Pod Insights a16z Podcast From AI to Instant Replay: The Technology Behind the Olympics About this episode The Olympics features over 11,000 athletes competing in 32 sports, attracting an audience of more than 10 million.
In this episode, Charlie Ebersol, co-founder of the Alliance of American Football and Infinite Athlete, explores how new innovations like AI and bespoke broadcasting technologies are shaping the future of sports.
Charlie also reflects on the storytelling legacy of his father, Dick Ebersol, a legendary sports producer who transformed how we experience the Olympics. We discuss the importance of making sports more accessible and engaging through technology that enhances, rather than distracts from, the human stories at the heart of the games.
Whether you're a tech enthusiast or a sports fan, this episode offers a unique look at the convergence of these two worlds.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Sports is interesting because it's the great aggregator. I talk to founders all the time. And one of the things I'm cautioning them about is how is what you're doing making this better? It's an extraordinary piece of technology because for the first time you understand the speed, you understand the ability of the athlete. A lot of people are sort of building technology without understanding like how does this actually enhance the storytelling experience? This is incredible. This is amazing. I have absolutely no idea what the applicable value of this is. We're seeing the purest version of the human experience of what can the human body actually accomplish?
0:39 Steph Smith? Exactly one week ago, the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics kicked off, bringing in an estimated 10 million plus people to the city. That of course included over 11,000 athletes who have begun competing across 32 sports, including four new additions. Ring dancing in its first games, plus skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing making their second appearance. And of course, there are a few events that bring the world together quite like the Olympics. So as we all watch in awe, there's a reason why people are talking about the bunny hopping fencer, or the 11-year-old skateboarder, or Kim Ujji, the sharpshooter with a lot of swag. There's also a reason why you might not recognize the name Nathan Adrian, but you almost certainly know the name Simone Biles,
1:25 Steph Smith? even though they're American Olympians who have earned the exact same medals in their Olympic careers. Because the Olympics is as much about excellence as it is about story. And that's precisely what we discussed today with Charlie Ebersol. Charlie has long been immersed in athletics, co-founding the Alliance of American Football and Infinite Athlete, where they're building products ranging from AI injury detection to bespoke broadcasting technology. Charlie also happens to be the son of Dick Ebersol, the longtime chairman of NBC Sports, where he produced 19 Olympic Games, and is also credited with the creation of NBC's Sunday Night Football, which as of 2023, had over 20 million average viewers every single week.
2:08 Steph Smith? So as we welcome yet another games with a whole new wave of technologies being showboated, this episode is about dissecting which pieces of technology have truly moved the needle in athletics. And equally importantly, why other innovations have historically failed to make their debut. All right, let's get into it.
2:29 Steph Smith? As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com/disclosures.
2:59 Steph Smith? So Charlie, why don't we actually start off with your background? You've got a pretty deep personal relationship to the Olympics. So maybe before we talk about what's going on today, what actually led you here?
3:11 Speaker 00 I had what some might call a very strange childhood. My dad was the chairman of NBC Sports for 25 years. When he retired in 2011, The New York Times wrote that he had produced nine of the 11 biggest events in the history of the world, most of which were Olympics, including like the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 92 Barcelona Olympics. He was the number two to the guy running all ABC production for the Munich Olympics when the Israeli athletes were kidnapped and killed. And there's a crazy story about my father and his boss at the time, Rue Narlage, standing outside the athletes' pavilion,
3:54 Speaker 00 waiting, just looking up as a full moon, smoking cigarettes, having this beautiful moment. And eventually, one said to the other, you know, we should really go home. And years later, when they did the security report, one of the terrorists said they had decided that they were just going to kill the two guys smoking cigarettes out front and just go in because they'd been there so long and they were like slowing down the kidnapping.
4:16 Steph Smith? Wow.
4:17 Speaker 00 My very first job, 12 years old, was working at an Olympics as a runner, working for a producer, telling stories. So yes, the Olympics were a big part of my life.
4:26 Steph Smith? And I mean, that puts you in a unique position to observe for many years, right? Not just the latest Olympics and the Olympics in Paris. What did you learn from watching your father, your brother, about what actually makes the game successful?
4:41 Speaker 00 My dad was the very first runner in Olympic history. And what that means, that sounds funny, it sounds like he's an Olympian. What that means is his job was, before the Olympics started, was to research the athletes, not just the American athletes, but the international athletes, and learn their backstories. And then they would tell those stories before the games. And so people would engage with, you know, nobody's following the 100-meter dash for three and a half years. And then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, we all have to pay attention to Usain Bolt, or Michael Johnson, or whatever. In fact, oddly enough, the very first athlete he ever covered was an athlete who was accused of being transgender. And this is in the late 1960s, early 70s.
5:25 Speaker 00 It was the first athlete ever to sort of face that with blood testing and all this other stuff to try to figure it out. And it is probably the single most important thing about the Olympics' success is that the Olympics, unlike all other professional sports, are a majority female audience. And they've done decades and decades of research. The reason they found out is because they created an emotional connection with the athletes through the storytelling. And so it's really not the guy behind a football mask who you don't really know doing this stuff. It's someone you've gotten to know over the 16 weeks of the Olympics. And then there's the patriotism of, I want to see America win. But my dad is largely credited with being the greatest storyteller in the history of sports. The people that he worked with were Jim McKay originally,
6:09 Speaker 00 and then Bob Costas and Al Michaels were telling these stories. And I think what gets lost often in the deluge of sports now, we are drawn as humans, I think, to the struggle of what got us there. There's the famous line, "The joy of victory and the agony of defeat." The idea that Shaun White had three open-heart surgeries before he was three years old, and then went on to win. Or Michael Phelps, his mom didn't swim. He'd never been in a pool, and she was a single mom and an educator. This incredible American story. And he goes on to become, I mean, certainly the most decorated athlete in the history of the world, if not maybe the greatest athlete. And it's the background that we care about. We learn to love these people and get to know them. We care about them so deeply.
6:54 Steph Smith? Let's dive into that idea of storytelling because the Olympics have been running for a long time. I mean, the original iteration of it, we're talking thousands of years, but even in the last revival, we're talking over a hundred years of modern Olympics. That's a lot of games. But when I originally reached out to you, I had this thesis. The last couple of years is all about AI. We're going into this new Olympics. It's going to completely change the games, just like everyone's saying it's going to completely change everything. But when we chatted, you had a really interesting take that kind of took me back and made me reconsider the original thesis of this episode about how technology maybe in itself is not enough. What are the different technologies over, let's say, the last couple of decades
7:35 Steph Smith? that have actually moved the needle in sports versus what I'd imagine are hundreds or thousands of other attempts to do the same that haven't quite succeeded?
7:45 Speaker 00 Sports is interesting because it's the great aggregator, right? It's what brings huge amounts of people together for a singular live event. We all watch it in unison, the Super Bowl being a great example, the World Cup, et cetera. And I think what gets lost oftentimes in the storytelling of technology around sports is that the technology has to actually move the experience of watching the sport forward in a way that makes it better, more accessible, more palatable, not just cool. I mean, there's been a lot of really cool technology, but at the end of the day, when you talk about the most transformative technology in the mid 60s, when my dad's former boss, Ron Arledge, introduced instant replay. It was game changing because unless you are a professional athlete,
8:28 Speaker 00 you probably can't see the nuances of what have just happened on this play. But now all of a sudden, if you've got Frank Gifford or Al Michaels or John Madden or Chris Collinsworth saying, no, look right there. See how he twisted on his right foot to do it? That's incredible. Now, all of a sudden, you're like, holy, that is incredible. It's amazing he did it. So there were four, and this is by no means the definitive list, but I think of four sort of transformative moments in terms of changing sport positively with technology. Instant replay in the 60s, for sure. It was a massive change. In the early eighties, the introduction of cable. So now all of a sudden, two things happened. One, sports basically became entirely live. People forget the NBA finals until the early eighties were on tape delay. People were not watching this stuff live.
9:13 Speaker 00 And then all of a sudden you get cable showing up and they're telling you, look, this is all going to be available all the time. And that cable ultimately became OTT. And so you've had this one great access point. And then in the mid nineties, probably the most transformative piece of technology of our era, of our generation is the yellow line. That for the first time, you could watch a football game and anyone could just walk in the room and instantaneously understand, oh, they've got this amount of distance to go to achieve their first down and be able to do this. And what's interesting is you look at how much augmented reality has actually been brought into sports. Very little of it has been as effective. I mean, I think the shot tracer where you're able to follow the golf ball or eagle eye with tennis,
9:57 Speaker 00 where it's, okay, I can see if the ball was in or out. Those technologies actually help the storytelling of the sport. And then I think probably in terms of just sheer engagement, other than Taylor Swift, fantasy is probably the single biggest thing that has affected sports in general, because all of a sudden you care about every single game. Like one of the challenges of baseball, football, et cetera, is I am a whatever LA Rams fan. I don't really care what's going on with the Dolphins unless it affects my standings. But now all of a sudden I've got fantasy and the quarterback for Miami, Tua, is on my fantasy team. Now I care about what's happening in the Miami game. So now all of a sudden you've got this engagement. I mean, let's be honest, fantasy is basically a glorified Excel sheet.
10:42 Speaker 00 It's technology that's been around since the late eighties, but inherently it enhances the storytelling. I've talked to founders all the time. And one of the things I'm cautioning them about is how is what you're doing making this better? Like gambling has become such a massive thing. So little of it is actually transformative because it's not really enhancing the experience. And then you look at a company like, for example, PrizePix, which has figured out how to really add drama and excitement around parlays. Like the technology is only there to enhance the storytelling, not the other way around. I think the thing people constantly get lost is in the lead up to the Olympics, you're seeing it already. They're like AI Michaels and all these different things that they're bringing to the game. Are you really gonna engage with the majority of those?
11:27 Speaker 00 I don't know. The ones that actually make the game better, like the drop cam in the high dive, where the camera drops with the diver. It's an extraordinary piece of technology because for the first time you understand the speed, you understand the ability of the athlete. There was a piece of tech a couple of years ago that they were trying out the Olympics. It was like bullet time, like the matrix, basically, where they line up a bunch of cameras in an arc around an athlete and then they all take a picture at the same time. And then you stitch the frames together and it looks like you're rotating around the athlete. Very cool. Very cool. Basically never got used because fundamentally, people didn't engage with the technology because it wasn't enhancing their understanding of the game.
12:08 Speaker 00 They used it in the home run derby at the All-Star game, baseball game this year. Again, really cool technology, but I don't understand how it's making my understanding of the game better. Whereas Statcast, where they're explaining the launch angle of the ball, like we know this is a home run because of the launch angle before the ball ever travels far enough, that changed my understanding of the game. And I think that that's a really hard thing for people to understand, particularly in technology, because they constantly lose track of the fact that just because you, my mom used to say all the time, not her quote, someone else's, but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. A lot of people are sort of building technology without understanding, like how does this actually enhance the storytelling experience?
12:47 Steph Smith? Let's kind of roll through those. I mean, you mentioned yellow lines. That helps people understand the way football works. Instant replay also helps people understand what just happened and also hear from experts. Cable allows people to engage all together and fantasy, like you said, kind of also expands the game, helps people get involved in other teams. So there's a lot of really clear learnings there. But to your point, a lot of people are kind of just exuberantly excited about what's on the horizon. Let's use AI as an example. If you were a founder, having just heard all the things you shared about the few technologies that did actually move the needle in sports and the reason that they did, how would you kind of coach them almost into adjusting their approach so that they can actually address a real problem, per your point?
13:31 Speaker 00 I'll quote Chamath, who is quoting someone else. When the refrigerator was invented, the guys that invented refrigeration did very well.
13:41 Speaker 00 But the people who did transformatively well was Coca-Cola. Like, as soon as you figured out how to use the technology to then make another product, the reach was exponentially bigger. I'll give you an example. Sports betting. Sports betting is really not a good business. It's usually four to seven percent margin business. Parlays, in-game, multi-game parlays, et cetera, they go to like a 27% margin business, but they're only really possible because of technology, because you have to move so fast and sort of be adaptive. The beauty of sport is inherently, it is this human endeavor where the rules are known, they're very static, you're not seeing a lot of change. So what can you do around that static component that can be really compelling? It's like what AI was designed to do.
14:26 Speaker 00 And so I'm constantly finding myself talking to founders and saying, there are 20 companies that are doing computer vision right now, like, that are all losing money, that all have cameras pointed at the field, they're all basically doing the same thing. And it's a race to the bottom because someone's going to commoditize it. And once we all sort of set the standard, a lot of those companies are going to get killed. And so if you can use AI to start to take the output of those technologies and start to build specific categories for players, coaches, bettors, field technicians, et cetera, you're going to find businesses there because right now, most of it's still being done with pencil and paper.
15:04 Steph Smith? Yeah, and just to double click on that, are there other technologies that you think we might see in this upcoming Olympics? Whether it's applied to actually making athletes better at performing, whether it's in the distribution of the content, or something else entirely?
15:20 Speaker 00 I remember, this is 16 years ago, but in the 08 Olympics, the swimmers were allowed to wear suits, like, full buy suits. And they were shaving like, seconds off of world record times, which in sprinting is unheard of. I mean, even like Usain Bolt, I think over the course of his entire career shaved a second off of his time, let alone doing it on every single race. And it was clear that the suit was doing, it was like a sharkskin suit, it like caused the water to move faster, like all this other stuff. And they changed the polyurethane or whatever the composite is for track and field, you know, a couple of years ago. And then all of a sudden, like world records were like getting decimated because the rebound on the foot was so much higher, which is to say nothing of what Adidas
16:05 Speaker 00 and Nike and Puma or New Balance, what they're doing inside of a shoe where someone can run a sub five minute or sub four minute mile or, you know, a two hour marathon. So what I'll say is this, I think that if Michael Phelps had won 16 gold medals, but we didn't know Michael Phelps' story, his background, who he was, what was going on in his life, I don't think people would remember it. I think the greatest athletes who ever lived are the athletes we have nostalgia for. Like, we remember the story of Michael Jordan leaving for a year and coming back, or LeBron leaving Cleveland only to come back and win it for Cleveland. Like, we care more about that in a lot of cases than we do the stats, right? And so when I look at the technologies that I think are coming, AI Michaels is an awesome technology where they're using AI and Al's voice to be able
16:50 Speaker 00 to recap. And I think from a pure experience standpoint, you're going to have a better experience because it's not going to sound like Siri telling you what happened or seeing it in infographics. It's going to feel like you're getting a studio host telling you what's going on. And the new camera technologies that they're introducing around track and field and water polo are incredible. In reality, I think the technology that's going to really change our experience is basic stuff that we take for granted, like Peacock, the fact that the streamer is set up in a way where you can create a bespoke experience of what you want. Like, I tell people a lot of times, all of the technology that really moves the needle in sports is super unsexy. Like, I'll
17:33 Speaker 00 give you an example, the yellow line, people are like, how do they do it? They isolate the players and they go, no, they're chroma keying the green on the field. It's 50 year old technology. I'm not discounting what they did. What they did was incredible. Like, the technology is amazing, but like, the most difficult part, people had overthought for years because, oh, we have to create masks of every player. No, they had a green field. They've been working with green screens in Hollywood for, you know, a decade at that point. And they're just like, oh, what if we just take the green away? Boom, right? And so, the thing I constantly go back to people with is like, you have to be solving for the solution, not solving for the technology. Because people have shown me stuff in sports technology that is insane. It's mind blowing.
18:15 Speaker 00 Somebody did a recreation of all of Messi's shots, from Messi's perspective, live, in 3D, in a Unreal Engine. I'm like, this is incredible. This is amazing. I have absolutely no idea what the applicable value of this is to a broadcast storytelling, but it's really cool. You know what I mean? And I think people overestimate the value of cool over the value of how does this make the story better? And I see it so much. I go to all these sports conferences, and they're talking about like, digital jerseys where you can change the number. Amazing, cool.
18:48 Steph Smith? Not useful.
18:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
18:50 Steph Smith? Yeah. Another example that you shared with me before is even just latency, right? We basically have the technology to have essentially no latency, but is that really necessary? I mean, there's certainly a difference between 0 seconds latency and a day latency, right? We've migrated from there. You want some immediacy, but do we really need to get to 0? Is 1 second too much? Is 3? Is 12? Is 20? And I feel like there's maybe a parallel there in asking that of any technology, right? Do we need precision, or do we need something that, to your prior points, actually enhances the story? And so, what is the right question there that people should be asking themselves if they're evaluating? Like, does a digital jersey that allows you to change your number help in some way? What's the right question they should be posing?
19:34 Speaker 00 Let's use latency as an example. My company works inside of latency a lot, because for certain things, it matters a lot. For officiating inside the NFL, they need to know instantaneously, at sub-second latency, whether or not the ball was in or out, and they've got to be able to look at it from every angle, and they've got to be able to do that.
19:52 Speaker 00 Latency to the mass of people. Like, I'll give you an example. If you're delivering video that people can bet against, you have to deliver it in sub-two seconds of latency, because the belief is somebody sitting in the stadium with a cellphone, if they have more than two seconds, could be like, "Home run", and you'd cheat the system. So, the sort of general thesis is sub-two seconds. And there is technology that allows you to deliver sub-two seconds of latency to video. Not at scale, yet. There are a bunch of companies that say they can do it, but, I mean, Amazon's one of the three biggest companies in the world working on this. They are by far the fastest in delivering video from live sports, and they're still in double-digit. But part of the argument is, why? Like, what do you need it for? If you want it for betting, when you look at the percentage of the population
20:35 Speaker 00 that's actually taking in-game bets, still, I'm not saying they're not going to. They clearly are. That's clearly where we're going. How we do that and why we do that is the question. I have had employees and partners and mentors and investors in this business and my last business who were fixated on these problems. And I found myself at odds with them a lot, just basically saying, "I don't disagree that that's where we're going, but you want to be there when the adoptive part is going to occur", and I think people forget that. And to your point, people forget. When you watch a game on cable television, it is a minimum of 30 seconds of latency. And if you're watching it on someone's streaming platform, I won't name any of them for the risk of pissing people up,
21:20 Speaker 00 but they're like at 90 seconds of latency. If I'm watching on my Android and you're watching on your iPhone, or I'm watching on my iPad and you're watching on your Samsung, or whatever, like, they're different codecs. There's all this other stuff that's going in. The latency is really significant. My dad used to take a ton of crap from reporters, because they would tape-delay a lot of the Olympics, so that it would happen in primetime. So, like, the gold medal game for the Dream Team, they would hold the game and then air it live. So, even if people knew the results, they could watch it live at 8 o'clock at night, when everyone is home, when they're not at work, like, trying to watch it on their screen. So, they did this study. First of all, at the time they did this study, which was, like, 20 years ago, less than 18% of the population in the United States
22:06 Speaker 00 live west of the Mississippi. And they were already getting a tape-delay, because people forget that almost everything appears on the west coast later than the east coast, meaning they delay it three hours. The ratings were always higher on the West Coast than the East Coast. So even if the East Coast got it live and the West Coast got it taped, the ratings were higher on the West Coast because the West Coast, even if they knew the results, they wanted to see the storytelling. They were engaged with the athlete and they wanted to see the event actually occur. You know, if you talk to sports reporters, they'll be like, it's very important that the Premier League, the World Cup game, or the UEFA game, or whatever, match has to be live in America. Like at 4:00 AM? Those people are going to figure out how to watch it. They're going to VPN it. They're going to whatever. That is not your audience.
22:49 Speaker 00 Your target audience is Bill and Sue who live in Colorado and who have three kids and they want to get their kids down and have dinner. And then they want to sit down and they want to watch the thing together. They're not getting up at 4:00 AM to watch this. They want to have a produced experience. The other technology that we talked about a couple of weeks ago, but I think is really important to drill down on is for the last 30 plus years, actually, this goes back to 96, giving users the ability to pick what camera angles to watch the game. So there's a guy, his name's Freddie Goodell. He's arguably, if he's not the best, he's one of the three best live sports producers who's ever lived, right? I mean, he did zillions of Super Bowls.
23:32 Speaker 00 He basically did all of Sunday Night Football forever. He launched Amazon's Thursday Night Football. Freddie is a transformative figure in sports. Freddie has spent every day since he was in his early twenties, perfecting the art of understanding that you got to go from camera one to camera four, to camera 16, to camera 11, go to the audience. I want to see the crying mom reacting to, okay, come back to Michael Phelps because this is really beautiful. Okay, now come wide. I want to see the expanse of 60,000 people cheering him on. Okay, now come tight to his opponent. Oh, the agony of defeat. Now come back wide. He's going to get the flowers from his sister who recovered from cancer. That's storytelling, right?
24:07 Steph Smith? Yes.
24:08 Speaker 00 Joe Blow on his couch does not want to do that. And every single time anyone has introduced the you get to pick your angle thing, it never works. There's never, they put all these BS numbers about engagement. Now, if someone built an AI platform. That knew who you were and knew that you hated seeing the audience shots. You wanted to stay on the tight shot of Steph Curry because you care about Steph. You don't care about random people and whatever. If AI knew that and had all the access to the cameras and all the other stuff. And AI Michaels is a great start. But if someone could actually produce the version of sports that I want to watch. That's tailored to me while you are also watching your version.
24:45 Speaker 00 Cause as dark as this is, the Democrats on Instagram are seeing the chat that they want to see in the comments. On the same video that the Republicans are seeing, right? Bespoke experiences. AI is going to be able to do that and deliver experiences that are worthwhile. But it takes understanding the expertise that goes into doing it that brings it to life. And right now, there's very little. I'm shocked, by the way, I'm shocked when I look at tech companies and sports. They'll have either no people from the creative production sports world involved. Or really old executives or nobody. I'm always blown away by that. And I go back, the last time there was this sort of massive transformation in technology.
25:30 Speaker 00 You gotta go to the early nineties with computer generated imagery with SGI boxes, silicon graphics boxes. And electric image and these technologies. The reason that you can watch Jurassic Park, the original, the 1993 original movie today. And still be like, God, that really does look like a real dinosaur. Like, it really looks like that brachiosaurus is walking behind Laura Dern. Is because they took the guys who had spent 30 years as clay modelers, making the Stan Winston monsters. And they brought them in and then they were like, no, no, you don't understand lighting. You think lighting is here, but actually there's 700 points of light that are making this shading work. Because when it comes through the leaf, it actually reflects off the leaf. And then you now watch movies that are produced today on Netflix and you're like.
26:17 Speaker 00 I don't understand this movie is 31 years after Jurassic Park came out and the graphics look like garbage. Meanwhile, Jurassic Park still holds up. It's because they went to expertise. And if storytelling is the only thing that matters, go get the storytellers who understand how to use what you're replacing to do this and make them a part of the team and make it great.
26:37 Steph Smith? And I mean, we see this in basically all industries. Tech is applied everywhere now, right? So whether it's financial services or real estate or healthcare, I think that's a learning that you can't necessarily just reshape these industries without the help of people within those industries. And it goes vice versa, right? There's a reason some of these industries are still on pen and paper, like you mentioned before, that could benefit from some of these newer technologies. But I guess to flip that on its head, what you just shared, we already know that there's a bunch of technologists who have created new things that maybe aren't being applied effectively to the sports world. But are there things that you actually wish could exist within athletics, within the Olympics, for
27:16 Steph Smith? example, that you haven't seen people address? Because the sports people know it's a problem, but the technologists have no idea. They're over here in their corner, building things that aren't going to work.
27:27 Speaker 00 30 minutes before we started this podcast, I was making my lunch. I was scrolling Instagram and there was somebody had taken a clip of Babe Ruth hitting a homerun. And using AI, they created frames that didn't exist so they could show his swing in slow motion. One of the things that I think people don't fully appreciate is, I'll use Secretariat as an example. Secretariat was not just a Triple Crown winner. Secretariat is still, someone will tell me I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain Secretariat still holds the track records at two of the three Triple Crown fields, and not by like a nose, by like horse lengths. When Secretariat won, Secretariat won by 14 horse lengths and he would beat almost every horse that's ever run the track again by that much.
28:13 Speaker 00 I would love to watch the Kentucky Derby with Secretariat on the field running. Like, I love this one thing during the Olympics where they show like Lindsey Vonn is skiing the track and they show her versus the Swedish girl who she's competing against and they overlay the one girl. So now I can see when Lindsey's ahead and she's behind and now, but they're on the same course and the same thing. I'm like, okay, I now understand how close this is. It's not just a little clock on the side.
28:38 Steph Smith? And by the way, I would love to see the average human on that as well.
28:42 Speaker 00 Well, yeah.
28:42 Steph Smith? You can just see them like, they're just completely off screen.
28:46 Speaker 00 Yeah. Having skied a couple of those courses and I've been skiing since I was two, I assure you it's the equivalent of ice skating down a sheer mountain for miles. And they're doing it at 100 and what, I mean, it's like the first time someone took me out in an Indy car. They had like a two seater and they put me in the front seat and Al Unser Jr., who's one of the greatest Indy car racers of all time. And they let me drive like the first one and I'm like, I'm going fast. And then he drove it. And I went from, oh, this track isn't that bad to, oh my God, like he's a quarter of an inch off the wall going 215 miles an hour around the corner, like incomprehensibly fast and you're this high off the ground.
29:29 Speaker 00 To answer your question though, context is really, really difficult in sport to understand like the significance. Like we use words, but we've moved beyond words. And what I would like to really see is technology make sport even more accessible and storytelling. Because the thing is, is to paraphrase Mark, the software eats the world. The one thing that I think we can probably feel pretty confident about, live human sport is going to remain incredibly important because it is the last bastion where we're not going to let LeBron start wearing animatronic legs that are allowing him to jump 60 feet in the air. Like, that's not really the tradition of the sport. Like, if you see how baseball has sort of come back, it's actually the things we used to joke about in baseball. Oh, it's so slow.
30:12 Speaker 00 It's so boring. Now, there's actually something to be said for the anticipation and the lack of like instant delivery that matters. And I think technology making that more available without interfering with it is going to be huge. I had a bunch of conversations with the team that's doing the enhanced games. And I'm fascinated by how traditional a sports people have come back and I'm like, this is wrong. Like, well, have you actually talked to them? Because first of all, it sounds like what they're doing is what you guys always should have been doing, which is like, if the FDA allows it, it should be allowed everywhere. But more importantly, you allowed swimming suits, you allowed rubberized sneakers. Like Phil Knight is a massive billionaire because he figured out that if you put rubber
30:54 Speaker 00 on the bottom of a sneaker that had grips on it, people would run faster than if they didn't. It's like, to your point, the guys who were competing in the Parthenon 400 years ago, 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, clearly weren't doing it where the dirt had been brought in and chemically altered so that it had the exact padding for the friction of the grass. Like, all of this stuff wasn't taken into account. And so technology's made a lot of things better, but I think people just skate by the need for it to be great storytelling.
31:25 Steph Smith? Yeah, to that point, I think people also misattribute what is technology, right? Who is to say that an injectable is so different from a different type of shoe, which is so different from a software that allows you to review your footage in a different way? Like, all of that is a form of technology, and it's just different lines that people have drawn around what is and isn't acceptable. And I guess it's interesting, at the very least, to see people challenging those lines. And I think just to close things out, since you have been a student of the Games, you've watched your father create the modern day version of them. What are you excited about this year?
32:01 Speaker 00 One thing that has happened in the last 20 years is the amount of parity in sports that have traditionally been owned by Americans is eye opening. I mean, I don't know when this is going to air, but you know, last night, Team USA, basketball team, came within one point of losing to an African nation that had never played in international basketball before. And I think that's a function of technology. I would venture a guess that things like Starlink have actually allowed for people to consume training videos and YouTube and all this other stuff and learn how to play that game. And then you add to it that the ubiquity of technology and the quality of shoes and all this other stuff. So I think that that's going to be a huge part of it.
32:45 Speaker 00 I also think, and this is gonna be a weird thing to say on a podcast that is entirely about technology, I think the thing that is gonna be the most popular about this Olympics is gonna be the things that technology really isn't touching. Like, obviously Simone Biles is this transformative freak of nature that comes along once in a generation that defies all we know about our genetics and aging and everything else. And I think that seeing her compete, particularly in the context of four years ago, when she really bravely said, "I can't do this because I have a mental block," and then overcame that, I think that we're all rooting for this experience of watching her collectively as a group. When the Olympics is at its best,
33:29 Speaker 00 the thing the Olympics does that is beautiful is it brings us together, humanity, in a singular moment to celebrate excellence. And I do think that we do all hold excellence at the highest levels of our respect as humans. And that's really what sport and the Olympics is about. The Olympics are run by what's called the International Olympic Committee, and it has representatives from every country that's part of the IOC, and they vote on what country it's going to. And in a lot of cases, the people who are at the IOC are politicians, former military guys, like men and women who have served their country in different ways and get elected to this wonderful place. And so you'd think there'd be tension, but because
34:10 Speaker 00 it was about sport, there wasn't. And yet, they would talk a ton of smack about how they were gonna beat each other in some arbitrary sport that like weren't even on our radar. And my mom said, "The Olympics has the ability to replace war in many places where war would have happened." Not all war, obviously, but like the fact that these two people might want to fight each other, but because they're given the FIFA World Cup, or the Club World Cup, or the Olympics, or whatever, they have this opportunity to do it in a way that is actually team building, like people coming together, even though they're competitors. And I think that that's the thing that we can't lose sight of with the Olympics is you're going to get inundated with all the cool technology and everyone will have it.
34:53 Speaker 00 Johnson and Johnson will have some cool way that you can pick your shampoo based on whatever Simone Biles does.
34:59 Steph Smith? Right.
35:00 Speaker 00 All of that is in the context of the fact that we're showing up because we're seeing the purest version of the human experience of what can the human body actually accomplish? And then what does that look like when it's head to head with someone else who's pushed themselves that hard? All of the garbage that we all watch on Instagram about they're like, it's inside of you. You just have to get up at 4:30 in the morning and eat your blah, blah, blah, and all this other stuff. Like, these people actually did that stuff. And now let's see what they can actually do when they did it.
35:27 Steph Smith? Yeah. And to your point, it's a culmination of not just them being there, it's their whole life being dedicated to that sport. And it's just the most human thing. There's been so many takeaways in this podcast, but I think to your point about whether it's like concerts or live sports, as technology continues to accelerate and eat the world, it's become super clear that people are just craving these superhuman experiences. And I guess the Olympics is where the most superhuman of humans show up. So thank you for sharing both your past, but also your experience today.
35:58 Speaker 00 Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
36:02 Steph Smith? All right. If you made it this far, make sure you're subscribed because we have several Olympic themed episodes dropping in the next two weeks. And if you enjoyed this episode, drop us a line at ratethispodcast.com/a16z. We would love to hear from listeners as we work our way up to the podcast podium. We'll see you next time.
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