UP557 Ed Smith: What Sport Got Wrong About Moneyball

0:00I'd witnessed at the sharp end of an industry, it could have been another industry, it could have been health, it could have been education, but as a sports person in my, principally in my 20s, I saw a gradual creeping scientism emerging, that things weren't true unless they could be notionally proved, and people would sort of drop out of the conversation unless there was some guy, yeah, but you know, how are you going to prove it? Well, actually, a lot of situations in life, the concept of scientific proof isn't really appropriate. It's not that you're against scientific proof, let alone being against science.

0:32It's just that it's not always appropriate. And therefore, you're dealing with something more approximate, something more general, something more based on experience, judgment, expertise, those types of concepts.

0:45Ed Smith:Hello, Richard Gillis here. That was Ed Smith, who is a regular visitor to Unofficial Partner. I remember being at an event when Gideon Haig, the great Australian cricket writer, introduced Ed on stage by saying probably the least interesting thing about Ed Smith is that he played cricket for England. And there is a truth there. Ed is an unusual hybrid in today's sports world. He's an academic. He left Cambridge with a double first in history, author of several excellent books, including Luck, Making Decisions and What Sport Tells Us About Life. He served as chief selector for England men's cricket from 2018 to 2021 and is the current president of the MCC.

1:32Ed Smith:And in 2019, he co-founded the Institute of Sports Humanities, which offers the Strategic Sport Leadership Masters. It's a programme that's designed for a lot of people who listen to this podcast, who are working in the industry of sport or want to, and are looking to accelerate their careers whilst continuing to work. So the applications for the next cohort, which starts at the end of September in 2026, are now open. And you can find out more by going to sportshumanities.org. Now, you don't need me to tell you that it's hot out in Britain at the moment. And the sound you can hear in the background of this recording is an industrial sized fan, which I had to have next to me in the studio because otherwise I'd have melted.

2:21Ed Smith:Otherwise, all you can hear is me and Ed Smith talking about the relationship between us human beings and tech and particularly AI. So it's a really interesting, varied conversation with a very interesting person. Welcome to Unofficial Partner.

2:41Where's the hottest you've played cricket? Malaysia, England A in Malaysia and then Perth. and it was, I reckon I played in 40 and actually 40 wasn't a lot of fun actually. I sort of think 35 today, you know, it's hard work but I actually remember being in Australia quite a bit and 35 is uncomfortable and 40 is like, it was like we just, everyone just, what are we doing kind of thing.

3:07Ed Smith:First of all, hello Ed, I recognise the backdrop. We did a podcast with Lord King, Mervyn King, didn't we here? And we'll probably touch on radical uncertainty and the concepts he and John Kay talk about in that book later. I remember it well. And so we've been talking over, well, quite a few years now. Over 10. I think we did at an event, didn't we, 10 or 12 years ago? We did. And then you sort of set up ISH. How long has that been going now? Well, we launched into the outside world in 2019, the World Cup year, England's World Cup year. And that was our first intake was autumn 2019. And so talking to you over that period of time, in parallel or just completely separately, we've been here talking a lot about AI.

3:55Yeah.

3:56Ed Smith:Because one of the things I wanted to talk about is just trying to get beyond some of the cliches that have grown up around AI in relation to sport and in the sports industry. And it seems to me that your argument is gaining traction. and I just wanted to sort of just land on what the argument is to begin with because you've got humanities in the title of the thing and it feels like there's a growth of what that might mean in relation to what we are now in terms of technology what do you think about that just give me a starting point sure so first of all sometimes you take a risk with a business or or even a title of a project and there's some instinct or feeling within you that that's broadly speaking the right place to be but you don't quite know why that was the case with with the institute of sports humanities ish which i can't say i predicted with any great clarity the detail of the world that we now live in now seven or eight years later but i did have a sense that if humanities broadly speaking were undervalued they were undervalued in several different contexts they were undervalued in universities and they were going to become more undervalued that's become more true they were undervalued inside elite sport and that was also going to become more true over time and they were also undervalued in the way we thought about effectiveness and I think that's become true for example I lived through the the COVID period as selector for England cricket and listening to politicians talk about what the science says in retrospect it's very obvious that there was no way of addressing those questions difficult as they were without the exercise of judgment and that science alone let alone data alone was never going to provide a complete or satisfactory solution to the balancing of short-term health long-term mental well-being the development of young people keeping schools open all those questions now in the case of sport i'd witnessed at the sharp end of an industry it could have been another industry it could have been health it could have been education but as a sports person principal my 20s i saw a gradual creeping scientism emerging that things weren't true unless they could be notionally proved and people would sort of drop out of the conversation unless there was some guy yeah but how are you going to prove it well actually a lot of situations in life the concept of scientific proof isn't really appropriate it's not that you're against scientific proof let alone being against science it's just that it's not always appropriate and therefore you're dealing with something more approximate something more general something more based on experience judgment expertise those types of concepts it feels like what we've lived through the Moneyball era.

6:55Ed Smith:We have. And there's a question, I think, in terms of whether we learned the right lessons or whether the sports industry has got it quite right and whether the book, it's a great book, but what are the longer term implications of that shift? Should we talk a little bit about Moneyball? So it's possible to really like the book and the film Moneyball and to admire Michael Lewis and the performance of Brad Pitt in the film and still have a conversation which looks at the sort of the other side of the coin. I don't think Michael Lewis would object to that either if he was part of this conversation.

7:29One reading of Moneyball is scouts are idiots, they're always wrong, they make it up as they go along. If it's not data, it's not real. Well, that's one reading. And I think that's, broadly speaking, not a very helpful way of thinking about decision making in sport. Because whilst they clearly, the Oakland Athletics, under Billy Bing, clearly gained an edge through using data and they expose some if you like you know they need some myth busting which was propagated by the scouts in an evolved decision making system today in elite sport you would want extremely good scouts you'd want extremely good data analysis you'd want extremely good science and medicine you want extremely good coach insight you've got extremely good understanding of team dynamics you'd want all those sources of information and i don't know anyone inside elite sport now he says I don't want to know what any scouts think about this at all that would be that would be mad so in actual fact the swing back has been yes data but that's one source of information and you don't want to be tilted too much towards only data so that's a more evolved reading of moneyball now at the time I think I think I reviewed the book I was still playing in in 2004 when it came out in the UK I think I was reading the spectator and then I did a little piece for the Today programme about it.

8:46And I said it may be that this is the high watermark of enlightenment overconfidence. That if you read Moneyball in the context of, for example, you just raised a paperback of John K and Mervyn King's book Radical Uncertainty, well, you could see Moneyball as belonging to a tradition which reaches a kind of apotheosis with the opposite of radical uncertainty, which is against the gods, the Bernstein book, which basically says we're getting better at risk it's it's a long-term sort of ascent of probabilistic reasoning and we're getting better and better and better with the odd hiccup but and of course King and Kay in Radical Uncertainty say actually no some areas of life have intrinsic radical uncertainty and probabilistic thinking is not necessarily appropriate isn't appropriate and I suppose if I look at what I was trying to do in in making decisions my reflections the book that reflected on my time as Chief Selector for England Cricket, I was trying to look at how do we blend some scientific strands and then also some, whether you call it the art of the science, would be a kind of easy cliche to reach for.

9:51Another way of thinking about this is through the lens of Ian McGilchrist's work who wrote The Matter With Things and then the previous book about left brain, right brain thinking, which basically argues that we've come to overestimate the kind of rational inverted commas precise method based left brain and underestimate the right brain which sees the whole and is approximately right and has a general conception of gestalt or overarching truth and that that is actually the foundation of most of what matters whether that's imaginative scientific innovation whether that's literary poetic truth whether that's how we understand people whether our instincts lead our kind of our more detailed analysis and it i think he's

10:47Ed Smith:broadly speaking correct i remember you mentioning the master and his emissary is that was the other book about left brain right yeah carry on no i was going to say that there was a you asked a question Someone asked you in Australia, when we've got AI, why do we need a selector? Something along those lines. It's a sort of a great classic question that is luring you down a particular route. And as I listened to the AI conversation is interesting because there is an assumption that it's endless progress. And now we're seeing a sort of a bit of a divergence of thought in terms of actually our language models the right lens or the entirely the right lens there are other ways of looking at ai and whatever and that's a that's part of the conversation we're having over on our chat up series which is a sort of about the tech but it does open up that question of there's a there's the judgment yes question and we're getting to the point of can you teach judgment is that because we're looking at i'm an ex-teacher i've just watched my daughter go through the education system university and i come away with some thoughts put it that way in terms of whether or how you teach what is required now so there's a lot in that but let's talk about that let's talk about that so so obviously the question was put to me actually was how much longer will it be we were just at a house very near the mcg and i was working for england cricket and it was england they tour in the alliance tour and a friend of mine's house how much long will it be till the england team is selected by an algorithm is actually what he said so he was kind of still in the money ball era we weren't talking sort of ai then but the same point stands secondly can judgment be taught well okay so that's a theme that runs through someone who who i knew quite well when i was selecting a team howard marx and his his oak tree newsletters about investment and and he often takes quite a sceptical view, despite having been a great inspiration to people on the subject of judgment, says, can second level thinking really be taught?

12:56Maybe not. Well, hold on a second. You could say that the whole of the humanities is actually about honing judgment. So let's look at some undervalued approaches. The concept of criticism is pretty central to the humanities. Obviously, we think of literary criticism, but also if you think about the historian as a critic. He's got to work out what is important. You know, there is no such thing as a complete history. We don't have time to capture a complete history because it would be everything that's ever happened. So what you leave out and what you put in is a hugely significant aspect of any historical interpretation.

13:37Now, one of the things I've found, let's put this now into the real world, leading sports organisations or sports teams. If you want to succeed inside a sports team I think understanding the team or the organization's identity is going to be very important and people often talk about connecting well it's a lot easier to connect with something that you understand you understand how it came to be what it is today do you understand what England cricket is and all the different types of people and traditions interpretations perspectives that go into England cricket we could you know we could go into much more detail than we have time today about concert amateur professional north south batter bowler the whole thing do you understand all of that do you have his englishness yeah do you understand do you have an understanding of that and then are you able to tell a story about its future which is authentic which feels like it's building on that tradition so you can almost see a sports team as kind of like a state where does it have a sense of progress trajectory direction now i don't think that can be done without understanding how it is today um and there's therefore there's a historical question now we can also look at that same question through the lens of tactics when i came into into the selector role in 2018 england had picked loads and loads of new batsmen debutants and they'd played a few games and I'm talking about 10 or 15 people opening the batting or batting in the top three and none of them had stayed in the team for very long now all of those selections actually were perfectly sensible I was working a little bit as a commentator at that time I'd seen them play and you could see that the selectors didn't have a necessarily a better option but none of them had really stayed in the team as a long-term partner to Alistair Cook or a replacement for Jonathan Trott who'd been a very successful number three.

15:33So then I come in and well, people are saying, oh, is data going to find the next number three or the next thing? I said, hang on a minute, before we come to the data, let's talk about the history. What's the likelihood that I'm going to go up the road to Leicester or Sussex and say, oh, we found Ricky Ponting or we found Viv Richards, but no one had spotted him before. The last guys weren't idiots. And that's actually the foundational first step is usually your predecessors are expert and they have a lot of strong characteristics in terms of their decision making and you may have a slightly different view to them about a particular selection but they're not completely in the wrong place and with that humility that sort of historically informed humility they're gonna say okay how am I going to find the edge where is the edge is it going to be a bit of data a bit of scouting a bit of imagination maybe putting some pieces in places that have seemed a bit unconventional or innovative or risk-taking.

16:25But I think with most teams, however interested you are in innovation, however interested you are in creativity, usually it's anchored in an understanding of what the team is, how it became what it is, and its DNA as a group.

16:43Ed Smith:Do you think that cricket, and it's a bit like baseball, I know you've written a book about cricket and baseball. But one of the obvious points to make is that it's that individual game is more exposed. So the data is seemingly more easily readable. I can say Ed Smith's average was this. He hit this percentage on the leg side. I can go in granulary on every player. And whether or not that helps when you're looking at the bigger story, which is the team, because you then got to make decisions about, well that players looks vulnerable if we just go on the data but actually we're a worse team if he isn't there or she isn't there what do you think about that as a because cricket unlike football it it feels a bit well it's they're still at play in other sports but cricket is much more pronounced in that way because it's just the averages and there's the data is much easier to to get hold of yeah cricket lends itself well to statistical analysis always has done and still does because you know what you're saying there about cricket and baseball is that it's full of discrete events the event is completely captured a ball and it was bowled by one person and faced by another and if you have enough of those events in a data sample you're going to get some useful insights from that however we also know that we then need to ask some very good questions of that data so give you two examples which we used to think a lot about at england one was okay but what were the conditions in which these data events happened so you know we we use a system called weighted averages which effectively translating raw averages into context so if a batsman scored his runs in a very difficult ground for batting his runs were worth more than someone who got runs at a place that was very easy for batting and flip side for a bowler.

18:43These are all perfectly common sense concepts. Nathan Lehman just translated common sense into numbers. And he wrote an algorithm which helped to make averages more useful and more predictive about how people go on to perform at international cricket. And then, of course, there's the question of looking for compounds rather than mixtures, which is your point about teams. Now, there are two dimensions to that the first is the kind of nebulous team spirit with something about him he's a winner he makes brings the best out of others and we can have an argument about that there's something in it and of course it's also sometimes used inappropriately and sometimes you think hang on i mean actually i'll have the 11 good players thanks very much and you know you know i mean then they're into the team spirit and illusion a glimpse in victory so there's something true about this question of character and making other people better but it can also be abused as a concept however where i think there's a bit more mileage all the time is in compound effects in terms of competency so we know for example that cricket teams which have a varied bowling attack in test cricket in other words cricket teams which present the opposition with a broad set of challenges spin pace left arm right arm extreme pace movement high release point etc that stresses is opposition batsman which was something again intuitively that's not difficult to understand i remember it very well as a batsman when i'd be batting okay and then a left arm fast bowler would come on and i'd think hang on a minute i'm going well here let's stick with let's stick with the right armers please just a bit more right arm over 80 miles an hour i'm happy and then you think well that's kind of the point of the captaincy to make it hard for me and that stuck with me of course and then you try and in terms of constructing a team you think about what adds up to in the cliche more than the sum of the parts put differently you're looking for for for lego players who fit together who help a team fit together you're looking for compound effects and that's a multi sort of dimensional conversation now it's also true that some of those points are informed and deepened by understanding the data they're not all the preserve of of intuition by any means and in actual fact I think one of the biggest misconceptions about if we talk about just about the money baller for a moment one of the most useful things you can get from from really effective data analysis is an understanding of trends so in other words it's often a big picture conversation rather than an extremely narrow conversation people think it's going to be a bit more like well should we pick Richard or should we pick Ed for the next match I've not seen that many people say I'm just going to go on the data there because normally coaches and selectors and captains have their own views and that data will be part of that conversation but I've never seen it be the whole story where I think data can open your eyes or help you to see the x-ray picture is the game is changing in this way and you used to be able to get away with x but now you're going to need y and if you're not on that or even better ahead of that curve you're going to be struggling so so sometimes you you want your you want your best data thinkers to almost challenge your deepest understanding of the sport and make it uncomfortable for you so that there's a side of all of us anyone who's who's been involved with the sharp end that is happiest when we're kind of metaphorically chatting in the pub with our friends about how we used to do it or we need people around us who are going to challenge us hard on on the

22:23Ed Smith:assumptions of those conversations let's let's push that into a sort of work and education environment because one of the the sort of tropes is that ai is going to divide us into sort of well it will commoditize lots of people's jobs and if you're on the wrong side of that there's there's a grim future for you but then there's another future where it takes another story which takes away the grind and leaves us with the good bits and the good bits being interesting creative decision making all of those things that you've talked about what do you think about that lens is never a binary but increasingly those things are that's in play and it there's a sort of follow on about we teach our kids and how we look at universities and what the role is there because i just let's let's get into that a bit yeah take the general make it specific in those realms let's um well first of all both the points you make have some truth in them so let's look at the downside first of all or the challenge i do envisage a world in which ai becomes increasingly dominant which looks overwhelmingly likely where there's considerable challenges around purpose I think it's not difficult to to project forward and and think that many though never all sort of comfort needs will be met things will be delivered in an even more frictionless way than now some aspects of production will not exactly be solved but they'll be less problematic than they have been traditionally and therefore the question will increasingly become what do I want to do what gives my life a sense of purpose and meaning which of course connects with the other side of the coin where if the challenge is going to be purpose and meaning I think that's where the humanities and the arts for that matter and sport all have incredible value so let's talk about to use a again a slightly slangy investor term why am I long humanities long the arts long sport let's take them in turn the other day you're a teacher Richard both my parents teachers my mum was an art teacher my dad a novelist and an English teacher and one of the great things that was ever said to me was by an English teacher who said to me my job as an English teacher is to be a seller of books.

24:55If I leave people with a love of reading, I've succeeded. And although it wasn't my father who said that, he did that incredibly well for his pupils and inspired many people to have. If we piled all the thank you letters up, it would be higher than the ceiling in this room. And the other day I was with my mum and dad and a bunch of their friends who taught with them in schools and shared a similar worldview. And it started off with them being quite gloomy about politics and about leadership and about the state of the world. I said, hang on a minute, guys, take a step back you guys have been right about everything we'd go past a computer room in the 1980s and say they don't look very well in there I'm not sure that's a good place to hang out you had total skepticism about the kind of pre-financial crash we've solved the risk everyone's going to get rich forever the allocation of risk has been optimized you thought it was complete nonsense you didn't even know what they were talking about but you thought it was nonsense because you didn't trust it you used to use five pencils to write your novels with because you thought there was something about touching or scratching the lead onto the paper that was good for you and then you'd send your novel off to get typed by by a typist so you've believed in looking at paintings acting in plays playing in sports teams living life on your own two feet touching things living them an embodied life enriched by creativity in all different domains physical artistic whatever you're going to be proved more right than any of us all of us that dabbled with kind of were quite sort of drawn to a bit of pseudoscience because it was sexy 20 years ago and everyone was writing books about everything was being decoded and demystified and turned into a science and pop science was the was the genre that everyone was being told they should write which thankfully never completely landed with me but but you can see in retrospect how how much people were getting dragged that way well it's looking pretty shot to bits now because what are we actually going to be doing with our time?

26:47Where are we going to find meaning? First of all, it was intellectually shown to be dubious. And secondly, then in an age of AI, what's going to bring value to our lives? What's going to make us feel human? Now let's talk about the humanities. I would say which evidence matters, how to weigh and balance different potentially legitimate sources of evidence and then how do you actually communicate convey inspire information into a story that's compelling and people want to follow they're all questions that this humanities can help with let's talk about sport for a moment one of the things that's sort of been so obvious we've not bothered to touch on yet is that if you'd said to me 30 years ago when when i was at my first year at university that sport which I was very interested in and was already some kind of professional um would be what it is today and there would be a thing called the Indian Premier League in which the teams were worth 1.7 billion dollars and the Premier League would be what it is today and viewership of sport would be what it is and that it would have become such a dominant aspect of wider culture and the world's common language and all the rest I would have said well I like my sport, but that's just ridiculous.

28:03You've got this way out of line, but it has. Now, I think sport in the age of AI is one of the most anti-fragile industries you could imagine. We, you know, the MCC, which I'm currently involved with this year, sold 49 % of the London Spirit franchise to a group of investors, sort of nicknamed the Tech Titans. And one of them, in a conversation with me in the winter pointed out to the middle at lords and said that's not going anywhere that green grass that and he didn't mean the ground he meant people being on the grass competing live with jeopardy with uncertainty baked into the story

28:47Ed Smith:and then it being streamed broadcast and all the rest of it and without revealing names it that coalition is made up of the people who run Google, Microsoft. Yeah, Satya Nadella, Nikesh, Aurora, all the rest. So they're probably, they've internalised the logic of the premise of your podcast, Richard, that tech is unavoidable. You might think of the digital world and the world of AI as like gravity. There's no point wishing it away. However, it still leaves a big question, which is what's going to be the thing that makes us feel human? and sport has as itself and has in the past with in the way it's ridden other technological revolutions to its own benefit has has sort of emerged from this period stronger bigger more central than ever and there's that great line by Leonard Cohen he said in the 60s music was the mode the way we understand heroes and today it's sport that was 1988 so he probably did see where it was going ahead of time so sports grow massively and will continue to do so and now Now, if you think about your children, have a 12-year-old and a 10-year-old, they play cricket, they play football, they play golf, whatever.

29:55If they said to me, well, actually, I'm spending all day on Sunday. I'm going to be playing sport pretty much all day with my friends. There's no part of me that is anything other than happy. Yes, you hope they might squeeze some time in to do something else as well, maybe read a bit or whatever. But the idea that might have been around 40 years ago that that was insufficiently intellectual, or whatever, that's shot to bits because they're living in the real world with real people standing on the ground using their body and mind, having fun, playing, you know, becoming more human.

30:27Ed Smith:Sport as the last human product is a line that I put that into, ironically, into Claude, my AI idiot assistant, and it came out of a nice line, sport as the last human product. I've no idea what it means and whether it's true or not, but it's a flatter, it's a sort of line that AI conjures up quite often. but that sort of captures a bit of what you're saying it feels that it is becoming increasingly successful human product and my co-founder at the institute andrew white who's an entrepreneur and philanthropist he he said to me one of the first times i met him sports the last live event which actually is extremely smart too because that's the value it's like not knowing what happens and of course in an atomized world people doing things together becomes incredibly precious and then we understand that feeling of walking to the stadium or even just all watching television together and a summer night which we're having now knowing that all the tvs are tuned into the england game particularly if you're in a city and you hear the kind of cheers go around the street with all the windows open that's a particular type of communal experience too wonder when i look at the institute when people in their 20s and early 30s second people have sort of come out of university they've done the university thing in whatever discipline they are they want to get into the sports business and some of them get in touch with me and other people and i'm never quite sure what to say to them because you've got the universities who are sort of on the whole pushing for them to do more master's type degrees in whatever they've done in the past.

32:10Ed Smith:You've got the MBA as a route, and it felt like what you were doing is a sort of a point of difference in that world. And I'm really interested in what you see when you look at when sport or the sports business enters the university, what directions people get pointed and what the incentives are at play within a university what they're teaching and how they go about it well look all of that's true and i think we're living through a moment of imminent disruption in education without doubt and obviously ai is going to be part of that and i also think cost is going to come down people are going to be able to study lots of things very cheaply but can they get special experiences cheaply maybe not maybe there's a there's still going to be a stronger place than ever for really challenging high-level conversation which they're not going to get on on Claude or ChatGPT or whatever so look first of all universities are big bureaucracies of course they are they have to set up in certain ways and they have schools and they have departments and they then have to slot courses into them now so someone like me and something like ISH which is independent and has several university partners and the reason we're talking today is we're you know we're we have a cohort coming up a new intake for strategic sport leadership in this autumn um now we fit between lots of places where sports traditionally been so when i was a player and they made me captain at middlesex i sort of this is going back nearly 20 years more than 20 years and you know where can I go and study so when I lead the guys out I feel like I've actually been stretched a little bit as a leader before I'm doing and I couldn't really find any work because you get sort of sports science and sports marketing you know okay but what about bringing it all together what about the leadership bit we're drawing on lots of different disciplines and then when I was teaching a history program 10 years later now in my late 30s I was like sports stuck in various silos but it's always cutting across and connecting across all these disciplines and And the people you want to be leading in the sports industry, whether that's on the business side or the high performance side, they're going to need to draw on all of it.

34:22So I'll give you two very simple examples. One, if you're making a decision about the playing side of sport, we've just touched on it. It's going to be a data question. Any interesting question is going to have some data in it, some scouting in it, some coaching site in it, some team dynamics inside it, some psychology. And it's going to be everything and probably a bit of history and sort of group understanding, too. and if you're on the business side of it and say you were you know running a big team you're going to need to understand where's the team been where is it now where is it going to and then we'll think about how we might do some communication around it but if you start with the what's a good PR strategy but we don't know what it is we don't know what the team is we don't know what the the entity is well good luck with that actually you've got no chance because you're just going to be empty it's just going to be a bunch of superlatives like dangling from nothing so i would say in all these ways an understanding of humanities is going to give you a significant edge inside the sports industry and i think that's becoming more and more true now that ai can automate some of the grunt work a lot of the grunt work if you think about it in all of our work lives the visualization of decks and it can all be done so easily and so quickly what can't be done easily and quickly is actually the deep understanding what's going on here what really matters and and i think that's where the concept of judgment which has been honed and trained through the humanities has an edge.

36:00Ed Smith:So when I talk to, so Andy Shorer is my co-host on our AI series, and he's there at the front end, 21st group, they're doing lots of, they're making things in sport and they're really at the sharp end of the tech. And he uses the term orchestration a lot, which again, I think is quite a nice word that captures some of what you're talking about in terms of the rose-tinted view of the future is that we move to a position where we are orchestrating the various things and that it will need, there's a sort of cross-curricular aspect to this. And you're right in that from the age of five, we are put through funnels of lessons of subject-related curricula, which is just so difficult.

36:45Ed Smith:I mean, it's such a fundamental thing that is going to have to change for that to be able to capitalise on that. I think that's absolutely correct. And I hadn't heard that term, but I think it's useful. I'll come back to the idea of a conductor in a minute. It's quite a funny story from a book written by a conductor. If I turn that into like working in sport, I've done some work with Palantir Technologies in football. I won't go into the detail about what we do for obvious reasons, but they have an incredibly powerful AI platform. And I was with a leading sports data analyst the other day, and we were looking at some queries on their AI platform involving curated data.

37:27So it's not publicly available data, it's data that has been specifically put in and then linked. So there's no kind of rubbish internet sort of noise in there. One of the things that emerged very quickly was that the process of gaining insights from those AI query tools is close to instant. And it's incredible. and then the visualization of those insights is also instant so if you say who's better x or y by these 10 criteria obviously that's a question which needs to be the right question with the right criteria and then we'll actually make it look so that make it look in a certain way that it fits to my iphone and the head coach is going to enjoy looking at it that also takes two seconds which of course leads you to a to a conclusion which we've circled around which is that you're going to end up with a relatively small number of creative thinkers asking really good questions of incredibly powerful platforms with curated data so if they are acting in the form of an orchestrator or a conductor now in the wrong hands it doesn't no matter how powerful the tool is it's not going to lead to very useful insights but in the right hands you're going to get places a lot more quickly than would have happened in the money ball era when you then have to set to work a large team of data scientists to build algorithms before you get the insights.

38:55That's the bit that's been automated. So it's almost like the creative questioner straight to the platform leading to useful insights.

39:04Ed Smith:Yeah. And again, there's the question, I guess, a difficult question is how you train judgment when that sort of apprenticeship layer has been removed. So how you get to a point to know which questions are the right questions. If you haven't been through the process of training, if that's been commoditized, if AI is sort of absorbing the entry level knowledge production rungs of the ladder, then now people can jump. Should we talk about that? So obviously that's a very common concern in areas like the law, isn't it when we're given that AI is doing so much legal work which used to be done by people at the lower end of the profession how do those people then get to the top of the profession because they're not getting the experiences so how would you work around that in the context of the humanities moving away from law now thinking about sport and the humanities and the work we do I would say two things put yourself in an environment which is going to lead you to ask better questions so in other words find a way to be challenged by the company you keep now that could be informal or formal that it could be that you have the most incredible group of friends and the conversations you have at the pub are all you need but that's not there aren't many people in that category so in actual fact put yourself in the way of institutionalized challenge put yourself in really intelligent interesting rooms which are going to help you to ask better more useful questions that's point one point two get your hands dirty as soon as you can so a little bit like was it David Hockney who said never come home without having painted a face drawn a face in the same way you need to be practicing and experiencing trial and error all the time as much as you can put yourself forward for experiences it may be those experiences are unpaid at the beginning it may be that they carry personal risk in terms of you might stuff up and look foolish but without cycles of having succeeded and having failed you're not going to be able to have that deep confidence when it matters when you are at the top of the tree so maybe we have to find our own pathways yeah actually let's just draw an analogy there so let's take you know it's a very common term in elite sport pathways I've always been ambivalent at best about the term pathway because it sounds a bit like you get on a treadmill at a young age and then it bundles you out in a professional sports team down the line.

41:33It's not like that. What you actually need is loads of experiences. And basically what top sports people have is they've had loads of experiences and they've managed to find a way to make use of them and benefit from them. Well, using that framework, that's what we need to do in our professional lives off the pitch too. We need to put ourselves in the way of experiences and then find value in them. And we're going to find it much easier to do that if we're asking the right questions and we've had support in honing our creativity and our imagination and our judgment.

42:10Ed Smith:There's a sort of promise of, I don't know if I'm using the right term, singularity, but there is something alluring about the AI conversation in every world education is one in health is another where you're saying actually we're in a world of averages and what this is promising to me is that this diet this selection of drugs this educational curriculum is tailored exactly to me and not the person next to me it's not to it's not to the middle it's individual and that is is again you that's something that is incredibly appealing if it ever happens i'm wondering i'm saying appealing i know what the implication the broader implications are but there is something quite beguiling and that is quite often when you hear the people who are running the sort of language models and you the mark Andreasen's of this world who are sort of backing and putting all the money in.

43:12Ed Smith:That's part of what their argument is, is that we're moving away from a world of where we're just being and always have been just because of necessity. Like a university, as you say, is just a series of bureaucracies, a series of departments and students are funneled in, it's a crude way of putting it. But there's a sort of sausage factory element to lots of bits of our lives, which actually the AI is promising to get beyond. So we're getting to a highly personalized relationship with my doctor. So I go to my doctor and because he or she has got my details down in front of them, there is a specific regime that I'm following, which isn't, this is the sort of thing that a bloke of my age with my background should be doing.

44:01Ed Smith:Interesting. I think certainly I would say that we're nearing the end of the turning education into factories and anyone believing in that so you said one thing then about what universities are I mean one way of thinking about a university particularly beyond kind of the laboratory or the the hard science end of it is the university is kind of a serendipity engine isn't it where it forces people together in those collisions those accidents they exchange information that they otherwise wouldn't have exchanged which helps them in their own work and sometimes if you if you drive out of a town and you're on a ring road and you see a university hall of residence and you just see people on the computer in a strip lit room you kind of think well is that really are they gaining anything from that that they couldn't gain by signing up to a you know an online course or an actual fact when I think about my own university education it was the people who who made me think that intellectual life was interesting that it was cool and that they would challenge me to a point that they would irritate me and I'd sort of spend time thinking about it in my own head and by the time I saw them next time I'd kind of like moved on and had better arguments now to me that's that's pushing you to be smarter and and to have deeper arguments which are the kinds of skills we're going to need in in the age of in the age of incredibly cheap commoditization of information but i'd never have any fear that ai will be able to do these things on its own i i i without getting into a long debate about a term or trying to define singularity machines are machines they're going to get better at being machines human beings are human beings and i have total confidence that we will remain special and different i think what's going to happen is that we're going to accidentally discover with greater clarity what it is that makes us human and what makes us feel good and i think we'll be surprised at the answers and surprised in a good way i would say so let's finish off with a very practical question which is what do people do to get onto the is it september when is when does the term start and how do they how do people well our website sportshumanities.org it's all there yeah they could obviously look at testimonials from our previous students and probably just one story from the last 10 days is quite interesting.

46:50I was at the Oval to watch one of our current students, Matt Fisher, playing a test match and played pretty well, got 50 and chipped in with wickets too. I was at Lords last night to watch one of our former students, Heather Knight, who used to captain England playing the T20 World Cup and was obviously a very successful England captain, had a great year when she was studying with us actually. And then probably left field, But one of the most satisfying experiences I've ever had is one of our students in Saudi Arabia is deputy minister, actually, in the sports ministry. And her work on innovation in sport kind of grew out of a series of conversations we'd had collectively in the group.

47:29And then she'd applied it to the future of women's sport in Saudi Arabia. and I'd never actually seen our ideas as an institute or if you like some of my ideas had been sort of translated into something new and different so effectively I thought that was the most which as you all know as a teacher is that you don't really want to see your own ideas just reflected back to you which is not interesting but when they've become something bigger and better and different you kind of think wow so I think we we draw in people from the administration of sport the business of sport to the sharp end the players captains coaches as well and i think one of the things that we've circled around today is that network itself becomes very interesting we know ish uh sort of alums of share boards in sport they often work in executive roles together their friendships will help them even if their their particular sports organizations are only analogous rather than actually working together they can share experiences and I think that's the the value that's one of the the forms of value of studying the humanities that your your peers your cohort your predecessors your successors will be facing similar problems similar challenges working out where's their value and sometimes the ability to talk to someone who really knows they don't know the answer but they know the experience we've probably found this in when we're having professional challenges whether that's in teaching or business it's very unlikely that someone's going to be able to tell you what to do better than you can do it would be odd if you said i don't know what to do and someone says do this and you go okay it's probably not going to be that way but someone who can say i understand and i had a an analogous set of experiences which i'm going to talk to you about and maybe you'll find some value and some use in that and you'll be able to pick it out and then and reapply it in your own context that's what friends do that's what teachers do and that's what effective educators do i think and whether that's peer-to-peer or whether that's teacher-to-peer but going back to some of our themes earlier on actually a friend of mine at an ai firm said to me the other day he said you've always had pretty intense skepticism about middle management we're busy killing them off and and he said it kind of with a lightness but he said input's not output output's not value and that's a good summary so a lot of people are attached to busy work if you've always been skeptical about that like i hate recurring meetings i've never really understood the need to tell people what you're doing you know anyone that begins a meeting with i've done this i've done that i'm like my god well you've already lived it and now you're telling me about it as well i must be agony all that time could be spent actually thinking harder grappling more deeply and hopefully hopefully coming up with better solutions so i think whilst i'm not blind to to to some of the threats and of course some people who don't have the opportunity to retrain at a later stage of their career that they face much bigger and and more difficult problems with ai i'm not making light of that but personally speaking and for people who are like a bit like me uh or who have a humanities background and they're young and are still forging their identity in their career i i see ai as playing to the strength of people who have imagination creativity and judgment and therefore basically i'm excited this course is going to be a bumpy ride and we're not going to be able to cling on to protected career journeys which are going to be there for 50 years both my grandfathers had one job teachers both teachers had my head teachers as well i've had about 10 already and I'm only 48 and probably my kids will have more than that so we're going to have to get used to living with uncertainty particularly around where your value is how you're going to charge people fees what's your job going to be because it's not going to be a job in the way that it used to be probably which was the great insight of the management thinker Charles Handy when he said look for customers not bosses that that if you're looking for bosses you're looking to the last generation of industries.