Revisionist History - A New Day at the Races

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

Revisionist History heads to Las Vegas for the Formula One Las Vegas Grand Prix, courtesy of T-Mobile for Business. Malcolm talks with T-Mobile and Las Vegas Grand Prix executives about how 5G technology is changing professional sports — from how athletes compete, to how fans watch and even find their seats.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode is a paid partnership with T-Mobile for Business. I've always loved things that go fast. Fast runners, fast cars, you get the picture. So I've been a fan of Formula One racing since about the same time I got interested in running track, which is to say, a very, very long time ago. I still have Niki Lauda's epic showdowns with James Hunt seared in my memory. Not to mention my favorite driver of those years, the great Brazilian, Emerson Fittipaldi. So nearly half a century later, when I heard about Formula One's plans for a ginormous racetrack

laid out in Las Vegas, of all places, I needed to know more. More about how exactly one hosts a race in one of the busiest entertainment centers in the world, let alone a race stretching nearly four miles in length, accommodating cars that can reach speeds of 220 miles per hour. It's an incredible technological challenge, coordinating event operations and hundreds

of thousands of fans across that massive area, which is already chock full of people. That's why the Las Vegas Grand Prix partnered with T-Mobile for business, because over the last few years, T-Mobile has been helping other sports entities connect teams and fans with technology, particularly 5G technology. They used 5G technology to bring Major League Baseball fans at the All-Star Game,

an app that showed 3D visuals of the field overlaid with stats like ball distance, launch angles, and an interactive strike zone. And they're helping SailGP, a global sailing competition, transmit 300,000 data points per second from ships racing at nearly 60 miles per hour.

So when T-Mobile offered me a chance to record a conversation with members of their leadership team and the Las Vegas Grand Prix group in Las Vegas during a race week, how could I say no? So I headed out to Las Vegas for a conversation with Callie Field, president of T-Mobile Business Group, Ulf Eveltsen, president of technology at T-Mobile, and Emily Prazer, Chief Commercial Officer of the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Coming into the strip that day, my cab drove along the actual racetrack. I kept telling my driver, speed up, speed up. Hello, everyone.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell. I am the host of the Revisionist History Podcast. And I am here in Las Vegas with three very interesting people. Callie Field, the president of T-Mobile Business. Alf Ewoltsen, the president of T-Mobile Technology. And Emily Prazer, who is the chief commercial officer for the Las Vegas Grand Prix, which is the reason that we're all here. It is. We are in the Marquee Nightclub overlooking the course, and we are here to discuss the role that technology can play, is playing, in transforming not just the fan experience,

but also the sport itself. And this is a topic of special interest to me because I was and remain a huge F1 fan. And I was just talking to Alf about how, as a kid in the 70s, I fell in love with James Hunt and Niki Lauda and Emerson Fittipaldi and Jody Schechter, that whole era of F1.

But the F1 that we're talking about today bears no resemblance to the F1 of the 70s. And that's what I want to discuss is like, what are we changing about this sport? How are we making it better? What role does technology play in transforming this into a very different kind of experience? But before we get started, I wanted... Let's start by talking about the old F1. So the F1 I grew up with. When we look back at that, what are the things that needed improvement? Why do we have to bring in technology into a sport like this?

Who wants to go with that? Well, I could start. I grew up with the same experience malcolm and and watching it on television was probably at that time the probably the best experience was really hard to follow um cars and drivers were on their own they made their own decisions it was all it was all a sports where it came down to the engines and the power and the drivers making all this. But today, with technology, it's transformed dramatically. And I would say what T-Mobile is doing here at the Las Vegas Grand Prix is to bring that experience to, first of all,

a lot more viewers in a completely different way. I just want to dwell on this point for a moment. So the fan experience back then was at a remove. It was relatively opaque, hard to figure out what's going on. And so that necessarily limited the size of the audience. Is that what you're saying? You'd have to be a fan. Like I read about F1 every month in Road Direct Magazine. And in Road to Trek magazine. I think about it a little bit. We used to participate or fans could

enjoy sports sitting around the radio. And then TV brought the ability to visually experience and celebrate and participate. And then if you're not able to be in person at the event, what 5G is bringing to F1 and to Major League Baseball or to even CellGP is accessibility. It democratizes the access for people to feel like they're a part of the event. You can put on an Oculus headset and you can ride the track around, which most people don't get the opportunity to do that. And you can get a sense for what speed around each corner is like. And technology allows you to have a very different kind of experience with the sport. Well, that's another thing I want to dig in more, but I just want to

explain a little bit about the technology itself before we go any further. First question is, five years ago, could we have done the exact thing we're doing here at Las Vegas? I mean, was the technology there five years ago? No, it wasn't. The generations of mobile technology has developed further and further and further. The fifth generation is really about sensors, low-cost visual experience. If you look at the typical smartphone today, has cameras that are just extraordinarily good. They have processing power that is just amazing in terms of rendering and putting things up for viewage.

And all that comes with these generations. And why it becomes so affordable is because the technology is standardized. So we create this ecosystem of technology where all the phones in the world are using the same standard. And that brings down the cost so dramatically. And that's what's really happening. So we're able to put sensors where we could never put them before. They were too costly. I'd also say, just if I could add the hundreds of thousands of sensors that are around,

whether it's for this sporting event or CellGP or for MLB, the amount of data that's coming from those sensors, the way that technology has evolved, what 5G allows us to do is take, you know, in CellGP with hundreds of sensors on boats, 300,000 data points that we're able to send to the cloud and have real-time experiences. Drivers, the athletes that are on the boats, they're able to get that data and information

as they're in the middle of doing 60 knots. We didn't, before 5G, we weren't able to get that kind of data real time. To me, that's one of the exciting things because we now have the speed and the latency where we can actually participate real time. I think that's pretty cool. Emily, has there ever been a Grand Prix event

that approaches this Las Vegas one in terms of the kind of technological sophistication? No, I mean, back to your original point around the 70s, obviously, Formula One in the Eccleston era was a technology broadcaster media company at its heart. They are their own broadcaster. So we're a very different business to, say, the NFL or the NBA, where we do all of our own cameras. We do all of our own filming, we do all of our own filming, we have our own IF. So everything that you see in Vegas this weekend is actually being filmed locally by the Formula One team. It's sent back to our offices in Biggin Hill, Kent in London and projected out to our 170 broadcast partners globally. So we're already quite technologically advanced with respect to how we operate as a business so from that point of view um to your earlier question around how the sport has evolved formula

one was bought by liberty media in 2017 and the brief was we want to take this up a notch we want to take it to the next level how do we make sure that we create the ultimate fan experience so when i first moved here about two years ago and started working on some of this stuff we actually mapped out who our ideal sponsors and partners would be to create that fan experience. And at the top of that list was T-Mobile from a technology standpoint, how do we get them to help us create this experience of which we have fan connected events. And I remember sitting in meetings in London saying, how do we bring all of this together? How do we create an application that's actually functional and good enough to get people around a living and breathing circuit? But with respect to this weekend, it's all been about, you know, setting the benchmark for connectivity, access. It's the first time that we've done e-ticketing as Formula One, and that

is completely impossible without a partner like T-Mobile. So there's been all of these different elements and then ultimately tapping into the marketing power of a T-Mobile as it related to, you know, concerts, fan zones, and engaging different audiences. So for us, you know, it's been incredibly important and something that we've needed to be able to be successful in Las Vegas. So let's dig into a little bit, let's talk about the fan experience. What is, what sorts of things are available to the fan watching this race that transform the experience from them? That's one question. But before I answer that question, tell me what you learned from other sports. What did you bring to this sport from? Because I know you mentioned baseball and sailing. well in sailing um well i'll start just from a fan experience perspective with with sail gp um first of all they they did a lot of things about the sport and the race to make it more accessible so they could bring in more fans um and they did that through technology they did that by

um bringing the races closer in to um to the the water's edge and um and then providing through the hundreds of sensors on each boat, the fans are able to, through the app or watching the live broadcast, be able to see how the individual athletes are deciding to make a turn or all jump over to the other side of the boat at 50 knots. I mean, am I seeing what's going on? Yes. Oh, I have an image yes of the life real time so you can see when the when the um captain of the boat decides to make a quick shift and and and pivot the boat

um you can see live from from his or her camera you can be in the race with uh with the athletes and um and that's something that you wouldn't, on those types of boats, you would never get to have that experience without technology. So I'm interested in sort of the, when I say that, the lessons that you learned from that. So what was the reaction of fans? I mean, did you get the expected bump that you thought the technology would bring you? Well, I think SailGP is a great example of bringing in audiences that they're fascinated with the technology. They're fascinated with the speed and the live experience of the race. They start to really like, who are these athletes and learn more about them. I mean,

it's a pretty incredible league that has come from this investment in technology on the boats. We have customers, business decision makers, CTOs, CIOs that will come and look at the way that the modems and the routers are installed, the sensors on the boats, and find business applications for their own critical infrastructure or their own needs for super low latency. If you're CIO of a hospital in healthcare, I mean, there's so many things that they can extrapolate from what we're learning in the live broadcasting, moving the data to the cloud, and how that draws in more and more people. So for broadcasting or even for ways that technologists might think about ways that they need to get data sooner and faster to either their employees or to their technicians or to their end users or customers overall. So to be a spectator at the MLB, and maybe you get to sit in a box, maybe you're sitting in the stands,

but with this technology, you can actually be the batter seeing the ball coming at you. And that's a truly unique experience for customers and fans alike. I'll latch on to that because there is another thing, you talked about what we learned. So, we see people who wants to be on an onboard camera view or they want to be

experiencing and taking part of this. And the problem in the past has been capacity. So even during Formula One races all over the world, it's been a difficult part for the operators who are operating these networks to actually be able to make it happen. It looks really nice when nobody's there.

And then you put... So it's really slow and buggy. But you put 150,000 people there and it looks very different. And just to give the scale of it, like this is a 3.8 mile track going through the center of Las Vegas for the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Cars are going to go 220 miles an hour. And we have had to put in massive capacity.

And, you know, we got about 50 different sites just covering this track. And we have speeds now 200, 300 megabits per second on average. We're putting in just this massive capacity that 5G gives compared to 4G. 4G couldn't at all. It was sort of a 30 to 40 megabits per second thing, and here we are like 10 times more. When we first started looking at what we needed to build this Grand Prix, a connectivity partner was number one on our list

because for us, having looked at this through the lens of other races, we realized that being in a living, breathing city like Las Vegas, it was so imperative to ensure that people can speak to each other. You know, everybody is coming here. They have fans in different areas.

They want to know where people's seats are. I mentioned previously that e-ticketing was such a big focus for this event. And so making sure that people can actually get to their seats and access their seats. So we came to T-Mobile with the solution and said, we want to create this unbelievable app that means that no different to Waze or Google Maps or what have you, that people, whilst the track is hot, so cars are going around the track, you could say I'm at the Bellagio and I need to get to the T-Mobile zone in this grandstand

and it creates a live platform of which you know exactly the walking path. And that's just not been done before, not just in a normal circuit, but in Formula One generally. And when you're here and everything is changing the whole time, the routes change. so you need something

live that means you can literally get from A to B in the shortest possible route. The connectivity challenge for us was really the size of the event and also that we are in the middle of a busy city. It's all about... You can hear the busy city behind you. You can hear the busy city but it's all about doing multiple things here at the same time. One, of course, fan experience, T-Mobile's customers, everybody who's here experiencing that. But it's also about navigation, finding seats, being able to purchase items out of points of sale. All of this on one platform.

And that's why 5G technology is good. It will give you the opportunity to build apps that can connect all kinds of sale. All of this on one platform. And that's why 5G technology is good. It will give you the opportunity to build apps that can connect all kinds of stuff on this 5G platform. That's the challenge that we took. And that's what we have built here in Las Vegas at this Grand Prix. You know, something that was funny that because it's now real time and broadcast and you're turning on the conversations that they're having. I mean, it's great for fans. They love it. But it's live broadcast. Yes. And so they're swearing. In Italian.

They get penalized. And so there's like this constant to the athlete, like you cannot swear in this live, high, intense competition. You know, I just thought that that was kind of humorous. Fortunately, there's a terminology that people know about. i think box box has become like a globally recognized term which box box means pit stop um but it's all part of the again the strategy discussion of they don't want it to become this whole conversation so you'll hear a lot of the time when the drivers are speaking with the team principals you know plan a through to plan f um obviously they get

to pick each tire compound and they make quite big decisions around that and that's all run through tire blankets and heat technology in the garages so when you're building a racetrack the way we have and i don't know if any of you have seen but we've obviously built this new pit building um we've put in really great technology obviously really advanced um services from t-Mobile to help us perform that and that building will be something that is a multi-functional facility year-round so we've had to be very very flexible but it all fits back to obviously how do we make sure that we're getting you know even setting this up making sure that the the right amount of cable to go up into all

of the different hospitality suites to make sure that the broadcast links the whole way through the circuit the fan tv making sure that what's happening at the T-Mobile zone. So I think we've got J Balvin performing on Saturday night as being shown on the big screens in the main grandstand and linking that whole thing together. So again, I know we're kind of jumping around, but there is just so much bringing it all together. And again, it comes back to making sure that the partnership here is just completely on point to make sure that we've got things all in the right places. So let's just talk about the information that's being transmitted from the car to the audience. So what are those sensors telling a fan about an individual automobile on the track? Again, it really depends on the

broadcast, but you'll see that there's time, there's telemetry, there's the distance between each of the different cars. It can come down to like a tenth of a second at points as to whether something happens. There is speed data, there's wind data. so the idea though is the the fan watching either at home or here in las vegas will have their phone open with the app and on that app is available a kind of it's almost like your own personal color commentator or something that's but it's data it's it's data commentary essentially on the race it is and i will I mean, I'm a big Formula One fan. So I've watched, I use the app all the time. And what I use it for is to know where all the drivers are.

So, for example, you get this real-time feed where you know exactly where they are, if there are overtaken events or something exciting going on. And all that has to be really real-time. Because when you are watching this thing, they pass you very, very fast, these cars. And you have to be interacting with that. And F1 have a F1 TV app as well. So there's the event app, which T-Mobile have helped us build. And then we've integrated the F1 TV so that, to your point, people can sit in the grandstands.

We don't have to put up as many big screens all around the circuit. So you go through to the F1 Las Vegas Grand Prix app presented presented by t-mobile you push a button takes you through to f1 tv and then you can watch the live race on your phone obviously f1 is a very strange consumer watching sport to the extent of which the car goes past so quickly that you want to see what's happening on the other side of the circuit so having that ability to see what's going on whilst you're waiting for the car to come back around is really important. Yeah. Tell me a little, let's talk a little bit about, we're going to get to the athletes, but I wanted to pause a little bit and ask the two of you, you two T-Mobilers, what was motivating T-Mobile to be involved with this? So you guys

have been involved with a bunch of different sports um i'm guessing in a way that your competitors have not am i am i right about this are you guys the sports leader in 5g oh that's a good uh i think for us uh first of all to be able to build what we believe is not only the united states best 5gG network, actually in the world, the best 5G network. We are covering about 330 million of the U.S. population, 98% with 5G. A lot of that is covered in what we call this ultra-capacity. Now it's getting a bit technical, but the ultra-capacity is where you get 10 times, 15 times better, better experience and speeds.

We are looking for possibilities for this technology to transform things and transforming what enterprises can do. And there is a massive interest for how can this technology be used. Obviously, sports is a great way to demonstrate that. Because here we got both the sensor technology that we talked about, we got all the visual experiences that we can create, the evolution of smartphones being supported by completely new new stuff and the more we engage in these kind of events the more we also learn ourselves how we need to set the networks up

can i can i too i mean because i mean let's let's be let's be honest it It's fun. It's really cool. To be able to bring fans in and to, and I said this earlier, but to like democratize the experience for people who may not have access or don't have whatever the limitation is, whether it's physical limitations or whether it's financial limitations, but to be able to bring people in and create community and excitement and entertainment around sporting events that people love where there's heroes and losers and winners. I mean, it's fun. From a technology standpoint, what I find is CTOs, CIOs are saying, look, I've got major cost transformation that I need to go through. I've got moving all of my data to the cloud. And what's going to help me in my process of digital transformation. And 5G is the technology that solves the cost and the data issues that are facing CIOs and CTOs, whether it's sports or whether it's any other vertical throughout industry. Being able to designate particular bands of spectrum for particular

experiences. We're the only one in the U.S. right now today that's able to do that. So it means that this is an area where we can come and play and deliver a live, real today experience, not a theoretical one in the future. So I think that puts us in a place where with the partners like Las Vegas Grand Prix, we're ready now and we can make this experience come to life. Yeah, it does. You know, it's funny because I was watching, not that long ago, I was watching a golf match and there was a rain delay.

And they had that thing where they had those little wrist monitors on the golfers, and they were transmitting the data in real time to the TV audience. And Rory McIlroy is just practicing his drives on a tee, waiting for the range light to be over. And they're tracking his heart rate, and it is whatever it normally is. And then suddenly it spikes. And all of a sudden they this insight yeah into the athletes like even rory mcelroy has this surge of like something adrenaline excitement tension when he's

hitting a practice yeah drive off the t and i had that inside then this stuff really can it's giving us it's not it's it's adding a whole new dimension to the fan experience. It's like all of a sudden I have insight into his inner psychology in that moment. Think about, you're a runner. Think about if I have access to your Strava app, I'm assuming you use Strava. My Strava is public. Yeah, so think of what I can know about how you perform on hills or particular race runs. I mean, connectivity has allowed us to know and form community and even compete in those times where you want live data and interaction

like you just described watching Rory that we can make that even more exciting and accessible for for people we'll be right back with more from Las Vegas we're back. Let's switch gears and talk a little bit about what this means for the drivers and their teams specifically. So not the fan experience, but how does this kind of 5G connectivity change what the teams themselves are doing? What are the opportunities here?

It is really about that latency and giving information that any sports has never really had access to before. It's just going to push the boundaries on performance and being able to do things that people have not been able to do before. We love it because it demonstrates... Give me a for example

of how a bit of data might push a boundary of performance. To use a sailing example, I could collect every bit of data about the performance of my boat, the wind, the speed. That's right. So the coach for the team actually is on the shore. And then the captain receives instructions from the coach. So they'll take a number of, I mean, just a complex amount of data, whether it's wind speed or whether it's where the other boat is situated or something that they know in particular about the team. Hey, this team really struggles whenever you're at 50 knots and you got to do a quick turn. So we're going to give them the data that they need in order to, you know, not overcorrect in the moment. I've done an analysis beforehand of my competitors,

based on data collected in, of my competitors' tendencies, strengths, weaknesses, and then I'm feeding that data back into the stream that's coming in real time and helping. Yeah, and we're just learning how AI, we're just learning how AI can help us get better and better at taking, I mean, 300,000 data points is a lot for, even if you're the most dedicated coach and team to go through. But we're just learning like how to use AI to be

able to give you the very best kind of critical data points for instruction and for coaching. We're doing the same with PJ of America. So they're working with T-Mobile to take all of the data about the mechanisms of a golfer and using AI in the practice facility, in the studio, to give them much better understanding about how you perform while you're actually competing, how you perform in your practices, where there's differences. If you had to pick another sport that would benefit as much or even more from being souped up with T-Mobile 5G, where would you go next? Like, wave a magic wand. Which one do you want to... Well, we do a lot. I think the coolest ones is where we actually have a larger area coverage thing going.

And Callie mentioned the golf, for example, is a good experience. A marathon is a great example. Oh, it is. I mean, a very good example because it's a large area. And the TV experience is so subpar. You can only ever, do you know that during the New York Marathon, the two women were locked, they were flat out, even with 800 meters to go,

and they cut away to show the man who was like two miles from the finish and had two minutes up on his competitor. And it was like every running fan in the world just said, what are you? But that's what, they have only one opportunity. And what we needed was an app which allowed us to move around and see who we wanted to see. That's right. Could anyone, could you create a situation if you have 10,000 runners in the field

where if they wanted to, every athlete could have sensors so their family could watch them throughout the entire race? Yeah, with 5G you can. You could do that? Yeah. It has this massive capacity. Wolf, what are you doing? What are you waiting for? Do you realize how huge this is? Yeah, it's going to change.

It's going to change a lot of sports events. And I believe, and Kali said very well about the democratization, it's really going to happen through events that are not only super, super events, but even smaller, like local events are going to change. Yeah. I watched a friend's kid run cross-country the other day with a drone. His school cross-country meet had a drone just followed it wasn't i mean it wasn't the best school event it was i mean it was a fancy school event there's a um company out of tel aviv that has a sort of plug and play solution for parents

to be able to set up uh 360 cameras at their' sporting events and then gives them also the connectivity and the data to be able to capture the whole event and then gives them the ability to kind of build their own broadcast, build their own production of what that sporting event looks like. And then they can create their own video and then they can send it to friends and family or to college recruiters you know obviously

that can't get to all the games or if you're from a small town which you've got this superstar kid and I thought that was pretty cool. Is this an excuse so that parents never have to go to games again? I can't speak to that. This could improve American productivity by life. Yeah.

I know all about it. On that note, I think, um, uh, we should, that's a great way to end. Um, but this has been really fun and incredibly illuminating. And, um, it's just, I think it's so exciting to think about how, you know, we're, we're present at the creation here in Las Vegas. This is the dawn of a completely new era in the fan experience. Thank you all so much. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you.

One more thing. Before I left, they surprised me with a sneak peek of the racetrack on the Oculus VR headset. It's a 360-degree immersive view of the Las Vegas Grand Prix street circuit that fans will be able to see on the app. This footage is filmed in 8K using 5G connected cameras. It's incredibly realistic to be in the driver's seat as the car goes around the circuit. All right, I'm putting this on. Hold on, hold on. Okay, it's just starting up.

Oh, my goodness. We don't have to turn. Yeah. So we're behind the pace car at the moment. Oh, my God, I can look down. I'm looking down at his head. The driver's... Oh, my goodness, I can look down. I'm looking down at his head. The driver's... It's so weird.

And we backhauled that whole experience. It was produced on a vehicle that was moving on the track. And then we took it out over the 5G network. Left unchecked. I'm just going to watch this forever. How much time? All right, I'm going to give up really shortly, but this is rad. That was my first ever.

I've never done that before. Oh, really? Yeah, never done that before. First time for everything. This episode was made in partnership with T-Mobile for Business and iHeartMedia. Special thanks to Callie Field, president of T-Mobile Business Group, Ulf Eveltsen, president of technology at T-Mobile,

Emily Praeser, chief commercial officer of the Las Vegas Grand Prix, and the entire production crew at iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Ben-Nadav Hafri and Tali Emlin. Editing by Sarah Nix. Engineering by Nina Lawrence. And mastering by Jake Gorski. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Special thanks to Kira Posey. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Thank you.