StarTalk Radio - Making a Phenom – Tech

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

To wrap up our “Making a Phenom’ mini-series, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice explore the ethics of technology in sports with author Rayvon Fouché, PhD, and bioethicist Arthur Caplan, PhD. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons and All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/making-a-phenom-tech/ Image Credit (Clockwise from top): Michael Jordan: Unknown author / Public domain; Lionel Messi: L.F.Salas / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0); Serena Williams: Hanson K Joseph / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0); Michelle Wie: Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0). Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Sports Edition. This is the fourth and final installment of the making of a Phenom. And today we're going to focus on the ethics and the technology that involve what's going on behind those who achieve and those who don't. And of course, I have my co-hosts. Who are they? Chuck Nice. Chuck. Hey, Neil. What's happening, buddy? Always good. Always good to be here. Stand-up comedian. Great to have you. When you're not on stage, you're with us. So thank you for that. Which means I'm going to be with you for some time

because I'm not getting back on stage anytime soon. And we've got Gary O'Reilly, former soccer pro and soccer commentary. Gary. Hey, Neil. Hi, Chuck. Except you're a Brit, so you call it football. Football. Football. And it's round. It is round. It's rounder than our football. And so you call it foot football football football yeah it's round it is round it's rounder than our football and so you know what we're going to have today uh we're bringing in someone who's an expert in thinking about the role of technology in the human performance of sports very important topic. And who is it? It's a guy named Rayvon. Rayvon. Do we call you Ray?

Is that? Please call me Ray. Ray. I'll call you Ray. So your full name, Professor Rayvon Fouché. And they're a hoose.

They're fancy. You have to be a professor with a name like that. Rayvon Fouché. I guess so. I guess so. You can't be working at Subway just like Raybon Fouché, your sandwich maker. I am Raybon Fouché, master sandwich maker.

No, no. You've got to be a professor. Here's your hot dog. Here's your hot dog. Would anyone be surprised if the professor just left now? What did he sign up for? So he's director and professor of American Studies at Purdue University. I think that's West Lafayette, Indiana.

That is correct. Yeah. And author of The Game Changer, a recent book. The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports. Wow. Came out in 2017. He's the guy for this segment and this episode. So, Ray, thanks for being on StarTalk. It's great to be here. Yeah, excellent.

So let me just ask you, who should we be crediting for the breaking of world records today? world records today? Is it the commitment of the athlete or the scientists and engineers who are empowering them to do so? I don't want to vote either way, even though I am a scientist. I do. Just the way you phrased the question, we saw your bias and your vote. That was the most leading question ever coming from a scientist. Excuse me, Professor, but who should take credit? Should it be lowly athletes who, you know, just happen to be there? Or the scientists who empower them? Uh-oh.

This is like an Agatha Christie. You've got someone in the library with a smoking gun, and Poirot says, was it you that shot her, sir? Right. All right. Sorry, Professor. No, no, no. Clearly, Neil, you have your feeling about the subject. And I would say, depending on where you are,

it's a little of both, potentially. Meaning that, right, at elite level athletics, the differences between great athletes and their bodies is getting smaller and smaller. So if you're an athlete and you're trying to figure out how to beat your competitors, you are looking for every possible way to get better. You are looking for every possible way to get better. And oftentimes, in the last 50 years or so, it has been science, technology, nutrition, other different ways of gaining competitive advantage. So in the bigger scheme of things, if we understand that the differences between the athletic bodies are getting smaller and smaller. And you see larger differences in winning and losing. Maybe it's the scientists that are, and engineers and designers are helping out. So for me, I'm interested in asking the question, right, is sports becoming less of a competition between athletes? Or is it becoming a competition between engineers, designers,

or scientists, and the athletes are actually instrumental in that activity? So at a certain level, yes, but the athletes still do run, jump, play, and compete. So I'm hedging on my answer to that question a bit and saying, yes, scientists are helping athletes get better, but athletes are still competing. So it's this strange, messy merger of the two. So, excuse me, I've done way too much thinking on this subject.

If I don't give my two co-hosts a chance to speak, too bad. Love you too, Neil. So it seems to me, all that matters if you want to see athletic performance is that there's a level playing field. And the level playing field simply means if you're going to wear this sharkskin new swimming suit, then everyone wears it. And that way way you're still competing body against body. I think NASCAR figured that out. All right. Every car is to a

spec. And so therefore it's driver against driver. And if you have a new technology, you'd give it to everybody. Maybe it might take a couple of years to break it in, but then everybody's competing. So you can still honor the commitment and the athletic prowess of the individual athletes. Isn't that all we need here? I love the idea of a level playing field. I love the idea that everyone follows the rules. But, right, in sport, there are the written rules that are in the books that the governing bodies control, and there are the rules that everyone plays by. Right.

Choose your sport. Say basketball. What's a foul these days? NFL, what's a catch? Or say football, soccer. What's, you know, pulling a jersey? Wait, wait, just a second. In my day in the schoolyard, the rule was no blood, no foul.

Exactly. Oh. What did you guys, play basketball with knives? That was rumble. What the hell? what do you mean no blood no i did not shoot you that's not a foul that's how it was that's a tough yard that was in the in the playground yeah but go i'm sorry right interrupt so no but i mean i think the point is that everyone bends the rules even if you level the playing field and everyone feels that they have the same equipment, everyone's going to try to get an angle.

Because my feeling is that sport is not about fairness. It's not about equality. It's maintaining, sustaining the largest competitive advantage you can. That's why you have mismatches. That's why you have inequities. That's why you want a bigger player against a smaller player. That's why well-funded Formula One teams do better than poorly funded Formula One teams. And they call that the competitive edge. And that's what everybody is looking to have. Just because at some elite level

of play, the playing field that is not level is kind of indistinguishable to us mere mortals you know but to the guy at the elite level that tiny little edge is the difference between a world record and not or the difference between a gold medal and just placing fourth you know when you when you look at that. So maybe what it's about is that that little tiny little bit of edge is for us tiny, but for them, it's gigantic. It is. And arguably the technology that's available today,

and I would say in the last considerably 30, 40 years, has really allowed people to gain that 1% or 2% or 3%. And those percentages add up to big differences in winning and losing. I just want to make it clear. If you're going to say that if there's a great new science technology advantage and everyone has it, there's still people, like you said, sports is not about being fair, it's about winning, like you said, sports is not about being fair. It's about winning, not to put exactly those words in your mouth, but I think that's what you

meant, that I will win based on some other thing that I ingeniously come up with. So that means I'm admitting to myself that I didn't beat them physiologically. I had performed some trick that no one knows about yet. And in that way, I win. So that poses for me an ethical issue. So these fast-skin swimsuits, which were designed to allow people to swim through the water really quickly, basically you're encasing the bodies in these packages that allow them to be very hydrodynamically efficient. However, your body doesn't change, right? So my body is less quick through the water because I've got a big butt and, you know, you can't choose any swimmer and a butt is not efficient.

Wait, wait, Ray, I don't remember that in my hydrodynamic equations. I know. You probably didn't remember that in my hydrodynamic equations. I know. You probably didn't notice that. The butt turbulent term. Butt turbulence is not very good. Well, you missed that. That's the part of the course that was taught by Sir Mix-a-Lot. So even if you have access to these technologies,

they don't apply to everyone equally, right? Similarly, you know, we talked about athletic shoes. I'm intrigued by athletic shoes because no one has ever really seen athletic shoes to be that big of a game changer in the context of sport, but they're huge, right? If running barefoot was more efficient, everyone would run barefoot. But depending on how I run, my gait, my body, that dictates how efficiently the shoe works for me. That's why you have particularly elite level athletes like Elliot Kipchoge. He has a custom pair of shoes. He's not running his shoes off the rack. Everyone has these custom pieces. And so I think this is where it gets to the messy part is that what does it mean for everyone to get access to the same equipment, the same technology, the same devices?

If you can customize yours to fit your body a little better, that gives you that much of an advantage over your competitors. Gary, you've got to ask a question because otherwise I'm all over your face. No, no, no, that's fine. I mean, so we're talking about using intelligence, how you do certain things. But what if we upgraded our own intelligence, Professor, and went, I'll use AI to solve the problems that I might encounter. How do we bring that in? How is it being used right now? Because this is the sort of frontier for me of technology in sport.

Yeah, I think this is where it's getting to, for me, the strange place. So in all sporting competitions, information is key. Knowing what the other team is going to do, ability to process information quickly or efficiently as possible. So when we other team's going to do, ability to process information quickly or efficiently as possible. So when we're talking about the use of AI and pushing to the level of having information directly processing through one's cortex, it allows us to really change the way in which games are played. The idea of having more information processing through your brain is really potent. I don't know what it looks like to have a world where artificial

intelligence is now being deployed as an additional actor or competitor in the sporting field. I don't know what that looks like. And I'm troubled by the idea of people using more technology. You know, I love technology. I love the way it changes the games. But when we start asking ourselves to have new forms of computing to make assumptions and make decisions about games, that's a problem for me. Because part of what I love about sports is that you can use all kinds of technology, but the randomness of humanity

is great. Because people make mistakes all the time. Watching the Premier League this weekend, the number of bad passes that are made that gave up goals, ideally that shouldn't happen, right? And the players at that level should not make that mistake, but they do. And that's part of what I love about sport is that as much as you import technology and make people technologically driven by these devices, people still have to make the choices mentally, cognitively, and they mess up. Do the commissioner of the NFL get ahead of the game here and say, AI cannot replace the head coach?

So as we've got this human element at the forefront. Because otherwise, I'm the owner of XX franchise, and I say, head coach, goodbye, meet my new dude. He comes in a box, I just plug him in, and he wins games for me. What's the difference between that, Gary, and AI in the earpiece of the coach? Right. Exactly.

There's no difference. No, no. I'm just not paying the coach. I just saved myself a lot of money. I forgot about that. I think part of where I see that kind of information coming into play is assisting coaches in making great decisions. So there's a whole system of coaches that are saying, well, you are my chess pieces and you will do my bidding and I'll move you around the floor

or the field or the field of play and you do what I want you to do. But there are other coaches that are saying, well, let me understand who you are as a human being, how you play when you're stressed, when you're motivated, and when you are at the highest level of confidence. And that allows people to do really amazing things. So how can you use that information to bring the best out of players? I think that's the next level of where that can be. AI, because a lot of human intelligence is pattern recognition. It's being able to see things that we know, oh, because we see this, oh, we know this. There's a lot of association and pattern recognition in human intelligence, and it's merely mimicking that. So let's say, for instance, everything that you just said, we have the AI, I have some type of biometer inside of the player,

whether it's a chip or whether it's a finger prick that, you know, and I'm able to judge his level of stress. I'm able to judge how tired he is. I'm able, based upon hormonal releases or brain chemical release, his mood even. releases or brain chemical release, his mood even. And then that coupled with all of the information that I've been able to store in from the week about how much he practiced, how well he performed, how much he should play in the real big game and all of these things. I could actually move around as chess pieces in real time where a human being could never do that.

True. True. But I think the question for me is that you believe that will give you a better outcome, but it may not. No. Because at the end of the day, athletes do amazing things. I think of the case of Bob Beeman in 68, when he jumps nearly two feet longer than anyone had jumped before in the long jump, one of the longest held world records. He never jumped close to that again. I don't know what

happened to Bob Beeman that day where it all came together in an amazing way. And I think this happens to athletes all the time. And I think arguably we just don't know enough about the human body to understand fully how to extract the highest level of performance from it. Yeah, I think the point is, Ray, that proper AI will figure it out in ways that we can't. That's the whole point. So I think it's a given that AI will be able to figure stuff out

that we think is somehow mysterious and intractable, and then it invokes it, and then Bob Beamon jumps 29 feet 4 inches every single time. Damn. But I mean, I think this is a question. It's like, how many data points do we need to get close enough to understanding how to produce that kind of problem? Well, AI figures it out.

It's not our problem. That's convenient. We're just outsourcing to AI. It's like, we'll solve our problem. Let me just ask another important question here. My homework on you tells me that you were big into bicycle racing. another important question here. My homework on you tells me that you were big into bicycle racing. So from that sport, I have fragmented memory and understanding. Let me just retell it and you correct it and then give me the answer to this. The derailleur had to be invented. Previously,

you had to like switch tires to change the gear ratio if you're going up or down a hill in the Tour de France. So the derailleur gets invented. You don't have to switch tires. Therefore, there's no pit stop. And now you're just way ahead of everybody else. So you first outlaw it, and then you realize, hey, this is a good idea. Everybody has it. So at what point are the rules just too slow relative to the technology? And should they have an immediate acceptance of something that's brand new? I think the rules are always very slow. So the case in cycling, right, the bicycle wheel had, you had a cog on the left side and a cog on the right side.

Oh, and then you flipped the wheel. You flipped the wheel upside down to use a different cog. So then you get derailleur, and you certainly, all of a sudden, you can move from a two-speed to maybe a three-speed, four-speed, five-speed. Then you have a front derailleur. Then you have a ten-speed. But the question is, oftentimes the sport governing bodies who control what technology is and is not permissible,

they are not in the business of selling technology. They're in the business of selling sport and human narratives. So the idea for them, I would say, if I'm the commissioner of an organization, I want my narrative to be about the athletes, the competition, rather than this new, hot new technology that's changing the game. But if you know it'll eventually get accepted why not just say do anything you want to win and watch people get invented about how to win that that becomes an entire other interesting sort of sideshow to

what's going on which would be in the future perhaps just a regular part of the sports we watch yeah but i think part of people sport is is about human narrative. You're not giving up the derailer. You know this. So don't tell me it's about human narrative. It's about the technology. You wrote the damn book on this subject. Tell me this. But I think the point is that people want to see the athlete win. They don't care about the technology of that one. Ah, now that is a very good point because from a human standpoint, the lure of sport is the human to human competition. It's the besting of someone. Chuck, you're right, because otherwise you just change the channel and go to BattleBots. Right, exactly.

And then you watch people with joysticks trying to defeat each other's robots. Yeah, okay, I'm with you. All right, so here we go. We've talked about how we improve performance. We've talked about how we get a better result and how Bob Beeman does what Bob Beeman did. What if I can extend my curve as a phenom? What if I have not five years, but 10 years as a phenom, right?

I don't have to have the same body I started with. What if I elect to have surgery, not on damaged tissue, bone, ligament, but replacement? What if I replace a kneecap, make it ceramic, make it more durable, make it stronger? Therefore, I run faster, I hit harder, I play better. We can make him faster. We can make him stronger.

There you go. We can rebuild him. We can make him faster. We can make him stronger. There you go. We can rebuild him. We can rebuild him. Professor, am I talking about a future or am I talking about what's happening now? I would like to say we're talking about a future. But clearly, folks are able to manipulate their body. And I'll talk. This is the larger category of doping, right?

You can have pharmaceutical doping, you can have mechanical doping. There are different ways in which you can change and augment your body. And I think, for instance, the existing technology is allowing us to do that. So we have all these technologies that we wear, we attach to our bodies that allow us to do better. But the gray space for me is this internal place. You're talking about, you know, new knees, new hips, new ankles, new feet. These are technologies. These are augmentations that people can't see.

So the stuff people can see easily are the things that cause most problems. But I don't know. we have the capability of you know having ceramic hips super quick uh and smooth moving device that can be put in your body and this is kind of the question about say tommy john surgery right you throw out your elbow you get it repaired and some athletes are able to throw better than before. Others, not so. I thought the Tommy John was the shoulder. It's the elbow. The elbow. Oh, okay. Yeah. So it's ligaments in your elbow. Young people are, the Tommy John surgery is moving down to high schoolers. And the question is, if you can repair your body efficiently and quickly do you

think about your body differently can you just destroy it and beat it up and then just go have it surgically repaired and i mean it's your question about surgically enhanced true so this is the question is what does it mean to be enhanced or repaired so if you damage your body i would say being repaired is potentially a form of enhancement. But doesn't that happen naturally? Chuck, we've got to bring this to a close. That's a very good point, Chuck. Maybe we can save that for the shoot the shit part.

Oh, okay. Let's do that because we want to get into that. Our next segment is going to be about the ethics of any of this. Ray, can you hang on until the third segment? We want to get our ethics discussion going, but then I want to come back and just bring you in on some more conversation. Definitely. Love to. When we come back, we're going to bring in

the ethicist Arthur Kaplan to find out where ethics in sports has landed today, given all the forces that operate on improving your performance. So stay tuned. We're back. StarTalk, segment two. We now change direction a little bit and talk about bioethics. But it's not changing directions entirely because there's the ethics of technology. And how does that work?

So we found ourselves a bioethicist. They exist. They're out there. And we've got Arthur Kaplan, who's actually been on StarTalk before. He's professor of bioethics and founder of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University. Ethics at New York University and author and editor of more than 35 books, including 2016, The Ethics of Sport. You are the guy for this segment. So, Arthur, welcome back to Star Talk. Thanks for having me back.

Excellent. We just came off a segment with Ray Fouché, who's an expert on technology in sport. And we're just wondering, if you start replacing body parts with mechanical versions of what they once were, no one thinks twice about doing that if it's just so you can function, right? So you give you sort of biomechanical legs if you lost your legs. No, that's fine. But if you now compete in sports and perform better and start setting world records, is there an ethical dimension to that that should be front and center in this conversation?

Well, there is. And it comes out in three ways. There are plenty of parts that we could replace. There is pretty close to a total artificial heart. People know, have heard of LVADs, left ventricular assist devices. They probably replace half the heart, the pumping function. You could imagine pretty soon us having a fully artificial heart that would be hyper-efficient or pump a greater... Or pacemaker where you can dial in sport mode. Yep, exactly. We've also got the possibility of artificial ligaments. You know, people get Tommy John surgery now just to sometimes pitch a little better. Maybe they didn't even tear a ligament, but you could put in an artificial one that's even stronger and get more movement on the ball, let's say.

There's obviously Lasix. A lot of people have that to improve their vision, but you can make your vision better than 2020. There are people who've done it. I think Tiger Woods maybe went to 2010 with his Lasix. So not only could you do it, some people do do it. So anyway, what's the problem here? First problem is most people want to watch sports because they want to see what human beings can do with training, with effort. If you start doing pharmacology and technology, you're moving to what I'm going to call an exhibition. It's not a competition. It's who's got the best engineer, who's got the best biomaterials, if you will, who's got the best pharmacist. And you might enjoy sports that way,

but I think it undercuts the reason we like sports. We don't really want to see who can jump the highest on artificial spring legs, right? I mean, we might want to see that as an exhibition or it's like Evel Knievel jumping over a canyon or something. It's interesting, but it's not sports in the same way. But if I'm born without a limb and I have a replacement limb and that's my limb as far as I'm concerned because I've never had one of your limbs, are you going to deny me access to a sport?

I might because I'd probably be looking. Wow, tough toes, man. Tough toes. Damn. Tough toes with you, buddy. We looked at this with Oscar Pistorius. He has the blades. And the problem is you want to see if it gives you too much of an advantage.

If you're competing, and what turned out to be true for his artificial leg, I don't know if you guys ever looked at this, on a straightaway, those legs really helped him. On curves, they penalized him. So they weren't ideal for, you know, improving your performance to the max. But if he had jet-powered artificial legs, I think, again, people would say, it's an exhibition. I'm not seeing a competition. And the point of sports is competition. Now, here's a question. Could you have the artificial leg race among people who were engineered? And I'm going to say to that, yeah, maybe you could. You might see that someday. People might say, you know, we have, even now,

there are competitions in weight, in bodybuilding, steroid ones, non-steroid ones. People go to the steroid ones and are sort of freaked out about how huge people can get. So you might see an all artificially engineered competition. But the key in what I'm saying here, Neil, is competition. You get too far away from equality among the athletes, all of a sudden you're just putting on an exhibition. In my college, there was a track that was designed by engineers to be the ideal balance between springiness and firmness. they it was it was a laboratory experiment that they did this they had people running on pillows and they did stroboscopic photographs of that and check the energy transfer

they had people running on cement and they checked that and they found the exact combination of both that would maximize this when people started running on it everyone was breaking their personal records. And the NCAA said, we cannot trust any records on that track. When it's the same person, it's just, I'm not losing as much of the energy I put into my step for every step I take. So what do you do if there's a technology that improves everybody, but it's over here and not over there. Well, two things to say about that. One is if everybody can access it, it doesn't bother me so much to start to see some bioengineering take place. Here's the sports that have done what you're talking about, Neil. Tennis went from wooden rackets to composite.

Absolutely improved performance. Pole vaulting. I think they used to jump on bamboo. I mean, I was like, okay. We'll do that more. Even sports like bobsled and luge, you know, they're engineering experiments. They're not really something that an athlete

is doing too much to contribute. I learned years ago, I had a discussion once, get this, with an owner of a bowling alley, one of my big audiences in the world. And he said to me, the fight is how well we wax the lanes. If we do them so that the ball always goes in and makes a strike, any idiot can bowl over 250. But the pros hate it because it makes it too easy to be good. Pros hate it because it makes it too easy to be good.

So if you're, again, trying to achieve something in sports and you buy and engineer it so that any art chaplain can go out and parade with it running around the track, I think people say you've undermined it. Point two, I'll tell you that point two this way. Charles Barkley once said back when he was in the Dream Team, they played Angola. He said, we showed up to win. Angola showed up to get a meal. Nutritionists, they didn't have any sports scientists. They weren't doing film of the athletes to see, you know. And he felt, and I think he was right, if the technology is available to all, introduce it, it doesn't undermine the competition. If it's only available

to some, that's trouble. All right, Professor, and because you can't take the money out of the sport right now, and it flows like water from a faucet, biodata is everywhere. Weekend Warriors have it. Every elite athlete has it. But ethically, I might go on as a free agent and sign myself to another franchise. But I might have a secret injury. Now, which side of the coin does this land on? The protection of the data of the athlete or the fact that the owner is about to drop $50 million on him and might find that money just flushed down the toilet? Well, it's a good question. And I'm disappointed to have to tell you that the NFL Players Association, I think unthinkingly, signed away their rights and said, the team can monitor me. They can put

a Fitbit type thing on me and know when I'm sleeping and where I'm going and if I'm drinking. And I wouldn't have agreed to that at all. If they'd asked me, I would have said, your right is to keep your personal health data private. A boss can't make you give it up. Shouldn't be able to give it up as a condition of work. They signed it away. So what you're talking about is already happening. They know, hey, you didn't sleep too well last night. And in fact, you weren't even in that bed. Where were you? That kind of thing. And as the Fitbits get better and the monitoring gets better, you start to see people saying, here's what you ate. Here's what you excreted. Here's the kinds

of infectious diseases that you might be bearing in the era of COVID and so on. You don't give those rights up. But basically they now own you. They own you. You're a high paid slave. Yeah. And worse, you know, you can say, look, I can perform well. The question isn't whether I went out last night and got drunk. The question is, how'd I do in the performance? Don't start penalizing me because you don't like what I do in the off hours. By the way, businesses across the board are going to be interested in this. Forget sports.

Pretty soon, you know, somebody's going to say, hey, Neil, you know, you looked a little drowsy on that podcast. It was Benadryl. It was Benadryl. That's all it was, Benadryl. I'm telling you, I've got allergies. It's don't operate heavy machinery or conduct a podcast. Add that to the warning. Be careful. Don't give up our rights just because the boss or the government or some third party says, I want to look. I wouldn't be giving that away. I think

that- But isn't that just one of the inherent pitfalls of technology as nascent technologies become more readily available? People don't understand the consequences associated with using those technologies. For instance, away from sports altogether, all this social media now, people have lost their jobs. They do things on social media and they go to a job interview and the employer has pulled up their profile and is judging who they are based on the profile. But the fact is that you put that out there for public consumption and therefore, you know, you have to live with the consequences of what that perception might be. So Chuck, my med students who are, you know, about 700 years

younger than I am, if I asked them, what do you think about privacy? They laugh at me. They would say, it's gone. Uber knows where I am. Facebook knows what I do. I also put up a lot of pictures I regret when I was in high school. There's so many leaks and so many hackers coming in to look at my data. I don't have privacy. So I think that is a huge challenge for sports coming down the road is protecting that information. But the presumption that you're going to be able to presume it's private is false. What you're going to have to do is build in penalties if somebody uses it without your permission.

You can't rely on, I don't know if you all have ever read any of those little tiny type releases, but if you do- No. You know, you should, but it probably wouldn't stop you anyway. But you know what, basically, we're going to take all this data and do what the hell we want with it stop you anyway. But you know what? We're going to take all this data and do what the hell we want with it.

Thank you. That's really what, and honestly, that's what every one of those releases says. As a matter of fact, I had the computer read me the release, and then I recorded it, and it's like 10 minutes long. I have a two-point question here. One is just regular ethics and then bioethics. Regular ethics is, let's say there are rules and you have to abide by the rules, but you find a loophole that no one knows about.

And so, for example, I read about this, that it was at NASCAR or one of the car racing contests. There's a rule for how big your gas tank is. So you can do that. But there's a rule for how big your gas tank is. So you can do that. But there's no rule about how long the hose is from your gas tank to the carburetor. And if you make that hose long, then even if your tank runs out of gas, you can go farther than anybody else for having done so. There's no law against that. So it's not illegal, but it's surely unethical because you're circumventing a rule that's trying to keep things equal. Where do you go in that scenario?

So if you're smart enough to figure out an advantage where there's no rules and no explicit prohibition, I'm okay. Even if the principle of what you did violates the rule itself. And I'll tell you why. Because part of sports is to be clever. You know, you can see it in things like baseball. People steal signals. I don't want to invoke the Houston Astros here for insider baseball knowledge, but, you know, there are plenty of teams. Bill Belichick is always running around in football filming the underpies somehow. It's technically wrong.

There's no prohibition explicitly. Well, there wasn't until recently until they finally caught it. Until, right. He made the prohibition happen. They made the rule, right. There's a part of me that says part of sports is getting an advantage.

If you figure it out, then they'll legislate you out if they don't like it. But you can try and push the envelope that way. That doesn't bother me as much. Yeah, but you're not just pushing envelope. You're violating the spirit of a rule. You are, but spirits are ephemeral and hard rules matter. Okay.

So with that in mind, I'm interested to hear, and I know you've said this before, but okay. So my edge is performance enhancing. I found a way to take this little thing or to shoot myself in the butt, and now I'm better. And I'm not, I still have to do all the work. Okay. I got to do all the work. I still got to practice.

I'm just recovering faster. Why isn't that an edge? So they are, first of all, you are breaking rules. They're explicit. You're not supposed to do it. Second of all, when you do it, you're going to hurt yourself. Most of those rules are in there, not because we are against improvement. No one banned better nutrition, right? Okay. Improves performance. But when it's risky and dangerous, and steroids are, we see them even in the hospital,

people whose liver fails and all kinds of complications, even shorten life because of abuse. Well, wait, Arthur, that's a technicality because suppose there were steroids that didn't shorten your life and that didn't harm your life. Then what? You're invoking that because that's easy, but in a philosophical world, remove that, imagine such a chemical, now what?

I think you just imagined coffee. Oh, okay. Which we drink all the time and get ready for sports. I imagine coffee, a good night's sleep, and a cup of coffee. Yeah, there you go. That's what I just described. Okay, you're right. I think people do it, and we don't yell at them.

But the riskier it is, I wouldn't say it's irrelevant. It's just that risk matters. And the other factor that comes into performance enhancement is one that I mentioned earlier. Is it really available to all? Can anybody really get it, or is it just an elite, rich athlete who can do the administration of the drug? Conversely, if we're all going to tolerate it, that means everybody's got to do it to compete. It's almost a forced requirement that you can't do this unless you take this. I've heard baseball players say, they all had to take amphetamines.

It's a pretty boring game. Once a few of them started to do it and got more alert, it swept through baseball like crazy. We all saw it in the home run contests in Major League Baseball with Sosa, McGuire, everybody had to dope up. The records also become artificial. So Neil, here's something else to think about. about. Some sports, they don't care about your continuity of performance with the past, right? It just doesn't matter. The football basically doesn't run around too much with statistics. Golf and baseball are rooted in their history. You're always trying to compare Babe Ruth to Ted Williams to Willie Mays to Mike Trout to whoever. If the performance enhancement comes through, it takes some of the spirit of the sport. Spirit and culture, and culture of the sport. Because, you know, they like to compare,

and so that matters to baseball fans. Very interesting point. It's purity. We like to believe in the purity of our sports. I don't want to say we're not collusional about that. There's a lot of hanky-panky, but the general idea is I can look and see who the best pitcher of all time is because I know that they're roughly with the same ball in the same mound and kind of the same stadium. Yeah, the ball's not juiced. Yeah, yeah. When do you think people used to get mad We've got to bring this segment to a close, but let me just ask a quick question here.

I've got to go get some stimulants. This will be quick, and I don't know if it has a short answer, but I've just got to get it out there. of the genome so that I can pre-program an unborn child to have certain athletic capacity that they then later exploit and then become the best in the world. Is there something ethically disturbing about that? Because not everyone has access to it, but the person is born, they didn't control it. That's just who they are. You're going to penalize them when they had no control over it. Where's the future of bioethics with regard to manipulating the human genome with regard to sports? Future is good for my students in arguing about that one. It's not going to happen tomorrow, but it is going to be an issue absolutely that's going to get faced. So here's how I think about

it. If you do a genetic engineering change that gives the child more abilities, more capacities, but they can choose not to use them. I find that much more acceptable than if you say you're going to be a halfback and I engineered you to do that. And that is what you are. Takes away your free will. Interesting. It's the way your free will takes away your choice. Yeah. That's hot housing. The hot housing. Yeah. Yeah. Hot housing yeah yeah hot house yes right very interesting description of that very that was as succinct an answer as as i could have ever imagined for for what i thought but i thought it was actually a deep question well you got a half hour no but you did it in 30 seconds it was like the answer is four okay 42 is the answer 42 arthur thanks for being on on

star talk thank you for having me. This has been highly illuminating. You're part of our Making a Phenom sub-series of StarTalk Sports Edition. So we've got to end that segment there, but when we return, Ray Fouché comes back to help Chuck and me and Gary just shoot the shit on this highly illuminating subject of the bioethics and technology of sports performance. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. StarTalk.

And I've got Rayvon Fouché. Rayvon Fouché. We brought him back from the first segment just to talk about this whole world of technology and human performance. And let me lead off just at what point do you say this is a boundary we'll never cross? Here's an example. The people who have lost their legs or from the legs from the knee down

and they have those blades that they run on, okay, I don't think records have been set on those, but you're running much faster than anyone would have imagined 50 years ago if they said, let's just make a blade instead of reconstructing the human anatomical foot. Suppose I do have something I can put you on where if we surgically remove your legs from the knee down, you can run faster than Usain Bolt in a sprint.

What would that mean? That's technology. Now, but you're sacrificing body parts to do it. Yeah, I mean, I think ethically it's deeply messed up. However. I like that. However? However.

However. It is so ethically against everything I stand for. But. However, the desire to win in athletic competitions is really powerful. Yeah. So I teach courses on technology and sport, and I ask folks in my classes, would you watch if people went to that logical extreme? And I have students in their 20s who would go, ah, I find that messy, but wow, yeah,

I would totally check that out. Yeah, so, yeah, it's weird. What's his name? Oh my God, played for San Francisco, Ronnie Lott. Ronnie Lott fractured a finger so bad in so many places during a game, and they wanted to win this game so badly. I don't know if it was a playoff game.

I think it was. And he had them cut the finger. Now, that might just be folklore, because, you know, NFL players love to talk about how injured they were. You know, they love that. You know, I had the guy amputate my foot. We sewed it back on after the game. You know, but I'm not if that's true.

I think there are people who would be willing to sacrifice and have no legs just to get that glory, to put that laurel leaf on their head. But I think there are two people that are going to, before we even get to the point of cutting off limbs, that are going to push, are pushing us to think deeply about this question. German track and field long jumper, Marcus Rehm, and American 400-meter Blake Lieber, runner. So Rehm, his personal best in the long jump, would have won the gold at the last two able-bodied Olympic Games. He jumps off his prosthetic limb. He attempted to enter the last Olympics, but he couldn't prove that his limb did not give him an advantage.

Ream's interesting because his leg was amputated due to an injury. Whereas the 400-meter runner, Blake Leeper, finished fifth in last year's 400-meter national championships, which were qualified from the world championships, would have potentially put him on the Olympic team if he could have proven his limbs that never existed were similar to his prosthetic limb. Wait, wait, so he was, what, did he run on a blade? He did, too.

Wow. Wow. So we're already here where you have these athletes who aren't removing limbs, are born without limbs, and are able to run equally fast. And so I think it's really a question for the world of athletics to figure out what's the next step to deal with these athletes because I think it's really a question for the world of athletics to figure out what's the next step. Do you deal with these athletes? Because I think Blake Lieber is a great example.

How do you prove his prosthetic limbs were similar to limbs he never had? You can't do that. You just can't do it. And so therefore you go, he doesn't qualify. So, Professor, who's been the best governing body? For me, it would be Formula One. it and so therefore you go he doesn't qualify so professor who's been the best governing body for me it would be formula one two because the advances in technology are ceaseless in that sport and they have to govern the way it's used and try and make the track as level as possible govern and guided

yeah yeah so i mean it's super easy for them because you know what they're not governing let's say for instance there was a was a pair of glasses that you could wear or a different shield that you could put on your helmet that gave you information about other drivers and stuff like that. Or if there was, I don't know, some kind of stimulant that you could take that quickened your responses so that you're a better driver. Dude, it's called LASIK eye surgery. Well, yes.

Yeah, you're going to take a guy with a visual impairment and possibly give them 2010 vision. Right, yeah. Ray, so what about that? We all, you know, that's something that we all know about and heard about and it's elective, but now you can make it even better. Yeah, so I think, you know,

this is where it gets for me really interesting is that i think that's definitely performance enhancing uh but right having enough liquid in your body is also performance enhancing so the question for getting a good night's sleep is a performance without a doubt so it's a question of like what we as a society believe the limits are and i think gary brought up Formula One. I think they do the best because they sort of pass the buck. Because they're saying, well, here are the parameters. And if you can figure out anything interesting

within those parameters within the formula, that was the original way, go for it. Whereas other sport governing bodies are saying, these are the rules. And that's a whole different dynamic. Very good. This is what you can do and not do. These are the rules. And that's a whole different dynamic. Very good. This is what you can do and not do. These are the things that are banned or not banned.

So Formula One is all about saying, well, these are the parameters, but if you come up with something, if you create a new type of material that's three times as light as carbon fiber, good. So it's built to embrace technology rather than stifle its influence. That's the difference. It really is. That's it. That's the way.

Yeah. Okay, how about this, getting back to physical, we call them deformities, but physical differences. If someone is born and they have very webbed fingers, you know, that can happen, or feet, and then they start swimming, should the governing body say no we have to cut out the webs because you have an unfair advantage i mean i think it's a big question right for instance right now is when it comes to the context of gender you have athletes sarcastis mania who's physiologically um people argued are different than a female athlete and she's been allowed to compete but, but then at different moments now banned.

So the question is, I think for me, it's a societal question. What do we believe is permissible? What do we believe is okay? And where do we draw the lines? And we used to think that you can't compete in the Olympics if you've ever been paid to have done sports. And today that looks so quaint and so antiquated. But everyone, you've got to be amateur,

you've got to be this. So who in there is tracking the evolving social mores that guide the rules that you're putting in the first place? You know, I think, arguably, I think potentially people like me are really interested in those questions. But arguably

most governing bodies... No, but you're an academic, so we don't care that you're interested in the questions. We care that you have answers, okay? Get your ass back to the lab and give us answers. I got to get some answers. I don't have you on this show for you to ask questions, all right? Let's make that clear. Isn't that my business? I ask questions and then let them hang out there.

That's the academic way of doing things. business, I ask questions and then let them hang out there. That's the academic way of doing things. But other organizations like the Champions League are producing the technical reports, which is like 67 pages, which has all kinds of really information, heat maps, data analysis, tracking the movement of players. So the question is, we're embracing this idea that we have all this information

and how it can be used to understand the game. And for me, how are we going to use it? And I think the goal is to allow the games to get better. And I don't know what better means. More entertaining, more fun to watch, more lucrative, better community and things. Lucrative. Depending on where.

I assume it has to do with money. Well, I shouldn't say all things, but most things. Professor, the thoughts just popped in my head. If we took away the technology, would we still have phenoms? Absolutely. Can I butt in there? Here's one. You ready? Yep. Okay. Mark Spitz.

1972. Yes. Was it 72 or 72? 72 in Munich. Okay. He wins seven gold medals. And he's got a mustache, a hairy chest, all the stuff that everyone is like shaving off today because they want

to go better. And he just kicked ass being the hairiest ape in the swimming pool, okay? Oh, yeah. I know. He's got a saggy bathing suit. He's got a saggy bathing suit on. He's got stuff in his pocket. He's got his car keys.

He's swimming with a dumbbell in his hand. So don't tell me will there be phenoms without technology. He's swimming with a dumbbell in his hand. So don't tell me will there be phenoms without technology. All right, so then flip it, all right, and ask, are the phenoms of the future going to be the engineers, going to be the scientists, the material scientists who produce equipment, and we are just going to lord them as much as we do the athletes? And then maybe they get traded from one team to the other

the way players do. Ooh. Yeah, no, no. No, we're not going to laud the engineers, the scientists, the engineers. No. I mean, because we already have them here. They're already in the ecology. They're already doing that work.

And, right, do we know the engineer who designed the first prosthetic racing limb? No, we don't know that. Do we know the aerodynamicists that are, who work for, say, any, choose any Formula One team? Choose anyone. I mean, what, what, yeah. So the MP4 won, like the first carbon fiber tub Formula One car. I want to know the aerodynamicist who convinced cyclists to wear conehead helmets. Okay, that one.

I want to know. You mentioned something there, Professor. Carbon fiber. Something that was, if I'm not mistaken, invented or discovered in the late 1800s. There's a debate whether it was Edison or a Brit, but I'm guessing my compatriots on this show would have to go with the American. No, we know Edison, so it was a Brit and then he stole it. But basically, was it not heating up bamboo to carbonize that,

if that's the right term, and then for the strength and the weight? So this thing's been around. It's not something that we didn't know existed. It's how we find a way to use it. Oh, I like that. I like that, Gary. And let me tighten that question back to you, Ray. The earliest pole vaults were not made of fiber,

whatever they're made of today. And so you say, let's change the materials, and then the physical body of the person can perform even greater. So that's not changing the person as much as the materials the person works with. Yes, so carbon fiber, what makes it special is that really it's not until the 1950s when you start getting high-modulus carbon fiber, which is light and it's hard to deal with, and that's why it's still very expensive. But the example of the pole vault, the really great example is the javelin. So there was a moment where javelins were actually very, very aerodynamic,

and the athletes who were throwing them got smaller because they had better technique. And eventually track and field decided that we don't want the javelin to be that way. So they de-engineered it, changed the weight, made it less aerodynamic. So now javelin throwers have to be a little bigger and a little stronger. So this is where the technology, the governing body pushed back and said, well, this is pushing the limits of what we thought it was for. I thought the javelin was because the javelin field inside of a stadium was no longer big enough to not have the javelin stab people watching them in the seats. So they had to de-aerodynamicize the javelin just so they can keep it in the visual space.

And only four people died to make that happen. I feel that the governing body should make that argument. Well, the field was too small, but that was an easy street. That's true.

That's true. Because what's more to saying, well, people are going to throw it farther, but we don't want them to

throw it farther. It's the opposite of the Olympic principle, faster, higher, stronger. We've got to bring this to a close. Chuck, Gary, give me last thoughts before we go to Ray's concluding comments. One cannot work without the other. It's like having the phenom have all the

bio data, not know their own body, but have a team around them. So without that team, without the technology, without the carbon fiber pads in a marathon runner's shoes, without the equipment that strengthens and supports. These two things cannot exist separately. They have a fabulous symbiotic relationship to me. Oh, I like that. Chuck, what do you say? You know, I just think that transparency should be the order of the day. I really don't care what technology anyone is utilizing. the order of the day. I really don't care what technology anyone is

utilizing. I just think that we should know that there is a technological edge that you have so that it gives everybody the opportunity to avail themselves if they want. So I agree with that.

And if you're the one who came up with it first and you win all the gold medals, those are your gold medals. Those are yours now. Like Fosbury and the Fosbury flop. And if you're the one who came up with it first and you win all the gold medals, those are your gold medals. Those are yours now. And everyone else catches up later. That's it. Right. Like Fosbury and the Fosbury flop. Right.

You know, he goes backwards over the pole, wins the gold medal and the world record, and everyone does it later. But he did it first. And everybody else was standing there thinking, why didn't I think of that? Okay. Ray, take us out. What should we know? Well, I think the thing is technology will continue to change sports and i think it will always be this really interesting as you point again gary the synergy between human bodies and engineers and scientists and eventually we're going to get to

a place where we're going to have to have some very hard conversations decisions what we want sport to look like and technology is going to be a very key and meaningful part of the future of sport. And it may be that those conversations are not hard to have, but actually easy once people come to embrace the spectacle of it. So excellent. Rayvon Foucher, author of The Game Changer, Technoscientific Revolution in Sports.

You have an excellent TEDx talk I enjoyed. And so thanks for being on StarTalk. It's been great. Thanks for having me here and I love the conversation. And I also want to thank Arthur Kaplan for bringing an ethical perspective so needed on this very topic.

So, this has been StarTalk Sports Edition, The Making of a Phenom, the fourth and final installment of that sub-series. Chuck, the fourth and final installment of that subseries. Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. Gary. Pleasure was mine, sir.

All right. It's our talk, Sports Edition, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Keep picking up.