Artificial Intelligence and Sports

Will AI change sports? Has it changed sports already? Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice, IBM’s Noah Syken and Second Spectrum’s Rajiv Maheswaran investigate how artificial intelligence is impacting sports.

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. And our special topic today is the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in sports. What is it? How's it manifesting? How's it gonna change what we experience not only as viewers, but how it might change with the athletes themselves? So, who do I have with me? Of course, my trusty co-host Chuck Nice.

• 0:41Chuck Nice?

  What's happening, Neil?

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you're a stand-up comedian and you think about sports sometimes.

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Occasionally. You know, every once in a while, I have a dream about it.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so for this, we go big guns and of course, we have Gary O'Reilly. Gary, ex-footballer, ex-footballer. What team did you play with?

• 1:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Tottenham, Crystal Palace, and Brighton. So, my idea is that I think about sports a lot and occasionally, I think I'm funny.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:10Gary O'Reilly?

  But it's only me thinking I'm funny, apparently.

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, that's the combination of that that we need here. Very good. Well, today, we have a special guest, Noah Syken. Did I pronounce that right, Noah?

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Yes, Neil, you did.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Perfect. Noah, you're VP of Sports and Entertainment Partnership at not a sports company, not an equipment company, not a logo sneaker company, at IBM.

• 1:41Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, this is Revenge of the Nerds? What's going on? Why do you even exist? How about that?

• 1:48Speaker 03

  Well, sports uses technology and data, so why not IBM?

• 1:53Chuck Nice?

  Well, there you go. And ladies and gentlemen, the show is over. Thank you all for tuning in. I think we've covered it all.

• 2:04Gary O'Reilly?

  It's all about quality, not wits.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, well, I just I just wonder because I think we did have to run through a generation of those who had gotten wedgie'd and their lunch money taken by the football jocks to let that sort of work its way under the bridge. And now we have the next generation of techies who who the sports community embraces, such as yourself. What's your formal background?

• 2:29Speaker 03

  I'm actually an advertising guy. Started in advertising and media. And as I came into IBM, I learned all about technology. I learned about the intersection of how do you take great technology? How do you mix it up with something that people love and they're passionate about? And tell stories, you know? And so the mix, like I said, the mix of technology and sports is actually very natural.

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So IBM needs the person who is sensitive to the technology, has the target objective with sports, but also IBM is one of the leaders in AI in this world. So so they need somebody like you.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, look, you know.

• 3:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or at least you tell yourself that.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Well, I I look at it as, you know, sports are business enterprises. They have the same needs as every other business, right? They have to get customers, they have to please their customers, they need a great technology infrastructure, it needs to be secure so that nobody's, you know, breaking in and doing bad things to their technology infrastructure. So sports are just businesses with a different name and they don't call them clients, they call them fans. And so we're very tuned in to how to help businesses operate better. That's what we do in sports.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Chuck and Gary think about AI all the time. Every time we have one of these shows, they're bringing it up. So I'm sure they got a million questions for you.

• 3:49Chuck Nice?

  I'm waiting for the day that AI is thinking about me.

• 3:54Gary O'Reilly?

  It already is, you just don't know it.

• 3:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, it just did your gig last night at the Comedy Stop.

• 4:02Gary O'Reilly?

  So Noah, I mean, I think people realize in the back of their minds somewhere that IBM has a connection to sport, but I don't think they realize just how holistic and embedded you are, because it's not just tennis, it's not just golf, it's not just, "We can protect your tech." You're in so many different areas of sport altogether. Can you kind of expand on where IBM has gone in and moved the game forward?

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Sure. Well, our history goes back to the Olympics in the 50s and 60s, and we started just keeping track of the data with punch cards, you know, a couple generations ago.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Explain punch cards, please.

• 4:48Chuck Nice?

  It's when you get really mad at a birthday card.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Oh, well, you know, Neil, but it's those little cards that you used to get at tollbooths, right? You used to slide the card and have all the little holes in it. So mechanical computing, taking those little punch cards and scoring the rowing contest or the fencing contest or the basketball contest in the 50s and 60s. And that just accelerated through the 80s and 90s into the digital age and the internet.

• 5:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Noah Second is 90 years old. That's what he's telling us.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  My gray hair, yeah.

• 5:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you guys have been, that's, I guess it's obvious in retrospect that you would be there because it is a lot of data. But I'd heard that certain Olympics among them, but Wimbledon as well, so you guys have a focus right now? No Olympics this year, so what's your focus?

• 5:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in the modern age, we partner with entities like Wimbledon, the US Open, the Masters, the Grammy Awards, fantasy football. But so Wimbledon was canceled, but the club came up with a great idea to actually play out Wimbledon over the course of the two weeks and still present four or five new matches each day of the fortnight of Wimbledon. They're classic matches, but if you think about the video content of your favorite match, Borg McEnroe, 1980. Broadcast standards weren't where they were today. So we actually created some custom algorithms using our AI and updated about fifteen of those matches to modern day broadcast standards. So being able to actually see Bjorn Borg's hair, you know, fiber by fiber,

• 6:25Speaker 03

  and really bringing a modern day standard to all of that broadcast footage and presented it on Wimbledon.com. So in just a matter of six weeks.

• 6:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh Noah, what you've done there is you've given AI the chance to give us data on Borg McEnroe final that never existed because AI can't use the grainy old footage. Oh, did you release those into the wild or is that just something you're keeping back?

• 6:50Speaker 03

  No, no. If you go to Wimbledon.com today, you'll actually see modern day statistics that weren't captured in 1980 that were able to be infused into that content today. So you're right on point. It's not just the video, it's all the supplemental data that we have ability to update.

• 7:06Chuck Nice?

  But that begs the question then, since these guys cannot play any longer, could the AI take the the data, the history of these matches, compile all that data, extrapolate what the outcome would be under certain conditions for a match that has never even taken place?

• 7:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what, in fact, that's what I'm waiting for. I don't care how many strands of hair Bjorn Borg has.

• 7:33Chuck Nice?

  Show me. Right. Neil, how dare you? Well, no, because then, no, I see what Neil is saying. It makes great sense because here's the deal.

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Invent a match.

• 7:44Chuck Nice?

  Invent a match.

• 7:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Borg versus Federer. Could we find out?

• 7:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Dude, you've got the data.

• 7:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Who would win?

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got the data.

• 7:51Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, okay, what metrics are you gonna need to construct a Borg versus McEnroe?

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know what you can do? You could take a modern person, put him back in time, slow down their racket, the ball speed off of the wooden bamboo rackets, and just to equalize that. So that's what we want you to do. Go back now and do that, and we'll call you when you've got something to report.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Oh, you guys are great. You guys should come work for us.

• 8:17Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People are always trying to match up people who never competed against each other, especially in boxing.

• 8:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, it's the classic.

• 8:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a pastime.

• 8:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Neil, it's the classic barroom conversation.

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 8:30Gary O'Reilly?

  So, and now you, now we have it. Now we can actually produce, but providing we set the metrics and continue as a constant in the equation, we should be able, now I'm talking as if I know about AI.

• 8:42Gary O'Reilly?

  We should be able to do that.

• 8:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's an example of the kinds of data you would collect in a tennis match?

• 8:48Speaker 03

  Well, so, so let me, let me actually talk about the data in two ways. You're actually, you guys are talking about two different aspects, right? Statistically, who's gonna win that match, right? But you're also getting at who's the best player of either one of those players. And that's a more nuanced conversation because that gets into your heart and that gets into what everybody believes, right? And so we can do this statistical modeling of, you know, who would perform better, who's speed is, who's serve is faster, who has more, you know, less unforced errors, all that kind of structured data. We think about structured data, rows and columns of data.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  But then we think about unstructured data, video, language, right? Language, and that gets at the second part of the equation, not just statistically who would win, but who's the favorite in the eyes of the fans? And more and more, we're thinking about how do we apply AI to that question? How do we get people talking about the matches, their favorite matches, their favorite players, expressing themselves? Because at the end of the day, there's no real answer to who's the best. The best player is who you believe is the best player and who the people believe is the best player. So we think AI actually has the ability to, we know AI has the ability to go out, listen, learn, and compile what people say about the players,

• 10:07Speaker 03

  and actually synthesize that into a crisp, articulate point of view as to who the best player is or who would win that match if it was played today.

• 10:15Gary O'Reilly?

  So you're learning.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Structured data, unstructured data, both have a role.

• 10:18Gary O'Reilly?

  So you're using language as A, a metric, and B, as a way for AI to learn sport?

• 10:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  It's.

• 10:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, to learn, to learn the fandom of sport.

• 10:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 10:32Chuck Nice?

  That's it.

• 10:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Also, I mean, if it can analyze language like that, Neil, imagine the coach's conversation with a player, the caddie's conversation on the tee or on the green in the Masters, which IBM are involved in. Imagine all of a sudden, they can analyze that data to bring forward. Because we're looking here historically, this, this Borg McEnroe thing takes place in 1980. That's historic analytics. I guarantee now Noah has spun that 180 and is looking with AI going forward in a more predictive role. Am I right, Noah?

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we, we think about predictive statistics already. We produce keys to the match in tennis. What do you have to do? What does this player have to do under these circumstances to win this match? Um, but we are very much looking at predictive using natural language. Uh, I talked a little bit about tennis, but in the world of fantasy football, we're do, we're using the same kind of capabilities. So we're out there reading the blogs, reading the, the local beat reporters, working with ESPN and the projections, uh, uh, that, that fantasy football players will get on ESPN Fantasy Football app are actually augmented through AI, uh, based on our natural language, understanding of what people are saying about the players.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  So this notion of language is pervasive across sports and more and more we're tapping into it. Um, think about sound right now. You have all these competitions going on with different levels of sound. In a team sport, right, if you eliminate that, that typed in sound, you're able to hear the interactions of the football players on the pitch, uh, the hockey players on the ice, right? So getting value out of that, how are those players interacting with each others? What are the coaches saying? What are productive interactions between, between coaches and players that lead to success versus unproductive interaction?

• 12:26Chuck Nice?

  So now, how, how, how exactly would you be able to implement that even from a fan perspective? Because if I'm a coach, I'm looking at the information you just cited as proprietary. I do not want you on the field, listening to the communication patterns of my team, because that gives my opponents the opportunity to see inside my head. So at that point, I'm trying to punch Watson in the face.

• 12:54Gary O'Reilly?

  I wanna see that.

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, Chuck, you do that? There goes your cable subscription. There goes everything. There goes your...

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Chuck, you're right. You're right on the right point. You know, these are the gnarly questions that the sports organizations have to sort out right now. And there's no question. I mean, go watch a hockey match tonight, one of the hockey games tonight, and you'll see they have this crowd noise and you can't hear the voices. And, you know, in many cases, I suspect that's very purposeful because of the exact reasons. But a great organization who wants to compete more effectively is gonna get their hands on that data. They're gonna get their hands on those interactions and understand those interactions, just like a business wants to communicate with their client and understand what their clients are saying.

• 13:40Chuck Nice?

  So what you're saying is Bill Belichick will definitely get his hands on this.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  I said nothing. I'm a New York fan, but I wouldn't...

• 13:48Gary O'Reilly?

  This is the next generation of sign reading, like we saw in baseball, yeah. No, I know you have, and IBM have a strong connection to the US Open tennis. Right? But there ain't nobody in the stadium. And it's a cavernous, the Arthur Ashe Arena is just a magnificent space, but it's going to be empty. Am I wrong in knowing that you have mapped the sound of every round going through to the final? And depending on who's playing who, you can actually recreate the noise? From a first round with a, with a, an unranked, unseeded player winning to create that sound,

• 14:30Gary O'Reilly?

  that soundscape to, and this game's never taken place, I don't believe, Nadal Federer final. So you could do all of that?

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, so for the past five years, for Wimbledon and the US Open, we've been creating AI-powered highlight reels. And so what we did was we'd listen to the sound of the crowd. We would watch the players in terms of fist pumps, gestures of excitement or not excitement.

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or anger.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Understand the particular position.

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mack and Row would need a whole separate anger track.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  He needs his own algorithm.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Um, understand, you know, is this a breakpoint? Is it, is it a, you know, is it a double fault? And we take that and analyze it all with AI and give it an excitement score to each individual point in the tennis match. But remember, part of that excitement score was driven by the audio. So Gary, as you said.

• 15:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  You know, we've been listening to the sounds of tennis for five years using AI, understanding the characteristics of a first round match versus a final match. And in this moment of need, we're, we're, we are enabling the organizations like the USDA to be able to turn around and actually generate that sound in their stadium. Whether they will or not is their own choice, but they have that, they have that capability.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you need the judges to come in to say to AI, quiet, please.

• 15:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. To the AI. Um, but a question, there's no sport like baseball with regard to statistics. And I think it's because there's so much downtime between pitches and events that the announcers have to talk about something, so. Translation, it's boring. No. Go ahead, go ahead. This is the third time he's stolen second base in late innings when they're down by three runs. On a Wednesday. Wednesday. So the statistics are so rich that for every player in every event, in every situation, it seems to me AI can just create baseball games that statistically and accurately represent actual players and actual teams. Is this, is anybody working on that?

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Well, we're not, that's for sure.

• 16:44Chuck Nice?

  Well, I'll go you one.

• 16:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did he not have an attitude? He had an attitude. He coped the tune on that.

• 16:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Let me tell you something.

• 16:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. I must ask you because we always kind of end up landing on this particular spot. We can historically analyze things. We can predict to a certain extent based on history. And these are kind of facts that we have. But what we haven't got yet is understanding what's between the ears of an athlete. Has IBM actually gone into this brain learning space? Or is that just too much of a leap forward right now?

• 17:20Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I think, Gary, again, I think for us at least, it comes back to language. Right? And the ability to understand language. If you were to take a, you know, take Tiger Woods as an example, or take Tom Brady, take your favorite athlete. Over the course of their careers, they've done how many hours of interviews? Post-round interviews, pre-round interviews, games, Super Bowls, pre, you know?

• 17:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Hundreds.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  All that content. Hundreds and hundreds. Right? And so if you can actually understand what they're saying, listen to what they're saying, decompose what they're saying, track it over time. What's the sentiment of their conversation? What kind of language do they use? I think you're going to be able to actually get a pretty good feel for their mental state over the course of time if you did that work. We're not putting, you know, electrodes on people's heads or anything like that quite yet. Maybe other organizations are. But for us, it's really about people expressing themselves. And people will tell you what they think and what they believe if you have the right tools to be able to get at it and actually, you know, track it over the course of time.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  So again, for us, language, natural language understanding, using those capabilities to understand the language of players, coaches, owners, the organizations, the fans themselves, that gives you a pretty good surrogate into the mental state of sport.

• 18:43Chuck Nice?

  Once again, I'm going to just say, I hope you're not counting on Bill Belichick for any advancement in that area because every single thing will just be like, yeah, well, okay.

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Noah, you're describing a brave new world because that's a parameter space that hardly anyone is talking about. And of course, it's one of the strong points of Watson. It's facility with languages, multiple languages, and people's ability to express themselves in that language. So.

• 19:16Chuck Nice?

  Interesting, interesting point, though, Neil. Are you working with it in multiple languages? Because there's a definite contextual difference between every single language and, you know, there are things that create different meanings, even though it's the exact same thing. We, we but the course.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  Well, we're definitely using AI in multiple different languages. And I think one of the things also to keep in mind in this time is eliminating bias from our models, right? AI comes with the same kinds of bias potentially as the people that are creating it. So we have.

• 19:52Chuck Nice?

  Did you just tell me that Watson is racist?

• 19:55Speaker 03

  I did not.

• 19:57Chuck Nice?

  No, you did not. And let me just say this, Watson is not racist. Okay, people? Thank you.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  But, but just going back to the, you know, an earlier example, when we're watching a tennis match, we're listening for crowd noise, you know, Roger Federer's crowd noise is significantly different than the number of 20, the number 25 player in the world, right?

• 20:18Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  And to be able to normalize that and not have Federer fans, you know, bias the models when we're trying to equalize the AI highlight creation is really important. So that notion of de-biasing AI models into the future cannot be understated.

• 20:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the point is, Chuck, not all bias is racist. That's all. There are other kinds of biases as well.

• 20:39Chuck Nice?

  The only ones that count are, okay?

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta, we gotta, we gotta call it a break right there before we go to our next segment. I want to thank Noah, Noah Syken. Noah S Y K E N. Noah Syken, it's great to have you on. Good to know that IBM is still at it, still working that Watson thing. And it'd be great to get further developments in the future from you.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks, guys. Appreciate you having me.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Thanks for being on StarTalk. When we come back, we're gonna further explore the role of AI in the fan experience on StarTalk.

• 21:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk. Sports edition. AI. AI. Just, it's both terrifying and exhilarating to think about what it could be for the future of sports. And we want to talk about now what might be the new emergent fan experience that exploits all the trappings of AI. And we have as our special guest Rajiv Maheswaran. Rajiv, welcome to StarTalk.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are CEO of Second Spectrum. And, you know, they didn't tell me this. I really prefer the CEO of the first spectrum. Can we swap you out for... I will do seconds here.

• 22:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your background is in electrical and computer engineering. University of Illinois, that's the place to do that sort of thing. Leaders in computer science. And what is Second Spectrum? What do you do there?

• 22:35Speaker 04

  So I think the name came up because we need to come up with a name for the company. It was like, we wanted to be the next way of seeing things, the next way of seeing things. We were doing variance on the next way of seeing things and we landed on Second Spectrum because we needed a name of the company. And I think in general, we basically are trying to bring AI in general to sports. It was founded by myself, a colleague of mine, we were professors at USC in the computer science department in AI.

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  USC, University of Southern California?

• 23:06Speaker 04

  University of Southern California. We didn't call it AI because it's, you know, there was a time where AI was a bad word. Now it's a good word. And then a friend of ours named Jeff Su, and the three of us sort of started the company to bring sort of cutting edge AI to sports.

• 23:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which of you, any of your three were athletes yourselves?

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Well, it depends on who you ask, in our own...

• 23:29Chuck Nice?

  That's my life, don't be stealing my life.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  But none of us played professionally or in college. But it was, it was the three of us and two nineteen year olds, a twenty year old and a twenty one year old who sort of dropped out of school from our research lab. But, that being said, I think we at some point, we have sort of over thirty some people in the company who played sports in college and then several professionals.

• 23:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but they're not in charge. The ones in charge are geeks, that's what you're telling me.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  Pretty much.

• 23:56Chuck Nice?

  Thank goodness. I don't think we'd like to have it any other way. Guys, guys, I'm still here.

• 24:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh Gary, we got Gary here. Former pro footballer. Okay, Gary, no, except for Gary, Chuck.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  We're definitely, there's no doubt about that.

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're, so you're, you are partnered, it's one of your foci, if I said that right, it's one of your, your focus is soccer.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  Absolutely, so we, we started out working in basketball and we were a basketball company for, you know, many, many years, but very recently, you know, we've always wanted to get into soccer and I apologize for calling it soccer for your, for your international fans. Um, but, you know, one of our board members said that the top three sports in the world are soccer, soccer and soccer and we have definitely found that out very recently.

• 24:47Chuck Nice?

  I like him, I like him a lot.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  So, we made a big splash in soccer in the, in the last year, we sort of got into, we sort of are league wide partners of both the English Premier League and Major League Soccer in the US. And so we're super excited and we're going pretty hard into, into soccer and it's, it's been very.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what do, what do you do? What are you doing?

• 25:06Speaker 04

  So I think we do a lot of things, um, in the, in the, in the sports space. So I think one of the things you can think about it is, there's, you know, people watch, historically people watch games with their eyes, they understand it, and then they sort of create content, whether it's, or in the old days we went and watched a game, understood it, wrote a story, and then distributed to people. And so, TV came along and there was things like video where a person went with a video camera, and, and then somebody edited it and told the story. I think for us, there's. Watching, the understanding and the creating is now, we have sort of three parts that are done by AI. So watching is what we call player tracking or ball tracking, where we have all these cameras in basketball and soccer stadiums,

• 25:47Speaker 04

  where a machine can tell you like, this is Raheem Sterling and this is Marcus Rashford, or this is Carlos Vela, and this is where he's standing, and this is how they're moving, and this is where the ball is. It just gets the positional locations of all the players, their identities, and the ball, you know, at 25 frames a second for every single game.

• 26:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but my brain does that, so you're not impressing me yet.

• 26:08Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 26:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't need AI to tell me who my favorite player is, where he's standing, whether or not he has the ball.

• 26:14Speaker 04

  Right, and that's the biggest thing is that it was recorded, and people were recording all this location. A person can watch it, but they can't write it all down. But it was recorded, and it was pretty useless, because of people said, I have a big pile of numbers that I can't do much with. So we came around and said, you know, we're going to turn that into things that have meaning. So we can turn all this data, what we call semantics, so we can turn it into the understanding of what previously only a human could do. It's like, that's a pick and roll, that's a blitz defense. This is a between the lines pass, this is a progression, a buildup, organization, transition defense in the different sports. And we were starting to create words out of these numbers that everybody in the sports landscape started to understand. And then we started working with teams and leagues across, you know, across the world.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  And the third part is creation, and we said, well, the machine can understand, it can also create. And not only did we sort of start creating content, we could say, a machine understands the full video, and so it can put information, it can put probabilities, or names, or explosions, or characters into a video, basically add special effects into video completely automatically. And so we basically do three things. We sort of watch the game with machines, we understand the game with machines, and we create, at this point, augmented content for these leagues.

• 27:31Chuck Nice?

  So your experience could very easily translate into a completely different fan user experience. You could end up watching a game that, with your technology, someone else sitting at home would not see the game that I'm watching via your AI augmented transmission.

• 27:55Speaker 04

  Exactly, and I think one of the biggest things that we are trying to do is the fact that, you know... Everybody wants what they want, when they want, how they want it. And the world's just getting better and better at delivering in it. So when you talk about content, you know, when you look at even the radio, it's like you sort of, back in the day, you know, you go to a radio station, you like a song, you hope they play it, you know, two hours later. And then sort of things start to become digital and then machines start understanding it. And right now, nobody listens to it that way. In fact, whether it's, whether it's a music service or podcasts, like you, you basically build up what you listen to personally. And, uh, and this is true, whether it's content on the web or whether it's music or whether it's photos, there's lots of things that people experience in very, very different ways.

• 28:38Speaker 04

  Sports is this one last thing where it's like, everybody gets to see the exact same thing. Whether you're a person who's been rooting for a team for 30 years, or it's your first game watching, or if you're a person who's into data or fun, like regardless of who you are and what your life is, it's the same content for everyone. And the only way you sort of really scale personalization is to have a machine understand it and give everybody something else, something different.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, my chief, wait, wait.

• 29:03Chuck Nice?

  I know where, I know exactly where Neil is gonna go right now.

• 29:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, just wait, wait.

• 29:07Chuck Nice?

  Go for it. Go for it, go for it.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't understand what you're talking about. I, I, I pay good money to see Gary O'Reilly perform on a soccer field.

• 29:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Let, let me think, let me think forward here. Linear TV is getting pushed over the edge by COVID plus everything else that's going on right now. We all want our own content universe, Neil, specific to us.

• 29:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 29:33Gary O'Reilly?

  The sort of, I get what I want when I want it.

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Explain to me how, what, I, I don't understand.

• 29:39Chuck Nice?

  I think, I think that's what Neil is saying is you gotta give, and I think many of our listeners right now are having the exact same response, which is, can you please paint for us a couple of user experience examples that make this a worthwhile experience for me to be interested in? I think that's what he's really saying.

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Chuck.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  Go from the simple to various. So one is sort of. A new fan and sometimes even experienced fans might not even know who the players are. Right? And so just having Gary's name over his head while he's playing is like, oh, that's Gary.

• 30:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? So these are these right now you're describing Google glasses. Okay, go on.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  Basically, like you make all the video like that and somebody who's watching a game. And maybe you you don't you can't read their jersey. You don't know who they are or you're a new fan. You might only know who the stars are. You might you might only want to see who are the stars like Gary. And like, put that over their head and float them over their head. So I know.

• 30:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we listen games where they have helmets like football. Yeah, that's even better. You have to know their number or their their body shape. Okay, go on.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  In the UK who were like their job is to watch all Premier League matches all day. And they're like, I don't know who number eight for Huddersfield is, and I wish I could because I had to do a story about them. And so that's simple thing was just makes everybody way more educated about, you know, who's actually playing. And knowing when you're having a piece of content, knowing who the characters in the story are are kind of important. And right now that's a hard thing to do. And now the reason you might want to personalize that is maybe some people know all them. Some people only want to know a few of them. Some people might want to only know the ones who are on their fantasy team. So just even knowing who people are is a value add because that's such a big deal. That for somebody coming into a sport or getting to learn a sport a lot more. So that's level one, like we can just tell you like who who the characters in the show are.

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 31:23Speaker 04

  Then level two is like describing the conflict of the show. So in basketball, like there's these two people are trying to score. And the basically the the fight is over the probability of the ball going into the basket based on all the different things you are like, well, we can float these probabilities over people heads. So if you're a data geek, you might love to see all these probabilities floating over these these heads. But somebody who isn't might not want that. So you can turn that on for yourself. And somebody who's not allowed these numbers like turn that off.

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is if some dribbling the ball, there are different parts of the court where I have a better field goal percentage than others and you can watch that. You could watch that in real time, come on. Okay, so keep going.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  And so somebody just like and then the third person like, you know what, like I want to have a I watch sports just to have a lot of fun. I'm on Snapchat. I'm on Instagram. It's like, why isn't it that every time somebody dunks a basketball, there's an explosion or lightning getting the backboard. It's like, well, we can do that. And we can have all kinds of fun stuff that that like, you know, NBA jam effects and all kinds of cool special effects.

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but but but will will Pikachu show up?

• 32:26Speaker 04

  We have a many.

• 32:28Gary O'Reilly?

  It will do if there's a Pokemon movie coming out. You know that this.

• 32:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We need some augmented Pikachu.

• 32:34Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God, I just realized that, Gary. So but that's amazing.

• 32:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Chuck Chuck, so now who gets to monetize this?

• 32:41Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 32:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But still have I still want he just gave me level two. Give me level three now.

• 32:46Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, buckle buckle up.

• 32:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Buckle up.

• 32:49Chuck Nice?

  Well, can I can I give my level three? Can I give my level three? Because I'm sure that you might be able to do this. OK, so one of the things that I really like when I watch Amazon is the fact that while I'm watching a scene, I can find out everything about that actor. That actor, I can actually either pause the scene or in real time while I'm watching it. I could find out other stuff they've been in. I can look at their resume. I can see how they got this job.

• 33:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is when you're watching movies on Prime.

• 33:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, when I'm watching movies on Prime.

• 33:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Prime.

• 33:18Chuck Nice?

  And I at first thought that that was kind of stupid, to be honest, because I'm used to watching television a very specific way. But then after like two or three experiences doing it, I find myself looking for that information. I'm like, I'm I'm pulling up. Who is this? What else have they done? What did it? You know, because, you know.

• 33:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't wait till the damn movie ends.

• 33:42Chuck Nice?

  I can't. And honestly, honestly, what you just said, Neil, is why I thought it was a stupid idea. I'm like, why can't you wait till it?

• 33:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm. Wait till the madam movie. Reggie, give me give me level three. Forget Chuck. Give me level three.

• 33:56Chuck Nice?

  Wait, wouldn't that could not be a level three?

• 33:58Speaker 04

  Chuck's right. Chuck's right in the sense like what we are doing is basically X ray supercharged for sports. Like, really, that's what we're doing, right? There's another another which is like, I want to understand the game more, right? Like you always basically so in basketball, like we can draw the play diagram under the players as it happens. In in soccer.

• 34:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, let me just interject real quickly there. I don't think it was until. John Madden, when he became a sportscaster.

• 34:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that, that game was ever unpacked by any sportscaster.

• 34:30Chuck Nice?

  Because he was the coach. He was an actual coach.

• 34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's old and, and he, he empowered you to pay attention to players that never otherwise got anybody's attention. What was the center doing after the hike? What was the first blocking person? And he opened this hole and he came through and he get it. And it's wow. The whole game was transformed for me, hearing him comment.

• 34:51Chuck Nice?

  And I gotta tell you, Neil, I, I am convinced, even though NFL will never say this, I am convinced that that is a huge reason why football became the number one sport in America. Because after John Madden started doing that, that, every single analyst started doing that. And then the networks started hiring former players to become the color analyst. And they all started doing the same thing. And as a result, you had a much deeper insight into the game.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So now Rajiv is, you're doing this with AI.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  Exactly. Because I think, you know, John Madden is exactly right, because John Madden explained a very complicated game to a lot of people that brought them into that universe, right? So for example, if we're watching TV shows, if I'm watching like a detective show or a romance, like I know the plot, I know the characters, I know what, what's supposed to happen. Like for a person watching a sporting event, unless you played the game or in, you don't really understand it. And for games like basketball and soccer, they're more continuous. You don't have a lot of breaks to sort of explain a lot of the strategic elements. And so for us, when we can.

• 35:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Baseball, you have tons of breaks.

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Baseball.

• 35:58Chuck Nice?

  Don't you go there. Don't you go there again. Hey, hey, can you put some explosions in baseball, please? Please, please.

• 36:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or statistical chance that the base will blow up when you step on it, right? Just some.

• 36:10Speaker 04

  For you, I'll look into that. So we can draw that in soccer, we can draw the, soccer's so geometric, there are these lines and there's formations and overloads and all these things that you can point out that, and Gary knows, like so much of, of soccer happens outside the ball that people just don't get.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Rajiv, to this day, I still don't understand offside. Just so you know.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  You can explain that by drawing a line that explains what offside is to people. It's like, wait, there's this line, right?

• 36:36Gary O'Reilly?

  They keep changing the rules, Neil. So if you don't feel that you understand it, just join everybody else.

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's very kind of you. Yeah.

• 36:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. So Rajiv, someone is going to monetize this. Because as a viewer, I'm sat there and as a viewer. They know everything about me. If I want a beer, if I want nachos, if I want a taco, if I want a burger, if I want to take a plane ride, if I want to buy ice cream, or whatever it is. So while I'm sat there, all of a sudden, all of my favorite things are going to explode in the soccer goal or come out of the hoop.

• 37:06Chuck Nice?

  It's the powerade, power dunk of the quarter.

• 37:11Gary O'Reilly?

  And Chuck's auditioning for the voiceover, which is brilliant.

• 37:15Chuck Nice?

  And now.

• 37:16Gary O'Reilly?

  So who gets to monetize this? You? The teams? The athletes, the league, or all of the above? Hey, why can't we all eat, Raziv? Why can't we all get a little piece of this pie? Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  I think, why not? In the long run, like, you know, it's a matter of how we get there, right? I think so. You know, I think, you know, the the sports landscape is changing significantly. I think, you know,

• 37:41Speaker 04

  that the way it's been delivered through linear TV into a television is is going to change from being, you know, to delivered over the internet into interactive personal devices. And I think you will see that same transition as you have seen, let's say, let's say the music industry or some other like, or the other kinds of video industries that are not sports change, where everybody in the ecosystem makes money in new ways as the distribution mechanism.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but Rajiv, they were biting and kicking and screaming in the transition. That was a bloody transition.

• 38:13Speaker 04

  I think sports will be the same. I think they will, they will. But I think like, in the end, you have sort of scientifically, you have to go back down to first principles in the sense of like, there is a very competitive market for people's attention. And that is, it's much more competitive now than it ever was. You know, when I was a kid, I would spend from like Friday night until Sunday night watching nothing but sports because that, you know, I was in the middle of Wisconsin. I grew up in the middle of Wisconsin. You know, I was there, I watched it. But now it's like, it's, there's so much good stuff to spend your time on, like the StarTalk podcast, many other things where you have to, you have to fight.

• 38:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for the plug. That was very nice of you.

• 38:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Can you please add some explosions to our podcast?

• 38:52Speaker 04

  I mean, I think of it like, the world is much more competitive and a lot, and it's a lot better for me as a consumer. Like, I'm a, I'm a science geek, so I love sci-fi shows. So it's like, for me, like, when Next Generation came back, there was like one show a week that I would live on. But now, if I look at all these, you know, whether it's podcasts or whether it's

• 39:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You binge it.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  I can, I can spend my whole life doing nothing but sci-fi. And I can, I can spend my whole life watching nothing but robots and explosions and spaceships. And it's amazing because I, like, the world is much, much more competitive. And I think Sports will have to go there. Sports basically had it and I'm a big fan.

• 39:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so who pulled you out of your parents' basement? Somebody got you? Somebody said you need a life?

• 39:30Chuck Nice?

  By the way, what was her name?

• 39:32Speaker 04

  I'm still in the basement, I'm just talking different stuff.

• 39:37Chuck Nice?

  Excellent answer.

• 39:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta, we gotta, we gotta close that segment, but in a third segment, Rajiv, if you can hang out. It's when Gary, Chuck and I just, we just sort of chew the fat. And you sound like a good fat chewer, you can just join us. Where we, unscripted, we just kind of go at it.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  That's great.

• 39:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's do it. When we come back, more StarTalk Sports Edition.

• 40:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk, we're back for the third and final segment, StarTalk Sports Edition. AI, I've got Rajiv Maheswaran.

• 40:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Help me there.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  Maheswaran, but it's getting better all the time.

• 40:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Maheswaran, thank you.

• 40:37Speaker 04

  I'm not actually approaching my name.

• 40:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very, thank you. And you and the, all the Maheshwarans in Wisconsin, where you're from. Yes, that's truly a long lineage of Maheshwarans in the Midwest.

• 40:51Speaker 04

  Wasla, Wisconsin.

• 40:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are your parents from Wisconsin as well?

• 40:57Speaker 04

  No, we, I grew up in Sri Lanka, which is a tiny island near India for those who don't know, but.

• 41:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I tell you, one of the main reasons why I know Sri Lanka is because that's where Arthur C. Clarke hung out.

• 41:10Speaker 04

  You know, Arthur C. Clarke, I know that he almost ran me over with his car once. I think that that's my, the closest I came.

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 41:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Is that what we call a brush with fame?

• 41:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a brush with death.

• 41:23Gary O'Reilly?

  It is.

• 41:23Chuck Nice?

  Brush with death.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  All right. But then from there, we moved from Sri Lanka to Wisconsin. So from a tropical island to Wisconsin. I used to make a joke that I could handle any temperature except room temperature. And then I moved to

• 41:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's funny.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  Moved to LA and then I can cover, I've got room temperature covered.

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get room temperature all the way.

• 41:43Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 41:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In LA. So would you can choose some fad? This is our, we just shoot the shit. I'm just wondering, Rajiv, are you really transforming our experience? Are you the birth of something that in 20 years will look back on and say, I remember when?

• 42:01Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I think I use that both internally and externally a lot. I think that I don't, I think we would like to be the birth of it. I think that we would like to be the birth. And we're doing everything in our power to make it so that like, remember when people used to say, remember when we all used to watch the same game the same way? That seems crazy. And we

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but wait, wait, but sports is still event television.

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one DVRs their football game. Okay. That just doesn't happen, really.

• 42:30Speaker 04

  No, it's true. So there's both live and non-live. I think there's two things in terms of personalization. In live, you know, everybody can watch a live game in different ways. And even the numbers show that not everyone watches 100% of a game, right?

• 42:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  And so it's like everybody's watching different subsets of a game. So even live

• 42:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But before we broke, you said that one manifestation of your company's inventiveness is to have, you'll have your own headset so that it's a very personal, private experience? Because it will know what you need and want from the game that you're watching. However, isn't it true that sports is more communal?

• 43:06Speaker 04

  Absolutely. So I think one of the things that we're going to do is like, the first thing we're doing is The one way to personalize it, have everybody have a different visual experience that's tailored to what exactly you want to see. But the next step is, you know, shared experience. So if you're just gonna have a different visual experience, why can't I create that for myself? Why can't I share it with... The next step is, why can't I visual experience with some of my friends or many of my...

• 43:31Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. So what you end up doing is kind of like Spotify-ing sports in such a way that you're creating or curating the visual experience and then you're inviting other people into a community to share the experience.

• 43:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're listening to your playlist.

• 43:44Chuck Nice?

  Right. They're kind of listening to your playlist while watching a game with you, which by the way, already happens on Twitter during live events now. You have these small groups that pop up and they're talking to one another and they're sharing memes and they're showing replayed videos and things like that.

• 44:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's Chuck during the Oscars, okay? Chuck is like, thousand tweet comes out of Chuck's panel from in the Oscars. What was she wearing? What was he doing? What? Did he say that? Did he really mean...

• 44:17Chuck Nice?

  Where's Janet Jackson when you need her? Anyway.

• 44:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh dear. This is a sports show, right?

• 44:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 44:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. So Rajiv, okay, we are talking about being on the cusp of a new dawn, a new age in the way that we consume. But you guys don't sit on your laurels. You go again. So are we into voice activation? Are we into touchscreen? Are we into a 360-degree soundscape? Uh, can you tell us all your IP?

• 44:50Speaker 04

  Well, I think that you don't want to go too far ahead. I think you want to do is, you know, I think we are already sort of pushing the envelope quite a bit. And I think we do find that like, we have to sort of stay with the pace at which the world is willing to change. But I think like, you don't want to go too far away from a core experience in terms of watching. And I think one of the biggest things to happen in the world is that everybody has these rectangles that they carry around with them. And some of them are small, medium and large, but they're all these rectangles and you can touch them and you can interact with them. And it's fundamentally changed the way people interact with computing and with content. And so for us... People are used to being, have the ability to be active. And so interactivity, being able to touch and interact with video is going to be a big thing.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  I think we've actually already built some prototypes where we can show what's possible. We're just waiting for the world to catch up a little bit. Because we're waiting for the world, more of the video to go on to digital than linear.

• 45:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 45:46Speaker 04

  Already happening for people under a certain age. But it happened to the whole world very soon. And that's going to really unleash interactive video.

• 45:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there sufficient bandwidth to move video at the rates you need to accomplish your goals?

• 45:59Speaker 04

  Absolutely, because we've already delivered this stuff into the world. So it already exists with lots of our partners. And so we're already doing it.

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I meant literal bandwidth. I mean, if you, are you going to stream HD, you know, soccer game on a device of someone who's on a mobile platform? I mean, is this, this is real?

• 46:18Speaker 04

  This is real, it's already happening. It's only going to get more, better and more powerful. So the degree of personalization and the degree of interactivity is only going to grow over time. If you think about it like the first time somebody streamed a game ever versus what the world is now.

• 46:31Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  Who streamed, you know, a piece of video content to what the world is now. It's like we are, we're on the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so in five years, what are we doing?

• 46:42Speaker 04

  Five years, everybody sort of just watches games.

• 46:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, in five years, you're the first trillionaire, okay?

• 46:50Speaker 04

  No, no, no. Nobody's a trillionaire, but I just, I think we just want to be part of the birth. And I mean, I don't have any assumptions other than like, we would like to move the world forward. Like we want to make a dent and as big a dent as we can for as long as we can. I think it would be worthwhile if in five years, every game everywhere, not just the professional games, but pickup games are watched by machines, understood, edited, augmented, and maybe interactive for people who care about that, whether that's a superfan or grandma watching my kid, right? And I think like that's, that's the vision is that it's not just for the pros. It's going to get cheaper and every game of everything played everywhere on the planet is going to be edited, augmented and streamed and watched and.

• 47:30Chuck Nice?

  I think you're right, I think you're right. And here's the only reason why I say that. I know five years ago. Was the you saw the emergence of individual player profile videos showing up on YouTube? And they were being used by scouts. And what happened was the players themselves, the coaches, started making the content instead of waiting for a scout to say, let me video this guy. They'd be like, no, let me take a video of all the stuff that I do great. I'm gonna throw that up on YouTube. And they would put together these compilations and and now it's almost like it's almost like its own little ESPN now. You know, the the way it works.

• 48:15Chuck Nice?

  So I could totally see this being the next incarnation.

• 48:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I still want to know, I need I want to give me some detail. Five to 10 years from now. And like Yankees are in the World Series, let's say, that's not a stretch, of course. What's what's what do I experience? What am I?

• 48:32Speaker 04

  So I mean, I think what you can do is you imagine like I'm gonna say I'm take the Clippers because they're one of our we we launched with our this argument to you with the Clippers. And so you you're you're at home. The Clippers are on. You turn on your iPad. You you come in in the middle of the second quarter. The AI basically tells you here's what's happened on in the first first. You know, quarter and a half the game. I catch you up at the important highlights. Then I take you to your story. Maybe you're watching the the first that's the first quarter with your kids. So you watch a mode with a bunch of explosions and characters and things like that. It's on bed, second half.

• 49:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pikachu, you need Pikachu.

• 49:07Speaker 04

  You need Pikachus in there. And then second half, you get on with your buddies and you're a bunch of data geeks. So you turn on all the the stats.

• 49:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Riley.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  Riley or the whoever you're favorite, you know, and that. The R bottle Riley, pick your favorite, right? And so you're watching it with your friends and it's interactive. So maybe you play a bunch of games and like you say, who's gonna you're playing a bunch of games by interacting with each other on the screen, by tapping the screen and making things happen. You have a social experience. Then after the game, you know, maybe the next day.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  Or that night, maybe you're like you you watch your kids' highlights from the Y game that that that she played earlier and and you want to see her highlights. You share that with grandma. Grandma makes some comments on that video. The next day you show it to your kids like, hey, I've caught up your pickup game with the Clippers game from last night. And you have all these sort of mixing and mashing and sharing and augment.

• 49:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the game is this living data entity. Is that a fair way to describe it?

• 50:03Speaker 04

  It's a great way to describe it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna take that if you don't mind.

• 50:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, our lawyers will be in touch.

• 50:11Gary O'Reilly?

  So, just saying, do we have lawyers? Don't tell Rajiv, do we have lawyers?

• 50:18Gary O'Reilly?

  What I'm hearing is, A firstly, this can only improve the baseline of sporting talent and elevate it because you'll be able to see and then not repeat mistakes and learn from your successes. The other thing Rajiv, you've talked about stories, your story, the story so far. And now what I'm thinking is, if I want the John Madden character to be my narrator, I dial up that. If I want an NBA superstar to be my narrator, if I wanted some guy from the hood or whichever way, now I wanna go cartoon graphics.

• 50:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, you never came from the hood. That sentence coming out of your mouth doesn't really work. Sorry, just thought I'd say that.

• 51:00Gary O'Reilly?

  I am not talking of a personal experience, I'm talking about someone who did.

• 51:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The hood, coming out of the hood.

• 51:06Gary O'Reilly?

  The hood, yes.

• 51:07Chuck Nice?

  However, I gotta say Gary, I wish you did come from the hood because I would have loved to walk through the hood and just heard somebody say, "I sailed man."

• 51:16Gary O'Reilly?

  And I'd have turned around and said, "Someone's speaking my language at last." Fabulous, let's have tea.

• 51:24Gary O'Reilly?

  So, but alright Rajiv, so if I've got a coaching mode set up on my viewing.

• 51:29Speaker 04

  We literally have a coaching mode, yeah.

• 51:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, how, you really do, right? So, if they're in a soccer game, there's a corner and I need to know what percentage in swinger, out swinger, short corner. Uh, then I look at the players, then I can wonder if the first phase will be a counter-attack or whether I contain, then I need my... How far into the weeds can I get with that kind of knowledge? Because I know as the attacking team, I'm never more vulnerable than when I have the ball. So now I am prone to counter-attack. Or do I, with this information, load up my big guys because I have... An advantage in size and putting corners that are to my advantage. How far away or how close can I get to all of that analysis in real time?

• 52:13Speaker 04

  We have that, all of that right now. So we basically have that and the, and the, and the sort of, the managers have access to that information to study that before the games. Now, from a fan experience, so we work with the, the coaches in the NBA and the managers in the Premier League. And they, they get that for, for the game prep. Now, does the fan need the degree, that degree of analysis? Maybe not, maybe not all fans are like you, but one day, I think fans will get access to that degree of specificity in real time. For us, we're just thinking about what are the first steps we can take to get people just accustomed to the fact that the game can look different than it did for the history of it. You know, since it's basically, since we started broadcasting games on TV, it hasn't really changed that much.

• 52:57Chuck Nice?

  All right, so let's, can we talk some real money here, Rashid? Let's, let's get into some real money here. How do we turn this into a gambling thing, man? Yeah, that's, that's where the dollars are.

• 53:08Speaker 04

  Well, I think.

• 53:09Chuck Nice?

  That's where it's gonna happen.

• 53:10Speaker 04

  No, I think that if you think about it, gambling was the first way people sort of personalized the viewing experience, right? Somebody basically like, I care differently about this game than somebody else. Fantasy sports took that to a very degree. Like I have like, I have a very different caring about the set of players than, than some other person. Because we have different incentives. So gambling was one of the ways, it's like saying, I, I want to care more and I want to care more in a very different way than.

• 53:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just, just to be clear, so, so that I'm up to speed, in case anyone else needs to be. But in fantasy sports, as I understand it, your, the, the performance of your players tracks their actual performance in the actual world.

• 53:51Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 53:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if they get injured, your player got injured. You're.

• 53:55Speaker 04

  So you might, you might be watching a game where two players on Team A are on your team and one player from Team B is on your team. And there's three players from Team B who's on your opponent's team. And so you have a very unique caring about that.

• 54:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a completely different thing, right?

• 54:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a completely different thing, but it's, it's, it's very popular. And it's our people saying, I, I want to care about this game in a different way than people, people next to me. So imagine you have a visual experience where the visual just tells you. This is what you care about and the presentation of the game is going to reflect what you care about and not what the next person, what Chuck cares about or Garrett Kais about. And we could all, and also, maybe all of us are in a room and we want to watch this game together and we all decide we're each going to pick a player or two and have a fun little game amongst ourselves. Maybe we want each of our heads floating over the player to know whether I should root for that or not. And so, it's just, gambling is a way of basically saying, "Look, I want the experience to be better. I'm going to bet to sort of care more about it, but then I'm also differentiating from other people who made different bets."

• 54:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not just whether it's better, it's, I guess implicit is better, but more specifically, you're more engaged. There's reasons to get deeper in. There's a stronger connection to the fan. It's like going to the racetrack.

• 55:07Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 55:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you happen, if someone hands you a ticket for the bet, you're going to be rooting for that horse in that race. Even though you have no real vested interest in the horse. You didn't know, but before, a minute before that, you didn't care. You didn't care anything.

• 55:25Speaker 04

  I think one of the things, and this is important, is that part of the reason people gamble is like the raw content is not good enough. I don't think, like, I didn't make a bet before I went and saw Avengers Endgame in the theater because like, "I don't need to, it's going to be good."

• 55:41Speaker 04

  I'm not going to make a bet about StarTalk, it's like, "I know y'all are going to bring it." And then so, but I think it's, I just need to, I just need to make it more interesting. And so like, it just, the fan singing thing is like, I need it to be more compelled. Right? And so we can either amplify that, whatever compels you in a very unique way, or we can find interactivity that helps you gamify in lots of different ways to make it more compelling for how much time and what form of time you're willing to give.

• 56:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, I lost the mortgage payment on Thanos.

• 56:17Speaker 04

  It was a good bet, one in fourteen million, you know.

• 56:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this reminds me, just to close with some reflections here. Baseball, was it in the 1970s, there was some episode where Major League Baseball said, people are too bored with the sport, and so they started adding bells and whistles. They would have like contests during the, between the innings, you know, where the fans would, if you go, I don't only know Yankee Stadium better than other stadiums, but between innings, there's like a subway race, and it's all on the, on the video screen, and they race the B train against the, the D train against the four train, and it's stupid, but people get into it, right, and then they have a, they have a, a, caps and they move the ball

• 57:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  around under the caps, and, and people are betting on it in between, and I'm thinking to myself, this is an early attempt to do exactly what you're trying to do.

• 57:12Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 57:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and it's early, and to me was always clumsy, what, what, what these were, but if you tune it and you make it sharp, you make it intelligent, in the way AI is expected to be, there's no stopping what you've got brewing there.

• 57:27Speaker 04

  You're exactly right. I think they were just doing what they were doing with the limits that they have. What AI has done is remove those limits and saying, what can you imagine? If you can imagine, I can make it happen.

• 57:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so when you're a trillionaire, we get 10%.

• 57:42Speaker 04

  I'll make that same deal vice versa, when you're a trillionaire.

• 57:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Deal.

• 57:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Rajiv, thanks for doing this, and when you get more developments, we get to have you back on and just check up on your, on how it's going.

• 57:56Speaker 04

  Absolutely, I'd love to.

• 57:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Totally see that. Gary, always good to have you there.

• 58:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Pleasure, my friend.

• 58:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You bring athletic authenticity to these conversations.

• 58:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Very kind of you to say.

• 58:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And unlike me or Chuck, you, you.

• 58:11Gary O'Reilly?

  That's damned by faint praise.

• 58:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. Chuck, always good to have you. A pleasure. This has been StarTalk, Sports Edition, AI. Signing off, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.