blockbuster.thoughtleader.school

Tomorrow, at 12pm EST, my coach and dear friend Anand Rao, is teaching the second session of Augmented Awakening 2.0. The details to join it are at the bottom of this post. The article below is a stand-alone post, and it sets the context for why the class is so important right now. Over the last month of the Agentic Academy, I’ve had a front-row seat to helping non-technical people transition from AI chat to agentic AI.

What if I told you that you and I could get better results from AI than the software engineers working in the labs that made it? They have the data, the talent, the compute. Shouldn’t they win hands-down? I believe that there’s a massive, underexploited opportunity to make AI smarter than the labs inside your own niche. And you don’t do it by fine-tuning AI, which is expensive and time-consuming (and out of reach for most of us).

The first cohort of the Agentic Academy for Knowledge Work closes tonight, and the doors open tomorrow, June 22. To summarize the offer, it’s a 10-week cohort that migrates you from using AI as a chatbot torunning an agentic system built around your own work,with white-glove support every step of the way. Starting in Claude Code and structured so it transfers to Codex. Created by two of the leading writers and teachers in AI knowledge work, it is the first and only cohort of its kind.

Over the past few months, you’ve been hearing me talk about how much of a difference using Claude Code agents has made in my work. But if you haven’t used Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex, then agents still feel abstract. And, it’s hard to commit time to something where the benefits aren’t concrete. Then, I saw the incredible demo, which I share in today’s post. For context: Earlier this year, we hosted Wyndo of The AI Maker on Cozora.

Most people are using AI to get things done faster. But there’s a deeper question that this session tackles head-on: what does it actually mean to think with AI, rather than just delegate to it? Augmented Awakening 2.0 is a year-long monthly program co-taught with Anand Rao (developmentalmastery.com) for people who want to develop a genuinely different relationship with AI — one that sharpens your thinking instead of replacing it. We’re past the prompting era.

Most people think of AI as a faster way to do things they already do. What if it’s actually a lever for a fundamentally new category of thinking — one that wasn’t possible before? That’s what this session is about. Over the past decade, I’ve gone deep on mental models — studying how the world’s top thinkers, from Charlie Munger to Magnus Carlsen, build and use conceptual frameworks that others don’t. The pattern is consistent: the people who see what others miss aren’t just smarter.

Last Friday, I shared that Wyndo of The AI Maker and I are launching a big, new program for knowledge workers and entrepreneurs who want to make the leap from interacting with AI in chat to building agents that do work for them. After five consecutive days waking up at 4am EST before my 7-month-old baby, I’m very excited to share that it’s now live!! The full cohort starts Monday, June 22. But we are also holding an optional prep session on Monday, June 15 at 11am ET.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter recently, you know this… While the chat paradigm facilitated a 1.5x productivity boost, the agentic paradigm has already facilitated a 20x productivity boost for the most pioneering AI companies, as I share in “I’m Not A Programmer” Will Be The New “I Can’t Read” In 5 Years. And that productivity boost is increasing rapidly as Anthropic and OpenAI add new features at a rate I’ve never seen before.

Last year, my coach, mentor, and dear friend Anand Rao, led the first cohort of its kind for paid subscribers to this newsletter. It was called Augmented Awakening, and the focus was on using AI for deep self-understanding and transformation, rather than just productivity.

Most people using AI for writing are leaving enormous value on the table. They prompt once, accept the output, and move on. But the writers and thinkers who are pulling away from the pack aren’t doing that — they’re building systems: systems that encode their mental models, break down the creative process into deliberate steps, and use AI to explore a whole possibility space, not just confirm what they already think. That’s what this session of Blockbuster Live is about.