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Pieter Levels

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2024-08-20
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2024-08-20
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  1. “Yeah, and I don't want to have like this consensus meeting where we all like, you know, you have like a meeting of three people and then you kind of get this compromise result, which is very European. I don't be called Polder model where you put people in the room and you only let them out when they agree on the compromise in politics. And I don't think it breeds like averageness. 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, like with my best friend Andre, I'm making a new AI startup. But it's because we know each other very long and he's one of the few people I would build something with. But almost never.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And the meaning it gives you, right? This is a very famous depression after startup on a solar company. This was me. Who am I? And they immediately start building another one. They never can stop. So I think it's good to keep working until you die. Just keep working on cool stuff You shoot into retirement, you know. I think retirement's bad, probably.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “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. But if you give me three, like three years, nothing, like I can wait.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “They're all automated, so I might as well wait three years and I get the same money as when I sell, and then I can still sell the same company. You know what I mean? I can still sell for three, five times. So financially, it doesn't really make sense to sell.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It's kind of sad, right? Like, I've been in, so I've been in a lot of acquisition, like deals and stuff. And I learn a lot about finance people as well as well there, like manipulation and due diligence and then changing the valuation. Like people change the valuation after. So a lot of people string you on to acquire you. And then it takes like six months. It's a classic. It takes six to 12 months. They want to see everything. They want to see your stripe and your code and whatever. 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. And then I don't want to sell, right? And the problem with my companies is like they make 90% profit margin. So the multiple companies get sold with multiples kind of multiples of profit or revenue. And often the multiples like three times, three times or four times or five times revenue or profit. So in my case,”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I have a weird amount of friends addicted to YouTube, and I'm not addicted because my attention span is too short for YouTube. But I have this extension to YouTube unhook, which hides all the related stuff. I can just see the video. And it's amazing. Sometimes I need to like 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 and you're you're just talking. And like what happened? I was gonna open I was gonna play like the coffee mix, you know, like the music mix for drinking coffee together like in the morning like jazz I didn't want to go to shorts So it's it's very difficult”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Difficult, you need to like manage your platforms, you know. I have a mute board list as well, so I mute like politics stuff because I don't really want it on my feet. And I think I muted so much that now my feet is good. I see like interesting stuff. But the fact that you need to modify, you need to like mod your app, your social media platform just to function. Not be toxic for you for your mental health, right? That's like a problem. Like, it should be doing that for you.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “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.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That's really cool. But this is the same stuff people, they pay 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.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Get like an uncaught variable error, whatever, blah blah blah, and 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.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And I'm like, this feels so good. But then I'm like, okay, obviously it's not going to me to hide the good ones and show only the bad ones. And now that's the case.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Get checked. Somebody sign up. Then I have uptimerobot.com, which is like for uptime, but it can also check keywords. It checks for an emoji, which is like the red X, which is if something is bad. And so it opens that health check page every minute to check if something is bad. Then if it's bad, it sends a message to me on Telegram saying, hey, what's up? Or doesn't say, hey, what's up? It sends me alert. 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. The good thing is, like, the last few years, things don't break anymore. And definitely 10 years ago when I started, everyone was breaking all the time. And now it's like almost last week's like 100.00% uptime. And these health checks are part of the uptime percentage. So it's like everything works.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “These web pages I make, 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 cures. For example, like, what's the internet speed in, for example, Amsterdam? Okay, it's a number. It's like 27. So it's accurate number. Okay, check. Good. And then it goes to the next. And it goes on all the data points. Did people sign up in the last 24 hours? It's important because maybe the signup broke.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “It's like Literally, I log into the server and I do like pseudo cron tab. And then I go into the editor and I write like hourly. And then I write PHP, you know, do this thing.php, and that's a script. And that script does a thing and it does it then hourly. That's it. And that's how all my websites work.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “This can literally be like phenomenalists, it's literally like it's not a different other stars, but it's like a web page 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 nomadist account. There's a meetup here. It sends a direct message to everybody in the city who are there who are going to be there. And then people show up on a bar and there's a meetup and that's fully automated. For me, it's like it's not, it's so obvious to make this automatic why would you have somebody organize this? It makes more sense to automate it. And this with most of my things, like I figure out how to do it with code. And I think especially now with AI, like you can automate so much more stuff than before because AI understands things so well. Like before I would use if statements, right? Now you ask GPT, you put something in GPT for and in the API and it sends back like this is good, this is bad.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So the general theory of starters 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 Nomad is, for example, there would be a job, for example. And I thought like I don't have the money for that and I don't really want to run like a big company with a lot of people because there's a lot of work managing these people. So I've always tried to automate these things as much as possible.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It's a very good comment, it should happen, but it should probably look a little bit more to these people as followers because they're probably more engaged in the platform, right?”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And you get too many replies now if you have a lot of followers. I get too many replies. I don't see everything, and I Love stuff I just miss, and I want to see the good stuff.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Exactly. And you can ask that. You can ask in the prompt. Like, I don't know, like, for example, do you think? 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 the fundamental deepness or something, interestness. And it will give you that with a pretty good score probably. I mean, Elon can do this with Grock, right? He can start using that to check replies. Because the reply section is like chaos.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I thought this week, like I tweeted like a fact check, you can click fact check and then GPT4. Look, GPT-4 is not always right about stuff, right? But it can give you a general fact check on a tweet. Usually what I do now, when I write something like difficult about economics or something or AI, I put in GPT-4 and say, can you fact check it? Because I might have said something stupid. And the stupid stuff always gets taken out by the replies. Like, oh, you said this wrong. And then the whole tweet kind of doesn't make sense anymore. I asked GBT for fact check a lot of stuff.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “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 moderators was very good, but they would start fighting the human moderator, like this guy is biased or something. Now, if GPT-4, and it's really, really, really, really good. It understands humor. It understands like you could say something bad, but it's kind of like a joke and it's kind of not offensive so much, so it shouldn't be deleted. It understands that, you know,”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I use GPT 4 now. It's amazing. So I have like user input. I have reviews. People can review cities and I don't need to actually sign up. It's anonymous reviews. And they write like whole books about seas and what's good and bad. So I run into GPT4 now and I ask like, is this a good review? Like, is it offensive? Is it racist or some stuff? And then sends me message on Telegram when it rejects reviews and I check it and it's, man, it's so on point. It's automated.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “The word role I think comes unfortunately, like not the word role, but like in this case, in the meme use You would get row doubles because every it was like post IDs on Fortan. So they were kind of like random. So if I get doubles, like this happens or something. So you'd get like two. Anyways, like a betting market kind of on these doubles, on these post IDs. So much funny stuff.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Then you add some stuff like I add like a NSFW word list. They would say like bad words. So when they would write like a bad word, they would get forwarded to YouTube, which was like a video, was like a very relaxing video that kind of ASMR with like glowing jelly streaming like this to relax them, you know, or cheese melting on the toast. Chill them out.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Destroys the thing. They're kind of like pen testers, you know, like penetration testers, hackers, yeah. They just test your app for you”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “You're saying, but everything's, I think it was never, man. I'm not a fortunate, but like, I it was always about provoking, it's just provocateurs, you know?”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “But I love fortune. I don't love fortune, but you know what I mean? Like they're so crazy, especially back then, it's kind of funny what they do, you know?”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Also, yeah. Yeah, it gives you high quality users, free users are. But they're horrible. Like, it's just millions of people, especially with AI startups, you get a lot of abuse. So you get millions of people from anywhere just abusing your app, just hacking it and whatever”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “A lot of companies It's like a secret hack. But I think even without how much discount they will give, you know, they will maybe give more. But that's why you should shit posts on Twitter so you get discounts maybe.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Yeah, so that's not a feature. 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. Can you make it cheaper? Which is I discovered this. You can just email companies and say, can you give me discount? Because it's too expensive. And they say, sure, 50%. I'm like, wow, very good. And I didn't know this. You can just ask. And especially in like now it's kind of recession. You can ask companies like I need a discount where I kind of need to like, you don't need to be asshole about it, say, you know, I kind of need a discount or I need to go maybe to another company. And it says, sure. A lot of them will say yes. Like 25% discount, 50% discount. Because you think the price on the website is the price of the API or something. It's not.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “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. You need to imagine if you're starting out getting a thousand users is quite difficult getting a thousand pages quite difficult and if you charge them like $30 you have 30k a month and it's a lot of money”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Yeah, so a lot of starters do like free users. So you could sign up and you can use an app for free, which is. Never worked for me well because I think free users generally don't convert and I think if you have VC funding it makes sense to get free users because you can spend your funding on ads and you can get like millions of people come in predictably how much they convert and give them like a free trial whatever and then they sign up but you need to have that flow worked out so well for you to make it work that you need like it's very difficult I think it's best to start and just start asking people for money in the beginning so show your app like what are you doing on your landing page like make a demo whatever video and then if you want to use it pay me money pay ten dollars 20 30 i would ask more than 10 per month like netflix like 10 per month but netflix is a giant company that can you know they can afford to make it so cheap relatively cheap if you're an individual like an indie hacker like you are making your own app you need to make like at least 30 or more on a user to make it worthy for you”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Yeah, and you don't need a lot of followers anymore because 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 will get tested to 1,000 people and on and on. So if the thing is good, it will rise anyway. It doesn't matter if you have half a million followers or a thousand followers or hundreds.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Yeah, yeah, I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did. It was amazing. And my server... Almost went down, and I was checking like Google Analytics was like 5,000 people on the website or something crazy, and it was at night and it was amazing. Man, I think nowadays, honestly, TikTok, YouTube reels, Instagram reels, a lot of apps get very big from people making TikTok videos about it. So let's say you make your own app, you can make a video for yourself like, oh, I made this app, this is how it works, blah, blah. And this is why I made it, for example, and this is why you should use it. And if it's a good video, we'll take off and you will get, man, I got like $20,000 extra per month or something from a TikTok, from one TikTok video. Like it made Photo AI.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “1500 people per year. And I don't like the blog because then they get angry, they make a screenshot, and they say, ah, he blocked me. So I just mute and it disappear. And it's amazing.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “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 a Your website sucks because blah blah blah, and you're like, okay, just remove this your website sucks because personally, you know, what did he say? Why did he not like it? And he figured out, okay, he didn't like it because the signup was difficult or something, or it wasn't the data. They say no, this data is not accurate or something, right? Okay, I need to improve quality data. This hater has a point. 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 just shouting crazy stuff. That's like most of Twitter, you know, or half Twitter. So you have to take it with a grain of salt.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Man, it's amazing. And something I live streamed 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. But I think most people look way too far ahead. 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”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “That was inspiration. There was a girl who did 160 websites in 160 days or something, literally mini websites. And she learned to code that way. So I think it's good to set yourself challenges, you know? Like, don't, you can go to some coding bootcamp, but I don't think they actually work. I think it's better to do like, for me, out of the dark. Setting yourself like challenges and just getting in it, but you need discipline, you know, you need discipline to keep doing it. And coding, you know, coding is very, it's a steep learning curve to get in. It's very annoying. Working with computers is very annoying. So it can be hard for people to keep doing it”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “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 extra memorials”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Because I thought this was like a new nascent technology that was going to be big. And if I had the skills for it, I could use this to build stuff. So I think with learning for me, it's like learning is so funny because people always ask me, like, how do I, how do you learn to code? Like, should I learn to code? And I'm like, I don't know. 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 ends. So where do you want to be? Do you want to know a little bit? Do you want to know a lot? Do you want to do it for your whole life? So I think taking action is the best step to learn. So making things like you know nothing. Just start making things. Okay. So like how to make a website, search how to make a website. Or nowadays you ask ChatGPT how to make a website. Where do I start? It generates code for you, right? Copy the code, put it in a file, save it, open it in Google.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Yeah, I tried to learn virtuality because I was like, this was like the same as AI, it came up suddenly like 2016, 2017. I think HC Vive, this big VR glasses before Apple Vision Pro. And I was like, oh, this is going to be big. So I need to learn this. I know nothing about 3D. I installed, I think Unity and Blender and stuff. And I started learning all this stuff.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “But I mean, Apple does this. Like I studied in business school, Apple does competing product teams that operate as startups. So it's three to five people. Make something, they have multiple teams 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, you know? You need entrepreneurial mentality in a company to come up with a new ideas and do it better.”

    2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source