"She doesn’t just tilt the future — she coaxes it into bloom."
E201: What should Tilt the Future 2.0 (my Act Two) look like?
True or False?
Karena de Souza is a compass in human form — magnetic, steady, and always pointing toward the future. A strategist with a storyteller’s soul, she blends the logic of a programmer with the lyricism of a poet, making complex ideas about work, education, and climate feel like dinner-table conversations. She’s the kind of futurist who’ll talk AI and ancestral wisdom in the same breath — and somehow make it sing.
She’s raised leaders while crossing continents, and her writing reflects that global heartbeat — nurturing, witty, and packed with metaphors that linger like the last note of a good song. Her newsletter feels like a warm cup of tea passed across generations, while her strategic mind scans the horizon for what’s next. She asks big questions with childlike curiosity, and her courage is rooted in a deep commitment to family, integrity, and action.
She doesn’t just tilt the future — she coaxes it into bloom.
Those of you following me in Substack Notes this past week know that I have returned to dabbling with AI and AI tools1. When I resurrected my ChatGPT account today, it asked if I would like to enable the memory function, offering to write an intro para for my newsletter. That - verbatim - is what AI generated above.
Now we all know that these models hallucinate! What should I change in the paragraphs above? What rings true? What is missing? Best answer, in the comments and/or on notes, wins bragging rights and special mention in my Cycle 29 recap!
Surprise! Sustain
I first dabbled with AI around Edition 150, using it to create a Bingo Card. My logic? Most new subscribers aren’t going to start at Edition 1—they’re more likely to read by topic. So I fed each edition into Perplexity, asking for a 30-word summary, five keywords, and how it connected to my three core pillars: Raising Future Ready Leaders, Future of Work, and Climate. I dropped the results into Excel and generated a word cloud.
That’s when AI first surprised me—with the word sustain. Turns out, I’ve unwittingly been writing a thesaurus for that word over the years.
I expected to see sustainability linked to my Climate work. But the model also applied sustain to intergenerational values, heirloom (EQ) skills, music, relationships, parenting, culture, and community. It flagged sustain in every “Rest” edition—on managing energy and avoiding burnout. It showed up in essays about sustaining a long-term writing practice, building resilience, upskilling, and future-readiness. I see echoes of it in how it even tagged the word linger in the intro above.
What's next for Tilt the Future 2.0?
It wasn’t surprising, in hindsight, that after Edition 200 - after distilling so much of what we’ve built and sustained over four years - I found myself in a lull. The kind where even showing up to write felt… unsustainable.
I almost published nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Enter
. A well-timed coffee and conversation with Dan pulled me out of the slump.“So what do you want to do now?” he asked as we caught up on my Europe travels and WoP sightings in Portugal and the UK.
That sparked a conversation about my vision for a community component for this newsletter, an idea first seeded by who has championed it since 2024.
We spoke about why community is my word for 2025 — how it keeps us human in an AI-saturated world. Why I believe in offering others courage, support, and visibility, so they can build their self-confidence. Because confidence expands our risk profile. With risk comes experimentation. And with experimentation, we tackle the problems facing humanity — big ones. But I believe we’ll figure it out.
I truly believe:
The best idea can come from anyone, anywhere, at any time.
And I want to keep building a space where that can happen. Community, to me, looks like a brain trust. A guild of thinkers. A fellowship — a corner of the internet filled with kindness, trust, accountability, and a bit of magic. A space where you bring the kernel of an idea, and it popcorns into a solution.
This feels like my Act Two — a natural evolution of what we’ve built together in Tribe Tilt — a nurturing, action-oriented space rooted in shared values. My writing, as ChatGPT observed above, reflects that: warm, relatable and future-scanning — like a cup of tea passed across generations, with a strategic mind always peering over the edge.
Act Two
Meanwhile, two Write of Passage alumni - Will and Dan - are exploring their own Act Two stories. Dan has been busy redoing all the carpentry in his turn-of-the-century home. Will’s doing stand-up comedy in Mandarin. Yes, in China.
Together,
(the operations genius behind WoP) and (curriculum and community wizard) are launching Act Two — a new experience for people asking, “What’s next?” The first cohort debuts this September, capped around 100 participants.If you suspect you’re made for more, keep reading, visit their site, and reach out.
As someone who’s seen Will shape Build a Second Brain and Write of Passage, and watching Dan (educator-turned-coder) wield his magic on Airtables behind the scenes to help the WoP editors, I can vouch: they’ve built experiences that hum with excellence.
Questions? I’ll happily answer any additional questions if their website does not already answer your concerns.
Related reads discussing the value of robust connections and communities (link to all the articles):
E159: Can Community be the Key to a Better Future?
E97: High Quality Connections: Three Circles ...
E121: Gifts upon gifts - check in on one another
E91: Your Relationships Are a 21st-century Asset
Stay healthy, dear Tribe member, dear Tilter. From there, all else becomes possible.
love
Karena
Dateline: Toronto, Canada
Do you want a quick tour through the previous editions of my newsletter? Use the Bingo Card I designed for my 3-year anniversary, and navigate by topics that interest you.
Would you like to join our Tribe Tilt?
Did you know I do keynotes, moderation and speeches? Here are some examples:
I’ve been experimenting with Lex.page, ChatGPT, Perplexity (my favourite goto), Louis Pereira’s AudioPen.ai, copilot, NotebookLM, Grammarly
Dan the man! What a duo.
Karena de Souza is a compass for humanity's journey toward the future. Like a hiker's magnetic aide that swings as the hiker navigates around boulders and over fallen logs, Karena's writing provides gentle course corrections around, or through, the obstacles of life. A strategist with a storyteller’s soul, she blends the logic of a programmer with the lyricism of a poet, making complex ideas about work, education, and climate feel like dinner-table conversations. She’s the kind of futurist who can convince a luddite to embrace AI while showing the astrophysicist that a child's grubby fingers hold more mysteries than all the stars.
She’s raised leaders while crossing continents, and her writing reflects that global heartbeat — nurturing, witty, and packed with metaphors. Her newsletter feels like a warm cup of tea passed across generations. She asks big questions with childlike curiosity, and her courage is rooted in a deep commitment to family, integrity, and action.
Karena doesn’t just tilt the future.
She coaxes it into bloom.