The Second Cognitive Revolution at Humanity’s Most Challenging Moment

Something feels different—something real and palpable about this moment we’re living through.

The conversations we’re having are brittle. The institutions we rely upon are either faltering or failing. Kids today seem both hyperconnected and yet, at the same time, strangely alone. Public debate yields only escalating conflict, not resolution and understanding. Organizations pivot, pivot again, then freeze and (all too often) disappear.

And all of this is happening against the backdrop of artificial intelligence—its rise, its acceleration, its steady permeation of the world, the very substrate, around us: writing, coding, summarizing, predicting, analyzing, all at speeds that would’ve sounded like science fiction just five years ago.

Most of the commentary out there treats these as separate stories.

They aren’t.

We are entering what I call a second cognitive revolution at precisely the moment when our stabilizers are weakest. Anthropologists sometimes distinguish between “cold” and “hot” societies. Cold systems resist rapid change through stabilizing myths, rituals, and durable narratives, while hot systems reinterpret themselves constantly through disruption and progress.

Modern society is hot. Digital society is hyper-hot. And many of our cold stabilizers—shared stories, widely trusted institutions, durable authority structures—have weakened or collapsed just as the environment began accelerating.

At its center, the crux of this moment, is something more fundamental than the rise of social media or the state of our politics: the erosion of human agency—the sense that events are increasingly beyond our control, delegated to algorithms or happening faster than we can shape them.

To me, navigating this moment is the defining challenge of our time.

For most of my career, I’ve worked far from the spotlight—in finance, in investing, in building businesses and institutions. My professional life, spanning some 30-plus years, has been largely defined by making decisions under uncertainty—allocating capital, evaluating people and organizations, assessing changing environments.

But I’m speaking up for the first time, right now, because I believe it’s time to sound the alarm.

When we as a species are reduced to reacting rather than choosing, responding rather than directing, consuming rather than constructing—that’s more than an evolution in the technologies we wield. It signals a fundamental shift in who (or what) is exercising agency in the first place.

To understand what’s at stake amid this second cognitive revolution, it helps to understand the first. When humankind developed language, it set our species on a radically different path. Today, our closest evolutionary relatives (primates like chimpanzees and bonobos) are capable of communication, but mostly about what’s happening right now—via gesture, posture, and sound (i.e., “predator over there,” “good food that way”).

With language, humans became capable of communicating about things that weren’t there. We could describe what we thought and experienced yesterday, articulate our hopes for tomorrow, invent gods, laws, customs, nations, markets. We could coordinate around shared fictions or abstract ideas, translating them into reality. More importantly, we could ask a simple but revolutionary question: what if?

What if we try something new? What if this story isn’t true—or there’s more to this than meets the eye? What if we organize ourselves differently or approach from a different angle?

That was the first cognitive revolution. It expanded human agency dramatically, making coordinated, intentional change possible at scale.

Eons later came mass media. For the first time, entire nations (and eventually the world) could watch the same politician’s speech, or the same conflict or natural disaster unfolding, in real time. Yet over the last 15 years, and with increasing speed over the past 5 or 6, our entire shared frame of reality has badly fractured. And with it, many of the cold stabilizers that once anchored public meaning began to weaken.

With the rise of social media came personalized information streams that reward speed and reaction. A child born in 2005 didn’t grow up in “a world with technology.” They grew up in a multiverse of curated realities, without anything to anchor them. Communication at once sped up and shortened. A thumbs-up replaced a sentence, a meme replaced an argument, a viral clip replaced a sustained narrative. We did not return to face-to-face depth; we compressed language into reactions.

Now layer artificial intelligence on top of this compression of reality and decay of stabilizers. It’s not about better autocomplete; it’s a question of offloading cognition itself.

At some point, the distinction between your native processing power and externally available intelligence will blur even further. With intelligence accessible on demand—and IQ not just downloadable, but embeddable, with the potential of brain-computer interfaces (like Neuralink and others)—raw cognitive horsepower stops being the differentiator. And not just between individual people, but between humanity and the technologies we’ve created.

If cognition itself can be outsourced, it becomes dangerously easy to outsource judgment, direction, the burden of deciding. And when all of this is happening while the environment is changing faster than our internal models can update, we begin to fall even further behind—cognitively, emotionally, institutionally. That gap between environment and understanding is where agency erodes most precipitously.

And (ominously) agency is not the only casualty. As technology grows better at satiating our low-level needs—efficiency, access to information, optimization, automation of routine tasks—the “upper levels” of human experience, including belonging, meaning, and purpose, feel less and less stable.

In this dawning future, the question is not: How powerful will AI become?

The real question is: How do we as humans retain meaning and agency in a world where the map keeps changing?

This newsletter is an attempt to explore this question in public.

To me, the answer is adaptability—the structured capacity to learn, revise, experiment, and update without losing direction. It is the ability to update your model of the world without collapsing into paralysis or chasing every new signal.

In a world where intelligence is commoditized, adaptability becomes the essential and indispensable human trait. Not who can calculate fastest, but who can navigate best. Not who has the highest IQ, but who can retain agency when IQ is everywhere.

And the good news is that—unlike IQ—adaptability can be learned.

After a career spent in high-stakes, fast-cycle decision-making, both building businesses myself amid uncertainty and learning from the most effective entrepreneurs who racked up “wins” across industries, I’ve observed that many of the most successful leaders are the ones who think most adaptively. Knowingly or unknowingly, many seem to be running a similar process—practicing adaptive thinking as a kind of discipline, not unlike a more advanced operating system for the brain.

Unpacking how, why, and what that looks like in practice—with an eye toward democratizing this process and building a community of adaptable thinkers—has become a major focus of mine, especially over the past couple of years. Sharing as much of what I’ve learned as possible will be our objective here.

In the next installment of this newsletter, we’ll start to unpack why decision-making today feels harder than it should—and why much of that difficulty has less to do with our intelligence than with the kind of uncertainty we’re living through.

For now, I’ll leave you with this:

The first cognitive revolution gave us the power to ask “What if?”

The second is testing whether we still have the agency to answer that question.