The following is a conversation with Peter levels also known on the X as levels IO he is a self-taught developer and entrepreneur who designed program shipped and ran over 40 startups many of which are hugely successful in most cases. He did it all by himself while living the digital Nomad life in over 40 countries and over 150 cities programming on a laptop while chilling on a couch.
Ouch using vanilla HTML jQuery PHP and SQL Lite, he builds and ships quickly and improves on the Fly only open documenting his work both his successes and failures. Well, the raw honesty of a true Indie hacker Peter is an inspiration to a huge number of developers and entrepreneurs who love creating cool things in the world that are hopefully useful for people.
This was an honor and a pleasure for me.
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About my belief as it stands now the Kamala Harris is not a communist and that Donald Trump is not a fascist.
And there's some other Nuance in that tweet and the response. I got the attacks. I got from both sides that are very intense the disagree were fascinating. So one of the things I have on my to-do list is to do a lengthy video and a lengthy podcast on communism and Fascism and other economic and political systems, you know, there needs to be a good solid criticism and explanation.
Of capitalism, for example, it's an economic system. It's a way for humans to work together that has I believe benefited the world way more than it has hurt the world but to articulate that and to steal man the criticisms and the perspectives that criticize capitalism is also really important. And so the same applies for communism for fascism for all kinds of ideologies that ruled the world for a time and all the kinds of ways that they've broken down.
And to do so serious the objectively calmly walking through the fire without the misuse of those words thinking clearly not as a partisan, but as an independent thinker as a human being I think that's something that would like to work on more and more even amidst this insane political season. Anyway, I mentioned all that because you know, when I think about Shopify think about capitalism, it's a bunch of small sellers.
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It's mot IFI C.J. I this episode is also brought to you by a G1 and all-in-one daily drink to support Better Health and Peak Performance. I'm going out. I think it's hundred degrees out and Austin right now. I'm going to go out and run anywhere from 5 to 12 miles. I'm feeling good right now. So I'm thinking like 10 11 12 mile.
Ranch by the way, I just heard a little clip on campaigns has Instagram and by the way cam amazing human being should definitely go follow him. He's an inspiration to me, you know quietly just does incredible Feats of Strength and does it all with a kind heart and just this warmth and humor. I love it. Anyway, he was talking about the fact that sometimes you know, when he's running crazy distances are fast-paced. He would just walk
For a short period of time he's doing it for Joy. He's doing it for the love of running like you don't always as he says have to hate it and I think I approach running the same way. Sometimes I'll be running really fast. Sometimes I walk this oftentimes correlates with how deeply I am in thought related to an audiobook. I'm listening to sometimes I get the sense of discomfort when there's a difficult part of the audio book. It's really making me think at the same time keeping a fast pace is difficult for me. So I just slow down.
Sometimes I walk sometimes I stop and just sitting on the bench. I'm doing it all not for sort of training for a marathon and training. So some difficult physical Endeavor. I'm doing it for For the Love of it for the love of running out in nature. Whether it's in the heater in the cold just the love of life that you can get. Especially when the the second wind hits. Anyway, after all that, I'm going to drink a nice cold ag1. They'll give you a one month supply of fish oil when you sign up a drink AG one.com.
Lex this episode is also brought to you by master class. Will you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines? I love master class. I love learning from people who are the best in the world at a thing. Sometimes there's incredible lectures that can explain a thing. I also love that but I think there's just something indescribably powerful about not a great.
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Some of the people losing their mind and the realm of the election that's coming up. That would be a fun one if they could sign up for better help and do a couples therapy somebody from the far left and the far right you're sitting down together boy, that would be a fascinating challenge for any therapist and from the conversational space. I would love to just listen to that then I'll be talking to a bunch of people on the left and the right and having
Of those tents difficult conversations and again having it with compassion but also with backbone. It's not an easy line to walk by the way, and I don't think I'm smart enough to do it. I most days I kind of feel like an idiot, but I'm doing my best. Anyway, you should try out talk therapy super easy to do it better help check them out a better help.com Lex and save on your first month. That's better help.com Flex.
This episode is also brought to you by eight sleep and it spotted for Ultra that I've been enjoying. I just recently enjoyed. I enjoyed every night multiple times a day. Let's get crazy. I love it for good nap. It can cool down the side of the bed to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature qu bed warm blanket and just shut off from the world.
just forget it all to get the madness of the world the political bickering the the attacks the tensions the drama all the stuff that you know, the media and the social media that wants to pull you in that wants to desperately like a drug wants your attention wants to just piss you off and use that anger to make you addicted to the platform so you can tell everybody how pissed off you are and then the other person
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You've launched a lot of companies and built a lot of products as you see most failed but some succeeded what's your philosophy behind building the startups that you
did? I think my philosophy is very different than most people in startups because most people startups they build a company and they raise money, right and they hire people and then they build a product and they find something that makes money and I don't really raise money. I don't use VC funding I do everything myself. I'm a designer. I'm the developer. I make everything I make the logo so
Or me I'm much more Scrappy and and because I don't have funding like I need to I need to go fast. I need to make things
fast to
see even ID works, right? I have an idea in my mind and I build it build it like a micro mini startup and I launched it very quickly like within, you know two weeks for someone who's building it and I check if there's the man if people actually sign up and not just sign up but if people actually pay money, right like they need to take out the credit card pay me money and I can see if the idea is validated and most of these don't work.
Because you say must feel
so there's this rapid iterative phase. We just build a prototype that works launch it. Yeah, see people like it improving it really really quickly to see if people like it a little bit more enough to pay and all that that that whole rapid process is called Yak
of I think it's like it's very rapid and it's like if I compared to for example Google, you know, like a big tech companies, especially Google right now is kind of struggling like they made like transform as I made old invented all day. I stuff years ago and they never
Everly shipped like they could have shipped GPT. For example, I think I heard in 2019. I've never shipped it because they were so stuck on bureaucracy, but they had everything they had the data. They have the deck. They had the engineers and it could do them do it and it's because these bigger ones are just it's it can make you very slow. So being alone by myself on my laptop like in my underwear in a hotel room or something. I can shift very fast and I don't need to like their need to ask that legal for like, oh it can you vouch for this. You know, I can just go and
ship you always coding.
And where their your profile picture you're like slouching couch in your underwear is showing a
laptop. No, but it's everywhere. I like shorts a lot. And I usually wear shorts and a t-shirt because I'm always too hot like I'm always
overheating. Thank you for showing up not just in your underwear. But yeah wearing shorts and now you know, I still wearing this for you. But thank you. Thank you for dressing up.
I think it's because I since I go to the gym, I'm always too hot. What's your favorite exercise in the gym man over at
press over press like shoulder press? Yeah, okay,
but it feels good. Cause you're doing like you
Do you win because when you go what did I do 60 kilos of 120 pounds or something? I guess it's my only thing I can do well in a gym and you said like this in your like I did it, you know, like a winner Charles their Victory pose. I do bench press squats
deadlifts. Hence the the mug. Yeah to my therapist. Yeah. It's a deadlift. Yeah,
because it acts like therapy for me. You know.
Yeah, it is controversial to
say like if I say it isn't whether people get angry
physical hardship is a kind of therapy. Yeah. I just re-watched happy.
People here in the taiga that Werner Herzog film with a document people that are doing trapping. They're essentially just working for survival in the wilderness year-round and there's a deep happiness to their way of life because they're so busy in it in nature. Like there's something about that physical physical. Yeah
toil. Yeah. My dad told me that my dad always did those like construction the house like it's always renovating the house he breaks through one room, and then he goes to the next
room and he's just going on in a circle around the house for like the last 40 years. So but so he's always doing construction housing is his Hobby and he like he told me when I'm depressed or something. He says like get a big like recalled like a big mountain of sand or something from construction and just get a shovel and bring it to the other side and just you know, do like physical labor do like hard work and do something I get set a goal do something and I kind of did that with startups to
yeah.
It's not about the destination man. It's about yeah. Yeah, sometimes I wonder people who are always remodeling their house. Is it really about the remodeling? There's no no, it's not it's about the progeny the puzzle of
it. He doesn't care about the results. Why shows me is like it's amazing. Like yeah, it's amazing, but then he wants to go to the next room, you know, but I think it's very metaphorical for work because I also I never stopped work I go to the next website or make a new one, right or make a new start up. So I'm always like to give you something to wake up in the
Morning, and like, you know have coffee and kiss your girlfriend and then you have like a goal. Not today. I'm going to fix this feature today. I'm going to fix this bar or something. When I do something you have something to wake up to, you know, and I think maybe especially as a man were also women but you need you need a hard work, you know, you need like and ever think
how much of the building that you do is about money. How much is it about just a deep internal happiness?
It's really about fun because I would because I was doing it when I didn't make money, right? That's the point. So I was
I was going I was always I was making music I made the electronic music drum and bass music like 20 years ago and I was always making stuff. So I think creative expression is like a meaningful work. That's so important. It's so fun. It's so fun to have like a daily challenge where you try to figure stuff out,
but the interesting thing is you've built a lot of successful products and you never really want to take it to that level where you scale real big. Yes sell it to a company or something like this. Yeah. The problem is I don't
Take that right, like if more people start using it moves people something start using it and becomes big. I'm not going to say, oh stop signing up to my website pay me money, but I never raise funding for it. And I think as I don't like this the stressful life that comes with it. Like I have a lot of founder friends and they tell me secretly like hundreds of millions of dollars in funding herself and they tell me like next time if I'm going to do it. I'm going to do like you because it's more it's more fun. It's more it needs more chill. It's more creative.
They don't like this. They don't like to be manager where you become like a CEO you become a manager and I think a lot of people that start startups when they become a CEO they don't like that job actually, but they can't really exited, you know, but they like to do the groundwork the coating. So I think that keeps you happy like doing something
creative. Yeah. It's interesting how people are pulled towards that to scale to go really big and you don't have that honest reflection with yourself.
Like what actually makes you happy because for a lot of great Engineers will make them happy is the building the the quote-unquote individual contributor like where you're actually still coding or you actually still building and they let go of that and then they become unhappy but some of that is the sacrifice needed to have a impact at scale if you truly believe in a thing you're doing but like look at
Elon he's doing things million times bigger than me, right and we don't want to do that. I don't know you cannot reduce these things.
But I really respect that I think you know is very different from VC Founders. Right VC start is like software. There's a lot of bullshit in this world. I think there's a lot of like dodgy Finance stuff happening there I think and I never have like concrete evidence about it. But your gut tells you something's going on with like companies getting sold to friends and feces and they do reciprocity in this Shady Financial dealings with Iran does not just raising money from investors and actually building stuff. He needs the money to build stuff, you know Hearts Hardware stuff and that I really
Respect
you said that there's been a few low points in your life. You've been depressed and the building is one of the ways you get out of that. But can you talk to that? Can you take me to that place that time when you were in at a low point
so I wasn't hauling then I graduate University and I didn't want to like get a normal job and I was making some money with YouTube because I had this music career and I upload my muse to YouTube and YouTube started paying me like with AdSense like two thousand dollars a month two thousand dollars a month and all my friends got like normal jobs, and we stopped.
All because people would like in University I hang out, you know utilities at each other's houses you go party, but even people get jobs they only party like any weekend and they don't hang anymore and we cause you need to be at the office and I was like, it's not for me I want to do something else and I was starting getting this like, I think it's like Saturn return is you know, when you turned 27, it's like some concept where Saturn returns to the same place in the orbit that it was when you're born
man. I'm learning so many things astrology thing, you know, so many truly
special artist.
Died when they were 27 exactly something with 27 men and it was for me like I started going crazy because I didn't really see like my future in Hollands buying a house going living in the suburbs and stuff. So I flew out and went to Asia. I started digital no Manning and did that for a year and then that made me feel even worse, you know, because I was like alone in hotel rooms like looking at the ceiling like what am I doing with my life like this is like I was working on startups and stuff and YouTube but it's like what is the future here? You know like is this
Is this something while my friends and Holland we're doing really well and with a normal life, you know, so it was getting very depressed and like I'm like an outcast, you know, and my money was shrinking I wasn't making money anymore lat we can find one of those a month or something and I was looking at the ceiling thinking like now I'm like 27, I'm a loser and that's the moment when I started building like startups and it's because my dad said like if you're depressed you need to you know gets and get a shovel start shoveling do something. You can't just sit still which is kind of like
Like a interesting way to deal with depression, you know, like it's not like, oh, let's talk about it. It's more like let's go do something and and I started doing a project called twelve stars in 12 months or every month. I would make something like a project and I would launch it with stripe. So people could pay for
it to the basic format is try to build a thing put online and put striped or you can pay money
for a described check the I'm not sponsored by stride. But at a stripe checkout
button, is that still like the easiest way to just like pay for stuff stripe
100% like I
At
school company, they just made it so easy. You just click and yeah,
and the really nice like the CEO Patrick is really nice
behind the scenes. I must be difficult to like actually make that happen because I used to be a huge problem like searching just just adding a thing a button where you can like pay for thing.
It's to I know this because when I was a trustworthy nine years old, I was making websites also and I tried to open a merchant accounts. There was like before strive you would have liked if he was called worldpay so I had
To like fill out all these forms and then I had to fax them to America from Holland with my dad's facts and my dad had to it wasn't my dad's name and he designed for this and he started reading these terms and conditions which is like he's liable for like a hundred million in Damages and he's like, I don't understand this like that. Come on. I need a merchant account. I need to make money on the internet and he signed it and we send it via fax it to America and I had a merchant accounts, but that never nobody paid for anything. So that was the problem, you know, but it's much easier now you can sign up you add some code and
4:12 startups in 12 months. Yeah. So what how do you start a number one? What was that? Like, what were you feeling? What were you sitting behind the computer? Like how much do you actually know about building stuff at
that? I could I could call it a little bit because I did to YouTube channel and I made a websites for I would make websites for like the YouTube channel. It was called panda make show and it was like these electronic music mixes like dubstep or drone base or techno house.
I saw one of them had like flash we're using flash.
Yeah my
Album I see Dionne was using flash. Yeah, I stole my CD.
Yeah kids flash was nice was cool software. This is like that the
break like the grandpa, you know, but
flash was yeah. There's was it called boy should remember this action script. This is some kind of programming
language. Yeah scream. Oh, yeah and flash back then that was the
JavaScript, you know, the JavaScript. Yeah, and I thought that's gonna that's supposed to be the dynamic thing that takes over the internet and investors so many hours and learning that you just killed it Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs had flesh socks. Stop using it. I was like, okay that guy.
Right though, right? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Well it was it was a closed platform. I think and close it this ironic because Apple, you know, they're not very open. All right, but back then Steve was like this is closed. We should not use it and it's a security problems. I think which sounded like a cop-out like I just wanted to say that to make it look on her bed The Flash was cool. Yeah.
Yeah. It was cool for time. Yeah. It doesn't animated gifts for cool for time to yeah, they came back in a different way as a meme. No, I mean like I remember when gifts were
Actually cool not ironically cool. Yeah, like there's a on the internet you would have like a Dancing Rabbit or something like this and that was really exciting. We
had like the you know, Lex homepage at least everything was centered. Yeah, he had like Peters homepage and under construction. Yeah gift which was like a guy like the helmets and the lights
and amazingly honors. Yeah. That's how before like Google AdSense you would have like banners bad words. It was amazing. Yeah and a lot of links to porn.
I
think yeah or before that was where the merchant accounts people would use for people to make money a lot only money made on Internationals like porn or a lot of it.
Yeah. It was a dark place is still a dark place. Yeah, and but there's Beauty in the darkness. Anyway, so you were you did some basic HTML. Yeah.
Yeah, but I had to learn to actual coding. So I it was good. It was a good idea to like every mom launch a startup so I could learn the codes learn basic stuff and but it was still very Scrappy because they didn't have time to
to which is on purpose. I didn't have time to spend a lot of add a month to do something so I couldn't spend more than the mom and I was pretty strict about that and I published it as a blog post. So people think I put it on Hacker News and people would check like kind of like, oh, did you actually, you know, I felt like accountability because I put it public that actually had to do it.
Remember the first one you did.
I think I was playing my inbox because back then my friends we would send would send like cool meat was before Spotify think we would send like 2014. We would send music to each other like YouTube links.
Like this is a cool song is a cool song and it was his these giant email threads on Gmail and they were like on navigatable. So I made an app that would log into your Gmail get them emails and find amounts of YouTube links and then make like a like a gallery of your your songs like essentially Spotify and my friends loved it
was this great being it. Like what was I usually
I Bo P like pop or IMAP, you know, it would actually check your email so that like privacy concerns because it would get all your emails to find YouTube links, but then I wouldn't save anything.
But there was fun. It was like and that the first priority would get like pressed I could when I think like some tech media and stuff and I was like this cool like they didn't make money there was no payment button, but it was a it was actually people using it I think tens of thousand people used
it. That's a great idea. I wonder why like why why don't we have that? Why don't we have things that access Gmail and extract some useful aggregate
in fashion? Yeah, you could tell Gmail like
Don't give me all the emails. Just give me the ones with YouTube things, you know, 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 remember these things like they build I've seen a few like Boomerang there's a few apps that are like good but just want to let you maybe it's not easy to make money.
I think it's hard to get people to pay for these like extensions and plugins, you know, because it's not like a real app, so it's not like people don't value it people very the artist and a plug-in should be free. You know, when I want to use a plug-in in Google Sheets or something. I'm not going
I pay for it. They 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 plug-in, you know?
Yeah, I mean you can do it through like extensions like Chrome extensions through from the browser side
it but who pays for Chrome extensions, right like barely anybody so buddy, that's not a good place to make money
probably. Yeah. That sucks a
Chrome extension should be an extension for your startup. You know, you have a product all we also have a Chrome
extension, you know, I wish the car.
Attention would be the product. I wish Chrome would support that like where you could pay for it easily. It's like imagine. I can't imagine a lot of products that would just live as extensions like improvements for social media or yeah, I think that looks these, you know GP G zi
dischargeability. They're going to charge money for now you get a ravaged Rapture. I think an opening. I I made a lot of them. Also
what we'll talk about it was 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.
Look at that time. How hard was that?
Hmm. I think the hard part is like figuring out what you shouldn't add right which is student-built because you don't have time. So you need to build a landing page. Well, you need to make that, you know, you need to build the product actually because it needs to be something that pay for do you need to build a log in system like maybe know, you know, like maybe you can build some Scrappy login system like for photo right you sign up your baby was strapped check out and you get a login link and when I started it was only a login link with a hash and that's just a static link, so it's very easy.
Again, yeah, it's not so safe. You know, what if you like the link and now I have real Google login, but that took like a year. So keeping it very Scrappy is very important to you don't have time. You know, you need to focus on what you can build fast. So money stripe build a product the 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 star of you should use it. No.
He's gets deleted. You know, maybe if you find a problem that a lot of people on Reddit already have on its a brad as you know, like you solve the problem say some people I made this thing that might solve your problem and maybe it's free for now, you know, like that could work, you know, but you need to be very, you know, narrow down what you're feeling time is
limited. Yeah, actually, can we go back to the you laying in a room feeling like a loser? Yeah. I still feel like a loser sometimes what?
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 to feel like a loser. First of all,
especially when you're 27. Yes. Yes Chris. There's like a pcap. Yeah.
I think this is the peak and so I would not kill yourselves is very important. Just get truth, you know, but
Because you have nothing you haven't probably no money. You have no business. You have no job yet you like Journey Peter said this I saw it somewhere like the reason people depressed because I have nothing they don't have a girlfriend. I don't have a boyfriend and I have you need stuff you need like our family you need things around. You need to build a life preserver don't build a life for yourself. You'll be depressed. So if you're alone in Asia in a hostel looking at the ceiling and you don't have any money coming in, you don't have a girlfriend. You don't of course you're depressed is logic but back then if you're in the moment, you think there's not logical something wrong with me, you know.
and also I think I started going I started getting like anxiety and I think I started going live with crazy where I think travel can make you sane and I know this because I know that there's like digital Nomads that they kill themselves and I don't I haven't checked like this the comparison with like Baseline people like soon as I read but I have a
hunch
especially in the beginning when it was a very new thing like 10 years ago that it can be very psychologically texting and you're alone a lot is back then
when you travel alone, there was no other diesel gnome inspect then a lot. So you're in a strange culture you look different and everybody like you're in I was in Asia like you everybody's really nice in Thailand's 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 this
rooted and you're constantly an outcast in this in that you're different from everybody
else exactly, but people treatin tactile and PS so nice, but you still feel like outcasts and then I think that these numbers are met then we're all kind of
It's like shady business, you know, but they were like Vigilantes because it was a new thing like one guy was selling illegal drugs was an american guy was selling illegal drugs via UPS to Americans, you know on this website, they were like a lot of drop shippers doing Shady stuff. There's a lot of shady things going on there and they were they didn't look like very balanced people 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 was like, man, I made a big mistake and then I went back to Holland and then I
got even more depressed. You said digital
Nomad what is digital Nomad? What is that way of life? What is the philosophy there and history of the movement? I struck a bonnet on
accident because I was like, I'm going to graduate University that I'm going to I need to get out of here. I'll fly to Asia because I've been before in Asia. I started in Korea and 2009 like study exchange those occasions easy talents easy. I'll just go there figure things out and it's cheap. It's very cheap Chiang Mai. I would live like $450 per month friends for like a private room pretty good. So I struggled on this on next and I was like, okay, there's other people on laptops working on their star but working.
Better nobody work remotely, but they worked on their businesses, right and they would you know living like Colombia or Thailand or Vietnam or Bali they would live kind of like a cheap places and it looked like a very adventurous life like you travel around you build your business. There's no pressure from like your Home Society right like you're American. So you're you get pressure from America started 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 to and you can get away from this pressure. You can find it kind of
Like you're free, you're kind of there's nobody telling you what to do. But that's also why you start feeling like you go crazy because you are free your disk attached from anything. And anybody you disattached from your culture your disattached from the coast. You're probably in because you're saying very short. I
think Franz Kafka said, I'm free. Therefore. I'm
lost man. This is so true. Yeah. It's exactly the point and yeah freedom is like it's the definition of no constraints right? Like every anything is possible you can go anywhere and
Reason I called it must be super nice, you know like Freedom. You must be very happy and the opposite like I don't think that makes you happy I think oh strange probably make you happy and it's a big lesson. I learned then
but what were they making for money? What so you're saying they're doing Shady stuff that time
for me, you know because I was more like a developer. I wanted to make startups kinda and it was like it was like drugs being shipped to America, like diet pills and stuff like non-fda-approved stuff, you know, and they would like that. There was no like a
Fuck they were like it would save a they would laugh about like all the Dodgers shit kind of they're doing you
know, that part of the okay kind of vibe, you know,
like kind of sleazy calm Vibe. I'm not saying all you comes these, you know, but right but you know this five
it could be a Vibe and your Vibe was more Mabel Mabel Chef. That's the
goal. You're the guys with sports cars and Dubai these people, you know, yes, he cam like bro, you gotta drop ship. Yeah, you make our million a month. Those people was 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 no, no judgment, but there's a foundation that's not quite ethical. And what is that? I don't know what that is. But yeah, I get you. No,
I'd like I don't want to judge. It was more I noted for me. It wasn't my world. It wasn't myself culture. I went to make cool shifts, you know, but they also think they're cool shit is cool. So, you know, but I wanted to make like real like startups and there was my thing. I would read a Hacker News, you know, like Y combinator and they were making cool stuff. So I wanted to make cool
stuff. I mean, that's a pretty cool way of life just
If you were meant to size it for a moment, it's very romantic man. It's very its colorful. You know, like if I think about the memories they would have some happy memories just like working working Cafe is a working and just the freedom that that envelops you for that that way of life because anything is possible you just get off because amazing like we would work but you wouldn't make friends and we would work until you know 6 a.m. In Bali for example with like
We've Andre my best friends who are still my best friend and we would another friend and we would work until like the morning when the sun came up because at night the co-working space was silent, you know, there was nobody else and I would wake up like 6 p.m. Or 5 p.m. I would drive to the co-working space on a motorbike. I would buy like 30 hot lattes from a cafe a money 30 because there was like there was like six people coming or we didn't know sometimes people would come in
and we say 30 30. Yeah.
Yeah
nice and we would drink like four per person or something. You know, man, it's body. I don't know if they were powerful lattes, you know, but they were lattes and would put in plastic bag and I would drive there and all the coffee was like falling, you know everywhere and then we'd go to courses and have this coffee is here and would work all night. We play like techno music and everybody would just work on there like this would let you like business people they would work in a start-up and withhold try and make something and then the sun would come up and the morning people. Do you know the yoga?
Yoga girls in yoga guys with come in, you know after yoga class and six and they say hey good morning, and we're like we look like this, you know, really what's up. How are you doing? And we didn't know how bad we looked you know, but it was very bad and then we'd go home sleeping like a hostel or hotel and do the same thing and again and again and again and it was this locking mode you don't like working and that was very fun.
So it's just a bunch of you techno music blasting all through the night. Yeah more
like,
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 excited I feel but that anxiety is channeled into productivity. But if it's a little too fast, I start the exoti overpowers the
electronic Bass music probably not. No, it's too fast.
I mean for working as a have to play with it. It's like you can actually like I can adjust my yeah level of anxiety is this must be a better word than anxiety.
They got productive anxiety that I like whatever that it was the best
what kind of work you do? Right? Like if you're writing you probably don't want John Bass music, I think for colds like industrial techno this kind of stuff kind of fast. It works. Well because you really get like locked in and put my drift caffeine, you know you go you go deep, you know, and and I think you balance on this edge of anxiety because it's caffeine is also hitting your anxiety. You want to be on the edge of anxiety with this Tecna running. Sometimes it gets too much like stop the Techno stuff.
Music is like but but those are good memories, you know, so like travel memories like you go from City to city and it feels like it's kind of like Jets head life. Like it's feels very beautiful. Like you're you're seeing a lot of cool cities. And
what was your favorite place? Remember leave us a I think
still like Bangkok is the best place and back in Chiang Mai. I think Thailand is very special like I've been to other places like I've been to Vietnam and I've been to South America and stuff. I still think that
And wins in how nice people are how easy of life people have their everything is cheap. Yeah and good. Well Bangkok is an expensive now, but Chiang Mai still cheap. I think when you're starting out, it's a great place man. The air quality socks. It's a big problem. So it's quite hot. But this is a very cool place
pros and cons. I love Brazil. Also
my girlfriend engineering but I do love not just because of that but I like Brazil. The problem still is the safety issue, you know, like
Like in America like it's localized it's hard for Europeans gonna sound like safety is localized to specific areas. So if you go to the right areas, it's amazing. Brazil's amazing. If you go to the wrong areas like you maybe you die, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's true. It's not true in Europe from Europe is much more like a show and
you're right. You're right. This is more averaged out. Yeah, I like it when they're strong neighborhoods. When you like you cross a certain Street and you're in a dangerous part of town man. Yeah this I like it. I like there since
Is in United States like that? Yeah, I like that and you're saying Europe is but you don't feel
scared. Well, I don't know why you'd like DJ
Now know even just that I think dangerous interesting. So yeah danger reveals something about yourself about others also like the full range of humanity. Yeah, so I don't like the mellowed out aspects of humanity. I
friends like these enormous friends that are exactly like this like they go to like the the kind of broken areas, you know, like they like this reality to likes authenticity more. They don't like lat
She didn't like yeah, you know luxury. Yeah, it's very European of you like with
that. That's a whole nother conversation. So you you quoted Freya Stark quote to awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most Pleasant Sensations in the world. Yeah. Do you remember time you're walking in a strange town and felt like that. We're talking about small towns Big Town's or and
anywhere. I think I wrote it in some blog posts.
and like
It was a common thing when you would wake up. And this was like cuz I have this website. I started a website about this deal known as like called Nomad list.com and there was a community so it was like 40,000 other digital Nomads because I was feeling lonely. So I built his website and I stopped feeling lonely. Like I said make organizing meetups and making friends and it was very commonly people say they would wake up and they would forget where they are. Yeah, like for the first half man and had to look outside like where am I which country which sounds really like privilege was more like funny like
like you literally don't know where you are because you're so this rooted but there's something man. It's like Anthony Bourdain, you know, there's something pure about this kind of
Vagabonds travel thing, you know like it's behind me. I think I don't like nachos 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 things 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 make you anxious and I still feel like that. It's a cool feeling it's scary at first, but then you realize where you are and you and I don't know it's like you awaken.
The possibilities of this place because it's like that it's like it's great and it's even when you're doing some basic travel I go to San Francisco something off
here. You have that good novelty effect. Like you're in a new place like here things are possible. You know you you're you don't get bored yet and
And that's why people get addicted to travel, you know
back to startups. You are a book on how to do this thing and gave a great talk on it how to do startups. The books called make bootstrappers handbook. Yeah. I was wondering if you could go through some of the steps. It's idea build launch grow monetize automated exit. There's a lot of fascinating ideas in each one. So idea stage, how do you find a good
idea? So I think you need to be able to spot problems. So for example, you can go in your daily life.
Like when you wake up and you're like what I 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 there's something I can add write code about you know code for and it will make my life easier. So I would say make like a list of all these problems you have and like idea to solve it and see which one is like viable. You can actually do something and then start building
it. So that's a really good place to start.
Become open to all the problems in your life. I guess you start noticing them. I think that's 16 not a trivial thing to do to realize that some aspects of your life could be done way way better. Yeah, as we kind of very quickly get accustomed to discomforts exactly like for example, like doorknobs. Yeah, like design a certain things
like you're like screaming doorknob
without that one. I know how much
incredible design work has gone into is it really interesting doors and door knobs just the Design of Everyday Things forks and spoons. It's going to be hard to come up with a fork that's better than the current. Yeah Fork designs. Yeah, and the other aspect of it is you're saying like in order to come up with interesting ideas. You got to try to live a more interesting life.
Yeah, but that's where travel comes in because when I started traveling or start seeing stuff in other countries that you didn't have in Europe for example, or America, even if you go to Asia,
Like do this for 10 years ago. Nobody knew about this like we chats all these apps that they already had before we had them these everything apps, right? Like now he loves trying to make X this everything act like we chatted same thing like in Indonesia or talent you have one app that you can order 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 tough. For example, you you know that's called like Arbitrage you can go to back to your country.
Build that same app for your country, for example, so you start seeing promise 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 travels uncomfortable, you know airports are horrible airplanes are not comfortable either. This is this a lot of problems you start seeing just getting out of your house, you know,
but also you can I mean in a digital world you can just go into different communities and see what can be improved by the
in that yeah. Yeah, but what specifically is your process of generating ideas do like do idea dumps like you have a document where you just keep
right? Yeah. I used to have like a because when I was when I wasn't making money, I was trying to like make this list of ideas to see like I need to build I was thinking statistically already like I need to build all these things and one of these will work out probably, you know, so I need to have a lot of things to try and I did that right now, I think like because I already have money I can do more things based on technology.
so for example a I when I found out about when stable diffusion came or chatty prettiest of all this thing all these things were like
I didn't start working with them because I had a problem I had no problems, but I was very curious about technology and I was like playing with it and figure out like first is playing with it in and you find something like okay. This generates still effusion generates house is very beautiful and Interiors, you know,
there's less about problem solving is more about the possibilities of new things. You can
create. Yeah, but that was very risky because that's the famous like solution trying to find the problem and use it doesn't work. And that's very common with with starter Farms are free.
They have Tech but actually people don't need to decorate it. Can you actually explain it be cool to talk about some of the stuff you've created? Can you explain this the photo a i.com? Yeah. So it's like fire your photographer. The idea is that you don't need a photographer anymore. You can train yourself as a i model and he can take as many photos you want anywhere in any clothes with X facial expressions like happy or sad or poses all the stuff. So, how does the how does it work?
Yes is he sent me so you can rattling to a gallery of one's done on meat which
is on the left. You have the prompt box. Yeah, so you can write like so model is your model this legs Friedman so you can write like model as a blah blah, whatever you want. Yep, then press the button and it will take for the stick will take like a minute.
What else? What are you using for the hosting for
the compute replicates? Okay, replica.com. They're very very good.
Okay, it's cool like this interface wise, it's cool that you're showing how long it's going to take. This is amazing. So
Taking a presuming. You just loaded in a few pictures from the
internet. Yeah, so I went to Google images tab select Friedman. I added like 10 or 20 images. You can open them in the gallery and you can use your cursor has to yeah, so some don't look like you so they hit or miss rate is like I know say like 50/50 or something, but I was
watching you twist like has been getting better and better and better. It
was very bad in the beginning. It was so bad, but still people signed up to his, you know,
there's there.
To Alexis is great. He's getting more and more sexual. It's making me very uncomfortable
Matt, but that's the problem with these models because now we need to talk about this because the models and sure Fusion. Yeah, so the photo realistic models that are like fine tunes. Yeah, they were all trained in born in the beginning and it was a guy called Hassan. So I was trying to figure out how to do photo realistic AI folders 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
Base models. He's fighting models and people are trading on porn and I would try them and they would be very photo-realistic. They would have bodies that actually made sense like body out Anatomy, but if you look at the photo realistic models that people use now still there still core of born there like of naked people. So I need to prompt out the neck and every need to do this with a I start ups. If Imaging need to prompt out the naked stuff. You need to put a naked you have to keep
reminding the model you need to because not all those on yeah, don't put
naked.
This is very risky. I have Google Vision detects every photo before shown to the user to like
Jekyll nipple. The doctor always have to at least do that
because you get to journalists get very angry if they you know, if you said it was a journalist. I think that we've got angry did use this and was like, oh it made me it showed like a nipple because Google Vision didn't detect it. So there's like these kind of problems you need to deal with, you know, that's what I'm talking about. This is with cats. But look at the cat face is also kind of angles.
I'm a little bit
disturbed me zoom in on the cat if you want like like yeah, it's very sad cuz it doesn't have a
nose. It is ever knows
what this man but this is the problem with the I started because they all act like it's perfect like this groundbreaking and but it's not perfect. It's like really bad, you know half the time
so if I wanted to sort of update model as so your
move this stuff and your rides like whatever you want like in Thailand or something or in Tokyo,
In Tokyo. Yeah,
and then you say like at night with neon lights like you can add more detail
to Michelle. I'll go in Austin. Do you think I'll know? Yeah in Texas in Austin Texas cowboy hats and Texas
has a cowboy.
As a Cowboy is going to go so towards the porn Direction. It's my
hope not just end of my career
or the beginning. It depends what can send you a push notification when your photos are done. All right, cool.
And let's see. Oh, wow. That's so this whole interface. You've built.
Yeah, this is really well to take Carrie. I still use jQuery.
Yes only one. He'll have to this day. You're not the only one the entire width of the web. Yeah this PHP the stacks be
inject your SQL
Lite, 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
Jefferson because of Wordpress, right?
Because the blogs are that's true. Yeah, that's true. I'm seeing a Revival now people are getting sick of Frameworks. Like all the JavaScript Frameworks are so like what he called like wieldy, like they're so thick so much work just maintain this coat and then it updates to a new version you to change everything BHP just stays the same and works. Yeah, and
can you actually just speak to that stack? Use you build all your websites apps startups projects all of that with mostly vanilla HTML. Yeah.
JavaScript jQuery PHP and SQL Lite as so that's a really simple stack and you get stuff done really fast as I 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 I smelled CSS, you know because you make websites and when my startup started taking off I didn't have time to around putting on my to-do list like learn no Jazz because it's important to switch, you know, because
yeah, this obvious is much better language than PHP and I never learned it the never did it because they have time I things were growing like this and I was launching more project and I never had time like one day, you know, I'll I'll start coding properly and I never got to it.
I sometimes wonder if I need to learn that stuff is still to-do item for me to really learn node.js or or flask or these kind of the eggs. Yeah react and it's just it feels like a
The bull 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 who want to get a job and there's like, you know people making stuff like startups if you want to be entrepreneur, probably you maybe shouldn't
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
To learn the new thing this complicated way of software engineering gets in the way. Not sure what to say about that because definitely like you shouldn't build everything from just vanilla JavaScript or vanilla. See, for example. Yeah C++ When You're Building Systems engineering is like there's a lot of benefits for point of safety all that kind of stuff. So, I don't know but it just feels like
You can get so much more stuff done. If you don't care about how you do it
man. This is my most controversial take I think and maybe I'm wrong, but I feel
like
That's Frameworks. Now that raise money. They raised a lot of money like they raise 50 million hundred million trimming Lawler's 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 it is open source, but you probably should use the platform which is bathed to use it and the cost of the platforms to host it are 1000 times higher.
Than just hosting it on a simple AWS server or VPS on digital ocean. Right? So this is obviously like a monetary incentive here. Like we want to get a lot of you developers to use this technology and then we need to charge them money because they're going to use it in startups and then the starters can pay for the bills, but what that it kind of destroys the information out there about learning to code because they you know, they pay YouTubers they pay influencers developing from has a big thing to like
And simply what happens with like nutrition and fitness or something same thing happens in developing the Paris in France to promote the staff use it make stuff with it make demo product with it. And then I love you. 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 want to I would say I was just Beach be jchiarie. Why does it matter and people would start kind of attacking me? Like, why are you not using this new technology this new framework this new thing and I say, I don't know because this PHP Frameworks and I don't really optimizing for anything just do it just works.
And I never understood like why like I understand there's new technologies that are better and it should be Improvement. But I'm very suspicious of money. She's like lobbying. There's money in this developer framework seen that hundreds of millions that goes to ads or influenced or whatever. It can't all go to developers. You don't need so many Developers for framework and it's open source.
To make a lot of more money on these
startups. So that's a really good perspective. But in addition to that is like when you say better.
It's like can we get some data on the better? Because like I want to know from the individual developer perspective and then from a team of five team of ten team of 20 developers. Yeah measure how productive they are and shipping features. How many bugs they create how many security holes
result be was not good in a security for a while, but now
it's games Theory in theory is it though? How is good now at 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 or is it just over represented? Same with WordPress? Yes. There's a reputation that WordPress has a gigantic number of security holes. I don't know if that's true. I 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 questioning the conventional wisdom that keeps one.
Going to push software Engineers towards framework stores are complex. Yeah, like super complicated sort of software engineering approaches that stretched out the the time it takes to actually build the thing
100% And it's the same thing with big corporations that 80% of people don't do anything. It's like right not efficient. And and if you if 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 used to call.
It's just that simple that's pragmatic. That's like that works. That's not overly complicated doesn't make your life like a living hell, you
know and use a framework when it's obviously solves a problem a direct Dom
the of course. Yeah, of course, I'm not saying you should codes without a framework. I'm you should use whatever you want. But
Yeah, I think it's suspicious, you know, and and I think speech when I talk about in the Twitter people like there's a lot of this is Army comes out. You know, this is this framework armies. Yeah, man something my gut tells me
I want to ask the framework. Army would have they built this week CEO on question. What did you do this
weekend? Did you make money with his you know, did you charge users? Is it a real business? And
yeah, so going back to the Cowboy.
First of all, everybody looks like you're right, but some
do every aspect of this isn't pretty
Incredible I'm also just looking at the interface is really well done. So this is all just jQuery. And yeah, this is really well done. So they tell them to take me to the journey of photo a I like you don't know what most of the world doesn't know much about stable diffusion or any of this and you're the generative AI stuff. And so you're thinking okay, how can I build cool stuff with us? Yeah. What was the origin story of photo AI
I think it started to establish Fusion came out just a few things like the first like generative image model a model.
And I started playing with like you could installed on your Mac is like somebody forked it and made it work for MacBooks. So download it and clone the repo start using it to generate images and it was like amazing like it would I found it on Twitter because you see things happen on Twitter and I would post what I was making on Twitter as well and you could make any image. You could write a problems because actually write a prompt and then it generates a photo of that or image of that in any style like they would use like
like artists names to make like a Picasso kind of style and stuff and I was trying to see like what is a good at? It's a good at people know it's really bad at people but it was good at houses. So architecture for example would generate like architecture houses. So I made a website called this house does not exist dot-org and it generated like they called like House born at that one like house porn is like a subreddit. So this was stable Fusion like the first version so it looks really you can click for
Another photo so generates like all these kind of non existing houses. It is house point but it looked kind of goods, you know, like especially back then I really didn't look much better.
This really really
well done.
wow angles to generous like a
description
and you can upvote is it nice avoid it? Yeah, and there's so much to talk to you about like the choices here. It's really
was very Scrappy in the bottom. There's like a ranking of the most up voted houses. So these are the top fold. If you go to old time you see quite beautiful ones.
Yeah, so this one is my favorite. Number one. It's like kind of like a
house 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 to like just continues House born like everything starts looking the same but then I saw it was really good at interior. So I pivoted to Interior a i.com where I tried to like uploads first generate interior designs, and then I tried to do like it was a new technology called.
Has to image where you can input image like a photo and with kind of modify the thing so you see it looks almost the same as photo as the same code essentially nice. So I would upload a photo of my interior where I lived and I would ask like genesis 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 start-up because obviously interior design Ai and nobody's doing that yet. So I launched this and it
Successful and made like in within a week May 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 existing and I model and you fine-tune it on a specific goal you wanted to do so, I would find really beautiful dear design make a gallery and train a new model that was very good interior design and it works and I use that as well and then for fun, I uploaded photos.
Myself and here's where it happened and to train myself like in this would never work obviously and it worked and actually it started understanding me as a concept so my face worked and and you could do like different styles like me as a great cheesy medieval warrior all this stuff. So I was like, this is not a start-up. So now I did Avatar AI dot me I couldn't get the.com and this was just yeah after I added me well now it's four words to photo.
Because a pivot is good, but this was more like cheesy things. So this is very interesting because this went so viral it made like feel like 150k in a week or something some most my ever made and and then big this variance into big fee see companies like Lanza which are much better at iOS stuff to me. I didn't have IOS app. They quickly build IOS app that does the same and they found technology and it's all open technology. So it's good and I think they made like 30 million dollars with it.
Yeah, they became the top grossing
app after that. And that 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
it was a little bit like sad because all my price would work out and I never had like real Fierce competition and I've like Fierce competition from like a very skilled High Talent like I was developer Studio something that and they already had an app. They had an app an app store for like I think retouching your face or something so they were very smart. They add these
There's two there. It's a feature they had the users to do a push notification to everybody. We have this avatars Yeah, 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 I quickly realized it wasn't my thing because it was so cheesy. It was like kids, you know, it's kind of like me as a Barbie or me as a you know, just a cheese I wanted to go for like what's a real problem because solve because this is going to be a hype is going to be and it was a hype this Outdoors.
It's like let's do real photography. Like how can you make people look really photo realistic and it was difficult and that's why he's off this work because they were all like in a Cheesy because so style and art is easy because you interpret the all the problems that AI has with your face are like artistic, you know, if you call it because so but if you make a real photo all the processor your face, like it just you look wrong, you know, so I started making photo AI which was like a pivot of it where it was like a photo studio.
Where you could take photos without actually needing a photographer needing a studio. You don't just you know, you just type it and I've been working on it for like the last
yeah, it's really incredible that journey is really incredible. Let's go to the beginning of photo a I 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 this is a tweet here sold 100,000 dollars in AIG
Serrated avatars and
it's a lot like it's a lot for anybody's a lot for me like making 10K a day on this, you know,
that's amazing that's amazing and then the
nested sweet like this launch tweets and then the before there is like the me hacking on it.
Oh, I see so that
Okay, so October 26th 2022. I trained animal model on my face.
Sure because my eyes are quite far apart I learned when I did YouTube I would put like photo of like my DJ photo, you know my make sure people would say I look like a hammerhead shark looks like the top comments and then I realized my eyes are far apart
as Internet helps you. Yeah, after all how you look you know, boy. Do I love this first trap?
What what is this wait
water from the waterfall but the waterfalls in the back, you know, so what's going
on.
So this is how much of this is real? It's all AI it's all AI That's pretty good though for the early
days exactly. So but this was 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 and more up-to-date pics later. These are the these are the only photos are uploaded. Yeah. Wow.
Wow, okay. So like you were learning all this super quickly. What what are some like interesting details you remember from that time for like what you have to figure out to make it work and for people just listening he uploaded just just a handful of photos that don't really have a good capture the face and he's able to
correct tickets cropped. It's like a crop Guided by the layout but they're they're Square photos that are 512 by 512 M because I simply Fusion
but nevertheless not great captured the face. Yeah like it's not
Not like a collection of several hundred photos that are just like
exactly right Alex. I would imagine that too. When I started I was like, ah, this must be like some 3D scan technology, right? Yeah. So I think the cool thing where I it trains the concept of you so it's literally like learning just like any a I'm on a clearance it learns how you look so I did this and I was getting so many I was getting DM's like telegram messages. Like, how can I do the same thing? I want these photos. My girlfriend was his photos. So I was like, okay, this is obviously business.
But I didn't have time to coat it make a hole like app about it. So I made HTML page register the domain name and this was not even it was a stripe payment link which means you have a little link to stripe to pay but there's no code in the back. So all you know is you have customers that paid money.
Then I added like a some type form link. So type form a society where you can help make create like your own
input from Google forms.
So they would get it email with a link to the type form actually is a link after the checkouts and I could upload their photos. So enter the email upload the photos and launched it and I was like here first till this October 2022
And I think within like the first 24 hours was like I'm not sure it was like a thousand customers coming but the problem was I didn't have code to automate this. So I have to do manually so the first few hundred I just literally took their photos train them and then I would generate the photos with the problems and had this text follow the prompts and I'll do everything manually and this be quickly became way too much. So but that's another constraint like I was forced to
Go something up that would do that and that was essentially making it into a real
website. Right? So the first was the type form and they uploaded through the type strap check out damage and then you will like that image is downloaded you write a script to
export not without download image of myself. This is your fault unzip listen
file. You unzipped it on
someone but yes, and then I know I'm because you know, do things don't skill Paul Graham says, right so and then I would trade and I would email them the photos of him for my personal email. So here's your here's your outfit.
Writing and they liked it. They were like, wow, it's amazing.
You emailed them with your personal email didn't have email
address on this domain
and this is like 100
people. Yeah, and then, you know who signed up like a man cannot say but really famous people like really really like billionaires famous deck 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 sides. You know, he's like, yeah amazing app great work. So it's like this is different and normal
reaction, you know.
As Bill Gates, isn't
it?
Can I say?
Just like shirtless pic
GDP are you know their privacy right European regulation? I'm not sure 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 want but then also about this height. 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 was that to figure out?
Okay, so that's
Actually in many ways the easiest thing because there is all these platforms already back then it was platforms for fine-tuned still diffusion. Like now I use replicates back. Then I use different platforms which was funny because that platform when this thing took off, I would tweet because that we'd always like how much money these websites make and then sort of the occult vendor right the digi the platform that the gpus they increase the price for training from three dollars twenty dollars after they saw that I was making so much money so immediately my profit
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 three dollars is a yeah, maybe in the future. We're looking at it right now. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like you just took all my money, you know and they're
smart. Well, they're not that smart because like you're also have a large platform and a lot of people respect you so you can literally come out and say that
they're gonna think it's like kind of dirty to cancel a company or something. I prefer just bringing my business elsewhere, but there was no alright, we're back then right. So I
started talking to other AI model ml platform. So replicated on those platforms and I started the I'm going to CEO say can you please create like it's called dream move this fine-tuning of you yourself. Okay at this to your side because I need this because I'm being prize guards and he said no because it takes too long to wrong takes half an hour to run and we don't have the GPS for it. I said, please please please no, no after week. You said we're doing it. We're launching this and then this company became it was like not very famous comedy became very famous with this stuff.
Because suddenly everybody was like, oh we can build similar apps like Avatar apps and every sort of building off their apps and everybody started using replicate for it and it was from this early DMS with like to see your like been first, very nice guy and he was like, they never prize. Gosh me to never treated me bad. They always been very nice. It's a very cool company so you can run any ml model. Anyway, I model LMS you can run on there
and you can scale. Yes, it's Kill Ya
and I mean you can do now you can click on the model and just run it over.
Ready? 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 generated images generate externally video generate music generate video like the line 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 rest of even looks weird. Now it started as like a machine learning platform. That was like, I didn't even understand what it did. It was just to
220 ml you know, like you would understand his urine ml world. I wouldn't
Alex Noob friendly. Yeah, exactly
and I do know how to work and but I knew that they could probably do this and they did it they build the models and now I use them for everything and we trained like think now like 36,000 models for 6,000 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 - so many hex the heck. It's like honored hex to make it work. What?
What's what does he get my secrets night? Well, not not the secrets but the more like insights maybe about the human face and the human body like what kind of stuff gets messed up bought
I think people man is living people don't know how they look so yeah, they generate photos of themselves and then they say, oh, it doesn't look like me. Yeah, but it doesn't, you know, you can check the training for us. It does look like you you don't know how you look so there's a face dysmorphia of yourself that you have.
Are you look? Yeah, that's hilarious. I mean, I've got to one of the least Pleasant activities of my existence is having to listen to my voice and look at my face. So I get to like really really have to sort of coming to terms with the reality of how I look and how I see
everybody and what people
often don't rightly know you have a distorted view
perspective. I know that like I would if I would make a selfie how I think I look good. That's nice other people think that's not nice.
Nice, but then they make a fool out of me. I'm like the super ugly but then you're like no that's how you look at you look nice, you know. So how other people see you is nice. So you need to ask other people to choose your photos. Yeah, you shouldn't choose them yourself. If you don't know how you look.
Hey, you don't know what makes you interesting. What makes you attractive World stuff and a lot of us. This is dark aspect of psychology. We focus on some small flaws. Yeah. This is why I hate plastic surgery. For example, people try to remove the flaws when the flaws of the thing that makes you interesting.
Attractive I learned from the hammerhead shark
eyes this stuff about you that looks ugly to you and it's probably that was Make You original make sure nice and people like it about you. Yeah, and it's not like, oh my God and people notice if people notice your Hammer had ice, you know, but it's like that's me. That's my face. So I love myself and that's confidence and confidence attractive. Yes, right
coughing 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.
We'll all that. Yeah, and obviously different from men and women of different ages all this kind of stuff but be Underneath It All the personality all of that when the face comes alive that also is the thing that makes you beautiful. Yeah. But anyway, you have to figure all that out with
AI ya one thing that worked was like people would upload full-body photos themselves. So I would crop the face right because then the model new better that we're training mostly the face here, but then I started losing resemblance of the body because some
For skinny some of your 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 automatic like and I know that other people they use again a i models to detect like what are the best photos in this training set and I'm trained on those but it's all it's all about training data and it's with everything in a I 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 this abuse like
The
Gold's give any guidelines for people of like how to get good data how to give good data to find to know
like the photo should be diverse. So for example, if I only upload photos with a brown shirt or green shirts the multiple think that I'm training the green shirts. So the things that are the same every photo are two concepts that are trains what you want is to your face to be the concept of strains and everything else to be diverse like different
so diverse lighting as well there were several.
Outside inside but there's no like this problem. There's no like manual for this and nobody knew we were all just special to you scroll 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 karpati I think says this like we don't really know how this thing works, but it does something but nobody really knows why right like we can't look,
Into the model of an llm. Like what is actually in there. We just know it's like a 3D Matrix of numbers, right? So it's very frustrating because some things you there would be you think they're obvious that it will improve things will make it worse and so many parameters you can speak. 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 what tries to break thing apart and there shall how it works.
But you know, there's also the data at side in the actual like consumer facing products side of figuring out how you get it to generate a thing that's beautiful or interesting or naturalistic all that kind of stuff and you're like at the Forefront of figuring that out about the human face and humans really care about the human face and very vain
like me, you know, like I want to look good in your podcast. We're gonna yeah
for sure and one of the things I actually would love to like rigorously use Photo AI
Hi, because for the thumbnails I take portraits of people I didn't know shit about photography. I basically used your approach for photography. I like Google how do you take photographs camera lighting and also it's tough because maybe you could speak to this also, but like with photography no offense to any their true artist great photographers, but like people like take themselves way too. Seriously think you need
Whole lot of equipment you definitely don't want one light you need like five lights like and you have to have like the lenses and I talked to a guy an expert of shaping the sound in a room. Okay, and I because I was thinking I'm gonna do a podcast Studio whatever I should probably like treat the do a sound treatment on the room and like when he showed up and
Analyze 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, which
I think I said Thank you. Thank you very much. I just I just felt like there is you know, focus on whatever the problems are use your own judgment use your own instincts. Don't listen to other people and only consult other people when there's a specific problem and you consult them not to offload the problem.
A 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 pH green jQuery. So she's from PHP Studio. I got a little suitcase. I use like just the basic sort of consumer type of stuff one light. It's great
and look at you. You're not one of the top guys 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 really well or also that a lot of these things don't matter like what matters is probably contents of the podcast like you get interesting
guest focused on stuff that matters.
Yeah, and I think this is very common the called gear acquisition syndrome like gasps like people in any industry do this. They just buy all the stuff. There was a meme reason like you but what's the name for the guy that buys all the stuff before I even started doing the habanero?
Marketing, you know marketing does that to people they want to buy this stuff? Yeah, but like man, you can make it you can make a Hollywood movie on an iPhone, you know, if the content is good enough it ends will probably be original because you would be using an iPhone for it, you know,
so that said I so the reason I brought that up with photography.
There is wisdom from people and one of the one of the things I realized you probably also realized this but how much power light has?
To convey emotion. They just take one light and move it around says you sitting the darkness move it around your face. The different positions are having a second life. Potentially. You can play with how a person feels just from a generic base. It's interesting. Like you can make people attractive you can make them ugly. You can make them scary. You can make them lonely all of this. And so you kind of real start to realize this and I would definitely love AI help in creating great.
Portraits of people to get guests 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. Yeah, what makes their appearance bar for some ways. Sometimes it's the eyes often times. It's the eyes but there's certain features of the face can sometimes be really powerful and I can't it's also kind of
Course
for me to take photographs, so I'm not collecting enough. Yeah photographs for myself to do it who just those photographs if I can load that off onto a i and then start to play with like writing you should do
this and you should probably do it yourself and you can use Photoshop but it's even more fun if you do it yourself. So you training models you can learn about the control net control. This is where for example your photos in your Puff Girls are usually like from the angle, right so you can create a control on that Facebook post.
There's always like this. So every model every 40 generated uses this control Nets pose. For example, I think will be very fun for you to try out this new
play with lighting at all. Do you play with lighting? So close with them
an extra dislike 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 things called relight and it's amazing like you can you can upload kind of like a light map for example
It's purple blue and use the light map to change the light on the phone to you you inputs amazing. So this for sure lost of you can do
what's your advice for people in general on how to learn all the state-of-the-art AI tools available? Like you mentioned the new models coming out all the time. Yeah, like what the how do you pay attention? How do you stay
on top of everything? I think you need to join Twitter X, you know X is amazing now and the whole AI Industries on X and
They're all like animated avatars. So it's funny because my friends asked me this like what 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 some Euro and they all start laughing like what is this but they're real like people hacking around the eye they get hired by big companies and their on X and most of them are non Amis is very funny. They these anime Afters I don't but those people have
Around and they publish what they're discovering the world papers, for example, so yeah, definitely
X is great almost exclusively all the people. I follow Rai people. Yeah. It's a good time now. Well it but also just brings happiness to my to my soul because there's so much turmoil on Twitter.
Yeah, like politics and stuff. There's battles going on. It's
like a war zone and it's nice to just go into this happy place to where people are building
stuff.
Oh, yeah on a 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 going to make something too. It's just super fun. And so if you want to start going X and then I would go to replicate and start trying to play with models. And when you have something that kind of you manually enter stuff you set the parameters, so I'm going to works you can make it up out of it or website. Can you
speak a little bit more too?
The process of a becoming better and better and better
photo are so I had this Photograph and a lot of people using it there was like a million or more folders a month being generated and I discovered I was testing parameters like increase the step Downs of generating photo or changing the sampler like a scheduler like you have DPM two colors all these things. I don't know anything about but I know he did you can choose them and you generate image and have different resulting images, but I didn't know which one we're better so we'll do it myself tested, but it was like, why don't I test on
These users because I have a million photos generate. Anyway, so unlike 10% of 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 favorite or like the photo and then with A/B test and you test for significance to stuff which parameters where we're better and which were worse.
So you search starting to figure out which Which models are actually working
exactly then if it's significant of data you switch to that for the whole, you know,
The users and so that was there was like the Breakthrough to make it better just use the users to improve themselves and I tell them when they sign up we do sampling. We do testing on your photos of random parameters and that worked really well. I don't do a lot of testing anymore because it's like I kind of reached like a diminishing point where it's like it's kind of good but that's there was a breakthrough year.
So it's really about the parameter the models that use in letting the users help do the search in the space of models and parameters for you. Yeah,
but actually so like
Emily Fusion I use 1.5 2.0 pick came out as stable Fusion Excel came out all these new versions and they're all worse. And so the core scene of people are still using 1.5 because it's like it's also not like what you called neutered like they neutered like to make it super like it was safety features and stuff. So most of the people are still on still effusion 125 and meanwhile stable diffusion. The company went like the CEO left a lot of drama happens because
To make money and so they gave it very instant. I gave us this this open source model that everybody uses. They raised like hundreds millions of dollars it all they didn't make any money if they're not a lots they did an amazing job and now everybody uses open source model for free and they did, you know, it's amazing like it's it's amazing. You're not even using the latest one your snow and the strange thing is that this comedy raised hundreds of millions, but the people that are benefiting from that are really small like people like me who make these small apps that are using the model
And now it's turned to charge money for the new models, but the new models are not so good for
people do not so open source, right? Yes. It's interesting because open source is so impactful in the AI space where you wonder like what is the business model behind that but it's enabling this whole ecosystem of companies that yeah, they're using the open source
model. It's kind of like this Frameworks, but then they didn't, you know, bribe enough. Everyone has to use it and they didn't charge money for the
platform, you know? Okay, so back to your book and the ideas
Wouldn't even get to the first step generating ideas. So you had no book and you're throwing it up. How do you know when ideas a good one? Like what you have this just flood of ideas. How do you pick the one the actually
try to build menu? Mostly? You don't know like mostly I choose the ones that are most viable for me to build like I cannot build a space company now right would be quite challenging, but I
can build kimchi right 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. It's all you need is like the robot that goes to the asteroid, you know and Robotics interesting like I want to also learn robotics. So maybe that could
be I think both the asteroid mining in the robotics. Yeah together.
Now exactly this is it. This is we do this not because it's easy, but because we thought it would be easy exactly this me with me. Let's move asteroid mining exactly. That's why I should
do this. It's not Nomad list.com it. No, it's not it's not just reminding you have to like build stuff you have to a gravity is really hard to overcome.
Yeah, but it seems man. I sounds like it is probably not but it sounds quite approachable like relatively brushable. You don't have to build the Rockers you
do you use something like
SpaceX to send your you know this dog robot, there's whatever
so is there actually exist in Notebook? What you wrote down asteroid mining are used back then use Trello
fella, but now I don't really use telegram rather than like saved messages. I have like idea arrived on
time to yourself until
you know, like because you use WhatsApp, right? I think so you have like message to yourself Fingal. So yeah. So yeah, so notice our self on telegram. Yeah use like a notepad not forget stuff and I've been it's you know,
I love how like you're not using super complicated systems or whatever.
You know people use obsidian now, there's a lot of these notion that we have systems for note-taking. You're not your notepad your notepad.exe guy. If you're those user
man, I saw some YouTubers doing this like there's a lot of these productivity gurus also and they do this whole like iPad was a pencil and then I also had an iPad and also got depends when I got this app where you can like draw on paper like draw like a calendar, you know, like like people students uses and you coloring and stuff.
I'm like dude I did this for a week and I'm like, what am I doing? My life? Like I could just write it as a message to myself and it's good enough, you know
speaking of ideas. You shared a tweet explaining why the first idea is sometimes might be a brilliant idea. The reason for this you think is the first idea submerges from your subconscious was actually boiling your brain for weeks months sometimes years in the background. They eight hours of thinking can never compete with the Perpetual subconscious background job. So this is the idea that if you think about an idea 48 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 like that emerges. I wrote it wrong because I don't know. I'm not native English, but it emerges from your subconscious Right comes from the like a water is your subconscious in here is boiling and then when it's ready, it's like Ting second microwave comes out and there you have your idea. You think you have ideas like that? Yeah all the time. I'm
sense. It's just stuff. That's been like they're yes.
Yeah, and I also
Comes up and bring it as send it back, you know, like the back to the kitchen already oil more. Yeah as like a soup that of ideas is cooking is Harbison. This is how my brain works and I think most people
but it's also about the the timing sometimes you have to send it back not just because you're not ready, but the world is not
ready. Yeah. So many times like started phones are too early with their idea. Yeah,
100% robotics is an interesting one for that because like there's been a lot of Robotics companies that failed. Yeah because it's been very difficult to build.
The revised 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 the see if there's this long line or robotics companies, they've tried that Big Dreams and they failed. Yeah like Boston Dynamics. I
still don't know what they're doing, but they always upload YouTube videos and it's amazing, but I feel like a lot of these companies don't have it's like a solution looking for a problem for now, you know military obviously these uses but like
And when do I need like a robotic dog now for my house? I don't know like it's fun, but it doesn't really solve anything yet. I feel the same kind of er, like it's really cool like a provision Pros very cool doesn't really solve something from me yet. And that's kind of the deck looking for a solution. Right? But one day we'll
when the personal computer on the Mac came along. There's a big switch that happened. It's somehow Captivate everybody's imagination. You could like the application to killer apps became apparent.
You can type in a
computer detect became apparent like immediately back then they also have like this thing. We like we don't need these computers are like a hype and and also went like in kind of like, you
know, yes. Yeah, but the hype is the thing that allowed the thing to proliferate sufficiently to where people's minds would start opening up to it a little bit the possibility of the right now, for example for with the robotics. There's very few robots in the homes of people exactly. Yeah the robots that are there are roombas.
The vacuum cleaners or their Amazon Alexa. Yeah or
dishwasher means essentially a robot.
Yes, but the intelligence is very limited. I guess is one way we can summarize all of them except Alexa, which is pretty intelligent but is limited with the kind of ways and interacts with you lets you know, that that's just one example. Yeah, I sometimes think about that is like if some people in this world where
kind of born in the whole existence is like
They were meant to build the thing, you know, thank you. Sometimes wonder like what might what I was meant to do. You have these plans for your life. You have these dreams.
I think I meant to build robots Okay
me first maybe maybe that's a sense of fire, but it could be other things. It could hilariously not be the thing I was meant to be is to talk to people. Yeah, which is weird because I always was anxious about
talking to people. It's like a really yeah, I'm scared of this I was scared is yeah exactly a better view. He's just excited throughout social interaction in general. I'm an introvert the hides from the world. So yeah, it's really strange. Yeah, but
it's also kind of life like life brings you to it's very hard to superintend Lee kind of choose what you're going to do with your life. It's more like surfing you're surfing the waves you go on the notion. 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, LOL yourself to be carried away. By the way is exactly. Yeah.
Have you felt that way in your life?
Yeah all the time like yeah, that's like I think that's the best way to live your
life. So Allah, whatever to happen. Like, you know what you're doing the next few years. Is it possible that will be completely like changed
possibly I think relationships that you want to hold a relationship that you want to hold your girl when you want to become why even all this stuff but you shoot I think you should stay open to where like we're somewhere 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
I swear you will get you will get sent by the waves to somewhere where you only for example where you're going to do. I think it's a really good way to live your life. If 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 loose and I things will happen. When you do mushrooms may do drugs like a psychedelic drugs the people that starts that are not control freaks get bad trips, right because you need to let go like I'm pretty control freak actually and when I
Mushrooms when I was 17, I was very good and then at the end of wasn't so good because I tried to control this guy God now it's going too much. You know now I need to let stop bro. You can't stop you need to go through with it, you know, and so I think it's a good metaphor for life. I think that's you know, very tranquil way to lead your life.
Yeah, actually when I took Ayahuasca that lesson is deeply within me already. They can't control anything and I probably learned that the most in Jiu-Jitsu
so just let go relax. Yeah, that's why I hadn't just an incredible experience. There's like literally no negative aspect of my Ayahuasca experience or any psychedelics I've ever had some of that could be with my biology my genetics whatever but some of it was just not trying to control and yeah just surf the way for sure
laughing most stress in life comes from trying to control.
So once you have the idea, yeah step to build. How do you think about building The Thing Once you have the idea,
I think you should build with the technology that you know, so for example Nomad lists, which is like this website. I made to figure out the best city to live and work as digital Nomads. It wasn't a website launched as a Google spreadsheet. So it was a public Google spreadsheet anybody could edit and I was like, I'm collecting like cities where we're can live as if numbers with the internet speeds the cost of living.
Other stuff and I would have tweeted it and I would and it back then I didn't have a lot of followers. I'd like a few thousand followers on me and I went like viral for my skill viral back Daniel, which was like five retweets and and a lot of people started editing it and there was like hundreds of cities in this list like from all over the world with all the data was very crowd-sourced and then I made that into a website. So figure out like what technology can use that you already know. So if you can't go GPU spreadsheet if you cannot use a spreadsheet like what
However, you can always use for example a web site generator like weeks or something or Squarespace. Right? Like you don't need the code to build a startup. All you need is a idea for products build something like a landing page or something Buddhist right button on there and then make it and if you can't go to use the language that you already, you know and start coding with that and see how far you can get you can always rewrite the code later like the tech stack is not excuse of them. It's not the most important of a business when you start a business the important thing is that you
Validate that there's a market that there's a product that people want to pay for. So use whatever you can use and if you can't go to use, you know, spreadsheets landing page generators, whatever. Yeah and in the
crowdsourcing Elm is fascinating, it's cool. It's cool. When a lot of people start using it you get to learn so fast. Yeah, like I've actually did the spreadsheet thing share a spreadsheet publicly.
And I made it editable. Yeah, it's
so cool things things started
happening. Yeah, I did it for like a workout things. I was doing a large amount of push-ups and pull-ups. Oh, yeah. I remember this man and like and and wall side Google Sheets is pretty Limited in that everything is allowed so people could just write anything and then you sell and they can create new sheets. Yeah new tabs and he just exploded and one of the things that were I really enjoyed is there's very few trolls.
No, because actually other people would delete the trolls there would be like this weird are more like of they want like to protect the thing. It's an immune system that's inherent to the
thing because the society now and it's
precious and then there's the outcast who go to the bottom of the spreadsheet and they would try to hide messages and they like, I don't want to be with the cool kids up at the top of the spreadsheet. So I'm going to the bottom of it. Yes. It's as fast I mean, but that kind of crowd sourcing element is really powerful.
And if you can create a product that you use that as a to his benefit, it's really nice. Like any kind of voting system a kind of rating system for A and B. Testing is really really really fascinating. So 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've 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 and the blog post. He can explain what HUD Maps is and what school like this all along was
so I was traveling and I was still trying to find like problems. Right and I would go out I've discovered like everybody's experience of a city's different because they say in different areas. Yeah, so I'm from Amsterdam and when I grew up in a time where another group I live there University. I knew it it's Center is like Europe dissenters are always.
These areas so they're super busy. They're not very authentic the code to not really Dutch culture is Amsterdam to or skills, you know, so when people would travel dreams I would say don't go to the center go to south east of the center you're down or the pipe or something more hipster areas. Like it would more authentic culture of Amsterdam with us 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 at you have like areas that are like color code.
I'd like red is tourists green is rich in a green money yellows hipster. He can figure out where you need to go in the city when you travel because I was traveling a lot. I wanted to go to
the cool spots. So just use your color color. Yeah. Yeah, and I would
use a canvas so I thought okay what I need I
need to did you know that you would be using a canvas?
No, I didn't know it was possible because I didn't know some of
this is cool. This is cool that people should really check it out started because like you're honestly capture so beautifully The Humbling aspects of the embarrassing a
So like not knowing what to do. So, how do I how do I do this? And you like document yourself? Yeah, you're right dude. I feel embarrassed about myself. It's called being alive. Nice. So you like you don't know anything about canvas is away HTTP HTML 5 thing that allows you to draw
shit drop images just drop pixels actually. So yeah, and that's there were special back then because before you get only have like elements, right?
So you want to draw a pixel use a compass and I knew I needed to draw pixels because I need to draw these colors and I felt like okay, I'll get like a Google Maps iframe embeds and then I'll put it Dave on top of it with the colors and I'll do like opacity 50, you know, so it's kind of shows. So I did that with compost and then I started drawing and then I felt like obviously other people need to edit this because I cannot draw all these things myself. So I crowdsource it again and I would draw on the map and then it would send.
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 with calculate or every day with calculate like okay. So am some Center there's like six people say it's tourists this part of the center, but two people say it's like hipster. Okay. So the tourist part wins, right? It's just an array so find the most common value in a little pixel area on a map. So so that serves most people say Stewart is tourists and becomes red and I'll do that for, you know, all the GPS coordinates.
In the world. Ok, just ya
know. If I do you have to be as a human that's contributing to this. You have to be in that location to make the label or
not. People just type in cities and go like go berserk and start drawing every where
would they draw shapes with a draw pigs
man it drew that crazy stuff like offensive symbols. I kind of mentioned they would draw
penises. I mean that's that's obviously that's a guy would do the same thing draw penises. That's the first thing when I show up to Mars and there's no cameras. I'm drawing the cleanest on the
stand. I did in the snow, you know, but the penis is did not become a
Umm, because I knew that not everybody would draw a penis and nothing the same place. So most people would use it fairly. So just if I had enough crowdsource data, so you have all these pixels on top of it like a layer of pixels any choose the most common pixel. So yeah, it's just like a bowl but in visual format and it works and we didn't we got enough data and and it was like cities that did really well at Los Angeles. A lot of people are using it like most data's in Los
Angeles because Los Angeles is has
Is defined neighborhoods? Yeah and not just in terms of the official labels, but like what they're known for. Yeah, what are the dupe? Did you provide the categories that they were allowed to use as labels the colors? Yeah, let's
color. So just like and you can see there. There's like hipster tourist Rich business. There's always a business area right under the residential resistance gray. So I thought those were the most common things in the city kind
of and a little bit me me like, it's almost fun too late.
It
as yeah, I mean, obviously it's simplified and it's but you need to simplify the stuffing or you don't have too many calories and is essentially is like using a you know paint brush where you select the color in the bottom, you set the category and start drawing. There's no instruction is no manual and then I also added tagging so people could like write something on a specific location. So don't go here or like here's like nice cafes and stuff and man the memes that came from that and I also added uploading so that the
tax could be uploaded. So the memes that came from that is like amazing, like people in Los Angeles with rides crazy stuff. It would go viral in all these cities. You can allow allow your location and will probably send you to Austin.
Okay, so we're looking boy drunk hipsters.
Are bro Ambrose
Ambrose hipster girls who do cocaine?
I saw a guy in a single action. Get beaten up here. Yep.
That seems also African price an underwhelming. Let me see that make sure this is accurate. Let's see.
36 for people who know Austin know that that's important to label the Sixth Street is famous in Austin dirty 6 drunk Frat Boys accurate drunk frat Bros continued on six very well Narrows West 6th drunk douche Bros for Fred to 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.
District
exercise freaks on the river. It is true dog Runners
Acura saw a guy in the fish cost him get beat up here. I want to know
the story like
so that's that's all user-contributed. Yeah, and that's like stuff I
couldn't come up with it because I don't know Austin. I don't know the memes your self cultures
and then me as a user can upload or download this. So this is completely
crossed like this because of read it, you know up or down vote because from there
that's really really really powerful single people with dogs.
At which point to go from colors to the actually showing the
text. I figured out of the text like a week week after and so here's like the
pixels. So it's really cool the pixels. How do you go from that? There's a huge amount of data. So there's yeah we're now looking at an image where it's just a sea of pixels that call a different colors in a city. So how do you combine that to be a thing that actually makes it some sense?
I think here the problem was that you have this data, but it's like it's not locked to one location.
Haitian yeah, so I have to normalize it. So when you click when you draw on a map it will show you the specific pixel location and you can convert the pixel location to GPS coordinates, right like latitudes longitudes, but the number will have a lot of commas or a lot of decimals, right because it's very specific like it's like this specific part of the table. So what you want to do is you want to take that pixel and you want to normalize it by removing like decimals, which I discovered so that you're talking about this neighborhoods 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 added.
Going to like a grid and then you have like a grid of data you get like a pixel map kind of
and you said it looks kind of ugly. So then you smooth it.
Yeah, I started adding blurring and stuff. I think now it's not smooth again because I liked it better people like the pixel look on. Yeah a lot of people use it and it keeps going viral and every time my maps Bill like matte box. I had to use stop using you first use Google Maps. It went viral and Google Maps. It was out of credits. So I
And I had to stuff on it during when I launched it went viral Google Maps the map didn't load anymore. It says over limits. You need to contact Enterprise sales and I'm like, but I need now like a map. So and I don't want to call the Enterprise sales. I don't want to go on a call scheduled with some counter. So I switch to Map box and then at my books for years and then it went viral and I had a bill for twenty thousand dollars was like last year so they helped me with the Builder said, you know, you can pay less and then I
Now switch to like open source kind of a platform. So it's very expensive products and never made any dollar money, but very fun, but it's very expensive. What do you learn
from that so like from that experience because when you leverage somebody else's or through the API? Yeah. I 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. Yes, go super complicated.
I
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. Then it's
hasn't worked you talked about like possibly doing advertisements on it or something. Yeah, but our people sponsoring. Yeah, but it's really surprising to me that people don't want to advertise on it. I think
map apps are very hard to like monetize. Like Google Maps also doesn't really make money like sometimes you see these ads but I don't think there's a lot of money there 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 as kind of a little part of normal is like a put it on normal lives in the cities as well. But I also realize that you don't need to mount this everything like some products just cool and you know, it's like it's cool to have good maps exist. I want this to exist
right? Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff. You've created that I'm just glad exist in this world. That's true. And so whole another puzzle and I surprised to figure out how to make money off of it. I'm surprised Maps don't make
Money, but you're right. It's hard to make money because there's there's a lot of computer quiet actually bring it
to life. So where do you put the atom? Right? Like if you have a website you can put like an ad box or you can do like a product placement or something, but you talked about a map app that we're 90% of interface is a map. So what you're going to do you're going to like like it's hard to figure out. Where is this? Yeah,
and people don't want to pay for
it now exactly because if you make people pay for it, you lose 99% the user base and you lose the crossroads data, so it's not fun anymore.
It stops being accurate, right? So you kind of they pay for it by crowdsourcing the data. But then yeah, it's fine. You know, it doesn't make money but
it's cool. But that said Nomad list makes money. Yeah. So what was the story behind no
medalist. So now I'm at least started because I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand, which is not like the second City here and I was you know working on my laptop. I met like I don't know Miss there and I was like, okay this seems like a cool thing to do like work.
On your laptop and different country kind of travel around but back then the internet everyone was very slow. So they there was fasting for example Holland or United States, but in a lot of parts in South America or Asia was very slow like 0.5 MB so you couldn't watch a YouTube video Silent weirdly. I'd like quite fast internet, but I wanted to find like other cities where I could go to like work on my laptop, whatever and travel and but we needed like fastens and so on.
Lets you know crowdsource this information with a spreadsheet and I also need to know the cost of living because I didn't have a lot of money at $500 a month. So I had to find a place where like the rent was like, you know $200 from over somewhere at you know, some money that I could actually read something and there was no more lists and it still runs now. I think it's now almost 10 years. So just to describe how it works like yeah. I'm looking at Chiang Mai here. There's a total score strike number two. Yeah. It's like a normal score 4.8 to 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 speaking. It's awesome. It's awesome walkability and keep hitting stuff because for certain groups of people certain things really matter and this is really cool. Yeah happy.
I'd love to ask about that not life free Wi-Fi AC female-friendly freedom of speech
and not so good. In fact, you know
values derived for National statistics my first like how that 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 speech between Bangkok or Chiang Mai. I know different Islands. I
mean, this is really fascinating. So this is for City. Yeah. It's basically rating all the different things that matter to an internet and this
Is all crowd-sourced
well so started crowdsource, but then I realized that you can download more accurate data sets from like public sources like World Bank. They have a lot of public data sets United Nations and you can download a lot of data there, but you can you know free to use like I started gettin Frost across those data where for example people from India, they really love India and they would submit the best scores for everything in India and not just like one person but like a lot
Of people they would love to pump India and I'm like, I love India to you know, but that's not valid data. So you started getting discrepancies in the data between people where people wear from and stuff. So I started switching to datasets and now it's mostly data sets. But one thing to still crowdsource is people add where they are. They're at their travels to their profile and 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 nomads.
Who are there you can click on the city you can click on people you can see the people the users are actually there and there's like 30,000 40,000 members. So these people are also now
and 1800 remote work is an awesome 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 30 at 30 per month. So it's like one meet up a day and I don't do anything they organized themselves. So I just it's the whole
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 race wedding humid. Now difficult to make it
difficult to make friends interesting right didn't know that difficult to make
friends with the salt crowds with but mostly it's Pros. Yeah, I'll suppress a faster and I understand why it says not safe for
women to check the dataset is feel safe the problem with a lot of plays like United States is that it depends per area right if you get like,
City level data or Nation level data. It's like Brazil is the worst because the range in like safe and wealthy and not safe is like huge so you can't say many things about
Brazil. So once I actually show up to say, how do you figure out what what are like where to get fast internet? For example, like for me is all this consistently a struggle to figure out my cool hotels with fast Wi-Fi, for example, like I'm place. Okay. I show up those City.
There's a lot of fascinating puzzles. I haven't figured out a way to actually solve this puzzle when I show up to a city figuring out where I can get fast internet connection and for podcasting purposes where I can find a place with a table that's quiet. Right? It's not easy structure songs all kinds of sauce yet to learn about all the source of the sounds in the world and also like the the quality of the room because the more if the
The room and like if it's just walls without any curtains or any of this kind of stuff than theirs or echoes in the room anyway, but you figure out that a lot of hotels don't have tables then I'll have like normals we're desk, right? Yeah. They've just another Center table. Yep, and if you want to get a nicer hotel with it's more spacious and so on. They usually have these like Boutique like fancy looking like modernist annoying tables. They don't have to design is to design. They're not real table.
What are you getting at here buy a Kia? Yeah,
before you arrive you order an Ikea like Nomads do this. They get
desks. I feel like you should be able to show off their place and have have the desk like it's not unless you stay in there for a long time. Just thought the entire assembly all that are being be is so unreliable. It's the the ranging quality that you get is as huge hotels have a lot of problems pros and cons like hotels have the problem that the pictures somehow never have good.
The pictures of what's actually going to be in the room and that's the problem like and you take photos man. If I could have the kind of data you have a nomad list for hotels. Yeah, and I feel like you can make a lot of money on that too.
Yeah the book if he's a Phillies, 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 the 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 is you some more expensive summer cheaper and so on but you can get the details of what's in the room. Like what's the actual layout of the room? What is the view of the scanner? It's I feel like as a hotel you can win a lot. So first you create a service that allows you to have like high resolution data bought a hotel then one hotel signs up for that. I would 100% use that website to look for a hotel instead of the crappy Alternatives that don't give any information and I feel like
They'll be this pressure for all the hotels to join that site and you can make a shit ton of money because hotels make a lot of
money. I think it's your with the problem is with these hotels like it's it's same with airline industry. Why does every Airline website suck we try book because slides yes, very strange. Like why does it have to talk? 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 I need to buy a book for some Qatar airlines 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 and that's why this process always sucks so much before dolls an airline websites and stuff because they don't have an incentive to improve it because generally only for like a super upper segment of the market. I think like super high luxury. It affects the actual booking
right I do.
I think that that's an interesting Theory I think there must be a different Theory. My theory would be that great Engineers like great software Engineers are not allowed to make changes. Yeah, basically like there's some kind of bureaucracy. There's way too many managers. There's a lot of bureaucracy and great Engineers show up to try to work there and they get they're not allowed to really make any contributions and then they leave and so you have a lot of mediocre software Engineers. They're not really interested in proving any other thing and like literally they would like to
Approve the stuff but the bureaucracy of the place plus all the bosses all the high up. People are not technical people probably. Yeah. They don't know much about what webdev 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 great programmer, would you want to work at American Airlines or no?
Now I'm torn on that because that I actually had somebody lost program would love to work at American Airlines so I can make the thing
better. Yeah, but for I would work that just to fix it for myself,
you know, yeah for yourself and then you just know how much suffering you are alleviated and whatever else exciting just 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.
A few you're making their life just so much better. Yeah, but there must be an explanation as to do with managers and bureaucracies that I don't I
think it's money. Do you know booking.com sure. It's a book and it's the biggest Bucharest in the world. It's dutch actually and they have teams could I find work that if 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 their 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 thing. So they have all these teams and here on the test for 24 hours. They go to sleep. They wake up next did it come to the office and see okay this perform better. This website has become a monster but it's the most Revenue generating hotel booking website in your world's number one. So that shows that it's not about like user experience. It's about like how about making more money and you know, not every company but you know if they're optimizing it's a public comment if you're optimizing
for money, please.
Optimized for money by disrupting like making it way better.
Yeah, but it's always start if they start with disrupting like booking all started as a start-up 1997 and then they become like the old shit again, like, you know Uber now it starts to become like a taxi again, right? It was very good in the beginning now, it's kind of like taxis now in many places are better. They're nicer than Ubers. Right? So it's like the circle
I think some of it is also just it's hard to have Ultra competent Engineers. Yeah, like stripe seems like a trivial thing, but
It-it's hard to pull off like why was it so hard for Amazon to have by with one? Click setting is a genius idea make buying easier like me make it as frictionless as possible. Just click a button once and you bought the thing. Yeah as opposed to most of the web was a lot of clicking and it often doesn't work like with the
airline's remember two forms with delete. You can click next submit and with for for something or your internet would go down your
modem and man.
And I would have an existential crisis like the frustration would take over my whole body and I would just wanted to quit life for a
brief moment there. Yeah. I'm so happy to form stays in Google Chrome now and if something goes wrong, but that's a total Google somebody at Google improve Society with that. Right?
Yeah, and one of the challenges of Google is to have the freedom to do
that. They don't anymore. There's
a bunch of bureaucracy. Yeah, because so many brilliant brilliant people there, but just move slowly. Yeah. I wonder why
Is that maybe that's the natural way of a company but you have people like Elon who rolls in and just five most most of the folks in always operate. They push the company to operate as a start-up even was already big. Yeah,
but I mean Apple does this I'd like I started in business school Apple does competing product teams that operate at startups. Just three to five people they make something they have multiple teams to make the same thing the best team wins. So you need to I think we need to emulate like a free market inside a company to make it entrepreneurial, you know. Yeah, you need entrepreneurs.
Ariel 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. You have your current skills, but you need to learn just a minimal amount of stuff. So you're a good person asked like what? How do you learn? How do you learn quickly and effectively in just the stuff you need you did just by way of example
Ample you did a 30 days learning session on 3D. Yeah. Well, you documented yourself giving yourself only 30 days to learn everything you can about.
Yeah, I try to learn virtual reality because I was like, this was like same as AI it came up Suddenly like 2016 2017 with think HTC Vive this big VR glasses before A Vision Pro and so I was like, oh this is going to be big so I need to learn this. So I don't know. I don't know nothing about Trudy. I installed like I think unity and like blender and stuff and I started learning all this stuff.
Because I thought this was like a new you know, nascent technology was going to be big and if I had the skills for it, I could use this to build stuff. And so I think we're learning for me. It's like I think learning is so funny because people always ask me like, how do I how do you learn to code? Like should I learn to code and I'm like, I don't know like I'm Every Day. I'm learning this kind of cliche, but every day I'm learning new stuff. So every day I'm searching on Google or asking out GPT how to do this thing out 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 do you know what no love do you want to do it for your whole life or so I think taking action is the best step to learn so making things like, you know, nothing just start making things. Okay. So like how to make a website search how to make a website or nowadays you ask gbt how to make a website. Where do I start? It generates code for you write copy the code put it in a file save it open it in Google Chrome or whatever. You have a website and then you start tweaking with it. And you start.
Okay, how do I add a button? How do I add AI features right like nowadays? So it's like by taking action you can learn stuff much fast and I reading books or lecture memorials
curious. Let me ask perplexity. How do I make a website? I'm just curious what it would say.
I hope it goes with like really basic vanilla solutions to find your website's purpose choose a domain name select the web hosting provider choose a website a builder or CMS website below barking wix3
wix4 Squarespace is what I said.
Yeah landing page. What do I how do I say if I want to programming it program it myself design your website create a central Pages. Yeah even tell City
launches right like start with your website
Cool why me you could do
that. Yeah, but this is
create like it's this is if you want to make a watch the base with a Google
analytics, you can make Nomad list with this way so I can with Wix like well,
no, you can you can get pretty far thing. You can get pretty far. He's racked up. There was a pretty Advanced likely need is a grid of images, right? Yeah, there are clickable that open like another page. Yeah, you can get quite far. How do I
learn the program?
Choose a programming language to start with a free app out camps Goods.
Work the resources to matically practice calling regularly for 3060 minutes a day. Consistency is key joint programming communities like right as yet.
Yes, pretty is pretty good. It's pretty good.
So I think it's a very good starting Grand because imagine, you know, nothing and you want to make a website. You want to make a start up. This is like this. Why did Amanda power of it AI for education is going to be insane, like people anywhere can can ask this question and start building stuff.
Yeah clarifies it for sure and just start building like keep yeah build build like actually apply the thing whether it's a I or any of the programming for web
element. Yeah just have a project in mind. I love the idea of like twelve stars in 12 months or like build a project almost every day just build this thing and get it to work and finish it every single day. That's a cool
experiment. I think that was the inspiration. It was a girl who did 160 websites and Hannah 60 days or some religion many
websites. Yeah, and
she learned to go that way. So I think it's good to set yourself Jack.
Just 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. I'll do the dark like self-learning and setting yourself like challenges and just getting in it, but you need discipline. You don't need to discipline to keep to keep doing it and coding you know coding is very it's a steep learning curve to get in. It's very annoying working with computers is very annoying so it can be hard for people to keep doing it, you know.
Yeah that thing of just
Keep doing it. And don't quit that urgency that's required to finish a thing. That's what it's really powerful. When you documented this the creation of what Maps or though like a working prototype that there is a just a constant frustration. I guess it's like, how do I do this? And then you look it up and you're like, okay, you have to interpret the different options you have and you're like and then just try it and then and then there's a dopamine Rush of like it works cool
man. It's amazing.
Some live stream needs it's on YouTube stuff people can watch it and it's amazing when things work it look it's just like amazing that you I look very not. I don't look far ahead. So I only look okay. What's the next problem to solve and then the next problem and at the end you have a whole app or website or thing, you know, but I think most people look way too far ahead. You know, they look it's like this poster again. Like you shouldn't you don't know how hard it's going to be so you should only look like for the next thing the next little challenge The Next Step.
And then see where you end up and
assume it's going to be easy.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah be naive about it because it's you're going to have very difficult problems. A lot of the big problems won't be even Tech will be like public right? Like maybe people don't like your website like you will get cancelled for 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 get in people's feedback. So there's the power of the crowdsourcing but there's also the
of 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, you know Kirk a just remove this your website sucks because personally know what did he say? Why did he do not like it and you figure out okay, you didn't like it because the sign up was difficult or something or it wasn't the data they say no but this date is not a cure some way. Okay need to improve the quality of data. This hater has a point if it's dumb to completely ignore your haters, you know and also,
Man, I think I've been there when I was like ten years old or something. You're on the internet. You just shout and crazy stuff. That's like most of the Twitter, you know where the have Twitter so you have to take it with a grain of salt. Yeah, you man, you need to grow a very thick skin like on Twitter on X like people say but I mute a lot of people like I found out I muted already 15,000 people recently. I checked. So in 10 years. I moved 50,000 people to dislike like this one by one man you
15? Yeah.
So 15
Hundred people per year and I don't like to block because then they get angry to make a screenshot this AI he blocked me. So I just mute and it disappear and it's amazing.
She mentioned read it. So Hood maps that make it to the front page of Reddit.
Yeah, I did. Yeah. Yeah dude was amazing and my server almost went down and I was checking on Google analytics is like 5,000 people in the web server somewhere crazy, and it was a night and was amazing. I've met I think nowadays honestly tick-tock.
YouTube reels instant reels a lot of apps get very big from people making these videos about it. So let's say you make your own app, you can make a video of yourself I go I made this app this how it works. Well and this is why I made it for example on this is why you should use it and if it's a good video will take off and you will get you man. I got like twenty thousand dollars extra per month or something from a tick tock from one Tick Tock video like it Maids photo, I by you or somebody else by some random.
Guy, so there's all these AI influences that they write about the show AI apps and they and they ask money later like when a viral video because we're all I can do it do it again and send me four thousand dollars coming. I'm like, okay, I did that for example, but it works like Tick Tock is a very big platform for user acquisition. Yeah and organic like the best user creation. I think is organic. You don't need to buy as you probably don't have money when you start to buy ads. So use organic or write a banger tweets, right that's can make it up.
Scoffs.
Well, I mean, yeah fundamentally create cool stuff. I have just a little bit of a following enough to like for for the cool thing to be noticed and then 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 Tick Tock X. I think it's not real so they have the same algorithm now, it's not all followers anymore. It's about the test your content on a small subset like 300 people if they like it, it will gets tested 2,000 people and on and on so if the thing is good it will
Rise anyway, it doesn't matter if you have half a million followers or thousand followers are honored
what's your philosophy of monetizing how to make money from the thing you built?
Yeah. So a lot of stars they do like free users so you can sign up with your user app for free, which is it never worked for me. Well because I think free users generally don't converts and I think if you have VC funding it makes sense to get free users because you can spend your money on ads and you can get like millions of people come in predictably how much they convert and give them like a
Free trial whatever and then they sign off but you need to have the flow worked out so well for you to make it work that you need like it's very difficult. I think it's best to start and just start asking people for money in the beginning. So show your app. Like what are you doing in your landing page like make a demo Whatever video and if you want to use it pay me money pay $10 $20 $40. I would ask more than $10 per month like Netflix like Dennis from off but Netflix is giant company. They can you know, they can afford to make it. So cheap relatively cheap.
Your individual like any actor like you are making our own app. You need to make like at least $30 or more on a user to make it worthy for you. You need to make money, you know,
and it builds a community of people that actually really care about the product
also. Yeah, making a community like making a Discord is very normal. Now every day I pass a Discord and you have the developers and the users together in like this coordinate talk about they asked for feature to build together is very normal now and you need to imagine like if you're if you're starting out
Getting 1,000 users is quite difficult getting thousand Pages quite difficult. And if you charge them like $40, you have 30k month. That's a lot of money
that's enough to like live a good life. Yeah little pretty good life. I mean that could be a lot of costs associated with hosting. So
it's not a finger I make sure my profit margins are very high. So I tried keep the calls very low. I don't hire people I tried to go she with like AI vendors now, like can you make it cheaper you know, which is I discovered that you can just email
He's in say can you give me a discount because too expensive and I said sure 50% I like wow, very good. And I didn't know this you can just ask and especially in like a like now. It's kind of recession. You can ask companies. Like I need a discount where I kind of need to like, you don't need to be an asshole about it. Say God I need a discount. Do I need to go maybe to in our company's I mean, like it's called like here and there and said sure a lot of them will say yes, like 25% discount fish and discounts because you think the price on the
Website is the price of the API or something. It's not like you know,
and also you're a public-facing person. Although it helps also and there's love and Good Vibes you put out into the world. Like you're actually legitimately trying to build cool stuff. So a lot of companies probably want to associate with you because you're trying to
do. Yeah. It's like a secret hack, but I think even without you could hack. Do you give a person the best how much discount they will give you know, they will maybe give more but you know, that's why you should shit post on Twitter. So you get you know, this comes maybe
yeah.
Yeah, but in also the when it's crowdsource, I mean paying does prevent spam or help
prevent spell so yeah, it gives you high quality users and Bodies free users are sir, but they're horrible like it's just like millions of people especially if a I start if you get a lot of abuse we get millions of people from anywhere just abusing your app just just hacking it and
whatever I get something and the internet you mentioned like 4chan discovered Hood
Maps. Yeah.
I love sports and I don't love fortune. But you know, I mean like this so crazy especially back then like that's it's kind of funny what they're doing, you know,
I actually what is it this new documentary on Netflix antisocial Network or something like that. Those really was fascinating just fortunate just a you know, the spirit of the thing fortune and HSN Durst and Fortune is so much about freedom and also like the humor involved in fucking with the system and
fucking Superman's just
But for the fun
the the dark aspect of it is
you're having
fun. You're doing anti-system stuff. But like the Nazis always show up and it's somehow that shit started happening in starts drifting somehow. Yeah, it's just School shooters and stuff. So
it's a very difficult topic, but I do know it's especially early on if in 2010 I would go to Fortune for fun and they would post like crazy fans of stuff. And this was just to scare off people. So we showed the Articles. Hey, do you notice internet website? 4chan just check it out.
Out. Yeah, and if we do what the fuck is that? I'm like no. No, you don't understand. Yes to scare you away. But actually when you go through scroll this like deep conversations, yes, and they would already be this was like a normal filter like 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 mad. I'm not a fortune about like I it was always about provoking. It's just perfect ears, you know,
but the provoking in the case of hood
After something like this can damage the good thing like, you know, a little poison in a town is always good. It's like the Tom Waits thing but you don't want too much. Otherwise, it destroys the town and destroys think they're
kind of like pentesters, you know, like penetration testers hackers. Yeah. They just test your app for you and you add some stuff like an ad like I had like a NSFW wordless. They would say like bad word. So when they would ride 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 zamar with like glowing jelly streamer this to relax them, you know where cheese melting on the
toes and Ice Shield. I like it like but actually a lot of stuff I didn't realize how much it originated in fortune in terms of memes this Reddit Rickroll. I didn't understand. I didn't know the Rickroll originated 4chan. There's just so many memes like most of the memes that you think they go
forward roll. I think Austin Fortune like not the word
But like in this case in a meme use like you would get like roll doubles because every it was a post ID is unfortunate so they were right they were kind of like random. So if I get doubles like this happen sighs, I'm so you'd get like two to anyways, like a betting Market kind of on these doubles and these both IDs is so much funny
stuff. Yeah. I mean that's internet its purest. But yeah again the dark stuff kind of seeps in. Yeah and you it's nice to keep the dark stuff too. Like some low amount its nice.
Have a bit of noise in the darkness, but not too much. Yeah, and but again like you have to pay attention to that with me, I guess spam in general. You have to fight that with Nomad list Buddyfight
spam managers gypsy4now. It's amazing. So so I have like user input have reviews people can review cities and I don't need to actually sign up. It's Anonymous reviews and a ride like whole books about like seas and what's good and bad so I run it to GPT for now, and I asked like
Is a this is a good review like this is defensive is racist or some stuff. And then since we met some telegram - rejects reviews and I check it and it's man it's so on point automated. Yes, and it's so accurate. It understands double meanings. I have g b d for running on the on the Tacoma jet Community. It's a community of 10,000 people and they're chatting and they start fighting with each other and I used to have human moderate was very good, but they would start fighting the human moderator like this.
Guys bias or something. I've GPT for and its really really really really good. It understands humor and his fans 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 shooting be deleted right understands that you know,
since I would love to have a gbt for based filter of like of different kinds of for like X. Yeah.
I fought this week like I tweeted like a fact check like you can click fact check and then
EPT for look gbd4 is not always right about stuff. Right but it can give you a general fact check on a tweet. Like you see what I do. Now when I write something like Difficult about economics or something or a I I put in Jeopardy for a second you fact check it because I might have said something stupid and the stupas of always gets taken out by the replies like, oh you said this wrong and and then the whole tweet going it doesn't make sense anymore. So I asked GPT for to fact-check a lot of slow.
So fact-check is tough one. Yeah, but it would be interesting to sort of
Ray the thing based on how well thought out of this and how well our get it is. Yeah that that seems more doable that seems like more durable like it seems like a GPT thing because that's less about the truth and it's more about the rigor of the
thing exactly and you can ask that you can ask him to problems like I know like personal do you think create like a ranking score of X Twitter applies where I should dispose B if we rank on like I don't Integrity reality like fundamental deepness.
Do something interesting this and it will give you that was a pretty good score. Probably. I mean Ilan can do this with Croc, right? You can start doing using that to to check replies because they're apply s like chaos. Yeah, you know
and actually the ranking the replies doesn't make any sense doesn't make sense and I will like to sort in different kinds of ways. Yeah, and you get too many
replies. Now if you have a lot of followers I get too many replies. I don't see everything and I love stuff each. I just miss and I don't want to see the good stuff
and also
Notifications or whatever, it's just complete chaos. Yeah, it'd be nice to be able to filter that in interesting ways sword in interesting ways because like I feel like I missed a lot and I what surfaced for me. I just like a random comment by a person with no followers positive or negative is like
okay if it's a very good comments it should have been but it should probably look a little bit more like do these people have followers because they're probably more engaged in a platform,
right? Oh know if it's I don't even care what I mean.
Followers if you're a ranking by the quality of the comment great. Yeah, but not just like randomly like chronological just to see of comments. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. Yeah. Yeah
X could be very proof of that. I think
one thing you you espouse a lot which I love is the automation step. So like once you have a Thing Once you have an idea and you build it and it actually starts making money and it's making people happy. There's a community of people using it.
You want to take the automation step of automating the things we have to do as little work as possible for it to keep running and definitely you like explain your philosophy there what you mean by
automatic? Yeah, so general theory of starters would be there when when it starts like start making money start hiring people to do stuff right stu stuff that you like marketing for example do stuff that you would do in the beginning yourself and whatever Community Management and organizing meetups for no missus, for example, that would be a job for example, and
I felt like I don't have the money for that and I don't really want to run like a big company with a lot of people because it's a lot of work managing these people. So I've always tried to like automate these things as much as possible and and this can literally be like for no man. This is it's literally like it's not a different outer Stars was like a webpage where you can organize your Meetup set a set of schedule dates, whatever you can see how many numbers will be there at that date. So, you know, there will be actually enough known as the meat off right and then
when it's done, it sends a tweet out on the noblest account. There's a meet up here. It sends a direct message to everybody in the city who are there who are going to be there and then people show up on a bar and there's a meet-up and that's fully automated and for me. It's like it's not it's so obvious to make this automatic. Why would you why would you have somebody organized this like it makes more sense to automated and this with most of my things like I figure out like how to do it with codes and I think especially now with a I like you can automate so much more stuff than before because they are
I understand things so well, like before I would use if statements right now you ask GPT you put something on DVD for 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 difference
now, that's very reason right but it's still
difficult. I mean that step of automation is difficult to figure out how to
Is you basically tell getting everything to code and it's not trivial to take that step for a lot of people so when you say automate I you are you talking about like cron jobs as men a lot of cron jobs a lot of yeah
chops. It's like I literally I log into the server and I do like pseudo crontab veggie and then I go into the editor and I ride like hourly and then I write PHP, you know do this thing dot PHP and that's the script and the script does it feel
Thing and it doesn't than hourly. That's it. And that's how all my Webster's work. Do you have a thing
where it like emails your something like this or email? Somebody managing the thing if something goes wrong
I have these web pages are make their code like health checks. It's like a health check-up PHP and then it has like emojis like a it's like a green check mark if it's good. And I read one of his bad and then it does like database cures. For example, like what's the internet speed on in for example, Amsterdam? Okay. It's a number is like 27-point MB. So it's accurate number.
Okay, check good then go to next and it goes on all the data points did people sign up in the last 24 hours is important because maybe the sign up broke get check somebody signed up. Then I have uptime robot.com which is like for up time, 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's bad then if it's bad it sends the message to me and telegram saying hey, what's up? It doesn't say. Hey, what's up? It sounds like a look at.
Alert a nice this thing is down and then I check so we did 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 any more and like definitely 10 years ago. When I started everything was breaking all the time and now it's like almost it's last people's 100.000 percent uptime and he's health checks are part of the uptime percentage. So it's like everything
works. Yeah actually making me realize I should I should have a page from
Self the one page that has all the health checks just so I can go to and see all the green check marks just feels good. Look at him. 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 checked since you've last cared to check it was all been. Okay for sure.
It's used to send me the good health checks like yeah, you know, this is all
works it all works, but it's been over
so
often that it feel so good. But then I'm like, okay, obviously it's not going to me to hide the good ones shown in the bad ones. And now that's the
case ain't you integrate everything into one place automated everything? Yeah. There's also just a large set of cron jobs. A lot of the publication is podcast is is done all that. Everything is just on automatically. It's all clipped up all those kind of stuff. Yeah, but it'd be nice to automate even more. Yeah. I got translation all
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 beige user if they run into an error the JavaScript sends the JavaScript error to the server and then it sends to my telegram from all my
websites. So you get like a message
so get like a uncaught variable error, whatever 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 Matt best really cool,
but this is the same stuff people they pay like very big sauce companies like New Relic for a like to manage the stuff so you can do that to you can use off-the-shelf. I like to build myself as easier.
That's nice. It's nice to do that kind of automation. I'm starting to think about like, what are the things in my life? I'm doing myself. They can be automated.
In this
activity for your like give your daily your day and then ask her what parts you to automate.
Well, one of the things I would love to automate more as my consumption social media. Yeah both the the output and the input
man that's variance. I think there's some startups are do that. Like they they summarize the cool shit happening on Twitter, you know, like with a I think the guy called s Wy X or something. He does like a newsletter. It's completely I generated with the cool the cool new stuff and I
yeah,
Now I would love to do that. But I also like across Instagram Facebook LinkedIn. Yeah, all this kind of stuff just like okay. Can I can you summarize the internet for me for today summarized in a.com yeah.com as IA feel like it pulls in way too much time, but also like I don't like it the effect that has some days on my psyche
because it's like haters or just general
competition Rings. No, no just general like for example like Tick Tock is a good examples of that for me.
I sometimes just feel Dumber after he's Tick-Tock. I just feel like I don't usually empty somehow and I like uninspired. Yeah, it's funny in the moment. I'm like have look at that cat doing a funny thing and then you're like, oh look at that person dancing in a funny way to that music and then you're like 10 minutes later. You're like I feel way dumber and I don't really want to do much for the rest of the day. My girlfriend said she
saw me like watching some dumb video. She's like dude your face look so dumb as well.
Your whole face starts going like interesting, you know, so
I mean with social media this with with X sometimes for me too is I think I'm probably naturally gravitating towards the
drama. Yeah our wheel.
Yeah. And so this following add people especially at people that only post technical content has been really good because then I just look at them and I and then I go down rabbit holes of like learning new papers have been published or good Repose or just any kind.
Of cool demonstration of stuff and the thing the kind of things that they retweet and that's the rabbit hole ago and I'm learning and I'm inspired all that kind of stuff. It's been tough has been tough to convince difficult. You need to
like manage 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 muted so much that now my feet is good. You know, I see like interesting stuff and but the fact that you need to modify you need to like mod your app your
My pleasure just to function and not be toxic for you for your mental health Ray. That's like a problem like it should be doing it for you
as some level of automation that that would be interesting. I wish I could access X and Instagram through API easier
you need to spend forty two thousand dollars a month, which my friends do. Yeah, you
could nevertheless still even if you do that that you're not getting. I mean, there's limitations that don't make it easy to do like yeah automate because they the thing is the trying to limit like a
Zeus or for you to steal all the data from the app to then train an llm or something like this. Yeah, but if I just want to like figure out ways to automate my interaction with the ex system or with Instagram, they didn't make that easy, but I would love to sort of automate that and explore different ways to how to leverage LMS to control the content and consume and I'm going to be published that maybe they themselves can see how that could be used to improve their system. So yeah, but there's not enough
Access to
recap your phone right? Come here an app that watches your screen with you. You couldn't yeah, but I don't really know like what it would do. Like maybe we can hide stuff before you see is you know, like
I had that done. I have Chrome extensions. I write a lot of Chrome extensions that hide parts of different pages and so on. I for example for my own my main computer, I hide all views and likes and all that on and YouTube content that I create so that I don't forget you. It doesn't. Yeah, so you don't pay attention.
I also hide parts that I have a mode for XY hide most of everything. So like there's no
is same with you just say my have to succession like why I wrote my own because
it's easier because it keeps changing its 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 jaded account or latest. Oh Sam. I don't want related
and like 10
minutes later. You're like or something that's trending.
I have a weird amount of friends addicted to YouTube and I'm
addicted I think is my attention span is too short for you to but but I have this exchange to like YouTube on hook which like it's highs all the related stuff. I can just see the video and some amazing and
but sometimes I need to like like I need to search a video how to how to do something and then I go to YouTube and I had this YouTube shorts as usual sorts are like they're like algorithm really designed to just make you tap them and I tap and and then I'm like five minutes later with his face way and you're just talking and he's like what happened? I was gonna open I was going to play like the kulfi mix, you know, like music mix for drinking coffee together like in the morning like jazz. I didn't want to go to shorts. So it's very very difficult.
I love how we're actually highlighting all kinds of interesting problems that all could be solved through the startup. Okay. So what about the exit when how to
exit my you shouldn't ask me because I never sold my company and
if you've never ever all the success of stuff you're 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's well, they're like manipulation and due diligence and changing the valuation like people
Change the valuation after so they a lot of people string you on to acquire you and then it takes like six months is a classic. It takes 6 to 12 months. They want to see everything you want to see the your stripe and your code and whatever and then in the end, they will do change. The price is lower because you're already so invested. So it's like a negotiation tactic right and like no and I don't want to celebrate and the problem with my company's. It's like they make 90 percent profit margin. So the multiple
Companies get sold with multiples kind of multiples of profit or revenue and often in multiples like three times three times or four times or five times revenue or profit so my case they're all automated so I might as well wait three years and I get the same money as when I sell and then I can still sell the same company, you know, I mean like I still sells for 35 times so financially it doesn't even 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.
Years for the money, you know, but if you give me three like three years nothing like I can wait
so it means a really valuable stuff about the company's you create is not just the interface and and the crowd-sourced content, but the people themselves like this user base. Yeah. Well at least it's a community. Yeah. So yeah, I could see that being extremely valuable. I'm surprised the helmet.
This is like it's like my babies like my first product took off and I don't really know if I want to sell it. It's like something you will be nice when you know when you're old, did you still work on in this?
You know as 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 learn if you go to China and live in China, you'll learn that they're nice people and a lot of stuff you hear about China's propaganda Love Stuff is true as well. But it's more, you know, you learn a lot from traveling and I think that's why it's like a cool product to like not so AI products I have less emotional feeling with a high price like floaty. I wish I could sell yeah.
Yeah, the thing you also mentioned is you have to price in the fact that you're going to miss. Yeah, the company you never heating it
gives you right. There's a very famous like depression after startup on a Solar Company like the like this was my this is me, who am I and they immediately start building another one, you know, they can never get stuff. So I think it's good to keep working, you know until you die. Just keep working and cool stuff and you shouldn't retire. You know, I think retirement is bad probably
so usually
The stuff solo and mostly work solo.
What's the thinking behind that
I think I'm not so good at working with other people not like I'm crazy. But like I don't trust other people
to clarify you. Don't trust other people to do a great job.
Yeah, and I don't want to have like this consensus meeting where we all like, you know, you have like a meeting with three people and then you kind of get this compromise results, which is very European like it's very easy and all the called Boulder model where you put people in a room and you only let them out when they agree on the compromise right in politics, and I don't think
I think it breeds like averageness and you get an average of the average company average culture. You need to have like a leader or you need to be solo and just do it. You know, there's yourself I think and I trust some people like now I like with my best friend Andre. I'm making a new AI startup but it's because we know each other very long and he's one of the few people I would build something with and but
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 other piece? So he codes I
should post on Twitter literally like I promoted on Twitter. I we said like product strategy. Like I said, this should be better. This should be better, but I think you need to have one person coding it. He goes in Ruby Souls that kind of the Ruby. I'm in
PHP so you literally so you have you ever coated with another person for prolonged periods of time never my life.
What do you think is behind that
and I was always just me and sitting on my laptop. Like I said, like
scolding know like you've never had another developer who like rolls in and like I've had one swear every
folder. I like I say I developer Philip I hired him to do this because I can't write by phone and I saw his Python and I needed to get models to work on replicate and stuff and it needs to improve photo eye and he held me a lot for like ten months. He worked in the man. I was trying by phone working with numpy and package manager and was too difficult for me.
To figure this shit out and I didn't have time like I think 10 years ago. I would have time to like sit, you know, go do all-nighters to figure this stuff out of my van. I don't have the another one of the it's not my thing. It's
not your thing. It's another programming language. I get it AI new thing got it, but like you never had a developer role in look at your PHP jQuery code and be and yes, like, you know like in conversation or you probably talked about. Yes and like basically, all
right I had for one week
understand and then
And that's
because you wanted to rewrite everything in
the this the wrong guy. I know we wanted to rewrite and
what you wanted to rewrite. The GE set is Jed Curry. We can't do this. I'm like, okay. It's like we need to rewrite I think of you you Jess. I'm like, are you sure? Can we just like, you know, like you take your he's like no man like and we need to change a lot of stuff and I'm like, okay and I was kind of like feeling it like this, you know, we're going to clean up shit, but then after weeks it's not gonna is gonna take way too much
time. I think I like working with people where like
When I approached them, I pretend in my head that they're the smartest person was ever existed. So I look at their code or I look at the stuff they've created and try to see The Genius of their way like you really have to understand people like really notice them like and then from that place have a conversation about what is the better
approach? Yeah, but those are the top tier developers. Yeah, and those are the ones that are deck ambiguous so they can work with that.
Learn any Tech stack they can that's like really few like it's like really top 5% because if you try hard abs, like no offense to death was most of us are not that most people in general jobs, not so good at the job like even doctors and stuff when you realize this people are very average at the job pushing with deaf coating of thing. So
sorry if I think that's a really important skill for developer to roll in and like understand the musicality the the Styles and like empathy is like ya told empathy right foot empathy.
Yes.
Award, but that's it. You need to understand like go over the code get a holistic view of it and man, you can suggest we change stuff for sure. But and look Jay curious crazy. It's crazy. I'm using jQuery we can change that's not crazy at all
jQuery is also the beautiful and powerful and PHP is beautiful and Powerful especially as you said recently in the is the versions evolved. It's much more serious programming language now is super fast like PHP is really
Last night. Yeah, it's crazy JavaScript present rubia really fast now. So if speed is something you care about is Superfast. Yeah, and like there's gigantic communities of people using those programming languages and there's Frameworks if you like the framework so that whatever it doesn't really matter what you use but like also you if I was like a developer working with you like you are extremely successful you've shipped a lot. Yeah, so like
If I roll in I'm going to be like I don't assume, you know, nothing assume Peter is genius like the smartest developer ever and like learn learn from it. And yes and like notice Parts in the code where like, okay, I got it like how yeah, here's how he's thinking and now if I want to add another like a little feature definitely needs to have Emoji. Yeah man in front of it and then like just follow the same style and add it am I
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 started working together in this way. I don't know. I don't know how hard it is to find
developers know. I think they exist. I think you need to I need to hire more people need to try more people at it. But that costs a lot of my energy and time but it's on it's impossible. 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. No, Melissa looks kind of clunky.
People say designs kind of like, okay, I'll improve the design. It's like next on my to-do list, for example, you know, like I can I'll get there eventually, but it's true. I mean, you're also
extremely good at what you do. Like, I'm just looking at the interfaces of like Photo a I like you. Would Jake jQuery, right? Like how amazing is you agree? But you can see these Cowboys are getting these are you 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 would Nomad list extremely nice the interface. Thank you, ma'am. And that's all you
yeah, that's everything is me.
So all of this and every little feature
also good looks kind of ADHD or add, you know, like it's so much because it has so many things and signers days is minimalist. Right right here you
but this is a lot of information and it's useful information is delivered in a clean way while still stylish and fun to look at so like minimalist design is about like when you want to convey no information whatsoever and look cool. Yeah. I don't 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 its clean you can't be too sexy. So it's sexy enough. Yeah,
this is I think how my brain looks you know, like it's a lot of shit going on like drawing Bass music. It's like very
but this is still pretty the spacing of everything is nice. The fonts are really nice like very readable very
sigh like I dunno but I made it so I don't trust my own
judgment. No, this is really nice. Thank you. Mmm.
Oh jeez are somehow like this a style to
thing. I need to pick the Emoji takes a while to pick them in like there's
some something about emojis a really nice memorable like placeholder for the idea. Yeah, like it was just text it would actually be overwhelming if you're just text the Emoji really helps. It's a brilliant addition like some people might look at it. Why do you have a mogees ever? It's actually really for me. It's really the only to do to remove them or you get what people don't know what they're talking about her and then the police I'm sure.
People will tell you a lot of things. This is really nice and using color is nice small font, but not too small and obviously have to show maps which is really tricky. Yeah.
Yeah, this is this is you know, this is really really really nice and all of the I mean like, okay like how this looks when you hover
over it exists transitions
not understandable. Like I'm sure there's like how long does it take you to figure out how you want it to look you ever go down the rabbit hole. We you spent like two
weeks, you know, so it's worth if it's like 10 years of you know at a CSS transition here or do this or
what was say like see these are all these are rounded now. Yeah if you wanted to like round
It is probably the better way, but if you want to be rectangular like sharp Corners, what would you do you
just go through the index of CSS? Yeah. I do come on F and I searched border-radius 12px and then I replace with border radius zero and then I do command enter and get deploys. Its pushes to the gets help and then sense of where we're going to deploy to my server and is live in five seconds. Are you often deployed to production? You don't have like a testing ground now, so I
The hi I'm like famous for this because I'm too lazy to set up like a staging server on my laptop every time so I nowadays I just deployed to production. Yeah, and it's man I'm going to 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 jesslyn so it tells you in his error so I don't deploy but my lychee I have like 37 thousand git commits and last 12 months or something. So I make like small fixed in and come out enter and sends to get up get up.
Substance a weapon to my server web server pulls its deployed to production and as there was
the latency that from you pressing question one
second can be one too
sexy should make change and then you getting really good at like not making mistakes,
but I understand you right like people are like how can you do is when you get good at not taking the server down, you know that yeah because you need to go to more carefully, but it's look is idiotic and 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 did like do like a stopwatch like how fast can I fix this bug and then two minutes later, for example, it's fixed. Yeah, and it's fun because it's because it's annoying for me to work with companies where you report a bug and it takes like six months. Yeah. It's like horrible and it makes people really happy when you can really quickly solve their problems. So but it's crazy. I'm not
only is crazy. I mean there's I'm sure there's a middle ground, but I think that whole thing would there's a phase of like testing and there's the stage
There's a developed like that and then there's like multiple tables and databases that you use for the state like it's smiling just 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, but just a little bit safer but not too much. It'll be great. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure that's actually like how X now we'll how they doing rapid Improvement exactly more bugs and yeah playing
about like all look he bought his Twitter now, it's full of bugs to this shipping stuff like things are happening now and
It's a
dynamic app now yet. The bugs is actually a sign of a good thing have yes bugs of the feature because it shows that the team is actually building shit 100% Well, one of the problems is like s you would YouTube there's so much potential to build features, but I just see how long it takes. So I've gotten a chance to interact with many other teams, but one of the team's is MLA multi-language audio. I don't know if you know this but in YouTube you can have audio tracks in different.
Is for of a dummy and that there's a team and not many people are using it but like every single feature they have to meet and agree and like there's allocate resources like Engineers have to work on it. But I'm sure it's a pain in the ass for the engineers to get approval to like to because that it has to not break the rest of the site whatever they do but like if you don't have enough dictatorial like top down like we need this now it's going to take forever to do anything multi-language audio, but multi-language otter is a good
example of a thing that seems nice right now, but it quite possibly could change the entire world when you have when I upload this this conversation right here if instantaneously it dubs it into 40 languages and everybody consumed every single video can be watched and listened to in those different it changes everything and YouTubers extremely well positioned to be the leader in this they got the got the compute it got the
The user base they got like they have the experience of how to do this. So like multi-language audio should be
hyper to feature a get
this high priority like that and it's a way you know, Google is obsessed with AI right now, they want to show off that they could be dominant in AI That's the Way for Google to say like we used a I like this is a way to to to Break Down The Walls that language creates the
preferred outcome for Dom for them is probably dead career and after the overall result of the
cool product, you know, I think they they're not like
Selfish or whatever they want to do good. There's something about the machine variation your organizational stuff that just
happens when I report Boggs unlike becomes a work with I get I talked a lot of different people in the em 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 and almost happening to say Matt. I know but I'm trying my best and yeah so
systemic. Yeah the well it requires again. I don't know if there must be a nicer word but like a dick
Coil type of top down the CEO roles in and just says like for you to as like MLA get this done. Now, this is the highest
priority. I think be companies, especially America a lot of his legal, right? You need to pass everything triangle. Yeah, and you can't like man the things I do it could never do it in a big Corporation because everything has to be probably get deployed has to go through legal.
Well again, take tutorial. You basically say Steve Jobs that this quite a lot. I've seen a lot of leaders do this.
Ignore the lawyers ignore cops. 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 launch this AI dubbing and it's some legal problems with lawsuits. Okay. So the Law changes there will be a bills. There will be some Supreme Court thing whatever and a lot of changes. So just by shipping it you change society you change the legal framework by not shipping being scared of the legal framework all the time that you're not changing things.
Just out of curiosity. What what I did you use let's talk about like your whole set up giving how Ultra productive you are and that you often program in your underwear slouching on the couch. Is there does it matter to you in general? Is there like a specific ideas use vs code? Yeah vehicle
before you Sublime Text. I don't think it matters a lot. I think I'm very skeptical like tools when people think it they said matters right and I think it matters I think.
Whatever tool you know, very well you can go very fast in like, you know the shortcuts for some idea, you know, you know, like I love Sublime Text because I could use like multi cursor, you know you sir something and I could you act like make Mass replaces in a file with the curse of thing and vehicle doesn't have that as
well. It's actually interesting sublime's first editor where I've learned that and I think they just make that super easy. So like what would that be called? Multi edit multi multi multi cursor added thing. Whatever site.
I think I'm sure like almost every editor can do that is just probably hard to set up. Yeah. This is why I suppose not so good. I think or at least I tried but I would use that to like process data like data sets for them from World Bank. I would just note takers are mass change everything but yeah vs codes man, I was bullied into using vehicle because Twitter would always see my screen shots of sublime text and say, why are you still using Sublime Text like Boomer in to use these codes and I'm like real try it I got
MacBook and then I never installed like I never copy the old MacBook. I just make it fresh, you know, like a clean like format see, you know windows clean start and I'm like, okay, I'll try vs cold and it's dark, you know, but I don't really care like it's not so important to me.
Well, you know the format see reference, huh,
dude, it was so good. You would install Windows and then after three or six months, it would start breaking and everything was like gets low. They would restart go to dolls format. See you. Delete your hard drive and then install
The Windows 95 again was so good times and you would design everything like now I'm going to install it properly. Now. I'm going to design my desktop properly, you know like yeah, I don't know if it's peer pressure.
But like I use emacs for many many years and I know you know, I love lisp. So a lot of the customization is done in lisp, its programming language and partially was peer pressure were part of his realizing like you need to keep learning stuff like same issue with jQuery. Like I still think I need to learn node.js for example. Yeah, even though
It's not my main thing or even close to the me thing. But I feel like you need to keep learning the stuff and even if you don't choose to use it long term, you need to give it a chance. So you get your understanding of the world expands
anywhere you want to understand the new technological Concepts and see if they can benefit, you know to be stupid not to even try
it's more about the concepts. I would say than the actual tools like expanding and that can be a challenging thing. So going to vs code and like really learning it like all the shortcuts.
It's all the extensions that actually installing different stuff and playing with it. That was interesting challenge. It was uncomfortable at first. Yeah for me too. Yeah. Yeah, but you just dive
in it's like no reflects like you keep your brain fresh, you know, like this kind of
stuff. I got to do that more like have you given reactor chance? No,
but I want to I want to learn and I want to I understand the basics, right?
I don't even know where to start
but would you like I guess you got to use your own model, which is like build the thing using
it not manager. So I kind of did that like I can't like the the stuff I do in jQuery is essentially a lot of it is like I started rebuilding whatever deck is already out there not based on that but just an accident like I keep calling long enough that I built the same. I start getting the same problems. Everybody else had and you start building the same Frameworks kindly, so I essentially I use my own kind of framework of to basically build a framework
from scratch.
Zero and the you understand the kind
of yeah, but Ajax calls, but essentially the same thing look I don't have the time. I do this is I think it's saying you don't have the time is like always a lie, cause she just don't prioritize is enough. My priority is still like the running the businesses and improving that and a I think learning AI is much more valuable than learning from then framework. Yeah, like it's just more impact. I guess it should be just
learning every single day nothing. Yeah, you can learn a little bit every day like a little bit
of reactor.
Or I think now like next very big so learn a little bit of next, you know, but I called on the military industrial complex. So if I you need to know you need to know it anyway, so
you gotta learn how to use the weapons of war and and then you could be snakes. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, but you got to learn it and it's 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
When you're starting out making websites like oh, how where do you start? Yes you before I guess what it yeah, it's just so Dynamic it changes so fast that I don't know if it would be a good idea for me to learn it, you know, maybe some combination of like view next with PHP laravel laravel is like a frame of PHP. I think that would be it could benefit me know maybe Tailwind for CSS like a styling engine that stuff could probably save me time. Yeah, but like you you won't know
until you really give it a
try and it feels like you have to build like if maybe I'm talking to myself a I should probably read code like my personal one page in laravel or yeah, and even though it might not have almost any Dynamic elements maybe have one Dynamic element, but it has to go and in that framework. Yeah or like end-to-end build a node.js. Some of it is I don't figuring out how to even deploy the thing.
I have no idea it was that all I know is right now I would send it to get up.
Up and it sends it to my server. I don't know how to get JavaScript running. I have no clue. Yeah, so I guess I need like a boss like a like first of all, right, or you know a local 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 webpage 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 exact page kind are they just school pride all these Frameworks? Yeah, you can see the differences. Yeah, that's interesting
one. It takes to do it. Yes stopwatch. I have time to go actually something sufficiently complicated because it should probably do you should probably do some kind of
thing where it accesses the database and dynamically changing stuff somebody I stuff some LM stuff. Yeah, maybe some it doesn't have to be AI one but maybe the API call an API called to
something to replicate for example, then you have yeah, that would be very cool product.
Yeah and like time it and also report on my happiness. Yeah, I'm gonna totally do this
because nobody benchmarks this nobody's been smart happiness developer happiness with Frameworks. Yeah, always best Marcus shipping time.
Let's just take like a month and do
This how many Frameworks are there. There's how many how many there's like five main ways of doing it. So there's like this is notice back and front end and this stuff confused me to
like react now apparently has become back end. Yeah or something used to be only front-ends and you're forced to do now Becca. And also I don't know and then but
there's not really, you know, really forced to do anything. It's so like basically according to the Internet so like there's no it's actually not trivial to find the canonical way of doing things like the standard vanilla like
You should go to the ice cream shop. There's like a million flavors. I 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 they'll literally named it vanilla. But like I want to know what's the basic way but not like dumb but like the standard canonical condo the
dominant way like the dhamma 6% of developers do it like this. Yeah. It's hard to figure that out. You know, that's the
problem.
Yeah, maybe a little arms can help maybe you should explicitly ask. What is the dominant? They
usually know that the dominant, you know, 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 we would help is if you want to learn where I would want to learn like a framework hire somebody that already does it and just sit with them and make something together. Like I've never done that but I thought about it so would be a very fast way to you know, take their knowledge.
My brain try these kinds of things
what happens is depends. What kind of if there are like world-class developer? Yes oftentimes they themselves are used to that thing and they have not themselves explored in other options. So there have this dogmatic like talking down to you like this is the right way to do it is like no. No, we're just like exploring together. Okay, show me the cool thing you've tried which is like it has to have open-mindedness to like, you know,
Node.js is not the right way to do web development. It's like one way and there's nothing wrong with the the old lamp PHP jQuery. Vanilla JavaScript way. It's just has its pros and cons and like you need to know
what this is. You could find those people probably. Yeah, like if you want to learn a I imagine you have karpati sitting next to you. Yes, you are lucky doses YouTube videos is amazing. You can teach you to like a five-year-old's about how how to make LM.
Amazing, like imagine this guy sitting next to you in just teaching you like let's make a lamb together. Like holy shit. It would be amazing. Yeah, I mean we'll capacity.
Has its own style and is all like I'm not sure he's for everybody but for example five-year-old. It depends on five-year-old. Yeah. Well,
he's like super technical but he's amazing because he's super technical and he's the only one who can explain yourself in a simple way which shows his complete genius. Yes his if you can explain without. Jargon, you're
like wow and build it from scratch.
Yeah. It's like top-tier, you know, like what a guy
but he might be anti
framework because he doesn't scratch exactly. Yeah, actually
Probably is. Yeah.
He's like you were free. I
guess maybe learning framework is a is a very bad idea for us, you know, maybe we should stay in Vichy and like script kiddie and the
way you have to Maybe by learning the framework you learn what you want to yourself build from
scratch. Yeah, maybe learn Concepts, but you don't actually have to start using it for your life, right? Yeah. Yeah
and you're still a Mac guy who was a mad guy. Yeah. I
switched them back in 2014 because it was caused when I wanted to start traveling and my brother was like dude get him back.
Because like the standard now, I'm like, wow, I need to switch from Windows and I had like three screens, you know, like Windows at this whole setup for music production had to sell everything and then had a Macbook and I remember opening up this MacBook box like and it was so beautiful. It's like this aluminium and then I opened it. I removed it, you know the screen protector thing. It's so beautiful and I didn't touch it for three days. I was just like looking at it really and I was still on the Windows computer and then I went driving with that. So I and all my great thing started.
When I switch to a Mac, which sounds very dogmatic, right but
what great things you talking about
all the business started working out like I started traveling I started building startups. They're making money it all started when I switch to
Mac wasn't I I kind of you make me wanna switch them back. So I used either use Linux and side windows with WSL or just Ubuntu Linux but windows for most stuff like editing or any like and you're like, oh God, that's right.
Well, you could use I guess you could do math stuff there. I wonder if I should squish. What do you miss about Windows? What was the pros and cons
after the finer is warble Mac. Like it's like it's it's the what is called finder are you don't know the facts of this is Windows Explorer? Yeah, thanks explores. Amazing talking Diner strange, man. That's like strange things. This is bog where if you if you send like a Tesha photo and WhatsApp or telegram, it just selects the whole folder and you almost exactly can click enter. You send all your photos or your files to this chat group.
Happy to my girlfriend starts sending me photo photo photo photo for so if I it's finder is very unusual. But it has Linux like the whole thing is like it's unix-based.
Right? So you use the command line like you all the time like all the time.
And the cool thing is you can run things like unix-like Debian or whatever. You can run most Linux tough on Mac OS which makes it very good for developments. Like I have my nginx server if I said if I'm not lazy and set up my staging on my laptop. It's just nginx server the same as I have.
Off of My Cloud Server, right the same way to websites run and I can use almost everything the same config files configuration files and it just works and that makes Mac a very good platform for Linux stuff. I think
ya real
Boon to is like better of course, but
yeah, I'm in this weird situation where
Somewhat of a power user in Windows and let's say Android and all the much smarter friends. I have all using Mac and iPhone and it's
like if you don't want to go through the peer pressure and it's not peer pressure. It's like
Like one of the reasons I want to have kids is that there's a lot of like I would love to have kids as a base as a baseline. But you know, this is like a concern maybe there's going to be a trade off all this kind of stuff. But you see like these extremely successful smart people who are friends of mine who have kids in a really happy they have kids. So that's that's not peer pressure. That's just like a strong signal. Yeah, this works for people that work there 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 need to give it a real chance, especially for development since more and more stuff is done in the cloud. Anyway. Yeah 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 them back all the
Yeah, start happening.
I think it was about the hardware as this much about the solver did the hardware so well build right keyboard. And
yeah, but look at the keyboard I use that is pretty cool. That's one word for it. What's your favorite place to work on the couch does the college matter is the couch at home. There's any
couch no, and you've got look Hotel clouds also like in the room, right? You know? Yeah, but I used to work like very economically with like a standing desk. Yeah and everything like perfect like I hide screen blah blah.
I felt like man this has to do with lifting to I started getting RSI like repetitive strain injury, like tingling stuff and go all the way down my back and I was sitting in a co-working space like 6 a.m. Sun comes up and I'm working and I'm coding and I hear like a sound or something. So I do like I look left and my next get stuck. Like I'm like wow fuck and what am I dying? You know and I thought I'm probably dying. Yeah, so probably want to die in a co-working space. I'm going to go home and die in like
Apiece and honor. Yeah, so I closed my laptop and I put it in my backpack and I walked to the street or got on my motorbike went home and I lied down on like a pillow like my legs up and stuff to get rid of this like because it was my whole back and if it was because I was working like this all the time. Yeah, so I started getting like a laptop stand everything ergonomically correct, but then I started lifting and since then like it seems like everything gets
Aidan out boss your kind of your more straight and I never have Arizona or side anymore representing injury. I never thinking anymore no pains stuff. So then I started working on the sofa and it's great. Like it feels you're close to the I'll sit like I said like this. Yeah, let's get it on a pillow in a laptop and then I work
are you like lean
back kind of like
Together like legs and then where's the mouse using using the do you not so everything's truck bed on the Mac OS my MacBook. I used to have the Logitech MX Mouse the perfect economic Mouse and
he's really like this little thing. What do you think? Yes one
screen one screen and you said three screen so I come from the I know where people come over I had a little stuff but then I realized that having it all condensed in 1 laptop. It's a 16 inch MacBook. So it's quite big but having no one there is amazing because you're so close to the tools you're so
Close to the what's happening, you know, is that working on a car or something? It's like so like man, if you have three screens look here. Look there. You can also neck injury actually. So
if I don't know this the sounds like a 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 in a single screen That's
it man. That's crazy. Come on tap you all top like winners all topped. Michael has come onto the scene which 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 would switch screens
on strap the Chrome. I used to have this swipe screen, you know, you could do like a different screen. Yeah spaces. Yeah, that's like ask too difficult. Let's just put it all on one screen on the MacBook and then he 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 a side code, right? Yeah for colleagues. He'll
know man. I love it like I'm
Laughs seeing it with friends that they have amazing like Battle Stations, right? It's called It's amazing I wanted but I don't want to write like you like the
constraints there's so that's it. There's some aspect of the constraints which like once you get good at it. You can focus your mind and you can I'm
suspicious of like more, you know, yeah, you really do stuff like it might Slow Me Down
actually, it's a good way to put it I'm suspicious of more me to suspicious of more in all in all ways in
which you can defend more red. You can defend. Yeah my developer I make money I need to
I need more screens, right? I need to be more efficient and you read stuff about like mythical man-month. We're like hiring more people slows down a software product project. That's famous think you can use a metaphor maybe for you know tools as well and I see friends just with gear acquisition syndrome that buying so much stuff, but they're not that productive. They have the best boot most beautiful Battle Stations desktops everything. They're not that productive. And so that kind of fun like it's all from a laptop in a backpack, right? It's kind of nomad minimalist take me through it.
Like
the perfect Ultra productive day in your life.
I say like where you get a lot of shit done. Yeah you and it's all focused on getting shit done. What when you waking up. Is it a regular time
release? Yes, I go sleep like 2 a.m. You see somebody that's and before 4 a.m. But my girlfriend would go sleep nude midnight. So we did a compromise like 2 a.m. You know, so wake up around 1011 the more like 10 shower make coffee I make
Make coffee like drip coffee like the V60, you know the filter and I boil water and then put the coffee and and then she'll live with my girlfriend and then open laptops are coding check what's going on like bugs or whatever. How long
are you like how stretches of time able to just sit behind the computer coding?
So I used to need like really long stretches where I would do like all-nighters and stuff to get shit done, but I've gotten trained to like have more interruptions where I can
like because you have to
this is
I feel like there's a lot of distractions like your girlfriend ask soft people come over whatever some very fast now I can lock in and lock out quite fast and hurt people developers or entrepreneurs with kids have the same thing like before they like I cannot work but to get used to it and they get really productive in like short time because they only have like 20 minutes and then shit goes crazy again. So I'm not a constraint, right? Yes funny. So think that works for me. I'm yeah and then maybe, you know cook food and stuff like that.
Lunch steak and
chicken and eat a bunch of times a day. So you said coffee? Yeah you doing.
Yeah. So if you guys later cook foods, we get like local stores like meat and stuff and vegetables and cook that and then second coffee and go some more maybe go outside for long like you can you can mix fun stuff. You know,
how many hours are you saying that perfectly productive day you doing programming? Like if you were like to kill it, I don't like all that
basically mean like the special days where I like special girlfriend leaves to like Bears or
You're alone for a week at home, which is amazing and just code it's like and you stay up all night and eat chocolate. And yeah, that's technically
yeah. Okay. Let's remove girlfriend from picture social life from picture. It's just you
man. This shit goes crazy because one should go see how she's goes
crazy. Okay. So should you let's rewind a you still waking up. There's coffee. There's no girlfriend to talk to you. There's no how we wake
up like 1:00 p.m.
2 p.m.
Because you went to bed at 6:00.
Yeah, because I was coding. I was finding some new AI shit. Yeah, I'm studying it and it was amazing and I cannot sleep because it's too important. We need to stay awake. We need to see all of this me to make something now and but that's the times I do make like new stuff more. So I think I give a friendly actually booked a hotel for like a week to like leave is he has a kid to his girlfriend's kids stay in the house and he goes to another hotel sounds a little suspicious right going through
But all he does is writing or coding. He's a writer and he needs like this alone time to silence and I think for this Flow State it's true. You know, I'm better maintaining stuff - Love disruptions then like creating new stuff. I need to and comments close. This is uninterrupted period of time see I wake up like 12 p.m. You know still coffee showers. We still shower, you know, and then this code like non-stop in my friends comes over.
Comes over some distraction. Yeah, you also already called stew so he comes over we go together. We listen, you know, it starts going back to that the body days, you know like yeah co-working days like
she's not really working with him, but you just both working
because it's nice to have like the vibe where he boasted to get on the couch and coding or something and you actually it's mostly silent or there's music, you know, sometimes you ask something and but generally like you really locked in and
what what music you listen to
I think like techno like YouTube techno. Listen, there's a channel called hor with a umlaut like h0 double dot. It's Berlin techno, whatever. It looks like they filmed 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 us so
fast and aggressive, you know like that that's not distracting to you. Right
that's amazing like that. I think distracting man Jazz like a
Some coffee Jazz with my girlfriend when I wake up and it's kind of like this piano starts getting annoying. It's like doing the news doing doing doing too many tones is like too many things wrong. This industrial techno is like, you know, this African like rain dances like this transcendental trans,
that's interesting because I actually mostly now listen to Brown noise noise. Yeah. Wow, like pretty loud. Wow, and one of the things you learn is your brain gets used to whatever so I'm sure Detective.
No, if I actually give it a real chance, my brain would get used to it. But like with was noise what happens if something happens you Brands 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 your own brand for me it like it does something I discovered right away when I tried it for the first time.
After about like a couple minutes your everything every distraction just like disappears and it goes like you can like hold focus on things like really well. It's weird like you got like really focus on the thing. It doesn't really matter what that I think that's what people achieve was like meditation. You can like my focus on your breath. For example,
it's normal Brown is not like been our oh no, this is normal.
Psych yeah white noise. I think it's the same as it make noise White Noise Brown noise I think is when it's like base
here. Yeah, it's more diffused more dampens dampened a casita no sharp sharp brightness. Yeah, but I a casita and use a headphone, right?
Yeah actually like walk around in life often with brown noise
through the SEC sacrifice shit, but it's cool. And
yeah. Yeah when I murder people at help Jake
It drowns out there screams Jesus Christ. Yeah,
I said too much. No, I'm gonna try the brown noise with a murderer or for the coating. Yeah for decoding. Okay good try it. Try it. But you have to like with everything else you give it a real chance. Yeah my fun. I also like I said do technically type stuff electronic music on top of the brown noise.
But then control the speed because the faster it goes the more Exotic Tea. So if I really need to get shit done, especially with programming, I'll have a beat. Yeah and it's great. It's cool as I is cool to play those little tricks with your mind. Is that 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 know
this might be a co-working space. I would just start talking too much. Yeah,
so there's source of distraction.
Yeah.
Do in the course that you would do like a money bought like a mug. So if you would would work for 45 minutes and then if you would say 11 a word you would get a fine which is like $1. So you put one dollar to say hey, what's up? So true three dollars you put in the Bog and until 15 minutes free time. Like we can like party whatever never 45 minutes again working that works, but you need to shut people up or they you know,
I think there's a
There's an intimacy in being silent together that maybe I'm maybe I'm uncomfortable with like but you if you need to make yourself vulnerable and actually do it like with close friends to just sit there in silence for more a a time and like doing anything
watch this video of this podcast was like this Buddhism podcast with people meditating and they were interviewing each other or whatever and like a poultice and suddenly after questions like yeah.
Yeah.
And then we just silent for like three minutes and then they said it was amazing. Yeah, that was amazing. I was like Wow pretty cool, you know,
he lies like that.
And I really like that when you'll ask a question.
I don't know. What's a perfectly productive day for you. Like I had 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 like I want to show you my heart. You know, I want to show you go straight from my heart to my mouth to like saying the real thing and the more I think the more I start like filtering myself, right? And I want to just throw it out there immediately.
I do that more with Tina. I think he has a lot of practice in that I do that as well in a team setting when you're thinking brainstorming and you allow yourself to just like think in silence. Yeah, just like because even in meetings people want to talk, yeah.
It's like know you'd think before you speak and just I guess okay to be silent together. If you allow yourself the room to do that. You can actually come up with really good ideas. Yeah, so okay this perfect day. How much caffeine are you consuming in? This Dad
too much right because Norm like two cups of coffee, but on this perfect day like we go to like four maybe so we're starting to hit like the anxiety levels. So four cups is a lot. What are you well, I think my coffees are quite strong when I make them is like 20 grams of
Coffee powder in the V60 so like my friends call them like nuclear coffee because it's quite heavy. So it's quite strong, but it's nice to hit that anxiety level where you're like almost panic attack, but you're not there yet. So but that's like man. It's like super locked in just like it's amazing. But I mean that's that's a space for that, you know in my life, but it's a thing is great for making new stuff. It's amazing
starting from scratch creating a new
thing. Yes, I think girlfriends should let the guys go away for like two weeks every few now every year at least, you know, maybe every quarter. I don't know and just sit and make some shits without you know, they're amazing but like no disturbances just be alone. And then, you know, people can make something very very amazing just wearing cowboy hats in the mountains like we
showed exactly we can do that. There's a movie about that if the laptops I didn't do much programming though. Yeah,
you can do a little bit of that. Okay then.
If shipping, you know can do both the different but I need allow us to go. You know, you need like a man
cave, right? Yeah to shit shit shit done. Yeah, it's a balance. Okay, cool. What about sleep naps and all that not sleeping
much. I don't do naps in a day. I think it's power naps are good, but I don't really I'm never tired anymore in the day and it's also because of Jim I'm not tired. I'm tired when I want to see when you know when it's night. I need sleep. Yeah me and very well. I
love naps. Yeah care.
I don't know. I don't know why brain shuts off turns on. I don't know if it's healthy or not. It just works. Yeah, I think with anything mental physical you have to be a student of your own body and like no know what the limits are like that you have to be skeptical taking advice from the internet in general because a lot of the advice is just a good Baseline for the general population, but then utilized you have to become a student of your own like of your own body of your own self. How you work. That's I've
A lot of like for me fasting was an interesting one. They used to eat a bunch of meals a day, especially when I was lifting heavy like because everybody says that you have to eat kind of a lot, you know multiple meals a day, but I realize I can get much stronger feel much better if I eat once or twice a day
I meet ya it's crazy. I never understood this small mule thing didn't work for me.
Let me just ask you could be interesting. If you can comment on some of the other products you've created we talked about know.
Nomad list interior a iPhoto a therapist AI what's remote? Okay.
It's a job board promote jobs because back then like 10 years ago. There was a job boards, but it was not really specifically remote job job boards. So I made one bale made like first on know Melissa made like no my job's like a page a lot of companies are hiring and I pay for job posts or spinning off to remote. Okay, and I was like this number one or number two biggest remote job boards, and and it's also fully automated people just post a job.
People apply it as like profiles as well. Like it's kind of
like LinkedIn for remotes work. Just focus on remote only. Yeah,
this is It's essentially like a simple job board. I discovered jobbers a way more complicated than you think but yeah, it's a job or for ammo jobs, but the nice thing is you can charge a lot of money for job pose. It's man it's good money B2B. You can charge like you serve to 99 but at the peak during when the FED started printing money like 2021, I was making 140.
Okay a month with remote okay with just job posts and I started like getting crazy up cells like rainbow color its job post. You can add your back or name is just up salesmen and you charge files not for an upsell. It was crazy. And I have all these companies is upset up. So yeah, we want everything job posted cost three thousand four hundred four thousand dollars and I was like, this is good good business and then the fat Stop Printing money and I all went down and went down to like 10K a month from 140.
Now it's back is I think it's like 40 was good times. You
know, I gotta ask you but back to the digital Nomad life. Yeah, you are you wrote a blog post on the reset and in general like just give them away everything living a minimalist life. Yeah. What does it take to do that like to get rid of
everything ten years ago was like this trend in the blog back then blogs were so popular was like a blogosphere and it was like a hundred fingers challenge. What is that horrid thing? I mean, it's ridiculous. But like you you write down every object you have in your house.
And you counted your make like a spreadsheet and you're like, okay. I have 500 things. You need to get it down to 100 why you know, it's just a trend. So I did it. I started like Selling Stuff search wrong way stuff and I did like MDMA and ecstasy like 2012 kind of and after the trip, I felt so different and I felt like I had to start throwing shit away. Like I swear and I start throwing shit away and I felt that was like, it was almost like the drug sending me to a battle flag.
Charlie she doing you start, you know go on a journey need to get out of here. And and this is what the end he made it. I think yeah how
hard is it to get down to 100
items or you need to like sell your PC and stuff. He's so you need to go on eBay and then Matt going eBay selling where stuff is very interesting because you discover Society. You just met you meet the craziest people. You meet every range from Rich to poor everybody comes to your house to buy stuff so funny. So engine I recommend everybody do this just to meet people that want your shit. Yeah.
Yeah, it was so I didn't know it was I was living in Amsterdam and I didn't know if 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 too weird. But like what's my mobile
so back then I was I was making music and I we would make music videos with like a Canon 5D camera back than ever is making films and feet new screws that and and we bought it with my friends and stuff and
it was kind of like I had to sit sell this thing too because it was like it was very expensive like six gators on me and but it meant that selling this man that we wouldn't make music music anywhere. I would leave Holland's this kind of like stuff we were working on with ends and I was kind of saying this music video stuff. We're not getting beat. We're not getting famous in his or successful need to stop doing this. He's music production. Also, we're not really working and it was kind of like felt very bad, you know for my friends because we work together on this and to sell this like camera that would make stuff.
If and there's a hard goodbye
was just the camera but it was like it felt like a sorry guys doesn't work and I need to go you know who who bought it you
remember was some guy who couldn't possibly understand the Journey action of
it. Yeah,
you showed up here tears the money. Thanks.
Yeah, but it was like it was like God in your life like this shit ends. Now we gonna do new stuff
and nothing has beautiful. Did that twice Mi give away everything everything everything like down to just
pants underwear backpack
I think I think is 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 little stuff and but there's a card to it like you lean more on this on the stuff on the services, right? Like for example, you don't need a car you use Uber right where you don't need kitchen stuff because you go to restaurants, you know when you're traveling so you lean more on other people services, but you spend money on that as well. So that's good.
If it just letting go of material possessions, which it
Gives a kind of freedom to how you move about the world. Yeah, it gives you complete freedom to go on to another city to if your backpack
with a backpack,
there's a kind of freedom to it. There's something about material possessions and having a place and all that the ties you down a little bit Yeah, Nick spiritually. Yeah, it's good to take a leap all turn into the world. Especially when you're younger to
like Matt. I rang my if you're 18, you get out of high school do this go travel and build some internet stuff, whatever if your laptop and it's amazing.
Ian sighs five years ago. It's still going to University. But now I'm thinking like know maybe don't maybe skip University just go first like drive around a little bit figure some stuff out. You can go back to University when you're 25, you can like okay now I learn be successful in business you have money at least now, you can choose what you really want to study, you know, because people at 18 they go study. What's probably good for the job market, right? So it probably makes more sense. Like if you want that go travel with some businesses and go back to University if you want. So one of the biggest
users of the universe
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
traveling and you meet so many different cultures.
I mean the problem for me is like if I travel it at that young age. I'm attracted to people at the outskirts of the world like for me. I wear no not
geographically. Well I did the subcultures is a
subtype. Yeah, like the weirdoes the darkness. Yeah, me too. But that might not be the best not working at 18 years old.
For nobody
man, if you're smart about it, you you can stay safe and I met so many weirdos from traveling. You meet this how travel works if you really let loose you meet the craziest people. Yeah, and it's the most interesting people and it's just I cannot recommend it enough but see the
thing is when you're 18, I feel like depending on your personality. You have to learn both how to be a weirdo and how to be a normie like you still have to learn how to fit.
To society that for a person like me for example was always an outcast like there's always a danger for going full out guest. Yeah, that's a harder life. If you like. If you go to like go full artists and full like Darkness. It's just a heart of life.
You can come back. You can come back to
normal as 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 I was cast as well and then I'm more adaptable to Normie now you
Earned it. Yes, after 30 days. You know, you're like, yeah, but I need skill. You have
to learn. Yeah,
I feel bad. I feel so do you start as an outcast? But the more you work on yourself the less like shit you have you kind of start becoming more normally because you become more chill with yourself more happy and it kind of makes you
uneasy right little yes. Yes,
like the most crazy people are always the most interesting if you've solved your internal struggles and your therapy and stuff and you kind of
Come kind of help. 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 underwear socks. You don't need a lot of clothes in Asia because it's hot. So you just wear sweat pants and shorts. He will grant flip-flops. So very basic t-shirt and
Go to the laundromat and watch my stuff and I think it's like 50 things or something.
Yeah. Yes. Nice. There's a images in the show alone. Yeah, they really test you because the only get 10 items and you have to survive on the Wilderness and acts like everybody brings an axe. Some people also have a saw.
Usually asks does the job you basically have to in order to build a shelter. You have to cut down on the cut the trees and make and like
Minecraft
everything. I learned about life aircraft, bro. Yeah. Yeah, you could it's a 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 that is just to live a minimalist life, but like at some people like I've met people that really enjoy
Your possessions and I bring them happiness and that's a beautiful thing. I 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 Baseline hedonist hedonistic adaptation very fast. Yeah, but man, if you look at the studies most people like like a get a new car six months, you know, get a new house six months. You just feel the same. She like wow, should I buy all the stuff that hadn't studying hedonistic adaptation made me think a lot about minimalism.
And so that you don't even need to go through the whole journey of getting it just just focus on the
the thing that's more permanent. Yeah, like building
shit. Yeah, like people around you to give you love nice food nice experiences meaningful work those things exercise, you know, those things make you happy. I think make me happy for sure. You wrote a blog
post why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too what's your strategy and communicating with people?
Yeah. So when I wrote that I was getting so many GM's as you probably have you have a million times more but
We're getting angry that it wasn't responding and I was like, okay, I'll just close down this DM's completely and people get angry that I close my DMs down that I'm not like man of the people he knows like little changed man. Yeah, it's changed you guys, you know like this and I'm like, I'll explain why I just don't have the time in a day to you know, answer every question and also people send you like crazy shit man, like stalkers and like people ride like their whole life story for you and then ask you to rise like my I have no idea. I'm not a therapist. I don't know.
No, I do this stuff, but also beautiful stuff. No absolutely
sure like life story. I've posted a coffee form. Like if you wanted to have a coffee with me and I've gotten an extremely large number of submissions. And when I look at them, they're just like beautiful people in there. Like yeah, beautiful really beings is really powerful stories and like breaks my heart that I won't get to meet those people, you know, like as 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 yes, he them.
Yeah, I have this problem that I try. I want to try help people and like also like oh that's make startups and whatever and it's I've learned over the years that generally for me and it sounds maybe bad right but like I helped my friend Andre, for example, he was he came up to me and go workspace. That's how I met him. He said I want to learn to code I wanted to start ups. How do we do it? I said, okay, let's go install nginx. Let's start coding and he has this self energy that he actually
Lee he doesn't need to be pushed he just goes and he just goes and ask questions and he doesn't ask too many questions just goes and learns that and now he has a company and makes a lot of money as his own startups. So and the people that did I had to kind of like that asked me for help but then I gave help and then I started started debating it, you know, yeah. Do you have that like people ask you twice and they go I guess you say no you're wrong because I'm like, okay, bro. I don't want to debate you ask me for advice. Right and if the people need to push gently.
It doesn't happen. You need to have this energy for
yourself whether searching they're searching the trying to figure it out but oftentimes their search if they successfully find what they're looking for. You'll be within sounds very like spiritual sounding but it's really like figuring that shit out on your own but there are reaching their trying to ask the world around them. Like, how do I live this life? How do I figure this out? But ultimately the answer is going to be from them working on themselves and like I said early
It's a stupid thing but like Googling and doing like yeah surfing it's their destination. I think sending messages to people is a lot of procrastination like blacks out overcome successful podcaster. Yeah, bro, just you know start like just go. Yeah and just go I would never ask you how to be successful with Castor. Like I was just started and then I would copy your message, you know saying oh this guy's black background. We probably need this as well. Yeah, you try it. Yeah, right and then you realize it's not about the black background. It's about something else.
You find your voice like keep trying to say exactly but it tastes is a difficult thing. Although a lot of people copy and they do move past it. Yeah, you should understand their methods and then move past it like find yourself find your own voice imitating and you put your own spin to it, you know, and that's like creative process. That's like literally the whole crate everybody always Builds on the previous work. You shouldn't get stuck 24 hours in a day eight hours of sleep. You like break it down into a math equation 90 minutes of showering clean up coffee.
It just keeps whittling down to
zero that is not the specific, but I had to make like a you know, an average or
something firefighting like that one h of groceries and errands. I've tried breaking down minute by minute what I do in a day. Yeah, especially when my life was simpler. It's really refreshing to understand where you waste a lot of time. Yeah and what you enjoy doing like how many minutes it takes to be happy doing the thing that makes you happy and how many minutes it takes to be productive?
- and you realize there's a lot of hours in the day if you spend it, right?
Yeah lot of his waist
for me. It's been the the biggest battle for the longest time as finding stretches of time where I can deeply focus into really really deep work just like zoom in and completely Focus cutting out away all the distractions and that's the battle but some pleasant extremely
unpleasant. We need to fly to an island, you know, make a man cave items where we can just everything just coat and
We cannot just get shit done make new projects Yeah Yeah, man, they called me psychopath for this because it says like one hours of sex always love you. No matter addicts write something, you know, and they were like, oh this guy's a psychopath. He plans his sex and Civic our like I'll grow I don't but you have a counter for hugs. Yeah, exactly like 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 your
life? I'll do this is like dark.
Yeah, I don't want a little bit from where it yeah,
how many times you see your parents Jesus? Yeah. Scary man.
That's right. It might be only you know, a handful more times. You just look at the math of a few see him once a year or twice a year I face
time today. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean that that's like dark when you
see somebody you like like seeing like a friend that's on the outskirts of your friend group. And then you realize like well with I'm really seeing him for like three years. So like how many more times do we have that we see each other? Yeah. Do
you believe that like friends just slowly disappear from your life. Like they kind of your friend
group evolves, right? So like it does it does he
don't want to there's the problem Facebook you get all these old friends from school like when you were 10 years old and back when Facebook started
But you don't really you would add friend them. And then you're like, why are we in touch? You can just keep the memories there, you know like it's different life now. Yeah, I have you know, I
don't know. I might be a guy thing or I don't know there's certain friends. I have that like we don't interact often, but we're still friends. Yeah, like every time I see him,
I think it's because we have a foundation of many shared experiences many memories. I guess. It's like nothing has changed like we've been almost like we've been talking every day, even if they haven't talked for a year. So that's like yeah that's deep. Yeah, she's 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 are interact with a lot so it depends but there's just this network of good human beings that can.
I have ever like a real love for them and I had taken those count on them. It's like if any of them called me in the middle of the night, I'll get rid of a body. You know, I'm there much like how that's a different definition of friendship. But it's true. It's true. It's true friend.
You become more and more
famous recently. How's that affect you it's not recently because this
is gradual thing. Right? Like it keeps keeps going and and I also don't know why it's
Going does that put pressure on you to 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 that put pressure on you to become more popular to be a little bit more.
like collected and
man, I think the opposite right like
because the people I follow are interesting because they say whatever they think and they ship or whatever. It's so boring that people start tweeting only about one topic. Yeah. I don't know anything about their personal life. I want to know about the personal life like you do podcast you ask about life stuff of personality. That's the most interesting part of like business or sports. Like what's the behind the sport athlete right behind the entrepreneur that's interesting stuff to be human. Yeah, like you you share that, you know, like I shared tweet went too far. But like we were cleaning the toilet because the toilet was clogged, you know,
No, but like just real stuff because the ansan hwarang them video guy. He says he started cleaning toilets. No,
that's cool. You it really says something about the the Denny's thing. I forget.
Yeah, it was recent that and video started in a Danny Diner
table and you made it somehow
profound. You're almost at this one. This one
and Vidya a three trillion dollar company was started in a Denny's an American Diner people need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next billion a trillion dollar company. What's the first and second
space?
Home office and then the in between.
Yeah, I'll I guess yeah Island, huh?
You need a space to like conquer it man. And I found history on this. So 400 years ago in the coffee houses of Europe the like the Scientific Revolution the enlightenment happens because it would go to coffee houses. They would sit there they would drink coffee and it would work they would work they would write or they would and it would do debates and they would organize Marine Rouse, right? It would do all the stuff in coffee houses in Europe in France.
In Austria and UK in Holland, so we would always be going to we were always going to cafes to to work and to have serendipitous conversations with other people and start businesses and stuff. And when I like you asked me to come on here and we flew to America and the first thing I realized was that I've been to America before but we were in this Cafe and like there's a lot of laptops ever. He's working on something and I made I took this photo and then when you're in Europe like a large parts of Europe now, you can't
Cannot use a laptop anymore. It's like no laptop which are understands. But that
is to you a fundamental place to create shares and that natural organic co-working space of a cough or
a lot of people a lot of people have very small homes and co-working spaces are kind of boring. They can't do not vary their private. They're not serendipitous kind of boring cafes are amazing because they random people can come in and ask you what are you working on there? You know and not
Just love. Those people are also having conversations. Like they did for energy years ago debates or whatever. It's things are happening and man. I understand that the Aesthetics of it. Like if I go start a brawl 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 versus we're benefiting from Nvidia. I think is the u.s. GDP for sure is benefiting from Nvidia. You're being g2b could benefit if we build more companies and I feel in Europe there's this
I've and this you have to connect things but not not allowing laptops interface is kind of like part of the vibe, which is like yeah, we're not really here to work. We're here to like enjoy life. I agree with this Anthony Bourdain like this tweet was quoted as anybody would any photo with him of cigarettes and a coffee in France? And he said that's this is what cafes are for I agree, but
there is some element of like entrepreneurship. Thank you have to allow people to dream big and work their ass off to towards that dream and feel each other's energy as the
Iraq with like that's one of the things I liked in Silicon Valley when I was working there is like the cafes like yeah, there's a bunch of dreamers there. You can make fun of them for like everybody thinks they're going to build a trillion dollar company, but like and it's
awesome. Not everybody wins 90% people will be bullshit
but they're working their ass
off. Yeah, they're doing something and and you need to pass this start up bro. Like oh it started one level. No, it's not just people making cool shit. Yeah, and this will benefit you because this will create jobs for your company or your country in your region and I think in Europe,
That's a big problem. Like we have a very anti
entrepreneurial my dream big and build shit. And this is really inspiring. This is pinned tweet of yours all the projects that you've tried and the ones that succeeded.
Has very few meet life
goes for Twitter to mute to Sheridan mutes list. Yeah
mute words, fire calculator. No more Google make a rank. How much is my side project worth climate finder ideas AI Airline Leah still
runs, but it doesn't make money are like this like compares the safety of Airlines because I was nervous to fly. So I was like, let's collect all the data on crashes for all the airplanes, but
at least he cable.
Nice, that's awesome. Make Village. No Maggie r3d and virtual reality Dev play play my inbox like you mentioned. There's a lot of stuff. Yeah, man, trying to find some embarrassing tweets Eeyore's
you can go to the highlights tab as older like the good shit Sky. There you go. This is Dubai
POV building an AI startup.
While you're real
influencer,
and if people copy this far down they they change the screenshot becomes like a meme.
Of course, you know, this is good.
So do I looks it's
insane as beautiful architecture as this crazy the story behind this ad you see rocks for
sure. It is about the European economy where like you're
paying 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 percent of top us companies were founded before 1950s
or the median finding of companies in u.s. It's not like 1960 and the median of the top companies, right and immediately in Europe is like 1900 or something. Yeah, so it's weird 1914 and 1963. So there's 250 of difference. It's a
good representation of the very thing you were talking about the different difference in the cultures entrepreneurial Spirit of the people's
your abuse to be entrepreneurial like there was companies founded in 1800 1850 1900 is flipped like around 1950 where America took the lead and and I guess my point is like I hope that Europe gets back to because I'm European. I hope that your app gets back to being an entrepreneurial culture where they build big companies again because right now the old old dinosaur companies controlled economies their low being with the government there Europe is also this like their infiltrators of the government where they create so much regulation like I think so,
Regulatory capture right where it's very hard for a newcomer to join in to enter an industry because it's too much regulation actually regulations very good for big companies because they can follow it. I can't follow it. Right if I want to start a I start up in Europe. Now it cannot because there's an AI regulation that makes it very complicated for me. I probably need to get like notaries involved. I need to get certificates licenses. Whereas in America. I can just open my laptop. I can start at a I started right now mostly, you know.
What do you think about a yak effective acceleration is movement
May yet be fj's is on I'm I love Beth Jesus and he's amazing. And if it Iraq is 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 York is like is
a positive outlook on the future is like
technology can make us
We'd 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 to space and build more technology that can improve society and we shouldn't shy away from technology technology can be the answer for many
things. Yeah build more don't spend so much time on fear-mongering and cautiousness and all this kind of stuff. Some is okay. Someone's good. But most of the time should be spent on building and creating unlike and
doing so unapologetically. It's a it's a refreshing reminder of what made United States great as all the builders. Like I said that entrepreneurs like we can't forget that and all the sort of discussions of how things could go wrong with technology and all this kind of
stuff. Yeah, it goes to a look at China China is now at the stage of like America was like 1900 is something they're building rapidly the insane and obviously China's massive problems, but that's comes with the whole thing that comes to American is beginning all the massive problems, right but
But I think it's very very dangerous for a country or region like Europe to you. You get to this point where you're kind of complacent your kind of comfortable and then you know, you can either go this or you can go this way, right? You're from here you go like this and then you can go this one is I think you should go this way and I'll go up. Yeah go up and and
I think there's a problem is to Michael's your so er chyme Adu Ock. He's like the European kind of version. I made like hoodies. It stops. A lot of people wear like this this make you deserve great again hats. I made it at first but it became too like Trump. So now it's more like European blue, you know, make your great again.
All right. Okay. See you at incredible life very successful built a lot of cool stuff. So what advice would you give to young people about how to do the
same?
Man, I would listen to like nobody just do what you think is good and follow your hearts, right like everybody peer pressure 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 could steer the ship, you know, 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.
Things as you did, you know as I did and I think that should be more promoted like Do Your Own Thing their space in the economy and in society for do your own thing, you know? Yeah. It's like, you know, like little Villages everybody would sell I would sell Brad you would sell meat everybody can do their own little thing. You don't need to
You're being normally as you say you are you can you can be what you really want to be, you know, and like
go all out doing that. Yeah, you got to go all
out because if you do if you have facets, you cannot succeed. You got me to go lean into the the outcast of leaning to the being different and just doing whatever it is you want to do right?
You gotta whole asset. Yeah. Well, that's it. Yeah, this was an incredible conversation. It was an honor.
To finally meet you because I'm only likes to talk to you and keep doing your thing. Keep inspiring me and the world with all the cool stuff your building. Thank you, ma'am.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Peter levels to support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Drew Houston Dropbox co-founder, by the way, I love Dropbox. Anyway, Drew said don't worry about failure. You only have to be right once thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
