Pieter Levels
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, so I... So I'm like famous for this because I'm too lazy to set up like a staging server on my laptop every time. So nowadays I just deploy to production.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And it's, man, I'm going to get canceled for this, you know, but it works very well for me because I have a lot of, I have like PHP lint and JS lint. So it tells me when there's error. So I don't deploy. Yeah. But my literally, I, I, I have like 37,000 Git commits in the last 12 months or something. So I make like small fix and then command enter, uh, and sends to GitHub.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
GitHub sends a web to my server, web server pulls it, deploys the production and is there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
One second can be one, two seconds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, you're 100% right. Like people are like, how can you do this? Well, you get good at not taking the server down, you know? Because you need to code more carefully. But it's, look, it's idiotic in any big company, but for me it works because it makes me so fast. Like somebody will report a bug on Twitter And I kind of did do like a stopwatch, like how fast can I fix this bug?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then two minutes later, for example, it's fixed. And it's fun 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's so fun to have like a daily challenge where you try to figure stuff out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, they do because there's more bugs. And people complain about like, oh, look, he bought this Twitter and now it's full of bugs. Dude, these shipping stuff, like things are happening now and it's a dynamic app now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The preferred outcome for them is probably their career and not the overall result of the cool product, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I have this when I report bugs on like big companies I work with. I talk to a lot of different people on DM and they're all really trying hard to do something. They're all really nice. And I'm the one being kind of asshole because I'm like, guys, I'm talking to 20 people about this for six months and nothing's happening. They say, man, I know, but I'm trying my best. And yeah, so it's systemic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. The problem is I don't dictate that, right? Like if more people start using, if millions of people suddenly start using it and it becomes big, I'm not going to say, oh, stop signing up to my website and pay me money. But I never raised funding for it. And I think because I don't like the stressful life that comes with it, like I have a lot of founder friends who
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think big companies, especially in America, a lot of it is legal, right? You need to pass everything through legal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you can't like, man, the things I do, I could never do it in a big corporation because everything has to be, probably get deployed has to go through legal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And the law can change. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
By not shipping, being scared of the legal framework all the time, like you're not changing things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, VS Code. Before I used Sublime Text, I don't think it matters a lot. I think I'm very skeptical of like tools when people think it, they say it matters, right? I don't think it matters. I think... whatever tool you know very well, you can go very fast in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like, you know, the shortcuts, for example, IDE, you know, like I love Sublime Text because I could use like multi-cursor, you know, you search something and I could like make mass replaces in a file with the cursor thing. And VS Code doesn't really have that as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. It's not so good. I think, or at least I tried, but I would use that to like, uh, process data, like, um, data sets, for example, from world bank, I would just multi-cursor mass change everything. Um, 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like, boomer, you need to use VS Code. And I'm like, well, I'll try it. I got a new MacBook and then I never installed, like, I never copied the old MacBook. I just make it fresh, you know, like a clean, like format C, you know, Windows, like clean start. And I'm like, okay, I'll try VS Code and it's stuck, you know, but I don't really care. Like, it's not so important for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Dude, it was so good. You would install Windows and then after three or six months, it would start breaking and everything was like, it got slow. Then you would restart, go to DOS, format C, you would delete your hard drive and then install the Windows 95 again. It was so good times. And you would design everything like, now I'm going to install it properly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And they tell me secretly, like with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and stuff. And 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 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Now I'm going to design my desktop properly, you know, like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, you want to understand the new technological concepts and see if they can benefit you. It would be stupid not to even try.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but you just dive in. It's like NeuroFlex. Like, you keep your brain fresh, you know? Like, this kind of stuff. I got to do that more. Like, have you given React a chance? No, but I want to learn. I understand the basics, right? Yeah. I don't really know where to start.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, man. So I kind of did that. 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 going long enough that I build the same. I start getting the same problems everybody else had and you start building the same frameworks kind of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So essentially I use my own kind of framework of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Kind of, yeah. With AJAX calls. But essentially it's the same thing. Look, I don't have the time. And this is, I think saying you don't have the time is like always a lie because you just don't prioritize it enough. My priority is still running the businesses and improving that and AI. I think learning AI is much more valuable now than learning a front-end framework. It's just more impact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, you can learn a little bit every day, like a little bit of React or I think now like Next is very big. So learn a little bit of Next, you know, but I call them the military industrial complex. So if I, you need to know, you need to know it anyway, so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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? Yeah, it's GPT-4, 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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? Yeah. but they like to do the groundwork, the coding. So I think that keeps you happy, like doing something creative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, you know? Maybe Tailwind for CSS, like a styling engine. That stuff could probably save me time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I guess I need like a pass, like Verso, right? Or Heroku, those kind of platforms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like just- Ah, on the same page. Same exact- Oh, the same page? Kind of page. That's a cool product. Like- All these frameworks. Yeah. And you can see the differences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Some AI stuff, some LLM stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
To replicate, for example, and then you have, yeah, that would be a very cool project.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because nobody benchmarks this. Nobody's benchmark developer happiness with frameworks. Nobody's benchmark the shipping time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And this stuff confused me too. Like React now apparently has become backend. Yeah. Or something that used to be only frontend and you're forced to do now backend also. I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like 60% of developers do it like this. Yeah. It's hard to figure that out. You know, that's the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They usually know the dominant. They give answers that are the most probable, kind of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that makes sense to ask an LLM. I think, honestly, maybe what would help is if you want to learn or I would want to learn a framework, hire somebody that already does it and just sit with them and make something together. I've never done that, but I've thought about it. There would be a very fast way to... take their knowledge, put it in my brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but those people exist. You could find those people probably online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like, if you want to learn AI, imagine you have Karpathy sitting next to you. Yeah. Like, he does his YouTube videos. It's amazing. He can teach it to, like, a five-year-old about how to make LLM. It's amazing. Like, imagine this guy sitting next to you and just teaching you, like, let's make LLM together. Like, holy shit, it would be amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But he's amazing because he's super technical and he's the only one who can explain stuff in a simple way, which shows his complete genius.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because if you can explain without jargon, you're like, Wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like, what a guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Exactly. Yeah. Actually, he probably is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. So maybe learning a framework is a very bad idea for us, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Maybe you learn concepts, but you don't actually have to start using it for your life, right? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, yeah. I switched to Mac in 2014 because it was because when I wanted to start traveling and my brother was like, dude, get a MacBook. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I remember opening up this MacBook box like, uh... And it was so beautiful. It was like this aluminum. And then I opened it. I removed 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And all my great things started when I switched to Mac, which sounds very dogmatic, right? What great things are you talking about? All the business started working out. I started traveling. I started building startups. I started making money. It all started when I switched to Mac.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think the Finder is horrible, Mac. The what is horrible? The Finder. Oh, you don't know the Finder? So there's the Windows Explorer? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Finder is strange, man. There's strange things. There's this bug where if you 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like the whole thing is like it's Unix based, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, all the time. Like all the time. And the cool thing is you can run, I think it's like Unix, like Debian or whatever. You can run most Linux stuff on macOS, which makes it very good for development. Like I have my Nginx server. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But look at Elon. He's doing things a million times bigger than me, right? And would I want to do that? I don't know. You can't really choose these things, right? But I really respect that. I think Elon is very different from VC founders, right? VC is like software. There's a lot of bullshit in this world, I think. There's a lot of dodgy finance stuff happening there, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I can use almost everything, the same config files, configuration files. Okay. And it just works. And that makes Mac a very good platform for Linux stuff, I think. Yeah, yeah. Real Ubuntu is better, of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think it's just about the hardware. It's not so much about the software. The hardware is so well built, right? The keyboard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That is pretty cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, any couch, like hotel couch also, like in the room, right? But I used to work like very ergonomically with like a standing desk and everything like perfect, like eye height, screen, blah, blah, blah. And I felt like, Man, this has to do with lifting too. I started getting RSI, like repetitive strain injury, like tingling stuff. And it would go all the way on my back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I was sitting in a coworker space, like 6 a.m., sun comes up, and I'm working and I'm coding. And I hear like a sound or something. So I do like, I look left and my neck gets stuck, like, and I'm like, wow, fuck. And, um... I'm like, what am I dying? You know? And I thought I'm probably dying. So I don't want to die in a cowork space. I'm going to go home and die in like peace and honor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I closed my laptop and I put it in my backpack and I walked to the, to the street. I got on my motorbike, went home. And I lied down on like a pillow, like with my legs up and stuff. to get rid of this, like, because it was my whole back. And it was because I was working like this all the time. So I started getting like a laptop stand, everything ergonomically correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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'd never have RSI anymore, reproductive injury. I never have tingling anymore, no pains and stuff. So then I started working on the sofa. And it's great. Like, it feels, you're close to the, I sit like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I never have 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 there's 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, hardware stuff. And that I really respect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Legs together and then a pillow and then a laptop. And then I work. Are you like leaning back? I'm kind of like. Together, like legs and then- Where's the mouse? No, so everything's trackpad on the Mac OS, on the MacBook. I used to have the Logitech MX mouse, the perfect economic mouse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like so... Like, man, if you have tree skin, you have to look here and look there. You get also neck injury, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Command-Tap to Chrome. I used to have this swipe screen, you know, you could do like different screen spaces. Yeah. I was like, ah, it's too difficult. Let's just put it on one screen on the MacBook and then. And you'd be productive that way. Yeah. Very productive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
More productive than before. Interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, man, I love it. I love seeing it with friends. They have amazing battle stations, right, it's called. It's amazing. I want it, but I don't want it, right? You like the constraints.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, I'm suspicious of more, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You really need all this stuff. It might slow me down, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 like mythical man month where like hiring more people slows down a software project that's famous. I think you can use that metaphor maybe for, you know, tools as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I see friends just with gear acquisition syndrome that buying so much stuff. but they're not that productive. They have the best, most beautiful battle stations, desktops, everything. They're not that productive. And it's also like kind of fun. Like it's all from my laptop in a backpack, right? It's kind of nomad, minimalist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yes, so I go to sleep, like, 2 a.m. usually, something like that, and before 4 a.m. But my girlfriend would go to sleep midnight, so we did a compromise, like, 2 a.m., you know? So I wake up around 10, 11, no, 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 I put the coffee in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I used to need like really long stretches where I would do like all nighters and stuff to get shit done. But I've gotten trained to like have more interruptions where I can like... Because you have to. This is life. There's a lot of distractions. Your girlfriend asks stuff, people come over, whatever. So I'm very fast now. I can lock in and lock out quite fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I heard people, developers or entrepreneurs with kids have the same thing. Before they're like, ah, I cannot work, but they get used to it. And they get really productive in like short time because they only have like 20 minutes and then shit goes crazy again. So another constraint, right? Yeah, it's funny. So I think that works for me. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then, you know, cook food and stuff, like have lunch, steak and chicken. You eat a bunch of times a day. So you say coffee.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
What are you doing? Yeah, so a few hours later, cook foods. We get like locally stores 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 mix fun stuff, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You mean like the special days where like girlfriend leaves to like Paris or something and you're alone for a week at home, which is amazing. You can just code. It's like, and you stay up all night and eat chocolate. Yeah. Eat chocolate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Now shit goes crazy. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Now we wake up like 1 p.m. at 2 p.m.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And his girlfriend and his kid stay in the house. And he goes to another hotel. Sounds a little suspicious, right? Going to a 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And it's common. It's flow state. It's this uninterrupted period of time. Yeah. So, yeah, I wake up like 1, 2 p.m., you know, still coffee, shower. We still shower, you know. And then just code like nonstop. Maybe my friend comes over. Just some distraction. Yeah. Andre, he codes too. So, he comes over. We code together. We listen, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It starts going back to like the Bali days, you know, like co-working days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because it's nice to have like a vibe where you both sit together on the couch and coding on something and you actually, it's mostly silent or there's music, you know, and sometimes you ask something and, but generally like you're really locked in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think like Techno, like YouTube Techno. There's a channel called H-O-R with a umlaut, like H-O, like double dot. It's Berlin Techno, whatever. It looks like 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 kind of aggressive, you know, like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like I think distracting, man, jazz. Like I listen to coffee jazz with my girlfriend when I wake up and it's kind of like this piano starts getting annoying. It's like, it's too many tones. It's like too many things going on. This industrial techno is like, you know, this African like rain dances, like it's this transcendental trance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 like in the weekend and they don't hang anymore in the week because you need to be at the office. And I was like, this is not for me. I want to do something else. And I was starting getting this, like, I think it's like Saturn return, you know, when you turn 27.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And it's just normal brown. It's not like binaural.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's more diffused, more dampened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I can see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, sharp brightness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I can see that. And you use a headphone, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
In coworker space, I would just start talking too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, we would do, in the co-work 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, like 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 then 45 minutes again working. And that worked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But you need to shut people up where they, you know...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like some concept where Saturn returns to the same place in the orbit that it was when you're born. I'm learning so many things. It's some astrology thing, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, like a podcast. And suddenly, after a question, it's like, yeah, yeah. And they were just silent for like three minutes. And then they said, that was amazing. Yeah, that was amazing. I was like, wow, pretty cool, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I don't know. That's so cool. I wish I was, I wish I could think more about, but I wanna like, I wanna show you my heart, you know? I wanna show you, go straight from my heart to my mouth to like saying the real thing. And the more I think, the more I start like filtering myself, right? And I wanna just throw it out there immediately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, too much, right? Because normally like two cups of coffee. But on this perfect day, like we go to like four maybe. So we're starting to hit like the anxiety levels. So four cups is a lot for you. Well, I think my coffees are quite strong when I make them. It's like 20 grams of coffee powder in the V60. So... Like my friends call them like nuclear coffee, because it's quite heavy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's quite strong. But it's nice to hit that anxiety level where you're like almost panic attack, but you're not there yet. So, but that's like, man, it's like super locked in just like- It's amazing. But I mean, there's a space for that in my life, but I think it's great for making new stuff. It's amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Exactly, the summer 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 shits without, you know, they're amazing, but like no disturbances, just be alone. And then, you know, people can make something very, very amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, you can do a little bit of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then a little bit of shipping, you know, do both.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But they need to allow us to go, you know? You need like a man cave, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Okay, cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, also because of gym, I'm not tired. I'm tired when I want to, you know, when it's night, I need to sleep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Me too, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I never understood the small meal thing. It didn't work for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Nomad is I 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 OK.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And now it's like the number one or number two biggest remote job boards. And it's also fully automated and people just post a job and people apply. It has like profiles as well. Like it's kind of like LinkedIn for remote work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's essentially like a simple job board. I discovered job boards are way more complicated than you think, but yeah, it's a job board for remote jobs. But the nice thing is you can charge a lot of money for job posts. Man, it's good money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 name. It's just upsells, man. And you charge $1,000 for an upsell. It was crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And all these companies just upsell, upsell. Yeah, we want everything. Job posts would cost $3,000, $4,000. And I was like, this is good business. And then the feds 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. It was good times, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like, what am I doing with my life? Like, this is... Like, I was working on startups and stuff and YouTube, but it's like, what is the future here, you know? Like, is this... Is this something while my friends 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 a hundred things challenge. What is that? A hundred things? I mean, it's ridiculous, but like you, you write down every object you have in your house and you count it, you make like a spreadsheet and you're like, okay, I have 500 things. You need to get it down to a hundred. Why?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You know, this is just a trend. So I did it. I started like selling stuff, started throwing away stuff. And I did like MDMA and XTC, like 2012 kind of, and, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
after that trip i felt so different and i felt like i had to start throwing shit away like i swear yeah and i started throwing shit away and i felt that was like it was almost like the drug sending me to a path of like you need to throw your shit away you need to start you know go on a journey you need to get out of here and um and that's what the mdma did i think yeah how hard is it to get down to 100 items
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Boy, you need to like sell your PC and stuff. You need to go on eBay. And then, man, going eBay selling all your stuff is very interesting because you discover society. Man, you meet the craziest people. You meet every range, from rich to poor. Everybody comes to your house to buy stuff. It's so funny, so interesting. I recommend everybody do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. It was so... I didn't know... I was living in Amsterdam and I didn't know... I have my own subculture or whatever. And I discovered the Dutch people as they are from eBay. So I sold everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So back then I was making music and we would make music videos with a Canon 5D camera. Back then everybody was making films and music videos. 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. But it meant that selling this meant that we wouldn't make music videos together anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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. It was a hard goodbye. It was just a camera, but it was like, it felt like, sorry guys, it doesn't work and I need to go, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. But it was like, it was like cutting your life. Like this shit ends now. Now we're going to do new stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I wasn't making money anymore a lot. I was making $500 a month or something. And I was, you know, looking at the ceiling thinking like, now I'm like 27, I'm a loser. And that's the moment when I started building like startups. And it was because my dad said, like, if you're depressed, you need to, you know, get sand, get a shovel, start shoveling, doing something. You can't just sit still.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I think that's what I learned from it. Like, you learn that you can live with very little objects, very little stuff. But there's a counter to it. Like, you lean more on the stuff, on the services, right? Like, for example, you don't need a car, you use Uber, right? Or you don't need... Kitchen stuff, because you go to restaurants, you know, when you're traveling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So you lean more on other people's services, but you spend money on that as well. So that's good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, I recommend if you're 18, you get out of high school, do this. Go travel. and build some internet stuff, whatever. Bring your laptop and it's an amazing experience. Five years ago, I was 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You can like, okay, now I learned, I've been 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Oh, like the subcultures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, but man, if you're smart about it, you can stay safe. And I met so many weirdos from traveling. You meet, that's how travel works. If you really let loose, you meet the craziest people. And it's the most interesting people. And it's just, I cannot recommend it enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But I was very strange outcast as well. And I'm more adaptable to normie now. You learned it. Yeah. After 30s, you know, you're like, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Man, I feel so good. You start as an outcast, but the more you work on yourself, the less like shit you have. You kind of start becoming more normie because you become more chill with yourself and more happy. And it kind of makes you uninteresting, right? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Which is kind of like an interesting way to deal with depression. It's not like, oh, let's talk about it. It's more like, let's go do something. And I started doing a project called 12 Startups in 12 Months, where every month I would make something, like a project, and I would launch it with Stripe so people could pay for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like the most, the crazy people are always the most interesting. If you've solved your internal struggles and your therapy and stuff, and you kind of become kind of, you know, it's not so interesting anymore, maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It gives me happiness for like two weeks. I'm very quickly adapting to like a baseline, hedonistic adaptation, very fast. But man, if you look at the studies, most people like, Like get a new car, six months, you know, get a new house, six months. You just feel the same. She's like, wow, should I buy all this stuff? Studying hedonistic adaptation made me think a lot about minimalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, like people around you, like people you love, nice food, nice experiences, meaningful work, those things, exercise, you know, those things make you happy, I think, make me happy for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, so when I wrote that, I was getting so many DMs, as you probably have a million times more. 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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
man of the people you know it's like you've changed man yeah you've changed you guys you know like this and i'm like i'll explain why i just don't have the time in a day to you know answer every question and also people send you like crazy shit man like stalkers and like people write like their whole life story for you and then ask you advice like man i have no idea i'm not a therapist i don't know i know this stuff
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, add a Stripe check. I'm not sponsored by Stripe, but add a Stripe checkout button.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. I have this problem that I want to try to help people and also like, oh, let's make startups and whatever. And I've learned over the years that generally for me, and it sounds maybe bad, right? But like I helped my friend Andre, for example, he came up to me in a coworker space. That's how I met him. He said, I want to learn to code. I want to do startups. How do I do it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 his own startups.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You need to have this energy for yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
100%, I think so, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, so I think it's procrastination. I think sending messages to people is a lot of procrastination. Like, Lex, how do you become a successful podcaster? Yeah. Bro, just, you know, start. Like, just go. Yeah. And, uh. Just go. I would never ask you how to be a successful podcaster. Like I would just start it and then I would copy your methods, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. And they're really nice. The CEO, Patrick, is really nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I would say, ah, this guy has a black background. We probably need this as well. Yeah. Try it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Try it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, you imitate and then you put your own spin to it, you know? And that's like creative process. That's like literally the whole, everybody always builds on the previous work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, it's not this specific, but I had to make like a... You know, an average is only... Firefighting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, a lot of it is wasted, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
We need to fly to an island, you know, make a man cave island where we can just, everybody can just code for a week, you know, and just get shit done, make new projects. Yeah. Yeah. But man, they called me psychopath for this because it says like one hours of sex, hugs, love, you know? Man, I had to write something, you know? And they were like, oh, this guy's psychopath.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
He plans his sex in a specific hour. Like, bro, I don't. You have a counter for hugs? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Click, click, click.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Dude, I know this. Because when I was nine years old, I was making websites also. Yeah. And I tried to open a merchant account. There was like before Stripe, you would have like, I think it was called WorldPay. So I had to like fill out all these forms. And then I had to fax them to America from Holland with my dad's fax. And my dad had to, it wasn't my dad's name. And he had to sign for this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
How many times you see your parents? Jesus, like, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's scary, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Do you believe that friends just slowly disappear from your life? Your friend group evolves, right? 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. 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. It's a different life now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So that- Yeah, that's deep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's not recently. I think it's just a gradual thing, right? Like it keeps going. And I also don't know why it keeps going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I don't know anything about their personal life. I want to know about their personal life. Like you do podcasts, you ask about life stuff or personality. That's the most interesting part of like business or sports. Like what's behind the athlete, right? Behind the entrepreneur. That's interesting stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, like you shared that, you know, like I shared a tweet that went too far, but like we were cleaning the toilet because the toilet was clogged, you know? But like, it's just real stuff because Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA guy, he says he started cleaning toilets, you know? That was cool. You tweeted something about the Denny's thing. I forget. Yeah, it was recent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
NVIDIA was started in a Denny's diner table. And you made it somehow profound. Yeah, this one, this one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The home office.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The island. Yeah. You need a space to congregate. Man, and I found history on this. So 400 years ago in the coffee houses of Europe- Like the scientific revolution, the enlightenment happened because they would go to coffee houses, they would sit there, they would drink coffee and they would work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And he started reading these terms and conditions. It was just like, he's liable for like a hundred million in damages. And he's like, I don't want to sign this. I'm like, dad, come on. I need a merchant account. I need to make money on the internet, you know? And he signed it and we faxed it to America. And I had a merchant account. But then nobody paid for anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They would work, they would write 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, And then when you're in Europe, like large parts of Europe now, you cannot use a laptop anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like no laptop, which I understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
For a lot of people. A lot of people have very small homes and co-working spaces are kind of boring. They're not very private. They're not serendipitous. They're kind of boring. Cafes are amazing because random people can come in and ask you, what are you working on? And not just laptops, people are also having conversations like they did 400 years ago, debates or whatever. Things are happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And man, I understand the aesthetics of it. It's like, oh, startup bro shipping his bullshit startup, you know? Mm-hmm. But there's something more there. Like there's people actually making stuff, making new companies that the society benefits from. Like we're benefiting from Nvidia. I think the US GDP for sure is benefiting from Nvidia. European GDP could benefit if we build more companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I feel in Europe, there's this vibe and this, you have to connect things, but not allowing laptops in cafes is kind of like part of the vibe, which is like, yeah, we're not really here to work. We're here to like enjoy life. I agree with this. Anthony Bourdain, like this tweet was quoted with Anthony Bourdain photo with him with cigarettes and a coffee in France.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And he said, this is what cafes are for. I agree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, and it's awesome. Not everybody wins. 99% of people will be bullshit, but 1% will win. But they're working their ass off. Yeah, and they're doing something. And you need to pass this startup bro, like, oh, it's startup on a 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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's a big problem. We have a very anti-entrepreneurial mindset.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it's much easier now. You can sign up, you add some codes and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's very few.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It was for Twitter to mute, to share the mute list. Yeah. Mute words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Airline list still runs, but it doesn't make money. Airline list like compares the safety of airlines because I was nervous to fly. So I was like, let's collect all the data on crashes for all the airplanes. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You can go to the highlights tab. It has all the good shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This was Dubai.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And if people copy this photo now and they change the screenshot, it becomes like a meme. Of course, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This is how Dubai looks. It's insane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, the stories behind, for sure. So this is about the European economy where like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But Europe used to be entrepreneurial. Like there was companies founded in 1800, 1850, 1900. It flipped like around 1950 where America took the lead. And I guess my point is like, I hope that Europe gets back to... Because I'm European. I hope that Europe gets back to being an entrepreneurial culture where they build big companies again. Because right now the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, right? Where it's very hard for a newcomer to join and to enter an industry because there's too much regulation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So actually regulation is very good for big companies because they can follow it. I can't follow it, right? If I want to start 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 notaries involved. I need to get certificates, licenses. Whereas in America, I can just open my laptop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I can start an AI startup right now, mostly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I could, I could code a little bit cause 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 and bass or techno or house.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, you had Beth Jesus on. I love Beth Jesus and he's amazing. And I think IAC 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 like, it's a positive outlook on the future. It's like technology can make us, you know, we spend more energy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
We should find ways to, of course, get like clean energy, but we need to spend more energy to make cooler stuff and, you know, go into space and build more technology that can improve society. And we shouldn't shy away from technology. Technology can be the answer for many things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it goes together. Look at China. China is now at the stage of like America, what, like 1900 or something? They're building rapidly, like insane. And obviously China has massive problems, but that comes with the whole thing. That comes with America in its beginning, all the massive problems, right? But...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think it's very, very dangerous for a country or region like Europe to, you, you, you get to this point where you're kind of complacent, you're kind of comfortable. And then, you know, you can either go this or you can go this way, right? You're, you're from here, you go like this and then you can go this or this. I think you should go this way and, uh, yeah, go off. And, and, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think the problem is the mind culture. So EOC, I made EUOC, which is like the European kind of version. I made like hoodies and stuff. So a lot of people wear like this Make Europe Great Again hat. 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, I would listen to, like, nobody. Just do what you think is good and follow your heart, right? Like, everybody peer-presses you into doing stuff you don't want to do. And, like, they tell you, like, parents or family or society and tell you. But, like, try your own thing, you know? Because it probably, it might work out. You can steer the ship, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, my album, my CD album was using Flash. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I sold my CD, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It probably doesn't work out immediately. You probably go into very bad times, like I did as well, relatively, right? Yeah. But in the end, if you're smart about it, you can make things work and you can create your own little life of things as you did, you know, as I did. And I think that should be more promoted, like do your own thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
There's space in economy and in society for do your own thing, you know? It's like, you know, like little villages, everybody would sell, I would sell bread, you would sell meat. Everybody can do their own little thing. You don't need to, you know, be a normie, as you say, you can be what you really want to be, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, you got to go all out. Because if you do, if you half-ass it, you cannot succeed. You need to go lean into the outcast stuff, lean into the being different and just doing whatever it is that you want to do, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, whole-ass it, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Thank you, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It was in Flash. Back then, that was the JavaScript, you know? The JavaScript, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And Steve Jobs killed it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Steve Jobs said, Flash sucks, stop using it. And everyone's like, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Well, it was a closed platform, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But this is ironic because Apple, you know, they're not very open. Right. But back then, Steve was like, this is closed. We should not use it. And it has security problems, I think, which sounded like a cop-out. Like, I just wanted to say that to make it look kind of bad. But Flash was cool. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You had, like, the, you know, Lex homepage. Everyone was centered. And you had, like, Peter's homepage. And on the construction GIF, which was, like, a guy with a helmet. Right. And the lights, it was amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think that was where the merchant accounts people would use for. People would make money a lot. Only money made on the internet then was porn, or a lot of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but I had to learn the actual coding. So this was good. It was a good idea to like every month launch a startup so I could learn the codes, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, 2013, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I made an app that would log into your Gmail, get the emails and find the ones with YouTube links, and then make like, kind of like a gallery of your songs. Like essentially Spotify. And my friends loved it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, it uses like POP, like POP or IMAP, you know, it would actually check your email. So that like privacy concerns, because it would get all your emails to find YouTube links, but then I wouldn't save anything. But 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, that's cool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, you could tell Gmail, like, don't give me all the emails. Just give me the ones with YouTube links, you know, or something like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think it's hard to get people to pay for these like extensions and plugins, you know, because it's not like a real app. So it's not like people don't value it. People value it. Oh, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but who pays for Chrome extensions, right? Like barely anybody. So that's not a good place to make money probably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like Chrome extensions should be an extension for your startup. You know, you have a product. Oh, we also have a Chrome extension.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like GPTs, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like these chat GPTs, they're going to charge money for it now. You get a rev share, I think, for an opening eye. I made a lot of them also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think the hard part is like figuring out what you shouldn't add, right? What you shouldn't build because you don't have time. So you need to build a landing page. Well, you need to make, you know, you need to build the product actually because it needs to be something they pay for. Do you need to build a login system? Like maybe no, you know, like maybe you can build some scrappy login system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like for Photoi, you sign up, you pay with a Stripe checkout and you get a login link. And when I started, there was only a login link with a hash and that's just a static link. So it's very easy to 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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, this is my new startup, you should use it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, nobody gets deleted, you know? Maybe if you find a problem that a lot of people on Reddit already have on subreddits, you know? And you solve that problem and say... Some people, I made this thing that might solve your problem and maybe it's free for now. That could work. But you need to be very, narrow it down what you're building.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Okay. So I think it's normal if you're young, that you feel like a loser.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. I think this is 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. Like Jeremy Peterson said this, I saw it somewhere. Like the reason people are depressed because they have nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They don't have a girlfriend, they don't have a boyfriend, they don't have... You need stuff, you need like a family, you need things around you, you need to build a life for yourself. If you don't build a life for yourself, you'll be depressed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So if you're alone in Asia, in a hostel, looking at the ceiling and you don't have any money coming in, you don't have a girlfriend, you don't... Of course you're depressed. It's logic. But back then, if you're in the moment, you think there's not logic, there's something wrong with me, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And also, I think I started going... I started getting like anxiety and I think I started going a little bit crazy where... I think travel can make you insane. And I know this because I know that there's like digital nomads that they kill themselves. And I haven't checked like the comparison with like baseline people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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. Yeah. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like everybody's really nice in Thailand, but you're not part of the culture. You're traveling around. You're hopping from city to city. You don't have a home anymore. you feel disrooted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yes, exactly. But people treat you like Thailand. People are so nice, but you still feel like outcast. And, and then I think that the digital nomads I met then were all kind of like, it was like shady business, you know, but they were like vigilantes because it was a new thing. And like one guy was selling illegal drugs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It was an American guy was selling illegal drugs via UPS to Americans, you know, on this website, they were like a lot of drop shippers doing shady stuff. Um, There's a lot of shady things going on there. And they didn't look like very balanced people. They didn't look like people I wanted to hang with, you know? So I also felt outcast from other foreigners in Thailand, other digital nomads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I struck upon it on accident because I was like, I'm going to graduate university and then I'm going to, I need to get out of here. I'll fly to Asia because I've been before in Asia. I studied in Korea in 2009, like study exchange. So I was like, Asia is easy. Thailand's easy. And I'll just go there, figure things out. And it's cheap. It's very cheap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Chiang Mai, I would live like for $150 per 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 live in like Colombia or Thailand or Vietnam or Bali.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They would live kind of like in more cheap places. And it looked like a very adventurous life. Like you travel around, you build your business. There's no pressure from like your home society, right? 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you can get away from this pressure. 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 disattached from anything and anybody. You're disattached from your culture. You're disattached from the culture you're probably in because you're staying very short.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think Franz Kafka said, I'm free, therefore I'm lost. Man, that's so true. Yeah, that's exactly the point. And yeah, freedom is like, it's the definition of no constraints, right? Like anything is possible. You can go anywhere. And everybody's like, oh, that must be super nice. You know, like freedom, you must be very happy. And it's the opposite. Like, I don't think that makes you happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think constraints probably make you happy. And that's a big lesson I learned then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
For me, you know, because I was more like a developer. I wanted to make startups kind of. And it was like drugs being shipped to America, like diet pills and stuff, like non-FDA approved stuff, you know? And they would like laugh. There was no like, they would sit with beers and they would laugh about like all the dodgy shit kind of they're doing, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That kind of vibe, you know, like kind of sleazy e-comm vibe. I'm not saying all e-comm is sleazy, you know, but you know this vibe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You know the guys with sports cars in Dubai, these people, you know? Yes. E-comm, like, oh, bro, you got to drop shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you'll make a hundred million a month. Those people, it was this shit. And I was like, this is not my people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, I don't want to judge. I know that for me, it wasn't my world. It wasn't my subculture. I wanted to make cool shit. But they also think their cool shit is cool. But I wanted to make real startups. And that was my thing. I would read Hacker News, like Y Combinator. And they were making cool stuff. So I wanted to make cool stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's very romantic, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, I think it was amazing. Like, we would work. Like, I would make friends and we would work until, you know, 6 a.m. in Bali, for example, with, like, with Andre, my best friend, who is still my best friend, and with another friend. And we would work until, like, the morning when the sun came up. Because at night, the coworker space was silent, you know, there was nobody else. And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because there was like six people coming or we didn't know. Sometimes people would come in. Did you say 3-0-30? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And we would drink like four per person or something, you know? Man, it's Bali. I don't know if they were powerful lattes, you know, but they were lattes. And we would put it in a plastic bag and then we'd drive there and all the coffee was like falling, you know, everywhere. And then we'd go in the coffee stand and have these coffees here and we'd work all night. We'd play like techno music and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
everybody would just work in there. 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, you know, the yoga girls and yoga guys would come in, you know, after the yoga class at six and they say, hey, good morning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And we're like, we look like this, you know, and we're like, what's up, how are you doing? And we didn't know how bad we looked, you know, but it was very bad. And then we'd go home, sleep in like a hostel or a hotel and do the same thing. And again, and again, and again. Yeah. And it was this lock-in mode, you know, like working. And that was very fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
More like... Like industrial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It also depends what kind of work you do, right? Like if you're writing, you probably don't want drum and bass 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 those are good memories, you know? And also like travel memories. Like you go from city to city. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think still like Bangkok is the best place. And back in Chiang Mai, I think Thailand is very special. Like I've been to the other place, like I've been to Vietnam and I've been to South America and stuff. I still think Thailand wins in how nice people are, how easy of a life people have there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I love Brazil also. My girlfriend is Brazilian, but I do love, not just because of that, but I like Brazil more. the problem still is the safety issue. It's like in America, it's localized. It's hard for Europeans to understand 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, maybe you die. Right? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it's not true in Europe. In Europe, it's much more average.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But you don't feel scared?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I have friends, like there's a lot of friends that are exactly like this. Like they go to like 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... Oh yeah, I hate luxury. Yeah, it's very European of you. Like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, anywhere. I think I wrote it in some blog posts and like, It was a common thing when you would wake up and this was like, because I have this website. I started a website about this digital nomads like called nomadlist.com and there was a community. So it was like 30,000 other digital nomads because I was feeling lonely. So I built this website and I stopped feeling lonely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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. Yeah. like for the first half minute. And I had to look outside, like, where am I? Which country? Which sounds really like privileged, but it's more like funny. Like you literally don't know where you are because you're so disrooted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But there's something, man, it's like Anthony Bourdain, you know? There's something pure about this kind of vagabond travel thing, you know? Like it's behind me, I think. I don't like, now I travel with my girlfriend, right? It's very different, but it is a romantic, like memories of this kind of like, vagabond, individualistic, solo life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 And that's why people get addicted to travel, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, you know, code for, and it will make my life easier.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I would say make like a list of all these problems you have and like idea to solve it. And I see which one is like viable. You can actually do something and then start building it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but that's where travel comes in. because when I started traveling, I started seeing stuff in other countries that you didn't have in Europe, for example, or America, even like, if you go to Asia, uh, Like, dude, especially 10 years ago, nobody knew about this. Like WeChat, all these apps that they already had before we had them. These everything apps, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 with. You can order groceries. You can order massage. You can order car mechanic. Anything you can think of is in the app. And that stuff, for example, you know, that's called like arbitrage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
There's a lot of problems you start seeing. Just getting out of your house, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I used to have like a... Because 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Right now, I think like, because I already have money, I can do more things based on technology. So for example, AI... when I found out about when stable diffusion came or chat GBT and stuff, all these things were like, I didn't start working with them because I had a problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but that's very risky because that's the famous like solution trying to find a problem. Yeah. 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 the tech, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So on the left, you have the prompt, the box. 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. It will take like one minute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Replicate. Replicate.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 cursor as to. Yeah. So some don't look like you. So the hit and miss rate is like, I don't know, let's say like 50-50 or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It was very bad in the beginning. It was so bad, but still people signed up to it, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, but that's the problem with these models. No, we need to talk about this, because the models in Stable Diffusion, so the photorealistic models that are fine-tuned, they were all trained on porn in the beginning. And there was a guy called Hassan. So I was trying to figure out how to do photorealistic AI photos, and Stable Diffusion by itself is not doing that well. The faces look all mangled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And it doesn't have enough resolution or something to do that well. But I started seeing these base models, these fine-tuned models, and people would train them on porn, and I would try them, and they would be very photorealistic. They would have bodies that actually made sense, like body anatomy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 everyone needs to do this with AI startups, with imaging. You need to prompt out the naked stuff. You need to put a, you know, naked... You have to keep reminding the model you need to put clothes on the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 for NSFW.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because you get the journalists get very angry if they, you know... There was a journalist, I think, that got angry that used this and was like, oh, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You can zoom in on the cat if you want. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's a very sad cut.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But this, man, but this is the problem with AI startups because they all act like it's perfect. Like this is groundbreaking and, but it's not perfect. It's like really bad, you know, half the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. So you remove this stuff and you write like whatever you want, like in Thailand or something or in Tokyo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. And then... You can say like at night with neon lights, like you can add more detail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
As a cowboy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, I hope not. This is the end of my career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, let's see.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's all jQuery. Do I still use jQuery?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's PHP and jQuery. And SQLite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's because of WordPress, right? Because the blogs are- Yeah, that's true. Yeah. That's true. I'm seeing a revival now. People are getting sick of frameworks. Like all the JavaScript frameworks are so like, what do you call it, like wieldy. Like they're so, it takes so much work to just maintain this code. And then it updates to a new version. You need to change everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
PHP just stays the same and works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 a much better language than PHP. And I never learned it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I never did it because I didn't have time. These things were growing like this and I was launching more projects and I never had time. It's like one day, you know, I'll start coding properly and I never got to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. It's like software developers. If you want to get a job and there's like, you know, people making stuff like startups. And if you want to be entrepreneur, probably you maybe shouldn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, $30 million. And the idea is that you need to make the developers, the new developers, like when you're 18 or 20 years old, right? Get them to use this framework and add a platform to it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
like where the framework can, it's open source, but you probably should use the platform, which is paid to use it. And 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 DigitalOcean, right? So there's obviously a monetary incentive here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
We want to get a lot of developers to use this technology, and then we need to charge them money because they're going to use it in startups, and then the 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's a big thing to like, and same thing what happens with like nutrition and fitness or something. Same thing happens in developing. They pay these influencers to promote the stuff, use it, make stuff with it, make demo products with it. And then a lot of people were like, wow, use this. And I started noticing this because when I would ship my stuff, people would ask me, what are you using?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
PHP was not good at security for a while, but now it's good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 like for society, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like if we want to save time, we should probably use technologies that's simple, that's pragmatic, that works, that's not overly complicated, doesn't make your life like a living hell, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 I think it's suspicious. When I talk about it on Twitter, there's this army comes out, you know? There's these framework armies. Man, something my gut tells me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, and did you make money with it? Did you charge users? Is it a real business?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
First of all, some don't look like you, right? But some do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think it started because Stability Fusion came out. So Stability Fusion is the first generative image model, AI model. And I started playing with it. You could install it on your Mac. Somebody forked it and made it work for MacBooks. So I downloaded it and cloned the repo and started using it to generate images. And... it was like amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like it would, I found it on Twitter because you see things happen on Twitter and I, I would post what I was making on Twitter as well. And you could make any image, you could write a prompt. So essentially you write a prompt and then it generates a photo of that or image of that, um, in any style. Like they would use like artist names to make like a Picasso kind of style and stuff. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I was trying to see like, what is it good at? Is it good at people? No, it's really bad at people, but it was good at houses. So architecture, for example, I would generate like architecture houses. So I made a website called thishousedosnotexist.org. And it generated like, they called like house porn in that one. Like house porn is like a subreddit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So, and this was Stable Diffusion, like the first version. So it looks really, you can click for another photo. So it generates like all these kind of non-existing houses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it looked kind of good, you know, like especially back then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Now things look much better. It's really, really well done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And it also generates like a description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This is very scrappy. In the bottom, there's like a ranking of the most upvoted houses. So these are the top voted. And if you go to all time, you see quite beautiful ones. Yeah. So this one is my favorite. The number one. It's like kind of like a... How is this not more popular? It was really popular for like a while, but then people got so bored of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think because I was getting bored of it too. Like just continuous house porn, like everything starts looking the same. But then I saw it was really good at interior. So I pivoted to interiorai.com where I tried to like upload first-generation interior designs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then I tried to do, like it 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. It has the same code essentially. 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And to train myself, like, and this would never work, obviously. And it worked. And actually it started understanding me as a concept. So my face worked and, and you could do like different styles, like me as a, like very cheesy medieval warrior, all this stuff. So I was like, this is another startup. So now I did avatarai.me. I couldn't get to .com. And this was... Is it still up?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, avatarai.me. Well, now it's forwards to Photoi because it pivoted. Got it. But this was more like cheesy thing. So this is very interesting because this went so viral. It made like, I think like 150K in a week or something. So most money ever made. And then big, this is very interesting, the big VC companies like Lenza, which are much better at iOS and stuff than me. I didn't have iOS app.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They became like the top grossing app after that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think it's amazing, honestly. And it's not like... You didn't have like a feeling like, oh, fuck. No, I was a little bit like sad because all my products would work out and I never had like real fierce competition. And now I have like fierce competition from like a very skilled, high talent, like iOS developer studio or something that... And they already had an app.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They had an app in App Store for, I think, retouching your face or something. So they were very smart. They add these avatars to there. It's a feature. They had the users. They do a push notification to everybody. We have these avatars. Man, I think they made so much money. And I think they did a really great job. And I also made a lot of money with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like, how can you make people look really photorealistic? And it was difficult. And that's why these avatars worked because they were all like in a cheesy, you know, Picasso style. And art is easy because you interpret the, the, all the problems that AI has with your face are like artistic, you know, if you call it Picasso.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But if you make a real photo, all the problems with your face, like it just, you look wrong, you know? So I started making photo AI, which was like a pivot of it, where it was like a photo studio where you could take photos without actually needing a photographer, needing a studio. You don't just, you know, you just type it. And I've been working on it for like the last year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And it's a lot, like it's a lot for anybody. It's a lot for me, like, uh, making 10 K a day on this, you know, that's amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then the nested tweet, like that's the launch tweets. And then the, before there is like the me hacking on it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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'd look like a hammerhead shark. It was like a top comment. So then I realized my eyes are far apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it helps you realize how you look, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
First trap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's water from the waterfall, but the waterfall is in the back, you know? So what's going on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's all AI. It's all AI. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Exactly. So, but this was hit or miss. So you had to do a lot of curation because 99% of it was really bad. So these are the photos I uploaded.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Exactly. I would imagine that too. When I started, I was like, oh, this must be like some 3D scan technology, right? Yeah. So I think the cool thing with AI, it trains the concept of you. So it's literally like learning, just like any AI model learns, it learns how you look. So I did this and then I was getting so much, I was getting DMs, like Telegram messages, like, how can I do the same thing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So all you know is you have customers that paid money. Then I added a Typeform link. So Typeform is a site where you can create your own input form, like Google Forms. So they would get an email with a link to the type form or actually just a link after the checkout and they could upload their photos. So enter their email, upload the photos and I launched it. And I was like, here, first sale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So it's October, 2022. And I think within like the first 24 hours was like, I'm not sure, it was like a thousand customers or something. But the problem was I didn't have code to automate this. So I had to do manually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, it's download the images myself. It's a zip file. It's a unzipped zip file. And you unzipped it? Yeah, unzipped it. Yes, and then I, no, 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 from my personal email, say, here's your, Here's your avatar. And they liked it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They were like, wow, it's amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because I didn't have an email address on this domain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 message them. So I said, thanks so much for using my sites. You know, he's like, yeah, amazing app, great work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So it's like, this is different than normal reaction, you know? It's Bill Gates, isn't it? Cannot say anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
European regulation. I cannot share anything. But I was very, I was like, wow. And, 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 it did. Because it's too cheesy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then so the, you call it 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 saying, what is this? Can you just put it back to $3? They say, yeah, maybe in the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
We're looking at it right now. I'm like, what are you talking about? You just took all my money, you know? And they're smart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think it's 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, say, can you please create, like, it's called Dreambooth, this fine tuning of yourself. Can you add this to your site?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because I need this because I'm being price guzzed. And he said, no, because it takes too long to run. It takes half an hour to run and we don't have the GPUs for it. I said, please, please, please. And then after a week, he said, we're doing it. We're launching this. And Then this company became, it was like not very famous company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 it was from these early DMs with like the CEO, like Ben Furrish, very nice guy. And he was like, they never priced gouge me. They never treated me bad. They always been very nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's a very cool company. So you can run any ML model, any AI model, LLMs, you can run on here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yes, they scale. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, you can do now. You can click on the model and just run it already. It's like super easy. You log in with GitHub. That's great. And by running it on the website, then you can automate with the API. You can make a website that runs the model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They do anything, yeah. It's a very cool company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. The website even looks weird now. It started as a machine learning platform. I didn't even understand what it did. It was just too... To ML, you know, like you would understand because you're in the ML world. I wouldn't understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 trained.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like how do you like... Yes, man, there's so many hacks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like a hundred hacks to make it work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think people... Well, man, it's a little thing. People don't know how they look. So they generate photos of themselves and then they say, ah, it doesn't look like me. But you can check the training photos, it does look like you, but you don't know how you look. So there's a face dysmorphia of yourself that you have no idea how you look.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I know that if I would make a selfie, how I think I look, 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. So how other people see you is nice. So you need to ask other people to choose your photos. You shouldn't choose them yourself because you don't know how you look.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I learned from the hammerhead shark eyes this stuff about you that looks ugly to you and it's probably that what makes you original makes you nice and people like it about you. 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, whatever. So you want to have that too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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. Like how good your training data is,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
is in many ways more important than how many steps you train for, like how many months or whatever with the GPUs, like the gold.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like the photos should be diverse. So for example, if I only upload photos with a brown shirt or green shirt, the model will think that I'm training the green shirt. So the things that are the same every photo are the concepts that are trained. What you want is your face to be the concept that's trained. And everything else to be diverse, like different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 were 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And like Carpati, I think, says this. Like, we don't really know how this thing works, but it does something, but nobody really knows why, right? Like, we 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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
In a very vain way. Like me, you know? Like, I want to look good in your podcast, for example. Yeah, for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, and look at you. You're one of the top podcasters 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like what matters is probably the content of the podcast. Like you get the interesting guests. Focus on stuff that matters. Yeah, and I think this is very common. They call it gear acquisition syndrome, like gas. Like people in any industry do this. They just buy all the stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
There was a meme recently, like what's the name for the guy that buys all the stuff before he even started doing the hobby, right? Um, marketing, you know, marketing does that to people. They want to buy this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But like, man, you can make a, you can make a Hollywood movie on an iPhone, you know, if the content is good enough, it's, it, and it will probably be original because you would be using an iPhone for it, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you should probably do it yourself. Like you can use Photia, but it's even more fun if you do it yourself. So you train the models. You can learn about like control nets. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So every model, every photo you generate uses this control net pose, for example. I think it would be very fun for you to try out that stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Do you play with lighting, with pose, with the... Man, actually, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's amazing. So there's for sure a lot of stuff you can do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think you need to join Twitter. X, you know, X is amazing now. And the whole AI industry is on X. And they're all like anime avatars. So... It's funny because my friends ask me this, like, who should I follow to stay up to date? And I say, go to X and follow all the AI anime models that this person is following or follows. And I sent them some URL and they all start laughing, like, what is this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But they're real, like, people hacking around in AI. They get hired by big companies and they're on X. And most of them are anonymous. This is very funny. They use anime avatars. I don't. But those people hack around and they publish what they're discovering. They talk about papers, for example. So yeah, definitely X. It's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 going to make something too. It's just super fun. And so if you want to start going X, and then I would go to replicate and start trying to play with models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I had this photo guy and a lot of people using it. There was like a million or more photos a month being generated. And I discovered I was testing parameters, like increase the step count of generating a photo or changing the sampler, like a scheduler.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like you have DPM, two caras, all these things I don't know anything about, but I know that you can choose them when you generate an image and they have different resulting images. But I didn't know which ones 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So on like 10% of the users, I would randomly test parameters. And then I would see if they would, because you can favor the photo or you can download it. I would measure if they favor it or like the photo. And then with A-B tests and you test for significance and stuff, which parameters were better and which were worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then if it's significant enough data, you switch to that for all the users. And so that was like the breakthrough to make it better. Just use the users to improve themselves. And I tell them when they sign up, we do sampling, we do testing. on your photos with random parameters. And that worked really well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 there was a breakthrough, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. But actually, so like Stable Diffusion, I used 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 what you call neutered. They neutered to make it super with safety features and stuff. So most of the people are still on Stable Diffusion 1.5.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And meanwhile, Stable Diffusion, the company went like... the CEO left, a lot of drama happened because they couldn't make money. And yeah, so they gave us, it's very interesting. They gave us this, this open source model that everybody uses. They raised like hundreds of millions of dollars. It all, they didn't make any money with it or not a lot. And they did an amazing job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And now everybody uses open source model for free. And they did, you know, It's amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, and the strange thing is that this company raised hundreds of millions, but the people that are benefiting from it are really small. 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's kind of like those frameworks, but then they didn't, you know, bribe enough influencers to use it. And they didn't charge money for the platform, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, mostly you don't know. Like, mostly I choose the ones that are most viable for me to build. Like, I cannot build a space company now, right? Would be quite challenging.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, I think asteroid mining would be very cool. Because, like, you go to an asteroid, you take some stuff from there, you bring it back, you sell it. You know, it's... But then you need to do... And you can hire someone to launch the thing. So all you need is, like, the robot that goes to the asteroid. You know, and the robotics is interesting. Like, I want to also learn robotics. So maybe...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but it seems, man, I sound like an idiot probably now, but it sounds quite approachable, like relatively approachable. You don't have to build the rockets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, you hire SpaceX to send your, you know, this dog robot or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, I used, back then I used Trello. Trello. Yeah, but now I don't really. I use Telegram. I write down like saved messages and I... Have like idea right down there. You type to yourself on Telegram. You know, like, cause you use WhatsApp, right? I think. So you have like message to yourself thing also. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Use like a notepad, not forget stuff. And then I pin it, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, I saw some YouTubers doing this, like, There's a lot of these productivity gurus also, and they do this whole like iPad with a pencil. And then I also had an iPad and I also got the pencil and I got this app where you can like draw on paper, like draw like a calendar, you know, like people, students use this and you can do coloring and stuff. And I'm like, dude, I did this for a week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I'm like, what am I doing with my life? Like I could just write it as a message to myself and it's good enough, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's really interesting. I wrote it wrong because I don't know. I'm not native English, but it emerges from your subconscious, right? It comes from the, like a water is your subconscious in here is boiling. And then when it's ready, it's like, ding, it's like a microwave comes out and there you have your idea. You think you have ideas like that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yes. Yeah. And I also, it comes up and I bring it, I send it back, you know, like send it back to the kitchen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I need to boil more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And it's like a soup of ideas that's cooking. It's 100%, this is how my brain works. And I think most people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, so many times, like, startup founders are too early with their idea. Yeah, 100%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, like Boston Dynamics. I still don't know what they're doing, but they always upload YouTube videos and it's amazing. But I feel like a lot of these companies don't have, it's like a solution looking for a problem for now, you know? Military obviously uses, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I feel the same kind of with VR. It's really cool. 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 it will.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But they became apparent like immediately. Back then they also had like this thing where like, we don't need these computers, they're like a hype. And it also went like in kind of like, you know, waves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, or dishwasher. I mean, it's essentially a robot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think you're meant to build robots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Really?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Exactly, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, all the time. Like, yeah, that's like, I think that's the best way to live your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Possibly. I think relationships, like you want to hold a relationship, right? You want to hold your girlfriend, you want to become wife and all this stuff. But, uh, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It will crystallize where, you know, you will get sent by the waves to somewhere where you want to live, for example. What are you going to do? I think that's a really good way to live your life. I think most stress comes from trying to control, like, hold things, like... It's kind of Buddhist, you know? You need to like lose control, let it loose, and then things will happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like when you do mushrooms, when you do drugs, like psychedelic drugs, the people that start, that are like control freaks get bad trips, right? Because you need to let go. Like I'm pretty control freak actually. And when I did mushrooms when I was 17, I... It was very good. And then at the end, it wasn't so good because I tried to control it. I was like, ah, now it's going too much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Now I need to, let's stop. Bro, you can't stop it. You need to go through with it. And so I think it's a good metaphor for life. I think that's a very tranquil way to lead your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
For sure. I think most stress in life comes from trying to control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think you should build with the technology that you know. So for example, Nomad List, which is like this website I made to figure out the best cities to live and work as digital nomads. It wasn't a website, it launched as a Google spreadsheet. So it was a public Google spreadsheet anybody could edit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I was like, I'm collecting cities where we can live as digital nomads with the internet speed. the cost of living, you know, other stuff. And I tweeted it and I would, and back then I didn't have a lot of followers. I had like a few thousand followers or something. And it went like viral for my skill viral back then, you know, which was like five retweets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 like what technology you can use that you already know. So if you cannot code, you can use a spreadsheet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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. The tech stack, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And if you can't code, use... spreadsheets, landing page generators, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I remember this, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I was traveling and I was still trying to find problems, right? And I would go, I would discover that everybody's experience of a city is different because they stay in different areas. 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 areas
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They're not very authentic. They're not really Dutch culture. It's Amsterdam tourist culture, you know? So when people would travel to Amsterdam, I would say, don't go to the center. Go to, you know, southeast of the center, the Jordaan or the Pijp or something, more hipster areas, like a little more authentic culture of Amsterdam. That's where I would live, you know, and where I would go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I thought this could be like an app where you can have like a Google Maps, you And then you put colors over it. You have like areas that are like color coded, like red is tourist, green is rich, you know, green money, yellow is hipster. And you can figure out where you need to go in a city when you travel. Cause I was traveling a lot. I wanted to go to the cool spots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Color. Yeah. Yeah. And I would use a canvas. So I thought, okay, what do I need? I need to. Did you know that you would be using a canvas? No, I didn't know it was possible because I didn't know... This is the cool thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, draw images. Just draw pixels, essentially. Yeah. 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 embeds, and then I'll put a div on top of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
with the colors and I'll do like opacity 50, you know, so it kind of shows. So I did that with convos 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 you would draw on the map and then it would send the pixel data to the server, it would put it in a database.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then I would have a robot running like a cron job, which every week would calculate or every day would calculate like, okay, so Amsterdam center, there's like six people say it's tourist, this part of the center, but two people say it's like hipster. Okay, so the tourist part wins, right? It's just an array. So find the most common value in a little pixel area on a map.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So most people say it's tourist, it's tourist and it becomes red. And I would do that for all the GPS corners in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, people just type in cities and go berserk and start drawing everywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, they drew that crazy stuff. Like offensive symbols, I can't mention, they would draw penises.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, I did it in the snow, you know? But the penises did not become a problem. Because I knew that not everybody would draw a penis and not in the same place. So most people would use it fairly. So just if I had enough crowdsourced data, so you have all these pixels on top of it. It's like a layer of pixels. And then you choose the most common pixel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So yeah, it's just like a poll, but in visual format. And it works. And within a week, I had enough data and... And there was like cities that did really well, like Los Angeles. A lot of people started using it, like most data's in Los Angeles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
The colors, yeah. As colors? So it's just like, I think you can see there, there's like hipster, tourist, rich, So there's always a business area, right? And then there's a residential. The residential's gray. So I thought those were the most common things in the city, kind of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, 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 paintbrush where you select a color in the bottom, you select the category, and you start drawing. There's no instruction, there's no manual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then I also added tagging so people could like write something on a specific location. So don't go here or like here's like nice cafes and stuff. And man, the memes that came from that. And I also added uploading so that the tags could be uploaded. So the memes that came from that is like amazing. Like people in Los Angeles would write crazy stuff. It would go viral in all these cities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You can allow, allow your location. And it will probably send you to Austin. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Air bro and bros.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I saw a guy in a fish costume get beaten up here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Overpriced and underwhelming.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They go from frat to douche.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like the district. Exercise freaks on the river. Yeah, that's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I want to know this story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, and that's like stuff I couldn't come up with because I don't know Austin. I don't know the memes here, the subcultures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's like because of Reddit, you know, upvote, downvote. It's good from there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think I added the text like a week after. So here's like the pixels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think here the problem was that you have this data, but it's not... locked to one location. So I had to normalize it. So when you click, when you draw on the map, it will show you the specific pixel location and you can convert the pixel location to a GPS coordinate, right? Like a latitude, longitude. But the number will have a lot of commas or a lot of decimals, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because it's very specific. Like it's like this specific part of the table. So what you want to do is you want to take that pixel and you want to normalize it by removing like decimals, which I discovered, so that you're talking about this 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 to like a grid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And then you have like a grid of data. You get like a pixel map kind of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 build, like Mapbox, I had to stop using, I first used Google Maps, it went viral. And Google Maps, it was out of credits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I, and I had to, it's so funny, during, when I launched it, it went viral. Google Maps, the map didn't load anymore. It says over the limit, you need to contact enterprise sales. And I'm like, but I need now like a map. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 switched to like an open source kind of map platform. So it's a very expensive project and never made any dollar money, but it's very fun, but it's very expensive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think that the thing is more about you can't make money with this product. I tried to do many things to make money with it and it hasn't worked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think map apps are very hard to like monetize. Like Google Maps also doesn't really make money. Like sometimes you see these ads, but I don't think there's a lot of money there. You could put like a banner ad, but it's kind of ugly. And the project is kind of like, it's kind of cool. So it's kind of fun to like subsidize it. And it's kind of a little bit part of Nomad List.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like I put it on Nomad List in the cities as well. But I also realized you don't need to monetize everything. Some products are just cool. And it's cool to have hood maps exist. I want this to exist, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And also where do you put the ad, right? Like if you have a website, you can put like an ad box or you can do like a product placement or something. But you're talking about a map app where 90% of the interface is a map. So what are you going to do? You're going to like, like it's hard to figure out where is this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 like other nomads there and I was like, okay, this seems like a cool thing to do, like work on your laptop in a different country, kind of travel around. But back then the internet everywhere was very slow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So the internet was fast in, for example, Holland or United States, but in a lot of parts in South America or Asia was very slow, like 0.5 megabits. So you couldn't watch a YouTube video. Thailand weirdly had like quite fast internet, but I wanted to find like other cities where I could go to like work on my laptop, whatever, and travel. But we needed like fast internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I was like, let's, you know, crowdsource this information with a spreadsheet. And I also needed to know the cost of living because I didn't have a lot of money. I had $500 a month. So I had to find a place where like the rent was like, you know, $200 per month or something where I had, you know, some money that I could actually rent something. And, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And there was Nomad List, and it still runs. I think it's now almost 10 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I like how that one... 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Well, so it started crowdsourced, but then I realized that you can download more accurate data sets from public sources, like World Bank. They have a lot of public data sets, United Nations, and you can download a lot of data there, which you can freely use. I started getting problems with crowdsourced data where, for example, people from India, they really love India, and they would submit...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
the best scores for everything in India. And not just like one person, but like a lot of people, they would love to pump India. And I'm like, I love India too, you know, but that's not valid data. So you started getting discrepancies in the data between where people were from and stuff. So I started switching to datasets and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 of the ranking you see here is based on actual digital nomads who are there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, so we have meetups. So people organize their own meetups. And we have about, I think like 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Difficult to make friends. Interesting, right? I didn't know that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I don't understand why it says not safe for women to check the data set. It's still safe. The problem with a lot of places like United States is that it depends per area, right? So if you get like city level data or nation level data, it's like Brazil is the worst because the range in like safe and wealthy and not safe is like huge. So you can't say many things about Brazil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They don't have like normal- They have this weird desk, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, the booking fees, I feel it, right? I thought about this idea because we have the same problem. Like I go to hotels and there's specific ones that are very good and I know now the chains and stuff and... But even if you go, some chains are very bad in a specific city and very good in other cities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think it's true, but the problem is with these hotels, it's the same with the airline industry. Why does every airline website suck when you try to book a flight? It's very strange. Why does it have to suck? Obviously, there's competition here. Why doesn't the best website win? What's the explanation for that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think my philosophy is very different than most people in startups, because most people in startups, they build a company and they raise money, right? And they hire people and then they build a product and they find something that makes money. And I don't really raise money. I don't use VC funding. I do everything myself. I'm a designer. I'm the developer. I make everything. I make the logo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, I thought about this for years, so I think it's like, I have to book the flight anyway. I know there's a route that they take, and I need to book, for example, Qatar Airlines, and I need to get through this process. Yeah. And with hotels, similar, you need a hotel anyway. So do you have time to like figure out the best one?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 any incentive to improve it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because generally, only for like a super upper segment of the market, I think, like super high luxury, it affects the actual booking, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but I would work there just to fix it for myself, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think it's money. Do you know booking.com? Sure. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So they run tests like, and they're famous for this stuff like, oh, there's only one room left, right? With this red letters, like one room left, book now. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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. It's number one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So for me, I'm much more scrappy. And because I don't have funding, like I need to go fast. I need to make things fast to see if an idea works, right? I have an idea in my mind and I build it, build like a micro mini startup. And I launch it very quickly, like within two weeks or something of building it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but it's always startups. They start with disrupting, like booking all startups 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Remember the forms would delete, you could click next submit and it would 404 or something where your internet would go down, your modem. Yeah, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I'm so happy the form stays in Google Chrome now when something goes wrong. So Google, somebody at Google improves society with that, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but I mean, Apple does this. Like I started in business school, Apple does competing product teams that operate as startups. So it's three to five people. They make something. They have multiple teams who make the same thing. The best team wins. So I think you need to emulate a free market inside a company to make it entrepreneurial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And you need entrepreneurial mentality in a company to come up with new ideas and do it better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 like Blender and stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I started learning all this stuff because I thought this was like a new, you know, nascent technology that was going to be big. And if I had the skills for it, I could use this to build stuff. And so I think with learning for me, it's like, I think learning is so funny because people always ask me like, how do you learn to code? Like, should I learn to code? And I'm like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I don't know, like 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 happen. 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 JetGPT, how do I make a website? Where do I start?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It generates code for you, right? Copy the code, put it in a file, save it, open it in Google Chrome or whatever. You have a website. And then you start tweaking with it and you start, okay, how do I add a button? How do I add AI features, right? Like nowadays. So it's like by taking action, you can learn stuff much faster than reading books or tutorials.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like Wix or Squarespace is what I said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Landing page.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Even tells you to launch it, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, but this is literally it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This is the basis. Google Analytics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like with... No, you can get pretty far, I think. You can get pretty far. These website builders are pretty advanced. Like all you need is a grid of images, right? Yeah. That are clickable, that open like another page.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You can get quite far.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Your free code camp is good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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. That's why, man, the power of AI for education is going to be insane. People anywhere can ask this question and start building stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think that was the inspiration. It was a girl who did 160 websites in 160 days or something. Literally mini websites. Yeah. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think it's better to do like... For me, I'll deduct like self-learning and setting yourself like challenges and just... But you need discipline. You need discipline to keep doing it. And 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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. 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think 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 invented all the AI stuff years ago and they never really shipped. Like they could have shipped JetGPT, for example, I think I heard in 2019.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But I think most people look way too far ahead. You know, they look, it's like this poster again, like you shouldn't, you don't know how hard it's going to be. So you should only look like for the next thing, the next little challenge, the next step, and then see where you end up. And assume it's going to be easy. Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like be naive about it because it's, you're going to have very difficult problems. A lot of the big problems won't be even tech, will be public, right? Maybe people don't like your website. You will get canceled for a website, for example. A lot of things can happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So, man, I think haters are actually good because I think a lot of haters have good points. And it takes like stepping away from the emotion of like, ah, your website sucks because blah, blah, blah. And you're like, okay, just remove this. Your website sucks because it's personal, you know. What did he say? Why did he not like it? And you figure out, okay, he didn't like it because...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 something, you're on the internet, you're just shouting crazy stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's like most of Twitter, you know, or half of Twitter. So you have to take it with a grain of salt. Yeah, man, you need to grow a very thick skin like on Twitter, on X, like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
people say but i mute a lot of people like i found out i muted already 15 000 people recently i checked so in in 10 years i moved 15 000 people so that's like like that's one by one manual 15 yeah oh so 1500 people per year and i don't like to block because then they get angry they make a screenshot they say ah you block me so i just mute and it disappear and it's amazing so you mentioned reddit so hood maps that make it to the front page of reddit
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, yeah, it did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it did. It was amazing. And my server almost went down and I was checking like Google Analytics. It was like 5,000 people on the website or something crazy. And it was at night. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So let's say you make your own app. You can make a video of yourself. Like, oh, I made this app. This is how it works, blah, blah, blah. And this is why I made it, for example, and this is why you should use it. And if it's a good video, it will take off and you will get... Man, I got like... $20,000 extra per month or something from a TikTok, from one TikTok video. Like it made a photo AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
By some random guy. So there's all these AI influencers that they write about, they show AI apps and then they ask money later, like when a viral video goes viral, all I can do is do it again and send me $4,000 or something. I'm like, okay, I did that, for example. But it works. TikTok is a very big platform for user acquisition. And organic. The best user acquisition, I think, is organic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy. But they had everything. They had the data. They had the tech. They had the engineers. And they 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, you know, in my underwear in a hotel room or something, I can ship very fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You don't need to buy ads. You probably don't have money when you start to buy ads. So use organic. Or write a banger tweet that can make an app take off as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, and you don't need a lot of followers anymore on X and a lot of platforms because TikTok X, I think Instant Reels also, they have the same algorithm now. It's not about followers anymore. It's about they test your content on a small subset, like 300 people. If they like it, it gets tested to 1,000 people and on and on. So if the thing is good, it will rise anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It doesn't matter if you have half a million followers or 1,000 followers or 100.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, so a lot of startups, they do like free users. So you could sign up, you could use an app for free, which is, it never worked for me well, because I think free users generally don't convert.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, a 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Also, yeah, making a community, like making a Discord is very normal now. Every AI app has a Discord and you have the developers and the users together in like a Discord and they talk about, they ask for features, they build together. It's very normal now. And you need to imagine, like if you're starting out, getting a thousand users is quite difficult. Getting a thousand pages is quite difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And if you charge them like $30, you have 30K a month. That's a lot of money. That's enough to like... Live a good life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, 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 try to negotiate with like AI vendors now. Like, can you make it cheaper, you know? Which is, I discovered this. You can just email companies and say, can you give me a discount? Because it's too expensive. And they say, sure, 50%. I'm like, wow, very good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I don't need to like, I don't need to ask that legal for like, oh, can you vouch for this? You know, I can just go and ship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I didn't know this. You can just ask. And especially in like, like now it's kind of recession. You can ask companies like, I need a discount or I kind of need to like, you don't need to be an asshole about it, say. You know, I kind of need a discount or I need to go maybe to another company. So maybe like there's a discount like here and there. And they say, sure. A lot of them will say yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like 25% discount, 50% discounts. Because you think the price on the website is the price of the API or something. It's not like, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Oh, that helps also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's like a secret hack. But I think even without... Secret hack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It depends how much discount they will give, you know? They'll maybe give more. But, you know, that's why you should shitpost on Twitter so you get, you know, discounts maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Also. Yeah. Yeah. It gives you high quality users and free users are sorry, but they're horrible. Like it's just like millions of people, especially if AI startups, you get a lot of abuse. So you get millions of people from anywhere, just abusing your app, just, just hacking it and whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. But I love 4chan. I don't love 4chan, but you know what I mean? Like they're so crazy, especially back then. Like that's, it's kind of funny what they do, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
People misunderstand Fortune.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's just anti-system for fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's just... Like 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 showed to other people, say, hey, do you know this internet website 4chan? Just check it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And they'd be, but dude, what the fuck is that? I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. That's to scare you away. But actually when you go through a scroll, there's like deep conversations. And they would already be, this was like a normie filter, like to stop. So kind of cool, but yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It goes dark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But everything is, I think it was never, man, I'm not a fortune, but like, it was always about provoking. It's just provocateurs, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They're kind of like pen testers, you know, like penetration testers, hackers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They just test your app for you. And then you add some stuff, like I add like, uh, I had like a NSFW word list. They would say like bad words. So when they would write like a bad words, they would get forwarded to YouTube, which was like a video. It was like a very relaxing video.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
That's like kind of ASMR with like glowing jelly streaming like this to relax them, you know, or cheese melting on the toast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like not the word roll, but like in this case, in the meme use, like you would get like roll doubles because every... It was like post IDs on 4chan. So they were 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 and these post IDs. There's so much funny stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And now, you know, I'm still wearing this for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, I use GPT-4 now. It's amazing. So I have 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 whole books about cities and what's good and bad. So I run it through GPT-4 now. And I ask, is this a good review? Is it offensive? Is it racist or some stuff? And then it sends me a message on Telegram saying,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think it's because since I go to the gym, I'm always too hot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
when it rejects reviews and I check it and it's, man, it's so on point. Automated. Yes, and it's so accurate. It understands double meanings. I have GPT-4 running on the chat community. It's a chat community of 10,000 people and they're chatting and they start fighting with each other. And I used to have, human moderates was very good. but they would start fighting the human moderator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, over press.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like this guy is biased or something. Now I have GPT-4 and it's really, really, really, really good. It understands humor and understands like, like you could say something bad, but it's kind of like a joke and it's kind of not like offensive so much. So it shouldn't be deleted, right? It understands that, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I thought this week, like I tweeted like a fact check, like you can click fact check and then GPT-4, look, GPT-4 is not always right about stuff, right? But it can give you a general fact check on a tweet. Like usually what I do now, when I write something like difficult about economics or something or AI, I put in GPT-4, I say, can you fact check it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But it feels good because you're doing like, you win. Because when you, what is it? I do 60 kilos, so it's like 120 pounds or something. 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Because I might've 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 GPT-4 to fact check a lot of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Exactly. And you can ask that. You can ask in the prompt like, I don't know, like for example, do you think create like a ranking score of X Twitter replies, where should this post be? If we rank on like, I don't know, integrity, reality, like fundamental deepness or something, interestness. And it will give you that pretty good score probably. I mean, Elon can do this with Croc, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
He can start using that to check replies. Because the reply section is like chaos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. And you get too many replies now. If you have a lot of followers, I get too many replies. I don't see everything. And I, I love stuff I just miss and I don't, I want to see the good stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
If it's a very good comment, it should happen, but it should probably look a little bit more like, do these people have followers? Because they're probably more engaged in the platform, right? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does make sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
X could be very improved with that, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, so the general theory of startups would be that when it starts, like you start making money, you start hiring people to do stuff, right? Do stuff that you, like marketing, for example, do stuff that you would do in the beginning yourself. And whatever, community management and organizing meetups for anomalies, for example. There would be a job, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 it's a lot of work managing these people. So I've always tried to like automate these things as much as possible. And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And this can literally be like, for Nomadlist, it's literally like a, it's not the different other stars, 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 Nomadlist account.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
There's a meetup here. It sends a direct message to everybody in the city who are there, who are gonna be there. And then people show up on a bar and there's a meetup and that's fully automated. And for me, it's so obvious to make this automatic. Why would you have somebody organize this? It makes more sense to automate it. And this is with most of my things. I figure out how to do it with code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Because it acts like therapy for me, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I think especially now with AI, you can automate so much more stuff than before. Because AI understands things so well. Before I would use if statements, right? Now you ask GPT, you put something in the GPT for and in the API, and it sends back like, this is good, this is bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Which is controversial to say. Like if I say this on Twitter, people get angry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This is the difference now. And that's very recent, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
A lot of cron jobs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's like, I literally, I log into the server and I do like pseudo 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 dot 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
They're called like health checks. So it's like healthcheck.php. And then it has like emojis, like a green check mark if it's good and a red one if it's bad. And then it does like database queries. For example, like what's the internet speed in, for example, Amsterdam? Okay, it's a number, it's like 27 point megabits, so it's an accurate number. Okay, check, good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And 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 signup broke. Okay, check, somebody signed up. Then I have uptimerobot.com, which is like for uptime, but it can also check keywords. It checks for an emoji. which is like the red X, which is if something is bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 like an alert. Like this thing is down. And then I check. So within a minute of something breaking, I know it and then I can open my laptop and fix it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But the good thing is like the last few years, things don't break anymore. And like definitely 10 years ago when I started, everything was breaking all the time. And now it's like almost, last week was like 100.000% uptime. And these health checks are part of the uptime percentage. So it's like, everything works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it feels good to look at, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, all right. We're okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
For sure. It used to send me the good health checks. It all works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I'm like, this feels so good. But then I'm like, okay, obviously it's not going to need to hide the good ones and show only the bad ones. And now that's the case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 a page user. If they run into an error, the JavaScript sends the JavaScript error to the server and then it sends it to my Telegram. From all my websites.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But this is the same stuff people, they pay like very big SaaS companies, like New Relic for, right? Like to manage the stuff. So you can do that too. You can use off the shelf. I like to build myself. It's easier. Yeah, it's nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
in it in nature yeah like there's something about that physical physical yeah toil yeah my dad taught me that my dad always does like a construction in the house like he's always renovating the house he breaks through one room and then he goes to the next room and he's just going in a circle around the house for like the last 40 years so but so he's always doing construction the house and it's his hobby and he like he taught me when i'm depressed or something um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Ask your GPT, you know, like give your daily, your day and then ask what parts you'd automate. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, that's very interesting. I think there's some startups that do that. Like they summarize the cool shit happening on Twitter, you know, like with AI. I think the guy called SWYX or something, he does like a newsletter that's completely AI generated with the cool news stuff on AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Summarize internet.com.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
My girlfriend said, she saw me like watching some dumb video. She's like, dude, your face looks so dumb as well. Your whole face starts going like, oh, interesting. You know, so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Hard wheel. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's difficult. You need to like manage your platforms, you know? I have a mute board list as well. So I mute like politics stuff because I don't really want it on my feet and I think I've muted so much that now my feed is good. You know, I see like interesting stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You need to spend $42,000 a month, which my friends do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You could screen cap your phone, right? It could be an app that watches your screen with you. You couldn't. Yeah. But I don't really know like what it would do. Like maybe it can hide stuff before you see it, you know, like I have that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
He says like, get a big, like what do you call it? Like a big mountain of sand or something from construction and just get a shovel and bring it to the other side and just, you know, do like physical labor, do like hard work and do something, like set a goal, do something. And I kind of did that with startups too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I have the same, I have this extension.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
they're really good at like getting you to be distracted and like starting related accounts related stuff i'm like i don't want related and like 10 minutes later you're like or something that's trending i have a weird amount of friends addicted to youtube and i'm not addicted i think because my attention span is too short for youtube but uh but i have this extension to like youtube on hook which like it hides all the related stuff i can just see the video and it's amazing and uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But sometimes I need to like, I need to search a video 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 stuck. And it's like, what happened?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 wanna go to shorts. So it's very difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Man, you shouldn't ask me because I never sold my company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's kind of sad, right? Like, 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, I don't want to sell, right? And the problem with my companies is like they make... you know, 90% profit margin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So the multiple, companies get sold with multiples, kind of multiples of profit or revenue. And often the multiple is like three times, three times or four times or five times revenue or profit. So in my case, They're all automated. So I might as well wait three years and I get the same money as when I sell. And then I can still sell the same company. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I can still sell for three, five times. So financially, it doesn't really make sense to sell. Yeah. Unless the price is high enough. Like if the price gets to like six or seven or eight, I don't want to wait six years for the money, you know? But if you give me three, like three years, nothing, like I can wait.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Well, it's a community. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
This is like, it's like my baby. It's like my first product I took off and I don't really know if I want to sell it. It's like something you will be nice when you, you know, when you're old, that you're still working on this, you know, it's like a, it has like a mission, which is like, um, People should travel anywhere and they can work from anywhere and they can meet different cultures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I have less emotional feeling with AI products like Photoguy, which I could sell. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And the meaning it gives you, right? There's a very famous like depression after startup found a seller 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You know, I think retirement's bad probably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I think I'm not so good working with other people. Not like I'm crazy, but like I don't trust other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. And I don't want to have like this consensus meeting where we all like, you know, you have like a meeting with three people and then you kind of get this compromise result, which is very European. Like it's very, in Holland we call it poldermodel, where you put people in a room and you only let them out when they agree on the compromise, right, in politics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
And I don't think, I think it breeds like averageness. You know, you get an average idea, average company, average culture. You need to have like a leader or you need to be solo and just do it, you know, do it yourself, I think. And I trust some people. Like now I, like with my best friend Andre, I'm making a new AI startup.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, he doesn't care about the results. Well, he shows me, he's like, it's amazing. I'm like, yeah, it's amazing. But then he wants to go to the next room, you know? But I think... It's very metaphorical for work. Because I also, I never stop work. I go to the next website or I make a new one, right? Or I make a new startup.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So he codes, I shitpost on Twitter, literally like I promote it 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 also I cannot do Ruby, I'm in PHP.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Never in my life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I know, it was always just me sitting on my laptop, like, just coding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Like, there's an AI developer, Philip. I hired him to do the... Because I can't write Python. And AI stuff is Python. And I needed to get models to work and replicate and stuff. And I needed to improve photo eye. And he helped me a lot. For, like, 10 months, he worked in the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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. I think 10 years ago, I would have time to 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 Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
I had for one week. Understand. And then it ended because he wanted to rewrite everything in the. No, that's the wrong guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
He wanted to rewrite. He said, it's 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 jQuery? He's like, no, man. Like, and we need to change a lot of stuff. And I'm like, okay. And I was kind of like feeling it like this, you know, we're going to clean up shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
But then after a week, it's not going to, it's going to take way too much time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I'm always like, it gives you something to wake up in the morning and like, you know, have coffee and kiss your girlfriend. And then you have like a goal. 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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 top 5%. Because if you try higher 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
When you realize this, people are very average at the job, especially with dev, with coding, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Empathy. It's like code empathy, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's a new word, but that's it. You need to understand, go over the code, get a holistic view of it and... Man, you can suggest we change stuff for sure. And look, jQuery is crazy. It's crazy I'm using jQuery. We can change that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, I think they exist. 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 a hundred percent 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Thank you, man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, that's everything is me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
You need like an endeavor, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's very cool. It's pretentious, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah. This is, I think, how my brain looks, you know? Like, there's a lot of shit going on. It's like drawing bass music.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, I like it, you know, but I made it so I don't trust my own judgment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
It's really about fun. Because I was doing it when I didn't make money, right? That's the point. So I was always coding. 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... A creative expression is like a meaningful work that's so important. It's so fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
Yeah, it's a CES transitions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
No, it's all iterative. It's like 10 years of, you know, add a CSS transition here or do this or... Well, say like, see, these are all, these are rounded now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life
So I go to the index.css and I do command F and I search border radius 12px and then I replace with border radius zero. And then I do command enter and it's Git deploys, it pushes to the Git hub and then sends a web book and then deploys to my server and it's live in five seconds.