Guard the Gate: Discernment, Curating Intelligence

Happy Sunday Friends!

Here’s one quote I’m musing on this week, two ideas, three favorites, and one question to take with you into the week ahead.

One Quote I’m Musing

“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts”
| Marcus Aurelius

This week I kept coming back to a simpler version of that:

You become whatever you repeatedly let into your head.

Lately, the feed has been trying very hard to decide that for you.
If you are not choosing the dye, someone else is.

📝 Drowning in “Important” Information

Every day this past week, my screen lit up with some fresh “AI is changing everything” headline.

Anthropic’s latest write-up on AI-driven espionage.
New draft language on AI and privacy coming out of Europe.
Endless “LLM rankings” and “Top 10 you need to know” lists.

All of it matters if you care about AI, cyber, or the future of work.

But letting reality rule:

I would sit down “just to check one thing,” and 25 minutes later I had 14 tabs open, three half-read articles, a vague sense of dread, and zero decisions made.

No clarity. No action. Just a nervous system running hot.

🔍 The Feed vs. My Brain

Midweek, I caught myself doing the exact thing I warn others about.

I had a quiet hour blocked to think about strategy.

Instead, I:

• Opened my browser to grab one link I needed for some notes on U.S. financial technologies and FS-ISAC

• Saw a related EU piece on digital regulation and opened it “for context”

• Let the recommendation engine hand me a “Top 10 LLMs in 2025” article, which I skimmed because “I probably should know this”

By the end, my mind felt like the browser. Too many tabs open. Warm, noisy, and useless.

No decisions. No analysis. No real thinking.

Just the illusion of productivity because I had seen a lot of “important” things.

That is the trap: consumption feels like progress.

🪞The Mirror: It Is Not Just You, It Is All of Us

I hear the same thing from:

• Senior leaders: “I feel like I’m always behind on AI and cyber. I read all this stuff and still don’t know what to do.”

• Cyber professionals: “I live in feeds and threat reports, but the signal-to-noise ratio is brutal.”

• Friends outside tech: “Everything is on fire, apparently. All the time. I’m just tired.”

What they are really saying is this:

“I don’t have an information problem. I have a discernment problem.”

The firehose is not going away.
The question is whether you become intentional about how you stand in front of it.

🏛 What Would the Ancient Philosophers Tell Us

We like to think our age is uniquely chaotic.

Endless notifications. Infinite feeds. A new “unprecedented” crisis every week.

If you dropped Marcus Aurelius into our world, he would probably just look around and say, “Same problem. Different costumes.”

The Stoics were not dealing with TikTok, but they were dealing with:

• Competing schools of philosophy

• Constant political intrigue and war

• A stream of letters, speeches, rumors, and public drama

Their answer to overload was not “read everything.”
It was learn to judge what deserves entry into the mind.

A few of them would have blunt words for our discernment problem.

1. Epictetus: Guard the gate

Epictetus trained his students to pause before accepting any impression.

Modern version:

Not every notification is news. Not every headline is reality.

He would tell us to:

• Notice the emotional spike without immediately obeying it

• Ask, “Is this as serious as it feels”

• Treat the mind like a guarded city, not an open marketplace

Our discernment problem often starts right there.
We treat every alert like it is urgent and true.

2. Seneca: Depth over volume

Seneca complained about people who jumped from book to book, never lingering long enough to digest anything.

His advice was simple:

“You must linger with a limited number of good authors.”

If Seneca saw our feeds, he would not be impressed by how much we consume. He would ask:

• Which ideas have you actually made part of your life

• Where can I see this in your actions

Information that never shapes your character or your choices is still noise, no matter how smart it sounds.

3. Marcus Aurelius: The inner citadel

Marcus wrote to himself about building an “inner citadel,” a stronghold of the mind that stays steady while the world thrashes around it.

He wrote those lines:

• In the middle of wars

• With political enemies

• During real plagues, not theoretical ones

His move was not to shut the world out, but to remember:

• What is within my control right now

• Which virtues I can practice in this moment

• Which thoughts make me weaker, and which make me stronger

Applied to us:

We cannot control the firehose.
We can control what we give authority to in our own minds.

4. Premeditation and pruning

The Stoics practiced premeditatio malorum: deliberately rehearsing future difficulties so they would not be surprised when they arrived.

If they lived today, they might say:

• Assume your feeds will be noisy and manipulative

• Expect distraction, outrage, and fear as the default

• Decide your response before the wave hits

That is the spirit behind high-signal inboxes, input fences, and what I am calling Curated Intelligence.

You are not trying to escape the time you live in.
You are building a filter that lets you live well inside it.

🔑 The Insight: Information Is Not the Advantage. Discernment Is.

We talk about AI like it is some alien force that showed up yesterday.

But the playbook is not new.

Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and others built entire businesses on three ideas:

1. Segment people into ever smaller groups

2. Figure out what emotionally moves each segment

3. Feed them exactly that until their view of reality shifts

That is not a conspiracy. That is applied behavioral design.

Someone always benefits from your overwhelm.
If you are not deciding how your attention is spent, that someone is not you.

BJ Fogg’s behavior model is simple:

Behavior = Motivation × Ability × Prompt

Right now, the internet has:

• Motivation: keep you scrolling, clicking, outraged, or entertained

• Ability: frictionless apps, infinite feeds, autoplay everything

• Prompt: notifications, badges, headlines crafted to spike emotion

If you are not designing your own prompts, someone else already is.
And their goal is not your clarity. Their goal is your compliance and your time on page.

To push back on that in my own life, I have started building something I call Curated Intelligence.

For years, I have collected feeds: YouTube channels, podcasts, blogs, newsletters, obscure policy sites, threat intel, research hubs. Great sources. Terrible sprawl. So I am pulling all of it into a single platform I am building for myself:

• One place where every input I care about lives

• Categorized into my core domains

• Scored for signal versus noise

• With a “noise dial” I can adjust

On days when I want depth, I crank the filter up and only see high-signal items I know I’ll value. When I want to skim and explore, I loosen the filter and let more variety in.

It is my way of taking back editorial control over what my brain sees first.

Curated Intelligence is my personal intel layer, not another feed.

If you are curious and want to follow along or help me tune it while I build, reply with ”Curated” and tell me you are interested.

The new power skill is not staying “up to date.” It is choosing what you let update you.

✨ Reframe

You do not need more information. You need a stricter border at the edge of your mind.

Guard the gate.

💡 Two Ideas From Me

1. If you cannot remember what you read yesterday, it was entertainment, not strategy.

2. Your information diet is training your future judgment. Treat it like a workout plan, not a buffet.

🧩 Secret Insight: Start Your Own Curated Intelligence (10 Minutes)

You don’t have to build your own platform to start. You just need a tighter gate.

Step 1: Pick your lanes (2 minutes)
Write down the three to five domains that actually matter for the next 12 months.
Example: “AI, cyber, leadership, national security, personal finance.”

Everything else is optional.

Step 2: Create one High-Signal Inbox (3 minutes)
Choose a single place for the good stuff to land:

• A “High Signal” folder in your email

• A “Read This” notebook in your notes app

• A tag in your read-later app

Commit to one rule: only save items that match your lanes.

Step 3: Run the 7-Day Input Audit (5 minutes)

For the next week:

• When you see something in your lane, save it to the High-Signal Inbox

• When you sit down to read, first open your High-Signal Inbox and pick one item. Only then are you allowed to touch any feed.

Before you add or click anything, give it a 10-second triage:

1. Is this in my lane

2. Will this matter in 30 days

3. Do I know what I will do with this information

If the answer is “no” twice, close it and move on.

When you do read something substantial, turn it into a decision, not just a feeling:

• Write one line: “For my team, this means…”

• Decide one action: brief, policy note, question to ask, or risk to reassess

If there is no action, file it under “interesting, not important,” and let it go.

When you catch yourself closing a low-value link after the triage, take half a second and tell yourself, “Good call.” It feels small. That little win is what teaches your brain, this is who we are now.

At the end of the week, ask:

“Which sources actually moved my thinking or my decisions”

Those are the seeds of your own Curated Intelligence. Keep them. Cut the rest.
You should feel it by then: fewer tabs, less vague dread, more actual decisions.

🔥 Top 3 AI Stories This Week

1. Gartner: By 2028 AI Agents Outnumber Sellers 10× (But Still Don’t Help Much)
Gartner’s new sales forecast: by 2028, AI agents will outnumber human sellers by 10×, but fewer than 40% of sellers will report that agents actually improved their productivity.

Their diagnosis:

• Most companies are bolting agents onto messy workflows, not redesigning the system.

• Sales orgs are piling on tools, prompts, and dashboards and then wondering why everyone feels more overwhelmed, not less.

Why it matters: More agents != more clarity.

• “If we do not fix how we filter and frame information, adding AI agents will simply automate our confusion. | Read More Gartner

2. Europe’s “Digital Simplification” and the AI Act wobble

The European Commission has rolled out a Digital Simplification / Digital Omnibus package that explicitly touches the AI Act, GDPR, ePrivacy, and related digital rules, with an eye toward easing compliance burdens and, in practice, slowing or softening high-risk AI obligations.

Why it matters: If your strategy assumes European AI rules are fixed and “tough forever,” this is your reminder that regulation is an evolving input, not a constant. Great brief topic for boards and leadership: What assumptions in our roadmap break if the AI Act gets delayed or softened? | Read More European Union

3. Deepfake fraud as a quantified, not hypothetical, threat

Deepfake-enabled fraud is no longer a “future concern.” Multiple 2024–2025 reports are now putting hard numbers behind it.

Why it matters: You can stop treating deepfakes as “edge cases.” They’re now:

• A line item in fraud loss statistics, not just conference slides

• A board-level risk, particularly for high-net-worth families and executives New Omni Bank

Trust is the new attack surface: update verification procedures, challenge-response protocols, and family/exec security practices with actual numbers behind them. | Read More JP Morgan

✍️ One Question to Take Into Your Week

If my future judgment was shaped only by what I consumed this week, would I be proud of it?

Journal prompt:

• “The inputs I need to protect my mind from are…”

• “The inputs I want to double down on are…”

Name specific accounts, sites, newsletters, and people.

Until Sunday, my friends.

Think Dangerously.
–e