Lex Fridman Podcast #440: Pieter Levels Interview Transcript — Indie Hacker Philosophy

Guest: Pieter Levels — Indie Developer, Digital Nomad, founder of Nomad List / Photo AI / RemoteOK Host: Lex Fridman — MIT Researcher, Podcast Host Show: Lex Fridman Podcast #440 Duration: 3 hours 43 minutes Source: YouTube Analysis: Deep Analysis & Commentary

Who is Pieter Levels 00:00:00
Motivation and Low Points 00:06:00
Early Attempts: Flash Era and 12 Startups in 12 Months 00:13:05
Digital Nomad Life: Loneliness, Freedom, and Madness 00:19:55
Finding Startup Ideas: From Problems to Inspiration 00:32:44
Tech Stack Philosophy: PHP, jQuery, and the Framework Debate 00:40:32
The Birth and Explosion of Photo AI 00:48:04
Learning AI and Rapid Prototyping 01:12:54
Building Hood Maps: Crowdsourced Maps Go Viral 01:26:38
Nomad List and Travel Products 01:41:03
Growth, Monetization, and Fighting Spam 02:01:29
Automate Everything 02:13:32
Solo Operation Philosophy: Never Sell, Code Empathy, and Design 02:24:59
Developer Tools, Productivity, and the Perfect Day 02:42:38
Life Philosophy: Minimalism, University, and European Entrepreneurship 03:15:25

1. Who is Pieter Levels

Time: 00:00:00 - 00:06:00

Pieter: 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 and it doesn’t have enough resolution or something to, to, to do that well. So but I started seeing these, these base models, these fine tuned models and people would train on porn and I would try them and they would be very photorealistic, they would have bodies that actually made sense, like body anatomy. But if you look at the photorealistic models that people use now, still, there’s still core of porn there, like of naked people. So I need to prompt out the naked and everybody needs to do this. With AI startups with imaging you need to prompt out the naked stuff.

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

Pieter: 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 like a nipple detector.

Lex: Oh, NSFW detector.

Pieter: Because you get the journalists get very angry.

Lex: The following is a conversation with Peter Levels, also known on X as Levels IO. He is a self taught developer and entrepreneur who designed, program, shipped and ran over 40 startups, many of which are hugely successful in most cases. He did it all by himself while living the digital nomad Life in over 40 countries and over 150 cities. Programming on a laptop while chilling on a couch, 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 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. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Peter Levels. You’ve launched a lot of companies and built a lot of products. As you say, most failed but some succeeded. What’s your philosophy behind building the startups that you did?

Pieter: I think my philosophy is very different than most people in startups because most people, startups, they build a company and they raise money, right? And they hire people and then they build a product and they find something that makes money. And I don’t really raise money, I don’t use VC funding, I do everything myself. I’m a designer, I’m the developer, I make everything, I make the logo. So for me I’m much more scrappy. And, and because I don’t have funding, like, I need to, I need to go fast, I need to make things fast to see if an idea works.

Pieter: I have an idea in my mind and I build it. Build 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. 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.

Lex: So there’s this rapid iterative phase where you just build a prototype that works, launch it.

Lex: 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.

Pieter: I think it’s like, it’s very rapid and it’s like 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 the, invented all the stuff years ago, and they never really shipped. Like they could have shipped, for example, I think I heard in 2019. And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy because. But they had everything. They had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers, and they didn’t do it. And it’s because these big organizations, it can make you very slow. So being alone by myself on my laptop, like in my underwear, in a hotel room or something, I can ship very fast and I don’t need to, like, I don’t need to ask like legal for like, oh, can you vouch for this? You know, I can just go and ship.

Lex: Do you always code in your underwear? Your profile picture? You’re like slouching couch in your underwear, chilling on a laptop?

Pieter: No, but I do wear, like shorts a lot. And I usually just wear shorts and no T shirt because I’m always too hot. Like, I’m always overheating.

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

Pieter: And now, you know, I still wearing this for you.

Lex: But thank you. Thank you for dressing up.

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

Lex: What’s your favorite exercise in the gym?

Pieter: Man over at Press.

Lex: Over Press. Like shoulder press? Yeah. Okay.

Pieter: But it feels good because you’re doing like you do. You win because when you. What Is it? I do 60 kilos is like 120 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, hence the.

Lex: The mug. Yeah. Talking to my therapist.

Lex: It’s a deadlift.

Pieter: Yeah. Because it acts like therapy for me, you know?

Pieter: It is controversial to say. Like, if I say this on Twitter, people get angry.

Lex: Physical hardship is a kind of therapy.

Lex: I just rewatched Happy People Year in the Taiga, that Warner Herzog film where they document people that are doing trapping. They’re essentially just working for survival in the wilderness year round. And there’s a deep happiness to their way of life because they’re so busy in it. In nature.

Lex: Like, there’s something about that. Physical.

Pieter: Physical. Yeah.

Lex: Toil.

Pieter: Yeah. My dad taught me that. My dad always does, like, 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 then. And he’s just going in a circle around the house for, like, the last 40 years. So.

Lex: But.

Pieter: So he’s always doing construction in the house, and it’s his hobby. And he, like, he taught me when I. 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. 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.

2. Motivation and Low Points

Time: 00:06:00 - 00:13:05

Lex: Yeah. Construction is not about the destination, man. It’s about the journey.

Lex: Yeah. Sometimes I wonder, people who are always remodeling their house, is it really about their modeling or.

Pieter: No, no, it’s not.

Lex: Is it about the project journey, the puzzle of it?

Pieter: No, he doesn’t care about the results. Well, it shows me. Like, it’s amazing. Like, yeah, it’s amazing, but then he wants to go to the next room, you know, But I think it’s very metaphorical for work because I also. I never 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, it gives you something to wake up in the morning and, like, you know, have coffee and then 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 a hard work, you know, you need like an endeavor.

Lex: I think how much of the building that you do is about money? How much is it about just a deep internal happiness?

Pieter: 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, drum and bass music like 20 years ago, and I was always making stuff. So I think creative expression is like a meaningful work that’s so important. It’s so fun. It’s so fun to have like a daily challenge where you try figure stuff out.

Lex: 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.

Pieter: Yeah. The problem is I don’t dictate that. Right. Like if more people start using, if millions 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 going to do it, I’m going to do it like you, because it’s more, it’s more fun, it’s more indie, it’s more chill, it’s more creative. They don’t like this. They don’t like to be manager. Right. You become like a CEO, you become a manager. And I think a lot of people that start startups when they become a CEO, they don’t like that job actually, but they can’t really exit it, you know, but they like to do the groundwork, the coding. So. So I think that keeps you happy, like doing something creative.

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

Pieter: 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 can’t really choose these things.

Pieter: But I really respect that. I think Elon’s very different from VC founders, right? VC start. It’s like software. There’s a lot of bullshit in this world, I think there’s a lot of, like, dodgy finance stuff happening there, I think. And I never have, like, concrete evidence about it. But your gut tells you something’s going on with, like, companies getting sold to friends and VCs and then they do reciprocity. And this shady financial dealings with Elon, 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.

Lex: 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? That time when you were at a low point?

Pieter: 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, $2,000 a month. $2,000 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 when people get jobs, they only party in the weekend and they don’t hang anymore in a 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. I think it’s like Saturn return when you turn 27. It’s some concept where Saturn returns to the same place in the orbit that it was when you’re born. I’m learning so many things, some astrology thing.

Lex: So many truly special artists died when they were 27.

Pieter: Exactly. Someone of 27, man. And it was for me, like, I started going crazy because I didn’t really see, like, my future in Holland, buying a house, going living in the suburbs and stuff. So 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 and YouTube, but it’s like, what is the future here? You know? Like, 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 $500 a month or something. And I was looking at the ceiling thinking, like, Now I’m like, 27, I’m a loser. And that’s the moment when I started building startups. And it was because my dad said, if you’re depressed, you need to get sand, get a shovel, start shoveling, doing something. You can’t just sit still. Which is kind of like a interesting way to deal with depression, you know? Like, it’s not like, oh, let’s talk about it. It’s more like, let’s go do something. And. 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.

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

Pieter: Yeah. At a Stripe check. I’m not sponsored by Stripe, but at a Stripe, checkout button.

Lex: Is that still, like, the eas way to just, like, pay for stuff?

Pieter: Stripe 100? Like, I think so, yeah.

Lex: It’s a cool company. They just made it so easy. You can just click.

Pieter: Yeah. And they’re really nice. Like, the CEO Patrick is really nice behind the scenes.

Lex: It must be difficult to, like, actually make that happen, because that used to be a huge problem.

Pieter: Like, merchant, just.

Lex: Just adding a thing. A button where you can, like, pay for a thing. It’s.

Pieter: Dude. I know this because when I was at Trustworthy, 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. 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. And my dad had to. It was on my dad’s name, and he designed for this, and he started reading these terms and conditions, which is like, he’s liable for, like, 100 million in damages, and he’s like, I don’t want to sign this. I’m like, dad, come on. I need an immersion account. I need to make money on the Internet, you know. And he signed it and we sent it, we fax it to America and I had a merchant account, but then never nobody paid for anything. So that was the problem, you know.

Pieter: But it’s much easier now. You can sign up, you add some codes and.

Lex: Yeah, so 12 startups in 12 months.

3. Early Attempts: Flash Era and 12 Startups in 12 Months

Time: 00:13:05 - 00:19:54

Lex: So what? How do you start number one? What was that? What? Like, what were you feeling? What were you sitting behind the computer? Like, how much do you actually know about building stuff?

Pieter: At that point I could code a little bit because I did the 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 bass or techno house.

Lex: I saw one of them had like Flash were using Flash.

Pieter: Yeah. My album, my cd almost using Flash. Yeah, yeah, I sold my cd.

Lex: Yeah. Because Flash was. Flash was cool software. This is like the break like grandpa, you know. But Flash was cool. Yeah. And there was. What’s it called? Boy, I should remember this. Action script. There’s some kind of programming language.

Lex: Oh, yeah.

Pieter: In Flash back then that was the JavaScript. You know the JavaScript?

Lex: 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 Steve Jobs killed it. Steve Jobs.

Pieter: Steve Jobs said, flash sucks. Stop using it. Everyone’s like, okay.

Lex: That guy was right though, right? Yeah.

Pieter: I don’t know. Yeah, well, it was, it was a closed platform, I think, and closed. But that’s ironic because Apple, you know, they’re not very open. But back then Steve was like, this is closed, we should not use it. And it’s security problems, I think, which sounded like a cop out. Like I just wanted to say that to make it look kind of bad. The Flash was cool.

Lex: Yeah, yeah, it was cool for a time.

Lex: It. Listen, animated GIFs were cool for a time too.

Lex: They came back in a different way.

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

Lex: Like there’s like on the Internet you would have like a dancing rabbit or something like this and that was really exciting.

Pieter: You had like the, you know, Lex homepage. Everyone was centered.

Pieter: And you had like Peter’s homepage and the. Under construction.

Pieter: Gif, which was like a guy like with a helmet and the lights. Amazing banners.

Lex: Yeah. That’s how before, like, Google AdSense, you would have, like, banners for.

Pieter: Advertising was amazing. Yeah.

Lex: And a lot of links to porn, I think.

Pieter: Yeah. Or that was where the merchant accounts people would use for people would make money a lot. Only money made on the Internet was, like, porn or a lot of it.

Lex: Yeah. It was a dark place. It’s still a dark place, but there’s beauty in the darkness. Anyway. So you did some basic HTML.

Pieter: Yeah, but I had to learn the actual coding, so this was good. It was a good idea to every month launch a startup so I could learn to code, learn basic stuff. But it was still very scrappy because I didn’t have time to. Which was 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.

Lex: Do you remember the first one you did?

Pieter: I think it was Play my Inbox. Because back then, my friends, we would send. We would send, like, cool. It was before Spotify, I think we would send, like, 2014. We would send music to each other, like YouTube links. Like, this is a cool song. This is a cool song. And it was these giant email threads on Gmail and they were, like, unnavigatable. So I made an app that would log into your Gmail, get them emails and find the ones of YouTube links and then make kind of like a gallery of your songs. Like, essentially Spotify. And my friends loved it.

Lex: Was it scraping it? Like, what was.

Pieter: No, it uses, like, pop. Like pop or imap. You know, it would actually check your email. So it had, like, privacy concerns because it would get all your emails to find YouTube links. But then I wouldn’t save anything. But that was fun. It was like. And that first product already would get, like, pressed. Like, it went on, I think, like some tech media and stuff. And I was like, this is cool. It didn’t make money. There was no payment button. But it was actually people using it. I think tens of thousands of people used it.

Lex: That’s a great idea. I wonder, why don’t we have that. Why don’t we have things that access Gmail and extract some useful aggregate information?

Pieter: Yeah, you could tell Gmail, don’t Give me all the emails. Just give me the ones with YouTube links, you know, or something like that.

Lex: Yeah, I mean, there is a whole ecosystem of like, apps you can build on top of the Google. But people don’t never do this. 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.

Pieter: 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 vote. Oh, this. And a plugin should be free. You know, when I want to use a plugin in Google Sheets or something, I’m not going to pay for it. It should be free, which is. But if you go to a website and you actually, okay, I need this product. I’m going to pay for this because it’s a real product. So even though it’s the same code in the back, it’s a plugin, you know?

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

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

Lex: Yeah. That sucks.

Pieter: Like, Chrome Extension should be an extension for your startup, you know, you have a product. Oh, we also have a Chrome extension.

Lex: You know, I wish the Chrome extension would be the product. I wish Chrome would support that, like, where you could pay for it easily because, like, imagine, I can imagine a lot of products that would just live as extensions. Like improvements for social media, like GPTs, you know. GPTs?

Pieter: Yeah, like these ChatGPTs. They’re going to charge money for it now and you get a rev share, I think, from OpenAI. I made a lot of them also.

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

Pieter: I think the hard part is like figuring out what you shouldn’t add. Right. Which you shouldn’t build because you don’t have time. So you need to build a landing page. Well, you need to make the, you know, you need to build the product, actually, because it 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 foti. You sign up, you Pay 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 log in. 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 a product, build a landing page. You need to think about how are people going to find this? So are you going to put it on Reddit or something? How are you going to put it on Reddit without being looked at as a spammer? Right. Like, if you say, hey, it is my new startup, you should use it. No, nobody gets deleted. You know, maybe if you find a problem that a lot of people on Reddit already have on Subreddit, you know, like. And 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.

Lex: Time is limited.

4. Digital Nomad Life: Loneliness, Freedom, and Madness

Time: 00:19:55 - 00:32:43

Lex: Actually, can we go back to the. You laying in a feeling like a loser? Yeah, I still feel like a loser sometimes. What’s. What can you. Can you speak to that feeling? To that place of just like, feeling like a loser and. Because I think a lot of people in this world are laying in a room right now listening to this and feeling like a loser.

Pieter: Okay. So I think it’s normal if you’re young that you feel like a loser, first of all.

Lex: Especially when you’re 27. Yes.

Lex: There’s like a peak gap.

Pieter: Yeah. I think twin is at the peak. And so I would not kill yourselves. It’s very important, just get through it, you know, but because you have nothing, you have probably no money, you have no business, you have no job. Yeah, you, like Jordan 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. You need stuff. You need like, or a family. You need things around you. You need to build a life for yourself. You don’t build a life for yourself. You’ll be depressed. So if you’re alone in Asia, in a hostel, looking at the ceiling and you don’t have any money coming in, you don’t have a girlfriend, you Don’t. Of course you’re depressed is logic. But back then if you’re in the moment, you think there’s not logic. Something wrong with me, you know?

Pieter: 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 noticed because I know that there’s like digital nomads, that they kill themselves. And 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 10 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. Everybody’s really nice in Thailand, but you’re not part of the culture. You’re traveling around, you’re hopping from city to city. You don’t have a home anymore, you

Lex: feel disrooted and you’re constantly an outcast in that you’re different from everybody else.

Pieter: Yes, exactly. But people treat you like Thailand people are so nice, but you still feel like outcasts. And then I think that these are 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, was an American guy was selling illegal drugs via UPS to Americans. You know, on this website there were like a lot of drop shippers doing shady stuff. There’s a lot of shady things going on there. And they were. They didn’t look like very balanced people. 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.

Lex: 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?

Pieter: I struck upon it on accident because I was like, I’m going to graduate university and 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’s easy. I’ll just go there, figure Things out. And it’s cheap, it’s very cheap. Chiang Mai, I would live like for $150per month rent for like a private room. Pretty good. So I struggled on 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, 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 your home society, right? 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 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 free. You’re this attached from anything and anybody you disattached from your culture. You’re disattached from the culture you’re probably in because you’re staying very short.

Lex: I think Franz Kafka said, I’m free, therefore I’m lost, man.

Pieter: 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.

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

Pieter: For me, you know, because I was more like a developer. I wanted to make startups kind of. And, and it was like, it was like drugs being shipped to America, like diet pills and stuff, like non FDA approved stuff, you know, and they would like let. There was no like effort. They were like, they would save a beers and they would laugh about like all the dodgy shit kind of they’re

Lex: doing, you know, that part of the

Pieter: okay kind of vibe, you know, like kind of sleazy E com vibe. I’m not saying all E commerce these, you know, but. Right, but you know, this vibe, it

Lex: could be a vibe. And your vibe was more build cool shit. That’s ethical you know the guys with

Pieter: sports cars in Dubai? These people, you know?

Pieter: E Comm. Like, oh, bro, you got a drop ship. Yeah, and you’ll make 100 million a month. Those people was this shit. And I was like, this is not my people.

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

Pieter: No judgment, but.

Lex: 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.

Pieter: No, I, Like, I don’t want to judge. It was more. I know that for me, it wasn’t my world, it wasn’t my subculture. I want to make cool shit, you know, but they also think their cool shit is cool. So, you know. 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.

Lex: I mean, that’s a pretty cool way of life. Just if you romanticize it for a moment.

Pieter: It’s very romantic, man. It’s very. It’s colorful, you know, like, if I think about the memories, I mean, what

Lex: are some happy memories? Just like working. Working cafes or working in just the freedom that. That envelops you from with that way of life. Because anything is possible. You can just get up.

Pieter: I think it was amazing. Like, we would work. Like, you wouldn’t. I would make friends and we would work until, you know, 6:00am in Bali, for example, with, like, with Andre, my best friend, who’s still my best friend, and other friends. And we would work until like, the morning when the sun came up. Because at night the co. Working space was silent, you know, there was nobody else. And I would wake up like 6pm or 5pm I would drive to the coworking space on a motorbike. I would buy like 30 hot lattes from a cafe.

Lex: How many?

Pieter: 30? Because there was like. There was like six people coming or. We didn’t know. Sometimes people would come in.

Lex: Did you say three zero, 30? Yeah. Nice.

Pieter: And we would drink like four per person or something, you know, man, it’s body. I don’t know if they were powerful lattes, you know, but they were lattes. And we’d put it in a plastic bag and I would drive there and all the coffee was like falling, you know, everywhere. And then we’d go in the cores and have these coffees here and we’d work all night. We’d play like techno music and everybody would just work on Their like this was literally like business people, they would work in their startup and we’d all try and make something and then the sun would come up and the morning people, the, you know, the, the yoga, yoga girls and yoga guys would come in, you know, after the yoga class at 6 and they say hey, good morning. And we’re like, we look like this, you know, and we’re like, what’s up?

Lex: How are you doing?

Pieter: And we didn’t know how bad we looked, you know, but it was very bad. And then we would go home, sleep in like a hostel or a hotel and do the same thing and again and again and again. And it was this lock in mode, you know, like working and that was very fun.

Lex: So it’s just a bunch of you techno music blasting all through the night.

Pieter: Yeah, more like industrial. Not like this.

Lex: 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.

Pieter: You don’t like drum based music? Probably not, no, it’s too fast.

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

Lex: Level of anxiety. This must be a better word than anxiety. It’s like productive anxiety that I like, whatever that is.

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

Pieter: And it feels like it’s kind of like jet set life. Like it feels very beautiful. Like you’re seeing a lot of cool cities and what was your favorite place

Lex: that you remember you visited?

Pieter: 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 places. Like I’ve been to Vietnam and I’ve been to South America and stuff. I still think Thailand wins in how nice people are, how easy of a life people have their.

Lex: Everything’s cheap. Yeah, good.

Pieter: 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.

Lex: Pros and cons.

Pieter: I love Brazil also. My girlfriend is Brazilian, but I do love. Not just because of that, but I like Brazil. The problem still is the safety issue. You know, like 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 is amazing. If you go to the wrong areas like you, maybe you die, right?

Lex: Yeah, yeah. I mean that’s true, but it’s not true in Europe.

Pieter: So in Europe it’s much more true.

Lex: That’s average. You’re right. You’re right. It’s more averaged out.

Lex: I like it when there’s strong neighborhoods. When you’re like, you cross a certain street and you’re in a dangerous part of town, man. Yeah, I like it. I like there’s certain cities in the United States like that. Yeah, I like that. And you’re saying Europe is more.

Pieter: But you don’t feel scared?

Lex: Well, I don’t like danger. BJJ no, not even just that. I think danger is interesting. So danger reveals something about yourself, about others also. I like the full range of humanity.

Lex: So I don’t like the mellowed out aspects of humanity.

Pieter: I have friends like these are normal 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.

Lex: Oh yeah, no luxury.

Pieter: Yeah. It’s very European of you.

Lex: Like wait, was that. That’s a whole nother conversation. So you, you quoted Freya Stark. Quote, to awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world.

Lex: Do you remember a time you awoken in a strange town and felt like that we’re talking about small towns or big towns or man anywhere.

Pieter: I think I wrote it in some blog posts and like it was a common thing when you would wake up and this was like. Because I have this website, I started a website about this digital nomads like called nomad list.com and this is a community. So it was like 30,000 other digital nomads. Because I was feeling lonely. So I built this website and I stopped feeling lonely. Like I started organizing meetups and making friends and it was very common that people would say they would wake up and they would forget where they are.

Pieter: Like for the first time, half minute. And I had to look outside, like, where am I? Which country? Which sounds really like privileged, but it’s more like funny. Like you literally don’t know where you are because you’re so disrooted. 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 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.

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

Pieter: Yeah, you have like the novelty effect. Like you’re in a new place. Like here things are possible, you know, you don’t get bored yet. And that’s why people get addicted to travel.

Lex: You know, back to startups, you wrote a book on how to do this thing and gave a great talk on it. How to do startups. The book’s called Make Bootstrappers Handbook.

5. Finding Startup Ideas: From Problems to Inspiration

Time: 00:32:44 - 00:40:32

Lex: I was wondering if you can go through some of the steps. Idea, build, launch, grow, monetize, automate and exit. There’s a lot of fascinating ideas in each one. So idea stage, how do you find a good idea?

Pieter: So I think you need to be able to spot problems. So for example, you can go in your daily life. Like when you wake up and you’re like, what is stuff that I’m really annoyed with? That’s like in my daily life that doesn’t function well. And that’s a problem that you can see. Okay, maybe that’s something I can write code about. 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 see which one is, like, viable. You can actually do something and then start building it.

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

Lex: Because we kind of very quickly get accustomed to discomforts.

Pieter: Exactly.

Lex: Like, for example, like doorknobs.

Lex: Like design of certain things.

Pieter: Like new Lex Freeman doorknob.

Lex: That one. I know how much incredible design work has gone into. It’s really interesting. Doors and doorknobs. Just the design of everyday things. Forks and spoons. It’s going to be hard to come up with a fork that’s better than the current fork designs.

Lex: 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.

Pieter: Yeah, but that’s where travel comes in. Because when I started traveling, I started seeing stuff in other countries that you didn’t have. In Europe, for example, or America. Even, like, if you go to Asia, like, dude, especially 10 years ago, nobody knew about this. Like WeChats, 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. 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, that’s called arbitrage. You can go back to your country and build that same app for your country, for example. So you start seeing problems, you start seeing solutions that other countries already. Other people already did in the rest of the world. And also traveling in general just gives you more problems because travel is uncomfortable. You know, airports are horrible. Airplanes are not comfortable either. There’s a lot of problems you start seeing just getting out of your house,

Lex: you know, but also you can. I mean, in the digital world, you can just go into different communities and see what can be improved by the others in that.

Pieter: Yeah, yeah.

Lex: 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?

Pieter: 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 chatgpt and stuff, all these things were like, I didn’t start working with them because I had a problem. I had no problems. But I was very curious about technology and I was like playing with it and figuring out like first just playing with it and then you find something like, okay, this generates stable fusion, generates houses, very beautiful and interiors, you know,

Lex: so it’s less about problem solving, it’s more about the possibilities of new things you can create.

Pieter: Yeah, but that’s very risky because that’s the famous like solution, trying to find a problem and usually it doesn’t work. And that’s very common with startup founders. I think they have tech, but actually people don’t need to tech. Right.

Lex: Can you actually explain? It’d be cool to talk about some of the stuff you created. Can you explain this photo? AI.com. yeah.

Pieter: 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 as you want anywhere in any clothes, with facial expressions like happy or sad or poses, all this stuff.

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

Pieter: So on the left you have the prompt, the box. Yeah. So you can write like. So model is your model. It’s Lex Friedman. So you can write like model as a. Blah, blah, blah, whatever you want, then press the button and it will take photos. Will take like one minute photos.

Lex: What are you using for the hosting for the compute?

Pieter: Replicate.

Lex: Okay.

Pieter: Replicate.com. they’re very, very good.

Lex: Okay. It’s cool like this interface wise, it’s cool that you’re showing how long it’s going to take. This is amazing. So it’s taking a. I’m presuming you just loaded in a few pictures from the Internet.

Pieter: Yeah. So I went to Google Images, typed in Lex Friedman. I added like 10 or 20 images. You can open them in the gallery and you can use your cursors to. Yeah. So some don’t look like you. So the hit and miss rate is like, I don’t know, I’d say like 5050 or something.

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

Pieter: It was very bad in the beginning. It was so bad. But still people signed up to it. You know

Lex: there’s two. Lexus is great. It’s getting more and more sexual. It’s making me very uncomfortable, man.

Pieter: But that’s the problem with these models because. No, we need to talk about this because the models. Diffusion. Yeah. So the photorealistic models that are like fine tuned, they were all trained on porn in the beginning and it was a guy called Hassan. So I was trying to figure out how to do photorealistic AI photos and it was stable. Diffusion by itself is not doing that well. Like the faces look all mangled.

Pieter: And it doesn’t have enough resolution or something to do that well. So. But I started seeing these base models, these fine tuned models and people would train on porn and I would try them and they would be very photorealistic. They would have bodies that actually made sense, like body anatomy. But if you look at the photorealistic models that people use now still there’s still core of porn there of naked people. So I need to prompt out the naked and everybody needs to do this with AI startups with imaging. You need to prompt out the naked stuff. You need to put a naked.

Lex: You have to keep reminding the model. You need to put clothes on the.

Pieter: 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 like a nipple detector.

Lex: Oh, NSFW detector.

Pieter: Because you get, the journalists get very angry if they, you know, if you sexualize. There was a journalist I think that got angry that used this and it was like, oh, it made me. It showed like a nipple because Google Vision didn’t detect it. So there’s like these kind of problems you need to deal with. You know, that’s what I’m talking about. This is with cats. But look at the cat face. It’s also kind of mangled. You know,

Lex: I’m a little bit disturbed.

Pieter: You can zoom in on the cat if you want. Like click. Yeah. This is a very sad cut. It doesn’t have a nose.

Lex: It doesn’t have a nose, man.

Pieter: But this is the problem with AI startups because they all act like it’s perfect. Like this is groundbreaking but it’s not perfect. It’s like really bad half the time.

Lex: So if I wanted to sort of update model as.

Pieter: Yeah, so you remove this Stuff and you write like whatever you want, like in Thailand or something. Or in Tokyo.

Lex: In Tokyo, yeah.

Pieter: And then you say like at night with neon lights, like you can add more detail.

Lex: I’ll go in Austin. Do you think I’ll know? In Texas? In Austin, Texas. Cowboy hats in Texas, Yeah.

Pieter: As a. As a cowboy.

Lex: As a cowboy. It’s going to go so towards the porn direction, man.

Pieter: I hope not. It’s the end of my career.

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

6. Tech Stack Philosophy: PHP, jQuery, and the Framework Debate

Time: 00:40:32 - 00:48:04

Pieter: Let’s see.

Lex: Oh, wow. So this whole interface you’ve built, this is really well done.

Pieter: It’s all jQuery. Do I still use jQuery?

Lex: Yes, you’re not the only one. The entire the web is php, the

Pieter: stack PHP and jquery. Yeah. And sqlite.

Lex: You’re just like one of the top performers from a programming perspective that are still openly talking about it. But everyone’s using php. If you look at most of the web is still probably PHP and JPM 70%.

Pieter: It’s because of WordPress, right? Because the blogs are. I’m seeing a revival now. People are getting sick of frameworks. Like all the JavaScript frameworks are. So what do you call it? Wieldy. 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.

Lex: Can you actually just speak to that stack? You build all your websites, apps, startups, projects, all of that with mostly vanilla HTML, JavaScript with jQuery, PHP and Light. So that’s a really simple stack and you get stuff done really fast with that. Can you just speak to the philosophy behind that?

Pieter: I think it’s accidental because that’s the thing. I knew like I knew php, I knew HTML css, you know, because you make websites. And when my startup 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 at the end of time I. These things were growing like this and I was launching more project and I never had time. It’s like one day, you know, I’ll. I’ll start coding properly and I never got to it.

Lex: I sometimes wonder if I need to learn that stuff. It’s still to do item for me to really learn Node JS or Flask or these kind of. React. Yeah, react. And it’s there’s. 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.

Pieter: Yeah, just 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 should, maybe shouldn’t.

Lex: I wonder if there’s like. I really want to measure performance and speed. I think there’s a deep wisdom in that. Yeah, I do think that frameworks and just constantly wanting to learn the new thing, this complicated way of software engineering gets in the way. I’m not sure what to say about that because definitely like you shouldn’t build everything from just vanilla JavaScript or vanilla C for example. C when you’re building systems engineering is like, there’s a lot of benefits for a pointer, safety and all that kind of stuff. So I don’t know, but it just feels like you can get so much more stuff done if you don’t care about how you do it.

Pieter: Man. This is my most controversial take, I think, and maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like there’s frameworks now that raise money. They raise a lot of money. Like they raise 50 million, 100 million, $3 million. And the idea is that you need to make the developers, the new developers, like when you’re 18 or 20 years old, get them to use this framework and then add a platform to it where the framework can. It’s open source, but you probably should use the platform which is paid to use it. And the, the cost of the platforms to host it are a thousand times higher than just hosting it on a simple AWS server or a VPS on Digital Ocean. Right. So there’s obviously like a monetary incentive here. Like we want to get a lot of developers to use the technology and then we need to charge them money because they’re going to use it in startups. And then the startups can pay for the bills, but 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, 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 products with it. And then a lot of people like, wow, use this. And I started noticing this because when I was shipping my stuff, people would ask me, what are you using? I would say, I would 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. And I never understood 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.

Lex: So that’s a really good perspective. But in addition to that is like when you say better, it’s like, can we get some data on the better? Because I want to know from the individual developer perspective and then from A team of five, team of 10, team of 20 developers measure how productive they are in shipping features, how many bugs they create, how many security holes.

Pieter: PHP was not good with security for

Lex: a while, but now it’s good in theory. In theory. Is it though? Now it’s good now as you’re saying it, I want to know if that’s true because PHP was just. The majority of websites on the Internet could be true. Is it just 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, I know it gets attacked a lot because it’s so popular. It definitely does have security holes, but maybe a lot of other systems have security holes as well. Anyway, I just sort of question the conventional wisdom that keeps wanting to push software engineers towards frameworks, towards complex, like super complicated sort of software engineering approaches that stretch out the, the time it takes to actually build the thing 100%.

Pieter: And it’s the same thing with big corporations. 80% of the people don’t do anything. It’s like, it’s not efficient. And if your benchmark is like people building stuff, that actually gets done and for society, right. If we want to save time, we should probably use technology that’s simple, that’s pragmatic, that works, that’s not overly complicated, doesn’t make your life like a living

Lex: hell, you know, and use a framework when it obviously solves a problem, a direct problem that you.

Pieter: Of course, yeah, of course. I’m not saying you should code without a framework. You should use whatever you want. But yeah, I think it’s suspicious, you know, and, and I think it’s because when I talk about it on the Twitter, like there’s a lot of this, this army comes out, you know, this is these framework armies. Yeah, man. Something my gut tells me I want

Lex: to ask the framework army, what have they built this week? It’s the Elon question, what did you do this week?

Pieter: And did you make money with it? You know, did you charge use? Is it a real business? And yeah.

Lex: So going back to the cowboy, first

Pieter: of all, some don’t look like you, right? But some do.

Lex: Every aspect of this is pretty incredible. I’m also just looking at the interface. It’s really well done. So this is all just jquery and this is really well done. So take me through the journey of photo AI. Most of the world doesn’t know much about stable diffusion or any of this, any of the generative AI stuff. And so you’re thinking, okay, how can I build cool stuff with this? What was the origin story of photo AI?

7. The Birth and Explosion of Photo AI

Time: 00:48:04 - 01:12:53

Pieter: I think it started because stable diffusion came out. So stable diffusion is like this, 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. 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. So essentially write a prompt and then it generates a photo of that or image of that in any style. Like they would use artist names to make a Picasso kind of style and stuff. And I was trying to see what is it good at? Is it good at people? No, it’s really bad at people. But it was good at houses. So architecture, for example, I would generate architecture houses. So I made a website called thishousedoesnotexist.org and it generated like they called like house porn. Like houseporn is like a subreddit. And this was stable diffusion, like the first version. So it looks really. You can click for another photo. So it generates all these kind of non existing houses.

Lex: It is house porn.

Pieter: But it looked kind of good, especially back then. It looks really cool now. Things look much better.

Lex: It’s really, really well done. Wow.

Pieter: And it also generates like a description

Lex: and you can upvote. Is it nice upvote it, man. There’s so much to talk to you about, like the choices here. It’s really well done.

Pieter: 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 old time, you see quite beautiful ones. Yeah. So this one is my favorite, the number one. It’s like kind of like a.

Lex: How is this not more popular?

Pieter: 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

Lex: I

Pieter: tried to upload first generate interior designs and then I tried to do. There was a new technology called image to image where you can input an image like a photo and it would kind of modify the thing. So you see it looks almost the same as photo guys. The same code essentially.

Pieter: So I would upload a photo of my interior where I lived and I would ask like change this into like, 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 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. And fine tuning is where you have this existing AI model and you fine tune it on the 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. And then for fun I uploaded photos of myself and here’s where it happened to train myself. And this would never work, obviously. And it worked and actually it started understanding me as a concept. So my face worked and you could do different styles. Like me as a like very cheesy medieval warrior, all this stuff. So I was like, this is another startup. So now I did avatarai me. I couldn’t get the dot com and this was, yeah, avatarai me. Well now it’s forwards to photoai because it pivoted.

Lex: Got it.

Pieter: But this was more like cheesy things. So this is very interesting because this went so viral. It made like, I think like 150k in a week or something. It’s the most money I ever made. And then big. This is very interesting. The big VC companies like Lensa, which are much better at iOS and stuff than me, I didn’t have iOS app. They quickly built an iOS app that does the same and they found technology and it’s all open technology, so it’s good. And I think they made like $30 million with it. They became like the top grossing app after that.

Lex: How do you feel about that?

Pieter: I think it’s amazing, honestly. And it’s not like you didn’t have

Lex: like a feeling like, ah, fuck, no.

Pieter: 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, something that. And they already had an app. They had an app in App Store for like, I think, retouching your face or something. So they were very smart. They add these avatars to their. It’s a feature. They had the users, they do a push notification to everybody. We have these avatars. Yeah, man. They made crazy. I think they made. They made so much money and I think they did a really great job. And I also made a lot of money with it. But that was. I quickly realized it wasn’t my thing because it was so cheesy. It was like, kitsch. You know, it’s kind of like me as a Barbie or me as a. You know, it was too cheesy. I wanted to go for, like, what’s a real problem we can solve? Because this is going to be a hype. This is 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 Picasso style. And art is easy because you interpret all the problems that AI has with your face are, like, artistic, if you call it Picasso, but if you make a real photo, all the problems you face, you look wrong. So I started making Photo AI, which was like a pivot of it, where it was like a photo studio where you could take photos without actually needing a photographer, needing a studio. You don’t just, you know, you just type it. And I’ve been working on it for like the last.

Lex: 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?

Lex: Yeah. So what? There’s a Tweet here. Sold $100,000 in AI generated avatars.

Pieter: And it’s a lot. Like, it’s a lot for anybody. It’s a lot for me. Like making 10k a day on this.

Lex: That’s amazing. That’s amazing.

Pieter: And then the nested tweet, like that’s a launch tweet. And then before there is like the me hacking on it.

Lex: Oh, I see. So that. Okay, so October 26, 2022, I trained an ML model on my face

Pieter: because my eyes are quite far apart. I learned when I did YouTube, I would put like a photo of like my DJ photo, you know, my mixture, and people would say I look like a hammerhead shark. It’s like the top comment. So then I realized my eyes are far apart.

Lex: Yeah, the Internet helps you.

Pieter: Yeah. How you look, you know.

Lex: Boy, do I love first trap. Well, what is. Is this. Wait.

Pieter: And it’s water from the waterfall, but the waterfall’s in the back, you know, so what’s going on?

Lex: So this is how much of this is real?

Pieter: It’s all AI.

Lex: It’s all AI. Yeah. That’s pretty good though, for the early days.

Pieter: Exactly. So, but this was hit or miss, so you had to do live curation because 99% of it was really bad. So these are the photos I uploaded.

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

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

Pieter: I think it’s cropped. It’s like a crop, but the layout, but they’re. They’re square photos. So they’re 512 by 512 because that’s

Lex: stable diffusion, but nevertheless not great capture the face. Like, it’s not. It’s not like a collection of several hundred photos that are like exactly like.

Pieter: I would imagine that too. When I started, I was like, oh, this must be like some 3D scan technology, right?

Pieter: 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 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 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 literally a link to stripe to pay, but there’s no code in the back, so all you know is you have customers that paid money. Then I added like a. Some. A Typeform link. So Typeform is a site where you can create like your own input form, like Google Forms. So they would get an email with a link to the Typeform, or actually just a link after the checkout, and they could upload their photos. So enter the email, upload the photos and then. And I launched it and I was like, here, first sale. So that’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. 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. 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.

Lex: Right. So first it was the Typeform and they uploaded through the Typeform stripe checkout image.

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

Pieter: No, download the images myself as a zip file to unzip file.

Lex: And you unzipped it?

Pieter: Yeah, unzipped, yes. And then no, I’m. Because, you know, do things don’t skill. Paul Graham says. Right. So and then I would train it and then I would email them the photos, I think for my personal email. So here’s your. Here’s your avatars, you know, and they liked it. They were like, wow, it’s amazing.

Lex: You emailed them with your personal email.

Pieter: Didn’t have email address on this domain.

Lex: And this is like 100 people.

Pieter: 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 sites. He’s like, yeah, amazing app, Great work. So it’s like, this is different than normal reaction.

Lex: It’s Bill Gates, isn’t it?

Pieter: Cannot say anything. Just like shirtless pics, gdpr, like privacy. European regulation cannot share anything. But I was like, wow. But this shows. Like, so you make something and then if it takes off very fast, you’re like, it’s validated, you know, you’re like, here’s something that people really want. But then also I thought, this is hype. This is going to die down very fast. And I did, because it’s too cheesy.

Lex: But you had to automate the whole thing. How’d you automate it? So what’s the AI component? How hard was that to figure out?

Pieter: Okay, so that’s actually in many ways the easiest thing because there is all these platforms already. Back then there was platforms for fine tune stable diffusion. Like now I use Replicate. Back then I used different platforms, which was funny because that platform, when this thing took off, I would tweet because I tweet always, like, how much money these websites make. And then. So you called vendor, right? The platform that did the GPUs, they increased their price for training from $3 to $20 after they saw that I was making so much money. So immediately my profit is gone because I was selling them for $30 and I was in a slack with them, like saying, what is this? Can you just put it back to $3? They say, yeah, maybe in the future. We’re looking at it right now. I’m like, what are you talking about? You just took all my money. And they’re smart.

Lex: Well, they’re not that smart because like, you also have a large platform and a lot of people respect you. So you can literally come out and say that.

Pieter: I think it’s like kind of dirty to cancel a company or something. I prefer just bringing my business elsewhere. But there was no elsewhere back then, right? So I started talking to other AI model ML platforms. So Replicate was on those platforms And I started DMing the CEO, saying, can you please create like, it’s called Dream Booth, this fine tuning of yourself. He add this to your site because I need this because 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 say, please, please, please. And then after a week they said we’re doing it, we’re launching this. And then this company became, it was like not very famous company. It became very famous with this stuff because suddenly everybody was like, oh, we can build similar apps, like avatar apps. And everybody started building avatar apps and everybody started using replicate for it. And that was from these early DMs with like the CEO, like Ben Firsh, very nice guy and he was like, they never price garage me, they never treated me bad, they always been very nice. It’s a very cool company. So you can run any ML model, any AI model, LLMs you can run

Lex: on here and you can scale.

Pieter: Yes, they scale. Yeah, yeah. And I mean you can do. Now you can click on the model and just run it already. It’s like super easy. You log in with GitHub, that’s great. And by running it on the website then you can automate with the API. You can make a website that runs

Lex: the model, generate images, generate text, generate video, generate music, generate video, fine tune models.

Pieter: They do anything. Yeah, it’s a very cool company.

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

Pieter: Yeah. 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 ML, you know, like you would understand because you’re in the ML world. I wouldn’t understand.

Lex: Now it’s noob friendly.

Pieter: Yeah, exactly. And I didn’t know how it worked, but I knew that they could probably do this. And they did it, they built the models and now I use them for everything. And we trained like, I think now like 36,000 models, 36,000 people already.

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

Pieter: Yes. So many hacks. The hacks, it’s like 100 hacks to make it work. What is the Chris 9?

Lex: Well, not, not the secrets, but the more like insights maybe about the human face and the human body. Like what kind of stuff get messed up a lot.

Pieter: I think people, man, it’s a living people don’t know how they look. So yeah, they generate photos of themselves and then they say it doesn’t look like me. Yeah, but then you know, you can check the training force. It does look like you. You don’t know how you look. So there’s a face dysmorphia of yourself that you have no idea how you look.

Lex: Yeah, that’s hilarious. I Mean, I’ve got to. One of the least pleasant activities in my existence is having to listen to my voice and look at my face. So I get to like really, really have to sort of come in to terms with the reality of how I look and how I sound.

Pieter: Everybody and.

Lex: But people often don’t, right? Really, you have a distorted view perspective.

Pieter: I know that. Like, I would. If I would make a selfie how I think I look, that 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.

Lex: Yeah. Yeah.

Pieter: You shouldn’t choose them yourself because you don’t know how you look.

Lex: 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.

Lex: 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.

Pieter: 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.

Pieter: And it’s not like, oh my God. And people notice it. People notice your hammerhead eyes, you know, but it’s like, that’s me, that’s my face. So I love myself and that’s confidence. And confidence is attractive.

Lex: 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.

Lex: And obviously different for men and women, a different age, all this kind of stuff. But be underneath it all, the personality, all of that, when, when the face comes alive, that also is the thing that makes you beautiful.

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

Pieter: Yeah. One thing that worked was like 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 resemblance of the body because some people are skinny, some people are muscular or whatever. So you want to have that too. So now I mix full body photos in the training with face photos, face crops and it’s all automatic. And I know that other people, they use again AI models to detect what are the best photos in this training set and then train on those. But it’s all about training data. And that’s with everything in AI. 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, the gold.

Lex: Do you have any guidelines for people of how to get good data, how to give good data to finetune on?

Pieter: 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 and everything else to be diverse. Like different.

Lex: So diverse lighting as well. Diverse everything.

Pieter: 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 Carpathi, I think says this, we don’t really know how this thing works, but it does something. But nobody really knows why.

Pieter: Like we cannot look into the model of an LLM, like what is actually in there. We just know it’s like a 3D matrix of numbers. Right. So it’s very frustrating because some things, you 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 improve things.

Lex: I mean, there’s a whole field now of mechanistic interpretability that 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.

Pieter: They’re very vain, like me, you know, like, I want to look good in your podcast, for example. Yeah, for sure.

Lex: And 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 about photography. I Basically used your approach for photography. I like Google. How do you take photographs?

Lex: 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 and you have to have, like, the lenses. And I talked to a guy, an expert of shaping the sound in a room. Okay. Because I was thinking I’m gonna do a podcast, studio, whatever. I should probably, like, treat the. Do a sound treatment on the room. And like, when he showed up and analyzed the room, he thought everything I was doing was horrible. And then that’s when I realized, like, you know what? I don’t need experts in my life. No, I didn’t kick him. I said, thank you. Thank you very much.

Pieter: Thank you. Great tips.

Lex: 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. With the PHP studio, I can have a little suitcase. I use, like, just the basic sort of consumer type of stuff. One light. It’s great. Yeah.

Pieter: 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 guest focus

Lex: on the stuff that matters.

Pieter: Yeah. And I think that’s very common. They call it 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. Yeah, but like, man, you can make a Hollywood movie on an iPhone, you know, if the content is Good enough. And it will probably be original because you would be using an iPhone for

Lex: it, you know, so that said, I. So the reason I brought that up with photography, there is wisdom from people. And one of the. One of the things I realized, you probably also realized this, but how much power light has to. To convey emotion. Take one light and move it around. 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 start to realize this. And I would definitely love AI help in creating great portraits of people. Guest photos, for example. That’s a small use case, but for me that’s. I suppose it’s an important use case because, like, I want people to look good, but I also want to capture who they are. Maybe my conception of who they are, what makes them beautiful, what makes their appearance powerful in some ways. Sometimes it’s the eyes. Oftentimes it’s the eyes, but there’s certain features of the face can sometimes be really powerful and I can’t. It’s also kind of awkward for me to take.

Pieter: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lex: Photographs. So I’m not collecting enough photographs for myself to do it with just those photographs. If I can load that off onto AI and then start to play with like lighting, you should do this and

Pieter: 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 Control Net. Control Net is where, for example, your photos in your podcast are usually like from the angle, right? So you can create a Control Net face pose that’s always like this. So every model, every photo you generate uses this Control Net pose. For example, I think will be very fun for you to try out that software.

Lex: Do you play with lighting at all? Do you play with lighting? With pose with the man.

Pieter: 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 upload kind of like a light map. So for example red, purple, blue, and use 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.

8. Learning AI and Rapid Prototyping

Time: 01:12:54 - 01:26:36

Lex: What’s your advice for People in general on how to learn all the state of the art AI tools available. Like you mentioned new models coming out all the time. Yeah, like what? How do you pay attention? How do you stay on top of everything?

Pieter: 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 asked me this, like, 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 sent them some URL and they all start laughing like, what is this? But they’re real, like people hacking around in AI. They get hired by big companies and they’re on X and most of them are anonymous. It’s very funny. They use anime avatars. I don’t. But those people hack around and then they publish what they’re discovering. They talk about papers, for example. So yeah, definitely X.

Lex: It’s great. Almost exclusively all the people I follow are AI people.

Pieter: Yeah, it’s a good time now.

Lex: Well, but also just brings happiness to my. To my soul. Because there’s so much turmoil on Twitter.

Pieter: Yeah. Like politics and stuff.

Lex: 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.

Pieter: Yeah, 100%. I like Twitter for that most. Like building stuff, like seeing other because it inspires you to build and 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 wanna 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 make an app out of it or a website.

Lex: Can you speak a little bit more to the process of it becoming better and better and better. Photo A so I had this photo

Pieter: AI and a lot of people using it. There was like a million or more photos a month being generated. And I discovered I was testing parameters like increase the step count of generating a photo or changing the sampler like a scheduler. Like you have DPM2 karras. 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, which parameters were better and which were worse.

Lex: So you starting to figure out which models are actually working well.

Pieter: 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 of random parameters. And that worked really well. I don’t do a lot of testing anymore because it’s like I kind of reached like a diminishing point where it’s like, it’s kind of good. But that’s. There was a breakthrough.

Lex: Yeah. So it’s really about the parameters and models that choose and letting the users help do the search in the space of models and parameters for you.

Pieter: But actually, so like Stable diffusion, I use 1.5, 2.0 came out. 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 also not like, what do you call neutered? Like they neutered to make it super 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 very insane. They gave us this open source model that everybody uses. They raised like hundreds of millions of dollars. They didn’t make any money with it or 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, it’s amazing.

Lex: You’re not even using the latest one.

Pieter: No. And the strange thing is that this company raised hundreds of millions, but the people that are benefiting from it are really small, like people like me who make these small apps that are using the model. And 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?

Lex: 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 they’re using the open source model.

Pieter: It’s kind of like those frameworks, but then they didn’t, you know, bribe enough influence to use it and they didn’t charge money for the platform, you know.

Lex: Okay, so back to your book. And the ideas wouldn’t even get to the first step, 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?

Pieter: 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.

Pieter: Would be quite challenging, but I can build something.

Lex: Could you actually write down like space company?

Pieter: No. I think asteroid mining would be very cool because you go to an asteroid, you take some stuff from there, you bring it back, you sell it and you can hire someone to launch the thing. So all you need is like the robot that goes to the asteroid and the robotics. Interesting. I want to also learn robotics. So maybe that could be, I think

Lex: both the asteroid mining and the robotics.

Pieter: Yeah. Together.

Lex: I feel like.

Pieter: No, exactly. This is it. 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.

Lex: It’s not nomadlist.com. no, it’s not asteroid mining. You have to build stuff. Gravity is really hard to overcome. Come.

Pieter: 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 the rockets.

Lex: Oh, you use something like SpaceX.

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

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

Pieter: No, I used. Back then I used Trello.

Lex: Trello.

Pieter: 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.

Lex: Type to yourself on television.

Pieter: Because you use WhatsApp, right? I think so you have like message to yourself thing also. Yeah.

Lex: So you talk to yourself on telegram.

Pieter: Yeah. Use like a notepad, not forget stuff and then I pin it.

Lex: You know, I love how like you’re not using super complicated systems or whatever. You know, people use obsidian now there’s a lot of these notion where you have systems for note taking. You’re not your notepad. You’re Notepad Exe guy. If you’re a Windows user, man, I

Pieter: saw some YouTubers doing this. Like, there’s a lot of these productivity gurus also. And they do this whole 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 draw on paper. Draw a calendar. People, students use this. And you do coloring and stuff. And I’m like, dude, I did this for a week. And then I’m like, what am I doing in my life? I could just write it as a message to myself and it’s good enough.

Lex: Speaking of ideas, you shared a tweet explaining why the first idea sometimes might be brilliant idea. The reason for this, you think, is the first idea submerges from your subconscious and was actually boiling in your brain for weeks, months, sometimes years in the background. The eight hours of thinking can never compete with a perpetual subconscious background job. So this is the idea that if you think about an idea for 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.

Pieter: It 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? It’s boiling. And then when it’s ready, it’s like, ding. It’s like a microwave. It comes out and there you have your idea.

Lex: You think you have ideas like that?

Pieter: Yeah, all the time. 100.

Lex: It’s just stuff that’s been like, there.

Pieter: And I also. It comes up and I bring it, I send it back, you know, like, send it back to the kitchen. Boil more.

Pieter: And it’s like a soup that of ideas that’s cooking. It’s 100%. This is how my brain works. And I think most people.

Lex: 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.

Pieter: Yes. So many times, like startup founders are too early with their idea. Yeah, 100%.

Lex: Robotics is an interesting one for that because, like, there’s been a lot of robotics companies that failed.

Lex: 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. It’s is not sufficient to create a compelling enough product from which to make money. So all. So there’s this long line of robotics companies that have tried. They had big dreams and they failed. Yeah.

Pieter: Like Boston Dynamics. I still don’t know what they’re doing, but they always upload YouTube videos and it’s amazing, but I feel like a lot of these companies don’t have. It’s like a solution looking for a problem for now. You know, military obviously is useless, but like, 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. It doesn’t really solve something for me yet. And that’s kind of the tech looking for a solution. Right. But one day will when the personal

Lex: computer, when the Mac came along, there’s a big switch that happened. It somehow captivated everybody’s imagination. You could like the application, the killer apps became apparent. You can type in a computer.

Pieter: But they became apparent like immediately back then. They also had like this thing like we don’t need these computers. They’re like a hype. And it also went like in kind of like ways.

Lex: 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.

Pieter: Exactly. Yeah.

Lex: The robots that are there are Roombas. So they’re vacuum cleaners or they’re Amazon Alexa.

Pieter: Yeah. Or dishwasher. I mean, it’s essentially a robot.

Lex: Yes. But the. The intelligence is very limited, I guess is one way we can summarize all of them except Alexa, which is pretty intelligent. But is. Is limited with the kind of ways it interacts with you. It’s, you know that. That’s just one example.

Lex: 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.

Lex: You know, like, I sometimes wonder like what my. What I was meant to do. You have these plans for your life. You have these dreams.

Pieter: I think you’re meant to build robots.

Lex: Okay. Me personally, maybe. Maybe that’s the sense of I’ve had. But it could be other things. Hilariously enough be the thing I was meant to be is to talk to people.

Lex: Which is weird because I always was anxious about talking to people.

Pieter: It’s like a really.

Lex: Yeah. I’m scared of this. I was Scared. Yeah, exactly.

Pieter: I’m scared of you.

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

Pieter: 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 going to 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?

Lex: Yeah, yeah. And there’s Universe has a kind of sense of humor.

Lex: I guess you have to just. Yeah. Allow yourself to be carried away by the waves.

Pieter: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Lex: Have you felt that way in your life?

Pieter: Yeah, all the time. Like. Yeah, that’s like. I think that’s the best way to live your life.

Lex: 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?

Pieter: Possibly. I think relationships, like you want to hold relationships, right. You want to hold your girlfriend, you want to become wife and all this stuff. But I think you should stay open to where, like for example, where you want to live. Like, I don’t know, we don’t know where we want to live, for example, that’s something that will figure itself out. It will crystallize where you will get sent by the waves to somewhere where you want to live, for example, what you’re going to do. I think that’s a really good way to live your life. I think most stress comes from trying to control, hold things. It’s kind of Buddhist. You need to lose control, let it loose and then things will happen. When you do mushrooms, when you do drugs, psychedelic drugs, the people that are control freaks get bad trips because you need to let go. I’m pretty control freak actually. And when I did mushrooms when I was 17, I. I was very good. And at the end it wasn’t so good because I tried to control. It’s 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, very tranquil way to lead your life.

Lex: Yeah. Actually, when I took ayahuasca, that lesson is deeply within me already, that you can’t control anything.

Lex: I think I probably learned that the most in jiu jitsu. So just let go and relax.

Lex: And that’s Why? I had just an incredible experience. There’s, like, literally no negative aspect of my ayahuasca experience or any psychedelics I’ve ever had. Some of that could be with my biology, my genetics, whatever, but some of it was just not trying to control. And you just surf the way, for sure.

Pieter: I think most stress in life comes from trying to control.

9. Building Hood Maps: Crowdsourced Maps Go Viral

Time: 01:26:38 - 01:41:02

Lex: So once you have the idea, step two, build. How do you think about building the thing? Once you have the idea, I think

Pieter: 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 nomads. It wasn’t a website. It launched as a Google spreadsheet. So it was a public Google spreadsheet. Anybody could edit. And I was like, I’m collecting, like, cities where we can live as digital nomads with the Internet speeds, the cost of living, other stuff. And I tweeted it, 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, which was like five retweets. And a lot of people started editing it. And there was like hundreds of cities in this list, like from all over the world with all the data. It was very crowdsourced. And then I made that into a website. So figuring out 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, 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. 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. So use whatever you can use. And if you cannot code, use, you know, spreadsheets, landing page generators, whatever.

Lex: Yeah. And the crowdsourcing element is fascinating. It’s cool. It’s cool when a lot of people start using it. You get to learn so fast. Yeah. Like, I’ve actually did the spreadsheet thing. You share a spreadsheet publicly. And I made it editable.

Lex: It’s so cool.

Pieter: Things start happening.

Lex: Yeah, I did it for like a workout thing. Cause I was doing a large amount of push ups and pull ups every day.

Pieter: I remember this, man.

Lex: Yeah. And like, and, and while I said Google sheets is pretty limited in that everything’s allowed. So people could just write anything in any cell and they can create new sheets.

Lex: New tabs. And he just exploded. And one of the things that I really enjoyed is there’s very few trolls. Because actually other people would delete the trolls. There would be like this weird war of they, they want like to protect the thing. It’s an immune system that’s inherent to the thing.

Pieter: It becomes a society, you know, in a spreadsheet.

Lex: 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. At the bottom I’m going to. Yeah, it’s fast. I mean, but that kind of crowdsourcing element is really powerful. And if you can create a product that use that as A to his benefit, that’s, that’s really nice. Like any kind of voting system, any kind of rating system for A and B testing is really, really, really fascinating. So anyway, so Nomad list is great. I would, I would love to, for you to talk about that. But one sort of way to talk about it is through you building hood maps.

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

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

Pieter: 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, 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 Jordan or the pipe or something more hipster areas, like a little bit 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, color coded. Like, red is tourists, green is rich. You know, green money, yellow is hipster. You can figure out where you need to go in a city when you travel. Because I was traveling a lot, I wanted to go to the cool spots.

Lex: So just use color.

Pieter: Color. Yeah, yeah. And I would use a canvas. So I thought, okay, what do I need? I need to.

Lex: Did you know that you would be using a canvas?

Pieter: No, I didn’t know it was possible because I didn’t know.

Lex: This is a cool. This is the cool thing. People should really check. This is how it started because, like, you’re honestly capture so beautifully the. The humbling aspects of. The embarrassing aspects of, like, not knowing what to do. It’s like, how do I. How do I do this? And you, like, document yourself. Yeah, you’re right, dude. I feel embarrassed about myself. It’s called being alive.

Lex: So you’re like, you don’t know anything about. Canvas is a way.HTML 5 thing that allows you to draw shapes, draw images,

Pieter: just draw pixels, essentially. And that was special back then because before you could only have elements, right? So you want to draw a pixel, use a convulse. 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 convulse, and then I started drawing. And then I felt like, obviously other people need to edit this because I cannot draw all these things myself. So I 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 MSM center. There’s like six people say it’s tourists, this part of the center, but two people say it’s like hipster. Okay, so the tourist part wins, right? It’s just an array. So find the most common value in a little pixel area on a map. So most People say it’s tourist, it’s tourists, and it becomes red. And I would do that for all the GPS corners in the world.

Lex: Can you just clarify? Do you have to be, as a human that’s contributing to this? Do you have to be in that location to make the label?

Pieter: No. People just type in cities and go, like, go berserk and start drawing everywhere.

Lex: Would they draw shapes or would they draw pixels?

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

Lex: I mean, that’s. That’s obviously a guy.

Pieter: I would do the same thing. Draw penises.

Lex: That’s the first thing. When I show up to Mars and there’s no cameras, I’m drawing a penis on the same.

Pieter: Exactly, man. I do it in the snow, you know? But the penises did not become a problem because I knew that not everybody would draw a penis and not in the same place. So most people would use it fairly. So just if I had enough crowdsource data. So you have all these pixels on top of each. It’s like a layer of pixels, and then you choose the most common pixel. So, yeah, it’s just like a ball, but in visual format. And it worked. And within a week, I had enough data, and. And. And it was like, cities that did really well. Like Los Angeles. A lot of people started using it. Like, most data’s in Los Angeles because Los Angeles is.

Lex: Has defined neighborhoods.

Lex: And not just in terms of the. The official labels, but, like, what they’re known for. Yeah. What are the. Do you. Did you provide the categories that they were allowed to use as labels?

Pieter: The colors.

Lex: Yeah, as colors.

Pieter: So I think you can see there. There’s like hipster, tourist rich business. So there’s always a business area. Right. And then there’s a residential. Residential is gray. So I thought those were the most common things in the city. Kind of.

Lex: And a little bit memey. Like, it’s almost fun to label it as that. Yeah.

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

Lex: Okay, so we’re looking. Oh, boy. Drunk hipsters. Airbro and bros. Hipster girls who do cocaine.

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

Lex: Yep.

Pieter: That seems also overpriced and underwhelming.

Lex: Let me see. Let me make sure this is accurate. Let’s see. Dirty sixth for people who know Austin know that that’s important to label. 6th street is famous in Austin. Dirty 6 Drunk Fat Boys. Accurate. Drunk Fat Bros. Continued on 6 Very Wellness West 6th Drunk Douche Bros. Go from Fred to douche douche. I mean, it’s very accurate so far. They only let hot people live here. That’s. I think that might be accurate.

Pieter: It’s like the district exercise freaks on the river. Yeah, that’s true.

Lex: Dog runners. Accurate. Saw a guy in the fish costume get beat up here.

Pieter: I want to know this story.

Lex: Like, so that’s. That’s all user contributed.

Pieter: Yeah. And that’s like, stuff. I couldn’t come up with it because I don’t know Austin. I don’t know the memes here. Subcultures.

Lex: And then me as a user can upload or download this. So this is completely cross because of Reddit.

Pieter: You know, upload, download, took it from there.

Lex: That’s really, really powerful. Single people with dogs. Accurate. At which point did it go from colors to the actually showing the text?

Pieter: I think I added the text like a week after. So here’s like the pixels.

Lex: So that’s really cool. The pixels. How do you go from there? That’s a huge amount of data. So there’s. We’re now looking at an image where it’s just a sea of pixels that call it different colors in a city. So how do you combine that to be a thing that actually makes some sense?

Pieter: I think here the problem was that you have this data, but it’s like it’s not locked to one location. 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.

Pieter: Like lattice, longitude. But the number will have a lot of commas or a lot of decimals. Right. Because it’s very specific. 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 decimals, which I discovered so that you’re talking about this neighborhood or this street. Right. So that’s what I did. I just took the decimals off and then I saved it like this. And then it starts going into like a grid and then you have a grid of data. You get like a pixel map kind of.

Lex: And then you said it looks kind of ugly. So then you smooth it.

Pieter: Yeah, I started adding blurring and stuff. I think now it’s not smooth again because I liked it better. People like the pixel look kind of. Yeah, a lot of people use it and it keeps going viral. And every time my maps bill, like mapbox, I had to stop using first use Google Maps. It went viral and Google Maps, it was out of credits. So I and I had to. It’s so funny, during when I launched it went viral Google Maps, the map didn’t load anymore. It says over the limits you need to contact enterprise sales. And I’m like, but I need now like a map, so. And I don’t want to contact enterprise sales. I don’t want to go on a call schedule with some calendar. So I switched to mapbox and then had Mapbox for years. And then it went viral and I had a bill of $20,000. Was like last year. 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 map platform. So it’s very expensive product and never made any dollar money. But it’s very fun. But it’s very expensive.

Lex: What do you learn from that? So like from that experience, because when you leverage somebody else’s through the API.

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

Lex: Yeah. It’s super complicated.

Pieter: I think that the thing is more about like you can’t make money with this project. I tried to do many things to make money with it and it hasn’t worked.

Lex: You talked about like possibly doing advertisements on it or somehow or people sponsoring it. Yeah, it’s really surprising to me that people don’t want to advertise on it.

Pieter: 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, like, subsidize it. It’s kind of a little bit part of Nomad List. Like, I put it on Nomad List in the cities as well. But I also realized, like, you don’t need to monetize everything. Like, some products are just cool and, you know, it’s like, it’s cool to have hoodmaps exist. I want this to exist. Right?

Lex: 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 because there’s a lot of compute required to actually bring it to life.

Pieter: Also, where do you put the ad? Right. 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 going to do? You’re going to, like, it’s hard to figure out where is this.

Lex: Yeah. And people don’t want to pay for it.

Pieter: No, exactly. Because if you make people pay for it, you lose 99% of the user base and you lose the crowdsource data. So it’s not fun anymore. It stops being accurate. Right. So you kind of. They pay for it by crowdsourcing the data. But then, yeah, it’s fine. You know, it doesn’t make money, but it’s cool.

Lex: But that said, Nomad List makes money.

10. Nomad List and Travel Products

Time: 01:41:03 - 02:01:28

Lex: So what was the story behind Nomad List?

Pieter: So Nomad List started because I was in Chiang Mai in Thailand, which is now like the second city here, and I was working on my laptop. I met other nomads there, and I was like, okay, this seems like a cool thing to do, working 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 South America or Asia, it was very slow, like 0.5 megabits, so you couldn’t watch a YouTube video. Thailand, weirdly, had quite fast Internet, but I wanted to find other cities where I could go to work on my laptop, whatever, and travel. But we needed fast Internet. So I Was like, let’s 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 the rent was $200 per month or something where I had, you know, some money that I could actually grant something. And. And there was Nomad list and it still runs, I think it’s now almost 10 years.

Lex: So just to describe how it works, like, you know, I’m looking at Chiang Mai here. There’s a total score, it’s ranked number two.

Pieter: Yeah, that’s like a Nomad score.

Lex: 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. Education level, power grid, vulnerability to climate change, income level.

Pieter: It’s a little much, you know, English speaking.

Lex: It’s awesome. It’s awesome.

Pieter: Walkability, keep cutting stuff.

Lex: Because for certain groups of people, certain things really matter and this is really cool. Happiness. I’d love to ask you about that. Nightlife, Free wi fi, ac. Female friendly. Freedom of speech.

Pieter: Yeah, not so good in Thailand.

Lex: You know, values derived from national statistics. I like how that one has.

Pieter: 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.

Lex: I mean this is really fascinating. So this is for city. Yeah, it’s basically rating all the different things that matter to you in Internet. And this is all crowdsourced.

Pieter: 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, you know, freely use. Like I started getting problems across this 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 people, where people were from and stuff. So I started switching to data sets and now it’s mostly datasets. But one thing that’s still crowdsourced is so people add where they are, they add their travels to their profile. And 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, and you can see the people, the users that are actually there. And it’s like 30,000 or 40,000 members. So these people are in Austin now.

Lex: And 1800 remote workers in Austin now, of which eight plus members checked in. Members who will be here soon. And go, yeah.

Pieter: So we have meetups. So people organize their own meetups. And we have about, I think like 30, 30 per month. So it’s like one meetup a day. And I don’t do anything. They organize themselves. So I just. It’s a whole black box. It just runs and I don’t do a lot on it. It pulls data from everywhere and it just works.

Lex: Cons of Austin is too expensive. Very sweaty and humid.

Lex: Difficult to make friends.

Pieter: Difficult to make friends. Interesting, right? I didn’t know that.

Lex: Difficult to make friends. I mean, but there’s all crowds, but mostly it’s pros. Yeah. Pretty safe, fast Internet.

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

Lex: So once they actually show up to a city, how do you figure out what area? Like, where to get fast Internet, for example. Like, for me, it’s consistently a struggle to figure out hotels with fast wi fi, for example, Like a place. Okay, okay. I show up to a city, there’s a lot of fascinating puzzles. I haven’t figured out a way to actually solve this puzzle. When I show up to a city, figuring out where I can get fast Internet connection and for podcasting purposes, where I can find a place with a table that’s quiet. Right. That’s not easy. Construction sounds, all kinds of sounds. You get to learn about all the sources of sounds in the world. And also, like, the. The quality of the room, because the

Pieter: more

Lex: the emptier the room. And like, if it’s just walls without any curtains or any of this kind of stuff, then there’s echoes in the room anyway. But if you figure out that a lot of hotels don’t have tables, they don’t have, like, normal, weird desk Right. Yeah. They have.

Pieter: It’s not a center table.

Lex: 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, annoying tables. They don’t.

Pieter: It’s too designy.

Lex: It’s too design. They’re not really real tables.

Pieter: What if you get ikea?

Lex: Buy ikea.

Pieter: Yeah. Before you arrive, you order an ikea.

Pieter: Like nomads do this. They get desks.

Lex: 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 and quality that you get is, is, is huge. Hotels have a lot of problems. Pros and cons. Like, hotels have the problem that the pictures somehow never have good representative pictures of what’s actually going to be in the rooms.

Pieter: And that’s a problem. Like, and you fake photos, man.

Lex: If I could have the kind of data you have on Nomad list for hotels. Yeah, man, I would. And can make a lot of money on that too.

Pieter: Yeah. The booking fees. Affiliate. Right. I thought about this idea because we have the same problem. Like I go to hotels and there’s specific ones that are very good. And I know now the chains and stuff. And. But even if the, even if you go to some chains are very bad in a specific city and very good

Lex: in other cities and each individual hotel has a lot of kinds of rooms. Yeah. 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?

Pieter: Scan it.

Lex: 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 that don’t give any information. And I feel like there’ll be this pressure for all the hotels to join that site and you can make a shit ton of money because hotels make a lot of money.

Pieter: I think it’s true. But the problem is with these hotels, like it’s the same with airline industry. Why does every airline website suck when you try book a flight? Yeah, like very strange. Like why does it have to suck? Obviously there’s competition here. Why doesn’t the best website win?

Lex: What’s the Explanation of that.

Pieter: 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. And with hotels similar, you need a hotel anyway. So do you have time to figure out the best one? Not really. You kind of just need to get the place booked and you need to get the flight and you’ll go through the pain of this process. And that’s why this process always sucks so much with hotels and airline websites and stuff because they don’t have an incentive to improve it. Because generally only for a super upper segment of the market, I think like super high luxury, it affects the actual booking.

Lex: Right. I don’t know. I think that that’s a good, interesting theory. I think there must be a different theory. My, my theory would be that great engineers, like great software engineers are not allowed to make changes.

Lex: 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, they try to work there and they, they’re not allowed to really make any contributions and then they leave. And so you have a lot of mediocre software engineers. They’re not really interested in improving any other thing. And like literally they would like to improve the stuff. But the bureaucracy of the place, plus all the bosses, all the high up people are not technical people. Probably they don’t know much about what web dev, they don’t know much about programming, so they just don’t give any respect. You have to give the freedom and the respect to great engineers as they try to do great things. That feels like an explanation. Like if you were a great programmer, would you want to work at America Airlines or no?

Lex: I’m torn on that because I actually as somebody who lost program would love to work at American Airlines so I can make the thing better. Yeah.

Pieter: But for, I would, I would work there just to fix it for myself, you know.

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

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

Pieter: Like I don’t, I Think it’s money. Do you know booking.com?

Lex: sure.

Pieter: So it’s a booking. It’s the biggest booking website in the world. It’s Dutch actually. And they have teams because my friend worked there, they have teams for a specific part of the website, like a 10 by 10 pixels area where they run tests on this. So they run tests and they’re famous for this stuff like, oh, there’s only one room left, right. Which is red letter. It’s like one room left book now. And they got a fine from the European Union about this. Kind of interesting. So they have all these teams and they run the test for 24 hours. They go to sleep, they wake up. Next day, they come to the office and they see, okay, this performed better. This website has become a monster. But it’s the most revenue generating hotel booking website in the world, is number one. So that shows that it’s not about like user experience. It’s about like, I don’t know about making more money. And you know, not every company but you know, if they’re optimizing, it’s a public company if they’re optimizing for money.

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

Pieter: Yeah, but it’s always startups. They start with disrupting like booking also started as a startup in 1997. And then they become like the old shit again. Like, you know, Uber now starts to become like a taxi again. Right. It was very good in the beginning. Now it’s kind of like taxis now in many places are better. They’re nicer than Ubers. Right. So it’s like this circle.

Lex: I think some of it is also just. It’s hard to have ultra competent engineers.

Lex: Like stripe seems like a trivial thing, but it, it’s hard to pull off. Like why was it so hard for Amazon to have buy with one click? Which I think is a genius idea. Make buying easier. Make it as frictionless as possible. Just click a button once and you bought the thing. As opposed to most of the web was a lot of clicking and it often doesn’t work like with the airlines.

Pieter: Remember the forms would delete, you could click next submit and 404 or something or your Internet would go down your modem. Yeah, man.

Lex: And I would have an existential crisis. The frustration would take over my whole body and I would just wanted to quit life for a brief moment there. Yeah.

Pieter: I’m so happy to form stays in Google Chrome now when something goes wrong. But that’s so Google. Somebody at Google Improved society with that. Right.

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

Pieter: They don’t anymore.

Lex: There’s a bunch of bureaucracy.

Lex: At Google, so many brilliant, brilliant people there, but it just moves slowly.

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

Pieter: Yeah, but I mean Apple does this. Like I studied in business school, Apple does competing product teams that operate as startups. So three to five people, they make something. They have multiple teams that make the same thing. The best team wins. So I think you need to emulate like a free market inside a company to make it entrepreneurial, you know? Yeah. You need entrepreneurial mentality in a company to, to come up with new ideas and do it better.

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

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

Pieter: 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, these big VR glasses before Apple Vision Pro. And I was like, oh, this is going to be big, so I need to learn this. So I know nothing about 3D. I installed like, I think Unity and Blender and stuff and I started learning all this stuff because I thought this was a new nascent technology that was going to be big and if I had the skills for it, I could use this to build stuff. I think with learning, for me, I think learning is so funny because people always ask me, how do you learn to code? Should I learn to code? And I’m like, I don’t know. 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 chatgpt how to do this thing. How to do this thing. Every day I’m getting better at my Skill so you never stop learning. So the whole concept of like, how do you learn? Well, you never end. So where do you want to be? Do you want to know a little bit? Do you want to know a lot? Do you want to do it for your whole life? So I think taking action is the best step to learn. So making things like, you know, nothing, just start making things. Okay, so like how to make a website, search how to make a website. Or nowadays you ask ChatGPT, how do I make a website? Where do I start? It generates codes for you, right? Copy the code, put it in a file, save it, open it in Google Chrome or whatever, you have a website and then you start tweaking with it. And you start, okay, how do I add a button? How do I add AI features? Right. Like nowadays. So it’s like by taking action, you can learn stuff much faster than reading books or.

Lex: Actually, I’m more curious. Let me ask Perplexity, how do I make a website? I’m just curious what he would say. I hope it goes with like really basic vanilla solutions. Define your website’s purpose. Choose a domain name. Select a web hosting provider. Choose a website, a builder or CMS website builder platform.

Pieter: Sounds like wix or Squarespace is what I said.

Pieter: Landing page.

Lex: How do I say if I want to programming it, Program it myself. Design your website. Create essential pages.

Pieter: Yeah, Even tells you to launch it, right? Like start, launch your website.

Lex: Cool. Well, I mean you could do that.

Pieter: Yeah. But this is literally it. Like it’s.

Lex: This is if you want to make

Pieter: a website, this is the basic, like Google Analytics.

Lex: But you can’t make Nomad list with this website. You can with wix. Like with.

Pieter: No, you can, you can get pretty far. I think you get pretty far. These website builders are pretty advanced. Like all you need is a grid of images, right, that are clickable, that open like another page. Yeah, you can get quite far.

Lex: How do I learn the program? Choose a programming language to start with.

Pieter: Your free boot camp is good.

Lex: Work through resources thematically. Practice cooling regularly for 30, 60 minutes a day. Consistency is key. Join programming communities like Reddit. Yeah, yeah, it’s pretty. It’s pretty good. Yeah, it’s pretty good.

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

Lex: Yeah, it clarifies it for sure. And Just start building, like keep, build, build, like actually apply the thing. Whether it’s AI or any of the programming for web development. Just have a project in mind, which I love. The idea of 12 startups in 12 months. Or like build a project almost every day. Just build the thing and get it to work and finish it every single day. That’s a cool experiment.

Pieter: I think that was the inspiration. There was a girl who did 160 websites in 160 days or something, literally mini websites, and she learned to code that way. So I think it’s good to set yourself challenges, you know, like don’t. You can go to some coding bootcamp, but I don’t think they actually work. I think it’s better to do like for me, how 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 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.

Lex: Yeah, that thing of just keep doing it and don’t quit that urgency that’s required to finish a thing, that’s why it’s really powerful. When you documented this, the creation of hood maps or the like a working prototype, that there’s a. Just a constant frustration, I guess. It’s like, how do I do this? And then you look it up and you’re like, okay, you have to interpret the different options you have. You’re like. And then just try it. And then. And then there’s a dopamine rush of like, ooh, it works.

Pieter: Cool, man. It’s amazing. And I live streamed it. It’s on YouTube and stuff. People can watch it and it’s amazing when things work. It’s look, it’s just like amazing that you. I look very not. I don’t look far ahead. So I only look, okay, what’s the next problem to solve? And then the next problem and at the end you have a whole app or website or thing, you know. But I think most people look way too far ahead. They look. It’s like this poster Again, you don’t know how hard it’s going to be. So you should only look for the next thing, the next little challenge, the next step and then see where you

Lex: end up and assume it’s going to be easy.

Pieter: Yeah, exactly. Be naive about it because you’re going to have very difficult problems. A lot of the big problems won’t be. Even tech will be public, right? Maybe people don’t like your website. You will get canceled for a website. For example, like, a lot of things can happen.

Lex: 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 the power of the crowdsourcing, but there’s also the negative aspects of people being able to criticize.

Pieter: So, man, I think haters are actually good because I think a lot of haters have good points. And it takes like stepping away from the emotion of like, your website sucks because blah, blah, blah, and you’re like, okay, just remove this. Your website sucks because personally, what did he say? Why did he not like it? And he figured out, okay, he didn’t like it because the signup was difficult or something. Or it wasn’t the data. They say, no, this data is not accurate or something. Right? Okay, I need to improve the quality of the data. This hater has a point. I think it’s dumb to completely ignore your haters, you know? And also, man, I think I’ve been there when I was like 10 years old or some of you on the Internet just shouting crazy stuff. That’s like most of Twitter, you know, or half Twitter Twitter. So you have to take it with a grain of salt, man. You need to grow a very thick skin on Twitter. On X. People say, but I mute a lot of people. I found out I muted already 15,000 people recently. I checked. So in 10 years I muted 15,000 people.

Lex: So that’s like, that’s one by one manual.

Lex: Oh, wow.

Pieter: So 1500 people per year. And I don’t like to block because then they get angry, they make a screenshot and they say, ah, you blocked me. So I just mute and it disappear and it’s amazing.

11. Growth, Monetization, and Fighting Spam

Time: 02:01:29 - 02:13:32

Lex: So you mentioned Reddit. So hood maps that make it to the front page of Reddit?

Pieter: 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 were crazy. And it was at night and it was amazing, 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 for 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, we’ll 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 photoeye by you or somebody else by some random guy. So there’s all these AI influencers that they write about. They show AI apps and then they ask money later. Like when a video goes viral, all I can do is do it again and send me $4,000 something. I’m like, okay, I did that, for example. But it works like TikTok is a very big platform for user acquisition and organic. 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 can make an app take off as well?

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

Pieter: And you don’t need a lot of followers anymore because on X and a lot of platforms because TikTok X I think, is in reels also, they have the same algorithm now. It’s not about followers anymore.

Lex: It’s about.

Pieter: They test your content on a small subset, like 300 people. If they like it, it gets tested to a thousand 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 a thousand followers or 100.

Lex: What’s your philosophy of monetizing how to make money from the thing you build?

Pieter: Yeah, so a lot of startups, they do like free users. So you could sign up and use the app for free, which is. It never worked for me. Well, because I. I think free users generally don’t convert. And I think if you have VC funding, it makes sense to get free users because you can spend your funding on ads and you can get like millions of people come in, 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 make it work that you need like, it’s very difficult. I think it’s best to start and just start asking people for money in the beginning. So show your app like, what are you doing on your landing page? Like make a demo or whatever video and then if you want to use it Pay me money. Pay $10, $20, $30. I would ask more than $10 per month. Like Netflix, like $10 per month. But Netflix is a giant company that can, you know, they can afford to make it so cheap, relatively cheap. If you’re an individual, like an indie hacker, like you are making your own app, you need to make like at least $30 or more on a user to make it worthy for you. You need to make money, you know,

Lex: and it builds a community of people that actually really care about the product also.

Pieter: 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 build 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 1,000 pages is quite difficult. And if you charge them like $30, you have 30k a month. That’s a lot of money.

Lex: That’s enough to like live a good life. Yeah, live a pretty good life. I mean that could be a lot of costs associated with hosting.

Pieter: So that’s another thing. I make sure my profit margins are very high so I try to keep the cost very low. I don’t hire people, I, I try negotiation 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 give me a discount because it’s too expensive. And they say sure, 50%. I’m like, wow, very good. And I didn’t know this. You can just ask. And especially in now it’s kind of recession, you can ask companies, I need a discount or I kind of need to, you don’t need to be asshole about it, say I kind of need a discount or I need to go maybe to another company. So maybe discount like here and there and it says sure. A lot of them will say yes, like 25% discount, 50% discount. Because you think the price on the website is the price of the API or something. It’s not like, you know, and also

Lex: you’re a public facing person.

Pieter: Oh, that helps also.

Lex: 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.

Pieter: Yeah, it’s like a secret hack. But I think even without it depends how much discount they will give you. Know they’ll maybe give more. But that’s why you should shit post on Twitter. So you get discounts maybe.

Lex: Yeah. And also when it’s crowdsourced, I mean paying does prevent spam or help prevent spam also.

Pieter: Yeah, it gives you high quality users. High quality users. Free users are. Sorry, but they’re horrible. It’s just like millions of people, especially with AI startups, you get a lot of abuse. So you get millions of people from anywhere just abusing your app, just. Just hacking it and whatever.

Lex: Like there’s something on the Internet you mentioned like 4chan discovered hood maps.

Pieter: Yeah, but I love Fortune. I don’t love Fortune but you know, I mean like they’re so crazy. Especially back then. Like that’s. It’s kind of funny what they do. You know.

Lex: I actually. What is it? This new documentary on Netflix. Anti social network or something like that that was really. Was fascinating. Just four channels. Just a. You know, the spirit of the thing.

Pieter: Fortune understands Fortune.

Lex: It’s so much about freedom and also like the humor involved in. With the system and it’s just anti

Pieter: system but for fun.

Lex: The. The dark aspect of it is you’re having fun, you’re doing anti system stuff. But like the Nazis always show up

Pieter: and it’s somehow that started happening.

Lex: It starts drifting somehow.

Pieter: Yeah, it’s 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 4chan for fun and they would post like crazy offensive stuff. And this was just to scare off people. So we’d show it to other people. Say hey, do you know this Internet website, 4chan? Just check it out.

Pieter: And they’d be 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. So kind of cool.

Lex: But yeah, it goes dark. It goes dark and if you have those people show up, they’ll for the fun of it do a bunch of racist things and all that kind of stuff you’re saying.

Pieter: But everything’s. I think it was never. Man, I’m not a fortunate. But like I. It was always about provoking. It’s just provocateurs, you know.

Lex: But the. The provoking in the case of Hood Maps or something like this can. Can damage the. 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 otherw. It destroys the town. It destroys the thing.

Pieter: They’re kind of like pen testers, you know, like penetration testers, hackers. They just test your app for you and then you add some stuff. Like I add like, I add 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, was like a very relaxing video that’s like kind of ASMR with like glowing jelly streaming like this to relax them, you know, or cheese melting on the toast. Chill them out.

Lex: Yeah, I like it. But actually a lot of stuff I didn’t realize how much originated in 4chan in terms of memes. Rick roll. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know that RickRoll originated in 4chan. Like there’s so many memes, like most of the memes that you think the

Pieter: word roll, I think, comes on 4chan. Like not the word roll, but like in this case in a meme use, like you would get like roll doubles because every. There was like post IDs on 4chan, so 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, there’s so much funny stuff.

Lex: Yeah, I mean, that’s the Internet. That’s purists. But yeah, again, the dark stuff kind of seeps in. And it’s nice to keep the dark stuff to like some low amount. It’s nice to have a bit of noise of the darkness, but not too much. Yeah. And. But again, like, you have to pay attention to that with, I mean, I guess spam in general. You have to fight that with Nomad list. How do you fight spam, man?

Pieter: I use GPT4 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 GPT4 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 then sends me a message on telegram when it rejects reviews. And I check it and it’s. Man, it’s so on point.

Lex: Automated.

Pieter: Yes. And it’s so accurate. It understands double Meanings. Um, I have GPT4 running on the, on the, on the chat community. It’s a chat community of 10,000 people and they’re chatting and they start fighting with each other. Um, and I used to have human moderators was very good, but they would start fighting the human moderator, like, this guy is biased or something. Now I have GPT4 and it’s really, really, really, really good. It understands humor. It understands like you could say something bad, but it’s kind of like a joke and it’s kind of not offensive so much so it shouldn’t be deleted. Right. It understands that. You know, I would love to have

Lex: a GPT4 based filter of like, of different kinds of. For X. Yeah.

Pieter: I thought this week I tweeted like a fact check. You can click fact check and then GPT4. Look, GPT4 is not always right about stuff.

Pieter: But it can give you a general fact check on a tweet. Usually what I do now when I write something difficult about economics or something or AI, I put in GPT4. I say, can you fact check it? Because I might have said something stupid. And the stupid stuff always gets taken out by the replies, like, oh, you said this wrong. And then the whole tweet kind of doesn’t make sense anymore. So I asked GPT4 to fact check a lot of stuff.

Lex: So fact check is tough one.

Lex: But it would be interesting to sort of rate a thing based on how well thought out it is and how well argued it is. Yeah, that. That seems more doable. That seems like more doable. Like it seems like a GPT thing because that’s less about the truth and it’s more about the rigor of the thing.

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

Lex: And actually the ranking of the reply is not.

Pieter: Doesn’t make any sense.

Lex: It doesn’t make sense. No. And I like to sort in different kinds of ways.

Pieter: 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. A lot of stuff I just miss and I don’t. I want to see the good stuff

Lex: and also the notifications or whatever is just complete chaos. Yeah, it’d be nice to be able to filter that in interesting ways. Sort in interesting ways because, 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 that’s positive or negative. It’s like, okay, if it’s a very

Pieter: good comment, it should happen, but it should probably look a little bit more at like, do these people have followers? Because they’re probably more engaged in the platform, right?

Lex: 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.

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

Pieter: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does make sense.

Pieter: X could be very proof of that.

12. Automate Everything

Time: 02:13:32 - 02:24:58

Lex: I think one thing you espouse a lot, which I love, is the automation step. So 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 explain your philosophy there? What do you mean by automate?

Pieter: 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, stuff that you would do in the beginning yourself and whatever. Community management and organizing meetups for Nomades, for example. There would be a job, for example. And I thought, like, I don’t have the money for that and I don’t really want to run like a big company with a lot of people because there’s a lot of work managing these people. So I’ve always tried to automate these things as much as possible. And this can literally be like. For Nomad List, it’s literally like a. It’s not a different other startup, but it’s like a webpage where you can organize your own meetup, set a schedule, a date, whatever. You can see how many nomads will be there at that date. So, you know, there will be actually enough nomads to meet up, right? And then when it’s done, it sends a tweet out on the Nomad List account. There’s a meetup here. It sends a direct message to everybody in the city who are there, who are going to be there, and then people show up on a bar and there’s a meetup and that’s fully automated. And for me it’s so obvious to make this automatic. Why would you have somebody organize this? It makes more sense to automate it. And this with most of my things I figure out how to do it with code. And I think especially now with AI, you can automate so much more stuff than before because AI understands things so well. Like before I would use if statements. Right now you ask GPT. You put something in GPT for and in the API and it sends back like this is good, this is bad.

Lex: Yeah. So you basically can now even automate sort of subjective type of things.

Pieter: This is the difference now. And that’s very recent. Right.

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

Pieter: Yes man, a lot of cron jobs.

Lex: A lot of cron jobs.

Pieter: It’s like I literally I log into the server and I do like sudo crontab dash e and then I go into the editor and I write like hourly and then I write php, 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.

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

Pieter: I have these web pages I make, they’re called like health checks. So like health check php and then it has like emojis like a, has like a green check mark if it’s good and a red one if it’s bad. And then it does like database curious for example, like what’s the Internet speed in for example Amsterdam. Okay, it’s a number, it’s like 27 point megabits. So it’s accurate number. Okay, check good. Then it goes to the next and it goes on all the data points. Did people sign up in the last 24 hours? It’s important because maybe the sign up broke. Okay, check. Somebody sign up. Then I have 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. Then if it’s bad, it sends a message to me on telegram saying, hey, what’s up? It doesn’t say, hey, what’s up? It sends me alert, hey, sweetie, 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. But the good thing is like the last few years, things don’t break anymore. And definitely 10 years ago when I started, everything was breaking all the time. And now it’s like almost last week was like 100.000% uptime. And these health checks are part of the uptime percentage. So it’s like everything works.

Lex: You’re actually making me realize 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.

Pieter: It feels good to look at, you

Lex: know, it’s just be like, okay, yeah, all right, we’re okay, Everything’s okay. Yeah. And like you can see like when was the last time something wasn’t okay? And it’ll say like never. Or like, meaning like you’ve, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve checked since you’ve last cared to check. It’s all been okay for sure.

Pieter: It used to send me the, the good health checks. Like, yeah, you know, it all works. It all works.

Lex: But it’s been so often and I’m

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

Lex: to integrate everything into one place. I automate, like everything. Yeah. Also just a large set of cron jobs. A lot of the publication of this podcast is, is done. All, everything’s just on automatically. It’s all clipped up. All the, all this kind of stuff. Yeah, but it would be nice to automate even more like translation. All this kind of stuff would be nice to Automate.

Pieter: 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. The JavaScript sends the JavaScript error to the server and then it sends to my telegram from all my websites.

Lex: So you get like a message.

Pieter: So I get like a uncaught 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.

Lex: That’s really cool. That’s really cool.

Pieter: But this is the same stuff people, they pay very big SaaS, companies like New relic for. Right. To manage the stuff. So you can do that too. You can use off the shelf. I like to build myself. It’s easier.

Lex: Yeah, it’s nice. It’s nice to do that kind of automation. I’m starting to think of what are the things in my life I’m doing myself that could be automated.

Pieter: Ask jgbt. Give your daily your day and then ask it, what part should automate?

Lex: Well, one of the things I would love to automate more is my consumption of social media, both the output and the input.

Pieter: Man, that’s very interesting. I think there’s some startups that do that. They summarize the cool shit happening on Twitter with AI. I think the guy called Swyx or something, he does a newsletter that’s completely AI generated. We have the cool, the cool new stuff in AI.

Lex: Yeah, I mean, I would love to do that, but also like across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, all this kind of stuff. Just like, okay, can I. Can you summarize the Internet for me for today?

Pieter: Summarize Internet.com, yeah, dot com.

Lex: Because I feel like it pulls in way too much time. But also I don’t like the effect it has some days on my psyche

Pieter: because, like, haters or just general content politics?

Lex: Like. No, no, just general. Like, for example, like, Tick Tock is a good example of that for me. I sometimes just feel dumber after I use Tick Tock. I just feel like I don’t use it anymore. Empty somehow. And I’m like, uninspired. Yeah, it’s funny in the moment, I’m like, 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, like, I feel way dumber and I don’t really want to do much for the rest of the day.

Pieter: 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.

Lex: You know, So I mean, with social media, with. With X sometimes for me too, it’s. I think I’m probably naturally gravitating towards the drama.

Pieter: Yeah, Hard wheel.

Lex: Yeah. And so with following AI people, especially ad people that only post technical content has been really good because then I just look at them and I. And then I go down rabbit holes of like learning New papers have been published or good repos or, or just any kind of cool demonstration of stuff and 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.

Pieter: It’s difficult. You need to like manage your, your platforms. You know, I have a mute word list as well, so I mute like politics stuff because I don’t really wanted on my feet and I think I’ve 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.

Lex: It’s some level of automation that would be interesting. I wish I could access X and Instagram through API easier.

Pieter: You need to spend $42,000 a month, which my friends do.

Lex: 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 LLM or something like this. But if I just want to 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 LLMs to control the content I consume and maybe publish that. Maybe they themselves can see how that could be used to improve their system. So there’s not enough access.

Pieter: Yes. You could screen cap your phone, right? Come here. An app that watches your screen with you.

Lex: You could, but I don’t really know

Pieter: what it would do. Maybe it’s going to hide stuff before you see it.

Lex: I have Chrome extensions. I write a lot of Chrome extensions that hide parts of different pages and so on. 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.

Pieter: I have this extension like.

Lex: Well, I wrote my own because it’s easier because it keeps Changing. It’s like, it’s. It’s not easy to keep it dynamically changing, but they’re really good at, like, getting you to be distracted and, like, starting related accounts. Related stuff.

Pieter: I’m like, I don’t want related.

Lex: And like, 10 minutes later you’re like. Or something that’s trending.

Pieter: 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. But I have this extension to, like, YouTube Unhook, which, like, it hides all the related stuff. I can just see the video, and it’s amazing.

Lex: And.

Pieter: But sometimes I need to, 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 I tap. And then I’m like, five minutes later with this face, like. And you’re just talking, and it’s like, what happened? I was gonna open. I was gonna play, like, the coffee mix, 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 very difficult.

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

13. Solo Operation Philosophy: Never Sell, Code Empathy, and Design

Time: 02:24:59 - 02:42:38

Pieter: Man, you shouldn’t ask me because I never sold my company.

Lex: And you’ve never. All the successful stuff you’ve done, you’ve never sold it.

Pieter: Yeah, it’s kind of sad, right? So I’ve been in a lot of acquisition, like, deals and stuff. And I learned a lot about finance people as well there, like manipulation and due diligence and then changing the valuation. Like, people change the valuation after. So a lot of people string you on to acquire you, and then it takes like, six months. It’s a classic. It takes six to 12 months. They want to see everything. They want to see your stripe and your code and whatever. And then in the end, they’ll change the price to lower because you’re already so invested. So it’s like a negotiation tactic, right? I’m like, no, then I don’t want to sell. Right? And the problem with my companies is, like, they make 90% profit margin. So the multiple companies get sold with multiples, kind of multiples of profit or revenue. And often the multiples like 3 times, 3 times, or 4 times, or 5 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 unless the price high enough. Like if the price gets to like six or seven or eight, I don’t want to wait six years for the money, you know. But if you give me three, like three years, nothing like I can wait,

Lex: that means there are really valuable stuff about the companies you create is not just the interface and, and the crowdsource content, but the people themselves. Like the user base.

Pieter: Yeah. But no one list. It’s a community. Yeah.

Lex: So I could see that being extremely valuable. I’m surprised.

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

Lex: Yeah, yeah. The thing you also mentioned is you have to price in the fact that you’re going to miss the company and

Pieter: the meaning it gives you. Right. There’s a very famous, like depression after startup on a solar company. Like, they’re like, this was my. This was me. Who am I? And they immediately start building another one, you know, they never can stop. So I think 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.

Lex: So you usually build this stuff solo and mostly work solo. What’s the thinking behind that?

Pieter: I think I’m not so good working with other people. Not like I’m crazy, but I don’t trust other people.

Lex: To clarify, you don’t trust other people to do a great job.

Pieter: Yeah. And I don’t want to have this consensus meeting where we all like you have a meeting of three people and then you kind of get this compromise result, which is very European called poldermoidal, where you put people in a room and you only let them out when they agree on the compromise. Right. In politics. And I think it breeds like averageness. You get an average idea, average company, average culture. You need to have a leader or you need to be solo and just do it, do it yourself. I think, and I trust some people with my best friend Andre, I’m making a new AI startup. But it’s because we know each other very long and he’s one of the few people I would build something with, but almost never.

Lex: 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?

Pieter: So he codes. I shit post on Twitter. Literally, like I promoted on Twitter. We said like, product strategy. Like I said, this should be better, this should be better. But I think you need to have one person coding it. He codes in Ruby. So I was like, I cannot do Ruby, I’m in php.

Lex: So have you ever coded with another person for prolonged periods of time?

Pieter: Never in my life.

Lex: What do you think is behind that?

Pieter: I know it was always just me sitting on my laptop coding.

Lex: No, you’ve never had another developer who rolls in And I’ve had one.

Pieter: So every photo 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 on replicate and stuff and I needed to improve photo and he helped me a lot for like 10 months he worked and 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.

Lex: It’s not your thing. It’s another programming language. I get it. AI, new thing. Got it. But like, you’ve never had a developer roll in, look at your php jQuery code and be. And yes, like, you know, like in conversation or improv they talk about. Yes. And like, basically, all right, I had

Pieter: for one week, understand? And then it ended because he wanted to rewrite everything in the.

Lex: No, that’s the wrong guy. I know he wanted to rewrite in

Pieter: what he wanted to rewrite the. He said this jQuery, we can’t 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 we just like, you know, like keep Jacques 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 going to. It’s going to take way too much time.

Lex: 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. So I look at their code or 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 and then from that place have a conversation about what is the better approach.

Pieter: Yeah, but those are the top tier developers and 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 really top 5%. Because 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 the job. Especially with dev. With coding. I think so. Sorry.

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

Pieter: Empathy. It’s like code empathy, right? Code empathy, yeah, it’s a new word, but that’s it. You need to understand like go over all the code, get a holistic view of it and man, you can suggest we change stuff for sure, but. And look, jQuery is crazy. It’s crazy. I’m using jQuery, we can change that.

Lex: It’s not crazy at all. JQuery is also beautiful and powerful and PHP is beautiful and powerful. Especially as you said recently, as the versions evolved, it’s much more serious programming language now. It’s super fast. Like PHP is really fast now. Yeah, it’s crazy.

Pieter: JavaScript much faster than Ruby.

Lex: Yeah, really fast now. So if speed is something you care about, it’s super fast. And there’s gigantic communities of people using those programming languages and there’s frameworks if you like the framework, so whatever, it doesn’t really matter what you use. But also you, if I Was like a developer working with you. You are extremely successful, you’ve shipped a lot. So 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.

Pieter: And.

Lex: Yes. And like notice parts in the code where like, 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. I don’t know. I. I don’t know how hard is to find developers.

Pieter: No, I think that exists. I think you need to. I need to hire more people, need to try more people. But that costs a lot of my energy and time. But it’s 100% possible. But do I want it? I don’t know. Things kind of run fine for now. And I mean like, okay, you could say, like, okay, Nomad List looks kind of clunky. Like people say the design is kind of clunky. Okay, I’ll improve the design. It’s like next to my to do list, for example, you know, like, I can, I’ll get there eventually. But it’s true.

Lex: 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 J, by the way, jQuery, right? Like, how amazing is jquery? But like you can. These cowboys are getting. These are. There’s these cowboys. This is a lot. It’s a lot. But I’m glad they’re all wearing shirts. Anyway, the interface here is just really, really nice. Like I could tell you know what you’re doing. And with Nomad List, extremely nice. The interface.

Pieter: Thank you, man.

Lex: And that’s all you?

Pieter: Yeah, that’s. Everything’s me.

Lex: So all of this and every little

Pieter: feature, 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, right, right.

Lex: I hear you. But this is a lot of information and it’s useful information and it’s delivered in a clean way while still stylish and fun to look at. So like minimalist design is about like when you want to convey no Information whatsoever and look cool.

Pieter: Yeah, it’s very cool. It’s pretentious, right?

Lex: 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.

Pieter: Yeah. This is, I think, how my brain looks, you know, like, there’s a lot of shit going on. Like drawing bass, music. It’s like, very.

Lex: Yeah, but it’s just too pretty. The spacing of everything is nice. The fonts are really nice. Like, very readable, very simple.

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

Lex: No, this is really nice.

Pieter: Thank you.

Lex: The emojis are somehow, like, this is a style. It’s a thing.

Pieter: I need to pick the emoji. It takes a while to pick them.

Lex: You know, like, there’s some. Something about the emoji is a really nice, memorable, like, placeholder for the idea.

Lex: Like, if it was just text, it would actually be overwhelming. If you were just text, the emoji really helps. It’s a brilliant addition. Like, some people might look at it. Why do you have emojis everywhere? It’s actually really. For me, it’s really interesting.

Pieter: Tell me to remove the emojis.

Lex: 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.

Pieter: Yeah, yeah. This is.

Lex: 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.

Pieter: Like, these as transitions.

Lex: No, I understand that, but, like, I’m sure there’s. How long does that 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?

Pieter: No, it’s so iterative. It’s like 10 years of ADD a CSS transition here. Or do this.

Lex: Well, say, like. See, these are rounded. Now, 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?

Pieter: So I go to the index CSS and I do command F and I search border radius 12px and then I replace with border radius 0. And then I do command enter and it git deploys. It pushes to the git hub and then sends a webbook and then deploys to my Server and it’s live in five seconds.

Lex: Oh, you often deploy to production. You don’t have like a testing ground?

Pieter: No, 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 and it’s man, I’m going to be canceled for this, you know. But it works very well for me because I have a lot of. I have like php, lint and JSON so it tells me when there’s error, so I don’t deploy. But my literally 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.

Lex: What’s the latency of that from you

Pieter: pressing 1 second can be 1, 2 seconds.

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

Pieter: Basically, man, you’re 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, yeah, because you need to code more carefully. But it’s, look, it’s idiotic in any big company, but for me it works because it makes me so fast. Like somebody will report a bug on Twitter and I kind of did do like a stopwatch. Like how fast can I fix this bug? And then two minutes later, for example, it’s fixed.

Pieter: 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. It’s like horrible. And it makes people really happy when you can really quickly solve their problems. But it’s crazy.

Lex: I don’t think it’s crazy. I mean there’s. I’m sure there’s a middle ground, but I think that whole thing where there’s 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 filing, it’s a mess and there’s different teams involved, it’s. It’s no good.

Pieter: I’m like a good, funny extreme on the other side, you know, but just

Lex: a little bit safer, but not too much. It would be great. Yeah, yeah, I’m sure that’s actually like how X now how they doing rapid improvement.

Pieter: There’s more bugs and people complain about like, oh, look, he bought this Twitter. Now it’s full of bugs, dude, he’s shipping stuff. Like things are happening now and it’s a dynamic app now.

Lex: Yeah, the bugs is actually a sign of a good thing happening the bugs of the feature because it shows that the team is actually building shit 100%. Well one of the problems is like I see with YouTube there’s so much potential to build features but I just see how long it takes. So I’ve gotten a chance to interact with many of their 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 because it has to not break the rest of the site whatever they do. But like if you don’t have enough dictatorial like top down, like we need this now. It’s going to take forever to do anything. Multi language audio. But multi Language 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 conversation right here, if instantaneously it dubs it into 40 languages and everybody consume every single video can be watched and listened to in those different. It changes everything. And YouTube is extremely well positioned to be the leader in this. They got the compute, they got the user base, they have the experience of how to do this. So multi Language Audio should be high priority feature, right? Yeah, that’s high priority and it’s a way. Google is obsessed with AI right now. They want to show off that they could be dominant in AI. That’s a way for Google to say like we used AI. Like this is a way to, to, to break down the walls that language creates.

Pieter: The preferred outcome for them, for them is probably their career and not the, the overall result of the, the cool product.

Lex: You know, I think they, they’re not like selfish or whatever. They, they want to do good. There’s something about the machine, the organizational stuff that’s just.

Pieter: I have this when I report bugs 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 kind of asshole. Because I’m like, guys, I’m talking to 20 people about this for six months and nothing’s happening. And say, man, I know, but I’m trying my best. And yeah, so it’s systemic.

Lex: Yeah. 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 and just says like for YouTube, it’s like MLA, get this done. Now. This is the highest priority.

Pieter: I think big companies, especially in America,

Lex: a lot of it is legal, right?

Pieter: You need to pass everything through legal.

Pieter: And you can’t, like, man, the things I do could never do that in a big corporation. Because everything has to be probably git, deploy has to go through legal.

Lex: 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 colleagues, 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. That’s it.

Pieter: And the law can change. Like for example, let’s say you launch this AI dubbing and there’s some legal problems with lawsuits, okay? So the law changes. There will be appeals, there will be some Supreme Court thing, whatever. And the law changes. So just by shipping it, you change society, you change the legal framework by not shipping. Being scared of the legal framework all the time, like you’re not changing things.

14. Developer Tools, Productivity, and the Perfect Day

Time: 02:42:38 - 03:15:25

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

Pieter: Yeah, VS code. Before I use Sublime Text, I don’t think it matters a lot. I think I’m very skeptical of tools when people think they say it matters, right? I don’t think it matters. I think whatever tool you know very well, you can go very fast in like, you know, the shortcuts, for example. Ideas. 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.

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

Pieter: Yeah, VSCode is not so good at it, I think. Or at least I tried. But I would use that to process data, like data sets, for example, from World Bank. I would just multi cursor, mass change everything. 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, yeah, 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 vscode. And it stuck, you know, but I don’t really care, like it’s not so important for me.

Lex: Well, you know the Format C reference, huh?

Pieter: Dude, it was so good. You would install Windows and then after three or six months it would start breaking and everything was like get slow. Then you would restart, go to DOS Format C. You would delete your hard drive and then install the Windows 95 again. Was so good times. And you would design everything like, now I’m going to install it properly. Now I’m going to design my desktop properly. You know, like, yeah, I don’t know

Lex: 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. Partially was peer pressure, but part of it was realizing like, you need to keep learning stuff. Like the same issue with jQuery, I still think I need to learn Node JS, for example, even though that’s not my main thing or even close to the main thing. But I feel like you need to keep learning this stuff and even if you don’t choose to use it long term, you need to give it a chance so your understanding of the world expands.

Pieter: 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.

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

Pieter: Yeah, for me too. Yeah, yeah. But you just dive in it’s like Neuroflex. Like you keep your brain fresh, you know, like this kind of stuff.

Lex: I gotta do that more. Like, have you given REACT a chance?

Pieter: No, but I want to. I want to learn it. I want to. I understand the basics. Right. I don’t really know where to start,

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

Pieter: No, man, you’re. So I kind of did that. Like, I kind of like 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 coding 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.

Lex: You basically build a framework from scratch that’s your own, that you understand it kind of.

Pieter: Yeah, with AJAX calls. But essentially it’s the same thing. Look, I don’t have the time. I think saying you don’t have the time is like always a lie because you just don’t prioritize it enough. My priority is still like running the businesses and improving that and AI. I think learning AI is much more valuable now than learning a front end framework. Yeah, like, it’s just more impact.

Lex: I guess you should be just learning every single day a thing.

Pieter: 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. But you need to know. You need to know it anyway.

Lex: So you gotta learn how to use the weapons of war. And then. And then you could be a peacenik. Yeah, yeah. I mean, but you got to learn it in the same exact way as we were talking about, which is learn it by trying to build something with it and actually deploy it.

Pieter: 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, where do you start? Ask GPT4, I guess. But yeah, it’s just so dynamic. It changes so fast that I don’t know if it would be a good idea for me to learn it. You know, maybe some combination of like VUE Next with php. Laravel. Laravel is like a framework for php. I think that would be. It could benefit me now. Maybe tailwind for css like a styling engine. That. That stuff could probably save me time. Yeah.

Lex: 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 should probably recode like my personal one page in Laravel or.

Lex: And even though it might not have almost any dynamic elements, maybe have one dynamic element, but it has to go end to end in that framework or like end to end build in Node js. Some of it is. I don’t figuring out how to even deploy the thing.

Pieter: 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.

Pieter: So I guess I need like a boss. Like a. Like Vercel.

Pieter: Or you know, Heroku, kind of those

Lex: kind of platforms actually kind of just gave myself the idea of like I kind of just want to build a single webpage. Like one web page that has like one dynamic element and just do it in every single. Like in a lot of frameworks.

Pieter: Like just on the same page.

Lex: Same page kind of page.

Pieter: That’s a cool product. Learn all these frameworks and you can see the differences.

Pieter: That’s interesting.

Lex: How long it takes to do it.

Pieter: Yeah. Stopwatch.

Lex: I have to figure out actually something sufficiently complicated because it should probably do. It should probably do some kind of thing where it accesses the database and dynamically is changing stuff.

Pieter: Some AI stuff. Some LLM stuff.

Lex: Yeah, maybe some. It doesn’t have to be AI alum.

Pieter: Maybe API call. API call to something to replicate, for example. And then you have. Yeah, that would be very cool.

Lex: Yeah. And like time it. And also report on my happiness.

Pieter: Yeah. I’m going to totally do this because nobody benchmarks this. Nobody’s benchmark happiness. Developer happiness with frameworks. Yeah, nobody’s benchmark the shipping time.

Lex: Just take like a month and do this. How many frameworks are there? There’s. How many. How many? There’s like five main ways of doing it. So there’s like this back end, front end.

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

Pieter: Or something that used to be only front end. And you’re forced to do now backend also. I don’t know.

Lex: And then. But there’s not really. You’re not really forced to do anything. So like according to the Internet. So like there’s no. It’s actually not trivial to find the canonical way of doing things. So like the standard vanilla, like you, you go to the ice cream shop, there’s like a million flavors. I want vanilla. If, if I’ve never had ice cream in my life, can we just like learn about ice cream? Yeah, I want vanilla. Nobody actually. Sometimes they’ll literally name it vanilla. But like I want to know what’s the basic way. But not like dumb, but like the standard canonical.

Pieter: I want to know the dominant way. Like 60% of developers do it like this. Yeah, it’s hard to figure that out. You know, that’s the problem.

Lex: Yeah. Maybe LLMs can help. Maybe you should explicitly ask what is the dominant.

Pieter: They usually know like the dominant, you know, they, they, they give answers that are like the most probable kind of.

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

Lex: it in my brain, try these kinds of things. What happens is it depends what kind of. If they’re like a world class developer. Yes. Oftentimes they themselves are used to that thing and they have not themselves explored in other options. So they have this dogmatic like talking down to you like this is the right way to do it. It’s like no, no, no, we’re just like exploring together. Okay, show me the cool thing you’ve tried. Which is like it has to have open 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 old lamp, php, jQuery, vanilla, JavaScript way. It just has its pros and cons and like you need to know whatever those people exist.

Pieter: You could find those people. Probably.

Pieter: Like if you want to learn AI, imagine you have Karpathi sitting next to you teaching, like he does his YouTube videos. It’s amazing. He can teach it to like a 5 year old about how to make LLM. It’s amazing. Imagine this guy sitting next to you and just teaching you like, let’s make LLM together. Like holy shit, it would be amazing.

Lex: Yeah. I mean, well, Karpathi has its own style and his own like I’m not sure he’s for everybody. For example, five year old. It depends on the five year old. Yeah, but he’s like super technical.

Pieter: But he’s amazing because he’s super technical and he’s the only one who can explain this stuff in a simple way, which shows his complete genius.

Pieter: Because if you can explain without jargon, you’re like, wow.

Lex: And build it from scratch.

Pieter: Yeah, it’s like top tier, you know, like what a guy.

Lex: But he might be anti framework because he built from scratch.

Pieter: Exactly. Yeah. Actually probably is. Yeah.

Lex: He’s like Yuba for AI.

Pieter: Yeah. So maybe learning a framework is a very bad idea for us. You know, maybe we should stay in PHP and like Script Kitty and the.

Lex: But you have to maybe by learning the framework, you learn what you want to yourself. Built from scratch.

Pieter: Yeah. Maybe learn concepts, but you don’t actually have to start using it for your life. Right? Yeah, yeah.

Lex: And you’re still a Mac guy or was a Mac guy.

Pieter: Yeah, yeah. I switched to Mac in 2014 because it was. Cause when I wanted to start traveling and my brother was like, dude, get a MacBook. It’s 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 aluminum. And then I opened it, 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 really. And I was still on the Windows computer. And then I went traveling with that and all my great things started when I switched to Mac, which sounds very dogmatic. Right?

Lex: But what great things are you talking about?

Pieter: All the business started working out. Like I started traveling, I started building startups, started making money. It all started when I switched to Mac.

Lex: Listen, I kind of. 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 any other products. Yeah, yeah. Well you could use. I guess you could do Mac stuff there. I wonder if I should switch. What do you miss about Windows? What was the pros and cons?

Pieter: I think the Finder is horrible. Mech. Like, it’s like, it’s. It’s the.

Lex: What is horrible?

Pieter: The Finder. Oh, you don’t know the Finder? So it’s the Windows Explorer. Yeah, Explorer is amazing. Finder is strange, man. There’s like strange things. There’s this bug where 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 unusual, but it has Linux. Like the whole thing is like, it’s Unix based, right?

Lex: So do you use the command all the time?

Pieter: 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, 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. Yeah, yeah, Real Ubuntu is like better of course.

Lex: But yeah, I’m in this weird situation where I’m somewhat of a power user in Windows and let’s say Android and all the much smarter friends I have all using Mac and iPhone. And it’s like if you don’t want

Pieter: to go through the peer pressure, you

Lex: know, it’s not peer pressure, it’s like, like one of the reasons I want to have kids is there’s a lot of like I, I would love to have kids as a base, as a baseline but you know, there’s like a concern maybe there’s going to be a 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 they have kids. So that’s, that’s not peer pressure, that’s just like a strong signal.

Pieter: Yeah, this works for people.

Lex: That works for people.

Lex: And the same thing with Mac, it’s like, yeah, like the fun, like I don’t see fundamentally I don’t like closed systems. So like fundamentally I like Windows more because there’s much more freedom. Same with Android, there’s much more freedom, it’s much more customizable. But like all the, 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. Yeah, well, anyway. But it’s funny to hear you say all the Good stuff started happening. Maybe I’ll be like that guy too. When I switched to Mac, all the good stuff started happening.

Pieter: I think it’s just about the hardware. It’s not so much about the software.

Lex: The hardware is so well built. Right.

Pieter: The keyboard and.

Lex: Yeah, but look at the keyboard I use.

Pieter: That is pretty cool.

Lex: That’s one word for it. What’s your favorite place to work?

Pieter: On the couch.

Lex: Does the couch matter? Is the couch at home or is it any couch?

Pieter: No. Any, like hotel couch also, like, in the room, right? Yeah. But I used to work like, very ergonomically with like a standing desk and everything. Like, perfect, like eye height, screen, 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 co working space. Like 6am, sun comes up and I’m working and I’m coding and I hear like a sound or something. So I do, like, I look left and my neck gets stuck, like. And I’m like, wow, fuck. And I’m like, what’s. Am I dying? You know, And I felt I’m probably dying.

Lex: Yeah, probably.

Pieter: I don’t want to die in a co working space. I’m going to go home and die in like, peace and honor. So I close my laptop and I put it in my backpack and I walked to the street. I got on my motorbike, went home and I lied down on like a pillow, like with my legs up and stuff to get rid of this, like, because it was my whole back and it was because I was working like this all the time.

Pieter: So I started getting like a laptop stand. Everything ergonomically correct. But then I started lifting. And since then, like, it seems like everything gets straightened out. Your posture kind of. You’re more straight. And I never have anymore repressive injury. I never have tingling anymore. No pains and stuff. So then I started working on the sofa. And it’s great. Like it. It feels. You’re close to the. I sit like, I sit like this.

Pieter: Legs together and then a pillow and then a laptop. And then I work.

Lex: Are you like leaning back?

Pieter: I’m kind of like together, like legs. And then where’s the mouse?

Lex: Using. Using.

Pieter: No, no. So everything’s trackpad on the Mac OS. On the MacBook, I used to have the Logitech MX mouse, the perfect ergonomic mouse.

Lex: And I used to doing like this little thing with thing.

Lex: One screen.

Pieter: One screen. And I used to have three screens, so I come from the. I know where people come from. I had all this stuff, but then I realized that having it all condensed in one laptop, it’s a 16 inch MacBook, so it’s quite big. But having it all in there is amazing because you’re so close to the tools. You’re so close to what’s happening. You know, it’s like working on a car or something. It’s like so like, man, if you have three skin. If you look here, look there, you get. Also neck injury, actually. So it’s.

Lex: Well, I don’t know. This, this sounds like you’re part of a cult and you’re just trying to convince me. But I mean, but it’s good to hear that you can be ultra productive on a single screen. That’s. Yeah. I mean, that’s crazy.

Pieter: Come on. Tap. You alt top, like Windows, all top macOS command tips. You switch very fast.

Lex: So you have like one. The entire screen is taken up by VS code. Say you look at the code and then. Yeah, and then like, if you deploy like a website, you what, switch screenstop to Chrome.

Pieter: I used to have this swipe screen. You know, you could do like different screen spaces.

Pieter: I was like, ah, it’s too difficult. Let’s just put it on one screen on the MacBook.

Lex: And then you can be productive that way.

Pieter: Yeah, very productive. Yeah. More productive than before.

Lex: Interesting, because I have three screens and two of them are vertical, like on the side.

Pieter: Code, right? Yeah.

Lex: For code you can see a lot.

Pieter: No, man, I love it. Like, I love seeing it with friends. Like, they have amazing, like battle stations, right?

Lex: It’s called.

Pieter: It’s amazing. I want it, but I don’t want it. Right.

Lex: Like, do you like the constraints? There’s.

Pieter: That’s it.

Lex: There’s some aspect of the constraints which, like, once you get good at it, you can focus your mind and you can.

Pieter: Man, I’m suspicious of like, more, you know?

Pieter: Do you really need all this stuff? Like, it might slow me down. Actually.

Lex: It’s a good way to put it. I’m suspicious of more. Me too. I’m suspicious of more in all ways. In all.

Pieter: Because you can defend more, right? You can defend. Yeah. I’m a developer. I make money. I need to get more screens. Right. I need to be more efficient. And then you read stuff about Mythical Man Month, where hiring more people slows down a software project. That’s famous. I think you can use that metaphor maybe for tools as well. Then I see friends Just with gear acquisition syndrome, buying so much stuff. But they’re not that productive. They have the best, most beautiful battle stations, desktops, everything. They’re not that productive. And it’s also kind of fun. It’s all from my laptop in a backpack. It’s kind of Nomad minimalist.

Lex: Take me through like the perfect ultra productive day in your life. Like say, like where you get a lot of done.

Lex: Are you. And it’s all focused on getting done. What, what, when are you waking up? Is it a regular time? Super early, super late.

Pieter: So I go to sleep like 2am Usually something like that. And before 4am, but my girlfriend would go sleep midnight. So we did a compromise, like 2:00am, you know, so I wake up around 10, 11, then more like 10. Shower, make coffee. I make coffee, like drip coffee, like the V60, you know, the filter. And I boil water and then put the coffee in and then chill a little bit with my girlfriend. And then open laptop, start coding, check what’s going on, like bugs or whatever.

Lex: How long are you, like how stretches of time are you able to just sit behind the computer coding?

Pieter: So I used to need really long stretches where I would do all nighters and stuff to get shit done. But I’ve gotten trained to have more interruptions where I can.

Lex: Because you have to.

Pieter: This is life. There’s a lot of distractions. Your girlfriend has stuff, people come over or whatever. So I’m very fast now. I can lock in and log out quite fast. And I heard people, developers or entrepreneurs with kids have the same thing before. They’re like, I can have 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?

Lex: Yeah, it’s funny.

Pieter: So think that works for me? Yeah. And then, you know, cook food and stuff. Like have lunch, steak and chicken, you

Lex: eat a bunch of times a day. So you said coffee?

Lex: What are you doing?

Pieter: 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?

Lex: How many hours are you saying? A perfectly productive day. Are you doing programming? Like if you already like to kill it, are you doing like all day, basically?

Pieter: You mean like the special days where like special 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. Yeah, yeah, you know?

Lex: Yeah. Okay, okay. Let’s remove girlfriend from picture, social life from picture.

Pieter: It’s just you, man. Then shit goes crazy. Because when shit goes crazy now, she goes crazy.

Lex: Okay, so you. Let’s. Let’s rewind. Are you still waking up? There’s coffee. There’s no girlfriend to talk to. There’s no now.

Pieter: We wake up like 1pm at 2pm

Lex: because you went to bed at 6am

Pieter: yeah, because I was coding. I was finding some new AI shit and I was studying it and it was amazing. And I cannot sleep because it’s too important. We need to stay awake. We need to see all of this. We need to make something now. But that’s the times I do make new stuff more so I think I have a friend, he actually books a hotel for a week to leave his. And he has a kid too, and his girlfriend and his kids stay in the house and he goes to another hotel. Sounds a little suspicious, right? Going to the hotel. But all he does is like writing or coding. He’s a writer and he needs like this alone time, this silence. And I think for this flow state. It’s true, you know, I’m better maintaining stuff when there’s a lot of disruptions than like creating new stuff. I need this. It’s common, it’s flow state. It’s this uninterrupted period of time. So yeah, wake up like 1 2pm, you know, still coffee, shower. We still shower, you know, and then just code like non stop. Maybe my friend comes over, comes over, some distraction. Yeah, he also Andrej. 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 co working days.

Lex: Like so you’re not really working with him, but you’re just both working because

Pieter: it’s nice to have like the vibe where you both sit together on the couch and coding on something and you actually. It’s mostly silent or there’s music, you know, and sometimes you ask something and. But generally like you’re really locked in and what.

Lex: What music are you listening to?

Pieter: I think like. Like techno, like YouTube techno. There’s a. There’s a channel called HOR with a umlaut, like H O, like double dot. It’s Berlin techno. Whatever it looks like, it’s. They film it in like a toilet with like white tiles and stuff and it’s very cool. And they always have like very good, like kind of industrial, like industrial so

Lex: fast, kind of Aggressive, you know, like. Yeah, that’s not distracting to you brain.

Pieter: That’s amazing. 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 too many tones. It’s like too many things going on. This industrial techno is like, you know, these African like rain dances. Like it’s this transcendental trance.

Lex: That’s interesting because I actually mostly now listen to brown noise. Noise.

Lex: Wow. Like pretty loud.

Lex: And one of the things you learn is your brain gets used to whatever. So I’m sure, Detective, if I actually give it a real chance, yeah, my brain would get used to it. But like, with, with noise, what happens if 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 with like meditation. You can like like focus on your breath, for example.

Pieter: It’s normal brown. It’s not like binaural.

Lex: No, it’s just normal brown. It’s like. Yeah. White noise. I think it’s the same. It’s like fake noise. White noise. Brown noise, I think is when it’s like bassier.

Pieter: Yeah. It’s more diffused, more dampened. Yeah, dampened, Yeah, I can see that.

Lex: No sharpness.

Pieter: Yeah, Sharp brightness. Yeah, I can see that. And you use a headphone, right?

Lex: Yeah, headphones. Yeah. Actually like, like walk around in life often with brown noise.

Pieter: Dude, that’s like psychopath. But it’s cool, you know?

Lex: Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I murder people, it helps. It drowns out their screams.

Pieter: Jesus Christ.

Lex: Yeah, I said too much.

Pieter: No, I’m gonna try brown noise with a murder or.

Lex: For the coding.

Pieter: Yeah, for the coding, yeah.

Lex: Okay, good. Try it, try it. But you have to like with everything else, give it a real chance. Yeah. I find I also, like I said, do techno Y type stuff. Electronic music on top of the brown noise. But then control the speed because the faster it goes, the more anxiety. So if I really need to get done, especially with programming, I’ll have a beat.

Lex: And it’s Great. It’s cool. I say it’s cool to play those little tricks with your mind, to study yourself.

Lex: 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.

Pieter: In coworking space, I would just start talking too much.

Lex: Yeah. So there’s so much distraction.

Pieter: Yeah. We would do. In the coworker space, we would do, like, a money pot, like, a mug. So if you would work for 45 minutes, and then if you would say one per word, you would get a fine, which is like $1. So you’d put $1 to say, hey, what’s up? So $3 you put in the mug, and then 15 minutes free time. Like, we can, like, party, whatever, and 45 minutes again, working. And that worked. But you need to shut people up or they. You know, I think there’s.

Lex: There’s an intimacy in being silent together that I might. Maybe I’m uncomfortable with. Like, but you. If you need to make yourself vulnerable and actually do it, like, with. With close friends, to just sit there in silence for long periods of time and, like, doing a thing.

Pieter: Dude. I watched this video of this podcast. It was like this Buddhism podcast with people meditating, and they were interviewing each other or whatever, and, like, a podcast, and suddenly after a question, it’s like, yeah, yeah. And they were just silent for, like, three minutes. And then they said, that was amazing. Yeah, that was amazing. I was like, wow. Pretty cool.

Lex: You know, Elon’s like that. And I really like that when you’ll ask a question 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.

Pieter: Yeah. He thinks,

Lex: yeah, I don’t know.

Pieter: That’s so cool. I wish I was. I wish I could think more about. But I want to, like, I want to show you my heart, you know, I want to show you go straight from my heart to my mouth to, like, saying the real thing. And the more I think, the more I start, like, filtering myself, Right. And I want to just throw it out there immediately.

Lex: I do that more with team. I think he has a lot of practice in that. I do that as well. In a team setting. When you’re thinking, brainstorming, and you allow yourself to just, like, think in silence.

Lex: Just like, because even in meetings, people want to talk.

Lex: It’s like, no, you think before you speak, and just, like, it’s okay to be silent. Together.

Lex: And if you allow yourself the room to do that, you can actually come up with really good ideas.

Lex: So, okay, this perfect day. How much caffeine are you consuming in this day, man?

Pieter: Too much. Right. Because normally, like two cups of coffee, but on this perfect day, we go to like four maybe. So we’re starting to hit, like, the anxiety levels.

Lex: So four cups is a lot for you.

Pieter: Well, I think my coffees are quite strong when I make them. It’s like 20 grams of coffee powder in the V60. So, like, my friends call them like nuclear coffee because it’s quite heavy, it’s quite strong. But it’s nice to hit that anxiety level where you’re like almost panic attack, but you’re not there yet, so. But that’s like. Man, it’s like super locked in. Just like. It’s amazing. But I mean, there’s a space for that, you know, in my life. But it’s. I think it’s great for making new stuff. It’s amazing.

Lex: Starting from scratch, creating a new thing.

Pieter: 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.

Lex: Just wearing cowboy hats in the mountains, like we showed.

Pieter: Exactly. We can do that.

Lex: There’s a movie about that with the laptops. They didn’t do much programming, though. Yeah.

Pieter: You can do a little bit of that.

Lex: Okay.

Pieter: And then a little bit of shipping, you know, do both.

Lex: It’s a different broken.

Pieter: But they need to allow us to go, you know, you need like a man cave, right?

Lex: Yeah. To ship.

Pieter: Yeah, to ship.

Lex: Get shit done. Yeah. It’s a balance. Okay, cool. What about sleep naps and all that? You’re not sleeping much.

Pieter: I don’t do naps in a day. I think it’s. Power naps are good, but I don’t really. I’m never tired anymore in the day, man. It’s also because of gym. I’m not tired. I. I’m tired when I want to. When, you know, when it’s night, I need to sleep.

Lex: Yeah. Me very well. 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.

Lex: I think with anything mental, physical, you have to be a student of Your own body. And like, no, no, what the limits are like that. You have to be skeptical taking advice from the Internet in general. Because a lot of advice is just like a good baseline for the general population. But then you personalized. Yeah, you have to become a student of your own, like of your own body, of your own self, of how you work. Yeah, that’s. I’ve. I’ve done a lot. Like, for me, fasting was an interesting one because I used to, you know, eat a bunch of meals a day, especially when I was lifting heavy. Like, because 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, man.

Pieter: Me too.

Lex: Yeah, it’s crazy.

Pieter: I never understood this small mule thing. Yeah, it didn’t work for me.

Lex: 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? Okay.

Pieter: 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. I made like first on Nomadism, made like Nomad Jobs like a page. And a lot of companies started hiring and they pay for job posts. So I spin it off to remote. Okay. And I was like this number one or number two biggest remote job boards. And. And it’s also fully automated 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.

Lex: Just focus on remote only.

Pieter: Yeah, this is 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. But the nice thing is you can charge a lot of money for job posts, man. It’s good money. B2B. You can charge like you start with 299, but at the peak during, when the Fed started printing money like 2021, I was making like 140k a month with remote. Okay. With just job posts. And I started like adding crazy upsells, like rainbow colored job posts. You can add your background image. Just upsells, man. And you charge thousand dollars for an upsell. It was crazy. And all these companies just upsell, Upsell. Yeah, we want everything. Javas 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. I think it’s like, 40 was good times, you know, I got to ask

Lex: you, but back to the digital nomad life.

15. Life Philosophy: Minimalism, University, and European Entrepreneurship

Time: 03:15:25 - 03:43:24

Lex: You. You wrote a blog post on the reset and in general, like, just giving away everything. Living a minimalist life.

Lex: What did it take to do that? Like, to get rid of everything?

Pieter: 10 years ago was like this trend in the blog. Back then, blogs were so popular. It was like a blogosphere, and it was like 100 things challenge.

Lex: What is that? The 100 things.

Pieter: I mean, it’s ridiculous, but, like, you. You write down every object you have in your house, and you count it. You make like, a spreadsheet and you’re like, okay, I have 500 things. You need to get it down to 100. Why? You know, this was just a trend. So I did it. I started, like, selling stuff, started throwing away stuff, and I did, like, MDMA and ecstasy. Like 2012, kind of. And after that trip, I felt so different, and I felt like I had to start throwing shit away. Like, I swear, and I started throwing shit away, and I felt that was like. It was almost like the drug sending me to a place 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. And that’s what the MDMA did, I think. Yeah.

Lex: How hard is it to get down to 100 items?

Pieter: Well, 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 met. 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 just to

Lex: meet people that want your shit.

Pieter: Yeah. It was so, like, I didn’t know it 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.

Lex: Was like the weirdest thing you had to sell, and you had to find a buyer for not the weirdest, but, like, what’s memorable.

Pieter: So back then, I was. I was making music, and we would make music videos of, like, a Canon 5D camera. Back then, everybody’s making films and music videos that. And. And we bought it with my friends and stuff, and it Was kind of like I had to sell this thing too, because it was like, it was very expensive, like 6k or something. And. But it meant that selling this meant that we wouldn’t make music videos to get anymore. I would leave Holland. This kind of like stuff we were working on would end. And I was kind of saying, this music video stuff, we’re not getting big. We’re not getting famous in this or successful. We need to stop doing this. This music production also. It’s not really working. And it was kind of like felt very bad, you know, for my friends, because we would work together on this and to sell this like camera that we’d make stuff with.

Lex: And it was a hard goodbye.

Pieter: It’s just a camera. But it was like, it felt like, sorry, guys, it doesn’t work and I need to go.

Lex: You know who, who bought it, do you remember? Was some guy who couldn’t possibly understand

Pieter: the journey of it.

Lex: Yeah. You just showed up. Here’s the money. Thanks.

Pieter: Yeah, but it was like. It was like cutting your life. Like, this shit ends now. Now we gonna do new stuff.

Lex: And I think it’s beautiful. I did that twice in my life. Giveaway. Everything, everything, everything. Like down to just pants, underwear, backpack. I think, I think it’s important to do. It shows you what’s important.

Pieter: 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, but 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.

Pieter: 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.

Lex: Yeah. But just letting go of material possessions, which. It gives a kind of freedom to how you move about the world.

Lex: It gives you complete freedom to go into another city to.

Pieter: Yeah. With your backpack.

Lex: With a backpack. There’s a kind of freedom to it. There’s something about material possessions and having a place and all that that ties you down a little bit.

Lex: Next. Spiritually. Yeah. It’s good to take a leap out into the world, especially when you’re younger to like, man.

Pieter: I Recommend if you’re 18, you get out of high school, do this, go travel, and you build some Internet stuff, whatever. Bring your laptop and it’s. It’s amazing experience. I. Five years ago, it’s still going to university. But now I’m thinking, like, no, maybe skip university. Just go first, like, travel around a little bit, figure some stuff out. You can go back to university when you’re 25. You can, like, okay, now I learned I be successful in business. You have money. At least now you can choose what you really want to study. You know, because people at 18, they go study what 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.

Lex: So one of the biggest uses of a university is the networking. You. You gain friends, you gain, like, you meet people. It’s a forcing function to meet people. But if you can meet people out

Pieter: into the world by traveling and you meet so many different cultures, I mean,

Lex: the problem for me is, like, if I traveled at that young age, I’m attracted to people at the outskirts of the world. Like, for me, like, where. No, not geographically.

Pieter: Oh, like the subcultures.

Lex: Yeah. Like the weirdos, the darkness.

Pieter: Yeah, me too.

Lex: But. But that might not be the best networking at 18 years old.

Pieter: No, but, man, if you. If you’re smart about it, you can stay safe. And I met so many weirdos from traveling. You meet. That’s how travel works. If you really let loose, you meet the craziest people.

Pieter: And it’s the most interesting people. And it’s just. I cannot recommend it enough.

Lex: 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. Yeah. Like, for a person like me, for example, who’s always an outcast, like, there’s always a danger for going full outcast.

Lex: And it’s a harder life if you, like, if you go to, like, go full artists and full, like, darkness, it’s just a heart of life.

Pieter: You can come back. You can come back to normie.

Lex: That’s a skill. That’s like, I think you have to learn how to. How to fit into, like, polite society.

Pieter: But I was very strange outcast as well. And I’m more adaptable to normie now.

Pieter: After 30s, you know, you’re like, yeah,

Lex: but it’s a skill you have to learn.

Pieter: Yeah. I feel, man, I feel so that you start as outcast, but the more you work on yourself, the less, like, shit you have. You kind of start becoming more normie because you become more chill with yourself and more happy and it kind of makes you uninteresting, right?

Lex: A little, yes.

Pieter: 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.

Lex: Maybe you don’t have to be broken to be interesting, I guess, is what I’m saying.

Lex: What kind of things were left when you minimalized?

Pieter: So the backpack, MacBook, toothbrush, some clothes, underwear, socks. You don’t need a lot of clothes in Asia because it’s hot. So you just wear swim pants, swim shorts, you walk around, flip flops. So very basic T shirt. And I would go to the laundromat and wash my stuff. And I think it was like 50 things or something. Yeah.

Lex: Yeah, it’s nice. As I mentioned to you, there’s the. The show alone.

Lex: They really test you because they only get 10 items, and you have to survive out in the wilderness. And the ax, like, everybody brings an ax. Some people also have a saw, but usually ax does the job. You basically have to. In order to build a shelter, you have to cut down and cut the trees and make and, like, Minecraft. You know, everything I learned about life, bro. Yeah. Yeah, you could. It’s a. It’s. It’s nice to create those constraints for yourself, to understand what matters to you, and also how to be in this world. And one. One of the ways to do that is 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.

Lex: Like, for me, it doesn’t. But people are different.

Pieter: It gives me happiness for, like, two weeks.

Pieter: I’m very quickly adapting to baseline hedonistic adaptation. Very fast. But, man, if you look at the studies, most people, like, getting a new car six months, get a new house six months, you just feel the same. She’s like, wow, should I buy all the stuff? Studying hedonistic adaptation made me think a lot about minimalism.

Lex: And so you don’t even need to go through the whole journey of getting it. Just focus on the. The thing that’s more permanent.

Lex: Like building shit. Yeah.

Pieter: 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.

Lex: You wrote a blog post. Why I’m unreachable, and maybe you should be, too. What’s your strategy in communicating with people?

Pieter: Yeah. So when I wrote That I was getting so many DMs as you probably have. You have a million times more.

Lex: But.

Pieter: And people were getting angry that I wasn’t responding. And I was like, okay, I’ll just close down these DMs completely. Then people got angry that I closed my DMs down, that I’m not like, man of the people, you know, it’s

Lex: like you changed, man.

Pieter: Yeah, you’ve changed. You got, 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, man, like stalkers and like people write like their whole life story for you and then ask your advice. Like, man, I have no idea. I’m not a therapist. I don’t know. I know this stuff.

Lex: But also beautiful stuff.

Pieter: No, absolutely sure.

Lex: Like life story. I’ve posted a coffee form, like if you wanted to have a coffee with me. And I’ve gotten an extremely large number of submissions. And when I look at them, there’s just like beautiful people in there. Like beautiful human beings, really powerful stories. It like breaks my heart that I won’t get to meet those people, you know, like, so this part of it is just like there’s only so much bandwidth to truly see other humans and help them or like understand them or hear them or. Yeah, see them.

Pieter: 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 Andrej for example. He came up to me in the code workspace, that’s how I met him. And he said, I want to learn to code, I want to do startups. How do I do it? I said, okay, let’s go install nginx, let’s start coding. And he has this self energy that he actually, he doesn’t need to be pushed. He just goes and he just goes and he asks questions and he doesn’t ask too many questions, he just goes and learns it. And now he has a company and makes a lot of money, has its own startups, so. And the people that I had to kind of like that asked me for help. But then I gave help and then they started debating it, you know, 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.

Lex: 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. Sounds very, like, spiritual, Sonny, but it’s really like figuring that out on your own. But they’re reaching. They’re trying to ask the world around them, like, how do I live this life? How do I figure this out? But ultimately, the answer is going to be from them working on themselves. And, like, literally, it’s the stupid thing, but, like, googling and doing, like. Yeah.

Pieter: So I think it’s procrastination. I think sending messages to people is a lot of procrastination. Like, Lex, how do you become successful podcaster?

Lex: Yeah, bro.

Pieter: Just, you know, start, like, just go.

Lex: Yeah, and just go.

Pieter: I would never ask you how to be successful podcaster. Like, I would just start it and then I would copy your methods. You know, I would say, ah, this guy’s black background. We probably need this as well.

Lex: Yeah, try it. Yeah, try it. And then you realize it’s not about the black background. It’s about something else. So you find your own voice. Like, keep trying.

Pieter: Exactly.

Lex: Imitation is a difficult thing. Like, a lot of people copy and they don’t move past it.

Lex: You should understand their methods and then move past it. Like, find yourself. Find your own voice.

Pieter: 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.

Lex: Yeah. You shouldn’t get stuck 24 hours in a day. Eight hours of sleep. You, like, break it down into a math equation. 90 minutes of showering, cleanup, coffee. It just keeps whittling down to zero, man.

Pieter: It’s not this specific, but I had to make like a, you know, an average or something.

Lex: Firefighting. I like that one. Hours of groceries and errands. I’ve tried breaking down minute by minute, what I do in a day.

Lex: Especially when my life was simpler. It’s really refreshing to understand where you waste a lot of time.

Lex: And what you enjoy doing. Like, how many minutes it takes to be happy doing the thing that makes you happy. And how many minutes it takes to be productive. And you realize there’s a lot of hours in the day if you spend it. Right. Yeah.

Pieter: A lot of it is wasted. Yeah.

Lex: For me, it’s been The. The biggest battle for. For the longest time is finding stretches of time where I can deeply focus and do really, really deep work. Just, like, zoom in and completely focus, cutting away all the distractions.

Pieter: Me, too.

Lex: That’s the battle. That’s unpleasant. It’s extremely unpleasant.

Pieter: We need to fly to an island, you know, make a man cave island, where we can just. Everybody can just coat and. For a week, you know, and just get shit done. Make new projects.

Lex: Yeah, yeah.

Pieter: 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, you know, in a specific hour. Like, bro, I don’t.

Lex: But you have a counter for hugs.

Pieter: Yeah, exactly. Like. Yeah, like, click, click, click.

Lex: It’s just a numerical representation of what life is. Yeah, it’s like one of those, like, when you draw out how many weeks you have in a life.

Pieter: I’ll do it. This is, like, dark.

Lex: Yeah, man.

Pieter: Don’t want to look at that too much. Yeah, man. How many times you see your parents? Jesus.

Lex: Yeah, scary, man. That’s right. It might be only, you know, a handful more times.

Pieter: Yeah, man.

Lex: You just look at the math of it. If you see him once a year or twice a year. Yeah.

Pieter: FaceTime today.

Lex: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it. That’s, like, dark. When you see somebody you like, seeing, like, a friend that’s on the outskirts of your friend group, and you realize, like, well, I haven’t really seen him for, like, three years. So, like, how many more times do we have that we see each other? Yeah.

Pieter: Do you believe that, like, friends just slowly disappear from your life? Like, they kind of. Your friend group evolves. Right. So, like, it does.

Lex: It does.

Pieter: Like, you don’t want to. There’s a problem with Facebook. You get all these old friends from school, like when you were 10 years old, back when Facebook started. Like, you don’t really. You would 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.

Lex: Yeah, I have. You know, I don’t. That might be a guy thing or. I don’t know. There’s certain friends I have that, like, we don’t interact often, but we’re still friends.

Lex: Like, every time I see him, 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.

Lex: So that’s like.

Pieter: Yeah, that’s deep.

Lex: 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. It depends. But there’s just this network of good human beings that can. I have, like, a real love for them, and I can always count on them. If, like, if any of them called me in the middle of the night, I’ll get rid of a body, you know, I’m there. I like how that’s a different definition of friendship. But it’s true. It’s true.

Pieter: True friend.

Lex: You’ve become more and more famous recently. How’s that affect you?

Pieter: It’s not recently. I guess it’s like this gradual thing. Right. Like, it keeps. Keeps going. And. And I also don’t know why it keeps going.

Lex: Does that put pressure on you to. Because you’re pretty open on Twitter and you’re just like, basically building in the open. Yeah. And just not really caring if it’s too technical, if it’s any of this, just being out there. Does it put pressure on you, as you become more popular, to be a little bit more, like, collected and Man,

Pieter: I think the opposite. Right. Because the people I follow are interesting because they say whatever they think and they ship or whatever. It’s so boring that people start tweeting only about one topic. 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 business or sports. Behind the athlete. Right. Behind the entrepreneur. That’s interesting stuff to be human. Yeah. Like, 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 and Huang, the Nvidia guy, he says he started cleaning toilets, you know, that was cool.

Lex: You tweeted something about the Denny’s thing. I forget.

Pieter: Yeah, it was recent. Nvidia was started in a Danny diner table.

Lex: And you made it somehow profound.

Pieter: Yeah. This one. This one.

Lex: Nvidia, a $3 trillion company, was started in a Denny’s, an American diner. People need a third space to work on their laptops to build the next billion or trillion dollar company. What’s the first and second space?

Pieter: The home office.

Lex: And then the in between.

Pieter: The island, I guess.

Lex: Yeah. The island?

Pieter: Yeah, you need a space to like congregate, 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 work and to have serendipitous conversations with other people and start businesses and stuff. And when I like you asked me to come on here and we flew to America and the first thing I realized was that I’ve been to America before, but we were in this cafe and like there’s a lot of laptops, everybody’s working on something. And I made, I took this photo. And then when you’re in Europe, like large parts of Europe now, you can’t, you cannot use a laptop anymore. There’s like no laptop, which I understand,

Lex: but that is to you a fundamental place to create shit is in that natural, organic, co working space of a

Pieter: coffee for a lot of people. A lot of people have very small homes and coworking spaces are kind of boring. They’re not very private, they’re not serendipitous kind of boring. Cafes are amazing because random people can come in and ask you what are you working on? And not just levels, people are also having conversations like they did 400 years ago, debates or whatever. Things are happening. And man, I understand the aesthetics of it. It’s like, oh, startup, bro, shipping is a bullshit startup, you know, but there’s something more there. Like there’s people actually making stuff, making new companies that the society benefits from. We’re benefiting from Nvidia. I think the US GDP for sure is benefiting from Nvidia. European GDP could benefit if we build more companies. And I feel in Europe there’s this vibe and this, you have to connect things. But not allowing laptops and cafes is kind of like part of the vibe, which is like, yeah, we’re not really here to work, we’re here to enjoy life. I agree with this Anthony Bourdain, like this tweet was quote tweeted Anthony Bourdain photo with him of cigarettes and a coffee in France. And he said that’s this is what cafes are for. I agree.

Lex: 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 it. That’s one of the things I liked in Silicon Valley when I was working there. It’s like the cafes. Like, yeah, there’s a bunch of dreamers that you can make fun of them for. Like everybody thinks they’re going to build a trillion dollar company, but like, yeah, and it’s us.

Pieter: Not everybody. 90% of people will be bullshit.

Lex: But they’re working their ass off.

Pieter: Yeah, they’re doing something. And you need to pass this startup, bro. Like, oh, it’s startup one level. No, it’s not. It’s people making cool shit. And this will benefit you because this will create jobs for your country and your region. And I think in Europe that’s a big problem. Like we have a very anti entrepreneurial mindset.

Lex: Dream big and build shit. And this is really inspiring. This is pin tweet of yours. All the projects that you’ve tried and the ones that succeeded, there’s very few

Pieter: Mute life It was for Twitter to mute to share the mute list.

Lex: Your mute words fire calculator. No more Google maker rank. How much is my site project worth? Climate finder ideas AI.

Pieter: Airline list still runs but it doesn’t make money. Airline list 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.

Lex: Bali C Cable.

Lex: That’s awesome. Make Village Nomad gear 3D and virtual reality dev. Play my inbox. Like you mentioned, there’s a lot of stuff.

Pieter: Yeah, man.

Lex: Trying to find some embarrassing tweets of yours.

Pieter: You can go to the highlights tab. It has all the good shit. Kind of.

Lex: There you go. This was Dubai POV building an AI startup. Wow, you’re a real influencer.

Pieter: And if people copy this photo now and they change the screenshots, it becomes like a meme. Of course, you know, this is good. This is how Dubai looks. It’s insane.

Lex: That’s beautiful. Architecture wise, it’s crazy. The stories behind these cities behind for sure.

Pieter: So this is about the European economy,

Lex: where like European economy landscape is ran by dinosaurs. And today I studied it so I can produce you with my evidence. 80% of top EU companies were founded before 1950. Only 36% of top US companies were founded before 1950. Yeah.

Pieter: So the median founding of companies in US is something like 1960. And the median the top companies. Right. And the median in Europe is like 1900 or something so it’s here 1913 and 1963. So there’s a 50 year difference.

Lex: It’s a good representation of the very thing you were talking about, the difference in the cultures, entrepreneurial spirit of the peoples.

Pieter: But Europe used to be entrepreneurial. There was Companies founded in 1800, 1850, 1900. It flipped around 1950 where America took the lead. And I guess my point is 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 all the old dinosaur companies control the economies, they’re lobbying with the government. Europe is also, they’re infiltrated with the government where they create so much regulation. I think it’s called regulatory capture 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. 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 AI startup right now mostly, you know, what do

Lex: you think about eac? Effective accelerationist movement?

Pieter: Man, you had Bev Jesus on. I love Bev Jesus and he’s amazing. And I think EAC is very needed to similarly create a more positive outlook on the future because people have been very pessimistic about society, about the future of society, climate change, all this stuff. EOC is a positive outlook on the future. Technology can make us, we need to spend more energy. We should find ways to of course get 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.

Lex: Yeah, build more. Don’t spend so much time on fear mongering and cautiousness and all this kind of stuff. Some is okay, some is good, but most of the time should be spent on building and creating on like, and doing so unapologetically. It’s, it’s a refreshing reminder. What made the United States great is all the builders, like you said, the entrepreneurs. Like we can’t forget that in all the sort of discussions of how things could go wrong with technology and all this kind of stuff.

Pieter: Yeah, it goes. 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, and it’s beginning all the massive problems. Right. But I think it’s very dangerous for a country or a region like Europe to. You get to this point where you’re kind of complacent, you’re kind of comfortable, and then you can either go this or you can go this way. Right. You’re from here. You go like this, and then you can go this or this. I think you should go this way and, yeah, go off. I think that’s the problem is the mind culture. So eoc, I made EU oc, which is like the European kind of version. I made, like, hoodies and stuff. So a lot of people wear, like, this make Europe great again hats. I made it red first, but it became too like Trump, so now it’s more like European blue, You know, make Europe great again.

Lex: All right. Okay. So you had a incredible life, very successful, built a lot of cool stuff. So what advice would you give to young people about how to do the same?

Pieter: Man, I would listen to nobody. Just do what you think is good and follow your heart, right? Everybody peer pressures you into doing stuff you don’t want to do, and they tell you parents or family or society and tell you, but try your own thing because it might work out. You can steer the ship. It probably doesn’t work out immediately. You probably go into very bad times, like I did as well, relatively. Right. But in the end, if you’re smart about it, you can make things work and you can create your own little life of things as you did, as I did. And I think that should be more promoted, like, do your own thing. There’s space in economy and in society for do your own thing. It’s 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 be a normie, as you say. You can be what you really want

Lex: to be and, like, go all out doing that.

Pieter: Yeah, you got to go all out. Because if you do, if you half assets, you cannot succeed. You need to go lean into the. To the outcast stuff. Lean into the being different and just doing whatever it is that you want to do. Right.

Lex: You got a whole asset.

Pieter: Yeah. Whole assets. Yeah.

Lex: This was an incredible conversation. It was an honor to finally meet you.

Pieter: It was an honor to be here,

Lex: Lex, to talk to you and keep doing your thing. Keep inspiring me and the world with all the cool stuff you’re building.

Pieter: Thank you Matt.

Lex: Thanks for listening to this conversation with Peter Levels. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Drew Houston, Dropbox Co Founder. By the way, I love Dropbox. Anyway, Drew said, don’t worry about failure. You only have to be right once. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

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