Why Sport Is One of AI's Last Stands

Hey Everyone - I have been thinking a lot this week about what does not change. With everything moving so fast in the AI space, I keep coming back to the things that feel durable. The things that matter to people regardless of what technology is doing. That thread runs through everything this week.

This week:

Let's dive in.

Over 120 million people watched the Super Bowl this year. Not a recording. Not a highlight reel. Not an AI-generated summary. They watched it live, in real time, with no idea what was going to happen next.

Think about how rare that is becoming.

AI can write a movie script. It can generate music. It can produce art that wins competitions. It can create entire video games. The list of creative and entertainment domains where AI is producing competent or even impressive output grows every month. But nobody is tuning in to watch an AI play football. Nobody ever will.

The reason is simple but worth sitting with. What people want from sport is not the output. It is the struggle. They want to see what a human being is capable of when everything is on the line. The drama of sport is not scripted. Nobody wrote the ending of that Super Bowl. Nobody programmed the comeback or the missed field goal or the fourth quarter collapse. It happened because real people with real limitations were pushing themselves to the absolute edge of what their bodies and minds could do, in front of millions of people, with no second takes.

That is something AI fundamentally cannot replicate. Not because the technology is not advanced enough. But because the entire point is that it is hard for humans specifically. A robot that can throw a perfect spiral every time is not interesting. A human who can do it under pressure, with a 260-pound defensive end bearing down on them, after three hours of physical punishment, that is interesting. The limitation is the product.

This is why Battle Bots, as cool as they are, will never have the cultural weight of the NFL or the World Cup or the Olympics. It is entertaining to watch machines destroy each other. But it does not move people the same way. There is no sacrifice. There is no risk. There is no story of a person who trained for twenty years for one moment. The human element is not a nice addition to sport. It is the entire thing.

I think this tells us something important about where value is going to live in the AI era more broadly.

As AI gets better at producing content, the things that hold their value will be the things where the human struggle is the point. Where you cannot separate the experience from the fact that a real person did it. Live performance. Physical craftsmanship. Competitive athletics. Cooking. Even conversation. The domains where the process matters as much as the result.

AI is going to keep getting better at making things. It is going to produce music that sounds great and writing that reads well and images that look stunning. But the more it does that, the more people are going to crave the things that are unmistakably, irreplaceably human. Not because those things are technically superior. But because they carry something AI never will: the weight of real effort, real risk, and real consequence.

Sport figured this out a long time ago. The rest of us are just starting to catch up.

I rebuilt austinfoundersfeed.com this week and I am genuinely proud of how it turned out.

I used Claude Code to build it. I still reviewed all the code and made decisions about the structure and design, but the actual writing of the code was mostly done by AI. I was able to customize the site exactly how I wanted it in a fraction of the time it would have taken me otherwise. I added a business directory, a sponsors page, product listings, and a bunch of other features I had been putting off because I assumed they would take too long to implement.

Here is what surprised me though. After building this, I started looking at the websites of businesses in my directory. Local Austin entrepreneurs. People doing real, legitimate work. And many of their websites are, to put it kindly, underwhelming. Outdated designs. Broken links. Missing information. Some of these businesses do not even have a website at all. They just have a social media page or nothing.

This made me realize something. There is still a very real opportunity in simply building websites for people.

That might sound absurd in 2026. The tools exist for anyone to build a great site. I just proved that by building one myself with AI. But the tools existing and people actually using them are two very different things. Most small business owners are not on the cutting edge. They are not experimenting with AI coding tools. They do not know where to start and so they just keep putting it off. They need someone they trust to say "let me handle this for you."

That trust piece is key. These business owners are not going to hire a random agency they found on Google. They are going to hire someone they know, someone in their community, someone who was recommended by another business owner they respect. Being a trusted, known figure in a local ecosystem is what unlocks those relationships.

I keep coming back to this same lesson. The technology changes but the underlying need does not. People want help from people they trust. If you can be that person in your community, there is no shortage of work to do. Even something as seemingly basic as building a website.

I went down a rabbit hole this week on aquaculture. Fish farming, water filtration, closed-loop ecosystems where the waste from one part of the system feeds another part. It is fascinating. But the reason I cannot stop thinking about it has nothing to do with fish.

It is the principle underneath it. Self-sustaining systems.

In aquaculture, the goal is to create an environment where the inputs feed the outputs and the outputs cycle back into inputs. The fish produce waste. The waste feeds the plants. The plants filter the water. The clean water goes back to the fish. Once the system is set up and balanced, it largely runs on its own. You still maintain it, you still monitor it, but the system is doing the heavy lifting.

This same principle applies to almost everything worth building.

Think about it in business. The best businesses are not the ones where you are manually generating every dollar. They are the ones where the work you did last month is still producing results this month. A newsletter is a self-sustaining system when it is working well. The content attracts readers. The readers attract sponsors. The sponsors fund more content. The community grows, which attracts more sponsors, which funds better events, which grows the community further. Each part feeds the next.

Think about it in relationships. The strongest networks are not built by constant outreach and follow-up. They are built by creating enough value that people come to you. When you become a connector, when you become the person who makes introductions and shares opportunities, people start doing the same for you without you asking. The system sustains itself.

Think about it at home. Growing your own food, even a small amount, is a self-sustaining system. Composting your scraps to feed your garden to feed your family to create more scraps. Generating your own energy. Collecting rainwater. Each of these reduces your dependence on external inputs and gives you a foundation that keeps producing whether you are actively working on it or not.

The skill here is learning to think in systems rather than transactions. Most people operate transactionally. They trade time for money. They trade effort for a single result. Then they start over tomorrow. Systems thinkers invest effort upfront to create something that keeps producing long after the initial work is done.

In a world where AI is making single transactions cheaper and faster, the real advantage belongs to people who build systems. AI can handle a task. But designing the system that determines which tasks matter and how they connect to each other, that is a deeply human skill.

Start looking at your life through this lens. Where are you doing the same work over and over that could be systematized. Where could you invest effort now to create something that sustains itself later. Where are you trading time for a one-time result when you could be building infrastructure that compounds.

The aquaculture rabbit hole taught me something I already knew but needed to be reminded of. The most resilient systems are the ones that feed themselves.