47 - EP47 w/ Callicrates: HOW TO STOP BEING A LOSER

So how do people stop being a loser? Calicritis? Yeah, I mean, honestly, it's like I've always thought that's kind of all-inclusive, you know, like, uh Everyone knows inherently what being a loser is in any facet, and no one wants to be one.

Yeah, I mean, I think 99% of the time people know what needs to be done. They just, they're just too lazy to do it, you know? Like, it's pretty simple, right? So many of the things, like working out, it's like probably one of the easiest, right? Everyone knows how to do it, right? There's no secret to it. They just refuse to.

Are you— be surprised, man. A lot of people don't know how to, like, literally, like, how do I pick up a weight? And, you know, whatever, they've never been exposed to it. Uh, but I guess the fundamental principle— but even running, man, you're like, oh yeah, how can you stuff up going for a run? But some people don't have their gait fixed, so they end up like— I would not recommend you run because you don't know how to do it. So I think they're going to have issues. Exactly. They're going to bust their knee open or whatever it is if they rush in and start doing squats without doing the proper hip mobility. You know, they're going to overcompensate and fuck that up. So I guess I think being a loser is more— it's a spiritual battle as well. But the discipline, like you said, success, not being a loser, it is relatively simple. There's no trick to it. It's just doing the things each day which a winner does.

Yeah, I mean, and you're right, it really is mentality too. Almost all of it can just boil down to just taking personal responsibility, right? Like, if you take personal responsibility for everything it's nearly impossible to be a loser. It really, it really would be difficult.

Yeah, 100%, because losers blame others. And through that mechanism, if you think your life is because— is the way it is because of external factors, by default you don't have control over external factors. So you're telling your brain, your subconscious, and yourself that I have no control over my life. And of course, if you don't think you have control then you're just going to be blown away by circumstances and inevitably be a loser.

Exactly. And it's just— and even if it's true, right? I mean, there are some things you don't have control over. It's just not a useful ideology, right? Like, there's— you don't get anything out of it. It's like, okay, I can't control it, then now what? You're just gonna stay in this state you are and that you don't like? Yeah, you know, it's just like, it's either you just assume everything is controllable and your responsibility and that you can improve your life, or you just stay with it sucking and you can blame however many people you want. It's not gonna change the fact that your life still sucks, you know?

Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of things, but the personal responsibility to just look at yourself objectively and be like, okay, this area isn't going too well. Like for instance, I'll share an example of mine. I have some minor back pain because my hips are too tight because I've been lifting heavy, not stretching properly. Sitting for periods and riding and all the rest of it without adequately stretching as well. Now I know why it's like that, and I still am personally just finding a bit of difficulty with forcing myself to stretch or whatever. Now it's a bit of a cope, but I understand why my leg mobility is— it is that way. So rather than having this— like, it is this task that I could inevitably complete at some point and fix my problem, but I'm aware of that. So it doesn't cause me the same distress, I think, as someone that if they perceive the problem as, oh, I just have lower back pain. Like, everything is in some way, shape, or form fixable by you if you put in the work.

100%. I actually had a similar thing happen to me. I had a few knee surgeries, and for a few years I was like, oh, I'm in a unique situation, they're never going to get better. Like, the whole blah blah blah. It's like, yeah, it's just the biggest cope ever. Like, of course I can get better. You know, like, you're not in a special situation. People have come back from not being able to walk before. So I mean, a lot of it is just kind of just figuring out, being like, hey, there's something you could do about it, and if there is, you might as well do it.

Yeah. The healing one is very interesting because I've been reading a bit of Joe Dispenza recently, and he, you know, he's laid out examples of people who've come back and cured cancers because of their, the manipulation of their emotional state, always living in fear and stress. And then you, you get the emotional highs from those feelings, and then you recount or have the memory of what happened, which was a bad thing. You're cementing that mental thought loop. And when you do that, you're basically reliving the experience over and over and over. And if it was a bad experience, then you're cementing those negative emotions. And, you know, it's a positive— well, the negative feedback loop. But what you end up doing is creating a constant state of fear or stress, which is then not allowing your body to heal as it optimally should. No, nobody is kind of born into ill health apart from, you know, the, the odd cases. But, um, I think I'm leaning more and more towards most, if not all, bodily conditions that are negative that we view as disease or whatever, just being some manifestation of the way that you're living, whether that's your lifestyle factors— and I'm sure everyone can agree there— but also your mental state and how you react to things, uh, in your life as a whole.

I, I completely agree with that, and I think it's, it's really hard for people to internalize that because there's no way to quantify it, right? No one could say like, oh, you have this many negative thoughts, this affected your body in this way, right? There's no way to put a number behind it. But anecdotally, I've seen that happen hundreds of times.

Yeah, and that's essentially what a hypochondriac is, you know. There's nothing literally wrong with their body, but they think themselves into ill health.

If you—

placebo versus nocebo, uh, it's all very real. And I don't know whether it's Like, how would you try to explain to someone— like, I'm sure you've, um, you've had this with family members or friends who their default is the negativity and the stress. And like, if any situation comes up, they're always thinking— and not like on purpose or whatever, you know, you're not blaming them for it— but just the way their mind is currently set is that they're always looking for the why it won't work or the the negativity just instantly before it even exists. You know, you're going out to a restaurant, they'll be like, I don't know if we'll be able to find a table or not. Like I said that myself. It's just a reaction. And I caught myself the other night saying that I was just putting this negative thought out like, oh, then we weren't going to get a table because it was last minute. Why? Like zero point. Okay, maybe. But you're going to call up, you're going to ask for a table, and if it's not there, Cool, you know, it is what it is. But the negative thought, the negative kind of pre-formation that you have in this assumption of a situation that doesn't exist yet, a lot of that is, you know, what a lot of people spend their valuable mental time thinking about.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. And those things are— you don't even realize that's kind of occurring most of the times. Like you're saying, you're like, oh, like I probably look at a table, it's like, what, what do you have a negative thought to begin with, you know? Um, but in terms of giving advice in that situation, it's almost— giving advice is always tricky, right? Because you almost never want to give unsolicited advice. Um, just makes people hate you usually. Just no matter, no matter how right you are, just makes people hate you. So if it's like a close friend or family member, usually what I try and do is I'll, I'll kind of say something, but like say it like, like in a very like more like a passing way, not like a serious way. And then really what you have to do next is you just convince by example. So if you go out and have a great night while not being negative, maybe next time they'll kind of internalize what you're saying. And that's obviously not the best example for it. Yeah, but usually the only way to convince people is by example. So it's like, example would be like crypto, right? You tell them, they're like, oh, I don't believe in it, blah blah blah. You say, hey, you should really invest in this. Then a week later you're like, hey, I made X amount in this investment. They're probably going to invest now, right?

Yeah.

I mean, so you almost— most people aren't capable of kind of like seeing like an abstract situation. So they almost need to see you do it, then like analyze your action, and then be like, oh, he was right. So it's, it's like a very long process for most people that you can't give them an abstract, hey, here's what you should do, because that means nothing to them.

Yeah, interesting. Uh, that probably, um, ties in with this thing that I read the other day, is that X amount of people literally you tell them, picture an apple in your head, they can't physically form— like, you think of an apple, yeah, oh, that's the memory of an apple. I've seen them in the store, I've eaten them lots of times, I know what an apple looks like, you can rotate it around. They literally don't have that ability. I don't know if it's like a, just a matter of, you know, IQ, or just the way that they've been brought up. Like, what do you think that is? And it, you know, it makes sense then that we see a lot of the issues that we see today, that where they can't abstractly think about, uh, theoretical advice that you would give them. Yeah, they—

I mean, I think it's 100% genetic. Um, there's, there's not much— if you don't have the horsepower for that, you just don't have the horsepower for that. Yeah, I think it was the— I may be just spouting nonsense right now, but I think I saw something about the Army had like done a study on this a while back when it was like politically acceptable to do it. Um, and they found out like under a certain IQ you almost couldn't recognize hypotheticals, which is insane. It's insane to think about, but a lot of people don't understand that at all.

Yeah, like, what if this happened? What do you mean what if it happened? It didn't happen.

Exactly, that's, that's literally what the conversations look like. It'd be like, hey, but it didn't happen. It's like, yeah, I know, but like what if? They're like, yeah, but it didn't. And that's just back and forth. It's like talking to a wall.

That's hilarious. So, so what are you— how did you come to be on Twitter? Uh, because I'm interested. You're one of those people that seem to just only have bangers, you know, really unique perspectives around about the world, uh, obviously crypto, finance, real estate. Um, I know you have your other page as well, but what How did that all come about? Was it a creative process you kind of focused on? Was it a byproduct of how your kind of life has played out? What do you think of those influences have been to lead to your writing style and all the rest of it?

Yeah, I mean, so I think how I first got there— it's so long ago at this point— I think I was reading Wall Street Playboy's blog back in the day, and they had a Twitter account. I think I just followed them on Twitter. And this, I don't know, maybe like 3 years ago at this point. But I think that's how I initially got on there. And in terms of writing style, I've always had a really direct writing style. I would say I'm definitely influenced by them as well. I think their writing style is great. And I also have a lot of friends now who are like direct response copywriters who have very similar writing styles. So it's a few different influences. Overall, I kind of always have written like that. And I would say I tone it back a lot on Twitter. I mean, In what sense? Just with so many opinions you could kind of spout out that just it's not worth it for just in terms of—

You gotta hit us with those, bro.

No need to get banned every day. Like, it's just like—

Look, there's a way of saying it without saying it.

Exactly. But at the end of the day, it's like you just, you don't want to get, have 100 people in your mentions every day just yapping. And that's— yeah, it's kind of— want to avoid that.

Yeah, it's interesting because a lot of the things that I would say most of the people, normal people, believe— but yes, you get the initial dopamine of like spreading that opinion, but is it conducive to any kind of meaningful discussion? And, you know, manner other than shit-talking? Probably not. Is it going to incense a lot of people? Possibly. And, you know, but, but I, but I— so is it worth doing? But on the other hand, I feel like you have to push the envelope to some degree sometimes. Otherwise, you know, how does discourse kind of move? You know, the Overton window, uh, someone makes a tweet that kind of introduces this unspoken thing into public consciousness in a way, or at least the Twitter consciousness. And as we know, uh, Twitter is incredibly influential, um, with the memes that it propagates, which kind of leak out into the real world. Um, I think there is a balance between saying a safe opinion and also, you know, putting a real, a real banger out there.

Yeah, and I, I 100% agree with that. There's a lot especially with the size of our accounts now at this point, you can kind of definitely introduce an idea of the consciousness, which I think is pretty important if you can do it. And a lot of the people who follow us are younger guys, so it's great. Like, I get so many messages where you're positively influencing them and then you feel great about it. So when there's something, when there's like a topic like that, I do try and push it pretty hard. And obviously a lot of it's hyperbole because that's the best way to get a point across. So I don't feel bad about doing that at all. Like, an example would be something like entrepreneurship. I don't feel bad about pushing that at all because I truly believe it's so important. So there are situations like that where you can really positively influence a lot of people, and you could do it with just pretty applicable and reasonable positions.

So I, I heavily agree with the idea that we should push entrepreneurship because ultimately, what is entrepreneurship? It's the act of building some profit-securing entity that you have control over and that doesn't rely on anyone else to make it run. That's ultimately what it is. Um, obviously you have other people involved in the company or whatever, but you've got the final say whether it's open, it's closed, uh, what it sells, how it sells, when it sells. And not only is that like just the most amazing feeling to have as a guy, um, where we kind of all strive for independence and, you know, strength being by yourselves, very masculine ideals. You, you can't really do that, uh, if you are taking orders from someone else or you have to work with someone else to depend on your food getting on the table. You know, any point if that's external to yourself and someone else has control of that. That's a liability, as we have seen. And when the government can say, nah mate, sorry, uh, virus around, you can't open your sandwich store in the fucking some random state in Australia, like, okay, cool, well, where's my income going to come from now? So it's— I mean, that maybe you opened up your own sandwich store and that's entrepreneurship in one way, but I think what you're saying, or at least what I recommend, is utilizing the power of the internet to create something for yourself that can, you know, be some expression of your entrepreneurship. What do you think about entrepreneurship for, for guys, young guys at the moment?

I mean, I, I think, and I've said this for a while, I think the risk-reward skewed a while ago in favor of entrepreneurship. Um, I just think with the leverage and scale of the internet, it just makes no sense to work for a company unless you're, you're not really skilled. To be brutally honest. Um, yeah, I mean, I, I have friends who are bankers who were cleaning up, and they spend 6 months working on NFTs, they quadruple their banking salary, you know what I mean? Yeah, just anytime there's a skilled guy, I tell them immediately, internet, crypto, go for it, right? Like, even I'm a real estate guy, you have to recognize when there, there's a situation where you need a gun for it. Internet and crypto are both situations you need a gun for. And I'm buying for it in the real estate.

Sorry, a gun for it. What did you say?

Gun for it, like just, just go for it. Um, uh, I'm, I'm by no means leaving the real estate field.

Not—

real estate's an incredible field, but when you have something like crypto where you can make a million dollars in a weekend, like, you have to look at that. Uh, yes, same thing with the internet. When you can scale out to the entire world with zero dollar cost, you have to look at that. I mean, you're an idiot for not looking at it. And I, I think it's kind of crazy how people always push them into— push young talented guys into careers where you just get bossed around for, for pretty much nothing, right? Like, this isn't like back in the day, yeah, where you'd work really hard and you'd become a partner at a great firm by age 30, right? Now you'd be lucky to be like VP of a small bank by age 30, right? It just, it doesn't, it doesn't really track anymore. It doesn't really make any sense. If you were getting $10 million bonuses like they used to get on Wall Street, then I'd say go for it. But now you get like $300K and it's not worth it, right? So the whole thing doesn't really make sense from a risk-reward perspective. And that's not even considering just the other kind of overarching factors of, I think, just like blatant government kind of— yeah, I don't know what to call it— out control, um, along with just corporate control. Um, like, I actually left my company right before, um, that the vax mandates and everything would have gone through, but I would put on the spot something like that. And it's not even about the, the vax itself. It's not about— it's just they have no right to tell me to do that, you know?

Yeah.

And I think any— if you're a red-blooded male with balls, I don't know how you— I don't know how you like sit there for that, you know?

Yeah, exactly. What do you think, uh, is going to happen in the continent in terms of the shift of, um, everything to crypto? Do you think real estate can be impacted by crypto?

Yes, I think it's longer out than we think. Like, these types of things are really hard to do. I think the future is everything in real estate becomes on-chain. So say rents get paid on-chain, expenses get paid on-chain, uh, the sales happen on-chain. So I do think that's the future. I think almost every company will be on-chain in the future, but whether that's 20 years from now, 50 years from now, I just don't know. Um, and I've heard of so many people who want to profit off it from the real estate angle And it's just so hard to do because essentially what you'd have to do is create a marketplace. And when you're doing something like that, you just need to— you probably need to raise a couple billion dollars in VC funding and you have to hope your timing is right. And it just— I prefer running profitable companies, you know.

What about OpenSea for real estate? People could put their houses up like NFTs, and if you like one, here's the ETH, and then now it's mine. The deed gets transferred to my wallet and then boom, there you go.

That would be the idea, yeah. And there are a lot of companies working on similar stuff like that. Um, I just think as of right now it doesn't really make a ton of sense because typically the deals that get put on those platforms, they're kind of self-selected out to be the worst deals. Because if you can get funding in another way, you do it the easier way. So like, it's, it's kind of the same problem with every crowdfunding real estate, uh, platform is you just get the crappiest deals.

Yeah. Alright. I think anyone has the capacity to learn some sort of skill and sell it on the internet. Like, it's not a— I mean, crypto stuff aside, where you can bluff your way into it 10 times because you saw a random tweet about it, you know, which is, like you said, something you have to look at. At least in some form. Don't have this pride about like, oh, I shouldn't have to learn about crypto. Like, learn and understand MetaMask, DeFi, Uniswap, you know, all these other little exchanges that are coming up, airdrop tokens where you just get free money if you, if you get, if you hold certain things. Like, that's just, it's going to be like another financial literacy skill. Um, and this is one of those things that, you know, our kids will probably just have a MetaMask wallet and they won't have bank accounts, uh, kind of scenario. So I think to be, as you know, even in the grand scheme of things in terms of the traditional finance system, um, you're listening to this now, you're still early, as they say, in terms of the amount of capital that's still in the major finance systems. Now, will that all kind collapse, and that'll be the catalyst for, uh, the inevitable shift to crypto. I think that's probably what will happen, is like when everyone realizes the banks have been lending out their money 9 times over, their money actually isn't in the banks, you know. That's something very critical that everyone needs to understand. Like, that's a house of cards. And then crypto hopefully will be, um, this less centralized option for everyone. But that's beside the point. Anyone can learn a profitable skill. I always like to try and encourage people to go about what they're interested in. But if you don't know what you're interested in, then okay, just get a money-making kind of skill and run that until you kind of figure it out. But anyone can do it. Old, young, all the rest of it.

It's— I think people forget too. Everyone's like, oh, like, not everyone's cut out for entrepreneurship. What do you think people did before big companies? Everyone worked for themselves.

Yeah, that's true.

I don't get it. Everyone thinks like it's like this, this thing where no one can do it. Every single person used to work for themselves on the entire planet until 100 years ago, you know? And everyone acts like it's this crazy thing to work for yourself. It's not. Everyone can do it.

Well, there might have been like, you know, big castles that employed people and, you know, all the rest of it, farmers, but they were just given food instead of money.

Even, I mean, farmer, yeah, they're working, but they're still running their own. It's like entrepreneurship on their own land, you know, like obviously they're giving the crops to someone, or maybe they're, they're, uh, maybe some of them are like sharecroppers or whatever, but almost all those people were what we'd consider today at least some degree to an entrepreneur. Or like, they're not just sitting there taking orders all day.

Yeah, yeah. I wanted to bring up one of these, um, one of your tweets actually. Um, you said that when you're truly talented, you should be ignoring almost all the advice you get. And I think that's great. I think it's— I always say about advice Does the person giving it have the real-world results that you want? If yes, then they must understand it to some level. If they've got a really hot girlfriend, if they've got a lot of money, they can tell you about how to get, how to get girls, or they can tell you how to make money. But if they're fat, then you're not going to listen to them about working in the gym. And a lot of the advice we get from people, I guess as a young guy, you just kind of shrug off a lot of advice that probably was the right thing. So there's a balance of that. And I feel like in life, you only really learn when you go through it yourself. So to the same point as your tweet, if you're truly talented or even just living your life, just ignore the advice, learn the life lessons anyway, because You might get told something, but it's not going to sink in until you've gone through that. And most people are giving out advice when they have no idea.

Yeah, I mean, that, that's probably one of the biggest issue is, is people who aren't qualified giving advice. But there are a ton of other issues now too, I think, especially in that most people who are giving advice are, say it's your dad, your uncle, the teacher, whoever it is, right? Who's giving advice, I mean, they're coming from— their success happened 40 years ago at this point, you know. So they, they were doing it a different world. Almost everyone who is successful nowadays would be like, oh, go work on Wall Street or go work in big tech. And that's not the way to do it anymore. So they're— they give you advice for the world that, that happened 40 years ago, not the world that's happening today. Like, no, no, no one you talk to successful would advise you to go into crypto, right? Who would have ever told you that? Yeah, um, so there's, there's a lot of kind of things at play, and a huge part of it's the fact that the world's changing so quickly right now that even things that worked 5, 10 years ago aren't even applicable. Um, so most people, even the qualified people, really aren't qualified for the new world. Um, so you almost need to find someone who's, who's around your age who's just really far ahead of you, and that, that's almost the best person to follow in this situation.

Like a mentor.

Yeah. And I mean, mentors are still great once you figure out what exactly you want to do. So say you get on a track— like, I have a mentor for real estate who's incredible, um, but he wouldn't have helped me get to the point I'm at, as in like making all the decisions that get to that point. He helps me when I have an issue and I'm like, hey, I've reached this point, um, I'm kind of at like a blockade, what do I do here? That's when it works, right? But he doesn't choose the track for you. That's not how it works at all, you know.

Do you, uh, listen to your intuition when you're kind of figuring out your path? Is it a logical analysis? What is the— how have you kind of navigated finding your path? Because that's what a lot of people ask me, right, is How do I listen to my intuition? How do I find what I'm meant to be good at?

Yeah, I listen to my intuition over every single thing. If everyone in the world told me I was wrong, my intuition told me to do this thing, I'd do my intuition. I'm really not kidding. It's— you kind of have to have that power of self-belief and just belief in yourself that you're right. And I think, yeah, it's kind of even hard to explain.

but— Were you always like that?

You should have— I consider it almost like an internal calculator. And I had a tweet about this the other day. But say like deciding whether something's worth it or not, or like deciding the risk-reward on something that's unquantifiable. Like example, the risk-reward between entrepreneurship and staying at a job right now. Like most people haven't realized that the risk-reward is switched. They don't understand that at all. Meanwhile, everyone I know with a good internal calculator realized that like 5 years ago.

Yeah.

And they're already ahead of the curve. But that's like an example where it's just, it's kind of intuition, right? There's no, you can sort of quantify, you can like run numbers on it, but at the end of the day, it either feels right or it doesn't. And I think a lot of people, I mean, they're probably right not to trust their intuition 'cause they're always wrong, you know? But if you have a personal track record of always being right, I say you trust your intuition over everything.

Right. Do you think that intuition has the ability to be the wrong choice, or is it because people aren't listening to their intuition?

So I think this gets very person-to-person dependent, um, in that most people don't have the mental horsepower to have good intuition. So like, they'll have good intuition on— and maybe like a life or death scenario, but good intuition between choosing to be an entrepreneur or choosing to stay at their job, I don't think they have that. Um, and I've seen people like kind of try and reason it out, and it just— I just don't think they're capable of it. So it's kind of one of those tough scenarios to give advice to, because if you're really talented, you shouldn't be listening to my advice anyway, and if you're not, like, you shouldn't be listening to your intuition. So it's, it's almost like a lose-lose, and you kind of have to do it yourself, right?

Yeah, there's like, um, I think a lot of it comes from being healthy and living healthy. Like, you, you have a skewed sense of self, your brain doesn't work as properly. So if you're constantly in that state and going out for beers every weekend, I think it's— it gets harder to listen to your intuition, or your intuitive voice or sense is not as strong. So It's the same with, you know, meditating. When you meditate, you can control your thoughts better and live a more positive life. So there are things you can do if you want to take first steps. But yeah, I don't think that everyone has naturally the same sense of intuition in that way, or even just like— it's the idea about free will, right? Like, yes, we have free will, I think, to some degree, but we don't choose the next thoughts that come into our head. And if someone else's— if the, if the drip feed of thoughts that they're getting is different to mine, they're going to come to a different conclusion about the world. So the result of my life has been through the thoughts that have just popped into my head. And to some degree, you can kind of choose which ones to to follow or not, but that analysis and the kind of running dialogue that's kind of processing the world, I don't have any choice in that.

Yeah, no, it's definitely interesting to think about. I was just thinking actually of a good example of this though. So if you read about mobsters, right, kind of if you track each individual one, and there are a lot of good books on this, You can see the ones who had good intuition, who didn't, just based on— and these are life and death scenarios for them because if you have bad intuition, you die. And if you have good intuition, you become the boss. So you can kind of track the exact bad move people made and you see how other guys at that same level didn't make that bad move. Or they made a better move, you know, whatever it was. But it's kind of fascinating to read about. One of my favorite things to read about in general because you can just see intuition at work. You could see some guys just had it, and every decision they made, you're like, that was just the perfect right decision. And other guys, like, you'd read about it and you're like, this guy's gonna get whacked, and next second, you know. So it's just like, it's so, it's so funny to think about how, like, those little decisions that people make every single day, some people just make the right ones, other people just don't.

Hmm, tough break. Uh, can you let me know about positioning? Because I love this topic as a whole. I read a book on it recently. But what would— what do you call positioning, and what is positioning for you?

Yeah, so first off, I want to give a shout out to IPB Media on Twitter. He's kind of the guy who introduced me. To it. Um, but in general, it's just— it's kind of like how you're situated in life and in every aspect. So say like socially, financially, um, whatever it is, right? And the idea is that things should be coming to you, right? Like you look at someone like Leonardo DiCaprio, right? And girls come to him, right? It's not the other way around. Girls are coming to him. So you know that that type of positioning is possible. Right? So if you're in a position where that's not happening to you, your positioning isn't right. And obviously there's a lot of other things going for him, but he put himself in that position to begin with, right? Anyone could have technically done it. Um, so I think the easiest way to think about it is look at a person who's really, really doing well and try and reverse engineer that. And the other thing about it too is once you see someone who's doing really, really well and positioned in a way so that everything comes to them, then you know it's possible, right? Because a lot of people will tell you, oh, like, it's not possible to be asked. Like, well, people are doing it. I mean, not you, but, but other people are doing it. Um, so why not you?

Yeah, positioning in the sense of literally finding a way to get in a position in life, a place on the chessboard where your next move you're just going to be able to take a piece. And, you know, a business deal comes to you, or it's an area where there are girls, you know, just being in the place, literally like geographically in the place, but also financially in the place to take advantage of an opportunity that comes to you. Whereas if you didn't have the spare capital, okay, cool, you missed that one, you mispositioned there. Working out and gymming is another form of it. Uh, it's about getting in the right— because like, you know, the more I learn about life in general, um, if you are in the same sauna as some bankers that mention this insider trading tip and you just happen to be in a high-end health club, boom, you've made some money. And I would never inside trade, whatever, act on that information because I don't do anything like that, but Theoretically, if you were.

Theoretically.

You're in that position because you went to the high-end health club in a financial district and you spent time there and you had your ears open. You know, that doesn't happen to the person that's not consciously trying to design situations in their life where they are positioned for this easy win. It doesn't have to be hard.

Yeah, I mean, one of the best examples of positioning I've ever seen kind of is one of my dad's friends. Um, he basically got in, in all the IPOs during the dot-com boom. And what would happen is he would, he would get in it. And I don't— I'm not a stock guy, so I don't know if it was like, uh, he got in pre-IPO or whatever it was, but he got in at like the pre-sale pretty much at $20 strike price. They would obviously underprice all those IPOs. Same day he'd sell it for like $120, make $100 on X amount amount of shares. They did it with every single company that went public, um, and he ended up making like $50 mil over the course of 2 or 3 years. And a monkey could have done it once he was in the position, you know? Like, you don't have to be smart to buy it at $20 and sell at $120 every single day when you know it's gonna happen. Yeah, um, but it's all about the positioning. He made those contacts, he made those friendships. There was nothing illegal about it, um, but he just, he just figured out how to position himself right, and he never worked again.

Crazy stuff. How did you kind of develop your mindset with money? Um, you obviously talk about it a lot on Twitter. I think it's one of the biggest kind of limiting beliefs that people hold, or keeps people down in life, is their relationship to money. And they can either be chains that shackle you to a certain area of life, or what facilitates you being able to do whatever you want, basically, if you have enough of it.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's like anything else in life, right? The more you need it, the less you're going to get it. So it's— and obviously abundance mentalities have been kind of like kicked like a dead horse at this point, but, um, that's really what it is. I mean, you just have to— you have to kind of just be so unattached to it that you're, you're ready to lose it. And once you're ready to lose it, that's when it starts coming in, right? Like, you'll see people, you'll see people in crypto, right? And crypto is one of those things where so much of it's about how big you bet, right? And these people will be like, I'm so confident Ethereum is going to go up. And then you look at what percent they allocated to it in their portfolio, and it's 5%. It's like, okay, well, that's a huge waste of time. Like, the guy who put in 50% is gonna blow you out of the water, you know? So a lot of it is just that, being willing to lose it and being willing to bet big. But a lot of it's something I was just kind of born around, to be honest. I grew up in kind of a pretty wealthy neighborhood and everyone around me already had money, so you kind of see what's possible. Yeah. And you also start seeing, I've written some posts about this, But you start seeing what happens when you mess up and you realize like pretty much nothing happens when you mess up. Yeah, right. Like, you can say you failed out of college, like nothing really happens. I'm not telling people to fail out of college or anything, but I mean, I had one point where I was getting like a— I forgot, like a 2.5 or something in college, right? And nothing happens. You still got a great job. Like, there's no consequence for stuff like this. So once you kind of operate with that mentality of that, there's really no consequence to a lot of things. You start learning more and more to just kind of focus on the big things and the big drivers. And that's most of the time, that's how you start making way more money. And kind of an easy way to reverse engineer this for people who didn't grow up like that is you just start making like small mistakes, right? Like say, say your boss is generally kind of, you always agree with them, right? Because you're afraid to disagree with them. Because you're afraid you'll lose your job, start disagreeing with them, right? Like, it doesn't, doesn't need to be like antagonistic, but just take the opposite perspective and have a well-reasoned argument, right? And once you start doing that a few times, you realize there's no consequence to disagreeing, and it kind of like widens your perspective on everything, and you become more and more willing to— okay, maybe I am worthy of this job. Maybe if I lose this job, I'm actually fine, right? Maybe if I lose this job, I actually do have the skills to get another job or even make more money by myself. Yeah, but if you're not in that mindset to begin with, you're never going to do that, and you're always going to be scared of losing that one job that you, you have, and you're never going to make a lot of money like that.

Yeah, it's— if you hold something tightly and you squeeze it to death, it can't blossom, it can't grow, can't increase. Same money, if you hold too tightly onto it, how is it going to go away, and how is more going to get in? You know, it's your hand if you're— if your fist is closed. I think it's a similar principle with understanding that no one's really thinking of you. You know, we have our direct experience in our life and we are privy to all our embarrassing moments. And because we see all of our embarrassing moments and memories, we can relive them. And it seems like there's a lot of them. You know, you live over the years, you go through some shit. It happens. What we don't see is everyone else doing the same thing. And what we don't see or really consider is the amount that people are not thinking about us. All of those embarrassing moments we see as this big deal. People looking, laughing. Maybe they saw you trip over and laughed and then were thinking about how they're going to pay rent next week. You know, it's because once you recognize you're not thinking of most of other— your friends' embarrassing moments that you would have participated. When's the last time you even, you know, worried about someone else was doing to a large degree? When you internalize that, that is so freeing, you know. Nothing really matters. It's not the nihilistic view, it's just, oh, if I say something at work, try something at work a bit different, people, they're not going to think I'm stupid. It just, you know, it's a small event. Like you said, there are no real meaningful consequences like life or death to these things. And when you have that tolerance of fear then, and risk, which is not a risk at all now, like you're saying, the risk profile for going your own way in a lot of things is flipped now. Um, Your tolerance for risk and fear is what you need to develop, otherwise you can never take those bets.

Yeah, you have to learn to embrace risk, and I think you put it great. I mean, I think— I don't know if I know anyone who makes a lot of money who wouldn't be okay with just making a fool of themselves in public just because they don't care about what other people think in public. Yeah, you know, like, say you just walk up to someone and say something ridiculous. Like, everyone I know makes a lot of money is fine with doing that. Yeah, people who are scared don't make a lot of money, and it's just, it's all a correlated mindset. It seems like it's unrelated, but at the end of the day, you're either scared of life or not.

Yeah, and it's also the same with people that, you know, it really does all come down to fear of yourself, of your the opinion that others have of you, which isn't a real thing anyway. Um, I've definitely noticed the same thing with people that it's almost like once you succeed in a realm, you just have that innate confidence that comes with success. And, you know, oh, I'm doing well at this, I'm getting bigger in the gym. You no longer have that fear because you've proven to yourself, oh, I've done something. I am, you know, you do need to have the belief in yourself first, but it's a lot easier to believe in yourself and be self-confident if you've actually done shit to back that up.

Yeah, it's, it's very, very hard to, to have confidence with no results. And I think that's actually one of the biggest things guys miss when they work at a company, is they never really become competent, and that, that really destroys their confidence. You know, like, if you have someone screaming at you all day, it's telling doing a bad job, it's pretty hard to build up confidence like that. Meanwhile, once you kind of own a project, say even if you're running our business, you own a project and you deliver on it, it's pretty hard not to be confident after that.

Yeah.

Because you just know you're competent, you know what you're worth. And if anyone tries to say you're not worth that, you just tell them to go pound sand, you know?

Exactly. What do you got on the rest of the day?

Rest of the day, I'm actually writing out a new email, um, on, on Real Estate God, actually, that hopefully— it's just taken me so long, I've had like extreme writer's block with it, but hopefully that's pretty good. Um, and then not much else, honestly. I, uh, have a call actually about a new real estate deal. Um, and then got everything else kind of done in the morning and just block out some time tonight to write, and that's kind of it. What about you?

Yeah, I'll probably get this up at some point. Um, how do you— how do you— how have you scheduled your work days in terms of entrepreneurship and, and all the rest of it? What is you— what have you found to be the most kind of productive split where you work the best?

Yeah, I'm, I'm huge on being outside when it's nice out, which is also why I just love Miami. So I usually I usually get up at like 9 or so. I'll do 2 hours of work, usually cook myself some food at like 11 or so, maybe noon, depending on how much work I have. Then I'll just go outside, go to the pool for like an hour or so, work out, and then I just come back in, do some work, and then that's kind of most of my day. Obviously it depends, and I'll switch it up on weekends, but The thing is, once you become an entrepreneur, every day is kind of like the same. Like a Saturday and Sunday is the same to me as like a Tuesday at this point. So it kind of meshes together a lot. But that's generally how I break it up. And if something needs to really be done, then I'll buckle down and grind the entire day. But typically it doesn't.

Yeah, I love it though. You know, you can kind of have— yes, you have some good work each day, but if the sun's out, I'm going the fuck outside and I'll take my laptop and I work outside. You'll lift when you want to, when it's not peak hours, cook good food, and then that's a good day where you've made some progress, you've kept momentum going. You're also living in a way that's going to be— that's the other, you know, benefit to entrepreneurship, let alone the kind of monetary scaling aspect of it, is it enables you to have some freedom. Like, I don't see the point in being an entrepreneur if you are inside all day at a desk grinding it out for 18 hours a day. Like, that's not— maybe your positioning is off if you have to do that. But I think that that's some people's perspective of entrepreneurship. And yes, there will be periods where you'll have to nut it out and not be able to chill on the beach all the time. But having that freedom is kind of you can take an initial hit of income even though it's very quickly more lucrative than most full-time jobs because you have that freedom to do what you want.

Yeah, and a lot of it's just your schedule just kind of getting shifted around, right? Where like when you have a full-time job, you're typically not working Saturdays and Sundays, and I'm almost always working at some point during those days. That means you can kind of take a chunk out of out of the weekdays and do what you want, which I'm fine, right? Like, I would 10 times rather have some actual normal time during the day, and I enjoy my job. I still want to work out every day. I want to go outside every day. Um, so I, I would way rather just be able to choose the schedule, and I think that's probably the biggest benefit.

100%. Well, um, why don't you just mention what you're, what you're doing with real estate, God, um, and then I will leave you to that beautiful email that's going to come out.

Yeah, let's hope it's beautiful. Um, so right now I'm kind of working on a few things, right? I'm building out a private equity firm, um, that's intentionally going to be relatively small because I guess to dive in a bit, there's a few ways to build out a private equity firm. And one is to take on a lot of investors, raise a lot of money, but then you're almost buying yourself a new job, um, which I didn't want to do. So I kind of declined every offer I had to raise a lot of money. They'll typically take a piece of your firm too, which is not what I wanted. Um, so I'm opting for the other route where I'm kind of building it small, mostly friends and family money right now, and then hopefully once I reach a point to the point where I have just a lot of capital just kind of sloshing around, then I'll almost phase them out entirely and just kind of run my own money. And that's what I've always really wanted to do. And I think every investor should kind of aspire to that. If you're really good, like why give up the returns to someone else? Mm-hmm. So that's kind of how I'm building it out on the real estate side. And then on the online side, kind of doing a few things right now, mainly, and I haven't rolled this out to Twitter yet, but, um, I'm trying to build an education platform that shows everyone how to build a private equity firm just from the ground up. Um, so I reveal everything, like every part of the deal, um, anything you want to hear, uh, the acquisition process, how I analyze deals, how I asset manage deals, just kind of the whole thing. Um, Except I won't give up my anonymity, so just won't give the location of the deals. But aside from that, I give up everything. And hopefully what I'm trying to do is just transform education. I think the university system is a total scam. I think the MBA system is a total scam. Um, so this will be extremely low cost, right? It's $25 a month, and I just show you how to build everything from scratch. You can ask, have any questions answered by real private equity, um, experts. And ideally, I just want to get kind of transform the entire system to the point where no one has to go into $250K of debt to learn about it. I think that's one of the most ridiculous things that we have right now. And I think with the scale of the internet, the beauty of it is that you can have a teacher teach thousands of people at once at scale versus having to sit in a classroom with 20 people and shell out $60K to learn it. So this, hopefully what it will be is just, and right now it is, it's just purely practical learning. So everyone can just hit the ground running at an incredibly low cost. And I'm pretty excited about it.

That sounds sick. And people can follow that on Real Estate God?

Yeah, yeah. Like I said, I haven't fully rolled it out to Twitter yet, just my email list, but I'll be rolling it out shortly.

Oh, well, thank you, Kallikrates. Appreciate your time, appreciate your wisdom, and I know this podcast is gonna get a lot of losers winning in their life.

Certainly hope so. It was great talking to you.

All right, catch you, bro. Have a good one.

All right, talk to you later.