Shibumi! Big Leap Investing and Money

All right, Gay Hendricks, we are about to do episode five. This is shibumi, which we will explain what shibumi is in the episode. But it's the big leap with investing in money. So what are we going to cover?

Well, we're going to cover all our personal wealth building strategies, and we're also going to cover how much your attitude and your inner energy depends. Creates your worth, creates your net worth as well as your self worth. Okay.

And one of the things that I'm super excited about is you're going to talk about, really a couple of the transformational moments going back to the Civil War time.

Yes.

And the idea of Yankee money and what that is and how it affected you growing up, but also the notion of. I talk a little bit about the seasons of money, a few big distinctions I've had, especially about slowing down to create opportunities to create wealth and create income, and then get into a few philosophies, the values of money, that have enabled me to completely change my investing strategies and philosophies. And we're going to get tactical, too.

Yes. And I can also testify to how to go from poor to rich without ever having a budget or a business plan.

I love it. So all of that and more coming up in episode five. Shibumi. And you've got to stick around because this is a fantastic word. I just learned it today.

Gay Hendricks. Here we are, episode five. We're talking about big leap, investing in money. It's nice to be here with you, my friend.

Great to be with you again, Mike.

All right, so why don't we begin. And I think the best way to get this thing rolling is. Let's just talk about. I'm curious what your big leap about money has been both from the past. Like, if you think about what was the biggest leap that got you into a space that at least got you comfortable with money. And then as it's evolved, I'm curious where it is now and also how conscious luck enters into that game. And I'll share a few things that I've learned and I think about now when it comes to investing in money.

And.

And we might as well be as tactical and as strategic simultaneously with this topic. So it provides as much value as possible for our audience. What do you think of that great idea?

Money is like, I think.

Religion or any marriage or any other big thing like that. It has this vast amount of energy that's bound up in it. And.

Either people define themselves by resisting that energy or by opening up to that energy. And there was a particular day. I remember when I opened up and it was when I caught myself in my mind having the same conversation about money that I heard around me growing up. And I was maybe 35 at the time or something like that when I had this insight. But I realized I was replaying the same are we going to have enough money to get through to the end of the month? Conversation that was just around me in the atmosphere when I was a kid. I don't think the month went by without somebody saying that out loud.

I can totally, totally relate to that. I remember growing up, probably my most distinctive thought was, and I don't remember exactly the exact year, but it must have been in the 70s sometime. And so it was definitely high inflation. My dad at the time, so he ran a barber shop, so he's a barber, but never really understood his own value. And he grew up very poor on a farm. My mom grew up very poor, raised more or less by her completely dysfunctional crazy mother, who is lobotomized by her father, by the way. I mean, how's that for a little dysfunction?

And he was this philandering alcoholic. So my point is, neither of my parents came from any form of wealth. There's old programming there. And my dad came from very, very poor German immigrants who came here during World War I. And my mother's family came over around World War I as well from Norway. Having said that. So here it is. My mom wanted to make dinner for the night, and we more or less grew up getting vegetables out of the garden. And. And my dad, because he came from a farm background, we had a freezer full of meat, or we went and caught our own meat in the lake. So we caught fish. But mom said, would you go up to the grocery store to get some hamburger? And I remember looking inside her purse and there was a dollar in there. So I got a dollar's worth of hamburger. And the way she bulked it out for the rest of us kids was by adding a box of saltine crackers. Right? So it was, I know that particular.

Dish from my childh.

So anyway, I can remember driving back and forth on my bike and it didn't seem, you know, it didn't seem bad. It wasn't like we had lack. It's just I didn't realize that the energy surrounding the mindset, how it affected me later on and how that was certainly a driving factor because it's the oldest, there wasn't extra at all around. We weren't in need necessarily. Dad always found a way but he worked a lot, and he was also the city clerk and the building inspector, and then did other odd jobs, always sharpening scissors. He always had a side gig on top of a side gig. So I started working full time the day I turned 16. And prior to that, I always had gigs going around because I hated being cold last and late, you know, it was like. So when anyone ever asked me, you know, what do to be when you grow up, I always said, I want to be warm first and rich. And so that was a driver.

That's good, though. You grew up in Minnesota, didn't you?

Yeah.

I can see where warm was a big issue. I grew up in the swamplands of central Florida. And the reason we were in central Florida was because my family, which had once been very wealthy before the Civil War, got on the wrong side of the Civil War. They lived in Alabama, and they had a bunch of factories and things that all got all blown up and all their lands confiscated. So my family went from this great wealth to basically having to run for their lives to Florida. And they ended up at the turn of the century in Florida and gradually worked their way back up the ladder again. But my grandmother, who I was primarily raised by my grandmother, she had this odd position about money that she didn't trust the, quote, Yankee money.

Of course, they'd lost all their Civil War dollars and everything and the Southern money. In fact, one time I was nosing around in some old chests in my grandmother's house, and I opened a chest and there were millions of dollars of Confederate money in it. And I was a little kid at the time. My eyes popped out because I thought it was real money. And I remember running into my grandmother and saying, granny, Granny, look what I found in. You know. And she said, sorry, it's not worth a nickel, you know, and.

Oh.

But I went through a process of really getting very comfortable with the Yankee money, and I'm totally comfortable with it.

That is really. I mean, that's such a strange conversation to have now, for sure. So let's talk about.

Breakthroughs, because I can for sure tell you a couple of mine and where I finally felt like I got my head above the water level, where I felt, looking back, the experience I had. If I was going to describe a dream state while I'm alive, it's feeling underwater all the time. I was always chasing, just barely floating above. It's like a little gasp for. Because I was burning through it fast. I didn't have good.

Saving skills or certainly not investing skills, and I certainly was raised in the environment of perform a task and get paid versus wealth accumulation and investor mentality. And more importantly, the notion of never creating a job for yourself when it comes to earning money, which is a big concept I want to talk about as we move through this. But the. Do you have. Do you want to talk about your breakthrough moment? And I'll tell you what mine were, two of them in particular that stand out.

Yeah, well, I had a couple right in a row. But right after I had that insight about replaying the old money conversation, I went in and I talked to Katie about it. And she and I had only been married a year or so at the time, and we were struggling with money. And so I talked to her about this insight and she kind of lit up about it. And we went out to a restaurant and plotted out our future basically and plotted out how we wanted things to be in the money arena. And you'll laugh at this probably, but the very first thing we came up with would, Wouldn't it be nice to have $1,000 in an excellent count that we never had to touch? And that was a very outrageous idea for us at the time. But once we got our attention on it, we manifested it very quickly and then we set our intention on getting $10,000 that we wouldn't have to touch. And so things went on up from there. But the key thing was getting our attention off of the old conversation and finding a new way of planting our flag in the ground about how we wanted it to be. Ultimately, we kept. We kept score for a while, up until we got past a million or so. But after that we quit keeping score and just developed a whole kind of a money mantra, which is all of our money is easily invested and expands constantly to bring us the things we want and need. So we have this kind of idea about it that.

That we think sustains our continuous money expansion.

That's great. So I'll tell you mine on just like a practical level. And I think a couple of my breakthroughs.

It really came from when I started Digital Cafe, which was my first real business. And it was an agency, a digital marketing agency. And one of the pains I had associated with it was on the outside. We created a great appearance that we were doing really well. And we were successful in the sense that we were working with huge clients like 20th Century Fox and Sony and doing movie promotions and writing video games. And we were working in a high visibility field doing interactive multimedia at the time, which was pre Internet. We'd do custom games and our clients were agencies. The problem was we got paid in dribs and drabs and we often wouldn't get paid until the client got paid. And that's back when agency work was all driven by creative. So someone would get a gig based upon the creative that they'd pitch. Mad Men or is it madman style like the TV show? And it meant creative drove everything. They'd get awarded. And then agencies made their money on the 10 or 15% of ad spend. So when money was being spent, they made money. But otherwise you'd win it based upon the creative, where we were service mentality. It was just the way we were raised. So we're kind of like this awkward in between. But when you're dealing with a company like 20th Century Fox or Sony, it would take 90 days to get paid. And what drove us was our creative team, our staff. So we were constantly fighting not just the 30 day monster, but the 90 day monster. And you know, someone's late and to them, you know, it's like if Things get delayed 120 days, it's no big deal to them, but for us, we're living on the 10% or 20% down payment. Well, finally though, after 10 years of struggling and at one point at the point where I was literally buying my groceries on gas cards because all my credit cards are full, I'm paying my staff with credit card checks. So. And we're basically. I didn't know this was not cool at the time, but I was kiting credit card checks. So I was paying my credit cards with credit card checks and moving money around all the time and all hoping for the next card to come in. And finally we got acquired and that for the first time was a lump of cash dropped into my lap. Plus we got an employment agreement and.

Not only that advance of that initial transaction, but I could pay off all my debt immediately. And had it wasn't millions, but in the high hundreds of thousands of dollars in my bank account. It was like, holy cow, this is miraculous. And because of that transaction and because of the visibility of it, I suddenly had options around me where people were paying me an inordinate amount of money for my advice. And that was the first time I genuinely felt refreshed and clean and rich.

And from there there were a couple other breakthroughs. But again, it was still very transactional at the time. And I didn't really understand.

The mindset of attracting it and being able to hold onto it and being able to maintain that mentality because depending on what was happening at any Given time inside my bank account, determined how I felt about money.

Your net worth was associated with your self worth?

Yes, totally.

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, I can remember a moment also when I quit worrying about money, and it didn't have anything to do with money itself. I read this little book one time called Seed Money in Action, and the idea of it was really radical. It talked about a process called tithing, which in regular religious terms means giving 10% of your income to the church or cause or religion. So.

This other guy wrote Seed Money in Action, said instead of doing that, do reverse tithing, figure out what you want to contribute, and let it be okay for 10 times that amount to come back to you. And so I remember trying this experiment with Katie where we took $50 and put it into a tree foundation, some foundation that planted trees. And we did that in honor of my grandmother who loved trees. And so we made this $50 contribution to a tree planting organization and support a whole bunch of those, by the way, 25 years later, we've had been able to plant something like 20 million trees over the years. And so within that first $50, we did a seed money in action process where we said, okay, we'll let it be okay for $500 to come in as a result of this contribution. So reverse tithing, getting out there, front with what you want, rather than waiting till you get it and then giving back 10% of it. So it's a whole different philosophy. And I completely forgot about it until one day a couple months later, I was walking through the office.

And.

I was looking through the mail, and I got an unexpected royalty check for $536 or something like that from a German edition of a book that I'd completely forgotten about. So anyway, it was this extra $500, and I showed it to Katie and I said, look, we got some free money in the mail.

And.

And she said, hey, it looks like the program must be working. And I remember saying, what program are you talking about? And she said, well, remember, we made a $50 contribution. And at that moment, something shifted in me, and I realized, oh, I'm in charge of this. It's not running me now. I can create by the amount of contribution I want to make to the world. I can create.

A back wave, so to speak. And so that, to me, rearranged my thinking. And it makes a lot of sense, because if you think about it, you grew up on a herb from farm stock.

My family was in citrus and watermelons and things like that. So we had one eye on the weather all the time, too. But when you're a farmer, you go out in the garden and you plant the garden and you water the garden. You go out there front. Yeah, up front with your contribution. No gardener or farmer ever gets out there and says, okay, give me some vegetables and then I'll water you. You know, it doesn't work that way. And so I think it's. It actually represents the way things are, that in life that you contribute to whatever level you can contribute, and then if you let it be okay to be rewarded for that. A lot of people in our field, though, especially in the field of coaching and personal transformation and entrepreneurship and everything, they miss out on that. How to let the backwash happen, how to let the wave of abundance come back over them for their contribution. And that's one thing that I've been really working on over the past 10 years that the Conscious Luck book is all about.

I love that. I love that. It got me thinking about a couple big ideas here. One of them is the seasons of money. We can talk about that. Which again, relates to the harvesting, which I know if we fast forward a little bit, there's a lot of in between here. But this past year, I took an enormous amount of time off, and historically, if I didn't have X number of coming in. So my mindset, which I'm still deeply programmed to, is I never, ever touch my principal, okay? I want to live on cash flow and build my businesses on cash flow, not dependent upon investors or banks or any kind of outside what I call a false.

Security blanket. Because in my mindset is provide for the industry or a market that exists, not for one that I hope exists or think might exist. So test and repeat, Test and repeat and build that, which I've basically done that same model about seven times now, fully acknowledging that it may or may not be the right thing, but it's the one that I understand fully and completely. So the basic notion, though, what I am not used to is taking time off because I'd be afraid that I'd lose momentum. So I think money momentum is a very important concept here. And what happened this past year. So I sold everything, shut down my last business, managed to sell it in the. And the assets, but I really took time to compress the spring. So if you think of, you know, planting time and growing time and harvest time and then winter time, it was a more or less controlled winter time to just rest and think and test out my thinking and have time for germination. To take place. I was seeding and it was fairly intentional, which is just building relationships and connecting without expecting reciprocity or any specific outcome, just knowing that by providing value it was compressing the spring. And then suddenly these new little things started to germinate and pop up and I've got many harvests happening all the time. But remembering that from a symbolic perspective has been an important vehicle for changing and rearranging my old panic stricken, anxiety driven mindset that I think was created by decades of trauma, of almost running out about having unforeseen forces suddenly take, steal or remove money from my existence, whatever that may be. And there were energy leaks, really, I mean, if you think in a metaphoric state. So.

I want to first of all see if you have some comments there before I ask you about investment philosophy, because one of the things that you are exceptional at is spotting a trend before it happens, creating an opportunity, controlling your luck, creating luck factors and then manifesting stuff very, very quickly and then also timing the exit. Yes, and I've watched that personally in the, I mean, I think you and I have known each other somewhere in the neighborhood now. It's, it's not far from 20 years, surprisingly. I think we met through Ariel shortly after I moved here and, and I'm going to guess it's in the 15 plus year range. It's not far off from there. I could be off, but I think that's. I know it was before Traffic Geyser even. We were working together and that goes back to the 2003, 2004, 2005 category. I'd have to look back at some of our original creative documents. So anyway, you and I have actually done some business things in the past and then I've watched some of your investments, some of them active, some of them reasonably passive. And let's talk a little bit about how your investing strategy being able to allow things to happen and steer them either energetically or with your advice and your, I'll say your superpowers. And I'd love to explore that and see what you know about you now that you didn't maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. When it comes to investing and manifesting and let's get tactical.

Yeah. Well, right now the way I look at my investments is a little bit differently than when I started because when I started I was just putting a little bit of money away in a fund, you know, that kind of thing. I didn't really think about it, except it was a savings plan for me and I'VE always been kind of a frugal person. You know, my wife and I love our house. We used to have three houses in a business building, but over the past 25 years, we've trimmed down to where we have one house we love. And.

Yeah, I love that about you, by the way. It's like I. You know, you and I have talked about net worth and all that, and you're. You're in a great place. You've. You've worked hard, and, like, you have a very. It's a beautiful spot in Ojai. And it's modest. I can remember the first time I walked in, I was like, well, this isn't the home of the gazillionaire I know you to be. And I say that with a little bit tongue in cheek, but I was like, wow. And it was like, you're not a big car guy. You're not a stuff guy at all, neither one of you. And I appreciate that in more ways than I've even ever had the conversation with you about. So I just wanted to put in a little bookmark there, but keep going.

Okay. Well, I appreciate that very much because actually, it's been a lot of work getting to that place, that place of just having one home that we love passionately. And, you know, the thing that I did in the early part of my life that I kind of look back on with some regret is I made things a lot more complicated than they really ought to be. And I created complexity in my life all the time. And for the past 25 or 30 years, I've been highly focused on simplicity, making things elegantly simple. That's the way I put it. The Japanese word shibumi that has that elegant simplicity.

How's that spelled?

That.

That word?

S H I B U M I, Shibumi.

Okay.

It's this sort of elegance of organization. Not too much, not too little. And with Katie and I, we don't have kids at home anymore. We just have the two cats. So we don't really want or need a big house. And the one we have, we've been there for 20 years now and just put energy into it and love our gardens and all of that. And so it's perfectly scale to us. And there was a time in my life when I went kind of wild with. When I first made money, we kind of. It was interesting because I was a university professor very happily, and then we wrote the book Conscious, Loving, and sort of overnight found ourselves on Oprah. And within a very short period of time, I was making more money every month doing seminars than I was at the university in a whole year. And so it got to be kind of costly then to have my regular job. And so from then on, I've never had anything that looks like a real job, which I'm very happy about. As soon as possible, everybody invent something that you love to do that people will pay you good money for so that you don't ever feel like you're working. A day in my life.

Yeah, yeah, that's. That I. That I can relate to, even though I know exactly what you're talking about, where it's so easy to suddenly create three jobs for yourself because the opportunities are so attractive. And these things just get thrown into our laps for sure. But it's about planning it. And I love what you say about shibumi, because that's something. It is really hard to shut off the leaks, the energy leaks, and stay focused on offering the two things or whatever it is that you're providing. And now I try to balance between really three areas of focus. One of them is, we'll call it just income generation. And this is outside of health and family, of course. The other one is celebrity manifestation, which is publicity and creating a platform like what we're doing here. And then the other part is.

Deep.

Meaningful relationship cultivation, which are.

I'm finding more and more how important as I become a lot less stuff oriented and eliminating all the excess and the desire to own is really what took up a lot of space or the fear of not owning. So in other words, a concept of even owning a home now is becoming less and less attractive. I'll always have a base, but I just don't need anything. And I just really have intentionally let a lot of that go.

But.

And I. I love shibumi. It's a great word. I think I just decided as I was looking at this, that'll be the title of this podcast.

Oh, good. Shibumi.

Yeah, I think we'll open up that way. But anyway, going back to invest. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, now I have a very unusual philosophy in investing. I like to have some stuff in the regular market, you know, in the. In the regular old stock market. I don't do real estate investing anymore. I had some good times there and I had some bad times, but it's just a pain taking care of it all. And I don't like to have business meetings very much. And so I really, really like to just keep things as simple as possible. So the things I invest in now, other than the Regular market. I have a lot of investments in startups that I really like and have taken a fancy to. We just sold one of our startups a couple of years ago to Pepsi and it took about seven or eight years to build up this.

I didn't know it was that long.

Yeah, it took seven or eight years. It was a probiotic drink called Kavita, which you can find everywhere now. But it got invented in a woman's kitchen. And the four or five first investors in the company were there in the kitchen watching her serve it to us. And then one of us, Bill Moses, who happens to be a Wall street genius, took it and built it into a big business. And so. But it was based on passion and heart. I saw something there. I saw the quality of the person she was. I saw the quality of the person Bill Moses was. And I always say I usually don't invest in stuff. I invest in people. And if I like what they're doing and I like the thing they're doing, if I have a general good feeling about it. But it's the people I look for. Because every great business depends on having a great team. And that great team could go off and do some other business. Nine times out of 10, they could build another business like I'm in another one now that was founded by Bill Moses called Flying Embers, which is a whole line of probiotic beers and kombucha, hard kombucha that people can buy in bars and the big hot item right now, which is gluten free beer. And so.

It'S a type investment in a type of beverage, but it's really investing in a person. And I have investments also in a whole bunch of things that are sort of, I would call them hedge sort of things. Like one of them is we fund, along with a bunch of other people, we fund a fund for lawyers that pays their expenses to go out and get involved in environmental lawsuits that eventually pay off from places like PG&E and Edison and things like that.

Yep.

So we're involved in a lot of those kinds of things, kind of to, to be a chest to finance those kind of operations. And so, so I have a lot of things like that. But also I think you really want to keep in mind with investments to make sure your heart is involved in addition to your head, because your head can make a lot of mistakes. And it can also create things that have, you know, I've been involved in businesses where it started out like a good idea, but I made a compromise along the way. I said, okay, I'll stay in. I don't to want like what this other guy is doing in here. That's one of the three top guys. But, you know, I'll go ahead and inevitably that always kicks me. Yeah, I always say Jerry Jones used to tell me the very best deals you'll ever make are the deals you don't make. And boy, is that true.

Yeah, that's. So I'll give you a couple things that I've learned in recent times. And I'm going to give credit where credit is due. One of the clients that I'm working with right now, his name is Justin Donald. And the backstory behind him was I met him in Fiji and he's this real low key, laid back guy. And at first I thought he seems like a nice accountant. And it turned out he had built a substantial net worth by studying the heck out of every investment strategy imaginable. And he had a job four years ago and inside of a period of about 21 months brought his net worth to over eight figures. And then inside of four years, another eight figures again. And it's about to grow again. So it's tens of millions of dollars. And when I met him, I was immediately. He told me about a couple of the investments he had made which were in mobile home parks, so some real estate, but also a bunch of other deals. And right now, over 50 deals that he's involved with and only two have ever turned bad. So statistically very good. And of course I was. My greed glands got activated as soon as we started talking. I'm like, okay, I want to know what your secrets are. So I'm going to share some of those now because I've adopted them as my own. And one of them. So he's got three values and ten commandments of investing. That's what we sort of built together because I'm helping him build his platform based on this. So his values are never create a job.

And then the second is he's a cash flow investor. So in the past, one of the mistakes I've made, I don't know if it's a mistake exactly, but it's someone comes to you with a deal and says invest money, and then you wait until it exits. And his whole deal is, I want to start making money from day one or at least month three, and then I want my principal back in six to 12 months with interest and equity and a kicker, ideally. So it definitely shrinks the kind of deals you can get involved in. But there's so many opportunities out There, which there's no such thing as a deal that really got away. Not necessarily, because there's just so many deals. That's why you've really got to be selective. And I know now some of the investments I made were only because I liked the person, not because it was a really good deal. So it's gotta be the combination of those things. But anyway, to get into his mindset, it's don't create a job. Start making money right away. Create equity and then find a kicker. So a kicker might mean, is there another way you can add value and make money simultaneously? Is there a way you can negotiate something that happens based upon maybe a relationship or an introduction you can make and sectioning that off? And then always remember that the offer presented to you, everything is negotiable. And it's easy when you're an open. When you're started, when you're just starting to invest that someone presents the offer. And it's so like it's this or that. Because our minds adhere to frameworks, the human brain loves to operate within rule sets as long as it doesn't feel like they're being imposed upon us. And that alone has dramatically changed my mindset now, even the way I invest my time in everything.

So because I've been careless and sloppy about where the leaks are, I'll say unconscious. And it's too bad it took me until 53 to figure this stuff out, but I guess that's just the name of the game. But I'm curious, what are your values and what's your mindset around.

Your rules and engagement, say, 30 years ago, 10 years ago, and now?

Well, now I realize that you can create more wealth through saying no than you can through saying yes. In the early days, I said yes to everything and just about drove myself crazy. But as I learned to be more discerning, I got. What really got me onto the right wavelength was learning how to feel a certain feeling in my body that told me yes or no. Learning how to tune into all of these signals that were coming up from way down in there that I wasn't paying attention to. In every situation where I can see where I lost money or didn't like the thing that was going on or had to drop out because I didn't want to be involved with whatever it was. In every situation, I got an early warning cue about that that I overlooked. And what did you call it? Your gre?

Greed glands.

Greed glands? Yeah. Well, you know, those things start firing off in there and they start hitting Your synapses and pumping you up with serotonin and everything like that. You know, those are hard to, they.

Are hard to say no to.

And, but like you said, there's an unlimited number of them out there. And also too, I want to speak to the conscious luck thing because I.

Wanted to go there.

Half of my net worth, I would say.

Yeah, I would say a good half of my net worth has come from being in the right place at the right time and making a decision based on something that I wouldn't have had the opportunity to do five minutes earlier.

I had the opportunity to invest in an electronics.com startup back in around 1995 and which ended up paying off a 33 to 1 shot. I mean you don't get many 33 x's in your whole investment career. But everybody that put in a $50,000 got back a million basically. And fortunately a lot of people put in a lot more than $50,000. But what really happened there was this 27 year old kid who was wearing braces, was their rep who was selling the stock and came to my office and was talking to my wife and I just happened to wander into the office and heard his pitch and said I was going to say no to it, but Katie really was in favor of it. And so we said yes to it. Boom. You know, then three years later we had to wait for a good outcome, but we got the 33x payoff another time being in the right place at the right time. So I think we ought to do a whole show on how to be at the right place at the right time because I've got a whole chapter on that in the new book. I'd love to share that.

Yeah, I think that's a great idea. And again, it gets. This is where we get into the juju and the manifestation. So I'm making some notes here, but I was taking note as I was listening to you about the kinds of deals I had been attracted to in the past and, and what I have done and what I wanted to just ask you is like how much you typically risk now. So again, on a purely tactical level, okay, that's what it is.

That's my current magic numbers, $250,000. And.

That I can even tell you a kind of a bigger philosophy that that's held in. One of my original investment advisors, a guy named Ken Casey up in the Bay Area told me that it would good, would be good. This goes back 30, 35 years. He said, think of your investments as most of it goes in a bread box and then 10% of it goes in a fun box. And don't forget your fun box. Invest in things that look interesting or things that capture your heart and everything like that, but mostly have 90% of your stuff in your bread box. Okay. And so now interestingly enough, the last thing that came along that I wanted to put my quarter of a million dollars into, I did. And then I got a call from the finance guy a week or two later that said it was over subscribed and they were going to have to give us back a $150,000. So I didn't even get to put my full 250 in. But I've calculated that I put 10% of my net worth in a fun box and it just sits there when I find something fun to put it into. And so that's, that's how I arrived at that number.

Okay, that's, that's interesting. I haven't gone down that path because most of what I put mine into now is my superpower box. So I'm looking at ways that. So there's a deal I'm negotiating right now where I know I can walk into this and put in a relatively small amount of money under $100,000 and can probably quadruple the value of the business with a series of three phone calls and a relationship. And it will provide much needed capabilities. So for example, and completely outsourced salesforce, guaranteed distribution, name recognition. And in this particular case, it would also provide access to celebrities that aren't easily accessible. So in all of those have inherent value multipliers associated with them. And so in one case, one of the investments I've made.

It'S both fun, it's a super power accelerator. It gives me more access to the people I want to work with. But I have to be exceptionally careful because it doesn't have the infrastructure or people it needs. And those become, they basically take from my capabilities. So now I have something that's not generating immediate cash flow and is taking from my cash flow because of the investment. And it's sort of like necessary because it's at that delicate, it's not quite there yet and needs more momentum. It needs more cash flow. And saying no to something like that, which it's sort of like having a hungry baby. You know exactly what you should give it. And you've got to decide whose clothes, if you have one set of clothes, which baby you're going to give them to. And it's just all a matter of resource allocation. And again that gets into the did I create a job with the investment? And I sort of did. But I do like the notion of superpower acceleration with relationships and things that I can immediately control without having created a job. And that's a delicate balance.

Yeah. And we ought to do another show sometime also on the value and wisdom of taking investments from other people, because I've got a lot of opinions about that now. I'm very leery of that now. There was a time when I took investments right and left from people and I found that if at all possible, do it on your own money because every one of those comes with issues that need to be resolved. And so after a certain point, you may not be able to do it that way. But I've funded now two or three of my own businesses just on my own capital. And I found it a lot better than starting from the get go with a bunch of people looking over my shoulder.

Yeah, I would say in my history, I have done every one of my own deals with no outside capital other than essentially I'll say rotating credit card debt, which in itself you'd look at and go, ugh, you know, why would you do something like that? But it's relatively so. It's pretty much zero risk from my lens anyway because there have always been cash flow producers. And now that I'm a little bit older.

I can operate with a boutique mentality versus a this must scale and go public sort of mentality. And having, I don't know, one person who's ever gone public and loved their life. And in my experience, I've never met the spouse of a business owner whose business is public who loved their lives or the children. Not one. And now I think small and controlled is much better with high net profit than something that's scaled and large complex because someone's going to find a way to steal from. You're constantly under, you know, lawsuits are thrown your way, you know. And I've, you know, you've heard before about Branson. He was asked once by someone I know about where he spends his time. A huge percentage. It was something like a third or maybe more is in depositions.

Yes, that's a subject. Let's not get into that. I'll get depressed just thinking about the amount of hours. And the interesting thing was I've only been sued once in my entire career and it was because I had a partner that was in conflict with the guy who sued us. And so I got sort of taken along for the ride in the situation. But it left a Bad impression. Spend many hours of my life deposing.

That's not fun at all. So let's. Let's bring this ship home and talk a little bit. I know we've got an upcoming episode that will talk about energetic money and investing in luck and really put it in the context of the Conscious Luck book and other people's money and funded with money topics because we can get a little more tactical there. And I know there's some great stories that we can talk about. And I do have one unspoken story about when I understood the avalanche of money and when luck and opportunity and market timing all collide at the same time. And creating those opportunities and experiences, which I think is a really important, energetic concept to think about. And then, I don't know. Do you have anything else you want to add to that?

Well, I think once you get how money is energy and you get how energy operates, you have a tremendous new source of wealth creation at your disposal. Great.

Well, with that, let's take this one home because we're going to be talking in the future about creativity. And that's another big idea that both of us love a lot. And I think it's a great spring compressor. And I want to incorporate in there the idea of theater and how important that is in terms of elevating yourself and everyone else around you. I've had some insights about theater lately, and I know because you're actively. You've been working on screenplays and stories, stuff that's being optioned for movies. Let's get into entertainment because I think that's something that will excite everyone who's listening. It'll excite us as well, because I just saw your. Your body language shift just with the top.

I forgot to tell you that.

My favorite investments that I've never made a nickel from yet is for about the past 10 years, I've been one of about 30 people, people that own the Terminator franchise. Oh, yeah. And we're still waiting for our first paycheck on that. But I really get a kick out of owning a piece of the Terminator franchise.

All right, well, let's go down that path. I think that would be a next one. We'll take a break from money, and we'll go down the path of creativity and theater and enhancing and increasing value with that, mate. What's that sound like?

Sounds great.

All right. Well, another great episode. Thanks, Gay.

Thanks, Mike.