Making a Phenom – Tech

To wrap up our “Making a Phenom’ mini-series, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice explore the ethics of technology in sports with author Rayvon Fouché, PhD, and bioethicist Arthur Caplan, PhD.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition. This is the fourth and final installment of The Making of a Phenom. And today, we're going to focus on the ethics and the technology that involve what's going on behind those who achieve and those who don't. Of course, I have my co-hosts. Who are they? Chuck Nice, Chuck.

• 0:39Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil, what's happening buddy?

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always good. Always good. Stand-up comedian, great to have you. When you're not on stage, you're with us. So, thank you for...

• 0:47Chuck Nice?

  Which means I'm going to be with you for some time because I'm not getting back on stage anytime soon.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Gary O'Reilly, former soccer pro and soccer commentator. Gary? Hey Neil, hi Chuck. Except you're Brit, so you call it football. Football, yes. Football. And it's round. It is round. It's rounder than our football. And so, you know what we're going to have today? We're bringing in someone who's an expert in thinking about the role of technology in the human performance of sports. Very important topic. And who is it? It's a guy named Rayvon. Rayvon? Do we call you Ray? Is that...

• 1:30Chuck Nice?

  Please call me Ray.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ray, I'll call you Ray. So, your full name, Professor Rayvon Fouchet. And...

• 1:39Chuck Nice?

  They're fancy. You have to be a professor with a name like that.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess so, I guess so.

• 1:44Chuck Nice?

  You can't be working at Subway just like Rayvon Fouchet, your sandwich maker. I am Rayvon Fouchet, master sandwich maker. No, no. You've got to be a professor.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's your hot dog. Here's your hot dog.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would anyone be surprised if the professor just left now?

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What did he sign up for? So, he's director and professor of American Studies at Purdue University. I think that's West Lafayette, Indiana.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  That is correct.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and author of The Game Changer, a recent book. The Techno Scientific Revolution in Sports. Came out in 2017. He's the guy for this segment in this episode. So, so Ray, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  It's great to be here.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, excellent. So let me just ask you. Who should we be crediting for the breaking of world records today? Is it the commitment of the athlete? Or the scientists and engineers who are empowering them to do so? I don't want to vote either way, even though I am a scientist.

• 2:56Chuck Nice?

  Just the way you phrased the question. We saw your bias and your vote. No, that was the most leading question ever coming from a scientist.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me, professor, but who should take credit? Should it be lowly athletes who, you know, just happen to be there? Or the scientists who empower them?

• 3:18Gary O'Reilly?

  This is, this is like an Agatha Christie. You've got, you've got someone in the library with a smoking gun. And Poirot says, was it you that shot her, sir?

• 3:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, sorry, sorry, professor.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. Clearly, Neil, you have your, your, your feeling about the subject. And I would say, depending on where you are, it's a little of both potentially. Meaning that, right, at elite level athletics, the differences between great athletics, athletes and their bodies is getting smaller and smaller. So if you're an athlete and you're trying to figure out how to beat your competitors, you are looking for every possible way to get better. And oftentimes, in the last 50 years or so, it has been science, technology, nutrition,

• 4:11Speaker 02

  other different ways of gaining competitive advantage. So, in the bigger scheme of things, if we understand that the differences between the athletic bodies are getting smaller and smaller. And you see larger differences in winning and losing. Maybe it's the scientists that are, and engineers and designers are helping out. So for me, I'm interested in asking the question, right? Is sports becoming less of a, of a competition between athletes? Or is it becoming a competition between engineers, designers, and scientists? And the athletes are actually instrumental in that activity?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  So at a certain level, yes, but the athletes still do run, jump, play, and compete. So I'm hedging on my answer to that question a bit and saying, yes, scientists are helping athletes get better, but athletes are still competing. So it's this strange, messy merger of the two.

• 5:16Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, excuse me, I've done way too much thinking on this subject. If I don't give my two co-hosts a chance to speak, too bad. Um, I'll say.

• 5:26Chuck Nice?

  Love you too, Neil.

• 5:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, so it seems to me, all that matters, if you want to see athletic performance, is that there's a level playing field. And the level playing field simply means if you're gonna wear this shark skin new swimming suit, then everyone wears it. And that way, you're still competing body against body. I think NASCAR figured that out, alright? Every car is to a spec. And so therefore, it's driver against driver. And if you have a new technology, you'd give it to everybody. Maybe it might take a couple of years to break it in, but then everybody's competing, so you can still honor the commitment and the, the athletic prowess of the individual athletes. Isn't that all we need here?

• 6:09Speaker 02

  I, I love the idea of a level playing field. I love the idea that everyone follows the rules. But right, in sport, there are the written rules that are in the books that the governing bodies control, and they're the rules that everyone plays by.

• 6:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Uh, choose your sport. Say basketball, what's a foul these days? NFL, what's a catch? Or say football soccer, what's, you know, pulling a jersey?

• 6:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, just, just, I gotta, in my day, in the, in the schoolyard.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The rule was no blood, no foul.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 6:41Chuck Nice?

  Oh, what did you guys, play basketball with knives? That was wrong. What do you mean, no blood, no? I did not shoot you. That's not a foul. That's how it was. That's a tough yard.

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was in the playground. Yeah, but go on. Sorry, Ray.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  So, no, but I mean, I think the point is that everyone bends the rules. Even if you level the playing field and everyone feels that they have the same equipment, everyone's gonna try to get an angle. Because my, my feeling is that sport is not about fairness. It's not about equality. It's maintaining, sustaining the largest competitive van as you can. That's why you have mismatches. That's why you have inequities. That's why you want a bigger player against a smaller player. That's why well-funded Formula One teams do better than poorly-funded Formula One teams.

• 7:28Chuck Nice?

  And they call that the competitive edge. And that's what everybody is looking to have. Just because at some elite level of play, there, there, there, the playing field that is not level is kind of indistinguishable to us, mere mortals. You know, but to the guy at the elite level, that tiny little edge is the difference between a world record and not. Or the difference between a gold medal and just placing fourth. You know, when you, when you look at that, so maybe what you're, maybe what it's about is that

• 8:07Chuck Nice?

  that little tiny little bit of edge is for us tiny, but for them, it's gigantic.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  It is, and arguably the technology that's available today, and I would say in the last considerably 30, 40 years, has really allowed people to gain that one or two or three percent. And those percentages add up to big differences in winning and losing.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just want to make it clear. If you're gonna say that if there's a great new science, technology advantage and everyone has it. There's still people, like you said, sports is not about being fair, it's about winning. Not to put exactly those words in your mouth, but I think that's what you meant. That I will win based on some other thing that I ingeniously come up with. So that means I'm admitting to myself that I didn't beat them physiologically. I had performed some trick that no one knows about yet, and in that way I win. So that poses for me an ethical issue.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  So these fast skin swimsuits, which were designed to allow people to swim through the water really quickly. Basically, you're encasing the bodies in these packages that allow them to be very hydrodramically efficient. However, your body doesn't change, right? So my body is less quick through the water because I've got a big butt.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Choose any swimmer and a butt is not efficient.

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Ray, I don't remember that in my hydrodynamic equations.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  I know, you probably didn't notice that.

• 9:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The butt turbulent term.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Butt turbulence is not very good.

• 9:50Chuck Nice?

  Well, you missed that. That's the part of the course that was taught by Sir Mix-a-Lot.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  So even if you have access to these technologies, they don't apply to everyone equally, right? Similarly, you know, we talked about athletic shoes. I'm intrigued by athletic shoes because no one has ever really seen athletic shoes to be that big of a game changer in the context of sport, but they're huge, right? If running barefoot was more efficient, everyone would run barefoot. But depending on how I run, my gait, my body, that dictates how efficiently the shoe works for me. That's why you have particularly elite level athletes like Elliot Kipchoge.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  He has a custom pair of shoes. He's not running shoes off the rack. Everyone has these custom pieces. And so I think this is where it gets to the messy part is that what does it mean for everyone to get access to the same equipment, the same technology, the same devices? If you can customize yours to fit your body a little better, that gives you that much of an advantage over your competitors.

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, you gotta ask a question, because otherwise I'm all over your face.

• 11:06Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, no, that's, that's fine. I mean, so we're talking about using intelligence, how you do certain things. But what if we upgraded our own intelligence, professor, and went, "I'll use AI to solve the problems that I might encounter." How do we bring that in? How is it being used right now? Because this is the sort of frontier for me of technology in sport.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think this is where it's getting to, for me, the, the strange place. Uh, so, in all sporting competitions, information is key. Knowing what other teams are going to do, ability to process information quickly or efficiently as possible. So when we're talking about the use of AI and, you know, pushing to the level of having information directly processing through one's cortex, it allows us to really change the way in which games are played. The idea of having more information processing through your, through your brain is, is really potent. I don't know what it looks like to have a

• 12:09Speaker 02

  world where artificial intelligence is now being deployed as a, as additional actor or competitor in the sporting field. I, I don't want to know what that looks like. And I'm, I'm troubled by the idea of people using more technology. I, you know, I love technology. I love the way it changes the games. But when we start asking ourselves to have new forms of computing to make assumptions and make decisions about games, um, that's really a struggle, that's a problem for me. Because a part of what I love about sports is that you can use all kinds of technology, but the randomness of humanity is great. Because

• 12:52Speaker 02

  people make mistakes all the time. You know, watching the Premier League this weekend, uh, the number of bad passes that are made that gave up goals. Ideally, that shouldn't happen, right? And the players at that level should not make that mistake, but they do. Uh, and that's part of what I love about sport, is that as much as you import technology and make people technologically driven by these devices, people still have to make the choices mentally, cognitively, and they mess up.

• 13:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Do the commissioner of the NFL get ahead of the game here and say, "AI cannot replace the head coach." So as we've got this human element at the forefront. Cause otherwise, I'm the owner of XX franchise and I say, head coach, goodbye. Meet my new dude. He comes in a box. I just plug him in and he wins games for me.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the difference between that Gary and AI in the earpiece of the coach?

• 13:50Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 13:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no, there's no difference.

• 13:52Gary O'Reilly?

  I don't see it. I'm not paying, I'm not paying the coach. I just saved myself a lot of money.

• 14:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I forgot about that.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  I think, I think part of what, where I see that kind of information coming into play is

• 14:09Speaker 02

  assisting coaches and making great decisions. Uh, so right, there's a whole system of coaches that are saying, well, you are my chess pieces and you will do my bidding and I'll move you around the floor or the field or the field of play. And you do what I want you to do. But there are other coaches that are saying, well, let me understand who you are as a human being, how you play, when you're stressed, when you're motivated and when you are at the highest level of confidence. And that allows people to do really amazing things. So how can you use that information to bring the best out of players? I think that's the, the next level of.

• 14:46Chuck Nice?

  Well, now you, you've actually in intrigued me going back to Gary's point. Let's say for instance, um, you have an AI. And a lot of AI, because a lot of human intelligence is pattern recognition. It's being able to see things that we know, oh, because we see this, oh, we know this. You know, there's a lot of association and pattern recognition in human intelligence. And it's merely mimicking that. So let's say for instance, everything that you just said, we have the AI. I have a, some type of biometer inside of the player.

• 15:26Chuck Nice?

  Whether it's a chip or whether it's a finger prick that, you know, and I'm able to judge his level of stress. I'm able to judge how tired he is. I'm able, based upon hormonal releases or brain chemical release, his mood even. And then that coupled with all of the information that I've been able to store in from the week about how much he practiced, how well he performed.

• 15:59Chuck Nice?

  How much he should play in the real big game and all of these things I could actually move around as chess pieces in real time where a human being could never do that.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  True, true. But I think the question for me is that you believe that will give you a better outcome, but it may not.

• 16:20Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Because at the end of the day, athletes do amazing things. I think of the case of Bob Beaman when he in 68 when he jumps nearly two feet longer than anyone had jumped before in the long jump, one of the longest held world records. He never jumped close to that again. I don't know what happened to Bob Beaman that day where it all came together in amazing way. And I think this happens to athletes all the time. And I think arguably we just don't know enough about the human body to understand fully how to extract the highest level of performance from it.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think the point is, Ray, that proper AI will figure it out in ways that we can't. That's the whole, that's the whole point. So I think it's a given that AI will be able to figure stuff out that we think is somehow mysterious and intractable. And then it invokes it and then Bob Beaman jumps 29 feet, four inches every single time.

• 17:15Chuck Nice?

  Damn.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  So, but I mean, I think this is a question. It's like, how many, how many data points do we need to get close enough to understanding how to produce that kind of?

• 17:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, AI figures it out. It's not our problem.

• 17:28Chuck Nice?

  That's convenient.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  We're just outsourcing to AI.

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me just ask another important question here. My homework on you tells me that you were a big into bicycle racing. So from that sport, I have fragmented memory and understanding. Let me just retell it and you correct it and then give me the answer to this. The derailleur had to be invented. And previously you had to like switch tires to change the gear ratio if you're going up or down a hill in the Tour de France. So the derailleur gets invented. You don't have to switch tires. Therefore, there's no pit stop. And now you're just way ahead of everybody else. So you first outlaw it and then you realize, hey, this is a good idea. Everybody has it. So at what point are the rules?

• 18:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just too slow relative to the technology? And should they have an immediate acceptance of something that's brand new?

• 18:28Speaker 02

  That's, you know, I think the rules are always very slow. So the, the case in cycling, right? The bicycle wheel had, you had a cog on the left side and the cog on the right side.

• 18:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, and then you flipped the wheel, oh.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  You flipped the wheel upside down to use a different cog. So then you get derailer. And you certainly, all of a sudden, you can move from a two-speed to maybe a three-speed, four-speed, five-speed, then you have a front derailer, then you have a ten-speed. But the question is, oftentimes, the sport governing bodies who control what technology is and is not permissible, they are not in the business of selling technology. They're in the business of selling sport and human narratives. So the idea for them, I would say, if I'm the commissioner of an organization, I want my narrative to be about the athletes, the competition, rather than this new, hot new technology that's changing the game.

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you know it'll eventually get accepted, why not just say, do anything you want to win? And watch people get invented about how to win? That, that becomes an entire other interesting sort of sideshow to what's going on, which would be, in the future, perhaps just a regular part of the sports we watch.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I think part of people, sport is about human narrative.

• 19:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not giving up the derailer. You know this. So tell me it's about human narrative, it's about the technology. You wrote the damn book on this subject. Tell me this.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  But I think the point is that people want to see the athlete win. They don't care about the technology that won.

• 19:59Chuck Nice?

  Ah, now that is a very good point, because from a human standpoint, the, the lure of sport is, is the human-to-human competition. It's the, the besting of someone.

• 20:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Chuck, you're right, because otherwise just change the channel and go to Battlebox.

• 20:17Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly.

• 20:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you watch people with, with joysticks trying to defeat each other's robots. Yeah, okay, I'm with you.

• 20:24Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so here, here we go. We've talked about how we improve performance. We've talked about how we get a better result and how Bob Beaman does what Bob Beaman did. What if I can extend my curve as a phenom? What if I have not five years, but 10 years as a phenom, right? I don't have to have the same body I started with. What if I elect to have surgery, not on damaged tissue, bone, ligament, but replacement? What if I replace a kneecap, make it ceramic, make it more durable, make it stronger? Therefore, I run faster, I hit harder, I plays better?

• 21:00Chuck Nice?

  We can make him faster. We can make him stronger.

• 21:03Gary O'Reilly?

  There you go.

• 21:04Chuck Nice?

  We can rebuild him. We can rebuild him.

• 21:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Professor, am I talking about a future? Or am I talking about what's happening now?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  I would like to say we're talking about a future. But clearly, folks are able to manipulate their body. And I'll talk, this is the larger category of doping, right? You can have pharmaceutical doping, you can have mechanical doping. There are different ways in which you can change and augment your body. And I think, for instance, the existing technology is allowing us to do that. So we have all these technologies that we wear, we attach to our bodies that allow us to do better. But the gray space for me is this internal place. You're talking about, you know, new knees, new hips, new ankles, new feet. These are technologies, these are augmentations that people can't see.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  So the stuff people can see easily are the things that cause most problems. But I don't know, we have the capability of, you know, having ceramic hips. Super quick and smooth moving device that can be put in your body. And this is kind of a question about, say, Tommy John surgery, right? You throw out your elbow, you get a repair. And some athletes were able to throw better than before, others not so.

• 22:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought the Tommy John was the shoulder.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  It's the elbow.

• 22:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The elbow, oh, okay.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's ligaments in your elbow. Young people are, the Tommy John surgery is moving down to high schoolers. And the question is, if you can repair your body efficiently and quickly, do you think about your body differently? Can you just destroy it and beat it up and then just go have it surgically repaired? And I mean, it's your question about-

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Surgically enhanced.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  True. So this is the question, is what does it mean to be enhanced or repaired? So if you damage your body, I would say being repaired is potentially a form of enhancement.

• 23:05Chuck Nice?

  But isn't that, doesn't that happen naturally?

• 23:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean- Chuck, we gotta actually bring this, we gotta bring this to a close. That's a very good point, Chuck. Maybe we can save that for the shoot the shit part?

• 23:13Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 23:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, let's do that, because we want to get into that. Our next segment is going to be about, about the ethics of any of this. Ray, can you hang on until the third segment? We want to get our ethics discussion going, but then I want to come back and, and just bring you in on some more conversation.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Definitely, love to.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, we're going to bring in the ethicist, Arthur Kaplan, to find out where ethics in sports has landed today, given all the forces that operate on improving your performance. So, stay tuned.

• 24:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk, segment two. We now change direction a little bit and talk about bioethics. But it's not changing directions entirely because there's the ethics of technology. And how does that work? So we found ourselves a bioethicist. They exist, they're out there.

• 24:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got Arthur Kaplan, who's actually been on StarTalk before. He's professor of bioethics and founder of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University, and author and editor of more than 35 books, including 2016, The Ethics of Sport. You are the guy for this segment. So, Arthur, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 24:54Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me back.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. We just came off a segment with Ray Fouchet, who's an expert on technology in sport. And we're just wondering, if you start replacing body parts with a mechanical versions of what they once were, no one thinks twice about doing that if it's just so you can function, right? So you give you sort of biomechanical legs if you lost your legs. That's fine. But if you now compete in sports and perform better and start setting world records, is there an ethical dimension to that that should be front and center in this conversation?

• 25:38Speaker 05

  Well, there is. And it comes out in three ways. There are plenty of parts that we could replace. There is pretty close to a total artificial heart. People know, have heard of LVADs, left ventricular assist devices. They'd probably replace half the heart, the pumping function. You could imagine pretty soon us having a fully artificial heart that would be hyper efficient or pumping a greater

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or pacemaker, where you can dial in sport mode.

• 26:06Speaker 05

  Yep, exactly. We've also got the possibility of artificial ligaments. You know, people do Tommy John surgery now just to sometimes pitch a little better. Maybe they didn't even tear a ligament, but you could put in an artificial one that's even stronger and get more movement on the ball, let's say. There's obviously Lasix. A lot of people have that to improve their vision. But you can make your vision better than 2020. There are people who've done it. I think Tiger Woods maybe went to 2010 with his Lasix. So Not only could you do it, some people do do it. So anyway, what's the problem here? First problem is, most people want to watch sports because they want to see what

• 26:51Speaker 05

  human beings can do with training, with effort. If you start doing pharmacology and technology, you're moving to what I'm going to call an exhibition. It's not a competition, it's who's got the best engineer, who's got the best biomaterials, if you will, who's got the best pharmacist? And you might enjoy sports that way, but I think it undercuts the reason we like sports. We don't really want to see who can jump the highest on artificial spring legs, right? I mean, we might want to see that as an exhibition, or it's like Evel Knievel jumping over a canyon or something. It's interesting, but it's not sports in the same way.

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if I'm born without a limb?

• 27:33Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 27:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I have a replacement limb, and that's, that's my limb, as far as I'm concerned, because I've never had one of your limbs, are you going to deny me access to a sport?

• 27:43Speaker 05

  I might, because I'd-

• 27:44Chuck Nice?

  Wow, tough toes, man. Damn. Tough toes with you, buddy.

• 27:49Speaker 05

  We looked at this with Oscar Pistorius. He has the-

• 27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The blades.

• 27:55Speaker 05

  ... limb, and the problem is, you want to see if it gives you too much of an advantage. If you're competing, and it would turn out to be true for his artificial leg, I don't know if you guys ever looked at this, on a straightaway, those legs really helped him. On curves, they penalized him. So they weren't ideal for, you know, improving your performance to the max. But if you had jet-powered artificial legs, I think, again, people would say, it's an exhibition. I'm not seeing a competition. And the point of sports is competition. Now, here's a question. Could you have the artificial leg race among people who were engineered? And I'm going to say to that, yeah, maybe you could. You might see that someday. People

• 28:39Speaker 05

  might say, you know, we have, even now, there are competitions in weight, in bodybuilding, steroid ones, non-steroid ones, and people go to the steroid ones and are- Sort of freaked out about how huge people can get. Um, so you might see an all artificially engineered competition. But the key is in what I'm saying here, Neil, is competition. You get too far away from equality among the athletes. Of a sudden, you're just putting on an exhibition.

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In in my college, there is a track that was designed by engineers to to be the ideal balance between springiness and firmness. And they it was it was a laboratory experiment that they did. They had people running on pillows and they did stroboscopic photographs of that and checked the energy transfer. They had people running on cement and they checked that and they found the exact combination of both that would maximize this. When people started running on it, everyone was breaking their personal records. And the NCAA said, we cannot trust any records on that track. When it's the same person, it's just we're not I'm not losing as much of the energy I

• 29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  put into my step for every step I take. So what do you do if there's a technology that improves everybody, but it's over here and not over there?

• 30:02Speaker 05

  Well, two things to say about that. One is if everybody can access it, it doesn't bother me so much to start to see some bioengineering take place. Here's the sports that have done what you're talking about, Neil. Tennis went from wooden rackets to composite. Absolutely improved performance. Pole vaulting, I think they used to jump on bamboo. I mean,

• 30:28Speaker 05

  even sports like bobsled and luge, you know, they're engineering experiments. They're not really something that an athlete is doing too much to contribute. You I I learned years ago, I had a discussion once, get this, with an owner of a bowling alley, one of my big audiences in the world. And he said to me, the fight is how well we wax the lanes. If we do them so that the ball always goes in and makes a strike, any idiot can bowl over 250. But the pros hate it because it makes it too easy to be good. So point, if you're, again, trying to achieve something in sports and you buy it, engineer it so that any

• 31:12Speaker 05

  Art Kaplan can go out and, you know, raid with, uh, running around the track. I think people say you've undermined point two. I'll tell you the point two this way. Charles Barkley once said, back in, when he was in the dream team, they played Angola. He said, we showed up to win, Angola showed up to get a meal.

• 31:35Speaker 05

  Nutritionists, they didn't have any sports scientists. They weren't doing, uh, film of the athletes to see, you know. And we felt, and I think he was right, if the technology is available to all, introduce it. It doesn't undermine the competition. If it's only available to some, that's trouble.

• 31:53Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, Professor, and because you can't take the money out of the sport right now, and it flows like water from a faucet, bidata is everywhere. Weekend warriors have it, every elite athlete has it, but ethically, I might go on as a free agent and get, and sign myself to another franchise, but I might have a secret injury. Now, which side of the coin does this land on? The protection of the data of the athlete or the fact that the owner is about to drop $15 million on him and might find that money just flushed down the toilet?

• 32:30Speaker 05

  Well, it's a good question, and I'm disappointed to have to tell you that the NFL Players Association, I think unthinkingly signed away their rights. Instead, the team can monitor me. They can put a Fitbit type thing on me and know when I'm sleeping and where I'm going and if I'm drinking. And I wouldn't have agreed to that at all. If they'd asked me, I would have said, your right is to keep your personal health data private. A boss can't make you give it up. Shouldn't be able to give it up as a condition of work. They signed it away. So what you're talking about is already happening. They know, hey, you didn't sleep too well last night, and in fact, you weren't even in that bed. Where were you? That kind of thing.

• 33:12Speaker 05

  And, uh, you know, as the Fitbits get better and the monitoring gets better, you start to see people saying, here's what you ate, here's what you excreted, here's, uh, the kinds of infectious diseases that you might be bearing in the era of COVID and so on. You don't give those rights up.

• 33:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But basically, they now own you. They own you.

• 33:31Speaker 05

  They own you and they can...

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a high-paid slave, yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 05

  And worse...

• 33:37Speaker 05

  You know, you can say, "Look, I can perform well." "The question isn't whether I went out last night and got drunk." "The question is, how did I do in the performance?" "Don't start penalizing me because you don't like what I do in the off-hours." "By the way, businesses across the board are going to be interested in this." "Forget sports."

• 33:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:54Speaker 05

  "Soon, you know, somebody's going to say, 'Hey, Neil, you know, uh, you looked a little drowsy on that podcast.'"

• 34:00Chuck Nice?

  It was Benadryl. It was Benadryl. That's all it was, Benadryl, I'm telling you. I've got allergies.

• 34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's "Don't operate heavy machinery or conduct a podcast." Add that to the warning.

• 34:12Speaker 05

  Be careful, don't give up our rights just because the boss, or the government, or some third-party says, "I want to look." I wouldn't be giving that away. I think that...

• 34:21Chuck Nice?

  But isn't that, isn't that just one of the inherent pitfalls of technology? As, as nascent technologies become, uh, you know, more readily available, people don't understand the consequences associated with using those technologies. For instance, away from sports altogether, all this social media now, people have lost their jobs, uh, they do things on social media, and, uh, they go to a job interview, and the employer has pulled up their profile, and is judging who they are based on the profile. But the fact is that you put that out there for public consumption,

• 35:02Chuck Nice?

  and therefore, you know, you have to live with the consequences of what that perception might be.

• 35:08Speaker 05

  So, Chuck, my med students, who are, you know, about 700 years younger than I am, if I ask them, "What do you think about privacy?", they laugh at me.

• 35:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 35:19Speaker 05

  They say, "It's gone. Uber knows where I am, Facebook knows what I do." "I also put up a lot of pictures I regret when I was in high school." Uh, there are so many leaks and so many hackers coming in to look at my data. I don't have privacy. So I think that is a huge challenge for sports coming down the road, is protecting that information. But the presumption that you're going to be able to presume it's private is false. What you're going to have to do is build in penalties if somebody uses it without your permission. You can't rely on... I don't know if you all have ever read any of those little tiny type releases. But if you do. No.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  You should, but it probably wouldn't stop you anyway, but you know what? We're gonna take all this data and do what the hell we want with it.

• 36:08Chuck Nice?

  That's really what, and honestly, that's what every one of those releases says. As a matter of fact, I had the computer read me the release. And then I recorded it. And it's like 10 minutes long.

• 36:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have a two point question here, one just regular ethics and then bioethics. Regular ethics is. Let's say there are rules and you have to abide by the rules, but you find a loophole. That no one knows about. And so, for example, I read about this, that was it NASCAR or one of the car racing. Contest. Uh, there's a rule for how big your gas tank is, so you can do that. But there's no rule about how long the hose is from your gas tank to the carburetor. And if you make that hose long, then even if your tank runs out of gas, you can go farther than anybody else for having done so. There's no law against that, so it's not illegal, but it's surely unethical. Because you're circumventing a rule that's trying to keep things equal.

• 37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where do you go in that scenario?

• 37:10Speaker 05

  So if you're smart enough to figure out an advantage where there's no rules and no explicit prohibition, I'm okay.

• 37:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even even if the principle of what you did violates the rule itself.

• 37:23Speaker 05

  And I'll tell you why, because part of sports is to be clever. You know, you can see it in things like baseball, people steal signals. I don't want to invoke the Houston Astros here for inside. Insider baseball knowledge, but you know, they, there are plenty of teams, Bill Belichick is always running around in football filming. The other guy somehow. Technically wrong, there's no prohibition explicit, well, there wasn't until recently till they finally caught it.

• 37:49Chuck Nice?

  Until, right.

• 37:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He made the rule, they made the rule, right.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  There's a part of me that says part of sports is getting an advantage. If you figure it out, then they'll legislate you out if they don't like it, but you can try and push the envelope that way. That doesn't bother me as much.

• 38:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but you're, but you're not just pushing envelope, you're violating the spirit of a rule.

• 38:11Speaker 05

  But spirits are ephemeral and hard rules matter.

• 38:16Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so with that in mind, I'm interested to hear, and I know you've said this before, but okay, so my edge is performance enhancing. I found a way to take this little thing or to shoot myself in the butt and now I'm better. And I'm not, I still have to do all the work, okay? I gotta do all the work, I still gotta practice, I'm just recovering faster. Why isn't that an edge?

• 38:46Speaker 05

  So there, first of all, you are breaking rules. They're explicit, you're not supposed to do it. Second of all, when you do it, you're gonna hurt yourself. Most of those rules are in there not because we don't, we are against improvement. No one banned better nutrition, right?

• 39:02Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 39:02Speaker 05

  Or improves performance. But when it's risky and dangerous, and steroids are, we see them even in the hospital, people whose liver fails and, you know, all kinds of complications, even shorten life because of abuse.

• 39:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, Arthur, Arthur, you're, that's a technicality, because suppose there were steroids that didn't shorten your life and that didn't harm your, harm your life. Then what? You're invoking that because that's easy, but, but in a philosophical world, remove that, imagine such a chemical, now what?

• 39:32Speaker 05

  I think you just imagined coffee.

• 39:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 39:36Speaker 05

  All the time and getting ready for sports and.

• 39:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I imagine coffee, a good night's sleep and a cup of coffee.

• 39:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, there you go.

• 39:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I just described, okay, you're right.

• 39:45Speaker 05

  People do it and we don't yell at them. But the risk here it is, I wouldn't say it's irrelevant, it's just that risk matters. And the other factor that comes into performance enhancement is one that I mentioned earlier. Is it really available to all? Can anybody really get it or is it just an elite, rich athlete who can do the administration of the drug? Conversely, if we're all gonna tolerate it, that means everybody's gotta do it to compete. It's a, almost a forced requirement that you can't do this unless you take this. I've heard baseball players say, now I had to take amphetamines, it's a pretty boring game. Once a few of them started to do it and got more alert, it swept through baseball like crazy.

• 40:29Speaker 05

  We all saw it in the homerun contests in Major League Baseball with Sosa, Maguire, everybody had to dope up. The records also become artificial, so Neil, here's something else to think about. Some sports, they don't care about your continuity of performance with the past, right? It just doesn't matter. The football basically doesn't run around too much with statistics. Golf and baseball are rooted in their history. You're always trying to compare Babe Ruth to Ted Williams to Willie Mays, to Mike Trout, to whoever. If the performance enhancement comes through, it takes some of the spirit of the sport.

• 41:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spirit and culture, and culture of the sport, that's right.

• 41:09Speaker 05

  Because, you know, they like to compare, and so that matters to baseball.

• 41:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very interesting point.

• 41:15Speaker 05

  It's purity. We like to believe in the purity of our sports. I don't want to say we're not collusional about that. There's a lot of pankey, pankey, but the general idea is, I can look and see who the best pitcher of all time is because I know that they're roughly with the same ball, the same mound, and kind of the same stadium.

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the ball's not juiced, if you have, you know.

• 41:40Speaker 05

  What do you think used to get mad?

• 41:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got to bring this segment to a close, but let me just ask one, a quick question here.

• 41:48Speaker 05

  I gotta go get some stimulants, but yeah.

• 41:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This will be quick, and I don't know if it has a short answer, but I just got to get it out there. If we have sufficient control of the genome so that I can pre-program an unborn child to have certain athletic capacity that they then later exploit and then become the best in the world, is there something ethically disturbing about that? Because not everyone has access to it, but the person is born, they didn't control it, that's just who they are. You're going to penalize them when they had no control over it? Where's the future of bioethics with regard to manipulating the human genome with regard to sports?

• 42:29Speaker 05

  Future's good for my students in arguing about that one. It's not going to happen tomorrow, but it is going to be an issue absolutely that's going to get faced. So here's how I think about it. If you do a genetic engineering change that gives the child more abilities, more capacities, but they can choose not to use them, I find that much more acceptable than if you say, "You're going to be a halfback and I engineered you to do that and that is what you are."

• 42:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Takes away your free will. Interesting.

• 42:57Speaker 05

  Takes away your free will, takes away your choice. Yeah, but that's hot housing.

• 43:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, the hot housing, yeah, yeah, hot housing athlete.

• 43:04Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 43:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very interesting description of that. Very, that was as succinct an answer as, as I could have ever imagined for, for, I thought, but I thought it was actually a deep question, "Well, you got a half hour?" No, but you did it in 30 seconds. It was like, "The answer is four." Okay. Forty-two is the answer. Exactly, forty-two. Arthur, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 43:23Speaker 05

  Hey, thank you for having me.

• 43:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Highly illuminating. Uh, you're part of our Making a Phenom, uh, sub-series of StarTalk Sports Edition. So we got to end that segment there, but when we return, Ray Fouchet comes back to help Chuck and me and Gary just shoot the shit on this highly illuminating subject of the bioethics and technology of sports performance. We'll be right back.

• 43:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we're back, StarTalk, and I've got Rayvon Fouchet, Rayvon Fouchet, who's, uh, we brought him back from the first segment just to, just to talk about this whole world of technology and human performance. And let me lead off, just, um, at what point?

• 44:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you say this is a boundary we'll never cross? Here's an example. The, the, the people who have lost their legs or from the legs from the knee down and they have those blades that they run on. Okay, I don't think records have been set on those, but you're running much faster than anyone would have imagined 50 years ago. If they said, let's just make a blade instead of reconstructing the human anatomical foot. Suppose I do have something I can put you on. If we surgically remove your legs from the knee down, you can run faster than, than Usain Bolt in a sprint. What would that mean? That's technology now, but you're sacrificing body parts to do it.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think ethically it's deeply messed up. However.

• 45:17Chuck Nice?

  However.

• 45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is so ethically against everything I stand for, but.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  However, the desire to win in athletic competitions is really powerful.

• 45:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Uh, so I teach courses on technology and sport and I ask folks in my classes. Would you watch if people went to that logical extreme? And I have students in their twenties who would go, ah, I find that messy, but wow, yeah, I would totally check that out.

• 45:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  So.

• 45:54Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's, it's weird. There, um, what's his name? Oh my God, played for San Francisco 40, Ronnie Lott.

• 46:03Chuck Nice?

  Ronnie Lott fractured a finger so bad in so many places during a game. And he, they, they wanted to win this game so badly. I, I don't know if it was a playoff game, I think it was, and he had them cut the finger.

• 46:19Chuck Nice?

  I'm, I, I, now that might just be folklore. Cause you know, NFL players love to talk about how, how injured they were, you know, it's, they love that, you know? I, I had the guy amputate my foot, we sewed it back on after the game. You know, but I'm not, if that's true. I I think there are people who would be willing to sacrifice and and and and have no legs just to get that glory, to to put that laurel leaf on their head.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  But I think there are two people that are gonna, before we even get to the point of cutting off limbs, that are gonna push, are pushing us to think deeply about this question. Um, German um, track and field long jumper Marcus Ream and uh, American 400 meter Blake Lieber runner. So, Ream, his personal best in the long jump would have won the gold at the last two able-bodied Olympic Games. He jumps off his prosthetic limb. He attempted to um, enter the last Olympics, but he couldn't prove that his limb did not

• 47:28Speaker 02

  give him uh, an advantage. Uh, Ream's interesting because his leg was amputated due to an injury, whereas the 400 meter runner Blake Lieber finished fifth in the uh, last year's 400 meter national championships, which would have qualified from the world championships, would have potentially put him on the Olympic team if he could have proven his limbs that never existed uh, um, were similar to his prosthetic limb.

• 48:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so he was, he was, what, did he run on a blade?

• 48:04Speaker 02

  He did, two.

• 48:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Wow. So, so we're, we're already here, where you have these athletes who aren't, aren't removing limbs, are born without limbs and are able to run equally fast. And so I think it's really a question for world athletics to figure out what's the next step do you deal with these athletes? Because uh, I think Blake Lieber is a great example. How do you prove his prosthetic limbs were similar to limbs he never had?

• 48:37Speaker 02

  You can't do that. And so therefore you go, he doesn't qualify.

• 48:42Gary O'Reilly?

  So Professor, who's been the best governing body? For me, it would be Formula One. Because the advances in technology are ceaseless in that sport. And they have to govern the way it's used and try and make the track as level as possible.

• 48:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Govern and guided. Yeah.

• 48:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 48:59Chuck Nice?

  But it's super easy for them because you know what they're not governing? Let's say for instance, there was a pair of glasses that you could wear. Or a different shield that you could put on your helmet that gave you information about other drivers and stuff like that. You know, they, or if there was, I don't know, some kind of stimulant that you could take that quickens your responses so that you're a better driver.

• 49:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Dude, it's called Lasik eye surgery.

• 49:26Chuck Nice?

  Well, yes.

• 49:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, you're gonna take a guy with a visual impairment and possibly give them 2010 vision.

• 49:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, yeah, Ray, so what about that? We all, you know, that's something that we all know about and heard about and it was elective, but now you can make it even better.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think, you know, this is where it gets, for me, really interesting is that I think that's definitely performance enhancing. But, right, having enough liquid in your body is also performance enhancing. So the question for me is like...

• 49:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Getting a good night's sleep is a performance enhancing.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  Without a doubt. So it's a question of like, what do we as a society believe the limits are? And I think, Gary, you brought up Formula One. I think they do the best because they sort of pass the buck. Because they're saying, well, here are the parameters. And if you can figure out anything interesting within those parameters within the formula, right, that was the original way, go for it. Whereas other sport governing bodies saying, these are the rules. And that's a whole different dynamic.

• 50:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  This is what you can do and not do. These are the things that are banned or not banned. So Formula One is all about saying, well, these are the parameters, but if you come up with something, if you create a new type of material that's three times as light as carbon fiber, good.

• 50:41Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's built to embrace technology rather than stifle its

• 50:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the difference.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  It really is. That's it. That's the way.

• 50:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Okay. How about this? Getting back to the physical, we call them deformities, but physical differences. If someone is born and they have very webbed fingers, you know, that can happen, or feet, and then they start swimming, should the governing body say, no, we have to cut out the webs because you have an unfair advantage?

• 51:08Speaker 02

  I mean, I think that's a big question. For instance, right now, as one comes into the context of gender, you have athletes like Casta Semenya, who's physiologically, people argue, are different than a female athlete. And she's been allowed to compete, but then at different moments, now banned. So the question is, I think for me, it's a societal question. What do we believe is permissible? What do we believe is okay? And where do we draw the lines?

• 51:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we used to think that you can't compete in the Olympics if you've ever been paid to have done sports. So, and that today, that looks so quaint and so antiquated, but everyone, you gotta be amateur, you gotta be this. So who in there is tracking the evolving social mores that guide the rules that you're putting in the first place?

• 51:56Speaker 02

  You know, I think arguably, I think potentially people like me are really interested in those questions, but arguably, most governing bodies...

• 52:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but you're an academic, so we don't care that you're interested in the questions. We care that you have answers. Okay?

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Well...

• 52:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get your ass back to the lab and give us answers.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  I gotta get some answers.

• 52:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't have you on this show for you to ask questions. All right? Let's make that clear.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  Isn't that my business? I ask questions and then let them hang out there. That's the academic way of doing things. So, but other organizations like the Champions League are producing the technical reports, which is like 67 pages, which has all kinds of really information, information, heat maps, data analysis, tracking the movement of players. So the question is, we're embracing this idea that we have all this information and how it can be used to understand the game. And for me, how are we going to use it? And I think the goal is to allow the games to get better. And I don't know what better means. More entertaining, more fun to watch?

• 53:05Speaker 02

  More lucrative, better community, different things.

• 53:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lucrative.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Depending, depending on where, where, I, I assume it has to do with money, like all. Well, I shouldn't say all things, but most things.

• 53:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Professor, the thoughts just popped in my head. If we took away the technology, would we still have phenoms?

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 53:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I, can I, can I butt in there? Here's one, you ready? Ready?

• 53:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep.

• 53:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Mark Spitz, nineteen seventy-two, okay? Was it seventy-two or seventy, seventy-two?

• 53:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Seventy-two in Munich.

• 53:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. He wins seven gold medals.

• 53:37Chuck Nice?

  Seven gold medals.

• 53:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he's got a mustache, a hairy chest, all the stuff that everyone is like shaving off today because they want to go better. And he just kicked ass being the hairiest ape in the swimming pool. Okay?

• 53:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  He's got a saggy, he's got a saggy.

• 53:54Chuck Nice?

  Saggy bathing suit.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  Bathing suit on.

• 53:56Chuck Nice?

  He's got stuff in his pocket. He's got his keys, his car keys.

• 54:02Chuck Nice?

  He's swimming with a dumbbell in his hand.

• 54:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So don't tell me, will there be phenoms without technology?

• 54:08Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so then flip, flip it. All right? And ask, are the phenoms of the future going to be the engineers? Going to be the scientists, the material scientists who produce equipment? And we are just going to log them as much as we do the athletes?

• 54:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then maybe they get traded from one team to the other, the way players do. Ooh.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no. No, we're not going to log the engineers, the scientists, engineer. No. I mean, because we already have them here. They're, they're already in the ecology. They're already doing that work. And, right? Do we know the engineer who designed the first prosthetic racing limb? No, we don't know that. Do we know the, the aerodynamicists that are, who work for, say, any, choose any Formula One team, choose anyone? I mean, what, what, yeah. So, VMP four one, like the first carbon fiber tub Formula One car.

• 55:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to know the, the aerodynamicist who convinced cyclists to wear cone head helmets. Okay?

• 55:09Gary O'Reilly?

  I wanna know. All right, you you mentioned something there, Professor. Carbon fibre. Something that was, if I'm not mistaken, invented or discovered in the late eighteen hundreds. Um, there's a debate whether it was Edison or a Brit, but I'm gonna, I'm guessing my compatriots on the show would have to go with the American.

• 55:29Chuck Nice?

  Nah, we know Edison, so it was a Brit and then he stole it.

• 55:34Gary O'Reilly?

  But basically, was it was it not heating up bamboo to carbonise that, if that's the right term, to and then for the strength and the weight? So this thing's been around, it's it's it's not something that we didn't know existed, it's how we find a way to use it.

• 55:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I like that, I like that, Gary. And let me tighten that question back to you, Ray. Um, the earliest pole vaults were not made of fibre, whatever they're made of today. And so you say, let's change the materials and then the physical body of the person can perform even greater. So that's not changing the person as much as the materials the person works with.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what's carbon fibre, what what makes it special is that really it's not until the nineteen fifty's when you start getting high modulus carbon fibre, which is light and it's hard to deal with, and that's why it's still very expensive. But the example of the pole vault, uh, the really great example is like the javelin. So there was a moment where javelins were actually very, very aerodynamic and the athletes who were throwing them got smaller, they because they had better technique. And eventually track and field decided that we don't want the javan to be that way. So they de-engineered it, changed the weight, made it less aerodynamic. So now javan throwers have to be a little bigger and a little stronger.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  So this is where where the technology, the governing body pushed back and said, well, this is pushing the limits of what we.

• 57:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, I thought the javelin was because the javelin field inside of a stadium was no longer big enough to not have the javelin stab people watching them in the seats. So they had to, they had to de-aerodynamicise the javelin just so they can keep it in the visual space.

• 57:17Chuck Nice?

  And only four people died to make that happen.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  I feel that they can make, the governing bodies can make that argument of saying, "Well, the field was too small," but, I mean, that was an easy True. Right.

• 57:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true. That's true.

• 57:33Speaker 02

  Because, I mean, because what's more to saying, "Well, people are going to throw it farther, but, well, we don't want them to throw it farther."

• 57:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, the opposite of the Olympic principle, faster, higher, stronger. Right. Yeah, we got to bring this to a close. Chuck, Gary, give me last thoughts before we go to Ray's concluding comments.

• 57:49Gary O'Reilly?

  One cannot work without the other. It's like having the phenom have all the biodata, not know their own body, but have a team around them. So without that team, without the technology, without the carbon fiber pads in a marathon runner's shoes, without the equipment that strengthens and supports, these two things cannot exist separately. They have a fabulous symbiotic relationship to me.

• 58:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I like that. Chuck, what do you say?

• 58:17Chuck Nice?

  You know, I just think that transparency should be the order of the day. I really don't care what technology anyone is utilizing, I just think that we should know that there is a technological edge that you have, so that it gives everybody the opportunity to avail themselves if they want, you know?

• 58:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I agree with that, and if you're the one who came up with it first and you win all the gold medals, those are your gold medals.

• 58:44Chuck Nice?

  Those are yours now.

• 58:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And everyone catches up later. Right. Like Fosbury in the Fosbury flop. You know, he goes backwards over the pole, wins the gold medal and the world record, and everyone does it later, but he did it first.

• 58:55Chuck Nice?

  And everybody else was standing there thinking, "Why didn't I think of that?"

• 58:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Ray, take us out. What should we know?

• 59:01Speaker 02

  Well, I think the thing is, like, technology will continue to change sports. And I think it will always be this really interesting, as you point again, Gary, the synergy between human bodies and engineers and scientists. And eventually, we're going to get to a place where we're going to have to have some very hard conversations to see what we want sport to look like. And technology is going to be a very key and meaningful part of the future of sport.

• 59:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it may be that those conversations are not hard to have, but actually easy once people come to embrace the spectacle. Of it. So excellent. Rayvon Fouché, author of The Game Changer: Techno Scientific Revolution in Sports. You have an excellent TEDx talk I enjoyed. And so, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  It's been great. Thanks for having me here and love the conversation.

• 59:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I also want to thank Arthur Kaplan for bringing an ethical perspective so needed on this very topic. So, this has been StarTalk Sports Edition, the making of a phenomenon, the fourth and final installment of that sub-series. Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. Gary? Pleasure was mine, sir. All right. StarTalk Sports Edition, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Keep looking.