Unofficial Partner Podcast

UP557 Ed Smith: What Sport Got Wrong About Moneyball

• Richard Gillis

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AI commoditises knowledge production and throws judgment into scarcity. In this episode, Ed Smith asks what that means for sport, education and the people building careers in the business — and why the humanities might be the most undervalued edge in an age of machines.

About the guest

Ed Smith is an unusual hybrid in today's sports world. An academic, he left Cambridge with a Double First in History, and is the 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. In 2019 he co-founded the Institute of Sports Humanities, which offers the Strategic Sport Leadership Master's — a programme designed for ambitious sports industry executives looking to accelerate their careers while continuing to work. Applications for the next cohort, starting at the end of September, are now open: sportshumanities.org

What we cover

  • The Moneyball hangover. Why the lazy reading of Billy Beane — "scouts are idiots, if it's not data it's not real" — was always wrong, and how elite sport has swung back to data as one source among many, not the whole story.
  • The limits of scientism. Ed on "creeping scientism," the idea that nothing's true unless it can be proved — and why some decisions (COVID policy, selection calls) carry intrinsic radical uncertainty that probability can't resolve.
  • Can judgment be taught? The case that the entire humanities tradition — criticism, history, weighing competing evidence — is really an apparatus for honing judgment, the skill AI makes scarce rather than obsolete.
  • Orchestration and the curated platform. What happens when a creative questioner goes straight to a powerful AI platform with curated data — near-instant insight — and why the bottleneck becomes asking the right question.
  • The apprenticeship gap. If AI absorbs the entry-level rungs of knowledge work (in law, in sport), how does anyone climb to the judgment seat at the top? Ed's two answers: institutionalised challenge, and getting your hands dirty early.
  • Sport as the last human product. Why Ed is "long sport" in the age of AI — live, embodied, uncertain competition as the most anti-fragile asset there is — and why the Tech Titans buying into London Spirit were buying the green grass, not the gadget.
  • The purpose problem. As production gets frictionless, meaning becomes the scarce good. Where the humanities, the arts and sport come into their own.
  • Careers without bosses. Charles Handy's "look for customers, not bosses," the death of the 50-year career path, and what an ideal student looks like: someone who doesn't know what's coming but trusts they can cope with it.

People, books & ideas referenced

  • John Kay & Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty · Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods
  • Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things (and his left-brain/right-brain work)
  • Michael Lewis, Moneyball · Howard Marks, Oaktree memos · Charles Handy
  • Institute of Sports Humanities — MA delivered with Loughborough University London

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Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

I'd witnessed, at the sharp end of an industry, it could've been another industry, it could've been health, it could've 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 w- you know, how are you gonna 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 m- more based on experience, judgment, expertise, those types of concepts.

Hello, Richard Gillis here. That was Ed Smith, who is a regular visitor to Unofficial Partner. I remember being at an event when Gideon Hague, 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. 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 sports humanities.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. 'cause otherwise I'd have melted. 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.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

Where's the hottest you've played cricket?

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

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

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

First of all, Hello, Ed. I recognize the backdrop

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

We did a podcast with um, Lord King, Mervyn King, didn't we here? And we'll probably touch on Radical Uncertainty and, and the concepts he and John Kay talk about in that book later

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

Remember it well. And so we've been talking over well, quite a few years now, and

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

I think we did at an event, didn't we? 10 or 12 years ago. Yeah

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

We did. And w- then you sort of set up ISH, how long has that been going now?

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

Well, we launched sort of i- you know, into the outside world in, in 2019, the, the World Cup year, England's World Cup year, and that was, that was our first intake was autumn 2019

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

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,

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

Yeah

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

'Cause 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 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

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

So, so first of all, sometimes you, you take a risk with a business or a, 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. Th- that was the case with, with the Institute of Sports Humanities,ISH. W- which, I can't say I predicted w- 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 humanities, broadly speaking, were undervalued. They were undervalued in several different contexts. undervalued in universities, and they were gonna become more undervalued. That's become more true. They were undervalued inside elite sport, that was also gonna become more true over time. 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 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. that science alone, let alone data alone, was never gonna provide a complete or satisfactory solution to the balancing of short-term health, long-term mental wellbeing, the development of young people, keeping schools open, all those questions. Now, in the case of sport, I, I'd witnessed, at the sharp end of an industry, it could've been another industry, it could've been health, it could've been education, but as a sports person 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 w- how are you gonna 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 m- more based on experience, judgment, expertise, those types of concepts.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

It feels like what we've lived through the Moneyball era

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

have

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

and there's a question, I think, in terms of whether we learnt the right lessons or whether the, 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?

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

Shall we talk a little bit about Moneyball? So it's

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

Yeah

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

really like the book and the film Moneyball, and to admire Michael Lewis and, and the performance of Brad Pitt in the film, still have a conversation which looks at the, sort of the other side of the coin. I don't think, Michael Lewis would, would object to that either if he was part of this conversation. One 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 they clearly, the Oakland Athletics under Billy Beane clearly gained an edge through using data, and they exposed some, if you like, you know- They did 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'd want extremely good coach insight, you'd want extremely good understanding of team dynamics. You'd want all those sources of information. And, I don't know anyone, uh, inside elite sport now who says, "I don't wanna 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, and you don't wanna be tilted too much towards only data. So that's a more evolved reading of, of Moneyball. Now, at the time, I think, I, I think I reviewed the book... I was still playing in, in 2004 when it came out in the UK. I think I was... I wrote it in The Spectator, and then I did a little piece for the Today program about it. And I said, it may be that this is the high water mark of enlightenment over confidence, that if you, if you read Moneyball in the context of, for example, you just raised a, a paperback of of John Kay 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 that's... 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, know, some scientific strands and then also some, whether you call it the art or the science would be a kind of, easy cliche to, to, to reach for. way of thinking about this is, is through lens of Ian McGilchrist's work, who, 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, it, I think he's broadly speaking correct.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

I remember you mentioning

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

The

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

at

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

is the, was the other book

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

the m- okay.

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

carry on

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

No, I was gonna say that there was a... You were asked a question, Someone asked you in Australia, when we've got AI why do we need a selector? Something along those lines.

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

yeah

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

is a sort of, a, the, the, a great classic question of that, that is luring you down a particular, particular route. And as I listen to the the AI conversation is interesting because there is an assumption that it's, it's endless progress." And now we're seeing a, a sort of a bit of a divergence of thought in terms of actually are 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 in, 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

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

Yes

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

question, and we're getting to the point of can you teach judgment is a, 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 just let's talk about that

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

let, let's talk about that. So, so obviously, the question that 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 a- and it was England A tour, England Lions tour, and it was a friend of mine's house. "How much longer 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 Moneyball era. We weren't talking to the AI then, but the same point stands. Secondly, can judgment be taught? Well, okay, so th- that's a theme that runs through, someone who, who, who I knew quite well when I was selecting the team, Howard Marks, and his, his Oak Tree newsletters about investment. And, and he often takes quite a skeptical view, despite having been a great inspiration to people on the subject of judgment. Says, "Can second-level thinking really be taught? Maybe 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 gotta work out is important. know, th- is no such thing as a complete history. We don't have time to, to capture a complete history, 'cause it would be everything that's ever happened. what you leave out and what you put in is a hugely significant aspect of any historical interpretation. Now, one of the things I've found, let's put this now into the real world, leading sports organizations or sports teams. If you wanna succeed inside a sports team, I think understanding the team or the organization's identity is gonna 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, we could go into more detail than we have time to today about, concept of amateur, professional, north, south, batter, bowler, the whole thing. Do you understand all of that?

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

what is Englishness?

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

yeah, do you understand, do you have an understanding of that? And then are you able to tell a story its future which is authentic, which feels like it's building on that tradition? So you can almost see a, a sports team as kind of like a, a state where does it have a, a sense of- Progress, trajectory, direction. Now, I don't think that can be done without understanding how it is today. 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 we're 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 Alastair Cook or, or as, or, or a replacement for Jonathan Trott, who'd, who'd been a very successful number three. So then I come in, and well, people are saying, "Oh, is data gonna find the next number three or the next eight men?" 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 gonna 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 your, your predecessors expert, and they have a lot of 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, then you say, "Okay, how am I gonna find the edge? Where is the edge? Is it gonna be a bit of data, a bit of scouting, a bit of imagination? Maybe putting some pieces in places that have, seem a bit unconventional or innovative or risk-taking?" But I think with most teams, however interested you are in innovation, however interested you are, 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 a- a- a- as a group

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

Do you think that cricket, and it's a bit like, 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, 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 granularly on every player, and whether or not that helps when you're looking at the bigger story, which is the team, because you then gotta make decisions about, well, that player's 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... 'Cause cricket, unlike football, it, it feels a bit... Well, it's, it, they're still at play in other sports, but cricket is much more pronounced in that way because they're just the averages and the, the data is much easier to, to get hold of

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

Yeah, cricket lends itself well to statistical analysis. Always has done and still does. Because, 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 e- enough of those events in a data sample, you're gonna get some useful insights from that. However, we also know that we then need to ask some very good questions of that data. So I'll 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. It was effectively translating raw 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. These are all perfectly common sense concepts. Nathan Lehman just translated common sense into, into numbers, and he, he wrote an algorithm which helped to make averages more useful and more predictive about how people would 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. It's 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 a minute. Actually I'll have the 11 good players, thanks very much." And you

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

Yeah,

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

you know what I mean? Then we're

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

yeah

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

Team spirit and illusion, 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, where I think there's a bit more mileage all the time is in compound effects in terms of competency. 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, et cetera, that stresses opposition batsmen, which was in 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'd think, "Well, that's kind of the point of the captaincy, is 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, and you're looking for compound effects. And the, and that's a multi- sort of -dimensional conversation. Now, also true that some of those- Points informed and deepened by understanding the data. They'd say they're not all the preserve of, of intuition by any means. actual fact, I think one of the biggest misconceptions about, if we talk about just about the Moneyball era 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 gonna 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 gonna go on the data there," 'cause 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, you used to be able to get away with X, but now you're gonna need Y. And if you're not on that, or even better, ahead of that curve, you're gonna 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 involved at 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. Well, we need people around us who are gonna challenge us hard on, on the assumptions of those conversations

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

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 take- 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, you talked about. What do you think about that lens? It's 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. Let's take the, the general and make it specific in those realms.

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

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, in which AI becomes increasingly dominant, which looks overwhelmingly likely, where there's considerable challenges around purpose. I think it, 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 e- even more frictionless way than now. Um, 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 wanna do? What gives my life a sense of purpose and meaning? Which of course connects with side of the coin, where if the challenge is gonna be purpose and meaning I think that's where the humanities and, and the arts for that matter, and sport, have incredible value. So let's talk about, to use a, again, a slightly slangy investor why am I long humanities, long the arts, long sport? Let's take them in turn. The other day, both... You're a teacher, Richard. Both my parents are teachers. My mum was an art teacher, my dad a novelist and an English teacher. And one of the great things that were ever, 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. If 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, 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 sh- 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. Let's take a step back. You guys have been right about everything." You would 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." Y- y- you had total skepticism about the kind of exuberant pre-financial crash. We've solved, risk. Everyone's gonna 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 'cause you didn't trust it. used to use five pencils to write your novels with 'cause you thought there was something about touching or scratching the lead onto the pen- 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, things, living them. An embodied life enriched by creativity in all different domains, physical, artistic, whatever you're gonna be proved more right than any of us. All of us that dabbled with kind of, or were quite sort of drawn to a bit of pseudoscience 'cause 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, well, everyone was being told they should write, which, thankfully never completely landed with me. 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 gonna be doing with our time? How, what... where are we gonna find meaning? First of all, it was intellectually shown to be dubious, and secondly then, age of AI, gonna value to our lives? What's gonna make us feel human? Now, let's talk about the humanities. 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 wanna follow? They're all questions that the 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, 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, 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, have said, "Well, I like my sport, but that's just ridiculous. You've got, you've got this way out of, out of line." But it has. 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, 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 Lord's 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, and then it being streamed, broadcast, and all the rest of it

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

And wi- and without revealing names, it, that coalition is made up of the people who run Google, Microsoft,

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

Satya Nadella, Nikesh Arora, all So, so they're, they're probably they've internalized the logic of the premise of of your podcast, Richard, that, that tech is, 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 gonna be the thing that makes us feel human? And sport has, as itself and has in the past with th- in, in, in the way it's ridden other technological revolutions to its own benefit, has, has sort of emerged from this period stronger, bigger, m- more central than ever, and there's that great line by Leonard Cohen who 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 sport's grown massively and will continue to do so. And now if you think about your children, I have a 12-year-old and a 10-year-old, they play cricket, they, they play football, they play golf, whatever. If they said to me, "Well, actually I'm, I'm spending all day on Sunday, I'm gonna 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, but the idea that that might've been around 40 years ago, that that was, s- insufficiently intellectual, well, 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, know, becoming more human.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

Sport as the last human product is a line that I I, I, I put that into ironically into Claude, the AI, my AI idiot assistant, and it came out of a nice line: sport as the fi- as the last human product. I've no idea what it means and whether it's true or not, but it's a ni- it's, it's a flatter, it's a sort of line that AI conjures up quite often, but that, that sort of captures a bit of what you're saying

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

it feels that it increasingly successful human product. And, my co-founder at, at the Institute, Andrew White, who's an entrepreneur and philanthropist, he, he said to me one of the first times I met him, "Sport's the last live event." Which actually i- is extremely smart too, 'cause it, that's the value, is 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, you hear the kind of cheers go around the street with all the windows open, that's a particular type of communal experience too

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

I 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 wanna 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 masters type degrees in whatever they've done in the past. You've got the MBA as a, as a route, and it felt like what you were doing is a sort of a point of difference in that world. And I, 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, i- a university what they're teaching and how they go about it.

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

Well, look, all of that's true and, and I think we're living through a, a, a moment of imminent disruption in education without doubt, and obviously AI is gonna be part of that. And I also think, cost is gonna come down, and people are gonna be able to study lots of things very cheaply. can they get, special experiences cheaply? Maybe not. Maybe there's a... There's still gonna be a stronger place than ever for really challenging high-level conversation, which they're not gonna get, on, on Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. So look, first of all, universities are big bureaucracies. Of course they are, and 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, 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 i- in this autumn. now- We fit between lots of places where sport's 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, yeah, where can I go and study so that when I lead the guys out, I feel like I've actually been stretched a little bit as a leader before I'm doing it? And I couldn't really find anywhere, because you get a sort of sports science and sports marketing. And you're like, "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, sport's stuck in various silos, but it's always cutting across and connecting across all these disciplines. And the people you wanna be leading in the sports industry, whether that's on the business side or the high-performance side, they're gonna need to draw on all of it. So, 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 gonna be a data question. Any interesting question's gonna have some data in it, some scouting in it, some coach insight in it, some team dynamics insight in it, some psychology in it. It's gonna be everything, and a bit, probably a bit of history and, and sort of group understanding too. if you're on the business side of it, and say you were, you're running a, a big team, you're gonna need to understand where's the team been, where is it now, where is it going to? And then we'll think about 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, 'cause you're just gonna be empty. It's just gonna be a bunch of superlatives, like, dangling from nothing. So, would say in all these ways, understanding of the humanities is gonna 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? really matters? And,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

Yeah

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

where the concept of judgment, which has been honed and trained through humanities has, has a, has an edge

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

So when I talk to... So Andy Shaw is my co-host on our AI series, and he's, he's at, they're 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, that captures some of what you're talking about in terms of, look, the, rose-tinted view of, 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, of subject-related curricula, which is just so different. I mean, it's such a fundamental thing that is gonna have to change for that to, be able to capitalize on that

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

that's absolutely correct. And al- I hadn't heard that term, but I think it's useful. I'll come back to th- the idea of a conductor in a minute. It's quite a funny story from a, from a book written by a conductor. I- I- 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, a leading sports data analyst the other day, and we were, we were looking at some, some queries on their AI platform involving curated data. So it's not publicly available data. It's data that has be- like has been specifically put in and then linked to so there's no kind of rubbish internet sort of noise in there. And one of the things that, that emerged very quickly was that the process of gaining insights from those AI query tools 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 the, so make it look in a certain way that it fits to my iPhone, and the head coach is gonna 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 gonna end up with a relatively small number of creative thinkers

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

Hmm

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

asking really good questions of incredibly powerful platforms with curated data. if they are acting, i- in the form of an orchestrator or a conductor. in the wrong hands, it doesn't... No matter how powerful the tool is, it's not gonna lead very useful insights. But in the right hands, you're gonna get places a lot more quickly than would've happened in the Moneyball era when, you then have to set to work a large team of data scientists to, build algorithms before you get the insights. That's the bit that's, that's been automated. So it's almost like the creative questioner straight to the platform leading to useful insights

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

Yeah. And again, there's a-- the qu- the question, I guess, the 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, of training, if that, If that's been commoditized. If AI is sort of absorbing the entry-level knowledge production rungs of the ladder, then how people can jump.

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

should we talk about that? So obviously, that, that's, that's a very common concern in, in areas like the law, isn't it? When 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 be at the top of the profession? 'Cause they're not getting the experiences. 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 gonna lead you 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 gonna help you to ask better, more useful questions. That's point one. Point two, get your hands dirty as soon as you can. a little bit like, was it David Hockney who said, "Never come home without having painted a face," or 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 gonna be, have that, 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. Actually, let's just draw an analogy there. So let's take, you know, it's a very common term in elite sport, pathways. always been ambivalent at best about the term pathway, 'cause it sounds a bit like you go on a, you get on a a treadmill at a young age, and then it bundles you out in a professional sports team down the line. It'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, in our professional lives off the pitch too. to put ourselves in the way of experiences then, find value in them, and we're gonna find it much easier to do that if we're asking the right questions, and we've had support honing our creativity and our imagination and our judgment

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

There's a, the sort of promise of, I don't know if I'm using the right term, the singularity, but there is something alluring about the AI conversation in every realm, education is one, in health is another, where you're saying, "Actually, we're in a world of averages, and what I, 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 Ed Smith, 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, the Marc Andreessens of this world who are sort of backing and putting all the money in, 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 I've, he or she has got my details down in front of them, that 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."

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

Hmm. Interesting. Well, I, I, I think certainly I would say that we're nearing the end of the turning education into factories, and anyone believing in that. 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 a university's kind of a serendipity engine, isn't it? Where it forces people together, and in those collisions, those accidents, they exchange information that they otherwise wouldn't have exchanged, which helps them in their own work. Sometimes- if you d- 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 kinda think, "Well, is that really... Are they gaining anything from that, that they, couldn't gain by signing up to a, an online course?" Or in actual fact, when I think about my own university educ- e- education, it was the people who, who made me think that intellectual life was interesting, that it was cool, 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 then by the time I saw them next time, I'd kinda like moved on and had better arguments. Now, to me, that's That's pushing you to be smarter and, and to deeper arguments, which are the kinds of skills we're gonna need in, in the age of, in the age of, incredibly cheap commoditization of information. But I 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, I Machines are machines. They're gonna get better at being machines. Human beings are human beings, and I have total confidence that we will special and different. I think what's gonna happen is that we're gonna 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

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

So let's finish off with a very practical question, which is what do people do to get onto the... Is it Septem- when is, when does the term start, and how does, how do they, how do people get into it?

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

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. I was at the Oval to watch one of our current students, Matt Fisher, play in a test match and, played pretty well, got 50 and chipped in with wickets too. I was at Lord's last night to watch one of our former students, Heather Knight, used to captain England, play in the T20 World Cup, and was a obviously very successful England captain, had a great year when she was studying with us, actually. and then probably, slightly 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 s- sports ministry. And, and her work on innovation in sport kind of w- grew out of a, a series of conversations we'd had collectively in, in the group, and then she'd applied it to, yeah, the future of, of women's sport in Saudi Arabia. And I'd, 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'll know as a teacher, is that you don't really wanna 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, 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 uh, sort of alums have, share boards in sport. They, they often work in executive roles together. Their, their friendships will help them, 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, the value, that's one of the, the forms of value of studying the humanities, that your, your peers, your cohort, 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. N- 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. unlikely that someone's gonna 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 gonna be that way. someone who can say, understand, and I had a, an analogous set of experiences, which I'm gonna 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." 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, our themes earlier on, actually a f- friend of mine at AI firm said to me the other day he said, "Ed, you've always had pretty intense skepticism about middle management. W- 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 th- 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. 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? It must be agony. That time could be spent actually thinking harder, grappling more deeply, and hope- 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, they, they face m- m- 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, or who have a humanities background and are young and are still forging their identity and their career, 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 gonna be a bumpy ride, and we're not gonna be able to cling on to protected career journeys which are gonna be there for 50 years. my grandfathers had one job, teachers. Both teachers. Headma- 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 gonna have to get used to living with uncertainty, particularly around where your value is, you're gonna charge people fees. W- what's your job gonna be? 'Cause it's not gonna be a job in the way that it used to be probably. Which was the, 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. Mm. Are they gonna be there? Of which I think leads to the sense that- The ability to, to live with a world we can't completely predict or imagine whilst having confidence in our ability to adapt to it is where to be. A bit like a player. If you think about the deep confidence of a great athlete, they don't know what's gonna happen next, but they believe they're gonna cope with it, whatever it might be. And that's almost what you would like your, your ideal student to be in a professional setting, even if it's not elite sport, if it's more on the administration or the business side of it, where they don't know what the world's gonna look like, but they know they've got the tools to cope with it and thrive in it. Setting the bar quite high, but I think that's where educators need to put their energy

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner

Okay. Ed Smith, thank you again for your time. Great to see you again, and good luck with the, the institute

Ed Smith, Institute of Sports Humanities

Thanks so much, Richard