yep. There is not a single sports channel that you can turn on that does not have some type of gambling affiliation.
SPEAKER_01:So do you agree with the legalization of gambling or not?
SPEAKER_00:So that's a funny conversation. I do. Okay. I do believe because I believe in freedom of choice. Like I believe that if I want to go gamble, that you know, I should have the right to go gamble. The difference what I believe from, and this is where it gets murky with like marketing, advertising, the dollar involved, is like Because you're right, there are more gambling ads than there are beer ads now.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And it's except for the cube, Clydesdale, Budweiser. You can always count on those.
SPEAKER_00:But he goes even going back to to beer ads, all the marketing of beer, right? And but they put that line, you know, or bet responsibly or drink responsibly, and they're like, oh, that's that just means that they have a lawyer that they listen to once. Right. And it's like the off the hook. And it's, you know, I do believe in the freedom to go have a drink. I believe in the freedom to go gamble. What I don't agree with is the association sports leagues have with these things. I don't agree with the publication of everybody go drink and say drink responsibly because we have a lawyer's now, it's okay. Or, you know, here's the number four if you have a gambling addiction. Yeah, because I'm gonna just call that number. I would I would wonder how many the efficiency of people addicted to gambling that actually utilize the gambling hotline. That should. So, all good points.
SPEAKER_01:You know what was one of the initial and worst justifications for the legalization of gambling? What's that? That it was gonna get rid of illegal gambling. I've seen that. Illegal gambling will never go away. Do you know why? I don't. Illegal gambling allows you to gamble on credit. Did not know that. Know some bookmakers, you learn something. So the thing is.
SPEAKER_00:You can tell I don't gamble at all.
SPEAKER_01:Neither do I. No, but the thing is, is that that's the that's the secret that nobody appreciates. Everyone acts like, oh, well, and then there's something to be to it, right? There's something to the argument of so the same thing with the legalization of marijuana, right? So if we legalize marijuana, we'll get to tax it, there'll be quality control, and it'll be better than the illegal stuff. Okay. Maybe. The illegal stuff's not going to go away, right? You're still gonna have the kid on the corner who's selling dye bags. The reason why illegal gambling will never go away is because you don't have to front the money. By the way, that's the easiest way to get into debt. But strangely, the mob doesn't have difficulty collecting. They're they have a higher collection rate than the IRS. So the thing is, is that two things. Number one, I completely agree with you that it is incestuous at the least, if not disgusting, that you talk about the integrity of sports being at the heart of sports, and yet the professional sports are advertising gambling. It just is ripe. The perception is problematic. But the other thing is that because you have to put money in before you can bet, you have to have money in your pocket to do so. Now, you could do that from a debit card, credit card, and so people can run up bills and still wind up with credit issues, but you're not going to get your legs broken.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:The reason why it will never go away is because underground betting allows you to bet on credit. And that's where you wind up. Now it's also much more dangerous, both literally for your physical health and also running up huge debts. But do you think anybody in these point-shaving scandals was betting on FanDuel? No. Right. Because you couldn't do it the same way. And there's algorithms to track when there's unusual bets and when it's not although a lot of the illegal gambling use like third-party offshore things so that they can have distance and you know they don't want to take bad bets because they have to pay them out. But there's always a hustle. Always a hustle.
SPEAKER_00:Well, hey, man, I appreciate you coming on. I think it was close to three hours here, if not at three hours. Uh holy shit. If uh if people want to reach out to you, they want to buy your book, where can they buy your book? Where can they get a hold of you?
SPEAKER_01:So Book is available through Amazon, Amazon.com as well as Barnes and Noble. Um, it's all over the place. It's doing very well. So I'm very appreciative for everybody who's taken a read so far. Um, my website is drmitabrams.com. I'm very easy to reach. I'm on Twitter at Mitch Abrams ID, as you guys can see. And Colin has been very generous with me over time, giving me the opportunity to speak. Sometimes it's hard to shut me up. So if you have questions, I'd be happy to answer. And the more we can figure all the shit out, the better. So I uh look forward to anybody having questions, comments, criticisms. Hopefully, no stalkers, no. I mean, look, it's it's scary stuff. I th I I'm glad you brought it up because it's it's the scary underbelly of society. And and I've worked it in those places with scary people. And it it reminds me of the the scene in Jaws, right? You're gonna ignore this particular problem until it swims up and bites you on the ass. We're a very reactive society. And um and there are things that are predictable. Whether it's a matter of figuring out how to prevent athletes from engaging in criminal behavior or recognizing how much money dictates a lot of things in sports, at its essence, I think this is this is I think one of the coolest things about sports. If you drop a drone anywhere in the world, there's two things that you're gonna see almost everybody doing. Praying to some invisible guy in the sky or whatever their version of their deity is, and people playing games, it's endemic to the human condition. And I think the competition is wonderful and sports are great, and and I want people to get all the benefits of it. But if we don't, if we're not honest about some of the negative stuff and ameliorate it and do things to correct it, there's no reason to believe it's gonna correct itself. Unless, of course, somehow it becomes financially in everyone's best interest to do it a little bit different.
SPEAKER_00:Well said. Appreciate you, brother. Listeners, as always, thank you for tuning in. Tune in next week, download the pod, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Five stars only, baby. Appreciate you guys. See you next week. Appreciate you, Doc.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you.