The Barbell Strategy for Surviving the AI Shift | Ep 982

0:00Some of you are not using AI at all. Some of you guys are AI laggards and are like, I don't need it. No one's ever going to replace humans. And good for you. I love that for you. It'll make it easier to beat you. But, you know, do you. There are people today that use fax machines. There are people today who still count on their fingers. It doesn't mean that it makes them more likely to compete. It means that they are competing and still winning with a disadvantage, which means that they have to be so much better in other arenas, right? And so it'd be like not getting on the internet for your company.

0:31Are there companies right now that do not have websites and make money? Absolutely. Do they make as much as they could? Probably not. And so this is an absolute promise to you, is that throughout all of human history, humans plus superior technology beat humans with inferior technology. It worked from the stone age to the bronze age. It worked from the bronze age to the iron age. It worked from the iron age to the titanium age, right? Or the aluminum, which I think my Aussies say, to what you can see it very naturally. And so also I want to give this as a little bit like a tiny bit of stress relaxation for you.

1:10As long as it is humans plus tools against humans with other tools, then you are still competing against humans. And as long as that game still goes, you should feel endlessly confident. The day that you try to beat the machine, you will lose. And every time we've tried to say, like machines will never beat us at chess, machines will never beat us at go, machines will never beat us at insert X, they always do. Just like autopilot on planes, everyone is very against it. Now there's going to be pushback on a lot of AI stuff, but not because of its function, but because of people's emotions around it.

1:42Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10 stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1 % of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases, that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this, and it works.

2:12And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com forward slash roadmap. Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you all free. Now, in a world of infinite AI labor and intelligence, where the cost of intelligence and labor go to functionally zero, rather the cost of energy, the last valuable thing that a human will get paid to do would be to take risk. And so that is something that you incur that no one else can really take away from you, which is why I think money will exist in the future. It's just that labor won't have value.

2:42And that's where this gets difficult. So it'd be more and more difficult to provide value to a marketplace when you, yourself, your labor, your inherent work no longer has value when there's a robot that has infinite intelligence inside of it. It's stronger, it's faster, and it works for$200. It works for the price of the electricity that runs it. Very hard. And this is, again, not to scare you, but to prepare you for what is going to come. And so if you're on Main Street right now, and you're thinking, oh, like every company is going to become a technology company. You wouldn't think of yourself as a technology company today, but it's like, well, do you use social media?

3:19Do you use the internet? Do you use email? Do you use phone? These are all components of technology that you integrated into your business. And I would consider this the last bastion of where humans play that role. Now, obviously, GDP is in gross domestic product. The amount that companies have made per headcount has continued to go up. If we look at the economy, what are the two factors that drive output? It's education, aka skills, and technology, right? And so when you have infinite labor with infinite intelligence, there's going to be a big explosion in GDP or gross domestic product. There's going to be more companies than ever before.

3:53And I also think that when many roles are going to get an automated way, the amount of businesses that will bloom from this will be huge. But I will not say that I know and I don't think anyone does know, but what are the few things that I can bet on? I believe in a barbell strategy for approaching the future. So what does that mean? On one extreme, this is the high risk, high reward. This is I'm fully incorporating AI in all my stuff. All my businesses are going to be AI first, AI native, AI forward. I have to be willing to have the hard conversations with team to get them to level up. And if they don't, I have to have to have even a hard conversation that we no longer need them because we've automated away the role.

4:30I have to be willing to do that because guess what? You might not be willing to do that, but there's going to be a startup that just doesn't have to have that conversation that is going to already be automating those roles and they will beat you. That's the high risk, high reward side. On the other side, it's what are the few bets, and this is Jeff Bezos frame, which is what are the few bets that I can make that I believe won't change? What things will absolutely still exist? I believe that humans will still have bodies, at least in the near to medium term. So I think health-related things will absolutely exist.

5:00So healthcare, fitness-related stuff, all that stuff, consumables, food, supplements, all that stuff will still exist. I think in a world where there's way more robots and way more work getting done for humans, what will humans have? If we look at human history, we have more of one thing, which is leisure or downtime. So what do we fill our leisure downtime with? Entertainment. I believe entertainment is going to boom. It's already big. It's gone. It's continued to grow as a percentage of GDP. And I think it will explode because I think people have more time on their hands. And entertainment is typically very cheap.

5:32And so if you want to like, you can make a full motion picture now. and there's this period of time where the prices have not adjusted to the cost basis associated. And so you can make some viral social media videos and get a huge amount of PR for a movie that you made entirely with AI and make$100 million,$200 million. And the beauty of that is it's all margin. And you can absolutely do that. So why don't people do it? Because people are afraid to take action. But is that there? Absolutely. I'll also give you something that will make some people uncomfortable, but it's just an absolute reality of business in general, is that if you actually really want to know what the bleeding edge of like what's going to happen with anything is in terms of tech, as it incorporates in business, I know this is going to sound a little bit off putting for some people.

6:16Look at porn. Whatever porn adopts first, eventually makes its way down. So what have we already seen happen in the porn industry? You've got AI avatar girls who are, you know, people are spinning up these AI avatars, They have an army of 100 girls or guys. I don't know, whatever your flavor is, right? Or aliens. I mean, again, whatever you want. Where people, and I'm not saying good or bad. I'm just saying pure economics, right? Where they don't have to deal with the drama associated with it. They don't have to film them. They don't have to give them. They just make videos. They render them. They send them out.

6:45They have chats that is really just a chat bot that's going back and forth. Someone that's been trained on 10 ,000 porn-related conversations. And people pay for them. And so what I believe is going to happen in the future, I believe that humans will need a place to live. I believe they will need food to eat. I believe that they will have things they need to do with their time for entertainment. I believe those are industries that I would absolutely say like these things will not change. Now, which one wins? Who knows? But those industries I think will exist. And then I'll give you my hell in a hand basket frame.

7:14So what does that mean? If there's a world where everything goes to shit, then it doesn't really matter. Right? And so I have to walk myself back off of the apocalyptic angle of like, OK, well, if all of these things eventually disrupt and there's a permanent underclass and no one has any money and there's only a select few who actually leaned into technology to acquire all the wealth in the world, if that were to happen, it's all going to be anarchy. Maybe. I don't know. But I just prefer to exist in a world where I'm hoping for the best, preparing for the worst. but I am absolutely hoping for the best.

7:50And I think in the hell in a handbasket world, none of it will matter. Prepare for sunshine and rain. Just be an all weather type of person. And I think if you do that, you'll give yourself the best chance at succeeding whatever the next season looks like. And I'll give you a final kind of thought experiment that might be helpful for you. So I read this on a Brian Johnson post from Blueprint. If you've heard of him, he's the longevity guy. He said, what people do not realize is that they've been training their entire lives to swim. And you think that you can swim in all types of weather and you get to become a better and better swimmer, right?

8:22And you know, there's waves crashing and you're like, no, you go from in a pool or a lap pool to a lake to eventually you're swimming off the coast to eventually you're free ocean swimming or from border country to the next border country, right? So crazy levels. He said, but the change that's about to happen is a phase shift where you're swimming, but then all of a sudden the water boils and now you're in gas because the water all evaporated and you're flapping your arms. It doesn't matter how good of a swimmer you are, the fundamental physics of the environment will have changed. And so that is the change that we're on the precipice of.

8:54Now, hopefully this was not dim and gloom because I actually see this tremendous opportunity because humans are slow to adapt in general. So what does that mean? First off, if you're watching this, you're already probably ahead of most people anyways, because most people just exist, put their head in the dirt. There's so many people over age 50 that are like, I'm told for this shit. And guess what? They got all the money. And so what's really interesting is that all the people got all the money are going to quickly realize that it's going to go somewhere else, which is not to them because they did not adapt.

9:22So that's a big opportunity. There's also huge opportunities, obviously, in going to regular businesses and automating portions of their work. But when I said humans are slow to adapt, it also means their price sensitivity is also slow to adapt. Meaning if people are used to paying$2 ,000 a month for something, that embedded in that price is the typical cost of labor. And so if you can still charge that$2 ,000 price for whatever it is, right? And instead of it costing you$500 a month, it costs you$50 a month or$5 a month. The margin, number one, that you can earn is tremendous. But second, and more importantly, the amount of operational leverage you have, meaning the amount of people per dollar of additional revenue you need to create goes down dramatically.

10:03As in one person that can bring millions and millions in revenue in, it becomes much easier to scale because one of the biggest costs of scaling is just the coordination between humans. And so what I would encourage you to do, so you're like, okay, I heard all this stuff. I feel motivated to do something. What should I do? This is what I motivate you to do. Write down a list of what you do, do every day. And I'm saying at the most granular level, you respond to emails, you respond to Slack messages. Maybe you make content. Maybe you make ads, you run ads. You have to separate these out into individual tasks.

10:36What's the task, right? Don't think chunked up. Don't think I make, you know, I run ads. It's like, yeah, there's a lot of stuff underneath of that, right? You make campaigns, you set budgets, you analyze results, you make the creative, you write copy, you test different landing pages, you test different headlines on the pages. There's lots of things that are underneath of that bucketed term of like, I run ads, right? Take all of the tasks and then look at those tasks and take the first one and put it into AI and say, help me automate this. What steps would you take? It'll give you a list and then take the first thing on the list and do it.

11:09If you get stuck, here's a little pro tip. Screenshot your screen and put it in and say, what do I do now? And it'll tell you. And then screenshot the next year and say, what do I do now? And it'll tell you. Like everyone now, here's just the craziest thing of all is everyone has an AI tutor at their fingertips that you're just not using. So with that, this is the type of stuff that we, that we were obviously actively working on inside of our ACU Vantage community. So if you are a million dollar plus business owner, we're talking about the stuff that we're doing right now every day inside of ACQ.

11:38And obviously we have an AI product that we've been training for years now. We also have like a salesman that we've been training. We've got a lot of stuff that we've been doing and keeping more or less behind, you know, behind closed doors, if you will, capitalizing on the opportunity, if you will. But with that, peace and blessings be upon you in your bloodline. And I wish you the absolute best. And I hope you are in the permanent upper class and not permanent underclass in the world that comes.