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 um and it doesn't have enough
resolution or something to to do that well so but i started seeing these these um base models these
fine-tuned models and people would train on porn and i would try them and they would be very
photorealistic they would have bodies that actually made sense like body uh anatomy um
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 with imaging you need to prompt out the naked stuff
you have to keep reminding the model you need to put clothes on yeah don't put naked because it's
very risky i have google vision that checks every photo before it's shown to the user to like check
like a nipple detector because you get the journalists get very angry the following is a
conversation with peter levels also known on x as levels io he is a self-taught developer and
entrepreneur who designed programs shipped and ran over 40 startups many of which are hugely successful
in most cases he did it all by himself while living the digital nomad life in over 40 countries and over
150 cities programming on a laptop while chilling on a couch using vanilla html jquery php and sql light
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 this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check
out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's peter levels you've launched a lot of
companies and built a lot of products as you say most failed but some succeeded what's your philosophy
behind building the startups that you did i think my philosophy is very different than most people
in startups because most people in startups they 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
i make everything i make the logo so for me i'm much more scrappy and and because i don't have funding
like i need to i need to go fast i need to make things fast uh to see if an idea works right i have
an idea in my mind and i build it build like a micro mini startup um and i launch it very quickly like
within you know two weeks or something of building it and i check if there's demand and if people
actually sign up and not just sign up but if people actually pay money right like they need to
take out their credit cards pay me money and then i can see if the idea is validated and most ideas
don't work like as you say must feel so there's this rapid iterative phase where you just build a
prototype that works launch it yeah see if people like it improving it really really quickly to see
if people like it a little bit more enough to pay and all that that that whole rapid process is how you
think of i think it's it's like it's very rapid and it's like um if i compare it to for example google
you know like our big tech companies especially google right now is kind of struggling like they made
like transformers they made all they invented all the ai stuff years ago and they never really shipped
like they could have shipped chat gpt for example i think i heard in 2019 and they never shipped it
because they were so stuck in bureaucracy but they had everything they had the data they had the tech
they had the engineers and they could didn't do it um and it's because these big organizations it's
it's it can make you very slow so being alone by myself on my laptop like you know in my underwear
in a hotel room or something i can ship very fast and i don't need to like i don't need to ask that
legal for like oh can you vouch for this you know i can just go and ship do you always code in your
underwear though your profile picture you're like slouching a couch in your underwear chilling on a
laptop no no but it's i would do wear like shorts a lot and i i usually just wear shorts and no t-shirt
because i'm always too hot like i'm always overheating thank you for showing up not just in your
underwear but yeah wearing shorts and no you know i'm still wearing this for you but thank you um
thank you for dressing up i think it's because i since i go to the gym i'm always too hot what's your
favorite exercise in the gym man overhead press over press like shoulder press yeah okay but it
feels good because you're doing like you do you win because when you what is it i do 60 kilos so
like 120 pounds or something like it's it's my only thing i can do well you know in the gym and you
stand like this and you're like i did it you know like a winner pose yeah victory pose uh i do bench
press squats deadlifts hence the uh the mug yeah talking to my therapist yeah it's a deadlift yeah
because it acts like therapy for me you know yeah yeah it is it's controversial to say like if i say
this on twitter people get angry physical hardship is a kind of therapy yeah i just re-watched uh happy
people a year in the taiga that uh warner herzog film where they document people that are doing
trapping they're essentially just working for survival in the wilderness year-round yeah and there's
a deep happiness to their way of life because they're so busy in it in nature yeah like there's
something about that physical physical yeah toil yeah my dad taught me that my dad always does like
construction in the house like he's always re-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 the house and it's his hobby and
he like he taught me when i'm depressed or something um he says like get a big like what do you
call it like a big uh mountain of sand or something from construction just get a shovel and
uh bring it to the other side and just you know do like physical labor do like hard work and do
something like get set a goal do something and i i kind of did that with startups too yeah construction
is not about the destination man it's about the journey yeah yeah sometimes i wonder people who
are always remodeling their house is it really about the remodeling or no no it's not it's about
the project journey the puzzle of it no he doesn't care about the results well he shows me he's like
it's amazing like yeah it's amazing but um then he wants to go to the next room you know but i think
it's very metaphorical for work because i also i never stop work i go to the next website or i make
a new one right or i make a new startup so i'm always like like to give you something to wake up
in the morning and like you know have coffee and then uh kiss your girlfriend and then you have like
a goal not today i'm 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 um maybe especially as a man also
women but you need you need a hard work you know you need like an endeavor i think how much of the
building that you do is about money how much is it about just a deep internal happiness it's really
about fun because i would because i was doing it when i didn't make money right that's the point so i
was always coding i was always i was making music i made electronic music uh drama based music like 20
years ago and i was always making stuff so i think a creative expression is like a meaningful work
that's so important it's so fun it's so fun to have like a daily challenge where you try to figure
stuff out but the interesting thing is you've built a lot of successful products and you never really
wanted to take it to that level where you scale real big and sell it to a company or something like
this yeah the problem is i don't dictate that right like if more people start using if millions
people suddenly start using it and it becomes big um i'm not gonna say oh stop signing up to my
website and pay me money but i never raised funding for it and i think because i don't like this the
stressful life that comes with it like i have a lot of um founder friends and they tell me secretly like
with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and stuff and they they tell me like next time if
i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it like you because it's more it's more fun it's more indies 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 um i think a lot of people that start startups when they become a ceo they don't
like that job actually but they can't really exit it you know but they like to do the groundwork the
coding so i think that keeps you happy like doing something creative yeah it's interesting how people
are pulled towards that the scale to go really big and you don't have that honest reflection with
yourself like what actually makes you happy because for a lot of great engineers what makes them happy
is the building the the quote-unquote individual contributor like where you're actually still coding
or you're actually still building and they let go of that and then they become unhappy but some of
that is the sacrifice needed to have a impact at scale if you truly believe in a thing you're doing
but like look at elon he's doing things million times bigger than me right and um would i want to
do that i don't know you can't really choose these things right but i really respect that i think elon's
very different from vc founders right vc start it's like software there's a lot of in this world i think
there's a lot of like dodgy finance stuff happening there i think um and i never have like concrete
evidence about it but your gut tells you something's going on with like companies getting sold to
friends and vcs and then they do reciprocity and this shady financial dealings with elon that's not
he's just raising money from investors and he's actually building stuff he needs the money to
build stuff you know hard hardware stuff um and that i really respect you said that there's been a
few low points in your life you've been depressed and the building is one of the ways you you get out
of that but can you talk to that can you take me to that place that time when you were at a low point
so i was in holland and i graduated university and i didn't want to like get a normal job and i was
making some money with youtube because i had this music career and i uploaded my music to youtube and
youtube started paying me like with adsense like two thousand dollars a month two thousand dollars a
month and all my friends got like normal jobs and we stopped hanging out because people would
like in university hang out you know utilities at each other's houses uh you go party but if when
people get jobs they only party like in the weekend and they don't hang anymore in the week because
you need to be at the office and i was like this is not for me i want to do something else and i was
starting getting this like i think it's like saturn return is you know when you're turned 27. it's
like some concept where saturn returns to the same place in the orbit that it was when you're born
i'm learning something some astrology thing you know so many truly special artists died when they
were 27. exactly something with 27 man and it was for me like i started going crazy because i didn't
really see like my future in holland buying a house going living in the suburbs and stuff so i flew
out i went to asia i started digital nomading and did that for a year and then that made me feel
even worse you know because i was like alone um in hotel rooms like looking at the ceiling like what
am i doing with my life like this is uh like i was working on startups and stuff and youtube but
it's like what is the future here you know like uh is this is this something while my friends in
holland were doing really well and with a normal life you know um so 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 a interesting way to deal with
depression you know like it's not like oh let's talk about it it's more like let's go do something
and um and i started doing a project called 12 startups in 12 months where every month i would
make something like a project and i would launch it with stripe so people could pay for it so the
basic format is try to build a thing put online and put stripe to where you can pay money yeah add a
stripe check i'm not sponsored by stripe but add a stripe checkout button is that still like the easiest
way to just like pay for stuff stripe 100 like i think so yeah it's a cool company
they just made it so easy you can just click them yeah and they're really nice like the ceo
patrick is really nice behind the scenes it must be difficult to like actually make that happen
because that used to be a huge problem like merchant just just adding a thing a button where you can
like pay for a thing dude it's dude i know this because when i was it trustworthy 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 um i think it was called world pay so i had to like fill out all these forms and then
i had to fax them to america from holland with my dad's fax um and my dad had to it wasn't my dad's
name and he just signed for this and he started reading these terms and conditions which was like
he's liable for like 100 million in damages and he's like i don't want to sign this i'm like dad come
on i need a merchant account i need to make money on the internet you know and he signed it and we
sent it we faxed it to america and i had a merchant account but then never nobody paid for anything
so that was the problem you know yeah but it's much easier now you can sign up you add some codes
and um yeah so 12 startups in 12 months yeah so what how do you start number one what was that
what like what what were you feeling what were you sitting behind the computer like how much do you
actually know about building stuff at that point i could code a little bit because i did the youtube
channel and i made a website for i would make websites for like the youtube channel it was called
panda mix show and it was like these electronic music mixes like dubstep or drum bass or techno
house i saw one of them had like flash were using flash yeah my album my cd album was using flash yeah
yeah i sold my cd yeah kids flash was flash was cool software this is like the the break like grandpa
you know but flash was yeah and there's what's it called boy i should remember this action script
there's some kind of programming language yeah x script oh yeah it was in flash back then that was the
javascript you know the javascript yeah and i i thought that's gonna that's supposed to be the
dynamic thing that takes over the internet i invested so many hours in learning that steve
jobs killed it steve jobs said flash sucks stop using it and everyone's like okay that guy was
right though right yeah i don't know yeah well it was it was a closed platform i think and
close but this is ironic because apple you know they're not very open right but back then steve was
like this is closed we should not use it and it's a security problems i think which sounded like a cop
out like i just wanted to say that to make it look kind of bad um the flash was cool yeah yeah it was cool for
time yeah it listen animated gifs were cool for a time too yeah they came back in a different way
yeah as a meme though i mean like i i remember when gifs were actually cool not ironically cool yeah like
there's like on the internet you would have like a dancing rabbit or something like this and that was
really exciting you had like the you know lex homepage yeah at least everything was centered yeah and
you had like peter's homepage and the on the construction yeah gif which was like a guy like
with a helmet and the lights it was amazing banners uh yeah that's how before like google adsense you
would have like banners for advertising it was amazing yeah and a lot of links to porn i think yeah
that was where the merchant accounts people would use for people would make money a lot only money made
on the internet then it was like porn or a lot of it yeah it was it was a dark place it's still a dark
place yeah and but there's beauty in the darkness anyway so you were uh you did some basic html yeah
yeah but i had to learn the actual like coding so i uh this was good it was a good good idea to like
every month launch a startup so i could uh learn the codes learn basic stuff and but it was still
very scrappy because i didn't have time to which is on purpose i didn't have time to spend a lot of um
i had a month to do something so i couldn't spend more than a month and i was pretty strict about that
um and i published it as a blog post so people i think i put it on hacker news and people would
check like kind of like oh did you actually you know i felt like accountability because i put it
public that i actually had to do it do you remember the first one you did i think it was
play my inbox because back then my friends we would send we would send like cool it was before
spotify i think we would send like uh 2013 we would send music to each other like youtube links
uh like this is a cool song this is a cool song and it was these giant email threads on gmail
and they were like unnavigatable so i made an app that would log into your gmail get them emails and
find the ones of youtube links and then make like kind of like a gallery of your your songs like
essentially spotify and my friends loved it was it scraping it like what was no it uses like pop or
imap you know it would actually check your email so that like privacy concerns because it would get
all your emails to find youtube links but then i would i wouldn't save anything um but that was
fun it was like and that that first product already would get like pressed like it went on i think like
some tech media and stuff and i was like that's cool like it didn't make money there was no payment
button but it was uh it was actually people using it i think tens of thousands of people used it
that's a great idea i wonder why like why why don't we have that why don't we have things that access
gmail and extract some useful aggregate information yeah yeah you could tell gmail like
don't give me all the emails just give me the ones with youtube links you know or something like that
yeah i mean there is a whole ecosystem of like apps you can build on top of the google yeah
but people don't never do this like they build i've seen a few like boomerang there's a few apps that
are like good but just i wonder what maybe it's not easy to make money i think it's hard to get people
to pay for these like extensions and plugins you know because it's not like a real app so it's not
like people don't value it people vote oh this and a plugin should be free you know when i want to use
a plugin in google sheets or something i'm not going to pay for it it should be free which is but if
you go to a website and you actually okay i need this product i'm going to pay for this because it's
a real product so even though it's the same code in the back it's a plugin you know yeah i mean you
can do it through like extensions like chrome extensions from the browser side yeah but who pays for
chrome extensions right like barely anybody so nobody uh that's not a good place to make money
probably yeah that sucks like chrome extension should be a extension for your startup you know
you have a product yeah oh we also have a chrome extension you know i wish the chrome extension would
be the product i wish chrome would support that like where you could pay for it easily because like
imagine i can imagine a lot of products that would just live as extensions like improvements for
social media yeah it's like gpt's you know gpt's yeah like these gpt's they're gonna charge money
for it now you get a ravish rev share i think from open ai i made a lot of them also right we'll
talk about it so let's rewind back it's a pretty cool idea to do 12 startups in 12 months what's
what's it take to build a thing in in 30 days like at that time how hard was that
um i think the hard part is like figuring out what you shouldn't add right what you shouldn't
build because you don't have time so you need to build a landing page well you need to make you
know you need to build the product actually because it needs to be something they pay for
um 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 stripe checkout and you get a login link
and when i started there was only a login link with a hash and that's just a static link so it's very
easy to log in yeah it's not so safe you know what if you leak the link and now i have real
google login but that took like a year so keeping it very scrappy is very important to
because you don't have time you know you need to focus on um what you can build fast
so money stripe uh build a product build landing page um you need to think about how are people
going to find this so are you going to put it on reddit or something how are you going to put it on
reddit without being looked at as a spammer right like um if you say hey this is my new startup you
should use it no nobody gets deleted you know um maybe if you find a problem that a lot of
people on reddit already have on a subreddit you know like you solve that problem say some people
i made this thing that might solve your problem and maybe it's free for now you know like uh that
could work you know but you need to be very you know um narrow it down what you're building time is
limited yeah actually can we go back to the you laying in a room feeling like a loser yeah i still
feel like a loser sometimes what's what can you can you speak to that feeling to that place of just
like feeling like a loser and i think a lot of people in this world are laying in a room right
now listening to this and feeling like a loser okay so i think it's normal if you're young that
you feel like a loser first of all especially when you're 27. yes yeah especially there's like a peak
yeah yeah i think this is the peak and so i would not kill yourselves it's very important just
get through it you know but uh because you have nothing you have probably no money you have no
business you have no job yeah you like journey peterson said this i saw it somewhere like the
reason people are depressed because they have nothing they don't have a girlfriend they don't
have a boyfriend they don't have you need stuff you need like or a family you need things around you
need to build a life for yourself you don't build a life for yourself you'll be depressed so if you're
alone in asia in a hostel looking at the ceiling and you don't have any money coming in you don't
have a girlfriend you don't of course you're depressed it's logic but back then if you're in the
moment you think there's not logic there's something wrong with me you know yeah um and and
also i think i started going i started getting like anxiety and i think i started going a little bit
crazy where i think travel can make you insane and i know this because i know that there's like
digital nomads that they kill themselves and i don't i haven't checked like the comparison with
like baseline people like suicide rate but i have a hunch um especially in the beginning when it was a
very new thing like 10 years ago that it can be very psychologically taxing and you're alone a lot
back then when you travel alone there was no other digital nomads back then a lot so you're in a strange
culture you look different than everybody like you're in i was in asia like everybody's really nice in
thailand but you're not part of the culture you're traveling around you're hopping from city to city
you don't have a home anymore you feel disrooted and you're constantly an outcast in the
you're different from everybody else yes exactly but people treat you like thailand people are so
nice but you still feel like outcast and and then i think the digital nomads i met then were all kind
of like it's like shady business you know but they were like vigilantes because it was a new thing
and like one guy was selling illegal drugs was american guy was selling illegal drugs via ups to
americans you know on his website they were like a lot of drop shippers doing shady stuff um
there's a lot of shady things going on there and they were they didn't look like very balanced people
they didn't look like people i wanted to hang with you know so i also felt outcast from other
foreigners in thailand other digital nomads and i was like man i made a big mistake and then i went
back to holland and then i got even more depressed you said digital nomad what is digital nomad what
is that way of life what is the philosophy there and the history of the movement i i i struck upon it
on accident because i i was like i'm gonna graduate university and then i'm gonna i need to get out of
here i'll fly to asia because i've been before in asia i started in korea in 2009 like study exchange so
like asia is easy thailand's easy i'll just go there figure things out and it's cheap it's very
cheap chiang mai i would live like 450 per month rent for like a private room pretty good so i
struggled on this on accident i was like okay there's other people on laptops working on their startup
or working remotely back then nobody worked remotely but they worked on their businesses right um and
they would you know live in like colombia or uh 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're you get pressure from american society telling you kind of what to do
like you need to buy a house or you need to do this stuff i had this in holland too and you can get
away from this pressure you can find it kind of feel like you're free you're kind of there's nobody
telling you what to do but that's also why you start feeling like you go crazy because you are you
are free you're disattached from anything and anybody um you're disattached from your culture
you're disattached from the culture you're probably in because you're staying very short
i think france kafka said i'm free therefore i'm lost man that's so true yeah that's exactly
the point and yeah freedom is like it's the definition of no constraints right like ever
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 that's a big lesson i learned then
but what were they making for money what what so you're saying they're doing shady stuff at that
time for me you know because i was more like a developer i wanted to make startups kind of and
and it was like um there was like drugs being shipped to america like diet pills and stuff like
non-fda approved stuff you know and they would like let there was no like effort they were like they
would would sit with beers and they would laugh about like all the dodgy kind of they're doing you know
ah that part of okay kind of vibe you know like kind of sleazy ecom vibe i'm not saying all
ecom is these you know but right but you know this vibe it could be a vibe and your your vibe was
more build cool that's ethical you know the guys with sports cars in dubai these people you know yes
ecom like oh bro you got a drop ship yeah you'll make 100 million a month like those people it was
this and i was like this is not my people yeah i don't i mean there's nothing wrong with any of
those individual no no judgment but but there's a foundation that's not quite ethical what is that i
don't know what that is but yeah i get you no i like i don't want to judge it was more i know that
for me it wasn't my world it wasn't my subculture i want to make cool you know but they also think
their cool is cool so you know uh but i wanted to make like real like startups and that was my
thing i would read hacker news you know like white combinator and they were making cool stuff so i
wanted to make cool stuff i mean that's a pretty cool way of life just if you romanticize it for a
moment it's very romantic man it's very it's colorful you know like if i think about the memories
what are some happy memories just like working working cafes or working in just the freedom
that that uh envelops you from with that way of life because anything is possible you can just
get up i think it was amazing like we would work like you wouldn't i would make friends and we would
work until you know 6 a.m in bali for example with like um with andre my best friend who's still my
best friend and with 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 or we didn't know
sometimes people would come in did you say three zero thirty yeah nice and we would drink like four per
person or something you know man it's bali i don't know if they were powerful lattes you know but
they were lattes and um we'd put it in plastic bag and then we'd drive there and all the coffee was
like falling you know everywhere and then we'd go in the course 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 was
literally like business people they would work in their startup and we'd all try and make something
and then the sun would come up and the morning people the you know the the yoga uh yoga girls and yoga
guys would come in you know after the yoga class at six and they say hey good morning and we're like
we look like this you know and we're like what's up how are you doing and we didn't know how bad we
looked you know but it was very bad and then we would go home sleep in like a hostel or a hotel and
do the same thing and again and again and again and it was this lock-in mode you know like working
um and that was very fun so it's just a bunch of you techno music blasting all through the night yeah
or more like like industrially not like it's easy see i got for me it's such an interesting thing
because the speed of the beat affects how i feel about a thing yeah so the faster it is the more
anxiety i feel but that anxiety is channeled into productivity but if it's a little too fast
i start the anxiety overpowers you don't like drum and bass music probably not no it's too fast
i mean for working i have to i have to play with it it's like you can actually like i can adjust my
yeah level of anxiety this must be a better word than anxiety it's like uh productive anxiety
that i like whatever that is it also depends what kind of work you do right like if you're writing
you probably don't want to draw on bass music i think for codes like industrial techno this kind
of stuff kind of fast it works well because you really get like locked in and combined with caffeine
you know you go you go deep you know and and i think you balance on this edge of anxiety because
this caffeine is also hitting your anxiety and you want to be on the edge of anxiety with this
techno running sometimes it gets too much like stop the techno stop the music it's like
but uh but those are good memories you know and also like travel memories like you go from city to
city yeah and it feels like it's kind of like jet set life like it's it feels very beautiful like you're
you're seeing a lot of cool cities and what was your favorite place you remember you visited i think still
like uh bangkok is the best place and back in 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 getting expensive now but chiang mai is still cheap i think when you're
starting out it's a great place man the air quality sucks it's a big problem so um and it's quite hot
but that's a very cool place um pros and cons i love brazil also my girlfriend is brazilian but i do
not just because of that but i like brazil uh the problem still is the safety issue you know like it
it's it's like in america like it's localized it's hard for europeans to understand like safety is
localized to specific areas so if you go to the right areas it's amazing brazil's amazing if you go to the
wrong areas like you maybe you die right yeah yeah i mean that's true it's not true in europe
feeling europe is much more that's true that's more average you're right you're right this is 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 this i i like it i like there's certain cities
in the united states like that yeah i like that and you're saying europe but you don't feel scared
well i don't i like danger bjj no not even just that i think danger is interesting so yeah danger
reveals something about yourself about others also i like the full range of humanity yeah so i don't
like the mellowed out aspects of humanity i have friends like these are not much friends that are
exactly like this 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 luxury yeah it's very
european of you like what was that that's a whole nother conversation so you uh you uh quoted freya
stark quote to awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world
yeah uh do you remember a time you awoken in a strange town and felt like that we're talking about
small towns or big towns or man anywhere i think i wrote it in some blog post and like
like it was a common thing when you would wake up and this was like because i have this website i
started a website about this digital nomads like called nomadlist.com and there was a community so
it was like 30 000 other digital nomads because i was feeling lonely so i built this website and
i stopped feeling lonely like i started make organizing meetups and making friends and um and it was very
common that people would say they would wake up and they would forget where they are yeah like for the
first half minute and i had to look outside like where am i which country which sounds really like
privileged but it's more like funny like you literally don't know where you are because you're
so disrooted um but there's something man it's like anthony bourdain you know there's something pure
about this kind of vagabond travel thing you know like it's behind me i think i don't like now i travel
with my girlfriend right it's very different but it is a romantic like memories of this kind of like
vagabond individualistic solo life but the thing is didn't make me happy but it was very cool but
it didn't make me happy right it made me anxious there's something about it that made you anxious
i don't know i still feel like that it's a cool feeling it's scary at first but then you realize
where you are and you and i don't know it's like you awaken to the possibilities of this place when you
feel like that it's like great and it's even when you're doing basic travel i go to san francisco
something else yeah you have like the novelty effect like you're in a new place like here
things are possible you know you're you don't get bored yet and and that's why people get addicted
to travel you know back to startups you wrote a book on uh how to do this thing and gave a great
talk on it how to do startups the book's called make bootstrappers handbook yeah i was wondering if
you could go through some of the steps it's idea build launch grow monetize automate and exit there's a
lot of fascinating ideas in each one so idea stage yeah how do you find a good idea so i think you need
to be able to spot problems so for example you can go in your daily life like when you wake up and
you're like what are stuff that i'm really annoyed with that's like um 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 see which one is like viable you can actually do
something and then start building it so that's that's a really good place to start become open
to all the problems in your life like actually start noticing them i think that's actually not a trivial
thing to do to realize that some aspects of your life could be done way way better yeah because we kind
of very quickly get uh accustomed to discomfort exactly uh like for example like doorknobs yeah like
design of certain things like new lex freeman doorknob that one i know how much uh incredible
design work has gone into it's a really interesting yeah doors and doorknobs just the design of everyday
things forks and spoons it's gonna be hard to come up with a fork that's better than the current yeah fork
designs yeah and the other aspect of it is you're saying like in order to come up with interesting
ideas you gotta try to live a more interesting life yeah but that's where travel comes in yeah
because when i started traveling i started seeing stuff in other countries that you didn't have in
europe for example or america even like if you go to asia uh like dude especially 10 years ago nobody
knew about this like we chats all these apps that they already had before we had them these everything
apps right like now elon's trying to make x this everything app like wechat same thing like in
indonesia or thailand you have one app that you can order food if you can order groceries you can
order massage uh you can order car mechanic um anything you can think of is in the app and that
stuff for example you 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 um 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
um airports are horrible airplanes are not comfortable either there's a lot of problems you start
seeing just getting out of your house you know but also you can i mean in the digital world you can
just go into different communities and see what can be improved by the yes in that yeah yeah
but what specifically is your process of generating ideas do you like do idea dumps like do you have
a document where you just keep writing yeah you used to have like a because when i was when i
wasn't making money i was trying to like make this list of ideas to see like so i need to build i was
thinking statistically already like i need to build all these things and one of these will work out
probably you know so i need to have a lot of things to try um and i did that right now i think like
because i already have money i can do more things uh based on technology so for example ai
when i found out about when stable diffusion came or uh chat gbt and stuff all this thing all these
things were like i didn't start working with them because i had a problem i had no problems but i was
very curious about technology and i was like playing with it and figuring out like first just playing
with it and then you find something like okay this generates uh stable fusion generates houses very
beautiful and interiors you know so it's less about problem solving it's more about the
possibilities of new things you can create yeah but that's very risky because that's the famous
like solution trying to find a problem yeah and usually it doesn't work and that's very common
with with startup founders i think they they have tech but actually people don't need the tech right
but can you actually explain it'd be cool to talk about some of the stuff you created can you explain
this the photoai.com yeah yeah so it's like fire your photographer the idea is like you don't need a
photographer anymore you can train yourself as an ai model and you can take as many photos you want
anywhere in any clothes uh with facial expressions like happy or sad or uh poses uh all this stuff so
how does how does it work yeah this is uh he sent me so you can press a link to a gallery of uh ones done
on me which is so on the left you have the prompt the box yeah so you can write like so model is your
model this lex friedman yeah so you can write like model as a blah blah whatever you want yep then
press the button and it will take photos take what will take like one minute photos what are you using
for the hosting for the compute replicate okay replicate.com they're very very good okay it's cool
like this interface wise it's cool that you're showing how long it's going to take this is amazing
so it's taking a i'm presuming you just loaded in a few pictures from the internet yeah so i went to
google images typed in lex friedman i added like 10 or 20 images you can open them in the gallery
and you can use your cursors to yeah so some don't look like you so the hit and miss rate is like
i don't know let's say like 50 50 or something but when i was watching your tweets like it's been
getting better and better and better it was very bad in the beginning it was so bad but still people
signed up to it you know uh there's there's two lux is great it's getting more and more sexual it's
making me very uncomfortable man but that's the problem with these models because no we need to talk
about this because the models i'm sure diffusion yeah so the photorealistic models that are like
fine-tuned yeah they were all trained on porn in the beginning and it was a guy called hassan
so i was trying to figure out how to do photorealistic ai photos and it was stable diffusion
by itself is not doing that well like the faces look all mangled yeah um and it doesn't have enough
resolution or something to to do that well so but i started seeing these these um base models these
fine-tuned 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 uh anatomy um 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 neck and everyone needs to do this with ai startups with imaging
you need to prompt out the naked stuff you need to put a you know naked um you have to keep reminding
the model you need to put clothes on yeah don't put naked because it's very risky i have google vision
that checks every photo before it's shown to the user to like check like a nipple detector
because you get the journalists get very angry if they you know if you said there was a journalist
i think 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 i'm i'm i'm uh i'm a little bit disturbed you can zoom in on the cat if you want like click
yeah this is a very sad cat it doesn't have a nose it doesn't have a nose but this man but this is
the problem with ai startups because they all act like it's perfect like this is groundbreaking and
but it's not perfect it's like really bad you know half the time so if i wanted to sort of update
model as yeah so you remove this stuff and you write like whatever you want like in thailand or
something or in tokyo uh in tokyo yeah and then you can say like at night with neon lights like you
can add more detail i'll go in austin do you think you'll know yeah in texas in austin texas cowboy hats
in texas yeah as a as a cowboy
as a cowboy it's gonna go so uh towards the porn directions it's man i hope not this is the end of
my career or the beginning it depends we can send you a push notification when your photos are done
yeah all right cool yeah let's see oh wow so this whole interface you've built yeah this is really well
it's all jquery do i still use jquery yeah only one still after this day you're not the only one
the entire of the web yeah this php this is php and jquery yeah and sqlite you're just like one of the
top performers from a programming perspective that are still like openly talking about it but everyone's
using php like if you look at most of the web is still probably php and jquery it's because of
wordpress right because the blogs that's true yeah that's true i'm seeing a revival now people are
getting sick of frameworks um like all the javascript famous are so like what do you call it
like wieldy like they're so it takes so much work to just maintain this code and then it updates to
a new version you need to change everything php just stays the same and works yeah and can you
actually just speak to that stack you you build all your websites apps startups projects all of that
with mostly vanilla html yeah uh javascript with jquery php and uh that's cool white um 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 i knew like i knew php i knew html um css
you know because you make websites and when my startup started taking off i didn't have time to
i remember putting on my to-do list like learn node.js because it's important to switch you know
because yeah this obviously is much better language than php and i never learned it i never did it
uh because at the end of time i i these things were growing like this and i was launching more
projects and i never had time it's like one day you know i'll 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 item for me to really learn
node.js or or flask or these kind of react and it's this it feels like a responsible software engineer
should know how to use these but you can get stuff done so fast with vanilla versions of stuff yeah
it's like software developers if you want to get a job and there's like you know people making stuff
like startups and if you want to be entrepreneur probably you maybe shouldn't i wonder if there's
like i really want to measure performance and speed i think there's a deep wisdom in that yeah
i do think that frameworks and just constantly wanting to learn the new thing this complicated
way of software engineering gets in the way i'm not sure what to say about that because definitely
like you shouldn't build everything from just vanilla javascript or vanilla c for example yeah c plus plus
when you're building systems engineering is like there's a lot of benefits for a point of safety
all that kind of stuff so i i don't know but it just feels like you can get so much more stuff done
if you don't care about how you do it 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 hundred million three million dollars and the idea is that you need to make the developers
the new developers like when you're 18 or 20 years old right um get them to use this framework and add
a platform to it like where the framework can it's open source but you probably should use the platform
which is paid to use it and the cost of the platforms to host it are a thousand times higher than
just hosting it on a simple aws server or a vps on digital ocean right um so there's obviously like
a monetary incentive here like we want to get a lot of developers to use this technology and then we
need to charge them money because they're going to use it in startups and then the startups can pay for
the bills um but what that it kind of destroys the the information out there about learning to code
because they you know they pay youtubers they pay influencers developer influencers it's a big thing
to like uh and same thing what happens with like uh nutrition and fitness or something same thing
happens in developing they pay this influence to promote the stuff use it make stuff with it make
demo products with it and then a lot of people like wow uh use this and i started noticing this
because when i would ship my stuff people would ask me what are you using i want i would say i would
just php jquery why does it matter and people would start kind of attacking me like why are you not
using this new technology this new framework this new thing and i say i don't know because this
php thing works and i don't really i'm optimizing for anything just do it just works and i never
understood like why uh like i understand there's new technologies that are better and there should
be improvement but i'm very suspicious of money just like lobbying there's money in this developer
framework scene there's hundreds of millions that goes to ads or influence 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
uh measure how productive they are in uh shipping features how many bugs they create how many
security holes uh php was not good at the security for a while but now it's good in theory
in theory is it though now it's good no no no now as you're saying it i want to know if that's true
because php was just the majority of websites on the internet could be true is it just overrepresented
same with wordpress yes there's a reputation that wordpress has a gigantic number of security holes
i don't know if that's true i know it gets attacked a lot because it's so popular it definitely
does have security holes but maybe a lot of other systems have security holes as well anyway i i just
sort of questioning the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push software engineers towards
frameworks towards complex yeah like uh super complicated sort of software engineering approaches
that stretch out the the time it takes to actually build the thing 100 and it's the same thing with
big corporations 80 of the people don't do anything it's like right it's not efficient and and if you
if you if your your your benchmark is like uh people building stuff that actually gets done and
like for society right like if we want to save time we should probably use the technologies um
that's simple that's pragmatic that's like that works uh that's not overly complicated doesn't
make your life life like a living hell you know and use the framework when it obviously solves a
problem a direct problem that you of course yeah of course i'm not saying you should code without a
framework i'm you should use whatever you want but yeah i think it's suspicious you know and uh
and i think especially when i talk about it on twitter like there's a lot of this army comes out you
know this is these framework armies yeah it's man something my god 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 it you know did you charge users is it a real business and um yeah uh so going back to
the cowboy first of all everyone look like you right but some do every aspect of this is pretty
incredible i'm also just looking at the interface is really well done so this is all just jquery and
yeah this is really well done so like tell me take me through the journey of photo ai like
you don't know most of the world doesn't know much about uh stable diffusion or any of this
any of the generative ai stuff and so you're thinking okay how can i build cool stuff with this
yeah what was the origin story of photo ai i think uh it started because stable diffusion came out so
stable fusion is like this the first like generative image model ai model and um i started playing with
it like you could install it on your mac like somebody forked it and made it work for macbooks so i
downloaded it and uh cloned the repo and started using it to generate images um and it was like amazing
like it would i found it on twitter because you see things happen on twitter and i i would post what i
was making on twitter as well and you could make any image you could write a prompt essentially write
a prompt and then it generates a photo of that or image of that um in any style like they would use
like artist names to make like a picasso kind of style and stuff um and i was trying to see
like what is it good at is it good at people no it's really bad at people but it was good at houses
so architecture for example i would generate like architecture houses um so i made a website called this
house does not exist dot org and it generated like they called like house porn and that one
like house porn is like a subreddit so and this was stable diffusion like the first version so it
looks really you can click for another photo so it generates like all these kind of non-existing
houses it is house porn but it looked kind of good you know like especially back then it looks really
now things look much better um it's really really well done
wow and it also generates like a description
and you can upvote is it nice upvote it yeah man there's so much to talk to you about like
the choices here it's really this is very scrappy in the bottom there's like a ranking of the most
upvoted houses so these are the top voted if you go to old time you see quite beautiful ones
yeah so this one is my favorite the number one it's like kind of like a
um how is this not more popular it was really popular for like a while but then people got
so bored of it i think because i was getting bored of it too like just continuous house porn like
everything starts looking the same but then i saw it was really good at interior so i pivoted to
interiorai.com where um i tried to like upload first generate interior designs and then i tried to do
like there was a new technology called image to image where you can input an image like a photo
and it would kind of modify the thing so you see it looks almost the same as photo guys the same
code essentially um nice so i would i would upload a photo of my interior where i lived and i would
ask like change this into like uh i don't know like maximalist design you know and it worked and it
worked really well so i was like okay this is a startup because obviously interior design ai and nobody's
doing that yet so i launched this and it was successful and made like in within a week made
10k 20k a month and now still makes like 40k 50k a month uh and it's been like two years so then i
was like how can i improve this interior design i need to start learning fine tuning and fine
tuning is where you have this existing ai model and you fine-tune it on the specific goal you wanted
to do so i would find really beautiful interior design make a gallery and um train a new model that
was very good interior design and it worked and i used that as well and then for fun i uploaded photos
of myself and here's where it happened uh and to train myself like and this would never work obviously
and it worked and actually it started understanding me as a concept so my face worked and and you could
do like different styles like me as a like very cheesy medieval warrior all this stuff so i was like
this is another startup so now i did avatarai.me i couldn't get the dot com and this was uh yeah
avatarai.me well now it's forward to photo because it pivoted got it but this was more like cheesy
thing so this is very interesting because this went so viral it made like i think like 150k in a week
or something so most money ever made and um and then big this is very interesting the big vc companies like
lensa which are much better at ios and stuff than me i didn't have ios app they quickly built ios app
that does the same and they found technology and it's all open technology so it's good and i think
they made like 30 million dollars with it yeah they they became like the top grossing app after that
um and it was how do you feel about that i think it's amazing honestly and it's not like you didn't
have like a feeling like ah no i was a little bit like sad because all my products would work out and
i never had like real fierce competition and now i have like fierce competition from like a a very
skilled high talent like ios developer studio or something that and they already had an app
they had an app in the app store for like um i think retouching your face or something so they
were very smart they add these avatars to there it's a feature they had the users they do a push
notification to everybody who have these avatars yeah man they made great i think they made they
made so much money and um i think they did a really great job and uh i also made a lot of money with it
but that was i i i quickly realized it wasn't my thing because it was so cheesy it was like kitsch
you know it's kind of like um me as a barbie or me as a you know it was too cheesy i wanted to go
for like what's a real problem we can solve because this is going to be a hype it's going to be and it
was a hype these avatars um it's like let's do real photography like how can you make people look
really photorealistic and it was difficult and that's why these authors worked because they were all
like in a cheesy you know picasso style and art is easy because you interpret the
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 of your face like it just you look wrong
you know so i started making photo ai which was like a pivot of it where it was like a photo studio
um where you could take photos without actually needing a photographer needing a studio you don't
just you know 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 re really hilarious photos i think you were using yourself
as a case study right yeah yeah so what uh there's a tweet here sold 100 000 in ai generated avatars and
it's a lot like it's a lot for anybody it's a lot for me like uh making 10k a day on this you know
that's amazing that's amazing and then the nested tweet like that's the launch tweets
and then the before there is like the me hacking on it oh i see so that okay so october 26 2022 yeah i
trained an ml model on my face sure because my eyes are quite far apart i learned when i did youtube
i would put like a photo of like my dj photo you know my mixture and people would say i'd look like
a hammerhead shark it was like a top comment so then i realized my eyes are far apart uh yeah the
internet helps you yeah how you look you know boy do i love the first first trap
well what is is this wait it's water from the waterfall but the waterfalls in the back you know so
what's going on so this is how much of this is real it's all ai it's all ai yeah that's pretty
good though for the early days exactly so but this was hit or miss so you had to do a lot of curation
because 99 of it was really bad so these are the photos are uploaded how many photos did you use
only these i will try more up to date pics later these are the these these are the only photos you
uploaded yeah wow wow okay so like you were learning all this super quickly what uh 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 uh just a handful of photos that don't really have a
good capture of the face and he's able to i think it's cropped it's like a crop but the layout but they're
they're square photos so they're 512 by 512 because that's stable diffusion um but nevertheless not
great capture the face yeah like it's not it's not like a uh collection of several hundred photos that
are sick exactly like i would imagine that too when i started i was like oh this must be like some 3d
scan technology right yeah so i think the cool thing with ai it trains the concept of you so
it's literally like learning just like any ai model learns it learns how you look so i did this and
then i was getting so much i was getting dms like telegram messages like how can i do the same thing
i want these photos my girlfriend wants these photos so i was like okay this is obviously a business
but i didn't have time to code it uh make a whole like app about it so i made an html page
um register the domain name and this was not even it was a stripe payment link which means you have a
literally a link to stripe to pay but there's no code in the back so all you know is you have customers
that paid money then i added like a some a type form link so type form is a site where you can
create like your own um 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 um and i launched it and i was like here first sale so it'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 um but the problem was i didn't have code to automate this so i had to do
manually so the first few hundred i just literally took their photos uh trained them and then i would
generate the photos with the prompts and i had this text file with the prompts and i would do everything
manually and this quickly became way too much so but that's another constraint like i was forced to
code something up uh that would do that and that was essentially making it into a real website right
so at first it was the type form and they uploaded through the type one stripe checkout yeah and then
you were like that image is downloaded did you write a script to export no download images myself
it was a zip file to unzip the zip file and you unzipped it yeah yes and then i know i'm because
you know do things don't skill paul graham says right so uh and then i would trade and then i would
email them the photos i think for my personal email say here's your here's your avatar you know and they
liked it they were like wow it's amazing you emailed them with your personal email didn't have
an email address on this domain and this is like 100 people yeah and then you know who signed up uh
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 message them
so i said thanks so much for using my sites you know he's like yeah amazing app great work so it's like
this is different than normal reaction you know it's bill gates isn't it can't say anything
just like shirtless picture gdpr you know like privacy right european regulation i cannot share
anything but i was very i was like wow and uh but this shows like so you make something and then if it
takes off very fast you're like it's validated you know you're like here's something that people
really want but then also i thought this is hype this is gonna die down very fast and i did
because it's too cheesy but you had to automate the whole thing how'd you automate it so like
what's the ai component like how hard is that to figure out okay so that's actually in many ways the
easiest thing because there is all these platforms already back then there was platforms for uh fine
tune still diffusion um like now i use replicate back then i use different platforms um which was funny
because that platform when this thing took off i would tweet because i tweet always like how much money
these websites make and then so the the you called vendor right the g the platform that did the gpus
they increased the price for training from three dollars to twenty dollars after they saw that i was
making so much money so immediately my profit is gone because i was selling them for thirty dollars
and i was in a slack with them like saying what is this like can you just put it back to three dollars
they say yeah maybe in the future we're looking at it right now i'm like what are you talking about
like you just took all my money you know and they're smart well they're not that smart because
like you're also have a large uh 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 right back then right so i started talking to
other um ai model ml platform so replicate was on those platforms and i started dm the ceo say
can you please create like it's called dream booth this fine tuning of yourself can you add this to your
side because i need this because i'm being price gouged and he said no because it takes too long
to run it takes half an hour to run and we don't have the gpus for it i said please please please
and then after a week they said we're doing it we're launching this and then this company became
it was like not very famous company it became very famous with this stuff because suddenly everybody
was like oh we can build similar apps like avatar apps and everybody started building avatar apps and
everybody started using replicate for it um and it was from these early dms with like the ceo like ben
first very nice guy and he was like they never price gouge me they never treated me bad they always
been very nice it's a very cool company so you can run any ml model any ai model llms you can run on
here and you can scale yes they scale yeah yeah 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 um that's great and by running
it on the website then you can automate with the api you can make a website that runs the model generate
images generate text generate video generate music generate video like find two models they do
anything yeah it's very cool 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 the website even looks weird now it started
as like a machine learning platform that was like i didn't even understand what it did it was just too
too ml you know like you would understand because you're in ml world i wouldn't know it's noob friendly
yeah exactly and i didn't know how it worked and um but i knew that they could probably do this and
they did it they built the models and now i use them for everything and we trained like i think now
like 36 000 models 36 000 people already but is there some tricks to fine tuning to like the collection
of photos that are provided like how do you like yes there's so many hacks the hacks it's like 100 hacks
to make it work what what's what are some give my secrets nine well not not the secrets but the more
like insights maybe about the human face and the human body like what kind of stuff gets messed up a lot
i think people well man it's living people don't know how they look so uh yeah they generate photos of
themselves and then they say ah it doesn't look like me yeah but it doesn't then you know you can check
the training force it does look like you but you don't know how you look so there's a face dysmorphia
of yourself that you have no idea how you look yeah that's hilarious i mean i've got to one of the
least pleasant activities in my existence is having to listen to my voice and look at my face so i get
to like really really have to sort of uh come in to terms with the reality of how i look and how i sound
everybody and but people often don't right really you have a distorted view perspective i know that like
i would if i would make a selfie how i think i look that that's nice other people think that's not
nice but then they make a photo of me i'm like that's super ugly but then they're like no that's
how you look and you look nice you know so how other people see you is nice so you need to ask other
people to choose your photos yeah yeah 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 a dark aspect of psychology we focus on some small flaws yeah this is why i hate
plastic surgery for example people try to remove the flaws when the flaws are the thing that makes
you interesting and attractive i learned from the hammerhead shark eyes this the stuff about you that
looks ugly to you and it's probably that what makes you original makes you nice and people like it
about you yeah and it's not like oh my god and people notice it people notice your hammerhead
eyes you know but it's like that's me that's my face so i'm 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 makes you beautiful it's the breaking of the the average face
makes you beautiful all that yeah and obviously different for men and women a different ages all this
kind of stuff yeah but be underneath it all the personality all of that when when the face
comes alive that also is the thing that makes you beautiful yeah but anyway you have to figure all
that out with the eye yeah one thing that worked was like um people would upload full body photos
of themselves so i would crop the face right because then the model knew better that we're training
mostly the face here but then i started losing a resemblance of the body because some people are
skinny some people are muscular whatever so you want to have that too so now i mix full body photos
in the training with face photos face crops and it's all automatic like um and i know that other
people they they use again ai models to detect like what are the best photos in this training set
and then train on those but it's all it's all about training data and that's with everything in ai
like how good your training data is is in many ways more important than how many steps you train for
like how many months or whatever with the gpus like um the gold do you have any guidelines for people
of like how to get good data how to give good data to fine tune on like the photos should be diverse
so for example if i only upload photos with a brown shirt or green shirt the model will think that
i'm training the green shirt so the things that are the same every photo are the concepts that are
trained what you want is your face to be the concept that strains um and everything else to be
diverse like different so diverse lighting as well diverse yeah outside inside uh but there's no
like this is the problem there's no like manual for this and nobody knew we were all just especially
two years ago we're all hacking trying to test anything anything you can think of and uh 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 carpatti i think says this like uh we don't really know how
this thing works but it does something but nobody really knows why right like we cannot look into the
the model of an llm like what is actually in there we just know it's like a 3d matrix of numbers right
um 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 you know improve things i mean there's a whole field now of mechanistic
interpretability that like studies that tries to figure out it tries to break things apart and
understand how it works but you know there's also the data side and the the actual like consumer
facing product side of figuring out how you get it to generate a thing that's beautiful or interesting
or naturalistic all that kind of stuff and you're like at the forefront of figuring that out about
the human face and humans really care about the human face they're very vain yeah like me you know
like i want to look good in your podcast for example yeah for sure and one of the things i
i actually would love to uh like rigorously use photo ai because for the thumbnails i take portraits
of people i didn't i don't know about photography uh i basically used your approach for photography
i like google how do you take photographs camera lighting and also it's tough because
maybe you could speak to this also but like with photography
no offense to any they're true artists great photographers but like people like take themselves
way too seriously think you need a whole lot of equipment you definitely don't want one light
you need like five lights and like and you have to have like the lenses and i talked to to a guy an
expert of uh shaping the sound in a room okay and because i was thinking i'm gonna do a podcast studio
whatever i should probably like treat the do a sound treatment on the room and like when he showed up
and analyzed the room he thought everything i was doing was horrible and that's when i realized like
you know what i don't need experts in my life
i said thank you thank you very much thank you great tips
i just i just felt like there is you know focus on whatever the problems are use your own judgment
use your own instincts don't listen to other people and only consult other people when there's a
specific problem and you consult them not to offload the problem onto them but to gain wisdom from their
perspective even if their perspective is ultimately one you don't agree with you're going to gain wisdom
from that and just i ultimately come up with like a php solution php and jquery solution through the
php studio i have a little suitcase i use like uh just the basic sort of uh consumer type of stuff
one light it's great yeah and look at you you're like one of the top podcasts in the world and you
get millions of views and it works and the people that spend so much money on optimizing for the best
sound for the best studio they get like 300 views you know so what is this about
this is about that either you do it really well or also that a lot of these things don't matter
like what matters is probably the content of the podcast like you get the interesting guests
focus on stuff that matters yeah and i think this is very common they called gear acquisition syndrome
like gas like people in any industry do this they just buy all the stuff there was a meme recently
like you but what's the name for the guy that buys all the stuff before he even started doing the
hobby right um marketing you know marketing does that to people they want to buy this stuff yeah but
like man you can make a you can make a hollywood movie on an iphone you know if the content is good
enough it's it and it will probably be original because you would be using an iphone for it you
know so that said i so the reason i brought that up with photography there is wisdom from people and
one of the one of the things i realized you probably also realized this but how much power light has
to uh to convey emotion you just take one light and move it around so you're sitting in the darkness
move it around your face the different positions are having a second light potentially you can play with
how a person feels just from a generic face it's interesting like you can make people attractive you
can make them ugly you can make them scary you can make them lonely all of this and so you kind of
real start to realize this and uh i would definitely love ai help in uh creating great portraits of
people guest photos yeah guest photos for example that's a small use case but for me that's uh
i suppose it's an important use case because like i want people to look good but i also want to
capture who they are maybe my conception of who they are what makes them beautiful yeah what makes their
appearance powerful in some ways sometimes it's the eyes oftentimes it's the eyes but there's
certain features the face can sometimes be really powerful and i can't it's also kind of awkward for
me to take yeah photographs so i'm not collecting enough yeah photographs for myself to do it um with
just those photographs if i can load that off onto ai and then start to play with like lighting you should
do this and you should probably do it yourself like you can use photo but it's even more fun if you do it
yourself so you train the models you can learn about like control net control it is where for
example your photos in your podcast are usually like from the angle right so you can create a
control net face pose that's always like this so every model every photo you generate uses this
control net uh pose for example i think would be very fun for you to try out that's do you play with
lighting at all do you play with lighting pose with the man actually this like this week or recently
there's a new model came out that can adjust the light of any photo but also ai image with stable
diffusion i think it's called relight and it's amazing like you can you can upload kind of like a
light map so for example red purple blue and use that light map to change the light on the photo you
you input it's amazing so there's for sure a lot of stuff you can do uh what's your advice for people
in general on how to learn all the state-of-the-art ai tools available like you mentioned the new models
coming out all the time yeah like what 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 uh my friends ask me this like what who
should i follow to stay stay up to date and i say go to x and follow all the ai anime models that this
person is following or follows and i sent them some url 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 um i don't um but those
people hack around and they publish what they're discovering um they talk about papers for example
so yeah definitely x it's great almost exclusively all the people i follow are ai people yeah it's
a good time now well but also just brings happiness to my to my soul because there's so much turmoil
on twitter yeah like politics and stuff there's battles going on it's like a war zone and it's nice
to just go into this happy place to where people are building stuff yeah i like twitter that for
that most like building stuff like yeah seeing other because it inspires you to build and it's
it's just fun to see other people share what they're discovering and then you're like okay i'm gonna
make something too it's just super fun and so if you want to start going x and then i would go to
replicate and start trying to play with models and when you have something that kind of you manually
enter stuff you set the parameters something that works you can you can make an app out of it or a
website can you speak a little bit more to the process of it becoming better and better and better
photo 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 photo or changing the sampler like a scheduler like you have dpm two caras all these things i
don't know anything about but i know that you can choose them when you generate an image and they
have different resulting images but i didn't know which one was were better so i would do it myself
test it but then i was like why don't i test on these users because i have a million photos generated
anyway so unlike 10 of the users i would um randomly test parameters and then i would see if they would
because you can favorite a photo or you can download it i would measure if they favored or like the photo
and then i would a b test and you test for significance and stuff uh which parameters
were were better and which were worse so you're starting to figure out which which models are
actually working exactly and then if it's significant enough data you switch to that for
the whole you know all the users and so that was that was like the breakthrough to make it better just
use the users to improve it themselves and i tell them 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
um but that's there was a breakthrough yeah so it's really about the parameters and models that
choose and letting the users help do the search in the space of models and parameters yeah for you
yeah but actually so like stable diffusion i used 1.5 2.0 came out as stable diffusion xl came out all
these new versions and they were all worse and so the core scene of people are still using 1.5 because it's
like it's also not like what you call neutered like they neutered like to make it super like
with safety features and stuff yeah so most of the people are still on stable diffusion 1.5 and
meanwhile stable diffusion the company went like the ceo left um a lot of drama happened yeah because
they couldn't make money and yeah so they gave it it's very interesting they gave us this this open
source model that everybody uses they raised like hundreds of millions of dollars it all they didn't
make any money with they're not a lot they did amazing job and now everybody uses open source
model for free and they did you know it's amazing like it's uh it's amazing you're not even using the
latest one yes no and the strange thing is that this company raised hundreds of millions but the
people that are benefiting from it are really small like people like me who make these small apps
that are using the model and and now they're starting to charge money for the new models but the new
models are not so good for people they're not so open source right yeah it's interesting because
open source is so impactful in the ai space but you wonder like what is the business model behind
that but it's enabling this whole ecosystem of companies that yeah they're using the open source
models it's kind of like this frameworks but then they didn't you know bribe enough influencers to use
it um and they didn't charge money for the platform you know okay so back to your book and the ideas
we didn't even get to the first step uh generating ideas so you had notebook and you're filling it up
how do you know when an idea is a good one like what you have this just flood of ideas how do you
pick the one that you actually try to build man mostly you don't know like mostly i choose the ones
that are most viable for me to build like i cannot build a space company now right would be quite
challenging but i can build you actually write down like space company no i think asteroid mining would be
very cool because like you you go to an asteroid you take some stuff from there you bring it back
you sell it you know it's but then you need to do and you can hire someone to launch the thing
so all you need is like the robot that goes to the asteroid you know and the robotics interesting
like i want to also learn robotics so maybe that could be i think both the asteroid mining and the
robotics yeah together
i feel like no exactly this is it this is the we do this not because it's easy but because we thought
it would be easy exactly that's me with that's me with asteroid mining exactly that's why i should do
this it's not nomadlist.com no it's not it's asteroid mining you have to like build stuff you have to
like gravity is really hard to overcome yeah but it seems man i sound like idiots probably not but it
sounds quite approachable like relatively approachable you don't have to build the rockets you
oh you use something like space you hire a spacex to send your your you know this dog robot or whatever
so is there actually exist a notebook where you wrote down asteroid mining no i used back then used
trello trello yeah but now i don't really i use telegram i write it on like saved messages and i
have like idea i write it down to yourself until you know like because you use whatsapp right i think
so you have like messages to yourself fingers yeah so you're talking to yourself on telegram
yeah use like a notepad not forget stuff and then i pin it you know i love how like you're
not using super complicated systems or whatever you know people use obsidian now there's a lot of these
um yeah a notion where you have systems for note taking you're not your notepad your notepad.exe
guy if 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 um draw like a calendar you know
like like people students use this and you can do coloring and stuff and i'm like dude i did this for
a week and then like what am i doing with my life like i could just write it as a message to myself
and it's good enough you know speaking of ideas you shared a tweet explaining why the first idea
sometimes might be a brilliant idea the reason for this you think is the first idea submerges
from your subconscious and was actually boiling in your brain for weeks most sometimes years in
the background the eight hours of thinking can never compete with the perpetual subconscious
background job so this is the idea that if you think about an idea for eight hours versus 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 is your subconscious and it's in here it's boiling and then when it's ready
it's like ding it's like a microwave it comes out and there you have your idea you think you have
ideas like that yeah all the time 100 it's just stuff that's been like there yes yeah and i also it
comes up and i bring it i send it back you know like send it back to the kitchen not ready to boil more
yeah it's like a soup that of ideas that's cooking it's 100 this is how my brain works and i think
most people but it's also about the the timing sometimes you have to send it back not just because
you're not ready but the world is not ready yes so many times like starter founders are too early
with their idea yeah 100 robotics is an interesting one for that because like there's been a lot of
robotics companies that failed yeah because it's been very difficult to build a robotics company make
money because there's the manufacturing like the cost of everything the intelligence of the robot is
enough is not sufficient to create a compelling enough product from which to make money so all
so there's this long line of robotics companies they've tried they had big dreams and they failed
yeah like boston dynamics i still don't know what they're doing but they always upload youtube videos
and it's amazing but i feel like a lot of these companies don't have a it's like a solution look
for a problem for now you know military obviously is useless but like am i doing do i need like a
robotic dog now for my house i don't know like it's fun but it doesn't really solve anything
yet i feel the same kind of with vr like it's really cool like apple vision pro is very cool
it doesn't really solve something for me yet and that's kind of the the tech looking for a solution
right but one day will when the personal computer when the mac came along there's a big
switch that happened it somehow captivated everybody's imagination you could like the application
the killer apps became apparent you can type in a computer but they became apparent like immediately
back then they also had like this thing like we don't need these computers uh they're like a hype
and um and it also went like in kind of like you know yes yeah but the hype is the thing that allowed
the thing to proliferate sufficiently to where people's minds would start opening up to it a
little bit the possibility of it right now for example with the robotics there's very few robots
robots in the homes of people exactly yeah the the robots that are there are roombas so the vacuum
cleaners or their amazon alexa yeah or dishwasher i mean it's essentially a robot yes but the the
intelligence is very limited i guess is one way we can summarize all of them except alexa which is
pretty intelligent but uh is is limited with the kind of ways it interacts with you let's you know that
that that's just one example yeah i sometimes think about that as 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 my what i was meant to do do you have these plans for your life you
have these dreams i think you're meant to build robots okay me personally maybe maybe um that that's
the sense i've uh i've had but it could be other things it could hilariously not be the thing i was
meant to be is to talk to people yeah which is weird because i always was anxious about talking to
people it's like a really yeah i'm scared of this i was scared yeah exactly it's just anxiety throughout
social interaction in general i'm an introvert that hides from the world so yeah it's really strange yeah
but that's that's also kind of life like life brings you to it's very hard to um super intently
kind of choose what you're going to do with your life it's it's more like surfing you're surfing the
waves you go in the in the ocean you see where you end up you know yeah yeah and there's universe has
a kind of sense of humor yeah i guess you have to just yeah allow yourself to be carried away by the
waves exactly yeah yeah have you felt that way in your life yeah all the time like yeah that's like i think
that's the best way to live your life so allow whatever to happen like do you know what you're
doing in the next few years is it possible that it'll be completely like changed possibly i think
relationships like you want to hold the relationships right you want to hold your girlfriend you want to
become wife and all this stuff but uh you should i think you should stay open to where like for
example where you want to live like i don't know we don't know where we want to live for example
um that's something that will figure itself out it will crystallize where you know you will get
you will get sent by the waves to somewhere where you want to live for example what you're going to
do i think that's a really good way to live your life it's i i think most stress comes from trying
to control like hold things like um it's kind of buddhist you know you need to like lose control that
lose and things will happen like when you do mushrooms when you do drugs like psychedelic drugs
the people that starts that are like control freaks get bad trips right because you need to let go
like i'm pretty control freak actually and um when i did mushrooms when i was 17 i i've it was very
good and at the end it wasn't so good because i tried to control it's like ah now it's going too
much you know now i need to let's stop bro you can't stop it you need to go through with it you know
and i think it's a good metaphor for life i think that's you know very tranquil way to lead your life
yeah actually when i um took ayahuasca that lesson is deeply within me already that you can't control
anything yeah 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 psychedelics i've ever had some of that could be with my biology my
genetics whatever but some of it was just not trying to control yeah just surf the way for sure i think
most stress in life comes from trying to control so once you have the idea yeah step two build how do
you think about building the thing once you have the idea i think you should build with the
technology that you know so for example um nomad list which is like this website i made to figure
out the best cities 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 these nomads with the internet speeds the cost of living um you know
other stuff and i would i've tweeted it and i would and back then i didn't have a lot of followers
i had like a few thousand followers or something and it went like viral for my skill viral back then
you know which was like five retweets and um and a lot of people started editing it and there was
like hundreds of cities in this list like from all over the world with all the data it was very
crowdsourced and then i made that into a website so figuring out like what technology you can use that
you already know so if you cannot code you can use a spreadsheet if you cannot um use a spreadsheet
like whatever you can always use for example a website generator like weeks or something or
squarespace right like you don't need to code to build a startup all you need is a idea for a product
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 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're starting on a business the important thing
is that you validate that there's a market that there's a product that people want to pay for
um so use whatever you can use and if you can't code use you know spreadsheets landing page
generators whatever yeah and the crowdsourcing element is fascinating uh it's cool it's cool
when a lot of people start using it you get to learn so fast 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
interesting things start happening yeah i did it for like a workout thing because i was doing a large
amount of push-ups and pull-ups yeah i remember this man yeah and like and and uh well also google
sheets is pretty limited in that everything's allowed so people could just write anything in any cell
and they can create new uh sheets yeah 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 war like of they they want like to protect the thing it's an immune
system that's inherent to the thing it comes to society you know in the spreadsheets and then there's
the 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 i'm gonna at the bottom
i'm gonna yeah it's insane it's fast i mean but that kind of crowdsourcing element is really powerful
and if you can create a product that uh use that as a 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 nomad list is great i would i would love for you to talk about that but
one sort of way to talk about it is uh through you building uh hood maps yeah so you've you did an
awesome thing which is document yourself building the thing and doing so in just a handful of days like
three four or five days so people should definitely check out the video in the in the blog post
um can you can you explain what hood maps is and what this whole like this process was so i was
traveling and i was still trying to find like problems right and i would go i would i would
discover that like everybody's experience of a city is different because they stay in different areas
yeah so i'm from amsterdam and when i grew up uh in amsterdam or didn't grow up but i lived there
university i knew that 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 um of the center the jordan or the pipe or something more hipster areas like a little more
authentic culture of amsterdam that's where i would live you know and where i would go um and i thought
this could be like an app where you can have like a google maps and you put colors over it you have
like areas that are like color 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 the city when you travel because i was traveling
a lot i wanted to go to the cool spots so just use color color yeah yeah and i would use a canvas so
i thought okay what i need i need to did you know that you would be using a canvas no i didn't know it
was possible because i didn't know i mean this is a cool this is the cool thing people should really
check this is how it started because like you're honestly capture 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 um so you're like you don't know anything about so canvas is a way
it's html yes html5 thing that allows you to draw shapes draw images just draw pixels essentially so
yeah and that's that 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 iframe embeds and then i'll put a div on top
of it with the colors and i'll do like opacity 50 you know so it kind of shows um so i did that with
convos and then i started drawing um and then i thought like obviously other people need to edit
this because i cannot draw all these things myself so i crowdsource it again and i uh you would draw on
the map and then it would send the pixel data to the server it would put it in the database and then i
would have a robot running like a cron job which every week would calculate or every day would calculate
like okay so mstem center there's like six people say it's tourist this part of the center but two
people say it's like hipster okay so the tourist part wins right it's just an array so find the most
common value in a little pixel area on a map so so that so if most people say it's tourist it's tourist
and it becomes red and i would do that for you know all the gps corners in the world can you just
clarify do you have to be as a human that's contributing to this do you have to be in that
location to make the label or no people just type in cities and go like go berserk and start drawing
everywhere would they draw shapes would they draw pixels man they drew that crazy stuff like offensive
symbols i cannot mention they would draw penises i mean that's that's obviously a guy would do the
same thing draw penises that's the first thing when i show up to mars and there's no cameras i'm
drawing a penis on this man i did it in the snow you know but the penises did not become a problem
because i knew that not everybody would draw a penis and not in the same place so most people would
use it fairly so just if i had enough crowd source data so you have all these pixels on top of it it's
like a layer of pixels and you choose the most common pixel so yeah it's just like a poll but in
visual format and it worked and uh within a week i had enough data and and there was like cities that
did really well like los angeles a lot of people started using it uh like most data is in los angeles
because uh los angeles is has defined neighborhoods yeah and not just in terms of the the official
labels but like what they're known for yeah what are the do you did you provide the categories that
they were allowed to use as labels the colors yeah as colors so it's just like i think you can see
there there's like hipster tourist rich business there's always a business area right and then there's
a residential your resistance is gray so i thought those were the most common things in the city kind
of and a little bit meme-y like it's almost fun to label it yeah i mean obviously it's simplified and
but you need to simplify this stuff you know you don't want to have too many categories and it's
essentially just like like using a you know paintbrush where you select the color in the bottom you
select the category you start drawing there's no instruction there's no manual um and then i also added
tagging so people could like write something on a specific location so don't go here or like here's
like um nice cafes and stuff and man the memes that came from that and i also added upvoting so that the
tags could be uploaded so the memes that came from that is like amazing like people in los angeles would
write crazy stuff it would go viral in all these cities you can allow allow your location and it will
probably send you to austin okay so we're looking uh oh boy uh drunk hipsters uh
air bro and bros air bro and bros hipster girls who do cocaine i saw a guy in a fish costume get
beaten up here yep that seems also overpriced and underwhelming
uh let me see let me make sure this is accurate uh let's see
dirty sixth for people who know austin know that that's important to label sixth street is uh famous
in austin dirty six drunk fat boys accurate drunk fat bros continued on six very well with six drunk
douche bros from fret to 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 uh it's like the district
exercise freaks on the river yeah that's true dog runners accurate
saw a guy in the fish costume get beat up here i want to know this story like
so that's that's all user contributed yeah and that's like stuff i couldn't come up with
it because i don't know austin i don't know the memes here in the subcultures and then me as a
user can upvote or download this so this is completely that's like because of reddit you
know up for download it's good from there and that's really really really powerful single people
with dogs accurate at which point did it go from colors to the actually showing the text i think i
added the text like a week a week after and uh so here's like the pixels so that's really cool the
pixels how do you go from there that's a huge amount of data so there's yeah uh we're now looking
at an image where it's just a sea of pixels that call 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 had to normalize it so when
you click when you draw on the map it will show you the specific pixel location and you can convert
the pixel location to a gps coordinate right like a lattice 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'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 um going to like a grid and then you have like a grid of data you get like a pixel map
kind of and you said it looks kind of ugly so then you smooth it yeah i started adding blurring and
stuff i think now it's it's not smooth again because i liked it better people like the pixel
look kind of yeah a lot of people use it and it keeps going viral and every time my my maps bill
uh like map box i had to stop using you first use google maps it went viral and google maps it was
out of credits so i and i had to so funny during when i launched it went viral um google maps the
map didn't load anymore it says over the limits you need to contact enterprise sales and i'm like
but i need now like a map so and i don't want to contact enterprise sales i don't want to go on a
call schedule with some calendar so i switched to map box and then had map box for years and then
it went viral and i had a bill of twenty thousand dollars was like last year
um so they helped me with the bill they said you know you can pay less and then i now switch to
like an open source kind of um map platform so it's very expensive project and never made any
dollar money but it's very fun but it's very expensive what do you learn from that so like
from that experience because when you leverage somebody else's sort of through the api yeah i mean
i don't think a map hosting service should cost 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 that the thing is more about like you can't make money with this project it's i tried to do
many things to make money with it and it's it's uh it hasn't worked you talked about like possibly
doing advertisements on it or something somehow 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 project is kind of like it's kind of cool so it's it's kind of fun to like subsidize it
it's kind of a little bit part of nomad list like i put it on nomad list in the cities as well
um but i also realized like you don't need to monetize everything like some projects are just cool
and you know it's like it's cool to have hood maps exist i i want this to exist right yeah there's a
bunch of stuff you've created that i'm just glad exists in this world that's true and it's a whole
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 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're talking about a map app that where 90 of the interface is a map so what are you going to
do you're going to like like it's hard to figure out where is this yeah and people don't want to pay for
it no exactly because if you make people pay for it you lose 99 of the user base and you lose
the crowdsource data so it's not fun anymore it stops being accurate right so you kind of
they pay for it by crowdsourcing the data but then yeah it's fine you know it doesn't make money but
it's it's cool but that said nomad list makes money yeah so what was the story behind nomad list
so nomad list started because i was in chiang mai in thailand which is now like the second city here
and i was you know working on my laptop um i met like other nomads there and i was like okay this
seems like a cool thing to do like working on your laptop in a different country kind of travel around
but back then the internet everywhere was very slow so the internet was fast in for example holland or
united states but in a lot of parts in in you know south america or asia was very slow like 0.5 megabits
so you you couldn't watch a youtube video um thailand weirdly had like quite fast internet
but i wanted to find like other cities where i could go to like work on my laptop whatever and
travel and but we needed like fast internet so i was like let's you know crowdsource this information
uh with a spreadsheet and i also needed to know the cost of living because i didn't have a lot of
money i had 500 a month so i had to find a place where like the rent was like you know 200 per month or
something we had you know some money uh that i could actually rent something and um and there was
nomad list and it still runs now i think it's now almost 10 years so just to 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 normal score 4.82 uh like by members but it's uh it's looking at the internet in this case
it's fast yeah fun temperature humidity air quality safety food safety uh crime racism
or lack of crime lack of racism educational level power grid vulnerability to climate change income
level it's a little much you know english it's awesome it's awesome walkability keep getting stuff
because for certain groups of people certain things really matter and this is really cool
yeah happiness i'd love to ask about that nightlife free wi-fi ac uh female friendly freedom of speech
and not so good in thailand you know values derived from national statistics
i need to do that because the data sets are usually national they're not on city level right so i don't
know about the freedom of speech between bangkok or chiangai i know them in thailand i mean this is
really fascinating so this is for city yeah it's basically rating all the different things that
matter to you and internet and this is all crowdsourced well so started crowdsourced but then um
i realized that you can download more accurate data sets from like public stores like world bank they have
a lot of public data sets united nations and you can download a lot of data there which you can you
know freely use like i started getting frost across the data where for example people from india they
really love india and they would submit the best scores for everything in india and not just like
one person but like a lot of people they would love to pump india and i'm like i love india too you
know but uh that's not valid data so you started getting discrepancies in the data between people
where people were from and stuff so i started switching to data sets and um and now it's mostly
data sets but one thing that's still crowdsource is so people add where they are they add their travels
to their profile and use that data to see which places are upcoming and which places are popular
now so about half the ranking you see here is based on actual digital nomads who are there you
can click on a city you can click on people you can see the people the users that are actually there
and it's like 30 000 or 40 000 members so these people are in austin now and 1800 remote workers
in austin now of which eight plus members checked in uh members who will be here soon and go yeah so we
have meetups so people organize their own meetups and we have about i think like 30 30 per month so
it's like one meetup a day and i don't do anything they organize themselves so i just
it's a whole black box it just runs and i don't do a lot on it it pulls data from everywhere and it
just works uh cons of austin is too expensive very sweaty and humid now difficult to make difficult to
make friends interesting right i didn't know that difficult to make friends and with this all
crowds but mostly it's pros yeah pretty safe faster than that i understand why it says not safe for
women to check the data set it feels safe the problem with a lot of places like united states
is that it depends per area right so if you get like city level data or nation level data it's like
brazil is the worst because the range in like safe and wealthy and and not safe is like huge so you
can't say many things about brazil so once you actually show up to the city how do you figure
out what uh what area like where to get fast internet for example like for me is oh it's
consistently a struggle to figure out like still hotels with fast wi-fi for example like a place
okay okay i show up to a city there's a lot of fascinating puzzles i haven't figured out a way to
actually solve this puzzle when i show up to a city figuring out where i can get fast internet connection
and uh for podcasting purposes where i can find a place with a table that's quiet right
it's not easy construction sounds all kinds of sounds you get to learn about all the sources of
sounds in the world and also like the the quality of the room because the more um the emptier the room
and like if it's just walls without any curtains or any of this kind of stuff then there's uh echoes in
the room anyway but you figure out that a lot of hotels don't have tables they don't have like normal
this weird desk right yeah but it's not a center table yep and if you want to get a nicer hotel
where it's more spacious and so on they usually have these like boutique like fancy looking like
modernist annoying tables they don't it's too designy it's too design they're not really real tables what
if you get ikea buy ikea yeah before you arrive you order an ikea yeah like no man's do this they
get desks i feel like you should be able to show up to a place and have have the desk like it's not
unless you stay in there for a long time just the entire assembly all that airbnb is so unreliable it's
the range in quality that you get is is huge hotels have a lot of problems pros and cons like hotels
have the problem that the pictures somehow never have good representative pictures of what's actually
going to be in the rooms and that's the problem like and you fake photos man if i could have
the kind of data you have on nomad list for hotels yeah and i feel like you can make a lot of money on
that too yeah the booking fees affiliate right i thought about this idea because we have the same
problem like i go to hotels and there's specific ones that are very good and i know now the chains and
stuff and but even if even if you go some chains are very bad in a specific city and very good in other
cities and each individual hotel has a lot of kinds of rooms yeah like you some are more expensive
some are cheaper and so on but you can get the details of what's in the room like what's the
actual layout of the room what is the view scan it i feel like as a hotel you can win a lot so first
you create a service that allows you to have like high resolution data about a hotel then one hotel
signs up for that i would 100 use that website to look for a hotel instead of the crappy alternatives
that don't give any information and i feel like there'll be this pressure for all the hotels to
join that site and you can make a ton of money because hotels make a lot of money i think it's
true but the problem is with these hotels like it's it's same with airline industry why does every
airline website suck when you try book a flight yeah it's like very strange like why does it have to
suck obviously there's competition here why doesn't the best website win what's the explanation of that
man i thought about this for years so i think it's like i have to book the flight anyway like i know
there's a route that they take and i need like i need to book for example qatar airlines and i and i
need to get through this process so the the and with a 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 an incentive to improve it because generally only for like a super upper segment of the market
i think like super high luxury it affects the actual booking right i don't know i think that that's a
interesting theory i think that must be a different theory my my theory would be that great engineers
like great software engineers are not allowed to make changes yeah basically like there's some kind of
bureaucracy there's way too many managers there's a lot of bureaucracy and uh great engineers show up
to try to work there and they they're not allowed to really make any contributions and then they leave
and so you have a lot of mediocre software engineers they're not really interested in improving any other
thing and like literally they would like to improve the stuff but the bureaucracy um of the place plus
all the bosses all the high up people are not technical people probably yeah they don't know much about
what web dev they don't know much about programming so they just don't give any respect like yeah you
have to give the freedom and the respect to great engineers as they try to do great things that feels
like an explanation like if you were a great programmer would you want to work at america airlines or no
no i'm torn on that because i i actually as somebody who lost program would love to work
at america airlines so i can make the thing better yeah but for i would i would work there just to fix it
for myself you know yeah for yourself and then you just know how much suffering you alleviated yeah
just oh you imagine all the thousands millions of people that go to that website and have to click
like a million times it often doesn't work it's clunky all that kind of stuff you you're making their
life just so much better yeah but there must be an explanation that's to do with managers and
bureaucracies like i don't i think it's money do you know booking.com sure so it's a booking it's
the biggest booking website in the world it's dutch actually and um they have teams because my friend
worked there they have teams for a specific part of the website like a 10 by 10 pixels area where they
they run tests on this so they run tests like and they're famous for this stuff like oh there's only
one room left right with this red letter it's like one room left book now you know and they got a
fine from the european union about this kind of interesting so they have all these teams and they run the
test for 24 hours they go to sleep they wake up next day they come to the office and they see okay
this performed better this website has become a monster but it's the most revenue generating hotel
booking website in the world is number one so that shows that it's not about like user experience it's
about like i don't know about making more money and you know not every company but you know if they're
optimizing it's a public company if they're optimizing for money but you can optimize for money by
disrupting like making it way better yeah but it's always startups they start with disrupting like
booking also started as a startup 1997 and then they become like the old again like you know uber
now starts to become like a taxi again right it was very good in the beginning now it's kind of like
taxis now in many places are better they're nicer than ubers right so it's like the circle i think some of
it is also just it's hard to have ultra competent engineers yeah like stripe seems like a trivial thing
but it it's hard to pull off like why was it so hard for amazon to have buy with one click which
i think is a genius idea yeah make buying easier like make it as as frictionless as possible just
click a button once and you bought the thing yeah as opposed to most of the web was a lot of clicking
and it often doesn't work like with the airlines remember the forms would delete you could like next
submit and it would 404 or something where your internet would go down yeah your modem yeah man
and i would have an existential crisis like the frustration would take over my whole body
and i would just wanted to quit life for a brief moment there yeah i'm so happy the form stays in
google chrome now when something goes wrong but that's so google somebody at google improves society with
that right yeah and one of the challenges of google is to have the freedom to do that they don't anymore
there's a bunch of bureaucracy yeah yeah so many brilliant brilliant people there but it just moves
slowly yeah i wonder why that is maybe that's the natural way of a company but you have people
like elon who rolls in and just fires most most of the folks and always operate like push the company
to operate as a startup even when it's already big yeah but i mean apple does this like i started
in business school apple does competing product teams that operate as startups so it's three to five
people they make something they have multiple teams to make the same thing the best team wins so you
need to i think you need to emulate like a free market inside a company to make it entrepreneurial
you know yeah you need entrepreneurial mentality in a company to to come up with new ideas and do it
better so one of the things you do really really well is learn a new thing like you're trying to you
have an idea you try to build it and then you learn everything you need to in order to build it you have
your current skills but you need to learn just a 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 uh just by way of example you did a 30 days learning session on 3d yeah where you
documented yourself giving yourself only 30 days to learn everything you can about yeah i tried to
learn virtual reality because i was like this was like same as ai it came up suddenly like 2016 2017
with i think htc vive this big vr glasses before apple vision pro and so i was like oh it is going
to be big so i need to learn this so i i know i know nothing about 3d i installed like um i think
unity and like blender and stuff and i started learning all this stuff um because i thought this
was like a new you know nascent technology that was going to be big and if i had the skills for it
uh i could use this to build stuff and so i think with learning for me it's like it i think learning
is so funny because people always ask me like how do i how do you learn to code like should i learn
to code and i'm like i don't know like i'm every day i'm learning it's kind of cliche but every day
i'm learning new stuff so every day i'm searching on google or asking now chat gpt how to do this
thing how to do this thing every day i'm getting better at my skill so you never stop learning so the
whole concept of like how do you learn well you never end so where do you want to be do you want to
know a little bit do you want to know a lot do you want to do it for your whole life or so i think
taking action is the best step to learn so making things like you know nothing just start making
things okay so like how to make a website search how to make a website or nowadays you ask gpt how
do i make a website where do i start it generates code for you right copy the code put it in a file
save it open it in google chrome or whatever you have a website and then you start tweaking with it
and you start okay how do i add a button how do i add ai features right like nowadays so it's like
by taking action you can learn stuff much faster than reading books or actually i'm always curious
let me ask perplexity how do i make a website i'm just curious what he would say
i hope it goes with like really basic vanilla solutions define your website's purpose choose
a domain name select a web hosting provider choose a website a builder or cms website
it feels like weeks or squarespace is what i said yeah landing page
what do i how do i say if i want to programming it program it myself design your website create
essential pages yeah even tells you to launch it right like start launching your website cool
well i mean you could do that yeah but this is literally it like it's this is if you want to make
a website this is the basic like google analytics but you can't make nomad list with this way you can
with wix like with ah no you can you can get pretty far i think you can get pretty far these website
builders are pretty advanced like all you need is a grid of images right yeah that are clickable
that open like another page yeah you can get quite far how do i learn to program
choose a programming language to start with your free podcast is good
work through resources thematically practice calling regularly for 30 60 minutes a day consistency is
key join 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 can can ask this question and start building stuff
yeah it clarifies it for sure and just start building like keep yeah build build like actually
apply the thing whether it's ai or uh any of the programming for web development yeah just have a
project in mind which i love the idea of like 12 startups in 12 months or like
build a project almost every day just build the thing yeah and get it to work and finish it every
single day that's a cool experiment i think that was inspiration it was a girl who did 160
websites in 160 days or something literally mini websites yeah and uh and she learned to code that
way so i think it's good to set yourself challenges you know like don't you can go to some coding boot
camp but i don't think they actually work i think it's better to do like for me out of the dark like
self-learning and setting yourself like challenges and just getting in but you need discipline you know you
need discipline to keep to keep doing it and coding you know coding is very it's a steep learning curve
to get in it's very annoying working with computers is very annoying uh so it can be hard for people to
keep doing it you know yeah that thing of just keep doing it and don't quit that urgency that's required
to finish a thing that's why it's really powerful when you documented this the creation of hood maps
or the like a working prototype that there's a just a constant frustration i guess it's like
how do i do this and then you look it up and you're like okay you have to interpret the different
options you have yeah you're like and then just try it and then and then there's a dopamine rush of
like oh it works cool man it's amazing and it's something i live streamed it it's on youtube and stuff
people can watch it and it's amazing when things work it's look it's just like amazing that you i
look very not i don't look far ahead so i only look okay what's the next problem to solve and then the
next problem and at the end you have a whole app or website or thing you know but i think most people
look way too far ahead you know they look it's like this poster again like you shouldn't you don't
know how hard it's going to be so you should only look like for the next thing the next little challenge
the next step and then see where you end up and assume it's going to be easy
yeah exactly like be naive about it because it's it's you're going to have very difficult problems
a lot of the big problems won't be even tech will be like public right like maybe people don't like
your website like um you will get cancelled for a website for example like a lot of things can happen
what's it like building in public like you do like openly we're just iterating quickly and you're
getting people's feedback so there's there's the power of the crowdsourcing but there's also the
the negative aspects of people being able to criticize so man i think haters are actually
good because i think a lot of haters have good points and it takes like stepping away from the
emotion of like uh your website sucks because blah blah blah and you're like okay just remove this your
website sucks because it's personal you know what did he say why did he didn't not like it and you
figure out okay he didn't like it because the signup was difficult or something or it wasn't the data
they say no this data is not accurate or something right okay i need to improve the quality of the data this
hater has a point 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 that's like most of twitter you know or the half twitter so you have to take it with grain
of salt um yeah you man you need to grow a very thick skin like on twitter on x like people say but i
mute a lot of people like i found out i muted already 15 000 people recently i checked so in in 10 years
i muted 15 000 people so that's like like that's one by one manual 15 yeah oh wow so 1500 people per
year and i don't like to block because then they get angry they make a screenshot and they say ah you
blocked me so i just mute and it disappear and it's amazing so you mentioned reddit so hood maps
that make it to the front page right yeah yeah it did yeah yeah yeah it did it was amazing and my
server almost went down and i was checking like google analytics was like 5 000 people on the
website or something crazy and it was at night it was amazing um i man i think nowadays honestly tick tock
youtube reels instant reels a lot of apps get very big from people making tick tock videos about it so
let's say you make your own app you can make a video of yourself like oh i made this app uh this
is how it works blah blah blah um and this is why i made it for example and this is why you should use
it and if it's a good video it will take off and you will get you man i got like 20 000 extra per month
or something from a tick tock from one tick tock video like it made a photo 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 they
then they ask money later like when a video goes right all i can do it do it again and send me
four thousand dollars or something i'm like okay i did that for example but it works like tick tock
is a very big platform for user uh um acquisition yeah and organic like the best user acquisition i
think is organic you don't need to buy ads you probably don't have money when you start to buy ads
so use organic or write a banger tweet right that's can make an app take off as well well i mean yeah
fundamentally create cool stuff yeah i have just a little bit of a following enough to like for
for the cool thing to be noticed and then it becomes viral if it's cool enough yeah and you
don't need a lot of followers anymore because that on x and a lot of platforms because tick tock x
i think instant reels also they have the same algorithm now it's not about followers anymore it's
about they test your content on a small subset like 300 people if they like it it will get tested
to a thousand people and on and on so if the thing is good it will rise anyway it doesn't
matter if you have half a million followers or a thousand followers or honored what's your
philosophy of monetizing how to make money from the thing you build yeah so a lot of starters they do
like free users so you could sign up and use the app for free which is um it never worked for me well
because i i think free users generally don't convert and i think if you have vc funding it makes sense to
get free users because you can spend your funding on ads and you can get like millions of people
come in predictably how much they convert and give them like a free trial whatever and then they
sign up but you need to have that flow worked out so well for you to to make it work that you need
like it's very difficult i think it's best to start and just um start asking people for money in the
beginning so show your app like what are you doing on your landing page like make a demo or whatever a
video and then if you want to use it pay me money pay ten dollars twenty dollars three dollars i would
ask more than ten dollars per month like netflix like ten dollars per month but netflix is a giant company
they can you know they can afford to make it so cheap relatively cheap if you're an individual
like an indie hacker like you are making your own app you need to make like at least thirty dollars
or more on a user to make it uh worthy for you you need to make money you know and it builds a
community of people that actually really care about the product also yeah making a community like
making a discord is very normal now every ai app has a discord and you have the developers and
the users together in like a discord they talk about they ask for features they build together it's
very normal now and um and you need to imagine like if you're if you're starting out getting a
thousand users is quite difficult getting thousand pages is quite difficult and if you charge them
like thirty dollars you have 30k a month that's a lot of money that's enough to like live a good life
yeah live a pretty good life i mean 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 cost very low i don't
hire people um i i try to negotiate with like ai vendors now like can you make it cheaper you know
which is i discovered this you can just email companies and say can you give me a discount
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 like now it's kind of recession you can ask companies like i i need a
discount or i kind of need to like you don't need to be about it say you know i kind of need a discount or i
need to go maybe to another company so maybe like discount like here and there and i say sure a lot
of them will say yes like 25 discount 50 discounts because you think the price on the website is the
price of the api or something it's not like you know and also you're a public facing person oh that
helps also and there's love and good vibes that you put out into the world like you're actually
legitimately trying to build cool stuff so a lot of companies probably want to associate with you
because you're trying to do yeah it's like a secret hack but i think even without a good person
it depends how much discount they will give you know they'll maybe give more but you know that's
why you should post on twitter so you get you know discounts maybe yeah yeah um but and also the
when it's crowdsourced i mean paying does prevent spam or help prevent spam also yeah it gives you high
quality users and free users are sorry but they're horrible like it's just like millions of people
especially with ai startups you get a lot of abuse so you get millions of people from anywhere just
abusing your app just just hacking it and whatever like there's something on the internet you mentioned
like 4chan discovered hood maps yeah but i love fortune i don't love fortune but you know i mean like
they're so crazy especially back then like that's it's kind of funny what they do you know i actually uh
what is it there's a new documentary on netflix anti-social network or something like that that
was really was fascinating just fortune just the you know the spirit of the thing fortune and
people misunderstand fortune it's so much about freedom and also like the humor involved in
with the system and that's it it's just anti-system but for fun the the dark aspect of it is
you're having fun you're doing anti-system stuff but like the nazis always show up and it's somehow
that started happening it's drifting somehow yeah it's just school shootings and stuff so
it's a very difficult topic but i do know it's especially early on i think 2010 i would go to
fortune for fun and they would post like crazy offensive stuff and this was just to scare off
people so we showed to other people say hey do you know this internet website fortune just check it out
yeah and it'd be dude what the is that i'm like no no you don't understand yeah 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 yeah and if you have those people show up they'll for the fun of it do a bunch of racist
things and all that kind of stuff you're saying but everything's i think it was never man i'm not
unfortunate but like i it was always about provoking it's just provocateurs you know but the the provoking in the
case of hood maps or something like this can can damage the uh a good thing like you know a little
poison in a town is always good it's like the tom waits thing but you don't want too much otherwise it
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 uh
i add like a nsfw word list they would say like bad words so when they would write like a bad words
they would get forwarded to youtube which was like a video it was like a very relaxing video
that's like kind of asmr with like glowing jelly streaming like this to relax them you know or
cheese melting on the toes nice chill them yeah yeah i like it like but actually a lot of stuff
i didn't realize how much originated in 4chan in terms of memes i didn't rickroll i didn't understand
i didn't know that rickroll originated in 4chan like just so many memes like most of the memes that
you think the word roll i think comes unfortunate like not the word world but like in this case in
the meme use like you would get like roll doubles because every there was like post ids on 4chan so
they were right they were kind of like random so if i get doubles like this happens or something so
you'd get like two two anyways like a betting market kind of on these doubles and these post ids
so much funny stuff yeah i mean that's the internet that's purest but yeah again the dark stuff kind of
seeps in yeah and you you it's nice to keep the dark stuff to like some low amount it's nice to
have a bit of noise of the darkness but not too much yeah and but again like you have to pay attention
to that with um i mean i guess spam in general you have to fight that with nomad list how do you fight
spam man i use gpt4 now it's amazing so so i have like um 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 c's and what's good and bad so uh i run it through gpt4 now and i ask like is this a you
know is this a good review like is it offensive is it racist or some stuff and and then sends me a
message on telegram when it rejects reviews and i check it and it's man it's so on point automated
yes and it's so accurate it understands double meanings um i have gpt4 running on the on the chat
community it's a chat community of 10 000 people and they're chatting and they start fighting with
each other um and i used to have uh human moderators was very good but they would start fighting the
human moderator like this guy is biased or something now i have gpt4 and it's it's it's really really
really really good it understands humor and it stands like like you could say something bad but it's
kind of like a joke and it's kind of not like offensive so much so it shouldn't be deleted right
it understands that you know i would love to have a gpt4 based filter of like of different kinds of
for like x yeah i thought this week like i tweeted like a fact check like you can click fact check
and then gpt4 look gpt4 is not always right about stuff right but it can give you a general fact check
on a tweet like usually what i do now when i write something like difficult about economics or something
or ai i put in gpt4 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 and then
the whole tweet kind of doesn't make sense anymore so i asked gpt for the fact check a lot of stuff
so fact check is a tough one yeah but it would be interesting to sort of um
rate a thing based on how well thought out it is and how well argued it is yeah that that seems more
doable that seems like more doable like it seems like a gpt thing because that'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 i should this post be if we rank on like i don't know integrity reality like the fundamental
deepness or something interestness um and it would give you that with a pretty good score probably
i mean elon can do this with croc right he can start doing using that to to check replies because
the reply section is like chaos yeah you know and actually the ranking of the replies doesn't make
any sense doesn't make sense no and i would like to sort in different kinds of ways yeah and you get
too many replies now if you have a lot of followers i get too many replies i don't see everything and i i
a lot of stuff i just miss and i don't i want to see the good stuff and also the notifications or
whatever it's just complete chaos yeah it'd be nice to be able to filter that in interesting ways
sort in interesting ways because like i feel like i miss a lot and i i what surfaced for me i just
like a random comment by a person with no followers yeah that's positive or negative it's like okay if
it's a very good comment it should happen but it should probably look a little bit more like do these
people have followers because they're probably more engaged in the platform right oh no if it's i don't
even care about how many followers if you're ranking by the quality of the comment great yeah
but not just like randomly like chronological just a sea of comments yeah yeah it doesn't make sense
yeah yeah x could be very proof of that i think one thing you you espouse a lot which i love is the
automation step so like once you have a thing once you have an idea and you build it and it actually
starts making money and it's mixing people happy there's a community of people using it
you want to take the automation step of automating the things you have to do as little work as
possible for it to keep running indefinitely can you like explain your philosophy there what you
mean by automate yeah so the general theory of starters would be that when when it starts like you start
making money you start hiring people to do stuff right do stuff that you like marketing for example do
stuff that you would do in the beginning yourself um and whatever community management and organizing
meetups for nominalists for example there would be a job for example and i thought like uh i don't
have the money for that and i i don't really want to run like a big company with a lot of people
because it's a lot of work managing these people so i've always tried to like automate these things as
much as possible and um and this can literally be like for normal this is it's literally like a it's
not a different other stuff it's like a web page where you can organize your own meetup set a set
a schedule a date whatever you can see how many nomads will be there at that date so you know there
will be actually enough nomads to meet up right and then um when it's done it sends a tweet out on
the normalist account there's a meetup here it sends a direct message to everybody in the city
who are there who are going to be there and then people show up on a bar and there's a meetup and
that's fully automated and for me it's like it's not it's so obvious to make this automatic why would
you why would you have somebody organize this like um it makes more sense to automate it and this with
most of my things like i figure out like how to do it with code and i think especially now with ai
like you can automate so much more stuff than before because ai understands things so well like before
i would use if statements right now you ask gpt you put something in gpt for and in the api and
it sends back like this is good this is bad yeah so you basically can now even uh 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 and it's not trivial to take that step for a lot of people so when you
say automate are you are you talking about like cron jobs yes man a lot of cron jobs a lot yeah it's
like uh i literally i log into the server and i do like pseudo crontab dash e and then i go into the
editor and i write like hourly and then i write php uh you know do this thing dot php and that's a script
and that script does a thing and it does it then hourly that's it and that's how all my websites
work do you have a thing where it like emails you or something like this or email somebody managing
the thing if something goes wrong i have these web pages i make they're called like health checks
it's like health check.php and then it has like emojis like a has like a green check mark if it's
good and a red one if it's bad and then it does like database cures for example like what's the
internet speed in for example um amsterdam okay it's a number it's like 27 point megabits so it's
accurate number okay check good and then it goes to the next and it goes on all the data points did
people sign up in the last 24 hours it's important because maybe the sign up broke okay check somebody
sign up then i have um uptime robot.com which is like for uptime but it can also check keywords it
checks for an emoji which is like the red x which is if something is bad and so it opens that health
check page every minute to check if something is bad then if it's bad it sends a message to me in
telegram saying hey what's up uh it 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 but the good thing is like the last few years things don't break anymore and
like definitely 10 years ago when i started everything was breaking all the time and now it's like
almost it's last week was like 100.000 uptime and these health checks are part of the uptime
percentage so it's like everything works you're actually making me realize i should uh i should
have a page for myself like one page that has all the health checks just so i can go to and see all
the green check marks just feels good to look at you know it's just be like okay yeah all right like
we're okay everything's okay yeah now like you can see like when was the last time something wasn't
okay and it'll say like never or like meaning like you've you've you've you've checked since you've
last cared to check it has all been okay for sure it used to send me the the good health checks like
yeah you know this it all works it all works but it's been so often and i'm like this feels so good
but then i'm like okay obviously it's not gonna you need to hide the good ones and show all the bad ones
and now that's the case i need to integrate everything into one place i automate like
everything yeah they have also just a large uh set of crowd jobs a lot of the publication of this
podcast is has done all everything is just on automatically it's all clipped up all the all
this kind of stuff yeah but it would be nice to automate even more like uh translation all this
kind of stuff would be nice to automate yeah every javascript every php error gets sent to my telegram
as well so every user whatever user it is doesn't have to be page user if they run into an error
um the javascript sends the javascript error to the server and then it sends to my telegram
from all my websites so you get like a message so i get like a uncaught variable error whatever blah
blah blah and then i'm like okay interesting and then i go check it out and that's like a way to get to
zero errors because you get flooded with errors in the beginning and now it's like nothing almost
so that's really cool but that's really cool but this is the same stuff people they they pay like
very big uh sas companies like new relic for right like to manage the stuff um so you can do that too
you can use off the shelf i like to build myself it's easier yeah it's nice it's nice to do that kind
of automation i'm starting to think of like what are the things in my life i'm doing myself that could
be automated uh in this gbt you know like give your daily your day and then ask what parts you
to automate well one of the things i i would love to automate more is my consumption of social media
yeah both the the output and the input man that's very interesting i think there's some
starters that do that like they they summarize the cool happening on twitter you know like with ai
i think the guy called swyx or something he does like a newsletter that's completely ai generated
we have the cool the cool new stuff in a guy yeah i mean i would love to do that but also like
across instagram facebook linkedin yeah all this kind of stuff just like okay can i can you summarize
the internet for me for today summarize internet.com yeah.com because i feel like it pulls in way too
much uh time but also like i don't like the effect it has some days on my psyche because of like haters
or or just general content like no no just general like for example like tick tock is a good example of
that for me i sometimes just feel dumber after i use tick tock i just feel like i don't use it anymore
empty somehow and i'm like uninspired yeah it's funny in the moment i'm like ha look at that cat
doing a funny thing and then you're like oh look at that person dancing in a funny way to that music
and then you're like 10 minutes later you're like i feel way dumber and i don't really want to do much
for the rest of the day my girlfriend said she saw me like watching some dumb video she's like dude
your face looks so dumb as well your whole face starts going like oh interesting you know so
i mean with social media this uh with uh with x sometimes for me too it's i think i'm probably
naturally gravitating towards the drama yeah aren't we all yeah and so with following ad people
especially ad people that only post technical content has been really good because then i just
look at them and they and then i go down rabbit holes of like learning new papers that have been
published or uh good repos or or um just any kind of cool demonstration of stuff and the thing the
kind of things that they retweet and that's the rabbit hole i go and i'm learning and i'm inspired
all that kind of stuff it's been tough it's been tough to control it's difficult you need to like
manage your your your platforms you know i have a mute board list as well so i mute like
politics stuff because i don't really want it on my feet and i think i've muted so much that now
my feed 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 could know
but still even if you do that that you're not getting i mean there's limitations that don't
make it easy to do like yeah automate because they the thing is they're trying to limit like abuse
or for you to steal all the data from the app to then train an lm or something like this yeah but if
i just want to like figure out ways to automate my interaction with the x system or with instagram
they don't make that easy but i would love to sort of automate that and explore different ways to
how to leverage lms to control the content i consume and and maybe publish that maybe they
themselves can see how that could be used to improve their system so yeah but there's not enough
uh access yes you could screen cap your phone right it could be an app that watches your screen
with you you couldn't yeah but i don't even know like what it would do like maybe it can hide
stuff before you see it you know like i have that 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 views and likes and all that on on youtube content that i create so that i don't
affect you it doesn't yeah so you don't pay attention to it um i also hide parts there 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 uh well i wrote my own because it's easier because it keeps changing it's like it's
it's not easy to keep it dynamically changing but they're really good at like getting you to be
distracted and like starting related accounts related stuff i'm like i don't want related and like
10 minutes later you're like or something that's trending i have a weird amount of friends
addicted to youtube and i'm not addicted i think because my attention span is too short for youtube
but uh 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 uh but sometimes i need to like like i need to search a
video how to how to do something and then i go to youtube and then i had these youtube shorts these
youtube shorts are like they're like algorithmically designed to just make you tap them and like i tap and
then i'm like five minutes later with this face like and you're you're just talking and it's like what
happened i was gonna open i was gonna play like the coffee mix you know like the music mix for
drinking coffee together like in the morning like jazz i didn't want to go to shorts so it's it's very
uh it's very difficult i love how we're actually highlighting all kinds of interesting problems that
all could be solved at a startup okay so what what about the exit when and how to exit man you shouldn't
ask me because i never sold my company and you've never all the successful stuff you've done you never sold it
yeah it's kind of sad right like i i've been in so i've been in in a lot of acquisition like deals
and stuff and i learned a lot about finance people as well as well there like manipulation and due
diligence and then changing the valuation like people change the valuation after uh so they a lot
of people string you on to acquire you and then it takes like six months it's a classic it takes six to
twelve months they want to see everything they want to see the your stripe and your code and whatever
and then um in the end they'll they'll change the price to lower because you're already so invested
so it's like a negotiation tactic right i'm like no and then i don't want to sell right and the problem
with my companies is like they make you know 90 profit margin so the multiple the companies get
sold with multiples kind of multiples of profit or revenue and often the multiples like three times
three times or four times or five times revenue or profit so in my case
in my case they're all automated so i might as well wait three years and i get the same money
as when i sell and then i can still sell the same company you know i mean i can still sell for three
five times so financially it doesn't really make sense to sell yeah unless the price high enough
like if the price gets to like six or seven or eight i don't want to wait six years for the money
you know but if you give me three like three years nothing like i can wait so i mean the really valuable
stuff about the companies you create is not just the interface and uh and the crowdsource content
but the people themselves like the user base yeah well normally it's a community yeah so yeah i could
see that being extremely valuable i'm surprised but normally this is like it's like my baby it's like my
first product it took off and i don't really know if i want to sell it it's like something you
will be nice when you you know when you're old that you're still working on this you know it's like
a it has like a mission which is like um people should travel anywhere and they can work from
anywhere and they can meet different cultures and that's a good way to make the world get better if
you learn if you go to china and live in china you'll learn that they're nice people and a lot of stuff
you hear about china's propaganda a lot of stuff is true as well but it's more you know you learn a
lot from traveling and i think that's why it's like a cool project to like not sell uh ai projects i have
less emotional feeling with ai projects like photo guy which i could sell yeah yeah the thing you
also mentioned is you have to price in the fact that you're going to miss yeah the company and the
meaning it gives you right there's a very famous like depression after start to find a seller company
like they're like this was my this was me who am i and they immediately start building another one
you know they can never can stop so i think it's it's good to keep working you know until you die
just keep working on cool stuff and you shouldn't retire you know i think retirement's bad probably
so you usually build the stuff solo and mostly work so well what's the thinking behind that i think
i'm not so good working with other people not like i'm crazy but like i i don't trust other people
to clarify you don't trust other people 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 in the on the called pull
the 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 it i think it breeds like averageness you know you get an average
idea average company average culture um 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 um but it's because we we know each other very long and he's one of the few
people i would build something with and uh but almost never yeah so what does it take to be successful
when you have more than one like how do you build together with andre how do you build together with
other people so he codes uh i should post on twitter literally like i promoted on twitter i i i we
said like product strategy like i said this should be better this should be better but i think you need
to have one person coding it he codes in ruby so i cannot do ruby i'm in php so you literally so
you have you ever coded with another person for prolonged periods of time never in my life
uh what what do you think is behind that i know it was always just me sitting on my laptop like
i said like just coding no like you've never had another developer who like rolls in and like i've had
it once wherever photo i like there's an ai developer philip i hired him to do the because i i can't
write python yeah 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 helped me a lot for like 10 months he worked and uh man i
was trying python working with numpy and package manager and it was too difficult for me to figure
this out and i didn't have time like i think 10 years ago i would have time to like sit you know go
do all-nighters to figure this stuff out with python i don't have the and i don't have the it's not my
thing it's not your thing it's another programming language i get it ai new thing got it but like
you never had a developer roll in look at your php jquery code and be and yes like you know like in
conversation or improv they talk about yes and like basically all right i had for one week understand
and then it ended because he wanted to rewrite everything in the no that's the wrong guy i know
you want to rewrite and what he wanted to rewrite the g he said this jquery we can't do this i'm like
okay he's like we need to rewrite everything in view view js i'm like are you sure i can't just
like uh you know like keep jquery he's like no man like and uh we need to change a lot of stuff and
i'm like okay and i was kind of like feeling it like this you know we're gonna clean up but then
after weeks it's not gonna it's gonna take way too much time i think i like working with people
where like when i approach them i pretend in my head that they're the smartest person who has ever
existed wow so i look at their code or i look at the stuff they've created and try to see the genius
of their way 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 those are the ones that are tech ambiguous so they can work with they can
learn any tech stack and they can and that's like really few like it's like really top five percent
because if you try higher devs like no offense to devs but most devs are not man most people in
general jobs are not so good at their job like even doctors and stuff when you realize this people
are very average at the job yeah especially with dev with coding i think so sorry i think that's a
really important skill for a developer to roll in and like understand the musicality the the style
that's it man and like empathy it's like yeah empathy right yeah it's a new word but that's it you need
to understand like go over the code get a holistic view of it and man you can suggest we change stuff
for for sure but um and look jquery is crazy it's crazy i'm using jquery we can change that it's not
crazy at all jquery is also beautiful and powerful and php is beautiful and powerful especially as you
said recently in the in the in the as the versions evolved it's much more serious programming language
now it's super fast like php is really fast now yeah yeah it's crazy javascript much faster ruby
yeah really fast now so if speed is something you care about it's super fast yeah um and like there's
gigantic communities of people using those programming languages and there's frameworks if you like the
framework so that whatever it doesn't really matter what you use but like also you if i was like a
developer working with you like you are extremely successful you've shipped a lot yeah so like
like if i roll in i'm gonna be like i don't assume you know nothing i assume peter is a genius like
the smartest developer ever and like learn learn from it and yes and like notice parts in the code
where like okay okay i got it like yeah here's how he's thinking and now if i want to add another
uh like little feature definitely needs to have emoji yeah man in front of it and then like just follow the
same style and add it and my goal is to make you happy to make you smile like to make you like
haha i i get it and now you're going to start respecting me and like trusting me and like and
you start working together in this way i i don't know i i don't know how hard it is to find developers
no i think they exist i think you need to i need to hire more people need to try more people but that
costs a lot of my energy and time 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 could say like okay 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 to my to-do list for example you know like i can i'll get there eventually but it's true i mean
you're also extremely good at what you do like i'm just looking at the interfaces of like photo ai
like you would jake jQuery right like how amazing is jQuery but like you can these cowboys are getting
these are there's these cowboys this is a lot it's a lot but i'm glad they're all wearing shirts
anyway the interface here is just really really nice like i could tell you know what you're doing
and with nomad list extremely nice the interface thank you man and that's all you yeah that's
everything's me so all of this and every little feature people say it looks kind of adhd or add you
know like it's so much because it has so many things and design these days is minimalist right
right right i hear you but this is a lot of information and it's useful information is
delivered in a clean way while still stylish and fun to look at so like minimalist design is about like
when you want to convey no information whatsoever and look cool yeah it's very cool it's pretentious
right pretentious or not the function is like is useless this is about a lot of information
delivered to you in a clean and when it's clean you can't be too sexy so it's sexy enough yeah this
is i think how my brain looks you know like there's a lot of going on it's like drawing bass music it's
like very yeah but it's still pretty the spacing of everything is nice the fonts are really nice
like very readable very small i like it you know but i made it so i don't trust my own judgment no this is
really nice thank you emojis are somehow like this is style it's a thing i need to pick the emoji it
takes a while to pick them you know like there's some something about the 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 don't need to remove the
emoji yeah what people don't know what they're talking about and then the i'm sure people will
tell you a lot of things this is really nice and then using color is nice small font but not too small
and obviously you have to show maps which is really tricky yeah yeah this is this is no this is really
really really nice and all of i mean like okay like how this looks when you uh hover over it
yeah it's a css transitions no i understand that but like i'm sure there's like how long does that
take you to figure out how you want it to look do you ever go down a rabbit hole where you spent like
two weeks no it's all iterative it's like 10 years of you know add a css transition here or do this or
well let's say like see these are all these are rounded now yeah if you wanted to like round
is probably the better way but if you want it to be rectangular like sharp corners what would you do
you're just so i go to the index.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's git deploys it's
it pushes to the git hub and then sends a web book and then deploys to my server and it's
live in five seconds oh you often deploy to production you don't have like a testing ground no so i
so i i'm like famous for this because uh i'm too lazy to set up like a staging server on my laptop
every time so i nowadays i just deploy to production yeah and um it's man i'm gonna be cancelled for
this you know but it works very well for me because i have a lot of i have like php lint and jslint so
it tells me when there's error so i don't deploy but my literally i i have like 37 000 git commits in
the last 12 months or something so i make like small fix and then command enter uh and sends to
github github sends a web to my server web server pulls it deploys to production and it's there what's
the latency of that from you pressing one second can be one two seconds so you should make a change and
then you're getting really good at like not making mistakes man you're 100 you're right like people
are like how can you do this well you get good at not taking the server down you know like yeah
because you need to code more carefully but it's look it's idiotic in any big company but for me it works
because it makes me so fast like somebody um will report a bug on twitter and i kind of did like
a stopwatch like how fast can i fix this bug and then two minutes later for example it's fixed 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 i mean there's
i'm sure there's a middle ground but i think that whole thing where there's a phase of like
testing and there's the staging and there's a development and then there's like multiple
tables and databases that you use for the state like it's filing it's a mess yeah and there's
different teams involved it's it's not good i'm like a good funny extreme on the other side you know
but just a little bit safer but not too much it would be great yeah yeah i'm sure that's actually like
how x now how they doing rapid improvement exactly more bugs and people complain about like oh look
he bought this twitter now it's full of bugs dude these shipping stuff like things are happening now
and it's a dynamic app now yeah the bugs is actually a sign of a good thing happening yes bugs of the
feature because it shows that the team is actually building 100 percent well one of the problems is like
i see with youtube there's so much potential to build features but i just see how long it takes so i've
gotten a chance to uh interact with many other teams but one of the teams is uh mla multi-language
audio i don't know if you know this but in youtube you can have audio tracks in different languages for
overdubbing and that there's a team and not many people are using it but like every single feature
they have to meet and agree and like there's allocate resources like engineers have to work on it but i'm
sure it's a pain in the ass for the engineers to get approval to like the because that it has to not
break the rest of the site whatever they do but like if you don't have enough dictatorial like
top down like we need this now it's going to take forever to do anything multi-language audio but
multi-language audio is a good example of a thing that seems niche right now but it quite possibly could
change the entire world when you have when i upload this this conversation right here if instantaneously
it dubs it into 40 languages yeah man 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 yeah they got the they got the compute they got the uh the user
base they got like they have the experience of how to do this so like multi-language audio should be
high priority feature right yeah that's high priority like that's and it's a way you know
google is obsessed with ai right now they want to show off that they could be dominant in ai
that's a way for google to say like we used ai like this is a way to to to break down the walls
that language creates the preferred outcome for them for them is probably their career not the the
overall result of the the cool product you know i think they they're not like selfish or whatever
they they want to do good there's something about the machine organization organizational stuff
i have this when i report bugs on like big companies i work with i get i talk to a lot of
different people on dm and they're all really trying hard to do something they're all really nice
and i'm the one being kind of because i'm like guys i'm talking to 20 people about this
for six months nothing's happening you say man i know but i'm trying my best and
yeah so it's systemic yeah so what it requires again i don't know if there must be a nicer word but
like a dictatorial type of top down the ceo rolls in uh and just says like for youtube it's like
mla yeah get this done now this is the highest priority i think big companies especially in
america a lot of it is legal right they need to pass everything through legal yeah and you can't like
man the things i do it could never do that in a big corporation because everything has to be
probably get deployed has to go through legal well again dictatorial you basically say steve jobs did this
quite a lot i've seen a lot of leaders do this ignore the lawyers ignore exactly yeah ignore pr
ignore everybody give power to the engineers like listen to the people on the ground get this
done and get it done by friday yeah that's it and the law can change like for example let's say you
you launch this ai dubbing and it's there's some legal problems with lawsuits okay so the law changes
there will be appeals there will be some supreme court thing whatever and the law changes so just by
shipping it you change society you change the legal framework by not shipping being scared of the
legal framework all the time like you're not changing things just out of curiosity what uh
what ide do you use let's talk about like your whole setup given how ultra productive you are
and that you often programming your underwear slouching on the couch is there does it matter to you
in general is there like a specific ideas you use vs code yeah vs code before i used sublime text
i don't think it matters a lot i think i'm very skeptical of like tools when people think it they
say it matters right i don't think it matters i think uh whatever tool you know very well you can
go very very fast in like you know the shortcuts for example ide you know you know like um i love
sublime text because i could use like multi cursor you know you search something and i could check like
make mass replaces in a file with the cursor thing and uh vs code doesn't really have that as well it's
actually interesting sublime is the first editor where i've learned that and i think they just make
that super easy so like what would that be called multi-edit multi multi multi cursor edit thing whatever
i'm sure like almost every editor can do that it's just probably hard to set up yeah
this was not so good i think or at least i tried but i would use that to like uh process data like
data sets for example from world bank i would just multi-cursor mass change everything um but yeah
vs code i man i was bullied into using vs code because twitter would always see my screenshots
of sublime text and say why are you still using sublime text like boomer you need to use vs code
and i'm like yeah i'll try it i i got a new macbook and then i i never installed like i never copied
the old macbook i just make it fresh you know like a clean like format c you know windows like clean
start and i'm like okay i'll try vs code and it's stuck you know but i don't really care like
it's not so important for me well you know the format c reference huh dude it was so good you would
install windows and then after three or six months it would start breaking and everything was like it
gets slow then you would restart go to dos format c you would delete your hard drive and then install
the windows 95 again it was so good times and you would design everything like now i'm 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 used emacs for many many years and i know you know i love lisp so a lot
of the customization is done in lisp it's a programming language it partially was peer pressure but part of
it is realizing like you need to keep learning stuff like the same issue with jquery like i still think i
need to learn no js for example yeah even though that's not my main thing or even close to the main
thing but i feel like you need to keep learning this stuff and even if you don't choose to use it
long term you need to give it a chance so you your understanding of the world expands yeah you want
to understand the new technological concepts and see if they can benefit you you know it would be stupid
not to even try it 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 and actually installing different stuff and playing with it that was a
interesting challenge it was uncomfortable at first yeah for me too yeah yeah but you just dive in it's
like neuroflex like you keep your brain fresh you know like this kind of stuff i gotta do that more
like have you given react a chance no but i i want to i want to learn and i want to i understand the
basics right um i don't really know where to start but would you like i guess you got to use your own
model which is like build the thing using it no man yeah so i i kind of did that like i kind of like
the the the stuff i do in jQuery is essentially a lot of it is like i start rebuilding whatever
tech is already out there not based on that but just an accident yeah like i keep coding long enough
that i built the same i start getting the same problems everybody else has and you start building
the same frameworks kind of so essentially i use my own kind of framework of you basically build a
framework from scratch that's your own that you understand it kind of yeah with ajax calls but
essentially it's the same same thing look i don't have the time i don't and this is i think saying
you don't have the time is like always a lie because you just don't prioritize it enough
my priority is still like the the running the businesses and improving that and ai i think
learning ai is much more valuable now than learning uh a front-end framework yeah like it's just more
impact i guess you should be just learning every single day a thing yeah you can learn a little bit
every day like a little bit of react or i think now like next is very big so learn a little bit of
next you know but i i call them the military industrial complex so if i but you need to know
you need to know it anyway so you gotta learn how to use the weapons of war and then and then you
can be a peacemaker yeah yeah i mean but you gotta learn in in the same exact way as we were talking
about which is learn it by trying to build something with it and actually deploy it the frameworks are
so complicated and it changes so fast so it's like where do i start you know and i guess it's the same
thing when you're starting out making websites like how where do you start yes gpt4 i guess but
it yeah it's just so dynamic it changes so fast that i don't know if it would be a good idea for me
to learn it you know um maybe some combination of like view next with php laravel laravel is like
a framework for php i think that would be uh it could benefit me you know maybe tailwind for css like a
styling engine that stuff could probably save me time yeah but like you you won't know until you really
give it a try and it feels like you have to build like if maybe i'm talking to myself but like i
should probably recode like my personal one page in laravel or yeah and even though it might not have
almost any dynamic elements maybe have one dynamic element but it has to go end to end in that
framework yeah or like end-to-end building node.js some of it is i don't figuring out how do you 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 uh you know heroku kind of those kind of platforms i
actually kind of just might gave myself the idea of like i kind of just want to build a single web page
like one web page that has like one dynamic element and just do it in every single like
in a lot of frameworks like just on the same page same oh the same page kind of page that's a cool
project uh all these frameworks yeah you can see the differences yeah that's interesting how long it
takes to do it yeah stopwatch uh i have to figure out actually something sufficiently complicated
because it should probably do it should probably do some kind of thing where it accesses the
database and dynamically exchanging stuff some ai stuff some lm stuff yeah maybe some it doesn't
have to be ailm but maybe api call api call to something to replicate for example and then you have
yeah that would be very cool project yeah and like time it and also report on my happiness yeah
i'm gonna totally do this because nobody benchmarks this nobody's benchmark happy developer happiness with
frameworks yeah nobody's benchmark the shipping time just take like a month and do this how many
frameworks are there there's how many how many there's like five main ways of doing it so there's
like this is 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 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
like according to the internet so like there's no um it's actually not trivial to find the canonical
way of doing things so like the standard vanilla like you should you go to the ice cream shop there's
like a million flavors i want vanilla if i if i've never had ice cream in my life can we just like
learn about ice cream yeah i want vanilla nobody actually sometimes a little name vanilla but like
i want to know what's the basic way but not like dumb but like the standard canonical yeah i want
to know the dominant way like the dominant six percent of developers do it like this yeah it's hard
to figure that out you know that's the problem yeah maybe alums can help maybe you should explicitly
ask what is the dominant they usually know like the dominant you know they they they give answers that
are like the most probable kind of yeah so that makes sense to ask them and uh i think honestly
maybe what would help is if if you want to learn or i would want to learn like a framework hire
somebody that already does it and just sit with them and make something together like i've never
done that but i thought about it so it would be a very fast way to you know take their knowledge
in my brain i've tried these kinds of things what happens is it depends what kind of if they're
like a world-class developer yes oftentimes they themselves are used to that thing and they have
not themselves explored in other options so they have this dogmatic like talking down to you
like this is the right way to do it yeah it's like no no we're just like exploring together okay
show me the cool thing you've tried which is like it has to have uh open-mindedness to like
you know node.js is not the right way to do web development it's like one way and there's nothing wrong with
the the old lamp php jquery vanilla javascript way it just has its pros and cons and like you need to
know those people exist you could find those people probably yeah like if you want to learn ai imagine
you have carpatti 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 how to make lm it's amazing like imagine this guy sitting next to
you and just teaching you like let's make lm together like holy it would be amazing yeah
i mean well karpathy has its own style and it's like i'm not sure he's for everybody but for
example five-year-old it depends on the five-year-old yeah but he's like super technical but he's amazing
because he's super technical and he's the only one who can explain this stuff in a simple way which
shows his complete genius yes because if you can explain without jargon you're like wow and build it
from scratch yeah it's like top tier you know like what a guy but he might be anti-framework
because he actually exactly yeah actually probably is yeah uh he's like yuba for ai yeah so maybe
learning framework is a very bad idea for us you know maybe we should stay in php and like script
kitty and uh but you have to maybe by learning the framework you learn what you want to yourself
build from scratch yeah maybe you learn concepts but you don't actually have to start using it for
your life right yeah yeah and you're still a mac guy what was a mac guy yeah yeah i switched to mac in
2014 because uh it was because when i wanted to start traveling and my brother was like dude
get a macbook it's like the standard now i'm like wow i need to switch from windows and i had like
three screens you know like windows had this whole setup for music production i had to sell everything
um and then i had a macbook and i remember opening up this macbook box like uh and it was so beautiful
it was like this aluminium and then i opened it i removed it you know the screen protector thing
it's so beautiful and i didn't touch it for three days i was just like looking at it really and i
was still on the windows computer and then i went traveling with that so i and all my great things
started when i switched to mac which sounds very dogmatic right but what great things are you talking
about all the business started working out like i started traveling i started building startups
i started making money it all started when i switched to mac listen i i kind of
uh 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 uh any of the products right yeah
well you could use i guess you could do mac 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
it's it's the what is the finder oh you don't know the find so there's the windows explorer yeah
and this explore is amazing talking finder is strange man there's like strange things
this is bug where if you if you send like attach a photo on whatsapp or telegram
it just selects the whole folder and you almost accidentally can click enter and you send all your
photos all your files to this chat group happen to my girlfriend she starts sending me photo photo
photo photo photo so if i finder is very unusual but it has linux like the whole thing is like
it's unix based right so you use the command yeah all the time like all the time and the cool thing
is you can run i think it's like unix like debian or whatever you can run most linux stuff on mac os
which makes it very good for development like i have my nginx server you know if i said if i'm not
lazy and set up my staging on my laptop it's just the nginx server the same as i have on my cloud server
right the same where the websites run and i can use almost everything the same config files configuration
files and it just works and that makes mac a very good platform for linux stuff i think yeah yeah
real ubuntu is like better of course but yeah i'm in this weird situation where i'm
somewhat of a power user in windows and let's say android and all the much smarter friends i have
all using mac and iphone and it's like if you don't want to go through the peer pressure you know
it's not peer pressure it's like like one of the reasons i want to have kids is that there's a lot
of like i would love to have kids as a base as a baseline but you know there's like a concern maybe
there's going to be a trade-off or all this kind of stuff but you see like these extremely successful
smart people who are friends of mine who have kids and are really happy they have kids so that's
that's not peer pressure that's just like a strong signal yeah it works for people that works yeah
and the same thing with mac it's like yeah like the fun like i don't see fundamentally i don't like
closed systems so like fundamentally i like windows more because there's much more freedom same with
android there's much more freedom 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 switched to mac all the good stuff started happening i think it's about the hardware it's not
much about the software the hardware so well built right the keyboard and yeah but look at the keyboard
i use so that is pretty cool that's one word for it uh what's your favorite place to work uh 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 yeah but i used to work like very ergonomically with like a standing desk yeah
and everything like perfect like eye height screen blah blah and i felt like man this has to do with
lifting too i started getting rsi like uh repetitive strain injury like tingling stuff and it would go
all the way on my back and i was sitting in the co-working space like 6 a.m sun comes up and i'm
working and i'm coding and i hear like a sound or something so i do like i look left and my necks
get stuck like i'm like wow and um i'm like what am i dying you know and i thought i'm probably dying
yeah so i don't want to die in a co-working space i'm gonna go home and die in like you know peace and
honor yeah so i closed my laptop and i put it in my backpack yeah and i walked to the street i got
on my motorbike went home um and i lied down on like a pillow like with my legs up and stuff uh to
get rid of this like because it was my whole back and it was because i was working like this all the
time yeah so um i started getting like a laptop stand everything ergonomically correct but then i
started lifting and since then like it seems like uh everything gets straightened out your posture
kind of you're more straight and i never have rsi rsi anymore repetitive injury i never have tingling
anymore uh no pains and stuff so then i started working on the sofa and it's great like it feels um
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 you know so everything's trackpad on the mac os on the macbook i used to have
the logitech mx mouse the perfect economic mouse and you're doing like this little thing with the
thing yes one screen one screen and i used to have three screens so i come from the i know where people
come from i i had all this stuff but then i realized that having it all condensed in one laptop
it's a 16-inch macbook so it's quite big but having no one there is amazing because you're so
close to the tools you're so close to what's happening you know is that working on a car or
something it's like so um like man if you have three screens look here look there you get also neck
injury actually so it's well i don't know this this sounds like you're part of a cult and you're just
trying to convince me but uh i mean but it's good to hear that you can be ultra productive on a single
screen that's yeah i mean that's crazy come on tap you all top like windows all top macOS command
tips 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 like if you deploy like a website you watch switch screens
mount tap to chrome i used to have this swipe screen you know you could do like um different screen
yeah spaces yeah i was like ah it's too difficult let's just put it on one screen
on the macbook and then and you'd be productive that way yeah very productive yeah more productive
than before interesting because i have three screens and two of them are vertical like inside code right
yeah for code you can see a lot yeah no man i love it like i love seeing it with friends like they have
amazing like battle stations right it's called it's amazing i want it but i don't want it right like you
like the constraints there's so 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 i'm suspicious of more in all in all ways you know because you can defend more right
you can defend yeah i'm a developer i make money i need to i need to get more screens right i need to
be more efficient and then you read stuff about like mythical man month where like hiring more people
slows down a software product project that's famous i think you can use that metaphor maybe for you
know tools as well then i see friends just with gear acquisition syndrome that buying so much stuff
but they're not that productive they have the best most beautiful battle stations desktops everything
they're not that productive and it's also like kind of fun like it's all from my laptop in a backpack
right it's kind of nomad minimalist take me through like the perfect ultra productive day in your life
like say like where you get a lot of done yeah are you uh and it's all focused on getting done
what what when are you waking up is it a regular time super early yes so i go to sleep like 2am usually
something like that and uh before 4am uh but my girlfriend would go sleep midnight so we did a
compromise like 2am you know so wake up around 10 11 then more like 10 um shower make coffee i make coffee
like drip coffee like the v60 you know the filter and i boil water and then put the coffee in um and then chill
a little bit with my girlfriend and then open laptop start coding check what's going on like bugs or
whatever how long how long are you like how stretches of time are you able to just sit behind the computer
coding so i used to need like really long stretches where i would do like all nighters and stuff to get
shit done but i've gotten trained to like have more interruptions where i can like because you have
to this is life like there's a lot of distractions like like your girlfriend has stuff people come over or
or whatever yeah um so i'm very fast now i can lock in and lock out quite fast and i heard people
developers or entrepreneurs with kids have the same thing like before they're like 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 goes crazy again so another constraint right yeah it's funny so i think that works for me
um yeah and then you know cook food and stuff like have lunch uh steak and chicken and you eat a bunch
of times a day so you say coffee yeah what are you doing yeah so a few hours later cook foods we get
like locally stores like meat and stuff and vegetables and cook that uh and then second coffee and then
go some more maybe go outside for lunch like you can you can mix fun stuff you know how many hours are
you saying a perfectly productive day are you doing programming like if you already like to kill it
are you doing like all day basically you mean like the special days where like special girlfriend
leaves to like paris or something and you're alone for a week at home which is amazing you can just
code that's like and you stay up all night and eat chocolate and yeah yeah yeah okay okay let's
remove girlfriend from picture social life from picture it's just you man that goes crazy okay yeah
because when she goes she goes crazy okay okay so you yeah let's let's rewind are you still waking up
there's coffee there's no girlfriend to talk to there's no now we wake up
like 1 p.m at 2 p.m
because you went to bed at 6 a.m yeah because i was coding i was finding some new ai yeah and i was
studying it and it was amazing and i cannot sleep because it's too important we need to stay awake we
need to see all of this we need to make something now and but that's the times i do make like new
stuff more so i think i have a friend he actually books a hotel for like a week to like leave his
and he has a kid too and his girlfriend and his kids stay in the house and he goes to another hotel
sounds a little suspicious right going to a hotel but all he does is like writing or coding he's a
writer and he needs like this alone time this silence and i think for this flow state it's true
you know i'm better maintaining stuff um when there's a lot of disruptions then like creating new
stuff i need this and it's common it's closed it's this uninterrupted period of time um so yeah
wake up like 1 2 p.m um you know still coffee shower we still shower you know uh and then just
code like non-stop maybe my friend comes over uh comes over some distraction yeah he also andre he
codes too so he comes over we go together we listen you know it starts going back to like the
body days you know like yeah co-working days like so you're not really working with him but you're
just both working because it's nice to have like a vibe where you both sit together on the couch
and coding or something and you actually it's mostly silent or there's music you know and sometimes
you ask something and but generally like you're really locked in and what uh what music are you
listening to i think like like um techno like youtube techno um there's a there's a channel called hor
with a umlaut like h o like double dot it's it's berlin techno whatever it looks like it's they
film it in like a toilet with like white tiles and stuff and it's very cool and they always have
like very good like kind of industrial like industrial so fast you know like yeah yeah that's
not distracting to your 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 going on this industrial techno is like you know this
african like rain dances like it's this transcendental trance that's interesting because i i i
actually mostly now listen to uh brown noise noise yeah wow like pretty loud wow and one of the
things you learn is your brain gets used to whatever so i'm sure to techno if i actually give
it a real chance yeah my brain would get used to it but like with with noise what happens if something
happens to your brain i think there's a science to it but i don't really care you just have to be a
a a scientist of one like study yourself your own 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
your everything every distraction just like disappears and it goes like you can like hold
focus on things like really well it's weird like you can like
like really focus on a thing it doesn't really matter what that is i think that's what people
achieve with like meditation you can like like focus on your breath for example it's just normal
brown it's not like binaural no it's just normal it's like yeah white noise i think it's the same
it's like fake noise white noise uh brown noise i think is when it's like bassier yeah it's more diffused
more dampened yeah dampened yeah i can see that no sharp yeah sharp brightness yeah yeah i can see
that and you use a headphone right yeah headphones yeah i actually like walk around in life often with
brown noise dude that's like psychopath but it's cool you know yeah yeah yeah when i murder people it
helps it drowns out their screams jesus christ yeah i said too much no i'm gonna try brown noise
with a murder or for the coding yeah for the coding okay good uh try it try it but you have to like
with everything else you give it a real chance yeah i find i also like i said do uh techno-y type
stuff electronic music on top of the brown noise uh but then control the speed because the faster it
goes the more anxiety so if i really need to get done especially with programming i'll have a beat
yeah and it's great it's cool i say it's cool to play those little tricks with your mind to study
yourself yeah i usually don't like to have people around because when people even if they're working
i don't know i like people too much they're like interesting no this might be yeah in co-worker
space i would just start talking too much yeah yeah so there's a source of distraction yeah we would
do in the core space we would do like a money like pot like a mug so if you would would work for 45
minutes and then if you would say one like pair words you would get a fine which is like one dollar
so you'd put one dollar to say hey what's up so true three dollars you put in the mug um and then
15 minutes free time like we can like party whatever and then 45 minutes again working and that worked
but you need to shut people up or they you know i think there's uh there's an intimacy in being silent
together then i might maybe i'm uncomfortable with like but you if you need to make yourself
vulnerable and actually do it like with close friends to just sit there in silence for long
periods of time and like doing a thing dude i watched this um this video of this podcast it was
like this buddhism podcast with people meditating and they were interviewing each other or whatever and
like a podcast and suddenly after a question it's like yeah yeah
yeah and they were just silent for like three minutes and then they said that was amazing
yeah that was amazing i was like wow pretty cool you know elon's like that
and i really like that when you'll ask a question like uh i don't know what's a perfectly productive
day for you like i just asked and you just sit there for like 30 seconds thinking yeah he thinks
yeah that's so cool i wish i was
i wish i could think more about but i want to like i want to show you my heart you know i want to
show you go straight from my heart to my mouth to like saying the real thing and the more i think
the more i start like filtering myself right and i want to just throw it out there immediately
i i do that more with team i think he has a lot of practice in that i i do that as well in a team
setting when you're thinking brainstorming and you allow yourself to just like think in silence
yeah just like because even in meetings people want to talk yeah
it's like no you think before you speak and just like it's okay to be silent together
and if you allow yourself the room to do that you can actually come up with really good ideas
yeah it's okay this perfect day how much caffeine are you consuming in this day too much right because
uh normally like two two cups of coffee but on this perfect day like we go to like four maybe
so we're starting to hit like the anxiety levels so four cups is a lot for you well i think my
coffees are quite strong when i make them it's like 20 grams of uh coffee powder in the v60 so
like my friends call them like nuclear coffee because it's quite heavy so it's quite strong
um but it's nice to hit that anxiety level where you're like almost panic attack but you're not
there yet so but that's like man it's like super locked in just like it's amazing but i mean that's
there's a space for that you know in my life but uh it's uh i think it's great for making new stuff
it's amazing starting from scratch creating a new thing yes i think girlfriends should let their guys
go away for like two weeks every few no every year at least you know maybe every quarter i don't know
and just sit and make some shits without you know they're amazing but like no disturbances just be
alone and then you know people can make something very very amazing just wearing cowboy hats in the
mountains like we showed exactly we can do that there's a movie about that with the laptops they
didn't do much programming though yeah you can do a little bit of that okay and then a little bit
of shipping you know you can do both it's a different but they need to allow us to go you
know you need like a man cave right yeah to ship yeah to get shit done yeah it's a balance okay cool
what about sleep naps and all that you're not sleeping much i don't do naps in a day i think it's
power naps are good but i don't really i'm never tired anymore in the day uh man it's also because
of gym i'm not tired i i'm tired when i want to when you know when it's night i need to sleep
yeah me i love naps i love naps yeah i don't care i don't know i don't know why brain shuts off turns
on i don't know if it's healthy or not it just works yeah i think with anything mental physical you
have to be a student of your own body and like know know what the limits are like you have to be
skeptical taking advice from the internet in general because a lot of advice is just like a good
baseline for the general population but then you personalized yeah you have to become a student
of your own like of your own body of your own self of how you work yeah that's i've i've done a lot
in like for me fasting was an interesting one because i used to you know eat a bunch of meals a day
especially when i was lifting heavy like because everybody says that you have to eat uh kind of a lot
you know multiple meals a day but i realized i can get much stronger feel much better if i
eat once or twice a day and me too yeah it's crazy i never understood this small meal thing yeah
didn't work for me let me just ask you it'd be interesting if you can comment on some of the
other products you've created we talked about nomad list interior ai photo ai therapist ai what's
remote okay it's a job board for remote jobs um because back then like 10 years ago there was
job boards but it was not really specifically remote job job boards so i made one i made like first
on nomad list i made like nomad jobs like a page and a lot of companies started hiring and they pay
for job posts so i spin it off to remote okay and now it's like this number one or number two biggest
remote job boards and uh and it's also fully automated and people just post a job and people apply it has
like profiles as well like it's kind of like linkedin for remote work just focus on remote only yeah
it's essentially like a simple job board i discovered job boards are way more complicated than
you think but um yeah it's a job board for remote jobs but the nice thing is you can charge a lot of
money for job posts it's man it's good money b2b you can charge like you start with 299 but at the
peak during when the fed started printing money like 2021 i was making like 140k a month with remote
okay with just job posts and i started like adding crazy upsells like rainbow colored uh job posts you can
add your background image just upsells man and you charge thousand dollar for an upsell
it was crazy and uh all these companies just up so up so yeah we want everything job posts would cost
three thousand four hundred dollars four thousand dollars and i was like this is good good business
and then the fed stopped printing money and it all went down and it went down to like 10k a month from
140. now it's back it's i think it's like 40. it was good times you know i gotta 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
giving away everything living a minimalist life yeah what did it take to do that like to get rid
of everything 10 years ago was like this trend in the blog back then blogs were so popular it was like
a blogosphere and it was like 100 things challenge what is that the hundred things i mean it's ridiculous
but like you you write down every object you have in your house and you count it you make like a
spreadsheet and you're like okay i have 500 things you need to get it down to 100 why you know this
is the trend so i did it i started like selling stuff started throwing away stuff and i did like
mdma and ecstasy like 2012 kind of and uh after that trip i felt so different and i felt like i had to
start throwing away like i swear and i started throwing 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 away you start you know go on
a journey you need to get out of here and um and that's what the mdma did i think yeah how hard is
it to get down to 100 items well you need to like sell your pc and stuff so you need to go on ebay and
then man going even selling all your stuff is very interesting 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 do this just to meet people
that want your yeah it was so like i 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 what's like the weirdest thing you had to sell
and you had to find a buyer for not the weirdest but like what's memorable so back then i was i was
making music and we would make music videos with like a canon 5d camera back then everybody's making
films and music videos 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 6k or something yeah and
but it meant that selling this meant that we wouldn't make music videos together anymore i would leave
holland this kind of like stuff we were working on would end and i was kind of saying this music video
stuff we're not getting big we're not getting famous in this or successful we need to stop doing this
this music production also it's not really working and it was kind of like felt very bad
you know for my friends because we would work together on this and um to sell this like camera
they would make stuff with and it was a hard goodbye it was just a camera but it was like
it felt like uh sorry guys doesn't work and i need to go you know who uh who bought it do you remember
it was some guy who couldn't possibly understand the the journey motion 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 ends now
now we kind of do new stuff and i think it's beautiful i did that twice a mile i gave away
everything everything everything like down to just pants underwear backpack i think i think it's
important to do it shows you what's important yeah i think that's what i learned from it like you you
learn that you can live with very little objects for your little stuff and um but there's a there's a
counter to it like you you lean more on this on the stuff on the services right like for example you
don't need a car you use uber right or you don't need kitchen stuff because you go to restaurants
you know when you're traveling so you lean more on other people's services but you spend money on
that as well so that's good yeah but just letting go of material possessions which it gives a kind of
freedom to how you move about the world yeah it gives you complete freedom to go into another city to
yeah with your backpack with a backpack yeah there's a kind of freedom to it there's something about
material possessions and having a place and all that that ties you down a little bit yeah next
spiritually yeah it's good to take a leap often into the world especially when you're younger to
like man i recommend if you're 18 you get out of high school do this go travel and uh you know build
some internet stuff whatever if you bring your laptop and uh it's it's amazing experience i
five years ago i would still go to university but now i'm thinking like no maybe don't maybe
skip university just go first like travel around a little bit figure some stuff out you can go back
to university when you're 25. you can like okay now i learned i've been successful in business you have
money at least now you can choose what you really want to study you know because people at 18 they
go study what is probably good for the job market right so it probably makes more sense like if you
want that go travel build some businesses and go back to university if you want so one of the
biggest uses of a university is the networking you 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
traveling and you meet so many different cultures i mean the problem for me
is like if i traveled at that young age i'm attracted to people at the outskirts of the
world like for me like where no me not geographically oh like the subcultures the sub yeah like
the weirdos the darkness yeah me too but but that might not be the best networking at 18 years
no but man if you if you're smart about it you can stay safe and i met so many weirdos from traveling
you meet 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 it enough well see the thing is that when you're
18 i feel like depending on your personality you have to learn both how to be a weirdo and how to be a
normie like you still have to learn how to fit into society yeah like for a person like me for
example who's always an outcast like there's always a danger for going full outcast yeah and
that's a harder life if you like if you go to like go full artists and full like darkness it's
just a harder life you can come back you can come back to normie that's a skill that's like i think
you have to learn how to how to fit into uh like polite society but i was very strange outcast as
well and i'm more adaptable to normie now i learned it yeah after 30s you know you're like yeah but
you need it's a skill you have to learn yeah i feel man i feel so that you start as an outcast but
the more you work on yourself the less like you have you kind of start becoming more normie because
you become more chill with yourself more happy and it kind of makes you honest right yes yes like the
most the crazy people are always the most interesting if you've solved your internal struggles and your
your therapy and stuff and you kind of become kind of you know it's not so interesting anymore maybe
you don't have to be broken to be interesting i guess is what i'm saying yeah what kind of things
were left when you minimalized so the backpack yeah uh macbook uh toothbrush uh some clothes underwear
socks um you don't need a lot of clothes in asia because it's hot so you just wear swim pants
swim shorts you walk around flip-flops uh so very basic t-shirt and uh i'll 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 uh as i
mentioned to you there's the uh the show alone yeah they really test you because they only get 10 items
and you have to survive out in the wilderness and an axe like everybody brings an axe some people uh also
have a saw wow but usually axe does the job you basically have to in order to build a shelter
you have to cut down and cut the trees and make and like minecraft you know everything i learned about
life minecraft bro yeah yeah you could it's a it's it's nice to create those constraints for yourself
to understand what matters to you and also how to be in this world and one one of the ways to do that
is just to live a minimalist life but like some people like i've met people that really enjoy
material possessions and that brings them happiness and that's that's a beautiful thing yeah 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 uh baseline hedonistic adaptation very fast yeah but man if you look at the studies
most people like like get a new car six months you know get a new house six months you just feel the
same she's like wow should i buy all the stuff that i didn't studying hedonistic adaptation made me think
a lot about minimalism and so you don't even need to go through the whole journey of getting it just
just focus on the the thing that's more permanent yeah like building yeah like people around you like
people you love nice food nice experiences meaningful work those things exercise you know
those things make you happy i think make me happy for sure you wrote a blog post why i'm unreachable
and maybe you should be too what's your strategy in communicating with people yeah so when i wrote
that i was getting so many dms as you probably have you have a million times more but um and people
were getting angry that i wasn't responding and i was like okay i'll just close down these dms completely
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've changed man yeah you've changed you guys 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 man like stalkers and like people write like their whole life story for you and then ask you
advice like man i have no idea i'm not a therapist i don't know i know this stuff but also beautiful
stuff no absolutely sure like life story i've posted a coffee form like if you wanted to have
a coffee with me and i've gotten an extremely large number of submissions and when i look at them
there's just like beautiful people in there like beautiful human beings really powerful stories
and like 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 yeah see them yeah i have this problem that i try i want to try help people and
like also like oh let's make startups and whatever and it's i've learned over the years that generally
for me and it sounds maybe bad right but like i helped my friend andre for example he was he came
up to me in the code workspace that's how i met him he said i want to learn to code i want to do
startups how do i do it i said okay let's go uh install nginx let's start coding and he has this self
energy that he actually um he he doesn't need to be pushed he just goes and he just goes and he
asks questions and he doesn't ask too many questions he just goes goes and learns it and
now he has a company and makes a lot of money has his own startups so and the people that that i had
to kind of like that asked me for help but then i i gave help and then they started they started
debating it you know yeah do you have that like people ask you advice and they go against you say no
you're wrong because i'm like okay bro i don't want to debate you ask me for advice right and the
people need to push generally it doesn't happen you need to have this energy for yourself well
they're searching they're searching they're trying to figure it out but oftentimes their search
if they successfully find what they're looking for it'll be within it sounds very like spiritual
sunny but it's really like figuring that out on your own but they're reaching they're trying to ask
the world around them like how do i live this life how do i figure this out but ultimately the answer
is going to be from them working on themselves and like literally it's the stupid thing but like
googling and doing like yeah searching procrastination i think sending messages to people is a lot of
procrastination like lex how do you become successful podcaster yeah bro just you know start
like just go yeah and uh just go i would never ask you how to be successful podcaster like i would
just start it and then i would copy your methods you know say ah this guy has a black background we
probably need this as well yeah try it yeah try it and then you realize it's not about the black
background it's about something else so you find your own voice like keep trying exactly imitation
is a difficult thing like a lot of people copy and they don't move past it yeah you should understand
their methods and then move past it like find yourself find your own voice you imitate and then you
put your own spin to it you know and that's like creative process that's like literally the whole
create everybody always builds on the previous work yeah you shouldn't get stuck 24 hours in a day
eight hours of sleep you like break it 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 just only firefighting i like that one hours of groceries and errands
i've tried breaking down minute by minute what i do in a day yeah especially when my life was simpler
it's really refreshing to understand where you waste a lot of time yeah and uh what you enjoy doing like
how many minutes it takes to be happy doing the thing that makes you happy and how many minutes
it takes to be productive and you realize there's a lot of hours in the day if you spend it right
yeah a lot of is wasted yeah for me has been the the biggest battle for uh for the longest time is
finding stretches of time where i can deeply focus into really really deep work just like zoom in and
completely focus cutting away all the distractions and me too that's the battle yeah it's unpleasant
it's extremely unpleasant we need to fly to an island you know make a a man cave island where
we can just everybody can just code and for a week you know and just get done make new projects
yeah yeah but man they called me psychopath for this because it says like one hours of sex hugs love you
know man i had to write something you know and uh they were like oh this guy's psychopath he plans his
sex you know in specific hour like bro i don't but you have a counter for hugs yeah exactly like yeah
like click click click uh it's it's just a numerical representation of what life is
yeah it's like one of those like when you draw out how many weeks you have in a life oh dude this is
like dark yeah man don't want to look at that too much yeah man how many times you see your parents
jesus is like man yeah it's scary man that's right it might be only you know a handful more times yeah
man you just look at the math of it if you see him once a year or twice a year yeah facetime today
yeah yeah i mean it 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 wait 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 facebook
you get all these old friends from school like when you were 10 years old yeah back when facebook
started like you don't really you would add friend them and then you're like why are we in touch
again just keep the memories there you know like it's different life now yeah i have
you know i don't know that might be a guy thing or i don't know there's certain friends i have that
like we don't interact often but we're still friends yeah like like every time i see him
i think it's because we have a foundation of many shared experiences and many memories i guess it's like
nothing has changed like we've been almost like we've been talking every day even if we haven't talked
for a year yeah so that's like yeah that's deep yeah issues so that so i don't have to be interacting
with them for them to be in a friend group and then there's some people i interact with a lot
just it depends but there's just this network of good human beings that can
yeah i have like a real love for them and i i can always count on them it's like if any of them
called me in the middle of the night i'll get rid of a body you know i'm there my
i like how that's a different definition of friendship but it's true it's true true friend
you've become more and more famous recently how's that uh affect you it's not recently because it's
this gradual thing right like it keeps keeps going and uh and i also don't know why it keeps going
does that put pressure on you to because you're pretty open on twitter and you're just like basically
building in the open yeah and just not really caring if it's too technical if there's any of
this just being out there does it put pressure on you to become more popular to be a little bit more
like collected and man i think the opposite right like because the people i follow are interesting
because they say whatever they think and they and they ship or whatever it's so boring that people
start tweeting only about one topic yeah i don't know anything about their personal life i want to
know about their personal life like you do podcasts you ask about life stuff of personality that's the
most interesting part of like business or sports like what's the behind the sport athlete right behind
the entrepreneur that's interesting stuff to be human yeah like you you share that you know like i
shared a tweet went too far but like we were cleaning the toilet because the toilet was clogged you know
but like it's just real stuff because jensen and wong the nvidia guy he says he started cleaning
toilets you know that was cool you you tweeted something about the the denny's thing i forget
yeah it was recent that nvidia was started in a danny diner uh table and you made it somehow
profound you're almost yeah this one this one uh nvidia a three trillion dollar company was started
in a denny's an american diner people need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next
billion or trillion dollar company what's the first and second space the home office and then the in
between yeah i guess yeah the island yeah you need a space to like congregate man and i found
history on this so 400 years ago in the coffee houses of europe the like the scientific revolution
the enlightenment happened because they would go to coffee houses they would sit there they would
drink coffee and they would work they would work they would write or they would and they would
do debates and they would organize marine routes right they would do all the stuff in coffee
houses in europe in france in austria in uk in holland so we would always be going to we were
always going to cafes to to 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 um
and then when you're in europe like a large part of europe now you kind of you cannot use a laptop
anymore it's like no laptop which i understand but that is to you a fundamental place to create
shit isn't that natural organic uh co-working space of a coffee for a lot of people a lot of people have
very small homes and co-working spaces are kind of boring they're not very they're private they're not
serendipitous they're kind of boring um cafes are amazing because they random people can come
in and ask you what are you working on or you know and not just laptops people are also having
conversations like they did 400 years ago debates or whatever things are happening and man i understand
the the aesthetics of it like it's like oh startup bro shipping is a bullshit startup you know like
but there's something more there like there's people actually making stuff
making new companies that the society benefits from like we're just we're benefiting from nvidia
i think it's the us gdp for sure is benefiting from nvidia european gdb could benefit if we build
more companies and i feel in europe there's this vibe and this you have to connect things but not not
allowing laptops in cafes is kind of like part of the vibe which is like yeah we're not really here
to work we're here to like enjoy life i agree with this anthony bourdain like this tweet was
quote to anthony bourdain photo with him with cigarettes and a coffee in france and he said
that's this is what cafes are for i agree but there is some element of like entrepreneurship
like you have to allow people to dream big and work their ass off to towards that dream and then
feel each other's energy as they interact with it like that's one of the things i liked in silicon
valley when i was uh working there it's like the cafes like yeah there's a bunch of dreamers that
there 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 all it's not everybody wins 90 percent of people will be
bullshit but they're working their ass off yeah and they're doing something and and you need to
pass this startup bro like oh it's startup level no it's not it's people making cool yeah and this
will benefit you because this will create jobs for your company your your country and your region
and i think in europe um that's a big problem like we have a very anti um entrepreneurial mindset
dream big and build and this is really inspiring this is pin tweet of yours all the projects that
you've tried and the ones that succeeded there's very few mute life it was for twitter to mute uh to
share the mute list yeah your uh mute words fire calculator no more google maker rank how much is my
site project worth climate finder ideas ai airline list still runs but it doesn't make money airline
list like compares the safety of airlines because i was nervous to fly so i was like let's collect
all the data on crashes for all the airplanes bali c cable nice that's awesome uh make village nomad
gear 3d and virtual reality dev play play my inbox like you mentioned there's a lot of stuff yeah man
trying to find some embarrassing tweets of yours you can go to the highlights tab as older like the good
shit guy there you go this was dubai pov building an ai startup wow you're a real influencer
and if people copy this photo now and they they change the screenshot it becomes like a meme
of course you know this is good man this is how dubai looks it's insane that's beautiful
architecture wise it's crazy the stories behind this yeah for sure so this is about the european
economy where like european economy landscape is ran by dinosaurs and today i studied it so i can
produce you with my evidence 80 of top eu companies were founded before 1950 only 36 of top us
companies were founded before 1950. yeah so the median founding of companies in us is something like
1960 and the median of the top companies right and the median in europe is like 1900 or something yeah
so it's um here 1913 and 1963 so there's a 50 year difference it's a good uh representation of the
very thing you were talking about the different difference in the cultures entrepreneurial spirit
of the peoples but europe used to be entrepreneurial like there was companies founded in 1800 1850 1900
it flipped like around 1950 where america took the lead and um and i guess my point is like i hope that
europe gets back to because i'm european i hope that europe gets back to being an entrepreneurial culture where
they build big companies again because right now the all the old dinosaur companies control the
economies they're lobbying with the government there europe is also there's like they're infiltrated 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 an ai startup in europe now i cannot because there's an ai regulation
that makes it very complicated for me i probably need to get like notaries involved i need to get
certificates licenses um whereas in america i can just open my laptop i can start an ai startup right
now um mostly you know what do you think about eac effective accelerationist movement man you had
beth jesus on i love beth jesus and um he's amazing and i think eoc is is very needed to similarly
create a more positive uh outlook on the future like because people people have been very pessimistic
um about society about the future of society um you know climate change all this stuff uh
eoc is like is a positive outlook on the future it's like technology can make us you know we need to
spend more energy we should find ways to of course get like clean energy but we need to spend more energy
to make cooler stuff and you know go into space and build more technology that can improve society
and we shouldn't shy away from technology technology can be the answer for many things yeah build more
don't spend so much time on uh fear-mongering and cautiousness and all this kind of stuff
some is okay some is good but most of the time should be spent on building and creating on like and
doing so unapologetically it's a it's a refreshing reminder what made united states great is all the
builders like you said the entrepreneurs like we can't forget that in in all the sort of discussions
of how things could go wrong with technology and all this kind of stuff yeah it goes again 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 has massive problems but that comes with the whole thing that comes
of america in this beginning holds a massive problems right um but i think it's very very
dangerous for a country or a region like europe to you you you get to this point where you're kind of
complacent you're kind of comfortable and then you know you can either go this or you can go this way
right you're you're from here you go like this and then you can go this or this i think you should
go this way and uh go up yeah go off and and uh i think that's the problem is the the the mind culture
so eoc i made euoc it's like the european kind of version um i made like hoodies and stuff so a lot
of people wear like this this make europe great again hats um yeah i made it red first but it became
too like trump so now it's more like european blue you know make europe great again all right um okay so you
had a incredible life very successful built a lot of cool stuff so what advice would you give to
young people about how to do the same man i would listen to like nobody just do what you think is
good and follow your heart right like uh everybody peer presses you into doing stuff you don't want to
do and like they tell you like parents or family or society and tell you but like try your own thing
you know because it probably it might work out you can you could 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 there's space in economy and in society for do your own thing you know yeah it's like um you know
like little villages everybody would sell i would sell bread you would sell meat everybody can do their
own little thing you don't need to you know be a normie as you say you you um you can you can be
what you really want to be you know and like go all out doing that yeah you got to go all out because
if you do if you have assets you cannot succeed you need to go lean into the to the outcast stuff lean
into the um 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 uh keep doing your thing keep inspiring me and uh the world with all the cool
stuff you're building thank you man thanks for listening to this conversation with peter levels
to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave
you with some words from drew houston dropbox co-founder by the way i love dropbox anyway drew said don't
worry about failure you only have to be right once thank you for listening i hope to see you next time