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

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

in a couch, using vanilla HTML, jQuery, PHP, and SQLite. He builds and ships quickly and improves on the fly, all in the open, documenting his work, both his successes and failures, with a raw, honest, ever-true indie hacker. Peter is an inspiration to a huge number of developers and entrepreneurs who love creating cool things in the world that are hopefully useful for people. This was an honor and a pleasure for me.

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data. I think Moctific was created by Cisco, specifically their outshift group that does the cutting edge R&D. So these guys are legit. It's great. Visit Moctific.ai to learn more that's motifc.ai. This episode is also brought to you by AG1 and all in one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I'm going out. I think it's 100 degrees out. And also right now, I'm going to go out and run. He wore from five to 12 miles. I'm feeling good right now. So I'm

thinking like a 10, 11, 12 mile range. By the way, I just heard a little clip on Cam Haines' Instagram. And by the way, Cam, amazing human being, you should definitely go follow him. He's an inspiration to me. You know, quietly just does incredible fits of strength and does it all with a kind heart and just this warmth and humor out of it. Anyway, he was talking about the fact that sometimes, you know, when he's running crazy distances or fast pace, he'll just walk

for a short period of time. He's doing it for joy. He's doing it for the love of running. Like, you don't always, as he says, have to hate it. And I think I approach running the same way. Sometimes I'll be running really fast. Sometimes I walk. This oftentimes correlates with how deeply I am in thought related to an audiobook. I'm listening to it. Sometimes I get this sort of discomfort when there's a difficult part of the audiobook that's really making me think

at the same time, keeping a fast pace is difficult for me. So I just slow down. Sometimes I'll walk. Sometimes I stop and just sit on a bench. And I'm doing it all not for sort of training for marathon or training for some difficult physical endeavor. I'm doing it for the love of it, for the love of running out in a nature, whether it's in the heat or in the cold, just the love of life that you can get, especially when the second wind hits. Anyway, after all that,

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

I would love to just listen to that. And then I'll be talking to a bunch of people on the left and the right and having some of those tense, difficult conversations and again, having it with compassion, but also with backbone. It's not an easy line to walk by the way. And I don't think I'm smart enough to do it. I'm most days that kind of feel like an idiot, but I'm do my best. Anyway, you should try out talk therapy. Super easy to do with BetterHelp. Check them out at

BetterHelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's BetterHelp.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by 8th Sleep and it's pod for ultra that I've been enjoying. I just recently enjoyed. I enjoyed every night multiple times a day. Let's get crazy. I love it. For a good nap, it can cool down inside of the bed to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature. Cool bed, warm blanket and just shut off from the world. Just forget it all.

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at each other. The end of the day just losing your mind. All of that can dissipate. For me, with a short nap. On a cold bed, a short nap feels like home. It's one of the favorite things I have about home and one of my least favorite things about traveling because I don't have 8th Sleep. Anyway, you could enjoy the same kind of peace of mind. If you go to 8thsleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get $350 off the pod for ultra. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to

support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Peter levels. You've launched a lot of companies and built a lot of products. As you say, most fail, but some succeeded. What's your philosophy behind building the startups that you did? I think my philosophy is very different. Most people in startups, because most people in startups, they build a company and they raise money. They hire people and then they build a product and

they find something that makes money. I don't really raise money. I don't use VC funding. I do everything myself. I'm a designer. I'm a developer. I make everything. I make the logo. For me, I'm much more scrappy. Because I don't have funding, I need to go fast. I need to make things fast to see even ID works. I have an ID in my mind and I build it. I build a micro mini startup.

And I launch it very quickly within two weeks or something of building it. And I check if there's the man and if people actually sign up and not just sign up, but if people actually pay money, they need to take out the credit cards, pay me money. And I can see if the idea is validated. Most of these don't work. As you say, most fail. So there's this rapid iterative phase. We just build a prototype that works, launch it, see if people like improving it really, really quickly

to see if people like it a little bit more enough to pay and all that. That whole rapid process is how you think of it. I think it's very rapid. And it's like if I compare it to, for example, Google, like our big tech companies, especially Google right now is kind of struggling. They made like transformers. They made all the invented all the AI stuff years ago and they never really shipped. They could have shipped chat GPD, for example. I think I heard in 2019. I 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 it couldn't do it. And it's because these big organizations, it can make you very slow. So being alone by myself and my laptop, in my underwear, in a hotel room or something, I can ship very fast. And I don't need to ask legal for, oh, can you vouch for this? You know, I can just go and ship. You always code in your underwear. Your profile

picture, you're like slouching and couching your underwear chilling on a laptop. No, but it's, I do wear shorts a lot and I usually wear shorts and I know t-shirts because I'm always too hot. Like I'm always overheating. Thank you for showing up not just in your underwear, but wearing shorts. And I'm still wearing this for you, but thank you. Thank you for dressing up. I think it's because since I go to the gym, I'm always too hot. What's your favorite

exercise in the gym? Man, over at press. Over at press like shoulder press. Yeah. Okay. But it feels good because you're doing like, you do, you win because when you, what is that? I do 60 kilos. There's like 120 pounds or something like this. It's my only thing I can do well in on the gym. And you said like this and you're like, I did it, you know? Like a winner pose. Yeah. A victory pose. I do bench press squats, dead lifts.

Hence the, the mug talking to my therapist. Yeah. It's a dead lift. Yeah. Because the ex like therapy for me, you know? Yeah. It is controversial to say like if I say it isn't to be the people get angry. Physical hardship is a kind of therapy. Yeah. I just rewatched happy people year in the tiger that Warner Herzog film where they document people that are doing trapping. 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. Like there's something about that physical physical. Yeah. Toil. Yeah. My dad taught me that my dad always does like a construction in the house. Like it's always renovating the house. He breaks through one room and then he goes to the next room and he's just going in a circle around the house for like the last 40 years. So, but so he's always doing construction

in the house and it's his hobby. And he like he taught me when I'm depressed or something. He says like get a big like what do you call it? Like a big mountain of sand or something from construction. 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 kind of did that with startups too. Yeah. Construction is not about the destination man. It's about the journey.

Yeah. Sometimes I wonder people who are always remodeling their house. Is it really about their modeling? No, no, it's not. It's about the project. It's the puzzle of it. No, he doesn't care about the results. Well, he shows me it's like it's amazing. I'm like yeah, it's amazing. But then he wants to go to the next room, you know, but I think it's very metaphorical for work. Because I also I never stop work. I go to the next website where I make a new one, right? Where I

make a new startup. So I'm always like like to give you something to wake up in the morning and like you know have coffee and and kiss your girlfriend and then you have like a goal. Not today I'm going to fix this feature. Today I'm going to fix this bug or something. I'm going to do something. You have something to wake up to, you know, and I think maybe especially as a man, also women, but you need you need a hard work, you know, you need like an endeavor, I think.

How much of the building that you do is about money. How much is it about just a deep internal happiness? It's really about fun because I was 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. I made electronic music, drama based music like 20 years ago. And I was always making stuff. So I think creative expression is like a meaningful work. It's so important. It's so fun. It's so fun to

have like a daily challenge where you try to figure stuff out. But the interesting thing is you put 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 something like this. Yeah. The problems I don't dictate that, right? Like if more people start using it, millions of people suddenly start using it and it becomes big. I'm not going to say, I'll stop signing up to my website and pay me money. But I never

raised funding for it. And I think as I don't like the stressful life that comes with it, like I have a lot of founder friends and they tell me secretly like hundreds of millions of dollars in funding stuff and they tell me like next time if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it like you because it's more fun. It's more in these more chill. It's more creative. They don't like this. They don't like

to be manager, right? You become like a CEO. You become a manager and I think a lot of people that start startups when they become a CEO, they don't like that job actually, but they can't really exit it, you know? But they like to do the groundwork, the coding. So I think that keeps you happy, like doing something creative. Yeah, it's interesting how people are pulled towards that, the scale to go really big. And you don't have that honest reflection with yourself, like what actually makes

you happy? Because for a lot of great engineers, we'll make some happy as the building, the the quote unquote individual contributor, like where you're actually still coding or you actually still building. And they let go of that and then they become unhappy. But some of that is the sacrifice needed to have an impact at scale. If you truly believe in a thing you're doing, but look at Elon is doing things a million times bigger than me, right? And 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's very different from VC founders. VC start is like software. There's a lot of bullseid in this

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

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

like with at-sense like $2000 a month, $2000 a month. And all my friends got like normal jobs and we stopped hanging out because people would like in university hang out, you know, you chill at these at each other's houses, you go party. But even when people get jobs, they're 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, it's not for me. I want to do something else. And I was starting getting this like,

I think it's like Saturn return, you know, when you're turn 27. It's like some concept where Saturn returns to the same place in the orbit that it was when you're born. I'm learning so many things. It's some astrology thing, you know? So many truly special artists died when they were 27. Exactly. It's someone who's 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 it flew

out. I went to Asia started digital nomadding and did that for a year. And then that made me feel even worse, you know, because I was like alone in hotel rooms, like looking at the ceiling, like what am I doing in my life? Like this is like I was working on startups and stuff on YouTube. But it's like, what is the future here? You know, like is this is this something while my friends in Holland were doing really well and with a normal life, you know? So I was getting very depressed and

like I'm like a outcast, you know? My money was shrinking. I wasn't making money anymore a lot. It was making $500 a month or something. And I was, you know, looking at the ceiling, thinking like now I'm like 27, I'm a loser. And that's the moment when I started building like startups. And it was because my dad said like if you're depressed, you need to, you know, get sand, get a shovel. Start shoveling, doing something. You can't just sit still. Which is kind of like 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. And I started doing a project called 12 Stars in 12 months. Where every month I would make something like a project and I would launch it with Stripe so people could pay for it. So the basic format is try to build a thing, put it online and put Stripe to where you can pay money for it. Yeah. I'm not sponsored by Stripe, but I just try to check out the 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 them. Yeah. And they're really nice. Like the CEO Patrick is really nice behind the scenes. That 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 a nine years old, I was making websites also. And I tried to open a merchant account. There was like before Stripe, you would have like, I think it was called world pay. So I had to like fill out all these forms. And then I had to fix them to America from Holland with my dad's facts. And my dad had to, it was on my dad's name and he did sign for this and he started reading these terms and conditions which was like, he's liable for like a hundred million in damages.

And he's like, I don't want to sign this. I'm like, Dad, come on. I need to make money on the internet. And he signed it and we sent it. We fixed it to America and I had a merchant account. But then never nobody paid for anything. So that was the problem. But it's much easier now. You can sign up, you add some codes and yeah. So 12 startups in 12 months. Yeah. So what, how do you start number one? What was that? What, like, what were you feeling? What were you sitting behind the

computer? Like, how much do you actually know about building stuff at that point? I could code a little bit because I did the YouTube channel and I made a website for, I would make websites for like the YouTube channel. It was called Panda Mix show. And it was like these electronic music mixes like dubstep or drone bass or techno house. I saw one of them like flash, reusing flash. Yeah, my album, my CDL was using flash. Yeah. I sold my CD. Yeah. Kids flash was a

flash was cool. Software. This is like the brain. Like grandpa, you know, but flash was good. Yeah. And there was what's it called? Boy, I should remember this action script. There's some kind of programming language script. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And flash back then that was the JavaScript, you know, the JavaScript. Yeah. And I thought that's going to that's supposed to be the dynamic thing that takes over the internet. I invested so many hours in learning that.

Steve Jobs killed it. Steve Jobs said flash sucks. Stop using it. And everyone's like, okay. That guy was right, though, right? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Well, it was it was a close platform, I think. And close. But this ironic because Apple, you know, they're not very open. Right. But back then, Steve was like, this is close. 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. But flash was cool. Yeah. Yeah. It was cool for time. Yeah. Listen, animated gifts were cool for time too. Yeah. They came back in a different way as a meme, though. I mean, like, I I even remember when gifts were actually cool, not ironically cool. Yeah. Like there's like on the internet, you would have like a dancing rabbit or something like this. And that was really exciting. Yeah. You had like the, you know, Lex homepage, you know, at least everything was centered. Yeah.

And you had like Peter's homepage and then the on the construction, yeah, Giff, which was like a guy like with a helmet and the lights. And it was amazing. And it was amazing. Yeah. That's how before like Google Adsense, you would have like banners for advertising. It was amazing. Yeah. And a lot of links to porn, I think. Yeah. Or porn. Yeah. I think that was where the merchant accounts people would use for people would make money a lot. Only money made on internet. And it was like

porn, where a lot of it. 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, you did some basic HTML. Yeah. Yeah. But I had to learn the actual coding. So I, this was good. It was a good, good idea to like every month launch a startup. So I could learn to code, learn basic stuff. And but it was still very scrappy because it didn't have time to, which is on purpose. I could do enough 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 playing my inbox. Cause back then my friends, we would send, we would send like cool, it was

before Spotify. I think we would send like two, three, 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 unavigable. So I made an app that would log into your Gmail, get them emails and find them on 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 it? No, it uses like POP, like pop or I map, you know, it would actually check your email. So that like privacy concerns, cause it would get all your emails to find YouTube links. But then I wouldn't save anything. But that was fun. It was like, and that, the first product already would get like pressed like went on, I think like some tech media and stuff. And I was like, this cool. Like it didn't make money. There was no payment button. But it was a, it was actually

people using it. I think tens of thousands of people's users. That's a great idea. I wonder why, like why don't we have that? Why don't we have things that access Gmail and extract some useful aggregate information? Yeah. 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. I mean, there is a whole ecosystem of like apps you can build on top of the Google. Yeah. But people don't never do this.

Like I've seen a few like boomerang. There's a few apps that are like good. But just I wonder what, maybe it's not easy to make money. I think it's hard to get people to pay for these like extensions and plugins, you know, cause it's not like a real app. So it's not like people don't value it. People very, oh, this, a plugin should be free. You know, when I want to use a plugin in Google

sheets or something, I'm not going to pay for it. It should be free, which is, but if you go to a website and you actually, okay, I need this product, I'm going to pay for this because it's a real product. So even though it's the same code in the back, it's a plugin, you know. Yeah. I mean, you can do it through like extensions like Chrome extensions through from the browser side. Yeah, but who pays for Chrome extensions, right? Like barely anybody. So that's not a good place to

make money probably. Yeah, that sucks. Like Chrome extensions should be a extension for your startup. You know, you have a product. Oh, we also have a Chrome extension, you know, I wish the Chrome extension would be the product. I wish Chrome would support that like where you could pay for it easily. It's like imagine, I can imagine a lot of products that would just live as extensions. Like improvements for social media. Yeah. I think that's easy. You know, GPD's yeah. Like these

judgey beauties, they're going to charge money for it now. You get a ravaged ref share. I think for an opening eye, I made a lot of them also. Why? We'll talk about it. So let's rewind back. It's a pretty cool idea to do 12 startups in 12 months. What's it take to build a thing in 30 days? Like at that time, how hard was that? I think the hard part is like figuring out what you shouldn't add, right? Which you shouldn't build because you don't have time. So you need to build a

landing page. Well, you need to make you know, you need to build the product actually because they need to be something that pay for. Do you need to build a login system? Like maybe no, you know, like maybe you can build some scrappy login system. Like for photo, you sign up, you pay with a 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 login. It's not so safe, you know, what if you link the link and now I have real Google login, but that took like a year. So keeping it very scrappy is very important to you don't have time. You know, you need to focus on what you can build fast. So money, stripe, build the product, build a landing page. You need to think about how are people going to find this? So are you going to put it on

Reddit or something? How are you going to put it on Reddit without being looked at as a spammer, right? Like if you say, Hey, it is my new startup. You should use it. No, nobody gets deleted, you know? Maybe if you find a problem that a lot of people on Reddit already have on subreddits, you know, like you solve that problem, say, some people I made this thing that might solve your problem and maybe it's free for now, you know, like that could work. But you need to be very,

you know, narrow it down. What you're building time is limited. Yeah. Actually, can we go back to the you laying in a room feeling like a loser? Yeah, I still feel like a loser sometimes. What's, what can you, can you speak to that feeling to that place of just like feeling like a loser? And I think a lot of people in this world are laying in a room right now listening to this and feeling like a loser. Okay, so I think it's normal. If you're young, did you feel like a loser?

First of all, especially when you're 27. Yes. Yeah, especially there's like a peak. Yeah. Yeah, I think 20 cents a peak. And so I would not kill yourself. It's very important to just get through it, you know, but because you have nothing, you have probably no money, you have no business, you have no job, you like Jordan Peterson said this. I saw it somewhere. Like the reason people are depressed because I have nothing. They don't have a girlfriend. They don't have a boyfriend.

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

And also, I think I started going, I started getting like anxiety and I think I started going a little bit crazy where I think travel can make you insane. And I noticed because I know that there's like digital nomads that they killed themselves. And I don't, I haven't checked like this comparison with like baseline people like, who's I ready? 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 texting. And

you're alone a lot back then when you travel alone. There was no other digital nomads back then. A lot. So you're in a strange culture. You look different in everybody. Like you're in, I was in Asia, like everybody's really nice in Thailand. But you're not part of the culture. You're traveling around. You're hopping from city to city. You don't have a home anymore. You feel disrooted. And you constantly and outcast in that you're different from everybody else.

Exactly. But people treat you like Thailand. People are so nice. But you still feel like outcast. And 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 of this new thing. And like one guy was selling illegal drugs. It was American guy was selling illegal drugs for UPS to Americans, you know, on this website, they were like a lot of drop shippers doing shady stuff. This love, shady things going on

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

What is the philosophy there? And the history of the movement. I struck upon it on the accident because I was like, I'm going to graduate university and then I'm going to need to get out of here. I'll fly to Asia because I've been before in Asia. I started in Korea in 2009, like study exchange. I was like, Asia is easy. Thailand's easy. And I'll just go there and figure things out. And it's cheap. It's very cheap. Check my, I would live like for $150 per month rent for like a private room.

Pretty good. So I struck upon this on the accident. I was like, oh, okay. There's other people on laptops working on their startup of working remotely back to nobody working remotely, but they're working their businesses, right? And they would live in like Colombia or Thailand or Vietnam or Bali. They would live kind of like a more cheap places. And it looked like a very adventurous life. Like

you travel around, you build your business. There's no pressure from like your home society, right? Like your American. So you get pressure from America's side telling you kind of what to do. Like you need to buy a house or you need to do this stuff. I had this in Holland too. And you can get away from the pressure. You can find it kind of feel like you're free. You're kind of, there's nobody telling

you what to do. But that's also why you start feeling like you go crazy because you are, you are free. You're this attached from anything and anybody. You're this attached from your culture. You're this attached from the culture. You're probably in because you're staying very short. I think France Kafka said, I'm free. Therefore I'm lost. Man, that's so true. Yeah. It's exactly the points. 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. 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 it's a big lesson I learned then. But what were they making for money? What? So you're saying they're doing shady stuff at that time?

For me, you know, because I was more like a developer. I wanted to make startups kind of and it was like drugs, being shipped to America, like diet pills and stuff, like non-FDA proof stuff, you know, and they would like let there was no like effort. They were like, they would, they would say with beers, they would laugh about like all the dodges shit kind of they're doing, you know, that part of it. Okay. You know, like kind of sleazy e-com vibe. I'm not saying all

e-com was sleazy, you know, but right. But you know, this vibe, it could be a vibe. And your vibe was more build cool shit. That's ethical. You know, the guys with sports cars in Dubai, these people, you know, e-com like, oh, it bro, you got a drop ship. Yeah. You make harm million. It month. Like those people was this shit. And I was like, this is not my people. Yeah. I don't mean there's nothing wrong with any of those individual. No, but there's a foundation that's not

quite ethical. I mean, what is that? I don't know what that is. But yeah, I get you. No, I like, I don't want to judge. It was more, I know that for me, it wasn't my world. It wasn't my sub-culture. I wanted to make cool shit. You know, but they also think that cool shit is cool. So, you know, but I wanted to make like real-life startups. And that was my thing. I would read Hacker News, you know, like white 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 from a moment. It's very romantic, man. It's very, it's colorful, you know, like if I think about the memories. We wanted some happy memories, just like working, working cafes, or working in just the freedom that envelops you with that way of life. Because anything is possible. You just get off.

I think it was amazing. Like we would work. I would make friends and we would work until, you know, 6 a.m. in Bali, for example, with like, we've Andre my best friend, we're still my best 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. And I would wake up like 6 p.m. or 5 p.m. I would drive to the co-working space on a motorbike. I would buy like a Fertie hot lattes from a cafe.

How many? Fertie. Because there was like six people coming. But we didn't know. Sometimes people would come in and we would say 3-0-30. Yeah. Nice. And we would drink like four per person or something, you know. Man, it's Bali. I don't know if they were powerful lattes, you know, but they were lattes. And we would put them in plastic bag and then we would drive there and all the coffee was like falling, you know, ever. And then we'd go and go and say, I have these coffees here and would work

all night. We'd play like techno music and everybody would just work on their, like this would literally like business people. They would work in their startup and we would all try and make something. And then the sun would come up and the morning people, you know, the yoga, yoga girls and yoga guys would come in after the yoga class and six. And they'd say, hey, good morning. And we're like, we look like this, you know, and we're like, we'll stop how you're

doing. And we didn't know how bad we looked, you know, but it was very bad. And then we'd go home, sleep in like a hostel or hotel and do the same thing. And again and again and again. And it was this locking mold, you know, like working. And that was very fun. So it's just a bunch of you techno music blasting all through the night. Yeah. More like. Like I see I got for me. It's such an interesting thing because the speed of the beat affects how I feel about a thing. So

the faster it is, the more anxiety I feel, but that anxiety is channeled into productivity. But if it's a little too fast, I start the anxiety overpower. That's too fast. I mean, for working. I have to play with it. It's like you can actually like adjust my level of anxiety. There's a must be a better word than anxiety. It's like a 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 to draw on bass music. I think for codes, like industrial techno, this kind of stuff kind of fast. It works well because you really get like locked in and combined with caffeine. You go deep. And I think you balance on this edge of anxiety because this caffeine is also hitting your anxiety. And you want to be on the edge of anxiety with this techno running. Sometimes it gets too much. Stop the techno, stop the music. But those are good

memories. You know, also like travel memories. You go from city to city. And it feels like it's kind of like jet set life. It feels very beautiful. You're seeing a lot of cool cities. And what was your favorite place? Do you remember? I think still like Bangkok is the best place. And back again, Chiang Mai. I think Thailand is very special. Like I've been to the other place. Like I've been to Vietnam and I've been to South America and stuff. I still think Thailand

wins in how nice people are, how easy of a life. People have their everything's cheap. Yeah, good. Well, Bangkok is going 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, and it's quite hot, but that's a very cool place. Problems. I love Brazil also. My girlfriend is visiting, but I do not just because of that, but I like Brazil. The problem still is the safety issue.

You know, like it's like in America, like it's localized. It's hard for Europeans to understand like safety is localized to specific areas. So if you go to the right areas, it's amazing. Brazil is amazing. If you go to the wrong areas, like maybe you die. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's true. But it's not true in Europe. From Europe is much more that come. That's true. That's more average. You're right. You're right. There's more average doubt. 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. Man, yeah. I like it. I like there's certain cities in the United States like that. Yeah. I like that. And you're saying Europe is more expensive. But you don't feel scared? Well, I don't. I like danger. DJ. 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. So I don't like the mellowed out aspects of humanity. I friends, like these are almost friends that are exactly like this. Like they go to like the kind of broken areas. You know, like they like this reality. They like authenticity more. They don't like luxury. They don't like. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's very European of you. Like, that's a whole other conversation. So you you quoted Freya Stark quote to awaken quite a loan in a strange town is one of the most

pleasant sensations in the world. Yeah. Do you remember time you were walking in a strange town and felt like that? We're talking about small towns or big towns or man, anywhere. I think I wrote it in some blog post and like. It was a common thing when you would wake up and this was like because I have this website. I started a website about this. The anonymous like called nomadlist.com and there was a community. So it was like 3,000 other digital nomads because I was

feeling lonely. So I built this website and I stopped feeling lonely. Like I started make organizing meetups and making friends. And then it was very common. People would say they would wake up and they would forget where they are. Yeah. Like for the first half minute and I had to look outside like where am I, which country? Which sounds really like privileged. But it was more like funny. Like you literally don't know where you are because you're so disrooted. But there's

something. Man, it's like Anthony Burden, you know, there's something pure about this kind of vagabonds travel thing, you know? Like it's behind me, I think. I don't like now travel my girlfriend, right? It's very different. But it is a romantic like memories of this kind of like vagabond individualistic solo life. But the thing didn't make me happy, but it was very cool, but it didn't make me happy, right? It made me anxious. There's something about it that made me anxious. I don't

know. I still feel like that. It's a cool feeling. It's scary at first, but then you realize where you are and you and I don't know. It's like you're awakened to the possibilities of this place. That's it. It's like great. And it's even when you're doing some basic travel. I go to San Francisco or something. Yeah, you have like the novelty effect. Like you're in a new place. Like here, things are possible. You know, you don't get bored yet. And that's why people get addicted to

travel, you know? 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 Bootstrapers Handbook. I was wondering if you can go through some of the steps. It's idea, build, launch, grow, monetize, automate, and exit. There's a lot of fascinating ideas in each one. So idea stage. How do you find a good idea? So I think you need to be able to spot problems. So for example, you can go in your daily life,

like when you wake up and you're like, what is stuff that I'm really annoyed with? That's like in my daily life, that doesn't function well. And that's a problem that you can see. Okay, maybe that's something I can add, write code about. You know, code for and it will make my life easier. So I would say make like a list of all these problems you have and like idea to solve it. And I see which one is like viable. You can actually do something and then start building it.

So that's a really good place to start. Become open to all the problems in your life. I can 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 accustomed to discomfort. Exactly. Like for example, like door knobs. Yeah. Like design of certain things like new, extreme door knob. That one I know how much

incredible design work has gone into. It's a really interesting doors and door knobs. It's 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. And the other aspect of it is you're saying like in order to come up with interesting ideas, you got to try to live a more interesting life. Yeah. But that's where travel comes in. Because when I started traveling, I started seeing stuff

in other countries that you didn't have in Europe, for example, or America, even. Like if you go to Asia, like do especially 10 years ago, nobody knew about this. Like wechat all these apps that they already had before we had them. These everything apps, right? Like now Elon's trying to make X. This everything app like wechat. Same thing. Like in an easier talent, you have one app that you can order food. If you can order groceries, you can order massage, you can order car mechanic.

Anything you can think of is in the app. And that's stuff, for example. You know, that's called like arbitrage. You can go to back to your country and build that same app for your country, for example. So you start seeing problems. You start seeing solutions that other countries already, other people already did in the rest of the world. And also traveling in general just gives you more problems. Because travel is uncomfortable, you know. Apports are horrible.

Airplanes are not comfortable either. There's a lot of problems. You start seeing just getting out of your house, you know. But also you can, I mean, in the digital world, you can just go into different communities and see what can be improved by the others in that. Yeah. Yeah. What specifically is your process of generating ideas? Do like do I do a dumps? Like do you have a

document? We just keep writing? Yeah. You used to have like a, because when I was, when I was making money, I was trying to like make this list of ideas to see like, so I need to build, I was thinking statistically already, like I need to build all these things and one of these will work out probably, you know. So I need to have a lot of things to try. And I did that. Right now,

I think like because I already have money, I can do more things based on technology. So for example, AI, when I found out about when stable diffusion came or chat GBT and stuff, all these things, all these things were like, I didn't start working with them because I had a problem. I had no problems, but I was very curious about technology. And I was like playing with it and figuring out like first is playing with it and then you find something like, okay, this generates,

stable fusion generates houses, very beautiful and interior, you know. So that's about problem stalling. It's more about the possibilities of new things you can create. Yeah, but that's very risky because that's the famous like solution trying to find a problem. Yeah. And usually it doesn't work. And that's very common with startups. I think they have tech, but actually people don't need to tech, right? So can you actually explain it be cool to talk about some of the stuff you

created? Can you explain this photo AI? Yeah. Yeah. So it's like fire your photographer. The idea is that you don't need a photographer anymore. You can train yourself as AI model and you can take as many photos you want anywhere in any clothes with facial expressions like happy or sad or poses, all the stuff. So how does it work? This is a, you see me. So you can press the link to a gallery of ones that are making it. So on the left you have the prompts, the box. Yeah,

so you can write like, so model is your model, this leg treatment. So you can write like model as a blah blah whatever you want. Yep. Then press the button and it will take photos, take like one minute. What are you using for the hosting for the compute? Replicate. Okay. Replicate.com. They're very, very good. Okay. It's cool. Like this interface wise, it's cool that you're showing how long it's going to take. This is amazing. So it's taking a, I'm presuming you just loaded

in a few pictures from the internet. Yeah. So I went to Google images, tapped in Lex Friedman. I added like 10 or 20 images. You can open them in the gallery and you can use your cursor to. Yeah. So some don't look like you. So they hit a miss rate is like, I don't know, say like 50, 50 or something. But when I was watching your tweets, like it's been getting better and better and better. It was very bad in the beginning. It was so bad, but still people who signed up today,

you know, there's there's two Lexes. It's great. It's getting more and more sexual. It's making me very uncomfortable. Yeah. But that's the problem with these models because, no, we need to talk about this because the models of diffusion. Yeah. So the photorealistic models that are like fine tunes. Yeah. They were all trained and born in the beginning. And it was a guy called Hassan. So I was trying to figure out how to do photorealistic AI photos and it was stable diffusion by itself

is not doing that well. Like the faces look all mangled. Yeah. And it doesn't have enough resolution or something to do the well. So, but I started seeing these these base models, these fine tune models and the people who trained them born and I would try them and they would be very photorealistic. They would have bodies that actually made sense like body anatomy. But if you look at the photorealist models that people use now, still, they're still core of born there like of naked people. So I

need to prompt out the naked and everyone needs to do this with AI startups of imaging. He needs to prompt out the naked stuff. You need to put a you know, naked, you have to keep reminding the model. You need to put those on the back. 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

the whole data. Oh, it's after we did that. Because you get the journalists get very angry if they, you know, there was a journalist I think that we've got anger that used this and was like, oh, it made me it showed like a nipple because Google vision didn't detect it. So there's like these kind of problems you need to deal with, you know, that's what I'm talking about. This is with cats. But look at the cat face. It's also kind of mangled, you know.

I'm I'm I'm a little bit disturbed. I'm assuming on the cat if you want like, like, yeah, this is a very sad cut. It doesn't have a nose. It doesn't have a nose. But this is a man, but this is the problem with AI service because they all act like it's perfect. Like this is ground breaking and but it's not perfect. It's like really bad, you know, half time. So if I wanted to sort of update model as yeah, so you remove this stuff and you write like whatever you want like

in Thailand or something or in Tokyo. Uh, in Tokyo. Yeah. And you say like at night with neon lights, like you can add more detail to make sure I go in Austin. Do you think you'll know? Yeah, in Texas, in Austin, Texas, cowboy hats and Texas. Yeah. As a cowboy. As a cowboy, it's going to go so towards the porn directions. It's, it's, it's my hope not. This end of my career. Or the beginning, it depends. We can send you a push notification

when your photos are done. Yeah, cool. Oh, wow. So this whole interface you've built. Yeah, this is really well done. So jQuery. I still use jQuery. Yes. Still after the day, you're not the only one the entire of the web. Yeah. This PHP, the stack. It's been jQuery. Yeah. As SQL lights, you're just like one of the top performers from a programming perspective that are still like openly talking about it. But everyone's using PHP. Like if you look at most of the web, it's still

probably PHP and it's because of WordPress, right? Because the blog is a. Yeah. Um, it's true. I'm seeing a revival now. People are getting sick of frameworks. Um, like all the JavaScript frameworks are so like what do you call it? Like, will they? Like, there's so it's, take so much work just maintain this code. And then it updates to a new version. You need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works. Yeah. And can you actually just speak to that stack? You

just build all your websites, app, startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML. Yeah. JavaScript with jQuery, PHP and a. That's cool. Like, I'm, so that that's a really simple stack. And you get stuff done really fast. Like, can you just speak to the philosophy behind that? I think it's accidental because that's the thing I knew. Like I knew PHP, I knew HTML, um,

CSS, you know, because she made websites. And when my startups started taking off, I didn't have time to, I remember putting on my to do list, like learn Node.js because it's important to switch, you know, because this obviously is much better language than PHP. And I never learned it. I never did it. Because at the end of time, I, these things were growing like this. And I was launching more project. And I never had time. It's like one day, you know, I'll, I'll start coding properly. And

I never got to it. I sometimes wonder if I need to learn that stuff. It's still to do ahead of for me to really learn Node.js or, or Flash or this kind of the act. Yeah. React. And it's just, it feels like a responsible software engineer should know how to use these. But you can get stuff done so fast with vanilla versions of stuff. Yeah. It's like software developers. If you want to get a job and there's like, you know, people making stuff like startups.

And if you want to be entrepreneur, probably you should maybe soon. 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, C++ 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 don't know, but it just feels like you can get so much more stuff done if you don't care about how you do it.

Man, this is my most controversial take I think. And maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like this framework's now that raised money. They raised a lot of money. They raised 50 million, 100 million, 3 million, dollars. And the idea is that you need to make the developers and new developers like when you're 18 or 20 years old, right? Get them to use this framework and add a platform to it like where the framework can open source, but you probably should use the platform

which is paid to use it. And the cost of the platforms to host it are a thousand times higher than just hosting it on a simple AWS server or a VPS on digital ocean, right? So there's obviously like a monetary incentive here. Like we want to get a lot of developers to use this technology and then we need to charge them money because they're going to use it in startups and then the startups can pay

for the bills. But what that kind of destroys the information out there about learning to code because they pay YouTubers, they pay influencers, developer influencers, a big thing to like and same thing happens with like nutrition and fitness or something. Same thing happens in developing. They pay these influencers to promote the stuff, use it, make stuff with it, make demo products with it. And then a lot of people like, wow, use this. And I started noticing this because when I was

ship my stuff, people would ask me, what are you using? I would say I would just be just be just be jacquery. Why doesn't matter? And people would start kind of attacking me like, why are you not using this new technology? This new framework, this new thing. And I say, I don't know because this beach people in works and I don't really optimizing for anything just works. And I never understood why I understand there's new technologies that are better and this should be improvement. But

I'm very suspicious of money. Just like lobbying. Does money in this developer framework scene? There's hundreds of millions that goes to ads or influencer or whatever. It can't all go to developers. You don't need so many developers for a framework and it's open source to make a lot of more money on these startups. So that's a really good perspective. But in addition to that is like when you say better, it's like, can we get some data on the better? Because like I want to know

from the individual developer perspective. And then from a team of five, team of 10, team of 20 developers, measure how productive they are in shipping features, how many bugs they create, how many security holes. PHP was not good at security for a while. But now it's in theory. In theory, is it though? How is good? 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.

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

have security holes as well. Anyway, I just sort of questioned the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push software engineers towards frameworks, towards complex, like super complicated, sort of software engineering approaches that stretch out the time it takes to actually build the thing. 100%. And it's the same thing with big corporations, 80% of the people don't do anything. It's not efficient. And if you, if your benchmark is like people building stuff that actually

gets done and like for society, right? Like if we want to save time, we should probably use technologies 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? And use the framework when it obviously solves the problem, a direct problem. Of course, yeah, of course. I'm not saying you code without a framework. I'm usually used whatever you want, but yeah, I think it's suspicious,

you know? And I think it's suspicious when I talk about on the Twitter, like this army comes out, you know? This is this framework armies. Man, something my gut tells me. I want to ask the framework army what have they built this week? It's the Elon question. What did you do this week? Yeah, did you make money with it? Did you charge users? Is it a real business? And yeah. So going back to the cowboy. First of all, it looks like you're right,

but some do every aspect that this is pretty incredible. I'm also just looking at the interface, it's really well done. So this is all just jQuery and yeah, this is really well done. So like, take me through the journey of photo AI, like you don't know what most of the world doesn't know much about stable diffusion or any of this, any of the generator of AI stuff. And so you're thinking, okay, how can I build cool stuff with this? Yeah. What was the origin story of photo AI?

I think it started because stable diffusion came out. So stable fusion is like the first like generative image model, AI model. And I started playing with like you could install it on your Mac like somebody forked it and made it work for Macbooks. So I downloaded it and cloned the repo and started using it to generate images. And it was like amazing. Like it would I found it on Twitter because you see things happen on Twitter and I would post what I was making on Twitter as well.

And you could make any image, you could write a prompt. So it's actually 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 pic also kind of style and stuff. And I was trying to see like what is a good at? It's a good at people notes really bad at people, but it was good at houses. So architecture, for example, I would generate like architecture houses. So I made a website called this house does not

exist.work. And it generated like they called like house porn and that one. Like house porn is like a subreddit. So and this was stable 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 good. Things look much better. Um, it's really, really well done. Wow. And those are generous like a

description. And you can up vote. Is it nice? Upvote it. Yeah. Man, there's so much to talk to you about like the choices here. It's really well. This is very scrappy. In the bottom there's like a racking of the most upvoted houses. So these are the top photos. And if you go to all time, you see quite beautiful ones. Yeah. So this one is my favorite. The number one is like kind of like a houses. Not more popular. It was really popular for like a while. But then people got so bored of

it. I think because I was getting bored of it too. Like just continuous house porn. Like everything starts looking the same. But then I thought was really good at interior. So I pivoted to interior AI.com where I tried to like upload first-genered interior designs. And then I tried to do like it was a new technology called image to image where you can input an image like a photo and it would kind of modify the thing. So you see it looks almost the same as photo as the

same code essentially. Um, nice. So I would upload a photo of my interior where I lived and I would ask like changes into like a, I know like maximalist design, you know. And it worked. And it worked really well. So I was like, okay, this is a startup because obviously interior design. AI, and nobody is doing the jet. So I launched this and it was successful and made like in a week, made 10K, 20K a month. And now it still makes like 40K, 50K a month. And it's been like two years. So then I

was like, how can I improve this interior design? I need to start learning fine tuning. Fine tuning is where you have existing AI model. And you find you on the specific goal you wanted to do. So I would find really beautiful interior design, make a gallery and train a new model that was very good interior design. And it worked. And I used it as well. And then for fun, I uploaded photos of myself. And here's what happened. And to train myself like and this would never work. Obviously.

And it worked. And actually, it started understanding me as a concept. So my face worked and you could do like different styles like me as a, like very cheesy medieval warrior, all this stuff. So it was like, this is another startup. So now I did avatar AI dot me. I couldn't get the dot com. And this was this was yeah, avatar. I got me well, now it's forwards to photo because I pivoted. Got it. But this was more like cheesy thing. So this is very interesting because this went so viral.

It made like I think like 150K in a week or something. So most of my ever made. And then and then big. This is very interesting. The big VC companies like Lensa, which are much better at iOS and stuff than me. I didn't have iOS app. They quickly built iOS app that does the same in their fun 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.

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. No, I was a little bit like sad because all my products would work out. And I never had like real fierce competition. And now I have like fierce competition from like a very skilled high talent like iOS developer studio or something that and they already had an app. They had an app store for like I think retouching your face or something. So they were very smart.

They add these avatars to their feature. They had the users to do push notifications to everybody. We have these avatars. Yeah. Man, they made great. I think they made they made so much money. And I think they did a really great job. And I also made a lot of money with it. But that was I I quickly realized it wasn't my thing because it was so cheesy. It was like kitsch. You know, it's kind of like 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 because this is going to be a hype. It's going to be and it was a hype. These avatars. It's like let's do real photography. Like how can you make people look really photorealistic and that was difficult. And that's why it's off those words because they were all like in a cheesy, you know, Picasso style and art is easy because you interpret the all the problems that AI has with your face are like artistic, you know, if you call it Picasso.

But if you make a real photo, all the problems with your face like it just you look wrong, you know. So I started making photo AI, which was like a pivot of it where it was like a photo studio where you could take photos without actually needing a photographer needing a studio. You don't just you know, you just type it. And I've been working on it for like the last year. Yeah, it's really incredible. That journey is really incredible. Let's go to the beginning of

photo AI though because I remember seeing a lot of really really hilarious photos. I think you were using yourself as a case study, right? Yeah. Yeah. So what is a tweet here sold $100,000 in AI-generated avatars. And it's a lot like it's a lot for anybody. It's a lot for me. Like I can 10k a day on this, you know. That's amazing. That's amazing. And then the nested tweet like the launched tweets. And then before that is like the me hacking on it. Oh I see.

So that okay. So October 26, 2022. Yeah. I trained in a model on my face. 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 make sure. And people would say I'd look like a hammerhead shark. It was like the top comment. So then I realized my eyes are far apart. Yeah, the internet helps you. Yeah, I've realized who you are. How you look, you know.

Boy, do I love the first trip? Well, what is this wait? It's a water from the waterfall. But the waterfall is in the back, you know. So what's going on? So this is how much of this is real? It's all AI. It's all AI. Yeah. That's pretty good though for the early days. Exactly. So, but this was a hit or miss. So you had to do love curation because 99% of it was really bad. So these are the photos uploaded. How many photos did you use? Only these. I will try more up to date picks

later. These are the these are the only photos you uploaded. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Okay. So like you were learning all this super quickly. What the what what is something like interesting details you're remember from that time for like what you have to figure out to make it work. And for people just listening, he uploaded just just a handful of photos that don't really have a good capture of the face. And he's able to get craft. It's like a crop by the layout, but they're they're square

photos. So they're 512 by 512. Because that's the only fusion. But nevertheless, not great capture the face. Yeah. Like it's not it's not like a collection of several hundred photos that are like exactly like I would imagine that too when I started I was like, oh, this must be like some treescan technology, right? Yeah. So I think the cool thing with it, it trains the concept of you. So

it's literally like learning just like any AI model learns it learns how you look. So I did this and then I was getting so I was getting DMs like telegram messages like how can I do the same thing? I want these photos. My girlfriend wants these photos. So I was like, okay, this is obviously a business. But I didn't have time to code it. Make a whole like app about it. So I made a HTML page where it's a domain name. And this was not even it was a striped payment link, which means you have

a legit link to striped to pay, but there's no code in the back. So all you know is you have customers that paid money. Then I add like some a type form link. So type form is a side where you can create like your own input form like Google forms. So they would get an email with a link to the type form or actually just a link after the checkout. And they could upload their photos. So enter the email, upload the photos and then and I launched it. And I was like here first

sale this October 2022. And I think within like the first 24 hours was like I'm not sure it was like a thousand customers or something. But the problem was I didn't have code to automate this. So I had to do manually. So the first few hundred I just literally took their photos, trained them, and then I would generate the photos with the problems and had this text follow the problems and I would do every manually. And this quickly became way too much. So but that's another constraint.

Like I was forced to code something up that would do that. And that was essentially making it into a real website. So first was the type form and they uploaded it through the type form and image. And then you were like that image downloaded. Did you write a script to export? No, it's download images myself. It's a zip file. It's literally. And you unzipped it. Yeah, unzipped one. But yes. And then I'm because you know do things don't skill.

Paul Graham says right. So and then I would train it and then with email them the photos. I feel for my personal email. So use your use your avatar. And they liked it. They were like wow, it's amazing. You emailed them with your personal email. I didn't have email address on this domain. And this was like a hundred people. Yeah. And then you know who signed up. Like a man I cannot say but really famous people like really really like billionaires famous

tech billionaires did it. And I was like wow, this is crazy. And I sent I was like so scared to mess them. So I said thanks so much for using my sites. You know, he's like amazing app, great work. So it's like this is different than normal reaction. You know, it's Bill Gates, isn't it? Can I say anything? Just like shirtless picture. GDPR, you know, like privacy.

Right. You're being regulation. But I was very I was like wow. And but this shows like so you make something and then if it takes off very fast, you're like it's validated. You know, you're like here's something that people really want. But then also I thought this is hype. This is going to die down very fast. And I did because it's too cheesy. But you have to automate the whole thing. How do you automate it? So like what's the AI component?

Like how hard was that to figure out? Okay. So that's actually in many ways the easiest thing because there is all these platforms already back then. There was platforms for fine tune still diffusion. Like now I use replicates back then I use different platforms. Which was funny because that platform when this thing took off I would tweet because I tweet always like how much money these websites make. And then so did the you called vendor right? The the platform that did the

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

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

you please create like it's called dream booth. This fine tuning of yourself. Can you add this to your site? Because I need this because I'm being price-guards. And he said no because it takes too long to run. It takes half an hour to run and we don't have the GPUs for it. I said please please please. And then after a week this said we're doing it where launching this. And then this

company became it was like not very famous company. It became very famous with this stuff because suddenly everybody was like oh we can build similar apps like AlphaTor apps and everybody started bailing AlphaTor apps and everybody started using replicates for it. And I was from these early DMs with like the CEO like Ben Furish very nice guy. And he was like they never price gosh me they never treat me bad they always be very nice. It's a very cool company. So you can run any ML model

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

Nice. And you're like growing with them essentially. They grew because of you because it's like a big use case. Yeah like the website even looks weird now. It started as like a machine learning platform. That was like I didn't even understand what it did. It was just too too ML you know like you would understand because you're in the ML world. I wouldn't understand. Now it's new but friendly. Yeah exactly. And I didn't know how it worked. And but I knew that they could probably do this. And

they did it they built the models and now I use them for everything. And we trained like I think now like 36,000 models 36,000 people ready. But is there some tricks to fine tuning to like the collection of photos that are provided like how do you like yes, it's so many hacks. The hacks it's like honored hacks to make it work. What what's what is your secret? Well, not the secrets but the more like insights maybe about the human face and the human body like what kind of stuff get

messed up a lot. I think people, man, it's like people don't know how they look. So yeah, they generate photos themselves and then they say, ah, it doesn't look like me. Yeah. But 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 this morphia of yourself that you have known. Yeah, that's hilarious. I mean, I've got to want to least pleasant activities in my existence is having to listen to my voice and

look at my face. So I get to like really really have to sort of come into terms with the reality of how I look and how I saw everybody and but people don't often don't really. You have a distorted view perspective. I know that like I would if I would make a selfie how I think I look that that's nice. Other people think that's not nice. But then they make a photo of me. I'm like this super ugly. But then they're like, no, that's how you look and you look nice. You know, so how other people see

you is nice. So you need to ask other people to choose your photos. Yeah, yeah. You shouldn't choose them yourself because you don't know how you look. Yeah, you don't know what makes you interesting. What makes you attractive and a lot of us, this is dark aspect of psychology. We focus on some small flaws. Yeah. This is why I hate plastic surgery. For example, people try to remove the flaws when the flaws are the thing that makes you interesting and attractive.

I learned from the hammerhead shark eyes. This stuff about you that looks ugly to you and it's probably that was makes you original makes you nice and people like it about you. Yeah. And it's not like, oh my God. And people notice it. People notice your hammerhead eyes, you know, but it's like, that's me. That's my face. So I love myself and that's confidence and confidence attractive. Yes. Confidence is attractive. But yes, understanding what makes you beautiful.

It's the breaking of symmetry makes you beautiful. It's the breaking of the the average face makes you beautiful. All that. Yeah. And obviously different from men and women and different ages. All this kind of stuff. But underneath it all, the personality, all of that when the face comes alive. That also is the thing that makes you beautiful. But anyway, you have to figure all that out with the eye. Yeah. One thing that worked was like people would upload full body photos of

themselves. So I would crop the face, right? Because then in the model, new bed, we're training mostly the face here. But then I started losing resemblance of the body because some people are skinny, some are muscular, whatever. So you want to have that too. So now I mix full body photos in the training with face photos, face crops. And it's all automatic. And I know that other people they use again, AI models to detect 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 the gold. Do you have any guidelines for people of like how to get good data, how to give good data to find you know, like the photos should be diverse. So for example, if I only upload photos with a brown shirt or green shirts, the

multiple thing that I'm training the green shirts. So the things that are the same every photo are the concepts that are trained. What you want is to your face to be the concept of strength. And everything else to be diverse like different. So diverse lighting as well. Yeah, outside inside. But there's no like this is the problem. There's no like manual for it is and nobody knew we were all just especially two years ago. We're all hacking trying to test anything

anything you can think of. And it's frustrating. It's one of the most frustrating and also fun and challenging things to do because with AI because it's a black box and like Carpati I think says this like we didn't really know how this thing works. But it does something but nobody really knows why right. Like we cannot look into the model of an LLM like what is actually in there we just know

it's like a 3D matrix of numbers right. So it's very frustrating because some things you you there 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, improvements. 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 outside and the the actual like consumer facing product side to figuring out how you get it to generate anything 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. And they're very vain. Like me you know like I want to look good

in your podcast for example. Yeah for sure. And then one of the things I actually would love to like rigorously use photo AI because for the thumbnails I take portraits of people. I didn't I don't know shit about photography. I basically used your approach for photography. I like Google how do you take photographs? Yeah camera lighting. And also it's tough because maybe you could speak to this also but like with photography. No offense to any they're true artists, great photographers.

But like people like take themselves way too seriously. Think you need a whole lot of equipment. You definitely don't want one light. You need like five lights. And you have to have like the lenses and I talked to a guy an expert of shaping the sound in a room. Okay. And because I was thinking I'm gonna do a podcast studio whatever I should probably like treat the sound 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 you know what I don't need experts in my life. I think you're smart of house. I think you go I said thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Great to be smart. I just I just felt like there is you know focus on whatever the problems are. Use your own judgment. Use your own instincts.

Don't listen to other people and only consult other people when there's a specific problem. And you consult them not to offload the problem onto them but to gain wisdom from their perspective. Even if their perspective is ultimately one you don't agree with you're gonna gain wisdom from that. And just I ultimately come up with like a PHP solution. PHP and J query solution. So the PHP studio I got a little suitcase. I use like just the basic sort of consumer type of

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

matters. Yeah. And I think this is very common they call gear acquisition syndrome like gas like people in any industry do this. They just buy all the stuff. There was a meme recently like what's the name for the guy that buys all the stuff before he even started doing the hobby. Right. I'm marketing you know marketing does that to people they want to buy this stuff. Yeah. But like man you can make a you can make a Hollywood movie on an iPhone you know if the content is good

enough it's it would probably be original because you would be using an iPhone for it you know. So that said I so the reason I brought that up with photography. There is wisdom from people and one of the one of the things I realized you probably also realized this but how much power light has to convey emotion. You just take one light and move it around. You're sitting in the dark and just move it around your face. The different positions are having a second light potentially.

You can play with how a person feels just from a generic face. It's interesting. Like you can make people attractive. You can make them ugly. You can make them scary. You can make them lonely. All of this. So you kind of start to realize this and I would definitely love AI help in creating great portraits of people. Guest photos. Yeah. Guest photos for example. It's a small use case but for me that's uh I suppose it's an important use case because like

I want people to look good but I also want to capture who they are. Maybe my conception of who they are what makes them beautiful. What makes their appearance powerful in some ways. Sometimes it's the eyes. Oftentimes it's the eyes but there are certain features of the face can sometimes be really powerful and I can't it's also kind of awkward for me to take photographs. So I'm not collecting enough photographs for myself to do it with just those photographs. If I can

load that off onto AI and then start to play with like lighting. You should do it. You should probably do it yourself. You can use photo yeah but it's even more fun if you do it yourself. So you train the models. You can learn about like control nets. Control nets is where for example your photos 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 nets

pose for example. I think it will be very fun for you to try out that something. Do you play with lighting at all? Do you play with lighting with pose with the man actually this like this week or recently there's a new model came out that can adjust the light of any photo but also AI image with stable diffusion. I think it's called relight and it's amazing like you can 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 you input. It's amazing. So this for sure a lot of stuff you can do. What's your advice for people in general on how to learn all the state of the art AI tools available like you mentioned new models coming out all the time. Yeah like what the how do you pay attention how do you stay on top of everything. I think you need to join Twitter X you know X is amazing now

and the whole AI industry is on X and they're all like anime avatars. So it's funny because my friends asked me this like what who should I follow to stay up to date and I say go to X and follow all the AI anime models that this person is following or follows and I sent them something you know and they all start laughing like what is this but they're real like people hacking around the AI they get hired by big companies and they're on X and most of them are anonymous. This

is very funny they use anime avatars. I don't but those people hack around and they publish what they're discovering they took out papers for example. So yeah definitely X is great. I almost exclusively all the people I follow are AI people. Yeah it's a good time now. Well but also just brings happiness to my to my soul because they there's so much turmoil on Twitter. Yeah like politics and stuff. There's battles going on. It's like a war zone and it's nice to just go into

this happy place to where people are building stuff. Yeah now I like Twitter that for that most like building stuff like yeah seeing other because it inspires you to build and it's it's just fun to see other people share what they're discovering and then you're like okay I'm gonna make something to it's just super fun and so if you want to start going X and then I would go to replicate and start trying to play with models and when you have something that kind of you manual enter stuff

you set the parameters. Something that works you can you can make a app out of it or website. Can you speak a little bit more to the process of becoming better and better and better photo. Yeah so I had this photo guy and a lot of people using it there was like a million or more photos a month being generated and I discovered I was testing parameters like increased the step count of

generating photo or changing the sampler like a scheduler like you have dpm 2 caras all these things I don't know anything about but I know you can choose them in your generate image and they have different resulting images but I didn't know which one was were better so I would do it myself

tested but then I was like why don't I test on these users because I have a million photos generate anyway so unlike 10% of users I would randomly test parameters 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 it would a b test and you test for significance and stuff which parameters were better and which were worse so you started to figure out which which models are actually working exactly and then if it's significant of 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 with themselves and I tell them when they sign up we do sampling we do testing on your photos with random parameters and that worked really well I don't do a lot of testing anymore because it's like

I kind of reached like a diminishing point where it's like it's kind of good but that's there was a breakthrough yeah so it's really about the parameters and models that choose and letting the users help do the search in the space of models and parameters for you yeah but actually so like

stable diffusion I use 1.5 2 2.0 came out as stable diffusion excel came out all these new versions and they're all worse and so the core scene of people are still using 1.5 because it's like it's also not like what you call newturt like they neutered like to make it super like with safety

features and stuff so most of the people are still on stable diffusion 1.5 and meanwhile stable diffusion the company went like the CEO left a lot of drama happens because they couldn't make money and yeah so they gave it it's very interesting where they gave us this open source model that

everybody uses they raised like hundreds of millions of dollars it all they didn't make any money with 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 you're not even using the latest one you're

saying no and the strange thing is that this comedy raised hundreds of millions but the people that are benefiting from it are really small like people like me who make these small apps that are using the model and now that it's turned to charge money for the new models but the new models are not

so good for people they're not so open source right yeah it's interesting because open source is so impactful in the AI space but you wonder like what is the business model behind that but it's enabling this whole ecosystem of companies that yeah they're using the open source model it's kind

like this frameworks but then they didn't you know bribe enough implements to use it and they didn't charge money for the platform you know okay so back to your book and the ideas when you get to the first step generating ideas so you got no book and you filling it up how do you know when ideas a

good one like what yeah you have this just flood of ideas how do you pick the one 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

actually right 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 you need just like the

robot that goes to the asteroid you know and the robotics interesting like I want to also learn robotics so maybe that could be I think both the asteroid mining and the robotics yeah together you're like no exactly this is this is we do this not because it's easy but because we thought it

would be easy exactly this me with this me with asteroid mining exactly that's why I should do this it's not nomadlist calm it's not it's not a certain finding you have to like build stuff you have to gravity is really hard to overcome yeah but it seems man I sound like it is probably not but

it sounds quite approachable like relatively approachable you don't have to build the rockets you oh you use something like space space space to send your your you know this dog robot or whatever so is there actually exists a notebook where you wrote down asteroid mine no I used back then you

used trello trello yeah but now I don't really I used telegram I rather than like save messages and I have like idea I read down to yourself until 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 use

like a note that does not forget stuff and then I pin it you know I love hope like you're not using super complicated systems or whatever you know people use up singing now there's a lot of these yeah a notion if we have systems for note taking you're not your notepad your notepad.dex

you guys yeah man I saw some youtubers doing this like there's a lot of these productivity gurus also and they do this whole like iPad with a pencil and then I also had an iPad and I also got the pencil and I got this app where you can like draw on paper like draw like a calendar you know

like 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 share the tweet explaining why the first idea

sometimes might be a brilliant idea the reason for this you think is the first idea submerges from your subconscious and was actually boiling your brain for weeks most sometimes years in the background they eight hours of thinking can never compete with the perpetual subconscious background

job so this is the idea that if you think about an idea for eight hours versus like the first idea that pops into your mind yeah and sometimes there is subconscious like stuff that you've been thinking about for many years that's really interesting it emerges I wrote it wrong because I don't

I'm not native English but it emerges from your subconscious right comes from the like a water is your subconscious in here is boiling and then when it's ready it's like thing second microwave comes out and there you have your idea you think you have ideas like that yeah all the time

harpsons it's just stuff that's been like there yes yeah and I also it comes up and I bring it I send it back you know like send it back to the kitchen I read it boil more yeah it's like a soup that of ideas that's cooking it's a hundred percent this is how my brain works and I think most people

but it's also about the the timing sometimes you have to send it back not just because you're not ready but the world is not ready yes so many times like startups are too early with their idea yeah 100% robotics is an interesting one for that because like there's been a lot of robotics companies

that failed yeah because it's been very difficult to build a robotics company make money because there's the manufacturing like the cost of everything the intelligence of the robot is enough is not sufficient to create a compelling enough product from which to make money so all

so if there's this long line of robotics companies that've tried that big dreams and they failed yeah like Boston Dynamics I still know what they're doing but they always upload YouTube videos and it's amazing but I feel like a lot of these companies don't have a it's like a solution look

for a problem for now you know military obviously is uses but like and do I do I need like a robotic dog now for my house I don't know like it's fun but it doesn't really solve anything yet I feel the same kind of if we are like it's really cool like Appalachian Pro is very cool

doesn't really solve something for me yet and that's kind of the tech looking for a solution right but one day will when the personal computer when the Mac came along there's a big switch that happened it somehow captivated everybody's imagination you could like the application

the killer apps became apparent you can type on a computer but did they became apparent like immediately back then they also have like this thing we're like we don't need these computers uh they're like a hype and um and it also went like in kind of like you know yes yeah but the hype

is the thing that a lot of the thing to proliferates efficiently to where people's minds would start opening up to it a little bit the possibility of it right now for example with the robotics there's very few robots in the homes of people exactly yeah the the robots that are

there are rumbo sort of vacuum cleaners or their amazon Alexa yeah where dishwasher I mean essentially a robot yes but the the intelligence is very limited yeah I guess is one way we can summarize all of them except Alexa which is pretty intelligent but uh is is limited with the kind of ways

and interacts with you it's you know that that's just one example yeah I sometimes think about that is like if some people in this world were kind of born in the whole existence is like they were meant to build the thing yeah you know I think I sometimes wonder like what might what

I was meant to do do you have these plans for your life here these dreams I think I meant to build robots yeah me first maybe maybe um that that's the sense of a of a hybrid could be other things like the hilarious thing not be the thing I was meant to be is to talk to people yeah which is

weird because I always was anxious about talking to people it's like a really yeah I'm scared of this I was scared yeah exactly I was scared of you it's just anxiety throughout social interaction general I'm an introvert the heights from the world so yeah it's really strange yeah but that's

that's also kind of life like life brings you to it's very hard to super intently kind of choose what you're gonna do with your life it's more like surfing you're surfing the waves you go in the ocean you see where you end up you know yeah yeah and there's universe has a kind of sense of humor yeah

I guess you have to just yeah allow yourself to be carried away by the waves yeah exactly have you felt that way in your life yeah all the time like yeah that's like I think that's the best way to live your life so a lot whatever to happen like do you know what you're doing the next

few years is it possible they'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 the stuff but you should I think you should stay open to where like for example where you want to live

like I don't know we don't know where we want to live for example that's something that will figure itself out it will crystallize where you know you will get you will get sent by the waves to somewhere where you want to live for example what you're gonna do I think that's a really good way to live your life it's I think most stress comes from trying to control like hold things like um it's kind of Buddhist you know you need to like lose control that it lose and I think

what 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 controlled freak actually and um when I did mushrooms when I was 17 I I was very good and at the end

it wasn't so good because I tried to control it was like ah now it's going too much you know now I need to let's stop bro you can't stop you need to go true with it you know and I think it's a good metaphor for life I think that's you know very tranquil way to lead your life yeah actually when

when I took I waska that lesson is deeply within me already they 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 there's like literally no negative aspect of my i waska experience

or any psychedelic I've ever had some of that could be with my biology my genetics whatever but some of it was just not trying to control yeah just surf the way for sure I think most stress in life comes from trying to control so once you have the idea yeah step two build how do

you think about building the thing once you have the idea I think you should build with the technology that you know so for example nomad list which is like this website I made to figure out the best cities to live and work as dejonomat it wasn't a website it launched as a google

spreadsheet so it was a public google spreadsheet anybody could edit and I was like I'm collecting like cities where we were can live as these nomads with the internet speeds the cost of living you know other stuff and I would I tweeted it and I would and I'd back then I didn't have a lot of followers I'd like a few thousand followers or something and it went like viral for my skill viral back then you know which was like five retweets and and a lot of people started editing it and there

was like hundreds of cities in this list like from all of the world with all the data was very crowdsourced and then I made that into a website so figuring out like what technology can use that you already know so if you cannot code you can use a spreadsheet if you cannot use a spreadsheet like whatever you can always use a for example a website generated like weeks or something with Squarespace right like you don't need to code to build a startup all you need is an idea for a product

build something like a landing page or something put a striped button on there and then make it and if you can't code use the language that you're already you know and start coding with that and see how far you can get you can always rewrite the code later like the tech stack it's not

actually it's not the most important of a business when you're starting out a business the important thing is that you validate that there's a market that does a product that people want to pay for so use whatever you can use and if you cannot code use you know spreadsheets landing page

generators whatever yeah and the crowdsourcing elements fascinating it's cool it's cool when a lot of people start using it you get to learn so fast yeah like I've actually did the spreadsheet thing you share a spreadsheet publicly and I made it editable

yeah it's so cool things things start happening yeah I did it for like a workout thing because I was doing a large amount of push-ups and pull-ups and I remember this man yeah and like and and and while I said Google Sheets is pretty limited in that everything's allowed so people could just

write anything in any cell and they can create new sheets new tabs and it just exploded and one of the things that I really enjoyed is there's very few trolls um because actually other people would delete the trolls there would be like this weird war

of like they want like to protect the thing it's an immune system that's inherent to the thing it comes to society you know and it's spreadsheets and then there's the out outcasts who go to the bottom of the spreadsheet and they would try to hide messages and they like I don't want to

be with the cool kids up at the top of the spreadsheet so no at the bottom I mean but that kind of crowdsourcing element is really powerful and if you can create a product that use that as a 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 no mad list is great I would I would love for you to talk about that but one sort of way to talk about it is uh through 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 so people should definitely check out the video in the in the blog post um can you explain what hood maps is and what this whole like this was so I was traveling and I was still trying

to find like problems right and I would go I would I would discover that like everybody's experience of a city is different because they say in different areas yeah so I'm from Amsterdam and when I grew up uh in Amsterdam or didn't grew up I lived there university I knew that center is like

Europe the centers are always tourist areas so they're super busy they're not very authentic the cult they're not really Dutch culture it's Amsterdam tourist culture you know so when people would travel to Amsterdam and say don't go to the center go to you know southeast um of the center

the Jordan or the pipe or something more hipster areas like a little more authentic culture ramps to them that's where I would live you know and where I would go um and I thought this could be like a app where you can have like a google maps and you put colors over it you have like areas

that are like color code like red as tourists green is rich you know green money yellow is hipster you can figure out where you need to go in a city when you travel because I was traveling not I wanted to go through cool spots so just use the color color yeah yeah and I would use a canvas so I

thought like 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 something you this is a cool this is a cool thing be was you'd really check it out because it's how it started because like you're honestly captured so

beautifully the the humbling aspects of the embarrassing aspects of like not knowing what to do so how do I how do I do this and you like document yourself yeah you're right dude I feel embarrassed about myself it's called being alive nice um so you're like you don't know anything about so canvas is a way yes HTML 5 thing that allows you to draw shit draw images just draw pixels essentially so yeah and that's there was special back then because before you could only have like elements

right so you want to draw pixel use a canvas 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 i frame and bats and I'll put a div on top of it with the colors and I'll do like opacity 50 you know so it kind of shows

um so I did that with canvas and then I started drawing um and then I thought like obviously other people need to edit this because I cannot draw all these things myself so I crowdsource it again and I you would draw on the map and then it would send the pixel data to the server put it in the database and then I would have a robot running like a cron job which every week would calculate or every day would calculate like okay so amps and center there's like six people say it's tourists

this part of the center but two people say it's like hipster okay so the tourist part wins right it's not array so find the most common value in a little pixel area on a map so so that so most people say

it's tourists is tourists and it comes red and I would do that for you know older GPS corners in the world can you just clarify do you have to be as a human that's contributing to this you have to be in that location to make the label or no people just type in cities and go like go berserk and start

drawing everywhere would they draw shapes would they draw pics man it drew like crazy stuff like offensive symbols I kind of mentioned they would draw penises I mean that's that's obviously a guy would do the same thing drop penises that's the first thing when I show up to Mars and there's no

cameras I'm drawing 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 crowds for data so you have all these

pixels on top of it it's like a layer of pixels yeah and you choose the most common pixels so yeah it's just like a pole but in visual format and it works and we didn't week out enough data and and there was like cities that did really well like Los Angeles a lot of people started using it

like most data's in Los Angeles because Los Angeles has defined neighborhoods yeah and not just in terms of the the official labels but like what they're known for yeah what are the dupe did you provide the categories that they were allowed to use as labels the colors yeah as colors so it

used like I think you can see there's like hipster tourists rich business there's always a business area right and then there's a residential here as this was gray so I thought those were the most common things in the city kind of and a little bit Mimi like it's almost fun to label it as yeah

I mean obviously it's simplified and but you need to simplify this stuff you know you don't want to have too many categories and it's essentially like like using a you know paintbrush where you select the color in the bottom you select the category and you start drawing there's no instruction

it's no manual and then I also add a tagging so people could like write something on a specific location so don't go here or like here's like a nice cafe and stuff and man the memes that came from that and I also added up voting so that the tags could be upvoted so the memes that came from

that is like amazing like people in Los Angeles with rights crazy stuff it would go viral in all these cities you can allow allow your location and it will probably send you to Austin okay so we're looking oh boy drunk hipsters airbro and bros airbro and bros hipster girls who do cocaine

I saw a guy in the fish costume get beaten up here yep that seems also at your price and on theirwhelming let me see let me make sure this is accurate let's see 36th for people who know Austin know that that's important to label six treat as famous in Austin 36 drunk fat boys accurate

drunk fat bros continued on six very well with six drunk douche bros for threat to douche douche I mean it's very accurate so far they only let hot people live here that's I think that might be accurate it's like the district

exercise freaks on the river yeah that's true dog runners accurate saw a guy in the fish costume get beat up here I want to know the story like so that's that's all user contributed yeah and this like stuff I couldn't come up with because I don't know Austin I don't know the memes you're

self-cultures and then me as a user can upload or download this so this is completely common source because I read it you know up for a download to get from there and that's really really really powerful single people dog accurate at which point did it go from colors to the

actually show in the text I figured out of the text like a week a week after and uh so here's like the pixels so that's really cool the pixels how do you go from there that's a huge amount of data so there's yeah uh we'll now look at an image where it's just a sea of pixels that call

a different colors in a city so how do you combine that to be a thing that actually makes it some sense I think here the problem was that you have this data but it's like it's not locked to one location yeah so I have to normalize it so when you click when you draw on the map

it will show you the specific pixel location and you can convert the pixel location to a GPS coordinate right like a ladder is longitude but the number will have a lot of commas or a lot of decimals right because it's very specific like it's like this specific part of the table so what you

want to do is you want to take that pixel and you want to normalize it by removing like decimals which I discovered so that you you're talking about this neighborhood this or this street right so that's what I did I just took the decimals off and then I saved it like this and then it starts

going to like a grid and then you have like a grid of data you get like a pixel map kind of and you said it looks kind of ugly so then you smooth it yeah I started adding blurring and stuff I think now it's it's not smooth again because I like 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 like map box I had to stop using first use google maps it went viral and google maps it was out of credits so I and I had to so funny during when I launched it went viral

um google maps the map didn't load anymore it says over the limit you need to contact enterprise sales and I'm like I but I need now like a map so and I don't want to contact enterprise sales I don't want to go and call schedule with some counter so I switched the map box and then I had

map box for years and then it went viral and I had a bill of twenty thousand dollars was like last year 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 a map platform so it's very expensive products and never made any

dollar money but it's very fun but it's very expensive would you learn from that so like from that experience because when you leverage somebody else's through the API yeah I mean I don't think a map hosting service should cause this much you know but I could host it myself

but that would be I don't know how to do that you know but I could do that yeah it's super complicated I think the thing is more about like you can't make money with this product it's I tried to do many things to make money with it and it's it's it hasn't worked you talked about

like possibly doing advertisements on it or some yeah but or people sponsoring yeah yeah it's really surprising to me that people don't want to advertise on it I think map apps are very hard to like monetize like Google Maps also doesn't really make money like sometimes you see these ads

but I don't think there's a lot of money there um you could put like a banner ad but it's kind of ugly and the price is kind of like it's kind of cool so it's it's kind of fun to like subsidize it it's kind of a little bit part of no matter this like I put it on no matter this in the cities as well

but I also realized like you don't need to monitor everything like some products are just cool and you know it's like it's cool to have hoodmaps exist I want this to exist right yeah there's a bunch of stuff you've created that I'm just glad exists in this world this true and so

whole another puzzle and I'm surprised to figure out how to make money out for it I'm surprised maps don't make money but you're right it's hard it's hard to make money because there's a lot of compute required to actually bring it to life you know so where do you put the ads 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% of 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 now exactly because if you make people pay for it you lose 99% of the user base and you lose the crowdsource data so it's not fun anymore it stops being accurate right so you kind of they pay for it by crowdsourcing the data but then yeah it's fine you know it doesn't

make money but it's it's cool but that said no mad list makes money yeah so what was the story behind no mad list so no mad list started because I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand which is now like the second city here and I was you know working on my laptop I met like other moments there and

I was like okay this seems like a cool thing to do like working in a laptop in a different country kind of travel around but back then the internet everywhere was very slow so the internet was fast in for example Holland or United States but in a lot of parts in in you know South America or Asia

was very slow like 0.5 megabits so you couldn't watch a YouTube video Thailand weirdly had like quite fast internet but I wanted to find like other cities where I could go to like work on my laptop whatever in travel and but we needed like fast intense so I was like let's you know crowdsource

this information with a spreadsheet and I also needed to know the cost of living because I didn't have a lot of money I had $500 a month so I had to find a place where like the rent was like you know $200 from offers and we're at you know some money that I could actually rent something and

and there was no list and it still runs I think it's now almost 10 years so it's just a describe how it works like yeah I'm looking at trying my here there's a total score strength number two yeah it's like I know my score 4.82 like by members but it's looking at the

internet in this case it's fast yeah fun temperature humidity air quality safety food safety uh crime racism or lack of crime lack of racism educational level power grid vulnerability to climate change income level it's a little much you know English speed it's awesome it's awesome

walkability keep things stuff because for certain groups of people certain things really matter and this is really cool yeah happiness that love to ask about that that life free Wi-Fi AC uh female friendly freedom of speech and not so good in fact you know values derived from

nationals at this is why I like how bad one I need to do it because the the data sets are usually national they're not on city level right so I don't know about the freedom of speech between bank or church and why I know Dylan Thailand I mean this is really fascinating so this is for

city yeah it's basically rating all the different things that matter to the internet and this is all cross-sourced well so started cross-sourced but then um 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 you know freely use like I started getting problems across with data where for example people from India they really love India and they would submit the best scores for everything in India and not just like one

person but like a lot of people they would love to pump India and I'm like I love India too you know but uh that's not valid data so you started getting discrepancies in the data between people where people wear from and stuff so I started speaking to data sets and um and now it's mostly data sets

but one thing that still crowdsource is so people add where they are they add their travels to their profile and I use that data to see which place are upcoming and which places are popular now so about half the ranking you see here is based on actual digital numbers who are there you can click

on a city you can click on people you can see the people the users that are actually there and it's like 30,000 or 40,000 members so these people are in Austin now and 1800 remote workers in Austin now which eight plus members checked in um 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 Firdie Firdie per month so it's like one meetup a day and I don't do anything they organize themselves so I just it's the whole black box it just runs and I don't do a lot on it it pulls data from everywhere and

it just works uh cons of Austin is too expensive very sweating human knowledge difficult to make for you have to make friends interesting right I didn't know that difficult to make friends with the salt crowds but mostly it's pros yeah awesome very fast internet I don't understand why

it says not safe for women to check the data set it's still safe the problem with a lot of place like United States is that it depends per area right so if you get like city level data or nation level data it's like Brazil is the worst because the the range in like safe and wealthy and

not safe is like huge so you can't say many things about Brazil so once I actually show up to say how do you figure out what uh what area like where to get fast internet for example like for me is oh it's consistently a struggle to figure out my school hotels with fast wifi for example like

up please okay okay I show up to a city there's a lot of fascinating puzzles and I haven't figured out a way to actually solve this puzzle when I show up to a city figuring out where I can get fast internet connection and uh for podcasting purposes where I can find a place with a table

that's quiet right that's not easy all kinds of sounds you get to learn about all the sources of sounds in the world and also like the the quality of the room because the more uh the the emptier the room and like if it's just walls without any curtains or any of this kind of stuff

than there's or uh echoes in the room anyway but you you figure out that a lot of hotels don't have tables they don't have like normal this weird desk right yeah they have it's not a center table yep and if you want to get a nicer hotel whether it's more spacious and so on they usually have these

like boutique like fancy looking like modernist tables they don't design these to design they're not real tables what if you get a key by a key yeah before you arrive you order a key yeah like no misdue this they get desks I feel like you should be able to show up to a place and have

have the desk like it's not unless you stay there for a long time just the entire assembly or that Airbnb is so unreliable it's the the the the ranging quality that you get is is huge hotels have a lot of problems pros and cons like hotels have the problem that the pictures somehow never have

good representative pictures of what's actually going to be in the rooms and that's a problem like and you fake photos man if I could have the kind of data you have on nomad list for hotels yeah man I would and I feel like you can make a lot of money on that too yeah the booking fees affiliate right

I thought about this idea because we have the same problem like I go to hotels and there's a specific ones that are very good and I know now the chains and stuff and but even if you go some chains are very bad in a specific city and very good in other cities and each individual hotel

has a lot of kinds of rooms yeah like you some are more expensive some are cheaper and so on but you can get the details of what's in the room like what's the actual layout of the room what is the view of the room I feel like as a hotel you can win a lot so first you create a service that allows

you to have like high resolution data about a hotel then one hotel sign signs up for that I would 100% use that website to look for a hotel instead of the crappy alternatives that don't give any information and I feel like there'll be this pressure for all the hotels to join that's

like you can make a shit ton of money because hotels make a lot of money I think it's true but the problem is with these hotels like it's it's same with airline industry why does every airline website suck we try book a book of flights yeah it's like very strange like why doesn't have to

suck obviously just competition here why doesn't the best website win what's the explanation of that man I thought about this for years so I think it's like I have to book the flight anyway like I know there's a route that they take and I need like I need to buy book for example Qatar Airlines and I

and I need to get through this process so the the and with hotel similar you need a hotel anyway so do you have time to like figure out the best one not really you kind of just need to get the place booked and you know you need to get the flight and you'll go through the pain of this process and

that's why this process always sucks so much with hotels and airline websites and stuff because they don't have any incentive to improve it because generally only for like a super opera 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 a good interesting theory I think that must be a different theory my my theory would be that great engineers like great software engineers and not a lot to make changes yeah basically like there's some kind of bureaucracy there's way too many managers there's a lot of

bureaucracy and great engineers show up to try to work there and they they're not allowed to really make any contributions than they leave and so you have a lot of mediocre software engineers they're not really interested in improving any other thing and like literally they would like to improve

the stuff but the bureaucracy of the place plus all the bosses all the higher people are not technical people probably yeah they don't know much about what web dev they don't know much about programming so they just don't give any respect like yeah you have to give the freedom and the respect

to great engineers as they try to do great things that feels like an explanation like if you were a great programmer would you want to work at America Airlines or no no I'm torn on that because I I actually as somebody who lost program would love to work at America Airlines so I can make the

thing better yeah but for I would work that just to fix it for myself you know yeah for yourself and then you just know how much suffering you're alleviated yeah what a world's for society just all you imagine all the thousands maybe millions of people that go to that website and have to click

like a million times it often doesn't work it's clunky all that kind of stuff you you're making their life just so much better yeah but there there must be an explanation that's to do with managers and bureaucracies like I don't I think it's money do you know booking.com sure so it's a book

and it's the biggest book in the world it's Dutch actually and they have teams because my friend worked that they have teams for a specific part of the website like a 10 by 10 pixels area where they run tests on this so they run tests like and they're famous for this stuff like oh there's only one

room left right which is red letters like one room left book now you know and they got to find 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 they come to the office and they see okay this

perform better this website has become a monster but it's the most revenue generating hotel booking website in the world's number one so that shows that it's not about like user experience it's about like I don't know about making more money and you know not every company but you know if they're

optimizing it's a public comment if they're optimizing for money but you can optimize for money by disrupting like making a way better yeah but it's always start they start with disrupting like booking all started to start up 1997 and then they become like the old shit again like you know Uber

now starts to become like a taxi again right it was very good in the beginning now it's kind of like taxi's now in many places are better they're nicer than Uber's right so it's like the circle I think some of it is also just it's hard to have ultra competent engineers yeah like

strike seems like a trivial thing but it it's hard to pull off like why was it so hard for Amazon to have buy would one click I think it's a genius idea yeah make buying easier like make it as frictionless as possible just click about one thing you bought the thing yeah as

opposed to most of the web was a lot of clicking and it often doesn't work like with the airlines you remember the forums would delete you could like next submit and with four or four or something or your internet would go down yeah your modem yeah man and I would have an existential crisis like

the frustration would take over my whole body and I would just wanted to quit life for a brief moment there yeah I'm so happy to form stays in Google Chrome now when someone goes wrong but that's so Google somebody at Google improved society with that right yeah and one of the

challenges of Google is to have the freedom to do that they don't anymore there's a bunch of bureaucracy yeah so many brilliant brilliant people there but it just moves slowly yeah I wonder why that is I mean maybe that's the natural way of a company but you have people like Elon who

rolls in and just fires most most of the folks and always operate like push the company to operate as a startup even once already big yeah but I mean Apple does this like I started in business school Apple does competing product teams that operate as startups so it's three to five people they make

something they have multiple teams to make the same thing the best team wins so you need to I think you need to emulate like a free market inside a company to make it entrepreneurial you know yeah you need entrepreneurial mentality in a company to to come up with new ideas and do it better

one of the things you do really really well is learn and you think like you're trying to you have an idea you try to build it and then you learn everything you need to in order to build it you have your current skills but you need to learn just the minimal modest though so you're a good person to

ask like what how do you learn how do you learn quickly and effectively ingest the stuff you need you did just by way of example you did a 30 days learning session on 3d yeah where you documented yourself giving yourself only 30 days to learn everything you can about yeah and I tried to learn

virtual reality because I was like this was like same as AI it came up suddenly like 2016 to 2017 with I think HTC Vive this big VR glasses before Appalvation Pro and so I was like oh this is gonna be big so I need to learn this so I know I know nothing about 3d I installed like I think

unity and like blend their stuff and I started learning all this stuff because I thought this was like a new you know nascent technology that was gonna be big and if I had the skills for it I could use this to build stuff and so I think we're learning for me it's like I think learning is so

funny because people always ask me like how do I how do you learn to code like should I learn to code and I'm like I don't know like I'm every day I'm learning this is 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 to the you know what I'm a lot do you want to do it for your whole life

or so I think taking action is the best step to learn so making things like you know nothing just start making things okay so like how to make a website search how to make a website or now it is you ask chat GPT how to make a website where do I start it generates codes for you right copy the code

put it in a file save it open it in Google Chrome or whatever you have a website and then you start tweaking with it and you start okay how do I add a button how do I add AI features right like nowadays so it's like by taking action you can learn stuff much faster than reading books or

lecture more curious let me ask for complexity how do I make a website I'm just curious what it would say I hope it goes with like really basic vanilla solutions to find your website's purpose choose a domain name select the web hosting provider choose a website or builder or CMS website build a phone which tells like weeks or square spaces what I said yeah learning page what what do I how do I say if I want a programming it program it myself design your website create essential pages yeah even

tells you to launch it right like start launching what do I say cool why do you do that yeah but this is literate like it's this is if you want to make a one basic like Google analytics but you can't make no mad list with this way again with wicks like with ah no you can you can get pretty far I think you can get pretty far these websites are pretty advanced like only is a great of images right yeah

that are clickable then open like another page yeah you can get quite far how do I learn the program choose a programming language to start with your free pathcams goods work their resources thematically practice calling regularly for 30 60 minutes a day

consistency skeet your programming communities like reddits yeah yeah it's pretty it's pretty good it's pretty good so think it's it's a very good starting ground because imagine you know nothing and you want to make a website you want to make a startup this is like that's why the man the power

AI for education is going to be insane like people anywhere I can can ask this question and start building stuff yeah 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 just

have a project in mind I love the idea of like 12 stars in 12 months or like build a project almost every day just build the thing yeah and get it to work and finish it every single day that's a cool experiment I think that was inspiration it was a girl who did 160

websites in 160 days with a little mini websites yeah and she learned to code that way so I think it's good to set yourself challenges you know like don't you can go to some coding bootcamp but I don't think they actually work I think it's better to do like for me out to deduct like self learning

and setting yourself like challenges and just getting in and but you need discipline you know you need to 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 so it can be hard for

people to keep doing it now yeah that thing of just keep doing it and don't quit that urgency that's required to finish a thing that's why it's really powerful when you documented this the creation of hood maps or though like a working prototype that there's a just a constant frustration I guess is

like okay how do I do this and then you look it up and you know like okay you have to interpret the different options you have yeah man you're like and then just try it and then and then there's a dopamine rush of like ooh it works cool man it's amazing and it's on a live stream dude it's on

YouTube a stuff people can watch it and it's amazing when things work it's look it's just like a main that you I look very not I don't look far ahead so I only look okay what's the next problem to solve and then the next problem and at the end you have a whole app or website or

thing you know but I think most people look way too far ahead you know they look it's like this poster again like you shouldn't you don't know how hard it's gonna be so you should only look like for the next thing the next little challenge the next step and then see where you end up and

assume it's gonna be easy yeah exactly like being naive about it because it's you're gonna have very difficult problems a lot of the big problems won't be even tech will be like public right like maybe people don't like your website like you will get cancelled for a website for example like a

lot of things can happen what's it like building in public like you do like openly we're just iterating quickly and you get people see back so there's the power of the crowdsourcing but there's also the the negative aspects of people being able to criticize so man I think haters are actually

good because I think a lot of haters have good points and it takes like stepping away from the emotion of like your website sucks because blah blah blah you're like okay just remove this your website sucks because personally you know what did you say why did he didn't not like it and he

figured out okay he didn't like it because the signup was difficult or something or it wasn't the data they say no this data is not accurate or something right okay need to improve the quality data this haters has a point because it's dumb to completely ignore your haters you know and also

yeah man I think I've been there when I was like 10 years old or someone you're on the internet just shouting crazy stuff that's like most of Twitter you know or the half Twitter so you have to take it with Grinf Salt yeah you man you need to grow a very thick skin like on Twitter on X like

people say but I'm used a lot of people like I found out I'm used to already 15,000 people recently I checked so in 10 years I'm used to 15,000 people so that's like like that's one by one manual 15 yeah so 1500 people per year and I don't like to block because then they get angry they make

a screenshot and they say ah you block me so I just mute and it disappear and it's amazing so you mentioned Reddit so hood maps that make it to the front page of Reddit yeah yeah I did yeah yeah yeah it was amazing and my server almost went down and I was checking like Google Analytics

was like 5,000 people on the website or somewhere crazy and it was at night it was amazing I think nowadays honestly TikTok YouTube Reels, Instagram Reels a lot of apps get very big from people making TikTok videos about it so let's say you make your own app you can make a video for yourself

like all I made this app this is how it works blah blah and this is why I made it for example and this is why you should use it and if it's a good video it will take off and you will get you man I got like 20,000 dollars extra per month or something from a TikTok from one TikTok video like it

made a photo by you or somebody else by some random guy so there's all these AI influencers that they write about they show AI apps and they then they ask money later like when a viral video because why all I can do it do it again and send me $4,000 something I'm like okay

I did that for example but it works like TikTok is a very big platform for user acquisition yeah and organic like the best user acquisition I think is organic you don't need to buy ads you probably don't have money when you start to buy ads so use organic or write a

banger tweet right that's can make an app take off as well well I mean yeah fundamentally create cool stuff yeah I have just a little bit of a following enough to like for for the cool thing to be noticed and then it becomes viral if it's cool enough yeah and you don't need a lot of

followers anymore because they on X and a lot of that's for us because TikTok X I think it's in reals also they have the same algorithm now it's not about followers anymore it's about they test your content on a small subset like 300 people if they like it it will get tested to 1000 people

and on and on so if the thing is good it will rise anyway it doesn't matter if you have half many followers or a thousand followers are honored what's your philosophy of monetizing how to make money from the thing you build yeah so a lot of stars they do like free users so you could sign up

I can use an app for free which is it never worked for me well because I I think free users generally don't convert and I think if you have VC funding it makes sense to get free users because you can spend your funding on ads and you can get like millions of people come in predictably how much they

convert and give them like a free trial whatever and then they sign up but you need to have that flow worked out so well for you to to make it work that you need like it's very difficult I think it's best to start and just start asking people for money in the beginning so show your app like what

are you doing in a landing page like make a demo or whatever video and if you want to use it pay me money pay ten dollars twenty dollars three dollars out ask more than ten dollars per month like Netflix like ten dollars per month but Netflix is a giant company they can you know they can

afford to make it so cheap relatively cheap if you're an individual like an indie hacker like you are making your own app you need to make like at least thirty dollars or more on a user to make it's a worthy for you you need to make money you know and it builds a community of people that

actually really care about the product also yeah making a community like making a discord is very normal now every AI app has a discord and you have the developers and the users together in like a discord and they talk about they ask for features they build together it's very normal now and

um and you need to imagine like if you're if you're starting out getting a thousand users is quite difficult getting thousand pages quite difficult and if you charge them like thirty dollars you have three decay a month that's a lot of money that's enough to like

live a good life yeah a little pretty good life I mean that could be a lot of costs associated with hosting yeah so that's not a thing I make sure my profit margins are very high so I try keep the costs very low I don't hire people I I try to go ship with like AI vendors now like

can you make it cheaper you know which is I discovered this you can just email companies and say can you can you give me discount because it's too expensive and they say sure 50% I'm like wow very good and I didn't know this you can just ask and especially in like a like now it's kind of

recession you can ask companies like I I need a discount or I kind of need to like you don't need to be asked about it say you know I kind of need a discount or I need to go maybe two in other companies maybe like this one discount like here and there and say sure a lot of them will say

yes like 20 represent this confidence and discounts because you think the price on the website is the price of the API or something it's not like you know and also you're a public facing person oh that helps also and there's love and good vibes you put on to the world like you're actually

legitimately trying to build cool stuff so a lot of companies probably won't associate with you because you're trying to do yeah it's like secret hack but I think even without secret hack they're a good person it's the best how much discount they will give you know they'll maybe give

more but you know that's why you should shit post on twitter so you get you know discounts maybe yeah yeah um and also the when it's crowdsourced I mean paying does prevent spam or help prevent spam also yeah it gives you high quality users and all these free users are

sir but they're horrible like it's just like millions of people especially with AI starbs you get a lot of abuse so you get millions of people from anywhere just abusing your app just just hacking it or whatever there's something on the internet you mentioned like 4chan discovered

hood maps yeah but I love fortune they I don't love fortune but you know what I mean like they're so crazy especially back then like that's it's kind of funny what they do you know I actually uh what is it there's new documentary on Netflix anti social network or something like that

that was really was fascinating just fortune just the you know the spirit of the thing fortune and agent is so much about freedom and also like the humor involved in fucking with the system and fucking man it's just anti system but for fun the 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 it's starting to happen it's starting drifting somehow yeah it's cool shooting some stuff so it's a very difficult topic but I do know it's especially early on I think 2010 I would go to fortune for fun and they

would post like crazy offensive stuff and this was just to scare off people so it showed the other who say hey do you know this internet web stuff fortune just check it out yeah and it would do what the fuck is that I'm like no no you don't understand yeah it's to scare you away but actually when

you go through a scroll there's like deep conversations yes and they they would already be this was like a normie filter like to stop yeah so kind of cool but yeah it goes dark it goes dark 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 but everything I think it was never man I'm not a fortune but like I it was always about provoking it's just provocateurs you know but the the provoking in the case of hood maps or something like this can can can damage the good thing like you know a little poison

in a town is always good it's like the town weights thing but you don't want too much otherwise it destroys the town it destroys the thing they're kind of like pen testers you know like penetration testers hackers yeah they just test your app for you and then you add some stuff like I add like

I add like an NSFW word lists 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 was like a very relaxing video that like kind of a's a mar with like glowing jelly streaming like this to relax them you know

or cheese melting on the toes nice seal them wow yeah I like it but actually a lot of stuff I didn't realize how much originated in fortune in terms of memes to read it Rick roll I didn't understand I didn't know the Rick roll originated for chance like there's so many memes like most of

the memes that you think they get the word roll I think comes in for you like not the word roll but like in this case in the meme use like you would get like roll doubles because every there was like post IDs and fortune so they were they were kind of like random so if I get doubles like

this happens for something so you get like two two 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 internet is purist but yeah again the dark stuff kind of seeps in yeah and you it's nice to keep the dark stuff to like

some low amount it's nice to have a bit of noise of the darkness but not too much yeah and but again like you have to pay attention to that with I mean I guess spam in general you have to fight that with no mad list how do you fight spam man I use GPT-4 now it's amazing so so I have like

user input I have reviews people can review cities and I don't need to actually sign up it's anonymous reviews and they write like whole books about like cities and what's good and bad so I run it through GPT-4 now and I asked like is this a you know is this a good review like is

offensive is this racist or some stuff and and since we messed up telegram when it rejects reviews and I check it and it's man it's so on point it's so yes and it's so accurate it understands double meanings I have GPT-4 running 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 and I used to have human moderators was very good but they would start fighting the human moderator like this guy's bias or something now I have GPT-4 and it's it's it's really really really really good it understands humor and it

stands like like you could say something bad but it's kind of like a joke and it's kind of not like offensive so much so shouldn't be deleted right and it stands at you know I would love to have a GPT-4 based filter of like of different kinds of for like X yeah I thought this week like I

tweeted like a fact check like you can click fact check and then GPT-4 look GPT-4 is not always right about stuff right but it can give you a general fact check on a tweet like usually what I do now when I write something like difficult about economics or something like AI I put in GPT-4

I say can you fact check it because I might have said something stupid and the stupid stuff always gets taken out by the reply is like oh you said this wrong and and then the whole tweet kind of doesn't make sense anymore so I asked GPT-4 to fact check a lot of stuff so fact check is tough one

yeah but it would be interesting to sort of um 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 like it seems like a GPT thing because that that's less about the truth and it's more about the rigor of

the thing exactly and you can ask that you can ask in the prompt like I don't know like for example do you think create like a ranking score of X Twitter replies where should this post be if we rank on like I don't integrity reality like the fundamental deepness or something interestness um and it

would give you that pretty good score probably I mean Elon can do this with crock right you can start doing using that to to check replies because the replies actually is like chaos yeah and actually the ranking that replies does make any sense doesn't make sense no and I would like to sort

in different kinds of ways yeah and you get too many replies now if you have a lot of followers I get too many replies and I don't see everything and I I love stuff I just miss and I don't I want to see the good stuff and also the notifications or whatever is just complete chaos yeah it would

be nice to be able to filter that in interesting ways sort in interesting ways because like I feel like I miss a lot and I what's surfaced for me I just like a random comment by a person with no followers yeah positive negative it's like okay if it's a very good comment that should happen

but it should probably look a little bit more like to these people I followers because they're probably more engaged in a platform right or no if it's I don't even care about how many followers if you're ranking by the quality of the comment great yeah but not just like randomly like chronological

just the sea of comments yeah it doesn't make sense yeah yeah yeah actually be very proof of that I think one thing you you espouse a lot which I love is the automation step so like once you have a thing once you have an idea and you build it and it actually starts making money and it's mixing

people happy there's a community of people using it you want to take the automation step of automating the things you've to do as little work as possible for it to keep running and definitely can you like explain your philosophy there what you mean by automate yeah so the general

theory of starters would be that when when it starts like you start making money start hiring people to do stuff right to stuff that you like marketing for example do stuff that you would do in the beginning yourself and whatever community management and organizing meetups for

nomadis for example there would be a job for example and I thought like 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 a lot of work managing these people so I've always tried to like automate these things as much as possible

and and this can literally be like for nomadis it's literally like a it's not the different other stars with like a web page where you can organize your own meetup set a set a schedule a date whatever you can see how many nomads will be there at that date so you know there will be

actually an off-nome as to meetup right and then when it's done it sends a tweet out on the nomadis account there's a meetup here it sends a direct message to everybody in the city who are there who are going to be there and then people show up on a bar and there's a meetup and that's fully automated and for me it's like it's not it's so obvious to make this automatic why would you why would you have somebody organize this like it makes more sense to automate it and this

with most of my things like I figure out like how to do it with code and I think especially now with AI like you can automate so much more stuff than before because AI understands things so well like before I would use if statements right now you ask gpt you put someone going to gpt4 and

in the API and it sends back like this is good this is bad yeah so you basically can now even automate sort of subjective type of things this is the difference now yeah and that's very recent right but it's still difficult though I mean that's step of automation is difficult to figure out how

to is you're basically delegating everything to code and it's not trivial to take that step for a lot of people so when you say automate are you are you talking about like cron jobs yes man a lot of cron jobs a lot yeah it's like a allergy I log into the server and I do like pseudo

cron tab dash e and then I go into the editor and I write like hourly and then I write PHP uh you know do this thing dot PHP and that's a script and it's script does a thing and it does it then hourly that's it and that's how all my web says work do you have a thing where it like emails

you're something like this or email somebody managing the thing if something goes wrong I have these web pages I make they are called like health checks this is like health check.pchp and then it has like emojis like a it's like a green check mark of his goods 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 goods and then it goes to the next and it goes on all the data points did people sign up

in the last 24 hours it's important because maybe the sign up broke okay check somebody sign up then I have um optime roba.com which is like for optime but it can also check keywords it checks for an emoji which is like the red x which is if something is bad and so it opens that health check

page every minute to check if something is bad then if it's bad it sends it message to me on telegram saying hey what's up uh what doesn't say hey what's up it sends me like alert hey like this thing is down and then I check so within a minute of something breaking I know it

and then I can open my laptop and fix it yeah but the good thing is like the last few years things don't break anymore and like definitely 10 years ago when I started everything was breaking all the time and now it's like almost it's last people's like 100 point zero zero percent uptime

and these health checks are part of the optime percentage so it's like everything works yeah actually making me realize I should uh I should have a page for myself like one page that has all the health checks just so I can go to and see all the green check marks just feels good to look

as you know it just be like okay yeah all right like we're okay everything's okay yeah now like you can see like one was the last time something wasn't okay and it'll say like never or like meaning like 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 to the good health checks like yeah you know this it all works it all works but it's been so often and I'm like it feels so good but then I'm like okay obviously it's not gonna you 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 that automate like everything yeah they've also just a large uh set of cron jobs a lot of the publication this podcast is done all everything's just on automatically so I'll clip up all the all the all the all this kind of stuff yeah but it'll be

nice to automate even more like uh translation all this kind of stuff will be nice to automate yeah every JavaScript every PHP error gets sent to my telegram as well so every user whatever user is doesn't have to be page user if they run into an error um the JavaScript sends the JavaScript

error to the server and then it sends to my telegram from all my websites so you get like a message so get like a uncalled variable error whatever blah blah blah and then I'm like okay interesting and then I go check it out and that's like a way to get to zero errors because you get flooded with

errors in the beginning and now it's like nothing almost so that's really cool but Matt that's really cool but this is the same stuff people they they pay like very big uh sour companies like New Relic for right like to manage the stuff um so you can do that too you can use off the shelf

I like to build myself is easier yeah it's nice it's nice to do that kind of automation I'm starting to think about like what are the things in my life I'm doing myself that could be automated uh in the HTML like give your daily your day and then ask what parts of the automate

well one of the things I would love to automate more is my consumption and social media yeah both the the output and the input Matt that's very interesting I think that some startups are do that like they they summarize the cool shit happening on twitter you know like with AI

I think the guy called SW wide x or something he does like a newsletter it's completely AI generated we have the cool the cool new stuff in AI yeah I mean I would love to do that but also like across Instagram Facebook LinkedIn yeah all this kind of stuff just like okay can I can you

summarize the internet from it for today somewhere i think that calm yeah calm yeah because I I feel like it pulls in which which uh time but also like I don't like the effect that has some days on my psyche because like haters or or just general content like no no just general like

for example like TikTok is a good example of that for me I sometimes just feel dumber after you stick talk I just feel like yeah I don't use it anymore empty somehow and I'm like uninspired yeah it's funny in the moment I'm like how I look at that cat doing a funny thing and then you're like oh

look at that person dancing in a funny way to that music and then you're like 10 minutes later like I feel way dumber and I don't really want to do much for the rest of the day my girlfriend sat she saw me like watching some dumb video she's like dude your face looks so dumb as well

your whole face starts going like oh interesting you know so I mean it was social media with with X sometimes for me too it's I think I'm probably naturally gravitating towards the drama yeah our wheel yeah and so with following ad people especially ad people that only post-technical content

has been really good because then I just look at them and I and then I go on down rabbit holes of like learning new papers have been published or good repos or or just any kind of cool demonstration of stuff and the thing the kind of things that they were tweet and that's the rabbit

hole going I'm learning and I'm inspired all that kind of stuff it's been tough it's been tough to control difficult you need to like manage your your your platforms you know I have a mute board list as well so I mute like politics stuff because I don't really want it on my feet and

I think I've muted so much that now my feet is good you know I see like interesting stuff and but the fact that you need to modify you need to like mod your app your social media platform just to function and not be toxic for you for your mental and all right that's like a problem like

it should be doing that for you it's some level of automation I that would be interesting I wish I could access X and Instagram through API easier you need to spend $42,000 a month which my friends do yeah you can know but still even if you do that that you're not getting I mean there's limitations

that don't make it easy to do like yeah automate because they 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 yeah but if I just want to like figure out ways to automate my interaction with the X

system or with with Instagram they they don't make that easy but I would love to sort of automate that and explore different ways to how to leverage LLM's to control the content I consume and I may be published that maybe they themselves can see how that could be used to improve their system

so yeah there's not enough access yeah you could screen cap your phone right come here if you're apt to watch is your screen with you you couldn't yeah but I don't really know like what it would do like maybe it's gonna hide stuff before you see it you know like I have

broken on it I have Chrome extensions I write a lot of Chrome extensions that hide parts of different pages and so on yeah for example for my own on my main computer I hide all the use and lights and all that on YouTube content that I create so that I don't it doesn't yeah so you don't pay attention

to it I also hide parts there's I have a mode for X where I hide most of everything so like there's no it's same with YouTube I have to say my extension like why I wrote my own because it's easier because it keeps changing it's like it's not easy to keep it dynamically changing but they're

really good at like getting you to be distracted and like starting to relate it's a calm related to all I don't want to relate it's and like 10 minutes later you're like or something that's trending I have a weird amount of friends addicted to YouTube and I'm not addicted I think

because my attention spans too short for YouTube but but I have this extension to like YouTube Unhoog which is like it's hides all the related stuff I can just see the video and it's amazing and uh 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 I had these YouTube shorts these YouTube shorts are like they're like algorithmally designed to just make you tap them and then I tap and then I'm like five minutes later with this phase like and you're you're just talking and it's like what happened I was gonna open I was gonna

play like the coffee mix you know like the music mix for drinking coffee together like in the morning like jazz I didn't want to go to shorts so it's it's very it's very difficult I love how we're actually highlighting all kinds of interesting problems that all could be solved or to start up

okay so what what about the exit when and how to exit man you shouldn't ask me because I never sold my company and I've never at all the successful stuff you've done you never sold it 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 and

I learn a lot about finance people as well as well there like manipulation and do diligence and then changing the valuation like people change the valuation after uh so they they a lot of people string you on to acquire you and then it takes like six months it's a classic it takes six to 12

months they want to see everything they want to see the your stripe and your code and whatever and then um in the end they'll they'll change the price a lower because you're already so invested so it's like a negotiation tactic right I'm like no I don't want to sell right and the problem with

my companies is like they make you know 90% profit margin so the multiple companies get sold with multiples kind of multiples of profit or revenue and often the multiples like three times three times or four times or five times grabbing your profit so in my case they're all automated so I might

just as well wait three years and I get the same money as when I sell and then I can still sell the same company you know I mean I can still sell it for three five times so financially it doesn't really make sense to sell yeah unless the price high enough like if the price gets to like six or

seven or eight I don't want to wait six years for the money you know but if you give me three like three years nothing like I can wait so I mean they're really valuable stuff about the companies you create is not just the interface and uh and the crowdsource content but the people themselves

like the user base yeah well no one this it's a community yeah so I could see that being extremely valuable yeah surprise I know this is like it's like my babies like my first part of the tuk-kauf and I don't really know if I want to sell it it's like something you will be nice when you know

when you're old they're just still working on this you know it's like a it has like a mission which is like um people should travel anywhere and they can work from anywhere and they can meet different cultures and that's a good way to make the world get better if you learn if you go to China 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 but it's more you know you learn a lot from traveling and I think that's why it's like a cool project to like not sell uh AI projects I have less emotional feeling with

AI projects like photo AI which I could sell yeah yeah the thing you also mentioned is you have to price in the fact that you're going to miss yeah the company and the meaning it gives you right this is a very famous like depression after start up on a seller company like they're like this

was my this was me like who am I and they immediately start building another one you know they can never get stuff so I think it's it's good to keep working you know until you die just keep working and cool stuff and you shoot into retire you know I think retirement's bad probably so you usually

build this stuff solo and mostly work solo what's the thinking behind that I think I'm not so good working with other people not like I'm crazy but like I I don't trust other people to clarify you don't trust other people do a great job yeah and I don't want to have like this consensus

meeting where we all like you know you have like a meeting with three people and then you kind of get this compromise results which is very European like it's very in the hall and we call it Poldemweidel where you put people in the room and you only let them out when they agree on the

compromise right in politics and I don't think it I think it it breeds like averageness you know you get average at the average company average culture you need to have like a leader or you need to be solo and just do it you know do yourself I think and I trust some people like now I like

with my best friend Andre I'm making a new AI startup but it's because we know each other very long and he's one of the few people I would build something with and but almost never yeah so what does it take to be successful and we have more than one like how do you build together with Andre

how do you build together with other people so he codes I should post on Twitter literally like I promote on Twitter I I we set like product strategy like I said this should be better this should be better but I think you need to have one person coding it's he codes in Ruby so I cannot do

Ruby I'm in PHP so you have you ever coded with another person for prolonged periods of time never my life so what do you think is behind that I know it was always just me sitting on my laptop like I said like coding no like you've never had another developer who like rolls in and like I've

had a once where the photo I like there's a I developer Philip I hired him to do the because I can't write Python and AI stuff is Python and I needed to get models to work and replicate and stuff and I need to improve photo and he helped me a lot for like 10 months he worked and

man I was trying Python working with Numpy and Package Manager and it was too difficult for me to figure this shit out and I didn't have time like I think 10 years ago I would have time to like sit you know go do all nighters to figure this stuff out with Python I don't have the and I don't

have to it's not my thing it's not your thing it's another programming language I get it AI new thing got it well like you never had a developer roll in look at your PHP jQuery code and be and yes like you know like in conversation or in a private talk about yes and like basically

all right I had for one week understand and then end it because he wanted to rewrite everything in the no that's the wrong guy I know you want to rewrite and what he wanted to rewrite the he said is jQuery we can't do this I'm like okay he's like we need to rewrite a thing in view

few years I'm like are you sure I'm just like you know like keep jQuery it's like no man like and we need to change a lot of stuff and I'm like okay and I was kind of like feeling it like this you know we're gonna clean up shit 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 I pretended my head that they're the smartest person was ever existed so I look at their code or I look at the stuff they've created and try to see the genius of their way like you really have to understand people like

really notice them like and then from that place have a conversation about what is the better approach yeah but those are the top tier developers yeah and they though those are the ones that are in tech ambiguous so they can work with they can learn any tech stack and they can

and that's like really few like it's like really top 5% because if you try hard devs like no offense to devs with most devs I'm not man most people in general jobs are not so good at the job like even doctors and stuff when you realize this people are very average at the job

yeah especially with devs coding I think so sorry I think that's a really important skill for for developer to roll in and like understand the musicality the the style and like empathy is like code empathy right yeah it's new word but that's it you need to understand like

go over the code get a holistic view of it and man you can suggest we we change stuff for for sure but and look jacuzzi crazy crazy I'm using jacuzzi we can change that it's not crazy at all jacuzzi is also the beautiful and powerful and php is beautiful and powerful especially as you said

recently in the in the as the versions evolved it's much more serious programming language now it's super fast like php is really fast now yeah it's crazy java's good much faster ruby that really fast now so if speed is something you care about it's super fast yeah and like there's gigantic

communities of people using those programming languages and there's frameworks if you like the framework so that whatever it doesn't really matter what you use but like also you if I was like a developer working with you like you are extremely successful you've shipped a lot yeah so like

if I roll in I'm gonna be like I don't assume you know nothing I assume Peter is a genius like the smartest developer ever and like learn learn from it and yes and like notice parts in the code were like okay okay I got it like yeah here's how he's thinking and now if I want to add another

like a little feature definitely stuff emoji yeah man 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 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 I don't know how hard it is to find developers no I think that exists I think you need to I need to hire more people need to try more people happy but that costs a lot of my energy in time yeah but it's 100% possible yeah but do I want it

I don't know things kind of run fine for now 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 it's like next time I to do this for example you know like I can I'll get there eventually

but it's true I mean you're also extremely good at what you do like I'm just looking at the interfaces I'm like photo AI like you would Jake like Jake right like how amazing is Jake great but like you can these cobweiss are getting these are there's these cobweiss

this is a lot it's a lot but I'm glad they're all wearing shirts anyway the interface here is just really really nice like I could tell you know what you're doing and with no mad list extremely nice the interface thank you man and that's all you yeah this everything's me

so all of this and every little feature all of this looks kind of ADHD or ADD you know like it's so much because it has so many things and design these days is minimalist right right here you but this is a lot of information and it's useful information is delivered in a clean way while still stylish

and fun to look at so like minimal is designed is about like when you want to convey no information what's the weather and look cool yeah it's very cool it's pretentious right pretentious or not the the function is meant like is useless this is about a lot of information delivered to you in a

clean and when it's clean you can't be too sexy so sexy and not yeah this is everything how my brain looks you know like this love shit going on like drawing bass music it's like very yeah but this is still pretty the spacing of everything is nice the fonts are really nice like very readable very small but I made it so I don't trust my own judgment no this is really nice frankly the emojis are somehow like this a style it's a thing I need to pick the emoji it takes a

while to pick them you know like there's something something about the emoji is a really nice memorable like placeholder for the idea yeah like if it was just text it would actually be overwhelming if you were just text the emoji really helps it's a brilliant addition like some people might look at

it why do you have emojis everywhere it's actually really for me it's really to remove the emoji yeah what people don't know what they're talking about and then the quiz I'm sure people tell you a lot of things this is really nice and using color is nice small font but not too small

and obviously you have to show maps which is really tricky yeah this is this is no this is really really really nice and all of I mean like okay like how this looks when you have a hover over it like these transitions now I understand that but like I'm sure there's like how long does that

take you to figure out how you want it to look do you ever go down rabbit hole will you spend like two weeks no it's all iterative it's like 10 years of you know add a seas decision here or do days or well let's say like see these are all these are rounded now yeah if you wanted to like around is probably the better way both if you wanted to be rectangular like sharp corners what would you do usually so I go to the index that CSS yeah and I do command f and I search border radius 12 px

yeah and then I replace with border radius zero and then I do command enter and it gets deploys it's it pushes to the get hub and then since the webbook and then deploys to my server and it's live in five seconds are you often deployed to production you you don't have like a testing ground

no so I'm like famous for this because I'm too lazy to set up like a staging server on my laptop every time so I nowadays I just deploy to production yeah and it's man I'm gonna make canceled for this you know but it works very well for me because I have a lot of like PHP lint and jaslin so

it tells me in this error so I don't deploy but my literally I I have like 37,000 get commits in the last 12 months or something so I make like small fix and then command enter and since to get up get up since the web to my server web server pulls it to deploy to production and is there

what's the latency of that from you pressing command one second can be one two seconds see you should make a change and then you get really good at like not making mistakes man you're 100% you're right like people are like how can you do this why you get good at not taking the server

down you know that yeah because you need to code more carefully but it's look it's idiotic and any big company but for me it works because it makes me so fast like somebody will report a bug on Twitter and I kind of did do like a stopwatch like how fast can I fix this bug and then two minutes

later for example it's fixed yeah and it's fun because it's 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 and it makes people really happy when you can really quickly solve the problems so but it's it's crazy I'm

I don't think it's crazy 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 like and then there's like multiple tables and databases that you use for the state like

it's filing just a mess and there's different teams involved it's it's not good I'm like a good funny extreme on the other side you know but just a little bit safer but not too much it would be great yeah yeah I'm sure that's actually like how X now how they doing rapid improvement exactly more

bugs yeah playing about like oh look he bought this Twitter now that's full of bugs do the shipping stuff like things are happening now and it's a dynamic app now yeah the bugs is actually a sign of a good thing happens yes bugs of the feature because it shows that the team is actually building

shit 100 percent 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 so I've gotten a chance to interact with many other teams but one of the teams is MLA multi-language audio yeah I don't know if you know

this but in YouTube you can have audio tracks in different languages for overdubbing and that there's a team and not many people are using it but like every single feature they have to meet and agree and like there's allocate resources like engineers have to work on it but I'm sure

it's a pan the ask for the engineers to get approval to like do because it has to not break the rest of the site whatever they do but like if you don't have enough dictatorial like top down like we need this now it's gonna take forever to do anything multi-language audio but multi-language

audio is a good example of a thing that seems niche right now but it quite possibly could change the entire world when you have when I upload this this conversation right here if instantaneously it dubs it into 40 languages and everybody consume every single video can be watched and listen to

in those different it changes everything and YouTube is extremely well positioned to be the leader in this they got the they got the compute they got the the user base they got like they have the experience of how to do this so like the multi-language audio should be

hyper-eater feature right yeah that's high priority like that's and it's a way you know Google's obsessed with AI right now they want to show off that they could be dominant in AI that's a way for Google to say like we use the AI like this is a way to to to break down the walls the language

craze they prefer outcome for them for them is probably their career and not the the overall result of the the cool product you know I think they they're not like selfish or whatever they they want to do good there's something about the machinization organizational stuff that she has

is when I do report box and like become is a work with I get I talk to a lot of different people on the M and they're all really trying hard to do something they're all really nice and I'm the one being kind of asshole because I'm like guys I'm talking to 20 people about this for six months

nothing is happening to say man I know but I'm trying my best and yeah so it's systemic yeah well it requires again I don't know if there must be a nice award but like a dig tutorial type of top down the CEO rolls in and just says like for you to it's like MLA yeah get this done now this

the highest priority I think the big companies especially in America a lot of it is legal right they need to pass everything to legal yeah and you can't like man the things I do it could never do it in a big corporation because it's everything has to be probably get deployed has to go to legal

well again dig tutorial you basically say Steve Jobs did this quite a lot I've seen a lot of leaders do this ignore the lawyers ignore comments 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 some let's say you you launched this AI dubbing and it's there's some legal problems with lawsuits okay so the law changes there will be appeals there will be some Supreme Court thing whatever and the law changes so just by shipping it you change

society you change the legal framework by not shipping being scared of the legal framework all the time like you're not changing things just out of curiosity what what I did to use let's talk about like your whole setup given how ultra productive you are and they who often program me underwear

slouching in the couch is there does it matter to you in general is there like a specific ideas use VS code yeah VS code before you sublime text I don't think it matters a lot I think I'm very skeptical of like tools when people think it they say it matters right I don't think it

matters I think whatever tool you know where you're low you can go very very fast and like you know the shortcuts for some idea you know like I love sublime text because I could use like multi cursor you know you serve something and I could like make mass replaces in a foul with the cursor thing

and the 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 I'm sure like almost every

editor can do that is just probably hard to set up yeah if he's not so good I think or at least I tried but I would use that to like process data like data sets for example world bank I would just multi cursor mass change everything but yeah VS code I man I was bullied into using VS code

because Twitter would always see my screenshots of sublime text and say why you still use sublime text like boomer you need to use VS codes and I'm like wait I'll try it I got a new MacBook and then I I never install like 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 and I'm like okay I'll try VS code and it's stuck you know but I don't really care like it's not so important well you know the format C reference huh dude it was so good you would install Windows and then after three or six months it would start

breaking and everything was like it gets slow then you would restart go to dolls format C you would delete your hard drive and then install the Windows 95 again was so good times and you would design everything like now I'm gonna install it properly now I'm gonna design my desktop properly you know

like yeah I don't know if it's peer pressure but like I use the max for many many years and I know you know I love Lisp so a lot of the customization has done in Lisp it's a programming language it partially was peer pressure but part of it's realizing like you need to keep learning stuff

like since issue with jQuery like I still think I need to learn no js for example even though that's not my main thing or even close to the main thing but I feel like you need to keep learning this stuff and even if you don't choose to use it long term you need to give it a

chance so you your understanding of the world expands hey you want to understand the new technological concepts and see if they can benefit you know it would be stupid not to even try it's more about the concepts I would say than the actual tools like expanding and that can be a challenging thing

so going to VS Code and like really learning it like all the shortcuts all the extensions that actually installing different stuff and playing with it that was an interesting challenge it was uncomfortable at first yeah for me too yeah yeah but you just dive in it's like neuroflex like you

keep your brain fresh you know like this kind of stuff I gotta do that more like have you given a reactive chance no but I want to I want to learn and I want to I understand the basics right um I don't really know where it starts but would you like I guess you got to use your own model which

is like build the thing using it no man yeah so I I kind of did that like I kind like the the stuff I do in jacuzzi essentially a lot of it is like I start rebuilding whatever tech is already out there not based on that but just an accident yeah like I keep going long enough that I build the same I start getting the same problems everybody else has and you start building the same frameworks kind of so I essentially I use my own kind of framework so you basically build a framework from scratch

that's your own understanding kind of yeah with AJAX calls but essentially it's the same same same thing look I don't have the time I don't 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 and my priority is still like the running the businesses and improving that and AI I think learning AI is much more valid than learning up from that framework yeah like it's just more impact I guess you should be just learning

every single day a thing yeah you can learn a little bit every day like a little bit of react or I think now like next is very big so learn a little bit of next you know but I call them the military industrial complex so if I but you need to know you need to know it anyway so you gotta

learn how to use the weapons of war and then you can be a piece of it yeah yeah I mean but you gotta learn in in the same exact way as we were talking about which is learning by trying to build something with it and actually deploy it the frameworks are so complicated and it changes

so fast so it's like where do I start you know and I guess it's the same thing when you're starting out making websites like how where do you start as GPT-4 I guess but it yeah it's just so dynamic it changes so fast that I don't know if it would be a good idea for me to learn it you know maybe some

combination of like few next with PHP Laravel Laravel is like a frame of PHP I think that would be it could benefit me you know maybe Tailwind for Ccess like a styling engine that stuff could probably save me time yeah but like you you won't know until you really give it a try and it feels

like you have to build like if maybe I'm talking to myself but like I should probably recode like my personal one page in Laravel or yeah 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 building no JS some of it is I don't figuring out how to even deploy the thing I have no idea all I know is right now I would send it to GitHub and it sends it to my server I don't know how to get JavaScript running I have no clue yeah so I guess I need like a pass like

like a like first all right or you know I had a little cool kind of those kind of platform actually kind of just might gave myself the idea of like I kind of just want to build a single web page like one web page that has like one dynamic element and just do it in every single like in a lot of frameworks like just on the same page same all the same page kind of page that's a cool product like all these frameworks yeah you can see the

differences yeah that's interesting it takes to do it yeah stopwatch I have to figure out actually something sufficiently complicated because it should probably do it should probably do some kind of thing where it accesses the database and dynamically changing stuff some AI stuff some add-on

stuff yeah maybe some it doesn't have to be a I want maybe API call API call to some to replicate for example then you have yeah that would be very cool part yeah yeah and like time it and also report on my happiness yeah I'm gonna totally do this because nobody benchmarks this nobody's

best work happy developer happiness with frameworks yeah nobody's benchmark the shipping time it's just take like a month and do this how many frameworks out there there's how many how many there's like five main ways of doing it so there's like there's no this back in front end

and this stuff confused me too like react now apparently has become back end yeah or something used to be only front end and you're forced to do now back end also I don't know and then but there's not really you're not really forced to do anything so like basically according to the internet so like

there's no it's actually not trivial to find a canonical way of doing things like the standard vanilla like you go to the ice cream shop there's like a million flavors I want vanilla if I've never had ice cream in my life can we just like learn about ice cream yeah I want vanilla nobody

actually sometimes I'll literally name it vanilla but like I want to know what's the basic way but not like dumb but like the standard canonical common the dominant way like the dominant six percent of developers do it like this yeah it's hard to figure that out you know that's the problem

yeah maybe all the lumps can help maybe you explicitly ask what is the dominant they usually know like the dominant you know they they they give answers that are like the most probable kind of yeah so that makes sense to ask them and I think honestly maybe it would help is if you want to learn

or I wouldn't want to learn like a framework hire somebody that already does it and just sit with them and make something together like I've never done that but I thought about it so it would be a very fast way to you know take their knowledge I am I'm trying these kinds of things what what

happens is depends what kind of if they're like a world class developer yes oftentimes they themselves are used to that thing and they have not themselves explored in other options so they have this dogmatic like talking down to you like this is the right way to do it yeah it's like no no we're

just like exploring together okay show me the cool thing you've tried which is like it has to have a open-mindedness to like you know no JS is not the right way to do web development it's like one way and there's nothing wrong with the the old lamp PHP jQuery vanilla JavaScript way it's just

as it's pros and cons and like you need to know there's people exist you could find those people probably yeah like if you want to learn AI imagine you have Karpati sitting next to you yeah it's you like he does his YouTube videos it's amazing he can teach it to like a five-year-old

about how how to make it amazing like imagine this guy sitting next to you and just teaching you like let's make it a lamb together like how the shit would be amazing yeah I mean well Karpati has its own style and I'm not sure he's for everybody but for example five-year-old it depends

on five-year-old yeah but he's like super technical but he's amazing because he's super technical and he's the only one who can explain stuff in a simple way which shows his complete genius yes because if you can explain without jargon you're like wow and build it from scratch yeah it's like top

tier you know like what a guy but he might be anti-framework because he built from scratch exactly yeah actually it probably is yeah he's like you but for AI yeah so maybe learning framework is a very bad idea for us you know maybe we should stay in PHP and like script kitty and the way you

have to maybe by learning the framework you learn what you want to yourself build from scratch yeah maybe learn concepts but you don't actually have to start using it for your life right yeah and you're still a Mack guy who was a Mack guy yeah yeah I switched to Mack in 2014 because it was

because when I wanted to start traveling and my brother was like dude get a MacBook is like the standard now like wow I need to switch from Windows and I had like three screens you know like Windows at this whole setup for music production had to sell everything and then I had a MacBook and I

remember opening up this MacBook box like and it was so beautiful was like this aluminium and then I opened it I removed it you know the screen protector thing it's so beautiful and I didn't touch it for three days I was just like looking at it yeah really and I was still in the Windows computer

and then I went traveling with that so I and all my great things started when I switched to Mack which sounds very dogmatic right but what great things are you talking about all the business started working out like I started traveling I started building startups that are making money it all started

when it speaks to Mack wasn't I I kind of you're making me want to switch to Mack so I use either use Linux inside Windows with WSL or just Ubuntu Linux but Windows for most stuff like editing or any like yeah like the old stuff right yeah well you could use I guess you could do my stuff there

I wonder if I should switch well wouldn't you mess about Windows what was the pros and cons I think the finer is horrible Mack like it's like it's the what is the finer you don't know the fine so there's the Windows Explorer yeah this is for as amazing the talking down

finer is strange man there's like strange things this is bug where if you if you send like a test your photo in WhatsApp or Telegram it just selects the whole folder and you almost accidentally can click enter and you send all your photos or your files to this chat group happy to my girlfriend just sending me photo photo photo photo photo so it's finer it's very unusual but it has Linux like the whole thing is like it's Unix base right so you use the command not like all the time like all the

time and the cool thing is you can run things like Unix like Debbie or whatever you can run most Linux stuff on macOS which makes it very good for development like I have my engine X server you know if I said if I'm not lazy and set up my staging on my laptop it's just the engine X server the same

as I have on my cloud server right the same where the web says run and I can use almost everything the same config files configuration files and it just works and that makes Mack a very good platform for Linux stuff I think yeah yeah real Ubuntu is like better of course but yeah I'm in this

weird situation where um somewhat of a powered user and Windows and let's say Android and all the much smarter friends I have all using Mac and iPhone and it's like if you don't want to go through the peer pressure you know it's not peer pressure it's like like one of the reasons I

want to have kids is that there's a lot of like I would love to have kids as a base as a baseline but you know there's like a concern maybe there's going to be a trade-off or all this kind of stuff but you see like these extremely successful smart people who are friends of mine who have kids

and are really happy they have kids so it's it's not peer pressure that's just like a strong signal yeah it works for people yeah and the same thing with Mac it's like yeah like 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 you know it's much more customizable but like all the 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 switch to Mac all the good stuff started happening I think it's just about the hardware it's just much about the

software the hardware so well built right the keyboard and yeah but look at the keyboard I use so that is pretty cool that's one word for it oh what's your favorite place to work on the couch does the couch matter is the couch at home or is it any couch no any like hotel

couch also like in the room right no but I used to work like very ergonomically with like a standing desk yeah and everything like perfect like i-hides screen blah blah and I felt like man it's has to do with lifting too I started getting RSI like repetitive string injury like

tingling stuff and it would go all the way on my back and I was sitting in a co-work space like 6am 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 next gets stuck like I'm like wow fuck and um I'm like what's am I dying you

know and I fuck I'm probably dying yeah so I don't want to die in a co-work space I'm gonna go home and die in like you know peace and honor yeah so I close my laptop and I put it in my backpack yeah and I walk to the street I got on my motorbike went home and I lie down on like a pillow like

with my legs up and stuff uh to get rid of this like because it was my whole back and it was because I was working like this all the time yeah so um I started getting like a laptop stand everything economically correct but then I started lifting and since then like it seems like uh

everything gets straightened out the posture kind of you you're more straight and I'd never have RSI RSI anymore repetitive string injury I never have tingling anymore no pains and stuff so then I started working on sofa and it's great like it feels um

you're close to the I sit like I sit like this yeah like together in an pillow in an laptop and then I work are you like leaning back kind of like together like legs and then where's the mouse using using no you so everything is track bed on the macOS on the MacBook I used to have the

Logitech MX mouse the perfect economic mouse and you should do like this little thing two things yes one screen one screen and I used to have three screens so I come from the I know where people come I had all the stuff but then I realized that having it all condensed in one laptop it's a six-inch MacBook so it's quite big but having an on there is amazing because you're so close to the tools you're so close to what's happening you know is that working on a car or something

it's like so um like man if you have trees can you just look here look there you can also neck injury actually so it's but I don't know this this sounds like you're part of a cult and you're just trying to convince me but uh I mean but it's good to hear that you can be ultra productive on a single screen that's yeah that's crazy come on tap you all top like when is all top macOS come on to switch very fast so you have like one the entire screen is taken up by VS code say you look

at the code and then yeah and then what like if you deploy like a website you watch switch screens month up the chrome I used to have this swipe screen you know you could do like um difference screen yeah yeah spaces yeah I was like ah it's too difficult let's just put it on one screen on the MacBook and then he'd be productive that way yeah very productive yeah more productive than before interesting because I have three screens and two of them are vertical like on the side yeah for

the code you can see oh 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 do you like the constraints there's there's that's it there's some aspect of the constraints which

like once you get good at it you can focus your mind and you can man I'm suspicious of like more you know yeah to really do all the stuff like it might slow me down actually it's a good way to put it I'm suspicious of more me too yeah suspicious of more and all and always in all

you can defend more right you can defend yeah my developer I make money I need to I need to get more screens right I need to be more efficient and then you read stuff about like mythical man month where like hiring more people slows down a software project project that's famous I think you can use

that metaphor maybe for you know tools as well and I see friends just with gear acquisition syndrome that buying so much stuff but they're not that productive they have the best beautiful battle stations desktops everything they're not that productive and it's also like kind of fun like it's all from my laptop in a backpack right it's kind of no mad minimalists take me through like the perfect ultra productive day in your life like say like where you get a lot of shit done yeah are you

uh and it's all focused on getting shit done what what when are you waking up is it a regular time super early yes so I go to sleep like 2 a.m. usually somebody that and before 4 a.m. but my girlfriend would go sleep midnight so we did a compromise like 2 a.m. you know so wake up around 10 11 in the morning 10 shower make coffee I make coffee like drip coffee like the V60 you know the filter and I boil water and then put the coffee in um and then chill a little bit of my girlfriend

and then open laptops are coding check what's going on like bugs or whatever how long are you like how stretches of time are you able to just sit behind the computer coding so I used to need like really long stretches where I would do like all nighters and stuff to get shit done

but I've gotten trained to like have more interruptions where I can like because you have to do this life like this love distractions like like your girlfriend asked of people come over or whatever 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 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 I'm not a constraint right yes funny so think like that works for me um yeah and then you know cook food and stuff like have lunch steak and chicken and we eat a bunch of times a day so you say coffee yeah yeah yeah so a few hours later cook foods

we get like locally stores like meat and stuff and vegetables and cook that uh and then second coffee and then go some more maybe go outside for lunch like you can you can mix fun stuff you know how many hours are you saying that perfectly productive day are you doing programming like if you

were like to kill it I do like all day basically you mean like the special days where like special girlfriend leaves to like bears or something and you're alone for a week at home which is amazing yes you can just code it's like and you stay up all night and eat chocolate and yeah

let's talk yeah yeah okay okay let's remove girlfriend from picture social life from picture it's just you man then shit goes crazy okay like because when shit goes crazy okay now it should goes crazy okay so shit you yeah let's let's rewind are you still waking up there's coffee there's

no girlfriend to talk to there's no now we wake up like 1 p.m. that's 2 p.m because you weren't to bed at 6 p.m. yeah because I was coding I was finding some new AI shit 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 need to make something now and but that's the time I do make like new stuff more so I think I have a friend he actually books a hotel for like a week to like leave his he has a kid too and his girlfriend has 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 when I love disruptions then like creating new stuff I need this and it's

common it's closed it's this uninterrupted period of time so yeah wake up like 1 p.m. you know still coffee shower we still shower you know and then this code like nonstop maybe my friends comes over comes over in distraction yeah he also on right 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 yeah core working days like you're not really working with him but you're just both working because it's nice to have like the vibe where you both sit together on the couch and coding or 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 and what what music are you listening to I think like like techno like youtube techno there's a there's a channel called h-o-r with a umlaut like h-o

like double dot it's it's brilliant techno whatever it looks like it's they're filming in like a toilet with like white tiles and stuff and very cool and they always have like very good like kind of industrial like it does so fast and heavy you know like yeah that's not distracting to

you brain that's amazing like I think distracting man jazz like I listen coffee jazz with my girlfriend when I wake up and it's kind of like this piano starts getting annoying it's like too many tones it's like too many things wrong this industrial techno is like you know this

African like rain dances like it's this transcendental trans that's interesting because like I I actually mostly now listen to brown noise noise yeah wow like pretty loud wow and one of the things you learn is your brain gets used to whatever so I'm sure to techno if I actually give

it a real chance yeah my brain get used to it but like with with noise what happens to something happens to your brain I think there's a science to it but I don't really care you just have to be a scientist of one like study yourself you own brand for me it like it does something

I discovered it right away when I tried it for the first time after about like a couple of minutes you're everything every distraction just like disappears and it goes like you can like hold focus on things like really well it's weird like you can like really focus on a thing it doesn't

really matter what that I think that's what people achieve with like meditation you can like make focus on your breath for example it's normal brown is not like binara no it's normal brown like white noise I think it's same as like make noise white noise brown noise

I think is what it's like bass here yeah it's more diffused more dampened dampened yeah casita no sharp sharp brightness yeah I can see that and you use a headphone right yeah yeah actually like walk around in life often with brown noise dude that's like psychopath shit

but it's cool yeah yeah yeah when I murder people it helps it it it drums out their screams Jesus Christ yeah I said too much no I'm gonna try it brown noise with a murder or with a coating yeah for the coating yeah okay good try try it try it but you have to like with everything

else who give it a real chance yeah I find I also like I said do uh technology type stuff electronic music on top of the brown noise but then control the speed because the faster it goes the more anxiety so very lean to get

shit done especially with programming I'll have a beat yeah and it's great and it's cool as I use cool to play those little tricks do you mind to study yourself yeah I usually don't like to have people around because when people even if they're working I don't know I like people too much

they're like interesting no this might be yeah in co-workers based I would just start talking to much yeah yeah so there's so-so distraction yeah we would do it in a co-workers we would do like a money like bought like a mug so if you would work for 45 minutes and then if you would say one

like pair of words 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 and at that 15 minutes free time like we can like party whatever and then 45 minutes again I'm working and that worked but you need to shut

people up or they you know I think there's uh there's an intimacy in being silent together then I'm maybe I'm uncomfortable with like but you if you need to make yourself vulnerable and actually do it like with close friends did you sit there in silence for a moment here is a time

and like doing a thing dude I watched this um this video of this podcast it was like this Buddhism podcast with people meditating and they were interviewing each other or whatever and like a podcast and suddenly after questions like yeah yeah and they were just silent for like

three minutes and then they said that was amazing yeah that was amazing I was like wow pretty cool yeah Elon's like that and I really like that when you'll ask a question 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 yeah but it's so cool I wish I was I wish I could think more about but I want to like I want to show you my heart you know I want to show you go straight from my heart to my mouth to like saying the real thing and the more I think the more I start like

filtering myself right and I want to just throw it out there immediately I do that more with team I think he has a lot of practice in that I I do that as well and in team setting when you're thinking brainstorming and you allow yourself to just like think in silence yeah just like

because even in meetings people want to talk yeah it's like no you'd think before you speak and just like it's okay to be silent together yeah and if you allow yourself the room to do that you can actually come up with really good ideas yeah so okay this perfect day how much caffeine

are you consuming in this day man too much right because uh 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 so four cups is a lot for you well I think my coffees are quite strong when I make them

it's like 20 grams of coffee powder in the V60 so like my friends call them like nuclear coffee because it's quite heavy so it's quite strong but it's nice to hit that anxiety level where you're like almost panic attack but you're not there yet so but that's like man it's like super locked in

just like it's amazing but I mean that's there's a space for that you know in my life but uh it's uh it's great for making new stuff it's amazing starting from scratch creating a new thing yes I think girlfriends should let their guys go away for like two weeks every few no every year at least

you know maybe every quarter I don't know and just sit and make some shit without you know they're amazing but like no the services just be alone and then you know people can make something very very amazing just wearing cobwe heads in the mountains like we showed exactly we can do that

there's a movie about that we've been left off they didn't do much programming now yeah you can do a little bit of that okay and then a little bit of shipping you know get the boat it's a different bro but they need to allow us to go you know you need like a man cave right yeah to ship yeah to ship

it should done yeah it's a balance okay cool what about sleep naps and all that you're not sleeping much I don't do naps in a day I think it's power naps are good but I don't read I'm never tired anymore in the day and also because of gym I'm not tired I'm tired when I want to when

you know when it's night I would I need to sleep yeah me yeah I love naps yeah care I don't know I don't know why brain shots off turns on I don't know if it's healthy or not it just works yeah I think with anything mental physically you have to be a student of your body and like no

know what the limits are like 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 have to become a student of your own like of your own body of yourself or how you work yeah that's I've

done a lot in like for me fast thing 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 kind of a lot you know multiple meals a day but I realize I can get much stronger feel much better if

I eat once or twice a day yeah me too yeah it's crazy I never understood this small meal thing yeah didn't work for me let me just ask you it'd be interesting if you can comment on some of the other products you've created we talked about nomad list interior AI photo AI therapist AI

what's your mode okay it's a job board for remote jobs because back then like 10 years ago there was job boards but it was not really specifically remote job boards so I made one they made like first on nomad list I made like nomad jobs like a page a lot of companies started hiring

they pay for job posts so I spin it off to remote okay and now it's like this number one or number two biggest remote job boards and and it's also fully automated and people just post a job and people apply it has like profiles as well like it's kind of like LinkedIn for remote work

just focus on remote only yeah it's essentially like a simple job board and it's covered job boards are way more complicated than you think but yeah it's a job board for remote jobs but the nice thing is you can charge a lot of money for job posts man it's good money B2B

you can charge like you start with $299 but at the peak during when the fed started printing money like 2021 I was making like 140k a month with remote okay with just job posts and I started like adding crazy upsells like rainbow color it's job posts you can add your back earners just

upsells man and you charge $1,000 for an upsell it was crazy and all these companies just upsell so yeah we want everything job posts would cost $3,400 $4,000 and I was like this good good business and then the fed stopped printing money and I all went down and it went down to like

10k a month from 140 now it's back it's I think it's like 40 was good times you know I got to ask you about back to the digital nomad life yeah you uh you wrote a blog post on the reset and in general like just give them away everything living a minimalist life yeah what did it

take to do that like to get rid of everything 10 years ago was like this trend in the blog back then blogs were still popular was like a blogosphere and it was like a 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 why you know this is the trend so I did it I started like selling stuff sort of throwing waste off and I did like MDMA and XC like 2012 kind of and

uh after the trip I felt so different and I felt like I had to start throwing shit away like I swear yeah and I started throwing shit away and I felt that was like it was almost like the drug sending me to a path of like you need to throw your shit away you need to start you know

going a journey you need to get out of here and and that's what the MDMA did I think yeah how hard is it to get down to 100 items well you need to like sell your PC and stuff you need to go on ebay and then man going ebay selling where stuff is very interesting because you discover society you just man you meet the craziest people you meet every range from rage to pour 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 didn't know it was I wasn't living in Amsterdam and I didn't know I have my own you know subculture whatever and I discovered the Dutch people like as they are from ebay you know so I sold everything was like the weirdest thing yet to sell and yet to find a

buyer for not the weirdest but like what what's my mobile so back then I was I was making music and I would make music videos with like a Canon 5d camera back then everybody's making films and beat music was that and and we bought it with my friends and stuff and it was kind of like I had

to sell this thing too because it was like it was very expensive like six K or something and but it meant that selling this man that we wouldn't make music videos to get anywhere I would leave Holland this kind of like stuff we were working on with end and I was kind of saying this music video

stuff we're not getting big we're not getting famous in his or successful needs to stop doing his his music production also we're it's not really working and it was kind of like it felt very bad you know for my friends because we would work together on this and to sell this like camera

that we'd make stuff with and that was a hard goodbye it was just a camera but it was like it felt like uh sorry guys doesn't work and I need to go you know who who bought it do you remember was some guy who couldn't possibly understand the journey yeah he just showed up here tears

the money thanks yeah but it was like it was like cutting your life like this shit ends now and now we're gonna do new stuff and nothing is beautiful I did that twice a mile to get away everything everything like don't just pants underwear backpack I think I think it's important to do

shows you what's important yeah I think that's what I learned from it like you learned that you can live a very little objects for a little stuff and um but there's a there's a car to it like you you lean more on this on the stuff on the surfaces right like for example you don't need a

car you use Uber right you don't need kitchen stuff because you go to restaurants you know when you're traveling so you lean more on other people's services but you spend money on that as well so that's good yeah but just letting go of material possessions which it gives a kind of freedom

to how you move about the world yeah it gives you complete freedom to go into another city too yeah but if you're backpack with a backpack yeah there's a kind of freedom to it there's something about material possessions and having a place and all that that ties you down a little bit yeah

next spiritually yeah it's good to take a leap onto the world especially when you're younger to like man I recommend if you're 18 you get out of high school do this go travel and uh you know build some internet stuff whatever bring your laptop and uh it's it's amazing experience I

five years ago it's still going 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 you can like okay now I learned I'd 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's probably good for the job market right so it probably makes more sense like if you want that go travel build some businesses and go back to university if you want so one of

the biggest uses uses of a university is the networking you you gain friends you gain like you meet people it's a forcing function to meet people but if you can meet people out into the world by travel and you meet so many different cultures I mean the problem for me is like if I travel at that

young age I'm attracted to people at the outskirts of the world like for me like where no not geographically oh like the subcultures the sub yeah like the weirdos the darkness yeah me too but but that might not be the best networking in 18 years for no but it can man if you if you're

smart about it you you can stay safe and I met so many weirdos from traveling you meet that's how travel works if you really that lose you meet the craziest people yeah and it's the most interesting people and it's just I kind of recommend enough what's the other thing is that when you're 18 I feel

like depending on your personality you have to learn both how to be a weirdo and how to be a normie like you still have to learn how to fit into society yeah like for a person like me for example who's always in outcast like there's always a danger of 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 like polite society but I was very strange outcast as well

and then I'm more adaptable to normie now yeah after firties you know you're like yeah but you need to skill you have to learn yeah I feel man I feel also the you start as an outcast but the more you work on yourself the less like shit you have you kind of start becoming more normie because you

become more chill with yourself and more happy and it kind of makes you honest right yes yes like the most the crazy people are always the most interesting if you've solved your internal struggles and your therapy and stuff and you kind of become kind of you know it's not so interesting anymore

maybe you don't have to be broken to be interesting I guess is what I'm saying yeah what kind of things were left when you minimalized so the backpack yeah a MacBook toothbrush some clothes unaware socks you don't need a lot of clothes in Asia because it's hot so you just wear a

swim pants swim shorts he will crowned fit flops so very basic t-shirt and go to the laundry mat and wash my stuff and I think it was like 50 things or something yeah yeah it's nice there's as I mentioned to you this is the show alone yeah they really test you because they only get 10

items and you have to survive out in the wilderness and the acts like everybody brings an axe some people also have a saw but usually acts as the job you basically have to you know to build a shelter you have to cut down and cut the trees and make and like

grind a Minecraft you know everything I learned about life like my craft bro yeah yeah you could it's a it's nice to create those constraints for yourself to understand what matters to you and also how to be in this world and one one of the ways to do this is just to live

a minimalist life but like some people like I've met people that really enjoy material possessions and I bring some happiness and that's a beautiful thing like for me it doesn't but people are different it gives me happiness for like two weeks yeah I'm very quickly adapting to

like a baseline you don't need to need to get adaptation very fast yeah but man if you look at the studies most people like like a getting new car six months you know get a new house six months you just feel the same she's like wow she didn't buy all the stuff the studying hedonistic

adaptation made me think a lot about minimalism and so you don't even need to go through the whole journey of getting it just just focus on the the thing that's more permanent yeah like building shit yeah like people around you like to be love nice food nice experiences meaningful work

those things exercise you know those things make you happy I think make me happy for sure you're the blog post why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too what's your strategy in communicating with people yeah so when I wrote that I was getting so many DMs as you probably

have you have a million times more but um and people were getting angry that I wasn't responding and I was like okay I'll just close down this DMs completely then people go angry that I closed my DMs down that I'm not like man of the people you know it's like you changed man yeah you changed

you got to you know like this and I'm like I'll explain why I just don't have the time in a day to you know answer every question and also people send you like crazy shit man like stalkers and like people write like their whole life story for you and then ask you to fight it's like man I have no

idea I'm not a therapist I don't know I don't know stuff but also beautiful stuff no absolutely sure like life story I've posted a coffee form like if you wanted to have a coffee with me and I've gotten an extremely large number of submissions and when I look at them there's just like beautiful

people in there like beautiful people being really powerful stories and like breaks my heart that I won't get to meet those people you know like 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

yes see them yeah I've just probably that I try I want to try help people and like also like oh let's make startups and whatever and it's I've learned over the years that generally for me and it sounds maybe bad right but like I help my friend Andre for example he was he came up to me in

the co-work space that's how I met him and he said I want to learn to go they want to do startups how do we do it I said okay let's go install engine X let's start coding and he has this self energy that he actually he doesn't need to be pushed he just goes and he just goes and he asks questions

and he doesn't ask too many questions he just goes goes and learns that and now he has a company and makes a lot of money as his own startups so and the people that did I have to kind of like that asked me for help but then I gave help and then they started they started debating it you know

do you have that like people ask your device and they go against you say no you're wrong because I'm like okay bro I don't want to debate you ask me for advice right and the people need to push generally it doesn't happen you need this energy for yourself well they're searching

they're searching they're trying to figure it out but oftentimes they're search if they successfully find what they're looking for it'll be within sounds very like spiritual sunny but it's really like figuring that shit out on your own but they're reaching they're trying to ask the world around them

like how do I live this life how do I figure this out but ultimately the answer is going to be from them working on themselves and like literally it's the stupid thing but like googling and doing like searching its procrastination if it's sending messages to people it's a lot of procrastination

like like how do we become successful podcaster bro just you know start like just go yeah and uh just go I would never ask you how to be successful podcaster like I would just start it and then I would copy your math as you know I would say oh this guy is a black background

we probably need this as well yeah try it yeah try and then you realize it's not about the black background it's about something else so you find your voice like keep trying to stop exactly meditation 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 voice and you imitate and then you put your own spin to it you know and that's like creative process that's like literally the whole create everybody always builds on the previous work

yeah you shouldn't get stuck 24 hours in a day eight hours of sleep you're like break it down to a math equation uh 90 minutes of showering clean up coffee it just keeps whittling down to zero man it's not this specific but I had to make like a you know an average just on yeah

firefighting like that one hours of groceries and errands I've tried breaking down minute by minute what I do in a day yeah especially when my life was simpler it's really refreshing to understand where you waste a lot of time yeah and uh what you enjoy doing like

how many minutes it takes to be happy doing the thing that makes you happy and how many minutes it takes to be productive and you realize there's a lot of hours in the day if you spend it right yeah a lot of his waste for me has been the the biggest battle for for the longest time is finding

stretches of time where I can deeply focus into really really deep work just like zoom in and completely focus cutting out away all the distractions and that's the battle yeah but some pleasant extremely unpleasant we need to fly to an island you know make a man cave island where we can just

everybody can just coat and for a week you know 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 man I think it writes something you know and uh this they were like other guy psychopath he plans

his sex in a specific hour like hugs bro I don't but you know I have a counter for hugs yeah exactly like yeah like click click click uh it's just a numerical representation of what life is yeah it's like one of those like when you draw out how many weeks you have in a life I'll do it this is like

dark yeah man don't want to look at that shit yeah man how many times you see your parents Jesus like yeah scary man that's right it might be only you know a handful more times yeah man you just look at the math away if you see him once a year or twice a year I face time today yeah yeah I mean

that that's like dark when you see somebody you like like seeing like a friend that's on the outskirts of your friend group and you realize like well I've really seen him for like three years so like how many more times do we have that we see each other yeah do you believe that like

friends just slowly disappear from your life like they kind of your friend group evolves right so like it does it does like you don't want to there's a problem on Facebook you get all these old friends from school like when you were 10 years old yeah back when Facebook started like you don't really

you would add friend them and then you're like why are we in touch again just keep the memories there you know like it's different life now yeah I have you know I don't know that might be a guy thing or I don't know there's certain friends I have that like we don't interact often but we're still

friends yeah like every time I see him I think it's because we have a foundation of many shared experiences yeah many memories I guess it's like nothing has changed like we've been almost like we've been talking every day we know who haven't talked for a year yeah so that's like yeah that's

deep yeah so that so I don't have to be interacting with them for them to be in a friend group and then there's some people I interact with a lot just it depends but there's just this network of good human beings that can yeah they have like a real love for them and I can always

comment it's like if any of them called me in the middle of the night I'll get rid of a body you know I'm there like how that's a different definition of friendship but it's true it's true it's true friend you become more and more famous recently how's that affect you it's not

recently because it's a gradual thing right like it keeps keeps going and 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 shit in the open yeah and just not really caring if it's

too technical if there's any of this just being out there does that put pressure on you as you become more popular to be a little bit more like collected and man I think the opposite right like because the people I follow are interesting because they say whatever they think and they

and they shape 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 podcast 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 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 when too far but like we were cleaning the toilet because the toilet was clogged you know but like it's just

real stuff because Jensen and Wang and Videa guy he says he started cleaning toilets you know that was cool you tweet is something about the the Denny's thing I forget yeah it was recent that and Videa was started in a Denny diner table and you made it somehow profound you're almost yeah this one

this one in video three trillion dollar company was started in a Denny's and American diner people need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next billion or trillion dollar company what's the first and second space the home office and then the in between the island I guess yeah

the island yeah you need a space to like congregate man and I found history on this so four 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 UK in Holland so we would always be going to we were always going to cafes to to work

and to have serendipitous conversations with other people and start businesses and stuff and when I like you asked me to come on here and we flew to America and the first thing I realized was that I've been to America before but we were in this cafe and like there's a lot of laptops

everybody's working on something and I made I took this photo and then when you're in Europe like large parts of Europe now you cannot you cannot use a laptop anymore it's like no laptop which are in a sense but that is to you a fundamental place to create sheds in a natural organic

core working space of a coffee 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 private they're not serendipitous they're kind of boring cafes are amazing because they random people can come in and ask you what are you

working on there you know and not just love those people are also having conversations like they did for as years ago debates or whatever things are happening and man I understand the aesthetics of it like it's like oh start a bra shipping is bullshit startup you know like but there's something

more there like there's people actually making stuff making new companies that the society benefits from like we're benefiting from and video I think it's the US GDP for sure is benefiting from and video European GDP could benefit if we build more companies and I feel in Europe there's his vibe

and this you have to connect things but not not allowing laptops and cafes it's kind of like part of the vibe which is like yeah we're not really here to work we're here to like enjoy life I agree with this Anthony Burdenne like this tweet was quote to the Anthony Burdenne photo with him

of cigarettes and a coffee in France and he said that's this is what cafes are for I agree but there is some element of like entrepreneurship like you have to allow people to dream big and work their ass off to towards that dream and then feel each other's energy as they interact with

yes that's one of the things I liked in Silicon Valley when I was working there is like the cafes like yeah there's a bunch of dreamers that they're you can make fun of them for like everybody thinks they're gonna build a trillion dollar company but like yeah and it's off not everybody wins nine

percent of people will be bullshit but they're working their ass off yeah and they're doing something and and you need to pass this starter bro like oh it's started on level no it's not it's people making cool shit yeah and this will benefit you because this will create jobs for your

your your country in your region and I think in Europe that's a big problem like we have a very anti-continue on my dream big and build shit yeah and this is really inspiring this is pin tweeter yours all the projects that you've tried and the ones that succeeded has very few mute life

there was for twitter to mute to share the mute lists yeah your mute words fire calculator no more google maker rank how much is my site project worth climate finder ideas AI airlines still runs but it doesn't make money airlines like compares to safety of airlines because I was nervous to fly

so I was like let's collect all the data on crashes for all the airplanes while he's capable nice that's awesome uh make village no man gear 3d and virtual reality dev play play my inbox like you mentioned there's a lot of stuff yeah man trying to find some embarrassing tweets he was

you can go to the highlights tab has all the like the good shit kind there you go this was Dubai POV building an AI startup while you're a real influencer and if people copy this for now they they change the screenshots it becomes like a meme of course you know this is good and this

how Dubai looks it's that's beautiful architectural is this crazy the story behind this story behind for sure so this is about the European economy where like European economy landscape is ran by dinosaurs and today I studied it so I can produce you with my evidence 80% of top EU companies were

founded before 1950 only 36% of top US companies were founded before 1950 yes so the median founding of companies in US is something like 1960 and the median of the top companies right and the median in Europe is like 1900 or something yes so it's um here 1914 and 1963 so there's a 50 of difference it's a good um representation of the very thing you were talking about the different difference in the cultures entrepreneurial spirit of the peoples but Europe used to be entrepreneurial

like there was companies founded in 1818 15 1900 it flipped like around 1950 where America took the lead and um and I guess my point is like I hope the Europe gets back to because I'm European I hope the Europe gets back to being an entrepreneurial culture where they build big companies again because right now the all the old dinosaur companies control the economies they're lobbying with the government their Europe is also there's like their infiltrative the government where they create so

much regulation like I think it's called regulatory capture right where it's very hard for a new comrade to join into enter an industry because there's too much regulation so actually regulations very good for big companies because they can follow it I can't follow it right if I want to start

AI start up in Europe now I cannot because there's an AI regulation that makes it very complicated for me I probably need to get like no theories involved I need to get certificates licenses um whereas in America I can just open my laptop I can start AI started right now um mostly you know

what do you think about EAC effective acceleration as movement man you had BFJs on I love BFJs and um he's amazing and if it EAC is is very needed to similarly create a more positive uh outlook on the future like because people people have been very pessimistic um about society

about the future of society um you know climate change all this stuff uh EAC is like is a positive outlook on the future like technology can make us you know we need to spend more energy we should find ways to of course get like clean energy but we need to spend more energy to

make cooler stuff and you know go into space and build more technology that can improve society and we shouldn't shy away from technology technology can be the answer for many things yeah build more don't spend so much time on uh fear mongering and cautiousness and all this kind of stuff

some is okay some is good but most of the time should be spent on building and creating on like and doing so unapologetically it's uh it's a it's a refreshing reminder of what made United States great as all the builders like you said the entrepreneurs like we can't forget that

in in all the sort of discussions of how things could go wrong with technology and all this kind of stuff yeah it goes to get a look at China China is not at the stage of like America what like 1900 or something they're building rapidly like insane and obviously China's massive problems

but that comes with the whole thing that comes American is beginning holds massive problems right um but i think it's very very dangerous for a country or a region like Europe to you you get to this point where you're kind of complacent you're kind of comfortable

and then you know you can either go this or you can go this way right you're you're from here you go like this and you can go this or this i think you should go this way and uh go off yeah go off and uh i think it's the problem is the the the the mic goes your so e-oc i made e-oc which is like the european kind of version um i made like hoodies and stuff so a lot of people were like this make your your great again hats um i made it red first but it became too like trumps so now it's

more like european blue you know make europe great again all right uh okay so you had a incredible life very successful built a lot of cool stuff so what advice would you give to young people about how to do the same man i would listen to like nobody just do what you think it's good and follow

your heart right like uh everybody peer-presses you into doing stuff you don't want to do and like they tell you like parents or family or society and toy but like try your own thing you know because it probably it might work out you can you can steer the ship you know it probably doesn't

work out immediately you probably go into very bad times like i did as well relatively right but in the end if you're smart about it you can make things work and you can you can create your own little life of things as you did you know as i did and i think that should be more promoted like do your

own thing their space in the economy and in society for do your own thing you know 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 you know be a normie as you say you

you um you can you can be what you really want to be you know and like go all out doing that yeah you got to go all out because if you do if you have acid you cannot succeed you got to go lean into the to the outcast stuff lean into the being different and and just doing whatever it is

as 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 honor to be your next to talk to you and keep doing your thing keep inspiring me and the world with all the cool stuff you're building thank you man

thanks for listening to this conversation with Peter levels to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some words from Drew Houston dropbox co-founder by the way i love dropbox anyway Drew said don't worry about failure you only have to be right once thank you for listening i hope to see you next time