a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Sports, Tech, and What We Can All Learn from the Latest Performance Science

Episode Date: November 14, 2014

The modern, average 12-year-old Madden NFL videogame player has actually visualized more plays than ‪any past real-life NFL Hall-of-Famer. And now, for the first time, we're seeing those videogame tactics show up on the field too. There's a "technological and analytical arms race" going on in sports, and it's producing the world's best athletes in history. How are they working smarter, using science and technology to enhance the way they train and perform, when it's not enough to put in 10,000 hours? How should athletes sleep? (Note: you can try this at home, too). And what does “performance by the aggregation of marginal gains” have to do with winning? Author of the new book Faster, Higher, Stronger Wired's Mark McClusky -- interviewed by a16z General Partner (and enthusiastic basketball player) Jeff Jordan -- bridge the worlds of "jocks" and "nerds" in this wide-ranging conversation about sports, performance technology, nature vs. nurture, and the tricky nuances of why some enhancement technologies are legal vs. illegal or better vs. worse than others.

Thanks everyone for coming. We're delighted to have Mark Gulleski with us. He's just written a book, faster, higher, stronger. People around here like books like this because it looks a little bit like Ben Horowitz's book. I mean, there's nothing, and I don't want to say anything, but this sold pretty well. Let's hope it helps. Take all the help we can get on color schemes. Yeah, so you're an editor wired, but have also been a journalist at a number of of sports concepts. Can you give a brief career of the career trajectory

and how you came to write the book? So my joke is this is bringing together the, I'm trying to bridge the nerd jock divide here. I started my career at Sports Illustrated where I covered baseball and college football and helped launch SSI's first website way back when

people were launching their first websites. And worked there for a while then moved out here, worked to Electronic Arts, where I launched some editorial products there and have been wired for nine years. So it's really, you know, I grew up wanting to be a sports writer and now I'm a technology editor. And so you just go back and forth between the nerd and the, which is great. So the premise of the books, there's been massive improvement in athletic performance due to our better understanding of our body and how they can be trained, as best I can

tell. So, you know, it's hacking your body. It is. You know, we, over the past hundred years, our performance, if you look at things like 100 meter freestyle, we're 49% faster than we were in 1909. Some women's field events are actually, we've had more than 100% performance improvement in those events. What's interesting is that curve's starting to flatten out a little bit, that we've had this century of unbelievable physical achievement, and a lot of that comes from just really understanding some of the basic science in ways that we never knew it before. Now, and I think one of the points I try and really illuminate in the book is to find sort of marginal gains over your competition, you have to look much deeper.

You have to look towards science and technology and towards not just doing the basics right, which is still incredibly important and surprisingly gets wrong a lot of the time, even at the elite level, but really finding those little improvements through really sort of cutting-edge crazy techniques. Yeah, you've got a line that I thought was, interesting and somewhat depressing. Today's great innovations are tomorrow's baseline. So, you know, the Annie for athletic performance keeps going up,

but then you're still competing. You're competing now with everyone who's, yeah. I mean, if you watch game tape of like an NBA game from the 50s or 60s, if you watch the Celtics from the 60s, who many people acknowledge it's like the greatest team ever, it's hysterical. It's hysterical. You see these guys taking sort of like 15-foot hook shots,

and like, just sort of like... Set shots. Look, look, if you can... Look, if you can make... If you can consistently make a 15-foot hook shot, that's amazing. He just fell off with the consistent. So we have some hoops players. Yeah, we have a few.

It's just such a different universe that we're competing in now. And yeah, it's just that ante goes up a little bit every year. And once you stack year over year, it's the same thing that we all face and all the things that we do business-wise, right? That, you know, if we could morph ourselves back to 1996 and launch a website, we'd be in pretty good shape, right? Because we've learned a whole lot. But at the time, it seemed like, you know, that things were pretty cool, what we were going, and now we'd laugh at. They were fast. It was high-paced.

Nature versus nurture. Can anyone be trained themselves to be a world-class athlete? No. Could I do it? No. No. I mean, that's, I mean, nature versus nurture is this never-ending debate in science. And we love the narrative that anybody can do anything because we want to believe that

and we want to encourage our kids that they can be or do anything they want. When it comes to elite athletic performance, there's really, there's this tension. There's a certain level of genetic endowment that you have to have. And without that, you're not going to be competitive at the elite level. Like, this level is so far beyond normal. This isn't about just sort of like being a good runner or being a decent golfer. I'm an okay golfer, and somebody who's a scratch golfer looks at me like I'm a joke, right? So multiply that by like 20, and you're at the worst player on the PGA tour.

And multiply that by another 20, and you're at the best player on the PGA tour. one biologist talks about genetics as the size of the bucket that you possess and work and training as how high you fill that bucket. So the best genetics don't always win, but they're sort of the cost of entry. Conversely, can anyone be a world-class athlete these days without using these training techniques? I think it's really hard to be. I mean, I think it's probably easier to be a world-class athlete with great genetics and bad training than it is to be a world-class athlete with bad genetics and great training, if that makes sense. Yeah, no way which is there. So are great athletes born?

You have some interesting examples in the book of where genetics seem pretty powerful. Yeah, genetics seem to make the most difference in sports that are really physiologically determined. So running, cycling, rowing, things that really, there are tactics and there is training, but a lot of it comes down to sort of how much oxygen you can process and how your muscles work. Team sports, things that require a lot of skill, seem to sort of border more on the training side. But there's always a balance there. But, you know, to use Gladwell's phrase, these guys are outliers. But there are people who have won world championships in the high jump three years after they high jumped for the first time.

you know that's that's crazy that is that's insane beating thousands of people spent their whole life doing this there are people who won Olympic rowing gold medals two years after sitting in a boat for the first time they were great athletes in other sports and there have been really cool things that the UK has done especially to try and find athletes in other sports and put them in a sport that's better suited to their athletic abilities and talents describe that that I love I enjoy that yeah so Helen um Helen Glover is this woman's name She was a field hockey player in the UK, and she was a good field hockey player, but not a great one.

The UK in the run-up to the London Olympics ran a program, and I love the name of it, but it was called Sporting Giants. And what they did is they put out a call for tall athletes. Heights's a real advantage in some sports, and one of them is rowing because basically you're a lever. Like the physics of it is just a longer lever's better, all other things being equal. So she saw, her mom actually saw a newspaper advertisement for this,

for this program. She went, she interviewed, they did sort of an initial screen, then they did physiological testing on about 1,000 athletes, male and female. A couple hundred went into a training program, and, yeah, three years later, she won a gold medal in London with her partner, Heather Standing, and the pairs rowing. Which is, you know, kind of cool. Bob Sleds had a few of those, too. Herschel Walker.

Herschel Walker was Lolo Jones, who was a sprinter, was in the bobsled, Lauren Williams, another sprinter. Some of those things, like a bobsled push athlete, you know, you run and push. It's not, there's not a lot of skill. The driver, on the other hand, spends decades honing his or her craft trying to figure out how to get that thing down. But then flipping back to genetics, the two winners of the New York Marathon this year again were Kenyan. So, you know, sure. What happens in East Africa?

That is a great. I mean, if I could answer that question, so I think people can conflate. genetics with other things. So there are things genetically, they're genetically determined like body size and height that East African runners tend to have. They're pretty small. They have really thin calves.

There have been some interesting research on the one thing in running is obviously how fast you can swing your legs and how much energy that takes and the lighter the leg, the better. That's why Oscar Pistorius was actually able to be competitive because he had a very light leg because it was made out of carbon fiber. But there are other factors.

The fact that the Rift Valley sits at over 2,000 meters of altitude. And so everybody's living at high altitude. We spend people move all over the U.S. to live at altitude and train. The fact that there's a culture that really values running as not just a mode of transportation, but as sort of like the highest athletic aspiration, it's the equivalent of making it to the NFL or NBA

or Major League Baseball in the States. The fact that you really have a culture that has developed around identifying good runners young and starting to train them. And frankly, some of the things we've seen is perhaps a culture that's willing to cut some corners when it comes to pharmacology. We'll come back to that time again.

Because there has to be hope for me. We've augmented. So, you know, I think everybody wants to find a really simple answer to that. question. If we'd been having this conversation in the 1930s, you would have said, like, why do Finnish runners win every middle distance event? Finns dominated

basically from the 800 to the 10,000 meters for 40 years. Things like the top seven in the Olympics, four of them were fins. And everybody's like, why the fins? I don't think we think that Finns had some genetic advantage. I think, frankly, we

look for these just-so stories, and it's a much more complicated question. Which is interesting. Okay, switching over to training. What you describe in the book as some of the state-of-the-art training now is unrecognizable, too. Talk about what some of the pro athletes now. Sure. So I spent some time, actually just down the road here, there's a guy named Phil Wagner who runs a gym called Sparta Sports Science.

And he works with – I started working with a lot of baseball players. He also worked a lot with Jeremy Lynn before Lynn's sanity. He sort of rebuilt Jeremy as an athlete. Phil has sort of two key things that he works on. One is like a very regimented way of evaluating athletic ability and he does it with force plate analysis. So there's a lot of literature that just doing a vertical jump on a force plate you can tell a lot about somebody's movement patterns.

There are sort of three factors. It's how quickly you can move, how long you can sustain a movement, and how much power you generate. Different sports ask for different things, right? We think of athleticism or athletic ability as sort of this global thing, and it's completely not. You look at an NFL lineman and Leonel Messi and put them up against each other, and like they barely look like the same species, let alone people who would compete with

one another. So one of the real frontiers is that match between your personal athletic ability, the event that you want to get better at. So, you know, when Phil tested me, you know, you get this graph. And he's like, okay, well, what do you want to do? Right, we wouldn't, yeah. I'm like, well, weightlifting.

It's probably not my forte, right? You know, so I've been playing a lot of golf. He's like, okay, well, then, you know, that's very rotational. You need to, and in his movement signature, what you need is a longer drive. You need to be able to sustain force as long as possible through that motion. And I'm pretty poor at that, it turns out, which explains a lot, perhaps.

So, you know, so he would prescribe one set of training methods if that's why I wanted to do. If I wanted to play wide receiver, he'd prescribe something that worked on my straight-line speed, which actually I'm not bad at. With a set of exercises. With a set of exercises with different lifts, with focusing on different sort of biomechanical chains in the body, sort of like lateral or posterior or anterior. And so you sort of, it's really, it's that level of scientific focus. It's not, it's so far beyond, not just like go run.

It's not even just like go run intervals. Not go lift, not go stretch. It's, okay. You know, I got a chance to meet Ashton Eaton, who's the world record holder in the decathlon for this book. And we actually went for a run and we ran like two miles. And it's the longest run he'd done in five years. There's no reason for him to ever run more than two miles.

The longest thing he ever runs in competition is 1,500 meters, right? So, you know, it was, but it was just one of those funny moments. It's like, oh, like, I've run more distance than you do when I go for a run because, like, we're not training to do the same thing. Right, right. Then you had this great phrase for British cycling. The performance by the aggregation of a whole bunch of incremental, you know, it's a performance by aggregation of marginal gains.

Yes. So British cycling is kind of this amazing sports science success story. British cycling sucked forever. They were terrible. They were a laughing stock. And it kind of was embarrassing to them. They didn't like it. And about 15 years ago, the UK started a nationwide lottery.

And one of the things that they do with the lottery money is they give millions and millions of dollars to high performance, sport, funding, and research. So they came upon this huge pile of money and tried to figure out what to do with it. And a couple of people, a guy named David Ralesford, ran British Cycling for, about a decade. And that's his phrase, performance by the aggregation of marginal gains. And the idea is there aren't any magic bullets anymore, that we've made all the big leaps in performance that we're going to make physically. And that the only way to really find a competitive advantage now is to find lots and lots of little tiny improvements over

dozens of things. And so some examples. Before the Olympics, they spent a lot of time with Adidas and some university researchers, track cyclists, they do a warm-up, and then they go to a holding area before the race, and the temperature and the muscle starts to drop as you sit there waiting for your race, and that's not good. So they developed what they called hot pants, which I love that they called them hot pants, heated track suit bottoms, basically, that had heating elements over the thighs and hamstrings to keep the muscle warm between the warm-up and the race. They travel with their own pillows. Most of us have probably had the experience of sleeping on a bad hotel pillow and waking up your necks hurts.

And that's annoying for us. Like the day before the Olympic final, that's a huge problem, right? So you travel with your own pillow. Also, it helps you not get sick. Right, right. 8% of athletes who competed in London got sick during the Olympics. That's got to be a bummer. That's a bummer, right?

You catch a cold the day before you race. It's like, okay, well. So when you talk to these athletes, they won't shake your hand because God only knows where my hands are. Right, right. So it's really about... It's really about trying to find little improvements. Before every race, they spray isopropyl alcohol on the tires

and wipe them down, just make sure there's no dust on the tires. Maybe it's 1,000th of a second, maybe it's nothing, but it can't hurt. And now it's got in a book you talk about it's gotten to the point where there's a cult around, almost, you know, people are willing to ascribe benefits to the British training approach that might not even be there. During the Olympics, the French, there's a great rivalry, obviously, and especially in track cycling, and they were killing the French. And the French were complaining, and they were saying, like, you know, it's really weird. Like, after every race, like, they take their bikes and they cover the wheels up really quickly. Like, what's up with the wheels? Is there something? What are they hiding from the wheels?

And Le Kippe, which is the French sports daily newspaper, went and asked Braille's where he's like, yeah, well, they're especially round. And so the headline in La Keefe the next day was like, Magic or Mavik. Mavik is the French company that makes their wheels. And they were speculating that perhaps they were especially round wheels. Yeah, yeah. You know, if you believe that they can make a more perfect circle. In France? No, no.

No, sorry. So back to the concept of sports-specific training. You talk, you have some fun examples of the hammer or the volleyball team. Yeah. So we don't practice very smartly in most sports. I mean, we do have some advantage, which is we practice. practice sports. And when you think about the rest of your life, we don't practice most things that we do, right? We just go and do them. Like, I don't practice writing and then try and

write a story. I just write a story. So, you know, at least we have some, something that's separated from the performance aspect. But we aren't very smart about it. A couple of things since we were talking about basketball and there's at least some basketball players. Like, if you learn how to shoot free throws and you practice free throws and practice, it's probably the coach blows a whistle and everybody lines up. and shoots free throws, and you sort of rotate around the key, right? That's not how you shoot free throws in a basketball game. In a basketball game, you get fouled when you're running around,

your heart rates elevated, and then you shoot two, maybe three. So why on earth are you standing there shooting a hundred in a row? You'll never, ever do that when it actually matters. So motor skilled learning, which is a thing, talks about random practice. The best way to practice is to simulate as close as possible. possible the competitive environment because that's what you actually need to do. So Peter Vint, who works at the USSC, works with some NBA teams, and they now practice free throws just like that.

Like they're doing a drill or they're doing something else, and the coach will grab a player and he'll go and shoot two free throws and go back to the drill, because that's how you do it. Yeah, it's simulating real game conditions. The game teaches the game is what one motor skill learning person said to me about it. So the examples I'd love probably most in here were the football. examples, too, both the small team football and the players, but, and then the special tool that's helping people with their cognitive football IQ? Oh, yeah, sorry.

I should remember what I wrote about. Made an impression on me, but yeah, no, it's, so two things, again, on skill acquisition. The term is small-sided games, so basketball gets one-on-one, playing one-on-one in basketball is really useful. You learn skills that you can apply in a game. Very few team sports have one-on-one being useful. Beach volleyball is two-on-two game. What's happened in football recently, especially Texas, has been sort of the epicenter of this, is seven-on-seven football, is these tournaments, and it's mostly during the summer, it's kind of flag football-ish, but basically quarterbacks will throw 60, 70 passes a game. There's only so many receivers, and it's just tons

and tons of reps and tons and tons of scene defenses, and it's tons and tons of catching and throwing footballs, many more than you would get in regular practice. Soccer has its own version of it called Futsal, which is incredibly popular in Brazil, and Dan Coyle wrote about this in his book. The other tool is Madden. So for all you gamers out there. For all you gamers out there. So, EA, where I worked briefly, yeah. The average 12-year-old Madden fanatic has seen more professional football plays develop visually than probably a pro football hall of famer in the 60s did.

I mean, if you think about how many, you know, if you play Madden really religiously, play three games a night for, you know, half a year, that's a lot of pattern recognition. ignition. And it takes away one of the huge problems with football, which is concussions and your body getting destroyed as you try and play it. So it's perhaps not surprising that we have this generation of kids running super crazy, sophisticated offenses that used to only be run at the pro level or not even at the pro level that require a lot of quick decision making by the quarterback. So the read option totally depends on the quarterback, seeing the defense, and basically reading one or two things that happened.

You know, that used to be like cutting-edge stuff. Now, like, Piedmont High School is running. You know, it's crazy. And I really think that a lot of that comes down to having seen so much and being able to have those visual patterns. It's a great. They do it for flying planes. They do it for flying planes.

You know, he is geniuses that people pay them for it. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, they do it for flying planes. They do it for doctors. And, you know, I think you've actually started to see some of that. There was a play a couple of years ago. So does anybody here play, Madden? And he said, thank you.

Be proud. Come on. Keep them up. There we go. Okay, yeah. Okay. So anybody who plays Madden knows what I'm talking about, which is sometimes if time is running out and you're like streaking down the field and you've broken away from everyone,

you're going to waste as much time as possible. So you get to the goal line, you sort of run across the goal line before you score a touchdown because you don't want your opponent to get the ball. Sounds like Deshawn Jackson, but I'll leave that alone. Well, so two years ago, Eric Decker, who at the time was playing for the Broncos, did that in an NFL game.

He got to the goal line and he ran. And it's the sort of thing that anybody who ever played Matt, it's like, oh, yeah, I totally know what he's doing. If you've watched the tape of the game, the commentaries like, what is he doing? It's like, oh, well, he's just, he's taking time off the clock. Of course he's doing that. And somebody asked him after the game. Like, Matt, he's like,

you all yeah madden you know when you have that i mean that's an amazing like this simulation derani if you'd only known this this simulation of the sport has fed back into the sport itself it's kind of it's kind of but by way a couple of the quarterbacks you mentioned from the texas small football league in the last couple years luck tanna hill rg3 rg3 yeah just a few guys who grew up in this sort of playing these tournaments where they play six games on a weekend and throw 300 passes. Staying with the physical, we're in the shadow of Stanford. That study on sleep was the most interesting.

I love that study. So Sherry Ma is a researcher down the hill at Stanford. We all intellectually know sleep is important. We also know that culturally, or I would suggest that culturally, we have a really messed up attitude towards sleep. Like the fragadoshio is about how little we sleep. And it's crazy. because sleep's not just a performance maintainer,

it's a performance enhancer, and that was the study that Sherry did. She worked with the men's basketball team. She took baseline sort of performance measurements, how they shot free throws, sprint tests, three-point shooting. There's one other. On their sort of normal sleep, they were sleeping. They were reporting seven hours of sleep.

They were really asleep like five and a half hours. And then she challenged them to sleep as much as they possibly could. And they started reporting 10. It was really more like 9. Every member of the team ran faster. Every member of the team shot free throws better. Every member of the team shot three-pointers better. So let's abandon that study now.

Yeah, sorry. I'm going to the game tonight. We'll see if they slept. Yeah, exactly. It's time to rest. I mean, and these weren't small improvements. These were like 10, 50s. 15% improvements.

Yeah. Did the Giants try to do the same thing in the playoffs where they didn't... So the Giants have been, and I write about this, they've really looked at this. Most teams over the course of the season, their plate discipline decreases. Teams will swing at worse pitches over the course of the year. The Giants, so I don't have data for 2014. In 2012, the Giants played discipline got better over the course of this season. They really have focused on that.

Several other teams have hired sleep consultants and done some work on that, but the Giants really. So speaking of sleep and getting tired, you talk a little bit about athletes who are working to train their brain to, for being able to perform longer. So for most of the history of exercise physiology, we've thought a we, like I'm a sports scientist. Sports scientist. You play one in a chair. I play one in a chair. Fatigue was thought of as something that happened at the muscular level. Peripheral fatigue is the sciencey term for it. So like, you know, I'm doing bench presses and eventually my muscles say like, that's it. Like there's always been argument about what's that mechanism. Is it the buildup of lactic acid? Is it like I run

out of fuel in the muscle? But the muscle says I'm done and it's done. The latest research is that that's probably not true. Because of that moment that I can't do that last rep, only 40% of the muscle fibers and that muscle are firing. My brain isn't recruiting everything that it could. And so why not? There are some slightly different theories, but the general

idea is that the brain sort of has this idea of what it's going to let my body do. If I set out to run 5K, before I take a stride, my brain knows how fast it's going to let me run, because its job is to get me to the end of the 5K. Not to let me run faster. It just wants to preserve

me. Right? So if I start out running 5K and halfway through, you pull up next to me of your car. It's like, hey, we're going to run 10K today, actually. First of all, I'll slow down subconsciously. But second of all, I'll still run that 10K faster than I would if if I started off and is knowing I was going to run 10K. There's potential there that's untapped. So Sam Markara is a researcher in Wales who's working with UK sport and also the British military

to see if through brain training exercises during physical exercise, can you get the brain to basically fatigue less during exercise and allow your body to do more? And he's such a classic thing, he's like, I'll tell you in 2016 after the Olympics if it works. Yeah, okay, yeah. Well, there were the one example,

the female observer, which you know where this is going. So social psych experiments are so amazing, right? So all of these research projects take place on college campuses with something like, 15 well-trained male students were brought in to run on a treadmill, and they'd run, and there were two conditions. One, there was a male person monitoring. In one condition, a male associate would come in and talk to that person, and in the other condition, an attractive female associate would come in and talk to that person. And every single man ran faster

when they'd try. Our brains are, you know, for all that's amazing about our brains, we're so easily manipulated. Right? I mean, we're so easily manipulated. If you tell me, some of these deception studies,

if you tell me it's a certain temperature in the room, yeah. even if it's not. If you tell me it's really hot, I'll go slower. If you tell me, even if it is hot, if you tell me it's not, I'll go faster. Yeah, which is wild. And then caffeine. Caffeine's a great drug.

Yeah. It's, I mean, not just for waking up, but for almost every athlete, the studies are really consistent that caffeine works. Yeah. No, which is great. That's why I drink, like, excuse me. Data analysis in sports. Dorkapalooza. Dorkapalooza.

So Bill Simmons is a sports writer for grantland.com now. He dubbed, that's the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Which is supposed to be just really cool. It's awesome. It's fun. It's 2,000 data nerds talking about sports. So what's cool about it and what's interesting about it, and we all sort of deal with this more

than perhaps a lot of people, is the boom in data collection has really caused this problem for our sports organizations and athletes, which is, used to be really hard to get the information. Now it's really easy to get the information. The trick now is analyzing the information. And especially when you start talking about

data sets like Sport View, which is a system in the MBA that captures three-dimensional positional data on every player and the ball and officials 25 times a second during a game. Every player, every game. Every player, every game. Yeah, every team. Every team. Yeah.

25 times a second. Like, that's not, that's not, you know, Bill James could sort of revolutionize baseball stats when he was a night watchman at a pork and beans factory in Kansas. Yeah. Because he could do the math. Like, to crunch those numbers, you need a data scientist. You need people who are used to, like, crazy big data sets. Most franchises, frankly, have no idea what to do with this.

So we've met with at least two companies that are taking NBA data and processing it. And it's unbelievably interesting because, first of all, they have to make the data into the players moving. And then once they have specific players moving the ball, they can then just start crunching tendencies. Okay, if you push LeBron left on the wing, his shooting percentage goes from 62 to 30. Right. You want LeBron moving left. You want Kobe to shoot from the left base. not the right baseline, so let's start funneling them that way. The granular information,

I write about Kirk Goldsbury, who is a Harvard cartologist. Yes. Sorry, I said, cardiologist for a second, which is totally different. Cartographer is what Kirk is. He got, he started actually by scraping data from ESPN's website before Sportview existed, and he was basically just getting shot data for every player where they took every shot, whether they made it or missed it, and then start mapping it. And it's like, what's the expected value of a shot here versus a shot there? And you see the game changing with these insights. So many teams are running offenses now based around, you know, the three-pointers is a great shot.

So you see really advanced organizations that the Warriors have really worked on this. Spurs. Houston Spurs. Three-pointers, or I want to be at the rim? Mid-range jump shot's a bad shot. Unless you're dirt. Yeah. Then some of the stuff, I mean, it's just, you know, high.

pick and roll. How do you play it? And so they can tell you, the guy goes over. You know, this has a 39 century. A guy goes under. This has, and it's just wild. You can see over under, with which players, with which defensive combination. It's, you know, we're so at the infancy of this movement. Because, you know, baseball, again, is where the starting. Baseball's easy because it's state-based. It's very discrete moments. Basketball is continually moving in fluid. Soccer, football, hockey. I mean, those team sports, there was a lot to do. Yeah, they're happening this in soccer too.

Cheating. So, this Dr. Bob Goldman's question is somewhat provocative. The Goldman dilemma is what, so Bob was a, he started doing this questionnaire with athletes asking them, if you could take a drug that would guarantee you an Olympic gold medal, but you would die in five years, would you take it? and crazy percentages said yes. Like 80, 90% said yes. Which is really hard to... It does explain biking.

It does explain. What the age of the athletes? So they were competitive international athletes, so they were in their 20s, right? What's interesting is... So he started doing this in the 80s. He had had a friend who died of a steroid overdose, and he started writing all of this stuff

about the scourge and danger of steroids. Oddly, he has become a advocate for life extension and human growth hormone, and he's sort of come in this weird full circle place. So those results stayed pretty consistent over time until about five years ago, and people continued asking this question, and the percentage has dropped pretty precipitously,

which is good news. I think we see it for a couple of reasons. It's always hard for testing to keep pace with potential cheating, but I think we're getting better, especially as a cyclist. It's called the biological passport. So instead of trying to catch you and identify a substance in your blood, I'm going to test you at regular intervals and I'm going to see what your red blood cell count is. And if there are spikes, if there is weirdness, I don't have to show, oh, you took something. I can just show like, this is abnormal. This is abnormal.

And that's really changed cycling. I think the culture has really changed in a lot of sports over the past few years. I think all the revelations in cycling finally sort of broke that culture of silence around it. And the Tyler Hamilton book is unbelievable. The Tyler Hamilton book is insane. I mean, if you haven't read it, you care about this stuff. It's an amazing, heartfelt, devastating book about choices that he felt like he had to make.

Had to make it. so I'm you know it's really easy to make really extreme arguments on doping and I've made some of them in the past like oh just let anybody do anything because at least you can be sort of internally consistent in sort of thinking about it more

and talking to people you know to argue by analogy which is a terrible way to argue but that would be like saying if somebody gets away with murder when we should just make murder legal it's okay right part of it is because sports are arbitrary there's no reason we have to do any of this so we feel

there's obviously a moral difference between cheating in a sport and killing someone but it's also this you're not trying, it's not about catching the cheat, it's about protecting the ability of the clean athlete to be competitive I shouldn't have to make that choice

to be competitive and so whatever we can do to protect that ability I think is worth doing. Go for me. Why beat juice and caffeine And why are they okay? It's a really good question. I mean, and the answer is because we decided that they are. But it's all arbitrary, right?

It could be 92 feet to first base or 85 feet to first base. Red blood cells, just another example of that, right? So we're totally cool with people living in altitude because we don't feel like we should let people. Okay, so. Okay, so how about a hypoxic? tent. If I spend 15 grand, I can build a room in our house, and Kristen might not like living at altitude every night. But like, we can sit there and be... You may be in the tent by yourself.

We can be slightly lightheaded and generate more red blood cells. Or I can blood dope. I can take my own blood out and spin out the red blood cells and put them back in. Or, so I'm doing this in what I think is the order of badness. Or I can blood dope with somebody else's blood, which is, that's detectable at least, or I can take EPO. They all had the same effect on my body. The same outcome, different degrees of the same outcome, but the same outcome, and we're okay with someone and we're not with others. The World Anti-Doping Agency actually looked into banning altitude tents, and they had

that conversation for a long time. And in talking to some of these altitude researchers, one thing that came up was like, look, if you're going to ban an altitude 10, you're going to have to ban Gatorade. And so the answer, I mean, the answer is it is all arbitrary, but we sort of decide, I think part of it goes to risks, like physical risks. There are no physical risks to too much beet juice. There are some to caffeine, but you really have to work at it. You know, there are profound physical risk to EPO. And so I think that's part of it.

I think part of it is accessibility of the technology to do a broad swath of people. people so you know everybody can sort of source beat juice event unless you're in London in 2012 so I think those are some of the some of the factors that feed into that but it is at the end of the day it's just we it's we decide on a set of rules and ask everybody to follow them I had a mini version of this I was this summer spent three straight weeks in the mountains biking came back in my time they're proved by like came back and you crushed nine percent yeah and it was just because I have these you know these sparkers I'm just like oh my god it's

It's, yeah, I mean, it does help to have more red blood cells on the bike. It was pretty good. So the past century has seen this massive improvement, but in many sports, the rate is slowing down. In some cases, sports haven't even gotten back to the blood, to the cheated records and things like that. Yeah. I mean. Are we reaching our natural limits? Yes and or no but.

In some ways, we are. I mean, just for the mathematicians, the curves flattening. out, right? It's, our improvement is slowing. It's not stopping. You know, logically, you come to a point where you think there has to be a limit, but one of the people I was talking to for the book, his name's Andy Walsh. He runs, Red Bull actually runs this giant high-performance athletic program. They sponsor hundreds of athletes around the world. Were we talking about caffeine before or is that, yeah, sorry. I was talking to Andy Walsh's his name. He came from, he's Australian and worked with the U.S. ski team. I'm like, well,

nobody's ever going to run 100 meters and 8 seconds. He's like, why not? I'm like, well, because you can't. He's like, well, so think of Neanderthal man and think of where we are now and think of that level of improvement. And he's like, and just start to project that forward, right?

Evolution hypothesis. Evolution hypothesis, right? And so his line was, you know, somebody run 100 meters in six seconds that he just won't look anything like what we think human beings look like today. Like Yassain Bolt. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, but Bolt's a great example, right? Like, every artist thought sprinters had to be short.

Turns out they don't. I'm going to ask, open up the questions after this. So be thinking, what interesting trends are you looking, seeing now that you think have, you know, that are worth watching go forward? I mean, I keep coming back to just, we're actually really far behind in the U.S. on a lot of this. And so seeing some of the things that have happened in Australia and the UK make their way into major U.S. team sports, I think we're going to see a lot of changes in NBA and NFL. You haven't mentioned what Australia is doing. I came up in the book repeatedly. Yeah, I mean, Australia really, so a lot of this really started in the 70s and 80s in Eastern Bloc countries.

And then Australia, after the 76 Olympics, founded the Australian Institute of Sport. and they really drove a ton of innovation to and through the 2000 games at Sydney. Companies have come out of that. There's a company called Catapult. Some of you might be familiar with. They make a little GPS. They make a little sensor units.

GPS, accelerometer, gyros, like 20 sensors. And it sits sort of in between your shoulder blades. Not that anybody else is watching Australian sports, but if you do, sometimes you'll see rugby players with this little thing protruding between their shoulders and they have a little pocket where it's sewn in. They're using that data in real time. So coaches are making decisions on substitution patterns based on what they're seeing from the data. So not like Jeff,

how do you feel, but like Jeff's initial 10-yard sprint time has gone down 10% he needs a break because he's not able to cover this winger with that speed. So we're two minutes into the game. We're two minutes. The game has just started. You know, so literally they're sitting there with an app that's suggesting here's the load that a player has undergone, and here's what we should do with him. And here's the impact. The World Cup said he's run six miles, but it doesn't say how the speed has changed over the six miles. So none of the U.S. team sports has allowed any of that yet. Some of the biggest pushback is from the players' unions because now I can evaluate.

Many of them are using them in practice. So regulation, again, limiting technology. Sorry. Not that that's, is that a thing down here? Nah. So I think, but I, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages, and eventually they'll come to an understanding with the unions, but they're worried that they're going to, like, your next contract time,

it's going to be like, yes, but, you know, look, here's the data. It's all the concussion technology that's, we've seen 20 different approaches to concussion management, and the players union's like, uh-uh. Yeah. Yeah, stay away. Which is interesting. Questions? Yeah, Mark. I'm curious what your comments are.

A player are getting bigger, too, it seems, right? You mentioned Dirk and LeBron, Durant, or tight ends in football? Yeah. Is that bigger people entering sports? I think we are... David Epstein, who wrote another great book about sports science last year, called The Sports Gene, talked about it as the big bang of body types. It used to be, there are these amazing studies on morphology done over the course of the Olympic Games,

like people literally going in and like taking measurements of Olympic athletes. And in the 20s, that range was very small. Like if you plotted height, weight, it was a pretty small range in every sport. Now today it's like this. It's so atomized. So I think part of it is just increased training proficiency. I think a big part of it is better nutrition worldwide. just getting people to sort of fulfill their genetic potential physically.

And part of it is I think every sport has sort of pushed to some of the extremes of that morphology just because the competitive landscape drive, you can't be competitive anymore as, again, you watch those now 60s NFL games, like the offensive linemen, like the huge guys on the field, are the size of like the tailbags? Not even, right? I mean, you know, like 6-230 was like a big guy back then and that's not a big guy anymore in the NFL. Do you have a question?

I thought you raised your hands, right? Yeah, go ahead. Well, actually, so I'm very interested in wearables right now, as are a lot of people. And I'm curious, oh, that's okay, I'll be loud, thank you. I'm curious whether or not you think that this, sort of consumer revolution in wearable technology is sort of adequate, an adequate slice of what we're seeing professionals do with technology, because it's being marketed

this ad, you know, measure your sleep with your wristband, and then, like, here we have, you know, professionals guiding the teams about sleep. I think most of the stuff on the market right now is still fundamentally a toy and a hobby. I mean, it's, there are going to be these steps but to get really good data the sensors are bigger and more annoying and bulkier right now or to have something that looks okay to wear

they're smaller and the data is not as good right so so we're a long way I mean I think just I think they're better than nothing I think capturing information is always better than not capturing information but nobody at the professional level

is relying on a tool like Fitbit or Up fuel band. Gerald? I just to piggyback off that question I did, read or hear about some NBA team is here in the chips actually on the players to monitor them throughout the season. I wonder where will they come into play with privacy for the athletes. I mean, I know guys that's going out and not me.

I think we'll see that tomorrow morning. I think those are huge questions. I think that's why the players unions are really pushing back on this, right? I mean, there's so little privacy for a professional athlete anyway that they're worried about that. You know, the teams that are, excuse me, using that stuff now, mostly are using them for practices and not sort of 24-7, but yeah, once I sign you to an $80,000-million contract,

am I going to want to know everything about your life? I probably am. And that's a tough negotiation, I think. Yeah. I have a great example of extreme performance in sports here. Recently, Madison Bunkartner, in the World Series. Like, we haven't seen a performance like that in a hundred years.

If ever. What do you attribute that to? I mean, I can't attribute it to anything other than, like, that's why we watch sports, right? We watch sports to see, like if you watch sports really, really carefully, every game, you will see something you've never seen before. And every game will offer you a moment of, oh my God, did that just happen? And it can be as small as a crossover move, it can be as large as Bumgardner coming on throwing 70-some pitches on two days' rest to say, I mean, it's crazy what he did, right? It's nuts.

and that's why it's not academic. That's why we cheer and yell and jump up and down and don't just hand in a spreadsheet at the start and say I trained more and here's my physiology and so I'm better. Like there's, I mean, that's like if you take the 10,000 hours thing to its reductionist most absurd point, there would be no point of running a race.

Just show me your training log, and I'll tell you who's going to win it. That's why they play the game. That is. And it's so hard dances, it did not sound super, super cliched as you say this, but like that's why we care. You know, otherwise it's just, it's just this thing that happens. What are your thoughts on anti-aging programs like cytogenics?

I will be honest that I don't know a super ton about them, so I don't want to speak terribly authoritatively. I mean, there are some really interesting research on, on sort of ways to keep the ongoing genetic damage that we all suffer as ourselves replicate over time to lessen that through different interventions and that sort of telemer decay that we all have. Exercise is one thing that shows that. A lot of times people are like, oh, professional athletes don't live that long. And there are certainly cases that we can point to in tragic cases, but generally as a population, elite athletes do live longer than the rest of us, even with what their bodies have been

put through. So I can't really speak to any specifics on a specific plan. But the reason I mentioned it is, is I did this race in October with this grandfondo. Pretty brutal race, 9402 miles. Which one? Okay. So Coleman Valley Road and all the fun up there? That was actually the part. Yeah. But the gentleman who had competed is 18 years older than May. I was able to keep pace between the entire time. Performed quite well. And I found it later on, he was on this syndiatic program, which is administered by medical physicians. Right.

It's a lot of data sampling, DNA testing. You know, there are things like human growth hormone and testosterone that are administered, but I thought it's so legally. His performance was amazing. I mean, look, HG&H and testosterone freaking work. I mean, there's no doubt that those anabolic agents are incredibly powerful. They're legal, you know, they're legal prescribed by a physician and not in a competitive environment.

So, yeah, in that case, you can do that. We haven't really talked about personalization, but that's one thing. It's like that testing in everything from nutrition to training programs, we're like, oh, yeah, yeah, we're all different, we're all individuals, but we are crazily so. So the population in this room, 65 or 70,

there are five of us in this room, likely, who are very low responders to aerobic exercise, like who can only see less than 5% improvement to our VO2 max through whatever we do forever. There are likely five of us who are incredibly high responders to aerobic exercise, 20 plus percent gain to VO2 max. That's a huge delta in a really small population. So, you know, we know this intuitively.

Two of us go on the same training program and have very different results. And the reason is genetic. Yeah. So my wife is German-American I know we've had many discussions over soccer. Okay. I have this theory that the U.S. soccer program is not better

because our best athletes don't play soccer. Yep. Which your take on that. You're right. So it's not the we're behind, we can get our best athletes to play. I mean, yeah. I mean, to a large extent, yes.

Yeah. I mean, it's, you should. Yeah, yeah, I'll give her a ring after. When we're having drinks, give me the phone. I'll tell her you're totally right. You know, we're starting, it's going to be interesting, right? There are two facets. One is obviously the athletes, and our best athletes don't play soccer.

More and more are, I think. I think in 10 years, I'd be short NFL right now if I were a betting man because I think we're going to start taking a harder and harder look at the consequences of playing American football. 30 years ago, boxing was one of the top three sports. Yeah. So, you know, I think we'll start to see some of those athletes shift. I think, obviously, we know all the youth participation numbers in soccer

that's never really translated to anything at the world stage. We're getting better. Clemsman's actually great because what Clemsman's actually worked on is not at the elite level but trying to build the infrastructure. He's a German. He's a German. He's a German. He's a German.

I know. I know. I know. But he's trying to build. You know, he's trying to build the system. Part of it is identifying those athletes and making sure that they're starting to play and getting them into the system.

You know, discoverability of a great athlete is, in a country our size is a problem. Just a couple more questions. So the question I had was around, to what extent does, you know, everything that you've seen on this topic lead to a general slippery slope towards just straight up genetic interventions?

And, you know, if we are going to get faster, stronger, whatever. Where does it end? And do we eventually get there? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's, so near the end of the book, the last chapter is on the limits of performance. And Mark Denny, who's another Stanford guy, wrote this kind of amazing paper, looking at the rates of improvement in three sports. Human track and field, third red horse racing, greyhound racing. Obviously, we're very comfortable running a straight-up genetics breeding program for speed in horses and dogs. Those sports have plateaued.

Horses haven't gotten any faster since the 70s, statistically. I mean, you can get some variation. Same with greyhound racing. I am so massively unqualified to have a medical ethics discussion about how we'll get to genetic modifications for these things. I guess I would just caution that the idea that there are easy genetic answers to these questions, you know, height, we know height to be 60% genetically determined roughly, 70, between 60 and 70. So that's easy to know. What the specific alleles are, what the SNPs are, a single, that's impossible.

And there's something on the order of 30,000 that have been identified that have. have some association, right? So we can know that there are genetic factors against these things. Our ability to even begin to touch or modify those factors today, of course, today is non-existent. Yeah, God only knows where we'll end up. In the book, the odds of playing in the NBA go up massively with each inch. So if you're seven feet tall, so first of all, there being seven feet tall is really crazy super rare. But if you're a seven foot tall

American male, you have roughly a 25% chance of playing in the National Basketball Association. If you are 6-6, which again is really tall, you have like a 0.2% chance at playing in the NBA.

That's how steep that curve gets at the bottom, right? And if you're 6'1, sorry. If you're 6'1, I mean, how are you? moving to the left, right? Anything in the back? Yeah, yeah. All day long.

Yeah. Use sports. Yes. So focus on travel team specialization. Please don't. Any correlation. No, it's... With injury.

High correlation with injury and negative correlation with elite success later in life. It's the short answer. The slightly longer answer is this is one of the real scourges of 10,000 hours, right? It's this idea that I need my kid to pick a sport early and really practice it hard. It can work, right? But, Eric Hayden. But Tiger Woods, you know, like, right. Right. There's your cautionary tale, right? But like, read Agassiz's autobiography on how he felt about tennis, you know. Most, there's actually been good research on this.

Most Olympic athletes specialize late. You have a much better chance of finding a sport, A, that you enjoy playing, which fundamentally is really what we should all be focused on, because statistically none, you know, it's a rounding error if you're an elite. The other part is you get a better match between your body and the sport. Like, you know, I grew up as a cyclist. maybe I would have been a great soccer player. I don't know.

I never played soccer. That sampling period is really important. So please, yeah. That's fine. Great. Thank you very much. I appreciate the conversation. Thank you.