Ep 4 - Financial and Life Survival Strategies with a Special Ops Veteran Chadwick Ford: Tactics for Overcoming Biases in Wealth and Warfare

• Military and financial planning share strategic parallels. Both require mission-oriented planning, risk assessment, and disciplined decision-making to navigate uncertainties and achieve long-term success.
• Risk management is essential. As reconnaissance reduces battlefield uncertainty, financial tools like insurance and diversification safeguard against unexpected setbacks.
• Success comes from adaptability. Understanding history, assessing risks, and evolving strategies are key to long-term financial and warfare success.

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Voiceover: Welcome to the Crazy Wealthy Podcast with your host, Jonathan Blau. Whether you're just starting [00:00:30] out or are an experienced investor, join Jonathan as he seeks to illuminate and demystify the complexities of making consistently rational financial decisions under conditions of uncertainty. He'll chat with professionals from the [00:00:45] advice world, entrepreneurs, executives.

And more to share fresh perspectives on making sound decisions that maximize your well. And now here's your host.

Jonathan Blau: Welcome to another episode of the Crazy [00:01:00] Wealthy Podcast. I'm so excited today because I have my good friend, Chadwick Ford, who who's an accomplished soldier and has done great things for our country.

Good person, smart person, and I think. Most importantly, will [00:01:15] be a very interesting podcast because of everything he brings to the table. So without further ado, I want to introduce my friend Chad, Chadwick Ford. And I'm going to let him from a biographical standpoint, tell you who he is, what his history [00:01:30] is because I can't do justice to to it as he can.

So Chad, thanks for joining us today on Crazy Wealthy Podcast.

Chadwick Ford: Hey Jonathan, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. I'm honored to be here. I know when you first came to me with the idea of jumping on the podcast, I'm like [00:01:45] military guy, I figure out what I can do to support.

Hopefully between yourself and the viewers and everyone else, I spent 24 years in the military. My primary role for 20 of those 24 was flying Black Hawk helicopters. I've supported all types of mission [00:02:00] operations overseas. I spent about seven years in combat. My primary role and job was I was the Senior Tactical Operations Officer, so I was in charge of, looking at the campaigns that we were on, looking at the operations we needed to do, and then go meet those [00:02:15] missions and develop a plan for the air, ground, and integration.

I spent time with Special Operations as well. That was the majority of some of our mission sets down in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places. And then culminating my career in the Pentagon. After spending countless [00:02:30] years deployed, which my beautiful wife, Nicole loved very much that I was always going to get to be a single parent.

They gave me a time to spend a few years at the Pentagon and where I supported the chief of staff of the army and the Department of army aviation with how we [00:02:45] do our tactical operations and employment. That's been my previous 24 years and enrolled into the commercial world now.

Jonathan Blau: All right. Great. And by the way, thanks. I, this all started the idea of having you as a guest because you were kind enough to listen to my podcast. And [00:03:00] when you when you gave me some feedback, you said, wow, it's, it was fascinating to you to see that all the biases the systematic errors that I point out investors make are similar to what you have to be aware of as you're looking at your squads, that you man your missions with.

As we talk [00:03:15] about missions you educated me on our Pre call last week preparing for this podcast the difference between a mission militarily and a campaign. And I was trying then to relate it to financial planning. He told me missions are short term narrow tasks [00:03:30] or objectives that you want to accomplish that lead to accomplishing the bigger objective, the mission, the long term objective, the broader objective.

And so I thought about in planning, some of the things that relate to missions to me are. We like our investors to always have three years spending outside of [00:03:45] their investments in equities because equities can decline 30, 35 percent at any time. That's the average down market, bear market. And by having three years spending you don't blow up the plan by having to sell stocks at a temporary decline and create a permanent loss.[00:04:00]

But one of the most important things in terms of the way I've been taught to define financial planning in 20 words or less is it's insuring against what can go wrong. in order to have the luxury of investing for what can go right. And [00:04:15] when I think of that the building blocks that I just described, the diversification, three year spending buying insurance could actually protect you against becoming disabled.

So you still have an income coming in. Otherwise, you'll never reach your long term campaign goal, which [00:04:30] is getting enough money so I can retire comfortably and stay that way. All right. If something happens to me, I'm not insured against it, but insurance paying for insurance could also slow down the time it takes to get to the main campaign objectives, which is retirement.

So I want, I wanted to throw [00:04:45] that out there because also if we don't buy insurance, we could actually jeopardize the entire campaign. If something happened to me and I was no longer able to work I can't continue to try and accomplish the campaign of getting enough money to retire. So with that as a thought process, I'm going to let you [00:05:00] relate some of that to the military and you can, run with it.

But I'm excited to hear your perspective. I appreciate it.

Chadwick Ford: So what I'll say is, What the, my time in service and, again, spending a lot of time downrange and downrange for those, being in a deployed environment, right? You're out [00:05:15] conducting strategic operations and you have multitude of missions.

What you're talking about, it's the same for us during the military decision making process as it would be for how I run my life here, with my family and commercial. I use the same process, the same [00:05:30] thought pattern. Regardless of I'm trying to go out and, do a, an air assault or a ground assault where we're doing a kill capture mission is the same thing.

If I'm deciding this weekend, taking my daughter to cheer, I do the same thought process and same planning and the steps and a lot of what [00:05:45] you just talked about was, looking at what the big goals are the campaign that you're trying to accomplish for the year for the multitude of years whatever that time span is.

And what small mission or small actions do I need to do leading up to it to make that, the most successful that it can be. And by [00:06:00] doing that, I, we focused on, on 1 risk management. But the 1 thing you brought up that are really 1 of the highlight was, you talked about planning for things that could happen or that worst case scenario, for, and it would benefit things that, [00:06:15] that.

May happen, or it could be the most beneficial. And I'm probably wording it wrong, but I just wanted to say we really look at how our contingency planning. I want to go down a path of, what could go wrong and I spent a lot of time [00:06:30] understanding that these are all the steps that we need to take for things that could go wrong.

So I'm prepared. That means I don't have panic when it happens. I don't have indecisiveness that happens and I'm very, we take action and we move and transition from the best plan in the world [00:06:45] that is the most perfect day, flying or the perfect day going after a target. There's no, nothing's happening wrong whatsoever and to, hey, there's a little bit of turmoil that we have and there's a little bit of things that are happening we need to adjust for.

It allows you not to stress, [00:07:00] not to panic, make those quick decisions. I don't say quick, but educated decisions to stay on target, to stay on task, to go after that mission that supports your long term objective. So it's something that I do believe relates a lot. I do believe that [00:07:15] you one of the things on targeting we would go do of how I want to approach a mission.

Not every mission is going to be the be all end all the sexy one, right? It may be an enabler, it may be an environmental setter, it may be going out [00:07:30] and setting the environment for me to accomplish another mission that is going after my objective or my campaign. Like you saw that insurance, I don't mean it sounds in a bad way, but insurance doesn't sound sexy, but it's a necessary evil in order to go after, so [00:07:45] you have put that into your plan and it's there.

It's something that enables you to do other things and reduce your risk. So hopefully. I was just saying insurance is not sexy. It doesn't hurt anybody's feelings, but just

Jonathan Blau: so it's not only not sexy, but some [00:08:00] people are offended by it, but when they hear the term insurance as a suggested activity should engage in, let me ask you a question.

I'm talking partly out of ignorance but what comes to my mind when you're talking about insurance and not sexy and relating it to military is a reconnaissance mission. Would that be like maybe the equivalent [00:08:15] of insurance?

Chadwick Ford: Yeah, so think about it. So for us, we do what's called pattern of life development.

So if I'm going after, and we have a, again, a kill capture mission or capture kill, depending upon if we want to, the target needs to be removed, or if it's just, we want to bring back and get more [00:08:30] information. If we're going to be over the objective, I must do what's called pattern of life development.

And a part of that is understanding the environmental situation. Is the guy a financier, is there an. Is there something that they are trying to accomplish [00:08:45] that town that city could have a lot structure? Let's say this, the plot structures in the weight bearing kind of land on that house.

I need to understand that environment. I understand that there's antennas wires power, there's threats ring. So we put up, [00:09:00] ISR. So we put up unmanned vehicles to go out, fly around, and do video. There's fixed wing guys that love, and I say that sarcastically, flying NASCARs, what we call it.

They fly around in circles. The mission is not sexy. You're up at altitude, and you're making left hand [00:09:15] turns, and you're just flying around in a circle, for hours on end. And it's not something that, as an aviator, you're like, this is the most fun thing ever. I'm flat. I'm in a bank. I'm sitting there.

I can fall asleep. You can do math homework because it's just not a lot going [00:09:30] on. You're not landing. You're not taking off. So that's what I was meaning by it's a necessary evil that you must have it to reduce risk for yourself. But when you get those missions, you're like, oh, crap. I really don't want to fly NASCAR tonight.

Jonathan Blau: One of the things we use the term risk. One of the things that I've [00:09:45] learned in trying to help people in the field that I try to help them with is in order to address risk properly, what I've learned is and this may sound silly to some people, but the broad industry I work in. I'd say 95 percent of [00:10:00] those who practice misdefined risk, they define risk and safety for the investor in terms of the need to protect their principle from fluctuating.

They call that volatility. And in doing that, and the misdefining the risk, the solutions are the wrong ones. So the solution to [00:10:15] control movement of temporary movements in a portfolio to add more bonds, things that freeze the dollar. And when they freeze the dollar, so if I put a dollar in a bond today, and it matures in 10 years, I still have a dollar, but I need a dollar thirty to buy what a dollar used to buy, so I have to [00:10:30] start unwinding my principle.

So by misdefining the risk, what actually is happening, the industry is hoisting on the investor the only real risk, which I call the inflation risk. So inflation which eats away at the value of every dollar that's frozen. In the face of [00:10:45] 3 percent increase in costs year by year that inflation risk is the disease of money.

And by, by adding bonds into the portfolio, just to control movement of the portfolio, you're actually freezing more and more money. You're killing the [00:11:00] dollars. You're killing the dollar. So by mis So risk and safety, to help the investor, needs to be defined not in terms of protecting principle from fluctuating, but protecting buying power from disappearing.

And the very cure for the [00:11:15] wrong definition of risk is what kills the investor. How Does that relate to anything at all in your world? Misdefining risk, in other words, and going after the wrong things because of it?

Chadwick Ford: So that's the thing. So we have, And I love using these terms because it [00:11:30] always confuses people and I apologize, but we have things like we say the we have the knowns, right?

So we have the known risk. Then we have the unknown known. Which means we don't know there's just something we have a sense or something out there that could be risk, but we just [00:11:45] don't know it. And then you have the known unknown. I have a gap in data gap in information. So there's some fun things that we do.

You sit there and you start doing your assessing mission parameters. You look at what resources we have. Timelines and obstacles, but when it [00:12:00] comes to misidentifying risk, we may look at. Flying in, obscure weather that we have weather that we can't see. We're flying a night vision.

There may be things that put our mission at a higher risk. However, it also provides a safety [00:12:15] as well, because if you can't see through obscurations the enemy cannot see through obscurations. The 1 thing that we tried to do is own the environment. Just because in normal, non special operations type stuff, the [00:12:30] risk would increase to try to fly in intermittent weather, dust storms, things of that nature.

We embrace it. That's where our skillset comes in. So we don't see it. Yes. Is it a risk? Is it harder? Yes. It makes life harder. But we don't miss [00:12:45] identify it and make decisions based upon. Hey, we have low line clouds. I can fly through and use radar use different things to be able to get through that cloud is to conduct the mission.

Some people would cancel that saying, hey, we, that's too [00:13:00] scary for us. We can't do that. We can't fly through, but I think that comes through for us through our training, through our assets, what we have available, how we are prepared to, to go out and mitigate that risk. So that may be one of the areas when misidentifying [00:13:15] risks that, that.

It's not always scary. It's not always going to be something that jeopardizes the mission. It's just how you react to it. So if you're going to react to it by having a bias, you're going to react to it for having some sort of, of, I call it [00:13:30] emotional reaction versus a planned out thought through and you have the training to get.

Through that makes sense. I'm going on a path. I guess that makes sense.

Jonathan Blau: Makes sense. First of all, just to clarify with the example you gave with the [00:13:45] clouds, I would assume that's a known unknown, right? We know there's always going to be clouds. We just don't know how many and when we're going to encounter them, but we know how to deal with it.

That's a known unknown.

Chadwick Ford: Yes. So yeah, the Air Force guys give you weather reports. You know what's there. What you don't understand is we're fog. The fog comes from the ground. You can't really see it [00:14:00] with radars. Or if you're in Afghanistan, there's not all these reporting facilities in the mountains of the Hindu,

Jonathan Blau: so if, yeah, but if you, that's right, if you have, so in our world, I know Donald Rumsfeld, by the way, in your world was credited for this. Cause I quoted him in an article I was writing. I love he, he [00:14:15] always, he said that in the military it's never. The known unknowns that kill you.

It's the unknown unknowns. And in my world, I use that in the article because investors are constantly worried about the known unknowns, right? The things we can [00:14:30] articulate. So for example what's going to happen. Are we going to go into a recession? We have a recession every seven years.

It's a known unknown. The unknown part is we don't know when the next one's coming, how deep it's going to be and when it's going to end. But it's a known unknown. We know that they come and they go. It's you don't react [00:14:45] to them by changing your, your, changing your mission, screwing up your mission.

Don't abandon your diversification. Don't sell it. Go to cash. And another great unknown. And by the way. The recession, there's been a recession predicted since the beginning of 2022, that most of the [00:15:00] top Wall Street firms are advising clients to prepare for by becoming more defensive in their portfolio, whatever that means.

And that I call it the Godot recession, like waiting for Godot. It still hasn't come. It's been predicted since March of 22, and it still hasn't come. The greatest unknown to [00:15:15] me, the most the most memorable is the credit crisis. We had a whole. financial global system shut down.

You couldn't borrow money in 2008 and nine and what caused it. It wasn't caused by anything esoteric [00:15:30] or anything that was very complex. You know what caused it? It was Mrs. O'Reilly's brownstone in Brooklyn. It was the single family home that caused the whole shutdown of the entire global financial system and the mortgages that were put together.

[00:15:45] Imprudently to support those things. Mrs. O'Reilly's Brownsville. So that that and the terror attacks of 9 11. That's the unknown. So you and I talked about preparedness and I would say it's important two Ps. Don't worry about predicting because the one defining characteristic about [00:16:00] the future is there's no facts about it.

Worry about always being prepared. So one of the ways we're prepared in our missions is three years expenses so that we're prepared not to have to sell stocks when they're temporarily down. What do you guys One of the most important things that you do when you're manning missions for [00:16:15] preparedness from a soldier

Chadwick Ford: standpoint, I'll say I enjoy the conversation about the known unknowns.

It's always fun to say, actually, it gets exciting when you have some conversations and for us, we do a lot of stuff. Look at Sun Tzu, the art of war, [00:16:30] right? To conduct military operations has not changed. The key. Thing, how to win a war or how to win a battle or how to win a, to go out and conduct a mission, honestly, go back to Genghis Khan.

It's the same. You got key terrain. You see the key [00:16:45] terrain, the high ground. There's things that are just no matter what, century you come from, it's very, it's the same. Same thing if you look at Afghanistan, Afghanistan is very mountainous, the northern portions of it, there's only one way in the valley and one way out.

So we understand that [00:17:00] bad guys will come from one way. Good guys will come from just there. There's no matter what. There's things that just. Or I call them table stakes or there's things that's going to happen regardless and the people that win when you come to your missions or your wars, the ones that are most prepared that [00:17:15] understand what they have, their assets, their abilities, and understand what they're fighting to understand the enemies.

That's going back to Sun Tzu, understand what he can do and what assets and things they can. And when you come together, if you understand both, you should win a hundred battles. That's really [00:17:30] paraphrasing out of Sun Tzu, but. Yeah. The biggest thing for us in the preparedness is that experience when you have experienced people that, understand history and we're really, especially in the military, we're big history buffs, a lot of us when we [00:17:45] come to mission planning and tactics.

And I say that because, the reason why I was very prepared, I read a book called the bear of the mountain. That was when the Russians invaded Afghanistan. And they use rotor wing aircraft and they talk about every single issue and problem. And [00:18:00] that book was something that really highlighted Army or, aviations constraints, limitations and honestly their problems they had with their tactics back when in the eighties.

Then I'll fast forward to [00:18:15] 2004 when a young Chad Ford sitting on the ramp in Bagram, scared to death. I had to go fly. I'm thinking about I read this and I understand, their tactics they use. Let's not use the same ones. If they got their ass handed to them, let's not use those same tactics.

I think our preparedness comes from [00:18:30] understanding, we do what's called after action reviews. Whenever I go out with my team and I fly due and something happens, I'll come back and I'll do a debrief. Say, hey guys, here's what I did. Here's what actions the enemies did. Or enemy did.

Here's something new that I saw. So [00:18:45] those were things you, when you're constantly developing your, TTPs, which is your techniques, tactics, and procedures based upon current information, and you're not just leveraging. Hey 6 months ago, we did it this way. We should do it this way again. We're constantly evolving.

We're [00:19:00] constantly learning and we're constantly updating how we go out each mission and we won't be complacent that we don't get it lulled into sleep. And that's what I believe is as how we attack this, the topic you're talking about now.

Jonathan Blau: Yeah. By the way, [00:19:15] that's interesting. You bring up complacency.

My year end newsletter talked about the the fact that I see investors now becoming very complacent because of what I call outcome bias. For the last three or four years basically as long as you're invested in large U. S. companies, [00:19:30] particularly the subset that's technology, you made 20% Last year, 25%, so forth.

And so people are getting too complacent, not recognizing that what's happened is the the investing in the Standard Poors 500 index, for example, [00:19:45] it seems to be a broad index and most people think if I invest $500 in it, I'm getting a dollar into each of 500 companies. But it's weighted so that each of your dollars goes to the most expensive company.

So Apple represents roughly three and a half trillion of the 50 trillion market value. [00:20:00] So $500. 35, 40 bucks goes to Apple. It's very concentrated. So people who are outcome biased don't even pay attention, don't even want to wear that. You have to look at the inputs in life, right? You got to make sure the inputs are prudent to protect you going forward because [00:20:15] success in our world is about longevity and endurance, not about finding what's going to do best for the next year or two, but what you can, what's the likely.

Best return you'll be able to sustain for the longest period of time. And I'm sure that relates to, to to, to what you do. And by the [00:20:30] way, before you address that,

Chadwick Ford: I'm sorry, being adapted, doing that, because if you think about it, if we conducted war, like we did back when the, we had the revolutionary war and we all stood on line and shot guns at each other and didn't do how we fight, asymmetric warfare [00:20:45] now that took people to have an adaptive mind of how to go about and have a campaign and outcome then to change.

The norm, and I believe that should be true in business, being adaptive and using your current environment, the things around you to develop plans that are suited [00:21:00] and tailored, not just the, the red coat saying online, facing each other. First line takes a knee. If we fought war like that today, we'd be decimated.

So it's just, you got to be adaptive. And I believe that's business.

Jonathan Blau: Same thing in business. That's it. But it's hard from a [00:21:15] human nature standpoint, because again if your outcome bias, like if you ran a mission and you and in all of our professions most people discount the role of luck, right?

They discount it, almost ignore it. So to me, luck and risk are the [00:21:30] same things just on opposite sides. So luck is when outside factors intervene. To yield a better outcome than otherwise would have happened. And risk is when outside, same outside factors intervene to, to yield the worst outcome. Both things had nothing to do with your efforts.

And I'm sure it's the [00:21:45] same in your world. And one of the things that that I find is that's what leads to complacency, right? People become overconfident. We have this attribution bias. It's called where we have a self serving attribution bias. No, there's all the good things that [00:22:00] happen because of our efforts and all that we attribute to ourselves and all the bad things that's exogenous outside efforts and Sorry, I couldn't control that but that's not the way it works.

And I wonder from the soldier standpoint, when I'm training in my world, helping investors [00:22:15] to avoid the biases, what I teach them is relatively straightforward, right? You gotta be more of an owner of companies than a loaner. Of course, the real risk is inflation and the, since bonds are being a loaner and owning bonds is the carrier of the disease of inflation.[00:22:30]

You want to be more, I can educate them about why that works. The key is keeping them adhered to a portfolio, therefore that maybe have 90 percent stocks or 85 instead of the industry has 60 percent only stocks because they have bonds in there for the wrong purpose. Too many [00:22:45] bonds. That to control the up and down movements so I can educate them about that.

But the challenge becomes keeping them adhered to it through all the fads and fears they're about to face over the next 30 years of retirement. And the challenge is not as hard for me as it is for [00:23:00] you to get a successful campaign accomplished. The reason is I'm teaching them that all of the declines that you're afraid of.

Because of our loss aversion bias that will kill you financially. Don't be, because every decline has something in common with each one before it. [00:23:15] They're all temporary. The S& P 500 is at new all time highs today. Nobody's ever gotten killed financially because of being invested, over invested in the S& P.

They've only gotten killed when they take one of those temporary declines, and the only way [00:23:30] possible, turn it into a permanent decline by humanly manufacturing. selling into the temporary decline. So in your world, you're dealing with permanent threats. There is no such thing. I always say people don't know in my world, the difference between a bear in the woods and a bear market bear in the woods, [00:23:45] get a kill you in a bear markets.

Not how do you deal with it? How do human beings, I can't relate to a chat. I'm walking down the street with you. I feel safe when you're walking down the street with me. I'm sure I don't make you feel safe, maybe financially, but I make you feel safe. So the question is, how do you train people to go [00:24:00] into these situations, life and death and suppress the biases and stay on mission and not look left or right, but keep looking straight at at the mission and the campaign.

How do you do that? That's always been fascinating to me that can be done.

Chadwick Ford: There's a few things. So [00:24:15] 1 thing in my background, I used to be enhanced interrogation, resistant technical structure. We won't go into details on that, but we had to do a lot of human factors and the help with some of the bias and talk about some of the fear.

We've got people that are have a lot of fear, most of us, especially [00:24:30] in the special community we're not absent of fear, we just have what's called the courage part, right? So we, even in the face of fear, we understand our plan, we have our training, we understand our risk mitigation, and so therefore we still execute the mission.

And that's going on the [00:24:45] definition of courage, right? So I don't want you to think any of us running around is not scared to death sometimes. Some of my flights, I'm sitting there going, this is going to be interesting day. So the fear is always there. This is how you react to it. Same thing with confidence.

You can be overly confident. So it's [00:25:00] both sides of that spectrum. You can be overly confident. You can, thank your skill sets. You can think, you're better or whatever it may be. And you make poor decisions. What we try to do is remove emotions from decision making. Emotions that's what we believe will get you killed [00:25:15] because emotional decision making is not taking in data, is not taking in a historical thing.

It is a action you are having based upon a very finite amount of pressure that's placed on you at that moment. There may be some things that [00:25:30] are acute or there may be things from your history or past, but so we train people to, we call it trust the instruments. So no matter what your sensations of your body is telling you, because, we can get into things called the leans, but a lot of aviators have gotten killed because they'll get [00:25:45] into spatial disorientation, their body, your receptors, like you're, so no view I think things inside your eyes, your vision, you're hearing your, semicircle canals makes you feel like you're leaning in a certain direction or not, when you're flying, you can't see things.

So people will [00:26:00] start saying, Oh, I need to turn left or the aircraft in a bank when it's really not. Can you feel it like that? So we call it trust the system. So we'll look at what the data is telling us. We'll look at what is happening inside the platform. We'll look at what's happening on the ground.

And we make those decisions based upon [00:26:15] data, the understanding of that data and what the outcomes are if we execute with those parameters. So that's it's. It's more simple. I think it's just don't let your emotions get in the way and get yourself killed. Use your training, use your [00:26:30] data and focus on what the plan is and stick to the plan.

Jonathan Blau: 100%. Look, that's what we, that's the, that's a great way to put it. If I had to say to a client where you just said, trust the system, what's the system? The system is your own great companies in the form of [00:26:45] being a stockholder of great companies. And you're diversified. You have small companies, large companies and international US companies and trust the system.

Meaning if you look back 200 years, every five or six years or so, you have a decline of 33%. It's normal. It's part of the [00:27:00] plan. It's part of why you get eight to 10 percent a year. If you stay with the plan, once you. take the emotion and abandon that system by saying, my loss aversion bias is telling me, Hey, this time is different.

That's what I call the forward death song of the American [00:27:15] investor. The difference is what gets people out. Not the number of crises in the nature, but the different that the thing that they think of is unprecedented. And as soon as they do that, as soon as they abandon the plan and sell out because of loss aversion.

Meaning we feel the pain of a loss two times greater than the pleasure of [00:27:30] gaining pleasure. So we want to avoid that loss more than anything else. More than keeping on a mission that's better for our long term success. And when we do that, we actually don't protect ourselves. We're accelerating the failure of our of our campaign.

And I, and that's basically what

Chadwick Ford: you just [00:27:45] said to me. So the one key thing to that though, is something, the reason why, you know, with our friendship and how I trust you on the financial side is. The other key part that I maybe missed on is, so I was the senior technical planner, so people [00:28:00] trusted my plan because of my experience and my track record and what I had done in the past.

Now, there's people out there that can have a phenomenal plan, or at least they think they do, and it's actually a horrible plan. But it still goes back to your investors or who's, [00:28:15] you gotta trust the person that's developing the plan that's within the system. For me, I had to prove myself, to the organization that, I knew what I was doing.

I was investing time. I was looking at different factors. And that came from years and [00:28:30] years of expertise and, being there and doing that. Same thing with you. Like, when we talked before in the past, you bring up how you think, how you see things. And I call it like the SOCON model.

You're very similar and looking at how do I develop the most and the best plan that [00:28:45] my clients can follow. So that's the having the trust in the architect of the plan is also very key and making sure that, you're not just following someone blindly and I, again, lots of trust for how you plan.

We've talked about before in the past.

Jonathan Blau: I [00:29:00] appreciate that. And by the way, what you just said couldn't be more spot on. My mentor in this business is a guy named Nick Murray, who is the behavioral counselor to behavioral counselors. He might be the Chad to the squad underneath you. So he he says that he says what you say.

Because I noticed exactly what you said, [00:29:15] but he says it to us very succinctly. He said, you can't convince anyone of anything they don't want to be convinced of. You can't start throwing up charts and graphs and statistics. The messenger has to be the message. It's got to be, if you're going to have your squad and [00:29:30] your client succeed, they have to engage in what you're telling because they believe what you're telling them.

You can't prove it to them with charts and graphs. And then once you have to, you're going to miss out. They're going to fail and you're going to fail as the advisor. And that's what you just said to me. The messenger has to be the [00:29:45] message ultimately.

Chadwick Ford: That's what you said. Definitely.

That's something, that's how that defines leadership. That's one of the things flying. And I want to share this with you because it's one of my proud moments that was unrecognized. We were flying a mission [00:30:00] and we won't go into details, but it was a very High risk mission set. And I was I call it a duck, right?

I look very calm on the surface, but my legs are turning because I was, I was a little fearful. I was the one that was like, holy crap. This is this is gonna be [00:30:15] interesting to me. Tough. And, as we're flying along our cockpits, I'm trying to keep our cockpit loose cockpits.

We're all, me and the other aviator, the pilot, I'm upon. I

Jonathan Blau: thought you were about to tell me about, I thought you're about to tell me about your wedding day. I'm sorry.

Chadwick Ford: I got no, got you. I appreciate [00:30:30] it. I got to be, I'm doing good to not using profanity. So those are my goals today.

But so we're flying along and we go conduct this mission and my crew did phenomenal. They did awesome. I land and I'm like. Guys, holy [00:30:45] crap. I'm sweating now. We call it seat cushion. I sucked up a lot of seat cushion because being so tight and just nervous.

So I get back, I'm like, you guys are, man, I'm just losing it. I'm the most, I was scared crapless. I'm telling you right now, how do we get through this? And you guys are so calm. [00:31:00] And one of the guys was like, if we, You were calm, so we were calm. You set the stage, like, when they're looking up at me, and I'm whistling, and I'm making jokes, and, we're getting shot up by Discos, and I'm like, ooh, that's, just, I'm saying things, and I'm just keeping the environment light.

We were very calm [00:31:15] because you were calm. We were very, we didn't worry about things, we were doing our mission sets, and no one got emotional. And I'm like, God, that was scary to crapless, and you didn't show it. And then, therefore, it didn't permeate through the team, and then, therefore, they didn't get the fearfulness and start getting [00:31:30] jittery.

So I think, you as a leader, and especially on the financial side of the house. If you have leaders that start showing panic, or they start showing, indecisiveness, or they start showing things that aren't there to reinforce or to provide that comfort, then you're going to have a lot of clients that [00:31:45] use fear and their emotions to bounce back and forth.

What could be the worst thing? It could be their financial death, because you're jumping from thought to thought to mission to mission, changing what we should be doing versus thinking through the plan.

Jonathan Blau: No, a hundred percent. One of the things, again, my mentor [00:32:00] taught me is when all the lights are out in the deepest depths of the worst bear market, 2008, nine down 60 percent Lehman Brothers collapses, Bear Stearns collapses.

You're the only light in the entire industry, the behavioral investment counselor in all the darkness. [00:32:15] And as soon as you don't have the rights. to go dark, because then you're failing your clients. You got, you're the only light they have. And that's what you're, that's what you're saying. It's just so many similarities.

So let me ask you a couple of things, and you don't have to answer these, if it goes into things that you can't answer for [00:32:30] certain reasons security and stuff. But I'd love to talk briefly, if you can talk about what's the closest you've ever come in your opinion to, to failing at the point of where it was life and death.

And two, coming out of that how did it impact you, if at all, in future [00:32:45] missions having, come that close?

Chadwick Ford: So there's two things that come to mind when you say that. The one was what I call self induced. There was one where I was an over, overconfident aviator, young in my career in 2006.

And then there was another time where [00:33:00] I had planned the best mission, it was, when I say the best, I truly believe to this date, it was one of the most awesome missions that we conducted in Afghanistan with the detailed planning and execution and assets, but the enemy got a vote. I'll just, I'll tell you about my flaw 1 [00:33:15] 1st.

I'll make it quick. And I really want to tell you about when the enemy gets a vote. I was overconfident. I was flying the aircraft. It was called mass gross weight. So that means I had the maximum people on board the dudes in the back that I could carry. We had to do some house to [00:33:30] landings. When you try to land in a helicopter, you need power, you certain amount of power to be able to land in the high altitudes because of the way the density altitude is.

And I was at my max, meaning that if I had one more pound, or I shot my approach with the wrong technique, my [00:33:45] aircraft would land, but it would be an uncontrolled landing. It means I would not be in control of that aircraft trying to land it because of the more weight than the aircraft could handle. But I was confident enough, I was overconfident, that I could do it.

And we got up to altitude, and I started shooting my approach. [00:34:00] I didn't lose control of the aircraft, but I was no longer able to maneuver the aircraft. It was landing no matter what I did I picked a point, started shooting the approach, and I had no ability to recover that aircraft.

Something went wrong. And that's a very [00:34:15] scary feeling to be. On the controls, but not in control. Lucky for me, we landed in a field that had just been plowed. So we hit a little hard, hard landing, but it didn't break anything didn't damage anything. But, that was me being overconfident that I could take an [00:34:30] aircraft at altitude under night vision goggles and land it somewhere.

At max all on match parameters and to me, it's if I was an investor and I'm investing in all my max. But no insurance, no anything. I'm just, overly confident and I squeaked it out. Everything went fine. Didn't [00:34:45] break anything to do anything. But that's not a very good plan.

That's that over confidence that I had. So that was my self induced 1 the other 1 is again 1 of my, I believe my favorite planning thing that we've ever done. We used and we can't get into details, but we used [00:35:00] assets. We use we use imagery. We use a lot of things that well, again, we won't get into here, but just.

The plan the best mission. So we completely understood while I land on this ridgeline. I'm on a collage structure, which is, their house and I'm up on a ridgeline. [00:35:15] And so I can't get the aircraft wheels all down on the top of the aircraft or on top of the structure to me to get this guy.

And his road leading up is to be trapped by to put 1 tire on his roof. And the seals were getting out and we get doors off. [00:35:30] So that means there's no doors on the cockpit either. Front of the nose of the aircraft is a zone where we have no weapons can shoot. I have door gunners, but they can't shoot.

It's like a little triangle. Off my nose is a dead zone, meaning I can't, no one can shoot what's in front of my aircraft for a couple, [00:35:45] about 50 feet. If I'm on this guy's house, a guy runs up with RPG. So I'm looking forward and he takes a knee. What's an RPG?

Jonathan Blau: I'm sorry. What's an RPG? Just for the audience.

Chadwick Ford: Yeah. Okay. So he takes the knee and points his rocket [00:36:00] grenade at me. So in my mind, none of my, no one can shoot him because I can't shoot him. I'm on the controls. The door gunners can't shoot because it's outside of their, engagement area. In my mind, I'm like, oh, this sucks. And I keyed on the mic, which I don't know what made me key it, but I was like, [00:36:15] hey, guys, this is going to suck.

That's all I said. I didn't yell, scream. I just said, hey, this is going to suck. About this time, and forgive the audience, but as I'm looking forward, and I'm going into this very calm yep, here comes the end of my life, and this is going to suck. The guy's head turns into a pink mist [00:36:30] and the Navy SEAL slaps me on my leg and gives me the thumbs up and then runs off.

No matter how well I planned, I wasn't planning for a guy to pop out of a little hole in the rooftop to point the RPG at the front of my aircraft. And I had no plan to defeat it. [00:36:45] But because we had a team members, because I had Navy SEAL, a good friend of mine, and they saw it, and we worked and rehearsed and done things together.

They were able to facilitate something that I hadn't planned for. That's to me, he was my insurance, having that Navy seal, I'll get off [00:37:00] my aircraft and pull forward security in my dead zone that we had talked about, but I'd never done it before in my life. Never had it happened. My insurance came through and kept myself and my crew alive.

And we've talked about the story now they again, they make it sound. [00:37:15] More badass like all Chad was just calm and cool didn't even sweat was grinning and smiling the guy with our I was scared I know I but I wasn't you know, wasn't this, badass. It was just oh crap, you know I don't know what else to say.

You

Jonathan Blau: know what Chad [00:37:30] I teach my clients when things happen to them financially in the markets, they did, The terrorist attacks, the market closes for seven days or five days the Lehman brothers, 200 year old institution starts disappearing along with the other big banks. I tell [00:37:45] them it would be unnatural for you not to feel fear.

And I would never counsel you to suppress fear. All I counsel you is don't reflect the fears by changing your strategy. that you need to adhere to win. And that's what you just said. And so that's [00:38:00] critical. I just want to say with that, thank you so much. This was this was a fun and interesting discussion, by the way, my father in law was very appreciative who was the last podcast guest that you listened to him.

And I told him what you said is you thank him for his service. And he was very humbled because he went into the [00:38:15] into Vietnam. He was 23 and, no experience, no training level of experience that you have. But to hear someone thank him and so forth at your level, he was actually touched.

So I wanted to pass that along to you.

Chadwick Ford: Thank you for doing that. That's something I wanted to do when we first opened up. If you noticed [00:38:30] my daughter was around in the background here, so I apologize. That wasn't no, that's

Jonathan Blau: good.

Chadwick Ford: So it threw me off a little bit, but I really appreciate it, and that's something I want to all warfighters is, respect to the history.

There are people that came before me. I've spent my 20 years in Afghanistan and people go after me into another [00:38:45] combat zone or something. So those that went to Vietnam had to fight a very, you know, unique war when it came to support when it came to what they were fighting and doing the insurgency The techniques and procedures so a lot of things we use now it came out of vietnam and [00:39:00] came out, you know from the Marines the army and the boots on the ground So a lot of those guys really paved the way for how we think how we operate and honestly it identifies some risk force.

We try to avoid not get into again So it's just very always meet and talk with some of our vietnam vets,

Jonathan Blau: That's great. [00:39:15] You will meet him. He'd love to he'd love to talk to you, Toby. And you'll like each other. So thanks again, Chad, for joining us today. But before we sign off, I want to have you share with the audience how you transitioned from active military to maybe what I'll call [00:39:30] maybe right around, but so corporate military and and talk about what you're currently doing and go ahead.

Love to hear it.

Chadwick Ford: Oh, no, I appreciate it again. Thanks for having me and for the conversation. So when I retired in 2020, the end of it and like any military service member, you don't really know what you want to get into. So we looked [00:39:45] at the Department of Defense and industry partners.

There 1 thing that I've learned over time was. I had a skill set of being able to help people and to help, in leadership. So what we stood up was called Elysium Arrow. It's a consulting and solutions firm. And what we do is provide [00:40:00] kind of some services, not personnel, but we help if you're expanding or growing and want to have leadership forums to discuss decision making, the different types of leadership, how to empower your employees to get the most bang for your buck.

And how to [00:40:15] really, be the growth and set the environment for growth within your organization. For those that don't have the connections to some of the military service leaders and want to have some clarity, or I call it translation, because, as the military, you have different lingo [00:40:30] and acronyms, we will help set up, the face to face business meetings and to help get people in touch with the right person, help you tweak your message, what's the right message.

And your message is getting there at the right time, provide engineering support and I got the engineering support. Not so much from a go [00:40:45] build something. It is if you're writing a piece, if you're trying to respond to request for information or request proposal, we have some people that can help and support making sure you understand what the true question is, what's being asked and the best way to respond to it.

Got the website [00:41:00] people can go to and look at and we stood it up. We're just getting off the ground and started. We love that part and so far so good. Had a lot of great engagements. My most favorite ones are going to leadership forums. I get to share some stories and we talk to and walk through decision making process and those would get [00:41:15] the most exciting.

It's almost like storytelling with some good senior leaders or executives and help walk through the best way they can help their organization.

Jonathan Blau: Your clients are lucky to have you. Let me tell you that level of experience there's no better way to learn from life by experientially.

You have [00:41:30] a lot of it and success, successful amounts of it. And so Elysium E L Y S I U M arrow, A E R O. And again, thank you so much for for joining us today. Really was a pleasure, Jeff.

Chadwick Ford: I appreciate it. Thank you, Jonathan.

Jonathan Blau: Thanks, everybody, [00:41:45] for tuning in to this episode of Crazy Wealthy. Hope you enjoyed it, and we'll see you next time.

Stay tuned to hear Amy's call in for the recap of today's episode.

Amy Blau: Happy Friday, honey. Hello, honey. Happy

Jonathan Blau: Friday.

Amy Blau: What's going on? Did you have a [00:42:00] good podcast today?

Jonathan Blau: We did. I had my interview with Chad, my friend Chad Ford, who as is, Retired from the military. He had achieved the highest level.

One of the highest levels of officer rankings is a chief Warren [00:42:15] officer five. He his experience actually included being an advisor to the chief of staff of the army at some of the very highest levels. And and he's also just a great person, very selfless during the podcast talked about feels like his mission in [00:42:30] life is to help people.

And it's one of the reasons that he went into the military.

Amy Blau: He's one of my favorite people also, but I'm going to wait till the end to tell you why. Anything that you learned from him that you can apply to what you do and behavior?

Jonathan Blau: Yeah [00:42:45] interestingly, the reason we decided to do the podcast together is because he listened unsolicited to my introductory podcast, called me and said, wow, all of these biases that you talk about are biases I needed to learn and be familiar with in order to be successful with [00:43:00] man.

My my missions and train my soldiers. So when he said that, I said that would be an interesting discussion to have to look at the similarities and differences.

Amy Blau: Give me an example of what a similarity is.

Jonathan Blau: So a similarity is, for [00:43:15] example, is when he has missions they have to be prepared.

They can't forecast every potential snag that they might face, but it's being prepared. So in my world, I can't forecast what's going to cause the next 33 percent decline, which is the average [00:43:30] down market happens when you're in five or six, but I got to be prepared. So my world being prepared means maybe having two to three years living expenses set aside.

For our clients so that whatever causes the decline doesn't matter. We're prepared to ride through the average [00:43:45] time it takes to go from a top in the market to a bottom and recovery which is three years and then that by the way, in my world would be an example of what he calls a mission.

So he defined missions as a series of short, narrowly defined tasks [00:44:00] that you need to accomplish successfully in order to achieve a broader longterm objective, which is called. A campaign. So the campaign objective for him might be, we're going to capture bin Laden. But along the way, we've got to do missions.

We've got to do surveillance of [00:44:15] the areas where he hangs out and people check them, hang out, see what the threats are. We've got to figure out how much time we can maneuver in the helicopter. And until we need to refuel and where the refueling take place. Those are all examples. [00:44:30] My role, the mission.

As I mentioned, two to three as living expenses, but another mission that's critical is having life insurance, right? Because if my mission for a client or their mission is to have life insurance, the purpose of that is to meet [00:44:45] their campaign goal. Their campaign goal is to accumulate enough money so that they can retire comfortably someday and stay retired comfortably.

But if they don't have insurance 10 years into their pursuit of that campaign goal, [00:45:00] Then they'll never achieve it because their earnings are gone and they didn't have insurance to cover it. So that mission is critical.

Amy Blau: That definitely makes sense. I know you talk about the role of bonds and how you should have some bonds in your portfolio, but it's [00:45:15] almost like a defense strategy.

I feel like he might have defense strategies, but then he has also things that help him complete his mission, which internally. Get him to complete his, his campaign. [00:45:30] What's, what's some defense strategies you would have besides the insurance?

Jonathan Blau: The biggest defense strategy that I think we have is preparing our investors emotionally so that they don't [00:45:45] respond to fears and envy and greed, et cetera by reflecting those feelings in a way that they change their mission.

In other words. They get rid of the cash because they say, you know what, I don't know how much longer I'm going to live. I'm just [00:46:00] going to spend it. I don't want to have the two to three years there in case the market does that. So now they've reduced the chance of reaching their campaign goal.

Amy Blau: I'm going to guess that you, Chad, really can't have fear in any kind of a situation, which is what you want to tell [00:46:15] your clients.

They can't have any kind of a fear.

Jonathan Blau: Actually, that's not what I tell him. What I tell him is that it would be unnatural for me to tell you to suppress the feeling of fear. It's human nature. And actually, Chad mentioned that he's been afraid many times, but he doesn't reflect that [00:46:30] fear by laying it into fear to how he responds to accomplishing a mission.

If there's fog suddenly, and he's afraid of what he's not seeing, He understands he has a plan for that. He's just going to follow the plan. He's going to trust the instruments on the [00:46:45] helicopter, and he's not going to make a jerk reaction to steer away from the fog, which could end up killing him and his crew.

So he mentioned that to me, the reason his crew doesn't feel fear is because they see that he doesn't reflect. The feeling of fear by reacting so they [00:47:00] never see that he's afraid so they're not afraid and that helps the mission in my world That's what I tell my clients feel the fear Just don't reflect the fears by making a portfolio change in response to the fear Don't sell your stocks and interrupt your compounding because then your [00:47:15] odds of hitting your campaign goal of retiring comfortably aren't going to be met

Amy Blau: That makes sense.

One thing i've learned from him and you should really learn from him is that When we spent some time with him a couple of summers ago, and he stayed at our house. We both got [00:47:30] up, at the crack of dawn military time. And I kept asking him if he wanted a bagel, if he needed anything from the bathroom.

And his response to me was, no, ma'am, no, thank you, ma'am. I see

Jonathan Blau: where [00:47:45] you're going with no, sir, that's not going to happen. I'm not I love you, but I am not calling you ma'am.

Amy Blau: You don't have to call me ma'am. You just have to call me your precious princess. And if you do that, then that's okay.

Jonathan Blau: Okay, so you [00:48:00] are my precious princess.

Okay. When I called you that, what do you have to do in return? I have

Amy Blau: to keep listening to your podcast. And so does everyone else. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Crazy Wealthy Podcast. We hope everyone has a great week [00:48:15] and we'll see you again.

Jonathan Blau: All right. Thanks for calling in honey.

Everybody thanks for listening. See you next time. Take care. Bye.

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