#440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Pieter Levels, also known on the X as Levels IO. He is a self-taught developer and entrepreneur who designed, programmed, shipped and ran over 40 startups, many of which are hugely successful. In most cases, he did it all by himself, while living the digital nomad life in over 40 countries and over 150 cities, programming on a laptop while chilling on a couch, using vanilla HTML, jQuery, PHP, and SQLite. He builds and ships quickly and improves on the fly. All in the open, documenting his work, both his successes and failures with a raw honesty of a true indie hacker. Pieter is an inspiration to a huge number of developers and entrepreneurs who love creating cool things in the world that are hopefully useful for people. This was an honor and a pleasure for me. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Shopify for e-commerce, Motific for LLM and RAG deployment, AG1 for health, Masterclass for learning, BetterHelp for the mind, and Aidsleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, there's a bunch of ways to get in touch with me by giving feedback, sending in questions that I can answer, and all other kinds of ways if you go to lexfreedman.com/contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I tried to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store. I recently tweeted about my belief, as it stands now, that Kamala Harris is not a communist, and that Donald Trump is not a fascist. And there's some other nuance in that tweet. And the response I got, the attacks I got from both sides that are very intense, that disagree, were fascinating. So, one of the things I have on my to-do list is to do a lengthy video and a lengthy podcast on communism and fascism, and other economic and political systems. You know, there needs to be a good, solid criticism and explanation of capitalism, for example. It's an economic system. It's a way for humans to work together that has, I believe, benefited the world way more than it has hurt the world. But to articulate that and to still man the criticisms and the perspectives that criticize capitalism is also really important. And so the same applies for communism, for fascism, for all kinds of ideologies that ruled the world for a time, and all the kinds of ways that they've broken down. And to do so seriously, objectively, calmly, walking through the fire without the misuse of those words. Thinking clearly, not as a partisan, but as an independent thinker, as a human being. I think that's something that I would like to work on more and more, even amidst this insane political season. Anyway, I mention all that because, you know, when I think about Shopify, I think about capitalism. It's a bunch of small sellers getting together and be able to sell stuff to people that would benefit from it, and would enjoy it, and they make it super easy. So if you're one such seller and you want to sell stuff, and you have awesome stuff to sell, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Motific, a SaaS platform that helps businesses deploy LLMs and drag that's customized, fine-tuned on organization data sources. Obviously, this is often extremely sensitive data, so you have to do this carefully and well. But when it is done carefully and well, and in a secure way, it can be a huge benefit for the company to be able to take all the data that the company has and internally be able to query that data, to be able to organize that data, to leverage in answering questions that would make everybody in the company more efficient. So I think that's the thing that unlocks, especially for large companies, but even mid-sized companies, even small companies, just the intranet, a thing that takes all the data on the inside and be able to make high quality, efficient, fast decisions based on that data. I think Motific was created by Cisco, specifically their outshift group that does the cutting edge R&D. So these guys are legit, it's great. Visit motific.ai to learn more, that's M-O-T-I-F-I-C dot A-I. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all in one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I'm going out, I think it's a hundred degrees out in Austin right now. I'm gonna go out and run anywhere from five to 12 miles. I'm feeling good right now. So I'm thinking like a 10, 11, 12 mile range. By the way, I just heard a little clip on Cam Haynes' Instagram. And by the way, Cam, amazing human being, you should definitely go follow him. He's an inspiration to me. You know, quietly just does incredible fits of strength and does it all with a kind heart and just this warmth and humor out of it. Anyway, he was talking about the fact that sometimes, you know, when he's running, crazy distances or fast pace, he'll just walk for a short period of time. He's doing it for joy. He's doing it for the love of running. Like you don't always, as he says, have to hate it. And I think I approach running the same way. I'll be running really fast. I walk. This oftentimes correlates with how deeply I am in thought related to an audiobook I'm listening to. I get this sort of discomfort when there's a difficult part of the audiobook that's really making me think. At the same time, keeping a fast pace is difficult for me. So I just slow down. I walk. I stop and just sit on a bench. I'm doing it all not for sort of training for a marathon, or training for some difficult physical endeavor. I'm doing it for the love of it, for the love of running out in nature, whether it's in the heat or in the cold, just the love of life that you can get, especially when the second wind hits. Anyway, after all that, I'm gonna drink a nice cold AG1. They'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex.