Sahil Lavingia Gets Radically Honest

All right, so Sahil Lavingia, 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?

Yeah, I mean, I, I love change. Uh, and you know, there's a great book by Nassim Taleb, Antifragile, which kind of goes into this concept of you know, there are certain things that get more resilient as, as you shake them up, and then there are other things that completely break, right? There's sort of fragile things and antifragile. And antifragile is kind of this interesting concept because it's not just like it doesn't get worse, you know, at a, 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, um, the human body, the human brain, like these adaptive systems And I just really try to run Gumroad, my venture stuff, like everything that I do in a very antifragile 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 2 years have been frustrating for people like me who like to build stuff because they're just, you weren't really rewarded as much for that. And I think this year, next year, it's going to, hopefully 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 tides, The tide is very quickly going out, uh, and I have no concerns about that, you know. Uh, so, uh, I'm excited.

Do you think there's going to be more builders now or less builders?

There will definitely be less, less builders. Um, as a percent, it'll go up, right? Because you're going to see tons of people who, 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, um, but like are gone already, frankly, right? They've peaced out like in January of this year, the first couple quarters. But I think, I think even the builder persona is, is going to shrink too, right? Where there are lots of people. 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, uh, to get someone like a Patrick Collison or a Dylan Field or a Mark Zuckerberg or an Elon Musk or whatever, right? You have to overlay quite a few things. Um, and, and so I think a lot of builders who are not, you know, who are doing the math, for example, and saying, hey, Robinhood being $80 billion makes me want to start a company, but Robinhood being worth $4 billion doesn't make me want to start a company— there are a lot of people that, that, that that make those kinds of decisions and will say, hey, you know, I'm actually going to go work at Amazon or Facebook or Google instead.

Also, like, Robinhood being worth $4 billion but having $4 billion in cash on hand, right?

Yeah. And to me, I mean, to be honest, like, 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 don't 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 2 to 3 times cheaper than they were like 6 months ago, which is amazing. You know, I would say the only other thing I'm waiting to crash— 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, 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+ 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 brainpower? Think, you know, thinking about it, you know, 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 That's pretty interesting. I don't think it's as notable as people— it's— 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 rote 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, it's hundreds of thousands of lines of code., but I only have to write 200 to 300 lines of code, right? Because I'm able to basically like abstract away all of the complexity to, you know, open source software. And so I think AI is just basically like that, but for like language that is just much more probabilistic and less deterministic, right? Language is not as, it's not math, right? It's, it's, it's, 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, right? Which is like super strange, right? You don't learn from like a base level of knowledge and build up. You kind of piece things together like a puzzle, which makes no sense. Like the reason that that works is 'cause we humans came up with it, right? 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 outputting. Um, and I think a lot of my brainpower right now is spent on basically reading up on these papers. Uh, like right now I'm reading a paper on— it's called Fusions of— it's called Fusions of Consciousness, I think, just came out today. Um, but basically we're learning a lot of stuff about neuroscience, about the brain, about intelligence, about neurons and how they work, and You know, it's sort of the last problem because if you can figure that out, then like, you know, it's kind of like what Google says, like you figure out how to solve the information problem and then you can solve every other problem with the information problem, right? Like everything else is a problem of lack of information, lack of understanding the patterns, right? Like magic is just like definitively when you don't know what the math is, it looks like magic. If you understand the math, then it's not magic, right? And one of the amazing things about this new wave of AI, which I think started in about 2017, is Transformers. Transformers and now diffusion models. But basically the Transformers are, at least to me, very, very cool, very awesome. Because before, if you wanted to understand a lot of these concepts, there's a lot of other things. There are a lot of things you have to piece together to figure out like, okay, what is intelligence? How does this thing work? Transformers are super simple. Like, it's kind of shocking how simple they are. I think they were invented in like the '70s with the perceptron. But basically you're just looking at noise and signal, and then you're trying to draw patterns between the noise and the signal. And what that means is, as long as you have enough data, you can kind of apply this problem to anything. There's nothing that I said there that is domain specific. Whereas, 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. And 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 asdf@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 and comes back with a risk score saying, hey, you know, based on what we've seen in the past, you know, like, uh, or, and what humans think looks risky or not, right? And, 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 4 years ago or even 2 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, you know, 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, we want to hire one ML engineer who to basically build recommendations for Gumroad. Like, I don't think it'll take more than one person. And that's amazing, right? I mean, like, to think about, like, you know, the hundreds of people that would have been required to build a model like this maybe 5 to 10 years ago, and did at YouTube before, before their new stuff, right? But now, I mean, it's a 10 or 100x. 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, right? Like, I built Gumroad in a weekend and, you know, like, obviously we've built stuff on top of that, but the core stuff took about 20 hours, right? And today would probably take about 4 hours or something, right?, right? Because I would use ChatGPT to write, you know, the majority of the code. Um, and so that, I mean, that, that I think is pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty amazing. I think it'll be a while until we get to hardware, like, but, but the cool thing about the whole transformer model is, in a sense, you can apply it to hardware, right? You can apply it to real-life experiences. And so imagine that as long as you have enough cameras watching what humans are doing just like you have, you know, you record all the text that gets inputted when you buy a product on Gumroad. Imagine if you have cameras everywhere recording all this stuff and then report, you know, you could totally automate tons and tons of stuff. It's pretty fascinating. I mean, I think we could see, for example, my guess is 10, 15 years from now, we'll start, 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 Lionel 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. But if you can take all of what's happening and just build a model and say, here, based on all this data and here's the inputs, here's the output, And now we want this new output. We want a goal to get scored, right? What do you do in this scenario? Oh, well, based on the million pieces of data we have, uh, from Messi and every other soccer player, we, you know, the only, the really only, that like the only real problem, but basically it's gone from a science problem to an engineering problem. Like the science is solved. We've like basically solved the science.

That sports thing is interesting.

So yeah, I mean, the only thing you have to do for sports is get the data. Which is, which is like Neuralink. Like, why is Elon working on Neuralink, right? Like, we just need to get the sensors in the place where we can get the math, and the math simplifies down to zeros and ones, right? And so we just need to get basically the— what's like the brain and the leg are talking via nerves, which is basically the, you know, our electronic circuit. And so we just need to basically like look at what's happening there. And we will, we will 100% basically be able to to, you know, get rid of pain, um, probably, you know, short-circuit depression. Like, all these sorts of things we will be able to do without needing to know exactly what— you know, we'll know the math because you can look into this function, right? Just like you can look into Stable Diffusion and, and do the math and figure out what's actually happening. Um, but you won't need to, right?

It doesn't, 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, like, you, 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, you know, 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 Counter-Strike on Twitch. Like, that's, 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, there's, 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, those dog videos. What's the robotics company? Boston.

Oh yeah. Boston 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. Mm-hmm. And it's because you can kind of see where it's gonna 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, et cetera. It, it makes, that's the arrow of progress or, or, and, and, and yeah, I think that's, 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 no 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, will basically reject this stuff just like they're— 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, my, my feeling is that surfing is much harder, um, than soccer, uh, for a robot to do. And so, you know, you'll, you'll kind of move the, the goalpost essentially, right? But just for example, like, how many people make a living playing chess? Nobody, right? Like, basically 4 people, or I don't know how many people But very, very few. And I guarantee you, if you look at like, you know, the sort of— I'm sure like when robots started to be able to do this stuff, it's like, okay, then why would I bother, right? Like, well, if it's fun, do it. But certainly to make a living, like getting into chess is not— no one would tell you that that's what to do, right? Or getting into horseback riding. But guess what? Like, that's every job. Like, every job is basically going to go through this thing. And people I think that's the thing that the sort of like the zeitgeist hasn't really figured out. There are all these artists getting really mad that like AI is going to take their jobs or whatever. But the truth is like AI took art away from their job long ago. Like these people are painting rocks for Pixar, right? Like they're doing a rote thing. They're not artists. They're executing a director's vision. Their hands, they're being paid for their hands. They're being paid for the training data because they painted a lot of rocks in the past so that they know how to paint rocks now. They're not painted for like their creative talent, their taste. That's another thing I think is interesting about the video game sports thing is that basically what it's done is people who may not have had the physical stature to play soccer, but did have the hand-eye coordination and the intellect to play soccer can now play FIFA and kind of can get really good at that. But what it shows me is that basically everything below here is going to be done, you know, you're gonna be judged more and more just based on what's in here. And almost nothing else. And to be honest, like, that's gonna lead to a very unequal world because we like to think that everyone is identical here and we are just different below, you know?

And by the way, if you're listening right now and you're not watching us on YouTube.

Oh yeah.

I'm, yeah, I'm, he's describing his head.

Yeah. My, my, you know, like basically what we're doing is we're, we're, we're, we're saying that like any privilege associated with, with anything else, height, or body mass or, you know, fast switch muscle fibers basically is not gonna matter 100 years from now, right? Just like, for example, height doesn't really matter in, in today's society, but it used to 100 years ago. And that's gonna just continue to happen until basically we're all just able to like, you know, we, we're kind of born, we, we like reach puberty and that's basically as, as functional as we're ever gonna be because everything else, you know, all the training, all the memorization, all, all that stuff, whereas we've sort of already outsourced. Um, and really the only stuff that differentiates us is stuff like working memory, which all of this stuff is basically genetic. So that's going to be weird. I think we're going to severely have to rewrite like how, how we, how we think of, of human beings and values and taxes and income inequality, wealth inequality. All these things are going to have to change pretty dramatically. Probably should have in the '70s. Um, but you know, it's going to get worse and worse and worse.

Did you see this thread by this guy, uh, François Chollet? He's, um, Yeah. Deep learning guy at Google. So he tweeted, for those who didn't see it, the current climate in AI has so many parallels to 2021 Web3, it's making me uncomfortable. Narratives based on zero data are acceptable, are accepted as self-evident. Everyone is expecting as a sure thing civilization altering impact and 100 times return on investment in the next 2 to 3 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 bear case. What do you think about that?

I mean, I have— I don't care at all about the, the financial investment piece of it, right? So, uh, 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, I don't, I don't think this is anything new. I think this is what data does. It automates rote input. And I don't see why, I don't see how that— 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 could apply the same thing to tons and tons of other stuff, right? Um, that people— it was just, we, we coalesce mimetically about certain topics and then share those things. And the truth is, people on Twitter, uh, are attention whores. And so we are— I mean, that's— I, I love the, uh, the, the view count, frankly, because it exposes us for the attention whores that we are. That's why we tweet. We want views. Um, 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 zeitgeist build up around AI. Um, 99% of it is, is BS. Um, however, like, I spent most of the Web3 stuff reading papers, and I spend most of my AI time reading papers. Uh, 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 2 or 3 that are incredibly compelling. I can give you 2 or 3 a week in AI that are incredibly compelling, right? 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 you have— I think you have a much higher bar to get stuff funded in academia. Um, you have many more diverse, uh, viewpoints in, in, in AI. Um, my guess is in Web3, there, you know, almost everybody was anti-Web3 except for like a few hundred people., right, that made a lot of money. Um, so I don't, I don't think it's the same at all. I think he probably just follows like a, a very, uh, you know, small slice of, of the population. I will agree with him though on that 100x invest thing, right, because that I do think is a problem. Um, I never thought that Web3 was a great way to make money necessarily. Um, I, again, I'm a builder, I like technology, right? Like if you ask me what's interesting about crypto, I'll tell you the interesting technology like the general, the Byzantine generals problem that led to Bitcoin, for example, that's super compelling. The Turing 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, 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. Um, I actually think that's quite likely. Um, 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, um, in this space. I would say, by the way, that like, that's always the other thing is 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— I tweeted a while ago, it was— I don't know, got some pushback, but I basically said, if you want to avoid scams, only invest in people who know how to code. Um, and obviously the counterfactual is a fallacy, so you, you can't reverse chain that and say, oh well, would you invest in people who don't know how to code? Of course I would. Um, but certainly the number one, you know, thing you could do to, 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, 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, on the internet all the time.

Can't you, you know, 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, 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 2 weeks. Minimal Viable Product was built, 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? Is it that?

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 code. So it's just not— 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. And so that's generally like, for example, a really— 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. Traditionally. And then basically photobashing started happening. So things started to go digital. By the way, artists 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 photobashing 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 the theater, it uses photobashing. Avatar, like, this is how they get to, like, super highly rendered matte paintings in the background. All the backgrounds are paintings, basically, and they're paintings that are photobashed together, right? And this is what every single amazing— like, Dylan Cole, who's 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 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 themselves. And that's exactly what I see happening, to be honest. Like I see a bunch of my artist friends who know how to code. Code takes about, You know, the thing is when people say like, you don't want to learn to 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 4-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. And, you know, obviously you don't need to, it's completely a choice. But as an investor, like I can just look at my portfolio And I can look at, you know, anyone can look at who's successful. Google. 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+ percent, is basically in 4 or 5 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, uh, basically are all started by Engineers, computer scientists, or software engineers. Uh, even Bezos, I think, had a CS degree. Um, and it just— it's a pattern I see over and over and over again. It's kind of undeniable. Um, and I think it's just kind of, you know, it just— it's just what it is, you know?

What about, like, 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 data structures and 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? Is that 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 this, 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 on your phone, what's, you know, like, 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? No, no. And guess what? Guess who gets all the money, all the reward? It's not number 2, not number 3, right? I can play chess, you know, I'm not making money as a chess player. All I'm saying is if I'm trying to make money as a chess player, I need to be the best. And the best, and I guarantee you this is true, I guarantee if you talk to Magnus Carlsen, he knows how to code. I guarantee you, um, because that's what chess is. It's, yeah, it's— and, and he knows what that— he knows that that's what chess is, and that's why he's so good, is he can figure out, oh, this is what it's— I'm building a heuristical model and I'm exploring these paths, and I basically have to figure out what's the longest path that doesn't lead to a loss, um, which is probably the right move to make. Which is, guess what, that's what AlphaZero does.

Yeah, yeah.

I think just reflecting on what you really understand it, and the truth is If you can't write it, you don't actually understand it. So you can pretend that you get it, uh, but the truth is, if you read the Bitcoin whitepaper and you haven't actually implemented it, you don't actually understand it. You don't actually understand what the math is. Um, and therefore you're never going to build anything that's a— like, to build something so compelling that it's created billions of dollars in value is so hard and so rare. To think that the, you know, 50 or 100 hours of curriculum you have to do to like unlock that, like that you, like, that's gonna, like, of course you're gonna need that, right? Because it's not that hard of a barrier to overcome. So of course there's gonna be a thousand, I don't know how many, there's like 10 million people in the world that can code. So why would you be, you know, if you can't, like, why would I, you know, it, it, so anyway.

Yeah, my, my takeaway from what you're saying really is, 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, uh, this apple is going to hit 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 worlds are, are these sets of laws, not really physics, but it's enforced by code. So to, 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 on Twitter. I don't understand traffic flows. Like all of these things, if you want to do, you know, 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 wanna 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 Gumroad 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 ship more code than most of my portfolio companies. And I'm a technical person that generally only invests in technical teams. And so I don't think people really grok the sort of difference that can make, right? Like, I can make Gumroad 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 valuation. I can do that literally every single weekend. That's like insane.

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 Late 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 frontdesk@latecheckout.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.

So what do you, 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 onto something. So I'm willing to to dedicate some of my time in 2023 to learning to be more technical and shipping one product or two products?

I mean, I think that, you know, 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 to code, let's just say you're going to spend $250 grand 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. The first thing I think I ever built was a GPA calculator where in just an Excel, I put in my math classes and then I put it, or my classes or whatever, and then I put in my A, B, C, D, whatever. And then I just had a column that said like, if A, 4, if B, 3, whatever. And then, you know, like sum 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, but just build it with Python. Like, you know, use ChatGPT, 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, like some problem that, and, and, 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. And then, you know, you, you know, there, there should be something in your life that you're like, oh, I spend 5 minutes like doing these 3 things. And it's like, okay, I can't, like, for example, let's say you wake up and you open like 7 tabs, right? You open like Twitter and Reddit and whatever. And it's part of your job. Well, write a script that opens those 7 tabs for you. And then all you have to do is run it 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, you can start saying, oh, well, what, you know, you could actually parse the tweets and turn it into like a, you know, I could like 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. And certainly like in 2022 would've been enough to raise a million bucks, right? Or whatever. And so I would just say always, always start there. And then I would also, to be honest, like I have tons of friends who are like, oh, I wanna learn to code. And then like 2 years go by 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. Never. Not in my— you know, you can't tell, but I'm actually 9 feet tall, right? Um, but, uh, no, just, it was never on my— was never on my list of things to do, uh, because I knew that I would never be any good at it, uh, because I just don't have the— I just literally cannot, you know, I don't have the height. And thank God I wasn't born in 1892. I would've been screwed at the factory, right? But luckily I was born in 1992 and the world is my oyster because I know how to code. Why? I don't know. And so that's the other thing is just like figure out what, you know, life's not a vacuum. So like figure out what you want to do. Don't let other people tell you what you want to do. And it's never been cheaper than, you know, to be happier. Like it's like almost free to be happy, like move to a place near the near the equator and you'll pay almost no, no, no, nothing. And, you know, and like rent will be a few hundred bucks a month. Food will be almost free. If you speak English, you can probably make that in just, you know, teaching people English.

Let's come back. Let's come back to that quality of life thing. Cause I want to, I want to get back to that. Cause I'm interested in that actually. But on the, on the, how do you become technical? How do you take someone who's not technical and make them technical? It sounds like what you're saying is step 1 is find a problem in your everyday life. And you know, step 2 is use platforms like ChatGPT to help, you know, write some of that initial code and just start, you know, trying to learn from there. Go online, you know, obviously there's, you know, tons of places where you can learn different, different.

Yeah. Well, it's, it's, it's tough. The reason it's so hard, the reason it's, it's like, why isn't this easy? Obviously if you can code, you can make like $200 grand a year. In a, in a year. Like, why wouldn't more people not do that? But it's kind of like learning English where it's, it's not like there's a simple, like, learn this and then learn this. It's like you kind of have to learn the whole thing and it's like a big puzzle piece and you're filling in the gaps like as you go. And eventually you have enough knowledge that you, you, you maybe don't even know, like, I don't know English. I can't tell you what the rules of English are, right? I can't tell you why like the old red car sounds better than the red old car. Sounds weird, but it does. It's just built into our brains that way. We have to learn it. And so coding is, I think, similar in which you just have to learn this stuff by lots of rote practice and building stuff. And you have to start small, just like English, and build up from there. But guess what? How many people learn a foreign language? Almost nobody, right? The way you learn a foreign language is you move to a place and you're like, ah, crap. And guess what? You'll learn a foreign language about 3 to 6 months. You can become basically conversationally fluent because it's not that hard. But you have to force yourself to, right? And so that I think is a big one. I think if the— 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 to code is like hitting your head against the wall for 5 years. It's very satisfying because you make millions of dollars and you get to build stuff and you don't have to work anymore. But it is frustrating on the path to getting there.

And so you have to— The building part is actually like, not enough people talk about like how amazing it is to just like, you know, using your example of like the ATAB script and you put it out in the world and you like post about it on Reddit or you post about it on Twitter and all of a sudden it goes viral and you're like, yeah, or you don't just realize, holy shit. Like, I'm, or you don't.

Yeah. Like I have, I have an extra 10 minutes a day. Right. And like with that 10 minutes a day, I could have an extra 20 minutes a day. And like with an extra 20 minutes a day, I could have an extra hour a day because I'm constantly using that. To automate more and more and more. And the premier way of automation, like I always joke with people, like the way you automate— oh, almost died. The way you automate people, or sorry, the way you automate is you just hire somebody else to do your job. So like once you can make like, let's say 200 to 300 grand a year, you don't really have to work anymore. Like working is very much a choice. And so I like, for example, like how many hours a week at Gumroad do I work? In front of a laptop, zero, basically. I don't type. I generally just respond to messages on Slack and Notion. And this is what most CEOs do. That's why it's appealing. Obviously Elon doesn't work at Tesla and SpaceX at all, and those companies are doing decently well, even though he's technically still the CEO of both of those companies.

Right.

And so He's, you know, he's automated the crap out of himself. Right. And guess what? He knows how to code. It's probably not a coincidence that he's able to do that. And so, yeah, I think that the appeal is like, you really have to know why you're doing it. For me, it's like, I don't like doing things I don't like to do. And so I just automate the crap out of everything. And I just, it means I have, you know, basically after this I'm done for the day. Right. 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 it. That's my life.

If that's not— You chose that life. You chose that life, right? Like that's, that's the life you want for yourself. And isn't that what a lot of people—

Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Yeah, I mean, I could— I have unlimited amounts of time and money and whatever. I— there's no bottleneck on what I can do, right? Um, it's completely—

but I think that's, 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 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, 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 9 to 5. 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. And again, let's say you don't, because technically you don't, right? Obviously there must be an example, but let's go back to the AI thing, right? The cool thing with AI is you don't actually have to know how to do anything. You just need data and outputs and they'll tell you, can you do it or not, right? Based on the data, I see a lot of data. I can't think of a single example, to be honest. 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. 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. 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? But he won. Why did he win? Like, you know, because he was the one who knew how to code.

Yeah, I think that's another benefit. Like, if we forget for one second, like, 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 7th grade, they had a coding class. I took it and one of the first projects was, um, build something in Visual Basic 6. So this is a long time ago for those of you who know what that is. Um, and I, I built a slot machine. I thought it'd be fun to build a slot machine. I built it and just seeing it work, like such an 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. 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 out. 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 output that will exist long after you're dead or whatever. But for some reason building, like I built like a game too, like Breakout. 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. And, you know, but it was—

was Naval your teacher or something?

Oh man, I can't imagine Naval. I don't even know if Naval would teach. He'd be like, here's a laptop, here's math edition, and you can figure out the rest.

I don't know. Right. Yeah. Let's talk about that for one second. What would— If Naval was designing, you know, a high school or something, 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 kids and teaching them? And he said, he said, not too different, I think. It's like, focus on math, basically. Like, if I think, I think math is the underlying, you know, now I'm saying my own stuff, but like, basically 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, given the internet. Like, you know, math is the sort of— like, for— like, 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, what 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 you just, you know, you use that data to— but you like, currently the AI doesn't get a choice of like, did I learn the— is this actually right or not, right? Like it just says, oh cool, yeah, like these strings lead to this strings, I can do that, right? And I think what's really important, 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, is because almost definitely there's a probability assigned to every single 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 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. Like that's why I have to read papers and I have to read books. Basically the only things that I can add to my brain are through books and through papers because nothing else has the foundational, has enough foundational stuff there for me to feel good enough about adding it to my mental model. And so I think that's where you start. And I would say if you can't, like, you can't really teach anyone anything is my guess. They have to want to learn it. And so I think you have to give them access to a computer and you have to teach them maybe some basic skills like English, you know, speaking, writing, and some math, maybe some physics or something. And at that point it's like, here's a laptop. What do you want to learn? What do you want to build? What do you want to do? Like, what do you want to understand? And that's all you can really do. Uh, like there's, there's a big controversy right now in the UK cuz it's like, oh, like Rishi Sunak is like making everyone do math and math is super key. And in the US we're talking about it like, oh, you know, we more people need to know math. Like we're getting screwed by China and India, blah, blah, blah. Uh, and it's like, well, I think the thing that people aren't really questioning is like, well, what if you can't? Like, but it's not new. That we've wanted to teach people these skills for hundreds of years. What if you just can't? There's certain people who want, and it's not capability in my view, it's purely desire. I want to build stuff. When I share that thing and it works and it does its thing, it feels super good. I get a deep amount of serotonin in my brain that I don't get if I see a nice thing at the jewelry shop and buy it and take it home. But I know that my wife is completely opposite from me. She doesn't care at all about what I do and she loves what she does. And so I think people are different and we have to acknowledge that. And that will skew in these ways. And I think we're forcing everyone to say everyone needs to learn math because math's essential in this new society. Uh, it's like, yeah, you should learn addition and subtraction and multiplication and division, which by the way was enough for the Romans to function. Like they didn't even have the number zero, which means they didn't even know multiplication. The Romans, you can do accounting, you can do real estate, you can do all these things without, without even multiplication.

Multiplication. Wait, sorry. The Romans didn't have the number zero.

Yeah, yeah, because you don't need it. You don't really need it. Uh, like, why would you need the number 0? What's, what's the use of the number 0? Uh, the number 0 doesn't exist inherently, right? Like, it literally refers to the concept of not existing. So the only, the only reason you need 0 is— I mean, there's a lot of benefits, uh, to inventing 0, because once you have 0, then you can— you have the decimal system, then you can do multiplication. Once you have multiplication, you can do exponentiation. Once you have exponentiation, now you can do predictions doing statistical modeling. So if you're an investor, then yes, you need multiplication. Um, but basically, if you're a real estate agent or if you're an accountant, which were the basically the two core money-related roles for a long period of time, you only need addition. I was actually talking to somebody and I was like, yeah, you don't need any multiplication for accounting. He's like, I'm the CFO of this major brand and you're telling me that like you can do my entire job with addition? And like after 5 seconds, he was like Yeah, I guess you can. It's called double entry accounting. That's why— is double entry accounting a thing? Because there's no zero. So how do you make a zero? It's plus one, negative one. So yeah, you don't need multiplication in accounting. Uh, Romans didn't have it. That's why they couldn't predict anything. You know, you can't— you need multiplication to predict. Also, what's really fascinating is in nature, the concept of multiplication only exists once. There's only been one time in the history of the universe where like multiplication has existed. But beyond that, we've just basically from the Big Bang just like divided stuff into pieces, which is DNA. Life, life is the only thing that actually has the property of multiplication. That's it. Uh, so yeah, it's kind of crazy. I think it's like, it's fundamentally like, it like kind of, kind of crazy how important math is and also how long We didn't have it, you know? But it also shows we don't actually need it. Like we don't actually have to, like, you know, this is the other thing is like 100,000 software engineers can run the world. Like we don't need a million, we don't need 10 million. And we'll, by the way, never get them anyway. We can try, we can, we can give everyone college degrees. By the way, most people with TS degrees don't know how to code, you know? It's just, we're like, we just have to be okay with like, there's a limited quantity of these people who want to do it and have the capacity to. And let's like make those people really, really successful. Let's tax the crap out of them. So we can all do pretty well. But I do think like, this is the thing I really agree with on like the whole like sort of Ponzi stuff around crypto and stuff is like the vast majority of us are just grifters. There's like a few people actually building the tech. And actually, that the number of people because of automation is actually getting smaller all the time. Right? I think this is a huge reason that like the managerial class exists is because there are all these people who would have been automated away in the '70s because of computer computer science, uh, and are like, no, I still need a job that's nice, uh, air-conditioned, and I want to type on a laptop. So let's create all this crap, right? Um, because how do you not? Uh, but I totally think you could run like America with like, you know, like a few thousand people, right? Um, with software. Again, like, what is— how many, how many people like work for the Social Security Administration? I think it's like 100,000 people or something, you know, it's like maybe millions, I don't know, tons of people. How many do you actually need? Again, it's just math.

It's just addition. So the IRS hired like 87,000 new people to go, you know, audit people.

Yeah. And what is that? It's literally just math. It's completely automated. It's, it should be completely automated. Uh, it should require actually, like, the goal is zero. Like, the goal is, is Gumroad, for example, we have zero full-time employees. The goal is zero, right? You can 100% run government. Like the US government was like a bunch of part-time employees for a long time, right? Like, let's get back to that. And you can do it now with code. It's certainly possible. It's just the problem is how do you actually— you require— you need leadership to actually implement all these things. And you need consensus and like all these other things. And it'll certainly happen in the next like few hundred years is my guess. But yeah, again, it comes back to, well, what do people do? What do people do? Well, they won't be making art like people think. They won't be poets because AI will show people that that's all kind of a BS thing that we just did at a period of time. And people actually don't like making art and poems if there is no monetary or fame attached to it. That's the truth. I mean, that's pretty revealed during what what, you know, COVID and the pandemic and all these things, like, it's pretty clear that people don't actually like doing this stuff. Um, so what do people want to do? Well, my guess is they, they would move closer to the equator and use their bodies, uh, more, uh, is generally what I would— and guess what? This is what people do. Like, what do rich people do? Like, they go to Italy and Greece and they walk around and eat food, and they go to the African safari and they walk around and eat food, and they go— that is what humans do. That's what humans would prefer to do. If we had unlimited time and money, we would do that. And so why the hell are we all living in Russia and like Portland, Oregon? And, you know, like we should all be moving closer and closer to the equator. It's honestly shocking to me that that like that isn't like a— like we have all this like housing prices. You want housing prices to go down, get the people here who shouldn't even be here anymore. They're just here randomly because they're like, you know, 2, 3 generations ago, someone wanted beaver pelts to sell to Chinese emperors., right? And move them the hell down. Uh, like, it's crazy to me.

Um, there's only— as a Canadian, I, I, I, I don't— I definitely feel, feel that.

Well, I mean, I, I, I mean, I literally cannot live in Portland, Oregon. Like, I'm deeply vitamin D deficient because I have too much melanin in my skin. So I, I like physically get depressed. Like, I physically feel it. Uh, and my guess is actually I'm not the only one who physically feels it. I'm just more aware of it because I have choice. And freedom and grew up in Singapore near the equator. But like, no, I have a completely— have depression like 3 to 4 months of the year because it's gray and there's no sun, basically. Like, why the hell am I here? I wouldn't be without, you know, without my wife, basically. But then why the hell is everybody else here? It's, well, they can't move anywhere. They like, they just, you know, it's like the conceptual model to be like, I can leave, you know, doesn't really exist.

Well, one is borders. Like, one is like there's a legitimate 100%.

I mean, that definitely needs— we need to figure that out. I mean, that's what— that's why I think there should be an effort. Like, we should figure out how do we get— where there's all these, all these Mexicans moving to America, which is awesome. They totally should. But guess what should also be happening? All these Americans should be moving to Mexico. Mexico is super cheap and way better weather. Like, why are you here? You know, um, you should be here if your, if your goal is to innovate, if your goal is to make money. But as soon as you've done those sort of things, you like, don't go to Florida. Like go to Costa Rica, go to like literally go anywhere else in the world where your talent is so necessary, is so vitally important. Your, your, your, your, your memes and genes are, would be, would do so much value in, in these other places. But, but that, I think that's a huge like liquidity problem that we have that, uh, that, that, that, yeah, that, that, that should totally change. Um, but it honestly blew my mind because I, I think this was a bias that I had. Like I grew up in Singapore and I was in SF and like was born in New York to Indian parents. Like, everyone I knew was always an immigrant. It was always like, oh, you know. And then like, now I live in Portland, Oregon, and like 99.9% of the people I talk to were born and raised here, you know. Like, and it shocked— it honestly blew my mind. It's like, it was like, wait, what? Like, you can just never leave your little place on Earth? Like, even though you know everything is there? Um, yeah, it's crazy to me.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, a lot of thoughts there and we don't have that much time, but I think, listen, I think first of all, some people are just, you know, they're, they're in Portland because they're in Portland. Like there's an inertia to the place that you live and it's difficult to get up and leave everything you know for something new. That's just like a difficult thing that a lot of people have to deal with. The other thing is like family is a big pull for, for a lot of people, right?

Like, I guess it's honestly entirely family. I actually don't think the first one matters at all. I think it's purely family. Yeah, yeah. I think people stick here because they, they can't imagine life without their family. I see my family like once every 6 months. This is— it's just who I am. It's my personality. It's the personality of my immigrant parents.

Um, and it's the life that you design.

Like, people build billion-dollar companies too.

It's the life that you design for yourself, right? Like, it's the— it's the life you want. Yeah.

And I think I don't value— I don't value, like, hanging out with my parents weekly, as much as I think people do.

You know, this is a great place to end, which is if people want to get the life that they imagine for themselves, like, how do you recommend them to reach that 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. So most people like don't want to leave their family and that's totally fine. I did. 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 want, 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 and you should be doing that. No, like I don't think most people should be learning how to code. I never said that. All I said is if you want to like live my lifestyle, you're you're gonna need it because that's the only way you can automate stuff is with code.

But have you, have you read, uh, I'm reading it right now, Wanting: The Creative Cycle?

Yeah, is that the Luke Borges book?

Yeah, so it's the power, yeah, the power of mimetic desire in everyday life. And it just goes through, um, this desire that all human beings have to copy other human beings. If I see someone with a Rolex, I'm gonna 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.

Yeah. And, and, and I would say that there's certain people who don't have mimetic drive nearly as much as other people. Yeah, right. Like, I don't have a watch, uh, I don't have anything besides a t-shirt and pant. Like, I have the essentials. I wrote a book called The Minimalist 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 like, I don't want anything else. I really don't want, like, why do I have lots of money? It's just so I can invest in startups. Like I don't want any physical things. I just don't have, I have zero desires for that. You know, why do I have a house? The only reason is cuz 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. Um, 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. Uh, I, I found it 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. Um, 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, Singapore, and London. And so very quickly, I think maybe that showed me that like this, this whole thing is a memetic social game that 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 3 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 cars 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 mimetic game that everybody else is playing. It's just, I don't— I can play it, you know, I can— I'm just at a different level. Uh, And I got lucky, I think, in being able to play that. But it's not a coincidence that like Balaji and Naval and me like have a similar aesthetic, a similar life, a similar disconnection to society. We all know how to code. We all have lots of Twitter followers. And we all have tons and tons of people 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 middle 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 wanna be like you. And I'll go like, go to their Instagram account. Like, you definitely don't wanna be like me. Like you're posting pictures on a boat. Like I would never do that. So like 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 deal, right? At the end of the day, you can only be jealous of someone if you want, if you, if you're willing to get everything that they have.

And to get everything that 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 Sahil's made, or I'd love to get as many Twitter followers as Sahil has, but there's inertia. What do you, like, you're obviously natural in the sense that you, you're, you know, you, 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, the most important thing you can do is to force it, right? So there's that scene from like The Dark Knight Rises where, you know, like the kind of the bridge burns and he has to do the thing, right? I think that's, you burn the boats, right? Like for example, you wanna start a company, you wanna 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, Balaji, 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's 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. So 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 the 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+ hours a week. I love it. Um, 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? Um, but better to be truthful about that than to, to say, hey, you can, like, here's a million bucks, and then, like, 4 years from now you're going to realize that this is not for you. Because guess what? Like, the, the company only matters 10 years from now. That's the other thing. A math teacher told me this time where I was like, this is math, right? Math, very key. Here's a good mathematical concept, um, which is like, uh, I think I, I got close to doing something and I'm like, I got 80% of the way there, so like I should get like an 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, for example, rule of math, uh, fractions don't exist. They don't exist. There's no proof of fractions. You have 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 and I'm like, you're going to keep doing this thing and you're going to realize it's not for you in 2 or 3 years. And do something else. You know, like I'm, you're 11 years into Gumroad, right? Like 7 years into Gumroad, 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. Gumroad would be dead. You know, like there's so many instances that this stuff has saved me. And that's the thing is when you look at Facebook and Twitter and all these examples of I was like, oh, what?

They're all—

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 knowing— not knowing how to code, AngelList 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. Basically, you're by yourself. The hardest decisions I look at, Gumroad, I was the only person in the room making them. I'm sure the same is true with Steve Jobs at Apple and Naval at AngelList and Elon at Twitter. You're the only person who thinks this is a good idea. And the only way that's possible is if you are literally possible to, you can do it by yourself. Like Elon knows how to make rockets go to space, I believe, not because he wants to, but because he has to. Like he has to know how to do all those pieces. So that I think goes back to, you know, your point around like inertia is like you have to want it so badly that like there's like, you wouldn't even, frankly, you wouldn't even be asking the question, right? Because you would've already done the thing, right? Like I love writing science fiction and fantasy, I was talking to Brandon Sanderson about this, and he said, you know, like, the truth is, like, the people who write science fiction fantasy and do really well, they can't do anything else. And the fact that you want— you have a choice, that you— this is something you do for fun, you're probably never, never going to be able to do this at this level, you know.

So I think— I mean, that's a— he's interesting. Okay, I've got a— I've got a few thoughts, and then we gotta— we gotta wrap up.

Um, I love ranting, so thanks for letting me.

No, no, I— this is you're, you're, you're gonna push a lot of people's—

2023, I'm trying to be more honest.

No, I like it. I like the honesty. And like, 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 and you're kind of like questioning things, it's, it's still an important exercise to do for yourself. So you might not wanna physically move for whatever reasons, but you know, another, 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 know, you follow or you consume content from people in San Francisco or something. Like I also was one of those people, like I, 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. 'Cause 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 having, like, you know, what's the saying? Like you're the average of the 5 people you spend time with. Well, you know, You know, you're the average of the 5 podcasts you consume is maybe another way of putting it, or the 5 Twitter accounts that you follow religiously, or the 5 YouTubers. Or, so I think the media you consume is really, really important. I think that's an important piece that you're, you're, you're kind of, 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, before I was I was, you know, 18 and went to, you know, went to college in the US. Um, it was, I was like that where I was like, I wanna leave, I can't, uh, 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, uh, to like meet those people, you know? Um, 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 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 know, like 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 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 also don't worry about unfollowing people too, right? Sometimes you do have to let go of certain things and I don't get to hang out with my high school friends as much as I used to and it sucks and I wish I could do more of it, but I choose, I make certain choices and 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 mimetic, 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 to code is kind of like going to the gym. Like it's, it's work. It's like, it's not fun in the beginning. You know, you're gonna hit your head against the wall. And if you could do it with somebody else or do it with 10 other people or start a Discord or whatever, like that's gonna make your life a lot easier too, I think.

Cool. Well, thanks for, thanks for coming on and, and, you know, making our, our brains explode. And I think a lot of people are gonna love this episode. Where, where could people get more of you and add you to their diets?

Yes. If you want to add, add me to your diet, that's a good one. I'm on Twitter @shlavingia. 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, 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, antiwork.com, which is, you know, that subreddit, which is really funny. Of course, 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, you can make the judgment calls, you can make the decisions, but ideally you're not, you know, you're not moving the knobs. Uh, and, uh, hopefully AI makes it possible so that more and more people get to experience what that, what that is like.

All right, man. Well, we're out of time. I'll see you. I'll see you later.

Yeah, see you later. Thanks so much again.