Cheating in Sports

Lance Armstrong, the New England Patriots, steroids in baseball – Neil deGrasse Tyson investigates cheating in sports alongside co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly, Dr. Lee Igel, PhD from the Tisch Institute of Global Sport, and behavioral scientist Lisa Shu, 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. This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And this is StarTalk Sports Edition. And I got with me, as always, Chuck Nice.

• 0:26Chuck Nice?

  That's right, sir. What's happening?

• 0:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary O'Reilly. Gary, just in case people don't know, you were a once and future professional athlete.

• 0:34Chuck Nice?

  Allegedly.

• 0:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Allegedly.

• 0:36Chuck Nice?

  No, one of those things are true. The once.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The once.

• 0:40Chuck Nice?

  Right. It's definitely a past tense.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a past tense-y there. A footballer from the UK. Always good to have you on the show. And our topic this week, the future of cheating.

• 0:55Chuck Nice?

  Yay!

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On and or off the field.

• 0:58Chuck Nice?

  Finally, cheating is getting it too!

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cheating! Like, what's up with that?

• 1:03Chuck Nice?

  What's up with cheating?

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, it's not only the technology that might enable you to cheat, but the psychology of cheating as well. So that's what we're going to explore in these three segments. And as usual, we comb the region to find academic expertise, of which there's quite a bit, in the tri-state area of New York.

• 1:22Chuck Nice?

  Good place to get brain power.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  New York is such a good place. And we have Dr. Lee Eagle. Lee, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you for having me over. I gotta get this right. Clinical Associate Professor at the NYU Tisch Institute.

• 1:34Chuck Nice?

  Tisch.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For global support. Did I get that right? Global, yeah. That's correct. That's why I got it right, okay. And your research focuses on medical ethics, especially with regard to sports business. Yeah, it's one of the areas. Well, okay, so I didn't know anything about this. You guys got questions lined up.

• 1:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. What are the ethics? Because I would say that it's very possible to... It's a lot more difficult to be ethical as a doctor for a sports team, because you are... Pressured to get people back to work.

• 2:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're talking about ethics for him.

• 2:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, because there's a lot of, a lot of concern about cheating on the field, a lot of concern about cheating by players, but what about the doctors? What about them?

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, give me that drug.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  About them.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That new drug.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, get them out there. So there is, there's incredible physicians, on team physicians especially, most of them are hired by teams and that is what an enormous pressure to perform.

• 2:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  And, and to fit into the box because think about all the, all the different people who are coming in on that. You've got the player, you've got the coaches, you've got team ownership.

• 2:41Chuck Nice?

  Ownership, general management.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  General managers, the front office.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Advertisers at some level.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Advertisers and sponsors, family members, I mean, everybody's sort of coming in.

• 2:50Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  And going, okay, make that happen. So to make that call is, it's not so easy.

• 2:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm sure you would have a lot of people upset with you. Like I watch now, one of them, to me, it's a fascinating thing to watch in football games, the blue tent. This is the new thing now.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:07Chuck Nice?

  And a player gets injured, they take him into the blue tent and.

• 3:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't look, you can't.

• 3:12Chuck Nice?

  And you can't see what's going on.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the blue tent.

• 3:14Chuck Nice?

  What's going on in the blue tent? But I got a feeling what's going on in the blue tent is like, you think you can get back out there? I don't know. No, you can get back out there.

• 3:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Try some of this. You got an injection right here.

• 3:26Chuck Nice?

  How about now?

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So people go in all busted and broken and then they pop out five minutes later after the commercial break.

• 3:34Chuck Nice?

  Sometimes it happens that way. It does.

• 3:37Gary O'Reilly?

  And it's like that. At the, at the very high end, you might have towards the end of a season, you might be in a championship game, you might be in a playoff game. If you don't play the next game as an owner, as a coach, I'm probably not that concerned. I want the result now.

• 3:55Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:56Gary O'Reilly?

  So there's pressure. Just tell the athlete they're fine. They'll get through the game, they may not be a hundred percent, they may not be eighty percent, but that'll be enough.

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So do you study ethics in your own field?

• 4:07Speaker 02

  It's certainly, it's one of the areas. So I, I cover, I'm in sports business and.

• 4:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you get that answer? I said, do you, do you study this? It's one of the areas.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  It's one of the areas, yeah.

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you study this?

• 4:18Gary O'Reilly?

  That's good to know.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, okay.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  It's a professor, you know, so it's either three minutes or three hours, nothing in between.

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the answers, right.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  In terms of comments.

• 4:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 4:27Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, from that point of view that Chuck just asked you about talking to that man in your mirror. Let's come out of that and look at the sports business side of things. If I'm a world governing body, like the IOC, the IAAF, or FIFA, whoever it might be, and I'm enforcing all of these sanctions, these bans because of cheating, for whatever reason.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Punishment.

• 4:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Right?

• 4:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, punishment.

• 4:52Gary O'Reilly?

  But there I am, being investigated for corruption, for all sorts of misdemeanors and foul play. How is that balanced? How on earth do you get that to be in the right place? And how do the people in your organization say, well, I don't care, because you're the bad guy as well?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  You've got a bunch of different things going on. And again, same kind of thing. It's happening at a few different levels. And those pressures keep coming back in. So on one hand, when you talk about the different governing bodies, those organizations and institutions, even when we see corruption in those ranks, there's still something that the public looks at in terms of those bodies, because, you know, those are still the sanctioning bodies, they're still legitimate. And what they do, what their guidelines and laws are, what they stand for is still, there's a code that's there, and that's in place. What happens within that is, you know, the stuff we get to work on.

• 5:48Chuck Nice?

  What about organizational, I'll say, what's it called when you have kind of like a group think? But, you know, for instance, it's kind of, kind of well-known that Bill Belichick will do whatever is necessary.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Allegedly.

• 6:07Chuck Nice?

  Allegedly. To win. Bill Belichick, coach of the New England Patriots. And son of Satan.

• 6:16Chuck Nice?

  Everyone who doesn't live in New England. Says the Eagles fan.

• 6:21Chuck Nice?

  No, but I'm joking about that. He's a brilliant coach. But, you know, it's kind of bandied about that he can be as loose with the rules as anyone can be because his deal is the end justifies the means. If we walk off the field with a W, then I did the right thing, you know? What does that do to the team's psychology?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  That's an interesting thing because Bill Belichick is really a special case. And a coach like he is, is such a special case because the culture that he created and his ability to coach and to manage and to bring people along.

• 6:56Chuck Nice?

  It's a winning culture.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Because it's a winning culture and it's so different. He operates on a level that I think most people looking at it miss. You know, you sort of see him in the hoodie and a press conference. He's gruff and all these things, but you talk to the players who have played with him and coaches who have worked with him, they go, this is somebody who is really special and you know that he cares. So he can do some of the things that he does because the players know where it's coming from. And it's not just, you know, it's about, there's a line from Man of it. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. And that's a Bill Belichick thing.

• 7:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so I've got my win at all costs mentality in my organization. And you know what? Everybody loves a winner, by all accounts. So if you're able to sit in that organization and structure it so as you've still got winning mentality, but you're not blurring the lines of, well, is it cheating, isn't it? Well, let's do it and see if anyone catches up. How do you, and can you implement a culture within an organization and still have it as a winning mentality?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Well, that's a great question, because part of this is also, I think it was the great Homer Simpson, who said, "It's only cheating if you get caught."

• 8:08Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm. Ah. And then he said that because he got caught.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:12Chuck Nice?

  Don't.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  But, yeah, it really, it comes back down to, I think, really, that idea of culture and strategy and the relationship between them.

• 8:21Chuck Nice?

  All right, so let's say, for instance, that you're a person who has this winning culture, all right? Like, let's remove the strategy, but it's all about win, win, win, win, win. But at the same time, you are a very honorable person. You would never actually cheat. However, you've created an environment that is so pressure-filled that it incites cheating by your players. I mean, I think sometimes you see that in educational arenas or forums, like when a school is under a tremendous pressure to perform well on a standardized test. And then you find out, "All the teachers in the school cheated with the kids because they were under that much pressure."

• 9:05Speaker 02

  There it is. You know, it's interesting what people do in the moment, right? And I think you see this certainly in schools and all sorts of cases, where otherwise good people get caught doing something that they just wouldn't do. And if you had them in a room, there's, you know, in psychology, we call this the hot and cold environment. In the cold environment, when we're sort of sitting around going, "You know, would you ever do this?" "Oh, my goodness, I would never. I would never do that awful thing." And then, in the hot moment, when it's happening, you know, the things that we let go of and our better selves start to go away and other things come out. And that's really where you see it, whether it's in sports or it's in education.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how does your research play into this understanding?

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Well, right at it. I mean, something like what people do in different environments. A person who has no willingness to cheat when they're sitting in a room. It's one thing. Look at it. What happens when you're out there in that moment?

• 10:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's conditional ethics.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  It's conditional ethics.

• 10:08Chuck Nice?

  Situational ethics.

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I should say. Situational ethics.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Which is interesting because from the business side and the management side, that's all about ethics. It's this idea that what's permissible and what's allowed in certain environments. And the truth is, there really is ethics. I mean, ethics is ethics. There's right, there's wrong, and it's not so situational.

• 10:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Suppose there's an ethics that prevails today,

• 10:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  but it's not so ethical, but it's no longer a matter of ethics in five years. We've sort of worked past it. And I don't know what an example of that would be.

• 10:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so we've become...

• 10:46Chuck Nice?

  Being gay.

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 10:48Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, in sports.

• 10:49Chuck Nice?

  Being gay in sports.

• 10:50Gary O'Reilly?

  We have been desensitized.

• 10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Years ago, that would have been almost criminal. Right, in male sports.

• 10:55Gary O'Reilly?

  And there's still some sports where it's not gonna go particularly well if you come out as a gay athlete.

• 11:02Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's too bad, because I am coming out.

• 11:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Good.

• 11:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So even if we ain't on any seal at all.

• 11:07Chuck Nice?

  I don't care. I've never played a sport, and I'm not gay, but I'm coming out just because people don't like it.

• 11:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Are you happy now?

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you're happy.

• 11:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 11:17Chuck Nice?

  I'm very happy.

• 11:18Gary O'Reilly?

  So in the last 20 years, we have become desensitized to certain elements of low-level cheating. So in a football game, if I pulled an opponent's jersey, 20 years ago, whistle, stop, foul goes against me. Now, I could probably get away with it. Flopping during a game, shunned upon 20 years ago, now it's like, okay, you did that. And the game carries on.

• 11:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in basketball, there's a lot. I've seen, you know, when they're positioning themselves near the net, I've seen guys pull on their, you know, and it's small and minor, and you would never call it in the street.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? It's like, that's just part of the game, right? But it's clearly unethical.

• 11:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Clearly.

• 12:00Gary O'Reilly?

  So to your point, in X amount of years' time...

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We all allow it now. So do you study the arc of ethics over time?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. Yeah, because and that's I think that's an important point because you've got to have this context, right? We've got to have some historical context and understand how thing, a big thing is, why are people doing the things that they're doing? So we can understand where we're going next. And I think that's a big part of it.

• 12:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what, what, okay, so if everybody's cheating, is it your ethical responsibility to still not cheat? Or is it your sports responsibility to cheat like everybody else? Then you get to the, like I said, the Lance Armstrong, for example, when it finally came out that he was a cheater, and then he talked about it, when people sat down and listened to him, he described how everybody around him was cheating, the only way he could compete is if he cheated as well. And so if everybody's cheating, then no one talks about it, then the sport just becomes more and more of a spectator performance. And then you learn somebody's cheating, then, so how does that all settle out in the end?

• 13:02Chuck Nice?

  Really good point, because what you just said, everybody,

• 13:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We want performance.

• 13:06Chuck Nice?

  Everybody knows that football players are on steroids.

• 13:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We want performance.

• 13:11Chuck Nice?

  Period.

• 13:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We want it.

• 13:12Chuck Nice?

  There's not one team in the NFL where somebody on that team is not on steroids. But you take steroids in baseball, you have ruined the sport. It's like you're going to hell. So it's.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  So that one, that's an, it's all interesting pieces, but on that part, the NFL did something policy-wise about steroids and performance enhancing drugs a bunch of years before Major League Baseball ever did, and Major League Baseball had to figure it out after the fact, after it all came to light. And so that's the public pushback. And an upset is really over that. They had a policy, and they said, look, we've been busting these guys for a good long time, maybe not all of them, but we've got a policy in place. At least they can say, okay, there we go. Major League Baseball, different story. And I think that, that's something that plays with, with our ethics. In your research. And our morals, yeah.

• 14:08Chuck Nice?

  I mean, just having a police department. Even if they're not enforcing the law, Ashley does something to you psychologically to say, "Well, at least these guys are trying."

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yep. National Hockey League concussion policy. NFL, no concussion policy. You don't hear much about, you know, the same thing.

• 14:26Chuck Nice?

  You don't hear much about the concussions in the NHL. Because they have a policy.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  And forget international football.

• 14:30Gary O'Reilly?

  I know, they're getting there.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  They're getting there.

• 14:33Gary O'Reilly?

  So, in your research, have you, have you come to a point where you think there is a way to construct an environment where cheating will not take place?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Oh. I'm not so sure that we want that. And that's a little back to the point you were making earlier. I'm not so sure we want it. Sports is, you know, it's, it's a human endeavor. It's about human performance. And part of the frustration about Lance Armstrong is not, you know, one thing is that it took him a while to come to and say, "This is what I did, and that's why people aren't listening so much." But the other thing is that really, we thought there was this incredible human performance. And, and most of us have gotten out on a bicycle and ridden it and figured, "Okay, I know what that feels like to go to these places." And here's somebody who did it at a level way better than I did and, and could ever do. Are you the measure of how good Lance Armstrong is? Yeah. Of course.

• 15:29Chuck Nice?

  He was so good, he was better than me!

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Yes. I can't get through Central Park on, on a bicycle. But, um, but I think we all start to think about that. And, you know, it's why we can appreciate LeBron James. They've all been out shooting hoops at some point or another. And you go, "Okay, I get it." And there's that level of performance. And when somebody cuts at it and seems to have faked it, we go, "No, they didn't do it in, in a human way." But cheating is human. It's a really human thing. When somebody goes over the line, I'm not saying it's a good thing.

• 16:01Chuck Nice?

  I'm just being human.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  But it's a hu- but it's a human thing.

• 16:03Chuck Nice?

  I'm only human.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  And, um, and that's part of where we look at what happens with cheating and ethics, because it's usually little lies that people start with and they excuse. And when, and then they get bigger. And they get bigger and bigger and bigger. And, uh, that's where I think all this kind of stuff sits and settles. And I'm not sure that, uh, as much as we would think, sitting in that sort of cold room, we'd sort of go, "Yeah, yeah, get it all out." I think when we really sit there and watch it happen, uh, to see a little bit of the- I don't want to play your jersey. But, um, but I don't know.

• 16:40Chuck Nice?

  I've already pulled yours four times.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  But, um.

• 16:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what that reminds me of? There was a, this is now decade, two, three decades ago. Major League Baseball, an important game. There was a pitcher who the other team accused him of roughing up the ball with an Emery board.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 16:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 16:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he denied it. And then the umpire went out to the mound to have him empty his pockets. And so he went into the pocket and quickly threw the Emery board out of, he actually was rubbing it up with an Emery board. It fell out of his pocket on purpose, but the cameras on him, right? So, so the camera just sees the thing fly out of his pocket.

• 17:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Who'd have thought there'd be cameras at a game?

• 17:20Chuck Nice?

  Who'd have thought that baseball players would have pockets? What is that about?

• 17:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Where are you gonna put your stick boards?

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But this is a case where you can actually, you know, people are human and that they want to cheat. So you put in ways that disincentivize it, like a camera at every possible angle where you might have cheated. That's another way to do it.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, and now in the other part of the coin here, the other side of the coin is yes. I mean, we also want people to not go so far over the line, uh, in cheating that it ends up, you know, let's have cameras look at all these different angles so that it's at least a level playing field. That's the great thing about sports. It's all really at a point about a level playing field. We want to see where, you know, what people can do within that level playing field. Where can you push the bounds?

• 18:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One day I want to see a football game that's on a playing field that's not level and just see how that actually plays out.

• 18:10Chuck Nice?

  A downhill ball.

• 18:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Downhill ball.

• 18:11Chuck Nice?

  A downhill football.

• 18:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Seriously, back in the UK, we have, I played on a team, Brighton, where the field was not level. It went, you went uphill, downhill.

• 18:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was not a level playing field.

• 18:20Gary O'Reilly?

  No, never.

• 18:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta take a break. Uh, and we come back, we'll continue with our discussions on ethics, cheating in sports on Startalk.

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  O'Reilly. Yes. Nice. Hey. All right. Gary and Chuck. The gang's all here. The gang's all here. Band is back together. The band is back. We are... We're continuing our discussion of the future of cheating on and off the playing field.

• 19:18Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 19:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, I don't know if you've ever cheated on the field?

• 19:22Chuck Nice?

  Cheaters never win. They just, they just win the game.

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Possibly not. Possibly yes. Possibly yes, says our former professional athlete here. So, we gotta introduce somebody who thinks about this stuff. So, joining us for this conversation is Lisa Shue. Lisa, welcome, dialing in from London.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Thank you so much.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From London, right?

• 19:42Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. You're an organizational psychologist, an expert on motivations for cheating to get ahead in sports and perhaps other things, and you're at the London Business School. So, this is your ideal guest for this show. And so, let me just lead off with a question. Does...

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Almost everyone I competed against, as I used to wrestle, I used to row, I saw them cheat. And I realized they cared about winning in any, by any means, rather than actually winning the rules and actually winning.

• 20:20Chuck Nice?

  Winning, because if you cheat, you didn't win.

• 20:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I was so disappointed by that, and I thought, what is going through their heads about this? And so, so, you study these people's heads?

• 20:34Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. I study the mental acrobatics that we are able to perform internally to justify to ourselves that we are good people despite the fact that we sometimes or very oftentimes will break the rules in order to get ahead.

• 20:54Chuck Nice?

  Well, now, is there a specific personality that is more prone to cheat? Because I've noticed in certain types of people,

• 21:06Chuck Nice?

  like, for instance, you're, let's not say we're competing at sports, just a game of chess, or checkers, or cards. And a person is that type of competitor where, when they see that they are about to lose, they start changing the rules, or doing something crazy, you know what I mean? Right, right. Their personality changes. Their personality changes. Right, right. Oh, you can't do that, you can't do that. Right. And you're like, whoa, wait a minute, what is going, so is there, who are these people?

• 21:34Speaker 04

  Who are these cheaters? Well, it turns out that cheaters are made, cheaters are not born. Cheaters are made by the environment that surrounds them. In fact, most cheaters probably don't think of themselves as cheaters, because, you know, they virtuously see themselves as someone who just worked hard, hustled, does whatever it takes to get ahead. They might not even see their behavior, or label it as cheating. So, yes, we call them cheaters. We see from the outside that their behaviors are impermissible, or, you know, rule, boundary crossing. But inside their own heads, it's this watertight narrative that they're good people who don't cheat.

• 22:19Chuck Nice?

  So they're, they're not only cheaters, they're delusional.

• 22:23Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 22:24Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay. So now, what, what, what really, what you just said, Neil, really sparked something in me. You said you're looking at these people, you're seeing them cheat. And I've had the same experience, not in like rowing, but in just competition. And I don't want to win that way. Like, to me, I don't want to win that way, but... That's why you've always been a loser, Chuck.

• 22:50Chuck Nice?

  Touche, sir. Well played. That was good.

• 22:56Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm not quite sure what I say at this moment.

• 22:58Chuck Nice?

  No, no, that's good. So, no, but here's my point. Is it possible, if Neil were a different person, that he would then say, "Well, I need to cheat now."

• 23:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 23:09Chuck Nice?

  You see?

• 23:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this a domino effect?

• 23:11Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. So it's like, "Well, look at this. Everybody around me is cheating, so they have a competitive edge, which makes me less competitive. So I need to cheat now, so I can be competitive, because I'm actually better than that guy.

• 23:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was...

• 23:23Chuck Nice?

  He's just cheating.

• 23:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was Lance Armstrong's argument.

• 23:26Chuck Nice?

  Was it? Yes.

• 23:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 23:28Chuck Nice?

  Yes. He looked around and saw, "Everybody's cheating." And the only way he could hang with them is if he cheated too. So, so, so he got made in this sense, right?

• 23:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  That's right. It's the environment that you enter. You become very blindsided by what the norms are. And then what's normal just becomes okay, regardless of whether or not the norm is, you know, that everyone cheats to get ahead. So you don't even see this anymore once you're so embedded in this environment.

• 24:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In physics, we call that renormalizing a function. When you renormalize it, it is, the function is doing something over here instead of over here. So you perform operations on it. Now that's the new place where it is. And when you do that, you lose all sense of where the thing was or how it used to function.

• 24:18Gary O'Reilly?

  You become anesthetized to the situation around you. So, I mean, and now I think we're desensitized to some of the minor cheating that goes on, not so much performance enhancing, but gaining advantage during an athletic performance or whatever it is.

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how do you fix it?

• 24:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't just tell us it exists. Give us solutions here.

• 24:41Speaker 04

  Absolutely. The solution is that we need to reawaken people to their blind spots. You know, once you're embedded in environments where cheating is the norm, you can't even see outside of that, right? So it does take an external environment, or it takes an external actor from an outside environment to say, wait a minute, these norms are not sustainable, they're not okay. And everyone is being blindsided by the fact that cheating is normalized within this environment. We continuously underestimate just how important the environment is as a driver of our behavior.

• 25:22Speaker 04

  We tend to think that, you know, we're good people, we're motivated to do well and do good, and that it doesn't matter how challenging, how morally challenging the environments we put ourselves into are. But the fact of the matter is, sometimes it's the number one driver of our behavior. And it doesn't matter how strongly we believe our standards will never, ever change. We don't even notice them changing. We become morally disengaged without noticing.

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got an important question. Okay. If, am I cheating if I figure out a way to gain an advantage over you that the people who make the rules have not yet noticed should be outlawed? Loopholing. Loophole, yeah, a loophole. So, so let me make this up, for example. Let's say I'm about to go to a swimming contest, and I take a five-minute hit of pure oxygen. Okay? That's not going to show up in a drug test. No, it's not. But now I have oxygen completely throughout me, and I don't know if that would work, but let's imagine it does. Imagine it does. And that enhances your performance. And I win. Did I cheat?

• 26:32Speaker 04

  So it depends on whether we're going by the definition of the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. By the letter of the law, you have not cheated.

• 26:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the loophole.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  There's not something that has outlawed you from doing that specific action. But by the spirit of the law, absolutely, you've done something to gain an unfair advantage. So it depends on how we define this for ourselves. And as individuals who are tempted to cheat, we would definitely define this by the letter of the law, right?

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I got another example. In NASCAR, okay? There was, there are very strict rules about the size and proportions and weight and everything, and how much, how big your gas tank is, okay? Well, I, I've read about this, I'm, you know, I'm not... A NASCAR fanatic or anything, but I know a couple of things. And apparently, they designed the fuel hose from the gas tank to the engine to be really long.

• 27:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh, weight distribution.

• 27:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, no, no, not weight distribution. No, no, just more gas.

• 27:36Chuck Nice?

  More gas!

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you, if you-

• 27:38Chuck Nice?

  When you fill it, you gotta fill the hose too.

• 27:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The hose too?

• 27:40Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, if you take one less pit stop because of it, that's your rate. So, that's engineers being clever.

• 27:49Chuck Nice?

  It's their job.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but you're still saying it's not fair. It's not, it's-

• 27:53Speaker 04

  So, you have to ask yourself, is it a level playing field? Can anyone else have access to engineers who would, you know, soup up their vehicle?

• 28:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then I'm gonna say that's not cheating then, because- I'm smarter than you. You're smarter.

• 28:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's different. Okay. While we discuss this, is cheating a ser- a random act? Or does cheating come in a, in like a recognizable pattern?

• 28:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I like that, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 04

  Unfortunately, cheating is not a random act. So, I mentioned earlier that cheaters are made, they are not born cheaters. But once we find ourselves in a situation where we, you know, trespass a moral rule, we morally disengage. I mentioned the mental acrobatics earlier. We're able to convince ourselves that our actions are a- actually moral and ethical, and it's okay. And what that represents is a downgrading of your moral standards, so that you don't feel any discomfort with your sketchy actions and the moral code that you, you know, think you possess.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  So, over time, we cheat once, then we make excuses for our cheating behavior. We downgrade our moral code of ethics. We think more things are morally permissible. And what this happens is-

• 29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Slippery slope.

• 29:15Speaker 04

  What happens in time is a downward spiral of-

• 29:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Decreasing ethical standards, more permissible behaviors, and greater disregard, and a bigger blind spot for moral rules.

• 29:29Chuck Nice?

  So, let me ask you this.

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, bumming me out.

• 29:31Chuck Nice?

  What is more, what is a more effective means of stopping, uh, cheating? Is it- Group shame, in other words, to be found out that you're a cheater amongst your peers and to suffer the embarrassment of them now knowing that you are not what you are. Or a police action. For instance, if we're all on the highway and everybody's doing 85 miles an hour and you feel like, well, everybody's going 85 miles an hour. But then you see flashing lights in the distance, everyone hits their brake because they all know they're doing something wrong. Everybody knows they're doing something wrong, otherwise they would continue going 85 miles an hour. Right. So that's the police action.

• 30:14Chuck Nice?

  But the group would be if you're heading down the highway at 85 miles an hour, everybody else is doing 60 miles an hour, and they're all beeping their horn at you, like, you crazy maniac, what the hell are you doing? That's a public shame. That's a public shame. And then you decide, well, clearly I'm doing something wrong, let me stop. Which is more effective?

• 30:32Speaker 04

  Public shame is super effective. We are social animals and we've evolved to be. So the most threatening thing that we can perceive is a set of eyes on us, right? So our peer group judging us. So one, the threat of like one police officer, like, all right, I'll pay the fine, but that's really about avoiding this behavior so I don't get caught. Whereas the threat of public shame is just so visceral, you know, as primates, we are wired to really want to avoid this bad thing, this public shame from our peers.

• 31:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Say for instance, say for instance, I'd been cheating for 10 years and got away with it for 9.99 part of those years. Would it be the best course of action to actually punish me? Because if you do, you tell everybody in the watching world what I've been doing, how successful I've been at it, and you also tell them where I failed, which then allows them the advantage.

• 31:34Chuck Nice?

  To be a better cheater than you?

• 31:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes. Yes. So is that then punishing always the best course of action?

• 31:44Speaker 04

  So I think the punishment sets a greater precedence for the future. So and that is really the value of the public, you know, domain noticing that cheating is not okay and really sanctioning the behavior. So you're setting a precedent for future groups that this is not excusable, that this is not how we get ahead.

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except, except you only know when he's cheating. You only know that he cheated when you find out. So, so it's a one-tailed statistical distribution. Here are all these cheaters, you shouldn't do it. How about all the other people who are actively cheating right now and you have no clue?

• 32:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's, there's no, there's, there's nothing to do with them because you don't even know who they are.

• 32:34Chuck Nice?

  You have an idea. So then that, so the argument there would be you make even a greater example of the people that you catch as a warning to the people who are already cheating in hopes that they may say, look, I gotta stop this. Like what was the woman, the track star? She was beloved.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you don't mean Flojo?

• 32:53Chuck Nice?

  Flojo, yes. With the nails. With the nails. Just hearing you say her name, my heart sunk just a little bit because that's how beloved she was. And she had to disappear. She had to go away because people loved her so much and when they found out that she cheated and she was like, yes, I'm sorry I cheated.

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, what, I mean, testosterone?

• 33:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, she was taking something. I don't know. It was, it was some kind of substance that she was taking.

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, you're, you're in a business school. So do you also consider, for example, how and why Volkswagen cheated on their emissions standards?

• 33:29Speaker 04

  Right. So sometimes companies and individuals within companies tell them that their cheating is tied to a greater good. And corporate matters, they manage to do this. Oftentimes they say, you know, we're creating value for shareholders. We have a fiduciary duty to take care of.

• 33:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the narrative you're talking about.

• 33:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Rationalizing, yeah.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 33:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the narrative.

• 33:58Speaker 04

  The mental acrobatics are amazing. It provides this watertight excuse for the individual to justify themselves that actually my actions are serving a greater good. And, you know, it would be wrong not to misreport. And this is how the psychology of a cheater works. It becomes very cyclical and it really feeds upon itself. So I, I will emphasize that cheaters are made, they are not born. So it takes a couple of these iteration loops for cheaters to, you know, continue along their downward spiral.

• 34:39Chuck Nice?

  We've got to make sure that our shareholders are able to re, re-decorate their, their vacation homes and then these people need boats. They need boats.

• 34:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Large boats.

• 34:49Chuck Nice?

  Large boats.

• 34:51Gary O'Reilly?

  And many.

• 34:51Chuck Nice?

  We're doing a, we're doing a public service.

• 34:54Speaker 04

  That's right. That's right.

• 34:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Are we ever gonna, are we ever gonna cure sport of cheating? Or do we just say, give up, let them all have a go?

• 35:02Speaker 04

  Oh gosh, that's a big one. So let's think about the system that sports sit in. So all the managers, all the partners, all the owners of these sports teams. Will anyone ever just say, we'll just give up on this because it's too messy. You know, let's just start anew. How are we going to convince all these actors that it's better to walk away, make a fresh start than, you know, all these people who are invested really in doing whatever it takes to get ahead? So you're, you're talking about reforming an entire system, like overthrowing.

• 35:42Chuck Nice?

  So, so your answer is it's never gonna happen.

• 35:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you.

• 35:46Chuck Nice?

  As long as there's this much money involved, it's never gonna happen.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I would, I, I would, I'm gonna, I think there's a middle ground, not exactly in the middle, but, but, you know, more in, in your direction of honesty, but still, I, I'd like, I want to leave open ingenuity.

• 36:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just want to leave that open. So here are the rules of the sport. And I do, I figure something out really clever. And it gives me an advantage. Don't punish me. Say, hey, that was really cool. That was brilliant. Maybe it can be shared with others. I don't have a problem with that. The whole sport benefits. Right? And then the, then the paying public sees a better performance.

• 36:25Chuck Nice?

  Or they shut your loophole down and then go forward without it.

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a, that's a tact that I don't know is in the best interest of the sport. If I figure out, think about this. People talk about steroids and everything. Let's go back in time. If I'm the first to figure out that if I lift weights, I get stronger, thereby making me better at my sport, did I just cheat? No, your lazy ass didn't figure out that that would be, that would be something that could work. I figured it out. So I will have a temporary advantage over a certain amount of time until everybody does.

• 36:57Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's kind of how that's been, right? I mean, so, so, and no one said, wait, whipping weights is illegal because you, by the way, you change your body chemistry, which you did. You change your, your molecular constitution, which you did.

• 37:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you changed your diet because you needed higher protein, which you did.

• 37:15Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? This is stuff you did to yourself. No, it's not called steroids. It's called pumping iron. You did it. I don't want somebody to say that I cheated because I figured out that that was something to do. How do you feel about that?

• 37:30Speaker 04

  So I think what's key to your argument is that it's a temporary advantage, right?

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  So the idea there is that the tide can rise together and everyone can surf these big waves, these bigger waves than they could surf before. Um, and I think that scenario sounds like innovation more than cheating.

• 37:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay. Uh, yeah. Yeah.

• 37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good.

• 37:53Chuck Nice?

  Whereas the steroids, the problem with the steroids is that, one, they're a health threat. So you are putting your health at risk, which we can never condone as a sanctioning body for anything.

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 38:04Chuck Nice?

  And two, giving you that advantage inspires others to put their health at risk because they now have to compete with you.

• 38:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm. Uh, we, we gotta like wrap up this segment. But, but do you have any like final thoughts for us? Cause you, you totally bummed us out this whole segment.

• 38:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give us something hopeful that we can close out this segment with.

• 38:26Chuck Nice?

  And take as much time as you want because we're out of time. So that'll be cheating.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  Well, there's much reason to be hopeful. I think so many organizations, you know, schools, businesses, governments are designing their organizations from first principles in mind, right? So from the very top, they care about the values that they want to see and then the behaviors that map onto those values. So having that one-to-one correspondence between what you believe and what you want to see in the behavior of people who work in the organization, I think that's so important that we're making, you know, movement in that direction.

• 39:17Speaker 04

  The other thing is that I think we're more aware that we all have blind spots, right? Whether that's like biases or just a proneness, you know, I'm a professor. I know that I have a blind spot to one side of the class and I always call on the left side of the classroom. Something as innocuous as that to much greater blind spots, like in our moral decision-making. I think as a society, we're becoming more and more educated in all the things that we don't see. And that's one of the first steps to noticing these moral trespasses. The first step is just noticing that the organization or the company that you just joined

• 40:01Speaker 04

  might have morally questionable standards, right? Because without noticing, you would just get pulled into it. So just the fact that we have more education around this, I think is a very hopeful, promising direction for the future.

• 40:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody be a whistleblower.

• 40:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Eyes wide open.

• 40:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's something for you to think about in the future, the day we then have designer babies. You can design a baby to be exceptional at soccer or at basketball. Is that cheating? The genetic profile is still human, but we, but I'll leave that for you. But that's our next phone call. Yeah, exactly. Gene editing cheating. Gene cheating.

• 40:41Gary O'Reilly?

  If you're born that way, is it cheating?

• 40:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, born this way, you're not cheating anybody. You're just you. It's your parents that did it. My parents cheated.

• 40:52Chuck Nice?

  I was just born like this.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, okay, we gotta, we gotta break it there. So Lisa, thank you for joining us and we'd, we'd love to tap back into your expertise at another time because we, we think about sports a lot in, in these editions. Yeah. And we'll, we'll definitely find you again.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having me. This has been so much fun.

• 41:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Professor. Okay. When we come back, more StarTalk Sports Edition.

• 41:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk, the final segment, uh, cheating in sports. Gary, Chuck. Yes. Had some serious content that we just went through.

• 41:53Gary O'Reilly?

  We have. I mean, Dr. Lisa Shu and Lee Eagle were discussing cheating and the forms of which it comes forward. I, I just, if you cheat, if you don't cheat.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can't believe you have, you took notes. Good for him. Look, look, it's got cosmic pictures on it.

• 42:11Gary O'Reilly?

  I know.

• 42:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very proud of you, very proud of you.

• 42:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, yeah, you're gonna criticize my handwriting. If you don't cheat, you don't win.

• 42:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, we'll let the world criticize your handwriting. I won't have to.

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, you in third grade?

• 42:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Just.

• 42:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go.

• 42:25Gary O'Reilly?

  So, okay, cheaters are made, they're not born.

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And they're mostly made by Bill Belichick.

• 42:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, says the Eagles fan.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Oh, oh.

• 42:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 42:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, so I, I think that for me, the big lesson there was honest people can cheat by talking themselves into thinking they're not cheating. Right. And what we, in mathematics, we call that renormalization. Renormalization. Yeah, not in reference to cheating, but reference to mathematical functions. If the function is like in another place. Right. And it has to be sort of scaled properly, you sort of renormalize it to that new place. And then all the things reference that, all the new parameters. Got you. Leaving the old ones behind. So if you renormalize your moral code, you have a new baseline. Right. And now you'll be cheating at that baseline and you won't even call it cheating. That was fascinating to me to learn this. Yeah, I mean.

• 43:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the mental gymnastics that people go through.

• 43:23Gary O'Reilly?

  But then again, you lose sight of what was originally considered zero.

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the drift.

• 43:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 43:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's the slippery slope. The drift away from your moral code, from your compass.

• 43:36Gary O'Reilly?

  So if everybody around you is cheating, you readapt to become part of that environment because you can't be competitive.

• 43:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's one motivation, but another one is you just want to win. Right. It's not just because, it's not only if everyone else is doing it, it's because you want to come out ahead of everybody. If everyone else is doing it, you're doing it just so you don't lose.

• 43:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Buy as much, yeah.

• 43:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Buy as much. Right. Yeah, it's the any means necessary. Yeah, yeah, and with the ends justified. Justifies the means. Justified the means. What I don't think they had a good answer for me when I noted, suppose you cheat without breaking the rules. Right. So the NASCAR example with the. With the long fuel line. The long fuel line.

• 44:18Gary O'Reilly?

  And the first guy who pushed iron, the first guy who lifted weights.

• 44:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's another one. Right. The person that figures out if I go to the gym. Right. And lift weights. Mm hmm. I can get bigger muscles. Right. And I can kick your ass or be faster than you or stronger than you. And that gives me an advantage. And by the way, I am changing the chemistry of my body when I build my muscles. When I lift weights, my body's, oh shit, I need, we need, we got to build these muscles. The chemistry changes. It uses the proteins in different ways to build higher crust, more, bigger muscle tissue. And there you go. Is that cheating? Uh, no, I'd say no. So. I say no, because quite frankly, what you're doing is, I call that ingenuity. I don't call that cheating. That's what I call that.

• 45:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so here we.

• 45:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good. I like that.

• 45:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Here's the issue. Here's the two sides of the coin. One is the letter of the law, the other is the spirit.

• 45:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 45:14Gary O'Reilly?

  And this is where you get arguments on both sides which are valid.

• 45:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me play devil's advocate here. I think there's a, I don't really believe this, but let me just put it on the table. Okay. Okay. Is lifting weights and drinking a cup of coffee in the morning really any different from taking steroids? When you're both chemically changing your body to give you an advantage over whatever you would have performed without it?

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're both chemical changes in your body. Except there happens to be a law against steroids. There's no law against caffeine or lifting weights. So how arbitrary is this rule?

• 45:49Chuck Nice?

  So I think the law-

• 45:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the big picture.

• 45:51Chuck Nice?

  I think the law against steroids has more to do- Because I used to be a person who said, and I think we did a show where I said, "I don't care if my athletes are on steroids." Because quite frankly, what I want to see is optimum performance on the field.

• 46:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you see, from the 80s, Saturday Night Live skit?

• 46:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 46:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With Hans and Franz.

• 46:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 46:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The bodybuilders.

• 46:09Chuck Nice?

  Daz.

• 46:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, and so the two of them, in one of the skits, it's an Olympic or some competitive event where all chemical enhancements are allowed. In fact, are encouraged, okay? So they come out extra big and they go to do a deadlift. And he goes and pulls. And the announcer says, "Oh, he pulled his arms off his body." And the two arms are stuck on the weight and blood is spurting out of his shoulders. "Oh, too bad."

• 46:36Chuck Nice?

  See, to me, that's the way weightlifters should be. See, that's where, that's what I'm saying. Now I'm interested in weightlifting. That's all. Like, you know. But I, I, I changed my mind because I forget who we were talking to from NYU University who said, "The real problem is..."

• 46:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Arthur Kaplan.

• 46:53Chuck Nice?

  Arthur Kaplan. Said, "The real problem is not the performance, but the fact that it is harmful and you're sanctioning harmful behavior by athletes."

• 47:05Gary O'Reilly?

  I think he was, he probably still is, Director of Medical Ethics at NYU.

• 47:11Chuck Nice?

  At NYU.

• 47:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 47:12Chuck Nice?

  Director of Medical Ethics.

• 47:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 47:13Chuck Nice?

  So, you know, we had a conversation with him and basically he was like, "Look, it's about the fact that these are dangerous drugs that you're saying it would be okay for them to use, which means that young people who now get into the sport are also going to use those dangerous drugs."

• 47:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Suppose the drugs weren't dangerous. Suppose I get to program your DNA in utero.

• 47:28Chuck Nice?

  I have no problem with that.

• 47:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, then, okay.

• 47:31Chuck Nice?

  See, I think that's perfectly fine. Like, if, you know, I mean, clearly you could look at me and you could see that I was designed to be a superior athlete while I was in the womb.

• 47:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then he woke up.

• 47:43Gary O'Reilly?

  That's another show. So then, then we get to that point where we pull the rug from underneath. Cheaters aren't born.

• 47:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, right, that changes that phrase.

• 47:54Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 47:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cheaters are boring. No, well, no, no, they're not.

• 47:57Chuck Nice?

  Well, you're not, you're not cheating.

• 47:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's your fault that somebody else.

• 48:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 48:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, no, but if you do that intentionally. Oh, if, if, if.

• 48:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or if you do it later even.

• 48:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, you can retrofit this apparently, or they're looking towards doing that.

• 48:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why not?

• 48:11Gary O'Reilly?

  If you were to be able to construct with this in mind.

• 48:16Chuck Nice?

  But we do that now. We do it with diet and sleep and certain.

• 48:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is my point.

• 48:21Chuck Nice?

  We're doing it. We're already doing it.

• 48:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do marathon runners do when they carbo load the night before?

• 48:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 48:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely changing their chemistry.

• 48:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Loading basic sugars into their bloodstream, ready and accessible for their muscles.

• 48:32Gary O'Reilly?

  But is that harmful to their body?

• 48:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's the problem. It's not. I can't claim to have ever seen a marathon runner when I say, that's a healthy person.

• 48:42Chuck Nice?

  So.

• 48:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm intrigued as what the future of that will be.

• 48:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 48:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what intrigues me. Now, here's the thing. May, okay, I'm gonna set up a new rule.

• 48:51Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 48:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Start talk rule of competition.

• 48:54Chuck Nice?

  Oh, sweet.

• 48:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let's take our cue from NASCAR. In NASCAR, the car is an exact prescribed weight.

• 49:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 49:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and if, I even think if you're a light driver, you gotta carry extra lead in the car. So that every car weighs the same, even with driver. Okay, I think if my memory serves, that's true. It's certainly true in horse racing.

• 49:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 49:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 49:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Handicapping.

• 49:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta, it's a handicap. Okay, you put the, the pouches have, carry weights. All right, so, maybe. Anything is allowed, provided it doesn't harm you in any real way. Anything is allowed, provided everyone knows what you did.

• 49:32Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 49:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then everybody's on the same playing field.

• 49:34Chuck Nice?

  Full disclosure.

• 49:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Full disclosure. How about that? Then the spirit of cheating evaporates completely, because cheaters are doing something that you don't know they're doing.

• 49:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 49:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're reading the answers off the palm of their hand during the test.

• 49:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 49:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They got some earpiece.

• 49:49Chuck Nice?

  Before they pitch it.

• 49:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scratching it, licking it, whatever.

• 49:52Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 49:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Maybe that's how you have to do it.

• 49:55Chuck Nice?

  That's one spitball I wanna see thrown, where they lick the baseball first.

• 50:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, that's, wait, wait, it's kinda what they do when they lick their finger.

• 50:03Chuck Nice?

  That's true.

• 50:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then, okay, you know how that rule where he's, he's from Britain, you know the rule?

• 50:07Gary O'Reilly?

  No.

• 50:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you can touch your fing, the last I knew the rule, you can touch your finger to your mouth. The pitcher can do that as long as you're not on the mound. Oh, right. So that puts a slight time delay. Right. Between the spit that's on your fingers. You gotta be able to let that spit dry. You gotta really hawk a serious loogie. Oh, thank you. To work your way back to the mound and still have it there when you pick, when you touch the ball. Ew. I know, I'm just saying. This ball is nasty. It's nasty. Nasty. No, no, nasty, nasty.

• 50:37Gary O'Reilly?

  So the thing is, if you, if you want to create a change within an environment that you know is rife with cheating, is the change gonna come from inside? Or does it have to be an external presence that changes what is going on in an environment?

• 50:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about this? Did Fosbury.

• 50:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Dick Fosbury.

• 51:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dick Fosbury, excuse me. Oh, the Fosbury flop. Did he cheat when he introduced the Fosbury flop to the world? See, yeah, I, once again, I call that ingenuity. Let me tell you. That's somebody who looked at it out of the box and said, why do we have to do it that way? For those who are not old enough, and he, the high jump.

• 51:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 51:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was previous to him, always done with your belly curling over the bar.

• 51:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 51:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Face down. Face down. And then he decided to go backwards over the bar. Now, do you know why that works? I'll tell you why. Please do. All right. What matters is how much energy does it take to elevate your center of mass, the center of mass of your body? If you're just standing there, the center of mass is like in your navel somewhere, in the center of your body, on the other side of your navel. If you curl your body, making sort of a hemicycle, the center of mass leaves your body and is in the air in between the curved of your body. Okay? Uh huh, okay. The center of mass is the center point of where all your mass would, if I rotated you, you'd rotate around that point. Got you, so since you're curled.

• 52:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so watch, so forward, you can only bend at your waist and a little bit forward on your, on your, on your torso, but your knees are not bending. That's right. The other way. They can't bend that way. You can't bend that way. So your knees have to go over straight. Whereas in the Fosbury flop, any flexible athlete can bend backwards. From their spine.

• 52:25Chuck Nice?

  And they kick.

• 52:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And bend at the base of their spine. And bend at the knees. So they can create a tighter curl over the bar.

• 52:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 52:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sending their center of mass below the bar while jumping to a higher bar than ever before. So he figured out the physics and I have said continuously that the pole vault.

• 52:47Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Needs to do that to add another foot to the world record. They're already backwards to the ground.

• 52:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 52:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Going up, but what do they do? They twist and turn, do the hokey pokey.

• 52:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 52:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they go over the... What's, what's up with that?

• 53:02Chuck Nice?

  Right. And I have always said that the pole vault should just stop.

• 53:07Gary O'Reilly?

  I, I think we should, I think we should.

• 53:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, our man.

• 53:11Chuck Nice?

  How is that a sport?

• 53:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse, excuse me. Excuse me.

• 53:13Chuck Nice?

  How is that a sport?

• 53:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Buzz Aldrin pole vaulted when he was in school. Okay. A man on the moon.

• 53:20Chuck Nice?

  Just cause.

• 53:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give it to him.

• 53:21Chuck Nice?

  Just cause he's one of your boys doesn't mean that it's still a good sport.

• 53:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me. He's everybody's boy. He's Buzz Aldrin.

• 53:26Chuck Nice?

  Okay. Okay. That's true.

• 53:27Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm just thinking we get Chuck to.

• 53:28Chuck Nice?

  What did Buzz Lightyear play in high school? That's what I want to know. What?

• 53:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here's what I'm saying. So did he cheat? What should have happened was he should have said to everybody, I'm going over the bar this way for this Olympics. You can choose to do it or not.

• 53:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Right. As long as it's in the rules, it's doable.

• 53:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no, no. The rules aren't smart enough to figure out all the ways you can break the rules.

• 53:54Chuck Nice?

  Right. So physics are ahead of the rules is basically what you were saying. Physics are ahead of the rules.

• 53:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if he said that, that'd be interesting. Early rowers, all right? They would have a, they would grease a smooth surface. And their leather pants would slide back and forth on that grease surface.

• 54:13Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 54:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Until somebody invented a, a rolling chair.

• 54:17Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 54:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. That, all right.

• 54:20Chuck Nice?

  Not nearly as sexy as greased up leather pants, but hey, what do you gotta tell?

• 54:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a grease tight end. So all I'm saying is.

• 54:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Why did I know you were gonna go back to that? Why?

• 54:32Chuck Nice?

  I need more grease.

• 54:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Slap on the grease.

• 54:36Chuck Nice?

  Somebody get some more Crisco under my ass.

• 54:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And why did I know you weren't gonna leave it alone? So, what they'll do is they'll say, "We invented this new thing, and here it is. And you can follow us or not, but this is what we're using in this next Olympics, and it's okay with these rules." Yeah. And so, later on, if they want to change the rules, they did. Another one. Harvard. Okay. Their track. They had, they got engineers that said, "We want the fastest track in the world. How are we gonna create that?" So they took stroboscopic photos of runners running on pillows and running on hard concrete. Nice. And they looked at the musculoskeletal response function to that. And they said, "We need the best combination of rigidity and softness." Okay?

• 55:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they invented a new kind of track that returns more of your energy to you. In the recoil. So the track is like a spring. Basically, a track like a spring. But it's still your energy. It's still your energy that you're using.

• 55:37Chuck Nice?

  So there's no advantage to any one runner? That's the key.

• 55:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good one. So now watch what happens. People start breaking records, and they say, and the NCAA says, "We're not gonna honor records on this track." Right. So when was this track introduced? This was when I was in college, so the 70s. Yeah, so they had a thing called a limpene, and then it was, in Britain, it was a limpene and then tartan. I remember the tartan track. Yes, yes. And so, yeah. My father ran track. Right. On wooden track surfaces, indoor. Indoor, and if you fell, you got splinters all up your leg. So when he discovered it. Should've greased up. When he found a tartan track, he thought he died and went to heaven. Right. Because it was bouncy, it was springy, you can roll on it, you can fall on it. Because it was just gravel, basically compacted gravel before then. Also, you wouldn't need spikes.

• 56:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can still use cleats, but not sharp spikes. No, you just needed the smaller spikes. The smaller ones. That was it, yeah. Right. Yeah. But anyhow, so if you're, if you invent a new way to do it, I think disclosure is what it's about. Right. And in that way, everybody has the same rules, and it's up to you whether you want to follow it. That's the new Star Talk. Cheater rule.

• 56:44Chuck Nice?

  If it's up to, right. I mean, listen, it's, you see that happening. I'll, I'll just, I know we gotta wrap it up, but you look at football and the amazing catches that these wide receivers makes now, all of them wear these sticky gloves, but.

• 56:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've seen those gloves with the red surface. Have you ever, have you ever touched a football wearing one of those gloves?

• 57:02Chuck Nice?

  What, you can't shake it off? Can't shake the ball off?

• 57:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I think they used to put glue, goo on the hand.

• 57:08Chuck Nice?

  Well, they used to put a stickum.

• 57:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stickum, right, right. But, but these gloves, it's a very tactile.

• 57:13Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 57:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Surface.

• 57:14Chuck Nice?

  But my point is, everybody has the opportunity to wear the gloves.

• 57:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 57:18Chuck Nice?

  So it's no longer cheating.

• 57:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 57:20Chuck Nice?

  Level playing field. That's it!

• 57:22Speaker 05

  Oh!

• 57:23Chuck Nice?

  Thank you. All right, well, can't believe we just spent all this time.

• 57:28Chuck Nice?

  To get there. To get right there, and that's really what it's about.

• 57:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Level Playing Field episode of StarTalk. Gary, Chuck, thanks for doing this.

• 57:35Chuck Nice?

  A pleasure.

• 57:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As always. Uh, this has been StarTalk, the Athletes Cheaters Edition, and I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always saying, keep looking up.