Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #440

so I was trying to figure out how to do photo realistic AI photos and it was stabil diffusion by itself is not doing that well like the faces look all mangled y 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 tun 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 there's still core porn there like of naked people so I need to prompt out the nak and everybody 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 detor oh nfw 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 programmed shipped and ran over 40 startups many of which are hugely successful in most cases he did it all by himself while living the digital Nomad life in over 40 countries and over 150 cities programming on a laptop while chilling on a couch using vanilla HTML jQuery PHP and 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 Alex Freedman 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 designer I'm the developer I make everything I make the logo so for me I'm much more Scrappy and and because I don't have funding like I need to I need to go fast I need to make things fast uh to see if an ID works right I have an IDE in my

mind and I build it build it like a mro 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 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 can see if the idea is validated and most ideas don't work like as you say most feel so there's this rapid iterative phase where you just build a prototype that

works launch it yeah see if people like it improving it really really quickly to see if people like it a little bit more enough to pay and all that that that whole rapid process is how you think of I think it's it's like it's very rapid and it's like um if I compare 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

jet gbt 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 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 like legal for like oh

can you vouch for this you know I can just go and ship you always code in your underwear the your profile picture you're like slouching a couch and your underwear chilling a laptop no no but it's I do wear like shorts a lot and I I usually just wear shorts and no T-shirt cuz I'm always too hot like I'm always overheating thank you for showing up not just in your underwear but wearing shorts I know you know I still wearing this for you but thank you um thank you for dressing up I think it's cuz

I since I go to the gym I'm always too hot what's your favorite EX in the gym man over press over press like like shoulder press yeah okay but it feels good cuz you're doing like you do you win cuz when you what is it I do 60 kilos so it's like 120 lbs or something like it's it's it's my only thing I can do well you know in the gym and you stand like this and you're like I did it you know like a winner pose yeah Victory pose uh I do bench press squads

deadlift hence the uh the mug yeah talking to my therapist it's a deadlift yeah because it acts like therapy for me you know yeah yeah it is which is controversial to say like if I say this on Twitter people get angry physical hardship is a kind of therapy yeah I just rewatched uh Happy People year in the tiger that Warner Herzog film where they document people that are doing trapping they're essentially just working for survival in the wilderness year round yeah and there's a deep happiness to their way of life because they're so busy in

it in nature yeah 100% like there's something about that physical physical yeah toil yeah my dad taught me that my dad always do 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 when I'm depressed or something um he says like get a big like what

do you call 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 is it's not is it about the project Journey the puzzle

of it no he doesn't care about the results well he shows me he's like it's amazing I'm 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 cuz 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 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 going to fix this feature or today I'm going to fix this bog or something I'm going to 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 about fun cuz I was cuz I was doing it when I didn't make money right

that's the point so I was always coding I was always I was making music I made electronic music drama based music like 20 years ago and I was always making stuff so I think 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 figure stuff out but but the interesting thing is you built a lot of successful products and you never really wanted to take it to that level where you scale real big andell it to aan something like this

yeah the problem is I don't dictate that right like if more people start using IF Millions people s start using it and it becomes big um I'm not going to 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

going to do it I'm going to do it like you because it's more it's more fun it's more Indie it's more chill it's more creative they don't like this they don't like to be manager right you become like a CEO you become a manager and 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 ground work the coding so I think that keeps you happy like doing something creative yeah it's interesting

how people are pulled towards that to scale to go really big and you don't have 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 um but some of that is the sacrifice needed to have a impact of 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 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 bullshit 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 does not he's just raising money from investors and he's actually building stuff with 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 to that time when you were in 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 uh with AdSense like $22,000 a month $2,000 up and all my friends got like normal jobs and we stopped hanging out cuz people would like in University hang out you know you chill each other's houses uh you go party but 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 this you know when you're turn 27 it's like some concept where Saturn returns to the same place in the orbit that it was when you're born I'm learning some it's some astrology thing you know so many truly special artists died when they were 27 exactly sum of 27 man and it was for me like I started going crazy because I didn't really see like

my future in Holland buying a house going living in the suburbs and stuff so it flew out I went to Asia started digital nomading and did that for a year and then that made me feel even worse you know CU 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 it was getting very depressed and like I'm like an outcast you know and my money was was shrinking I wasn't making money anymore lot 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 it online and put stripe to where you can pay money for it yeah add a stripe check I'm not sponsored

by stripe but add a stripe checkout button is that still like the the easiest way to just like pay for stuff stripe 100% like I think so yeah it's a cool company they just made it so easy you can just click and yeah and they're really nice like the CEO Patrick is really nice behind the scenes it must be difficult to like actually make that happen cuz that used to be a huge problem like just Merchant just just adding a thing a button where you can like pay for a thing dude it's dude I know

this because when I was when I 9 years old I was making websites also and I tried to open a merchant account there was like before tribe 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 F them to America from Holland with my dad's facts um and my dad had to it wasn't my dad's name and he to sign for this and he started reading these terms and conditions which 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 we fax 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 what startup number one what what was that what

like what what were you feeling what were you sitting behind the computer like how much do you actually know about building stuff at that point I could I could code a little bit because I did the YouTube channel and I made a website for I would make websit for like the YouTube channel it was called panda mix show and it was like these electronic music mixes like dubstep or dral base or Tech in our house I saw one of them had like flash were you using flash yeah my album my CD album was using flash

yeah yeah I sold my CD yeah kids flash was Flash was software this is like the the break like Grandpa you know but flash was cool yeah and there was what's it called boy I should remember this action script there's some kind of programming language scpt yeah yeah script in flash back then that was the JavaScript you know the JavaScript yeah and I I thought that's going to that's supposed to be the dynamic thing that takes over the internet I invested so many hours in learning Steve Jobs killer Steve Job said flesh sucks stop using

it every was like okay that guy was right though right yeah I I don't know yeah well it was it was a closed platform I think and Clos but it's ironic cuz Apple you know they're not very open right but back then Steve was like this is closed we should not use it and it's as security problems I think which sounded like a copout like I just wanted to say that to make it look kind of bad um but flash was cool yeah yeah it was cool for a time yeah H listen animated gifts 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 gifts were actually cool not ironically cool like there's like on the internet you would have like a Dancing Rabbit or something like this and that was really exciting no you had like the you know Lex homepage you Le everything was centered yeah and you had like Peter's homepage and then the on construction yeah GIF which was like a guy like with a helmet and the lights banners uh yeah that's how before

like Google AdSense you would have like banners for advertising it was amazing yeah and and a lot of links to porn I think yeah where the Merion accounts people would use for people would make money a lot only money made on internet 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 monom lunch a startup so I could uh learn to code learn basic stuff and but it was still very Scrappy because I didn't have time to which was on purpose like 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 playing my inbox cuz back then my friends we would send we would send like cool was before Spotify we would send like uh 2014 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 the these giant email trads on Gmail and they were like unnavigable so I made an app

that would log into your Gmail get them emails and find ons of YouTube links and then make like kind 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 poop 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 project already would get like

pressed like it went on think like um 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 you could tell GMA like don't give me all 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 but people don't never do this I've seen a few like Boomerang there's a few apps that are like good but just I wonder what maybe it's not easy to make money I think it's hard to get people to pay for these like extensions and plugins you know cuz it's not like a real app so it's not like people don't value it people value oh this a plugin should be free you know when I want to use

a plugin in Google Sheets or something I'm not going to pay for it like it should be free which is but if you go to a website and you actually okay I need this product I'm G to pay for this because it's a real product so even though it's the same code in the back it's a plugin you know yeah I mean you can do it through like extensions like Chrome extensions through from the browser side yeah but who pays for Chrome extensions right like barely anybody so nobody uh that's not a good place to

make money probably yeah that sucks like chromic 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 cuz like imagine I can imagine a lot of products that would just live as extensions like improvements for social media like it's like gpts you know gpts yeah like these CH gpts they they going to charge money for it now and you get

a ref ref share I think from an open AI I made a lot of them also why we'll we'll talk about it so let's rewind back it's a pretty cool idea to do 12 startup in 12 months what what's it take to build a thing in in in 30 days like at that time how hard was that I think the hard part is like figuring out what you shouldn't add right what you shouldn't build because you don't have time so you need to build a landing page well you need to make the you know you

need to build the product actually because it need 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 fot you sign up you pay strap checkout and you get a login link and when I started it was only a login link with a hash and that's just a static link so it's very easy to log in yeah it's not so safe you know what if you leak the link and now I have real Google login

but that took like a year so keeping it very Scrappy is very important to because you don't have time you know you need to focus on um what you can build fast uh so money stripe uh build a product build a 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's it gets deleted you know M um maybe if you find a problem that a lot of people on Reddit already have on subreddit you know like and you solve that problem say sub people I made this thing that might solve your problem and maybe it's free for now you know like 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 cuz 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 think a peak and so I would not kill yourself it's very important just get through it you

know but uh because you have nothing you have probably no money you have no business you have no job you have you like Jeremy Peterson said this I saw it somewhere like the reason people are depressed because they have nothing they don't have a girlfriend they don't have a or boyfriend they don't have a you need stuff you need like or a family you need things around you you need to build a life for yourself if you don't build a life for yourself you'll be depressed so if you're alone in Asia in a hostel looking

at the ceiling and you don't have any money coming in you don't have a girlfriend you don't of course you're depressed press is logic but back then if you're in a moment you think this is 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 Nomad that they kill themselves and I don't I haven't

checked like this 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 ecologically taxing and you're alone a lot back then when you travel alone there was no other digital Nance 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 you 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 MH you feel this rooted and you're constantly in the outcast in in that you're different from everybody else yes exactly but people treat like Thailand people are so nice but you still feel like Outcast and and then I think the the digital n i met then were all kind of like it was like shady business you know but they were like Vigilantes cuz 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 this 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 struck upon it on accident because I I was like I'm going to graduate University and then I'm going to I need to get out of here I'll fly to Asia because I've been before in Asia I studied in Korea in 2009 like study exchange I was like Asia is easy Thailand's easy I'll just go there figure things out and it's cheap it's very cheap changai I would live like for $150 per month rent for like a private room pretty good so I struck on this on

next 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 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 a more cheap places and it looked like a very adventurous life like you travel around you build your business there's no pressure from like your Home Society right like you're American so you're you get pressure from American soci telling you kind of what to do

like you need to buy a house or you need to this stuff I had this in Holland too and you can get away from this pressure you can find 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 dis attached 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 kofka said I'm free therefore for I'm lost

man that's so true yeah that's exactly the point and yeah freedom is like it's the definition of no constraints right like anything 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 what were they making for money what what so you're saying they were doing Shady stuff at that time for me you know because

I was more like a developer I wanted to make startups kind of and and it was like um it was like drugs being shipped to America like diet pills and stuff like non FDA proofed stuff you know and they would like there was no like e they were like they would would save beers they would laugh about like all the dodgy shit 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 SLE you know but right but you

know this Vibe it could be a Vibe and your your Vibe was more buol shit 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 and you'll make 100 million a month like those people was this shit and I I was like this is not my people yeah I don't I mean there's nothing wrong with any of those individual components judg but but there's a foundation that's not quite ethical I 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 shit you know but they also think their cool shit 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 why 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 I mean what are some happy memories just like working working cafes or working in just the freedom that that uh envelops you from with that that way of life cuz anything is possible you can just get up was amazing like we would work like you would I would make friends and we would work until you know 6:00 a.m. in Bali for example with like um with Andre my best friend who who still my best friend and we

and other friends and we would work until like the morning when the sun came up because at night the co-working space was silent you know there was nobody else and I would wake up like 6 p.m. or 5:00 p.m. I would drive to the cing space on a motorbike I would buy like uh 30 hot lattes from a cafe how many 30 cuz there was like there was like six people coming or we didn't know sometimes people would come in and did you say 3030 yeah nice and we would drink like four per person or

something you know uhhuh man it's B I don't know if they were powerful lattes you know but they were lattes and um we would put in plastic bag and I would drive there and all the coffee was like falling you know everywhere and then we'd go into course and have these coffees here and we'd work all night we'd play like techno music and everybody would just work on their like this was literally like business people they would work in their startup and we would 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 6 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 uh then we'd go home sleep in like a hostel or a hotel and do the same thing and again and again and again and it was this lockin mode you know like

working um and that was very fun so it's just a a bunch of you music blasting all through the night yeah more like like indust not like see I for me it's such an interesting thing because the speed of the beat affects how I feel about a thing So the faster it is the more anxiety I feel but that anxiety is channeled into productivity but if it's a little too fast I start the anxiety overpowers don't like drama base 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 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 drama based 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's 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 Bangkok and changai I think Thailand is very special like I've been to the other place like I've been to Vietnam and I've been to South America and stuff I still think Thailand wins in how nice people are how easy of a life people have their everything's cheap yeah good well bangok is getting expensive now but changai 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 love not just because of that but I like Brazil brail uh the problem still is the safety issue you know like it's it's like in America like it's localized it's hard for Europeans to understand like safety's localized to specific areas so if you go to the right areas it's amazing Brazil is amazing if you go to the wrong areas like you maybe you die MH right yeah yeah I mean that's true it's not true in Europe feel in Europe

is much more true more average you're right you're right there it's more averaged out yeah I like it when there's strong neighborhoods when you're like you cross a certain Street and you're in in a dangerous part of town man yeah it's I 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 is you don't feel scared well I don't I like danger BJJ no not even just that I think danger is interesting so danger reveals something about yourself about others also I like

the full range of humanity yeah so I don't like the mellowed out aspects of humanity I I have friends like theom 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 this authenticity more they don't like luxury they don't like oh yeah I hate luxury yeah it's very European of you like wait was that that's a whole another 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 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 D Nom like called Nomad list.com and there was a community so it was like 3, and other digital no man 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 dis rooted um but there's something man it's like Anthony berdan you know there's something pure about this kind of vagab Bor 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 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'll

awaken to the possibilities of this place when you feel like that it's like great and it's even when you're doing some basic travel I go to San Francisco or something El yeah you have like the novelty effect like you're in a new place like here things are possible you know you you 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 is 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 right 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 cuz we kind of very quickly get accustomed to discomforts exactly uh like for example like door knobs yeah like design of certain things like new cream and door off well that when I know how much uh incredible design work has gone into it's really interesting doors and door knobs just the Design of Everyday Things forks and spoons it's going to be hard to come up with a fork that's better than the current Fork designs yeah and the other aspect of it is you're saying like in order to come up

with interesting ideas you got to try to live a more interesting life yeah but that's where travel comes in 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 weads 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 the same thing like in Indonesia or tand do you

have one app that you can order food with 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 cuz 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 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 I used to have like a because when I was when I wasn't making money I

was trying to like make this list of ideas to see like so I need to build I was thinking statistically already like I need to build all these things and one of these will work out probably you know so I need to have a lot of things to try um 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 C 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 and then you find something like okay this generates St 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 G is like a solution trying to find a problem yeah and usually it doesn't

work and that's very common with with startup FS I think they they have Tech but actually people don't need to Tech right can you actually explain it'd be cool to talk about some of the stuff you created can you explain um this photo.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 AI model and you can take as many photos you want anywhere in any clothes uh with facial expressions like happy or sad or poses uh all this stuff so how does

how does it work so this is uh you send me a link to a gallery of ones done on me which is so on the left you have the prompts the Box yeah so you can write like so model is your model this Lex Freedman so you can write like model as a blah blah blah whatever you want y then press the button and it will take photos take will take like photos what are you using for the hosting for the compute replicates okay replicate decom they're very very goods 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 St in Lex Freedman 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 or miss rate is like I don't know say like 50/50 or something but when I was watching your Tweet like it's been getting better and better

and better it was very bad in beginning it was so bad but still people sign up to it you know uh there's there's two luxes is great it's getting more and more sexual it's making me very uncomfortable man but that's the problem with these models cuz no we need to talk about this cuz the models the fusion yeah so the photorealistic models that are like fine tuned they were all trained on porn in the beginning and there was a guy called Hassan so I was trying to figure out how to do photo realistic AI photos

and it was stable diffusion by itself is not doing that well like the faces look all mangled yep 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 tune models and people would train on porn and I would try them and they would be very photo realistic 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 there's still core of porn there like of naked

people so I need to prompt out the nak and everybody 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 foror oh nfw detector because you get the journalists get very angry if they you know you if you sex there was a journalist I

think that would got angry that used this and was like oh it it made me it showed like a nipple because Google Vision didn't detect it so there's like these kind of problems you need to deal with you know that's what I'm talking about this is with cats but look at the cat face it's also kind of mangled you know I'm I'm uh I'm a little bit disturbed you can zoom in on the cat if you want like like 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 to make I'll go in Austin do you think you'll know in

Texas in Austin Texas cowboy hats in Texas yeah as a as a cowboy as a cowboy it's going to go so uh towards the porn Direction it's 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 all right cool yeah let's see oh wow so this whole interface you've built this is really well done J cury so I still use J cury the only one still after this day you're not the only one the entire of the

web is PHP thep and jur yeah and SQL lights you're just like one of the top performers from a programming perspective that are still like openly talking about it but every everyone's using PHP like if you look most of the web is still probably PHP 70% it's because of Wordpress right cuz the blogs are that's true yeah um true I'm seeing a Revival now people are getting sick of Frameworks um like all the JavaScript Frameworks are so like what do you called 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 to change everything BEP 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 J jQuery PHP and cool white so that that's a really simple stack and you get stuff done really fast 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 HML um CSS

you know because you make websites and when my startup started taken off I didn't have time to I remember putting on my to-do list like learn node.js cuz I it's important to switch you know cuz this obviously is much better language than PHP and I never learned it I never did it uh because the time I I these things were growing like this and I was launching more project and I never had time it's like one day you know I'll I'll start coding properly and I never got to it I I sometimes wonder if I

need to learn that stuff it's still to-do atem for me to really learn node.js or or flask or these kind of react yeah react and it's there 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 C++ When You're Building Systems engineering is like there's a lot of benefits for a pointer safety all that kind of stuff so I I don't know but it just feels like you can get so much more stuff done if you don't

care about how you do it man this is my most controversial take I think and maybe I'm wrong but I feel like there's Frameworks now that raise money they raise a lot of money like they raise 50 million 100 million 300 million dollars and the idea is that you need to make the developers the new developers like when you're 18 or 20 years old right um get them to use this framework and then add a platform to it like where the framework can it's open source but you probably should use the platform which is paid

to use it and the the cost of the platforms to host it are a thousand times higher than just hosting it on a simple AWS server or VPS on 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 starts 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 influen is a big thing to like um and same thing what happens with like uh nutrition in Fitness or something same thing happens in developing they pay this influen to promote the stuff use it make stuff with it make demo product with it and then a lot of people like wow uh use this and I started noticing this because when I was ship my stuff people would ask me what are you using I I would say I just PHP JQ 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 cuz this PHP thing works and I don't really I'm optimizing for anything just doing it just works and I never understood like why uh like I understand there's new technologies that are better and it 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 influenc or whatever it can't all go to developers you don't

need Developers for 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 uhp was not good of security for a while but

now it's good in theory in theory is it though now no no now as 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 over represented 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 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 like I

just sort of questioning the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push software Engineers towards Frameworks towards complex like uh super complicated sort of software engineering approaches that stretch out the the time it takes to actually build a thing 100% And it's the same thing with big corporations 80% of the people don't do anything it's like it's not efficient and and 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 technology that's um that's

simple that's pragmatic that's like that works uh that's not overly complicated doesn't make your life like a living hell you know and use a framework when it obviously solves a problem a direct problem that you of course you yeah of course I'm not saying you should code without a framework you should use whatever you want but yeah I think it's suspicious you know and um and I think when I talk about on Twitter like there's a lot this this Army comes out you know this this these framework armies yeah man something my gut tells me

you I want to ask the framework Army what have they built this week it's the Elon question what did you do this week yeah did you make money with it you know did you charge users is it a real business and um yeah uh so going back to the Cowboy first of all some don't look like you right but some do every aspect of this is pretty incredible I'm also just looking at the interface it's really well done so this is all just jQuery and yeah this is really well done so like tell take me

through the Journey of photo AI like you don't know much 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 what was the origin story of photo AI I think uh it started cuz stable diffusion came out so stable diffusion is like this the first like generative image mod 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 to 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 exist. org and it generated like they called like house porn and that one like house porn it's like a subreddit so and this was stable diffusion like the first version so looks really you can click for another photo so it generates like all these kind of

non-existing houses it is house point but it looked kind of good you know like especially back then now things look much better um this really really well done wow and it also generates like a description and you can up vote is it nice up vote it man there's so much to talk to you about like the choices here is this is very Scrappy in the bottom there's like a ranking of the most up voted 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 cuz I was getting bored of it too like just continuous house porn like everything starts looking the same but then I thought it was really good at interior so I pivoted to interior ai.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 mhm so you see it looks almost the same as photo it's 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 a 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 interor design make a gallery and um train a new model that was very good at 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 a startup so now I Avatar ai. me I couldn't get the do and this was uh this was yeah Avatar ai. me well now it forwards

to phot because I pivoted got it but this was more like cheesy thing so this is very interesting because this went so viral it made like I think like 150k in a week or something it's the most money I ever made and um and then big this is very interesting the big VC companies like lenza which are much better at iOS and stuff than me I didn't have IOS app they quickly build the 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 with it yeah they they became like the top grossing app after that um and it was how 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 fuck no I was a little bit like sad cuz 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 sent like iOS Developer Studio or something that and 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 C 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 kit

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 this is going to be and it was a hype this Avatar 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 offs word because they were all like in a Cheesy you know Picasso style and art is easy because you interpret the

the all the problems that AI has with your face are like artistic you know if you call it Picasso but if you make a real photo all the problems with your face like it just you look wrong you know mhm 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 cuz 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 yeah 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 a launch tweet and then the before there is like the me hacking on

it oh I see so that okay so October 26 2022 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 mixure and people would say I look like a hammerhead shark was like the top comment so then I realized my eyes are far apart uh yeah the internet helps you realiz who how you look you know boy do I love the internet first first trap what what is is this wait

it's water from the waterfall but the waterfall is in the back you know so what's going on so this is how much of this is real it's all AI it's all AI yeah that's pretty good though for the early days exactly so but this was hit or miss so you had to do love curation cuz 99% of it was really bad MH so these are the photos I uploaded how many photos did you use only these I will try more up to date picks later these are the these are the only photos you uploaded yeah

wow wow 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 or I think it's cropped it's like a cropped by the by the the layout but they're they're Square photos so they're 512 by 512 mhm because that's stable fusion um but nevertheless not

great captures the face like it's not it's not like a uh collection of several hundred photos that it's like exactly like I I would imagine that too when I started I was like a 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 leurs it learns how you look so I I did this and then I was getting so I was getting DMs like telegram messages like how can I do the same

thing I want these photos my girlfriend wants these photo 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 a HTML page um registered a domain name and this was not even it was a stripe payment link which means you have uh literally 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 uh a typ form link so Ty

form is a site where you can have create like your own um input form like Google forms so they would get a email with a link to the type form or actually just a link after the checkout and they could upload their photos so enter their email upload the photos and um and I launched it and I was like here first sale so this October 2022 and I think within like the first 24 hours was like I'm not sure it was like a thousand customers or something um but the problem was I didn't have code

to automate this so I had to do manually so the first few hundred I just literally took their photos uh train them and then I would generate the photos with the prompts and I had this text file with the promps and I would do everything manually and this quickly became way too much so but that's another constraint like I was forced to code something up uh that would do that and that was essentially making it into a real website right so first it was the type form and they uploaded through the typ form strip check

out form yeah and then you were like that image is downloaded did you write a script to export down download the images myself it's a zip file unzip file you unzipped it un yes and then I no I'm because you know do things don't skill Paul graah says right so uh and then I would train it and then I would email them the photos I think from my personal email say here's your here's your avatars you know and they liked it they were like wow it's amazing you emailed them with your personal email it didn't

have an email address on this domain and this is like a 100 people yeah and then you know who signed up uh like man I cannot say but really famous people like really really like billionaires famous Tech billionaires did it and I was like wow this is crazy and I sent I was like so scared to message them so I said thanks so much for using my sites you know he's like yeah amazing app gra work so it's like this is different than normal reaction you know it's Bill Gates isn't it can say anything just

like shirtless P gdpr you know like privacy European regulation canot 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 going to die down very fast and I did because it's too cheesy but you have to automate the whole thing how' you automate it so like what's the AI component like how hard was that to

figure out okay so that's actually in many ways the easiest thing because there is all these platforms already back then there was platforms for uh fine-tune St 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 cuz I tweet always like how much money these websites make and then so the the you called vendor right the the G the platform that did the gpus they increased their price for training from $3 to $20 after they saw that I

was making so much money so immediately my profit is gone because I was selling them for $30 and I was in a slack with them like saying what is this like can you just put it back to $3 they say yeah maybe in the future we're looking at it right now I'm like what are you talking about like you just took all my money you know and they're smart well they're not that smart because like you also have a large uh platform and a lot of people respect you so you can literally come out and

say that they're not I think it's like kind of dirty to cancel a company or something I I prefer just bringing my business elsewhere but there was no elsewhere back then right so I started talking to other um AI model ml platforms so replicade was one those platforms and I started dming the CEO say can you please create like it's called dream Boo this fine tuning of you yourself can you add this to your site CU I need this cuz I'm being price gods 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 Fish very nice guy and he was like

they never price go me they never treat me bad they always been very nice it's 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 vide generate music generate spech find two models 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 it started as like a machine learning platform that was like I didn't even understand what it did it was just too to ml you know like you would understand because you're in the ml world I wouldn't understand now it's newb friendly yeah exactly and I didn't know how it

worked and um but I knew that they could probably do this and they did it they built the models and now I use them for everything and we trained like I think now like 36,000 models 36,000 people already but is there some tricks to fine tuning to like the collection of photos that are provided like how do you like yes man it's so many Hecks the hack it's like 100 Hecks to make it work what what's what are some my secrets now well not not the secrets but the more like insights maybe about the human

face and the human body like what what kind of stuff get messed up a lot I think people well man it's thing people don't know know how they look so um yeah they generate photos of themselves and then they say ah it doesn't look like me yeah but it then you know you can check the training phones it does look like you but you don't know how you look so there's a face dysmorphia of yourself that you you have no idea how you look yeah that's hilarious I mean I've got to one 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 coming to terms with the reality of how I look and how I sound and everybody and but people often don't right like you have a distorted view perspective I know that like I would if I would make a selfie how I think I look that I that's nice other people think that's not nice but then they make a photo of me I'm like that's super ugly 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 you shouldn't choose them yourself because you don't know how you look yeah you don't know what makes you interesting what makes you attractive all this kind of stuff and a lot of us this is dark aspect of psychology we focus on some small flaws yeah this 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 and it's not like oh my God and people notice it people notice your Hammer had eyes you know but it's like that's me that's my face so I'm I love I love myself and that's confidence 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 at different ages all this kind of stuff but be Underneath It All the personality all of that when when the face comes alive that also is the thing that makes you Beau beautiful but anyway you have to figure all that out with AI yeah one thing that worked was like um people would upload full body photos of themselves so I would crop the face right because and then the model knew better that we're

training mostly the face here but then I started losing uh resemblance of the body because some people are skinny some people are muscular whatever so you want to have that too uh so now I mix full body photos in the training with face photos face crops uh and it's all automatic like um and I know that other people they they use again AI mod 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 these gpus like um the golds do you have any guidelines for people of like how to get good data how to give good data to find tune on like the photos should be diverse so for example if I only upload photos with a brown shirt or green shirt the mulle think that I'm training the green shirt so the things that are the same every photo are the concepts that are trained what

you want is your face to be the concept that's 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 CU it's a black box and like carpati 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 CU some things you that would be you think they're obvious that they will improve things will make them worse and there's so many parameters you can tweak so you're testing everything to you know improve things I mean there's a whole field now of mechanistic interpretability

that like studies that tries to figure out tries to break thing 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 do 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 yeah very vain yeah like me you know like I want to look good in your podcast for example yeah

for sure and one of the things I actually would love to uh like rigorously use Photo AI because for the thumbnails I take portraits of people I didn't I don't know shit about photography uh I basically used your approach for photography I like Google how do you take photographs yeah camera lighting and also it's tough because maybe you could speak to this also but like with photography no offense to any they're true artists great photographers but like people like take themselves way too seriously think you need a whole lot of equipment you definitely don't want

one light you need like five lights I know 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 cuz I was thinking I'm going to 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 then that's when I realized like you know what I don't need experts in my life he kick him

out of the house no I didn't kick him I me I said Thank you thank you very much thank you great tips all 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 the PHP Studio like have a little suitcase I use like uh just the the basic sort of uh consumer type of stuff one light it's great yeah and look at you you're like one of the top podcasts in the world and you get millions of views and it works and the people that spend so much money on optimizing for the best sound for the best studio they get like 300 views you know so what is this about this is about that either

you do it really well or also that a lot of these things don't matter like what matters is probably the content the podcast like you get interesting guest focus on the stuff that matters yeah and I think that's 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 buy 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 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 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 say you're sitting in the darkness mooving 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

a I suppose it's an important use case because like I want people to look good but I also want to capture who they are maybe my conception of who they are what makes them beautiful what makes their appearance powerful in some ways sometimes it's the eyes often times it's the eyes but there's certain features of the face can sometimes be really powerful and I can't it's it's also kind of awkward for me to take yeah yeah 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 fun to Ai and then start to play with like lighting you should do this and you should probably do it yourself like you can get use photo but it's even more fun if you do it yourself so you train the models you can learn about like control net control net is where for example your photos and your podcast are usually like from the angle right so you can create a control net face posst that's always like this so every model every photo you generate uses this control net uh pose for

example I think it would be very fun for you to try out that stuff do you play with lighting at all do you play with lighting with with 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 uh with stable diffusion uh I think it's called relight and it's amazing like you can you can upload kind of like a a light map so for example red purple blue and it uses that light map to change the light on the photo

to 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 people in general on how to learn all the state-of-the-art AI tools available like you mentioned new models coming out all the time yeah like what 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 asked 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 model 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 in AI they get hired by big companies and they're on X and most of them are Anonymous this is very funny they're they use anime avars um I don't um but those people hack around and they they publish what they're discovering um they talk

about papers for example uh so yeah definitely X it's great I almost exclusively all the people I follow are AI people people yeah it's a good time now it well but also just brings happiness to my to my soul cuz there's so much turmoil on Twitter yeah like politics and stuff there's battles going on it's like a war zone and it's nice to just go into this happy place to where people are building stuff yeah 100% I like Twitter that for that most like building stuff like yeah seeing other cuz 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 going to make something too it's just super fun and so if you want to start go on X and then I would go to replicate and start trying to play with models and when you have something that kind of you you manually enter stuff you set the parameters something that works you you can make an app out of it or 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 and a lot of people using it there was like a million or more photos a month being generated and I discovered I was testing parameters like increase the step count of generating a photo or changing the sampler like a scheduler like you have DPM two caras all these things I don't know anything about but I know that you can choose them when you generate 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 un like 10% of the users I would um randomly test parameters and then I would see if they would because you can favor it photo or you can download it I would measure if they favored or like the photo and then I would AB 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 well 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 work 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 CH and letting the users help do the search in the space of models and parameters for you yeah but actually so like stable diff Fusion I used 1.5 two 2.0 came out as stab Fusion 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 do you call neutered like they they neutered like to make it super like with safety features and stuff so most of the people are still on stable

diffusion 1.5 and meanwhile stable diffusion the company went like the CEO left um a lot of drama happened because they couldn't make money and yeah so they gave us 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 it or not a lot they did an amazing job and now everybody use this open source model for free and they did you know it's amazing like it's a it's amazing you're not even using the latest one you're

say 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 do not sell open source right yeah it's interesting because open source is so impact 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 open source models it's kind of like those 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 the notebook and you're filling it up how do you know when an idea is a good one like what you 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 something actually write down like space company no I 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 Robotics interesting like I want to also learn robotics so maybe that could be I think both the asteroid Mining and the robotics is yeah together I feel like no exactly this is it this is says 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 Aster mining exactly that's why I should do this it's not Nomad list.com it's it's you have to like build stuff you have to gravity is really hard to overcome yeah but it seems man

I sound like idiots probably now but it sounds quite approachable like relatively approachable you don't have to build a rocket you oh you use something like SpaceX SpaceX to send your your you know this dog robot or whatever so is there actually exist a notebook where you wrote Don estro might no I used back then I used Trello Trello yeah but now I don't really I use telegram I write down like saved messages and I have like idea I write down you type to yourself on you know like cuz you use WhatsApp right I think

so you have like message to yourself thing also yeah so yourself on telegram yeah you use like a notepad not forget stuff and then I pinets 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 not taking you're not you're notepad you're notepad.exe guy if you're a Windows user man I saw some YouTubers doing this like 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 do coloring and stuff and I'm like dude I did this for a week and I'm like what am I doing with my life like I can just write it as a message to myself and it's good enough you know speaking of ideas you shared a tweet explaining why the first idea sometimes might be a brilliant

idea the reason for this you think is the first idea submerges from your subconscious was actually boiling your brain for weeks months sometimes years in the background the eight hours of thinking can never compete with a Perpetual subconscious background job so this is the idea that if you think about an idea for 8 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 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 here your subconscious in here it's boiling and then when it's ready it's like ding it's like microwave 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 boil more yeah and 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 yeah so many times like starter fins 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 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 that' 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 looking for a problem for now you know military obviously is usess but like and do I do I need like a robotic dog now for my house I don't know like it's fun but

it doesn't really solve anything yet I feel the same kind of with VR like it's really cool like apple Vision Pro is very cool doesn't really solve something for me yet and that's kind of the the tech looking for a solution right but one day will when the person on computer when the Mac came along there was a big switch that happened it somehow captivated everybody's imagination you could like the application the killer apps became apparent you can type in a computer but did 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 W yeah yeah but the hype is the thing that allowed the thing to proliferate sufficiently to where people Minds would start opening up to it a little bit the possibility of right now for example with the robotics there's very few robots in the homes of people exactly yeah the the robots that are there are roombas so the vacuum cleaners or they're Amazon Alexa yeah or dishwasher I mean it's essentially a robot

yes but the the intelligence is very limited I guess there 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 it's you know that that's just one example yeah I sometimes think about that is like if some people in this world were kind of born in their whole existence is like they were meant to build the thing yeah you know like I sometimes wonder like what my what I was meant to 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 that's a sense I've I've had but it could be other things it could hilariously enough be the thing I was meant to be is to talk to people yeah which is weird because I always was anxious about talking to people it's like a really yeah I'm scared of this I scared yeah exactly I'm scared of you it's just anxiety throughout social interaction in general I'm an introvert that hides from the world so yeah it's really strange

yeah but that's that's also kind of Li 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 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 wayes yeah 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 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 I think relationships like you want to hold relationships right you want to hold your girlfriend you want to become wife and all the stuff but uh you should I think you should stay open to where like like for example where you want to live like I don't know we don't know where we want to live

for example um that's something that will figure itself out it will crystallize where you know you will get you will get sent by the waves to somewhere where you want to live for example what you're going to do I think that's a really good way to live your life it's I I think most stress comes from trying to control like hold things like um it's kind of Buddhist you know you need to like lose control let it lose and then 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 it was very good and at the end it wasn't so good cuz I tried to control was like ah now it's going too much you now I need to let's stop bro you can't stop it you need to go through with it you know and so I think it's a good manhor for life I think that's you know very tranquil way

to lead your life yeah actually when I um took kaasa that lesson is deeply within me already that you can't control anything yes I think I probably learned that the most in Jiu-Jitsu so just let go and relax yeah and that's why I had just an incredible experience there's like literally no negative aspect to my iasa experience or any psychedelics I've ever had some of that could be with my biology or my genetics whatever but some of it was just not trying to control and 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 Nomad 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 we can live

as eom with the internet speed the cost of living um you know other stuff and I would I tweeted it and I would and back then I didn't have a lot of followers I had like a few thousand followers or something and it went like viral for my skill viral back then you know which was like five retweets and um and a lot of people started editing it and there was like hundreds of cities in this list like from of the world with all the data 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 a 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 tax stack is not actually it's not the most important of a business when you're starting out a business the important thing is that you validate that there's a market that there's a product that people want to pay for um so use whatever you can use and if you canot 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' I've actually did the spread sheeet thing you share a spreadsheet publicly and I made it editable yeah interesting things start happening yeah I did it for like a a workout thing cuz I was doing a large amount of push-ups and pull-ups every day yeah I remember this man yeah and like and and IDE Google Sheets is pretty Limited in that everything's allowed so people could just write anything in any and they can create new uh sheets new tabs and he just exploded

and uh one of the things that I really enjoyed is there's very few trolls um because actually other people would delete the trolls there would be like this weird war of like of they they want like to protect the thing it's an immune system that's inherent to the thing it becomes a society you know in a spreadsheet and then there's the out Outcast who go to the bottom of the spreadsheet and they would try to had messages and they like I don't want to be with the cool kids up at the top of the spreadsheet

so I'm going the bottom yes it's fast I mean but that kind of crowdsourcing element is really powerful and if you can create a product that use that as a to his benefit that's that's really nice like any kind of voting system any kind of rating system for A and B testing is really really really fascinating so anyway so NAD 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 five days so people should je 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 grew 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 amam would say don't go to the center go to you know Southeast um of the center the yordan 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 a app where you can have like a Google Maps and you put colors over it you have like areas that are like color coded like red is tourist green is Rich you know green money yellow is hipster you can figure out where you need to go in a city when you travel because I was traveling a lot I wanted to go to the cool spots so just use color color yeah yeah and I would use a canvas so I thought okay what do I

need I need to did you know that you would be using a canvas no I didn't know it was possible cuz I didn't no some this is the cool this is the cool thing people should really check out this how it started because like you 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 oh really yeah it's called being alive nice um so

you're like you don't know anything about so canvas is a way is HTM yes HTML five thing that allows you to draw shapes draw images just draw pixels essentially so yeah and that's there was special back then because before you could only have like elements right so you want to draw a pixel use a convos and I knew I needed to draw pixels because I need to draw these colors and I thought like okay I'll get like a Google Maps iframe embed and then I'll put a div on top of it 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 felt like obviously other people need to edit this cuz I cannot draw all these things myself so I crowdsourced 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 MH which every week would calculate or every day would calculate

like okay so mm 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 so find the most common value in a little pixel area on a map so so that so most people say it's tourist it's tourist and it becomes redh and I would do that for you know older GPS Corners in the world can we 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 or would they draw pixels man they drew that crazy stuff like offensive symbols I cannot mention they would draw penises I mean that's that's obviously a guy I would do the same thing draw penises that's the first thing when I show up to Mars and there's no cameras I'm drawing penis on the same man I do it in the snow you know but the penises did not become a problem

because I knew that not everybody would draw a penis and not in the same place so most people would use it fairly so just if I had enough crowdsource data so you have all these pixels on top of each it's like a layer of pixels and you choose the most common pixel so yeah it's just like a bow but in visual format and it worked and uh we didn't we had enough data and and and it was like cities that did really well like Los Angeles a lot of people started using it uh like most

datas 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 used like I think you can see there there's like hipster tourist rich business so there's always a business area right and then there's a residential residential is gray so I thought those were the most common things in the city kind of and a

little bit Mimi like it's almost fun to label it as yeah I mean obviously it's simplified and but you need to simplify this stuff you know you don't want to have too many categories and it's essentially just like like using a you know paintbrush where you you select the color in the bottom you select the category and 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 up voting so that the tags could be upvoted so the memes that came from that is like amazing like people in Los Angeles would write crazy stuff it would go viral in all these cities you can allow allow your location and it will probably send you to Austin okay so we're looking uh oh boy uh drunk hipster uh air bro and Bros air bro BR hipster girls who do cocaine I saw a guy in a fish costume get beaten up here yep that seems also

ACC overpriced and underwhelming uh let me see let me make sure this is accurate uh let's see 36th for people who know Austin know that that's important to label six street is uh famous in Austin dirty six drunk Fat Boys accurate drunk Fat Bros continued on six very well West Sixth drunk douche Bros go from frat 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 the 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 USIC can upload or downlo this so this is completely Crown cuz of RIT you know up down vote took it from there hey that's really really really powerful single people 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 that 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 of different colors in in a city so how do you combine that to be a thing that actually makes 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 a map it will show you the specific pixel location and you can convert the pixel location to a GPS coordinate right like latitude longitudes but the number will have a lot of commas or a lot of decimals right because it's very specific like it's like this specific part of the table so what you want to do is you want to take that pixel and you want to normalize it by removing like decimals um which I discovered so that you you're talking about

this neighborhood this or this street right so that's what I did I just took the decimals off and then I saved it like this and then it starts um going to like a grid and then you have like a grid of data you get like a pixel map kind of and then you said it looks kind of ugly so then you smooth it yeah I started adding blurring and stuff I think now it's it's not smooth again because I liked it better people like the pixel look kind of yeah a lot of people use it

and it keeps going viral and every time my my maps Bill uh like map box I had to stop using first used Google Maps it went viral and Google Maps it was out of credits so I and I had to so funny during when I launched it went viral um Google Maps the map didn't load anymore it says over the limit you need to contact Enterprise sales and I'm like I but I need now like a map so and I don't want to contact Enterprise sales I don't want to go on a call schedule with

some calendar so I switched to mapbox and then had mapbox for years and then it went viral and I had a bill of $20,000 was like last year um so they helped me with the bill they said you know you can pay less and then I now switch to like a open source kind of um map platform so it's very expensive project and it 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 cuz when you leverage somebody else's through the API

yeah I mean I don't think a map hosting service should cost this much you know 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 yes it's super complicated I think that the thing is more about like you can't make money with this project I tried to do many things to make money with it and it's it's uh it hasn't worked you talked about like possibly doing advertisements on it or some somehow 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 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 cuz there's there's a lot of compute required

to actually bring it to life also where do you put the ad right like if you have a website you can put like a 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 NAD list makes money yeah so what was the story behind Nomad list so Nomad list started because uh I was in Chang maai in Thailand which is now like the second City here and I was you know working on my laptop um I met like other NS there and I was like okay

this seems like a cool thing to do like work on your laptop in a different country kind of travel around uh 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 also needed to know the cost of living cuz I didn't have a lot of money I had $500 a month so I had to find a place where like the rent was like you know $200 per month or something where I had you know some money uh that I could actually rent something and um and there was NAD list and it still runs now I think it's now almost 10 years so just

to describe how it works like I'm looking at Chang ma here there's a total score it's rank number two yeah that's like a number 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 speak it's awesome it's awesome walkability keep adding stuff cuz for certain groups of people certain things really matter and

this is really cool happiness I'd love to ask about that not life free Wii by AC uh female friendly freedom of speech AP and not so good in tit you know values derived from National statistics my yeah I like how that one has I need to do that because the the data sets are usually National they're not on City level right so I don't know about the freedom of speech between Bangkok or changai I know in Thailand I mean this is really fascinating so this is for City yeah it's basically raiding all the different things

that matter to you in Internet and this is all crowdsourced well so it started crowdsourced but then um I realized that you can download more accurate data sets from like public Source like World Bank they have a lot of public data sets United Nations and you can download a lot of data there which you can you know freely use like I I started getting FR cross 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 discrepancy in the data between people where people wear from and stuff so I 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 I use that data to see which plac are upcoming and which places are popular now so about half the ranking you see

here is based on actual digital NAD who are there you can click on a city you can click on people and you can see the people the users that are actually there and it's like 30,000 or 40,000 members so these people are in Austin now and 1,800 remote work is in Austin now now of which eight plus members checked in U 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 cons of Austin is too expensive very sweaty and humid now difficult to make friends difficult to make friends interesting right I didn't know that difficult to make friends Austin but this all crowd but mostly it's Pros uh safe fast internet I don't 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's worst because the 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 they 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 all it's consistently a struggle to figure out like 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 and I haven't figured out a way to actually solve this puzzle when I show up to City figuring out where I can get fast internet connection and uh for podcasting purposes where I can find a place with a table that's quiet right that's not easy construction sounds all kinds of sounds you have 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 the emptier of the

room and like if it's just walls without any curtains or any of this kind of stuff then there's uh echo in the room anyway but you you figure out that a lot of hotels don't have tables they don't have like normal this weird desk right yeah they have it's not a center table yep and if you want to get a nicer hotel where it's more spacious and so on they usually have these like Boutique like fancy looking like modernist annoy tables that don't it's too Desy it's too design they're not really real tables why don't

you get Ikea buy Ikea yeah before you arrive you order an Ikea like n this they get desks I feel like you should be able to show up to a place and have have the desk like it's not unless you stay there for a long time just the entire assembly all that Airbnb is so unreliable it's the the the range and quality that you get is 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 room and that's a problem like and you fake photos man if I could have the kind of data you have on NAD list for hotels yeah man I would and I feel like you can make a lot of money on that too yeah the booking fees affiliate right I thought about this idea because we have the same problem like I go to hotels and there's specific ones that are very good and I know now the chains and stuff and but even 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 you some are more expensive some are cheaper and so on but you can get the details of what's in the room like what's the actual layout of the room what is the view of the rooman I feel like as a hotel you can win a lot so first you create a service that allows you to have like high resolution data about a hotel then one hotel sign signs up for that I would 100% use that

website to look for a hotel instead of the crappy Alternatives that don't give any information and I feel like there'll be this pressure for all the hotels to join that site and you can make a shit ton of money cuz 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 book a flights 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 buy book for example Qatar airlines and I and I need to get through this process so the the the and with a hotel is similar you need a hotel anyway so 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 good interesting Theory I think that must be a different Theory my my theory would 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 they 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 of the thing and like literally they would like to improve the stuff but the bureaucracy um of the place plus all the bosses is all the high up people are not technical people probably they don't know

much about web web dev they don't know much about programming so they just don't give any respect like you have to give the freedom and the respect to Great Engineers as they try to do great things that feels like an explanation like if you were a great programmer would you want to work at America Airlines or no no I'm I'm torn on that cuz I I actually as somebody 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 how much just oh you imagine all the thousands maybe millions of people that go to that website and have to click like a million times it often doesn't work it's clunky all that kind of stuff you you're making their life just so much better yeah but there there must be an explanation has to do with managers and bureaucracies like I don't I think it's money do you know booking.com sure so it's the boooking it's the biggest boooking website

in the world it's dutch actually and um they have teams CU 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 if if they're optimizing it's a public company if they're optimizing for money but you can optimize for money by disrupting like making it way better yeah

but it's always startups they start with disrupting like booking also started startup 1997 and then they become like the old shit again like you know Uber now starts to become like a taxi again right it was very good in the beginning now it's kind of like 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 make buying easier like make it as as frictional as 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 CLI next submit and would 404 or something or your internet would go down your modem yeah man and I would have an existential crisis like the frustration would take over my whole

body and I just wanted to quit life for a brief moment there yeah yeah I'm so happy to form stays in Google Chrome now when something goes wrong but that's so Google somebody did Google improv 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 go there's so many brilliant brilliant people there but it just moves slowly yeah I wonder why that is maybe that's the natural way of a company but you have people like Elon who

rolls in and just fir most most of the folks and always oper like push the company to operate as a startup even when it's already big yeah but I mean Apple does this I like I started in business school Apple does competing product teams that operate as startups so three to five people they make something they have multiple teams who make the same thing the best team wins so you need to I think you need to emulate like a a free market inside a company to make it entrepreneurial you know yeah and 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 learn just the minimal amount of stuff so you're a good person to ask like what how do you learn how do how do you learn quickly and effectively in just the stuff you need you

did um just by way of example you did a 30 days learning session on 3D yeah where you documented yourself giving yourself only 30 days to learn everything you can about yeah I tried to learn virtual reality CU I was like this was like same as AI it came up Suddenly like 2016 2017 with I think HTC VI this big VR glasses before Apple Vision Pro and I was like oh this 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 n technology that was going to be big and if I had to skill 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 how do I how do you learn to code like should I learn to code and I'm like I don't know like I'm Every Day I'm learning

it's kind of cliche but every day I'm learning new stuff so every day I'm searching on Google or asking out cat gbt 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 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 jbt how do I make a website where do I start it generates codes for you right copy the code put it in a file save it open it in Google Chrome or whatever you have a website and then you start tweaking with it and you start okay how do I add a button how do I add AI features right like nowadays so it's

like by taking action you can learn stuffff much faster than reading books or actually I'm curious let me ask perplexity how do I make a website I'm just curious what it would say I hope it goes with like really basic vanilla Solutions Define your website's purpose choose a domain name select a web hosting provider choose a website or Builder or CMS website build platform like wi for Squarespace is what I said yeah landing page what 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 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 this is the basic like Google analytics but you can't make Nomad list with this way so with Wix like with ah no you can you can get pretty far I think these website Builders are pretty Advanced like all you need is a grid of images right that are clickable that open like another page yeah you can can get quite far

how do I learn to program choose a programming language to start with yeah free code Camp is good work through a resources systematically practice coing regularly for 30 60 minutes a day consistency key join programming communities like reddits 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 clarifies it for sure and just start building like keep build build like actually apply the thing whether it's AI or uh any of the programming for web development yeah just have a project in mind which I love the idea of like 12 startups in 12 months or like build a project almost every day just build a thing yeah and get it to work and finish it every single day that's a cool experiment I think that was the inspiration there was a girl who did 160 websites

in 160 days or something like lit mini websites yeah and uh and she learned to go 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 outto deduct like selflearning and setting yourself like challenges and just getting in but you need discipline you know you need to discipline to keep to keep doing it and coding you know coding is very it's a steep learning curve to get in

it's very annoying working with computers is very annoying 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 you're like and

then just try it and then and then there's a dopamine Rush of like o it works cool man it's amazing and it's I 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 yeah 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 we'll be like public right like maybe people don't like your website like um you will get canceled for a

website for example like a lot of things can happen what's it like building in public like you do like openly where you're just iterating quickly and you're getting people's feedback so there 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 cuz I think a lot of haters have good points and it takes like stepping away from the emotion of like uh ah 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 sign up 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 data this hater has a point think it's dumb to completely ignore your haters you know and also you man I think I've been there when I was like 10 years old or some you're on the internet you just shouting crazy stuff that's

like most of Twitter you know or half Twitter so you 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 like to block cuz then they get angry they make

a screenshot and they say ah you block me so I just mute and it disappear and it's amazing so you mentioned Reddit So Hood maps that make it to the front page of Reddit yeah yeah 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 or crazy and it was a night and was amazing um I man I think nowadays honestly Tik Tok uh YouTube Reals Instagram reals a lot of apps get very big

from people T making Tik Tok videos about it so let's say you make your own app you can make a video for yourself like oh I made this app uh this is how it works blah blah blah um and this is why I made it for example and this is why you should use it and if it's a good video will take off and you will get man you I got like $20,000 extra per month or something from a Tik Tok from one Tik Tok video like it made a photoi by you or somebody else

by some random guy so there's all these AI influencers that they write about they show AI apps and they then they ask money later like when a V video goes vir all I can do it do it again and send me $4,000 something I'm like okay I did that for example but it works like Tik Tok 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 and have just a little bit of a following enough to like for for the cool thing to be noticed and then it becomes viral if it's cool enough yeah and you don't need a lot of followers anymore because that on on X and a lot of platforms because Tik Tok X I think Instagram reals also they have the same algorithm now it's not about followers anymore it's about they test your content on

a small subset like 300 people if they like it it will gets tested to thousand people and on and on so if the thing is good it will rise anyway it doesn't matter if you have million followers or a th000 followers or 100 what's your philosophy of monetizing how to make money from the thing you build yeah so a lot of stter they do like free users so you could sign up and can 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 com 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 Whatever video and then if you want to use it pay me money pay $10 $20 $30 I would ask more than $10 per month like Netflix is like $10 per month but Netflix is a giant company that can you know they can afford to make it so cheap relatively cheap if you're individual like an indie hacker like you are making your own app you need to make like at least $30 or more on a user to make it 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 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 $30 you have 30k a

month that's a lot of money that's enough to like live a good life yeah live a pretty good life I mean there could be a lot of cost associated with hosting so that's another thing I make sure my profit margets 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 can give me discount cuz too expensive and they

say sure 50% I'm like wow very good and 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 asshole about it say you know I kind of need a discount or I need to go maybe to another company so maybe like a discount like here and there and it says 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 secret heck but I think even without good person it depends how much discount they will give you know they'll maybe give more but you know that's why you should shit

post on Twitter so you get you know discounts maybe yeah yeah um but and also the when it's crowdsourced I mean paying does prevent spam or help prevent spam also yeah yeah it gives you high quality users and free users are s but they're horrible like it's just like millions of people especially if 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 forand discovered Hood Maps yeah but I love fortune

they 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 this new documentary on Netflix antisocial Network or something like that that was really was fascinating just fortun just the you know the spirit of the thing Fortune Mis understand Fortune it's so much about freedom and also like the humor involved in fucking with the system and fucking with man it's just anti-stem for fun the the dark aspect of it is you're having fun

you're doing anti-stem stuff but like the Nazis always show up and it's somehow bad shit started happening it starts drifting somehow yeah like school shootings and stuff so it's a very difficult topic but I I do know it's especially early on I think 2010 I would go to for for fun and they would post like crazy offensive stuff and this was just to scare off people so we' show to other people say hey do you know this internet website for just check it out yeah and it' be dude what the fuck I'm like no no

you don't understand that's to scare you away but actually when you go through a scroll there's like deep conversations yes and there would already be this was like a Normy filter like to stop yeah so kind of cool but yeah goes dark it goes dark and if you have those people show up they'll for the fun of it do a bunch of racist things and all that kind of stuff you're saying but everything's I think it was never man I'm not a fortunate but like I it was always about provoking it's just provocateur you know

but the the provoking in the case of hood Maps or something like this can can damage the uh good thing like you know a a little poison in a town is always good it's like the the Tom weights 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 a I add like a NSFW W list they would say like bad

words so when they would write like a bad word they would get forwarded to YouTube which was like a video was like a 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 to chill them out I like it like but actually a lot of stuff I didn't realize how much originated in forchan in terms of memes Rick Roll I didn't understand I didn't know that Rick Roll originated in forchan like there's so many memes like most of the

memes that you think the word role I think comes from forun like not the word role but like in this case in a mem used like you would get like roll doubles cuz every it was like post IDs on fortun so they were R they were kind of like random so if I get doubles like this happens or something so You' get like two two anyway it's like a betting Market kind of on these doubles on these post IDs this so much funny stuff yeah I mean that's 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 NAD list how do you fight spam man I use gp4 now it's amazing so so I have like um user input I have reviews people can review cities and they don't need to actually sign up

it's Anonymous reviews and they write like whole books about like cities and what's good and bad so uh I run it through gp4 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 it sends me a message on telegram when it rejects reviews and I check it and it's man it's so on point a yes and it's so accurate it understands double meanings um I have gb4 running on the on the on the chat Community it's a chat community

of 10,000 people and they're chatting and they start fighting with each other um and I used to have uh human moderators was very good but they would start fighting the human moderator like this guy's biased or something I have GPT 4 and it's it's it's really really really really good it understands humor it understands like like you could say something bad but it's kind of like a joke and it's kind of not like offensive so much so it shouldn't be deleted right understands that you know it's I would love to have a gbt 4 based

filter of like of different kinds of for like X yeah I fought this week like I tweeted like a fact check like you can click fact check and then gp4 look gp4 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 gp4 I say can you fact check it because I might have said something stupid and the stupid stuff always gets taken out by the reply is like

oh you said this wrong and and then the whole tweet kind of doesn't make sense anymore so I asked gbt for to fact check a lot of stuff so fact check is a tough one yeah but it would be interesting to sort of um rate the thing based on how well thought out it is and how well argued it is yeah that that seems more doable that seems like more doable like it seems like a GPT thing because that that's less about the truth and it's more about the rigor of the thing exactly and you

can ask that you can ask in the prompt like I don't know like for example do you think create like a ranking score of X Twitter replies where I should this post be if we rank on like I don't know Integrity reality like fundamental deepness or something inness um and it would give you that with a pretty good score probably I mean Elon can do this with groc right he can start doing using that to to check replies cuz the reply section is like chaos you know and actually the ranking of the replies is not

doesn't make any sense doesn't make sense no and I 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 cuz like I feel like I miss a lot

and I what's surfaced for me are just like a random comment by a person with no followers that's positive or negative it's like okay if it's a very good comment it should happen but it should probably look a little bit more like do these people have followers because they're probably more engaged in the platform right oh no if it's I don't even care about how many followers if you're ranking by the quality of the comment great yeah but not just like randomly like chronological just a sea of comments yeah yeah yeah it does makes sense

yeah uh X could be very improved of that I think one thing you you spouse a lot which I love is the automation step so like once you have a Thing Once you have an idea and you build it and it actually starts making money and it's making people happy there's a community of people using it you want to take the autom 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 do you mean by automate yeah so

the general theory of stter 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 nist for example that would be a job for example and I thought like uh I don't the money for that and I I don't really want to run like a big company with a lot of people because there'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 this it's literally like a it's not a different other stars was 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 nist 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 and that's very recent right but it's still difficult to I mean that step of automation is difficult to figure out how to is you're basically delegating everything to code and it's not trivial to take that step for a lot of

people So when you say automate are you are you talking about like Crown jobs Yes Man a lot of crown jobs a lot of crown jobs it's like uh I literally I log into the server and I do like pseudo Chron tab d e and then I go into the editor and I write like hourly and then I write PHP uh you know do this thing. 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 emils 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 so like Health check. PHP and then it has like emojis like a has like a green check mark if it's good and a red one if it's bad and then it does like database curious for example like what's the internet speed in for example um Amsterdam MH okay it's a number it's like 27 point megabit so it's accurate number okay check good and it goes

to the next and it goes on all the data points did people sign up in the last 24 hours it's important because maybe 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 on telegram saying hey what's up uh

it doesn't say hey what's up it sends me like alert like this thing is down and then I check so within a minute of something breaking I know it and then I can open my laptop and fix it yeah but the good thing is like the last few years things don't break anymore and like definitely 10 years ago when I started everything was breaking all the time and now it's like almost it's last week was like 100. z% up time and these health checks are part of the uptime percentage so it's like everything works yeah

actually making me realize I should uh I should have a page for myself like one page that has all the health checks just so I can go to didn't see all the green check marks just it feels good to look as you know it just be like okay yeah all right we're okay everything's okay yeah and like you can see like when was the last time something wasn't okay and it'll say like never or like meaning like you've you've you've you've checked since you've last cared to check it was all been okay for sure it

used to send me the the good health checks like yeah you know this 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 OB is not going to we need to hide the good ones and show only the bad ones and now that's the case I need to integrate everything into one place I automate like everything yeah have also just a large uh set of cron jobs a lot of the publication this podcast is has done all everything is just on automatically it's all

clipped up all the all all this kind of stuff yeah but it would be nice to automate even more like a 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 uncut 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 mat that's really cool but this is the same stuff people they they pay like very big size 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 about like what are the things in my life I'm doing myself that could be automated uh in the ask your gbt you know like give your daily your day and then ask it what part you to automate well one of the things I I would love to automate more is my consumption and social media yeah both the the output and the input man that's very I think there's some startups that do that like they they summarize the cool shit happening on Twitter you know like with

AI I think the guy called s wyx or something he does like a newsletter it's completely AI generated we have the cool the cool new stuff in AI yeah I mean I would love to do that but also like across Instagram Facebook LinkedIn all this kind of stuff just like okay can I can you summarize the internet for me for today summarize internet.com yeah cuz I 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 like haters or or

just general content like no no just general like for example like Tik Tok is a good example of that for me I sometimes just feel Dumber after I use Tik Tok 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 ah 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 is 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 sat she saw me like watching some dumb video and 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 uh with uh with X sometimes for me too is I think I'm probably naturally gravitating towards the drama yeah aren't we all yeah so there following AI people especially AI people that only post technical content has been really good cuz then I just look at them and I and then I

go down rabbit holes of like learning new papers that have been published or uh good repos or or um just any kind of cool demonstration of stuff and the 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 word list as well so I mute like politics stuff because I don't really want it on my feet and

I think I've muted so much that now my feet is good you know I see like interesting stuff and but the fact that you need to modify you need to like mod your app your social media platform just to function and not be toxic for you for your mental health right that's like a problem like it should be doing that for you it's some level of automation I that that would be interesting I wish I could access X and Instagram through API easier you need to spend $42,000 a month which my friends do yeah you

can do no but still even if you do that that you're not getting I mean there's limitations that don't make it easy to do like yeah automate because they the thing that they're trying to limit like abuse or for you to steal all the data from the app to then train an llm or something like this but if I just want to like figure out ways to automate my inter action with the X system or with with Instagram they they don't make that easy but I would love to sort of automate that and explore different

ways to how to leverage llms 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 but there's not enough uh access you can screen cap your phone right can be an app that watches your screen with you you could yeah but I don't really know like what it would do like maybe it can hide stuff before you see it you know like I I have Chrome extensions I 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 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 the 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 post 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 I have this extension to like YouTube on hook which like it hides all the related stuff I can just see the video mhm and it's amazing and uh but sometimes I need to like like I

I need to search a video how to how to do something and then I go to YouTube and I had these YouTube shorts these YouTube shorts are like they're like algorithmically designed to just make you tap them and like I tap and and then I'm like five minutes later with his face like and you're you're just stuck and he's like what happened I was gonna open I was going to play like the coffee mix you know like the music mix for drinking coffee together like in the morning like jazz I didn't want to go to

shorts 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 with a start up okay so what what about the exit when and how to exit man you shouldn't ask me because I never sold my company and you've never all the successful stuff you've done you've 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 learn a lot about Finance people as as well

there like manipulation and do diligence and then changing the valuation like people change the valuation after uh so they they a lot of people string you on to acquire you and then it takes like six months it's like classic it takes six to 12 months they want to see everything they want to see the 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 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 they companies get sold with multiples kind of multiples of profit or revenue and often the multiples like three times three times or four times or five times revenue or profit so in my case they're all automated so I might as as well wait three years and I get the same money as when I sell and then I can still sell the same company you know what I mean I can still sell for three five times so financially it

doesn't really make sense to sell yeah unless the price high enough like if the 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 created is not just the interface and the and the crowdsource content but the people themselves like the user base yeah but nor list it's a community yeah so 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 I took off and I don't really know if I want to sell it it's like something you would nice when you you know when you're old that you're still working in this you know it's like a it has like a mission which is like um people should travel anywhere and they can work from anywhere and they can meet different cultures and that's a good way to make the world get better if you learn if you go to China and live in China you'll learn

that they're nice people and a lot of stuff you hear about China's propaganda a lot of stuff is true as well but it's more you know you learn a lot from traveling and I think that's why it's like a cool project to like not sell uh AI projects I have less emotional feeling with AI projects like guy mhm 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 you cre and meaning it gives you right there's a very famous

like depression after started fin a Solar Company like they're like this was my this was me like who am I and they immediately start building another one you know they 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 is bad probably so you usually build the stuff solo and mostly work solo what's the thinking behind that I think I'm not so good working with other people not like I'm crazy but like I 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 result which is very European like it's very in Holland we call po where you put people in the room and you only let them out when they agree on the compromise right in politics and I don't think it I think it it breeds like averageness you know you get

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 it yourself I think and I trust some people like now I like with my best friend Andre I'm making a new AI startup 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 you build together with other people so he codes uh I shit post on Twitter literally like I promoted on Twitter 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 so uh what what do you think is behind that I don't know

it was always just me sitting on my laptop like like goting no like you've never had another developer who like rolls in and like I've had once where F I like there's AI developer Philip I hired him to do the because I I can't write Python and AI stuff is Python and I needed to get models to work on replicate and stuff and I needed to improve photo ey and he helped me a lot for like 10 months he worked and uh man I was trying Pyon working with numpy and package manager and it was

too difficult for me to figure this shit out and I didn't have time like I think 10 years ago I would have time to like sit you know go do all nighters to figure this stuff out with python I don't have the and I don't have the it's not my thing it's not your thing it's another programming language I get it AI new thing got it but like you've never had a developer roll in look at your PHP J query code and be and yes like you know like in conversation or in impr they talk

about yes and like basically all right I had for one week understand and then it ended because he wanted to rewrite everything in the no that's the wrong guy I know he wanted to rewrite in what he wanted to rewrite to he said to JY we cannot do this I'm like okay he's like we need to rewrite everything think in view VJs I'm like are you sure come just like kind you know like keep jaker 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 going to clean up shit but then after weeks this 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 really 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 teex Tech and they can and that's like really few like it's like top 5% cuz if you try hire deps 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 especially with death

with coding I think so sorry I think that's a really important skill for for developer to roll in and like understand the musicality the the style of and like empathy it's like code empathy right code empathy yeah it's a new word but that's it you need to understand like go over all the code get a holistic view of it and man you can suggest we we change stuff for sure but um and look jur is crazy it's crazy I'm using J Cur we can change that it's not crazy at all jQuery is also like beautiful

and powerful and PHP is beautiful and Powerful especially as you said recently in the in the in the as the versions evolved it's much more serious programming language now it's super like PHP is really fast now it's cat JavaScript much Ruby really fast now so if speed is something you care about it's super fast um and like there's gigantic communities of people using those programming languages and there's Frameworks if you like the framework so there 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 so like if I roll in I'm going to be be like I don't assume you know nothing assume Peter's 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 okay I got it like here's how he's thinking and now if I want to add another uh like a little feature definitely needs to have Emoji yeah 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 make you smile like to make you like ha fuck I I get it and now you're going to start respecting me and like trusting me and like you start working together in this way I I don't know I I don't know how hard is to find developers no I think that exist I think you need to I need to hire more people need to try more people but that cost a lot of my energy and time but it's 100% possible but do I want it I don't know

things kind of run fine for now and I mean like okay you can say like okay nor looks kind of clunky like people say the design is kind of clunk 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 at what you do like I'm just looking at the interfaces of like Photo AI like you would Jake by the way jQuery right 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 is me so all of this in every little feature all 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 uh 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 it's very cool it's pretentious right pretentious or not that 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 shit going on it's like drawing based music it's like very yeah but it's still pretty the spacing of everything is nice the font a really nice like very readable very small I like it you know but I made it so I don't trust my own judgments no this is really nice thank you the Emojis are somehow like it's a style it's a thing I need to pick the Emoji it takes a while to pick them you know there's some something about Emoji is a really nice memorable like placeholder for the idea yeah like if

it was just text it would actually be overwhelming if you was just text the Emoji really helps it's a brilliant addition like some some people might look at it why do you have emojis everywhere it's actually really for me it's really tell me to to remove the Emojis 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 as transitions no I understand that but like I'm sure there's like how long does it take you to figure out how you want it to look do you ever go out down Rabbit Hole where you spend like two weeks no it's all iterative it's like 10 years of you know add a SE transition here or or do this or well was say like see these are all these are

rounded now yeah if you wanted to like H round is probably the better way but if you wanted to be rectangular like sharp Corners what would you do you just so I go to the index. CSS and I do command F and I search border radius 12px and then I replace with border radius zero and then I do command enter and it's G deploys it it pushes to the GI Hub and then sends a webbook and then deploys to my server and it's live in 5 seconds oh you often deploy to production you you don't

have like a testing ground no so I so I I'm like famous for this Cu 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 going to canel for this you know but it it works very well for me CU I have a lot of I have like PHP lint and J lint so it tells me when has error so I don't deploy but my literally I I I have like 37,000 git commits in the last

12 months or something so I make like small fix and then command enter M uh and sends to GitHub GitHub sends a web to my server web server pulls it deploys the production and it's there what's the latency of that from you pressing one second can be one two seconds to make a change and then you're getting really good at like not making mistakes basically man 100% you're right like people are like how can you do this why you get good at not taking the server down you know like 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 do like a stopwatch like how fast can I fix this bug and then two minutes later for example it's fixed yeah and it's fun cuz it's cuz it's annoying for me to work with companies where report a bug and it takes like 6 months yeah it's like horrible and it makes people really happy when you can really quickly solve their problems so

but it's it's crazy I'm I admit 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 a phase of like testing and there's the staging and there's a develop and then there's like multiple tables and databases that you use for the state like it's fing it's a mess and there's different teams involved it's it's not good I'm like a good funny extreme on the other size 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 they do because there's more bugs and people complain about like oh look he bought this Twitter now it's full of bugs dude he's shipping stuff like things are happening now and it's a dynamic app now yeah the bugs is actually a sign of a good thing happening the bugs of the feature because it shows that the team is actually building shit 100% 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 with many other teams but one of the teams is uh MLA multilanguage 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

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 multilanguage audio but multilanguage 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 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 multilanguage audio should be high priority feature right yeah that's high priority like 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 and not the the overall result of the the cool product you know I think they they're not like selfish or whatever they they want to do good there's something about the machine organization organizational stuff that I have this when I report bogs and like big companies I work with I get I talk to a lot of different people DM and they're all really trying hard to do something they're all really nice and I'm the one being kind

of asshole cuz I'm like guys I'm talking to 20 people about this for six months and nothing's happening and 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 co rolls in uh and just says like for YouTube it's like MLA get this done now this is the highest priority I think big companies especially in America a lot of it is legal right you need to pass everything

through legal yeah and you can't like man the things I do I could never do that in a big Corporation because it's everything has to be probably get deployed has to go to Legal well again dict tutorial you basically say Steve Jobs did this quite a lot I've seen a lot of leaders do this ignore the lawyers ignore coms ignore PR ignore everybody give power to the engineers like listen to the people on the ground get this shit done and get it done by Friday yeah that's it and the law can change like for example

let's say you you launch this AI dubbing and it there's some law legal problems with lawsuits okay so the Law changes there will be appeals there will be some Supreme Court thing whatever and the Law changes so just by shipping it you change society you change the legal framework and by not shipping being scared of the legal framework all the time like you're not changing things just out of curiosity what uh what IDE do you use let's talk about like your whole setup given how ultr productive you are and that you often programing your underwear

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

multic cursor you know you search something and I could like make Mass replaces in a file with the cursor thing and uh VOD 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 cursor edit thing whatever I'm sure like almost every editor can do that it's just probably hard to set up yeah's not so good at it I think or at least I try it but I would use say

to like uh process data like um data sets for example from World Bank I would just multic 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 codes and I'm like okay I'll try it I I got a new Macbook and then I I never install like I never copi 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 wow you know the format see 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 get slow then you would restart go to Doss format C you would delete your hard drive and then install the Windows 95 again was so good times and you would design everything like now

I'm going to install it properly now I'm going to design my desktop properly you know like yeah I don't know if it's peer pressure but like I use zMAX 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 was realizing like you need to keep learning stuff like the same issue with jQuery like I still think I need to learn node.js for example 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's more about the concepts I would say than the actual tools like expanding and that can be a challenging thing so going to VSS 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 neur Flex like you keep your brain fresh you know like this kind of stuff I got to do that more like have you given react a chance no but I I want to I want to learn I want to I 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 you're so I kind of did that like I kind like the the the stuff I do in Jer is essentially a lot of it is like I start rebuilding whatever Tech is already out there not based on that but just an accident like I keep goinging long enough that I built the same I start getting the same problems everybody else had and you start building the same Frameworks kind of so I essentially I use my own kind of framework of

so you basically build a framework from scratch that's your own that you understand it kind of yeah with ax calls but essentially it's 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 and AI I think learning AI is much more Val out and 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 got to learn how to use the weapons of war and then and then you can be a peace neck yeah yeah I mean but you got to learn in in in the same

exact ways we were talking about which is learning by trying to build something with it and actually deploy it the Frameworks are so complicated and it changes so fast so it's like where do I start you know and I guess it's the same thing when you're starting out making websites like how where do you start as gp4 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 few 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 CS like a styling engine that 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 I should probably recode like my personal one page in laral 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 or like end to end build it in node.js some of it is I don't figuring out how to you even deploy the thing 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 versal right or uh you know Heroku kind of those kind of platforms I actually kind of just my gave

myself the idea of like I kind of just want to build a single web page like one web page that has like one Dynamic element and just do it in every single like in a lot of Frameworks like just ah on the same page same same page kind page that's a cool prodct like learn all these Frameworks and you can see the differences yeah that's interesting how long it takes to do it yeah stopwatch I have to figure out actually something sufficiently complicated because it should probably do it should probably do some kind of thing

where it accesses the database and dynamically is changing stuff some AI stuff some llm stuff yeah maybe some it doesn't have to be aii call Api call to something to to replicate for example and then you have yeah that would be a very cool project yeah yeah and like time it and also report on my happiness yeah I'm going to totally do this cuz nobody benchmarks this nobody's Benchmark happy developer happiness with Frameworks yeah nobody's benchmarked the shipping time just take like a month do this how many Frameworks are there there's how many how many

there there's like five main ways of doing it so there's like this is no there's back end 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 backend also I don't know and then but there's not really you're not really forced to do anything so like B according to the Internet so like there's no um it's actually not trivial to find the canical way of doing things so like the standard vanilla like you you go

to the ice cream shop there's like a million flavors I want vanilla if if I've never had ice cream in my life can we just like learn about ice cream yeah I want vanilla nobody actually sometimes they'll literally name it vanilla but like I want to know what's the basic way but not like dumb but like the standard canonical want to know the dominant way like 60% of developers do it like this it's hard to figure that out you know that's the problem yeah maybe LMS 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 not I think honestly maybe it 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 that would be a very fast way to you know take their knowledge Tred these kinds of things what happens

is depends what kind of if they're like a worldclass developer yes often times they themselves are used to that thing and they have not themselves explored in other options so they have this dogmatic like talking down to you like this is the right way to do it it's like no no no we're just like exploring together okay show me the cool thing you've tried which is like it has to have U 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 what those people exist you could find those people probably yeah like if you want to learn AI imagine you have karpati sitting next to you teach you L like he does his YouTube videos is amazing he can teach it to like a 5-year-old about how how to make llm it's amazing like imagine this guy sitting next to you and just teaching you like let's make LM together like holy shit it would be amazing yeah I

mean well Kath has its own style and his like I'm not sure he he's for everybody but for example 5-year-old it depends on the 5-year-old yeah but he's like super technical but he's amazing because he's super technical and he's the only one who can explain stuff in a simple way which shows his complete genius yes because if you can explain without jargon you're like wow and build it from scratch yeah it's like top tier you know like what a guy but he might be anti framework cuz he buil from Scrat exactly yeah actually probably is

yeah uh he's like you but for AI yeah so maybe learning framework is a is a very bad idea for us you know maybe we should stay in PHP and like script Kitty and the 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 was a Mac guy yeah yeah I switched to Mac in 2015 because uh it was CU When I

wanted to start traveling and my brother was like dude get a Macbook is like the standard now I'm like wow I need to switch from Windows and I had like three screens you know like Windows had this whole setup for music production I had to sell everything um and then I had a Macbook and I remember opening up this MacBook box like ah and it was so beautiful it was like this aluminum and then I opened it I removed the you know the screen protector thing mhm 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 MEC 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 Mech listen I I kind of you're making me want to switch to Mac so I use either use Linux inside windows with w

SL or just UB ontu Linux but windows for most stuff like editing or any like uh any yeah yeah well you could use I guess you could do Mac stuff there I wonder if I should switch what do you miss about Windows what was the pros and cons I think the finder is horrible MEC like it's like it's it's the what is horrible the finder oh you don't know the so this the Windows Explorer yeah is amazing finder is strange man there like strange things this's this bug where if you if you send like test

your 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 have it to my girlfriend she starts sending me photo photo photo photo photo so F finder is very unusable but it has Linux like the whole thing is like it's Unix based right so you use the command line like 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 MEC OS which makes it very very good for development like I have my engine X server you know if I set if I'm not lazy and set up my staging on my laptop it's just the engine X server the same as I have on my Cloud Server right the same where the websites run and I can use almost everything the same config files configuration files and it just works and that makes Mac a very good platform for Linux stuff I think yeah yeah real Ubuntu is like better of course but

yeah I'm in this weird situation where I'm somewhat of a power user in Windows and let's say Android and all the much smarter friends I have all using Mac and iPhone and it's like but you don't want to go through the peer pressure you know it's not peer pressure it's like like one of the reasons I want to have kids is that there's a lot of like I 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 tradeoff for 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 works for people it works for people and the same thing with Mac it's like yeah like the the fun like I don't see fundamentally I don't like closed systems so like fundamentally I like Windows more because there there's much more freedom same with Android there's much more freedom it's much more customizable but like all the the cool kids

the smart kids are using Mac and iPhone it's like all right I need to really I need to give it a real chance especially for development since more and more stuff is done in the cloud anyway yeah well anyway uh but it's funny to hear you say all the good stuff started happening maybe I'll be like that guy too when I switch to Mac all the good stuff started happening I think it's just about the hardware it's not so much about the software the hardware so well builds 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 in 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 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 a co-working space like 6:00 a.m. sun comes up and I'm working and I'm coding and I hear like a sound or something so I do like I look left and my neck get stuck like and I'm like wow fuck and um I'm like what's am I dying you know and I thought I'm probably dying so I don't want to die in a cing space I'm going to go home and die in like you know peace and honor yeah so I

close my laptop and I put it in my backpack and I walked to the to the street and got on my motorbike went home um and I lie down on like a 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 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 RS RSI anymore rep injury I never have tingling anymore uh no pain and stuff so then I started working on the sofa and it's great like it it feels um you're close to the I 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 the No No so every St bed on the Mac OS on the MacBook

I used to have the Logitech MX Mouse the perfect economic Mouse doing like this little with thing 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 I had all the stuff but then I realized that having it all condensed in one laptop it's a 16-inch Macbook so it's quite big but having it all there is amazing because you're so close to the tools you're so close to what's happening you know it's like working on the car or something it's like

so um like man if you have Tre skin you 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 I me that's crazy command tap you alt up like when is alt up Mac command you switch very fast so you have like one the entire screen is taken out by vs code say you look at

the code and then yeah and then like if you deploy like a website you what switch screens mon to Chrome I used to have this swipe screen you know you could do like um different screen spaces yeah I was like it's too difficult let's just put it on one screen on the MacBook and then and he can be productive that way yeah very productive yeah more productive than before interesting because I have I have three screens and two of them are vertical like the size code right yeah for code you can see a lot no

man I love it like I'm I love seeing it with friends like they have amazing like Battle Stations right it's called It's amazing I want it but I don't want it right like do you like the constraints there's that's it there's some aspect of the constraints which like once 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 in all 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 project 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 buying so much stuff but they're not that productive they have the best

be 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 noat minimalist take me through like the perfect ultr productive day in your life like say like where you get a lot of shit done yeah are you uh and it's all focused on getting shit done what what when are you waking up is it a regular time super early super late so I go to sleep like 2: am. usually something like that and uh before 4:

a.m. uh but my girlfriend would go sleep midnight so we did a compromise like 2: a.m. you know MH so I 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 I put the coffee in um and then chill a little 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 cuz you have to this life like there's a lot of distractions like like your girlfriend asked off people come over whatever yeah um so I'm very fast now I can lock in and lock out quite fast and I heard people developers or entrepreneurs with kids have the same thing like before they're like ah I cannot work but they get used

to it and they get really productive in like short time because they only have like 20 minutes and then shit goes crazy again so another constraint right yeah it's funny so think that works for me um yeah and then you know cook food and stuff like have lunch steak and chicken and eat a bunch of times a day so you say coffee what are you doing yeah so a few hours later cook foods we get like locally soures like meat and stuff and vegetables and cook that uh and then second coffee and then coat some

more maybe go outside for lunch like you can you can mix fun stuff you know how many hours are you say in a perfectly productive day are you doing programming like if you were like to kill it are you doing like all day basically you mean like the special days where like girlfriend leaves to like Paris or something and you're alone for a week at home which is amazing you can just coat it's like and you stay up all night and eat chocolate and yeah chocolate yeah you know okay okay let's remove girlfriend from picture

social life from picture it's just you man that shit goes crazy like cuz when shit goes now she goes crazy okay okay so sh you let's let's rewind are you still waking up there's coffee there's no girlfriend to talk to there's now we wake up like 1: p.m. at 2 p.m. cuz you went to bed at 6 a.m. yeah cuz I was coding I was finding some new AI shit 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 kid stay in the house and he goes to another hotel sounds a little suspicious right going to the hotel but all he does is like writing or coding he's a writer and he needs like this alone time this silence and I think for this Flow State it's

true you know I'm better maintaining stuff um when there's a lot of disruptions than like creating new stuff I need this it's common it's flow it's this uninterrupted period of time um so yeah I wake up like 1 2 p.m. um you know still coffee shower we still shower you know uh and then this code like nonstop maybe my friend comes over uh comes over some distraction yeah he also Andre codes too so he comes over we code together we listen you know it starts going back to like the Bali days you know like yeah

coor days like you're not really working with him but you're just both working because it's nice to have like the vibe where you both sit together on the couch and coding on something and you actually it's mostly silent or there 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 h o r with a o Loud 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 very cool and they always have like very good like kind of industrial like indust so fast kind of aggressive you know like 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 it's 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 trans that's interesting cuz 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 is 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 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 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 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 normal Brown It's not like binar no it's just normal

Brown yeah white noise I think it's the same it's like pink Noise White Noise uh Brown noise I think is when it's like basier like yeah it's more diffused more dampened yeah dampened yeah I can see that no sharp yeah sharp brightness yeah bright yeah I can see that and you use a headphone right yeah headphones yeah actually like walk around in life often with brown noise dude that's like psychopath shit but it's cool you know yeah yeah yeah when I murder people it helps it it drowns out their screams Jesus Christ sorry I said

too much no I'm going to try Brown noise with the murder or for the coding yeah for the coding yeah okay good uh try it try it but you have to like with everything else you give it a real chance yeah I find I also like I said do uh techno type stuff electronic music on top of the brown noise uh but then control the speed cuz the faster goes and more anxiety so if I really need to get shit done especially with programming I'll have a beat yeah and it's great it's cool 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 that's my yeah in coworkers space I would just start too much yeah yeah so there's a source of distraction yeah we would do in the cob space we would do like a a money like pot like a mug so if you would we would work for 45 minutes and then if you would say one like per

word you would get a fine which is like $1 so you'd put $1 to say hey what's up so three $3 you put in the mug um and then 10 15 minutes free time like we can like party whatever and then 45 minutes again I'm working and that worked but you need to shut people up where they you know I think there's um there's an intimacy in being silent together that I might maybe I'm uncomfortable with like but you if you need to make yourself vulnerable and actually do it like with with close friends to

just sit there and 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 and they were just silent for like three minutes and then they said that was amazing yeah that was amazing I was like Wow pretty cool you know elon's like that and I I really like that when you'll ask a question like uh I

don't know what's a perfectly productive day for you like I I just asked and you just sit there for like 30 seconds thinking yeah he thinks yeah I don't know that's so cool I wish I was 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 the 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 yeah and if you allow yourself the room to do that you can actually come up with really good ideas yeah so okay this perfect day how much

caffeine are you consuming in this day man too much right cuz 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 gram of uh coffee powder in the V60 so like my friends call him like nuclear coffee cuz it's quite heavy 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 start starting from scratch creating a new thing yes I think girlfriends should let their guys go away for like two weeks mhm every few no every year at least you know maybe every quarter I don't know and just sit and make some shit without you know they're amazing

but like no 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 do both it's a different broke they need to allow us to go you know you need like a man cave right yeah to ship yeah to ship get shit done yeah it's a

balance okay cool what about sleep naps 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 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 me I love apps 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 that you have to be skeptical taking advice from the internet in general cuz a lot of advice is just like a good Baseline for the general population but 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 of like for me fasting was an interesting one because I used to you know eat a bunch of

meals a day especially when I was lifting heavy like as everybody says to you have to eat uh kind of a lot you know multiple meals a day but I realize I can get much stronger feel much better if I eat once or twice a day man me too yeah it's crazy I never underst do 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 uh job boards but there was not really specifically promote job job boards so I made one B I made like first on Nomad Le I made like Nomad jobs like a page and a lot of companies started hiring and they pay for job post so I spin it off to remote and now it's like the number one or number two biggest remote job boards and uh and it's also fully automated it and people just post a job and

people apply it has like profiles as well like it's kind of like LinkedIn for remotes work just focus on remote only yeah it's this 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 jobboard for remote jobs but the nice thing is you can charge a lot of money for job posst it's man it's good money B2B you can charge like you start of$ 299 but at the peak during when the FED started printing money like 2021 I was making like 140k a

month with remot k with just jaob posts and I started like adding crazy upsells like rainbow colored uh jaw post you can add your background name it's just upsells man and you charge $5 for an upsell it was crazy and uh all these companies just UPS so up so yeah we want everything jobst would cost $3,400 $4,000 and I was like this is good good business and then the fat stopped printing money and it all went down and it went down to like 10K a month from 140 yeah now it's back it's I think it's

like 40 was good times you know uh I got to ask you about back to the digital Nomad life yeah you uh you wrote a blog post on the reset and in general like just 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 was like a blogosphere and it was like the 100 things challenge what is that the 100 things I mean it's ridiculous but like you you write

down every object you have in your house and you count it you make like a spreadsheet and you're like okay I have 500 things you need to get it down to 100 why you know this was just a trend so I did it I started like selling stuff started throwing away stuff and I did like MDMA and easy like 2012 kind of and uh after that trip I felt so different and I felt like I had to started throwing shit away like I swear yeah and I started throwing shit away and I felt that was

like it was almost like the drug sending me to a path of like you need to throw your shit away you need to start you know 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 you need s you need to go on eBay and then man going eBay selling or your stuff is verying because you discover Society you mat you meet the craziest people

you meet every range from Rich the poor everybody comes to your house to buy stuff it's so funny so interesting I recommend everybody do this just to meet people people that want your shit yeah it was so like I I didn't know was I was living in Amsterdam and I didn't know I have my own you know subculture whatever and I discovered the Dutch people like as they are from eBay you know so I sold everything what's what's like the weirdest thing you had to sell and you had to find a buyer for not the

weirds but like what what's memorable so back then I was I was making music and I we would make music videos with like a Canon 5D camera back then everybody's making films and music 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 cuz we would work together on this and um to sell this like camera that we make stuff with and it was a hard goodbye was just a camera but it was like it felt like uh sorry guys it doesn't work and I need to

go you know who uh who bought it do you remember was some guy who couldn't possibly understand the journey motion of it yeah yeah he just showed up here here's the money thanks yeah but it was like a it was like cutting your life like this shit ends now now we GNA do new stuff and I think it's beautiful I did that twice in my life give away everything everything everything like down to just pants underwear backpack I think uh I think it's important to do it shows you what's important yeah I think that's what

I learned from it like you you learn that you can live with very little objects very little stuff and um but there's a there's a counter to it like you you lean more on this on the stuff on the services right like for example you don't need a car you use Uber right or you don't need kitchen stuff because you go to restaurants you know when you're traveling so you lean more on other people's services but you spend money on that as well so 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 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 like spiritually it's good to take a leap out 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 uh you know build some internet

stuff whatever if your bring your laptop and uh it's it's amazing experience I five years ago it's still going to University but now I'm thinking like no maybe don't maybe skip University just go first like travel around a little bit figure some stuff out you can go back to University when you're 25 you can like okay now I learned I being 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 man 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 mean not geographically oh like the 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 old no but it man if you if you're smart about it you can stay safe and I met so many weirdos from traveling you meet that's how travel works if you really let lose 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 when you're 18

I feel like depending on your personality you have to learn both how to be a weirdo and how to be a normie like you still have to learn how to fit into society like for a person like me for example who's always an outcast like there's always a danger for going full Outcast yeah and that's a harder life if you like if you go to like go full artist and full like Darkness it's just a heart of life you can come back you can come back to normally 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 I'm more adaptable to normally now you know learned it after 30s you know you're like yeah but you mean it's a skill you have to learn yeah I feel man I feel also the you start as Outcast but the more you work on yourself the less like shit you have you kind of start becoming more normally because you become more chill with yourself and more happy and it kind of makes you uninteresting right

a little bit 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 cuz it's hot so you just wear swimpants swim

shorts he w walk around flipflops uh so very basic t-shirt and uh I would go to the lroom mat and wash my stuff and I think it was like 50 F or something yeah yeah it's nice there's uh as I mentioned to you there's the the show alone yeah they really test you cuz they you 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 a does the job you basically have to in order to

build a shelter you have to cut down cut the trees and make and like learning Minecraft you know everything I learn about life I learn Minecraft bro yeah yeah you can it's a it's it's nice to create those constraints for yourself to understand what matters to you and also how to be in this world and one one of the ways to do that just to live a minimalist life but like some people like I've met people that really enjoy material possessions and it brings him 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 a baseline hedonist hedonistic adaptation very fast yeah but man if you look at the studies most people like like getting a new car six months you know getting a new house six months you just feel the same you're like wow should I buy all the stuff that studying hedonistic adaptation made me think a lot about minimalism like and so you don't even need to go through the whole journey of getting it just just focus on

the the thing that's more permanent yeah like building shit yeah like people around you like 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 M 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 M then people got angry that I Clos my DMs down that I'm not like man of the people you know it's like you changed man yeah you Chang 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 shit man like stalkers and like people write like their whole life story for you and then ask you advice like man I have no idea I'm not a

therapist I don't know I don't know 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 help my friend Andre for example he was he he came up to me in a cing space that's how I met him and he said I want to learn a code I want to do startups how do I do it I said

okay let's go uh install engine X let 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 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 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 debate you ask me for advice right and the people who need this push generally it doesn't happen you need to have this energy for yourself well they're searching they're searching they're trying to figure it out but often times their search if they successfully find what they're looking for it'll be within sounds very like spiritual Sonny but it's it's really like figuring that shit out on your own but they're

reaching they're trying to ask the world around them like how do I live this life how do I figure this out but ultimately the answer is going to be from them working on themselves and like literally it's the stupid thing but like Googling and doing like yeah I think it's procrastination I think sending messages to people is a lot of procrastination like Lex how do you become successful podcaster bro just you know start like just go yeah and uh just go I would never ask you how to be a successful podcaster like I would just

start it and then I would copy your methods you know I would say ah this guy's a black background we probably need this as well yeah try it yeah try it and then you realize it's not about the black background it's about something else so you find your own voice like keep trying stuffa 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 cre everybody always Builds on the previous work yeah uh 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 or something firefighting I don't 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 the biggest battle for uh for the longest time is finding stretches a time where I can

deeply focus into really really deep work just like zoom in and completely focused cutting away all the distractions yeah me too that's the battle Yeah it's unpleasant it's extremely unpleasant we need to fly to an island you know make a a man cave Island where we can just everybody can just goat and for a week you know just get shit done make new projects yeah yeah but man they called me psychopath for this because it says like one hours of sex hugs love you know man I had to write something you know and they were

like ah this guy psychopath he plans his sex know in specific hour like bro I don't but have a counter for hugs yeah exactly like yeah like click click click H 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 that too much yeah man how many times you see your parents Jesus like man yeah it's scary man that's right it might be only 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 you realize like well I haven't really seen him for like three years so like how many more times do we have that we see each other yeah do you believe that like friends just slowly disappear from your life like they kind

of your friend group evolves right so like it does it does like you don't want to there's a problem with Facebook you get all these old friends from school like when you were 10 years old back when Facebook started like you don't really you would 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 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 I every time I see him I think it's because we have a foundation of many shared experiences and many memories like I it's like nothing has changed like we've been almost like we've been talking every day even if we haven't talked for a year yeah so that like yeah that's deep yeah so that so I don't have to be interacting with them for them to be in a friend group and then there's some people I interact with a lot so it's it it depends but there's just this network of good

human beings that can I have like a real love for them and I I can always count on them if like if any of them called me in the middle of the night I'll get rid of a body you know I'm there 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 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 cuz you're pretty open on Twitter and you're just like basically building shit in the open yeah and just not really caring if it's too technical if it's any of this just being out there does it put pressure on you as you become more popular to be a little bit more 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 podcast you ask about LIF stuff about personality that's the most interesting part of like business or sports like what's the behind this for the athlete right behind the entrepreneur that's interesting stuff to be human yeah like you you share that you know like I Shar the Tweet went too far but like we were cleaning the toilet because the toilet was clogged you know but like it's just real stuff because Jansen hang the Nvidia guy he says he started cleaning toilets

you know that was cool you you tweeted something about the the Denny's thing I forget yeah it was recent Nvidia was started in a Denny Diner uh table and you made it somehow profound you're almost yeah this one this one uh Nvidia three $3 trillion company was started in a Denny's an American Diner people need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next billion or trillion dollar company what's the first and second space the home office and the in between the island I guess yeah the island yeah you need a space

to like congregate man and I found history on this so 400 years ago in the coffee hous of Europe the like the Scientific Revolution the enlightenment happened because they would go to coffee houses they would sit there they would drink coffee and they would work they would work they would write or they would and they would do debates and they would organize Marine routes right they would do all the stuff in coffee houses in Europe in France in Austria in UK in Holland so we would always be going to we were always going to cafes

to to work and to have serendipitous conversations with other people and start businesses and stuff and when I like you asked me to come on here and we flew to America and the first thing I realized was that I've been to America before but 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 large parts of Europe now you can't 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 is in 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 kind they're not very they're private they're not serendipitous 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 left those 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 his uh 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 we're benefiting from Nvidia I think as the US GDP for sure is benefiting from Nvidia European GDP could benefit if we build more companies and I feel in Europe there's this Vibe and this you have to connect things but not not allowing laptops and cafes is kind of like part of the vibe which is like yeah

we're not really here to work we're here to like enjoy life I agree with this Anthony bdan like this tweet was quote tweeted Anthony Bain 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 to towards that dream and then feel each other's energy as they interact with that's one of the things I liked in Silicon Valley when I was uh working

there is like the cafes like 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 a not everybody wins 99% of people will be bullshit but they working their ass off yeah they're doing something and and you need to past this startup bro like oh it's startup Lev no it's not it's people making cool shit yeah and this will benefit you because this will create jobs for your com your your country in your region and I

think in Europe um that's a big problem like we have a very anti- um entrepreneurial mind dream big and build shit this is really inspiring this is pin tweet of yours all the projects that you've tried and the ones that succeeded has very few mute life it was for Twitter to mute uh to share the mute list 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's doesn't make money Airline list like compares the safety of Airlines CU

I was nervous to fly so I was like let's collect all the data on crashes for all the airplanes BC cable nice that's awesome uh Village NORAD gear 3D and virtual reality Dev play play my inbox like you mentioned there's a lot of stuff yeah man I'm trying to find some embarrassing tweets of yours you can go to the highlights tab it has all the like the good shit kind of there you go this was Dubai POV building an AI startup wow you're a real influencer and people copy this photo now and they they change

the screenshots it becomes like a meme of course you know this is good this how Dubai looks it's insane that's beautiful architecture wise it's crazy the story is behind this story behind for sure so this is about the European economy where like European economy landscape is ran by dinosaurs and today I studied it so I can produce you with my evidence 80% of top EU companies were founded before 1950 only 36% of top us companies were founded before 1950 yeah so the median founding of companies in US is something like 1960 and IM Med median

the top companies right and IM median in Europe is like 1900 or something yeah so it's um here 1914 and 1963 so there a 50-year difference it's a good um representation of the very thing you were talking about the diff difference in the cultures entrepreneurial Spirit of the peoples but Europe used to be entrepreneurial like there was companies found in 1800 1850 1900 it flipped like around 1950 where America took the lead and uh and I guess my point is like I hope that Europe gets back to because I'm European I hope that Europe gets

back to being an entrepreneurial culture where they build big companies again because right now the all the old dinosaur companies control the economies they're lobbying with the government they're Europe is also that's like they're infiltrated with the government where they create so much regulation like I think it's called regulatory capture right where it's very hard for a newcomer to join 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 a 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 started AI started right now um mostly you know what do you think about eak effective accelerationist movement man you had Beth jzos on I I love Beth jzos and um he's amazing and I think iok 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 eok is like is a positive outlook in 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 was 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 SC 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 America and this beginning also massive problems right um but I think it's very very dangerous for a country or region like Europe to you you you get to this point where you're kind of complacent you're kind of comfort and then you know you can either go this or you can go this way right you're from here you go like this and then you can go this or this I think you should go

this way and uh OB yeah go up and and uh I think it's the problem is the the the Mind culture so eok I made eok which is like the European kind of version um I made like hoodies and stuff so a lot of people wear like this this make your grade again head um I made it red first but it became too like Trump so now it's more like you're being 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 and society and tell you but like try your own thing you know because it probably it might work out you can you can steer the ship 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 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 every can do their own little thing you don't need to you know be

a Normy as you say you you you um you can you can be what you really want to be you know and like go all out doing that thing yeah you got to go all out cuz if you do if you have assets you cannot succeed you got 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 yet this was an incredible conversation it was an honor to finally meet you

it was honor to be 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 Matt thanks for listening to this conversation with Peter levels to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Drew hon 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 and hope to see you next time