Lex Fridman Podcast - #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

Pieter Levels (aka levelsio on X) is a self-taught developer and entrepreneur who has designed, programmed, launched over 40 startups, many of which are highly successful. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep440-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/pieter-levels-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Pieter's X: https://x.com/levelsio Pieter's Techno Optimist Shop: https://levelsio.com/ Indie Maker Handbook: https://readmake.com/ Nomad List: https://nomadlist.com Remote OK: https://remoteok.com Hoodmaps: https://hoodmaps.com SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex Motific: Generative ai deployment. Go to https://motific.ai AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex MasterClass: Online classes from world-class experts. Go to https://masterclass.com/lexpod BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex Eight Sleep: Temp-controlled smart mattress. Go to https://eightsleep.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (11:38) - Startup philosophy (19:09) - Low points (22:37) - 12 startups in 12 months (29:29) - Traveling and depression (42:08) - Indie hacking (46:11) - Photo AI (1:22:28) - How to learn AI (1:31:04) - Robots (1:39:21) - Hoodmaps (2:03:26) - Learning new programming languages (2:12:58) - Monetize your website (2:19:34) - Fighting SPAM (2:23:07) - Automation (2:34:33) - When to sell startup (2:37:26) - Coding solo (2:43:28) - Ship fast (2:52:13) - Best IDE for programming (3:01:43) - Andrej Karpathy (3:11:09) - Productivity (3:24:56) - Minimalism (3:33:41) - Emails (3:40:54) - Coffee (3:48:40) - E/acc (3:50:56) - Advice for young people PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips

The following is a conversation with Peter Levels, also known on X as Levels.io. He is a self-taught developer and entrepreneur who designed, programmed, shipped, and ran over 40 startups, many of which are hugely successful. In most cases, he did it all by himself, while living the digital nomad life in over 40 countries and over 150 cities.

Programming on a laptop while chilling on a couch, using vanilla HTML, jQuery, PHP, and SQLite. He builds and ships quickly and improves on the fly. All in the open, documenting his work, both his successes and failures, with a raw honesty of a true indie hacker. Peter is an inspiration to a huge number of developers and entrepreneurs who love creating cool things in the world that are, hopefully, useful for people.

This was an honor and a pleasure for me. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description, it's the best way to support this podcast. We got Shopify for e-commerce, Motific for LLM and RAG deployment, AG1 for health, Masterclass for learning, BetterHelp for the mind, and 8Sleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends.

Also, there's a bunch of ways to get in touch with me by giving feedback, sending in questions that I can answer, and all other kinds of ways if you go to luxfreeman.com slash contact. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store. I recently tweeted

about my belief as it stands now that Kamala Harris is not a communist and that Donald Trump is not a fascist. And the response I got, the attacks I got from both sides that are very intense, that disagree were fascinating. So one of the things I have on my to-do list is to do a lengthy video and a lengthy podcast on communism and how it's going to affect the world. And I think that's a very interesting thing to do. And I think that's a very interesting thing to do. And I think that's ado list is to do a lengthy video and a lengthy podcast on communism and fascism and other economic and political systems.

You know, there needs to be a good solid criticism and explanation of capitalism, for example. It's an economic system. It's a way for humans to work together that has, I believe, benefited the world way more than it has hurt the world. But to articulate that and to still man the criticisms and the perspectives that criticize capitalism is also really important.

And so the same applies for communism, for fascism, for all kinds of ideologies that rule the world for a time and all the kinds of ways that they've broken down. And to do so seriously, objectively, calmly, walking through the fire without the misuse of those words, thinking clearly, not as a partisan, but as an independent thinker, as a human being, I think that's something that I would like to work on more and more, even amidst this insane political season. Anyway, I mention all that because when I think

about Shopify, I think about capitalism. It's a bunch of small sellers getting together and being able to sell stuff to people that would benefit from it and would enjoy it and then make it super easy. So if you're one such seller and you to sell stuff to people that would benefit from it and would enjoy it and they make it super easy. So if you're one such seller and you want to sell stuff and you have awesome stuff to sell, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase.

Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Motific, a SaaS platform that helps businesses deploy LLMs and RAG that's customized fine-tuned on organization data sources. Obviously, this is often extremely sensitive data, so you have to do this carefully and well. But when it is done carefully and well and in a secure way, it can be a huge benefit for the company to be able to take all the data that the company has and internally be able to query that data, to be able to organize that data, to leverage and answering questions that would make everybody in

the company more efficient. So I think that's the thing that unlocks, especially for large companies, but even mid-sized companies, even small companies, just the intranet, a thing that takes all the data on the inside and be able to make high quality, efficient, fast decisions based on that data. I think Motific was created by Cisco, specifically their outshift group

that does the cutting edge R&D. So these guys are legit, it's great. Visit motific.ai to learn more. That's M-O-T-I-F-I-C dot A-I. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I'm going out, I think it's 100 degrees out in Austin right

now, I'm gonna go, I think it's 100 degrees out in Austin right now. I'm going to go out and run anywhere from five to 12 miles. I'm feeling good right now. So I'm thinking like a 10, 11, 12 mile range. By the way, I just heard a little clip on Cam Haynes' Instagram. And by the way, Cam, amazing human being, you should definitely go follow him. He's an inspiration to me. You know, quietly just does incredible fits of strength and does it all with a kind heart

and just this warmth and humor out of it. Anyway, he was talking about the fact that sometimes, you know, when he's running, crazy distances or fast pace, he'll just walk for a short period of time. He's doing it for joy. He's doing it for the love of running. Like you don't always, as he says, have to hate it. And I think I approach running the same way.

Sometimes I'll be running really fast. Sometimes I walk. This oftentimes correlates with how deeply I am in thought related to an audiobook I'm listening to. Sometimes I get this sort of discomfort when there's a difficult part of the audiobook that's really making me think. At the same time, keeping a fast pace is difficult for me.

So I just slow down. Sometimes I walk. Sometimes I stop and just sit on a bench. I'm doing it all not for sort of training for a marathon or training for some difficult physical endeavor. I'm doing it for the love of it. For the love of running out in nature. Whether it's in the heat or in the cold.

Just the love of life that you can get, especially when the second wind hits. Anyway, after all that, I'm going to drink a nice cold AG1. They'll give you a one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at www.drinkag1.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. I love Masterclass. I love learning from people who are the best in the world at a thing. Sometimes there's incredible lecturers that can explain a thing.

I also love that. But I think there's just something indescribably powerful about not a great lecturer, but a great doer stepping back and explaining the core of their art, of their skill, of their genius. Anyway, there's great stuff on Poker with Phil Ivey, great stuff on Barbecue,

it has been forever since I had Barbecue from Aaron Franklin. These are all the ones I've watched. Martin Scorsese on filmmaking, that is one I really enjoyed. I mean, Scorsese, his stuff is both powerful and thoughtful and deep and profound about family, about human nature, all of that.

And it's just fun to watch, okay? Maybe I'm one of a certain generation, but it's just fun to watch. So you get to hear how the Master does it on Masterclass. You get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lexpod. That's masterclass.com slash lexpod. That's masterclass.com slash lexpod.

This episode is also brought to you by Better Help, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. Some of the people losing their mind in the realm of the election that's coming up. That would be a fun one if they could sign up for better help and do a couples therapy. Somebody from the far left and the far right just sitting down together. Boy, that would be a fascinating challenge for any therapist. And from the conversational space,

I would love to just listen to that. Then I'll be talking to a bunch of people on the left and the right, and having some of those tense, difficult conversations. And again, having it with compassion, but also with backbone. It's not an easy line to walk, by the way. And I don't think I'm smart enough to do it. On most days I kind of feel like an idiot but I'm doing my best.

Anyway you should try out talk therapy. Super easy to do with BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by 8 Sleep and it's a pod for Ultra that I've been enjoying. I just recently enjoyed. I enjoy it every night, multiple times a day. Let's get crazy. I love it.

For a good nap, it can cool down any side of the bed to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature. Cool bed, warm blanket, and just shut off from the world. Just forget it all. Forget the madness of the world, the political bickering, the attacks, the tensions, the drama, all the stuff that, you know, the media and the social media that wants to pull you in, that wants you

desperately, like a drug wants your attention, wants to just piss you off and use that anger to make you addicted to the platform so you can tell everybody how pissed off you are. And then the other person attacks you back, gets them to be pissed off and you're both pissed off at each other. At the end of the day, just losing your mind. All of that can dissipate for me with a short nap. On a cold bed, short nap feels like home. It's one of the favorite things I have about home and one of my least favorite things about

traveling because I don't have eight sleep. Anyway, you could enjoy the same kind of peace of mind. If you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the pod for Ultra. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Peter Levels. Here's Peter Levels.

You've launched a lot of companies and built a lot of products. As you say, most failed, but some succeeded. What's your philosophy behind building the startups that you did? I think my philosophy is very different than most people in startups. Cause most people in startups, they build a company and they raise money, right? And they hire people and then they build a product and they find something that makes money and I don't really raise money. I don't use VC funding. I do everything myself.

I'm a designer, I'm the developer. I make everything. I make the logo. So for me, I'm much more scrappy. And because I don't have funding, I need to go fast. I need to make things fast to see if an idea works. I have an idea in my mind and I build it, build it like a mini startup.

And I launch it very quickly, like within two weeks or something of building it. And I check if there's demand and if launch it very quickly, like within two weeks or so of building it. And I check if there's demand, if people actually sign up, and not just sign up, but if people actually pay money, right, like they need to take out their credit cards, pay me money, and then I can see if the idea is validated. And most ideas don't work, like as you say, most fail.

So there's this rapid iterative phase where you just build a prototype that works, launch it, see if people like it, improving it really, really quickly, to see if people like it a little bit more enough to pay and all that. That whole rapid process is how you think of... I think it's very rapid. And it's like, if I compare it to, for example, Google, our big tech companies, especially Google right now is kind of struggling. They made Transformers, they invented all the AI stuff years ago and they never really shipped like they could have shipped JetGBT for example, I think I heard in 2019. And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy, but they had everything.

They had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers and they didn't do it. And it's because these big organizations, it can make you very slow. So being alone by myself on my laptop, like, you know, in my underwear, in a hotel room or something, I can ship very fast. And I don't need to like, I don't need to ask that legal for like, oh, can you vouch for this? You know, I can just go and ship. Do you always code in your underwear? Your profile picture, you're like slouching a couch in your underwear, chilling on a laptop.

No, but I do wear shorts a lot. And I usually just wear shorts and no t-shirts because I'm always too hot. Like I'm always overheating. Thank you for showing up, not just in your underwear, but you're wearing shorts. And I'm still wearing this for you. Thank you.

Thank you for dressing up. I think it's because since I go to the gym, I'm always too hot. What's your favorite exercise in the gym? Man, over press. Over press, like shoulder press? Yeah. Okay. But it feels good because you're doing like you do you win because when you What is that? You 60 kilos so like 120 pounds or something like it's it's my only thing I can do Well, you know in the gym and you stand like this and you're like I did it

You know like a winner pose a victory pose. I do bench press squats deadlifts Hence the the mug. Yeah talking to my to my therapist, it's a deadlift. Yeah, because it acts like therapy for me, no? Yeah, it is. Which is controversial to say. If I say this on Twitter, people get angry. Physical hardship is a kind of therapy. I just rewatched Happy People, Year in the Taiga,

that Warner Herzog film, where they document people that are doing trapping. They're essentially just working for survival in the wilderness year round. And there's a deep happiness to their way of life because they're so busy in it, in nature. Like there's something about that physical toil. My dad taught me that.

My dad always did, that was like construction in the house. Like he's always renovating the house. He breaks through one room and then he goes to the next room and he's just going in a circle around the house for like the last 40 years. But so he's always doing construction in the house and it's his hobby. And he, like he taught me when I'm depressed or something, he says like, get a big, like what do you call it? Like a big mountain of sand or something from construction and just get a shovel and bring it to the other side and just do like physical labor, do like hard work and do something, like set a goal, do something.

And I kind of did that with startups too. Yeah, construction is not about the destination, man. It's about the journey. Yeah, sometimes I wonder people who are always remodeling their house. Is it really about the remodeling? No, no, it's not. Is it about the project?

It's about the journey. The puzzle of it. No, he doesn't care about the results. Well, he shows me. He's like, it's amazing. I'm like, yeah, it's amazing. But then he wants to go to the next room, you know? But I think it's very metaphorical for work because I also I never stop work. I go to the next website or I make a new one or I make a new startup.

So I'm always like, like, it gives you something to wake up in the morning and like, you know, have coffee and kiss your girlfriend. And then you have like a goal. Not today. I'm going to fix this feature today. I'm going to fix this bug or something. I'm going to do something. You have something to wake up to, you know? And I think maybe especially as a man, also women, but you need, you need a hard work, you, but you need a hard work. You need like an endeavor, I think. How much of the building that you do is about money? How much is it about just a deep internal happiness?

It's really about fun because I was doing it when I didn't make money. That's the point. So I was always coding. I was always making music. I made electronic music, drum and bass music like 20 years ago. And I was always making stuff. So I think creative expression is like a meaningful work. That's so important.

It's so fun. It's so fun to have like a daily challenge where you try to figure stuff out. The interesting thing is you've built a lot of successful products and you never really wanted to take it to that level where you scale real big and sell it to a company or something like this. Yeah, the problem is I don't dictate that, right?

Like if more people start using it, if millions of people suddenly start using it and it becomes big, I'm not gonna say, oh, stop signing up to my website and pay me money. But I never raised funding for it. And I think because I don't like the stressful life that comes with it, like I have a lot of founder friends and they tell me secretly, like hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and stuff.

And they tell me like next time, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it like you because it's more fun, it's more in these more chill, it's more creative. They don't like this. They don't like to be manager, right? You become like a CEO, you become a manager. And I think a lot of people that start startups, when they become a CEO, they don't like that job actually, but they can't really exit it, you know? But they like to do the groundwork, the coding. So I think that keeps you happy,

like doing something creative. Yeah, it was interesting how people are pulled towards that, the scale to go really big. And you don't have that honest reflection with yourself like what actually makes you happy. Because for a lot of great engineers, what makes them happy is the building, the quote unquote individual contributor. Like where you're actually still coding or you're actually still building.

And they let go of that and then they become unhappy. But some of that is the sacrifice needed to have an impact at scale. If you truly believe in a thing you're doing. But like, look at Elon, he's doing things million times bigger than me, right? And, um, would I want to do that? I don't know, you can't really choose these things, right? But I really respect that. I think Elon is very different from VC founders, right?

VC start is like software. There's a lot of bullshit in this world. I think there's a lot of like dodgy finance stuff happening there, I think. And I never have like concrete evidence about it, but your gut tells you something's going on with like companies getting sold to friends and VCs and then they do reciprocity and there's shady financial dealings. With Elon, that's not, he's just raising money from investors and he's actually building stuff. He needs the money to build stuff, hardware stuff. And that I really respect.

You said that there's been a few low points in your life that you've been depressed and the building is one of the ways you get out of that. But can you talk to that? Can you take me to that place, that time when you were at a low point? So I was in Holland and I graduated university and I didn't wanna like get a normal job. And I was making some money with YouTube university and I didn't want to like get a normal job.

And I was making some money with YouTube because I had this music career and I uploaded my music to YouTube and YouTube started paying me like with AdSense like $2,000 a month, $2,000 a month. And all my friends got like normal jobs and we stopped hanging out because people would like in university hang out,

you know, you chill at each other's houses, you go party. But even when people get jobs, they only party like in the weekend and they don't hang anymore in the week because you need to be at the office. And I was like, this is not for me, I wanna do something else.

And I was starting getting this like, I think it's like Saturn Returns, you know, when you're turned 27. It's like some concept where Saturn returns to the same place in the orbit that it was when you're born. Man, it's like- I'm learning so many things. It's some astrology thing, you know?

So many truly special artists died when they were 27. Exactly, someone was 27, man. And it was for me, like I started going crazy because I didn't really see my future in Holland, buying a house, going living in the suburbs and stuff. So it flew out. I went to Asia, I started digital nomading and did that for a year.

And then that made me feel even worse, you know? Cause I was like alone, um, in hotel rooms, like looking at the ceiling, like, what am I doing with my life? Like, this is, uh, like I was working on startups and stuff and YouTube, but it's like, what is the future here? You know, like, uh, is this, is this something while my friends in Holland were doing really well and with a normal life, you know? Um, so it was getting very depressed and like, I'm like an outcast, you know?

And my money was, was shrinking. I wasn't making money anymore. A lot. It's making $500 a month or something. And I was looking at the ceiling thinking like, now I'm like 27, I'm a loser. And that's the moment when I started building like startups. And it was because my dad said, like, if you're depressed, you need to, you know, get sand, get a shovel, start shoveling, doing something.

You can't just sit still. Which is kind of like a interesting way to deal with depression. You know, like, it's not like, oh, let's talk about it. It's more like, let's go do something. And, um, and I started doing a project called 12 startups in 12 months, where every month I would make something like a project and I would launch it with Stripe so people could pay for it. So the basic format is try to build a thing, put it online,

and put Stripe to where you can pay money for it. Yeah, add a Stripe check, I'm not sponsored by Stripe, but add a Stripe checkout button. Is that still like the easiest way to just like pay for stuff, Stripe? 100%, like I think so, yeah. It's a cool company, they just made it so easy, you can just click and-

Yeah, and they're really nice, like the CEO, Patrick, is really nice. Behind the scenes, it must be difficult to like actually make that happen. Cause that used to be a huge problem. Like just merchant, just, just adding a thing, a button where you can like pay for a thing, it's dude, I know this because when I was nine years old, I was making websites also, and I tried to open a merchant account that was like before strive, you would have like, um, I think it was called Worldpay.

So I had to like fill out all these forms. And then I had to fax them to America from Holland with my dad's fax. And my dad had to, it wasn't my dad's name. And he just signed for this. And he started reading these terms and conditions. It was just like, he's liable for like a hundred million in damages.

And he's like, I don't want to sign this. I'm like, dad, come on, I need a merchant account. I need to make money on the internet, you know? And he signed it and we sent it, we faxed it to America and I had a merchant account, but then nobody paid for anything. So that was the problem, you know? But it's much easier now.

You can sign up, you add some codes and yeah. So 12 startups in 12 months. So what, how do you, startup number one, what was that, what were you feeling? What were you, you sit behind the computer, like how much do you actually know about building stuff at that point? I could code a little bit,

because I did the YouTube channel and I made a website for, I would make websites for like the YouTube channel, it was called Panda Mix Show, and it was like these electronic music mixes, like Dubstep or Drum and Bass or Techno House. I saw one of them had like Flash, were you using Flash? my album my CD almost using flash. Yeah. I sold my CD Yeah kids flash was a software. This is like the break

Yeah, there's was it called boy. I should remember this action script. There's some kind of programming language Yeah, yeah, yeah in flash back, that was the JavaScript, you know? The JavaScript, yeah. And I thought that's supposed to be the dynamic thing that takes over the internet. I invested so many hours in learning that thing. And Steve Jobs killed it. Steve Jobs killed it.

Steve Jobs said, Flash sucks. Stop using it. And everyone's like, OK. That guy was right, though, right? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Well, it was a closed platform, I think.

And this is ironic, because Apple, they're not very open. But back then, Steve was like, this is closed, we should not use it. And it's security problems, I think, which sounded like a cop-out. Like, I just wanted to say that to make it look kinda bad. The Flash was cool, yeah. Yeah, it was cool for a time.

Listen, animated GIFs were cool for a time, too. They came back in a different way. As a meme, though. I mean, I even remember when GIFs were cool for a time too. They came back in a different way. As a meme though, I mean like, I even remember when GIFs were actually cool, not ironically cool. On the internet you would have like a dancing rabbit or something like this, and that was really exciting. You had like the Lex homepage,

everything was centered, and you had like Peter's homepage, and then the under construction GIF, which was like a guy with a helmet and the lights. And it was amazing. Banners. Yeah. That's how before like Google AdSense, you would have like banners for advertisements. It was amazing. Yeah. And a lot of links to porn, I think. Yeah. Or porn type. I think that was where the merchant accounts people would use for. People would make money a lot.

The only money made on the internet then was like porn or a lot of it yeah it was it was a dark place it's still a dark place yeah and but there's beauty in the darkness anyway so you were uh you did some basic html yeah yeah but i had to learn the actual like coding so i uh this was good it was a good good idea to like every month lunch at startup so i could uh learn the codes learn basic stuff and but it was still very scrappy because it didn't have time to, which was on purpose. I didn't have time to spend a lot of, um, I had a month to do something, so I couldn't spend more than a month and it was pretty strict about that. Um, and I published it as a blog post. So people, I think I put it on Hacker News and people would check like, kind of like, oh, did you actually, you know, I felt like accountability because I put it public that I actually had to do it.

Do you remember the first one you did? I think it was play my inbox. Cause back then my friends, we would send, we would send like cool music. It was before Spotify, I think we would send like, uh, 2014, we would send music to each other, like YouTube links. Uh, like this is a cool song. This is a cool song. And it was these giant email threads on Gmail and they were like unnavigatable.

So I made an app that would log into your Gmail, get them emails, and find the ones with YouTube links, and then make a gallery of your songs. Essentially Spotify, and my friends loved it. Was it scraping it? No, it uses like POP, like pop, or IMAP. It would actually check your email. So that had privacy concerns,

because it would get all your emails to find YouTube links, but then I wouldn't save anything. But that was fun. It was like, and that first product already would get like pressed, like it went on, I think like some tech media and stuff. And I was like, this is cool. Like it didn't make money.

There was no payment button, but it was actually people using it. I think tens of thousands of people used it. That's a great idea. I wonder why, why don't we have that? Why don't we have things that access Gmail and extract some useful aggregate information? Yeah, you could tell Gmail, don't give me all emails,

just give me the ones with YouTube links, or something like that. I mean, there is a whole ecosystem of apps you can build on top of the Google, but people don't never do this. Like they build. I've seen a few like boomerang. There's a few apps that are like good, but I wonder what, maybe it's not easy to

make money. I think it's hard to get people to pay for these like extensions and plugins, you know, cause it's not like a real app. So it's not like people don't value it. People very artists and a plugin should be free, you know, when I want to use a plugin in Google Sheets or something, I'm not going to pay for it. It should be free, which is, but if you go to a website and you actually, okay, I need this product, I'm going to pay for this because it's a real product. So even though it's the same code in the back, it's a plugin, you know?

Yeah, I mean, you can do it through like extensions, like Chrome extensions from the browser side. Yeah, but who pays for Chrome extensions, right? Like barely anybody. So that's not a good place to make money probably. Yeah, that sucks. Like Chrome extensions should be an extension for your startup, you know?

You have a product, oh, we also have a Chrome extension. I wish the Chrome extension would be the product. I wish Chrome would support that. Like where you could pay for it easily. Cause like imagine, I can't imagine a lot of products that would just live as extensions. Like improvements for social media. Like a thing that lives.

It's like GPTs, you know? GPTs, yeah. Like these chat GPTs, they're gonna charge money for it now and you get a rev share, I think, for an open AI. I made a lot of them also. Why? We'll talk about it, but let's rewind back. It's a pretty cool idea to do 12 startups in 12 months.

What does it take to build a thing in 30 days? Like at that time, how hard was that? I think the hard part is like figuring out what you shouldn't add, right? What you shouldn't build because you don't have time. So you need to build a landing page. Well, you need to build the product actually, because it needs to be something they pay for.

Do you need to build a login system? Maybe no. Maybe you can build some scrappy login system. Like for Photii, you sign up, you pay with Stripe checkout, and you get a login link. And when I started, there was only a login link with a hash, and that's just a static link. So it's very easy to log in.

It's not so safe, what if you leak the link? And now I have real Google login. But that took like a year. So keeping it very scrappy is very important to, because you don't have time. You know, you need to focus on what you can build fast. So money, Stripe, build a product, build a landing page. You need to think about how are people going to find this? So are you going to put it on Reddit or something?

How are you going to put it on Reddit without being looked at as a spammer? Right? Like if you say, hey, it is my new startup. You should use it. No, nobody gets deleted. You know? Um, maybe if you find a problem that a lot of people on Reddit already have on a sub Reddit, you know, like you solve that problem and say,

stop people, I made this thing that might solve your problem. And maybe it's free for now, you know, like, uh, that could work, you know, but you need to be very, you know, narrow it down what you're building. Time is limited. Yeah. Actually, can we go back to the you laying in a room feeling like a loser? Yeah.

I still feel like a loser sometimes. What's, what can you, can you speak to that feeling to that place of just like feeling like a loser? And I think a lot of people in this world are laying in a room right now listening to this and feeling like a loser. Okay, so I think it's normal if you're young that you feel like a loser, first of all.

Especially when you're 27. Yes, yeah, especially. There's like a peak. Yeah, yeah, I think 20 is the peak. And so I would not kill yourselves, it's very important to just get through it, you know, but, uh, because you have nothing, you haven't probably no money. You have no business.

You have no job yet. Like Jordan Peterson said this, I saw it somewhere, like the reason people are depressed because they have nothing. They don't have a girlfriend. They don't have a boyfriend. They don't have a, you need stuff. You need like our family. You need things around you.

You need to build a life for yourself. You don't build a life for yourself. You'll be depressed. So if you're alone in Asia, in a hostel, looking at the ceiling and you don't have any money coming in, you don't have a girlfriend, you don't, of course you're depressed, it's logic. But back then, if you're in the moment, you think there's not logic, there's something wrong with me, you know?

Um, and, and also I think I started going, I started getting like anxiety. And I think I started going a little bit crazy where I think travel can make you insane and I know this because I know that there's like digital moments that they kill themselves and I don't I haven't checked like this the comparison with like baseline people like suicide rate but I have a hunch um especially in the beginning when it was a very new thing like 10 years ago that it can be very psychologically taxing. And you're alone a lot. Back then, when you travel alone, there was no other digital moments back then. A lot. So you're in a strange culture. You look different than everybody.

Like you're in. I was in Asia. Like everybody's really nice in Thailand, but you're not part of the culture. You're traveling around. You're hopping from city to city. You don't have a home anymore. You feel disrooted and you're hopping from city to city. You don't have a home anymore. You feel dis-rooted. And you're constantly in the outcast in that you're different from everybody else. Yes, exactly.

But people treat you like Thailand. People are so nice, but you still feel like outcast. And then I think the digital nomads I met then were all kind of like, it was like shady business, you know, but they were like vigilantes because it was a new thing. And like one guy was selling illegal drugs. It was an American guy was selling illegal drugs via UPS to Americans on this website. There were like a lot of drop shippers doing shady stuff. There's a lot of shady things going on there.

And they didn't look like very balanced people. They didn't look like people I wanted to hang with. So I also felt outcast from other foreigners in Thailand, other digital nomads. And I was like, man, I made a big mistake. And then I went back to Holland and then I got even more depressed. You said digital nomad. What is digital nomad?

What is that way of life? What is the philosophy there? And the history of the movement. I struck upon it on accident because I was like, I'm going to graduate university and then I'm going to, I need to get out of here. I'll fly to Asia because I've been before. In Asia, I studied in Korea in 2009, like study exchange.

I was like, Asia is easy, Thailand is easy. I'll just go there, figure things out. And it's cheap. It's very cheap. Chiang Mai, I would live like for 2009, like study exchange. I was like, Asia is easy, Thailand is easy. I'll just go there, figure things out. And it's cheap. It's very cheap. Chiang Mai, I would live like for $150 per month rent for like a private room, pretty good. So I struck up on this on X and I was like, okay, there's other people on laptops working on their startup or working remotely.

Back then nobody worked remotely, but they worked on their businesses, right? And they would live in like Colombia or Thailand or Vietnam or Bali. They would live kind of like in more cheap places. And it looked like a very adventurous life. Like you travel around, you build your business. There's no pressure from like your home society, right? Like you're American, so you get pressure from American society telling you kind of

what to do. Like you need to buy a house or you need to do this stuff. I had this in Holland too. And you can get away from this pressure and you can find it kind of feel like you're free. You're kind of, there's nobody telling you what to do, but that's also why you start feeling like you go crazy because you are, you are free. You're dis attached from anything and anybody. Um, you're dis attached from your culture. You're dis attached from the culture you're probably in cause you're staying very short.

I think Franz Kafka said, I'm free, therefore I'm lost. Man, that's so true. Yeah, that's exactly the point. And yeah, freedom is like, it's the definition of no constraints, right? Like anything's possible, you can go anywhere. And everybody's like, oh, that must be super nice.

You know, like freedom, you must be very happy. And it's the opposite. Like, I don't think that makes you happy. I think constraints probably make you happy. And that's the opposite. Like, I don't think that makes you happy. I think constraints probably make you happy. And that's a big lesson I learned then. But what were they making for money? So you're saying they were doing shady stuff at that time? For me, you know, because I was more like a developer.

I wanted to make startups, kind of. And it was like drugs being shipped to America, like diet pills and stuff, like non FDA approved stuff, you know? And they would like laugh. There was no like, they were like, they would sit with beers and they would laugh about like all the dodgy shit kind of they're doing, you know? That part of the, okay.

That kind of vibe, you know? Like kind of sleazy Ecom vibe. I'm not saying all Ecom is sleazy, you know? But, but you know, this vibe. It could be a vibe. And your vibe was more build cool shit that's ethical. You know the guys with sports cars in Dubai, these people, you know? Yes.

Ecom, like, oh, bro, you got to drop ship. Yeah. You'll make 100 million a month. Those people, it was this shit. And I was like, this is not my people. Yeah. I mean, there's nothing wrong with any of those individual components. No, no judgment.

But there's a foundation that's not quite ethical. What is that? I don't know what that is, but yeah, I get you. No, I don't wanna judge. It was more, I know that for me, it wasn't my world. It wasn't my subculture. I wanted to make cool shit, but they also think that cool shit is cool.

But I wanted to make real startups, and that was my thing. I would read Hacker News, like Y Combinator, and they were making cool stuff, so I wanted to make cool stuff. That's, that's a pretty cool way of life. Just if you romanticize it for a moment. It's very romantic, man. It's very, it's colorful. You know, like if I think about the memories.

What are some happy memories, just like working, working cafes or working in just the freedom that envelops you for that way of life. Cause anything is possible. You can just get off and go. I think it was amazing. Like we would work, like you wouldn't, I would make friends and we would work until, you know,

6 a.m. in Bali, for example, with like, with Andre, my best friend, who is still my best friend. And we would, another friend, and we would work until like the morning when the sun came up because at night the coworking space was silent, you know, there was nobody else and I would wake up like 6 PM or 5 PM, I would drive to the coworking space on a motorbike. I would buy like a 30 hot lattes from a cafe. How many?

30. Cause there was like, there was like six people coming or we didn't know. Sometimes people would come in. And you say three zero thirty? Yeah. Nice. And we would drink like four per person or something, you know? Yeah. Man, it's bad.

I don't know if they were powerful lattes, you know, but there were lattes. And we would put it in a plastic bag and then we would drive there and all the coffee was like falling everywhere. And then we'd go into the coffee shop and have these coffees here and we'd work all night. We'd play like techno music and everybody would just work in there. This was literally like business people. They would work in a startup and we'd all try and make something. Then the sun would come up and the morning people,

the yoga girls and yoga guys would come in after the yoga class at six. They'd say, hey, good morning. We're like, we look like this. We're like, what's up, how are you doing? And we didn't know how bad we looked, you know, but it was very bad. And then we'd go home, sleep in like a hostel or a hotel and do the same thing and again and again and again.

And it was this lock-in mode, you know, like working. And that was very fun. So it's just a bunch of you, techno music blasting all through the night. Yeah. More like industrially. Not like this cheesy. See, for me it's such an interesting thing because the speed of the beat affects how I feel about a thing. So the faster it is the more anxiety I feel but that anxiety is channeled into productivity but if it's a little too fast I start the anxiety

overpowers. You don't like drum and bass music. Probably not. No, a little too fast, I start the anxiety overpowers. You don't like drum and bass music? Probably not. No, it's too fast. I mean, for working, I have to play with it. It's like, you can actually, like, I can adjust my level of anxiety. Must be a better word than anxiety.

It's like productive anxiety. That I like, whatever that is. It also depends what kind of work you do, right? Like if you're writing, you probably don't want drum and bass music. I think for codes, like industrial techno, this kind of stuff, kind of fast, it works well because you really get like locked in

and combined with caffeine, you know, you go, you go deep, you know? And I think you balance on this edge of anxiety because this caffeine is also hitting your anxiety and you want to be on the edge of anxiety with this techno running. Sometimes it gets too much. Like stop the techno, stop the music.

It's like, but, uh, but those are good memories, you know, and also like travel memories, like you go from city to city and it feels like it's kind of like jet set life, like it's, it feels very beautiful. Like you're, you're seeing a lot of cool cities and what was your favorite place you remember? You visited. I think still like, uh like Bangkok is the best place. And Bangkok and Chiang Mai, I think Thailand is very special.

Like I've been to the other place, like I've been to Vietnam and I've been to South America and stuff. I still think Thailand wins in how nice people are, how easy of a life people have there. Everything's cheap. Yeah. Well, Bangkok is getting expensive now, but Chiang Mai is still cheap. I think when you're starting out, it's a great place. Man, the air quality sucks. It's a big problem.

So, um, and it's quite hot, but that's a very cool place. Um, I love Brazil also. My girlfriend is Brazilian, but I do not just because of that, but I like Brazil. Uh, the problem still is the safety issue. You know, like it's, it's like in America, like it's localized, it's hard for Europeans to understand, like safety is localized to specific areas. So if you go to the right areas, it's amazing. Brazil's amazing.

If you go to the wrong areas, like you, maybe you die. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's true. That's not true in Europe. For Europe is much more, that's true. That's more average.

You're right. You're right. There's, it's more averaged out. Yeah. is much more. That's true. That's more average. You're right. You're right. There's more averaged out. Yeah. I like it when there's strong neighborhoods. When you like, you cross a certain street and you're in a dangerous part of town. Man. Yeah.

This I like it. I like there's certain cities in the United States like that. Yeah. I like that. And you're saying Europe is more. You don't feel scared? Well, I don't. Why you do BJJ?

No, not even just that. I think danger is interesting. So danger reveals something about yourself, about others. Also, I like the full range of humanity. So I don't like the meloed out aspects of humanity. I have friends, like these are not much friends that are exactly like this. Like they go to like the kind of broken areas, you know?

Like they like this reality. They like this authenticity more. They don't like luxury. They don't like... Oh yeah, I hate luxury. Yeah, it's very European of you. That's a whole nother conversation. So you quoted Freya Stark, quote, to awaken quite alone in a strange town

is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. Yeah. Do you remember a time you awoken in a strange town and felt like that? We're talking about small towns or big towns or? Man, anywhere. I think I wrote it in some blog post and like, it was a common thing when you would wake up.

And this was like, cause I have this website, I started a website about this digital nomads like called nomadlist.com and there was a community. So it was like 30,000 other digital nomads. Cause I was feeling lonely. So I built this website and I stopped feeling lonely. Like I started making organizing meetups and making friends. And, um, and it was very common that people would say they would wake up and they would forget where they are. Like for the first half minute and I had to look outside like, where am I? Which country? It sounds really like privilege, but it's more like funny.

Like you literally don't know where you are because you're so disrooted. Um, but there's something, man, it's like Anthony Bourdain, you know, there's something pure about this kind of Vagabond travel thing, you know? Like it's behind me. I think I don't like now I travel with my girlfriend, right? It's very different, but it is a romantic, like memories of this kind of like. Vagabond individualistic solo life, but the thing didn't make me happy, but it was very cool, but it didn't make me happy, right?

It made me anxious. There's something about it that made me anxious. I don't know. I still feel like that. It's a cool feeling. It's scary at first, but then you realize where you are and you, and I don't know, I still feel like that. It's a cool feeling. It's scary at first, but then you realize where you are and you, and I don't know. It's like you'll awaken to the possibilities of this place. When you see like that, it's like, great.

And it's even when you're doing some basic travel, I go to San Francisco or something. Yeah. You have like the novelty effect. Like you're in a new place. Like here things are possible. You know, you're, you don't get bored yet. And, and that's why people get addicted to travel, you know, you're you don't get bored yet and and That's why people get addicted to travel, you know back to startups you were a book on

How to do this thing and gave a great talk on it how to do startups the books called make Bootstrappers handbook. Yeah, I was wondering if you can go through some of the steps It's idea build launch grow monetize automate and exit. There's a lot of fascinating ideas in each one. So idea stage. How do you find a good idea? So I think you need to be able to spot problems. So for example, you can go in your daily life, like when you wake up and you're like, what are stuff that I'm really annoyed with? That's like, in my daily life, that doesn't function well. And that's a problem that you can see, okay, maybe that's something I can add, write code about, you know, code for, and it will make my life easier. So I would say make like a list of all these problems you have and like an idea to solve it,

and see which one is like viable, you can actually do something, and then start building it. So that's a really good place to start. Become open to all the problems in your life. Like actually start noticing them. I think that's actually not a trivial thing to do. To realize that some aspects of your life could be done way, way better.

Because we kind of very quickly get accustomed to discomforts. Exactly. Like for example, like doorknobs. Yeah. Like design of certain things. New Lex Freeman doorknobs. Yeah. Like design of certain things. Like new Lex Freeman doorknob. Yeah, that one I know how much incredible design work

has gone into. It's really interesting. Doors and doorknobs, just the design of everyday things, forks and spoons. It's gonna be hard to come up with a fork that's better than the current fork designs. And the other aspect of it is you're saying like, in order to come up with a fork that's better than the current fork designs. And the other aspect of it is you're saying like in order to come up with interesting ideas, you got to try to live a more interesting life.

Yeah, but that's where travel comes in. Because when I started traveling, I started seeing stuff in other countries that you didn't have in Europe, for example, or America even. Like if you go to Asia, like dude, especially 10 years ago, nobody knew about this. WeChat, all these apps that they already had before we had them. These everything apps, right? Like now Elon's trying to make X this everything app, like we chat the same thing. Like in Indonesia or Thailand, you have one app that you can order food with. You can order groceries, you can order massage.

Uh, you can order car mechanic. Um, anything you can think of is in the app and that stuff,. And that stuff, for example, that's called like arbitrage. You can go back to your country and build that same app for your country, for example. So you start seeing problems, you start seeing solutions that other countries already, other people already did in the rest of the world. And also traveling in general just gives you more problems

because travel is uncomfortable, you know? Airports are horrible, airplanes are not comfortable either. There's a lot of problems you start seeing. Just getting out of your house, you know? But also you can, I mean, in a digital world, you can just go into different communities and see what can be improved by the others in that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But what specifically is your process of generating ideas? Do you like, do idea dumps? Like do you have a document where you just keep writing stuff? Yeah, I used to have like a, cause when I was, when I wasn't making money, I was trying to like make this list of ideas to see like, so I need to build, I was thinking statistically already, like I need to build all these things

and one of these will work out probably, you know? So I need to have a lot of things to try. And I did that. Right now I think like, because I already have money, I can do more things based on technology. So I need to have a lot of things to try. And I did that right now. I think like, because I already have money, I can do more things based on technology. So for example, AI, when I found out about when stable diffusion came or chat, GBT and stuff, all these things were like, I didn't start working with them because I had a problem. I had no problems, but I was very curious about technology. And I was like playing with it and figuring out like,

first just playing with it and then you find something like, okay, this generates, Stable Fusion generates houses very beautiful and interiors, you know? So it's less about problem solving, it's more about the possibilities of new things you can create. Yeah, but that's very risky

because that's the famous like solution trying to find a problem. And usually it doesn't work. And that's very risky because that's the famous like solution trying to find a problem Yeah, and usually it doesn't work and that's very common with with startup funds I think they they have tech but actually people don't need to tech right? But can you actually explain? It'd be cool to talk about some of the stuff you created. Can you explain? This the photo AI.com. Yeah. Yeah, so it's like fire your photographer The idea is like you don't need a photographer anymore

You can train yourself as an AI model and you can take as many photos you want anywhere in any clothes, uh, with facial expressions like happy or sad or poses, uh, all this stuff. So how does, how does it work? This is, uh, he said me a link to a gallery of, uh, ones done on me. Which is on the left, you have the prompts, the box. Yeah. So you can write like, so to a gallery of ones done on me. Yeah, so on the left you have the prompts, the box. Yeah, so you can write like, so model is your model, this is Lex Friedman.

So you can write like model as a blah, blah, blah, whatever you want. Yep. Then press the button and it will take photos, it will take like one minute. 60 photos. What are you using for the hosting for the compute? Replicate.

Okay. Replicate.com, they're very, very good. Okay, it's cool like this interface wise, it's cool that you're showing how long it's going to take. This is amazing. So it's taking a, I'm presuming you just loaded in a few pictures from the internet. Yeah, so I went to Google Images,

typed in Lex Friedman, I added like 10 or 20 images. You can open them in the gallery. And you can use your cursor to, yeah. So some don't look like you. So the hit and miss rate is like, I don't know, let's say like 50-50 or something. But when I was watching your tweets, like it's been getting better and better and better. It was very bad in the beginning.

It was so bad, but still people signed up to it, you know. There's two Lexus is great. It's getting more and more sexual. It's making me very uncomfortable. Man, but that's the problem with these models because no,, we need to talk about this because the models of diffusion. Yeah. So the photorealistic models that are like fine-tuned, they were all trained on porn in the beginning.

And there was a guy called Hassan. So I was trying to figure out how to do photorealistic AI photos. And it was stable diffusion by itself is not doing that well. Like the faces look all mangled. Yeah. And it doesn't have enough resolution or something to do that well. So, but I started seeing these base models, these fine-tuning models and people would

train on porn and I would try them and they would be very photorealistic. They would have bodies that actually made sense like body anatomy. But if you look at the photorealistic models that people use now, still, there's still core of porn there, like of naked people. So I need to prompt out the naked, and everyone needs to do this with AI startups, with imaging, you need to prompt out the naked stuff. You need to put a, you know, naked... You have to keep reminding the model, you need to put clothes on.

Yeah, don't put naked because it's very risky. I have Google Vision that checks every photo before it's shown to the user to like check for NSFW. Oh, NS SFW detector. Because you get, the journalists get very angry if they, you know. If you sexualize. There was a journalist, I think, that got angry

that used this and was like, oh, it made me, it showed like a nipple because Google vision didn't detect it. So there's like these kinds of problems you need to deal with, you know? That's what I'm talking about. This is with cats. But look at the cat face, it's also kind of mangled.

You know? I'm a little bit disturbed. You can zoom in on the cat if you want. Like, yeah. This is a very sad cat. It doesn't have a nose. It doesn't have a nose. But this is the problem with AI startups, because they all act like it's perfect.

Like this is groundbreaking. But it's not perfect. It's like really bad, you know, half the time. So if I wanted to sort of update model as, yeah. So you remove this stuff and you write like whatever you want, like in Thailand or something or in Tokyo. Uh, in Tokyo. Yeah.

And you can say like at nights with neon neon lights like you can add more detail I'll go in Austin. Do you think I'll know in Texas in Austin, Texas cowboy hats in Texas. Yeah as a cowboy As a cowboy it's gonna go so towards the porn directions it's man. I hope not this end of my career Or the beginning it depends we can send you a push notification when your photos are done. Yeah, all right, cool. Yeah, let's see. Oh, wow, so this whole interface you've built. Yeah. This is really well done.

It's all jQuery. So I still use jQuery? Yes, still. The only one. After 10 years. To this day, you're not the only one. The entire web is PHP. It's PHP and jQuery, yeah, and SQLite. You're just like one of the top performers

from a programming perspective that are still openly talking about it. But everyone's using PHP. If you look, most of the web is still probably PHP and jQuery. I think 70%. It's because of WordPress, right? Because the blogs are. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah. That's true. I'm seeing a revival now. People are getting sick of frameworks. All all the JavaScript frameworks are so like, what do you call it, like wieldy. Like they're so, it takes so much work to just maintain this code. And then it updates to a new version,

you need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works. Yeah. And- Can you actually just speak to that stack? You build all your websites, apps, startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML. Yeah. speak to that stack? You build all your websites, apps, startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, and that's cool.

So that's a really simple stack and you get stuff done really fast. Can you just speak to the philosophy behind that? I think it's accidental because that's the thing I knew. Like I knew PHP, I knew HTML, CSS, because you make websites. And when my startup started taking off, I didn't have time to, I remember putting on my to-do list, like learn Node.js, because it's important to switch, because this obviously is a much better language than PHP.

And I never learned it, I never did it, because I didn't have time. These things were growing like this, and I was launching more projects, and I never learned it. I never did it. Cause at the end of time, these things were growing like this and I was launching more projects and I never had time. It's like one day, you know, I'll start coding properly and I never got to it. I sometimes wonder if I need to learn that stuff.

It's still to do at them for me to really learn Node.js or Flask or these kinds of... React, Fuee. Yeah, React. And it's just, it feels like a responsible software engineer should know how to use these, but you can get stuff done so fast with vanilla versions of stuff.

Yeah. It's like software developers, if you want to get a job and there's like, you know, people making stuff like startups, and if you want to be a job and there's like, you know, people making stuff like startups. And if you want to be entrepreneur, probably you should maybe students. I wonder if there's like, I really want to measure performance and speed. I think there's a deep wisdom in that.

I do think that frameworks and just constantly wanting to learn the new thing, this complicated way of software engineering gets in the way. I'm not sure what to say about that because definitely, like, you shouldn't build everything from just vanilla JavaScript or vanilla C, for example. C++, when you're building systems engineering, is like, there's a lot of benefits for a pointer safety and all that kind of stuff. So I don't know, but it just feels like

you can get so much more stuff done if you don't care about how you do it. Man, this is my most controversial take, I think. And maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like there's frameworks now that raise money. They raise a lot of money. Like they raise 50 million, 100 million, $3 million. And the idea is that you need to make the developers and new developers, like when you're 18 or 20 years old, get them to use this framework and add a platform to it, like where the framework can... It's open source, but you probably should use the platform, which is paid to use it. And the cost of the platforms to host it are a thousand times higher than just hosting it on a simple AWS server or a VPS on DigitalOcean, right? So there's obviously like a monetary incentive here.

Like we want to get a lot of developers to use this technology and then we need to charge them money because they're going to use it in startups and then the startups can pay for the bills. But what that it kind of destroys the the information out there about learning to code because they pay YouTubers, they pay influencers, developer influencers. It's a big thing. And same thing what happens with nutrition and fitness or something. Same thing happens in developing. They pay these influencers to promote the stuff, use it, make stuff with it, make demo products with it. And then a lot of people are like, wow, use this. And I started noticing this because when I would ship my stuff, people would ask me

what are you using? I would say I would just PHP, jQuery, why does it matter? And people would start kind of attacking me. Like, why are you not using this new technology, this new framework, this new thing? And I say, I don't know, cause this PHP thing works and I don't really, I'm optimizing for anything, it just works. And I never understood like why, like I understand there's new technologies that are better

and it should be improvement, but I'm very suspicious of money, just like lobbying. There's money in this developer framework scene. There's hundreds of millions that goes to ads or influencer or whatever. It can't all go to developers. You don't need so many developers for a framework and it's open source, to make

a lot of more money on these startups. So that's a really good perspective. But in addition to that is like when you say better, it's like, can we get some data on the better? Because like, I want to know from the individual developer perspective, and then from a team of five, team of 10, team of 20 developers, measure how productive they are in shipping features, how many bugs they create, how many security holes. The result.

PHP was not good at security for a while, but now it's good. In theory, in theory, is it though? Now it's good. No, no, now as you're saying it, I wanna know if that's true because PHP was just the majority of websites on the internet.

It could be true. Is it just overrepresented? Same with WordPress. Yes, there's a reputation that WordPress has a gigantic number of security holes. I don't know if that's true. I know it gets attacked a lot because it's so popular. It definitely does have security holes,

but maybe a lot of other systems have security holes as well. Anyway, I just sort of questioning the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push software engineers towards frameworks, towards complex, like super complicated sort of software engineering approaches that stretch out the time it takes to actually build the thing.

100%, and it's the same thing with big corporations. 80% of the people don't do anything. It's like, it's not efficient. And if your benchmark is like people building stuff that actually gets done and like for society, right? Like if we want to save time, we should probably use technologies that's simple, that's pragmatic, that works, that's not overly complicated, doesn't make your life like a living hell. And use a framework when it obviously solves a problem, a direct problem that you do. Of course, yeah, of course. I'm not saying you should code without a framework.

You should use whatever you want, but yeah, I think it's suspicious, you know? And, um, and I think it's when I talk about it on the Twitter, like there's a lot of, there's this army comes out, you know, this is these framework armies. Yeah. Man, something my gut tells me. I want to ask the framework army what have they built this week? It's the Elon question. What'd you do this week? Dan, did you make money with it?

You know, did you charge users? Is it a real business? And, um, yeah. Uh, so going back to the cowboy. Did you make money with it? Did you charge users? Is it a real business? So going back to the cowboy. First of all, some don't look like you, right? But some do. Every aspect of this is pretty incredible. I'm also just looking at the interface.

It's really well done. So this is all just jQuery. This is really well done. So take me through the journey of photo AI. Most of the world doesn't know much about stable diffusion or any of this, any of this generative AI stuff. So you're thinking, okay, how can I build cool stuff

with this? What was the origin story of photo AI? I think it started because stable diffusion came out. So stable diffusion is like the first like generative image model, AI model. And I started playing with it, like you could install it on your Mac. Like somebody forked it and made it work for MacBooks.

So I downloaded it and cloned the repo and started using it to generate images. And it was like amazing. Like it would, I found it on Twitter because you see things happen on Twitter and I would post what I was making on Twitter as well. And you could make any image, you could write a prompt. So essentially write a prompt

and then it generates a photo of that or image of that in any style. Like they would use like artist names to make like a Picasso kind of style and stuff. And I was trying to see like, what is it good at? Is it good at people? No, it's really bad at people, but it was good at houses. So architecture, for example, would

generate architecture houses. So I made a website called thishousedoesnotexist.org. And it generated like, they called it like house porn at that one. Like house porn is like a subreddit. And this was stable diffusion, like the first version. You can click for another photo. So it generates all these kind of non-existing houses.

It is house porn, but it looked kind of good, you know, like, especially back then. It looks really good. Things look much better. Um, that's really, really well done. Wow. And it also generates like a description. And you can up vote. Is it nice? like a description. And you can upvote. Is it nice? Upvote it. Yeah. Man, there's so much to talk to you about. Like the choices here is really well done. This is very scrappy. In the bottom,

there's like a ranking of the most upvoted houses. So these are the top voted. And if you go to old time, you see quite beautiful ones. Yeah. So this one is my favorite. The number one is like kind of like a, um, how is this not more popular? It was really popular for like a while, but then people got so bored of it. I think cause I was getting bored of it too. Like just continuous house porn, like everything starts looking the same. But then I saw it was really good at interior. So I pivoted to interior AI.com where, um, I tried to like upload first-generation interior designs. And where I tried to upload first-generation interior designs and then I tried to do, there was a new technology called image to image where you can input

an image, like a photo, and it would kind of modify the thing. So you see it looks almost the same as photo, it's the same code essentially. Nice. So I would upload a photo of my interior where I lived and I would ask like, change this into like, I don't know, like maximalist design, you know? And it worked and it worked really well. So I was like, okay, this is a startup because obviously interior design, AI, and nobody's doing that yet.

So I launched this and it was successful and made like, within a week made 10k, 20k a month and now still makes like 40K, 50K a month. And it's been like two years. So then I was like, how can I improve this interior design? I need to start learning fine tuning. And fine tuning is where you have this existing AI model, and you fine tune it on the specific goal you want it to do. So I would find really beautiful interior design,

make a gallery, and train a new model that was very good in interior design. And it worked and train a new model that was very good interior design and it worked and I used that as well. And then for fun, I uploaded photos of myself and here's where it happened. Uh, and to train myself, like, and this would never work, obviously. And it worked and actually it started understanding me as a concept. So my face worked and, and you could do like different styles, like me as a, like very cheesy medieval warrior, all this stuff. So I was like, this is another startup. So now I did avatar AI dot me. I couldn't get to.com and this

was, uh, yeah, avatar AI.me. Well, now it's forwards to photo because it pivoted, but this was more like cheesy things. So this is very interesting because this went so viral. It made like, I think like 150K in a week or something. So most money ever made. And then big, this is very interesting, the big VC companies like Lenza, which are much better at iOS and stuff than me. I didn't have iOS app.

They quickly built iOS app that does the same and they found technology. And it's all open technology. So it's good. And I think they made like $30 million with it. They became like the top grossing app after that. How do you feel about that? I think it's amazing, honestly. And it's not like-

You didn't have like a feeling like, oh fuck. No, I was a little bit like sad because all my products would work out and I never had like real fierce competition and now I have like fierce competition from like a very skilled high talent like iOS developer studio or something that and they already had an app. They had an app in the App Store for like I think retouching your face or something. So they were very smart.

They add these avatars to there. It's a feature. They had the users. They do push notifications to everybody. You have these avatars. Yeah. Man, they made great. I think they made so much money. And I think they did a really great job. And I also made a lot of money with it. But I quickly realized it wasn't my thing because it was so cheesy. It was like kitsch. It's kind of like me as a Barbie or me as a...

It was too cheesy. I wanted to go for like, what's a real problem we can solve because this is going to be a hype. This is going to be, and it was a hype, this avatars. It's like, let's do real photography. Like how can you make people look really photorealistic? And it was difficult. And that's why these avatars worked, because they were all like in a cheesy, you know,

Picasso style and art is easy because you interpret the, all the problems that AI has with your face are like artistic, you know, if you call it Picasso. But if you make a real photo, all the problems with your face, like it just, you look wrong, you know? So I started making photo AI, which was like a pivot of it, where it was like a photo studio where you could take photos without actually needing a photographer, needing a studio. You don't just, you know, you just type it.

And I've been working on it for like the last year. Yeah, it's really incredible. That journey is really incredible. Let's go to the beginning of photo AI though, because I remember seeing a lot of really, really hilarious photos. I think you were using yourself as a case study, right? Yeah. Yeah. So what, uh, there's a tweet here, sold $100,000 in AI generated avatars. And it's a lot, like it's a lot for anybody. It's a lot for me, like, uh, making 10 K a day on this, you know, that's amazing. That's amazing. And then the NASA tweet, like that's the launch tweets. And then the before there is like the me hacking on it.

Oh, I see. So that. Okay. So October 26, 2022, I trained an ML model on my face. Sure. Because my eyes are quite far apart. I learned when I did YouTube, I would put like photo of like my DJ photo, you know, my mixture. People would say I'd look like a hammerhead shark. It was like the top comment.

So then I realized my eyes are far apart. Yeah. The Internet helps you. Yeah. How you look, you know, boy, do I love the first strap. Well, what is this? Wait, it's water from the waterfall, but the waterfalls in the back, you know. So what's going on?

So this is how much of this is this? Wait. And it's water from the waterfall. But the waterfall's in the back, you know? So what's going on? So this is, how much of this is real? It's all AI. It's all AI. Yeah. That's pretty good though for the early days. Exactly. So, but this was hit or miss.

So you had to do a lot of curation because 99% of it was really bad. So these are the photos I uploaded. How many photos did you use? Only these. I will try more up to date pics later. These are the only photos you uploaded? Yeah.

Wow. Wow, okay, so like you were learning all this super quickly. What are some like interesting details you remember from that time for like what you had to figure out to make it work? And for people just listening, he uploaded just a handful of photos that don't really have a good capture of the face and he's able to-

I think it's cropped. It's like a cropped by the layout, but they're square photos, so they're 512 by 512 because of stable diffusion. But nevertheless, not great capture of the face. Yeah. Like it's not like a collection of several hundred photos that are like 360 view.

Exactly, I would imagine that too when I started. I was like, oh, this must be like some 3D scan technology, right? So I think the cool thing with AI, it trains the concept of you. So it's literally like learning, just like any AI model learns, it learns how you look. So I did this and then I was getting so much,

I was getting DMs like telegram messages, like how can I do the same thing? I want these photos, my girlfriend wants these photos. So I was like, okay, this is obviously a business, but I didn't have time to code it, make a whole like app about it. So I made an HTML page, registered a domain name. And this was not even, it was a Stripe payment link, which means you have a legit link to Stripe to pay, but there's no code in the back. So all you know is you have customers that paid money.

Then I added like a type form link. So type form is a site where you can create like your own input form, like Google forms. So they would get an email with a link to the type form, or actually just a link after the checkout and they could upload their photos. So enter their email, upload the photos and I launched it. And I was like, here, first sale, so this October, 2022.

And I think within like the first 24 hours was like, I'm not sure, it was like a thousand customers or something. But the problem was I didn't have code to automate this, so I had to do it manually. So the first few hundred, I just literally took their photos, trained them, and then I would generate the photos with the prompts and had this text file with the prompts and I would do everything manually.

And this quickly became way too much. But that's another constraint, like I was forced to code something up that would do that. And that was essentially making it into a real website. So first it was the type form and they uploaded it through the type form. Stripe checkout type form. And then you were like, that image is downloaded. Did you write a script to export?

No, I just downloaded the images myself. It was a zip file. It was an unzipped zip file. And you unzipped it. Yeah, unzipped it. Yes, and then I'm, because, you know, do things don't scale, Paul Graham says, right? So, and then I would train it and then I, no, I'm, because, you know, do things don't skill, Paul Graham says, right? So, and then I would train it, and then I would email them the photos.

If you were for my personal email, say, here's your, here's your avatar, you know? And they liked it. They were like, wow, it's amazing. You emailed them with your personal email. Because they didn't have an email address on this domain. And this was like a hundred people.

Yeah, and then you know who signed up. Like, man, I cannot say, but really famous people, like really, really, like billionaires, famous tech billionaires did it. And I was like, wow, this is crazy. And I sent, I was like, so scared to mess them. So I said, thanks so much for using my sites. You know, he's like, yeah, amazing app. Great work.

So I was like, this is different than normal reaction, you know, it's Bill Gates, isn't it? Cannot say anything. Just like shirtless pictures. GDPR, you know, like privacy, European regulation. But I was like, wow. But this shows like, so you make something and then if it takes off very fast,

you're like, it's validated, you know? You're like, here's something that people really want. But then also I thought this is hype. This is gonna die down very fast. And it did because it's too cheesy. But you had to automate the whole thing. How'd you automate it? So like what's the AI component?

Like how hard was that to figure out? Okay. So that's actually in many ways the easiest thing because there is all these platforms already back then. There was platforms for fine tune stable diffusion. Like now I use Replicate replicate back then I use different platforms. Um, which was funny cause that platform, when this thing took off, I would tweet cause I tweet always like how much money these websites make.

And then so the, the, you called vendor, right? Did the G the platform that did the GPUs, they increased their price for training from $3 to $20 after they saw that I was making so much money. So immediately my profit is gone because I was selling them for $30. And I was in a slack with them like saying, what is this? Like, can you just put it back to $3? I said, yeah, maybe in the future we're looking at it right now. I'm like, what are you talking about?

Like, you just took all my money, you know, and they're smart. Well, they're not that smart because like you also have uh, platform and a lot of people respect you so you can literally come out and say that. I think it's like kind of dirty to cancel a company or something. I prefer just bringing my business elsewhere, but there was no elsewhere back then. So I started talking to other, um, AI model ML platform. So replicate was on those platforms. And I started DMing the CEO say, can you please create like, it's called dream

booth, this fine tuning of use yourself. He add this to your site because I need this because I'm being price gouged and he said, no, because it takes too long to run, it takes half an hour to run and we don't have the GPUs for it. I said, please, please, please. And then after a week, they said, we're doing it. We're launching this. And then this company became, it was like not very famous company.

It became very famous with this stuff because suddenly everybody was like, Oh, we can build similar apps like avatar apps and everybody started building avatar apps and everybody started using replicate for it. Um, and it was from these early DMS with like the CEO, like Ben first, very nice guy, and he was like, they never priced gouged me, they never treated me bad. They always been very nice. It's a very cool company. So you can run any ML model, any AI model, LLMs, you can run on here.

And you can scale. Yes, they scale. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you can do now, you can click on the model and just run it already. It's like super easy. You log in with GitHub. That's great. And by running it on the website, then you can automate with the API. You can make a website that runs the model. Generate images, generate text, generate video, generate music, generate video, like find two models.

They do anything. Yeah. It's very cool. Come on. Nice. And you're like growing with them. Essentially they grew because of you, because it's like a big use case. Yeah.

Like the, the website even looks weird. Now it started as like a machine learning platform that was like, I didn't even understand what it did. It was just too, too ML, you know, like you would understand it because you're in the ML world. I wouldn't know it's new friendly. Yeah, exactly. And I didn't know how it worked.

And, um, but I knew that they could probably do this and they did it. They built the models and now I use them for everything. And we trained like, I think now like 36,000 models, 36,000 people already. But is there some tricks to fine tuning to like the collection of photos that are provided? Like how do you like? Yes, man, there's so many hacks.

The hacks, yeah. It's like 100 hacks to make it work. What is some interesting? To give my secrets an eye. Well, not the secrets, but the more like insights maybe about the human face and the human body, like what kind of stuff gets messed up a lot?

I think people, well man, it's a little thing. People don't know how they look, so they generate photos of themselves and then they say, ah, it doesn't look like me. Yeah. But then you can check the training photos, it does look like you, but you don't know how you look. So there's a face dysmorphia of yourself that you have no idea how you look.

Yeah, that's hilarious. I mean, I've got one of the least pleasant activities in my existence is having to listen to my voice and look at my face. So I get to really have to sort of come into terms with the reality of how I look and how I sound. And everybody. People often don't, right? Really?

You have a distorted view, perspective. I know that like I would, if I would make a selfie, how I think I look, that's nice. Other people think that's not nice. But then they make a photo of me. I'm like, this is super ugly. But then they're like, no, that's how you look. And you look nice, you know? So how other people see you is nice.

So you need to ask other people to choose your photos. You shouldn't choose them yourself because you don't know how you look. Yeah, you don't know what makes you interesting, what makes you attractive, all this kind of stuff. And a lot of us, this is dark aspect of psychology. We focus on some small flaws. This is why I hate plastic surgery, for example.

People try to remove the flaws when the flaws when the flaws are the thing that makes you interesting and attractive. I learned from the hammerhead shark eyes, this stuff about you that looks ugly to you and it's probably, that what makes you original makes you nice and people like it about you. And it's not like, oh my God.

And people notice it, people notice your hammerhead eyes, but it's like, that's me, that's my face. So I love myself and that's confidence and confidence is attractive. Yes. Confidence is attractive. But yes, understanding what makes you beautiful. It's the breaking of symmetry makes you beautiful.

It's the breaking of the average face makes you beautiful. All of that. Yeah. And obviously different for men and women at different ages, all this kind of stuff. But underneath it all, the personality, all of that, when the face comes alive, different ages, all this kind of stuff. But underneath it all, the personality, all of that, when the face comes alive,

that also is the thing that makes you beautiful. But anyway, you have to figure all that out with AI. Yeah, one thing that worked was like, people would upload full body photos of themselves. So I would crop the face, right? Because then the model knew better that we're training mostly the face here. But then I started losing resemb resemblance of the body.

Cause some people are skinny, some people were muscular, whatever. So you want to have that too. So now I mix full body photos in the training with face photos, face crops. And it's all automatic. Like, um, and I know that other people, they, they use again, AI models to detect like what are the best photos in this training set and then train on those. But it's all, it's all about training training data and that's with everything in AI. Like how good your training data is, is in many ways more important than how many steps

you train for, like how many months or whatever with these GPUs, like the goals. Do you have any guidelines for people of like how to get good data? How to give good data to find Tuna? Like the photos should be diverse. So for example, if I only upload photos with a brown shirt or green shirts, the model will think that I'm training the green shirts. So the things that are the same, every photo are the concepts that are trained. What you want is your face to be the concept of strength. Um, and everything else to be diverse, like different. So diverse lighting as well, diverse everything.

Outside, inside. But there's no like, this is the problem. There's no like manual for this and nobody knew we were all just, especially two years ago, we were all hacking, trying to test anything, anything you can think of. And it's frustrating. It's one of the most frustrating and also fun and challenging things to do because with AI, because it's a black box and like Carpati I think says this, like we

didn't really know how this thing works, but it does something, but nobody really knows why, right? Like we can't look into the model of an LLM, like what is actually in there. We just know it's like a 3D matrix of numbers, right? So it's very frustrating because some things you think they're obvious that they will improve things will make them worse. And there's so many parameters you can tweak. So you're testing everything to improve things. I mean, there's a whole field now of mechanistic interpretability that like studies that tries to figure out how to break things apart and understand how it works.

But there's also the data side and the actual consumer facing product side of figuring out how you get it to generate a thing that's beautiful or interesting or naturalistic, all that kind of stuff. And you're at the forefront of figuring that out about the human face. And humans really care about the human face.

They're very vain. They're like me, you know? Like I wanna look good in your podcast, for example. Yeah, for sure. And then one of the things I actually would love to like rigorously use photo AI because for the thumbnails, I take portraits of people. I didn't, I don't know shit about photography.

I basically used your approach for photography. I like Googled, how do you take photographs? Like, camera, lighting. And also it's tough because, maybe you could speak to this also, but like with photography, no offense to any, they're true artists, great photographers, but like people like take themselves way too seriously, think you need a whole lot of equipment. You definitely don't want one

light, you need like five lights. And you have to have like the lenses and I talked to a guy, an expert of shaping the sound in a room. Okay? Cause I was thinking, I'm gonna do a podcast studio, whatever, I should probably like treat the, do a sound treatment on the room. And like when he showed up and analyzed the room, he thought everything I was doing was horrible. And that's when I realized like,

you know what, I don't need experts in my life. I'm just kidding. Did you kick him out of the house? No, I didn't kick him. I mean, I said, thank you know what, I don't need experts in my life. I'm just kidding. Did you kick him out of the house? No, I didn't kick him. I mean, I said thank you, thank you very much. Thank you, great tips, bye. I just felt like there is, focus on whatever the problems are,

use your own judgment, use your own instincts, don't listen to other people, and only consult other people when there's a specific problem, and you consult them not to offload the problem onto them but to gain wisdom from their perspective. Even if their perspective is ultimately one you don't agree with, you're gonna gain wisdom from that.

And just, I ultimately come up with like a PHP solution. PHP and jQuery solution to most of the PHP studio. I can have a little suitcase, I use like just the basic the basic consumer type of stuff. One light. It's great. Yeah. And look at you.

You're one of the top podcasts in the world and you get millions of views and it works. And the people that spend so much money on optimizing for the best sound, for the best studio, they get like 300 views. So what is this about? This is about that either you do it really well or also that a lot of these things don't matter. Like what matters is probably the content of the podcast. Like you get the interesting guests.

Focus on stuff that matters. Yeah. And I think that's very common. They call it gear acquisition syndrome, like gas. Like people in any industry do this. They just buy all the stuff. There was a meme recently, like what's the name for the guy that buys all the stuff before he even started doing the hobby, right?

Um, marketing, you know, marketing does that to people. They want to buy this stuff. Yeah. But like, man, you can make a, you can make a Hollywood movie on iPhone, you know, if the content is good enough, it's, it will probably be original because you would be using an iPhone for it, you know? So that said, I, so the reason I brought that up with photography, there is wisdom from people.

And one of the things I realized, you probably also realize this, but how much power light has to convey emotion. You just take one light and move it around. You're sitting in the darkness, move it around your face. The different positions are having a second light, potentially.

You can play with how a person feels just from a generic face. It's interesting. Like you can make people attractive, you can make them ugly, you can make them scary, you can make them lonely, all of this.

And so you kind of start to realize this. And I would definitely love AI help in creating great portraits of people, guest photos, for example, that's a small use case. But for me, that's a, I suppose it's an important use case because like I want people to look good, but I also want to capture who they are. Maybe my conception of who they are, what makes them beautiful, what makes their appearance powerful in some ways. Sometimes it's the eyes, oftentimes it's the eyes, but there's certain features of the face

can sometimes be really powerful and I can't, it's also kind of awkward for me to take photographs, so I'm not collecting enough photographs for myself to do it. Um, with just those photographs, if I can load that off onto AI and then start to play with like lighting, you should do this and you should probably do it yourself, like you can use photo. Yeah. But it's even more fun if you do it yourself. So you train the models. You can learn about like control nets, control nets is where, for example, your

photos and your podcasts are usually like from the angle, right? So you can create a control net face pose that's always like this. So every model, every photo you generate uses this control net pose, for example. I think it would be very fun for you to try out. Do you play with lighting at all? Do you play with lighting pose with the-

Man, actually this week or recently there's a new model came out that can adjust the light of any photo, but also AI image with stable diffusion. I think it's called Relight. And it's amazing. Like you can upload kind of like a light map. So for example, red, purple, blue, and use that light map to change the light on the photo

you input. It's amazing. So, there's for sure a lot of stuff you can do. What's your advice for people in general on how to learn all the state-of-the-art AI tools available? Like you mentioned, the new model is coming out all the time. How do you pay attention? How do you stay on top of everything?

I think you need to join Twitter. X is amazing now and the whole AI industry is on X and they're all like anime avatars. So it's funny cause, uh, my friends asked me this, like, what, who should I follow to stay, stay up to date? And I say, go to X and follow all the AI. Anime models that this person is following or follows. And I sent them something URL and they all started laughing.

Like, what is this? But they're real, like people hacking around in AI. They get hired by big companies and they're on X and most of them are anonymous. This is very funny. They, they use anime avatars. Um, I don't. Um, but those people hack around and they publish what they're discovering. Um, they took out papers, for example.

Uh, so yeah, definitely X. It's great. Almost exclusively, all the people I follow are AI people. Yeah. It's a good time now. Well, but also just brings happiness to my soul, because there's so much turmoil on Twitter. Yeah, like politics and stuff.

There's battles going on. It's like a war zone. And it's nice to just go into this happy place to where people politics and stuff. There's battles going on. It's like a war zone and it's nice to just go into this happy place to where people are building stuff. Yeah, 100%. I like Twitter for that most, like building stuff, like seeing other, because it inspires you to build. And it's just fun to see other people share

what they're discovering and then you're like, okay, I'm gonna make something too. It's just super fun. And so if you wanna start Go on X and then I would go to replicate and start trying to play with models. And when you have something that kind of, you manually enter stuff, you set the parameters, something that works, you can, you can make an app out of it or a website. Can you speak a little bit more to the process of it becoming better and

better and better photo? So I had this photo and a lot of people using it. There was like a million or more photos a month being generated. And I discovered I was testing parameters, like increase the step count of generating a photo or changing the sampler, like a scheduler. Like you have DPM tool, caras,

all these things I don't know anything about, but I know that you can choose them when you generate an image and they have different resulting images. But I didn't know which one was, were better. So I would do it myself, test it. But then I was like, why don't I test on these users? Cause I have a million photos generated anyway.

So unlike 10% of the users, I would, um, randomly test parameters. And then I would see if they would, cause you can favorite a photo or you can download it, I would measure if they favorite or like the photo and then I would AB test and you test for significance and stuff, uh, which parameters were, were better and which were worse. So you started to figure out which, which models are actually working. Exactly. And then if it's significant enough data, you switch to that for the whole,

you know, all the users. And so that was, that was like the breakthrough to make it better. Just use the users to improve themselves. And I tell them when they sign up, we do sampling, we do testing on your photos with random parameters. And that worked really well. I don't do a lot of testing anymore because it's like, I kind of reached like a diminishing point

where it's like, it's kind of good. But that was a breakthrough, yeah. So it's really about the parameters and models and letting the users help do the search in the space of models and parameters for you. Yeah. But actually, so like StableDiffusion, I use 1.5, 2.0 came out, StableDiffusion XL came out,

all these new versions, and they're all worse. And so the core scene of people are still using 1.5 because it's also not like what you call neutered, like they neutered to make it super like with safety features and stuff. Yeah. So most of the people are still on stable diffusion 1.5 and. Meanwhile, stable diffusion, the company went like the CEO left.

Um, a lot of drama happens because they couldn't make money. And yeah, so they gave us, it's very interesting. They gave us this, this open source model that everybody uses. They raised like hundreds of millions of dollars. It all, they didn't make any money with it. There are not a lot. And they did an amazing job. And now everybody uses open source model for free.

And they did, you know, it's amazing. Like it's amazing. You're not even using the latest one. No, and the strange thing is that this company raised hundreds of millions, but the people that are benefiting from it are really small. Like people like me who make these small apps that are using the model. And now they're starting to charge money for the new models,

but the new models are not so good for people. They're not so open source, right? Yeah, it's interesting because open source is so impactful in the AI space, but you wonder like, what is the business model behind that? But it's enabling this whole ecosystem of companies that they're using the open source models. It's kind of like this frameworks, but then they didn't bribe enough influence to use it

and they didn't charge money for the platform. Okay, so back to your book and the ideas. We didn't even get to the first step. Generating ideas. So you had notebook and you're filling it up. How do you know when an idea is a good one? Like what, you have this just flood of ideas. How do you pick the one that you actually try to build?

Man, mostly you don't know. Like mostly I choose the ones that are most viable for me to build. Like I cannot build a space company now, right? Would be quite challenging. But I can build something- Did you actually write down like space company? No, I think asteroid mining would be very cool.

Cause like you go to an asteroid, you take some stuff from there, you bring it back, you sell it, you know, it's, but then you need to do, and you can hire someone to launch the thing. So all you need is like the robot that goes to the asteroid, you know, and the robotics interesting. Like I want to also learn robotics. So maybe that could be. I think both the asteroid mining and the robotics interesting like I want to also learn robotics. So maybe that could be I think both the astro mining and the robotics

Yeah together No, exactly this is this is the We do this not because it's easy, but because we thought it would be easy exactly. That's me with this me of Astro mining Exactly. That's why with asteroid mining. Exactly. That's why I should do this. It's not nomadlist.com. It's asteroid mining. You have to build stuff.

Gravity is really hard to overcome. Yeah, but it seems, man, I sound like an idiot probably now, but it sounds quite approachable, like relatively approachable. You don't have to build the rocket. Oh, you use something like SpaceX to get out of space. You hire SpaceX to send your dog robot or whatever. So, does there actually exist a notebook where you wrote down Asteroid Minus? No, I used Trello.

Trello. But now I don't really. I use Telegram. I write it down like saved messages. I have like an idea. I write it down. You type to yourself on Telegram. You know, like, because you use WhatsApp, right? I think. So you have like a message to yourself. So you're talking to yourself on Telegram. Yeah, I use like a notepad to forget stuff and then I've been it's you know

I love how like you're not using super complicated systems or whatever, you know people use obsidian now. There's a lot of these Notion we have systems for note taking you're not your Notepad your notepad that the XC guy of those users. Man, I saw some YouTubers doing this. There's a lot of these productivity gurus also, and they do this whole iPad with a pencil. And then I also had an iPad, and I also got the pencil, and I got this app where you can draw on paper, like a calendar.

People's students use this, and you can do coloring and stuff. And I'm like, dude, I did this for a week. And then I'm like, what am I doing with my life? Like, I could just write it as a message to myself, and it's good enough, you know? Speaking of ideas, you shared a tweet explaining why the first idea sometimes might be a brilliant idea. The reason for this, you think, is the first idea

submerges from your subconscious and was actually boiling in your brain for weeks, months, sometimes years, in the background. The eight hours of thinking can never compete with the perpetual subconscious background job. So this is the idea that if you think about an idea for eight hours versus the first idea that pops into your mind.

And sometimes there is subconscious stuff that you've been thinking about for many years. That's really interesting. It emerges, I wrote it wrong, because I'm not native English, but it emerges from your subconscious, right? It comes from the, like a water, is your subconscious in here is boiling.

And then when it's ready, it's like ding, it's like a microwave comes out and there you have your idea. You think you have ideas like that? Yeah, all the time, a hundred percent. So just stuff that's been like there. Yes. Yeah. And I also, it comes up and I bring it,

I send it back, you know, like send it back to the kitchen. Not ready. To boil more. Yeah. And I also, it comes up and I bring it, I send it back, you know, like send it back to the kitchen. I'm not ready. Yeah. And it's like a soup that of ideas that's cooking. It's a hundred percent. This is how my brain works. And I think most people, but it's also about the timing. Sometimes you have to send it back, not just because you're not ready, but the world is not ready. Yes. So many times like startup founders are too early with their idea. Yeah. A hundred percent. Robotics is an interesting one for that because there's been a lot of robotics companies

that failed because it's been very difficult to build a robotics company and make money because there's the manufacturing, the cost of everything, the intelligence of the robot is enough, is not sufficient to create a compelling enough product from which to make money. So there's this long line of robotics companies that have tried, they had big dreams and they failed.

Yeah, like Boston Dynamics, I still don't know what they're doing, but they always upload YouTube videos and it's amazing. But I feel like a lot of these companies don't have, it's like a solution looking for a problem for now. Military obviously uses, but like, do I need like a robotic dog now for my house? I don't know, like it's fun, but it doesn't really solve anything yet.

I feel the same kind of with VR. Like it's really cool. Like Apple vision pro is very cool. Doesn't really solve something for me yet. And that's kind of the tech looking for a solution, right? But one day will. When the personal computer, when the Mac came along, there's a big switch that happened.

It somehow captivated everybody's imagination you could like the application the killer apps became apparent you can type in a computer but they became apparent like immediately back then they also had like this thing like we don't need these computers uh they're like a hype and um and it also went like in kind of like you know yes yeah but the hype is the thing that allowed the thing to proliferate sufficiently to where people's minds would start opening up to it a little bit, the possibility of it.

Right now, for example, with the robotics, there's very few robots in the homes of people. Exactly, yeah. The robots that are there are Roombas, so the vacuum cleaners, or their Amazon Alexa. Yeah, or dishwasher. I mean, it's essentially a robot. Yes, but the intelligence is very limited, I guess is one way we can summarize all of them, except Alexa, which is pretty intelligent, but, uh, is, is

limited with the kind of ways it interacts with you. Let's, you know, that, that's just one example. Yeah. I sometimes think about that as like like if some people in this world were kind of born in the whole existence is like They were meant to build the thing yeah, you know, I think I sometimes wonder like what my what I was meant to do Do you have these plans for your life? You have these dreams? I Think I meant to build robots.

Okay. Me personally, maybe, maybe, um, that that's a sense of, uh, of habit. It could be other things. It could hilariously enough be the thing I was meant to be is to talk to people. Yeah. Which is weird because I always was anxious about talking to people. It's like a really. Yeah. I'm scared of this.

I was scared. Yeah, exactly. I'm scared of you. It's just anxiety throughout social interaction in general. I'm an introvert that hides from the world. So yeah, it's really strange. Yeah. But that's, that's also kind of life.

Like life brings you to, it's very hard to, um, super intently kind of choose what you're going to do with your life. It's more like surfing. You're surfing the waves, you go in the ocean, you see where you end up, you know? Yeah, yeah. And there's universe has a kind of sense of humor. Yeah.

I guess you have to just allow yourself to be carried away by the waves. Exactly, yeah, yeah. Have you felt that way in your life? Yeah, all the time, like, yeah. That's like, I think that's the best way to live your life. Have you felt that way in your life? Yeah. All the time. Like, yeah, that's like, I think that's the best way to live your life. So a lot of whatever to happen. Like, do you know what you're doing in the next few years?

Is it possible that it would be completely like changed? Possibly. I think relationships, like you want to hold the relationships, right? You want to hold your girlfriend, you want to become wife and all this stuff, but, uh, you should, I think you should stay open to where like, for example, where you want to live. Like, I don't know, we don't know where we want to live, for example. That's something that will figure itself out. It will crystallize where you will get, you will get sent by the waves to somewhere where you want to live. For example, what are you going to do? I

think that's a really good way to live your life. I think most stress comes from trying to control, like hold things. Like it's kind of Buddhist, you know, you need to like lose control, let it lose and things will happen. Like when you do mushrooms, when you do drugs, like psychedelic drugs, the people that start, that are like control freaks get bad trips, right? Because you need to let go. Like I'm pretty control freak actually. And when I did mushrooms when I was 17, I, I was very good. And at the end,

it wasn't so good because I tried to control it. It was like, ah, now it's going too much. You know, now I need to let's stop, bro. You can't stop it. You need to go through with it, you know? And so I think it's a good metaphor for life. I think that's, you know, very tranquil way to lead your life. Yeah. Actually, when I took ayahuasca, that lesson is deeply within me already that you can't control anything. I think I probably learned that the most in jujitsu. So just let go and relax. And that's why I had just an incredible experience.

There's literally no negative aspect of my ayahuasca experience or any psychedelics I've ever had. Some of that could be with my biology, my genetics, whatever, but some of it was just not trying to control. And you just surfed away. For sure. I think most stress in life comes from trying to control.

So once you have the idea, step two, build. How do you think about building the thing once you have the idea? I think you should build with the technology that you know. So for example, Nomad List, which is like this website I made to figure out the best cities to live and work as digital nomads. It wasn't a website. It launched as a Google spreadsheet. So it was a public Google spreadsheet anybody could

edit. And I was like, I'm collecting like cities where we can live as digital nomads with the internet speeds, the cost of living, you know, other stuff. And I tweeted it and I would, and at back then I didn't have a lot of followers, I had like a few thousand followers or something. And it went like viral for my skill viral back then, you know, which was like five retweets and, and a lot of people started editing it and there was like hundreds of cities in this list, like from all over the world with all the data. It was very crowdsourced. And then I made that into a website.

So figuring out like what technology can use that you already know. So if you cannot code, you can use a spreadsheet. If you cannot use a spreadsheet, you can always use, for example, a website generator like Wix or something like Squarespace, right? You don't need to code to build a startup. All you need is an idea for a product, build something like a landing page or something, put a Stripe button on there, and then make it. And if you can't code, use the language that you already know and start coding with that and see how far you can get. You can

always rewrite the code later. The tech stack is not actually the most important of a business when you're starting out a business. The important thing is that you validate that there's a market, that there's a product that people wanna pay for. So use whatever you can use. If you can't code, use spreadsheets, landing page generators, whatever. Yeah, and the crowdsourcing element is fascinating. It's cool.

It's cool when a lot of people start using it. You get to learn so fast. Yeah. Like I've actually did the spreadsheet thing. You share a spreadsheet publicly and I made it editable. It's so cool. It's interesting things start happening. Yeah, I did it for like a workout thing

because I was doing a large amount of pushups and pullups every day. Yeah, I remember this one, yeah. And like, and while I said Google Sheets is pretty limited in that everything's allowed. So people could just write anything in any cell and they can create new sheets, new tabs. And it just exploded.

And one of the things that I really enjoyed is there's very few trolls. Because actually other people would delete the trolls. There would be like this weird war. because actually other people would delete the trolls. There would be like this weird war. They want to protect the thing. It's an immune system that's inherent to the thing. It becomes a society in the spreadsheet.

And then there's the outcasts who go to the bottom of the spreadsheet and they would try to hide messages and they're like, I don't want to be with the cool kids up at the top of the spreadsheet. So I'm gonna go to the bottom. Yeah, it's fast. I mean, but that kind of crowdsourcing element is really powerful.

And if you can create a product that use that as a, to its benefit, that's really nice. Like any kind of voting system, any kind of rating system for A and B testing is really, really, really fascinating. So anyway, so Nomad List is great. I would love for you to talk about that. But one sort of way to talk about it is through you building hood maps. You've did an awesome thing, which is document yourself building the thing and doing so in just a handful of days, like three,

four, five days. So people should definitely check out the video in the blog post. Can you explain what Hoodmaps is and what this whole, like, this process was? So I was traveling and I was still trying to find like problems, right? And I would go, I would discover that like, everybody's experience of a city is different

because they stay in different areas. So I'm from Amsterdam and when I grew up in Amsterdam, or didn't grow up, but I lived there, university, I knew that the center is like, in Europe, the centers are always tourist areas. So they're super busy. They're not very authentic. They're not really Dutch culture. It's Amsterdam tourist culture, you know?

So when people would travel to Amsterdam, they would say, don't go to the center, go to, you know, southeast of the center, the Jordaan or the pipe or something, more hipster areas, like it was more authentic culture of Amsterdam. That's where I would live, you know, and where I would go. And I thought this could be like an app where you can have like a Google Maps and you put colors over it. You have like areas that are like color-coded, like red is tourist, green is rich, you know, green money, yellow is hipster. You can figure out where you need to go in the city

when you travel, because I was traveling a lot and I wanted to go to the cool spots. So just use color. Color, yeah, yeah, and I would use a canvas. So I thought, okay, what do I need? I need to. Did you know that you would be using a canvas? No, I didn't know it was possible,

because I didn't know. So I mean, this is the cool, this is the cool thing, people should really check it out. Because this is how it started. Because like, you're honestly capture so beautifully the humbling aspects, the embarrassing aspects of not knowing what to do.

It's like, how do I do this? And you document yourself, yeah you're right, dude I feel embarrassed about myself. It's called being alive, nice. So you're like, you don't know anything about, Canvas is a way, it's a HTML, yeah, it's HTML5 thing that allows you to draw shapes. Draw images, just draw pixels essentially.

So, and that's, there was special back then because before you could only have like elements, right? So you wanna draw a pixel, use a canvas. And I knew I needed to draw pixels because I need to draw these colors. And I felt like, okay I'll get like a Google Maps iframe embeds and then I'll put a div on top of it With the colors and I'll do like opacity 50, you know, so it's kind of shows

So I did that with combos and then I started drawing And then I felt like obviously other people need to edit this because I cannot draw all these things myself so I crowdsource it again and I I thought, obviously, other people need to edit this, because I cannot draw all these things myself. So I crowdsourced it again. And you would draw on the map, and then it would send the pixel data to the server. It would put it in the database. And then I would have a robot running, like a cron job,

which every week would calculate, or every day would calculate. OK, so Amstam Center, there's like six people say, it's tourists, this part of the center, but two people say it's like hipster. OK, so the tourist part wins, right? It's just an array. So find the most common value in a little pixel area on a map. So that, so if most people say it's tourists, it's tourists and it becomes red. And I would do that for, you know, all the GPS corners in the world. Can you just clarify, do you have to be as a human

that's contributing to this, do you have to be in that location to make the label? No, people just type in cities and go like, go berserk and start drawing everywhere. Would they draw shapes or would they draw pixels? Man, they drew that crazy stuff, like offensive symbols, I cannot mention they would draw penises. I mean, that's, that's obviously a guy thing. I would do the same thing, draw penises. That's the first thing, when I show up to Mars and there's no cameras, I'm drawing a penis on the same thing.

Man, I do it in the snow, you know? But the penises did not become a problem because I knew that not everybody would draw a penis and not in the same place. So most people would use it fairly. So just if I had enough crowd-spaced data, so you have all these pixels on top of each, it's like a layer of pixels and then you choose the most common pixel. So yeah, it's just like a poll, but in visual format. And it worked.

And within a week I had enough data. And it was like cities that did really well, like Los Angeles. A lot of people started using it, like most data's in Los Angeles. Because Los Angeles has defined neighborhoods. Yeah, I understand. And not just in terms of the official labels,

but like what they're known for. What are the, did you provide the categories that they were allowed to use as labels? The colors, yeah. As colors? So it's just like, I think you can see there, there's like hipster tourist rich business. There's always a business area, right?

And then there's a residential. Your residential is gray. So I thought those were the most common things in the city kind of. And a little bit me me, like it's almost fun to label it. Yeah, I mean, obviously it's simplified but you need to simplify this stuff. You don't want to have too many categories.

And it's essentially like using a paint brush where you select a color in the bottom, you select a category and you start drawing. There's no instruction, there's no manual. And then I also added tagging so people could like write something on a specific location. So, uh, don't go here or like here's like, um, nice cafes and stuff. And man, the memes that came from that.

And I also had uploading so that the tags could be uploaded. So the memes that came from that is like amazing. Like people in Los Angeles would write crazy stuff. It would go viral in all these cities you can allow allow your location And it will probably send you to Austin Okay, so we're looking Boy drunk hipsters Airbrow and bros, air bro and bros, hipster girls who do cocaine.

I saw a guy in a fish costume get beaten up here. Yep. That seems also at your price and underwhelming. Uh, let me see. Let me make sure this is accurate. Uh, let's see. Dirty sixth for people who know Austin know that that's important to label. Sixth Street is famous in Austin.

Dirty Sixth Drunk Fat Boys, accurate. Drunk Fat Bros continued on Sixth, very well known. West Sixth Drunk Doucha Bros. They go from frat to douche. Douche. I mean, it's very accurate so far. Really? They only let hot people live here. That's, I think that might be accurate. It's like the district.

Exercise freaks on the river. Yeah, that's true. Dog runners, accurate. Saw a guy in a fish costume get beat up. I want to know the story. So that's, that's all user contributed. Yeah. And that's like stuff I couldn't come up with it because I don't know Austin. I don't know up here. I want to know the story. So that's all user contributed.

Yeah, and that's stuff I couldn't come up with because I don't know Austin. I don't know the memes here, the subcultures. And then me as a user can upvote or downvote this. So this is completely crowdsourced. Because of Reddit, you know, upvote, downvote. Took it from there. And that's really, really, really powerful. Single people with dogs, accurate.

At which point did it go from colors to the actually showing the text? I think I added the text like a week after. So here's like the pixels. So that's really cool, the pixels. How do you go from there? That's a huge amount of data. So there's, we're now looking at an image

where it's just a sea of pixels that are called different colors in a city. So how do you combine that to be a thing that actually makes some sense? I think here the problem was that you have this data, but it's not locked to one location. So I had to normalize it. So when you click, when you draw on a map, it will show you the specific pixel location, and you can convert the pixel location to a GPS coordinate, like latitude, longitude. But the number will have a lot of commas or a lot of decimals, right? Because it's very specific.

Like it's like this specific part of the table. So what you want to do is you want to take that pixel and you want to normalize it by removing like decimals, which I discovered. So that you're talking about this neighborhood, this or this street, right? So that's what I did. I just took the decimals off and then I saved it like this and it starts Going to like a grid and then you have like a grid of data You get like a pixel map kind of and you said it looks kind of ugly. So then you smooth it Yeah, I started adding blurring and stuff. I think now it's it's not smooth again because I liked it better People like the pixel look kind of yeah a lot of people use it and it keeps going viral. And every time my, my maps bill, uh, like map box, I had to stop using it. You first use Google maps.

It went viral and Google maps. It was out of credits. So I, and I had to so funny during when I launched it went viral. Um, Google maps, the map didn't load anymore. It says over the limits, you need to contact enterprise sales. And I'm like, but I need now like a map. So, and I, you need to contact enterprise sales. And I'm like, but I need now like a map. So, and I don't want to contact enterprise sales. I don't want to go on a call schedule with some calendar. So I switched to Mapbox and then had Mapbox for years. And then

it went viral and I had a bill of $20,000 was like last year. So they helped me with the bill. They said, you know, you can pay less. And then I now switched to like an open source kind of, um, map platform. So it's very expensive product and never made any dollar money, but it's very fun, but it's very expensive. Where do you learn from that? So like from that experience, cause when you leverage somebody else's sort of through the API. Yeah.

I mean, I don't think a map hosting service should cost this much, you know, but I could host it myself, but that would be, I don't know how to do that, you know, but I could do that. Yes, super complicated. I think that the thing is more about like you can't make money with this project. I tried to do many things to make money with it and it hasn't worked. You talked about like possibly doing advertisements on it or some, somehow, or people sponsoring it. Yeah. Well, it's really surprising to me that people don't want to advertise on it. I think map apps are very hard to like monetize.

Like Google Maps also doesn't really make money. Like sometimes you see these ads, but I don't think there's a lot of money there. You could put like a banner ad, but it's kind of ugly. And the product is kind of like, it's kind of cool. So it's kind of fun to like subsidize it. And it's kind of ugly. And the project is kind of like, it's kind of cool. So it's, it's kind of fun to like subsidize it. It's kind of a little bit part of Nomad List. Like I put it on Nomad List in the cities as well.

Um, but I also realized like, you don't need to monitor everything. Like some projects are just cool. And you know, it's like, it's cool to have hood maps exists. I want this to exist, right? Yeah. There's a bunch of stuff you've created that I'm just glad exists in this world. That's true. And it's a whole other puzzle. And I'm surprised to figure out how to make money off of it. I'm surprised maps don't make money. But you're right. It's hard. It's hard to make money.

Because there's a lot of compute required to actually bring it to life. And also, where do you put the ad? If you have a website, you can put like an ad box or you can do like a product placement or something, but you're talking about a map app that where 90% of the interface is a map. So what are you going to do? You're going to like, like, it's hard to figure out where is this. Yeah. And people don't want to pay for it.

No, exactly. Because if you make people pay for it, you lose 99% of the user base and you lose the crowdsource data. So it's not fun anymore. It stops being accurate. Right? 99% of the user base and you lose the crowdsource data. So it's not fun anymore. It stops being accurate. Right. So you kind of, they pay for it by crowdsourcing the data, but then yeah, it's fine. You know, it doesn't make money, but it's cool.

But that said Nomad list makes money. Yeah. So what was the story behind Nomad list? So Nomad list started because I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand, which is now like the second city here. So Nomad List started because I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand, which is now the second city here. And I was working on my laptop. I met other Nomads there and I was like, okay, this seems like a cool thing to do, like working

on your laptop in a different country, kind of travel around. But back then, the internet everywhere was very slow. So the internet was fast in, for example, Holland or United States. But in a lot of parts in South America or Asia, it was very slow, like 0.5 megabits. So you couldn't watch a YouTube video. Thailand weirdly had like quite fast internet, but I wanted to find like other cities where I could go to like work on my laptop, whatever, and travel. And, but we needed like fast internet.

So I was like, let's, you know, crowdsource this information, uh, with a spreadsheet. And I also needed to know the cost of living cause I didn't have a lot of money. I had $500 a month. So I had to find a place where like the rent was like, you know, $200 per month or something where I had some money, uh, that I could actually rent something. And, um, and there was no med lists and it still runs. It's not, I think it's now almost 10 years.

So just to describe how it works, like I'm looking at Chiang Mai here, there's a total score, it's rank number two. Yeah, that's like a normal score. 4.82, liked by members, but it's looking at the internet, in this case it's fast, fun, temperature, humidity, air quality, safety, food safety, crime, racism, or lack of crime, lack of racism, educational level, power grid, vulnerability to climate

change, income level. It's a little much, you know, English. It's awesome. It's awesome. Walkability. Cause for certain groups of people, certain things really matter. And this is really cool. Yeah.

Happiness. I'd love to ask you about that. certain groups of people, certain things really matter. And this is really cool. Yeah. Happiness. I'd love to ask you about that. That life free wifi, AC, uh, female friendly freedom of speech. Yeah.

Not so good in Thailand, you know, values derived from national statistics. My, I like how that one. I need to do that because the data sets are usually national. They're not on city level. Right. So I don't know about the freedom of speech between Bangkok or Chiang Mai. I know them in Thailand.

I mean, this is really fascinating. So this is for city. Yeah. It's basically rating all the different things that matter to you and internet. And this is all crowdsourced. Well, so it started crowdsourced, but then I realized that you can download

more accurate data sets from like public sources, like World Bank. They have a lot of public data sets, United Nations, and you can download a lot of data there, which you can freely use. I started getting problems across with data where, for example, people from India, they really love India, and they would submit the best scores for everything in India. And not just like one person, but like a lot of people, they would love to pump India. And I'm like, I love India too, you know, but that's not valid data. So you started getting discrepancies in the data between people, where people were from

and stuff. So I started switching to datasets and, and that was mostly datasets. But one thing that's still crowdsourced is so people add where they are, they add their travels to their profile and use that data to see which places are upcoming and which places are popular now. So about half the ranking you see here is based on actual digital nomads who are there. You can click on a city, you can click on people,

you can see the people, the users that are actually there. And it's like 30,000 or 40,000 members. So these people are in Austin now. 1800 remote workers in Austin now, which eight 40,000 members. So these people are in Austin now and. 1800 remote workers in Austin now, which eight plus members checked in. Members who will be here soon. Yeah, so we have meetups. So people organize their own meetups

and we have about, I think like 30 per month. So it's like one meetup a day. And I don't do anything, they organize themselves. So I just, it's a whole black box. It just runs and I don't do a lot on it. It pulls data from everywhere and it just works. Cons of Austin is too expensive, very sweating, humid, now difficult to make friends, difficult to make friends.

Interesting, right? I didn't know that difficult to make friends. And with this all crowds, but mostly it's pros. Yeah. Austin's very safe, fast internet. I don't understand why it says not safe for women to check the dataset. It's still safe. The problem with a lot of places like United States is that it depends per area, right?

So if you get like city level data or nation level data, it's like Brazil is the worst because the range in like safe and wealthy and not safe is like huge. So you can't say many things about Brazil. So once you actually show up to a city, how do you figure out what area, like where to get fast internet? For example, like for me, it's consistently a struggle to figure out my hotel.

Hotels with fast wifi, for example. Like a place, okay, okay. I show up to a city, there's a lot of fascinating puzzles. I haven't figured out a way to actually solve this puzzle. When I show up to a city, there's a lot of fascinating puzzles. I haven't figured out a way to actually solve this puzzle. When I show up to a city, figuring out where I can get fast internet connection, and for podcasting purposes, where I can find a place with a table that's quiet.

Right, yeah. That's not easy. Construction sounds? All kinds of sounds. You have to learn about all the sources of sounds in the world And also like the the quality of the room because the more The emptier the room and like if it's just walls without any curtains or any of this kind of stuff then there's Echos in the room anyway, but you figure out that a lot of hotels don't have tables

They don't have like normal weird desk, right? Yeah, there's not a center table. Yep, and if you want out that a lot of hotels don't have tables. They don't have like normal. They have this weird desk, right? Yeah, they have this desk. But it's not a center table. Yep, and if you wanna get a nicer hotel where it's more spacious and so on, they usually have these like boutique, like fancy looking, like modernist tables. They don't.

It's too designy. It's too designy. They're not real tables. What if you get an IKEA? Buy IKEA. Yeah, before you arrive, you order on IKEA. Like, nomas do this, they get desks. I feel like you should be able to show up to a place

and have the desk. Unless you stay in there for a long time. Just the entire assembly, all that. Airbnb is so unreliable. The range in quality that you get is huge. Hotels have a lot of problems, pros and cons. the range in quality that you get is huge. Hotels have a lot of problems, pros and cons. Hotels have the problem that the pictures somehow never have good representative pictures

of what's actually going to be in the rooms. And that's a problem. Fake photos, man. If I could have the kind of data you have on Nomad List for hotels. Yeah, man. And I feel like you can make a lot of money on that too. Yeah, the booking fees, I feel it, right?

I thought about this idea, because we have the same problem. Like I go to hotels and there's specific ones that are very good and I know now the chains and stuff. But even if you go to some chains are very bad in a specific city and very good in other cities. And each individual hotel has a lot of kinds of rooms. Some are more expensive, some are cheaper and so on.

But you can get the details of what's in the room, like what's the actual layout of the room, what is the view of the room. I feel like as a hotel you can win a lot. So first you create a service that allows you to have like high resolution data about a hotel. Then one hotel signs up for that. I would 100% use that website to look for a hotel instead of the crappy alternatives

that don't give any information. And I feel like there'll be this pressure for all the hotels to join that site. And you can make a shit ton of money because hotels make a lot of money. I think it's true, but the problem is with these hotels, like it's it's same with airline industry. Why does every airline website suck when you try Book of Flights? Yeah. It's very strange. Why does it have to suck?

Obviously there's competition here. Why doesn't the best website win? What's the explanation for that? Man, I thought about this for years. So I think it's like, I have to book the flight anyway. I know there's a route that they take. And I need to book, for example, Qatar Airlines. And I need to get through this process.

And with hotels, similar, you need a hotel anyway. So do you have time to like figure out the best one? Not really. You kind of just need to get the place booked and you know, you need to get the flight and you'll go through the pain of this process. And that's why this process always sucks so much with hotels and airline websites and stuff, because they don't have any incentive to improve it because Because generally only for like a super upper segment of the market, I think like super high luxury, it affects the actual booking, right?

I don't know. I think that that's a good, interesting theory. I think that must be a different theory. My, my theory would be that great engineers, like great software engineers are not allowed to make changes. Yeah. Basically like there's some kind of bureaucracy. There's way too many managers, there's a lot of bureaucracy

and great engineers show up to try to work there and they're not allowed to really make any contributions and then they leave. And so you have a lot of mediocre software engineers that are not really interested in improving any other thing. And like literally, they would like to improve the stuff but the bureaucracy of the place, plus all the bosses,

all the higher people are not technical people probably. They don't know much about web dev, they don't know much about programming, so they just don't give any respect. Like, you have to give the freedom and the respect to great engineers as they try to do great things. That feels like an explanation. Like if you were a great programmer,

would you want to work at America Airlines or? No, no. I'm torn on that because I actually, as somebody who lost program, would love to work at America Airlines so I can make the thing better. Yeah, but I would work there just to fix it for myself, you know? Yeah, for yourself.

And then you just know how much suffering you alleviated. How much frustration. Yeah, for the world, for society. Just imagine all the thousands, maybe millions of people that go to that website and have to click like a million times. It often doesn't work. It's clunky, all that kind of stuff. You're making their life just so much better.

Yeah. But there, there must be an explanation that has to do with managers and bureaucracies that I don't. I think it's money. Do you know booking.com? Sure. So it's a booking. It's the biggest booking website in the world.

It's Dutch actually. And, um, they have teams because my friend worked there. They have teams for a specific part of the website, like a 10 by 10 pixels area where they, they run tests on this. So they run tests like, and they're famous for this stuff like, Oh, there's only one room left, right? With this red letters, like one room left book now, you know, and they got a fine from the European union about this kind of thing.

So they have all these teams and they run the test for 24 hours. They go to sleep, they wake up next day, they come to the office and they see, okay, this performed better. This website has become a monster, but it's the most revenue generating hotel booking website in the world, it's number one. So that shows that it's not about like user experience, it's about like, I don't know, about making more money and you know, not every company, but you know,

if they're optimizing, it's a public company, if they're optimizing for money. But you can optimize for money by disrupting, like making it way better. Yeah, but it's always startups. They start with disrupting, like booking old startups, start up 1997. And then they become like the old shit again, like, you know, Uber now starts to become like a taxi again, right?

It was very good in the beginning. Now it's kind of like taxis now in many places are better. They're nicer than Uber's, right? So it's like the circle. I think some of it is also just, it's hard to have ultra competent engineers. Yeah. Like Stripe seems like a trivial thing, but it, it's hard to pull off. Like why was it so hard for Amazon to have buy with one click? Which I think is a genius idea. Make buying easier.

Like make it as frictionless as possible. Just click a button once and you bought the thing. As opposed to most of the web was a lot of clicking and it often doesn't work like with the airlines. Remember the forms would delete you could click next submit and it would 404 or something or your internet would go down. Yeah. Your modem. Yeah man. And I would have an existential crisis like the frustration would take over my whole body, and I would just want to quit life for a brief moment there. Yeah.

I'm so happy to form stays in Google Chrome now when someone goes wrong. But that's so cool. Google, somebody at Google improved society with that, right? Yeah. And one of the challenges at Google is to have the freedom to do that. They don't anymore. There's a bunch of bureaucracy. Yeah, at Google.

There's so many brilliant, brilliant people there. But it just moves slowly. Yeah. I wonder why that is. Maybe that's the natural way of a company. But you have people like Elon, who rolls in and just fires most of the folks and always push the company to operate as a startup, even when it's already big.

Yeah, but I mean, Apple does this. Like I started in business school, Apple does competing product teams that operate as startups. So it's three to five people. They make something. They have multiple teams who make the same thing. The best team wins. So you need to, I think you need to emulate like a free market inside a company to make it entrepreneurial, you know?

Yeah. And you need entrepreneurial mentality in a company to, to come up with new ideas and do it better. So one of the things you do really, really well is learn a new thing. Like you're trying to, you have an idea, you try to build it, and then you learn everything you need to in order to build it.

You have your current skills, but you learn just the minimal amount of stuff. So you're a good person to ask, like, what, how do you learn? How do you learn quickly and effectively ingest the stuff you need? You did just by way of example, you did a 30 days learning session on 3D where you documented yourself, giving yourself only 30 days to learn everything you can about 3D. Yeah, I tried to learn virtual reality because I was like, this was like same as AI. It came up suddenly like 2016, 2017 with I think HTC Vive, this big VR

glasses before Apple vision pro. And I was like, oh, it is going to be big. So I need to learn this. So I, I know, I know nothing about 3d. I installed like, um, I think unity and like blender and stuff. And I started learning all this stuff. Um, because I thought this was like a new, you know, nascent technology that was going to be big and if I had the skills for it, uh, I could use this was like a new, you know, nascent technology that was going to be big.

And if I had the skills for it, uh, I could use this to build stuff. And so I think it was learning for me. It's like, I think learning is so funny because people always ask me like, how do I, how do you learn to code? Like, should I learn to code? And I'm like, I don't know. Like I'm every day I'm learning this kind of cliche, but every day I'm learning new stuff. So every day I'm searching on Google or asking out chat GPT, how to do this thing, how to do this thing every day, I'm getting better at my skill. So you never stop learning.

So the whole concept of like, how do you learn? Well, you never end. So where do you want to be? Do you want to know a little bit? Do you want to know a lot? Do you want to do it for your whole life? Or so I think taking action is the best step to learn. So making things like, you know, nothing, just start making things.

Okay. So like how to make a website search, how to make a website. Or nowadays you ask JGBT, how do I make a website? Where do I start? It generates codes for you, right? Copy the code, put it in a file, save it, open it in Google Chrome or whatever. You have a website and then you start tweaking with it and you start, okay, how do I add a button?

How do I add AI features, right? Like nowadays. So it's like by, okay, how do I add a button? How do I add AI features, right? Like nowadays. So it's like by taking action, you can learn stuff much faster than reading books or. Actually I'm always curious. Let me ask for perplexity. How do I make a website? I'm just curious what it would say.

I hope it goes with like really basic vanilla solutions. Define your website's purpose. Choose a domain name. Select a web hosting provider. Choose a website or builder or CMS. Website, builder, platform, Wix. It's very, it tells like Wix or Squarespace is what I said.

Yeah. The landing page. What do I, how do I say if I want to programming it, program it myself? Design your website, create essential pages. Yeah, even tells you to launch it, right? Like start promoting it. Launch your website, cool.

Well, I mean, you could do that. Yeah, but this is literally it. Like this is- If you wanna make a website. This is the basics, like Google Analytics. But you can't make Nomad lists with this way. You can. With Wix, like with- Ah, no, you can get pretty far, I think.

You can get pretty far. These website builders are pretty advanced. Like all you need is a grid of images, right? Yeah. That are clickable, that open like another page. You can get quite far. How do I learn to program? Choose a programming language to start with.

Yeah, free code camps are good. Work through resources systematically. Practice coding regularly for 30, 60 minutes a day. Consistencies, key, join programming communities like Reddits. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. So I think it's a very good starting ground because imagine you know nothing and you want to make a website, you want to make a startup.

That's why the power of AI for education is going to be insane. Like people anywhere can ask this question and start building stuff. Yeah, it clarifies it for sure. And just start building, like keep, build, build, like actually apply the thing, whether it's AI or any of the programming for web development.

Just have a project in mind. I love the idea of like 12 startups in 12 months any of the programming for web development. Just have a project in mind. I love the idea of like 12 startups in 12 months or like build a project almost every day. Just build the thing and get it to work and finish it every single day. That's a cool experiment. I think that was the inspiration.

It was a girl who did 160 websites in 160 days or something, little mini websites. Yeah. And, uh, and she learned to code that way. So I think it's good to set yourself challenges, you know, like don't, you can go through some coding bootcamp, but I don't think they actually work. I think it's better to do like for me, out of the dark, like self learning and setting yourself like challenges and just getting in, but you need discipline, you know, you need discipline to keep, to keep doing it.

And coding, you know, coding is very, it's a steep learning curve to get in. It's very annoying. Working with computers is very annoying. Uh, so it can be hard for people to keep doing it, you know? Yeah. That thing of just keep doing it and don't quit that urgency that's required to finish a thing. That's why it's really powerful when you documented this, that thing of just keep doing it and don't quit that urgency that's required to finish a thing That's why it's really powerful when you documented this the creation of hoodmaps or though like a working prototype

that there's a Just a constant frustration. I guess is like How do I do this and then you look it up and you know, like, okay You have to interpret the different options you have. Yeah, man. You're like, and then just try it. And then, and then there's a dopamine rush of like, Ooh, it works. Cool. Man, it's amazing. And it's on, I live streamed it.

It's on YouTube and stuff. People can watch it and it's amazing when things work. It's look, it's just like amazing that you, I look very not, I don't look far ahead. So I only look, okay, what's the next problem to solve and then the next problem. And at the end, you have a whole app or website or thing, you know? But I think most people look way too far ahead. You know, they look, it's like this poster again, like you shouldn't, you don't know how hard it's going to be.

So you should only look like for the next thing, the next little challenge, the next step, and then see where you end up. And assume it's going to be easy. Yeah, exactly. the next little challenge, the next step, and then see where you end up. And assume it's gonna be easy. Yeah, exactly, like be naive about it, because you're gonna have very difficult problems. A lot of the big problems, when we even tech, will be like public, right? Like maybe people don't like your website,

like you will get canceled for a website, for example. Like a lot of things can happen. What's it like building in public like you do? Like openly, where you're just iterating quickly and you're getting people's feedback. So there's the power of the crowdsourcing, but there's also the negative aspects of people being able to criticize. So man, I think haters are actually good because I think a lot of haters have good points. And it takes like stepping away from the emotion of

like, your website sucks because blah blah blah. And you're like, okay, just remove this. Your website sucks. Cause it's personal, you know, what did he say? Why did he didn't not like it? And he figured out, okay, he didn't like it because the signup was difficult or something, or it wasn't the data. They say, no, this data is not accurate or something, right? Okay.

I need to improve the quality of the data. This hater has a point. I think it's dumb to completely ignore your haters, you know? And also, man, I think I've been there when I was like 10 years old or someone you're on the internet just shouting crazy stuff. That's like most of Twitter, you know, or half Twitter. So you have to take it with a grain of salt. Yeah, man, you need to grow a very thick skin like on Twitter, on X.

People say, but I mute a lot of people. I found out I muted already 15,000 people recently I checked. So in, in 10 years, I moved 15,000 people. So that's like, like that's one by one manual. Yeah. So 1500 people per year. And I don't like to block cause then they get angry. They make a screenshot and they say, ah, you blocked me.

So I just mute and it disappear. And it's amazing. So you mentioned Reddit. So hood maps that make it to the front page of Reddit? Yeah, yeah, it did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it did. It was amazing.

And my server almost went down and I was checking like Google Analytics was like 5,000 people on the website or something or crazy. And it was at night and it was amazing. Man, I think nowadays honestly, TikTok, YouTube reels, instant reels, a lot of apps get very big from people making tick tock videos about it. So let's say you make your own app.

You can make a video of yourself. I call, I made this app. Uh, this is how it works, blah, blah, um, and this is why I made it, for example, and this is why you should use it. And if it's a good video, we'll take off and you will get, man, I got like $20,000 extra per month or something from a TikTok, from one TikTok video. Like it made a photo of AI. By you or somebody else. By some random guy. So there's all these AI influencers that they write about,

they show AI apps and they ask money later, like when a viral video goes viral, all I can do it again and send me $4,000 or something. I'm like, okay, I did that for example, but it works. Like TikTok is a very big platform for user, um, acquisition. Yeah. And organic, like the best user acquisition, I think is organic. You don't need to buy ads.

You probably don't have money when you start to buy ads. So use organic or write a banger tweets, right? That's can make an app take off as well. Well, I mean, yeah, I find them not to create cool stuff. I have just a little bit of a following enough to like, for, for the cool thing to be noticed and then it becomes viral. If it's cool enough. Yeah.

And you don't need a lot of followers anymore because on X and a lot of platforms, because tick tock X I think it's in reels also, they have the same algorithm now it's not about followers anymore. It's about they test your content on a small subset, like 300 people. If they like it, it gets tested to a thousand people and on and on. So if the thing is good, it will rise anyway. It doesn't matter if you have half a million followers or a thousand followers are honored. What's your philosophy of monetizing?

How to make money from the thing you build? Yeah. So a lot of starters, they do like free users. So you could sign up and you could use an app for free, which is, it never worked for me well, because I think free users generally don't convert. And I think if you have VC funding, it makes sense to get free users,

because you can spend your funding on ads and you can get like millions of people come in, predictably how much they convert and give them like a free trial, whatever. And then they sign up, but you need to have that flow worked out so well for you to make it work that you need like, it's very difficult. I think it's best to start and just start asking people for money in the beginning. So show your app, like what are you doing on your landing page?

Like make a demo or whatever video. And if you want to use it, pay me money, pay $10, $20, $30. I would ask more than $10 per month. Like Netflix, like $10 per month, but Netflix is a giant company that can, you know, they can afford to make it so cheap, relatively cheap. If you're an individual, like an indie hacker, like you are making your own app, you need to make like at least $30 or more on a user to make it a worthy for you. You need to make money, you know? And it builds a community of people

that actually really care about the product. Also, yeah, making a community, like making a Discord is very normal now. Every AI app has a Discord and you have the developers and the users together in like a Discord and they talk about, they ask for features they built together, it's very normal now. And you need to imagine, like if you're starting out,

getting a thousand users is quite difficult. Getting thousand pages is quite difficult. And if you charge them like $30, you have 30 K a month. And it's a lot of money. That's enough to like, live a good life. Yeah. We'll have a pretty good life. I mean, that could be a lot of costs associated with hosting.

So that's not a thing. I make sure my profit margins are very high. So I try to keep the costs very low. I don't hire people. I make sure my profit margins are very high. So I try to keep the costs very low. I don't hire people. Um, I, I try to negotiate with like AI vendors now, like, can you make it cheaper? You know, which is, I discovered this, you can just email companies and say,

can you give me a discount cause it's too expensive. And they say, sure 50%. I'm like, wow, very good. And I didn't know this. You can just ask. And especially in like, like now it's kind of recession, you can ask companies like, I need a discount or I kind of need to like,

you don't need to be asshole about it, say, you know, I kind of need a discount or I need to go maybe to another company, so maybe like, discount, like here and there. And they say, sure, a lot of them will say yes, like 25% discount, 50% discounts. Because you think the price on the website is the price of the API or something, it's not.

And also you're a public facing person. Oh, that helps also. And there's love and good vibes that you put out into the world. Like you're actually legitimately trying to build cool stuff, so a lot of companies probably wanna associate with you because you're trying to do.

Yeah, it's like a secret hack. But I think even without- Secret hack. Be a good person. It depends how much discount they will give, you know, they'll maybe give more. But you know, that's why you should shitpost on Twitter. So you get, you know, discounts maybe. Yeah, yeah. But and also the, when it's crowdsourced, I mean, paying does prevent spam or help prevent spam. Also, yeah, it gives you high quality users and free users are sorry, but they're horrible.

Like it's just like millions of people, especially if AI startups, you get a lot of abuse, so you get millions of people from anywhere just abusing your app, just, just hacking it and whatever. There's something on the internet. You mentioned like 4chan discovered hood maps. Yeah, but I love 4chan. I don't love 4chan. I don't love 4chan, but you know what I mean?

Like they're so crazy, especially back then. Like that's, it's kind of funny what they do, you know? I actually, what is it? This new documentary on Netflix, Anti-Social Network or something like that. That was really, was fascinating. Just 4chan, just the, you know, the spirit of the thing, 4chan and 8chan. People misunderstand 4chan.

It's so much about freedom and also like the humor involved in fucking with the system and fucking with the band. That's it, it's just anti-system for fun. The dark aspect of it is you're having fun, you're doing anti-system stuff, but like the Nazis always show up. And it's somehow. And, bad shit started happening. It's drifting somehow.

Yeah. It's just school shootings and stuff. So it's a very difficult topic, but I do know it's especially early on, I think 2010, I would go to 4chan for fun and they would post like crazy offensive stuff. And this was just to scare off people. So we showed the articles, say, Hey, do you notice internet website, 4chan? Just check it out. Yeah.

And it'd be, what the fuck is that? I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. Yeah. That's to scare you people. So we show it to other people, say, hey, do you know this internet website, 4chan, just check it out. And they'll be, but dude, what the fuck is that? I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. That's to scare you away. But actually when you go through a scroll, there's like deep conversations. And there would already be, this was like a normie filter, like to stop. So kind of cool, but yeah.

It goes dark. It goes dark. And if you have those people show up, they'll, for the fun of it, do a bunch of racist things and all that kind of stuff you were saying. But everything is, I think it was never, man, I'm not a fortune, but like, it was always about provoking.

It's just provocateurs, you know? But the provoking in the case of hood maps or something like this can damage the, a good thing. Like, you know, a little poison in a town is always good. It's like the Tom Waits thing, but you don't want too much. Otherwise it destroys the town. It destroys the thing. They're kind of like pen testers, you know, like penetration testers, hackers.

Yeah. They just test your app for you and then you add some stuff. Like I add like a, I had like a NSFW word list. They would say like bad words. So when they would write like a bad words, they would get forward to YouTube, which was like a video. It was like a very relaxing video that's like kind of ASMR with like glowing jelly streaming like this to relax them, you know, or cheese melting on the toast. Nice.

Chill them out. Yeah. I like it. But actually a lot of stuff, I didn't realize how much originated in 4chan in terms of memes. I didn't realize how much originated in 4chan in terms of memes. I didn't know that Rick Roll originated in 4chan. There's so many memes. Most of the memes that you think... The word roll I think comes from 4chan. Not the word roll, but in this case, in meme use, you would get roll doubles.

There were post IDs on 4chan. They were kind of random. If I get doubles, this happens or something. So you'd get like two, two. Anyway, it's like a betting market kind of on these doubles and these post IDs. So much funny stuff. Yeah. I mean, that's the internet that's purist, but yeah, again, the dark stuff kind of seeps in. Yeah. And you, it's nice to keep the dark stuff to like some low amount. It's nice to have a bit of noise in the darkness, but not too much.

Yeah. And, but again, like you have to pay attention to that with, I mean, I guess spam in general, you have to fight that with Nomad List. How do you fight spam? Man, I use GPT-4 now. It's amazing. So, so I have like user input.

I have reviews, people can review cities and I don't need to actually sign up. It's anonymous reviews and they write like whole books about like cities and what's good and bad. So I run it through GPT-4 now and I asked like, is this a good review? Like, is it offensive? Is it racist or some stuff? And then it sends me a message on Telegram when it rejects reviews and I check it and it's so, it's so on point. Automated. Yes.

And it's so accurate. It understands double meanings. I have GPT-4 running on the chat community. It's a chat community of 10,000 people and they're chatting and they start fighting with each other. And I used to have a human moderator, it was very good, but they would start fighting the human moderator like this guy's biased or something. Now I have GPT-4 and it's, it's, it's really, really, really, really good.

It understands humor and understands like, like you could say something bad, but it's kind of like a joke and it's kind of not like offensive so much. So it shouldn't be deleted. Right. It understands that, you know, I would love to have a GPT-4 based filter of different kinds for X. Yeah. I thought this week I tweeted a fact check.

You can click fact check and then GPT-4. Look, GPT-4 is not always right about stuff, right? But it can give you a general fact check on a tweet. Usually what I do now when I write something difficult about economics or something about AI, I put in GPT-4, I say, can you fact check it? Because I might've said something stupid and the stupid stuff always gets taken out by the replies.

Like, oh, you said this wrong. And then the whole tweet kind of doesn't make sense anymore. So I asked GPT-4 to fact check a lot of stuff. So fact check is a tough one, but it would be interesting to sort of rate a thing based on how well thought out it is and how well argued it is. That seems more doable. That seems like more doable.

Like it seems like a GPT thing because that's less about the truth and it's more about the rigor of the thing. Exactly. And you can ask that. You can ask in the prompt, like, I don't know, like, for example, do you think create like a ranking score of X Twitter replies, where should this post be? If we rank on like, I don't know, integrity reality, like the fundamental deepness or something, interestness. Um, and it will give you that pretty good score probably.

I mean, Elon can do this with crock, right? He can start doing, using that to, to check replies. Cause the reply section is like chaos. Yeah. You know, and actually the ranking of the replies doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make sense. And I would like to sort in different kinds of ways. Yeah.

And you get too many replies now. If you have a lot of followers, I get too many replies. I don't see everything. And I, I love stuff. I just miss and I don't want, I want to see the good stuff. And also the notifications or whatever. It's just complete chaos. It'd be nice to be able to filter that in interesting ways, sort it in

interesting ways because like, I feel like I miss a lot and I, what's surfaced for me, I was just like a random comment by a person with no followers. Yeah. That's positive or negative. It's like, okay. If it's a very good comment, it should happen, but it should probably look a little bit more like do these people have followers? Cause they're probably more engaged in the platform.

Right. Oh no. If it's, I don't even care about how many followers, if you're ranking by the quality of the comment, great. Yeah. But not just like randomly, like chronological, just the sea of comments. Yeah. It doesn't make sense.

Yeah. Yeah. X could be very proof of comments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't make sense. Yeah. Yeah, X could be very improved with that, I think. One thing you espouse a lot, which I love, is the automation step. So like, once you have a thing, once you have an idea and you build it, and it actually starts making money

and it's making people happy, there's a community of people using it, you want to take the automation step of automating the things. We have to do as little work as possible for it to keep running indefinitely. Can you like explain your philosophy there? What you mean by automate? Yeah, so the general theory of starters would be that when it starts like you start making money, you start hiring people to do stuff, right?

Do stuff that you like marketing, for example, do stuff that you would do in the beginning yourself, um, and whatever, community management and organizing meetups for normalists, for example, there would be a job, for example. And I felt like, uh, I don't have the money for that. And I don't really want to run like a big company with a lot of people, cause there's a lot of work managing these people. So I've always tried to like automate these things as much as possible. And, um, and this can literally be like for Nomadlist, it's literally like, it's not a different, other stories.

It was like a webpage where you can organize your own meetup, set a, set a schedule, a date, whatever you can see how many Nomads will be there at that date, so you know, there will be actually enough Nomads to meet up, right. And then, um, when it's done, it sends a tweet out on the normalist account. There's a meetup here. It sends a direct message to everybody in the city who are there, who are going to be there, and then people show up on a bar and there's a meetup and that's fully automated and for me it's like, it's not, it's so obvious to make this

automatic, why would you, why would you have somebody organize this? Like, um, it makes more sense to automate it. And this with most of my things, like I figure out like how to do it with code. And I think especially now with AI, like you can automate so much more stuff than before. Cause AI understands things so well. Like before I would use if statements, right?

Now you ask GPT, you put something in GPT for, and in API and it sends back like, this is good, this is bad. Yeah, so you basically can now even automate sort of subjective type of things. This is the difference now. Yeah. And that's very recent, right?

But it's still difficult to, I mean, that step of automation is difficult to figure out how to, is you're basically delegating everything to code. And it's not trivial to take that step for a lot of people. So when you say automate, are you talking about like, cron jobs? Yes, man, a lot of cron jobs.

A lot of cron jobs. It's like, I literally, I log into the server and I do like pseudo crontab-e, and then I go into the editor and I write like hourly, and then I write php, you know, do this thing dot PHP. And that's a script and it's script does a thing and it does it then hourly. That's it. And that's how all my websites work.

Do you have a thing where it like emails you or something like this or email somebody managing the thing if something goes wrong? I have these web pages I make, they're called like health checks. So it's like health check dot PHP. And then it has like emojis, like a green check mark if it's good and a red one if it's bad. And then it does like database queries, for example,

like what's the internet speed in, for example, Amsterdam. Okay, it's a number, it's like 27 point megabits, so it's accurate number. Okay, check, good. And then it goes to the next and it goes on all the data points. Did people sign up in the last 24 hours? It's important because maybe the sign up broke.

Okay, check. Somebody sign up. Then I have uptimerobot.com, which is like for uptime, but it can also check keywords. It checks for an emoji, which is like the red X, which is if something is bad. And so it opens that health check page every minute to check if something is bad. Then if it's bad, it sends a message to me in Telegram saying, Hey, what's up? It doesn't say, Hey, what's up? It sends me like alert.

Like this thing is down and then I check. So within a minute of something breaking, I know it and then I can open my laptop and fix it. But the good thing is like the last few years things don't break anymore. And like definitely 10 years ago when I started, everything was breaking all the time. And now it's like almost, last week was like 100.000% uptime. And these health checks are part of the uptime percentage.

So it's like, everything works. You're actually making me realize I should have a page for myself, like one page that has all the health checks, just so I can go to and see all the green check marks. It feels good to look at, you know. It's just be like, okay. Yeah, all right.

We're okay. Everything's okay. Yeah. And you can see like, when was the last time something wasn't okay, and it'll say, like never. Or like, meaning like you've checked. Since you've last cared to check, it's all been okay. For sure.

It used to send me the good health checks, like, you know, it all works, it all works. But it's been so often. And I'm like, this feels so good, but then I'm like, okay, obviously it's not gonna, we need to hide the good ones and show only the bad ones. And now that's the case. I need to integrate everything into one place.

Gotta automate like everything. Yeah. Also just a large set of cron jobs. A lot of the publication of this podcast has done all, everything's just automatically, it's all clipped up, all this kind of stuff. But it would be nice to automate even more. Like translation, all this kind of stuff

would be nice to automate. Every JavaScript, every PHP error gets sent to my telegram as well. So every user, whatever user it is, doesn't have to be a page user. If they run into an error, um, the JavaScript sends the JavaScript error to the server and then it sends to my telegram from all my websites. So you get like a message. So I get like a uncalled variable error, whatever, blah, blah, blah.

And then I'm like, okay, interesting. And then I go check it out. And that's like a way to get to zero errors. And then I'm like, okay, interesting. And then I go check it out. And that's like a way to get to zero errors because you get flooded with errors in the beginning and now it's like nothing almost. So that's really cool. But Matt, that's really cool. But this is the same stuff people, they pay like very big SaaS companies, like new relic for, right?

Like to manage this stuff. So you can do that too. You can use off the shelf. I like to build myself, it's easier. Yeah, it's nice. It's nice to do that kind of automation. I'm starting to think about like, what are the things in my life I'm doing myself that could be automated? Ask your GPT, you know, like give your daily, your day and then ask it what parts you'd automate. Well, one of the things I would love to automate more is my consumption and social media. Both the output and the input. Man, that's very interesting.

I think there's some startups that do that. Like they summarize the cool shit happening on Twitter, you know, like with AI. I think the guy called SWYX or something, he does like a newsletter that's completely AI generated with the cool new stuff in AI. Yeah, I mean, I would love to do that. But also like across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn,

all this kind of stuff. Just like, okay, can you summarize the internet for me? For today. Summarizeinternet.com. Yeah,.com. Because I feel like it pulls in way too much time, but also like I don't like the effect that has some days on my psyche.

Because like haters or just general content, like politics. No, no, just general. Like for example, TikTok is a good example of that for me. I sometimes just feel dumber after I use TikTok. I just feel like- Yeah, I don't use it anymore. Empty somehow, and I'm like uninspired. It's funny in the moment I'm like, ha, look at that cat doing a funny thing.

And then you're like, oh, look at that person dancing in a funny way to that music. And then you're like, 10 minutes later, you're like, I feel way dumber and I don't really wanna do much for the rest of the day. My girlfriend said, she saw me like watching some dumb video. She's like, dude, your face looks so dumb as well. Your whole face starts going like, oh, interesting.

You know, so. I mean, with social media, with with X sometimes for me too, is I think I'm probably naturally gravitating towards the drama. Yeah, are we all? Yeah. And so following ad people, especially AI people that only post technical content has been really good because then I just look at them and then I go down rabbit holes of like learning new papers that have been published or good repos or just any kind of cool demonstration of stuff and the kind of things that they retweet and that's the rabbit hole.

I go and I'm learning and I'm inspired, all that kind of stuff. It's been tough. It's been tough to control. retweet and that's the rabbit hole. I go and I'm learning and I'm inspired. All that kind of stuff. It's been tough. It's been tough to control. It's difficult. You need to like manage your, your, your platforms. You know, I have a mute board list as well. So I mute like politics stuff because I don't really want it on my feet. And I think I've muted so much that now my feet is good.

You know, I see like interesting stuff and, but the fact that you need to modify it, you need to like mod your app, your social media platform, just to function and not be toxic for you, for your mental health, right? That's like a problem. Like it should be doing that for you. It's some level of automation. That'd be interesting.

I wish I could access X and Instagram through API easier. You need to spend $42,000 a month, which my friends do. Yeah, you can do that. No, but still, even if you do that, that you're not getting, I mean, there's limitations that don't make it easy to do like automate. Because the thing that they're trying to limit like abuse or for you to steal all the data from the app

to then train in LLM or something like this. But if I just want to like figure out ways to automate my interaction with the X system or with Instagram, they don't make that easy. But I would love to sort of automate that and explore different ways to, how to leverage LLMs to control the content I consume. And maybe publish that, maybe they themselves

can see how that could be used to improve their system. So there's not enough access. You could screen cap your phone, right? It could be an app that watches your screen with you. You couldn't, yeah. But I don't even know what it would do. Maybe it can hide stuff before you see it. I have Chrome extensions.

I write a lot of Chrome extensions that hide parts of different pages and so on. For example, on my main computer, I hide all views different pages and so on. For example, for my own, on my main computer, I hide all views and likes and all that on YouTube content that I create. So that I don't- Smartphone doesn't affect you. It doesn't, yeah, so you don't pay attention to it.

I also hide parts. I have a mode for X where I hide most of everything. So like there's no, it's the same with YouTube. I have the same, I have this extension. Like, well I wrote my own cause it's easier cause it keeps changing. It's like, it's not easy to keep it dynamically changing, but they're really good at like getting you to be distracted

and like starting to related accounts, related posts. I'm like, I don't want related. And like 10 minutes later you're like, or something that's trending. I have a weird amount of friends addicted to YouTube and I'm not addicted. I think because my attention span is too short for YouTube. But I have this extension to YouTube on hook,

which hides all the related stuff. I can just see the video and it's amazing. But sometimes I need to search a video how to do something. And then I go to YouTube and I had these YouTube shorts. These YouTube shorts are like, they're like algorithmally designed to just make you tap them. And I tap and then I'm like five minutes later with this face like, and you're just stuck.

And it's like, what happened? I was gonna open, I was gonna play like the coffee mix, you know, like the music mix for drinking coffee together, like in the morning, like jazz. I didn't wanna go to shorts. So it's very difficult. I love how we're actually highlighting all kinds of interesting problems

that all could be solved at a startup. Okay, so what about the exit? When and how to exit? Man, you shouldn't ask me because I never sold my company. You've never, all the successful stuff you've done, you've never sold it. Yeah, it's kind of sad, right?

Like I've been in. So I've been in a lot of acquisition deals and stuff. And I learned a lot about finance people as well. They're like manipulation and due diligence and changing the valuation. Like people change the valuation after. So a lot of people string you on to acquire you. And then it takes like six months.

It's a classic, it takes six to 12 months. They wanna see everything. They wanna see your Stripe and your code and whatever. And then in the end, they'll change the price to lower because you're already so invested. So it's like a negotiation tactic, right? I'm like, no, then I don't wanna sell, right? And the problem with my companies is like,

they make 90% profit margin. So the multiple, the companies get sold with multiples kind of multiples of profit or revenue. And often the multiples like three times, three times or four times or five times revenue or profit. So in my case, they're all automated. So I might as well wait three years and I get the same money as when I sell and then I can still sell the same company. You know what I mean? I can still sell for three, five times. So financially it doesn't really make sense to sell.

Yeah. Unless the price high enough, like if the price gets to like six or seven or eight, I don't want to wait six years for the money, you know? But if you give me three, like three years, nothing like I can wait. So I mean, there are really valuable stuff about the companies you create is not just the interface and the crowdsource content, but the people themselves, like the user base.

Yeah, well, Nomadlist, it's a community, yeah. So I could see that being extremely valuable. I'm surprised it has not. But Nomadlist is like, it's like my baby. It's like my first product I took off, and I don't really know if I wanna sell it. It's like something you would be nice when you're old, that you're still working on this. It has a mission, which is like people should travel anywhere and they can work from anywhere

and they can meet different cultures. And that's a good way to make the world get better. If you go to China and live in China, you'll learn that there are nice people and a lot of stuff you hear about China's propaganda, a lot of stuff is true as well, but it's more, you know, you learn a lot from traveling and I think that's why it's like a cool product to like not sell. Uh, AI projects. I have less emotional feeling with AI projects like photo AI, which I could sell. Yeah.

Yeah. The thing you also mentioned is you have to price in the fact that you're going to miss the company you created. And the meaning it gives you, right? There's a very famous like depression're going to miss the company. And the meaning it gives you, right? There's a very famous like depression after startup finance sold their company. Like they're like, this was me, who am I? And they immediately start building another one.

They can never stop. So I think it's good to keep working until you die, just keep working on cool stuff and you shouldn't retire. I think retirement's bad, probably. So you usually build this stuff solo and mostly work solo. What's the thinking behind that?

I think I'm not so good working with other people. Not like I'm crazy, but like I don't trust other people. To clarify, you don't trust other people to do a great job. Yeah. And I don't want to have this consensus meeting where we all, like, you have a meeting with three people and then you kind of get this compromise result, which is very European.

It's very, in Holland we call it polder model, where you put people in a room and you only let them out when they agree on the compromise in politics. And I think it breeds averageness. You get an average idea, average company, average culture. You need to have like a leader or you need to be solo and just do it, do it yourself, I think. And I trust some people, like now I,

like with my best friend Andre, I'm making a new AI startup. But it's because we know each other very long and he's one of the few people I would build something with. And, but almost never. So what does it take to be successful? When you have more than one, like how do you build together with Andre? How do you build together with other people? So he codes, uh, I should post on Twitter, literally like I promote it on Twitter.

I, I, we set like product strategy. Like I said, this should be better. This should be better, but I think you need to have one person coding it. He codes in Ruby. So I was like, I cannot do Ruby, I'm in PHP. So you literally, so have you ever coded with another person for prolonged periods of time? Never in my life.

What do you think is behind that? I know, it was always just me sitting on my laptop, like I said, like coding. No, like you've never had another developer who like rolls in and like, I've had once with Photoi, like there's AI developer, Philip. I hired him to do the, cause I can't write Python and AI stuff is Python. And I needed to get models to work on replicate and stuff. And I needed to improve Photoi and he helped me a lot for like 10 months.

He worked in a man. I was trying Python working with NumPP and package manager, and it was too difficult for me to figure this shit out. And I didn't have time. Like, I think 10 years ago, I would have time to like sit, you know, go do all nighters to figure this stuff out with Python. I don't have the, and I don't have the, it's not my thing. It's not your thing.

It's another programming language. I get it. AI new thing. Got it. But like you never had a developer roll in, look at your PHP jQuery code and yes, like you know like in conversation or improv they talk about yes and,

like basically, all right. I had for one week. Understand. And then it ended. Because he wanted to rewrite everything in the. No, that's the wrong guy. I know. He wanted to rewrite in what?

He wanted to rewrite the, he said this jQuery, we can't do this. I'm like, okay. He in what? He wanted to rewrite the, he said this jQuery, we can't do this. I'm like, okay. He's like, we need to rewrite everything in Vue, Vue.js. I'm like, are you sure? Come on, just like, you know, like keep jQuery. He's like, no, man, like, and we need to change a lot of stuff.

And I'm like, okay. And I was kind of like feeling it like this, you know, we're going to clean up shit. But then after a week, it's not going to, it's going to take way too much time. I think I like working with people where, like, when I approach them, I pretend in my head that they're the smartest person who has ever existed.

So I look at their code, or I look at the stuff they've created, and try to see the genius of their way. Like, you really have to understand people, like, really notice them. And then from that place, have a conversation about what is the better approach. Yeah, but those are the top tier developers. And those are the ones that are tech ambiguous.

So they can work with, they can learn any tech stack and they can, and that's like really few, like it's like top 5%. Cause if you try hiring devs, like no offense to devs, but most devs are not, man, most people in general jobs are not so good at their job. Like even doctors and stuff. When you realize this, people are very average at the job, especially with dev, with coding, I think.

So sorry. I think that's a really important skill for, for developer to roll in and like understand the musicality, the style. That's it, man. And like, empathy is like code empathy, right? It's code empathy. Yeah, it's a new word style. That's it, man. Empathy, it's like code empathy, right? It's code empathy. Yeah, it's a new word, but that's it. You need to understand, like, go over the code, get a holistic view of it, and man,

you can suggest we change stuff for sure. But look, jQuery is crazy. It's crazy I'm using jQuery. We can change that. It's not crazy at all. jQuery is also beautiful and powerful, and PHP is beautiful and powerful, especially as you said recently, and as the versions evolved,

it's much more serious programming language now. It's super fast. Like PHP is really fast now. It's crazy. JavaScript is really fast now. So if speed is something you care about, it's super fast. And there's gigantic communities of people using those programming languages,

and there's frameworks if you like the framework. So whatever, it doesn't really matter what you use, but also, you, if I was a developer working with you, you are extremely successful, you've shipped a lot. So if I roll in, I'm gonna be like, I don't assume you know nothing, I assume Peter's a genius, like the smartest developer ever, and like learn, learn from it, and yes and, like, notice parts in the code

where like, okay, okay, okay, I got it, like, here's how he's thinking, and now if I wanna add another like little feature, definitely you just have emoji in front of it. And then just follow the same style and add it. And my goal is to make you happy, to make you smile, to make you like, haha, fuck, I get it. And now you're going to start respecting me and trusting me and you start working together in this way.

I don't know how hard it is to find developers. No, I think they exist. I think you need to hire more people, need to try more people, but that costs a lot of my energy and time, but it's 100% possible. But do I want it? I don't know. Things kind of run fine for now. And I mean, like, okay, you could say like, okay, no, my list looks kind of clunky.

Like people say the design is kind of clunky. Okay, I'll improve the design. It's like next to my to-do list, for example, you know? Like I can, I'll get there eventually. But it's true. I mean, you're also extremely good at what you do. Like I'm just looking at the interfaces of like photo AI. Like you would Jake, feel like Jake Corey, right?

Like how amazing is Jake Corey? But like you can see these cowboys are getting, these are, there's these cowboys. This is a lot, this is a lot. But I'm glad they're all wearing shirts. Anyway, the interface here is just really, really nice. Like I could tell you know what you're doing. And with Nomad List, extremely nice, the interface.

Thank you, man. And that's all you. Yeah, this everything's me. So all of this and every little feature, all of this. People say it looks kinda ADHD or ADD, you know, like it's so much because it has so many things and design these days is minimalist, right? Right, right, I hear you.

But this is a lot of information and it's useful information and it's delivered in a clean way while still stylish and fun to look at. So like minimalist design is about like when you want to convey no information whatsoever and look cool. Yeah, it's very cool. It's pretentious, right?

Pretentious or not, the function is like, is useless. This is about a lot of information delivered to you in a clean, and when it's clean, you can't be too sexy. So it's sexy enough. Yeah, this is I think how my brain looks, you know? Like, there's a lot of shit going on. It's like drawing bass music. It's like very...

Yeah, but it's still pretty. The spacing of everything is nice. The fonts are really nice. Like, very readable. Very small. Yeah, I like it, you know? But I made it so I don't trust my own judgment. No, this is really nice.

Thank you. The emojis are somehow... Like, this is a nice. Thank you. The emojis are somehow like this is style. It's a thing. I need to pick the emoji. It takes a while to pick them. You know, like there's some something about the emojis a really nice memorable like placeholder for the idea. Yeah. Like if it was just text it would actually be overwhelming if you was just text. The emoji really helps. It's a brilliant addition. Like some people might look at it, why do you have emojis everywhere? It's actually really, for me, it's really nice.

People tell me to remove the emoji. Yeah, well, people don't know what they're talking about. And then the, I'm sure people will tell you a lot of things. This is really nice. And then using color is nice. Small font, but not too small. And obviously you have to show maps,

which is really tricky. Yeah. Yeah, this is, this is, no no this is really really really nice and all of I mean like okay like how this looks when you hover over it. It's a C-S transitions. No I understand that but like I'm sure there's like how long does that take you to figure out how you want it to look? Do you ever go down a rabbit hole where you spent like two weeks? No it's all iterative. It's like 10 years of, you know,

add a CSS transition here or do this or. Well, let's say like, see these are all, these are rounded now. Yeah. If you wanted to like, round is probably the better way. But if you want it to be rectangular, like sharp corners, what would you do? You just go through the index of CSS.

Yeah. And I do command F and I search border radius 12px and then I replace with border radius zero and then I do command enter and it's git deploys. It pushes to the git hub and then sends a web book and then deploys to my server and it's live in five seconds. You often deploy it to production. You don't have like a testing ground? No. So I'm like famous for this because

I'm too lazy to set up like a staging server on my laptop every time. So I nowadays I just deploy to production and it's man, I'm going to be canceled for this, you know, but it works very well for me because I have a lot of, I have like PHP, Lint and JSON. So it tells me when there's error. So I don't deploy, but my, literally I have like 37,000 Git commits in the last 12 months or something. So I make like small fix and then command enter and sends to GitHub. GitHub sends a web to my server,

web server pulls it, deploys the production and is there. What's the latency of that from you pressing command? One second, can be one, two seconds. So you just make a change and then you're getting really good at like not making mistakes. Man, you're a hundred percent. You're right. Like people are like, how can you do this? Why you get good at not taking the server down, you know, like, cause you

need to code more carefully, but it's. Look, it's idiotic in any big company, but for me it works because it makes me so fast. Like somebody will report a bug on Twitter and I kind of did like a stopwatch, like how fast can I fix this bug? And then two minutes later, for example, it's fixed. And it's fun because it's annoying for me to work with companies where you report a bug and it takes like six months. It's like horrible and it makes people really happy when you can really quickly solve the

problems. But it's crazy. I don't think it's crazy. I think, I mean, there's, I'm sure there's a middle ground, but I think that. Whole thing where there's a phase of like testing and there's the staging and there's a development and then there's like multiple tables and databases that you use for the state, like it's filing, it's a mess and there's different teams involved.

It's, it's no good. I'm like a good, funny extreme on the other side, you know? But just a little bit safer, but not too much. It would be great. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure that's actually like how X now, how they doing rapid improvement. No, they do cause there's more bugs.

And people complain about like, oh, look, he bought this Twitter and now it's full of bugs. Dude, he's shipping stuff. Like things are happening now and it's a dynamic app now. Yeah, the bugs is actually a sign of a good thing happening. Bugs of the feature, because it shows that the team is actually building shit. 100%.

One of the problems is like I see with YouTube, there's so much potential to build features, but I just see how long it takes. So I've gotten the chance to interact with many other teams, but one of the teams is MLA, multi-language audio. I don't know if you know this, but in YouTube, you can have audio tracks in different languages, four over doubling.

And there's a team, and not many people are using it, but like every single feature, they have to meet and agree, and like there's allocate resources, like engineers have to work on it But I'm sure it's a pain the ass for the engineers to get approval to like them Because that it has to not break the rest of the site whatever they do But like if you don't have enough dictatorial like top-down like we need this now It's gonna take forever to do anything multi-language audio, but multi-language audio is a good example of a thing that seems

niche right now, but it quite possibly could change the entire world. When you have, when I upload this conversation right here, if instantaneously it dubs it into 40 languages and everybody can assume every single video can be watched and listened to in those different, it changes everything. And YouTube is extremely well positioned to be the leader in this. They got the, they got the compute, they got the, uh, the user base. They got like, they have the experience of how to do this. So like multi-language audio should be hyper to feature, right?

Yeah. That's high priority. Like that's, and it's a way, you know, Google is obsessed with AI right now. They want to show off that they could be dominant in AI. That's the way for Google to say, like, we use the AI. Like this is a way to, to, to break down the walls that language creates. The preferred outcome for them, for them is probably their career and not the overall result of the, the cool product.

You know, I think they, they're not like selfish or whatever. They, they want to do good. There's something about the machine. The organization. The organizational stuff that you saw. I have this when I do report box on like big companies I work with. I talk to a lot of different people on DM

and they're all really trying hard to do something. They're all really nice. And I'm the one being kind of asshole because I'm like, guys, I'm talking to 20 people about this for six months and nothing's happening. They say, man, I know, but I'm trying my best. And yeah. So it's systemic.

Yeah. So what it requires again, I don't know if there must be a nice word, but like a dictatorial type of top down and the CEO rolls in, uh, and just says like for you too, it's like MLA get this done. Now this is the highest priority. I think big companies, especially in America, a lot of it is legal, right? They need to pass everything through legal. And you can't, like, man, the things I do,

I could never do that in a big corporation because everything has to be, probably Git Deploy has to go through legal. Well, again, take tutorial. You basically say, Steve Jobs did this quite a lot. I've seen a lot of leaders do this. Ignore the lawyers, ignore the cops, ignore PR, ignore everybody, give power to the engineers,

like listen to the people on the ground, get this shit done and get it done by Friday. That's it. And the law can change. Like for example, let's say you launched this AI dubbing and there's some legal problems with lawsuits. Okay, so the law changes. There will be appeals,

there will be some Supreme Court thing, whatever, and the law changes. So just by shipping it there will be some Supreme Court thing, whatever, and the law changes. So just by shipping it, you change society, you change the legal framework, and by not shipping, being scared of the legal framework all the time, like you're not changing things. Just out of curiosity, what ID do you use? Let's talk about like your whole setup.

Given how ultra productive you are, I mean, you often program in your underwear, slouching on the couch. Is there, does it matter to you in general? Is there like a specific ID, you use VS code? Yeah, VS code. Before I used Sublime Text, I don't think it matters a lot. I think I'm very skeptical of like tools

when people think it, they say it matters, right? I don't think it matters. I think whatever tool you know very well, you can go very fast. And like, you know, the shortcuts, for example, IDE, you know, like, I love Sublime Text because I could use like multi-cursor, you know, you search something and then I could like make mass replaces in a file with the cursor thing. And VSCode doesn't really have that as well. It's actually interesting. Sublime is the first editor where I've learned that. And I think they just make that super easy. So like actually interesting. Sublime is the first editor where I've learned that.

And I think they just make that super easy. So like, what would that be called? Multi-edit, multi-cursor edit thing, whatever. I'm sure like almost every editor can do that. It's just probably hard to set up. Yeah, Visco's not so good at it, I think. Or at least I tried. But I would use that to like process data. like data sets, for example, on World Bank.

I would just multi-cursor, mass change everything. But yeah, VS code, man, I was bullied into using VS code because Twitter would always see my screenshots of Sublime Text and say, why are you still using Sublime Text, like boomer, you need to use VS codes. And I'm like, well, I'll try it. I got a new MacBook and then I never like, yeah, I'll try it. I got a new Mac book and then I, I never install like, I never copy the old Mac book. I just make it fresh, you know, like a clean, like format C, you know, windows, like clean start and I'm like, okay, I'll try VS code and it's stuck, you know, but I don't really

care. Like it's not so important for me. Wow. You know, the format C reference, huh? Dude, it was so good. You would install windows and then after three or six months, it would start breaking and everything was like, it gets slow. Then you would restart, go to DOS, format C, you would delete your hard drive,

and then install the Windows 95 again. It was so good times. And you would design everything like, now I'm going to install it properly. Now I'm going to design my desktop properly. Yeah, I don't know if it's peer pressure, but like I use Emacs for many, many years. And I know, you know, I love Lisp. So a lot of the customization is done in Lisp. It's a programming language.

It partially was peer pressure, but part of it is realizing like you need to keep learning stuff. Like the same issue with jQuery. Like I still think I need to learn Node.js for example. Even though that's not my main thing or even close to the main thing, but I feel like you need to keep learning this stuff. And even if you don't choose to use it long-term, you need to give it a chance.

So your understanding of the world expands. Yeah, you wanna understand the new technological concepts and see if they can benefit you. It would be stupid not to even try. It's more about the concepts, I say than the actual tools like expanding. And that can be a challenging thing. So go into VS code and like really learning it, like all the shortcuts, all the extensions and actually installing different stuff and playing with it.

That was a interesting challenge. It was uncomfortable at first. Yeah, for me too. Yeah. Yeah. But you just dive in. It's like NeuroFlex. Like you keep your brain fresh, you know, like this kind of stuff.

I gotta do that more. Like, have you given React a chance? No, but I want to learn it. I understand the basics, right? I don't really know where it starts. But would you like, I guess you got to use your own model, which is like build the thing using it. No, man, so I kind of did that. Like I kind of like the, the stuff I do in jQuery is essentially a lot of it is

like, I start rebuilding whatever tech is already out there, not based on that, but just an accident. Like I keep going long enough that I built the same, I start getting the same problems every day else had and you start building the same frameworks kind of. So I essentially, I use my own kind of framework of, you basically build a framework from scratch. So it's your own that you understand it. same frameworks kind of. So essentially I use my own kind of framework of. So you basically build a framework from scratch. That's your own, you understand it. Kind of, yeah.

With Ajax calls, but essentially it's the same thing. Look, I don't have the time. I think saying you don't have the time is like always a lie because you just don't prioritize it enough. My priority is still like running the businesses and improving that and AI. I think learning AI is much more valuable now than learning a front end framework.

Yeah. Like it's just more impact. I guess it should be just learning every single day. A thing. Yeah. You can learn a little bit every day, like a little bit of react or I think now like next is very big. So learn a little bit of next, you know, but I call them the

military industrial complex. So if I, but you need to know, you need to know it anyway. So you got to learn how to use the weapons of war and then, and then you can be a peace naked. Yeah. I mean, but you got to learn it in the same exact way as we were talking about, which is learning by trying to build something with it and actually deploy it. The frameworks are so complicated and it changes so fast. So it's like, where do I start?

You know? And I guess it's the same thing when you're starting out making So it's like, where do I start? You know? And I guess it's the same thing when you're starting out making websites, like how, where do you start? Yeah. As GPT-4 I guess, but it, yeah, it's just so dynamic. It changes so fast that I don't know if it would be a good idea for me to learn it. You know? Um, maybe some combination of like view next with PHP Laravel.

Laravel is like a framework for PHP. I think that would be, uh, it could benefit me, you know? Maybe Tailwind for CSS, like a styling engine. That stuff could probably save me time. Yeah, but like you, you won't know until you really give it a try. And it feels like you have to build, like if maybe I'm talking to myself, like I should probably recode like my personal one page in Laravel. And even though it might not have

almost any dynamic elements, maybe have one dynamic element, but it has to go end to end in that framework. Or end to end build in Node.js. Some of it is figuring out how to even deploy the thing. Like what is the full stack? All I know is right now I would send it to GitHub and it sends it to my server.

I don't know how to get JavaScript running. I have no clue. Yeah. So I guess I need like a pass, like Versal, right? Or Heroku, kind of those kind of platforms. I actually kind of just gave myself the idea of like I kind of just want to build a single web page, like one web page that has like one dynamic element and just do it in every

single, like in a lot of frameworks, like just on the same page, same, all the exact page kind of page. That's cool. Prior to all these frameworks and you can see the differences. Yeah. That's interesting. It takes to do it. Yeah. Stopwatch. I have to figure out actually something sufficiently complicated because it should probably do it should probably do some kind of Thing where it accesses the database and dynamically is changing stuff some AI stuff some LLM stuff Yeah, maybe some it doesn't have to be a one Maybe API call API call to something to replicate for example, then you have, yeah, that would be a very cool project.

Yeah. And like time it and also report on my happiness. Yeah. I'm going to totally do this. Cause nobody benchmarks this. Nobody's benchmark happy, developer happiness with frameworks. Yeah. Nobody's benchmark the shipping time.

I like to just take like a month and do this. How many frameworks are there? There's how many, how many, there's like five main ways of doing it. So there's like, there's no, there's backend, frontend. And this stuff confused me too. Like React now apparently has become backend. Yeah.

Or something used to be only frontends and you're forced to do now backend also, I don't know. And then, but there's not really, you're not really forced to do anything. So like, according to the internet, so like there's no, it's actually not trivial to find the canonical way of doing things. So like the standard vanilla, like you go

to the ice cream shop, there's like a million flavors. I want vanilla. If I've never had ice cream in my life, can we just like learn about ice cream? Yeah. I want vanilla. Nobody actually,. Can we just like learn about ice cream? Yeah. I want vanilla. Nobody actually, sometimes I'll literally name it vanilla, but like I wanna know what's the basic way,

but not like dumb, but like the standard canonical. Yeah, I wanna know the dominant way. Like the dominant way. Like the 6% of developers do it like this. Yeah. It's hard to figure that out, you know? That's the problem. Yeah, maybe all the lumps can help. Maybe all the lums can help.

Maybe you should explicitly ask, what is the dominant? They usually know like the dominant, you know, they, they, they give answers that are like the most probable kind of. So that makes sense to ask them. And I think honestly, maybe what would help is if you want to learn, or I wouldn't want to learn like a framework, hire somebody that already does it and just sit with them and make something together. Like I've never done that, but I thought about it.

So it would be a very fast way to, you know, take their knowledge. I've tried these kinds of things. What happens is it depends what kind of, if they're like a world-class developer, yes. Oftentimes they themselves are used to that thing and they have not themselves explored in other options So they're have this dogmatic like talking down to you Like this is the right way to do it. It's like no, no, we're just like exploring together. Okay, show me the cool thing. You've tried which is like it has to have open mindedness to like

You know, no JS is not the right way to do web development. It's like one way and there's nothing wrong with the old LAMP, PHP, jQuery, vanilla JavaScript way. It just has its pros and cons and like, you need to know what the pros and cons are. Yeah, but those people exist. You could find those people probably. Yeah.

Like if you wanna learn AI, imagine you have Karpati sitting next to you. Yeah. Like, if you want to learn AI, imagine you have Karpati sitting next to you. Yeah. Like, he does his YouTube videos. It's amazing. He can teach it to, like, a five-year-old about how to make LLM.

It's amazing. Like, imagine this guy sitting next to you and just teaching you, like, let's make LLM together. Like, holy shit, that would be amazing. Yeah. I mean, Karpati has its own style. And I'm not sure he's for everybody. For example, five-year-old, it depends on the five-year-old.

He's like super technical. But he's amazing because he's super technical and he's the only one who can explain stuff in a simple way, which shows his complete genius. Because if you can explain without jargon, you're like, wow. And build it from scratch. Yeah, it's like top tier, you know? Like what a guy. But he might be anti-framework because he builds from scratch. Exactly.

Yeah, actually probably is. Yeah. Uh, he's like you, but for AI. Yeah. So maybe learning framework is a, is a very bad idea for us. You know, maybe we should stay in PHP and like ScriptKitty and the. Well, you have to, maybe by learning the framework, you learn what you want to yourself build from scratch.

Yeah, maybe learn concepts, but you don't actually have to start using it for your life, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you're still a Mac guy. Always a Mac guy? Yeah, yeah.

I switched to Mac in 2014, because it was cause when I wanted to start traveling and my brother was like, dude, get a Mac book is like the standard now. I'm like, wow, I need to switch from windows. And I had like three screens, you know, like windows had this whole setup for music production had to sell everything. Um, and then I had a Mac book and I remember opening up this Mac book box, like, uh, and

it was so beautiful. It was like this aluminium. And then I opened it and I removed it, you know, the screen protector thing. It's so beautiful. And I didn't touch it for three days. I was just like looking at it really. And I was still on the Windows computer and then I went traveling with that. So I, and all my great things started when I switched to Mac, which

sounds very dogmatic, right? But what great things are you talking about? All the business started working out. Like I started traveling. I started building startups, started making money. It all started when I switched to Mac. Listen, I, I kind of, you're all started when I switched to Mac. Listen, I kinda, you're making me wanna switch to Mac.

So I either use Linux inside Windows with WSL or just Ubuntu, Linux, but Windows for most stuff like editing or any Adobe products. Yeah, Adobe stuff, right? Well, you could use, I guess you could do math stuff there. I wonder if I should switch. What, what do you miss about windows? What was the pros and cons? I think the finder is horrible Mac.

Like it's like, it's, it's the what is the finder. Oh, you don't know the file. So there's the windows explorer. Yeah. Thank you for talking. The binder is strange, man. That's like strange things. This is bug where if you, if you send like a dash of photo and WhatsApp or

telegram, it just selects the whole folder and you almost accidentally can click enter and you send all your photos or your files to this chat group habit to my girlfriend, just start sending me photo photo photo photo. So if it's finders very unusual, but it has Linux like the whole thing is like it's Unix based, right? So you use the command not all the time, like all the time. And the cool thing is you can run, I think it's like Unix, like Debian or whatever,

you can run most Linux stuff on Mac OS, which makes it very good for development. Like I have my Nginx server, you know, if I'm not lazy and set up my staging on my laptop, it's just the Nginx server, the same as I have on my cloud server, right? The same where the websites run, and I can use almost everything,

the same config files, configuration files. And it just works, and that makes Mac a very good platform for Linux stuff, I think. Yeah, yeah. Real Ubuntu is better, of course, but. Yeah, I'm in this weird situation where somewhat of a power user in Windows and let's say Android and all the much smarter friends I have all using Mac and iPhone. And it's like,

if you don't want to go through the peer pressure, you know, it's not peer pressure. It's like, like one of the reasons I wanna have kids is that there's a lot of, like I would love to have kids as a baseline, but you know, there's like a concern, maybe there's gonna be a trade-off or all this kind of stuff, but you see like these extremely successful,

smart people who are friends of mine who have kids and are really happy they have kids. So that's not peer pressure, that's just like a strong signal. Yeah, it works for people. It works for people. Yeah. And the same thing with Mac, that's just like a strong signal. Yeah, it works for people. It works for people. Yeah. And the same thing with Mac, it's like,

I don't see fundamentally, I don't like closed systems. So fundamentally, I like Windows more because there's much more freedom. Same with Android, there's much more freedom. It's much more customizable. But like all the cool kids, the smart kids are using Mac and iPhones, like all right, I need to really,

I need to give it a real chance, especially for development, since more and more stuff is done in the cloud anyway. Anyway, but it's funny to hear you say all the good stuff started happening. Maybe I'll be like that guy too. When I switched to Mac, all the good stuff started happening. I think it's just about the hardware. It's not so much about the software.

The hardware is so well built, right? The keyboard and... Yeah, but look at the keyboard I use. Yeah, that's pretty cool. That's one word for it. What's your favorite place to work? On the couch. Does the couch matter?

Is the couch your home or is it any couch? No, any hotel couch also. In the room, right? I know. But I used to work very ergonomically with a standing desk and everything perfect. Eye height, screen, blah, blah, blah. And I felt like, man, this has to do with lifting too. I started getting RSI, like repetitive strain injury, like tingling stuff,

and it would go all the way on my back. And I was sitting in a co-working space, like 6 a.m., sun comes up, and I'm working and I'm coding and I hear like a sound or something so I do like I look left and my neck gets stuck like and I'm like wow fuck and um I'm like what am I dying you know and I thought I'm probably dying yeah so I don't want to die in a coworking space I'm gonna go home and die in like yeah you know peace and honor yeah so I close my to go home and die in like peace and honor. So I closed my laptop and I put it in my backpack and I walked to the street. I got on my motorbike, went home and I lied down on like a pillow, like with my legs up and stuff to get rid of this, like, cause it was my whole back.

And it was because I was working like this all the time. So I started getting like a laptop stand, everything economically correct. But then I started lifting and since then, like, it seems like, uh, everything gets straightened out. Your posture kind of, you're more straight and I'd never have RSI, RSI and more repetitive injury. I never have tingling anymore. Uh, no pains and stuff.

So then I started working on the sofa and it's great. It feels you're close to the... I sit like this, legs together, and then a pillow and then a laptop, and then I work. Are you leaning back? I'm together like legs and then- Where's the mouse? Using the-

No, so everything's trackpad on the Mac OS on the Macbook I used to have the logic MX mouse the perfect economic mouse and he's doing like this little thing with the thing yes one screen one screen and you said tree screen so I come from the I know where people come I had all the stuff but then I realized that having it all condensed in one laptop it's a 16-inch MacBook, so it's quite big, but having it all in there is amazing because you're so close to the tools, you're so close to what's happening, you know?

It's like working on a car or something. It's like so... Like, man, if you have tree skin, you have to look here, look there, you get also neck injury actually. So it's... Well, I don't know. This sounds like you're part of a cult and you're just trying to convince me. But I mean, but it's, I don't know. This, this sounds like you're part of a cult and you're just trying to convince me.

But, uh, I mean, but it's good to hear that you can be ultra productive on a single screen. That's crazy. Come on, tap you all top, like when is all top macOS come on to switch very fast. So you have like one, the entire screen is taken up by VS code. Say you're looking at the code and then, and then like if you deploy like a website, you want to switch screens. I used to have this swipe screen, you know, you could do like, um, different

screen spaces. Yeah. I was like, ah, it's too difficult. Let's just put it all on one screen on the Mac book and then it can be productive that way. Yeah. Very productive. Yeah.

More productive than before. Interesting. Because I have three screens and two of them are vertical. Like besides code, right? Yeah. For the code, you can screens and two of them are vertical. Like on the sides. The code, right? Yeah. For the code, you can see a lot. No, man.

I love it. Like I love seeing it with friends. Like they have amazing like battle stations, right? It's called. It's amazing. I want it, but I don't want it. Right? Like.

You like the constraints. There's some. That's it. There's some aspect of the constraints, which like once you get good at it, you can focus your mind and you can. Man, I'm suspicious of like more, you know? Yeah. Do really need all the stuff. Like it might slow me down actually. It's a good way to put it. I'm suspicious of more. Me too. I'm suspicious of more in all,

in all ways. Because you can defend more, right? You can defend, yeah, I'm a developer. I make money. I need to, I need to get more screens, right? I need to be more efficient. And then you read stuff about like mythical man month where like hiring more people slows down a software project that's famous. I think you can use that metaphor maybe for, you know, tools as well. And I see friends just with gear acquisition syndrome, they're buying so much stuff, but they're not that productive. They have the best, most beautiful battle stations, desktops, everything.

They're not that productive. And it's also like kind of fun. Like it's all from my laptop in a backpack, right? It's kind of nomad, minimalist. Take me through like the perfect ultra productive day in your life. Like say like where you get a lot of shit done. Yeah.

Are you, and it's all focused on getting shit done. What, when are you waking up? Is it a regular time? Super early, super late? Yes, so I go to sleep like 2 a.m. usually, something like that, and before 4 a.m. But my girlfriend would go to sleep midnight, so we did a compromise like 2 a.m., you know?

So I wake up around 10, 11, then more like 10. Shower, make coffee. I make coffee, like drip coffee, like the V60, you know, the filter. And I boil water and then put the coffee in. Um, and then chill a little bit with my girlfriend and then open laptops, start coding, check what's going on, like bugs or whatever. How long are you like how stretches of time are you able to just sit behind the computer coding?

So I used to need like really long stretches where I would do like all nighters and stuff to get shit done. But I've gotten trained to like have more interruptions where I can like. Cause you have to. This is life. Like there's a lot of distractions. Like your girlfriend asks off, people come over or whatever. So I'm very fast now.

I can lock in and lock out quite fast. And I heard people, developers or entrepreneurs with kids, have the same thing. Before they're like, ah, I cannot work, but they get used to it. And they get really productive in a short time because they only have 20 minutes and then shit goes crazy again. So another constraint, right?

Yeah, it's funny. So I think that works for me. Yeah, and then cook food and stuff, have lunch, steak and chicken. You eat a bunch of times a day. So you say coffee. Yeah. Yeah. So a few hours later, cook foods. We get like locally stores like meat and stuff and vegetables and cook that. And then second coffee and then go some more, maybe go outside for lunch.

Like you can mix fun stuff, you know. How many hours are you saying a perfectly productive day? You do programming like if you were like a perfectly productive day are you doing programming? Like if you were like to kill it, are you doing like all day basically? You mean like the special days where like girlfriend leaves to like Paris or something and you're alone for a week at home, which is amazing.

You can just go, it's like, and you stay up all night and eat chocolate and- Yeah, eat chocolate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay. Let's remove girlfriend from picture, social life from picture. It's just you. Man, yeah, yeah, okay, okay. Let's remove girlfriend from picture, social life from picture. It's just you. Man, that shit goes crazy.

Okay, yeah, because when shit goes crazy. Now shit goes crazy. Okay, okay. So, let's rewind. Are you still waking up? There's coffee. There's no girlfriend to talk to. There's no-

And now we wake up like 1 p.m. At 2 p.m. Because you went to bed at 6 PM. Yeah. Cause I was coding. I was finding some new AI shit and I was studying it and it was amazing. And I cannot sleep because it's too important. We need to stay awake.

We need to see all of this. We need to make something now. And, but that's the times I do make like new stuff more. So I think I have a friend, he actually books a hotel for like a week to like leave his and he has a kid too, and his girlfriend and his kids stay in the house and he goes to another hotel. Sounds a little suspicious, right? Going to the hotel, but all he does is like writing or coding.

He's a writer and he needs like this alone time, the silence. And I think for this flow state, it's true, you know, I'm better maintaining stuff, um, when there's a lot of disruptions, then like creating new stuff. I need this. And it's common as flow states, this uninterrupted period of time. Um, so yeah, I wake up like one, two PM, um, you know, still coffee shower. We still shower, you know? Uh, and then this code like nonstop. Maybe my friend comes over, uh, comes over. Yeah. He also, Andre, he codes too. my friend comes over, comes over. Just some distraction. Yeah.

Andre, he codes too. So he comes over. We code together. We listen. It starts going back to the body days, like co-working days. So you're not really working with him, but you're just both working. Because it's nice to have the vibe where you both sit together

on the couch and coding on something. And you actually, it's mostly silent or there's music. Sometimes you ask something, but generally, it's mostly silent or there's music, you know, and sometimes you ask something and, but generally like you're really locked in and. What music are you listening to? I think like, like, techno, like YouTube techno. There's a channel called HOR with a umlaut, like H-O-Double-Dot.

It's Berlin techno, whatever. It looks like it's, they film it in like a toilet with like white tiles and stuff. And it's very cool. And they always have like very good, like kind of industrial, like industrial, so fast paced, heavy. You know, like, yeah, yeah. That's not distracting to your brain. That's amazing.

Like I think distracting man, jazz, like I listen to coffee jazz with my girlfriend when I wake up and it's kind of like, this piano starts getting annoying, it's like, dun dun dun dun dun dun, too many tones, it's like too many things going on. This industrial techno is like, you know these African like rain dances, like, it's this transcendental trance. That's interesting because I actually mostly now listen to

brown noise, noise. Yeah, wow. Like pretty loud. And one of the things you learn is your brain gets used to whatever. So I'm sure to techno if I actually give it a real chance, my brain would get used to it. But with noise, what happens is something happens to your brain.

I think there's a science to it, but I don't really care. You just have to be a scientist of one, like study yourself, your own brand. For me, it like, it does something. I discovered it right away when I tried it for the first time. After about like a couple of minutes, everything, every distraction just like disappears

and it goes like, shoo. You can like hold Focus on things like really well, it's weird like you can like Really focus on a thing. It doesn't really matter what that is I think that's what people achieve was like meditation you can like my focus on your breath. For example, it's no brown It's not like binar. Oh No, it's just normal. It's like Yeah, white noise. I think it like shhh. White noise I think is the same. It's like pink noise, white noise.

Brown noise I think is like bassier. Yeah, it's more diffused, more dampened. Yeah, dampened. Yeah, I can see that. Sharp brightness. And you use a headphone, right? Yeah, headphones. I actually like walk around in life often with brown noise.

Dude, that's like psychopath shit, but it's cool. Yeah, yeah had one. I actually like walk around in life often with brown noise. Dude, that's like psychopath shit, but it's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I murder people, it helps. It drowns out their screams. Jesus Christ. Yeah. I said too much. No, I'm going to try brown noise. With a murder or with a coating?

Yeah, for the coating. OK, good. Try it. Try it. But you have to like with everything else, you give it a real chance. Yeah. I find I also, like I said, do, uh, techno-y type stuff, electronic music on top of the brown noise, uh, but then control the speed cause the faster goes to more anxiety.

So if I really need to get shit done, especially with programming, I'll have a beat. And it's great. It's cool. I say it's cool to play those little tricks with your mind to study yourself. I usually don't like to have people around because when people, even if they're working, I don't know, I like people too much. They're like interesting. In coworker space, I would just start talking too much. So they're a source of distraction. Yeah. In coworker space, I would just start talking too much. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a source of distraction.

Yeah. We would do in the coworkers space, we would do like a money, like pot, like a mug. So if you would, we'd work for 45 minutes and then if you would say one, like per word, you would get a fine, which is like $1. You'd put $1 to say, Hey, what's up? So $3 you put in the mug. Um, and then 10, 15 minutes free time, like we can like party, whatever. And then 45 minutes again, I'm working and that worked, but you need to shut people up or they, you know.

I think there's a, there's an intimacy in being silent together. Then I might, maybe I'm uncomfortable with like, but you, if you need to make yourself vulnerable and actually do it. Like with, with close friends to just sit there in silence for a long periods of time and like doing a thing. Dude, I watched this, um, this video of this podcast. It was like this Buddhism podcast with people meditating and they were interviewing each other or whatever.

And like a podcast and suddenly after a question is like, yeah, yeah. And they were just silent for like three minutes. And then they said, that was amazing. Yeah, that was amazing. I was like, wow, pretty cool, you know? Elon's like that. And I really liked that. You'll ask a question.

Like, I don't know. What's a perfectly productive day for you? Like I had just asked. And you just sit there for like 30 seconds thinking. Yeah, he thinks. Yeah. That's so cool. I wish I was, I wish I could think more about,

but I wanna like, I wanna show you my heart, you know? I wanna show you, go straight from my heart to my mouth to like saying the real thing. And the more I think, the more I start like filtering myself, right. And I want to just throw it out there immediately. I do that more with team. I think he has a lot of practice in that.

I do that as well. And in team setting, when you're thinking, brainstorming, and you allow yourself to just like think in silence. Yeah. Just like, because even in meetings, people want to talk. Yeah. It's like, no, you think before you speak and just like, it's okay to be silent together.

Yeah. And if you allow yourself the room to do that, you can actually come up with really good ideas. Yeah. So, okay, this perfect day. How much caffeine are you consuming in this day? Man, too much, right? Cause normally like two cups of coffee,

but on this perfect day, like we go to like four maybe. So we're starting to hit like the anxiety levels. So four cups is a lot for you. Well, I think my coffees are quite strong when I make them. It's like 20 grams of coffee powder in the V60. So like my friends call them like nuclear coffee cause it's quite heavy. Yeah, super strong.

It's quite strong. But it's nice to hit that anxiety level where you're like almost panic attack, but you're not there yet. So, but that's like, man, it's like super locked in, just like, it's amazing. But I mean, there's a space for that, you know, in my life, but I think it's great for making new stuff.

It's amazing. Starting from scratch, creating a new thing. Yes, I think girlfriends should let their guys go away for like two weeks every few, no, every year at least, you know, maybe every quarter. I don't know. And just sit and make some shits without, you know, they're amazing, but like no disturbances, just be alone. And then, you know, people can make something very, very amazing. Just wearing cowboy hats in the mountains. Like we showed exactly we can do that. There's a movie about that with the laptops.

They didn't do much programming though. Yeah. You can do a little bit of that. Okay. And then a little bit of shipping, you know, do both. It's a different broke back. They need to allow us to go, you know, you need like a man cave, right? Yeah, to ship.

Yeah, to ship. Shit done. Yeah, it's a balance. Okay, cool. What about sleep? Naps and all that? You're not sleeping much? I don't do naps in the day.

I think power naps are good, but I'm never tired anymore in the day. Also because of gym, I'm not tired. I'm tired when it's night, I need to sleep. Yeah, me, I love naps. I don't care. I don't know. I don't know why. Brain shuts off, turns on. I don't know. I don't know why.

Brain shuts off, turns on. I don't know if it's healthy or not. It just works. Yeah. I think with anything mental, physical, you have to be a student of your own body and like know what the limits are. Like you have to be skeptical,

taking advice from the internet in general. Cause a lot of the advice is just like a good baseline for the general population. But then you have to become a student of your own, like of your own body, of your own self, how you work. I've done a lot of like for me, fasting was an interesting one. They used to eat a bunch of meals a day, especially when I was lifting heavy, like because everybody says that you have to eat kind of a lot, you know, multiple meals a day.

But I realized I can get much stronger, feel much better if I eat once or twice a day. Me too, yeah. It's crazy. I never understood this small meal thing, yeah. Didn't work for me. Well, let me just ask you, it'd be interesting if you can comment

on some of the other products you've created. We talked about Nomad List, Interior AI, Photo AI, Therapist AI. What's Remote OK? It's a job board for remote jobs. Because back then, like 10 years ago, there was a job board, but it was not really specifically remote job, job boards. So I made one, but I made like, first of all Nomad is I made like Nomad jobs,

like a page and a lot of companies started hiring and they pay for job posts. So I spin it off to Remote OK. And I was like this number one or number two biggest remote job boards. And, uh, and it's also fully automated and people just post a job and people apply. It has like profiles as well. Like it's kind of like LinkedIn for remotes work. So it's focused on remote only. Yeah.

Is this, it's essentially like a simple job board. I discovered job boards are way more complicated than you think. But, yeah, it's a job board for remote jobs. But the nice thing is you can charge a lot of money for job posts. Man, it's good money. B2B. You can charge like you start with $299. But at the peak, when the Fed started printing money, like 2021, I was making like $140K a month with remote okay, with just job posts.

And I started like adding crazy upsells, like rainbow color, it's a job post. You can add your background image, just upsells, man. And you charge $1,000 for an upsell. It was crazy. And all these companies just upsell, upsell. Yeah, we want everything. Job posts would cost $3,400, $4,000. And I was like, this is good business. And then the feds stopped printing money

and it all went down and it went down to like 10K a month from 140. Now it's back, I think it's like 40. It was good times, you know? I gotta ask you about back to the digital nomad life. You wrote a blog post on the reset and in general, just giving away everything, living a minimalist life.

Yeah. What did it take to do that? Like to get rid of everything. 10 years ago was like this trend in the blog. Back then blogs were so popular. It was like a blogosphere and it was like the 100 things challenge. What is that? The hundred things.

I mean, it's ridiculous, but like you, you write down every object you have in your house and you count it, you make like a spreadsheet and you're like, okay, I have 500 things. You need to get it down to a hundred. Why, you know, this was just a trend. So I did it. I started like selling stuff, started throwing away stuff. And I did like MDMA and ecstasy like 2012 kind of, and, uh, after that trip, I felt so different and I felt like I had to start throwing shit away.

Like, I felt so different and I felt like I had to start throwing shit away. I swear. And I started throwing shit away and I felt that was like, it was almost like the drug sending me to a path of like, you need to throw your shit away. You need to start going on a journey. You need to get out of here. And that's what the MDMA did, I think. How hard is it to get down to 100 items? Well, you need to sell your PC and stuff. You need to go on eBay and then, man, go on eBay selling all your stuff is

variance thing because you discover society. You just met, you meet the craziest people. You meet every range from rich to poor. Everybody comes to your house to buy stuff. It's so funny. So interesting. I recommend everybody do this. Just to meet people that want your shit. Yeah, it was so I didn't know it was. It was so, like, I didn't know.

I was living in Amsterdam and I didn't know, I have my own, you know, subculture or whatever. And I discovered the Dutch people, like as they are from eBay, you know? So I sold everything. What's like the weirdest thing you had to sell and you had to find a buyer for? Not the weirdest, but like, what's my mobile?

So back then I was, I was making music and we would make music videos with like a Canon 5D camera. Back then everyone was making films and music videos with that. And we bought it with my friends and stuff. And it was kind of like I had to sell this thing too because it was like, it was very expensive, like 6K or something. But it meant that selling this meant that we wouldn't make music videos together anymore. I would leave Holland. This kind of like stuff we were working on would end.

And I was kind of saying this music video stuff, we're not getting famous in this or successful. We need to stop doing this music production also. It's not really working. And it was kind of like, felt very bad, you know, for my friends, because we would work together on this and to sell this like camera that we'd make stuff with. And it was a hard goodbye.

It was just a camera, but it was like, it felt like, sorry guys, it doesn't work and I need to go, you know? Who, who bought it? Do you remember? It was some guy who couldn't possibly understand the journey. The potion of it. Yeah. Yeah. He just showed up here, here's the money, thanks.

Yeah, but it was like, it was like cutting your life. Like this shit ends now, now we kind of do new stuff. And I think it's beautiful. I did that twice. My I give away everything, everything, everything like down to just pants, underwear, backpack. I think, I think it's important to do. It shows you what's important. Yeah. I think that's what I learned from it. Like you, you learned that you can live a very little objects for a little stuff. And, um, but there's a, there's a counter to it. Like you, you lean more on this, on the stuff, on the services, right? Like, for example, you don't need a car, you use Uber,

right? Or you don't need kitchen stuff because you go to restaurants, you know, when you're traveling. So you lean more on other people's services, but you spend money on that as well. So that's good. Yeah, but just letting go of material possessions, which gives a kind of freedom to how you move about the world. Yeah. It gives you complete freedom to go into another city to...

Yeah, with your backpack. With a backpack. Yeah. There's a kind of freedom to it. There's something about material possessions and having a place and all that that ties you down a little bit. Yeah. Like spiritually.

Yeah. It's good to take a leap out into the world, especially when you're younger to like. Man, I recommend if you're 18, you get out of high school, do this, go travel and build some internet stuff, whatever. If you bring your laptop and it's amazing experience. Five years ago, I would still go to university, but now I'm thinking like, no, maybe skip university.

Just go first, like travel around a little bit, figure some stuff out. You can go back to university when you're 25. You can like, okay, now I learned, I've been successful in business, you have money at least. Now you can choose what you really wanna study, you know? Because people at 18, they go study what is probably good for the job market, right?

So it probably makes more sense. Like if you want that, go travel, build some businesses and go back to university if you want. So one of the biggest uses of a university is the networking. You gain friends, you gain, like, you meet people. It's a forcing function to meet people. But if you can meet people out into the world by traveling.

And you meet so many different cultures. I mean, the problem for me is, like, if I traveled at that young age, I'm attracted to people at the outskirts of the world. Like, for me. Like where? No, not geographically. Oh, like the subcultures. The subcultures.

Yeah. Like the weirdos, the darkness. Yeah, me too. But, but that might not be the best networking at 18 years old. No, but man, if you, if you're smart about it, you can stay safe. And I met so many weirdos from traveling. You meet, that's how travel works. If you really let loose, you meet the craziest people. And it's the most interesting people. And

it's just, I cannot recommend it enough. Well, see, the thing is that when you're 18, I feel like depending on your personality, you have to learn both how to be a weirdo and how to be a normie. Like you still have to learn how to fit into society. Like for a person like me for example, who's always an outcast, like there's always a danger for going full outcast. And that's a harder life. If you like, if you go to like,

go full artists and full like darkness, it's just a harder life. You can come back, you can come back to normie. That's a skill. That's like, I think you have to learn how to fit into like polite society. But I was very strange outcast as well. And then I'm more adaptable to norming now.

You learned it. Yeah, learned it. After Fertis, you know, you're like, yeah. But it means the skill you have to learn. Yeah. I feel, man, I feel also that you start as an outcast, but the more you work on yourself, the less like shit you have. You kind of start becoming more normie because you become more chill with

yourself and more happy and it kind of makes you un-interesting, right? A little bit. Yes. Yes. Like the most, the crazy people are always the most interesting. If you've solved your internal struggles and your therapy and stuff, and you kind of become kind of, you know, it's not so interesting anymore, maybe. You don't have to be broken to be interesting.

I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah. What kind of things were left when you minimalized? So the backpack, a MacBook, a toothbrush, some clothes, underwear, socks. You don't need a lot of clothes in Asia because it's hot. a MacBook, a toothbrush, some clothes, underwear, socks. You don't need a lot of clothes in Asia because it's hot. So you just wear swim pants, swim shorts, you walk around, flip-flops. So very basic t-shirt and I would go to the laundromat

and wash my stuff. And I think it was like 50 things or something. Yeah, it's nice. There's, as I mentioned to you, there's the, uh, the show alone. Yeah. They really test you cause they only, you only get 10 items and you have to survive out in the wilderness and the ax like everybody brings an ax. Some people, uh, also have a saw, but usually acts does the job.

You basically have to, you know, to build a shelter, you have to cut down and cut the trees and make, and like. Learn in Minecraft. Everything I learned about life, I learned in Minecraft, bro. Yeah, yeah, you could, it's nice to create those constraints for yourself to understand what matters to you and also how to be in this world.

And one of the ways to do that is to live a minimalist life. But like some people, like I've met people that really enjoy material possessions and that brings them happiness. And that's a beautiful thing. Like for me, it doesn't, but people are different. It gives me happiness for like two weeks. I'm very quickly adapting to like a baseline,

hedonistic adaptation very fast. Yeah. But man, if you look at the studies, most people like, like getting a new car, six months, you know, get a new house, six months, you just feel the same. She's like, wow, should I buy all this stuff? That hadn't studying hedonistic adaptation made me think a lot about minimalism. And so you don't even need to go through the whole journey of getting it. Just, just focus on the, the thing that's more permanent.

Yeah. Like building shit. Yeah. Like people around you, like people you love, nice food, nice experiences, meaningful work, those things, exercise, you know, those things make you happy. I think make me happy for sure. You wrote a blog post, why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too. What's your strategy in communicating with people?

Yeah. So when I wrote that I was getting so many DMs as you probably have, you have a million times more, but, um, and people were getting angry that I wasn't responding. And I was like, okay, I'll just close down this DMs completely. Then people got angry that I closed my DMs down, that I'm not like man of the people, you know, it's like. You've changed man. Yeah, you've changed.

You got, you know, like this. And I'm like, I'll explain why I just don't have the time in a day to, you know, answer every question. And also people send you like crazy shit, man. Like stalkers and like people write like their whole life story for you and then ask you advice. Like, man, I have no idea. I'm not a therapist. I don't know another stuff, but also beautiful stuff. No, absolutely Sure, like life story. I've posted a coffee for him

like if you wanted to have a coffee with me and I've gotten an Extremely large number of submissions and when I look at them, there's just like beautiful people in there like beautiful human beings Really powerful stories and like breaks my heart that I won't get to meet those people, you know? So part of it is just like there's only so much bandwidth to truly see other humans and help them or like understand them or hear them or see them. Yeah. I have this problem that I try, I want to try help people and like also like, oh, let's make startups and whatever.

And it's, I've learned over the years that generally for me, and it sounds maybe bad, right, but like I helped my friend Andre, for example, he was, he came up to me in the co-workspace. That's how I met him. He said, I want to learn to code. I want to do startups. How do I do it? I said, okay, let's go, uh, install engine X, let's start coding.

And he has this self energy that he actually, he doesn't need to be pushed, he just goes, and he just goes and he asks questions, and he doesn't ask too many questions, he just goes and learns it, and now he has a company and makes a lot of money, has his own startups. So, and the people that I had to kind of like, that asked me for help, but then I gave help,

and then they started debating it, you know? Do you have that? Like people ask you advice and they go against you say, no, you're wrong. Because I'm like, okay, bro, I don't want to debate. You asked me for advice, right? And the people who need to push generally, it doesn't happen. You need to have this energy for yourself. Well, they're searching, they're searching, they're trying to figure it out. But oftentimes their search, if they successfully find what they're looking for, it'll be within. Sounds very like spiritual Sony,

but it's really like figuring that shit out on your own. But they're reaching, they're trying to ask the world around them, like, how do I live this life? How do I figure this out? But ultimately the answer is gonna be from them working on themselves. And like literally, it's a stupid thing, but like Googling and doing like. Yeah.

I think it's procrastination. I think sending messages to people is a lot of procrastination. Like Lex, how do you become successful podcaster? Yeah. Bro, just, you know, start like this goal. Yeah. And, uh, just go, I would never ask you how to be successful podcaster. Like I would just start it and then I would copy your methods.

You know, I would say, ah, this guy has a black background. We probably need this as well. Yeah, try it. Yeah, try it. And then you realize it's not about the black background. It's about something else. So you find your own voice. Like keep trying. Exactly.

Imitation is a difficult thing. Like a lot of people copy and they don't move past it. Yeah. You should understand their methods and then move past it. Find yourself, find your own voice. Find your own voice. Yeah, you imitate and then you put your own spin to it. That's like creative process.

That's like literally the whole, everybody always builds on the previous work. You shouldn't get stuck. 24 hours in a day, eight hours of sleep. You break it down into a math equation. 90 minutes of showering, clean up coffee. It just keeps whittling down to zero. Man, it's not this specific,

but I had to make like an average or something. Firefighting, I don't like that. One hour's of groceries and errands. I've tried breaking down minute by minute what I do in a day. Especially when my life was simpler. It's really refreshing to understand where you waste a lot of time.

And what you enjoy doing. How many minutes it takes to be happy, doing the thing that makes you happy, and how many minutes it takes to be productive. And you realize there's a lot of hours in the day if you spend it right. Yeah, a lot of it is wasted. For me, it's been the biggest battle for the longest time is finding stretches of time where I can deeply focus into really, really deep work. Just like zoom in and completely focus cutting

out away all the distractions. Me too. That's the battle. It's unpleasant. It's extremely unpleasant. We need to fly to an island, you know, make a man cave island where we can just, everybody can just go out for a week, you know, and just get shit done, make new projects. Yeah, yeah. But man, they called me psychopath for this because it says like one hour of sex, hugs, love, you know?

Man, I had to write something, you know? And they were like, oh, this guy's psychopath, he plans his sex in a specific hour. Like, bro, I don't, but you know. You have a counter for hugs. Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, click, click, click. It's just a numerical representation of what life is.

Yeah. It's like one of those like, when you draw out how many weeks you have in a life. Oh dude, this is like dark, yeah, man. Don't wanna look at that too much. Holy shit. Yeah, man. How many times you see your parents, Jesus, like, man.

Yeah. Scary, man. That's right. It might be only a handful more times. You just look at the math of it. If you see him once a year or twice a year. FaceTime today. Yeah. I mean, that's like dark when you see somebody you like seeing, like a friend that's on the

outskirts of your friend group. And then you realize like, well, I haven't really seen him for like three years. So like how many more times do we have that we see each other? Yeah. Do you believe that like friends just slowly disappear from your life? Like they kind of your friend evolves, right? So like, if you don't want to, there's a problem with Facebook, you get all these old friends from school, like when you were 10 years old, when Facebook started, like you don't really, you would add friend them.

And then you're like, why are we in touch again? Just keep the memories there. You know, like it's different life now. Yeah. I have, you know, that might be a guy thing or I don't know. There's certain friends I have that like we don't interact often, but we're still friends. Yeah.

Like, like every time I see him, I interact often, but we're still friends. Yeah. Like, like every time I see him, I think it's because we have a foundation of many shared experiences and many memories. I guess it's like nothing has changed. Like we've been almost like we've been talking every day, even if we haven't talked for a year. So that's like, yeah, that's deep. Yeah. So that, so I don't have to be interacting with them for them to be in a friend group. And then there's some people I interact with a lot. So it depends, but there's just this network of good human beings that can, I have like a real love for them. I can always count on them.

It's like if any of them called me in the middle of the night, I'll get rid of a body. You know, I'm there. I like how that's a different definition of friendship, but it's true. It's true. True friend. You've become more and more famous recently. How's that affect you? It's not recently because it's a gradual thing, right? Like it keeps keeps uh, and I also don't know why it keeps going. Does that put pressure on you to, cause you're pretty open on Twitter and you're just like basically building shit in the open. Yeah. And just not really caring if it's too

technical, if there's any of this, just being out there, does it put pressure on you as you become more popular to be a little bit more like collected and. being out there. Does it put pressure on you as you become more popular to be a little bit more collected? Man, I think the opposite, right? Because the people I follow are interesting because they say whatever they think and they ship or whatever. It's so boring that people start tweeting only about one topic.

I don't know anything about their personal life. I want to know about their personal life. You do podcasts, you ask about lifestyle or personality. That's the most interesting part of like business or sports. Like what's the behind the sport, the athlete, right? Behind the entrepreneur. That's interesting stuff. To be human. Yeah. Like you share that, you know, like I shared a tweet, it went too far, but like we were

cleaning the toilet because the toilet was clogged, you know? But like it's just real stuff because Jensen and Wong, the Nvidia guy, he says he started cleaning toilets, you know? That was cool. You tweeted something about the Denny's thing. Yeah. Like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you

know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know? But like, it's just real stuff, because Jensen and Wong, the Nvidia guy, he says he started cleaning toilets, you know? That was cool.

You tweeted something about the Denny's thing, I forget. Yeah, it was recent. Nvidia was started in a Denny diner table. And you made it somehow profound. Yeah, this one, this one. Nvidia, a three trillion dollar company was started in a Denny's, an American diner. People need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next billion or trillion dollar company was started in Denny's at American Diner. People need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next

billion or trillion dollar company. What's the first and second space? The home office. And then the in between the island. I guess, yeah. The island. Yeah. You need a space to like congregate, man.

And I found history on this. So 400 years ago in the coffee houses of Europe, the, like the scientific revolution, the enlightenment happened because they would go the coffee houses of Europe, the scientific revolution, the enlightenment happened because they would go to coffee houses, they would sit there, they would drink coffee, and they would work. They would write and they would do debates and they would organize marine routes. They would do all the stuff in coffee houses in Europe, in France, in Austria, in UK, in Holland. So we were always going to cafes to work and to have serendipitous conversations with other people and start businesses and stuff.

You asked me to come on here and we flew to America. The first thing I realized was that I've been to America before, but we were in this cafe and there's a lot of laptops, everybody's working on something, I took this photo. And then when you're in Europe, like large parts of Europe now, you kind of, you cannot use a laptop anymore. It's like no laptop, which I understand. But that is to you a fundamental place to create shit isn't that

natural organic, uh, coworking space of a coffee shop? For a lot of people, a lot of people have very small homes and coworking spaces are kind of boring. They're not very, they're private. They're not serendipitous. Kind of boring. Um, cafes are amazing because they random people can come in and ask you, what are you working on?

Or, you know, and not just left those people are also having conversations like they did 400 years ago, debates or whatever. It's things are happening. And man, I understand the aesthetics of it. Like it's like, Oh, start a bra, shipping is a bullshit startup, you know? Like, but there's something more there. Like there's people actually making stuff, making new companies that the society benefits from, like we're, we're benefiting from Nvidia. I think it's the U S GDP for sure're benefiting from Nvidia. I think it's the US GDP for sure is benefiting from

Nvidia. European GDP could benefit if we build more companies. And I feel in Europe, there's this vibe and this you have to connect things, but not not allowing laptops and cafes is kind of like part of the vibe, which is like, yeah, we're not really here to work. We're here to like enjoy life. I agree with this Anthony Bourdain. Like this tweet was quoted of Anthony Bourdain photo with him with cigarettes and a coffee in France. And he said, this is what cafes are for, I agree. But there is some element of like entrepreneurship. Like you have to allow people to dream big

and work their ass off towards that dream and then feel each other's energy as they interact with. That's one of the things I liked in Silicon Valley when I was working there, is like the cafes. There's a bunch of dreamers that you can make fun of them for like, everybody thinks they're gonna build a trillion dollar company, but like. Yeah, and it's all, it's not everybody wins.

90% of people will be bullshit, but 1% will win. But they're working their ass off. Yeah, and they're doing something. And you need to pass this startup bro, like, oh, it's startup on a level. No, it's not, it's people making cool shit. And this will benefit you, because this will create jobs for your company, your, your country and your region.

And I think in Europe, um, that's a big problem. Like we have a very anti, um, entrepreneurial dream, big and build shit. And this is really inspiring. This is pin tweet of yours, all the projects that you've tried and the ones that succeeded. That's very few. Mute life. This was for Twitter to share the mute list. Yeah.

Your mute words. Fire calculator, no more Google, maker rank, how much is my site project worth, climate finder, ideas AI. Airline list still runs runs but it doesn't make money airline list like compares the safety of airlines because I was nervous to fly so I was like let's collect all the data on crashes for all the airplanes. Bali C cable nice that's awesome.

Make village nomad gear 3d and virtual, Play My Inbox, like you mentioned. There's a lot of stuff. Yeah, man. I'm trying to find some embarrassing tweets of yours. You can go to the highlights tab, it has all the good shit. There you go. This was Dubai. POV, building an AI startup.

Wow, you're a real influencer. And if people copy this photo now and they change the screenshots, it becomes like a meme. Of course, you know. This is good. This is how Dubai looks. It's insane. It's beautiful.

Architecturize. It's crazy. The stories behind these cities. Yeah, the stories behind, for sure. So this is about the European economy where like... European economy landscape is ran by dinosaurs and today I studied it so I can produce you with my evidence. 80% of top EU companies were founded before 1950. Only 36% of top US companies were founded before 1950.

Yeah. So the median founding of companies in US is something like 1960 and the median of the top companies, right? And the median in Europe is like 1900 or something. Yeah. So it's, um, here, 1913 and 1963. So there's a 50 year difference. It's a good, um, representation of the very thing you were talking

about, the different difference in the cultures, entrepreneurial spirit of the peoples, but Europe used to be entrepreneurial. Like there was companies founded in 1800, 1850, 1900. But Europe used to be entrepreneurial. Like there was companies founded in 1800, 1850, 1900. It flipped like around 1950 where America took the lead. And I guess my point is like, I hope that Europe gets back to, because I'm European, I hope that Europe gets back to being an entrepreneurial culture where they build big companies again. Because right now all the old dinosaur companies control the economies.

They're lobbying with the government. Europe is also, they're infiltrating with the government where they create so much regulation. I think it's called regulatory capture, right? Where it's very hard for a newcomer to join in, to enter an industry because there's too much regulation. So actually regulation is very good for big companies because they can follow it. I can't follow it, right?

If I want to start an AI startup in Europe now, I cannot, because there's an AI regulation that makes it very complicated for me. I probably need to get notaries involved. I need to get certificates, licenses. Whereas in America, I can just open my laptop. I can start an AI startup right now, mostly. What do you think about EAC, Effective Accelerationist Movement?

You had Beth Jaisals on. I love Beth Jaisals on. I love Beth Jaisals and he's amazing. I think EAC is very needed to similarly create a more positive outlook on the future. Because people have been very pessimistic about society, about the future of society, climate change, all this stuff. EAC is a positive outlook on the future of society, climate change, all this stuff. Eoc is a positive outlook on the future. Technology can make us, we need to spend more energy.

We should find ways to of course get clean energy, but we need to spend more energy to make cooler stuff and go into space and build more technology that can improve society. And we shouldn't shy away from technology. Technology can be the answer for many things. Yeah, build more, don't spend so much time on fear mongering and cautiousness and all this kind of stuff. Some was okay, some was good,

but most of the time should be spent on building and creating and doing so unapologetically. It's a refreshing reminder of what made the United States great is all the builders, like you said, the entrepreneurs. Like we can't forget that in all the sort of discussions of how things could go wrong with technology and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, it goes together.

Look at China. China's now at the stage of like America, what, like 1900 or something? They're building rapidly, like insane. And obviously China has massive problems, but that comes with the whole thing. That comes with America in the beginning, all the massive problems, right? But I think it's very dangerous for a country or a region like Europe to, you get to this point

where you're kind of complacent, you're kind of comfortable. And then, you know, you can either go this or you can go this way, right? You're, you're from here. You go like this and then you can go this or this. I think you should go this way and, uh, yeah, go off. And, and, uh, I think it's the problem is the, the, the mind culture. So EOC, I made EUOC, which is like the European kind of version. Um, I made like hoodies and stuff. So a lot of people wear like this, this make Europe great again hat.

Um, I made it red first, but it became too like Trump. So now it's more like European blue, you know, make your grade again. All right. Uh, okay. So you had a incredible life, very successful, built a lot of cool stuff. So what advice would you give to young people about how to do the same? Man, I would listen to like nobody just do what you think is good and follow your heart. Right?

Like, uh, everybody peer presses you into doing stuff you don't want to do. And like they tell you like parents or family or society and tell you, but like, try your own thing, you know, because it probably, it might work out. You can, you can steer the ship, you know, it probably doesn't work out immediately. You probably go into very bad times like I did as well, relatively, right. But in the end, if you're smart about it, you can make things work and you can, you can create your own little life of things as you did, you know, as I did. And I think that should be more promoted, like do your own thing. There's space in the economy and in society for do your own thing, you know?

It's like, you know, like little villages, everybody would sell, I would sell bread, you would sell meat, everybody can do their own little thing. You don't need to, you know, be a normie, as you say, you can be what you really wanna be, you know? And like go all out doing that thing. Yeah, you gotta go all out. Cause if you do, if you have assets, you cannot succeed.

You need to go lean into the, to the outcast stuff, lean into the, um, being different and just doing whatever it is that you want to do, right? You got a whole asset. Yeah. Whole assets. Yeah. This was an incredible conversation. It was an honor to finally meet you.

It was an honor to be your Lex. To talk to you and to be your Lex. To talk to you and keep doing your thing. Keep inspiring me and the world with all the cool stuff you're building. Thank you, man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Peter Levels.

To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Drew Houston, Dropbox co-founder. By the way, I love Dropbox. Anyway, Drew said, don't worry about failure. You only have to be right once. Thank you for listening.

I hope to see you next time. Music