But that’s going to kill you one day.

Just like life will kill us all, no matter what we get and don’t get. Money or poverty, safety or oppression. Love or hate. Freedom or confinement. Acceptance of rejection.

I think there’s supposed to be this sentiment that when you espouse human rights and when you’re against war and against greed and corruption, that you’re not supposed to be wealthy.

You’re not supposed to travel.

You’re not supposed to enjoy luxury.

That mindset itself is impoverishing.

I think there is a collective understanding… Under the surface in our collective consciousness, that the very machine we support, the capitalist global economy, is the same hungry monster that eats the poor.

It feeds off populations in the global south. People with little means and a few rights. I don’t wanna believe that.

I want to believe that I have the same right to be here at the beach club as the rest of you. I want to feel like I’m in good company. I want to feel like I’m with kind and resilient human beings. A lot of the time, I am.

Earlier this summer, I spent 10 days in Ibiza.

Before I went, I thought to myself that I really don’t wanna meet any zionists. I don’t wanna yell at them.

Stop demanding American taxpayer money to murder your indigenous population and then pretend to be victims. Fuck you.

But who am I?

I’m an American who’s not active enough working to right the wrongs in his country or even in his community.

I didn’t yell at anyone. I was kind because that’s what my beliefs demand. I didn’t talk about politics. I didn’t talk about genocide, but I did apologize to a few people for Donald Trump.

The thing is, we’ll have to take responsibility for our role in the chaos and animality we create with our desires and lifestyles addicted to comfort.

… But how much is enough and how much is this self-flagellation?

When will we know when we’re doing enough?

When will we know the end?

I left Los Angeles today for London and I promised myself I wouldn’t leave a mess. Every hotel room, AirBnB, and friend’s home I’ve dwelled in over the past eight years has been littered with my calling cards: a smattering of innocuous filth comprised of sand, tobacco, dirt, paper wrappers, coins, and discarded supplement capsules.

Today I left my father’s house for a new life – an adventure intended to render me a person of graceful value. But everyone seems to think I’m taking an extended vacation.

I promised myself I would show gratitude by leaving a clean room, free of extra objects. This was to initiate a new me – one that pays his debts and covers his tracks.

Instead, I left about 150lbs of books, clothes, refuse, toiletries, storage containers, and a dirty yoga mat.

The worst part was when I unsuccessfully tried to empty into a trash bag the contents of my suitcase and backpack, which sent particles fanning out over the pristine, wooden floor.

The residue was the stuff of three months traveling without a clear purpose, intent, or routine. Lacking these structures invites complacency, vice, and ultimately resentment. That condition also produces a lot of garbage, unnecessary waste that, for the conscious consumer, feels like a knife jab to the spirit of personal development.

“No more dust,” I told myself a week before I left.

I’m going to pack out in a calm and organized fashion – WRONG! I ran out of time and crammed whatever I could into two huge suitcases. Remnants of me spanned the bedroom and hallway.

Someone has to inspect that grainy guestroom and wonder quietly what kind of man can’t be bothered to restore his progenitor’s home to the glory he found it in – clean, orderly, and tranquil. It looked like I fled a boarding house in a hurry because I couldn’t pay the very modest rent and decided to abandon some of my hoarded items rather than face the proprietor.

It was the scene of one anxious to get away rather than one excited to begin the next chapter of their life.

I disgust myself with the piles I leave behind, both corporeal and inorganic – the byproducts of an anxious, flustered mind.

I didn’t even wash the sheets…

But to my credit, I did at least pull them off the bed and throw them in the corner. That way, someone knows for sure these are dirty (maybe even soiled.)

Luckily, I have another opportunity to be a five-star guest. I’m spending the next 2-4 weeks at a friend’s exquisite London loft. My crap isn’t scattered across the four corners (yet), which may save me time from undergoing an idiotic easter egg hunt for senior citizens. And I am ever more keenly aware that my movements can leave trails of hairs, lint, alpha-keratin, and sticky finger and toe prints.

I figure I’ll do a five-day pre-departure crime scene investigation, complete with magnifying glass and cloth sacks on my feet. Then when all is right, I’ll open the front door and usher out the limpid demons who arrived with me and sat on the couch for long days, enticing me to forget my manners.

I have a hard time sharing my Buddhist practice with other people and fully demonstrating exactly why they should practice too.

We can all agree that religion is lame (though I don’t think of Buddhism as a religion).

But everyone I know and meet needs Buddhist humanism more than ever. I like to use the expansion of Buddhism east from Japan to the United States in the decades after WWII - the conclusion of an era when the quest for world dominance ended with a few clear winners, a new rules-based economic and global governance system meant to prevent more world wars, and tens of millions dead and maimed.

Mahayana Buddhism spread east to west because we kicked Japan’s ass in WWII (and even nuked them)

It spread to every country on earth because of the prosperity we enjoyed in the decades of building after the last war across our species. I think the point of Buddhist teachings is to show us that no matter how spread out we are or what we have or don’t have, we’re all the same.

Furthermore, with insane, unprecedented prosperity came the elevated search for meaning. We’re either obsessed with prosperity or obsessed with finding meaning. Buddhism teaches the Middle Way.

The fundamental truth that all beings possess the Buddha nature is facing the greatest threat it’s ever faced:

Global warming, simultaneous precision and industrial warfare, renewed racism/sexism/chauvanism - humans clinging endlessly to delusions while the world burns around them as long as they have cell service, a wifi connection.

There’s also nuclear weapons... Lots of nuclear weapons.

Many of us think of Buddhism and our individual contribution to world peace as the meditation we can sneak away to do at any time of day or perhaps for a few days a year in the mountains, the forest, the beach, the retreat.

But there is no retreating. Indifference is to embrace the return of chaos.

Not especially as those wars spin up again, threaten supply chains, threaten consensus, threaten peace, send those fires into our forests, those storms into our mountains, those bodies on our beaches.

Power off.

This is SPY -

- WiFi connection

and this is SPIRIT -

- One in mind

Hell, Hunger, Animality, Anger, Humanity, Heaven, Learning, Realization, Bodhisattva, Buddhahood.

Not places you go after death. Worlds you inhabit in any given moment. Every one of them is present at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. This is the mandala.

Hell

is the ground the tournament was built on. The forgotten story of past atrocities. The ones that were paved over to make the world pitch we plan on today.

People from every corner of the world come to watch the games, but not people from all walks of life. Most Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans are a far cry from affording a ticket to one of the matches.

Iran’s national team commuted from Tijuana to Los Angeles for their group stage matches, bused across the border like workers sneaking through a checkpoint, because US restrictions wouldn’t allow them a normal stay. A national team entering through the back door of the country hosting the tournament.

Hunger

is Africa on the pitch. Senegal, Egypt, the DRC, ZAF - nations that have been exploited for centuries, arriving with the weight of a continent that wants one victory the rich world can’t take away.

Animality

is the South Korean president ordering an investigation into his team after they lost. The pack turns on its own the moment it stops being useful.

Anger

is mine. It’s the cognitive dissonance of a World Cup on American soil while ICE runs concentration camps, while brown players are celebrated in the same cities brown people are being deported from. I wanted a fuckup. I wanted the incompetence to be undeniable. The tournament mostly hasn’t obliged.

Humanity

is what keeps happening anyway. People from opposite ends of the earth, speaking nothing of each other’s languages, losing their minds together over the same goal. English and German soldiers played soccer between the trenches in 1914. A hundred years later, nothing has changed.

Heaven

is Paraguay beating Germany 4-3 on penalties. It’s Ecuador doing the same thing the week before. It’s President Peña signing a national holiday decree with a photo of himself grinning. It’s the fact that Cabo Verde could win this thing. It’s the fact that the games are happening at all, in this divided, exhausted world.

Learning

is the family from Ohio that had to Google where Cabo Verde was. It’s the foreign visitor who arrived expecting the America of Trump rallies and found people in the stands not frothing at the mouth.

The World Cup smuggles geography and humanity past everyone’s defenses.

Realization

is small nations waking up to what they’re capable of. Not learning it - knowing it, in their bodies, after penalties.

Bodhisattva

is the note Iran left in the locker room at SoFi Stadium. Handwritten. Thanking Los Angeles for its hospitality. Ending with a call for peace among all nations. They commuted from Tijuana. They left grace behind.

Buddhahood is the nobler instinct of all people - underneath the desire for the fuckup.

May all beings be happy.

May all beings be safe.

May all beings be free from misery (and so on..)

This is Spy - desire for victory.

And this is Spirit - desire for harmony

They’re the ones who will survive the longest doing what they have to.

They’re the ones who will be here at the end when all the dinosaurs have died (or departed to Mars)

They’re Hamas.

They’re Hezbollah.

They’re the Houthis.

They’re the Taliban.

They’re the Vietcong.

They’re the Apaches

They’re the 26th of July movement.

They’re the Mujihadeen.

Imagine them speaking to a Tony Robbins-sized audience about what it’s REALLY like to face adversity while sophisticated hunting machines are scouring the Earth for them like a vacuum cleaner trying to find a living room spider.

Spider’s lessons.

Spider’s revenge.

The annoying part is that they’ll probably give a lot of thanks to God.

This is Spy - adoration.

And this is Spirit - the almighty.

Uncle Tariq’s door was slightly ajar.

Ahmed looked around, shouted into the apartment. No one answered. He went inside and found chaos. Blood on the walls. Tariq lay motionless on the other side of the living room, hands submerged in pools of blood. Open eyes that didn’t need closing to confirm what Ahmed already knew.

He let himself go hysterical. Pounded blood-wet fists into the kitchen cabinets just to break something. Crouched in a corner crying and smearing his uncle’s blood into his own hair and forehead.

Then he found what they’d stuffed in Tariq’s mouth: two photographs. One showed Tariq smiling between coalition soldiers holding a birthday cake, his shirt reading Translator. The other was older, black and white — Tariq and another soldier in Saddam’s uniforms, Kalashnikovs raised, grinning.

Ahmed walked back out into the corridor.

In the hallways outside Tariq’s flat, no one had opened their front doors. No curious residents responded to his wails and banging. No one was watching from the façade when he left.

There may as well have been a neon sign along the top of the building reading: WE DIDN’T SEE SHIT!

That’s a scene from my novel Made in Mosul. And I want to be fair to the people behind those doors. They weren’t cowards. They weren’t monsters. They were people living in post-war Baghdad who had learned, at considerable cost, exactly what opening a door could get you. The math was simple and the math was correct. The social contract of the building — enforced by no one, agreed to by everyone — was the only rational response to the environment they were in.

The problem is when that contract scales up.

SPY: A deliberate blinding

In 2015, I was an analyst at a political risk firm called PLANETRISK. My job, in part, was mapping the spread of the Ebola outbreak from West Africa. Not from a satellite. Not from an algorithm. I was a human being sitting at a desk, reading field reports from aid workers on the ground in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and following the vector west to Texas the way you’d follow a thread through a knot. The thread existed because there were people on the ground to pull it.

I think about that job a lot now.

Earlier this year, DOGE gutted USAID from roughly 14,000 staff to 294 in two weeks. The coverage treated it mostly as a humanitarian story — which it is, catastrophically. But that’s not the only thing that died. USAID workers weren’t just delivering food and medicine. They were the people who noticed when a village started moving before the migration became a headline. They saw the water supply dry up before it became a coup. They reported the quiet before the shooting started. In Afghanistan, Central Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Horn — they were the open doors in buildings that everyone else had learned to keep shut.

Afghanistan went dark after the withdrawal. That black hole has been spreading west ever since.

The intelligence community has its own version of this collapse: brain drain, politicization, a credibility crisis that predates the current administration but has accelerated sharply under it. Good analysts don’t stay in environments where the analysis is unwelcome. They leave. And into the gap, a new industry has rushed — AI-powered political risk platforms, promising machine-speed surveillance of instability signals across every region simultaneously.

Here’s the thing about those platforms. They ingest data from the networks that are collapsing. The algorithm is only as good as the field reports coming in, and the field reports are coming in from a rapidly shrinking number of places. The AI doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. I’ve seen the product. If it’s flagging the blind spots we’ve just created, I’ll be surprised. (If it has, I don’t believe it. 😐)

This is not a failure of technology. It’s not even a failure of policy, exactly. It’s a deliberate blinding. Someone made a decision — several decisions, across several administrations, accelerated dramatically by this one — that certain kinds of seeing were too expensive, too inconvenient, too likely to produce information that complicated the preferred narrative. The eyes went dark because someone turned off the lights.

We’re losing our capacity to see disasters coming. The hunger, the displacement, the resource wars — they will push closer and closer to home. They already are.

SPIRIT: The power of not seeing

George Orwell wrote “Notes on Nationalism” in 1945. He wasn’t really writing about nationalism — he said so himself, noting he was using the word for want of a better one. He was writing about a particular human capacity that nationalism exemplifies but doesn’t own. He called a section of the essay “Indifference to Reality,” and opened it like this:

“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts.”

And then, the sharper observation:

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

Not even hearing about them. Not suppressing the information. Not lying to himself, exactly. Just — not receiving it. The signal goes out and the receiver is off. Orwell’s example was English admirers of Hitler who, for six years, contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. The information was available. They simply exercised the power not to see it.

The people behind the doors in Tariq’s building had a reason to stay silent. Fear. Survival. A reasonable assessment of consequences. But Orwell is describing something different — not people who are afraid to see, but people who have decided, at some level beneath conscious thought, that seeing would cost them something they’re not willing to pay. Pride, comfort, the coherence of a worldview. The buildings in Orwell’s essay aren’t in Baghdad. They’re in London. In Washington. In every country that has ever committed an atrocity in its own name and then developed a remarkable capacity not to hear about it.

What’s new — and this is the part that keeps me up — is when governments start institutionalizing that capacity. When the defunding of USAID isn’t just a budget cut but a decision about what America needs to see. When the politicization of intelligence analysis isn’t just incompetence but a preference for operating blind in certain directions. The hallway goes dark not because the residents are afraid, but because someone unscrewed the bulbs. On purpose. And filed the paperwork.

Now contrast that with this.

In the early days of the Syrian revolution, in cities like Manbij, Anand Gopal documents something almost painfully fragile: activists finding vacant lots far from the security forces — away from the Shabiha, away from the mukhabarat — just to shout the word “Freedom” into the air. Not to a crowd. Not to a camera. To nobody. The act wasn’t strategic. It was almost the opposite of strategic. It was people testing whether the voice still worked. Whether the spirit in them was still alive enough to produce the sound. Whether, if you opened your mouth in an empty lot in a police state, the word came out.

Regime forces could come around the corner at any moment. They knew that. They shouted anyway.

That’s the other end of the spectrum from the hallway outside Tariq’s apartment. Same region. Same era. Same danger. Completely different response to the question of what you do when seeing — when even saying that you see — costs something.

Because saying something, doing something often leads to imprisonment or death. It’s the lucky ones who get to die quickly. It’s the lucky ones who get to wait it out. That’s why God is an important instrument in wars/revolutions/human-led systemic shifts. Those people need to think beyond this life and beyond their own physical safety, or there will be no struggle, only capitulation.

I don’t think the activists in Manbij were braver than the people in that Baghdad building. I think they were operating with a different calculation about what they could survive losing. The people behind Tariq’s doors were protecting something specific: their lives, their families, the building they lived in. The activists in the vacant lots had already decided that certain things were worse than dying. That if the word couldn’t be said, something essential was already gone.

I don’t know where that leaves any of us sitting in comfortable cities reading a newsletter. I’ve thought about it for a long time, and I don’t have a clean answer.

I think this image is a good summary of all of this - the night before an unknown day. I took it from ABC News. It could be a Free Syrian Army sentry in Daraa, Syria, in 2018 - the year the regime of Bashar al-Assad retook it from the rebels.

That revolution was an unfathomably painstaking, hellish undertaking. It started in that city after police arrested, tortured, and murdered some boys for a message they wrote with graffiti. This picture was taken after seven years of war.

They lost the war.

The bad guys won. That reality reflected the end of happy endings. Good people, sick of a tyrant, protested, then took up arms, fought bravely, lost, and had their struggle hijacked by terrorists.

That regime finally fell in 2024.

The neon sign doesn’t turn off. We just moved it indoors and mounted it somewhere official. We call it a budget decision. We try using an algorithm to watch in its place.

The algorithms don’t know what they don’t know.

And the vacant lots where people used to shout “Freedom” — some of them are just vacant now.

Until next time.

Ian

In The Fellowship of the Rings, Frodo and the gang are almost buried in snow at the Pass of Cardharas. The Wizard Saruman the White cast the blizzard to stop them.

This sucks. Everyone’s afraid. Gimli, the dwarf, keeps saying, ‘Let’s go under the mountain through the Mines of Moria! My cousin Balin will hook it up!”

Frodo likes the idea, and they take it.

It sounds like a nice and easy answer, but Gandalf is against it. He hears Saruman’s voice in his head:

Moria... You fear to go into those mines. The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum... shadow and flame.

The mines are vacant. The place is a tomb. The dwarf colony that inhabited it is long dead. The fellowship is ambushed by orcs.

They’re close to escaping when a giant, fire-breathing demon (a Balrog) emerges from the darkness. Gandalf fights it with spells.

YOU SHALL NOT PASS! (remember now?)

He seems to have won when the Balrog’s fire whip comes back around, grabs Gandalf’s ankle, and takes him down into the chasm with it.

The fellowship continues toward Mordor without their fearless leader.

I was wrong. The shift was when they decided to attack it - whether that was when the pilots received the frag order, or when they released the munitions over the targets. By the way, after the bombing, the planes and helicopters came back around and strafed the scene with machine gun rounds. (Talk about adding insult to injury.)

“We were just following orders.” 🙂

I’ve been thinking about that argument. Can a single event carry that much weight? Can one decision, one convoy, one morning in September 2016 really represent the moment the world slid onto a darker branch?

It wasn’t one shift. It never is.

The cascade

The multiverse doesn’t hinge on a single decision. It bends gradually, then suddenly. By the time you feel it, you’ve already passed through several doors you can’t reopen.

Parts of the sequence.

1. COVID-19 (2020)

Covid was surprising as a pandemic - different from movies we saw or …stuff we read about the Spanish Flu a hundred years earlier. Covid spread easily, strangled the global economy, and changed the world, but didn’t ravage the human race with casualties (despite being very stupidly managed). The more stupid part was eroded trust in institutions.

Governments lied, contradicted themselves, and then got angry when people stopped listening. The lesson most people absorbed wasn’t “science works.” It was “no one is in charge, and everyone is lying.” That’s a timeline shift. Not because of the virus, but because of what the response exposed.

2. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (2022)

Putin flipped a coin and invaded.

Serious analysts still disagree about whether he expected it to take three days or whether he always planned for a long war. What it ended was the post-Cold War assumption that the borders of sovereign nations are inviolable. Or more accurately, it ended the pos-9/11 assumption that nations could invade and subjugate one another.

Russia did a stupid thing, fueled by pride and desire for empire and prestige. (America does that a lot, too.)

3. AI’s emergence

A power tool for ignorance and delusion. Makes the stupid feel smart. Makes smart people feel philosophical. The shift here isn’t that AI exists, it’s that it arrived before anyone had figured out how to govern the last technology that rewired civilization. We’re doing it again, faster, with higher stakes, and the people most excited about it are the least interested in the question of what happens to everyone else.

Fuck AI! (I use AI every day.)

4. October 7th, 2023

The surprising part is that such a horrific, distressing event like that could happen despite warning signs, sentries, and a vast intelligence infrastructure maintained for countering that exact thing.

That was the illusion, anyway. The reality is that Bibi wanted it. The reality is that real monsters exist, and they’re not the devils that come skulking out of a hellscape like Gaza seeking blood and flesh from their enemy; they’re real-life super villains like Netanyahu, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump.

October 7th revealed the convergence of powerful, hungry forces more powerful than international law and Western ideas of human rights and decency.

October 7th exposed a pandemic that seized minds all over the world like a prion

(But prions are not contagious pathogens like flu viruses, you get it through cannibalism…)

5. The failure to constrain Israel — and the revelation of how much Israel owns America

This is the environment of this timeline.

American credibility is dead. The shift here was the end of American moral authority as a usable instrument of foreign policy.

This is the world where powerful people serve interests that aren’t in their own interests or their countries’ interests. This goes for America, Israel, the UK, and Germany, at least.

7. The short-term memory cascade

Trump’s return. The death of USAID. The US departure from the WHO. The withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords. The hollowing of the State Department and the CIA (and the FBI!). The end of the institutions that, imperfect as they were, represented the idea that the future was worth planning for. This shift is the normalization of the previous ones. Each week brings something that six years ago would have consumed a news cycle for a month. Now it’s gone in a day. The cascade becomes the condition. We live in it.

SPIRIT: The world that didn’t happen

In the multiverse, there are versions of all of this that went differently.

A pandemic response that rebuilt rather than destroyed institutional trust. An algorithm that never learned to reward outrage. A phone call that talked Putin down. A regulatory framework that arrived before the technology. A ceasefire that held. An arms shipment that didn’t go. A second term that didn’t happen.

Every branch not taken is a world that didn’t happen. And the grief of that — the accumulated grief of seven shifts, seven doors, seven versions of the world where someone made a different decision in a room somewhere — that grief doesn’t have a clean name. It’s not mourning, exactly. Mourning is for something you had. This is for something you almost had. Something that was possible and then wasn’t, so quickly you didn’t see it go.

I think about the Aleppo convoy a lot. Twenty civilians killed. The planes came back around. And somewhere in a room, before any of that, someone decided.

Maybe I think that’s when a timeline shifted because that’s when my work at the Department of Defense started feeling untenable. Selfish to assume the universe changed because I didn’t like it anymore, isn’t it?

Maybe. But I’ve learned something from sitting with all of this: the grief for the world that didn’t happen is only useful if it clarifies what you do in the world that did.

There is no time better than now. No day better than today.

—Ian

Spy & Spirit analyzes geopolitics through fiction, art, and spirituality. New editions every week.

Everyone who ever collaborated with an occupying power had a reason.

That’s the part that doesn’t make it into the war films. The innkeeper who housed German officers didn’t do it because he was stoked on the Aryan Race. He did it for his family, his livelihood, the building he’d spent thirty years paying for. The woman who fell in love with the soldier occupying her town wasn’t a traitor — she was lonely and scared, and he was the only person who wasn’t. Irène Némirovsky wrote all of this down in Suite Française while it was happening, while France was still warm with occupation, while the laws stripping her of her citizenship and her livelihood were being enacted one by one. She kept writing. She called it clearly and without sentimentality: ordinary people making ordinary calculations under extraordinary pressure.

Nobody in that book is a monster. They’re all just in the canyon.

SPY: Throwing it scraps and calling it a career

Midway through my novel Made in Mosul, a man named Ken calls Ahmed at Beirut International Airport. He speaks in an eerily calm and casual way, like he intended to distract Ahmed from the day’s tragedies. He knows Ahmed killed a Hezbollah man that morning. He knows Zeinab and Karim are standing at the gate. “Your flight leaves in one hour. I have half a mind to call them right now and tell them the man who killed their comrade is waiting at Gate 23. Do you think Zeinab and Karim will make it home alright?”

Ahmed boarded the plane alone.

Walking the wide streets of Doha later, he tried to convince himself it was purely about keeping them safe. Not about the money... or the challenge. Not about the feeling of agency. He nearly slapped himself. Then he remembered the servitude — the feeling of being stuck in a canyon, pinned against a cliff, shielding his family from an opportunistic tiger, throwing it scraps of raw meat as it snarled at them. He hadn’t thought his way out of it at Beirut Airport.

He used that excuse for walking these clean, debris-free streets.

Ken doesn’t need Ahmed to believe in anything. He just needs leverage. That’s the architecture. It’s not ideology. It’s a gate number and a phone call, and the two people you love most in the world standing in a terminal.

I know something about this. Not Beirut Airport escape routes — a desk in the DC metro area, a clearance, a data entry job building dossiers on brown men we suspected of wanting to come to the US to hurt people and break things. I loved my coworkers and had an ok salary and Health insurance. The work felt purposeful. We were keeping people safe (in a low-grade, bureaucratic fashion.)

On an unclassified server, you could flip over to the news. Every few weeks, sometimes more, another mass shooting. A deranged man with a high-powered rifle or an extended clip aired his demons at a school/church/Walmart. Broad daylight. Many targets. None specific. Profile: White. Male. Domestic. Unmarried. Aged 12 - 40.

The evil we were hired to prevent was foreign and theoretical. The evil that kept actually happening was already inside. We all saw it. We all kept showing up.

Elon Musk and DOGE destroyed USAID. Microsoft facilitates targeting in Gaza. Palantir is categorizing the American public using surveillance architecture road-tested on occupied populations. Israeli checkpoint technology, perfected through decades of apartheid enforcement, facial recognition trained on people with nowhere to run now deployed at ICE roadblocks in American cities.

The engineers building these tools aren’t twirling mustaches. They have mortgages. They have fun coworkers. They have the feeling of agency that comes from a technically interesting problem and a fully-funded 401k.

Ken doesn’t even need to threaten them. He just has to keep paying them.

SPIRIT: The ledger

Here’s what people forget about the French Resistance.

They killed people. In alleyways. With knives. They blew up buses of Wehrmacht. They knifed Gestapo in the dark and vanished into the city. Sabotage, assassination, networks of cells that would be labeled terrorist organizations without hesitation if they operated today.

And the reprisals came. Whole villages massacred for a single act of sabotage. Public hangings staged as performance. People dragged into concrete cells and sleep-deprived for days until they confessed things they didn’t know they were saying, gave up names they’d sworn to protect, unraveled networks built on trust and sacrifice. That’s what resistance actually looks like at close range. Not the wine and monuments and the movies. The cell and the confession and the village that burned.

Would anyone want a different history? Would anyone look back at what the Resistance cost — in blood, in reprisal, in the names given up under interrogation — and say, they should have complied?

No.

So hold that thought and consider this: the Resistance is also Hamas. The Resistance is Hezbollah. The Resistance is the Irgun, which bombed the King David Hotel in 1946, killing 91 people, whose leader later won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Every occupied people who ever decided to make the occupation ungovernable used the same logic. We call some of them freedom fighters and some of them terrorists, depending on which side of the result we’re standing on, and how much time has passed, and whether their cause eventually won. The moral framework doesn’t change. Only the outcome does.

I don’t have a clean answer here. Neither do you.

What I can say is this — boycotts matter. Starving the machine that feeds on it matters. Refusing to buy what the canyon is selling, even when the canyon is plush, and the salary is good, and the coworkers are cool, matters. Maybe it’s the version of resistance available to people who aren’t willing to knife a Gestapo officer in an alleyway. Maybe it’s enough. I hope it lasts.

Irène Némirovsky kept writing until she couldn’t. She was deported to Auschwitz in July 1942. She died there a month later. Her manuscript sat in a suitcase her daughter couldn’t bring herself to open for sixty years — she assumed it would be too painful to read. When she finally opened it, she found Suite Française: a clear-eyed, unsentimental account of ordinary collaboration, ordinary fear, ordinary people in the canyon.

The manuscript survived.

She didn’t.

Make of that what you will.

—Ian

Irony: I edited my thoughts here with AI and linked my book being sold on Amazon. Freedom, bondage, and servitude all at once.

We went to Palestine to save Palestinians, but Palestine saved us. Palestine liberated us from the shackles of Hollywood, from the shackles of capitalism.

One of the brilliant women on a panel of entertainment professionals-turned-activists said that at the Sumud Festival in Los Angeles on May 9th.

That sentiment stuck with me. It’s one of the most important things someone could hear in 2026... because... that sort of aberration... that came at the cost of confronting the most extreme tragedies and injustices any of us have ever experienced in our lives.

That’s what we all need, and that’s what spy and spirit is.

Spy is glamour-seeking. It’s the prestige we’re all trying to get in our lives from society > Prosperity that gives us influence, security, runway, and more years of comfort.

Spirit is the truth that Palestine saved you from the shackles of Hollywood and capitalism, and all the stupid things we allow dictate our values now.

Palestin saved us is the most empowering message I’ve heard in years, maybe ever.

We should all rethink what we value when we go about striving every day and night. What is it all for? Isn’t it for a peaceful world where we all feel safe?

The things we strive for —our careers, our taxes—pay for mass murder.

Spy is glamorizing, decadent Western men kicking ass in some film, probably at the expense of a brown or yellow person. Someone’s gotta be dehumanized.

The spy is the idiotic mistakes caused by the short-term memory of governments and corporations... in the modern world. 🌎

Spy is profit.

Spirit is honor.

Spy & Spirit is short for Spycraft and Spirituality.

I’m obsessed with geopolitics and espionage, but in this case, spy/spycraft refers to the mistrust, hubris, and shallow belief that nations can dominate one another or outfox one another so one wins while the other loses.

In Realist theory, International Relations is a zero-sum game.

I believe that point of view ensures our destruction. That’s why the world is stuffed with nuclear missiles. Walls and fields of anti-personnel mines are used to divide territory.

Deep down, everyone knows hope and prosperity for humanity will be the cause and effect of one-world government, with checks and balances ensuring human safety as opposed to the safety of the state or elites - one world government vs empire.

Espionage is fun.

Competition between nations is a game. It’s vanity, secrecy, and significance. Spy, the game, makes a mess of Earth, at the expense of Earthlings.

Blatant violations of truth.

Spirit - Spirituality is truth. It’s cause and effect. It’s the fact that all people are the same.

It’s the collective consciousness and the collective unconscious.

‘Spy’ lets us forget this truth. Spy lets us put up walls. It lets us hate.

Spirit can be ignored for a while, but we’ll always have to pay it back.

Spirit is salvation.

Why are we reading this? What are we supposed to get from this? How does Spy + Spirit benefit us?

I made these audience questions because I have the same questions…

Where does it lead us? That’s why I want to keep it short. Why should I lock you into ten pages of thoughts?

How many Substacks do you subscribe to and not read? (me: all of them)

I’m overwhelmed! I’m trying to give you and me a better relationship with the universe with brief, worldly analyses and anecdotes. It’s lessons. It’s knowledge

It’s only wisdom if we practice it.

It’s a journey for me. There’s no destination. Sometimes, it feels like there’s no winning, but some people tell me there is winning and victory in life!

Does that answer your question?

(No? All right, well…never mind then.)

How does Spy + Spirit benefit us?

Ask questions.

How did you come up with Spy & Spirit?

I’m seeking self-awareness. (Or at least better self-awareness that doesn’t collapse in on itself four times a week like a straw house under power lines.

Here’s an anecdote:

Remember the Twin Towers?

There weren’t a lot of good answers to why Al Qaeda flew planes into them and murdered all of those people.

We called them evil. We used that conviction to start a lot more problems in the world. Spy is what we told ourselves to go to war.

Spirit is the knowledge that we called these tragedies to us.

Spy & Spirit is my effort to make the subconscious conscious.

Do you write about all geopolitical issues and conflicts or just certain ones?

I’ll go as broad as I can, but it will be mostly informed by what I know about conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries.

It will be geographically broad.

I grew up in the Global War on Terror era. 9/11 was my first week in 9th grade.

When I was eight, my dad gave me If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O’Brien’s biography of his experience as an infantryman in the Vietnam War.

I’ve been studying all the wars ever since.

The Black Wasp of Zamalek

I was eating dinner alone one night in the top-floor dining room of my spacious penthouse.

The windows were thrown wide and the fans off. So I was mostly paying attention to my sushi and the sounds of the city at ground level when a faint humming joined the noises and soon turned to buzzing.

An arrival.

There was terror before I looked up. Ice in my veins. Recognition.

When I did, I saw the largest black wasp/hornet/horrible insect I’d ever seen curiously hovering toward me. I shrieked, stood up, probably crashed into the window behind me, and yelled ‘holy shit!’ at least three times.

I don’t know who I was calling to. I shared this two-story apartment in Zamalek — a posh Nile island in Cairo — with three other American men. The youngest one came running up the stairs.

“What is it?!”

I pointed to the winged devil. He shrieked, too. We both immediately knew we had to get it out.

Too clear and present a danger to be permitted to fly around or hang out. Too menacing to wait for it to leave of its own accord. It would need prodding.

I rushed across the room to shut my bedroom door. The wasp got caught in a glass globe attached to the five-light chandelier. Frantic buzzing sounds told us it was struggling, getting fried by a hot bulb.

Good! Hopefully, it’ll die, and we’ll fish that fucker out later with a pair of prongs.

He got himself out and flaunted his menace on the edge of the globe like he owned the place. I grabbed a towel from my room. The other man grabbed a push broom.

“I’ll run up and swat him as hard as I can. You finish him off when he’s down.”

I was afraid he’d take flight again and start attacking once he knew we were hostile. I swatted as hard as I could. “Did we win?”

Not quite.

All the lights in the room went out. I’d broken the chandelier. We freaked out.

Retreating to opposite ends of the room, we shouted at each other, trying to locate it, and hoping it wasn’t about to swoop down and sting one of us.

“Oh, it’s here.” Immobilized on the floor. He crushed it.

We clasped one another’s shoulders and took deep breaths like we’d just successfully stabbed a seven-foot intruder to death. I tied the broken light fixture back onto the chandelier and waited for someone more measured to hire an electrician.

The room was dark for days.

….

Sorry, I’m missing a specific metaphor here. Can you think of a high-level situation when a fearful development led to needless destruction and distrust? (darkness)

Better yet, can you think of a situation like that where the belligerents required someone else to sort out the consequences?

If you watched Zootopia 2 and have a decent command of Middle Eastern history, you've realized the story draws parallels to the history of Palestine, pre-1948, and contemporary Israeli efforts to seize their land and erase their history.

Flashback scenes from the film even resemble Ottoman-era depictions of Jerusalem.

I caught it.

I salute you. This article is a salute to all the creatives who resist ethnic exceptionalism, late-stage capitalism, and every other manifestation of imperial barbarism. #greed #anger #stupidity.

On April 26th, 2026, for the first time, in my heart, I recognized the victims of the Armenian Genocide in 1915. I can’t think of any films or pieces of popular fiction that allegorized that tragedy to advance human consciousness.

I ignored it.

That was a hundred years ago. Give it a rest. I’m sick of seeing Armenian flags everywhere!

My honest thoughts.

Never again. New thoughts: I’m sorry for whatever unhealed part of me turned a blind eye to your suffering. I pray it stays that way.

My point - If and when the day comes when we fail to hold a light to the suffering of millions, near or far, we are broken and doomed to repeat it and aggravate it.

This is Spy - the silver screen.

And this is Spirit - solidarity.

One of Us Will Fly to Mars!

In the short story The Rocket by Ray Bradbury, Fiorello has enough money for himself or one member of his family to visit space on a rocket.

His friend Bramante tells him,

When I was young they wrote it in fiery letters: THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE! Science, Comfort, and New Things for All! Ha! Eighty years. The future becomes Now! Do we fly rockets? No! We live in shacks like our ancestors before us.”

That story from The Illustrated Man has me pondering a concept I can’t fully comprehend:

Let me give you an example.

I went to a Vipassana course and spent ten days in silence meditating among dozens of other men. When I came out, I had tens of thousands of dollars in my bank account. You might say that was going to happen anyway.

But I wonder if, had it been the striving, craving city at that time, if I would have done something to delay or undo the arrival of that money.

In the weeks after that course, society got back in. It got back under my skin and started burning me like it always does. And during that time, with craving, striving, and wanting more from myself, I hurt myself.

Imagine trying to open your mouth ever wider, trying to swallow more knowledge and power, and then trying so hard you break your jaw.

I found misery in the relentless quest to become better than I am, rather than leaning into the acceptance I had cultivated in meditation. And so it goes on. Again and again

On the next page, Bramante says of Fiorello’s children:

They will want to die if they cannot go. Don’t set that goal, I warn you. Let them be content with being poor. Turn their eyes down to their hands and to your junkyard, not up to the stars.

Bramante’s advice will never be taken fully.

That’s because consciousness is not linear. We leap toward enlightenment, then arrogance exploits the peace and prosperity we’ve cultivated with illusions of control.

Before we know it, were back to where we started.

That’s all for today. I’d really love to hear your own reflections and what inspires you. Please comment or message me.

✌🏽

-Ian

The rebels were losing the Syrian Civil War. Trump would be president. The West in retreat. The future was pregnant with ignorance, uncertainty, and pain.

The future always carries those things. Now, I think 2016 was a great year, despite the tragedies I’d observed. So much hope, available through global systems, still felt tangible.

Why not now?

Here’s my advice to you:

The enemy year is a time of transition and instability.

My next Enemy Year will be in 2029.

I think that’s when I’ll get everything I want. (Material things! Career success, influence, property, all that monopoly shit. Not intrinsic bullshit that’s always available like self-acceptance, peace of mind, etc.)

I wonder if the enemy year is called that because it’s the year you gain no wisdom and instead revel only in societal accolades.

Maybe it’s the year you grow weak and complacent, choosing comfort over courage.

2023 was my Chinese zodiac year - the year of the rabbit.

It was supposed to be a good year. I thought it sucked.

I published a novel. But I also ended a long-term relationship, went broke, moved back to Los Angeles from London, lived with my dad, and started driving Uber again.

*/*/*/*/

Just for the record, my life is extremely abundant. My journey has been buttressed by guardrails. It was that way in 2023 as well.

I began a long process of smashing delusions. I’m endlessly grateful for the opportunity. Grateful to be born.

Failure Tension

Yesterday, I walked past molds of World Cup moments from decades past. Many unlikely victories:

N. Korea 1 - 0 Italy (1966)

Tunisia 3 - 1 Mexico (1978)

USA 1 - 0 England (1958)

Doubt creeps in during moments of high excitement and high pressure.

Your mind raises the stakes and dims your vision of success. You grab onto heavy ideas like ‘what if this’ and ‘maybe we can’t.’ Try running with that!

The American men’s team carries the weight of the past. ‘No one thinks you’ll win.’ Every game surrendered to cautious optimism.

But whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right.

“Of course you can! Why not you!?”

The same mental reversal of fortune can happen for any of these teams - any nation.

Intelligence Agencies in Democratic Societies:

I speculated in a recent piece of writing how China exploits a concept called Gaunxi to get Chinese-Americans to sell secrets without blackmail or bribes.

In its nascent years, the CIA only recruited white Christians. They soon found out that the racial, religious, and national identities of one employee’s parents weren’t key indicators that someone would be a traitor. something that could be easily leveraged for recruiting agents.

It was regular human flaws that were the best pressure points -

• Debt and Greed (see Aldrich Ames)

• Blackmail - Oh no, they found out I’m gay! (see John Vassall)

• Ideology - See the Cohens)

I’m nostalgically citing these examples from decades past because it was our diversity and meritocracy that made American society and American spies motivated, high-performance individuals. MANY of them overcame serious institutional resistance to secure their positions and, in the process, became more capable.

The US intelligence community is at peak disgust with the US government. I don’t have to take a poll to know that. Neither do you. It’s felt. Every day without a major disaster is a miracle.

Diversity = competence.

This dream is something we must always continue to aspire to.

It’s a way of combining my creative passions with International Relations and History. I hope you enjoy it and derive meaning and clarity from it.

I’ll keep the entries short.

That’s all. Peace

✌🏽❤️ 🌍

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