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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, 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. If you go to Asia. Like, dude, especially 10 years ago, nobody knew about this, like WeChats, all these apps that they already had before we had them, these everything apps, right? Like now Elon's trying to make X, this everything app like WeChat, same thing. Like in Indonesia or Thailand, you have one app that you can order food 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, that's called like arbitrage. You can go back to your country and build that same app for your country, for example. So you start seeing probably start seeing solutions that other countries already, other people already did in the rest of the world. And also traveling in general just gives you more problems because travel is uncomfortable, you know, airports are horrible. Airplanes are not comfortable either. There's a lot of problems you start seeing. Just getting out of your house, you know?”

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

  2. “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 add write code about, you know, code for and it will make my life easier. So I would say make like a list of all these problems you have and like idea to solve it and I see which one is like viable you can actually do something and then start building it.”

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

  3. “You have like the novelty effect, like you're in a new place, like here things are possible. You don't get bored yet. And that's why people get addicted to travel, you know?”

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

  4. “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 disrupted. But there's something, man, it's like Anthony Burdain, you know? There's something pure about this kind of. Vagabond's travel thing, you know, like it's behind me, I think. I don't like now I travel with my girlfriend, right? It's very different, but it is romantic memories of this kind of vagabond individualistic solo life. But the thing is, didn't make me happy, but it was very cool, but it didn't make me happy, right? It made me anxious.”

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

  5. “Anywhere. I think I wrote it in some blog posts and like. Was a common thing when you would wake up, and this was like because I have this website, I started a website about this dinner, it's 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. Like I started make 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.”

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

  6. “Friends, like these are not with friends that are exactly like this, they go to 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.”

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

  7. “I love Brazil also My girlfriend's beginning, but I do love not just because of that, but I like Brazil. Problem still is the safety issue, you know, like it's like in America, like it's localized, it's hard for Europeans to understand safety is localized to specific areas. So if you go to the right areas, it's amazing. Brazil's amazing. If you go to the wrong areas, like maybe you die.”

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

  8. “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.”

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

  9. “Think still Bangkok is the best place. And bank again, 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 their.”

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

  10. “And I think you ban us on this adjective. 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 It feels like it's kind of like Jet's head life, like it feels very beautiful. Like you're seeing a lot of cool cities and.”

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

  11. “Like whatever that is, it also depends what kind of work you do, right? Like, if you're writing, you probably don't want drama based music. I think for codes, like industrial techno, this kind of stuff kind of fast. It works well because you really get like locked in and combined with caffeine, you know, you go deep, you know.”

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

  12. “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 would go home sleep in like a hostel or a hotel and do the same thing. And again and again and again. And it was this lock-in mode, you know, like working. And that was very fun.”

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

  13. “And we would drink like four per person or something, you know It's body. I don't know if they were powerful lattes, you know, but there were lattes, and we would put them in plastic bag, and I would drive there, and all the coffee was like falling everywhere. And then we'd go in the gorge store and have these coffees here and we'd work all night. We'd play like techno music and everybody would just work on there. Like this was literally like business people. They would work in their startup and we would 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. And we're like, we look like this, you know, and we're like.”

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

  14. “I think it was amazing. Like, we would work, I would make friends and we would work until 6 a.m. in Bali, for example, with, um, With Andre, my best friend, who's still my best friend, and other friends, and we would work until like the morning when the sun came up because at night the co-working space was silent. You know, there was nobody else. And I would wake up like 6 p.m. or 5 p.m. I would drive to the co-working space on a motorbike. I would buy like 30 hot lattes from a cafe. Because there was like six people coming, or we didn't know. Sometimes people would come in and you say.”

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

  15. “No, I don't want to judge. It was more, I know that for me, it wasn't my world. It wasn't my subculture. I went to make cool, but they also think their cool shit is cool. So, you know, but I wanted to make real startups. And that was my thing. I would read hacker news, you know, like White Combinator. And they were making cool stuff, so I wanted to make cool stuff.”

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

  16. “The guys with sports cars in Dubai, these people, you know e-com like oh bro you gotta drop ship You'll make $100 million a month. Those people was this shit. And I was like, this is not my people.”

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

  17. “Kind of vibe, you know, like kind of sleazy e comm vibe. I'm not saying all e comm is sleazy, you know, but right, but you know this vibe.”

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

  18. “For me, you know, because I was more like a developer. I wanted to make startups, kind of, and it was like, there was like drugs being shipped to America, like diet pills and stuff, like non-FDA proof, you know, and they would like, there was no like effort. And they would laugh about like all the dodgy shit kind of they're doing, you know.”

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

  19. “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's possible, you can go anywhere. And everybody's like, oh, it must be super nice, you know, like freedom, you must be very happy. And it's the opposite. I don't think that makes you happy. I think constraints probably make you happy. And that's a big lesson I learned then.”

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

  20. “And anybody, you disattach from your culture, you're disattached from the culture you're probably in because you're staying very short.”

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

  21. “For like a private room, pretty good. So I struggle 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 Colombia or Thailand or Vietnam or Bali. They would live kind of like in more cheap places. And it looked like a very adventurous life. Like you travel around, you build your business. There's no pressure from like your home society, right? Like you're American. So you get pressure from American society telling you kind of what to do. Like you need to buy a house or you need to do this stuff. I had this in Holland too. And you can get away from this pressure. You can find it 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.”

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

  22. “Of the movement. 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's easy, Thailand's easy. I'll just go there and figure things out. And it's cheap. It's very cheap. Chiang Mai, I would live like 450 per month rent.”

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

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

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

  24. “Course, you're depressed, it's logic, but back then, if you're in a moment, you think this is not logic, there's something wrong with me, you know, and also I think I started getting anxiety and I think I started going a little bit crazy where I think travel can make you insane. And I know this because I know that there is like digital nomads that they kill themselves and I haven't checked the comparison with like baseline people like Suza ray, but I have a hunch, especially in the beginning when it was a very new thing like 10 years ago that It can be very psychologically taxing and you're alone a lot back then when you travel alone there was no other digital nomads back then a lot so you're in a strange culture you look different than everybody like you're in i was in asia like you 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”

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

  25. “Yeah, I think it's at the peak. And so I would not kill yourself. It's very important. Just get through it, you know. But because you have nothing, you haven't probably no money. You have no business. You have no job. Jeremy Peterson said this. I saw it somewhere. Like the reason people are depressed because they have nothing. They don't have a girlfriend. They don't have a boyfriend. They don't have a, you need stuff. You need like our family. You need things around you. You need to build a life for yourself. You don't build a life for yourself. You'll be depressed. So if you're alone in Asia, in a hostel, looking at the ceiling and you don't have any.”

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

  26. “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. No, nobody gets deleted, you know? Maybe if you find a problem that a lot of people in Reddit already have on subreddit, you know, like and you solve that problem, say some people I made this thing that might solve your problem and maybe it's free for now, you know, like that could work, but you need to be very narrow it down. what you're”

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

  27. “Do you need to build a login system? Like, maybe no, you know, like maybe you can build some scrappy login system. Like for Photi, you sign up, you pay Scripe 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. Not so safe, you know, what if you leak the link? And now I have real Google login, but that took like a year. So keeping it very scrappy is very important to, because you don't have time, you know, you need to focus on what you can build fast.”

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

  28. “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 the, you know, you need to build the product, actually, because they need to be something they pay for.”

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

  29. “These chat GPTs are gonna charge money for it now, and you get a ref share, I think, from OpenAI. I made a lot of them also.”

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

  30. “Chrome extension should be an extension for your startup. You have a product. Oh, we also have a chrome extension, you know.”

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

  31. “I think it's hard to get people to pay for these 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 and a plugin should be free. When I want to use a plugin in Google Sheets or something, I'm not going to pay for it. It should be free, which is, but if you go to a website and you actually, okay, I need this product, I'm going to pay for this because it's a real product. So even though it's the same code in the back, it's a plugin, you know.”

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

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

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

  33. “No, it uses POP, like Pop or iMap. It would actually check your email. So that privacy concerns, because it would get all your emails to find YouTube links, but then I would, I wouldn't save anything. But that was fun. That first project already would get pressed. some tech media and stuff. And I was like, this is cool. Like, it didn't make money. There was no payment button, but it was actually people using it, I think tens of thousands of people used it.”

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

  34. “Think it was play my inbox because back then my friends, we would send like cool, it was before Spotify, I think. We would send 2014. We would send music to each other, like YouTube links. This is a cool song. This is a cool song. And it was these giant email threads on Gmail. And they were like unnavigable. So I made an app that would log into your Gmail, get the emails and find the ones of YouTube links, and then make kind of like a gallery of your songs. Like essentially Spotify. And my friends loved it.”

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

  35. “Yeah, but I had to learn the actual coding. This was good. It was a good idea to 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. And I published it as a blog post. So people, I think I put it on hacker news and people would check 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.”

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

  36. “I think that was where the merchant accounts people would use for people would make money a lot. Only money made on Internet was like porn.”

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

  37. “You had like the legs homepage. Everyone was centered. Had Peter's homepage, and then on the construction Give, which was like a guy with a helmet. The lights, that's amazing”

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

  38. “This is ironic because Apple, you know, they're not very open Back then, Steve was like, This is close, we should not use it, and it's as 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.”

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

  39. “I could code a little bit because I did a YouTube channel and I made a website for, I would make websites for like the YouTube channel. It was called Panda Mikshow.”

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

  40. “Nine years old, I was making websites also, and I tried to open a merchant account. It was like before Stripe, you would have like, I think it was called World Pay. 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 designed for this. And he started reading these terms and conditions, which was like, he's liable for like 100 million in damages. And he's like, I don't want to sign this. I'm like, dad, come on. I need a merchant account. I need to make money on the internet, you know. And he signed it and we faxed it to America and I had a merchant account. But then never nobody paid for anything. So that was the problem, you know? It's much easier now. You can sign up, you add some code, and”

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

  41. “Interesting way to deal with depression, you know, like it's not like, oh, let's talk about it, it's more like let's go do something. And I started doing a project called 12 Startups in 12 months where every month I would make something like a project and I would launch it with Stripe so people could pay for it.”

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

  42. “Exactly the summing of 27 men. And it was for me. Like, I started going crazy. Because I didn't really see my future in Holland buying a house, going living in the suburbs and stuff. So I flew out. I went to Asia, started digital nomadding, and did that for a year. And then that made me feel even worse, you know, because I was like alone in hotel rooms, like looking at the ceiling, like, what am I doing in my life? Like, this is like I was working on startups and stuff on YouTube, but it's like, what is the future here, you know? Like, is this something while my friends in Holland were doing really well and with a normal life, you know? So it was getting very depressed and like, I'm like an outcast, you know, and my money was shrinking. I wasn't making money anymore a lot. I was making $500 a month or something. And I was looking at the ceiling, thinking like now I'm like 27. I'm a loser. And that's the moment when I started building startups. And it was because my dad said, 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, which is kind of like a...”

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

  43. “So, I was in Holland and I graduated university and I didn't want to 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 with AdSense like $2,000 a month, $2,000 a month. All my friends got like normal jobs and we stopped hanging out because people would like in university hang out. You know, utilities 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. When you turn 27, 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.”

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

  44. “Friends and VCs, and then they do reciprocity and this shady financial dealings. With Elon, that's not. He's just raising money from investors and he's actually building stuff. He needs the money to build stuff, you know, hardware stuff. And that I really respect.”

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

  45. “Like, 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 cannot really choose these things, right? But I really respect that. I think Elon's very different from VC founders, right? VC Start is like software. There's a lot of bullshit in this world, I think. There's a lot of like dodgy finance stuff happening there, I think. And I never have concrete evidence about it, but your gut tells you something's going on with like companies getting sold to.”

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

  46. “The problem is, I don't dictate that, right? Like, if more people start using it, if millions of people starting 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. And they tell me secretly 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 indies, more chill, it's more creative. They don't like this. They don't like to be manager, right? You become like a CEO, you become a manager. And I think a lot of people that start startups, when they become a CEO, they don't like that job actually, but they can't really exit it, you know. But they like to do the groundwork, the coding. So I think that keeps you happy, like doing something creative.”

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

  47. “Really about fun because I was because I was doing it when I didn't make money, right? That's the point. So I was always coding, I was always, I was making music, I made electronic music, Jaron Bay's music like 20 years ago. And I was always making stuff. So I think creative expression is like a meaningful work that's so important. It's so fun. It's so fun to have like a daily challenge where you try figure stuff out.”

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

  48. “Puzzle it. 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. Then he wants to go to the next room, you know? But I think it's very metaphorical for work because I also never stop work. I go to the next website or I make a new one, right? Or I make a new startup. So I'm always like it gives you something to wake up in the morning and like, you know, have coffee and 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, you need like an endeavor, I think.”

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

  49. “Yeah. My Taught me that my dad always does like construction in the Like it's always renovating the house. He breaks through one room and then he goes to the next room, and he's just going in a circle around the house. For like the last 40 years. So he's always doing construction. It's his hobby, and he likes he taught me when I'm depressed or something, he says, get a big, like, what do you call it? Like a big. Mountain of sand or something from construction, just get a shovel and Bring it to the other side and just do like physical. And do something, like set a goal, do something. I kind of did that with startups too.”

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

  50. “Because it acts like therapy for me, you know? Which is controversial to say, like, if I say this on Twitter, people get angry”

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