Ari Emanuel on AI, live events, and where the ad money goes
Stratechery's conversation with Ari Emanuel on where advertising goes once agents take the human out of the search loop, what AI does to production costs and software prices, and his bet on live events.
One item landed in your Gmail reading queue on October 15: the Stratechery conversation with the Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel. Lenny's Newsletter published nothing new that day, so today's page holds a single entry. 1
Media and AI: a talent agent's view of the post-AI economy
Stratechery: "A Conversation With Ari Emanuel About Entertainment and AI"
Published October 15, 2026. Ari Emanuel is executive chairman of WME Group, executive chair and CEO of TKO Group Holdings, which owns UFC and WWE, and founder of MARI, a live events and experiences company. Ben Thompson writes Stratechery, and this week's interview slot turned into a two-way conversation, prompted by Emanuel's memoir Roll the Calls. The full piece is free on the page, and the audio version sits in the Stratechery podcast feed. 1
- Advertising that runs on a person doing the searching is the exposed part. Thompson's starting point is that while people type their own queries, Google's search business holds up, which is why ChatGPT alone did not shake it. Agents take that person out of the loop, and that is what breaks the search-adjacent ad models at Google and Amazon. Emanuel puts a number on the Amazon side: a $60 billion advertising business now in jeopardy, one that will eventually force CEO Andy Jassy into a deal. 1 The money then flows toward the surfaces people visit for other people. Thompson names social networks, which he reads as close to the bottom of their value, and live events, where he locates the generation of human desire that defines the post-AI economy. 1 One detail worth holding onto: Meta promised to keep what people say to Muse out of its advertising system. Thompson says nobody registered that promise, that it costs Meta today, and that it pays off as advertising moves from matching an ad to a person toward predicting what that person wants. 1
- When production gets cheap, taste and human attention stay scarce. Emanuel expects AI to cut the cost of production sharply, with a workflow he sketches in one line: shoot the scene, hand it to the model, do the makeup once. More content follows, from more creators, and audiences get more time to watch it. 1 His ceiling claim is the interesting part. A model is a probability distribution, so it returns what he calls, quoting George Gilder, the greatest average. Great filmmakers still set the standard, and Thompson's version of that idea is taste, the part of the work with no test to pass. 1 The commercial consequence is where both land. AI gives exceptional individuals more leverage, so more of them want an agent who can find the money, resolve the conflicts and choose the projects. 1
- Software gets a price cut, and private equity pays for it. Thompson expects severe pressure on software prices, and gives the mechanism: rolling your own becomes practical when the fit matters, and companies whose output jumps will push sideways into one another's markets, which competes margins down. Emanuel aims the same point at private equity firms that bought software businesses at the top of the market. 1 On how early the cycle is, Thompson answers very early, and splits it into two games. The first is the eating of everything digital, and every digital company is exposed while it runs. The second is the physical world, and both men put robots further off than the coverage suggests: Emanuel saw the hand Elon Musk is building, called it incredible, and says manufacturing and training it remain very hard. 1
What Emanuel is buying against that backdrop is a live events company, and the conversation is specific about its shape. MARI runs tennis tournaments and participatory sports, the Frieze art fairs, the Barrett-Jackson car auctions, the Collect-A-Con Pokémon shows, and 70 West End and Broadway theaters through ATG, taking each format city by city. 1 His case for live events is social. He describes a baseball crowd where the man beside him voted the other way and both cheered the same team. That is the contact he wants to protect as more of life moves onto a screen. 1
The other through-line is the memoir's title, Roll the Calls. Emanuel still works the phone the way he did in the 1980s, one narrow question per call. Texting costs him the tone that matters, which he ties to being dyslexic. Thompson's reading is that the bandwidth of a call is what makes that persistence so precisely aimed. 1 Emanuel also put questions to Thompson, so the piece reads as two people who follow each other's work talking shop. 1
Where to start
There is one item today, and it earns the read if you sell or buy advertising, run a software business, or hold an asset whose value depends on people showing up in person. The page is free and lists its own eight topics, which makes it easy to jump to the thread you want: The State of Social, Roll the Calls, AI and Creativity, Buying UFC, Post-AI Tech, AI and Generational Change, MARI, and Hollywood Logic. 1
The queue is otherwise empty. The newest item on Lenny's Newsletter is still the October 14 benchmark of Meta's Muse Wonder models, which yesterday's edition covered. 2 The queue refills when Stratechery posts its next update and Lenny's publishes its next piece.
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