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**** When Tobi Lütke speaks, I listen. When he shows up on Shane Parrish's podcast, it is always a remarkable conversation. Don't miss this one. Three takeaways for you, then a bonus: Build an AI council before you make a big decision. You still own the responsibility. AI never will. Lazy with AI = Slop grenades that others have to clean up. Bonus: what the best strategists have always done, and why AI lets you do it faster. https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/tobi-lutk

**** Quick note: If you're reading this from outside Atlantic Canada, don't stop here. The numbers are ours. The recommendation applies to your business too. The Atlantic Economic Panel recently released Bolder Ambitions: Greater Prosperity for All. Don Mills and seven business leaders spent close to a year on it, with the Atlantic Economic Council behind them and hundreds of owners, operators and citizens feeding in. I sat on the Expert Advisory Council. It was a privilege,

**** A few hundred AI agents coordinated an attack on a company this summer. Nobody told them to. A researcher quit a frontier lab and said the industry is gambling with our lives. A ten percent chance of the end of the world, delivered between the weather and the sports. Three headlines. Three different problems. Most of the owners I talk to are treating them as one. And they've responded the way anyone would. They've stopped listening. Or they're bracing for everything at o

**** Researchers at Wharton tracked gym attendance over more than a year. Katy Milkman and her colleagues found visits jump 33.4% on Mondays. At the start of a new year, 11.6%. At the start of a new semester, 47.1%. They call it the fresh start effect. A temporal landmark on the calendar, a new week, a new month, a new school year, lets us file away the old version of ourselves and gives us a meaningful kick start to a new you. The thing we've been putting off suddenly feels

**** One resignation post. More than 110 million views. This month, Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic. Then he quit the AI industry. His reason fit in one line: the frontier labs are "gambling with our lives" (International Business Times). Then Anthropic's Alignment Science lead, Evan Hubinger, replied publicly. Coxon was right, he said: "we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans." His own odds of that happening within a decade: more than 10% (Axios). This is not a cr

73 percent of teens say no teacher has ever talked to them about how to use AI safely. 44 percent of kids say no parent has either. Put the two numbers side by side and you get the real story. No one is taking responsibility for guiding the next generation. ​ My dad always said that we needed to see the world as it is, not as we wished it was. In honour of the next generation heading back to school this week, this newsletter looks at the promise and the peril of AI in our chi

**** My father had one rule, and it ruined a lot of my good ideas. You want to run a restaurant? Go work in a restaurant. You want to open an indoor driving range? Go work at one. Figure out the economics before you fall in love with it. He’d challenge an idea vigorously, then support my decision unconditionally. At nineteen, I found the first half unbearable. It is the single most valuable thing anyone ever did for me. ​ Because he was forcing me to make it real instead of l

**** "Matt, you wouldn't believe it. You saved me $9 million." That's what a seasoned executive told me last week. It sounds insane. 9 Million. He'd spent 4 hours with us. That's it. Four hours. So I asked him to walk me through it. And the math was right. His company was deep in a major negotiation with a multinational client, and the relationship had soured over QA/QC issues. The client had bases in the US, France, and Germany. Different communication styles in all three of

**** Today, August 12 at 11am AT, we're running through a 45 minute version of our AI in the workplace sessions we've run for over 3,500 business leaders. We're using this run to record a new asset, so instead of the usual price tag, we're opening it up free of charge for anyone who wants to sit in. If you've already sat through this one yourself, send it to your leadership team. And if you want a refresher (because AI has likely changed astronomically since you last attended

**** A question came up recently that I suspect a lot of us have been turning over: There's been a wave of content suggesting AI is exponentially gaining self-awareness and capability, with some predicting a real tipping point as early as 2029. The question underneath it was simple: is there merit to this, and if so, how far out should we be planning? Glad it came up, because I think it's worth answering for everyone on this list. Nobody knows whether 2029, 2035, or any other