#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 honesty of a true indie hacker. Peter is an inspiration to a huge number of developers and entrepreneurs who love creating cool things in the world that are hopefully useful for people. This was an honor and a pleasure for me. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description, it's the best way to support this podcast. We got Shopify for e-commerce, MOTIFIC for LLM and RAG deployment, AG1 for health, master class for learning, better help for the mind, and 8 sleep for naps, choose wise in my friends. Also, there's a bunch of ways to get in touch with me by giving feedback, sending in questions that I can answer, and all other kinds of ways if you go to luxfreamer.com/contact. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle, I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors, I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I recently tweeted about my belief as it stands now that Kamala Harris is not a communist and that Donald Trump is not a fascist. And there's some other nuance in that tweet. And the response I got, the attacks I got from both sides, that are very intense, that disagree. We're fascinating. So one of the things I have my to do list is to do a lengthy video and a lengthy podcast on communism and fascism and other economic and political systems. You know, there needs to be a good solid criticism and explanation of capitalism, for example. It's an economic system, it's a way for humans to work together that has, I believe, benefited the world way more than it has hurt the world. But to articulate that and to still man the criticisms and the perspectives that criticize capitalism is also really important. And so the same applies for communism, for fascism, for all kinds of ideologies that rule the world for a time and all the kinds of ways that they've broken down and to do so seriously objectively calmly, walking through the fire without the misuse of those words, thinking clearly, not as a partisan, but as an independent thinker as a human being. I think that's something that I would like to work on more and more, even amidst this insane political season. Anyway, I mention all that because, you know, when I think about Shopify, I think about capitalism. It's a bunch of small sellers getting together and being able to sell stuff to people that would benefit from it and would enjoy it and they make it super easy. So if you're one such seller and you want to sell stuff and you have awesome stuff to sell, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase, go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Moctific, a SaaS platform that helps businesses deploy LLMs and drag that's a customized fine tune on organization data sources. Obviously, this is often extremely sensitive data. So you have to do this carefully and well, but when it is done carefully and well and in a secure way, it can be a huge benefit for the company to be able to take all the data that the company has and internally be able to query that data to be able to organize that data to leverage and answering questions that would make everybody in the company more efficient. So I think that's the thing that unlocks, especially for large companies, but even mid-sized companies, even small companies, just the intranet, a thing that takes all the data on the inside and be able to make high quality, efficient, fast decisions based on that data. I think Moctific was created by Cisco, specifically their outshift group that does the cutting-edge R&D. 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 went from 5 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 those 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 often times correlates with how deeply I am in thought related to an audiobook I'm listening to. Sometimes I get this sort of discomfort when there's a difficult part of the audiobook that's really making me think. At the same time, keeping a fast pace is difficult for me. So I just slow down and sometimes I'll walk. Sometimes I stop and just sit on a bench and I'm doing it all not for sort of training for a marathon or training for some difficult physical endeavor. I'm doing it for the love of it, for the love of running out in nature, whether it's in the heat or in the cold, just the love of life that you can get, especially when the second wind hits. Anyway, after all that, I'm going to drink a nice cold A.G.1. It'll give you a one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkaG1.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. I love Masterclass. I love learning from people who are the best in the world at a thing. Sometimes there's incredible lectures that can explain a thing. I also love that, but I think there's just something indescribably powerful about not a great lecture, but a great doer stepping back and explaining the core of their art of their skill, of their genius, and where there's great stuff on poker with Phil Ivey, great stuff on barbecue. It has been forever since I had barbecue from Aaron Franklin. These are all ones I've watched. Martin Scorsese and Filmmaking, that is one I really enjoyed. I mean, Scorsese is just, his stuff is both powerful and thoughtful and deeper profound about family, about human nature, all of that, and it's just fun to watch, okay? Maybe I'm one of a certain generation, but it's just fun to watch. So you get to hear how the Master does it on Masterclass. Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com/lexpod, that's masterclass.com/lexpod. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp spelled H-E-L-P-H-H-H-L-P. They figure out what you need and match you with a license therapist in under 48 hours. Some of the people losing their mind in the realm of the election that's coming up. That would be a fun one if they could sign up for BetterHelp and do a couples therapy. From the far left and the far right, just sitting down together, boy, that would be a fascinating challenge for any therapist. And from the conversational space, I would love to just listen to that 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 doing my best. Anyway, you should try out talk therapy, super easy to do with BetterHelp, check them out at BetterHelp.com/lex and save on your first month that's BetterHelp.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by H-Sleep and it's powered for Ultra that I've been enjoying. I just recently enjoyed it, I enjoyed every night, multiple times a day, let's get crazy. I love it. for a good nap, it can cool down inside the bed to 20 degrees. These fan height below room temperature, coup bed, warm blanket, and just shut off from the world. Just forget it all, forget the madness of the world, the political bickering, the attacks, the tensions, the drama, all the stuff that the media and the social media that wants to pull you in, that wants you desperately, like a drug wants your attention, wants to just piss you off and use that anger to make you addicted to the platform. So you can tell everybody how pissed off you are, and then the other person attacks you back, it gets them to be pissed off and you're both pissed off at each other. The end of the day, just losing your mind, all of that can dissipate for me with a short nap, okay, on a cold bed, short nap, feels like home. It's one of the favorite things I have about home, and one of my least favorite things about traveling because I don't have eight sleep. Anyway, you could enjoy the same kind of peace of mind. If you go to eightsleep.com/lex, and use code Lex to get $350 off the pod for ultra. This is the Lex Freeman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Peter levels. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - 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 than most people in startups, 'cause most people in startups, they build a company and they raise money, right? And they hire people and then they build a product and they find something that makes money. And I don't really raise money. I don't use VC funding. I do everything myself. I'm a designer, I'm the developer. I make everything, I make the logo. So for me, I'm much more scrappy. And because I don't have funding, I need to go fast. I need to make things fast to see even ID works, right? I have an ID in my mind and I build it. Build like a mini startup. And I launch it very quickly, like within two weeks or something of building it. And I check if there's the man. And if people actually sign up and not just sign up, but if people actually pay money, right? Like they need to take out the credit cards, pay me money and then I can see if the idea is validated. And most of these don't work, like 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 like, it's very rapid. And it's like, if I compare it to, for example, Google, you know, like our big tech companies, especially Google right now is kind of struggling, like they made like transformers, they made all the invented all the AI stuff years ago and they never really shipped, like they could have shipped chat GPT, for example, I think I heard in 2019 and they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy, but they had everything, they had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers and 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, like, you know, in my underwear, in a hotel room or something, I can ship very fast and I don't need to like, I don't need to ask like legal for like, oh, can you vouch for this? You know, I can just go and ship. - Do you always code in your underwear? Your profile picture, you're like slouching and couching your underwear, chilling in a laptop. - No, no, but it's, I would do where I like shorts a lot and I usually just wear shorts and no t-shirts 'cause I'm always too hot, like I'm always overheating. - Thank you for showing up, not just in your underwear, but wearing shorts. - And no, you know, I'm still wearing this for you, but. - Thank you. - Thank you for dressing up. - I think it's, 'cause since I go to the gym, I'm always too hot. - What's your favorite accent in the gym? - Man, over at press. - Over at press, like shoulder press. - Yeah. - Okay. - But it feels good 'cause you're doing like, you're doing, you win. 'Cause when you, like, what is it? I do 60 kilos, there's like 120 pounds or something, like 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? Winner polls, the victory polls. I do bench press squats, deadlifts. - Hence the mug talking to my therapist, it's a deadlift. Because it acts like therapy for me, you know? - Yeah, it is. - Which is controversial to say. Like if I say it isn't, people get angry. - Physical hardship is a kind of therapy. I just rewashed happy people a year in the tiger that won a Herzog film with a document, people that are doing trapping. They're essentially just working for survival in the wilderness year round. And there's a deep happiness to their way of life because they're so busy in it, in nature. - Yeah, absolutely. - 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 in his hobby and he like he taught me when I'm depressed or something. He says like get a big like what do you call it? Like a big mountain of sand or something from construction and just get a shovel and bring it to the other side and just 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. - Yeah, sometimes I wonder people who are always remodeling their house. Is it really about their remodeling? - No, no, it's not. - Is it about the project? - It's journey, 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. 'Cause I also, I never stop work. I go to the next website where I make a new one, right? Or 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 kiss your girlfriend. And then you have like a goal. Not today I'm gonna fix this feature. Today I'm gonna fix this bug or something. I'm gonna do something. You have something to wake up to, you know? And I think maybe especially as a man, well, also women, but you need a hard work, you know? You need like an endeavor, I think. - How much of the building that you do is about money? How much is it about just a deep internal happiness? - It's really about fun, 'cause I was doing it when I didn't make money, right? That's the point. So I was always coding. I was always making music. I made electronic music. Drama based music like 20 years ago. And I was always making stuff. So I think creative expression is like a meaningful work that's so important, it's so fun. It's so fun to have like a daily challenge where you try to figure stuff out. - But the interesting thing is you put a lot of successful products and you never really want to take it to that level where you scale real big and sell it to a company something like this. The problems, I don't dictate that, right? Like if more people start using it, if millions of people starting to start using it and it becomes big, I'm not gonna say, I'll stop signing up to my website and paying 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 with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and stuff, and they tell me like next time, if I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it like you, because it's more fun, it's more Indian, it's more chill, it's more creative. They don't like this, they don't like to be manager, right, you become like a CEO, you become a manager, and I think a lot of people that start startups, when they become a CEO, they don't like that job, actually, but they can't really exit it, you know? But they like to do the groundwork, the coding. So I think that keeps you happy, like doing something creative. - Yeah, it's interesting how people are pulled towards that, the scale to go really big. And you don't have that honest reflection with yourself, like what actually makes you happy? 'Cause for a lot of great engineers, we'll make some happy as the building, the quote unquote individual contributor, like where you're actually still coding, or you're actually still building. And they let go of that, and then they become unhappy. But some of that is the sacrifice needed to have an impact at scale. If you truly believe in a thing you're doing. - Well, like look at Elon, he's doing things a million times bigger than me, right? And would I wanna do that? I don't know, you kinda really choose these things, right? But I really respect that. I think Elon's very different from VC founders, right? VC start is like software, there's a lot of bullshit in this world, I think. There's a lot of like dodgy finance stuff happening there, I think, and I never have like concrete evidence about it, but your gut tells you something's going on with like companies getting sold to friends and VCs, and then they do reciprocity and shady financial dealings. If Elon does not, he's just raising money from investors, and he's actually building stuff, he needs the money to build stuff, you know, heart and some 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 at that time when you were at a low point? - So I wasn't Holland, and I graduated university, and I didn't wanna like get a normal job. And I was making some money with YouTube, 'cause I had this music career, and I uploaded my music to YouTube, and YouTube started paying me like with ads sense, like $2,000 a month, $2,000 a month. And all my friends got like normal jobs, and we stopped hanging out, 'cause people would like in university, hang out, you know, chill 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 'cause you need to be at the office, and I was like, this is not for me, I wanna do something else. And I was starting getting this like, I think it's like Saturn return, it's, you know, when you turn 27, It's like some concept where Saturn returns to the same place. in the orbit that it was when you were 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 was 27, man. And it was for me, like I started going crazy. Because I didn't really see like my future in Holland, buying a house, going living in the suburbs and stuff, sort of 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, 'cause I was like alone in hotel rooms, like looking at the ceiling. Like what am I doing with my life? Like this is, like I was working on startups and stuff in 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 an outcast, you know, my money was shrinking. I wasn't making money anymore a lot. I was making $500 a month or something. And I was, you know, looking at the ceiling, thinking like, now I'm like 27, I'm a loser. And that's the moment when I started building like startups. And it 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 online and put Stripe to where you can pay money for it. - Yeah, I'm not sponsored by Stripe, but at a Stripe, check out the button. - Is that still like the easiest way to just like pay for stuff, Stripe? - 100% like a thing, so yeah. - It's a cool company. They just made it so easy. You can just click 'em. - Yeah. - And they're really nice. Like the CEO Patrick is really nice. - Behind the scenes, it must be difficult to like actually make that happen. 'Cause that used to be a huge problem like, - Merchant. - Just adding a thing, a button where you can like, pay for a thing. - Dude. - Dude, I know this. - When it was 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 wasn't 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 100 million in damages, and he's like, I don't want to sign this. I'm like, Dad, come on, I need the Merchant account. I need to make money on the internet, you know? And he signed it, and we sent it, we fixed it to America, and I had a Merchant account, but then nobody paid for anything, so that was the problem, you know? But it's much easier now. You can sign up, you add some codes, and, yeah. - So 12 startups in 12 months. - Yeah. - So what started number one? What was that, 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, 'cause 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 or house. - I saw one of them, like Flash, reusing Flash. - Yeah, my album, my CD album was using Flash, yeah. I sold my CD, yeah. - Kids Flash, was it? - The Flash was cool. - Software, this is like, the brain, the grandpa, you know? But Flash was cool. - Yeah, and there was, what's it called? Boy, I should remember this action script. There's some kind of programming language. - A script, yeah, a script. - Oh yeah, and Flash. Back then, that was the JavaScript, you know? - The JavaScript, yeah. And I thought that's supposed to be the dynamic thing that takes over the internet. I invested so many hours in learning that. - And Steve Jobs killed it. - Steve Jobs said, "Flesh sucks, stop using it." And everyone's like, "Okay." - That guy was right, though, right? - Yeah, I don't know, yeah. Well, it was a closed platform, I think, and closed. - But this ironic, 'cause Apple, you know, they're not very open, but back then Steve was like, "This is closed, we should not use it." And it's as security problems, I think, which sounded like a cop-out. Like, I just wanted to say that to make it look kind of bad. But Flash was cool. - Yeah. - Yeah, it was cool for a time. - Yeah. - It, listen, animated gifts were cool for a time too. - Yeah. - They came back in a different way as a meme, though. I mean, like, I even remember when gifts were actually cool. Not ironically cool. - Yeah. - Like, on the internet, you would have like a dancing rabbit or something like this. And that was really exciting. - You had like the, you know, Lex homepage, you know? - Yeah, everything was centered. - Yeah. - Like Peter's homepage and the, on the construction. - Yeah. - Gif, which was like a guy, like, with a helmet. And the lights, that was amazing. - That 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-y types. - 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. 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 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 it was pretty strict about that. And I published it as a blog post so people, I think I put it on hack or news and people would check like, kind of like, oh, did you actually, you know. I felt like accountability because I put it public. Then 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, too far so 13. 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 giant email threads on Gmail. And they were like unavigatable. So I made an app that would log into your Gmail, get the emails and find the ones with YouTube links. And then make like, kind of like a gallery of your songs. Like essentially Spotify and my friends loved it. - Was it scraping it? Like what was it? - No, it uses like POP, like pop or I'm app, 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. I could write on, I think like some tag media and stuff. And I was like, this is cool, like it didn't make money. There was no payment button. But it was actually, people are 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, you could tell Gmail like, don't give me all the emails. Just give me the ones with YouTube links, you know, or something like that. I mean, there is a whole ecosystem of like apps you can build on top of the Google. 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 gonna 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 gonna pay for this 'cause it's a real product. So even though it's the same code in the back, it's a plugin, you know? - Yeah, I mean, you can do it through like extensions like Chrome extensions from the browser side. - Yeah, but who pays for Chrome extensions, right? Like barely anybody. So that's not a good place to make money probably. - Yeah, that sucks. - Like Chrome extensions should be 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. - It's like TNTs, you know? - GPDs, yeah. - Like these chat GPDs, they're gonna charge money for it now. You get a ref share, I think for an opening eye. I made a lot of them also. - Well, we'll talk about it. So let's rewind back. It's a pretty cool idea to do 12 startups in 12 months. What's it take to build a thing in 30 days? Like at that time, how hard was that? - I think the hard part is like figuring out what you shouldn't add, right? What you shouldn't build, because you don't have time. So you need to build a landing page. Well, you need to build the product actually, 'cause 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 strap checkout and you get a login link. And when I started, there was only a login link with a hash and that's just a static link. So it's very easy to log in. It's not so safe, you know? What if you link the link? And now I have a real Google login, but that took like a year. So keeping it very scrappy is very important to, 'cause 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 gonna find this? So are you gonna put it on Reddit or something? How are you gonna 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 a subreddit, you know? Like, and you solve that problem, say, sub people, I made this thing that might solve your problem and maybe it's free for now, you know? Like, that could work, you know? But you need to be very, you know, narrowed down what you're building. - Time is limited. I 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. - Yeah. - 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, yes, 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, 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 don't have any money coming in, you don't have a girlfriend, you don't, of course you're depressed, it's logic. But back then, if you're in a moment, you think there's not logic, there's something wrong with me, you know? - Yeah. - 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 moments that they kill themselves, and I don't, I haven't checked like this, the 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 moments back then, a lot. So you're in a strange culture, you look different than everybody, like I was in Asia, like everybody's really nice in Thailand, but you're not part of the culture, you're traveling around. You're hopping from city to city, you don't have a home anymore, you feel disrooted, and you're constantly in the outcast, in that you're different from everybody else. - Yes, exactly, but people treat you like Thailand, people are so nice, but you still feel like outcast, and then I think the digital moments I met then, were all kind of like, it was like shady business, but they were like vigilantes, 'cause it was a new thing. And like one guy was selling illegal drugs, it was American guy was selling illegal drugs for your UPS to Americans, you know, on this website. They were like a lot of drop shippers doing shady stuff. There's a lot of things going on there, and they didn't look like very balanced people. They didn't look like people I wanted to hang with, you know? So I also felt outcast from other foreigners in Thailand, other digital nomads, and I was like, man, I made a big mistake, and then I went back to Holland, and then I got even more depressed. - You said digital nomads, what is digital nomads? What is that way of life? What is the philosophy there? And the history of the movement? - I struck upon it on the accident, 'cause I was like, I'm gonna graduate university, and then I'm gonna need to get out of here. I'll fly to Asia, 'cause I've been before in Asia. I started in Korea in 2009, like study exchange. I was like, Asia's 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 for $150 per month rent, for like a private room, pretty good. So I struck upon this on the accident. I was like, okay, there's other people on laptops working on their startup of working remotely. Back then, nobody worked remotely, but they worked on their businesses, right? And they would, you know, live in like Colombia, or Thailand, or Vietnam, or Bali. They would live kind of like in more cheap places, and it looked like a very adventurous life. Like you travel around, you build your business, there's no pressure from like your home society, right? Like you're American, so you get pressure from 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 this pressure, you can kind of feel like you're free. You're kind of, there's nobody telling you what to do. But that's also why you start feeling like you go crazy, 'cause you are free, you're detached from anything, and anybody, you're detached from your culture, you're detached from the culture, probably in, 'cause you're staying very short. I think Franz Kafka said, I'm free, therefore I'm lost. Man, that's so true, yeah, it's exactly the point. 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? So you're saying they were doing shady stuff at that time? For me, you know, 'cause I was more like a developer, I wanted to make startups kind of, and it was like, there was like drugs, being shipped to America, like diet pills and stuff, like non-FDA proof stuff, you know? And they would like let, there was no like effort. They were like, they would say with beers, they would laugh about like all the dodgy shit kind of they're doing, you know? That part of it, kind of vibe, you know? Like kind of sleazy e-com vibe. I'm not saying all e-com is 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 and Dubai, these people, you know? Yes. E-com, like oh, it probably got a drop ship. Yeah. And you'll make $100 million a month. Those people was this shit. And I was like, this is not my people. Yeah. I don't, I mean, there's nothing wrong with any of those individual phones, but there's a foundation that's not quite ethical. And what is that? I don't know what that is. But yeah, I get you. 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 like startups. And that was my thing. I would read Hacker News, you know? Like why culminator? And they were making cool stuff. So I wanted to make cool stuff. I mean, that's a pretty cool way of life. Just if you romanticize it for a moment. It's very romantic, man. It's very, it's colorful, you know? Like if I think about the memories. What is 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 can 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. We've like, we've Andre, my best friends. We're still my best friend. And we would, another friend. And we would work until like the morning when the sun came up. Because at night, the co-working space was silent, you know? There was nobody else. And I would wake up like 6 p.m. or 5 p.m. I would drive to the co-working space on a motorbike. I would buy like 30 hot lattes from a cafe. How many? 30. Because there was like, there was like six people coming. But we didn't know. Sometimes people would come in. And we would say three, zero, 30. Yeah, nice. And we would drink like four per person or something, you know? Yeah. Man, it's Bali. I don't know if they were powerful lattes, you know? But there were lattes. And we would put it in plastic bag. And I would drive there. And all the coffee was like falling, you know, ever. And then we'd go and go upstairs and have these coffees here. And we'd work all night. We'd play like techno music. And everybody would just work in there. 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, you know, 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 saw 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 a hotel and do the same thing. And again, and again, and again. And it was this locking in 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. Or more like, like in the show, right? Not like this. You 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. So you don't like drawing bass music? Probably not. That's too fast. I mean, for working as a, I have to play with it. It's like you can actually like, I can adjust my level of anxiety. It must be a better word than anxiety. It's like a productive anxiety that I like, whatever it 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 locked in and combined with caffeine, you know, you go deep, you know. And I think you balance on this edge of anxiety because this caffeine is also hitting your anxiety. And you want to be on the edge of anxiety with this techno running. Sometimes it gets too much to stop the techno, stop the music, it's like, but those are good memories, you know, and also like travel memories, like you go from city to city. And it feels like, it's kind of like jet set life. Like it feels very beautiful. Like you're, you're seeing a lot of cool cities and what's your favorite place, do you remember? Do you visit it? 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 there. Everything's cheap. Yeah, good. Well, Bangkok is going to 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. - Problem counts. - I love Brazil also. My girlfriend is Brazilian, but I do not just because of that, but I like Brazil. The problem still is the safety issue, you know? 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, right? - Yeah. - Yeah, I mean, that's true. - But it's not true in Europe. From Europe is much more, that's true. - That's true, that's true. - You're right, you're right. It's more averaged out. - Yeah, I like it when there's strong neighborhoods. When you'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 cities in the United States like that. - Yeah. - I like that. And you're saying Europe is more like that. - But you don't feel scared? - Well, I don't. - Well, you do. - I like 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 that. like they go to like the 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, it's very European of you. Like, that's a whole nother conversation. So you, you quoted Freya Stark quote to awake and quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. Yeah, do you remember time you're walking in a strange town and felt like that? We're talking about small towns or big towns or 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 data. No, it's like called nomadlist.com and there was a community. So it was like 30,000 other digital nomads because I was feeling lonely. So I built this website and I stopped feeling lonely. Like I started making organizing meetups and making friends. And it was very common. People would say they would wake up and they would forget where they are. Like for the first half minute and I had to look outside like where am I, which country? 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 Vaga bones travel thing, you know? Like it's behind me, I think I don't like not 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 when you see like that. It's like great. And it's even when you're doing some basic travel, like go to San Francisco or something like that. 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 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. The 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 get you 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 Lex Freeman door knob. That one I know how much incredible design work has gone into. It's a really interesting doors and door knobs. 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 forks 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, especially 10 years ago, nobody knew about this. Like we chance all these apps that they already had before we had them, these everything apps. Like now Elon's trying to make X this everything app, like we chat the same thing. Like in an easier talent, you have one app that you can order food, 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, airports are horrible. Airplanes are not comfortable either. There's a lot of problems you start seeing just getting out of your house, you know. But also you can, I mean, in a digital world, you can just go into different communities and see what can be improved by this. Yes, in that. Yeah, yeah. What specifically is your process of generating ideas? Do like do idea dumps? Do you have a document where you just keep writing? Yeah, you used to have like a, because when I wasn't making money, I was trying to like make this list of ideas to see like, so I need to build, I was thinking statistically already like I need to build all these things and one of these will work out probably, you know, so I need to have a lot of things to try. And I did that right now. I think like because I already have money, I can do more things based on technology. So for example, AI, when I found out about when stable diffusion came or chat GPT and stuff, all this thing, all these things were like, I didn't start working with them because I had a problem. I had no problems. But I was very curious about technology. And I was like playing with it and figuring out like, first, just playing with it and then you find something like, okay, this generates, a stable fusion generates houses very beautiful and interiors, 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. And usually it doesn't work. And that's very common with, with startups, I think they, they have tech, but actually people don't need to tech, right? So can you actually explain, it'd be cool to talk about some of the stuff you created. Can you explain this photo AI dot com? 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 as you want anywhere in any clothes, facial expressions like happy or sad or poses, all this stuff. So how does it, how does it work? So this is a, you send me a link to a gallery of ones that I'm making, which is 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, we'll take like one minute photos. What are you using for the hosting for the compute? Replicates. 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 taken a, I'm presuming you just loaded in a few pictures from the internet. Yeah. So I went to Google images, tucked in Lex Friedman. I added like 10 or 20 images. You can open them in the gallery and you can use your cursor to, yeah. So some don't look like you. So the hidden misrate is like, I don't know, let's say like 50, 50 or something. But when I was watching your tweets, like it's been getting better and better and better. It was very bad at 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. Man, but that's the problem with these models because, no, we need to talk about this because the models of diffusion. Yeah. So the photorealistic models that are like fine tunes, 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 and 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 people were training on porn and I would try them and they would be very photorealistic. They would have bodies that actually made sense like body anatomy. But if you look at the photorealistic models that people use now, still, they're still core of porn there, like of naked people. So I need to prompt out the naked and everyone needs to do this with AI startups of imaging. You need to prompt out the naked stuff. You need to put a, you know, naked, you have to keep reminding the model to put those on the thing. Yeah, don't put naked because it's very risky. I have Google Vision that checks every photo before it's shown to the user to like check. Like a nipple detector. Oh, it's after we did that detector because you get the journalists get very angry if they, you know, there was a journalist a thing that would got angry that used this and was like, oh, it made me it showed like a nipple because Google Vision didn't detect it. So there's like these 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 a, I'm a, I'm a little bit disturbed assuming on the cat if you want like, like, yeah, this is a very sad cut. It doesn't have a nose. But this is a man, but this is the problem with AI startups 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'm going Austin. Do you think I'll know? Yeah, Austin, you know, 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 man. this end of my career. Or the beginning, it depends. We can send you a portion of notification when your photos are done. Yeah, I cool. Oh, wow. So this whole interface you've built. Yeah, this is really well done. So jcury. I still use jcury. Yes, still after the day, you're not the only one the entire of the web. Yeah, this PHP, the stack. It's been jcury. Yeah, 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. I mean, seven percent. It's because of WordPress, right? Because the blog is a. That's true. Yeah. That's true. I'm seeing a revival now. People are getting sick of frameworks. Like all the JavaScript frameworks are so like what are called like wieldy? Like they're so it's takes so much work to just maintain this code. And then it updates to a new version. You need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works. Yeah. And can you actually just speak to that stack? You build all your websites, app startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML. Yeah. JavaScript with jcury, PHP and that's cool. Like I'm so that that's a really simple stack. And you get stuff done really fast with that. Can you just speak to the philosophy behind that? I think it's accidental because that's the thing I knew. Like I knew PHP, I knew HTML 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 it for me to really learn Node.js or or Flask or this kind of the, 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 development. If you want to get a job and there's like, you know, people making stuff like startups. If you want to be entrepreneur, probably you should maybe shoot. 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 it's 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 there's frameworks now that raise money. They raise a lot of money, like they raise 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. So there's obviously a monetary incentive here. 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 it kind of destroys the information out there about learning to code because they pay YouTubers, they pay influencers, developing influencers is 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 PHP, jQuery, 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 PHP thing works and I don't really optimizing for anything just works. And I never understood like why, like I understand there's new technologies that are better and this should be improvement. But I'm very suspicious of money, just like lobbying. There's money in this developer framework scene. There's hundreds of millions that goes to ads or influencers or whatever. It can't all go to developers. You don't need so many developers for a framework and it's open source to make a lot of more money on these startups. So that's a really good perspective. But in addition to that 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. Yeah. 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? 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. It could be true. 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 question the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push software engineers towards frameworks, towards complex, super complicated software engineering approaches that stretch out the time it takes to actually build a 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 your benchmark is like people building stuff that actually gets done for society, if you want to save time, we should probably use technologies. It's simple. It's pragmatic. That's like that works. That's not overly complicated. It doesn't make your life like a living hell. And use a framework when it's obviously solves a problem, a direct problem. Of course. Yeah, of course. I'm not saying you should code without a framework. You should use whatever you want. But yeah, I think it's suspicious. And I think it's suspicious. When I talk about on the Twitter, there's this army comes out. This is these framework armies. Yeah. Man, something my gut tells me. I want to ask the framework army what have they built this week? It's the Elon question. What did you do this week? Again, did you make money with this? You know, did you charge users? Is it a real business? And yeah. So going back to the cowboy. First of all, everybody looked like you, right? But some do every aspect of this is pretty incredible. I'm also just looking at the interface is really well done. So this is all just jQuery. And yeah, this is really well done. So like, 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 generative AI stuff. And so you're thinking, okay, how can I build cool stuff with this? Yeah. So 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, a 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 repost 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 artists names to make like a pic also kind of style and stuff. And I was trying to see like what is a good at is 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.org. And it generated like they called like house porn that I want. 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. Countings look much better. That's really really well done. Wow. And it also generates 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. That's really well done. 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 house is 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 it was really good interior. I pivoted to interiorai.com where I tried to like upload first-genered interior designs and then I tried to do like there was a new technology called image to image where you can input the 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, nice. So I would upload a photo of my interior where I lived and I would ask like changes into like a 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, nobody's doing that yet. So I launched this and it was successful and made like in a week, made 10k, 20k a month and now still makes like 40k, 50k a month and it's been like two years. So then I was like, how can I improve this interior design? I need to start learning fine tuning, fine tuning is where you have existing AI model and to fine tune it on the specific goal you wanted to do. So I would find really beautiful interior design, make a gallery and train a new model that was very good in interior design and it worked and I used that 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 very cheesy medieval warrior or all this stuff. So I was like, this is another startup. So now I did avatar AI dot me, I couldn't get it dot com and this was, yeah, avatar AI dot me. Well, now it's forwards to photo because it pivoted, 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 and then big, this is very interesting, the big VC companies like Lanza, which are much better at iOS and stuff than me. I didn't have iOS app. They quickly build the iOS app that does the same in their fun technology and it's all open technology. So it's good. 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, uh, no, it was a little bit like sad because all my products would work out and I never had like real fierce competition. And 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 algorithms to their feature. They had the users. They do push notifications to everybody. We have these avatars. Yeah. 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 quickly realized it wasn't my thing because it was so cheesy. It was like, kids, 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. This avatars. Um, 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, 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, yeah, it's really incredible. That journey is really incredible. Let's go to the beginning of photo AI though, because I remember seeing a lot of really hilarious photos. I think you were using yourself as a case study, right? Yeah. So, what, there's a tweet here sold $100,000 in AI-generated avatars. And it's a lot. Like, it's a lot for anybody. It's a lot for me. Like a 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, it's like the me hacking on it. Oh, I see. So that. Okay. So October 26, 2022, I trained in a mail model on my face. Because my eyes are quite far apart, I learned when I did YouTube, I would put like a photo of like my DJ photo, you know, my, make sure, and people would say I'd look like a hammer head shark. It was like a top comment. So then I realized my eyes are far apart. Yeah. The internet helps you. Yeah. Absolutely. How you look, you know? Boy. Do I love them? Well, what is, is this wait, it's water from the waterfall, but the water falls 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. 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 are uploaded. How many photos did you use? Only these. I will try more up to date pics later. These are the, these are the only photos you uploaded. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Okay. So like, you were learning all this super quickly. What, what, what are some like interesting details you 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. I think it's cropped. It's like a cropped by the layout, but they're, they're square photos, so they're 512 mm-hmm. Because that's the diffusion, but nevertheless, not great capture of the face, like, it's not, it's not like a collection of several hundred photos that are like. Exactly. I would imagine that too when I started. I was like, oh, this must be like some 3D scan technology, right? Yeah. So I think the cool thing, whether I, it trains the concept of you. So it's literally like learning, just like any AI model learns, it learns how you look. So I did this and then I was getting so much, I was getting DMs. Like telegram messages, like, how can I do the same thing? I want these photos. My girlfriend wants these photos. So I was like, okay, this is obviously a business. But I didn't have time to code it, make a whole like app about it. So I made a HTML page, registered the domain name. And this was not even, it was a striped payment link, which means you have a liturant link to stripe to pay, but there's no code in the back. So all you know is you have customers that paid money. And I added like some type form link, so type form is a site where you can create like your own input form, like Google forms. So they would get an email with a link to the type form, or actually just a link after the checkout. And they could upload their photos. So enter the email, upload the photos and I launched it and I was like, here, first still, there's 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, right? So the first was the type form and they uploaded through the type form and then you were like, that image is downloaded. Did you write a script to export? No, it's download images myself as a zip file to unzip the zip file and you unzipped it. Yeah, unzipped one, but yes. And then I'm, no, 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 here's your, here's your avatar. And they liked it. They were like, wow, it's amazing. You emailed them with your personal email. They 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, and he's like, yeah, amazing app, great work. So it's like, this is different in normal reaction, you know, it's Bill Gates, isn't it? And I was saying, just like sure, let's pick GDPR, you know, like privacy, you're being regulation, you know, it's sure anything. But I was very, I was like, wow, and but this shows like, so you make something and then if it takes off very fast, you're like, it's validated, you know, you're like, here's something that people really want. But then also thought, this is a 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 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 and say, yeah, maybe in the future, we're looking at it right now. I'm like, what are you talking about, like, you just took all my money, you know, and they're smart. Well, they're not that smart. because you also have a large platform, and a lot of people respect you, so you can literally come out and say that. - Yeah, 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 platform. So we replicated one of those platforms, and I started DMing the CEO, say, can you please create, it's called Dream Booth, this fine tuning of yourself. Can you add this to your site? 'Cause I need this 'cause I'm being price-ghosted. And he said, no, because it takes too long to run, takes half an hour to run, and we don't have the GPUs for it. I said, please, please, please. And then after a week, we're doing it, we're launching this. And then this company became, it was like not very famous company. It became very famous with this stuff, because suddenly everybody was like, oh, we can build similar apps, like AlphaTar apps and every startup, then in AlphaTar apps and everybody started using replicates for it. And it was from these early DMs with like the CEO, like Ben Furish, very nice guy. And he was like, they never price-ghosted 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 it. 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. 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 two ML, you know? Like you would understand, 'cause you're in the ML world. I wouldn't understand. That was 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 already. But is there some tricks to fine tuning to like the collection of photos that are provided? Like how do you like? Yes, it means so many hacks. The hacks, yeah. It's like honored hacks to make it work. What is, what's, what is my secret nine? 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, well, man, it's a lot of things. People don't know how they look. So, yeah, they generate photos of 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 how you look. Yeah, that's hilarious. I mean, I've got one of the least pleasant activities in my existence is having to listen to my voice and look at my face. So I get to like really, really have to sort of come into terms with the reality of how I look and how I sound. And everybody and, but people often don't, right? Like, really? You have a distorted view of the perspective. I know that like, I would, if I would make a selfie, how I think I look that I, that's nice. Other people think that's not nice. But then they make a photo of me. I'm like, that's super ugly. And then I 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, all this kind of stuff. And a lot of us, this is dark aspect of psychology. We focus on some small flaws. Yeah. This is what I hate plastic surgery, for example. People try to remove the flaws when the flaws are the thing that makes you interesting and attractive. I learned from the hammerhead shark eyes. This stuff about you that looks ugly to you. And it's probably, that what makes you original, makes you nice and people like it about you. 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 is attractive. Yes, right. Confidence is attractive. But yes, understanding what makes you beautiful. It's the breaking of symmetry. It 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 be 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 knew better that we're training mostly the face here. But then I started losing resemblance of the body. Because some people are skinny, some are muscular, whatever. So you want to have that too. So now I mix full body photos in the training with face photos, face crops. And it's all automatic. And I know that other people, they use, again, AI models to detect what are the best photos in this training set and then train on those. But it's all about training data. And it'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 how to get good data, how to give good data to fine, 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 your face to be the concept of strength and everything else to be diverse, like different. So diverse lighting as well, diverse everything. - Yeah, outside, inside. But there's no like, this is a problem. There's no like manual for this. And nobody knew, we were all just, especially two years ago, we were all hacking, trying to test anything. Anything you can think of. And it's frustrating. It's one of the most frustrating and also fun and challenging things to do because with AI, because it's a black box. And like Carpati, I think, says this. Like we didn't really know how this thing works, but it does something. But nobody really knows why, right? Like we can't look into the model of an LLM. Like what is actually in there? We just know it's like a 3D matrix of numbers, right? So it's very frustrating because some things you, 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 improve things. - I mean, there's a whole field now of mechanistic interpretability that studies that tries to figure out how it tries to break thing apart and understand how it works. But there's also the data outside and the actual consumer facing product side or figuring out how you get it to generate anything that's beautiful or interesting or naturalistic, all that kind of stuff. And you're at the forefront of figuring that out about the human face. And humans really care about the human face. - They're very vain. Like me, you know, like I wanna look good in your pocket, 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 don't know shit about photography. I basically used your approach for photography. I like Google, how do you take photographs? - Yeah. (laughs) - 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. - I know this. - And you have to have like the lenses and I talk to a guy, an expert of shaping the sound in a room, okay? 'Cause I was thinking, I'm gonna do a podcast studio, whatever, I should probably like treat, do a sound treatment on the room. And like when he showed up and analyzed the room, he thought everything I was doing was horrible. And that's when I realized like, you know what, I don't need experts in my life. - I think it's not a house. - I think Google, I mean I said thank you. Thank you very much. - Thank you for your tips. - I just felt like there is, to 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 all float the problem onto them, but to gain wisdom from their perspective. Even if their perspective is ultimately when 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. - PHP. - PHP studio. Like I have 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 like one of the top podcasts in the world and you get millions of views and it works. And the people that spend so much money on optimizing for the best sound, for the best studio, they get like 300 views, you know? So what is this about? This is about that either you do the 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. - Focus on stuff that matters. - Yeah, and I think this is very common, they call it gear acquisition syndrome. Like guests, like people in any industry do this. They just buy all the stuff. There was a meme recently, like what's the name for the guy that buys all the stuff before he even started doing the hobby, right? Marketing, you know, marketing does that to people they wanna buy this stuff. But like man, you can make a Hollywood movie on an iPhone, you know? If the content is good enough, it. And it would probably be original because you would be using an iPhone for it, you know? So that said, so the reason I brought that up with photography, there is wisdom from people. 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 darkness, move it around in 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. For example, that's a small use case, but for me, that's, I suppose it's an important use case because 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. Yeah, 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 all that stuff. And you should probably do it yourself, like you can use photo yeah, but it's even more fun if you do it yourself. So you train the models, you can learn about like control net, control net is where, for example, your photos in your podcast are usually like from the angle, right? So you can create a control net face pose that's always like this. So every model, every photo you generate uses this control net pose, for example, I think it would 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. 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 inputs. It's amazing. So this for sure, a lot of stuff you can do, what's your advice for people in general and how to learn all the state of the art AI tools available, like you mentioned, new models coming out all the time, 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 today? 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 talk about 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 are so much turmoil on Twitter. Yeah. Like politics and stuff. There's battles going on. It's like a war zone and it's nice to just go into this happy place to where people are building stuff. Yeah, 100%. I like Twitter for that most, like building stuff, like seeing other, because it inspires you to build. And it's, it's just fun to see other people share what they are discovering and then you're like, okay, I'm going to make something 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 models. And when you have something that kind of, you manually enter stuff, you set the parameters, something that works, you can, you can make a app out of it or a 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 increase the step count of generating a photo or changing the sampler, like a scheduler, like you have DPM, two cars, all these things, I don't know anything about that. I know that you can choose them and generate an image and they have different resulting images. But I didn't know which one was, were better. So I would do it myself, test it. But I was like, why don't I test on these users because I have a million photos generated anyway. So on like 10% of the 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 AB test and you test for significance and stuff, which parameters were better and which were worse. So you started to figure out which models are actually working well. 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 it themselves. And I told 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 parameter, the 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 point opic came out as stable diffusion excel came out, all these new versions. And they were all worse. And so the core scene of people are still using 1.5 because it's like, it's also not like what he called neutered, 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 happened because they couldn't make money. And yeah. So they gave it, it's very interesting, they gave us this open source model that everybody uses. They raised like hundreds of millions of dollars, they didn't make any money with it, they're not a lot. They did an amazing job and now everybody uses open source model for free. And they did, you know, it's amazing, like it's amazing, you're not even using the latest one. No, and the strange thing is that this company raised hundreds of millions, but the people that are benefiting it from it are really small, like people like me will 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 they're using the open source model. So it's kind of like this framework, but then they didn't, you know, bribe enough influence to use it. And they didn't charge money for the platform, you know? Okay. So back to your book and the ideas, what did you get to the first step? Nothing ideas. So you had no book and you filling it up, how do you know when ideas are a good one? Like what? You have this just flood of ideas. How do you pick the one that you actually try to build? Man, mostly you don't know. Like mostly I choose the ones that are most viable for me to build. Like I cannot build a space company now, right? It would be quite challenging, but I can build something to actually write down like space company. No, I think asteroid mining would be very cool because like you go to an asteroid, you take some stuff from there, you bring it back, you sell it. You know, it's, but then you need to do it and you can hire someone to launch the thing. So all you need is like the robot that goes to the asteroid, you know, and the robotics is interesting. Like I want to also learn robotics. So maybe that could be, I think both the asteroid mining and the robotics. Yeah. Together. You're like, no, exactly this is this is the, we do this not because it's easy, but because we thought it would be easy. This me with this me with asteroid mining, exactly. That's why I should do this. It's not nomadlist.com. No, it's not. It's not. It's asteroid mining. You have to like build stuff. You have to, it 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 rocket. Oh, you use something like space to get out the space to send your, your, you know, this dog robot or whatever. So is there actually exists a notebook where you wrote down asteroid mining? No, I used, back then used Trello Trello, but now I don't really, I used Telegram. I rather than like save messages and I have like idea, I read it down to you yourself on Telegram. You know, like, because you use WhatsApp, right? I think. So you have like message to yourself. I think also, yeah. So you talk to yourself on Telegram. Yeah. Use like a notepad. It's not forget stuff. And then I pin it. I love hope. Like you're not using super complicated systems or whatever, you know, people use Obsidian now. There's a lot of these. Yeah. And we have systems for note taking, you're not your notepad, you're notepad.dexee guy. 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 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 in my life? Like I could just write it as a message to myself and it's good enough, you know? Speaking of ideas, you shared a tweet explaining why the first idea sometimes might be a brilliant idea. The reason for this, you think is the first idea submerges from your subconscious and was actually. 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. I mean like emerges. I wrote it wrong because I don't know, I'm not native English, but it emerges from your subconscious, right? It comes from the like a water. It's just subconscious in here is boiling and then when it's ready, it's like, second microwave comes out and there you have your idea. You think you have ideas like that? Yeah, all the time. Harmsons. 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 with the boil more. Yeah. And it's like a soup of ideas that's cooking. It's a hundred percent. This is how my brain works and I think most people, but it's also about the timing. Sometimes you have to send it back. Not just because you're not ready, but the world is not ready. Yes. So many times like startups are too early with their idea. Yeah, 100 percent. 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 wish to make money. So there's this long line of robotics companies that have tried their big dreams and they failed. Yeah. Like Boston Dynamics. I still don't know what they're doing, but they always upload YouTube videos and it's amazing. But I feel like a lot of these companies don't have a, it's like a solution, look for a problem for now, you know. Military obviously is useless. But like, and 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 VR. Like it's really cool. Appalachian Pro is very cool. It doesn't really solve something for me yet. And that's kind of the tech looking for a solution, right? But one day 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 a parent. You can type on a computer. But did they become a parent like immediately? Back then, they also had like this thing. We don't need these computers. They're like a hype. And it also went like in kind of like, ways. Yeah. But the hype is the thing that allowed the thing to proliferate sufficiently to where people's minds would start opening up to it a little bit, the possibility of it. Right now, for example, with the robotics, there's very few robots in the homes of people. Exactly. Yeah. The robots that are there are Rumba sort of vacuum cleaners or their Amazon Alexa. Yeah. Or dishwasher. I mean, essentially a robot. Yes. But the intelligence is very limited, I guess, is one way we can summarize all of them, except Alexa, which is pretty intelligent, but is limited with the kind of ways it interacts with you. That's just one example. 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 guess sometimes wonder like what might what I was meant to do. If you have these plans for your life, you have these dreams. I mean, I meant to build robots. Okay. Me personally. Maybe. Maybe. That's a sense of habit. It could be other things. Hilarious enough be the thing I was meant to be is to talk to people. Yeah. Which is weird because I always was anxious about talking to people. It's like really? Yeah. I'm scared of this. I was scared. Yeah. Exactly. It's just anxiety throughout social interaction in general. I'm an introvert that hides from the world. So yeah, it's really strange. Yeah, but that's also kind of life. Like life brings you to it's very hard to super intently kind of choose what you're going to do with your life. It's more like surfing. You're surfing the waves. You go in the ocean. You see where you end up, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And there's universe has a kind of sense of humor. Yeah. I guess you have to just yeah, allow yourself to be carried away by the waves. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Have you felt that way in your life? Yeah. All the time. Like yeah. That's like, I think that's the best way to live your life. So a lot, whatever to happen. Like do you know what you're doing the next few years? Is it possible that it'll be completely like changed? Possibly. I think relationships, like you want to hold relationships, right? You want to hold your girlfriend. You want to become wife and all this 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 are you going to 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, it's kind of Buddhist. You know, you need to like lose control that it lose and then things will happen. Like when you do mushrooms, when you do drugs, like psychedelic drugs, the people that start that are like control freaks get bad trips, right? Because you need to let go. Like, I'm pretty controlled freak actually. And when I did mushrooms when I was 17, I, I was very good and at the end, it wasn't so good because I tried to control. It was like, ah, now it's going too much. You know, now I need to let stop. Bro, you can't stop. You need to go true with it, you know? And so I think it's a good metaphor for life. I think that's, you know, a very tranquil way to lead your life. Yeah, actually when I took ayahuasca, that lesson is deeply within me already that you can't control anything. I think I probably learned that the most in 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 ayahuasca experience or any psychedelic you've ever had. Some of that could be with my biology, my genetics, whatever, but some of it was just not trying to control it. Yeah, just surf the way. For sure. I think most stress in life comes from trying to control. So once you have the idea, step two, build. How do you think about building the thing once you have the idea? I think you should build with the technology that you know. So for example, um, nomad lists, which is like this website I made to figure out the best things to live and work as digital nomads. Uh, it wasn't a website. It launched as a Google spreadsheet. So it was a public Google spreadsheet. Anybody could edit. And I was like, I'm collecting like cities where we can live as the nomads with the internet speed, the cost of living, um, 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 um, 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. It was very crowdsourced. And then I made that into a website. So figure out like what technology can use that you already know. So if you cannot code, you can use a spreadsheet. If you cannot, um, use a spreadsheet like whatever you can always use a, for example, a website generated like weeks or somewhere square space, right? Like you don't need to code to build a startup. All you need is a idea for a product, um, build something like a landing page or something, um, put a stripe button on there and then make it. Um, and if you can code use the language that you'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 is not actually, it's not the most important of a business when you start on a business. The important thing is that you validate that there's a market, that there's a product that people want to pay for. Um, so use whatever you can use. And if you cannot code use, you know, spreadsheets, landing page generators, whatever. Yeah. And in the crowdsourcing, um, it's fascinating. Uh, it's cool. It's cool when a lot of people start using it, you get to learn so fast. Yeah. Uh, 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 like, and, and uh, 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, uh, sheets, new tabs. And he just exploded. And, uh, one of the things that I really enjoyed is there's very few trolls. Um, because actually other people would delete the trolls. There would be like this weird, more, like, uh, they, they want like to protect the thing. It's an immune system that's inherent to the thing that comes to society, you know, in the 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 the bottom, I mean, but that kind of crowdsourcing element is really powerful. And if you can create a product that, uh, used that as a, uh, to its 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 with one sort of way to talk about it is, uh, through you building, uh, hood maps. Yeah. So you've, you did an awesome thing, which is document yourself building the thing and doing so on 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 column 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 in Amsterdam or didn't grew up, I lived there in university I knew that the center is like in Europe the centers are always tourist areas. So they're super busy They're not very authentic 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 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 And I thought this could be like an app where you can have like a Google maps and you put colors over it You have like areas that are like color code like red is tourist 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 to the cool spots. So just use the color color. Yeah. Yeah, yeah And I would use a canvas. So I thought like I 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 some of you this is a cool. This is a cool thing People should really check it out 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 It's like 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 So you like you don't know anything about so canvas is away. It's HTML. Yes, HTML five 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 a 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 then I'll put a div on top of it with the colors and I'll do like opacity 50, you know, so it kind of shows So I did that with canvas and then I started drawing 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 We put it in a 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 I'm some 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 just an 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, all the 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 or would they drop pics man It drew like crazy stuff like offensive symbols. I can't mention they would draw penises. I mean, that's that's obviously a guy I 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 a penis on the same man I did it in the snow you know, but the penises did not become a problem because I knew that not everybody would draw a penis and not in the same place So most people would use it fairly So just if I had enough 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 pixel. So yeah, it's just like a poll but in visual format and it works and We didn't week out enough data and and it was like cities that did really well like Los Angeles Mm-hmm 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 Colors. Yeah, it's colors. So it's just like I think you can see there. There's like hipster tourists rich Business there's always a business area, right? 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 Yeah, I mean obviously it's simplified and it's 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 Nice cafes and stuff and man the memes that came from that and I also added up voting So that the tags could be upvotes So the memes that came from that is like amazing like people in Los Angeles with writes crazy stuff It would go viral in all these cities and you can allow allow your location Then we'll probably send you to Austin Okay, so we're looking Oh boy drunk hipsters Airbrow and bros Airbrow and bros hipster girls who do cocaine. I saw a guy in the fish costume get beaten up here. Yep That seems also accurate for pricing on their welding Uh, let me see. Let me make sure this is accurate. Oh, 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 that was six drunk douche bros douche douche douche. I mean, it's very accurate so far Uh, they only let hot people live here That's I think that might be accurate It's like the districts Excess 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 in the 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 download. Mm-hmm. It's from there And that's really really really powerful Single people dog accurate at which point did it go from colors to the actually showing 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're now looking at an image where it's just A sea of pixels that call it 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 Um, 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 liked it better People like the pixel look kind of Yeah, a lot of people use it and it keeps going viral and every time my my maps bill 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, 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 to map box and then had map box for years and then It went viral and I had a bill of $20,000 was like last year Um, 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 um map platform So it's very expensive products and never made any dollar money, but it's very fun, but it's very expensive What do you learn from that so like From that experience because when you leverage somebody else's sort of through the API. Yeah, I mean, I don't think a map Hosting service should cause this much, you know, but uh 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 I tried to do many things to make money with and it's it's uh, it hasn't worked You talked about like possibly doing advertisements on it or somehow yeah, but or people sponsoring it Yeah, well, it's really surprising to me that people don't want to Advertise on it. I think map apps are very hard to like monetize like Google maps also doesn't really make money Like sometimes you see these ads, but I don't think there's a lot of money there Um, you could put like a banner ad but it's kind of ugly and the product is kind of like it's kind of cool It's kind of fun to like subsidize it It's kind of a little bit part of nomenclist like I put it on nomenclist in the cities as well um But I also realized like you don't need to monetize everything like some products are just cool and You know, it's like it's cool to have who maps 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. That's true And so hold another puzzle and I'm surprised to figure out how to make money off of it I'm surprised maps don't make money, but you're right. It's it's hard to make money because there's there's a lot of compute required to actually bring it to life And also, where do you put the ad, right? Like, if you have a website, you can put like an ad box or you can do like a product placement or something, but you talk about a map app that, where 90% of the interface is a map. So what are you gonna do? You're gonna like, it's hard to figure out where is this, yeah, and people don't wanna pay for it. - No, exactly, 'cause if you make people pay for it, you lose 90% of the user base, and you lose the crowdsource data. So it's not fun anymore, it stops being accurate, right? So you kinda, they pay for it by crowdsourcing the data, but then, yeah, it's fine, you know, it doesn't make money, but it's cool. But that said, 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 nomads there, and I was like, okay, this seems like a cool thing to do, like working on your laptop in a different country, kind of travel around. But back then, the internet everywhere was very slow. So the internet was fast, and for example, Holland or United States, but in a lot of parts in 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 or whatever and travel, and but we needed like fast internet. So I was like, let's, you know, crowdsource this information with spreadsheets. And I also needed to know the cost of living 'cause I didn't have a lot of money. I had $500 a month. So I had to find a place where like the rent was like, you know, $200 from offers, and we had, you know, some money that I could actually rent something. And there was no mad list, and it still runs. It's not, I think it's now almost 10 years. - So it's just a describe how it works. Like, yeah, I'm looking at Chiang Mai here. There's a total score, it's ranked number two. - Yeah, that's like a number score. - 4.82, like by members, but it's looking at the internet. In this case, it's fast, fun, temperature, humidity, air quality, safety, food safety, crime, racism, or lack of crime, lack of racism, educational level, power grid, vulnerability to climate change, income level. - It's a little much, you know, English, it's awesome. It's awesome, walkability. - And keep getting stuff. - 'Cause for certain groups of people, certain things really matter. And this is really cool, happiness I'd love to ask about that. That life, free Wi-Fi, AC, female friendly, freedom of speech. - And not so good in Thailand, you know? - Values derived from national statistics, my foot. - Yeah, I like how that one is. - I need to do it because the data sets are usually national, they're not on city level, right? So I don't know about the freedom of speech between Bangkok or Chiang Mai. I know they're in Thailand. - I mean, this is really fascinating. So this is for city, is basically rating all the different things that matter to you and internet. And this is all cross-sourced. - Well, so started cross-sourced, but then I realized that you can download more accurate data sets from like public source, like World Bank. They have a lot of public data sets, United Nations, and you can download a lot of data there, which you can freely use. Like I started getting cross-sourced data, where for example, people from India, they really love India, and they would submit the best scores for everything in India. And not just like one person, but like a lot of people, they would love to pump India. And I'm like, I love India too, you know, but that's not valid data. So you started getting discrepancies in the data between where people were from and stuff. So I started speaking to data sets, and now it's mostly data sets, but one thing that's still cross-sourced 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 of 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 1,800 remote workers in Austin now, which eight plus members checked in, members who will be here soon and go. Yeah, so we have meetups, so people organize their own meetups, and we have about, I think like, 30 per month, so it's like one meetup a day. And I don't do anything, they organize themselves. So I just, it's 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. - Cons of Austin is too expensive, very sweating, human, not difficult to make friends. - Difficult to make friends, interesting, right? I didn't know that. - Difficult to make friends. - I'm with the salt crowds, but mostly it's pros. - Yeah, Austin's 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 places, like the United States, is that it depends per area, right? So if you get like city level data or nation level data, it's like Brazil is the worst, because the range in like safe and wealthy and not safe is like huge. So you can't say many things about Brazil. - So once I actually show up to say, how do you figure out what area, like where to get fast internet? For example, like for me, it's consistently a struggle to figure out what hotels with fast wifi, for example, like a place, 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 for podcasting purposes, where I can find a place with a table that's quiet. - Right. - That's not easy. - Construction sounds? - All kinds of sounds. You get to learn about all the sources of sounds in the world, and also like the quality of the room, because the more, the empty of the room, and like if it's just walls without any curtains or any of this kind of stuff, then there's echoes in the room. Anyway, but you figure out that a lot of hotels don't have tables. They don't have like normal. - It's weird desk, right? - Yeah, they have it. It's not a center table. And if you want to get a nicer hotel, where it's more spacious and so on, they usually have these boutique fancy-looking, modernist tables. They don't-- - Yeah, that's too designing. - These two design, they're not real tables. - Why don't you get a key up? - Buy a key up. - Yeah, before you arrive, you order a key up. Like, no, my students, they get desks. - I feel like you should be able to show up to a place and have the desk. It's not, unless you stay there for a long time, just the entire assembly, all that. There being B is so unreliable, it's the ranging quality that you get 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-- - Fake photos, man. - If I could have the kind of data you have on nomad list for hotels. - Yeah, man. - And I feel like you can make a lot of money on that too. - Yeah, the booking fees, I feel it, right? I thought about this idea, 'cause we have the same problem. Like, I go to hotels and there's specific ones that are very good and I know now the chains and stuff. But even if you go to some chains are very bad in a specific city and very good in other cities. - And each individual hotel has a lot of kinds of rooms. - Yeah, like, you, someone more expensive, some are cheaper and so on. But you can get the details of what's in the room, like what's the actual layout of the room, what is the view of the room? - I feel like as a hotel, you can win a lot. So first you create a service that allows you to have like high resolution data about a hotel. Then one hotel signs up for that. I would 100% use that website to look for a hotel instead of the crappy alternatives that don't give any information. And I feel like there'll be this pressure for all the hotels that join that site and you can make a shit ton of money 'cause hotels make a lot of money. - I think it's true, but the problem is with these hotels, like it's same with airline industry. Why does every airline website suck? When you try book flights? It's like very strange. Like why doesn't it have to suck? Obviously there's competition here. Why doesn't the best website win? - What's the explanation for that? - Man, I thought about this for years. So I think it's like, I have to book the flight anyway. Like I know there's a route that they take and I need to book for example Qatar Airlines and I need to get through this process. So the, and with 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 super high luxury, it affects the actual booking, right? I don't know. I think that's a good, interesting theory. I think that must be a different theory. My, my theory will be that great engineers, like great software engineers are not allowed to make changes. Yeah, basically like there's some kind of bureaucracy. There's way too many managers, there's a lot of bureaucracy and great engineers show up to try to work there and they, they're not allowed to really make any contributions than they leave. And so you have a lot of mediocre software engineers that are not really interested in improving any other thing. And like literally they would like to improve the stuff but the bureaucracy of the place plus all the bosses, all the higher people are not technical people probably. They don't know much about what web dev they don't know much about programming so they just don't give any respect. Like you have to give the freedom and the respect to great engineers as they try to do great things. That feels like an explanation. Like if you were a great programmer, would you want to work at America Airlines or? No, no, I'm torn on that because I actually, as somebody who lost program would love to work at America Airlines. So I can make the thing better. Yeah, but I would work that just to fix it for myself, you know? Yeah, for yourself. And then you just know how much suffering you're alleviated. I'm much frustrated. 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're making their life just so much better. But there must be an explanation. That's to do with managers and bureaucracies. I don't. I think it's money. Do you know booking.com? Sure. It's the biggest booking website in the world. It's Dutch, actually. And they have teams, because my friend worked there. They have teams for a specific part of the website, like 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 tests for 24 hours. They go to sleep, they wake up next day, they come to the office, and they see, okay, this performed better. This website has become a monster, but it's the most revenue generating hotel booking website in the world. 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. Not every company, but, you know, if they're optimizing. It's a public company. If they're optimizing for money. But you can optimize for money by disrupting, like making a way better. Yeah, but this always starts. They start with disrupting, like booking will start at the start of 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 not in many places are better. They're nicer than Uber's, right? So it's like the circle. I think some of it is also just. It's hard to have ultra competent engineers. Yeah. Like, Stripe seems like a trivial thing. But it's hard to pull off. Yeah. Why was it so hard for Amazon to have buy with one click? Which I think is a genius idea. Yeah. Make buying easier. Like, make it as frictional 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 for a 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. Yes. And I would just want it to quit life for a brief moment there. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm happy to form stays in Google Chrome now when someone goes wrong. So Google somebody had Google improved society with that, right? Yeah. And one of the challenges to Google is to have the freedom to do that. They don't anymore. There's a bunch of bureaucracy. Yeah. There's so many brilliant people there. Yeah. But it just moves slowly. Yeah. And I wonder why that is. Maybe that's the natural way of a company. But you have people like Elon who rolls in and just fires most of the folks and always operate. They push the company to operate as a startup. People in words are really 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. Yeah. And you need entrepreneurial mentality in a company to come up with any way to use and do it better. So 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 amount of stuff. So you're a good person to ask like what? How do you learn? How do you learn quickly and effectively and just the stuff you need? You did just by way of example, you did a 30 days learning session on 3D. Yeah. Will you document yourself giving yourself only 30 days to learn everything you can about? Yeah. I tried to learn virtual reality because I was like, this was like same as AI. It came up suddenly like 2016 to 2017 with I think HTC five, this big VR glasses before Appolvation Pro. And so I was like, oh, this is going to be big. So I need to learn this. So I know, I know nothing about 3D. I installed like, I think unity and like blender and stuff, and I started learning all the stuff. Because I thought this was like a new, you know, nascent technology that was going to be big. And if I had the skills for it, I could use this to build stuff. And so I think learning for me is like it. I think learning is so fun because people always ask me like, how do I, how do you learn to code? Like should I learn to code? And I'm like, I don't know like I'm every day I'm learning this kind of cliche, but every day I'm learning new stuff. So every day I'm searching on Google or asking out chat GPT, how to do this thing? How to do this thing? Every day I'm getting better at my skill. So you never stop learning. So the whole concept of like, how do you learn? Well, you never answer where do you want to be? Do you want to know a little bit? Do you want to know a lot? Do you want to do it for your whole life or? So I think taking action is the best step to learn. So making things. Like you know nothing. Just start making things. Okay. So like how to make a website? Search how to make a website. And now that you ask chat GPT, how do I make a website? Where do I start? It generates codes for you, right? Copy the code, put it in a file, save it, open it in Google Chrome or whatever. You have a website. And then you start tweaking with it and you start. Okay. How do I add a button? How do I add AI features, right? Like nowadays. So it's like by taking action you can learn stuff much faster than reading books or. Like I'm already 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 platform with. Tell us that weeks are square spaces, what I said. Yeah. Learning page. What do I, how do I say if I want to programming it? Program it myself. Design your website, create essential pages. Yeah. Even tells you to launch it, right? Like start launch your website. Cool. Why do you do that? Yeah, but this is literate. Like it's, this is. If you want to make a website. This is the basic Google Analytics. But you can't make no mad list with this way. You can. With wicks. Like with. Ah, no. You can, you can get pretty far. You can get pretty far. These websites are pretty advanced. Like only there's a grid of images, right? Yeah. That are clickable. That 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 podcast is good. Work the resource systematically. Practice calling regularly for 30, 60 minutes a day. Consistency, ski joint programming communities like Reddit. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty good. Yeah. It's pretty good. So I 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 of 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. Yeah. 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. There was a girl who did 160. Websites and 160 days of some little mini websites. Yeah. And. And she learned to code that way. So I think it's good to set yourself challenges, you know. Like don't. You can go through some coding bootcamp, but I don't think they actually work. I think it's better to do like for me, out to deduct, like self learning. And setting yourself like challenges and just. Getting in. 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 it. 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, oh, 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. You're like, and then just try it. And then. And then there's a dopamine rush of like, ooh, it works. Man, it's amazing. And it's amazing. And it's on YouTube and stuff. People can watch it. And it's amazing when things work. It's just like amazing that you. I look very not. I don't look far ahead. So I only look. Okay. What's the next problem to solve? And then the next problem. And at the end, you have a whole app or a website or thing, you know. But I think most people look way too far ahead. You know, they look. It's like this poster again. Like you shouldn't. You don't know how hard it's going to be. So you should only look like for the next thing. The next little challenge, the next step. And then see where you end up. And assume it's going to be easy. Yeah, exactly. Be naive about it. Because it's. You're going to have very difficult problems. A lot of the big problems won't be even tick. We'll be like public, right? Like maybe people don't like your website. Like. You will get canceled for a website, for example. Like a lot of things can happen. What's it like building in public? Like you do. Like openly, we're just iterating quickly and you're getting 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. So, man, I think haters are actually good because I think a lot of haters have good points. stepping away from the emotion of like, your website sucks because blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're like, okay, just remove this, your website sucks because personally, you know, what did he say, why did he didn't not like it? And then he figured out, okay, he didn't like it 'cause the signup was difficult or something, or it wasn't the data. They say, no, this data's not accurate or something, right? Okay, I need to improve the quality of the 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 something, you're on the internet just shouting crazy stuff. It's like most of Twitter, you know, or the half Twitter. So you have to take it with Grange Salt. Yeah, man, you need to grow a very thick skin like on Twitter, on X, like people say, but I'm new to a lot of people. Like I found out I'm new to the already 15,000 people. Recently I checked. So in 10 years, I'm new to 15,000 people. So it's like, that's one by one manual. Yeah, so 1500 people per year. And I don't like to block 'cause then they get angry, they make a screenshot and they say, ah, you blocked me. So I just mute and it disappear and it's amazing. So you mentioned Reddit. So Hoodmaps, that make it to the front page of Reddit? Yeah, yeah, I did, yeah, yeah, I did. It was amazing. And my server almost went down. And I was checking like Google Analytics, it was like 5,000 people on the website or something crazy. And it was at night and it was amazing. I've, man, I think nowadays honestly, TikTok, YouTube Reels, Instagram Reels, a lot of apps get very big from people making TikTok videos about it. So let's say you make your own app. You can make a video for yourself. Like, oh, I made this app. This is how it works blah, blah. 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, man, I got like $20,000 extra per month or something from a TikTok, from one TikTok video. Like it made a photo eye by you or somebody else. By some random guy. So there's all these AI influences that they write about. They show AI apps and then they ask money later, like when a video goes viral, all I can do it again and send me $4,000 or something. I'm like, okay, I did that, for example. But it works. Like TikTok is a very big platform for user acquisition, yeah. And organic, like the best user acquisition I think is organic. You don't need to buy ads. You probably don't have money when you start to buy ads. So use organic or write a banger tweet, right? That's can make an app take off as well. Well, I mean, yeah, fundamentally create cool stuff. I have just a little bit of a following enough to like, 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 'cause they own X and a lot of platforms. 'Cause 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 1,000 people and on and on. So if the thing is good, it will rise anyway. It doesn't matter if you have half a million followers or a thousand followers are honored. What's your philosophy of monetizing? How to make money from the thing you build? Yeah, so a lot of stars, they do like free users. So you could sign up and you could use an app for free, which is, it never worked for me well because I think free users generally don't convert. And I think if you have VC funding, it makes sense to get free users because you can spend your funding on ads and you can get like millions of people come in predictably how much they convert and give them like a free trial whatever and then they sign up. But you need to have that flow worked out so well for you to make it work that you need like, it's very difficult. I think it's best to start and just start asking people for money in the beginning. So show your app, like what are you doing in a landing page? Like make a demo or whatever video. And if you want to use it, pay me money. Pay $10, $20, $3. I would ask more than $10 per month. Like Netflix, like $10 per month, but Netflix is a giant company that can, you know, they can afford to make it so cheap, relatively cheap. If you're an individual, like an indie hacker, like you are making your own app, you need to make like at least $30 or more on a user to make it worthy for you. You need to make money, you know? - And it builds the community of people that actually really care about the product. - Also, yeah, making a community, like making a Discord is very normal now. Every AI app has a Discord and you have the developers and the users together in like a Discord and they talk about, they ask for features they build together. It's very normal now. And you need to imagine like if you're starting out, getting a thousand users is quite difficult, getting a thousand pages is quite difficult. And if you charge them like $30, you have 3DK a month. That's a lot of money. That's enough to like live a good life. - Yeah, live a pretty good life. I mean, 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 to keep the costs very low. I don't hire people. I try to negotiate with like AI vendors now. Like can you make a cheaper, you know? Which is, I discovered this. You can just email companies and say, can you give me a 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 need a Discord or I kind of need to like, you don't need to be asked about it. Say, you know, I kind of need a Discord or I need to go maybe to another company. Or maybe like a discount, like a year and a half. And they 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, then it helps also. - And there's love and good vibes that you put out into the world. Like you're actually legitimately trying to build cool stuff. So a lot of companies probably won't associate with you because you're trying to do. - Yeah, it's like a secret hack. But I think even without a secret hack, they give it a person. It depends how much discount they will give, you know? They will maybe give more. But you know, that's why you should shit post on Twitter. So you get, you know, discounts maybe. - Yeah, yeah. But and also the, when it's crowdsourced, I mean, paying does prevent spam or help prevent spam. - Also, yeah. - It gives you high quality users. - High quality users. - Free users are, sir, but they're horrible. Like it's just like millions of people, especially if AI starves, you get a lot of abuse. So you get millions of people from anywhere, just abusing your app, just hacking it and whatever. - Like there's something on the internet, you mentioned like 4chan discovered hood maps. - Yeah. - But I love 4chan. I don't love 4chan, but you know what I mean? Like they're so crazy, especially back then. Like that's, it's kind of funny what they do, you know? - I actually, what is it? There's new documentary on Netflix, anti-social network or something like that. That was really, what's fascinating. - Just 4chan, just the, you know, the spirit of the thing, 4chan and agent. - People misunderstand 4chan. - It's so much about freedom. And also like the humor involved in fucking with the system and fucking with the man. - That's it. - It's just anti-system. - But for fun, the dark aspect of it is, you're having fun, you're doing anti-system stuff, but like the Nazis always show up. And somehow, it starts 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 4chan for fun. And they would post like crazy offensive stuff. And this was just to scare off people. So it showed to other people say, "Hey, do you know this internet website 4chan? Just check it out." And they'd be, what the fuck is that? I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. That's to scare you away. But actually when you go through a scroll, there's like deep conversations. - Yes. - And 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's, I think it was never, man, I'm not a 4chan, but like I, it was always about provoking. It's just, both of a Arthur's, you know? - But the, the provoking in the case of hoodmaps or something like this can damage the, a good thing. Like, you know, a little poison in a town is always good. It's like the 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 a, I add like an NSFW word list. They would say like bad words. So when they would write like a bad words, they would get forwarded to YouTube, which was like a video, was like a very relaxing video that kind of a's a mar with like glowing jelly streaming like this to relax them, you know? Or cheese melting on the toes. - Cheese melting nice. - Yeah. - I like it. - Yeah. - But actually a lot of stuff, I didn't realize how much originated in Forchan in terms of memes. I didn't, Rick Roll. I didn't understand. I didn't know that Rick Roll originated in Forchan. Like there's so many memes. Like most of the memes that you think they get-- - The word Roll, I think comes from Forchan. Like not the word Roll, but like in this case, in the meme use, like you would get like roll doubles 'cause every, there was like post IDs on Forchan. So they were, they were kind of like random. So if I get doubles, like this happens for something. So you'd get like two, two. Anyways, like a betting market kind of on these doubles on these post IDs, so much funny stuff. - Yeah. I mean, that's the internet that's purist. But yeah, again, the dark stuff kind of seeps in. - Yeah. - And you, it's nice to keep the dark stuff to like some low amount. It's nice to have a bit of noise in the darkness, but not too much. - Yeah. - And but again, like you have to pay attention to that with, I mean, I guess spam in general, you have to fight that with no mad list. How do you fight spam? - Man, I use GPT-4 now. It's amazing. So I have like user input, I have reviews. People can review cities. And 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 ask like, is this a, you know, is this a good review? Like is it offensive? Is it racist or some stuff? And then since we messed up Telegram, When it rejects reviews and I check it and it's, man, it's so on point. Automated. Yes. And it's so accurate. It understands double meanings. I have GPT-4 running on the chat community. It's a chat community of 10,000 people and they're chatting and they start fighting with each other. And I used to have human moderates was very good, but they would start fighting the human moderator like this guy is biased or something. Now, I have GPT-4 and it's really, really, really, really good. It understands humor and it understands like, like you could say something bad, but it's kind of like a joke and it's kind of not like offensive so much, so it shouldn't be deleted. Right? It understands that. You know? I would love to have a GPT-4 based filter of like, of different kinds of for like X. Yeah. I thought this week like, I tweeted like a fact check, like you can click fact check and 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 replies like, oh, you said this wrong and then the whole tweet kind of doesn't make sense anymore. So I asked GPT-4 to fact check a lot of stuff. So fact check is a tough one, but it would be interesting to sort of rate the thing based on how well thought out it is and how well argued it is, that that seems more doable. That seems like more doable, like it seems like a GPT thing because that's less about the truth and it's more about the rigor of the thing. Exactly. And you can ask that. You can ask in the prompt like, I don't know, like for example, do you think, create like a ranking score of X, Twitter replies, where should this supposed be? If we rank on like, I don't know, integrity, reality, like fundamental deepness or something, interestness, and it would give you that pretty good score probably. I mean Elon can do this with crock, right? He can start doing, using that to check replies because the replies actually is like chaos. Yeah. And actually the ranking of the replies does make any sense. Doesn't make sense. And I would like to sort in different kinds of ways. Yeah. And you get too many replies now. If you have a lot of followers, I get too many replies. I don't see everything. And I 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 that's positive or 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 followers because they're probably more engaged in a platform, right? Oh no. I don't even care about how many followers. If you're a 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. 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 we have to do as little work as possible for it to keep running indefinitely. Can you like explain your philosophy there? What do you mean by automate? Yeah. So the general theory of starters would be that when when it starts like you start making money, you start hiring people to do stuff, right? To stuff that you like marketing, for example, stuff that you would do in the beginning yourself. And whatever community management and organizing meetups for an omelist, for example, that 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 automate these things as much as possible. And this can literally be like for an omelist, it's literally like a, it's not the different other starters. It's like a webpage where you can organize your own meetup, set a schedule, a date, whatever. You can see how many nomads will be there at that date, so you know there will be actually enough nomads to meet up, right? And then when it's done, it sends a tweet out on the nomadist 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 not, it's so obvious to make this automatic. Why would you, why would you have somebody organize this? It makes more sense to automate it. And this with most of my things, like I figure out like how to do it with code. And I think especially now with AI, like you can automate so much more stuff than before, because AI understands things so well. Like before, I would use if statements, right? Now you ask GPT, you put something in the 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. I mean, that step of automation is difficult to figure out how to, is you're basically delegating everything to code. Yeah. 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, crime jobs? Yes. A lot of crime jobs. A lot of crime jobs. Yeah. It's like, I literally, I log into the server and I do like pseudo-crontab -e and then I go into the editor and I write like hourly. And then I write PHP, you know, do this thing.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 or something like this or emails somebody managing the thing if something goes wrong? I have these web pages I make. They are called like health checks, it's like healthcheck.php. 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 in, for example, Amsterdam. Okay. It's a number. It's like 27 point megabits. So it's accurate number. Okay. Check. Good. And 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 you sign up broke. Okay. Check. Um, optime roba dot 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, 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. Because 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 the last people's like 100 point zero zero percent up time. 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. This feels good to look at. It's just be like, okay, yeah, all right, we're okay. Everything's okay. Yeah. And 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, you know, it's 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, you feel so good. And I'm like, okay, obviously it's not going to 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. Automate like everything. Yeah. They've also just a large set of crime jobs. A lot of the publications in this podcast is done all, everything's just unautomatically so I'll clip up all the, all the all this kind of stuff. Yeah. But it would be nice to automate even more like translation, all this kind of stuff would be nice to automate. Yeah. You have to, 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, the JavaScript sends the JavaScript error to the server and then it sends to my telegram from all my websites. So you get like a message. So I get like a uncought variable error, whatever blah, 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 that's really cool. But this is the same stuff people, they pay like very big SaaS companies like new relic for right, like to manage the stuff. So you can do that too. You can use off the shelf. I like to build myself as 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 in this. That's what you would see for you know, like give your daily day and then ask what parts you to automate. Well, one of the things I would love to automate more is my consumption and social media. Yeah. And both the output and the input. Matt, that's very interesting. I think there's some startups that do that, like they they summarize the cool shit happening on Twitter, you know, like with AI, I think the guy called SWYX or something, he does like a newsletter. 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, all this kind of stuff. It's just like, okay, can I can you summarize the internet from it for today? Summarizeinath.com. Yeah,.com. Yeah. Cause I feel like, you know, that's what I'm talking about. like it pulls in which time. But also I don't like the effect that has some days on my psyche. - 'Cause like haters or just general content for general. - I just general. - No, no, just general. Like for example, TikTok is a good example of that for me. I sometimes just feel dumber after I use TikTok. I just feel like 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 whatnot. And then you're like, time and it's later like, I feel way dumber and I don't really want to do much for the rest of the day. - Like girlfriend's sad. 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 X sometimes for me too. It's, I think I'm probably naturally gravitating towards the drama. - Yeah. - Art will. - Yeah, and so with following ad people, especially ad people that only post technical content has been really good 'cause then I just look at them and then I go down rabbit holes of like, learning new papers that have been published or good repos or just any kind of cool demonstration of stuff and the kind of things that they retweet. And that's the rabbit hole I go in. I'm learning and I'm inspired, all that kind of stuff. It's been tough, it's been tough to control. You need to like manage your platforms, you know? I have a mute board list as well. So I mute like politic stuff 'cause 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 health, right? That's like a problem, like it should be doing that for you. - It's some level of automation. - That would be interesting. I wish I could access X and Instagram through API easier. - You need to spend $42,000 a month, which my friends do. - Yeah, you can do that. - No, but still even if you do that, that you're not getting, I mean, there's limitations that don't make it easy to do like automate. 'Cause the thing that they're trying to limit like abuse or for you to steal all the data from the app to then train an LLM or something like this. But if I just want to like figure out ways to automate my interaction with the X system or with with Instagram, they don't make that easy. But I would love to sort of automate that and explore different ways to leverage LLMs to control the content I consume. And I mean, be published that maybe they themselves can see how that could be used to improve their system. So, but there's not enough access. - Yeah, you could screen cap your phone, right? Can we have an app that watches your screen with you? - You could, yeah. - But I don't really know like what it would do. Like maybe it's gonna hide stuff before you see it, you know? - I have Chrome extensions, I write a lot of Chrome extensions that hide parts of different pages and so on. Like 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 that I have a mode for X where I hide most of everything. So like there's no, it's same with YouTube. - Same, I have this extension. - Like I wrote my own 'cause it's easier 'cause it keeps changing. It's like, it's not easy to keep it dynamically changing. But they're really good at like getting you to be distracted and like starting. - Related accounts. - Related installs. - I'm like, I don't want to relate it. - 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 'cause my attention span is too short for YouTube, but I have this extension to like YouTube on hook, which like it hides all the related stuff. I can just see the video and it's amazing. And but sometimes I need to like, like I need to search a video how to do something. And then I go to YouTube and I had these YouTube shorts. These YouTube shorts are like, they're like algorithmally designed to just make you tap them. And then I tap and then I'm like five minutes later with this face like, and 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 yeah, it's very, it's very difficult. - I love how we're actually highlighting all kinds of interesting problems that all could be solved through the startup. Okay, so what about the exit? When and how to exit? - Man, you shouldn't ask me 'cause I never sold my company. - And if you've never, 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 there, like manipulation and due diligence and then changing the valuation. Like people change the valuation after. So they, a lot of people string you on to acquire you and then it takes like six months. It's like classic. It takes six to 12 months. They want to see everything. They want to see your stripe and your code and whatever. And then in the end they'll change the price to lower 'cause you're already so invested. So it's like a negotiation tactic, right? I'm like, no, I don't want to sell, right? And the problem with my companies is like they make 90% profit margin. So the multiple, companies get sold with multiples, kind of multiples of profit or revenue and often the multiples like three times. Three times or four times or five times revenue or profit. So in my case, they're all automated. So I might as well wait three years and I get the same money as when I sell and then I can still sell the same company. You know what I mean? I can still sell 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 the crowdsource content, but the people themselves. Like the user base. - Yeah. - Well, no with this, it's a community, yeah. So I could see that being extremely valuable. - Yeah. - Surprise. - The moment this is like, it's like my babies. Like my first part I get to cough and I don't really know if I want to sell it. It's like something you would be nice when you're old to just still work on this. You know, it's like a, it has like a mission which is like people should travel anywhere and they can work from anywhere and they can meet different cultures and that's a good way to make the world get better. If you go to China, live in China, you'll learn that they're nice people and a lot of stuff you hear about China's propaganda, a lot of stuff is true as well. But it's more, you know, you learn a lot from traveling and I think that's why it's like a cool product to like not sell AI products. I have less emotional feeling with AI products like photo AI, which I could sell, yeah. - Yeah, the thing you also mentioned is you have to price in the fact that you're going to miss the company you were in. - And the meaning it gives you, right? This is very famous like depression after start off on a seller company. Like they're like, this was my, this was me. I was like, who am I? And they immediately start building another one. You know, they can never stop. So I think it's good to keep working, you know, until you die, just keep working in cool stuff and you shoot in the retiree, you know, I think retirement's bad, probably. - So you usually build the stuff solo and mostly work solo? - What's the thing behind that? - I think I'm not so good working with other people, not like I'm crazy, but like I don't trust other people. - To clarify, you don't trust other people to do a great job. - Yeah, and I don't want to have like this consensus meeting where we all like, you know, you have like a meeting with three people and then you kind of get this compromise results, which is very European. Like it's very, it's very, it's all in the called Poldo model where you put people in the room and you only let them out when they agree on the compromise, right, in politics. And I don't think, I think it breeds like averageness. You know, you get average idea, average company, average culture. You need to have like a leader or you need to be solo and just do it, you know, do 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 almost never. - So what does it take to be successful when you have more than one? Like how do you build together with Andre? How do you build together with other people? - So he codes, I shit post on Twitter. Like I promoted on Twitter. I, we set like product strategy. Like I said, this should be better, this should be better. But I think you need to have one person coding it. He codes in Ruby, so I cannot do Ruby. I'm in PHP. - See you later. So have you ever coded with another person for prolonged periods of time? - Never in my life. So what do you think is behind that? - I know, it's 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 AI developer Philip, I hired him to do the, 'cause I can't write Python and AI stuff is Python. And I needed to get models to work and replicate and stuff and I needed to improve photo I. And he held me a lot for like 10 months he worked. And man, I was trying Python, working with Numpy and Package Manager and it was too difficult for me to figure this shit out. And I didn't have time. Like I think 10 years ago I would have time to like sit, you know, go do all nighters to figure this stuff out with Python, I don't have the, and I don't have the, it's not my thing. - It's not your thing, it's another programming language. I get it, AI, and you think, got it. Well, like you've never had a developer roll in, look at your PHPJ query code and be, and yes, like you know, like in conversation or you probably talk about yes and basically, all right. - I had for one week understand. - And then it's, because you wanted to rewrite everything in the, No, that's the wrong guy. I know you want to rewrite what he wanted to rewrite the J 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 jazz. I'm like, are you sure if I'm just like kind of you know Like keep jQuery is 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 is 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 who has ever existed. So I look at their code Or I look at the stuff they've created and try to see the genius of their way like you really have to understand people like Really notice them 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 tech ambiguous so they can work with they can learn any tech stack Nick and that's like really few like it's like really top 5% because if you try hard devs like no fence 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 dev and coding I think so sorry I think that's a really important skill for it for developer to roll in and like Understand the musicality the the style and like Empathy's like yeah Empathy right? Yeah, it's the award, 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'd be changed stuff for sure, but And look, Jake, you're crazy. It's crazy. I'm using Jake. We can change that. It's not crazy at all Jake Query is also the beautiful and powerful and PHP is beautiful and powerful especially as you said recently in the in As the versions Evolved it's much more serious programming language now. It's super fast like PHP is really fast now. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy Javascript much faster ruby that really fast now So if speed is something you care about is super fast. Yeah, and like there's gigantic communities of people using those program In 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 going to 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 where like okay, okay, I got it like how here's how he's thinking and now if I want to add Another like a little feature. Definitely need to have emoji 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 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 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 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, so normally it looks kind of clunky like people say the design is kind of like 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 jQuery right like how amazing is jQuery but like you get these cobweys are getting These are there's these cobweys. This is a lot It's a lot, but I'm glad they're all wearing shirts. Anyway, the interface here is just really really nice Like I could tell you know what you're doing and with nomad list Extremely nice the interface. Thank you, man. And that's all you. Yeah, that's everything'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 Finks and design these days is minimalist right right right here But this is a lot of information and it's useful information and it's delivered in a clean way While still stylish and fun to look at so like minimal is designed is about like when you want to convey no information whatsoever and look cool. Yeah, it's very cool. It's pretentious right pretentious or not that 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 it's sexy enough. 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 and I made it so I don't trust my own judgments. No, this is really nice Thank you. 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 some something about the emoji is a really nice memorable like Placeholder for the idea. Yeah, like if it was just text it would actually be overwhelming if you 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 useful 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 a map, which is really tricky. Yeah 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 at Hover over it Now I understand that but like I'm sure there's like how long is 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 at a CSS tradition here or or do days or what was say like see these are all these are rounded now Yeah, if you wanted to like round is probably the better way But if if you wanted to be rectangular like sharp corners, what would you do usually? So I go to the index at 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 hop and then sense of 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 So I'm like famous for this because I'm too lazy to set up like a staging server on my laptop every time So nowadays I just deploy to production. Yeah, and um, it's man I'm gonna be canceled for this, you know, but it works very well for me because I have a lot of I have like php lint and jace lint 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 sends to get up get up sends a web to my server web server pulls it Deploy the production and is there was the latency of that from you present in command one second can be one two seconds So you make 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 while 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 Um, we'll 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 think I mean there's I'm sure there's a middle ground But I think that whole thing where there's a phase of like testing and there's the staging and there's a develop like the and then there's like Multiple tables and databases that you use for the state like it's just a mess And there's different teams involved. It's it's no good. I'm like a good funny extreme on the other side, you know But just a little bit safer, but not too much will be great. Yeah, yeah I'm sure that's actually like how X now how they doing rapid improvement exactly more bugs Yeah, I'm playing about like all look he bought this Twitter now that's full of bugs do the shipping stuff like yeah things are happening now and It's a dynamic app now. Yeah, the bugs is actually a sign of a good thing. Yes bugs of the feature because it shows that the team is actually building shit 100% one of the problems is like I see with YouTube There's so much potential to build features, but I just see how long it takes so I've gotten a chance to Interact with many other teams, but one of the teams is MLA multi-language audio. I don't know if you know this, but in YouTube you can have Audio tracks in different languages 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 pain the ass 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 listened to in those different, it changes everything. And YouTube is extremely well positioned to be the leader in this. They got the compute, they got the user base, they have the experience of how to do this. So the multi-language audio should be. - Hyperherty feature, right? - Yeah, that's high priority, like that. And it's a way Google's obsessed with AI right now, they wanna show off that they could be dominant in AI. That's a way for Google to say like, we use AI. Like this is a way to break down the walls that language creates. - The preferred outcome for them is probably their career and not the overall result of the cool product, you know? - I think they're not like selfish or whatever. They wanna do good. There's something about the machine. - The organization, the organizational stuff. - I have stuff that just says. - When I do report bugs and like, becoming as I work with. I get, I talk to a lot of different people on DM and they're all really trying hard to do something. They're all really nice. And I'm the one being kind of asshole 'cause I'm like, guys, I'm talking to 20 people about this for six months. And normally it's happening to say, man, I know, but I'm trying my best. And yeah, so it's systemic. - Yeah. - It requires, again, I don't know if there must be a nice award but like a dictatorial type of top down the CEO rolls in and just says like, for YouTube it's like, MLA, get this done now. This is the highest priority. - I think the company's 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 'cause it's, everything has to be, probably get deployed, has to go to legal. - Well, again, dictatorial. You basically say Steve Jobs did this quite a lot. I've seen a lot of leaders do this, ignore the lawyers, ignore problems, 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. For example, let's say you launch this AI dubbing and there's some legal problems with lawsuits. Okay, so the law changes, there will be appeals, there will be some Supreme Court thing, whatever. And the law changes. So just by shipping it, you change society, you change the legal framework. And by not shipping being scared of the legal framework all the time, like you're not changing things. - Just out of curiosity, what ID do you use? Let's talk about like your whole setup. Given how ultra-productive you are, are they you often program me underwear, slouching in the couch? Is there, does it matter to you in general? Is there like a specific ID use, VS code? - Yeah, VS code, before I used sublime text, I don't think it matters a lot. I think I'm very skeptical of like tools when people think they say it matters, right? I don't think it matters, I think whatever tool you know very well, you can go very fast and like, you know, the shortcuts, for example, ID, you know, like, I love sublime text 'cause I could use like multi cursor, you know, you search something and I could like make mass replaces in a file with the cursor thing and VS code doesn't really have that as well. - It's actually interesting. Sublime is the first editor where I've learned that. And I think they just make that super easy. So like what would that be called? Multi edit, multi cursor edit, thing, whatever. - I'm sure like almost every editor can do that. It's just probably hard to set up. - Yeah. - Yeah, if VS code is not so good, I think, or at least I tried. But I would use that to like process data. Like data sets, for example, in World Bank, I would just multi cursor mass change everything. But yeah, VS code, man, I was bullied into using VS code 'cause 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, well, I'll try it. I got a new MacBook and then 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. It's not so important for me. - Well, you know, the format C reference, huh? - Dude, it was so good. You would install Windows and then after three or six months, it would start breaking and everything was like, it gets slow. Then you would restart, go to dolls, format C. You would delete your hard drive and then install the Windows 95 again. It was so good times. And you would design everything like, now I'm 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 DMACS for many, many years. And I know, you know, I love Lisp, so a lot of the customization is done in Lisp, it's a programming language. It partially was peer pressure, but part of it was realizing like, you need to keep learning stuff. Like, since issue with JQuery, like, I still think I need to learn Node.js, for example. Even though that's not my main thing or even close to the main thing, but I feel like you need to keep learning this stuff. And even if you don't choose to use it long term, you need to give it a chance. So you're understanding of the world expands. - Yeah, you wanna understand the new technological concepts and see if they can benefit you, you know? Do we be stupid not to even try it? - 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 wanna learn it, I wanna, I understand the basics, right? I don't really know where it starts, but would you like, I guess you gotta use your own model, which is like, build the thing using it. - No, man, you're, so I kind of did that. Like, I kind of, like, the stuff I do in jacory is essentially, a lot of it is like, I start rebuilding whatever tech is already out there, not based on that, but just on the accident. 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 the framework from scratch that's your own understanding. - Kind of, yeah, with AJAX calls. But essentially, it's the same thing. Look, I don't have the time. And this is, I think saying you don't have the time is always a lie, 'cause you just don't prioritize it enough. My priority is still like running the businesses and improving that and AI. I think learning AI is much more valuable now than learning 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, you need to know, you need to know it anyway, so. - You gotta learn how to use the weapons of war and then you could be a peacen egg. Yeah, I mean, but you gotta learn it in the same exact way as we were talking about, which is learn by trying to build something with it and actually deploy it. - The frameworks are so complicated and it changed it 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 CSS, like a styling engine. That stuff could probably save me time. - Yeah, but 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 I should probably recode like my personal one page in Laravel or, and even though it might not have almost any dynamic elements, maybe have one dynamic element, but it has to go and to end in that framework, or like, end to end building Node.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, a pass, like a, like, first of all, right? Or, you know, a local kind of those kind of platforms. - I actually kind of just gave myself the idea of like, I kind of just want to build a single web page, like one web page that has, like, one dynamic element, and just do it in every single, like, in a lot of frameworks. Like, just-- - Ah, on the same page. - Same, all the same page, kind of page. - That's a cool part. - Like, on all these frameworks. - Yeah. - You can see the differences. - Yeah. - That's interesting. - It only takes to do it. - Yeah, stopwatching. - I have to figure out, actually, something sufficiently complicated. 'Cause 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 Adlem stuff. - Yeah, maybe some, it doesn't have to be AI alone, but maybe API calling, API call to something. - So, to replicate, for example, and then you have, yeah, that would be a very cool part. - Yeah, yeah. And, like, time it. And also, report on my happiness. - Yeah. - I'm gonna totally do this. - 'Cause nobody benchmarks this. Nobody's benchmarked happiness. They've had it for happiness with frameworks. Nobody's benchmarked the shipping time. - Well, it's just take like a month and do this. How many frameworks are there? There's, how many, how many, there's, there's like five main ways of doing it. So there's like, there's no, there's back and 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 it 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 the canonical way of doing things. So, like, the standard, vanilla, like, you go to the ice cream shop. There's like a million flavors. I want vanilla. If I've never had ice cream. of my life. Can we just like learn about ice cream? Yeah. I want vanilla. Nobody actually sometimes own little name vanilla, but like I want to know what's the basic way. But not like dumb, but like the standard canonical column. Yeah, I want to know the dominant way like the dominant way. Six percent of developers do it like this. Yeah. It's hard to figure that out, you know? That's the problem. Yeah, maybe other ones can help. Maybe you explicitly ask, what is the dominant? They usually know like the dominant. You know, 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. I've never done that, but I thought about it. There would be a very fast way to, you know, take their knowledge. I try these kinds of things. 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. It's like, no, no, no, we're just like exploring together. Okay, show me the cool thing you've tried, which is like, it has to have open-mindedness to like, you know, no JS is not the right way to do web development. It's like one way and there's nothing wrong with the old lamp PHP, jQuery vanilla JavaScript way. It just has this pros and cons. And like, you need to know you can find those people probably. Yeah. Like if you want to learn AI, imagine you have Karpati sitting next to you. Yeah. Like he does his YouTube videos. It's amazing. He can teach it to like a five year old about how to make it. It's 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 his own style and is like, I'm not sure he's for everybody. But for example, five year old, it depends on five year old. Yeah. He's like super technical, but he's amazing, because he's super technical. And he's the only one who can explain stuff in a simple way, which shows his complete genius. Yes. Because if you can explain it 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 you 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. 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. I'm like, wow, I need to switch from Windows. And I had like three screens, you know, like Windows had this whole setup for music production. I had to sell everything. And then I had a MacBook. And I remember opening up this MacBook box like, and it was so beautiful. It was like this aluminum. And then I opened it. I removed the, 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 Mac, which sounds very dogmatic, right? But what great things are you talking about? All the business started working out. Like I started traveling. I started building startups. I started making money. It all started when I switched to Mac. Listen, I kind of, you're making me want to switch to Mac. So I use either use Linux inside Windows with WSL or just Ubuntu Linux, but Windows for most stuff like editing or any like, any other stuff, right? Well, you could use, I guess you could do my stuff there. I wonder if I should switch. What would you miss about Windows? What was the pros and cons? I think the finder is horrible Mac. Like it's like, it's the what is the finder. Oh, you don't know the fine. So there's the windows explorer. Yeah. This is for us amazing. But talking about finder is strange, man. That's like strange things. This is bug where if you, if you send like a test your photo and WhatsApp or Telegram, it just selects the whole folder and you almost accidentally can click enter and you send all your photos or your files to this chat group. Happy to my girlfriend. Just start sending me photo, photo, photo, photo, so finder is very unusual, but it has Linux. Like the whole thing is like it's Unix base, right? So you use the command not all the time, like all the time. And the cool thing is you can run things like Unix, like Debian 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 set, 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 Mac a very good platform for Linux stuff, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Real Ubuntu is like better of course, but yeah. I'm in this weird situation where I'm somewhat of a powered user in Windows and let's say Android and all the much smarter friends I have all using Mac and iPhone. And it's like, if you don't want to go through the peer pressure, you know, it's not peer pressure. It's like 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 their kids. So that's that's not peer pressure. That's just like a strong signal. Yeah, it works for people. Yeah. And the same thing with Mac. It's like, yeah. Like the fun, like I don't see fundamentally, I don't like close systems. So like fundamentally, I like Windows more because there's much more freedom. Same with Android. There's much more freedom. It's much more customizable. But like all the the cool kids, the smart kids are using Mac and iPhone. It's 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 also about the hardware. It's not so much about the software. The hardware is so well-built, right? The keyboard and yeah, but look at the keyboard. I use it. That is pretty cool. That's one word for it. What's your favorite place to work on the couch? Does the couch matter? Is the couch at home or is it any couch? No, any like hotel couch also, like in the room, right? But I used to work like very ergonomically with like a standing desk and everything like perfect, like eye 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 I'm like, what's am I dying? You know, and I'm probably dying. So I want to die in a co-work space. I'm going to go home and die in like, you know, peace and honor. So I close my laptop and I put it in my backpack 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, to get rid of this like, because it was my whole back. And it was because I was working like this all the time. So I started getting like a laptop stand, everything ergonomically correct. But then I started lifting and since then, like it seems like everything gets straightened out. Your posture kind of, you're more straight. And I'd never have RSI anymore, represent injury. I never have tingling anymore, no pains and stuff. So then I started working on sofa and it's great. Like it feels, you're close to the, I sit like, I sit like this. Yeah, legs together and then a pillow and then a laptop. And then I work. Are you like leaning back? I'm kind of like together like legs and then where's the mouse using using? No, so everything is track bed on the macOS on the MacBook. I used to have the Logitech MX mouse, the perfect economic mouse. I used to 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 from. I had all the stuff. But then I realized that having it all condensed in one laptop, it's a six-stage MacBook. So it's quite big, but having a known there is amazing because you're so close to the tools. You're so close to what's happening. Is that working on a car or something? It's like so. Like, man, if you have three screens to look here, look there. You can also neck injury, actually. So it's, I don't know, this, this sounds like you're part of a cult and you're just trying to convince me. But I mean, but it's good to hear that you can be ultra productive on a single screen. That's great. Come on tap. You all talk like when there's all top macros, come on. You switch very fast. So you have like one, the entire screen is taken up by VS Code. Say you're looking at the code and then yeah. And then what like if you deploy like a website, you watch, switch screens, come on tap the Chrome. I used to have this swipe screen. You know, you could do like a different screen. Yeah, spaces. Yeah. I was like, ah, it's too difficult. Let's just put it all 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. - Yeah. - Like on the sides. - Cold, right? - Yeah. - For the cold, you can seal. - No, man, I love it. 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? - Do you like the constraints? - 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. - You really need all the stuff, like, it might slow me down, actually. It's a good way to put it, I'm suspicious of more. Me too. - Yeah. - I'm suspicious of more and all, in all ways. - Because you can defend more, right? You can defend. Yeah, I'm a developer. I make money. I need to get more screens, right? I need to be more efficient. And then you read stuff about, like, mythical man-month where, like, hiring more people slows down a software project that's famous. I think you can use that metaphor maybe for, 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, most beautiful battle stations, desktops, everything. They're not that productive. And it's also, like, kind of fun. Like, it's all from a 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, when are you waking up? Is it a regular time? Super early, super early. - Yeah, so it goes sleep like 2 a.m. Usually somebody that, and, uh, 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, then more like 10. Shower, make coffee. I make coffee like drip coffee, like the V60, you know, the filter. And I boil water and then put the coffee in. And then chill a little bit with my girlfriend and then open laptops, start coding. Check what's going on, like bugs or whatever. How long are you, like how stretches of time are you able to just say behind the computer coding? - So I used to need like really long stretches where I would do like all nighters and stuff to get shit done. But I've gotten trained to like have more interruptions where I can like, 'cause you have to. This life, like there's a lot of distractions. Like your girlfriend asks stuff. People come over or whatever. - Yeah. - 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 that works for me. Yeah, and then you know, cook food and stuff. Like have lunch, steak and chicken. - You eat a bunch of times a day. So you say coffee, what are you doing? - Yeah, so a few hours later, cook foods. We get like locally sourced like meat and stuff and vegetables and cook that. And then second coffee and then go some more. Maybe go outside for lunch. Like you can mix fun stuff, you know? How many hours are you seeing a perfectly productive day are you doing programming? Like if you were like to kill it. Are you doing like all day basically? - You mean like the special days where like girlfriend leaves to like bearers 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 that's chocolate. - Yeah, okay, okay. Let's remove girlfriend from picture, social life from picture. It's just you. - Man, then shit goes crazy. - Okay, like when shit goes crazy. - Okay, now shit goes crazy. - Okay. - So shit you, 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. 2 p.m. 'cause you weren't to bed at 6 a.m. - Yeah, 'cause I was coding. I was finding some new AI shit and I was studying it. And it was amazing. And I cannot sleep 'cause it's too important. We need to stay awake. We need to see all of this. We need to make something now. But that's the times I do make like new stuff more. So I think, I have a friend, he actually books a hotel for like a week to like leave his, and he has a kid too. And his girlfriend has a kid staying out and he goes to another hotel. Sounds a little suspicious right going to the hotel, but all he does is like writing or coding. He's a writer and he needs like this alone time, this silence and I think for this flow state, it's true, you know? I'm better maintaining stuff when there's a lot of disruptions than like creating new stuff. I need this, it's common, it's closed. It's this uninterrupted period of time. So yeah, wake up like 1 p.m. Still coffee, shower, we still shower, you know? And then this code like nonstop. Maybe my friend comes over, he comes over in distraction. - Yeah, he also, Andre, he codes too. So he comes over, we code together, we listen, you know, it starts going back to like the body days, you know? Like co-working days, 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 in the college 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 music are you listening to? - I think like, like, techno, like YouTube techno. There's a channel called HOR with a umlaut, like H, O, like double dot, it's Berlin techno, whatever. It looks like it's, they film in like a toilet with like white tiles and stuff and it's very cool. And they always have like very good, like, kind of industrial, like, - It does, so fast, fast, 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. It's like, it's this transcendental trans. - That's interesting because 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 the techno, if I actually give it a real chance, my brain will get used to it. But like, with noise, what happens, or 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 a brain. 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 disappears. And it goes like, - No. - You can like hold focus on things like really well. It's weird, like you can like really focus on a thing. It doesn't really matter what that is. I think that's what people achieve with like meditation. You can like, my focus on your breath, for example. - And it's normal brown is not like been horrible. - No. - This is normal brown noise. - Yeah. - White noise, I think it's the same. It's like, make noise, white noise, brown noise, I think is what it's like, base here. - Yeah, it's more diffused, more dampened. - Yeah, dampened. - Yeah, Cassida. - No sharp brightness. - Yeah, yeah, Cassida. - And you use the headphones, right? - Yeah, headphones. - Yeah. - Actually like, walk around in life often with brown noise. - Dude, it's like psychopath shit, but it's cool, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. When I murder people, it helps. - It comes out their screams. - Jesus Christ. - Yeah. - I said too much. - And I'm gonna try it with brown noise. - With a murder or with a coating. - Yeah. - For the coating. - Okay, good. Try it, try it. But you have to like, with everything else, you give it a real chance. - Yeah. - I find, I also, like I said, do techno-y type stuff, electronic music on top of the brown noise, but then control the speed. 'Cause the faster it goes, the more anxiety. So if I really need to get shit done, especially with programming, I'll have a beat. - Yeah. - And it's great. - It's cool. - It's cool to play those little tricks in your mind to study yourself. - I usually don't like to have people around. 'Cause 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 coworker space, I would just start talking too much. - Yeah. - Yeah. - So there's social distraction. - Yeah, we would do it in a coworker space. 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 $1. So you would put $1 to say, hey, what's up? So $3, you put in the mug, and then 15 minutes free time, like we can like party, whatever, and then 45 minutes again, I'm working. And that worked. But you need to shut people up, or they, you know? - I think there's a, there's an intimacy in being silent together. Then maybe I'm uncomfortable with, like, but you need to make yourself vulnerable and actually do it. I could put close friends to just sit there and silence for a long period of time, and like doing a thing. - Dude, I watched this video of this podcast. It was like this Buddhism podcast with people meditating, and they were interviewing each other or whatever, and like a podcast, and suddenly after questions like, yeah, yeah. And they were just silent for like three minutes. And then they said, that was amazing. Yeah, that was amazing. And I was like, wow, pretty cool, you know? - Elon's like that, and I really like that. I mean, you'll ask a question, like, I don't know. What's a perfectly productive day for you? Like, I just asked, and you just sit there for like 30 seconds. Thinking. - Yeah, he thinks. Yeah. - That's so cool. I wish I was, I wish I could think more about, but I wanna like, I wanna show you my heart, you know? I wanna show you, go straight from my heart my mouth to like saying the real thing. And the more I think, the more I start like filtering myself right, and I want to just throw it out there immediately. I do that more with team. I think he has a lot of practice in that. I do that as well. And in team setting when you're thinking brainstorming and you allow yourself to just like think in silence. Yeah. Just like because even in meetings, people want to talk. Yeah. It's like, no, you'd think before you speak and just like, it's okay to be silent together. 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? Too much, right? Because normally like two cups of coffee, but on this perfect day, like we go to like four maybe. So we're starting to hit 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 in my life. But it's a, I think it's great for making new stuff. It's amazing. Starting from scratch, creating a new thing. Yes. I think girlfriends should let their guys go away for like two weeks every few, no, every year, at least, you know, maybe every quarter, I don't know. And just sit and make some shits without, you know, they're amazing. But like no, the services just be alone. And then, you know, people can make something very, very amazing. Just wearing cardboard hats in the mountains, like we showed them. Exactly. We can do that. There's a movie about that. We've done laptops. 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, you can do both. It's a different program. 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 really, I'm never tired anymore in the day. And also because of Jim, I'm not tired. I'm tired when I want to, you know, when it's night, I would need to sleep. Yeah. Me, 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, take an advice from the internet in general, because a lot of advice is just a good baseline for the general population. You have to become a student of your own body, of your own self, of how you work. That's, I've done a lot of, like for me, fasting was an interesting one. At least to eat a bunch of meals a day, especially when I was lifting heavy, like because everybody says that you have to eat kind of a lot, you know, multiple meals a day. But I realize I can get much stronger, feel much better if I eat once or twice a day. And me too. Yeah. That's crazy. I never understood this small meal thing. Yeah. It didn't work for me. Well, let me just ask you to 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 the remote? 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, made, like first on nomad list, I made like nomad jobs, like a page. A lot of companies started hiring and 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 it's also fully automated. 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 K with just job posts. And I started like adding crazy upsells like rainbow color. It's job posts. You can add your background image just upsells, man. And you charge $1,000 for an upsell. It was crazy. And all these companies just upsell. So yeah, we want everything. Job posts would cost $3,400 for $4,000. And I was like, this is 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. It 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. It was like a blogosphere. And it was like the honored things challenge. What is that? 100 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, it's just the trend. So I did it. I started like selling stuff, start a throwing way stuff. And I did like MDMA and XC like 2012 kind of. And, uh, after that trip, I felt so different. And I felt like I had to start throwing shit away. Like I 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 on a journey. You need to get out of here. And, um, and that's what the MD made it, I think. Yeah. How hard is it to get down to 100 items? Well, you need to like sell your PC and stuff. So you need to go on eBay and then, man, go on email selling where stuff is embarrassing because you discover society. You just, man, you meet the craziest people. You meet every range from rich to poor. Everybody comes to your house to buy stuff. It's so funny. So interesting. I recommend everybody to 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. It was, it was like the weirdest thing you had to sell. And you had 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 with that. And, uh, 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, we're not getting famous in his or his successful needs to stop doing his music production. Also, we're 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, um, to sell this like camera that we'd make stuff with. And it was a hard goodbye. It was just the camera, but it was like, it felt like, uh, sorry guys, it doesn't work and I need to go, you know, who, uh, who bought it? Do you remember? Was some guy who couldn't possibly understand the journey of it? Yeah. Yeah. He just showed up here. Here's the money. Thanks. Yeah. But it was like, it was like cutting your life. Like, this shit ends now. And now we're gonna do new stuff. And I think it's beautiful. I did that twice in my life. I get away everything, everything, everything. Like, Dante just pants underwear backpack. I think, uh, I think it's important to do. It shows you what's important. Yeah. I think that's what I learned from it. Like, you learned that you can live a very little objects for a little stuff. And, um, but there's a, there's a counter to it. Like, you, you lean more on this, on the stuff, on the services, right? Like, for example, you don't need a car. You use Uber, right? 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. With your backpack. With a backpack. Yeah. There's a kind of freedom to it. There's something about material possessions and having a place and all that that ties you down a little bit. Yeah. 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, you know, build some internet stuff, whatever, bring your laptop. And, uh, it's, it's amazing experience. Five years ago, I was 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 of a university is the networking. You, you, uh, 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 that might not be the best networking in 18 years. No, but it, man, if you're smart about it, you can stay safe. And I met so many weirdos from traveling. You meet this, how travel works. If you really let loose, you meet the craziest people. Yeah. And it's the most interesting people. And it's just I cannot recommend enough. Well, see the thing is that when you're 18, I feel like, depending on your personality, you have to learn both how to be a weirdo and how to be a normie. Like you still have to learn how to fit into society. Like for a person like me, for example, who's always an outcast, like there's always a danger of 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 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 that you start as an outcast, but the more you work on yourself, the less like shit you have, you kind of start becoming more normie because you become more chill with yourself and more happy. And it kind of makes you honest, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. Like the most 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, MacBook, toothbrush, some clothes unaware of socks. You don't need a lot of clothes in Asia because it's hot. So you just wear swim pants, swim shorts, you walk around, flip flops. So very basic t-shirt and go to the laundromat 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 on the wilderness. And then acts like everybody brings an axe. Some people also have a saw. But usually acts does the job. You basically have to, you know, to build a shelter, you have to cut down and cut the trees and make, and like, you know, everything I learned about life and my craft, bro. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice to create those constraints for yourself to understand what matters to you and also how to be in this world. And one of the ways to do 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. He didn't, he didn't stick adaptation very fast. Yeah. But man, if you look at the studies, most people, like, like getting a new car, six months, you know, get a new house, six months, you just feel the same. She's like, wow, she don'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 in. Just, just focus on the thing that's more permanent. Yeah. Like building shit. Yeah. Like people around, you're like, baby, you love nice food, nice experiences, meaningful work. Those things exercise, you know, those things make you happy. I think make me happy for sure. You're at a blog post. Why I'm unreachable. And maybe you should be too. What's your strategy in communicating with people? Yeah. So when I wrote that, I was getting so many DMs as you probably have, you have a million times more. But people were getting angry that I wasn't responding. And I was like, okay, I'll just close down this DMs completely. And people got 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 because you know, like this. And I'm like, I'll explain why I just don't have the time in a day to, you know, answer every question. And also people send you like crazy shit man, like stalkers and like people write like their whole life story for you. And then ask you advice like man, I have no idea. I'm not a therapist. I don't know. 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 human beings, 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 see them. Yeah. I have this problem that I try. I want to try help people and like also like, oh, let's make startups and whatever. And it's I've learned over the years that generally for me, and it sounds maybe bad, right? But like, I help my friend Andre for example, he was, he came up to me in a co-work space. That's how I met him. And he said, I want to learn to code. I want to do startups. How do I do it? I said, okay, let's go install 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 it. 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 who need to push generally, it doesn't happen. You need to have this energy for yourself. Well, they're searching. They're searching. They're trying to figure it out. But oftentimes they're search. If they successfully find what they're looking for, you'll be within. Sounds very like spiritual. 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 for them working on themselves. And like literally, it's a stupid thing, but like googling and doing like, yeah, searching as procrastination. I think sending messages to people is a lot of procrastination. Like, like, how do we become successful podcasts there? Yeah. Bro, just, you know, start, like just go. Yeah. And just go. I would never ask you how to be successful podcasts there. Like, I would just start it. And then I would copy your methods. You know, I would say, oh, this guy's a black background. We probably need this as well. Yeah. Try it. Yeah. Try it. And then you realize it's not about the black background. It's about something else. So you find your voice. Like, keep trying. Exactly. Punitation 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. Yeah. You imitate and then you put your own spin to it, you know, and that's like creative process. That's like literally a 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 breaking down into 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 or something. Yeah. Firefighting. Oh, 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? Yeah. 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 wasted. Yeah. For me, it's been the biggest battle for, for the longest time. It's 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. But some pleasant, extremely unpleasant. We need to fly to an island, you know, make a man cave island where we can just, where we can just coat and for a week, you know, just get shit done, make new projects. Yeah. Yeah. But man, they called me psychopeforties because it says like one hours of sex hugs love, you know? Man, I think it writes something, you know? And they were like, oh, this guy is psychopath. He plans his sex in a specific hour like hugs. Bro, I don't. But you have a counter for hugs. Yeah. Exactly. 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. Don't want to look at that. How many times you see your parents just like, yeah, scary man. That's right. It might be only, you know, a handful more times. You just look at the math of it. If you see him once a year or twice a year, I face time today. 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 then you realize like, well, I haven't really seen him for like three years. So like, how many more times do we have that we see each other? Yeah. Do you believe that like friends just slowly disappear from your life? Like they kind of, your friend group evolves, right? So like, it does, it does. Like you don't want to, there's a problem with Facebook. You get all these old friends from school. Like when you were 10 years old. Yeah. Back with Facebook started. Like, you don't really, you would add friend them. And then you're like, why are we in touch? You can just keep the memories there. You know, like, it's different life now. Yeah. I have, you you know, that might be a guy thing or I don't know. There's certain friends I have that, we don't interact often, but we're still friends. Every time I see them, I think it's because we have a foundation of many shared experiences of many memories. I guess it's like nothing has changed. Like we've been, almost like we've been talking every day, we haven't talked for a year. So 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, it depends, but there's just this network of good human beings that can, I have a real love for them, I can always count on them. If any of them called me in the middle of the night, I'll get rid of a body that I'm there. I like how that's a different definition of friendship, but it's true, it's true friends. You become more and more famous recently, how's that affect you? It's not the reason, because it's a gradual thing, right? It keeps going, and I also don't know why it keeps going. Does that put pressure on you? 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. It's a bit more of a topic to be a little bit more collected. Man, I think the opposite, right? Because the people I follow are interesting because they say whatever they think and they 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. You do podcasts, you ask about life stuff of personality. That's the most interesting part of business or sports. What's behind the sport athlete, behind the entrepreneur. That's interesting stuff. To be human. Yeah. Like I shared a tweet that went too far, but like we were cleaning the toilet because the toilet was clogged. But like it's just real stuff because Jensen and Wong, the envidia guy, he says he started cleaning toilets. That was cool. The tweet is something about the Denny's thing, I forget. Yeah. It was recent. The envidia was started in a Denny diner table and you made it somehow profound. Yeah. This one, this one. The three trillion dollar company was started in a Denny's, an American diner. People need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next billion or trillion dollar company. What's the first and second space? The home office and then in between the island. Yeah. I guess, yeah. The island. Yeah. You need a space to like congregate, man. And I found history on this. So four years ago in the coffee houses of Europe, like the scientific revolution, the enlightenment happened because it 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 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 I understand. But that is to you, a fundamental place to create shares in that natural organic co-working space of a car. Well, for a lot of people, a lot of people have very small homes. And co-working spaces are kind of boring. They're not very, they're private, they're not serendipitous, they're kind of boring. Cafés are amazing because they, random people can come in and ask you, what are you working on there? And not just love those people are also having conversations like they did for as years ago, debates or whatever. And things are happening. And man, I understand the aesthetics of it, like it's like, oh, start a bra, shipping is a bullshit startup, you know? But there's something more there, like there's people actually making stuff, making new companies that the society benefits from, like we're benefiting from Nvidia, I think, as the US GDP, for sure is benefiting from Nvidia, European GDP could benefit if we build more companies. And I feel in Europe, there's this vibe and this, you have to connect things, but not allowing laptops and cafes is kind of like part of the vibe, which is like, yeah, we're not really here to work, we're here to 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, this is what Cafés 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. That's one of the things I liked in Silicon Valley when I was working there is like the cafes. Like, there's a bunch of dreamers that you can make fun of them for like everybody thinks they're going to build a trillion dollar company, but like, yeah, and it's awesome. Not everybody wins. 9% of people will be bullshit, but they're working their ass off. Yeah. And they're doing something. And you need to pass this starter bro like, oh, it started on a level. No, it's not. It's people making cool shit. And this will benefit you because this will create jobs for your country and your region. And I think in Europe, that's a big problem. Like we have a very anti dream big and build shit. Yeah. And this is really inspiring. This has been Twitter 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 list. Yeah. Your mute words fire, calculator, no more Google maker rank. How much is my site project worth climate finder ideas AI? Airlines is still runs, but it doesn't make money. It's like compared to the safety of airlines, because I was nervous to fly. So I was like, let's collect all the data on crashes for all the airplanes. While he's capable, that's awesome. Make village, nomad gear, 3D and virtual reality dev play my inbox. Like you mentioned, there's a lot of stuff. Yeah, man. I'm trying to find some embarrassing tweets. You can go to the highlights tab as all the like, the good shit kind of. There you go. It's just Dubai POV building an AI startup while you're a real influencer. And if people copy this photo now, they change the screenshots, it becomes like a meme. Of course. You know? This is good. And this is how Dubai looks. It's insane. That's beautiful architectural. This is crazy. The story behind this. Yeah. The story behind for sure. So this is about the European economy where like European economy landscape is run by dinosaurs. I studied it so I can produce you with my evidence. 80% of top EU companies were founded before 1950. Only 36% of top US companies were founded before 1950. Yeah. So the median founding of companies in US is something like 1960 and the median, the top companies, right? And the median in Europe is like 1900 or something. So it's here. Here, 1914 and 1963, so there's a 50-year difference, it's a good representation of the very thing you were talking about, the difference in the cultures, entrepreneurial spirit of the peoples. But Europe used to be entrepreneurial. There was companies founded in 1818, 15, 1900. It flipped around 1950 where America took the lead. And I guess my point is like, I hope that Europe gets back to, because I'm European. I hope that Europe gets back to being an entrepreneurial culture where they build big companies again, because right now the, all the old dinosaur companies control the economies, they're lobbying with the government, they're, Europe is also, there's like their infiltrative of the government where they create so much regulation, like I think it's called regulatory capture, right, where it's very hard for a newcomer to join and to enter an industry because there's too much regulation. So actually, regulation is very good for big companies because they can follow it. I can't follow it, right? If I want to start 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 to reason involved, I need to get certificates, licenses. Whereas in America, I can just open my laptop, I can start AI, I started right now. Mostly, you know? What do you think about EAC, effective acceleration at this moment? I mean, you had Beth Jesus on, I love Beth Jesus and he's amazing and if it's EAC is, it's very needed to similarly create a more positive outlook on the future, like, because people, people have been very pessimistic about society, about the future of society, you know, climate change, all this stuff, EAC is like, it's 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, fear mongering and cautiousness and all this kind of stuff, some is okay, some is good, but most of the time should be spent on building and creating and doing so unapologetically. It's a, 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 all the sort of discussions of how things could go wrong with technology and all this kind of stuff. Yeah. It goes to get, look at China. China is now 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 to America in this beginning holds massive problems right. But I think it's very very dangerous for a country or a region like Europe to you get to this point where you're kind of complacent you're kind of comfortable and then you know you can either go this or you can go this way right you're you're from here you go like this and you can go this or this I think you should go this way and I'll go off yeah go off and and I think it's the problem is the the the mind goes you're so EOC I made EOC which is like the European kind of version I made like hoodies and stuff so a lot of people wear like this make Europe great again hats I made it red first but it became too like Trump so now it's more like European blue you know make Europe great again all right okay so you had a incredible life very successful built a lot of cool stuff so what advice would you give to young people about how to do the same man I would listen to like nobody just do what you think 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 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 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 economy and in society for do your own thing you know it's like you know like little villages everybody would sell I would sell bread you would sell meat everybody can do their own little thing you don't need to you know be enormous as you say you you 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 assets you cannot succeed you need to go lean into the to the outcast stuff lean into the being different and and just doing whatever it is that you want to do right you got a whole asset yeah whole assets yeah this was an incredible conversation it was an honor to finally meet you to talk to you and keep doing your thing keep inspiring me and the world with all the cool stuff you're building thank you man thanks for listening to this conversation with Peter levels to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Drew Houston Dropbox cold 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