Your Feed Is Lying to You: Critical Thinking During the Iran Crisis

The world changed on February 28th. Now your feed is full of propaganda, panic, and hot takes from every direction. But are you actually THINKING — or just reacting?

In this episode, M.A. Aponte — former NYPD officer, former Merrill Lynch wealth manager, and current school principal and Consultant — breaks down the facts of the Iran conflict from EVERY side, teaches you the CLEAR Protocol for processing information during crisis, and gives you four practical emotional regulation tools you can use tonight.

This is not a political episode. This is a THINKING episode. Because right now, thinking is the most radical act you can perform.

What you'll learn:

• the hook: phones, alerts, and reflexive emotion
• factual timeline of the current conflict
• positions from the U.S., Israel, and Iran
• independent assessments on urgency and legality
• the clear protocol for critical thinking
• box breathing and physiological calm
• source labeling and agenda awareness
• facts vs contested claims vs opinion
• humility: writing down unknowns
• redirecting to controllables and boundaries
• ripple effects from self to nation
• tools: news windows, 555 rule, contribution check, 54321
• The verified facts of the Iran conflict — from the U.S., Israel, Iran, and independent sources

• The CLEAR Protocol: 5 steps to triage information when the world is on fire
• Why your first reaction is almost always wrong (and what to do instead)
  The ripple effect: what happens when communities practice critical thinking
• 4 emotional regulation tools you can use starting tonight
  Your action plan for the week ahead

If this episode helped you think more clearly, even a little bit, share with one person who needs to hear it. Go to maaponte.substack.com and subscribe. The link is on the show notes. For the full system, paid subscribers get the complete toolkit for $10 a month. To get updates on the upcoming Udemy course, sign up for our free Substack where I will be announcing it there once it's ready to launch.

Transcript

The Phone, The Buzz, The Hook

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Right now, as you're listening to this, your phone has probably buzzed three times, maybe four, on news alerts about a missile strike or a terrorist attack. Maybe it was a friend sharing a video that made your stomach drop. Maybe it was someone on social media telling you who to blame and exactly how to feel about it. And here's the thing: you probably didn't even decide to read it, you just reacted. Your thumb moved up, your brain engaged, you felt the emotion before you process a single fact. And I know this feeling, I've lived it. And um not to the extent that you may see. See, in October 23rd, 2014, in Jamaica, Queens, I'm in my command and getting dressed for a roll call. Uh, this is the NYPD. I'm one of the first ones ready. Haven't even turned on my radio yet. And then my sergeant comes around the corner, grabs me, and says the two words that changes everything. 1013. There's a tent code for Officer Dunn. And I didn't know what was happening. Active shooter, terrorist attack, bomb. We had zero information. All we knew was that officers were down four or five blocks from where I was standing in at a precinct, just waiting for a roll call. And in that moment, my body wanted to do one thing, run to the situation. Because I know those cops personally, which I found out later. But also they were my people. But my sergeant, and I'll never forget this, pointed at me and put me in the vehicle. I wanted to run there. He said, get in the car, we stick together. We don't know what we're walking into. Four blocks, it might have been faster on foot. But that wasn't the point. The point was we don't rush into what we don't understand. We move together. We stay ready. We think before we act. What we drove into was chaos. A man named Zale Thompson had charged four rookie officers with an 18-inch hatchet on Jamaica Avenue. One officer's skull was shattered. The whole thing was over in 10 seconds. It was classified as a domestic terrorist attack. Two months later, December 20th, five days before Christmas, two detectives, Rafael Ramios, uh Ramos, and Wei Jing Lu, were assassinated sitting in the patrol car in Brooklyn. They were just having lunch. A gunman walked up to the passenger window and executed them both. My sergeants knew them. It was the first time this had happened since the 1980s. And here's what I want, I need to tell you. Because this is where the lesson is, and it's not comfortable. After Ramos and Lou were killed, I changed. The fear got inside me. I became aggressive. I didn't let anyone near me or my partner. If you weren't wearing blue, I didn't trust you. Civilians, the same people I swore to protect, treated them like threats. And looking back, I regret it deeply because that wasn't thinking. That was reacting. Fear had hijacked my brain. And I let it change who I was. I let the threat turn me into someone I wasn't proud of. I'm telling you this because right now, right at this moment, the same thing is happening to millions of people, not on the streets of Queens, but in their living rooms, on their phones, their feeds full of explosions, casualties, counts, and rage. Just like me in December 2014, they're not thinking, they're reacting. And the reaction is changing who they are. Today I'm going to teach you how to not make mistakes I made, how to process information during a crisis, especially crisis you cannot control without losing yourself in the process. I'm Mike Aponte, also known as M A Aponte. This is thinking to think. Before we can think critically about anything, we need facts, not opinions, not spin facts. So let's lay out what we know from every side as of the recording of this episode. I'm going to present this the way I was trained to present evidence as a police officer. What do we know? What do we don't know? And what are people claiming without evidence? Here is the factual timeline. Verified across multiple independent sources, and I'm going to give you those sources so this way it is the most unbiased approach. Throughout January and February 2026, the United States deployed the largest military buildup in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Two aircraft carrier strike groups, guided missile destroyers, and submarines were positioned in the region. Negotiations between the U.S. and Iran had an ongoing, uh had been ongoing since April 2025, mediated by Oman, with rounds of talks in Muscat, Rome, and Geneva. These negotiations focused on Iran's nuclear program, its ballistic missile capabilities, and its support for regional proxy groups. On February 24th, during the State of the Union address, the U.S. President accused Iran of reviving efforts to build nuclear weapons and developing missiles that could reach the United States. He warned the U.S. was prepared to act. On February 28th, at approximately 2.30 a.m. Eastern Time, the U.S. and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran. The U.S. called it Operation Epic Fury. Israel called it Operation Roaring Lion. Targets include leadership compounds, military installations, and security infrastructures in Tehran, Fahan Kwam Karaj, and Kermanshah. Excuse me for the misspoken words. Ivan's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamani, was killed in the initial strikes along with dozens of senior military and intelligence officials. The president explicitly called for a regime change, telling the Iranian people to take over your government. Ivan's responded with Operation True Promise 4. Launching drones and ballistic missiles against Israel, U.S. military bases in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Baran, and hitting targets in the UAE, including the data centers and civilian infrastructures. Six U.S. service members have been confirmed killed. Embassies in Saudi Arabia in Kuwait has been closed. The Strait of Harmus, through which 20% of the world's oil flows has effectively been shut down. The conflict has expanded to Lebanon, where Hezbolla entered the fight. Israel has launched strikes on Beirut. Protests have erupted worldwide, including across the United States, both for and against the combat. Markets have dropped sharply, oil prices have spiked, and gas prices experienced the largest single-day increase since 2005. So, what do each side claims? Now, this is where it gets even more complicated, and here's where your critical thinking has to kick in. And let me present what each side is saying without endorsing any of it. So here's the US and Israeli position. Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons and developing missiles capabilities that threaten the U.S. and its allies. Iran's regime was massacring its own citizens during the 2025-26 protests, with death tolls estimates ranking from the government's 3,117 to the U.S. estimate of 32,000. Diplomacy had failed after nearly a year of negotiations. This was framed as both a defensive action against an imminent nuclear threat and support for the Iranian people's desire for democracy. Israel's prime minister stated this would usher in an era of peace and allow Iranians to form a democratic government. Iran's positions. Iran's foreign minister stated the U.S. entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel and that there was never any so-called Iranian threat. Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of uranium as a guarantee against nuclear weapons during negotiations just days before the strikes began. Iran characterizes the strikes as violations of international law and sovereignty. And the Iran's claim school children were killed in strikes on Munab, with reports of 148 students killed. The Washington Post and New York Times verified footage of the aftermath through the exact number remains unconfirmed. And here's what independent sources say. The UN's nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, told CNN that Iran was not days or weeks away from having atomic weapons, contradicting the urgency claim. U.S. intelligence assessments suggested Iran would need until 2035 to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile if it chose to pursue it. The European Council of Foreign Relations called the strikes an illegal war of choice. Multiple legal scholars at Just Security questioned whether the strikes complied with the UN charter. And the House of Commons library noted that around 2,000 strikes had been conducted by March 1st. Now, I just gave you a lot of information, and I want to be honest with you about something. I have my own feelings about this. I'm a former NYPD officer. I've have experience in the military, and I serve this country. I have friends in the military. I also have students whose families are from the Middle East. And I have students that are serving this country currently, well, former students. And I carry all of that with me. But my feelings don't change the facts. And the facts are contested, messy, and incomplete, as they always are in the first weeks of any conflict. Which brings us to the most important question of this episode. When I was at Merrill Lynch, we had a rule. When the market is in free fall, the first thing you do is nothing. You do not touch your portfolio, you do not make a single trade because every decision you make in a state of fear is a decision you regret when the fear passes. I watched people, smart, wealthy, educated people, lose hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars in 2008, not because the market crashed. The market recovered. They lost money because they panic sold at the bottom. Their fear made the decision. The same principles apply to how you consume information during a crisis. When your feed is flooded with explosions, casualty counts, hot takes, propaganda from every direction, even AI videos that are not real. And outrage from people you trust. Your brain goes into system one, fast, emotional, automatic. And system one doesn't evaluate evidence, it defends beliefs. So here's the framework I want to give you today. I call it the clear protocol. Five steps to process information when the world feels like it's falling apart. So here's the clear protocol. C-L-E-A-R. C. Check your body first. Before you evaluate a single piece of information, check your physical state. Are your shoulders tense? Is your jaw clenched? Is your heart rate elevated? Is your breathing shallow? These are signs your amliedala has hijacked your prefrontal cortex. You're physiologically incapable of critical thinking in this state. So what to do? Box breathing. Four seconds in, hold for four seconds, four seconds out, hold for four seconds. Do this three times. It takes one minute. This isn't meditation fluff. This is what Navy SEALs use before making life or death decisions. It literally deactivates the fight or flight response and it re-engages your thinking brain. I use this every single day when I was an officer. I use it at difficult decisions and high stress moments as an executive director at the school. Before entering a building on a call when I was in the NYPD, before confronting someone who might be alarmed, before making any decisions that cannot be unmade. One minute, that's all it takes to shift from reacting to thinking. L, label the source. Every piece of information you encounter has a source, and every source has an agenda. That doesn't mean the information is wrong, but it means you need to know who is telling you what and why. During this conflict, you're going to encounter information from state-controlled media on all sides, from anonymous social media accounts, from verified journalists on the ground, from political commentators with known positions, from AI-generated content, and from people you personally know and trust who are amplifying things they haven't verified. Before you believe anything, ask three questions. One, who created this? Is it a verified journalist, a government, an anonymous account or AI generated? Two, what do they gain from behaving or believing this? Every message has a purpose. Would the other side present the same facts? If you can only find this claim from one side of a conflict, that's a flag. Not proof it's false, but a flag. And real lynch, we had a saying if the person selling you the investment doesn't tell you the downside, they're not advising you, they're selling you. The same principle with information. If a source only shows you one side, they're not informing you, they're recruiting you. E. Evaluate what you actually know. After the emotional check and the source check, now you can evaluate the information itself. But here's the key. You have to separate three categories in your mind. Verified facts, things confirmed by multiple independent sources, the strikes happen, Kamani is dead, U.S. service members have been killed, markets dropped. These are not in dispute. Contested claims, that's number two, things one side says that the other side disputes the nuclear threat timeline, the student casualty numbers, whether diplomacy had truly failed or was abandoned, whether the legal basis exists under international law. These require more information before you form a position. And then there's three pure opinion. This includes hot takes, predictions, moral judgments, and calls to action. These deserve the least weight in your thinking. But they're the things that feel the most urgent on social media. That's by design. You're getting it's the propaganda of the emotional appeal. Most people skip straight to opinion. They share the takes that matches their existing worldview or anchor bias and move on. That's not thinking, that's cosplaying as a thinker. A. Acknowledge what you do not know. This is the hardest one because it takes humility. And social media rewards certainty and punishes nuance. But intellectual humility, saying, I don't know enough about this yet, is the most powerful position you can hold. Here's what we don't know right now. We don't know the full civilian casualty count in Iran. Internet blackouts have restricted report. We don't know how long this conflict will last. We don't know the full scope of Iran's remaining military capabilities. We don't know whether the stated goal of regime change is achievable. We don't know the long-term economic impact. That's the secondary consequence that I mentioned in the previous episode. We don't know what intelligence the decision makers had access to that the public doesn't. And here's what I need you to hear. It is okay to not know. It is okay to say this is a complex situation and I'm still gathering information. That statement takes more courage than any confident hot take on Twitter or well, X and TikTok. Then there's R. Redirect to what you control. This is one that changes everything. And I want you to really hear this because it's the bridge between thinking and living. You cannot control whether a missile hits a target 6,000 miles away. You cannot control what the US president decides. You cannot control oil prices or the Strait of Harmuz or whether your airline cancels flights, but you can control the following things. You can control how much news you consume when you consume it. Set a limit. 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes in the evening. That's enough to be informed without being consumed. You can control the quality of sources you allow into your brain. Curate your information diet the way you curate your food diet. Junk information makes you mentally sick the same way junk food makes you physically sick. You can't control how you show up for the people around you. Your kids are watching how you handle this, your coworkers are watching, your employees are watching, your friends are watching. Be the calm one. Be the one who asks questions instead of shouting answers. You can control your financial decisions. Do not panic sell investments. Do not make major purchases driven by fear. If you filled up your gas tank when it was cheap, good. If you didn't, don't panic buy. That creates the shortage you're afraid of. And finally, you control your conversations. When someone at the dinner table or in your group chat starts spiraling, you can be the person who says, What do we actually know for sure? The one question changes the temperature of every room it enters. Now, I want to take this further because here's something I think about a lot as an educator. As someone who works with young people every single day, what would happen if everyone used the clearer protocol? What would the ripple effect look like? So let's Think about this in concentric circles. Start with circle one. You. If you practice the clear protocol, you sleep better tonight. I'm not exaggerating. The anxiety that comes from doom scrolling is directly tied to the illusion that you need to have an opinion on everything right now. When you give yourself permission to say, I'm still processing, your nervous system calms down. Your relationships improve because you stop projecting your anxiety onto your partner, your kids, your colleagues. Your work improves because your cognitive bandwidth isn't being consumed by a conflict you have no control over. And if you want to know more about this, I highly recommend you look at previous episodes on cognitive bandwidth. You only have so much, and we do a deep dive about it. Circle two, your household. Even if you have a dog or a cat, a gerbil, it doesn't matter. Everything has an emotional state that you're it's absorbing. If you're panicked, they're panicked. If you're glued to the news, they feel unsafe. If you're fighting with your spouse about politics at the dinner table, they're learning that disagreement means conflict and conflict means danger. But if you're the parent or an adult who says, yes, something serious is happening in the world. Here's what we know, here's what we don't know, and here's what our family is going to do. You've just taught your child or even a loved one that most valuable lesson they'll ever learn how to be okay when things are not okay. I say this as a parent myself, and I say this as a school principal who sees what happens when kids come from homes where the adults are emotionally regulated versus homes where they're not. The difference is night and day. Then there's circle three, your community. If 10% of people in your community stop sharing unverified information, the inform the misinformation chain breaks. Social media algorithms amplify the content that gets the most engagement and outrage, fear, and uncertainty generate more engagement than nuance. Every time you share a hot take without verification, you're feeding the machine. Every time you pause, verify, and choose not to share something inflammatory, you're starving it. Think about it this way: if a thousand people in your town each influence 10 people, and those people influence 10 more, one community practicing information triage changes the information environment for tens of thousands. That's not naive optimism. That's network effects. The same math that makes misinformation go viral works in reverse if enough people practice critical thinking, which is the whole point of this podcast, by the way. Circle four, the country. Wars are fought with weapons, but they're sustained with narratives. This is a Sunsuit art of war. If the people do not support a war, the war is bound to fail. If the people support it, the war can be a victory. Every side and every conflict needs public support to continue. And public support is driven by how people feel, not what they know. If enough citizens demand verified information before supporting or opposing military action, politicians have to provide it. If enough voters say, show me the evidence, instead of I trust you because you're on my team, the entire calculus of decision making changes. And this is not a left or right thing. This is just facts. This isn't about anti-war or pro-war. It's about being pro-thinking. Whatever position you arrive at, support the strikes, oppose them, remain undecided, arrive there through evidence, not emotion. That's the standard we should hold ourselves to as citizens. I want to get a practical, I want to go practical now. Because I know some of you are feeling overwhelmed. And some of you have family in the Middle East, some of you have friends serving in the military, some of you are just exhausted by the constant state of crisis that seems to define our era. So let me give you specific tools you can use starting tonight. So, tool one, the news boundary protocol. Set specific times for news consumption, morning and evening, 30 minutes each outside those windows. You don't check, you don't scroll, you don't engage, turn off push notifications for news apps. This isn't about being an uninformed, it's about being intentionally informed instead of reactively overwhelmed. I do this at my school when crisis hits, a school is shooting somewhere, a major political event, natural disaster. I don't let the news play in the background all day. We get the facts in the morning, we discuss them with the students, if you know it's on topic in a structured way, of course. And then we get back to work for education, not because we don't care, but because we do care. We care enough to protect our cognitive and emotional resources. Here's tool number two, the 555 rule. When you encounter a piece of information that triggers a strong emotional reaction, ask yourself three questions. Will this matter in five minutes? Probably. Will this matter in five days? Maybe. Will this matter in five months? That's the real question. If the answer to the five-month question is yes, it deserves your sustained attention and careful thought. If it won't matter in five months, it doesn't deserve your emotional energy right now. Most of what you're scrolling past right now falls into the five-minute category. Hot takes, reaction videos, dunking on the other side. None of that will make next week focus your energy on what matters at the five-month horizon. Your family safety, your financial stability, your mental health, and teaching your children or others how to process the world. Tool three, the contribution check. Before you share anything on social media about this conflict or any crisis, ask yourself: am I adding light or adding heat? Is what I'm about to share verified, useful, and likely to help someone think more clearly? Or am I sharing because I'm scared and I want other people to feel what I feel? If you're adding heat, put the phone down. If you're allowed to feel your feelings without broadcasting them, journal instead. Call a friend, go for a walk. But don't become a nod in the misinformation network just because you're overwhelmed. Tool four, the emergency grounding exercise. This is for when it gets really bad. When you feel the anxiety in your chest and you can't stop scrolling and the world feels like it's ending. Here's what you do: name five things you can see in the room you're in right now. Name four things you can physically touch. Name three things you can hear. Name two things you can smell, name one thing you're grateful for. This is called the 54321 grounding technique. It yanks your brain out of the hypothetical future, the catastrophic, the spiraling, and plants it in the present moment. Because in this moment, in this room, you are safe. And from a place of safety, you can think. All right, here's your homework. And I don't mean that casually. I'm an executive director and a school principal after all. Homework matters. Here's what I want you to do between now and next week's episode. Action one: the information audit. Write down every source you consume news from the last 48 hours. Be honest. Twitter, TikTok, a friend's text, Fox, CNN, random, Instagram, real. Write them all down. Then rate each one. Is this a primary source? Meaning actual on the ground, like this is the real information. And I'll tell you, let you in a little secret. Fox and CNN and the major networks, not primary source. They are secondary source. Secondary source. And if they're not secondary source, are they pure opinion? You'd be shocked at how much news, quotes, you consume that was actually just opinion wrapped in urgency. Action two, set your news windows. Pick two 30-minute blocks, morning and evening. That's your news time. Outside those blocks, turn off notifications. Do not scroll. Set a timer on your phone if you need to. You'll feel anxious at first. That's the withdrawal. Stay with it. By day three, you'll feel clearer than you'll have in months. Action three, have one genuine conversation. Find one person who disagrees with you about this information and have a conversation. Not a debate, conversation. Ask them, what are you seeing that I'm not seeing? Listen. Don't respond with your counterpoint. Just listen. Then say thank you. Let me think about that. That's it. You don't have to change your mind. You just have to genuinely hear other perspectives. This is the muscle that atrophist uh fastes during crisis. Action four, write down what you don't know. Get a piece of paper and write two columns. On the left, what I know for sure, and on the right, what I don't know yet. Be rigorous. Move anything from the left column to the right column if you can't back it up with verified source. I guarantee the right column will be three times longer than the left column. And that's good. That's where honest thinking begins. So let me bring this home. Here's what we covered today. We broke down the facts of what's happening from every side with the US-Israel position, Iran's position, what independent sources are saying. We learned the clear protocol, check your body, label the source, evaluate what you know, acknowledge what you don't, and redirect what you control. We talked about ripple effect, how one person practicing information triage can influence a household, communities, and eventually the national conversation. And I gave you four practical tools for emotional regulation: the news boundary protocol, the 555 rule, the contribution check, the and the 54321 grounding exercise. Now, here's what I need from you. If this episode helped you think more clearly, even a little bit, share with one person who needs to hear it. Not on social media, not on public posts, send it directly to someone you care about, who you know is struggling right now. A text, a DM, hey, listen to this, person in person. That's how real change spreads. If you want to go deeper, and I mean really develop this skill so it becomes automatic. I'm sending out a free, clear protocol worksheet this week on my Substack. It walks you through every step I taught today with space to write your answers. Go to M-A-A-P-O-N-T-E, so it's M-A-A-Ponty.substack.com and subscribe. It's free. For those of you who want the full system, not just one framework, but the complete critical thinking toolkit with decision matrices, biases, detection worksheets, and advanced frameworks. That's available to paid subscribers for$10 a month. And honestly, if this episode saved you from one panic decision, one bad trade, one regretful social media post, one destroyed relationship, it's paid for itself. It's cheaper than a cup of coffee a day. The link is on the show notes. I highly recommend it. Also have an upcoming Udemy course. This course will help anyone with critical thinking, decision making, and emotional regulation. To get updates on this on the upcoming courses, please sign up for our free Substack where I will be announcing it there once it's ready to launch. Again, the link is in the show notes. Next week, Wednesday, save it on your calendars. I am going to be discussing uh a deep dive of history of the whole history of the Iranian regime and how it's led up to this. We're going to go all the way back. We're going to study history and how you, by learning this as an example, you'll be able to expand your own critical thinking and your own understanding, not just of the world around you, but also internally and how you can use context to make better decisions. Until then, slow is smooth, smooth is fast, keep thinking. I'm Mike Aponte, and this is Thinking to Think.