Building Successful Startups with Peter Levels: A Digital Nomad’s Journey
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Introduction
Peter Levels is not your average entrepreneur; he is a digital nomad who has created over 40 startups while traveling through more than 40 countries. His journey is an inspiring tale of resilience, creativity, and innovation. In this post, we’ll dive into Levels’ philosophy on building startups, his unique approaches to productivity, and the lessons he’s learned throughout his adventures in the tech world.
The Philosophy of Building Startups
Lean Startup Methodology
Peter Levels has a distinct philosophy when it comes to building startups that sets him apart from traditional entrepreneurs. Most startup founders seek funding, hire teams, and build products before finding a market fit. In contrast, Levels adopts a bootstrapping approach, where he does everything himself, from designing to coding.
- Speed Over Perfection: Levels believes in launching prototypes rapidly, allowing him to gauge demand early on.
- Validate Ideas Early: Peter emphasizes the importance of making sure customers are willing to pay before investing a significant amount of time and money into a project.
The Digital Nomad Lifestyle
Freedom and Flexibility
Living the life of a digital nomad offers immense freedom. It allows entrepreneurs like Peter to pursue their passions without the constraints of traditional employment.
- Minimalism: Getting rid of material possessions is essential to embrace this lifestyle. Levels outlines his experience of discarding everything to travel light.
- Cultural Experiences: Traveling exposes individuals to different cultures, which can spark new ideas for startups.
Lessons in Productivity
Embracing Constraints
In the interview, Levels shares his techniques for maintaining productivity while staying flexible in an unpredictable nomadic lifestyle.
- Quality Over Quantity: He finds that having fewer distractions helps him focus better.
- Automation: Levels automates many aspects of his projects, from operational tasks to customer interactions, allowing him to spend more time on creating and less on repetitive tasks.
- Work Environment: He prefers working from cafes or on hotel couches where he feels inspired and free.
Favorite Tools and Technologies
Levels is a fan of using simple yet effective technologies in his projects. He often employs:
- PHP and jQuery: For most of his web projects, he sticks with familiar languages that allow him to work quickly without the learning curve.
- Stable Diffusion and AI Models: He has also ventured into the AI space, using models for generating photos and creating art.
The Future of AI and Entrepreneurship
Navigating the Evolving Landscape
Peter’s insights into the future of AI technologies and startups highlight the ongoing evolution in both fields.
- Continual Learning: As the tech landscape changes, he recognizes the need to adapt to new frameworks or tools, like React or Node.js, and integrates them into his skill set gradually.
- Networking and Community: Building meaningful connections with other entrepreneurs and developers is just as critical to success as the technology itself.
Conclusion
Peter Levels’ journey as a digital nomad and entrepreneur serves as a vital reminder that success stems from persistence, adaptability, and a willingness to embrace the unknown. By creating a lean and agile approach to startups, he has developed a unique career path that many aspiring entrepreneurs can learn from. As he continues to innovate and inspire others, the tech world can only get brighter with creators like Peter pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
In the words of Drew Houston, "Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once." Keep building and exploring, just like Levels has done throughout his impressive career.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
like build a project almost every day just build a thing yeah and get it to work and finish it every single day
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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