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Years playing RTS (real-time strategy) games prepared me for today.

StarCraft, Age of Empires 2, Age of Kings (I was one of the top deathmatch players on Earth)…

Playing today is like playing a video game.

You manage tokens (resources). You attack problems. You build a strong economy (systems). You communicate with your team. The parallels are uncanny.

And the skills needed to manage a live game like that are just like managing multiple windows, projects, brands, etc.

Even if that's not you, just using these tools, knowing what tool to use, how to use it, and knowing how to manage multiple things, just knowing all this stuff is going to be absolutely incredibly valuable over the next few years.

We are just getting started, so a percent of a percent of the world's been doing these things, and it is going to keep growing. Every small business on earth is going to be asking, "What do I need to do with AI, or who can help me with AI?"

What I'd actually do

What I recommend is you start at least using these things and learning. If you're here, that's great; that's a good start. Now start building things, start creating things, start understanding Claude and Cowork, the desktop app versus GPT, all that, and just keep learning.

Stay on the edge of it from a usability perspective and from an understanding and lingo perspective.

The number of ways you can benefit from this knowledge directly or not is huge (and growing).

This is the way.

-Colin
X-IG-TT

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8+ hours of screens a day, and most people protect exactly none of it.

The LITEZ All-day 3 Lens system fixes that: it blocks up to 99% of the blue light hitting your eyes from sunup to bedtime.

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Pick one business you actually know. Yours, a friend's, a former employer. You need access to how the work really happens, not a website.
Sit with one person for 30 minutes and have them narrate one recurring process out loud, start to finish. Write every step, every handoff, every place they sit waiting on somebody.
Tag each step one of three ways: a human has to decide this, this is moving information from one place to another, this is waiting.
Every "moving information" step is billable. That is where AI goes. Not the deciding, not the waiting.
Build the smallest thing that kills one of those steps. One. Show it running on their real data, not a demo.
Write the one-page memo: here is the process, here is the hours it eats per week, here is what I built, here is what the next three would cost.

Spend 60 minutes with one person who does real work inside a real business and ask them to walk you through their week. Do not pitch. Do not say the word AI once. Ask what takes the longest, what they redo, what they dread on Monday morning. Write it down in their words, not yours.

Everybody selling AI services right now is selling a tool. Almost nobody has sat down and listened to how the work actually happens, which is exactly why most implementations die and why the few that land get paid again.

One hour. One conversation. You walk out holding a proposal you did not have to invent. That's the way.

🤖 AI

🟢 PLTR +30.7%. Q2 revenue of 1.93 billion dollars, up 93 percent year over year, US commercial up 149 percent, full-year guide raised above 8.15 billion dollars. The whole newsletter in one ticker.
🟢 AMD +7.8% intraday to around 513. Pre-earnings positioning ahead of the after-bell report. The market front-ran the AI capex read.
🔴 AMZN -1.7%. Bezos filed to sell about 15 million shares, roughly 4.1 billion dollars, one day after Amazon crossed 3 trillion. Founder selling into a record is not a signal, but it is a mood.
🔴 No clean second AI decliner Tuesday. Chips and AI software closed broadly green and I am not inventing one to fill the row.

💻 Tech

🟢 ZBRA +18.6%. Zebra beat on Q2. Barcode scanners quietly having a year.
🟢 IT +16.3%. Gartner beat. Everyone is paying someone to explain AI to them, which is the entire thesis of today's issue.
🔴 APTV -15.5%. Aptiv guided weak and revenue dropped sequentially after spin-offs. Auto tech is carrying the sector's headwind.
🔴 ROK -6.4%. Rockwell beat and sold off anyway. A beat is not a floor.

🏦 Finance

🟢 The S&P 500 hit a fresh all-time intraday high near 7,712 and the Dow closed at a record, on Hormuz optimism plus earnings.
🟢 Gold rose 0.43 percent to 4,108.20 and silver rose 2.29 percent to 59.18.
🔴 WTI crude fell 3.20 percent to 77.77 after Bessent said a Strait deal could land within days.
🔴 No single financial-sector name moved enough to headline Tuesday. Reporting that straight instead of manufacturing a ticker.

🌎 Other

🟢 CAT +11.3%. First quarter in company history above 20 billion dollars in sales, 8.17 per share adjusted against 6.20 expected.
🟢 W +19%. Wayfair beat Q2. The left-for-dead trade keeps working.
🔴 CERT -23.7%. Certara missed Q2. Drug-development software got no AI premium.
🔴 NRG -10%. Mixed Q2. The power-demand narrative did not save the print.

Records everywhere, and the two biggest moves of the day were both earnings. Palantir put up 93 percent growth by wiring AI into other people's operations. That is a services business wearing a software multiple, and it is the exact job most companies cannot do for themselves.

A New Hampshire teenager listed a joke game on Steam at the platform maximum and pulled 1.3 million dollars before nearly every buyer refunded, leaving him 2,000 dollars. Attention is not revenue. Source: Numlock News
Researchers found insect prey on 43 of 45 alpine Saxifraga specimens, averaging 71 trapped insects each, confirming a theory Darwin floated in 1875. Some bets take 151 years to settle. Source: Numlock News
Smoke from Canada's 2023 wildfires cut solar generation about 3 percent across the US and Europe, costing roughly 2 billion dollars. Second-order effects are where the real bill shows up. Source: Numlock News

🗓️ On this day in 1861 → the US enacted its first federal income tax to pay for the Civil War. It was sold as temporary.
🦾 How to be dangerous → Sit with someone who does the work and ask what takes them longest. You will hear a business idea inside 20 minutes.
🌞 Health → Eat protein before caffeine. Cortisol is already peaking when you wake up and coffee on an empty stomach stacks right on top of it.
🍳 Cooking → Salt your onions the second they hit the pan. They release water faster and brown in half the time.
💬 Quote → "Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics." —Omar Bradley
🤖 AI reality check → Nobody will pay you for knowing what a model is. They will pay you for knowing where it goes in their process.

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👓 Starting at screens for hours each day started giving me headaches and blurry vision at night. Blue light-induced eye strain was the culprit. And it’s why I now wear these daily: LITEZ Screen Glasses. BH readers get 10% off using code BHNL

🛠️ The tools I actually run my business on → My Apps Stack (click here)

🪴 Better Human Goods → Nontoxic essentials for health and home. Products that work without the junk. Use code BNL for 10% off.

🛒 My favorite products, with subscriber discounts → My Favorite Products

👋 I’m Colin → Father, AI builder, founder, investor. X-IG-TT → Free Stuff

🧠 Become irreplaceable: Build Your Personal AI Moat. Get 50% off the year and support so I can keep dropping free stuff here and here.

Use AI. Stay Human. This is the way.

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