Superbowl Athlete: How to Grow Human Capital

[00:00:00] Alright, I am thrilled to join my friend Chris Thomas, Superbowl athlete on non consensus investing. The best investment is investment in human capital. It's investing in oneself and those around us. I've known Chris for a long time and, Chris has a life before the NFL, during the NFL, and after the NFL.

He is a Retire from football and he's got a champion mindset and he also focuses his time and effort on inculcating a high performance athletic mindset in the next generation of talent. So we're going to talk about a wide range of events, I think, starting with his experience in the Super Bowl and his formative events.

What shaped him and I think there's a lot of meaning in this for anyone that's looking to improve and level themselves up and really understand what it is for an athlete or anyone that [00:01:00] aspires to do great things, to go through that journey and what that means and what the burden of that means also.

Thank you, Chris. Chris, do you have a ring, by the way, that you can show us? I do. I'm wearing it specifically for you. So it is my Super Bowl ring from my time with the Rams. If you can see it, it's got 152 diamonds on it. Really special. It's funny because I've told the story before, but oh, you can actually see the Rams possibly right there.

My eyes are getting blinded here by the light. Yeah. You can see the Rams right there, but I've told this story before, anytime I do wear the ring, and it's not really my personality to wear the ring, I'm not that guy, except in events where I know people would be interested to see it, but more than the jewelry, it's really the journey, right?

So more than the jewelry, it's really the journey. The journey. That defines so much of why I got the ring, right? So yeah, it's a really, it's cool, but it's really, I'm most [00:02:00] proud of what I had to overcome to, to get to the point where I could achieve the ring. So let's get into that. I believe that anyone that has accomplished anything meaningful in life has had some formative experiences in their childhood.

So what was the first real challenge that you had to deal with? Was a young kid, my, my father died when I was three years old. So we grew up in a not so nice area in Southern California, just outside of LA. And my father died when I was three and I really only have three memories of him.

One being bounced on his chest or belly, one sitting on his lap and this old, I'm guessing like Ford truck that was like bluish green, pretending to drive and we're having a good time. And then the other. Where I was in bed with my brother and sister and we were giggling and we got whooped for giggling.

So I have three very different memories of my father and I will say that without knowing who my father was in great detail at [00:03:00] the time, as I grew up and I was, the product of a single mother trying to raise three kids at the age of 26 by herself with no higher education, and I have a very interesting family dynamic.

My father's, was black African American. My mother is Spanish, French and Guatemalan. Here we are with a Spanish, French and Guatemalan mother, raising three black kids. And in my household, education wasn't really promoted because that was not the Spanish culture of my family dynamic.

It was all about love and togetherness and. My mom making sure that she was present. So because of that, she didn't really get a job, that she could, be in for, from, for a nine to fiver, she wanted to make sure that when we got out of school, like she was present, she was there, we were always together, but we grew up in a neighborhood that was fairly tough and challenging, and that made us tough.

And so I credit that environment a lot. Because I learned to be very tough and thick skinned. Not an exaggeration. It wasn't uncommon that in any given week, we were, throwing blows with somebody [00:04:00] else, four times a week. It just was very standard. And so you learn to be tough and I was not a big kid.

I was a very skinny, small, frail kid, but I learned to be a very tough kid. So I say all that to say Chris, was that bullying? Was that bullying or just like neighborhood street fight? What was that about? Definitely was not bullying unless, you considered your older brother picking on you bullying.

And I didn't know that he picked on me. It was just, I probably was instigating it half the time, but he was so much bigger than me that I couldn't beat him up. And so maybe it's you just deciding to go You know, vent that or project that somewhere else. But it was always, when I was playing with other kids, you're playing with kids that are two years younger than you and six years older than you.

And there's no judicious process they use to decide who they're going to, pick who they're going to push on the concrete when you're playing two hand football. So you really have two choices, right? It was a different era. Like you defend yourself and you respond to that, or you go home crying to your mom who wasn't going to in turn go to [00:05:00] someone's house and knock on their door and say, Hey, okay.

Your little Johnny hurt my little Johnny. So I'm going to sue you. Or what do you have to say about that? It was like, mom, this kid just pushed me down on the concrete. Okay. Did you not want to play anymore? It's that was the response. Do you want to experience from a single mom and you were like moggly in the jungle book thrown in the jungle, you had your brothers who are your friends, allies, and sometimes they're beating on you.

And, you had to assert yourself and carve out your own space in this. In this challenging world. Oh, yeah. There's, and there was a level of respect you had to gain where people did not feel like you were a target enough that they would come at you every single day. So there was definitely a level of respect that you had to gain.

And I do think that now, as I look back, I do think that not having a father figure in my life until I was then 11 it definitely, that absence, I think, made me a little rambunctious, right? I needed, I think that father figure, that figure, as I [00:06:00] look back, That I think would have really tempered me a little bit and drawn some lines, right?

But it's funny because I think those of those Zoom people who have grown up without fathers, we think that we were missing something, right? If I only had a dad and if he could have been there, like my life would have been different or I could have had his influence, but then. What does that really mean?

Do you really know what the influence would have been? And as I look back on my life, as I would learn, my father was not a very good, human being in regards to his influence on my mom and on us. And I would learn things later on that I'm grateful he was not in our lives. Had he been in our lives, Chris Thomas would have turned out as a very different human being.

A different role model. 100%. And that role model would not have been a positive influence at all on my life. And truth be told, the best thing that ever happened to my life was my stepfather coming into our lives and taking us out of where we grew up and taking us to an [00:07:00] entirely different city and area and culture that started framing who I eventually would become in a very positive way.

At age 10 or 11. Let's get to that. So how do you go from, tough neighborhood and now stepfather enters a picture and then you join the NFL? How did you realize the dream? So it was funny. So we played a lot of football when I was growing up as a kid in the street and the Rams were my team.

Wearing a Super Bowl ring with the Rams is like a dream come true. Just saw it on TV and I was captivated by that game. I was like, I wanna play that. And I want to be Eric Dickerson, right? Who was the running back for the Rams. He's in the Hall of Fame now. And that guy was like the dream player for me.

And I'm like, when I can finally play football, I want to be Eric Dickerson. And I couldn't play football until I was a freshman in high school. My mom would not allow it. I just knew that I was going to be the next ED as we called him, right? And what I didn't really consider is that Eric Dickerson was 6'3 235.

And my first time playing football, I was [00:08:00] 5'5 a buck 18, right? And I got pads that were supposed to go just under my chest plate, and they're going down to my rib cage, or the bottom of my rib cage, the top of my stomach, and my thigh pads were not just thigh pads, they were like thigh and knee pads I could hardly hold my pants up.

It was like, if you thought about a belt and you go into the very last notch on the belt that's where I was. And I didn't know how to play the game. I really didn't know how to play it in a structured environment where there were rules and positions and responsibilities. I just, I was playing on grass and beaten up by the other kids on the field, with what I could do, but this was different.

And I was not good, right? I was a third string running back and I ended up starting on defense, but about halfway through that season when I was a freshman I was asked to go back and catch this punt, right? And I'd never done that before in a game. And if you've never attempted to catch a punt, I swear it's like you have vertigo, right?

Like you're looking up and the ball's going like this and you're trying to stay with it. And so it was very new to me and I attempted to catch it. The ball went through my arms. [00:09:00] Threw my legs, but touched my leg. And as I attempted to go jump on the ball, 'cause obviously that's a fumble, the second it touches your leg or any part of your body.

The other team recovered it, unlike our four yard line. So as I come off the sideline, the assistant head coach does not think that I'm trying hard enough to catch the ball. And so it sees to it that I'm benched for the entire rest of the season. From one accident, your first time on the field. Yes. You learned the wrong lesson from that coach.

I did, right? And this is, it's funny you say that because two things happen in today's day and age with a coach like that. One, athletes quit because they see the hill as being too high. Hide a climb to figure out how to be really good in this game and get what they want. So the obstacle seems too large.

And so the easy path of resistance is to just retreat and go do something else. But you lose so much in doing that for so many reasons. But, that's the first thing too. It sends the wrong message. What it tells you is that you're incapable of making a mistake. And if you [00:10:00] make a mistake there's severe consequences to that.

And so I guess, fortunately For me, I was too naive. And I was too hungry to play the game that I ignored that. I came back for year two as a sophomore in high school. And I was now like five, 10, a buck 40. So by no means am I the rock but I'm bigger. And so I look more the part and I'm not playing varsity.

I'm on JV and I was, it was an inconsequential year. I was fine. I was a fine player on JV. I played strong safety. It was fine. Fast forward to my junior year. I'm now, six foot a buck, 60. We have all these seniors on our varsity team, and so it's even hard to break into the starting lineup, but I did, as a free safety on defense.

And I was one of three juniors starting on an all senior team. Our team was really good. Had one of the better defenses in the state of California. And I was just a piece of that. I by no means was like the face of our defense. I was just a piece of that. And very not intimidating. Again, I wasn't, hadn't lifted a weight at that time.

I was just showing up and playing football and was pretty good at it [00:11:00] by that time. And so after that year, we have a very successful season. Again, defense is one of the best in the state. And this is when all the attention starts. So I literally started getting letters from everybody across the country.

And by that time I'd established that Miami was my dream school, by the way. And that was a one school. And I'm saying, Hey, look, come to our school. Yeah, it was different. Recruiting was different then, right? Typically speaking, you would get letters that were all generic, right? That a lot of kids got across the country, but then you'd get the handwritten ones, and those are the ones that meant something.

‍