A Briefing by Eric Edmeades - April 2026

Something is happening right now in your life and in mine and in the lives of nearly everybody you know that most people alive today do not fully understand, and they won't until it's too late to respond to it. You can feel it already. You probably felt it this morning, maybe before breakfast, or the moment you reached out for your phone. That low hum of overwhelm that you can't quite name, that sense that you should be doing something about something, but you're not really sure what. I'm not saying that to scare anyone. I'm saying it because it's true. True. And all I want to do in the next little while is tell you what that hum is all about, why it's there, and why your body is built to react the way it's reacting right now. And what people who have come out on the right side of these moments across history have always had in common. Innovation always divides the population, every single time, without exception. When the plow arrived, there were people who picked it up and there were people who didn't. The people who did ate through the winter. The people who didn't buried their children. When electricity arrived, there were people who wired up their homes and towns, and there were people who stayed with lanterns. A generation later, the lantern makers were gone. When the car arrived, the blacksmith who learned how to turn a spanner ate. The ones who didn't, well, they were hungry by 1925. And of course, when the computer arrived in the 1980s, there were people who sat down in front of them, figured them out, and then there were others who said, "I don't need one of these newfangled things." 40 years later, you can still tell who was who and which was which. You can tell by their houses, you can tell by their careers, and you can tell by their retirement accounts. Sometimes you can even tell by their relationships with their kids and their grandchildren. The internet in the '90s, same pattern. Mobile in 2000, same pattern. Social media, e-commerce, streaming, innovation, division. Every time a significant innovation arrives, the population splits. The ones who get on board and the ones who don't. We look back at history and we think it must have been fairly obvious which side to be on. It wasn't. It never is. At the time, it never looks like the choice between catastrophe and prosperity. It looks like the choice between something familiar and something weird, something known and something uncomfortable or difficult. Something that feels like your life and something that feels like somebody else's life. And most people, given that choice, pick familiar. They pick the apparently safe. And the cost of being wrong has never been small. The blacksmith doesn't get a slow, dignified decline. He goes hungry in 5 years. The lantern maker doesn't get a graceful retirement. He watches his entire trade disappear in a single generation. Being on the wrong side of these moments is not a setback. It's an exit. The story of who flourishes and who doesn't, who thrives and who falls behind, who keeps their dignity and who loses it, that story is told in every era by which side of the dividing lines people ended up on. That story is the story of the last 10,000 years. Now, I want to tell you what is different this time. For most of human history, the average generation faced none of these moments. None. Children lived essentially the same lives as their parents. And the tools that they had were the tools that they had, and the work was the work, and the, the world your grandfather saw was more or less the same world that you saw too. Every few generations, something would shift— a new tool, a new technology, a new way of organizing socially— and the cycle I just described would play out: the split, the winners, and those left behind. Then, somewhere around the 18th century, those moments started more often, like once in a lifetime, and then suddenly twice, and then it would happen in 3 times in a generation. And now we have arrived at a moment in history that no human being before us has ever faced: 6 or 7 of these stacked on top of each other at the same time. In the last 5 years and in the coming 5, we are facing simultaneously artificial intelligence, agentic AI, which is a different beast entirely, Robotics, which is going to do for physical labor what AI is doing to cognitive labor right now. Cryptocurrency and the restructuring of finance. Geopolitical realignment we haven't seen on this scale since 1945. Economic upheaval that isn't a recession, it's a rewriting of the rules. Mass displacement of white-collar work, and right behind it, the mass displacement of nearly every other kind of work that we know about right now. The restructuring of what careers even are. The collapse of trust in institutions that held for 3 generations. And all of it running at a pace of innovation that no human nervous system has ever been asked to adapt to. And we feel it. We all feel it. We feel it when we open our phones and scroll through a flood of headlines that feel urgent, that feel important, that feel like things we ought to have an opinion about or do something about, but that on an honest reflection will not actually touch our day-to-day lives at all. We feel it when somebody at the dinner table mentions a new tool that came out last Tuesday and everybody else seems to be already using it and we have no idea what it is. We feel it when our kids ask us a question about their career path and we don't have an answer because the answer we would have given them 6 months ago is already outdated. This is not us being slow. This is us being normal human beings inside a speed of change that humans were not built for. There's a saying I've been thinking a lot about lately. Hard times make for tough people. Tough people make for easy times. Easy times make for, well, not so tough people. And we are, all of us, alive today because of some very tough people that came before us. I want you to picture for a moment a woman born in the year 1900. Not an abstract person. Think of a real woman, somebody's grandmother. By the time she reaches her late teens, the First World War is on. The boys she went to school with have been sent to France. Some of them come back. Many of them don't. Her father, if he is still alive, comes home with damage that no one in 1918 has a name for. She watches. And I want you to understand what war meant in 1918. Yes, terrorism still targets civilians today, and we've all seen the heartbreak that that causes. But in conventional war today, targeting civilians is the exception. In 1918, it was the rule. That was the strategy. That was the job. In the same window, she sees the Spanish flu arrive. It infects 1 in 3 human beings on the planet. 1 in 3. It kills somewhere between 50 and 100 million people. She loses relatives. She nurses neighbors in her own house and watches some of them die. She is only 20 years old. By the time she reaches her early 30s, the Great Depression hits. Real food becomes difficult to get. The bank where her family kept their savings closes its doors. Relatives she grew up with quietly disappear into a country that has gone dark, looking for work that doesn't exist. There are mornings where she wonders, with a kind of cold, practical clarity that our generation does not really know, whether she herself is going to make it through the year. By her early 40s, the Second World War descends. Both of her brothers are called up. One of them comes home. The devastation by the time the war ends is on a scale no human being has ever seen before, or God willing, will ever see again. By her mid-50s, she's now staring down the Cuban Missile Crisis and the opening of the Cold War, living with the everyday, in-the-bones possibility that her world will be vaporized and the future will be over. That woman, whoever she was, lived with levels of difficulty, grief, and uncertainty that most of us right now have never had to even think about for more than a minute or two, or during a Hollywood movie. And here we are today in the safest, wealthiest, most medically advanced, most physically comfortable period in human history, and yet more of us than ever are anxious. More of us than ever can't sleep properly. More of us than ever are self-medicating, and more of us than ever are actually struggling, and some of us are even coming apart. Coming apart with what? With this? With the easy? Look, I'm not saying that we have not faced challenges. I am suggesting that we have lived through what has been the safest, most stable, most secure, and most comfortable time in human history until now. And now we are entering a new phase. —a phase many of us are not prepared for, and at a pace of change nobody has ever seen before. The pace is real and the stakes are serious. Our collective challenge in meeting this moment is not only because the moment is hard, it is also because, well, we are softer than the people who came before us. Of course we are. We haven't been forged in the way they were by the events that they had to go through. So if we know that innovation always divides the population, And we know that the division this time is the steepest in history. The obvious question becomes, what puts people on which side? History is actually really clear on this. Three things put people on the wrong side: fear, because the new thing threatens something that they've built their identity on and their lives upon; ignorance— not stupidity, ignorance— because they don't look squarely at what's coming; They distract themselves. They check out. They skim headlines. They make jokes about it. They dismiss it. They don't study it. And reaction, because they respond before they think. They buy things they don't need. They sign up for things they can't finish and don't use. And they scatter their focus. And so what puts people on the right side? 4 things. The first 3 are about regulation and state of mind. Vision, because they can see. They look around, even if only dimly, at where this is all going. Calm, because they don't panic, they don't scatter, they don't turn every new development into an emergency. And understanding, because they actually do the work to understand what is happening and what it means for them instead of scattering their focus and efforts. And then there is the fourth thing, which I think is the most overlooked of all: connection. The instinct, when the ground is moving, to look around for other people who see what you see and to band together with them. To pool what you know, to pool what you have, to not try and do this alone. Lloyd's of London, the institution that made global trade possible, did not begin as a financial firm. It began in a coffeehouse in 1688. Ship captains, merchants, and underwriters meeting every day to share what they knew. Which ships were worth backing? Which captains were trustworthy? Which shipping routes were dangerous? They were facing what was for them an unprecedented level of risk uncertainty and opportunity. Sea travel was opening up the world and ruining people who got it wrong. So they built a room, they shared information, they shared the load, they built between them a system that none of them could have built alone. And that coffeehouse is now the largest insurance market on the planet. This lesson isn't about insurance. The lesson is about the room. The people who get through these moments don't get through them alone. They find the people who see what they see. They share the weight. So that is 4: vision, calm, understanding, and connection. And look at them again. None of those things are about intelligence. None of them are about wealth. None of them are about access. They are all, every one of them, about the state of a person's nervous system and the people they have around them. You cannot have a vision when you are in fight or flight. You cannot have calm when your amygdala is firing. You cannot have understanding when your blood is pulled out of your prefrontal cortex. And you cannot build connection when your nervous system is reading every face in the room as a threat or a competitor. The dividing line of the next 10 years is not going to be between the smart and the stupid. It's going to be between the regulated and the unregulated, between the connected and the alone. Which brings me to the part of this I most want you to hear. You did not evolve for this. Your body, your brain, your nervous system evolved over a couple of million years on the African savanna, walking 10 to 15 miles or kilometers a day, eating food that was in season, sleeping when the sun went down, living in a group of 30 to 50 people that you had known since you were a child, facing the same challenges that your parents and grandparents had faced, and rarely having to deal with major innovation. That is the machine that you are running right now. And then in the last 200 years, we changed everything. The food, the light, the movement, the social structure, the information environment, the pace of change itself. The part of your brain that was designed to notice threats is called the amygdala, and it's about the size of an almond. It was built to spot a snake in the grass or a stranger in the tribe. It was not built for 27 push notifications before breakfast split-tested headlines designed to frighten and addict you, and social media programs that can manipulate your pleasure centers and trick you into trading empty bubblegum entertainment for real enjoyment or productivity. And so your amygdala is firing all the same, looking for threats, looking for opportunities, and it's firing constantly. It's scanning your phone, it's looking at your email, your feeds, your news, and it's tagging everything as urgent. When the amygdala fires, a predictable sequence happens. Adrenaline floods your system. Cortisol follows. Blood moves away from the prefrontal cortex, the part of you that makes thoughtful decisions, and it moves into your muscles. You become physiologically stronger but simultaneously dumber, more reactive, less patient, less wise, and less empathetic. In that state, we don't make good choices. We make fast ones. We make safe ones. We buy every new AI tool. We sign up for every webinar. We enroll in courses we never complete. We start 3 businesses at once. We chase, we scatter, we perform productivity because moving in 10 directions feels better than sitting still and thinking or admitting to those around us that we need help. And we tell ourselves this is ambition, this is keeping up. It isn't. It's a freeze response in a nice outfit. It feels like motion. It feels like effort. It feels like keeping up. But under its hood, it is a body that has decided since it can't fight and it doesn't know what's going on and it can't escape, to look busy. This, we now know, is the result of evolutionary mismatch and rapid innovation. The condition of a body trying to function inside an environment and a pace of change radically unlike the one it was designed for. This isn't a metaphor. It is a measurable physiological reality. The reason most of us struggle to self-regulate is not lack of willpower. It is a nervous system that has been pushed for years past what it was built for. And that has lost the foundations needed to even attempt proper regulation. Look, you can't self-regulate on 4 hours of broken sleep. You can't self-regulate on blood sugar that rides like a roller coaster and that crashes throughout the day. You cannot self-regulate in a home that stresses you out every time you walk into it, and you cannot self-regulate when your finances are a slow bleed that you haven't looked at in 6 months. Self-regulation is downstream of your foundations. Physical, emotional, spiritual, environmental, financial. If any of those things is broken, your nervous system is going to run hot no matter what you do at the level of mindset. The most important skill of the next 10 years is not artificial intelligence literacy. It is not technical skill. It's not even speed. It's self-regulation. The ability to sit with the discomfort of the moment, the ability to slow your own nervous system down, the ability to resist the urge to grab the next shiny thing and instead ask, what actually matters? What will really move the needle? What actually serves my life? You cannot out-hustle a nervous system in flight-or-fight mode. You can only regulate it. This is not new wisdom. It was in fact the oldest wisdom we have. Every spiritual tradition that has lasted more than a few hundred years has had some core practice of nervous system regulation. The monks knew it. The yogis knew it. The Stoics knew it. They didn't have the neuroscience, but they had the practice. What is new is that for most of human history, regulation was a luxury, something that the wise pursued in their spare time. Today, in the environment we have built for ourselves, regulation is the basic operating requirement for being a functional adult. It's not optional. It's not advanced. It's the floor. Let me make this concrete. Picture two people. They both wake up Monday morning to news of a new AI tool that everyone in their industry is suddenly talking about. The unregulated one feels the spike. By 9 AM, they've signed up for the tool, watched three YouTube videos about it, joined a Discord, bought the course on prompt engineering, and texted two friends that they should have it too. By Wednesday, they've barely opened it. By Friday, there's a newer tool, and the cycle restarts. On the other hand, the regulated person feels the same spike when they hear about this tool. They notice it. They write the tool down and they add it to the list. And then they go to the gym or they go for a walk. They come back, they eat a good healthy lunch, get through their actual work for the day. And on Saturday, when they have a clear head, they spend an hour looking at the tool. They discuss it with the team they've assembled. They decide it isn't relevant to what they are doing right now. They cross it off the list and they get back to on with the work of the real week. The first person's life is being run by the amygdala. The second person's life is being run by consciousness. Same news, same nervous system, different relationship to it. That in two scenes is the whole game. Now, let me tell you about the other side, the people who end up on the right side of these divisions. They are almost never the smartest people in the room. They're almost never the, the most well-resourced. Look, think about Kodak for a moment. Kodak invented the digital camera. Do you know when? In 1975. They had the patent, they had the team, they had the technology, and they buried it. They buried it because in an ironic, if not funny hindsight way, their executives were terrified it would cannibalize their main business, film. They were afraid it would hurt what they saw as their primary sector. That terror bankrupted them, and the people and companies who embraced digital built entire industries on top of its ashes. Blockbuster, similar story. They owned home video. They were offered the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million and turned it down. It was new, it was strange, they thought it was a fad. Today, Netflix is worth close to half a trillion dollars. These were not dumb people. They were smart people operating from fear who rationalized their fear as prudence. They chose the familiar when they thought it was safety. And look, the ones who won, they weren't geniuses either. They were people who looked at what was coming, felt the fear like everybody else, and then regulated it long enough to act. Hold on to that phrase: regulated their fear long enough to act. You will feel the fear. You should feel it. What's coming is enormous. You should be taking it seriously. You should feel the weight of it. The question isn't whether to feel the fear. The question is how do you respond when you feel it? Do you react and scatter and play it safe, or do you regulate yourself and respond with consciousness, from calm, from vision, from understanding, with the people that you trust around you. That is what the people on the right side of history have always had in common. Not courage in the absence of fear, regulation in the presence of it. So here is where I want to take you next. We have two futures sitting in front of us right now, two pretty different ones. And you watching this get to choose which side of the dividing line you are going to be on. The future is the future we have already begun to live. The technology accelerates. The divide gets deeper. The people who can't regulate fall further behind. And the comforts that were supposed to make life better, the convenience, the abundance, the algorithmic everything, quietly weakens us and grinds us down. I want you to pay attention to this part. Easier has not been working out so well for us so far. Every time that we've made life softer, more frictionless, more comfortable, our anxiety has gone up, our depression has gone up, and our sleep has gotten worse. Our relationships have grown thinner. The whole arc of modernity has been an arc of more comfort and more suffering at the same time. This is not a coincidence. This is evolutionary mismatch at a civilization scale. So when people promise you abundance is coming, the AI assistants, the robotics, the post-scarcity utopia, the easy button on every problem, I want you to be careful. The same forces that are about to make life unimaginably easy are also the forces that on present trajectory will make most people unimaginably worse off. Unless, unless you understand the body and the mind you actually have. Unless you understand what your nervous system was built for and what it wasn't, unless you take the ancient wiring seriously and learn how to feed it, move it, rest it, connect it, and regulate it. The second future, the one I want for you, is not the future where we go back. We can't go back. The plow doesn't go in reverse. The internet isn't going to be undone, and AI isn't going anywhere except further. I am suggesting a future where we go forward but consciously, where we marry the deepest understanding of our own evolution to the most extraordinary tools any human beings have ever had access to, where the abundance is real and where we are actually well enough to enjoy it, where the technology serves the body instead of grinding it down and weakening it. That future is available. It's right here. It's the most magnificent future a human being has ever had the chance to experience. But it is only available to people who understand that the technology is the easy part. The hard part and the magnificent part is what we do with these bodies and with the minds that we were given. Before we finish, I want to make each of these four strategies concrete because telling you to choose vision, calm, understanding, and connection without saying what those actually look like in your real week, well, would be a bit of a disservice. So here's what each one of them looks like. Vision. Vision is about the quality of what you let into your head. If you spend 3 hours a day scrolling reaction on your headlines, you do not have vision. You have noise. If you spend 1 hour a week reading something serious by someone who has thought hard about where things are going, you start accumulating vision. Cut the doom scroll, pick 3 sources that you trust, and spend 1 hour a week thinking about the next 5 years instead of the next 5 minutes. Calm. Calm is not a personality trait. It is what your nervous system does when you have been sleeping properly, eating properly, moving your body, and taking time every day to be still. Set the foundations and calm becomes the reality. Skip them and no breathing exercise will save you. When you feel the spike, when a new tool drops or a new headline lands, do this: write it down, revisit it in 3 days. If it still matters, then act. If it is evaporated, you've just saved yourself another Tuesday. Understanding. Understanding takes the most work because it requires you to go deep on something. You cannot understand all 6 of the revolutions we are facing right now. You can't. Pick the ones that matter most to your work and your family and your future and put the time in. Read the books, not threads. Ask basic questions. Without worrying about whether you look stupid, without worrying about embarrassment. Find the people who actually know and then listen more than you talk. A few things understood properly will serve you more than 10 things skimmed. Connection is the one most of us are worst at because we've all been told for decades that we should be self-made, that seeking help is weakness or even cheating. Pick people who see what you see and maybe more, and make sure you talk to them this month. Bring something when you do. What do you know? What do you have? Don't only take. And if you don't have those 3 people yet, start with 2 or start with 1. Just get started. I want to bring us back to where we started. Innovation has always divided the population. Always. Every time. Without exception. The division is happening right now, this year, this quarter. It's happening in your life. It's happening in the lives of the people that you were on calls with this week. It's happening in your industry. It's happening everywhere. It's happening in the home of every person that you know. Some of the people we know right now are going to come out of this decade on the other side, calm, clear, well-positioned, with their foundations intact and their nervous systems regulated. Connected to other people who see what they see, and maybe more, doing meaningful work in a world that has been rewritten. And some of the people we know right now are going to come out of this decade exhausted, scattered, behind, stressed, and alone, still chasing the tool that was going to fix it, still signing up for the next course but getting nowhere. Look, you don't get to pick which side you come out on by hoping and wishing. You pick it by the actions that you take, by the way you behave in the next 90 days. Fear will show up. Ignorance will be tempting. Distraction will be alluring. Reaction will feel like productivity. Don't take the bait. Choose vision. Choose calm. Choose understanding. Choose connection. The ground is moving, and it's moving faster than it ever has before. Pick where you stand and choose who you stand with. I'm Eric Edmeades, and if you found this message useful, please share it. We are at one of the most exciting times in human history if we do the right things right now.