Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast #ICYMI - SEASON PREMIERE: 2019 Big Game Special, with Neil deGrasse Tyson About this episode Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly kick off Season 4 of Playing with Science covering the science and spectacle of the Big Game. Featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, sports physicist John Eric Goff, sports economist Victor Matheson, and former NY Giants WR and Super Bowl XLII ring holder Brandon London.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Gary O'Reilly? I'm Gary O'Reilly.
0:02 Chuck Nice? And I'm Chuck Nice.
0:03 Gary O'Reilly? And this is Playing with Science.
0:08 Gary O'Reilly? Today, we find out why Super Bowl is a bad day to be in avocado. Yes, stick around, you'll find out why. A good day to go to the mall, and why the day after, we're all going to be talking about it, whether we like football or not.
0:23 Chuck Nice? And grinding out the hard science will be our good friend, Professor Eric Goff. Whilst taking us behind the curtain of being the host city will be sports economist Victor Matheson.
0:33 Gary O'Reilly? And providing us with the all-important player's point of view is former NFL wide receiver, actor, and TV host, Brandon London, who just happens to own a Super Bowl winner's ring. And last but not least, making a special appearance just for you, will be your personal astrophysicist, the one, the only, lucky you don't know who it is, right? Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're gonna tease you with the great man. But first, straight into our very, very good friend, Professor of Physics and a sporting guru, Professor Eric Goff. The author of Gold Medal Physics, among other stocking stuffer.
1:18 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
1:19 Gary O'Reilly? Best-selling, fabulous, must-get-your-hands-on books.
1:23 Chuck Nice? Eric Goff lives at the intersection of sports and science.
1:27 Gary O'Reilly? He does.
1:28 Chuck Nice? What's happening, Professor?
1:29 Speaker 02 Yeah. Just getting anxious for the Super Bowl.
1:32 Chuck Nice? Okay, all right.
1:33 Gary O'Reilly? All right, so, hey, burning question, are you or are you not related to the Rams quarterback? Full disclosure.
1:40 Speaker 02 Well, all humans share a common ancestor, but, you know, I am from West Virginia, so if he is too, we have a 1 in 3 chance of being related, I guess, but, um...
1:49 Chuck Nice? Is that a West Virginia joke?
1:53 Speaker 02 It sure is.
1:55 Gary O'Reilly? All right. So, if I had to give you a dollar and say, which quarterback do you put it on, what are you gonna spend big?
2:03 Speaker 02 Well, I got one quarterback who just finished his third season and I got another quarterback who's been in the league about seventeen, eighteen years and he's finished half of his seasons in the Super Bowl. So it's tough to go against Brady and Belichick. I mean, if I'm just betting a dollar, I think I might be pulling for the Rams, but if I had to bet money, I'd probably put it on the Patriots.
2:27 Gary O'Reilly? Any science behind why you would go there or is that just a complete gut feeling?
2:33 Speaker 02 Well, I don't know if you watched the overtime game. I'm sure you watched the conference title games, but I mean Brady is throwing into some really tiny windows to make those third and ten completions he did in overtime. Those three passes, I mean threading the needle is a good description because when you look at the camera view from behind the quarterback, you see where he's throwing to a spot where the receiver's yet to reach. And I mean, sometimes those receivers, they're just turning their head around and bam, oh, the ball's right there in their, their hands and they got a, you know, defender draped over the back of them. I mean, that guy, he's not gonna break under any pressure. He's not gonna care if they're down fourteen. I mean, you know, he's been there before and
3:14 Speaker 02 he, you know, look how, how they came back against the Falcons a couple of Super Bowls back.
3:20 Gary O'Reilly? What sort of times are we talking about in the pocket for a player like Brady? What sort of, what sort of numbers are we looking at in terms of I've got to get the snap and by the time I've released it, I've got how many fractions, how many seconds?
3:33 Speaker 02 So, you know, Brady's gonna get the ball out sometime in, under two and a half seconds, you know, between two, two and a half seconds. And that, that's gonna be really quick. He doesn't have to be that mobile to escape a rush. He's talented and deft enough over his career to be able to sidestep some of the rush, but he doesn't have to do any major scrambling. I mean, he's gonna be able to get that ball released very quickly, you know.
3:56 Chuck Nice? Let me just say this. Tom Brady, and I will preface what I'm about to say by saying that he, he is pretty much the best quarterback ever. Okay. Just gonna go with that. And that being said. Tom Brady is a crying little baby if you hit him. And so that's what the Rams have to do. Every team that gets to Brady beats him. And that's really what it comes down to. It's like, uh, you know, he, people don't know that he's actually made of cotton candy. And, uh, if you get to him, guess what? You win. So I really think that's what it's gonna come down to.
4:40 Gary O'Reilly? Your inner Eagles fan is screaming right now.
4:42 Chuck Nice? What? Who? Who? What?
4:44 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
4:44 Chuck Nice? What?
4:45 Gary O'Reilly? When?
4:45 Chuck Nice? Well, so.
4:45 Speaker 02 And all they have to do is pick up that deflated football to help wipe the tears, right?
4:49 Gary O'Reilly? Yay. So, Professor, Brady's got a snap, he's in the pocket. The Rams head coach, uh, Mr. C Nice, has directed him to make mincemeat of him. What kind of forces can we expect a quarterback, particularly Tom Brady, to be under in an impact? From say like a 300 pound massive offensive lineman?
5:15 Speaker 02 So, uh, unless the quarterback's really running fast, you know, if the quarterback's back in the pocket, maybe backpedaling slightly, uh, getting hit. And remember that the linemen, you know, they've gutted the defensive, uh, attack so much over the years that, uh, we've seen all you have to do to Brady is just kind of drape your arm around it. Barely get it near his helmet to get a roughing the passer call.
5:36 Gary O'Reilly? Mm-hmm.
5:37 Speaker 02 So, you know, they're, they're gonna be backing off if they see the ball coming out of his hand. But they're gonna be kind of grabbing and pulling down. You know, the really, the, the hard collisions are gonna happen when you get two players moving, you know? So if, if Brady was able to scramble or run, you know, very fast out of the pocket, this would be the case. But one of his running backs or his receivers colliding at, you know, moving at 20 miles an hour, hitting a, you know, defensive back coming in or a linebacker at that speed. You're talking about average forces in the 500 pound range and the instantaneous maximum forces can get up to 1500 pounds. I mean, this is.
6:13 Chuck Nice? So when you say instantaneous maximum forces at 1500 pounds, is that the equivalent of a 1500 pound weight just slapping you at that speed?
6:23 Speaker 02 Uh, not quite because.
6:24 Chuck Nice? Okay, that's what I'm saying. Can you, can you explain that, please?
6:27 Speaker 02 You could put a force like that on a hard object like a helmet or a pad. That's not going to be the same thing as if your skin is feeling it. So you're, you're talking about distributing that force over a larger area. Where, where, you know, the players get hurt, you know, if their arm gets hurt or something. That's where you're really getting the force concentrated in one spot where the pressure's really going up. You know, it only takes about a hundred PSI or so to puncture the skin. So when you concentrate the force in a small area, that's where you're going to get the possibility of, of damage.
6:56 Gary O'Reilly? So you're talking about fifteen hundred pounds per square inch?
7:00 Speaker 02 No, no, fifteen hundred pounds total force.
7:03 Gary O'Reilly? Total force, okay.
7:04 Speaker 02 What you, what you don't want is for that force to be just the helmet to helmet or just pad to pad. You know, you're talking about the whole, you know, these two hundred and fifty pound bodies with twenty plus pounds with pads and helmet, you know, colliding into each other. I mean, you got five hundred pounds of weight crashing into each other. You got a quarter ton right there and that's about the size of the average force. So, you know, and, and to give you an idea of what these collisions are, I mean, you could actually get a hundred Gs for a very tiny fraction of a second on some of these collisions. You compare that to a car crash?
7:36 Gary O'Reilly? Yes.
7:36 Speaker 02 Thirty, thirty Gs. You got a fighter pilot in a dive, maybe ten Gs. Now they, they're experiencing that acceleration for a lot longer time, but these football players are getting an order of magnitude more acceleration on a very short amount of time than fighter pilots.
7:52 Chuck Nice? Wow, that's amazing. All right.
7:54 Gary O'Reilly? Okay, so let's, let's focus on the venue. I mean, this is an awesome looking stadium. The dome itself is just, looks like a work of art once that roof opens. What is in play in an environment like that, professor?
8:11 Speaker 02 Well, i- if the dome is closed, um, you're going to have a very well-controlled, uh, environment in there. You know, you shouldn't have too many swirling winds. You shouldn't have a whole lot of environmental factors influencing the, the, you know, trajectory of the ball. So this is being played in Atlanta and Atlanta is going to be somewhere around, what, thirty-three and a half or so degrees, uh, latitude? And the closer you get to the equator, the more the, uh, the Coriolis effect becomes a, an issue, but.
8:41 Chuck Nice? Oh, well, now you gotta break down the Coriolis effect for the listeners. What is that? And, and how's it, uh, pertain to football?
8:48 Speaker 02 So it doesn't play a very big role, but you know, you look at the earth turning and we were sitting on the earth turning. So we don't really notice that, but whenever we kick a ball up into the air, you know, the earth is kind of turning while the ball is in flight. So what we notice in the northern hemisphere is when you project something outward like that it gets a little bit of a bump to the right and the field is actually laid out in an east to west fashion. So you know, any kind of field goals or anything like that are going to be kicked east or west. And just doing a really quick calculation before the show here, including a little air resistance. If the ball is kicked pretty hard, I mean,
9:30 Speaker 02 we're talking, you know, getting into 50, 60 mile an hour kick range. You're talking about a maybe a quarter to a third of an inch deflection on the Coriolis effect. So
9:41 Chuck Nice? That's absolutely significant.
9:44 Speaker 02 It could be. If we're just scraping the upright. Now, you know, you felt really felt sorry for the poor kicker that
9:55 Chuck Nice? Chicago Bears. Yes. And I did not feel sorry for him at all. I mean, come on, professor. You know, I'm an Eagles fan. That was one of the greatest days in Eagles history.
10:04 Speaker 02 You can root for the Eagles, but you can feel a little sadness for poor Cody Parkey. But so he hit the left upright. Now that's a little higher elevation at Soldier Field. So the Coriolis effect's not quite as influential as will be in Atlanta.
10:18 Chuck Nice? Okay.
10:19 Speaker 02 But it even though it hit the left upright at, you know, the Coriolis was actually pushing it in the direction that would have been good. Had the Coriolis not been there, it would have been slightly more toward the center of the post. So Coriolis really didn't play a role in the in the miss.
10:33 Chuck Nice? Yeah. So even with Coriolis helping the guy, he's still screwed up. Oh, well. You've gone to smug factor 10, haven't you? What are you talking about? I don't know what you mean. You'll be in overdrive in a minute. Hey, listen, what can we say, you know? Anything else? Sometimes the bear eats you. Sometimes you eat the bear. There you go.
10:53 Speaker 02 When you're when you're watching the game and you see those nice tight spirals. So those balls are spinning about 600 RPMs. That's about 30% faster than the rotor blades on a helicopter. So those those balls have some pretty good spin on them. And that's why that that helps the angular momentum vector. Keep the ball from wobbling too much and you get a lot of reduced air drag that way.
11:14 Chuck Nice? Hmm. Okay. All right. All right. So listen, we're we're about out of time for this segment, Professor. But from a physics standpoint, I don't know if you were. You probably weren't anticipating this. If you have an answer, that's good. If you don't, I understand. From a physics standpoint, which team would you think is going to win? When you look at the physics of the game and considering each team, which team would win?
11:42 Speaker 02 Well, see, this is what Super Bowl 53.
11:45 Gary O'Reilly? Yep.
11:46 Speaker 02 So that's L I I. So the L is angular momentum vector. Three is Newton's third law. So I'm going to go with the guy that can throw that football. I'm going to go with Brady if I had to put any money on it.
11:58 Gary O'Reilly? Professor, I absolutely love that.
12:01 Chuck Nice? That was amazing.
12:02 Gary O'Reilly? You know what?
12:02 Chuck Nice? That was amazing.
12:03 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
12:04 Chuck Nice? I I gotta give it to you.
12:05 Gary O'Reilly? E equals mc squared.
12:06 Chuck Nice? Right.
12:06 Gary O'Reilly? That reduction into a very tight little nugget of information.
12:10 Chuck Nice? You pulled that one out of a black hole, my friend. That was great.
12:13 Gary O'Reilly? Professor Eric Goff, brilliant to talk to you as always. And if the Patriots do win, it's all down to physics, apparently.
12:22 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
12:22 Gary O'Reilly? Um, right, that's it from the good professor. We'll be back very, very shortly. Please don't go away.
12:40 Gary O'Reilly? Welcome back, Playing with Science, another Super Bowl Big Game Special. All right, time to talk some numbers with sports economist Victor Matheson. Now, you've got to give us a full explanation because we will see you as an economist. But I guess your title is far grander than that.
12:59 Speaker 03 So I don't know about that. Some people call me a sports economist.
13:03 Chuck Nice? Oh.
13:03 Speaker 03 And, uh, and on top of that, I do lots of fun things like I'm the president of the North American Association of Sports Economists. I edit the Journal of Sports Economics. Uh, and, uh, I do lots of fun things looking at the intersection of sports and economics.
13:21 Chuck Nice? So let's talk about the economics of the Super Bowl. You know, it's the biggest cultural event of the year here in America. I mean, it's, it's like we have the World Cup every single year, but it's just this one game and it's become more of a, a thing. It's, it's become more of a happening. A thing. It's not really a sporting event. You know, you think about it, how many people are going to get together on Super Bowl Sunday or the, the, and, and, you know, they're gonna eat and they're gonna watch the game and they're gonna talk about commercials and all that kinda stuff, but really they're not even football fans. You know, what they're a fan of is
14:00 Chuck Nice? conviviality. Let's get together and have a little party, you know, let's drink. And so is there any data that lets us know what that day, not, not as a, not as a sports team or not as bringing the game to a city, but that day itself. Uh, what kind of impact does that have on the nation economically?
14:23 Speaker 03 Well, certainly we know for individual products, uh, it's a huge day. Uh, for example, it is the single largest day of consumption of avocados in the United States.
14:34 Chuck Nice? What?
14:35 Speaker 03 You gotta have that, you gotta have that guacamole for, uh, for the big game. Uh, so for individual products, boy, you are really depending on having a good Super Bowl, cause it's a long wait for the avocado growers until next Super Bowl Sunday.
14:49 Chuck Nice? So it's avocado Christmas.
14:52 Speaker 03 Avocado Christmas.
14:53 Gary O'Reilly? Okay, so it's bad day to be a chicken because Neil deGrasse Tyson told us the number of chicken wings that consumed, so it's also a bad day to be an avocado.
15:01 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
15:02 Gary O'Reilly? So what kind of numbers are we talking here? Because it's beer, chicken wings, I suppose now gambling. What's our TV audience? Who wins the TV game? CBS, who have this year's Super Bowl, or is it the guy on Madison Avenue? Or girl?
15:19 Speaker 03 So we have, we have a bunch of winners here, right?
15:22 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
15:23 Speaker 03 Certainly the NFL comes out as the big winner. We're gonna have maybe 100 or 110 million people tuning in.
15:31 Chuck Nice? Wow.
15:32 Speaker 03 Far and away the biggest TV event by at least a factor of two of any annual event that's either number one or number two in the world. It may be at this point being eclipsed by the Champions League final, since that has a little more of a worldwide footprint rather than just exclusively the US. But it is without question the largest annual TV event in the United States. On top of that, think about selling 70,000 tickets that the NFL is doing in Atlanta. Those tickets are averaging over $1,000 a piece.
16:08 Chuck Nice? Wow.
16:09 Speaker 03 Tax-free to the NFL. That means that the NFL is generating in the vicinity of $100 million just on ticket sales from the games before even anyone buys a hot dog.
16:21 Chuck Nice? Before you go any further, I need you to just, because you said something that a lot of people don't know. You used two words in that description: tax-free. What's up with that? Why is that?
16:36 Speaker 03 The reason that is, is because the NFL has a game that everyone, every city thinks they want at least, and because they are in the driver's seat, they can drive a very hard bargain. One of the really fun things that we saw actually last year in Minneapolis, for the first time, someone got a hold of the bid book. So this is the whole list of things that the NFL demands out of host cities and published that so that everyone could read it.
17:04 Chuck Nice? Ooh.
17:04 Speaker 03 In that document, the phrase "at no cost to the NFL" appeared 47 times. And so they got huge, they get a huge party that someone else throws for them, and they get to collect all the money. One. At least two crazy things here. Let's imagine you're in Atlanta during the Super Bowl and you decide I want to get away from all the crowds and congestion and the football, just my, not my thing. And you decide to go to a movie Sunday night and you pay 10 bucks for the movie. USA movie theater goer will pay more taxes into the Atlanta coffers than that person
17:44 Speaker 03 buying a $1,500 Super Bowl ticket being played just next door in the Super Bowl stadium. You buying that $10 movie ticket are paying more in taxes than the person buying the $1,500 Super Bowl ticket.
17:57 Gary O'Reilly? So where, where does, where does the host city benefit? Because hotel rates get hiked, flights get hiked, car rental, I'm sure, all these other things. Does the, does the host city not get a tax windfall from all of this revenue?
18:11 Speaker 03 So the host city is hoping that all of those hotel rooms outside of the hotel rooms that the NFL is using. So for example, Tom Brady's hotel room, he's getting that tax free this weekend. So is Bob Kraft and all of the other folks in the NFL. They get an entire hotel tax free. The spectators, the fans coming down, they'll be paying sky high rates along with sky high taxes along with that. So what the Super Bowl host city is hoping is that all of that money that they're going to generate is going to pay for the roughly 40 or 50 million dollars in added costs and giveaways that the city is giving to the NFL for the rights to host that game.
18:53 Chuck Nice? So does it work out? Now, you know, so I do standup comedy for a living and, or at least you might want to, at least I like to say I do.
19:02 Gary O'Reilly? I'm not gonna go there.
19:04 Chuck Nice? Anyway, in my business, we call that a door deal. So what happens is you go to a club and you say, hey, man, I'm really popular. I'm going to sell this club out and I'm going to sell it out on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So you, you give me the door minus like 10% because you need to cover your electric and all that kind of stuff. So you're going to give me like 85% of the door and you're going to collect all that alcohol. And the alcohol sales are going to be so high that it makes perfect sense for you to let me just keep the covers as they walk through the door. Does that actually work for these cities? Are these cities making out?
19:46 Speaker 03 So that's really one of the real questions that we always have. What the NFL will claim is that the economic impact of the Super Bowl to the host city is somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 or $500 million. And I've even seen estimates as high as $700 or $800 million of benefit to the city for hosting these games. The catch is that when economists not associated with the NFL go back and actually look at data from cities who have hosted the game, and we look at things like employment, or personal income, or GDP, or tax collections, or hotel room sales, all these things,
20:27 Speaker 03 we get a number that's positive, but we get numbers somewhere between $30 and $130 million. Now, mind you, not something you'd sneeze at, but it's also a fraction of what the NFL is claiming. And, of course, we haven't talked about the biggest elephant in the room is how much the taxpayers have already given to the NFL in terms of stadium subsidies to build these billion-dollar stadiums that we're seeing nowadays.
20:56 Chuck Nice? Yeah, because the stadium is always going to be in an NFL city. So the stadium that's there, what do most cities have as a deal? I'm ignorant here. What do most cities have as a deal with the NFL when it comes to the stadium that's being built? Does the NFL actually throw into the kitty? Or is it one of these things where it's, "Well, we're gonna float municipal bonds," or "We're just gonna raise property taxes," or... I mean, how's it really work? Does the NFL pay for their stadiums? Because if the Super Bowl is always in an NFL city, and the NFL doesn't pay for its stadium, man, this is the sweetest deal ever made, and I wanna own a team.
21:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, you want to own a team because of course if you're a team owner that mean you'd be at least a billionaire. So that's not a bad thing to be.
21:49 Chuck Nice? This is true.
21:50 Speaker 03 That being said.
21:51 Chuck Nice? Yeah, go ahead.
21:52 Speaker 03 But I'm sure I'm sure you're close already. So this is this is the way it works is that almost every stadium in the in the country is some sort of public private partnership. And the real question is, you know, how much is public and how much is private?
22:09 Chuck Nice? Okay.
22:10 Speaker 03 In the two decades before the Great Recession, which started in 2008, in the two decades before that, what we had was roughly two thirds of all stadium costs were paid for by taxpayers with private entities. That's the NFL plus the the local owner were covering about one third of the cost. Since the Great Recession, those numbers have actually flipped. So it's now about two thirds private money and about one third public money. Although stadiums have gotten so expensive that that amount of private money has actually gone up, even
22:52 Speaker 03 though it's only one third of the cost. So for example, a typical NFL stadium today costs at least a billion dollars and and possibly more.
23:00 Chuck Nice? Yep.
23:00 Speaker 03 Back two decades ago, like Gillette Stadium where the obviously where the Patriots play, that was only about a $250 million stadium, only 20 years ago. And and I should point out, one of the very few stadiums in the NFL, almost entirely privately financed. So stadium deals vary widely, but on average in the last 10 years, the public has has picked up about a third of the cost with the NFL and local owners together picking up the other two thirds.
23:31 Chuck Nice? I gotta say, that's pretty significant when you think about the number of people who are actually attending games. You're talking about an entire municipality picking up the third of the cost of a stadium that maybe a fraction.
23:44 Gary O'Reilly? Eighty thousand.
23:45 Chuck Nice? A fraction of the population is actually going to use. Is is it worth it? Does the city make money off of this deal? I mean, forget the Super Bowl now, we'll get back to that. But I'm now I'm interested in just stadiums itself. Does it if if am I better off with a franchise than I am without one?
24:05 Speaker 03 So you certainly might be happier with a franchise. In terms of dollars and cents, there's no evidence that you're richer in any way.
24:12 Chuck Nice? Oh my goodness.
24:13 Gary O'Reilly? Before you go, here's a thought. In the week leading up to Super Bowl, four economists sit in the bar, they're talking about what it goes on. What algorithm, fact, number is gonna give those four economists a nerdgasm? Which one is gonna spark outrageous debate and focus?
24:33 Speaker 03 Ah, that's a good question. Uh, so I think probably the biggest one is can we measure people's happiness? And not just the dollars and cents? Because we do spend money on things that don't necessarily have a dollar rate of return. We spend money on parks. Parks make us happy, but they don't generate dollars. So, yeah, maybe this Super Bowl does make us, uh, millions of dollars poorer, but if it makes us tens of millions of dollars happier, that's a good trade-off. Uh, and, and if someone makes that argument to me, I'm not gonna complain. But when they come and tell me this is gonna make us all rich, uh, that's just not what the data says.
25:16 Chuck Nice? That's very cool. Well, all I can say is that, uh, the scenario you just unfolded only works if the Philadelphia Eagles win the Super Bowl. And that ain't happening this year, so we're not, uh, yeah.
25:27 Gary O'Reilly? You had a whole year.
25:28 Chuck Nice? It's just costing us money. It's just a waste of money now.
25:34 Gary O'Reilly? He's got problems. Victor Matheson, sports economist and someone we've enjoyed the company of immensely. Thank you, sir.
25:42 Chuck Nice? Thank you, professor.
25:43 Speaker 03 Hey, gentlemen, it's been my pleasure being here.
25:45 Gary O'Reilly? All right, that's it from Victor Matheson, our sports economist. Now, if you thought it was all peaches and cream when it comes to hosting a Super Bowl, maybe, like us, you think slightly different. We're gonna take a break. Stick with us, we'll be back very, very shortly.
26:12 Chuck Nice? Welcome back to Playing with Science. Chuck, should we speak to somebody? Just anybody about Super Bowl? Not just anybody. I believe that we need to put the Neil signal in the sky. It's a big mustache and a lighted, a big lighted mustache. Oh, that's my favorite one. That's my favorite one. And you know who shows up when we actually put that signal in the sky? None other than your own personal astro physicist, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yay!
26:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? My mustache?
26:41 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
26:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How do you know Magnum P.I. won't show up if you just put mustaches up there?
26:46 Chuck Nice? Because it's your mustache.
26:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, my mustache? I got a special mustache.
26:50 Chuck Nice? You got a mustache, yeah.
26:51 Gary O'Reilly? And you don't own a Ferrari.
26:52 Chuck Nice? It's a Cosmos, Cosmos stash.
26:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do you know I have never shaved my mustache in my entire life?
26:58 Chuck Nice? No.
26:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a life, so, so, I mean, of course I trim it, but I've never had a-
27:02 Chuck Nice? No, you never cut it off.
27:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I've never cut it off.
27:03 Chuck Nice? Yeah, just shaved it down to a bare lip.
27:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just a lip. That's all we got.
27:07 Chuck Nice? Now, now I have something on my bucket list.
27:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What, we're talking about the Super Bowl?
27:14 Chuck Nice? Super Bowl. It'd be great to get your musings on the Super Bowl.
27:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? General musings?
27:19 Chuck Nice? General musings on the Super Bowl because you know-
27:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I think there are other kinds of bowls.
27:21 Gary O'Reilly? Do we have to salute if he's general music?
27:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know what I think? I think the number, the team that loses and then whatever was the third place team that didn't get into the Super Bowl, they should play each other in like the salad bowl or something. No, just some, think of the other bowls that are, you know?
27:39 Chuck Nice? There's a lot of bowls.
27:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The soup bowl, the salad bowl, the other kind of bowls you can have out there.
27:43 Chuck Nice? That would be called the loser bowl.
27:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The loser bowl.
27:47 Gary O'Reilly? What we would call the wooden spoon.
27:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, you know, the Super Bowl is such a ritual. It's become like the thing in America. It's the one day where we're all doing the same thing at the same time, which otherwise doesn't really happen. It's the last bastion of event television.
28:06 Chuck Nice? It really is.
28:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because you're not, you are not going to DVR the Super Bowl.
28:10 Chuck Nice? Right.
28:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's not how that works.
28:12 Chuck Nice? Nope.
28:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You, you, you, and no one is going to be looking at some other thing unless they're social mediaing the fact that they're looking at the Super Bowl.
28:20 Chuck Nice? Right.
28:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Nobody's doing anything except people who love puppies.
28:24 Chuck Nice? Because they're watching-
28:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The Puppy Bowl.
28:27 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, no.
28:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You gotta hand it to Animal Planet.
28:31 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
28:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You got, because not everyone is into football.
28:33 Chuck Nice? Right.
28:34 Gary O'Reilly? No.
28:34 Chuck Nice? Counter-programming.
28:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so you gotta hand it to them.
28:37 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
28:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just shout out to Animal Planet for thinking that up.
28:40 Chuck Nice? The Puppy Bowl.
28:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, was there a kitten bowl at one year or two, I think?
28:43 Chuck Nice? Every year, there's a kitten bowl. That's on the Hallmark channel.
28:48 Chuck Nice? It really is.
28:49 Gary O'Reilly? Let's get back on the road to Su-
28:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The Super Bowl.
28:50 Gary O'Reilly? No, we're getting back on the road to Super Bowl.
28:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Super Bowl, sorry.
28:53 Gary O'Reilly? Come on, focus.
28:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Get back on the on-ramp.
28:56 Chuck Nice? Okay.
28:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To the Super Bowl highway. All right, so, so that's my comment about the commercials.
29:01 Chuck Nice? Okay.
29:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, about the teams that are, you know, they're, they're like so hyped, they're so pumped. And the, one of the big worries was that if your energy doesn't sort of keep its momentum, then a Super Bowl can become lopsided and then they're uninteresting for the second half.
29:17 Chuck Nice? Which really kills the sponsors.
29:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It kills, it kills everything. Kills everything. People start eating their chips and not paying attention to the TV.
29:25 Chuck Nice? Mmm.
29:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, I don't know how to assure that you have a good game all the way to the end.
29:30 Chuck Nice? Pay the refs.
29:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, I'm joking. Pay the refs.
29:33 Chuck Nice? Pay the refs, no.
29:34 Gary O'Reilly? You went there, didn't you? You went there.
29:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But I got something, something to look for. I, I don't, I, I don't pick winners or losers in the game because I just like sports in general.
29:42 Chuck Nice? Sure.
29:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the, and the athletic-
29:43 Chuck Nice? You want competition.
29:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Competition than that was. Um, and I remember being invited to the Seattle Seahawks training camp. Because I'm latter-day buds with their coach.
29:52 Chuck Nice? Right.
29:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Um, and, uh, and just to watch them train.
29:56 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
29:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're like gazelles, just as they run. And, you know, how often do you see them on field level? You don't. The camera's always above. You're on field level, they're bigger than you. No matter how big you are, they're bigger than you and they're moving like gazelles. And they're more graceful.
30:11 Gary O'Reilly? Because you get that proximity and you get on a natural eye line with them, it does change everything about your perception.
30:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know what they need? They need- Camera bots on the field. So you get a sense of what the quarterback is experiencing. Because you can say, oh, there's an open guy right there. No, there are five, you know, 350 pound people standing in front of him. Right. Okay, and there's someone ready to block it. So he has to fake like he's looking this way and throw this way. You don't see that in the replays.
30:41 Gary O'Reilly? Okay, so in the future, we're gonna have little mini drone cameras that will follow.
30:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They have to survive a tackle, obviously.
30:49 Gary O'Reilly? No, no, no, they will, they will.
30:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, drone.
30:51 Gary O'Reilly? Yes. Little, okay, I'm gonna give them insect form and they're gonna fly above just by a certain height and you'll come, they'll come in if it's the quarterback.
30:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You might lose a few of them in a, in a thing, but what.
31:01 Gary O'Reilly? Collateral.
31:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Collateral.
31:02 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, I'm happy with that. So then you're gonna get, you're gonna get that view of the running back.
31:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of the actual running back. They're running and they're, they're looking, you need the, the, you need the breath to. You know, like a Darth Vader kinda.
31:15 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, yeah.
31:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the person's coming up to them and you just, so yeah, maybe inside the helmet.
31:21 Gary O'Reilly? Fiber optic cameras within the form in the helmet.
31:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You heard it here first on Startalk.
31:26 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, yeah, we invent stuff here, by the way.
31:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because it was interesting enough to have a camera that follows the kickoff. Right. Right, they got the, the.
31:33 Gary O'Reilly? The spider cams that are suspended.
31:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, next thing is drone cams. Very good. I like the drone cam.
31:38 Gary O'Reilly? Providing we can legally allow them in a certain space.
31:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I'd just do it, just do it. Plus, no one's gonna get hurt by the drone cam. Right. Cause these are big people tackling each other and the drone ain't, ain't, you know. Exactly. If it, if it's in the way, that's too bad for the drone. Maybe the refs, maybe the refs can get hurt.
31:55 Gary O'Reilly? You got a downer on refs, haven't you?
31:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So something else to watch for, and I might, I'll probably tweet about this on the day. There's an interesting mildly mysterious fact that when a foot, a spiral pass is thrown. Go ahead. Perfect spiral, you see the spiral go up. And then come down. Okay, wait a minute. Point down. It, it goes up and then when it hits the top of its arc, it levels off. Then on its way down, it points down. Points down, yeah. That's an amazing physics fact. Because if it's spin stabilized, what you would expect naively is that it would just spin, come up, and then come down in the same orientation. In the way gyroscopes maintain their orientation.
32:34 Chuck Nice? No matter where you are.
32:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Where you put them.
32:36 Chuck Nice? That's why they put them in planes.
32:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's why they put them in and in spacecraft. To make sure your orientation is stable. So that's why when the football is thrown and the receiver is ready to catch it, the ball aims straight into their arms. They don't have to sort of readjust it as they catch it.
32:53 Chuck Nice? Beautiful thing.
32:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a beautiful, just watch it as it happens. It's an aerodynamic effect. If there was no air, then the football would not do this. It would just keep its orientation all the way during the pass.
33:04 Chuck Nice? Oh.
33:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. So just watch for that.
33:06 Chuck Nice? Okay. But so the air is affecting the, there's a friction.
33:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What it's trying to do, by the way, they worried about this in the Apollo mission. This might be the first time ever Apollo.
33:18 Chuck Nice? This is now, this is awesome. This is it.
33:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Apollo and the Super Bowl ever spoken in the same. Okay. They're designing the capsule.
33:26 Chuck Nice? Right.
33:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay? So the capsule is that little bit, oh, we've got a, oh, it's not on camera. This is my office and I have a Saturn V rocket, of course, in my office.
33:35 Chuck Nice? And by the way, it's to scale, people.
33:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a scale.
33:38 Chuck Nice? It's a big office.
33:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's not one to one scale, but it is to scale. But the very top is the capsule. That's where the three astronauts, the Apollo astronauts.
33:45 Chuck Nice? Exactly.
33:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And here's this Saturn V rocket, thirty-four stories tall.
33:49 Chuck Nice? Right.
33:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which is mostly fuel, a controlled bomb.
33:52 Chuck Nice? Yeah, right.
33:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This takes them to orbit, it takes them to the moon, it brings them back to Earth. There's enough fuel to do that. Most of the fuel is to carry the fuel you haven't burnt yet so that you can use it later so you can get back home. Okay?
34:04 Chuck Nice? Understood.
34:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the fuel is not just to carry the payload, it's to carry the fuel you haven't burned yet. That's why you have this mismatch and how big the engines are relative and the fuel tanks are relative to the people. All right, so now, so here's what happens. All that's left is the capsule coming back. It has heat shields.
34:21 Chuck Nice? Down at the bottom, well, it does.
34:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How do you make sure it comes in heat shield first?
34:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You get a quarterback to throw it. Doesn't quarterback. Spin stabilized capsule. So you design it so that no matter what orientation it hits the atmosphere, the aerodynamics writes it. You play with the center of gravity. Yes. There you go. Yes. So it is aerodynamically stable coming in heat shields first. Right. And nothing else will work in the physics of that encounter. So when you throw the ball and has an upward arc, the lowest air resistance is pointing upwards through the air. Now it's going horizontally.
35:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The minimum air resistance is only when it angles this way. Cause there's more air hitting the back of it than the front. It tips it more. Now it's trying to come down. There's air hitting the back and so it will move itself to the minimum air resistance that it can. And so that's really what's happening here. And so it's minimum air resistance pointing up, horizontal. And then minimum air resistance pointing down. Pointing down. That's great. So if you threw a capsule. Yes. A capsule. Yeah, yeah. No matter how you threw it. No matter how you throw it. Yeah, it would orient so that it then goes that way. That convex side would actually point down. Right. And you would kill the receiver. That's awesome. And a quick thing. Castle ball. Well, capsule. You wanted to land on the ref is what you want. Damn right. Oh, by the way, the same thing with the shuttlecock.
35:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, watch your mouth.
36:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The shuttlecock. Yes, I know what he's, forget it. Okay, forget him.
36:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so if you hit a badminton. I thought that was weight, not the. Well, it's weight distribution matters. Okay, gotcha. So in a shuttlecock, it's designed, it's got feathers, be they fake or real. Yeah. And, and a round hittable ball, but that's the heavy part, okay? If you hit that, no matter how you hit it, okay? Right. It is gonna go heavy part first down. Right. So that when you hit it again, the racket hits the rubber part of the ball. It always ends up in that orientation. That's correct. It's a center of mass thing and where the air resistance is. And it minimizes the air resistance. That's exactly why I play badminton with a cat.
36:40 Gary O'Reilly? Where did you get, where, how did you? I don't know, but we've got a returns policy, I think. Yeah, I just gotta, I just gotta check the date.
36:48 Chuck Nice? No matter how you hit that cat, it's coming down on its feet. Feet first.
36:53 Gary O'Reilly? All right, so now that we've, uh...
36:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Actually, if you take a cat.
36:55 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, they haven't, no.
36:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I've done this. If you take a cat.
36:58 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, don't, don't.
36:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hold it upside down.
36:59 Chuck Nice? Yes.
37:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I did, you do this over a pillow.
37:02 Chuck Nice? Right.
37:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you just rapidly drop your hands out.
37:05 Chuck Nice? Right.
37:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It doesn't have any angular momentum.
37:08 Chuck Nice? Right.
37:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it cannot turn over. It just falls on its back.
37:10 Chuck Nice? Really?
37:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But if you, but cats that jump or fall or tossed, there's always some movement of their body.
37:16 Chuck Nice? Right.
37:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that they can curl up the way an ice skater does.
37:19 Chuck Nice? Right.
37:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Pulling in their arms and they spin faster. The cat will pull in its arms, spin, get oriented because it knows which way it's falling, which way gravity goes. And then when its feet are down and then it opens up, stops rotating and then lands on all four feet.
37:34 Chuck Nice? Right.
37:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it's a, it's a simple act of, of skating physics applied to cats. But it needs some angular momentum to do this.
37:41 Chuck Nice? I do the same thing with my children.
37:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, is that right? And on their feet.
37:44 Chuck Nice? I always use a pillow, though.
37:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
37:47 Gary O'Reilly? And that's been our Cats on Ice show.
37:51 Gary O'Reilly? I hope you've enjoyed the physics and the madness. That's, that's another one. Right, so Super Bowl, while you're watching Super Bowl, while you're fixated on Brady and Goff leading their teams, just remember, just like us, they're playing with science.
38:22 Gary O'Reilly? Welcome back to Playing with Science and our look at the big game from a lot of different aspects, from the economics, from the physics, from the wonderful mind of Neil deGrasse Tyson. And what better way... To get to grips with Super Bowl itself than have a player's point of view.
38:42 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
38:42 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah. All right. So Brandon London, former NFL wide receiver, a man with a Super Bowl winner's ring, Chuck. So I think we're in the right place.
38:52 Chuck Nice? Yeah, we are. That's very, very cool. Hey, Brandon, how are you?
38:55 Speaker 05 I'm going great, man. Down here in sunny Orlando, Florida at the Pro Bowl, covering the Pro Bowl for the New York Giants.
39:03 Chuck Nice? Very nice. So, you know, we're talking about the big game, man. You've actually been, you know, from a player's standpoint, what is the run up to, what is the feel of the team? What is the run up to the, to the actual game itself? How do you keep emotions in check? What are these guys saying to one another? What's it like?
39:25 Speaker 05 Well, you know, since you have two weeks to prepare, 2007, our year, you get all the hard practices in that first week because that's when you're at your team facility. That's when you're in your city, you go through your basic routine and you try and keep everything the same. You know, you don't, you don't want to try and over emphasize it too much because then you start working in the guys nerves or guys trying to over prepare or, you know, you, you, you just, instead of going through your routine and doing the things that you're used to do, you, you, you get in the guys heads if you try and put too much pressure on them. So that first week, you know, you're working hard, you're going through your normal routine, then you fly out there. And that second week, you're still practicing and
40:10 Speaker 05 you're still going through some sort of a routine, but you're in a different practice facility. You're in a different place. You're not waking up at home with your family. You're waking up in a hotel room and then you throw in the media day and you throw in all the things that what some people would call distractions. You know, that, that last Super Bowl week, it could be filled with distractions because you're doing so much. So 07, my year, Tom Coughlin had us practice and then when we went out to Arizona, because that's where the Super Bowl was that, that year.
40:40 Gary O'Reilly? I was there.
40:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, it was, uh, I wouldn't say practice was a little bit lighter. You know, you don't want anyone to get hurt during that week, but you fine tune everything. You double checking everything, you're making sure that, you know, guys know what their job is, what the play is, what they're supposed to do, because the last thing you want is to have, lose the game off of a missed assignment in the Super Bowl.
41:06 Gary O'Reilly? Right.
41:06 Speaker 05 So you try and keep things relaxed, but at the same time, you already know, you're thinking, yeah, I'm going to the Super Bowl, I'm playing in the Super Bowl. So you just, you go through the same routine, but since it's the Super Bowl, man, once you run out that tunnel, the fireworks hit, those emotions, I don't care who you are, your emotions are running hot.
41:28 Gary O'Reilly? In the run up, in the week before, you're going through these practice drills, you're doing the things that you know you've got to do. But my experience involved in big games in terms of soccer, you're looking at the teammates around you, you're looking at the way your drills are going, and you're saying, you know what, we need to sharpen up, or this stuff is in such a sweet moment, this is gonna be beautiful. Did you get that vibe? Did you pick up on anything like that in the week running up to the big one?
41:58 Speaker 05 No, I, I've noticed everyone was pretty much focused. You know, going towards the end of that year, we had to go on a run just to make it into the playoffs.
42:07 Gary O'Reilly? Mm-hmm.
42:07 Speaker 05 So to us, it felt like every week was already a playoff game because it was a lose and you go home, sort of thing. And then when it comes to looking around at your teammates, you're not so much looking around at your teammates. Everyone knows that it's an accountability thing, where you have to look within yourself and make sure that you're prepared. You're not that guy, you know, you're not that guy that's messing up, you're not that guy that's dropping balls. You're not that guy that doesn't look like. He's preparing for a Super Bowl, you know, so I think one thing that helped us that year was being in the predicament we were in where we had to make that run towards the end of the season just to get in. So you look at it and we prepared just like it was
42:48 Speaker 05 any other week because for what eight weeks before that it was a lose and go or go home situation.
42:55 Chuck Nice? Mm hmm. I gotta ask you and you Gary. So you guys, when you're looking at a big game like that, how important is the coach to keeping the guys kind of focused and relaxed? You know, you talk about being relaxed. Uh, how important is the coach to making that happen for the players? Or is it really like you're like, hey, man, we're professionals? Like you gotta handle this on your own. How how does it go down?
43:19 Speaker 05 Well, first and foremost, you know, you're a professional. You you have to handle things. And then, like I said, it goes back to that accountability thing. I don't want to overuse that word, but that's that's a theme when it comes to playing professional football. Guys look at themselves. I have to be accountable. I have to make that play. I have to make that tackle, that sort of thing. But I think Tom Coughlin did a great job. Uh, not only during that week or two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, I think throughout that entire year with his demeanor and his temperament and the way he addressed the teams, you know, he he joked around a little bit and that's what people were saying was a little uncanny when it comes to Tom Coughlin, his personality. He joked a little
44:00 Speaker 05 bit, but at the same time, he's very stern. You know, he he made sure guys not only were on time for things, but you looked professional with the way you dress. You acted like a professional when you're in the building and when you're off, you know, you're out in the in the public eye as well. So I think that he did a great job, not only those two weeks, but just that year and getting guys ready to be a professional or in a be accountable in the biggest moments. And you saw guys all throughout the year step up and make big plays.
44:33 Gary O'Reilly? Interesting. Brandon, um, my experience, and you can maybe relate to this or say it's different. There are some individuals you got to bring down and some individuals you got to bring up and some individuals you just know just need steering just gently. Did Kaufman, did the staff know exactly which players to work with to just boost up, which ones they had to just keep a lid on, just keep them quiet?
45:00 Speaker 05 Not so much keep quiet. You you ask guys to when they're doing interviews, you ask them not to give another team billboard material or what we call locker room material. You know, you not call guys out, that sort of thing. Uh, I think during that year, we all did a great job of saying the right things to the press. Um, you, no one really got in trouble that year. There was no outside distraction when uh, it came to that. But I, like, like I said, professionalism, accountability. You know, you shouldn't, if you're in the NFL, no one should have to go and rev you up to get you up for a game because in, in, in the NFL, every game is a playoff game. You know, the first three games are so important
45:42 Speaker 05 as are just as important as the last three games because when you're talking about home field advantage throughout the playoffs or even trying to get a last wild card spot, you start off on three, you're, you're, and then you're having to fight the last three games, you know? So I, I, I think guys understand the situation they're in and you understand that the NFL is a high performance, high production, uh, league, high production business. So if you're not producing, you're on your way out of there. So whether you have to get yourself up or you have to calm yourself down, it's not up to a one grown man to go up to another grown man and try and get him revved up for a game. You understand the situation you're in. And then the thing is, he goes that A word again, the accountability
46:25 Speaker 05 word, because you're not just playing for yourself, you're playing for that guy across from you that just had a baby and could use that extra money, you know, for his family, that sort of thing. You're playing for that guy who, like, in case of Michael Strahan, you're playing with a guy who this is his last year, you want to, and he's such a great teammate, such a great mentor and leader, you want to play your butt off to make sure that he rides off in the sunset, sunset for the career that he had, that sort of thing. So the, the biggest thing Tom Coughlin did that year was getting guys to not only play for themselves, but playing for the guy that's right next to them.
47:02 Chuck Nice? So check this out, man. We're, uh, we're pretty much out of time here. We can't let you go. It's Wednesday before Super Bowl Sunday. Uh, we're looking at the Rams, we're looking at the Patriots. Uh, who do you like and why?
47:18 Speaker 05 Oh man, I'm team Tom Brady. I don't root for the Patriots, I root for Tom Brady. Yeah, that's the same reason why I rooted for Michael Jordan and I root for LeBron James. Because anyone, when they're chasing, or they're going for what they call that GOAT.
47:32 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
47:33 Speaker 05 Trying to be the greatest of all time. Like Jerry Rice, I want Tom Brady to play forever and I want him to shatter every record book there is. Because there's so many Tom Brady haters out there, and he just consistently goes out there and puts on some of the greatest performances we've ever seen. So, I think I'm blessed to be able to, I've been on the field against that guy a couple of times, not only in New York, but down in Miami, when I played with the Dolphins as well. And just you hear the stories about this guy and his preparation and how, you know, people say the separation is in the preparation, and that guy prepares. That's why he's the greatest. So I root for Tom Brady.
48:12 Chuck Nice? Okay, okay. Uh, let me just say that Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback of all time, and uh, I, I hope he suffers a humiliating defeat.
48:22 Gary O'Reilly? Brandon, you're dealing with an Eagles fan here, dude. This, this is a conversation that goes nowhere.
48:27 Chuck Nice? But I'm not a hater, I'm not a hater, Brandon. I was on the sideline the year you guys won the, uh, the, the Super Bowl in Arizona. And as an Eagles fan, I was standing on the giant sideline, and halftime, halftime, I was like, you know what? I'm jinxing these dudes. Let me go over to the Patriots sideline, and you guys won the game, so you're welcome. That's all I'm saying.
48:51 Gary O'Reilly? Brandon.
48:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, you know, there's, there's, there's bad luck, there's bad luck charms out there too. You know, luckily I had my rabbit's foot in my pocket and he went over to the other sideline.
49:00 Chuck Nice? There you go, buddy. There you go.
49:02 Gary O'Reilly? All right, Brandon, I hope you still got that rabbit's foot. Sounds like you had, because considering your acting and hosting TV shows, must be all good. Brandon London, thank you so much for your time and your insights on what it takes to be in Super Bowl.
49:16 Chuck Nice? And good luck in the rest of your career, man. I wish you all the best.
49:20 Gary O'Reilly? So Chuck, there you go. Yep. Super Bowl show. That's it. Whether your team's in it, whether your team is a winner come the end. We wish you the best of luck. Hope you've enjoyed it and we look forward to your company very, very soon. From Gary O'Reilly. And Chuck Nice. It's been Playing with Science. Bye, bye, bye.
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