I was reminded of this twice this week.

The first reminder came from @Jim Kwik, sitting across from on [Achieve Your Goals](https://miraclemorning.com/jim-kwik-miracle-mind/). Kwik calls it "mind before media" & "intention before interruption." The science backs him up; the first few minutes after waking are governed by what neuroscientists call sleep inertia, the transition state between sleep & full waking cognition. Whatever fills that window shapes the rest of your day, whether you chose it or not. Most people hand that window to email, notifications, & everyone else's priorities before they have decided a single thing for themselves.

The second reminder came from a book: [Be One of Zero](https://a.co/d/0i1fui2H), by . Karla is a former Marine Corps officer who has walked the same road a lot of us have; from operational discipline in uniform to building systems as a civilian, translating hard-earned leadership principles into something a business can actually use. It is free right now, which means there is no excuse not to read it.

Here is the throughline. The Personal domain of your Table is not just workouts & supplements. It is the discipline of choosing your inputs before the world chooses them for you. Five Foundations; Sleep, Move, Eat, Focus, Breathe. Focus does not start at nine a.m. It starts the second your eyes open.

Close the gap between the life you declare & the life you live by closing the gap between what you intend to think about & what you actually think about. Start with the first five minutes.

Stay in the fight. Set your table ~ Brian 🚀

There is a number tattooed on Brian Johnson's forearm: 51 | 2051. Shorthand for a world in which fifty-one percent of humanity is flourishing by the year 2051. As a Heroic Coach I have looked at that number for years. This week I finally understood why it comforts me.

It is not a demand for consensus. It is a tipping point.

The week handed me the usual sparring. People with real credentials elevating people with none. Loud mistaken for aligned. Confidence mistaken for character. My instinct in those moments is old muscle memory; find the flank, close the distance & win the ground.

The complication is that my read is skewed too.

5 combat tours & 33 years in uniform gave me judgment I would not trade. They also gave me pattern recognition that fires on patterns that are not there anymore. I have been certain & wrong. I watched men I respected be certain & wrong. Anyone who tells you their lens is clean simply never had it tested hard enough.

Holding both of those truths at once is the whole job. My judgment matters; my judgment is partial. Conviction without humility is just volume.

So how do you move someone who has chosen the nefarious actor over the aligned leader?

You do not out-argue them. I have never once seen a mind changed by superior rhetoric in a public forum. I have seen hundreds changed by watching somebody pay a price for a standard.

That is the mechanism. Not persuasion; proof.

An aligned leader wields the tough conversation & the tough choice personally. Early. In the room, to the face, before the misalignment calcifies into culture. It costs relationships & sometimes rank. The nefarious actor is popular precisely because he never picks up that weight; he offers people the fiction that hard things can be skipped.

The gap between what we declare & how we live is the Freedom Gap. Organizations have one too & theirs is measured in the distance between the values on the wall & the behavior that gets promoted. You cannot legislate that gap closed. You can only shrink your own, visibly, until somebody else decides the cost is worth paying.

Which brings me back to the number.

51. Not one hundred. Not unanimity. Not the whole room, not the whole comment section & not the loud middle. A bare working majority & then the room tips.

That is survivable math. That is a mission a bruised man can carry on a Friday.

Roll with the punches. Stay upright. Count to 51.

Stay in the fight. Set your table. ~ Brian 🚀

Then a review landed that put a finer point on it than I could have. It came from a fellow war college instructor; a naval aviator who teaches strategy to senior military officers.

He opened with the line every author hopes for & every author fears:

"I picked up Set Your Table expecting a good book on leadership & personal development. I finished it realizing I needed it far more than I knew."

Then he went where I did not expect him to go:

"The chapter on 'dropping your armor' hit me in the gut. Like Brian, I spent much of my career in the military; in my case as a naval aviator, developing traits that helped me succeed in demanding environments. The walls we build can protect us, make us resilient, & help us perform. Those same walls can eventually keep us from the relationships & fulfillment we actually want."

Then the line I could not shake:

"One irony particularly stayed with me: I teach strategy to senior military officers, yet I realized how little deliberate thought I had given to the strategy for my own life."

Read that again.

A man whose profession is strategy; whose classroom is filled with the officers who will run the next war; a man who thinks about second- & third-order effects for a living. Even he had not turned the lens on his own life.

None of us are exempt. That is the whole point.

The armor that got us here is real. It works. It has kept us alive, promoted, respected, in demand. That is the trap. The armor works so well for so long that we forget we are still wearing it long after the fight is over.

Perfection in the imperfection means we do not wait until we are healed, optimized, or fully sorted before we set the table. We start where we are, cracked & carrying, & we do the work anyway. The bowl mended in gold is stronger at the break than it ever was whole.

If a peer who teaches strategy for a living can look at his own life & say "I hadn't done this work," none of us can hide behind our resumes.

Grateful for the review. Grateful for the reader who let the book do its job.

Set Your Table: Reclaim Your Life is available at Barnes & Noble (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/set-your-table-cook/1150219527?ean=9798901021774), Bookshop.org (https://bookshop.org/p/books/set-your-table-reclaim-your-life-cook/2cd113377e3bf567?ean=9798901021774), & Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX3733HQ).

Stay in the fight. Set your table.~ Brian 🚀

On August 20th, Scott Bessent walked to a podium & declared what he called “the single greatest financial offensive ever marshalled against an adversary.” The President already gave it a name: Economic D-Day (yawn). By the 24th, Treasury rolled out a campaign designed, in Bessent’s words, “to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone.” And Washington was working the phones, telling every ally, partner and adversary, China included, to sign on or get counted against us.

Impressive hammer. Also a tell.

The instinct is to read strength. Look what we can do to them. Read it the other way. A country with the full toolkit doesn’t run one instrument to the redline. Overplay a single lever & you spotlight the ones you’ve already burned out. On Iran, four of them are smoking.

Four tools, one swinging alone

Strategists sort national power into four buckets: Diplomatic, Informational, Military, Economic. DIME.

• Diplomacy shapes behavior.

• Information shapes the story, who the enemy is & why anyone should believe you.

• The military shapes the math in the head of whoever’s deciding to test you. And..

• The economy shapes the incentives under all of it.

The point is that they reinforce each other. Economic pressure works as the closing argument, after diplomacy framed the offer, information isolated the adversary, & the military made “wait us out” look like a losing bet. Used that way, sanctions are leverage. Used alone, they’re a substitute for strategy, because they photograph like resolve & require nobody’s agreement first.

The War College & NDU crowd have been saying it for years: DIME rots into a checklist. Count the instruments, confirm you “used” each one, mistake motion for integration. Iran is that checklist after forty years.

Forty years of the same swing

We’ve sanctioned Iran since the hostages came home in 1981. Same two outcomes every time. The economy takes real damage. The behavior doesn’t budge. The nuclear program advanced anyway. The proxies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Iraqi militias grew anyway. The regime survived.

The cleanest test was the JCPOA. Whatever you thought of it, it was the 1 stretch where all 4 instruments pulled together. Diplomacy set terms. The economic lever bought verifiable limits. A credible military option backstopped the whole thing. Walking away in 2018 didn’t just shred paper. It pulled the frame, the inspectors & left the hammer swinging at air… maximum pressure with nothing behind it & nothing to trade. Iran didn’t fold. It sprinted. More enrichment, fewer inspectors & more centrifuges.

Then this year. February 28th, the Israel then the U.S. hit Iran’s nuclear sites. It took two ceasefires & a 14-paragraph memorandum signed in Islamabad (that’s still odd to me) to slow down the shooting. It was a deal that gave Iran upfront sanctions relief, oil waivers through August 21st, & a reopened (kinda) Strait of Hormuz, for 60 days to negotiate the nuclear file. Sixty days ran out. Both sides walked. Iran suspended the inspectors, floated “service fees” & ship seizures in Hormuz, so gas at here in the U.S. jumped nearly a dollar in a year.

That’s the scoreboard these sanctions get stacked on. We bombed the sites & didn’t end the program. We signed the deal & didn’t keep the peace. Now, waiver dead, we swing the economic instrument again & call it the greatest offensive in history.

Greatest offensive in history… the way the fourth swing at the same nail is the hardest. It has to be. The other three missed.

The tool we’re breaking on purpose

Here’s what should worry you more than the sanctions, because at least the sanctions have a theory. The informational instrument isn’t misfiring by accident. We’re breaking it deliberately; in the way that helps Tehran most.

Iran’s regime has a real weak spot & it isn’t military. It’s legitimacy. A theocracy that jails its own people over how they pray is beatable in the information space precisely because it claims to speak for God. The winning move is simple: make the fight freedom versus a police state. Let Iranians, including the millions who hate their own government, see themselves on our side of the line.

Instead we handed the mullahs the one frame they couldn’t build themselves. The Secretary of Defense (the fox news dude) asks the country to pray “on bended knee... in the name of Jesus Christ” for victory. The President closes remarks on the strikes with “Glory to God.” Commanders, per Soldiers in the room, tell troops the war is ordained by God. One Army sergeant got briefed they were fighting “their bloodthirsty version of Jesus.” Downed pilots get narrated as Good Friday & resurrection.

Now read it from Qom. For forty years the regime told its people the Americans aren’t fighting the government of Iran, they’re fighting Islam… a Christian empire coming for the faith. We just said it for them. On the record. From the Pentagon podium. That’s not a slip. It’s a self-inflicted wound on the exact instrument meant to isolate the enemy. Weinstein called it a “propaganda bonanza.” Generous. It’s a gift, gift-wrapped, with our seal on it.

It lands twice. It tells 3.5 million Muslim Americans, plenty of them in uniform, in intelligence & in the diplomatic corps that has to run this strategy, which side of “under God” the leadership puts them on. It tells the Iranian Christians we claim to protect that we made their faith a weapon their neighbors will punish them for. A theological frame doesn’t isolate the theocracy. It matches it. You can’t beat a regime that says God is on its side by insisting, louder, that God is on yours. You’ve just agreed about what the war is.

Fight the war, not the battle

Steelman the sanctions, because a serious argument owes you that. Maximum pressure can work. It helped drag Iran to the table before the JCPOA & a cornered regime has fewer moves. If this were the closing act of an integrated strategy with a real offer on the table, an information push at the gap between Iranians & their rulers, and a military posture that made patience expensive, then “economic D-Day” would fit.

But it isn’t the closing act. It’s the opening one, again, because the other instruments are spent or sabotaged. We run the economic tool at maximum not because the strategy calls for it but because it’s the only lever still bolted to the machine. Sanctions will do what they’ve done for forty years. Hurt the economy, harden the regime, and move the behavior at the margins if at all. Meanwhile Hormuz stays contested, the centrifuges spin with nobody watching & China gets a choice that mostly shows how few people we can still get to say yes.

A battle is one instrument, swung hard, in one moment. Win every one & we can still lose. The war is the integration, all four tools on the same outcome long enough to bend it. We keep winning battles (kinda). We keep announcing the biggest version of one tool & calling the announcement a plan.

Iran cracked this a long time ago. It doesn’t fight the battle. It absorbs the hammer, waits out the administration & plays the war. Forty years on it still has its program, its proxies & its regime.

The fix isn’t a bigger hammer. It’s the discipline to stop dressing a geopolitical fight as a holy war, put a real offer back on the table & swing the economic instrument as the last argument of a coherent case…not the first reflex of an incoherent one. No God-talk from the podium. No checklist pretending to be a plan. Four tools, one direction, over the horizon.

Don’t be the battle. Be the war.

The views here are my own.

Somewhere between the MTE & the inbox, most of us do the same quiet thing: we wait. We wait for the go-ahead from a boss who is not paying attention. We wait for the market to turn. We wait for the promotion, the raise, the acknowledgment or the permission slip that never seems to come.

Stop waiting.

There is no one coming to save you. Not your organization. Not your algorithm. Not the next administration or the next quarter. The cavalry is not on the ridge; you are the cavalry, & the horn just sounded.

I learned this the hard way in a sterile office at the Army War College, listening at a JAG officer explaining why my career was over. Four cardiac arrests; one pacemaker; thirty-three years of service ending on medical retirement rather than my own terms. No one was riding in with an answer. Not the Army. Not my rank. Not the résumé I had spent three decades building.

What I found in that room is what calls the inner citadel: the fortress of the mind that stays unconquerable regardless of external circumstances. It is your mindset. Your last line of defense; your first line of offense. Guard it accordingly.

, distilling the Stoics, gives us the operating principle: you cannot control what happens to you, but you can always control how you respond. In that response lives your power. Everything downstream shaped by the space you create between what happens & what you do next: your habits, your relationships, your calendar, & your legacy.

That space is not free. You have to build it. Three practices for the week ahead:

One. Name the narrative. There is a story running in your head about who you are, what you deserve, & what is possible. Name it before it runs you. Write it down. Then ask whether it is true.

Two. Take the beat. Divine calls it the sacred pause. The Stoics called it the space between stimulus & response. Neuroscience confirms what warriors & monks have known for centuries: the beat is where you get to choose. Without it, you are on autopilot.

Three. Run the internal scorecard. Warren Buffett called it internal scorecard thinking. Measure this week against last week's version of you, not against someone else's highlight reel. External scorecards are designed by people who have never walked your path. Yours is the only one that tells the truth.

The Freedom Gap is the distance between your declared life & your lived life. It does not close because someone rides in with an answer. It closes because you stop waiting for one.

You are the cavalry. Set your table. Start today.

Stay in the fight. Set your table.

~ Brian 🚀

Grab a copy of Set Your Table at @Barnes & Noble (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/set-your-table-cook/1150219527?ean=9798901021774), [Bookshop.org](https://bookshop.org/p/books/set-your-table-reclaim-your-life-cook/2cd113377e3bf567?ean=9798901021774), or [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX3733HQ).

The drive home felt different. This morning felt different again. Underneath the good feeling was something hollow, & it took me a minute to name it.

It was not about the room. The room was excellent. It was about what the room could never give me.

I could help win millions of dollars in deals. I could be in every important conversation in that ecosystem. And none of it would be mine to keep. Temporary satisfaction, however well-earned, is still temporary.

Set Your Table exists because I got tired of confusing a great room for a lasting table. The book asks one question underneath every chapter: whose table are you sitting at? Are you building your own, or dining at someone else's, however gilded the china?

You do not need permission to build something of your own. You do not need the room's approval to be proud of it. You need to show up & work on it, on the days no one is watching & the days no deal is closing.

That is the whole difference between a gilded cage & a table.

Stay in the fight. Set your table. Allons. 🇺🇸

So let me put the question to the people who actually know: current & former PACOM leaders, planners, & war college professors. How vital is the US-South Korea alliance, forged in Korean War blood & codified in the 1953 Mutual Defense Treaty?

28,500 American troops stand on that peninsula today. Joint exercises run year-round. Deterrence against North Korea is only half the story; the other half is Indo-Pacific stability itself, which analysts consistently call the linchpin of the entire regional architecture.

Don’t take my word for it. CRS reports & Small Wars Journal both make the case in far more detail than a social post can carry.

Strategy without character is manipulation. An alliance sealed in blood deserves LEADERS who understand what it cost & what it holds together.

Stay in the fight. Set your table. ~ Brian

The Stoics arrived at the same door from a different road. Amor fati. Love of one's fate. Marcus Aurelius didn't write the Meditations from a palace of ease; he wrote them in a tent, on campaign, making peace with a life he didn't fully choose.

Here's where most of us get the order wrong. We treat richness as the precondition for contentment. Hit the number, then relax. Get the title, then breathe. Close the deal, then be present with your family. It's a trap dressed up as ambition, & I spent 33 years & 4 (really 5) cardiac arrests learning that the sequence runs the other direction.

Contentment first. Richness follows.

This Saturday, out on the water before Austin woke up, I found myself thinking about my father, Will Cook, and the quiet lessons he handed me before I knew to call them lessons. Whether the version of me writing this morning would make him proud has never been about the rank on my chest. It's been about whether I was content with the table I'd actually set, not the one I kept declaring I'd get to eventually.

Close your Freedom Gap this weekend. Set the table you already have. The richness follows; it always does.

Stay in the fight. Set your table. 🚀

This morning, while sorting them into what I call "the container of love" (because poetry matters, & medicine does too), I checked the time. First game starts at 8. Wimberley. 1 hour south. 45 minutes to shower, plunge, move.

The math says I'll be late. I'm going anyway.

This is the thing they don't teach you in the Army, & they don't teach you in cardiac recovery either: closing the Freedom Gap isn't about being efficient. It's about being honest. My declared life says my daughter matters more than sleep or schedule optimization. My lived life gets tested right now…8 a.m. volleyball in a town I can make if I stop talking about it & start driving.

Gengus stays home to guard the house. My wife Sara works her own day. I grab the Tesla & move.

The fight isn't always on a battlefield. Sometimes it's just showing up; sometimes it's leaving on time; sometimes it's building a life where the small decisions & the big ones point the same way.

No one needs me to be perfect. They needs me to be present.

Stay in the fight. Set your table.

"Just the way I like it," the farmer said.

"How can you know that?"

"I don't. I stopped trying to know. I learned long ago not to fight it; whatever comes will be terrific, one way or another. So it is just the way I like it."

I heard that story a lifetime ago & mistook it for a shrug. It is not a shrug. It is the hardest discipline I know.

I spent a career studying weather I could not command. Sandstorms in the desert. The fog & friction Clausewitz warned about. The politics above me & the forecast inside my own chest, which I ignored until my heart stopped; once in 2015, three more times in 2018. A pacemaker ended the argument.

Lying in that hospital bed, I finally understood the farmer. My whole life I had braced against the forecast, armored up, jaw set, certain that enough planning could bend the sky. The sky does not bend. It arrives.

The gap between the life I declared & the life I was living was not made of bad weather. It was made of my war against the weather.

Acceptance is not defeat. Epictetus drew the only line that matters: some things are up to us, most are not. Freedom lives entirely on our side of that line. The farmer knows this in his bones. He is not hoping for sun; he has already made peace with rain. So he walks his road light, ready, unafraid of a sky he was never going to control.

That is what it means to Drop the Armor. Not to stop caring; to stop clenching. To breathe. To meet the day as it is, not as you demanded it be.

Whatever comes today will be terrific, one way or another. Set the table anyway.

Stay in the fight. Set your table.

BLUF. Today’s Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed by Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, & Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif, is real & consequential; but it is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the temptation now forming to end a stalemated war against Iran with a tactical nuclear weapon. That strike would not finish the war; it would begin a worse one, forfeit the moral & institutional advantages that are the West’s actual center of gravity, & convert a Sunni deterrence hedge into a permanent nuclear fault line. We are setting the table wrong. A table set wrong loses the meal before the first course.

The Pact: A Sunni Hedge in Islam’s Holiest City

The facts first, because byline credibility is earned in the details. Three Sunni-majority powers, meeting at the Makkah summit, pledged that an armed attack on one is an attack on all: Saudi capital; Turkey’s army, the second-largest in NATO; Pakistan’s warheads, the Muslim world’s only arsenal. It builds directly on the September 2025 Saudi–Pakistan accord & lands in the middle of the US–Israeli war on Iran that opened on 28 February.

Notice what the signatories did not say. The public text is “purely defensive”; Pakistani officials repeatedly placed nuclear extension “not on the radar”; serious analysts remain split on whether Islamabad’s umbrella now formally covers Riyadh. That ambiguity is not a footnote; it is the entire strategic instrument. Deterrence lives in the maybe. Riyadh gains the shadow of a bomb without owning one; Islamabad keeps its deniability; & Ankara supplies the alliance scaffolding. The pact’s power is precisely that no one has to say the word.

The Depletion Trap

Here is why the timing should worry you. By CSIS estimates reported through CNN & ABC, US Patriot stocks are down by roughly half & THAAD interceptors by something near four-fifths since the war began; CSIS projects three or more years to rebuild. The Pentagon disputes the framing. But the strategic reality does not hinge on the exact count: the United States is burning a finite magazine faster than it can refill it, in a theater it did not choose to prioritize, while China keeps its own ledger on the Indo-Pacific.

When a great power runs low on conventional options yet cannot accept the political cost of an inconclusive war, the nuclear “off-ramp” starts to look like an on-ramp. That is the oldest trap in the strategic canon: mistaking a weapon that ends a battle for one that ends a war. Iran’s enrichment infrastructure is buried under mountains; the killing of Khamenei removed the cleric who authored the fatwa against weaponization, not the knowledge & not the centrifuges. A tactical nuke does not solve that problem. It advertises that we could not.

Davutoğlu’s Ghost

Watch Ankara, because Ankara is playing a longer game than the news cycle. I translated portions of Davutoğlu’s Stratejik Derinlik while teaching at the Army War College, & the thesis was never subtle: Turkey should convert its Ottoman-era geographic & historical position into pivotal power across Europe, Asia, & the Middle East. Erdoğan signing in Mecca is that thesis operationalized: Turkey hedging NATO ambivalence by anchoring a Sunni security bloc it can lead. For Washington, the uncomfortable read is that a treaty ally just bought insurance against us. That is not betrayal; it is strategic depth doing exactly what the book said it would do.

The Die No One Wants to Roll

Now run the sequence, because sequencing is where strategy lives or dies. A tactical strike on or near Tehran does not produce surrender; it produces a decapitated state of ninety million people across mountainous terrain, a shattered nuclear taboo, & a moral rupture with the very Sunni world the Mecca Pact just organized. Occupation follows, or chaos does; Iraq 2003 taught us the price of the first & Libya 2011 the price of the second. Multiply either by four. Every hedging state on earth reads the same lesson in the same hour: acquire the bomb, or accept that a bad month can end your capital. The nonproliferation regime that took seventy years to build dies in an afternoon.

That is what “the West loses” means. Not a lost battle; a lost order. We would have proven that our decision speed outran our human values, & Clausewitz would collect his debt: war divorced from policy is not strategy, it is violence with a press release. Strategy without character is manipulation. A tactical nuke on Tehran would be the most consequential act of manipulation in eighty years & the bill would come due on our own alliances, our own credibility, our own soul.

Setting the Table

There is a sequence that does not end here & it is unglamorous: sustain the defense of Gulf partners, refill the magazine, hold the Hormuz diplomacy open, & let the Mecca Pact’s own ambiguity do the deterrent work it was built to do. Foundation before substance before integration. You do not skip to the last course because the meal is running long.

The pact is not the peril. The peril is us, deciding that speed is the same thing as wisdom. Set the table or some Turk will.

ALLONS

Podcast · The Tim Ferriss Show #877

Ferriss opens the mailbag for a wide-ranging subscriber Q&A: the art of male friendship, mini-retirements, higher-resolution living, & which skills are actually worth building for reinvention in the age of AI. I don't want to steal the show, so I'll just say it rocks on a lot of levels. Listen.

Book · The Age of Chaos — Robbin Laird

Laird's argument lands hard: the post-WWII "rules-based order" didn't so much collapse as get operationally falsified, worn down over years of workarounds until it no longer described the world our leaders actually have to navigate. He treats the war in Ukraine as the furnace where kill-web warfare & indigenous "intelligent mass" are overturning platform-centric force design, & makes the case that crisis management is no longer enough; democracies have to learn chaos management. Loving it. On Audible.

Quantum Advantage Is Here — & IBM Showed Its Work

On 30 July, the phrase changed tense. IBM published three papers demonstrating quantum advantage with validation built in; results beyond the reach of the best classical methods, produced with rigorous, checkable evidence that they're actually right. The part that matters is not just the claim, it's that IBM is submitting everything to a public Quantum Advantage Tracker & daring the community to break it. Trust, not only speed. This is the on-ramp our whole field has been waiting for. Read how they did it.

Podcast · The Daily Stoic — Ryan Holiday & BG (Ret.) Ty Seidule

Holiday sits down with retired Brigadier General Ty Seidule, West Point historian & vice chair of the Congressional Naming Commission, on five American heroes most of us have never heard of, & why the names we bolt onto our posts are an argument about who we are. His case for why Benning, Bragg, & Hood were the wrong men to honor is history done with moral seriousness; telling the truth about the past is not the same as giving up on greatness. Listen.

Podcast · The Prof G Pod — Scott Galloway, "Shoulders of Giants"

Galloway takes his son to see Nolan's Odyssey & walks out not with a review but a meditation: Nolan stands on Homer, Homer on a nameless older oral tradition, & all of us on giants we'll never get to thank. He ties it to his own recent good fortune & the plain truth that success is never an individual sport. A fitting note to close the week on. Listen.

Never stop Learning. Set Your Table.

ALLONS

The part that stopped me was not the physics. It was the posture.

IBM did not simply announce the milestone & take a bow. It submitted every circuit & every result to a public tracker, then invited the entire research community to challenge the claim, continuously & in the open. One demonstration leaned on seventy logical qubits & a new error-correction method, producing statistical evidence that the answer was actually correct. The company called it trusted quantum advantage. Advantage you can verify. Advantage that survives contact with skeptics.

I spent years at IBM, so I will own my bias. This is a real milestone, & I am proud of the badge. Set the pride aside, because the discipline underneath it belongs to all of us.

Everyone is asking the same question: will quantum dwarf AI? It is the wrong question, & it is wrong in a revealing way. Quantum & AI are not rivals fighting for one throne; they are different instruments for different problems. Asking which one wins is the tactical reflex, the pull of the shiny object. It keeps your eyes on the announcement while the ground reshapes beneath you.

Clarity asks the strategic question instead: what does my environment now demand of me?

Here is how you adopt quantum advantage into your life, & it has nothing to do with owning a quantum computer. You adopt the posture IBM modeled.

Verify before you claim. Most of the noise in a life comes from conclusions we never tested. We declare a story about our marriage, our body, our work, & we never once submit it to challenge.

Invite the skeptics. IBM built trust by handing critics the tools to break its results. Do you hand anyone the tools to break yours, or do you defend the declared version at all costs?

Read the ground before you move. The environment is not the one you memorized five years ago. It shifted this week. It shifts every week.

That is the Freedom Gap in one paragraph; the distance between the life you declare & the life you actually live. You close it the same way IBM earned trust. You stop claiming & start verifying. You test the declared against the lived, & you have the courage to act on what the test returns.

The environment just moved. The only question that matters is whether you are reading it, or reacting to it.

Stay in the fight. Set your table.

Now, the heavier thing on my mind.

Line up the board the way a planner does & the coalitions of the next world war are no longer hard to see. On one side: the United States, Israel, and thank God Ukraine. On the other: Russia, China, Iran, the Houthis, and Hamas. I am not predicting a lightning bolt out of a clear sky. I am telling you the pieces are sliding toward these squares for years, & the naming always comes last. Historians will draw the start line long after the fact & call it obvious. The people living it just called it the news.

Here is what stopped me cold this week.

Today I sit down to record Chapter One of the audiobook. Its title is "The Always-On Apocalypse." I wrote that chapter about a different war entirely; the one being waged for your attention, your presence, & your capacity to be fully in your own life. The notifications that arrive with the same urgency as incoming fire. The work that followed you home & never left. The slow erosion of the hours that were supposed to be yours.

Two wars. One assembling its armies across oceans. One already inside your house, inside your phone, inside your head. Both were underway long before anyone gave them a name.

That parallel is the entire reason the book exists. In combat I learned to tell the difference between a distant explosion & the whistle of incoming; one is background, the other demands you move now. Modern life strips that instinct from us. Everything arrives at the same volume, so we treat nothing as the true threat, so the real war, the one for our own lives, goes unfought.

You cannot win a war you refuse to name. You cannot set a table you will not look at. The distance between the life you declared & the life you are living has a name too; I call it the Freedom Gap, & closing it is the fight that is actually yours.

Let the world sort its coalitions. Watch it clearly, name it honestly, & prepare like a professional. Then turn & fight the war with your name on it: the one at your kitchen table, in your marriage, and in the mirror. That one you can still win.

Stay in the fight. Set your table. ~ Brian

I have been sitting with a hard thought this week. If we are in a third world war now, then we were in it months ago; maybe years. The declaration is not the ignition. The declaration is the moment we stop pretending.

I spent 33 years in uniform learning to live inside that gap; the space between what is happening & what we are willing to call it. 5 combat tours will teach you to distrust the comfort of the unnamed. A distant explosion is background noise until you learn to hear the whistle of incoming; then you move. Most of modern life has lost that ear. Everything arrives at the same volume, so nothing gets named, so nothing gets acted on.

Here is the turn I want to make, because I did not write a book about geopolitics. I wrote a book about US.

There is a war that has been running inside most of us for years, unnamed. It is the distance between the life you declared you would live & the life you are living. I call it the Freedom Gap. It does not announce itself. It creeps. A compromise here, a silenced want there, a role you outgrew but kept performing because performing was easier than naming the truth. By the time you feel the full weight of it, you have been losing the war for a long time.

The naming is the counterattack. You cannot set a table you refuse to look at. You cannot reclaim a life you will not admit you have drifted from. The first act of courage is simply calling the thing what it is.

Three markers from my own arena today, offered not as a highlight reel but as evidence that the work is ordinary & daily:

Today I sit down behind the microphone & begin reading my own book aloud. The audiobook. 33 years I trained to be a warrior; now I am learning to be a teacher, in my own voice, one chapter at a time. It is humbling to hear yourself say your own sentences back to you.

Today my first royalty check from Amazon arrived. I will be honest; it was smaller than I would like. It was also larger than the check earned by the version of me who talked about writing a book for a decade & never did. The arena pays less than the daydream promises & more than the sideline ever will.

Today I am also asking for something. I want this book in more hands beyond the United States. 🌏 If you are reading this from anywhere outside our borders & you want a copy, raise your hand; reply here or find me & say so. I will help you get it in your country. A book about reclaiming your life should not stop at a border. ⛓️‍💥

The world may be naming its war this year. Name yours too. Then do the harder, quieter, more radical thing: set your table & take your life back, one decision at a time.

Stay in the fight. Set your table. 📢

I did not earn what courage I have in a newsroom. I earned it across five combat tours & thirty-three years, until four cardiac arrests finally took the uniform off me. Let me be careful, then, about what I claim to know. I know my own fear. I have come to love the study of courage the way some men love a fine wine; slowly, with respect for everything that went into the barrel.

Physical courage is the loud kind. It arrives fast, burns bright, ends quick. You run toward the guns because the men beside you are counting on it. I honor that courage; I have watched it up close, & I have carried men who spent it.

Moral courage is the rarer vintage. It is quiet. It is slow. It asks you to stand for the hard right thing with no adrenaline to carry you; when the crowd leans the other way, when standing costs you something real & pays you back nothing but a clean conscience. Most people never train that muscle. The few who do are the ones who hold a country together.

American courage, to me, is a particular cask of that second kind. It is aged in hardship. It carries the taste of everyone who paid before you.

Let me pour a hard one.

Last weekend, Iran killed four American service members. Three fell around Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, beginning 17 July. One fell at Erbil in northern Iraq on 19 July, working to detonate a downed Iranian drone.

Their names are Isabella Gonzales, nineteen, of Texas. Angel Rampersad, twenty-eight, of New York. Tyler Feehan, twenty-five, of Hawaii. Michael Swinton, thirty, of North Carolina. Say them out loud. They are worth the breath.

Here is the part that keeps me up. The President stood before the country & said the fallen in Jordan died ensuring Iran never builds a nuclear weapon. The Pentagon, meanwhile, did not count them in the Iran war; it filed them under an older mission. Killed by Iranian fire, named by their Commander in Chief as part of that fight, absent from its ledger.

I will not dress that up. I believe it is wrong. I believe it is unpatriotic. You do not get to claim a soldier's death as your war when the cameras are rolling & file it elsewhere when the tally is read. A nation that will not count its dead honestly has not yet earned the courage those dead spent on its behalf.

That is moral courage's whole assignment; to say the uncomfortable true thing while the comfortable false thing sits right there, easy & waiting.

I do not agree with every person who claims courage. Courage is not a team jersey; it is a discipline. Speak the truth as you see it. Count your dead correctly. Take the incoming. Stand anyway.

That is the table I am trying to set. Yours is yours to set. Set it standing. ~ Brian

They are not about the Freedom Gap or the Four Domains or the Five Foundations. Those are scaffolding; useful, but scaffolding.

The messages that land hardest sound like this: "I read chapter fifteen twice & then I called my brother."

That is the whole point. The book is a means. The conversation is the end.

Here is the pattern I keep seeing.

The people who need this material most are the least likely to go find it. They are competent. They are load-bearing. They have built an identity around being the one who does not need help, & that identity has been reinforced by twenty or thirty years of it working.

Until it stops working. Usually in a hospital. Sometimes in a divorce. Sometimes in a quiet Tuesday afternoon when the whole thing just goes hollow.

I know the sequence because I lived it. Four cardiac arrests & a career ended in the space of a few weeks. Nobody handed me a book beforehand. I had to reverse-engineer the lesson from the wreckage.

You can shorten that path for someone. Not by lecturing them. Not by diagnosing them over lunch. Simply by putting something in their hands & letting them come to their own conclusions in their own time.

That is what I am asking.

Think of one person. You almost certainly thought of them three paragraphs ago.

Buy them a copy. Or mention the book in a conversation & let it sit there. Or write two sentences about why it mattered to you & post them where that person will see it.

Any of those beats a marketing campaign, because it comes from you & they trust you.

I want to be clear about what this is not. This is not a plea. The book is doing fine; it will keep doing fine. I am not short on sales & I am not fishing for pity.

This is a request from one person who has been through it to another person who might know someone still in it.

Books do not save anybody. People save people. Books just start the conversation.

Start one. https://bookshop.org/p/books/set-your-table-reclaim-your-life-cook/2cd113377e3bf567?ean=9798901021774

Stay in the fight. Set your table. / Brian

BLUF: America’s military edge is eroding for technical reasons we understand & can fix; it is eroding faster for institutional & moral reasons we keep deferring. Adversaries do not need to defeat our systems if we spend our own credibility for them. Adaptation is not a budget problem or a technology problem; it is a character problem with a clock on it.

One · The floor came up

Paul Scharre made the argument on the Foreign Affairs Interview this week, & he is not a man who reaches for drama. Army Ranger in Iraq & Afghanistan; then the Pentagon shop that wrote our policy on drones & autonomous weapons; now executive vice president at CNAS. His read is that the wars we are watching are not anomalies. Iran, weakened by years of strikes, sanctions & sabotage, came out of its exchange with two far larger militaries holding the better hand. Russia planned a short war in Ukraine & got thwarted by a force it outclassed on paper.

The pattern is not that great powers got worse. It is that the floor came up. Cheap autonomy, commercial sensing, distributed strike & software-defined targeting have compressed the gap between a first-rate military & a determined second-rate one. The advantages we spent forty years buying — exquisite platforms, long production tails, assured logistics — were priced for a world where the other side could not see us & could not shoot back at scale. That world is closed.

None of this is unknown inside the building. What is missin

g is the willingness to trade a known-good platform for an unproven capability at scale, on a timeline shorter than a program of record. We keep writing the strategy. We keep deferring the sequencing.

Two · The damage from inside

On the sixteenth, the President addressed the nation from the East Room, announced the declassification of a tranche of documents, & argued that America’s election infrastructure had been penetrated & that China had worked to shape the 2020 outcome. He ordered the Justice Department to pursue prosecutions & directed DHS to brief the states before the midterms.

Tom Nichols, writing at The Atlantic, called the speech a mashup of charges the released documents do not carry, & closed with a line I have not been able to put down: no regime, no spies, no saboteurs have yet matched the damage America’s own president did that night. The fact-checkers landed in a narrower but related place — that years-old intelligence reporting was quoted without distinguishing what Beijing planned from what analysts concluded it actually accomplished, & that the 2021 assessment’s minority view, which John Ratcliffe endorsed, found no information that China tried to interfere with election processes themselves.

Set the politics aside & look at it as a security problem, because that is what it is. Two things are true at once. Our election systems do carry real attack surface; state voter rolls, registration databases & the vendor supply chain underneath them are soft targets, & treating that seriously is overdue work. And a president describing an election system that no one can possibly defend, months before a midterm, hands an adversary the exact effect that adversary has spent a decade & a great deal of money failing to buy.

This is what information operations doctrine has always understood & what our appropriations never quite reach. The objective was never to change votes. It was to make Americans doubt that votes get counted. Any capability that produces that outcome is an enemy capability, regardless of who fires it.

Which brings me back to the sentence this newsletter is built on. Strategy without character is manipulation. It holds for adversaries; it holds for allies; it holds most uncomfortably at home. Deterrence is a claim about credibility, & credibility is not a hardware line item. You cannot forward-deploy trust you have already spent.

Three · Stop saying one day

The third thing was Tim Ferriss & Kevin Rose, of all people, on the Random Show. Zen retreats. Learning to climb at almost fifty. Mortality & grief. And a piece of advice that has nothing to do with national security & everything to do with it: stop saying someday.

I have sat in enough rooms to know the shape of the institutional version. We will get to autonomy after the next POM cycle. We will fix the software pipeline after the platform delivers. We will harden the registration databases after the election. We will migrate the crypto after the quantum threat is confirmed — never mind that harvest-now, decrypt-later means the collection against us already happened & the only variable left is when it gets read.

Someday is how institutions decline without ever choosing to. No one votes for it. It arrives by deferral.

Four · Bowl, cereal, milk

I write a lot about sequencing, so here is the sequence as I see it.

Bowl. Fix what we have before we buy what we want. Readiness & sustainment first; a fleet or a formation that cannot deploy is a slide, not a capability. Same logic in cyber: patch the registration & tabulation supply chain, fund the state & county officials who run it, & do it in a way both parties can stand behind in public. Certification without partisanship is itself a deterrent.

Cereal. Buy mass we can actually replace. Attritable autonomy, unmanned surface & air systems, munitions with a real production floor. Scharre’s point is that the cheap side of the curve is where advantage now lives; ours is the industrial base that treats every unit as precious. And build the domestic supply chain underneath it — batteries, propulsion, optics — because a drone we cannot resource is a demonstration, not a force.

Milk. Decision speed. AI-enabled planning that compresses the loop rather than generating more staff product; data that becomes a narrative a commander can act on; post-quantum migration started now rather than announced later. This is the layer everyone wants to pour first, & it is the layer that spills without the other two underneath it.

Sequencing is not a bureaucratic nicety. Skipping steps produces the same failure every time, & it is always predictable in hindsight.

The through line

Scharre is telling us the technical advantage is contested. Nichols is telling us the moral advantage is being spent. Ferriss, in a conversation about climbing & grief, is telling us the reason both are true: we keep behaving as though we have unlimited time to begin.

We do not. The adversary is not waiting for our next cycle, & the clock does not care which of the three problems we would prefer to solve.

Set the table. Then eat.

ALLONS - Brian C. Cook
COL, USA (Ret.)

Sources. Paul Scharre, “The End of American Military Dominance?”, The Foreign Affairs Interview with Dan Kurtz-Phelan, July 2026. Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, July 16–17, 2026. PBS NewsHour & ABC News reporting on the July 16, 2026 address; PolitiFact live fact-check. The Tim Ferriss Show #875, The Random Show with Kevin Rose, July 16, 2026.

I've spent a lot of time lately watching this administration's actions — & its inactions — & asking myself a harder question than "what do I think about this." The real question is: how do you step into the future of America with clarity of thought, & therefore decisive action, when the ground keeps shifting beneath you. Clarity doesn't come from the news cycle & decisiveness doesn't come from outrage. Both come from knowing what you're standing on. So before you serve the meal, set the table. Here is where I start.

BLUF: America's strategic center of gravity is not a fleet, a budget line, or a border; it is the Constitution. We are not losing to our adversaries. We are losing because this administration is corroding the one source of strength no enemy could ever reach.

I grew up on the winning team. The Constitution was our unbreakable center of gravity; it outlasted the Redcoats, the Confederacy, the Axis & the Soviets. It was never the strongest army that made us the winning team. It was the charter that told the army what it served.

So watching my DOD & VA teammates carry a losing season… not because they were outfought, but because the foundation beneath them is being pulled up — is heartbreaking.

Sequence is a discipline, not a suggestion. Bowl, then cereal, then milk. Set the table, then serve. The Constitution is the table; it comes first. An administration that serves power first & sets the table never is not running a bold strategy. It is running a con. Strategy without character is manipulation.

Clausewitz's trinity — the people, the military, the government — only holds when all three answer to the same charter. Right now that trinity is out of balance, & not by accident.

Here is the campaign plan: reaffirm the oath — to the Constitution, not a man. Realign the trinity — an accountable people, a professional & apolitical military, a government bound back to the law. Make the Constitution doctrine, not a slogan.

We are not losers. We are down a season & unbroken. The Constitution is still the table; it is still the winning play. #ConstitutionCenterOfGravity

ALLONS 🇺🇸

Brian C. Cook, COL, USA (Ret.)

Here’s what happened. IBM fell about 25% in one session; near $67 billion in market value erased before lunch. The company pre-announced a soft quarter: revenue light, a couple of large software deals slipping, & — the real story — enterprise buyers suddenly redirecting capital toward AI hardware. Servers, storage, memory. There is a global shortage of the chips that feed AI data centers, prices are spiking, & CFOs are grabbing hardware now while deferring software later. IBM got caught flat-footed on the timing, and management said so plainly. Good; own it.

Now read past the number.

Software still grew. Red Hat grew 11%. The distributed-infrastructure line grew 37%. The mainframe dip is cyclical — the z17 cycle will turn. None of the assets that make IBM structurally valuable broke yesterday. What broke was a single quarter’s spending mix, & the market’s patience.

So what did the market actually discount? Hybrid cloud that runs the regulated core of the global economy. High-performance computing. Governed, enterprise-grade AI; watsonx & the Granite models: open, cryptographically signed, IP-indemnified, deployable on-prem, built for institutions that cannot ship their data to someone else’s cloud. And a quantum program that is not a science-fair poster but a delivery schedule: verified advantage targeted by the end of 2026, fault-tolerance by 2029, with real-time error decoding already delivered a full year ahead of plan. Google & Quantinuum are in that race too; IBM does not “own” it. But IBM is a frontrunner — & frontrunners in foundational compute rarely stay cheap.

This is where I reach for the discipline I write about most: sequencing. Bowl, then cereal, then milk. You cannot pour the milk first & call it breakfast. IBM is building in sequence; fabrication, error correction, then advantage; data governance, then trusted models, then scaled deployment. The market, in noisy & frankly corrupt times, does the opposite. It pours the milk first. It prices the momentum trade; memory chips, GPUs, whatever soared this week… & sells the moat to fund it.

There is a character point buried here, & it’s the one I keep returning to: strategy without character is manipulation. Markets under stress don’t reward the disciplined; they reward the loud. That is not an argument against discipline. It is the whole reason discipline pays; because the crowd abandons it precisely when it matters, & leaves it on sale.

I’ll be honest about the bear case, because pretending it away would be its own kind of manipulation. Analysts have already downgraded the stock & cut targets. The spending shift toward hardware may not reverse next quarter. IBM has to prove those slipped deals actually close & that it can adapt faster than it just did. Those are real questions. Watch the July 22 report. If the answers are bad, I’m wrong, & I’ll say so.

One more thing, & I’ll say it plainly because it’s a little ironic. Part of what spooked the tape was fear that AI is coming for the software business… and some of that fear points straight at Anthropic’s newest models, which IBM’s own CEO named as stalling deals. Sit with that. The market is pricing IBM as a casualty of the AI disruption while ignoring that IBM is itself an AI & quantum principal; indemnified models, sovereign deployment, and a quantum roadmap most of the disruptors can’t touch. Being sold as the victim of a wave you are also positioned to ride is exactly the kind of mispricing that pays patient capital.

I’m not here to tell you what to do with your money; I’m not your advisor & this isn’t advice. I’m telling you what I see & what I did. When the crowd sells the moat to buy the momentum, I want the moat.