This One Shift Makes AI 10x Smarter

Episode summary

Geoff Woods, author of the #1 AI book The AI-Driven Leader, joins Nick to fix the way most people use AI: as a glorified assistant for writing better emails. His reframe is that these models have read 200–500 million books’ worth of data and can recall and apply nearly all of it instantly — so using them for busywork leaves superhuman ability on the table. As he puts it, nobody ever got promoted for being the best email-checker in the building.

The core of the episode is his CRIT framework — Context, Role, Interview, Task. The game-changer is the “interview” step: instead of asking AI questions, you make AI interview you, pulling context out of your head you’d never have thought to share. Jeff walks through a jaw-dropping live example — a CEO weeks from bankruptcy who got a non-obvious “saving-face” debt-restructuring strategy in under ten minutes — plus the workshops where he solves Fortune 500 CEOs’ biggest problems on stage.

From there it gets deeper: why you should treat AI’s first great answer as the bad answer and stay in the driver’s seat giving feedback; building an “AI board” of advisors (Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett — even your future self); how his executive assistant used CRIT to reinvent her own role into “executive multiplier”; and why the industrial-era school system is broken for an AI world. The throughline: AI can’t replace you — it can only enhance you, if you bring the right questions.