#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life

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 the 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.
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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 there's some other nuance in that tweet.
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 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 ruled 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 they make it super easy.
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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 Austin right now, I'm going to go out and run.
Anywhere from 5 to 12 miles. I'm feeling good right now.
So I'm thinking like 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. 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. And 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 drinkag1.com.

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.
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This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, 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 BetterHelp 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. 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 8sleep and it's 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 each 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,

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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, it 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, okay? On a cold bed, short nap feels like home.
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in the description.

And now, dear friends, 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, because 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, like I need to go fast. I need to make things fast to see if an idea works, right? I have an idea in my mind and I build it, build like a micro 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 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 like, it's very rapid.
And it's like, if I compare it to, for example, Google, you know, like our big tech companies, especially Google right now is kind of struggling. Like they made like they made all they invented all the ai stuff years ago and they never really shipped like they could have shipped chat gpt 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 could didn't do it um and it's because these big organizations it's it's it can make you very slow so 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, like, shorts a lot. And I usually just wear shorts and no t-shirt because I'm always too hot.
Like I'm always overheating. Thank you for showing up, not just in your underwear, but 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, overhead press. Over press, like shoulder press.

Yeah.

Okay.

But it feels good because you're doing like, you win.

Because when you, what is it? I do 60 kilos, so it's like 120 pounds or something.

Like 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.

Yeah, victory pose.

I do bench press squats, deadlifts.

Hence the mug.

Yeah. Talking to my therapist.
Yeah. It's a deadlift.
Yeah. Because it acts like therapy for me, you know? Yeah, it is.
Which is controversial to say. Like, if I say this on Twitter, people get angry.
Physical hardship is a kind of therapy. Yeah.
I just re-watched 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 yeah 100% like there's something about that physical physical yeah toil yeah my dad taught me that my dad always does like construction in the house like he's always renov 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. So, 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 uh bring it to the other side and just you know do like physical labor do like hard work and do something like get set a goal do something and i i kind of did that with startups too yeah construction is not about the destination man it's about the journey yeah 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

right

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 a hard work, you know?

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, right?

That's the point.

So I was always coding.

I was always making music.

I made electronic music,

drama-based 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.
But 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 if millions people suddenly start using it and it becomes big um 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 um founder friends and they tell me secretly, like with 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 indie. It's 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's interesting how people are pulled towards that to scale to go really big and you don't have 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. Look at Elon.
He's doing things a million times bigger than me. Would I want to do that? I don't know.
You can't really choose these things. But I really respect that.
I think Elon's very different from VC founders. It's 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 this 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, you know, hardware stuff.
And that I really respect. You said that there's been a few low points in your life.
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, to that time when you were at a low point? So I was in Holland and I graduated 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, utilities at each other's houses, you go party but when people get jobs they only party like 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 want to do something else. And I was starting getting this like, I think it's like Saturn return.
You know, when you turn 27. It's like some concept where Saturn returns to the same place in the orbit that it was when you're born.
I'm learning so many things. It's some astrology thing, you know? So many truly special artists died when they were 27.
Exactly, something of 27, man. And it was for me, like I started going crazy because I didn't really see like my future in Holland, buying a house, going, living in the suburbs and stuff.
So I flew out. I went to Asia, started digital nomading and did that for a year.
And then that made me feel even worse, you know? 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 i was getting very depressed and like i'm like an outcast you know my money was shrinking i wasn't making money anymore a lot i was making 500 a month or something and i was you know 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's 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?

A hundred percent. Like I think so.
Yeah.

It's a cool company. They just made it so easy.
You can just click.

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 because that used to be a huge problem. Merchant.
Just adding a thing, a button where you can like pay for a thing. Dude.
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 Stripe, you would have like, I think it was called World Pay.
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 which was like, he's liable for like 100 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 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.
Yeah. So what, startup number one, what was that, like what were you you feeling what were you sitting 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 had like Flash.
Were you using Flash? Yeah, my album, my CD album was using Flash. Yeah, yeah.
I sold my CD, yeah. Kids, Flash was a software.
Flash was cool. This is like the break.
Like grandpa, you know, but Flash was cool. Yeah, and there was, what's it called? Boy, I should remember this, ActionScript.
There's some kind of programming language. Yeah, yeah, ActionScript.
Oh, yeah. It was in Flash.
Back then, that was the JavaScript, you know? know the javascript yeah and i thought that's gonna that's supposed to be the dynamic thing that takes over the internet i invested so many hours in learning and steve jobs killed it steve jobs steve jobs said flash sucks stop using it and everyone's like okay that guy was right though right yeah i don't know yeah well it was a closed platform i think and closed but it's ironic because apple you know they're not very open right but back then steve was like this is closed we should not use it and it's as security problems i think which sounded like a cop-out like i just wanted to say that to make it look kind of bad um the flesh was cool yeah yeah it was cool for a time yeah it listen animated gifs were cool for a time too yeah they came back in a different way yeah as a meme though i mean like i i remember when gifs were actually cool not ironically cool yeah like there's like on the internet you would have like a dancing rabbit or something like this and that was really exciting you had like the you know lex homepage you know at least everything was centered yeah and you had like peter's homepage and then the on the construction yeah gif which was like a guy with a helmet and the lights it was amazing banners uh yeah that's how before like google adsense you would have like banners for advertising it was amazing yeah and a lot of links to porn i think yeah or that was where the merchant accounts people would use for people would make money a lot only money made on internet then it was like porn or a lot of it. Yeah.
It was a dark place. It's still a dark place.
Yeah. But there's beauty in the darkness.
Anyway, so you did some basic HTML. Yeah.
Yeah, but I had to learn the actual coding. So this was good.
It was a good idea to like every month launch a startup so I could learn to code, learn basic stuff. But it was still very scrappy because i didn't have time to which is 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 i 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 because back then my friends we would send we would send like cool it was before spotify i think we would send like uh 2013 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 I made an app that would log into Gmail, get them emails and find them ones with YouTube links and then make like kind of like a gallery of your songs.
Like essentially Spotify and my friends loved it. Was it scraping it? Like what was it? No, it uses like POP, like pop or IMAP, you know, it would actually check your email.
So that like 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 went on, I think like some tech media and stuff. And I was like, that's 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 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, like, don't give me all the emails, just give me the ones with YouTube links, you know, 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 really do this. I've seen a few like Boomerang.
There's a few apps that are like good, but just, 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? Because it's not like a real app.
So it's not like people don't value it. People vote, oh, this plugin should be free.
You know, when I want to want to use a plugin in google sheets or something i'm not going to pay for it like 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.

Yeah.

Oh, we also have

a Chrome extension, you know.

I wish the Chrome extension

would be the product.

I wish Chrome would support that.

Like where you could pay

for it easily.

Because like imagine,

I can imagine a lot of products

that would just live as extensions,

like improvements for social media.

Yeah.

It's like GPTs, you know?

GPTs, yeah.

Like these GPTs,

they're going to charge money for it now.

You get a ref share,

I think, from OpenAI.

I made a lot of them also.

Right.

We'll talk about it.

So let's rewind back.

It's a pretty cool idea

to do 12 startups in 12 months.

What's 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 make the, you know, you need to build the product actually because it needs to be something to pay for. Do you need to build a login system? Maybe no.
Maybe you can build some scrappy login system. Like for PhotoEye, 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 um 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 subreddit you know like you solve that problem say some 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 narrow it down what you're building.
Time is limited. Yeah.

I actually can't That could work. But you need to be very narrowed 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 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 this is the peak and so i would not kill yourselves it's very important just get through it you know but because you have nothing you have probably no money you have no business you have no job like Jeremy 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 you need stuff you need like a family you need things around you you need to build a life for yourself if you don't build a, 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? 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 nomads

that they kill themselves.

And I haven't checked like the comparison

with like baseline people,

like suicide rate,

but I have a hunch,

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 nomads 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 constantly an outcast in that you're different from city to city you don't have a home anymore you feel disrooted and you're constantly an 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 and then i think that 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 was an american guy drugs via UPS to Americans, you know, on his 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, you know? 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 gonna graduate university and then I'm gonna, 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. So I was like, Asia is easy.
Thailand is easy.

And 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 struggled on this on accident.

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, you know, 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. You can 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 free. You're disattached from anything and anybody.
You're disattached from your culture. You're disattached from the culture you're probably in because 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 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,

there was like drugs being shipped to America,

like diet pills and stuff,

like non-FDA proof stuff, you know? And they would like, 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? Ah, that part of it. Okay.
That kind of vibe, you know? Like kind of sleazy Ecom vibe. I'm not saying all Ecom is sleazy, you know? 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.

E-com, like, oh, bro, you got to drop shit.

Yeah.

And 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 want to 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, you know, but they also think their cool shit is cool.
So, you know, but I wanted to make like real like startups and that was my thing. I would read Hacker News, you know, like Y Combinator and they were making cool stuff, so I wanted to make cool stuff.
I mean, 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

in cafes or working in

just

the freedom

that envelops

you with that way of life. Because anything is possible.
You can just get up and go. I think it was amazing.
Like we would work, 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 other friends, and we would work until like the morning when the sun came up because at night the co-working space was silent, you know, there was nobody else.
And I would wake up like 6 p.m. or 5 p.m.
I would drive to the co-working space on a motorbike. I would buy like 30 hot lattes from a cafe.
How many? 30. Because there was like six people coming or we didn't know.
Sometimes people would come in. Did you did you say 3-0-30? yeah nice and we would drink like four per person or something you know man it's Bali I don't know if they were powerful lattes you know but they were lattes and we would put them in a plastic bag and then we would drive there and all the coffee was like falling you know everywhere and then we'd go and go and have these coffees here and we'd work all night we'd play like techno techno music and everybody would just work in there.
Like this was literally like business people. They would work in their startup and we'd all try and make something.
And then the sun would come up and the morning people, you know, the yoga girls and yoga guys would come in, you know, after the yoga class at six and they'd say, hey, good morning. And we're like, we look like this, you know, and we're like, what's up? How are you 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 um and that was very fun so it's just a bunch of you techno music blasting all through through the night.
Yeah. More like like industrial.
Not like this. See, I got, 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.
So 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. This 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 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 yeah 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 they you remember that you visited? I think still 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.

And good.

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.
And it's quite hot, but that's a very cool place. Pros and cons.
I love Brazil also. My girlfriend is Brazilian, but I do love, not just because of that, but I like Brazil.
The problem still is the safety issue. It's like in America, it's localized.
It's hard for Europeans to understand safety is localized to specific areas. So if you go to the right areas, it's amazing.
Brazil is amazing. If you go to the wrong areas, maybe you die.
Yeah, I mean, that's true. But it's not true in Europe.
In Europe, it's much more average. That's true.
You're right. You're right.
It's more averaged out. Yeah.
I like it when there's strong neighborhoods. When you cross a certain street and you're in a dangerous part of town.
Man, yeah. 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 well- But you don't feel scared? Well, I don't.
I like danger. BJJ.

No, not even just that.

I think danger is interesting.

Yeah.

Danger reveals something about yourself, about others.

Also, I like the full range of humanity.

Yeah.

So I don't like the mellowed out aspects of humanity.

I have friends.

There's no much friends that are exactly like this. They go to the kind of broken areas.

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.

Like-

Wait, who's that?

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. 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 posts and like it was a common thing when you would wake up and this was like, because 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 because i was feeling lonely so i built this website and i stopped feeling lonely like i started make organizing meetups and making friends and um and it was very common people would say they would wake up and they would forget where they are yeah like for the first half minute and i had to look outside like where am i which country which sounds really like privileged but it's more like funny like you literally don't know where they are like for the first half minute and I had to look outside like where am I which country

which sounds really like

privileged but it's more like funny

like

you literally don't know

where you are

because you're so disrooted

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

Thank you. 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 is, it 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 you 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, I don't know, it's like you awaken to the possibilities of this place when you feel like that.

It's like, great.

And it's even when you're doing 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 don't get bored yet.

And that's why people get addicted to travel, you travel. Back to startups.
You wrote a book on how to do this thing and gave a great talk on it, how to do startups. The book's called Make Bootstrappers Handbook.
I was wondering if you could 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 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 I 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. Like- New Lex Freeman doorknob.
Yeah. Like design of certain things.

Like-

New Lex Freeman doorknob.

50 dollars.

That one I know how much incredible design work

has gone into.

It's really interesting.

Doors and doorknobs.

It's 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 interesting ideas, you better than the current fork designs yeah and the other aspect of it is you're saying like in order to come up with interesting ideas you gotta try to live a more interesting life yeah but that's where travel comes in yeah 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 uh like dude especially 10 years ago nobody knew about this like 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 wechat same thing like in indonesia or thailand you have one app that you can order food if 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, for example,

that's called 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 people already did in the rest of the world.

And also traveling in general

just gives you more problems

because travel is uncomfortable. 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 the 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 idea dumps? Like, do you have a document where you just keep writing stuff? Yeah, you used to have like a, because 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 think like because i already have money i can do more things uh based on technology so for example ai when i found out about when stable diffusion came or chat gbt and stuff all this thing 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't work and that's very common with startup founders I think they have tech but actually people don't need the tech right can you actually explain it'd be cool to talk about some of the stuff you've created can you explain this photoai.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 as you want anywhere in any clothes with facial expressions like happy or sad or poses, all this stuff. So how does it work? This is a link to a gallery of ones done on me.
So on the left, you have the prompts, the box. 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. 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 cursors to...
Yeah. So some don't look like you.
So the hit and miss rate is, like, I don't know,'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 Lex's, it's great.
It's getting more and more sexual and it's making me very uncomfortable. Man, but that's the problem with these models.
No, we we need to talk about this because the models of Stable Diffusion, so the photorealistic models that are like fine-tuned, they were all trained on porn in the beginning and it 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 and it doesn't have enough resolution or something to do that well that well. But I started seeing these base models, these fine-tuned 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 a 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 the thing.
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.
Like a nipple detector? Oh, NSF the journalists get very angry if they, you know. There was a journalist, I think, that got angry.
They'd use 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 kind 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 i'm i'm i'm uh i'm a little bit disturbed you can zoom in on the cat if you want like like yeah it's a very sad cat it doesn't have a nose it doesn't have a nose but this man but this is the problem with ai startups because they all act like it's perfect like this is 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.

In Tokyo?

Yeah.

And then...

You could say like at night

with neon lights

like you can add more detail. I'll go in Austin.
Do you think you'll know yeah in texas in austin texas cowboy hats in texas yeah as a cowboy as a cowboy it's gonna go so uh towards the porn direction it's it's man i hope not it's the 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. Do I still use jQuery? Yes.
The only one? Yes, still. 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 like openly talking about it. But everyone's using PHP.
Like 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.
Like all the JavaScript frameworks are so what do you call it, wieldy. 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. Can you actually just speak to that stack? You build all your websites, apps, startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML.
Yeah. JavaScript with jQuery, PHP, and SQLite.
So that's a really simple stack, and you get stuff done really fast with that. Can you just speak to the philosophy behind that? I think it's accidental, that's the thing I knew.
Like I knew PHP,

I knew HTML, CSS,

you know,

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,

you know,

because this obviously

is a much better language than PHP.

And I never learned it.

I never did it

because at the end of time,

these things were growing like this and I was launching more projects and I never had time. I never did it because 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

I'll start coding

properly and I never got to it.

I sometimes wonder if I need to

learn that stuff. It's still a to-do item for me to

really learn Node.js or

Flask or these

kind of... React, Fue.
Yeah, React and it's it feels like a responsible software engineer There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are not going to be able to do that.

There should be a lot of people who are 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 people making stuff, like startups.
And if you want wanna be an entrepreneur, probably maybe you shouldn't. I wonder if there's like, I really wanna 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 300 million dollars and the idea is that you need to make the developers and new developers like when you're 18 or 20 years old right 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 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 information out there about learning to code because they, you know, they pay YouTubers, they pay influencers, developer influencers, it's a big thing to like, and same thing what happens with like 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, because this PHP thing works and I don't really, I'm optimizing for anything, I'm just doing, it just works. And I never understood like why, like I understand there's new technologies that are better and there 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 influencers 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, it's like

when you say better,

it's like,

can we get some data on the

better? Because 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 uh shipping features how many bugs they create how many security holes uh 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 no now as you're saying it i want to know if that's true. Because PHP was just the majority of websites on the internet.
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 question 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 you,

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

the technology

that's simple, that's pragmatic, that's like, that works uh that's not overly complicated doesn't make your life like a living hell you know and use a framework when it obviously solves a problem a direct problem that you of course yeah of course i'm not saying you should code without a framework i mean you should use whatever you want but yeah i think it's suspicious you know and um and i think it. When I talk about it on Twitter, like there's a lot, there's this army comes out, you know? There's this framework armies.
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 did you do this week? Yeah, and did you make money with it, you know? Did you charge users? Is it a real business? And yeah uh 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 is really well done so this is all just jQuery and yeah this is really well done so like tell me take me through the journey of photo ai like you don't know what most of the world doesn't know much about uh stable diffusion or any of this any of the generative ai stuff and so you're thinking okay how can i build cool stuff with this yeah what was the origin story of photo ai i think uh it started because stable diffusion came out so stable diffusion like this the first like generative image model ai model and um i 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.

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 you 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, I would generate like architecture houses. So I made a website called thishousedoesnotexist.org.
And it generated like, they called it like house porn, that one. Like house porn is like a subreddit.
And this was Stable Diffusion, like the first version. So it looks really, you can click for another photo.
So it generates like 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.
Now things look much better. It's really, really well done.
Wow. And it also generates like a description.
And you can upvote. Is it nice? Upvote itvote it yeah man there's so much to talk to you about like the choices here it's really well this is very scrappy in the bottom there's like a ranking of the most upvoted houses so these are the top voted if you go to old time you see quite beautiful ones yeah so this one is my favorite the number one it's 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, because I was getting bored of it too.
Just continuous house porn, like everything starts looking the same. But then I saw it was really good at interior.
So I pivoted to interiorai.com, I tried to like upload first generated interior designs.

And then I tried to do like it 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 in within a week made 10k 20k a month and now still makes like 40k 50k a month uh 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 wanted to do so i would find really beautiful interior design make a gallery 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 avatarai.me i couldn't get the dot com and this was uh yeah avatarai.me well now it's forwards to photo because it pivoted got it but this was more like cheesy thing. 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 an 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 dollars 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 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 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 a push notification to everybody

who have these avatars.

Yeah.

Man, they made great,

I think they made so much money.

And I feel like I'm going to be a hype. This is going to be, and 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

these 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 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 um where you could take photos without actually needing a photographer needing a studio you don't just you know just type it. And I've been working on that 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 hilarious photos. I think you were using yourself as a case study, right? Yeah.
Yeah, so 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 10k a day on this you know that's amazing that's amazing and then the nesta tweet like that's a launch tweet and And then before there is like the me hacking on it. Oh, I see.
So that, okay. So October 26, 2022.
Yeah. I trained an ML model on my face.
Because my eyes are quite far apart. I learned when I did YouTube, I would put like a photo of like my DJ photo, you know, my mixture and people would say I'd look like a hammerhead shark.
It was like a top comment. So then I realized my eyes are far apart.
Yeah, the internet helps you figure out what you look like. Yeah, helps you realize how you look, you know? Boy, do I love the internet.
So first trap. Well, what is, is this, wait.
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 a 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 you were learning all this super quickly. What are some interesting details you remember from that time for 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 crop by the layout, but they're square photos.
So they're 512 by 512 because that's stable diffusion. But nevertheless, not great capture of the face.
It's not like a collection of several hundred photos that are like exactly like i would imagine that too when i started i was like oh this must be like some 3d scan technology right yeah 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 um registered a domain name and this was not even it was a stripe payment link which means you have literally a 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 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 um 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 um but the problem was i didn't have code to automate this. So I had to do 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 I 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 right so at first it was the type form and they uploaded through the type form stripe checkout an image yeah and then you were like that image is downloaded did you write a script to export no it's download images myself it's a zip file to unzip the zip file and you unzipped it yeah unzipped one boat yes and then i know i'm because you know do things don't skill pa says, right? So, and then I would trade it and then I would email them the photos, I think from my personal email, say, here's your, here's your avatars, you know? And they liked it. They were like, wow, it's amazing.
You emailed them with your personal email. They didn't have an email address on this domain.
And this is like 100 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 with 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?

Can't say anything. Just like shirtless pics.
GDPR, you know, like privacy. Right.
European regulation. I can't share anything.
But I was very, I was like, wow. And, 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 going to die down very fast.
And I 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 is 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-tuned stable diffusion. Like now I use Replicate.
Back then, I used different platforms, which was funny because that platform, when this thing took off, I would tweet. Because I tweet always like how much money these websites make.
And then so you call it Vendor, right? 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? They say, 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're also have a large platform and a lot of people respect you.
So you can literally come out and say that. Yeah, but I think it's kind of dirty to cancel a company or something.
I prefer just bringing my business elsewhere, but there was no elsewhere back then. Right.
So I started talking to other AI model ML platforms, so Replicate was on those platforms, and I started DMing the CEO, say, can you please create, it's it's called Dreambooth, this fine tuning of yourself. Can you 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, he said, we're doing it. We're launching this.
And then this company became, it was like 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 gouge 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 it. Like they never priced gouge 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, 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 speech. Video.
Find two models. They do anything, yeah.
It's a very cool company. 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 website even looks weird now.
It started as like a machine learning platform. That was like, I didn't even understand did it was just too too ml you know like you would understand because you're in the ml world i wouldn't know it's noob 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 so many hacks the hack it's like 100 hacks to make it work what what's what are some secrets now well not not the secrets but the more like insights maybe about the human face and the human body like what kind kind of stuff gets messed up a lot? I think people, well, man, 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 to, 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 like really, really have to sort of come to 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, that's 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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, or all this kind of stuff.
And a lot of us, this is a dark aspect of psychology. We focus on some small flaws.
Yeah. This is why I hate plastic surgery, for example.
People try to remove 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. Yeah.
And it's not like, oh my God. And people notice it.
People notice your hammerhead eyes, you know. But it's like, that's me.
That's my face. So I love myself.
And that's confidence is attractive yes right 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 the average face makes you beautiful all that yeah and obviously different for men and women a different age it's all this kind of stuff it all, the personality, all of that, when the face comes alive,

that also is the thing that makes you beautiful.

Yeah.

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 resemblance of the body because some people are skinny, some people are 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.
And I know that other people, they use, again, AI models to detect what are the best photos in this training set and then train on those. But it all it's all about 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 the gpus like um the gold do you have any guidelines for people of like how to get good data how to give good data to fine tune on 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 shirt 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 that's trained um and everything else to be diverse like different so diverse lighting as well yeah outside inside but there's no like this is a problem there's no like manual for this and nobody knew we were all just especially two years ago we're 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 because it's a black box.
And like Karpathy, I think, says this. We don't really know how this thing works, but it does something, but nobody really knows why, right? Like we cannot 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 studies that tries to figure out, tries to break things apart and understand how it works.
But, you know, there's also the data side and the, the actual like 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 like at the forefront of figuring that out about the human face and humans really care about the human face.
They're very vain. you know like i want to look good in your podcast for example yeah for sure and one of the things i actually would love to uh like rigorously use photo ai because for the thumbnails i take portraits of people i didn't i don't know shit about photography uh i basically used your approach for photography i like google how do you take photographs 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 like and you have to have like the lenses and i talked to to a guy an expert of uh shaping the sound in a room okay and because i was was thinking, I'm gonna do a podcast studio, whatever.
I should probably do a sound treatment on the room. And when he showed up and analyzed the room, he thought everything I was doing was horrible.
And that's when I realized, you know what, I don't need experts in my life. Did you kick him out of the house? No, I didn't kick him.
I said, thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Great tips.
Bye. I just felt like there is, you know, 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 going to gain wisdom from that.
And I ultimately come up with a PHP solution, PHP and jQuery solution. PHP Studio.
I have a little suitcase. I just the the basic sort of uh consumer type of stuff one light it's great yeah and look at you you're like 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 you know 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 this is 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? Marketing, you know, marketing does that to people.
They want to buy this stuff. But like, man, you can make a Hollywood movie on an iPhone, you know? If the content is good enough, and it will probably be original because you would be using an iPhone for it, you know? 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.

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.
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 uh creating great portraits of people guest photos yeah guest photos for example that's a small use case but for me that's uh 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 Maybe my conception of who they are, what makes them beautiful. Yeah.
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 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 Photos. Yeah, but it's even more fun if you do it yourself.
So you train the models. You can learn about like ControlNet.
ControlNet is where, for example, your photos in your podcast are usually like from the angle, right? So you can create a ControlNet face pose that's always like this. So every model, every photo you generate uses this ControlNet 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 like 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.

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, new models coming out all the time.

Yeah.

Like how do you pay attention?

How do you stay on top of everything?

I think you need to join Twitter, X.

You know, X is amazing now. And the whole AI industry is on X.
And they're all like anime avatars. So it's funny because my friends ask me this.
Who should I follow to 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 send them some URL and they all start laughing.
Like, what is this'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're they use anime avatars um i don't um but those people hack around and they publish what they're discovering um they talk about 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 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 are building stuff yeah 100 i like twitter that for that most like building stuff like yeah seeing other because it inspires you to build and it's 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 want to start going 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 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? So I had this photo AI and a lot of people using it 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 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 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 because i have a million photos generated anyway so on like 10% users i would um randomly test parameters and then i would see if they would because you can favorite a photo or you can download it i would measure if they favored or like the photo and then i would a b test and you test for significance and stuff uh which parameters were were better and which were worse so you're starting 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 it themselves and i tell them 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 that choose and letting the users help do the search in the space of models and parameters for you. Yeah, yeah.
But actually, so like Stable Diffusion, I used 1.5, 2.0 came out, Stable Diffusion XL came out, all these new versions, and they were 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 so most of the people are still on Stable Diffusion 1.5 and meanwhile Stable Diffusion the company went like the CEO left a lot of drama happened because they couldn't make money and yeah so they gave it's very interesting they gave us 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, or 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 are really small like people like me who make these small apps that are using the model and 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.
So it's kind of like those frameworks, but then they didn't bribe enough influencers 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 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 But I can build something. Would you actually write down like space company?

No, I think asteroid mining would be very cool.

Because 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 is 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 asteroid mining and the robotics yeah together no exactly this is it this is we do this not because it's easy but because we thought it would be easy exactly that's me with that's me 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 rockets oh you use something like SpaceX to get out of space yeah you hire SpaceX to this dog robot or whatever.
So is there actually exist a notebook where you wrote down asteroid mining? No, I used, back then I used Trello. Trello.
Yeah, but now I don't really, I use Telegram. I write it down like saved messages and 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 messages to yourself thing also, yeah.
So you're talking to yourself on Telegram. Yeah, use like aad not forget stuff and then I pin it 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 um yeah notion where you have systems for note taking you're not you're notepad you're notepad.exe guy if you're a Windows user man I some YouTubers doing this, like there's a lot of these productivity gurus also and they do this whole like 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 like draw on paper, like draw like a calendar, you know, like people, students use this and you can do coloring and stuff. And I'm like, dude, I did this for a week and 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.
This is the idea that if you think about an idea for eight hours versus like the first idea that pops into your mind. And sometimes there is subconscious like stuff that you've been thinking about for many years.
That's really interesting. It emerges, I wrote it wrong, cause I don't know, I'm not native English, but it emerges from your subconscious, right? It comes from the, like a water is your subconscious and in here it's boiling.
And then when it's ready, it's like ding, it's like a microwave, it comes out and there you have your idea. You think you have ideas like that? Yeah, all the time, 100%.
It's 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.
It's not ready yet. You need to boil more.
Yeah. And it's like a soup of ideas that's cooking.
It's 100%. 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 starter founders are too early with their idea. Yeah.
100%. Robotics is an interesting one for that because like 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, like 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 companies they've 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 a it's like a solution look for a problem for now you know military obviously is useless but like am i do i 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 it 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 where, like,

we don't need these computers.

They're like a hype.

And it also went, like, in kind of, like, you know, ways.

Yes, yeah, but the hype is the thing that allowed the thing

to proliferate sufficiently to where people's minds

Thank you. And it also went in kind of like, you know, waves.
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. 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 is limited with the kind of ways it interacts with you.
That's just one example. I sometimes think about that as like, if some people in this world were kind of born

in the whole existence,

it's like they were meant to build the thing.

Yeah.

You know?

I guess sometimes wonder what I was meant to do.

Do you have these plans for your life?

You have these dreams?

I think you're meant to build robots.

Okay, me first.

Maybe, maybe.

That's a sense I've had, but it could be other things.

It could hilariously not 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 also kind of life.
Like life brings you to, it's very hard to 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, yeah, 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 that's like i think that's the best way to live your life so allow whatever to happen like do you know what you're doing the next few years is it possible that it'll 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 um that's

something that will figure itself out it will crystallize where you know you will get you will

get sent by the waves to somewhere where you want to live for example what you're going to do i think

that's a really good way to live your life it's i i think most stress comes from trying to control

like hold things like um it's kind of buddhist you know you need to like lose control let it lose

And if you're not going to do that, I think most stress comes from trying to control like hold things it's kind of Buddhist you need to lose control

and things will happen

when you do mushrooms, when you do drugs

psychedelic drugs, the people that start

that are like control freaks

get bad trips, right?

because you need to let go

I'm pretty control freak actually

when I did mushrooms when I was 17

it was very good and at the end it wasn't so good

because I tried to control

now it's going too much, now I need to stop

Thank you. freak actually and um when i did mushrooms when i was 17 i i it was very good and at the end it wasn't so good because i tried to control it's 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 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 um took ayahuasca that lesson is deeply within me already that you can't control anything.
I think I probably learned that the most in Jiu Jitsu. So just let go and relax.
And that's why I had just an incredible experience. There's like 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.

Yeah.

Just surf the way.

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 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 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 you can use that you already know. So if you cannot code, you can use a spreadsheet.
If you cannot use a spreadsheet, like whatever, you can always use, for example, a website generator, like Wix or something or Squarespace, right? Like you don't need to code to build a startup. All you need is a idea for a product, build something like a landing page or something um put a stripe button on there and then make it um and if you can 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 like the tech stack is not actually it's not the most important of a business when you're starting on a business the important thing is that you validate that there's a market that there's a product that people want to pay for um so use whatever you can use and if you can't code use you know spreadsheets landing page generators whatever yeah and the crowdsourcing element is fascinating uh it's cool it's cool when a lot of people start using it you get to learn so fast fast.
Yeah. Like I've actually did the spreadsheet thing.
You share a spreadsheet publicly, and I made it editable. Yeah.
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 push-ups and pull-ups every day.
Yeah, I remember this, man, yeah. And like, and also Google Sheets is pretty limited in that everything's allowed.
So people could just write anything in any cell and they can create new, uh, sheets, new tabs. And it just exploded.
And, uh, one of the things that I really enjoyed is there's very few trolls, um, because actually other people would delete the trolls. There would be like this weird war of like, they want like to protect the thing.
It's an immune system that's inherent to the thing. It becomes a society, you know, in a 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 going to go to the.
Self-organizing. Yeah, it's insane.
I mean, but that kind of crowdsourcing element is really powerful. And if you can create a product that used that 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. Yeah.
So you 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 and the blog post.

Can you explain what Hood Maps is

and what this whole process was?

So I was traveling and I was still trying to find problems, right?

And I would go, I would discover that

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 and say, don't go to the center, go to, you know, southeast of the center, the Jordan or the Pijp or something, more hip hipster areas like a little more authentic culture of Amsterdam that's where I would live you know and where I would go um 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 colored 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.
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...
I mean, this is the cool thing. People should really check it out.
Is this how it started? Because, like, you 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 write, dude, I feel embarrassed about myself. It's called being alive.
Nice. So you don't know anything about, so Canvas is a way, it's HTML5 thing that allows you to draw shapes.
Yeah, draw images. Just draw pixels, essentially.
Yeah. And that was special back then because before you could only have like elements, right? So you want to draw a pixel, use a confus.
And I knew I needed to draw pixels because I need to draw these colors. And I thought like 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 kind of shows um so i did that with canvas and then i started drawing um and then i thought like obviously other people need to edit this because i cannot draw all these things myself so i crowdsource it again and i uh 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 like okay so msum center there's like six people say it's tourist this part of the center but two people say it's like hipster okay 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 so that so if most people say it's tourist it's tourist 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 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 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. Man, I did 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-first 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 works.
And within a week, I had enough data and there was like cities that did really well, like Los Angeles. A lot of people started using it.
Like most data is 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.
So there's always a business area, right? And then there's a residential. The residential is gray.
So I thought those were the most common things in the city, kind of. And a little bit meme-y.
Like, it's almost fun to label it. Yeah.
I mean, obviously, it's simplified. But you need to simplify this stuff.
You know, you don't want to have too many categories. And it's essentially just like using a paintbrush where you select the color in the bottom.
You select the 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 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 added upvoting so that the tags could be upvoted 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 oh boy drunk hipsters 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 accurate overpriced and underwhelming let me see let me make sure this is accurate let's see 36th for people who know Austin know that that's important to label Sixth Street is famous in Austin Dirty Sixth Drunk Frat Boys accurate Drunk Frat Bros continued on Sixth West Sixth Drunk Douche Bros I go from Frat to Douche I mean it's very accurate so far uh they only let hot people live here that's I think that might be accurate uh 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 here I wanna know this story so that's that's all user contributed, and that's like stuff I couldn't come up with because I don't know Austin. I don't know the memes here and the subcultures.
And then me as a user can upvote or downvote this. So this is completely crowdsourced.
That's like because of Reddit, you know, upvote, downvote. It's good 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 a week after and uh 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 yeah uh we're now looking at an image where it's just a sea of pixels that call different colors in a city so how do you combine that to be a thing that actually makes it some sense i think here the problem was that you have this data but it's like it's not locked to one location yeah so i had to normalize it so when you click when you draw on the map it will show you the specific pixel location and you can convert the pixel location to a gps coordinate right like a latitude 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 or this street, right? So that's what I did. I just took the decimals off and then I saved it like this.
And then 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 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 don't want to contact enterprise sales i don't want to go on a call schedule with some calendar so i switched to map box and then had map box for years and then it went viral and i had a bill of twenty thousand dollars was like last year um 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 map platform. So it's a very expensive project and never made any dollar money, but it's very fun, but it's very expensive.
What do you learn from that? So like from that experience, because when you leverage somebody else's through the API. Yeah.
I mean, I don't think a map hosting service should cost this much, you know, i could host it myself but that would be i don't know how to do that you know but i could do that yeah it's 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's it's uh it hasn't worked you talked about like possibly doing advertisements on it or some yeah but or people sponsoring people sponsoring it. Yeah.
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 project is kind of like, it's kind of cool.
So 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 monetize everything like some projects are just cool and you know it's like it's cool to have hood maps exist i i want this to exist right yeah there's a bunch of stuff you've created that i'm just glad 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, right? Like 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

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? 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, Nomadlist makes money.
Yeah. So what was the story behind Nomadlist? So Nomadlist started because I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand, which is now like the second city here.

And I was, you know, working on my laptop.

I met like 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, you know Asia, it was very slow, like 0.5 megabits.
So you couldn't watch a YouTube video. Thailand weirdly had quite fast internet.
But I wanted to find other cities where I could go to work on my laptop or whatever and travel. But we needed fast internet.
So I was like, let's crowdsource this information with a spreadsheet. And I also needed to know the cost of living because 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, you know, some money that I could actually rent something.
And there was Nomad List and it still runs. I think it's now almost 10 years.
So just to describe how it works,

I'm looking at Chiang Mai here. There's a total score.
It's ranked number two. Yeah, that's like a nomad 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 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 keep adding stuff because for certain groups of people certain things really matter and this is really.
Happiness, I'd love to ask about that. Net life, free wifi, AC, female friendly, freedom of speech.
Yeah, not so good in Thailand, you know? Values derived from national statistics. I like how that one has- 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 the 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 source,

like World Bank.

They have a lot of public data sets,

United Nations,

and you can download a lot of data

I don't know. you can download more accurate data sets from like public stores, 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, you know, freely use. Like I started getting problems across this 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 where people were from and stuff. So I started switching to datasets and now it's 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 and 1800 remote work in Austin now which eight plus members checked in members who will be here soon and go 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

Thank you. 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 uh cons of austin is too expensive very sweating humid now difficult to make 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 pretty safe fast internet i don't understand why it says not safe for women.
To check the data set. 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. Still.
Hotels with fast Wi-Fi, 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, 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.
It's not easy. Construction sounds? All kinds of sounds.
You get to learn about all the sources of sounds in the world. And also like 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 echoes in the room.
Anyway, but you figure out that a lot of hotels don't have tables. They don't have like normal.
They have this weird desk, right? Yeah. But it's not a center table.
Yep. And if you want to 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 really real tables.
What if you get an Ikea? Buy Ikea. Yeah.
Before you arrive, you order an Ikea. Yeah ikea yeah like no man's do this they get desks i feel like you should be able to show up to a place and have have the desk like it's not unless you stay in there for a long time just the entire assembly all that airbnb is so unreliable it's the the range in quality that you get is is huge hotels is huge.
Hotels have a lot of problems,

pros and cons.

Like hotels have the problem that the pictures somehow never have good representative pictures of what's actually going to be in the room.

And that's a problem.

Like,

and you,

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, affiliate, 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 and but even if the even if you go 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 yeah like you 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 scan it 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 a flight yeah It's like very strange. Like why does it have to suck? Obviously there's competition here.
Why doesn't the best website win? What's the explanation of that? Man, I thought about this for years. So I think it's like, I have to book the flight anyway.
Like 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.
So the, and with a hotel similar. You need a hotel anyway.
So do you have time to figure out the best one? Not really. You kind of just need to get the place booked and 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 an incentive to improve it. Because generally, only 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 an 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 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 high-up people are not technical people, probably. Yeah.
They don't know much about web dev. They don't know much about programming.
So they just don't give any respect. Yeah.
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. 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 yeah but there must be an explanation that's to do with managers and bureaucracies like 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 letter.
It's like one room left, book now. You know, and they got a fine from the European Union about this.
Kind of interesting. 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 not every company, but 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 also started as a startup in 1997.
And then they become like the old shit again. Like 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 Ubers, right? So it's like this circle.
I think some of it is also just, it's hard to have ultra competent engineers. Like Stripe seems like a trivial thing, but 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 where your internet would go down, 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 it to quit life for a brief moment there, yeah.
I'm so happy to form stays in Google Chrome now when something goes wrong. But that's, so Google, somebody at Google improves 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.

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,

most of the folks and always operate,

like 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.

Thank you. Like 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 to make the same thing. The best team wins.
So I think you need to emulate like a free market inside a company to make it entrepreneurial, you know? And you need entrepreneurial mentality in a company 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 a minimal amount of stuff.
So you're a good person to ask, like what, how do you learn learn how do you learn quickly and effectively and just the stuff you need you did um just by way of example you did a 30 days learning session on 3d yeah where you documented yourself giving yourself only 30 days to learn everything you can about yeah i tried to learn virtual reality because i was like this was like same as ai it came up came up suddenly like 2016, 2017 with I think HTC Vive, this big VR glasses before Apple Vision Pro. And so I was like, oh, this is going to be big.
So I need to learn this. So I know nothing about 3D.
I installed like, I think Unity and like Blender and stuff. And I started learning all this stuff 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, I could use this to build stuff. And so I think with learning for me, it's like, I think learning is so funny because people always ask me like, 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. It's kind of cliche, but every day I'm learning new stuff.
So every day I'm searching on Google or asking now 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? 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 JGPT, how do I make a website? Where do I start? It generates code 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 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 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, a builder, a CMS. Website, build a platform, Wix.
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 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 it's, this is. If you want to make a website.
This is the basics. Like Google Analytics.
But you can't make Nomad lists with this web. 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.
clickable, that open another page. You can get quite far.
How do I learn to program? Choose a programming language to start with. Your free podcast is good.
Work through resources thematically. Practice coding regularly for 30, 60 minutes a day, consistency is key, join programming communities like Reddit's, yeah.
Yeah, it's pretty good. Yeah.
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.
This is like, that's why the power of ai for education is going to be insane like people anywhere can can ask this question and start

building stuff yeah it clarifies it for sure and just start building like keep yeah build build

like actually apply the thing whether it's ai or uh any of the programming for web development

yeah just have a project in mind which i love the idea of like 12 startups in 12 months or like build a project almost every day. Just build a thing.
Yeah. And get it to work and finish it every single day.
That's a cool experiment. I think that was inspiration.
There was a girl who did 160 websites in 160 days or something, 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 to some coding boot camp 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. You need discipline to keep doing it.
And coding is very it's a steep learning curve to get in. It's very annoying.
Working with computers is very annoying. It can be hard for people to keep doing it.
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, the creation of hood maps, or like a working prototype, that there's just a constant frustration, I guess. It's like, how do I do this? And then you look it up, and you're like, okay, you have to interpret the different options you have.
Yeah, man. You're like, and then just try it.

And then there's a dopamine rush of like, ooh, it works.

Cool.

Man, it's amazing.

And I live streamed it.

It's on YouTube and stuff.

People can watch it.

And it's amazing when things work.

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 gonna 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 it's going to be easy. Yeah, exactly.
Be naive about it because you're going to have very difficult problems. A lot of the big problems won't be even tech, will be like public, right? Like maybe people don't like your website.
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 there's the power of the crowdsourcing but there's also the 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 uh your website sucks because blah blah blah and you're like okay just remove this like, okay, just remove this, your website sucks because it's personal, you know. What did he say? Why did he 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 something you're on the internet just shouting crazy stuff that's like most of twitter you know or the half twitter so you have to take it with a grain of salt um yeah you man you need to grow a very thick skin like on twitter on x like people say but i mute a lot of people like i found out i muted already 15 000 people recently i checked so in in 10 years i muted 15 000 people so that's like like that's one by one manual 15 yeah oh wow so 1500 people per year and i don't like to block because 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 Maps, did 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. It was like 5,000 people on the website or something.
It was crazy. And it was at night.
It was amazing. Man, I think nowadays, honestly, TikTok, YouTube Reels, Instagram Reels, a lot of apps get very big from people making TikTok videos about it.

So let's say you make your own app.

You can make a video for yourself.

Like, oh, I made this app.

This is how it works, blah, blah, blah.

And this is why I made it, for example, and this is why you should use it.

And if it's a good video, it will take off. Man, I got like $20,000 extra per month or something from a TikTok, from one TikTok video.
Like it made a photo 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 then they ask money later, like when a 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 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, fundamentally create cool stuff.
Yeah. And 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 TikTok 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 1000 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 1000 followers or 100 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 use an app for free which is um it never worked for me well because i 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 um 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 whatever video and then if you want to use it pay me money pay ten dollars twenty dollars three dollars i would ask more than ten dollars per month like netflix like ten dollars 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 thirty dollars or more on a user to make it uh worthy for you you need to make money 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 build together.
It's very normal now. And you need to imagine, like if you're starting out, getting a users is quite difficult.
Getting 1,000 pages is quite difficult. And if you charge them like $30, you have 30K a month.
That's a lot of money. That's enough to like- Live a good life.
Yeah, live a pretty good life. I mean, there could be a lot of costs associated with hosting.
Yeah, so that's not a thing. I make sure my profit margins are very high, so I try to keep the cost very low.
I don't hire people. 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, 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 I say, sure. A lot of them will say yes.
Like 20% discount, 50% discount. 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 want to 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 shit post 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.

High quality users.

Free users are,

sorry, but they're horrible.

Like, it's just like millions of people,

especially with AI startups,

you get a lot of abuse.

So you get millions of people from anywhere

just abusing your app,

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, but you know what I mean? Like like they're so crazy especially back then like that's it's kind of funny what they do you know i actually uh what is it there's a new documentary on netflix anti-social network or something like that that was really was fascinating just fortune just the you know the spirit of the thing fortune people Fortune. It's so much about freedom and also the humor involved in fucking with the system and fucking with the man.
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 the Nazis always show up. And it's somehow- And any bad shit started happening.
It started drifting somehow. Yeah.
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'd show it to other people, say, hey, do you know this internet website 4chan? Just check it out.
Yeah. And they'd be, 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.
Yes. And there would already be, this was like a normie filter, like to stop.
Yeah. So kind of cool, but yeah.
It goes dark. It goes dark.
Yeah. 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's i think it was never man i'm not a fortunate but like i it was always about provoking it's just provocateurs you know but the the provoking in the case of hood maps or something like this can can damage the uh a good thing like you know a little poison in a town is always good it's like the tom waits things 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 add like a NSFW word list. They would say like bad words.
So when they would write like a bad words, they would get forwarded 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.
Cheese melting, 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.
Rickroll, I didn't understand. I didn't know that Rickroll originated in 4chan.
There's just so many memes. Most of the memes that you think.
The word roll, I think, comes in 4chan. Not the word roll, but in this case, in the meme use, you would get roll doubles.
There was post IDs on 4chan. So they were kind of random.
So if I get doubles, this happens happens or something so you'd get like 2-2 anyway it's like a betting market kind of on these doubles on these post IDs there's so much funny stuff yeah i mean that's the internet that's purest 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.
But again,

like you have to pay attention to that

with, I mean, I guess

spam in general, you have to fight that with NomadList.

How do you fight spam?

Man, I use GPT-4 now. It's amazing.

So I have like

user input. I have

reviews. People can review cities and

they 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 gpt4 now and i ask like is this a you know is this a good review like is it offensive is it racist or some stuff and and then sends me a message on telegram when it rejects reviews and i check it and it's man it's 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, human moderators was very good, but they would start fighting the human moderator like this guy is biased or something.
I have GPT-4 and it's really, really, really, really good. It understands humor.
It 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 like of different kinds of for like x yeah i thought this week like i tweeted like a fact check like you can click fact check and then gpt4 look gpt4 is not always right about stuff right but it can give you a general fact check on a tweet like usually what i do now when i write something like difficult about economics or something or AI, I put it 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.
It seems like a GPT thing because it'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.
I don't know. For example, do you think create a ranking score of x twitter replies where should this post be if we rank on like i don't know integrity reality like fundamental deepness or something interestness um and it will give you that with a pretty good score probably i mean elon can do this with croc right he can start doing using that to to check replies because the reply section is like chaos yeah you know and actually the ranking of the replies doesn't make any sense doesn't make sense no 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 i want to see the good stuff and also the notifications or whatever it's just complete chaos yeah it'd be nice to be able to filter that in interesting ways sort in interesting ways because like I feel like I miss a lot and I what surfaced for me I just like a random comment by a person with no followers 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 because 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 a sea of comments yeah yeah it doesn't make sense yeah X x could be very improved with that i think one thing you 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 you 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 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 nomadless for example that would be a job for example and i thought like uh i don't have the money for that and i i don't really want to run like a big company with a lot of people because it's a lot of work managing these people so i've always tried to like automate these things as much as possible.
And this can literally be like, for no one,

this is literally be, like for Nomadless, it's literally like, it's not a different other stuff, it's like a webpage where you can organize your own meetup, 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 when it's done, it sends a tweet out on the Nomadless 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, 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 because AI understands things so well. Like before I would use if statements, right? Now you ask GPT, you put something in a 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.
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 thing dot PHP and that's a script and that 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 emails 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 healthcheck dot PHP and then it has like 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 signup 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

on Telegram saying, hey, what's up? It doesn't say hey what's up it sends me like alert hey 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 yeah 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 it's 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 uh 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 green check marks it feels good to look at it's just be like okay yeah alright we're okay everything's okay yeah and like 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. 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 them the bad ones.
And now that's the case. I need to integrate everything into one place.
I automate like everything. Yeah.
I have also just a large set of cron jobs. A lot of the publication of this podcast is done all, everything is just on 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. Yeah.
Every JavaScript, every PHP error gets sent to my Telegram as well. So every user,

whatever user it is,

doesn't have to be page user.

If they run into an error,

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 because you get flooded with errors in the beginning.
And now it's like nothing almost. That's really cool.
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 the 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 of like, what are the things in my life I'm doing myself that could be automated? You can ask JGBT, you know, like give your daily, your day and then ask what parts should I automate? Well, one of the things I would love to automate more is my consumption of social media. Yeah.
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 S-W-Y-X or something, he does like a newsletter that's completely AI generated with the cool new stuff in AI. Yeah, mean i would love to do that but also like across instagram facebook linkedin yeah all this kind of stuff just like okay can i can you summarize the internet for me for today summarize internet.com yeah.com because i feel like it pulls in way too much time but also like i don't like the effect it has some days on my psyche because like haters or just general content like no no just general like for example like tiktok is a good example of that for me i sometimes just feel dumber after i use tiktok i just feel like i don't use it anymore empty somehow and i'm like uninspired yeah it's 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 want to 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 X sometimes for me too, it's, I think I'm probably naturally gravitating towards the drama. Yeah.
Art wheel. Yeah.
And so following ad people, especially ad people that only post technical content has been really good because then i just look at them and i and then i go down rabbit holes of like learning new papers that have been published or uh good repos or or um 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 but 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 you need to like mod, 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 would 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.
Cause the thing that they're trying to limit like abuse or for you to steal all the data from the app to then train an 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 could, yeah. But I don't really know like what it would do.
Like maybe it can hide stuff before you see it, you know? Like scroll down. I have Chrome extensions.
I write a lot of Chrome extensions that hide parts of 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- Smart 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 because it's easier because it keeps changing it's like it's it's not easy to keep it dynamically changing but they're really good at like getting you to be distracted and like starting 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 algorithmically 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, like the music mix for drinking coffee together like in the morning, like jazz. I't want to 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? right like i've been in so i've been in in a lot of acquisition like deals and stuff and i learn a lot about finance people as well as well they're like manipulation and due diligence and then changing the valuation like people change the valuation after uh so they a lot of people string you on to acquire you and then it takes like six months it's classic. It takes six to 12 months.
They want to see everything. They want to 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, I don't want to 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 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 the really valuable stuff about the companies you create is not just the interface and the crowdsourced content, but the people themselves.
Like, the user base. Yeah.
Well, Nomadist, it's a community, yeah. So, I could see that being extremely valuable.
I'm surprised that it has not. But Nomadist is like my baby.
It's like my first product I took off, and I don't really know if I want to sell it. It's something you will be nice when you you know when you're old that you're still working in this you know it's like a it has like a mission which is like um 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 learn if you go to china and live in china you'll learn that they're 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 project to like not sell uh ai projects i have less emotional feeling with ai projects like photo guy 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 depression

after starting to find a solar company.

They're like, this was me.

Who am I?

And they immediately start building another one.

They never can 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 the 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 like this consensus meeting where we all like, you know, you have like a meeting with three people and then you kinda get this compromise results, which is very European, like it's very, in Holland we call it Poldermodel, where you put people in the room and you only let them out when they agree on the compromise, right, in politics. And I don't think, I think it breeds like averageness.
You know, 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, you know, 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. I shit post on Twitter.
Literally, like I promoted on Twitter. We said 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 just coding.
No, like you've never had another developer who like rolls in and like I've had it once with PhotoEye like there's an AI developer Philip I hired him to do the because I can't write Python and AI stuff is Python and I needed to get models to work and replicate and stuff and I needed to improve PhotoEye and he helped me a lot for like 10 months he worked and man I was trying Python working with NumPy 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 be,

and yes,

like, you know,

like in conversation

or in 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's like, we need to rewrite everything in Vue, Vue.js. I'm like, are you sure? Can we just like, you know, like keep JQuery? He's like, no man.
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 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's ever existed wow 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

like and then from that place have a conversation about what is the better approach. Yeah, but those are the top tier developers.
Yeah. 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%. Because if you try higher 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 their job.
Especially with dev, with coding, I think. So sorry.
I think that's a really important skill for a developer to roll in and like understand the musicality, the 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, and 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 in the in the as the versions evolved it's much more serious programming language now it's super fast like php is really fast now yeah it's crazy javascript much faster ruby yeah really fast now so if speed is something you care about it's super fast yeah um and like there's gigantic communities of people using those programming languages and there's frameworks if you like the framework so that whatever it doesn't really matter what you use but like also you if i was like a developer working with you like you are extremely successful you've shipped a lot yeah so like if i roll in i'm gonna be like i don't assume you know nothing assume peter is 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 i got it like here's how he's thinking and now if i want to add another uh like little feature definitely needs to 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, ha-ha, 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.
I don't know how hard it is to find developers. No, I think they exist.
I think you need to, I 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, Nomad 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,

like Jake Corey,

right?

Like how amazing is Jake Corey?

But like you can,

these cowboys are getting,

these are,

there's these cowboys.

This is a lot. It's 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 that's everything it's me so all of this feature, all of this.
It looks kind of 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 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.
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, it's a style. It 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 emoji is 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 It's actually really, for me, it's really nice.
People tell me to remove the emojis. 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 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, no is this is no this is really really really nice and all of i mean like okay like how this looks when you uh hover over it yeah it's easy as 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 No, it's all iterative. It's like 10 years of, you know, add a CSS transition here or do this or...
Well, say like, see, 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? So I go to the index.css and I do command F and I search border radius 12px and then I replace with border radius 0 and then I do command enter and it 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 5 seconds. Oh you often deploy to production? You don't have like a testing ground? No so I...
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 nowadays, I just deploy to production.
Yeah. And it's...
Man, I'm going to get canceled for this, you know, but it works very well for me because I have a lot of... I have like PHP Lint and JSLint, so it tells me when there's error, so I don't deploy.
But but my literally i i i have like 37 000 git commits in the last 12 months or something so i make like small fix and then command enter uh and sends to github github sends a web to my server web server pulls it deploys the production and it's there what's the latency of that from you pressing 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 100% you're right like people are like how can you do this well you get good at not taking the server down you know because 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 do like a stopwatch like how 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 their problems. But it's crazy.
I don't think it's crazy. I 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 other sides, 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're doing rapid improvement. No, they do because there's more bugs.
And people complain about it. 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 yes bugs of the future 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 a chance to uh interact

with many other teams but one of the teams is uh mla multi-language audio i don't know if you know

the so i've gotten a chance to uh interact with many other teams but one of the teams is uh mla multi-language audio i don't know if you know this but in youtube you can have audio tracks in different languages for overdubbing and that 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'm sure it's a pain in the ass for the engineers to get approval to like because 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 going to 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 this conversation right here if instantaneously it dubs it into 40 languages and everybody consume 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 compute. They got the user base.
They got like, they have the experience of how to do this. So like multi-language audio should be.
High priority feature, right? Yeah, that's high priority. And it's a way, you know, Google is obsessed with with ai right now they want to show off that they could be dominant in ai that's a way for google to say like we used 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 not the the overall result of the the cool product you know i think they they're not like selfish or whatever they want to do good.
There's something about the machine. Organizational stuff.
I have this when I report bugs on like big companies I work with. I get, 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. It requires, again, I don't know if there must be a nicer word, but like a dictatorial type of top down.
The CEO rolls in and just says like, for YouTube, it's like MLA. Yeah.
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. Yeah.
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, dictatorial.
You basically say Steve Jobs did this quite a lot. I've seen a lot of leaders do this.
Ignore the lawyers. Ignore comms give power to the engineers like listen to the people on the ground get this shit done and get it done by friday yeah that's it and the law can change like for example let's say you you launch this ai dubbing and it's 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 you 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 IDE do you use? Let's talk about like your whole setup. Given how ultra productive you are, I think you often program in your underwear, slouching on the couch.
Is there, does it matter to you in general? Is there like a specific IDE you use, do 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 in.
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 I could, like, make mass replaces in a file with the cursor thing.
And VS Code 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, 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.

VS Code is 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 example from 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? Boomer, you need to use VS Code. And I'm like, yeah, I'll try it.
I got a new MacBook and then I i i never install like i never copied the old macbook 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 well 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 you know like yeah i don't know if it's peer pressure, but I used Emacs for many, many years.

And I 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 was 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 want to understand the new technological concepts and see if they can benefit you, you know? It would be stupid not to even try.
It's more the concepts i would say than the actual tools like expanding and that can be a challenging thing so going to 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'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 wanna learn

and I understand the basics, right?

I don't really know where to start.

But would you, like, I guess you gotta

use your own model, which is like

build the thing using it.

No, man, so I kinda did that.

Like, the stuff I do in JQuery

is essentially, a lot of it is like

Thank you. use your own model which is like build the thing using it no man you're so i 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 coding long enough that i built the same i start getting the same problems everybody else has and you start building the same frameworks kind of so i essentially i use my own kind of framework of- So you basically build a framework from scratch that's your own, that 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 you should be just learning

I'm going to go ahead and get started. businesses and improving that and ai i think learning ai is much more valuable now than learning uh a front-end framework yeah like it's just more impact i guess you 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 it anyway.
So you got to learn how to use the weapons of war and then you can be a peacenaker. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, but you got to learn it in the same exact way as we were talking about, which is learn it 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 websites, like where do you start? Yeah, SGBT4, 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? Maybe some combination of like Vue, 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 but 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.

I have no idea.

All I know is right now I would send it to GitHub and then send 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, you know, 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 webpage, like one webpage 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 exact page, kind of page.
That's a cool project. All these frameworks.
Yeah. You can see the differences.
Yeah. That's interesting.
All it takes to do it. Yeah, stopwatch.
I have to figure out actually something sufficiently complicated because 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 AI LLM, but maybe API call to something.
To replicate, for example. And then you have, yeah, that would be a very cool project.
Yeah, yeah. And like time it and also report on my happiness.
Yeah. I'm going to totally do this.
Because nobody benchmarks this. Nobody's benchmarking developer happiness with frameworks.
Yeah. Nobody's benchmarking the shipping time.
I'm going 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, front end. And this stuff confused me too.
Like React now apparently has become backend. Yeah.
Or something that used to be only front end 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 anything so like according to the internet so like there's no um it's actually not trivial to find the canonical way of doing things so like the standard vanilla like you should 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 sometimes i'll literally name it vanilla but like i want to know what's the basic way but not like dumb but like the standard canonical yeah i want to know the dominant way like the dominant 60% of developers do it like this yeah it's hard to figure that out you know that's the problem yeah maybe all the limbs 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 yeah so that makes sense to ask them and uh i think honestly maybe what would help is if if you want to learn or i would 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 out of my brain.

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 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 uh open-mindedness to like you know node.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 are.
Yeah, but those people exist. You could find those people probably.
Yeah. Like if you want to learn AI, imagine you have Karpathy 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, it would be amazing.

Yeah.

I mean, Karpathy has its own style.

And it's like, I'm not sure he's for everybody. But, for example, five-year-old, it depends on the five-year-old.
Yeah. yeah I mean well Karpathy has its own style and is like

I'm not sure

he's for everybody

but for example

five year old

it depends on the five year old

yeah

he's like super technical

but he's amazing

because he's super technical

and he's the only one

who can explain

this stuff

in a simple way

which shows his

complete genius

yes

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

I'll see you next time. 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 built from scratch exactly yeah actually probably is yeah uh he's like you but for ai yeah so maybe learning framework is a very bad idea for us you know maybe we should stay in php and like script kitty and uh but you have to maybe by learning the, you learn what you want to yourself build from scratch.
Yeah, maybe you learn concepts, but you don't actually have to start using it for your life, right? Yeah. And you're still a Mac guy.
Always a Mac guy. Yeah, yeah.
I switched to Mac in 2014, because it was because when I wanted to start traveling and my brother was like, dude, get a MacBook, it's 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. And then I had a MacBook.
And I remember opening up this MacBook box like, and it was so beautiful. It was like this aluminum.
And then I opened it. 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.
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. I started making money.
It all started when I switched to Mac. Listen, I kind of, you're making me want to 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 like Adobe products.
Yeah, yeah. Well, you could use, I guess you could do Mac stuff there.
I wonder if should switch 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 the what is horrible the Finder oh you don't know so does the Windows Explorer yeah Windows Explorer is amazing thank you for talking about Finder is strange man there's like strange things there's this bug where if you if you send like attach a photo on WhatsApp or Telegram it it just selects the whole folder, and you almost accidentally can click enter, and you send all your photos, all your files to this chat group, habit to my girlfriend. She starts sending me photo, photo, photo, photo, photo.
So, Finder is very unusual, but it has Linux. Like, the whole thing is like, it's Unix-based, right? So, you use the command? Yeah, all the time.
Like, all the time. And the cool thing is 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 said 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 like better of course but yeah i'm in this weird situation where i'm 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... But 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 want to have kids is that there's a lot of like i would love to have kids as a base as a baseline but you know there's like a concern maybe there's going to 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 that's not peer pressure that's just like a strong signal yeah 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 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. Yeah.
Well, 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.

That is 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 at home or is it any couch?

No, any hotel couch also.

In the room, right? Yeah. But I used to like very ergonomically with like a standing desk yeah and everything like perfect like eye height screen blah blah and i felt like man this has to do with lifting too i started getting rsi like a 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 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 co-working space i'm gonna go home and die in like in like peace and honor.
Yeah. So I closed my laptop and I put it in my backpack and I walked to the street, 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, because it was my whole back.
And it was because I was working like this all the time. Yeah.
So I getting like a laptop stand everything ergonomically 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 never have rsi rsi anymore repetitive injury i never have tingling anymore uh no pains and stuff so then I started working on the sofa and it's great. Like it feels, you're close to the, I sit like this.
Yeah. Legs together and then a pillow and then a laptop.
And then I work. Are you like leaning back? I'm kind of like together, like legs and then.
Where's the mouse? No, so everything's trackpad on on the mac os on the macbook i used to have the logitech mx mouse the perfect economic mouse and you're doing like this little thing with the thing yes one screen one screen and i used to have three screens 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, is that working on a car or something? It's like, so like, man, if you have three skin, you can look here and look there.
You get also neck injury actually. So 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 I mean but it's good to hear that you can be ultra productive on a single screen that's I mean that's crazy Command tap you alt up like Windows alt up Mac OS Command tap you switch very fast so you have like one the entire screen is taken up by VS Code say you look at the code and then and then like if you deploy like a website you what switch screens mount up to chrome i used to have this swipe screen you know you could do like um different screen yeah spaces yeah i was like ah it's too difficult let's just put it on one screen on the macbook and then and you'd 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 sides. Code, right, yeah.
For code, you can see a lot. Yeah.
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. 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 you really need all this 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 ways because you can defend more right? You can defend yeah I'm a developer I make money 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 tools as well.
And I see friends just with gear acquisition syndrome that are 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 the perfect ultra-productive day in your life.
Say where you get a lot of shit done. Yeah.
And it's all focused on getting shit done. 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. And then chill a little bit with my girlfriend and then open laptop, 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 because you have to this is life like there's a lot of distractions like like your girlfriend has stuff people come over whatever yeah um 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. Like before they're like, ah, I can have work, but they get used to it.
And they get really productive in like short time because they only have like 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, you know, cook food and stuff, like have lunch, steak and chicken.
You eat a bunch of times a day? So you say coffee, what are you doing? Yeah, so a few hours later, cook foods. We get locally sourced meat and stuff and vegetables and cook that.
And then second coffee and then go some more. Maybe go outside for lunch.
You can mix fun stuff, you know? How many hours are you saying on a perfectly productive day are you doing? Like, if you already 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 code. It's like, and you stay up all night and eat chocolate.
Yeah. Eat chocolate.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, okay. Let's remove girlfriend from picture, social life from picture.
It you man that shit goes crazy okay yeah because when shit goes crazy now shit goes crazy okay so shit you yeah let's let's rewind are you still waking up there's coffee there's no girlfriend to talk to there's no now we wake up like 1 p.m at At 2 p.m.

Because you wanted to bed at 6 p.m.

Yeah, because I was coding.

I was finding some new AI shit.

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.

But that's the times I do make new stuff more.

So I think I have a friend. He actually books a hotel for like a week to leave 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 a hotel but all he does is like writing or coding he's a writer and he needs like this alone time this 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 than like creating new stuff i need this and it's common it's flow states this uninterrupted period of time um so yeah wake up like 1 2 p.m um you know still coffee shower we still shower you know uh and then just code like non-stop maybe my friend comes over uh comes over some distraction Yeah.
Andre, he codes too. So he comes over.
We code together. We listen.
It starts going back to the Bali 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 a vibe where you both sit together on the couch and coding on something. And you actually, it's mostly silent or there's music.
And sometimes 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 H-O-R with a umlaut like H-O like double dot it's Berlin whatever. It looks like 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 pace, heavy.

You know, like.

Yeah.

That's not distracting to you, Brian?

No, it's amazing.

Like, I think distracting, man, jazz.

Like I listen coffee jazz with my girlfriend

when I wake up and it's kind of like

this piano starts getting annoying. It's like.
It's too many tones. It's like too many things going on.
This industrial techno is like, you know, this African like rain dance. It's like, it's this transcendental trance.
That's interesting. Cause I, I actually mostly now listen to a brown noise noise.
Yeah. Wow.
Like pretty loud. Wow.
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 like with noise, what happens, if 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 brain.
For me, it does something. I discovered it right away when I tried it for the first time.
After about a couple of minutes, everything, every distraction just disappears and it goes like . You can hold 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 with like meditation.
You can like, like focus on your breath, for example. And it's just normal brown.
It's not like binaural. No.
It's just normal brown. It's just like, Yeah.
White, I think, it's the same. It's like fake noise, white noise.
Brown noise, I think, it's like bassier. Yeah, it's more diffused, more dampened.
Dampened. Yeah, I can see that.
No sharpness. Yeah, sharp brightness.
Yeah, brightness. Yeah, I can see that.
And you use a headphone, right? Yeah, headphones. Yeah.
I actually, like, walk around in life often with brown noise. Dude, that's like psychopath shit, but it's cool, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
actually like walk around in life often with brown noise dude that's like psychopath shit but it's cool you know yeah yeah yeah when i murder people it helps it drowns out their screams jesus christ yeah i said too much no i'm gonna try brown noise with a murder or for the coding yeah for the coding okay good uh 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 because the faster it goes the more anxiety so if i really need to get shit done especially with programming i'll have. Yeah.
And it's great. It's cool.
It's cool to play those little tricks with your mind to study yourself. Yeah.
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.
That's my, yeah, in co-worker space, I would just start talking too much. Yeah.
Yeah. So there's a source of distraction.
Yeah. We would do, in the co-worker space, we would do like a money pot, like a mug.
So if you would work for 45 minutes, and then if you would say one, like per ward, you would get a fine, which is like $1. So you'd put $1 to say, hey, what's up? So $3, you'd put in the mug.
And then 15 minutes free time, like we can like party, whatever, and then 45 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 long periods of time and like doing a thing. Dude, I watched 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, it's 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 I really like that when you'll ask a question like I don't know what's a perfectly productive day for you like I 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 want to like i want to show you my heart you know i want to 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 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.
And it's like, no, you think before you speak and just like, it's okay to be silent together. If you allow yourself the room to do that, you can actually come up with really good ideas.
It's okay, this perfect day. How much caffeine are you consuming in this day? Too much, right? Because normally like two cups of coffee, but on this perfect day, like we go to like four maybe.
So we're starting to hit 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 my friends call them nuclear coffee because it's quite heavy. 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. 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 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 before. 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.
You can do both. It's a different.
Brokeback mountain. But they need to allow us to go, you know.
You need like a man cave, right? Yeah. To ship.
Yeah. To ship.
Get shit done. Yeah.
It's a balance. Okay.
Cool. What about sleep? Naps andaps and all that you're not sleeping much i don't do naps in a day i think it's power naps are good but i don't really i'm never tired anymore in the day uh man it's also because of gym i'm not tired i i'm tired when i want to when you know when it's night i need to sleep yeah me i love naps i love naps yeah i don't care i don't know i 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 know what the limits are. You have to be skeptical taking advice from the internet in general because a lot of advice is just a good baseline for the general population.
It's not personalized, yeah. You of your own, like of your own body, of your own self, of how you work.
Yeah. I've done a lot, like for me, fasting was an interesting one.
They used to, you know, 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 realize I can get much stronger, feel much better if I eat once or twice a day.
Yeah, me too, yeah. It's crazy.
I never understood this small meal thing, yeah. It 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 therapist ai what's the remote okay it's a job board for remote jobs um because back then like 10 years ago there was uh job boards but it was not really specifically remote job job boards so i made one i made like first on nomad list 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 now it's like the number one or number two biggest remote job boards 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 remote work just focus on remote only yeah 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 uh job posts you can add your background name it's just upsells man and you charge thousand dollars for an upsell it was crazy and uh all these companies just upsell up so yeah we want everything job posts would cost three thousand four hundred four thousand.
And I was like, this is good business.

And then the Fed 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 got to ask you about back to the digital nomad life.

Yeah.

You wrote a blog post on the reset.

And in general, like 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 a 100 things challenge. What is that? The 100 things challenge? I mean, it's ridiculous.
But like 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 100. Why? You know, this is just a trend.
So I did it. I started like selling stuff, started throwing away stuff and I did like MDMA and XTC like 2012 kind of and after that trip, I felt so different and I felt like I had to start throwing shit away like 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 you know go on a journey you need to get out of here and and that's what the MDMA did I think yeah how hard is it to get down to 100 items well you need to like sell your PC and stuff you need to go on eBay and then man going on eBay selling all your stuff is very interesting because you discover society 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 it's so interesting I recommend everybody do this just to meet people that want your shit yeah it was so I didn't know I was living was i was living in amsterdam and i didn't know i have my own you know subculture 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 memorable so back then i was i was making music and we would make music videos with like a Canon 5D camera.
Back then everybody was making films

and music videos 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.

And, but it meant that selling this

meant that we wouldn't make music videos

to get anymore.

I would leave Holland.

This kind of like stuff

we were working on would end. And I was kind of saying, we're not getting big we're not getting famous in this or successful we need to stop doing this 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 um to sell this like camera that we'd make stuff with and it was a hard goodbye it was just 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. Motion of it.
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 we're gonna do new stuff.
I think it's beautiful. I did that twice in my life, give away everything, everything, everything.
Like, down to just pants, underwear, backpack. 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 learn that you can live with very little objects very 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 so that's good. Yeah, but just letting go of material possessions, which

it gives a kind of freedom to

how you move about the world.

It gives you complete freedom to go into another city, to

Yeah, with your backpack.

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.

Spiritually, it's good to take a leap

out into the world, especially when you're younger. Man, I recommend if you're 18, you get out of high school, do this, go travel and build some internet stuff, whatever.
Bring your laptop and it's an 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 want to 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 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.

Yeah, like the weirdos,

the darkness.

Yeah, me too.

But that might not be the best networking at 18 years old.

No, but man,

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.
people yeah 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 yeah like for a person like me for example who's always an outcast like there's always a danger for going full outcast yeah 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,

how to fit into,

uh,

like,

pull. like darkness it's just a heart of 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 how to fit into uh like polite society but i was very strange outcast as well and i'm more adaptable to normie now i learned it yeah after 30s you know you're like yeah but i mean it's a skill you have to learn yeah i feel man i feel also that start as an outcast, but the more you work on yourself, the less shit you have, you kind of start becoming more normie because you become more chill with yourself, more happy, and it kind of makes you uninteresting, right? 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 yeah macbook toothbrush uh some clothes underwear socks um 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 show alone. Yeah.
They really test you because you only get 10 items and you have to survive out in the wilderness. And an axe, like everybody brings an axe.
Some people also have a saw. Wow.
But usually axe does the job. You basically have to, in order to build a shelter, you have to cut down and cut the trees and make.
Learned in Minecraft. Everything I learned about life, I learned in Minecraft, bro.
Yeah, yeah. 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.
Yeah. I'm very quickly adapting to like a baseline, hedonisticistic adaptation very fast.
Yeah.

But man, if you look at the studies, most people

like

get a new car, six months, you know, get a new house

six months, you just feel the same.

You're like, wow, should I buy all this stuff?

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

focus on 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 these 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 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 i know this stuff but also beautiful stuff no absolutely sure like life story i've posted a coffee form 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 It breaks my heart that I won't get to meet those people, you know? Like, so this 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 yeah, see them. Yeah.
I have this problem that I try, I wanna try help 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 a coworking space.

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 install Nginx.

Let's start coding.

And he has this self energy that he actually, he, he'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 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 that i had to kind of like that asked me for help but then i i gave help and then they started they started debating it you know yeah 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 this 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.
It sounds very like spiritual, Sonny, 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 going to be from them working on themselves.
And like literally, it stupid thing but like googling and doing like yeah searching 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 just go yeah and uh just go i would never ask you how to be a 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 stuff.

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. Like, find yourself.
Find your own voice. Yeah, you imitate and then you put your own spin to it, you know? And that's like creative process.
That's like literally the whole, everybody always builds on the previous work. Yeah.
You shouldn't get stuck. 24 hours in a day, eight hours of sleep.
You like 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 a

You know an average or something

Firefighting

I like that

One hour of groceries and errands

I've tried breaking down

Minute by minute

What I do in a day

Yeah

Especially when my life was simpler

It's really refreshing

To understand where you waste a lot of time

Yeah

And

What you enjoy doing

Like

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 is wasted yeah for me it's been the the biggest battle for uh for the longest time is finding stretches of time where I can deeply focus and do really, really deep work. Just like zoom in and completely focus, cutting away all the distractions.
Yeah, 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 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.
You have a counter for hugs? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like 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 want to look at that too much.
Yeah, man. How many times you see your parents? Jesus, like, man.
Yeah. It's scary, man.
That's right. It might be only a handful more times.

Yeah, man.

You just look at the math of it.

If you see him once a year or twice a year.

Yeah, FaceTime today.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that's 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? Do you believe that like friends just slowly disappear from your life? Like they kind of, your friend group evolves, right? So like- It does.
Like you don't wanna, there's a problem with Facebook. You get all these old friends from school, like when you were 10 years old, back 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, I don't 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 every time I see them, 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. Yeah, it's like, yeah, there's deep issues.
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.
It depends, but there's just this network of good human beings that can, I have like a real love for them. And 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. I'm there.
I like how that's a different definition of friendship. It's true.
You've become more and more famous recently. How does that affect you? It's not recently because it's a gradual thing, right? It keeps going.
And I also don't know why it it keeps going does that put pressure on you to because 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 man I think the opposite right like 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 yeah I don't know anything about their personal life I want to know about their personal life like you do podcasts, you ask about lifestyle or personality. That's the most interesting part of business or sports.
What's behind the sport, the athlete, right? Behind the entrepreneur. That's interesting stuff.
To be human. Yeah.
I shared a tweet that went too far, but we were cleaning the toilet because the toilet was clogged. But 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 $3 trillion 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.

What's the first and second space?

The home office.

And then the in-between, the island.

Yeah, 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 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 work they would write or they would and they would do debates and they would organize marine routes right they would do all the stuff in coffee houses in europe in france in austria in uk in holland so we would always be going, we were always going to cafes to work and to have serendipitous conversations with other people and start businesses and stuff. And when I, like you asked me to come on here and we flew to America.
And the first thing I realized was that, I've been to America before, but we were in this cafe and like, 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 cannot use a laptop anymore there's like no laptop which I understand but that is to you a fundamental place to create shit is in that natural organic co-working space of a coffee shop for a lot of people a lot of people have very small homes and co-working spaces are kind of boring.
They're not very, they're private. They're not serendipitous.
They're kind of boring. Cafes are amazing because they, random people can come in and ask you, what are you working on? And not just laptops, people are also having conversations like they did 400 years ago, debates or things are happening and man i understand the aesthetics of it like it's like oh startup bro 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 benefiting from nvidia i think 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 in 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 quote to 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 it.
That's one of the things I liked in Silicon Valley when I was working there. It was like the cafes.
Yeah. 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 awesome. Not everybody wins.
90% of people will be bullshit, but one percent 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 level.
No, it's not. It's people making cool shit.
Yeah. And and this will benefit you because this will create jobs for your country and your region and I think in Europe that's a big problem like we have a very anti entrepreneurial mindset dream big and build shit this is really inspiring this is a pinned tweet of yours all the projects that you've tried and the ones that succeeded.
That's very few. Mute life.
It was for Twitter to mute, to share the mute list. Yeah.
Mute words. Fire calculator, no more Google.
Maker rank. How much is my site project worth? Climate finder.
Ideas AI. Airline list still runs, but it doesn't make money 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 uh make village nomad gear 3d Reality Dev, 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, kind of.

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 screenshot it becomes like a meme of course you know this is good this is how Dubai looks it's insane that's beautiful architecture wise it's crazy the story is behind these cities yeah the story is behind for sure so this is about the European economy where like European economy landscape is ran by dinosaurs and today I studied this 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, the top companies, right? And the median in Europe is like 1900 or something so it's here 1913 and 1963 so there's a 50 year difference it's a good representation of the very thing you were talking about the difference in the cultures entrepreneurial spirit of the peoples 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 um 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 the all the old dinosaur companies control the economies they're lobbying with the government their Europe is Europe is also, they're infiltrated 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 and 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 like 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 you know what do you think about EAC effective acceleration is moving man you had Beth Jaisal on I love Beth Jaisal and he's amazing and I about EAC, Effective Accelerationist Movement? Man, you had Beth Jaisers on.
I love Beth Jaisers, and he's amazing. And 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. EARC is like, is a positive outlook on the future.
It's like, technology can make us, you know, 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, you know, 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 is okay, some is 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. 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 those massive problems, right? But I think it's very dangerous for a country or a region like Europe to get to this point where you're kind of complacent and you're kind of comfortable. And then, you know, you can either go this or you can go this way, right? 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 go off yeah go off and and uh i think that's the problem is 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 make europe great again hat.
I made it red first, but it became too like Trump. So now it's more like European blue, you know, make Europe great again.
All right. 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 press 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, cause it probably, it might work out.
You can, you can steer the ship, you ship. 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 create your own little life of things, as you did, as I did. And I think that should be more promoted, like do your own thing.
There's space in economy and in society for do your own thing, you know?

It's 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

be a normie, as you say.

You can be what you really

want to be, you know?

And like, go all out doing

that thing. Yeah, you gotta go all out.

Because if you half-ass it,

you cannot succeed.

You need to go lean into the

Thank you. It was an honor to be here, 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, Matt. 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.