The Barbell Strategy for Surviving the AI Shift | Ep 982

Download your free personalized $100M scaling roadmap in under 30 seconds: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube The rules haven't changed. Superior technology still beats inferior technology, every single time, from the Stone Age to right now. In this episode, Alex explains what AI means for business owners, why the last thing people will ever get paid to do is take risks, and how to position a business on the right side of the biggest economic shift in human history. In this episode 00:00 Humans with superior tools always win 04:06 Barbell strategy for the future 08:10 The phase shift analogy 10:20 Next steps: how to automate daily tasks More Value: Book Your Spot At The Live Scaling Workshop In Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas Explore ACQ Vantage: https://www.skool.com/acq/about Download Your Free Personalized $100m Scaling Roadmap In Under 30 Seconds: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube Get the $100M Book Bundle: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/100m-book-bundle Discover The Easiest Business I Can Help You Start (Free Trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi Free Books and Video Courses: https://www.acquisition.com/training DISCLOSURE: Information shared here is for educational purposes only. Individuals and business owners should evaluate their own business strategies and identify any potential risks. The information shared here is not a guarantee of success. Your results may vary. Copyright © 2026.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Hormozi?

  Some 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. And so it'd be like not getting on the internet for your company. Are 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,

• 0:44Alex Hormozi?

  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. 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. As 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, we like, machines will never beat us at chess.

• 1:29Alex Hormozi?

  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. Real 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. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free.

• 2:14Alex Hormozi?

  And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/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.

• 2:25Alex Hormozi?

  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 will 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 like money will exist in the future. It's just that labor won't have value. And that's where this gets difficult. So it'll 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,

• 3:08Alex Hormozi?

  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? Do 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

• 3:51Alex Hormozi?

  product. There's going to be more companies than ever before. And I also think that when many roles are going to get automated away, the amount of businesses that will bloom from this will be huge. But I will not say that like, I know, and I don't think anyone does know, but I'd like, what are the few things that I can bet on, right? I would, like, 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 on 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 teams to get them to level up. And if they don't, I have to have to have the even harder conversation that we no longer need them because we've automated away the role. I 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

• 4:34Alex Hormozi?

  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.

• 4:42Alex Hormozi?

  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. So 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.

• 5:25Alex Hormozi?

  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. And so if you were to like, you can make a full motion picture now. And, and there's this period of time where the prices have not adjusted to the, to the cost basis associated. And so you can make some viral social media videos and get huge amount of PR for a movie that you made entirely with AI and make a hundred million dollars, 200 million dollars. 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, to take action. But is that, 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

• 6:08Alex Hormozi?

  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 gonna sound, at least it's gonna sound a little bit off, off putting for some people. Look at porn. Whatever porn adopts first, eventually makes its way down. So what have, 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 a hundred 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, they just make videos, they render them, they send them out, they have chats that is really just a chat bot that's going back and forth, someone

• 6:49Alex Hormozi?

  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. So 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, okay. Well, if all of these things eventually disrupt and there's a permanent underclass

• 7:31Alex Hormozi?

  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. And I think in the hell in a hand basket world, none of it'll 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

• 8:16Alex Hormozi?

  to swim. And you think that you can swim in all types of weather and you're going to become a better and better swimmer, right? And those waves crashing and you're like, 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? Some 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 and it doesn't matter how good of a swimmer you are, the phenomenal physics of the environment will have changed." And so that is the change that we're on the precipice of now. Hopefully, this was not dim and gloom because I actually see this tremendous opportunity. Because.

• 8:59Alex Hormozi?

  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, they put their, put their head in the dirt. There are 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. So that's a big opportunity. There's also a huge opportunity to obviously in going into regular businesses and automating proportions 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 costs of labor.

• 9:40Alex Hormozi?

  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, to, to create goes down dramatically, as in one person now 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.

• 10:21Alex Hormozi?

  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, you make ads, you run ads. There's, you have to separate these out into individual task. What's the task, right? Don't think, 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 did you take?

• 11:05Alex Hormozi?

  It'll give you a list and then take the first thing on the list and do it. If 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 this, 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. And 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 opportunity, if you will.

• 11:49Alex Hormozi?

  But with that, peace and blessings be upon you and 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.