🦾 The Morning Tax

As AI handles more of the heavy lifting, the importance of human creativity is going to skyrocket.

So your human taste, your judgment, and your creativity- doing the things only humans can do- are best done in the morning when your brain is the most active and has the most energy.

It's the freshest, and it's the most creative.

If you log into social media or check your email or your text messages or go to meetings early, you are literally sapping the most valuable time of the day.

Protect your mornings:

• Avoid meetings.

• Don't check your phone.

• Don't go on social media.

• Don't go on email.

Save all of that low-importance stuff for later in the day, when you have less energy overall and when you aren't going to spend the most important and finite resource you have.

This is the way.

-Colin
X-IG-TT

8+ hours of screens a day, and most people protect exactly none of it. The bill shows up as eye strain, headaches, and worse sleep.

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. Yellow for daytime, orange and red for night. I rotate all three.

End the day sharp instead of fried. BH readers get 10% off with code BHNL → litez.co/discount/BHNL.

• CNN: The EU hits Google with a 1 billion dollar fine, its first major enforcement under the Digital Markets Act

• Motley Fool: Tesla drops 15% on a Q2 miss, dragging the Nasdaq down 2.2%

• Korea Herald: AMD starts production of its Helios AI server rack, with Samsung supplying the HBM4

• TradingKey: SK Hynix and Micron climb even as Big Tech sells off, memory riding record AI capex

• Tech Startups: Etched raises 300 million dollars Series C from Sequoia, a16z, and SK hynix for AI chips

• TechCrunch: Natural raises 30 million dollars to build a payments layer for AI agents

• Tech Startups: The July 23 tech roundup, AMD, Anthropic, Google, Samsung, and SpaceX

1. Write down every check you run each morning before you even know what to work on: calendar, inbox flags, open tasks, key numbers, yesterday's loose ends. That scavenger hunt is the morning tax.

2. Open one doc and draft the exact briefing you wish landed in your inbox at 6am: today's top 3 priorities, your meetings, anything on fire, and the one number that matters.

3. Hand that template to Claude with access to your calendar and task list and tell it: fill this out for tomorrow, in this format, every morning.

4. Schedule it to run before you wake up. Read it with coffee instead of building it from scratch.

5. Each morning, cut the lines you didn't need and add the ones you wish were there. Inside a week the briefing writes itself and the 40 minutes are yours again.

Spend 60 minutes listing every decision you make between waking up and starting real work: what to check, what to prioritize, what to ignore. Hand that list to your AI and make it deliver the answers before you open your eyes. The first hour is where most people leak their sharpest energy on low-value sorting. Automate it once and you buy back 40 minutes every single day. That's the way.

Every morning at 8am, this text is already waiting for me. My AI put it together while I slept.

My AI assistant reads my calendar, my inbox, my crm, and my open tasks and sends me a daily Morning Briefing.

I stopped managing follow-ups. I stopped checking my calendar completely.

And my email is also down to 15 mins a day (that skill is also included below).

I can reply to my agent in chat, and it will take actions like:

1. Move that cal invite to 4pm and send them an email

2. Push that follow-up back 3 days.

3. Add this task to my task DB, remind me in 7 days

4. So and so forth.

I packed this up into a simple 5 min install. This is the fastest way to get started with a personal AI agent assistant.

The Morning Briefing Agent Skill + DB → $27

🤖 AI

• 🟢 MU +4%. Micron neared 1,000 dollars as Google and Tesla's record AI capex confirmed the memory-demand story.

• 🟢 ORCL +3%. Oracle rose a day after landing a 10-year Pentagon cloud deal worth up to 7 billion dollars.

• 🔴 GOOGL −7%. Alphabet slid after guiding 2026 capex up to 195-205 billion dollars with no clear return date.

• 🔴 AMD −3.9%. Fell in the risk-off tape even as it started production on its Helios AI server rack.

💻 Tech

• 🟢 IBM +6.4%. Beat on earnings at 2.43 dollars EPS and 15.8 billion in sales, closing near 196 dollars.

• 🟢 NOW +7%. ServiceNow jumped on a strong Q2 beat.

• 🔴 TSLA −13%. Missed on Q2 profit as AI and robotics spend jumped and free cash flow went negative.

• 🔴 MXL −9.5%. MaxLinear slid in the chip-sector pullback.

🏦 Finance

• ▪️ No clean single-name finance mover Thursday. The big banks reported back on the 14th, so the sector traded on macro: Treasury yields hit fresh year highs as Brent topped 100 dollars, pressuring rate-sensitive names across the board.

🌎 Other

• 🟢 LVWR +86%. LiveWire, the EV motorcycle maker, soared on the session.

• 🟢 HON +6.3%. Honeywell rose on a strong Q2 and its completed aerospace spin-off.

• 🔴 Megacaps posted their worst day since April 2025 as AI-capex doubt and the oil spike hit sentiment.

• 🔴 Rate-sensitive and consumer names leaked lower as Brent above 100 dollars and WTI back over 90 stoked inflation fears.

The rotation is loud: money left the AI-capex trade and ran to anything with proven earnings today, IBM, Honeywell, memory. Same lesson as the intro. The edge isn't doing more, it's knowing which thing actually pays. Let your system sort that before the market opens.

https://x.com/colinstuckert

• Vita Coco bought super-premium rival Copra for 275 million dollars; Copra has grown net sales at a 48% compound annual rate over the past three years. Source: Numlock

• Prescribed burns cut giant sequoia wildfire death odds by 77% and prevented roughly 1,900 tree deaths across 19 groves. Source: Numlock

• Studio Ghibli Fest re-releases pulled 10.6 million dollars last year across eight films, expanding from 640 to 1,100 US theater locations. Source: Numlock

• 🗓️ On this day in 1969 → Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific, bringing the first humans back from the Moon.

• 🦾 How to be dangerous → Timebox email to two 20-minute windows a day. It expands to fill whatever space you hand it.

• 🌞 Health → Get sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking. It sets your body clock better than any supplement.

• 🍳 Cooking → Salt your eggs 15 minutes before cooking, not while they cook. They stay tender instead of turning rubbery.

• 💬 Quote → "The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing." —Walt Disney

• 🤖 AI reality check → An agent that runs every morning beats a genius model you open twice a week. Cadence is the moat, not IQ.

🤖 While everyone’s watching tutorials, the winners are installing systems like this: My AI Agent Operating System → full memory, setup, and database needed to get an agent working for you in minutes. Get the basics down, then customize it for your exact work and life routine → Only $76 → Personal AI Agent System: A Work + Life OS

👓 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.