Happy Sunday Friends!

Hello Friends! Hope you’re enjoying a moment of calm before diving into this week’s mental recon. Here’s what I’ve been thinking about… one quote I’m musing on this week, two core ideas, three favorite things, and one question to carry with you into the week ahead.

One Quote I’m Musing

“The first opinion that occurs to us is not always the best. We must make room for a second, a third, a fourth.”

| Blaise Pascal

It feels like a new era is unfolding in real-time.
Executive orders are being signed. Institutions are shifting doctrine.
Narratives are evolving and twisting faster than policies can keep up.

Depending on your lens, all this change might feel like justice finally finding its momentum—or the erosion of long-standing guardrails. But here’s the deeper truth:

Change is neither good nor bad—until you understand who it serves and what their motives are.

And that’s what this trilogy is about. Mental reconnaissance to lead when others are being led.

I call it Eyes Open—a three-part mental exercise series to help navigate this age of change, not with panic or passivity, but with observation and power.

Over the next three Sundays, we’ll sharpen three core ideas:

Read Like a Spy — Intelligence isn’t just what you know. It’s how you read the terrain.
Tradition vs. Convention — Learn to honor what matters and discard what doesn’t.
The Discipline of Dangerous Thinking — Build mental resilience in a world addicted to outrage.

This isn’t about ideology.
It’s about sovereignty of thought—so you can lead, decide, and act with clarity.

Let’s begin.

Part I: Read Like a Spy

Imagine waking up to a news story so outrageous, you instantly share it—only to realize later, it was seeded by a hostile foreign actor… That’s not fiction. It’s how modern warfare works.

🕰️ A Moment in Time

In the 1980s, the KGB launched Operation INFEKTION(Denver)—a long-game disinformation campaign to convince the world the U.S. military had created AIDS.
All it took was one fabricated article, a few sympathetic international media outlets, and time.
The lie wasn’t designed to be believed by everyone—just enough people to sow doubt.

It didn’t need to be true. It just needed to be plausible.

In narrative warfare, plausibility beats truth every time.

Fast forward to 2020. Ghostwriter, a digital influence op linked to Russian and Belarusian actors, seeded forged documents and fake leaks into Western media pipelines.

The targets? Not just policies.

Alliances. Trust. Cohesion.

The strategy wasn’t persuasion. It was erosion.

This is the modern battlefield. Not bullets. Not bombs.
Belief.

Who controls the narrative controls the outcome.

Read Like a Spy

Most people read to reinforce what they already believe.
Spies don’t. Spies read to decode. They track patterns. Uncover intent. Detect where the power lies.

That’s the mindset we need—especially now.

Your inbox. Your news apps. Your Slack. Your socials.

They’re full of signals disguised as noise—and noise disguised as truth.

You don’t need more information. You need interpretation.

A Personal Anecdote

A few months ago, I encountered a widely circulated article titled “The Pentagon is flirting with the dark side of AI”, published by Responsible Statecraft. It argued the Pentagon’s AI expansion risks ethical blindness, loss of human control, and dangerous escalation.

I nodded along. The risks are real. I can understand how quickly technology outpaces regulation—especially under operational urgency.

But I paused. Who authored this critique?

The article was published by Responsible Statecraft, a publication affiliated with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, known for advocating a restrained U.S. foreign policy. While their position adds valuable perspective, it’s essential to understand the lens through which they see the world.

Their view isn’t wrong. But it is shaped. The ethical implications of AI in warfare are profound and warrant rigorous scrutiny.

Was it the whole picture? Not entirely.

That moment reminded me:

Reading is never neutral.

If you’re not reading like a spy, you’re reading like a target.

🔧 Fieldcraft for the Modern Thinker

A 5-Step Reading Protocol:

Source Check – Who’s behind the content? What’s their history, funding, political leanings, and repeat themes.
Language Scan – Are they informing or inflaming? Spot the emotional bait.
Contextual Layering – Zoom out. Where does this fit in the larger narrative?
Counterpoint Insertion – Seek out credible disagreement. Not to refute—to refine to round out your view.
Historical Echo – Has this logic or rhetoric shown up before in history? Take the opportunity to view it more objectively with a historical lens. What happened next?

❓Pause and Reflect

“What if the opposite of this article were true?”
Sit with that. Can you hold the dissonance?
That’s the edge where clarity is forged.

💪 One Tiny Habit

After every headline you read today, pause and ask:
“What is the author’s mission?”
Say it out loud. Then again.
This is how mental firewalls are built.

Democracies don’t collapse from invasion.

They decay quietly—through lazy thinking, shared assumptions, and emotional certainty dressed up as moral clarity.

Reading critically is not just a skill. It’s a civic virtue.
When propaganda is crowdsourced and truth is algorithmic,
Clarity isn’t just intelligence—it’s integrity.

And the cost of not developing that integrity?
You become a carrier of someone else’s war—and you don’t even know it.

Two Ideas From Me

You can’t defend against what you don’t understand. If you’re not reading with strategic intent, you’re absorbing someone else’s strategy.
Every narrative is a negotiation. Learn to see who benefits. That’s where truth hides.

Three Favorite Things This Week

🧠 Book: The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richards Heuer
Written for intelligence professionals, this book reads like a manual for anyone trying to stay mentally sharp in a world flooded with agenda-driven information
🛠 Tool: Ground.News
Triangulates media coverage from left, right, and center.
🔦 Mental Model: “Red Teaming” — Adopt the mindset of a devil’s advocate. Challenge your own beliefs like they came from your enemy.

⚡️ A Challenge This Week

Find one article you completely disagree with.
Read it without flinching.
Research the author.

Find one valid point—and share it publicly.

Why?
Because clarity lives on the other side of confrontation.
Because echo chambers build weakness.
Because thinking clearly is how we lead in an age of noise.

💬 If this sparked something, share it with a teammate or drop me a note—I'd love to know what you're reading like a spy this week.

Have a wonderful week,

I’ll see you Next Sunday:
Tradition vs. Convention
Let’s talk about the difference between values that guide us—and rituals that trap us.

Eyes open. Read Dangerously.
-e