The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1196 - Dale Earnhardt Jr.

00:00:02.000 Four, three, two...

00:00:06.000 Hello, Dale.

00:00:08.000 Hey, how you doing?

00:00:09.000 Thanks for doing this, man.

00:00:10.000 I appreciate it.

00:00:10.000 Yeah, I'm glad to be here.

00:00:11.000 Nice to meet you, man, and nice to find out that not only you're a race car driver, you're also a bow hunter.

00:00:16.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:00:17.000 I saw your archery equipment and all that stuff, but me and a buddy of mine own some land, and I try to get out there and...

00:00:27.000 At least go twice a year.

00:00:28.000 I just love being in the stands, sitting in the woods, just thinking about what's going on.

00:00:33.000 Yeah, it's brain cleansing, right?

00:00:35.000 It is.

00:00:35.000 Everything before the shot, really, is what it's all about.

00:00:38.000 Yeah, that's a lot of it, right?

00:00:40.000 Hanging out, being with your friends and family, you know.

00:00:42.000 You need one of those techno hunts in your life, don't you?

00:00:44.000 I do.

00:00:44.000 The techno hunt was pretty impressive.

00:00:46.000 Yeah, that thing is, all my friends who come over here just go, whoa!

00:00:50.000 That's a life changer.

00:00:52.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:00:53.000 But it's also a giant time waster.

00:00:55.000 I know.

00:00:55.000 I don't know.

00:00:56.000 I've got a golf sim at the house, so I've got to figure out where I can put that.

00:00:59.000 Golf's the one I've always avoided.

00:01:01.000 I've always avoided golf because I just saw it suck away people's time.

00:01:04.000 Yeah.

00:01:06.000 That's the thing.

00:01:06.000 I don't have the time and the patience to really block that whole day off to go play outdoors, but to go over there and just hit the driver for 30 minutes on the simulator is so fun.

00:01:16.000 Well, I would imagine with what you do for a living, I think what you do is one of the craziest, wildest, most demanding things a person could do for an occupation.

00:01:28.000 Boy, I don't know.

00:01:29.000 It's right up there.

00:01:31.000 You don't know?

00:01:32.000 Other than being a soldier or a firefighter or a cop or a fighter?

00:01:37.000 Yeah, fighter and bullfighting and bull riding, those type of things.

00:01:41.000 Those people.

00:01:41.000 Boxing.

00:01:42.000 Bull riders, that's on another level.

00:01:44.000 That's another level of crazy. 0.99

00:01:45.000 I've hung out with those guys and they are crazy people. 0.96

00:01:49.000 It takes a certain mentality to be able to climb onto a bull.

00:01:54.000 Yeah, they have a certain energy about them. 0.99

00:01:56.000 They got that I don't give a fuck energy and it's cranked up to 10. Exactly. 0.99

00:02:01.000 Have you ever been in Vegas when they have the big...

00:02:04.000 The finals?

00:02:05.000 I haven't, actually.

00:02:06.000 Oh, they're everywhere, and they're all crazy. 0.74

00:02:08.000 I know. 0.98

00:02:09.000 They are really...

00:02:10.000 I know a lot of those guys, and our paths have crossed several times, and every time you're around them, you're like, are we going to end up in jail tonight?

00:02:19.000 You know, just that's a real possibility.

00:02:21.000 Yeah, I mean, they're throwbacks.

00:02:23.000 Yeah, they are.

00:02:23.000 They're real throwbacks.

00:02:24.000 They are.

00:02:25.000 Legit wild men.

00:02:26.000 I agree.

00:02:26.000 Yeah, I mean, but driving a race car, I mean, you have a giant engine, you're strapped into a seat, you're hurling down the road at extreme speeds, right next to other cars doing the same thing.

00:02:39.000 Just the intensity and just everything being on nine at all times, like, that is a wild way to make a living, sir.

00:02:47.000 Yeah.

00:02:47.000 Yeah, thanks.

00:02:50.000 When I was little, thinking about what the hell am I going to grow up and be, my father was really successful in the sport, so I would go to the races and I would watch him race and see him win and watch him go through victory lane and celebrate and all those things.

00:03:07.000 I thought, man, this is what I've got to do.

00:03:09.000 I've got to do this.

00:03:10.000 This looks fun.

00:03:11.000 This looks exciting.

00:03:12.000 People are in awe of the drivers, the race, my father, the personalities.

00:03:20.000 And I just wanted to do it real badly.

00:03:24.000 But I knew that the odds of making it are tough.

00:03:27.000 So there's only 40 guys in the field every weekend.

00:03:30.000 So there's 40 guys in the whole country that are going to get the shot to do it.

00:03:36.000 The odds of me, even with my dad being as successful as he was, I'd have a lot of doors open to me, but the odds of me actually getting there and being able to stay had the staying power and the success and talent.

00:03:46.000 I just knew it were tough, so I didn't know if I'd ever get that chance.

00:03:54.000 I remember the first time I went to a two-and-a-half-mile track.

00:03:59.000 It's Talladega, and you hold it wide open.

00:04:02.000 I was working at my dad's dealership, Changing Oil.

00:04:05.000 He owned this Chevy store in Newton, North Carolina.

00:04:09.000 And the phone rang and he said my dad was on there then.

00:04:12.000 And he was in Talladega for a test and he said, get your helmet and your suit and meet me at the racetrack.

00:04:18.000 The next day you're going to fly in the King Air to the track.

00:04:21.000 Don't ask questions.

00:04:22.000 Just do it.

00:04:23.000 And so I got there and I knew I was going to Talladega and I thought, man, I must be driving.

00:04:28.000 This is going to be crazy.

00:04:29.000 I'm going to go around this two and a half mile track full speed at 190 miles an hour.

00:04:35.000 I never went faster than 90 or 95 on a racetrack before.

00:04:39.000 I never drove anything bigger than a half mile.

00:04:44.000 I got there, he's like, you're going to test this car, get in, get ready.

00:04:47.000 He puts me in there and he's like, you got to hold it wide open.

00:04:50.000 If you don't hold it wide open, the motor's not going to work.

00:04:52.000 It'll hurt the motor.

00:04:53.000 You got to hold it.

00:04:54.000 The way they tune the motor to run wide open, it has to run at full throttle.

00:04:59.000 If you try to go around there at half throttle, it'll burn the pistons, it'll run too lean.

00:05:03.000 Wow.

00:05:04.000 All those things.

00:05:05.000 Wow. 1.00

00:05:05.000 He was saying that and I thought to myself, is he just telling me that just to make sure I hold it wide open because he thought I would be a pussy and not do it? 1.00

00:05:13.000 And so I was like, man, I'm a little nervous to hold it wide open, but I pulled out on the track and I mashed the gas full throttle and I'm going down the back straightaway and I was like, I'm looking down the back straightaway into the next corner, this long corner, 0.99

00:05:30.000 and I'm like...

00:05:32.000 How's it going to stick?

00:05:33.000 You know, how's the car not going to fly out of the racetrack?

00:05:37.000 Like, I'm going so fast, it doesn't feel like it's going to stay in the track.

00:05:44.000 And I kept running that through my head about my dad saying, I've got to hold it wide open.

00:05:49.000 I'm like, well, dad said it'll go wide open around here.

00:05:53.000 So I don't think he would, you know, I believe everything he says.

00:05:57.000 And You go in the corner and you turn into the corner and there is more grip than you can imagine.

00:06:06.000 There's so much grip.

00:06:08.000 The car is stuck to the track with such grip that you've never felt this before in your life.

00:06:13.000 This grip.

00:06:14.000 You can't slide across that track.

00:06:17.000 The tires in the car hold of the track so tough and tight that nothing's going to make it.

00:06:23.000 It just goes around there like it's the craziest thing.

00:06:26.000 And so now, today, when I tell people, when we've got this two-seater car and we take people for rides and they get in there and I'm like, man, what am I going to do?

00:06:35.000 What are you going to do to explain to somebody what this is going to feel like?

00:06:37.000 I'm going to tell you things to pay attention to.

00:06:39.000 Pay attention to the grip.

00:06:40.000 You're not going to believe how much grip this car has.

00:06:43.000 Like, you're just not going to believe that it'll stick to the track the way it does.

00:06:48.000 So pay attention to that and pay attention to how bumpy and violent it is.

00:06:53.000 You know, you drive a Cadillac or any car down the street.

00:06:56.000 Well, it's, you know, six, eight inches off the ground, these big old inflated tires and big giant sidewalls.

00:07:03.000 It's going to feel nice when it hits little bumps.

00:07:06.000 Our cars are rigid and suck to the ground and don't have much travel in the suspension.

00:07:12.000 It's built to go fast, not to feel good.

00:07:15.000 It's rough as hell and shakes the hell out of you.

00:07:19.000 That's what I remember about that.

00:07:22.000 And as soon as I got over that initial fear, I think that was the only time I ever had any real fear of driving a car.

00:07:28.000 As soon as I was like, well, all right, anything, nothing else is going to be as scary as that was, right?

00:07:35.000 Driving a car.

00:07:36.000 And I mean, flipping, and when I flip for the first time, and the car's tumbling and flying, parts flying off the air, I thought to myself that I wasn't scared or I never was scared of flipping.

00:07:52.000 My thought was I just did something a lot of people are never going to experience.

00:07:56.000 You know, I did something that...

00:08:01.000 That only a few people know what that's like.

00:08:04.000 And I feel safe.

00:08:06.000 I've always felt incredibly safe inside the car.

00:08:09.000 Especially in the last 20 years, the safety stuff has really been focused on and improved and better and better and better.

00:08:18.000 But I look at the interior of our cars today versus 20 years ago, and I can't believe some of the stuff that we used to climb into.

00:08:23.000 So you felt calm while it was flipping?

00:08:27.000 Yeah.

00:08:27.000 Oh yeah.

00:08:28.000 I always...

00:08:29.000 Well, I've seen cars flip, right?

00:08:30.000 I've seen it for years, right?

00:08:32.000 So I know it's possible.

00:08:33.000 So I get in there and I got turned around at a race in 1998. I was racing at Daytona.

00:08:40.000 And I got turned around and the car...

00:08:43.000 So I'm flipping for the first time in my life.

00:08:45.000 And this car's like over 3,000 pounds.

00:08:50.000 But it flies up in the air like it's paper, man.

00:08:52.000 It's the craziest thing in the world.

00:08:54.000 It's so weightless, you know?

00:08:56.000 And what it felt like to me, so the car rolled on its side and came down kind of on its side.

00:09:04.000 It felt like somebody rolled a prop wall of grass up against the car.

00:09:08.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:09:09.000 When I was on my side and I could see the ground, I felt like I was right side up because as you're flipping, the force pushes you down in the seat.

00:09:17.000 So you feel eternally, you feel gravity.

00:09:21.000 All the time.

00:09:22.000 As the car's flipping, you're pushed into the seat, so you feel weight of yourself in the seat.

00:09:29.000 That never changes.

00:09:30.000 You never come up out of the seat like that.

00:09:33.000 It's like somebody rolled a prop wall of grass up against the side of the car, and then against the roof, and then against that side.

00:09:38.000 It kept doing that.

00:09:40.000 I'm like...

00:09:41.000 It's just the weirdest feeling.

00:09:42.000 And you feel completely safe.

00:09:44.000 You feel like, you know, nothing's going to harm me.

00:09:49.000 One of the things they always talk about is get your hands onto something because the spinning makes your arms just go like this.

00:10:00.000 And if you watch a lot of old wrecks from the 60s and 70s, you'll see the guy's arms come flying out the window and they're just kind of flopping around.

00:10:07.000 It's spinning so fast you can't pull it in.

00:10:10.000 And your arms will go like that.

00:10:11.000 So as soon as you know you're going upside down, you grab the bottom of the steering wheel and just kind of, you know, watch.

00:10:17.000 But I flipped my pickup truck one time on Christmas Day, and I wasn't holding on the steering wheel, and my arm went out the window.

00:10:26.000 You know, for like a split second, it banged around in the window sill.

00:10:31.000 And I was like, man, you know, I got it back in and grabbed ahold of the steering wheel with both my hands.

00:10:37.000 And so ever since then, I've like, you know, now I know, like anytime I'm in a crash, you got to have your hands ahold of something because that's the one thing that you can't control.

00:10:47.000 You're strapped in with your seatbelt and everything, but your arms are, you know, can go anywhere.

00:10:52.000 And in that moment when the car is rolling or barrel rolling or flipping, It's so fast.

00:10:58.000 Like, you can't.

00:10:59.000 Your arms just go this way.

00:11:01.000 Yeah.

00:11:01.000 It's the craziest thing in the world.

00:11:03.000 That's the only fear, I guess, is that your arm could get outside the window and get crushed or something.

00:11:07.000 Because the guys have had that happen.

00:11:09.000 Yeah, I would imagine.

00:11:10.000 Yeah.

00:11:10.000 How'd you flip when you were on Christmas?

00:11:12.000 On Christmas Day, my sister... 0.96

00:11:15.000 She knows this.

00:11:16.000 This won't be news to her.

00:11:19.000 It's probably not fun for her to hear every time I tell it.

00:11:23.000 I had a pickup truck with a tape deck in it.

00:11:27.000 She got me that Walkman CD with the adapter for the tape deck that you stick into your cassette adapter.

00:11:35.000 And she bought me the Walkman cassette adapter and I'm in my truck.

00:11:39.000 I got an extended cab S10. I'm driving from my house to my mamaw's house where family reunion is. 0.93

00:11:45.000 My dad's there.

00:11:46.000 Everybody's there.

00:11:47.000 The whole family's there.

00:11:48.000 I'm a little late.

00:11:51.000 And I'm driving down the road.

00:11:53.000 And I got to messing with that Walkman, and I drove off into the ditch, and I hit a driveway culvert, a pipe, drainage pipe in a driveway, and went like seven flips and destroyed this truck.

00:12:04.000 And in the middle of the flipping, I remember that happening.

00:12:07.000 And everything, all my change, jacket, anything that was loose in the car ended up down in the one corner, like floorboard.

00:12:15.000 Everything sort of collects into that one corner as it's spinning.

00:12:19.000 And it crushed the windshield down.

00:12:22.000 The mirror was down into the radio.

00:12:24.000 You know, it crushed the roof down real bad.

00:12:26.000 I was really lucky.

00:12:27.000 I had my hands on top of the steering wheel and the windshield kept slapping my knuckles and busted all my knuckles real bad.

00:12:34.000 And so then I let go and my hands went this way.

00:12:38.000 And then I finally got them back in and grabbed the bottom of the steering wheel.

00:12:43.000 The tires were broken and busted off the truck.

00:12:49.000 I got out of the truck, and I was fine.

00:12:52.000 I didn't have any injuries other than just the knuckles kind of being scraped up.

00:12:56.000 This newly married couple, they either got engaged or just got married, were driving the other way and saw the whole thing.

00:13:04.000 And they stopped.

00:13:05.000 And they were like, you alright?

00:13:07.000 I'm like, yeah.

00:13:09.000 And, of course, there's this line of cars behind me stopped on the road, and this one lady pulls up, and I was like, I need to borrow your cell phone to call my dad.

00:13:17.000 She's like, you're in shock.

00:13:18.000 You need to sit down.

00:13:18.000 I was like, no, I'm not in shock.

00:13:20.000 I just need to borrow your cell phone.

00:13:22.000 So I walked in the next car, and I got a cell phone from this person.

00:13:26.000 I called my dad, and I was like, Dad, I was like, man, I flipped my truck.

00:13:31.000 I had financed this thing for five years.

00:13:34.000 I was paying $100 a month.

00:13:35.000 It was perfect.

00:13:37.000 I was working at a dealership changing oil, probably making $130 a week.

00:13:42.000 And, I mean, just got this truck for probably two, three months.

00:13:46.000 And used truck, but it was good. 0.96

00:13:51.000 It's junk.

00:13:52.000 I called dad and I'm like, man, he's going to be mad. 0.89

00:13:55.000 Can't be too mad because I'm paying for the truck, but he's going to be mad at me because I'm screwing up family reunion and Christmas stuff.

00:14:03.000 He comes to get me.

00:14:05.000 I'd flipped this truck real close to where our farm was, so he ran over to the farm and got this flatbed truck, and he pulls out there with the flatbed truck.

00:14:13.000 And he pulls up, and as soon as he pulls up, a state trooper pulls up.

00:14:17.000 And the state trooper guy and dad talked for a minute.

00:14:20.000 And the state trooper's like, you know, one single car accident, you okay?

00:14:24.000 Yeah, everybody's okay.

00:14:24.000 Dad, are you going to put this on the flatbed and take it home?

00:14:27.000 Yeah, okay, okay.

00:14:29.000 I ain't going to investigate or anything.

00:14:31.000 Everything's cool.

00:14:31.000 Y'all just go about your business.

00:14:32.000 So he left.

00:14:33.000 He did us a solid there and didn't give me any kind of traffic ticket.

00:14:38.000 And so me and dad put the truck on the flatbed and we're driving back and he started laughing.

00:14:44.000 And I was like, man, I expected you to be really mad because he was a fiery kind of dad, you know, and pull the belt out and go to town, you know.

00:14:53.000 He was a rough, strict, tough, tough dude.

00:14:56.000 And so I thought I was going to get a good cussing at least, but he started laughing.

00:15:02.000 And I said, man, what's so funny?

00:15:04.000 And he goes...

00:15:05.000 I was 18 when this happened.

00:15:06.000 He goes, when I was 18 years old, I flipped my car.

00:15:08.000 He's like, I can't get mad.

00:15:10.000 He's like, I'm just glad you're not hurt.

00:15:13.000 I'm like, that's nice.

00:15:14.000 So we drove back.

00:15:16.000 I took a couple pictures of it and got insurance for it.

00:15:20.000 Got like 11 or 12 grand for the insurance to be able to buy another truck.

00:15:23.000 Yeah.

00:15:24.000 So it all worked out.

00:15:25.000 So that was the first time you ever flipped something, or did you flip the race car first?

00:15:29.000 That was the first time.

00:15:29.000 No, the race car was next.

00:15:31.000 So the race car is like, oh, I've been here before.

00:15:33.000 Yes, yeah.

00:15:34.000 And in the race car, it's not as bad as a passenger car.

00:15:38.000 You only got that strap.

00:15:39.000 You're moving around and banging around in there, and in the race car, you're in there pretty tight.

00:15:44.000 Yeah.

00:15:44.000 Do you feel weird when you're in a passenger car, too, for the lack of support?

00:15:48.000 The lack of support and safety?

00:15:49.000 Yeah.

00:15:50.000 You know, I do.

00:15:51.000 Because compared to the way our cup cars are now, or the race cars are now, man, we're cocooned in there.

00:15:57.000 The seat and everything, the headrests, you got a six, seven-point harness.

00:16:00.000 I mean, in a street car, you really just got the strap.

00:16:04.000 I mean, it's...

00:16:04.000 I certainly, you know...

00:16:10.000 I'm much more cautious as I get older on the highway.

00:16:14.000 And people are like, hey man, how do you do it?

00:16:16.000 How do you drive a race car and then go 45, 55 on the road?

00:16:20.000 And it's real easy, actually.

00:16:21.000 You know, just kind of chill.

00:16:22.000 Does it get all your fast driving out of the way?

00:16:25.000 Yeah.

00:16:25.000 When I was younger, I was getting speeding tickets all the time.

00:16:27.000 But as I got older, I just didn't care to be in a hurry anymore.

00:16:32.000 Yeah, I would figure the way you drive for a living, you'd just get it out of your system.

00:16:36.000 I had plenty of high-speed action and hijinks on the racetrack.

00:16:43.000 I calmed down the road.

00:16:44.000 What kind of car do you drive in real life?

00:16:47.000 Well, it's funny.

00:16:48.000 I just bought a brand new Silverado.

00:16:51.000 I haven't bought a truck in a long time.

00:16:53.000 I still have my old Silverado I bought.

00:16:55.000 It's about an 0406, but this new one I like a lot.

00:16:59.000 The new ones are badass.

00:16:59.000 I didn't like the old ones that much.

00:17:01.000 They just look kind of basic.

00:17:02.000 The new ones are really sweet looking.

00:17:04.000 The character lines and the body lines, it's just a good looking truck.

00:17:07.000 So I bought that.

00:17:11.000 But what I was driving before that, I got a 48 pickup truck.

00:17:16.000 And it's all rough as hell on the outside and original faded all messy and ugly looking.

00:17:24.000 But it's got a Vortec motor and good drivetrain in it.

00:17:27.000 It drives good.

00:17:28.000 But it's easy to work on and I just love fooling with it.

00:17:31.000 I took the original bench seat out and put these old bucket seats in from an 80 Chevy Blazer.

00:17:38.000 And so I made it comfortable and just the way I wanted it.

00:17:41.000 So I drove that a lot this summer until I got this new truck.

00:17:45.000 And I got a 76 Chevy Laguna that I love to drive.

00:17:50.000 Yeah, that thing just kind of floats down the road, man.

00:17:54.000 And it's dark midnight blue tinted windows and just a...

00:17:59.000 Really cool car.

00:18:00.000 I love the 70s and the style of the cars in the 70s.

00:18:03.000 Even kind of the bigger ones like in the late 70s like the 442 Oldsmobile Cutlass.

00:18:08.000 Yeah.

00:18:09.000 Those big, big, big cars.

00:18:11.000 There's something about those guys that I really dig.

00:18:13.000 Is that your car right there?

00:18:14.000 That's my car right there, yeah. 1.00

00:18:15.000 Damn. 0.99

00:18:16.000 I love that thing, man. 0.99

00:18:17.000 I had a 1973 Chevelle that reminds me of that kind of body style.

00:18:22.000 That's it.

00:18:23.000 I got a 442 that's sort of the sister to that, Oldsville 442 that's red and kind of the same tinted one.

00:18:31.000 I did the same wheels, same tires, same tint.

00:18:34.000 I put a spoiler, like a NASCAR style spoiler on the back and the front because those cars were big in NASCAR. Oh.

00:18:42.000 See, those cars don't get as much love as the 60s muscle cars.

00:18:45.000 Well, we'll get there.

00:18:46.000 I think as we get older, what's cool gets older.

00:18:50.000 Really?

00:18:50.000 Yeah, like, I mean, nothing...

00:18:52.000 I mean, the 67 Camaro, those cars...

00:18:55.000 69, yeah.

00:18:55.000 Yeah, I got a 67. I thought...

00:18:57.000 I had a 69. But, like, the 55 Chevy, all those things will always hold their rightful place in history, but...

00:19:05.000 These cars, like that car right there, that wasn't very cool 10, 15, 20 years ago.

00:19:10.000 No.

00:19:10.000 But as we get older, that car becomes cool, you know.

00:19:14.000 And, you know, one day we'll be driving around in like 85 pickup trucks going, man, this thing's so awesome, so old school.

00:19:23.000 Really?

00:19:23.000 Yeah, I think so.

00:19:24.000 I don't know about that.

00:19:26.000 Yeah.

00:19:28.000 I just think that car might just be cool because you own it.

00:19:31.000 I don't know.

00:19:31.000 I think it's got these old character lines, man, that I really like.

00:19:35.000 It does.

00:19:35.000 It does have old character.

00:19:36.000 You know what's interesting?

00:19:36.000 I was just talking to a friend of mine about this.

00:19:38.000 In 1970, my mom bought a Barracuda.

00:19:42.000 And when I was in high school, in 1981, I was a freshman in high school, and she had this Barracuda.

00:19:47.000 And it was like a classic car.

00:19:49.000 And it was like a classic muscle car.

00:19:51.000 But that's only 11 years old.

00:19:53.000 Yeah.

00:19:54.000 Like, if you had a car today from 2007, that wouldn't be a classic car.

00:20:00.000 It's just a car.

00:20:01.000 Yeah, you're right.

00:20:02.000 It's weird.

00:20:03.000 It is weird.

00:20:04.000 It is weird.

00:20:04.000 Like a 1969, when I was in high school, in 1969, which was only an 11-year-old car, was amazing.

00:20:10.000 Like, whoa, people would stop and stare at it.

00:20:13.000 Dude, look at that 69 Camaro.

00:20:15.000 Yeah.

00:20:15.000 Whoa.

00:20:16.000 I got an 88 S10. That was the first pickup truck I owned or had.

00:20:20.000 That was like the car I got when I was 16 years old.

00:20:23.000 And I got one and restored it, which was a terrible investment.

00:20:27.000 But it makes sense for me because it was my first truck. 0.98

00:20:33.000 And I didn't think anybody would give a shit about it, right? 0.98

00:20:35.000 Because it's an S10. It's like the bottom of the barrel in pickup trucks for Chevrolet in 1988. But I drive that thing around and people are like, Wow, that's the cleanest S10 I've seen in 15, 20 years. 0.98

00:20:48.000 That's it right there.

00:20:49.000 Oh, that's a nice car.

00:20:50.000 You think there's something about seeing one of those that's in great shape, that it made it through?

00:20:55.000 Yeah, there's not many of them left.

00:20:57.000 I mean, for good reason, but what was your first car?

00:21:01.000 My first car...

00:21:03.000 It was a 73 Chevelle, that one, but the engine blew out on it.

00:21:06.000 I got a 71. Chevelle is a good car, man.

00:21:08.000 Oh, I love Chevelles.

00:21:09.000 So would you get a 73 and restore it to a...

00:21:13.000 I would get a 70. That's my favorite year.

00:21:15.000 69 and 70 are my favorite years.

00:21:18.000 I go back and forth between 69 and 70 with Chevelles.

00:21:21.000 They're both amazing years.

00:21:23.000 Yeah, I like those cars.

00:21:24.000 They're a big muscle car.

00:21:27.000 They are.

00:21:27.000 It's a big ride.

00:21:28.000 It's bigger than the Camaro.

00:21:30.000 Yeah.

00:21:30.000 I have a 1969 Nova.

00:21:32.000 Really?

00:21:33.000 Yeah, which is like a smaller.

00:21:35.000 Yeah.

00:21:35.000 Yeah, like that right there.

00:21:36.000 Woo, daddy! 1.00

00:21:37.000 That's a good looking car.

00:21:38.000 That is as classic an American muscle car as you get.

00:21:41.000 It's a 1970 with silver with black stripes.

00:21:45.000 Come on! 0.61

00:21:46.000 They used to race Novas.

00:21:47.000 My dad raced a Nova.

00:21:49.000 Yeah, Nova. 0.79

00:21:50.000 I like Novas because they're light.

00:21:51.000 Yeah.

00:21:52.000 Because it's a light car and because, you know, you put a big engine in it and new suspension and, you know.

00:21:57.000 Yeah.

00:21:58.000 I have a Nova...

00:22:01.000 A wagon that I just bought.

00:22:03.000 A 66. Oh, wow.

00:22:04.000 Yeah.

00:22:05.000 That's my next project.

00:22:07.000 I bought it from a buddy for five grand, and it's in pretty bad shape, but that's my next project as soon as I get some time.

00:22:15.000 I had this little girl, Isla, and she's six months, so it's kind of made it tough doing any kind of projects.

00:22:21.000 I know what that's like.

00:22:22.000 Congratulations.

00:22:23.000 Thanks.

00:22:24.000 It's awesome, but it does eat up a lot of your time.

00:22:27.000 Everything is on the side right now.

00:22:29.000 And it will be.

00:22:30.000 Yeah.

00:22:31.000 How long?

00:22:32.000 Forever.

00:22:33.000 It's just forever, until they move out, and then it's still a little bit on the side, because you've got to call and check on them.

00:22:40.000 It's awesome, though.

00:22:41.000 Yeah, it is.

00:22:42.000 It's amazing.

00:22:43.000 It's like getting married and having a kid and all that stuff is nothing like I thought it'd be.

00:22:50.000 No one can explain it to you, especially the kid part.

00:22:53.000 They can explain it to you.

00:22:54.000 I've had friends that have kids, they just go, we'll talk after the kid's boy.

00:22:58.000 There's no way you're going to be able to figure this out until it actually happens.

00:23:01.000 I've had people, everybody tries to tell you, this is what it's going to be like.

00:23:06.000 Man, you ain't going to believe it.

00:23:07.000 Greatest thing ever.

00:23:08.000 Boy, you just don't even know.

00:23:10.000 It still doesn't help.

00:23:12.000 It don't sink in until you go through that experience. 0.98

00:23:14.000 When you go through that experience, you're like, damn, they were right. 0.93

00:23:17.000 This is the greatest thing ever. 0.97

00:23:19.000 It's a different kind of love.

00:23:20.000 It is.

00:23:22.000 It's hard to explain.

00:23:25.000 If I come home, my daughters run up to me and jump in my arms, and I catch them, and they give me a kiss, and I'm hugging them.

00:23:32.000 There's a kind of love that doesn't exist in any other part of my life.

00:23:35.000 Nothing you could have ever felt before with anything or anybody else.

00:23:39.000 It is.

00:23:40.000 It's just different.

00:23:41.000 I can't wait for that.

00:23:42.000 She's six months, and...

00:23:45.000 Everybody's like, man, and you'll probably agree.

00:23:47.000 They're like, it goes fast.

00:23:49.000 It goes fast.

00:23:50.000 We're sort of in that moment where we're like, come on.

00:23:53.000 I can't wait for her to talk.

00:23:54.000 I can't wait to hear her voice.

00:23:56.000 What is her voice going to sound like?

00:23:58.000 What kind of voice is she going to have? 1.00

00:24:00.000 What is she going to like?

00:24:01.000 What is she going to want me to do with her? 0.89

00:24:04.000 Those kind of things.

00:24:05.000 Yeah, it's awesome.

00:24:06.000 Yeah.

00:24:06.000 It's awesome.

00:24:07.000 But yeah, it does put your projects on the side.

00:24:09.000 Yeah, my projects are on the side.

00:24:10.000 Golf sim's on the side.

00:24:12.000 Hunting's on the side.

00:24:13.000 I ain't going to go hunting this year.

00:24:14.000 I was going to go.

00:24:16.000 I usually go in October or November, first of November.

00:24:20.000 And you guys have a spot in Ohio, which is one of the best whitetail spots in the country.

00:24:24.000 Me and a buddy of mine, Martin Trex Jr., he races too.

00:24:27.000 And we've just been buddies a long time, and he's hardcore.

00:24:30.000 He's heavy-duty into the hunting.

00:24:31.000 Yeah.

00:24:31.000 And so we got, I wanted to hunt, but not, you know, I'm not going to be going every week.

00:24:37.000 But I knew he was probably interested in probably buying some land and us managing it together and learning how that process goes.

00:24:44.000 So we bought this land and we've put the crop, we've put the, you know, we put the food plots in, not ourselves, but we've managed the land on how we want to change it.

00:24:52.000 And Sort of managing the herd.

00:24:56.000 It's been a really educational experience.

00:25:00.000 I think a lot of people who don't hunt don't even understand what we're talking about, the whole process.

00:25:05.000 If you buy a nice piece of land, people who, especially if you look at, there's a bunch of organizations that teach classes in how to manage a giant piece of property, but laying out food plots.

00:25:19.000 People buy these big chunks of property specifically for whitetail hunting.

00:25:23.000 Yeah, so we have about a thousand acres.

00:25:26.000 That's awesome.

00:25:27.000 All we do is bow hunt for whitetail.

00:25:29.000 That's it.

00:25:30.000 We'll go in there twice a year, maybe, or at least once a year for turkey.

00:25:34.000 And we eat what we kill.

00:25:35.000 We got a turkey last year and was eating it that night.

00:25:40.000 I mean, yeah.

00:25:40.000 That's amazing, isn't it?

00:25:42.000 It is crazy.

00:25:43.000 Yeah, when you can eat it and it doesn't ever touch the freezer, never goes in the refrigerator, just straight from the harvest right to the grill.

00:25:50.000 Yeah, it's great.

00:25:51.000 It's incredible.

00:25:52.000 I love deer jerky.

00:25:53.000 It's probably my favorite.

00:25:55.000 And we fry turkey nuggets and stuff like that.

00:25:59.000 I mean, it's pretty cool.

00:26:00.000 That's awesome.

00:26:01.000 Yeah.

00:26:01.000 So that's a cool little getaway for you, too, right?

00:26:04.000 A thousand acre, a little slice of heaven.

00:26:06.000 Yeah, and it's driving distance.

00:26:08.000 Because I love a road trip.

00:26:10.000 I mean, if I wanted to, I could fly up there, but I like the road trip.

00:26:15.000 The whole thing for me really is everything before the shot that you take on the deer.

00:26:20.000 It's the drive up there with your buddies talking about what you're going to do, what you can't wait to do, what's been going on with everybody.

00:26:28.000 Getting up there and getting everything laid out.

00:26:30.000 Looking at the map on the wall.

00:26:32.000 Get that big laminated map on the wall.

00:26:34.000 Be like, man, this big good stand.

00:26:36.000 Which way is the wind blowing?

00:26:37.000 Let's talk about the wind.

00:26:38.000 What's wind going to be doing tomorrow morning?

00:26:39.000 Where are we going to go tomorrow morning?

00:26:43.000 Everybody gets their hands into cooking dinner that night.

00:26:49.000 Everybody gets a side or something they're dealing with and managing.

00:26:53.000 It's just fun.

00:26:54.000 Just spending time with your buddies.

00:26:56.000 We don't take that time anymore.

00:26:58.000 We don't really make time anymore.

00:27:01.000 You're going to go do that for two days.

00:27:04.000 You're going to make time to be with each other and enjoy it.

00:27:07.000 I like taking my buddies and taking friends of mine that don't hunt or haven't ever hunted and letting them understand what that experience is like.

00:27:15.000 It's pretty cool.

00:27:16.000 It is cool, but it's tough to get someone who's never hunted before, who isn't in a hunting, sit in a stand.

00:27:22.000 Yeah.

00:27:22.000 I can't get my wife to go.

00:27:23.000 I wanted Amy to go.

00:27:24.000 She knows what hunting's about.

00:27:26.000 She's into it, but she don't want to go.

00:27:30.000 We even got the redneck blinds, you know, the real comfortable deals, and you're sitting there in a chair and move all you want. 0.72

00:27:35.000 Yeah.

00:27:36.000 You ain't got to worry about your scent too bad or anything like that, and she won't even go sit in that. 1.00

00:27:40.000 I'm hoping little Isla will want to go, so we'll see.

00:27:43.000 Yeah, maybe it's better that she doesn't go.

00:27:47.000 You need a little break.

00:27:49.000 Yeah, you're right.

00:27:49.000 You need a little place where, like, if she wanted to go every time you were going, then it'd be like, oh, come on.

00:27:56.000 Well, you wanted me to like, honey.

00:27:58.000 Oh, but you like it too much.

00:28:02.000 Yeah.

00:28:02.000 Well, I would imagine, again, with what you do for a living, having something that's peaceful and quiet and out in nature would be very important to kind of balance out just the wild, hectic nature of race car driving.

00:28:15.000 Yeah.

00:28:15.000 I mean, for me, when I get in the stand and I sit down and I look out across the field and look at the land and everything, man, you ain't got to worry about...

00:28:30.000 You know, answering no email or getting back to this guy or setting up this appointment or answering this question or, you know, it's just, it's even better.

00:28:42.000 It's better than going on vacation.

00:28:44.000 Like, we go on vacation with my wife or with my buddies or whatever.

00:28:48.000 You still can't ever really disconnect from everything you're doing.

00:28:53.000 It seems like, though, when I go hunting, I can completely get rid of technology if I want.

00:29:02.000 Sitting in the woods is peaceful.

00:29:07.000 It's good for you.

00:29:08.000 It is.

00:29:08.000 It's therapeutic.

00:29:10.000 Even though nothing's happening, it's kind of cleansing in a way.

00:29:14.000 Yeah.

00:29:14.000 In a weird way.

00:29:16.000 I think human beings have a certain amount of requirement for time and nature.

00:29:20.000 Yeah.

00:29:20.000 And you don't realize you have that requirement until you're out there.

00:29:23.000 Yeah, you wouldn't know it until you go sit in a stand and you're like, wow, I needed a little bit of this.

00:29:27.000 I think even a park, you know, even people that go to Central Park in New York City, they go to that park and sit down by a tree and they just feel better.

00:29:34.000 Yeah.

00:29:35.000 Exactly.

00:29:35.000 That's exactly what it is.

00:29:36.000 Yeah.

00:29:37.000 I mean, and your work environment is a concrete slab, you know, that you're driving.

00:29:43.000 What's the fastest you go?

00:29:46.000 215. When that passes you, you realize how fast 215 really is.

00:29:53.000 Like, jeez.

00:29:55.000 You sit in that car and do it long enough, you forget.

00:29:57.000 Do you have apprehension about the horsepower wars with just modern consumer cars?

00:30:04.000 Because I look at some of these cars that they're putting out that are amazing, like the new Corvette ZR1s.

00:30:10.000 700 plus horsepower right from the factory.

00:30:13.000 The Dodge Demon's like 800 horsepower.

00:30:16.000 They're putting out these insane race cars right from the factory that any dummy like me, I could just go to, if I have the cash, I go to a Corvette dealership and pick one up and all of a sudden I'm on the highway.

00:30:29.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:30:30.000 I don't have a problem with it now until it becomes a common occurrence where people don't know how to control it, you know, or don't know how to manage what they're doing behind the wheel or something like that.

00:30:40.000 But until that's like a common issue, I don't know that it'll need regulation.

00:30:46.000 Yeah, I don't necessarily think...

00:30:48.000 I wouldn't be surprised, though, that one day it may be regulated because everything gets governed at some point.

00:30:55.000 Right, yeah.

00:30:56.000 Maybe too much, right?

00:30:58.000 Maybe we should just appreciate the fact that you can do that.

00:31:01.000 I know.

00:31:01.000 I mean, I want to be able to build whatever I want to build.

00:31:04.000 Right.

00:31:05.000 And if I want that in production, I ought to be able to produce whatever they want.

00:31:09.000 I agree.

00:31:09.000 But I feel like the same way I feel about guns.

00:31:13.000 I'm very pro-Second Amendment.

00:31:15.000 I feel like...

00:31:16.000 I am a responsible gun owner.

00:31:19.000 I have a lot of friends that are responsible gun owners.

00:31:21.000 I've used guns for hunting.

00:31:22.000 I think you should have a gun for protection.

00:31:24.000 I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

00:31:26.000 But I don't think it would be a bad idea to have some sort of course that you have to go through so you understand all the aspects of safety and precautions that you should take and how to correctly load a gun and clean a gun.

00:31:38.000 Absolutely.

00:31:39.000 But this is not really the case right now.

00:31:42.000 I'm not talking about gun control as much as I'm talking about gun safety and gun responsibility.

00:31:47.000 I feel like the same way about a car.

00:31:49.000 I feel like if you're going to go out and buy a Corvette ZR1, the kind of body-mashing acceleration, the G-forces you can get from something like that right from the factory, zero to 60 in under three seconds, that's an insane automobile.

00:32:04.000 Maybe someone should take you around a track a little bit.

00:32:07.000 That's a great idea.

00:32:08.000 I guess that would be the case.

00:32:09.000 If you were going to buy something like that or get in a car like that, you would need some kind of a trainer course that you would have to pass.

00:32:15.000 Three hours on a track.

00:32:16.000 If you have to have a particular license to drive 18-wheelers down the interstate, there should be a style or type of license that you need to achieve to have a certain type of license.

00:32:28.000 You want to go buy a Viper ACR and take it on the road?

00:32:31.000 Those crazy race car Vipers that you could just drive?

00:32:34.000 You should probably know how to drive that thing.

00:32:36.000 Especially the Vipers.

00:32:37.000 Those things are a little bit of a handful.

00:32:39.000 They're a little tail happy.

00:32:41.000 They're pretty tail happy.

00:32:42.000 They're so crazy too.

00:32:44.000 The race car one with all the vents and all the aero all around it.

00:32:47.000 That is just an insane thing that you could just go buy that and take that on the road.

00:32:51.000 Giant ass V10 in it. 0.96

00:32:53.000 It's pretty crazy. 0.98

00:32:54.000 It's awesome.

00:32:54.000 Yeah.

00:32:57.000 Do you, so, do you drive, like, fast cars on the road ever, or do you mostly, are you just, like, just mostly driving normal, relaxed on the road?

00:33:09.000 So, I, um, I got a lot of speeding tickets when I was younger.

00:33:13.000 That's a shocker.

00:33:15.000 Yeah.

00:33:16.000 And I... And it seemed like it just never failed.

00:33:21.000 Anytime I got behind the wheel of a Corvette or anything like that, I would get pulled over for, you know, rolling through lights or rolling through a stop sign or reckless driving or whatever.

00:33:31.000 And I kept...

00:33:32.000 I mean, it happened as recently as two or three years ago.

00:33:35.000 I got pulled over for rolling through a stop sign and speeding.

00:33:43.000 And the guy's like, man, you don't need these tickets.

00:33:46.000 Like, what are you doing?

00:33:48.000 And I was like, you're right.

00:33:49.000 I don't know what the hell I'm doing. 0.99

00:33:51.000 I don't need to be driving this damn car is what's up. 1.00

00:33:53.000 I need to get out of this stupid car. 1.00

00:33:55.000 I don't need no Corvette with all this power. 1.00

00:33:57.000 And so...

00:33:58.000 And I've got this original...

00:34:06.000 I got this original 65 Impala that's been in my family since it was brand new.

00:34:13.000 It's kind of been the community car.

00:34:14.000 It was passed around, got banged up on the corner, right front corner.

00:34:18.000 A couple crashes here, a couple crashes there.

00:34:20.000 This guy needed a car because his was broke down, so he used it for a while and such.

00:34:24.000 And I finally got it.

00:34:25.000 I bought it for two grand for my dad.

00:34:27.000 And I've fixed it up.

00:34:29.000 It's got a two barrel, 283. Wow.

00:34:32.000 Doesn't go anywhere.

00:34:33.000 Right?

00:34:34.000 And I just as much rather drive that car as little of power as it has. 0.99

00:34:40.000 Knowing I won't get myself into any stupid trouble. 0.99

00:34:43.000 Right. 1.00

00:34:44.000 You know, being in a hurry or being impatient.

00:34:47.000 And so, that's, you know, that's what I try to do.

00:34:53.000 I actually, I don't care about as much what kind of power the car has.

00:34:58.000 I like a driver.

00:34:59.000 I want to, I like...

00:35:02.000 Nice cars.

00:35:02.000 I like, you know, frame off restorations, but I'd rather have a driver that's reliable and easy to work on.

00:35:10.000 And I think that's why I like that 48 pickup truck.

00:35:13.000 It's got the Vortec motor, which is just a, you know, it's not a powerhouse.

00:35:18.000 It's just dropped in out of a junkyard crash.

00:35:22.000 And it's easy to work on.

00:35:26.000 Me and a buddy of mine put an electric wiper motor in it the other day because it had the old vacuum on it and it just didn't work.

00:35:33.000 And it's easy to work on. 0.81

00:35:36.000 We put these seats in it and we got an old ammo box for a console and shit like that.

00:35:42.000 Do you just enjoy it because it's something that's sort of related to what you do for a living but then again not and kind of just a project.

00:35:51.000 Automobile?

00:35:51.000 Yeah.

00:35:52.000 Yeah.

00:35:57.000 I think the reason why I like to work on cars is because it makes you a little invested in the car.

00:36:07.000 There was a point of time where I was just kind of like, that's cool.

00:36:10.000 I want to buy that.

00:36:11.000 I'll get that.

00:36:11.000 I'll drive that a year.

00:36:12.000 Now I don't like that anymore.

00:36:13.000 Oh, that's cool.

00:36:14.000 I want to buy that.

00:36:15.000 I'll get rid of this one and get this one.

00:36:17.000 And that got old real fast for me.

00:36:21.000 And so I started to...

00:36:23.000 That's when I put a little more time in that 65 Impala and fixed it up.

00:36:26.000 And I'm like, I'm never selling that car.

00:36:30.000 Never going to sell it.

00:36:32.000 That 48 truck, I'll never sell it.

00:36:34.000 Just because of the work I put into it or the time that I've spent with it.

00:36:41.000 I've had...

00:36:42.000 I mean, you know...

00:36:42.000 There's people that are helping me work on these cars.

00:36:45.000 I've got a buddy of mine that actually helps me work on these cars.

00:36:48.000 But...

00:36:49.000 When I finish that Nova wagon, I'll probably never sell it, even though it's probably nothing special if someone else were to look at it, but it's what I put into it.

00:37:00.000 Yeah, you've got sweat equity.

00:37:03.000 And the more you work on these cars, the more confidence you get in trying to do more, getting into the jobs that you didn't think you were capable of doing.

00:37:11.000 Have you ever thought about a build-up straight from scratch?

00:37:14.000 That's probably what this little Nova wagon is going to be.

00:37:17.000 Yeah?

00:37:17.000 Yeah.

00:37:18.000 I wanted a Nomad.

00:37:20.000 So my dad had a Nomad.

00:37:25.000 This thing had polished aluminum on the underneath floor pan. 0.99

00:37:30.000 He'd park it on a mirror in the shop so you could look underneath it and look how good the damn thing was. 0.98

00:37:36.000 It was frame off. 0.98

00:37:38.000 Hardly ever seen the road.

00:37:40.000 I mean, just clean as it could be from end to end.

00:37:43.000 And I love road trips.

00:37:46.000 The Nomad is the perfect road trip car.

00:37:51.000 But I just don't want to spend the money on a Nomad chassis and body. 0.65

00:37:58.000 They're just ridiculous to buy.

00:38:01.000 And I want to build the car. 0.88

00:38:05.000 I'm not an expert modder.

00:38:09.000 So this Nova wagon is perfect.

00:38:12.000 It's a wagon.

00:38:13.000 It's not a Nomad, but it's a little smaller, which I like.

00:38:16.000 And if I screw it up, it's okay.

00:38:19.000 If I screwed up a Nomad build, I'd be pissed.

00:38:22.000 Why are Nomads so expensive?

00:38:24.000 I don't know.

00:38:25.000 They're just rare, and it's like the old 55 Chevy wagon.

00:38:31.000 I'm trying to put into my head what a Nomad looks like.

00:38:34.000 What year?

00:38:34.000 Like a 55, 56, 57. Pull up like a 55 Nomad.

00:38:38.000 Oh.

00:38:39.000 Yeah.

00:38:40.000 See, that to me is my ultimate car.

00:38:43.000 Uh... 0.99

00:38:45.000 But damn, man, I mean, they're just so high. 0.99

00:38:48.000 That's a beautiful car, though. 0.99

00:38:50.000 That's a different era, you know?

00:38:51.000 Like, when you look at the muscle cars of, like, the 1960s, and then you go to something like this, like, that's a whole different world.

00:38:58.000 Yeah.

00:38:58.000 It's a different kind of thing.

00:39:00.000 I'd like to get, um, there was this one nomad, this guy chopped up and narrowed up, and he made, uh, one of those things, um, it's like a rat rod.

00:39:10.000 Out of it, yeah.

00:39:13.000 That was an idea for this Nova wagon, but I don't think I'm going to chop it up.

00:39:17.000 I think I'm going to keep it as it is.

00:39:18.000 When I was in high school, there was a man in the neighborhood when I was a kid that had a 55 Chevy, and it was the greatest thing anybody had ever seen in their lives.

00:39:27.000 And we would all wait while this guy drove by in his 50s.

00:39:29.000 55 Chevy.

00:39:30.000 We just couldn't believe it was a real car that someone could own this.

00:39:33.000 It was black and mint.

00:39:35.000 It was a beautiful car.

00:39:37.000 Manual transmission.

00:39:38.000 He would just drive by in that thing.

00:39:40.000 We would all just have our jaws hanging out.

00:39:42.000 When I was a little boy, I had Hot Wheels.

00:39:45.000 My favorite Hot Wheel was the black 55 Chevy that had the flip hood with the flames on the front.

00:39:53.000 It was like an original Hot Wheel.

00:39:55.000 And ever since then, you know, that's kind of been my car, but I went from the regular, you know, sedan to the wagon.

00:40:02.000 I think that nomad's pretty awesome.

00:40:04.000 Do you have, like, a full garage set up where you can do repairs on things?

00:40:07.000 Yeah.

00:40:08.000 It's kind of a farm shop, so it's dirty.

00:40:11.000 We fix lawnmowers.

00:40:12.000 We do some modding on our cars, whatever needs to be done in there.

00:40:16.000 I park my bus in there.

00:40:19.000 I got a bus that we take to the racetrack, and So, I mean, it's kind of just a big building.

00:40:26.000 We just got a sandblaster in there.

00:40:28.000 We got a big old, we got sheer in there.

00:40:33.000 We can do anything.

00:40:34.000 It's a man shop.

00:40:35.000 Yeah, whatever.

00:40:36.000 Man shop.

00:40:36.000 Yes.

00:40:37.000 Yeah.

00:40:37.000 Nice.

00:40:38.000 So, tell me about your book.

00:40:40.000 Yeah.

00:40:41.000 One of the things that was surprising that I had heard was your experience with concussions.

00:40:47.000 Mm-hmm.

00:40:48.000 Tell me about that.

00:40:51.000 I've had concussions.

00:40:53.000 In that flip I was talking about in 1998 at Daytona, I got a concussion from that crash.

00:40:58.000 I'd had concussions throughout my career at many different points and didn't think anything of them.

00:41:05.000 I thought when you got a concussion, you joked about it with your buddies, about how it made you feel, and you just rested until it was gone.

00:41:13.000 And you raced through it and eventually it'd go away and you were fine.

00:41:18.000 You know, it was just something that would go away and you never thought anything about, you never thought about seeing a doctor.

00:41:25.000 You never thought about getting treatment.

00:41:26.000 You didn't know there was even treatment available for a concussion.

00:41:29.000 You just thought it was something like a bruise, you know.

00:41:31.000 So this is going on throughout my whole career.

00:41:34.000 I was racing at, I was testing at Kansas Motor Speedway in 2012, blew a right front tire, hit the wall at 185 miles an hour, and it screwed me up.

00:41:47.000 And so that was a really not, you know, That wasn't a typical crash, not something that drivers deal with usually in their career.

00:41:57.000 This was something that was unique to me and it was just a terrible impact at a bad angle at a very, very fast rate of speed.

00:42:07.000 And I got out of the car and I knew something was wrong with me and I couldn't, you know, I couldn't I felt, you know, just like I'd been hitting the head with a bat, shocked and shell-shocked in a way, or just couldn't...

00:42:22.000 I couldn't...

00:42:26.000 Shake it off.

00:42:27.000 You just kind of wanted to shake your head and get it out, whatever it was, and you couldn't.

00:42:33.000 That's the way I failed immediately after that crash.

00:42:36.000 Our test was done because the car was killed.

00:42:39.000 So we went over to this place to get some lunch, and we're sitting there, and I started getting sick, nauseous, before we ever, you know, I wasn't eating.

00:42:47.000 We just ordered, we just sat down, and I started, I'm sitting with my team, all my guys, and I'm starting to, I feel like I'm going to throw up right there in front of them, and I'm getting nervous, and I don't, I haven't said to them that I feel this way, you know, so I don't want to tell them I feel this way.

00:43:05.000 But my crew chief, Steve LaTarte, is like a brother.

00:43:10.000 I was like, Steve, I am getting sick and something's wrong with me.

00:43:14.000 I don't know what's wrong with me, but I got to get out of this room.

00:43:16.000 It's lunch hour. 0.99

00:43:18.000 It's full of people, noises, talking, chatter, shit going on, and I got to get the hell out of there. 0.98

00:43:26.000 And as I was getting up to leave, my wife came walking in. 1.00

00:43:29.000 She was coming to get me.

00:43:31.000 We were going to Washington Redskins Monday night game and sitting on her box with Dan Snyder and whoever else was there.

00:43:38.000 So we had them plans to go.

00:43:42.000 I said, Amy, I'm going to go lay down in the car.

00:43:44.000 I just got to lay down in the car for a minute.

00:43:46.000 And I laid down in the car all the way to the airport.

00:43:49.000 I'm thinking, this is bad.

00:43:52.000 This is worse than I've ever felt anything, but hopefully it's going to go away.

00:43:55.000 And so we get to the game.

00:43:58.000 We went to the Redskins game.

00:43:59.000 We watched the game.

00:44:02.000 Did that whole thing.

00:44:05.000 And I went about four weeks of feeling bad and sick for about four weeks, and it finally went away.

00:44:12.000 And I knew that was unusual for it to be that long, but in my mind, I wasn't thinking doctor.

00:44:19.000 I wasn't thinking treatment.

00:44:20.000 I wasn't thinking anything like that.

00:44:21.000 It didn't even cross my mind to tell anybody or that I really needed...

00:44:25.000 I thought, you know, I thought that I had been dishonest and not...

00:44:34.000 I hadn't been honest with everybody about the way I was feeling, but I didn't ever think that it was going to cost me anything.

00:44:40.000 So I thought, alright, I'm feeling better.

00:44:42.000 I'm good.

00:44:43.000 Go to this race.

00:44:44.000 I'd been racing the whole time, right?

00:44:46.000 Finally, four weeks later, I'm great.

00:44:47.000 I go to another race.

00:44:48.000 I'm racing.

00:44:49.000 I crashed.

00:44:50.000 And it all came right back.

00:44:52.000 Like, as bad as it was, if not worse.

00:44:55.000 And that's when I said, I've got to go to the doctor.

00:44:58.000 This is bad.

00:45:00.000 I can't even...

00:45:02.000 I can't keep crashing like this.

00:45:04.000 Just putting these concussions so close together is a bad deal.

00:45:09.000 This is dangerous.

00:45:10.000 And I couldn't bite my tongue. 0.99

00:45:13.000 My attitude and my emotions and shit was out of whack. 0.99

00:45:17.000 I couldn't control my anger. 0.99

00:45:19.000 And I was like, anybody say something I didn't like, I'm like... 1.00

00:45:23.000 I wanted to tell them to fuck off. 1.00

00:45:26.000 That was just not like me. 1.00

00:45:28.000 I couldn't keep myself calm.

00:45:33.000 Everything that I heard made me angry.

00:45:37.000 It was the craziest thing.

00:45:39.000 Even people just talking about stuff would just get under my skin.

00:45:42.000 I'm like...

00:45:46.000 Real impatient.

00:45:49.000 And there were some new symptoms, but I finally went to the doctor and I went to this neurosurgeon in Charlotte, Dr. Petty.

00:45:59.000 He's like, I want you to meet this guy in Pittsburgh.

00:46:01.000 His name's Mickey Collins.

00:46:03.000 He works with the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Penguins.

00:46:07.000 And I'm like, alright.

00:46:09.000 I go up there and I'm thinking I'm going to meet this guy that works with the Penguins and the Steelers and he sees...

00:46:16.000 He's a doctor that sees anybody and everybody.

00:46:19.000 There's kids in there that got hurt playing on the playground.

00:46:23.000 There's workers, carpenters, housewives. 1.00

00:46:28.000 Everybody's in that damn waiting room to see this man. 0.99

00:46:31.000 He sees about 25 people a day. 1.00

00:46:36.000 He's an expert on head injuries. 1.00

00:46:39.000 He's on the cutting edge of whatever the hell the new shit is, he knows it. 0.99

00:46:45.000 His team and his people are investigating it. 0.99

00:46:50.000 He fixed me.

00:46:51.000 I go there and I'm like, this is what happened.

00:46:54.000 This is how it happened.

00:46:55.000 I crashed.

00:46:55.000 I hit it.

00:46:56.000 I didn't tell anybody about it.

00:46:57.000 I was sick for four weeks.

00:46:59.000 I got better.

00:46:59.000 I crashed in this race and I feel sick again.

00:47:01.000 And he was like, well, these are two different injuries, two different parts of your brain.

00:47:05.000 The first injury, you bruised this right front edge of your brain when you hit the wall.

00:47:11.000 He said this second crash, you twisted the base of your brain and injured some things in the back of your brain, and that's why you're having the emotional and different things like that.

00:47:22.000 But he went deeper into it than that.

00:47:24.000 He was like, you know, we did all these tests and visual tests and all kinds of stuff.

00:47:33.000 And I'd go back to, I mean, we did this thing.

00:47:35.000 I went through the gamut for a whole day of doing tests.

00:47:39.000 And then I went back every week before I, you know, and in two weeks I was back racing again.

00:47:45.000 I was clear.

00:47:47.000 And so he took an injury that I hid and took four weeks to heal and healed it in two weeks.

00:47:54.000 What did he do to heal it?

00:47:57.000 He gave me...

00:47:59.000 I never took any medication on this particular issue.

00:48:04.000 He gave me home exercises and eye exercises.

00:48:08.000 There was...

00:48:09.000 I had problems with focusing and making my eyes work, tracking an object like a bird flying across the sky or anything like that.

00:48:16.000 My eyes couldn't stay on it.

00:48:18.000 If I looked at you, my eyes would bounce off of you and they just wouldn't stay.

00:48:24.000 If you said, hey man, we'll take a picture and you held up a camera And I tried to look at the lens and smile.

00:48:30.000 My eyes would want to jump off of that object.

00:48:33.000 They didn't want to look at what I wanted them to look at and track anything, going anywhere.

00:48:38.000 What was the cause of that?

00:48:42.000 The brain has...

00:48:45.000 The ocular stuff, I mean, you can have injury to that part of your brain or you can have an injury to the vestibular part of your brain that may, like if you have bad balance, then your eyes and your balance work together.

00:49:00.000 And so if you have vestibular issues, that can create ocular issues.

00:49:07.000 That can affect your anxiety and depression and things like that.

00:49:14.000 You can have an injury to one part of your brain that affects four other areas.

00:49:20.000 And we talk about that in the book.

00:49:24.000 Mickey comes into the book and I'll say, this is what I was feeling, this is what I did, and Mickey will come in behind me and say, this is the medical science behind that and this is how we treated it and why.

00:49:36.000 I would have an injury to one singular area of my brain, but I would have four different symptoms affecting four different parts of my brain, four different senses.

00:49:44.000 And, you know, he would have to hone in on the one that was broken and then know to fix it.

00:49:51.000 And when he started fixing it, all the other ones would start communicating together.

00:49:56.000 The brain would start working again, balance and visual and all those things would start to work again and anxiety and all those things would, you know, begin to come back in tune.

00:50:05.000 No, when you said he fixed it, what is he doing?

00:50:09.000 Well, so he gave me physical exercises to do.

00:50:15.000 I had some balance issues.

00:50:17.000 Basically, if I turned my head or looked up and down, I would get dizzy and sick.

00:50:23.000 Like, my stomach would turn if I turned my head left to right, if I looked up and down, just sitting there.

00:50:28.000 Like, the best thing for me was to sit on the couch and not move.

00:50:32.000 Literally not move.

00:50:35.000 I felt fine then, but if I moved an inch, it would make your stomach nauseous.

00:50:43.000 I did a lot of exercises that created a ton of motion with my head, lifting heavy balls up.

00:50:50.000 And passing them over my shoulder this way or that way, taking a ball and turning around and hitting it this way, taking the ball, turning around and hitting it, just doing that for hours and hours and hours.

00:51:02.000 And so I would train, basically, I was training myself to balance again.

00:51:09.000 Training my body to balance itself again.

00:51:15.000 If I couldn't see a horizon or a flat surface, I couldn't tell which way was up.

00:51:23.000 It was so bad.

00:51:29.000 The visual stuff, there was these, I had a string with these balls on it, and I would hold the string on my nose and hold it out here, and I had to look at all those balls, and it would, my eyes are focusing, just, all it's doing is really just making my eyes change focus,

00:51:46.000 from one to the next to the next, and back, one to the next, next, and back.

00:51:50.000 And there was this I-chart on the wall, and it had all these letters and all these numbers on it.

00:51:55.000 And I had to look at that I-chart and turn my head back and forth this way, but look at that I-chart and count from A to Z, but backwards.

00:52:06.000 Do the alphabet.

00:52:07.000 So I'd have to look for the letters.

00:52:08.000 Where's Z? You know, and go backwards.

00:52:11.000 Or one to twenty, you know.

00:52:13.000 All while you're shaking your head.

00:52:14.000 Two, three.

00:52:15.000 Yeah, and standing up and walking backwards and walking forward.

00:52:18.000 And what is this doing to your mind?

00:52:20.000 Like, how does this fix your mind?

00:52:22.000 What is the process?

00:52:24.000 You know, I don't know what the real...

00:52:26.000 I don't know what...

00:52:28.000 It's the...

00:52:29.000 I've had...

00:52:29.000 The problem with me was my vestibular system, so my ability to understand balance and understand horizons and...

00:52:38.000 So I was putting my mind in a complex environment or making my mind do complex things that you don't do every day.

00:52:49.000 And it's just firing up these parts of your brain and exercises them?

00:52:51.000 Yeah, it's kind of like stretching this muscle.

00:52:55.000 They used to say when you would get hurt to go into a dark room and hide, no electronics, no TV, just sit in a dark room and wait.

00:53:04.000 Yeah.

00:53:04.000 And what they believe today is that exposure is what helps.

00:53:09.000 Pushing yourself into these complex environments and doing things that are really challenging for yourself.

00:53:13.000 Even doing that, if I put you in front of that eye chart and made you turn your head back and forth and walking two steps forward, two steps back, it would be difficult for you.

00:53:24.000 But for an injured person, it's super difficult.

00:53:26.000 It has to be really challenging.

00:53:29.000 But it just sort of tunes the mind or retrains the brain to balance.

00:53:34.000 It retrains the eyes to track on objects and to lock on objects and stay on them.

00:53:38.000 What's crazy is it sounds like physical rehab.

00:53:41.000 It is.

00:53:41.000 Like if you had a knee injury or something like that.

00:53:43.000 Yes, there's a lot of physical rehab to it.

00:53:45.000 Yeah.

00:53:46.000 There's a ton of it.

00:53:47.000 We don't think about that when it comes to the mind, though.

00:53:49.000 We usually think of the mind as like something that needs to be healed with medicine.

00:53:52.000 Yeah, I agree.

00:53:56.000 Probably 85% of the work that I did was physical therapy.

00:54:01.000 Did you change your diet or anything like that?

00:54:03.000 Because they say inflammatory causing foods or inflammation causing foods.

00:54:07.000 I did not change.

00:54:09.000 I strictly drank water.

00:54:11.000 I didn't drink anything other than water.

00:54:13.000 And I incorporated bananas and things like that into my diet that I never ate before.

00:54:19.000 Because of potassium?

00:54:20.000 Yeah.

00:54:21.000 What effect does potassium have on brain recovery?

00:54:24.000 I just hear that it's good for your brain.

00:54:26.000 It's good for your brain.

00:54:28.000 My doctor didn't say start eating this stuff.

00:54:32.000 When you go and get injured like that, you're going to get people texting you and giving you information here and there.

00:54:39.000 You kind of take what you want and go, I don't know about that.

00:54:42.000 Did you ever mess with CBD at all?

00:54:44.000 CBD. You don't know what that is?

00:54:46.000 No.

00:54:47.000 Interesting.

00:54:48.000 CBD is a non-psychoactive form of hemp, and it's a radical inflammation fighter.

00:54:55.000 And a lot of people that have some pretty significant injuries to the brain, a lot of fighters take it right after fights.

00:55:03.000 It used to be...

00:55:04.000 It's still...

00:55:08.000 No, I've actually read a little bit about that just a couple weeks ago because it controls anxiety.

00:55:27.000 Yes.

00:55:27.000 And it's helped a lot of people with that.

00:55:30.000 One of the problems that I face just on the regular every day is where my anxiety is.

00:55:36.000 Is that because of being famous?

00:55:39.000 I don't know.

00:55:40.000 I think it comes from your childhood and just things that you experience in life.

00:55:44.000 What are you anxious about?

00:55:51.000 Just general social situations?

00:55:53.000 Yeah.

00:55:53.000 Yeah, I mean, I would avoid...

00:55:55.000 I've gotten a lot better.

00:55:58.000 I would avoid concerts, even if I love the band.

00:56:03.000 I would...

00:56:04.000 Just because there's too many people there?

00:56:06.000 Yeah.

00:56:06.000 But is it too many people that are going to bother you?

00:56:08.000 No.

00:56:09.000 No?

00:56:10.000 I don't think so.

00:56:11.000 And I like being bothered.

00:56:12.000 I don't mind people coming up to me and saying, Man, that's cool.

00:56:15.000 I know who you are. 0.99

00:56:16.000 I mean, that shit feels great. 1.00

00:56:18.000 Right. 0.99

00:56:19.000 It was more about, like, am I going to be accepted?

00:56:23.000 Is it my scene?

00:56:25.000 Is...

00:56:25.000 I don't know, man.

00:56:26.000 I just always had a lot of anxiety over...

00:56:29.000 Oh, okay.

00:56:29.000 So, anxiety about whether or not you're going to be...

00:56:33.000 Fit in.

00:56:33.000 Yeah, okay.

00:56:34.000 So, you felt like an outsider when you were younger.

00:56:36.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:56:37.000 So, that anxiety...

00:56:39.000 I don't know.

00:56:40.000 I still feel...

00:56:42.000 I don't... 1.00

00:56:44.000 That shit goes away hard. 1.00

00:56:47.000 It takes a long time for that to go away. 1.00

00:56:48.000 Yeah, like my wife, she likes ashwagandha.

00:56:54.000 You ever heard of ashwagandha?

00:56:55.000 Yes. 0.99

00:56:56.000 Yeah, so she likes that, and I take that every once in a while, and I think that shit works pretty good. 0.99

00:57:00.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:57:00.000 Kind of keeps you calm. 0.98

00:57:01.000 Mm-hmm.

00:57:02.000 Yeah.

00:57:03.000 So, but I've never tried the, I've read about, when I was reading about ashwagandha is when I read about that stuff you're talking about.

00:57:10.000 I'll get you some.

00:57:11.000 All right.

00:57:11.000 It'll help.

00:57:12.000 CBD's amazing.

00:57:13.000 Okay.

00:57:13.000 And you know what's really good?

00:57:14.000 There's some muscle balms that work really good on sore joints and stuff.

00:57:18.000 I mean, but like, and nothing I've ever used before.

00:57:21.000 Better than anything.

00:57:22.000 Mm-hmm.

00:57:22.000 CBD just gets right into the muscles and just relaxes all the inflammation.

00:57:26.000 And the best part about it is it's 100% natural and no side effects.

00:57:30.000 There's nothing.

00:57:31.000 But in terms of like, there's a bunch of different CBD oils you can take.

00:57:35.000 They chill you out.

00:57:36.000 But they don't get you high or anything.

00:57:37.000 You're not weirded out.

00:57:39.000 But they just calm you down.

00:57:41.000 And I wonder how much that calming down is because of inflammation, just reducing inflammation.

00:57:46.000 It seems that your body knows what to do with it.

00:57:51.000 Your body's like, oh, I know what this is.

00:57:53.000 This is good.

00:57:53.000 Yeah.

00:57:54.000 I mean, I got Ted Nugent into it.

00:57:57.000 Really?

00:57:58.000 Man, Ted Nugent, before he came on here, he was telling me how he's all anti-marijuana and this and that.

00:58:03.000 And we had this conversation about it.

00:58:05.000 It makes people lazy.

00:58:06.000 I'm like...

00:58:06.000 I don't think it does, man.

00:58:07.000 I think people are just lazy.

00:58:09.000 And I told him, because I know he's got some serious knee problems.

00:58:12.000 He had all these knee surgeries. 0.99

00:58:13.000 He's a madman. 1.00

00:58:15.000 He used to jump off the top of the fucking stage and land on the ground and blew his meniscus out. 1.00

00:58:19.000 I got him on the CBD bomb now. 0.99

00:58:21.000 He texted me the other day and said, there's not a thing I've ever used that's helped me like this before.

00:58:26.000 Really?

00:58:26.000 Yeah, so now I'm having cases sent to him, like, every week.

00:58:30.000 Nice. 1.00

00:58:30.000 Yeah, he loves the shit. 1.00

00:58:31.000 I mean, he wants to endorse it, which is hilarious. 1.00

00:58:34.000 Yeah.

00:58:35.000 Like, the Motor City Madman, Ted Nugent, super anti-marijuana, wants to endorse a cannabis product that's helped his needs.

00:58:42.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:58:43.000 But it doesn't do anything to you psychologically.

00:58:45.000 Right.

00:58:45.000 It doesn't affect you.

00:58:46.000 No, yeah.

00:58:47.000 Other than calm you down.

00:58:48.000 Yeah, that's what I read about it.

00:58:49.000 Yeah.

00:58:50.000 It doesn't have that part of the drug that makes you hot.

00:58:53.000 Well, my friend's son has...

00:58:56.000 It's a type of epilepsy.

00:58:57.000 Brendan, Chubb, and he started giving his kid CBD oil, and it stopped the epilepsy in his tracks.

00:59:05.000 Yeah, I think I read where it's been used for that for years.

00:59:10.000 Yes, yes, yeah.

00:59:15.000 Seizures and stuff.

00:59:16.000 Yes.

00:59:16.000 Yeah, for seizures.

00:59:17.000 Yeah.

00:59:18.000 It's just a radical inflammation decreaser.

00:59:21.000 It just figures out a way.

00:59:23.000 It has some sort of interaction with your body where it just reduces inflammation.

00:59:27.000 But it's just, like I said, it also calms people down, alleviates anxiety, and no side effects.

00:59:34.000 That's the most important one.

00:59:35.000 Some people, it gives them a weird stomach.

00:59:37.000 They don't like the way, but I think they're probably taking too much or maybe it's expired or something like that.

00:59:42.000 Yeah.

00:59:43.000 I've never had those issues, but I'll get you something.

00:59:45.000 You should look into that too.

00:59:46.000 All right.

00:59:47.000 Yeah.

00:59:47.000 So what else did they do with you?

00:59:49.000 Did you do any cryotherapy or anything like that that also would reduce information?

00:59:54.000 No, no.

00:59:55.000 Basically I went and in 2012 we did basic physical therapy and eye therapy, eye tests and different eye exercises.

01:00:11.000 And in two weeks, I was back in the race car.

01:00:13.000 I raced for...

01:00:14.000 That was in 2012. I raced all the way to 2016. Two weeks you felt 100%.

01:00:20.000 Yeah.

01:00:20.000 That's amazing.

01:00:21.000 So with all these crazy exercises you're doing, when did you feel like it had settled in?

01:00:25.000 Like, wow, this is really working.

01:00:30.000 Pretty, I mean, if it was a two-week period, it wasn't, you know, it was a day or two, I guess.

01:00:35.000 You know, I mean, I can't even remember.

01:00:37.000 I can't even remember that far back.

01:00:38.000 A day or two?

01:00:39.000 Yeah, I mean, I imagine it was feeling pretty good after a couple days.

01:00:42.000 I'd have to, I don't know.

01:00:44.000 I mean, I don't know if it affected me right away or, but I know I was, by the time we had, I take an impact test, which is basically kind of measures memory and things like that, all kinds of different stuff, and And my measurements had come back to my norm,

01:01:00.000 you know, my basic You know, they kind of make you take the impact test beforehand, so that gets your blueprint of how you are.

01:01:10.000 And then whenever you get injured, you take it again, and they'll line that up against that and say, okay, yeah, you're deficient here.

01:01:18.000 This is a problem.

01:01:19.000 Maybe it's not diagnosing a concussion, but it's asking us to look in this area.

01:01:25.000 And so you have a baseline, and then you have whatever your injury or post-crash baseline is.

01:01:33.000 So I was matching all my normals on that impact test, and that was kind of the trigger for them to go, man, if you feel good, you look good here, all the things are saying that you're back.

01:01:45.000 And I wanted to go race, so I felt pretty good.

01:01:49.000 Is it a strange feeling knowing that you can't see what the damage is?

01:01:56.000 Like a brain injury is a strange one, right?

01:01:59.000 Because it's affecting everything in your body, but you don't see it.

01:02:03.000 Like if you have a broken arm, you're looking at it, you know it's in a cast, it gets fixed.

01:02:08.000 You know, you're aware of it.

01:02:10.000 You're doing rehab on it.

01:02:11.000 You're looking at it while you're doing it.

01:02:12.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:02:12.000 There's something about the brain where it's all, like, you can kind of mindfuck yourself and say, eh, I think I'm okay. 0.99

01:02:19.000 Yeah. 0.51

01:02:20.000 That's why, so in the book I talk about these notes I started taking.

01:02:23.000 After that crash in 2012, when I would wreck after that, I would get sick and I wouldn't tell anybody.

01:02:29.000 And so I started writing these notes in a journal in my phone.

01:02:33.000 And from 2013 all the way to 2016, I had this long journal of crashes and how I felt.

01:02:39.000 And I would crash on Sunday and I'd write in the journal on Sunday night, Monday morning, Monday at lunch, Monday at night, you know, three times a day every day until whenever I felt good, which was usually either Wednesday or Thursday of that week.

01:02:55.000 And I was writing these notes because I couldn't tell if I was getting better. 0.96

01:03:00.000 The brain injury or any type of head injury, I mean, if you said, how's it feel Monday, and then you asked me again Tuesday, I'd be like, I really don't fucking know, man.

01:03:08.000 It's there. 0.90

01:03:09.000 Right.

01:03:10.000 I don't know if it's better.

01:03:11.000 It just feels bad.

01:03:13.000 And so I would try to write as detailed as I could on a Monday and then try to write as detailed as I could on Tuesday and reread Monday and see, hmm, is it better?

01:03:23.000 I can see in the comments or, you know, I can't really remember exactly what I was feeling Monday, but in the comments it seems better and I would write these notes, right?

01:03:31.000 And so I kept doing this and I thought I was treating myself.

01:03:35.000 And eventually it caught up with me.

01:03:37.000 Like I had about a dozen concussions in a period of about two and a half years.

01:03:41.000 Wow.

01:03:41.000 And I got to where I couldn't walk.

01:03:43.000 And I called my owner and I was like, man, I need to talk to you.

01:03:48.000 I can't race this weekend.

01:03:49.000 I can't hardly walk.

01:03:51.000 And my balance is so bad that I can't get up off the couch without holding on to something and walking across the room without grabbing stuff as I go.

01:03:59.000 Jesus.

01:04:00.000 He was like, we got to go back to the doctor.

01:04:02.000 What are you doing?

01:04:02.000 He was mad.

01:04:03.000 He's like, you know, what are you fucking doing getting to the doctor? 0.99

01:04:06.000 Why aren't you at the doctor? 0.99

01:04:07.000 And I was like, you're right.

01:04:08.000 I need to go to the doctor.

01:04:09.000 I mean, a concussed person doesn't have good judgment and self-awareness, you know? 0.99

01:04:13.000 Right.

01:04:13.000 You're just in a freaking, you're in a, it's like being hungover.

01:04:17.000 Yeah. 0.81

01:04:18.000 Like the worst hangover.

01:04:19.000 You can't make decisions.

01:04:21.000 Yeah.

01:04:21.000 And so I went back to Pittsburgh and saw Mickey again, and I had to stay out the entire whole half of the year in 2016 to get better.

01:04:29.000 It took me five months to get well instead of two weeks.

01:04:32.000 Wow.

01:04:33.000 And that time, they put me on medication that would drop my anxiety levels, so the anxiety levels would stay down so that I could concentrate on the injury.

01:04:44.000 What medications?

01:04:47.000 I don't know exactly the names, but it was very, very small doses, and it would take about three weeks for it to kind of kick in.

01:04:59.000 I'd have to take it for a while before it'd start working.

01:05:02.000 But it just made me real chill.

01:05:04.000 And it made me not analyze myself every single day when I got up.

01:05:10.000 When I got up, I wouldn't go, hmm, is it still there?

01:05:13.000 Is it as bad as it was?

01:05:14.000 Let me walk across the room and see how I feel.

01:05:16.000 Let me go do this and test this and try this and try this and try this all day long and see how I feel.

01:05:22.000 It made me stop doing that because I was driving myself crazy.

01:05:27.000 He gave me a lot more physical therapy, basketball, movements, anything that got my head moving.

01:05:36.000 I'd do those exercises for about two weeks.

01:05:38.000 Some of them would stop triggering symptoms.

01:05:41.000 I'd go back to his place in Pittsburgh.

01:05:43.000 We'd go through about 30 more exercises and I'd take home about 15 that made the symptoms trigger.

01:05:48.000 And I'd do them for about two or three weeks, and some of them would stop working.

01:05:52.000 I'd go back to him.

01:05:53.000 We'd go through more physical exercises.

01:05:55.000 Kept doing that process over and over and over.

01:05:57.000 I took the medication for about a year and a half.

01:06:05.000 They gave me this computer program for my eyes and I would wear these 3D glasses and this computer program would try to take these 3D objects and go to 2D and back to 3D and my eyes would literally try, it felt like it was trying to rip my eyes apart.

01:06:23.000 It hurt, like physically hurt when this object would try to go from 3D to 2D and it was going very very slowly and it felt like it was trying to rip my eyes apart.

01:06:34.000 And imagine your eyes are tethered together.

01:06:36.000 So when you look left, they both go there, right?

01:06:39.000 And they both go wherever you look.

01:06:40.000 They go together like they're supposed to.

01:06:41.000 And mine didn't want to do that.

01:06:43.000 You couldn't physically see my eyes towed out or going the wrong way.

01:06:47.000 You couldn't see that.

01:06:48.000 But when I try to look over here, they both didn't go to the same place.

01:06:53.000 And that action or that computer program was strengthening that activity of my eyes trying to do something together.

01:07:05.000 Yeah.

01:07:25.000 My eyes would shake and I'd have to find them again.

01:07:29.000 And so that computer program would strengthen my ability.

01:07:33.000 It's called gaze stabilization.

01:07:35.000 It would make it to where when I walk, if I'm walking or bouncing across the room, I can still look at you in the eyes like a normal person.

01:07:44.000 And when I was at my worst, I couldn't do that.

01:07:49.000 But that took a long time to fix.

01:07:52.000 The book basically is me admitting making those mistakes.

01:07:57.000 I should have went to him as soon as I got sick again the first time instead of trying to document it myself and hide it and manage it myself and trying to get to whatever the end of my career was, whenever that moment was, and retire thinking I was going to walk away without anybody ever knowing.

01:08:16.000 And I had to retire after that.

01:08:18.000 After that 2016 year of missing half a season and going through all that, I didn't want to go through it again.

01:08:23.000 I had one more year on my contract in 2017, so I finished that season, and that was that.

01:08:29.000 Were you apprehensive while you were finishing that season?

01:08:32.000 I didn't want to get hurt.

01:08:33.000 I didn't want to go back through that whole process again and go through that rehab again.

01:08:36.000 I didn't want to get sick again.

01:08:38.000 Me and my wife just got married on New Year's of 2016-17, so we are newlyweds.

01:08:44.000 She's pregnant. 1.00

01:08:46.000 We're going to have a baby.

01:08:49.000 I didn't want to go through any of that stuff sick.

01:08:52.000 You know what?

01:08:52.000 I told my doctor, though, you'll like this, since now we know each other so well.

01:08:57.000 When I was ill in the hospital, or when I was with Mickey in Pittsburgh, my wedding was on New Year's, and this was probably around October.

01:09:08.000 No, this was probably in August.

01:09:10.000 I said, I need two things.

01:09:14.000 I need to be able to go through my wedding.

01:09:19.000 On my wedding day and my wedding night and that whole experience, I want to do it with a completely clear head.

01:09:24.000 I want to be able to remember everything.

01:09:25.000 I don't want to be on any drugs.

01:09:27.000 I don't want to have any symptoms.

01:09:30.000 I don't want to even be thinking about my head or reminded about it at any moment during that night.

01:09:34.000 I want my wedding to be perfect.

01:09:37.000 And I want to be able to climb up in my deer stand without feeling like I'm going to fall out of it.

01:09:42.000 And he said he'd fix it.

01:09:43.000 And I was hunting that October.

01:09:47.000 Wow.

01:09:48.000 Or that November.

01:09:49.000 In doing these exercises and in fixing the issues that you were facing, were you concerned, though, about long-term effects?

01:10:02.000 Absolutely.

01:10:03.000 Over the last five years, it's been hard for me to turn my back on articles, stories about NFL players and their history.

01:10:18.000 The whole lawsuit brought up so many stories about what these guys have went through, what their families have went through.

01:10:25.000 It's been impossible not to read that stuff and fear that, is that something that's going to happen to me?

01:10:34.000 Do I need to be worried about my long-term health?

01:10:41.000 It took me the longest time to watch that concussion movie because I just didn't want to know what it had to tell me.

01:10:49.000 And I... Eventually, I got to a place where I thought...

01:10:58.000 I talked to Mickey.

01:11:02.000 When I was hurt in 2016, I said, Mickey, why aren't you shutting me down?

01:11:05.000 He shut down some player.

01:11:08.000 I don't know the guy's name.

01:11:09.000 I don't know whether he was a hockey player or a football player, but the guy was making millions of dollars, and he was in his mid-20s, and Mickey had to say, you can't play anymore.

01:11:19.000 And I wanted Mickey to tell me that.

01:11:21.000 I didn't want to have to go out the room and say, y'all, I'm retiring.

01:11:25.000 I don't want to do this anymore.

01:11:26.000 I wanted to say, y'all, Mickey said I got to retire.

01:11:28.000 But he wouldn't.

01:11:30.000 And he said, you know, you're not where that guy is.

01:11:33.000 And I don't see what's going on.

01:11:34.000 I don't see anything going on with you that tells me you can't race if you want to race.

01:11:37.000 I said, well, what if I get hurt again?

01:11:39.000 He said, if you get hurt again, I can fix it.

01:11:42.000 It's up to you if you want to go through that.

01:11:44.000 He said, you're just as likely to get hurt as you were before the injury.

01:11:48.000 You're going to race in racing and racing is dangerous.

01:11:52.000 You got to make up your mind whether you want to go out there and risk getting hurt again.

01:11:56.000 And if you do, I'll fix it.

01:11:58.000 You can come right back here and we'll fix it all over again.

01:12:01.000 And I was like, alright, if you're not shutting me down, then you must not be worried about my long-term health.

01:12:08.000 And he's like, no, I'm not worried about your long-term health.

01:12:10.000 There's nothing going on here that I see that would make me concerned about your long-term health.

01:12:14.000 And so...

01:12:16.000 With all that said, I got married.

01:12:18.000 I had a little girl.

01:12:19.000 I'm sitting there on them days at home with them, and I'm thinking to myself, what if I'm sitting here worried about CTE or my mind, you know...

01:12:33.000 Going away, and it never happens. 0.95

01:12:35.000 You know, am I going to sit here and worry about that at 44 all the way through my 50s and my 60s and 70s and then one day wake up at 80 and go, damn, I lived a pretty good life.

01:12:44.000 Why did I worry about all that? 0.66

01:12:47.000 Why didn't I enjoy what was in front of me?

01:12:50.000 And so...

01:12:53.000 So I'm going to enjoy what's in front of me, not going to worry about CTE, not going to worry about my long-term health.

01:13:00.000 And there's another thing, too.

01:13:01.000 The conversation about concussions has really just skyrocketed into warp speed over the last five or six years.

01:13:14.000 And the way they treated me in 2012 to the way they treated me in 2016 was completely 180 degrees because they know so much more and they understand so much more about treating the injury.

01:13:26.000 And so if I do have any problems, whenever that is, I'm confident that there'll be something there for me, that there'll be something there to give me a good quality of life.

01:13:37.000 I had a hell of a run.

01:13:38.000 I had a lot of fun.

01:13:39.000 I raised hell.

01:13:41.000 I partied.

01:13:42.000 I won.

01:13:43.000 I lost.

01:13:44.000 And if it all ended now, I wouldn't have missed out on anything other than my wife and my little girl.

01:13:51.000 And so...

01:13:54.000 I'm content with where I am.

01:13:59.000 All I want to be able to do is just be a good father and be a good husband.

01:14:04.000 And I think I'm going to have that opportunity.

01:14:08.000 But if anything does happen to me, I think that there will be some technology, some information, some medicine, something that would give me a good enough quality of life that I would be able to enjoy those things.

01:14:18.000 I think you made the wise choice in retiring.

01:14:21.000 Oh, yeah.

01:14:21.000 And I think that, look, I'm very familiar with head injuries.

01:14:26.000 I'm around people that have had them all the time.

01:14:29.000 And I think it's something that we're understanding now more than ever before.

01:14:34.000 But someone like you, writing a book about this and your experience with it, I think is really important for people.

01:14:40.000 I think it's going to help a lot of people.

01:14:41.000 It's going to help a lot of people understand it.

01:14:43.000 And the more we talk about this, the more this gets out there in the public, the more it helps just regular folks that have had concussions understand what a significant thing this is.

01:14:54.000 Yeah.

01:14:56.000 This book is to not discourage you from doing what you want to do.

01:15:00.000 If you want to race, race.

01:15:02.000 If you want to fight, fight.

01:15:04.000 If you want to do whatever it is, play football, I'm not discouraging anyone from doing that.

01:15:08.000 I'm encouraging it.

01:15:10.000 I'm just saying that whenever you are hurt, if you ever do find yourself with an injury, don't make the bad choices that I made.

01:15:17.000 That's really all I'm doing here is to share with people the mistakes that I made.

01:15:22.000 I never would have known about Mickey had somebody not taken me to him.

01:15:27.000 I would have never even considered the fact that there was treatment for a head injury had I not met Mickey.

01:15:33.000 I mean, there's people out there today that don't know there's treatment, that they're living with these injuries.

01:15:38.000 Right.

01:15:38.000 Our veterans that don't think that they can be healed.

01:15:44.000 There's people in my timeline all the time saying, man, I'm glad you're talking about concussions.

01:15:47.000 I had one and I'm dealing with it all the time.

01:15:50.000 Boy, it's just nagging me every day.

01:15:52.000 And the truth is that you don't have to even live that way.

01:15:55.000 There's a better quality of life with the information that they know today.

01:15:59.000 Even if this injury was 10 years ago or 15 years ago, there's stuff today that can help give you a better quality of life.

01:16:07.000 And so that's what the book's about.

01:16:09.000 It's an amazing time.

01:16:11.000 When you think about the fact that 2012, you had an injury and they treated you one way.

01:16:16.000 2016, they had already advanced their techniques, and I'm sure they've advanced even more now in 2018. It's amazing.

01:16:23.000 Yeah, and we're living in this.

01:16:25.000 We're living in this big learning experience right now.

01:16:28.000 Yeah, I know they're starting to do some stuff with stem cells as well.

01:16:31.000 And, you know, there's a guy named Dr. Neil Reardon that I've had on the podcast before that he did wonders for Mel Gibson's dad.

01:16:39.000 And so Mel Gibson came on and wanted to talk about this.

01:16:42.000 They have to do treatment in Panama.

01:16:46.000 Yeah.

01:16:54.000 Yeah.

01:16:56.000 Yeah.

01:17:04.000 Yeah, I'm excited for them to find a way to detect CTE in the living human being.

01:17:10.000 They already have.

01:17:11.000 They've figured out a way to do that now.

01:17:13.000 It's very, very recently they've started to do that.

01:17:16.000 It's a major concern, obviously, for fighters, but I would imagine that someone in your line of work, it's not thought about the same way.

01:17:24.000 If people think about it with football, they directly associate boxing with head injury.

01:17:31.000 They don't directly associate race car driving.

01:17:34.000 Yeah.

01:17:34.000 And I'm hopeful that there aren't a lot of drivers that have experienced what I've experienced and crashed the way I've crashed.

01:17:41.000 And there's drivers that will race their lives without it, you know, without ever having that experience.

01:17:47.000 And I'm glad for that.

01:17:48.000 But for the guys that have, I've had veterans, retired guys call me, say, man, I've given my doctor's number to so many damn people ever since I've spoken up about this in 2012 to now in this book.

01:18:01.000 Mickey says there's at least three people a week that come in his office talking about me, and that's why they're there.

01:18:06.000 And so that's the whole mission, man.

01:18:09.000 Because Mickey gave me my life back twice.

01:18:11.000 I'm telling you, man, in 16, I was in bad shape.

01:18:14.000 And without my wife and without Mickey, I don't know that I would have made it out there then.

01:18:21.000 This book or anything else, this podcast, any opportunity to talk about this is only to push more people to Mickey so that he can do the same thing for them he did for me.

01:18:33.000 That's amazing.

01:18:35.000 There's a guy named Dr. Mark Gordon that's also been on this podcast before that does a lot of work with TBI and soldiers and football players and stuff like that.

01:18:44.000 So there's a lot of other doctors out there that are specializing in this and realizing this is a significant issue.

01:18:50.000 Just so happy that those people are out there.

01:18:52.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:18:53.000 Well, they're getting some good, you know, they're getting some opportunities to actually, you know, get up there and speak up about it and make it known.

01:19:00.000 I know, I have Mickey.

01:19:03.000 There's a bunch of Mickeys out there. 0.95

01:19:05.000 Yeah.

01:19:05.000 And there's a lot getting learned right now.

01:19:08.000 Well, there's just so many people that are silently suffering that don't want to open their mouth because they don't want to appear weak.

01:19:13.000 That's part of it, too.

01:19:14.000 Yeah.

01:19:15.000 A lot of people don't want to...

01:19:17.000 There's some people that just don't know where to go, you know, or don't think that they can afford it or don't think that they're going to get that...

01:19:25.000 You know, like, when I first went to Mickey, I thought I was going to go in there and see just Steelers and NHL players.

01:19:31.000 Right.

01:19:31.000 Right?

01:19:31.000 That's how ignorant I was about it.

01:19:33.000 And, you know, he sees every man.

01:19:36.000 That's awesome.

01:19:37.000 Yeah.

01:19:38.000 Now, being a race car driver is such a wild, exciting, powerful way to make a living.

01:19:47.000 Do you ever get the itch now?

01:19:49.000 Yeah, sure.

01:19:51.000 I ran a race about a month or two months ago at Richmond, Virginia.

01:19:59.000 We have an Xfinity series that's sponsored by Xfinity.

01:20:06.000 It's basically our college level.

01:20:08.000 They race on Saturdays before the big show on Sunday at the same track.

01:20:13.000 It's an abbreviated race.

01:20:17.000 I own a couple cars that race in that every week.

01:20:20.000 I ran in a race at Richmond.

01:20:23.000 To scratch the itch a little bit and had a blast.

01:20:26.000 We ran great.

01:20:27.000 Led a lot of laps.

01:20:27.000 Had fun.

01:20:28.000 Accomplished everything we wanted to accomplish.

01:20:31.000 I'll probably run one more next year at another track and probably do that every year until I just don't feel like doing it anymore.

01:20:38.000 Just for fun.

01:20:39.000 Yeah, just for fun.

01:20:40.000 But no more than that.

01:20:41.000 And I never go back to the Cup Series.

01:20:43.000 So the Cup Series, people talk about it like, man, you can just go back.

01:20:47.000 It's like, you can't just go back.

01:20:54.000 It'd be like one of the fighters just taking a couple years off and then jumping back in for the championship match.

01:21:03.000 It's too elite.

01:21:04.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:21:05.000 Well, that just happened.

01:21:07.000 Conor McGregor just came back after two years off and fought Khabib Nurmagomedov and got smashed.

01:21:12.000 Yeah, so it's a good point you're making.

01:21:14.000 I mean, he probably would have lost anyway to Khabib. 0.96

01:21:17.000 Khabib's just a monster. 0.89

01:21:19.000 But who knows? 0.98

01:21:20.000 He might not have.

01:21:22.000 If I would go back, it would take me six months just to get up to speed, not even really even get competitive, just to get up to speed physically and mentally.

01:21:32.000 Bring yourself to your A game.

01:21:33.000 Yeah.

01:21:33.000 And it ain't something you just get out of and go back in.

01:21:37.000 People on the outside looking at, well, you're steering, you're shifting.

01:21:40.000 What's the big deal?

01:21:41.000 Hit the gas?

01:21:42.000 Go! 0.95

01:21:42.000 It's such a... 0.95

01:21:43.000 Man, if you take a week off, you just get so behind.

01:21:46.000 What is it that you get behind?

01:21:48.000 What...

01:21:53.000 Well, so our sport, I was talking about this with a friend today, and he made a good point.

01:21:57.000 He said, there was a guy, he says, our sport is the only one where the ball is governed, and the ball is inspected, like the race car, the car, right?

01:22:07.000 Yeah.

01:22:07.000 The physical car itself.

01:22:09.000 So technology is one of the things that is, like, what's fast today will be obsolete and slow six months from now.

01:22:18.000 You wouldn't even think about running it.

01:22:21.000 Six months?

01:22:22.000 Yeah.

01:22:22.000 Really?

01:22:23.000 Yeah.

01:22:23.000 Wow.

01:22:25.000 Yeah.

01:22:26.000 I mean, it's constantly evolving.

01:22:30.000 And somebody next door, the guy next to you and the guy next to him and the guy next to him is always constantly trying to build a better mousetrap.

01:22:37.000 And everybody's...

01:22:39.000 And what's new and badass today is going to be okay and not very good six months from now.

01:22:45.000 And...

01:22:47.000 They're constantly, so the teams are constantly working, and if you're not in those cars and current and in that flow, in that changing, in that cycle, in that wheel, then you can't, you're behind.

01:23:03.000 Like, when you get in the car and you get around the team, like, you're behind on what's in the car, what's happening with the car, and I don't know, it's just not something you just jump in and out of, because you're not really the The key component.

01:23:19.000 Like, your body as a fighter, you know your body, and your body is the tool.

01:23:26.000 A football player, same thing.

01:23:27.000 Quarterback, his arm's the tool, right?

01:23:29.000 In racing, it's the car.

01:23:32.000 And so, if you're not in it and around it every day, you will be behind on technology, understanding what's happening, what teams are doing, what you need to be doing. 0.97

01:23:43.000 The damn dash is full of switches with all kinds of shit going on, and this needs to be on, and this needs to be off, and this needs to be back on and off and on. 0.75

01:23:50.000 And there's, you know, levers, there's brake levers. 1.00

01:23:54.000 Some drivers have four fucking brake levers. 0.94

01:23:56.000 There's like a rear... 0.99

01:23:57.000 You can shut off the left front, the right rear, the right front.

01:24:00.000 You can put all the brakes from the back to the front, from the left to the right.

01:24:05.000 I mean, that's just the brakes.

01:24:06.000 And, yeah, I mean, there's just so many...

01:24:08.000 There's just a lot going on that...

01:24:13.000 It would take you a while to get back up to speed if you were to take some time off.

01:24:19.000 It's just not as easy as it used to be.

01:24:21.000 I had no idea there were that many brake options.

01:24:23.000 Oh yeah.

01:24:25.000 Yeah.

01:24:26.000 I mean you can have as many as you want or as little as you want.

01:24:29.000 Some guys really think that that stuff's a good tool for them to be able to adjust the brakes and change how the brakes work on all four corners of the car.

01:24:37.000 Some of them do.

01:24:37.000 They move them during the race, while they're racing.

01:24:39.000 They're changing them and fooling with them.

01:24:41.000 In an Indy car, you can adjust the roll bars and wings and all that stuff in those cars and stuff like that.

01:24:47.000 As a race car driver, there's a ton of stuff going on in that car that people don't even know about.

01:24:56.000 So it would just take you a while to get all that stuff automatic in your mind?

01:25:02.000 Yeah.

01:25:02.000 I would get in the car and forget about those tools and forget that I have those adjustments and knowledge and getting beat by guys that are using it every day.

01:25:13.000 Now, how much time are you in a car in a race?

01:25:18.000 Three hours, probably three and a half hours.

01:25:19.000 Do you do anything or do you take anything to keep you concentrating at your full potential during that time?

01:25:29.000 Vitamins?

01:25:30.000 I never did.

01:25:31.000 I just mixed water and orange Gatorade.

01:25:33.000 So you have your electrolytes?

01:25:36.000 Yeah.

01:25:36.000 50-50?

01:25:37.000 Yeah.

01:25:38.000 Jimmy Johnson, several of those guys do energy chews, different things.

01:25:42.000 A lot of Gatorade-oriented stuff.

01:25:45.000 Gatorade's a sponsor for Jimmy, so he's going to have the Gatorade chews or whatever, you know.

01:25:48.000 Just because you must be sweating like a pig in those things, right?

01:25:50.000 You sweat a ton.

01:25:51.000 You lose anywhere from around six to eight pounds a race.

01:25:56.000 It's all just water weight, and you just put it right back on in a day or two.

01:25:59.000 Is it really hot in the car?

01:26:01.000 Is that what it is?

01:26:01.000 Yeah.

01:26:02.000 So, in Chicago this year, it was 150 degrees in the car.

01:26:06.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:26:07.000 So it's a sauna.

01:26:09.000 Yeah.

01:26:09.000 We had these temperature gauges in the car, so we're seeing them from the broadcast booth.

01:26:15.000 Jesus.

01:26:15.000 We can see during the in-car camera, it'll be pointed at that temperature gauge, and all of the guys' cars were 150 degrees inside, all the drivers, and it was miserable.

01:26:25.000 That's insane.

01:26:26.000 Yeah.

01:26:26.000 So is there any fear of people blacking out from heat exhaustion?

01:26:30.000 You know, that's something that I've always kind of been concerned with.

01:26:37.000 I think that we don't have that concern today, but it is coming.

01:26:43.000 And we need to, like, if we have 150 degree in-car temperatures, I think that we need to think about how to try not to have that.

01:26:51.000 You know, try to do something to where, man, is that really necessary that we put the drivers through that?

01:26:57.000 Is it because the engine's in front of you, and as you're driving, the heat from the engine just blows into the driver's compartment?

01:27:02.000 Yeah, that and the brakes, everything.

01:27:04.000 The brakes?

01:27:04.000 Yeah, the brakes are going to be a thousand degrees on the calipers, and that heat's radiating into the car.

01:27:09.000 Wow.

01:27:10.000 The drivers can open up these NACADUCs to allow air into the car, but that's going to hurt.

01:27:17.000 Slows you down?

01:27:17.000 Well, yeah, it's going to slow you down.

01:27:19.000 It's going to hurt the performance of the car.

01:27:20.000 And so the drivers try to trim the cars out so much that there's not a lot of air moving around in the car.

01:27:26.000 And it's so low to the ground, there's not a lot of air moving around under the car either.

01:27:30.000 So that air under the car is just kind of baking in there and just sitting in there.

01:27:36.000 So they're miserable. 0.95

01:27:37.000 They're a miserable, miserable, miserable car. 0.99

01:27:40.000 When I watch races and I'm like, you know, I'd love to get out there and do that for a few minutes, but damn, running three hours in a 150 degree race car. 0.99

01:27:48.000 It's miserable. 0.99

01:27:49.000 That's crazy.

01:27:51.000 It is the worst experience.

01:27:53.000 I can't imagine being in a sauna just sitting there for three hours.

01:27:56.000 Never mind...

01:27:57.000 Driving a car around a bunch of other cars.

01:28:00.000 Everyone's going 200 miles an hour.

01:28:02.000 The worst part is when you slow down.

01:28:04.000 The caution comes out because it gets hotter.

01:28:07.000 When the caution comes out and you have to come in and change tires and you're sitting there and you go about 8 or 10 pace laps at 50 miles an hour, that's when you get to think about it. 0.96

01:28:17.000 That's when you're sitting there going, damn, this is hot!

01:28:21.000 While you're racing, you're almost so hyper-focused on what you're doing, it kind of doesn't bother you as bad. 0.98

01:28:26.000 It distracts you.

01:28:28.000 Is there anything they can do to cool you off with your suit?

01:28:31.000 Does your suit do anything?

01:28:33.000 There's these new vests that we wear that has a gel in it, and you plug into a little machine that pumps it, and so you unplug it to get out of the car.

01:28:42.000 Those work really well.

01:28:43.000 I actually used one the last year of my career, and it was very comfortable.

01:28:49.000 So there's some innovative stuff out there.

01:28:51.000 They have a helmet cooler.

01:28:54.000 There's a hose that plugs into the top of your helmet, and it blows some air in there.

01:28:57.000 It's a little bit cooler.

01:28:59.000 But those two things draw so much amps that the teams don't want to use them.

01:29:04.000 The drivers want to use them, but the crew chiefs don't want you drawing that many amps off the alternator.

01:29:08.000 They want to use amps for other things that are going to make the car go faster.

01:29:12.000 Yeah, no.

01:29:12.000 That's why there's no AC. Yeah.

01:29:15.000 Yeah, I would imagine.

01:29:16.000 Yeah.

01:29:17.000 Man.

01:29:18.000 Now, when you think back on doing all that stuff that you did do, and think about those kind of races, and think about all the endurance and all the different aspects of it, does it ever seem kind of crazy that you did it?

01:29:33.000 Yeah.

01:29:34.000 Like, that I raced?

01:29:36.000 Yeah.

01:29:36.000 I mean, now that you're not racing, you're like, whoa, what a...

01:29:40.000 Wild way to make a living.

01:29:41.000 Yeah, like I can't believe it happened to me. 0.99

01:29:44.000 No shit. 0.98

01:29:47.000 My dad was sort of this I'm an invincible hero, and I wanted to do what he did. 0.99

01:29:59.000 I didn't think I was going to get to do that.

01:30:02.000 When I started doing it, I was thinking to myself, I can't believe this is happening to me.

01:30:07.000 When I started to win, I won a few races.

01:30:11.000 When I was 20 years old, I wasn't thinking, man, I'm going to be a champion.

01:30:15.000 I'm going to win 20 races.

01:30:17.000 I'm going to win 50 races. 1.00

01:30:19.000 I'm going to kick some ass. 0.99

01:30:20.000 I was thinking, I sure would love to do this and pay my bills. 0.99

01:30:23.000 I would love to do this just for a living, not have to work.

01:30:28.000 Changing oil wasn't the best, you know, wasn't where I wanted to be.

01:30:33.000 Right. 0.97

01:30:33.000 Working in the service department was fun, but damn, I wanted to be a race car driver. 0.97

01:30:37.000 And so when I made it, I didn't really... 0.97

01:30:42.000 I wanted to win, but damn, I just wanted to make money to afford to do it for a living, and that's all I ever wanted. 0.98

01:30:49.000 So the wins, Daytona 500s, and all that shit was a bonus. 0.99

01:30:54.000 And when I look back on it now, I'm like, man, I was so lucky. 0.97

01:30:58.000 Holy cow, was I lucky to do what we did, and do what I did, and win what I did, and...

01:31:03.000 Very lucky.

01:31:04.000 Do you think you had such great success, not just because, obviously, your dad is one of the greatest of all time, but also because your love for it was what propelled you?

01:31:15.000 It wasn't trying to seek fame or fortune.

01:31:19.000 You just truly loved racing, and that's why you became so great at it.

01:31:23.000 Yeah, my dad's...

01:31:24.000 The link to my father opened up a shit ton of doors for me, opened up so many opportunities for me.

01:31:31.000 Even today, it made my path much easier than some other fellows that I know.

01:31:38.000 But I think that my passion for it and my love for its history, my wanting for it to be healthy...

01:31:50.000 The sport, all those things is what probably made me make good decisions as I went along.

01:31:56.000 And when I would talk or get in a position to make a comment or say something, I always tried to think about how that would represent the sport.

01:32:05.000 I didn't understand what building a brand meant until way too late in my career.

01:32:10.000 Good.

01:32:11.000 Yeah.

01:32:12.000 That's good.

01:32:12.000 To people that are concentrating on that, it's always a mess.

01:32:16.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:32:17.000 I mean, I wish I'd have known a little bit about trying to build my brand, and I wouldn't have been such a hard-ass and hard to work with a lot of times.

01:32:23.000 There were some sponsors I loved, and I did everything they wanted, and there were some that I just wasn't as good as I should have been.

01:32:32.000 I wasn't...

01:32:34.000 I have regrets, but I'm just saying, as I was going through this career, I wasn't thinking about me, me, me.

01:32:42.000 I didn't even know how to build my own brand.

01:32:44.000 I didn't know what that meant.

01:32:45.000 I was thinking about, man, I love this.

01:32:48.000 This is great.

01:32:49.000 I can't believe I get to do this.

01:32:50.000 I can't believe I'm here.

01:32:51.000 I can't believe I'm...

01:32:52.000 Racing here, racing this person, driving this car, got this sponsorship.

01:32:57.000 Everything was the best of the best.

01:33:01.000 I had great sponsors, awesome equipment.

01:33:06.000 Everybody always nice.

01:33:08.000 Hey, how you doing?

01:33:09.000 Everybody's so nice.

01:33:11.000 My wife just hates that because everywhere I go, I'm like, everybody's so nice.

01:33:15.000 How was this?

01:33:16.000 Well, they were so nice.

01:33:17.000 She goes, everybody's nice to you.

01:33:19.000 You know, she gets so bent out of shape. 0.96

01:33:21.000 Why did she get mad at that?

01:33:23.000 Because she says, I don't know, she just says, us normal people, we don't get everybody nice.

01:33:29.000 Yeah.

01:33:30.000 You live in a different world.

01:33:31.000 Yeah.

01:33:32.000 That is interesting.

01:33:33.000 Yeah.

01:33:33.000 You live in this world where everybody's happy to meet you.

01:33:36.000 Yes.

01:33:36.000 Like a hot chick.

01:33:37.000 Yeah.

01:33:39.000 Kind of, right?

01:33:41.000 Yeah, like you're a hot chick everywhere you go.

01:33:44.000 People are like, hey Dale.

01:33:48.000 It's kind of similar, right?

01:33:49.000 I suppose.

01:33:50.000 Right?

01:33:51.000 I guess.

01:33:52.000 I mean, hot chicks don't have any idea what the world's like. 1.00

01:33:54.000 Everywhere they go, everybody loves them.

01:33:56.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:33:57.000 People are super, super excited to see them.

01:33:59.000 Yeah.

01:33:59.000 They know there's danger out there in some of these men, but everybody's very friendly to them.

01:34:04.000 Yeah, right.

01:34:04.000 Yeah.

01:34:05.000 Very similar.

01:34:06.000 But a large lady with unfortunate looks, she has a different view of the world. 0.99

01:34:10.000 Yes.

01:34:12.000 Yeah.

01:34:13.000 Yeah.

01:34:15.000 How much did you learn about racing from your dad?

01:34:19.000 Hardly nothing, man.

01:34:20.000 I mean, I would get asked all the time what your dad taught you about X, Y, and Z, and we never talked about racing.

01:34:29.000 Really?

01:34:30.000 Never.

01:34:31.000 Wow.

01:34:31.000 Yeah.

01:34:32.000 We never talked about racing.

01:34:33.000 Even when you started racing professionally?

01:34:35.000 Yeah.

01:34:35.000 Wow.

01:34:36.000 Yeah.

01:34:37.000 We never did.

01:34:39.000 He was always, don't, you know, finish...

01:34:46.000 He was so worried that me and Kelly wouldn't finish school, that we would give up on school.

01:34:51.000 He gave up on school as an 8th grader at 16 years old.

01:34:54.000 He was 16 in the 8th grade and quit and never finished high school, never got no GED, nothing.

01:35:01.000 And people would come up to him and say, or people would talk about him, even while he was alive and ever since, and say, look what this guy made of himself, having quit the 8th grade.

01:35:16.000 That's awesome.

01:35:17.000 And he always hated that.

01:35:19.000 That was embarrassing.

01:35:22.000 He was embarrassed that he quit.

01:35:24.000 He knew how bad it disappointed his own father.

01:35:27.000 So he was always worried about where I was, who I was hanging out with, whether I was doing my homework.

01:35:35.000 And then even when I started racing, it was who I was hanging out with, what I was doing with my free time, what I was focusing on, whether I was thinking about what I was Whether I was on time for sponsor appearances and never, this is how you drive this corner.

01:35:52.000 This is how you get around this racetrack.

01:35:54.000 He never talked about that stuff.

01:35:56.000 It was always the personality, being a man, being right, being good to people, being on time, being ready to work, looking your best, general, you know,

01:36:12.000 Morals and values. 0.82

01:36:14.000 We never sat down and talked about racing, like, I'm going to show you how to get around this corner and this is how you shift and shit like that. 0.86

01:36:21.000 Well, in that respect, it was probably brilliant of him. 0.75

01:36:24.000 Because look, the championships came.

01:36:27.000 And you also turned out to be a great man.

01:36:30.000 Thanks.

01:36:31.000 I appreciate you saying that.

01:36:34.000 I don't know.

01:36:36.000 I always felt like that when I was younger, I kind of let my father down because there was this one time, I was probably 12 years old, and there was this, me and my buddy, we were gonna play.

01:36:48.000 Man, we're here, we're outside, we're gonna play outside. 0.99

01:36:51.000 My dad's standing over there and there was a bucket full of shit. 0.99

01:36:54.000 And he's like, hey, come here. 0.99

01:36:57.000 Junior, pick that bucket up. 0.96

01:36:58.000 Move it over here.

01:36:59.000 And I went over there and tried to pick it up.

01:37:01.000 And I was like, I can't lift it.

01:37:02.000 And he got so pissed off at me because he knew I didn't try.

01:37:06.000 And he said to my buddy, Ryan, he goes, Ryan, come here.

01:37:09.000 Pick the bucket up and take it over there. 0.74

01:37:11.000 And he turned around and gave me this look of pure freaking disappointment.

01:37:15.000 And I felt like that set the tone for our relationship.

01:37:19.000 Wow.

01:37:20.000 One bucket.

01:37:22.000 I know.

01:37:22.000 I feel like that was our relationship in a nutshell for most of my teenage years.

01:37:33.000 He looked at me as...

01:37:35.000 You know, I don't know what he's going to mount to.

01:37:37.000 I don't know what this kid's going to do.

01:37:39.000 I don't know what skills he has or whether he's going to ever get his act together or whether he's ever going to figure himself out, you know?

01:37:48.000 And I probably didn't give him much reason to think different.

01:37:52.000 But then when we got...

01:37:54.000 When I started racing...

01:37:56.000 When I started racing at Late Models, I ran 159 races and he never came to one.

01:38:04.000 Through 94, 95, 96, 97, I raced at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina every weekend, and he never once came down there to watch me.

01:38:11.000 And so he didn't know whether I was a good race car driver or a bad race car driver.

01:38:15.000 He didn't know whether I was, you know, working on my car or understanding how to build the car, fix the car.

01:38:25.000 And when I would do good, I'd come home and I'd have a trophy and I'd say, hey man, I won!

01:38:29.000 And he'd go, well, who wasn't there? 0.99

01:38:32.000 And I'm like, shit. 1.00

01:38:36.000 He really did. 1.00

01:38:38.000 I remember coming home with a trophy, and I could not wait until he would walk.

01:38:42.000 I kept my car in this building that was his, and he put all his deer head up there called a deer head shop.

01:38:50.000 I'm talking 35, 40 miles in this place.

01:38:52.000 A couple elk.

01:38:54.000 And he'd come in there every Monday morning before lunch.

01:38:59.000 And I had that trophy sitting up.

01:39:01.000 We'd brought it home.

01:39:02.000 Man, it was right in view as soon as he walks in.

01:39:06.000 I got my car, working on my car.

01:39:08.000 And he comes in there and I'm like, he's like, so you won, huh?

01:39:14.000 Sees a trophy.

01:39:15.000 I was like, yeah, we did.

01:39:16.000 And he's like, such and such must have not been there.

01:39:19.000 Because there was this one guy named Robert Powell that used to beat us all the time.

01:39:22.000 And he goes, Robert must not been there.

01:39:24.000 I was like, no, he wasn't.

01:39:25.000 He wasn't there.

01:39:26.000 You're right.

01:39:28.000 I was so pissed off, man. 1.00

01:39:30.000 I finally won a damn race. 0.99

01:39:32.000 I thought he was going to come in there and slap me on the back and give me a good talk. 0.99

01:39:39.000 Did it give you more motivation that he didn't do that?

01:39:41.000 I don't think so.

01:39:43.000 I don't think it did.

01:39:44.000 I think it did not make me want to win more.

01:39:50.000 But then, one day, so right around the end of 1997, I was out of money.

01:39:59.000 He was like, hey, you know, you're out of money.

01:40:00.000 You ain't gonna race. 0.99

01:40:01.000 I was like, shit, my life's coming to an end as far as I know it. 0.99

01:40:05.000 You know, I'm not gonna... 0.98

01:40:06.000 I guess my racing career, this is it.

01:40:08.000 It's coming to an end.

01:40:09.000 1997. He was sitting down talking to...

01:40:14.000 He had a car that races in the Xfinity series that I told you about.

01:40:20.000 On Saturdays, and his driver was leaving to go to a cup car, and he was talking to his best friend, Tony Sr., is the guy's name that actually crew chiefs that car, and he's like, who are we going to get to drive this thing?

01:40:34.000 Who should we get?

01:40:34.000 We've got to hire us a driver.

01:40:36.000 And Tony Sr. said, why don't you put Dale Jr. in there?

01:40:38.000 And he goes, what?

01:40:39.000 Are you serious?

01:40:40.000 You really think so?

01:40:41.000 He's like, you're going to spend a little money on this car, why don't you spend it on your own kid?

01:40:46.000 I can probably make a driver out of him, Tony Sr. says.

01:40:52.000 So they made the decision to put me in this car in the Xfinity Series.

01:40:56.000 You'd think that Dad would come tell me, or we would have a press conference, might be a press release at least.

01:41:04.000 I walked into, this is a month before the race season starts.

01:41:07.000 I think I'm out of racing, right?

01:41:11.000 I ain't even talked to anybody about what I'm racing or if I'm racing in a couple months.

01:41:16.000 I think that it's dried up, opportunities are gone.

01:41:19.000 I walk into the shop to get something where Tony Sr.'s race car was and my name was on the roof.

01:41:28.000 And I was like, I thought it was a joke, like a mean joke, a prank.

01:41:32.000 Wow.

01:41:33.000 And they were laughing, Tony Sr. and some of the guys in the shop were laughing, and I'm like, man, that's messed up. 0.99

01:41:38.000 Man, y'all are dicks for putting that name on there. 0.98

01:41:42.000 This ain't no funny. 1.00

01:41:43.000 And they were like, it's true, man.

01:41:45.000 I was like, you mean I'm going to race this car?

01:41:48.000 I'm racing this car?

01:41:49.000 And they were like, yeah.

01:41:51.000 I was like, really?

01:41:52.000 And, I mean, obviously I was thrilled.

01:41:56.000 Like, man, I couldn't believe it, but this is the way I found out.

01:42:00.000 Not from my own dad.

01:42:02.000 And I'm like, Dad, I'm racing the car?

01:42:05.000 Yep.

01:42:06.000 I mean, like, days later when I see him.

01:42:08.000 I'm like, so I'm going to race that car?

01:42:10.000 And he's like, yep, yep, sure.

01:42:12.000 Better get ready.

01:42:13.000 That's it?

01:42:14.000 Yeah.

01:42:15.000 And, I mean, he was the strangest dude.

01:42:19.000 He didn't really...

01:42:23.000 So I started racing that car.

01:42:25.000 I had great success.

01:42:26.000 We won six or seven races the first year.

01:42:29.000 We won another six or seven races the second year.

01:42:31.000 Championships in both seasons.

01:42:33.000 So the choice to put me in that car worked out better than he probably ever imagined.

01:42:38.000 Ever.

01:42:40.000 In 159 late model races that I ran from 94 to 97, I won four.

01:42:45.000 In 159 late model races, I won four.

01:42:47.000 So, he put me in this car on a whim and a prayer.

01:42:51.000 And we ended up winning a championship.

01:42:53.000 Two in a row. 0.99

01:42:54.000 So, he is thinking, damn! 1.00

01:42:57.000 This little shit can drive a car. 1.00

01:43:00.000 And that's when our relationship completely changed. 1.00

01:43:03.000 That's when I had his arm around me. 0.99

01:43:06.000 We were doing shit together. 0.98

01:43:08.000 We had sponsor deals and promotions together. 1.00

01:43:12.000 We were doing photo shoots together.

01:43:14.000 I saw him all the time.

01:43:16.000 And we talked about all kinds of, you know, we talked about life, girls, and everything but racing.

01:43:22.000 You know, we didn't talk about racing much, which is fine.

01:43:24.000 But it was awesome.

01:43:27.000 And so, 98, 99, and then 2000, I went to Cup.

01:43:31.000 He built a Cup team around me.

01:43:34.000 We had Budweiser come in for $10 million a year, which was the biggest sponsorship anybody had at that time.

01:43:44.000 Wow.

01:43:51.000 Yeah.

01:43:55.000 That must have been amazing.

01:43:56.000 It must have been amazing for you to turn that corner.

01:43:59.000 Yeah.

01:43:59.000 It was like a light switch.

01:44:01.000 He went from not really engaging with me, me not comfortable around him, feeling ashamed, not measuring up. 1.00

01:44:14.000 Because he's 10 foot tall, cowboy boots, black hat, tougher and shit, intimidator. 0.99

01:44:22.000 That was his nickname. 0.99

01:44:23.000 And I was blind, pale, short as hell, not a muscle on me, and had accomplished nothing, you know?

01:44:33.000 Right.

01:44:33.000 And so, but overnight, it was, like, completely changed.

01:44:38.000 We started running great, and people were coming up to me, like, dude, you're freaking, you're doing awesome!

01:44:47.000 And, you know, and he was real happy with that.

01:44:52.000 He was pretty proud.

01:44:54.000 It's crazy that he never talked to you about racing.

01:44:56.000 No.

01:44:57.000 That's just so strange.

01:44:58.000 I can't imagine.

01:44:59.000 There was only one time that he did that.

01:45:03.000 We were at a track called Bristol, Tennessee.

01:45:04.000 We were at a track in Bristol, Tennessee.

01:45:08.000 It's a half-mile, high-banked racetrack, and we run 15-second laps around there.

01:45:12.000 It's really fast, and it's kind of technical and tough to get around.

01:45:17.000 And I'm out there practicing...

01:45:21.000 And I wasn't doing it right, and he got up on one of the haulers and got on the radio and started talking to me.

01:45:30.000 And he was like, hey man, I'm going to tell you how to drive it.

01:45:33.000 And so this one day, one time, in this one practice for about five minutes, he's like, I'm going to tell you how to drive this track.

01:45:41.000 So I'm out there driving, and he's like, all right, lift right here.

01:45:44.000 And I lift, and he's getting the gas, okay.

01:45:46.000 Turn there, and he's just telling me how to drive the track.

01:45:49.000 And that was the only time he ever did that.

01:45:52.000 Just think of how much it would have improved you.

01:45:54.000 I know.

01:45:54.000 It really helped me there that day.

01:45:56.000 I mean, when he told me how to do it, I'm like, holy shit. 0.89

01:46:01.000 I would have never thought of doing it this way, and this is way better. 0.90

01:46:06.000 So, yeah, maybe he could have given me a few more tips on some things.

01:46:09.000 I mean, come on, man.

01:46:12.000 I mean, that has to be so crazy, because that's your profession, and your dad is a superhero.

01:46:18.000 Well, I think that, you know, I finally made it to Cup, and I think had he lived, he would have been in my ear all those years.

01:46:28.000 You know, do this, do this, don't do this.

01:46:30.000 This is the best decision today.

01:46:32.000 So maybe he just wasn't in a hurry to do it, because he didn't know that he wasn't going to be around for it.

01:46:37.000 Right.

01:46:39.000 How hard was it to race after he was gone?

01:46:41.000 Right.

01:46:42.000 I thought about whether I should quit or not.

01:46:49.000 If it hadn't paid a lot of money and I didn't have partners and people that were depending on me or counting on me, I probably could have easily walked away from it.

01:47:02.000 But we had a great partner in Budweiser that was incredibly supportive.

01:47:10.000 I had a lucrative opportunity in front of me personally to be a race car driver for as long as I wanted to, which I wanted.

01:47:19.000 And I just had to go through missing him really bad for a few months.

01:47:23.000 I had to go to the racetrack, and everywhere I looked, there's Dad.

01:47:29.000 There were fans mourning.

01:47:33.000 There were signs and paintings and things. 0.98

01:47:37.000 There were just markings and acknowledgments and just shit everywhere for like a year. 0.77

01:47:43.000 And I appreciated it and I knew why it was like that.

01:47:48.000 But it took a while for me to sort of get to where I didn't...

01:47:55.000 There was a little period of time where I was real self-destructive and just like...

01:48:02.000 I was mad at everything.

01:48:07.000 It took me a while to calm down and get to work.

01:48:13.000 For a while there it was just sort of going through the motions.

01:48:19.000 I mean, you must have always known, I mean, everyone knows there's dangers involved in racing cars, but when it hit someone so close as your own father, that had to change what racing felt like to you.

01:48:37.000 Yeah, I'm sure it would have completely been a different experience emotionally had that not happened.

01:48:46.000 Racing for me would have meant something completely different.

01:48:53.000 You know, I just was...

01:48:54.000 He was this invincible...

01:49:01.000 Guy that wasn't supposed to get hurt.

01:49:04.000 He was supposed to get hurt and drive hurt and be tough.

01:49:11.000 He wasn't supposed to get killed and leave us all.

01:49:15.000 He left the whole sport and no one knew what to do. 1.00

01:49:19.000 The whole sport was sitting there going, shit. 1.00

01:49:22.000 What do we do? 1.00

01:49:24.000 You know, he was the guy for everyone.

01:49:27.000 And even the competitors, you know, looked up to him like he was the guy.

01:49:32.000 Like, that's the man.

01:49:34.000 And so it was tough on the whole sport.

01:49:38.000 Big, giant void for the whole sport.

01:49:44.000 But I, you know...

01:49:47.000 We just huddled together, me and my team, me and our company.

01:49:51.000 I raced for my dad's company, so that whole company just kind of held itself together and everybody kind of pulled together and worked our way through it.

01:49:59.000 That first year in 01, just that year that he was killed, that was just kind of a tough year.

01:50:04.000 I don't even really remember anything much about what happened that year.

01:50:10.000 Won a couple races, but it was otherwise, you know, the races where we didn't win, I can't even, I don't even remember much about them, you know, just retaining too much from it.

01:50:23.000 It was just kind of a daze, you know.

01:50:25.000 04 was a great year.

01:50:27.000 I think we kind of finally were coming out of the funk, you know, around 2004. Kind of coming out of the cloud of that.

01:50:34.000 I would imagine that being a race car driver and having your dad be who he was always carried a lot of weight.

01:50:42.000 But did he carry more weight after he was gone?

01:50:45.000 Were there more eyes on you?

01:50:46.000 Yeah, I thought so.

01:50:48.000 I thought he was tough.

01:50:53.000 He knew who he was to the sport.

01:50:57.000 He knew that he carried a big, massive fan base, and he knew that people listened when he spoke and all those things.

01:51:06.000 And so when he was gone, I think some people kind of looked at me to try to carry that same load and even be that same person, and I just wasn't going to do it.

01:51:16.000 I was like, man, I'm going to be me.

01:51:19.000 Like I said, he's this 10 foot tall black hat and I'm this short, scrawny, pale kid.

01:51:29.000 I couldn't be who he was.

01:51:31.000 I'd have been faking it.

01:51:32.000 And I couldn't be the intimidator.

01:51:35.000 So I just have always, ever since then...

01:51:40.000 And if that's good, if you like that, great.

01:51:47.000 I think I've been relatable, honest, genuine.

01:51:53.000 And the fan base that I gained when he passed away, I thought we nurtured that and grew that.

01:51:58.000 And I think we did a lot of great things in and outside the sport to do that.

01:52:08.000 So I'm kind of proud of all those things.

01:52:10.000 I thought I handled that well, considering there are a lot of different avenues to go at that time.

01:52:17.000 And I think I chose some good ones and certainly probably could have made some different decisions and have regrets.

01:52:24.000 But for the most part, I was able to, you know...

01:52:28.000 Add to his legacy a little bit.

01:52:30.000 That was something that was important to me. 0.98

01:52:32.000 I didn't go out there and win 90 damn races. 0.91

01:52:35.000 I didn't win seven championships. 0.96

01:52:37.000 But I didn't hurt his legacy.

01:52:39.000 I added to it.

01:52:41.000 Made a lot of people happy.

01:52:44.000 There was an Earnhardt on the track.

01:52:47.000 That was good for a lot of people.

01:52:50.000 Dale, you got a great perspective.

01:52:52.000 Well, thanks.

01:52:53.000 You really do.

01:52:54.000 In your book, it's called Racing to the Finish...

01:52:58.000 It's out now.

01:52:59.000 Go get it, folks.

01:53:01.000 Thanks.

01:53:01.000 Thank you, Dale.

01:53:02.000 Yes, sir, man.

01:53:02.000 I appreciate you having me on, dude.

01:53:03.000 I really appreciate you being here, man.

01:53:04.000 It's great to meet you.

01:53:05.000 Great to meet you, too.

01:53:06.000 Thank you.

01:53:06.000 We should do a hunt.

01:53:07.000 Absolutely.

01:53:07.000 Let's do it.

01:53:08.000 Let's do it.

01:53:09.000 You name it.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 07, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1196 - Dale Earnhardt Jr.

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