Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀

2 months ago, Steven Shorkey wrote a guest post about embracing the mastery of your hard-earned knowledge. And he was spot on.

But the last 60 days have felt like decades of technology evolution. Every day I wake up to exponential updates. Driving to dental appointments last week, I caught up with an important podcast that confirmed this insane flywheel.

And the takeaway is that while mastery is now more attainable than ever, those who already have it are in the drivers seat.

Let's get into it.

How many times have you repeated a podcast?

Last week, I needed 3 different sessions listening to Christian Catalini discuss the new paper Some Simple Economics of AGI.

Catalini is a researcher, entrepreneur (co-created Diem) and the founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. He is a technology optimist who’s known for his research on cryptocurrencies and blockchain, and has a well-informed view of AI. And this new paper is worth your time.

Catalini and his co-authors wrote: "Today's defining challenge is not the race to deploy the most autonomous systems; it is the race to secure the foundations of their oversight. Only by scaling our bandwidth for verification alongside our capacity for execution can we ensure that the intelligence we have summoned preserves the humanity that initiated it."

The conversation is chock full of clear-eyed future thinking.

One of his more interesting answers was the education of pre-teen kids. Mastery is now within everyone’s grasp - and much sooner.

The traditional path to mastery (K-12 → college → apprenticeship → time → expertise) was never about learning — it was about access to resources, mentors, and credentialing gatekeepers. AI removes most of those gates.

Parents and kids today might identify areas of genuine interest (languages, STEM, writing, art, music, etc) then using AI tools to learn, create, and direct their own projects. They become the director of their education, not the executor. They won’t need the traditional K-12 conveyor belt and will be years ahead of their peers with actual experience and deep subject knowledge.

Sidebar: its important to watch how the tech leaders let their own children use the technology they’re funding or building. I’ve commented before on what Andreessen, Palihapitiya and Musk have done. They didn’t just give their kids ipads for instance. Silicon Valley leaders who denied their kids early social media usage were just proven correct (Meta, Google lose US case over social media harm to kids).

Back to the topic, the Catalini paper’s central economic logic: when intelligence becomes cheap, value migrates to its scarcest complement — trustworthy verification.

Catalini is on the circuit pitching their work, and I caught the message (multiple times) on the A16Z Pod AI just gave you Super Powers - Now What?

Experience, judgment, and accountability — your non-measurable capacities built over decades — are precisely what the agentic economy makes scarce and premium.

The race to deploy AI agents is exciting but their ultimate success will come from the intelligence of the underlying model - or your uncommon knowledge.

In his bestseller, Mastery, Robert Greene details the unvarnished Ben Franklin story: self-taught dropout rising to prominence as one of the greatest Americans using social intelligence as an indispensable component of his mastery.

It took Franklin decades to evolve from printer’s apprentice to statesman, scientist, and diplomat. He was enabled not just by intellectual ability but by an extraordinary capacity to read people and navigate social environments - the exact things you’ve been doing as you’ve gained mastery throughout your work career.

As AI makes cognitive execution abundant, the new scarce resource are experienced professionals already on the other side of the traditional path.

Professionals just like you.

Late-career folks have the taste, judgment, and domain knowledge. What we lacked was the execution capacity to act on it without a team.

That gap is now closed.

Mastery + AI agency = the most powerful combination in the second-act economy.

Giddyup.

Now go launch something 🚀

If you’re still just dabbling with the free versions of ChatGPT, Grok, Claude or Gemini, let me make a suggestion: Upgrade to a paid version. Get the latest model and see incredible results.

I upgraded to Claude Pro in late 2025 and the responses only get better with each chat. It’s helped me create a far better Notion knowledgebase of my own ideas, books, business experience and topics. It’s allowed me to create and test a few of my own agents. And I am developing a Claude-based research assistant now.

Mastery is not a gift — it is an inevitable outcome. Robert Greene organized the book into six interlinked chapters that map a three-phase arc — Apprenticeship, Creative-Active, and Mastery. Study the behaviors of Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci and the nine contemporary Masters interviewed for this New York Times #1 Bestseller.

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