Dear Lovely Human,

Investors don’t ever want to hear a Founder say they have a Plan B. It can signal you are not all in and would not try to make the business work no matter what . This is not what I am talking about…..

For as long as I can remember, I've known I was going to end up somewhere with a forest, rain and labradors around me. Not a maybe. But a someday. Anyone who's known me for more than ten years will tell you about my love of hiking in bush, my dogs ( Stan and Caesar now in heaven) and hugging trees;-)

I have never ever thought this as the plan of very ambitious people until I had lunch with Eddie, my techie buddy at the beginning of the year. He leads one of the largest funds in the Middle East investing in AI Series B/C companies amongst other sectors. He said to me Sal, my wife and I are looking into becoming owners of a sheep yoga farm by next year. I have to be honest…I had never heard of sheep yoga. I was also so surprised since I always saw him as driven in the midst on things.

I naively thought my nature escape ambitions was a DNA thing as an island girl, but the more I look into it, all the big very ambitious AI and Technology leaders are setting up their Plan B in some remote forest.

Peter Thiel (claude him if you don’t know who he is) is said to have some major bunker in New Zealand. A few of the leading AI founders have bought islands. A pattern….

I wonder if with everything you are reading around AI right now you also have started thinking about a Plan B- a physical place and way of being/living?

Where will you actually live, and how will you be safe with your loved ones, if the world as you know it moves in a way that scares you and you have no control over the outcomes?

I found part of my answer this year. Living through real regional instability in the UAE taught me: I implicitly trust this government to keep me and my family safe, as their guests. That's not a small thing to say out loud when most countries leadership is corrupt and don’t care about their citizen much less their guests.

You either trust a place and its leadership because you've tested it, or you don't. And when you are unsure …. you find the best Plan B spot you can find that moves you away from human created chaos and interestingly technology, but gets you closer to mother nature i.e. the source.

Most of us have never tested a Plan B. So I would ask….would you trust the place, the systems, the ground itself where you live right now or would you find out for the first time exactly how fragile all of it is if something were to really go wrong?

Where is your safe place and Plan B?

1 - Google just admitted your data is the product
Google is paying over $12m an airline for its raw customer interaction data to train reinforcement learning models. Emails, tickets +++. They have no idea if any of the info will be useful to the models.

2 - This tool turns any book into a trainable skill
Feed it a book, get back a usable skill an AI agent can run.

3 - A personal CRM for people who live in AI tools
It is built for individuals, not sales teams, which is the part that is actually rare. If your business card pile has become a graveyard, this is worth ten minutes.

4 - Anthropic's own threat intelligence report just landed
AI has collapsed the skill gap between a nation state hacking team and one person with a laptop. Worth a read if you have only thought about AI risk in the abstract.

5 - The Anthropic researcher who quit and will not stop warning us
Jacob Coxon walked away from Anthropic this month, gave up his equity on the way out, and told his former colleagues that his own company and its rivals are gambling with our lives. He puts the odds of AI ending humanity above ten percent by the end of the decade.

1 - HR has a problem in the AI era
Most HR functions were built to manage headcount, not a workforce that is part human and part agent.

2 - Why 150 friends might be your hard ceiling
Your network is not a scaling problem, it is a biological one, and that changes how you should think about who actually gets your attention this quarter.

3 - What is contemporary art, actually?
A free four week newsletter course from MoMA on how artists actually think about materials, space, technology and power.

4 - Stop trying to predict what's coming, build for whatever does
Three executives at the Fortune Leaders Forum, from BCG, Starbucks and Syngenta, all landed on the same idea. Forecasting is a losing game right now, adaptability is not.

Religious Focus this month: Ubuntu

Every month we pick one religion or way of living. It allows us to open our minds and be mindful of how we and others live better, healthier, joyful and meaningful lives.

This week, the practice is about people showing up with their hands.

Palesa is forty-six and runs payroll for a clinic network in Maseru during the week. On weekends she drives two hours south to the family fields outside Mafeteng, where her father grew maize until his knees gave out.

This September the planting window is short. Her father is in hospital in Bloemfontein. Her brother works at a mine in Rustenburg and cannot get leave.

She does the arithmetic on a Thursday night and it does not work. One person, four hectares, eleven days.

On Saturday morning she drives down expecting to plant what she can and accept the rest.

There are nine people waiting at the gate.

Ntate Mokhethi has brought his tractor. Two of the Ramaili sons have brought hoes. A woman Palesa knows only as her late mother's church friend has brought a pot of papa and a flask of tea big enough for everybody. Nobody phoned ahead. Nobody needed to.

"Your father ploughed my fields the year I broke my arm," Ntate Mokhethi says, already reversing. "You think we forget?"

This is letsema. In Sesotho and Setswana it names a work party, neighbours turning out to do the ploughing, planting or harvest for one household, usually one that has been knocked off its feet. In isiZulu and isiXhosa the same practice is called ilima.

There is no invoice. But there is a ledger, and everybody can read it. You come when others need you, and when your turn arrives, they come for you. Not out of charity. Out of a memory of who showed up.

That is what makes letsema different from hoping for help. It is not a promise. It is a record. Palesa's family had been paying into it for thirty years without ever calling it anything.

By Sunday evening the four hectares are in. Palesa tries to pay for the diesel. Ntate Mokhethi waves her off and tells her the next field on the list is his cousin's, two weekends from now.

She has already put it in her calendar.

Guiding question:

If your life got knocked sideways tomorrow, who would be at the gate on Saturday morning, and when did you last show up at theirs?

Three steps. One list.

1. Write down the five people who would come.
Not who you hope would come. Who has actually shown up before. If the list is short, that is the data.

2. Check the ledger both ways.
For each name, when did you last show up for them, uninvited?

3. Go to someone's gate this week.
A meal, a lift, an hour of help nobody asked you for. Letsema is built one Saturday at a time.

Palesa's family paid into it for thirty years without calling it anything. Nine people showed up anyway. That was the Plan B.

1 - The UN just voted to make Africa look its actual size
For five hundred years the Mercator map has told a quiet lie, shrinking Africa down until it looks about the same size as Greenland when it is actually fourteen times larger. The UN just voted to correct it.

2 - Tinned fish is having a moment, and nutritionists are into it
Sardines, mackerel and salmon from a can turn out to be genuinely complete foods, protein, omega-3s and vitamins, at a fraction of the cost of the fresh version. Sometimes the unglamorous, cheap thing was the right answer all along.

3 - Trauma might outlive the person who lived it
New research suggests trauma can change how genes are expressed, and that change can pass to the next generation, seen in the children of Holocaust survivors and the families of war veterans. What you inherited is not necessarily what you are stuck with.

4 - Where the ultra-wealthy actually plan to ride it out
The same New Zealand hideouts and private islands Peter Thiel and a handful of AI founders have quietly bought are not rumor, they are mapped out property by property.