Brent was born in Los Angeles to Catholic parents from Detroit, Michigan. He received a Catholic education including at an all-boys high school where he was in sports and theater. Brent studied international relations at USC where he also joined a fraternity and played on the school's ice hockey team. After 9/11, I started taking Arabic classes, first moving to Beirut, Lebanon, then to Cairo, Egypt where he got a graduate degree in Middle East studies. He then moved to Washington DC where I worked at Human Rights Watch for two years before joining the CIA and working as a counterterrorism analyst for five years. In 2015, He resigned from the government and since has been working as a contract writer, sometimes for the History Channel, but usually ghostwriting political op-eds for executives, politicians, and university presidents.