Dr. Scott Padgett sent Gene a text: "I've been drifting toward a real belief we have no free will." Gene's entire show is built on choosing discipline over comfort, so he brought Scott in to explain himself. It started with AI. Everybody kept talking about machines becoming sentient and nobody could say what that meant, so Scott went down the rabbit hole into consciousness and came out the other side a determinist. He walks Gene through the case: the stress hormones in the womb, the button experiment where your brain decides seconds before you do, the turtles all the way down, and why every excuse we make for someone's behavior quietly admits the point.

Then the hard question. If nobody is choosing, why train? Why do the hard thing? Scott's answer is not what you would expect. Along the way: the four F's that marketers and politicians run on, why consciousness might be an accident, accountability versus blame, the Massachusetts trial, how corporal punishment programs a kid with fear, why detachment is easier than patience, the AI stories and who is telling them, patterns on the mat, and whether a dog has more free will than you.

Send us Fan Mail

Learn with us at warriorfitnessma.com More at warriormindset.us

Never give up. Never quit. Kaizen. Get after it.

Everybody's got AI now. Every business, every side hustle, every guy at the gym with a "system." And the pitch is always the same: do more, faster, with less effort.

Here's what the people running the biggest companies on the planet just said out loud: that's the trap.

At a recent Fortune leadership forum, CEOs from AS Watson, Walmart China, HP, ServiceNow and others warned that most companies are using AI to make yesterday's process run faster instead of doing the hard thinking about what should change. The line that stuck with me: the biggest risk is "a better version of yesterday."

That's not a tech problem. That's a discipline problem. And it's the exact same problem I see on the mat every week.

The reps that build a decision-maker

1. Decide before you ask. Write down what you'd do before you open the tool. Then compare. Over time you learn where your judgment is good and where it's weak.
2. Debrief your calls. Once a week, look at the decisions you made. Which ones were you actually thinking on, and which ones did you just accept? Be honest.
3. 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.
4. Own the outcome out loud. If it goes bad, "the AI suggested it" is not a sentence a leader gets to say. Ever.
5. Train against ambiguity on purpose. Take on situations where there's no clean answer. That's the mat. That's where you get better.

The tool doesn't build the judgment. The reps do.

Read the Fortune piece: https://fortune.com/2026/09/15/ceos-ai-efficiency-trap-fortune-leaders-forum/

Send us Fan Mail

Learn with us at warriorfitnessma.com More at warriormindset.us

Never give up. Never quit. Kaizen. Get after it.

Aaron is back, and this one starts with a newsletter. Carl Smith at the Bureau of Digital (https://thebureau.community/) wrote on how he made a tough call the day he had to cancel one of his own events, and the two of them put his four steps through the test. Say the decision out loud in a plain sentence. Talk to the people it affects before you decide, not after. Put two dates on the calendar, one to decide and one to tell people. Then say what is changing without the overthinking attached.

Along the way: why doing nothing is only a decision if you actually chose it, the time in basic training Aaron called an ambulance without permission and stood at parade rest for three hours over it, the validation trap every owner falls into, the event that has been sitting in limbo for months, and why the warrior never pretends the cost is zero.

Send us Fan Mail

Learn with us at warriorfitnessma.com More at warriormindset.us

Never give up. Never quit. Kaizen. Get after it.