Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast The Joy of Techno Science, with Rayvon Fouché About this episode How is technology changing sports? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice talk with author Rayvon Fouché to explore game-changing technology in the final episode of our Game Changers mini-series.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk Sports Edition, and today's episode is all about tech in sports. Let's in fact title it Tech Rules. And who do I have with me? My co-host, Gary O'Reilly. Gary?
0:31 Gary O'Reilly? Hey Neil.
0:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? God, love having you Gary, and we love your accent, straight from the UK. And that's not why we have you, it's because you're ex-pro footballer, soccer player, I think they, we call it over here. So, great to have you, your perspective, and you spent time as an announcer.
0:49 Gary O'Reilly? Yes.
0:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That was also good, very cool. I assume you were announcing soccer?
0:54 Gary O'Reilly? Yes.
0:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Not something else?
0:56 Gary O'Reilly? They wouldn't let me loose on the royal family, so I just had to stick with soccer.
1:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Royal family need, need full-time announcers for what they're up to. And Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always good to be here. And your, your body of knowledge of sports always impresses me. I don't want to say surprises, because that meant I had low expectations. You meant surprise.
1:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You have a fluency that I don't find with many comedians, I just want to thank you for lending that to this show. Yeah, sure. Very excellent. So, we, you know, we could opine on this subject, but really what we really need is a, an expert. That's what StarTalk is all about. Subject expert. Yes, subject expert, and we've got Professor Rayvon Fouché. Rayvon, welcome to StarTalk.
1:42 Speaker 02 Thanks so much for having me.
1:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Excellent, and you are professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies in Purdue University. That's the Boilermakers, right?
1:51 Speaker 02 It is.
1:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you guys in Indiana, if I remember correctly, you don't have daylight savings time there, is that still the case?
1:57 Speaker 02 I think some parts have daylight savings times, but I believe, you know, other parts don't, so we're, we're splitting the difference.
2:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't think it's supposed to work that way, but...
2:07 Speaker 02 We're embracing the interpretive flexibility of time here in the state of Indiana.
2:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, you're author of the perfectly titled book for this episode, The Game Changer. Yes. The Techno Scientific Revolution in Sports. All right. Okay? And also, Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation. Whoa, whoa, we gotta bring you back for that.
2:32 Chuck Nice? So you mean up until last year?
2:37 Chuck Nice? Oh, okay.
2:38 Speaker 02 That's good, Chuck. You're a bit ahead of me. I'm not sure it's ended yet.
2:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're not even sure that's happened yet.
2:43 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
2:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you have a PhD in science and technology from Cornell. It's great to have you on here. So thanks for for participating in our game changer series, which is sort of a sub series within our our sports edition. So interdisciplinary studies, that feels kind of sort of wishy washy. So where does the science fit into that?
3:05 Chuck Nice? Wow, man, why you gotta do that to my man's?
3:08 Speaker 02 Wishy washy.
3:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just ask him interdisciplinary.
3:11 Chuck Nice? How you gonna do that to his concentration? You know, interdisciplinary stuff. I mean, I'm just gonna say that's that's very, very weak and wimpy.
3:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That is not what I said. I said, I'm trying to understand it, asking questions.
3:24 Chuck Nice? All right, all right.
3:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So take me there. What happens in interdisciplinary studies?
3:28 Speaker 02 So Neil, you should be the biggest champion of interdisciplinary studies. It's just bringing together multiple different disciplinary perspectives and asking questions that are bigger and larger than one disciplinary space.
3:40 Chuck Nice? Oh, snap. So it's like the cosmic perspective for science itself.
3:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, it's.
3:48 Chuck Nice? Oh, shoot.
3:50 Speaker 02 Thank you. Thanks, Chuck. That was great.
3:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, that was good, but I wouldn't give it a an oh snap. I mean, I would save the oh snap for, you know, and there's the z snap, you know, you gotta.
4:03 Gary O'Reilly? Guys, just wait there. I'm gonna get the snapometer. That's just behind me. I'll bring it in and we can wear it since it registers on the sky.
4:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. So how far back would you say technology has impacted sports? I can tell you, I used to row and I was only told about this. I never read it because I didn't want to believe it, but that there was a day when rowers, before they had the seat that rolled, okay, the sliding seat, they would grease your butt and you would slide back and forth on a polished surface when you rode. And I'm thinking, damn, but at that time, would that have been considered high tech? You know, friction, low friction, grease, butt sliding, increasing power to the stroke. At what point do we say sports has been touched by technology?
4:57 Speaker 02 My my perspective is. Technology influences sport from the beginning. So roughly 3000 B.C. They have instances of wrestling, Greco-Roman wrestling, bodies and arms. And the moment, I would say, you potentially move past that moment of people using their bodies and arms, you have a ball, a piece of equipment of any kind, it becomes technological. And all of a sudden, that changes the nature of sport. All of a sudden, you go from using your own body to playing with something else that can be manipulated by an athlete, a competitor. Technology enters the game.
5:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it's a tool. It could be material science or anything else.
5:42 Speaker 02 Yes, and...
5:43 Chuck Nice? Okay. So when they started oiling themselves with olive oil, that was a technological advancement for Greco-Roman wrestling.
5:52 Speaker 02 Exactly, because you know olive oil comes in many different forms. It can be Spanish, Italian, and it depends on what part of the world you're from. You know, maybe Italian oil is better than Spanish oil, I don't know.
6:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But, all right, but when we move forward in time, there are certain sports that feel distinctly backwards. You know, I think of baseball, they're still using leather, you have to kill an animal for your leather glove. The ball is leather, it's got rubber bands on the inside. They spit, they use pine tar resin, you know, and I'm thinking, was any of that ever considered modern? Because right now, that stuff looks old.
6:31 Speaker 02 I think it's tremendously modern, right? The baseball bat has gone through multiple evolutions in time, from very simple wood...
6:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Two by four.
6:40 Speaker 02 Wood sticks.
6:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just get your two by four out.
6:43 Speaker 02 To now, you go to places like Louisville, Louisville Slugger, the engineering of the bats is very, very serious and thoughtful about the woods that are being chosen, how and where the wood is being cultivated. It is deeply techno-scientific, as well as the ball, right? The ball is going through, has gone through multiple iterations, even down to the more recent instances of people talking about the baseball being juiced. And a lot of some more recent research has been studying the seams of the ball. And the question is... You know, how the ball has changed and evolved over time is part of this continual techno-scientific evolution. You can't get the same leather that the ball was made out of 100 years ago because you killed all, we've killed all those cows. And eventually.
7:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But cows today are fatter, so maybe their leather, their skin is thinner, I don't know.
7:32 Speaker 02 True, and, but tanning is a kind of old-school technology, right? Early, late 19th, early 20th century. And a lot of the materials are still being tanned by the same few factories in the United States. Orween is one factory that tans for the NBA balls and also NFL footballs. So they're trying to maintain the continuity, but I would say very deeply technological and scientific.
7:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's, it's weird, I wanna, I know Chuck and Gary have questions, but it's, it's weird to think that they want to be consistent with the past, but for example, they've now, they've changed the athlete's diet, they've changed their exercise regimen, they've changed the medicine surrounding it. Oh, but the ball has to be exactly the same, and this has to be exactly the same. So it's weird that the body is allowed to change, but the other stuff related to the sport isn't. To me, that looks very inconsistent.
8:26 Speaker 02 I, I agree with you completely, it's totally inconsistent. Ball is not the same as it was 100 years ago. The bat is not the same.
8:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
8:33 Speaker 02 And.
8:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, in fact, the mound in a baseball field is six inches lower than it used to be, right? I mean, they're changing stuff, so don't pretend like it's all pure, right? So Chuck, what do you got? Gary?
8:44 Chuck Nice? I wanna know if, if you, speaking of things changing, is there a technological advancement that can be too much, too soon, too fast, so that you have altered the game in such a way where the spirit of the competition is compromised?
9:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ooh, that sounds like, like, like you rehearsed that question.
9:06 Chuck Nice? No, I just thought.
9:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That sound like, show all work, yes, compare and contrast.
9:12 Chuck Nice? No, that popped into, that popped into my head.
9:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He's gonna use that question on the next exam he administers, you know it.
9:19 Chuck Nice? But no, because you guys were just talking about, everything has changed. But you know, those changes are kind of gradual, so could it happen in such a way that, you know, you look at it and you say, nope, that's too advanced, that's too much changed. Then you've, you're changing the spirit of the competition itself.
9:35 Speaker 02 Yes, absolutely. I mean, there have been multiple instances where the technology has changed the, the, the understanding of the sport. One of the biggest examples in recent past is the Speedo laser racer swimsuit, which changed the nature of the competition from individual bodies to the question about who is using which existing suit? Who is using which new technology? So you have world championships in, say, 2009, where 40-plus world records were broken in one world championship?
10:10 Chuck Nice? Oh.
10:11 Speaker 02 And it all has to do with the suit and the technology.
10:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, so it's no longer about the athlete?
10:16 Speaker 02 No, it's about the suit. So the narrative of the sport is like, traditionally, part of what makes baseball so unique is they're saying, well, it's such a simple sport, it's just a ball and a bat. And it's about individual athletic brilliance. And historically, the same thing was going, would go for swimming, it's just athletic talent. However, all of a sudden it transitioned from which athlete, how much time they spent in the pool, how much training they had done, to who was wearing the fastest suit. And rights, sport governing bodies, who are selling athletic performance and not swimsuits, had to change that. So by 2010, they banned all of these polyurethane, super high-performance suits.
10:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know, that's, you know, I, I feel like old school, like I'm the grandpa on the porch in the rocking chair when I say, back in my day, you know, Mark Spitz had a hairy chest, had a mustache, and my boy still won all those gold medals in this, what, 1976?
11:13 Chuck Nice? He actually swam in a sweater. He was wearing a cardigan while he was swimming and still broke world records.
11:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the snow. Yeah, in fact, it was ice. He swam in the ice.
11:29 Speaker 02 But there are also, there are some very interesting instances where the athletes actually revolted. So most recently NBA, a handful of years ago, introduced synthetic basketball to the NBA. And a handful of players, primarily led by Steve Nash and others, said that they had no part in changing the ball. It was different. It bounced different. It felt different. And eventually the NBA Players Association was able to force the NBA to go back to its traditional leather ball. And the idea is that the spalding in the NBA was trying to produce a modern techno-scientific ball. One that was grippier when it was wet, one that performed better. It was more consistent, right?
12:13 Speaker 02 Because if you're thinking about leather on balls, they come from different animals, different cows. The consistency is suspect. So you could create this new technology that allowed you to have really similar balls from game to game, to arena to arena, to state to state. But the players said this ball was different than they were used to playing with. It changed the game in a substantive way, and they wanted the old leather ball back, which they still play.
12:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So they should use, they should use free range cows for their leather balls. They're happy cows.
12:46 Gary O'Reilly? All right. Okay, Professor, if I look back, and I'm using the word intentionally, I find one thing that seems to have changed sport, no matter which event it is, more than anything else. And it's cameras. I mean, am I the only person who thinks cameras? Or has it had such a profound effect on the way we are engaged in sport now?
13:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Were we the, we the viewer or the?
13:13 Gary O'Reilly? We, we the viewer, the athlete, the coaches, everything.
13:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of course, the viewer, but how is the athlete touched by a camera?
13:19 Gary O'Reilly? Okay.
13:21 Chuck Nice? Something, something had to be using it because we have footage of games from way back before there was television. Somebody was filming that for some reason.
13:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For some reason.
13:32 Gary O'Reilly? I mean, Lombardi was using game footage to analyze opponents in the mid-sixties. And he would roll his defensive unit in or offensive unit in, sit them down, now watch this. Now, this is how this happens. Now, without sort of slow motion, without instant replay, without all of those clever things that came through, for me, this sport isn't as big. Football does not take off without massive TV audience and without upgrading cameras. For me, it doesn't happen.
14:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you're saying Lombardi was just an ordinary coach, but he had really good technology?
14:05 Gary O'Reilly? That's you putting words in my mouth that I never said.
14:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I like it. He had an asymmetric advantage if he's using video or film and other people aren't. So what do you say here, professor?
14:19 Speaker 02 Well, definitely. I mean, two most recent examples. I don't know, we're getting on to the world of cheating, but you know, we think about these Astros, or a little further back, 2007 with the New England Patriots and Spygate. So there have been cameras used to observe the opponent for multiple different times and for different agendas. And Lombardi's just one of many who have used cameras to observe the ways that people perform, right? It's an old technique. It's espionage. You think about...
14:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's espionage. That's what it is.
14:56 Speaker 02 Yeah. S71 Blackbirds. It's an old war technique and sport is driven by these metaphors of competition and warfare. It's about gathering data using a camera, which will give people a very strong visual representation of what's happening. So yeah, it's totally powerful.
15:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I once visited the Seattle Seahawks training camp, and when they were in their, they have a training dome, basically, like one of those inflatable things, and they wouldn't let me take pictures in there. They wouldn't want to...
15:29 Gary O'Reilly? No, not a chance. He likes you. He doesn't love you.
15:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, no, that was I I I'd not thought about that until that moment where he says, no, not in here. We're working on plays and you get to see what the athletes are doing. So that's his polite way to to that's his strategic defense initiative preventing me from possibly exploiting his secrets. So damn, so so you so you're you're going with that with that war metaphor. That's good.
16:00 Gary O'Reilly? Well, I mean, a lot of people, a lot of coaches, a lot of coaches see it quite literally as a war for X amount of minutes or hours. And and this, you know, hopefully there's there's no deaths or casualties. But to them, it is mano a mano. It is a war. I I just look now, Professor, if I take my 200 inch TV screen in the in the ginormous man cave, and I want to watch pictures that aren't very good quality, I need myself a 5K picture. Therefore, I got to have 5K cameras. And all of a sudden, I have such a sharp image. Am I opening up then the route for artificial intelligence? Because back in
16:41 Gary O'Reilly? a blurry day, artificial intelligence couldn't analyze as accurately? Or have I just made
16:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? it? It didn't have the data, you mean? It couldn't get the data?
16:48 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, couldn't get the data, couldn't get the sharp enough image. I mean, I think for golf, for tennis, for baseball with spin rates, all those sort of different sports. With camera technology comes an advance in other ways technology is enabled.
17:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, wait. It's just not it's not only the 5K. It would be because you said spin rate. It's 5K plus a frame rate.
17:10 Gary O'Reilly? Yes.
17:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So so that things aren't a blur. And then you can actually track track this. So so so Rayvon, where where does that fit in? Just high res data?
17:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think
17:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Time and spatial data.
17:21 Speaker 02 It is totally where much, much, I think, there's a lot of potential within the context of sport. Because now, instead of having using, say, Lombardi taking photographs, you can have that data coming into your home. And Gary can now be the next Sabermetrics data analyst and he's just he's just sitting on his couch slowing down the frame rate doing his analysis on his own. So it opens up in many ways that potentially democratizes the use of data in certain ways that was not necessarily available because like Neil you said you couldn't take photographs in the arena but in many ways you might not need to be in the arena anymore. You can just sit at home
18:05 Speaker 02 and download the data and use it how you see fit.
18:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, we gotta take a quick break. We're gonna shift from cameras and the data it provides us so that we can gain an asymmetric advantage. I've got to use these war terms. Let's keep doing that if that's what this is. I'm gonna see what more of high tech has influenced the sport when StarTalk continues.
18:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. We're talking about game changers and in this case, what role tech has played in this. And of course, we've got Professor Rayvon Fouchet. That's an E with an accent in case you didn't know how to pronounce the trailing E. He's at Purdue University who basically, literally, figuratively and literally wrote the book on this. And that book was titled The Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports. When was that published, Rayvon?
19:23 Speaker 02 2017.
19:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? 2017. So it should still be out there. Excellent. And who published it?
19:27 Speaker 02 Johns Hopkins University Press.
19:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good. So give them a shout out there. Thanks for mentioning that. So with cameras giving us sort of some people who use it cleverly and asymmetric advantage, if you connected the information the cameras obtained to computers.
19:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And using that to analyze, so it's not just a human looking at it. We now feed it to computers. When would you, at what point did computers start mattering in sports, would you say?
19:56 Speaker 02 I would say really when the computational power started to push forward in a big way. Late 90s, early 2000s. And in many ways, I think a big marker of the combination of all these pieces is 2006. When we get the MIT Sloan Conference on Sports Analytics. It's the one point where I think that's the culmination of the moment of everyone seeing the power of the computation could have. But I think really it's early, late 90s, early 2000s when instead of having large scale computers, the personal computer could do a lot of the data crunching and data analytics.
20:38 Speaker 02 You didn't need to go to your local university and ask for supercomputer time to do some data analytics. And that's when it became a real powerful tool.
20:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know, interesting, this is a little bit off the subject, but I'm going to slip it in there because we were thinking warfare. So to design a fuselage of an airplane to be stealth requires very significant calculations so that any surface that reflects a radio radar signal towards it will not reflect it back towards the detector at all so that it doesn't show up. And in the 1970s and 80s, computing was so primitive that they could only solve the equations with straight lines. So the F-117 stealth fighter has these surfaces, flat surfaces on it because that's the best they could do.
21:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They couldn't fit the spline, the continual spline solution to the shape of the fuselage. Once the computing power boosted into the 80s and into the 90s, then they could design the B-2 stealth bomber. And all the surfaces are curved on that in all places. So that this is computing power having it totally affecting, of course, not only sports, but everything in our lives.
21:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, I think that connection is deeply related because arguably, I think some of the people that are doing that high level computing engineering are also interested in sports.
22:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Does computing count if you, because I remember there was a big deal in the, in the US Open, tennis open, where IBM was brought in to detect to see if the ball hit the line or didn't. And they re, and it was like, wow, this is computing and it's this. And I, I remember the enthusiasm behind that. Not everyone was, embraced it. But with, with computers as judges, is this a thing? As referees?
22:34 Speaker 02 With, without a doubt. And we are here at this moment. And this is a huge controversy. Because we're asking the big question of, do we want to eliminate humans? And their, well, just say idiosyncrasies.
22:51 Chuck Nice? Right. Or, or their biases?
22:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You, you can't kick dirt on the shoes of a computer because you're angry with the call.
22:59 Speaker 02 No. So, Major League Baseball has experimented already with, in some of their minor leagues.
23:05 Chuck Nice? Strike zones.
23:06 Speaker 02 With the strike zones.
23:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Really?
23:07 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
23:08 Speaker 02 Yes. And where you have a home plate official who has microphones in his, or headphones in his ears. And the ball comes by and they call ball a strike. And so now, do you want your officials to be bystanders or just reporting out the information that's?
23:27 Chuck Nice? I want, I want a reporter. But I think the.
23:31 Speaker 02 Wait, wait, why do you want a reporter?
23:32 Chuck Nice? Because.
23:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What do you need him for? It's either is a striker, it isn't.
23:35 Speaker 02 This is a part of the game.
23:37 Chuck Nice? No, here's why you need them. You need them because there are things that happen at the plate that still require sportsmanship. Uh, there's certain conduct that needs to be, uh, monitored. There's also, uh, factors of cheating that could happen.
23:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Program that into the AI and get rid of the empire. That's the whole point of AI. It'll do what the humans do, but better. And this, and this is computing power at its next extreme here, correct?
24:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, but I think the limitations are that we, as the rules are written right now, they're not capable of enacting this clear specificity that the AIs can.
24:16 Chuck Nice? Right.
24:16 Speaker 02 Right? Because the strike zone, halfway between the shoulder and the waist, that's the Major League Baseball's understanding of it.
24:28 Chuck Nice? But see, I don't want him there. I don't want the AI for that. Even though the AI from a camera angle might be able to determine that, I only want it for inside, outside, over the plate. That's all I want the AI for, because everything else is still subjective. There really isn't a, and there's not an objective strike zone. There just isn't.
24:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're in the wrong place here. So just program into the AI a subjectivity. So it gets 1 in 10 calls wrong. How about that? And you don't know what you call that.
25:00 Chuck Nice? No, no, no, no, no.
25:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In fact, you could have the record, you could preload the ball-strike record of any ump you want, and it'll be them.
25:12 Chuck Nice? But here's the problem with that.
25:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What?
25:14 Chuck Nice? Okay.
25:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What?
25:15 Chuck Nice? I don't want a computer to be just as stupid as me.
25:20 Chuck Nice? I can't, no, no.
25:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Gary, you're gonna ask him about Moneyball and stuff like that?
25:25 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, no, that's, well, okay, Moneyball was pre-computer power. That was all done with a human brain, I think.
25:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But it's still analytics.
25:33 Gary O'Reilly? It's still analytics. I mean, it is the birth of analytics in sport to another level, but it's still pre-computers. Now, what we've just discussed here has got me jumping even further forward. Professor, am I wrong here? Where normally the rules of the game, the rules of the sport, the laws that are engaged to play or execute the performance are written by humans. With the technology that we've just discussed with Chuck, Neil, and yourself, are we not at the point where the technology is in advance of the rules and the rules have now got to play catcher? Are we in that zone already, or is that something in the next few years?
26:11 Speaker 02 We're in that zone, and I think people are not very happy that we're in that zone. For instance, what is a catch in the NFL?
26:19 Gary O'Reilly? Right.
26:21 Speaker 02 And it's possession.
26:24 Chuck Nice? Right.
26:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Control, it's control.
26:26 Chuck Nice? Well, it's possession and control and a football move.
26:31 Speaker 02 And so the question is, like, you know, I I'm on board with you, Neil. You can clearly program an AI to make that decision. But the problem is, we haven't made that decision outside of the of the AI to even have that discussion.
26:48 Chuck Nice? Right.
26:50 Speaker 02 So we can tell the AI what to do.
26:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you can't, if you don't even know what it is you're saying it's doing.
26:57 Chuck Nice? Exactly.
26:58 Speaker 02 So but I like the idea that technology is pushing us to make those have to make those decisions. Because now, you know, we live in a world where the AI can do it. And the only reason we're we don't have a clear understanding of what it catches is because we're not willing to make that decision. We're not being willing to lay that terminology down in text and say, we're doing this because the technology exists at this moment to make clear, accurate, definitive decisions.
27:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Somebody's got to judge whether the the person was in control of the ball to judge it to be a correct catch. And we and that's not written down anywhere. It's just somebody's looking at it. They know that they see it.
27:34 Chuck Nice? Yes, exactly. It's like that was control, that wasn't control, or, you know, he was bobbling. Some some will say that the ball moving at all is a lack of control, whereas others will say it was moving while he had a trap to his body. Therefore, he still had control.
27:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, but did his knee hit the ground before that happened?
27:54 Chuck Nice? Exactly.
27:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, I got another one for you. This I think about this all the time. This first I've ever gone public on this. Uh, so what you can do is you have a pitcher. And you can get the statistics of how of how of the spread of where the ball is thrown to the catcher.
28:14 Chuck Nice? Hmm.
28:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. And so you can look at the statistical likelihood that that pitcher is going to throw outside of that zone. Okay? So if one of the pitches comes and floats up and damn near hits the batter in the head, you reject the pitcher if that's a two or three sigma throw. Whereas if the pitcher's just wild today, then a throw that kinda goes near the head, there's no intent there, because the pitcher's control has not demonstrated that that could be intentional. So you can statistically judge whether the throw was at the person's head or not.
28:51 Chuck Nice? Yeah, but isn't Tim music a part of the game?
28:57 Gary O'Reilly? And then the fact is, you just have to know whether the pitcher and the hitter have got something going on historically, right? And he's likely to ding one off his helmet and it's all gonna break loose and the bench is clear.
29:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, how about this? Let me move this forward. My father used to run track, and he, at the finish line, there would be people with stopwatches, and each person, it was their job, you would time the second place person, the third, or the fourth, whichever, okay? And then they'd come and compare all the stopwatches. All right. This involves human reaction time, all of this. That's all went to cameras, it's now digital, and in swimming, they do it to a hundredth of a second. Is there gonna be a day where we're not really improving all that much, so we gotta go down to like ten thousandths of a second, or a hundred thousandths of a second? You could set a world record by being a hundred thousandths of a second faster than the previous record?
29:50 Speaker 02 Absolutely. I mean, we're already here, because we can time well below the chosen level. And yes, hand timing has been problematic, and they've been slowly...
30:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is in swimming, in swimming.
30:02 Speaker 02 Swimming, yeah. Yeah, across the sport, right? So, you know, in the 1950s, they're saying hand timing was off by a quarter second. By the 60s, they're saying roughly hand timing was off by about a tenth of a second. So people were getting better, but now, timing is all fully automated. And, right, we're at the point right now where we can time even more detailed than not. So, for instance, in the last handful of years, there's been a couple ties in World Cups skiing. However, they're timing down to, I think, the millionth of a second in World Cups skiing. So...
30:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, but I bet they're not tied to a millionth of a second. So they could've easily picked the winner there.
30:42 Speaker 02 Exactly. But they don't want to, because I think the argument is that we don't believe that the infrastructure of sport is clear enough to time to that level. And you gave the instance of swimming. It's impossible to build a completely, perfectly square swimming pool.
31:02 Speaker 02 Right? It's pouring a big, massive concrete block. I mean, my house isn't straight. How can you think about pouring this liquid substance and making it perfectly straight? So, in theory, what, one lane is longer than another. And if we're starting to time down to the millionth, the ten millionth of a second, it may be that the pool is not square instead of someone's square.
31:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or, or you didn't arrive at your destination with the correct phasing of your stroke. And you had to like bring your helm another, on another swing. And then you just lost a quarter of a second right there. Okay, so you can't, it doesn't, okay, so this happens in science all the time, where it's possible to have excess precision for the question that has been posed. And using that precision becomes completely misleading and in fact, false.
31:54 Speaker 02 Yes. Oh, wow.
31:56 Chuck Nice? And we get, so in the end, we've got too much data.
32:00 Speaker 02 That's a very sad state.
32:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, for, no, for, I'll give you an example, I'll give you an example. So, in track and field, I, I think they still do this. It's not, it, when your head crosses the front line, it's your chest.
32:11 Speaker 02 Okay, which is, is that why everybody leans?
32:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's why they lean, right? They, they, they, okay, it's your chest. Well, if you can measure this to a millionth of a second, that's the time between your shirts crossing the line and your flesh. Okay? But they're only measuring your shirt. So maybe people will wear like big bosoms or something.
32:31 Speaker 02 I should have never. If only I didn't have these blasted man boobs.
32:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, no, I'm, I'm just agreeing with Rayvon here that you end up measuring things that are not even what you're trying to measure. Oh, man.
32:48 Speaker 02 And, and part of it is we don't have the rules to, to deal with that kind of accuracy.
32:52 Chuck Nice? Gotcha. So in the accuracy that we do have and that we're using right now, are there events, and I know if they are, they would be very infrequent, but in world-class events, do we ever have ties anymore? Do we ever have somebody coming in on the clock at the same exact time?
33:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The answer is yes, but we can time it better and show that they're not at the same time, but then you're measuring other things at that point. This is the point I was trying to make.
33:17 Chuck Nice? We have to have a winner. No, I'm saying, has there been instances where we've had ties?
33:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, yes, in the 100-meter dash. And when you have a tie, two people stand on the podium at the number one spot, they omit the second spot, and then a person comes in third. So there's no silver medal given when that happens. That's how they do that.
33:39 Chuck Nice? I was just unaware if that had ever happened. But that shouldn't happen any longer.
33:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It wouldn't have to happen. But let's take a quick break, and we'll come back, and just digest all of this and shoot the shit with Ravon, our professor-at-large, helping us unpack technology and sports when we return.
34:10 Chuck Nice? Hey, it's time to give a Patreon shout-out to the following Patreon patrons: Daniel Freeman, Coleman, Oei, and Cesar Perez. Hey, guys, thank you so much for your support. Without you, we could not do this show, or at least, we couldn't do it as well as we do it. And anyone listening who would like their very own Patreon shout-out, please go to patreon.com/stargradio and support us.
34:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back. StarTalk. Sports edition. I got Professor Fouché from Purdue University, the Boiler Makers. And that's a whole town full of engineers right there. So you've got just the expertise we need for this show. We're talking about game changers, athletes, but in this case, we're talking about technology. So we've got in recent past, some examples of damn near geriatric, highly performing athletes.
35:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Name names, name names.
35:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what do we have? We have, how old is LeBron? LeBron is like 36? Yeah. Okay, that's a foot in the grave right there. And Tom Brady was, it was 43 in the Super Bowl. That means he died three years ago and didn't even know it. So, but they're at their height. They're not just put out to pasture and we keep them just because they're, they sell tickets. They're actually performing at the top of their game. Drew Brees is another one. Yeah. So tell me about technology and health and surgery and, and, and all the rest of that. There'd be medical technology, of course.
35:51 Speaker 02 I think clearly we're at the, the front edge of what we can do physiologically with athletes. With the amount of, at least football players, right? And you mentioned two examples, LeBron. LeBron is on pace to have the most mileage on his legs of any NBA player in the history of the game. Similarly, Tom Brady playing at his level until 43.
36:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just remind me, LeBron came right out of high school, right? Yeah. Right, right. Okay, okay.
36:22 Speaker 02 And so obviously there's a whole infrastructure that's allowing these athletes to perform longer and at the highest level. And it's not just a crisp bowl of Wheaties every morning that's allowing them to perform at that high level, right? There's a whole infrastructure of health professionals, bodily treatments, scientific and technological training methods that allow these athletes to continue to play.
36:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Diet, diet is in there too. Yeah, all of this. And so, all right, so let's, let's unpack the 900 pound elephant in the room. If technology helps you win.
37:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you have the technology and other people don't, what's the difference between that and cheating?
37:06 Speaker 02 It's all about perspective, right? Of all kinds of things. So, from my perspective, sport is not about equality. Sport is about maintaining a competitive advantage for as long as possible, legally or illegally. So I think there's a gray space when we have the conversation about cheating. And I would say it's not cheat, it's only cheating until it's been officially banned within a sporting governing body or sporting environment.
37:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Fosbury didn't cheat when he jumped backwards over the bar with the Fosbury flop? He was not cheating?
37:43 Gary O'Reilly? Which is smart, Neil. I mean, let, let, let's, I mean, all right, I, I use my own body because I had knee ligament reconstruction, right? Now, the whole idea of that is, it is stronger after surgery than before I damaged it.
37:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh.
37:59 Gary O'Reilly? Now, am I coming back?
38:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We can rebuild him. We can.
38:03 Gary O'Reilly? But, am I, is, am I now doped? Have I now body doped by having surgery that's actually made my knee ligament stronger? I mean, this, this-
38:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is like the Tommy John surgery in baseball.
38:15 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, correct. So this is the point the professor is making, I think. Until it's made illegal, it's okay. But is it, is it in the spirit of things cheating?
38:25 Speaker 02 I would say it's completely within the spirit of sport.
38:29 Gary O'Reilly? Right.
38:30 Speaker 02 Because the spirit of sport is about winning. And I think that's what makes the technology and science so powerful and so awesome at the moment.
38:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, in elementary school, it's about participating, okay? Just to make-
38:40 Speaker 02 Okay, thank you.
38:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just, just let's get that straight.
38:43 Speaker 02 I, I think we're all past elementary school, so.
38:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You get your participation trophy.
38:49 Speaker 02 Speak for yourself.
38:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well Chuck, I like that you have your participation trophy on your shelf there, Chuck.
38:56 Speaker 02 Exactly. No, so, I mean, technology is the- The place where you can gain and acquire the biggest competitive advantage. And so many of the technologies, computational processes, health mechanisms, the governing bodies of the sport aren't looking at and aren't thinking about. So therefore, it's kind of an open world for people to experiment and see what the limits are and how they can improve their bodies.
39:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, Gary, is that a real thing from my notes here? Like ghost pacers from an augmented reality glasses you wear?
39:30 Gary O'Reilly? Uh, by the way, sir, yes.
39:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Damn.
39:34 Gary O'Reilly? I know. So this thing is now otherworldly. So imagine, imagine I gave you a pair of look like a normal pair of sunglasses. You pop them on, you're gonna go run around a track. Then all of a sudden, this augmented reality appears in front of you and you can't catch it because it's been set at a certain pace. Imagine you're an elite athlete. We talked about it in a recent show, right? About the marathon breaking two hours, right? Kip Koji, imagine he was training with one of these that just made him run faster and faster and faster until he gets himself under two hours. This is the sort of technological advancement we're finding ourselves with
40:18 Gary O'Reilly? outside of someone's got to run in front of you, burn themselves out, and then someone else has got to come in. So you go through half a dozen pacemakers during a marathon. Nope, this thing's gonna run, run, run and run.
40:29 Chuck Nice? But that really isn't very different from the way anyone trains now. I mean, that's the same as a sparring partner. The better your sparring partner, the better boxer you will be.
40:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, if your sparring partner kick your ass every day, then you should be the sparring partner.
40:43 Chuck Nice? That's what I was gonna say. Or you're just not gonna be boxing, you know? Um, but, but you don't wanna spar with somebody who can't box very well because that doesn't help you at all. So, you know, the pacing, I think pacing is different.
40:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh, plus, I wouldn't, I wouldn't want, I wouldn't wanna not be able to catch the, the augmented reality. Like you set it up so that I catch it right at the finish line and then I have some sense of triumph.
41:11 Chuck Nice? So, okay, I was about to say, there is how about, what's the old, the experiment where they took, uh, uh, mice or a rat and they put it and they let it swim halfway and then they, they wouldn't, they wouldn't allow it to ever reach the, the edge. And so it ended up giving up and drowning. I mean, can you break somebody's spirit by training them to a place where they never receive a reward?
41:37 Gary O'Reilly? You probably can, Chuck, but I think it's the whole, now the technology has to be managed. Because otherwise, as you've just described, is a destructive use of technology.
41:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, Rayvon, what, what my co-hosts are telling us here is that athletes, they need a little, a little tasty tidbit every time they achieve something, like they feed the dolphin in the swimming pool.
41:58 Chuck Nice? So, you can't keep the carrot out there forever. You gotta, you gotta bite the carrot every now.
42:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Toss them a fish when they, when they get it right. But, but which, where's this headed? Where are we going 10 years from now? What's going on?
42:10 Speaker 02 I mean, I think this is getting back to what Chuck was saying about, and, and just pushing the limits, right? So, the outer edge is this whole world of neural stimulation.
42:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ooh.
42:19 Speaker 02 Right? So, the idea is that athletes, the brain is the limiting factor within athletic ability and competition. So, in a sense, your brain breaks down.
42:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I was gonna tweet that about a week ago. I was saving for a good moment. It's that very thing, right? The elite athletes are limited not by their bodies, but by their brains, by their minds.
42:40 Speaker 02 Yeah. And so, some people have been saying, researchers saying that, well, what's happening is you're getting central fatigue, and that all of a sudden, you're getting weaker signals from your body, from your brain to your muscles. So therefore, you work on a series of newer stimulations, create more plasticity within the brain, and allow and train yourself to push farther and deeper into the pain zone, and allow your body to produce stronger signals to your muscles.
43:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, you'll be ignoring your evolutionary signs to stop?
43:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're
43:20 Chuck Nice? Or even overriding them.
43:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Override, that's a better, that's a better term.
43:24 Speaker 02 Yes. And so the idea is to
43:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, but we're all gonna be like the dude who ran from Marathon to Athens and to report on the battle and then just drop dead. That's what's gonna happen. If you don't drop dead at the finish line, then you didn't give all the energy you could have. Is that what you're telling us?
43:40 Speaker 02 That's, that's where the goal is.
43:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, no, no, you're not supposed to agree with that sentence.
43:46 Gary O'Reilly? Do you know, this is, this has been something
43:48 Speaker 02 Being with LeBron being dead and So I'm just following
43:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I didn't say that for you to agree with the sentence, okay?
43:56 Chuck Nice? No, I love it. It's the Kellen Winslow, it's the Kellen Winslow effect. Like, if they don't carry you off the field, then you didn't do your job.
44:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Don't leave anything on the
44:07 Gary O'Reilly? See, the thing, I mean, we've had this, this thought process in, in sport and in training for, for decades and decades. You train harder than you compete. So it's when you compete, you're not at the edge of your envelope. And Chuck and I had a discussion
44:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, wait, wait, I can tell you what, that makes sense to hear it, but it's not true. Because no one breaks world records while they're training.
44:30 Gary O'Reilly? I know, but once you get into the element of competition, other stuff kicks in and you push, push, push. So you've all, you know what you need to do to win, and so you train beyond that. So if anything ever comes along, you're always working within comfort and without stress. So you've got that wriggle room to push further onwards, to get to be even better.
44:52 Speaker 02 But I'm not convinced people aren't breaking world records in, in, in training. They're just not organized and have the, the record keeping. I think people are going extremely fast and powerful in training. They're just not officially sanctioned, right? When we think about world records, they're official sanctioning events.
45:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The absence of data on that, yes, okay.
45:10 Chuck Nice? Okay, nothing would piss me off than more than to break a world record while I was practicing.
45:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And while nobody was looking.
45:19 Chuck Nice? And nobody was there.
45:23 Gary O'Reilly? Well, that won't happen now, Chuck, because everything is filmed. Absolutely, everything is filmed. And we go back to the cameras, with the super high speed cameras with tens of thousand frames a second. And there's nothing goes past anybody anymore. So it will be captured. I mean, look at our, our dear friend Sasha Coe. She produced, uh, was it a quadruple salchow?
45:45 Chuck Nice? Five, yes.
45:46 Gary O'Reilly? In a, in a warm-up routine, rather than in competition, and she landed it. It's on film, so therefore she owns one. So credit to her.
45:56 Chuck Nice? So let me ask you this then, speaking of that, because she never did it in competition, not to, not to disparage her in any way.
46:01 Gary O'Reilly? Not at all.
46:02 Chuck Nice? But the fact is she didn't. Is there, is there any technology that can monitor and help an athlete kind of stay in the zone? So that when the time comes, they're just popping in the zone, right when they need to be.
46:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, so, so I think this is one of the leading edges of where we are as well. There are companies that are in the process of trying to track biometric data and figure out peak performance. So generally, a lot of these organizations and companies and research labs have gotten very, very good at tracking a series of biometric data points and being able to determine if you will be at your highest level of peak performance. So that's the part they're really good at. However, the part where it breaks down is the less biometrically dated data-related events.
47:04 Speaker 02 So you could be ready to perform at your highest level, but you've got an argument with your mother, your girlfriend broke up with you. You got in a car accident. All of these other social things that intervene intervene in one's life may derail you.
47:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, Rayvon, you just put in brain implants that will that'll rub that out. I mean, let's go 10 years into the future. It's just your brain.
47:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, so then we'll just go robotic all the way.
47:31 Chuck Nice? Yeah, right.
47:32 Speaker 02 Get rid of the bodies. Just ditch the bodies.
47:36 Chuck Nice? You have your match and you go home, you're like, who are you?
47:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Rayvon, I wish I had a rebuttal to that sentence and I don't. You're right. If I, if, once you start tickling and twitching brain cells, interrupting or enhancing neurochemical synapses, uh, you're, you're a machine at that point.
47:55 Chuck Nice? All right, so now let me ask you this. Speaking of machines, is there or will there be an acceptable time for implantation to be a part of any sport?
48:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Implantation of what?
48:10 Chuck Nice? Oh, of, of anything, whether it's, um, not just sensors, but augmentation. So the implantation actually heightens your performance. Okay, so prosthetics. So we're talking prosthetics then?
48:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But suppose I have a bad heart and I get a, and I get a pacemaker. Okay, and now I'm, now I'm a senior running in a, you know, 65 and older race. Did, did the pacemaker prevent me from dying? Yes. Did it make me win the race? I don't know. But there's a lot of stuff we can put in our bodies and that already is put in our bodies. So Rayvon, where, where does that sit going forward?
48:40 Speaker 02 I, I think we're already at the point where, generally I think people are going to get more comfortable with it. Because I think we're understanding as a society that the world in which we live is techno scientifically driven and mediates all things that we live with. And we're getting to the point where we're going to have to give up on this, this illusion that sport is all about the human body and just generic performance. The technology is here. You know, if we can talk about the pacemaker, we can talk about all of these kind of technological innovations. And eventually it's going to come to the point where. We're going to be more interested in the great athletic performances and what the
49:21 Speaker 02 technology can bring than I think old school representations or ideas of what an athlete should be.
49:29 Gary O'Reilly? Hmm.
49:30 Speaker 02 Because you know, athletes go through surgical procedures, right? You know, Kevin Durant, he's back playing.
49:36 Gary O'Reilly? Mm-hmm.
49:37 Speaker 02 And that's pretty amazing.
49:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But what happened with him, remind me? This is Kevin Durant, the basketball player.
49:42 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
49:43 Speaker 02 Yeah. So multiple injuries, he's gone through a series of injuries, um, AC, um, some gruesome ankle, feet.
49:51 Gary O'Reilly? Calf.
49:52 Speaker 02 Calf injuries.
49:53 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
49:54 Speaker 02 And I think, I don't even know the extent of the bodily injuries, but an injury enough that allowed him, he had to sit out a whole season. And so choose him or any other athletes who are sitting out long periods of time and they're getting back because there's a massive amount of techno-scientific research to allow their, themselves to retrain their bodies.
50:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's not why they're getting back, they're maybe because they make, it's money.
50:19 Gary O'Reilly? That's why.
50:20 Chuck Nice? Neo, Neo.
50:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm not retiring your ass, you get back on that court, I'm gonna, I paid that for that contract.
50:28 Speaker 02 True, but I mean, the only way they get back is there's
50:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's gotta be something to make it happen.
50:32 Speaker 02 Huge team of scientific and technological innovation going, uh, going forward. And so I think we're getting to the point where if athletes are just going to get injured, are we willing to say, well, maybe we should implant certain things, reconfigure their bodies because we would like to see Tom Brady play another decade?
50:49 Gary O'Reilly? Well, some, some of us would.
50:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Some of us.
50:52 Chuck Nice? Well, no, I, the only way I'd like to see him play another day is if he were wearing an Eagles uniform, other than that.
50:59 Gary O'Reilly? So, I mean, Professor, are we, are you actually saying that we're going to see some crusty old forty-somethings performing at the very top of Major League Baseball, NFL, NBA? Well, baseball maybe still, but um, are we going to see more dynamic sports populated by older athletes?
51:15 Speaker 02 I think so.
51:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, I, I have to modify that. I think where pure skill matters, yes, but where physicality, no.
51:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No.
51:26 Chuck Nice? Right.
51:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so, so Brady is not the wide receiver at 43. No. Okay, so that's the difference.
51:34 Chuck Nice? Right.
51:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Here.
51:35 Chuck Nice? Yeah. And, and his, and his offensive line becomes way more important than it ever.
51:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, exactly, because if anybody gets through, that's the end of Tom Brady.
51:44 Chuck Nice? Right.
51:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Exactly. You don't want to see that. So guys, we got to bring this to a close. Rayvon, it sounds like you're, you're all in on this technology thing. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounded like you're, you're ready to take this wherever it can go.
51:58 Speaker 02 I wouldn't say I'm ready to take it wherever it go, but I think we as a society are, are getting to the point where we are interested in seeing what technology can bring to the human body and athletic performance. And I think the next steps are really right around the corner.
52:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In our lifetimes, you're saying?
52:18 Speaker 02 Yes, definitely, in our lifetime.
52:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, all right, dude. Well, this has been fascinating, and I'm sure we only just began to plumb the depths of this topic. All right, guys, we got to call it there. So, uh, thank you, uh, Professor, for joining us for this. And Chuck, Gary, always good to have you. Thank you.
52:36 Chuck Nice? Thank you.
52:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This has been StarTalk Sports Edition Game Changers. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, occasionally posing as an ex-athlete for these shows. I hope to see you next time. As always, keep looking up.
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