The progress of AI cannot be halted anymore. Instead of pushing it away, we must learn to gradually integrate it into our processes and daily lives. In this episode of Success Unleash’d, Zack Ellison and Shawne Merriman sit down with Ari Smith, co-founder of Hypereon Labs, to discuss the future of AI and how to thrive in this era of rapid change. He explains the right way to navigate uncertainty surrounding AI innovation and how to leverage disruption as a competitive business advantage. Ari also shares why sports and hospitality will benefit the most from utilizing AI while keeping the human element intact and relevant.

Success Unleash’d Principles From This Episode

1. Embrace Failure as a Stepping Stone

Ari is more than happy to fail because it brings him closer to success. Every setback he makes means eliminating one wrong strategy, which opens up another chance to try again.

2. Get Comfortable with Uncertainty

Because of AI’s rapid transformation, the tech space is now surrounded by a lot of uncertainty. Ari navigates the unpredictable by turning constant disruption into a competitive advantage.

3. Harness AI to Augment, Not Replace

Many people stay away from AI fearing it will soon take over jobs from real-life people. Ari counters this thinking by using AI to enhance human performance instead of replacing actual human beings.

4. Trust the Process and Adapt Quickly

AI will not wait around for you. It will quickly evolve as demands change. In this AI-dominated world, Ari recognized that success comes from speed and adaptability. Moving fast can outpace even better ideas if executed swiftly.

5. Pursue Purpose, Not Just Profit

Ari predicts that thriving industries in the future will be those that fulfill fundamental human needs and value human connection above everything else. Sports and hospitality are two industries with highly promising futures.

6. Stay Curious and Courageous

In an ever-changing tech landscape, Ari achieved success by letting his curious self run free and take some risks whenever necessary. These two attitudes are essential for innovation and personal growth.

7. Build for Long-Term Value

Ari advises businesses to never stop reinventing themselves in this digital era. Those who continuously evolve will outlast those who cling to outdated models.

8. Control the Narrative Around Technology

Ari underlines that the real battle around technology is between open-source and closed-source AI. He hopes that more open-source systems will be available to the public as this benefits society as a whole.

9. Focus on Experiential Value

In a world where AI can do and produce almost anything, Ari stresses that the human element must never be set aside. Even with cutting-edge technology easily available, people will still crave for unique, unpredictable, and meaningful human experiences.

10. Align Success with Personal Values

Never sacrifice personal values in the pursuit of success. Ari found true fulfillment in his craft by aligning his goals with personal meaning and passion for bringing a positive impact to the world.

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Watch the Episode Here

Listen to the Podcast Here

Dealing With The Uncertainties Of AI With Ari Smith

In this episode, we have with us Ari Smith, an AI genius and the Cofounder of Hypereon Labs. Ari, thanks for joining.

Thanks for having me.

Keeping Up With The Rapid AI Progress

Ari, you are a leader in AI, and there’s so much changing so quickly. Let’s start with what you’re doing now, and then we’re going to dig into all things AI and what that means for where we’re headed as a society and as individuals.

First of all, about the word genius. I don’t know if anybody is a genius in this day and age. Things are being disrupted so quickly that I always feel like I’m perpetually behind every single day because disruption is just a part of our existence. That being said, I have been working in the field for a long time. What we are doing, as far as my business partners and I at Hypereon Labs, is we’re just trying to work with forward-thinking investors and corporations, strategists, and high net-worth individuals who recognize that the old way of doing things as it pertains to technology is pretty much over.

The ones that are going to thrive in the new era are not going to be the ones that fear AI or are trying to resist it, but those who are trying to find groups like ours who can help them navigate and profit from all the chaos that’s being created. That’s really what we do. It’s just trying to help people position themselves ahead of the curve so that they’re not reacting to the future but shaping it.

Ari, how much resistance do you get? Say the bigger companies or they operate on different systems and they’re just far behind or the people just have old mentalities. How much resistance do you get from people trying to put them up on AI and where markets are going?

It’s shocking, honestly, because somebody will come to us and say, “We have these technical problems and we want you to solve them.” Every problem at this point involves AI in some way or another, at least in terms of how we end up engaging with clients. They’ll come to us with that idea. Ostensibly, that would sound like, “We’re open to moving our business forward. We want to transform.”

As soon as you start explaining the realities of what AI transformation really entails, there’s this massive pullback, which is what I know you’re alluding to. It’s like, “Is there a fear? Is there this friction?” There is massive friction. It’s friction based upon very legitimate concerns that AI will disintermediate and eliminate jobs. That is, in fact, what it’s doing.

As a company says, “I want to become more efficient,” there’s an inverse correlation to the employment vector of the business. When you say, “If we implement this AI, we can save money, not just by making processes more efficient, but also by wiping out this division of accountants or reducing our legal department by 80%.” That’s the part that scares people. That, Shawne, is when the resistance kicks in. It’s like this natural reaction. They just got poked. They’re like, “Wait, it’s not just like implementing software anymore.” It’s about, “Am I bringing somebody into the firm that is going to take my job out of the game?”

We have to navigate that very carefully. One of the things that I believe we become proficient at is ensuring that when we implement solutions, they’re designed to positively augment the humans that are in place versus just replace them. In some situations, that just is the best strategy, and it’s up for the business to decide if they’re comfortable with that or not.

How To Turn Uncertainty Into Productivity

With all this change, Ari, we’re seeing just as you alluded to, massive daily uncertainty. Things are evolving so quickly that we don’t know what’s next. I wanted to ask you this, and I want to ask Shawne, too, in terms of broader principles, how do you deal with uncertainty? This could be somebody whose job is on the line in a tech firm or a corporation, or it could be in the NFL. Maybe there’s a quarterback controversy, and every day, you don’t know who’s going to be playing, who’s going to be starting that game, how many snaps you’re going to get. I want to ask both of you guys how do you deal with that uncertainty, and can it actually be harnessed to make you more productive?

I don’t know if harnessed would be the word I would use, but in the same vein, I would say that uncertainty is something that, as a species, we feel like evolutionarily, uncertainty, unpredictability. The unknown is something that we revolt against. Think about it when you’re a kid, you turn the lights off. Why are you scared? It’s because we don’t know how to predict the future because we can’t see what’s around us. We don’t know if there’s, as in the case of my daughter from when she was five, she had a nightmare because it was just too dark, and she didn’t know if a Pokemon was going to come attack her.

That’s built into our DNA. It’s like a fear of the unknown. Our ability to predict is entirely predicated upon understanding something. Shawne, to analogize to your prior life, if somebody is going to throw the ball at you, your brain is doing an incredibly sophisticated set of calculations that you are not even aware of, but that result in biomechanics that allow you to predict where the ball is going to land so that you’re able to catch it. That is extraordinarily sophisticated calculations that our brain is doing autonomously.

Your comfort level comes from the fact that when the event first started, the ball was thrown, and you can predict where it’s going to be in X number of seconds. Just think about uncertainty from that point of view when we don’t know that. Imagine somebody is going to throw the ball to you, Shawne, and your eyes were closed, and you had no idea what it started. It’s a preposterous notion, but that’s what uncertainty feels like to people, especially in the business world. With AI, I don’t even think that’s an unreasonable exaggeration.It is literally trying to throw a ball blind, and they’ll go catch it with no data.

The short answer is that uncertainty is bad in most situations. If you adapt a business infrastructure that allows you to harness disruption where there is an assumption that technologically, operationally, logistically, even from the perspective of your business model, there’ll need to be a constant reinvention, then it moves from being something that’s part of your threat matrix into something that is a huge competitive advantage because you can be reasonably confident that your competitors are not doing that.

When a new, let’s say, large language model is released, it has some great multimodal vision capabilities that might take out a big portion. If you’re in medical scanning or vision diagnostics, that might take out a big part of your business. If you’re already assuming that those types of disruptions are going to occur, you can incorporate that into your business fabric. You’re not going through, even logistically, the pain and like the legal pain of saying, “Now we need to downsize this division and we need to integrate it.”

It’s like, no, that’s going to be a competitive advantage because all of our competitors have the same problem, but they didn’t account for the fact that there would need to be reshuffling and manipulation of our technology platform and so on and so forth. You can make it into a huge competitive advantage. That is another big part of what we do, or maybe a corollary of what we do. It is try to ensure that companies that they get really comfortable with being uncomfortable. By so doing, every single time that some unexpected thing, like we can’t know what’s going to happen in this world.

I don’t know where it’s going. I have some pretty good ideas, but I’m sure I’m going to be wrong about most of them. I do know that when something happens, it’s not going to so much catch me off guard because I’m expecting that everything short of we’ve got teleportation down, and I think there was some announcement about quantum teleportation. Everything is up for grabs. When some crazy new invention comes out or new service or sub-disruptive capability that we’re just like, “Great, let’s roll.” Grab it, incorporate, let go. It’s going to cause some chaos in the backend, but it’s going to be 100 times worse for our competitors. Now, we have to be prepared to run and take advantage of this versus to recoil from the pain.

I think that everyone’s initial thing is when they don’t know something, it brings fear. It’s just unknown. Just people are scared of what they don’t know. To use your analogy of catching a football, in AI, if you really want to think about it, catching that same pass 1,000 times, knowing if it’s going to go a little further, a little shorter, if there’s going to be a spiral. AI has figured that out for you already.

If you’re catching a ball, the reason why a wide receiver does it so well is that he did it 1,000 times. Now, you don’t have to do 1,000 times because AI does it for you. I think that if you go in with that approach, when you’re talking to people and say, “What if I told you, you didn’t have to go out and catch it 1,000 times. It already can predict where the ball is going to land.” You have to trust it.

Building up that trust when you’re talking about AI, Zach and I talk about this all the time. Every time I talk, there’s a football analogy that I used to hate. I used to hate the analogy all the time that people say using intellectual property with football, AI with football. It’s so funny that you’re saying it now, and it doesn’t bother me.

The Future Of Human Component In AI

It actually helps me explain certain things in different industries, like AI. It literally is catching a football 1,000 times, knowing that it’s going to be there and trusting that it’s going to predict because it’s already did it 1,000 times. Now, you don’t have to go out there and replicate 1,000 catches anymore. For example, I have Lights Out Xtreme Fighting, my MMA organization, and we feed a lot of guys to the UFC.

We’re using a lot of AI now when it comes to sponsorship, which obviously increases our revenue and doing different things where we can shift things out, make it live, and predict different kinds of things, whatever. How far do you see it going towards certain businesses that are really going to be to the point where that’s all we do? Do you think that there’ll always be some human component to everything that happens?

Uncertainty, unpredictability, and the unknown are things we naturally revolt against as human beings. Share on X

I don’t want to be too dystopian, which most of my partners and friends would accuse me of, but I don’t believe that I would be honest if I didn’t tell you that I don’t really think that there are too many realms that AI is not going to dramatically surpass us in a shocking period of time. However, the performance of an athlete, and by the way, there are other industries this works that this analogy is going to apply well.

I think sports is a great area to start because in sports, if I told you that, “I’m going to replace you, Shawne, with a robot Shawne, that’s going to do exactly what you do, but it’s never going to get tired. It’s not going to want to raise, it’s not going to take a vacation. It’s just going to work. It’s going to improve itself exponentially.” I do not envision that humans are going to find that an enjoyable thing to watch versus an actual human whom they know. In sports, humans can see an idealized version of themselves.

A young child might look at you and say, “If I work hard, if I sacrifice, if I exercise, if I practice, maybe I can be that too.” Nobody is going to say, “If I work hard and sacrifice, maybe I can be a robotic entity that has no feelings, no emotions, or nothing.” I think that the role for sports is going to be for other humans to derive pleasure from seeing what our potential is, not that it will be the best performer. I could put a football in a bazooka and shoot it miles. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see the quarterback do it because I can relate to that individual.

Now, that’s a very specific. I think sports is in a very unique space to actually survive the let’s call it an AI apocalypse of sorts. It will probably thrive because AI is allowing us to optimize human performance in ways that we never could. There are other industries where this is going to be the case. My wife’s industry, she’s an expert in hospitality and real estate. She builds luxury micro-communities where people go and stay, vacation, reconnect, and whatnot. That’s a very human-centric business, a very human-centric industry.

Yet technologies like AI, just like with sports, can accelerate our ability to deliver those bespoke hyper-personalized experiences just like it can accelerate our ability to make you the most effective version of yourself that you can be, but not to replace. Most industries are not going to have the luxury of that scenario, though. For the most part, it’s just going to be a complete and utter replacement.

You’re saying that there’s no matter what, in your opinion, no matter how advanced AI gets, if there will always be a human element to it.

Not necessarily. I think that there will be scenarios like in the case of sports hospitality where humans necessarily want other humans involved. When it comes to pure profit motive or production output, AI is going to be across the board. I think that’s going to be unequivocal. There are a few things we haven’t hacked yet. There aren’t robots that can smell in the way that we can smell.

They don’t feel. I go outside, and as I mentioned before we started, I’m in Vermont. We got tons of snow. I actually love the feeling of plowing the snow or setting up a fire. It could be done more efficiently, but there’s a tactile, experiential value that is not relative to productivity or output. For the most part, businesses they’re just engines of capital creation. Their goal is to optimize the amount of units they can produce per unit of energy.

As a result, they will go to the most efficient means of production, which is invariably going to be hyper-intelligent robotic systems that can work without fail. That’s a vision for you. How many years is it going to take, 5 or 10 years? Who’s to say? There’s going to be a complete transformation of what it means to be an entrepreneur. Even the nature of our economic systems is going to truly change. People need to be prepared for that. You need to be thinking about how they’re going to shift themselves into the new version of what reality is going to look like.

Gamification Of Sports And More Personalized Advertisements

One of the things I want to touch on is this notion that I think we agree that AI in 5, 10, or 15 years, whatever it takes, will be able to basically replace much, if not most, of what we do as humans and do it more efficiently. The question becomes, what do we actually want it to replace? We can build a better robot athlete than Shawne, but do we actually want to see robots play each other? To me, that’s not really that interesting. I don’t think it is to most people. I guess one of the things I’ve been thinking about is not what AI can do because it’ll eventually be able to do almost everything but what we want it to do.

What will remain something that we want to remain human? Where will there be pockets of innate humanness that we want to keep? Sports, I think, you guys both agree, is one of them. Even within sports, I think it’s very interesting because AI can be used to augment the experience. For instance, with Lights Out Sports TV, with what Shawne’s doing, and with his Lights Out Xtreme Fighting, there are a lot of AI applications and advanced technologies that he’s utilizing.

There are these gloves that Shawne can tell you more about, but it basically tracks the speed and the power of the punches. Eventually, that will enable us to gamify live MMA fights where you can say, “How much damage has this human incurred?” Just like a Street Fighter video game in a sense. How thick is their beard, in a sense? How much damage have they really taken? You never really knew that. You could look at somebody and say, “They look like they’re in rough shape,” but you never really knew how much they have sustained.

There’s stuff like that. As Shawne mentioned earlier, there’s also so much you can do on the advertising side with AI that could never be done before. Just like a super simple application is if you think about the octagon, there’s usually a sponsor whose logo is in the middle of the octagon. Now, that can be changed virtually throughout the fight. When you’re watching on TV, you will see a different sponsor logo, depending on who you are, and where you are, and what fight it is.

That and the ability to then target exactly what ads people are seeing and how they’re connecting with the fight in real time. Some people love to gamble, so there are going to be options for them to gamble on this in different ways. Other people may not be gambling, but they want to see certain ads. Shawne, I’ll let you talk more about it because I think it’s fascinating, especially with the gloves.

I already jumped in when we first started out. Sports, I think it’s going to go through the roof because of AI, and the data is going to be pulled and what the data is going to be able to use for. There will always be a human element. You want to see a 250-pound line linebacker run through somebody and big hits and things like that because there’s a human doing it. Most people are going to watch the game and say, “I wish I could do that.”

If a robot does it, anybody can go buy a robot and have someone tackle somebody. I think there’ll always be that part of it. My biggest question for that is, when you talk about sports in general, the live sports, you’re in the business of seeing this new up-and-coming AI, and you said that there’s constantly changing, like quickly, especially in the live sports sector. How fast do you see that changing?

Whatever answer I give you, it’s faster than that. It’s happening daily, hourly, because it’s worldwide. There are innovations happening, and I don’t mean micro innovations that may roll up something valuable in a couple of years. Let’s take a look at advertising. We already know that we can superimpose different visual constructs over a game or a fight. In fact, you’re just describing the very first stages towards hyper-personalization. Imagine the scenario, by the way, technologically, what I’m about to describe, we can already do.

Society is just catching up. That’s why it comes to this so quickly. It’s because the stuff’s already done. It has to get rolled out. Think about what true hyper-personalization is going to entail from the perspective of advertising, where I know that Shawne is watching here, and Zach’s watching over here in this other place, and Ari’s watching here. Based upon the historical data I have on these individuals and other demographic data and psychographic analysis that’s been done and behavioral science and studies, I can say this is the best ad to send to Shawne.

AI allows us to optimize human performance in ways we never could. Share on X

I hyper-personalized one-to-one advertisements so that you see something different on the screen than Zach sees, and he sees something different than I see. We are getting ads that are entirely tailored to us. To put this in more of a specific context, somebody’s engaged in combat, and they’ve got these type of gloves and a mouth guard and they’re being sponsored by these different groups.

They might say as an owner of this business, Shawne is going to be interested in the effectiveness of the advertiser’s messages, so the brand. Maybe on your screen, you’re going to get an advertisement for companies that are focused around business intelligence, data analytics, and figuring out optimized ways to deliver messaging.

Now, Zach’s interest, maybe he owns one of the fighters and he might say, “Shawne is owning the business. He’s going to be caring about the broad issues relative to those advertising messages.” Zach’s maybe going to be more interested in the performance of his fighter. His advertisements might be related to post-exertion recovery, like maybe cryogenic things you can go into that are really cold that help you with recovery or whatnot.

Cryotherapy.

Thank you. If I’m looking at it completely outside of it, I’m just somebody who trained with the American top team, and the system would know that I did that. It’s like, “He’s going to care about the gloves, the equipment. He might want to send some ads for gyms in his neighborhood because he’s outside of this realm. I’m going to get totally different advertisements.”

That is how the future of advertising is going to look like, but even more bespoke, where AI is going to actually dynamically create the ad. It’s going to say, “Here’s Everlast.” Instead of just showing an Everlast glove from some static pool of data that says, “Everlast, when your thing is supposed to be shown, show this glove, show this price,” whatever.

It’s going to potentially create a dynamic video of me wearing Everglass gloves, fighting and saying, “Wouldn’t you like to be this version you see here? This version has an eight-pack, and you’ve got a one-pack, but if you get these gloves, this is what you look like. This is the experience.” Little videos that are designed to completely engage the user. That’s just the first stage of what advertising is going to look like. There’s so much more I could talk about, but it’s going to be wild.

One of the best, I would call it right now, just the market and running ads and trying to figure it out is Amazon. They’ve been amazing at how they deliver ads and popping up. I’m in daily talks with people in their team and just where the market is going as far as ads and geographically. That’s something we’re going to be able to do. Someone watching a different ad or a different scene, a different sponsor in a different country, different state. We have it all the way down to the different zip codes.

If you got a water company that is only sold in Southern California, you only want to show that ad and so Cal to go to your local Costco or whatever it is. I completely understand where this thing is going. It’s mind-boggling to me because when I first started talking about the guys we partnered with over at PTF about delivering, and relate to me say, “It’s changing faster than we can talk.” It was two days before these guys said, “We can do it by country. We can do it by state.” It was 2 or 3 days later, “We can do zip codes now.” It was that fast, and how fast they were able to pivot doing all this stuff.

It’s not just the speed that’s blinding. The acceleration is increasing. The speed with which these new innovations are coming is increasing itself. You can even already envision a scenario where they go beyond just high definition geo-targeting to where we’re saying, “If it’s to be delivered in Poland, then let’s do real-time translations into Polish. Let’s even maybe manipulate the text on the product, which is sold internationally but maybe has English lettering or whatnot. Let’s make sure we put a real-time caption or description of what this is in that customer’s language.”

It is wild what is already possible, and what will be possible. In fact, the bigger challenge is not how are we going to effectively reach people with messages. It’s how are those people going to make money in this new world so that they can buy? That’s a bigger question that I think governments are struggling with and corporations are, in the short-term, benefiting from because of all this improvement efficiency.

Even over the next couple of years, there’s going to be a cratering of the economy when they realize that all these efficiencies that these corporations have implemented got, you’ll have companies worth billions of dollars that have like six people because everything else will be a gigantic AI system. They can say, “Wait a minute. The people that used to work for us, which we would pay and which other companies would pay would then use that would cycle that money back into the economy to buy our goods. Now, they don’t have jobs. They’re not cycling the money back in. Where does our money come from?”

The efficiency is almost like that of a poison pill. They’re going to be hurt by it. That’s why the industries that are going to be safe or going to genuinely benefit over a longer period of time from this, like sports, like hospitality, like any industries where the human element, it’s not going to be because of our intellectual capability or even our ability to think strategically. It’s going to be predicated upon the emotional connection. Those industries where that’s not just a feature, but it is the predominant feature. It is the connection to the emotion of sports.

It’s the connection to the hospitality experience. Those are the industries that are going to thrive. The other industries, it’s going to be a very rocky road. I know governments are trying to figure out how to address this, but they have no good answers. It’s just going to be some regulatory gibberish that’s going to be quite ineffective and probably just going to slow down the ability of everyday people to exist effectively in the world. Obviously, it’ll be designed in such a way that it benefits the elites at the top. I don’t want to go too dystopian on this, but that’s what I think is happening.

Very optimistic.

I’m the one they bring in for the birthday parties. It’s like, “We need somebody to smile.”

Ari, all that said, and I agree with you, I do think there’s just not going to be the same demand for human workers in most industries in the next couple of years, and certainly, within a decade, there will be very little if we so choose. We may choose at the government level to basically say, “We’re going to mandate that you have to hire humans.” We don’t want them sitting on the couch watching Netflix and scrolling on Instagram all day. Who knows where we’re going to wind up? It’s probably going to be something along the lines of a universal basic income where the robots are doing all the work, and we all get something to sustain ourselves.

Providing Value To Human Workforce

Quite frankly, I think the riches are going to wind up in the hands of a very few who own or have mastered the use of these technologies. It’s going to basically be a world of a few big players. We’re already seeing it. We see the tech aristocracy, and there are a dozen guys who basically have all the assets and all your data. They know exactly what you’re doing. They know exactly where the world’s going because they’re creating it. It is a little bit disheartening in some ways. On the other hand, let’s be optimistic.

The bigger challenge with AI disruption is not about how to effectively reach people with messages. It is about how people will make money in this new world so they can continue buying. Share on X

There’s another hand. Hit me with that side of it.

The optimistic view is that this frees us up from having to grind ten hours a day. This frees us up from an industrial economy where people are working 10, 12, or 14 hours a day in sweatshops just so they can survive. Imagine if we look at it from that angle and we say, “This is going to actually eliminate the need for people to do all that low-value backbreaking work.” It needs to get done, but on a per-worker basis, they’re not adding that much value individually.

Think about what we could do. What could you do if you had 40 hours a week and a couple of $100,000 in your pocket, and you could do whatever the heck you wanted? You’d probably become good at something. If you’re somebody who’s motivated, who is going to be successful anyway, like if you’re naturally like an entrepreneur and you’re a hard worker, and now all of a sudden you’ve got all this time and you’ve got all your basic needs met. You’re not like stressed about, “Am I going to have to eat ramen noodles for the next six years to get this startup off the ground?”

Instead, I could just let my creativity flow. I have all to get my vision implemented. The biggest thing that’s impacted my life personally over the last couple of years is that I can now do things in such a short amount of time that big corporations would have taken literally years, if not decades, to accomplish. I can do in a week what some of the companies I worked for 10 years ago would take 2 years to do. It’s not just me. Anybody who knows how to harness technology can do that now. It’s completely game-changing.

My view is that a lot of the winners are going to be those who are able to move quickly. We were talking about this on another episode, Shawne and I, about this idea of moving quickly. Speed kills. It’s just like if you’re fast in sports, that makes you very valuable no matter what sport you’re playing. It’s the same thing in business. You could have a great idea, Ari, but if I do it next week and you’re going to do it four years from now, it doesn’t even matter if my version’s even close to as good as your version would have been because I’m already a leader in the space. How do you think about it in terms of the optimistic side of things? If you’re giving advice to people, how should they position themselves?

One thing I just want to say, I guess the game theoreticist in me has to make one mention of the idea of like government-mandated hiring. There’s no economic theory that I’ve ever heard that actually supports the idea that that would work. It may be something that humans try anyway. They probably will, but artificial inefficiency just makes businesses uncompetitive. They would either relocate or automate in secret or just shut down. The issue is like economic restructuring. That’s the real key.

It’s not forcing inefficient human jobs. AI would control the economy anyway. Just do it behind the scenes if the government mandates some gibberish on the front. The real issue is not that AI automation is going to replace humans on a global scale. It is. It’s more a question of where do humans get value without work. The majority of human history, like human value, is tied to economic product. Whatever you could build, produce or contribute to society determines your value in society.

Since AI erases the need for human labor, we have to totally rethink value beyond work. There are places where this can come from, and this is where I think the optimism should be derived from. As you said, it’s all being funneled into a small group of technology-like oligarchs who are trying to control the future. What’s the one thing that is uniform across all humans? For whatever we think or feel, we all want to feel greater value in ourselves and in our lives for whatever that might mean to us.

The ideal business for somebody to invest their time and energy into is one that has this bifurcated strategy running in parallel. One where you are able to provide a genuine benefit that is tied to whatever economic system is in place, is tied to people who control those economics and is able to give them some legitimate value back coupled with something that gives you purpose and provides value to your life, which can necessarily be decoupled from productivity. Let’s stick with the two examples which I think work the best here, sports and hospitality.

In sports, let’s say we have an entirely new economic system, and now we’ve got these tech barons that are controlling all the money and all the AI, whatnot. What is their life going to look like? Think about the ultra wealthy of, even on the surface, do these seem like particularly joyful people, or do they seem like they are constantly in these battles with each other to try to one-up each other to get, “Now I have the best AI.” “No, I have the best AI, and I built this thing, and I’m building a rocket. I’m doing this.”

All of those things. These are really interesting intellectual endeavors, but ultimately, where’s the fundamental value driver? Is it like spending time watching your daughter and her crib learning to walk, or is it talking with your wife about the flower garden? A robot could have done it more effectively, but if you were engaging in those kinds of activities, if you’re engaging in something that other people are going to find valuable, even if the wealthiest people in society, they’re still going to want to watch, like Shawne said, a 250-pound block of muscle can crash through other humans.

That has sustaining value. They will pay the people who are engaged in those activities and who support those activities in a very handsome way. That’s why I said, I think sports is in one of the unique positions to thrive. Humans get value out of that from an entertainment perspective, and that’s decoupled from technological advancement, even though technology helps it.

Even as they acquire as systems of control roll up into a smaller group of people who are effectively controlling AI, there are still going to be people at a level that are providing so much value that they’re going to be insulated from that because economics will funnel into them because they’re providing some type of benefit. That would be in an entertainment perspective. In terms of hospitality, it’s more purpose-built. It’s like, if I go back to the unpredictability thing, if I have a world where I’m in some kind of AI bubble, and everything is done for me by robots, and I have ultimate power.

I have nothing to worry about. As you said, nothing to think about. What’s the meaning of my life? There is no unpredictability. While unpredictability is scary, as we talked about, you turn the lights off. People also want to go to see horror movies because they like those jump scares. They want excitement. They want newness. If I can predict everything, then there is no value whatsoever to my life. If I knew every word that would come out of my wife’s mouth, everything she would say how she felt about it.

There’s nothing for me to be surprised by, and surprise is where joy comes from. When you laugh at something, it’s not because you knew exactly what the joke was going to be. It’s because it tickled something in you, like, “I didn’t expect that,” or, “That’s an unusual take.” In terms of hospitality, we anticipate these same oligarchs saying, “We want to have controlled, yet unpredictable experiences,” which is why they come to places like my wife’s property. She has this thing called the Folly Collection.

It’s just like I said, this elite or upscale like micro-community, it’s off-grid. Very wealthy and famous people want to spend a lot of money to go there because it allows them to disconnect. They get to walk around the Mojave Desert and feel the air on their face. You pay a lot of money for it, but you can’t buy that experience in an AI bubble. I think that those areas where people are going to perpetually derive value just because of the fact that we are biological creatures with the hormones and senses that we have until transhumanism kicks in and people stop being humans entirely.

There will always be value drivers based upon those fundamental premises. That’s where I think the optimism should come from. Now, I do want to mention, I think that’s going to be for the select people who recognize what’s going on and say, “I need to take action.” When clients come to us at Hypereon Labs, they are in a framework mentally that they weren’t in before. It’s not just like, “Give me value.”

It’s like, “What should we do?” There’s a sense of fear around that. We try to give them a warm embrace and say, “Here, let us paint you a roadmap. We’ll take you through the planning, the requirements, the analysis of the problem domain, the design of the solution, the implementation of the solution, the evaluation of the success of that solution, and the deployment of it, and any upgrades you’re going to want.” We try to give them that roadmap to something that’s going to feel like it’s got where it’s going to be sustainable.

While unpredictability is scary, people will still crave excitement and newness. If we can predict everything, there will be no value whatsoever to our lives. Share on X

It’s going to be long-term value drivers, competitive value drivers for the business. Any area, any industry, any market segment that is focused on driving value to fundamental human needs, that is where I think that incredible wealth is going to be generated. In fact, new elites. I don’t think there’s going to be too many opportunities to generate incredible wealth. I think these are the areas where I do believe that will happen. I think it’s going to happen at a faster pace than has ever happened in the history of humanity.

Keeping The Experience Real In The Age Of AI

Sports and AI is basically the biggest opportunity right now on the board.

No, I think it would probably have to be the hospital, just because it’s a fundamental need for living. For example, I think sports is quite insulated, but think of what happened during COVID. Sports is still a want. It’s the fun entertainment of seeing people who are superhuman do incredible things. When COVID hits, you’re not thinking about football. You think, “Is there food in the grocery store?”

Hospitality explodes and real estate explodes. You can’t make more land effectively. That was COVID. The COVID shutdowns were quite rough for most people, but it benefited my wife greatly because people were paying enormous amounts of money just to have a safe place to sit down. This disruption is going to cause a lot of chaos in society.

You do want to think about what’s an economic and evolutionary hedge against the upcoming chaos, which we know is going to happen. The writer strike alone was based upon them not wanting AI, whatever else was in it. It was just like, “We don’t want AI replicating us or writing the scripts.” Why not? It’s because it would put them all out of work. See that? Imagine that happening across countless industries and that’s a recipe for chaos.

You want to have those economic hedges against that. The evolutionary hedge is to do something in an area to have your hedge be one where it also provides meaning and value. That’s why sports fits nicely in that and so does hospitality. It’s like, how do we live? How do we derive joy? How do we see value in ourselves? How do we see value in others?

Ari, to simplify it, in a way, you’re saying it’s the experience.

It is 100% experiential. That is everything.

That involves the hospitality aspect, but it also involves sports because sports is an experience. We’re all living vicariously through that.

It’s an escapism fantasy. That doesn’t feel out of reach because a human did it. Maybe that human is twice my size. I’m five foot two. That person is seven foot. Yes, they can do things I couldn’t do, but we all started from DNA. We’re at least similar enough that we can analogize or juxtapose ourselves into that situation or into that individual.

That’s really what it comes down to. Those human-centric markets that are experientially driven are not just going to persist. Those are going to explode. They are going to thrive. That’s why if you were deploying capital into anything, I would be looking at sports and hospitality. I don’t even know why somebody would think about deploying money into other traditional businesses, which are going to be disrupted.

There are just too many ways where other types of investments can go wildly wrong and where you should like the default assumption, which should necessarily be that this probably won’t work because AI is going to solve the problem that this thing is supposedly solving better tomorrow. It really could be that precarious. Finding those areas that are experientially driven and totally human-centric that’s where all the wild profits are going to come from. I’m quite sure of that.

Ari, you just described a big part of my investment thesis. You just described what Shawne’s doing with Lights Out Sports. Thank you. One of the smartest guys in any room just basically said that one of the biggest opportunities.

Check with my wife on that. Sometimes, I’m the dumbest guy in the room.

I’ll just send this to investors like, “You want to know what Ari and Lights Out are doing? Just watch Ari talk about where the world’s headed and how this is like the biggest opportunity out there.”

I really think it’s true. I could justify it with game theory, like just look at dominant strategies. You could justify it with econometric theory with the way that society has evolved in terms of sports, like editorial competitions. There is a fundamental need for humans to watch other humans compete. Evolutionarily, we play as children to learn how to fight, survive and compete. That’s what playing is.

It is completely logical to understand why that would be the case and having a need for shelter and by extension, food, water and security. As I said, that’s where the hospitality side kicks in. You want to all the needs that people have, the wants and the requirements. If you’re functioning in one of those areas, then you’re dominating the dojo.

Answering Lightning Round Questions

In the interest of time, we’re going to do a lightning round. This is always fun. What we’re focused on here is just success principles, like things you’ve learned over the years that others can benefit from. We’re just going to ask a couple of questions. Keep it short, and I’ll kick it off. I wanted to just ask you of all the advice you’ve ever received, what’s been the most impactful for you?

Being incredibly comfortable with failure. I remember when I first heard this. I had the first week of class back at MIT, a 6001, this is like intro to computer science and they talked explicitly about how when you fail to develop the application you want or the algorithm doesn’t work the way you expect, what you’re really doing is you’re just putting aside a strategy. You’re validating that this strategy doesn’t work, and so now there are less strategies that won’t work, and you’re ostensibly closer to the strategy that will.

We may not know what will come on the other end of AI, but right now is the right time to innovate and develop. Share on X

The idea that it’s not just okay to fail, but it’s awesome to fail, especially in the realm of AI, this applies to life. In the realm of AI, every time we start from a position of failure, we’re trying to optimize our mathematics and algorithms so that we pass that inflection point between success and failure. You might fail with your strategies 100 times, but then on 100, you’re zeroing in on the target. Eventually, when you crack that inflection, you just have to succeed one time, and you win.

Failure is something to be embraced, not to be afraid of. I think it’s fundamental to any entrepreneur to realize that. Of course, there’s a difficult line between just being stubborn and make sure that you’re validating your strategies and your hypothesis on a continuous basis. Embracing failure is everything, and loving to fail is really something that I’ve found to be beneficial in my life.

If you could change one thing in a space, what would that be? We talked about so many different angles, such as sports and entertainment, and we talked about hospitality. If you can change something about this space that people are not really looking into, what would it be?

That AI, in particular, is being controlled by a select few and that we are seeing this in the wrong lens. The vast majority of people think that the AI problem or the challenge of AI is a fight between the US and China, but it’s not. It has nothing to do with that. It is a fight between open source and closed source. It’s ironic because most folks in government would say, “China is our biggest threat, biggest enemy.”

The US has these closed-sourced AI systems. OpenAI, ironically enough, is closed. China, maybe they are reverse engineering systems, and maybe they’re stealing data, but they’re building AI systems that are incredibly effective, and then they’re open-sourcing them so that people back in the US who are not amongst those elites are able to take advantage of that open-source technology.

I think reframing the argument appropriately, not as a US versus China thing, but as an open versus closed source situation, is I wish people would understand that because then we could put pressure on the government to make all of these developments open source so that everybody, not just in the US, but worldwide could at least understand what is happening and that there would be transparency and universal benefit.

Of course, that requires humans to think in a far less selfish way than we’ve evolved to think. I don’t anticipate that happening, but I would so wish that humans could wake up and realize that the people who are developing AI they’re driving themselves into obsolescence. They just don’t know it because they might be obsolete a year or two after they make everybody else obsolete because it’s going to be at least an obsolete life where there’s no value. If we could make this something more global, then I think, as a people, we could come together in ways that were never possible before.

Ari, before we go in, any success habits or mindsets that you take with you every day that we should learn from?

Despite a lot of what we said on this show, the future is incredible. There’s going to be a period of utter chaos. You can envision a landscape maybe similar to the Industrial Revolution where new technologies were just completely redefining society. If you can embrace that idea and think, “We may not know what’s going to come on the other end, but this is the time to innovate and develop.”

I don’t mean like in 12 months or 24 months, like that’s a lifetime. Right now, you should say, “What is it that I’m going to do? What am I going to be courageous enough to do?” I shouldn’t be trying to think, “How am I going to get promoted in my job over the next ten years so that I could eventually be a senior VP at some bank,” or something like that. It’s a waste of time, life and effort.

What they should be doing or saying, “How am I going to stay curious? How am I going to stay courageous? How am I going to be innovative? How am I going to align the things I do in my life with the values I hold dear? How am I going to make sure that the impact I have relative to my economic success correlates to the things that really matter?” Meaning driving the true value of my loved ones, my family, my friends, and ideally, the world around.

If you can think in that way, then you can look at this future, however terrifying and unknown it may be, with a certain sense of wonder. I’m truly excited in the same way that I’m horrified about what we’re barreling towards. We’re also barreling towards a future that is incredibly exciting. I both can’t wait to get there and worried about what it’s going to mean when we do.

Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

Thanks, Ari. I appreciate it. We appreciate you coming on, and it’s exciting to hear because you just back up a lot of stuff that we’re talking about. Even though we’re a smaller organization with Lights Out Sports and a smaller organization with Lights Out Xtreme Fighting, the things we’re implementing with AI and some of this tech and stuff is going to amplify and build verticals that haven’t been in these spaces. By you saying that, it makes me feel smart.

Trust me. What we know instinctually far outstrips what we can explain. That’s what goes back to the explanation about like, where the ball is going to go. If I said, “Work out the math.” You’d be like, “It doesn’t matter.” Us humans are capable of things that we don’t understand. One last piece of advice. Drive money into sports because it’s going to be a great field to be in.

I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks, guys.

Good stuff, Ari. Thank you.

Take care. Cheers.

Important Links

• Zack Ellison on LinkedIn
• Zack Ellison on Instagram
• The 7 in 7 Show with Zack Ellison (podcast)
• Applied Real Intelligence (A.R.I.) website
• Shawne Merriman on LinkedIn
• Shawne Merriman on Instagram
• Lights Out Sports TV website
• Lights Out Xtreme Fighting website
• Hypereon Labs
• Ari Smith on LinkedIn
• A.R.I. Partners with Hypereon Labs to Drive AI-Powered Innovation on Businesswire
• A.R.I. Partners with Hypereon Labs to Drive AI-Powered Innovation on Einpresswire

About Ari Smith

Ari Smith is a pioneering entrepreneur and leader in artificial intelligence and logistics optimization. As Co-Founder of Hypereon Labs—a strategic consulting firm at the forefront of AI innovation—Ari has been instrumental in developing high-performance enterprise solutions that redefine operational efficiency across industries such as fintech, energy, telecommunications, digital media, and precision medicine. Hypereon Labs, known for its unique revenue-sharing and equity-based partnership model, harnesses advanced machine learning, predictive analytics, and automation to help businesses unlock efficiencies and drive measurable impact. Under his leadership, the firm has secured strategic financing from Applied Real Intelligence (A.R.I.), positioning it as a global powerhouse capable of deploying AI solutions to tackle even the most complex challenges.

Prior to his groundbreaking work at Hypereon Labs, Ari co-founded FatRat AI, a firm dedicated to AI-driven business transformation, and founded AlertWire—a venture he successfully built and sold. His career also includes serving as a Solutions Architect at Microsoft and mentoring the next generation of AI talent as a Visiting Professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Ari’s innovative spirit is reflected in his multiple patents in algorithmic efficiency and his impressive accolades, including first place in NASA’s National Science Olympiad, a gold medal at the 2017 GeekPark International AI Challenge in Shanghai, and semifinalist honors in MIT’s 100K Entrepreneurship Competition.