Gold Metal Physics, with Edwin Moses (Re-release)

Can a physics background help you win gold? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice discover how to use science to win with Dr. Edwin Moses, two-time Olympic gold medalist and the greatest hurdler of all time.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This week on StarTalk, we look back at an episode where we featured Dr. Edwin Moses, Olympic 400-meter hurdler, and learn how he applied the laws of physics to ensure that he would win gold in that event. Also, we're going to ask the question, can the application of science to human performance go too far? Up next on StarTalk.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition, and we're going to title this episode, "It Ain't Rocket Science." Who do I have with me? Of course, Gary O'Reilly. Gary?

• 0:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey, Neil.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Former professional soccer player in the UK. What team did you play with?

• 1:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Tottenham, Crystal Palace, and Brighton and Hove Albion, all Premier League teams right now, so good news.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay. So you got traded a lot?

• 1:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, yes.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that mean everyone wanted you? Does that mean no one wanted you? Which does that mean?

• 1:15Gary O'Reilly?

  All of the above.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So former pro turned sports commentator, and we're lucky to have you. Thanks for being on, of course, as always. And Chuck? Hey, buddy. How you doing, man? I'm doing well, man. All right, well, I'm StarTalk co-host and comedian and, dare I say, actor. Damn, damn. Well, you know, you would be daring to say that.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you got some gigs coming up. Well, maybe we'll do a whole episode on where that's going. So always good to have you guys. Today, we're going to take a look at the upcoming Olympics, Olympics 2021. Of course, they were canceled, postponed out of 2020 due to the pandemic, wisely so. And so I just got a sense of what it means to compete at that level, what people did to enhance their performance to get to these levels. And we've got a former Olympian, Edwin Moses. Edwin, welcome to StarTalk. Yeah.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Good morning. Glad to be on. Thank you.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, man. It's like, this is crazy.

• 2:22Chuck Nice?

  This is insane and not only, not only Olympic gold medalist, not only the greatest hurdler of all time, but then-

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, he's not a hurdler, he's a hurdler.

• 2:35Chuck Nice?

  That's what I said, hurdler.

• 2:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said hurdler.

• 2:37Chuck Nice?

  Hurdler.

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's a sheep herder, yes.

• 2:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, hurdler, absolutely. No, here's what, here's what people don't even know.

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, you never know.

• 2:44Chuck Nice?

  He does that too.

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Olympics, again, every sport, every sport of, sheep herding might be an Olympic sport one day, the way that's going.

• 2:50Chuck Nice?

  And if it ever did, if it ever is or ever was, Edwin would, would have a medal in it, so.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 2:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me, let me flesh this out, so arguably, in fact, not even, just are the greatest 400 meter hurdler of all time, two-time Olympic gold medalist, 1976, you surely would have won one in 1980, but we boycotted the Moscow Olympics in the middle, in Cold War, you know, and then came back and then did it again in 1984. So that's spanning eight years, which is extraordinary, especially for that event. And you're an emeritus chairman of the board of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, so we're gonna spend a whole segment on that.

• 3:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, kinda dope.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. You couldn't resist it, could you? That's a low-end Chuck joke, okay?

• 3:40Chuck Nice?

  What can we do, you know, sometimes they're just hanging, you gotta do it.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're chair of the Laureate World Sports Academy. So, so let's just, let's just resurrect some of this, this, this time of you as, as a hurdler. You had a unique approach to the sport, to the, to your steps, to your, to the, just tell us what made your performance unique. And, and my father used to run track and he described to me what I was looking at, because I'm old enough to remember all this, he described to me what I was looking at when I saw you in the 1976 and 1984 Olympics, but I want you to tell everybody this. Okay, go.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Well, the story starts that I was a pretty much of a nerd in high school. Yes, yes, yes. I was a nerd. I was a straight out nerd. In fact, they could have had me playing the character of Urkel because that's how I presented myself. I was smaller than everyone else. I was pretty good in track, but I wasn't a superstar, was unrecruitable going into into college. I couldn't get the scholarship, so I got an academic scholarship to go to Morehouse to study engineering. I was in a dual degree program, so I majored in physics and engineering. Wow. At Morehouse, there was no track, no field, so I had to really look at everything differently when it came to being able to train every day. So I used to have to jump

• 5:04Speaker 02

  fences. We used to carpool to three or four tracks. I ran hurdles in the hallway. I had a hurdle that I jumped in the hallway in the wintertime. Just, I was absolutely the most unlikely person to, three years after going to Morehouse with no track, no field, jumping over fences to become Olympic champion. So I had to reinvent everything. And I started by really just technically with the hurdles and also using the science to really, you know, take a couple of meters off of the track without anybody else knowing it. So it was a combination of sheer will, going to the right school at the right time, you know, being at an HBCU. I went when I was 17 years old, but being in-

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Starfleet Black Colleges and Universities, yeah, HBCU.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, where I was able to thrive and study. And the academics was hard, so I was, I didn't have time for frats and parties and girls. I was physics and track and field. So that's where I put my-

• 5:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So could it be, you know, I'm thinking of Bobby Fischer in this example where he didn't have the traditional path of chess training that so many other grandmasters and masters did. So he had to be sort of inventive, all on his own. And then when he burst out onto the world scene, no one knew how to handle him. Or is it the fact that you had to invent this on your own, contribute to your unique running style when you finally ended up competing?

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, when I was, I think, a sophomore or junior in high school, they had an event, you probably have heard of it, the four by one twenty, four hundred and eighty yards shuttle hurdle relay where each team is running ten hurdles, but one runs up the track and one runs down. And I jumped in as a substitute and really taught myself how to run hurdles. So that was how I started. And I think Tommy Smith, John Carlos, the nineteen sixty-eight Olympics, I was thirteen years old, just getting ready to go to high school. Sprinters who So that had a big impact on my whole outlook going in. And then the seventy-two Olympics, which was a debacle for the United States, but in the seventy-two Olympics, there was a guy by the name of John Akiabor from Uganda, smashed a world record and ran forty-seven

• 7:12Speaker 02

  point eight-two seconds from lane one. And I imagined myself being John Akiabor every time I went out onto the track. I had no idea that four years later, I would go to the Olympics, win the gold medal and break his record. But that was my take on track.

• 7:29Gary O'Reilly?

  But let's take, literally take a step back. You must have had a smart idea about the biometrics. Because of your physics background, you'd have an engineering, you'd have dismantled the whole event and then rebuilt it in your style, in your form that gave you, surely, did you have an unfair advantage is what I'm asking, I suppose?

• 7:49Chuck Nice?

  We need to add more physics so people will have an advantage.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  It was my grade.

• 7:55Chuck Nice?

  It's called a fair advantage. That's what it is.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I taught myself to run, well, thirteen hurdles. I was a very good high hurdler. I was running like thirteen-six. And I dropped my four hundred flat down. So just to be clear, that would be the hundred and ten meter high hurdle, correct? Hundred and ten, yeah. I went one ten. And then I ran from my sophomore year to my junior year, I won the conference in forty-seven-five. And I felt like I had made it in track and field. Well, at the first meet of my junior year, which was seventy-six at the Florida relays, I started the season with a forty-six-one. So that was like a second and a half drop right from the beginning. And then when I ran the four hundred hurdles for the first time, I had been doing a lot of power running, cross-country running. So I was in tip-top condition.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  All I had to do was teach myself how to run the hurdles thirty-five meters apart. And the first time I did it, I found myself running thirteen. I found myself using my left leg, which is the inner leg.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thirteen strides between hurdles.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Thirteen steps, yeah. Yeah, running closer to the curve. And then I figured out that if I run eight inches away from the inner line, which is where they measure the lane, versus, you know, two or three feet in the middle of the lane, I'm saving three to four meters per race, which is like fifteen feet. Anywhere from twelve to fifteen feet. So that was the first adjustment I made.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, Edwin, are you saying that the effective length of your path, because you start out in blocks, right?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, you just have to stay in your lane because you were hurdle all the way around. So the length, the actual four hundred meters is not the center line of the width of your lane?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Eight inches, eight inches from the inner line.

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know that.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Eight inches from the inner line. So my endeavor was to run as close to the inner line as I could. Whereas most people just run all over the lane. And by doing that, I calculated the radius of the track and figured it out that I was saving three to four meters per race. So that's twelve fifteen feet. And I was, I was basically. And that, that, that, that's an unfair advantage.

• 10:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a huge, that's a huge distance. That's a unfair advantage there. That is amazing. But Edwin, that's not nice.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  So everyone was always asking me what the secret was, but I would never talk about something as simple as that. They thought it was, you know.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Whatever it could be. But it was a combination of thirteen steps. I was a very good technician. I ran with my inner leg. My left leg was the one that I went over the hurdle first. So I was able to run closer to the line, which got me twelve to fifteen feet in every race. And that was the first thing on my mind coming out of the blocks. If you ever see me come out of the blocks, I'm running almost on the line around those turns.

• 10:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. If you take thirteen steps, that's an odd number of steps.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying your left leg only took you over the first hurdle, but your right leg is going to take you over the second one?

• 10:55Speaker 02

  No, left leg every time. Because they don't count the step where you touch down. They don't count that one. They count the following one. So an odd number of steps will have you hurdling on the same leg, an even number, you would switch.

• 11:10Chuck Nice?

  You switch. Wow.

• 11:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Anyone wonder why he was world champion?

• 11:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is, wait, wait, so if you go over with your left leg, and since we all run counterclockwise around the tracks, that left leg assures you that you will be closer to the line, eight inches.

• 11:27Chuck Nice?

  Every time.

• 11:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the right leg, you're landing somewhere else.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 11:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh my.

• 11:33Chuck Nice?

  You've got to love this.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  And if you run with your right leg, for example, your body has to remain within the vertical plane of 48 inches, the lanes are 48 inches wide, so if your knee swings outside of the lane, technically, you can get eliminated from the race, it's a foul, and they will call it in the Olympic Games, because there's guys who run with their right leg going over first, and their left leg is what they call hooking, going outside of the lane, or even under the plane of the hurdle.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Speaking of that, speaking of fouls. But just to be clear, your knee, just, just, your front leg goes straight out and over, and then your trailing leg, it's your knee.

• 12:11Chuck Nice?

  Comes up and around.

• 12:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pulls over, so there's a whole drag motion there.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That has width to it, and that's what you're describing.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 12:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's exiting the lane.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  That's right, and if it exits the lane, that can be a penalty, but if your left leg, you don't have to worry about it, and you're running inside.

• 12:26Chuck Nice?

  Right. So let me ask you this, and I will show my ignorance, because I've always been just too afraid to ask this question. When you see the guys running, and they're knocking over all the hurdles, are they being penalized for that? Because every time I watch hurdleers, and I see them knocking over the hurdles, I'm like, well, that guy sucks, I could do that. He's just knocking stuff over.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Well, the Federation, the Federation did a trick on that, because when I was running, I think it took Eighteen to twenty pounds to tip over a high hurdle. It would take twenty pounds of force to knock it over. They reduced that to twelve. So during Roger Kingdom's era, and he won two gold medals. Those guys were knocking over hurdles every time. In my era, they had big lead weights on it. One was flipped forward and one was flipped back.

• 13:22Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  If you hit any hurdle, it would it would take away from you.

• 13:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, it had to go there. He's saying, in my day, it snowed in both directions. And I, we had it hard.

• 13:35Chuck Nice?

  But I get it. I get it.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  They had to change the rules to keep up with the old dogs. That's what they did.

• 13:41Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  So basically, basically. And with the track surfaces as well, they changed the bouncy, the elasticity of the track to make times faster.

• 13:51Gary O'Reilly?

  So how did you cope with that? Because you went from what I would call cinder track to, we call it tartan. It's a very smart tartan track. Yeah, and that obviously, energy rebounds back out of that. So you being the engineer, how did you cope with the effect that that had in your technique? Because you always say about the most important thing being the takeoff.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:13Chuck Nice?

  And first, before you do that, maybe there's somebody listening who's like me, who is not a track aficionado like you three, and doesn't and doesn't know what a cinder track and a tartan is.

• 14:25Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, cool.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Rubber track, the tracks you see now, the rubberized surfaces, that's what that's what he means. It's a trade name. There's about three different names, Mondo, Tartan, Recroton. There's quite a few brand names, but they're all essentially rubber and they all have a standardized compound that they must have. I ran on dirt tracks in Dayton, Ohio. It was cinder. Basically, it was.

• 14:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here it is again. I was on dirt tracks and I had pearls, wouldn't.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  It was ground up cinders and sand. And they would take, they would spike it up and get a tractor to roll it down. So it's almost like, like you would see on a, at a construction site, right before they begin to put up everything, it's just rolled, flattened, heavy. And we used to wear these long three-quarter inch spikes in it. The problem with that is when you're behind, you literally eat dirt. The people in front of you are kicking up dust and sand and, you know, it gets in your teeth and in your eyes. The first time I ran on a rubberized track with great shoes was in the 1976 Olympic Games. I had Adidas.

• 15:27Gary O'Reilly?

  First time you ran on that, on one of those tracks?

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Well, the first time I ran where I really, really felt the difference. When I got brand new shoes that were made by Adidas and they were custom made for the Olympic Games and the Olympic track, which was a lot bigger and just perfect for running. I felt like I, I just felt like a Ferrari and with big wheels on it, the total amount of grip that you could get, the elasticity when you take off, I mean, you could feel the energy coming out of the track if you put it in. So when I felt that in Montreal, ran around that track, I just knew it was gonna be all over.

• 16:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the spikes are shorter for the, for the rubberized track, correct?

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're, they're like, mine were like nine millimeters, something like that, like a quarter of an inch, less than a half of an inch.

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. I knew once those shoes were on my feet, it was all over as far as I was concerned.

• 16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, see. That's confidence right there.

• 16:23Chuck Nice?

  This is, this is where being disadvantaged becomes the ultimate advantage. Because when you have all the accoutrement and they're just giving you all the, the latest and the best, you're like, okay, I'm spoiled. But when you don't have any of that and then you get it, it's like, oh my God, now this is an elevation. Like, I'm sure right now, there's a brother somewhere in Africa that's skiing on dirt. And when, and when he gets to snow, it's gonna be over.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Edwin, you, I'm, I'm a fan of dance and I learned that you took ballet classes. Was this specifically to, to work, to help you work on your hurdling or had some other just general interest?

• 17:07Speaker 02

  My, uh, roommate at Morehouse, Josiah Young, Dr. Josiah Young now.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  He was, I guess, one of the first male principal dancers at the Atlanta Ballet. When we were in college, he was that good. He had been taking it all of his life. He would come out to the track and watch, and I would watch him compose dances and stretch and flexibility. So I learned a tremendous amount about flexibility from him. And I actually took one class over at Spelman in ballet and dance. He drugged me over there because there was not too many guys that wanted to take it. But I went over and took it because I was interested in the flexibility and the stretching part of it. So I learned a lot about, and hurdles and ballet are very, very similar. I consider myself more of an artist and artisan when it comes to technically running

• 17:56Speaker 02

  the hurdles, but using the scientific background and being in tip-top condition, having the cardiovascular training, being a very, very good sprinter, everything.

• 18:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it sounds like you had combined mind, body, soul into one sort of holistic package. Is that a fair way to think about this?

• 18:15Speaker 02

  I would say so because the thing that I didn't have was a track, which is the main requirement for track appeal. So I had to think of everything, flexibility, diet. Yeah, I had to use every advantage and everything I could think of because just as today where you see basketball Jones, that's what they call them, walking around with a basketball and their baggy shorts and a couple of pairs of shoes in the bag. I was walking around with track shoes and thinking about running all day long.

• 18:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we got to take a break. So when we come back, Edmund, I want to get into what your role has been in the sort of anti-doping movement with regard to the purity and the efficacy of sports. So stay with us on StarTalk Sports.

• 19:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition. We're here with Edwin Moses, Olympic great, from a period where I was, you know, first really getting into the Olympics back in the 1970s, because that's how old I am. 1976 and 1984 gold medalists, 400-meter hurdles. And, and, and something I want to pick up in that first segment. Edwin, you, you won how many consecutive races?

• 19:50Speaker 02

  At the end of my career, it was 122 straight races. And 107 of those were finals. 122, but it was 122.

• 20:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn. So why does anyone even bother to say, "Here, just take the medal. I'll go to Amish at the bar." Right. I mean, if everyone knows you're gonna win, what, do, do other, do other runners believe that they might be able to beat you in that one time? Do they think so?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Every time I ran, in someone else's mind, they were in an Olympic final. And I knew that every step of the way. And a lot of people thought that me winning was easy, but running faster, probably running more than the other athletes, I had to be prepared all the time. And the faster you run, the more it hurts. So I was the one that was in pain all the time. But I was always ready for that.

• 20:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that was across almost 10 years. How many times did you break your own record in those 122 wins?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  1976, I broke the world record in the Olympic Games. That year, I was breaking my own personal record all the way up until the Olympic Games, until my personal record became the world record. So much for 70s.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  It's hard. It's hard. It sounds, it sounds easy.

• 21:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Once you become a world record holder, I mean, it becomes hard to break your personal record. You might only get two or three chances a year if you run 20.

• 21:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  That everything can go right.

• 21:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, do you need someone on your shoulder to try to, to push you?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Well, that's what I didn't have. That's the one thing I didn't have. I was.

• 21:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I'm so fast. Nobody was ever near me.

• 21:31Chuck Nice?

  Hey, yeah. And by the way, Dr. Moses, I just need to correct you on one thing. You said it sounds easy. No, it doesn't. It's not.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  It looked, it looked easy. When you see it on television, it looked like I was just frantic away, but I had to run hard every time.

• 21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You look like you were just floating and then.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  With 13 steps, you have to run hard. You have to run hard to maintain 13, especially at the end. So I, I had like a zone where I could run 13 steps slowly and run maybe a 48.3, 48.5. And if I ran fast, then I could run as, as far as, as fast as I did down to 47 flat. So there's like a second range and your times are generally going to be in there. Whether you run fast or slow, it's just a matter of intensity during the race.

• 22:19Gary O'Reilly?

  You have an internal stopwatch, don't you?

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Amazing.

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, uh, did you, given that you could have made this calculation, I'm wondering if you did. There's, there's a calculation between how much time you spend airborne versus how much time. So in other words, the arc of every stride. The higher you go, the more time you're wasting coming back to earth before your foot hits the ground again. Is there some ideal elevation airborne elevation above the track that maximizes your forward motion?

• 22:51Chuck Nice?

  And, and can I add to that and say, and is there anything that in that, what Neil just said, that changes the gate itself?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's really the key. Those two questions are really the key because there's only one perfect takeoff point for the hurdle. There's only one point and you might, I may be, for me, it's about nine to 12 feet away from the hurdle that I'm taking off. And for me, what I did was I never thought that I was going up into the air and going over an object. I thought I was, really I called it an exaggerated step. And all I did, and because I was flexible, I was just able to take off at the right point, begin my movement, get my lead leg up, just.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  The hurdle's three feet high, so maybe three feet and two or three inches.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait a minute, Edwin, wait, wait, wait, wait. Did you just tell me that your launch point to jump over hurdle is up to nine feet?

• 23:45Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 23:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before the hurdle?

• 23:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and did you notice that he just said that? He just casually, right? Like, oh yeah, everybody, everybody just, everybody can just put their leg up 12 feet away from something and just end up on the other side of it. And by the way.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Like four feet on the other side.

• 24:03Chuck Nice?

  Four feet on the other, so you were, so basically you were Jordan before Jordan. That's basically.

• 24:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  I used to kick basketball rims when I was at that age, when I was running. Go up, kick it with my foot and come down like a cat. I can, I can jump. I could have played basketball, but I really loved track. But basically, I also, another thing.

• 24:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, you could have slammed dust with your feet.

• 24:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Horrible, like 2,400 back then. It's like 2,600. So 35 meters, I can't even see the hurdle in front of me. So I had to concentrate on the one takeoff point for everything and then count the number of steps and then wait for the hurdle to come in. But I never really focused visually on the hurdle. This will be interesting to you, Neil. I always, you know, you're a running platform and everything is moving, your mind is working, but I saw myself as, as a stationary object. And I saw the hurdle as something that was moving at me. And most runners, they say, okay, I'm moving, there's an object out there I'm

• 25:06Speaker 02

  running it at. But I saw myself as a stationary object. My whole mental frame of mind was the hurdle is going to get to where I want it to be. All I have to do is take off when I get there. Versus trying to aim at a spot that's 12 or 15 feet in front of a hurdle.

• 25:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is, this is called a Galilean transformation.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  I transformed everything.

• 25:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are stationary? The track is moving under your feet. There it is.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I wore contact lenses and glasses and if it was raining or they fogged up, then I was in trouble. So I had to look at it from a completely different way. That with the stretching, the diet. And I trained hard. I outtrained everyone. And I'd like to say that I I became better than people that were much, much better than me because I stayed in it longer and just became better than them, outworked them.

• 25:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now tell me about at the time and even continuing decades to follow, there's always been rumors of doping. In one way or another, doping is, I guess, the broad category of what anyone would do to themselves chemically, usually to the blood, to enhance their performance. So in your later years, in your, I guess, in retirement, you've become a big anti-doping advocate. So could you just describe what your motivations were there and why it brings you back?

• 26:25Speaker 02

  It happened at the 76 Olympic Games, which was my first one. I was 20 years old. And from my perspective, here I am, I'm the best 400-meter hurdler in the world. I'm running at under 48 seconds. And I see these women from Romania and East Germany and Bulgaria and Russians, and they have more muscles than me. And I was like, what the hell? You know, looking at them in the bill, it's the swimmers, the track and field people, not to mention the discus and hammer, but all of the runners. If you go back and look at any book that had the 76 Olympic sprints, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1500, it was dominated by East Bloc women. And that really bothered me. One reason was because I came from from

• 27:08Speaker 02

  an atmosphere where I didn't even have a track. So for me to take drugs and think about cheating was really beyond comprehension. And during that time, to be honest with you, most of the cheating was done in the East Bloc. There were a few athletes in the United States, but most of those were like the discus, hammer throwers, the weight guys.

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The strength, the other, the strength sports, yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, the extreme sports. And so as my career progressed, after 1980, it really changed in the United States as we led towards the 1984 Olympic Games because it was money on the table for marketing and

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was Los Angeles, right?

• 27:44Speaker 02

  There were coaches out there that were willing to show athletes what to do. And I began to fight it, quite frankly, back in the 70s. And it was an uphill battle. I was one of the few athletes that was not afraid to say anything because we were kind of like, sort of like a code of honor that they have amongst state policemen, for example, was that kind of. Scenario.

• 28:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Is it, is it right, doctor, that you, you receive death threats because of the actions that you took to change the sport and keep it clean?

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, all kinds of threats, yeah.

• 28:14Chuck Nice?

  So, wait, these guys were doping, right, and you're still beating them. You're, you're natural a hundred percent, you're clean, they're hopped up on whatever Andro, whatever they got in them, and you're still winning, which is why if you look very closely at the seventy-six race that you took the world record, there's one dude in the back giving you a finger the entire way around.

• 28:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I missed that, Chuck.

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that on YouTube?

• 28:48Chuck Nice?

  I just watched it on YouTube.

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But wait, wait, wait, so, so, so, Edmund, the, you famously lost some race to some guy in Germany, and then a week later beat him by fifteen meters, right? And this is like widely talked about, so was he doped up when he beat you? Or would someone accuse you of doping up in order to beat him right one week later?

• 29:12Speaker 02

  No, I think he was, he was one of my competitors that I ran against many, many times. He was my arch rival, Harold Smith from Germany, and he was clean his whole career. He worked hard too. And we both started in the seventy-six games, and we both finished in the nineteen eighty-eight games, so our career.

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But wait, so how, so how, how could he, how did he beat you?

• 29:33Speaker 02

  I was, to be honest with you, I was staying at a, a, at a guest house of a guy who owned a Mercedes dealership in Berlin, and myself, and a guy named Maxi Parks, we were out at the pool sipping martinis, and we should have been warming up. So when we got out to the track, I just got out there late, it was my second or third race ever in Europe, and I just wasn't paying attention, wasn't paying attention. I clipped, I clipped the hurdle, I clipped the ninth hurdle and he passed me, and then I'd lunged at the wrong finish line, and, you know, it was too late to beat him, and at that point, it really didn't matter, there was no winning streak or anything like that.

• 30:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, yeah, didn't break a winning streak, and you, and you kicked ass a week later just to?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  It angered me.

• 30:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that was very Michael Jordan to be motivated to say.

• 30:20Gary O'Reilly?

  And there's, Neil, Neil, there's a little phrase in there.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  What?

• 30:23Gary O'Reilly?

  It angered me.

• 30:26Gary O'Reilly?

  You see, when you, when, when you, when you hear an athlete say that, and then you look at the history of what that triggered. You realize how condensed that power was and how that was brought forward. So that for me is a very powerful short sentence.

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this thing about doping, over the years, it gets more and more sophisticated.

• 30:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In part to dodge loopholes, which I guess you just have to plug the loopholes. But also, even if there's no loophole, you do it so that they don't get caught. So how do you approach this? How can you expect to be effective if this is like whack a mole? You know, every next drug that gets developed, somebody does something different.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Well, there's a couple of different approaches now. There's a deterrence model that they set up, which does statistical analysis and kind of bases certain events, whether it's biathlon or bobsled or track and field, on probabilities of athletes needing to take drugs and being in that type of event, when the competitions are, what countries they come from, what part of the training cycle that they're in. We also have new tools out there. One is what they call a non-analytical positive. The computer power, Neil, has really helped in the fight against doping because most people think of drug testing as like a litmus test. You have urine and then, you know, you can test for a lot of things like the opioids,

• 31:47Speaker 02

  cocaine, steroids, stimulants, things of that nature. And those are pretty much the same with the GCMS. But then we also have a lot of other.

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess no one tests for marijuana because then you're just too chilled.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  They're trying to minimize that because around the world in some places it's legal. And you're dealing with a pool of athletes where it's quite likely that they were using.

• 32:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I still know that marijuana ever helped anyone do any sport at all.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  It can help in some sports. But basically it clogs up the legal system in terms of dealing with positive tests. And that's what they don't want to have. They actually raised the limits a couple of years ago. And I think they've almost decriminalized it in sport, except for in competition now.

• 32:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Dr. Moses, there's something selective androgen receptor modulators.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  That's what I was gonna talk to you about.

• 32:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Then I'll step aside, sir.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  They are not anabolic steroids, but they are precursors where they stimulate the production of anabolic steroids or some kind of hormones in your body. Most of them are research drugs. There's a bunch of doctors from around the world that get these drugs from laboratories in China or from a lab under the auspices of doing research and they convert these drugs and take them and package them up. But they make your body produce more of the type of hormones and not all of it is straight testosterone.

• 33:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Androstenidione is an idiocalanolone is about five or six different drugs that they know are part of the reason that the body does overproduction and stimulates muscle growth. But the research now, what did I say, non-analytical positive test, they're looking now, they're looking at proteins on a steroid chain and they're looking at like 200, 300 different strands of DNA that they know will change and they know there's nothing your body can do about it to reverse it. So now they're looking at, you know, the DNA strands on protein chains. And now they're able to go up to an athlete and say, oh, you're 6'9", 290 pounds and throwing a javelin 300 feet. How can you have breast cancer and

• 33:53Speaker 02

  be pregnant? You know, it's that sophisticated. And that's actually is what's happening. Women who present as though they have testicular cancer, for example.

• 34:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  So it's very, very sophisticated now.

• 34:05Chuck Nice?

  And those markers are there because they're an imprint of the doping that they have done. These small molecule things that they've put in their body, that's the imprint that they made.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  The effect is immediate. It may not be an imprint that it makes on the body, but it causes something else to happen that can be measured.

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. And that's something else is not necessarily revealed in a blood test, but you do get it genetically out of it. Whoa.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Right. But they call those non-analytical positives. We don't even detect the drug. We just know that this can't be possible.

• 34:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Some of these research jokes, are they sort of gene therapy? And is this where we are?

• 34:43Speaker 02

  They're moving into that too. Some of them are.

• 34:44Gary O'Reilly?

  But how do we detect that?

• 34:46Speaker 02

  They, uh, we go right to the manufacturers of some of these drugs in the pharmaceutical houses and make agreements with them such that we see the research way in advance and we're able to, uh, figure out when we see it, we recognize it.

• 35:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  That's what, that's what they're doing now.

• 35:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, you're ahead of the story.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a lot of detection out there and we have agents, we have guys from the DEA and FBI and Interpol that run security offices that do, that do investigations. We have a bunch of whistleblowers all over the world. So there's a lot of different elements. It's not just urine and blood anymore. There's very sophisticated intelligence that goes on.

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Edward, we gotta take a break, but can you hang out for our third segment? Cause we wanna just sort of shoot the shit and just sort of speak in a completely disorganized way on topics that didn't completely fit into the two previous segments with your permission, if you can hang on. When, when we come back, more StarTalk Sports Edition with Olympic great Edward Moses.

• 36:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, we're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. It's not rocket science with Edward Moses, Olympic great, nineteen seventies and eighties for the four hundred meter hurdles. And, uh, a few things, Edward. Uh, I've always known, I've, as I said, my father ran track and he told me about it and I ran with him a few times. The four hundred meter race, with or without hurdles, I think everyone agrees is the hardest race in all track and field. And would you, because it's too long to sprint the whole way, but it's not so long that you could pace yourself. So is this, is this a fair commentary on it?

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Very fair. The only other race that I'd say would be... Equal is the 800 meter, 800 meters, the way that they're running that now, because they're running like 141 and 142.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's become, the 800 meters has worked its way.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  In 800 meters, you don't have to lift your leg and, and go over something, and then come down and sprint, and then make it to the next hurdle, and then go over something.

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no 800 meter hurdle, is what you're saying, right?

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Yep, so it's the tough, they call it the man killer event.

• 37:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I just want to go a little further back on your story again. So, you had a chemistry set as a kid, you, you were a geek kid, you know, the word today would be blurred, black nerd, right?

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the term for that. So, tell me some other geeky things that you did. Your, your father was a Tuskegee Airmen, is that right?

• 37:34Speaker 02

  My dad was a Tuskegee Airmen. He studied botany and biochemistry at Kentucky State. He wanted to be a doctor, but he could never get into medical school back during those days, in the early 50s. He tried Indiana University, a bunch of schools, and he was very frustrated. He went into education, but I grew up looking at my dad's chemistry books, organic chemistry books. I didn't know what I was looking at, but I was just turning pages and fascinated. Algebra and geometry books, we had a whole basement full of his college books.

• 38:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, today, many people sell back their books, or they just, you know, the, the idea that a book is something ephemeral is so anathema to me, that I'm glad that you're, you benefited from kept books.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  We had children's encyclopedia, we had Encyclopedia Britannica. I've done everything from making a volcano with potassium chloride, or whatever it is, and blowing it up at school. I had a big hill, I had fossil collection, insect collection, frogs and snakes, I had butterfly collections, launch model rockets, had a chemistry set and a biology set, so I was just a total, total nerd after my dad.

• 38:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, I'm so loving this.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was. And then I, I had braces and big Coke bottle glasses, so I used to have to fight a lot. I would get bullied.

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You really were Urkel.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  I had to fight. My house, my house was uphill, so after, I used to get out of school early and leave like five minutes before, and start running uphill with my saxophone, but I never got caught, so that's one of the reasons I was able to get in shape, because I wasn't afraid to run uphill to get over.

• 39:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's before bullies were outlawed. You know, bullies are like a whole thing today. You know, they're sent to the principal or kicked out of school, and back in our day... They were just a fundamental part of life in high school. And in fact, you know, people forget that the movie Back to the Future, that whole storyline exists only because there's a bully. Just think of, just think about how that is and what that works. Today, that would be not, that wouldn't be tolerated from an administrative level, even if it was, you know, the terror of the kids in the school. So, so you, you had all this kind of backdrop and I'm, I'm just loving, I, I love hearing it. Let me ask you, you approach the whole sport holistically as we described, or just as one generalized package.

• 39:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rather than send out Interpol to catch cheaters, is there a way, and I don't want to sound all, get all new agey on you, but is there a way to just change the culture of high-performance athletics so that no one would even think to do such a thing? Yes, yes, Dr. Moses. Can you please change human nature?

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Well, I was, I was the chairman, interestingly enough.

• 40:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, he might have a solution, Chuck. He just might.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  I was the chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency's Education Committee, and we realigned the education to really, even at a young age, as early as like three, four, five years old, to really kind of integrate ethics and fair play in sports at an age-appropriate level, or even if you're seven years old, or 12, or 15. For example, if a kid, if you put together a group of nursery school kids and you let them run across the room, 20 meters or something, you go ahead and put one kid in front of the others and watch the other ones go off. They know innately what's cheating and what's fair and what's not fair. And so when you begin to talk to them at that appropriate level, why it's important to play by the rules, understand the rules, be a gracious loser.

• 41:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in that example, you gave an obvious advantage to another student.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  That's right. They, they know that right off the bat. So when you can engage them at age-appropriate levels with those principles, then you can begin to deter the use of steroids. And then you have to talk about the risks. There's risk and rewards for, that athletes are willing to, to take in order to become a world-class champion, become an Olympic champion.

• 41:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean, you mean health risks or? Uh penalization risks.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Uh penalization risks.

• 41:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because I.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  And physical risks as well as physical risks.

• 41:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You should talk about physical risks because.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  As physical risks.

• 41:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because there might be some future doping thing that has no other side effects. And so to say, don't do this because you'll lose your testicles or whatever.

• 42:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that the only reason why? No, you you don't want them to do it because it would give them an unfair advantage. The rest of that is just a byproduct.

• 42:07Gary O'Reilly?

  So, okay, okay, Dr. Moses, your athletic career is nothing short of stellar. The campaign and your advocacy for a clean sport is amazing, but do you not regret having passed a cognitive test to be an astronaut, not to have gone to space?

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, the story is I got drafted in nineteen seventy five. Passed the test for uh to go become a Navy bomber navigator. And uh the war was still going on. I think I was a junior sophomore, junior at at Morehouse Steel. And the recruiter came by. He was from the Marine Corps. He said, well, it's another one of my uh physicist partners. We both got drafted on the same day. Our numbers came up, so we were definitely going to Vietnam. And he said, I give you guys a choice. We said, what's that? He said, you can go to Vietnam with an M sixteen on your back or F sixteen. We said, we'll take the F.

• 42:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  F sixteen.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  And we were supposed to go down to Pensacola, need to train to become a bomber navigator. My vision was not good enough for a pilot, but um. And then that was actually gonna be the path to becoming an astronaut for me because there there was no black astronauts back then. And uh they were recruiting us because we were physicists and engineers. So I had that path and was very interested in it. And then the next year I went to the Olympic Games and all bets were off.

• 43:29Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  What a surprise. Yeah, it was.

• 43:33Chuck Nice?

  Unfortunately, I cannot run to the moon, so. I'll be here, guys.

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Settle for the Olympics.

• 43:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, Dr. Moses, looking forward and hopefully in 2021 and Tokyo, what are we going to get on top of sport and make it clean? Or are we going to rinse and repeat the episodes of previous Olympians?

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Well, generally Olympic sport is clean. There's just, there's a few bad players that promote the use of drugs and write prescriptions. And it's all over the world and all different sports. The majority of athletes want to be clean. And because of the work that we've done at USADA, they trust us to do what's necessary to keep the playing field level for everyone. If athletes test positive, we have to do something about it. And so they have the confidence that there is someone there that's going to keep the playing field level. And that's been the greatest thing, one of the greatest pieces of work that we've done. And we've actually been able to kind of clean the playing field up and make it level and have the athletes think that there are no exceptions.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Whether you're a Lance Armstrong or whoever else you may be, that there's no exceptions. That we in the United States, we go after anyone, including the 85-year-old little old lady who's, you know, a cyclist on weekends and, you know, there's so many different athletes that test positive. And there's a lot that make innocent mistakes, especially with supplements or. Get over here, Grandma. Did you just say this is 85? I'm sorry. Get over here, Grandma. We don't give a damn.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  The heartbreaking thing is inadvertent use, like a substance that's in a. Ingeritol.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  An 85-year-old lady with muscle dysfunction, people. Yep, supplements, you know, supplements that retain it. Those are the heartbreaking cases. Or someone who just missed tests, you know, they're a knucklehead and they just miss a couple of tests every now and then. You only get three. Those are the heartbreaking tests. The majority of people want to compete clean.

• 45:41Chuck Nice?

  So can I ask you, I want to ask you a philosophical question because as we talk about this, so, you know, people take these things when they're cheating. For the promotion of anabolism and then also for recovery time.

• 45:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Chuck Nice?

  So let's say for instance, you had a drug that did not promote the growth aspect, but did decrease recovery time.

• 46:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With healing.

• 46:09Chuck Nice?

  Would that, yeah, that improved your healing. Would that be okay if something like that were, or is philosophically, it's just the whole act of utilizing a substance that is the problem, period?

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Well, in cycling, they use corticosteroids. They're mostly used for recovery, to help the body recover. Cause if you look at the Tour de France, there's no way that you can pedal like that or do any high intensity sport for eighteen, twenty days in a row without a lot of physical damage and eventually your body's gonna break down. So all those recovery drugs that are pharmaceuticals that aren't normal, a normal person would take just to feel good, those are all banned. Those are all banned. There's certain ways that you can take them, injections in a joint, for example, but you can't inject them into your skin, can't rub them onto your skin, just like you can't do testosterone and whatnot. So I use ice. That was the best recovery method.

• 47:04Chuck Nice?

  Ice.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Ice baths. And when I was doing it back in the late seventies and early eighties, everyone laughed at me. But now every NBA, soccer team, NFL, baseball, you see their guys in ice immediately after the game.

• 47:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but wait a minute.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Cause that's more than almost any other, any other.

• 47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  H two O.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  I was the first to do that. They laughed at me back then.

• 47:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  H two O is a major additive.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Fifty degrees, twenty minutes.

• 47:30Gary O'Reilly?

  So you were, I mean, apart, apart from being this holistic athlete and the yoga, the stretching, the diet, you embrace technology. Uh, you, you, you were one of the first people to have one of those.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Heartbeat monitors.

• 47:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, the Finnish company Polar.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  Polar.

• 47:48Gary O'Reilly?

  When was that, that you started to take that sort of tech onto the track and use it?

• 47:52Speaker 02

  That was seventy eight. I went to, I went to Finland to run about three track meets and met this Finnish masseur, Ilpo Nikila, who stayed with me for almost my whole career. And they showed me the monitor. And then one year I got injured and went up and trained in a place called Viramarki, the Finnish training center for six weeks. And they gave me a new one and I just found a way to incorporate that into my training because I knew how far I was going. I measured everything off, my cross-country courses around the track. And I used it to be able to moderate how much time I would use between races. And I've still got all the charts, the original charts.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  And then I plotted it on the old Epson QX ten, which had about twenty discs to load up just to be able to count the five. But I saved all that and printed it all out.

• 48:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, man.

• 48:44Gary O'Reilly?

  You've got a museum there.

• 48:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Edwin, when is, when is the biopic coming out?

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Um, actually, we're working on it right now.

• 48:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, good.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  We have a treatment. I don't know which way it's gonna go, but we actually are working on it right now.

• 49:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it based on a book or is it, is it just something out of, just going straight to film?

• 49:06Gary O'Reilly?

  And who do you want to play young Edwin Moses?

• 49:09Speaker 02

  I don't know if it's gonna be that kind of movie. It really just depends on how it's marketed and who picks it up. But I do see scenes, in my imagination, I see scenes of me asking the teacher, can I, can I go to the bathroom, running to my locker, getting my clothes, grabbing my saxophone and busting out the door uphill with the kids chasing me. I see that, you know, at night as a part of the movie.

• 49:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me channel some of my father's spirit energy here. We lost him a couple of years ago. Just that it's, it's an honor to have you on the show, to talk with you about what you did in that race that all of us were. A gape at as we saw you win with such grace and such poison. It's great to see that you've continued. It's great to learn that you're blurred from way back. And if we may, when the Olympics comes a little closer, if you're not heavily tapped by all the Olympic outlets, can we bring you back on and just shoot the shit about the Olympics? Absolutely. Because, you know, Olympics is the way we all, the world comes together just to think about the sports that keeps us together, really, at some level.

• 50:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it'd be great to have you back on when that time comes. All right, we gotta, we gotta call it quits there. Sorry, sorry, Edwin. We gotta run. Yeah.

• 50:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't want to talk no more.

• 50:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna run. We gotta hurry up out of here. Also, plus, it's pretty clear that Edwin was destined to greatness because the dude's name is Moses. Okay? Yeah. There you go. Deliver us from the desert. Edwin. So anyhow, we'll call it quits there. So Chuck, good to have you. Gary, as always. Pleasure. Dr. Edwin Moses, it's been an honor. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Keep working out.