The Man Who Biohacks Olympic Athletes: Electronic Tattoos, Self-Quantifying Contact Lenses, Flexible Electronics, Artificial Intelligence & More.

Hey, what's up? It's Ben Greenfield. I've got a real geek on the show today. So if you're into Fitbit and way, way beyond Fitbit, definitely stay tuned to this episode. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, the general understanding is that if you're able to develop a technological solution for a very, very high performing athlete, you know, an athlete who is pushing his or her body beyond the extremes and beyond the boundaries of what most of the human can do, then through a trickle down effect, you can configure a product or service that can suit the majority of people. Many people refer to technology as enhancing performance. I don't necessarily agree with that. I see technology more as an aid that would enhance decision making.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy, all the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And I recently watched this fascinating video on YouTube about sports technology. And in the video, this guy named Dr. Zak, Dr. Munir Zach, who's the director of Technology and Innovation for the US Olympic Committee, he delves into everything from electronic tattoos that read body signals to contact lenses that analyze fluid in the eyes for self quantification. This is basically, I would qualify this guy as the nerd who biohacks the jocks, basically. And he has a PhD in biomedical engineering. He works with Team USA in their emerging technologies department. So he champions and sets up and runs the high performance technology and quantification programs that are designed to increase the chances that Team USA will win gold medals. So now that all of the Chinese and the Russians and the Germans and everyone else have their ears perked up so they can listen into this episode. For all the secret tips from the usoc, what can you expect from this episode? We're going to talk wearable technology. We're going to talk smart textiles and fabric. We're going to talk the Internet of things, artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, and how it specifically all relates to making you perform better, whether it's your body or your brain. And by the way, speaking of brains, I learned that Dr. Zock is also fluent in four languages. So he's officially one smart cookie and he is here with us on the call. Dr. Zock, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

And I suppose before we delve in, I should ask you because I'm very curious, are you wearing any type of device right now? Are you wearing any self quantification device right now or other form of technology?

Not on me right now. Today is my relaxing day.

I want to say completely unplugged, naked, exposed to the elements.

I just have my phone on me. That's it.

If you were going to be wearing it sounds like perhaps sometimes you do. If you were going to wear something, are you like a Fitbit or a jawbone guy or do you have some super secret sauce that you use?

Yeah, no, usually I would have on me what you cannot find in the shops, let's say. Yeah, I would have it on me before it makes a way to the shops. I would have it on me before it's even being, let's say, designed to be in the shops.

Okay, like what? Give me an example.

So let's say I would have on me, for example, a technology that would help me understand how much oxygen I have in my muscles. I might have on me some kind of a technology that would help me understand, you know, what are my stress levels levels right now. No names that can be revealed. No specific tech that can be revealed.

Okay, gotcha, gotcha.

I'm sure you understand.

Sounds to me like you're probably going above and beyond something like heart rate variability though, when you're talking about stress levels.

I mean, you know what, we work with so many different sports, we work with so many different athletes. They all span the range of the technology needs from very basic to extremely, extremely advanced. And according to what we're working with. And sometimes we touch heart rate variability, sometimes we touch basic heart rate. Most of the times we do touch though emerging concepts, emerging scientific concepts that are making their ways into consumer electronics, let's say, and begin to the hands of Team USA coaches and athletes before they're out for everyone to buy.

Cool. All right, well, let's jump in. What are smart textiles? I noticed that in your video you talk about those. And by the way, for those of you listening in, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com quantify. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com quantify. Yes, you need to be able to know how to spell that, but good luck. And if you go there, you'll get access to this video. I'm talking about as well as everything else that Dr. Zoch and I discuss in today's episode. But, Dr. Zach, what is a smart textile or a flexible electronic.

Let's talk about wearable technology. Wearable technology is a term that has been coined about three, three and a half years ago. And if you look at the wearable technology trend, let's say on any search engine over the Internet, you will see a very, very high peak towards the end of 2013. Today, when we think about wearable technology, we were always thinking about a physical object, an object that has, you know, small dimensions, it's usually rigid, it has a battery to it, and has no very directed usage. You know, it's been designed to do one thing extremely, extremely well. And then it can perform other things or other measurements, let's say fairly well as well. Now, today, when we think about wearable technology, we're always thinking about a gadget, you know, an add on that we put in our body. You know, it can be a watch, it can be a bracelet, it can be a necklace, it can be a ring, it can be something that we stick in our shoes. Now, the evolution of wearable technology and what is being worked on currently is found underneath so many categories, and the market has not come yet to a consensus about what to call it. In some cases it's referred to as flexible electronics. In some cases it's referred to as smart textile, in some cases as functional fabrics. The concept here is taking wearable technology beyond what we understand it today to really mean what it stands for, like truly wearable technology.

So when you say wearable, like, do you mean like shirts or underwear or pants that are measuring things like electrical muscle signals or nerve signals or something like that? Or are you just talking about, like, rings or wristbands?

Shorts, pants, underwear, socks, you name it. Our wardrobe today is the wearable part of the new wearable.

Okay, so we're literally talking, like, wearable clothing. We're not talking about, like, little trinkets that you hang around your neck.

Exactly, exactly.

Okay, so what would be an example of something like this?

So, you know, what if I look at what a wardrobe of one of our speed skaters or one of our swimmers might look like five, ten years from now? I'm imagining so many apparel hanging there in the wardrobe that provides our athletes information about how they're conducting their lifestyle or how they're conducting their sports. Right, so let's say, you know, athletes show up for their morning training session. They're wearing their socks, they're wearing their shoes, they're wearing their underwear, they're wearing their shorts, and each and every garment that they have on their body is picking up vitals from their body now. So some of the apparel will be picking up, let's say, what's their heart rate. Another one would be analyzing their sweat to give them an indicator of stress. Another one will be picking up muscle. And there would be several of the apparels that are picking up so many different vitals at the same time, communicating them to the device that will most probably still be the smartphone. There's no intent from any consumer electronic brand today to get away with a smartphone, but on the contrary, to make it even more of a concrete part of our life. And then having on the smartphone or any smart device that they have that has a display on it, information that helps them understand how their body's behaving right now, and what kind of workout, what kind of nutrition program should they be sticking to according to what their body needs.

Now to delve into detail on a couple of things that you just mentioned, and feel free to get into the nitty gritty science if you want to. One of the things that you talked about was sweat and how you'd have underwear or clothing that could monitor sweat. How exactly is it doing that? Are you actually talking about something that's detecting minerals, sweat volume, both? How would something like that actually work?

So sweat and tears are actually believed to be the new gold mine in wearable technology. Now there's so much, so much information that is contained within our sweat and our tears that can substitute at one point, blood testing so far, to get any kind of indicator regarding the sort of the chemical composition of our body. We do have to extract blood. In some cases, even just one drop would suffice. And we do have to run some blood testing technology to extract, for example, information regarding how well hydrated the athletes are. You know, what's the mineral content of the body right now? Do they need more iron? Are they fine? And so on and so on. With the sweat and tears chemical composition and with the advancements that are being that we are witnessing currently in the technology space, we are on the very, very early, early stages of devising technologies that analyze the sweat. And that analysis can be towards whether giving you an information about how hydrated you are so that you don't have to do, let's say, the urine test anymore. Sweat can tell you so many, so many, so many things.

What are some other things? I mean, obviously most people would know that. It seems pretty easy to wrap my head around something that would measure water loss or say, I've even done sweat sodium analyses where I've worn devices that tell you how to, you know, the mineral composition of your sweat. What are some other variables that one could measure via sweat, theoretically?

Well, you know what? Theoretically, you can measure several, several elements. I mean, you can even take heart rate variability, which we use today to gain an indicator regarding how prepared our athletes are, and discover some new variables that we could measure through the sweat that would substitute heart rate variability at one point. All right, so let's say 10 years from now, instead of talking about HRV as an indicator of how fit our athletes are, I predict that we will be using sweat or sweat indicators that would tell us how fit the athlete is this morning and whether they should be sticking to the plan that has been put forward by adapting the plan to satisfy what their body is requiring from them today.

Now, I want to ask you about tears as well here in a second, but when you're talking about a couple of these things, I get a sense that you're saying that this is theoretical or in the future, when you talk about, say, sweat and being able to measure heart rate variability and sweat, are there little lab rats somewhere in the US Olympic Training center where this is actually being accomplished? Is this stuff all just stuff that's on paper right now, or what's the status of being able to measure, for example, some of these parameters in sweat?

For now, the status is confined within the walls of university and research labs. Now, we don't have anyone within the team USA using the smart garments for that specific purpose. Or rather, smart garments are used to pick up heart rate. They're used to pick up muscular activity.

Yeah, like EMGs and heart rates and things like that.

Yes.

Yeah, I've messed around with some of that stuff and I have a few questions to ask you about that. And I do want to ask you about tier as well, but something else related to, for example, this concept of some of this stuff being theoretical or still being researched on a university level. Are there websites that you recommend or forum feeds that you recommend or RSS feeds or anything like that that you think would be ideal if people really wanted to stay on the cusp of this technology and be able to read articles or see research that shows the most recent advances in this technology?

My recommendation would be to search on any search engine the term flexible electronics. Today, it still seems to be the one big umbrella under which you can find, you know, works on smart fabrics, work on the smart tattoos, on conductive Inks. There's not one RSS fee, there's not one website that I follow and I do have all of the different alerts set up to come into, you know, to come to my attention rather than me doing the work each and every day.

Okay, gotcha. Now how about tiers? You mentioned that you think tiers are also going to be one of the gold mines in terms of the future of quantifying, folks. Why?

Well, you know what tears are, or let's say the industry is looking at what does our body generate? What has it been generating over the past thousands of years that we can tap into so that we begin understanding what our body is trying to tell us? Elements like sweat, elements like tears. We mentioned earlier on the fluid content of the eye. Now those are sort of chemicals and those are elements that we possess and we will continue possessing these and we will continue having tears and we will continue sweating no matter where we are in the world, no matter what we're doing in the world. So tears, you know, they just like, let's say urine right now, it's fluid that is coming out of the, out of the body and it's used to, let's say, determine how properly hydrated we are. So, you know, so tears can at one point also substitute urine testing to gain indication about, you know, how well hydrated the body is.

So what about like some other things in urine testing? Sorry to interrupt, but, but you'll see, you know, glucose ketones, you'll, you'll see measurement of, of some of the cells, like, like white blood cell and, and you know, a lot of things from a, from a basic 10 point urine strip. Are you suggesting that one could achieve something similar with something like a tear?

You know what the, the research that, that we are seeing and that we're in contact with currently here in the US Specifically, research coming out of the military world is making breakthroughs that I don't think we can even imagine right now. Talking about tears, talking about sweat, those are just very, very, very minor elements of what is coming and what is currently, to be honest with you, being done inside the military and some of the sort of US military forces are experimenting with such technology.

Like what?

Let's see, what can I share with.

You without you having to kill me?

Let's say, well, maybe the most exciting one that I've heard about and that I can share with you has to do with biodegradable tattoos. All right, so the tattoos that are, that can be positioned anywhere on the body and according to the composition of the tattoo and according to where it is on the body, it can pick up the tattoo, can pick up the vitals from that specific area. The tattoos have on them flexible transparent batteries and flexible transmission nodes that can transfer the knowledge from the tattoo to a smart device that's in the vicinity or on the body to then communicate that to a remote control center. Now, the main aim is, for example, to extract, in this case, we're talking about the military soldiers from dangerous situations. But there are so many applications that come down the line, such as informing firefighters, for example, of being in a highly, highly dangerous situation. Adrenaline is so high temperature so hot, firefighter might not be aware of them, really compromising their life or risk in their life at any certain point. And if their fellow firefighters are aware of that, then they can extract them in proper time and not run any risks there.

So are these. When you say tattoo, like, I think about actual ink. Are we talking about ink that has, like, nano robots in it? Are we talking about like a electronic health monitor that's. That's thin and that sticks to the. To the skin?

Either or, either or. You know, when you're talking about smart tattoos, you're really talking about, let's say, a thin film that you can put as if it's a sticker, let's say, on the body. Then the body would absorb it.

What do you mean the body would absorb it? Like, it would. It would go past the skin.

It can go past the skin sometimes.

Really interesting.

And when you're talking about conductive, I mean, that's ink that you can sort of draw on the body with, and then you can begin generating electrical circuits directly on the body instead of having to put, let's say, a standard electronic chip glued to the body somehow.

So you could just basically have some type of material that gets absorbed into the skin that measures things like blood oxygen level or heart rate or even something like temperature or the potential presence of adrenaline. And that would then transmit a signal to a smartphone without one actually needing to wear a wearable, and potentially even without anyone around that person knowing that person was quantifying themselves.

That is very well described. Yes. These are the user cases that are being worked on right now. And you know what? Even if you want to take it further also, I mean, there are some slick universities working on research around nano robots, right? So they're working on research that. Through which you can develop, let's say, invisible submarines, right? You can delve those submarines, you can inject those submarines somewhere in the body, and then through let's say a smart device, you can navigate the body and let's say, get to a certain organ, you can pick up certain tissues from that organization, and then navigate the robot back to the injection point and extract it without having to run any operations or do any cuts.

Yeah, I've heard a little bit about this nanosurgery. I think it's fascinating. Obviously, that's kind of like a whole different ball of wax compared to, say, like, enhancing sports performance or nervous system performance or decreasing stress by quantifying one using some of these things that go way above and beyond a ring or a wristband. But, yeah, the concept of using nanorobots for surgery, that, to me, is also fascinating. Scary. Especially for anybody who's read any of Hugh Howey's novels like Silo, in which the world is basically destroyed by tiny little nanobacteria. But anyways, back to tears real quick. What about, And I think you mentioned this briefly in your YouTube video, contact lenses. When you mentioned about the use of contact lenses to monitor eye fluids, are you specifically referring to tears or are you referring to something like the practice? There's an alternative medical practice, for example, of iridology, where one actually reads the patterns of the retina and the rods and the cones in the eyes to determine the presence or absence of health issues.

When we're talking about contact lenses, we're really targeting the analysis of the fluids that are present around the eye area, not necessarily the tears. The concept is always the same over here, Ben, you know, how can we use objects that we've been using for so long and that we use for alternative purposes to begin deriving from those information? Now, there's a great, great work coming out of the MIT group, out of the MIT Media Lab, by a professor called David Rose, and he talks about enchanted objects. And the concept of enchanted objects is transforming any shoe, a tennis racket, a phone and an earphone into an object that can give you more information so that you can live a better life. So, for example, questions such as, do I take the umbrella out today or not? The umbrella can eventually tell us what the weather forecast is like and help us make a more informed decision so that we're not worried about the umbrella and where do we put that? And it can become a little bit awkward carrying an umbrella when it's not going to rain.

Interesting.

Or you think about sports. Let's say, let's take soccer shoes, for example, and have the soccer shoe tell the strength and conditioning coaches or the physical trainers who are at the edge of the soccer field? How many miles did the athletes run right now? What was their frequency of steps and how long they spend in each of the speed zones Rather than having a GPS unit that they have today to wear, you know, on their backs.

What would be the difference between analyzing fluids versus analyzing tears?

Analyzing. Well, hold on. What do you mean by fluids?

You mentioned that the primary purpose of a contact lens for self quantification would be to analyze fluids in the eyes versus tears. So we have other fluids coming out of our eyes aside from tears that we can also analyze.

Yes, you know, so the tears are coming out of, let's say, the tear hole that we have, you know, just outside the eye. However, the fluids that are in the eye, you know, they have a different chemical composition. Different compounds are in there. What can we analyze? What can we not analyze? I don't think we need to look at this from an exclusive perspective. And it's not about whether do we extract or do we put a contact lens, But I would say it's more about how do we put our hands on technology that we can use in our everyday life with our athletes or with our stakeholders that can extract the information that we're after in the seamless and easiest way possible and inform everyone about what's the best decision that they have to make.

Gotcha. One of the things that appears on your bio is that you delve quite a bit into artificial intelligence. Have you come across the use of AI for something like enhancing sports performance or something that an Olympic athlete might use?

So, you know what, I do have sort of over there, a philosophical stand, if you want, around technology, because many people refer to technology as enhancing performance. I don't necessarily agree with that. I see technology more as an aid that would enhance decision making. And the real question that I believe everyone should be focusing on is not how can technology enhance performance, but rather, how can technology inform all of the stakeholders, Athletes, coaches, high performance directors, physical therapists, nutritionists, physiologists, you name it. Everyone working around the app to make the most informed decision.

Yeah, I guess that's. I guess that's kind of what I meant. Right. So, yeah, indirectly improving sports performance by supplying quantified intelligence about an athlete's activity so that programming could be altered to. To enhance that. That athlete's response to training, I guess, is. I think we're on the same page, basically, you know, in terms of how these things would be used. But artificial intelligence, how would that be used, for example, for. For a coach or. Or a scout or anyone Else to gather data about a player's activity.

Well, artificial intelligence is, Is a very sexy term to represent clever mathematical models. Mathematical models that can learn from the person or that can learn also from the data that is present within the sort of data ecosystem that it's operating in. So far, for example, when we are talking about high performance, let's take soccer. In soccer, there are so many studies and so many groups working on correlations between speed and performance, focusing on the transfer of training to the. The competition ground, focusing on, you know, how. How quick do you lift certain weights in the gym, and how does that correlate with your performance on the field? Now, so many variables, though, come into play are not taking into account for such as weather conditions, such as turf conditions, such as humidity in the air, such as travel scheduling, and so on. And when we think about artificial intelligence, we are thinking about building intelligence on top of all of the possible data sets that we can bring into an ecosystem and having algorithms teach us about the correlations that are present within the data sets, on one hand, to uncover surprises, and on the other hand, maybe to confirm some decisions that have been made in the past. So, for example, right now, our track cycling team, specifically our women's team pursuit, is using extensive artificial intelligence technology to help the coach and the team determine the different correlations that come into play when they're training. Now, what does the environment look like? What is the temperature? What's the air pressure? What is the humidity? What is the timing? What is our timing in the velodrome? What is the power generated from the bike? What is the heart rate? What is the oxygen level in the muscles? And so on. And all of these data points come into one ecosystem upon which artificial intelligence are running and then extracting information, delivering it to the coach, and then maybe it can tell the coach, hey, you know what? When the team is at an altitude that goes beyond 5,000ft, the power output put is changed by so much.

Yeah, I've always wished that I could have access to something like that for athletes. I do some consulting with some business people and athletes on things like stress and sleep and everything from doing an ironman triathlon to just managing jet lag. And I measure things like sleep data and heart rate variability data and training volume and nutrition, but have always wished that rather than me just sitting there on my computer pouring through the data, that some kind of artificial intelligence could just read this and then tell me, okay, this is what this particular athlete or CEO or anybody else, this is how much they should sleep based on the sleep debt that they might have accumulated. This is how much they should train this week based off training hours and stress score from a previous week, et cetera. It sounds to me like that technology exists and you guys are using it at the end Olympic level.

You know, that technology exists and that technology will become more and more widespread in the future. You know, it's used in so many different verticals that have nothing to do with sports. You know, take the financial market for example, you take the oil and field industry, you take the aerospace navigation industry, you take the military industry. You know, there's so many, so many artificial intelligence examples already in place that help stakeholders make very good decisions, I believe.

Are there specific pieces of software that already exist that would be examples of something like that?

I wouldn't say there are sort of, I would not recommend any one software rather than the other. But again, you know, if you look up on any search engine the word artificial intelligence and software if you want, then you will find different options to choose from. The big consumer electronics companies are developing their own AI platforms, their own AI plugins that any company or any research organization can tap into to extract information.

Yeah, it's kind of interesting because there's this good old boys network that I think still is pervasive in especially team sports like football and baseball and basketball in the US and even in a lot of individual sports like triathlon or marathoning that says, oh, you should just listen to your body, you should just see how you feel and make training decisions based on that. Even like say Brett Sutton is one really famous coach who coaches a lot of really good Ironman triathletes. And what's been said about him is that he just kind of looks the athlete in the eye and decides whether or not they're ready for the rigors of that day's training. Do you think that there's anything to be said for that kind of approach of just like a natural feel for the body? Or do you think that that kind of stuff is just like totally useless compared to what artificial intelligence and quantification can give us?

You know what all coaches who we work with, we always tell them this. You know, we are here to compare decision making process. Now I highly, highly doubt that technology one day will overtake the coach. No technology is, it's going to be very, very hard to use just technology and have your artificial intelligence coach telling you what to do and what not to do. And all coaches who I've been working with over the past years with Team USA and prior To Team usa, they all say the same thing. The best coaches are the ones who find the best equilibrium between the arts and the sciences of coaching. If you go only to the arts of coaching, you are taking yourself to a position where you will not know how to answer questions coming your way. If you go to the scientific extreme, then you're not taking the human element into consideration and you have to be in that sweet spot that helps you make decisions based off of what you're observing with the technology and science that you're using, and also by, in this case, looking the athletes in the eye and taking into account all the personal elements of the athlete.

Okay, that makes sense. Now we talked about tattoos, we talked about contact lenses, we talked about some of these flexible electronics like socks and underwear that you can wear. Are there any other devices or self quantification methods that exist right now that you're aware of that not many people listening right now would know about, but that are cool or that are intriguing or that you wouldn't have to kill me after you tell me about?

Well, you know what? Not necessarily on the self quantification, but maybe on the manipulation, if you want, of our learning capabilities. Okay, we are, we're looking very, very closely at a field of science called neuropriming, which has to do with stimulating the, the brain with very, very low frequency, very low power electrical frequencies that are non invasive. You know, the stimulation happens through a headphone looking device that allows the, the athletes to learn quicker, certain specifically technical skills.

Is this like the Halo device that the Golden State warriors were using during the NBA finals?

Halo would be one of the companies that is working in that field. But yeah, this is the philosophy that we're looking at. And you know what, whenever we consider high performance, Ben, within Team usa, we have come to the understanding that the sports sciences breakthroughs that we will see in the future are going to come exclusively from the technology area now. Technologies that make their way into the traditional sports sciences, technologies that create new standards and new paradigms in sports. Neuropriming is one the smart tattoos, smart fabrics, artificial intelligence, IoT classical technologies such as radar, technologies that are now making their way into sports to help athletes make better decisions. But it is the technological advancement that will help us make the most informed decisions in our capacity in the future.

What about eeg? I recently was down in LA and had a Q EEG done to myself and that was based on neurofeedback. Right. You identify specific areas of the brain that might have limited blood flow or Limited EEG activity and then using neurofeedback, you more or less fix that area of the brain by teaching it how to either increase or decrease activity. Have you experimented with much of that at all?

You know what? Our focus is not necessarily on experimenting with the scientific research, in this case, when EEG has been around for so long. There are so many great studies that combine EEG and virtual reality for rehabilitation purposes, like virtual reality environments that can change the world in which you are living in within brackets. They can manipulate the gravity, they can have objects falling at different speeds, and then you would have to learn how to intercept those objects before they hit a certain target. Our focus is mostly on empowering athletes and coaches with decision making tools. And most of the times, in more than 99% of the times, we are focusing on technologies that can be used directly on the field of play. Hence the smart fabrics and smart textiles and wearable technology and IoT and AI. Now we want to take the athletes out of the standardized lab, we want to take them out of the standardized scientific environment, and we want to keep them on the field of play. And we want to get our data directly from them as they are performing. In many of the presentations that I make, I always, I always give reference to how did we work as sports technologists only 10 years ago and how we had to bring athletes into the standardized environment, into the biomechanics lab, into the physiology lab. And, you know, we asked the athletes to do the best that they can to simulate what they would do on the field of play. And the science was very accurate, the math was very accurate. Excellent, excellent research. But the core ingredient, which is the data, the raw data, was the best wrong data that we could work with.

And today it's interesting because I studied exercise physiology at the University of Idaho, and when we wanted to do a blood lactate evaluation, for example, that involved multiple blood strips and multiple fingertip or earlobe pricks to analyze blood coming out of the body at various workloads. And those workloads still, as you just alluded to, they were just designed to simulate what an athlete might be experiencing in the field of battle. But now we have things like, I don't know if underwear measures blood lactate, but there are, for example, I've seen calf sleeves now that measure lactate, and I believe they're doing so via sweat, if I'm not mistaken.

And you know what, even if you take it to simpler metrics, such as what are the external loads on a skier's low knees, let's say a lower limbs as they're skiing down the mountain. Ten years ago, to answer that, you had to run a scientific experiment. There was no way that you would be able to put reliable technology into the hands of any skiing team around the world and have the athletes use it. Now today, almost everyone around the world is using a technology that helps them quantify the loads. As a matter of fact, if you look at the skiing injury trends over the past years, you would see a decreasing trend with respect to the 10 years prior to that. So, you know, technology is making its way into sports and the more technology makes its way into onto the playing field, the more reliable the data we're working with is and the more buy in we will get from the athletes. Because, you know, we're not asking them to allocate extra time to do the testing, but rather, you know, they're just doing their sport and we are monitoring what they're doing without sometimes without them even knowing that we're doing it. And this is the beauty of working with sports technology today.

Where do you draw the line between something that would be considered, for example, an ergogenic aid and something that could be paralleled with an illegal sports performance enhancing drug? Because I've seen arguments that, for example, for Tiger woods to go out and get Lasik surgery and for that to be legal, how could he be able to go do that but Lance Armstrong can't, for example, do EPO or testosterone. Where do you draw the line? How do you frame this in the context of sports legality and sports morality?

You know, and I would take a step back from that, to be honest with you, because the way that I see technology and the way that we work with Team USA athletes is to get their hands on technology that helps make better decisions. And this is why I have a very, very strong stand when people refer to technology as enhancing performance. Because we're really enhancing the decision making process here. We're helping athletes gain more awareness around how their bodies behave. We're helping them understand how many miles are they running, what was the G force when they're cutting, what's the oxygen levels in their muscles and how does that correlate with their performance and how does the weather impact their performance, Performance and sleep and travel and all of the elements that come into the athlete's life cycle. I know that there are different practices out there that try to use technology to give the physiological advances by manipulating the body somehow. I'm not familiar with those. We don't do this at Team usa, okay?

So you're not talking about implanting limbs. You're not talking about, for example, the tattoos somehow priming the body during sports rather than simply collecting information. But what about even like this neuroscience thing, right? Like this halo neuro, you know, like, I've seen their website, and they say that they can, for example, increase, I believe it's, you know, activation of the motor cortex to improve the brain's response to training. But they also say that it could accelerate strength and explosiveness and dexterity if one athlete or team has access to or is using something like that. Can you argue that that would be unfair compared to another athlete that wouldn't be able to use that type of technology?

Well, you know what? If we were having this conversation 10 years ago, I would have said maybe you can argue that technology can be a competitive edge for one country with respect to another country. But, you know, it's 2016. In 2016, you get portable computers that you can stick in your pockets for very, very, very accessible amounts of dollars and very accessible for so many countries around the world, if not all the countries around the world. And as a matter of fact, you know, when you see athletes around the world, all of them, they do have some technological tool that they're using, whether it's for leisure, whether it's for sport. So technology today, it's very accessible. It's not a matter of economy anymore. It's not a matter about whether you can afford it or not. I believe that the best countries who are using technology are not necessarily the ones who have more access to technology, but are the ones who are pausing and asking themselves and taking time to figure out what is the question that they need to be asking themselves. Now, within the Olympic committee, within the U.S. olympic Committee, we always talk about the 1% question. And it's our duty as technologists to help coaches and to help athletes come up with the 1% question. Like, what is that one question that if we can find an answer to, we will be able to establish a 1% competitive gap with respect to the rest of the world and eventually help Team USA gain an advantage.

Okay, got it. Now, do you think that there are. And feel free to let me know if I'm stepping outside the. The bounds of what you can talk about. But do you think that there are certain countries or nationalities that are light years ahead of others? I don't even know how the US Compares with, say, China or Japan or Germany. There's this old school thought that the Russians were always ahead of the game when it came to steroids and hormones and perhaps the Chinese. When it comes to technology, do you know who is doing the best job at this type of thing or who seems to be ahead of the game?

You know what, each and every country has its own culture, it has its own traditions, has its own sets of rules. I've lived in so many countries, I've grown up in so many different countries that bring me to the understanding that, you know what? You cannot establish who is best in the world. You cannot establish who's doing better than anyone else in the world. Let's take the US Olympic Committee, for example. The USOC is one of the very, very, very, very few Olympic committees around the world that is a non government organization. It's a purely sponsored, driven organization. It's a nonprofit organization. And that brings in a set of dynamics that does not allow us to use the same strategies that other countries use. We cannot rely on a steady influx of resources like other countries do. But also, since we're a non government organization, that helps us make decisions maybe quicker than other countries can do. Yeah, you know, we are in the U.S. we're in the U.S. we do have, you know, we do have collegiate sports, we do have private education. And those elements come into play whenever you are, you know, whenever you're talking about what technologies do we work with, what technologies do we use, how much do we invest? I believe, you know, that what we need to be asking ourselves, and I have to say we do a great job at this within Team USA, is how do we find a 1% competitive gap with respect to the rest of the world? And how can we then align ourselves strategically with the best companies and best scientific organizations in the US and outside of the US so that we can bring into Team USA's hand technologies way, way before those make their way into the hands of either other sports or onto the market and become accessible to everyone else.

Got it. Well, that was a very political answer, but it was also insightful. I didn't really realize that you guys definitely have your hands tied compared to some other countries, but at the same time, you perhaps have a little bit more freedom. It's interesting. I have a couple of practical questions for you now because this is something I'm concerned about because I've been given at biohacking conferences self quantification devices that promise to measure electrical muscle activity, heart rates and heart rate variability during exercise, et cetera. But I'm a freaking obstacle course racer. I do triathlons. So a lot of times we're talking about water Dirt, mud, the elements. In terms of a lot of this stuff, how much of it is just white lab coats in pristine settings, testing stuff that hasn't been exposed to dirt? And the elements, how much of it is actually getting field tested? And if so, like, are there things that can really hold up to the rigors of, of, you know, crawling through the mud under barbed wire, for example? Yeah.

You know what, one of the biggest criticisms that technology faces today, specifically the wearable technology, because such a big market, not only the US but worldwide, is the lack of standards. Now there are no standards that companies have to abide to. There are no standards that they have to abide to. You know, so if you take, if you purchase 10 different products and all of these are measuring your heart rate, for example, or your step count, most probably you will be putting your hands on 10 different readings with, you know, with you not knowing exactly which one should you trust, which one should, should you not trust? And this, this is a huge issue and becomes very serious when you're talking about high performance, you know, when you're talking about 1% margins. Now, me as a consumer, me as a person who is not an avid racer, you know, I'm not a competitive athlete, I might be fine, you know, with even a 75% accuracy, probably, you know, whether I slept eight hours or whether I slept seven hours and a half, maybe that doesn't really affect me that much as it would affect a very, very, very high performing athlete who is calibrating her life each and every day according to the data points that she's getting her hands on.

Right.

You know, it is 2016. You know, it is the time where we have so many, so many companies getting generated on the market. You know, my recommendation or let's say my take when I'm evaluating, which companies do we go with, which companies do we not go with is, you know, doing due diligence work on the companies and with the companies, you know, where are they coming from, who is behind them, who is advising them, what kind of research are they using, what kind of testing did they perform and you know, make a decision that would help you begin testing it and then making up your mind whether you're going to use it or not.

Yeah, I was actually asking, you know, for example, I have like a, I've tried like an EMG device where it's a giant almost like pager right above your crotch. And my response to the person who was testing it out on me, I told them like this would hold up for maybe the first 20 minutes of something like an obstacle training event, at which point it would be crushed, slash, broken. So yeah, I guess the army though, they must be field testing a lot of this stuff in the army, like you mentioned, some of the tattoos and things like that. So I would imagine that some of it has got to hold up to the rigors.

You know, this is actually very important point that you bring up because this tends to be a strategic point for us that we use within Team USA to establish strategic partnerships with companies. The general understanding is that if you're able to develop a technological solution for a very, very, very high performance athlete, you know, an athlete who is pushing his or her body beyond extremes and beyond the boundaries of what most of the human population can do, then through a trickle down effect, you can configure a product or service that can suit the majority of the people. And you know, so when we're talking about Team USA and we're talking about Team USA athletes now, when we engage with companies, the companies are extremely, extremely excited and enthusiastic to work directly with the people who are going to push the boundaries with the athletes who are going to take the testing session within brackets to the next level. Now they're gonna put it in the mud, put it in the water, dive consecutively off of a 10 meter platform with it, and if it breaks, if water leaks, if data is skewed because lots of usage and lots of impacts on the sensors, then the companies would be aware of this. But as you said, many, many products on the market have not been crafted with high performing athletes feedback into them and have not been tested thoroughly. So I'm not surprised that you can purchase something today and then it's going to break at a certain point right.

Now another thing I wanted to ask you because we had a podcast a couple of years ago about how Bluetooth radiation next to the head, for example, was shown to cause some blood brain barrier leakage in rodent models. And there is of course lots of anecdotal studies out there about how when you put wifi routers next to plants, the plants slowly die compared to similar plants under similar conditions not placed next to a WI fi router. So those talk about electrical pollution or dirty electricity. And then of course there's a classic cell phone. You know how the label on the cell phone says don't put it next to your body, be careful with radiation. You know, the studies that have shown that like, you know, cell phones in the pocket can reduce sperm count. So there's obviously effects that Bluetooth or WI FI radiation have upon the body. My question for you regarding this is twofold. Do you ever study the effects of things like that in the athletes that are using some of this stuff? Or are you yourself concerned about the potential for, as we delve deeper and deeper into self quantification, the effects of more or less dirty electricity on the human body. Like is the underwear going to reduce my sperm count? Basically, is what I want to know.

The first question that you asked Ben. We do have a group of people who advise us. We do have a group of experts who guide us whenever we're making a decision now we take their advice and their recommendations heavily, heavily into consideration. We don't do any testing ourselves on a continuous basis. It's nothing that, there's nothing that concerns us for now. Mostly because the technologies that we're using with our athletes do not approach by any means sort of a 24 continuous, like 247 usage if you want. You know, it's technology that's used on the spot. It's technology that has very, very special purpose and you can be using technologies here and there, but they are so various in nature. They're so various in terms of what kind of wireless communication protocols they, they include. That does not raise any concerns for us right now. But it's, it's a very, very interesting topic. It's a very important topic that needs to be addressed, needs to be addressed with more energy specifically as we, as we near the smart clothing era if you want because you know, we will have those, those technologies on our bodies right now. What I can tell you is that the technologies that will be coming consumer available to the consumers over the next two to three years will rarely, rarely have any wireless transmission capabilities embedded on them. But rather they will still have let's say a wired element to them to very, very, very small transmitting unit, you know. So in the case of the underwear, I don't think that if you have to worry about Bluetooth right now being embedded in the underwear, but it will be, you know, like a very, very small sized gadget that you will have somewhere on your body that will take care of this transmission for you.

Well, I tell you what man, I, I would love to see testing done in this too. Like I would love to see for example investigation of say like blood brain barrier permeability. Maybe look at like microrna, right? Like, like blood microrna to see if there's any potential damage being done to RNA and then maybe sleep cycles, right, like your sleep latency or percentage of deep sleep in in an athlete exposed to X amount of Bluetooth or WI fi during the day versus an athlete who is not exposed to those same signals during the day. I have my own personal hunch that there's kind of a law of diminishing returns. I don't know what it is, but I still would love to see a really big emphasis in this whole self quantification industry on the long term health effects on an athlete or any other person who's using something like this.

I'm with you. I'm with you on that one.

Yeah. Well, first of all, for people listening in, I've been taking some notes to things like this Halo neuroscience device and flexible electronics and Munur's website as well as his video about sports technology and everything else that we discussed. And you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com quantify to check out the show notes and then if you have comments or you have questions or things that you want to add in, pipe in the comment section there. Leave your own thoughts because I read them all, try to reply to as many of them as possible and this stuff is super fascinating. I like it. Hate it. I'm like Dr. Zoch in that I definitely love to have those days where I'm completely unplugged. But I certainly acknowledge the usefulness of doing something like getting a tattoo that will measure your blood lactate levels. Maybe that's my next tattoo. Or I'll add that into the Primal sun and the Iron man tattoo, a skin tattoo to self quantify myself. Dr. Zoc, thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us, man.

Thank you. Thank you Ben for having me.

All right folks, well, this is Ben Greenfield and Dr. Munir Zoc signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com quantify and you have yourself a healthy week. We'll catch you next time. You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.