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

26:36Yeah. You could tell Jim or like don't give me all the emails just give me the ones with YouTube links, you know or something like that Yeah, I mean there is a whole ecosystem of like apps you can build on top of the Google But people don't never do this like I've seen a few like boomerang. There's a few apps that are like good But just I wonder what maybe it's not easy to make money I think it's hard to get people to pay for these like extensions of plugins, you know Because it's not like a real app so it's not like people don't value it people very Oh, this 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.

27:08It should be free, which is, but if you go to a website and you actually, okay, I need this product, I'm going to pay for this because it's a real product. So even though it's the same code in the back, it's a plugin, you know? Yeah, I mean, you can do it through like extensions like Chrome extensions from the browser side. Yeah, but who pays for Chrome extensions, right? Like barely anybody. So that's not a good place to make money probably. Yeah, that sucks. Like Chrome extensions should be a extension for your startup. you know, you have a product. Oh, we also have a Chrome extension, you know, I wish the Chrome extension would be the product.

27:39I wish Chrome would support that. Like where you could pay for it easily. It's like imagine, I can imagine a lot of products that would just live as extensions. Like improvements for social media. Yeah. I think that looks like TPs, you know, GPs. Yeah. Like these chat GPs, they're gonna charge money for it now. You get a rev, rev share, I think for an opening eye, I made a lot of them also. Why? We'll talk about it. So let's rewind back. It's a pretty cool idea to do 12 startups in 12 months. What's it take to build a thing in 30 days? Like at that time, how hard was that? I think the hard part is like figuring out what you shouldn't add, right?

28:14Which you shouldn't build because you don't have time. So you need to build a landing page. Well, you need to build the product actually because they need to be something that pay for. Do you need to build a login system? Like maybe no, you know, like maybe you can build some scrappy login system. Like for photo, you sign up, you pay with a stripe checkout and you get a login link. And when I started, there was only a login link with a hash and that's just a static link. So it's very easy to login. It's not so safe, you know, what if you link the link. And now I have a real Google login, but that took like a year.

28:43So keeping it very scrappy is very important to, because you don't have time, you know, you need to focus on what you can build fast. So money, me, Stripe, build the product, build a landing page. You need to think about how are people going to find this. So are you going to put it on Reddit or something? How are you going to put it on Reddit without being looked at as a spammer, right? Like if you say, hey, it is my new startup. You should use it. No, nobody gets deleted, you know? Maybe if you find a problem that a lot of people on Reddit already have on subreddits, you know, like, and you solve that problem, say, sub people, I made this thing that might solve your problem.

29:18And maybe it's free for now, you know, like, that could work. But you need to be very, you know, narrow it down. What you're building time is limited. Yeah. Actually, can we go back to the U -Laying in a room, feeling like a loser? Yeah. I still feel like a loser sometimes. What's, what can you, can you speak to that feeling to that place of just like feeling like a loser? And I think a lot of people in this world are laying in a room right now listening to this. and feeling like a loser. Okay, so I think it's normal if you're young, that you feel like a loser, first of all, especially when you're 27.

29:58Yes, there's like a peak. Yeah, yeah, I think 20th of the peak. And so I would not kill yourselves, it's very important to just get through it, you know? But because you have nothing, you have probably no money, you have no business, you have no job, you, like, Jordan and Peterson said this, I saw it somewhere, like the reason people are depressed, because I have nothing, they don't have a girlfriend, they don't have a boyfriend, they don't have, you need stuff, you need like our family, you need things around you, you need to build a life for yourself, you don't build a life for yourself, you'll be depressed.

30:25So if you're alone in Asia in a hostel, looking at the ceiling and you don't have any money coming in, you don't have a girlfriend, you don't, of course you're depressed. It's logic. But back then, if you're in a moment, you think there's not logic, there's something wrong with me, you know? 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 is like digital nomads that they killed themselves. And I haven't checked like this comparison with like baseline people like who's I ready?

30:55But I have a hunch, especially in the beginning when it was a very new thing like 10 years ago that it can be very psychologically texting and you're alone a lot back then when you travel alone. There was no other digital nomads back then a lot. So you're in a strange culture. You look different in everybody. like you're in, I was in Asia, like everybody's really nice in Thailand, but you're not part of the culture, you're traveling around. You're hopping from city to city. You don't have a home anymore. You feel disrooted and you're constantly in the outcasts in that you're different from everybody else.

31:30Exactly. But people treat you like Thailand, people are so nice, but you still feel like outcasts. And I think the digital moments I met then were all kind of like, it was like shady business, you know, but they were like vigilantes because of this new thing. Like one guy was selling illegal drugs was American guy was selling illegal drugs for UPS to Americans you know on this website they were like a lot of drop shippers doing shady stuff um this love shays 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?

32:11And the history of the movement? I struck upon it on the accident because I was like, I'm going to graduate university and then I'm going to need to get out of here. I'll fly to Asia because I've been before in Asia. I started in Korea in 2009, study exchange. I was like, Asia is easy, Thailand is easy. And I'll just go there and figure things out. And it's cheap. It's very cheap. Check my, I would live for $150 per month rent for private room. Pretty good. So I struck upon this on the accident. I was like, oh, okay, there's other people on laptops working on their start, but working remotely.

32:37Back then, nobody worked remotely, but they worked on their business. businesses, right? And they would live in like Colombia or Thailand, or Vietnam or Bali. They would live kind of like a more cheap places. And it looked like a very adventurous life. Like you travel around, you build your business, there's no pressure from like your home society, right? Like you're American. So you get pressure from America's society telling you kind of what to do. Like you need to buy a house or you need to do this stuff. I had this in Holland too. And you can get away from this pressure. You can find it, kind of feel like you're free.

33:08You're kind of there's nobody telling you what to do, but that's also why you start feeling like you go crazy because you are you are free You're this attached from anything and anybody You disattached from your culture. You're this attached from the coast you're probably in because you're staying very short I think Franz Kafka said I'm Free therefore I'm lost man. That's so true. Yeah, it's exactly the points and Yeah, freedom is like it's the definition of no constraints, right? Like everything is possible. You can go anywhere And everybody's like, oh, it must be super nice, you know, like freedom.

33:40You must be very happy. And it's the opposite. Like, I don't think that makes you happy. I think Australia probably make you happy. And it's a big lesson I learned then. But 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 it was like, there was like drugs, being shipped to America, like diet pills and stuff, like non -FDA proof stuff, You know, and they would like that there was no like effort. They were like they would would say with beers They would laugh about like all the dodges shit kind of they're doing, you know, oh that part of it Okay, you know like kind of sleazy ecom vibe.

34:15I'm not saying all ecom was sleazy, you know, but right But you know this vibe it could be a vibe and your your vibe was more Make me cool 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. Yeah, you make harm million it month There's people with this shit and I was like this is not my people. Yeah, I don't mean There's nothing wrong with any of those individual But but there's a foundation That's not quite ethical. I mean, what is that? I don't know what that is, but yeah, I get you No, I don't want to judge it was more I noted for me it wasn't my world.

34:50It wasn't my subculture I want to make cool shit, you know, but they also think that cool shit is cool, so you know But I wanted to make like real like startups and there was my thing I would read Hekken News, you know, like, white culminator and they were making cool stuff, so I wanted to make cool stuff I mean, that's a pretty cool way of life Just if you romanticize it from moment. It's very romantic, man. It's very it's colorful You know like if I think about the memories. What are some happy memories? Just like working working cafes or working and Just the freedom that That envelops you with that that way of life because anything is possible You just got off and it was amazing.

35:29Like we would work. Like you wouldn't make friends and we would work until, you know, 6 a .m. in Bali, for example, with like, um, with Andre my best friend, who I was still my best friend. And we would, another friend and we would work until like the morning when the sun came up, because at night, the co -worker space was silence. You know, there was nobody else. And I would wake up like 6 p .m. or 5 p .m. I would drive to the co -worker space on a motorbike. I would buy like a Fertie hot lattes from a cafe. How many? Fertie. Because there was like six people coming. We didn't know. Sometimes people would come in.

36:05And we would say three zero thirty. Yeah. Nice. And we would drink like four per person or something, you know? Yeah. Man, it's body. I don't know if they were powerful lattes, you know, but they were lattes. And we would put them in plastic bag and then we would drive there and all the coffee was like falling, you know, ever. And then we'd go and go upstairs and have these coffees here and would work all night we play like techno music and everybody which is working there like this would literally like business people they would work in their startup and we would all try and make something and then the sun would come up and the morning people the you know the yoga yoga girls and yoga guys would come in you know after the yoga class and six and they say hey good morning and we're like we look like this you know and we're like we'll stop how you're doing and we didn't know how bad we looked you know but it was very bad and then we'd go home sleeping like a hostel hotel and do the same thing and again and then again and again.

36:55And it was this locking mold, you know, like working. And that was very fun. So it's just a bunch of you, techno music blasting all through the night. Yeah. Or more like, like in the old show, right? Not like this. I see, I got, for me, it's such an interesting thing because the speed of the beat affects how I feel about a thing. So the faster it is, the more anxiety I feel, but that anxiety is channeled into productivity, But if it's a little too fast, I start the anxiety overpower. So you don't like drama based music? Probably not. That's too fast. I mean, for working, after I have to play with it, it's like you can actually like, I can adjust my level of anxiety.

37:35There's a must be a better word than anxiety. It's like a productive anxiety that I like. Whatever that is. It also depends what kind of work you do, right? Like if you're writing, you probably don't want drama based music. I think for codes, like industrial techno, this kind of stuff, kind of fast. it works well because you really get locked in and combined with caffeine, you go deep. And I think you balance on this edge of anxiety because this caffeine is also hitting your anxiety. And you want to be on the edge of anxiety with this techno running. Sometimes it gets too much. Like stop the techno, stop the music.

38:07It's like, but those are good memories. You know, also like travel memories. Like you go from city to city and it feels like it's kind of like What was your favorite place? Do you remember? Divisited. I think still, Bangkok is the best place. And Bangkok and Chiang Mai, I think Thailand is very special. Like I've been to the other place, like I've been to Vietnam, and I've been to South America and stuff. I still think Thailand wins in how nice people are, how easy of a life people have their everything's cheap. Yeah, good. Well Bangkok is going expensive now, but Chiang Mai is still cheap. I think when you're starting out, it's a great place.

38:50Man, the air quality sucks. It's a big problem. So, and it's quite hot, but that's a very cool place. Problem comes. I love Brazil also. My girlfriend is Brazilian, but I do not just because of that, but I like Brazil. The problem still is the safety issue. It's like in America, it's localized. It's hard for Europeans to understand, like, safety is localized to specific areas. So if you go to the right areas, it's amazing. Brazil is amazing. If you go to the wrong areas, you may be die. Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's true. But it's not true in Europe. From Europe is much more than come. That's true.

39:22That's true. You're right. You're right. It's more averaged out. Yeah. I like it when there's strong neighborhoods. When you're like, you cross a certain street and you're in a dangerous part of town. Man, yeah. I like it. I like there's certain cities in the United States like that. Yeah. I like that. And you're saying Europe is more about that. But you don't feel scared? Well, I don't. I like DJ. No, not even just that. I think danger is interesting. So, danger reveals something about yourself, about others. Also, I like the full range of humanity. So, I don't like the mellowed out aspects of humanity.

39:57I friends, these are almost friends that are exactly like this. They go to the broken areas. They like this reality. They like authenticity more. They don't like luxury. They don't like luxury. It's very European of you. Wait, was that? That's a whole other conversation. So you quoted Freya Stark quote to a wake and quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. Do you remember time you were woken in a strange town and felt like that? We're talking about small towns or big towns or anywhere. I think I wrote it in some blog post and like It was a common thing when you would wake up.

40:41And this was like, because I have this website, I started a website about this data no more is like called nomadlist .com and this was a community. So it was like 3 ,000 other digital nomads because I was feeling lonely so I built this website and I stopped feeling lonely like I started organizing meetups and making friends. And it was very common that people would say they would wake up and they would forget where they are. Like for the first half minute and I had to look outside like where am I, which country, which sounds really like privileged, but it's more like funny. Like, you literally don't know where you are because you're so disrooted.

41:12But there's something, man, it's like Anthony Burden, there's something pure about this kind of vagabonds travel thing, you know? Like, it's behind me, I think. I don't like, now I travel with my girlfriend, right? It's very different, but it is a romantic, like memories of this kind of like vagabond individualistic solo life. But the thing 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.

41:45And you, and I don't know, it's like you're awakened to the possibilities of this place when you feel like that. It's great. And it's even when you're doing some basic travel. I go to San Francisco or something. Yeah, you have like the novelty effect. Like you're in a new place. Like here, things are possible. You know, you don't get bored yet. and that's why people get addicted to traveling, you know? Back to startups. You wrote a book on how to do this thing and gave a great talk on it, how to do startups. The book's called Make Bootstrapers Handbook. I was wondering if you could go through some of the steps.

42:21It's the idea of build, launch, grow, monetize, automate, and exit. There's a lot of fascinating ideas in each one. So idea stage, how do you find a good idea? Yeah, so I think you need to be able to spot problems. So for example, you can go in your daily life, like when you wake up and you're like, what is stuff that I'm really annoyed with? That's like in my daily life, that doesn't function well. And that's a problem that you can see. Okay, maybe that's something I can add, write code about. You know, code for and it will make my life easier. So I would say make like a list of all these problems you have and like idea to solve it.

42:54And I see which one is like viable. You can actually do something and then start building it. So that's a really good place to start. Become open to all the problems in your life. I get to 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. Because we kind of very quickly get accustomed to discomfort. Exactly. Like for example, like door knobs. Yeah. Like design of certain things. New Lex Freeman door knob. That one I know how much incredible design work has gone into. It's really interesting. Doors and door knobs.

43:35The design of everyday things, forks and spoons, it's going to be hard to come up with a fork that's better than the current fork designs. And the other aspect of it is you're saying in order to come up with interesting ideas, you got to try to live a more interesting life. Yeah, but that's where travel comes in. Because when I started traveling, I started seeing stuff in other countries that you didn't have in Europe, for example, or America, even. Like if you go to Asia, like, do especially 10 years ago, nobody knew about this, like, weChat, all these apps that they already had before we had them, these, everything apps, right?

44:09Like now Elon's trying to make X, this everything app, like weChat, the same thing. Like, in an easier talent, you have one app that you can, or the food, if you can order groceries, you can order massage, you can order car mechanic. Anything you can think of is in the app. And that's stuff, for example, you know, that's called like arbitrage. You can go to back to your country and build that same app for your country, for example. So you start seeing problems, you start seeing solutions that other countries already, other people already did in the rest of the world. And also traveling in general just gives you more problems because travel is uncomfortable, you know, airports are horrible, airplanes are not comfortable either.

44:50There's a lot of problems you start seeing. just getting out of your house, you know? But also you can, I mean, in the digital world, you can just go into different communities and see what can be improved by the others in that. Yeah, yeah. What specifically is your process of generating ideas? Do you like do idea dumps? Like do you have a document where you just keep writing? Yeah, you still 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?

45:20So I need to have a lot of things to try. And I did that. Right now, I think like because I already have money, I can do more things based on technology. So for example, AI, when I found out about when stable diffusion came or chat GBT and stuff, all these things were like, I didn't start working with them because I had a problem. I had no problems, but I was very curious about technology. And I was like playing with it and figuring out like, First, just playing with it and then you find something like, okay, this generates, a distribution generates houses very beautiful and interior, you know?

45:56So it's less about problem -solving, it's more about the possibilities of new things you can create. Yeah, but that's very risky because that's the famous solution trying to find a problem. And usually it doesn't work. And that's very common with startups, I think they have tech, but actually people don't need to tech, right? So can you actually explain, it'd be cool to talk about some of the stuff you created. Can you explain this photo AI? Yeah. So it's like fire your photographer ideas. You don't need a photographer anymore. You can train yourself as AI model. And you can take as many photos you want anywhere and any clothes with facial expressions, like happy or sad or poses, all this stuff.

46:36So how does it work? So this is a semi -align to a gallery of ones done on me. Which is on the left you have the prompts, Yeah, so you can write like so model is your model this Lex Friedman. Yeah, so you can write like model as a blah blah whatever you want. Yeah, then press the button and it will take photos take will take like One minute photos. What are you using for the hosting for the compute replicates? Okay, replicate calm. They're very very good. Okay. It's cool like this interface wise It's cool that you're showing how long it's gonna take this is amazing. So it's taking a Presuming you just loaded in a few pictures from the internet.

47:11Yeah, so I went to Google images type in Lex Friedman I added like 10 or 20 images. You can open them in the gallery and you can use your cursor to yeah So some don't look like you so that the hidden misrate is like I don't know. It's say like 50 50 or something but when I was watching your tweez like it's been getting better and better and better It was very bad in the beginning. It was so bad, but still people who signed up today, you know There's there's two lexes is great. It's getting more and more sexual. It's making me very uncomfortable But that's the problem with these models because no, we need to talk about this because the models of diffusion Yeah, so the photorealistic models that are like fine tunes.

47:50Yeah, they were all trained on porn in the beginning And it was a guy called Hassan So I was trying to figure out how to do photorealistic AI photos and it was stable diffusion by itself is not doing that well Like the faces look all mangled. Yeah And it doesn't have enough resolution or something to do the well so but I started seeing these these base models, it's fine -tune models and people were training on porn and I would try them and they would be very photorealistic. They would have bodies that actually made sense like body anatomy. But if you look at the photorealist models that people use now, still, there's still a core of porn there, like of naked people.

48:25So I need to prompt out the naked and everyone needs to do this with AI startups of imaging. You need to prompt out the naked stuff. You need to put a, you know, naked, you have to keep reminding the model to put those on the thing. Yeah, don't put naked because it's very risky. I have Google Vision that checks every photo before it's shown to the user to like check or accept the audio. Oh, it's after we did that detector. Because you get the journalists get very angry if they, you know, there was a journalist a thing that would got angry that used this and it was like, oh, it made me it showed like a nipple because Google Vision didn't detect it.

48:56So there's like these kind of problems you need to deal with, you know, that's what I'm talking about. This is with cats. But look at the cat face, it's also kind of mangled. I'm a little bit disturbed. I'm assuming on the cat if you want to click. This is a very sad cut. It doesn't have a nose. It doesn't have a nose. But this is the problem with AI startups, because they all act like it's perfect. This is groundbreaking. But it's not perfect. It's like really bad, you know, half time. So if I wanted to sort of update model as... Yeah, so you remove this stuff and you write like whatever you want like in Thailand or something or in Tokyo.

49:37In Tokyo? Yeah. And you say like at night with neon lights, like you can add more detail. Shall I go in Austin? Do you think I'll know in Texas? In Austin, Texas. The cowboy hats in Texas. Yeah. As a cowboy. As a cowboy, it's going to go so towards the porn directions. It's my open up. This is the end of my career. Or the beginning, it depends. We can send you a push notification when your photos are done. Yeah, I cool. Yeah, let's see. Oh, wow. So this whole interface you've built. Yeah, this is really well done. So jQuery. I still use jQuery. Yes, still. After the day, you're not the only one.

50:19The entire of the web. Yeah, this PHP, the stack. It's been jQuery. Yeah, SQL lights. You're just like one of the top performers from a programming perspective that are still like openly Talking about it, but everyone's using PHP like if you look at most of the web is still probably PHP and it's because of WordPress right because the blog is a yes true. Yeah I'm seeing a revival now people are getting sick of frameworks Like all the JavaScript frameworks are so like what he called like wieldy like there's so it's takes so much work just maintain this code. And then it updates to a new version, you need to change everything.

50:55PHP just stays the same and works. Yeah. And can you actually just speak to that stack? You just build all your websites, app, startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML. JavaScript, with jQuery, PHP, and a school like. So that's a really simple stack. And you get stuff done really fast. Like, can you just speak to the philosophy behind that? I think it's accidental because that's the thing I knew. Like I knew PHP, I knew HTML CSS, you know, because she made websites. And when my startups started taking off, I didn't have time to, I remember putting on my to do this, like learn Node .js because it's important to switch, you know, because this obviously is much better language than PHP.

51:40And I never learned it. I never did it. Cause at the end of time, I, these things were growing like this. and I was launching more project and I never had time. It's like one day, I'll start coding properly and I never got to it. I sometimes wonder if I need to learn that stuff. It's still to do it for me to really learn no JS or Flash or this kind of the... React, you can react. 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.

52:24If you want to be entrepreneur, probably you should maybe shoot. I wonder if there's like, I really want to measure performance and speed. I think there's a deep wisdom in that. Yeah. I do think that frameworks and just constantly wanting to learn the new thing this complicated way of software engineering gets in the way. I'm not sure what to say about that because definitely, like you shouldn't build everything from just vanilla JavaScript or vanilla C, for example. C++ when you're building systems and engineering is like, there's a lot of benefits for a pointer safety, all that kind of stuff.

52:58So I don't know, but it just feels like you can get so much more stuff done if you don't care about how you do it. Man, this is my most controversial take, I think, and maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like this framework is now that it raised money. They raised a lot of money. Like they raised 50 million, 100 million, 3 million, $1 million. And the idea is that you need to make the developers and new developers, like when you're 18 or 20 years old, right? Get them to use this framework and add a platform to it, like where the framework can, know, it's open source, but you probably should use the platform, which is paid to use it.

53:36And the cost of the platforms to host it are a thousand times higher than just hosting it on a simple AWS server or a VPS on digital ocean, right? So there's obviously like a monetary incentive here, like we want to get a lot of you develop to use this technology and then we need to charge them money because they're going to use it in startups and then the startups can pay for the bills. But what that kind of destroys the information out there about learning to code because they pay YouTube or they pay influencers, developing influencers is a big thing to like, and same thing when happens with like nutrition and fitness or something, same thing happens in developing.

54:16They pay these influencers to promote the stuff, use it, make stuff with it, make demo product with it, and then a lot of people like, wow, use this. And I started noticing this because when I was ship my stuff people would ask me what are you using I would say I would just be a bit jacquery why doesn't matter and people would start kind of attacking me like why are you not using this new technology this new framework this new thing and I say I don't know because this beach people in works and I don't really optimizing for anything just do just works. And I never understood like why like I understand there's new technologies that are better and and this should be improvement, but I'm very suspicious of money, just like lobbying.

54:51Does money in this developer framework scene? There's hundreds of millions that goes to ads or influencer, whatever. It can't all go to developers. You don't need so many developers for a framework and it's open source to make a lot of more money on these startups. So that's a really good perspective. But in addition to that is like when you say better, it's like, can we get some data on the better because I want to know from the individual developer perspective. And then from a team of five, team of 10, team of 20 developers, measure how productive they are in shipping features, how many bugs they create, how many security holes.

55:34PHP was not good at security for a while, but now it's good. In theory, is it though? I was good. No, no, no, no. 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. It's just overrepresented. Same with WordPress. Yes, there's a reputation that WordPress has a gigantic number of security holes. I don't know if that's true. I know it gets attacked a lot because it's so popular. It definitely does have security holes, but maybe a lot of other systems have security holes as well. Anyway, I just sort of question the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push softener engineers towards frameworks, towards complex, like super complicated softener engineering approaches that stretch out the time it takes to actually build the thing.

56:24100%. And it's the same thing with big corporations, 80 % of the people don't do anything. It's not efficient. And if you, if you're your benchmark is like people building stuff that actually gets done and like for society, right? Like if we want to save time, we should probably use the technologies. It's simple, it's pragmatic, it's like that works. That's not overly complicated, it doesn't make your life like a living hell, you know? And use the framework when it obviously solves a problem, a direct problem. Of course, yeah, of course. I'm not saying you should code without a framework. I'm usually used whatever you want, but Yeah, I think it's suspicious, you know, and And I think it's because when I talk about on the Twitter like there's a lot of this this army comes out, you know This is this framework armies.

57:11Yeah, it's man something my gut tells me I want to ask the framework army what to have they built this week. It's the Elon question. What did you do this week? Yeah, did you make money with us? You know, did you charge users? Is it a real business and Yeah Yeah. So going back to the cowboy. First of all, everyone looked 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 this is really well done. So like, take me through the journey of photo AI. Like, you don't know what most of the world doesn't know much about stable diffusion or any of this, any of the generative AI stuff.

57:49And so you're thinking, OK, how can I build cool stuff with this? Yeah. What was the origin story of photo AI? I think it started because StableEfusion came out. So StableEfusion is the first generative image model, AI model. And I started playing with it. You could install it on your Mac. Somebody forked it and made it work for Macbooks. So I downloaded it and cloned the repo, and started using it to generate images. And it was amazing. I found it on Twitter because you see things happen on Twitter and I would post what I was making on Twitter as well. and you could make any image, you could write a prompt.

58:26So it's actually write a prompt and then it generates a photo of that or image of that in any style. Like they would use like artist names to make like a picostle kind of style and stuff. And I was trying to see, like what is a good at? It's a good at people notes, really bad at people. But it was good at houses. So architecture for example, I would generate like architecture houses. So I made a website called this house does not exist .work. and it generated like, they called like house porn, and they want, like house porn is like a subreddit. So, and this was stable fusion like the first version.

59:00So it looks really, you can click for another photo. So it generates like all these kind of non -existing houses. It is house porn. But it looks kind of good, you know, like especially back then. It looks really good. And things look much better.

59:16It's really, really well done. Wow. And it also generates like a description. And you can up vote. Is it nice? Upvote it. Yeah, man. There's so much to talk to you about like the choices here. It's really well. This is very scrappy in the bottom. There's like a racking of the most upvoted houses. So these are the top photos and if you go to all time you see quite beautiful ones. Yeah, so this one is my favorite. The number one is like kind of like a How is this not more popular? It was really popular for like a while, but then people got so bored of it. I think because I was getting bored of it too, just continuous house porn, like everything starts looking the same.

59:57But then I thought was really good at interior. So I pivoted to interiorai .com, where I tried to upload first -genered interior designs, and then I tried to do, like there was a new technology called Image to Image, where you can input an image like a photo, and it would kind of modify the thing. So you see, it looks almost the same as photo, I was a same code essentially. Nice. So I would upload a photo of my interior where I lived, and I would ask like, chances into like, I know like, maximalist design, you know? And it worked, and it worked really well. So I was like, okay, this is a startup, because obviously interior design, AI, and nobody's doing that yet.

1:00:38So I launched this, and it was successful and made like, in a week, made 10K, 20K a month, and now still makes like 40K, 50K a month, and it's been like two years. So then I was like, how can I improve this interior design? I need to start learning fine tuning. A fine tuning is where you have this existing AI model and you find tuning it on the specific goal you wanted to do. So I would find really beautiful interior design, make a gallery and train a new model that was very good at interior design. And it worked and I used that as well. And then for fun, I uploaded photos of myself and here's what happened.

1:01:13And to train myself, And this would never work, obviously. And it worked. And actually, it started understanding me as a concept. So my face worked. And you could do different styles, like me, as a, like very cheesy medieval warrior, all this stuff. So it was like, this is another startup. So now I did avatar AI .me. I couldn't get to .com. And this was, this was, yeah, avatar AI .me. Well, now it's forwards to photo AI, because it pivoted. But this was more like cheesy thing. So this is very interesting because this went so viral it made like I think like 150K in a week or something So most of my ever made and And then big this is very interesting the big VC companies like lensa, which are much better at iOS and stuff than me I didn't have iOS app they quickly build the iOS app that does the same in their fun technology And it's all open technology so it's good.

1:02:06I think they made like 30 million dollars with it Yeah, they they became like the top -grossing app after that And it was how do you feel about that? I think it's amazing, honestly, and it's not like you didn't have like a feeling like a was a little bit like sad because all my products would work out and I never had like real fierce competition and I have like fierce competition from like a very skilled high talent like I was developer studio or something that and they already had an app they had an app store for like I think retouching your face or something so they were very smart they add these other stuff there.

1:02:40It's a feature they had the users they do a push notifications to everybody who have these avatars man, they made create I think they made they made so much money and I think they did a really great job and I also made a lot of money with it, but that was I Quickly really as it wasn't my thing because it was so cheesy. It was like kitch, you know, it's kind of like Me as a Barbie or me as a you know, it was too cheesy I wanted to go for like what's a real problem? We can solve because this is gonna be a hype It's gonna be and it was a hype these avatars It's like let's do real photography. How can you make people look really photorealistic?

1:03:15And that was difficult. And that's why it's off this world because they were all in a cheesy Picasso style. And art is easy because you interpret all the problems that AI has with your face are like artistic, if you call it Picasso. But if you make a real photo, all the problems with your face, you look wrong. So I started making photo AI, which was like a pivot of it, where it was like a photo studio where you could take photos without actually needing a photographer needing a studio you don't just you know you just type it and I've been working on it for like the last year. Yeah it's really incredible that journey is really incredible let's go to the beginning of photo AI though because I remember seeing a lot of really really hilarious photos I think you were using yourself as a case study right yeah yeah so what uh there's a tweet here sold $100 ,000 in AI -generated avatars.

1:04:10And it's a lot, like it's a lot for anybody, it's a lot for me. Like, I can 10k a day on this, you know? That's amazing. That's amazing. And then the nested tweet, like the launched tweets. And then the before there is like the me hacking on it. Oh, I see. So that, okay. So October 26, 2022. I train an ML model on my face. Because my eyes are quite far apart, I learned when I did YouTube, I would put like a photo of my DJ photo, you know, my make sure people would say, I'd look like a hammerhead shark. It was like a top comment. So then I realized my eyes are far apart. Yeah, the internet helps you.

1:04:53Yeah, absolutely. That's who you are. How are you looking? Boy, do I love doing that? First trip. Well, what is this? Wait, this is water from the waterfall. But the water falls in the back, you know, so what's going on? So this is how much of this is real it's all AI it's all AI That's pretty good though for the early days exactly so but this was a hit or miss so you had to do love curation Because 99 % of it was really bad. So these are the photos are uploaded. How many photos did you use only these? I will try more up to date picks later. These are the these are the only photos you uploaded.

1:05:29Yeah, wow Wow. Wow, okay, so like you were learning all this super quickly. What is something like interesting details you're remember from that time for like what you have to figure out to make it work? And for people just listening, he uploaded just 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 layout, but they're square photos, so they're 512 by 512. Because that's the illusion. but nevertheless, not great capture the face. It's not like a collection of several hundred photos that are like... Exactly, I would imagine that too, when I started, I was like, oh, there's must be like some treescan technology, right?

1:06:14Yeah. So I think the cool thing with AI, it trains the concept of you. So it's literally like learning, just like any AI model learns, it learns how you look. So I did this and then I was getting so much, I was getting DMs, like telegram messages, just like, how can I do the same thing? I want these photos. My girlfriend wants these photos. So I was like, okay, this is obviously a business. But I didn't have time to code it, make a whole app about it. So I made an HTML page, registered the domain name. And this was not even, it was a Stripe payment link, which means you have a legit link to Stripe to pay, but there's no code in the back.

1:06:50So all you know is you have customers that paid money. Then I added like some, a type form link. So typeform is a site where you can create your own input form like Google forms. So they would get an email with a link to the typeform or actually just a link after the checkout and they could upload their photos. So enter the email, upload the photos and I launched it and I was like here first sale this October 2022 and I think within the first 24 hours was like I'm not sure it was like a thousand customers or something but the problem was I didn't have code to automate this. So I had to do manually.

1:07:27So the first few hundred, I just literally took their photos, trained them, and then I would generate the photos with the problems and had this text follow the problems and I would do every manually. And this quickly became way too much. So, but that's another constraint, like I was forced to code something up that would do that. And that was essentially making it into a real website, right? So the first was the type form and they uploaded it through the type form and image. And then you were like, that image is downloaded. Did you write a script to export? I don't know the images myself. This is zip file.

1:07:57It's literally. Are you unzipped it? Yeah, unzipped one, but yes. And then I'm, no, I'm, because, you know, do things don't skill, Paul Graham says, right? So, and then I was trained, and then I would email them the photos, if you're from my personal email, so you use your, use your avatar, you know, and they liked it. They were like, wow, it's amazing. You emailed them with your personal email. So they didn't have email address on this domain. And this was like a hundred people. Yeah, and then you know who signed up like a man I cannot say but really famous people like really really like billionaires Famous tech billionaires did it and I was like wow this is crazy and I sent I was like so scared to mess them So I said thanks so much for using my sights, you know, he's like amazing app great work So it's like this is different in normal reaction, you know it's Bill Gates, isn't it?

1:08:44Council just like sure let's pick GDPR you know like privacy right you're being regulation right and let's share anything but I was very I was like wow and but this shows like so you make something and if it takes off very fast you're like it's validated you know you're like here's something that people really wants but then also thought this is hype this is gonna die down very fast and I did because it's too cheesy but you have to automate the whole thing how do you automate it so like what's the AI component like how hard is that to figure out. Okay, so that's actually in many ways the easiest thing because there is all these platforms already back then there was platforms for fine tune still diffusion.

1:09:24Like now I use replicates back then I use different platforms which was funny because that platform when this thing took off I would tweet because I tweet always like how much money these websites make and then so the the you called vendor right the the platform that did the GPUs they increased their price for training from $3 to $20. After they saw that I was making so much money. So immediately my profit is gone because I was selling them for $30. And I was in a slack with them like saying what is this like can you just put it back to $3 and say yeah maybe in the future we're looking at it right now I'm like what are you talking about like you just took all my money you know and they're smart.

1:09:59Well they're not that smart because like you also have a large platform and a lot of people respect you so you can literally come out and say that. I think it's like kind of dirty to cancel a company or something. I prefer just bringing my business elsewhere, but there was no elsewhere back then. Right. So I started talking to other AI model ML platform. So we're applicator on those platforms and I started DMing the CEO, say, can you please create like, it's called Dream Booth, this fine tuning of yourself. Can you add this to your side? Because I need this because I'm being price -guards. And he said, no, because it takes too long to run, takes half an hour to run and we don't have the GPUs for it.

1:10:36I said, please, please, please. And then after a week, we're doing it where launching this. And then this company became, it was like not very famous company, it became very famous with this stuff because suddenly everybody was like, oh, we can build similar apps like AlphaTor apps and every start of the day, then AlphaTor apps and everybody started using replicate for it. And I was from these early DMs with like the CEO like Ben Furish, very nice guy. And he was like, they never price guise me, they never treat me bad, they always be very nice. It's a very cool company. So you can run any ML model, any AI model, LLMs, you can run on here.

1:11:10And you can scale. Yes, they scale, yeah, yeah. And I mean, you can do now. You can click on the model and just run it already. It's like super easy. You log in with GitHub. That's great. And by running it on the website, then you can automate with the API. You can make a website that runs the model. Generate images, generate text, generate video, generate music, generate video. Video, like fine two models. They do anything, yeah. It's very cool coming. Nice. And you're like growing with them essentially. They grew because of you because it's like a big use case. Yeah, like the website even looks weird now It started as like a machine learning platform.

1:11:43That was like I didn't even understand what it did. It was just two Two ML, you know like you would understand because you're in the ML world. I wouldn't know it's new but friendly Yeah, exactly and I didn't know how to work and But I knew that they could probably do this and they did it they built the models and now I use them for everything and We trained like I think now like 36 ,000 models 36 ,000 people ready. But is there some tricks to fine tuning to like the collection of photos that are provided? Like how do you like? Yes, it's so many hacks. The hacks. It's like honored hacks to make it work.

1:12:16What is what's what is my secret? And I will not not the secrets, but the more like insights, maybe about the human face and the human body. Like what kind of stuff get messed up a lot? I think people, man, it's a lot of people don't know how they look. So, yeah, they generate photos of themselves and then they say, it doesn't look like me. But then you know you can check the training for us, it does look like you, but you don't know how you look. So there's a face this morphia of yourself that you have no idea how you look. Yeah, that's hilarious. I mean, I've got one of the least pleasant activities in my existence is having to listen to my voice and look at my face.

1:12:54So I get to like really really have to sort of come into terms with the reality of how I look and how I smile. And everybody But people often don't right really that 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 this super ugly, but then I like no that's how you look and you look nice You know, so how other people see you is nice So you need to ask other people to choose your photos. Yeah, yeah, you shouldn't choose them yourself. 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.

1:13:34And a lot of us, this is dark aspect of psychology. We focus on some small flaws. Yeah. This is what I hate plastic surgery, for example. People try to remove the flaws when the flaws are the thing that makes you interesting and attractive. I learned from the hammerhead shark eyes, this stuff about you that looks ugly to you. And it's probably that what makes you original makes you nice and people like it about you. Yeah. And it's not like, oh my God. And people notice it, people notice your hammerhead eyes, you know, but it's like that's me, that's my face So I love myself and that's confidence and confidence is attractive.

1:14:05Yes Confidence is attractive, but yes, understanding what makes you beautiful It's the breaking of symmetry makes you beautiful. It's the breaking of the The average face makes you beautiful all that yeah and Obviously different from men and women are different ages all this kind of stuff But be underneath it all the personality all of that when when the face Comes alive that also is the thing that makes you beautiful. Yeah, but anyway, you have to figure all that out with the eye Yeah, one thing that worked was like People would upload full body photos of themselves. So I would crop the face, right?

1:14:40Because then in the model knew better that we're training mostly the face here But then I started losing Resemblance of the body because some people are skinny some are muscular whatever so you want to have that too So now I mix full body photos in the training with face photos face crops and it's all automatic like And I know that other people they use, again, AI models to detect what are the best photos in this training set and then train on those. But it's all about training data and it's with everything in AI, like how good your training data is, is in many ways more important than how many steps you train for, like how many months or whatever with these GPUs, like the gold.

1:15:18Do you have any guidelines for people of how to get good data, how to give good data to find, you know? Like the photos should be diverse. So, for example, if I only publish photos with a brown shirt or green shirt, the multiple thing that I'm training the green shirts. So the things that are the same every photo are the concepts that are trained. What you want is your face to be the concept of the strength and everything else to be diverse, like different. So diverse lighting as well, diverse, yeah, outside inside. 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.

1:15:54We're all hacking trying to test anything anything you can think of and It's frustrating. It's one of the most frustrating and also fun and challenging things to do because with AI because It's a black box and like Carpati, I think says this like We didn't really know how this thing works But it does something but nobody really knows why right like we cannot look into the the model of an LLM, like what is actually in there? We just know it's like a 3D matrix of numbers, right? So it's very frustrating because some things you, there would be, you think they're obvious that they will improve things will make it worse.

1:16:32And there's so many parameters you can tweak. So you're testing everything to improve things. I mean, there's a whole field now of mechanistic interpretability that like studies that tries to figure out, tries to break thing apart and not shant how it works. But, you know, there's also the data outside and the actual consumer -facing product side of figuring out how you get it to generate anything that's beautiful or interesting or naturalistic, all that kind of stuff. And you're at the forefront of figuring that out about the human face. And humans really care about the human face. They're very vain.

1:17:06Like me, you know, I want to look good in your podcast, for example. Yeah, for sure. And then one of the things I actually would love to Like rigorously use photo AI because for the thumbnails I take portraits of people. I didn't I don't know shit about photography I basically used your approach for photography. I like Google. How do you take photographs? Yeah Camera lighting and also it's tough because Maybe you could speak to this also but like with photography be 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.

1:17:48You definitely don't want one light. You need like five lights. And you have to have like the lenses. And I talked to a guy, an expert of shaping being the sound in a room, okay? And because I was thinking, I'm gonna do a podcast studio, whatever I should probably like treat, do a sound treatment on the room. And like when he showed up and analyzed the room, he thought everything I was doing was horrible. And that's when I realized like, you know what, I don't need experts in my life. I think it's not a house. I think it could go, I mean, I said thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for your tips.

1:18:29I 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 all float 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 J query solution PHP studio like I have a little suitcase. I use like Just the the basic sort of consumer type of stuff one light It's great Yeah, and look at you.

1:19:12You'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 contents of the podcast. Like you get the interesting guests. Focus on stuff that matters. Yeah, and I think this is very common, they call it gear acquisition syndrome, like gas. Like people in any industry do this. They just buy all the stuff.

1:19:41There was a meme recently, like what's the name for the guide that buys all the stuff before I even started doing the hobby, right? Marketing, you know, marketing does that to people. they want to buy this stuff. But like man, you can make a, you can make a Hollywood movie on an iPhone, you know, if the content is good enough, it would probably be original because you would be using an iPhone for it, you know. So that said, I, so the reason I brought that up with photography, there is wisdom from people. And one of the things I realized, you probably We've also realized this, but how much power light has to convey emotion.

1:20:21You take one light and move it around, you're sitting in the dark and just move it around your face. The different positions are having a second light potentially. You can play with how a person feels just from a generic face. It's interesting. 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 I would definitely love AI help in creating great Portraits of people guess photos. Yeah, guess photos for example. I see 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.

1:21:11Sometimes it's the eyes, oftentimes it's the eyes, but there are certain features of the face, and sometimes it'd be really powerful. It's also kind of awkward for me to take photographs. So I'm not collecting enough photographs for myself to do it with just those photographs. If I can load that off onto AI and then start to play with like lighting all the time. you should do this and you should probably do it yourself. Like you can use photo here, but it's even more fun if you do it yourself. So you train the models, you can learn about like control nets, control nets is where, for example, your photos in your podcast are usually like from the angle, right?

1:21:46So you can create a control net face pose that's always like this. So every model, every photo you generate uses this control net pose, for example. I think it will be very fun for you to try out that something. Do you play with lighting at all? Do you play with lighting with pose with the? Man, actually this, like this week, or recently, there's a new model came out that can adjust the light of any photo, but also AI image with stable diffusion. I think it's called relight. And it's amazing. Like you can you can upload kind of like a light map. So for example, red, purple, blue, and it uses that light map to change the light on the photo you input.

1:22:24It's amazing. So this for sure, a lot of stuff you can do. What's your advice for people in general on how to learn all the state of the AI tools available? Like you mentioned, new models coming out all the time. Yeah, like how do you pay attention? How do you stay on top of everything? I think you need to join Twitter, X, you know, X is amazing now and the whole AI industry is on X. And they're all like anime avatars. So it's funny because my friends ask me this, like who should I follow to stay up to date? And I say go to X and follow all the AI anime models that this person is Following or follows and I sent them something you're all and they're all sort of laughing like what is this?

1:23:05But they're real like people hacking around the AI They get hired by big companies and they're on X and Most of them are anonymous. This is very funny. They're to use anime off -tars. I don't But those people hack around and they publish what they're discovering They took out papers for example So yeah, definitely X is great. I almost exclusively all the people I follow are AI people. Yeah, it's a good time now. Well, but also just brings happiness to my soul, because there's so much turmoil on Twitter. Yeah, like politics and stuff. There's battles going on. It's like a war zone and it's nice to just go into this happy place to where people are building stuff.

1:23:49Yeah, I like Twitter that for that most like building stuff. like seeing other because it inspires you to build and it's it's just fun to see other people share what they're discovering and then you're like okay I'm gonna make something to it's just super fun and so if you want to start going X and then I would go to replicate and start trying to play with models and when you have something that kind of you manually enter stuff you set the parameters something that works you can you can make a app out of it or a website. Can you speak a a little bit more to the process of becoming better and better and better.

1:24:21Photo, yeah. So I had this photo guy and a lot of people using it, there was like a million or more photos a month being generated. And I discovered I was testing parameters like increased the step count of generating 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 you can choose them and you generate an image and they have different resulting images. But I didn't know which one was were better. So I would do it myself, test it. But then I was like, why don't I test on these users? Because I have a million photos generated anyway.

1:24:52So on like 10 % of the users, I would randomly test parameters. And then I would see if they would, because you can favor the photo or you can download it, I would measure if they favor it or like the photo. And then I would AB test and you test for significance and stuff, which parameters were better and which were worse. So you started to figure out which models I actually work on. Exactly. And then if it's significant enough data, you switch to that for the whole, you know, all the users. And so that was, that was like the breakthrough to make it better. Just use the users to improve it themselves.

1:25:24And I tell them when they sign up, we do sampling, we do testing on your photos with random parameters. And that worked really well. I don't do a lot of testing anymore because it's like, I kind of reached like a diminishing point where it's like, it's kind of good. Um, but that's, there was a breakthrough. Yeah. So it's really about the parameters and models that choose and letting the users help. do the search in the space of models and parameters for you. But actually, so like stable diffusion, I use 1 .5, 2 .0 pick came out as stable diffusion Excel came out, all these new versions, and they're all worse.

1:25:56And so the core scene of people are still using 1 .5 because it's like, it's also not like what they call neutered, like they neutered, like to make it super like with safety features and stuff. So most of the people are still on stable diffusion 1 .5 and meanwhile, stable diffusion of the company went like the CEO left a lot of drama happens because they couldn't make money. So they gave us this open source model that everybody uses. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars. They didn't make any money with it. They did an amazing job and now everybody uses open source model for free. And it's amazing.

1:26:37like it's amazing. You're not even using the latest one. No. And the strange thing is that this comedy raised hundreds of millions, but the people that are benefiting it from it are really small. Like, people like me will make these small apps that are using the model. And now that it's turned to charge money for the new models, but the new models are not so good for people that are not so open -source, right? Yeah, it's interesting because open -source is so impactful in AI space, but you wonder like, what is the business model behind that? But it's enabling this whole ecosystem of companies that they're using.

1:27:07in the open source model. It's kind of like this framework, but then they didn't, you know, bribe enough, implement it to use it. And they didn't charge money for the platform, you know? Okay, so back to your book and the ideas, what did you get to the first step? Generating ideas. So you had no book and you filling it up. How do you know when an idea is a good one? Like what? You have this just flood of ideas. How do you pick the one that you actually try to build? Man, mostly you don't know. Like mostly I choose the ones that are most viable for me to build. Like I cannot build a space company now, right?

1:27:41It would be quite challenging. But I can build some - Did you actually write down like space company? No, I think asteroid mining would be very cool. Because like you go to an asteroid, you take some stuff from there, you bring it back, you sell it. You know, it's - But then you need to do - And you can hire someone to launch the thing. So all you need is like the robot that goes to the asteroid. You know, and the robotics is interesting. Like I want to also learn robotics. So maybe that could be - I think both the Astero and Mining and their robotics is together.

1:28:12You're like, no, exactly this is this is the we do this not because it's easy, but because we thought it would be easy. Exactly. That's me with this me with Astero and Mining. Exactly. That's why I should do this. It's not nomadlist .com. It's not. It's not a certain finding. You have to like build stuff. You have to, it 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 the rock as you oh you use something like space You're higher space X to send your your you know this dog robot or whatever So is there actually exists a notebook where you wrote down S for my no I used back then used trello trello Yeah, but now I don't really I used telegram.

1:28:53I rather than like save messages And I have like idea I read down to yourself until you know like because you use WhatsApp right I think so you have like like message to yourself. Thing also, yeah. So you talk to yourself on Telegram. Yeah, use like a notepad. Not forget stuff. And then I pin it, you know. I love how like you're not using super complicated systems or whatever, you know, people use up to you now. There's a lot of these, a notion, we have systems for notepad, you're not your notepad, you're notepad .dxc guy, if you have those users. Man, I saw some YouTubers doing this like, there's a lot of these productivity gurus also, when they do this whole iPad with a pencil.

1:29:31And then I also had an iPad and I also got the pencil and I got this app where you can draw on paper, like a calendar, you know? Like people's students use this and you can do coloring and stuff. And I'm like, dude, I did this for a week and I'm like, what am I doing in my life? Like I 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 Yes, emerges from your subconscious. It was actually boiling your brain for weeks, most sometimes years in the background.

1:30:03They ate hours of thinking can never compete with the perpetual subconscious background job. So this is the idea that if you think about an idea for eight hours versus like the first idea that pops into your mind. And sometimes there is subconscious, like stuff that you've been thinking about for many years. That's really interesting. I mean like emerges, I wrote it wrong because I don't know, I'm not native English, but it emerges from your subconscious, right? It comes from the like a water. There's just some conscience in here. It's boiling and then when it's ready, it's like thing. Second microwave comes out and there you have your idea.

1:30:35You 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. I write it. I 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 timing. Sometimes you have to send it back, not just because you're not ready, but the world is not ready. Yes, so many times, like, startups are too early with their idea. Yeah, 100%. Robotics is an interesting one for that because like, there's been a lot of robotics companies that failed because it's been very difficult to build a robot.

1:31:12It's company make money because there's the manufacturing, like the cost of everything. The intelligence of the robot is enough, is not sufficient to create a compelling enough product from which to make money. So all so there's this long line of robotics companies that have tried that big dreams and they failed Yeah, like Boston dynamics. I still know what they're doing But they always upload YouTube videos and it's amazing But I feel like a lot of these companies don't have a it's like a solution look for a problem for now, you know military obviously is uses but like I'm doing do I need like a rope robotic dog now for my house?

1:31:44I don't know like it's fun, but it doesn't really solve anything yet I I feel the same kind of VR, like it's really cool, like Appalachian Pro is very cool. It doesn't really solve something from me yet, and that's kind of the tech looking for a solution, right? But one day will, when the personal computer, when the Mac came along, there's a big switch that happened, that somehow captivated everybody's imagination. You could, like the application, the killer apps, became apparent, you can type in a computer. But they take, they came up here and like immediately. Back then they also had like this thing, We don't need these computers.

1:32:17They're like a hype and it also went like in kind of like you know ways. Yes. Yeah, but the hype is the thing that allowed the thing to proliferate sufficiently to where people's minds would start opening up to it a little bit. Yeah. The possibility of it. Right now, for example, with the robotics, there's very few robots in the homes of people. Exactly. Yeah. The robots that are there are rumbers sort of acting Yeah, or dishwasher. I mean, essentially a robot. Yes, but the intelligence is very limited I guess is one way we can summarize all of them except Alexa, which is pretty intelligent, but uh, is limited with the kind of ways it interacts with you.

1:33:00That's, you know, that's just one example. Yeah. And sometimes think about that is like if some people in this world were kind of born in the whole existence is like, They were meant to build the thing. You know? I think I sometimes wonder like what I was meant to do. Do you have these plans for your life? Do you have these dreams? I think I meant to build robots. Me first. Maybe. That's the sense of how. But it could be other things. How lazy enough to 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.

1:33:46I was 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 life like life brings you to it's very hard to Superintently kind of choose what you're gonna do with your life It's more like surfing. You're surfing the waves. You go in the ocean. You see where you end up, you know? Yeah, yeah, and there's universe has a kind of sense of humor. Yeah. I guess you have to just yeah, allow yourself to be carried away by the way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

1:34:22Have you felt that way in your life? Yeah, all the time. Like yeah. That's like I think that's the best way to live your life So a lot whatever to happen. Like do you know what you're doing the next few years? Is it possible that it'll be completely like changed? possibly I think relationships like you want to hold the relationships right you want to hold your girlfriend you want to become wife and all this stuff but you should I think you should stay open to where like for example where you want to live like I don't know we don't know where we want to live for example that's something that will figure itself out it will crystallize where you 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 think most stress comes from trying to control like hold things like it's kind of Buddhist you know you need to like lose control that it lose and 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 controlled freak actually and when I did mushrooms when I was 17 I was very good and at the end it wasn't so good because I tried to control it was like ah now it's going too much you know now I need to let stop bro you can't stop you need to go true with it, you know?

1:35:34And I think it's a good metaphor for life. I think that's you know, a very tranquil way to lead your life. Yeah, actually, when I took a ayahuasca, that lesson is deeply within me already, that you can't control anything. I think I probably learned that the most in jiu -jitsu, so just let go and relax. Yeah, and that's why I had just an incredible experience. There's like literally no negative aspect of my ayahuasca experience, or any I think you said that I was the one who ever had some of that could be with my biology, my genetics, whatever, but some of it was just not trying to control. Yeah, just surf the way for sure.

1:36:09I think most stressing life comes from trying to control. So once you have the idea, step two, build. How do you think about building the thing? What's the idea? I think you should build with the technology that you know. So for example, Nomad lists, which is like this website I made to figure out the best cities to live and work as digital nomads. 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 cities where we can live as a normal, with the internet speeds, the cost of living, you know, other stuff.

1:36:44And I tweeted it and I would, and I'd back then I didn't have a lot of followers, I'd like a few thousand followers or something. And it went like viral for my skill viral back then, which was like five retweets. And a lot of people started editing it and there was like hundreds of cities in this list, like from all of the world with all the data, it was very crowdsourced. And then I made that into a website. So figuring out like what technology can use that you already know. So if you cannot code, you can use a spreadsheet. If you cannot use a spreadsheet, like whatever you can always use, for example, a website generated like weeks or something with Squarespace, right?

1:37:18Like you don't need to code to build a startup. All you need is an idea for a product, build something like a landing page or something, put a striped button on there and then make it. And if you can't code, use the language that you already know and start coding with that and see how far you can get, you can always rewrite the code later. Like the tech stack is not actually, it's not the most important of a business when you're starting out a business. The important thing is that you're validate that there's a market, that there's a product that people want to pay for. So use whatever you can use.

1:37:48If you can't code, use spreadsheets, landing page generators, whatever. Yeah. In the crowdsourcing elements, fascinating. It's cool. It's cool when a lot of people start using it. You get to learn so fast. Yeah. I've actually did the spreadsheet thing. You share a spreadsheet publicly and I made it editable. Yeah. It's so cool things things start happening. Yeah, I did it for like a workout things I was doing a large amount of push -ups and pull ups and remember this man. Yeah, and like and and while I said Google Sheets is pretty limited in that everything's allowed so people could just write anything in any cell and they can create new Sheets new tabs and he just exploded and One of the things that I really enjoyed is there's very few trolls because actually other people would delete the trolls.

1:38:44There would be like this weird war of like, they want like to protect the thing. It's an immune system that's inherent to the thing that comes to society, you know, in a spreadsheet. And then there's the outcasts who go to the bottom of the spreadsheet and they would try to hide messages and they like, I don't want to be with the cool kids up at the top of the spreadsheet. So, no, at the bottom, I'm gonna, yes. It's fast, I mean, but that kind of crowdsourcing element is really powerful. And if you can create a product that used that as a to his benefit, that's really nice. Any kind of voting system, any kind of rating system for A and B testing is really, really, really fascinating.

1:39:21So anyway, so Nomad List is great. I would love for you to talk about that, but one sort of way to talk about it is through you building hood maps. Yeah, so 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 Jeff definitely check out the video in the in the blog post Can you explain what hood maps is and what this whole like this was so I was traveling and I was still trying to find like problems Right, and I would go I would I would discover it like everybody's experience overseas different because they say in different areas Yeah, so I'm from Amsterdam and when I grew up in Amsterdam or didn't grew up I lived there University I knew the center is like in Europe the centers are always tourist areas.

1:40:09So they're super busy They're not very authentic the cult. They're not really Dutch culture. It's Amsterdam tourist culture You know, so when people would travel to Amsterdam and say don't go to the center go to you know, Southeast Of the center the Jordan or the pipe or something more hipster areas like a little more authentic take culture ramps to them. That's where I would live, you know, and where I would go. And I thought this could be like an app where you can have like a Google Maps and you put colors over it. You have like areas that are like color colored like red as tourists, green as rich, you know, green money, yellow as hipster.

1:40:43You can figure out where you need to go in a city where 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 like, 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 because I didn't know something this is a cool this cool thing Beans should really check it out It's how it started because like you're honestly capture so beautifully the Humbling aspects of the embarrassing aspects of like not knowing what to do So like how do I how do I do this and you like document yourself?

1:41:15Yeah, you're right dude. I feel embarrassed about myself It's called being alive nice So you're like, you don't know anything about, so Canvas is a way HTML5 thing that allows you to draw. It's just draw pictures, just draw pixels essentially. Yeah, and that's, there was special back then because before you could only have like elements, right? So you want to draw a pixel, use a canvas. And I knew I needed to draw pixels because I needed to draw these colors. And I felt like, okay, I'll get like a Google Maps, iFrame and Bats. And then I'll put a div on top of it with the colors and I'll do like opacity 50, you know, so it kind of shows.

1:41:56So I did that with convos and then I started drawing and then I thought like obviously other people need to edit this because I cannot draw all these things myself. So I crowdsource it again and I you would draw on the map and then it would send the pixel data to the server, put it in the database and then I would have a robot running like a cron job which every week would calculate or every day would calculate like, okay, So, Amazon Center, there's like six people say it's tourists, this part of the center, but two people say it's like hipster. Okay, so the tourist part wins, right? It's just an array.

1:42:28So find the most common value in a little pixel area on the map. So that, so most people say it's tourists, it comes red. And I would do that for, you know, all the GPS corners in the world. Can you just clarify, do you have to be as a human that's contributing to this? Do you have to be in that location to make the label? No, people just type in cities and go like go berserk and start drawing everywhere. Would they draw shapes? Would they draw pics? Man, it drew like crazy stuff. Like offensive symbols I can't mention they would draw penises. I mean, that's obviously a guy. I would do the same thing, draw penises.

1:43:01That's the first thing when I show up to Mars and there's no cameras. I'm drawing penises on the same thing. Man, I did it in the snow, you know. But the penises did not become a problem because I knew that not everybody would draw a penis and not in the same place. So most people would use it fairly. So just if I had enough crowds for this data, so you have all these pixels on top of it. It's like a layer of pixels and you choose the most common pixel. So yeah, it's just like a poll but in visual formats and it works and we didn't week out enough data and and it was like cities that did really well like Los Angeles.

1:43:33A lot of people started using it like most data in Los Angeles because Los Angeles has defined neighborhoods. Yeah, not just in terms of the official labels, but like what they're known for. Yeah. What are the, Duke, did you provide the categories that they were allowed to use as labels? Colors, yeah. As colors. So it's just like, I think you can see there's like hipster, tourist, rich business. There's always a business area, right? And then there's a residential. Resistions 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.

1:44:09Yeah, I mean, obviously it's simplified. But you need to simplify this stuff. You know, you don't want to have too many categories. And it's essentially just like like using a, you know, paintbrush where you select the color in the bottle and you select the category, you start drawing. There's no instruction, there's no manual. And then I also add a tagging, so people could like write something on a specific location. So don't go here or like here is like like nice cafes and stuff. And man, the memes that came from that, and I also had an uproading so that the tags could be upvoted. So the memes that came from that is like amazing.

1:44:42Like people in Los Angeles would write crazy stuff. It would go viral in all these cities. And you can allow, allow your location. And it would probably send you to Austin. Okay, so we're looking. Oh boy. Drunk hipsters.

1:45:03Airbro and bros. Airbro and bros. Hipster girls who do cocaine. I saw a guy in a fish costume. You got beaten up here. Yep. That seems also accurate. For pricing on their welding.

1:45:17Let me see. Let me make sure this is accurate. Let's see.

1:45:2436th for people who know Austin know that that's important to label six treaters famous in Austin 36 drunk fat boys accurate drunk fat bros continued on six very well with six drunk douche bros for free to douche douche douche I mean it's very accurate so far they only let hot people live here That's I think that might be accurate It's like the district Because that's freaks on the river. Yeah, that's true dog runners accurate Saw a guy in the fish costume get beat up here. I want to know the story like So that's that's all user contributed. Yeah, and this like stuff I couldn't come up with because I don't know Austin I don't know the memes you're in the self cultures and then me as a user can upload or download this So this is completely craft force because I read it, you know up for down to get from there.

1:46:19And that's really, really, really powerful. Single people of dogs accurate. At which point did it go from colors to the actually showing the text? I figured out of the text like a week after. And so here's like the pixels. So that's really cool, the pixels. How do you go from there? That's a huge amount of data. So there's, we're not looking at an image where it's just a sea of pixels that call it different colors in a city. So how do you combine that to be a thing it actually makes it some sense. I think here the problem was that you have this data, but it's like it's not locked to one location.

1:46:54Yeah. So I had to normalize it. So when you click, when you draw on the map, it will show you the specific pixel location and then you can convert the pixel location to a GPS coordinate, right? Like a ladder is longer to it. 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 like, moving like decimals, which I discovered. So you're talking about this neighborhood, this or this street, right? So that's what I did. I just took the decimals off and then I saved it like this and then it starts going through like a grid and then you have like a grid of data.

1:47:28You get like a pixel map kind of. And you said it looks kind of ugly, so then you smooth it. Yeah, I started adding blurring and stuff. I think now it's not smooth again, because I like it better. People like the pixel look kind of. Yeah, a lot of people use it and it keeps going viral and every time my maps bill, like map box, I had to stop using first use Google Maps, it went viral and Google Maps, it was out of credits. So I had to so funny during when I launched it went viral. Google Maps, the map didn't load anymore, it says over the limit, you need to contact enterprise sales. And I'm like, but I need now like a map.

1:48:06So and I don't want to contact enterprise sales, I don't want to go in and call schedule with some counter. So I switched to Mapbox and then I had Mapbox for years and then it went viral and I had a bill of $20 ,000 was like last year. So they helped me with the bill. They said, you can pay less and then I now switched to like an open source kind of Map Platform. So it's very expensive products and never made any dollar money but it's very fun but it's very expensive. What do you learn from that? So like from that experience because when you leverage bridge somebody else's through the API. Yeah.

1:48:41I mean, I don't think a map hosting service should cause this much, you know? But I could host it myself, but that would be, I don't know how to do that, you know, but I could do that. Yeah, it's super complicated. I think the thing is more about like you can't make money with this product. I tried to do many things to make money with it and it's, it's, it hasn't worked. You talked about like possibly doing advertisements on it or some, 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.

1:49:15Like sometimes you see these ads, but I don't think there's a lot of money there. You could put like a banner ad but it's kind of ugly. And the product is kind of like it's kind of cool. So it's kind of fun to like subsidize it. It's kind of a little bit part of no mad list. Like I put it on no mad list in the cities as well. But I also realized like you don't need to monetize everything. like some products are just cool and you know it's like it's cool to have hood maps exist. I want this to exist right? Yeah there's a bunch of stuff you've created that I'm just glad exists in this world this true.

1:49:47And so, a whole other puzzle and I'm surprised to figure out how to make money out of it. I'm surprised maps don't make money but you're right. It's hard to make money because there's a lot of computer required to actually bring it to life. Also where do you put the app? 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, 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 90 % of the user base and you lose the crowdsource data.

1:50:22So it's not fun anymore. It stops being accurate. Right? So you kind of, they pay for it by crowdsourcing the data. Yeah, but then yeah, it's fine. You know, it doesn't make money, but it's cool. But that said No, Mad List makes money. Yeah. So it was a story behind no Mad List. So no, Mad List started because I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand Which is now like the second city here and I was you know working on my laptop I met like other nomads there and I was like okay. This seems like a cool thing to do like working in a laptop in a different country kind of travel around But back then, the internet everywhere was very slow.

1:51:00So the internet was fast. And for example, Holland or United States. But in a lot of parts in South America or Asia was very slow, like 0 .5 megabits. So you couldn't watch a YouTube video. Thailand weirdly had quite fast internet. But I wanted to find other cities where I could go to work on my laptop or whatever and travel. But we needed fast internet. And so I was like, let's, you know, crowdsource this information with spreadsheets. And I also needed to know the cost of living because I didn't have a lot of money. I had $500 a month. So I had to find a place where like the rent was like, you know, $200 from offers.

1:51:34I'm aware that, you know, some money that I could actually rent something. And, um, and there was no med lists and it still runs. So I think it's now almost 10 years. So it's just a describe how it works. I, yeah, I'm looking at my here. There's a total score. It's ranked number two. Yeah, that's like a Nova score 4 .82 like by members, but it's looking at the internet. In this case, it's fast. Yeah, fun, temperature, humidity, air quality, safety, food safety, crime, racism, or lack of crime, lack of racism, educational level, power grid, vulnerability, to climate change, income level. It's a little much, you know, English speed.

1:52:16It's awesome. It's awesome walkability. Keep getting stuff. Because for certain groups of people, certain things really matter. And this is really cool. Yeah. Happiness that love to ask about that. That life, free Wi -Fi, AC, female friendly, freedom of speech. And not so good in time, you know. Values derived from Nashville's the distance, my foot. Yeah. I like how bad one. I need to do it because the data sets are usually national. They're not on city level, right? So I don't know about the freedom of speech between Bangkok or Chennai. I know they're in Thailand. I mean, this is really fascinating.

1:52:48So this is for city. Yeah. It's basically rating all the different things that matter to you and internet. And this is all cross -sourced. Well, so it started cross -sourced, but then I realized that you can download more accurate data sets from like public source, like World Bank. They have a lot of public data sets, United Nations, and you can download a lot of data there, which you can freely use. Like I started getting problems across with data, where for example people from India, they really love India and they would submit the best scores for everything in India and not just like one person but like a lot of people, they would love to pump India.

1:53:26And I'm like, I love India too, you know, but that's not valid data. So you started getting discrepancies in the data between people where people were from and stuff. So I started speaking to datasets and that was mostly datasets. But one thing that still crowdsource is, so people people where they are, they're at their travels to their profile. And I use that data to see which place are upcoming and which places are popular now. So about half the ranking you see here is based on actual digital numbers who are there. You can click on a city, you can click on people, you can see the people, the users that are actually there.

1:53:58And it's like 30 ,000 or 40 ,000 members. So these people are in Austin now and 1800 remote workers in Austin now, which 8 plus members checked in, members who will be here soon and go. Yeah, so we have meetups. So people organize their own meetups and we have about, I think like, Firdi, Firdi per month. So it's like one meetup a day. And I don't do anything. They organize themselves. So I just, it's the whole black box. It just runs and I don't do a lot on it. It pulls data from everywhere and it just works. Cons of Austin is too expensive, very sweating, human, not difficult to make. Yeah, it's good to make friends interesting right?

1:54:35I didn't know that difficult to make friends and with the salt crowds, but mostly it's pros Yeah, awesome very fast internet. I don't understand why it says not safe for women Did check the data set is still safe The problem with a lot of plays like United States is that it depends per area right? Yeah, so if you get like city -level data or nation -level data. It's like Brazil is the worst because the the range in like safe and wealthy and not safe is like huge. So you can't say many things about Brazil. So once I actually show up to the city, how do you figure out what area, like where to get fast internet?

1:55:11For example, like for me, it's consistently a struggle to figure out my school. Hotels with fast wifi, for example. Like a place, okay, okay. I show up to a city, there's a lot of fascinating puzzles. And I haven't figured out a way to actually solve this puzzle. So when I show up to a city, figuring out where I can get fast internet connection, and for podcasting purposes, where I can find a place with a table that's quiet. That's not easy. Structure sounds? All kinds of sounds. You get to learn about all the sources of sounds in the world and also the quality of the room because the more... the empty of the room and like if it's just walls without any curtains or any of this kind of stuff, then there's or echoes in the room.

1:55:59Anyway, but you've figured out that a lot of hotels don't have tables. They don't have like normal. It's weird desk, right? Yeah, they have a lot of center table. Yeah. And if you want to get a nicer hotel, whether it's more spacious and so on, they usually have these like boutique, like fancy looking like modernist tables. They don't design these two design. They're not real tables. What if you get a key by a key? Yeah, before you arrive you order a key Yeah, like no, my dude is 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 The the the range and quality that you get is is huge hotels have a lot of problems, pros and cons.

1:56:48Like hotels have the problem that the pictures somehow never have good representative pictures of what's actually going to be in the rooms. And that's a problem. Fake photos, man. If I could have the kind of data you have, I know Mad List for hotels. Yeah, man. And I feel like you can make a lot of money on that too. Yeah, the book is a philly, right? I thought about this idea, because we have the same problem. Like I go to hotels and there's specific ones that are very good and I know now the chains and stuff. And but even if you go to some chains are very bad in a specific city and very good in other cities and each individual hotel has a lot of kinds of rooms Yeah, like you Someone more expensive some 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?

1:57:31What is the view of the room? I feel like as a hotel you can win a lot. So first you create a service that allows you to have high resolution data about a hotel. Then one hotel sign up for that. I would 100 % use that website to look for a hotel instead of the crappy alternatives that don't give any information. And I feel like there'll be this pressure for all the hotels that join that site. And you can make a shit ton of money because hotels make a lot of money. I think it's true, but the problem is with these hotels, it's same with airline industry. Why does every airline website suck? When you try book flights?

1:58:05It's very strange. like why doesn't it have to suck obviously just competition here? Why doesn't the best website win? What's the explanation of that? Man, I thought about this for years. So I think it's like, I have to book the flight anyway. Like I know there's a route that they take and I need like a need to buy book for example Qatar Airlines and I and I need to get through this process. So the the and with hotel similar, you need a hotel anyway. So do you have time to like figure out the best one? Not really. You kind of just need to get the place booked and you know, you need to get the flight and you'll go through the pain of this process.

1:58:37And that's why this process always sucks so much before tells an airline website and stuff because they don't have any incentive to improve it because generally only for like a super upper segment of the market, I think like a super high luxury it affects the actual booking, right? I don't know. I think that's a good interesting theory. I think that must be a different theory. My theory will be that great engineers like great software engineers are not allowed to make changes. basically like there's some kind of bureaucracy. There's way too many managers, there's a lot of bureaucracy and great engineers show up to try to work there and they get there not a lot to really make any contributions than they leave and so you have a lot of mediocre software engineers.

1:59:17They're not really interested in improving any other thing and like literally they would like to improve the stuff, but the bureaucracy of the place plus all the bosses all the higher people are not technical people probably yeah They don't know much about what web dev they don't know much about programming So they just don't give any respect Like you have to give the freedom and the respect to great engineers as they try to do great things That feels like an explanation like if you were a great programmer would you want to work at America Airlines or no No I'm torn on that because I actually As somebody who lost program would love to work at America Airlines So I can make the thing better.

2:00:02Yeah, but I would work that just to fix it for myself, you know? Yeah, for yourself. And then you just know how much suffering you're alleviated. Yeah, it's for the rest of society. Just all you imagine, all the thousands, maybe millions of people that go to that website and have to click like a million times. It often doesn't work. It's clunky, all that kind of stuff. You're making their life just so much better. Yeah, but there must be an explanation. That's to do with managers and bureaucracies. I don't, I think it's money. Do you know booking .com? Sure. So it's the biggest booking website in the world.

2:00:34It's Dutch actually. And they have teams, because my friend worked there, they have teams for a specific part of the website, like a 10 by 10 pixels area, where they run tests on this. So they run tests like, and they're famous for this stuff, like, oh, there's only one room left, right? Which is red letters, like, one room left, book now. You know, and they got to find from the European Union about this kind of interesting. So they have all these teams and they run the tests for 24 hours. They go to sleep, they wake up next day, they come to the office and they see you can just perform better.

2:01:02This website has become a monster, but it's the most revenue generating hotel booking website in the world is number one. So that shows that it's not about like user experience. It's about like I don't know about making more money and you know not every company but You know if they're optimizing it's a public company if they're optimizing for money But you can optimize for money by disrupting like making a way better. Yeah, but it's always startups They start with disrupting like booking all started to start up 1997 and then they become like the old Shit again like you know uber now starts to become like a taxi again, right?

2:01:35It was very good in the beginning now. It's kind of like Taxi's not 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 would one click? I think it's a genius idea. Yeah make buying easier like Make it as frictionless as possible just click about one thing you bought the thing Yeah, as opposed to most of the web was a lot of clicking and it often doesn't work like with the airlines Remember the force would delete you could like next submit and would for a force on it or your internet would go down Yeah, your modem.

2:02:21Yeah, man. And I would have an existential crisis like the frustration would take over my whole body And I would just wanted to quit life for a brief moment there. Yeah, yeah I'm so happy to form stays in Google Chrome now when someone goes wrong But that said so Google somebody at Google improved society with that, right? Yeah, and One of the challenges that Google is to have the freedom to do that. They don't anymore There's a bunch of bureaucracy. Yeah, I'd go so many brilliant and brilliant people there, but it just moves slowly. Yeah. I wonder why that is. Maybe that's the natural way of a company, but you have people like Elon who rolls in and just fires most of the folks and always operate.

2:03:00They push the company to operate as a startup. People in what's already big. Yeah, but I mean, Apple does this. Like I started in business school, Apple does competing product teams that operate as startups. So it's three to five people. They make something they have multiple teams who make the same thing. The best team wins. So you need to, I think you need to emulate like a free market inside a company to make it entrepreneurial, you know? Yeah. And you need entrepreneurial mentality in a company to come up with new ideas and do it better. So one of the things you do really, really well is learn and you think like you're trying to, you have an idea, you try to build it and then you learn everything you need to in order to build it.

2:03:37You have your current skills, but you need to learn just the minimal modest stuff. So you're a good person to ask like what? How do you learn? How do you learn quickly and effectively and just the stuff you need you did Just by way of example you did a 30 days learning session on 3d Yeah, well you documented yourself giving yourself only 30 days to learn everything you can't about yeah I tried to learn virtual reality because I was like this was like same as AI it came up suddenly like 2016 to 2017 With I think HC5 this big VR glasses before Appalvation Pro and And I was like, oh, this is going to be big.

2:04:11So I need to learn this. So I know nothing about 3D. I installed like, I think Unity and like, blend their stuff. And I started learning all this stuff. Because I thought this was like a new, you know, nascent technology that was going to be big. And if I had to skills for it, I could use this to build stuff. And so I think learning for me is like, I think learning is so fun because people always ask me like, how do you learn to code? Like, should I learn to code? And I'm like, I don't know, like, I'm, every day I'm learning, this is kind of cliche, but every day I'm learning new stuff. So every day I'm searching on Google or asking out chat GPT, how to do this thing?

2:04:46How 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 ends. Where do you want to be? Do you want to know a little bit to the one that a lot? Do you want to do it for your whole life or so? I think taking action is the best step to learn. So making things. like you know nothing just start making things okay so like how to make a website search how to make a website or now Does you ask GGPT how to make a website where to start it generates codes for you right copy the code put it in a file save it open 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 At AI features right like nowadays so it's like by taking action you can learn stuff much faster than reading books or Actually, I'm more curious.

2:05:32Let me ask for a complexity. How do I make a website? I'm just curious what it would say. I hope it goes with like really basic vanilla solutions. To find your website's purpose, choose a domain name, select the web hosting provider, choose a website or builder or CMS. Website build a platform with, it tells that weeks are square spaces, what I said. Yeah. And landing page. How do I say, if I want a programming, programming it, program it myself, design your website, create essential pages. Yeah. Even tell Cytlaunches, right? Like start writing your website. Cool. Why do you mean you could do that?

2:06:08Yeah, but this is literate. Like it's, this is, if you want to make a one, that's the basic Google analytics. But you can't make no mad list with this way. You can. You can. With Wix. Ah, no, you can, you can get pretty far, I think. You can get pretty far. These website builders are pretty advanced. Like all you need is a, a grid of images, right? Yeah. They're clickable. They're open like another page. Yeah. You can get quite far. How do I learn the program?

2:06:34Choose a programming language to start with. If free. Podcasts good. Work through resources systematically. Practice calling regularly for 30, 60 minutes a day. Consistency, ski, joint programming communities like Reddit. Yes, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. So I think 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 gonna be insane like people anywhere can can ask this question and start building stuff. Yeah, it clarifies it for sure and just start building like keep Yeah build build like actually apply the thing whether it's AI or Any of the programming for web development.

2:07:22Yeah, just have a project in mind I love the idea of like two stars in 12 months or like Build a project almost every day just build the thing Yeah, and get it to work and finish it every single day. That's a cool experiment I think that was inspiration. It was a girl who did 160 Websites and 160 days of some little mini websites and And she learned to code that way. So I think it's good to set yourself challenges, you know like don't you can go to some coding bootcamp but I don't think they actually work. I think it's better to do like for me out to deduct like self learning and setting yourself like challenges and getting in and but you need discipline you know you need to discipline to keep doing it and coding you know coding is very it's a steep learning curve to get in it's very annoying working with computers is very annoying so it can be hard for people to keep doing it you know.

2:08:20Yeah 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 Hoodmaps, or though like a working prototype, that there's just a constant frustration I guess is like, oh okay. How do I do this? And then you look it up and you know like okay, you have to interpret the different options you have. You're like, and then just try it and then and then there's a dopamine rush of like, oh, it works. cool. Man, it's amazing and it's on a live stream, dude. It's on YouTube and stuff. People can watch it and it's amazing when things work.

2:08:58It's just like a main that you, I look very not, I don't look far ahead. So I only look, okay, what's the next problem to solve and then the next problem. And at the end, you have a whole app or a website or a 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 You should only look like for the next thing, the next little challenge, the next step, and then see where you end up. And as soon as it's going to be easy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, be naive about it because you're going to have very difficult problems.

2:09:31A lot of the big problems won't be even tech, will be like public, right? Like maybe people don't like your website. You will get canceled for a website, for example. Like a lot of things can happen. What's it like building in public like you do? Like openly. We're just iterating quickly and you're getting people feedback. So there's the power of the crowdsourcing, but there's also the negative aspects of people being able to criticize. So man, I think haters are actually good because I think a lot of haters have good points and it takes like stepping away from the emotion of like your website sucks because blah, blah, blah.

2:10:04You're like, okay, just remove this, your website sucks because it's personal, you know, what did you say? Why did he not like it? And he figured out, okay, he didn't like it because the signup was difficult or something or it wasn't the data, they say, no, this data is not accurate or something, right? Okay, I need to improve the quality of the data. This hater has a point. Because it's dumb to completely ignore your haters, you know? And also, man, I think I've been there when I was like 10 years old or someone you're on the internet just shouting crazy stuff. That's like most of Twitter, you know, or the half Twitter.

2:10:32So you have to take it with grain of salt. Yeah, man, you need to grow a very thick skin on Twitter, on X. People say, but I'm mute a lot of people. Like I found out I muted already 15 ,000 people recently I checked So in 10 years I'm moved to 15 ,000 people so that's like like that's one by one manual. Yeah So 1500 people per year And I don't like to block because then they get angry they make a screenshot and they say ah you block me So I just mute and it disappear and it's amazing So you mentioned Reddit so hood maps That make it to the front page of Reddit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was amazing and my server almost went down and I was checking like Google Analytics was like 5 ,000 people on the website or somewhere crazy and it was at night and was amazing.

2:11:21I think nowadays honestly TikTok, YouTube Reels, Instant Reels, a lot of apps get very big from people making TikTok videos about it. So let's say you make your own app, you can make a video for yourself, like, oh I made this app, this is how it works blah blah. And this is why I made it, for example, and this is why you should use it. And if it's a good video, it will take off and you will get, man, I got like $20 ,000 extra per month or something from a TikTok, from one TikTok video. Like it made a photo eye by you or somebody else. By some random guy. So there's all these AI influencers that they write about, they show AI apps and then they ask money later like when a viral video goes viral, all I can do it again and send me $4 ,000 something.

2:12:04I'm like, okay, I did that, for example. But it works. Tiktok is a very big platform for user acquisition. Yeah. 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 that can make an app take off as well. Well, I mean, yeah, fundamentally create cool stuff. I have just a little bit of a following enough to like for the cool thing to be noticed and then it becomes viral if it's cool enough. Yeah, you don't need a lot of followers anymore because they're on X and a lot of platforms because TikTok X I think it's in reals also they have the same algorithm now.

2:12:42It's not about followers anymore It's about they test your content on a small subset like 300 people if they like it It will get tested to 1000 people and on and on so if the thing is good it will rise anyway It doesn't matter if you have half many followers or a thousand followers are honored What's your philosophy of monetizing how to make money from the thing you build? Yeah, so a lot of stars they do like free users so you could sign up and you use an app for free which is It never worked for me well because I I think free users generally don't convert and I think if you have VC funding It makes sense to get free users because you can spend your funding on ads and you can get like millions of people come in Prolictably how much they convert and give them like a free trial whatever and then they sign up But you need to have that flow worked out so well for you to make it work that you need like it's very difficult I think it's best to start and just start asking people for money in the beginning.

2:13:36So show your app, like what are you doing in a landing page, like make a demo or whatever video and if you want to use it, pay me money, pay $10, $20, $30. I would ask more than $10 per month, like Netflix, like $10 per month, but Netflix is a giant company that can, you know, they can afford to make it so cheap, relatively cheap. If you're an individual, like an indie hacker, like you are making your own app, you need to make at least $30 or more on a user to make it worthy for you. You need to make money. It builds a community of people that actually really care about the product. Also, making a community, making a Discord is very normal now.

2:14:12Every AI app has a Discord and you have the developers and the users together in a Discord and they talk about the ask for features they build together is very normal now. You need to imagine, if you're starting out getting a 1000 users is quite difficult, getting thousands of pages quite difficult and if you charge some like $30 you have 3DK a month and it's a lot of money that's enough to like live a good life. Yeah a little pretty good life. I mean that could be a lot of costs associated with hosting. Yeah so that's not a thing. I make sure my profit margins are very high so I try to keep the costs very low.

2:14:43I don't hire people. I try to negotiate with like AI vendors now like can you make it cheaper you know? Which is I discovered is you can just email companies and say, can you give me discount because it's too expensive. And they say, sure, 50%. I'm like, wow, very good. And I didn't know this. You can just ask, and especially in like, like, now it's kind of recession, you can ask companies like, I need a discount or I kind of need to like, you don't need to be asked what about it. Say, you know, I kind of need a discount or I need to go maybe to another company, maybe like, this is a discount like here and there.

2:15:17And they say, sure, a lot of them will say, yes, like 20 represent discount, 50 % discount. 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 on to 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 hack, but I think even without secret hack, they would person. It depends how much discount they will give you.

2:15:46You 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 But and also the when it's crowdsource I mean Paying does prevent spam or help prevent spam also. Yeah, it gives you high quality users and bodies free users are Sure, but they're horrible like it's just like millions of people especially for AI starbs You get a lot of abuse so you get millions of people from anywhere just abusing your app just just hacking it or whatever There's something on the internet you mentioned like 4chan discovered hood maps. Yeah, but I love fortune I don't love fortune, but you know what I mean like they're so crazy, especially back then Like that's it's kind of funny what they do, you know I actually What is it there's new documentary on Netflix anti -social network or something like that?

2:16:37That was really was fascinating just fortune just the You know the spirit of the thing fortune and it's so much about freedom and also like the human involved in fucking with the system and fucking with the man. That's it. It's just anti -system. But for fun, the dark aspect of it is you're having fun, you're doing anti -system stuff, but like the Nazis always show up. And somehow, you guys should start happening. It's drifting somehow. Yeah, it's cool shooting and stuff. So it's a very difficult topic, but I do know it's, especially early on, I think 2010, then I would go to fortune for fun. And they would post like crazy offensive stuff.

2:17:18And this was just to scare off people. So it showed to other people say, hey, do you know this internet website fortune? Just check it out. And if we do, what the fuck is that? I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. That's to scare you away. But actually when you go through a scroll, there's like deep conversations. Yes. And they would already be, this was like a normie filter like to stop. Yeah. So kind of cool. But yeah, it goes dark. It goes dark. And if you have those people show up, they'll, for the fun of it, do a bunch of racist things and all that kind of stuff. You're saying, but everything is, I think it was never, man, I'm not a fortune.

2:17:48I'm about like, it was always about provoking. It's just both of a catheterist, you know, but the, the provoking in the case of hood maps or something like this can, can, can damage the, uh, a good thing. Like, you know, a, a little poison in a town is always good. It's like the, the Tom weights thing, but you don't want too much. Otherwise it, it destroys the town. It destroys the thing. They're kind of like bentestors, you know, like penetration testers, hackers. Yeah. They just test your app for you and then you add some stuff like I add like I add like an NSFW wordless they would say like bad words so when they would write like a bad words They would get forward to YouTube which was like a video Was like a very relaxing video that like kind of a's a mar with like Glowing jelly streaming like this to relax them, you know or cheese melting on the toes.

2:18:35Not a nice shield them. Oh yeah, I like it But actually a lot of stuff, I didn't realize how much originated in fortune in terms of memes. I didn't, I didn't know the Rick Roll originated in fortune. There's so many memes, like most of the memes that you think they guess. The word roll, I think, comes in fortune. Like not the word roll, but like in this case, in the meme use, like, you would get like roll doubles because every, there was like post IDs in fortune. So they were, they were kind of like random. So if I get doubles like this happens to something, so you get like two, two. Anyway, it's like a betting market kind of on these doubles and these post IDs.

2:19:11This is so much funny stuff. Yeah, I mean, that's internet is purist, but yeah, again, the dark stuff kind of seeps in. Yeah. And it's nice to keep the dark stuff to like some low amount. It's nice to have a bit of noise of the darkness, but not too much. Yeah. And but again, like you have to pay attention to that with, I mean, I guess spam in general, you have to fight that with no mad list. How do you fight spam? Man, I use GPT -40. Oh, it's amazing. So I have like user input, I have reviews. People can review cities. And I don't need to actually sign up. It's anonymous reviews. And they write like whole books about like cities and what's good and bad.

2:19:50So I run it through GPT -4 now and I ask like, is this a good review? Like is it offensive? Is it racist or some stuff? And in that sense, we messed up telegram. When it rejects reviews and I check it, and it's so on point. It's so automated. Yes, and it's so accurate. It understands double meanings. I have GPT -4 running on the chat community. It's a chat community of 10 ,000 people and they're chatting and they start fighting with each other. And I used to have human moderates, it was very good, but they would start fighting the human moderator like this guy is biased or something. Now, I have GPT -4 and it's really, really, really, really good.

2:20:30It understands humor and understands like, like you could say something bad, but it's kind of like a joke and it's kind of not like offensive so much. So it shouldn't be deleted, right? It understands that, you know? I would love to have a GPT -4 based filter of like, of different kinds of, for like X. Yeah, I thought this week like I tweeted like a fact check. like you can click fact check and then GPT -4, look, GPT -4 is not always right about stuff, right? But it can give you a general fact check on a tweet. Like, usually what I do now, when I write something like difficult about economics or something like AI, I put in GPT -4, I say can you fact check it?

2:21:07Because I might have said something stupid and the stupid stuff always gets taken out by the replies. Like, oh, you said this wrong and then the whole tweet kind of doesn't make sense anymore. So I ask GPT -4 to fact check a lot of stuff. So fact check is a tough one. But it would be interesting to sort of rate the thing based on how well thought out it is and how well argued it is. That seems more doable. That seems like more doable. It seems like a GPT thing because that's less about the truth and it's more about the rigor of the thing. Exactly. And you can ask that. You can ask in the prompt like, I don't know.

2:21:42For example, do you think, create like a ranking score of X Twitter replies where I rank on like, I don't know, integrity, reality, like fundamental deepness or something, interestness. And it would give you that pretty good score probably. I mean, Elon can do this with crock, right? He can start doing using that to check replies. Because the replies actually is like chaos. Yeah. And actually the ranking that replies, not really. Doesn't make any sense. Doesn't make sense. No. And I would like to sort in different kinds of ways. Yeah. And you get too many replies now. If you have a lot of followers, I get too many replies.

2:22:17I don't see everything. and I love stuff, I just miss and I don't want to see the good stuff. And also the notifications or whatever, it's just complete chaos. It'd be nice to be able to filter that in interesting ways, sort in interesting ways. Because I feel like I miss a lot. And what surfaced for me, I just like a random comment by a person with no followers. That's positive or negative. It's like, okay. If it's a very good comment that should happen, but it should probably look a little bit more like to these people Followers because they're probably more engaged in a platform, right? Oh, no, if it's I don't even care about how many you follow If you're a ranking by the quality of the comment great.

2:22:56Yeah, but not just like randomly like chronological Just the sea of comments. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. Yeah Actually be very proof of that I think One thing you you espouse a lot which I love is the automation step So like once you have a thing, once you have an idea and you build it and it actually starts making money and it's mixing people happy, there's a community of people using it. You want to take the automation step of automating the things you 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 automating?

2:23:35Yeah, so the general theory of starters would be that when it starts like you start making your money start hiring people to do stuff, right? To stuff that you, like marketing, for example, stuff that you would do in the beginning yourself, and whatever community management, and organizing meetups for NOMO this, for example, there would be a job, for example. And I thought like, I don't have the money for that, and I don't really wanna 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 this can literally be like, for normal.

2:24:09This is it's literally like a it's not the different other stars with like a web page where you can organize your own meetup set a set a schedule a date whatever you can see how many known as will be there at that date so you know there will be actually an of known as to meet up right. And then when it's done it sends a tweet out on the known is the count as a meet up here. It sends a direct message everybody in the city. who are there, who are going to be there. And then people show up on a bar and there's a meetup and that's fully automated. And for me, it's not, it's so obvious to make this automatic.

2:24:39Why would you, why would you have somebody organize this? It makes more sense to automate it. And this with most of my things, like I figure out how to do it with code. And I think especially now with AI, 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 GPD, you put something in the GPD G4 and in API and it sends back like, this is good, this is bad. Yeah, so you basically can now even automate sort of subjective type of things. This is a difference now. Yeah. And that's very recent, right? But it's still difficult.

2:25:13I mean, that step of automation is difficult to figure out how to, is you're basically delegating everything to code. It's not trivial to take that step for a lot of people. So when you say automate, are you talking about like, cron jobs? Yes, man, a lot of cron jobs. A lot of cron jobs. It's like, I literally, I log into the server and I do like pseudo cron tab, dash e, and then I go into the editor and I write like hourly. And then I write PHP, you know, do this thing .pchp, and that's a script. And it's script does a thing and it does it then hourly. That's it. And that's how all my websites work.

2:25:53Do you have a thing where it like emails you or something like this or email somebody managing the thing if something goes wrong? I have these web pages that make they are called like health checks It's like health check .pchp and then it has like emojis like a It's like a green check mark of his goods and a red one if it's bad and then it does like database curious for example Like what's the internet speed on in for example? Amsterdam Okay, it's a number. It's like 27 point megabits. So it's accurate number. Okay check goods And then it goes to the next and it goes on all the data points. Did people sign up in the last 24 hours?

2:26:25It's important because maybe the sign up broke. Okay, check somebody sign up. Then I have optime roba .com, which is like for optime, but it can also check keywords. It checks for an emoji, which is like the red X, which is if something is bad. And so it opens that health check page every minute to check if something is bad. Then if it's bad, it sends it message to me in Telegram, saying, hey, what's up? What doesn't say, hey, what's up? It sends me like alert. Hey, this thing is down and then I check so within a minute of something breaking I know it and then I can open my laptop and fix it Yeah, 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 Last people's like a hundred point zero zero percent up time And these health checks are part of the uptime percentage.

2:27:13So it's like everything works Yeah, actually making me realize I should I should have a page for myself Like one page that has all the health checks Just so I can go to and see all the green check marks just feels good to look at it. It's just be like okay. Yeah, all right We're okay. Everything's okay. Yeah, and like you can see like one was the last time something wasn't okay and it'll say Like never or like meaning like you've you've you've checked since you've last cared to check It's all been okay for sure. It used to send me the good health checks like yeah, you know this all works It all works, but it's been so often And I'm like you feel so good, but then I'm like okay Obviously it's not gonna need to hide the good ones and show only the bad ones and not that's the case I need to integrate everything into one place that automate like everything.

2:28:02Yeah, they've also just a large Set of crime jobs a lot of the publication this podcast is is done all the everything's just on automatically. So I'll clip up all the all the all this kind of stuff. But it would be nice to automate even more. Like 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 is, doesn't have to be page user. If they run into an error, the JavaScript sends the JavaScript error to the server and then it sends to my telegram. From all my websites. So you get like a message.

2:28:40So you get like a uncalled variable error, whatever blah blah blah. And then I'm like, okay, interesting. And then I go check it out. And that's like a way to get to zero errors, because you get flooded with errors in the beginning. And now it's like nothing almost. So that's really cool. But that's really cool. But this is the same stuff. People, they pay like very big SaaS companies like New Relic for right? Like to manage the stuff. So you can do that too. you can use off the shelf, I like to build myself as easier. Yeah, it's nice. It's nice to do that kind of automation. I'm starting to think about like, what are the things in my life?

2:29:13I'm doing myself that could be automated in the LGBT for you know, like give your daily, your day and then ask what parts you to automate? Well, one of the things I would love to automate more is my consumption and social media, yeah, both the, the output and the input. Matt, that's very interesting. I think that some startups do that. That's like they summarize the cool shit happening on Twitter, you know, like with AI. I think the guy called SWX 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.

2:29:47But also like across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, all this kind of stuff. Just like, okay, can I, can you summarize the internet from it for today? Summarizeinad .com. Yeah, dot com. Because I feel like it pulls in which time, but also I don't like the effect it has some days on my psyche. Because like haters or just general content for general? No, no, just general. Like for example, TikTok is a good example of that for me. I sometimes just feel dumber after I use TikTok. I just feel like I don't use it anymore. Empty somehow. And I'm like, uninspired. Yeah. It's funny in the moment I'm like, how I look at that cat doing a funny thing.

2:30:29And then you're like, oh, look at that person dancing in a funny way to that music. And then you're like, time and then later, I feel way dumber and I don't really want to do much for the rest of the day. Like Girlfriend's Sats, she saw me like watching some dumb video. She's like, dude, your face looks so dumb as well. So your whole face starts going like, oh, interesting. You know, so, I mean, it was social media with X, Sometimes for me too is I think I'm probably naturally gravitating towards the drama. Yeah, Art Wheel. Yeah, and so following ad people, especially ad people that only post technical content has been really good because then I just look at them and then I go down rabbit holes of like learning new papers that have been published or good repos or just any kind of cool demonstration of stuff and the kind of things that they retweet.

2:31:20And that's the rabbit hole going I'm learning and I'm inspired all that kind of stuff It's been tough. It's been tough to control it. It's difficult. You need to like manage your your your platforms You know, I have a mute board list as well so I mute like politics stuff because I don't really want it on my feet and I think I've muted so much that now my feet is good, you know, I see like interesting stuff and But the fact that you need to modify it you need to like mod your app You're still shooting me to the platform just to function and not be toxic for you for your mental and all right That's like a problem like it should be doing that for you.

2:31:53It's some level of automation That'd be interesting. I wish I could Access X and Instagram through API easier. You need to spend $42 ,000 a month Which my friends do yeah, you can know but still even if you do that that you're not getting I mean there's limitations that don't make it easy to do like yeah automate because they think that they're trying to limit like abuse or for you to steal all the data from the app to then train an LLM or something like this. But if I just want to like figure out ways to automate my interaction with the X system or with Instagram, they don't make that easy. But I would love to sort of automate that and explore different ways to how to leverage LLM's to control the content I consume and And I mean, we publish that maybe they themselves can see how that could be used to improve their system.

2:32:42So yeah, there's not enough Access, you could screen cap your phone, right? Come here after watch is your screen with you. You couldn't yeah, but I don't really know like what it would do Like maybe it's gonna hide stuff before you see it, you know like I had that I have comic extensions I write a lot of comic extensions that hide parts of different pages and so on. Yeah, for example for my own On my main computer I hide all the use and lights and all that on YouTube content that I create so that I don't it doesn't yeah, so you don't pay attention to it I also hide parts that I have a mode for X -Ware hide most of everything so like there's no It's same with YouTube.

2:33:23I have this extension like why I wrote my own cuz it's easier because it keeps changing It's like it's not easy to keep it dynamically changing but they're really good at like getting you to be distracted and like starting related accounts, related stuff. I don't want to relate it. And like 10 minutes later you're like or something that's trending. I have a weird amount of friends addicted to YouTube and I'm not addicted. I think because my attention spans too short for YouTube. But I have this extension to like YouTube on hook, which is like it's highest all the related stuff. I can just see the video.

2:33:55And it's amazing. And but sometimes I need to like like I need I need to search a video how to do something. And then I go to YouTube, and I had these YouTube shorts. These YouTube shorts are like, they're like algorithmally designed to just make you tap them. And I tap, and then I'm like five minutes later with this face, like, and you're just talking. And it's like, what happened? I was gonna open, I was gonna play like the coffee mix, like the music mix for drinking coffee together, like in the morning, like jazz. I didn't wanna go to shorts. So it's very, it's very difficult. I love how we're actually highlighting all kinds of interesting problems that all could be solved to start up.

2:34:33Okay, so what about the exit? When and how to exit? Man, you shouldn't ask me because I never sold my company. And I've never, all the successful stuff you've done, you never sold it. Yeah, it's kind of sad, right? Like, I've been in, so I've been in a lot of acquisition, like, deals and stuff. And I learn a lot about finance people as well. There are like manipulation and do diligence and then changing the valuation. Like people change the valuation after. So a lot of people string you on to acquire you and then it takes like six months, it's a classic. It takes six to 12 months. They wanna see everything, they wanna see your stripe and your code and whatever.

2:35:11And then in the end they'll change the price a lower because you're already so invested. So it's like a negotiation tactic, right? I'm like no, I don't wanna sell, right? And the problem with my companies is like, they make 90 % profit margin. So the multiple companies get sold with multiples, kind of multiples of profit or revenue and often the multiples like three times, three times or four times or five times, revenue or profit. So in my case, they're all automated. So I might as well wait three years and I get the same money as when I sell and then I can still sell the same company, you know, mean, I can still sell for three five times.

2:35:48So financially, it doesn't really make sense to sell. Yeah, unless the price high enough like if the price gets to like six or seven or eight I don't want to wait six years for the money, you know But if you give me three like three years nothing like I can wait. So I mean, they're really valuable Stuff about the companies you create is not just the interface and In the crowdsource content, but the people themselves like the user base. Yeah, well, no one this it's a community Yeah, so I could see that being extremely valuable I'm surprised. No, this is like my babies, my first part of the Tukov and I don't really know if I want to sell it.

2:36:23It's like something you will be nice when you're old, you're just still working on this. It has like a mission which is like people should travel anywhere and they can work from anywhere and they can meet different cultures and that's a good way to make the world get better. If you go to China, live in China, you'll learn that they're nice people and a lot of stuff you hear about China is propaganda, a lot of stuff is true as well but it's more, you learn a lot from traveling and I think that's why it's like a cool product to like not sell. AI products, I have less emotional feeling with AI products like PhotoEye, which I could sell.

2:36:56Yeah. The thing you also mentioned is you have to price in the fact that you're going to miss the company. And the meaning it gives you, right? This is very famous like depression after start up on a seller company. Like they're like this was my, this was me, like who am I? And they They immediately start building another one. You know, they can never get stuff. So I think it's good to keep working until you die. Just keep working on cool stuff. And you shoot into retirement. I think retirement's bad, probably. So you usually build this stuff solo and mostly work solo. What's the thinking behind that?

2:37:33I think I'm not so good working with other people. Not like I'm crazy, but like I don't trust other people. To clarify, you don't trust other people. You're a great job. Yeah. And I don't want to have like this consensus meeting where we all like You know, you have like a meeting with three people and then you kind of get this compromise results Which is very European like it's very it's all on the called pool to model where you put people in the room And you only let them out when they agree on the compromise right in politics and I don't think it I think it it breeds like Averageness, you know you get average at the average company average culture You need to have like a leader or you need to be solo and just do it, you know, do yourself, I think.

2:38:14And I trust some people. Like now I like with my best friend, Andre, I'm making a new AI startup. But it's because we know each other very long and he's one of the few people I would build something with and almost never. So what does it take to be successful when you have more than one? Like how do you build together with Andre? How do you build together with other people? So he codes. I shit post on Twitter. Literally, like I promote it on Twitter. I said we set like product strategy like I said this should be better this should be better But I think you need to have one person coding it. He codes in Ruby souls.

2:38:46I cannot do Ruby. I'm in PHP See a little so you have you ever coded with another person for prolonged periods of time never my life

2:38:58What do you think is behind that? I know it was always just me sitting on my laptop like I said like this coding No, like you've never had another developer who like rolls in and like I've had a once wherever photo I like does it. I developed a philip. I hired him to do the cuz I can't write Python Yeah, and I still have a spy phone and I needed to get models to work on replicating stuff And I need to improve photo. I and he helped me a lot for like 10 months. He worked and Man, I was trying to buy fun 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 it's, you know, do all nighters to figure this stuff out with Python?

2:39:36I 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. Well, like you never had a developer roll in. Look at your PHP, JQuery code and be, and yes, like, you know, like in conversation or in a private talk about yes and, like basically, all right, I had for one week, understand. And then end it because he wanted to rewrite everything in the, no, That's the wrong guy. I know you want to rewrite what you want to rewrite the J he said is jk You can't do this. I'm like, okay, he's like we need to rewrite a thing in view few jazz I'm like are you sure?

2:40:10I'm just like kind of you know like keep jk. He's like no man like and uh We need to change a lot of stuff and I'm like, okay, and I was kind of like feeling it like this, you know We're gonna clean up shit, but then after weeks. It's not gonna. He's gonna take way too much time I think I like working with people where like when I approach them I I pretended my head that they're the smartest person who has ever existed. So I look at their code or I look at the stuff they've created and try to see the genius of their way. Like you really have to understand people, like really notice them. Like and then from that place have a conversation about what is the better approach.

2:40:49Yeah, but those are the top tier developers. Yeah, and they, those are the ones that are tech ambiguous so they can work with, they can learn any tech stack like, and that's like really few, like it's like, top five percent. Because if you try Harry Devs, like no offense to Devs, but most Devs are not, but 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 their job. Especially with Dev and with coding, I think. So sorry. I think that's a really important skill for developer to roll in and like understand the musicality, the style of the, and like, Empathy's like, yeah, yeah, it's code empathy.

2:41:26Yeah, it's the reward, But that's it. You need to understand like Go over the code get a holistic view of it and Man, you can suggest we'd be changed stuff for sure, but And look, Jake, you're crazy. It's crazy. I'm using Jake. You can change that. It's not crazy at all Jake query is also the beautiful and powerful and PHP is beautiful and powerful especially as you said recently in the in as the versions Evolved it's much more serious programming language now. It's super fast like PHP is really fast now. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. Javascript. My stress and Ruby that really fast now. So if speed is something you care about, it's super fast.

2:42:04And like there's gigantic communities of people using those programs in 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 like, I don't assume you know nothing, I assume Peter is a genius. Like the smartest developer ever. And like learn, learn from it and yes and, like notice parts in the code where like, okay, okay, I got it. Like, here's how he's thinking. And now if I want to add another, like a little feature, definitely need to have emoji.

2:42:46Yeah, right in front of it. And then like just follow the same style and add it. And my goal is to make you happy, to make you smile, like to make you like, haha, fuck, I get it. And now you're going to start respecting me and like trusting me and like, you start working together in this way. I don't know. I don't know how hard it is to find developers. No, I think that exists. I think you need to, I need to hire more people, need to try more people. But that costs a lot of my energy in time. Yeah. 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, It's normally looks kind of clunky, like people say the design is kind of clunky.

2:43:23Okay, I'll improve the design. It's like next time I do this, for example, you know, like I can, I'll get there eventually. But it's true. I mean, you're also extremely good at what you do. Like I'm just looking at the interfaces of like photo AI, like you would jake, like 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 no mad list, extremely nice, the interface.

2:43:59Thank you, ma 'am. And that's all you. Yeah, that's everything's me. So all of this and every little feature, all of this. People say it looks kind of ADHD or ADD, you know, like it's so much, because it has so many things and design your days is minimalist, right? Right, right, right, I hear you. But this is a lot of information and it's useful information and it's delivered in a clean way While still stylish and fun to look at so like minimal design is about like when you want to convey no information What's so ever and look cool? Yeah, I don't know. It's very cool. It's pretentious right pretentious or not The function is meant like is useless This is about a lot of information delivered to you in a clean and when it's clean You can't be too sexy so it's sexy enough.

2:44:42Yeah This is everything how my brain looks you know like this love shit going on like drawing bass music. It's like very Yeah, but this is stupid the spacing of everything is nice the fonts are really nice Like very readable very small I made it so I don't trust my own judgment. No, this is really nice. Thank you The emojis are somehow like this a style. It's a thing. I need to pick the emoji takes a while to pick them Like there's something about their moji is a really nice memorable like Placeholder for the idea. Yeah, like if it was just text it would actually be overwhelming if you were just text the emoji really helps It's a brilliant addition Like some people might look at it.

2:45:25Why do you have emojis everywhere? It's actually really for me It's really to remove the emoji. Yeah, what people don't know what they're talking about and then the quiz I'm sure people tell you a lot of things this is really nice and using color is nice small font but not too small and obviously you have to show a mouse which is really tricky. Yeah. Yeah, this is, no, this is really, really, really nice. And all of, I mean like, okay, like how this looks when you hover over it. Like, I understand that but like, I'm sure there's, like how long does that take you to figure out how you wanted to look?

2:46:01Do you ever go down a rabbit hole where you spent like two weeks? No, it's all iterative. It's like 10 years of you know at a CSS tradition here or do days or what was say like see these are all these around it now yeah if you wanted to like around is probably the better way but if you wanted to be rectangular like sharp corners what would you do usually so I go to the index at CSS yeah and I do command F and I search border radius 12px yeah and then I replace with border radius zero and then I do command enter and it gets the ploy it's it's pushes to the get hop and then since the webbook and deploy to my server and it's live in five seconds.

2:46:39Are you often deployed to production? You don't have like a testing ground? No, so I, so I'm like famous for this because I'm too lazy to set up like a staging server on my laptop every time. So nowadays I just deploy to production. Yeah. And it's, man, I'm gonna be canceled for this, you know, but it works very well for me because I have a lot of, I have like PHP, Lint and Jaislin. So it tells me in this error. So I don't deploy. But my, let's you, I have like 37 ,000 Git commits in the last 12 months or something. So I make like small fix and then command enter and sends to GitHub, get up, sends a web to my server, web server pulls it, deploys the production and is there.

2:47:19What's the latency of that from you, pressing command? One second can be one, two seconds. So you should make a change and then you get really good at like not making mistakes. Man, you're 100 % you're right. Like people are like, how can you do this? where you get good at not taking the server down, you know? 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 will report a bug on Twitter. And I kind of do like a stopwatch, like how fast can I fix this bug? And then two minutes later, for example, it's fixed.

2:47:49Yeah. And it's fun because it's, because it's annoying for me to work with companies where you report a bug and it takes like six months. Yeah. It's like horrible. And it makes people really happy when you can really quickly solve the problems. But it's crazy. I don't think it's crazy. I mean, I'm sure there's a middle ground, but I think that whole thing where there's a phase of testing and there's the staging and there's the development. And then there's multiple tables and databases that you use for the state. It's filing. It's a mess. And there's different teams involved. It's not good. I'm like a good, funny, extreme on the other side, you know?

2:48:26But just a little bit safer, but not too much will be great. Yeah. I'm sure that's actually like how X now, how they doing rapid improvement. Exactly. They do because it's more bugs. Yeah. I'm playing about like, oh look, he bought this Twitter. Now it's full of bugs. Dude, these shipping stuff, like things are happening now and it's a dynamic app now. Yeah, the bugs is actually a sign of a good thing. Yes. 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.

2:49:00So I've gotten a chance to interact with many other teams, but one of the teams is MLA multi -language audio. I don't know if you know this, but in YouTube you can have audio tracks in different languages for over doubling. And there's a team, and not many people are using it, but like every single feature, They have to meet and agree and like there's allocate resources like engineers have to work on it But I'm sure it's a pain the ass for the engineers to get approval to like do because 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 gonna take forever to do anything multi -language audio But multi -language audio is a good example of a thing that seems niche right now but it quite possibly could change the entire world.

2:49:50When you have, when I upload this conversation right here, if instantaneously it dubs it into 40 languages and everybody consumes, every single video can be watched and listened to in those different, it changes everything. And YouTube is extremely well positioned to be the leader in this. They got the compute, they got the user base, they got like they have the experience of how to do this. So like the multi -language audio should be Hyper -eater feature. Yeah, that's high priority. Yeah, yeah. And it's a way, you know, Google's obsessed with AI right now. They want to show off that they could be dominant in AI.

2:50:29That's a way for Google to say like we use the AI. Like this is a way to break down the walls of the language craze. The preferred outcome for them is probably their career and not the overall result of the the cool product, you know? I think they're not like selfish or whatever. They want to do good. There's something about the machination, the organizational stuff that she's talking about. I have to say when I do report box and like become a user work with, I get, I talk to a lot of different people on DM and they're all really trying hard to do something. They're all really nice. And I'm the one being kind of asshole because I'm like, guys, I'm talking to 20 people about this for six months, normally it's happening to say, man, I know, but I'm trying my best.

2:51:06And yeah, so it's systemic. Yeah, well it requires again, I don't know if there must be a nice award, but like a digital tutorial type of top down the CEO rolls in And just says like for you to it's like MLA. Yeah, get this done now. This is the highest priority I think big big companies especially in America a lot of it is legal, right? They need to pass every legal. Yeah, and you can't like man the things I do It could never do it in a big corporation because it's everything has to be probably get deployed has to go to legal well Again, take tutorial. You basically say Steve Jobs did this quite a lot.

2:51:40I've seen a lot of leaders do this Ignore the lawyers ignore comments. Yeah ignore PR ignore everybody give power to the engineers like listen to the people on the ground Get this shit done and get it done by Friday. Yeah That's it and the law can change like for some let's say you you launched this AI dubbing and it's there's some legal promise with lawsuits Okay, so the law changes there will be appeals there will be some supreme court thing whatever and the law changes So just by shipping it you change society you change the legal framework and by not shipping being scared of the legal framework all the time like you're not changing things Just out of curiosity.

2:52:14What uh what ID do you use? Let's talk about like your whole setup Given how ultra productive you are Are they you often programming your underwear slouching in the couch? Is there does it matter to you? In general is there like a specific ID use use VS code? Yeah, VS code before you sublime text I don't think it matters a lot. I think I'm very skeptical of tools when people think they say it matters, right? I don't think it matters. I think whatever tool you know very well, you can go very fast in. Like the shortcuts, for example, I love sublime text because I could use multi cursor. You serve something and I could make mass replaces in a file with the cursor thing and if you guys go, it doesn't really have that as well.

2:53:01It's actually interesting. So a lot of 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 is just probably hard to set up. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not so good. I think or at least I tried. But I would use that to like process data. Like data sets, for example, World Bank. I would just multi cursor mass change everything. But yeah, VS codes. Man, I was bullied into using VS code because Twitter would always see my screenshots of sublime text and say why you still use sublime text like Boomer, you need to use VS codes.

2:53:41And I'm like, wait, I'll try it. I got a new MacBook and then I never install like, I never copied the old MacBook. I just make it fresh, you know, like a clean, like format C, you know, Windows, like clean start. And I'm like, okay, I'll try VS code and it's stuck, you know, but I don't really care. Like it's not so important for me. Well, you know the format C reference, huh? Dude, it was so good. You would install windows and then after three or six months It would start breaking and everything was like get slow They would restart go to dolls format C You would delete your hard drive and then install the windows 95 again Was so good times and you would design everything like now I'm gonna install it properly now I'm gonna design my desktop properly, you know like yeah, I don't know if it's peer pressure But like I use the max for many many years and I know you know I love Lisp, so a lot of the customization is done in Lisp, it's a programming language.

2:54:31Partially it was peer pressure, but part of it was realizing like, you need to keep learning stuff. Like, since issue with JQuery, like I still think I need to learn Node .js, for example. Even though that's not my main thing or even close to the main thing, but I feel like you need to keep learning this stuff. And even if you don't choose to use it long term, you need to give it a chance. So you're understanding of the world expands. 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.

2:55:09And that could be a challenging thing. So go to VS Code and like really learning it, like all the shortcuts, all the extensions and actually installing different stuff and playing with it. That was an interesting challenge. It was uncomfortable at first. Yeah, for me too. Yeah, but you just dive in. It's like neuroflex. Like you keep your brain fresh, you know, like this kind of stuff. I gotta do that more. Like have you given a reactive chance? No, but I want to learn it. I want to I understand the basics, right? I don't really know where it starts, but would you like, I guess you got to use your own model, which is like build the thing using it.

2:55:43No, man, so I kind of did that. Like I kind of did the the stuff I do in jacory is essentially, a lot of it is like, I start rebuilding whatever tech is already out there, not based on that, but just an accident. I keep going long enough that I start getting the same problems every day else has, and you start building the same frameworks kind of. So I essentially use my own kind of framework. You basically build the framework from scratch that's your own understanding. Kind of, yeah, with Ajax calls, but essentially it's the same thing. Look, I don't have the time. I think saying you don't have the time is always a lie, because she just don't prioritize I've got a lot of ties to this enough.

2:56:17My priority is still like running the businesses and improving that and AI. I think learning AI is much more valuable than learning from that framework. Yeah. 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 called them the military industrial complex. So if I, but you need to know, you need to know it anyway. So you gotta learn how to use the weapons of war and then you could be a piece of it. Yeah. Yeah.

2:56:50I mean But you gotta learn in in the same exact way as we were talking about which is learning by trying to build something with it And actually deploy it the frameworks are so complicated and it changes so fast So it's like where do I start, you know, and I guess it's the same thing when you're starting out making websites like how where do you start? Yeah, as you before I guess but But 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. Maybe some combination of like few next with PHP, Laravel. Laravel is like a frame of PHP. I think that would be, it could benefit me, you know?

2:57:28Maybe Tailwind for CSS, like a styling engine. That stuff could probably save me time. Yeah, but you won't know until you really give it a try and it feels like you have to build, like if maybe I'm talking to myself, but I should probably recode like my personal one page in a larval or, 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 building Node .js. Some of it is, I don't, figuring out how to even deploy the thing. That's what it was like. All I know is right now I would send it to GitHub and it sends it to my server.

2:58:06I don't know how to get JavaScript running. I have no clue. Yeah. So I guess I need like a boss like a like first all right or You know, I had a little kind of those kind of platform actually kind of just might give myself the idea of like I kind of just want to build a single web page Like one web page that has like one dynamic element and Just do it in every single like in a lot of frameworks like just on the same page Same all the same page kind of page. That's a cool product. Like all these frameworks. Yeah, you can see the differences. Yeah. That's interesting. It only takes to do it. Yeah, stopwatch.

2:58:44I have to figure out actually something sufficiently complicated. Because it should probably do, it should probably do some kind of thing where it accesses the database and dynamically changing stuff. Some AI stuff, some add -on -m stuff. Yeah, maybe some, it doesn't have to be AI alone, maybe API call to some two and to replicate for example, then you have yeah, that would be a very cool part. Yeah, and like time it and also report on my happiness. Yeah, I'm gonna totally do this because nobody benchmarks this nobody's best work happy to develop our happiness with frameworks. Yeah, nobody's best mark the shipping time.

2:59:21It just take like a month and do this. How many frameworks are there? There's like five main ways of doing it. So there's like, there's this 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 back end. Also, I don't know. And then but there's not really, you're not really forced to do anything. So like, according to the internet. So like there's no, it's actually not trivial to find a canonical way of doing things. So like the standard vanilla, like, you go to the ice cream shop, there's like a million flavors.

2:59:57I want vanilla. If I've never had ice cream in my life, can we just like learn about ice cream? Yeah. I want vanilla. Nobody actually sometimes own little name vanilla, but like, I want to know what's the basic way, but not like dumb, but like the standard canonical. Yeah, I want to know the dominant way. like the dominant six percent of developers do it like this. Yeah, it's hard to figure that out, you know, that's the problem. Yeah, maybe all the lumps can help. Maybe you explicitly ask what is the dominant? They usually know like the dominant. You know, they they they give answers that are like the most probable kind of yeah, so that makes sense to ask them and I think honestly, maybe it would help is if you want to learn or I wouldn't want to learn like a framework hire somebody that already does it and just sit with them and make something together.

3:00:47I've never done that, but I thought about it. There would be a very fast way to take their knowledge. I am a brain of trying these kinds of things. What happens is, depends what kind of, if they're like a world -class developer, yes. Oftentimes, they themselves are used to that thing and they have not themselves explored in other options. So they have this dogmatic, like talking down to you. like this is the right way to do it. It's like, no, no, no, we're just like exploring together. Okay, show me the cool thing you've tried, which is like, it has to have open mind and nest to like, you know, no JS is not the right way to do web development.

3:01:27It's like one way and there's nothing wrong with 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 Yeah, like he does this YouTube videos. It's amazing. He can teach it to like a five -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 a lamb together Like how the shit would be amazing. Yeah, I mean will Karpati Has its own style and so like I'm not sure he's for everybody But for example, five year old, it depends on five year old.

3:02:09Yeah. He's like super technical. But he's amazing because he's super technical. And he's the only one who can explain stuff in a simple way, which shows his complete genius. Yes. Because if you can explain it without jargon, you're like, wow. And build it from scratch. Yeah. It's like top tier, you know, like what a guy. But he might be anti -framework because he built from scratch. Exactly. Yeah, actually, it probably is. Yeah. He's like you, but for AI. Yeah, so maybe learning framework is a very bad idea for us, you know, maybe we should stay in VHV and Like script kitty and the way you have to maybe by learning the framework you learn What you want to yourself build from scratch.

3:02:48Yeah, 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 Mack guy What was a Mack guy? Yeah, yeah, I switched to Mack in 2014 because it was because when I wanted to start traveling and my brother I was like, dude, get a MacBook is like the standard now. I'm like, wow, I need to switch from Windows. And I had like three screens, you know, like Windows had this whole setup for music production. I had to sell everything and then I had a MacBook and I remember opening up this MacBook box like, and it was so beautiful of us like this aluminum.

3:03:20And then I opened it, I removed it, you know, the screen protector thing. It's so beautiful and I didn't touch it for three days. I was just like looking at it. Really, and I was still in the Windows computer and then I went around with that. So I and all my great things started when I speak to mech which sounds very dogmatic, right? But what great things are you talking about all the business started working out like I started traveling I started building startups that are making money it all started when it speaks to mech wasn't I I kind of You're making me want to switch to mech So I use either use Linux inside Windows with WSL or just Ubuntu Linux, but Windows for most stuff like editing or any like and you know, like the old stuff, right?

3:04:02Yeah, well, you could use, I guess you could do my stuff there. I wonder if I should switch. What would you miss about Windows? What was the pros and cons? I think the Finder is horrible, Mac. Like it's like, it's the what is horror? The Finder, you don't know the, so there's the Windows Explorer. Yeah. This is for us amazing. Finder is strange, man. There's like strange things. This is bug where if you send like a TESHA photo on WhatsApp or Telegram, it just selects the whole folder and you almost accidentally can click Enter and you send all your photos or your files to this chat group, happy to my girlfriend.

3:04:33Just sending me photo, photo, photo, photo, photo. So it's, finder is very unusual. But it has Linux, like the whole thing is like it's Unix base, right? So you use the command not all the time, like all the time. And the cool thing is you can run, I think it's like Unix, like Debbie, or whatever. You can run most Linux stuff on macOS, which makes it very good for development. Like I have my engine X server, If I'm not lazy and set up my staging on my laptop, it's just the engine X server, the same as I have on my cloud server, right? The same where the web says run. And I can use almost everything, the same config files, configuration files.

3:05:09And it just works. And that makes Mac a very good platform for Linux stuff, I think. Yeah, yeah. Real Ubuntu is like better of course, but. Yeah. I'm in this weird situation where I'm somewhat of a powered user in Windows and let's say Android and all the much smarter friends I have all using Mac and iPhone and it's like, if you don't want to go through the peer pressure, you know, it's not peer pressure. It's like one of the reasons I want to have kids is that there's a lot of, like I would love that kids as a base as a baseline, but you know, there's like a concern maybe there's going to be a trade -off or all this kind of stuff.

3:05:53But you see like these extremely successful smart people who are friends of mine who have kids and are really happy they have kids. So that's, that's not peer pressure. That's just like a strong signal. Yeah, it works for people. Yeah. And the same thing with Mac. It's like, like the fun, like I don't see fundamentally, I don't like closed systems. So like fundamentally, I like windows more because there's much more freedom. Same with Android, there's much more freedom. It's much more customizable. But like all the cool kids, the smart kids are using Mac and iPhones like, all right, I need to really, I need to give it a real chance, especially for development.

3:06:33Since more and more stuff is done in the cloud anyway. Yeah. Well, anyway, 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. whereas that's much about the software, the hardware is so well -built, right? The keyboard and... Yeah, but look at the keyboard, I use it. That is pretty cool. That's one word for it. What's your favorite place to work? On the couch. Does the couch matter? Is the couch at home or is it an e -couch? No, like hotel couch also, like in the room, right?

3:07:05Yeah. But I used to work very ergonomically with a standing desk and everything, like perfect. Like eye hides, screen blah blah blah. And I felt like... Man, it's has to do with lifting too. I started getting RSI, like repetitive string injury, like tingling stuff and it would go all the way on my back and I was sitting in a co -work space like 6am sun comes up and I'm working and I'm coding and I hear like a sound or something so I do like I look left and my next gets stuck like, and I'm like wow, fuck. And I'm like what's, am I dying, you know? And I fuck, I'm probably dying. So I don't wanna die in a co -work space.

3:07:41I'm gonna go home and die in like, you know, piece and honor. So I closed my laptop and I put it in my backpack and I walked to the street, I got on my motorbike, went home and I lied down on like a pillow like with my legs up and stuff to get rid of this like because it was my whole back and it was because I was working like this all the time. So I started getting like a laptop stand everything economically correct. But then I started lifting and since then it seems like everything gets straight and out. You're posture kind of, you're more straight. And I never have arseidon, or represson injury.

3:08:19I never have tingling anymore, no pains and stuff. So then I started working on sofa and it's great. Like it feels you're close to the, I sit like this. Yeah, legs together in a pillow in a laptop. And then I work are you like leaning back? kind of like Together like legs and then where's the mouse using using no you know, so everything's trackpad on the macOS on the macbook I used to have the logic mx mouse the perfect economic mouse And you do like this little thing with two things. Yes, one screen one screen and I used to have three screens So I come from the I know where people come I had all the stuff But then I realized that having it all condensed in one laptop, it's a six -inch MacBook, so it's quite big But having an on there is amazing because you're so close to the tools.

3:09:09You're so close to what's happening You know is that working on a car or something it's like so Like man if you have trees can you look here look there you get also neck injury actually so It's I don't know this sounds like you're part of a cult and you're just trying to convince me but I mean, but it's good to hear that you can be ultra productive on a single screen. That's crazy. Come on tap. You all talk like when there's all top macros come on. Switch very fast. So you have like one the entire screen is taken up by VS code say you look at the code and then yeah. And then what like if you deploy like a website you watch screen.

3:09:45Mount up the Chrome. I used to have this swipe screen. You know, you could do like a different screen. Yeah, yeah, spaces. Yeah. I was like, ah, it's too difficult. Let's just put it on one screen on the MacBook and then he'd be productive that way. Yeah Very productive. Yeah more productive than before interesting because I have three screens and two of them are vertical Like the size code right. Yeah for the code you can see it Yeah, no man. I love it like I'm I love seeing it with friends like they have amazing like battle stations, right? It's called it's amazing I want it, but I don't want it right like you like the constraints.

3:10:17There's there's that's it There's some aspect of the constraints which like once you get good at it you can focus your mind and you can man I'm suspicious of like more you know. Yeah, do really need all the stuff like it might slow me down actually It's a good way to put it. I'm suspicious of more me too Yeah, suspicious of more and all and always in all of it because you can defend more right you can defend Yeah, my developer I make money. I need to I need to get more screens right I need to be more efficient And then you read stuff about like Mythical man month where like hiring more people slows down a software project project that's famous Think you can use that metaphor maybe for you know tools as well And I see friends just with gear acquisition syndrome that buying so much stuff But they're not that productive.

3:10:59They have the best beautiful Battle stations desktops everything they're not that productive and it's also like kind of fun Like it's all from a laptop in a backpack, right? It's kind of no mad minimalists take me through like the perfect ultra productive day in your life Like say like where you get a lot of shit done. Yeah. Are you, and it's all focused on getting shit done. What, what, when are you waking up? Is it a regular time? Super early. Yes. So I go to sleep like 2 a .m. usually somebody that and before 4 a .m. But my girlfriend would go sleep midnight. So we did a compromise like 2 a .m.

3:11:36You know? So wake up around 10 11. And then more like 10, shower, make coffee. I make coffee like drip coffee, like the V60, you know, the filter and I boil water and then put the coffee in. And then chill a little bit with my girlfriend and then open laptops, our coding check was going on like bugs or whatever. How long are you, like how stretches of time are you able to just sit behind a cabito 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 have more interruptions where I can... Because you have to.

3:12:12This life, there's a lot of distractions. Your girlfriend asks if people come over or whatever. 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. Before they're like, I cannot work, but they get used to it. And they get really productive in short time, because they only have 20 minutes and then shit goes crazy again. So, I'm not a constraint, right? Yeah, it's funny. So I think that works for me. Yeah, and then cook food and stuff like have lunch, steak and chicken and we eat a bunch of times a day. So you say coffee.

3:12:48Yeah. Yeah. So a few hours later, cook foods, we get like locally sourced meat and stuff and vegetables and cook that. And then second coffee and then go some more. Maybe go outside for lunch. Like you can mix fun stuff, you know? How many hours are you seeing a perfectly productive day? you're doing programming. Like if you were like to kill it, I do like all day basically. You mean like the special days where like, girlfriend leaves to like, bears or something and you're alone for a week at home, which is amazing. You can just code. It's like, and you stay up all night and eat chocolate and yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

3:13:22Let's remove girlfriend from pictures, social life from picture. It's just you, man, then she'd go crazy. Okay, like, because when she goes crazy, now she'd go crazy. Okay, So shit you let's let's rewind are you still waking up there's coffee there's no girlfriend to talk to there's no now we wake up Like 1 p .m

3:13:45Because you weren't a better six. Yeah, cuz I was coding I was finding some new AI shit Yeah, I was studying it and it was amazing and I cannot sleep cuz it's too important We need to stay awake. We need to see all of this need to make something now and but that's the time I do make like new stuff more. So I think I have a friend he actually books a hotel for like a week to like leave Is he has a kid too and his girlfriend has kids staying out and he goes to another hotel Sounds a little suspicious right going to hotel, but oh he does It's 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 and better maintaining stuff when there's a lot of disruptions, then creating new stuff.

3:14:27I need this, it's common, it's closed, it's uninterrupted period of time. So yeah, wake up like 1 2 p .m. still coffee, shower, we still shower, you know? And then this code, like nonstop, maybe my friend comes over, he comes over in the distraction. Yeah, he also, Andre, he calls too, so he comes over, we code together, we listen, it starts going back to the body days, you know, like coworking days, like you're not really working with him, but you're just both working because it's nice to have like the vibe where You both sit together on the couch and coding or something and you actually it's mostly silent or there's music You know and sometimes you ask something and but generally like you're really locked in and what what music you're listening to I think like like Techno like YouTube techno There's a channel called H .O .R.

3:15:18with a umlaut like H .O. like double -daw. It's Berlin techno whatever. It looks like it's they feel 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. And thus so fast. Kind of aggressive. Yeah. That's not distracting to you, Brain. That's amazing. Like I think distracting man jazz. Like I listen coffee jazz with my girlfriend when I wake up and it's kind of like this piano starts getting annoying. It's like like, dun dun dun dun dun dun. Too many tones, it's like too many things wrong. This industrial techno is like, you know, this African like rain dances, like, it's this transcendental trans.

3:15:57That's interesting, because I actually mostly now listen to brown noise. Yeah, wow, like pretty loud. Wow, and one of the things you learn is your brain gets used to whatever. So I'm sure the techno, if I actually give it a real chance, Yeah, my brain will get used to it. But like with noise, what happens, or something happens to your brain, I think there's a science to it, but I don't really care. You just have to be a scientist of one, like study yourself, you own brain. For me, it like, it does something, I discovered it right away when I tried it for the first time. After about like a couple of minutes, you're everything, every distraction just disappears.

3:16:39It disappears and it goes like, you can like hold focus on things like really well. It's weird. You can like really focus on a thing. It doesn't really matter what that is. I think that's what people achieve with meditation. You can like, my focus on your breath, for example, it's normal. Normal brown is not like binarro. No. It's normal brown. It's like white noise, I think it's insane. and it's like, make noise, white noise, brown noise I think is what, it's like bassier. Yeah, it's more diffused, more dampened. Yeah, dampened. Yeah, casita. No sharp brightness. Yeah, bravo. Yeah, casita. And you use a headphone, right?

3:17:20Yeah, headphones. I actually like walk around in life, often with brown noise. Dude, that's like psychopath shit, but it's cool, no? Yeah, yeah, when I murder people, it helps. It comes out their screams. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I said too much. No, I'm gonna try brown noise with a murder or with a coding. Yeah, for the coding. Okay, good Try it try it. But you have to like with everything else you give it a real chance. Yeah, I find I also like I said do Tech -no -ey type stuff electronic music on top of the brown noise But then control the speed Because the faster goes the more anxiety so very lean to get shit done especially with programming, I'll have a beat.

3:18:05Yeah. And it's great. It's cool. I'd say it's cool to play those little tricks to 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 co -work space, I would just start talking too much. Yeah. So there's social distraction. Yeah, we would do it in a co -work space. We would do like a money, like Bob, like a mug. So if you would work for 45 minutes, And then if you would say one word like pair of words you would get a fine which is like one dollar So you put one dollar to say hey, what's up?

3:18:38So three three dollars you put in the mug And then that 15 minutes free time like we can like party whatever never 45 minutes again working And that worked but you need to shut people up. Where they you know, I think there's There's an intimacy in being silent together then I might maybe I'm uncomfortable with like But you need to make yourself vulnerable and actually do it. Like with close friends to just sit there and silence for a moment, as a time and like doing a thing. Dude, I watched this video of this podcast. It was like this Buddhism podcast with people meditating and they were interviewing each other or whatever and like a podcast.

3:19:19And suddenly after questions like, yeah, yeah. And they were just silent for like three minutes. and then they said it was amazing. Yeah, it was amazing. I was like, wow, pretty cool, you know? Elon's like that. And I really like that. When you ask a question, I don't know. What's a perfectly productive day for you? Like I just asked, and you just sit there for like 30 seconds. Thinking. Yeah, he thinks. Yeah, but it's so cool. I wish I was, I wish I could think more about, But I want to show you my heart. I want to show you, go straight from my heart to my mouth to saying the real thing. The more I think, the more I start filtering myself right, and I want to just throw it out there immediately.

3:20:08I do that more with team. I think he has a lot of practice in that. I do that as well. And in team setting, when you're thinking brainstorming, and you allow yourself to think in silence. Yeah. Just like, because even in meetings, people want to talk. Yeah. It's like, no, you'd think before you speak and just like, it's okay to be silent together. If you allow yourself to do that, you can actually come up with really good ideas. Yeah. It's okay, this perfect day. How much caffeine are you consuming in this day? Too much, right? Because normally, like, two cups of coffee, but on this perfect day, like, we go to, like, four maybe.

3:20:44So we're starting to hit like the anxiety levels. So four cups is a lot for you. Well, I think my coffees are quite strong when I make them. It's like 20 grams of coffee powder in the V60. So like my friends call them like nuclear coffee because it's quite heavy. So it's quite strong. But it's nice to hit that anxiety level where you're like almost panic attack, but you're not there yet. So, but that's like man, it's like super locked in just like. It's amazing. But I mean, there's a space for that in my life, but it's, I think it's great for making new stuff. It's amazing. Starting from scratch, creating a new thing.

3:21:23Yes. I think girlfriends should let their guys go away for like two weeks every few, no, every year at least, you know, maybe every quarter, I don't know. And just sit and make some shit without, you know, they're amazing, but like no, the Services just be alone and then you know people can make something very very amazing Just wearing cobwebs and the mountains like we showed exactly we can do that. There's a movie about that We've been left off. They didn't do much programming now. Yeah, you can do a little bit of that. Okay, and then a little bit of shipping You know It's a different but they need to allow us to go you know, you need like a man cave, right?

3:22:00Yeah to ship yeah to ship 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. Also, because of gym, I'm not tired. I'm tired when I want to, you know, when it's night, I need to sleep. Yeah, me and my love naps. I love naps. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know why. Brain shots off turns on. I don't know if it's healthy or not. It just works. Yeah. I think with anything mental, physically, you have to be a student of your body. and like, no, no, what the limbs are.

3:22:35Like, you have to be skeptical, take an advice from the internet in general, because a lot of advice is just a good baseline for the general population. It's something that's nice, yeah. You have to become a student of your own body, of yourself, of how you work. That's, I've done a lot of, like for me, fast thing was an interesting one. It leads to, you know, eat a bunch of meals a day, especially when I was lifting heavy, like, because everybody says that you have to eat, kind of a lot, you know, multiple meals a day. But I realize I can get much stronger, feel much better if I eat once or twice a day.

3:23:12Yeah, me too, yeah. It's crazy. I never understood this small meal thing. Yeah, it didn't work for me. Well, 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 the remote okay? It's a job board for remote jobs. Because back then, like 10 years ago, there was job boards, but it was not really specifically remote job boards. So, I made one, first of all, normally they made like no -my jobs, like a page. And a lot of companies started hiring, and they pay for job posts. So, I spin it off to Ramote K.

3:23:45And now it's like this, number one or number two biggest remote job boards. And it's also fully automated. People just post a job and people apply. It has like profiles as well. It's kind of like LinkedIn for remote work. Just focus on remote only. Yeah, it's essentially like a simple job board and it's covered job boards are way more complicated than you think but Yeah, it's a job word for remote jobs But the nice thing is you can charge a lot of money for job posts. Man, it's a good money B2B You can charge like you start with $299, but At the peak during when the Fed started printing money like 2021 I was making like 140k a month with remote okay with just job posts and I started like adding crazy upsells like rainbow color, it's a job post, you can add your background image, just upsells, man.

3:24:32And you charged $1 ,000 for an upsell, it was crazy. And all these companies just upsell, so yeah, we want everything. Job post would cost $3 ,400, $4 ,000. And I was like, this is good business. And then the fat stopped printing money. And I all went down and it went down to like 10K from 140. Now it's back, I think it's like 40. It was good times, you know? I got to ask you about back to the digital nomad life. Yeah. You wrote a blog post on the reset. And in general, just give them away everything, living a minimalist life. Yeah. What did it take to do that? Like to get rid of everything? 10 years ago, it was like this trend in the blog.

3:25:14Back then, blogs were still popular. It was like a blogosphere and it was like the honored things challenge. What is that? I mean, it's ridiculous. But like 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 five random things. You need to get it down to 100. Why, you know, it's just a trend. So I did it. I started selling stuff, started throwing away stuff. And I did like MDMA and XC, like 2012 kind of, and after that trip, I felt so different. And I felt like I had to start throwing shit away. Like I swear. And I started throwing shit away.

3:25:48And I felt that was like, it was almost like the drug sending me to a path of like, you need to throw away shit away. you start going on a journey, you need to get out of here. And that's what the MD made it, I think. Yeah. How hard is it to get down to 100 items? Boy, you need to sell your PC and stuff. You need to go on eBay and then, man, going to email someone where stuff is very interesting because you discover society. You just, man, you meet the craziest people. You meet every range from rich to poor. Everybody comes to your house to buy stuff. It's so funny, so interesting. I recommend everybody to do this.

3:26:20Just to meet people that want your shit. Yeah, it was so like I didn't know it was I was in living in Amsterdam and I didn't know I have my own you know Subculture whatever and I discovered the Dutch people like as they are from eBay, you know So I sold everything was like the weirdest thing yet to sell and yet to find a buyer for not the weirdest But like what what's my mobile so back then I was I was making music and I would make music videos with like a Canon 5D camera back then everybody's making films and beat music was that and and we bought it with my friends and stuff and It was kind of like I had to sell this thing too because it was like it was very expensive like six K or something Yeah, and but it meant that selling this man that we wouldn't make music videos to get anywhere I would leave Holland this kind of like stuff we were working on with end and I was kind of saying this music video stuff We're not getting big.

3:27:08We're not getting famous in his or successful. We need to stop doing his music production Also, we're not really working and it was kind of like felt very bad You know for my friends because we would work together on this and And to sell this like camera that we'd make stuff with and there's a hard goodbye. It's just a camera, but it was like it felt like Sorry guys doesn't work and I need to go you know who who bought it do you remember? Was some guy who couldn't possibly understand the The journey of it. Yeah, yeah, you showed up here tears the money. Thanks. Yeah, but it was like it was like cutting your life like this shit ends now and now we're gonna do new stuff and nothing is beautiful.

3:27:47I did that twice my I'll give away everything everything like don't know just pants underwear back back. I think I think it's important to do. It shows you what's important. Yeah, I think that's what I learned from it like you learned that you can live a very little objects for your little stuff and but there's a there's a counter to it like you you lean more on this on the stuff on the services, like for example you don't need a car, you use Uber, right? You don't need kitchen stuff because you go to restaurants, you know, when you're traveling. So you lean more on other people's services, but you spend money on that as well, so that's good.

3:28:23Yeah, but just letting go of material possessions, which gives a kind of freedom to how you move about the world. Yeah. It gives you a complete freedom to go into another city too. Yeah, but if you're 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, next spiritually. Yeah, 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 You know build some internet stuff whatever bring your laptop and it's amazing experience 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 and now I learn I be successful in business you have money at least now you can choose what you really want to study you know Because people at 18 they go study what's probably good for the job market, right?

3:29:18So it probably makes more sense like if you want that go travel Pills and businesses and go back to university if you want so one of the biggest uses of the universities the networking you You gain friends you gain like you meet people. It's a forcing function to meet people But if you can meet people out into the world by travel and you meet so many different cultures I mean, the problem for me is like if I travel at that young age, I'm attracted to people at the outskirts of the world. Like for me, like where? No, not geographically. Oh, like the subcultures, the subc... Yeah, like the weirdos, the darkness.

3:29:52Yeah, me too. But that might not be the best networking in 18 years. No, but man, if you're smart about it, you can stay safe. And I met so many weirdos from traveling. You meet how travel works. if you really had to lose, you meet the craziest people. Yeah. And it's the most interesting people. And it's just, I cannot recommend enough. What's the other thing is that when you're 18, I feel like, depending on your personality, you have to learn both how to be a weirdo and how to be a normie. Like, you still have to learn how to fit into society. Like for a person like me, for example, who's always in outcast, like, there's always a danger of going full outcast.

3:30:33Yeah, and it's a harder life if you like if you go to like go full artists and full like darkness It's just a harder life you can come back. You can come back to Normie. That's a skill That's like I think you have to learn how to how to fit into Like polite society, but I was very strange outcast as well and then I'm more Adaptable to Normie now. Yeah, yeah, after firties, you know, you're like yeah, but I mean it's a skill you have to learn Yeah, I feel man, I feel also the You start as an outcast, but the more you work on yourself the less like shit you have you kind of start becoming more Normie because you become more chill with yourself and more happy and It kind of makes you honest, right?

3:31:17Yes. Yes Like the most crazy people are always the most interesting if you've solved your internal struggles and your therapy and stuff and you kind of become kind of You know, it's not so interesting anymore maybe. You don't have to be broken to be interesting I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah. What kind of things were left when you minimalized? So the backpack, MacBook, toothbrush, some clothes unaware of socks. You don't need a lot of clothes in Asia because it's hot so you just wear a swim pants, swim shorts, you walk around flip flops, so very basic T -shirt and go to the laundromat and wash my stuff and I think it was like 50 things with something.

3:32:01Yeah. Yeah, it's nice. There's as I mentioned to you The show alone Yeah, they really test you because they only get 10 items and you have to survive out in the wilderness and the acts like everybody brings an axe some people Also have a saw But usually acts as the job. You basically have to build a shelter, you have to cut down and cut the trees and make a bunch of Minecraft. Everything I learned about life in Minecraft, bro. Yeah, yeah. It's nice to create those constraints for yourself to understand what matters to you and also how to be in this world. And one of the ways to do this is to live a minimalist life.

3:32:45But like some people like I've met people that really enjoy material possessions and I bring some happiness and that's a beautiful thing like for me it doesn't But people are different it gives me happiness for like two weeks. Yeah, I'm very quickly adapting to like a baseline He didn't he didn't stick adaptation very fast. Yeah, but man if you look at the studies most people like Like a getting new car six months, you know get a new house six months. You just feel the same She's like, wow, she did buy all the stuff. I didn't, studying hedonistic adaptation made me think a lot about mentalism.

3:33:20And so you don't even need to go through the whole journey of getting in. Just focus on 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're a blog post. why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too. What's your strategy in communicating with people? Yeah, so when I wrote that, I was getting so many DMs, as you probably have a million times more, but people were getting angry that I wasn't responding.

3:33:58And I was like, okay, I'll just close down this DMs completely. Then people got angry that I closed my DMs down that I'm not like man of the people, you know, it's like, you've changed, man. Yeah, you've changed, you've got to, You know, like this. And I'm like, I'll explain why I just don't have the time in a day to, you know, answer every question. And also people send you like crazy shit man, like stalkers and like people write like their whole life story for you and then ask you to write. It's like, man, I have no idea. I'm not a therapist. I don't know. I don't know the stuff. But also beautiful stuff.

3:34:28No, absolutely sure. Like life story, I've posted a coffee form. Like if you wanted to have a coffee with me. And I've gotten an extremely large number of submissions and when I look at them There's just like beautiful people in there like beautiful people beings really powerful stories And like breaks my heart that I won't get to meet those people, you know like So this part of it is just like there's only so much bandwidth to truly see other humans and Help them or like understand them or hear them or see them. Yeah, I've this problem that I try I want to try help people and also like, oh, let's make startups and whatever.

3:35:05And I've learned over the years that generally for me, and it sounds maybe bad, right? But like I helped my friend Andre, for example, he came up to me in a co -work space. That's how I met him. He said, I want to learn the code. I want to do startups. How do I do it? I said, okay, let's go install EngineX. Let's start coding. And he has this self -energy that he actually, he doesn't need to be pushed. He just goes and he just goes and he asks questions. and he doesn't ask too many questions. He just goes, and learns that now he has a company and makes a lot of money as his own startups. So, and the people that I had to kind of like, that asked me for help, but then I gave help, and then they started debating it, you know?

3:35:45Do you have that? Like people ask you advice and they go against you, say, no, you're wrong, because I'm like, okay, bro, I don't want to debate. Do you ask me for advice, right? And the people who need to push generally, it doesn't happen. You need to have this energy for yourself. Well, they're searching. They're searching. They're trying to figure it out. But oftentimes they're search If they successfully find what they're looking for, it'll be within. Sounds very like spiritual Sony But it's really like figuring that shit out on your own. But they're reaching. They're trying to ask the world around them like How do I live this life?

3:36:19How do I figure this out? But ultimately the answer is gonna be from them working on themselves and like literally It's a stupid thing but like Googling and doing like searching for procrastination. I think sending messages to people is a lot of procrastination. Like, like how do we become successful podcasts? Bro, just, you know, start, like just go. Yeah. And just go. I would never ask you how to be successful podcasts. Like I would just start it and then I would copy your methods. You know, I would say, oh, this guy is a black background. We probably need to just as well. Yeah, try it. Yeah, try it.

3:36:52And then you realize it's not about the black background. It's about something else. So you find your voice like keep trying to exactly the notation 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. And you imitate and then you put your own spin to it. You know, and that's like creative process. That's like literally a whole create. Everybody always builds on the previous work. Yeah. You shouldn't get stuck 24 hours in a day, eight hours of sleep. You're like breaking down to a math equation.

3:37:2090 minutes of showering, clean up coffee, it just keeps whittling down to zero. Man, it's not this specific, but I had to make like a, you know, an average of something. Firefighting, all like that. When I was a girl, she's an errands. I've tried breaking down a 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 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.

3:37:57Yeah, a lot of his waste. For me, it's been the biggest battle for the longest time. It's finding stretches of time where I can deeply focus into really deep work. Just like zoom in and completely focus cutting away all the distractions. And that's the battle. But some pleasant, extremely unpleasant. We need to fly to New Zealand, make a man cave island where we can just coat for a week, just get shit done, make new projects. Yeah. But man, they called me Psycho Pephrase because it says like one hours of sex hugs love, man, I think it writes something, and they were like, oh, this guy's psychopath, he plans his sex in a specific hour.

3:38:40Bro, I don't. But you have a counter for hugs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, click, click, click. It's just a numerical representation of what life is. Yeah. It's like one of those like when you draw out how many weeks you have in a life. I'll do it. This is like dark. Yeah. Don't want to look at that. How many times you see your parents? You just like, man, it's scary, man. That's right. It might be only, you know, a handful more times. Yeah. You just look at the math away. If you see him once a year or twice a year, I face time today. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's like dark when you see somebody you like seeing, like a friend that's on the outskirts of your friend group and you realize like, well, I've really seen him for like three years.

3:39:30So like how many more times do we have that we see each other? Do you believe that like friends just slowly disappear from your life? Like they kind of… your friend who evolves, right? So like, it does, it does. Like you don't wanna, there's a problem with Facebook, you get all these old friends from school, like when you were 10 years old, back with Facebook started, like you don't really, you would add friend them and then you were 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, 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.

3:40:04Yeah. Like every time I see him, I think it's because we have a foundation of many shared experiences of many memories. I guess it's like nothing has changed. Like we've been almost like we've been talking every day, we haven't talked for a year. So that's 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 depends. But there's just this network of good human beings that can, yeah. I have like a real love for them. I can always count on them. If any of them called me in the middle of the night, I'll get rid of a body.

3:40:46I'm there. I'm like how that's a different definition of friendship. But it's true. It's true, friend. You become more and more famous recently. How's that affect you? It's not the reason, because it's a gradual thing, right? Like it keeps going. And I also don't know why it keeps going. Does that put pressure on you? Because you're pretty open on Twitter and you're just like basically building shit in the open. Yeah. And just not really caring if it's too technical, if there's any of this just being out there. Does that put pressure on you? Is it becoming more popular to be a little bit more collected?

3:41:28Man, I think the opposite, right? Like, because the people I follow are interesting because they say whatever they think and they shape or whatever. It's so boring that people start tweeting only about one topic. Yeah. I don't know anything about their personal life. I want to know about their personal life. Like you do podcasts you ask about life stuff or personality. That's the most interesting part of like business or sports. Like what's the behind the sport athlete, right? Behind the entrepreneur. That's interesting stuff to be human. Yeah. Like you you share that, you know, like I shared a tweet when too far, but like we were cleaning the toilet because the toilet was clogged, you know?

3:42:01But like it's just real stuff because Jensen and Wang and Videa guy he says he started cleaning toilets, you know. That was cool. You tweeted something about the the Denny's thing, I forget. Yeah, it was recent that and Videa was started in a Denny diner table and you made it somehow profound. Yeah, this one, this one. In video, a $3 trillion dollar company was started in a Denny's and American diner. People need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next billion or trillion dollar company. What's the first and second space? The home office and then the in between the island. I guess, yeah, the island.

3:42:35You need a space to like congregate, man, and I've found history on this. So four years ago in the coffee houses of Europe, 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 work and to have serendipitous conversations with other people and start businesses and stuff.

3:43:13And when I, like you asked me to come on here and we flew to America, and the first thing I realized was that, I've been to America before, but we were in this cafe and like, There's a lot of laptops, everybody's working on something and I made I took this photo And then when you're in Europe like large parts of Europe now you cannot you cannot use a laptop anymore It's like no laptop which are in a sense, but that is to you a fundamental Place to create shit isn't that natural organic Co -working space of a cost for a lot of people a lot of people have very small homes and co -working spaces are They're kind of boring.

3:43:49They're not very private. They're not serendipitous. They're kind of boring. Cafés are amazing because they, random people can come in and ask you, what are you working on? And not just love those people are also having conversations. Like they did it for as years ago, debates or whatever. Things are happening. And man, I understand the aesthetics of it. Like, it's like, oh, start a bra, shipping is bullshit startup, you know? Like, but there's something more there. like there's people actually making stuff, making new companies that the society benefits from like we're benefiting from Nvidia, I think it's the US GDP for sure is benefiting from Nvidia.

3:44:26European GDP could benefit if we build more companies. And I feel in Europe, there's his vibe and this you have to connect things, but not not allowing laptops and cafes 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 Burdenne, like this tweet He was quoted with Anthony Burdenne photo with him of cigarettes and a coffee in France. And he said, this is what cafes are for. I agree. But there is some element of entrepreneurship. You have to allow people to dream big and work their ass off to towards that dream and then feel each other's energy as they interact with.

3:45:01That's one of the things I liked in Silicon Valley when I was working there. It was like the cafes. There's a bunch of dreamers that you can make fun of them for everybody thinks they're going to build a trillion dollar company. But like yeah, and it's awesome not everybody wins nine percent of people will be bullshit But they're working their ass off. Yeah, they're doing something and and you need to pass this starter bro Like oh, it's started on level. No, it's not this people making cool shit Yeah, and this will benefit you because this will create jobs for your your country in your region and I think in Europe That's a big problem like we have a very anti I dream big and build shit.

3:45:38This is really inspiring. This has been Twitter yours. All the projects that you've tried and the ones that succeeded. Has very few mute life. There was for Twitter to mute, to share the mute list. Yeah, your mute words. Fire calculator, no more Google, make a rank. How much is my site project worth, climate finder, Ideas AI. Airlines is still runs, but it doesn't make money. Airlines is like, compared to the safety of airlines, because I was nervous to fly. So I was like, let's collect all the data on crashes for all the airplanes. While he's capable. Nice. That's awesome. Make village, nomad gear, 3D and virtual reality dev, play my inbox, like you mentioned.

3:46:27There's a lot of stuff. Yeah, man. I'm trying to find some embarrassing Tweets viewers. You can go to the highlights tab as all that like the good shit. There you go. It's just Dubai POV building an AI startup While you're a real influencer And if people copy this phone now and they they change the screenshots it becomes like a meme Of course, you know That's how Dubai looks it's insane. That's beautiful architectural. I just crazy the stories behind this Yeah, the 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.

3:47:17Yeah, so the median founding of companies in US is some like 1960 and the median of the top companies, right? And the median in Europe is like 1900 or something. Yeah, so it's So here, 1913 and 1963, so there's a 50 year difference. It's a good representation of the very thing you were talking about the difference in the cultures, entrepreneurial spirit of the peoples. But Europe used to be entrepreneurial. Like there was companies found in 1818, 15, 1900. It flipped around 1950 where America took the lead. And I guess my point is like, I hope that Europe gets back to, because I'm European. I hope that Europe gets back to being an entrepreneurial culture where they build big companies again.

3:47:58Because right now, all the old dinosaur companies control the economies. They're lobbying with the government. Their Europe is also there. It'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 into the enter industry because there's too much regulation. So actually, regulation is very good for big companies because they can follow it. I can't follow it, right? If I want to start AI startup in Europe now, I cannot because there's an AI regulation that makes it very complicated for me.

3:48:28I probably need to get like no to reason involved. I need to get certificates, licenses. Whereas in America, I can just open my laptop. I can start it, AI started right now. Mostly, you know? What do you think about E -AQ? Effective acceleration at this moment. And yet, Beth Jais is on. I love Beth Jais' and he's amazing. And if it's E -AQ is very needed to similarly create a more positive outlook on the future. like because people, people have been very pessimistic about society, about the future of society, you know climate change, all this stuff. E -Arch is like, it's a positive outlook on the future.

3:49:09Like 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 Shire away from technology. Technology can be the answer for many things. Yeah, build more. Don't spend so much time on fear mongering and cautiousness and all this kind of stuff. Some is okay. Some is good, but most of the time should be spent on building and creating and doing so unapologetically. It's a refreshing reminder of what made United States great as all the builders.

3:49:47Like you said, the entrepreneurs, we can't forget that in all the sort of discussions of how things could go wrong with technology and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, it goes to get a look at China. China is now at the stage of America, what, like 1900 or something. They're building rapidly, like insane. And obviously China's massive problems, but that comes with the whole thing that comes to America in this beginning, holds it massive problems, right? But I think it's very dangerous for a country or a region like Europe to you, you, you get to this point where you're kind of complacent, you're kind of comfortable.

3:50:20and then you know you can either go this or you can go this way right you're you're from here you go like this and you can go this or this I think you should go this way and yeah go off and and I think it's the problem is the the the mind goes your so EOC I made EOC which is like the European kind of version I made like hoodies and stuff so a lot of people were like this make your gradigan hats I made it red first but it became too like Trump so now it's more like European blue, you know, make Europe great again. All right. Okay. So you had an incredible life. Very successful, built a lot of cool stuff.

3:51:02So 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, everybody peer presses you into doing stuff you don't want to do and like they tell you like parents or family or society and toy but like try your own thing, you know, because it probably it might work out you can you can steer the ship you know it probably doesn't work out immediately you probably go into very bad times like I did as well relatively right but in the end if you're smart about it you can make things work and you can 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.

3:51:41They're space in the economy and in society for do your own thing. You know, it's like, you know, like little villages, everybody would sell, I would sell bread, you would sell meat, everybody can do their own little thing. You don't need to, you know, be enormous. As you say, you can be what you really want to be, you know? And like go all out doing that. Yeah, you got to go all out because if you do, if you half -asset, you cannot succeed. You need to go lean into the outcast stuff, lean into the being different and just doing whatever it is that you want to do, right? You got a whole asset.

3:52:18Yeah, whole asset, yeah. This was an incredible conversation. It was an honor to finally meet you. It was honor to be your legs. To talk to you and keep doing your thing, keep inspiring me and the world with all the cool stuff you're building. Thank you, 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 Hausten, 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.

3:52:57I hope to see you next time.