The Startup Ideas Podcast - Sahil Lavingia Gets Radically Honest

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

Today, Greg is joined by Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad. Sahil told himself he's going to start being totally honest in 2023 and he doesn't hold back in this conversation. ►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team: https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comSahil Lavingia: https://twitter.com/shlSHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro4:22 - Where Sahil's brainpower is going in 20239:18 - Robots replacing humans (yes or no)17:19 - The most valuable skillset25:17 - The first step to becoming more technical34:46 - How to get the life you really want39:47 - How to beat inertia44:14 - Clean up your information diet

All right. So Saha Halevina, I actually just want to catch up with you, to be honest. And before we started this call, you were saying how excited you are for 2023. Why are you excited? I love change. And, you know, there's a great book by Nassim Tile, I'm anti-fragile, which kind of goes into this concept of, you know, there are certain things that get more resilient as you shake them up. And then there are other things that completely break, right? there's sort of fragile things and anti-fragile. And antifragile is kind of this interesting concept because it's not just like it doesn't get worse, you know, at a, it's sort of, you know, better at staying good. No, it actually improves in chaotic kind of environments, right?

So like evolution, you know, things like that, the human body, the human brain, like these adaptive systems. And I just really try to run gum road, my venture stuff, like everything that I do in a very anti-fragile way where basically everything can kind of go to zero. And I will outperform the competition in that way. And so I'm just, anytime there's like any real risk or change in the environment ecosystem, whether that's COVID, leaving COVID, whatever it is, I'm, I just, I get super psyched. It's frustrating. I think the last two years have been frustrating for for, for people like me who like to build stuff because they're just, you weren't, you weren't really

rewarded as much for that. And I think this year, next year, it's going to, hopefully it'll be, it'll be much more valuable to actually build valuable things. Right. And I'm confident that I know how to do that. And so that's kind of why I'm excited is I guess, you know, like the tide's, the tide is very quickly going out. And I have no concerns about that, you know, so I'm excited. Do you think there's going to be more builders now or less builders? They'll definitely be less, less builders. As a percent, it'll go up, right? Because you're going to see tons of people who don't identify as builders leaving the ecosystem. I consider these people like tourists, basically, who got in when it was like really sexy, but like are gone already, frankly, right?

They've pieced out like in January of this year, the first couple quarters. But I think even the builder persona is going to shrink too. And the reason is because builders are also relatively rational people and sort of factor in risk quite significantly. Most builders are not risk seeking at all. Right. So when you look at founders, like the founder personality type, you have to overlay so many things that are like in the minority to get someone like a Patrick Olson or a Dylan Field or Mark Zuckerberg or a Neon Musk or whatever, right? You have to overlay quite a few things. And so I think a lot of builders who are not, you know, who are doing the math, for example, and saying, hey, Robin Hood being 80 billion makes me want to start a company, but Robin Hood being

worth $4 billion doesn't make me want to start a company. There are a lot of people that make those kinds of decisions and we'll say, hey, I'm actually going to go work at Amazon or Facebook or Google instead. Also, like, Robin Hood being worth $4 billion, but having $4 billion on cash on hand. And to me, I mean, to be honest, it's irrelevant. I really don't care. Like, I did not build stuff because there was money to be had in building stuff. Like when I started making iPhone apps when I was like 15 years old, this was before, you know, Instagram and Snap and Uber even.

Like one of the first things I built was like an Uber, basically call a cab on your phone app. But I just did it to solve my own problem. Like I didn't think about it like, oh, wow, there's like we can completely reinvent transportation or something like that. Right. And so for me, it's like cool. Like engineers are cheaper.

They're easier to hire. Designers are cheaper, easier to hire. And that's all I need. I actually don't need anything else. Those are the two most valuable, you know, resources on the planet. And now they're, you know, they're sort of two to three times cheaper than they were like six months ago. The only other thing I'm super excited about is to hope that is I hope interest rates continue to climb. And I hope that stock prices continue to get crushed.

I hope that housing gets destroyed completely, you know, like I would love to be able to buy a house in San Francisco, you know, for $200,000. And I think that's possible. but it's going to take, you know, 10 plus percent interest rates. So that's what I want, like fingers crossed. We'll see what happens. And where are you spending a lot of your brain power, you know, thinking about, are there particular industries or ideas that you can share that, you know, are on your mind? Yeah, I mean, you know, the big one that everyone's talking about these days is AI, right?

So I think that's, that's pretty interesting. I don't think it's as notable as people. I don't think it's a step function increase, for example. I think we've been basically seeing this gradual thing happening, which is we take work that is valuable, but it wrote and automate it. And we've been doing this for a long period of time. Like I would say the largest example of this is open source software, right? So I can build a new product that really to build the product,

hundreds of thousands of lines of code. But I only have to write two to 300 lines of code, right? Because I'm able to basically like abstract away. all of the complexity to open source software. And so I think AI is just basically like that, but for language that is just much more probabilistic and less deterministic, right? Language is not as, it's not math, right?

It's actually like there's, it is relative, right? When you learn a language, you're kind of learning how all the words connect to each other, but there's like nothing outside of it, which is like super strange, right? You don't learn from like a base level of knowledge and buildup. You kind of piece things together into like a puzzle,

which makes no sense. The reason that that works is because we humans came up with it. Nature didn't come up with it. So it's not great. But yeah, I just look at basically all of these different kinds of jobs. Basically any job in which your output is digital, you know, I see that that will kind of be replaced with basically a computer predicting what that human would be output. And one of the amazing things about this new wave of AI, which I think started in a

about 2017 is transformers, transformers and now diffusion models. But basically the transformers are, at least to me, very cool, very awesome. But basically, you're just looking at noise and signal. And then you're trying to draw patterns between the noise and the signal. For example, at Gumroad, we have a risk model at Gumroad, right? Every purchase that goes through kind of, and it looks at all of these, you know, hundreds and hundreds of feature flags. Like a human had to come in and say, okay, we should have a rule that, you know,

looks at like the the letters in their email and, you know, kind of creates a model, you know, a tiny model based on like, is it that ASDF at gmail.com, probably fraud, right? Or whatever, right? And like, you basically build these hundreds of rules. And then you have this sort of tree function. And then it kind of does this thing. It comes back with a risk score saying, hey, you know, based on what we've seen in the past, you know, like, or, and what you.

humans think looks risky or not, right? And basically just get rid of that and humans think, right? And you just say, based on what we've seen in the past, is this risky or not? And if you think about how little code is actually required to do that, it's almost nothing. It's like a few dozen lines of code. So what it means in practicality is that a startup like Gumroad or really an indie developer can now compete with YouTube on YouTube recommendations, which four years ago or even two years ago would not have been the case, right? Basically, Gumroad could not have really entered the discovery, we had to kind of outsource it to Twitter and Facebook and all these other services because there's just no way that a tiny company could do

recommendations at scale. Whereas now I see the problem and I'm like, actually, you know, I plan to tweet tomorrow that we want to hire one ML engineer to basically build recommendations for government. Like I don't think it'll take more than one person and to think about like, you know, the hundreds of people that would have been required to build a model like this maybe five to 10 years ago and did at YouTube before, before their new stuff, right? But now, I mean, it's a 10 or 100 X. And so when I look at AI, like AI is automating 99 of those engineers.

Right. Now I only need one. And so it's funny because people think all of these other jobs are getting automated away. But the number one job that's getting automated away is actually the software engineering job, right? Like, why is software engineering such a valuable skill? It's because we've automated the crap out of it so that the people who are still able to do it are insanely highly leveraged. Like I built gum road in a weekend.

And obviously we've built stuff on top of that, but the core stuff took about 20 hours, right? And today would probably take about four hours or something, right? Because I would use Chad GPT to write the majority of the code. My guess is 10, 15 years from now, you know, we'll be watching robots play soccer instead of humans. Because you can't, a human cannot physically, like the complexity required, in my view, to like build a brain.

it's similar to like creating Leonel Messi's neural pathways in his legs, right? Like it's just it's possible, but it's math at the end of the day, but the complexity of it is like millions of lines of code. Like you're just never going to get there with humans. It doesn't happen overnight though. I feel like let's just use the sports example for a second. So let's think about how sports and sports viewership has evolved over the last 100 years or whatever. So in the beginning, you know, we would play soccer together, we'd be on a field, then, you know, radio comes out, all of a sudden you're listening or television comes out, you're watching other people play on a field. And then video games come out.

And at the time, it's like, what do you mean? You're watching someone play video games. You're watching Counterstrike on Twitch. Like that's not even, you know, those are, that's fake bodies, right? Those are essentially just like fake bodies playing connected to a computer. And then all of a sudden there's hundreds of millions of people watching that. And now, you know, I believe what you're saying is true, which is, you know, everyone's seen or a lot of people have seen those dog videos. What's the robotics company, Boston?

Oh, yeah, lots of dynamics. And you watch these dogs basically move around and they look and feel like, you know, real dogs or real animals. And it gives you this weird feeling. Everyone sits there, you get this weird feeling. And it's because you can kind of see where it's going to go. So yeah, could I imagine that like instead of a dog, it's a human? And instead of a human, maybe they're playing soccer. And instead of like being trained by a human behind it, maybe it's trained, you know, with AI, etc.

It makes, that's the arrow of progress. That's certainly the arrow of technology, right? Like if you wanted to build the best soccer player on Earth, 100%, it would be a robot. It would not be a human being, right? The question I think is also like, what does that mean? Right. Like, for example, will people replace dogs with robot dogs because they don't longer have to take them for walks if they are functionally as similar as a dog?

Right. And I think a lot of people will not. I think a lot of people will say, well, basically reject this stuff. Just like I still paint with oil paints, right? For example. But will you be able to make money? No, because what it does is it shows you that this is basically valueless. I think these things have value in this weird cultural sort of bubble and zeitgeist.

But the minute that a human or a robot can kind of do it just as well as a human, it sort of reveals the illusion that this thing is actually useful and interesting. And people will just move on to something that only humans will do. I think that's really what the pattern will be, is that people will play soccer for fun, but not to make money. I think there will be new sports that robots cannot yet do. Like surfing, I think my feeling is that surfing is much harder than soccer for a robot to do. And you'll kind of move the goalpost essentially, right?

Did you see this thread by this guy, Francois Chalet, he's a deep learning guy at Google? So he tweeted, for those who didn't see it, the current climate. and AI has so many parallels to 2021 Web 3, it's making me uncomfortable. Narratives based on zero data are accepted, are accepted at self-evident. Everyone is expecting as a sure thing, civilization altering impact and a hundred times return on investment in the next two to three years. Personally, I think there's a bull case and a bear case. The bull case is way more conservative than what the median person on my timeline considers

as completely self-evident. and the actual outcome we'll see is statistically likely to lie in between somewhat closer to the bare case. What do you think about that? I mean, I don't care at all about the financial investment piece of it, right? So is it going to be 100x? Is there any way to make money on AI? Like, I have no idea. But will it dramatically transform society?

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I don't think this is anything new. I think this is what data does. it automates wrote input. And I don't see why, I don't see how, I mean, definitely I can see why people are saying, oh, this is just like Web3, in the sense that there's lots of people loud and proud on Twitter. But I think you can apply the same thing to tons and tons of other stuff, right?

That people, it just, we coalesce memetically about certain topics and then share those things. And the truth is, people on Twitter are attention hoars. And so we are, I mean, that's, I love the view count, frankly, because it exposes us for the attention horrors that we are. That's why we tweet. We want views. Why do we want attention so we can make money at some point in the future based on that attention? And so, yeah, of course, you're going to have like a similar sort of design guys build up around AI.

99% of it is BS. However, like I spent most of the Web3 stuff reading papers and I spend most of my AI time reading papers. reading papers. And so I can compare the papers from AI and compare the papers in crypto. And the papers in crypto are actually quite interesting. I can give you two or three that are incredibly compelling. I can give you two or three a week in AI that are incredibly compelling. And so I think that's very, very different.

I think crypto is mostly engineers outside of academia. I think AI is mostly engineers within academia. And so I think you have a much higher bar to get stuff funded in academia. you have many more diverse viewpoints in AI. My guess is in Web 3. Almost everybody was anti-Web3 except for like a few hundred people, right? That made a lot of money.

So I don't think it's the same at all. I think he probably just follows like a very, you know, small slice of the population. I will agree with him, though, on that 100x invest thing, right? Because that I do think is a problem. I never thought that Web 3 was a great way to make money, necessarily. Again, I'm a builder. I like technology. If you ask me what's interesting about crypto, I'll tell you the interesting technology, like the Byzantine General's problem that

led to Bitcoin, for example. That's super compelling. The term completeness of Ethereum, super compelling. And my investments follow technology. So I cannot invest in something unless there is a paper or unless there is some code that's interesting that hasn't been written in that way before, because that's how you make money as a VC like I do. And so, yeah, I definitely agree with him that like I could 100% see that like 10 years from now, there's there's no way to make money in AI, right? Like basically nobody made any money on AI. All the returns basically just went to, you know, whoever like basically gets attention so that they can monetize via ads. I actually think that's quite likely.

And that's why I like being an investor is so I can invest in a bunch of stuff. But I'm not, you know, spending my, you know, I'm not putting all my eggs, you know, in one basket. I'm not a CEO of a company in this space. I would say, by the way, that's always the other thing. It's like, I just like, like, there's all these people who have opinions, uh, on Twitter. Like, you should ignore 99.9% of them, right? Because what really matters is like what's on like what's on their screen? Like what are they looking at?

Um, are they, and generally if they're not looking at code, I don't really care about their opinion, to be honest. Um, and I've held this view for a long time. Like if you, if you, if you, I tweeted a while ago, I was, I don't know, I've got some pushback. But I basically said if you want to avoid scams, only invest in people who know how to code. And obviously the counterfactual is a fallacy. So you can't reverse chain that and say, oh, well, would you invest in people who don't out of code? Of course, I would. But certainly the number one thing you could do to kind of invest in and make money, frankly, is to invest in people who know how to code because those people are the most leveraged people.

Everybody else is basically building an audience off of skill set that's just not that valuable in today's society. And so we're really struggling to do so, which is why we're hyping all this stuff on the internet all the time. Okay, so I understand your argument, which is basically like if you want the most amount of leverage, learn how to code. Because you're basically building a machine like you, you know, you started Gumroad, which is essentially payments for creators, landing pages for creators. And, you know, I'm sure hundreds of millions of dollars have gone through the platform. And you start, you know, the MVP was in two weeks or sorry, the minimal viable product is built in a weekend. So code is magical in that sense. but can't you, you know, be a magician as a designer, a copywriter, a marketer.

No. No. Yeah, I don't think so. Explain why. Yeah, I don't think so. And the reason is because it's not an or. The best painters, I know, write coat. So it's just not, it, writing code doesn't mean you cannot be a painter, cannot be all of these other things.

And so what ends up happening is that the best painters are the ones who know how to code. And because they know how to code, they can basically automate 10, 20, 30 of their peers. You can see this in art in the entertainment industry, for example, because back in the day, like if you worked on Star Wars in the 70s, you were doing everything traditionally. And then basically photo bashing started happening. So things started to go digital. By the way, artist freaked out about that change where they're like, what? No, you can't do digital.

That's crazy. copy paste what you know uh copy paste no way uh and then photo bashing became a thing because you could now basically like do a mock and then you could take a bunch of photos and skew them on Photoshop and like get really you know and people are like that's cheating that's not allowed every single movie you've seen in theater it uses photo bashing avatar like this is how they get to like super highly rendered mat paintings in the background all the backgrounds are paintings basically and their paintings that are photobashed together right and this is what every single amazing like dylan cole who's that that basically the art director behind Avatar, that's how he became famous,

is he basically pioneered this technique, literally. And so he's literally like in charge of the most, you know, the most important probably visual IP of this year because he automated his peers, right? And he was shit on for that in the industry for a long period of time. So I think what you'll end up seeing is you'll just see a continuation of that where the best, the best artists are using AI in their workflow and they're just automating all of their peers.

They're able to do so much more work for themselves. The thing is when people say, like, you don't want to learn a code. To me, that's like saying I don't want to learn how to speak English. Like, it doesn't take a lot. You know, like, I'm not asking you to get a four-year degree in computer science. I don't have one. I didn't go to, I went to USC for one semester and dropped out. All I'm saying is like Google, like, how to, you know, start a blog and ship it to Heroku and understand that piece of code. I mean, if you look at startups, right, if you look at startups and you say, okay, 99% of the public value is basically, or 90 plus percent is basically

in four or five companies, right? If you get rid of like Google, Amazon, meta, like we haven't done shit as an industry, right, in terms of actually creating value, the whole reason venture capital exists, right? Basically, they're all started by engineers, computer scientists or software engineers. Even Bezos, I think, had a CS degree.

And it's a pattern I see over and over and over again. It's kind of undeniable. Do you need to be writing code, or could you just understand how to read, code. Like, you know, I get the argument where it's like, okay. You need to understand the fundamentals. So for example, if you want to be an artist, you have to learn perspective, you have to learn anatomy. And if you are not able to do perspective and anatomy, it doesn't matter how good AI is. It will not help you currently at least do anatomy, perspective, design,

composition, colors, all of that stuff, you have to learn. And by the way, if you look at artists who are not that good, it's often because they don't actually have the fundamentals in place. Like they know how to draw dragons, but they don't know perspective. So the dragons look all stupid and wonky, right? Or they draw eyes that look like almonds. No, you have to learn the anatomy of the eye. And guess what? It's not fun.

No. But what is it? It's STEM. It's science and math. It always comes back to STEM, science, math, and engineering. Art is just like a tiny layer on top of STEM, on top of understanding the physics of the world. And so I think when you learn computer science, what I really mean is just the equivalent of those fundamentals, which means data.

structures, conditionals, algorithms. You need to understand how like HTTP works. You have to understand how the internet operates, like when you use an app, like what's, what's on your phone. What's, you know, because otherwise you can't build anything. You can't really build anything new. You can copy paste, right? Like, for example, I can like, if there's something I don't know how to do, I can pretend, but will I ever be able to contribute to the frontier? And guess what? Guess who gets all the money, all the reward? It's not number two, not number three. A lot of people ask me, Greg, how do you build products that foster community? Well, I've got good news.

That's exactly what Lake Checkout does, my company. We partner with the largest brands in the world and fast-paced startups to design products that resonate with your community. We add a couple interesting clients every single year. So if you're interested, and that sounds like you, email front desk at laycheckout. Dot Studio with what you're working on, what you need help with. And don't forget to mention the Where It Happens Pod. Thank you. You know, one of the most important things that we teach our children is understanding physics, right?

Like, if I take this apple and I drop it to the ground, it moves down at 9.8 meters per squared. I know that this apple is going to hit the, the ground and I know how to navigate my world based on these laws that govern our world. What you're saying is basically like we're spending a lot of time in these digital worlds. And what governs our digital world are these sets of laws, not really physics, but it's enforced by code. If you want to, you know, go out in the wild, wild west and you want to, you know, stake a claim, basically, you know, you really need to understand like the equivalent of gravity,

but in our virtual worlds. Is that right? Like for, yeah, exactly. Like, for example, I own a house. I bought a house, you know, 300 grand, whatever. But would I ever claim to be a real estate developer or an investor? No, because I don't understand like migration patterns. I don't understand weather.

I don't understand flooding in this region. I don't understand the atmospheric river, whatever the hell that is, people are talking about. I don't understand traffic flows. Like all of these things, you're not living in a vacuum. That's the other thing is like there are $7 billion, $8 billion, whatever the number is, people out there who want to make money too, right? And so, yeah, if you were the only person, then yeah, you totally could do this without knowing traffic flows. But in a world in which Blackstone knows that stuff, you are going to get destroyed by them, right?

Because you don't know that stuff. And that's what I see all day in our field is that like I can build gum road in a weekend and I can outship. basically any, it doesn't matter how awesome your team is. If it doesn't have engineers on it, I will beat them. Right. I would just, I will win. I can chip more code than most of my portfolio companies. And I'm a technical person that generally only invest in technical teams.

And so I, it's just, it's a, I don't think people really rock the sort of difference that can make, right? Like, I can make gum road every weekend, which means I can make a new company every weekend. And that company can probably raise money at a 10, 15 million post money evaluation. I can do that literally every single weekend. That's like insane. What do you recommend to people who might not be technical, but who are listening to you now and be like, you know what? This guy's crazy, but he might be on to something.

So I'm willing to dedicate some of my time in 2023 to learning to be more technical and shipping one product or two products. What I did was I really wanted to build something, and the only way for me to build that thing was to learn how to code because I had no money to hire anybody else, which is true for most people. Engineers, by the way, are very expensive. So if you can't learn a code, let's just say you're going to spend $250,000 a year on one person, right? So good luck building a successful company with that. That's just almost impossible. So I would say find something that you really want to build. It doesn't matter how simple or easy, actually the simpler, the easier, the better probably.

and build that thing. Like the first thing I think I ever built was a GPA calculator, where in just in Excel, I put in my math classes and then I put it or my classes or whatever. And then I put in like my, you know, A, B, C, D, whatever. And then I just had a, you know, a column that said like if A, four, if B, three, whatever. And then, you know, like some divide by number of classes.

And that was like a calculator. I built like a little GPA calculator in Excel. And then build that with Python. Like build the exact same thing. just build it with Python, like, you know, use chatGBT, probably write 99% of that code for you and then just write a Python script that's just local on your computer. But you need to solve like some problem. And the way that I think about it is save time or save money generally.

Like what do you spend time or money doing that you wish you didn't and then just automate that? Like for example, let's say you wake up and you open like seven tabs, right? You open like Twitter and Reddit and whatever and it's part of your job. Well, write a script that opens those seven tabs for you. And then all you have to do is run one script and boom, it'll open up. And guess what? When you have that script, you can start doing other stuff once you have the glue. Probably by the end of the day, I could take, I could probably take like my Twitter feed

and turn it into a 30 minute podcast that I could listen to like while at the gym or something, right? It would take me probably like a few hours to do with the current tech. I don't know if there's a product there. I don't know if there's a business there, but I know that doing that, you know, will teach me skills. To be honest, like I have tons of friends who are like, oh, I want to learn. to code and then like two years go by it and they they haven't and I just tell them like you will never do it like stop wanting to do something you will never do it just makes you sad and depressed right like for example I don't intend to ever play in the NBA because I knew that I would never be any good

at it because I just don't have the I just literally cannot you know I don't have the height how do you take someone who's not technical and make them technical it sounds like what you're saying is step one is find a problem in your everyday life and you know step two is use platforms like chat GPT to help, you know, write some of that initial code and just start, you know, trying to learn from there, go online. It also is like, why do you want to? Right. That's a big question.

If you want to build stuff like I want to build stuff, by the way, you'll do it. The truth is many people don't actually want to build stuff. They want to make money. They don't want to work anymore. They have these other things that they want. And that's why they want to build stuff. And that's honestly not, I don't know if that ever has worked because learning the code is like hitting your head against the wall for five years. It's very satisfying because you make millions of dollars and you get to build stuff.

You don't have to work anymore. But it is, you know, frustrating on the path to getting there. But how badly do you want it? Like most people actually, if they heard about my lifestyle, they'd be like, no way. I don't want that. Like I live in Oregon. I talk to basically on average one human a day, which is my wife. I don't have a social life.

I don't have any friends in the area. I basically all of my friends are like talking about papers about AI and stuff. That's my life. You chose that life. You chose that life. Right. Like that's the life you want for yourself. And isn't that what a lot of people?

Yeah. 100%. Yeah. I mean, I have unlimited amounts of time and money and whatever. There's no bottleneck on what I can do. Right. It's completely. But I think that's attractive to people.

What's attractive? to people isn't the fact of how you designed your life particularly, but is the fact that you designed your life the way you wanted it to be and then you did it. I think they're related. The fact that I'm able to design my life like this is because I have a personality that wants a life that is like mine, right? For example, if you like hanging out with people, if you like hanging out with your friends, like every day at night, you will never have my lifestyle.

Ever. Because the way that I have my lifestyle is I spend my Friday nights building software. That's when I built Gumroad. I didn't build Gumroad nine to five. I built it when? On the weekend. If you don't build software on the weekend, you will never build Gumroad. You will never have my lifestyle. You just won't. You just won't. You have to do this stuff on the weekends. You have to do this stuff on Friday nights. I can't think of a single example of someone who is non-technical, doesn't have any interest in knowing how to code and has built a $10 billion company. thing. Like, is it possible? Yeah, of course it is possible. But that person got killed by someone who was working on Friday night. Right. Like, that's what tends to happen. Like, Zuck didn't win because he was the best engineer on planet Earth. It's because he really wanted to build stuff.

I don't even think Facebook was his idea. Right. Like, but he won. Why did he win? Like, you know, because he was the one who knew how to code. Another benefit, like, if we forget for one second, and the financial benefits of learning how to code and building, the other benefit, and I think you'll agree with this, is it just feels really good, like conceptualizing something and just like putting it out there. Like I remember the first time I coded anything,

I was lucky that the school I went to in the seventh grade, they had a coding class. Took it. And one of the first projects was build something in Visual Basic Six. So this is a long time ago, for those of you. who know what that is. And I built a slot machine. I thought it would be fun to build a slot machine.

I built it and just seeing it work, like such a incredible feeling that I built this thing, I published it, other people could use it. And it didn't make a difference if a million people used it or I just used it. It didn't make a difference if I, you know, created a casino around it. and made all this money from it. Like, I didn't care. I was just like, wow, I got to build this. And there's something powerful about like, you could die and that thing still exists.

Like there's something, at least to me, that was important. It's like it was almost like a legacy of like if I can build stuff, put it. And I think tweeting and all these things are similar. Like when you write a great thing and you put it out there, you're like, this is part of your kind of your public, you know, output that will exist long after you're dead or whatever. but for some reason building I built like a game to like break out you know and my teacher was like you can't play video games during class

unless you made the game yourself and I was like cool I'll go build a game that I want to play and did you know good good teacher by the way was it was Naval your teacher or something oh man I can't imagine Naval I don't even know if Naval would teach you'd be like

here's a laptop here's math addition and you figure out the rest I don't know right yeah let's talk with it for One second. What would, if Naval was designing, you know, a high school or something, what would, what would it be like? I've talked to him about this, actually. I asked him this exact question.

I was like, how do you, you know, he has kids. Like, how do you think about, how do you just think about raising a kid and teaching them? And he said, focus on math, basically. Like, I think math is the underlying substrate of reality. It's the language that we use. And so if you can teach someone math, then they can learn whatever the hell else they want. I've been thinking about this actually with AI. It's like, what is what is missing?

What is missing currently from AI right now? Like what is next, right? Like, how do you like, can it get better? What, what it does it take to get better? And I think the number one thing that's missing is basically discrimination, where right now you basically get all this data. And currently the AI doesn't get a choice of like, is this actually right or not? Right.

Like it just says, oh, cool, yeah. Like these strings lead to the strings. I can do that. Right. And I think what's really important and what, a lot of people I think miss is like when you get new data, right? Like what did you learn that was actually not correct? And this is why the probabilistic piece I think is actually really important. It's because almost definitely there's a probability assigned to everything, the thing that you learn,

like how true is this thing? And often you read a book and you're like, oh my God, I'm so much smarter, right? Because I've learned all these things. Very few people read a book and they're like, holy shit, I'm so stupid now because I think I'm smart, but actually half the things that are in this book are actually completely wrong. And so to me, what's so important about math is that it allows you this objective framework in which to evaluate new information. So when I learn a new thing, most of the stuff I read, to be honest, on the internet, I'm like, this is wrong. I just, it doesn't go into my mental model at all.

So yeah, it's kind of crazy how important math is and also how long we didn't have it, you know. If people want to get the life that they imagine for themselves, like how do you recommend them to reach out life. Honestly, I think everyone has it. That's my current belief is that everybody basically has the life that they want. Because the truth is, like, people do have the freedom to change if they wanted to and they don't. You know, most people don't want to learn how to code and that's totally fine.

I did. I think what's most important is that people should stop wanting things that they don't actually want. I think the biggest concern I have right now is that people look at social media and they think they want all those things. And maybe they even do want those things. but they wouldn't have if they never saw it. They wouldn't want a six-pack if they never saw someone with a six-pack, right?

Like these sorts of things. And so I think most people should just really focus on what's really important to them and make sure that they're getting those sorts of things. And I bet that they are and that they maybe just feel guilty because other people are saying, oh, no, you should be doing this and you should be doing that. No, like I don't think most people should be learning out of code. I never said that. All I said is if you want to live my lifestyle, you're going to need it.

because that's the only way you can automate stuff is with code. Have you read, I'm reading it right now, wanting the creative cycle? Yeah, is that the Luke Borgas book? Yeah, so it's the power. Yeah, the power of mememic desire in everyday life. And it just goes through this desire that all human beings have to copy other human beings.

If I see someone with a Rolex, I'm going to want a Rolex. If I see someone with a lot of followers, I'm going to want a lot of followers. And it's an absolute must read. And I would say that there's certain people who don't have memetic drive nearly as much as other people. Yeah. Right. Like I don't have a watch.

I don't have anything besides a t-shirt and pant. Like I have the essentials. I wrote a book called The Minimals Entrepreneur. Right. Like I don't have things. I don't. Like everything fits in a suitcase or backpack actually. And that's it.

I don't want anything else. Like, why do I have a book? lots of money is just so I can invest in startups. I don't want any physical things. I have zero desires for that. Why do I have a house? The only reason is because there are other human beings in my life now. And that's why I need a house.

Otherwise, I don't really even need a house, right? And so that's the other thing. It's like, this is who I am. Like, I can't change it. Or I could, but I don't want to. I don't want to want more, you know? I found weird that people have more. But like, I've just never, I've never been that person, like in high school or

whatever. Like I've never, like who wants a nice, fancy car? Like, no, that's ridiculous. However, I would say that, like, one thing that was really important to me growing up is the fact that I didn't grow up in a single place, right? Like, my parents are from India. I was born in New York, grew up in Hong Kong, San Port, in London. And so very quickly, I think maybe that showed me that, like, this whole thing is a memetic social game. But, like, everyone is copying each other. And when you constantly move from one place to one place, you realize, like, oh, there's a game over here, people are playing. That's the social game over here. There's a social game over here that people are playing. But what's really important is basically I think of it

like there's three things, which is family, money, and weather. That's it. Those are the only three things that matter fundamentally. And I think most people actually are memetic and buying all those things to get laid, which is family. They feel like they won't be able to do that thing that they really want to do, which is have a family. And so they need the watch, they need the car, they need all those things. And by the way, they might be right. They might be right about those things because in many cultures, those things do matter. I don't need those things. Why? Because I can code. So I can show people my status very easily. I don't need to buy fancy clothes and cards because I can show people that I know how to code. And everyone knows that I could get all those

other things if I wanted to. And so I don't need those other things at all. So I'm playing the exact same social memetic game that everybody else is playing, I'm just out of a different level. And I got lucky, I think, you know, in being able to play that. But it's not a coincidence that, like, Bologi and Naval and me, like, have a similar aesthetic, a similar life, a similar disconnection to society. We all know how to code. We have lots of Twitter followers. And we all have, you know, tons and tons of people who want, who say they want to be like us. But the truth is, they don't. Otherwise, they would be. Otherwise, they would be building stuff on the weekends and living in the of nowhere. But when you actually look at them and you're like, oh, no, you actually, like,

they'll be like, oh, I really want to be like you. And I'll go like go to their Instagram account. Like, you definitely don't want to be like me. Like, you're posting pictures on a boat. Like, I would never do that. So they want money. They want other things. They want whatever, whatever things that they think I may be able to, you know, I have. But it's a package of deal, right? At the end of the day, you can only be jealous of someone if you, if you, if you're willing to get everything that they have. And to get everything that's, you know, that's, you know, they have, there's this big inertia that exists. Like a lot of people might be listening to this and be like, yeah, like I'd love to make something like Sahel's made or I'd love to get as many

Twitter followers as Sahel has, but there's inertia. Like, you're obviously natural in the sense that you're, you know, you've got a bias for action. So you don't have much inertia. But how do you recommend to people who don't necessarily have a bias for action to how do you stimulate that? I mean, I would say the most important thing you can do is to force it, right? So there's that scene from like the dark night rises where, you know, like the kind of the bridge burns and he has to do the thing, right? I think that you burn the boats, right? Like, for example, you want to start a company?

You want to do a startup? Move to San Francisco. I did. Work for a startup. I did. Again, like the data is the truth. Like look at what people have done. Me, Bologi and Naval moved to San Francisco and worked at startups.

in order to start our own startups. And so there are all these people who are like, oh, I really want to do that, but I have too much inertia, I have too much family. Then leave, move. The number one most important thing, by far anyone could do who is listening to this

is literally physically change your location. By far, because that will sever all of these things in your life that are preventing you from moving forward. Just move. Like physically move. And if you can't do that, just be okay with not moving,

which means not getting all of these things that you think you want, but you actually don't want because your family is more important than those things. And that's great. I wish that family was as important to me as it is to them, but it's not. It just isn't. That might be due to childhood trauma. That might be due to genes. That might be, who knows why?

That may be to socialization. But that's just the truth of who I am and the things that I get to do because of it. I don't mind working 60 plus hours a week. I love it. you know, when I go on holiday, like, I wish I were working. Guess what? If you are on holiday and you're like, I love being on holiday, I'm sorry to say that like, you know, doing a startup is probably not for you, right? But better to be truthful about that than to say, hey, you can like, here's a million bucks

and then like four years from now, you're going to realize that this is not for you. Because guess what? Like the company only matters 10 years from now. That's the other thing. Math teacher told me this one time where I, was like, this is math, right? Math very key. Here's a good mathematical concept, which is like, I got close to doing something and I'm like, I got 80% of the way there. So like I should get like at 80% and he's like, cool, walk 80% of the way to the door. And so I do. And he's like,

are you out the door? And I said, no. And he's like, yeah. So in math, fractions don't exist. They don't exist. There's no proof of fractions. You're zero and you have one. That's it. there's no proof of half of anything in real life because if you have half of something, then you just have one of that half, right? You only have one. And that was a super important concept. I think there are so many people right now. I see it in my portfolio, to be honest. I see founders. I'm like, you're going to keep doing this thing and you're going to realize it's not for you in two or three years and do something else. You know, like I'm, you're 11 years into gum road, right? Like seven years into gum road, it was a failure. And the only reason I kept going

is because I knew how to code because I could run the whole thing myself, which means I could automate the entire thing and go do other stuff with my life, which gave it the time to actually thrive. So if I didn't know how to code, you wouldn't be listening to this today. Gumber would be dead, you know, like there's so many instances that this stuff has saved has saved me. And that's the thing is when you look at Facebook and Twitter, all these examples of like, oh, there are all these other rules, all these other things.

Like, yeah, but like basically they all died. Like in the instance that Elon didn't know how to code, Tesla would have died. You know, in the instance of Naval not knowing how to code, Angelus would have died. Like the amount of near deaths that these companies have is incredibly high. And basically the only way that these companies exist is because the people at the top are insanely competent and self-reliant. Because the truth is when these things become near-death experiences, everybody leaves. Everybody gets off the boat except for you. You're by yourself.

The hardest decisions I look at Gumroad, I was the only person in the room making them. You know, I'm sure the same is true with Steve Jobs at Apple and Naval at Angelist and Elon at Twitter. Like, you're the only person who thinks this is a good idea. you know and the only way that's possible is if you you can do it by yourself okay i've got a i got a few thoughts and then we got to grab up even if you know people only agree with 70% or 80% of what you're saying i think that the fact that if you're listening to this you're kind of like questioning things it's it's still an important exercise to do for yourself so you might not want to physically move for whatever reason but you know one thing i recommend people do if they can't physically move is

mentally move. Like, mentally move in the sense of like, okay, you still live in, you know, Portland, Oregon, but like you follow or you consume content from people in San Francisco or something. Like, I also was one of those people. Like, I left where I was and, you know, in Canada and moved to San Francisco. And like, this conversation with you is like one of the reasons why I loved being in San Francisco because like, I hope you don't take this as like offensive. Like, you're crazy. Like, in the sense of like you've got big ideas and you've got crazy ideas and they're bold and stuff like that and like I had never met people like that until I moved to San Francisco. Yeah.

So I think that like, you know, what's the saying? Like you're the average of the five people you spend time with. Well, you know, you're the average of the five podcasts you consume is maybe another way of putting it or the five Twitter accounts that you follow religiously or the five YouTubers or I think the media you consume is really, really important. I think that's an important piece that you're, I know you believe in as well. Yeah, no, I think you're completely right. And when I, you know, I grew up in Singapore and like, you know, before I was, you know,

18 and went to, you know, went to college in the U.S. I was like that where I was like, I want to leave. I can't currently. And so I'm going to, Twitter was my, you know, social network, even when I was, you know, back then, like, I'd go on Twitter every morning and I'd be like, these are all my friends that I don't know yet. And then when I moved, you know, when I finally moved to. LA, you know, I went to startup school in San Francisco to like meet those people, you know.

And it is, yeah, it is crazy. The way you speak and like I speak and like I have so much confidence and everyone should totally like add layers of like self-awareness into what I say. I'm conscious of the things that I say as I say them and how I say them. But I try to be, but you really want to surround yourself your environment, you know, with what you want in the future, right? make your environment in the current look like the environment you want in the future. And if that means Twitter and the books that you read and the people you follow,

you know, resemble that. I think that does help a lot. And you can learn a lot that way too. I would say the other thing I would just add is like also don't worry about unfollowing people too, right? Like sometimes you do have to let go of certain things. And, you know, I don't get to hang out with my high school friends as much, you know, as I used to. And it sucks. And I wish I could do more of it.

But, you know, I made certain choices. and other other you know some of my high school friends still hang out with each other every weekend and i see them on instagram you know um so i think yeah at the end of the day you are memetic right like you are going to be programmed by what you consume and so make sure that you're kind of consuming just like a diet like you're consuming things that you know you are what you eat in a way right um i do i do think that is that is really important i would say the other thing is like do stuff with these people like don't just follow people on twitter but like what if you could work together on something, right?

Like, what if two of you, like learning a code is kind of like going in the gym? Like, it's work. It's like, it's not fun in the beginning. You know, you're going to hit your head against the wall. If you could do it with somebody else or do it with 10 other people or start a discord or whatever, like that's going to make your life a lot easier too, I think. Cool. Well, thanks for, thanks for coming on and, you know, making our brains explode.

And I think a lot of people are going to love this episode. But where could people get more of you and add you to their diets? Yes, if you want to add me to your diet. I'm on Twitter at SHL. That's the best place to, yeah, follow me, see what I'm up to. And you've got a great book. I've listened to it on Audible called The Minimalist Entrepreneur. Definitely worth a read.

I think your next book should be called something like, you know, get to zero. And it should be an AI book, AI, plus automation book. I do have a domain, anti-work.com, which is, you know, that subreddit,

which is really funny. They have a, the problem is that they have a very pessimistic view. I try to be a little bit more optimistic, but yeah, that's the goal. I always joke with people. Like the goal,

like entrepreneur by definition is someone who does not want to work. And so you, you kind of build a company and hire the people so that you can, you can make the judgment calls, you can make the decisions, but ideally you're not, you know, you're not moving the knobs. And hopefully AI makes it possible.

So that more and more people get to experience what that is like. All right, man. Well, we're out of time. I'll see you later. Yeah, see you later. Thanks so much again.