Editor’s Brief

Last week we looked at Chimney Trail Health and the cognitive war they are actively fighting. If you haven’t read David French’s opinion piece, “It’s September 2026, and the Pentagon Is Alarmed,”I highly recommend you give it a look.

This week, we are releasing an interview with the CTH CEO and Co-founder Matthew Brown. Special thanks to Matt and the team at The Bulleit Group.

Since this is a new format, I would appreciate feedback whether you like it or not. There is a 1 question poll at the end of the write up. Give me a click, Vasili. One click only please.

Matt Brown; CEO of Chimney Trail Health

Or listen on Spotify

In This Interview

• 00:00 Introduction to Chimney Trail and Its Purpose

• 01:49 The Journey from Naval Officer to Behavioral Health CEO

• 09:21 The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health

• 15:12 Bridging the Gap: Engaging Senior Leaders and Junior Sailors

• 18:36 Innovative Approaches to Mental Health Interventions

• 24:04 Understanding the War on Cognitive Warfare

The following responses are all from Matt Brown, CEO of Chimney Trail health and have been lightly edited for a clean read.

Opening Discussion

When you first look at it, it doesn't appear to be tech-related, but our top-of-funnel input is currently done in a seminar format, and we're converting that to an AI tool that will assess your demographics and specific psychological needs.

This allows us to create highly customized psychological interventions for people and mail them to you in the same way that Stitch Fix and HelloFresh mail you clothes and food.

From the defense side, it's principally in response to cognitive warfare threat vectors. People's psychological issues aren't coming from nowhere—in many instances, they're coming from very directed campaigns.

Origins

I was the captain of USS Scout in San Diego but as all captains eventually do, I rotated off that job and went to the SEAL teams, where I was working on defense tech innovation.

I got a phone call from the new captain of my old ship. He said, "Matt, I hope you're sitting down, but a kid that you thought was going to be the Chief of Naval Operations one day bought a gun, and turned it on himself."

What was unusual is that he was a first-generation American, and his family was from India. They flew in because he didn't die right away, and the new captain was asking if I could go sit with them in the hospital.

His dad kept bringing up this team-building exercise I took his son on where we all went to Yosemite and climbed Cathedral peaks together. His dad shook me very aggressively and said, "Why didn't I do these things with my son? Why didn't I do these things with my beautiful son?"

On my drive home, I called my wife Jen and explained what was going on. She very matter-of-factly said, "Well, what are we going to do about it?" I thought that was really cool—she gave me permission to think differently, even though we had this Navy career planned out.

Next Steps

Then I called my commanding officer at Team 17, Christian Dunbar, and his civilian equivalent, Dr. Bruce Morris. They said, "Why don't you turn some of this innovation energy you've been expending toward a very real threat, which is suicide in our armed forces."

So I did that. I was given latitude to fly around the country and ask psychiatrists and psychologists what we're not doing that we should be doing. All of them came back and said you have to figure out how to magically teach everyone something called cognitive behavioral theory.

I started looking into it and discovered that you can get cognitive behavioral theory—or cognitive behavioral therapy if it's in a therapeutic context—but often you have to self-identify as being in need of care. it could take you anywhere from three and a half weeks to four months to get in with somebody.

We discovered there's a ton of research about something called bibliotherapy. Bibliotherapy based on evidence based practices is as effective as market-leading pharmaceutical interventions, which just blew my mind.

We asked a very natural question: Why doesn't this already exist? Why isn't everybody reading these books? It turns out it's because they're like this big—one volume with three or four others like it. People just don't want to read it.

We went to Stanford's design school and a couple of other design places, and they helped us mature the idea of creating a fun activity that you could do by yourself or with your family, mailed to you directly so that you feel personally seen and valued rather than getting just another resource when you're already in your uniform feeling like a cog in a wheel.

Company Naming

If you're depressed—fundamentally suffering from anxiety or depression—it can feel like you're in a wilderness. So it's about reconnecting with those things that are most important. The chimney represents the archetypal cornerstone of the home, so it's like finding your way home to the stuff that matters, getting out of the wilderness.

Social Media and Mental Health Impact

Anytime there's a change in your communications medium mixed with an advance in technology, mixed with social adjustments, you end up with essentially a revolution—and sometimes that revolution can be in your own brain.

I've talked to senior Department of Defense leaders—admirals and generals that you see on TV—and I'll bring up cognitive warfare threat vectors and explain that Russia's SVR has very sophisticated campaigns to get in the head of their adversaries with disinformation and misinformation. They do it in a way that specifically positions people against the community that would theoretically reinforce them.

A great example is 2014 on the Crimean Peninsula. You can watch the Frontline documentary called "The Facebook Dilemma" that covers it. It's about Russia getting inside the OODA loop of the people who inhabited the Crimean Peninsula and turning them against one another.

People who identified as Ukrainian versus people who were on the fence and might have considered themselves Russian. They weaponized Facebook in a way that really pitted them against each other.

We're in a position now where AI is so advanced and these cognitive warfare farms or factories are so sophisticated that even digital natives aren't totally skilled to push back on it. Some combination of the deteriorating community—the isolation that persistent engagement with social media creates—plus the sophistication of the material itself creates a toxic storm that results in suicide.

One in 10 kids born today is going to make an attempt on their own life before they graduate from high school, which to me is like, "All stop. We've got to solve that." If 10% of your population doesn't even want to live, you can't imagine them solving any real-world problems.

Bridging Generational Divides

I think trying to convince a 65-year-old man of anything as it pertains to social media is a losing proposition.

What I try to do is increase their anxiety as it pertains to cognitive warfare as a threat vector. They'll say, "Oh, Matt, we've always had psychological warfare."

And it's like, No, sir, you had a C-17 with a bunch of pamphlets that you dumped out the back, and maybe a couple of them stuck.

But what we're interacting with now is propaganda that is literally fingerprinted to your specific psyche. It's tailor-made specifically for you, which is a much more insidious way of putting forward erroneous information.

Because if you're seeing it in familiar context and the way you want to see it, it's way harder to say no to.

There is some stuff out there helping to inform the debate, like Jonathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation," which is useful in illustrating just how insidious these threat vectors can be. But then you have to rely on them to be interested in a book like that, which is a low-probability event.

Engaging Junior Personnel

The real connection needs to happen with the person who is going to benefit from it—the junior sailor.

If you just give them a seminar, we already have data showing they're going to forget 50 to 75% of what you said the moment they walk out the door.

So we created this four-kit system and mail the kits to them. It's modeled after something called a brief intervention for CBT which is essentially four sessions with a trained therapist who knows what they're doing, and they can give you the skills you need.

What we've done is operationalized CBT in this mail-delivered kit. If we can get them to open it, then it's the same thing as if you put your running shoes on—you're more likely to go for a run.

We're discovering that the kinesthetic learning piece, valuing them by sending it directly to their doorstep, making sure it's a high-value kit inside so they feel appreciated.

Then they're able to almost accidentally benefit from the bibliotherapeutic element of the training itself.

Integration with Clinical Care

We had a terrific meeting with Dr. Robinson, who was the director of the VA Pacific Island Health System and the organization is pointed in the direction of integrating Chimney Trail's offering into the primary care mental health intervention model.

They do essentially a diagnostic head-to-toe assessment of how this veteran is doing. On the psychological side of things, there are often times they can't flag or diagnose in such a short period of time. But the physician nevertheless has a sneaky suspicion that they would benefit from some intervention.

They're starting to talk about using this as a homework assignment, whether you're waiting to see a trained clinician or the physician ultimately determines that you don't need something acute but would just benefit from some coping training.

Final Thoughts: The Current State of Warfare

We need to realize that we're already at war. The initial shots have already been fired—they just don't look like bullets. The behavioral health space and cognitive warfare is insidious and effective at manipulating sentiment throughout the force. They're just so sophisticated and good.

But the good news for us is that it is a brittle threat.

You don't need to fortify the castle, so to speak, in order to combat this. You just need to give people the reflex of skepticism to do the cross-referencing, to do the checking, and do what CBT teaches—which is to catch the distortions you're having or the emotion you're having, then check on the validity of the thought that created that emotion, and then change your behavior if it makes sense to do so.

That's the model: catch, check, change. If you can do that in your media diet, if you can do it in your ordinary life, then the most sophisticated threats that they have in this phase zero or the gray zone, as they call it, we can essentially defang with very little effort, honestly.

This interview was conducted as part of the Defense Tech Signals series, exploring the intersection of technology, national security, and warfighter readiness.

Error’s and Omissions:Last week, we failed to mention Garrett Santos is also a co-founder CTH, and the Waypoints Kit has been updated with the hatchets removed.