On this Flashback Friday episode, Jason Hartman hosts Daniel Flynn, former Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia and Editor of the weblog FlynnFiles. They discuss his latest book titled, “The War on Football: Saving America’s Game.”
Flynn discusses and responds to Malcolm Gladwell’s thesis that football should be banned as the risk of dying young increases. He gives research-based evidence that shows that the sport of football is safer than going to theme parks. He gives insight into lawsuits in youth sports. Later they discuss the Obama presidency.
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Jason Hartman 1:03
It’s my pleasure to welcome Daniel Flynn to the show. He’s the former executive director of accuracy in academia and the editor of a weblog, Flynn files and the author of a new book, the war on football, saving America’s game. Now, lest you think this is a sports segment, and it will be a little bit, let me just tell you about some of Daniel’s other books, titled blue collar intellectuals, a conservative history of the American left, intellectual morons how ideology makes smart people fall into stupid ideals, and few more, including why the left hates America. So glad to have him on the show to talk about this rather important topic. Maybe surprisingly to some of you,
Daniel Flynn 1:44
Daniel, welcome. How are you? outstanding? Thank you for having me.
Jason Hartman 1:47
Well, good. Hey, I always like to give our listeners a sense of geography. Where are you located today?
Daniel Flynn 1:52
I am in western Massachusetts.
Jason Hartman 1:54
Well, what prompted you to write a book? I mean, is it fair to say that this is not exactly A book about football per se or, or now?
Daniel Flynn 2:03
Well football tells us a lot about America. I mean if they polled Americans and about two thirds of the American people cop to watching football So, it you know, there’s not too many issues out there that you can get two thirds of the American people to agree on. But football is one of them. And I think you know, at a time when we’re divided by race, we’re divided by religion, we’re divided by what cable news network we watch at night, the one thing that really brings us together is football. And people may think that’s silly, they may wish that it was something more highbrow than an athletic contest. It brings us together. But the fact of the matter is that it’s football more than anything else. That brings us together in America.
Jason Hartman 2:44
Yeah, well, very good point. And our president ran on the, on the platform of being the great uniter and he said, all this class division and racial division was going to heal and it’s gotten worse. It’s worse than ever. At least in my lifetime, just just crazy. No comm Gladwell, he has a thesis that football should be banned because players are at a greater risk of dying now, we saw that big NFL lawsuit about the concussions recently settled for an astronomical amount of money. You know, what are your thoughts on this?
Daniel Flynn 3:20
I think, you know, first of all, Malcolm Gladwell is just wrong and Malcolm Gladwell and George well, Elsie Granderson and some other critics of the game have repeatedly made the point that football players die young the guy in their 50s The reality is, is that science has reverted this the NFL players Association number years ago because this rumor was so rampant. They petitioned the federal government to conduct a study on retired football players and the federal government looked at every player who played in the NFL from 1959 to 1988. played in five or more years pension drastic players and What they found are rebonded what Malcolm Gladwell says NFL players actually live longer than their peers in society, the scientists were expecting to find a death rate of 18% amongst these veteran NFL players. Instead, they found a 10% death rate there was dramatically reduced levels of heart disease, and lung cancer in all types of cancer and respiratory illness, and even suicide, which is something that the media has really run with since the deaths of junior saao and Dave duerson and other star players. They’ve run with this myth that NFL players are prone to killing themselves. The reality is that NFL players that the suicide rate is dramatically lower than the societal suicide rate. If you read some of the accounts in the New York Times and elsewhere, they’ll say that the NFL suicide rate is six times the national average. The truth is that the the average amongst comparable males is two and a half times what it is in the NFL. So a lot of this anti football now If that we’ve seen the last few years in the media, it’s kind of like, it’s kind of like the y2k bug or the The, the, you know, shark attacks that have happened every August or the killer bee story that was around when I was a kid. These are sort of stories that the media loves to run with, but they don’t really bear out in reality. And it’s the same thing with with the NFL suicide story, that it’s something that the media is all over. And every time an NFL player kills himself, there’ll be endless amounts of articles and news coverage of it. But it doesn’t really happen very often.
Jason Hartman 5:30
Well, you know, what’s interesting about that, and, you know, is that there are so many other issues in there have been, you know, there’s been a decent amount of writing about how NFL players have higher bankruptcy rates or get into financial trouble after they’ve earned all this money and they just kind of blow it and mismanaged it and, you know, maybe they get ripped off by their managers too. But more than any other major sport where players are getting highly compensated when they’re when they’re working. It seems like NFL players are do have some financial problems. So if you want to look at like suicide rate, or you know, even death rate in general because of maybe the cost of health care, accessibility to it. I mean, if if you if you have financial problems, there’s going to be maybe another contributing factor. I don’t know. You may say, Well, the financial problem thing isn’t true either, Jason, but that’s what I’ve read. Well, yeah,
Daniel Flynn 6:23
I mean, there’s a lot of that mythical toolkit just leaving that aside. You know, a guy like Jr, say, who’s probably the most inspected case of disaster he said to me, when the San Diego union Tribune looked at him know he was drinking five or six nights a week. He You know, he had been divorced. He drove his car off a cliff about a year before suicide, his restaurant, it was going out of business and actually went out of business a couple weeks after he died. So these guys have all sorts of problems that that have nothing to do with football. I mean, Dave duerson for the Chicago Bears, he killed himself and he hits For bank bankruptcy, and that’s, you know, that’s one of the issues that you alluded to. So, the point your point stands that, you know, these guys have all sorts of issues going on in their lives just like everyone else does. Who doesn’t play football? And so I think the, you know, because we watch what they do on the field so intense intensely, we forget that they have private lives off the field. And some of these guys private lives are really screwed up, and it has nothing to do with football.
Jason Hartman 7:25
Right. Right. So I mean, compare it to like skateboarding or theme parks. I mean, is football safer than the neither of those?
Daniel Flynn 7:33
Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the things that I do in the book is that you know that there are all sorts of dangerous activities that kids engage in, that their parents don’t really, they don’t really care about so much. They don’t really think of them as dangerous. So last year, skateboarding killed 30, skateboarders in America, football killed two players from from football hits. So collision hips and skateboarding were 15 times the number. They were in football. They were more Kids last year who died by getting struck by lightning on football fields, then died by getting struck by other players that that should put into perspective how safe football has become. And I think the odd thing is, the safer football becomes for players, the more dangerous it’s become for the game because it’s not that the game has become more rough. It’s that society has grown very soft and in football really presents a culture clash with the kind of passive indoor society that we all live in.
Jason Hartman 8:30
Right, but but in quoting those statistics, I just have to take issue with you. And maybe it’s not an issue, but I just want to make sure it’s considered in those statistics. I mean, don’t more Don’t we have to look at it like as a percentage per capita basis. Don’t more people skateboard and play football.
Daniel Flynn 8:46
I don’t think so. But it’s possible. I mean, there are 4 million people that play tackle football every year. I have no idea how many people skateboard, but you can look at other activities like skiing or bicycling or skiing. And certainly more people swim or bicycle than play football. But you’re talking about thousands of people who die from drowning swimming every year you’re talking about seven or 800 that die from bicycling 25% of die from skiing collisions into the die from playing football. So I think we really have to put this into perspective and and we’ve really lost perspective when it comes to football. I think the reason we’ve lost perspective is because the intent of football is very different from all those other activities, the intent of football often instead, you know, to do violence and harm to your opponent. But I think we get too caught up in intent, and we don’t get caught up in outcomes. I know that the street doesn’t intend to harm a skateboarder or an oncoming car doesn’t intend to harm skateboarder. But the reality is the outcome is you know that that street can be a lot more unforgiving than even linebacker
Jason Hartman 9:54
we didn’t know when it comes to the Americana sort of aspect of professional sports or or nonprofessional what is America’s game? I think most people think of it as baseball you know, baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet. That’s pretty good. ad campaign. Is it football or baseball?
Daniel Flynn 10:12
Well, the last time that Harris Poll surveyed Americans, the football beat baseball by about four times to one. And if you just look at professional football, it would be three times to one. But when you add College in there, it’s about four times to one four times as many Americans say their favorite sport is football, as a baseball. So I think the concept of baseball being America’s game, that’s maybe a 1950s mindset that’s looking at that. I don’t know when you look at the ratings right now, the ratings of just Sunday afternoon, NFL games often beat the ratings of World Series games. So as far as as a spectator sport, I think football easily beats baseball. It easily beats in the revenue, it easily beats in the ratings. So I I don’t know that people could say baseball is America’s sport anymore, but certainly that once was the case
Jason Hartman 11:04
how football doesn’t really happen around the world. I mean, they call soccer, football. But why isn’t football translated to other countries? Why is it Why is their game soccer and ours is football?
Daniel Flynn 11:17
Well, I think it it does in the sense that rugby is you know football is a rugby derived game. So you’ll see like Celtic football or you know, Australian rules football or Canadian Football League. But all all the gains derived from rugby and they kind of went their own direction and the direction that we went in the United States is American football. One of the weird things about football I think you touch on an important point. You know, every year the the ratings for the Super Bowl rivals the ratings for the the Premier League game championship, the final championship game that they have in that Premier Soccer League. And the difference between the two is that people watch that championship soccer game. Just about every country around the world, they’re watching on every continent, everywhere they’re watching a game. With regard to football, they’re really watching it only in North America. And it tells you how it tells you two things there. That’s unlike say Coca Cola, or you know, Disney World. Football is not for export. It’s almost an all it’s a Made in America only in America game. But beyond that, it tells you something about America how intensely our devotion or devotion of football is because if the Super Bowl is getting ratings on par with the soccer championship game, and the only people watching it are here in North America, it demonstrates you how in devotional how intense how religious, how does it become our national religion in America, that you have that many people watching the game?
Jason Hartman 12:48
No, I think that’s a that’s a very valid point that you make it really is. Just to talk about a couple other quick things before you go and I think they relate but I mean, maybe a good segue to it is is this Whole attack on football just part of the kind of this nanny state mentality that we’ve got or or is it not related to the nanny state mentality? It’s just a sort of a private thing. I mean, you know, where does the government, I guess, what is the government’s role in this is probably the right question.
Daniel Flynn 13:17
Well, there has been some some government activity, obviously, earlier this year, the president united states commented that if he had a son, he would, he would hesitate to have him play football.
Jason Hartman 13:28
Oh, I thought he was gonna, you know, say if he had a son look like Trayvon Martin,
Daniel Flynn 13:32
but ridiculous. If not, you know, there’s been some other government officials who have been trying to take action people like, you know, on school boards trying to ban football at high schools, or, you know, state legislators in Illinois and New York and Texas, trying to restrict the game in various ways. And New York Assemblyman introduced a bill trying to ban football, for kids under 11. And for people that you know, people don’t understand, but The 4 million people playing tackle football, about 95% of them can’t even legally buy alcohol. So it gives you a sense of who’s playing the game. It’s kids football is a kids game. The league that we watched the most, is a league composed of giant behemoth men. The leagues that most players participate in our leagues, a little boys in these restrictions that are trying to cut off football at 14 or an 18. These are really just sort of back back end ways to ban game of football because almost everyone who plays the game of football as a kid, you can’t get it. So I think as far as the war in football is concerned, there are there are government officials who are trying to prevent kids are playing and they’re not having a huge deal of success legally. But from a from a sort of a guilt tripping perspective. They’re having an amazing amount of success. Youth youth football was down 6% in its player population last year, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact That, you know, the portrayal of football in the media is that if you sign your kid up for football, you’re signing your kid up for organized child abuse. And to me football is the greatest game that there is that nothing could be further from the truth. You’re teaching a kid a lot of life lessons. And just to point out one, just about every single playing football, some kid gets knocked on his butt. And then he gets up and he fights or he stays on his butt. And to me, that’s a lot like life. That’s that is a metaphor for life right there.
Jason Hartman 15:29
Yeah. It is a metaphor for life. No question about it. Yeah, those two deaths that you mentioned earlier with those weren’t professional where they are. Those were youth.
Daniel Flynn 15:40
Know that the two deaths that happened last year were both in adult leagues. And one was an occasion of a guy’s heart stopping after you had hit his he just got hit at the wrong time and chest and the other was from a helmet to helmet collision. I believe it was from a head injury. They both were adult leagues and there’s very few people playing and adult leagues and aren’t professional leagues. But as Chance would have it. There were no, you know, no Youth League players, no High School players, no college players that died from a football hit last year. So it was it extremely safe here as far as players were concerned, but obviously, as far as the game itself was concerned, boy, they The game was facing an existential crisis. No, very good point.
Jason Hartman 16:19
So hey, before you go down, just tell us a little bit about some of your other books. You’ve got such great titles, you know, a conservative history of the American left. Just give us a couple quick, quick points of interest if you would,
Daniel Flynn 16:31
yeah, sure. You know, my first few, my first few books were on the American left essentially, and I in more political in scope, and just the last few years I’ve gravitated more towards, you know, just cultural issues in general. I wrote a book a few years ago called Blue Collar intellectuals. about some of my heroes, people like Ray Bradbury, and Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher, Milton Friedman, and will and Ariel Durant. Some other folks can From from very humble backgrounds, but we’re able because of those backgrounds we’ll be able to speak to a mass audience with with their intellectual message. And I wrote a book A number of years ago called an intellectual morons how ideology makes smart people fall for stupid ideas. And I looked at both right and left in that book, and just how people get wrapped up in abstract thinking, and they don’t really see reality because they’re so wrapped up in the in the abstract thinking, and there’s a lot of, you know, people like Peter Singer, in their web boys, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and a number of other thinkers that I profile in that book. And then of course, I wrote a conservative history, the American left, which is just the history of the American left from from a conservative perspective. And so the left is always writing its own history. It’s always writing the history of conservatives.
Jason Hartman 17:49
The left is revising history all the time.
Daniel Flynn 17:52
Yeah, so I thought it would be need to look at the left using the same kind of perspective that they use them to understand Anyone else? Yeah, very interesting.
Jason Hartman 18:01
Tell us about the the on the intellectual morons book, how ideology makes smart people fall for stupid ideas. seems as though when you talk to these very intelligent leftist people, especially professors at colleges, for God’s sake, they’re just so wrapped up in details, like the details, obscure the story, it’s almost like they should be looking at backing up from the painting and looking at the big picture. It seems like the left more than any other group is just very guilty of not understanding cause and effect. And the bigger picture on things they they see this one little part of it and they think, Oh, well, let’s just fix that. And usually the fix is let’s either print more fake money, let’s tax people more or creates more regulations and burdens to fix the problem, but then it creates a whole host of other problems that they never understand why.
Daniel Flynn 18:57
Yeah, I think that’s that’s an intellectual Kind of disease that you’re describing? What I what I do in the book, you know, it’s a it’s almost the opposite of what you said in a way that I think that some of these guys get so wrapped up in big picture ideology that they don’t look for the truth of the false sort of individual events. And just to give you one example of this, in the late 1970s, when Cambodia was undergoing its genocide under Pol Pot, Noam Chomsky wrote an article for the nation magazine where he described this as just a big hoax. You know, it was almost like Holocaust denial in real time. You had a million people being killed by their government over a million people. And he was saying it was just a it was thousands of thousand people at most and this is just a you know, this is just a New York Times created media hoaxes the way he described it. So he to me, he looked at the big picture thing, which was his big picture was communism, good. United States capitalism bad and he went with the side, you know, the people who are opposing the United States, rather than looking at the end. Visual details and the individual details there were just horrific. They were killing people for not wearing the right clothes. They were killing people who were wearing glasses because they were considered main. Young kids were being given guns and killing their parents. It was just probably said, Hey, man, I have a time machine. Where do you what do you want to go least on all of planet Earth for all of history? I’d probably say Cambodia in the late 1970s. But, but Noam Chomsky was denying everything that was happening. And that that’s one of among many examples that I use to sort of illustrate the point in an intellectual moron.
Jason Hartman 20:32
Yeah, very, very good point. You know, it’s interesting. I was watching a YouTube video with Noam Chomsky and Julian Assange the other day, and it was it was kind of fascinating. One of the things he said that that really interested me and I have been trying to think about this for the past few days. He claimed and I don’t know if this is true, it’s certainly his view. But he claimed that the concept of democracy and capitalism or never historically you intertwined. He said that the US created that fallacy, basically, to combat the rise of communism during the Cold War. And I thought, really, I mean, how could How could you have democracy without private property rights and capitalism? You know, that’s what the concept of freedom stems stems from property rights, in my view,
Daniel Flynn 21:25
that, you know, that was the point of one of the writers that I profiled in blue collar intellectual, Milton Friedman, who wrote in his book capitalism and freedom that the two were intertwined, you couldn’t really have freedom, if you just had economic freedom, or if you just had political freedom, at a certain point, not having the other freedom would erode on to you know, not having political freedom would erode on economic freedom or vice versa. And I think there are a lot of people out there, Chomsky included who think, well, we can get away with with confiscating people’s money and that kind of thing, all sorts of intrusions, on their economics. Freedom, but we can still maintain political freedom. I think the lesson through history is that that’s a very rare condition that they’re describing. You know, it’s something maybe that they had in some of the northern parts of Europe for a time in the late 20th century. But beyond that, it’s it’s not something you see very often, whenever you have central planning, danger ahead. I mean, that’s, that’s the bottom line. And that’s what the that’s what this Warren football book is about. It’s about giving people the freedom to do what they want. I mean, not, not every choice that we make is good for us. I happen to think playing football is healthy for you. But you know, we should be free to make choices that other people wouldn’t make. And I think part of the reason I wrote the Warren football is to educate people that they can make the decisions for their kids, whether they want them to play football or not based on facts rather than fear. And I think for too long the decisions have been done based on fear mongering or surrounding the game of football.
Jason Hartman 22:59
Yeah. Last time I checked, no one was forcing anybody to play football.
Daniel Flynn 23:03
That’s right. That’s a
Jason Hartman 23:04
good point. Dan, give out your website.
Daniel Flynn 23:07
Sure. It’s Flynn files calm. And I, you know, I blog there once a day or once every couple of days. And most of the stuff I do, I write every Friday for the American spectator, mostly on pop culture. And the big thing I have right now is the Warren football. And if anyone’s interested in the book, you can pretty much get it at any bookstore, or go to Amazon and just type in Daniel Flynn, the war on football, saving America’s game, and it’s pretty easy enough to get
Jason Hartman 23:33
Fantastic. Well, Daniel Flynn, thank you so much for joining us today.
Daniel Flynn 23:37
Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Jason Hartman 23:44
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