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

Pieter Levels (aka levelsio on X) is a self-taught developer and entrepreneur who has designed, programmed, launched over 40 startups, many of which are highly successful. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep440-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/pieter-levels-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Pieter’s X: https://x.com/levelsio Pieter’s Techno Optimist Shop: https://levelsio.com/ Indie Maker Handbook: https://readmake.com/ Nomad List: https://nomadlist.com Remote OK: https://remoteok.com Hoodmaps: https://hoodmaps.com SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/shopify-ep440-sc Motific: Generative ai deployment. Go to https://motific.ai https://lexfridman.com/s/motific-ep440-sc AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/ag1-ep440-sc MasterClass: Online classes from world-class experts. Go to https://masterclass.com/lexpod https://lexfridman.com/s/masterclass-ep440-sc BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/betterhelp-ep440-sc Eight Sleep: Temp-controlled smart mattress. Go to https://eightsleep.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/eight_sleep-ep440-sc OUTLINE: (00:00) – Introduction (11:38) – Startup philosophy (19:09) – Low points (22:37) – 12 startups in 12 months (29:29) – Traveling and depression (42:08) – Indie hacking (46:11) – Photo AI (1:22:28) – How to learn AI (1:31:04) – Robots (1:39:21) – Hoodmaps (2:03:26) – Learning new programming languages (2:12:58) – Monetize your website (2:19:34) – Fighting SPAM (2:23:07) – Automation (2:34:33) – When to sell startup (2:37:26) – Coding solo (2:43:28) – Ship fast (2:52:13) – Best IDE for programming (3:01:43) – Andrej Karpathy (3:11:09) – Productivity (3:24:56) – Minimalism (3:33:41) – Emails (3:40:54) – Coffee (3:48:40) – E/acc (3:50:56) – Advice for young people PODCAST LINKS: – Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast – Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr – Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 – RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ – Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 – Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Pieter Levels, also known on X as LevelsIO. He is a self-taught developer and entrepreneur who designed, programmed, shipped and ran over 40 startups, many of which are hugely successful. In most cases, he did it all by himself, while living the digital nomad life in over 40 countries and over 150 cities, programming on a laptop while chilling on a couch using vanilla HTML, jQuery, PHP and SQLite. He builds and ships quickly and improves on the fly, all in the open, documenting his work, both his successes and failures,

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  with 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. And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Shopify for ecommerce, Motific for LLM and RAG deployment, AG1 for health, MasterClass for learning, BetterHelp for the mind, and Aidsleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, there's a bunch of ways to get in touch with me

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  by giving feedback, sending in questions that I can answer, and all other kinds of ways if you go to luxfreeman.com/contact. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store. I recently tweeted about my belief, as it stands now, that Kamala Harris is not a communist and that Donald Trump is not a fascist.

• 2:10Lex Fridman?

  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, that 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.

• 2:52Lex Fridman?

  But to articulate that and to still 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 seriously, 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 I would like to work on more and more, even amidst this insane political season. Anyway, I mention all that because, you know, when I think about Shopify, I think about

• 3:37Lex Fridman?

  capitalism. It's a bunch of small sellers getting together and be able to sell stuff to people that would benefit from it and would enjoy it, and they make it super easy. So if you're one such seller and you want to sell stuff and you have awesome stuff to sell, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Motific, a SaaS platform that helps businesses deploy LLMs and RAG that's customized, fine tuned on organization data sources. Obviously, this is often extremely sensitive data, so you have to do this carefully and well.

• 4:22Lex Fridman?

  But when it is done carefully and well and in a secure way, it can be a huge benefit for the company to be able to take all the data that the company has and internally be able to query that data, to be able to organize that data, to leverage and answering questions that would make everybody in the company more efficient. So I think that's the thing that unlocks, especially for large companies, but even midsize companies, even small companies, just the Intranet, a thing that takes all the data on the inside and be able to make high-quality, efficient, fast decisions based on that data. I think Motific was created by Cisco, specifically their Outshift Group that does the cutting-edge R and D. So these guys are legit. It's great.

• 5:06Lex Fridman?

  Visit motific.ai to learn more. That's M-O-T-I-F-I-C dot A I. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I'm going out. I think it's 100 degrees out in Austin right now. I'm gonna go out and run.

• 5:28Lex Fridman?

  Anywhere from 5 to 12 miles. I'm feeling good right now, so I'm thinking like 10, 11, 12 mile range. By the way, I just heard a little clip on Cam Haynes's Instagram. And by the way, Cam, amazing human being. You should definitely go follow him. He's an inspiration to me. You know, quietly just does incredible fits 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 or fast-paced, he'll 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.

• 6:12Lex Fridman?

  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 this sort of discomfort when there's a difficult part of the audiobook that'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 sit on a bench. And I'm doing it all not for sort of training for a marathon or training for 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 heat or in the cold, just the love of life that you can get, especially when the, the second wind hits.

• 6:57Lex Fridman?

  Anyway, after all that, I'm gonna drink a nice cold AG1. They'll give you a one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex.

• 7:08Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by MasterClass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. I love MasterClass. 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 lecturer, but a great doer stepping back and explaining the core of their art, of their skill, of their genius. Anyway, there's great stuff on poker with Phil Ivey, great stuff on barbecue. Man, it's been forever since I had barbecue from Aaron Franklin.

• 7:53Lex Fridman?

  These are all ones I've watched. Martin Scorsese on filmmaking, that is one I really enjoyed. I mean, Scorsese is just, his stuff is both powerful and thoughtful and deep and profound about family, about human nature, all of that, and it's just fun to watch. Okay? Maybe I'm one of a certain generation, but it's just fun to watch. So you get to hear how the master does it on MasterClass. Get unlimited access to every MasterClass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com/lexpod. That's masterclass.com/lexpod.

• 8:30Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. Some of the people losing their mind in the realm of the election that's coming up, that would be a fun one if they could sign up for BetterHelp and do a couples therapy. Somebody from the far left and the far right just sitting down together. Boy, that'd be a fascinating challenge for any therapist. And from the conversational space, I would love to just listen to that. And then I'll be talking to a bunch of people on the left and the right, and having some of those tense, difficult conversations.

• 9:14Lex Fridman?

  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. Most days, I kind of feel like an idiot, but I'm doing my best. Anyway, you should try OutTalk Therapy. Super easy to do with BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its pod for Ultra that I've been enjoying. I just recently enjoyed it. I enjoy it every night, multiple times a day. Let's get crazy. I love it.

• 9:56Lex Fridman?

  For a good nap, it can cool down inside of the bed to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature. Cool bed, warm blanket, and just shut off from the world. Just forget it all. Forget the madness of the world, the political bickering, 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 you 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 attacks you back, gets them to be pissed off,

• 10:41Lex Fridman?

  and you're both pissed off at each other. At the end of the day, just losing your mind, all of that can dissipate. For me, with a short nap, okay? On a cold bed, short nap feels like home. It's one of the favorite things I have about home and one of my least favorite things about traveling because I don't have 8Sleep. Anyway, you could enjoy the same kind of peace of mind. If you go to 8sleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get $350 off the Pod for Ultra. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Peter Levels.

• 11:38Lex Fridman?

  You've launched a lot of companies and built a lot of products. As you say, most failed, but some succeeded. What's your philosophy behind building the startups that you did?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  I think my philosophy is very different than most people in startups because most people in 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 for me, I'm much more scrappy 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 an idea 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 or something of building it. And I check if there's demand and if people actually sign up and not just sign up, but if people actually pay money, right?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Like they need to take out their credit cards, pay me money and then I can see if the idea is validated. And most ideas don't work, like as you say, most fail.

• 12:40Lex Fridman?

  So there's this rapid iterative phase where you just... Build a prototype that works, launch it.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:46Lex Fridman?

  See if people like it, improving it really, really quickly to see if people like it a little bit more enough to pay and all that. That that whole rapid process is how you think of.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  I think it's it's like it's very rapid and it's like um if I compare it to, for example, Google, you know, like our big tech companies, especially Google right now is kind of struggling. Like they made like transformers, they made all they invented all the AI stuff years ago and they never really shipped. Like they could have shipped chat G P T, for example, I think I heard in two thousand nineteen and they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy. But they had everything, they had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers and they could didn't do it. And it's because these big organizations, it's it's it can make you very slow. So being alone by myself on my laptop, like, you know, in my underwear, in a hotel room or something, I can ship very fast and I don't need to like. Don't need to ask like legal for like, oh, can you vouch for this, you know, I can just go and ship.

• 13:36Lex Fridman?

  Do you always code in your underwear, your profile picture, you're like slouching on couch in your underwear, chilling on laptop?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  No, no, but it's I would do wear like shorts a lot and I I usually just wear shorts and no T shirt because I'm always too hot, like I'm always overheating.

• 13:50Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for showing up, not just in your underwear, but wearing shorts.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  And no, you know, I still wearing this for you, but.

• 13:55Lex Fridman?

  Thank you. Thank you for dressing up.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  I think it's because I, since I go to the gym, I'm always too hot.

• 14:00Lex Fridman?

  What's your favorite exercise in the gym?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Man, over press.

• 14:03Lex Fridman?

  Over press, like shoulder press?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:05Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  But it feels good because you're doing like you do, you win, because when you like, what is it, I do sixty kilos, it's like hundred twenty pounds or something like it's. It's my only thing I can do well, you know, in the gym and you stand like this and you're like, I did it, you know, like a winner pose. A victory pose. I do bench press squats, deadlifts.

• 14:23Lex Fridman?

  Hence the uh the mug.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:25Lex Fridman?

  Talking to my therapist.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:26Lex Fridman?

  It's a deadlift.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it acts like therapy for me, you know?

• 14:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it is.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  It's controversial to say, like, if I say this on Twitter, people get angry.

• 14:33Lex Fridman?

  Physical hardship is a kind of therapy.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:35Lex Fridman?

  I just rewatched Happy People, A Year in the Taiga, that Warner Herzog film where they document.

• 14:43Lex Fridman?

  People that are doing trapping, they're essentially just working for survival in the wilderness year round.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:49Lex Fridman?

  And there's a deep happiness to their way of life.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:52Lex Fridman?

  Because they're so busy in it, in nature.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 14:57Lex Fridman?

  Like, there's something about that physical.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Physical, yeah.

• 14:59Lex Fridman?

  Toil.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. My dad taught me that. My dad always does like a construction in the house. Like, he's always renovating the house. He breaks through one room and then he goes to the next room. And he's just going in a circle around the house for like the last forty years. So, but so he's always doing construction in the house and it's his hobby. And he, like, he taught me when I'm depressed or something. He says, like, get a big, like, what do you call it? 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, like get, set a goal, do something. And I, I kind of did that with startups too.

• 15:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, construction is not about the destination, man. It's about the journey.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, sometimes I wonder, people who are always remodeling their house, is it really about the remodeling?

• 15:45Speaker 01

  No, no, it's not.

• 15:46Lex Fridman?

  Is it about the project?

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Journey.

• 15:48Lex Fridman?

  The puzzle of it.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  No, he doesn't care about the results. Well, he shows me, he's like, it's amazing. I'm like, yeah, it's amazing. But then he wants to go to the next room, you know? But I think it's very metaphorical for work. Because I also, I never stop work. I go to the next website. Or I make a new one, right? Or I make a new startup. So I'm always like, like, it gives 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 bug or something. I'm going to do something. You have something to wake up to, you know? And I think maybe especially as a man, also women, but you need, you need a hard work, you know? You need like endeavor, I think.

• 16:26Lex Fridman?

  How much of the building that you do is about money? How much is it about just a deep internal happiness?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  It's really about fun because I was, because I was doing it when I didn't make money, right? That's the point. So I was always coding. I was always, I was making music. I made electronic music, German bass music like twenty years ago. And I was always making stuff. So I think creative expression is like a meaningful work. It's so important. It's so fun. It's so fun to have like a daily challenge where you try to figure stuff out.

• 16:54Lex Fridman?

  But the interesting thing is you built a lot of successful products and you never really wanted to take it to that. Level where you scale real big and sell it to a company or something like this.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, the problem is I don't dictate that, right? Like if more people start using, if millions of people suddenly start using it and it becomes big. I'm not gonna say, oh, stop signing up to my website and pay me money. But I never raised funding for it. And I think because I don't like the stressful life that comes with it. Like I have a lot of founder friends and they tell me secretly like with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and stuff. And they they tell me like, next time, if I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it like you. Because it's more it's more fun, it's more in these more chill, it's more creative. They don't like this, they don't like to be manager, right? You become like a CEO, you become a manager. And I think a lot of people that start startups, when they become a CEO, they don't like that job, actually. But they can't really exit it, you know?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  But they like to do the groundwork, the coding. So I think that keeps you happy, like doing something creative.

• 17:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it was interesting how people are pulled towards that, to scale, to go really big. And you don't have that honest reflection with yourself, like what actually makes you happy? Because for a lot of great engineers, what makes them happy is the building, the the quote unquote individual contributor. Like where you're actually still coding or you're actually still building. And they let go of that and then they become unhappy. But some of that is the sacrifice needed to have an impact at scale. If you truly believe in a thing you're doing.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  But like, look at Elon, he's doing things million times bigger than me, right? And would I want to do that? I don't know, you cannot really choose these things, right? But I really respect that. I think Elon is very different from VC founders, right? VC start, it's like software, there's a lot of bullshit in this world, I think. There's a lot of like dodgy finance stuff happening there, I think. And I never have like concrete evidence about it, but your gut tells you something is going on with like companies getting sold to friends and VCs. And then they do reciprocity and this shady financial dealings. With Elon, that's not, he's just raising money from investors and he's actually building stuff. He needs the money to build stuff, you know, hard hardware stuff. And that I really respect.

• 19:09Lex Fridman?

  You said that there's been a few low points in your life. You've been depressed and the building is one of the ways you you get out of that. But can you talk to that? Can you take me to that place, to that time when you were at a low point?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  So I was in Holland and I graduated university and I didn't want to like get a normal job. And I was making some money with YouTube because I had this music career and I uploaded my music to YouTube. And YouTube started paying me like with AdSense, like two thousand dollars a month, two thousand dollars a month. And all my friends got like normal jobs and we stopped hanging out because people would like in university, you hang out, you know, you chill at each other's houses. You go party, but even when people get jobs, they only party like in the weekend and they don't hang anymore in the week because you need to be at the office. And I was like, this is not for me. I want to do something else. And I was starting getting this like, I think it's like Saturn return, you know, when you turn twenty seven. It's like some concept where Saturn returns to the same place in the orbit that it was when you're born.

• 20:03Lex Fridman?

  I'm learning some of your things.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Some astrology thing, you know?

• 20:05Lex Fridman?

  So many truly special artists died when they were twenty seven.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Exactly, someone with twenty seven, man. And it was for me, like I started going crazy because I didn't really see like my future in Holland, buying a house, going, living in the suburbs and stuff. So I flew out, I went to Asia, started digital nomading 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 on YouTube, but it's like, what is the future here, you know? Like, is this, is this something, while my friends in Holland were doing really well and with a normal life, you know? So I was getting very depressed and like, I'm like an outcast, you know? My money was shrinking. I wasn't making money anymore a lot. I was making five hundred dollars a month or something.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  And I was, you know, looking at the ceiling, thinking like, now I'm like twenty seven, I'm a loser. And that's the moment when I started building like startups. And it was because my dad said, like, if you're depressed, you need to, you know, get sand, get a shovel, start shoveling, do something. You can't just sit still. Which is kind of like a interesting way to deal with depression, you know? Like, it's not like, oh, let's talk about it. It's more like, let's go do something. And I started doing a project called 12 Startups in 12 Months, where every month I would make something, like a project, and I would launch it with Stripe so people could pay for it.

• 21:23Lex Fridman?

  So the basic format is try to build a thing, put it online, and put Stripe to where you can pay money for it.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, add a Stripe checkout button.

• 21:32Lex Fridman?

  Is that still like the easiest way to just like pay for stuff, Stripe?

• 21:36Speaker 01

  A hundred percent, like, I think so, yeah.

• 21:38Lex Fridman?

  It's a cool company. They just made it so easy, you can just click and...

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they're really nice, like, the CEO, Patrick, is really nice.

• 21:44Lex Fridman?

  Behind the scenes, it must be difficult to like actually make that happen. Because that used to be a huge problem, like...

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Merchant.

• 21:50Lex Fridman?

  Just adding a thing, a button, where you can like pay for a thing.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Dude. Dude, I know this, because when I was nine years old, I was making websites also, and I tried to open a merchant account. There was like before Stripe, you would have like, I think it 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 fax.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  And my dad had to, it wasn't my dad's name, and he had to sign for this. And he started reading these terms and conditions, which was like, he's liable for like a hundred million in damages. And he's like, I don't want to sign this. I'm like, Dad, come on, I need a merchant account. I need to make money on the internet, you know? And he signed it, and we faxed it to America, and I had a merchant account. But then 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 codes, and yeah.

• 22:37Lex Fridman?

  So 12 startups in 12 months.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:40Lex Fridman?

  So what, startup number one? What was that, like, what were you feeling? Were you sitting behind the computer? Like, how much do you actually know about building stuff at that point?

• 22:53Speaker 01

  I could code a little bit, because I did a YouTube channel, and I made a website for, I would make websites for like the YouTube channel. It was called Panda Mix Show, and it was like these electronic music mixes, like dubstep or drum and bass or techno or house.

• 23:04Lex Fridman?

  I saw one of them had like Flash, were you using Flash?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, my album, my CD album was using Flash. Yeah, I sold my CD. Yeah.

• 23:10Lex Fridman?

  Kids, Flash was a

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Flash was cool.

• 23:12Lex Fridman?

  Software. This is like the break.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Like grandpa, you know, but Flash was cool.

• 23:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and there was, what's it called? Oh, boy, I should remember this action script. There's some kind of programming language.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, X script.

• 23:22Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  It was in Flash. Back then, that was the JavaScript, you know?

• 23:25Lex Fridman?

  The JavaScript, yeah. And I thought that's gonna, that's supposed to be the dynamic thing that takes over the internet. I invested so many hours in learning that.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Steve Jobs killed it.

• 23:33Lex Fridman?

  Steve Jobs.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Steve Jobs said, Flash sucks, stop using it. And everyone was like, okay.

• 23:37Lex Fridman?

  That guy was right, though, right?

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Well, it was, it was a closed platform, I think, and

• 23:42Lex Fridman?

  Closed.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  But it's ironic because Apple, you know, they're not very open.

• 23:45Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  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 he just wanted to say that to make it look kind of bad. The Flash was cool. Yeah.

• 23:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it was cool for a time.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:58Lex Fridman?

  It, listen, animated GIFs were cool for a time, too.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:02Lex Fridman?

  They came back in a different way.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:03Lex Fridman?

  As a meme, though. I mean, like, I even remember when GIFs were actually cool, not ironically cool.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:11Lex Fridman?

  Like, there's like, on the internet, you would have like a dancing rabbit or something like this. And that was really exciting.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  You had like the, you know, Lex homepage, you know, at least, everything was centered.

• 24:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  And you had like Peter's homepage and the, on the construction.

• 24:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  GIF, which was like a guy with a helmet and the lights. It was amazing.

• 24:29Lex Fridman?

  Banners. Yeah, that's how, before like Google AdSense, you would have like banners for advertising.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  It was amazing. Yeah.

• 24:35Lex Fridman?

  And a lot of links to porn, I think.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:39Lex Fridman?

  Or porny type.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  That was where the merchant accounts people would use for, people would make money a lot. The only money made on the internet then was like porn, or a lot of it.

• 24:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it was, it was a dark place. It's still a dark place.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:49Lex Fridman?

  And, but there's beauty in the darkness. Anyway, so you were, you did some basic HTML.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, but I had to learn the actual like coding, so I, this was good. It was a good, good idea to like every month launch a startup so I could learn the codes, learn basic stuff and, but it was still very scrappy because I didn't have time to, which is on purpose, I didn't have time to spend a lot of, I had a month to do something, so I couldn't spend more than a month and I was pretty strict about that. And I published it as a blog post, so people, I think I put it on Hacker News and people would check like, kind of like, oh, did you actually, you know? I felt like accountability because I put it public, that I actually had to do it.

• 25:24Lex Fridman?

  Do you remember the first one you did?

• 25:26Speaker 01

  I think it was play my inbox, because back then my friends, we would send, we would send like cool mu- it was before Spotify, I think. We would send like, uh, 2013, we would send music to each other, like YouTube links. Uh, like, this is a cool song, this is a cool song. And it was these giant email threads on Gmail. And they were like un-navigatable. So I made an app that would log into Gmail, get them emails and find the ones with YouTube links. And then make like, kinda like a gallery of your, your songs, like essentially Spotify. And my friends loved it.

• 25:56Lex Fridman?

  Was it scraping it? Like what was?

• 25:57Speaker 01

  No, it uses like P O 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. Um, but that was fun. It was like, and that, that first product already would get like pressed, like it went on, I think like, um, some tech media and stuff. And I was like, this is cool. Like it didn't make money. There was no payment button, but it was a, it was actually, people using it. I think tens of thousands of people used it.

• 26:26Lex Fridman?

  That's a great idea. I wonder why, like, why, why don't we have that? Why don't we have things that access Gmail? And extract some useful aggregate information?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you could tell Gmail, like, don't give me all the emails, just give me the ones with YouTube links, you know, or something like that. Yeah.

• 26:41Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there is a whole ecosystem of like apps you can build on top of the Google, but people don't really do this. They build, I've seen a few, like Boomerang, there's a few apps that are like good, but just, I wonder what, maybe it's not easy to make money.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  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 value, oh, this, and a plugin should be free, you know? When I wanna use a plugin in Google Sheets or something, I'm not gonna pay for it. Like, it should be free. Which is, but if you go to a website and you actually, okay, I need this product, I'm gonna pay for this because it's a real product. So even though it's the same code in the back, it's a plugin, you know?

• 27:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, you could do it through like extensions, like Chrome extensions through, from the browser side.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, but who pays for Chrome extensions, right? Like barely anybody. So, uh, that's not a good place to make money, probably.

• 27:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that sucks.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Like Chrome extension should be an extension for your startup, you know? You have a product?

• 27:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Oh, we also have a Chrome extension. You know.

• 27:36Lex Fridman?

  I wish the Chrome extension would be the product. I wish Chrome would support that, like where you could pay for it easily. It's like imagine, I can imagine a lot of products that would just live as extensions, like improvements for social media.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like GPTs, you know?

• 27:51Lex Fridman?

  GPTs, yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Like these chat GPTs, they're gonna charge money for it now. You get a rev share, I think, for an OpenAI. I made a lot of them also.

• 27:58Lex Fridman?

  Why? We'll, we'll talk about it. So let's rewind back. It's a pretty cool idea to do 12 startups in 12 months. What's, what's it take to build a thing in, in, in 30 days? Like at that time, how hard was that?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Hmm. I think the hard part is like figuring out what you shouldn't add, right? What you shouldn't build because you don't have time. So you need to build a landing page. Well, you need to make, you know, you need to build the product actually, because it needs to be something they pay for. Do you need to build a login system? Like maybe no, you know, like maybe you can build some scrappy login system. Like for Foltir, you sign up, you pay with Stripe checkout and you get a login link. And when I started, there was only a login link with a hash and that's just a static link. So it's very easy to login.

• 28:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  It's not so safe, you know, what if you leak the link? And now I have real Google login, but that took like a year. So keeping it very scrappy is very important to, because you don't have time, you know, you need to focus on what you can build fast. So money, Stripe, build the product, build a landing page. You need to think about how are people gonna find this? So are you gonna put it on Reddit or something? How are you gonna put it on Reddit without being looked at as a spammer, right? Like, if you say, hey, this is my new startup, you should use it. No, nobody gets deleted, you know?

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Maybe if you find a problem that a lot of people on Reddit already have on a subreddit, you know, like you solve that problem, say, some people, I made this thing that might solve your problem and maybe it's free for now, you know, like that could work, you know? But you need to be very, you know, narrow it down what you're building.

• 29:27Lex Fridman?

  Time is limited.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:29Lex Fridman?

  Actually, can we go back to the you laying in a room feeling like a loser?

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:34Lex Fridman?

  I still feel like a loser sometimes. What's, what can you, can you speak to that feeling, to that place of just like?

• 29:44Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Okay, so I think it's normal if you're young that you feel like a loser, first of all.

• 29:55Lex Fridman?

  Especially when you're twenty seven.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 29:59Lex Fridman?

  There's like a peak.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think twenty is the peak and so I would not kill yourselves, it's very important to get through it, you know, but because you have nothing, you have probably no money, you have no business, you have no job, you like, Jeremy Peterson said this, I saw it somewhere, like, the reason people are depressed, because they have nothing, they don't have a girlfriend, they don't have a boyfriend, they don't have a, you need stuff, you need like a family, you need things around you, you need to build a life for yourself, if you don't build a life for yourself, you'll be depressed. So if you're alone in Asia, in a hostel, looking at the ceiling and you don't have any money coming in, you don't have a girlfriend, you don't, of course you're depressed, it's logic, but back then, if you're in the moment, you think this is not logic, there's something wrong with me, you know?

• 30:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  And, and also, I think I started going, I started getting like anxiety and I think I started going a little bit crazy, where I think travel can make you insane and I know this because I know that there is like digital nomads that they kill themselves and I don't, I haven't checked like the comparison with like baseline people, like suicide rate, but I have a hunch, especially in the beginning, when it was a very new thing, like ten years ago, that it can be very psychologically taxing and you're alone a lot, back then, when you travel alone, there was no other digital nomads back then, a lot, so you're in a strange culture, you look different than everybody, like you're in, I was in Asia, like everybody's really nice in Thailand, but you're not part of the culture, you're traveling around, you're hopping from city to city, you don't have a home anymore,

• 31:24Speaker 01

  you feel disrooted.

• 31:26Lex Fridman?

  And you're constantly an outcast, in that you're different from everybody else.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, but people treat you in like Thailand, people are so nice, but you still feel like outcasts and, and then I think the digital nomads I met then were all kind of like, it was like shady business, you know, but they were like vigilantes because it was a new thing. And like one guy was selling illegal drugs, it was an American guy, was selling illegal drugs via UPS to Americans, you know, on his website, they were like a lot of drop shippers doing shady stuff. There's a lot of shady things going on there and they didn't look like very balanced people. They didn't look like people I wanted to hang with, you know? So I also felt outcasts from other foreigners in Thailand, other digital nomads. And I was like, man, I made a big mistake. And then I went back to Holland and then I got even more depressed.

• 32:06Lex Fridman?

  You said digital nomad. What is digital nomad? What is that way of life? What is the philosophy there? And the history of the movement?

• 32:13Speaker 01

  I struck upon it on accident because I was like, I'm going to graduate university and then I'm going to, I need to get out of here. I'll fly to Asia because I've been before in Asia. I studied in Korea in 2009, like study exchange. So I was like, Asia is easy, Thailand is easy. And I'll just go there, figure things out. And it's cheap, it's very cheap. Chiang Mai, I would live like for a hundred fifty dollar per month rent for like a private room, pretty good. So I struck upon this on accident. I was like, okay, there's other people on laptops, working on their startup or working remotely. Back then, nobody worked remotely, but they worked on their businesses, right? And they would, you know, live in like Colombia or Thailand or Vietnam or Bali. They would live kind of like in more cheap places. And it looked like a very adventurous life, like you travel around, you build your business. There's no pressure from like your home society, right?

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Like you're American, so you get pressure from American society telling you kind of what to do. Like you need to buy a house or you need to do this stuff. I had this in Holland too. And you can get away from this pressure and you can find, kind of feel like you're free. You're kind of, there's nobody telling you what to do. But that's also why you start feeling like you go crazy because you are, you are free. You're disattached from anything and anybody. You're disattached from your culture, you're disattached from the culture you're probably in because you're staying very short.

• 33:23Lex Fridman?

  I think Franz Kafka said, I'm free, therefore I'm lost.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Man, that's so true. Yeah, that's exactly the point. And yeah, freedom is like, it's the definition of no constraints, right? Like anything is possible, you can go anywhere. And everybody's like, oh, that must be super nice, you know, like freedom, you must be very happy. And it's the opposite, like I don't think that makes you happy. I think constraints probably make you happy. And that's a big lesson I learned then.

• 33:48Lex Fridman?

  But what were they making for money? What, so you're saying they were doing shady stuff at that time?

• 33:53Speaker 01

  For me, you know, because I was more like a developer. I wanted to make startups kinda and it was like, um, it was like drugs being shipped to America, like diet pills and stuff, like non FDA approved stuff, you know? And they would like, there was no like, they were like, they would sip of beers and they would laugh about like all the dodgy shit kinda they're doing, you know?

• 34:11Lex Fridman?

  Ah, that part of, okay.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Kind of vibe, you know, like kinda sleazy e-comm vibe. I'm not saying all e-comm is sleazy, you know, but.

• 34:17Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  But you know, this vibe.

• 34:19Lex Fridman?

  It could be a vibe and your vibe was more.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Make, make cool stuff.

• 34:23Lex Fridman?

  That's ethical.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  You know the guys with sports cars in Dubai, these people, you know?

• 34:26Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  E-comm like, oh, bro, you gotta drop ship.

• 34:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  And you'll make a hundred million a month. Those people, it was this shit and I was like, this is not my people.

• 34:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I don't, I mean, there's nothing wrong with any of those individual.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  No, no judgment.

• 34:39Lex Fridman?

  But, but there's a foundation that's not quite ethical. I, what is that? I don't know what that is, but yeah, I get you.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  No, I like, I don't wanna judge. It was more, I know that for me, it wasn't my world. It wasn't my subculture. I wanted to make cool shit, you know, but they also think their cool shit is cool. So, you know, uh, but I wanted to make like real like startups and that was my thing. I would read Hacker News, you know, like Y Combinator and they were making cool stuff. So I wanted to make cool stuff.

• 35:04Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's a pretty cool way of life, just if you romanticize it for a moment.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  It's very romantic, man. It's very, it's colorful, you know, like if I think about the memories.

• 35:13Lex Fridman?

  What are some happy memories? Just like working, working cafes or working and just the freedom that, that envelops you with that, that way of life. Cause anything is possible. You can just get up and go.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  It was amazing, like we would work, like you wouldn't, I would make friends and we would work until, you know, six AM in Bali, for example, with like, um.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  With Andre, my best friend, who is still my best friend, and another friend, and we would work until like the morning when the sun came up. Because at night, the coworking space was silent, you know, there was nobody else. And I would wake up like six P M. or five P M. I would drive to the coworking space on a motorbike. I would buy like thirty hot lattes from a cafe.

• 35:58Lex Fridman?

  How many?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Thirty, because there was like, there was like six people coming, or we didn't know. Sometimes people would come in.

• 36:04Lex Fridman?

  Did you say three zero thirty?

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:07Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  And we would drink like four per person or something, you know?

• 36:10Lex Fridman?

  Uh huh.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Man, it's body. I don't know if they were powerful lattes, you know, but they were lattes. And we would put it in a plastic bag and then we'd drive there and all the coffee was like falling, you know, everywhere. And then we'd go and go to the coffee station and have these coffees here and would work all night. We'd play like techno music and everybody would just work on their, like, this was literally like business people. They would work in a startup and would all try and make something. And then the sun would come up and the morning people, the, you know, the yoga, yoga girls and yoga guys would come in, you know, after the yoga class at six. And they say, hey, good morning. And we're like, we look like this, you know, and we're like, what's up? How are you doing? And we didn't know how bad we looked, you know, but it was very bad. And then we'd go home, sleep in like a hostel or a hotel and do the same thing and again and again and again.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  And it was this lock-in mode, you know, like working. And that was very fun.

• 37:00Lex Fridman?

  So it's just a bunch of you techno music blasting all through the night? Yeah.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  More like, like industrially.

• 37:08Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so rapping like this cheesy. See, I got, for me, it's such an interesting thing because the speed of the beat affects how I feel about a thing. So the faster it is, the more anxiety I feel, but that anxiety is channeled into productivity. But if it's a little too fast, I start, the anxiety overpowers.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  She don't like drum and bass music.

• 37:27Lex Fridman?

  Probably not.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  No, it's too fast.

• 37:28Lex Fridman?

  I mean, for working, I have to, I have to play with it. It's like you can actually, like, I can adjust my

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:34Lex Fridman?

  level of anxiety. There's a, must be a better word than anxiety. It's like a. Productive anxiety that like whatever that is.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  It also depends what kind of work you do, right? Like if you're writing, you probably don't want to draw on music. I think for codes, like industrial techno, this kind of stuff, kind of fast. It works well because you really get like locked in and combined with caffeine, you know, you go, you go deep, you know? And and I think you balance on this edge of anxiety because this caffeine is also hitting your anxiety. You want to be on the edge of anxiety with this techno running. Sometimes it gets too much, like stop the techno, stop the music. It's like, but but those are good memories, you know? And also like travel memories, like you go from city to city.

• 38:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  And it feels like it's kind of like jet set life. Like it's it's feels very beautiful, like you're you're seeing a lot of cool cities and.

• 38:21Lex Fridman?

  What was your favorite place you remember you visited?

• 38:24Speaker 01

  I think still like Bangkok is the best place and Bangkok and Chiang Mai. I think Thailand is very special. Like I've been to the other place, like I've been to Vietnam and I've been to South America and stuff. I still think Thailand wins in how nice people are, how easy of a life people have there.

• 38:42Lex Fridman?

  Everything's cheap.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:44Lex Fridman?

  And good.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Well, Bangkok is getting expensive now, but Chiang Mai is still cheap. I think when you're starting out, it's a great place. Man, the air quality sucks. It's a big problem, so and it's quite hot, but that's a very cool place.

• 38:57Lex Fridman?

  Pros and cons.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  I love Brazil also. My girlfriend is Brazilian, but I do love, not just because of that, but I like Brazil.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  The problem still is the safety issue, you know, like it's it's like in America, like it's localized. It's hard for Europeans to understand like safety 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.

• 39:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's true.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  But it's not true in Europe. So in Europe, it's much more like.

• 39:22Lex Fridman?

  That's true.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  More average.

• 39:23Lex Fridman?

  You're right. You're right. It's it's more averaged out.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:27Lex Fridman?

  I like it when there's strong neighborhoods, when you're like you cross a certain street and you're in a dangerous part of town.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Man, yeah.

• 39:35Lex Fridman?

  This I I like it. I like there's certain cities in the United States like that.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:39Lex Fridman?

  I like that. And you're saying Europe is more.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  But you don't feel scared?

• 39:42Lex Fridman?

  Well, I don't, I like danger.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  BJJ.

• 39:45Lex Fridman?

  No, not even just that. I think danger is interesting.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:48Lex Fridman?

  Danger reveals something about yourself, about others. Also, I like the full range of humanity.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:54Lex Fridman?

  So I don't like the mellowed out aspects of humanity.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  I have friends, like digital nomads friends that are exactly like this, like they go to like the, the kind of broken areas, you know, like they like this reality, they like authenticity more. They don't like luxury, they don't like.

• 40:08Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah, I hate luxury.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very European of you, like.

• 40:12Lex Fridman?

  Wait, was that? That's a whole nother conversation. So you, uh, you quoted Freya Stark. Quote, "To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world."

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:27Lex Fridman?

  Uh, do you remember a time you awoken in a strange town and felt like that? We're talking about small towns or big towns or?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Man, anywhere. I think I wrote it in some blog post and like,

• 40:39Speaker 01

  it was a common thing when you would wake up and this was like, cause I have this website. I started a website about this digital nomads like called nomadlist.com and there was a community. So it was like 30,000 other digital nomads, cause I was feeling lonely. So I built this website and I stopped feeling lonely, like I started make organizing meetups and making friends. And, um, and it was very common that people would say they would wake up and they would forget where they are.

• 41:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Like for the first half minute and I had to look outside like where, where am I, which country? It sounds really like privileged, but it's more like funny, like you literally don't know where you are because you're so disrooted. But there's something, man, it's like Anthony Bourdain, you know? There's something pure about this kind of vagabond travel thing, you know? Like it's behind me, I think. I don't like, now I travel with my girlfriend, right? It's very different, but it is a romantic, like memories of this kind of like vagabond, individualistic, solo life. But the thing is, it didn't make me happy, but it was very cool, but it didn't make me happy, right? It made me anxious.

• 41:37Lex Fridman?

  There's something about it that make you anxious. I don't know, I still feel like that. It's a cool feeling. It's scary at first, but then you realize where you are and you, and I don't know. It's like you awaken to the possibilities of this place when you feel like that. It's like, great. And it's even when you're doing some basic travel. I go to San Francisco or something else.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have like the 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.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  And that's why people get addicted to travel, you know?

• 42:08Lex Fridman?

  Back to startups. You wrote a book on how to do this thing and gave a great talk on it. How to do startups. The book's called Make Bootstrapper's Handbook.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:19Lex Fridman?

  I was wondering if you could go through some of the steps. It's idea, build, launch, grow, monetize, automate, and exit. There's a lot of fascinating ideas in each one. So idea stage.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:29Lex Fridman?

  How do you find a good idea?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  So I think you need to be able to spot problems. So for example, you can go in your daily life, like when you wake up and you're like, what are stuff that I'm really annoyed with that's like in my daily life that doesn't function well? And that's a problem that you can see, okay, maybe that's something I can add, write code about, you know, code for, and it will make my life easier. So I would say make like a list of all these problems you have and like an idea to solve it. And I see which one is like viable, you can actually do something and then start building it.

• 42:59Lex Fridman?

  So that's a, that's a really good place to start.

• 43:03Lex Fridman?

  Become open to all the problems in your life. Like actually start noticing them. I think that's actually not a trivial thing to do, to realize that some aspects of your life could be done way, way better.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:14Lex Fridman?

  Cause we kind of very quickly get accustomed to discomforts.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 43:19Lex Fridman?

  Like, for example, like doorknobs.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:22Lex Fridman?

  Like design of certain things.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  New Lex Fridman doorknob.

• 43:27Lex Fridman?

  Well, that one, I know how much incredible design work has gone into. It's a really interesting doors and doorknobs, just the design of everyday things, forks and spoons. It's gonna be hard to come up with a fork that's better than the current fork designs.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:43Lex Fridman?

  And the other aspect of it is you're saying like, in order to come up with interesting ideas, you gotta try to live a more interesting life.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's where travel comes in. Because when I started traveling, I started seeing stuff in other countries that you didn't have in Europe, for example, or America even. Like if you go to Asia.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Like dude, especially 10 years ago, nobody knew about this, like WeChat, all these apps that they already had before we had them, these everything apps, right? Like now Elon's trying to make X, this everything app, like WeChat, the same thing. Like in Indonesia or Thailand, you have one app that you can order food, if you can order groceries, you can order massage, you can order car mechanic. Anything you can think of is in the app. And that stuff, for example, you know, that's called like arbitrage. You can go to back to your country and build that same app for your country, for example. So you start seeing problems, you start seeing solutions that other countries already, other people already did in the rest of the world. And also traveling in general just gives you more problems because travel is uncomfortable, you know?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Airports are horrible, airplanes are not comfortable either. There's a lot of problems you start seeing, just getting out of your house, you know?

• 44:53Lex Fridman?

  But also you can, I mean, in the digital world, you can just go into different communities and see what can be improved by that in that.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:02Lex Fridman?

  But what specifically is your process of generating ideas? Do you like, do idea dumps, like do you have a document where you just keep writing?

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I used to have like a, because when I was, when I wasn't making money, I was trying to like make this list of ideas to see like, so I need to build, I was thinking statistically already, like I need to build all these things and one of these will work out probably, you know? So I need to have a lot of things to try. And I did that. Right now, I think like because I already have money, I can do more things based on technology. So for example, AI, when I found out about when stable diffusion came or chat GPT and stuff, all these thing, all these things were like, I didn't start working with them because I had a problem. I had no problems, but I was very curious about technology. And I was like playing with it and figuring out like first just playing with it

• 45:49Speaker 01

  and then you find something like, okay, this generates, stable fusion generates houses very beautiful and interiors, you know?

• 45:56Lex Fridman?

  So it's less about problem solving, it's more about the possibilities of new things you can create.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's very risky because that's the famous like solution trying to find a problem.

• 46:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  And usually it doesn't work. And that's very common with, with startup founders, I think they, they have tech, but actually people don't need the tech, right?

• 46:12Lex Fridman?

  Look, can you actually explain, it'd be cool to talk about some of the stuff you created. Can you explain?

• 46:18Lex Fridman?

  This photo AI dot com.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So it's like fire your photographer. The idea is like you don't need a photographer anymore. You can train yourself as an AI model and you can take as many photos you want, anywhere in any close with facial expressions like happy or sad or poses, all this stuff.

• 46:36Lex Fridman?

  So how does it work? This is a, he sent me a link to a gallery of ones done on me.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  On the left, you have the prompt, the box. Yeah. So you can write like, so model is your model. This is Lex Fridman. So you can write like model as a blah, blah, blah, whatever you want.

• 46:52Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Then press the button and it will take photos, take, it will take like one minute.

• 46:56Lex Fridman?

  What are you using for the hosting for the compute?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Replicate.

• 46:59Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Replicate.com. They're very, very good.

• 47:02Lex Fridman?

  Okay, it's cool like this interface wise, it's cool that you're showing how long it's gonna take. This is amazing. So it's taken a, I'm presuming you just loaded in a few pictures from the internet.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I went to Google Images, typed in Lex Fridman. I added like 10 or 20 images. You can open them in the gallery and you can use your cursor as to, yeah. So some don't look like you. So the hit or miss rate is like, I don't know, let's say like 50 50 or something.

• 47:27Lex Fridman?

  But when I was watching your tweets, like it's been getting better and better and better.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  It was very bad in the beginning. It was so bad, but still people signed up to it, you know?

• 47:37Lex Fridman?

  There's two Lex's is great. It's getting more and more sexual. It's making me very uncomfortable.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Man, but that's the problem with these models. Cause no, we need to talk about this because the models, the diffusion.

• 47:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  So the photorealistic models that are like fine tuned.

• 47:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  They were all trained on porn in the beginning. And there was a guy called Hassan. So I was trying to figure out how to do photorealistic AI photos. And it was, stable diffusion by itself is not doing that well. Like the faces look all mangled.

• 48:01Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  And it doesn't have enough resolution or something to do that well. So, but I started seeing these, these base models, these fine tuned models. And the people were trained on porn and I would try them and they would be very photorealistic. They would have bodies that actually made sense, like body anatomy.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  But if you look at the photorealistic models that people use now, still, there's still core porn there, like of naked people. So I need to prompt out the naked, and everyone needs to do this with AI startups with imaging. You need to prompt out the naked stuff. You need to put a, you know, naked.

• 48:34Lex Fridman?

  You have to keep reminding the model, you need to put clothes on.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't put naked because it's very risky. I have Google Vision that checks every photo before it's shown to the user to like check.

• 48:42Lex Fridman?

  Like a nipple detector? Oh, NSFW detector.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Because you get, the journalists get very angry if they, you know.

• 48:49Lex Fridman?

  If you're sexy.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  There was a journalist, I think, that got angry that used this and was like, oh, it made me, it showed like a nipple. Because Google Vision didn't detect it. So there's like these kind of problems you need to deal with, you know? That's what I'm talking about. This is with cats. But look at the cat face, it's also kind of mangled.

• 49:05Lex Fridman?

  I'm, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm a little bit disturbed.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  You can zoom in on the cat if you want, like, like. Yeah, this is a very sad cat. It doesn't have a nose.

• 49:17Lex Fridman?

  It doesn't have a nose.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  But this, man, but this is the problem with AI startups because they all act like it's perfect. Like this is groundbreaking and, but it's not perfect. It's like really bad, you know, half the time.

• 49:27Lex Fridman?

  So if I wanted to sort of update model as.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you remove this stuff and you write like whatever you want, like in Thailand or something or in Tokyo.

• 49:36Lex Fridman?

  Uh, in Tokyo?

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:40Lex Fridman?

  And?

• 49:41Speaker 01

  You could say like at night with neon lights, like you can add more detail.

• 49:45Lex Fridman?

  Sure, I'll go in Austin. Do you think you'll know in Texas, in Austin, Texas?

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Cowboy hats?

• 49:50Lex Fridman?

  In Texas, yeah.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  As a cowboy.

• 49:55Lex Fridman?

  As a cowboy. It's gonna go so, uh, towards the porn direction is, is.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Man, I hope not, this is the end of my career.

• 50:02Lex Fridman?

  Or the beginning, it depends. We can send you a push notification when your photos are done. Yeah, all right, cool.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's see.

• 50:09Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow. So this whole interface you've built.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:12Lex Fridman?

  This is really well done.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  It's all jQuery. Do I still use jQuery?

• 50:16Lex Fridman?

  Yes, still.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  After 10 years?

• 50:18Lex Fridman?

  You're not the only one, the entire of the web.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:21Lex Fridman?

  This PHP, the stack.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  PHP and jQuery, yeah, and SQLite.

• 50:24Lex Fridman?

  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, most of the web is still probably PHP and jQuery.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  It's because of WordPress, right? Because the blogs are.

• 50:39Lex Fridman?

  That's true.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:40Lex Fridman?

  That's true.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  I'm seeing a revival now. People are getting sick of frameworks. Like all the JavaScript frameworks are so like, what do you call it, like wieldy? Like they're so, it takes so much work to just maintain this code. And then it updates to a new version, you need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works.

• 50:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  And.

• 50:59Lex Fridman?

  Can you actually just speak to that stack? You build all your websites, apps, startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:09Lex Fridman?

  JavaScript with jQuery, PHP and a little light. And so that that's a really simple stack and you get stuff done really fast. Like, can you just speak to the philosophy behind that?

• 51:21Speaker 01

  I think it's accidental because that's the thing I I knew. Like I knew PHP, I knew HTML CSS, you know, because you make websites. And when my startups started taking off, I didn't have time to. I remember putting on my to do list, like learn Node JS because it's important to switch, you know? Because this obviously is much better language than PHP. And I never learned it, I never did it because I didn't have time. I these things were growing like this and I was launching more projects and I never had time. It's like one day, you know, I'll I'll start coding properly and I never got to it.

• 51:54Lex Fridman?

  I sometimes wonder if I need to learn that stuff. It's still to do item for me to really learn Node JS or or Flask or these kind of.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  React.

• 52:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, React. And it's this, it feels like a responsible software engineer should know how to use these. But you can get stuff done so fast with vanilla versions of stuff.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like software developers, if you want to get a job and there's like, you know, people making stuff like startups. And if you want to be entrepreneur, probably you maybe shouldn't.

• 52:28Lex Fridman?

  I wonder if there's like, I really want to measure performance and speed. I think there's a deep wisdom in that.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:35Lex Fridman?

  I do think that frameworks and just constantly wanting to learn the new thing. This complicated way of software engineering gets in the way. I'm not sure what to say about that because definitely like you shouldn't build everything from just vanilla JavaScript or vanilla C, for example.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:50Lex Fridman?

  C++ when you're building systems engineering is like, there's a lot of benefits for a point of safety and all that kind of stuff. So I I don't know, but it just feels like you can get so much more stuff done if you don't care about how you do it.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Man, this is my most controversial take, I think, and maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like. There's frameworks now that raise money. They raise a lot of money, like they raise fifty million, a hundred million, trillion million dollars. And the idea is that you need to make the developers, the new developers, like when you're eighteen or twenty 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 paid, to use it. And the the cost of the platforms to host it are a thousand times higher than just hosting it on a simple AWS server or a VPS on Digital Ocean, right? So there's obviously like a monetary incentive here, like we wanna get a lot of developers to use this technology

• 53:52Speaker 01

  and then we need to charge them money because they're gonna use it in startups and then the startups can pay for the bills.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  But what that it kind of destroys the the information out there about learning to code because they, you know, they pay YouTubers, they pay influencers, developer influencers, it's a big thing to like. And same thing what happens with like nutrition and fitness or something, same thing happens in developing. They pay these influencers to promote the stuff, use it, make stuff with it, make demo product with it. And then a lot of people are like, wow, use this. And I started noticing this because when I would ship my stuff, people would ask me, what are you using? I would say, I'm just PHP, jQuery, why does it matter? And people would start kind of attacking me like, why are you not using this new technology? This new framework, this new thing? And I say, I don't know, because this PHP thing works and I don't really, I'm optimizing for anything, it just works.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  And then everyone stood like, why, like, I understand there's new technologies that are better and there should be improvement. But I'm very suspicious of money, just like lobbying. There's money in this developer framework scene, there's hundreds of millions that goes to ads or influencers or whatever. It can't all go to developers, you don't need so many developers for a framework and it's open source to make a lot of more money on these startups.

• 55:06Lex Fridman?

  So that's a really good perspective, but in addition to that is like when you say better, like.

• 55:14Lex Fridman?

  Can we get some data on the better? Because like, I wanna know from the individual developer perspective. And then from a team of five, team of 10, team of 20 developers.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:25Lex Fridman?

  Uh, measure how productive they are in shipping features. How many bugs they create? How many security holes?

• 55:34Speaker 01

  PHP was not good at the security for a while, but now it's good.

• 55:37Lex Fridman?

  In theory, in theory, is it though?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Now it's good.

• 55:40Lex Fridman?

  Now, no, no, now as you're saying it. I wanna know if that's true. Because PHP was just the majority of websites on the internet.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Could be true.

• 55:50Lex Fridman?

  I, is it just overrepresented? Same with WordPress. Yes, there's a reputation that WordPress has a gigantic number of security holes. I don't know if that's true. I know it gets attacked a lot because it's so popular. It definitely does have security holes, but maybe a lot of other systems have security holes as well. Anyway, I just sort of questioning the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push software engineers towards frameworks, towards complex.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:16Lex Fridman?

  Like, uh, super complicated sort of software engineering approaches that stretch out the, the time it takes to actually build a thing.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And it's the same thing with big corporations. Eighty percent of the people don't do anything. It's like, it's not efficient. And, and if you, if your, your, your benchmark is like, uh, people building stuff that actually gets done and like for society, right? Like if we wanna save time, we should probably use technologies.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  That's simple, that's pragmatic, that's like, that works, uh, that's not overly complicated. It doesn't make your life like a living hell, you know?

• 56:52Lex Fridman?

  And use a framework when it obviously solves a problem, a direct problem that you.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Of course, yeah, of course. I'm not saying you should code without a framework. Um, you should use whatever you want, but.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's suspicious, you know? And, uh, and I think it's suspicious when I talk about on the Twitter, like there's a lot, there's this army comes out, you know? This is these framework armies.

• 57:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  It's man, something my gut tells me.

• 57:14Lex Fridman?

  I want to ask the framework army, what have they built this week? It's the Elon question. What did you do this week?

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and did you make money with it? You know, did you charge users? Is it a real business? And, um, yeah.

• 57:26Lex Fridman?

  So going back to the cowboy.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  First of all. Some don't look like you, right? But some do.

• 57:31Lex Fridman?

  Every aspect of this is pretty incredible. I'm also just looking at the interface. It's really well done. So this is all just jQuery.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:37Lex Fridman?

  This is really well done. So like, tell me, take me through the journey of photo AI. Like, you don't know, most of the world doesn't know much about stable diffusion or any of this. Any of this generative AI stuff. And so you're thinking, okay, how can I build cool stuff with this?

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:53Lex Fridman?

  What was the origin story of photo AI?

• 57:55Speaker 01

  I think it started because stable diffusion came out. So stable diffusion is like the first like generative image model, AI model. And I started playing with it, like you could install it on your Mac. Like somebody forked it and made it work for MacBooks. So I downloaded it and cloned the repo and started using it to generate images.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  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 prompt. Essentially, you write a prompt and then it generates a photo of that or image of that. In any style, like they would use like artist names to make like a Picasso kind of style and stuff.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  And I was trying to see, like, what is it good at? Is it good at people? No, it's really bad at people. But it was good at houses, so architecture, for example, would generate like architecture houses.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  So I made a website called thishousedoesnotexist.org. And it generated like, they called like house porn in that one. Like house porn is like a subreddit. So, and this was stable diffusion, like the first version. So it looks really, you can click for another photo. So it generates like all these kind of non-existing houses.

• 59:08Lex Fridman?

  It is house porn.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  But it looked kind of good, you know, like especially back then.

• 59:12Lex Fridman?

  It looks really good.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Now things look much better.

• 59:16Lex Fridman?

  That's really, really well done.

• 59:20Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  And it also generates like a description.

• 59:24Lex Fridman?

  And you can upvote. Is it nice upvoted?

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:27Lex Fridman?

  Man, there's so much to talk to you about. Like, the choice is here. It's really well done.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  This is very scrappy. In the bottom, there's like a ranking of the most upvoted houses. So these are the top voted. If you go to all time, you see quite beautiful ones.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this one is my favorite, the number one. It's like, kind of like a...

• 59:44Lex Fridman?

  How is this not more popular?

• 59:46Speaker 01

  It was really popular for like a while, but then people got so bored of it. I think because I was getting bored of it too, like just continuous house porn, like everything starts looking the same. But then I saw it was really good at interior. So I pivoted to interiorai.com where I tried to like upload first generated interior designs. And then I tried to do, like, there was a new technology called image to image, where you can input an image, like a photo, and it would kind of modify the thing. So you see, it looks almost the same as photia. It's the same code essentially.

• 1:00:21Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  So I would, I would upload a photo of my interior where I lived and I would ask like, change this into like a, I don't know, like maximalist design, you know? And it worked and it worked really well. So I was like, okay, this is a startup because obviously interior design, AI, and nobody's doing that yet. So I launched this and it was successful and made like, within a week, made 10K, 20K a month. And now it still makes like 40K, 50K a month. And it's been like two years. So then I was like, how can I improve this interior design? I need to start learning fine tuning. A fine tuning is where you have this existing AI model and you fine tune it on a specific goal you want it to do. So I would find really beautiful interior design, make a gallery, and train a new model that was very good at interior design. And it worked and I used that as well.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  And then for fun, I uploaded photos of myself. And here's what happened. And to train myself, like, and this would never work, obviously, and it worked. And actually, it started understanding me as a concept. So my face worked and, and you could do like different styles, like me as a, like very cheesy medieval warrior, all this stuff. So I was like, this is another startup. So now I did avatarai.me. I couldn't get the dot com. And this was...

• 1:01:36Lex Fridman?

  This is still up?

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, avatarai.me. Well, now it's forwards to photia because I pivoted.

• 1:01:40Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  But this was more like cheesy. Thing. So this is very interesting because this went so viral, it made like, I think like one hundred fifty K in a week or something. So most money I ever made. And um, and then big, this is very interesting, the big VC companies like Lenza, which are much better at iOS and stuff than me. I didn't have iOS app. They quickly build 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 thirty million dollars with it.

• 1:02:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  They they became like the top grossing app after that.

• 1:02:14Lex Fridman?

  And it was. How do you feel about that?

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  I think it's amazing, honestly. And it's not like.

• 1:02:18Lex Fridman?

  You didn't have like a feeling like, ah, fuck.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  No, I was a little bit like sad because all my products would work out and I never had like real fierce competition. And now I have like fierce competition from like a very skilled, high talent, like iOS developer studio or something that. And and they already had an app. They had an app in App Store for like, um, I think retouching your face or something. So they were very smart. They add these avatars to there. It's a feature. They had the users, they do a push notification to everybody. We have these avatars.

• 1:02:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Man, they made great. I think they made, they made so much money. And um, I think they did a really great job. And uh, I also made a lot of money with it. But that was, I I I quickly realized it wasn't my thing because it was so cheesy. It was like kitsch, you know? It's kind of like um, me as a Barbie or me as a, you know, it was too cheesy. I wanted to go for like, what's a real problem we can solve because this is going to be a hype. It's going to be, and it was a hype, these avatars. It's like, let's do real photography. Like, how can you make people look really photorealistic? And it was difficult. And that's why these avatars worked because they were all like in a cheesy, you know, Picasso style. And art is easy because you interpret the, the, the, all the problems that AI has with your face are like artistic, you know, if you call it Picasso.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  But if you make a real photo, all the problems with 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,

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's really incredible. That journey is really incredible. Let's go to the beginning of Photo AI though, because I remember seeing a lot of really hilarious photos. I think you were using yourself as a case study, right?

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So what, uh, there's a tweet here, sold.

• 1:04:07Lex Fridman?

  One hundred thousand dollars in AI-generated avatars.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  And it's a lot, like it's a lot for anybody, it's a lot for me. Like, uh, making ten K a day on this, you know?

• 1:04:16Lex Fridman?

  That's amazing. That's amazing.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  And then the NASA tweet, like the Solange tweets. And then before there is like the me hacking on it.

• 1:04:28Lex Fridman?

  Oh, I see. So that. Okay. So October twenty-six, twenty twenty-two.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Lex Fridman?

  I trained an ML model on my face.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  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 mixture. People would say I'd look like a hammerhead shark. It's like a top comment, so then I realized my eyes are far apart.

• 1:04:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the internet helps you.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it helps you realize how you look, you know?

• 1:04:56Lex Fridman?

  Boy, do I love the internet.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  First trap.

• 1:05:00Lex Fridman?

  Well, what is, is this, wait.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  It's water from the waterfall. But the waterfall is in the back, you know, so what's going on?

• 1:05:08Lex Fridman?

  So this is, how much of this is real?

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  It's all AI.

• 1:05:11Lex Fridman?

  It's all AI?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Lex Fridman?

  That's pretty good, though, for the early days.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Exactly, so, but this was hit or miss, so you had to do a lot of curation. Because ninety-nine percent of it was really bad. So these are the photos are uploaded.

• 1:05:22Lex Fridman?

  How many photos did you use? Only these, I will try more up to date pics later. These are the, these are the only photos you uploaded?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:30Lex Fridman?

  Wow. Wow, okay, so like you were learning all this super quickly. What, uh, what are some like interesting details you remember from that time for like what you had to figure out? To make it work and for people just listening. He uploaded just, uh, just a handful of photos that don't really have a good capture of the face. And he's able to.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  I think it's cropped, it's like a crop by the, by the layout, but they're, they're square photos, so they're five twelve by five twelve. Because that's stable diffusion.

• 1:05:58Lex Fridman?

  But nevertheless, not great capture of the face.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Lex Fridman?

  Like, it's not, it's not like a, uh, collection of several hundred photos that are like.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  Exactly, like I would imagine that too, when I started, I was like, oh, this must be like some 3D scan technology, right?

• 1:06:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  So type form is the site where you can create like your own input form, like Google Forms. So they would get an email with a link to the type form or actually just a link after checkout. And they could upload their photos. So enter their email, upload the photos and then, and I launched it. And I was like, here, first sale, so it's October 2022. And I think within like the first 24 hours was like, I'm not sure. It was like a thousand customers or something.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  But the problem was I didn't have code to automate this, so I had to do manually. So the first few hundred, I just literally took their photos, trained them. And then I would generate the photos with the prompts and had this text file with the prompts and I would do everything manually. And this quickly became way too much. So, but that's another constraint, like I was forced to code something up that would do that. And that was essentially making it into a real website, right?

• 1:07:47Lex Fridman?

  So at first it was the type form and they uploaded through the type form.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  Stripe checkout type form, yeah.

• 1:07:51Lex Fridman?

  And then you were like, that image is downloaded. Did you write a script to export?

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  No, it's download images myself. It was a zip file, unzip, zip file.

• 1:07:58Lex Fridman?

  And you unzipped it?

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, unzipped it. Yes, and then I, no, I'm, because, you know, do things don't skill, Paul Graham says, right? So, and then I would train it and I would email them the photos, I think from my personal email. So here's your, here's your avatar, you know? And they liked it. They were like, wow, it's amazing.

• 1:08:14Lex Fridman?

  You emailed them with your personal email?

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Didn't have an email address on this domain.

• 1:08:20Lex Fridman?

  And this was like a hundred people?

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then you know who signed up? Like, man, I cannot say, but really famous people, like really, really like billionaires, famous tech billionaires did it. And I was like, wow, this is crazy. And I sent, I was like so scared to mess them, so I said, thanks so much for using my site. You know, he's like, yeah, amazing app, great work. So it's like, this is different than normal reaction, you know?

• 1:08:41Lex Fridman?

  It's Bill Gates, isn't it?

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Cannot say anything.

• 1:08:47Lex Fridman?

  Just like shirtless pics.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  GDPR, you know, like privacy, European regulations, cannot share anything. But I was very, I was like, wow. And, uh, but this shows like, so you make something and then if it takes off very fast, you're like, it's validated, you know, you're like, here's something that people really want. But then also I thought this is hype, this is gonna die down very fast and it did. Cause it's too cheesy.

• 1:09:08Lex Fridman?

  But you had to automate the whole thing. How'd you automate it? So like, what's the AI component? Like, how hard was that to figure out?

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's actually, in many ways, the easiest thing. Cause there is all these platforms already back then, there was platforms for, uh, fine tune, stable diffusion. Um, like now I use replicate, back then I used different platforms. Um, which was funny, cause that platform, when this thing took off, I would tweet. Cause I tweet always like how much money these websites make. And then so the, you called vendor, right? The, the G, the platform that did the GPUs, they increased their price for training from three dollars to twenty dollars after they saw that I was making so much money. So immediately my profit is gone, cause I was selling them for thirty dollars. And I was in a Slack with them, like saying, what is this? Like, can you just put it back to three dollars? They say, yeah, maybe in the future, we're looking at it right now. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, you just took all my money, you know? And they're smart.

• 1:09:59Lex Fridman?

  Well, they're not that smart, because like, you also have a large, uh, platform and a lot of people respect you, so you can literally come out and say that.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think it's like, kinda dirty to cancel a company or something. I, I prefer just bringing my business elsewhere, but there was no elsewhere back then.

• 1:10:14Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  So I started talking to other, um, AI model, ML platforms. So replicate was on those platforms and I started DMing the CEO, say, can you please create, like, it's called Dreambooth, this fine tuning of yourself. Can you add this to your site? Cause I need this, cause I'm being price gouged. And he said, no, because it takes too long to run, it takes half an hour to run and we don't have the GPUs for it. I said, please, please, please. And then after a week, he said, we're doing it, we're launching this. And then this company became, it was like, not very famous company, it became very famous with this stuff, because suddenly, everybody was like, oh, we can build similar apps, like avatar apps and everybody started building avatar apps and everybody started using replicate for it. Um, and that was from these early DMs with like the CEO, like Ben Furish, very nice guy. And he was like,

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  They never price gouge me, they never treat me bad, they always be very nice. It's a very cool company, so you can run any ML model, any AI model, L L Ms, you can run on here.

• 1:11:10Lex Fridman?

  And you can scale.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Yes, they scale, yeah, yeah. And I mean, you can do now, you can click on the model and just run it already. It's like super easy. You log in with GitHub.

• 1:11:19Lex Fridman?

  That's great.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  And by running it on the website, then you can automate with the API, you can make a website that runs the model.

• 1:11:24Lex Fridman?

  Generate images, generate text, generate videos, generate music, generate speech, find two models.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  They do anything, yeah. It's a very cool company.

• 1:11:32Lex Fridman?

  Nice. And you're like growing with them essentially. They grew because of you because it's like a big use case.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, like the website even looks weird now. It started as like a machine learning platform. That was like, I didn't even understand what it did. It was just too, too ML, you know, like you would understand because you're in the ML world. I wouldn't.

• 1:11:50Lex Fridman?

  Now it's noob friendly.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I didn't know how it worked and but I knew that they could probably do this. And they did it. They built the models and now I use them for everything. And we trained like, I think now like thirty six thousand models, thirty six thousand people already.

• 1:12:06Lex Fridman?

  But is there some tricks to fine tuning to like the collection of photos that are provided? Like, how do you like?

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Yes, man, there's so many hacks.

• 1:12:13Lex Fridman?

  The hacks.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  It's like a hundred hacks to make it work.

• 1:12:16Lex Fridman?

  What is, what's, what is some?

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  To give my secrets now.

• 1:12:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, not, not the secrets, but the more like insights maybe about the human face and the human body, like what, what kind of stuff gets messed up a lot?

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  I think people, well, man, it's a living, people don't know how they look. So.

• 1:12:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  They generate photos of themselves and then they say, ah, it doesn't look like me.

• 1:12:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  But it does, then I, you know, you can check the training files, it does look like you, but you don't know how you look. So there's a face dysmorphia of yourself that you have no idea how you look.

• 1:12:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's hilarious. I mean, I've got to, one of, one of the least pleasant activities in my existence is having to listen to my voice and look at my face. So I get to like really.

• 1:12:57Lex Fridman?

  Really have to sort of come into terms with the reality of how I look and how I sound.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  And everybody and but.

• 1:13:05Lex Fridman?

  People often don't, right?

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:13:07Lex Fridman?

  You have a distorted view, perspective.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  I know that like I would if I would make a selfie, how I think I look that I that's nice. Other people think that's not nice, but then they make a photo of me. I'm like, that's super ugly, but then they're like, no, that's how you look and you look nice, you know? So how other people see you is nice. So you need to ask other people to choose your photos.

• 1:13:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  You shouldn't choose them yourself because you don't know how you look.

• 1:13:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you don't know what makes you interesting, what makes you attractive or all this kind of stuff. And a lot of us, this is a dark aspect of psychology. We focus on some small flaws.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:40Lex Fridman?

  This is why I hate plastic surgery, for example. People try to remove the flaws when the flaws are the thing that makes you interesting and attractive.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  I learned from the hammerhead shark eyes, this the stuff about you that looks ugly to you. And it's probably that what makes you original, makes you nice and people like it about you.

• 1:13:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  And it's not like, oh, my God. And people notice it, people notice your hammerhead eyes, you know? But it's like, that's me, that's my face. So I'm I love I love myself and that's confidence and confidence is attractive.

• 1:14:05Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:14:07Lex Fridman?

  Confidence is attractive, but yes, understanding what makes you beautiful. It's the breaking of symmetry makes you beautiful. It's the breaking of the the average face makes you beautiful, all that.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:18Lex Fridman?

  And obviously different for men and women, a different age, all this kind of stuff.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:21Lex Fridman?

  But be underneath it all, the personality, all of that, when when the face comes alive, that also is the thing that makes you beautiful.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Lex Fridman?

  But anyway, you have to figure all that out with AI.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, one thing that worked was like, um, people would upload full body photos of themselves. So I would crop the face, right? Because then the model knew better that we're training mostly the face here. But then I started losing a resemblance of the body because some people are skinny. Some people are muscular, whatever, so you want to have that too. Uh, so now I mix full body photos in the training with face photos, face crops. Uh, and it's all automatic like, um, and I know that other people, they they use again AI models to detect like what are the best photos in this training set and then train on those. But it's all it's all about training data and that's with everything in AI. Like how good your training data is, is in many ways more important than how many steps you train for, like how many months or whatever with these GPUs like. The gold.

• 1:15:18Lex Fridman?

  Do you have any guidelines for people of like how to get good data? How to give good data to fine tune on?

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  Like the photos should be diverse. So for example, if I only upload photos with a brown shirt or green shirt, the model will think that I'm training the green shirt. So the things that are the same every photo are the concepts that are trained. What you want is your face to be the concept that's trained.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  And everything else to be diverse, like different.

• 1:15:44Lex Fridman?

  So diverse lighting as well, diverse.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, outside, inside. But there's no like, this is the problem, there's no like manual for this. And nobody knew, we were all just, especially two years ago, we're all hacking, trying to test anything, anything you can think of. And it's frustrating. It's one of the most frustrating and also fun and challenging things to do because with AI. Because it's a black box and like Carpathia, I think says this, like, we didn't really know how this thing works, but it does something, but nobody really knows why. Right? Like we cannot look into the, the model of an L L M. Like what is actually in there? We just know it's like a 3D matrix of numbers, right?

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  So it's very frustrating because some things you, that would be, you think they're obvious that they will improve things, will make them worse. And there's so many parameters you can tweak. So you're testing everything to, you know, improve things.

• 1:16:38Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's a whole field now of mechanistic interpretability that like studies that tries to figure out, tries to break things apart and understand how it works. But, you know, there's also the data side and the, the actual like consumer facing product side of figuring out how you get it to generate a thing that's beautiful or interesting or naturalistic, all that kind of stuff. And you're like at the forefront of figuring that out about the human face. And humans really care about the human face.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  Very vain. Yeah, like me, you know, like I want to look good in your podcast, for example. Yeah, for sure.

• 1:17:10Lex Fridman?

  And then one of the things I actually would love to like rigorously use photo AI. Because for the thumbnails, I take portraits of people. I didn't, I don't know shit about photography. I basically used your approach for photography. I like Google, how do you take photographs?

• 1:17:29Lex Fridman?

  Camera, lighting, and also it's tough because maybe you could speak to this also, but like with photography, no offense to any, they're true artists, great photographers, but like people like take themselves way too seriously, think you need a whole lot of equipment. You definitely don't want one light. You need like five lights.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:17:52Lex Fridman?

  And 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 because I was thinking, I was, I'm gonna do a podcast studio, whatever. I should probably like treat the, do a sound treatment on the room. And like when he showed up and analyzed the room, he thought everything I was doing was horrible. And that's when I realized like, you know what? I don't need experts in my life.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  Get out of the house?

• 1:18:25Lex Fridman?

  No, I didn't kick. I said, thank you. Thank you very much.

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  Thank you. Great tips.

• 1:18:29Lex Fridman?

  I just, I just felt like there is, you know, focus on whatever the problems are. Use your own judgment. Use your own instincts. Don't listen to other people and only consult other people when there's a specific problem and you consult them not to offload the problem onto them, but to gain wisdom from their perspective, even if their perspective is ultimately one you don't agree with, you're going to gain wisdom from that. And just, I ultimately come up with like a PHP solution, PHP and jQuery solution.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  PHP studio.

• 1:19:00Lex Fridman?

  PHP studio. I have a little suitcase. I use like, uh, just the, the basic sort of, uh, consumer type of stuff, one light. It's great.

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And look at you. You're like one of the top podcasts in the world and you get millions of views and it works. And the people that spend so much money on optimizing for the best sound, for the best studio, they get like 300 views, you know? So what is this about? This is about that. Either you do it really well, or also that a lot of these things don't matter. Like what matters is probably the content of the podcast. Like you get the interesting guests.

• 1:19:31Lex Fridman?

  Focus on stuff that matters.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think this is very common. They called gear acquisition syndrome, like gas. Like people in any industry do this. They just buy all the stuff. There was a meme recently, like you buy, what's the name for the guy that buys all the stuff before he even started doing the hobby, right? Marketing, you know, marketing does that to people. They want to buy this stuff.

• 1:19:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  But like, man, you can make a, you can make a Hollywood movie on iPhone, you know? If the content is good enough, it's, it, and it will probably be original because you would be using an iPhone for it, you know? So.

• 1:20:04Lex Fridman?

  That said, I, so the, the reason I brought that up with photography.

• 1:20:09Lex Fridman?

  There is wisdom from people and one of, one of the things I realized, you probably also realized this, but how much power light has

• 1:20:19Lex Fridman?

  to, uh, to convey emotion. Did you just take one light and move it around? So you're sitting in the darkness, move it around your face. The different positions are having a second light potentially. You can play with how a person feels just from a generic face. It's interesting. Like you can make people attractive. You can make them ugly. You can make them scary. You can make them lonely, all of this. And so you kind of real, start to realize this and I would definitely love AI help in creating great portraits of people.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  Guest photos, yeah.

• 1:20:51Lex Fridman?

  Guest photos, for example, that's a small use case, but for me, that's a,

• 1:20:57Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:08Lex Fridman?

  What makes their appearance powerful in some ways? Sometimes it's the eyes, oftentimes it's the eyes, but there's certain features of the face can sometimes be really powerful. And I can't, it's, it's also kind of awkward for me to take.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:20Lex Fridman?

  Photographs, so I'm not collecting enough.

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Lex Fridman?

  Photographs for myself to do it with just those photographs. If I can load that off onto AI and then start to play with like lighting.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  You should do this and you should probably do it yourself. Like you can use photo, but it's even more fun if you do it yourself. So you train the models. You can learn about like ControlNet. ControlNet is where, for example, your photos in your podcast are usually like from the angle, right? So you can create a ControlNet face pose that's always like this. So every model, every photo you generate uses this ControlNet pose, for example. I think it would be very fun for you to try out that stuff.

• 1:21:57Lex Fridman?

  Do you play with lighting at all? Do you play with lighting with pose with the?

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Man, actually this like this week or recently, there's a new model came out that can adjust the light of any photo, but also AI image with stable diffusion. I think it's called Relight and it's amazing. Like you can, you can upload kind of like a light map. So for example, red, purple, blue, and it uses that light map to change the light on the photo you input. It's amazing. So there's for sure a lot of stuff you can do.

• 1:22:28Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:37Lex Fridman?

  Like what, how do you pay attention? How do you stay on top of everything?

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  I think you need to join Twitter, X, you know, X is amazing now and the whole AI industry is on X. And they're all like anime avatars. So it's funny because my friends ask me this, like what, who should I follow to stay, stay up to date? And I say, go to X and follow all the AI anime models that this person is following or follows. And I send them some URL and they all start laughing like, what is this? But they're real, like people hacking around in AI. They get hired by big companies and they're on X and most of them are anonymous. This is very funny. They're, they use anime avatars. I don't. But those people hack around and then they publish what they're discovering. They took out papers, for example. So yeah, definitely X.

• 1:23:25Lex Fridman?

  It's great. And almost exclusively, all the people I follow are AI people.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a good time now.

• 1:23:32Lex Fridman?

  Well, but also just brings happiness to my.

• 1:23:36Lex Fridman?

  To my soul, because there's so much turmoil on Twitter.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, like politics and stuff.

• 1:23:41Lex Fridman?

  There's battles going on. It's like a war zone and it's nice to just go into this happy place to where people are building stuff.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent. I like Twitter for that most, like building stuff, like seeing other, because it inspires you to build and it's it's just fun to see other people share what they're discovering and then you're like, okay, I'm gonna make something too. It's just super fun. And so if you want to start going X and then I would go to replicate and start trying to play with models. And when you have something that kind of you manually enter stuff, you set the parameters, something that works, you can you can make an app out of it or a website.

• 1:24:17Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak a little bit more to the process of it becoming better and better and better photo? Yeah.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  So I had this photo and a lot of people using it. There was like a million or more photos a month being generated. And I discovered I was testing parameters, like increase the step count of generating photo or changing the sampler, like a scheduler. Like you have DPM two cars, all these things I don't know anything about, but I know that you can choose them when you generate image and they have different resulting images. But I didn't know which one was were better. So I would do it myself, test it. But then I was like, why don't I test on these users? Because I have a million photos generated anyway. So on like 10% of the users, I would randomly test parameters and then I would see if they would, because you can favorite a photo or you can download it. I would measure if they favorite or like the photo. And then I would A B test and you test for significance and stuff.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  Which parameters were were better and which were worse.

• 1:25:12Lex Fridman?

  So you started to figure out which which models are actually working.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then if it's significant enough data, you switch to that for the whole, you know, all the users. And so that was that was like the breakthrough to make it better. Just use the users to improve themselves. And I tell them when they sign up, we do sampling, we do testing on your photos with random parameters and that worked really well. I don't do a lot of testing anymore because it's like I kind of reached like a diminishing point where it's like, it's kind of good. But that's there was a breakthrough. Yeah.

• 1:25:37Lex Fridman?

  So it's really about the parameters, the models that choose and letting the users. Help do the search in the space of models and parameters for you.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, but actually, so like Stable Diffusion, I use 1.5, 2.0 came out, as Stable Diffusion XL came out, all these new versions, and they were all worse. And so the core scene of people are still using 1.5 because it's like, it's also not like what do you call neutered? Like they neutered like to make it super like with safety features and stuff. So most of the people are still on Stable Diffusion 1.5. And meanwhile, Stable Diffusion, the company went like, the CEO left, a lot of drama happened because they couldn't make money. And yeah, so they gave us, it's very interesting, they gave us this open source model that everybody uses. They raised like hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  It all, they didn't make any money, they were not a lot, and they did amazing job. And now everybody uses open source model for free. And they did, you know, it's amazing, like it's amazing.

• 1:26:38Lex Fridman?

  You're not even using the latest one.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  No, and the strange thing is that this company raised hundreds of millions, but the people that are benefiting from it are already small. Like people like me who make these small apps that are using the model. And now they're starting to charge money for the new models, but the new models are not so good for people. They're not so open source, right?

• 1:26:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's interesting because open source is so impactful in the AI space. But you wonder like, what is the business model behind that? But it's enabling this whole ecosystem of companies that

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Lex Fridman?

  They're using open source models.

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  It's kind of like those frameworks, but then they didn't, you know, bribe enough influencers to use it. And they didn't charge money for the platform, you know?

• 1:27:16Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so back to your book and the ideas. We didn't even get to the first step.

• 1:27:22Lex Fridman?

  Generating ideas. So you had notebook and you're filling it up. How do you know when an idea is a good one? Like what, you have this just flood of ideas. How do you pick the one that you actually try to build?

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  Man, mostly you don't know, like mostly I choose the ones that are most viable for me to build. Like I cannot build a space company now, right? Would be quite challenging, but I can build something.

• 1:27:44Lex Fridman?

  Did you actually write down like space company?

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  No, I think asteroid mining would be very cool. Cause like you, you go to an asteroid, you take some stuff from there, you bring it back, you sell it. You know, it's, but then you need to do, and you can hire someone to launch the thing. So all you need is like the robot that goes to the asteroid, you know? And the robotics is interesting, like I want to also learn robotics. So maybe that could be.

• 1:28:05Lex Fridman?

  I think both asteroid mining and the robotics is.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, together.

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  No, exactly. This is it. This is the We do this not because it's easy, but because we thought it would be easy. Exactly. That's me with asteroid mining. Exactly. That's why I should do this.

• 1:28:26Lex Fridman?

  It's not nomadlist.com.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  No, it's not.

• 1:28:28Lex Fridman?

  It's asteroid mining. You have to like build stuff. You have to, gravity is really hard to overcome.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it seems, man, I sound like idiots probably not, but it sounds quite approachable, like relatively approachable. You don't have to build a rocket.

• 1:28:40Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you use something like SpaceX to get out of space?

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  SpaceX to send your, you know, this dog robot or whatever.

• 1:28:46Lex Fridman?

  So is there actually exist a notebook where you wrote down asteroid mining?

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  No, I used, back then I used Trello.

• 1:28:51Lex Fridman?

  Trello.

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, but now I don't really, I use Telegram. I write it on like saved messages and I have like idea I write it down.

• 1:28:57Lex Fridman?

  You type to yourself on Telegram?

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  You know, like, because you use WhatsApp, right? I think. So you have like message to yourself thing also. Yeah. So you

• 1:29:03Lex Fridman?

  You're talking to yourself on Telegram?

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, use like a notepad, not forget stuff and then I pin it, you know?

• 1:29:07Lex Fridman?

  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 a Notion where you have systems for note taking. You're not, you're notepad, you're notepad.exe guy. If you're one of those user.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Man, I saw some YouTubers doing this like, there's a lot of these productivity gurus also and they do this whole like iPad with a pencil. And then I also had an iPad and I also got the pencil and I got this app where you can like draw on paper, like draw like a calendar, you know, like, like people, students use this and you can do coloring and stuff. And I'm like, dude, I did this for a week and then I'm like, what am I doing with my life? Like I could just write it as a message to myself and it's good enough, you know?

• 1:29:48Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of ideas, you shared a tweet explaining why the first idea sometimes might be a brilliant idea. The reason for this, you think is the first idea submerges from your subconscious was actually boiling in your brain for weeks, months, sometimes years in the background. The eight hours of thinking can never compete with the perpetual subconscious background job. So this is the idea that if you think about an idea for eight hours versus like the first idea that pops into your mind. And sometimes there is subconscious. Like stuff that you've been thinking about for many years. That's really interesting.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  Emerges. I wrote it wrong because I don't know. I'm not native English, but it emerges from your subconscious, right? It comes from the like a water is your subconscious in here is boiling and then when it's ready, it's like ding. It's like a microwave comes out and there you have your idea.

• 1:30:35Lex Fridman?

  You think you have ideas like that?

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, all the time, hundred percent.

• 1:30:38Lex Fridman?

  It's just stuff that's been like there.

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:30:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  And I also, it comes up and I bring it, I send it back, you know, like send it back to the kitchen.

• 1:30:45Lex Fridman?

  Not ready.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  To boil more.

• 1:30:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  And it's like a soup that of ideas is cooking. It's a hundred percent. This is how my brain works and I think most people.

• 1:30:53Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  Yes. So many times like startup founders are too early with their idea. Yeah, hundred percent.

• 1:31:04Lex Fridman?

  Robotics is an interesting one for that because like there's been a lot of robotics companies that failed.

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:10Lex Fridman?

  Because it's been very difficult to build a robotics company, make money because there's the manufacturing, like the cost of everything. The intelligence of the robot is enough, is not sufficient to create a compelling enough product from which to make money. So all, so there's this long line of robotics companies that've tried, they had big dreams and they failed.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, like Boston Dynamics. I still don't know what they're doing, but they always upload YouTube videos and it's amazing. But I feel like a lot of these companies don't have a, it's like a solution looking for a problem for now, you know? Military obviously uses, but like, do I, do I need like a robotic dog now for my house? I don't know, like it's fun, but it doesn't really solve anything yet. I feel the same kind of with VR, like it's really cool, like Apple Vision Pro is very cool. Doesn't really solve something for me yet. And that's kind of the tech looking for a solution, right? But one day will.

• 1:31:58Lex Fridman?

  When the personal computer, when the Mac came along, there's a big switch that happened. It somehow captivated everybody's imagination and you could like the application, the killer apps became. A parent, you can type on a computer.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  But they became apparent like immediately. Back then, they also had like this thing where like, we don't need these computers. They're like a hype and it also went like in kind of like, you know.

• 1:32:23Lex Fridman?

  Yes, yeah, but the hype is the thing that allowed the thing to proliferate sufficiently to where people's minds would start opening up to it a little bit. The possibility of it right now, for example, with the robotics, there's very few robots in the homes of people.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:32:39Lex Fridman?

  The robots that are there are Roombas, so the vacuum cleaners, or they're Amazon Alexa.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, or dishwasher. I mean, it's essentially a robot.

• 1:32:48Lex Fridman?

  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 it interacts with you. It's, you know, that's just one example.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:04Lex Fridman?

  I sometimes think about that as like if some people in this world were kind of born in the whole existence is like, they were meant to build the thing.

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:15Lex Fridman?

  You know, I guess sometimes wonder like what my, what I was meant to do. Do you have these plans for your life? You have these dreams?

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  I think you're meant to build robots.

• 1:33:25Lex Fridman?

  Okay, me personally, maybe, maybe.

• 1:33:30Lex Fridman?

  That's a sense I've had, but it could be other things. It could hilariously enough be the thing I was meant to be is to talk to people.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:40Lex Fridman?

  Which is weird because I always was anxious about talking to people. It's like a.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:33:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm scared of this. I was scared. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  I'm scared of you.

• 1:33:50Lex Fridman?

  It's just anxiety throughout, social interaction in general. I'm an introvert that hides from the world. So, yeah, it's really strange.

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's, that's also kind of life. Like, life brings you to, it's very hard to super intently kind of choose what you're gonna do with your life. It's more like surfing. You're surfing the waves, you go in the ocean, you see where you end up, you know?

• 1:34:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah. And there's, the universe has a kind of sense of humor.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:17Lex Fridman?

  I guess you have to just, yeah, allow yourself to be carried away by the waves.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:22Lex Fridman?

  Have you felt that way in your life?

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, all the time. Like, yeah, that's like, I think that's the best way to live your life.

• 1:34:28Lex Fridman?

  So allow whatever to happen. Like, do you know what you're doing in the next few years? Is it possible that it'll be completely like changed?

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  Possibly. I think relationships, like you wanna hold relationships, right? You wanna hold your girlfriend, you wanna become wife and all this stuff. But you should, I think you should stay open to where, like, for example, where you wanna live. Like, I don't know, we don't know where we wanna live, for example. That's something that will figure itself out. It will crystallize where, you know, you will get, you will get sent by the waves to somewhere where you wanna live, for example. What you're gonna do? I think that's a really good way to live your life. It's, I, I think most stress comes from trying to control, like, hold things, like.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  It's kind of Buddhist, you know? You need to like lose control, let it loose, and then things will happen. Like, when you do mushrooms, when you do drugs, like psychedelic drugs, the people that starts, that are like control freaks, get bad trips, right? Because you need to let go. Like, I'm pretty control freak, actually. And when I did mushrooms, when I was seventeen, I, I, it was very good. And then at the end, it wasn't so good because I tried to control. It was like, ah, now it's going too much, you know? Now I need to, let's stop. Bro, you can't stop it. You need to go through with it, you know? And so I think it's a good metaphor for life. I think that's, you know, a very tranquil way to lead your life.

• 1:35:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, actually, when I took ayahuasca, that lesson is deeply within me already that you can't control anything. I think I probably learned that the most in jiu-jitsu. So just let go and relax.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:55Lex Fridman?

  And that's why I had just an incredible experience. There's like literally no negative aspect in 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.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:08Lex Fridman?

  Just serve the way.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  For sure. I think most stress in life comes from trying to control.

• 1:36:13Lex Fridman?

  So once you have the idea,

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  yeah.

• 1:36:15Lex Fridman?

  Step two, build. How do you think about building the thing once you have the idea?

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  I think you should build with the technology that you know. So for example, Nomad List, which is like this website I made to figure out the best cities to live and work as digital nomad. It wasn't a website, it launched as a Google spreadsheet. So it was a public Google spreadsheet, anybody could edit. And I was like, I'm collecting like cities where we can live as digital nomads with the internet speeds, the cost of living, you know, other stuff. And I tweeted it and I would, and back then I didn't have a lot of followers, I had like a few thousand followers or something. And it went like viral for my skill viral back then, you know, which was like five retweets. And, um, and a lot of people started editing it and there was like hundreds of cities in this list, like from all over the world with all the data. It was very crowdsourced and then I made that into a website.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  So figuring out like what technology you can use that you already know. So if you cannot code, you can use a spreadsheet. If you cannot use a spreadsheet, like whatever, you can always use a, for example, a website generator like Wix or something or Squarespace, right? Like you don't need to code to build a startup. All you need is a idea for a product, build something like a landing page or something.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  Put a Stripe button on there and then make it. And if you can code, use the language that you already know and start coding with that and see how far you can get. You can always rewrite the code later, like the tech stack is not actually, it's not the most important of a business when you're starting out a business. The important thing is that you validate that there's a market, that there's a product that people want to pay for.

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  So use whatever you can use and if you cannot code, use, you know, spreadsheets, landing page generators, whatever.

• 1:37:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and the crowdsourcing element is fascinating.

• 1:37:58Lex Fridman?

  It's cool, it's cool when a lot of people start using it, you get to learn so fast.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:03Lex Fridman?

  Like I've actually did the spreadsheet thing, you share a spreadsheet publicly.

• 1:38:09Lex Fridman?

  And I made it editable.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:12Lex Fridman?

  It's so cool.

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  Interesting things start happening.

• 1:38:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I did it for like a workout thing because I was doing a large amount of pushups and pullups.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember this, man, yeah.

• 1:38:19Lex Fridman?

  And like, and, and well, I'll say Google Sheets is pretty limited in that everything's allowed. So people could just write anything in any cell and they can create new sheets.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:31Lex Fridman?

  New tabs. And it just exploded. And one of the things that I really enjoyed is there's very few trolls.

• 1:38:41Lex Fridman?

  Because actually, other people would delete the trolls. There would be like this weird war of like, of they, they want like to protect the thing. It's an immune system that's inherent to the thing.

• 1:38:52Speaker 01

  It becomes a society, you know, in the spreadsheets.

• 1:38:54Lex Fridman?

  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 go to the bottom. Yes. It's fascinating. I mean, but that kind of crowdsourcing element is really powerful. And if you can create a product that use that as a, to his benefit, that's, that's really nice. Like any kind of voting system, any kind of rating system for A and B testing is really, really, really fascinating. So anyway, so Nomad List is great. I would, I would love for you to talk about that. But one sort of way to talk about it is through you building Hood Maps.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:33Lex Fridman?

  You've, you did an awesome thing, which is document yourself building the thing. And doing so in just a handful of days, like three, four, five days. So people should definitely check out the video in the, in the blog post. Can you, can you explain what Hood Maps is and what this whole, like, this process was?

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  So I was traveling and I was still trying to find like problems, right? And I would go, I would, I would discover that like everybody's experience of a city is different because they stay in different areas.

• 1:39:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  So I'm from Amsterdam and when I grew up in Amsterdam, or didn't grow up, but I lived there, university, I knew that center is like, in Europe, the centers are always tourist areas. So they're super busy. They're not very authentic, the culture, they're not really Dutch culture, it's Amsterdam tourist culture, you know? So when people would travel to Amsterdam, I would say, don't go to the center, go to, you know, southeast of the center, the Jordaan or the pipe or something, more hipster areas, like, it was more authentic culture of Amsterdam. That's where I would live, you know, and where I would go. And I thought this could be like an app where you can have like a Google Maps, and you put colors over it, you have like areas that are like colorful, like red is tourist, green is rich, you know, green money,

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  yellow is hipster, and you can figure out where you need to go in the city when you travel, because I was traveling a lot, I wanted to go to the cool spots.

• 1:40:48Lex Fridman?

  So just use color?

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  Color, yeah, yeah, and I would use a canvas, so I thought, okay, what do I need, I need to...

• 1:40:54Lex Fridman?

  Did you know that you would be using a canvas?

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  No, I didn't know it was possible, because I didn't know...

• 1:40:58Lex Fridman?

  So I mean, this is a cool, this is a cool thing, people should really check it out.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  This is how it started.

• 1:41:02Lex Fridman?

  Because like, you're honestly capture so beautifully the, the humbling aspects, the embarrassing aspects of like not knowing what to do. It's like, how do I, how do I do this? And you like, document yourself, yeah, you're right, dude, I feel embarrassed about myself. It's called being alive, nice. So you're like, you don't know anything about, so canvas is a way, it's HTML, yeah, it's HTML5 thing that allows you to draw shapes.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  Draw images, just draw pixels essentially, so...

• 1:41:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:35Speaker 01

  And that's, that was special back then, because before you could only have like elements, right? So you want to draw a pixel, use a canvas. And I knew I needed to draw pixels, because I need to draw these colors. And I thought like, okay, I'll get like a Google Maps iframe embed, and then I'll put a div on top of it with the colors, and I'll do like opacity 50, you know, so it kind of shows. So I did that with canvas, and then I started drawing. And then I thought like, obviously other people need to edit this, because I cannot draw all these things myself. So I crowdsourced it again, and I, you would draw on the map, and then it would send the pixel data to the server, it would put it in the database. And then I would have a robot running, like a cron job, which every week would calculate, or every day would calculate, like, okay, so Amsterdam center, there's like,

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  six people say it's tourist, this part of the center, but two people say it's like hipster. Okay, so the tourist part wins, right, it's just an array. So find the most common value in a little pixel area on a map. So that, so if most people say it's tourist, it's tourist, and it becomes red. And I would do that for, you know, all the GPS corners in the world.

• 1:42:39Lex Fridman?

  Can we just clarify, do you have to be, as a human that's contributing to this, do you have to be in that location to make the label?

• 1:42:46Speaker 01

  No, people just type in cities and go like, go berserk and start drawing everywhere.

• 1:42:51Lex Fridman?

  Would they draw shapes or would they draw pixels?

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  Man, they drew like crazy stuff, like offensive symbols. I cannot mention, they would draw penises.

• 1:42:57Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's, that's obviously a guy.

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  I would do the same thing, draw penises.

• 1:43:01Lex Fridman?

  That's the first thing, when I show up to Mars and there's no cameras, I'm drawing a penis on the same.

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  Man, I did it in the snow, you know? But the penises did not become a problem because I knew that not everybody would draw a penis and not in the same place. So most people would use it fairly. So just if I had enough crowds first data, so you have all these pixels on top of it. It's like a layer of pixels and you choose the most common pixel. So yeah, it's just like a poll, but in visual format and it worked. And within a week, I had enough data and, and it was like cities that did really well, like Los Angeles. A lot of people started using it, like most data in Los Angeles.

• 1:43:36Lex Fridman?

  Because Los Angeles is, has defined neighborhoods.

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:41Lex Fridman?

  And not just in terms of the, the official labels, but like what they're known for.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:46Lex Fridman?

  What are the, do you, did you provide the categories that they were allowed to use as labels?

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  The colors, yeah.

• 1:43:54Lex Fridman?

  As colors?

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  So it's just like, I think you can see there, there's like hipster, tourist, rich, business. There's always a business area, right? And then there's a residential, the residential is gray. So I thought those were the most common things in the city, kind of.

• 1:44:06Lex Fridman?

  And a little bit meme-y, like it's almost fun to label it as that.

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, obviously it's simplified and, but you need to simplify this stuff, you know? You, you don't want to have too many categories. And it's essentially just like, like using a, you know, paintbrush where you, you select the color in the bottom, you select the category, you start drawing, there's no instruction, there's no manual. And then I also added tagging, so people could like, write something on a specific location. So, uh, don't go here or like, here's like, um, nice cafes and stuff. And man, the memes that came from that, and I also added uploading, so that the tags could be uploaded. So the memes that came from that is like amazing, like people in Los Angeles would write crazy stuff. It would go viral in all these cities. You can allow, allow your location and it will probably send you to Austin.

• 1:44:52Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so we're looking, uh, oh boy, drunk hipsters.

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  Air bro and bros?

• 1:45:04Lex Fridman?

  Air bro and bros. Hipster girls who do cocaine.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  I saw a guy in a fish costume get beaten up here.

• 1:45:10Lex Fridman?

  Yep. That seems also accurate.

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  Overpriced and underwhelming.

• 1:45:17Lex Fridman?

  Uh, let me see, let me make sure this is accurate. Uh, let's see.

• 1:45:24Lex Fridman?

  Dirty sixth, for people who know Austin, know that that's important to a label. Sixth Street is, uh, famous in Austin. Dirty six drunk frat boys, accurate. Drunk frat bros continued on six, very well known. West sixth drunk douche bros.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  Go from frat to douche.

• 1:45:41Lex Fridman?

  Douche. I mean, it's very accurate so far.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:45:45Lex Fridman?

  Uh, they only let hot people live here. That's. I think that might be accurate. Uh.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  It's like the district. Exercise freaks on the river? Yeah, that's true.

• 1:45:58Lex Fridman?

  Dog runners, accurate. Saw a guy in a fish costume get beat up here.

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  I wanna know this story, like.

• 1:46:04Lex Fridman?

  So that's, that's all user contributed.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's like stuff I couldn't come up with because I don't know Austin. I don't know the memes here, the subcultures.

• 1:46:11Lex Fridman?

  And then me as a user can upload or download this. So this is completely crowdsourced.

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  Cause of Reddit, you know, upload, download, took it from there.

• 1:46:19Lex Fridman?

  And that's really, really, really powerful. Single people with dogs, accurate. At which point did it go from colors to the, actually showing the text?

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  I think I added the text like a week, a week after. And, uh, so here's like the pixels.

• 1:46:34Lex Fridman?

  So that's really cool, the pixels. How do you go from there? That's a huge amount of data. So there's.

• 1:46:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:38Lex Fridman?

  Uh, we're now looking at an image where it's just a sea of pixels that are colored different colors in a city. So how do you combine that to be a thing that actually makes it some sense?

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  I think here the problem was that you have this data, but it's like, it's not. Lock to one location.

• 1:46:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  So I had to normalize it. So when you click, when you draw on a map, it will show you the specific pixel location and you can convert the pixel location to a GPS coordinate, right? Like latitude, longitude. But the number will have a lot of commas or a lot of decimals, right? Because it's very specific, like it's like this specific part of the table. So what you want to do is you want to take that pixel and you want to normalize it by removing like decimals, um, which I discovered so that you you're talking about this neighborhood, this or this street, right? So that's what I did. I just took the decimals off and then I saved it like this and then it starts um, going to like a grid and then you have like a grid of data. You get like a pixel map kinda.

• 1:47:30Lex Fridman?

  And you said it looks kinda ugly, so then you smoothed it.

• 1:47:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I started adding blurring and stuff. I think now it's it's not smooth again because I liked it better. People like the pixel look kinda. Yeah, a lot of people use it and it keeps going viral and every time my my maps bill, uh, like Mapbox, I had to use, stop using, I first used Google Maps, it went viral and Google Maps, it was out of credits. So I, and I had to, so funny, during, when I launched it, went viral. Um, Google Maps, the map didn't load anymore. It says over the limits, you need to contact enterprise sales. And I'm like, I, but I need now like a map, so, and I don't want to contact enterprise sales. I don't want to go on a call, schedule with some calendar. So I switched to Mapbox and then had Mapbox for years and then it went viral and I had a bill of twenty thousand dollars, was like last year.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  Um, so they helped me with the bill. They said, you know, you can pay less. And then I now switch to like an open source kind of um, map platform. So it's a very expensive product and never made any dollar money, but it's very fun, but it's very expensive.

• 1:48:32Lex Fridman?

  What do you learn from that? So like

• 1:48:36Lex Fridman?

  from that experience? Because when you leverage somebody else's through the API.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I don't think a map hosting service should cost this much, you know? But uh, I could host it myself, but that would be, I don't know how to do that, you know, but I could do that.

• 1:48:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's super complicated.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  I think that the thing is more about like, you you can't make money with this project. I tried to do many things to make money with it and it's, it's uh, it hasn't worked.

• 1:49:00Lex Fridman?

  You talked about like possibly doing advertisements on it or some somehow.

• 1:49:04Speaker 01

  But.

• 1:49:05Lex Fridman?

  Or people sponsoring it, yeah. Well, it's really surprising to me that people don't want to. Advertise on it.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  I think map apps are very hard to 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 project is kind of like, it's kind of cool. So it's kind of fun to subsidize it. It's kind of a little bit part of Nomad List. Like I put it on Nomad List in the cities as well. But I also realized like you don't need to monetize everything. Like some projects are just cool. And you know, it's like, it's cool to have Hood Maps exist. I want this to exist, right?

• 1:49:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff you've created that I'm just glad exists in this world. That's true. And it's a whole nother puzzle. And I'm surprised to figure out how to make money off of it. I'm surprised maps don't make money, but you're right. It's hard. It's hard to make money. Cause there's, there's a lot of compute required to actually bring it to life.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  Also, where do you put the ad, right? Like if you have a website, you can put like an ad box or you can do like a product placement or something. But you're talking about a map app that where 90% of the interface is a map. So what are you gonna do? You're gonna like, like it's hard to figure out where is this?

• 1:50:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and people don't want to pay for it.

• 1:50:16Speaker 01

  No, exactly. Because if you make people pay for it, you lose 99% of the user base and you lose the crowdsourced data. So it's not fun anymore. It stops being accurate, right? So you kind of, they pay for it by crowdsourcing the data, but then, yeah, it's fine. You know, it doesn't make money, but it's, it's cool.

• 1:50:33Lex Fridman?

  But that said, Nomad List makes money.

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:37Lex Fridman?

  So what was the story behind Nomad List?

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  So Nomad List started because I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand, which is now like the second city here. And I was, you know, working on my laptop.

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  I met like other nomads there and I was like, okay, this seems like a cool thing to do. Like working on your laptop in a different country, kind of travel around. But back then, the internet everywhere was very slow. So the internet was fast in, for example, Holland or United States. But in a lot of parts in, you know, South America or Asia was very slow, like 0.5 megabits. So you couldn't watch a YouTube video. Thailand weirdly had like quite fast internet. But I wanted to find like other cities where I could go to like work on my laptop, whatever, and travel. And, but we needed like fast internet. So I was like, let's, you know, crowdsource this information with a spreadsheet. And I also needed to know the cost of living because I didn't have a lot of money. I had $500 a month. So I had to find a place where like the rent was like, you know, $200 per month or something where I had, you know, some money

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  that I could actually rent something. And um. And there was Nomad List and it still runs. I think it's now almost 10 years.

• 1:51:43Lex Fridman?

  So just to describe how it works, I'm looking at Chiang Mai here. There's a total score, it's rank number two.

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's like a Nomad score.

• 1:51:51Lex Fridman?

  4.82, like by members, but it's looking at the internet. In this case, it's fast, 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.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  It's a little much, you know?

• 1:52:15Lex Fridman?

  English speaking, it's awesome. It's awesome. Walkability.

• 1:52:18Speaker 01

  Keep adding stuff.

• 1:52:19Lex Fridman?

  Because for certain groups of people, certain things really matter. And this is really cool. Happiness, I'd love to ask you about that. Night life, free wifi, AC,

• 1:52:30Lex Fridman?

  female friendly, freedom of speech.

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, not so good in Thailand, you know?

• 1:52:34Lex Fridman?

  Values derived from national statistics. I like how that one.

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  I need to do that because the data sets are usually national, they're not on city level, right? So I don't know about the freedom of speech between Bangkok or Chiang Mai. I know them in Thailand.

• 1:52:46Lex Fridman?

  I mean, this is really fascinating. So this is for city.

• 1:52:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:49Lex Fridman?

  It's basically rating all the different things that matter to you in internet. And this is all crowdsourced.

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  Well, so it started crowdsourced, but then I realized that you can download more accurate data sets from like public source, like World Bank. They have a lot of public data sets, United Nations, and you can download a lot of data there, which you can freely use. Like I started getting prompts across with data where, for example, people from India, they really love India, and they would submit the best scores for everything in India. And not just like one person, but like a lot of people. They would love to pump India. And I'm like, I love India too, you know, but that's not valid data. So you started getting discrepancies in the data between where people were from and stuff. So I started switching to data sets and.

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  And now it's mostly data sets, but one thing that's still crowdsourced is so people add where they are, they add their travels to their profile. And I use that data to see which places are upcoming and which places are popular now. So about half the ranking you see here is based on actual digital nomads who are there. You can click on a city, you can click on people, you can see the people, the users that are actually there. And it's like thirty thousand or forty thousand members. So these people are in Austin now and

• 1:54:03Lex Fridman?

  Eighteen hundred remote workers in Austin now, of which eight plus members checked in, members who will be here soon.

• 1:54:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we have meetups. So people organize their own meetups and we have about, I think like thirty, thirty per month. So it's like one meetup a day. And I don't do anything. They organize themselves. So I just, it's a whole black box. It just runs and I don't do a lot on it. It pulls data from everywhere and it just works.

• 1:54:30Lex Fridman?

  Cons of Austin is too expensive, very sweaty and humid now, difficult to make.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  Difficult to make friends. Interesting, right? I didn't know that.

• 1:54:36Lex Fridman?

  Difficult to make friends. But this all crowds, but mostly it's pros.

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:42Lex Fridman?

  Pretty safe, fast internet.

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  I don't understand why it says not safe for women to check the data set. It's still safe. The problem with a lot of places like United States is that it depends per area, right? So if you get like city level data or nation level data, it's like Brazil is the worst because the range in like safe and wealthy and not safe is like huge. So you can't say many things about Brazil.

• 1:55:05Lex Fridman?

  So once I actually show up to a city, how do you figure out what, what area, like where to get fast internet? For example, like for me is, oh, it's consistently a struggle to figure out.

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  Still.

• 1:55:16Lex Fridman?

  Hotels with fast wifi, for example, like a place. Okay, okay. I show up to a city. There's a lot of fascinating puzzles and I haven't figured out a way to actually solve this puzzle. When I show up to a city, figuring out where I can get fast internet connection.

• 1:55:33Lex Fridman?

  And for podcasting purposes, where I can find a place with a table that's quiet.

• 1:55:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:39Lex Fridman?

  It's not easy.

• 1:55:40Speaker 01

  Construction sounds?

• 1:55:41Lex Fridman?

  All kinds of sounds. You have to learn about all the sources of sounds in the world. And also like the, the quality of the room, because the more, um, the emptier the room and like if it's just walls without any curtains or any of this kind of stuff, then there's uh, echoes in the room. Anyway, but you, you figure out that a lot of hotels don't have tables. They don't have like normal.

• 1:56:04Speaker 01

  This weird desk, right?

• 1:56:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:05Speaker 01

  But it's not a center table.

• 1:56:07Lex Fridman?

  Yep. And if you want to get a nicer hotel where it's more spacious and so on, they usually have these like boutique, like fancy looking, like modernist.

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  Annoying.

• 1:56:17Lex Fridman?

  Tables that don't.

• 1:56:18Speaker 01

  It's too designy.

• 1:56:19Lex Fridman?

  It's too designy. They're not really real tables.

• 1:56:22Speaker 01

  What if you get Ikea?

• 1:56:23Lex Fridman?

  Buy Ikea.

• 1:56:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Before you arrive, you order on Ikea.

• 1:56:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  Like Nomad do this. They get desks.

• 1:56:28Lex Fridman?

  I feel like you should be able to show up to a place and have, have the desk. Like it's not, unless you stay in there for a long time. Just the entire assembly, all that Airbnb is so unreliable. It's the, the, the range in quality that you get is, is, is huge. Hotels have a lot of problems, pros and cons. Like hotels have the problem that the pictures somehow never have good representative pictures of what's actually going to be in the rooms.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  And that's the problem. Like.

• 1:56:55Lex Fridman?

  And you.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  Fake photos, man.

• 1:56:57Lex Fridman?

  If I could have the kind of data you have on Nomad list for hotels.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 1:57:01Lex Fridman?

  I would, and I feel like you can make a lot of money on that, too.

• 1:57:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. The booking fees, affiliates, right? I thought about this idea because we have the same problem. Like I go to hotels and there's specific ones that are very good and I know now the chains and stuff and, but even if, even if you go to some chains are very bad in a specific city and very good in other cities.

• 1:57:18Lex Fridman?

  And each individual hotel has a lot of kinds of rooms.

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:22Lex Fridman?

  Like you, some are more expensive, some are cheaper and so on, but you can get the details of what's in the room. Like what's the actual layout of the room? What is the view of the room?

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  Scannits.

• 1:57:33Lex Fridman?

  I feel like as a hotel, you can win a lot. So first you create a service. That allows you to have like high resolution data about a hotel. Then one hotel signs up for that. I would 100% use that website to look for a hotel instead of the crappy alternatives. They don't give any information and I feel like there'll be this pressure for all the hotels to join that site. And you can make a shit ton of money because hotels make a lot of money.

• 1:57:58Speaker 01

  I think it's true, but the problem is with these hotels, like it's same with airline industry. Why does every airline website suck when you try to book a flight?

• 1:58:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:05Speaker 01

  It's like very strange, like why does it have to suck? Obviously there's competition here. Why doesn't the best website win?

• 1:58:09Lex Fridman?

  What's the explanation of that?

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  Man, I thought about this for years, so I think it's like. I have to book the flight anyway. Like I know there's a route that they take and I need like I need to book for example Qatar Airlines and I. And I need to get through this process, so. The, the, and with hotels similar, you need a hotel anyway. So do you have time to like figure out the best one? Not really, you kind of just need to get the place booked and you know, you need to get the flight and. You'll go through the pain of this process and that's why this process always sucks so much with hotels and airline websites and stuff. Because they don't have 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?

• 1:58:51Lex Fridman?

  I don't know. I think that's an interesting theory. I think that must be a different theory. My, my theory would be that great engineers, like great software engineers are not allowed to make changes.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:02Lex Fridman?

  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, they're not allowed to really make any contributions and then they leave. And so you have a lot of mediocre software engineers, they're not really interested in improving any other thing. And like literally they would like to improve the stuff, but the bureaucracy.

• 1:59:25Lex Fridman?

  Of the place, plus all the bosses, all the high up people are not technical people probably.

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:30Lex Fridman?

  They don't know much about what web dev, they don't know much about programming. So they just don't give any respect.

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:38Lex Fridman?

  You have to give the freedom and the respect to great engineers as they try to do great things. That feels like an explanation. Like if you were a great programmer, would you want to work at? America Airlines or?

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:59:53Lex Fridman?

  I'm torn on that cuz I actually, as somebody who lost program, would love to work at American Airlines. So I can make the thing better.

• 2:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, but for I would I would work there just to fix it for myself, you know?

• 2:00:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, for yourself. And then you just know how much suffering you alleviated.

• 2:00:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:10Lex Fridman?

  How much frustration. Just oh, you imagine all the thousands, millions of people that go to that website and have to click like a million times. It often doesn't work. It's clunky, all that kind of stuff. You you're making their life just so much better. Yeah, but there there must be an explanation that has to do with managers and bureaucracies like I don't.

• 2:00:29Speaker 01

  I think it's money. Do you know booking.com?

• 2:00:32Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 2:00:32Speaker 01

  So it's a booking. It's the biggest booking website in the world. It's Dutch, actually. And they have teams, cuz my friend worked there, they have teams for a specific part of the website, like a ten by ten pixels area where they they run tests on this. So they run tests like and they're famous for this stuff like, oh, there's only one room left, right? With this red letters, like one room left, book now, you know, and they got a fine from the European Union about this, kind of interesting. So they have all these teams and they run the test for twenty four hours. They go to sleep, they wake up next day, they come to the office and they see, okay, this performed better. This website has become a monster, but it's the most revenue generating hotel booking website in the world, number one. So that shows that it's not about like user experience, it's about like, I don't know, about making more money and, you know, not every company, but

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  you know, if they if they're optimizing, it's a public company, if they're optimizing for money.

• 2:01:21Lex Fridman?

  But you can optimize for money by disrupting, like making it way better.

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's always startups. They start with disrupting, like Booking also started as a startup nineteen ninety seven. And then they become like the old shit again, like, you know, Uber now starts to become like a taxi again, right? It was very good in the beginning. Now it's kind of like taxis now in many places are better. They're nicer than Ubers, right? So it's like this circle.

• 2:01:42Lex Fridman?

  I think some of it is also just it's hard to have ultra competent engineers.

• 2:01:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:48Lex Fridman?

  Like Stripe seems like a trivial thing, but it it's hard to pull off like. Why was it so hard for Amazon to have buy with one click? Which I think is a genius idea.

• 2:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:59Lex Fridman?

  Make buying easier, like.

• 2:02:02Lex Fridman?

  Make it as frictionless as possible. Just click a button once and you bought the thing.

• 2:02:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:09Lex Fridman?

  As opposed to most of the web was a lot of clicking and it often doesn't work. Like with the airlines.

• 2:02:14Speaker 01

  Remember the forms would delete, you could click next, submit and it would 404 or something where your internet would go down. Your modem. Yeah, man.

• 2:02:22Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  I'm so happy the form stays in Google Chrome now when something goes wrong. But that's so Google, somebody at Google improved society with that, right?

• 2:02:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And one of the challenges of Google is to have the freedom to do that.

• 2:02:42Speaker 01

  They don't anymore.

• 2:02:43Lex Fridman?

  There's a bunch of bureaucracy.

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:45Lex Fridman?

  At Google. So many brilliant, brilliant people there, but it just moves slowly.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:51Lex Fridman?

  I wonder why that is. Maybe that's the natural way of a company, but you have people like Elon who rolls in and just fires most, most of the folks and always operate. They push the company to operate as a startup, even when it's already big.

• 2:03:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, Apple does this. Like I studied in business school, Apple does competing product teams that operate as startups. So it's three to five people, they make something, they have multiple teams to make the same thing. The best team wins. So you need to, I think you need to emulate like a free market inside a company to make it entrepreneurial, you know?

• 2:03:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:21Speaker 01

  And you need entrepreneurial mentality in a company to, to come up with new ideas and do it better.

• 2:03:26Lex Fridman?

  So one of the things you do really, really well is learn a new thing. Like you're trying to, you have an idea, you try to build it and then you've learned everything you need to in order to build it. You have your current skills, but you need to learn just the minimal amount of stuff. So you're a good person to ask like, what? How do you learn? How do, how do you learn quickly and effectively and just the stuff you need? You did, um, just by way of example, you did a 30 days learning session on 3D.

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:55Lex Fridman?

  Where you documented yourself, giving yourself only 30 days to learn everything you can about.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I tried to learn virtual reality because I was like, this was like same as AI. It came up suddenly like 2016, 2017 with, I think HTC Vive, this big VR glasses before Apple Vision Pro. And so I was like, oh, this is going to be big, so I need to learn this. So I, I know, I know nothing about 3D. I installed like, um, I think Unity and like Blender and stuff. And I started learning all this stuff.

• 2:04:21Speaker 01

  Because I thought this was like a new, you know, nascent technology that was gonna be big. And if I had the skills for it, I could use this to build stuff. And so I think with 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. It's kind of cliche, but every day I'm learning new stuff. So every day I'm searching on Google or asking now chat G P T, how to do this thing? How to do this thing? Every day I'm getting better at my skill. So you never stop learning. So the whole concept of like, how do you learn? Well, it never ends. So where do you want to be? Do you want to know a little bit? Do you want to know a lot? Do you want to do it for your whole life? Or so I think taking action is the best step to learn. So making things, like you know, nothing, just start making things.

• 2:05:06Speaker 01

  Okay. So like how to make a website, search, how to make a website. Or nowadays you ask chat G P T, how do I make a website? Where do I start? It generates code for you, right? Copy the code, put it in a file, save it, open it in Google Chrome or whatever. You have a website and then you start tweaking with it and you start, okay, how do I add a button? How do I add A I features, right? Like nowadays. So it's like by taking action, you can learn stuff much faster than reading books or.

• 2:05:31Lex Fridman?

  Actually, I'm always curious. Let me ask perplexity. How do I make a website? I'm just curious what it would say.

• 2:05:40Lex Fridman?

  I hope it goes with like really basic vanilla solutions. Define your website's purpose. Choose a domain name. Select a web hosting provider. Choose a website or builder or C M S. Website builder platform.

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  Tells like Wix or Squarespace is what I said.

• 2:05:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:54Speaker 01

  Landing page.

• 2:05:56Lex Fridman?

  What, what do I, how do I say if I want to programming it, program it myself? Design your website, create essential pages.

• 2:06:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, even tells you to launch it, right? Like start.

• 2:06:06Lex Fridman?

  Launch your website. Cool. Well, I mean, you could do that.

• 2:06:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, but this is literally it. Like it's, this is.

• 2:06:10Lex Fridman?

  If you want to make a website.

• 2:06:11Speaker 01

  This is the basics, like Google Analytics.

• 2:06:12Lex Fridman?

  But you can't make nomad list with this way.

• 2:06:14Speaker 01

  You can.

• 2:06:15Lex Fridman?

  With Wix, like with.

• 2:06:16Speaker 01

  Ah, no, you can, you can get pretty far, I think.

• 2:06:19Lex Fridman?

  You can get pretty far.

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  These website builders are pretty advanced. Like all you need is a grid of images, right?

• 2:06:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  That are clickable, that open like another page.

• 2:06:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  You can get quite far.

• 2:06:27Lex Fridman?

  How do I learn to program?

• 2:06:35Lex Fridman?

  Choose a programming language to start with.

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, free bootcamp is good.

• 2:06:41Lex Fridman?

  Work through resources systematically, practice coding regularly for thirty, sixty minutes a day. Consistencies, key join programming communities like Reddit. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty good.

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:54Lex Fridman?

  It's pretty good.

• 2:06:55Speaker 01

  So I think it's, it's a very good starting ground because imagine you know nothing and you want to make a website, you want to make a startup. This is like, that's why the, man, the, the power of AI for education is going to be insane. Like, people anywhere can, can ask this question and start building stuff.

• 2:07:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it clarifies it for sure. And just start building, like keep, yeah, build, build, like actually apply the thing. Whether it's AI or any of the programming for web development.

• 2:07:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:22Lex Fridman?

  Just have a project in mind. I love the idea of like twelve startups in twelve months or like,

• 2:07:31Lex Fridman?

  build a project almost every day. Just build the thing.

• 2:07:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:35Lex Fridman?

  And get it to work and finish it every single day. That's a cool experiment.

• 2:07:39Speaker 01

  I think that was the inspiration. There was a girl who did one hundred and sixty websites in one hundred and sixty days or something, literally mini websites.

• 2:07:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:47Speaker 01

  And, uh, and she learned to code that way. So I think it's good to set yourself challenges, you know? Like, don't, you can go through some coding bootcamp, but I don't think they actually work. I think it's better to do like, for me, out to deduct like self learning and setting yourself like challenges and just getting in it. But you need discipline, you know, you need discipline to keep, to keep doing it. And coding, you know, coding is very, it's a steep learning curve to get in. It's very annoying. Working with computers is very annoying. So it can be hard for people to keep doing it, you know?

• 2:08:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that thing of just keep doing it and don't quit. That urgency that's required to finish a thing. That's why it's really powerful when you documented this, the creation of hoodmaps or the, like a working prototype. That there's a, just a constant frustration, I guess. It's like, oh, okay, 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.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 2:08:43Lex Fridman?

  You're like, and then just try it. And then, and then there's a dopamine rush of like, ooh, it works. Cool.

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  Man, it's amazing. And it's, I, I livestreamed it. It's on YouTube and stuff. People can watch it and it's amazing when things work. It's look, it's just like a main that you I look very not I don't look far ahead. So I only look, okay, what's the next problem to solve and then the next problem? And at the end, you have a whole app or 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 gonna 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.

• 2:09:23Lex Fridman?

  And assume it's gonna be easy.

• 2:09:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, like be naive about it because it's it's you're gonna have very difficult problems.

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

  A lot of the big problems won't be even tech will be like public, right? Like maybe people don't like your website, like um you will get canceled for a website, for example. Like a lot of things can happen.

• 2:09:40Lex Fridman?

  What's it like building in public like you do, like openly? Where you're just iterating quickly and you're getting people's feedback. So there's there's the power of the crowdsourcing, but there's also the the negative aspects of people being able to criticize.

• 2:09:54Speaker 01

  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, ah, your website sucks because blah, blah, blah. And you're like, okay, just remove this, your website sucks because personally, you know. What did he say? Why did he didn't not like it? And you figure out, okay, he didn't like it because the signup was difficult or something, or it wasn't the data. They say, no, this data is not accurate or something, right? Okay, I need to improve the quality of data. This hater has a point. I think it's dumb to completely ignore your haters, you know? And also, yeah. Man, I think I've been there when I was like 10 years old or something. You're on the internet, you just shouting crazy stuff. That's like most of Twitter, you know, or the half of Twitter. So you you have to take it with a grain of salt.

• 2:10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, man, you need to grow a very thick skin like on Twitter, on X, like. People say, but I mute a lot of people like I found out I muted already 15,000 people recently. I checked. So in in 10 years, I muted 15,000 people. So that's like.

• 2:10:50Lex Fridman?

  Like that's one by one manual?

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  Fifteen, yeah.

• 2:10:53Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  So 1,500 people per year. And I don't like to block because then they get angry, they make a screenshot, they say, ah, you blocked me. So I just mute and it disappear and it's amazing.

• 2:11:03Lex Fridman?

  She mentioned Reddit. So Hoodmaps, that make it to the front page of Reddit?

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it did. It was amazing. And my server almost went down and I was checking like Google Analytics. It's like 5,000 people on the website or something crazy. And it was at night and was amazing.

• 2:11:21Speaker 01

  Man, I think nowadays, honestly, TikTok, YouTube reels, Instagram reels, a lot of apps get very big from people making TikTok videos about it. So let's say you make your own app. You can make a video of yourself, like, oh, I made this app. This is how it works, blah, blah, blah. And this is why I made it, for example, and this is why you should use it. And if it's a good video, it will take off and you will get, man, I got like $20,000 extra per month or something from a TikTok, from one TikTok video. Like it made a photo I.

• 2:11:52Lex Fridman?

  By you or somebody else?

• 2:11:53Speaker 01

  By some random guy. So there's all these AI influencers that they write about, they show AI apps and they, then they ask money later, like when a video goes viral, all I can do is do it again and send me $4,000 or something. I'm like, okay, I did that, for example. But it works, like TikTok is a very big platform for user acquisition, yeah. And organic, like the best user acquisition, I think, is organic. You don't need to buy ads. You probably don't have money when you start to buy ads. So use organic or write a banger tweet, right? That's can make an app take off as well.

• 2:12:24Lex Fridman?

  Well, I mean, yeah, fundamentally create cool stuff. And have just a little bit of a following enough to like for, for the cool thing to be noticed and then it becomes viral if it's cool enough.

• 2:12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you don't need a lot of followers anymore because on X and a lot of platforms, because TikTok, X, I think Instagram reels also, they have the same algorithm now. It's not about followers anymore. It's about they test your content on a small subset, like 300 people. If they like it, it 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 1,000 followers or 100.

• 2:12:58Lex Fridman?

  What's your philosophy of monetizing? How to make money from the thing you build?

• 2:13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a lot of startups, they do like free users. So you could sign up, like you use an app for free, which is, um, it never worked for me well, because I, I think free users generally don't convert. And I think if you have VC funding, it makes sense to get free users because you can spend your funding on ads and you can get like millions of people come in, predictably how much they convert and give them like a free trial, whatever, and then they sign up. But you need to have that flow worked out so well for you to, to make it work that you need like, it's very difficult. I think it's best to start and just start asking people for money in the, in the beginning. So show your app, like what are you doing on your landing page? Like make a demo, whatever, a video. And then if you want to use it, pay me money, pay $10, $20, $30.

• 2:13:45Speaker 01

  I would ask more than ten dollars per month, like Netflix, like ten dollars per month. But Netflix is a giant company that can, you know, they can afford to make it so cheap, relatively cheap. If you're an individual, like an indie hacker, like you are making your own app, you need to make like at least thirty dollars or more on a user to make it worthy for you. You need to make money, you know?

• 2:14:05Lex Fridman?

  And it builds a community of people that actually really care about the product.

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  Also, yeah, making a community, like making a Discord is very normal now. Every AI app has a Discord and you have the developers and the users together in like a Discord. And they talk about, they ask for features they built together. It's very normal now. And you need to imagine, like, if you're, if you're starting out, getting a thousand users is quite difficult. Getting a thousand pages is quite difficult. And if you charge them like thirty dollars, you have thirty K a month. That's a lot of money.

• 2:14:33Lex Fridman?

  That's enough to like.

• 2:14:34Speaker 01

  Live a good life.

• 2:14:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, live a pretty good life. I mean, there could be a lot of costs associated with hosting.

• 2:14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's not a thing. I make sure my profit margins are very high, so I try to keep the costs very low. I don't hire people.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  I, I try to negotiate with like AI vendors now, like can you make it cheaper, you know? Which is, I discovered this, you can just email companies and say, can you, can you give me a discount? Cause it's too expensive. And they say, sure, fifty percent. I'm like, wow, very good. And, and I didn't know this. You can just ask, and especially in like, like now it's kind of recession. You can ask companies like, I, I need a discount or I kind of need to like, you don't need to be asshole about it, say, you know, I kind of need a discount or I need to go maybe to another company, maybe like this is gone, like here and there. And they say, sure. A lot of them will say yes, like twenty five percent discount, fifty percent discounts. Cause you think the price on the website is the price of the API or something. It's not like, you know?

• 2:15:27Lex Fridman?

  And also you're a public facing person.

• 2:15:30Speaker 01

  Oh, that helps also.

• 2:15:31Lex Fridman?

  And there's love and good vibes that you put out into the world. Like you're actually legitimately trying to build cool stuff. So a lot of companies probably want to associate with you because you're trying to do.

• 2:15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like a secret hack. But I think even without.

• 2:15:43Lex Fridman?

  Be a good person.

• 2:15:44Speaker 01

  It depends how much discount they will give, you know? They'll maybe give more. But, you know, that's why you should shitpost on Twitter so you get, you know, discounts maybe.

• 2:15:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah. But and also the when it's crowdsourced. I mean, paying does prevent spam or help prevent spam.

• 2:16:03Speaker 01

  Also, yeah, it gives you high quality users and free users are sorry, but they're horrible. Like, it's just like millions of people, especially if AI startups, you get a lot of abuse. So you get millions of people from anywhere just abusing your app, just hacking it and whatever.

• 2:16:18Lex Fridman?

  There's something on the internet. You mentioned like 4chan discovered hood maps.

• 2:16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I love Fortune. I don't love Fortune, but you know what I mean? Like, they're so crazy, especially back then. Like, that's it's kind of funny what they do, you know?

• 2:16:32Lex Fridman?

  I actually, what is it? This new documentary on Netflix, Anti-Social Network or something like that? That was really was fascinating. Just Fortune, just the, you know, the spirit of the thing, Fortune and H.

• 2:16:43Speaker 01

  People misunderstand Fortune.

• 2:16:45Lex Fridman?

  It's so much about freedom and also like the humor involved in fucking with the system and fucking with it, man.

• 2:16:53Speaker 01

  It's just anti-system for fun.

• 2:16:55Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:17:05Speaker 01

  Bad shit started happening.

• 2:17:06Lex Fridman?

  It starts drifting somehow. Yeah.

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  School shootings and stuff. So it's a very difficult topic, but I do know it's especially early on, I think 2010, I would go to Fortune for fun and they would post like crazy offensive stuff. And this was just to scare off people. So we showed to other people, say, hey, do you know this internet website Fortune? Just check it out. And they'll be, dude, what the fuck is that? I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. That's to scare you away. But actually, when you go through a scroll, there's like deep conversations and they would already be, this was like a normie filter, like to stop.

• 2:17:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  So kind of cool. But yeah.

• 2:17:37Lex Fridman?

  Goes dark.

• 2:17:38Speaker 01

  It goes dark.

• 2:17:39Lex Fridman?

  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 were saying.

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  But everything is, I think it was never, man, I'm not a Fortuneer, but like I, it was always about provoking. It's just provocateurs, you know?

• 2:17:51Lex Fridman?

  But the provoking in the case of hood maps or something like this can can damage the.

• 2:17:58Lex Fridman?

  A good thing, like, you know, a little poison in a town is always good. It's like the Tom Waits thing, but you don't want too much. Otherwise, it destroys the town. It destroys the thing.

• 2:18:09Speaker 01

  They're kind of like pen testers, you know, like penetration testers, hackers.

• 2:18:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:12Speaker 01

  They just test your app for you. And then you add some stuff like I add like a, I had like a NSFW word list. They would say like bad words. So when they would write like a bad words, they would get forwarded to YouTube, which was like a video. It was like a very relaxing video that like kind of ASMR with like glowing jelly streaming like this to relax them, you know? Or cheese melting on the toast.

• 2:18:35Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 2:18:36Speaker 01

  Chill them out.

• 2:18:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I like it.

• 2:18:38Speaker 01

  Like.

• 2:18:39Lex Fridman?

  But actually, a lot of stuff, I didn't realize how much originated in 4chan in terms of memes.

• 2:18:44Speaker 01

  Dude, Reddit.

• 2:18:45Lex Fridman?

  Rick roll, I didn't understand, I didn't know that Rick roll originated in 4chan. Like, there's so many memes, like, most of the memes that you think.

• 2:18:51Speaker 01

  The word roll, I think, comes on 4chan, like, not the word roll, but like, in this case, in the meme use, like, you would get like roll doubles, because every, it was like post IDs on 4chan. So they were, they were kind of like random. So if I get doubles, like this happens or something, so you'd get like two, two. Anyway, it's like a betting market kind of on these doubles, on these post IDs. So much funny stuff.

• 2:19:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the internet, it's purist, but yeah, again, the dark stuff kind of seeps in.

• 2:19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:18Lex Fridman?

  And you, it's nice to keep the dark stuff to like some low amount. It's nice to have a bit of noise of the darkness, but not too much.

• 2:19:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:27Lex Fridman?

  And but again, like, you have to pay attention to that with, I mean, I guess spam in general, you have to fight that with Nomad List. How do you fight spam?

• 2:19:35Speaker 01

  Man, I use GPT-4 now. It's amazing. So, so I have like user input, I have reviews, people can review cities and I don't need to actually sign up. It's anonymous reviews and they write like whole books about like cities and what's good and bad. So I run it through GPT-4 now and I ask like, is this a, you know, is this a good review? Like, is it offensive? Is it racist or some stuff? And, and it sends me a message on Telegram. When it rejects reviews and I check it and it's, man, it's so on point.

• 2:20:05Lex Fridman?

  Automated.

• 2:20:06Speaker 01

  Yes, and it's so accurate. It understands double meanings. I have GPT-4 running on the chat community. It's a chat community of 10,000 people. And they're chatting and they start fighting with each other.

• 2:20:19Speaker 01

  And I used to have, uh, human moderators was very good. But they would start fighting the human moderator, like this guy is biased or something. Now I have GPT-4 and it's, it's, it's really, really, really, really good. It understands humor, it understands like, like you could say something bad, but it's kind of like a joke and it's kind of not like offensive so much. So it shouldn't be deleted, right? It understands that, you know?

• 2:20:41Lex Fridman?

  I would love to have a GPT-4 based filter of like, of different kinds of, for like X.

• 2:20:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought this week, like I tweeted like a fact check. Like you can click fact check and then GPT-4, look, GPT-4 is not always right about stuff, right? But it can give you a general fact check on a tweet, like. Usually what I do now, when I write something like difficult about economics or something, or AI, I put in GPT-4, I say, can you fact check it? Cause I might've said something stupid. And the stupid stuff always gets taken out by the replies, like, oh, you said this wrong. And, and then the whole tweet kind of doesn't make sense anymore. So I asked GPT-4 to fact check a lot of stuff.

• 2:21:19Lex Fridman?

  So fact check is a tough one.

• 2:21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:21Lex Fridman?

  But it would be interesting to sort of, um,

• 2:21:25Lex Fridman?

  rate a thing based on how well thought out it is and how well argued it is.

• 2:21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:30Lex Fridman?

  That, that seems more doable. That seems like more doable, like it seems like a GPT thing. Because that's less about the truth and it's more about the rigor of the thing.

• 2:21:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. And you can ask that. You can ask in the prompt, like, I don't know, like, for example, do you think, create like a ranking score of X Twitter replies, where should this post be? If we rank on like, I don't know, integrity, reality, like fundamental deepness or something, interestness. And it would give you that pretty good score probably. I mean, Elon can do this with Croc, right? He can start doing, using that to, to check replies. Cause the reply section is like chaos.

• 2:22:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:07Speaker 01

  You know?

• 2:22:07Lex Fridman?

  And actually the ranking of the replies is not.

• 2:22:09Speaker 01

  Doesn't make any sense.

• 2:22:10Lex Fridman?

  Doesn't make sense.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:22:11Lex Fridman?

  And I would like to sort in different kinds of ways.

• 2:22:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you get too many replies now. If you have a lot of followers, I get too many replies. I don't see everything and I, I. A lot of stuff I just miss and I don't, I wanna see the good stuff.

• 2:22:23Lex Fridman?

  And also the notifications or whatever, it's just complete chaos.

• 2:22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:27Lex Fridman?

  It'd be nice to be able to filter that in interesting ways, sort it in interesting ways.

• 2:22:33Lex Fridman?

  Cause like, I feel like I miss a lot and I, what surfaced for me, I just like a random comment by a person with no followers.

• 2:22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:42Lex Fridman?

  That's positive or negative, it's like, okay.

• 2:22:43Speaker 01

  If it's a very good comment, it should happen, but it should probably look a little bit more like, do these people have followers? Cause they're probably more engaged in the platform, right?

• 2:22:51Lex Fridman?

  Oh no, if it's, I don't even care about how many followers. If you're ranking by the quality of the comment, great.

• 2:22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:57Lex Fridman?

  But not just like randomly like chronological, just a sea of comments.

• 2:23:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does make sense.

• 2:23:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. X could be very improved with that, I think.

• 2:23:07Lex Fridman?

  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. You have to do as little work as possible for it to keep running indefinitely. Can you like, explain your philosophy there? What do you mean by automate?

• 2:23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the general theory of startups would be that when, when it starts like, you start making money, you start hiring people to do stuff, right? Do stuff that you, like marketing, for example, do stuff that you would do in the beginning yourself. And whatever, community management and organizing meetups for nomads, for example. There would be a job, for example. And I thought like, I don't have the money for that and I, I don't really wanna run like a big company with a lot of people, cause 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 nomads, it's literally like, it's not a different other startups. It's like a webpage where you can organize your own meetup, set a, set a schedule, a date, whatever. You can see how many nomads will be there at that date.

• 2:24:18Speaker 01

  So you know there will be actually enough nomads to meet up, right? And then when it's done, it sends a tweet out on the nomad's account. There's a meetup here, it sends a direct message to everybody in the city who are there, who are gonna be there. And then people show up on a bar and there's a meetup and that's fully automated. And for me, it's like, it's not, it's so obvious to make this automatic. Why would you, why would you have somebody organize this? Like, it makes more sense to automate it. And this with most of my things, like I figure out like how to do it with code. And I think especially now with AI, like you can automate so much more stuff than before. Cause AI understands things so well. Like before I would use if statements, right? Now you ask GPT, you put something in GPT for and in the API and it sends back like this is good, this is bad.

• 2:25:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so you basically can now even automate sort of subjective type of things.

• 2:25:09Speaker 01

  This is the difference now.

• 2:25:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:10Speaker 01

  And that's very recent, right?

• 2:25:12Lex Fridman?

  But it's still difficult to, I mean, that step of automation is difficult to figure out how to. Cause you're basically delegating everything to code. And it's not trivial to take that step for a lot of people. So when you say automate, are you, are you talking about like cron jobs?

• 2:25:30Speaker 01

  Yes, man, a lot of cron jobs.

• 2:25:32Lex Fridman?

  A lot of cron jobs.

• 2:25:33Speaker 01

  It's like, uh, I literally, I log into the server and I do like sudo crontab dash E. And then I go into editor and I write like hourly. And then I write PHP, uh, you know, do this thing PHP and that's a script. And that script does a thing and it does it then hourly. That's it. And that's how all my websites work.

• 2:25:53Lex Fridman?

  Do you have a thing where it like emails you or something like this or email somebody managing the thing if something goes wrong?

• 2:25:59Speaker 01

  I have these webpages I make, they're called like health checks. It's like health check PHP. And then it has like emojis, like a, it's like a green check mark if it's good and a red one if it's bad. And then it does like database queries, for example, like what's the internet speed in, for example, Amsterdam? Okay, it's a number, it's like twenty seven point megabits, so it's accurate number. Okay, check, good. And then it goes to the next and it goes on all the data points. Did people sign up in the last twenty four hours? It's important because maybe the signup broke. Okay, check, somebody signed up. Then I have uptimerobot.com, which is like for uptime, but it can also check keywords. It checks for an emoji, which is like the red X, which is if something is bad. And so it opens that health check page every minute to check if something is bad.

• 2:26:43Speaker 01

  Then if it's bad, it sends the message to me on Telegram saying, hey, what's up? It doesn't say, hey, what's up? It sends me like alert.

• 2:26:49Lex Fridman?

  Hey, hey, sweetie.

• 2:26:50Speaker 01

  This thing is down and then I check. So within a minute of something breaking, I know it and then I can open my laptop and fix it.

• 2:26:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:57Speaker 01

  But the good thing is like the last few years, things don't break anymore. And like definitely ten years ago when I started, everything was breaking all the time. And now it's like almost, it's last week was like a hundred point zero zero percent uptime. And these health checks are part of the uptime percentage. So it's like, everything works.

• 2:27:15Lex Fridman?

  You're actually making me realize I should, I should have a page for myself, like one page that has all the health checks, just so I can go to and see all the green check marks.

• 2:27:26Speaker 01

  It feels good to look at, you know?

• 2:27:28Lex Fridman?

  It's just be like, okay.

• 2:27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:29Lex Fridman?

  All right. We're okay. Everything's okay.

• 2:27:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:32Lex Fridman?

  Now you can see like, when was the last time something wasn't okay? And it'll say, like, never, or like, meaning like you've, you've, you've, you've checked since you've last cared to check. It was all been okay.

• 2:27:45Speaker 01

  For sure. It used to send me the, the good health checks, like,

• 2:27:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:48Speaker 01

  You know, this, it all works. It all works.

• 2:27:50Lex Fridman?

  But it's been so often.

• 2:27:52Speaker 01

  And I'm like, this feels so good. But then I'm like, okay, obviously it's not gonna, we need to hide the good ones and show only the bad ones. And now that's the case.

• 2:27:59Lex Fridman?

  I need to integrate everything into one place, automate like everything.

• 2:28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:03Lex Fridman?

  They have also just a large set of cron jobs. A lot of the publication of this podcast is, has done all, everything is just automatically, it's all clipped up, all the, all the, all this kind of stuff. But it would be nice to automate even more, like translation, all this kind of stuff would be nice to automate.

• 2:28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Every JavaScript, every PHP error gets sent to my Telegram as well. So every user, whatever user it is, doesn't have to be page user. If they run into an error, um, the JavaScript sends the JavaScript error to the server and then it sends to my Telegram. From all my websites.

• 2:28:38Lex Fridman?

  So you get like a message?

• 2:28:40Speaker 01

  So I get like a uncalled variable error, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And then I'm like, okay, interesting. And then I go check it out. And that's like a way to get to zero errors because you get flooded with errors in the beginning. And now it's like nothing almost.

• 2:28:53Lex Fridman?

  So that's really cool.

• 2:28:54Speaker 01

  But Matt.

• 2:28:55Lex Fridman?

  That's really cool.

• 2:28:56Speaker 01

  But this is the same stuff people, they, they pay like very big SaaS companies, like New Relic for, right? Like to manage the stuff. So you can do that too. You can use off the shelf. I like to build myself. It's easier.

• 2:29:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's nice. It's nice to do that kind of automation. I'm starting to think of like, what are the things in my life I'm doing myself that could be automated? Uh, in addition.

• 2:29:17Speaker 01

  Ask your GPT, you know, like, give your daily, your day and then ask what parts you to automate.

• 2:29:22Lex Fridman?

  Well, one of the things I I would love to automate more is my consumption of social media.

• 2:29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:27Lex Fridman?

  Both the the output and the input.

• 2:29:30Speaker 01

  Man, that's very interesting. I think there's some startups that do that, like they they summarize the cool shit happening on Twitter, you know, like with AI. I think the guy called SWYX or something, he does like a newsletter that's completely AI generated. We have the cool, the cool news stuff in AI.

• 2:29:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, I would love to do that, but also like across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn.

• 2:29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:51Lex Fridman?

  All this kind of stuff. Just like, okay, can I, can you summarize the internet for me for today?

• 2:29:56Speaker 01

  Summarize internet dot com.

• 2:29:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, dot com. Cause I feel like it pulls in way too much

• 2:30:03Lex Fridman?

  time, but also like I don't like the effect it has some days on my psyche.

• 2:30:08Speaker 01

  Cause like haters or or just general content, like politics?

• 2:30:11Lex Fridman?

  Like, no, no, just general, like, for example, like TikTok is a good examples of that for me. I sometimes just feel dumber after I use TikTok. I just feel like

• 2:30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't use it anymore.

• 2:30:20Lex Fridman?

  Empty somehow. And I'm like, uninspired.

• 2:30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:25Lex Fridman?

  It's funny. In the moment, I'm like, ha, look at that cat doing a funny thing. And then you're like, oh, look at that person dancing in a funny way to that music. And then you're like, 10 minutes later, you're like, I feel way dumber and I don't really want to do much for the rest of the day.

• 2:30:41Speaker 01

  My girlfriend said she saw me like watching some dumb video. She's like, dude, your face looks so dumb as well. Your whole face starts going like, oh, interesting, you know, so.

• 2:30:51Lex Fridman?

  I mean, with social media, with with X sometimes for me too, is I think I'm probably naturally gravitating towards the drama.

• 2:30:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, hard wheel.

• 2:31:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And so there's following ad people, especially ad people that only post technical content has been really good. Cause then I just look at them and I, and then I go down rabbit holes of like learning new papers that have been published or good repos or 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. I go, and I'm learning and I'm inspired, all that kind of stuff. It's been tough. It's been tough to control.

• 2:31:27Speaker 01

  It's 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 feed. And I think I muted so much that now my feed is good, you know? I see like interesting stuff. And but the fact that you need to modify, you need to like mod your app, your social media platform just to function and not be toxic for you, for your mental health, right? That's like a problem, like it should be doing that for you.

• 2:31:53Lex Fridman?

  It's some level of automation. That would be interesting. I wish I could access X and Instagram through API easier.

• 2:32:02Speaker 01

  You need to spend forty two thousand dollars a month, which my friends do.

• 2:32:06Lex Fridman?

  No, but still, even if you do that, that you're not getting. I mean, there's limitations that don't make it easy to do like automate. Because they, the thing is they're trying to limit like abuse or for you to steal all the data from the app to then train an L L M or something like this. But if I just want to like figure out ways to automate my interaction with the X system or with Instagram, they don't make that easy. But I would love to sort of automate that and explore different ways to how to leverage L L M's to control the content I consume. And and maybe publish that, maybe they themselves can see how that could be used to improve their system. So there's not enough access.

• 2:32:45Speaker 01

  Yes, you could screen cap your phone, right? It could be an app that watches your screen with you.

• 2:32:50Lex Fridman?

  You couldn't, yeah.

• 2:32:51Speaker 01

  But I don't really know like what it would do, like maybe it can hide stuff before you see it, you know, like.

• 2:32:56Lex Fridman?

  I have that. I have Chrome extensions. I write a lot of Chrome extensions that hide parts of different pages and so on. Like, for example, for my own, on my main computer, I hide all views and likes and all that on YouTube content that I create. So that I don't. It doesn't. Yeah. So you don't pay attention to it. I also hide parts. I have a mode for X where I hide most of everything. So like, there's no, it's same with YouTube.

• 2:33:23Speaker 01

  Same. I have this extension.

• 2:33:24Lex Fridman?

  Like, I wrote my own because it's easier, because it keeps changing. It's like, it's not easy to keep it dynamically changing. But they're really good at like getting you to be distracted and like starting to.

• 2:33:35Speaker 01

  Related accounts.

• 2:33:35Lex Fridman?

  Related stuff.

• 2:33:36Speaker 01

  I'm like, I don't want related.

• 2:33:38Lex Fridman?

  And like, ten minutes later, you're like, or something that's trending.

• 2:33:42Speaker 01

  I have a weird amount of friends addicted to YouTube and I'm not addicted. I think because my attention span is too short for YouTube, but.

• 2:33:49Speaker 01

  But I have this extension to like YouTube unhook, which like hides all the related stuff. I can just see the video and it's 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 then I had these YouTube shorts. These YouTube shorts are like, they're like algorithmically designed to just make you tap them. And like I tap and then I'm like five minutes later with this face like, and you're, you're just stuck. And it's like, what happened? I was gonna open, I was gonna play like the coffee mix, you know, like the music mix for drinking coffee together like in the morning, like jazz. I didn't want to go to shorts. So it's, it's very, it's very difficult.

• 2:34:28Lex Fridman?

  I love how we're actually highlighting all kinds of interesting problems that all could be solved at a startup. Okay, so what, what about the exit? When and how to exit?

• 2:34:38Speaker 01

  Man, you shouldn't ask me because I never sold my company.

• 2:34:40Lex Fridman?

  And you've never, all the successful stuff you've done, you've never sold it.

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of sad, right? Like I, I've been in, so I've been in, in a lot of acquisitions, like deals and stuff. And I learned a lot about finance people as well, as well there, like manipulation and due diligence. And then changing the valuation, like people change the valuation after. So they, a lot of people string you on to acquire you. And then it takes like six months. It's a classic, it takes six to 12 months. They want to see everything, they want to see the, your stripe and your code and whatever. And then in the end, they'll, they'll change the price to lower because you're already so invested. So it's like a negotiation tactic, right? And like, no, and then I don't want to sell, right? And the problem with my companies is like, they make 90% profit margin.

• 2:35:26Speaker 01

  So the multiple, the companies get sold with multiples, kind of multiples of profit or revenue. And often the multiples like three times, three times or four times or five times revenue or profit. So in my case, 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 what I mean? I can still sell for three, five times. So financially, it doesn't really make sense to sell.

• 2:35:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:53Speaker 01

  Unless the price is high enough. Like if the price gets to like six or seven or eight, I don't want to wait six years for the money, you know? But if you give me three, like three years, nothing, like I can wait.

• 2:36:02Lex Fridman?

  So I mean, the really valuable stuff about the companies you create is not just the interface and and the crowdsourced content, but the people themselves, like the user base.

• 2:36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, Nomad List, it's a community, yeah.

• 2:36:15Lex Fridman?

  So I could see that being extremely valuable. I'm surprised that hasn't.

• 2:36:18Speaker 01

  But Nomad List is like, it's like my baby. It's like my first product that took off and I don't really know if I want to sell it. It's like something you would be nice when, you know, when you're old, that you're still working on this. You know, it's like a, it has like a mission, which is like, um, people should travel anywhere and they can work from anywhere and they can meet different cultures and that's a good way to make the world get better. If you learn, if you go to China and live in China, you'll learn that they're nice people and a lot of stuff you hear about China's propaganda, a lot of stuff is true as well, but it's more, you know, you learn a lot from traveling. And I think that's why it's like a cool product to like not sell. AI projects, I have less emotional feeling with AI projects like Photi, which I could sell, yeah.

• 2:36:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the thing you also mentioned is you have to price in the fact that you're going to miss.

• 2:37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:04Lex Fridman?

  The company.

• 2:37:05Speaker 01

  And the meaning it gives you, right? There's a very famous like depression after start a firm and sell their company. Like they're like, this was my, this was me, like who am I? And they immediately start building another one, you know, they never can stop. So I think it's, it's good to keep working, you know, until you die, just keep working on cool stuff. And you shouldn't retire, you know? I think retirement's bad, probably.

• 2:37:26Lex Fridman?

  So you usually build the stuff solo and mostly work solo.

• 2:37:31Lex Fridman?

  What's the thinking behind that?

• 2:37:33Speaker 01

  I think I'm not so good working with other people, not like I'm crazy, but like I I don't trust other people.

• 2:37:38Lex Fridman?

  To clarify, you don't trust other people to do a great job?

• 2:37:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I don't want to have like this consensus meeting where we all like, you know, you have like a meeting with three people and then you kind of get this compromise result, which is very European, like it's very, in Holland we call it Poldermodel, 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. You know, you get an average idea, average company, average culture.

• 2:38:07Speaker 01

  You need to have like a leader or you need to be solo and just do it, you know, do it yourself, I think. And I trust some people, like now I, like with my best friend Andre, I'm making a new AI startup. But it's because we we know each other very long and he's one of the few people I would build something with. And but almost never, yeah.

• 2:38:26Lex Fridman?

  So what does it take to be successful when you have more than one? Like, how do you build together with Andre? How do you build together with other people?

• 2:38:33Speaker 01

  So he codes, I shitpost on Twitter, literally like I promoted on Twitter, I I we said like product strategy, like I said, this should be better, this should be better. But I think you need to have one person coding it. He codes in Ruby, so also I cannot do Ruby, I'm in PHP.

• 2:38:48Lex Fridman?

  So you literally, so you, have you ever coded with another person for prolonged periods of time?

• 2:38:53Speaker 01

  Never in my life.

• 2:38:58Lex Fridman?

  What what do you think is behind that?

• 2:39:00Speaker 01

  I know, it was always just me sitting on my laptop, like I said, like coding.

• 2:39:04Lex Fridman?

  No, like you've never had another developer who like rolls in and like.

• 2:39:07Speaker 01

  I've had it once with Photoreye, like there's an AI developer, Philip, I hired him to do the, because I can't write Python. And AI stuff is Python. And I needed to get models to work and replicate and stuff, and I needed to improve Photoreye. And he helped me a lot for like 10 months, he worked in a, man, I was trying Python, working with NumPy and package manager, and it was too difficult for me to figure this shit out. And I didn't have time, like. I think 10 years ago, I would have time to like sit, you know, go do all nighters to figure this stuff out with Python. I don't have the, and I don't have the, it's not my thing.

• 2:39:39Lex Fridman?

  It's not your thing. It's another programming language. I get it. AI, new thing. Got it. But like, you never had to develop a role in, look at your PHP, jQuery code and be, and yes, like, you know, like in conversation or improv, they talk about yes and like basically, all right.

• 2:39:54Speaker 01

  I had for one week.

• 2:39:55Lex Fridman?

  Understand.

• 2:39:56Speaker 01

  And then it ended because he wanted to rewrite everything in the.

• 2:40:00Lex Fridman?

  No, that's the wrong guy.

• 2:40:01Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:40:01Lex Fridman?

  He wanted to rewrite in what?

• 2:40:03Speaker 01

  He wanted to rewrite the, he said, is jQuery, we cannot do this. I'm like, okay. He's like, we need to rewrite everything in Vue, Vue JS. I'm like, are you sure? Can't we just like, you know, like keep jQuery? 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, it's gonna take way too much time.

• 2:40:24Lex Fridman?

  I think I like working with people where like, when I approach them, I pretend in my head that they're the smartest person who has ever existed.

• 2:40:33Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:40:34Lex Fridman?

  So I look at their code or I look at the stuff they've created and try to see the genius of their way. Like you really have to understand people, like really notice them like, and then from that place, have a conversation about what is the better approach.

• 2:40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but those are the top tier developers.

• 2:40:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:52Speaker 01

  And they, those are the ones that are tech ambiguous. So they can work with, they can learn any tech stack and they can, and that's like really few, like it's like.

• 2:41:00Lex Fridman?

  Really?

• 2:41:00Speaker 01

  Top 5%. Cause if you try hiring devs, like no offense to devs, but most devs are not, man, most people in general jobs are not so good at their job. Like even doctors and stuff, when you realize this, people are very average at their job.

• 2:41:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:13Speaker 01

  Especially with dev, with coding, I think. So sorry.

• 2:41:16Lex Fridman?

  I think that's a really important skill for, for developer to roll in and like, understand the musicality, the, the style.

• 2:41:22Speaker 01

  That's it, man. Empathy is like code empathy, right?

• 2:41:25Lex Fridman?

  Code empathy.

• 2:41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a new word, but that's it. You need to understand like. Go over the code, get a holistic view of it and man, you can suggest we change stuff for sure. But and look, jQuery is crazy. It's crazy. I'm using jQuery. We can change that.

• 2:41:39Lex Fridman?

  It's not crazy at all. jQuery is also beautiful and powerful and PHP is beautiful and powerful, especially as you said recently in the, in the, as the versions evolved. It's much more serious programming language now. It's super fast. Like PHP is really fast now.

• 2:41:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:41:57Lex Fridman?

  It's crazy. JavaScript.

• 2:41:58Speaker 01

  Much faster Ruby, yeah.

• 2:41:59Lex Fridman?

  Really fast now. So if speed is something you care about, it's super fast.

• 2:42:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:04Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:42:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:21Lex Fridman?

  So like, if I roll in, I'm going to be like, I don't assume you know nothing. Assume Peter is a genius. Like the smartest developer ever and like learn, learn from it. And yes, and like notice parts in the code where like, okay, okay, I got it. Like here's how he's thinking. And now if I want to add another like little feature, definitely needs to have emoji in front of it and then like just follow the same style and add it. And my goal is to make you happy, to make you smile, like to make you like, haha, fuck, I get it. And now you're going to start respecting me and like trusting me and like you start working together in this way.

• 2:43:03Lex Fridman?

  I don't know. I, I don't know how hard it is to find developers.

• 2:43:07Speaker 01

  No, I think they exist. I think you need to, I need to hire more people, need to try more people.

• 2:43:10Lex Fridman?

  Try people.

• 2:43:10Speaker 01

  But that costs a lot of my energy and time, but it's 100% possible.

• 2:43:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:14Speaker 01

  But do I want it? I don't know. Things kind of run fine for now. And I mean, like, okay, you could say like, okay, no, my list looks kind of clunky. Like people say the design is kind of clunky. 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.

• 2:43:28Lex Fridman?

  But it's true. I mean, you're also extremely good at what you do. Like I'm just looking at the interfaces of like photo AI, like you would Jake, like jQuery, right? Like how amazing is jQuery? But like you can, these cowboys are getting, these are, there's these cowboys. This is a lot. It's a lot, but I'm glad they're all wearing shirts. Anyway, the interface here is just really, really nice. Like I could tell you know what you're doing. And with Nomad List, extremely nice, the interface.

• 2:43:59Speaker 01

  Thank you, man.

• 2:44:00Lex Fridman?

  And that's all you.

• 2:44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, this everything is me.

• 2:44:03Lex Fridman?

  So all of this and every little feature, all of this.

• 2:44:06Speaker 01

  People say it looks kind of ADHD or ADD, you know, like it's so much. Because it has so many things and design these days is minimalist, right?

• 2:44:15Lex Fridman?

  Right, right, I hear you. But this is a lot of information and it's useful information and 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.

• 2:44:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very cool. It's pretentious, right?

• 2:44:32Lex Fridman?

  Pretentious or not, the function is like is useless. This is about a lot of information delivered to you in a clean. And when it's clean, you can't be too sexy, so it's sexy enough.

• 2:44:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is I think how my brain looks, you know? Like, there's a lot of shit going on. It's like drawing bass music. It's like very.

• 2:44:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but this is still pretty, the spacing of everything is nice. The fonts are really nice, like very readable, very small.

• 2:44:57Speaker 01

  I like it, you know, but I made it so I don't trust my own judgment.

• 2:45:01Lex Fridman?

  No, this is really nice.

• 2:45:02Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:45:03Lex Fridman?

  The emojis are somehow, like this is style, it's a thing.

• 2:45:07Speaker 01

  I need to pick the emoji. It takes a while to pick them, you know?

• 2:45:10Lex Fridman?

  Like there's some, something about the emoji is a really nice memorable, like placeholder for the idea.

• 2:45:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:17Lex Fridman?

  Like if it was just text, it would actually be overwhelming if it was just text. The emoji really helps. It's a brilliant addition. Like some people might look at it, why do you have emojis everywhere? It's actually really, for me, it's really nice.

• 2:45:27Speaker 01

  People tell me to do, to remove the emojis.

• 2:45:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, well, people don't know what they're talking about. And then the, I'm sure people will tell you a lot of things. This is really nice. And then using color is nice, small font, but not too small. And obviously you have to show maps, which is really tricky.

• 2:45:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, this is, this is, no, this is really, really, really nice. And all of, I mean, like, okay, like how this looks when you hover over it.

• 2:45:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, CSS transitions.

• 2:45:56Lex Fridman?

  No, I understand that, but like, I'm sure there's, like, how long does it take you to figure out how you want it to look? Do you ever go down a rabbit hole where you spent like two weeks?

• 2:46:04Speaker 01

  No, it's all iterative. It's like 10 years of, you know, add a CSS transition here or do this or.

• 2:46:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, let's say like, see, these are all, these are rounded now.

• 2:46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46:13Lex Fridman?

  If you wanted to like round is probably the better way, but if you want it to be rectangular, like sharp corners, what would you do?

• 2:46:19Speaker 01

  So I go through the index CSS.

• 2:46:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:22Speaker 01

  And I do command F and I search border radius 12px.

• 2:46:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:26Speaker 01

  And then I replace with border radius zero. And then I do command enter and it gets deploys, it pushes to the GitHub and then sends a web book and then deploys to my server and it's live in five seconds.

• 2:46:39Lex Fridman?

  Are you often deploy to production? You don't have like a testing ground?

• 2:46:42Speaker 01

  No, so I

• 2:46:45Speaker 01

  so I, I'm like famous for this because I'm too lazy to set up like a staging server on my laptop every time. So nowadays I just deploy to production.

• 2:46:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:54Speaker 01

  And it's, man, I'm gonna be canceled for this, you know, but it works very well for me because I have a lot of, I have like PHP lint and JSON lint. So it tells me when there's error, so I don't deploy. But my, literally, I, I have like 37,000 git commits in the last 12 months or something. So I make like small fix and then command enter and sends to GitHub. GitHub sends a web to my server, web server pulls it, deploys to production and is there.

• 2:47:19Lex Fridman?

  What's the latency of that from you pressing command?

• 2:47:21Speaker 01

  One second, can be one to two seconds.

• 2:47:23Lex Fridman?

  So you just make a change and then you're getting really good at like not making mistakes.

• 2:47:27Speaker 01

  Man, 100% you're right. Like people are like, how can you do this? Well, you get good at not taking the server down, you know, like.

• 2:47:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:32Speaker 01

  Because you need to code more carefully. But it's, look, it's idiotic in any big company, but for me it works because it makes me so fast. Like somebody reported a bug on Twitter.

• 2:47:43Speaker 01

  And I kind of did do like a stopwatch, like how fast can I fix this bug? And then two minutes later, for example, it's fixed.

• 2:47:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:47:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:56Speaker 01

  It's like horrible and it makes people really happy when you can really quickly solve their problems. So, but it's it's crazy.

• 2:48:03Lex Fridman?

  I'm I'm. I don't think it's crazy. I think, I mean, there's, I'm sure there's a middle ground, but I think that whole thing where there's a a phase of like testing and there's the staging and there's a development and then there's like multiple tables and databases that you use for the state like it's.

• 2:48:19Speaker 01

  Filing.

• 2:48:20Lex Fridman?

  It's a mess. And there's different teams involved. It's it's not good.

• 2:48:23Speaker 01

  I'm like a good funny extreme on the other side, you know?

• 2:48:26Lex Fridman?

  But just a little bit safer, but not too much will be great.

• 2:48:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:48:31Lex Fridman?

  And I'm sure that's actually like how X now, how they doing rapid improvement.

• 2:48:35Speaker 01

  They do because there's more bugs and people complain about like, oh, look, he bought this Twitter. Now it's full of bugs. Dude, these shipping stuff like things are happening now and it's a dynamic app now.

• 2:48:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the bugs is actually a sign of a good thing happening.

• 2:48:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:48:47Lex Fridman?

  Bugs of the feature because it shows that the team is actually building shit.

• 2:48:50Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 2:48:51Lex Fridman?

  Well, one of the problems is like I see with YouTube, there's so much potential to build features, but I just see how long it takes. So I've gotten a chance to interact with many other teams, but one of the teams is MLA, multi-language audio. I don't know if you know this, but in YouTube you can have audio tracks in different languages for overdubbing. And that there's a team and not many people are using it, but like every single feature, they have to meet and agree and like there's allocate resources, like engineers have to work on it. But I'm sure it's a pain in the ass for the engineers to get approval to like the because it has to not break the rest of the site, whatever they do.

• 2:49:33Lex Fridman?

  But like, if you don't have enough dictatorial, like top down, like we need this now, it's going to take forever to do anything multi-language audio. But multi-language audio is a good example of a thing that seems niche right now. But it quite possibly could change the entire world. When you have, when I upload this, this conversation right here, if instantaneously it dubs it into forty languages.

• 2:49:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 2:50:00Lex Fridman?

  And everybody consume, every single video can be watched and listened to in those different, it changes everything. And YouTube is extremely well positioned to be the leader in this.

• 2:50:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50:10Lex Fridman?

  They got the, they got the compute, they got the, uh, the user base, they got like, they have the experience of how to do this. So like multi-language audio should be.

• 2:50:20Speaker 01

  High priority feature, right?

• 2:50:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's high priority. Like that's, and it's a way, you know, Google is obsessed with AI right now. They wanna show off that they could be dominant in AI. That's a way for Google to say like, we use AI. Like this is a way to, to, to break down the walls that language creates.

• 2:50:36Speaker 01

  The preferred outcome for them, for them is probably their career and not the, the overall result of the, the cool product, you know?

• 2:50:41Lex Fridman?

  I think they, they're not like selfish or whatever. They, they wanna do good. There's something about the machine.

• 2:50:46Speaker 01

  Organization.

• 2:50:47Lex Fridman?

  Organizational stuff that's.

• 2:50:48Speaker 01

  I have this when I do report box on like, big companies I work with. I get, I talk to a lot of different people in DM and they're all really trying hard to do something. They're all really nice. And I'm the one being kinda asshole, cause I'm like, guys, I'm talking to twenty people about this for six months and nothing's happening. They say, man, I know, but I'm trying my best and yeah, so it's systemic.

• 2:51:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. The, what it requires, again, I don't know if, there must be a nicer word, but like a dictatorial type of top-down, the CEO rolls in, uh, and just says like, for YouTube, it's like MLA.

• 2:51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:20Lex Fridman?

  Get this done now. This is the highest priority.

• 2:51:22Speaker 01

  I think big, big companies, especially in America, a lot of it is legal, right? They need to pass everything through legal.

• 2:51:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:28Speaker 01

  And you can't like, man, the things I do, I could never do that in a big corporation cause it's, everything has to be, probably get deployed, has to go through legal.

• 2:51:35Lex Fridman?

  Well, again, dictatorial. You basically say Steve Jobs did this quite a lot. I've seen a lot of leaders do this. Ignore the lawyers, ignore comms.

• 2:51:45Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 2:51:45Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:51:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:53Lex Fridman?

  That's it.

• 2:51:54Speaker 01

  And the law can change. Like for example, let's say you, you launched this AI dubbing and it's, there's some law, legal promises, lawsuits. Okay, so the law changes, there will be appeals, there will be some Supreme Court thing, whatever, and the law changes. So just by shipping it, you change society, you change the legal framework. By not shipping, being scared of the legal framework all the time, like you're not changing things.

• 2:52:13Lex Fridman?

  Just out of curiosity, what IDE do you use? Let's talk about like your whole setup. Given how ultra productive you are, I mean, you often program in your underwear, slouching on the couch. Is there, does it matter to you in general? Is there like a specific IDEs you use VS Code?

• 2:52:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, VS Code. Before I used Sublime Text, I don't think it matters a lot. I think I'm very skeptical of like tools when people think it, they say it matters, right? I don't think it matters. I think whatever tool you know very well, you can go very fast in like, you know, the shortcuts. For example, IDE, you know, you're like, I love Sublime Text because I could use like multi cursor. You know, you search something and I could like make mass replaces in a file with the cursor thing. And VS Code doesn't really have that as well.

• 2:53:01Lex Fridman?

  It's actually interesting. Sublime is the first editor where I've learned that. And I think they just make that super easy. So like, what would that be called? Multi edit, multi cursor edit thing, whatever. I'm sure like almost every editor can do that. It's just probably hard to set up.

• 2:53:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. VS Code is not so good, I think, or at least I tried. But I would use that to like process data, like data sets. For example, from World Bank, I would just multi cursor mass change everything.

• 2:53:31Speaker 01

  But yeah, VS Code, man, I was bullied into using VS Code because Twitter would always see my screenshots of Sublime Text and say, why are you still using Sublime Text? Like boomer, you need to use VS Code. And I'm like, well, I'll try it. I got a new MacBook and then I, I never install like, I never copy the old MacBook. I just make it fresh, you know, like a clean, like format C, you know, Windows, like clean start. And I'm like, okay, I'll try VS Code and it's stuck, you know? But I don't really care. Like it's not so important for me.

• 2:53:57Lex Fridman?

  Wow, you know, the format C reference, huh?

• 2:53:59Speaker 01

  Dude, it was so good. You would install Windows and then after three or six months, it would start breaking and everything was like, it gets slow. Then you would restart, go to DOS, format C. You would delete your hard drive and then install the Windows 95 again. It was so good times and you would design everything like, now I'm going to install it properly. Now I'm going to design my desktop properly, you know, like.

• 2:54:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I don't know if it's peer pressure, but like I used Emacs for many, many years. And I know, you know, I love Lisp, so a lot of the customization is done in Lisp. It's a programming language. It partially was peer pressure, but part of it is realizing like, you need to keep learning stuff. Like same issue with jQuery, like I still think I need to learn Node.js, for example. Even though that's not my main thing, or even close to the main thing, but I feel like you need to keep learning this stuff.

• 2:54:50Lex Fridman?

  And even if you don't choose to use it long term, you need to give it a chance. So you your understanding of the world expands.

• 2:54:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, you want to understand the new technological concepts and see if they can benefit you, you know, it would be stupid not to even try.

• 2:55:04Lex Fridman?

  It's more about the concepts, I would say, than the actual tools like expanding. And that that can be a challenging thing. So going to VS Code and like really learning it, like all the shortcuts, all the extensions and actually installing different stuff and playing with it. That was an interesting challenge. It was uncomfortable at first.

• 2:55:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me too, yeah.

• 2:55:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but you just dive in.

• 2:55:22Speaker 01

  It's like Neuroflex, like you keep your brain fresh, you know, like this kind of stuff.

• 2:55:26Lex Fridman?

  I gotta do that more. Like, have you given React a chance?

• 2:55:30Speaker 01

  No, but I want to I want to learn and I want to I understand the basics, right?

• 2:55:36Speaker 01

  I don't really know where to start.

• 2:55:37Lex Fridman?

  But would you like, I guess you got to use your own model, which is like build the thing using it.

• 2:55:43Speaker 01

  No, man, you're so I I kind of did that, like I kind of like the the stuff I do in jQuery is essentially a lot of it is like. I start rebuilding whatever tech is already out there, not based on that, but just an accident. Like I keep going long enough that I built the same, I start getting the same problems everybody else had. And you start building the same frameworks kind of. So essentially I use my own kind of framework of.

• 2:56:04Lex Fridman?

  You basically build a framework from scratch that's your own that you understand.

• 2:56:07Speaker 01

  Kind of, yeah, with Ajax calls, but essentially it's the same same thing. Look, I don't have the time. I don't. And this is. I think saying you don't have the time is like always a lie because you just don't prioritize it enough.

• 2:56:18Speaker 01

  My priority is still like the the running the businesses and improving that and AI. I think learning AI is much more valuable now than learning a front end framework.

• 2:56:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:26Speaker 01

  Like it's just more impact.

• 2:56:28Lex Fridman?

  I guess you should be just learning. Every single day, a thing.

• 2:56:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can learn a little bit every day, like a little bit of React. Or I think now like Next is very big, so learn a little bit of Next, you know. But I call them the military industrial complex. So if I, you need to know, you need to know it anyway, so.

• 2:56:45Lex Fridman?

  You gotta learn how to use the weapons of war and then, and then you could be a peacenik.

• 2:56:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, but you gotta learn in, in the same exact ways we were talking about, which is learn it by trying to build something with it and actually deploy it.

• 2:56:59Speaker 01

  The frameworks are so complicated and it changes so fast. So it's like, where do I start, you know? And I guess it's the same thing when you're starting out making websites, like how, where do you start? Yeah, SGPT four, I guess, but it, yeah, it's just so dynamic. It changes so fast that I don't know if it would be a good idea for me to learn it, you know?

• 2:57:18Speaker 01

  Maybe some combination of like Vue, Next with PHP, Laravel. Laravel is like a framework for PHP. I think that would be, uh, it could benefit me, you know? Maybe Tailwind for CSS, like a styling engine, that, that stuff could probably save me time.

• 2:57:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but like you, you won't know until you really give it a try. And it feels like you have to build, like, if maybe I'm talking to myself, but like I, I should probably recode like my personal one page in Laravel or.

• 2:57:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:48Lex Fridman?

  And even though it might not have almost any dynamic elements, maybe have one dynamic element, but it has to go end to end in that framework.

• 2:57:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:56Lex Fridman?

  Or like end to end, build it in Node.js. Some of it is, I don't, figuring out how to even deploy the thing.

• 2:58:02Speaker 01

  I have no idea. All I know is right now I would send it to GitHub and it sends it to my server. I don't know how to get JavaScript running. I have no clue.

• 2:58:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:10Speaker 01

  So I guess I need like a, a pass, like a, like first of all, right? Or, uh, you know, Heroku, kind of those kind of platforms.

• 2:58:18Lex Fridman?

  Actually, kind of just might gave myself the idea of like, I kind of just want to build a single webpage, like one webpage that has like one dynamic element and just do it in every single, like in a lot of frameworks. Like just.

• 2:58:34Speaker 01

  Ah, on the same page.

• 2:58:35Lex Fridman?

  Same.

• 2:58:36Speaker 01

  All the same page.

• 2:58:37Lex Fridman?

  Kind of page.

• 2:58:37Speaker 01

  It's a cool project.

• 2:58:38Lex Fridman?

  Uh.

• 2:58:39Speaker 01

  All these frameworks.

• 2:58:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:40Speaker 01

  And you can see the differences.

• 2:58:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:42Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 2:58:43Lex Fridman?

  All it takes to do it.

• 2:58:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, stopwatch.

• 2:58:45Lex Fridman?

  I have to figure out actually something sufficiently complicated. Cause it, it should probably do, it should probably do some kind of. Thing where it accesses the database and dynamically is changing stuff.

• 2:58:57Speaker 01

  Some AI stuff, some LLM stuff.

• 2:58:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, maybe some, it doesn't have to be AI or LLM, but maybe API, API call to something.

• 2:59:04Speaker 01

  To replicate, for example, then you have, yeah, that would be a very cool project.

• 2:59:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and like time it and also report on my happiness.

• 2:59:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:59:14Lex Fridman?

  I'm gonna totally do this.

• 2:59:15Speaker 01

  Cause nobody benchmarks this. Nobody's benchmark happy developer happiness with frameworks.

• 2:59:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:19Speaker 01

  Nobody's benchmarked the shipping time.

• 2:59:21Lex Fridman?

  It'd just take like a month and do this. How many frameworks are there? There's how many, how many, there's, there's like five main ways of doing it. So there's like, there's no, there's backend, frontend.

• 2:59:32Speaker 01

  And this stuff confused me too. Like React now apparently has become backend.

• 2:59:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:36Speaker 01

  Or something that used to be only frontend and you're forced to do now backend also. I don't know.

• 2:59:41Lex Fridman?

  And then, but there's not really, you're not really forced to do anything. So like, based according to the internet. So like, there's no, it's actually not trivial to find the canonical way of doing things. So like the standard vanilla, like you go to the ice cream shop, there's like a million flavors. I want vanilla. If, if I've never had ice cream in my life, can we just like learn about ice cream?

• 3:00:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:00:05Lex Fridman?

  I want vanilla. Nobody actually, sometimes they'll literally name it vanilla, but like, I wanna know what's the basic way, but not like dumb, but like the standard canonical.

• 3:00:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wanna know the dominant way. Like the, the 60% of developers do it like this.

• 3:00:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:21Speaker 01

  It's hard to figure that out, you know? That's the problem.

• 3:00:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, maybe LLMs can help. Maybe you should explicitly ask, what is the dominant?

• 3:00:29Speaker 01

  They usually know like the dominant, you know, they, they, they give answers that are like the most probable kinda.

• 3:00:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:34Speaker 01

  So that makes sense to ask LLM. And I think honestly, maybe what would help is if, if you wanna learn or I would wanna learn like a framework, hire somebody that already does it and just sit with them and make something together. Like I've never done that, but I thought about it. So it would be a very fast way to, you know, take their knowledge.

• 3:00:53Lex Fridman?

  I've tried these kinds of things. What, what happens is, depends what kinda, if they're like a world-class developer, yes. Oftentimes, they themselves are used to that thing and they have not themselves explored in other options. So they're, have this dogmatic like talking down to you. Like this is the right way to do it.

• 3:01:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:01:12Lex Fridman?

  It's like, no, no, no, we're just like exploring together. Okay. Show me the cool thing you've tried. Which is like, it has to have a open mindedness to like, you know, Node JS is not the right way to do web development. It's like one way and there's nothing wrong with the the old Lamp, PHP, jQuery, vanilla JavaScript way. It just has its pros and cons and like you need to know.

• 3:01:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but those people exist. You could find those people probably.

• 3:01:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:43Speaker 01

  Like, if you want to learn AI, imagine you have Karpati sitting next to you.

• 3:01:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:47Speaker 01

  It's you like he does his YouTube videos. It's amazing. He can teach it to like a five year old about how how to make LLM. It's amazing. Like, imagine this guy sitting next to you and just teaching you like, let's make LLM together. Like, holy shit, it would be amazing.

• 3:02:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, well, Karpati has its own style and is like, I'm not sure he he's for everybody. But for example, five year old, it depends on the five year old.

• 3:02:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:02:10Lex Fridman?

  He's like super technical.

• 3:02:12Speaker 01

  But he's amazing because he's super technical and he's the only one who can explain his stuff in a simple way, which shows his complete genius.

• 3:02:18Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:02:19Speaker 01

  Because if you can explain without jargon, you're like, wow.

• 3:02:23Lex Fridman?

  And build it from scratch.

• 3:02:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like top tier, you know, like, what a guy.

• 3:02:27Lex Fridman?

  But he might be anti framework because he built from scratch.

• 3:02:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, actually, probably is. Yeah.

• 3:02:34Lex Fridman?

  He's like you, but for AI.

• 3:02:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so maybe learning framework is a is a very bad idea for us, you know? Maybe we should stay in PHP and like Script Kitty and the.

• 3:02:42Lex Fridman?

  But you have to, maybe by learning the framework, you learn what you want to yourself build from scratch.

• 3:02:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe you learn concepts, but you don't actually have to start using it for your life, right? Yeah.

• 3:02:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And you're still a Mac guy. What was a Mac guy?

• 3:02:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I switched to Mac in 2014 because it was because when I wanted to start traveling and my brother was like, dude, get a MacBook is like the standard now. I'm like, wow, I need to switch from Windows and I had like three screens, you know, like Windows. I had this whole setup for music production. I had to sell everything and then I had a MacBook. And I remember opening up this MacBook box like, ah, and it was so beautiful. It was like this aluminium. And then I opened it and I removed the, 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.

• 3:03:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:27Speaker 01

  Really? And I was still on the Windows computer and then I went traveling with that. So I and all my great things started when I switched to Mac, which sounds very dogmatic, right? But.

• 3:03:35Lex Fridman?

  What great things are you talking about?

• 3:03:37Speaker 01

  All the businesses started working out. Like, I started traveling. I started building startups. I started making money. It all started when I switched to Mac.

• 3:03:44Lex Fridman?

  Listen, I I kinda.

• 3:03:48Lex Fridman?

  You're making me want to switch to Mac. So I use either use Linux inside Windows with WSL or just Ubuntu Linux. But Windows for most stuff like editing or any like Adobe products. Yeah, yeah. Well, you could use, I guess you could do Mac stuff there. I wonder if I should switch. What would you miss about Windows? What was the pros and cons?

• 3:04:09Speaker 01

  I think the Finder is horrible, Mac. Like, it's like, it's.

• 3:04:12Lex Fridman?

  The what is horrible?

• 3:04:13Speaker 01

  The Finder. Oh, you don't know the Finder. So there's the Windows Explorer?

• 3:04:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:16Speaker 01

  Windows Explorer is amazing.

• 3:04:17Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for talking down.

• 3:04:18Speaker 01

  Finder is strange, man. There's like strange things. This is bug where if you, if you send like attach a photo on WhatsApp or Telegram, it just selects the whole folder and you almost accidentally can click enter. And you send all your photos, all your files to this chat group. Happened to my girlfriend. She starts sending me photo, photo, photo, photo, photo. So Finder is very unusable, but it has Linux. Like, the whole thing is like it's Unix based, right?

• 3:04:41Lex Fridman?

  So you use the command?

• 3:04:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, all the time, like all the time. And the cool thing is you can run, I think it's like Unix, like Debian or whatever. You can run most Linux stuff on macOS, which makes it very good for development. Like I have my NGINX server. You know, if I said, if I'm not lazy and set up my staging on my laptop, it's just the NGINX server, the same as I have on my cloud server, right? The same where the websites run and I can use almost everything. The same config files, configuration files. And it just works and that makes Mac a very good platform for Linux stuff, I think.

• 3:05:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:05:17Speaker 01

  Real Ubuntu is like better, of course, but.

• 3:05:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I'm in this weird situation where I'm somewhat of a power user in Windows and let's say Android and all the much smarter friends I have, all using Mac and iPhone. And it's like.

• 3:05:37Speaker 01

  But you don't want to go through the peer pressure, you know?

• 3:05:40Lex Fridman?

  It's not peer pressure. It's like. Like, one of the reasons I want to have kids is that there's a lot of, like, I would love to have kids as a base, as a baseline. But, you know, there's like a concern, maybe there's going to be a trade off or all this kind of stuff. But you see like these extremely successful, smart people who are friends of mine, who have kids and are really happy to have kids. So it's, it's not peer pressure, that's just like a strong signal.

• 3:06:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it works for people.

• 3:06:04Lex Fridman?

  That works for people.

• 3:06:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06:05Lex Fridman?

  And the same thing with Mac, it's like,

• 3:06:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06:08Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 3:06:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06:19Lex Fridman?

  It's much more customizable. But, like, all the, the cool kids, the smart kids are using Mac and iPhones. Like, all right, I need to really, I need to give it a real chance, especially for development. Since more and more stuff is done in the cloud anyway.

• 3:06:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06:35Lex Fridman?

  Well, anyway. Uh, but it's funny to hear you say all the good stuff started happening. Maybe I'll be like that guy too. When I switched to Mac, all the good stuff started happening.

• 3:06:44Speaker 01

  I think it's just about the hardware, it's not so much about the software, the hardware is so well built, right? Keyboard and...

• 3:06:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but look at the keyboard I use, so.

• 3:06:51Speaker 01

  That is pretty cool.

• 3:06:53Lex Fridman?

  That's one word for it. Uh, what's your favorite place to work?

• 3:06:57Speaker 01

  Uh, on the couch.

• 3:06:59Lex Fridman?

  Does the couch matter? Is the couch at home or is it any couch?

• 3:07:02Speaker 01

  No, any couch, like hotel couch also, like in the room, right?

• 3:07:05Lex Fridman?

  In the room.

• 3:07:05Speaker 01

  But I used to work like very ergonomically with like a standing desk.

• 3:07:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:09Speaker 01

  And everything like perfect, like eye height, screen, blah, blah, blah. And I felt like, man, this has to do with lifting too. I started getting RSI, like repetitive strain injury, like tingling stuff, and it would go all the way on my back. And I was sitting in a coworker space, like 6 a.m., sun comes up. And I'm working and coding. And I hear like a sound or something, so I do like, I look left and my necks get stuck, like, and I'm like, wow, fuck. And, um, I'm like, what's, am I dying? You know, and I thought I'm probably dying.

• 3:07:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:40Speaker 01

  So I don't want to die in a coworking space. I'm gonna go home and die in like,

• 3:07:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:43Speaker 01

  you know, peace and honor.

• 3:07:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:45Speaker 01

  So I closed my laptop and I put it in my backpack.

• 3:07:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:48Speaker 01

  And I walked to the, to the street, got on my motorbike, went home.

• 3:07:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:52Speaker 01

  Um, and I lied down on like a, a pillow, like with my legs up and stuff. Uh, to get rid of this, like, cause it was my whole back and it was because I was working like this all the time.

• 3:08:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:03Speaker 01

  So, um, I started getting like a, a laptop stand, everything economically correct. But then I started lifting and since then, like it seems like, uh, everything gets straightened out. Your posture kind of, you, you're more straight. And I'd never have ERSI, ORSI anymore, repetitive injury. I never have tingling anymore. Uh, no pains and stuff. So then I started working on the sofa and it's great. Like it, it feels, um, you're close to the, I, I sit like, I sit like this.

• 3:08:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:33Speaker 01

  Legs together and then a pillow and then a laptop and then I work.

• 3:08:36Lex Fridman?

  Are you like leaning back?

• 3:08:38Speaker 01

  I'm kinda like, together like legs and then.

• 3:08:42Lex Fridman?

  Where's the mouse using, using?

• 3:08:43Speaker 01

  No, I, you, no. So everything's trackpad on the macOS, on the MacBook. I used to have the Logitech MX mouse, the perfect economic mouse.

• 3:08:51Lex Fridman?

  And you're just doing like this little thing with the thing?

• 3:08:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:08:53Lex Fridman?

  One screen?

• 3:08:54Speaker 01

  One screen. And I used to have three screens. So I come from the, I know where people come from. I, I had, I had all this stuff. Uh, but then I realized that having it all condensed in one laptop, it's a 16 inch MacBook. So it's quite big, but having it all in there is amazing because you're so close to the tools. You're so close to what's happening, you know? Is that working on a car or something? It's like so, um, like, man, if you have three screens, you have to look here, look there. You get also neck injury, actually. So it's.

• 3:09:21Lex Fridman?

  Well, I don't know. This, this sounds like you're part of a cult and you're just trying to convince me, but, uh, I mean, but it's good to hear that you can be ultra productive on a single screen. That's, I mean, that's crazy.

• 3:09:31Speaker 01

  Command tab, you alt up, like Windows alt up, macOS command tab, you switch very fast.

• 3:09:36Lex Fridman?

  So you have like one, the, the entire screen is taken out by VS Code. Say you're looking at the code and then.

• 3:09:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:09:41Lex Fridman?

  And then like if you deploy like a website, you what? Switch screens?

• 3:09:45Speaker 01

  Montap to Chrome. I used to have this swipe screen, you know, you could do like, um, different screen.

• 3:09:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:50Speaker 01

  Spaces.

• 3:09:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:51Speaker 01

  I was like, ah, it's too difficult. Let's just put it all on one screen on the MacBook and then.

• 3:09:56Lex Fridman?

  And he'd be productive that way.

• 3:09:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, very productive. Yeah, more productive than before.

• 3:10:01Lex Fridman?

  Interesting, because I have three screens and two of them are vertical.

• 3:10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the code, right, yeah.

• 3:10:06Lex Fridman?

  For the code, you can see all.

• 3:10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, man, I love it. Like, I love seeing it with friends. Like, they have amazing, like, battle stations, right? It's called. It's amazing. I want it, but I don't want it, right?

• 3:10:16Lex Fridman?

  Like, you like the constraints. There's.

• 3:10:18Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 3:10:19Lex Fridman?

  There's some aspect of the constraints, which, like, once you get good at it, you can focus your mind and you can.

• 3:10:24Speaker 01

  Man, I'm suspicious of, like, more, you know?

• 3:10:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:27Speaker 01

  You really need all the stuff. Like, it might slow me down, actually.

• 3:10:29Lex Fridman?

  It's a good way to put it. I'm suspicious of more. Me too. I'm suspicious of more in all, in all ways, in all.

• 3:10:36Speaker 01

  Because you can defend more, right? You can defend, yeah, I'm a developer. I make money. I need to, I need to get more screens, right? I need to be more efficient. And then you read stuff about, like, mythical man month, where, like, hiring more people slows down a software product, project that's famous. I think you can use that metaphor maybe for, you know, tools as well. And I see friends just with gear acquisition syndrome, that buying so much stuff, but they're not that productive. They have the best, most beautiful battle stations, desktops, everything. They're not that productive. And it's also like, kind of fun. Like, it's all from a laptop in a backpack, right? It's kind of nomad, minimalist.

• 3:11:09Lex Fridman?

  Take me through, like, the perfect ultra productive day in your life.

• 3:11:14Lex Fridman?

  Like, say, like, where you get a lot of shit done.

• 3:11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:11:18Lex Fridman?

  Are you, uh, and it's all focused on getting shit done? What, what, when are you waking up? Is it a regular time? Super early, super late?

• 3:11:27Speaker 01

  So I go to sleep like 2:00 AM usually, something like that, and, uh, before 4:00 AM. But my girlfriend would go sleep midnight, so we did a compromise, like 2:00 AM, you know? So I wake up around 10, 11, then more like 10.

• 3:11:41Speaker 01

  Shower, make coffee. I make coffee, like drip coffee, like the V60, you know, the filter? And I boil water and then I put the coffee in.

• 3:11:50Speaker 01

  And then chill a little with my girlfriend and then open laptop, start coding, check what's going on, like bugs or whatever.

• 3:11:57Lex Fridman?

  How lo, how long are you, like, how stretches of time are you able to just sit behind the computer coding?

• 3:12:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:12:11Lex Fridman?

  Cause you have to.

• 3:12:12Speaker 01

  This is life, like there's a lot of distractions, like your girlfriend asks stuff, people come over, whatever. So I'm very fast now, I can lock in and lock out quite fast. And I heard people, developers or entrepreneurs with kids have the same thing, like before they're like, ah, I cannot work, but they get used to it. And they get really productive in like short time because they only have like 20 minutes and then shit goes crazy again. So another constraint, right?

• 3:12:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's funny.

• 3:12:37Speaker 01

  So I think that works for me. Um, yeah. And then, you know, cook food and stuff, like have lunch, steak and chicken.

• 3:12:45Lex Fridman?

  You eat a bunch of times a day? So you say coffee?

• 3:12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:12:48Lex Fridman?

  What are you doing?

• 3:12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. So a few hours later, cook foods. We get like locally sourced like meat and stuff and vegetables and cook that. And then second coffee and then go some more, maybe go outside for lunch. Like you can, you can mix fun stuff, you know?

• 3:13:02Lex Fridman?

  How many hours are you saying a perfectly productive day are you doing programming? Like if you were like to kill it, are you doing like all day basically?

• 3:13:09Speaker 01

  You mean like the special days where like girlfriend leaves to like Paris or something and you're alone for a week at home, which is amazing. You can just code. It's like, and you stay up all night and eat chocolate and.

• 3:13:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:13:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. Let's remove girlfriend from picture, social life from picture. It's just you.

• 3:13:27Speaker 01

  Man, then shit goes crazy.

• 3:13:28Lex Fridman?

  Okay, yeah, cause when shit goes crazy.

• 3:13:30Speaker 01

  Now shit goes crazy.

• 3:13:31Lex Fridman?

  Okay, good. So you, uh, let's, let's rewind. Are you still waking up? There's coffee. There's no girlfriend to talk to. There's no.

• 3:13:38Speaker 01

  Now we wake up.

• 3:13:41Speaker 01

  Like 1pm? At 2pm?

• 3:13:46Lex Fridman?

  Cause you went to bed at 6am.

• 3:13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, cause I was coding. I was finding some new AI shit.

• 3:13:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:50Speaker 01

  And I was studying it and it was amazing and I cannot sleep because it's too important. We need to stay awake. We need to see all of this. We need to make something now. And, but that's the times I do make like new stuff more. So I think, I have a friend, he actually books a hotel for like a week to like leave his. And he has a kid too. And his girlfriend and his kid stay in the house and he goes to another hotel. Sounds a little suspicious, right? Going to hotel, but all he does is like writing or coding. He's a writer and he needs like this alone time, this silence. And I think for this flow state, it's true, you know, I'm better maintaining stuff. When there's a lot of disruptions than like creating new stuff. I need this, it's common, it's flows, it's this uninterrupted period of time.

• 3:14:33Speaker 01

  So yeah, wake up like one, two P M. Um, you know, still coffee, shower, we still shower, you know? Uh, and then this code like nonstop, maybe my friend comes over, uh, comes over.

• 3:14:44Lex Fridman?

  Just some distraction.

• 3:14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, he also, Andre, he codes too. So he comes over, we code together, we listen, you know, it starts going back to like the Bali days, you know, like

• 3:14:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:52Speaker 01

  uh, coworking days, like

• 3:14:53Lex Fridman?

  So you're not really working with him, but you're just both working?

• 3:14:56Speaker 01

  Because it's nice to have like a vibe where you both sit together on the couch and coding on something and you actually, it's mostly silent or there's music, you know? And sometimes you add something and, but generally like you're really locked in and

• 3:15:08Lex Fridman?

  What, uh, what music are you listening to?

• 3:15:11Speaker 01

  I think like, like, um, techno, like YouTube techno, um, there's a, there's a channel called H O R with a umlaut, like H O, like double dot. It's, it's Berlin techno, whatever. It looks like it's, they film it in like a toilet with like white tiles and stuff and very cool. And they always have like very good like kind of industrial like

• 3:15:31Lex Fridman?

  Industri- so fast

• 3:15:32Speaker 01

  Kind of aggressive, you know, like

• 3:15:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's not distracting to your brain?

• 3:15:37Speaker 01

  That's amazing. Like, I think distracting, man jazz, like I listen coffee jazz with my girlfriend when I wake up and it's kind of like this piano starts getting annoying. It's like dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Too many tones. It's like too many things going on. This industrial techno is like, you know, this African like rain dance is like it's this transcendental trance.

• 3:15:57Lex Fridman?

  That's interesting because like I, I actually mostly now listen to, uh, brown noise, noise.

• 3:16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, wow.

• 3:16:05Lex Fridman?

  Like pretty loud.

• 3:16:06Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 3:16:07Lex Fridman?

  And one of the things you learn is your brain gets used to whatever. So I'm sure to techno, if I actually give it a real chance,

• 3:16:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:16:13Lex Fridman?

  my brain would get used to it. But like with, with noise, what happens is something happens to your brain. I think there's a science to it, but I don't really care. You just have to be a, a scientist of one, like study yourself, your own brain. For me, it like, it does something. I discovered it right away when I tried it for the first time. After about like a couple of minutes, your, everything, every distraction just like disappears and it goes like You can like hold focus on things like really well. It's weird like you can like really focus on a thing. It doesn't really matter what that is. I think that's what people achieve was like meditation. You can like like focus on your breath, for example.

• 3:16:58Speaker 01

  It's just normal brown. It's not like binarol.

• 3:17:01Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 3:17:01Speaker 01

  It's just normal brown noise.

• 3:17:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. White noise, I think, is the same. It's like pick noise, white noise.

• 3:17:09Lex Fridman?

  Brown noise, I think, is when it's like basier.

• 3:17:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's more diffuse, more dampened. Yeah.

• 3:17:13Lex Fridman?

  Dampened.

• 3:17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can see that.

• 3:17:15Lex Fridman?

  No sharpness.

• 3:17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, sharp brightness.

• 3:17:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can see that. And you use a headphone, right?

• 3:17:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, headphones.

• 3:17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:17:21Lex Fridman?

  I actually like walk around in life often with brown noise.

• 3:17:25Speaker 01

  Dude, that's like psychopath shit, but it's cool, you know?

• 3:17:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I murder people, it helps.

• 3:17:32Lex Fridman?

  It it drowns out their screams.

• 3:17:34Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ. Yeah.

• 3:17:36Lex Fridman?

  I said too much. No.

• 3:17:37Speaker 01

  Man, I'm gonna try brown noise.

• 3:17:39Lex Fridman?

  With a murder or with a coding? Yeah.

• 3:17:41Speaker 01

  For the coding, yeah.

• 3:17:41Lex Fridman?

  Okay, good. Try it, try it. But you have to like with everything else, you give it a real chance.

• 3:17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:17:47Lex Fridman?

  I find I also, like I said, do techno-y type stuff, electronic music on top of the brown noise. Uh, but then control the speed. Cause the faster it goes, the more anxiety. So if I really need to get shit done, especially with programming, I'll have a beat.

• 3:18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18:06Lex Fridman?

  And it's great. It's cool. I say it's cool to play those little tricks with your mind to study yourself.

• 3:18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18:11Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 3:18:19Speaker 01

  No, that's my, yeah, in coworker space, I would just start talking too much.

• 3:18:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18:23Lex Fridman?

  So they're a source of distraction.

• 3:18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, we would do in the coworker space, we would do like a money like pot, like a mug. So if you would would work for forty five minutes and then if you would say one like per word, you would get a fine, which is like one dollar. So you'd put one dollar to say, hey, what's up? So three, three dollars you put in the mug. And then ten fifteen minutes free time, like we can like party, whatever, and then forty five minutes again, working. And that worked, but you need to shut people up or they, you know?

• 3:18:50Lex Fridman?

  I think there's a. There's an intimacy in being silent together.

• 3:18:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18:57Lex Fridman?

  Maybe I'm uncomfortable with like, but you if you need to make yourself vulnerable and actually do it. Like with with close friends to just sit there in silence for long periods of time and like doing a thing.

• 3:19:10Speaker 01

  Dude, I watched this um, this video of this podcast. It was like this Buddhism podcast with people meditating. And they were interviewing each other or whatever and like a podcast and suddenly after a question is like, yeah, yeah.

• 3:19:25Speaker 01

  And they were just silent for like three minutes. And then they said, that was amazing. Yeah, that was amazing. I was like, wow, pretty cool, you know?

• 3:19:32Lex Fridman?

  Elon's like that. And I really like that when you'll ask a question.

• 3:19:39Lex Fridman?

  Like, I don't know. What's a perfectly productive day for you? Like I just asked. And you just sit there for like 30 seconds thinking.

• 3:19:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, he thinks.

• 3:19:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:50Speaker 01

  That's so cool. I wish I was. I wish I could think more about, but I wanna like, I wanna show you my heart, you know? I wanna 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 wanna just throw it out there immediately.

• 3:20:08Lex Fridman?

  I I do that more with team. I think he has a lot of practice in that. I I do that as well in a team setting when you're thinking, brainstorming. And you allow yourself to just like think in silence.

• 3:20:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:20:18Lex Fridman?

  Just like, because even in meetings, people wanna talk.

• 3:20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:20:23Lex Fridman?

  It's like, no, you think before you speak and just like, it's okay to be silent together. And if you allow yourself the room to do that, you can actually come up with really good ideas.

• 3:20:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:20:32Lex Fridman?

  It's okay, this perfect day. How much caffeine are you consuming in this day?

• 3:20:37Speaker 01

  Man, too much, right? Because uh, normally like two, two cups of coffee. But on this perfect day, like we go to like four maybe. So we're starting to hit like the anxiety levels.

• 3:20:46Lex Fridman?

  So four cups is a lot for you.

• 3:20:49Speaker 01

  Well, I think my coffees are quite strong when I make them. It's like 20 grams of uh, coffee powder in the V60. So like my friends call them like nuclear coffee because it's quite heavy.

• 3:20:59Lex Fridman?

  So strong.

• 3:20:59Speaker 01

  It's quite strong. Um, but it's nice to hit that anxiety level where you're like almost panic attack, but you're not there yet. So. But that's like, man, it's like super locked in, just like.

• 3:21:13Speaker 01

  It's amazing, but I mean, that's, there's a space for that, you know, in my life, but uh, it's uh, I think it's great for making new stuff. It's amazing.

• 3:21:21Lex Fridman?

  Starting from scratch, creating a new thing.

• 3:21:22Speaker 01

  Yes, I think girlfriends should let their guys go away for like two weeks. Every few, no, every year at least, you know, maybe every quarter, I don't know. And just sit and make some shit without, you know, they're amazing, but like no disturbances, just be alone. And then, you know, people can make something very, very amazing.

• 3:21:43Lex Fridman?

  Just wearing cowboy hats in the mountains like we showed.

• 3:21:46Speaker 01

  Exactly, we can do that.

• 3:21:47Lex Fridman?

  There's a movie about that.

• 3:21:48Speaker 01

  With the laptops.

• 3:21:48Lex Fridman?

  They didn't do much programming though.

• 3:21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can do a little bit of that.

• 3:21:51Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 3:21:52Speaker 01

  And then a little bit of shipping, you know, can do both.

• 3:21:56Lex Fridman?

  It's a different.

• 3:21:56Speaker 01

  But they need to allow us to go, you know, you need like a man cave, right?

• 3:21:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, to ship.

• 3:22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, to ship.

• 3:22:01Lex Fridman?

  Get shit done. Yeah, it's a balance. Okay, cool. What about sleep, naps and all that? You're not sleeping much?

• 3:22:09Speaker 01

  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 a day. And it's also because of gym, I'm not tired. I, I'm tired when I wanna, you know, when it's night, I need to sleep.

• 3:22:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, me, I love naps. I love naps. I don't care. I don't know. I don't know why. Brain shuts off, turns on. I don't know if it's healthy or not. It just works.

• 3:22:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:22:29Lex Fridman?

  I think with anything, mental, physical, you have to be a student of your own body and like know, know what the limits are. Like you have to be skeptical taking advice from the internet in general, because a lot of the advice is just like a good baseline for the general population, but then you have to become a student of your own, like of your own body, of your own self, of how you work. That's, I've, I've done a lot, like for me fasting was an interesting one. They used to, you know, eat a bunch of meals a day, especially when I was lifting heavy, like, cause everybody says that you have to eat kind of a lot, you know, multiple meals a day, but I realized I can get much stronger, feel much better if I. Eat once or twice a day.

• 3:23:12Speaker 01

  And me too, yeah.

• 3:23:13Lex Fridman?

  It's crazy.

• 3:23:14Speaker 01

  I never understood the small meal thing. Yeah, it didn't work for me.

• 3:23:16Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me just ask you, it'd be interesting if you can comment on some of the other products you've created. We talked about Nomad List, Interior AI, Photo AI, Therapist AI. What's Remote OK?

• 3:23:26Speaker 01

  It's a job board for remote jobs. Because back then, like 10 years ago, there was job boards, but it was not really specifically remote job job boards. So I made one, but I made like first on Nomad List, I made like Nomad Jobs, like a page. And a lot of companies started hiring and they pay for job posts. So I split it off to Remote OK. And now it's like the number one or the number two biggest remote job boards. And it's also fully automated and people just post a job and people apply. It has like profiles as well, like it's kind of like LinkedIn for remote work.

• 3:23:57Lex Fridman?

  Just focus on remote only.

• 3:23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's essentially like a simple job board. I discovered job boards are way more complicated than you think, but yeah, it's a job board for remote jobs.

• 3:24:10Speaker 01

  But the nice thing is you can charge a lot of money for job posts. It's man, it's good money, B two B. You can charge like you start with $2.99, but at the peak during when the Fed started printing money, like 2021, I was making like 140K a month with Remote OK with just job posts. And I started like adding crazy upsells, like rainbow colored job posts. You can add your background image. It's just upsells, man. And you charge $1,000 for an upsell. It was crazy. And all these companies just upsell, upsell. Yeah, we want everything. Job posts would cost $3,400, $4,000. And I was like, this is good, good business. And then the Fed stopped printing money and it all went down and it went down to like 10K a month from 140. Now it's back. It's I think it's like 40. It was good times, you know?

• 3:24:56Lex Fridman?

  I gotta ask you, but back to the digital nomad life.

• 3:24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:25:00Lex Fridman?

  You, you wrote a blog post on the reset. And in general, like just giving away everything, living a minimalist life.

• 3:25:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:25:08Lex Fridman?

  What did it take to do that? Like to get rid of everything.

• 3:25:12Speaker 01

  Ten years ago was like this trend in the blog. Back then blogs were so popular, it was like a blogosphere and it was like a hundred things challenge.

• 3:25:18Lex Fridman?

  What is that, the hundred things?

• 3:25:19Speaker 01

  I mean, it's ridiculous, but like you, you write down every object you have in your house and you count it. You make like a spreadsheet and you're like, okay, I have five hundred things. You need to get it down to a hundred. Why? You know, this was just a trend, so I did it. I started like selling stuff, started throwing away stuff and I did like MDMA and ecstasy, like two thousand twelve kinda and

• 3:25:40Speaker 01

  after that trip, I felt so different and I felt like I had to start throwing shit away. Like, I swear. And I started throwing shit away and I felt that was like, it was almost like the drug sending me to a path of like, you need to throw your shit away. You need to start, you know, go on a journey, you need to get out of here. And, um, and that's what the MDMA did, I think, yeah.

• 3:26:01Lex Fridman?

  How hard is it to get down to a hundred items?

• 3:26:03Speaker 01

  Boy, you need to like sell your PC and stuff, you need to go on eBay and then, man, going eBay selling all your stuff is very interesting because you discover society, you just, man, you meet the craziest people, you meet every range from rich to poor. Everybody comes to your house to buy stuff. It's so funny, so interesting. I recommend everybody do this.

• 3:26:20Lex Fridman?

  Just to meet people that want your shit?

• 3:26:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was so, like, I, I didn't know, I was, I was living in Amsterdam and I didn't know, I have my own, you know, subculture, whatever. And I discovered the Dutch people like as they are from eBay, you know? So I sold everything.

• 3:26:33Lex Fridman?

  What's, what's like the weirdest thing you had to sell? And you had to find a buyer for, not the weirdest, but like what, what's memorable?

• 3:26:40Speaker 01

  So back then I was, I was making music and we would make music videos with like a Canon five D camera. Back then everyone's making films and music videos that and, uh, and we bought it with my friends and stuff. And it was kinda like, I had to sell this thing too, because it was like, it was very expensive, like six K or something. And, but it meant that selling this meant that we wouldn't make music videos together anymore. I would leave Holland, this kinda like stuff we were working on would end. And I was kinda saying, this music video stuff, we're not getting, we're not getting famous in this or successful. We need to stop doing this, this music production also, it's not really working. And it was kinda like, felt very bad, you know, for my friends, because we would work together on this. And, um, to sell this like camera that we'd make stuff with and.

• 3:27:23Lex Fridman?

  It was a hard goodbye.

• 3:27:24Speaker 01

  It was just a camera, but it was like, it felt like, uh, sorry guys, it doesn't work and I need to go, you know?

• 3:27:30Lex Fridman?

  Who, uh, who bought it? Do you remember? Was some guy who couldn't possibly understand the? The journey.

• 3:27:37Speaker 01

  Motion of it.

• 3:27:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:27:39Lex Fridman?

  You just showed up here. Here's the money. Thanks.

• 3:27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it was like it was like cutting your life like this shit ends now. Now we're gonna do new stuff and.

• 3:27:46Lex Fridman?

  I think it's beautiful. I did that twice in my life. I give away everything, everything, everything like down to just pants, underwear, backpack.

• 3:27:56Speaker 01

  I think.

• 3:27:57Lex Fridman?

  I think it's important to do. It shows you what's important.

• 3:28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's what I learned from it. Like you you learn that you can live a very little objects, very little stuff. And um, but there's a there's a counter to it. Like you you lean more on this on the stuff, on the services, right? Like, for example, you don't need a car. You use Uber, right? Or you don't need kitchen stuff because you go to restaurants, you know, when you're traveling. So you lean more on other people's services, but you spend money on that as well. So that's good.

• 3:28:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but just letting go of material possessions, which it gives a kind of freedom to how you move about the world.

• 3:28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:28:29Lex Fridman?

  It gives you complete freedom to go into another city to.

• 3:28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, with your backpack.

• 3:28:33Lex Fridman?

  With a backpack.

• 3:28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:28:34Lex Fridman?

  There's a kind of freedom to it. There's something about material possessions and having a place and all that that ties you down a little bit.

• 3:28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:28:41Lex Fridman?

  Next spiritually.

• 3:28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:28:42Lex Fridman?

  It's good to take a leap out into the world, especially when you're younger to like.

• 3:28:46Speaker 01

  Man, I recommend if you're eighteen, you get out of high school, do this, go travel. And uh, you know, build some internet stuff, whatever. If you bring your laptop and uh, it's it's amazing experience. Five years ago, I was still going to university, but now I'm thinking like, no, maybe maybe skip university. Just go first, like travel around a little bit, figure some stuff out. You can go back to university when you're twenty five. You can like, okay, now I learned, I be successful in business. You have money at least. Now you can choose what you really want to study, you know? Because people at eighteen, they go study what is probably good for the job market, right? So it probably makes more sense like, if you want that, go travel, build some businesses and go back to university if you want.

• 3:29:23Lex Fridman?

  So one of the biggest uses uses of a university is the networking. You you uh, you gain friends, you gain like, you meet people. It's a forcing function to meet people. But if you can meet people out into the world by traveling.

• 3:29:35Speaker 01

  And you meet so many different cultures.

• 3:29:37Lex Fridman?

  I mean, the problem for me is like, if I traveled at that young age, I'm attracted to people at the outskirts of the world. Like for me.

• 3:29:45Speaker 01

  Like where?

• 3:29:45Lex Fridman?

  No, not geographically.

• 3:29:47Speaker 01

  Oh, like the the subcultures.

• 3:29:48Lex Fridman?

  The sub, yeah, like the weirdos, the darkness.

• 3:29:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, me too.

• 3:29:53Lex Fridman?

  But but that might not be the best networking at eighteen years.

• 3:29:56Speaker 01

  No, but man, if you're smart about it, you can stay safe. And I met so many weirdos from traveling. You meet, that's how travel works. If you really let loose, you meet the craziest people.

• 3:30:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:06Speaker 01

  And it's the most interesting people. And it's just, I cannot recommend it enough.

• 3:30:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, see, the thing is, when you're 18, I feel like, depending on your personality, you have to learn both how to be a weirdo and how to be a normie. Like, you still have to learn how to fit into society.

• 3:30:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:30:27Lex Fridman?

  Like, for a person like me, for example, who's always an outcast, like, there's always a danger for going full outcast.

• 3:30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:30:34Lex Fridman?

  And it's a harder life. If you like, if you go to like, go full artist and full like darkness, it's just a harder life.

• 3:30:41Speaker 01

  You can come back. You can come back to normie.

• 3:30:43Lex Fridman?

  That's a skill. That's like, I think you have to learn how to, how to fit into, uh, like polite society.

• 3:30:51Speaker 01

  But I was very strange outcast as well. And I'm more adaptable to normie now.

• 3:30:55Lex Fridman?

  Learned it.

• 3:30:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. After 30s, you know, you're like, yeah.

• 3:30:59Lex Fridman?

  But it needs a skill you have to learn.

• 3:31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I feel, man, I feel also that you start as an outcast, but the more you work on yourself, the less like shit you have, you kind of start becoming more normie because you become more chill with yourself, more happy, and it kind of makes you uninteresting, right?

• 3:31:16Lex Fridman?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:31:18Speaker 01

  Like, the most, the crazy people are always the most interesting. If you've solved your internal struggles and your therapy and stuff, and you kind of become kind of, you know, it's not so interesting anymore, maybe.

• 3:31:31Lex Fridman?

  You don't have to be broken to be interesting, I guess is what I'm saying.

• 3:31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:31:34Lex Fridman?

  What kind of things were left when you minimalized?

• 3:31:38Speaker 01

  So the backpack.

• 3:31:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:39Speaker 01

  MacBook, toothbrush, some clothes, underwear, socks. You don't need a lot of clothes in Asia because it's hot. So you just wear swim pants, swim shorts, you walk around flip flops. Uh, so very basic, t-shirt and, uh, I'll go to the laundromat and wash my stuff. And I think it was like 50 things or something, yeah.

• 3:32:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's nice. There's, uh, as I mentioned to you, there's the, uh, the show alone.

• 3:32:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:32:07Lex Fridman?

  They really test you because you only get 10 items and you have to survive out in the wilderness. And an axe, like everybody brings an axe. Some people, uh, also have a saw.

• 3:32:19Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 3:32:20Lex Fridman?

  But usually Axe does the job. You basically have to, in order to build a shelter, you have to cut down, cut the trees and make, and like.

• 3:32:27Speaker 01

  Learn in Minecraft.

• 3:32:29Speaker 01

  You know.

• 3:32:29Lex Fridman?

  Everything I learn about life, learn in Minecraft, bro. Yeah, yeah, you could, it's, it's, it's nice to create those constraints for yourself to understand what matters to you and also how to be in this world. And one, one of the ways to do that is just to live a minimalist life. But like, some people, like I've met people that really enjoy material possessions and that brings them happiness and that's, that's a beautiful thing.

• 3:32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:32:53Lex Fridman?

  Like for me, it doesn't.

• 3:32:56Lex Fridman?

  But people are different.

• 3:32:57Speaker 01

  It gives me happiness for like two weeks.

• 3:32:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:59Speaker 01

  I'm very quickly adapting to like baseline hedonistic, hedonistic adaptation, very fast.

• 3:33:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:05Speaker 01

  But man, if you look at the studies, most people, like, like get a new car, six months, you know, get a new house, six months, you just feel the same. She's like, wow, should I buy all the stuff? That, I didn't, studying hedonistic adaptation made me think a lot about minimalism.

• 3:33:20Lex Fridman?

  And so you don't even need to go through the whole journey of getting it, just, just focus on the, the thing that's more permanent.

• 3:33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:33:29Lex Fridman?

  Like building shit.

• 3:33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, like people around you, like people you love, nice food, nice experiences, meaningful work, those things, exercise, you know, those things make you happy, I think, make me happy for sure.

• 3:33:41Lex Fridman?

  You wrote a blog post, why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too. What's your strategy in communicating with people?

• 3:33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when I wrote that, I was getting so many DMs, as you probably have, you have a million times more, but, um, and people were getting angry that I wasn't responding. And I was like, okay, I'll just close down these DMs completely. And people got angry that I closed my DMs down, that I'm not like man of the people, you know, it's like.

• 3:34:05Lex Fridman?

  You've changed, man.

• 3:34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've changed, you guys, you know, like this, and I'm like, I'll explain why, I just don't have the time in a day to, you know. Answer every question and also people send you like crazy shit, man. Like stalkers and like people write like their whole life story for you and then ask you advice. Like, man, I have no idea. I'm not a therapist. I don't know. I know this stuff.

• 3:34:26Lex Fridman?

  But also beautiful stuff.

• 3:34:28Speaker 01

  No, absolutely. Sure.

• 3:34:29Lex Fridman?

  Like life story, I've posted a coffee forum, like if you wanted to have a coffee with me. And I've gotten an extremely large number of submissions. And when I look at them, there's just like beautiful people in there, like beautiful human beings. There's really powerful stories and like breaks my heart that I won't get to meet those people, you know? Like, and so this part of it is just like, there's only so much bandwidth to truly see other humans and help them or like understand them or hear them or yeah, see them.

• 3:34:59Speaker 01

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

• 3:35:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:45Speaker 01

  Do you have that? Like people ask you advice and they go against you. Say, no, you're wrong. Because I'm like, okay, bro, I don't want to debate. You asked me for advice, right? And the people who need this push generally, it doesn't happen. You need to have this energy for yourself.

• 3:35:59Lex Fridman?

  Well, they're searching. They're searching. They're trying to figure it out. But oftentimes their search, if they successfully find what they're looking for, it'll be within. It sounds very like spiritual sounding, but it's, it's really like figuring that shit out on your own. But they're reaching, they're trying to ask the world around them, like. How do I live this life? How do I figure this out? But ultimately, the answer is gonna be from them working on themselves. And like literally, it's the stupid thing, but like Googling and doing like.

• 3:36:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think it's procrastination. I think sending messages to people is a lot of procrastination. Like Lex, how do you become a successful podcaster?

• 3:36:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:35Speaker 01

  Bro, just, you know, start, like, just go.

• 3:36:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:39Speaker 01

  And uh.

• 3:36:40Lex Fridman?

  Just go.

• 3:36:41Speaker 01

  I would never ask you how to be a successful podcaster. Like, I would just start it and then I would copy your methods, you know? I would say, ah, this guy has a black background. We probably need this as well.

• 3:36:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, try it.

• 3:36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:36:51Lex Fridman?

  Try it. And then you realize it's not about the black background. It's about something else. So you find your own voice, like, keep trying stuff.

• 3:36:57Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 3:36:57Lex Fridman?

  Imitation is a difficult thing. Like, a lot of people copy and they don't move past it.

• 3:37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:37:03Lex Fridman?

  You should understand their methods and then move past it. Like, find yourself, find your own voice.

• 3:37:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, you imitate and then you put your own spin to it, you know? And that's like creative process. That's like literally the whole, everybody always builds on the previous work. Uh, you shouldn't get stuck.

• 3:37:16Lex Fridman?

  Twenty-four hours in a day, eight hours of sleep. You like break it down into a math equation. Uh, ninety minutes of showering, clean up coffee. It just keeps whittling down to zero.

• 3:37:26Speaker 01

  Man, it's not this specific, but I had to make like a, you know, an average or something.

• 3:37:30Lex Fridman?

  Firefighting, I like that. One hours of groceries and errands. I've tried breaking down minute by minute what I do in a day.

• 3:37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:37:38Lex Fridman?

  Especially when my life was simpler. It's really refreshing to understand where you waste a lot of time.

• 3:37:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:37:44Lex Fridman?

  And uh, what you enjoy doing, like, how many minutes it takes to be happy? Doing the thing that makes you happy and how many minutes it takes to be productive? And you realize there's a lot of hours in the day if you spend it right.

• 3:37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of it is wasted, yeah.

• 3:37:58Lex Fridman?

  For me, it's been the, the, the biggest battle for, uh, for the longest time is finding stretches of time where I can deeply focus into really, really deep work. Just like zoom in and completely focus, cutting out away all the distractions.

• 3:38:13Speaker 01

  And me too.

• 3:38:14Lex Fridman?

  That's the battle.

• 3:38:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:38:15Lex Fridman?

  It's unpleasant. It's extremely unpleasant.

• 3:38:18Speaker 01

  We need to fly to an island, you know? Make a man cave island where we can just, everybody can just code and for a week, you know? And just get shit done, make new projects.

• 3:38:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:38:29Speaker 01

  But man, they called me psychopath for this because it says like one hours of sex, hugs, love, you know? Man, I had to write something, you know, and they were like, oh, this guy's psychopath. He plans his sex in a specific hour like.

• 3:38:39Lex Fridman?

  Hugs.

• 3:38:39Speaker 01

  Bro, I don't, but.

• 3:38:41Lex Fridman?

  You have a counter for hugs?

• 3:38:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like click, click, click.

• 3:38:46Lex Fridman?

  Uh, it's, it's just a numerical representation of what life is.

• 3:38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:38:51Lex Fridman?

  It's like one of those like when you draw out how many weeks you have in a life.

• 3:38:55Speaker 01

  Oh dude, this is like dark. Yeah, man. Don't want to look at that too much. Yeah, man. How many times you see your parents? Jesus, like, man.

• 3:39:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:03Speaker 01

  Scary, man.

• 3:39:04Lex Fridman?

  That's right. It might be only, you know, a handful more times.

• 3:39:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 3:39:07Lex Fridman?

  You just look at the math of it. If you see him once a year or twice a year.

• 3:39:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I FaceTimed today.

• 3:39:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:14Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it, that, that's like dark when you

• 3:39:19Lex Fridman?

  see somebody you like, like seeing, like a friend that's on the outskirts of your friend group. And then you realize like, well, I haven't really seen him for like three years. So like, how many more times do we have that we see each other? Yeah.

• 3:39:34Speaker 01

  Do you believe that like friends just slowly disappear from your life? Like they kind of, your friend group evolves, right? So like.

• 3:39:41Lex Fridman?

  It does, it does.

• 3:39:42Speaker 01

  You don't want to, there's a problem with Facebook. You get all these old friends from school, like when you were 10 years old.

• 3:39:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:47Speaker 01

  Back when Facebook started, like you don't really, you would add friend them and then you're like, why are we in touch again? Just keep the memories there, you know, like it's different life now.

• 3:39:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I have, you know, I don't know. That might be a guy thing or I don't know. There's certain friends I have that like we don't interact often, but we're still friends.

• 3:40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:40:05Lex Fridman?

  Like, like every time I see him,

• 3:40:09Lex Fridman?

  I think it's because we have a foundation of many shared experiences and many memories. I guess it's like nothing has changed. Like we've been, almost like we've been talking every day, even if we haven't talked for a year.

• 3:40:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:40:19Lex Fridman?

  So that.

• 3:40:20Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah, there's deep.

• 3:40:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So that, so I don't have to be interacting with them for them to be in a friend group. And then there's some people I interact with a lot. So it, it depends, but there's just this network of good human beings that can. I have like a real love for them. I can always count on them. It's like if any of them called me in the middle of the night, I'll get rid of a body. You know, I'm there. I like how that's a different definition of friendship. But it's true. It's true.

• 3:40:53Speaker 01

  True friend.

• 3:40:54Lex Fridman?

  You've become more and more famous recently. How's that affect you?

• 3:40:58Speaker 01

  It's not recently because it's a gradual thing, right? Like it keeps, keeps going. And, uh, and I also don't know why it keeps going.

• 3:41:07Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 3:41:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:41:15Lex Fridman?

  And just not really caring if it's too technical, if there's any of this, just being out there. Does it put pressure on you as you become more popular to be a little bit more like collected and?

• 3:41:28Speaker 01

  Man, I think the opposite, right? Like, because the people I follow are interesting because they say whatever they think and they, and they ship or whatever. It's so boring that people start tweeting only about one topic.

• 3:41:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:41Speaker 01

  I don't know anything about their personal life. I want to know about their personal life. Like you do podcasts, you ask about life stuff or personality. That's the most interesting part of like business or sports, like what's the behind the sport, the athlete, right? Behind the entrepreneur. That's interesting stuff.

• 3:41:53Lex Fridman?

  To be human.

• 3:41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, like you, you share that, you know, like I shared a tweet, went too far, but like we were cleaning the toilet because the toilet was clogged, you know? But like, it's just real stuff because Jensen Huang, the Nvidia guy, he says he started cleaning toilets, you know?

• 3:42:06Lex Fridman?

  That was cool. You, you tweeted something about the, the Denny's thing. I forget.

• 3:42:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was recent. Nvidia was started in a Denny diner, uh, table.

• 3:42:15Lex Fridman?

  And you made it somehow profound.

• 3:42:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, this one, this one.

• 3:42:19Lex Fridman?

  Uh, Nvidia, a three trillion dollar company was started in a Denny's, an American diner. People need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next billion or trillion dollar company. What's the first and second space?

• 3:42:30Speaker 01

  The home, office.

• 3:42:32Lex Fridman?

  And then the in-between, the island.

• 3:42:34Speaker 01

  I guess, yeah.

• 3:42:34Lex Fridman?

  The island.

• 3:42:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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 happened because they would go to coffee houses, they would sit there, they would drink coffee and they would work, they would work, they would write or they would, and they would do debates and they would organize marine routes, right? They would do all the stuff in coffee houses in Europe, in France, in Austria, in UK, in Holland. So we would always be going to, we were always going to cafes to, to work and to have serendipitous conversations with other people and start businesses and stuff. And when I, like you asked me to come on here and we flew to America and the first thing I

• 3:43:17Speaker 01

  realized was that I've been to America before, but we were in this cafe and like there's a lot of laptops, everybody's working on something and I made, I took this photo. And then when you're in Europe, like a large part of Europe now, you can't, you cannot use a laptop anymore. It's like no laptop, which I understand.

• 3:43:35Lex Fridman?

  But that is to you a fundamental place to create shit, isn't it? Natural, organic, uh, coworking space of a coffee.

• 3:43:44Speaker 01

  Well, for a lot of people, a lot of people have very small homes and coworking spaces are kind of boring. They're not very, they're private, they're not serendipitous, they're kind of boring. Um, cafes are amazing because they, random people can come in and ask you, what are you working on? Or, you know, and not just laptops, people are also having conversations like they did 400 years ago, debates or whatever. Things are happening. And man, I understand the, the aesthetics of it. Like, it's like, oh, startup bro, shipping is a bullshit startup, you know, like, but there's something more there. Like there's people actually making stuff, making new companies that the society benefits from. Like we're, we're benefiting from Nvidia, I think is the US GDP for sure is benefiting from Nvidia. European GDP could

• 3:44:27Speaker 01

  benefit if we build more companies. And I feel in Europe, there's this vibe and this, you have to connect things, but not, not allowing laptops in cafes is kind of like part of the vibe, which is like, yeah, we're not really here to work. We're here to like enjoy life. I agree with this Anthony Bourdain, like this tweet was quote to Anthony Bourdain photo with him with cigarettes and a coffee in France. And he said, that's, this is what cafes are for. I agree.

• 3:44:50Lex Fridman?

  But there is some element of like entrepreneurship. Like you have to allow people to dream big and work their ass off to towards that dream and then feel each other's energy as they interact with.

• 3:45:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:45:01Lex Fridman?

  That's one of the things I liked in Silicon Valley when I was working there is like the cafes.

• 3:45:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:45:07Lex Fridman?

  There's a bunch of dreamers that there you can make fun of them for like, everybody thinks they're gonna build a trillion dollar company, but like.

• 3:45:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's awesome. Not everybody wins. Ninety percent of people will be bullshit.

• 3:45:15Lex Fridman?

  But they're working their ass off.

• 3:45:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're doing something and and you need to pass this startup, bro, like, oh, it's startup on level. No, it's not. It's people making cool shit.

• 3:45:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:24Speaker 01

  And this will benefit you because this will create jobs for your company, your your country and your region. And I think in Europe, that's a big problem. Like, we have a very anti entrepreneurial mindset.

• 3:45:37Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 3:45:47Speaker 01

  There's very few.

• 3:45:48Lex Fridman?

  Mute life.

• 3:45:49Speaker 01

  This was for Twitter to mute, to share the mute list.

• 3:45:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:53Speaker 01

  Your mute words.

• 3:45:55Lex Fridman?

  Fire calculator, no more Google, maker rank, how much is my site project worth? Climate finder, ideas AI.

• 3:46:04Speaker 01

  Airline list still runs, but it doesn't make money. Airline list like compares the safety of airlines because I was nervous to fly. So I was like, let's collect all the data on crashes for all the airplanes.

• 3:46:14Lex Fridman?

  Bali Sea Cable. Nice. That's awesome. Make Village, Nomad Gear, 3D and virtual reality dev, play play my inbox, like you mentioned. There's a lot of stuff.

• 3:46:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 3:46:29Lex Fridman?

  Trying to find some embarrassing tweets of yours.

• 3:46:31Speaker 01

  You can go to the highlights tab. It has all the like the good shit, kind of.

• 3:46:34Lex Fridman?

  There you go.

• 3:46:35Speaker 01

  This was Dubai.

• 3:46:37Lex Fridman?

  POV, building an AI startup. Wow, you're a real influencer.

• 3:46:43Speaker 01

  And people copy this photo now and they they change the screenshots. It becomes like a meme, of course, you know?

• 3:46:50Lex Fridman?

  This is good.

• 3:46:52Speaker 01

  Man, this is how Dubai looks. It's insane.

• 3:46:54Lex Fridman?

  That's beautiful. Architecture wise, it's crazy. The stories behind this.

• 3:46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, the stories behind, for sure. So this is about the European economy where like.

• 3:47:01Lex Fridman?

  European economy landscape is ran by dinosaurs and today I studied it so I can produce. You with my evidence, eighty percent of top EU companies were founded before nineteen fifty. Only thirty six percent of top US companies were founded before nineteen fifty.

• 3:47:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the median founding of companies in US is something like nineteen sixty. And the median, the top companies, right? And the median in Europe is like nineteen hundred or something.

• 3:47:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:47:27Speaker 01

  So it's here nineteen thirteen and nineteen sixty three. So there's a fifty year difference.

• 3:47:32Lex Fridman?

  It's a good representation of the very thing you were talking about, the difference in the cultures, entrepreneurial spirit of the peoples.

• 3:47:40Speaker 01

  But Europe used to be entrepreneurial, like there was companies founded in eighteen hundred, eighteen fifty, nineteen hundred. It flipped like around nineteen fifty, where America took the lead. And I guess my point is like, I hope that Europe gets back to, because I'm European. I hope that Europe gets back to being an entrepreneurial culture where they build big companies again. Because right now, the old dinosaur companies control the economies. They're lobbying with the government. They're, Europe is also, there's like, they're infiltrative of the government where they create so much regulation. Like, I think it's called regulatory capture, right? Where it's very hard for a newcomer to join and to enter an industry because there's too much regulation. So actually, regulation is very good for big companies because they can follow it. I can't follow it, right?

• 3:48:21Speaker 01

  If I want to start an AI startup in Europe now, I cannot because there's an AI regulation that makes it very complicated for me. I probably need to get like notaries involved. I need to get certificates, licenses. Whereas in America, I can just open my laptop. I can start an AI startup right now, mostly, you know?

• 3:48:40Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about EAC, Effective Accelerationist Movement?

• 3:48:43Speaker 01

  Man, you had Bev Jaisels on. I love Bev Jaisels and he's amazing. And I think EAC 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.

• 3:49:06Speaker 01

  EOC is like, is a positive outlook in the future. It's like, technology can make us, you know, we need to spend more energy. We should find ways to, of course, get like clean energy, but we need to spend more energy to make cooler stuff and, you know, go into space and build more technology that can improve society. And we shouldn't shy away from technology. Technology can be the answer for many things.

• 3:49:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, build more. Don't spend so much time on fear mongering and cautiousness and all this kind of stuff. Something is okay. Something is good, but most of the time should be spent on building and creating and like, and doing so unapologetically. It's a, it's a refreshing reminder of what made the United States great is all the builders, like you said, the entrepreneurs. Like, we can't forget that in, in all the sort of discussions of how things could go wrong with technology and all this kind of stuff.

• 3:49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it goes to get, look at China. China is now at the stage of like America, what, like 1900 or something? They're building rapidly, like insane. And obviously China has massive problems, but that comes with the whole thing. That comes with America in this beginning, also the massive problems, right? But I think it's very, very dangerous for a country or a region like Europe to, you, you, you get to this point where you're kind of complacent, you're kind of comfortable. And then, you know, you can either go this or you can go this way, right? You're, you're from here, you go like this, and then you can go this or this. I think you should go this way and.

• 3:50:30Lex Fridman?

  Go up.

• 3:50:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, go up. And, and I, I think the problem is the, the, the mind culture. So EOC, I made EUOC, which is like the European kind of version. I made like hoodies and stuff. So a lot of people wear like this, this Make Europe Great Again hat. I made it red first, but it became too like Trump's. So now it's more like European blue, you know? Make Europe Great Again.

• 3:50:54Lex Fridman?

  All right. Okay. So you had a incredible life.

• 3:51:00Lex Fridman?

  Very successful, built a lot of cool stuff. So what advice would you give to young people about how to do the same?

• 3:51:06Speaker 01

  Man, I would listen to like, nobody just do what you think is good and follow your heart. Right? Like, uh, everybody peer presses you into doing stuff you don't want to do. And like, they tell you, like, parents or family or society and tell you, but like, try your own thing, you know? Cause it probably, it might work out. You can, you can steer the ship, you know? It probably doesn't work out immediately. You probably go into very bad times, like I did as well, relatively, right? But in the end, if you're smart about it, you can make things work and you can, you can create your own little life of things as you did, you know, as I did. And I think that should be more promoted, like do your own thing. There's space in the economy and in society for do your own thing, you know?

• 3:51:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:45Speaker 01

  It's like, um, you know, like little villages, everybody would sell, I would sell bread, you would sell meat. Everybody can do their own little thing. You don't need to, you know, be a normie, as you say, you, you, um, you can, you can be what you really want to be, you know?

• 3:51:59Lex Fridman?

  And like, go all out doing that.

• 3:52:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you gotta go all out. Cause if you do, if you're half assets, you cannot succeed. You need to go lean into the, to the outcast stuff, lean into the, um, being different and, and just doing whatever it is that you want to do, right?

• 3:52:16Lex Fridman?

  You got a whole asset.

• 3:52:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, whole asset, yeah.

• 3:52:20Lex Fridman?

  This was an incredible conversation. It was an honor to finally meet you.

• 3:52:24Speaker 01

  It was an honor to be here, Lex.

• 3:52:25Lex Fridman?

  To talk to you and, uh, keep doing your thing, keep inspiring me and, uh, the world with all the cool stuff you're building.

• 3:52:32Speaker 01

  Thank you, man.

• 3:52:33Lex Fridman?

  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 and I hope to see you next time.