Building a Virtual World – Drone Racing League

They’re fun, they’re fast, they’re drones. Neil deGrasse Tyson explores the Drone Racing League with founder and CEO Nicholas Horbaczewski, Marilyn Smith, PhD, Director of the Georgia Tech Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Sports Edition. In this episode, we're talking about the DRL, the Drone Racing League Behind the Controls. First, my co-host, Chuck Nice. Hey Neil, what's happening? All right. That's my favorite comedian. And did I ever tell you that, Chuck? I never told you that. Only every day, but I will accept it whenever I hear it, Neil. There you go. Chalk it up. We've also got Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, former footballer, excellent pro footballer from the UK, former professional athlete and commentator. So Gary, always good to have you. But none of us have expertise in drone racing. I know a little bit about drones just aerodynamically, but that's about it. This notion that we have a drone racing league, this is out there. And so we had to bring in the person who is responsible for this fact. Named Nicholas Horbichewski. Did I pronounce that right, Nicholas?

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you did.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. You founded the Drone Racing League. We call it the DRL. We're familiar enough. On an initials basis, all right? The DRL back in 2015, that that's even a thing to do. And you're the CEO of it. And you went to business school, but somewhere in there, you had to know something about drones. And Cranes voted you 40 under 40. Is that still true? How old are you now?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  I'm still under 40.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Still in the mix there, huh Nicholas? Still in the mix, right on, man. Okay, well, I gotta ask this. And you're in the Guinness Book of World Records for holder of the fastest drone.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how fast is that drone?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  So that drone went just under 180 miles an hour.

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. That's pretty wild. And is this the quadcopter or septacopter type setup?

• 2:19Gary O'Reilly?

  It's the Bugatti drone.

• 2:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The custom Bugatti.

• 2:24Chuck Nice?

  I'm trying to figure out the aerodynamics of getting a drone. When you look at them, they don't normally look very aerodynamic.

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before we get there, Chuck, let me just ask.

• 2:35Chuck Nice?

  Sure.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What were you thinking when you created this league back in 2015? Did you want to, were you thinking, this is cool? I want other people to think it's cool and I want to grow this. Or was it already happening and you said, let me organize this?

• 2:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, are you the Madonna of drone racing? You're like, wait, voguing is a thing? I'll just make it big.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I mean, all a lot of things, the Madonna of drone racing is not one of them.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not one of them.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  That's new.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Chuck, that was a stretch, a little bit of a stretch there, Chuck.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Um, no, I, look, drone racing was around since about 2010. People, the minute they put cameras on drones, it would let them see what the drone sees. They started flying high-speed, complex, three-dimensional lines with them. And then they immediately started racing them.

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, are you saying that before then, it wasn't common to put cameras on them? So it's not interesting to gamers at that point?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think, I think, you know, quadcopters really kind of came around in the early 2000s and people started putting cameras on them to film things. But when they put a camera on the front with a fixed point of view, they fed a real-time video back to the pilot. It was the first time they gave you a perspective like you were sitting in the drone.

• 3:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  And, you know, we always say it's like sitting in the cockpit of the drone. And you need that if you're going to go at high speeds through, you know, complex courses, through enclosed spaces, things like that.

• 3:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that added a whole extra participatory dimension to it.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And it just sort of took off between 2010 and 2014. It, it spread all over the world. There were groups that have exchanging information on the internet, how to build these drones, where to meet up to race them. And it was this whole underground subculture of drone racing.

• 4:10Gary O'Reilly?

  So the developments of small optics has been the game changer in drone racing?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think three things really drive it. One is the, the core technology that drove the development of drones, which is all the very small, inexpensive sensors that let you sort of stabilize the flight. The second is these very small, you know, high-performance cameras. And then finally, the radio technology to broadcast that back to the pilots. And whether they look on a screen or a pair of goggles, so that they can see what the drone sees in such real time. And even when the drone's flying very quickly, they can avoid the obstacles, they can navigate the space.

• 4:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, to be specific, when you say small, you really mean low mass? Because the thrust provided by your rotor blades can only accelerate a mass at whatever, you know, Newton's laws, right? So you want not only something small if and other, but it can't weigh very much.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. You need a very high thrust-to-weight ratio. Because you need to accelerate very quickly. Um, it's your only means of stopping too. So you need to decelerate very quickly by reversing that thrust, so.

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you can stop if you crash into something. That's another way.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  A tree will also stop.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another way to stop the drone.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  It might even be the most common way to stop.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  It is true, right?

• 5:24Gary O'Reilly?

  When you, when you sat down with the concept of, right, we're gonna take this and as Chuck says, make it big, make it real and organized. The concept of doing that to actually getting finished races, drone races, was that a simple process or did that find itself difficulty?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  It took years. Uh, it was a very complex process. Uh, I remember, so in, in early 2015, I saw my first live drone race, which was a group of friends getting together in this field behind a Home Depot in Long Island. They had these homemade drones. They put up some like pool noodles to fly through as gates. And it was very amateur, it was very sort of backyard, but it was, I just thought it was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. There were these moments, the drones would fly by you and you really felt like you were inside Star Wars. And I was, I, my thought was, how do we take this to a mainstream audience? How do we bring this to everybody in the world? Cause I'm in this field in the middle of nowhere and I'm having this very cool experience. We should be sharing this more broadly. And the road from that to, you know, you look at last year, we had thousands of people

• 6:26Speaker 01

  in Chase Field in Phoenix, watching a drone race live, you know, fans on their feet screaming, wearing pilot T-shirts, watching this exciting race is just huge. And the main part of that journey was developing the technology to make it possible. That was our primary barrier to pulling it off.

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wonder something here, is for so many sports, they are, let's say, technologically conservative. If someone has a brilliant new idea, no, can't do that, undue advantage, no, let's go back to the old ways, and is pulling teeth, trying to get new technology to participate. Are you, do you race, are there rules about the drones that can race? Or can somebody do a rocket, I mean, are there rules about the drones that you can enter into a race?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  So one of the, all of the drones are identical. So DRL actually builds all the drones. All the technology you see out there racing with drones, the radio systems, the timings, that's all stuff that we created from scratch.

• 7:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's like NASCAR, where the cars are in principle identical, so you're really testing the driver.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's a test of pilot skill. It's spec racing. Everybody should be on an equal platform.

• 7:35Chuck Nice?

  Is there anything that they can do to give themselves an advantage with the physical drone itself?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 7:44Chuck Nice?

  That you allow, that you allow, or do they have to accept your drones? They can't touch the drones.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  They don't even get to touch the drones at all. We have a, the league has its own pit crew that puts all the drones on the line. We want this to be an absolute test. We want to, you know, absolute E-level playing field. And, because our goal at the end of the season is to crown the greatest drone pilot on the planet, right? And that requires everybody having the same equipment.

• 8:06Chuck Nice?

  So how do I practice if I'm a drone, if I'm a aspiring drone pilot, and I, or is it the fact that everybody's on the same playing field, so it doesn't make a difference? It's like, if you practice with one type of drone, and we give you another, everybody's at the same disadvantage? Or can I go get a drone that is most like the drone you're going to give me, and practice with that? And is that what everybody does?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  So there's two ways. So we have a simulator which in which you can fly a drone that is an exact simulation of the drone we fly in the league. So you can get very used to the performance best of that drone. You could also make something that's sort of somewhat similar. Most of these drone pilots practice on, you know, their favorite drone that is the most convenient to go out and practice with. And they make the transition when they get into the league to getting used to flying on our particular aircraft. But it's, you know, it's true. Once you're accepted into the league as a pilot, you get your own, you know, you get several of those drones. You get to fly with them every day. But, you know, that's a, that's a step that people make once they get into the league.

• 9:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Let's go back to the bit where you say you wanted to make it bigger, bring it to a larger audience. I think Chuck would call it Madonna-ifying.

• 9:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nicholas, you did confirm it with us that you are the Madonna.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  You are.

• 9:22Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, Nicholas. Strike a pose. It's too late.

• 9:26Gary O'Reilly?

  So when you're sat down with the likes of ESPN and the British sports broadcaster, Sky Sports, how easy was it to convince them that what you saw flying through noodles on Long Island was just perfect for their TV screens?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  It was challenging. You know, it was a funny experience going around and pitching this idea to investors or broadcasters because I got a really binary reaction. People either laughed me out of the room, or they got very excited and they'd start talking about Star Wars, they'd start talking about video games they played going, they'd go, you know, they'd start describing drone racing to me in these incredibly elaborate terms. And you'd say, wow, you've got very high expectations about what this is going to be. And I think people sort of fell in those categories. You know, with ESPN and Sky in particular, we were, we were lucky from a timing standpoint, you know, esports was just taking off. And I think a lot of people had laughed esports out of the room two years before. And suddenly it was, you know, filling Madison Square Garden and having huge broadcasts. So people were a little more open minded to something new.

• 10:25Chuck Nice?

  They didn't want to, they didn't want to look like a donkey twice.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And I think people, I always say that one of the craziest things about drone racing to me is when I started talking to people about it, as I say, people go right to pod racing and Star Wars and, you know, games they played. And you're like, wow, we have been priming people for this sport for decades through movies, TV, video games. So people are ready for this high-speed aerial robotic racing. They just want to see it brought to life.

• 10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So was there, was there, was there strong age segregation here? Because someone over 70 who didn't like grow up with Star Wars because they predated it. They, maybe they don't have the, it's not, it's not, they don't feel the force operating within them to embrace what it, what it is you're describing. Because you said it perfectly. You, what you've created here is the crowning, is the icing on top of a cake that you haven't had to bake. That's been in the oven for 40 years.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's, there's upside to that, which is you don't have to bake the cake. There's downside, which is, you know, when someone starts describing, you know, I always take pod racing. People always go to pod racing and episode 1 of Star Wars. And I always say, you know, if you look at that scene, that's a couple-minute scene. It's entirely CGI, costs millions of dollars to produce. It uses camera angles you could not possibly replicate in real life. So even if you gave me flying pods and a desert to race them in, I couldn't remake that scene. That's a very high bar of expectation. That was one of our biggest challenges creating the league is that, you know, people see pod racing, you're like, wow, that's a, you, you want that in real life with actual drones in a competitive sports environment, arena? That's, that's a pretty high bar. So we had to, we had to embrace that expectations. We couldn't fight it, but we also had to be realistic that it, it, you know, it created a big challenge for us to get over.

• 12:06Gary O'Reilly?

  But back in the day with the resistance to e-sport that once was, was the fact that you brought half-human, half-machine sport to the table, the bridge between the sort of traditional sports and e-sport that made it easier to sell?

• 12:21Speaker 01

  It definitely made it easier. You know, I think for people, they said, this is a real-life sport. These are real drones going 90 miles an hour in real spaces. They hit a wall, they explode into a million pieces. You know, it's not just showing people playing a video game. And I think, I think for the broadcasters, you know, the ESPNs of this world, it was, it helped to say that. A lot of people weren't ready to make the leap to put video games on TV. But this wasn't that. This was just a new form of racing.

• 12:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm curious, I, I, so often you might have a drone to film some other sporting activity, and then the drone follows that sporting activity. What drone follows racing drones?

• 12:58Speaker 01

  So we film them in a lot of different ways. So we, we, all the drones have cameras on them. So they're filming themselves, they're on point of view, they're filming each other.

• 13:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's probably sufficient. If they all know where they are and they're seeing everybody, you know.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  It helps. Again, these are, these drones are about the size of a dinner plate. They go 90 miles an hour. They go from zero to 90 in less than a second. So they corner on a dime, they, high acceleration. So they, filming them is a little challenging. So we use ground-based cameras. We use very interesting cameras. We use high-speed cable cameras. They can, can go very fast to keep up with them. We've had to get very creative in, in how we film them. You can't use a traditional camera drone. They're just too slow.

• 13:33Chuck Nice?

  I was about to say that. I've watched a couple of races on ESPN. And the truth is, the technology for broadcast is behind you. Um, you guys have created something much like Formula One, but far more difficult to follow and film. The, the course track is much shorter. So you have a lot more action packed into a much smaller space. Uh, and more importantly, you, your ground-based cameras can get coming and going. And the tracking cameras can only go for a little while. But at some point, this technology is, and I'm talking about the broadcast industry technology,

• 14:18Chuck Nice?

  is going to be to a point where it will look like Star Wars. And that's when stuff is going to get crazy.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you see it. I mean, I, I, our pilots go out and have fun sometimes. You see them filming videos where they're tracking a golf ball with a racing drone. And they're right behind it in the air. And it gives you a shot you can't get in any other way. I think, you know, they, they're, they're doing a good job following things that are slightly slower than a racing drone right now, a race car, a golf ball. But eventually we'll need people who can keep up with the races and, and track them in real time with camera drones, uh, while also staying out of the way, which is another whole challenge.

• 14:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. It'll be cool if, you know, the fastest pitch in the major leagues is, you know, 100 miles an hour. Have a drone follow, follow the pitch right.

• 15:02Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right into the glove. Right into the glove. Yeah. Yeah. I just, there's, there's endless possibilities here.

• 15:08Chuck Nice?

  And then cut to a wide shot of the drone just exploding on the face of the catcher.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Chuck, for choreographing. So has this opened up in the COVID lockdown? You know, there's so, you know, we've all been starved for for team sports. This is something that seems like it could fill some of that gap and has it? And will it continue?

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely, you know, we're very fortunate. Our sport is naturally socially distanced. The pilots don't need to be immediately next to each other, not in contact to be able to play. We do, and we've got other features. You know, we've always done races without audiences because we go and race places you couldn't put an audience. You know, we've done races in places like the Biosphere Two in Arizona, where we're racing through the world's largest earth science laboratory. You can't put an audience here. So for us, non-audience racing is authentic. And we also do simulator-based racing. So this spring, when the pandemic really broke out and people had to work entirely remotely, we did an entire racing series entirely based in simulation using pro pilots, put it on NBC Sports Network, the FanDuel DRL, Sim Cup, and it was incredible.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  It was a chance to bring sports to people in real time when they needed it in a way that was totally safe, given the environment.

• 16:20Gary O'Reilly?

  How did your pilots react? Excuse me, Neil.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 16:23Gary O'Reilly?

  From going with a tactile scenario, holding a control panel, to working a sim and not having the reality.

• 16:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't it the same thing? Isn't that the whole point?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  That the whole point is for it to be identical. We, in fact, we recruit pilots through simulation. So we do an open contest through our simulator. People can download an Xbox on Steam, they compete, and we whittle that down. And the best person in the sim that year gets a contract to come and fly real drones. And those pilots do incredibly well in the real league, even if they're basically someone with a gaming background who's learning it. That was why we spent so much time and energy on the sim. We wanted something that was so one-to-one that if you learned in simulation, you could translate their skills immediately, not just to real life, but real life at the highest level of competition.

• 17:05Gary O'Reilly?

  This actually replicates Formula One because, Neil, the drivers themselves sit in sims of the Formula One tracks around the world and go with it.

• 17:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, OK.

• 17:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, so this is a, there's a lot of correlation between the two.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What it comes down to is how good is your sim? Are the laws of physics accurately captured? Otherwise, you're not really simming anything.

• 17:31Chuck Nice?

  However, however, the great part about that is you can replicate the laws of physics and then break them because you are in a simulation and then judge the pilots on how they handle the anomalies that would never occur in the physical world.

• 17:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, this is not The Matrix.

• 17:49Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it is The Matrix. That's exactly what it is.

• 17:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want to turn it into The Matrix. Nicholas, can you come back in the third segment because we have to break and in our second segment, we're bringing on an expert on aviation simulations just to get a sense of what those challenges are. But for our third segment and final segment, if you can come back, that's where we sort of chew the fat and bring all the facts together and just have fun with it. So if you can hang on, that'd be great. Sounds great. Okay, when we return on StarTalk Sports Edition Drone Racing League, we're going to find out just what it takes to simulate a flying vehicle on StarTalk.

• 18:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. We're getting behind the scenes and inside look at drone racing. Started off talking about the Drone Racing League with its founder, but now we learned that they also have a sim racing universe that people compete in and we wanted to get to the bottom of what that requires. So we caught up with a Professor Marilyn Smith. Marilyn, welcome to StarTalk Sports Edition.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  Thank you. Great to meet you all.

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're at Georgia Tech and the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, but that's not where it ends, okay? You're also Director of Georgia Tech's Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence. Love that. And you do research for the US Army, the Navy and for NASA. There's more, but wait, there's more. Director of the Aerospace Engineering School's Computational Nonlinear Aeroelasticity Lab.

• 19:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and also a technical director for the Vertical Flight Society. So this is, let's just, just, just, vertical flight simply means you are, you are in a standing position and then you ascend. Is, is that what, this vertical flight? So you, so you're ascending without the benefit of aerodynamic lift in that moment? I mean, with, with lift that would come from moving horizontally?

• 20:19Speaker 04

  Well, that's true. Although the principles are the same, you're just using, instead of using a propeller to go in forward flight, you're transitioning at 90 degrees and using it as a rotor for vertical flight.

• 20:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this, okay, so we've had, you know, helicopters for, you know, functioning, useful helicopters for most of the 20th century. What is, is there anything new going on in there now that you're at the forefront of? What is it, what's the frontier of what it is you're advising all these people who want to know?

• 20:53Speaker 04

  This is the most exciting time I have ever had in my career, which is much longer than I'm going to admit on this show.

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's fine. You knew the Wright Brothers, did you?

• 21:04Speaker 04

  Well, not that bad. But, um, yeah, this is so exciting because between the, the US Army building two brand new, high-speed, really advanced helicopters to replace what we've already got, then there is this, the whole blast of drones or unmanned air vehicles. And then there's the whole concept of the civilian world in terms of urban air mobility, both for package flying, because you see Amazon all the time in the news and how they're delivering packages through, through drones.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  And there's this huge concept that's being developed by NASA and the FAA and, and great innovators all the way across the US and the world about how to replace then the congestion in the US with, you know, flying helicopters, either taxis or flying cars, personal air vehicles, you've probably heard of GoFly.

• 22:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  It's just incredible.

• 22:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uber flights.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  Yes, and everything is changing. I mean, the one, one main rotor vehicle that you have, that's a traditional helicopter, now you see four, eight, you see combinations vertically, side by side, forward, aft. It's crazy.

• 22:25Chuck Nice?

  So, so basically what has happened is, you know, we finally accepted the helicopter and let it be. We're like, okay, we're not going to try and turn you into a plane, which is what it's been, whether it's like the Harrier jet, you know, moving the jets themselves, or the Osprey, taking it from a helicopter, rotational wings. It's like, why are we doing all that when we could just let, let it be? Let it be what it is.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Well, actually, we're not letting it be. We do want to fly, and there's a lot of different, what we call hybrid configurations, where it starts out acting like a helicopter, and then it has some transitional, like the Transformers, where it transitions and flies forward in forward flight, and which what we're trying to do is get the benefits of the airplane, if you will, as well as the vertical takeoff and landing of the helicopter.

• 23:22Chuck Nice?

  And you're, and these are winged flights?

• 23:24Speaker 04

  Some have wings, some have moving propulsion systems where they act as rotors and then turn into propellers. Some have combinations of both. It's, it's really exciting because there is no limit. You know, you guys were talking with Nick about the Star Wars and everything. Well, you know, it's not Star Wars because we need air, but kind of the same thing. So, so maybe more like the Transformers movies.

• 23:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I think Chuck, I, I think Chuck, the point you were trying to make was that the, the helicopter, if all you ever had was a helicopter, now be creative with that.

• 23:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 23:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not, not trying to always say, oh, maybe I can turn a helicopter into an airplane.

• 24:02Chuck Nice?

  Into an airplane. Wait, which has been traditionally what has been done in the past. Yeah.

• 24:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, but we're saying here that, that helicopter is now...

• 24:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Its own thing and with with the whole divisions, whole branches. And in fact, the US Army, correct me if I'm wrong, Marilyn, is we think of the Air Force as having flying vessels, but the Army has vastly more flying vehicles than the Air Force ever had, primarily because of vertical lift helicopters.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  Yes, I think that's that's a fair statement. And plus, if you think about what the Army does, their vehicles are lower cost than, you know, say a fighter jet. So we can invest in more of them and and we need them because there's a lot of places, both for military and humanitarian, that helicopters can go into. You know, one of the things we're trying to do is see, can we get there faster? Can we carry bigger loads so we don't have to go in and out as much? And, you know, we see the fires in California. We see the hurricanes down in the Texas area. Those are the kind of things that that we really want to access and to to address.

• 25:15Chuck Nice?

  What's the power source and energy source for these? I mean, are these electric vehicles? Are they chemically powered? Are they gas? What is it?

• 25:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dilithium crystals.

• 25:25Chuck Nice?

  Oh, of course.

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Didn't know this.

• 25:27Chuck Nice?

  Finally. Finally.

• 25:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the classified work. Well, I should have.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  Uh-oh, we're gonna you'll get some Men in Black visiting you.

• 25:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. Yeah, if she gets yanked off the screen mid interview, we'll know why.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  Right, right now, honestly, right now, we're still in the oil and gas powered engines. There's a lot of research going on for electric. I think what we'll see is we're gonna see a lot of hybrid vehicles, very much like we see in cars first. But there is a lot of research going on. There's even a company looking at hydrogen powered vehicles. So there's a lot of. Very, very interesting research. You know, the sky is...

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, when you say hydrogen, you mean hydrogen combining with oxygen, not hydrogen fusion?

• 26:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no, no.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear.

• 26:17Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no.

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Home fusion device. We saw that in Back to the Future.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, we don't, we're not going that, that far out yet.

• 26:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not, not, not Mr. Fusion.

• 26:28Gary O'Reilly?

  No, I don't want to see, I do not want to see flying Deloreans.

• 26:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No. So Marilyn, what are your challenges? Given that, dare I use the word simple? You know, air moving over an airfoil of an airplane is simple compared to what's going on on a rotor blade. So if somebody wants to simulate that, are, how, how well behaved are the equation, the, the, the aerodynamic equations that model it?

• 26:57Speaker 04

  Well, we're talking about rotors and things. We do have some simple theories that work either in hover and they're, they're actually very good in very fast flight. So we do have those. And what's really great is that they are simple enough, or I should say mathematically fast enough to be able to predict what's happening during flight. So we can use them in real time.

• 27:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 27:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, but, you know, whenever you're doing a simulation, there's always a trade off. What kind of accuracy do you need? Because what is it that you're trying to simulate? So here, what we're doing with the drone racing league, as well as the modeling and simulations that we do with the military and with NASA, is that we want to be able to predict the reactions, the forces and moments that are happening either on the rotor or the vehicle itself. And so we do have some concepts that are out there either as traditional design tools or that are...

• 28:01Speaker 04

  out there that can be used for any kind of simulation. So

• 28:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Of course, if what you do is accurate, you can inform the the engineers who are designing the next craft as well as inform the programmers who are designing the next simulation.

• 28:19Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It should work both ways. Yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 04

  That's kind of where this came into play. Because we were we were actually looking and looking into the ability to use our simulation tools that we developed. They were actually developed first for army sling loads to get those those loads out to the emergency areas. And then what happened is we had

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, a sling load is just something that dangles below.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then it gets dropped.

• 28:51Speaker 04

  Exactly. So you see the helicopters coming in.

• 28:54Chuck Nice?

  They got a big net, a big net with a bunch of boxes and stuff.

• 28:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A big net with Godzilla in it.

• 29:00Chuck Nice?

  Yes. That's the perfect one.

• 29:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The one with the monster in it. Yes.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 29:07Chuck Nice?

  This long to get to Godzilla.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Marilyn, what how do you what do you teach specifically? Do you teach the programming? Do you teach the physics? Do you teach the engineering? What's in your program?

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Yes, to all of the above, actually.

• 29:23Chuck Nice?

  Good for you.

• 29:24Speaker 04

  So at the moment, I'm teaching both graduate and undergraduate students the basics of helicopter aeromechanics. And we call it aeromechanics because it's a combination of aerodynamics, the structural dynamics, and the acoustics, the controls, all together. So we call that aeromechanics. And for the graduate students.

• 29:45Chuck Nice?

  You said acoustics.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 29:48Chuck Nice?

  Can you just just for my own, you know, giggles, what how do acoustics tie into this situation?

• 29:56Speaker 04

  For the drone racing league, not much. For regular applications, either military or civilian, a lot. Because first of all

• 30:07Chuck Nice?

  Is that making a quieter, sneaky helicopter? Oh, Chuck.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Not well, for military, sneakier, yes. For civilian, you don't want to live around a vertiport or in the flight path of a helicopter, just like you wouldn't for, you know, an airplane. So yes, that's important. And so

• 30:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck, just to be clear, you're you're young, but when when in my day, airplanes themselves were so loud that if any airplane flew overhead, you had to stop your conversation for it to finish. And over the decades, they've gotten quieter and quieter and quieter without any fanfare. And now you don't even look up when there's an airplane there. So I so Marilyn, I entirely if if if drones are going to be delivering goods all to all manner of people, and if they are noisy, nobody's going to want this.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 31:01Chuck Nice?

  So here's what just popped into my head when you talk about all these things. I mean, just like drone racing. So drone racing, if you crash, you crash. Now, the other kind of drone, that ain't so good. So are you also designing the systems that track and help pilots and drones stay on course, reach their destinations, stay clear of one another, and more importantly, stay clear of me?

• 31:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean that navigation?

• 31:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean navigation?

• 31:38Speaker 04

  Yes, autonomous systems as well as piloted systems. We absolutely and in fact, after this conversation, I will go in and put a line of code in there that says stay away.

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From Chuck?

• 31:52Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, you heard it here.

• 31:55Chuck Nice?

  There you go. I'm gonna hold you to that, Marilyn. And you know what'd be funny? Five years from now, 10 years from now, when everybody's taking drones from building to building in Manhattan, and I walk up and I can't get a drone, they'll be like, I'm sorry, the code says we can't go near you. I'll be the only guy with a restraining order ordered by drones.

• 32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the Chuck avoidance protocol.

• 32:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Professor, when developing this SIM for the Drone League racing and working with these particular vehicles?

• 32:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Did it take you somewhere where you A didn't think you'd go? And did it help you? Or did you break new ground in equations and sinking?

• 32:37Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's a good question.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  Yes, we have in this whole process. Even before we got hooked up with the Drone Racing League. One of the main things that we worked on was how can you take very complex aerodynamics that, you know, we typically were solving, requiring tens of thousands of computer hours. And we tried to reduce it to get the information that we wanted for the and the fidelity of the information that we wanted in real time, which was a huge undertaking. So we had to take what we knew from different theories and combine them together and make corrections based on the physics because, you know, we can't break the physics even in a simulation.

• 33:21Chuck Nice?

  Chuck.

• 33:24Chuck Nice?

  You just don't want to, Marilyn, that's all.

• 33:26Speaker 04

  Well, true, because if you do and you're trying to train pilots, whether it's for the Drone Racing League or whether it's for the Army, then, you know, they're not going to know the real thing. And then there's the safety factor. But that's the key, is that we're trying to get as close as possible to realism, but still have it so that you can interact. So it has to be in real time. So that required a lot of innovation and it wasn't just me. I mean, I have a whole team of really talented graduate students and undergraduate students at Georgia Tech. And in fact, the person that got us hooked up with the Drone Racing League was a pilot for the Drone Racing League who was also a student at Georgia Tech.

• 34:10Speaker 04

  And he happened to walk by where we were trying to design a new autonomous control system using our models. And got interested and said, I think this would be great for the D R L. And so that's how we got hooked up with the D R L because before we were working uh primarily just for the uh the military and for NASA.

• 34:33Chuck Nice?

  So can I ask you two scientists a question about planes and copters?

• 34:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta do it quick because we're running short on time.

• 34:40Chuck Nice?

  All right. So the thing about planes is, you know, you see them flying through all kinds of weather, you know, aside from like icing on the wings, which can be deadly, like storms, all kinds of stuff. They even get struck by lightning. But then when you look at helicopters, it's all about like every time in this, I'm I'm coming from the movies now, every time a helicopter is in bad weather, it crashes. So have you made, have you solved that problem? And and and and is it really that much of a difference aerodynamically that that trope? Is it true or is it just kind of like a poetic fantasy?

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Chuck, Chuck, aren't you simply saying a a an airplane where its engines fail is a glider, but a helicopter where its engines fail is a brick? Isn't that really all you're saying?

• 35:29Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 35:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Marilyn, what are what are the safety, what what's the safety profile of a helicopter?

• 35:36Speaker 04

  Well, there's something called auto-rotation and auto-rotation is where you let the air flowing through the the rotor blades power the rotor blades as opposed to an engine. So it's not really a brick. It's a it's a brick with the kind of like small wings on it. So.

• 35:53Chuck Nice?

  No, it's a uh it's a one of those things that fall from the trees.

• 35:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:56Chuck Nice?

  The curly things.

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the little sieves.

• 35:58Speaker 04

  Exactly right. And that's how the helicopter and the whole concepts came about is that um way back even before uh in in the B C area, uh errorless, say, uh people saw those and they said, great. Yeah, can can we design something that flies like that? And so they did it with toys, but during the Renaissance and Leonardo da Vinci's time, he said, well, could we take that concept and make it into a real vehicle? And that was the beginning, if you will, of the modern designing of of helicopters. They didn't succeed for several hundred years, but that was where it began.

• 36:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, let's let's let's put this to bed right now. So Marilyn, just tell everyone, standing there flat-footed, that Leonardo da Vinci's design. Fails to say that because everyone thinks he was a genius. He invented helicopters. No, he didn't. No, he didn't. That design didn't work. He never built it. He never tested it. He would have known it didn't work.

• 36:59Speaker 04

  That's right. The air screw, which is what he designed, is is not really viable. What's interesting-

• 37:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At all. You're still trying to be nice to the guy. He's brilliant enough. You can say he messed up here. Just say it. Just put it out there.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  No, I'm gonna, what I'm gonna say is he didn't know enough about the physics and the mathematics of the time to be able to refine his design enough so that it was viable.

• 37:23Chuck Nice?

  But his design does make for a great water propeller.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  Yes, to a certain extent. So you can design something. You need bigger power and it's not very efficient. So let's put it this way, is that with modern technology, you can fly with an air screw. It's just not very efficient. So there's no way poor Leonardo could have made anything fly.

• 37:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Leonardo was was a helicopter idiot. That's all.

• 37:52Chuck Nice?

  Such a dumber than Da Vinci.

• 37:54Speaker 04

  He was not-

• 37:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, listen, I was kidding.

• 37:58Speaker 04

  He was a great innovator. He was a great designer. He wasn't an engineer.

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:04Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, there's really nobody around to defend him from that time. So.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm just being stupidly provocative.

• 38:13Chuck Nice?

  Nah, it is. It's totally fine.

• 38:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We all love Leonardo.

• 38:15Chuck Nice?

  He's joking. Everybody knows he was a genius.

• 38:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We all love Leonardo. We gotta bring this-

• 38:20Chuck Nice?

  He was a genius, except in helicopters where he was a dumbass.

• 38:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, to Marilyn's point, physics was not yet fully developed of forces and aerodynamics. Had they been, you know, he would have been at the forefront of that and he would have invented the first viable helicopter. I think that's what you're trying to say.

• 38:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. And even then, if you look at all the concepts, they all tried and built upon what Leonardo proposed.

• 38:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got to bring this segment to a close.

• 38:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Neil, but if you look at his early drawings, you'll find he's, he designs the first Tesla.

• 38:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he calls it the Tesla, doesn't he?

• 38:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, but he just hadn't got to the lithium battery bit.

• 39:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Marilyn, it's been a delight to have you on here. We love being close to engineers. And if we can bring you on again when we have future questions about aerodynamics in sports or anywhere else, I'd be delighted to know that you're there for us.

• 39:20Speaker 04

  Absolutely. It's been a pleasure and been great getting to know you guys and, you know,

• 39:28Speaker 04

  Tesla on or?

• 39:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Aim high, as the air? Yeah, there you go.

• 39:34Speaker 04

  Aim high, aiming fast.

• 39:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guys, we've got to take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll enter our sort of chew the fat mode and just see what we've really been thinking these first two segments when we return on StarTalk Sports Edition.

• 40:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. Sports Edition, the Drone Racing League. I'm delighted to have had the expertise that Marilyn brought to the table on rotor lift, helicopter design, the physics, the engineering. We'll get her back. We'll find a reason to bring her back because there's way more to learn from her. Yeah. So, but we've had back on Nicholas. Let's do the last name again. Horbatschewski. Got it.

• 40:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Horbatschewski. Horbatschewski. Horbatschewski. Did I get that right, Nicholas?

• 40:47Speaker 01

  You got it.

• 40:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it. Excellent, excellent. Founder of the Drone Racing League. So, this where we just sort of shoot the shit and just find out. Let me ask you, is there, are you growing? Is this? Yeah, what's your height now?

• 41:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where's this gonna be in in five more years?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  You know, it's it's hard to think back, you know, five years ago, this was nothing. And now we're broadcasting countries around the world. We have millions of people watch our content. We have, you know, thousands and thousands of people participate in our tryouts every year. So it's it's almost hard to imagine where this is gonna go. But we want this to be a mainstream sport. And and frankly, I think this is the beginning of a robotic sport revolution. It's gonna come and change the way people think about sports and entertainment.

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this is it fair to call it sport if it's a machine that's doing all the that's doing the heavy lifting?

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, you know, there's this huge debate over what's a sport and esports and regular sports. You know, we we define ourselves as a robotic sport, one where a robot is on the field of play, but it's being controlled by a person.

• 41:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, Nicholas, we we've resolved this on StarTalk in an earlier episode. You have to ask, would the Greeks have drawn you on one of their urns? And they would have as a god. They would have as a god. I'm sorry, that is, we we define that as, is it a sport or is it not? I'm just saying, just so you know. No, let me, Nicholas, let's just give you the real deal. Neil is a wrestler, and so he's defined it because that includes him on an urn. That's the deal.

• 42:24Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, let's try, let's try and wander back into the present day.

• 42:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 42:29Gary O'Reilly?

  So so let's pick up on a point Neil made earlier in the show about drone racing league getting a COVID bump. Has has that been definable in your numbers with the NBC Sports Network?

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. We have seen, you know, huge numbers. And we we did a all simulation tournament that we brought up very quickly. We had over 4 billion people watching that on Twitter alone. So, you know, for us, that's an out of season segment that we normally wouldn't do.

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's 4 million, 4 million?

• 42:56Speaker 01

  4 million, yeah.

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  The most interesting thing to me, though, is is some of the stats are coming out that a a large number of people were exposed to a new sport during this. And there's some recent studies say 60% of them plan to continue to follow those new sports. So I actually think, in addition to sort of the immediate bump during the COVID period, I think the long term modification for sports is huge. I think people are going to broaden the sports concept they consume because of what they were exposed to during this disruption to the global sports environment.

• 43:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there any plans for you? Because, okay, I

• 43:27Chuck Nice?

  I know that there's got to be a huge overlap between gamers and the people who like this sport. I don't know that for a fact empirically, but I'm just venturing to guess that, you know, that that's gotta be the case. And if so, is there any plan to bring those people into the sport physically through video gaming that you develop?

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So our fans are four times more likely to be interested in gaming than a traditional sort of big five sports fan. And, you know, we have the game. We have the simulator. It's on Xbox. It's on Steam. Anyone can play it. Anyone, it'll teach you how to race a drone, let you start racing against your friends. You can compete in it in our tryouts and you might even earn a pro real life drone racing contract through it. So it is a way to draw people in a participatory way into the sport in a very low friction way. They don't need to go build a drone. They don't need to go fly a field. They can just start learning to race.

• 44:20Chuck Nice?

  All right. All right. Now here's the real question. How do I get in on this?

• 44:26Chuck Nice?

  Let me tell you something, Nicholas. You are headed for some like out of mind success, bro.

• 44:34Chuck Nice?

  I got a 14 year old and, you know, I have to limit the, that, the amount of gaming because it's so infectious. But, I mean, you're, you know what you're doing, right? You're recruiting and creating an entire audience. Like, that's, that's really, it's, that's crazy, man.

• 44:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, that's why he was Crane's 40 under 40.

• 45:00Gary O'Reilly?

  So we've been over this. You're limiting your 14 year olds time because you want to get on.

• 45:05Chuck Nice?

  Damn right. I want to play. I want to be a part of it and I also want to own it.

• 45:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to be in Crane's 70 under 70.

• 45:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Nicholas, you talked about your fans and we're all, we're all wishing we can be 70 under 70. You're looking at your fans and it's fabulous. They're growing, but I'm having a thought here. Most likely poster on the wall for your fans is Elon Musk rather than Tom Brady.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  You nailed it. You're 100% right. I, our fan to our fans, 75% of our fans are under 35, but the most interesting thing to me about them is 70% of them don't follow a big five sport. So they don't have, they're not, they're not the people who follow football or baseball. They are the people who, they're into video games, they're into technology. As you said, their hero is Elon Musk. It's not Tom Brady. They get a sport too, right? That, that, this is a generation, they're interested in sport and competition. They're just not that interested in how far Tom Brady can throw a football versus high-performance technology out on the field of play.

• 46:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Do you think that's because that 75% of your fanbase all got wedgies from the football quarterback when they were in high school? So, so they have completely disaffected by big five sports? I mean, how much of it is that set? The geek set, basically?

• 46:26Speaker 01

  I think it's, maybe it's a geek set, but I think the reality is, you know, when I think of people I know, we're sitting down, we're gonna talk, they're gonna start talking about technology, when's the new iPhone coming out? What's Tesla doing with its cars? What SpaceX, you know, and they're gonna talk about Elon Musk. They're not gonna say, oh, did you see that football game where this person hit that person harder than somebody else? They're just not as interested in that. It's not, sports are part of your lifestyle and our lifestyle is kinda techno-centric.

• 46:50Chuck Nice?

  So now, but, but the interesting thing is, when you look at the emergence and the ascension of the X Games, they followed that same, those same characteristics of the fan are present there as well. They are not nearly as likely to watch big five sports or to be as interested as they are in, you know, the, the more extreme sports. Do you see any overlap with that, I'll call it, that, that fanbase and your fanbase?

• 47:21Speaker 01

  So our fans probably have less overlap there. So the majority of our fans are sort of that Gen Z type. They're, they're less into extreme sports. That, that is found less of a foothold with that generation. But again, I, I also think, you know, you think about when the X Games came out, people were skateboarding outside.

• 47:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Their lifestyle was about those alternative sports, about adventure and exploring. You know, our fans' lifestyle is about, it's about technology, it's about progress, it's about STEM, it's the things they really care about and this is a sport that pulls in those other aspects of their life and then wrapped it in, in high-speed racing competition, which makes it very entertaining.

• 47:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I, I, I wonder if, if your sim racing was as successful or competitively successful to the regular racing? Could that be the beginning of simulations in every sport? I mean, look how successful the the home game versions are of the NFL or the NBA. If those were taken up a few notches, might people just sim everything? And not even look at the real people playing the game if they get the physics of all the mechanics and everything correct?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny, I say this sometimes, I have I have walked by a TV that was showing DRL and I've had to look twice to decide if it was our sim or real life. And if you could do that with every sport, I do think it starts to blur together. But we talk about this a lot, which is the key thing is for our fans, they don't care. We talk about this sport being on the blurry line between the digital and the real. We seamlessly move between the two in the way that their lives seamlessly move between the two of them. You talk about them chatting with their friends on Facebook versus talking in person. They don't draw some bright line saying this one's better than that one. And I think the key is especially for Gen Z fans, authenticity is so important. Our fan, our sport authentically integrates simulation in real life. And I think that's where sports are going to need to go. You know, F1 does a great job because they have sim racing real life.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  But basketball, there's less sim involved. They're gonna have to explain to fans why this is connected.

• 49:14Chuck Nice?

  However, however, I will say this, the ESPN did run a video game NBA 2 on their on their airwaves and it rated. So, so there is an appetite for this.

• 49:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, no, no, it's it's because there was nothing else to eat.

• 49:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the middle of the night, you're looking in the refrigerator.

• 49:38Chuck Nice?

  So you're like, so what's this saying?

• 49:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a carrot and there's a pickle.

• 49:43Chuck Nice?

  Pig's knuckles are good to anybody who hasn't eaten in five days.

• 49:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. So don't be telling me, don't, don't go there.

• 49:50Gary O'Reilly?

  If we get better computer graphics. Are we there then? Are we there yet? Are we, are we still a long way off?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  I, I think it's very close. But, but again, to me, the more interesting thing is what does simulation do? It moves the participant away from where the action is taking place. But then we, we go back to the next level, which is we then are controlling a real life robot. Like simulation is one step, but you know, so simulated, say NFL games in a video game. It's mad and everyone's playing. What if the next step is robots on the field of play actually competing, being remotely controlled by people? And then you start to feel that you think you can't do otherwise, right? They can jump higher, they can hit harder, they can throw the ball further. And it's pretty exciting and it's real. There is still something about watching something in real life that is very attractive to fans. That sort of, uh, you know, that excitement about being in the real arena. And I think that's where this goes, right? The, the minute you can simulate perfectly, then you pair it up with robotics technology

• 50:43Speaker 01

  and you're at a completely different level of sports and entertainment.

• 50:46Gary O'Reilly?

  But what makes DRL so captivating for a younger audience is the fact the race takes about, what? Minute, minute 10?

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 50:54Gary O'Reilly?

  And it's, it's rinse, repeat. How many?

• 50:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, it's not three hours long like a baseball game?

• 50:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly. Right? So how many of this audience that you're capturing are going to want to do three hours of dedicated viewing? Whether it's real or otherwise, you've capturing a market where an attention span is shorter.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  I think it's true. You know, a, a DRL race is about a minute long. Our events are made up of many, many races and we talk about it, you know, they still, people still watch our full multi-hour broadcast on NBC or NBCSN. I, we think of it as like lean in, lean out. For one minute you are totally in, action's happening, it stops, then you can lean back, you can chat with your friends, you can watch the replay and then you're back in again. I think that viewing pace is actually what people really like about the DRL format. Not the fact, I mean, it's not like our entire event is one minute long and you only need one minute attention span. It's, it's that you, I'm not asking you to, you know, I think this is one of the challenges with something like NASCAR where every second you're supposed to be zoned in. Every second counts equally. That's not really in sync with our life where we're on multiple devices, looking around, moving around. People like that punctuated viewing experience.

• 52:00Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, you have to understand that DRL, just like anything else, it's about drama. So there are storylines that have developed. There are guys that are like, you know, super match rivalries. I mean, all these things, once you get into the sport, become part of the soap opera type narrative. That's a part of every sport. When the Philadelphia Eagles play the Dallas Cowboys, you know, people who aren't fans of either are excited for that matchup because they're known to go at each other so viciously. So these become like the psychological attachments to a sport that reside outside of the sport itself. And I think you guys, of course, would have the same thing happen to you.

• 52:45Chuck Nice?

  Nicholas, at the beginning, do they stare each other down at the weight table?

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. They do. A lot of trash talk.

• 52:53Chuck Nice?

  They draw their thumbs, look at my thumbs. Right, yeah.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  They're getting each other's heads. But I, I, look, I think Chuck's dead on, which is it's about the rivalries. Ultimately, it's about the thrill of sport, which is the same everywhere, right? Competition is ancient. The playing field, the battleground just keeps changing. And that's what keeps, what we find exciting. And the truth is, we have intense rivalries in our sport. And I think what's important when people who look at the sport with some skepticism is to appreciate, is that they, oh, well, they're controlling a robot with their thumbs. And you're like, but for our fans, it doesn't matter. That rivalry is real. That skill is real. They translate that skill to the real world. They go out and do things with drones that make you think they have superpowers. That matters to our fans.

• 53:34Gary O'Reilly?

  But to your fans, are the heroes the pilots or the engineers? Ooh.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  I actually think there's three heroes in our sport. There's the pilots, there's the engineers, and there's the drones themselves. I think people anthropomorphize the drones. They're actually cheering for those drones as they're flying. They love the engineers. Our pit crew is a very popular segment. We put on TV. People want to know, how do you, we hand build every one of these drones. We hand tune them. And then the pilots themselves with the skill. And again, I think for our fans, it makes total sense, right? You people are fascinated by the engineers that are building their technology as much as they're enjoying the technology themselves.

• 54:08Chuck Nice?

  And that's completely consistent with everything else you've described about the sport and the fan base.

• 54:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we actually, we're out of time. We gotta sort of land this drone.

• 54:17Chuck Nice?

  Ha, I see what I did there.

• 54:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See what I did there?

• 54:20Chuck Nice?

  Ah, look at that.

• 54:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me just get Nicholas's yes or no to my following comment. Ready? You know, Gary and I, we're old timers. When we grew up, if you wanted to say someone was clumsy, all you had to say was that they were all thumbs. But I haven't heard that much lately. So now if you say someone is all thumbs, is that the highest compliment of their dexterity that you can give them?

• 54:46Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 54:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 54:51Speaker 05

  You know, there are guys out there making millions of dollars a year.

• 54:55Chuck Nice?

  I was about to say, that's with their thumbs. And that's why, that kid is all thumbs and he has a contract.

• 55:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Talk to the thumb. Talk to the thumb, there you go. All right, Nicholas, great to have you on. And good luck with this.

• 55:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 55:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's hope you stay 40 under 40, as long as you're under 40.

• 55:16Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, Nicholas, even after 40, just stay there.

• 55:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, always good to have you. Pleasure. Chuck? Always a pleasure. All right, guys, thanks for being on. This has been StarTalk Sports Edition Drone League. Till next time, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, bidding you to keep working up.