Everyone teaching AI right now learned it eighteen months ago.
I've been getting to the future early for thirty years.
No, literally I was a "computer tutor" at Jordan Junior High School back in the 80s.
I had a Commodore Vic 20 and used to program games after school.
We were digital hustlers in 8th grade.
In Palo Alto.
I don't say that to brag.
I say it because I recognize the feeling in the room right now the noise, the panic, the thousand voices promising to teach you how to prompt.
I’ve felt that exact feeling five times before.
And I want to tell you what’s on the other side of it.
Before most people believed in the internet, I was in all the rooms convincing them it was real.
As an executive at Columbia Records in the '90s, I sat with a young Beyoncé from this little group called Destiny's Child (lol) and her dad Matthew Knowles and made the case for why she needed a website
At Columbia Records, I fought to get my artists online before my own label and the record industry thought it mattered.
From that same office on 55th and Madison, I built Soul Purpose an email newsletter, a "zine" for you OG's, back in Web1, before the dot-coms, that people actually waited for every week.
Talk about a side hustle.
I sold it to a dot-com called Urban Box Office.
We went on to raise $40 million.
In the early 2000s, I was on CNN regularly, helping the world make sense of what was happening. I covered the rise of social media, the Arab Spring, it was the moment the internet stopped being a toy and started moving history.
Then I built an agency called Social People, helping brands, personalities and TV shows think about real-time storytelling and digital presence.
I was working with influencers before the word existed and became one myself, before marketers at Cannes were chasing the title.
Web.
Social.
Mobile.
Creators.
Every single wave, the same lonely feeling: seeing it before the room does.
And when this one arrived, AI, the wave everyone's bracing against, I didn't write a Substack thread about it.
I was part of the team behind "BBL Drizzy," the AI track that got sampled into a Metro Boomin beat then rapped over by Drake himself, one of the first AI songs in history to cross over into the mainstream and reshape how the industry thinks about sampling.
Five waves now. The pattern never changes.
A few people move.
Everyone else explains why they didn't.
So here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to write.
Speak.
Lecture.
Show up in rooms across the world.
But the words were never the point.
The rooms are.
That's where the leaders find each other before the world has a name for what's happening.
That's where I'll be gathering.
Aug 1–3, I'm opening the first one.
Three days. Live. Virtual. Sure, there will be recordings.
This is a working room not a prompt course, not another AI lecture.
It's called MAKE: The Gathering.
Paired with a book I'm writing in real time: Day One: React or Create.
The machine already took the mechanical work back.
What's left is what was never mechanical:
imagination,
identity,
judgment,
and the nerve to begin again.
I'm building this live.
Come in now and you're not buying a finished product you're getting in at Day One, while it's still becoming what it's going to be.
That isn't the catch.
That's the offer.
100 seats. Hard cap.
Not a tactic this only works if the room stays real.
If you're reading this, you're probably already in one of my inside circles, secret whatsapp and signal groups.
You're one of the people I want in the room.
What founders get:
the book (pre-order)
three days inside MAKE
the community and the marketplace
early access to what comes next
a founder rate, grandfathered for life
$97 for all of it.
The book alone is $47.
The room is worth more than $300.
But this isn't really about the bundle.
The book is the door.
MAKE is the first room.
What we're actually building is a journey and I'm asking you to take it with me.
The world is shifting.
So am I.
This is where that shows up.
Come see what I see.
James