CEOs are warning that AI without hard thinking just gives you a faster version of yesterday. The tool doesn’t build judgment. The reps do. A discipline-of-thought episode.
A couple of weeks ago, the CEO of one of the biggest retailers in the world stood in front of a room of executives and said the biggest risk with AI is ending up with “a better version of yesterday.”
Her name is Malina Ngai, she runs AS Watson Group, and she wasn’t saying AI is bad. She was saying most companies are using it to make the same old process run faster. Same decisions, same blind spots, same weak spots. Just quicker.
The number that backs her up is rough. According to the Fortune piece where she said it, only about 5% of companies that have rolled out AI agents actually restructured how they work. Everyone else bolted a jet engine onto a horse cart and called it transformation.
I run a web agency. I use these tools every day. I also run a gym. And I’ve watched the same thing happen in both places for years, long before AI showed up. Somebody grabs a tool hoping it’ll do the hard part for them. It never does.
Speed multiplies whatever you already are
That’s the whole thing in one sentence. If you’re a sharp thinker, AI makes you sharper. If you’re sloppy, it makes you sloppy faster and with a lot more confidence.
I’ve watched a client want AI to fix a marketing problem that was actually a “we don’t know who our customer is” problem. The tool wrote gorgeous copy aimed at nobody. I’ve watched a guy at the gym buy the program, the app and the tracker and still skip the hard sessions. The tool didn’t make him disciplined. It gave him a nicer-looking record of not being disciplined.
The trap was never the tool. The trap is believing the tool did the thinking.
Judgment is the thing getting scarce
Another exec at that forum, Christina Zhu from Walmart China, made the point that AI makes the human more important, not less. Data can tell you what customers picked. It can’t tell you what they needed and never found. That takes a person who’s paying attention.
Judgment isn’t knowing the answer. It’s knowing which question matters, what to ignore, when the data is lying to you, and when to move before you have all of it. None of that comes from a prompt. It comes from having been wrong enough times, in enough situations, that you’ve built a feel for it.
Martial artists already know this. Anybody can learn a technique from a video. Knowing when to throw it, against this guy, in this moment, with this much gas left in the tank? That’s reps. Only reps.
How the people who make real calls actually train
Look at how special operators, first responders and fighters build judgment. They don’t train with the answer key. They train under ambiguity. Bad information, time pressure, real consequences. Then they debrief. Then they do it again.
Those people use tools constantly. Intel, comms, maps, data. But the tool feeds the decision. It never makes it. The second the tool makes the decision, you’re not a leader anymore. You’re a relay.
The crutch test
Here’s how you know which side of the line you’re on. Ask yourself: am I using this to sharpen my thinking, or to skip it?
Sharpening looks like this. You’ve already thought about the problem. You have a position. You hand it to the tool and tell it to attack it, find what you missed, or clear the grunt work so you can spend your energy on the call.
Skipping looks like this. You don’t have a position. You ask the tool what to do. It gives you something confident and plausible and you go with it, because it sounded smart and you didn’t want to sit in the discomfort of not knowing.
From the outside, both look identical. Only you know which one you’re doing.
Where AI belongs in a decision
It belongs in the research. Let it gather and summarize. That was always grunt work.
It belongs in the stress test. After you’ve made your call, let it argue with you. Great sparring partner. Terrible coach.
It belongs in the execution. Once the decision is made, let it draft and build and ship.
It never belongs in the decision itself. The moment where you weigh it, own it and put your name on it. That’s yours. Hand that over and you’ve handed over the one thing that made you worth following.
The reps that build a decision-maker
Decide before you ask. Write down what you’d do before you open the tool, then compare. Over time you’ll learn where your judgment is strong and where it’s weak.
Debrief your calls. Once a week, look back at the decisions you made. Which ones were you actually thinking on? Which ones did you just accept?
Sit in the uncomfortable part longer. Not knowing is where judgment gets built. The tool is designed to end that feeling as fast as possible. Don’t let it.
Own the outcome out loud. If it goes bad, “the AI suggested it” is not a sentence a leader gets to say.
The warrior take
The tool doesn’t build the judgment. The reps do.
A better version of yesterday is still yesterday. If you want a different tomorrow, you’ve got to do the thinking that’s uncomfortable, and nothing can do that part for you.
This week’s challenge: for seven days, before you use AI for anything that matters, write your own answer first. One line. Then ask. Then compare. At the end of the week you’ll have a map of exactly where you’ve been leaning on a crutch.
Gene and Aaron take Carl Smith’s four-step process for hard decisions and run it through a basic training emergency, a stalled event, and the calls they both still carry. Get after it.
Aaron came back for another one, and after a detour through zombie apocalypse prep and the two axes on the wall behind Gene, the conversation landed on a newsletter. Carl Smith, a good friend of both of them from the Bureau of Digital, wrote up the process he used the day he had to cancel one of his own events. Four steps. Say the decision out loud in a plain sentence. Talk to the people closest to it before you decide. Put a date on the calendar. Then say what is changing, plainly. Gene and Aaron take each step and hold it up against their own history.
They open on why the tough calls pile up in the first place. The easy thing is easy right now and expensive later, and most of us are optimists who figure it will work out. Sometimes it does, which teaches you the wrong lesson. Aaron tells the Chinese farmer parable, the one where every stroke of luck and every disaster gets the same answer, we will see, and the two of them draw the line that matters: choosing to do nothing is a decision. Just not deciding is not. Gene brings in Musashi, the way is in training, and the idea that decision-making is a drilled skill and not a character trait. That is where Aaron’s basic training story comes in. Twenty-three years old, on staff duty at Fort Bragg, drill sergeant nowhere to be found, a kid going into seizures. He made the call to go help and then made a second call to get an ambulance there. The right thing by any human measure and the wrong thing by military procedure, and he stood outside at parade rest for three hours waiting to find out which one counted. The drill sergeant came back and told him the kid really did have a problem, and he was okay thanks to Aaron, and he was still going to stand there another hour because it was never about that.
From there they work Carl’s steps in order. The plain sentence, and why the verb in it is the whole point. Aaron’s journaling habit and the value of writing out the instead of, the other outcomes, before you can get to the sentence. Then the hardest step for any owner operator: asking people what they think before you have decided, instead of shopping a decision around for validation. Aaron has run that experiment on purpose, and the feedback is always better when he asks what would you do instead of what do you think of what I am doing. He also shares an event that has been in limbo for months at his organization. He said no when the estimate came in a hundred thousand dollars over, the space turned out to be reserved already, the cost dropped, and now there is a week left to decide and still not all the information. Which leads to the line Gene needed to hear: sometimes you cannot get all the information. You just have to go through the thing.
They spend real time on ego and leadership. Gene admits he promoted Thomas and Brian to coaches at the gym without asking a single person first and calls it leading with his ego without meaning to. Neither of them has ever worked with a truly democratic leader and both admit it would drive them nuts. Aaron’s formula: three quarters ego to make the hard calls, one quarter held in reserve to figure out what is actually right. Then the two dates, deciding and telling, and why they should never be the same day. The military rule that an 80 percent plan executed now beats a perfect plan later. And the step both of them are guilty of, over-explaining the decision because sharing the process feels safe. Aaron’s leadership team argued over whether to present the decision then the justification or walk people through the story that leads to it, and he is honest that presenting the decision is often harder than making it.
The episode closes on the aftermath. The warrior does not pretend the cost is zero. He carries it honestly and keeps walking. Gene talks about quitting events two years before COVID and losing an entire world of people in the process. Aaron has made plenty of bad decisions and does not regret the big ones, because sometimes the decision gets made for you and sometimes you were the one who made it, and you have to be okay carrying either.
Mentioned in this episode: Carl Smith and the Bureau of Digital newsletter, “Making The Tough Call” Miyamoto Musashi, the way is in training Marcus Aurelius, “If anyone can refute me, show me I am making a mistake, I will gladly change “The Chinese farmer parable (we will see) SEAL Team (the series) Jurassic Park: The Lost World, and the observer effect
Cleaning out the inbox this week. A pile of clips and stories people have sent me have been sitting there long enough, so let’s debrief.
We start with the Jonah Hill jiu-jitsu clip that went viral, the perfect illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect: a little training turns into “I can beat people up,” while the guys who’ve actually been on the mats for years get quieter and more humble the more they learn. Then the tech bros. Zuckerberg sparring on a custom floating platform in the middle of a lake, and how that stacks up against the story of his super-yacht reportedly passing on a distress call, when helping is one of the oldest rules on the water.
Then the one that got under my skin. Gordon Ryan taking a student’s purple belt and throwing it in a fire, on camera, as a “reward.” One of the best grapplers alive, and a masterclass in how not to treat people who trust you. We finish with the antidote: Gabriel Varga, five-time world champion, breaking down how a real professional spars with people who aren’t. Playful, controlled, take turns, let them learn. That’s the standard.
In this episode:
What good sparring actually looks like, from someone who’d know
The Dunning-Kruger effect and the blue-belt fallacy
Why the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know
Performative toughness vs. the real thing
The unwritten (maybe written) rule of the sea and what it says about character
Why filming yourself humiliating a student makes the whole thing unserious
Toughness gets you into the fight. Resilience wins it. Two elite coaches, one dangerous lie, and the one question to ask yourself every morning.
Two runners from the same country, same talent, same fire. One stays elite for fourteen years. The other is done at twenty-seven. The difference wasn’t heart. It was how they spent it.
This episode of Warrior Mindset goes after the most dangerous lie in the tough-guy playbook: that a real high performer should be able to absorb unlimited stress, handle it alone, and never let off the gas. It feels like strength. A lot of the time it’s just pride wearing camo.
We put two elite coaches side by side. David Goggins, who teaches you to rip the governor off your mind and find the gear you didn’t know you had. And Firas Zahabi, the man who cornered Georges St-Pierre, who tells his fighters to train at seventy percent and never leave the gym sore. They give almost opposite advice, and they’re both right. It depends on the job.
We get into:
Toughness vs. resilience, and why most guys have only ever trained one of them
Where the “I can take anything” identity comes from and what it actually costs
Goggins as a breakthrough protocol, not a lifestyle
Zahabi, greasing the groove, and why recovery is the real bottleneck
The one question to ask every morning: Goggins day or Zahabi day?
What the research says about mental toughness as a buffer, not a bottomless tank
Three tools for intelligent energy management
This week’s challenge: find your tell
If you’ve been calling it heart while quietly running on empty, this one’s for you.
Most people who think they’re burnt out aren’t overworked. They’re under-purposed. This episode breaks down why rest isn’t fixing it and what a warrior does instead.
You took the vacation. You downloaded the meditation app. You fixed your sleep. And you still feel like you’re dragging yourself through every week.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: that might not be burnout at all.
In this episode of Warrior Mindset, we dig into an idea from writer and entrepreneur Neil Thanedar that reframes the whole conversation. Burnout is what happens when you have too much load. But a lot of us are dealing with something different. We don’t have enough meaning. And you can’t rest your way out of that.
We get into:
Why the standard burnout fixes keep failing you
Viktor Frankl’s idea that meaning, not pleasure or power, is what actually holds people up
The “horseshoe” of stress and why a perfectly balanced life can still feel empty
The childhood dream test and what it reveals about what you’re really built for
Why students with the worst schedules are often the ones who never miss class
A practical plan to start feeding yourself again, one hour a week
If you’ve been calling it burnout and nothing’s working, this one’s for you.
