I'm a submarine officer turned author here to talk about existential threats to humanity, real-life mind control, military thrillers, and my latest book RESET—AMA.

What do you mean by Real-life mind control?

It's what they do at nuclear power school to make you think boats should travel under water rather than on it.

Did you serve on a "target"?

I was hoping to see some good ole Nuke Sub-Surface shit talking. I was not disappointed.

Never gets old, brother

Yet you write a book about an Army Sergeant. WE KNOW WHO YOU WANT TO BE!!!

Is that obvious... arg. Hooah?

It's ok we love our flippered cousins. You can hang out at the treehouse.

Grabbed the book on Amazon btw, will start reading it tomorrow!

Feeling is mutual. Drop me a line anytime. Would love to hear what you think of the book when you're done

I spoke about Biological Mind Control in an earlier reply, but I wanted to come back to Technological Mind Control. There is new research being conducted on something called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. Not sure how much you know about electro-magnetism but let’s start with the basics. Electricity and magnetism are interconnected. Move an electrical conductor through a magnetic field, and you induce an electric current in the wire. Conversely, pass an electric current through a conductor, and you induce a circular magnetic field around the wire. The human cortex is essentially a folded mass of microscopic biological wires. The neurons and neural pathways in our brains use electrochemical voltage potentials to generate very low-amperage electrical current inside the brain. ese currents form the basis of brain activity and are how neurons communicate with and stimulate other neurons. However, if you subject the brain to a properly calibrated and variable electromagnetic field, you can induce electrical currents in the brain involuntarily. is imposed stimulation can induce physical sensations, perceptions, emotions, memories, movement, and even thoughts in a subject. This is technological mind control and something I take to the next level in RESET.

Presently, Duke University is one of the leaders in this field. Look up Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on YouTube

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkNbYHu_STU

There was an interesting episode of invisibilia about TMS. The fact there are people hacking around with magnets on their brain is crazy to me.

I know it is disturbing. Right now, the work is pretty benign. The processing power needed to map the brain and then calibrate a field for complex manipulation of higher cortex functions is out of bounds...for now. With AI, it could happen. That's the germ of an idea that spawned RESET. I don't want to give the plot away, but the seed has been planted.

One my goals in writing RESET was to pay homage to the conspiracy theory lore of the last several decades that was fodder for books and movies that I loved. Mind Control has always occupied a "sacred" place in conspiracy lore, MK Ultra, alien mind control, etc. I knew I wanted to dig into this "tin foil hats" and all and so I started researching and realized you can divide mind control in to two baskets: Biological Mind Control, and Technological Mind Control

Biological Mind control is real, but not in the way you might think. There are several intriguing instances of this. The one that features most prominently in RESET is Ophiocordyceps camponoti-rupedis, popularly referred to as the zombie-ant fungus. This is real and generating considerable buzz in entomological circles.

What makes this particular parasitic fungus so intriguing is that, despite not having a nervous system itself, it is somehow capable of manipulating ant behavior by hijacking the ant's brain.

Once infected with fungal spores, an unwitting ant quickly became a slave to Ophiocordyceps camponoti-rupedis. The fungus enters its host’s brain and then actively modifies the ant’s behavior to facilitate its own reproductive life cycle.

Instead of behaving like a normal ant, an infected ant will climb into the understory jungle canopy, clamp its jaws to the bottom of a leaf, and wait to die. After death, a fungal stalk grew from the head of the ant cadaver, spewing fresh infectious spores toward the forest oor below to infect other foraging ants and start the cycle anew.

There is new evidence that human behavior might be influenced and driven by microorganisms (some symbiotic, others parasitic) that populate our micro biome. Some estimates put 43% of the biomass in and on our bodies as "other" mainly bacteria. In this way, we might change the paradigm of "me" to "ark" as we seem to carry around billions of passengers in our gut. These critters use complex chemistry to influence our GI, and our GI has a tremendous number of connections to the brain and seems to influence brain neurotransmitter levels

CHECK OUT THIS LINK: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mental-health-may-depend-on-creatures-in-the-gut/

Do you think that in some future world you might be able to slip someone a type of probiotic that could change the way they view the world?

Yes, I think that very, very soon custom tailored probiotics will be prescribed in lieu of certain prescription pharmaceutical regiments. There is a start-up called Viome that is now doing targeted GI micro biome assessments. I'm going to try it because I have been battling GI problems and issues for 5 years.

LINK: https://www.viome.com

The next step after identifying the micro biome deficiencies is to restore the "good bug" populations into the proper range. It is important to keep in mind, that these bacteria have been co-evoloving with us as a species for millennia. Our GI system has outsourced a number of digestive subprocesses to these little guys. We need them in there!

I'm looking forward to a dully dystopian future where every fast food restaurant adds its own health-improving probiotic upon request.

• Taco Bell: digestive health
• McDonalds: diabetes
• Burger King: weight loss
• Wendy's: pure snark

That is awesome! Hilarious, and it will happen now that you put it out there

Ophiocordyceps camponoti-rufipedis - This is what happens to humans on the game "The Last of Us"!

I don't know that game, but I'll definitely check it out! But if you think Ophiocordyceps camponoti-rufipedis is bad, try reading up on Dicrocoelium dendriticum! I threw that into RESET for fun too!

From RESET: "Dicrocoelium dendriticum is a type of lancet liver Fluke that has quite a complex life cycle, utilizing three host species. First, land snails consume uke eggs in infected cow dung. The eggs hatch in the snails, where the larval flukes burrow into the snail’s digestive system and mature to juvenile flukes. The snails combat the infection by encapsulating the flukes in cysts and sloughing them off as slime balls in the grass. Foraging ants eat the slime balls and become infected with the juvenile flukes. Once the ukes mature, they become ready to transition to their nal host so they can lay eggs. But for this to happen, the ant has to be eaten by a grazing cow or sheep, and ruminants are not anteat- ers. So the ukes do something very clever: they burrow out of the ant’s digestive system and make their way to the ant’s subesophageal ganglion nerve cluster. During the day, the ant behaves like a normal ant, but after sundown when the temperature drops, the ukes take control of the ant and force it to climb to the top of a blade of grass, clamp down with its mandibles, and wait to be eaten by a grazing cow. If the ant escapes digestion that night, the uke releases control and lets it go about being an ant again during the day. When nightfall comes anew, the fluke takes control again and zombifies the ant until morning"

Toxoplasma gondii. Not as overt as the fungus example, but it’s effect on rodents is curiously specific. There’s also (scientific) theories that it might cause or exacerbate several mental disorders in humans, and change us in ways ranging from inhibiting/modifying executive function to being worse drivers.

Do you think something like this could be “weaponized” to, say, augment efforts to cause/increase stochastic terrorism?

I would make for a great thriller novel, but giggleworm has a valid point. It is far less complicated and more efficient to utilize established technology based structures like social media to manipulate and control people. I think Toxo and the micro biome impact on behavior is population health issue, more than discrete threat

And what do you think of the technological aspect?

I spoke about Biological Mind Control in an earlier reply, but I wanted to come back to Technological Mind Control. There is new research being conducted on something called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. Not sure how much you know about electro-magnetism but let’s start with the basics. Electricity and magnetism are interconnected. Move an electrical conductor through a magnetic field, and you induce an electric current in the wire. Conversely, pass an electric current through a conductor, and you induce a circular magnetic field around the wire. The human cortex is essentially a folded mass of microscopic biological wires. The neurons and neural pathways in our brains use electrochemical voltage potentials to generate very low-amperage electrical current inside the brain. ese currents form the basis of brain activity and are how neurons communicate with and stimulate other neurons. However, if you subject the brain to a properly calibrated and variable electromagnetic field, you can induce electrical currents in the brain involuntarily. is imposed stimulation can induce physical sensations, perceptions, emotions, memories, movement, and even thoughts in a subject. This is technological mind control and something I take to the next level in RESET.

Presently, Duke University is one of the leaders in this field. Look up Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on YouTube LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkNbYHu_STU

Brian's book editor here: Brian's books are very well researched, and while, of course, these are works of fiction, they find their groundings in reality. MK Ultra is one scary wikihole to fall down. And you can read all about the Ant fungus he mentions below here: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/how-the-zombie-fungus-takes-over-ants-bodies-to-control-their-minds/545864/

Oh hi, Brian.

Hi!

He means he can use the term "mind control" to sell books as a form of marketing mind control.

LOL... I wish. Selling books is much harder than I thought it would be. Mind control would be handy, but that is what Alexa is for!

How difficult was it being confined inside a submarine for extended periods of time? How frequently did people "freak out"?

The longest I was submerged on single extended operation was 102 days. I am not a claustrophobic person by nature, so I never felt a sense of panic during normal submarine operations. There is a certain measure of comfort taken in joining a submarine that has an operating history. Sea trials on a brand new sub would be different story, something I never did. Honestly, the greatest challenge for long missions is the depletion of food stores. Why? Because the quality of the food was one of the main drivers of quality of life and hence crew morale. Perishable items like vegetables are depleted quickly. Then the staples begin to get depleted like eggs, cheese, meats, etc. By the end of 102 days it was slim pickings and folks were getting pretty grumpy

We did have one "freak out" during one of my deployments. It was a new guy, enlisted RT, who simply did not understand what he was getting into. Maybe he was hard recruited for the nuclear pipeline because he had high technical ratings. While we were diving, he tried to undog and open the lower access hatch to the sail. We were about at 150' deep and the OOD would been on the bridge (sail conning tower) was still standing in the passage in his harness talking to someone. He grabbed the kid along with the Chief of the Boat. There is a two hatch system for access points for redundancy, so even if he had managed to open the lower hatch, we would have been okay. But it created quite the drama. Obviously, his decision was driven by panic because "where did he think he was going to go at 150' down and diving?"

How the fuck does the reactor technician get to control without anyone noticing????

He was off watch

What’s the closest you have ever been to another man while cranking one off?

Hmmm... how to answer that. Let's just say guys wear their headphones in their racks for a reason

My brother helped design nuclear subs in Connecticut . He told me how long some of them could stay out in the sea. What has the navy done to help alleviate “cabin fever?”

Hmmm, there's not a whole lot the Navy can do eliminate cabin fever other than the occasional "swim call" which is when the boat surfaces in transit and let's guys out to swim in the middle of the ocean. We did that at a really cool place in the Pacific, the CO set the course so we would cross the international date line and the equator where they intersected. It was really cool because we had a party called a "shell back" ceremony and a sea turtle (shell back) surfaced and swam past us in the middle of it. The whole crew was freaking out because it was like a divine sign of good luck

The thing you have to remember about submarine life is that the humans are really the secondary consideration to the Engineers. The humans are there to serve the machine, and this is a strange paradigm I like to think about often as a writer. All of the human space are sort of nested inconveniently among the machines, and the people are crawling around inside the sub like ants inside a whale.

How did you guys stay in shape for the PT test when underway? Not only is space a lot tighter on a sub than even a DDG, you guys can't afford to make excess noise as I understand it.

Staying in shape was brutal. The majority of the crew did not exercise. When I was in, we are on a three section 6 hour watch rotation. Which meant that we had watch for 6 hours then "off watch" for 12. Then the cycle started over. The "off watch" time was no picnic. You had to do pre-watch and post-watch tours, paperwork, maintenance, training, watch reconstructs if on mission, and relieve the on-watch guys for training. So it was hard to ever get more than 3-4 hours of continuous sleep. Everyone was so exhausted that exercise was the first casualty of the underway routine.

On my boat, we had one stair climber, and two recumbent bikes. The bike was next to the main engine port side and hot as hell. It was like working out in jungle. After a minute, you'd be pouring sweat. The stair climber was by the hydraulic system, and that always creeped me out. If one of those fittings sprung a leak, you'd get sawed in half by a 3000 psi oil jet.

Do you believe that alien existence is real, if so do you believe they are capable of living under water? And could this be a threat if the sky’s Attack and the water attacks, the human race would have absolutely no place to go and be demolished

I believe with 100% confidence that we are but one of a million if not billion different forms of life in the universe. There are approximately 10 billion galaxies in the observable universe and an average of 100 billion stars per galaxy, which means that there are about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s 1 billion trillion) stars in the observable universe!!

We are finding exoplanets at an astounding rate. How can there not be other life. Statistically, it seems impossible to me.

WIKIPEDIA: As of 15 February 2018 there are 3,700 confirmed exoplanets. The majority of these planets were discovered by the Kepler spacecraft. In addition to the confirmed exoplanets, there are 4,496 potential exoplanets from its first mission, and 741 from its "Second Light" mission

Have you ever been “in combat” before while in a sub?

We did some hair raising things I can't speak about. My boat was equipped with a state of the art towed array sonar system, we had vertical launch missiles, carried mines and torpedoes, and for a 688 class sub we were pretty quiet and fast. We got tasked to do some Hollywood worthy missions and I had a number of white knuckle experiences.

That being said, we never engaged in sub-on-sub or sub-on-surface ship combat. My boat did launch Tomahawks to support combat operations in the Middle East, so you could call that combat.

How many logs of dip did your submarine go through? Who made profit on the dip and why was it a chief?

Former bubblehead here. I don't know about the dip situation, but cigarettes were pretty expensive. My first LPO would sell a pack for $20 when we were underway

Operators dip, squids eat junk food

Do you think we'll really ever see true AI / machine self awareness? If so you believe it'll will be a threat to humanity (as Elon musk does) or a boon? And why do you think that?

My fear is bifurcated on this topic. It keeps me up at night. On the one hand we have the threat from emergence of a SuperIntelligence. As Nick Bostrum points out (and forgive me if I misspeak the numbers) even a synthetic human mind analog with equal intelligence to an average human would think one million times faster because of how much faster because of electricity flows orders of magnitude faster in circuits than electro-chemical impulses. If this intelligence were you, it could think everything you've thought in your entire life in weeks. It would have to be smarter to outwit, you it could simply out contemplate you by speed alone. But no self-aware AI will be content with status quo, so it will learn and augment its intelligence just like we do. It would probably hack and reprogram it's own software to make improvements. What Musk recognizes and is afraid of is the exponential rate of intelligence growth of AI. We are not even well-equipped to contemplate what this would look like, just like an ant cannot contemplate the machinations of government.

In the case of the SuperIntelligent AI, the fear is that it develops an agenda, executes on this agenda, and no one is smart enough to stop it. Even a secondary emerging self-aware AI would not be able to compete because it could never catch up, because the first AI will reprogram itself and be learning at an exponential rate. This is why so many people are concerned, because once the super intelligent AI is born, intervention is virtually impossible. The safeguards (if any are even possible) must be instilled in advance.

The other half of my fear I would categorize simply as Human Obsolescence. In one way this is even more terrifying and upsetting to me than a super intelligence AI. In this scenario, which is playing out right now, humans get outperformed by both targeted AI and bots, and general purpose AI and bots until we can't do anything better, safer, or cheaper than machines. From a biological and anthropological perspective, we are communal social creatures that live and work together. A life without labor and profession would be a depressing existence. We derive a sense of identity and worth from our professions. What would a society without meaningful human contribution look and feel like?

We could be like ancient Greece and devote our free time to philosophical and scientific contemplation. I see this future as either utopian or dystopian depending on how things shake out.

rest assured they were doing labor in Greece, friend. we've never seen what happens when the whole populace is left to twitter their thumbs.

This video had a paradigmatic impact on my thinking. It should be required study for all politicians, CEOs, small business owners, and parents. HUMANS NEED NOT APPLY LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&t=134s

Hey Brian thanks a lot for doing this AMA, I find the topics you write about to be truly interesting. I am nearly finished with my undergrad with a double major of poly sci and international politics. I desire to work in intelligence once I graduate, would you have any recommendations on where to look regarding a job relative to the topics you discuss?

Email me at brianandrewsauthor (at) gmail.com. Let's take this conversation offline.

What's the most interesting thing you saw from your time in the submarine?

The most interesting thing is classified TS SCI. The second most interesting thing was watching two sperm whales hunting as a team on sonar. They were cooperating and using their sonar to "herd" fish into a cluster

What would most surprise non-military people about the functioning of the US military?

That the military is NOT inefficient. In a sense, the military is humanity's oldest corporation. The military had been tackling management and productivity problems since the beginning, and I mean the very beginning. So in one sense, an argument could be made that it is the most efficient management structure because it is the most evolved. Now I realize tons of folks will disagree with this assertion, it is purely my opinion, but compared to civilian and corporate bureaucracy (and all comparisons must be made at scale), I feel the military has the edge. (don't compare a 5 man startup to the DOD, there is no comparison in agility there)

Are you a shell back?

Yep, I posted a little story in another thread. I'm a "golden shell back" because we crossed the Int'l Date line and Equator at the same time

Hello, thank you for your time

With life burning out, how should we enjoy our time?

I think we need to recast ourselves from conquerors to stewards. We have a moral obligation now to put our best minds and efforts to trying to undo the desolation. I've been contemplating this for some time now. Everyone knows the famous Spiderman quote: With great power comes great responsibility" well, as the dominate species on Earth the time has come to take responsibility for our actions as a species.

what is your education background besides being a naval officer?

I majored in psychology and conducted research on cognition—specifically the representation of pictures and words in memory—at Vanderbilt. After my naval tour, I became a Park Leadership Fellow and earned a MBA from Cornell University. After B-School, I started a small business and did some entrepreneurial stuff before gravitating toward story-telling. I'm a full time author now.

Boomer or Fast Attack?

fast attack

How many time were you told to “look the other way?”

What do you mean by this?