My Next Book! And The Next Phase of Future Intelligence

I’m having a lovely viral moment on TikTok right now. Yes, TIKTOK—a platform I foreswore for extremely valid counterintelligence concerns, but which is behaving in no less worrisome a fashion that our credit score agencies and Meta and Twitter—is now home to an audience that’s taking me viral over videos about cognitive bias and intelligence analysis and Iran and Cuba! Go see for yourself. It is almost as magical a time as when Twitter dropped everything to get familiar with strategic simulation, or “game theory.”

If you just found me — welcome. And if you subscribed to this Substack long ago, let me reintroduce myself and tell you about my current intellectual project, which is in further defense of our shared democracy.

My name is Eric Garland. I am a native Vermonter, a bassist, and a career intelligence analyst. I’ve spent roughly three decades briefing Fortune 500 executives and government leaders on geopolitics, competitive intelligence, and future trend analysis. I have a Masters Degree in International Affairs Technology Policy from The George Washington University Elliott School. I published my first book, Future, Inc., with AMACOM in 2007, with translations in Korean, Chinese, and Indonesian. I am a Fellow of the Council of Competitive Intelligence — the senior rank of my profession.

On December 11, 2016, I published a Twitter thread — “It’s time for some game theory” — that laid out the Russian intelligence operation behind the 2016 election. No classified sources. Open-source tradecraft. The New York Times later named it one of the 25 most important tweets in history. On May 21, 2022, Vladimir Putin personally sanctioned me for that work, placing me on a list alongside the President of the United States, the Attorney General, and three directors of the CIA.

I am happy, somewhat surprised to be still breathing, and—because the country is still under threat from enemies foreign and domestic—still writing for the public about the attacks on our shared democracy.

Now I’m building something for the public.

Game Theory Today — my channel on TikTok and YouTube — is where I deliver the same professional intelligence analysis I’ve given to boardrooms and government briefings, except now it’s for everybody. The cognitive bias series, the international relations theory breakdowns, the geopolitical analysis that makes you feel like you just sat in on a classified briefing — that’s the product, and it’s growing fast.

But the channel is the surface. Underneath it, I’m writing a book.

PSYINT: Psychological Integrity In a World Where Men and Machines Want to Control How You Think.

PSYINT is a book about the coordinated assault on your capacity to think freely — who is conducting it, how it works, and what you can do about it. Drawing on my background in strategic intelligence, author I am documenting how Russian intelligence services, Chinese government influence operations, and domestic institutional actors have systematically targeted the American mind through disinformation, algorithmic manipulation, elite capture, and in documented cases, the abuse of courts, doctors, and police departments to silence citizens who identified the operation.

The book traces this assault against 2,500 years of Western and Eastern thought about intellectual freedom — from Socrates and Marcus Aurelius to the Talmudic scholars to Martin Luther to Viktor Frankl — and argues that the arrival of artificial intelligence has made the question of psychological sovereignty the defining challenge of our time.

PSYINT offers readers a framework for recognizing manipulation in real time, understanding the historical and geopolitical forces behind it, and developing what the author calls Psychic Integrity — the disciplined, grounded capacity to think for yourself that every tradition of human wisdom has identified as both the hardest and most essential achievement of a free person. The fight for American independence, Garland argues, was never finished. It continues now, largely undeclared, against the most sophisticated psychological operation in history — and the outcome depends on whether enough citizens recognize it in time.

PSYINT is the story of American freedom, which starts in the mind. But while the Revolutionary War was fought against the British monarchy, and the Civil War against the remnants of absolutism still alive in the American system, after certain American elites made common cause with Russia and China, the new American Revolution of the mind is against the largest psychological slavers in history–and the war was undeclared.

It is time for Americans to recognize the threat and the attacks for what they are, and to fight back.

Paid Tier—What You’ll Get

If you help out with support you’ll get access to Paid Subscriber-only chat and the ability to ask professional-level questions of me directly—something normally only available to my clients.

And you’ll be part of advancing the project that only began with the Game Theory Thread in 2016, but which must become part of the American cognitive infrastructure—the ability to defend ourselves against the onslaught of our enemies, foreign and domestic, kinetic and intellectual.

AND—to have fun doing it. I refuse to give up that part.

For those of you reading right now—thank you. And I look forward to this journey together.

First published on Game Theory Today (Substack), April 6, 2026.