Daniel Woodford

“Yeah, there was always a little bit of that. My dad always thought that either I should become a nuclear physicist, or a doctor like a couple of my uncles. My dad always had those types of high expectations for me. I don't know where he got the idea of a nuclear physicist. I think, to him, it just sounded cool.”

Interviewed by Jonathan Rozek for Ten Paths. David Lindahl was not involved in editing these interviews.

Daniel: I grew up in a small town. Niles, Michigan was a town with about 12,000 people, and it still is about that size today.

Jon: Do you have siblings?

Daniel: I have an older sister and a younger brother.

Jon: Did anything stand out in terms of your being expected to become a doctor or whatever—following somebody's footsteps?

Daniel: Yeah, there was always a little bit of that. My dad always thought that either I should become a nuclear physicist, or a doctor like a couple of my uncles. My dad always had those types of high expectations for me. I don't know where he got the idea of a nuclear physicist. I think, to him, it just sounded cool.

Jon: That's a pretty good aspiration. Early on, did you feel like you knew what you wanted to do? Or were you not sure?

Daniel: I was one of those kids who never was really sure what I wanted to do. Even after I graduated high school and left to go to college, I really never knew what I wanted to major in. I literally went to four or five different colleges, just trying to figure things out. Finally I went into the military and got a little direction in that regard, and finished my degree. Now I have a bachelor's, two master's degrees and kind of went completely gung-ho on education, once I figured out my direction.

Jon: I have a theory that everybody is a collector of something: some people collect spouses over time, and some people have hobbies. Even the people who insist they are not collectors may be collecting experiences of some kind. It sounds like you had a rare skill to collect degrees.

Daniel: It started a little bit later in life, but yeah.

Jon: How did you end up attending so many colleges? Was it that one college didn't have a broad enough set of courses?

Daniel: My parents were overseas, working for the government at the time. I started one school at the satellite campus of the University of Maryland in Okinawa, Japan. That was the first school. Then I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to come back to the states and go to college. So I came back and stayed with some high school friends and their parents. I went to a local community college and then my friends and I decided OK, let's transfer to this bigger college. I just kept moving around, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Ultimately I ended up enlisting in the Air Force.

Jon: Were your parents in the military or in a different part of government?

Daniel: My dad was in the Marines and later was a civil servant, working for the government over in Japan.

Jon: Were you born overseas?

Daniel: No, I was born in Niles. We were there for about my first ten years and then we moved to California for a couple of years. From there, we moved to Japan and I graduated from high school there.

Jon: What was your initial reaction after moving to Japan?

Daniel: It was an interesting experience. I was up for a new adventure, but at the same time it was my senior year in high school. I didn’t really want to leave California, but I did, and it was one of the best experiences of my life. Just living in another country and understanding another culture was so interesting for me. I stayed there for two or three years, then came back and tried to go to college.

Jon: How much is Okinawa a different culture from mainland Japan?

Daniel: There are definitely distinct differences in both cultures. Okinawa is often called the “Hawaii of Japan”. It actually was its own island kingdom with a completely different culture and language that got colonized and integrated into the mainland, so it's culturally a fairly different place than the rest of Japan.

Jon: How were Americans viewed at that time?

Daniel: It varied. There’s sometimes that perception of Americans that they kinda come over and think they run the show. Other parts of society fight that view, and for the most part I felt very welcomed. There's always going to be a small subset of society that thinks: We don't want them here.

Jon: Well, that does happen in the U.S., too. It might be like Cape Cod, where the local people want the tourist money, but not necessarily the swarms of tourists. So where did you end up in the U.S. when you got back?

Daniel: I came back to California. I lived with friends and their family for the first semester of college. As I said, it was a bit of a winding route through different colleges and programs before I finally went into the Air Force.

Jon: How did you decide that you'd go into that branch of the military?

Daniel: I’ve always heard that the Air Force has a lot better living conditions, and for the most part, it's true. They also had more of a technical type of career path that I was leaning toward at the time. I was thinking about maybe engineering or something like that.

Jon: How much training did you have? I'm sure there's basic training, but when does basic turn into specialized?

Daniel: It was about 12 weeks of basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Then I went to Biloxi Air Force Base in Mississippi. I had 10 or 11 months of electronics training and specialty training on the Airborne Warning and Control System (“AWACS”) radar, which is an essential airborne radar system that acts as “traffic control” in the air.

Jon: How much choice did they give you after basic training as to which direction you could go?

Daniel: They always give you the opportunity to select what you go into, but with the caveat that the needs of the Air Force come first. Sometimes you get what you ask for, and more often than not, you don't. They'll give you a list of things that you can choose from, and you may get something on that list, or something that isn't on the list. That's how it worked for me.

Jon: Did you win the lottery, or did they place you where they wanted you?

Daniel: I actually got the first choice on my list. I got the airborne-radar system, which was pretty cool. I enjoyed that job, which was at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City.

But here’s the interesting thing: throughout my 20-year career in the Air Force, the jobs that I picked often turned out to be not as rewarding as the jobs that were picked for me. For instance, my last tour was at the Pentagon. I'm like, Oh my gosh, I'm going to the Pentagon. I'm going to be the lowest guy on the totem pole. I'll be shining the generals' shoes. But it turned out to be one of the better tours that I ever had.

Jon: I don't know where I heard it, but somebody said that three-star officers are a dime a dozen in the Pentagon.

Daniel: I don't know about three stars, but I would say probably colonels, and maybe one stars. Some of the colonels that I worked with had a cubicle, just like me.

Jon: How long were you at the Pentagon?

Daniel: I was there for about four and a half years.

Jon: Without getting into anything that's sensitive, what was the nature of the work that you were doing?

Daniel: I was in a space-related field. I did everything from launching satellites, to tracking satellites, to operating them, flying them, testing them—that type of thing. At the Pentagon, I was actually the head space test officer for the Air Force. I wrote the policy on how we test satellites and space weapon systems.

Jon: Man, and this is in what year? I'm thinking about which administration.

Daniel: This was the 2009 to 2014 timeframe.

Jon: So Bush and Obama years.

Daniel: Yes.

Jon: Talk about a growth area. I'm interested in your opinion: when Trump was in office, there was this whole issue of creating a space command that would be a whole other military branch. What's your opinion of that? Was that needed, or was it already being done?

Daniel: To be honest, it was already in place. It just wasn't called the U.S. Space Force. It was Air Force Space Command, and what he did was take that portion of the Air Force and basically pull it out and make it its own. Nothing really changed. We're still doing the exact same mission, except they just took Space Command out of the Air Force and created its own branch.

Jon: It's interesting, because the Army originally had the Air Force, and the Air Force was pulled out into its own branch. So it's kind of like a progression.

Daniel: Yeah.

Jon: So you were at the Pentagon for a while, and then what made you leave?

Daniel: Well, I had put my 20 years in, and it was time for me to retire. I was ready to do something different, and that's when I came across Dave Lindahl and multi-family investing.

Jon: Were you actively looking for different potential opportunities on the investment side, like real estate or other things?

Daniel: Yes, and I made a determination that real estate was where I wanted to go. After about 15 years in the Air Force, I started to think about my options. I knew at that point that I would punch out at 20 years. I could easily have stayed in the space-career field and built satellites. Not very many people have that on their resume. I could have just transitioned over to be a government contractor.

But I was like, Man, I've been commuting in this D.C. traffic year after year, two hours there, and two hours back. I need to figure out something. I need to replace this income.

That’s when I started to focus on single-family investing. I went to a seminar in Baltimore about single families that Dave Lindahl did at the time. It was brought up at the event that he did multifamily. That's how I learned about multifamily, and I immediately transitioned to that. I signed up for the coaching and everything else.

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