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

Speaker 1 following is a conversation with Peter Levels, also known on X as Levels.io.

Speaker 1 He is a self-taught developer and entrepreneur who designed, programmed, shipped, and ran over 40 startups, many of which are hugely successful.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 a pleasure for me.

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Speaker 1 Also, there's a bunch of ways to get in touch with me by giving feedback, sending in questions that I can answer, and all other kinds of ways. If you go to luxfreeman.com slash contact.

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Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store. I recently tweeted

Speaker 1 about about my belief as it stands now that Kamala Harris is not a communist

Speaker 1 and that Donald Trump is not a fascist.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, there needs to be a good, solid criticism and explanation of capitalism, for example. It's an economic system.

Speaker 1 It's a way for humans to work together that has, I believe, benefited the world way more than it has hurt the world.

Speaker 1 But to articulate that and to steal man the criticisms and the perspectives that criticize capitalism is also really important.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 not as a partisan, but as an independent thinker, as a human being.

Speaker 1 I think that's something that I would like to

Speaker 1 work on more and more, even amidst this insane political season. Anyway, I mention all that because, you know, when I think about Shopify, I think about capitalism.

Speaker 1 It's a bunch of small sellers getting together and be able to sell stuff to people that would benefit from it and would enjoy it and they make it super easy.

Speaker 1 So if you're one such seller and you want to sell stuff and you have awesome stuff to sell, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash Lux. That's all lowercase.

Speaker 1 Go to shopify.com/slash Lux to take your business to the next level today.

Speaker 1 This episode is also brought to you by MoTific, a SaaS platform that helps businesses deploy LLMs and RAG that's customized, fine-tuned on organization data sources.

Speaker 1 Obviously, this is often extremely sensitive data, so you have to do this carefully and well.

Speaker 1 But when it is done carefully and well, and in a secure way, it can be a huge benefit for the company to be able to take all the data that the company has and internally be able to query that data, to be able to organize that data, to leverage and answering questions that would make everybody in the company more efficient.

Speaker 1 So, I think that's the thing that unlocks, especially for large companies, but even mid-sized companies, even small companies, just the intranet, a thing that takes all the data on the inside

Speaker 1 and be able to make high-quality, efficient, fast decisions based on that data. I think Motific was created by Cisco, specifically their outshift group that does cutting-edge R D.

Speaker 1 So these guys are legit. It's great.
Visit motific.ai to learn more. That's M-O-T-I-F-I-C dot AI.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 In Austin right now, I'm going to go out and run

Speaker 1 anywhere from five to twelve miles. I'm feeling good right now.
So I'm thinking like 10, 11, 12 mile

Speaker 1 range. By the way, I just heard a little clip on Cam Haynes's Instagram.
And by the way, Cam, amazing human being. You should definitely go follow him.
He's an inspiration to me.

Speaker 1 You know, quietly just does incredible fits of strength and does it all with a kind heart and just this warmth and humor element.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He's doing it for the love of running. Like you don't always, as he says, have to hate it.
And I think I approach running the same way. Sometimes I'll be running really fast.
Sometimes I walk.

Speaker 1 This oftentimes correlates with how deeply I am in thought related to an audiobook I'm listening to.

Speaker 1 Sometimes I get this sort of discomfort when there's a difficult part of the audiobook that's really really making me think. At the same time, keeping a fast pace is difficult for me.

Speaker 1 So I just slow down. And sometimes I'll 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Anyway, after all that, I'm going to drink a nice cold cold AG1. It'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/slash Lex.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I love learning from people who are the best in the world at a thing.

Speaker 1 Sometimes there's incredible lectures that can explain a thing.

Speaker 1 I also love that. But I think there's just something indescribably powerful about

Speaker 1 not a great lecturer, but a great doer stepping back and explaining the

Speaker 1 core of their art, of their skill, of their genius. Anyway, there's great stuff on poker with Phil Ivey.
Great stuff on barbecue. Man, it's been forever since I had barbecue from Aaron Franklin.

Speaker 1 These are all ones I've watched. Martin Scorsese on filmmaking, that is one I really enjoyed.

Speaker 1 I mean, Scorsese is just, his stuff, it is both powerful, and thoughtful, and deep, and profound about family, about human nature, all of that. And it's just fun to watch.

Speaker 1 Okay, maybe I'm one of a certain generation, but it's just fun to watch. So you get to hear how the master does it on Masterclass.

Speaker 1 Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com/slash Lexpod. That's masterclass.com/slash Lexpod.

Speaker 1 This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P

Speaker 1 Help.

Speaker 1 They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.

Speaker 1 Some of the people losing their mind in the realm of the

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Boy, that would be a fascinating challenge for any therapist.

Speaker 1 And from the conversational space, I would love to just listen to that. And I'll be talking to a bunch of people on the left and the right and having some of those tense, difficult conversations.

Speaker 1 And again, having it

Speaker 1 with compassion, but also with backbone. It's not an easy line to walk, by the way.
And I don't think I'm smart enough to do it. On most days, I kind of feel like an idiot, but I'm doing my best.

Speaker 1 anyway. You should uh 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.

Speaker 1 This episode is also brought to you by 8 Sleep and it's pod for Ultra that I've been enjoying. I just recently enjoyed it.
I enjoy it every night, multiple times a day. Let's get crazy.
I love it.

Speaker 1 For a good nap, it can cool down each side of the bed to 20 degrees degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature. Cool bed, warm blanket, and just shut off from the world.

Speaker 1 Just forget it all. Forget the madness of the world.
The political bickering, the attacks, the tensions, the

Speaker 1 drama, all the stuff that, you know, the media and the social media that wants to pull you in, that wants you desperately, like a drug, wants your attention, 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.

Speaker 1 And then the other person attacks you back, they 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

Speaker 1 for me with a short nap. Okay.
On a cold bed, short nap feels like home.

Speaker 1 It's one of the favorite things I have about home and one of my least favorite things about traveling because I don't have eight sleep.

Speaker 1 Anyway, you could enjoy the same kind of peace of mind if you go to eight sleep.com/slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the pod for Ultra.

Speaker 1 This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Peter Levels.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 And they hire people and then they build a product and they find something that makes money.

Speaker 2 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 i make everything i make the logo so for me i'm much more scrappy and and because i don't have funding like i need to i need to go fast i need to make things fast uh to see if an id works right i have an idea in my mind and i build it build it like a micro mini startup um and i launch it very quickly like within you know 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 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 feel so there's this rapid iterative phase where you just build a prototype that works launch it yeah 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 that whole rapid process is how you think of i think it's it's like it's very rapid and it's like um if i compare it to for example google Google, you know, like our big tech companies, especially Google right now is kind of struggling.

Speaker 2 Like they made like transformers. They made all they invented all the AI stuff years ago and they never really shipped.
Like they could have shipped ChatGPT, for example, I think I heard in 2019.

Speaker 2 And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy. But they had everything.
They had the data. They had the tech.
They had the engineers and they didn't do it.

Speaker 2 And it's because these big organizations,

Speaker 2 it can make you very slow. So being alone by myself on my laptop, like, you know, in my underwear in a hotel room or something, I can ship very fast.

Speaker 2 And I don't need to like, I don't need to ask like legal for like, oh, can you vouch for this? You know, I can just go and ship.

Speaker 1 Do you always code in your underwear? Your profile picture, you're like slouching on a couch in your underwear, chilling on a laptop.

Speaker 2 No, no, but it's, I do wear like shorts a lot. And I usually just wear shorts and no t-shirts because I'm always too hot.
Like I'm always overheating.

Speaker 1 Thank you for showing up, not just in your underwear, but wearing shorts.

Speaker 2 I know, you know, I still wearing this for you. But thank you.

Speaker 1 Thank you for dressing up.

Speaker 2 I think it's because I, since I go to the gym, gym i'm always too hot what's your favorite exercise in the gym man over at press over press like shoulder press yeah okay but it feels good because you're doing like you do you win because when you you go what is it i do 60 kilos it's like 120 pounds or something like it's it's it's my only thing i can do well you know in the gym and you stand like this and you're like i did it you know like a winner pose yeah victory pose uh i do bench press squats deadlift

Speaker 1 hence the uh the mug yeah talking to my therapist yeah it's a deadlift yeah because it acts like therapy for me you know yeah yeah it it is.

Speaker 2 Which is controversial to say, like, if I say this on Twitter, people get angry.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They're essentially just working for survival in the wilderness year-round. Yeah.
And there's a deep happiness to their way of life because they're so busy in it, in nature. Yeah.
100%.

Speaker 1 Like, there's something about that physical

Speaker 1 toil. Yeah.

Speaker 2 My dad taught me that. My dad always does like construction in the house.
Like he's always re-renovating the house.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 when I'm depressed or something,

Speaker 2 he says like get a big, like, what do you call it, like a big mountain of sand or something from construction and just get a shovel and bring it to the other side and just, 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 or something no no it's not is it about the project journey the puzzle of it no he doesn't care about the results well he shows me he's like this is amazing i'm like yeah it's amazing but um

Speaker 2 Then he wants to go to the next room, you know?

Speaker 2 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 then uh kiss your girlfriend and then you have like a goal not today i'm going to fix this feature or 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 um

Speaker 1 maybe especially as a man also women but you need 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?

Speaker 2 It's really about fun because I was, because I was doing it when I didn't make money, right? That's the point. So I was always coding.
I was always, I was making music.

Speaker 2 I made electronic music, German bass music, like 20 years ago. And I was always making stuff.
So I think.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 2 i'm not gonna say oh stop signing up to my website pay me money but i never raised funding for it and i think because i don't like this 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They don't like to be manager, right? You become like a CEO, you become a manager. And

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 But they like to do the groundwork, the coding. So I think that keeps you happy, like doing something creative.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's interesting how people are pulled towards that to scale to go really big

Speaker 1 and you don't have that honest reflection with yourself like what actually makes you happy because for a lot of great engineers what makes them happy is the building the 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 to scale if you truly believe in a thing you're doing but like look at Elon.

Speaker 2 He's doing things a million times bigger than me, right? And

Speaker 2 would I want to do that? I don't know. You can't really choose these things, right? But I really respect that.
I think Elon is very different from VC founders, right? VC start is like software.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of bullshit in this world, I think. There's a lot of like dodgy finance stuff happening there, I think.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And that I really respect.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Can you take me to that place, to that time, when you were at a low point?

Speaker 2 So I was in Holland and I graduated university and I didn't want to get a normal job.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 all my friends got like normal jobs and we stopped hanging out because people would like in university you hang out you know you chill

Speaker 2 at each other's houses you go party but if when people get jobs they only party like in the weekend and they don't hang anymore in the week because you need to be at the office and I was like this is not for me I want to do something else and I was starting getting this like I think it's like Saturn return is 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.

Speaker 1 I'm learning so many things.

Speaker 2 It's some astrology thing, you know?

Speaker 1 So many truly special artists died when they were 27. Exactly.

Speaker 2 Someone was 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.

Speaker 2 I went to Asia, started digital nomading and did that for a year. And then that made me feel even worse, you know, because I was like alone

Speaker 2 in hotel rooms, like looking at the ceiling. Like, what am I doing with my life? Like, this is, like, I was working on startups and stuff on YouTube, but I was like, what is the future here?

Speaker 2 You know, like, is this, is this something while my friends in Holland were doing really well and with a normal life, you know?

Speaker 2 So I was getting very depressed and like, I'm like an outcast, you know, and my money was shrinking. I wasn't making money anymore.
A lot, I was making $500 a month or something.

Speaker 2 And I was looking at the ceiling, thinking like, now I'm like 27, I'm a loser. And that's the moment when I started building like startups.

Speaker 2 And it was because my dad said, like, if you're depressed, you need to, you know, get sand, get a shovel, start shoveling, doing something.

Speaker 2 You can't just sit still, which is kind of like an 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.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 So the basic format is try to build a thing, put it online, and put Stripe to where you can pay money for it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, add add a stripe check i'm not sponsored by stripe but add a stripe checkout button is that still like the easiest way to just like pay for stuff stripe 100 like i think so yeah it's a cool company they just made it so easy you can just click and yeah and they're really nice like the ceo patrick is really nice behind the scenes it must be difficult to like actually make that happen because that used to be a huge problem like just merchant just just adding a thing a button where you can like pay for a thing dude it's dude i know this because when i was at trustworthy nine years old i was making websites also, and I tried to open a merchant account.

Speaker 2 There was like before Stripe, you would have like,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And my dad had to, it wasn't my dad's name, and he to sign for this. And he started reading these terms and conditions, which is like, he's liable for like 100 million in damages.

Speaker 2 And he's like, I don't want to sign this. I'm like, dad, come on.
I need a merchant account. I need to make money on the internet, you know? And he signed it and we sent it, we faxed it to America.

Speaker 2 And I had a merchant account but then never nobody paid for anything so that was the problem you know yeah but it's much easier now you can sign up you add some codes and um yeah so 12 startups in 12 months yeah so what how do you what startup number one what what was that what like what what were you feeling what were you sitting behind the computer like how much do you actually know about building stuff at that time i could 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 mixhow Show.

Speaker 2 And it was like these electronic music mixes, like Dubstep or German Bass or Techno or House.

Speaker 1 I saw one of them like Flash. Were you using Flash?

Speaker 2 Yeah, my album, my CD album was using Flash. Yeah, yeah.
I sold my CD, yeah. Because Flash was

Speaker 1 software. This is like the break.

Speaker 2 It's like grandpa, you know, but Flash was cool.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and there was, what's it called? Oh, boy, I should remember this action script. There's some kind of programming language.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, script. Oh, yeah.
It was in Flash.

Speaker 2 Back then, that was the JavaScript, you know?

Speaker 1 The JavaScript. Yeah.
And I thought that's going to, that's supposed to be the dynamic thing that takes over the internet.

Speaker 2 I invested so many hours in learning that Steve Jobs killed it, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs said Flash sucks, stop using it.

Speaker 1 I was like, Okay, that guy was right, though, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't know, yeah. Well, it was it was a closed platform, I think, and

Speaker 2 closed, but it's ironic because Apple, you know, they're not very open, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Um, but Flash was cool, yeah, yeah, it was cool for a time, yeah. It listened animated gifts were cool for a time too.
Yeah. They came back in a different way.
Yeah. As a meme, though.

Speaker 1 I mean, like, 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.

Speaker 1 And that was really exciting.

Speaker 2 Oh, you had like the, you know, Lex homepage. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Everything was centered. Yeah.
And you had like Peter's homepage and then the on the construction gif, which was like a guy like with a helmet and the lights.

Speaker 1 That was amazing. Banners.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's how before like Google AdSense, you would have like banners for advertising.

Speaker 2 It was amazing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And a lot of links to porn, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think that was where the merchant accounts people would use for people would make money a lot. The only money made on Internet then was like porn or a lot of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was a dark place. It's still a dark place.
Yeah. And, but there's beauty in the darkness.
Anyway, so you were, uh, you did some basic HTML. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I had to learn the actual like coding. So I, uh, this was good.

Speaker 2 It was a good, good idea to like every month launch a startup so I could learn the code learn basic stuff and but it was still very scrappy because I didn't have time to which is on purpose I couldn't have time to spend a lot of I had a month to do something so I couldn't spend more than a month and I was pretty strict about that 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 me it was before Spotify I think we would send like 2013 we would send music to each other like YouTube links like this is a cool song this is a cool song and it was these these giant email threads on gmail and they were like unnavigatable so I made an app that would log into your gmail get them emails and find the ones with YouTube links and then make like kind of like a gallery of your your songs like essentially spotify and my friends loved it was it scraping it like what was no it uses like pop like pop or IMAP.

Speaker 2 You know, it would actually check your email. So it had like privacy concerns because it would get all your emails to find YouTube links.
But then I wouldn't save anything.

Speaker 2 But that was fun. It was like, and that first product already would get like pressed.
Like it went on, I think like

Speaker 2 some tech media and stuff. And I was like, that's cool.
Like, it didn't make money. There was no payment button, but

Speaker 2 it was actually... people using it.
I think tens of thousands of people used it.

Speaker 1 That's a great idea. I wonder why, like, why, why don't we have that? Why don't we have things that access Gmail and extract some useful aggregate information?

Speaker 2 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. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, there is a whole ecosystem of like apps you can build on top of the Google,

Speaker 1 but people don't

Speaker 1 do this. Like,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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 value it.

Speaker 2 Oh, this plugin should be free. When I want to use a plugin in Google Sheets or something, I'm not going to pay for it.
It should be free.

Speaker 2 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 plug-in, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, you can do it through like extensions, like Chrome extensions from the browser side.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but who pays for Chrome extensions, right? Like barely anybody. So

Speaker 2 that's not a good place to make money, probably. Yeah, that sucks.
Like, Chrome extension should be an extension for your startup, you know. You have a product, yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, we also have a Chrome extension, you know.

Speaker 1 I wish the Chrome extension would be the product. I wish Chrome would support that, like, where you could pay for it easily.

Speaker 1 Because, like, imagine, I can imagine a lot of products that would just live as extensions, like improvements for social media.

Speaker 2 Like, I think GPTs, you know, GPTs, yeah. Like, these chat GPTs, they're going to charge money for it now.
You get a rev share, I think, from OpenAI. I made a lot of them also.

Speaker 1 Why? We'll talk about it. So, let's rewind back.
It's a pretty cool idea to do 12 startups in 12 months.

Speaker 1 What's it take to build a thing in 30 days? Like at that time, how hard was that?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Well, you need to pay the, you know, you need to build the product, actually, because it needs to be something they pay for.

Speaker 2 Do you need to build a login system? Like, maybe no, you know, like maybe you can build some scrappy login system.

Speaker 2 Like for Fotiai, 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 yeah it's not so safe you know 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 um what you can build fast uh so money stripe uh build the product build a landing page um you need to think about how are people gonna find this so are you gonna put it on Reddit or something?

Speaker 2 How are you going to put it on Reddit without being looked at as a spammer? Right?

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 2 if you say, Hey, it is my new startup, you should use it. No, nobody gets deleted, you know?

Speaker 2 Maybe if you find a problem that a lot of people on Reddit already have on a sub-reddit, you know, like and you solve that problem and say,

Speaker 2 Sub-people, I made this thing that might solve your problem, and maybe it's free for now, you know, like that could work, you know. But you need to be very, you know,

Speaker 2 narrow it down what you're building.

Speaker 1 Time is limited. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Actually, can we go back to the you laying in a room feeling like a loser? Yeah. I still feel like a loser sometimes.
What's what can you can you speak to that feeling to that place of just like

Speaker 1 feeling like a loser? And because I think a lot of people in this world are laying in a room right now listening to this

Speaker 1 and feeling like a loser.

Speaker 2 Okay, so I think it's normal if you're young that you feel like a loser, first of all.

Speaker 1 Especially when you're 27. Yes.
Yeah. Especially.
There's like a peak.

Speaker 2 yeah yeah I think 20 is the peak and so I would not kill yourselves it's very important just get through it you know but uh because you have nothing you have probably no money you have no business you have no job you you 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 they don't have a you need stuff you need like our family you need things around you you need to build a life for yourself if you don't build a life for yourself you'll be depressed so if you're alone in Asia in a hostel looking at the ceiling and you don't have any money coming in, you don't have a girlfriend, you don't, of course, you're depressed, it's logic.

Speaker 2 But back then, if you're in the moment, you think there's not logic, there's something wrong with me, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And also, I think I started going, I started getting like anxiety. And I think I started going a little bit crazy, where

Speaker 2 I think travel can make you insane. And I know this because I know that there's like digital nomads that they kill themselves.

Speaker 2 And I haven't checked like this, the comparison with baseline people, like suicide rate.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You feel this rooted.

Speaker 1 And you're constantly an outcast in that you're different from everybody else.

Speaker 2 Yes, exactly. But people treat you like Thailand.
People are so nice, but you still feel like outcast.

Speaker 2 And then I think the digital nomads I met then were all kind of like, it was like shady business, you know, but they were like vigilantes because it was a new thing.

Speaker 2 And like one guy was selling illegal drugs, it was an American guy who was selling illegal drugs via UPS to Americans, you know, on this website.

Speaker 2 There were like a lot of drop shippers doing shady stuff.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 So I also felt outcast from other foreigners 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 i i struck upon it on accident because i 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's 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.

Speaker 2 Pretty good. So I struck upon this on accident.
I was like, okay, there's other people on laptops working on their startup or working remotely.

Speaker 2 Back then, nobody worked remotely, but they worked on their businesses, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 finally kind of feel like you're free.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You're disattached from your culture. You're disattached from the culture you're probably in because you're staying very short.

Speaker 1 I think Franz Kafka said, I'm free, therefore I'm lost.

Speaker 2 Man, that's so true. Yeah, that's exactly the point.

Speaker 2 And yeah, freedom is like, it's the definition of no constraints, right? Like anything is possible. You can go anywhere.
And everybody's like, oh, that must be super nice, you know, like freedom.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 But what were they making for money?

Speaker 1 So you're saying they were doing shady stuff at that time?

Speaker 2 For me, you know, because I was more like a developer. I wanted to make startups kind of.

Speaker 2 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 let there was no like efficient they were like they would sit with beers and they would laugh about like all the dodgy shit kind of they're doing you know that part of the okay kind of vibe, you know, like kind of sleazy e-com vibe.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying all e-comm is sleazy, you know, but right, but you know this vibe. It could be a vibe.

Speaker 1 And your vibe was more

Speaker 1 that's ethical.

Speaker 2 You know the guys with sports cars in Dubai, these people, you know,

Speaker 2 e-comm, like, oh, bro, you got a drop ship. Yeah.
And you'll make 100 million a month. Like, those people was this shit.
And I was like, this is not my people.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I don't, I mean, there's nothing wrong with any of those individual people.
No, no judgment. But there's a foundation

Speaker 1 that's not quite ethical. What is that? I don't know what that is.
But yeah, I get you.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But they also think their cool shit is cool. So, you know,

Speaker 2 but I wanted to make like real startups. And that was my thing.

Speaker 1 I would read hacker news you know like why culminator 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 working cafes or working in

Speaker 1 just the freedom that

Speaker 2 that uh envelops you for with that that way of life because anything is possible you can just get off it was amazing like we would work like, you wouldn't, I would make friends, and we would work until you know 6 a.m.

Speaker 2 in Bali, for example, with like

Speaker 2 with Andre, my best friend, who has still my best friend, and we would, another friend, and we would work until like the morning when the sun came up, because at night the co-working space was silent, you know, there was nobody else.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I would wake up like 6 p.m. or 5 p.m.
I would drive to the co-working space on a motorbike.

Speaker 1 I would buy like 30 hot lattes from a cafe. How many?

Speaker 2 30. Because

Speaker 2 there was like six people coming, or we didn't know. Sometimes people would come in.

Speaker 1 Would you say 3, 0, 30? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Nice. And we would drink like four per person or something, you know?

Speaker 2 Man, it's body. I don't know if they were powerful lattes, you know, but they were lattes.

Speaker 2 And we would put them in a plastic bag and then we'd drive there and all the coffee was like falling, you know, everywhere. And then we'd go in the congress and have these coffees here and would work.

Speaker 2 all night we'd play like techno music and everybody would just work on their like this was literally like business people they would work in their startup and we'd all try to make something.

Speaker 2 And then the sun would come up, and the morning people, the you know, the yoga, uh, yoga girls, and yoga guys, would come in, you know, after the yoga class at six, and they say, Hey, good morning.

Speaker 2 And we're like, We look like this, you know, and we're like, Yeah, what's up? How are you doing? And we didn't know how bad we looked, you know, but it was very bad.

Speaker 2 And uh, 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.

Speaker 2 Um, and that was very fun.

Speaker 1 So it's just a bunch of you techno music blasting all through the night. Yeah.
Or more like

Speaker 1 industrial, not like this.

Speaker 1 For me,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But if it's a little too fast, I start the anxiety overpowers.

Speaker 2 You don't like drum and bass music?

Speaker 1 Probably not. No, it's too fast.

Speaker 1 I mean, for working. i have to i have to play with it it's like you can actually like i can adjust my yeah level of anxiety there's a must be a better word than anxiety it's like uh

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 combined with caffeine you know you go you go deep you know and and i think you balance on this edge of of anxiety because this caffeine is also hitting your anxiety.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 but uh, but those are good memories, you know, and also like travel memories.

Speaker 2 Like, you go from city to city, yeah, and it feels like it's kind of like Jet Set life, like, it's it's feels very beautiful, like you're you're seeing a lot of cool cities.

Speaker 1 And what was your favorite place that you remember you visited?

Speaker 2 I think still, like, uh,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I still think Thailand wins in how nice people are, how easy of a life people have there.

Speaker 1 Everything's cheap.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, Bangkok is getting expensive now, but Chiang Mai is still cheap. I think when you're starting out, it's a great place.
Man, the air quality sucks. It's a big problem.
So,

Speaker 2 and it's quite hot, but that's a very cool place.

Speaker 1 Pros and cons.

Speaker 2 I love Brazil also. My girlfriend is is Brazilian, but I do love, not just because of that, but I like Brazil.

Speaker 2 The problem still is the safety issue.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 If you go to the wrong areas, maybe you die.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, that's true.

Speaker 2 But it's not true in Europe. So in Europe, it's much more

Speaker 1 average. You're right.
You're right.

Speaker 1 It's more averaged out. Yeah.
I like it when there's strong neighborhoods. When you're like, you cross a certain street and you're in a dangerous part of town.

Speaker 2 Man, yeah.

Speaker 1 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 like... But you don't feel scared? Well, I don't.
I like danger. BJJ.

Speaker 1 No, not even just that. I think danger is interesting.
So danger reveals something about yourself, about others. Also, I like the full range of humanity.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I don't like the mellowed out aspects of humanity.

Speaker 2 I have friends, like, these are the most friends that are exactly like this. Like, they go to like the

Speaker 2 kind of broken areas, you know, like they like this reality. They like this authenticity more.
They don't like luxury. They don't like.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, I hate luxury. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's very European of you.

Speaker 1 Wait, was that?

Speaker 1 That's a whole nother conversation. So you

Speaker 1 quoted Freya Stark,

Speaker 1 quote, to awaken quite alone in a strange town. is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 I think I wrote it in some blog post and like

Speaker 2 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 it was a community.

Speaker 2 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 organizing meetups and making friends.

Speaker 2 And it was very common that people would say they would wake up and they would forget where they are yeah like for the first half minute and they 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 um but there's something

Speaker 2 man it's like anthony bourdain you know there's something pure about this kind of

Speaker 2 vagabond

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 1 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 and 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 some basic travel like go to san francisco or something else yeah you have like the novelty effect like you're in a new place Like here, things are possible.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 you don't get bored yet. And

Speaker 2 that's why people get addicted to travel, you know?

Speaker 1 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. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 How do you find a good idea?

Speaker 2 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 is stuff that I'm really annoyed with? That's like

Speaker 2 in my daily life that doesn't function well. And that's a problem that you can see.
Okay, maybe that's something I can add, write code about, you know, code for and it will make my life easier.

Speaker 2 So I would say make like a list of all these problems you have and like idea to solve it and see which one is like viable. You can actually do something and then start building it.

Speaker 1 So that's that's that's a really good place to start

Speaker 1 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 yeah because we kind of very quickly get uh accustomed to discomforts exactly uh like for example like doorknobs yeah like design of certain things like new extreme doorknob

Speaker 1 that one i know how much

Speaker 1 incredible design work has gone into. It's really interesting.

Speaker 1 Doors and doorknobs, just the design of everyday things, forks and spoons. It's going to be hard to come up with a fork that's better than the current fork designs.

Speaker 1 And the other aspect of it is you're saying like in order to come up with interesting ideas, you got to try to live a more interesting life. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But that's where travel comes in.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 like, dude, especially 10 years ago, nobody knew about this, like, the WeChats, all these apps that they already had before we had them. These everything apps, right?

Speaker 2 Like now, Elon's trying to make X, this everything app, like WeChat, the same thing.

Speaker 2 Like in Indonesia or Thailand, you have one app that you can order food with, you can order groceries, you can order massage, you can order car mechanic.

Speaker 2 Anything you can think of is in the app. And that stuff, for example, you, you know, that's called like arbitrage.

Speaker 2 You can go to back to your country and build that same app for your country, for example. So you start seeing

Speaker 2 problems. You start seeing solutions that other countries already, other people already did in the rest of the world.

Speaker 2 And also traveling in general just gives you more problems because travel is uncomfortable, you know.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 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 developments in that yeah yeah

Speaker 2 but what specifically is your process of generating ideas do you like do idea dumps like do you have a document where you just keep writing yeah i 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 um

Speaker 2 and i did that right now i think like because i already have money i can do more things uh based on technology so for for example, AI, when I found out about when Stable Diffusion came or ChatGPT and stuff,

Speaker 2 all these things were like

Speaker 2 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...

Speaker 2 First, just playing with it and then you find something like, okay, this generates, stable diffusion generates houses very beautiful and interiors, you know?

Speaker 1 So it's less about problem solving. It's more about the possibilities of new things you can create.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but that's very risky because that's the famous solution trying to find a problem.

Speaker 2 And usually it doesn't work. And that's very common with startup founders.
I think they have tech, but actually people don't need the tech, right?

Speaker 1 Can you actually explain?

Speaker 1 It'd be cool to talk about some of the stuff you've created. Can you explain

Speaker 1 this photoai.com? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So it's like fire your photographer. The idea is like you don't need a photographer anymore.
You can train yourself as an AI model and you can take as many photos you want anywhere in any clothes

Speaker 2 with facial expressions like happy or sad or poses, all this stuff.

Speaker 1 So how does it work? This is

Speaker 1 a link to a gallery of ones done on MIDI.

Speaker 2 So on the left, you have the prompts, the box. Yeah.
So you can write like, so model is your model. This is Lex Friedman.
So you can write like model as a blah, blah, blah, whatever you want. Yep.

Speaker 2 Then press the button and it will take photos. It will take like one minute.

Speaker 1 What are you using for the hosting for the compute? Replicate. Okay.

Speaker 1 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 taken uh i'm presuming you just loaded in a few pictures from the internet yeah so i went to google images touching lex freedman i added like 10 or 20 images you can open them in the gallery and you can use your cursors to

Speaker 2 yeah

Speaker 2 so some don't look like you so the hit and miss rate is like i don't know let's say like 50 50 or something but when i was watching your tweets like it's been getting better and better and better.

Speaker 2 It was very bad in the beginning. It was so bad, but still people signed up to it, you know?

Speaker 1 There's two Luxes. It's great.
It's getting more and more sexual. It's making me very uncomfortable.

Speaker 2 Man, but that's the problem with these models.

Speaker 2 No, we need to talk about this because the models of stable diffusion.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 Like the faces look all mangled.

Speaker 2 And it doesn't have enough resolution or something to do that well. So, but I started seeing these

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 anatomy.

Speaker 2 But if you look at the photorealistic models that people use now, still, there's still core of porn there, like of naked people.

Speaker 2 So I need to prompt out the naked, and everyone needs to do this with AI startups with imaging.

Speaker 2 You you need to prompt out the naked stuff you need to put a you know naked um you have to keep reminding the model you need to put clothes on yeah don't put naked because it's very risky i have google vision that checks every photo before it's shown to the user to like check like a nipple detector oh nice detector because you get the journalists get very angry if they you know

Speaker 2 there was a journalist i think that would get angry that used this and was like oh it 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

Speaker 2 but look at the cat face it's also kind of mangled you know i'm i'm i'm uh

Speaker 1 i'm a little bit disturbed you can zoom in on the cat if you want like like

Speaker 2 yeah it's a very sad cat that doesn't have a nose it doesn't have a nose but this man but this is the problem with ai starters because they all act like it's perfect like this is groundbreaking and but it's not perfect it's like really bad you know half the time so if i wanted to sort of update model as yeah, so you remove this stuff and you write like whatever you want, like in Thailand or something, or in Tokyo, uh, in Tokyo, yeah,

Speaker 2 and then you could say, like, at night with neon lights, like you can add more detail to make sure.

Speaker 1 I'll go in Austin. Do you think I'll know? Yeah, in Texas, in Austin, Texas, cowboy hat, in Texas, yeah, as a cowboy,

Speaker 1 as a cowboy, it's gonna go so uh, towards the porn direction. It's it's man, I I hope not.

Speaker 2 It's the end of my career.

Speaker 1 Or the beginning. It depends.
We can send you a push notification when your photos are done. Yeah.
All right, cool.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. So, this whole interface you've built.
Yeah. This is really well done.
So, jcury.

Speaker 2 Do I still use jcury?

Speaker 1 Yeah. The only one.
Still, after that,

Speaker 1 you're not the only one. The entire of the web is PHP.

Speaker 2 PHP and JCURI. Yeah.
And SQLite.

Speaker 1 You're just like one of the top performers from a programming perspective that are still openly talking about it. But everyone's using PHP.

Speaker 1 Like if you look at most of the web is still probably PHP and JP's because of WordPress, right?

Speaker 2 Because the blogs are. That's true.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's true. I'm seeing a revival now.
People are getting sick of frameworks.

Speaker 2 Like all the JavaScript frameworks are so like, what do you call it, like wieldy? Like they're so, it takes so much work to just maintain this code. And then it updates to a new version.

Speaker 2 You need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And can you actually just speak to that stack?

Speaker 1 You build all your websites, apps, startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML. Yeah.

Speaker 1 JavaScript with jQuery, PHP, and a school of light.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 that's a really simple stack, and you get stuff done really fast with that. Can you just speak to the philosophy behind that?

Speaker 2 I think it's accidental because that's the thing I knew. Like I knew PHP, I knew HTML, CSS, you know, because you make websites.
And

Speaker 2 when my startup started taking off, I didn't have time to.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I never did it because I didn't have time.

Speaker 2 These things were growing like this, and I was launching more projects. And I never had time.
It's like one day, you know,

Speaker 2 I'll start coding properly. And I never got to it.

Speaker 1 I sometimes wonder if I need to learn that stuff. It's still too due item for me to really learn Node.js or Flask or these kind of

Speaker 1 React. And

Speaker 1 it feels like a responsible software engineer should know how to use these. But you can get stuff done

Speaker 1 so fast with vanilla versions of stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's like software developers, if you want to get a job and there's like, you know, people making stuff like startups. And if you want to be entrepreneur, probably you maybe shouldn't.

Speaker 1 I wonder if there's like, I really want to measure performance and speed i think there's a deep wisdom in that yeah 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 yeah c

Speaker 1 when you're building systems engineering is like there's a lot of benefits for a pointer safety all that kind of stuff so i 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.

Speaker 2 Man, this is my most controversial take, I think. And maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like

Speaker 2 there's frameworks now that raise money. They raise a lot of money, like they raise 50 million, 100 million, 30 million dollars.

Speaker 2 And the idea is that you need to make the developers, the new developers, like when you're 18 or 20 years old, right?

Speaker 2 Get them to use this framework and then 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

Speaker 2 cost of the platforms to host it are a thousand times higher than just hosting it on a simple AWS server or a VPS on digital ocean, right?

Speaker 2 So there's obviously like a monetary incentive here.

Speaker 2 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 starters can pay for the bills.

Speaker 2 But what that it kind of destroys the

Speaker 2 information out there about learning to code because they, you know, they pay YouTubers, they pay influencers, developer influencers, a big thing to like, and the same thing would happen with like nutrition and fitness or something.

Speaker 2 Same thing happens in developing. They pay this 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.

Speaker 2 And I started noticing this because when I would ship my stuff, people would ask me, what are you using? I would say, just PHP, JQ, why does does it matter?

Speaker 2 And people would start kind of attacking me, like, why are you not using this new technology, this new framework, this new thing?

Speaker 2 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, it just works.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 There's money in this developer framework scene. There's hundreds of millions that goes to ads or influence or whatever.
It can't all go to developers.

Speaker 2 You don't need so many developers for a framework. And it's open source

Speaker 2 to make a lot of more money on these startups.

Speaker 1 So that's a really good perspective. But in addition to that, is like when you say better,

Speaker 1 it's like,

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 measure how productive they are in shipping features, how many bugs they create, how many security holes.

Speaker 2 PHP was not good with security for a while, but now it's good. In theory, in theory, is it though?

Speaker 1 Now it's good.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I 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.

Speaker 1 Anyway, I just was sort of questioning the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push software engineers towards frameworks, towards complex,

Speaker 1 like super complicated sort of software engineering approaches that stretch out the time it takes to actually build a thing.

Speaker 2 100%. 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

Speaker 2 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 technology that's

Speaker 2 that's simple, that's pragmatic, that's like, that works, that's not overly complicated, doesn't make your life like a living hell, you know?

Speaker 1 And use a framework when it obviously solves a problem, a direct problem that you do. Of course.

Speaker 2 Yeah, of course. I'm not saying you should code without a framework.
You should use whatever you want, but

Speaker 2 yeah, I think it's suspicious, you know? And

Speaker 2 I think it's when I talk about it on Twitter, like there's a lot of this army comes out, you know, this is these framework armies. Yeah, it's man, something my gut tells me.

Speaker 1 I want to ask the framework army, what have they built this week? It's the Elon question. What did you do this week?

Speaker 2 Yeah, did you make money with it? You know, did you charge users? Is it a real business? And

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 So going back to the cowboy, first of all, everyone. Some people look like like you, right?

Speaker 2 But some do.

Speaker 1 Every aspect of this is pretty incredible. I'm also just looking at the interface.
It's really well done. So this is all just jQuery.
And this is really well done. So

Speaker 1 take me through the journey of Photo AI.

Speaker 1 You don't know much. Most of the world doesn't know much about 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?

Speaker 1 So what was the origin story of Photo AI?

Speaker 2 I think it started because Stable Diffusion came out. So Stable Diffusion is the first generative image model, AI model.
And I started playing with it. You could install it on your Mac.

Speaker 2 Somebody forked it and made it work for MacBooks. So I downloaded it and cloned the repo and started using it to generate images.

Speaker 2 And it was amazing.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So architecture, for example, I would generate like architecture houses.

Speaker 2 So I made a website called thishouse does not exist.org. And it generated like, they called like house porn at that one.

Speaker 2 Like house porn is like a subreddit.

Speaker 2 So and this was table fusion 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 now things look much better

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 1 that's really really well done

Speaker 2 wow and it also generates like a description

Speaker 1 And you can upvote. Is it nice? Upvote it.
Yeah, man. There's so much to talk to you about.
Like the choices here. It's really weird.
This is very scrappy.

Speaker 2 In the bottom, there's like a ranking of the most upvoted houses. So these are the top voted.
And if you go to old time, you see quite beautiful ones.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So this one is my favorite.
The number one. It's like kind of like a

Speaker 1 how is this not more popular?

Speaker 2 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, like just continuous houseborn, like everything starts looking the same.

Speaker 2 But then I saw it was really good at interior. So I I pivoted to interiorai.com where

Speaker 2 I tried to like upload first generated interior designs.

Speaker 2 And then I tried to do, like there was a new technology called image to image, where you can input an image, like a photo, and it would kind of modify the thing.

Speaker 2 So you see, it looks almost the same as photo. It's the same code, essentially.

Speaker 2 Nice. So I would upload a photo of my interior where I lived and I would ask like changes into like,

Speaker 2 I don't know, like

Speaker 2 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 i 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 a specific goal you wanted to do so i would find really beautiful in tier design, make a gallery and train a new model that was very good in tier design.

Speaker 2 And it worked and I used that as well. And then for fun, I uploaded photos of myself.

Speaker 2 And here's what happened.

Speaker 2 And to train myself, like, and this would never work, obviously. And it worked.
And actually,

Speaker 2 it started understanding me as a concept. So my face worked.
And you could do like different styles, like me as a like very cheesy medieval warrior, all this stuff.

Speaker 2 So it's like, this is another startup. so now i did avatar ai.me i couldn't get the dot com

Speaker 2 and this was uh this was yeah avatar ai.me well now it forwards to photoi because i pivoted got it but this was more like cheesy

Speaker 2 thing so this is very interesting because this went so viral it made like i think like 150k in a week or something the most money ever made and um

Speaker 2 and then big this is very interesting the big vc companies like lanza 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 yeah they they became like the top grossing app after that um and it was how do you feel about that i think it's amazing honestly and it's not like you didn't have like a feeling like oh 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

Speaker 2 very skilled high talent like ios developer studio or something that and and they already had an app they had an app in app store for like um 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 this do a push notification to everybody who have these avatars yeah man they made great i think they made they made so much money and um

Speaker 2 i think they did a really great job and uh i also made a lot of money with it but that was I I quickly realized it wasn't my thing because it was so cheesy. It was like kitsch, you know?

Speaker 2 It's kind of like

Speaker 2 me as a Barbie or me as a, you know, it was too cheesy. I wanted to go for like, what's a real problem we can solve? Cause this is going to be a hype.

Speaker 2 This is going to be, and it was a hype, these avatars.

Speaker 2 It's like, let's do real photography. Like, how can you make people look really photorealistic? And it was difficult.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 All the problems that AI has with your face are like artistic, you know, if you call it Picasso. But if you make a real photo, all the problems with your face, like it just, you look wrong, you know?

Speaker 2 So I started making photo AI, which was like a pivot of it, where it was like a photo studio

Speaker 2 where you could take photos without actually needing a photographer, needing a studio. You don't just, you know, you just type it.
And I've been working on it for like the last.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's really incredible.

Speaker 1 That journey is really incredible. Let's go to the beginning of Photo AI, though, because I remember seeing a lot of really, really

Speaker 1 hilarious photos. I think you were using yourself as a case study right yeah yeah so what uh there's a tweet here sold

Speaker 1 one hundred thousand dollars in AI generated avatars yeah that'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

Speaker 2 that's amazing and then the NASA tweet like that's a launch tweet and then the before there is like the me hacking on it

Speaker 1 oh i see so that

Speaker 1 okay.

Speaker 1 So October 26th, 2022. Yeah.
I trained an ML model on my face.

Speaker 2 Sure. 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.

Speaker 2 It's like the top comment. So then I realized my eyes are far apart.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the internet helps you. Yeah, it helps you realize how you look, you know? Boy, do I love that? So first trap.

Speaker 1 Well, what is this?

Speaker 2 Wait, it's water from the waterfall, but the waterfall is in the back, you know. So, what's going on?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 So, but this was hit or miss, so you had to do a lot of curation because 99% of it was really bad.

Speaker 2 So, these are the photos I uploaded.

Speaker 1 How many photos did you use? Only these. I will try more up to date pics later.
These are the these are the only photos you uploaded? Yeah, Wow.

Speaker 1 Wow. Okay.
So like you were learning all this super quickly. What the what are some like interesting details you remember from that time for like what you have to figure out to make it work?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 I think it's cropped. It's like a cropped by the layout, but they're they're square photos, so they're 512 by 512 because that's stable diffusion.

Speaker 1 But nevertheless, not great capture of the face.

Speaker 1 It's not like a

Speaker 1 collection of several hundred photos that are like.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 many, I was getting DMs, like

Speaker 2 Telegram messages, like, how can I do the same thing? I want these photos.

Speaker 2 My girlfriend 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

Speaker 2 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 some a type form link.

Speaker 2 So type form is a site where you can create like your own input form, like Google Forms. So they would get an email with a link to the type form or actually just a link after the checkout.

Speaker 2 And they could upload their photos. So enter the email, upload the photos.
And

Speaker 2 I launched it. And I was like, here, first sale.
So this is October 2022.

Speaker 2 And I think within like the first 24 hours was like, I'm not sure. It was like a thousand customers or something.

Speaker 2 But the problem was I didn't have code to automate this. So I had to do manually.

Speaker 2 So the first few hundred, I just literally took their photos, uh 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 so but that's another constraint like i was forced to code something up uh that would do that and that was essentially making it into a real website right so first it was the type form and they uploaded through the type form stripe checkout type form yeah and then you were like that image is downloaded did you write a script to export no download the image myself it was a zip file to unzip

Speaker 1 and you unzipped it it.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 Because, you know, do things don't scale, Paul Graham says, right? So,

Speaker 2 and then I would train it, and then I would email them the photos, I think, from my personal email. Say,

Speaker 2 here's your avatars, you know. And they liked it.
They were like, wow, it's amazing.

Speaker 1 You emailed them with your personal email.

Speaker 2 So they didn't have an email address on this domain.

Speaker 1 And this is like 100 people.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And then you know who signed up?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I sent, I was like so scared to mess them. So I said, thanks so much for using my sites.
You know, he's like, yeah, amazing app. Great work.

Speaker 2 So it's like, this is different than normal reaction, you know?

Speaker 1 It's Bill Gates, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Cannot say anything.

Speaker 1 Just like shirtless pictures.

Speaker 2 GDPR, you know, like privacy, European regulation. I cannot share anything.
But I was very, I was like, wow. And,

Speaker 2 but this shows like, so you make something and then if it takes off very fast, you're like, it's validated, you you know? You're like, here's something that people really want.

Speaker 2 But then also I thought, this is hype. This is going to die down very fast.
And it did because it's too cheesy.

Speaker 1 But you have to automate the whole thing. How'd you automate it? So like, what's the AI component? Like, how hard was that to figure out?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like now I use replicate. Back then I use different platforms,

Speaker 2 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 the, you call it vendor, right?

Speaker 2 The G, the platform that did the GPUs, they increased their price for training from $3 to $20 after they saw that I was making so much money.

Speaker 2 So immediately my profit is gone because I was selling them for $30.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, you just took all my money, you know, and they're smart.

Speaker 2 Well, they're not that smart because like you also have a large uh platform and a lot of people respect you so you can literally come out and say that yeah but i think it's like kind of dirty to cancel a company or something i i prefer just bringing my business elsewhere but there was no elsewhere back then right so i started talking to other um ai model ml platforms so replicate was on those platforms and i started dming the ceo say can you please create like it's called dream booth this fine-tuning of you 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 takes half an hour to run and we don't have the gpus for it i said please please please and then after a week they said we're doing it we're launching this and then this company became it was like not very famous company 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 that was from these early dms with like the ceo like ben furs very nice guy and he was like, they never price gouged me.

Speaker 2 They never treated me bad. They always been very nice.

Speaker 2 It's a very cool company. So you can run any ML model, any AI model, LLMs you can run on here.

Speaker 1 And you can scale.

Speaker 2 Yes, they scale. Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, you can do now. You can click on the model and just run it already.
It's like super easy. You log in with GitHub.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Generate images, generate text, generate videos, generate music, generate video, like fine-tune models.

Speaker 2 They do anything, yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Like

Speaker 2 the website even looks weird now. It started as like a machine learning platform that was like, I didn't even understand what it did.
It was just too

Speaker 2 ML, you know? Like you would understand because you're in the ML world. I wouldn't understand.

Speaker 1 Now it's noob friendly.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. And I didn't know how it worked.

Speaker 2 But I knew that they could probably do this. And they did it.
They built the models. And now I use them for for everything.
And we trained, like, I think now like 36,000 models, 36,000 people already.

Speaker 1 But is there some tricks to fine-tuning to like the collection of photos that are provided? Like, how do you like.

Speaker 2 Yes, man, there's so many hacks.

Speaker 1 The hacks.

Speaker 2 It's like 100 hacks to make it work.

Speaker 1 What is the thing?

Speaker 1 Well, not the secrets, but the more like insights maybe about the human face and the human body. Like, what kind of stuff gets messed up a lot?

Speaker 2 I think people, well, man, that's the other thing. People People don't know how they look.
So

Speaker 2 they generate photos of themselves and then they say, ah, it doesn't look like me. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 it does, then I, you know, you can check the training for us. It does look like you, but you don't know how you look.
So there's a face dysmorphia of yourself that you, you have no idea how you look.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's hilarious. I mean, I've got to, one of the least pleasant activities of my existence is having to listen to my voice and look at my face.
So I get to like really,

Speaker 1 really have to sort of

Speaker 1 come in to terms with the reality of how I look and how I see. And everybody.

Speaker 1 People often don't, right? Really? You have a distorted view perspective.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You shouldn't choose them yourself because you don't know how you look.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 I learned from the hammerhead shark eyes, this

Speaker 2 stuff about you that looks ugly to you. And it's probably...
that what makes you original, makes you nice, and people like it about you. And it's not like, oh my God.

Speaker 2 And people notice it. People notice your hammerhead eyes, you know, but it's like that's me, that's my face.
So, I'm I love, I love myself, and that's confidence.

Speaker 2 And confidence is attractive, yes, right?

Speaker 1 Confidence is attractive, but yes, understanding what makes you beautiful, it's the breaking of symmetry makes you beautiful, it's the breaking of the average face makes you beautiful, all that, yeah,

Speaker 1 and obviously different for men and women of different ages, all this kind of stuff. Yeah, but be underneath it all, the personality, all of that, when when the face

Speaker 2 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 um 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 uh 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 uh and it's all automatic like um and i know that other people they they use again ai models to detect like what are the best photos in this training set and then train on those but it's all it's all about training 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 tuna like the photos should be diverse So, for example, if I only upload photos with a brown shirt or green shirt, the model will think that I'm training the green shirt.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 and everything else to be diverse, like different.

Speaker 1 So diverse lighting as well, diverse everything.

Speaker 2 Yeah, outside, inside.

Speaker 2 But there's no like, this is the problem. There's no like manual for this.
And nobody knew.

Speaker 2 We were all just, especially two years ago, we were all hacking, trying to test anything, anything you can think of. And

Speaker 2 it's frustrating. It's one of the most frustrating and also fun and challenging things to do because with AI, because

Speaker 2 it's a black box. And like Carpati, I think, says this, like

Speaker 2 we didn'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.

Speaker 2 We just know it's like a 3D matrix of numbers, right?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 1 it's very frustrating because some things you that would be 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 you know improve things i mean there's a whole field now of mechanistic interpretability that like studies that tries to figure out how tries to break thing apart and understand how it works but you know there's also the data at 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 in a very vain yeah like me 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

Speaker 1 like rigorously use photo ai because for the thumbnails i take portraits of people i didn't i don't know about photography uh i basically used your approach for photography i like google how do you take photographs

Speaker 1 Camera lighting. And also, it's tough because, man, maybe you could speak to this also, but like with photography, no offense to any.

Speaker 1 They're true artists, great photographers. But like, people

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And you have to have like the lenses. And I talked to a guy, an expert of

Speaker 1 shaping the sound in a room. Okay,

Speaker 1 and because I was thinking, I'm gonna do a podcast studio, whatever.

Speaker 1 I should probably like treat the

Speaker 1 do a sound treatment on the room. And like, when he showed up and analyzed the room, he thought everything I was doing was horrible.
And then that's when I realized, like,

Speaker 1 you know what? I don't need experts in my life.

Speaker 1 No, I didn't kick him. I mean, I said, thank you.
Thank you very much.

Speaker 2 Great tips.

Speaker 1 I just felt like there is,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And you consult them not to offload the problem onto them, but to gain wisdom from their perspective.

Speaker 1 Even if their perspective is ultimately one you don't agree with, you're going to gain wisdom from that.

Speaker 1 And just, I ultimately come up with like a PHP solution, PHP and jQuery solution towards the PHP studio like I have a little suitcase I use like

Speaker 2 just the the basic sort of 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

Speaker 2 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 focused on the 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 you buy what's the name for the guy that buys all the stuff before he even started doing the hobby right

Speaker 2 um marketing you know marketing does that to people they want to buy this stuff yeah but

Speaker 2 like man

Speaker 2 you can make a you can make a hollywood movie on an iphone you know if the content is good enough it's it and it would probably be original because you would be using an iPhone for it, you know?

Speaker 1 So that said, so the reason I brought that up with photography,

Speaker 1 there is wisdom from people. And one of the things I realized, you probably

Speaker 1 also realized this, but how much power light has

Speaker 1 to convey emotion.

Speaker 1 You just take one light. and move it around say you're sitting in the darkness move it around your face

Speaker 1 the different positions are having a second light potentially You can play with how a person feels just from a generic face. It's interesting.
Like, you can make people attractive.

Speaker 1 You can make them ugly. You can make them scary.
You can make them lonely. All of this.
And so you kind of

Speaker 1 start to realize this. And I would definitely love AI help in creating great portraits of people.
Guest photos, yeah. Guest photos, for example.
That's a small use case, but for me, that's

Speaker 1 I suppose it's an important use case because I want people to look good, but I also want to capture who they are,

Speaker 1 maybe my conception of who they are, what makes them beautiful, what makes their appearance powerful in some ways.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 photographs. So I'm not collecting enough.

Speaker 1 Yeah, photographs for myself to do it

Speaker 1 with just those photographs. If I can load that off onto AI and then start to play with like

Speaker 2 lighting you should do this and you should probably do it yourself like you can use photo but it's even more fun if you do it yourself so you train the models you can learn about like control net control net is where for example your photos in your podcast are usually like from the angle right so you can create a control net face pose that's always like this so every model every photo you generate uses this control net uh pose for example i think it would be very fun for you to try out that stuff do you play with lighting at all do you play with lighting with pose with Man, actually, this week or recently, there's a new model that came out that can adjust the light of any photo, but also AI image with stable diffusion.

Speaker 2 I think it's called Relight.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's amazing. Like

Speaker 2 you can upload kind of like a light map. So for example, red, purple, blue.
And it uses that light map to change the light on the photo you input. It's amazing.

Speaker 2 So there's for sure a lot of stuff you can do.

Speaker 1 What's your advice for people in general on how to learn all the state-of-the-art AI tools available? Like you mentioned, the new models coming out all the time. Yeah.
Like, how do you pay attention?

Speaker 1 How do you stay on top of everything?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 it's funny because my friends asked me this, like, 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.

Speaker 2 And I send them something URL and they all start laughing. Like, what is this? But they're real like people hacking around in AI.
They get hired by big companies and they're on X.

Speaker 2 And most of them are anonymous. This is very funny.

Speaker 2 They use anime avatars. I don't.

Speaker 2 But those people hack around and then they publish what they're discovering. They talk about papers, for example.
So yeah, definitely X.

Speaker 1 It's great.

Speaker 1 Almost exclusively all the people I follow are AI people. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's a good time now.

Speaker 1 Well, but also just brings happiness to

Speaker 1 my soul because there's so much turmoil on Twitter.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like politics and stuff.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, 100%. I like Twitter for that most, like building stuff, like, yeah, seeing other, because it inspires you to build.
And

Speaker 2 it's just fun to see other people share what they are discovering. And then you're like, okay, I'm going to make something too.
It's just super fun.

Speaker 2 And so if you want to start going X, and then I would go to replicate and start trying to play with models.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Can you speak a little bit more to the process of it becoming better and better and better? Photo AI?

Speaker 2 So I had this Photo AI and a lot of people using it. There was like a million or more photos a month being generated.

Speaker 2 And I discovered, I was testing parameters like increase the step count of generating photo or changing the sampler like a scheduler.

Speaker 2 Like you have DPM tool cars, all these things I don't know anything about, but I know that you can choose them when you generate an image and they have different resulting images.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So on like 10% of the users, I would

Speaker 2 randomly test parameters.

Speaker 2 And then I would see if they would, because you can favor the photo or you can download it I would measure if they favor it or like the photo and then I would a b test and you test for significance and stuff

Speaker 2 which parameters were were better and which were worse so you start 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 themselves and i tell them when they sign up we do sampling we do testing on your photos with random parameters and that worked really well i 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.

Speaker 2 But there was a breakthrough, yeah.

Speaker 1 So it's really about the parameters and models and letting the users

Speaker 1 help

Speaker 1 do the search in the space of models and parameters for you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But actually, so like Stable Diffusion, I use 1.5, 2.0BIC came out, Stable Diffusion Excel came out, all these new versions, and they were all worse.

Speaker 2 And so the core scene of people are still using 1.5 because it's like, it's also not like what they call neutered. Like they, they neutered like to make it super like with safety features and stuff.

Speaker 2 So most of the people are still on Stable Diffusion 1.5. And meanwhile, Stable Diffusion, the company went like the CEO left.

Speaker 2 A lot of drama happened because they couldn't make money. And yeah, so they gave it, it's very interesting.
They gave us this.

Speaker 2 open source model that everybody uses. They raised like hundreds of millions of dollars.

Speaker 2 They didn't make any money with it. They're 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.

Speaker 1 You're not even using the latest one.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 And the strange thing is that this company raised hundreds of millions, but the people that are benefiting from it are really small, like people like me who make these small apps that are using the model.

Speaker 2 And now they're starting to charge money for the new models, but the new models are not so good for.

Speaker 1 people.

Speaker 2 They're not so open source, right?

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 are using the open source model.

Speaker 2 So it's kind of like those frameworks, but then they didn't bribe enough influence to use it, and they didn't charge money for the platform, you know?

Speaker 1 Okay, so back to your book and the ideas.

Speaker 1 We didn't even get to the first step.

Speaker 1 Generating ideas. So you had notebook and you're filling it up.
How do you know when an idea is a good one?

Speaker 2 Like what you have this just flood of ideas how do you pick the one that you actually try to build man mostly you don't know like mostly i choose the ones that are most viable for me to build like i cannot build a space company now right would be quite challenging but i can build you actually write down like space company no i think asteroid mining would be very cool because like you 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 asteroid.

Speaker 2 You know, and the robotics is interesting. Like, I want to also learn robotics.
So maybe that could be.

Speaker 1 I think both the asteroid mining and the robotics is

Speaker 1 together.

Speaker 1 I feel like.

Speaker 1 No, exactly. This is it.
This is the.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Exactly. That's why I should do this.

Speaker 1 It's not nomadlist.com. No, it's not.
It's not asteroid mining.

Speaker 1 You have to like build stuff.

Speaker 1 Gravity is really hard to overcome. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But it seems, man, I sound like idiots probably not, but it sounds quite approachable. Like relatively approachable.
You don't have to build the rockets.

Speaker 1 Oh, you use something like SpaceX.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you hire SpaceX to send your, you know, this dog robot or whatever.

Speaker 1 So is there actually exist a notebook where you wrote down asteroid mining?

Speaker 2 No, I used, back then I used Trello. Trello.
Yeah, but now I don't really. I use Telegram.
I rather don't like save messages and I have like idea I rather.

Speaker 1 You have to type to yourself on Telegram.

Speaker 1 You know, like, because you use WhatsApp, right, I think so you have like message to yourself thing also yeah so you talk to yourself on Telegram yeah you use like a notepad to 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 a 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 saw some youtubers doing this like

Speaker 2 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 um

Speaker 2 draw like a calendar you know like 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 my life like i can 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The eight hours of thinking can never compete with the perpetual subconscious background job.

Speaker 1 So, 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,

Speaker 1 like stuff that you've been thinking about for many years. That's true.

Speaker 2 I mean, like, it emerges. I wrote it wrong because 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.

Speaker 2 And it's 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.

Speaker 2 You think you have ideas like that, yeah, all the time, 100%.

Speaker 1 It's just stuff that's been like there, yes, yeah.

Speaker 2 And I also, it comes up, and I bring it, I send it back, you know, like send it back to the kitchen to boil more, yeah. And it's like a soup that of ideas that's cooking.
It's 100%.

Speaker 2 This is how my brain works. And I think most people.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yes. So many times, like starter phones are too early with their idea.

Speaker 1 Yeah, 100%. Robotics is an interesting one for that because like there's been a lot of robotics companies that failed

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 wish to make money. So all so there's this long line of robotics companies that have tried, they had big dreams and they failed.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like Boston Dynamics, I I still don't know what they're doing, but they always upload YouTube videos and it's amazing.

Speaker 2 But I feel like a lot of these companies don't have a, it's like a solution looking for a problem for now, you know. Military obviously is useless, but like,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, Apple Vision Pro is very cool. It 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.

Speaker 1 When the personal computer, when the mac came along there was a big switch that happened it somehow captivated everybody's imagination you could like the application the killer apps became apparent you can type in a computer but they became apparent like immediately back then they also had like this thing like we don't need these computers uh they're like a hype and um and it also went like in kind of like you know ways 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?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the possibility of it. Right now, for example, for the robotics, there's very few robots in the homes of people.

Speaker 2 Exactly, yeah.

Speaker 1 The robots that are there are Roombas, so the vacuum cleaners, or they're Amazon Alexa, yeah, or a dishwasher.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's essentially a robot, yes, but the intelligence is very limited, I guess, is one way we can summarize all of them, except Alexa, which is pretty intelligent, but uh

Speaker 1 is limited with the kind of ways it interacts with you.

Speaker 1 That's just one example.

Speaker 1 I sometimes think about that as like if some people in this world were kind of born in their whole existence, it's like

Speaker 1 they were meant to build the thing. Yeah.
You know, like I sometimes wonder like what my, what I was meant to do. Do you have these plans for your life? You have these dreams.

Speaker 2 I think you're meant to build robots.

Speaker 1 Okay, me personally.

Speaker 1 Maybe, maybe.

Speaker 1 that's that's a sense I've

Speaker 1 had, but it could be other things.

Speaker 1 It could hilariously enough be the thing I was meant to be:

Speaker 1 is to talk to people, yeah, which is weird because I always was anxious about talking to people. It's like a really,

Speaker 1 yeah, I'm scared of this. I was scared,

Speaker 1 yeah, exactly. I'm scared of you, so

Speaker 1 it's just anxiety throughout social interaction in general. I'm an introvert that hides from the world, so yeah,

Speaker 1 it's really strange, yeah.

Speaker 2 But that's that's also kind of life, like life brings you to it's very hard to

Speaker 2 super intently kind of choose what you're going to do with your life.

Speaker 2 It's more like surfing. You're surfing the waves.
You go in the ocean. You see where you end up, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And there's universe has a kind of sense of humor.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I guess you have to just allow yourself to be carried away by the waves. Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Have you felt that way in your life?

Speaker 2 Yeah, all the time. Like, yeah.
That's like, I think that's the best way to live your life.

Speaker 1 So allow whatever to happen.

Speaker 2 Like, do you know what you're doing in the next few years is it possible that it'll be completely like changed possibly i think relationships like you want to hold relationships right you want to hold your girlfriend you want to become wife and all this stuff but uh

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 it's kind of buddhist you know you need to like lose control let it loose and then things will happen like when you do mushrooms when you do drugs like psychedelic drugs the people that start that are like control freaks get bad trips right because you need to let go like i'm pretty control freak actually and um when i did mushrooms when i was 17 i I it was very good.

Speaker 2 And then at the end, it wasn't so good because I tried to control. It was like, ah, now it's going too much.
Now I need to let's stop. bro you can't stop it you need to go through with it you know and

Speaker 2 so I think it's a good metaphor for life I think that's you know very tranquil way to lead your life yeah actually when I um took ayahuasca

Speaker 1 that lesson is deeply within me already that you can't control anything yes I think I probably learned that the most in jiu-jitsu so just let go and relax Yeah, and that's why I had just an incredible experience.

Speaker 1 There's like literally no negative aspect of my ayahuasca experience or any psychedelics I've ever had.

Speaker 1 Some of that could be with my biology, my genetics, whatever, but some of it was just not trying to control. Yeah.
Just surfed the way. For sure.

Speaker 2 I think most stress in life comes from trying to control.

Speaker 1 So once you have the idea,

Speaker 1 step two, build. How do you think about building the thing once you have the idea?

Speaker 2 I think you should build with the technology that you know. So, for example,

Speaker 2 Nomad List, which is like this website I made to figure out the best cities to live and work as digital nomads.

Speaker 2 It wasn't a website. It launched as a Google spreadsheet.
So it was a public Google spreadsheet. Anybody could edit.

Speaker 2 And I was like, I'm collecting like cities where we can live as digital nomads with the internet speed, the cost of living,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And it went like viral for my skill viral back then, which was like five retweets. And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So figuring out like what technology you can use that you already know. So if you cannot code, you can use a spreadsheet.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 All you need is an idea for a product,

Speaker 2 build something like a landing page or something,

Speaker 2 put a stripe button on there and then make it. And if you can code, use the language that you already know and start coding with that and see how far you can get.

Speaker 2 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 out a business.

Speaker 2 The important thing is that you validate that there's a market, that there's a product that people want to pay for.

Speaker 2 So use whatever you can use. And if you cannot code, use

Speaker 2 spreadsheets, landing page generators, whatever.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and the crowdsourcing element is fascinating.

Speaker 1 It's cool. It's cool when a lot of people start using it.
You get to learn so fast. Yeah.
Like I've actually

Speaker 1 did the spreadsheet thing. You share a spreadsheet publicly

Speaker 1 and I made it editable.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's so interesting.
Things start happening. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I did it for like a workout thing because I was doing a large amount of push-ups and pull-ups. Yeah, I remember this, man.
Yeah. And like,

Speaker 1 and well, I'll say Google Sheets is pretty limited in that everything is allowed. So people could just write anything in any cell and they can create new

Speaker 1 sheets, new tabs. And it just exploded.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 one of the things that I really enjoyed is there's very few trolls.

Speaker 1 Because actually,

Speaker 1 other people would delete the trolls. There would be like this weird war of like, of they want to protect the thing.
It's an immune system that's inherent to the thing.

Speaker 1 It becomes a society, you know, in the spreadsheets. And then there's the outcast who go to the bottom of the spreadsheet and they would try to hide messages.

Speaker 1 And they 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 bottom.

Speaker 1 Yes,

Speaker 1 it's fast. I mean, but that kind of crowdsourcing element is really powerful.
And if you can create a product that use that as a

Speaker 1 to his benefit, that's 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.

Speaker 1 I would love for you to talk about that. But one sort of way to talk about it is

Speaker 1 through

Speaker 1 you building hood maps. Yeah.
So you've 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.

Speaker 1 So people should definitely check out the video in the blog post.

Speaker 1 Can you explain what hood maps is and what this whole like this process was?

Speaker 2 So I was traveling and I was still trying to find like problems, right? And I would go, I would discover that like everybody's experience of a city is different because they stay in different areas.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So I'm from Amsterdam and when I grew up in Amsterdam, or didn't grow up, but I lived there in university, I knew that center is like in Europe, the centers are always tourist areas.

Speaker 2 So they're super busy. They're not very authentic.

Speaker 2 They're not really Dutch culture. It's Amsterdam tourist culture, you know?

Speaker 2 So when people would travel to Amsterdam, I would say, don't go to the center, go to southeast of the center, the Jordan or the pipe or something, more hipster areas, like a little more authentic culture of Amsterdam.

Speaker 2 That's where I would live, you know and where I would go

Speaker 2 and I thought this could be like an app where you can have like a Google Maps and you put colors over it you have like areas that are like color coded like red is tourist green is rich you know green money yellow is hipster you can figure out where you need to go in the city when you travel because I was traveling a lot 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 I need I need to did you know that you would be using a canvas no I didn't know it was possible because I didn't know so this is the cool this is the the cool thing.

Speaker 1 People should really check.

Speaker 1 Because, like, you honestly capture so beautifully the

Speaker 1 humbling aspects of it, the embarrassing aspects of not knowing what to do. It's like, how do I, how do I do this? And you like document yourself.
Yeah, you're right, dude.

Speaker 1 I feel embarrassed about myself.

Speaker 1 It's called being alive. Nice.

Speaker 1 So you're like, you don't know anything about so canvas is a way,

Speaker 1 yeah, it's HTML5

Speaker 1 thing that allows you to draw shapes.

Speaker 2 Draw images, just draw pixels essentially.

Speaker 2 And that was special back then because before you could only have like elements, right? So you want to draw a pixel, use a convos.

Speaker 2 And I knew I needed to draw pixels because I need to draw these colors. And I thought like, okay, I'll get like a Google Maps iframe embed and then I'll put a div on top of it.

Speaker 2 with the colors and I'll do like opacity 50, you know, so it kind of shows.

Speaker 2 So I did that with convos and then I started drawing.

Speaker 2 And then I thought like, obviously other people need to edit this because I cannot draw all these things myself.

Speaker 2 So I crowdsourced it again and I, you would draw on the map and then it would send the pixel data to the server. It would put it in the database.

Speaker 2 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 Amster center, there's like six people say.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So most people say it's tourist, it's tourists, and it becomes red.

Speaker 2 And I would do that for all the GPS corners in the world.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 No, people just type in cities and go like, go berserk and start drawing everywhere.

Speaker 1 Would they draw shapes or would they draw pixels?

Speaker 2 Man, they drew like crazy stuff. Like offensive symbols, I cannot mention they would draw penises.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's

Speaker 2 obviously a guy 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 crowdsource data so you have all these pixels on top of it it's like a layer of pixels and you choose the most common pixel so yeah it's just like a pole but in visual format and it worked and uh within a week i had enough data and and there was like cities that did really well like los angeles a lot of people started using it uh like most data is in los angeles because uh los angeles is has defined neighborhoods yeah

Speaker 1 and not just in terms of the the official labels but like what they're known for yeah what are the do you 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

Speaker 2 business so there's always a business area, right? And then there's a residential. Residential is gray.
So, I thought those were the most common things in the city, kind of.

Speaker 1 And a little bit meme-y, like, it's almost fun to label it as yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, obviously, it's simplified, but you need to simplify this stuff. You know, you don't want to have too many categories.

Speaker 2 And it's essentially just like using a paintbrush where you select the color in the button, you select the category, and you start drawing. There's no instruction, there's no manual.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, people in Los Angeles would write crazy stuff, it would go viral in all these cities. You can allow, allow your location, and then we'll probably send you to Austin.

Speaker 1 Okay, so we're looking.

Speaker 1 Uh, oh boy, uh, drunk hipsters,

Speaker 1 uh,

Speaker 2 Airbro and Bros.

Speaker 1 Airbro and Bros.

Speaker 1 Hipster girls who do cocaine.

Speaker 2 I saw a guy in a fish costume get beaten up here. Yep.

Speaker 2 That seems also overpriced and underwhelming.

Speaker 1 Let me see. Let me make sure this is accurate.
Let's see.

Speaker 1 Dirty Sixth. For people who know Austin know that that's important to label.
6th Street is famous in Austin. Dirty Sixth, Drunk Fat Boys.
Accurate.

Speaker 1 Drunk Fat Bros. Continued on 6th.
Very well known.

Speaker 1 West 6th, drunk douche of bros.

Speaker 2 Go from Frat to Douche.

Speaker 1 Douche. I mean, it's very accurate so far.

Speaker 1 They only let hot people live here. That's.

Speaker 1 I think that might be accurate.

Speaker 2 Exercise freaks on the river? Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 Dog runners, accurate.

Speaker 1 Saw a guy in the fish costume get beat up here.

Speaker 2 I want to know the story.

Speaker 1 So that's all a user contributed.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and that's like stuff I couldn't come up with it because I don't know Austin. I don't know the memes here in the subcultures.

Speaker 1 And then me as a user can upvote or downvote this. So this is completely chronic.

Speaker 2 That's like because of Reddit, you know, upvote, downvote. Took it from there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, 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?

Speaker 2 I think I added the text like

Speaker 2 a week after.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 so here's like the pixels.

Speaker 1 So that's really cool, the pixels. How do you go from that? That's a huge amount of data.
So there's

Speaker 1 we're now looking at an image where it's just a sea of pixels that are called different colors in a city. So how do you combine that to be a thing that actually makes it some sense?

Speaker 2 I think here the problem was that you have this data, but it's like it's not

Speaker 2 locked to one location. Yeah.
So I had to normalize it.

Speaker 2 So when you click, when you draw on a map, it will show you the specific pixel location and you can convert the pixel location to a GPS coordinate, right? Like a latitude, longitude.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So what you want to do is you want to take that pixel and you want to normalize it by removing like decimals,

Speaker 2 which I discovered, so that you're talking about this neighborhood, this or this street, right? And so that's what I did. I just took the decimals off and then I saved it like this.
And then it starts

Speaker 2 going to like a grid. And then you have like a grid of data.

Speaker 2 You get like a pixel map kind of and then 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 used google maps it went viral and google maps it was out of credits so i and i had to it's so funny during when i launched it went viral um google maps the map didn't load anymore.

Speaker 2 It says over the limits, you need to contact enterprise sales.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So I switched to Mapbox and then had Mapbox for years. And then it went viral.
And I had a bill of $20,000. It was like last year.

Speaker 2 So they helped me with the bill. They said, you know, you can pay less.
And then I now switch to like an open source kind of map platform. So it's a very expensive product.

Speaker 2 And it never made any dollar money, but it's very fun, but it's very expensive.

Speaker 1 What do you learn from that? So like

Speaker 1 from that experience, because when you leverage somebody else's through the API, yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't think a map hosting service should cost this much, you know, but

Speaker 2 I could host it myself, but that would be, I don't know how to do that, you know, but I could do that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's super complicated.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 it hasn't worked.

Speaker 1 You talked about possibly doing advertisements on it or somehow.

Speaker 1 Or people sponsoring it. Yeah.
But it's really surprising to me that people don't want to advertise on it.

Speaker 2 I think map apps are very hard to monetize. Like Google Maps also doesn't really make money.
Sometimes you see these ads, but I don't think there's a lot of money there.

Speaker 2 You could put a banner ad, but it's kind of ugly. And the product is kind of like, it's kind of cool.
So it's kind of fun to subsidize it. And it's kind of a little bit part of Nomad List.

Speaker 2 Like I put it on Nomad List in the cities as well.

Speaker 2 But I also realized you don't need to monetize everything. Some products are just cool.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 it's cool to have hoodmaps exist.

Speaker 2 I want this to exist, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff you've created that I'm just glad exists in this world. That's true.
And it's a whole nother puzzle. And I'm surprised to figure out how to make money off of it.

Speaker 1 I'm surprised maps don't make money, but you're right. It's hard.
It's hard to make money. Because

Speaker 1 there's a lot of compute required to actually bring it to life.

Speaker 2 life 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 that where 90 the interface is a map so what are you gonna do you're gonna 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 the user base and you lose the crowdsource data so it's not fun anymore it stops being accurate right so you kind of

Speaker 2 they pay for it by crowdsourcing the data but then yeah, it's fine, you know, it doesn't make money, but it's it's cool.

Speaker 1 But that said, Nomad List makes money. Yeah.
So what was the story behind Nomad List?

Speaker 2 So Nomad List started because I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand, which is now like the second city here.

Speaker 2 And I was, you know, working on my laptop.

Speaker 2 I met like other nomads there and I was like, okay, this seems like a cool thing to do, like work on your laptop in a different country, kind of travel around.

Speaker 2 But back then, the internet everywhere was very slow.

Speaker 2 So so the internet was fast in for example Holland or United States but in a lot of parts in you know South America or Asia it was very slow like 0.5 megabits so you you couldn't watch a YouTube video Thailand weirdly had like quite fast internet but I wanted to find like other cities where I could go to like work on my laptop whatever and travel and but we needed like fast internet so I was like let's you know crowdsource this information uh with a spreadsheet and i also needed to know the cost of living because i didn't have a lot of money i had 500 a month.

Speaker 2 So I had to find a place where the rent was $200 per month or something. Where I had some money that I could actually rent something.

Speaker 2 And there was Nomad List. And it still runs.

Speaker 2 I think it's now almost 10 years.

Speaker 1 So just to describe how it works,

Speaker 1 I'm looking at Chiang Mai here.

Speaker 1 There's a total score. It's ranked number two.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's like a nomad score.

Speaker 1 4.82.

Speaker 1 Like by members, but it's

Speaker 1 looking at the internet. In this case, it's fast,

Speaker 1 fun, temperature, humidity, air quality, safety, food safety,

Speaker 1 crime, racism, or lack of crime, lack of racism, education level, power grid, vulnerability to climate change, income level.

Speaker 2 It's a little much, you know.

Speaker 1 English speaking. It's awesome.
It's awesome. Walkability.
Keep cutting stuff. Because for certain groups of people, certain things really matter.
And this is really cool. Yeah.
Happiness.

Speaker 1 I'd love to ask you about that. Nightlife,

Speaker 1 free Wi-Fi, AC,

Speaker 1 female-friendly, freedom of speech.

Speaker 2 Yeah, not so good in Thailand, you know?

Speaker 1 Values derived from national statistics.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I know it's in Thailand.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is really fascinating. So this is for city.
Yeah. It's basically rating all the different things that matter to you in the internet.
And this is all crowdsourced.

Speaker 2 Well, so it started crowdsourced, but then

Speaker 2 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 there, which you can freely use.

Speaker 2 Like I started getting problems with crowdsource data, where, for example, people from India, they really love India, and they would submit the best scores for everything in India.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So you started getting discrepancies in the data between where people were from and stuff. So I started switching to data sets.
And

Speaker 2 now it's mostly data sets. But one thing that's still crowdsourced is, so people add where they are, they add their travels to their profile.

Speaker 2 And I use that data to see which places are upcoming and which places are popular now.

Speaker 2 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, and you can see the people, the users that are actually there.

Speaker 2 And it's like 30,000 000 or 40 000 members so these people are in austin now and 1800 remote workers in austin now of which eight plus members checked in uh 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 30 per month so it's like one meetup a day and i don't do anything they organize themselves so i just

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Cons of Austin. It's too expensive, very sweaty and humid.
No, difficult to make friends. Difficult to make friends.

Speaker 2 Interesting, right? I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 Difficult to make friends.

Speaker 1 I mean, but it's all crowdsourced, but mostly it's pros. Yeah.
Austin's very safe, fast internet.

Speaker 2 I don't understand why it says not safe for women. You need to check the data set.

Speaker 1 It feels safe.

Speaker 2 The problem with a lot of places like the United States is that it depends per area, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 So once you actually show up to a city, how do you figure out what area, like where to get fast internet? For example, like for me, it's consistently a struggle to figure out my school.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 When I show up to a city, figuring out where I can get get fast internet connection

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 for podcasting purposes, where I can find a place with a table that's quiet. Right.

Speaker 1 It's not easy.

Speaker 2 Construction sounds?

Speaker 1 All kinds of sounds. You have to learn about all the sources of sounds in the world.
And also like the quality of the room because the more

Speaker 1 the emptier the room and like if it's just walls without any curtains or any of this kind of stuff, then there's

Speaker 1 echoes in the room. Anyway, but you figure out that a lot of hotels don't have tables.
They don't have like normal.

Speaker 2 It's this weird desk, right? Yeah, they have a center table.

Speaker 1 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 that don't.

Speaker 2 It's too designy.

Speaker 1 It's too designy. They're not really real tables.
What if you get an IKEA?

Speaker 1 Buy IKEA.

Speaker 2 Yeah, before you arrive, you order an IKEA. Yeah.
Like nomads do this. They get desks.

Speaker 1 I feel like you should be able to show up at to a place and have the desk.

Speaker 1 Unless you stay in there for a long time. Just the entire assembly, all that.
Airbnb is so unreliable.

Speaker 1 The range and quality that you get is

Speaker 1 huge.

Speaker 1 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 rooms.

Speaker 2 And that's a problem.

Speaker 2 Fake photos, man.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the booking fees, affiliate, right? I thought about this idea because we have the same problem.

Speaker 2 Like I go to hotels and there's specific ones that are very good and I know now the chains and stuff.

Speaker 2 And but even if the, even if you go to some chains are very bad in a specific city and very good in other cities.

Speaker 1 And each individual hotel has a lot of kinds of rooms. Yeah.
Like you.

Speaker 1 Some are more expensive, some are cheaper and so on. But you can get the details of what's in the room.

Speaker 1 Like what's the actual layout of the room what is the view of the room 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 sign signs up for that i would 100 use that website to look for a hotel instead of uh the crappy alternatives that don't give any information and i feel like ev there'll be this pressure for all the hotels to join that site and you can make a shit ton of money'cause hotels make a lot of money.

Speaker 2 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 to book book a flight?

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 What's the explanation of that?

Speaker 2 Man, I thought about this for years. So I think it's like

Speaker 2 I have to book the flight anyway. Like I know there's a route that they take and I need like I need to bu book, for example, Qatar Airlines.
And I and I need to get through this process. So

Speaker 2 the the and with a hotel, similar, you need a hotel anyway.

Speaker 2 So do you have time to like figure out the best one not really you kind of just need to get the place booked and you know you need to get the flight and you'll go through the pain of this process and that's why this process always sucks so much with hotels and airline websites and stuff because they don't have an incentive to improve it because generally only for like a super upper segment of the market i think like a super high luxury it affects the actual booking right i don't know I think that that's an interesting theory.

Speaker 1 I think that must be a different theory.

Speaker 1 My theory would be that great engineers, like great software engineers, are not allowed to make changes.

Speaker 1 Basically, like there's some kind of bureaucracy. There's way too many managers.
There's a lot of bureaucracy.

Speaker 1 And great engineers show up, they 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.

Speaker 1 They're not really interested in improving any of the thing. And like, literally, they would like to improve the stuff, but the bureaucracy

Speaker 1 of the place, plus all the bosses, all the high-up people are not technical people, probably. They don't know much about web dev.
They don't know much about programming.

Speaker 1 So they just don't give any respect.

Speaker 1 You have to give the freedom and the respect to great engineers as they try to do great things. That feels like an explanation.

Speaker 1 Like, if you were a great programmer, would you want to work at America Airlines?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 I'm torn on that because I... I actually,

Speaker 1 as somebody who lost program, would love to work at America Airlines so I can make the thing better.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but for, I would, I would work there just to fix it for myself, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, for yourself. And then you just know how much suffering you alleviated.
Yeah, how much frustration

Speaker 1 just

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You're making their life just so much better. Yeah.
But there must be an explanation that has to do with managers and bureaucracies. Like, I don't.

Speaker 2 I think it's money. Do you know booking.com?

Speaker 1 Sure. So

Speaker 2 it's the biggest booking website in the world. It's Dutch, actually.
And they have teams, because my friend worked there.

Speaker 2 They have teams for a specific part of the website, like a 10 by 10 pixels area, where they run tests on this.

Speaker 2 So they run tests, 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 i don't know about making more money and you know not every company but

Speaker 2 you know if they if 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.

Speaker 2 They start with disrupting. Like booking all started as a startup in 1997.
And then they become like the old shit again. Like, you know, Uber now starts to become like a taxi again, right?

Speaker 2 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 the circle.

Speaker 1 I think some of it is also just

Speaker 1 it's hard to have ultra competent engineers. Yeah.
Like Stripe seems like a trivial thing, but it's hard to pull off.

Speaker 1 Why was it so hard for Amazon to have buy with one click? Which I think is a genius idea. Make buying easier, like

Speaker 1 make it as frictionless as possible. Just click a button once and you bought the thing, yeah, as opposed to most of the web was a lot of clicking, and it often doesn't work.

Speaker 2 Like with the airlines, you remember the forms would delete, you could click next, submit, and it would 404 or something, or your internet would go down, your modem. Yeah, man.

Speaker 1 And I would have an existential crisis. Like the frustration would take over my whole body.
Yes. And I would just wanted to quit life for a brief moment there.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm so happy the form stays in Google Chrome now when something goes wrong.

Speaker 2 But that's so Google, somebody at Google improved society with that, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And one of the challenges of Google is to have the freedom to do that.

Speaker 2 They don't anymore.

Speaker 1 There's a bunch of bureaucracy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's so many brilliant, brilliant people there, but it just moves slowly. Yeah.
And I wonder why that is. Maybe that's the natural way of a company, but

Speaker 1 you have people like Elon who rolls in and just fires most of the folks and always operate, like push the company to operate as a startup, even when it's already big.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I mean, Apple does this. Like I studied in business school, Apple does competing product teams that operate as startups.
So it's three to five people. They make something.

Speaker 2 They have multiple teams to make the same thing. The best team wins.
So I think you need to emulate a free market inside a company to make it entrepreneurial.

Speaker 2 And you need entrepreneurial mentality in a company to come up with new ideas and do it better.

Speaker 1 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've learn everything you need to in order to build it you have your current skills but you need to learn just the minimal amount of stuff so you're a good person to ask like what

Speaker 1 how do you learn

Speaker 1 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 the same as AI.

Speaker 2 It 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, it is going to be big.
So I need to learn this. So

Speaker 2 I know nothing about 3D. I installed like,

Speaker 2 I think, Unity and like Blender and stuff. And I started learning all this stuff

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 and so i think with learning for me it's like it i think learning is so funny because people always ask me like how how do i how do you learn to code like should i learn to code and i'm like i don't know like i'm every day i'm learning it's kind of cliche but every day i'm learning new stuff so every day i'm searching on google or asking out chat gpt how to do this thing how to do this thing every day i'm getting better at my skill so you never stop learning so the whole concept of like how do you learn well you never end so where do you want to be do you want to know a little bit do you want to know a lot do you want to do it for your whole life or so, I think taking action is the best step to learn.

Speaker 2 So, making things

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And you start, okay, how do I add a button? How do I add AI features, right? Like nowadays, so it's like by taking action, you can learn stuff much faster than reading books or

Speaker 1 curious. Let me ask perplexity.
How do I make a website? I'm just curious what it would say.

Speaker 1 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, or CMS.

Speaker 1 Website builder platform, Wix.

Speaker 2 It tells like Wix or Squarespace is what I said.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Landing page.

Speaker 1 What do I, how do I say, if I want to programming it, program it myself

Speaker 1 design your website create essential pages yeah even tells you to launch it right like start 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 the basic like google analytics but you can't make nomad lists with this website

Speaker 2 with wix like with ah no you can you can get pretty far i think you can get pretty far these website builders are pretty advanced like all you need is a grid of images right yeah that are clickable that open like another page yeah you can get quite far how do i learn to program?

Speaker 1 Choose a programming language to start with.

Speaker 2 Yeah, free both camp is good.

Speaker 1 Work through resources thematically.

Speaker 1 Practice coding regularly for 30, 60 minutes a day. Consistency is key.
Join programming communities like Reddits. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty good. Yeah.
It's pretty good.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This is like, that's why the man, the power of AI for education is going to be insane. Like people anywhere can

Speaker 2 ask this question and start building stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it clarifies it for sure. And just start building.
Like keep build, build, like actually apply the thing. Whether it's AI or any of the programming for web development.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Just have a project in mind.

Speaker 1 I love the idea of like

Speaker 1 12 startups in 12 months or like

Speaker 1 build a project almost every day. Just build a thing

Speaker 1 and get it to work and finish it every single day. That's a cool experiment.

Speaker 2 I think that was the inspiration. There was a girl who did 160 websites in 160 days or something.
Literally mini websites.

Speaker 2 And she learned to code that way. So I think it's good to set yourself challenges, you know?

Speaker 2 like don't you can go to some coding bootcamp but i don't think they actually work i think it's better to do like for me out to the dark like self-learning and setting yourself like challenges and just

Speaker 2 getting in it but you need discipline you know you need discipline to keep to keep doing it and coding you know coding is very it's a steep learning curve to get in it's very annoying working with computers is very annoying uh so it can be hard for people to keep doing it you know

Speaker 1 Yeah, that thing of just keep doing it and don't quit, that urgency that's required to finish a thing.

Speaker 1 That's why it's really powerful when you documented this, the creation of hood maps or the like a working prototype that there's a just a constant frustration i guess it's like

Speaker 1 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 and then there is a dopamine rush of like oh it works cool man it's amazing and it's on i i live streamed it it's on youtube and stuff people can watch it and it's amazing when things work

Speaker 2 it's look it's just like amazing that you i look very not i don't look far ahead so i only look okay what's the next problem to solve and then the next problem and at the end you have a whole app or website or thing you know but i think most people look way too far ahead you know they look it's like this poster again like you shouldn't you don't know how hard it's going to be so you should only look like for the next thing the next little challenge the next step and then see where you end up and assume it's going to be easy

Speaker 2 yeah exactly like be naive about it because it's it's you're going to have very difficult problems.

Speaker 2 A lot of the big problems won't be even tech, will be like public, right? Like maybe people don't like your website. Like

Speaker 2 you will get canceled for a website, for example. Like a lot of things can happen.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So there's the power of the crowdsourcing, but there's also the negative aspects of people being able to criticize.

Speaker 2 So, man, I think haters are actually good because I think a lot of haters have good points.

Speaker 2 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 your website sucks because it's personal you know what did he say why did he didn't not like it and you figure out okay you didn't like it because the signup was difficult or something or it wasn't the data they say no but this data is not accurate or something right okay i need to improve the quality of data this hater has a point i think it's dumb to completely ignore your haters you know and also you

Speaker 2 Man, I think I've been there when I was like 10 years old or someone you're on the internet, you're just shouting crazy stuff. That's like most of Twitter, you know, or the half of Twitter.

Speaker 2 So you sh you have to take it with a grain of salt.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So in 10 years, I muted 15,000 people. So that's like...

Speaker 1 Like that's one by one manual? 15, yeah.

Speaker 2 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, ah, you blocked me. So I just mute and they disappear.

Speaker 2 And it's amazing.

Speaker 1 So you mentioned Reddit. So Hoodmaps.
Did that make it to the front page of Reddit?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, it did. Yeah,

Speaker 2 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 somewhere crazy.
And it was at night. It was amazing.

Speaker 2 Man, I think nowadays, honestly, TikTok,

Speaker 2 YouTube Reels, Instagram Reels, a lot of apps get very big from people

Speaker 2 making TikTok tock 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 uh this is how it works blah blah blah um and this is why i made it for example and this is why you should use it and if it's a good video will take off and you will get you man you i got like twenty thousand dollars extra per month or something from a tick tock from one tick tock video like it made a photo guy by you or somebody else by some random guy so there's all these ai influences that that they write about they show ai apps and they then they ask money later like when a video goes viral, all I can do is do it again and send me $4,000 or something.

Speaker 2 I'm like, okay, I did that, for example. But it works.

Speaker 2 TikTok is a very big platform for user

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So use organic or write a banger tweet, right?

Speaker 1 That's can make an app take off as well. Well, I mean, yeah, fundamentally create cool stuff and have just a little bit of a following, enough enough to like

Speaker 1 for

Speaker 1 the cool thing to be noticed and then it becomes viral if it's cool enough.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and you don't need a lot of followers anymore because on X and a lot of platforms, because TikTok, X, I think Instant Reels also, they have the same algorithm now.

Speaker 2 It's not about followers anymore. It's about they test your content on a small subset, like 300 people.
If they like it, it gets tested to a thousand people and on and on.

Speaker 2 So if the thing is good, it will. Rise anyway.
It doesn't matter if you have half a million followers or a thousand followers or 100.

Speaker 1 What's your philosophy of monetizing? How to make money from the thing you build?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So a lot of startups, they do like free users.
So you could sign up and you use an app for free, which is,

Speaker 2 it never worked for me well because I think free users generally don't convert.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I think it's best to start and just

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then if you want to use it, pay me money, pay $10, $20, $30.

Speaker 2 I would ask more than $10 per month. Like Netflix is like $10 per month, but Netflix is a giant company that can, you know, they can afford to make it so cheap, relatively cheap.

Speaker 2 If you're an individual, like an indie hacker, like you are making your own app, you need to make like at least $30

Speaker 2 or more on a user to make it worthy for you. You need to make money, you know?

Speaker 1 And it builds a community of people that actually really care about the product.

Speaker 2 Also, yeah, making a community, like making a Discord is very normal now.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 you need to imagine, like, if you're, if you're starting out, getting a thousand users is quite difficult. Getting a thousand pages is quite difficult.

Speaker 2 And if you charge them them like $30, you have $30K a month. That's a lot of money.

Speaker 1 That's enough to live a good life. Yeah, live a pretty good life.
I mean, there could be a lot of costs associated with hosting.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so that's another thing. I make sure my profit margins are very high.
So I try to keep the cost very low. I don't hire people.

Speaker 2 I try 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,

Speaker 2 can you give me a discount? Because it's too expensive. And they say, sure, 50%.
I'm like, wow, very good.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 I need a discount, or I kind of need to, like, you don't need to be an asshole about it.

Speaker 2 Say, you know, I kind of need a discount, or I need to go maybe to another company, so maybe like this count, like here and there. And they say, sure.

Speaker 2 A lot of them will say, yes, like 25% discount, 50% discounts.

Speaker 2 Because you think the price on the website is the price of the API or something. It's not.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, a lot of companies probably want to associate with you because you're trying to do.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like a secret hack. But I think even without secret hack, they'd be a good person.
It depends how much discount they will give, you know? They'll maybe give more.

Speaker 2 But, you know, that's why you should shit post on Twitter so you get, you know, discounts, maybe.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 But, and also, when it's crowdsourced, I mean, paying does prevent spam or help prevent spam. Also, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it gives you high-quality users.

Speaker 2 Free users are

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 hacking it and whatever.

Speaker 1 There's something on the internet. You mentioned like 4chan discovered.
hood maps.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I love 4chan. I don't love 40, but you know what I mean? Like they're so crazy, especially back then.
Like that's, it's kind of funny what they do, you know?

Speaker 1 I actually, uh, what is it? This new documentary on Netflix, anti-social network, or something like that. That was really fascinating.
Just Fortune, just the

Speaker 1 you know, the spirit of the thing, Fortune and H.

Speaker 1 It's so much about freedom and also like the humor involved in fucking with the system and fucking with man.

Speaker 2 It's just anti-system

Speaker 2 for fun.

Speaker 1 The dark aspect of it is you're having fun, you're doing anti-system stuff, but like the Nazis always show up, and it's somehow bad shit started happening, it starts drifting somehow.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's just school shootings and stuff. So it's a very difficult topic, but I do know it's

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 like, but what the fuck is that? I'm like, no, no, you don't understand.

Speaker 2 It'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.

Speaker 2 So kind of cool. But yeah.
It goes dark. It goes dark.

Speaker 1 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're saying.

Speaker 2 But everything is, 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...

Speaker 1 The provoking in the case of hood maps or something like this can

Speaker 1 damage the

Speaker 1 good thing. Like, Like, you know,

Speaker 1 a little poison in a town is always good. It's like the tom waits thing, but you don't want too much.
Otherwise, it destroys the town. It destroys the thing.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It was like a very relaxing video that's like kind of ASMR mr with like glowing jelly streaming like this to relax them you know or cheese melting on the toast

Speaker 1 to chill them oh yeah i like it like

Speaker 2 but actually a lot of stuff i didn't realize how much originated in 4chan in terms of memes to the reddit rick roll i didn't understand i didn't know that rick roll originated in 4chan there's just so many memes like most of the memes that you think they word roll i think comes in 4chan like not the word role but like in this case in the meme use like you would get like roll doubles because every there was like post ids on 4chan so they were rat they were kind of like random so if i get doubles like this happens or something so you'd get like two two

Speaker 1 anyways like a betting market kind of on these doubles on these post ids this is so much funny stuff yeah i mean that's the internet that's purist but yeah again the dark stuff kind of seeps in yeah and you you it's nice to keep the dark stuff to like some low amount it's nice to have a bit of noise of the darkness but not too much yeah and but again like you have to pay attention to that with um

Speaker 1 i mean i guess spam in general you have to fight that with nomad list how do you fight spam man i use gpt4 now it's amazing so

Speaker 2 so i have like um 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 GPT-4 now and I ask like, is this a, you know, is this a good review?

Speaker 2 Like, is it offensive? Is it racist or some stuff?

Speaker 2 And, and then it sends me a message on telegram when it rejects reviews and i check it and it's man it's so on point it's automated yes and it's so accurate it understands double meanings um i have gpt4 running on the on the on the chat community it's a chat community of 10 000 people and they're chatting and they start fighting with each other um and i used to have uh human moderators was very good but they would start fighting the human moderator like this guy is biased or something now i have gpt4 and it's it's it's really really really really good It understands humor and understands like

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 It understands that, you know, so it's I would love to have a GPT-4 based filter of like

Speaker 1 of different kinds of for like X.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I thought this week like I tweeted like a fact check. Like you can click fact check and then GPT-4.

Speaker 2 Look, GPT-4 is not always right about stuff, right? But it can give you a general fact check on a tweet.

Speaker 2 Like, usually, what I do now, when I write something like difficult about economics or something about AI, I put in GPT4, I say, can you fact-check it? Because I might have said something stupid.

Speaker 2 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 ask GPT-4 to fact-check a lot of stuff.

Speaker 1 So, fact-check is a tough one. Yeah.
But it would be interesting to sort of

Speaker 1 rate a thing based on how well thought out it is and how well-argued it is. Yeah, that that seems more doable.
That seems like more doable.

Speaker 1 Like it seems like a GPT thing because that's less about the truth and it's more about the rigor of the thing.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And you can ask that.
You can ask in the prompt, like, I don't know, like, for example, do you think create like a ranking score of X Twitter replies? Where should this post be?

Speaker 2 If we rank on like, I don't know, integrity, reality, like the fundamental deepness or something, interestness.

Speaker 2 And it will give you that with a pretty good score, probably. I mean, Elon can do do this with Groc, right? He can start doing using that to

Speaker 2 check replies. Because the replies section is like chaos.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And actually, the ranking of the replies is not. Doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make sense.

Speaker 1 And I would like to sort in different kinds of ways.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 a lot of stuff I just miss. And I want to see the good stuff.

Speaker 1 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 it in interesting ways.

Speaker 1 Because, like, I feel like I miss a lot. And I,

Speaker 1 what's surfaced for me is just like a random comment by a person with no followers. Yeah, that's positive or negative.
It's like, okay.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But not just like randomly chronological, chronological, just a sea of comments. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 It does make sense.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 X could be very improved with that, I think.

Speaker 1 One thing you espouse a lot, which I love, is the automation step.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You want to take the automation step of automating the thing. So you have to do as little work as possible for it to keep running indefinitely.
Can you like explain your philosophy there?

Speaker 1 What you mean by automate?

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Do stuff that you, like marketing, for example, stuff that you would do in the beginning yourself.

Speaker 2 And whatever, community management and organizing meetups for Nomadis, for example, there would be a job, for example. And I thought like,

Speaker 2 I don't have the money for that. And I don't really want to run like a big company with a lot of people because it's it's a lot of work managing these people.

Speaker 2 So I've always tried to automate these things as much as possible. And

Speaker 2 this can literally be like for Nomadists, it's literally like a, it's not a different outer star, but it's like a web page where you can organize your own meetup, set a schedule, a date, whatever.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 when it's done, it sends a tweet out on the nomadist account. There's a meetup here.

Speaker 2 It sends a direct message to everybody in the city who are there who are going to be there and then people show up on a bar and there's a meetup and that's fully automated and for me it's like it's not it's so obvious to make this automatic why would you why would you have somebody organize this like um it makes more sense to automate it and this with most of my things like i figure out like how to do it with code and i think especially now with ai like you can automate so much more stuff than before because ai understands things so well like before i would use if statements right now you ask gpt you put something in the gpt for and in the API and it sends back like this is good, this is bad.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so you basically can now even

Speaker 1 automate sort of subjective type of things.

Speaker 2 This is the difference now. And that's very recent, right?

Speaker 1 But it's still difficult. I mean, that step of automation is difficult to

Speaker 1 figure out how to

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 Yes, man, a lot of cron jobs.

Speaker 1 A lot of cron jobs.

Speaker 2 It's like

Speaker 2 I literally I log into the server and I do like sudo crontab dash e and then I go into the editor and I write like hourly and then I write PHP

Speaker 2 you know do this 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.

Speaker 1 Do you have a thing where it like emails you or something like this or emails somebody managing the thing if something goes wrong?

Speaker 2 I have these web pages i make they're called like health checks so it's like health check.php and then it has like emojis like a has like a green check mark if it's good and a red one if it's bad and then it does like database curious for example like what's the internet speed on in for example um 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 um uptimerobo.com, which is like for uptime, but it can also check keywords.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Then if it's bad, it sends a message to me on Telegram saying, hey, what's up? Or it doesn't say, hey, what's up?

Speaker 1 It sends me like an alert.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But the good thing is, like the last few years, don't break anymore. And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And these health checks are part of the uptime percentage. So it's like everything works.

Speaker 1 You're actually making me realize I should

Speaker 1 I should have a page for myself, like one page that has all the health checks, just so I can go to and see all the green check marks. It feels good to look at, you know, it's just be like, okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. like 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

Speaker 1 like never or like meaning like you've you've you've you've checked since you've last cared to check it has all been okay for sure it used to send me the the good health checks like yeah you know this it all works it all works but it's been

Speaker 2 so often and i'm like this feels so good but then i'm like okay obviously it's not gonna need to hide the good ones and show only the bad ones and now that's the case i need to integrate everything into one place.

Speaker 1 I automate like everything. Yeah.
They 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,

Speaker 1 all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 But it would be nice to automate even more.

Speaker 1 Like translation, all this kind of stuff would be nice to automate. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Every JavaScript, every PHP error gets sent to my Telegram as well. So every user, whatever user it is, doesn't have to be a page user.
If they run into an error,

Speaker 2 the JavaScript sends the JavaScript error to the server and then it sends to my Telegram from all my websites.

Speaker 1 So you get like a message.

Speaker 2 So I get like a uncaught variable error, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And then I'm like, okay, interesting.
And then I go check it out.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 So that's really cool.

Speaker 2 That's really cool. But this is the same stuff people

Speaker 2 they pay like very big SaaS companies, like New Relic for, right? Like to manage the stuff.

Speaker 2 So you can do that too. You can use off the shelf.
I like to build myself. It's easier.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's nice. It's nice to do that kind of automation.

Speaker 1 I'm starting to think about what are the things in my life I'm doing myself that could be automated

Speaker 2 in the day. Ask your GPT for, you know, like give your daily your day and then ask it what part you automate.

Speaker 1 Well, one of the things I would love to automate more is my consumption and social media. Yeah.
Both the output and the input.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I think the guy called SWYX or something, he does like a newsletter that's completely AI generated with the cool, the cool new stuff in AI.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I would love to do that, but also like across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn,

Speaker 1 all this kind of stuff. Just like, okay,

Speaker 1 can you summarize the internet for me for today?

Speaker 2 Summarize internet.com.

Speaker 1 Yeah, dot com. Because I feel like it pulls in way too much

Speaker 1 time, but also I don't like the effect it has some days on my psyche.

Speaker 2 Because like haters or just general content, just general content.

Speaker 1 No, 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

Speaker 1 it's empty somehow. And I'm like, uninspired.
Yeah. It's funny.
In the moment, I'm like, ha, look at that cat doing a funny thing.

Speaker 1 And then you're like, oh, look at that person dancing in a funny way to that music.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 1 I mean, with social media, with X, sometimes for me, too, it's, I think I'm probably naturally gravitating towards the drama. Yeah.
Aren't we all? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so with following AI people, especially AI people that only post technical content, that's been really good.

Speaker 1 Cause then I just look at them and I, and then I go on down rabbit holes of like learning new papers that have been published or good repos or

Speaker 1 just any kind of cool demonstration of stuff and the thing, 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.

Speaker 1 It's been tough. It's been tough to control.
It's difficult.

Speaker 2 You need to manage 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 feed.

Speaker 2 And I think I've muted so much that now my feed is good. I see interesting stuff.

Speaker 2 But the fact that you need to modify, you need to mod your app, your social media platform, just to function and not be toxic for you, for your mental health, right? That's like a problem.

Speaker 2 It should be doing that for you.

Speaker 1 It's some level of automation.

Speaker 1 That would be interesting. I wish I could access X and Instagram through API easier.

Speaker 2 You need to spend $42,000 a month, which my friends do.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you could do that. No, but still, even if you do that, you're not getting, I mean, there's limitations that don't make it easy to do, like automate.
Because

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But if I just want to figure out ways to automate my interaction with the X system or with Instagram, they don't make that easy.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Maybe they themselves can see how that could be used to improve their system. So there's not enough

Speaker 1 access.

Speaker 2 Yes, you could screen cap your phone, right? It can be an app that watches your screen with you. You could, yeah.
But I don't even know like what it would do.

Speaker 2 Like maybe it's going to hide stuff before you see it. You know, like

Speaker 1 scroll down. I have Chrome extensions.
I write a lot of Chrome extensions that hide parts of different pages and so on.

Speaker 1 For example, for my own, on my main computer, I hide all views and likes and all that on

Speaker 1 YouTube content that I create so that

Speaker 1 it doesn't affect you. It doesn't, yeah, so you don't pay attention to it.

Speaker 1 I also hide parts. I have a mode for X where I hide most of everything.
So like there's no,

Speaker 2 it's the same with you. It's the same.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But they're really good at like getting you to be distracted and like starting

Speaker 2 accounts. Related stuff.

Speaker 2 I'm like, I don't want related stuff. And like

Speaker 1 10 minutes later, you're like, or something that's trending.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But I have this extension to like YouTube on hook, which like it hides all the related stuff. I can just see the video and it's amazing.

Speaker 2 But sometimes I need to like like I need to search a video how to how to do something. And then I go to YouTube and then I had these YouTube shorts.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And you're just stuck. And it's like, what happened?

Speaker 2 I was going to open, I was going to play like the coffee mix, you know, like the music mix for drinking coffee together like in the morning, like jazz. I didn't want to go to shorts.

Speaker 2 So it's very, it's very difficult.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 Man, you shouldn't ask me because I never sold my company.

Speaker 1 And I've never, all the successful stuff you've done, you've never sold it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's kind of sad, right? Like I've been in, so I've been in a lot of acquisition, like deals and stuff.

Speaker 2 And I learned a lot about finance people as well there, like manipulation and due diligence and then changing the valuation. Like people change the valuation after.

Speaker 2 So a lot of people string you on to acquire you. And then it takes like six months.
It's like classic. It takes six to 12 months.
They want to see everything.

Speaker 2 They want to see your stripe and your code and whatever. And then

Speaker 2 in the end, they'll change the price to lower because you're already so invested. So it's like a negotiation tactic, right? And like, no, then I don't want to sell, right?

Speaker 2 And the problem with my companies is like they make. you know 90% profit margin so the multiple they companies get sold with multiples kind of multiples of profit or revenue.

Speaker 2 And often the multiple is like three times, three times or four times or five times revenue or profit. So in my case, they're all automated.

Speaker 2 So I might as well wait three years and I get the same money as when I sell. And then I can still sell the same company.
You know what I mean? I can still sell for three, five times.

Speaker 2 So financially, it doesn't really make sense to sell. Yeah.
Unless the price is high enough.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 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've created is not just the interface and the

Speaker 2 and the crowdsource content but the people themselves like the user base yeah well the homie list it's a community yeah so you i could see that being extremely valuable i'm surprised that the homie list is like it's like my baby it's like my first product it took off and I don't really know if I want to sell it.

Speaker 2 It's like something you would 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 is propaganda, a lot of stuff is true as well.

Speaker 2 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 not sell.

Speaker 2 AI products. I have less emotional feeling with AI products, like Fote Eye, which I could sell.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. The thing you also mentioned is you have have to price in the fact that you're going to miss

Speaker 1 the company.

Speaker 2 And the meaning it gives you, right? There's a very famous like depression after startup on a solar company. Like they're like, this was my, this was me.
Like, who am I?

Speaker 2 And they immediately start building another one. You know, they never can stop.
So I think it's, it's good to keep working, you know, until you die. Just keep working on cool stuff.
And

Speaker 2 you shouldn't retire, you know. I think retirement is bad, probably.

Speaker 1 So you usually build the stuff solo and mostly work solo.

Speaker 1 What's the thinking behind that?

Speaker 2 I think I'm not so good at working with other people. Not like I'm crazy, but like I don't trust other people.

Speaker 1 To clarify, you don't trust other people to do a great job.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 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 kind of get this compromise result,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I I don't think it I think it breeds like averageness you know you get an average idea average company average culture

Speaker 2 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 we know each other very long and he's one of the few people I would build something with and uh but almost never yeah so what does it take to be successful when you have more one?

Speaker 1 Like, how do you build together with Andre? How do you build together with other people?

Speaker 2 So, he codes. Uh, I should post on Twitter.
Literally, like, I promote it on Twitter. I, I, we said, like, product strategy.
Like, I say this should be better, this should be better.

Speaker 2 But I think you need to have one person coding it. He codes in Ruby, so also I cannot do Ruby.
I'm in PHP.

Speaker 1 So, you literally, so you've have you ever coded with another person for prolonged periods of time?

Speaker 2 Never in my life.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 uh, what do you think is behind that?

Speaker 2 I know. It was always just me sitting on my laptop, like just coding.

Speaker 1 No, like you've never had another developer who like rolls in and like.

Speaker 2 I've had it once, but with Fotori, like there's an AI developer, Philip. I hired him to do the, because I can't write Python.
And AI stuff is Python.

Speaker 2 And I needed to get models to work on replicate and stuff. And I needed to improve Fotory.

Speaker 2 And he helped me a lot for like 10 months. He worked.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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've never had a developer roll in look at your php jQuery code and be and yes like you know like in conversation or in prov they talk about yes and like basically all right i had for one week understand and then end it like because he wanted to rewrite everything in uh uh no that's the wrong guy i know he wanted to rewrite in what he wanted to rewrite the he said it's jq we cannot do this i'm like okay he's like we need to rewrite everything in view view js i'm like are you sure can we just like kind of you know like keep jQuery he's like no man like and uh 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 gonna clean up

Speaker 2 but then after weeks it's not gonna it's gonna take way too much time I think I like working with people where like when I approach them

Speaker 1 I pretend in my head that they're the smartest person who has 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but those are the top-tier developers. Yeah.
And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, it's like really top five percent 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

Speaker 1 when you realize this people are very average at their job yeah especially with dev with coding i think so sorry for i think that's a really important skill for for developer to roll in and like understand the musicality the the style of the and like empathy it's like code empathy right code empathy yeah it's a new word but that's it you need to understand like

Speaker 2 go over over all the code get a holistic view of it and man you can suggest we we change stuff for for sure but

Speaker 1 um 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 like beautiful and powerful and PHP is beautiful and powerful especially as you said recently in the in the in the

Speaker 1 as the versions

Speaker 1 evolved it's much more serious programming language now it's super fast like PHP is really fast now yeah yeah it's crazy JavaScript much faster than Ruby yeah Really fast now.

Speaker 1 So if speed is something you care about, it's super fast. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And like there's gigantic communities of people using those programming languages. And there's frameworks if you like the framework.
So whatever. It doesn't really matter what you use.
But like, also

Speaker 1 you, if I was like a developer working with you, like you are extremely successful. You've shipped a lot.

Speaker 1 So like

Speaker 1 if I roll in, I'm going to 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

Speaker 1 notice parts in the code where like, okay, okay, okay, I got it. Like,

Speaker 1 here's how he's thinking. And now, if I want to add another,

Speaker 1 like little feature, definitely needs to have emoji

Speaker 1 in front of it. And then, like, just follow the same style and add it.
And my goal is to make you happy, to make you smile, like, to make you like, haha, fuck, I get it.

Speaker 1 And now you're going to start respecting me and like trusting me. And like, you start working together in this way.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know how hard it is to find developers.

Speaker 2 No, I think they exist. I think I need to hire more people, need to try more people.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I mean, like, okay, you can say like, okay, normally it looks kind of clunky. Like people say the design is kind of clunky.
Okay, I'll improve the design.

Speaker 2 It's like, next to my to-do list, for example, you know, like I can, I'll get there eventually.

Speaker 1 But it's true. I mean, you're also extremely extremely good at what you do.
Like, I'm just looking at the interfaces of, like, photo AI. Like, you would jake.
By the way, jQuery, right?

Speaker 1 Like, how amazing is jQuery? But, like, you can, these cowboys are getting...

Speaker 1 These are...

Speaker 1 There's these cowboys. This is a lot.
This is a lot. But I'm glad they're all wearing shirts.
Anyway, the interface here is just really, really nice.

Speaker 1 Like I could tell you know what you're doing. And with Nomad List,

Speaker 1 extremely nice, the interface. Thank you, man.
man. And that's all you.

Speaker 2 Yeah, everything is me.

Speaker 1 So all of this and every little feature.

Speaker 2 People say it looks kind of ADHD or ADD, you know, like it's so much because it has so many things.

Speaker 2 And design these days is minimalist, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So like minimalist design is about like when you want to convey no information whatsoever and look cool. Yeah, I don't know.
It's very cool.

Speaker 2 It's pretentious, right?

Speaker 1 Pretentious or not, the function is like is useless. This is about a lot of information delivered to you in a clean,

Speaker 1 and when it's clean, you can't be too sexy. So it's sexy enough.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but it's just still pretty. The spacing of everything is nice.
The fonts are really nice. Like very readable.
Very sexy. Yeah, I like it, you know.

Speaker 2 I made it, so I don't trust my own judgment.

Speaker 1 No, this is really nice. Thank you, Lee.
The emojis are somehow like this is a style, it's a thing.

Speaker 2 I need to pick the emoji. It takes a while to pick them, you know.

Speaker 1 Like, there's something about the emojis, a really nice, memorable, like,

Speaker 1 placeholder for the idea. Yeah.
Like, if it was just text, it would actually be overwhelming if it was just text. The emoji really helps.
It's a brilliant addition. Like, some people might look at it.

Speaker 1 Why do you have emojis everywhere? It's actually really, for me, it's really.

Speaker 2 Tell me to remove the emojis.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what people don't know what they're talking about.

Speaker 1 And then the queen.

Speaker 1 I'm sure people will tell you a lot of things. This is really nice.
And then using color is nice. Small font, but not too small.
And obviously, you have to show maps, which is really tricky. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is nice.

Speaker 1 No, this is really, really, really nice. And all of, I mean, like, okay, like how this looks when you

Speaker 1 hover over it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's easy as transitions.

Speaker 1 No, I understand that, but like, I'm sure there's, like, how long does it take you you to figure out how you want it to look? Do you ever go down a rabbit hole where you spent like two weeks?

Speaker 2 No, it's all iterative. It's like 10 years of, you know, add a CSS transition here or do this.

Speaker 1 Well, say, like, see, these are all, these are rounded now. Yeah.
If you wanted to, like, round is probably the better way, but if you want it to be rectangular, like sharp corners, what would you do?

Speaker 2 You just. So I go to the index.css and I do command F.
And I search border radius 12px. Yeah.
And then I replace with border radius zero.

Speaker 2 And then I do command enter and it's git deploys it's it pushes to the git hub and then sends a web book and then deploys to my server and it's live in five seconds oh you often deploy to production you don't have like a testing ground no so i

Speaker 2 so i i'm like famous for this because uh i'm too lazy to set up like a staging server on my laptop every time so i nowadays i just deploy to production yeah and um it's man i'm gonna be cancelled for this you know but it works very well for me because i have a lot of i have like PHP lint and JSLint.

Speaker 2 So it tells me when there's error. So I don't deploy.
But my literally,

Speaker 2 I have like 37,000 Git commits in the last 12 months or something. So I make like small fix and then command enter

Speaker 2 and sends to GitHub. GitHub sends a web to my server.
Web server pulls it, deploys to production, and it's there.

Speaker 1 What's the latency of that from you pressing command?

Speaker 2 One second. It can be one to two seconds.

Speaker 1 So you should make a change. And then you're getting really good at like not making mistakes, basically.
Man, you're 100%.

Speaker 2 You're right. Like people are like, how can you do this? Well, you get good at not taking the server down, you know, like because you need to code more carefully.

Speaker 2 But it's look, it's idiotic in any big company. But for me, it works because it makes me so fast.
Like somebody

Speaker 2 will report a bug on Twitter. And I kind of did do like a stopwatch.
Like, how fast can I fix this bug? And then two minutes later, for example, it's fixed. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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. Yeah.
It's like horrible.

Speaker 2 And it makes people really happy when you can really quickly solve their problems. So, but it's it's crazy.

Speaker 1 I'm I don't think it's crazy.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, it's filing, it's a mess, yeah, and there's different teams involved. It's it's not good.

Speaker 2 I'm like a good funny extreme on the other side, you know?

Speaker 1 But just a little bit safer, but not too much 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.

Speaker 2 And people complain about like, oh, look, he bought this Twitter and now it's full of bugs. Dude, he's shipping stuff.
Like, things are happening now. And it's a dynamic app now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the bugs is actually a sign of a good thing happening. Yes.
Bugs of the feature because it shows that the team is actually building shit. 100%.

Speaker 1 Well, 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.

Speaker 1 So I've gotten a chance to interact with many other teams, but one of the teams is MLA Multi-Language Audio.

Speaker 1 I don't know if you know this, but in YouTube, you can have audio tracks in different languages for overdubbing. And there's a team, and not many people are using it, but like...

Speaker 1 Every single feature, they have to meet and agree.

Speaker 1 And like, there's allocate resources, like engineers have to work on it, but I'm sure it's a pain in the ass for the engineers to get approval to like,

Speaker 1 because it has to not break the rest of the site, whatever they do.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But multi-language audio is a good example of a thing that seems niche right now,

Speaker 1 but it quite possibly could change the entire world. When you have, when I upload this

Speaker 1 conversation right here, if instantaneously it dubs it into

Speaker 1 40 languages,

Speaker 1 And everybody consumes 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.

Speaker 1 They got the compute. They got the

Speaker 1 user base.

Speaker 1 They have the experience of how to do this. So the multi-language audio should be...

Speaker 2 High-priority feature, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's high priority.

Speaker 1 And it's a way, you know, Google is obsessed with AI right now. They want to show off that they could be dominant in AI.
That's a way for Google Google to say, like, we used AI.

Speaker 1 Like, this is a way to, to, to break down the walls that language creates.

Speaker 2 The preferred outcome for them, for them is probably their career and not the overall result of

Speaker 2 the cool product, you know?

Speaker 1 I think they're not like selfish or whatever. They, they want to do good.
There's something about the machine.

Speaker 2 Organization, the organizational stuff that's just happening. I have this when I report bugs on like big companies I work with.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 nothing's happening they say man i know but i'm trying my best and yeah so it's systemic yeah so what it requires again i don't know if there must be a nicer word but like a dictatorial type of top down the ceo rolls in uh 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?

Speaker 2 You need to pass everything through legal.

Speaker 2 And you can't like, man, the things I do, it could never do that in a big corporation because it's 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 exactly yeah ignore pr ignore everybody give power to the engineers like listen to the people on the ground get this shit done and get it done by friday yeah that's it and the law can change like for example let's say you you launch this ai dubbing and it 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Just out of curiosity, what uh what IDE do you use? Let's talk about like your whole setup.

Speaker 1 Given how ultra-productive you are, I mean that you often program in your underwear, slouching on the couch. Is there, does it matter to you in general?

Speaker 2 Is there like a specific id you use vs code yeah vs code before i use sublime text i don't think it matters a lot i think i'm i'm very skeptical of like tools when people think it they say it matters right i don't think it matters i think uh

Speaker 2 whatever tool you know very well you can go very very fast in like you know the shortcuts for example ide you know you know like um i love sublime text because i could use like multi-cursor you know you search something and then i could just like make mass replaces in a file with the cursor thing and uh 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 multi multi-cursor edit thing whatever

Speaker 1 i'm sure like almost every editor can do that it's just probably hard to set up yeah

Speaker 2 vs code is not so good at it i think or at least i tried but i would use that to like uh process data like um data sets for example from world bank i would just multi-cursor mass change everything

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Like, boomer, you need to use VS Code. And I'm like, well, yeah, I'll try it.
I got a new MacBook, and then I never installed,

Speaker 2 I never copy the old MacBook, I just make it fresh, you know, like a clean, like Format C, you know, Windows, like clean start.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, okay, I'll try VS Code and it stuck, you know, but I don't really care. Like, it's not so important for me.

Speaker 1 Wow, you know, the format C reference, huh?

Speaker 2 Dude, it was was so good. You would install Windows, and then after three or six months, it would start breaking, and everything was like, it got slow.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, now I'm going to install it properly. Now I'm going to design my desktop properly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know if it's peer pressure, but like I used Emacs for many, many years. And I know, you know, I love Lisp.
So a lot of the customization is done in Lisp. It's a programming language.

Speaker 1 Partially it 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 It's more about the concepts, I would say, than the actual tools, like expanding. And that can be a challenging thing.

Speaker 1 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 an interesting challenge.

Speaker 1 It was uncomfortable at first.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for me too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but you just dive in.

Speaker 2 It's like NeuroFlex, like you keep your brain fresh, you know, like this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 I got to do that more. Like, have you given React a chance?

Speaker 2 no but i i want to i want to learn and i want to i i understand the basics right um

Speaker 2 i don't really know where to start but would you like i guess you got to 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 like the the the stuff i do in jcury is essentially a lot of it is like

Speaker 2 i start rebuilding whatever tech is already out there not based on that but just on accident like i keep coding long enough that i build the same i start getting the same problems everybody else had, and you start building the same frameworks kind of.

Speaker 2 So I essentially I use my own kind of framework.

Speaker 1 So you basically build a framework from scratch. That's your own that you understand it.

Speaker 2 Kind of, yeah, with Ajax calls. And essentially, it's the same thing.
Look, I don't have the time.

Speaker 2 And this is, I think saying you don't have the time is like always a lie because you just don't prioritize it enough.

Speaker 2 My priority is still like the 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.

Speaker 1 I guess you should be just learning every single day a thing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So if I, but you need to know, you need to know it anyway.

Speaker 1 So you gotta learn how to use the weapons of war and then and then you can be a peace next. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 1 but you gotta 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, how, where do you start? Yeah. As GPT-4, I guess.
But it, yeah, it's just so dynamic. It changes so fast.
And I don't know if it would be a good idea for me to learn it, you know?

Speaker 2 Maybe some combination of like view next with PHP, Laravel. Laravel is like a framework for PHP.
I think that would be,

Speaker 2 it could benefit me, you know? Maybe Tailwind for CSS, like a styling styling engine.

Speaker 2 That stuff could probably save me time.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 recode like my personal one page in Larva.

Speaker 1 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. Yeah.
Or like end-to-end built in Node.js.

Speaker 1 Some of it is, I don't,

Speaker 1 figuring out how to even deploy the thing i have no idea

Speaker 2 all i know is right now i would send it to github and it sends it to my server i don't know how to get javascript running i have no clue yeah so i guess i need like a

Speaker 2 pass like a like first right or uh

Speaker 1 you know heroku kind of those kind of platforms i actually kind of just might gave myself the idea of like i kind of just want to build a single web page

Speaker 1 like one web page that has like one dynamic element and just do it in every single like in a lot of frameworks like just on the same page same

Speaker 2 page kind of smart page.

Speaker 1 That's a cool price.

Speaker 2 On oldest frameworks. Yeah.
And you can see the differences.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's interesting.
How long it takes to do it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, stopwatch.

Speaker 1 I have to figure out actually something sufficiently complicated because it should probably do it should probably do some kind of

Speaker 1 thing where it accesses the database and dynamically is changing stuff.

Speaker 2 Some AI stuff, some LLM stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah, maybe maybe some. It doesn't have to be AI LLM, but maybe

Speaker 1 API call to something.

Speaker 2 To replicate, for example, and then you have, yeah, that would be a very cool project.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And like time it and also report on my happiness. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm going to totally do this.

Speaker 2 Because nobody benchmarks this. Nobody's benchmarked developer happiness with frameworks.
Yeah. Nobody's benchmarked the shipping time.

Speaker 1 I would just take like a month and do this. How many frameworks are there? There's how many

Speaker 1 there's like five main ways of doing it. So there's like, this is no, there's back end, front end.

Speaker 2 And this stuff confused me too. Like React now apparently has become back-end.
Yeah. Or something that used to be only front end and you're forced to do now backend also.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 And then, but there's not really, you're not really forced to do anything. So like,

Speaker 1 according to the internet, so like there's no, it's actually not trivial to find the canonical way of doing things. So like the standard vanilla, like

Speaker 1 you go to the ice cream shop, there's like a million flavors. I want vanilla.

Speaker 1 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 they'll literally name it vanilla but like i want to know what's the basic way but not like

Speaker 2 dumb but like the standard canonical 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

Speaker 1 Yeah, maybe all alums can help. Maybe you should explicitly ask what is the dominant.

Speaker 2 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 LLM and not 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 that would be a very fast way to you know take their knowledge out of my brain.

Speaker 2 I've tried these kinds of things.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, they have this dogmatic, like talking down to you.

Speaker 1 Like, this is the right way to do it. It's like, no, no, no, we're just like exploring together.
Okay, show me the cool thing you've tried,

Speaker 1 which is like it has to have

Speaker 1 open-mindedness to like,

Speaker 1 you know, Node.js is not the right way to do web development. It's like one way.
And there's there's nothing wrong with the

Speaker 1 old LAMP PHP jQuery vanilla JavaScript way. It just has its pros and cons.
And like, you need to know what you're doing. Yeah, but those people exist.

Speaker 2 You could find those people, probably.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, if you want to learn AI, imagine you have Karpati sitting next to you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, well, Copati

Speaker 1 has its own style. And it's like, I'm not sure he's for everybody.
For example, five-year-old, it depends on the five-year-old. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He's like super technical.

Speaker 2 But he's amazing because he's super technical and he's the only one who can explain stuff in a simple way, which shows his complete genius. Yes.

Speaker 2 Because if you can explain it without jargon, you're like, wow.

Speaker 1 And build it from scratch. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's like top tier, you know? Like, what a guy.

Speaker 1 But he might be anti-framework.

Speaker 2 because he built from scratch exactly yeah actually he probably is yeah

Speaker 2 uh he's like you but for ai yeah so maybe learning a framework is a 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 framework 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 yeah and you're still a mac guy always a mac guy yeah yeah i switched to mac in 2014 because uh it was because when i I wanted to start traveling and my brother was like, dude, get a MacBook is like the standard now.

Speaker 2 I'm like, wow, I need to switch from Windows. And I had like three screens, you know, like Windows.
I had this whole setup for music production. I had to sell everything.

Speaker 2 And then I had a MacBook. And I remember opening up this MacBook box.

Speaker 1 Like, ah.

Speaker 2 And it was so beautiful. It was like this aluminium.
And then I opened it. I removed the, you know, the screen protector thing.
It's so beautiful. And I didn't touch it for three days.

Speaker 2 I was just like looking at it. Really? And I was still in the Windows computer.
And then I went traveling traveling with that.

Speaker 2 So I, and all my great things started when I switched to Mac, which sounds very dogmatic, right?

Speaker 1 But what great things are you talking about?

Speaker 2 All the businesses started working out. Like, I started traveling, I started building startups, I started making money.
It all started when I switched to Mac.

Speaker 1 Listen, I kind of

Speaker 1 you're making me want to switch to Mac. So I use either use Linux inside Windows with WSL or just Ubuntu Linux, but Windows for most stuff like editing or any like any like

Speaker 1 stuff, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, you could use, I guess you could do Mac stuff there.
I wonder if I should switch. What do you miss about Windows? What was the pros and cons?

Speaker 2 I think the Finder is horrible on Mac. Like, it's like, it's, it's the what is horrible? The Finder.
Oh, you don't know the fine. So there's the Windows Explorer? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Windows Explorer is amazing.

Speaker 2 The Finder is strange, man. There's like strange things.

Speaker 2 There's this bug where if you, if you send, like, attach a photo in WhatsApp or Telegram, 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.

Speaker 2 Happened to my girlfriend. She starts sending me photo, photo, photo, photo, photo.
So

Speaker 2 Finder is very unusable, but it has Linux. Like the whole thing is like, it's Unix-based, right?

Speaker 1 So do you use the command?

Speaker 2 All the time. Like all the time.
And the cool thing is you can run, I think it's like Unix, like Debian or whatever. You can run most Linux stuff on macOS, which makes this very good for development.

Speaker 2 I have my Nginx server. You know, if I set, if I'm not lazy and set up my staging on my laptop, it's just the the Nginx server, the same as I have on my cloud server, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 2 Real Ubuntu is like better, of course, but.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm in this weird situation where I'm

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 And it's like, if you don't want to go through the peer pressure, you know, it's not peer pressure.

Speaker 1 It's like

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But, you know, there's like a concern maybe there's going to be a trade-off or all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 But you see, like, these extremely successful, smart people who are friends of mine who have kids and are really happy they have kids.

Speaker 1 So so that's that's not peer pressure that's just like a strong signal yeah it works for people it works for people yeah and the same thing with mac it's like yeah

Speaker 1 like the the fun like i don't see fundamentally i don't like closed systems so like 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

Speaker 1 like all the

Speaker 1 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 uh 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 so that is pretty cool

Speaker 1 That's one word for it.

Speaker 1 What's your favorite place to work?

Speaker 2 On the couch.

Speaker 1 Does the couch matter? Is the couch at home or is it any couch?

Speaker 2 No, any like a hotel couch, also, like in the room, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. But I used to work like very ergonomically with like a standing desk and everything like perfect, like eye height, screen, blah, blah, blah.
And I felt like,

Speaker 2 man, this has to do with lifting too. I started getting RSI, like repetitive strain injury, like tingling stuff.
And it would go all the way in my back.

Speaker 2 And I was sitting in the co-working space, like 6 a.m., the 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 necks get stuck like

Speaker 2 and I'm like, wow, fuck. And

Speaker 2 I'm like, what's, am I dying? You know, and I thought, I'm probably dying. Yeah, I want to die in a co-working space.
I'm going to go home and die in like, you know, peace and honor. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I closed my laptop and I put it in my backpack. Yeah.
And I walked to the street. I got on my motorbike, went home.

Speaker 2 Um, 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.

Speaker 2 So I started getting like a laptop stand, everything agronomically correct. But then I started lifting.

Speaker 2 And since then, like it seems like everything gets straightened out, your posture kind of, you're more straight. And I never have

Speaker 2 RSI anymore, reproductive injury. I never have tingling anymore, no pains and stuff.
So then I started working on the sofa and it's great. Like it feels

Speaker 2 you're close to the

Speaker 2 i sit like 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

Speaker 2 together like legs and then where's the mouse using using the no no so everything is trackpad on the mac os on the macbook i used to have the logitec mx mouse the perfect ergonomic mouse so you're doing like this little thing with

Speaker 2 one screen one screen and i used to have three screens so i come from the i know where people come from i i had 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.

Speaker 2 You're so close to what's happening, you know? It's like working on a car or something. It's like so

Speaker 2 like, man, if you have three screens, look here, look there, you get also neck injury, actually. So it's.

Speaker 1 Well, I don't know. This, this sounds like you're part of a cult and you're just trying to convince me.
But

Speaker 1 I mean, but it's good to hear that you can be ultra productive on a single screen. That's crazy.

Speaker 2 Command tap, you alt top, like Windows alt-top Mac OS Command Tap, you can switch very fast.

Speaker 1 So you have like one, the entire screen is taken up by VS Code, say you look at the code and then

Speaker 1 w like if you deploy like a website, you what switch screen command tap to Chrome.

Speaker 2 I used to have this swipe screen, you know, you could do like

Speaker 2 different screen

Speaker 1 spaces.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I was like, ah, it's too difficult. Let's just put it all on one screen on the MacBook and then...

Speaker 1 And you can be productive that way. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Very productive. Yeah.

Speaker 1 more productive than before interesting because i have i have three screens and two of them are vertical like on the side code right yeah for the code you can see a lot yeah no man i love it like i'm i love seeing it with friends like they have amazing like battle stations right it's called it's amazing i want it but i don't want it right like you like the constraints there's some that's it there's some aspect of the constraints which like once you get good at it you can focus your mind and you can man i'm suspicious of like more you know yeah do you really need all the stuff like it might slow me down actually it's a a good way to put it.

Speaker 1 I'm suspicious of more. Me too.
I'm suspicious of more in all, in all ways.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Then I see friends just with gear acquisition syndrome that buying so much stuff, but they're not that productive. They have the best, most beautiful battle stations, desktops, everything.

Speaker 2 They're not that productive. And it's also like kind of fun.
Like, it's all for my laptop in a backpack, right? It's kind of nomad, minimalist.

Speaker 1 Take me through like the perfect ultra-productive day in your life.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 say, like, where you get a lot of shit done. Yeah.
Are you, uh,

Speaker 1 and it's all focused on getting shit done?

Speaker 1 What, what, when are you waking up? Is it a regular time?

Speaker 1 Super early, super early.

Speaker 2 Yes, so I go to sleep like 2 a.m. Usually, something like that.
And before 4 a.m.

Speaker 2 But my girlfriend would go sleep midnight. So we did a compromise like 2 a.m.
You know? So I wake up around 10, 11, then more like 10.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then chill a little bit with my girlfriend and then open laptop, start coding, check what's going on, like bugs or whatever.

Speaker 2 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 night and stuff to get 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 asks stuff the 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 cannot 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 think

Speaker 2 that works for me um but yeah and then maybe you know cook food and stuff like have lunch steak and chicken and eat a bunch of times a day so you say coffee yeah

Speaker 2 so a few hours later cook foods we get like locally source like meat and stuff and vegetables and cook that uh

Speaker 2 and then second coffee and then go some more maybe go outside for lunch like you can mix fun stuff, you know.

Speaker 1 How many hours are you saying a perfectly productive day? Are you doing programming? Like, if you were like to kill it, are you doing like all day, basically?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's like, and you stay up all night and eat chocolate.

Speaker 1 And yeah, it's like,

Speaker 1 yeah, you know, okay, okay. Let's remove girlfriend from picture, social life from picture.

Speaker 2 It's just you, man, then shit goes crazy.

Speaker 1 Because when shit goes crazy now shit goes crazy okay so 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

Speaker 1 like 1 p.m

Speaker 1 at 2 p.m

Speaker 2 because you went to bed at 6 a.m yeah because i was coding i was finding some new ai yeah i was studying it and it was amazing and i cannot sleep because it's too important we need to stay awake we need to see all of this we need to make something now and but that's the times i do make make like new stuff more so i think like i have a friend he actually books a hotel for like a week to like leave his and he has a kid too and his girlfriend and his kids stay in the house and he goes to another hotel sounds a little suspicious right going to 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

Speaker 2 when there's a lot of disruptions than like creating new stuff. I need this, and it's common, it's flow state, it's this uninterrupted period of time.

Speaker 2 So yeah, I wake up like 1, 2 p.m.

Speaker 2 You know, still coffee, showers, we still shower, you know.

Speaker 2 And then this code, like non-stop. Maybe my friend comes over.

Speaker 1 He comes over. Some distraction.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he also, Andre, he codes too. So he comes over, we code together, we listen, you know, it starts going back to like the body days, you know, like co-working days.

Speaker 1 So you're not really working with him, but you're just both working.

Speaker 2 Because it's nice to have like the vibe where you both sit together on the couch and and coding on something and you actually, it's mostly silent or there's music, you know, and sometimes you ask something and, but generally like you're really locked in.

Speaker 1 And what uh what music are you listening to?

Speaker 2 I think like like

Speaker 2 um techno like YouTube techno. Um there's an there's a channel called H-O-R with a umlaut like HO, like double dot.

Speaker 2 It's Berlin Techno, whatever. It looks like it's.
They film it in like a toilet with like white tiles and stuff. And it's very cool.

Speaker 2 And they always have like very good, like, kind of industrial, like industrial, so fast, kind of aggressive, you know. Like,

Speaker 1 yeah, that's not distracting to your brain.

Speaker 2 That's amazing. Like, I think distracting, man, jazz.
Like, I listen to coffee jazz with my girlfriend when I wake up, and it's kind of like this piano starts getting annoying. It's like

Speaker 2 it's too many tones, it's like too many things wrong. This industrial techno is like you know, these African like rain dances, like

Speaker 2 it's this transcendental trance.

Speaker 1 That's interesting because I

Speaker 1 actually mostly now listen to

Speaker 1 brown noise. Noise.
Yeah, wow. Like pretty loud.
Wow.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 my brain will get used to it. But like with noise, what happens is something happens to your brain.
I think there's a science to it, but I don't really care.

Speaker 1 You just have to be a scientist of one, like study yourself, your own brain. For me, it like does something.

Speaker 1 I discovered it right away when I tried it for the first time.

Speaker 1 After about like a couple of minutes,

Speaker 1 everything,

Speaker 1 every distraction just like disappears and it goes like

Speaker 1 you can like hold

Speaker 1 focus on things like really well. It's weird.
Like you can like

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 focus on your breath, for example.

Speaker 2 It's just normal brownness. It's not like binarial.

Speaker 1 No, it's just normal brownness. It's like, shh.

Speaker 1 Yeah. White noise, I think, it's the same.
Make noise, white noise.

Speaker 1 Brown noise, I think, is when it's like bassier.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's more diffused, more dampened.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, dampened. Yeah, I can see that.
No sharpness.

Speaker 2 Yeah, sharp brightness. Yeah, brightness.
Yeah, I can see that. And you use a headphone, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, headphones. Yeah.
I actually like walk around in life often with brown noise.

Speaker 2 Dude, that's like psychofed shit, but it's cool, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I murder people, it helps.

Speaker 1 It drowns out their screams. Jesus Christ.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 I said too much.

Speaker 2 No, I'm gonna try it.

Speaker 1 Brown noise with a murder or for the coding, yeah. For the coding, yeah.
Okay, good. Uh, try it, try it.
But you have to, like, with everything else, you give it a real chance.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I find I also, like I said, do uh

Speaker 1 techno-y type stuff, electronic music on top of the brown noise,

Speaker 1 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 a beat.
Yeah. And it's great.
It's cool.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 even if they're working, I don't know. I like people too much.
They're like interesting.

Speaker 2 Yeah. In co-workerspace, I would just start talking too much.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So they're a source of distraction.

Speaker 2 Yeah. We would do in the co-workers, we would do like a money like pot, like a mug.

Speaker 2 so if you would would work for 45 minutes and then if you would say one like per word you would get a fine which is like one dollar so you'd put one dollar to say hey what's up so three three dollars you put in the mug

Speaker 2 and then 15 minutes free time like we can like party with every 45 minutes again working and that worked but you need to shut people up or they you know I think there's a

Speaker 1 there's an intimacy in being silent together that I might maybe I'm uncomfortable with

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 if you need to make yourself vulnerable and actually do it, like with close friends, to just sit there in silence for long periods of time and like doing a thing.

Speaker 2 Dude, I watched this

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 2 And they were just silent for like three minutes. And then they said, that was amazing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that was amazing i was like wow pretty cool you know elon's like that

Speaker 1 and i i really like that when you'll ask a question

Speaker 1 like uh 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

Speaker 2 yeah i don't know that's so cool i wish i was

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the more I think, the more I start like filtering myself, right? And I want to just throw it out there immediately.

Speaker 1 I do that more with team. I think he has a lot of practice in that.
I do that as well in a team setting when you're thinking, brainstorming, and you allow yourself to just like think in silence. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Just like, because even in meetings, people want to talk. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like, no, you think before you speak and just, it's okay to be silent together.

Speaker 1 And if you allow yourself the room to do that, you can actually come up with really good ideas. Yeah, it's okay.
This perfect day,

Speaker 1 how much caffeine are you consuming in this day?

Speaker 2 Too much, right? Because

Speaker 2 normally, like two, two cups of coffee, but on this perfect day, like we go to like four maybe. So, we're starting to hit like the anxiety levels.

Speaker 1 So, four cups is a lot for you.

Speaker 2 Well, I think my coffees are quite strong when I make them. It's like 20 grams of coffee powder in the V60.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 like, my friends call them like nuclear coffee because it's quite heavy.

Speaker 1 It's strong.

Speaker 2 it's quite strong.

Speaker 2 But it's nice to hit that anxiety level where you're like almost panic attack, but you're not there yet. So, but that's like, man, it's like super locked in.
Just like,

Speaker 2 it's amazing. But I mean, there's a space for that, you know, in my life.
But

Speaker 2 it's, I think it's great for making new stuff. It's amazing.

Speaker 1 Starting from scratch, creating a new thing. Yes.

Speaker 2 I think girlfriends should let their guys go away for like two weeks

Speaker 2 every few, no, every year at least, you know, maybe every quarter, I don't know, and just sit and make some shit without, you know, they're amazing, but like no the services, just be alone.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, people can make something very, very amazing.

Speaker 1 Just wearing cowboy hats in the mountains, like we showed you. Exactly, we can do that.
There's a movie about that.

Speaker 2 With the laptops.

Speaker 1 They didn't do much programming, though.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you can do a little bit of that.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 And then a little bit of shipping, you know?

Speaker 1 Do both.

Speaker 1 It's a different program.

Speaker 2 But they need to allow us to go, you know, you need like a man cave, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a ship. Yeah, it's a ship.
Shit done. Yeah, it's a balance.
Okay, cool. What about sleep, naps, and all that? You're not sleeping much?

Speaker 2 I don't do naps in the day. I think it's power naps are good, but I don't really, I'm never tired anymore in the day.

Speaker 2 Man, it's also because of gym. I'm not tired.
I'm tired when I want to, when you know, when it's night, I need to sleep. Yeah, me.

Speaker 1 I sleep very well. I love naps.
Yeah. I don't care.
I don't know. I don't know why.
Brain shuts off, turns on. I don't know if it's healthy or not.
It just works. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think with anything, anything mental physical you have to be a student of your own body and like know

Speaker 1 what the limits are like that you have to be skeptical taking advice from the internet in general because a lot of advice is just like a good baseline for the general population but then you specialize yeah you have to become a student of your own like of your own body of your own self of how you work yeah

Speaker 1 that's i've i've done a lot of like for me fasting was an interesting one because i 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

Speaker 1 kind of a lot, you know,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 It's crazy. I never did the small meal thing.
Yeah. It didn't work for me.

Speaker 1 Let me just ask you, it would be interesting if you can comment on some of the other products you've created. We talked about Nomad List, Interior AI, Photo AI, Therapist AI.
What's remote OK?

Speaker 2 It's a job board for remote jobs.

Speaker 2 Because back then, like 10 years ago, there was job boards, but it was not really specifically remote job job boards. So I made one.

Speaker 2 First on Nomadis, 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.

Speaker 2 And now it's like the number one or number two biggest remote job boards.

Speaker 2 And it's also fully automated. And people just post a job and people apply.
It has like profiles as well.

Speaker 2 It's kind of like LinkedIn for remote work.

Speaker 1 It's just focused on remote only. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's essentially like a simple job board. I discovered job boards are way more complicated than you think, but

Speaker 2 yeah, it's a job board for remote jobs.

Speaker 2 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 $2.99.

Speaker 2 But at the peak during when the Fed started printing money, like 2021, I was making like 140K a month with remote OK, with just job posts.

Speaker 2 And I started like adding crazy upsells, like rainbow colored job posts. You can can add your background image, just upsells, man.
And you charge $1,000 for an upsell. It was crazy.
And

Speaker 2 all these companies just upsell, upsell. Yeah, we want everything.
Job posts would cost $3,400, $4,000.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Now it's back. I think it's like $40.
It was good times, you know?

Speaker 1 I got to ask you, but back to the digital nomad life. Yeah.

Speaker 2 you uh 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 it was like this trend in the blog back then blogs were so popular it was like a blogosphere and it was like the 100 things challenge what is that the hundred things i mean it's ridiculous but like you you write down every object you have in your house and you count it you make like a spreadsheet and you're like okay i have 500 things you need to get it down to 100.

Speaker 2 why you know this was just the the trend so i did it i started like selling stuff started throwing away stuff and i did like mdma an ecstasy like 2012 kind of and

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 2 after that trip i felt so different and i felt like i had to start throwing shit away like i swear

Speaker 2 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 all your shit away you need to start you know go on a journey you need to get out of here and

Speaker 2 um 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 so you need to go on ebay and then man going ebay selling all your stuff is very interesting because you discover society you just met you meet the craziest people you meet every range from rich to poor everybody comes to your house to buy stuff it's so funny so interesting i recommend everybody do this just to meet people that want your shit yeah it was so like i i didn't know it 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, as they are from eBay, you know?

Speaker 2 So I sold everything.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 So back then I was making music and we would make music videos with like a Canon 5D camera. Back then, everybody's making films and music videos that.
And

Speaker 2 we bought it with my friends and stuff. And

Speaker 2 it was kind of like I had to sell this thing too because it was like, it was very expensive, like 6K or something.

Speaker 2 But it meant that selling this meant that we wouldn't make music videos together anymore i would leave holland this kind of like stuff we were working on would end and i was kind of saying this music video stuff we're not getting 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 a camera, but it was like, it felt like,

Speaker 1 sorry, guys, it doesn't work and I need to go, you know who uh who bought it do you remember was some guy who couldn't possibly understand the

Speaker 2 journey

Speaker 1 of it yeah yeah he just showed up here here's the money thanks yeah but it was like it was like cutting your life like this shit ends now and now we kind of do new stuff and i think it's beautiful i did that twice in my life give away everything everything everything like down to just pants underwear yeah backpack

Speaker 1 i think uh i think it's important to do it shows you what's important.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that's what I learned from it. Like you, you learn that you can live with very little objects, very little stuff.

Speaker 2 But there's a counter to it. Like 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?

Speaker 2 Or you don't need kitchen stuff because you go to restaurants, you know, when you're traveling. So you lean more on other people's services, but you spend money on that as well.
So that's good.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but just letting go of material possessions, which gives a kind of freedom to how you move about the world. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It gives you you a complete freedom to go into another city to with your backpack. With a backpack.
Yeah. There's a kind of freedom to it.

Speaker 1 There's something about material possessions and having a place and all that that ties you down a little bit. Yeah.
Like spiritually. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's good to take a leap out into the world, especially when you're younger.

Speaker 2 Man, I recommend if you're 18, you get out of high school, do this, go travel. and

Speaker 2 build some internet stuff, whatever. Bring your laptop.
And it's an amazing experience.

Speaker 2 Five years ago, I would still go to university, but now I'm thinking like, no, maybe don't 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.

Speaker 2 you can like okay now i learned i be 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 use uses of a university is the networking you you uh you gain friends you get gain like, you meet people.

Speaker 1 It's a forcing function to meet people. But if you can meet people out into the world by traveling.

Speaker 2 And you meet so many different cultures.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Oh, like the subcultures.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like the weirdos, the darkness.

Speaker 2 Yeah, me too.

Speaker 1 But that might not be the best networking at 18 years old.

Speaker 2 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.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's the most interesting people. And

Speaker 2 it's just, I cannot recommend it enough.

Speaker 1 Well, see, the thing is, 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.

Speaker 1 Like, you still have to learn how to fit into society.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 2 uh like polite society but i was very strange outcast as well and i'm i'm more adaptable to normie now you learned it yeah

Speaker 1 after 30s you know you're like yeah but it's a skill you have to learn. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I feel, man, I feel also that

Speaker 2 you start as an outcast, but the more you work on yourself, the less like shit you have, you kind of start becoming more normy because you become more chill with yourself and more happy.

Speaker 2 And it kind of makes you uninteresting, right?

Speaker 1 Yes. Yes.

Speaker 2 Like the most, the crazy people are always the most interesting.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 So the backpack,

Speaker 2 MacBook, toothbrush, some clothes, underwear, socks.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I would go to the laundromat and wash my stuff. And I think it was like 50 things or something.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's nice. There's, as I mentioned to you, there's the

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Some people

Speaker 1 also have a saw.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You learn Minecraft.

Speaker 1 Everything I learned about life, I'm learning Minecraft, bro.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. You can, it's a, it's, it's nice to create those constraints for yourself to understand what matters to you and also how to be in this world.

Speaker 1 And one, 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.

Speaker 1 And that's that's a beautiful thing. Yeah.
Like for me, it doesn't.

Speaker 1 But people are different.

Speaker 2 It gives me happiness for like two weeks. Yeah.
I'm very quickly adapting to like baseline

Speaker 2 hedonistic adaptation very fast. Yeah.
But man, if you look at the studies, most people, like

Speaker 2 get a new car six months, you know, get a new house, six months, you just feel the same. She's like, wow, should I buy all the stuff?

Speaker 2 Studying hedonistic adaptation made me think a lot about minimalism.

Speaker 1 And so that you don't even need to go through the whole journey of getting it. Just

Speaker 1 focus on the

Speaker 1 thing that's more permanent. Yeah.
Like building shit.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like people around you, like people you love, nice food, nice experiences, meaningful work, those things,

Speaker 2 exercise, you know, those things make you happy, I think, make me happy for sure.

Speaker 1 You wrote a blog post, why I'm unreachable, and maybe you should be too. What's your strategy on communicating with people?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so when I wrote that, I was getting so many DMs. As you probably have, you have a million times more.

Speaker 2 And people were getting angry that I wasn't responding. And I was like, okay, I'll just close down these DMs completely.

Speaker 2 Then people got angry that I closed my DMs down. That I'm not like

Speaker 2 man of the people, you know. It's like changed, man.
Yeah, you've changed. You got to, you know, like this.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, I'll explain why. I just don't have the time in a day to, you know,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I'm not a therapist. I don't know.
I know this stuff.

Speaker 1 But also beautiful stuff.

Speaker 2 No, absolutely. Sure.

Speaker 1 Like, life story. I've posted a coffee form, like, if you wanted to have a coffee with me.

Speaker 1 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.
There's really powerful stories.

Speaker 1 It like breaks my heart that I won't get to meet those people.

Speaker 1 And 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 see them.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I have this problem that i i try i want to try help people and like also like oh let's make startups and whatever and it's i've learned over the years that generally for me and it sounds maybe bad right but like i helped my friend andre for example he was he came up to me in the code work space that's how i met him and he said i want to learn the code i want to do startups how do we do it and i said okay let's go uh install nginx let's start coding and he has this self-energy that he actually um

Speaker 2 he he doesn't need to be pushed he just goes and he just goes and he asks questions and he doesn't ask too many questions. He just goes, goes, and learns it.

Speaker 2 And now he has a company and makes a lot of money, has his own startups. So, and the people that I had to kind of like, that asked me for help, but then I gave help and then

Speaker 2 they started debating it, you know?

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 And the people who need this push, generally,

Speaker 2 it doesn't happen. You need to have this energy for yourself.

Speaker 1 Well, they're searching. They're searching.
They're trying to figure it out. But oftentimes their search,

Speaker 1 if they successfully find what they're looking for, it'll be within. Sounds very like spiritual Sony, but it's really like figuring that shit out on your own.
But they're reaching.

Speaker 1 They're trying to ask the world around them, like,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And like, literally, it's the stupid thing, but like googling and doing like

Speaker 1 searching is procrastination.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 just go.

Speaker 2 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, say, ah, this guy has a black background.

Speaker 2 We probably need this as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Try it.
Yeah. 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, just keep trying to start. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Annotation 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.

Speaker 2 You imitate and then you put your own spin to it, you know? And that's like a creative process. That's like literally the whole create.
Everybody always builds on the previous work. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You shouldn't get stuck.

Speaker 1 24 hours in a day, eight hours of sleep. You like break it down into a math equation.

Speaker 1 90 minutes of showering, clean up coffee.

Speaker 1 It just keeps whittling down to zero.

Speaker 2 Man, it's not this specific, but I had to make like a, you know, an average or something. something.

Speaker 1 Firefighting, I like that. One hours of groceries and errands.
I've tried breaking down minute by minute what I do in a day,

Speaker 1 especially when my life was simpler. It's really refreshing to understand where you waste a lot of time, yeah, and uh, what you enjoy doing, like

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, a lot of it is wasted.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for me, it's been the 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

Speaker 2 zoom in and completely focus cutting away all the distractions yeah me too that's the battle yeah 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 code and 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 hours of sex, hugs, love, you know.

Speaker 2 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.
Hugs. Bro, I don't.

Speaker 1 You have a counter for hugs.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah.
Like, click, click, click.

Speaker 1 It's just a numerical representation of what life is. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like one of those like... When you draw out how many weeks you have in a life.

Speaker 2 Oh, dude. This is like dark.
Yeah, man. Don't want to look at that for months.
Yeah, man. How many times do you see your parents? Jesus, like, man, yeah, it's scary, man.

Speaker 1 That's right, it might be only you know, 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,

Speaker 1 yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 I mean, it that that's like dark when you

Speaker 1 see somebody you like 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.

Speaker 1 So, like, how many more times do we have that we see each other? Yeah.

Speaker 2 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, it does.

Speaker 2 Like, you don't want to, there's a problem with Facebook. You get all these old friends from school, like when you were 10 years old, back when Facebook started.

Speaker 2 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 a different life now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I have, you know, I don't know. That might be a guy thing or I don't know.

Speaker 1 There's there's certain friends i have that like we don't interact often but we're still friends yeah like i every time i see them

Speaker 1 i think it's because we have a foundation of many shared experiences and many memories like i 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 so that's like yeah that's deep yeah

Speaker 1 so that so i don't have to be interacting with them for them to be in a friend group and then there's some people i interact with a lot so it's it, it depends.

Speaker 1 But there's just this network of good human beings that can

Speaker 1 have like a real love for them. And I, I can always

Speaker 1 count on them. If, like, if any of them called me in the middle of the night, I'll get rid of a body.
You know, I'm there.

Speaker 1 I like how that's a different definition of friendship. But it's true.
It's true. True friend.
You've become more and more famous recently. How's that affect you?

Speaker 2 It's not recently because it's this this gradual thing right like it keeps keeps going

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 1 uh and i also don't know why it keeps going does that put pressure on you to because you're pretty open on twitter and you're just like basically building in the open yeah and just

Speaker 1 not really caring if it's too technical if it'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

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 collected and

Speaker 2 man i think the opposite right like

Speaker 2 because the people i follow are interesting because they say whatever they think and they 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 life stuff of personality that's the most interesting part of like business or sports like what's the behind the sport the athlete right behind the entrepreneur that's interesting stuff to be human yeah like you you share that you know like i shared a tweet went too far but like we were cleaning the toilet because the toilet was clogged you know but like it's just real stuff because jansen and wong the nvidia guy he says he started cleaning toilets you know that was cool you you tweeted something about the the denny's thing i forget yeah it was recent nvidia was started in a denny diner uh table and you made it somehow profound you're almost yeah this one this one uh nvidia a three trillion dollar company was started in a denny's an american diner People need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next billion or trillion dollar company.

Speaker 2 What's the first and second space the home office and then the in-between the island i guess yeah the island yeah you need a space to like congregate man and i found history on this so 400 years ago in the coffee houses of europe the like the scientific revolution the enlightenment happened because they would go 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 the UK, in Holland.

Speaker 2 So we would always be going to, we were always going to cafes to work and to have serendipitous conversations with other people and start businesses and stuff.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Everybody's working on something. And I made, I took this photo.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 But that is, to you, a fundamental place to create shit, isn't that natural, organic co-working space of a coffee?

Speaker 2 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...

Speaker 2 private, they're not serendipitous, they're kind of boring.

Speaker 2 Cafes are amazing because they random people can come in and ask you, what are you working on?

Speaker 2 And not just laptops, people are also having conversations like they did 400 years ago, debates or whatever. Things are happening.
And man, I understand the aesthetics of it.

Speaker 2 It's like, oh, startup bro shipping is a bullshit startup, you know?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The US GDP for sure is benefiting from NVIDIA.

Speaker 2 European GDP could benefit if we build more companies. And I feel in Europe, there's this vibe.

Speaker 2 You have to connect things, but not allowing laptops in cafes is kind of like part of the vibe. It's like, yeah, we're not really here to work.
We're here to like enjoy life. I agree with this.

Speaker 2 Anthony Bourdain, like this tweet was quote tweeted with an Anthony Bourdain photo of him with cigarettes and a coffee in France. And he said, this is what cafes are for.

Speaker 1 I agree. But there is some element of like entrepreneurship.

Speaker 1 Like you have to allow people to dream big and work their ass off

Speaker 1 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's like the cafes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's a bunch of dreamers.

Speaker 1 You can make fun of them for like everybody thinks they're going to build a trillion dollar company. But like.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and it's odd. Not everybody wins.
99% of people will be bullshit.

Speaker 1 But they're working their ass off.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and they're doing something. And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And this will benefit you because this will create jobs for your company, your country, and your region. And I think in Europe,

Speaker 2 that's a big problem. Like we have a very anti-entrepreneurial mind.

Speaker 1 Dream big and build shit. And this is really inspiring.
This is pinned tweet of yours. All the projects that you've tried and the ones that succeeded.

Speaker 1 That's very few. Mute life.

Speaker 2 It was for Twitter to

Speaker 2 share the mute list.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Mute words.

Speaker 1 Fire calculator, no more Google. Maker rank.
How much is my site project worth? Climate finder. Ideas AI.

Speaker 2 Airline list still runs, but it doesn't make money. Airline list compares the safety of airlines because I was nervous to fly.

Speaker 2 So I was like, let's collect all the data on the crashes for all the airplanes.

Speaker 1 Bali C cable.

Speaker 1 Nice. That's awesome.

Speaker 1 Make village, Nomad Gear. 3D and virtual reality dev, play

Speaker 1 my inbox, like you mentioned. There's a lot of stuff.
Yeah, man. I'm trying to find some embarrassing tweets of yours.

Speaker 2 You can go to the highlights tab. It has all the good shit.

Speaker 1 There you go.

Speaker 2 This was Dubai.

Speaker 1 POV building an AI startup.

Speaker 1 Wow, you're a real influencer.

Speaker 2 And if people copy this photo now and they change the screenshots, it becomes like a meme.

Speaker 1 Of course, you know.

Speaker 1 This is good.

Speaker 2 That's how Dubai looks. It's insane.

Speaker 1 That's beautiful, architecture-wise. It's crazy.
The stories behind this scene. Yeah,

Speaker 1 for sure. So this is about about the European economy, where like European economy landscape is ran by dinosaurs.
And today, I studied it so I can produce you with my evidence.

Speaker 1 80% of top EU companies were founded before 1950.

Speaker 1 Only 36% of top US companies were founded before 1950.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so the median founding of companies in the US is something like 1960, and the median of the top companies, right? And the median in Europe is like 1900 or something. Yeah, so it's

Speaker 2 here: 1913 and 1963. So there's a 50-year difference.

Speaker 1 It's a good

Speaker 1 representation of the very thing you were talking about, the difference in the cultures, entrepreneurial spirit of the peoples.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Because right now,

Speaker 2 all the old dinosaur companies control the economies they're lobbying with the government they're europe is also that's like they're infiltrated with the government where they create so much regulation like 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.

Speaker 2 I need to get certificates, licenses.

Speaker 2 Whereas in America, I can just open my laptop. I can start an AI startup right now.

Speaker 2 Mostly, you know.

Speaker 1 What do you think about EAC, effective accelerationist movement?

Speaker 2 Man, you had Beth Jesus on. I love Beth Jesus, and

Speaker 2 he's amazing. And I think EOC is very needed to similarly create a more positive outlook on the future.
Like, because people, people have been very pessimistic

Speaker 2 about society, about the future of society,

Speaker 2 climate change, all this stuff.

Speaker 2 EARC is like a positive outlook on the future. It's like technology can make us, you know, we need to spend more energy.

Speaker 2 We should find ways to, of course, get clean energy, but we need to spend more energy to make cooler stuff and go into space and build more technology that can... improve society.

Speaker 2 And we shouldn't shy away from technology. Technology can be the answer for many things.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Build more.
Don't spend so much time on fear-mongering and cautiousness and all this kind of stuff. Some was okay.

Speaker 1 Some is good, but most of the time should be spent on building and creating and like and doing so unapologetically.

Speaker 1 It's a refreshing reminder of what made the United States great is all the builders, like you said, the entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1 Like we can't forget that in all the sort of discussions of how things could go wrong with technology and all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it goes together. Look at China.
China is now at the stage of like America, what, like 1900 or something? They're building rapidly, like insane.

Speaker 2 And obviously, China has massive problems, but that comes with the whole thing that comes with America in this beginning, also the massive problems, right?

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I think it's very, very dangerous for a country or a region like Europe to,

Speaker 2 you get to this point where you're kind of complacent, you're kind of comfortable.

Speaker 1 And then...

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 yeah, go off. And, and, uh,

Speaker 2 I think it's the problem:

Speaker 2 the mind culture. So, EOC, I made EU OCK, which is like the European kind of version.

Speaker 2 Um, I made like hoodies and stuff. So, a lot of people wear like this, this make Europe great again hats.

Speaker 2 Um, yeah, 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.

Speaker 1 All right. Um,

Speaker 1 okay, so you had an

Speaker 1 incredible life,

Speaker 1 very successful, built a lot of cool stuff. So what advice would you give to young people about how to do the same?

Speaker 2 Man, I would listen to like nobody. Just do what you think is good and follow your heart, right? Like

Speaker 2 everybody peer presses you into doing stuff you don't want to do.

Speaker 2 And like they tell you, like parents or family or society and tell you, but like try your own thing, you know, because it probably it might work out. You can, you can steer the ship.

Speaker 2 You know, it probably doesn't work out immediately. You probably go into very bad times like I did as well, relatively, right?

Speaker 2 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, you know, as I did. And

Speaker 2 I think that should be more promoted, like do your own thing. There's space in the economy and in society for do your own thing, you know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like, um, you know, like little villages, everybody would sell, I would sell bread, you would sell meat, everybody can do their own little thing. You don't need to

Speaker 2 be a normie, as you say.

Speaker 2 You, um, you can, you can be what you really want to be, you know,

Speaker 1 and like

Speaker 2 go all out doing that yeah you got to go all out because if you do if you have assets you cannot succeed you gotta you need to go lean into the to the outcast stuff lean into the

Speaker 1 um being different and and just doing whatever it is that you want to do right you got a whole asset yeah whole asset yeah this was an incredible conversation it was an honor to finally meet you it was an honor to be here lex to talk to you and uh keep doing your thing keep inspiring me and uh the world with all the cool stuff you're building.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Matt.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Peter Levels. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Thank you for listening, and I hope to see you next time.