The Joy of Techno Science with Rayvon Fouché

0:04 This is StarTalk Sports Edition. And today's episode is all about tech in sports. In fact, title it Tech Rules. And who do I have with me? My co-host, Gary O'Reilly.

0:19 Gary.

0:20 Hey, Neil.

0:22 I 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 an ex-pro footballer, soccer player, I think we call it over here. So great to have you, your perspective. And you spent time as an announcer. So that was also good.

0:40 Very cool. I assume you were announcing soccer.

0:43 Yes.

0:44 Not something else.

0:45 They wouldn't let me loose on the Royal Family, so I had to stick with soccer.

0:50 Royal Family need full-time announcers for what they're up to.

0:54 And Chuck, always good to have you, man. Oh, it's good to be here.

0:57 And your body of knowledge of sports always... impresses me. I don't want to say surprises because that meant I had low expectations.

1:03 You meant surprise.

1:06 You have a fluency that I don't find with many comedians. I just want to thank you for lending that to this show.

1:12 Yeah, sure. Very excellent.

1:14 So we could opine on this subject, but really what we really need is an expert. That's what StarTalk is all about. Subject expert.

1:25 Subject expert.

1:26 And we've got Professor Ravon Fouché. Ravon, welcome to StarTalk.

1:31 Thanks so much for having me. Excellent.

1:33 You are a professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies in Purdue University. That's the Boilermakers, right?

1:40 It is.

1:41 And you guys in Indiana, if I remember correctly, you don't have daylight savings time there. Is that still the case?

1:46 I think some parts have daylight savings times, but I believe, you know, other parts don't. So we're splitting the differences.

1:53 Okay.

1:54 I don't think it's supposed to work that way, but that's right.

1:56 We're embracing the interpretive flexibility of time.

2:02 So you're author of the perfectly titled book for this episode, The Game Changer.

2:09 Yes.

2:09 Technoscientific revolution in sports.

2:13 Okay.

2:14 And also black inventors in the age of segregation.

2:19 Whoa.

2:20 Whoa, we got to bring you back for that. So you mean up until last year? This happened to us. Oh, okay.

2:28 That's good, Chuck. You're a bit ahead of me. I'm not sure.

2:31 You're not even sure that's happened yet. Yeah.

2:35 So you have a PhD in science and technology from Cornell. It's great to have you on here. So thanks for participating in our Game Changer series, which is sort of a sub-series within our sports edition. So interdisciplinary studies, That feels kind of sort of wishy-washy. So where does the science fit into that?

2:55 Wow, man, why you got to do that to my mask? I'm just asking. Interdisciplinary. How you going to do that to his concentration? You know, interdisciplinary. I'm just going to say that's very, very weak at women.

3:09 That is not what I said. I said I'm trying to understand it. I'm asking questions, okay?

3:14 All right. So take me there.

3:15 What happens in interdisciplinary studies?

3:18 You should be the biggest champion of interdisciplinary studies. It's just bringing together multiple disciplinary perspectives and asking questions that are bigger and larger than one disciplinary space.

3:29 Oh, snap. So it's like the cosmic perspective for science itself. No, it's... Oh, Stu.

3:39 Thank you, sir.

3:40 Thanks, Chuck.

3:40 Okay, that was good, but I wouldn't give it an oh, snap.

3:44 I mean, that was.

3:44 I would save the oh, snap for, you know... And there's the Z-snap, you know, you gotta.

3:51 But anyhow.

3:52 Guys, just wait there. I'm going to get the snapometer. It's just behind me. I'll bring it in and we can, where it seems, it registers on the scale.

4:02 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.

4:42 At what point do we say sports has been touched by technology?

4:46 My perspective is... Technology influences sport from the beginning. So roughly 3000 BC, 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.

5:27 So it's a tool.

5:28 It could be material science or anything else.

5:31 Yes. Okay.

5:33 So when they started oiling themselves with olive oil, that was a technological advancement for Greco-Roman wrestling.

5:41 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.

5:52 But all right.

5:52 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. And I'm thinking, was any of that ever considered modern? Because right now, that stuff looks old.

6:20 Yes. I think it's tremendously modern, right? The baseball bat has gone through multiple evolutions in time, from very simple.

6:28 Two by four. Just get your two by four out.

6:33 So now you go to a place like Louisville and Louisville Slugger, the engineering of the bats is very, very serious and thoughtful about the woods that are being chosen and where the wood is being cultivated. It is deeply technoscientific, as well as the ball. The ball 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 as part of this continuous techno-scientific evolution. You can't get the same leather that the ball was made out of 100 years ago because we've killed all those cows.

7:16 And eventually- But cows today are fatter. So maybe their skin is thinner.

7:20 I don't know.

7:20 True. But tanning is a kind of old school technology, right? Late 19th, early 20th century technology. And a lot of the materials are still being tanned by the same few factories in the United States. Horween 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.

7:46 It's weird.

7:47 I know Chuck and Gary have questions, but it's weird to think that they want to be consistent with the past But for example, 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. I agree with you completely. It's totally inconsistent.

8:18 The ball is not the same as.

8:19 It was 100 years ago. The bat is not the same. Right.

8:23 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?

8:32 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?

8:48 Ooh, that sounds like you rehearsed that question. No, I just thought that it just sounds like- Show all work.

8:57 Yes.

8:57 Compare and contrast. No, that popped into my head.

9:01 He's going to use that question on the next exam he administers.

9:04 You know it. 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. And you're changing the spirit of the competition itself.

9:21 Yes, absolutely. I mean, there have been multiple instances where the technology has changed 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. And it all has to do with the suit and the technology.

10:01 Well, so it's no longer about the athlete.

10:03 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 the ball and the bat. And it's about individual athletic brilliance. And historically, the same thing 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 right, 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.

10:46 You know, 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 1972. He actually swam in a sweater.

11:03 A sweater? He was wearing a cardigan while he was swimming and still broke world records. In the snow.

11:12 Yeah, in fact, it was ice.

11:13 He swam in the ice.

11:15 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.

11:35 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 Spalding and 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? 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 player said this ball was different than they were used to playing with. It

12:19 changed the game in a substantive way. And they wanted the old leather ball back.

12:24 So they should use free range cows for their leather balls. They're happy cows. All right.

12:32 OK, 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?

12:58 We the viewer, or the athlete?

12:59 We the viewer, the athlete. Oh, sure, of course the viewer, but how is the athlete touched by a camera?

13:05 Okay, so.

13:06 Well, some 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. For some reason.

13:18 I mean, Lombardi was using game footage to analyze opponents in the mid-60s. 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 the upgrading cameras. For me, it doesn't happen.

13:46 So you're saying Lombardi was just an ordinary coach, but he had really good technology.

13:50 The camera, the footage.

13:51 That's you putting words in my mouth that I never said.

13:55 I like it.

13:55 No, he had an asymmetric advantage if he's using video or film. and other people aren't. So what do you say here, Professor?

14:04 Well, definitely. I mean, two most recent examples. I don't know if we're getting onto the world of cheating, but we think about the Eastern Astros or a little further back, 2007, with the New England Patriots and Spygates. So there have been cameras used to observe the opponent for multiple different times and different agendas. And Lombardi is just one of many.

14:30 who have used cameras to observe the ways that people perform, right? It's an old technique. It's espionage. You think about- It's espionage.

14:40 That's what it is.

14:41 Oh my gosh. S-71 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, totally powerful.

14:59 I once visited the Seattle Seahawks training camp. And when they were in there, 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 show their moves. Oh no, not a chance. He likes you, he doesn't love you. Yeah, no, I had 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, that's his strategic defense initiative, preventing me from possibly exploiting his secrets. So damn, so you're going with that war metaphor.

15:44 That's good. I can't argue against that.

15:48 A lot of coaches see it quite literally as a war for X amount of minutes or hours. And hopefully there's no deaths or casualties, but to them it is, Mano a mano, it is a war. I just look now, Professor, if I take my 200-inch TV screen 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've 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 a blurry day, artificial intelligence couldn't analyze as accurately or have I just made it?

16:31 But didn't have the data. You mean it couldn't get the data.

16:33 Yeah.

16:33 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 sorts of different sports with camera technology comes an advance in other ways technology is enabled.

16:48 Well, wait, wait, it's just not, it's not only the 5k. It would be, cause you said spin rate it's 5k plus a frame rate. So that things aren't a blur and then you can actually track this. So, Ravon, where does that fit in? Just high-res data. Time and spatial data.

17:07 It is totally where 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... um, saber metrics, data analysts, then 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. Cause 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 and download the data and use it how you see fit. Hmm.

17:55 All right, well, we've got to take a quick break. We're going to shift from cameras and the data it provides us so that we can gain an asymmetric advantage. We've got to use these war terms. Let's keep doing that if that's what this is. I'm going to see what more of high tech has influenced the sport when StarTalk continues. 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 Raymond Fouché.

18:28 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, Raymond?

18:46 2017.

18:46 2017. So it should still be out there.

18:48 Excellent.

18:49 And who published it?

18:50 Johns Hopkins University Press. Good.

18:52 So we'll give them a shout out there.

18:53 Good.

18:53 Thanks for mentioning that.

18:54 So if cameras are giving us sort of some people who use it cleverly and asymmetric advantage, if you connected the information the cameras obtain to computers 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?

19:19 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 around 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 competition you can 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. 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.

20:11 You know what's interesting?

20:12 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.

20:56 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.

21:20 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.

21:31 Does computing count if you, because I remember there was a big deal in the, in the U S open tennis open where, IBM was brought in to detect to see if the ball hit the line or didn't and they read and it was like wow this is computing and it's this and I remember the enthusiasm behind that not everyone was embraced it but with with computers as judges is this a thing as referees.

21:58 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 a humans and their, well, I'll just say idiosyncrasies.

22:14 Right. Or their biases.

22:17 You can't kick dirt on the shoes of a computer because you're angry with the call.

22:23 No. So Major League Baseball has experimented already in some of their minor leagues.

22:29 Strike zones.

22:29 With the strike zones.

22:30 Really?

22:31 Yeah.

22:31 Yes.

22:33 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.

22:51 I want i want a reporter but i think why do you want a reporter because what do you need him for it's either is a striker it isn't all right this is a part of the game no here's why you need him You need them because there are things that happen at the plate that still require sportsmanship. There's certain conduct that needs to be monitored. There's also factors of cheating that could happen.

23:15 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 is computing power at its next extreme here, correct?

23:28 Yeah, but I think the limitations are that As the rules are written right now, they're not capable of enacting this clear specificity that the AIs can. Right. Because the strike zone, halfway between the shoulder and the waist, that's the Major League Baseball's understanding of it.

23:52 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, there's not an objective strike zone.

24:13 You're in the wrong place here. So just program into the AI a subjectivity. So it gets one in 10 calls wrong.

24:22 How about that? And you don't know which call that's going to be. No, no, no, no, no.

24:25 In fact, you could have the record. You could preload the ball strike record of any ump you want. And it'll be them. But here's the problem with that.

24:37 What?

24:38 I don't want a computer to be just as stupid as me. Okay, stop it. I can't know.

24:45 Wait, Gary, you're going to ask him about Moneyball and stuff. Take me there.

24:50 Okay. Moneyball was pre-computer power. That was all done with a human brain, I think.

24:56 But it's still analytics.

24:57 It's still analytics.

24:58 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.

25:19 With the technology that we've just discussed with Chuck and 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 catch up? Are we in that zone already? Or is that something in the next few years?

25:35 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? Right. And it's possession.

25:48 Right.

25:49 Control.

25:50 It's control.

25:51 Well, it's possession and control and a football move. And so the question is, 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 yet. outside of the AI to even have that discussion.

26:13 Right. So if we can't tell the AI what to do.

26:17 If you can't, if you don't even know what it is you're saying it's doing.

26:21 Exactly.

26:22 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 don't have a clear understanding of what a catch 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.

26:49 Somebody's got to judge whether the person was in control of the ball to judge it to be a correct catch. And that's not written down anywhere. It's just somebody's looking at it. They know that they see it.

27:01 Yes, exactly. It's like that was control, that wasn't control, or whatever. you know, he was bobbling. Some will say that the ball moving at all is a lack of control. Whereas others will say it was moving while he had it trapped to his body, therefore he still had control.

27:19 Yeah, but did his knee hit the ground before that happened?

27:22 Right, right.

27:22 Exactly.

27:23 Okay, I got another one for you. I think about this all the time. This is the first I've ever gone public on this. So what you can do is you have a pitcher and you can get the statistics of how, of the spread of where the ball is thrown to the catcher.

27:42 Okay.

27:43 And so you can look at the statistical likelihood that that picture is going to throw outside of that zone.

27:50 Okay.

27:51 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 is just wild today, then a The throw that kind of goes near the head, there's no intent there because the pitcher's control has not demonstrated that that could be.

28:14 Intentional.

28:15 So you can statistically judge whether the throw was at the person's head or not.

28:21 Yeah, but isn't Tim Music a part of the game? Tim, okay, okay.

28:27 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.

28:37 All right, how about this? Let me move this forward.

28:40 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 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 going to be a day where we're not really improving all that much?

29:09 So we got to go down to like 10,000th of a second or a hundred thousandth of a second. You can set a world record by being a hundred thousandth of a second faster than the previous record.

29:19 Yeah, 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.

29:30 This is in swimming and swimming.

29:31 Yeah. Across the sport.

29:33 Right.

29:33 So, you know, in the 1950s, they're saying hand timing was off by a quarter of a 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 of ties in World Cup skiing. However, they're timing down to, I think, the millionth of a second in World Cup skiing.

30:06 Yeah, but I bet they're not tied to a millionth of a second. So they could have easily picked the winner there.

30:11 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 tie them to that level. You gave the instance of swimming. It's impossible to build a completely, perfectly square swimming pool. right? It's pouring a big, massive concrete block.

30:36 Okay.

30:36 There you go. I mean, my house isn't straight. How can you think about pouring this liquid substance and making it perfectly straight? So in theory, one lane is longer than another. And if we're starting to time down to the million, the 10 millionth of a second, it may be that the pool is not square. instead of someone swam back.

30:57 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.

31:08 Okay.

31:08 So you can't, it doesn't. Okay.

31:10 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.

31:23 And in fact, false.

31:25 Yes. Oh.

31:26 Wow.

31:28 That's a sad state.

31:31 That's a very sad state.

31:33 I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example. So in track and field, I think they still do this. It's not when your head crosses the front line.

31:41 It's your chest. Is that why everybody leans?

31:45 That's why they lean, right?

31:47 Okay. It's your chest.

31:48 Well, if you can measure this to a millionth of a second, that's the time between your shirt's crossing the line and your flesh.

31:57 Okay.

31:58 But the only measuring your shirt. So maybe people will wear like big bosoms or something.

32:03 I said, I never, I mean, I didn't have these blasted man boobs. No, no, no.

32:12 I'm just agreeing with Rayvon here that you end up measuring things that are not even what you're trying to measure.

32:19 Oh man.

32:20 And part of it is we don't have the rules to deal with that kind of accuracy.

32:24 That's it. 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?

32:41 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.

32:51 We have to have a word.

32:52 No, I'm saying has there been instances where we've had ties?

32:57 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.

33:12 I was just unaware if they had ever happened.

33:14 But that shouldn't happen any longer.

33:15 It wouldn't have to happen. But let's take a quick break and we'll come back. We'll just digest all of this and shoot the shit with Rayvon, our professor at large, helping us unpack technology and sports when we return.

33:30 We're back.

33:31 StarTalk Sports Edition. I've got Professor Fouchier from Purdue University, the Boilermakers. 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. And so we've got in recent past some examples of damn near geriatric highly performing athletes.

34:00 Nine names, nine names.

34:06 So what do we have? We have, how old is LeBron? LeBron is like 36. Okay, that's a foot in the grave right there. And Tom Brady was, it was 43 in the Super Bowl.

34:16 That means he died three years ago and didn't even know it.

34:20 So, but they're at their height. They're not just put out to pasture and we keep them just because they sell tickets. They're actually performing at the top of their game.

34:28 Drew Brees is another one.

34:29 Yeah, so tell me about technology and health and surgery and all the rest of that. There'd be medical technology, of course.

34:40 I think clearly we're at 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.

35:06 Just remind me, LeBron came right out of high school, right?

35:08 Yeah, correct. Right, right.

35:09 Okay, okay.

35:11 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.

35:36 Diet. Diet is in there too.

35:38 Yeah.

35:38 All of this.

35:41 And so, all right, so let's, let's unpack the 900 pound elephant in the room. Uh, if technology helps you win, if you have the technology and other people don't, what's the difference between that and cheating?

35:57 Um, 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 only cheating until it's been officially banned within a sporting governing body or sporting environment.

36:31 So Fosbury didn't cheat when he jumped backwards over the bar with the Fosbury flop.

36:36 He did not.

36:36 He was not cheating.

36:37 Which is smarter, Neil. I mean, all right, I used 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.

36:52 Ooh.

36:53 Now, am I coming back- We can rebuild him.

36:56 We can.

36:56 But am I now doped? Have I now body doped by having surgery that's actually made my knee ligaments stronger?

37:06 I mean, this- That's like the Tommy John surgery in baseball.

37:09 Correct.

37:09 So this is the point the professor is making, I think. Until it's made illegal, it's okay. But is it in the spirit of things cheating?

37:20 I would say- it's completely within the spirit of sport. 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.

37:30 No, in elementary school, it's about participating.

37:32 Okay? Just to make you... Thank you. Let's get that straight.

37:37 I think we're all past elementary school.

37:39 You get your participation trophy.

37:43 Speak for yourself.

37:46 Oh, Chuck, I like that your participation trophy on your shelf there, Chuck.

37:49 Yeah, exactly.

37:50 Yeah. So, I mean, technology is 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.

38:18 Yeah.

38:19 Wait, Gary, is that a real thing from my notes here? Like ghost pacers from an augmented reality glasses you wear?

38:25 Is that real?

38:26 By the way, sir, yes.

38:28 Damn. I know.

38:29 So this thing is now otherworldly. So imagine I gave you a pair of look like a normal pair of sunglasses. You put them on. You're going to 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?

38:55 About the marathon breaking two hours.

38:59 Yeah.

38:59 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. 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 going to run, run, run, and run.

39:24 But that really isn't very different from the way anyone trains now. I mean, that's the same as a sparring.

39:30 Partner.

39:30 The better your sparring partner, the better boxer you will be.

39:33 If a sparring partner kicks your ass every day, then... you should be the sparring partner. That's what I was going to say.

39:39 Or you're just not going to be boxing. But you don't want to spar with somebody who can't box very well because that doesn't help you at all. So the pacing, I think pacing is different.

39:55 Plus, I wouldn't want to not be able to catch the augmented reality. You set it up so that I catch it right at the finish line, and then I have some sense of triumph.

40:07 So, okay, I was about to say, there is, how about, what's the experiment where they took mice or a rat and they put it and they let it swim halfway and then they wouldn't allow it to ever reach 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?

40:33 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.

40:42 So, Ravon, what my co-hosts are telling us here is that athletes, they need a little tasty tidbit every time they achieve something. Like they feed the dolphin in the swimming pool.

40:58 You can't keep the carrot out there forever.

41:00 You got to toss them a fish. Toss them a fish when they get it right. But where is this headed? Where are we going 10 years from now?

41:07 What's going on?

41:08 I mean, I think this is getting back to what Chuck was saying about and just pushing a limit, right? So the outer edge is this whole world of neural stimulation, 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.

41:32 I was going to tweet that about a week ago. I was saving for a good moment. It's that very thing, right? Elite athletes are limited, not by their bodies, but by their brains, by their minds.

41:41 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 the and train yourself to push farther and deeper into the pain zone and allow your body to produce stronger signals to your muscles.

42:13 So you'll be ignoring your evolutionary signs to stop.

42:18 Yes.

42:20 Or even overriding them. Overriding, that's a better term.

42:23 And so the idea is to Okay.

42:28 But we're all going to be like the dude who ran from Marathon to Athens to report on the battle and then just drop dead. That's what's going to 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?

42:41 That's where the goal is, right?

42:43 No, no, you're not supposed to agree with that sentence.

42:46 This has been something- You're going to be in with LeBron being dead and.

42:50 Brady- No, no, I didn't say that for you to agree with the sentence, okay?

42:55 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.

43:05 Don't leave anything on the field.

43:07 See, the thing, I mean, we've had this, this thought process in sport and in training for decades and decades, you train harder than you compete. So it was when you compete, you're not at the edge of your envelope. And Chuck and I had a discussion.

43:22 Wait, wait, wait, wait.

43:23 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.

43:30 I know, but once you get into the element of competition, other stuff kicks in and you push, push, push. So 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 the stress. So you've got that wriggle room to push further onwards to be even better.

43:52 But I'm not convinced people aren't breaking world records in training. They're just not organized and have the record keeping. I think people are going extremely fast and powerful in training. They're just not officially sanctioned, right? We think about official sanctioning events.

44:07 The absence of data on that. Yes. Okay. Nothing would piss me off more than to break a world record while I was practicing. While nobody was looking. Nobody was there.

44:21 Well, that won't happen now, Chuck, because everything is filmed. Absolutely everything is filmed. And we go back to the cameras, where 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 dear friend, Sasha Cohen. She produced, was it a quadruple salchow?

44:45 A quad, yes.

44:46 In a warm-up routine rather than in competition. And she landed it. It's on film. So therefore, she owns one.

44:54 Right.

44:54 So credit to her.

44:56 So let me ask you this then. Speaking of that, because she never did it in competition, not to disparage her in any way, but the fact that she did. 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.

45:25 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'll 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. So you could be ready to perform at your highest level, but you got in an argument with your mother, your girlfriend broke up with you, you got in a car accident.

46:14 All of these other social things that intervene in one's life may derail you.

46:20 No, no, Rayvon, you just put in brain implants. That'll rub that out. I mean, let's go 10 years into the future.

46:27 It's just your brain.

46:28 So therefore we're just, so then we'll just go robotic all the way.

46:32 You have your mats and you go home. You're like, who are you?

46:41 I wish I had a rebuttal to that sentence and I don't.

46:44 You're right.

46:44 If once you start tickling and twitching brain cells, interrupting or enhancing neurochemical synapses, you're a machine at that point.

46:56 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? Implantation of what? Of anything, whether it's not just sensors, but augmentation. So the implantation actually heightens your performance. Wait, wait, wait.

47:20 So we're talking prosthetics.

47:21 Suppose I have a bad heart and I get a pacemaker.

47:25 Okay.

47:25 And now I'm, now I'm a senior running in a, you know, 65 and older race. Did the pacemaker prevent me from dying?

47:32 Yes.

47:32 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 already is put in our bodies. So Rayvon, where, where does that sit going forward?

47:41 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 illusion that sport is all about the human body and just generic performance. The technology is here. We can talk about the pacemaker. We can talk about all 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 technology can bring than I think old school representations or ideas

48:27 of what an athlete should be. You know, athletes go through surgical procedures, right? You know, Kevin Durant, he's back playing and that's pretty amazing.

48:39 What happened with him? Remind me. Kevin Durant, the basketball player. Yeah.

48:43 Yeah. So multiple injuries. He's gone through a series of injuries, some gruesome ankle, feet. Calf. Calf injuries. 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 themselves to retrain their bodies.

49:16 That's not why they're getting bad. They get bad because they make, it's money. I'm not retiring your ass. You get back on that court. I paid that for that contract.

49:29 True, but the only way they get back is there's a huge team of scientific and technological innovation going forward. I think we're getting to the point where if athletes are 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.

49:51 Wow.

49:53 Some of us would. Yeah.

49:55 Some of us. Well, no, the only way I'd like to see him play another day is if he were wearing an Eagles uniform, other than that.

50:03 So, I mean, Professor, are you actually saying that we're going to see some crusty old 40-somethings performing at the very top of Major League Baseball, NFL, NBA, well, baseball maybe still, but are we gonna see more dynamic sports populated by older athletes?

50:19 I think so.

50:20 Okay, I have to modify that. I think where pure skill matters, yes, but where physicality, no, no.

50:29 Right.

50:29 Yeah, so Brady is not the wide receiver at 43.

50:34 No. Okay, so that's the difference.

50:37 Right. Here. Yeah.

50:40 And his offensive line becomes way more important than it ever has. Exactly.

50:45 Because if anybody gets through, that's the end of Tom Brady.

50:47 Right. Exactly.

50:48 You don't want to see that.

50:51 So guys, we've got to bring this to a close. Rayvon, it sounds like you're all in on this technology thing. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounded like you're ready to take this wherever it can go.

51:01 I wouldn't say I'm ready to take it wherever it'll go, but I think we as a society 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.

51:21 In our lifetimes, you're saying?

51:22 Yes, definitely in our lifetime.

51:24 Okay.

51:24 All right, dude.

51:25 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 thank you. Professor, for joining us for this. And guys, Gary, Chuck, always good to have you.

51:40 Thank you. My co-host.

51:41 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.