How to Create Unbreakable Wealth - PODCAST with Brad Hart (guest Mike Brown)

Foreign.

I'm so excited and grateful to have a dear friend, client, and buddy of mine on the podcast today, Mr. Mike Brown. What's going on, Mike?

Hey, Brad. Great to be here, man. Thanks for having me.

My pleasure. If you're out there in Facebook land watching us live, hit us with a hashtag live. If you're watching this on a replay, hit us with a hashtag replay. Mike, tell us a little bit about yourself, your journey up to this point. I know you don't like long drawn out heroes journey, so you could do the one minute version and we'll get right into it and add some value to these folks because we want to teach them how to create unbreakable wealth in their life and pass that on to future generations.

Yeah, definitely. It's a subject that I am very passionate about and look forward to sharing more of my journey. But, you know, my journey starts in a former Life. I flew F18s for the Navy. I did that from 2003 to 2011. I got out of the Navy and went to work for a mentor in my hometown in the oil and gas business. And he was not a billionaire at the time, but he was making a good run at it. And when an opportunity like that presents itself, that's just a door that you walk through. So I never imagined I would be back in my hometown, but there I was, and I worked for him for 18 months and learned a ton. And then with his blessing, eventually went out and started my own firm with my business partner who was a fellow naval aviator. And we flew a bunch of missions into Iraq together and started an oil and gas investment firm. So we were basically an aggregator of minerals and royalties, meaning we would buy deals from 50,000 to $2 million and build them into packages of like 5 to 15 million and sell those off to private equity funds. So, you know, I like to say that there's a difference in entrepreneurs and investors, and I really count myself in the investor camp more so than, than a traditional CEO.

Yeah, yeah, I can see that. And then what happened after you exited that company and what, what brings you to your journey today?

Yeah, so I sold that company in 2019. I had an eight figure exit. And the day I sold my company, I thought I would never be unhappy again. I, I had finally done the thing that I was supposed to do. I, I had, you know, gone to combat, proven myself there, built a company, sold it off. This is my childhood dream. And I, and I thought I would never have to work again. And two years later, I wake up and I am more stressed out than I've ever been there. There are days I don't want to face the day because I am so full of anxiety. And what had happened is I bought a distressed e commerce company. It was a unmitigated disaster. I was losing a hundred thousand dollars a month. My bank account was quickly dwindling towards zero. And for me, debrief is such an important part of my DNA as a fighter guy that I'm in this place, I'm going, how did I wind up here? How did I wind up after selling my company for millions of dollars more stressed out than I was before? And I uncovered a couple things. Number one, I was addicted to risk. I was taking moonshots and high risk, high reward angel investments and I was not maintaining enough liquidity relative to my net worth. And then secondly, I had deeper money stories. I had a very poor relationship with money. I had this easy come, easy go. I'll just make more mentality. And what that was causing me to do was write checks outsized my net worth. So I would as soon as money coming in. It's not like I had a spending problem per se. I had an investing problem, illiquid assets. And what I realized as I open up with my story and my journey is that so many entrepreneurs have the same issues. And around the time that I sold my company, I also started coaching other entrepreneurs. I had mentored a lot of the entrepreneurs that I invested in during my angel days. And it really felt like natural alignment. And as I got deeper and deeper into coaching, I realized that so many entrepreneurs are so good at building businesses, but they have a broken relationship to money and they're not able to actually transfer the skill of building a business to building wealth. So that's what I help people with today. And it's really based on my own journey.

Yeah, because you went through the cycle of I'm going to do real estate, and that ended up being a $50,000 year job. And you're like, what the hell am I doing? You went through the cycle of I'm going to invest in a bunch of startups. Instead of like, hey, why don't we stick it in the market and just go play with our kids? Like you went through all these journeys, which we all do. You know, I've been through a crypto journey, I've been through a real estate journey, I've been through a hedge fund journey. I've been a trader. It's like all these journeys lead you back to the, to the truth, which is I need to master my emotions around money before I can actually make it and keep it and have it grow and protect it. That's it. Period.

Exactly it. And you know, part of it was also I was doing what I thought rich people did versus what actual rich people do, which is rich people take a whole lot less risk than you think they do. Yeah. You know, and when you see rich people who are making angel investments or these real estate investments, that's actually a very small portion of their portfolio. And they're never risking their base. Their base is covered in something that is completely liquid and zero risk, like cash flowing bonds or you know, treasuries, like they, they have wealth that they're not touching and then with everything else they can go risk it and swing for the fences. But we as entrepreneurs don't see that base. So what we do, we think it takes money to make money and it does in certain ways. But then we go deploy it into all these risky assets, thinking that's how you grow wealth. But really it's a difference in how the portfolio is constructed. Right.

You gotta think about it from a psychological point of view too. If you don't have that safety bucket, right. Those T bills, those bonds, those life insurance policies, the boring shit that nobody wants to talk about and is less sexy to even sell, like nobody wants to buy it, but everybody needs it, you're not going to have the ability to make sound and reasoned decisions in other areas. If you're always betting the farm on every role, you're going to be jacked up emotionally. You can't help it totally.

And it makes sense. Right. Going all in and betting on ourselves is how we got wealthy to begin with as entrepreneurs. There's a point in every entrepreneurial journey where it's like, I got to push my chips into the tape, all in on the table and burn the boats and go full speed ahead. And like at some point that pays off. But now there has to be a mindset shift. You have to go from being an accumulator of wealth to a defender of wealth. And it's the same thing as when you're going from a startup CEO where you're scrappy, you're wearing all the hats, you have to get good at delegation. And then all of a sudden to scale, you know, past $10 million, you've got to become a completely different type of CEO who holds the vision for the company. And those are two very different roles. And if you're not able to make that shift, you're never going to Grow beyond those limitations. And it's the same thing with building personal wealth. Yeah.

So give us some examples. You can obviously redact the names of people that have come to you with one particular mindset, and you've helped them to shift what some of the strategies, tools that you helped. Because there's only so many stories about money. You know, maybe it's a dozen, maybe it's 20. I don't know. But, like, there's only so many stories about money. A lot of them rhyme. And to give examples of real people that have been names changed to protect the innocent, so to speak, I think would really help some people listening. Listening to be like, oh, I can identify with Sally, who did X and Y. And this is what I'm struggling with.

Yeah. One of the things I realized early on was that, you know, while my story was. Was not uncommon, and I. And I share that story with a lot of other entrepreneurs, there are, you know, the more I do this work, I realize there really are only, you know, 7, 8, 9, 10 different versions of money stories. And they. They exist on a spectrum. So at my first retreat, there was. There were two people sitting in the room. One of them was making 16 million a year and spending 17 million, and the other had just sold his company for 16 million. And he told us that his greatest fear was that he couldn't send his kids to college. And all of us exist somewhere in that spectrum. Right. We might be the high risk, high reward guy, or we might be the person that's deeply rooted in this basically scarcity mindset of there's never enough. I can never be protected. I'm never safe. And all of us share some version of those stories. And so what we do at the core of the work in Unbreakable wealth is examine where those beliefs came from. How did I get to this place where I have $17 million in a bank account and I don't think I can send my kids to college? And typically, that starts with how we grew up and what we witnessed from our parents in relation to money, what we witnessed in our hometown. You know, whether we were poor in a rich town or rich in a poor town, all of those things create subconscious patterns. And our brains are pattern matching machines. Okay, so basically, if you. If you go back to caveman days, right, our brain has one core driver. It's to keep us safe, and it keeps us safe so we can reproduce. But that. That's another story for another time. Our brain's whole function is to keep us safe. So caveman days we eat the red berries. The red berries make us sick. Our brain imprints the pattern that we don't eat red berries. And so now we go off and we see a new set of red berries. We're like, nope, those make me sick. I don't eat those. Okay, so these patterns are good, right? Their whole job is to keep us safe. But eventually they become limitations. So the same thing happens with money stories, right? So here's a great example. If you grow up and you're sitting around the dinner table and your parents talk about how rich people are evil, right? If we see a rich person, they must have exploited someone to get that they exploit the workers. Money is the root of all evil. These are very common stories that we hear in our society. And if you hear that every night growing up, what's going to happen as you start to build wealth for yourself? You're going to find a way to self sabotage because you don't want to be evil. Your brain is keeping you safe. You have this pattern imprinted on you from your parents that rich people are evil. That means if you are wealthy, you must be evil. And we will do anything to avoid falling into that trap, right? And so we have to go back, we have to look at where our beliefs around money were formed and then try and rewire those beliefs in order to create the life that we really want.

Yeah. No, I love that. And I think it comes down to what is the goal. A lot of people can't even get clear on what they want is it doesn't matter like the, the Cheshire Cat. Doesn't matter which way you go, Alice, if you don't care, right? If you don't care where you end up. So getting clear on what you actually want, where you want to end up, that's so important. Most people have a way overinflated amount of money. I've noticed of like I need to have 50 million or 100 million or whatever it is, right? But if you really broke it down, like their lifestyle and what they actually want, and you worked all that out in the spreadsheet, it'd be like 6 million or 10 million or something like that, right? It wouldn't be a crazy amount and they wouldn't have to take crazy amount of risk to get there. I mean, if you're making 300 grand a year now, and then one day you have 6 million tax free in the bank and you just earn 5%, which is a very conservative rate of return. In fact, you can get that in a bank account right now. You would be there. Right? So people don't really equate the two things, right. Or they'll think, oh, I need a certain amount of principal, right, that I'm going to spend down to nothing. Which is insane advice. I don't understand it, how they're getting there. You know where I'm going to, I'm going to have some chunk of money and then we'll spend it till the end of life. But then inflation's going up and you're living on hot dogs and waters by the end, it's like, or maybe live longer than you expect or whatever it is is like, why don't we think about it in terms of we have a certain amount of principle and it produces a certain amount of interest. So we can kind of gauge that on a risk adjusted return and decide, okay, where do we want to be and what would it take to maintain and improve our lifestyle and continue to invest and, and never have to touch the principle and pass that on to future generations? Like, how would that happen? Right. So Mike, what's kind of your methodology when it comes to helping break people out of those patterns that they get into to, to get there? And I also really want to touch on your writing, which I think is phenomenal and you obviously put a lot of time into, so. So let's talk about that too.

Yeah, definitely. So the framework, like I said, was really built out of my own experience. So the first thing I had to do is heal myself. And what came out of that was a deep personal development journey. I hired coaches, I went to therapy, I did psychedelics, I did all kinds of things in order to unwind this risk addiction and this easy come, easy go mindset. And out of that came a three step process. Number one is uncover. So that means we need to dive into our stories, understand where they came from, and rewire those subconscious beliefs. The second step then is align. So that means I need to align my wealth to my values. I need to figure out, just like you said, what is the life that I actually want to create, how much does it cost? And then how can I use my wealth to. Or my money to create the life that I actually want? And then everything else is excess after that. And then the last step is to connect. And that means connecting with systems and with people so that ultimately when our subconscious fails us, because it will inevitably fail us at some point, how do we have frameworks and systems that keep us on track so we don't self sabotage and fall back into old patterns? So that's the core of the work we do. But it really does ultimately come down to figuring out exactly what it is we want. And most people are terrible at understanding what it is they want. They think, just like you said, they think they need way more money than they actually do to live the life of their dreams. And the deeper I get into this work and the more entrepreneurs that I help on this journey, what I find is almost all of us already are making enough money or within striking distance of making enough money to create the life of our dreams. So that means it's not an actual income problem, it's a mindset problem, it's a planning problem, it's an alignment problem. And when we solve the alignment problem, now, number one, we can sleep at night, right? We can take all this fear and need to create more and we can just stay the path because we know we have a plan that serves our values and we know that if we just follow this simple plan, we're going to end up where we want to go. Because we, we have lined that out and we have a very clear direction. And then the reason that most people aren't able to do this, I think is because of the financial industry. The financial industry is incentivized to make you feel stupid, to keep you in fear so that you hand over your hard and earned money and they can get fat on fees rather than actual performance. So there's all this information out there and the number one thing people tell me the reason they don't get started on their personal finances is because of overwhelm. They don't know where to start. Should I be investing in crypto or real estate? They say if I just build a whole short term rental portfolio, that's the way to get wealthy. The fact is, if you're an entrepreneur, you already have a vehicle for beating the market. And that is your primary business that will always outperform the market. If you reinvest your time and your wealth into your primary business, you will outperform the market. And we don't need more than that vehicle to outperform the market. So now everything else I take out of my primary business should be used to create safety and long term stability and serve those values that I was talking about. And so that's what I help people do, is focus on their primary business, grow that, and then take everything that they get from that primary business and invest it in a way that creates the life they want to.

I love it. And I've been corresponding with you via text, but also by email because Every time you send out an email, I read it and I always get something a little nugget out of it. And I think they're really great. You had one in real estate, you had one on some other pieces of, you know, your journey and what you've been up to and how to buy dream cars, for example. And that's always fun. We could talk about that. But what I want to highlight here is like, Mike's always writing. He's got a great newsletter and I want you guys to check it out because, you know, it's free to check it out. And where can they go to check that out?

Mike? So you sign up for the newsletter@unbreakablewealth.com newsletter. I send it out every Friday. And really it's a personal journey, just kind of sharing my lessons learned over a decade plus as a professional investor. And as much as people love the wins, we tend to learn more from other people's mistakes. So I write a lot about, you know, failed investments or things I wish I'd done differently. And, and the real goal of the newsletter is just to help people shortcut that pain and not make some of those mistakes. And so, you know, one that you kind of.

And they will anyway, but at least we tried.

That's it, right? And everybody's on their own journey and, and you know, look, if information was all that we needed to be wealthy, then there'd be a lot more rich people, right? Because there's a wealth of information out there and there's a reason we don't follow that good advice. But real estate, for example, is we hear, and I think social media has contributed to this a lot too. There's a lot of gurus out there selling either fix and flip strategies or mobile home park strategies or all of these things. And so what you get is entrepreneurs distracting themselves from their true wealth building vehicle, which is their business. Then they go split their time trying to acquire mobile home parks or whatever it is on the side. They find out, number one, it's not as easy as they say it is on Instagram. Number two, it requires a hell of a lot more time than most people realized. And there's all kinds of headaches associated with managing your own real estate portfolio. And now, so what I tell people is either, number one, if you want to build wealth via real estate, great, become a real estate professional. Make that your primary business. Go all in, Learn the pitfalls, take the licks, learn the lessons and become a professional. But don't dabble, right? Because that's where you get burned when you have a business that's already beating the market. You take a bunch of money and you go, you know, acquire a multifamily complex. Now you're out there, you know, managing tenants property. Like there's so much involved in that. When the reality is you could have just build, been building a whole lot more wealth by investing and growing your primary business, or you can be an.

LP and some real estate deals and just write a check and be done. But then you get real estate exposure.

Leave it up to the professionals. And, and you know, there is a giant myth that, you know, the wealthy got wealthy by, by acquiring real estate. They have exposure to real estate. For sure. We all, we all want some exposure to real estate, but they don't have hundred door portfolios that they're managing themselves. That, that is not a thing that actual wealthy people do. They invest as LPs and funds like you said, or maybe even publicly via REITs. Like, there are a million ways to get exposure in your portfolio to real estate. And look, this is not a knock on real estate professionals. Like, if this is your business, like, dude, go for it, Go all in, be a pro, no problem there. But it's when people are distracting themselves with this side hustle, it's actually detracting from their ability to create true wealth, right?

So the shiny object syndrome, and it's the same thing I've experienced is like I turned 100,000 into 500,000 in crypto in 90 days because I got Covid and got down a rabbit hole on NFTs one day. But then I got busy and I stopped looking and I didn't sell when I was supposed to sell. And that 500,000 quickly dwindled back probably to the $100,000 mark or lower even, right? And it's like, you just do this enough times, you realize, like, no, I got to keep my eye on the ball. I can't be adding things all the time. And I have to leverage my strengths, right? Not everybody is a natural entrepreneur who can just build a business out of nothing. That's a zero to one thing. It's a difficult thing to go zero to one. I've done it a few times. It's fricking hard, you know, and then you have people are really good at 1 to 10. And then you got people that are like 1 to, you know, or 10 to infinity, right? It's very, very rare that there's an entrepreneur that can see it all the way through from the beginning to the end. And they typically fail a lot along the way. And the ones that really nail it, we write books about. Walter Isaacson writes books about.

Well, and the greatest enemy to entrepreneurs is distraction. And you know, the way I think about this is like, you know, most of us that end up in this entrepreneurial journey, which like you said, is a select few, you got to be a little bit crazy. You got to have an unwavering self belief. But what happens is we're really hungry for knowledge and we learn really quickly. But we love the prito principle, we love the 8020 rule. We love to learn 80%. And then that last 20% is really boring. It takes a lot of time and it doesn't give that dopamine hit that the first 80% does. Right. And so what happens is we learn things really quickly and then we get bored. And when we get bored, that's when we start to distract ourselves with, hey, I'm an agency owner, I've got to $2 million a year in revenue, but I'm super bored with marketing at this point. Let me go become a crypto investor. That's distraction. But if you show me an entrepreneur who is bored to tears with their primary business, that person is on the verge of real wealth. And if you can find a way to keep yourself inside the lines and not get distracted with Shiny Object syndrome, or my personal favorite and the one that I'm afflicted with, which is Midas Touch syndrome, which is I'm really smart at this one thing. That must mean I'm really smart at everything. And I've learned the hard way that I need to stay in my lane and that I'm not really smart at everything. And it's not that I couldn't be smart at those things. It's I haven't put in the time, I don't have the reps and I don't want to pay the tuition to get the reps to be smart at those things. Right. Because it's all about opportunity cost. Like I can go pivot and learn a completely new skillset. And that is super fun and rewarding and you know, something that I encourage people to do, but don't risk your primary vehicle for making money by doing.

Yeah. So given the light of this conversation, I think it's really interesting. Have you reflected back on when you sold your business and would you make the same choice today? You know, given that you were kind of like you were doing it, you were bored, you were like, hey, you know, now if you just 10x that business you'd be a lot wealthier and you'd have a lot less risk because you already figured it out at that point. Or do you think the market shifted? Like, where. Where are you at with that?

Yeah, so the reason I sold my business was because of a shift in the market. And so what happens with markets is that they become efficient over time. And as an aggregator, we were essentially a small to medium fish in a very large pond, but we were taking advantage of a market inefficiency. So There were these 300 million, $500 million billion dollars funds that were looking to acquire properties, and properties that were 50k were just not interesting to them. So there was an opportunity for us to go out and aggregate these properties, build them into a package that now becomes interesting to those guys. Well, what happens over time, as more of these funds spring up and the market gets efficient, is they realize that, wait a minute, those guys are making a lot of margin on us by aggregating these properties. They stand up their own buying teams, and essentially we can't compete with an end user because they can pay higher prices because they're essentially squeezing our margin. So, you know, I was very fortunate to start that business during. During a boom in the Permian, which is where we were focused. It was one of the greatest times in the history of oil and gas to be in that business. But our business model got squeezed. And so selling when I did was actually a blessing. But the decisions that I made on the backside, there's a few I wish I could take back.

Right.

So the number one thing is that, like I said, we see rich people taking risk and we think we need to do the same thing. But if we can build enough net worth to cover our spending for the rest of our lives, that is financial freedom. And there's kind of three levels of financial freedom. So the first level of financial freedom is safety. That means, hey, I've got a nest egg. And for me, that means I have 12 months of living expenses in the bank in a liquid asset, and then ideally six months of business expenses, and my income from my business is greater than what I spend every month. That's financial safety. The next level, level two, is when we get to the place where we have assets and our time is no longer required necessarily to cover our expenses. So, you know, this is where we look at, like, building a real estate portfolio or maybe a crypto portfolio. But there's still. There's active management required at this level, and there's also risk. Right. So if you are levered up and you have a big real estate portfolio and it's, it's, you know, the income is covering your expenses. That's all fine and good until a crash comes. And if you're levered up all of a sudden, now you're in a different situation. So, hey, really great place to be. I call that financial independence. You're there, your monthly nuts covered. But there's still a lot of risk involved in the market. The ultimate level of financial freedom is level three. And that's where we have enough liquid net worth to inoculate our spending for the rest of our lives in a zero net worth or very, very low risk asset. So, you know, like we said, like, like bonds, T bills, like the things that create cash flow with, with very, very low risk. Like that's true financial freedom. But that's not as sexy as, you know, building a real estate portfolio. So you don't hear about it on Instagram, but like, that's where we're trying to get to. And for most people, let's say you spend, you know, between 5 and $600,000 a year, you need about $8 million in fixed income in order to cover that for the rest of your life once you get there. Now every dollar beyond that, you can go risk, you can go swing for the fences because it's all gravy at that point. So for most of us as entrepreneurs, we need to take the money that we make from our primary business and start stacking it into liquid assets. At some point, we're probably building that business to sell. Most people are looking for an exit at some point. If between the money that you take off the table while you're operating your business and then from your exit is greater than 8 million, and you spend half a million dollars a year, you're golden forever. And that's financial freedom to me.

Yeah, no, I love that. And you mentioned kind of the wave. I look at it as like a wave. You're on the beginning of the wave, the wave's coming, you're surfing the wave, the wave's about to crash. Where do you get off the wave? So in your particular situation, you actually got off the wave at the right time. Looking back, right? You couldn't know that at the time, but you know, all the signs are pointing that way and you made the right decision at the time. But we're all on a wave, right? Every business is going to be upended by AI and robotics pretty soon, right? I don't know any business.

Every business has a natural life cycle. Every Business critical to understand where you are on that life cycle. Like so E commerce was the best thing in the world in 2015. You could put a dollar into Facebook, you get four out. Like all of a sudden, you know, with algorithm updates like, E commerce faces a lot of headwinds right now. And we see a lot of these aggregators like Frazio and some of these other ones that snapped up a bunch of E commerce companies. Now they're hurting. They didn't truly understand where they were on the life cycle of those businesses. And now the only E commerce businesses that are successful are ones with a very diversified marketing channel, acquisition strategy and with a very, very high margin. Those E commerce businesses are always going to be safe. But a lot of the ones that we were seeing, like I said, rising up in 15, 16, 17, 18, those are no longer the same. So you have to understand where you are in that life cycle. And so one reason a lot of entrepreneurs want to sell is because they're tired. And that is the wrong reason to sell a company. If you can look at your company and go, hey, I know where I am on this business life cycle and I can see the forest through the trees. I can see that I've built into this place. I'm really proud of what I built. But it's going to be harder to grow beyond where I am right now. That's a really good time to sell your business, send it off to the professionals. Maybe it's a private equity roll up, like whatever it is, like they can actually take your business to the next level. Or maybe not, but you've taken your chips off the table at the right time. And if you have enough, like I said now you can cover your spending for the rest of your life. And now you can go out and make an impact. You can create a new business that's not driven by the need to accumulate wealth.

Yeah, so it's almost like achieving financial escape velocity in a way.

Escape velocity is exactly the language that I use and it's totally misunderstood. And the most critical place is that like, let's call it like 8 to 15 million. Because if you sell for 50 million, you can make a lot of mistakes and still be fine for the rest of your life. If you sell for 5 million, unless you're really frugal, you probably don't have enough to cover your expenses for the rest of your life. As you go from, let's call it 8 to 20, that's a really critical. You have to make really good decisions with your money. And if you start risking too much of that lump, you could be in for trouble. And so that's the decision I wish I could take back. I wish I would have taken all of my proceeds from the sale, put it into fixed income with a very, very low risk portfolio or low risk profile, and then taken the excess and gone out and swamped. Like that was the right decision. I didn't, I didn't have access to that type of information back then.

Yeah, well, and you were doing what you thought rich people did. Right. And you were missing a big component of that. Or you had heard it before, but it didn't quite sink in because it was kind of boring and not sexy. Or you were like, well, I could do better than that. Right. Because the Midas touch thing, in retrospect, our foibles are pretty simple. It takes three, four, five cycles for some people to really get to a point where they're like, oh, I know how I operate. And I even see it in myself. When crypto is boring, I don't look at crypto. But now I'm smart enough to set and forget dca. And now it's coming up again and getting exciting again. And now I'm like, okay, I'm starting to feel all those old emotions of, oh, I got more money now. It's like, no, I don't actually. It's just my portfolio going through its natural ebbs and swings. And don't just go throw all your bucket into crypto again because, you know, you're doing other things that are more sustainable for the long term. So it's, it becomes a personal journey, you know, and, and Mike, I think, is somebody that can help guide you because he's been there. Like, I had the big exit. I thought I had it all figured out. I didn't. And here's what I learned that maybe will help you to get to a place where you achieve financial escape velocity and then can swing through the fences with the other stuff. Because if we, you know, Tim Ferriss said something really poignant in the four Hour workweek. If you're the kind of person who's going to come away with 8 to 15 million dollars after tax basis and, and crush it like that, you're not going to be somebody who's just like, okay, now I'm going to go off and play with my kids for the next 15 years. No, you're going to want to stick bicycle spokes in your eyes. You're going to be bored to tears. And after a few days on the beach or a Few months of watching Netflix you're going to be like what the hell can I get into? And you'll get into all these shiny objects and lose all your money. The smarter thing is make it so that your lifestyle so you can't fuck it up so it's unbreakable. And then you can go off and play with some, some stuff or raise money, you know, take the risk off the table, you know, because you got the track absolutely.

For second time founders opm other people's money is, is absolutely the best way to start a company because now you can go create the true impact that you want but you haven't risked your nest egg, right. And, and the, the typical post exit founders and I, and I've talked to a lot of post exit founders since I had my exit is exactly what you just said. Sell for a bunch of money, take a little bit of time off, probably not as much as you would think. Get really bored, take the money you just made and go re risk it in a new company. And all of a sudden you're working 100 hour weeks again wondering how the hell did I get here? This is so typical. And there's a better way to do it. And that's what I really want to shed light on for people is like hey, don't make it twice, right? You've already done the thing that you were supposed to do. You've knocked it out of the park. Now you need to put that in a place where it's going to cover you for the rest of your life. And that doesn't mean give up, that doesn't mean go retire. And by the way, if you want to retire, I was retired for a couple years. It's great. It was fantastic. It was an excellent time in my life. But you're right, at some point I think we have a deep human desire to contribute. And that doesn't mean going and building necessarily a billion dollar company though that's an option a lot of times. And I take this from the Second Mountain by David Brooks, one of my most often gifted books for post exit founders is from pain leads to wisdom leads to service. And where a lot of us find alignment in a post exit world is in something that is in service to others and helping share that wisdom that we earn through blood, sweat and tears. The natural human proclivity is to go share that and help other people. Short touch pain.

Yeah. And you've been through it once so you know what it's like. There's no illusions. Like it's kind of like, you know, when you've had a few kids, you kind of know what being pregnant's like, right? Or what giving birth is like. But you forget the pain, you want to go through it again for some reason. 0 to 1. But if you're 0 to 1 with a track record, if you're 0 to 1 with A network with success under your belt, as long as you're not lying to yourself, you might be able to spot a better thing. Like, I'm not competing in the most change the world industry in the world. I believe it changes the world for individuals like Mike, who now has a really cool program that he helps a lot of people with. Like, I believe it changed the world, but it's not Apple. I'm not gonna like lie to myself, be like, it's Tesla, like any of that crap, like, but my next exit, when I have my 20 mil in the bank or whatever it is, where it's like churning, you know, million a year and I can't fuck it up, I'm gonna swing for the fences. I'm gonna go for personalized medicine, I'm gonna go for AI and robotics. I'm gonna go for 3D printing. I'm gonna go for something that's like really sexy and exciting that I've been looking at for 10 years. But I've had the. I realize how risky it is. I realize how risky it is and how low the chance of success is. So I'm not throwing all my small amount of chips relatively in the long scheme of things into that which has a very low likelihood of succeeding. I'd rather do that when I'm stable and I can come with it with all my attention and I can use other people's money as leverage.

Well, and the irony is when you're covered in that way, you're probably going to make better long term decisions 100%. Because if your monthly spending isn't covered and you don't have this nest egg like now, you have to make more short term decisions to make sure that you're able to pull money out and do some of these other things. If you've truly inoculated yourself for the rest of your life from ever having to worry about money, you can swing for the fences and make really great long term decisions. And that's the best place to be when you really want to climb that second mountain and create that impact and.

Investors want to invest in the founder that doesn't need the money.

Yeah, totally.

Hands down, 10 out of 10 times.

Oh, and it's and it's crazy like, and you know, we see this all the time, like the, you know, these first time founders that, you know, can build a company like 20, 25 million on the back of investment and they pay themselves like a hundred grand and it's like, hey investors, like why are you allowing your CEO to pay himself 100k when you know that the decisions he could be making or she could be making for the company at that level, if they were taken care of financially, could be so much more impactful because they're not burdened by the stress of where their paycheck's coming from. Yeah, so, so it's a total misaligned incentive.

So are you, are you saying they should be paying themselves more or less?

Yeah, more. They should be, they should be able to pay themselves more. They should be able to, you know, and again this is, this is critical for, for a first time founder, more than a, than a second time founder who's, who's got this thing taken care of. But, but so many investors don't see that, you know, and, and so many CEOs don't see that like well if I pay myself more, you know, then I'm costing the company resources. I could go hire another engineer or whatever it is. But in reality like you have to be taking care of yourself so that you can make the best decisions for the long term. And, and, and we, we have this short sighted bias, you know, with quarterly earnings. Right. Like, like even the biggest companies in the world still have short term bias.

Yeah, that's incredible. And I, I don't know what, like I'd like to get your thoughts on this actually. So just like we don't have feudalism or mercantilism anymore. Just like we aren't trading shares of Dusty Dutch East India Company, the stock market's come a long way now we have crypto with all these different things. Like I realize that capitalism, end stage capitalism, wherever we're at right now, is kind of the best thing we got. It's the best system we have. But that's not to say that it will be the system forever. Where do you think economics is going in the future? Where do you think wealth creation and generally is going in the future? Do you think we're going to end up in a autonomous society where it's very difficult to actually produce value the way we've always done? Like where, where do you think we're going to land here?

Yeah, I, I love thinking about this because it's a hard problem because for the first time in the history of humanity work is no longer valuable. The work itself is no longer the most valuable commodity. And with the rise of machine learning and AI and all of these other technologies, work becomes less and less valuable over time. And I can definitely foresee a future, a very near future, by the way, a lot faster than we think, where most of us won't have to or need to, or can't even put in a 40 hour workweek because there's so much automation and the things that used to take up our time no longer take any time, right? I mean, and just think about it in the terms of like the last year, a year ago I didn't know what ChatGPT was. Now I have a chat GPT window open all day, every day. And I can crank copy, I can crank, I mean, I can crank so many things out of that. And it's dramatically reduced my workload, allowing me to spend that on other places in my business. But if that continues to happen at the rate which it's happening, like menial jobs go away with robots, right? Copywriting jobs, travel agent jobs like financial advisor jobs like, like machine learning takes care of all of these things. Attorneys, like we don't need any of these skills.

Diagnosticians, the AIs are already better at diagnosis than doctors, right? Way better.

This is where we're going. So if the work is no longer valuable, what are we going to do? And how do we, how do we look at that as a society? And it's a new problem. It's a new problem that society's never had. We've never had a world where resources are so abundant that we don't need to work to turn those resources into something valuable. But that is coming. So now what do we do? I am a libertarian by nature. I have been for a long time, at least since my late 20s. And I used to think that UBI was a socialist or communist philosophy. But I had a good friend, Floyd Marinescu, he's the founder of UBI Works in Canada. He explained to me UBI from a libertarian perspective, which is if we are to be liberated from the work, then we have to figure out some system where work is no longer the way that we earn money. And so I think that we need some form of UBI in the future. And look, I'll be the first to admit the transition from now until where we get there is super messy. I don't have all the answers, but most humans in our lifetime are going to be liberated from work, which means that we have to be liberated from tying our income to work.

And I would go further to say I think you got five to 10 years max where you can still make money and compete before you don't have an opportunity to do that. So you might as well get wealthy now because I don't know if there's going to be a chance in the future. And I could be Chicken Little with the sky's falling, but I can't think of a single job that can't be done or a business that can't be built. I'm looking at a world where an AI system is analyzing the market at 8pm has an idea that by 8am could be a billion dollar idea. Yeah, how are you going to be with that? You were asleep.

Well, and look, I mean we're already somewhat living in that dystopian future because with, with HFTs and advanced algorithms and hedge funds, the market is rigged against us. Which is why there's never been a worse time to be an active trader because the market's completely rigged in the favor of people with access to high speed trading algorithms. That's why I think the rise of indexing has been so prolific because it's essentially saying if we can't beat them, join them. And so, but again, you know, now we've moved from an active trading strategy to a passive trading strategy and the same thing's going to happen within the professional, you know, services. Like, you know, I mean like a social media agency for example, is an example I always use. Like, you know, we've been able to reduce or generate more output per employee and that's been a steady rise. At some point though, the employees aren't going to have a place to play there anymore. And that's not now. Right. We definitely need a man controlling the machine at this point. ChatGPT is not perfect. It's not going to create perfect copy. We've got to learn how to prompt it so we still have time. There are still places where we can generate a tremendous amount of wealth by leveraging that technology. But if we look out at the long run of this equation, equation like that gap starts to narrow where we don't need the man in the machine anymore. And then what the hell are we going to do?

Yeah, and I start to think about like, yeah, we talk about this as the furthest we've been on this society since recorded history. But you know, if you believe in like the younger Dries impact theory, there might have been way more civilized societies way before us that we don't even have record of because they're all, you know, if they had silicon, it's gone. If they had the Internet, it's gone. If they had anything but stone structures, like all we have left to look at. And then I start to think, okay, what about other intelligent species in the universe? Like how would they look at this problem? They're not thinking about scarcity. They can make whatever they want, right? They have quantum gravity wells and shit. They can power around the universe with and they can take a star and build it into whatever elements they need to do whatever they want. All those ideas of science fiction, the aliens are coming to invade us and take our resources. It's kind of bullshit when you can make whatever you want whenever you want, right? So we need to start thinking about what the future could look like from outside of our little, you know, monkey with thermo nuclear weapon scarcity, tribal, you know, thing territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons. We need to expand outside of that and start to think, well what could it be like, right? Because that's, you know, how progress happens in the first place. And especially if you're wealthy, especially if you got time in your hands and you've been proven that you, you can be a disciplined problem solver. That's what we need you working on. It's like what can we do in a post work society? Does it look more like the Danes who, you know, they get tax at 70% and have all these social safety nets and focus their time on how comfortable they can be now, you know, and how hygge their lifestyle can be. Like there's, there's people out there living whole different lifestyles that just within our society, you know, we think about it from an American point of view but the reality is there's a whole lot of ways to live. I don't necessarily want it to go the way of China or Russia, but you know, there's other ways this thing could go.

Well yeah, and if we think about it from the lens of abundance, right? The problem when these things have been tried in the past or tried in the present is that it's all about wealth confiscation and wealth transfer from the haves to the have nots, right? But if we truly have abundant creation and unlimited resources, the pie can just get bigger. So we don't need to necessarily go take from anybody, make that, we just make the entire pie bigger and make sure that there is a fair distribution system where people get to share in the upside. And so, but you know, in some ways, that already exists, like with the free markets, with the publicly traded markets, like, you have access to be able to invest in the companies that are going to create these technologies. But the poorest people don't have access. Right. They don't have the ability to participate. And so, you know, as that gap widens, that creates a bigger and bigger problem moving forward, because we all need to be able to have the ability to tap into those investments in that.

Abundance, at the very least, to pace inflation. If you just have cash or you have a fixed salary and you're not in the stock market. You know, I can remember I had friends growing up that I used to have dinner over their house all the time. They kind of took me in when my dad was being an. He would say things like, when are you ever gonna invest in the stock market? What do you care about the stock market? And I was like, that was a big break for me. I realized, like, oh, these people are always going to be stuck if they stay in this mindset because I. I have to go out and figure out how the rich people are doing it. Right. It's not. It's not magic. They're not 10 times or 100 times smarter than I am. It's just they're doing different things and they. They're thinking about things differently they've had around them that gave them a possibility.

Totally. And that, I mean, that was actually one of the biggest money beliefs that was shattered for me early on when I became a millionaire, is that I thought if somebody was wealthier me than me, they must be smarter than me. And that's not true. Like, there's. There's a lot of mouth breathers who are rich. Like. Like, they. They may have figured out one thing, but that doesn't necessarily make them brilliant. And so, you know, we. We idolize rich people. And. And again, I think this is what contributes to that Midas touch syndrome we were talking about is like, we. We idolize these entrepreneurs. We idolize Elon Musk. We idolize people who are really good at one thing, but I think we're not actually, you know, aligning ourselves properly with values. Because if I look at Elon Musk, like, that's not a life I want to live.

No.

Yeah, exactly.

Even admits he's like, you don't want to be me. It sucks. It's horrible.

And to be the best in the world at something, to dedicate yourself in that way, in that relentless pursuit of perfection, it necessarily means you are probably deficient in other areas of your life. Very rarely are you going to be the absolute best in the world at something, including wealth creation and be a great father. At least not a very present father. Right. So, okay, if that's not my idol, like, who do I actually want to idolize? It's someone that's living in alignment. It's someone that's living in balance, who, you know, yes, they are providing value to society and as a result of that, they're, they're, you know, creating wealth for themselves. But they're also, they also have a great relationship with their spouse. They have a great relationship with their kids. When their kids leave, you know, they want to come back and visit their parents. Like, that's the life that I want to live. I want to have freedom of time, I want to have freedom of health. I want to have freedom of relationships where I can enjoy, invest in relationships and go deep with people that help me become a better version of myself. Those are the things that I really care about. So it's not all about how do I maximize my resource collection and become the wealthiest. After a certain point, we just don't need that much more. And that's cool. You can still want more and you can still serve more and you can still create more value and accumulate more. Right. So it's finding that balance.

Yeah. No, I love that. I love this conversation too. We've gone all over the map here. I want to make sure we come back to the original premise here, which is if you need to figure out how to exit, figure out how to get your wealth sorted. If you have exited, if you're at the place where you need to not screw up your wealth because you'd have to switch gears.

Right.

You can't use the same gear that you got there from entrepreneurship, which is, you know, leveraging, yielding more time, more energy, more attention, you know, to now going into defense and grow and protect mode of wealth, which is more about sitting on your hands than anything else. I found having the, well, it's, it's.

It'S, yeah, it's making sure you have the right structures and systems in place and then, yeah, creating guardrails so that you don't self sabotage. Right. And, and you know, that is really the core of the work that we're doing at Unbreakable wealth that starts with our relationship to money and understanding what subconscious patterns are, are leading to that self sabotage. So, you know, beyond the free newsletter, I have group coaching programs, I have a private coaching practice as well. And all of those, we focus on learning how to build that wealth and bridging the gap between wealth and freedom. Right. Because that's the ultimate goal.

And I've known Mike for years. He's the real deal. I helped him get the program off the ground. In the beginning he was a client as well. He practices what he preaches. He had a beautiful time. We had a great time out in near Denver where his home is near Red Rocks. We had an awesome group there. Cool little kickoff party. Really did it up. Right. When's the next one of those coming up that people maybe get involved with?

Yeah, so the, the wealth coaching program. I've taken their curriculum from my retreats which you know, were were only accessible by 16 at a time. I've moved that fully online so it is scalable. I can serve more folks and that is up to a year long program. There's various options that's fully online. I put the retreats in my home on pause right now as I really build and focus on growing that. But if you sign up for my newsletter, there will be another in person mastermind later in the year. We don't have all the details hammered out but that's going to be focused on, hey, you've got the basics already from the group coaching program. Now let's level up and let's really look at designing that ideal life. And so I'm super excited to launch that later in the year.

Yeah. What I love is the accountability piece. Right. It's just having that group of people who are also doing what you're doing and kind of masterminding around, hey, is this a dumb idea or not? Right. It's like we all have ideas, we all have different things we could focus on and deals we're going to do. And like you just need some halfway decent people to be in a room and just ask you questions to make sure you're not going completely off the rails.

Yeah. I mean that's, it's what I call having a band of truth seekers. And truth seekers are people that will number one, point out your blind spots and help you see the places where you're falling short or you're sabotaging yourself. And then the second half of that is also being open to you, being a mirror for them and accepting places that they might have blind spots. Right. So creating a band of truth seekers I think is the most critical step in creating that life because you always need peers and mentors that have been where you want to go or are also on the journey with you. And that's the last part of Unbreakable wealth is a small group mastermind with four or five people that are all on the path. They're all at the same net worth. They're all in the same place in life, and they're building consciously together. And the point of accountability is not necessarily, hey, am I making a bad decision or not? It's saying, hey, here's the plan that I built based on my values, based on my principles. Here's the decision I'm thinking about making. Does this align to the path that I set forth? Right. So if you want to go invest in a big crypto fund, and I don't know anything about crypto, I'm not going to tell you what a bad idea that is. I'm going to say, well, hey, you told me this is the wealth plan that you had set up for yourself. Does this serve that or does this attract from me? And that's what true accountability is.

Yeah. No, I love that. And just to recap, everybody, you can check out Mike's writing, get on the list, be notified of events and masterminds and all kinds of cool stuff@unbreakable wealth.com newsletter, right?

Yep.

And then Mike will keep you up to date. He sends out things on Friday. I love reading his emails. Sometimes I miss them, so I'm sad I should go back and find them. But, yeah, man, it's. I'm so grateful to know you. I'm so grateful you're doing this. It's so awesome to see it come from, like, a little seed and see all the different ups and downs and journeys. Like, I. I think I knew you right after you exited. Like, that's when I first met you, actually.

Before.

Oh, yeah. So before you exit. So that's awesome. So, yeah, just to see all the ups and downs of your journey and to see you go through all these different cycles and to not hear from you for months and be like, yeah, I'm in a deep, dark hole right now in hellish. And, you know, meeting Claire and getting married and all this really beautiful stuff. So grateful for you in my life. Grateful you could come on the podcast. Finally I get to introduce more of my cool friends to the rest of my cool friends. Um, and yeah, if you're out there, you know, and these topics are important to you, even if you're not quite where you want to be yet, get on Mike's newsletter. You'll learn a thing or two.

Dude, I. I deeply appreciate the opportunity to be here and. Yeah, man, I. I really appreciate our friendship. Yeah, we. We met, I, I believe in 2017.

And it was, you know, it was at 212. That's where.

Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's been a wild ride for both of us. Lots of reinventions and pivots and.

Still happening.

Yeah, totally. But, you know, I can honestly say, and this is, you know, really why I created this program is right now, today, you know, as opposed to a couple of years ago, when I was. When I was in that kind of deep, dark place. Like, I am living the best version of my life to date, and I know it's only getting better. And you've been a big part of that. And I. And I deeply appreciate you and your guidance and. Yeah. How you're showing up in the world, man, because. Because it's important and it's needed.

Same. Same. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, everybody, for listening. If you're watching live, hashtag live. If you have questions, drop them below. We'll make sure Mike gets tagged in this. If you're watching the replay, hashtag replay, don't forget to subscribe to Mike's newsletter. Check out what he's doing@unbreakable wealth.com newsletter. All right, everybody, have a beautiful rest of your day. Stay blessed. Happy New Year.