Tactical Wealth: From Military to Money

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the capacity of the human system is, is always bigger than most people imagine

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classic never judge a book by its cover.

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Unknown
one of the reasons we wanted to have this conversation was to really, like, tease out this idea of like,

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okay, you come at a service, and you want to

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build a company.

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Like, who? Who is that appropriate for? Who is it not, if you do decide to do it, what are the things you should be thinking about?

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you can be an entrepreneur and not have to be building your own company.

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if you live and work in a high stress environment and you don't have the right tools to sleep well and deactivate and manage your nervous system, that takes a toll on your health.

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For too long, those that have worn the cloth of the country, that have fought and sacrificed for our nation have been left out of the greatest financial engine the world has ever seen. My service paved the way for my success, and that's true for so many venture partners. In fact, some of the greatest companies were created by veterans.

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I'm your host, Carson, and in each episode, we'll bring you the stories and the wisdom of those who have gone from boots on the ground to successful careers, from military to wealth and how they've done it. So you can apply those insights to your own mission and life. Welcome to tactical wealth, from military to money.

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Unknown
All right. Before we get tactical, if you had to sum up your journey from Navy service to entrepreneurship in one sentence, what would it be?

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Unknown
An act of accidental intentionality. Nice. Nice. Happy accident. Yeah, yeah, 100%. I would say that, the the story of Arena Labs is in some ways accidental and in other ways, decades in the making. We can kind of deconstruct that. A lot of it has to do with service, not just in the military, but seeing my mom is a nurse and growing up in a household that was service oriented.

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Unknown
And what's one moment from your time in the teams that has sort of reshaped how you see the world? I think in special operations in general? I think the reverence people have for the special operations community is this, I often say it's overly mythologized. But at the end of the day, it's very cliche, but it's it's about the people.

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Unknown
I think for me, going back to early days in training, you, you truly begin to understand

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a the capacity of the human system is, is always bigger than most people imagine and be the classic never judge a book by its

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cover. I think of like some of the most capable men I served with. And how initially you would never understand their capacity, either intellectually or physically or just in terms of pure heart.

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And I do really aim to bring that into how we think about our work now and just how I live in terms of

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how do you find the deeper part of someone else as well and getting to know them?

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Unknown
I am super excited about today's episode, in part because we share such similar trajectories. Naval Academy to seal teams to fancy graduate schools, to, entrepreneurship. Attacking that world. And I've wanted to get to know you for a long time. Obviously we have similar mindsets. That's why how we pick similar outfits without even coordinating.

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Unknown
Today's guest is, Brian Ferguson. He is the CEO and founder of Arena Labs, a company that helps medical professionals perform in an optimal way. Using tools that come are rooted and grounded in human performance science. He's advised the Pentagon, he's collaborated with top performers across the domains and discipline of medicine, sports and defense, obviously. And he is committed to unlocking human potential at scale.

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Unknown
Brian Ferguson, welcome to the podcast. I am so honored to have you here. I'm so honored to finally meet another seal, another fellow colleague who's, stepped off into the void of entrepreneurship. Thank you. Amazing. So, let's start with your, background. How did you how did you come to your military service? Is this, the family tradition?

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Unknown
Yeah. So to make it, is succinct as possible, I think, is that there's. We were just saying before they could talk for days on some of these themes, but, you know, I, I really did life backwards. I did not join the military until I was. I was 28. I was 29 when I started, you know, basic what's called, you know, basic Seal training in 30 when I finished.

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Unknown
You have to get a waiver right? I did not. I was right on the cusp, right on the money. So actually living in Florida. But the reason I joined was was multifold. I had grown up in a house of service. My mom was a nurse. So we say, like in arena, we talk a lot about the service archetype.

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Unknown
And then obviously listeners here are, you know, people are coming out of uniform or, you know, they're a spouse to someone in uniform. I think when you live around that, it's hard to see the world through any other lens than service. I always thought I'd go into medicine and I ended up studying international relations in college. And then the summer after 911, I went to a public school in Ohio called Miami University.

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Unknown
And the summer after 911, I had an internship in the white House and, really changed my life. I had a front row seat to history. I then went and worked in National security, first in the white House and then the Pentagon as a civilian, kind of a low level, you know, at the time, just being I was around extraordinary leaders and thinkers, but really seeing how the world was changing.

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Unknown
Simultaneous to that, my younger brother served in the Army. He had gone into infantry, Ranger school, and then he was in special operations. And so here I was in the Pentagon and, you know, I was 28 years old. I love national security, but I knew I didn't want to spend my life, as a civilian.

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Unknown
I really I felt like I missed the chance to serve. And there's a longer conversation, I think, on, a number of elements around that physicality that I was really drawn to. But but later in life, you know, I had a number of mentors in national security who really helped me understand the role I might play in the opportunity.

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Unknown
And, frankly, got lucky. I almost missed the chance. But, yeah, it was an extraordinary journey. Yeah. 28 is late in life to go through buds. Yeah. I mean, there was a point where it was like favorable to 30 and I think the oldest. Yeah. So I think for I at the time it's probably changed. But in you know, 2008, the, I think it was 28 was a cutoff for an officer.

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Unknown
You had to get into OCS, and then 35 might have been the cutoff or enlisted. So yeah, but I, you know, you know, the deal. I would say, like most things in life, within reason, being older is nothing but an advantage. Now, obviously, for the military, you have to keep your body in good shape. But if you've done that, like more experience and reference points is nothing but an advantage.

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Unknown
And so when you graduate, where where do you go? What were you? I went to the West Coast. Okay. Yeah, as did I. West coast. West coast. That I really was lucky. Had some extraordinary mentors and, Yeah, it was, I was it, I was out there for six years and just really lucky. Incredible.

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Unknown
Yeah. And one of the things that you did that's maybe unique in the officer pipeline is you really worked in some, some innovation within the Seal community, within the special operations community. Can can you tell me about what you did and how that kind of helped prep you for what you did on the outside? Yeah, I think, I, I reflect on it now.

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Unknown
It's funny. So I've been out of the military for nine years, which is a bit surreal. And I think about that era, again, kind of 2010, when when I was in the Pentagon, there was a huge focus, if you think again, about what 911 did, is it just it changed the way we thought about conflict and war because we were no longer fighting a nation state.

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Unknown
We had this, you know, decentralized, networked enemy. And that meant we had to think differently about technology. And so I was, you know, in those in those years, you know, between two secretaries, defense, Secretary Rumsfeld and then gates, but there was this emerging focus on, you know, you could you could quickly see how technology was just changing the battlefield.

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Unknown
And so I was I was really fortunate to be around the emerging tech landscape. And then I went and worked for a leader, actually, down here in Florida named Admiral Jim Stavridis and Ordinary Guy. Well, yeah, we just incidentally, I met him when I was a fellow at, Tufts University Jepson Center for Counterterrorism Studies, one of the greatest thinkers, military civilian minds ever.

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Unknown
He's so inspirational. And it's interesting, I think just for I think for listeners, especially Virgin and entrepreneurship, like it. The threat it pulls is and we get to come back to this. But like,

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Unknown
you can be an entrepreneur and not have to be building your own company.

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Unknown
And sorry, this was in many ways, I think like he had that very strong entrepreneurial bend.

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Unknown
But he was focused. So he had built something in the Pentagon called Deep Blue, which was the early days of the Navy thinking about innovation and just frankly, bringing, unorthodox thinkers in. I met him when he was, Secretary Rumsfeld, senior military advisor, and he actually became a mentor. Really helped me get into the Navy. But Stavridis, when he got his fourth star, became what's called a combatant commander.

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Unknown
So just pick on commander. Right. Well, he was actually here in U.S. Southern Command in Doral, Florida. So. So I lived in Miami at the time working for him. I was on assignment from the Pentagon and was to Reese was doing it was very interesting. Was he understood as the as the the national security community was modernizing. We had to think differently about how we leverage the private sector and innovation and entrepreneurship, the whole spectrum.

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Unknown
And so he built something down here that was engaging with the private sector on things like, counter-narcotics and the shipping industry. So as you can imagine, the cruise ship industry sees a lot of illicit trafficking. And he was he was the guy thinking about, okay, how do we build better relationships there? So I work for us, and learned a ton about how you think about emerging technology in the, the bigger landscape of a bureaucracy.

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Unknown
Fast forward, you know, by the time I was in the Navy, I ended, I went from the West Coast out to Hawaii. I worked for a very sharp leader named Travis Schweitzer, who's the commodore for basically undersea special operations to make it. Exactly. Yeah. And so at the time, you know, Captain Schweizer Travis was was trying to understand he saw that we had, you know, the the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were dying down.

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Unknown
And those wars, I think we there's a longer conversation, say, in many ways they were a distraction technologically about what we need for, you know, do you think of today's world and sort of the near pure competitors of China, like very different ballgame? And so Travis was an early visionary that saw, okay, we're returning to the water here.

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Unknown
He is leading the undersea special operations footprint. He wanted to think about how to bring emerging technology into that space. And so I had once I decided to leave the military, my last job was building this undersea essentially innovation cell, which for me was a dream job. If I was on active duty because I was I was working with people who were thinking about bringing new technology into this domain.

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Unknown
Yeah, there's some fascinating micro lessons there as well. And I think the two of them that you kind of touched on are just about mentorship in general, like you got sort of readers who has these, these tentacles into influencing so many of us that he touched. Right, into these alternative career paths or into an entrepreneurial mind ship?

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Unknown
I'd put myself in that category, having read his book, like having been mentored by him at, at the Jepson Center. And then Travis Schweitzer, obviously. Right. Like that sort of culture of innovation. And then you translate that outside

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Unknown
because I think one of the challenges for people when they get out of the military is like, there's not a huge civilian market for underwater demolition, right?

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Unknown
Yeah. There's nobody like, you can't really put that out of your board intercom like did resume. And people are like, oh, I need that guy to blow up a boat for me. Right. So like, what do you think are like the skills that you actually pick up through military service that are most translatable in the, in the private sector?

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Unknown
I thought a lot of coming in this because, you know, a passion of mine and I'm grateful for what you're doing here is like how you know, I've, I've intermittently over the last nine years done a lot of work with people transitioning out of either special operations or other parts of service, and I struggle. I like what is the meta lesson?

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Unknown
And I think number one, we were talking before the show. I think especially in special operations, people are entrepreneurs at heart. But that doesn't mean you should start a company. And I think most people in the military are hungry to have a high sense of agency and impact, which is usually not going to come in a when you're a cog in a larger, large organization.

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Unknown
So the question is where do you fit? I think for me, the probably the meta lesson that I take away of those leaders, number one, it's I mean, the very cliche, but it's about people. And then how do you think about for yourself the, the threads that allow you to feel like you're still serving something bigger and creating.

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Unknown
And I think that, again, is like that's it's a it's a trite statement, but I where I see people struggle is we take for granted. When you're in military service, you're always serving like that's the subtext of everything. And I think when you leave and just dive into something in the private sector that's strictly about revenue or profit, it just sucks the soul a little bit.

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Unknown
So you have to start with like, how am I going to pull that thread a service and then like, what's the risk calculus? I'm willing to take in this next season? And that's totally different for everyone. Yeah, I think that part, when you at least consider the culture of entrepreneurship.

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Unknown
And I think one of the things, one of the reasons we wanted to have this conversation was to really, like, tease out this idea of like, okay, you come at a service, and you want to build a company.

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Unknown
Like, who? Who is that appropriate for? Who is it not, if you do decide to do it, what are the things you should be thinking about? So let's let's talk about that risk calculus and that risk profile, like it's different if you serve if you serve 20 years, you're used to, a regular paycheck. Maybe you have your TSP, but you have like a family to support.

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Unknown
Like the slope for entrepreneurship is steeper, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to hit that quickly. What I do, you know, some of the work I've done in and around this question is, I think at a basic level, someone in going into special operations has a pretty high individual risk calculus to say I'm, you know, betting on myself when, you know, if you go 20 years and you come out and you've got three kids and, you're, you're the sole income earner, it's a lot harder to have that same approach.

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Unknown
However, if you shift your risk calculus to zero, I think that's where people end up really yearning for something more. And that's the work to say. Where on that spectrum am I going to shift? I will say, I mean, starting a company. I advise most people against that because it is it is insanely all consuming and difficult, as you know.

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Unknown
However, you know, what I see now is like the people who've come out, in, in some way the I think cause the thing that I often the starting place I mentioned service earlier, but when you're in the military, especially for, for 20 years, like it's you sort of forget your, your time is someone else's at the end of the day.

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Unknown
And so it's the reason people squabble over, you know, a per diem trip or dive pay because it really is like, you can't you don't have any other way to make money. And so that becomes a point of contention. When you get out of the military, your time is now wholly yours. And so I think the way to start is to say, you know, I call it the portfolio lifestyle.

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Unknown
When you're getting back up that learning curve to say, where do I want to sit? The more you can control your own time and allocate it carefully to to, you know, being around new mentors, new people, new challenges, it helps make that that clear. Now, I know that's challenging if you've been in for 20 years, but I think there are still more creative ways to do it than to say I'm going to take a full time paycheck and give my time again.

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Unknown
But now it's going to be a big company where there is not that threat of service. And I think that's where you start to see a real tension for people. Yeah, I mean, like, I, I felt this tension myself when I got off active duty. I said,

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Unknown
never again will I be in a position where somebody can tell me, like, you have to do this and you have to go there, and you have zero choice,

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Unknown
or else they'll throw you a jail.

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Unknown
Right? And then somebody reminded me like, well, that's okay, because outside of the military, indentured servitude doesn't really exist. So you're, you're good. You're absolutely good. But I do think this is an important principle. One of the things that you talk about that I think is so profound is this idea that you can be an entrepreneur without starting your own company, explain that to people so they understand.

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Unknown
Yeah. I mean, there's this some of these words feel a little corny, but the idea of entrepreneurs, one that comes up a lot. And, you know, the question is, you know, if you exist in a large a large business or some sort of a large infrastructure, that's a big set of companies where you have a lot of autonomy and creativity to either focus on leadership or mentorship.

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Unknown
That allows people to feel like they're building and creating. The classic definition of entrepreneurship is starting something solely on your own. Now, that might be if if you're going to go out and just, you know, a lot of people get out and want to be sort of advisors or coaches, I think that always hits its own limit, where you start to realize you're exchanging time for money and that becomes its own indentured servitude.

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Unknown
I went through that when we first started arena. We were a services business, like a consultancy. I was on the road all the time, was in hospitals all the time. And it was it was grinding me. But the classic, you know, I think the definition people sort of Revere is I'm going to go out, I've got a big idea, I'm going to start a company.

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Unknown
I'm gonna raise a ton of money. With that comes insane responsibility that, you know, inside the military, even on the hardest day, you always know you've got a huge institution behind you to back you up, whether that's, you know, literally in kind of being rescued in a bad situation, tactically or just in, you know, a legal dispute when you're building something on your own.

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Unknown
You know, one of my the sort of early hires in our company, Glenn Trachtenberg, uses this great analogy, which she says, you know, when you're an entrepreneur, in some ways you're glamping, right? Or you're in a big company and glamping is, hey, like you're trying this thing. And if it doesn't work out, I'm going to go back inside the main lodge and I'm like, you know, I've got nice toilets and infrastructure inside warm showers.

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Unknown
Building something from scratch is like being in the Alaskan outback. You're in the hinterland and if you don't figure it out, it is existential, like the company goes away. And if you've all if you put all your chips on that, that means you're back to square one. And that is a very high risk calculus. So, so that's where like there's a whole longer conversation there.

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Unknown
But I think it's sometimes it's okay to go out glamping if you've earned it for 20 years in the military, and you want to have some of those creature comforts for your family, that's totally reasonable. Yeah. And I think the takeaway there reminds me of this great anecdote, which I heard about Elon one time, which is that when Elon got fired from PayPal, the company that he had founded, he took all of the money that he had.

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Unknown
And I mean literally all of the money, and he reinvested it into PayPal and the one in the company that had just fired him, and he went out to dinner with his family that night. And his ATM card got declined because he literally had taken every penny he had and put it into a company that had just fired him.

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Unknown
A lot of people with families are not willing to sit at the restaurant and have their ATM card declined. So his risk calculus, this risk portfolio profile that we're talking about is obviously very high. And I do think it's actually a caution that probably special operations folks specifically need, sometimes I like to think that sometimes the same skills that made us successful in the teams and in the special operations community, we have to we have to modify some of those instincts when we translate them into the private sector.

00:19:09:20 - 00:19:37:10
Unknown
Right? Yeah. In the teams, you are rewarded for running through a wall. In the private sector, you can more often be rewarded for figuring out like how to go around the wall, had a tunnel under the wall, had to go over the wall. But you don't necessarily need to, like, never quit. By all means necessary. Yeah. And there's an identity element to that too, which is when you come out of the military, what is more important, I think, in the spirit of this discussion and in what tactical wealth is doing, is just to complete the hero's journey.

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Unknown
And this is Joseph Campbell's idea of like,

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Unknown
at some point you have to come home to yourself and say, how have I changed?

00:19:42:00 - 00:19:58:07
Unknown
Because again, that the calculus you made going in when you join the military, that higher risk calculus, you want to keep some element of that. Like that's clearly in your soul to take risks and do hard things, but especially if you've got a family in that landscape's change and you've evolved as a person, that means you probably have to think about things differently.

00:19:58:07 - 00:20:17:20
Unknown
And, you know, I look at, you know, when I started arena, I was not yet a father. And I have a daughter who's six, and I even see if I'm being honest, my risk calculus has continue to change because I think that's just the innate that's human nature. And almost to the point where, like, once you start to build for a while, you want to de-risk things early on, you need that.

00:20:17:20 - 00:20:36:20
Unknown
I'm all in mindset to build anything worth. I think it's value in the world. But that, you know, it's a real deep conversation to say, what does that look like? Yeah, I really like this idea of like the dynamic nature of identity, because I think we've all we've seen it so many times, guys who are like, still trying to be that guy.

00:20:36:20 - 00:20:58:08
Unknown
In the same way, you will always be that guy, but you don't necessarily have to wear it on your sleeve. Like in the in the same way, and in some ways it can be a hindrance to further growth. I want to talk about arena because I'm actually personally very interested in it. So you come out of the Seal teams, you have a really interesting cadre of experience because you had done stuff in the private sector before.

00:20:58:10 - 00:21:12:01
Unknown
Why the health care sector? So back to my story, which is why on the front end we said, you know, how did go at one, one sentence sort of accidental intention? I think the intention for me was I always wanted to be on service. It was a subtext in my life. Several my uncles were in Vietnam.

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Unknown
Both my grandfathers were in World War two. It was never expected. I was kid around. My parents were both 60s hippies.

00:21:18:01 - 00:21:31:10
Unknown
my dad was definitely a hippie who, There's a whole nother story there who I saw, I think, grapple with being more in a traditional role. Like, he he didn't pull that inspired soul of creativity in himself. He was a talented musician.

00:21:31:10 - 00:21:49:23
Unknown
But all that to say, my mom was a nurse. I thought I'd go into health care. And so, serendipity being what it is, I, when I was leaving the military, I met a heart surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic so that the heart, the Cleveland Clinic is ranked number one in the world now for like 30 years. And heart surgery and heart surgery is really interesting because in a lot of ways it's similar or special operations.

00:21:49:23 - 00:22:05:17
Unknown
You've got a team of 8 to 12 people in a time compressed environment, meaning when you when you stop the human heart to do surgery, the longer that person is on this machine that is pumping the heart artificially, the higher the risk of stroke. So there is just a subtext of of having to move fast. There's pressure and stress.

00:22:05:19 - 00:22:18:18
Unknown
And so I went in, I it was fun for me because I went to this place where, you know, I'm from Cleveland, Ohio. This is, you know, where I'd grown up. It was this, this revered sort of shining star on the hill. And here I am at the number one place in the history of the world of heart surgery.

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Unknown
And on one hand, I was blown away by the technological advancement of the modern operating room. On the other hand, life came full circle. I realize that my mom is a nurse. Doctors, surgeons never get access to the basic tools that were foundational in military training and that are foundational for athletes in a lot of creative performance, which is how do I manage myself, especially in a high stress career.

00:22:39:19 - 00:23:00:05
Unknown
And so that, you know, there's a longer story that I'll save for now. But when I was going through training because I was a bit older, there was a guy named Kirk Parsley who had been a Seal and became a medical doctor, and he was the medical doctor to the West Coast Seal teams. But Kirk was early on looking at the signature of of what's called high allostatic load wear and tear in the body from stress over the long arc of a seal.

00:23:00:05 - 00:23:06:19
Unknown
Career and Kirk's work ten years later was published and I was known as operator syndrome. But operator center basically says if you

00:23:06:19 - 00:23:14:23
Unknown
if you live and work in a high stress environment and you don't have the right tools to sleep well and deactivate and manage your nervous system, that takes a toll on your health.

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Unknown
And so, you know, the world, it's essentially like in layman's terms, being in a state of like fight or flight for a sustained period of time.

00:23:23:20 - 00:23:41:14
Unknown
Yeah, yeah. And there's deleterious effects, right. Like to that from a hormonal perspective, like from physiological perspective, all that. Yeah. And I would say like right now in society for any listener this is becoming more mainstream. Like these are wearable devices. Whether you have a Woohp inner ring an Apple Watch. People are learning about the importance of sleep recovery.

00:23:41:14 - 00:23:59:06
Unknown
And most people feel more stressed today than they did five years ago because of social media and pressure. So all that to say that that experience led to this conversation with that heart surgeon to say, how come you guys don't train these tools to manage yourself? And it's just we don't have time. And medical school, in nursing school, that led a long journey to what we now call high performance medicine.

00:23:59:06 - 00:24:12:18
Unknown
And the provocative question we ask is, why don't we give frontline medical teams the same tools, coaching and data as other high stakes, high stress professions? Yeah, I really like this lesson a lot for guys who are thinking guys and gals who are thinking about transitioning out, right.

00:24:12:18 - 00:24:22:22
Unknown
What you did is you looked at in similar ways to what our friend Richard, of any genders you looked like at these optimum human optimization, high performance skills.

00:24:22:22 - 00:24:41:17
Unknown
What makes people internally really good and able to perform at a high level. And then you were able to take those ideas and help translate them into something in the civilian sector? Yeah. And I'm always like, you know, I feel really humble that I really had an unremarkable career in the teams in the sense, you know, I was when I got out, I really want to stay in.

00:24:41:17 - 00:24:59:11
Unknown
But I was older and it but it was unequivocally the most extraordinary experience in my life. And when I, when I really boil it down, I think a number one like standing on the shoulders of giants, the amount we were learning at the time about the human system under stress and pressure. You had a small community of guys who carried the load of two wars.

00:24:59:13 - 00:25:24:07
Unknown
Many of these people, my mentors and when you when I, you know, sort of got out into the civilian world, I say the one time in my life I saw a coming tidal wave no one else could was human factors. I saw that these wearable sensors were going to change the world, into land and medicine. This this service world and say, wow, like, how do you guys not think about not just what special operations is doing, but, you know, pro Sport is doing this, the creative arts.

00:25:24:09 - 00:25:48:16
Unknown
And so when you I think it's tough when you're wired that way and you see a problem that seems solvable and no one's working on it, it almost becomes this thing that, like, you can't look away from. And so it's, it's taken, I think, for me, I feel, if nothing else, the, the special operations community allowed this connective tissue of all these extraordinary people that had been mentors to me or were one degree removed for someone who could help solve that.

00:25:48:18 - 00:25:55:03
Unknown
And it's just been invaluable. And and where's Arena Labs at now? What stage of the entrepreneurial journey are you at?

00:25:55:03 - 00:26:18:02
Unknown
what's interesting about arena story, we were pre-COVID. We were a services business. We would deploy into hospitals. We would take a multidisciplinary team of people who had maybe some people from the military, the creative arts, sport, embed in a hospital for up to six weeks and be in the clinical spaces, meaning the operating rooms, the ICU, the Ed, and then we would run workshops to train doctors and nurses on the same tools that were either, you know, part

00:26:18:02 - 00:26:36:22
Unknown
of the military, the creative arts community or in sport. When Covid happened, we started using biometric sensors in about 2019 to get an objective signature of stress post-Covid. We so that version of the company burned to the ground when Covid happened, because we all of our contracts were to be on the ground and we we were non-essential personnel.

00:26:37:00 - 00:26:54:12
Unknown
So I went through having to rebuild the business as a technology platform. That was in 2021. And we just we hired a whole new team. And that's been remarkable. It's it's own challenge building a technology and data company. But we've got a small team of 20 people. We've done two smaller rounds. It's not for this discussion.

00:26:54:12 - 00:27:12:19
Unknown
I've got pretty contrarian views on how to think about being capital efficient and trying to control more of our own destiny. We're still a human performance company. We offer human coaches, but we have to do that through technology. So we're not a classic kind of venture capital company. So we've done two rounds of funding. And now we, you know, really grateful.

00:27:12:19 - 00:27:34:07
Unknown
We've got partnerships with many of the best hospitals in the country. And we're still very much in the trenches learning and scaling. Yeah. Well, I, I'm keenly personally interested. I don't think we've talked about it, but my, my sister's an er physician major. And I, and I've watched her and her community live with the stress, especially through Covid, and I've watched what's happened in the medical community writ large.

00:27:34:07 - 00:28:03:04
Unknown
So, I understand the demand signal when it comes to Doctor burnout. How how few tools they're actually given through med school and residency in order to deal with, and they also the medical community, specifically the Ed, where my sister works, had this black swan event. Right. And, yeah, I was going to say, like, it's so interesting if you were to that sort of comparison of you and your sister, the tools that were innately part of what you learned, your own passions now outside of the military and here your sister's also clearly a service archetype.

00:28:03:04 - 00:28:23:02
Unknown
She's deeply devoted. And what we see in our data, the, the most, intense signatures of stress and allostatic load are 100% ICU and emergency room physicians. Because in Covid, you know, for the listener, if you think about most people who had Covid and ended up in emergency department a lot of times passed away there or went to the ICU and passed away.

00:28:23:02 - 00:28:48:20
Unknown
And so those people saw insane loss. Unbelievable. I my sister who's like my best friend, we talk about this all the time in fact, we we have like a little moniker in our family for it. We call it like, you know, her job and my job, right? Saving lives and taking lives, which seemed totally disparate and offset, but in reality, the underlying human factors, you know, in terms of, in terms of stress combating stress are almost identical.

00:28:48:23 - 00:29:13:02
Unknown
And so it's so interesting how her and I can shorthand between her profession, my time as commander in the Seal teams. And really the parallels are, are uncanny. So and I think it's really just a hit that I think and it's what we see is that when at the higher order back to I think when someone's just thinking through the lens of transition, like the service component of that is like, clearly it's in your DNA for both you and your sister.

00:29:13:02 - 00:29:30:03
Unknown
And so if you're not continuing to pull that thread, like you end up feeling empty. But, you know, one of our the top values in our company is service. You don't have to have served in the military, but you have to understand what it means to believe in something bigger than yourself. Because as humans, when we do that, number one, it's part of living a, I think, a deeply fulfilling life.

00:29:30:05 - 00:29:48:15
Unknown
But if you don't have the tools to protect against the better angels of your nature, you end up in a huge deficit. Absolutely, absolutely. I want to transition to, one of my favorite sections of the podcast. It's like, I say it's like shooting steel. It's rapid fire. Get instant feedback. So, put you in the hot seat.

00:29:48:16 - 00:29:52:17
Unknown
Yeah, for a second. All right. Best investment you ever made.

00:29:52:17 - 00:29:53:05
Unknown
Loan.

00:29:53:05 - 00:29:58:06
Unknown
Excellent. Yeah. First person to say that. Yeah. And I actually think,

00:29:58:06 - 00:30:01:17
Unknown
this is rapid fire. But just a quick context there for the listener. If you haven't used it, like,

00:30:01:17 - 00:30:06:11
Unknown
I think it's probably from a financial perspective, this I did not appreciate what an amazing instrument that is.

00:30:06:16 - 00:30:26:13
Unknown
But very fortunate. One station who I'd have bought a house out there and like, a place I wouldn't have sniffed otherwise. Yeah. I grew up in a pretty blue collar environment where, you know, I had so much stress buying that house, but the military allowed that. And. Yeah, super grateful. It's one of our big lessons here on the podcast is like how you maximize the full umbrella and spectrum of benefits out there.

00:30:26:13 - 00:30:51:17
Unknown
VA loans, one that we haven't hit on. So I appreciate that. All right. On the flip side, dumbest financial mistake you've ever made. In that same period had just bought this house and had like, you know, maybe 50 grand that I should not have been spending and just investing it and put it into got like, classically, drawn into this quote unquote sexy world of Silicon Valley investments and invested in a company through friends that, you know, was gone in like three years and.

00:30:51:22 - 00:31:09:13
Unknown
Yeah. Yeah. And like, what had no business didn't really understand the technology, didn't it just seemed cool. And it was like a hard lesson in the distractions of investment and all the classic things. $50,000 lesson in early stage. You think about that point in my life that was a lot of money. Yeah. I mean, even now, it still stings when I think about it.

00:31:09:15 - 00:31:33:11
Unknown
A, a military habit that, you carry into the civilian world. I think it's just rigorous stewardship of my mind and body. I mean, I think that's like, unequivocally, what I love the most about the special operations community, I would say, like, when I was in the Pentagon and I was around these special operations leaders, they were not only physically capable, but always intellectually curious.

00:31:33:13 - 00:31:59:12
Unknown
And I think those combinations of traits allow for that. That's ultimately, to me, human potential over time, a book that helped shape your mindset. I'm going to go with two. Well, I'd say mindset in particular. Man's search for meaning. Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor like classic one on one on attitude in life. When I was actually living here in South Florida in 2008, really struggling, I was kind of older, like, do I join the military?

00:31:59:17 - 00:32:17:02
Unknown
I had a reasonably successful career in national security. Like, do I take this risk? And I read The Alchemist, and Paulo Coelho. It can feel cliche, but it is a deep exploration of listening to the heart in, in one's sort of inner yearnings, to, to steward your own life in that really change might change the arc of my life.

00:32:17:04 - 00:32:22:04
Unknown
First thing you do in the morning or morning routine, this is kind of a real time change of answer.

00:32:22:04 - 00:32:38:06
Unknown
In the last two weeks, what I've shifted back to. And you can appreciate this college and building a company. I got out of the routine of working out first thing. I love getting up early. I've always loved the solitude and quiet in the morning. So up until three weeks ago, it was, I would sit in my library in the dark and just either meditator.

00:32:38:06 - 00:32:53:11
Unknown
Right. I now get up and go right into working out because the real the dynamism of my day, I kid myself saying I'm going to work out later. And I was really finding myself in suboptimal shape. So now it's just start with a workout. Yeah, yeah. And and we've said it so many times, both on this podcast.

00:32:53:11 - 00:33:11:21
Unknown
You and I have hit on it a bunch. Keeping keeping your knife sharp physically is kind of essential to dominating in other domains of. Yeah. And I will say that just for the listener here, I think it is an important consideration when you're looking at your next, what are you moving into? I think a lot of people discount the need for physicality.

00:33:12:01 - 00:33:28:18
Unknown
People join the military because they love being physical. You're literally paid to work out. Most places you go work after the military are not going to pay you to work out. And so but if you can find a place that does, I think there's a that skews higher and thinking about what is wealth. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Health as well.

00:33:28:20 - 00:33:47:17
Unknown
Yeah. Another theme that we hit on constantly. Great. How can we, follow arenas journey and your journey. Yeah. So, and more importantly, how can I get my sister on the program? Yeah. We'd love to have your sister. And, I mean, we are. Yeah. Anyone I will say is, I guess, sort of, self-serving here for our team.

00:33:47:21 - 00:33:59:03
Unknown
If you're listening, you have someone in your family who's a clinician, doctor, nurse. You know, our our work we call high performance medicine arena Labs echo. And you can find us on Instagram at Arena Labs.

00:33:59:03 - 00:34:12:03
Unknown
just generally these conversations I am passionate I will say like as a plug anyone listening to this, I mean to think like you, I am really committed in love, helping, helping people who are who are trying to ask the question, do I want to start a business or be an entrepreneur?

00:34:12:05 - 00:34:14:13
Unknown
And so I, you know, please reach out there.

00:34:14:13 - 00:34:16:19
Unknown
Brian, thanks for your service and your continued mission.

00:34:17:21 - 00:34:40:20
Unknown
Hey, thanks again for walking in with us today. I hope this episode stimulated the old brain housing unit. Step one to becoming richer is becoming smarter, and I hope some of the lessons and ideas from today have sharpened your knife. As always, I hope you're taking notes and more importantly, that you're taking action. Thanks again to Siebert Bauer and Siebert Financial for the support.

00:34:40:22 - 00:34:47:09
Unknown
And remember, stay tactical, stay driven. And don't forget to bang that subscribe button.

00:34:51:06 - 00:34:53:01
Unknown
You can.

00:34:59:01 - 00:35:04:09
Unknown
Find.

00:35:04:09 - 00:35:24:05
Unknown
Tactical wealth is a Gabby, a media production brought to you by Siebert Valor, a military focused initiative from Siebert Financial. The Tactical Wealth Podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Siebert Financial. This podcast does not constitute investment advice or an offer to sell or solicitation to buy any securities.

00:35:24:07 - 00:35:30:15
Unknown
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Listeners should consult a qualified financial professional before making any investment decisions.