Why Wealth Is a Feeling, Not a Number

What We Need to Grow, Episode 073: What Is the More For?. A Founder Talk conversation with Mike Brown. Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.

A Conversation with Mike Brown, Founder of Unbreakable Wealth and Author of Be Rich Now

Caleb Pedosiuk: All right, Mike. I feel like I got first dibs on your new book coming out, Be Rich Now. I don't have the book yet, but on Instagram I got chapter one and started going through it. I don't know if you want to answer whether you wrote it or had a ghostwriter, but it is well written, and I don't say that lightly. I just took a peek and got pulled in.

It's called Be Rich Now, and you pick the story up right where you've got this company built and you're about to exit. You've got your brothers involved. People are already congratulating you when you don't even have the due diligence done, which is going to take a number of months, and already people are asking, what are you going to do next? I love the way you put it: you win a championship, you've got to defend that championship. That's the mentality. And I love that you didn't wait until chapter five or six to get into it. I'm about two-thirds of the way through that chapter, and already you're defining the pillars. You're asking, why was that number $100 million for me? Why wasn't it 12? I'm at the part where you're sending people back: picture that moment when you were a kid, with the breeze flowing through your hair. Do you remember how much money you had in your wallet back then? No, you don't. So we're into the mindset, and what that freedom is. By all means, introduce yourself, and let's do it.

Mike Brown: Amazing. Well, I deeply appreciate you having me on, and I'm glad the chapter resonated. I did not use AI. I poured three years of my life into writing the book, and I'm really proud of it. I'd call it memoir-ish nonfiction. It uses my own story, but only in a way that serves the reader, by showing the principles I've come to. As I like to say, I love learning the hard way, but I'm trying to quit. The book is wrapped in a money and wealth wrapper, but it's really about finding meaning, purpose and fulfilment in this game, in the short time we have here. We can dive in wherever you want. I'm happy to jam.

Caleb: Maybe we can jump around in it like a good, fun, messed-up film timeline. But where are things right now? In the book you mention your company before. I don't know the context of what that company was, but you'd made a couple of bets, they paid off, you were doing well. You had this golden era. You got your brothers on board and you were building. I don't know if it was roll-ups, but some kind of acquisition was part of it. And then you noticed more venture capital coming in, so you were competing with players bringing bigger bats to the party, so to speak.

Mike: That's a great way to put it. Let me give you the 30,000-foot view. I grew up in Midland, Texas, which becomes important later. I flew jets in the Navy, which is a fun subject we could talk about. I got out of the Navy in 2012 and moved back to my hometown, which is kind of the oil and gas capital of the US. We weren't wealthy growing up, but I had a family friend who was, and he offered me a job. He said it was the best time in the history of oil and gas to be in oil and gas, and he was right. It was a wild ride. As we say in the Navy, a rising tide lifts all boats, and we were in the thick of an oil boom. We made a lot of money very quickly.

Which is really cool, except I was not equipped to deal with that sudden wealth. So I made a lot of big bets. Some of them very fortunately paid off; others certainly did not. So I have a lot of lumps and a lot of lessons learned, and that gets us to where we are today. I sold that company in 2019.

Caleb: You step away from it, and the question you pose in the first chapter is, okay, what am I going to do next? I'm curious what you're seeing right now. A day or so ago I noticed you'd posted about being wary of a mentality in this day and age, the blinders in building. People are so focused they say, I'm obsessed. And you said something like, if all you're going to talk about is Claude Code, I'm not sure you're the kind of person I want to have dinner with.

Mike: Yeah, this is it. I hate this word, obsessed. It's the new hustle-culture bro code: if you're building a business, you have to be obsessed. I think it's actually dangerous, because it makes us fragile if we're obsessed with one singular thing. A lot of business owners can be very singularly focused, and especially when you're building a first business, it tends to be very external and me-focused. What can I build, what can I do? And otherwise we wouldn't get entrepreneurship, but we expect that when we finally build the thing, then I'm going to feel a certain way about myself.

What I like to say from the stage, and I say it in the book, is that the day I sold my company, I thought I'd never be unhappy again. I did it. I did all the things I was supposed to do. I went to a good school, tested myself in combat, built the company, had the house and the money and the cars, and I woke up and went, oh shit. I'm still the same person inside. And now what? If all of this didn't work, what am I supposed to do with that?

So this whole idea of being obsessed: if you're obsessed with one singular focus and it doesn't fill you up the way you think it will, now you're in for a big problem. I'd say it's foundational to build a fulfilled life, which is multidimensional, meaning I have other hobbies, interests and relationships, because life is a never-ending conveyor belt of problems rolling down the pipe. There are always going to be problems. If my business fails but I have hobbies and friends and other things that light me up, cool, I can weather that. But if my business fails and that's all I've got because I'm obsessed, I have a real problem.

Caleb: It's funny, the analogy that's stood out for me is regenerative agriculture: biodiverse ecosystems versus monoculture cash-crop farming. And first of all, I'm not crapping on anybody. The farmers who figured out how to optimize for their KPIs of output, yield and profit, have done an exceedingly good job, all the way down to engineering the seeds, genetically modifying them to resist certain things for a certain yield, and then the machines built for that crop, prepping the land for it, tiling the waterways, everything. You drive past and all the corn is at the exact same height, sisters of each other, and you think, wow, in many respects they've won the whole game. Unless you bring other KPIs into the equation, it looks like that's it.

And then some people go, hold on a second. These insects have become more resilient, or this disease, or we no longer have this part of the ecosystem at all, or the waterway has changed. Maybe when we stripped everything down to those two KPIs, those weren't the only two. And I've noticed it in people's lives. If we get so focused, so niched down on money and a couple of other things, people look and say, I'm just winning at life, look at the growth. But then you look at what's going on with your health, with your relationships, with your soul, and you start to realize it.

Even in this series of conversations, I'm talking with people doing aerodynamics, bioengineering, VCs doing wild stuff in space, and then a baker in Victoria, my last call today, who's franchising the first fully gluten-free bakery across Canada. The heart and soul that's gone into it. And I realize it's almost like the fascia in the body, the tissue in between things. It's not all just you hit the bench press and that's game over. There are all these other parts. For society and for our lives, to age well, there's a lot more going on.

Mike: I think your analogy is spot on. It's: what am I optimizing for? Optimizing for a single KPI drives really great results. It can build really big businesses. It can make you really financially wealthy. But chances are, if that's your singular focus, you're going to be bankrupt in other areas of your life. So it's really important to understand, number one, what am I doing this for? What's the outcome I'm driving toward? Is it growth for growth's sake? Is it because I finally want to prove to my dad, who never said he was proud of me, that I can build something worthwhile? That can work as motivation and fuel for a while, but eventually you wake up and either you've missed it, your kids are growing up and you weren't there for their T-ball games, or you don't have anything else. You don't have a relationship with your partner, nothing fulfilling outside of work. There's a real danger in that.

And the reality is most of us don't need to grow giant companies. There are some people who are exceptional and built for scale, the Elon Musk mentality. But Elon has admitted himself that he lives a tortured existence. I wouldn't trade lives with that guy in a million years. I'm really glad the Elons of the world exist. Everybody's stoked on flying cars, so thanks, dude, for doing that so I don't have to. But I don't want to be the guy who has to do that.

Caleb: What did I hear recently? If everyone in the world wrote their problems on a sheet of paper and put them in a hat, and you had to pick one at random, would you do it? No, not a chance. Maybe someone at a certain point might, but it's a recalibration, a perspective reset.

Mike: I love that thought experiment. The reality of building yourself multidimensionally is the question: do I want a great business or do I want a great life? You can have both, but you have to be really intentional about what you're building for. What is the more for is one of my favourite questions.

Caleb: What is the more for?

Mike: Some money is better than no money, for sure. I've been rich, I've been broke, and I prefer to be rich. It's much better. But at a certain point, diminishing returns kick in very quickly. And what is it actually for? I'm at a point in my life where, if I have to trade my life force for an extra dollar above what I need to live the exact life I've designed, I don't want to do it. I'd rather put that somewhere else.

Caleb: So the perspective. I haven't gone through the whole book, but Be Rich Now, even the way you describe being 16, the wind blowing in your hair, windows down, going down that road. It made me wonder how close we are to the perspective adjustment. I often walk barefoot on the flagstone path to the house from here, and that little 45 seconds is such a little window of treasure. Whether it's the sunshine hitting me, the breeze or the fresh air, so many times I don't have conscious language for what I'm experiencing, but there's something. So I'm wondering whether, with some of what you're presenting, it's possible, within under 60 seconds, not that you need to quantify it, to pull yourself into a point where you feel the refocus on how rich life is.

Mike: It took me 55,000 words to say that, so thank you for putting it into perspective. The reality is, I just asked what the more is for. Well, what's underneath it? When we think about wanting more money, why do we actually want it? It's to feel something. We imagine more money is going to make us feel a certain way. So when we talk about wealth, I'd say wealth is a feeling.

And the whole thesis of the book, the Law of Now, is that wealth can only be experienced in the present moment, because wealth is a state of being. What you described, walking down the path with your feet planted, getting the sun and going, oh, this is it, and it's available at any time, that's what be rich now actually means. If you are in the present moment and open yourself to direct experience, it's here, any time you look for it.

Caleb: You're no stranger to money. You coach people on money, you talk about it, you've written about it, and you have circles of people who are also in the mix. I think it was actually Dan Martell talking about you, and how highly he spoke of you, that first made me curious. Dan certainly has a heart to give back to a younger generation and beyond, building, I don't even know, 18 or more AI companies now with Martell Ventures. I see his giving back in how he lives. Sure, maybe there's a big cheque he writes here or there. But what I'm curious about is the more for. How are you navigating the idea of philanthropy, write a cheque, the more is for giving it to a cause, versus recognizing that in the hands of someone who's used to growing money, maybe it should be stewarded, to a degree, by someone able to cultivate it? How are you navigating where to deploy that more?

Mike: This is an excellent question, because again, when it comes to philanthropy, what feeling am I actually trying to generate? Altruism feels really good. When you're giving, whether that's your time or your effort or your money, it feels really good. It comes back. That's a feature, not a bug. It's really cool that we're designed so that helping other people makes us feel better about ourselves. So from that place, one question is, what's the most effective way for me to give? And the second is, what's going to give me the deepest feeling back? I'd argue it's some combination of both. If you're really good at making money, giving a lot away may be your most effective place. But I'd argue it's better to actually be connected to the thing you're supporting.

I'm an instructor and I serve on the board of an organization called The Wisdom Dojo. We teach meditation to veterans on the back side of psychedelic-assisted therapy. This organization has completely changed my life. It's been an incredible journey with them, and the privilege of learning from my teachers has been so deeply impactful. I donated the last three days of proceeds I raised for my book to the dojo, so I am giving financially. But being an instructor, serving on the board, helping them at an organizational level, is wildly fulfilling for me in a way that giving money never could touch.

In chapter 10 of the book I talk about wealth as service. The day you become truly wealthy is the day you realize it's not about you, when you go out there connected to something greater than yourself, serving something other than yourself. That's where true wealth really compounds.

Caleb: Over the last couple of years, my wife and I, and she's a superstar at what she does, came alongside an organization that works with a lot of veterans, a lot of special forces guys, and even got to go shoulder to shoulder with some of them after the hurricane in Jamaica last year. We were in Honduras for a bit too, on some really interesting projects. When you spend time in the field with some of these guys, it's amazing how they think. In Jamaica, something like two-thirds of the island was written off. No power, no water. One Sunday night in Kingston, where there was power, everyone was there, the press, all the NGOs, and you'd make your plan of where you were going to go, load up early in the morning, drive across the island, three or four hours depending on where you're going, deploy what you need to, and come back.

We found out there was a home up a mountain, with the roads washed out, with about 96 disabled kids, and they had no water. They were trying to collect rainwater. And this Green Beret I was with said, oh yeah, we'll do it. He got people sourcing the water, and that night I was asking questions: but the roads are washed out. And he said, yeah, we'll figure it out when we get there. Sure enough, one of the big trucks a local had hired broke down on the way, and we had to figure it out on the way, with a caravan of a few vehicles. But we made it, and it got delivered. I loved watching that mentality: we'll figure it out along the way. A lot of the work we do is digital, behind screens or with people in person, but not with sleeves rolled up like that. I saw how well some of those guys are wired, and the strengths they have, but I also saw, with some of my favourite people I got to work with, how hard some of their time had been. I don't know exactly what the dojo is like, or whether people apply to be part of it, but it sounds like it's serving a really important need for some really capable operators who may have parts of their experience, or their time serving, that could use some help processing.

Mike: This work is so meaningful and impactful to me and to the people it touches. There's a cost to being in combat and serving downrange. My wife, in the time I've known her, has maybe lost one friend to suicide, and I've lost two dozen. So there is a real cost that we bear as veterans who have served overseas, and there's a lot of pain out there. The combination of psychedelic-assisted therapy and meditation has been profoundly healing in my life, and I see it work wonders with the amazing folks I get to work with. And yes, it's largely a special operations type of community, a lot of Green Berets and Navy SEALs. It's a really, really cool way to get to impact others, but also to have an incredible community of very high-calibre individuals who have been an absolute blessing in my life.

Caleb: Mike, you decouple money from wealth. Money isn't even in the pillars you list, I think. You're being really intentional, four to six of them, health and relationships and a couple of others, and you describe money as a store of value, almost like a battery. It can buy supplements or buy back your time in some instances, but it's a battery. So I'm curious, in that community, people who have dealt with the weight, the shrapnel, of a lot of other life, and it could be first responders, not just military, when they deal with money as it relates to their perception of wealth, is that one of the main things that needs to be pulled apart, and the bigger picture put first, before you introduce not just money consciousness but the capability to cultivate the resource and allocate it?

Mike: That's a great question. My work is very separate. I run my wealth coaching community, mostly working with high-earning founders and professionals, and at the dojo we're very focused on meditation itself, so I actually don't have money conversations with most of the guys. What I will say is many of them are very successful. The same qualities that drove them to be special operators in the military tend to translate fairly well to civilian life.

But in general, when we're having trouble in our relationship with our partner, most of us, I hope at this point, think therapy is probably a good place to start. We don't really think of money in a therapy context. And that's what a lot of my work focuses on: where did your beliefs about money come from? What was your childhood like as it relates to money? And how is that showing up in your life today? It generates a lot of ahas. People say, oh wow, I saw my dad do this and my mom do this, and I'm totally repeating the same pattern. Or I swung so far in the other direction. The relationship is fundamentally broken, and it has nothing to do with how much they're earning, and a lot more to do with how they relate to money and the life they want to live.

Caleb: How quickly can those perceptions change? Let me go first here. In some of the time I've spent with Dan Martell, the number of times I'd hear wisdom coming from him and think, yeah, that's me. I like to think of myself as an honest person, truthful with myself, but sometimes you're confronted with a part of you, a limiting belief, and the question is how to change it. Looking back and asking where some of these beliefs came from, whether it's how you were raised, or whether you swung to the opposite side. Is there an aspect of your identity that holds onto it, and why is it sitting there? You take someone through an exercise and they highlight something: I have a belief about money that, even looking at it, I don't think is accurate. How do you move that belief?

Mike: The model I use for change, in chapter four of the book, is called the alignment loop. It has four stages. The first is awareness, which is what you're describing: wait a minute, maybe I'm having an outsized reaction, or holding this belief. That moment of recognition is awareness. The next stage is insight. Where did this come from? I realize I saw my dad be really bad with money, so I turned out very conservative with money and I don't take risks. That's insight. The problem is people love to get stuck in insight, and that's the knock on talk therapy: you're constantly mining your past for why am I the way I am. What I offer people is a minimum effective dose. Gathering insight about where a pattern or story came from can be a really helpful unlock, but you can't get stuck there. You've got to move to the next step, which is action.

When I think about action, there are two fixes. There's a mechanical fix. Say I have a very fast and loose relationship with money and I spend everything I make. A mechanical fix might be diverting some of that money into an investment account before it ever hits my account. But that doesn't fix the root problem. So then I need an emotional fix. Why do I have this make-it, spend-it mentality, and what actions can I actually take? That can re-pattern over time, and it can shift quickly. One of the big things is that we think it has to be a big, dramatic process. But if you repeat the action enough times, whatever intervention you choose, eventually you integrate it. That's the fourth stage. When you move through the loop, awareness, insight, action, integration, it's a continuous cycle.

And the reality, for a lot of us, is that we never truly get rid of these patterns. We just get faster at recognizing them and moving through the cycle. I'm an 11 out of 10 when it comes to risk. I was a fighter guy. I flew F-18s in the Navy and landed on aircraft carriers. I love the adrenaline. I used to feed that adrenaline junkie by taking big bets on investments, gambling in the stock market, wild things with money. Now I've recognized I can feed the same beast with snowboarding and mountain biking and healthier activities, and not bring that mentality into my finances. I haven't gotten rid of the deeply embedded, adrenaline-fuelled guy underneath. I've just diverted him to a healthier outlet. And sometimes that's enough.

Caleb: There was a really interesting episode two or three weeks ago with Stephen, who was talking about risk versus uncertainty: how a portion of the population is risk-tolerant, and those often tend to be the entrepreneurs, and then there's uncertainty, which is a different category, where most people sit.

Mike: I couldn't agree more. A lot of what we consider success comes down to the ability to tolerate uncertainty. And the reality is that control is an illusion. Uncertainty is a constant. I'd argue there's no such thing as certainty. It's a fundamental Buddhist principle, impermanence: everything is in a process of birth, death and rebirth at any given time. The more comfort we can take in impermanence, the more it increases our ability to navigate the world, both from a value-creation perspective and from an internal-peace perspective.

Caleb: The last question I like to ask guests: if you had to put your finger on one thing, what would you say you need most to grow right now? For some it's raising capital, for some it's a launch, for some it's team. What's the one thing you need most right now?

Mike: That's a great question. My friend Dan loves to give me a hard time and ask, why are you the best kept secret? So the best thing people can do, and this is exactly what I hope happens, is buy the book. We just closed pre-orders, so it'll be live on Amazon very soon; sign up for my mailing list in the meantime. Buy the book, and if you dig it, give it to five people. Gift it to five friends.

We talked about service earlier, and the reason I wanted to write this book is this. I'm going to toot my own horn a little: I'm a really good coach, and I love the work I get to do, but there's an investment, a barrier, to joining my community or doing one-on-one coaching. The book is $20, and it's everything I know. You can take this book, implement it, and absolutely change your life. It feels so good to be able to put that out in the world. For the price of a Starbucks run, you get everything I know, three years of my life, to implement on your own. If that sounds interesting to you, go buy a copy, go buy five, give them to your friends. That would be the coolest thing on the planet.

Caleb: Very cool. What are the best places to follow you and find you online?

Mike: I'm on Instagram at @mbrown.co, and on Twitter at @mbrown_co, because the same handle was taken. I love Twitter; it's my favourite place to write. And my newsletter is at berichnow.com. I write long form every week. Follow, and say hey.

Caleb: Awesome. Thank you.

Mike: All right, thanks Caleb. Appreciate you, man.