My Story

Who I am (it’s not that simple…is it ever?) Today

My name is Ben “Miami” Weiss.  “Miami” as I have been known for the better part of my career as a Naval Aviator and Helicopter Pilot is my callsign.  Cool right?  Miami Weiss, like Miami Vice.  Except my callsign was inspired more by the movie Eurotrip than by Don Johnson, and that’s all you get to know outside of Naval Aviation circles or close friendships.

I was a career Naval Aviator.  I was a Helicopter Pilot and Weapons and Tactics instructor.  In the later stages of my career, I became a military planner.  I have been extremely fortunate to have had the experiences that I did.  I learned an enormous amount of lessons along the way.  

There was always however a common theme as I stepped through my career.  Too often when I learned something either about my aircraft or about military planning, I was struck by how long some of these concepts had been known, but how few actually knew them or how to apply them.  I was struck by this same sense concerning concepts around finance, my health, and fitness related topics as well.  I found great personal success in not only applying the lessons I had learned but even more so in teaching the concepts to others so that they could be better.

So why did I start this blog?

I started this blog for a number of reasons.  I wanted to do something different with my life as I approached the end of my military career, but I didn’t know what my options were.  The more I started to explore, the more I found that blogging was a great outlet for entrepreneurialism as well as a great way to showcase your resume.

I developed a personal mission based on my experiences to share information with others that I believed was valuable.  A blog was a great way to self-publish for the purpose of promoting important concepts to help others left in the dark.

I started to get a glimpse of the world outside of the narrow exposure of my decisions in life up until that point.  I learned enough to know that unless you’ve got a mentor guiding you, you may never know what might be out there for you.

I liked the idea of starting my own business and didn’t know where to start.  I discovered the bottomless pit of Youtubers promising get-rich-quick businesses but learned enough that starting a personal blog can be a great launching point for a number of different ventures and could teach me a ton along the way.

I was once told during a screening board in the military that I would make a good consultant.  It wasn’t a compliment.  Basically what they were saying is “hey you’ve got some great ideas, but we don’t want any of that here.”  I liked the opportunity to share my ideas with those that were willing to listen.

I want to teach people things that I wish I had learned sooner.  I first experienced this as an instructor pilot learning to teach tactics for the first time.  The concepts I was learned, becoming as an instructor weren’t new.  It’s just that none of the pilots before me either understood them well enough or bothered to teach them.  It became my mission to make sure the generation after me, didn’t learn the same mistakes that I made, but instead could advance their knowledge faster and be smarter sooner than I was able to become.  

As I move to the next phase of my life I find this common theme prevailing.  To make sure that those that are coming after me don’t have to make it as far through life as I did to learn basic concepts to make my life better, more fulfilling, and more rewarding.  

The Beginning

Ok that’s me today, but how did I get here?  Like how did I really get here?  

Well, unsurprisingly to a lot of people I am the son of a career naval officer, I arguably ended up in the military because it was the only life I’d ever known.

I was born in a military hospital in Fort Ord, California and spent my entire adolescent life moving every two to three years.

I enjoyed my childhood and I got to see some amazing places that I definitely took for granted and didn’t fully appreciate as I was growing up.  

I lived on both coasts from California to Florida to Maryland and the Washington DC area.  I lived in England and Germany and visited (dragged to) numerous other countries around Europe including Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Hungary, and Czech Republic.  It was without a doubt an amazing experience but calm down I was a child and appreciated it about as well as any child dragged around to historical sites and cities across Europe.  Take me to a castle and let me play with fake medieval weapons and I was happy.  Eiffel Tower? Ugh, can I have some ice cream?

I eventually had to make a decision about what I was going to do with my life as an adult and I never even thought about the options.  I didn’t ask anyone what they thought or consulted with a friend to see what they might do.  I was joining the military.  Despite the places I’d lived and the experiences of my childhood, I didn’t even ask about what schools were available.  I only applied to a small handful of military schools and ended up attending a small military college in South Carolina.  The Citadel.

I basically spent most of my early life making safe, but questionable decisions.  I thought I knew what I was supposed to do and I was following a path that I knew and understood.

I graduated with a degree in physics because I was apparently not smart enough to go get an engineering degree despite having to take all the same hard classes.  They graduated engineers, I just got this silly piece of paper.

As it would turn out I would probably use my physics degree more than most others that didn’t enter academia by going to flight school.  I remember watching a good number of my classmates struggle with some of the concepts of aerodynamics.

As I progressed through flight school I often tell people this was one of the most fun times of my life.  I was learning how to fly and having an amazing time with enormous freedom in the process.

I knew I wanted to fly helicopters.  My uncle was a helicopter pilot and I remember thinking they were really cool.  Turns out they were.  I loved flying.  So much so I went out of my way to spend as much of my career in the cockpit as possible.  One of the best ways to do this was to become an instructor, specifically a weapons instructor. This would ensure that I got to spend as much time flying throughout my early career as possible.  And I loved it. I loved teaching students in the classroom as much as dynamic maneuvers in the cockpit.  My instructor tours were my absolute favorite jobs I’ve ever held in the military.  There may have been more rewarding experiences, but none nearly as fun. 

This is the period of my life that had the biggest impact on me and was largely responsible for a good amount of my personal discovery.  I can safely say that before my thirties, I really hadn’t fully matured.  I hadn’t achieved adult status until this point.  This was the turning point where I think I finally knew, what I didn’t know, and just how much I needed to learn.

I also believe I  ended up where I am as a result of falling victim to the same common lies that we tell most of our youth.  

Lies is the more controversial way to say it.  Sometimes half-truths.  Sometimes oversimplifications, but often misleading information that confuses and ultimately inhibits growth and progress.

Now I’m not a conspiracy theorist.  I don’t think there’s an evil organization of nefarious actors conspiring to lie to everyone to stifle individual knowledge and growth.  I think most people just don’t know, and they’ve never had a mentor to show them a world outside of all of the lies, intentional or not, that left them unexposed to the myriad options available to them in life.

My Health Journey

Some people spend their whole lives being relatively healthy and some have a moment that hits them like a brick wall that makes them get their act together.  Mine was the latter, only it was several moments, and several brick walls before I really started to understand.

Flight school was a busy time in my life.  I had always been active.  I played sports in high school and college and got into weightlifting, but after I graduated college, and started flight school, my physical fitness really dropped off.  I made it through most of flight school dedicating little if any time to my health and focusing exclusively on school.  It worked out in the long run.  I ended up graduating flight school at the top of my class and getting my first choice for platform selection.  Helicopters in Hawaii.  I know, feel bad for me.

Brick wall number 1.  My Vanity

It was about the time I saw a picture of myself on my first deployment that I hit my first brick wall.  I had been going over old deployment photos when a flight deck picnic photo popped up on my computer screen.  It was also a swim call so we were all in our bathing suits.  I immediately hated how I looked.  I used to be in such good shape.  What happened?  Well, I had dedicated so much time to getting through flight school but I made it.  I’m here.  I should probably get back in shape.

What made matters worse was that I saw this picture while showing an old college friend of mine photos of my first deployment and I remember the words he said to me. “Of all our classmates I would never have thought that you would ever be out of shape.”

I spent my entire next deployment focusing on my health.  I was stranded on a ship in the middle of the ocean for months on end, so my dietary choices were limited.  I basically committed to just not eating any deserts and running (treadmills were one of the few options available on a ship).  When I returned from that deployment I had completely transformed my body.  I had lost about 25 pounds and had effectively turned myself into a short distance endurance runner. 

I would go on to fall in love with it and run about 20-25 miles a week for several years.  I felt great for the most part but something just didn’t feel right.  It was about this time that I discovered CrossFit.  

I had met several members of a local gym and decided to give it a try.  It sounded like a great idea as it gave me an avenue to continue to pursue my aerobic fitness but add weightlifting which I had come to feel was lacking in my life.  I was significantly smaller than I was in college as a result of much lower muscle mass than what I had put on while weightlifting.

Time to get big.

Brick wall number 2.  My Genes.

I really enjoyed my time doing CrossFit.  The community is amazing.  I enjoyed the workouts.  They were hard but I felt great thinking about how I was going to transform my body.  On top of that it was a community that was discerning about not only what they were doing with their bodies, but what goes into it.

I started to focus more of my attention on health care and nutrition. This was also about the time my father was put on a statin drug.  These were my genetics after all.  I lost both of my grandfathers to heart disease before I was even born.  I better start learning as much as I can about health and nutrition. 

I already cared about exercise.  Everything I had learned up until that point was that exercise was how I maintained my fitness and how I would look.  No one had ever taught me anything about nutrition.  Eat your veggies was about the extent of my nutritional education.  That and how well just cutting dessert out of my diet allowed me to trim down. 

Before I go any further, here’s something you should understand about my father.  In its simplest terms, he’s a rule follower.  Now he doesn’t just blindly do what he’s told, but he does follow the speed limit, always use his turn signal, and do exactly what his doctor tells him to do.

So I remember when my father came home one day talking about how he needed to make some changes to his diet.  It was pretty clear his doctor told him to.

Getting back to my father’s statin status.  The flags went up in my head.  Wait a minute.  My dad did everything you told him to, and you’re telling me he still needs to be on medication for the rest of his life?  I just didn’t buy it. Additionally, these were my genetics too.  Two grandfathers were claimed to heart disease before I was ever born (remember? it was four paragraphs ago).  Now my father, despite doing everything the doctors told him to, seemed doomed to the same fate, albeit maybe delayed for a few years with the help of some statins.

I couldn’t believe that the body would just arbitrarily decide to produce too much of something, “Bad Cholesterol,” that would just slowly kill itself over time.  Something, the doctor was telling him to do wasn’t working.  Something the doctor was advising was wrong. 

This is about the time that my nutritional investigations really started to ramp up.  I started researching medical and dietary nutritional science and recommendations.  I had a friend in their early thirties on a statin drug as a result of high cholesterol and triglycerides.  How does this even make sense?  He was fit?  What chance do I have.  I needed to figure this out.

One of the earliest things I discovered was the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease was far more complicated than anyone seemed to be talking about.  The actual science tying cholesterol levels to heart disease seemed weak at best.  

Some of this just boiled down to asking the right questions.  I was able to find a small handful of doctors, many of who had slightly different takes, but all understood the same basic conclusion.  Cholesterol isn’t the problem.  Something else is. 

The problem was, based on the actual data.  There was no substantial scientific evidence that associates high cholesterol numbers with cardiovascular events.  People with high numbers had them, and people with low numbers had them, but there was no shortage of studies “confirming” the cholesterol hypothesis, and medical institutions warning you of the dangers of high cholesterol. 

We know that the body has a number of very complex systems and functions that can be distorted through excesses, deficiencies, or otherwise imbalances related to exposures in our environment.  We can disrupt our metabolic process, distort thyroid function and alter brain function based on things we put in our body.  So we know what and how much goes into it matters.  However, I firmly believe that when in balance, and our bodies work very hard to keep things in balance, then it won’t just go out of its way to produce things that will kill itself.

We’re sort of taught that the best way to die is peacefully in our sleep.  Ultimately we will all die at the point when our organs and systems break down and are no longer capable of keeping us alive. This is inevitable.  But there are things you can do to keep these systems working optimally and not only live a long life, but to make those years far more productive than many people think possible.

Invest in your body, like your money, at as early an age as possible.  There is an erroneous assumption by the youth that getting old is something they don’t have to worry about until they are older.  But this isn’t true.  Just like a good long-term investment, decisions we make about our health compound over time.  If you really want to live long and in good health up until the end, It starts in your 20’s, and arguably earlier than that in many cases.  

Nutrition.

My first foray into nutrition started with Paleo.  Most likely as a result of having gotten into CrossFit.  Paleo dieters were prolific during that period. It wasn’t enough for me to just follow paleo rules, what foods are in and what foods are out.  I wanted to know why.  I discovered things like the perfect health diet, and to this day one of my favorite books The Omnivours Dilemma.  

Some of the earliest lessons I learned were the importance of the source of our food.  What a difference that grass-fed beef or free-range (actual free-range) chickens have over their contemporary counterparts.  The lesson here was that eating animals that were able to eat their optimal diets made the quality of that food significantly greater.  You can see it in the egg yokes.  If you get an egg from a free-range chicken you’ll know it by the color of the yoke. You can’t miss it.

Over time I would come to appreciate this same principle applies to plants.  Plants need food too, and the majority of differentiation in plants is in the soil.  

So this is great!  I’m figuring out my nutrition, I’m doing CrossFit so I can add physical size from weightlifting to my 

There’s just one problem.  I’m not getting big.  Now I’m sure that doesn’t surprise a lot of people but, I wasn’t getting stronger either.  My endurance was fantastic but something was wrong.  I was also starting to feel worn down.

I was also getting tired of being told that I would be really good at CrossFit if I got stronger.  But I was doing CrossFit, why wasn’t I getting stronger?  

Exercise Physiology.

Here’s where I started looking into exercise physiology.  Why wasn’t the work I was doing making me stronger?  I thought I had a sense and that it would be related to fatigue and recovery.  I was doing too much work and not enough recovery.  

I would later discover that I wasn’t doing the right kind of work.  Now I’m not trying to hate on CrossFit, for some people it can be enormously beneficial.  What this was really hinting at me was that what is optimal for one person isn’t necessarily optimal for everyone.  Some people will absolutely thrive in the CrossFit environment.  As much as I enjoyed the community and workouts.  I wasn’t one of them.  I would soon discover that what was optimal for me was significantly less work and significantly more recovery.  

I discovered a company called Renaissance Periodization.  I’m happy to say that I was an RP Dr. Mike fan before he was cool or had his YouTube channel.  

I learned to create workout programs and dietary nutrition plans to support my needs.  But even with the enormous amount of knowledge I had gained, I was still making mistakes.  I would continue to struggle with gains and would start to develop GI distress that I couldn’t understand.  

So here I am again.  I’ve spent most of my adult life working out.  Sure I was in good Shape. But I basically spent a lot of that time going sideways.  Again because of something I didn’t know and no one taught me.

Brick wall number 3.  My…what the hell are FODMAPs?

I would eventually see a nutritionist to help me work through my GI symptoms, and after describing my issues they asked me if I’d ever heard of FODMAPs.  They handed me a list of foods.  Right at the top of the alphabetically ordered list, staring me straight in the face took me by surprise.  Apples.  Wait, what?  Apples might be bad for me?  But what about an apple a day and all that?  As it turned out, in my effort to support my workouts with healthy whole-food carbohydrates, I had recently started eating 2 apples a day.  

After learning about FODMAPs and conducting an elimination diet (apples being the first to go), my symptoms cleared up immediately.  This lesson would come to be important later in my life as well.

Not every nutritional recommendation works for everyone.  There is significant genetic variability in us all where certain foods may cause issues in some and not in others.  These may be called “food sensitivities” or allergies, but this is something everyone needs to figure out for themselves.  It isn’t easy. But I could escape the feeling that If certain whole foods are causing me problems, how difficult might it be to discern which scientifically bioengineered food-like substances I’ve never thought about may be causing issues as well?

Brick wall number 4.  My Eczema

The next major phase of my life was parenthood.  And I definitely dad bod’ed with the best of them.  I think I generally did pretty well with my physical fitness, but my nutrition went south again.  No big deal.  I know what I’m doing now.  I can lose this weight with no problem.  If only a little weight gain was my only problem.

Through the necessity of raising a child, I wasn’t sleeping and my diet began to suffer.  As my children grew and started eating regular food I was starting to eat their leftovers as well.  Any semblance of a plan I used to have for my nutrition had mostly gone out the window.  

It was about this time that I started to develop an itchy rash on my elbows.  At first, I thought it was a fungal infection and tried to treat it with over-the-counter medication.  That maybe lasted for a couple of weeks before It spiraled wildly out of control.  At its peak, I had a rash easily over half of my body and the worst locations on my knees, elbows, groin, and armpits.  I was miserable.

By the time I got to see a dermatologist, I had open sores in multiple locations and huge areas covered in rash.  I had gotten a steroid cream from my primary care provider that just wasn’t cutting it anymore and the dermatologist confirmed it was eczema, put me on a medication called Otezla, and told me I’d probably have to take it for the rest of my life.  

Now these last words were the same red flag I’d heard before. I highly doubted that I would need this for the rest of my life.  At the same time, I hated how I felt on the medication.  It worked.  My skin cleared up, but it did so fighting my body the whole way.  I could feel throughout my entire body, this medication blocking biology from doing something it needed. It was my immune system.  Most of these medications work by suppressing immune function. 

I’ll tell anyone.  That medication likely saved my life.  But I also new that I needed to figure out how to get off of it as soon as possible.  I had at least convinced myself that I could figure this out and all I needed was time which this medication provided.  I couldn’t escape the idea that this all happened when my wife and I began having children so I was pretty sure I could isolate it to something that changed during that time.

The most obvious change was my diet.  As much as I knew if there is a potential food related sensitivity there’s a good chance it could be found on a FODMAP list.  So I went back and I pulled the little FODMAP cheat sheet out of my files and dusted it off. Maybe something on this list is causing my immune system to act up.  It had been a while since I looked at it.  Other than apples which I had still pretty much eliminated from my diet entirely.  I went back to see if anything could be causing me problems.  And they were everywhere. 

But wait, I thought FODMAPs led to gastrointestinal problems, not skin issues?  This is about the time that I started to feel something was wrong with the way we treat medical conditions.  Could it be that food that I may be sensitive to could cause symptoms beyond GI and potentially other chronic issues throughout my body?  How often do Dermatologists talk to Gastroenterologists?  It turns out not at all.

I put myself on another strict elimination diet and slowly started introducing foods to see if I could feel a reaction.  In the end, I had eliminated most nuts, a good chunk of foods from the nightshade family, and artificial sweeteners by the time I had tackled the problem.  I still didn’t feel great, but I no longer felt like the medication was fighting my whole body.  It was at this point that I stopped taking the medication to see if I was right.  I gave myself a full 6 months before I was willing to declare victory based on what I had read about how long the effects of the medication might remain.  During that time I would occasionally consume small amounts of these foods while off the medication to confirm the issues, and sure enough, past a certain threshold, the skin on my elbows and armpits would start to get red and itchy, and as soon as I stopped it would clear on its own.  

I had effectively cured my eczema with my diet.  When I told my dermatologist his response blew my mind.  He told me that he was happy for me but it couldn’t have been my diet.  He said these things can go into remission for long periods of time and I could have another episode at any moment without warning.  

It was clear to me based on my ability to generate symptoms and eliminate them the same through the introduction and elimination that this was not the case.  I had figured out how to improve my body’s immune function with nutrition.  

This was the second nail in the coffin for my faith in our silo-specialized medical system.

My Financial Journey.

You’ve heard it before.  We don’t teach our kids about money.  There’s a cultural aspect of this.  I was told by my family not to ask others how much they make and never talk about income.  Money was a taboo topic.  This is how you keep people in the dark.

My family wasn’t malicious about it.  They just didn’t know.  It shouldn’t be a taboo topic.  People should be confident to speak about financial concepts so that others can learn. Otherwise, they’ll spend decades of their lives on the dark.  Losing money.  As a result, I spent well over a decade of my income years saving instead of investing.  

Just like my nutrition and fitness journey, I started out making just about every mistake in the book.  

I made some of the most embarrassing money mistakes. Fortunately, my parents did teach me to pay my credit card bills in full every month and I didn’t have student loans thanks to the good graces of the United States Navy.  

That didn’t stop me from holding a large chunk of my earned income in a bond fund for an embarrassingly long period of time because I listened to a financial advisor who knew nothing more than to ask me how much risk I wanted to take and to recommend this bond fund when I told him “very little.”  I mean why not?  I didn’t know anything, and I didn’t want to lose money.

I would later come to realize this is the most absurd financial advice that would be given to anyone in their early 20’s and displays an extraordinary lack of any actual appreciation of risk.  

I would eventually learn that risk, when you’re young, is watching your hard-earned money lose value over time when the very real, and astonishingly simple alternative is earning a long-term compound annual growth rate of about 10%.  This is your baseline, and everyone should know it.

I wish I could say that I at least had a ROTH IRA before too long but it wouldn’t matter since it spent the first 5+ years sitting in cash.  Now if you don’t see a problem with this, you’re gonna wanna stick around.  There will be some good stuff for you in this blog.

It wasn’t until late in my career that I met a few very vocal proponents of investing before I started to learn.  

I began to read books about investing and trading and eventually built two portfolios, including my ROTH IRA, that I’m happy with and confident that I will never need money from the government in retirement.  

The Value of Planning

As is the case with most career paths in the military I couldn’t keep flying forever.  I eventually transitioned into a staff officer role to live out my days flying a desk.  I was fortunate to be given the opportunity to become a professional military planner.  I wanted to still stay involved with military operations without being totally relegated to administrative work, and this felt like a great opportunity.  

As it would turn out, besides flight school, this would end up being the most valuable course I would ever take.  

Planning, as a skill just isn’t talked about anywhere. Not the necessity to have a plan. The act of planning.  How to plan.  Learning how to plan, and teaching others to plan, would ultimately have the greatest impact on my life. I’ve applied it to my health, my finances and just about every aspect of my life. Whenever I want to take on something knew. I start with planning.

The BLAB (bottom Line at the Bottom, IYKYK)

I spent a significant amount of my life going sideways.  All because I didn’t know, and no one taught me.  When I finally understood the concepts around the tasks I was working on. Growth was fantastic and often exponential.

In almost every case these things are well known from the perspective of human discovery. Why are we not teaching people these basic concepts?  Because it’s hard?  Maybe we’re just bad at explaining things to people.

We have experts that know a great deal about these things and entire communities that hold useful knowledge that doesn’t seem to see the light of day. 

What we don’t have is a reliable source of individuals to aggregate useful information and assess the relationships between numerous fields to develop a coherent whole approach to living our best lives.  

It seems as though most expert are so close the the problem that they miss the proverbial forest for the trees.  A different approach is needed where we can discuss the opinions of various experts and determine what’s best for ourselves instead of letting governments and institutions determine for us. 

I plan to participate in this approach.

I hope you’ll join me!