You don’t need an MBA to understand the value proposition of live sports in the future. According to legendary Hollywood executive and current UFC frontman Ari Emanuel, you don’t even need a solid grasp of live sports.
If you want to know why live sports are a sound investment, all you have to do is reach into your pocket.
“At one point, Tiger talked about how the first time he won, people were clapping; (but) the second when he won, the phones lit up and people were shouting,” Emanuel said, illustrating his broader point by pointing to the cell phone next to his left hand.
“This is because of that thing,” he said. “You want to show how wonderful your life is. And also because that the disconnect, you want a place where you can have a great experience with other people.”
This was Emanuel’s opening in a fascinating interview on Invest like the best podcast in which Emanuel discussed, among other topics, why the world of sports represents one of the world’s few “AI-proof” investments.
Among those who know him, Emanuel is perhaps best understood as a human lightning bolt. In one life, he was a wildly successful Hollywood agent, who served as his inspiration entourageGold. In another, he was the prolific investor and entertainment executive behind the Hollywood superagency EFFORTS. Then, in 2016, he began a third life as a sports owner, buying a majority ownership stake in the UFC for $4.2 billion — a perceived overpayment for which he scoffed harshly.
Before long, Emanuel was the one laughing. Under his leadership, the UFC has increased revenue from $15 million in 2003 to more than $1.3 BILLION in the year 2023.
While Emanuel’s blunt style and his ties to the Saudi Public Investment Fund haven’t endeared him to everyone, his institutional understanding of events and media at the helm of the UFC has proven pretty bulletproof. Emanuel oversaw the UFC’s savvy broadcast and cable deal with ESPN, pinpointing the demise of the cable TV model and providing a blueprint for sports leagues in the broadcast age. Later, he led a frantic push into the UAE-based Covid “bubble” that made the UFC the only pro sports league active during the early years of the pandemic, turbocharging an already explosive period of growth.
Now Emanuel’s attention has turned to the looming spectrum of artificial intelligence and its potentially revolutionary effects on the business he knows best.
In the revolution promised by AI evangelists like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, the world is moving towards “general artificial intelligence,” or “AGI” – a phenomenon in which AI becomes smart enough to replace most human work. whether If researchers manage to create AGI in the image of Altman and Amodei, it will prove powerful enough to change the economy as we know it: lowering the cost of goods and services, reducing the time and difficulty of white-collar work, and dramatically expanding access to leisure.
“HE WILL BE… big. Which I think is a fitting conclusion,” Emanuel said. “There’s a lot of smart people spending a lot of money on it, and they’re smarter than me. The Netherlands just switched to a four-day work week. Drive time is now 11-4 across America. Hotel bookings on Thursdays are up a lot – and there’s a lot more data to back it up. The weekend starts on Thursday now, and we’re in 2025. Maybe in 2027 it starts on Wednesday.”
whether AI evangelists are right, the media is poised to witness a major transformation. In a world where AGI can produce endless content for next to nothing, and where people have more time than ever to consume it, media companies will have to reimagine their efforts to capture attention. Or will the void be filled by those who can create large amounts of unique content from existing intellectual property, drawing attention to the vastness of AI-generated content on future social media platforms, such as executives like the Paramount/CBS chairman David Ellison has suggested. Or, as leaders like Emanuel have suggested, the void will be filled by those who create things that AI can’t copy—things so ontologically different from our digital world that even the smartest computers can’t threaten them.
Enter: Live Sports. Emanuel has always had an intuition for the special power of a crowd. Some of it stems from his memory of Tiger Woods. The community that comes from watching Woods compete and the social capital that comes from capturing and sharing that experience with others? According to Emanuel, this’It’s the kind of experience AI can’t replicate.
“It just bodes well for music, live sports, live events,” he said. “This IS status.”
And, as Emanuel knows all too well, where there’s status, there’s profit.
“We are social animals,” Emanuel said. “You’re coming to a UFC fight, you’re a social guy. What are you going to do? You’re going to watch a lot of content – David Ellison concludes – there’s going to be more content than ever, and it costs zero. You’re going to concerts, you’re going to stand-up, you’re going to live events. The value of that is just so up in the air. That’s my whole bet.”
Of course, Emanuel’s point is exactly that – a bet. There’s no telling whether we’ll reach the AGI world promised by AI evangelists (who themselves have a financial incentive to believe such optimistic arguments), just as there’s no telling whether live events will be an added value in a world with more free time. Emanuel’s hypothesis rests on the success of a series of others hypothesis.
In many ways, this is a microcosm of the moment for the biggest economic gamble of the post-Internet world. The range of outcomes still possible for AI is far wider than both its evangelists and critics would like to admit, while the extent of progress already achieved remains obscure. Are our current chatbots already creating a more efficient world, or are they simply helping a legion of white-collar workers achieve active voice in their email correspondence? Is AI the technology that will turn out to be smarter than human civilization, or is it too stupid to trust the answers it gives to even simple questions? Your answers to these questions—and your beliefs about the meaning of those answers—depend largely on the orientation of your financial portfolio and your willingness to trust many of the same executives responsible for the proliferation of modern social media.
The potential and the political are hard to sort out, which is part of what makes AI so divisive. For skeptics, it is outrageous to live as if AI will become as revolutionary as its creators imagine; for the optimists, it is scandalous not for him.
It is this gap that creates an opportunity for leaders like Ari Emanuel. And now, his money is in live events.
“I don’t know how to write an algorithm, I don’t know how to build a data center, I’m not in the chip business,” Emanuel said. “I just know how to create great live events, and live is the reverse bet of AI.”
You can watch it in full by Emanuel Invest like the best interview in the link below.
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