Context
Link to Original Twitter Space.
The conversation provided in the transcript is between Whiz and the founder of ChatBoo, an AI application for mobile devices. It revolves around the challenges and experiences of a software engineer involved in app development, content creation, and navigating the online world. Here are some key points:
Wearing Many Hats: The speakers discuss the multifaceted nature of app development, involving tasks such as front-end and back-end coding, database management, UI design, and building an online presence. This aligns with the reality of being a solo entrepreneur or a small team in the tech industry.
Diverse Interests: The person mentions having various interests, including fitness, health, photography, and videography. They emphasize the importance of integrating these skills into their app development, suggesting that combining passions can lead to unique and standout projects.
Role of AI in Creativity: There's a discussion about the impact of generative AI, like ChatGPT, on the creative process. The idea is that such tools can streamline certain tasks, allowing creators to focus more on directing their vision and engaging in creative directing.
Podcasting and Content Creation: The conversation touches upon the decision to create podcast-based content, with a recommendation to explore YouTube as well. There's a recognition of the power dynamic on social media and a preference for genuine, quality conversation over echo chambers.
Influencer Dynamics: The speakers express a view that follower counts and vanity metrics shouldn't change how people interact. There's acknowledgment of the excitement that comes with influential figures taking notice and the desire to leverage such opportunities.
Quality and Recognition: The importance of quality content is emphasized, with recognition from established accounts seen as a quick test of quality. The conversation also hints at the challenges of differentiating between genuine engagement and inflated metrics.
App Release and Advertising Strategy: The speakers mention being in the early phases of app release, with plans to roll out key features and intensify advertising efforts once those features are implemented.
Overall, the conversation provides insights into the complexities and dynamics of app development, content creation, and online engagement, touching on themes of creativity, quality, recognition, and the impact of AI.
Transcript
00:00
Hey what's up man? Hey, good to see the technical difficulties have been sorted out. It's Twitter being Twitter as usual, but also I'm also lowkey in the midst of being raided right now, which probably might explain why. Long story short, I pissed off an AI influencer just now. No way. Oh yes, wait, I'm about to send you a DM real quick. Oh, this platform. What?
00:28
Yeah, Twitter Spaces have been really playing up the last few days, hey. Yeah, like read the DM I just sent you. Griftfluences, I love that. So long story short, whoever this person is, I honestly could not care less about them as far as the role they have to play in this circle of folks and the AI scene, but...
00:54
It seems to me that they are gathering some attention and I've got to go in some of their spaces and doing what I usually do I would ask some pointed questions and then the guy that's in the screenshot I think he goes by like Bae Yeos or something Jeff Jaysus? No no no the other one, the one that has like the helmet looking thing on their PSP Ahhhh
01:20
So like he showed up in the space and what was supposedly an open discourse essentially turned into like a two hour lecture from this guy. And I'm like, why are we sitting here listening to this guy preach to us? Um, and I guess it pissed them off, but didn't really think much of it. And then I went into their sub stack and kind of like just like often they make like a little poking comment about how they wanted to change their lives in 2023. And then they joined.
01:49
EAC, you know, it's like, well, talk about joining cults. If you're trying to change your life, there's no better way to do that than to join the EAC folks. And then another one of the people in the EAC scene that's like very prominent, Beth Jassos got exposed recently, going around doing some messed up stuff with women, which, you know, sounds on brand, you know, it's a lot of, it's a lot of fucking like, wanna be influencers or like...
02:18
who I guess like not that popular in their normal lives that are taking a shot at like fame here on Twitter and trying to make use of it. So this is really not a lot of fun. Well I thought that EAC was like a sort of, you know, kind of serious but really just like a joke kind of movement. You know, like, oh yeah, this is fun. Let's just talk about how we think that AI is going to be good for the future. Kind of like QAnon basically.
02:48
I thought QAnon was a bit more serious than EAC. I don't know. So what, people really take EAC seriously, hey? From the looks of it, yeah, apparently. Which again, I generally do not know. I'm just going off of what people are doing and how they respond. Again, not even me going after them. It's really just me just tweeting stuff into the ether and seeing what happens. But um...
03:16
It lets you know what it's really about when it gets under the skin. And for me, man, I can't really afford to just get caught up in hype and nonsense bullshit because so much of what I do is research heavy. And imagine presenting like something new to my audience of like 80,000 people and telling them, oh, this stuff is revolutionary. You should try it now. It's like, no, bro, like I generally don't do that. And that's why I went into casting personally.
03:44
I find that podcasting actually serves two purposes. Number one, it allows me to actually get a good grip of what people are really doing. And number two, it's an open forum in the way I do it where people, if they feel like jumping in, can jump in and actually properly participate in the conversation and not do so in a way where it's like heavily curated or censored in the way some of these Twitter spaces run, as you probably have seen by now.
04:13
Yeah, it's a bit of an interesting dichotomy, either serving the mass market of people who just want clickbait titles and buzzwords and that kind of thing. You get a bigger market, but at the same time, that's not very interesting. And if you want to actually have keen insights and not just jump on every single hype train, then you inevitably...
04:42
close down your market and to a smaller number of people who kind of want the high quality stuff, but my take on that is that you know, it's cheap and easy to do the sort of hype train AI influencer bro thing and that because it's cheap and easy you get a lot of people doing it saturating the market and It's easily copied and they won't last you know
05:11
Those are the people who might see some quick start and like a one hit wonder and then after that it's difficult to kind of keep producing good content. Whereas the people who kind of do stick with the quality, there's a few YouTubers I follow who are in the low thousands of subscribers but they consistently put out really good content and I make sure every single time I see one of their videos to...
05:40
what should the whole way through comment like? And those are the kinds of people who get long-term success. Yeah, it's not to dissimilar to the blitz scaling phenomenon that you described earlier, which actually was a such spot on way to describe what MrBeast was doing. I feel like not a lot of people think of these terms in this way, but a lot of what I'm doing with this podcast, man, as far as the intersection of arts, culture, and tech is concerned is to...
06:10
really hint at the implication that a lot of these concepts, although seemingly unrelated, turns out there's a lot of touching points, if you will. Points of convergence even, I might add, that over your time of exposure to my work and also the way I do research will hopefully become apparent to you.
06:35
But before I get into the nitty gritty of stuff, man, let's jump into you first and really get proper into who you are, what you do, why you got into Twitter, and what you hope to do with the platform. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I kind of just got a bunch of social media for my app when I started building the app so that, you know, when I get users, there's a place to sort of interact with them on.
07:04
I never really planned to do spaces. At that time I didn't even have Twitter. I didn't even know about spaces. But I don't know, I just really connected to it a few people and they were really interesting and I saw some spaces come up and I really liked the spaces, you know, being able to listen to a bunch of different people, chat it out and given the opportunity to speak as well was just, yeah, something I never really even thought about but I really loved it when I tried it out.
07:34
So, you know, why not? But as far as the rest of me, I'm from Australia. I did a degree in electrical and electronics engineering, got my masters, but I thought it was pretty boring, to be honest. And so in my course, we did a bit of C programming and a bit of MATLAB, which is a more engineering math based language.
08:02
And I thought at the time I kind of really liked programming. And so when I graduated, I thought, all right, I'm just gonna do some stuff in my spare time while I apply for jobs. And I just fell in love with software development. And it was the same time actually that ChatGBT was announced. So, you know, ChatGBT was announced in November of 2022. And then that's when I was graduating.
08:32
And so when I was applying for jobs, I thought, you know what, I'm just going to build an app for fun. Um, so I had taught myself how to program in Python and JavaScript and Swift, uh, cause I originally wrote my app in Swift for iPhone. Um, but then I thought, no, I definitely want this to be cross platform, so I learned JavaScript. Um, and AWS.
09:00
So yeah, it's been a really, really exciting road. In the beginning, I kind of didn't actually have anyone to sort of connect with and talk to. And I kept trying to find people on YouTube and Discord, and I could never find any like-minded people who just wanted to chat about nerdy subjects. And then on Twitter, I found a bunch of really like-minded people like yourself, and it's just fantastic. Yeah, I think another...
09:29
secret weapon that podcasting affords me is that it essentially gives me carte blanche to talk to people actually want to talk about granted for me i i i tend to veer more on the open-minded aspect given the idea of intersectionality i brought up earlier i try not to funnel myself too deep into certain communities specifically for that reason um don't get me wrong i i'm very much a geek
09:58
custom modded my game boys when I was growing up. But I think it's very easy to get caught up in the nonsense of like what's available online. I'm here to shoot the shit, have some fun along the way, piss some grifters off if I can too, you know, why not? But otherwise, I think culturally speaking, I'm still...
10:25
Deciding where to put myself, you know, am I a tech person? Because I cover quite a bit of tech and in the last year alone in the 52 something odd articles I've published on the topic. I'm pretty sure at least half of that is tech related which would make sense You know a lot of what I do is discussing social media trends recent resurgence of applications and more importantly how they used by mainstream users, but I think
10:55
Yeah, like if someone was to come across my stuff for the first time, they would probably pin me down as a tech person. I'm curious to hear like what you would pin me down as though, not just off of faces, but like specifically off of like the profile itself, you know? Yeah, no, definitely hearing you speak on some sort of tech related topics. I thought you were tech just straight away because you know, you have that technical ability.
11:23
Yeah, then diving more into your profile and stuff. I do see that you've got more of a broader sort of horizon, which I really appreciate. Um, you know, I was thinking about, uh, do you know, MKBHD, the YouTuber? Oh, bro, don't even get me started. I'm trying to be like this guy. Yeah. I mean, he's, he's such a, he's the name in the original, like phone reviews. Um, but he also does so much other stuff that.
11:53
is he loves doing and he brings really high quality stuff to it. And I mean, that's, I think that sort of, you know, master of all trades or jack of all trades is a really valuable tool because you can bring those ideas from other fields into your main passion. That's the intersectionality that you were talking about, which I think is really important for entrepreneurs, you know, you can't be extremely skilled.
12:22
one thing while you're trying to bring something off the ground. Eventually you might be able to palm off a bunch of stuff. And I'm pretty sure MKBHD just did a video on this. His analogy was about the octopus. The octopus with the three hearts, bro. Yeah. I'm so glad I'm going to have you on this podcast. Like full disclosure, I'm going to milk that section for what it's worth. Cause I'm currently gearing up to like spread it to YouTube. Uh, I mostly.
12:49
I mostly focus my time into going to podcasts first because I'm not a content guy, right? You know what I mean by that? I don't like doing the whole, yo, welcome to the YouTube channel and tune into the show, fucking influencer bullshit. I am more of a, yo, here's what I'm currently discussing in a very matter of fact kind of way. Here's the context of why I'm discussing it. And if you care enough to subscribe, go on ahead and subscribe.
13:17
The hosting platform I use within the first week of me documenting stuff, people were actually paying me to read my stuff and listen to it, so I'm like, okay cool, it sounds like I'm onto something here. So I just kept it going. But in terms of like going onto YouTube, my biggest hurdle has been the whole content thing. I don't want to do the whole content grind farm shit. Instead, what I chose to do strategy-wise was to build up a catalogue.
13:44
I didn't intend to do it on purpose for a year, but at this point a year later I have well over a hundred hours plus of stuff already published over one And already recorded so I can just like get in there and stitch it all together into content proper with the help of my Editor friend like he's really good by the way like he's he done. He does video essays. I'm sure as a YouTube watcher You know what these are? so like
14:10
When we linked up he was like hey your articles are basically video essays, but not in written form So I'll help you out with like formatting and all that stuff So and now we here we are but yeah the octopus shit man. I am At first I was I wasn't we're gonna watch that video because I was like Okay, he's just gonna give like his general take on my part It's like to be a big dog with like a big following and the demands of such a status
14:37
but he actually dropped some major gems in there. So I want you to go into that real quick. Yeah, I mean, I've been watching MKBHD since, I don't know, probably a year after he started publishing videos. He's always been a favorite of mine. And I've seen a lot of other favorites sort of sell out or go into more mainstream, cheap content, you know, but I felt like he never did that. I felt like...
15:05
his videos are always really high quality, they're pretty genuine, he doesn't sign with pretty shitty sponsors, so that kind of quality and passion that you saw him in him at a young age has really carried through. And yeah, just in terms of the multiple arms octopus analogy about as a founder having to wear so many different hats. He goes into detail.
15:35
about that and it really resonated with me because starting my app you have to deal with front end code, back end code, database code, you have to build an online presence and a website, you have to do all of the sort of UI design and get some nice photos and yeah, just lots and lots and lots of different hats as well as planning out the business side of everything.
16:02
you know, actually having a way to monetize it and, you know, still resonate with your users. And I feel like personally, just for me, I've always kind of been that, you know, jack of all trades, master of none kind of thing, just because I have so many interests, you know, around the place. I'm into fitness, I'm into health, I'm into, as I said, photography and videography. I used to be a photographer and videographer.
16:31
And I feel like bringing all those skills together and putting that into one of your passions is how you can stand out and really go the distance. Yeah, that makes sense. For me, man, I've always been the kind of person that wears many hats for better or for worse. And it took me some time to make sense of what these hats even mean in the context of...
16:58
how I should wear them and why I should wear them. So I think right now in the age of everything, large language model, everything AI based, I feel like it's going to offload so much of the need to wear different hats and effectively take on the task of actually doing the thing that matters, which is directing the vision. Cause in a lot of ways, a lot of what we're doing is a-
17:26
creative directing, right? Like whether you're a writer, a video maker, an app developer, you just have a vision that you want to see through. I don't know how resonating you find that statement to be from your own perspective. Well actually, I feel like I'll play devil's advocate there. And so if I understood your statement, your position properly, you're saying that, you know, the advent of generative AI.
17:53
will allow people to focus more on their singular creative output, which might still resonate with my opinion. So my opinion is that without ChatGPT and all of these other AI tools that I've taken advantage of, there's no way I could have built my app in the time that I did, having to learn all these new technologies.
18:23
all this different stuff. So I think that it gives someone the ability to do so much more in all of these different fields compared to before where you might have had to hire five different people with five different skill sets, which I think is just amazing that we can do that kind of thing. And just before you were talking about how you want to get into YouTube.
18:50
but your content is more podcast based. I reckon still go for it. I listen to a bunch of podcasts on YouTube and even if it's not a podcast and if it's just a video with some pretty graphics, I just listen to it while I work and I usually don't watch the videos. So I think there might be a few people out there like that. So I definitely recommend you to go after that avenue because there's a big market there. Yeah. So I think...
19:18
I think what got me clued into the power of podcasting fairly early on was Joe Rogan. Although I gotta say, he was more of a shit poster if anything. Like he has this very bro-y way of doing things which I'm actually fairly okay with. Because for him it worked out because essentially Joe Rogan plays the role of the surrogate viewer that-
19:44
does not know shit about anything and just sits there and gets told by the experts how things work right that I think the world that he plays very much falls into the why of how he got so popular so quickly so for me that one makes sense I'm not that guy personally I'm not I'm not so much interested in like having people lecture me quote unquote
20:14
I'm more interested in a dialogue, in a discourse, and hopefully learning about things that are interesting along the way. I really feel that a lot of the Twitter spaces that I might actually play into that too, and from a humble perspective, unfortunately man, Twitter spaces tend to get misused quite a bit. And unfortunately, they tend to...
20:41
effectively serve as like an echo chamber where only the people that echo the same sentiment are allowed in and everyone else that there speak something different are kicked out. I think it's like a really annoying thing that happens and for me, I try not to do that. I try not to promote that and I definitely try to, if I can to be honest, because you know, I'm not unfathomable, but if I can, I'll actually try to hear people out and see where they're coming from.
21:11
It makes sense for me, man. I don't want to do this whole thing of like free speech for me, but not for the kind of thing, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I think having that sort of open dialogue where you're open to other people disagreeing with you and actually, you know, the biggest thing, the most amazing sort of quality someone can have in that sort of setting is humility. You know, having a...
21:40
say stating your position, having someone else disagree with you, explain why, and then for that person to come back and say, you know what, that was really well put together and you know what, I agree. And yeah, you just don't, you don't see that very often. I feel like people think that admitting that you made a mistake or that you had your wrong is a sign of weakness, but in reality, I think that's the only way we can actually grow and learn more. And I think it's one of the best skills to have.
22:08
Yeah, and for me, another layer that plays into it too, it's like, I think people necessarily don't want to address the elephant in the room, but there's a power dynamic at play here too, man, in terms of this very platform we're currently speaking on. And I'm sure you've been around long enough to maybe notice it. You've been on the space and someone is, you know, talking about whatever they're talking about, and all of a sudden, someone with a bigger platform or bigger reach shows up.
22:37
and the vibe of the space switches up entirely and now it's all about what this person is doing and whatnot. And to be honest, I find that to be quite shitty because one, you're sort of forcing people into a conversation they didn't sign up for and two, in a lot of ways, it's essentially allowing people to essentially use you as a mouthpiece to advertise whatever they want to advertise.
23:04
For me, I kinda take a more opt-in approach of like, well, you being on by default on my podcast means that we will touch upon what you're working on. That's a given. It's not like, oh, I just happened to quote unquote show up here and randomly I'm now talking to like however many people that are currently on stage. I see it a lot.
23:28
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I suppose there's an audience for everything and the audience who appreciate quality conversation will naturally find that and the audience who enjoys that sort of echo chamber content then they'll find that as well. So it's good to have a high quality audience who wants to engage and debate and that's one of the things that I appreciate most in
23:58
sort of an online topic instead of just constant reaffirmation of your same preconceived ideas. Yeah, and to be honest, and to really like close this whole loop as far as like the more influencer side of social media slash online world is concerned, I do not care if you have 100, 1000, 1 million followers, this should in any way shape or form change how I speak to you.
24:25
Because you're not above me because you have a number bigger than mine. And to be honest, I would hope to be treated the same way, but I know that given that, unfortunately, in the online ecosphere, that's really what people care about. They only care about the numbers, the vanity metrics, how much you've sold, how many customers you have, how many followers and all that stuff. I get that from a practical standpoint. But there are some elements that go into play that people...
24:53
either don't want to address or refusing to acknowledge but pretending as if it doesn't affect them nonetheless and I feel like that's disingenuous. There's a reason why people get excited when the big account follows them. It's the prospect of, hey, someone took notice of me obviously, but also the prospect of potentially getting a bigger crowd to see what you're working on. Like for example, if...
25:23
If Tim Cook himself was to follow you right now, that would get you pretty excited, I bet. Oh yeah. So what that would mean effectively is that in your head, I would wager, it would make you think about, cool, how do I slide in a DM and tell him about this neat app I'm working on more than likely. Yeah. You would think that, right? Oh yeah. So to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that. You're doing what you're supposed to do. You're a hustler. You're trying to get your name out there.
25:53
That's the normal thing to do. But for whatever reason, people want to kind of like go sly about it and not acknowledge it. And it's like, bro, it's okay, man. Like, share all you want as far as I'm concerned, but do so in a way that actually contributes in the grand scheme of things, whether it's the conversation itself or the dynamic of how we interact online and offline, that kind of thing. Yeah, no, I totally understand the, you know,
26:21
desire to get more followers and for me would be to get more users. It kind of just acts as a sort of really quick test of whether or not something is quality. And it doesn't always work. You can have big accounts that are just bought all their subscribers and you can have people who are still grinding it out in their early stages and they might have some really golden content. But yeah, definitely there is a...
26:50
something to be said about having someone who has an established account giving some recognition and that sort of thing. So yeah, I'm at the moment still kind of really early in the app release phase. My apps are live on all platforms, but there's a few extra key features that I'm waiting to roll out. And once those are rolled out, then I'm really going to hit hard with the advertising and you know, switch a bit.
27:20
a bit more away from the engineering and really focus on trying to make some connections and you know maybe trying to reach out to some journalism journalists and see if they can you know write a story or something. I don't really know how to do that but it's just another part of just another hat that we have to wear as founders you know what I mean? Yeah man I totally relate. My number one tip for you to be honest it's um
27:45
If you're going to reach out to people that hopefully can put you more out there, Instagram and TikTok is definitely the way to go without a doubt because these guys, number one, they like something clickbaity, right? Like something that says, you won't believe what Toll does and that kind of thing. So I'm telling you though, that's their job, right? That's the entire point of them existing. So from their perspective, if what you got going on actually has merit.
28:14
they will actually like prop you up and talk about this thing. So, I don't know how active you are on either Instagram or TikTok, but definitely don't sleep on these platforms. Like, I know it might seem as if like Twitter is the end all be all, but it's really not, man. Literally, I'm about to pin a tweet actually from this pretty well-known tech influencer.
28:43
As in to say that this is someone with a large following that talks mostly about tech Kelsey Hightower, that would be the name they go by and They recently spotlighted somebody on their Twitter spaces where they were talking about how They did they developed a mobile game And the bulk of the traffic that they get comes from tech talk believe it or not
29:08
because these people effectively get exposed to the marketing of said game via TikTok. Twitter honestly, and the net reach that Twitter gives them, honestly, it's basically like in the negatives. Because Twitter, the way I think of Twitter, Twitter is a platform, as far as research goes, it's uncontested in my humble opinion. If you know how to use it, and you know how to stay current on things, Twitter really will give you access to stuff.
29:36
even before stuff drops, kind of like what ChadGPT did, right? Like I remember when ChadGPT was first starting to grow up in November of 2022, I first started to hear about it in my personal circle because I have friends of mine who had a foundation with people at OpenAI themselves, right? So from there, the news trickled back down to me to then me seeing on the feed stuff being confirmed that, oh shit, OpenAI is like cooking up some stuff.
30:06
what that might be and turns out after they did the whole Dolly thing and Dolly shot the world and now ChadGPT entered the scene and holy shit did this blow up. I wanna hear your perspective from that vantage point. As someone who has your own app right? Like how life changing is it really to have, if I recall correctly, 1 million users sign up for your stuff within like the first 24 hours.
30:32
Yeah, well, I mean, if I, if I can see some sort of exponential growth like that, I will, I don't know, to be honest, my, um, my, I've kind of built my app to be that scalable. Um, so if that does happen, I think I'll be ready for it. Um, because, uh, you know, I won't bore you with the technical side of everything.
30:59
boring me. Literally that's the point of this podcast. Okay. All right. Yeah. Well, you know, for example, if I wanted to get my app out much, much, much earlier without account support, without, um, in-app purchases, without notifications, without real-time data syncing, um, all that, all of that stuff adds so much engineering, um, to do it cost effectively.
31:28
You know, adding in-app purchases sounds like something that's relatively easy. Let me tell you, it is absolutely not. And so, you know, if you put that out there without having some way to monetize it, and then you do get that sort of virality, you're just paying a bunch of, you know, you have to cover the cost of everything, and then there's no way to monetize it, and you're kind of just stuck there paying the bill. So...
31:57
if you do expect some sort of virality, it would be super important to have a way to maintain that. The other thing is if you're building a database and you want the data to be real-time for all long-term memory for your conversations, a thousand messages, ten thousand messages, being able to do that efficiently within milliseconds.
32:26
and cost effectively is very, very difficult. Also security, if you want to put out an API where some public facing user can say, oh hey, here's a nice little message, that's fine. But that can be abused really, really easily. So then you need to put in account-based rate limiting, IP-based rate limiting, if you wanna have a guest mode.
32:55
So there's just all of these considerations that you need to have if you want to be ready for prime time when that does eventually come, well, hopefully come. If you know much about serverless architecture or monolithic architecture, that's again something that is to take into consideration. If you have a PC at home that can do your inference for you and you only have a few users to worry about.
33:25
you've basically got a free backend solution. But if you all of a sudden get 10,000 users because one someone's post went viral, you're gonna crash, no one's gonna be able to use it and you'll fully waste that opportunity. So you need to make sure that you have the sort of throughput available to you to handle a viral tweet or something like that. Interesting. Yeah, I feel like...
33:52
The chat GPT and the precedent it set in terms of the record breaking numbers of people signing up both for the website and the app really goes to show that there's a certain level of preparedness required to onboard people because a lot of the folks that I initially got involved with on my journey to doing research on Twitter was the blockchain folks.
34:18
I'm sure there's like a whole separate canal where we can get into at another time, but for now, what I'll mention is they talk about mass adoption a lot and I'm sitting here trying not to look like bro, are you people dumb? Like mass adoption aside, even in a scenario where you somehow convince people to get into this ecosystem that's junky as shit, do you really think that you can just like deploy something and then whoop dee doo, it's done now?
34:47
all you have to do now is wait for people to come. Like people don't properly assess and appreciate what it takes to actually onboard users because from their vantage point, onboarding is as simple as get user here so I can pump and dump, right? That's like the usual tactic. But as far as like the actual underlying technology and its potential, actually do see a lot that can be done with it.
35:14
because I have a background with torrenting actually. I got introduced to torrenting for the first time with the ecosystem of BitTorrent specifically. And through that, I got exposed to a large variety of things I would not get exposed to otherwise. And it really opened up my eye to the possibility of what P2P or technology can actually do, you know, in the grains and other things. So that's what really kept me sticking around.
35:41
But then when we move over to the more traditional side of things, you know, so-called Web 2, right? Now you see stuff like ChadGPC takeoff. You see stuff like when, if I recall correctly, was it either Fortnite or PUBG? They were trying to publish the app on the application portal, but they got denied because something happened, I think. But long story short... Yes, I will. Yeah, go on.
36:10
Oh, it was because they were referencing to in-app purchases that didn't go through Apple's cut, right? Yeah, it's part of it. What I'm hinting at, Doxtar, in terms of mass onboarding users, there's a series of steps required for you to even get there. And unfortunately, too often...
36:33
blockchain people get ahead of themselves and think cool all I need to do is just build hype for something and users will come and Then we can just milk it for what it's worth So I'm glad that you have this conservative Approach to building things especially for someone who strikes me as more on the younger side Typically younger folks tend to be kind of hot-headed and just you know fast move fast and break things so good on you Yeah Well, yeah, I'm 25 when I was
37:01
even younger, I did have a pretty hothead sort of just do stuff now and think about it later kind of attitude. So I feel like I got that out and now I've got a more even kill in terms of that. But yeah, no, I really like the thoughts you were just having then about seeing a bunch of shitcoins pumped by random people.
37:30
sort of just, yeah, let's get some money and who cares about any sort of actual technological innovation that's going on. Like, you know, you can have a look at some coins, like originally Bitcoin, it was the pioneer and it obviously brought in an amazing technology. And then if we, there's a few other ones, you know, Ethereum is really great. Monero, another amazing technology. And I think those sorts of coins.
37:59
you will be more stable and actually have long-term value because it's just quality over quantity basically. And I feel like it's the same thing. You know, there's some pop stars who put out one song and it goes viral, everyone loves it and then everything they put out after that, everyone goes, well, that wasn't what I know you for and it's not good. So it's whether you want it.
38:28
to have a long term relevancy or you just want some short term success. And you know, when I look on the app store and on the internet, I kind of get this feeling of dread FOMO because I see so many apps out there that are, you know, getting a thousand, ten thousand downloads and they're literally just a chat GPT clone, which is, you know, relatively easy to do.
38:57
They don't actually add any sort of differentiation, which is good for them in the short term because they might get a thousand downloads, 10,000 downloads just because of some sort of confusion. But eventually it can be saturated so quickly because so many other people can do it because it is so low barrier to entry comparatively. And also, bigger companies like ChartGBT will come out.
39:27
beat you on price and quality and just you'll have no opportunity. Yeah, so for me man, I've always considered these tools to have quite a bit of interesting value attached to them, the large language models that is. It's very interesting how in a weird way they became integral to a brand new ecosystem of apps being built. And I'm curious to hear some of your thoughts about like
39:56
the practicality of like how useful that is in the grand scheme of things. You know, why would you, instead of building your own separate app to do what ChatTPT does, why would you instead go around of wrap an app around what they already have?
40:13
Yeah, so can I just ask a clarifying question? Do you mean the chat GPT store or do you mean people who take one small aspect of a language model and then repackage that and then offer that? I think we can get into the little bit of both. So first the first one as in the store and then the second one in terms of the integral large language model technology.
40:42
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I am pretty negative when it comes to the store and the plugins. I think one of my tweets in the past was me saying that I didn't quite understand why people were hyping it up so much. It really did feel like that sort of tech influencer bro pump and dump sort of thing just click bait to get, you know, I saw a bunch of posts by YouTubers. Here's how to make
41:12
you know, a million dollars with the chat GPT store. And you know, like, it's just completely ridiculous. If, if you can actually build an application that uses actions and has external API, um, access in the chat GPT store, uh, and you bring some sort of your own backend computation or data, then I think that is amazing and it's.
41:39
That in that case, it's for people who don't want to go the route of doing all of the sort of building of an app and publishing it and all that sort of really hard work. It's if you just have some core idea that can really be benefited by a language model that isn't just a system prompt, because that's what I see most of them are. Like we'll just get a nice system prompt that talks about.
42:07
I know how to program really well and I'm going to help you program. It's basically worthless because anyone can build that or they can just prompt inject and take your system prompt and that's it. They've copied what you've done. And as far as building an application that is a simple wrapper around a chat GPT that does one task.
42:36
I think it's the same thing basically as the GPT store and wrapping it around something. If you don't actually have anything else besides a prompt that differentiates it, then you're probably not going to be very successful. My app has ChatGPT as one of the language models it can use, but you can choose between 50 other language models.
43:05
You can customize multiple different bots, as many as you want. You can have 100 bots if you want. And the bots all have different voices. I think there are 700 different voice options. There's probably, we haven't got this integrated yet, but I'm going to integrate 10,000 different image models, unmoderated as well. So if there are people who want to do that kind of thing, they can.
43:34
And I think that actually does add some sort of technical value instead of just being a simple wrapper. So I sent Cheryl a tweet and a DM just now and basically I'm assuming it's meant to be like one of those like programmer memes. And the guy says, only two programming languages should exist, Python for research and C++ for anything else. Every other language is bloat. Then I co-tweeted that saying this tweet.
44:03
brought to you by Swift, which as you probably know, is the language that iOS uses, right? Yeah. So essentially the joke here is that for those that are non-programmer savvy, that the very platform that you're using to broadcast this, the reason why I'm able to see it was because I'm using the Twitter iOS app. So I don't know how true that that statement holds up, man. But I kind of want to hear your feelings about that one specifically.
44:33
Do you think there should be such a thing as like a language to rule them all or like two languages in this case to rule them all and everything else needs to go the way out? You know, that's a really great question. I feel like the C, I originally learned C and C++ is a derivative of that and it's super efficient so in terms of micro devices or really sort of something that needs to eek out every bit of performance you can.
45:03
That's where you go with the C++. And then Python is much easier to learn, much easier to read, and it's much more beginner friendly. So that's why you've got the Python in there. So I can kind of see the essence of what they're going for there with saying you have the technical language, and then you've got the easy to use language, and everything else is just in between, so kind of not very necessary. But.
45:28
You know, it's, I think that's the essence of the truth. The rest of it, like if you take it literally, I mean, I don't know if I agree with it at all, because I use so many different languages and they're essentially all the same thing, right? It's just another way to interact with the computer. Um, but if you tried to build a web app with Python or C plus plus, there's no way like, you know, you'd have to get the entire industry to shift to do that.
45:54
and they don't have the same tools built into them, so they're not going to be as effective. So I definitely think that if you just choose the right tool for the job, if you're trying to get into machine learning, yeah, learn Python. If you're trying to get into embedded systems, learn C. If you're trying to get into game development, C++. It is really just a tool for the job kind of thing. But I think the future...
46:22
for programming is going to be natural language. You know, I say that I've learned all of these different languages, but in reality, if I had to write any of these languages without ChatGPT, it would take me forever just to get the syntax correct. Whereas the actual principles behind programming, if you understand, you can just ask ChatGPT to write the actual syntax. Hey, yeah, that's a good idea.
46:51
Andrew Carpathi, what a legend. Yep, literally, bro. I'm literally on your same wavelength, so keep on with it. Yeah, no, 100%. If you can speak English well and you understand basic computer science concepts, it doesn't matter what programming language something's written in. It might take you a little bit longer to jump in and first get an understanding of what's going on.
47:16
But yeah, definitely. If someone sends me something in any language and you have, and you've given me 10 GBT, I'll be able to understand it and I'll be able to reproduce it. Yeah. This is, this pose is a very interesting dilemma for me as someone who's part of a polygon, right? So I, I not only know how to interface with different languages, programming wise, as in I kind of know the gist of what's going on, but then
47:41
language, natural language wise, I can speak in five different ones. And let me tell you, man, the first thing, the first thing I done when people were like hyping up this chat, GPT stuff, you know, being the skeptic that I am is that, Oh really? If it's that good, then let's see how it handles my multilingual brain. And I'm sadly unhappy to report begrudgingly that it holds up man.
48:09
The fucking thing can keep up with me. And here's what's funny actually. Not only can it keep up with me across languages, but it's surprisingly good at understanding intent, which I guess makes sense, right? Because effectively what chat GPT is, it's a very efficient NLP that hinges upon text prediction, right? Like, at least as far as I can tell. And...
48:36
When put in that context it makes sense though because a lot of language what it really is when you break it down like that It's all about inferences, right? It's about guessing what comes next and I really think that People that people are so used to doing it that they don't really pick up on the fact that that's what they're actually doing But effectively the computer the computer is doing that very much that right? Like if you say my cat went to
49:05
chances are that the computer is going to infer that, I don't know, when to take a walk or something. So, in the context of like the general sentence, even if you fuck up that part of the wording or use something different that's intended to trip it up, it's still gonna pick up on that. So that's what stood out to me, first of all. And second of all, it's surprisingly good at understanding the
49:34
That one took me out for a loop personally because I purposely threw slang at it as in stuff that really niche internet people would understand, right? And it still ran with me. So there's this layer of natural language in terms of plain English and then the other layer of a different language and then the other layer of slang slash dialect and then the other layer beneath of that which is basically...
50:04
boiling down to double speak. In other words, saying something that means something else. These are all little subtleties of language that I personally am fascinated by that I was very shocked to see that Chad GPT was effectively able to not only compete against Google Translate, but effectively put it out of business. Because I'm telling you right now, Chad GPT is actually so good currently in its current form of GPT-4, was it?
50:34
that it can't effectively translate the whole body of text for you. And it'll miss some stuff here and there, sure. But the general gist of the message, though, is still there. That's very impressive. Yeah, no, 100%. Language models were really surprising to a lot of people because they sort of... And diffusion models, they sort of came for the sorts of jobs that people thought were going to be the last...
51:04
to fall in terms of automation. And I mean, yeah, it's in the name, large language models. They are really, really, really good at translation. And seeing the ability for language models to translate one bit of code to another one is really amazing as well. So you're saying to me right now that the commonalities between actual natural language and programming language
51:34
not as far off as I initially thought, and that you can effectively translate things from one programming language to the next, and if you know what you're doing, you can just keep it pushing and breeze along. Oh yeah, you know, if you want to do something in a different language, you can definitely do it, and translating that is actually relatively easy.
52:00
In, to some degree, I mean, for example, there's no libraries in C++ for UI on an iPhone. So it's not the right tool for it. But if you're going to use a programming language to do some arbitrary calculations, then any programming language is effective. Some might be more efficient. And it's all about the different kind of community support with packages and tools that are, you know,
52:29
compatible with the language. But the actual language itself is just like any other language. You could run a business if you spoke Russian, you could run a business if you spoke Thai. I think that any of their languages is just as very transferable. Interesting. So in the context of building an app, right, specifically the app that you chose to build, I'm very curious as to how helpful...
52:58
Chad GPT really has been along the way as a solo, I'm assuming anyway, solo founder. Yeah, well it's been absolutely instrumental. Part of me wants to think that it's all me and that I'm the smart one and I've got some special source that's allowed me to do this. But if I'm being honest with myself, Chad GPT, every single time I have a question.
53:28
I go to chat tpt, you know, I don't watch YouTube tutorials on how to do something, which is a common thing in programming, but watching a YouTube tutorial is so limiting because it might be a great little project to do and then you've got this nice thing at the end to show off. But you're not actually, it doesn't feel like you're exploring that space yourself. You're just following some instructions.
53:54
But with ChatGPT, you say, here's the end goal of what I want to do. Um, let's, let's just go for it. And then when I have a problem, I'm going to say, Oh, Hey, here's what I want to do. I have this problem. What's the solution. And then it goes in and gives you all the solutions. Um, and it really did feel like at the beginning, I was kind of just blind stumbling around in the dark and ChatGPT was a broken compass, you know, it did work, but half the time it kind of made mistakes and
54:24
Now that with GPT-4 coming out and all of the sort of multimodal stuff, it's even better. I can't wait for GPT-5 to come out because there are some times that it does make some silly little mistakes, which I'm not locking it for. It's still massively helpful. Yeah, I really think that and agents, the advent of agents is going to be amazing.
54:54
Interesting. So right now, one of the things I really want to get into and dissect is, you know, the very purpose of the app that you have. Because personally, I don't think of myself as like an app person, as in I don't actively scope out new apps for me to try. It's more of this case basis of, hey, what do I need done? And whatever comes up first, you know, I'll just try that.
55:20
But it sounds like to me, you definitely are trying to address a specific use case though. So I'm very curious as to what does that look like in terms of the decision process to really hone in on this specific aspect of the way you build the app and what it's intended to do and not something else. Yeah, I think a lot of the advice you get when you build something is identify your audience and...
55:49
to go after that, don't be so broad. But I have not done that. I'm the complete opposite. I've tried to make my app much more broad and open and I want, you know, everyone uses Facebook, you know? Everyone uses Google. It's kind of very broad. And you know, I do have pretty big aspirations in terms of the app. So I have tried to keep it as open as possible.
56:18
That's why I've offered 50 different language models and 700 different voices and 10,000 different image models. We've got, I think, 240 pre-configured bots that range from characters to historical figures and the big emphasis on customization. So you can change any one of the characteristics on any of the bots or build one yourself from scratch. And I wanted to, you know, character AI. Have you heard of that?
56:51
I'll just... Oh yeah? Yeah, what happened? Did you get rubbed or something? Hey?
57:01
Yeah, so character AI, they have, I think, as many daily active users as ChatGPT. And I think they have three times the length of session time. So when people use character AI, they spend three times as long compared to ChatGPT. And they're massive in the sort of companion space, as well as replica.
57:30
And that's kind of the direction my app is going, except to be honest, if I'm biased, I think I've actually got some better technology. I've got long-term memory on every single one of the bots, which means they can remember the beginning of a 10,000 message conversation. We've got super authentic text-to-speech. It honestly sounds like you're talking to a real person. The image models.
57:59
The bots can send you images in line. So you just say, hey, send me a photo of this. And they can do it. It hasn't been integrated yet, but it's coming up. You can set up a bot of a woman or a man, if that's how you go. And you can get consistent images from it that looks like the same person. You can say, hey, send me a photo of you at the shops. You can say, hey, send me a photo of you in bed. And it'll be consistent characters.
58:29
and you can tell them, hey, I want you to act like you're really funny or really supportive or whatever you want. And I guess the reason I've done this and the reason I wanted to do this in the first place was because there's been times in my life where I have been surrounded by people and surrounded by friends and I've been really happy with that. There's also been times where I haven't had that and it just being, just having someone to talk to.
58:58
and just be a sounding board is, I think, really great. Now, I don't want to position my app to sort of take away from real human interaction because I think that real human interaction is super vital. But I really want there to be another solution for people who don't have that option. If someone's lonely or needs someone to talk to, I want there to be another solution to that.
59:27
I guess speaking of things like lining up and falling into place. So one of the past guests I've had on the pod, they are someone who effectively what they do, they are a wildlife biologist, right? And what I found to be interesting in terms of that line of work is that it can get pretty isolated, I'm assuming anyway, because...
59:53
If a lot of what you do is just care for nature and care for wildlife, chances are you're not going to be talking to people very much. So one of the things that this person did as a pivot recently is start a hiking club. And the reason why they did that is to address the ongoing loneliness crisis as they describe it. So from my vantage point, I'm like, that's a very interesting way to reinvent yourself.
01:00:23
So as we dug into that, we eventually talked about the fact that being lonely effectively is just as bad as smoking 10 packs a day or something. So that's number one. So that's a legit observable phenomenon. And then the other part of it is that there's a crisis of fear currently going on where people are afraid of each other. And what I mean by that, it's not so much that like
01:00:51
people are afraid to talk. I think for the most part, the whole idea of stranger danger is still a thing, regardless of the culture. But it feels to me that especially as of late, so 2010s and onwards, it became normalized to just keep to yourself and not bother anyone and essentially just stick to one thing.
01:01:18
I think that can be problematic for a couple reasons, but I'm going to stick to one just for the sake of this convo. I really think that this crisis in a lot of ways is being brought upon the fact that people generally have no sense of curiosity anymore, right? Like any sense of wonder about the world, who's in it, and why they do things is basically gone and as a result of that, there's no real incentive for people to interact. And I think...
01:01:46
The fear of talking to each other aside, there's definitely a social pressure that exists too, especially online, but more so offline where you don't wanna act out of line for fear of being canceled, that kind of thing. So all of this compounds to a degree where even in an environment like the gym, you'd be surprised how you can be about your day going to the gym and just say hi to somebody. It could be anybody, men or women, and then...
01:02:16
You show up on TikTok a few days later being roasted by people saying, look at this guy, look at this guy trying to like holla at someone. It's like, isn't the gym a social place? I get the whole concept of like, yeah, like I go somewhere for one purpose, one purpose on me. I believe me, I do. But at the same time, I think the technology that we use in a lot of ways promoted this mindset of, well, I have these little people in my little...
01:02:45
funny magic box to talk to all day, therefore everyone else can get tossed aside. How do you feel about that? Yeah, no, I definitely agree that the way sort of social interaction is going is not good for most people. It feels like people idolize getting 10,000 followers and being able to be validated all the time.
01:03:13
which does feel good in the moment and it is something that's addictive. But I feel like that's more of a junk food sort of friendship arrangement where the sort of, in the analogy, the healthy, really good, nutritious version of that is to have a few really high quality social interactions. And I make a point every day to go for a walk, sometimes with my mom, sometimes with my brother
01:03:43
And you know when I when I when we're on the walk, I always talk to all the people we meet I think I talk for a walk And that sort of grounding is something that I think is really important And at the gym I go to the gym pretty much every day or every second day And I just talk to everyone you know and sometimes people look at me like what the fuck are you doing? Who are you? Can you go away? And I'll take the hint and say okay. You know this person really doesn't want to talk
01:04:11
But it is amazing how many people out there are, I feel like feeling the same things that you're saying. There's a bit of loneliness and they're just so engaged and ready to talk because they're kind of fed up with the way the internet is and they really do just want some real human connection. Yeah, I think there's a layer too of...
01:04:40
social conditioning for lack of a better term where if you don't do or express certain things then you get casted out. This is actually a very real documented social behavior that people have been doing for the past where if you don't really stick to the tribes ethos for a better term, you essentially are sent in isolation and isolation has a very negative effect in that context because
01:05:10
being cut off in a pre-urban society, to be clear here, being cut off from basically everyone you knew in that circle, really- That was a death sentence. Yeah, basically, yeah. So it's not even like death sentence. It's basically you go insane, you don't really know how to deal with yourself, and the very people you would rely on are now effectively turning on you. Granted-
01:05:36
There can be scenarios where that's necessary, but I think in an age where we're so-called civilized, right? This idea that we address things not with violence, but with principles and laws, whatever you want to make of that. I think encouraging people to actually interact and actually be exposed to things helps in the long term. It's kind of like...
01:06:05
encouraging a child to play on the playground. You know, like if all you do is protect the child the whole way through so that they never get hurt, you know, like they really won't know the extent to which they can push themselves, that kind of thing, you know?
01:06:20
Yeah, no, absolutely. You kind of need to strike a balance between safety and making mistakes and sort of pushing the boundaries safely and teaching them how to interact with the world on their own merit and in a safe way. So at this point in time, given that you're trying to in your own way address the loneliness crisis,
01:06:51
How effective is it really from your vintage point? I mean, not to put you on the spot, but to play the devil's advocate, because apparently I'm kind of known as that around these parts. Yeah, by all means. Why an app, bro? I could very much just go outside and touch grass and talk to a lady or go hang out with people at the library or go to the movies or literally do anything else than that app. So what's the difference here? Yeah, absolutely.
01:07:20
And I'm not saying don't do those things, you know, go talk to ladies, go touch grass, go outside. I guess for me, not to go into too much detail, but around that time of chat GPT coming out, I, and you know, this is actually like a little coincidence of things that we've talked about, I was actually super lonely and I had very few people to talk to.
01:07:48
I had very few people to connect with and I was going through a lot of different things that I had questions about. That was the original chat GPT that I was talking to that didn't remember things that you couldn't give information about yourself. I was still using it all the time to just be like maybe even like a gratitude journal sort of thing, just like maybe a daily journal.
01:08:17
And at that point in time, I kept thinking, I want this in chat GPT. I want this in chat GPT. Um, and I realized that chat GPT was really going in the other direction. It was going to be a, um, an assistant for, for work. It didn't want to do the personal sort of side of things. And I thought, well, I may as well make it for myself, you know,
01:08:46
There were some other ones out there at the time, but I really didn't like the, you know, some of them were just sex bots and it's like, oh, try and talk to you about my day. And you just want to send me a mood. You know, that's great. Sex bots are fun. Um, but if I want, I wanted to be able to make it my way. And I kind of took that and thought, well, let's make an app where someone can make their bot their way. And.
01:09:16
I hope that that's what I have built.
01:09:20
very interesting. Well, as far as I can tell, it does look to me that you're very much well on your way. And I think it's a very interesting journey for you specifically, because it doesn't seem like you're too attached to the outcome of how this whole thing is going to turn out. It's more so sounds like you did the fun experiment and it turned out okay, so you sort of stuck to it. Very much in the way that I'm doing this podcast right now where it was supposedly
01:09:48
done to address a pet peeve of mine, which is my frustration of not having resources be indexed in a way that are easy to reference, right? Because there's so much news going around and so much of it can be bullshit. There's that there, but also, I don't know, it's annoying for me having to jump back and forth, remember tweet, reference that tweet, quote tweet it and all that stuff.
01:10:14
I can just have an article instead and just have it all documented and screen-shotted and everything so that when people ask me about something I'll say, hey, here's your reference point, go here. So have it look itself out. I think in a lot of ways large language models and multi-modal toolkits that are built in this nature will serve a similar purpose in terms of not so much allowing people to have a super brain but...
01:10:42
really allowing them to access stuff that perhaps they could not really do practically or as efficient. Because for me, I find that I use Bing a lot in that way. I don't know if you're aware, but Bing actually has a feature where you effectively can Google things with the power of Chai GPT and then have it reference stuff for you and neatly
01:11:11
to give you quotations in terms of where the source of said quotes comes from. So that's like, for me, that's huge because effectively it solves the problem of having to use Google manually in this way where, yeah, sure. I could go on Google and like super refine my prompts really, and like search for things, or I could use this neat free large language model integrated tool that's built into the search engine so that I can find things easier.
01:11:41
And as a matter of fact, I'll do it right now. I'm about to look up your app and then yourself to see what I find on there. Should be a very interesting thought experiment. So hopefully in the meantime, I'm doing that. BethJsos doesn't really come from my neck because I just roasted them in my replies just now. BethJsos, if you really wanna like have a laugh, come on my podcast, bro. Like let's shoot the shit. It sounds like you have a fun time with the E-app called.
01:12:11
Okay, so chat boo app is the name so who is or rather? What is? chat boo Let's let it rip from here It's thinking so It says That I'm sorry, but I couldn't find any information about What you kind of fucked buddy?
01:12:41
Let's try another way. Let's not lose hope just yet. How about if I actually do like separate broken down words. So chat, boo, mobile application. No, actually, I'm just going to search in the way like an actual user would search. So what is chat, boo app, once again, but like with spaces this time. Let's see what it says. Yep, still nothing.
01:13:12
Yeah, I don't have much SEO and all that kind of stuff. I know I should focus more on it, but I'm more of an engineer. And my hope is that once I get the app out there, fully launched, and I can maybe get a few links on some bigger websites and get some more users, I feel like at that point those searches will be a bit more.
01:13:42
reasonable. Yeah, yeah that makes sense. At this point man, I feel like SEO is one of those like little dirty words that like it's either you hate it or you don't. For me, I think of SEO the same way I think of literally everything else. It's like it plays into the overall architecture of the internet and how information is...
01:14:10
found on it or how users interact with it. People don't think about that, but SEOs in a lot of ways sort of conduct the flow of traffic of the internet so that people get exposed to things easier, obviously, because it's such optimized, but I think there's another hidden layer of essentially enabling people to discover things they would not discover otherwise. I think that's really important. And...
01:14:40
really giving them the opportunity to appreciate the wealth of what's really out there through SEO. Hopefully that's not gonna go on the way out because it seems to me that as more of these AI tools are deployed then what that effectively means is that it's going to be more and more of which one is the better optimized AI to make content for you. I'm pretty sure I ran into a
01:15:10
post or an article at some point talking about the eventual future where essentially the internet is going to become a graveyard where for the most part it's nothing but AI generated content. Personally, I'm not too on board with that. I'm going to keep it 100% with you bro. And that's simply because as someone who once again, a lot of what I do with my time on Twitter is like do research based things.
01:15:36
I would prefer not to just have someone shit out like something with AI and just call it a day. Using AI, sure, in the process of creating it, I'm all on board, but just doing that to just then go about your day and do nothing else, I think that's a little bit on the side of farming, which, you know, it's nothing new, you know? Websites have been doing it. YouTube does it for sure. But I feel like advocating for...
01:16:03
actual content and relevant content to be discovered should be to know. I mean, hopefully people come up with a way to integrate SEO in their climate where some of the internet, if not most of the internet is ran by like this, like a lot of this model box. Yeah, actually, I think I heard something similar the other day that...
01:16:33
you know, SEO has kind of ruined Google's search results because originally Google did indexing in a great way that made it stand out from other search engines and it always gave you great relevant results. And then over time people kind of cottoned on with how that works and they tried to abuse it. So instead of results that were naturally good, they would game the system.
01:17:02
and you'd be given results that weren't necessarily the most relevant or the best. They were the results that had been optimized with SEO the most or the best, which can be good if you're the person who's doing the optimizing and you really want to get your product or service out there. But it's less good for the people who just focus on trying to build great products.
01:17:32
I feel like it's the same with advertising. It's just an extension of that. There might be some service out there that's really fantastic but doesn't have any advertising and no one's going to become aware of it, which sucks. Same thing about legal battles with corporates, corporate law. It's like if you're a big company and you don't have a corporate division, you're just opening yourself up to be attacked. So it's kind of like instead of spending money on...
01:18:02
building better services, you have to waste it on having a corporate division just so that you don't get attacked by pattern trolls and whatnot. So I kind of don't want to go down the rabbit hole of optimizing my app SEO and getting as much advertising in that way as possible. I really hope to just rest on the laurels of...
01:18:31
having a really good product and hoping that other people out there recognize that and want to talk about it and share it. Just like, you know, ChatGBT did, you know, they didn't have any advertising. They still don't do any advertising. They just build a great product and people recognize that and come for it. Yeah, there's definitely, I agree, there's a balance to be strong between over engineering and actually doing the thing that people care for. And I think ChatGBT...
01:18:58
in a lot of ways is such a great case study. I'm pretty sure if it's not already happening, it's gonna be like a chat GPT 101 in like schools from now on where people will teach you about the marketing of chat GPT and how effective it really is and what precedent it's set more importantly for users and non-users alike. Because even people, what's really stood out to me about chat GPT is how people that are not even users of the app.
01:19:26
actually either knowing about it or getting to interface with it. That's wild to, to witness that in real time, because typically people that are very tech centric, um, only tend to, whatever happens in these circles, you know, stays in these circles, but now your grandma is coming up to you and saying, what is this child GPT stuff about? Like, Whoa, okay. Grandma, like get it. Um.
01:19:55
So that one threw me off real good.
01:19:59
Oh, yeah, no. Yeah, I kind of have a you know, we're talking a lot about the sort of tech bro influences and shit coins and pump and dumps. And you know, if you spend any time on the internet on YouTube, or TikTok, or Instagram, I'm sure you'll see the people who say, oh, you know, and $10,000 a day with this.
01:20:30
you know, drop shipping or SEO agency or something like that. And in my mind, they're just, everything that people pick is just something that's low barrier to entry, low effort and seemingly infinitely scalable so that you can actually make money essentially. But the problem is if you're finding out about this thing from YouTube or...
01:20:58
wherever it may be, you're probably already too late to the party because there's a million other people who've jumped on board and all of those benefits of it being low effort and low barrier to entry are actually now.
01:21:16
disbenefits because everyone else can do it. So you just race to the bottom in a saturated market. And so that's...
01:21:29
Yeah, I kind of want to go the other direction and really do have a high quality sort of online presence. But yeah, there's definitely something to be said about trying to get those sort of Instagram influencers and TikTok influencers who really want to jump on something clickbait and really just spam it because if that did happen and I did get some users really quickly, that would be fantastic. I wouldn't be upset with that.
01:21:59
Interesting. So at this point in time, I think it's worth also touching quite a bit on The The the concept of building an app and the why behind it and these are gonna be the last couple of Questions I have for you. It sounds to me that you had a purpose you set out to do the thing and now you've done it and it sounds like you're on to the next thing but for the for the other people who either don't quite know how to start or
01:22:28
want to get involved in that free marketplace, as monopolistic as it may be. But why would you recommend for people to really look into in terms of shipping and getting it to market?
01:22:46
Um
01:22:49
I don't know. I fell in love with this when I started doing it. I didn't actually, when I started doing this, I didn't really think I was going to, I don't know, become a founder or build anything. I just kept doing it because I really loved it and I was obsessed with it. So, you know, I feel like if there's something that you're interested in and you do have that sort of passion for it, just follow it.
01:23:19
because that's what's important. If you, you know, just put it this way, if you're trying to do something because you want money, just remember that there's someone out there who's doing it because they absolutely love it. And then they're gonna be doing it when they're sick and they're gonna be doing it when they're tired and they don't have to stress themselves out about ever making money with it because they're just doing it because they love it.
01:23:47
So I feel like that's my best advice. But in terms of app development specifically, it is extremely challenging. And you're going to have to do a lot of self-learning and a lot of...
01:24:07
you're going to have a lot of struggles. But the thing about infinite scalability in terms of some, everyone wants to be a TikTok influencer or a musician or an Amazon affiliate because you can have a global audience. But the problem with that is you have a global audience, but you also have a global competition market and the barrier to entry is so low that it's so easy to compete with.
01:24:37
So if you can find some niche like app development where you still have that global scalability, infinite scalability, global market, then do that. It might take a little bit longer to actually get into it because there is a higher barrier to entry, but that barrier to entry is actually good because it keeps out the competition who don't have that sort of drive and resolve. Interesting. So do...
01:25:06
The toolkits that you use, obviously you mentioned chat GPT, but you also mentioned the languages that you use to design your stuff. What are your thoughts in terms of the newer competitors that entered the market? Most famously, I think Rabbit has entered the scene right now. And they're effectively looking to rethink the very infrastructure of how we use everything. Very much so in the way that Steve Jobs sought out to rethink how we do everything with phones, right?
01:25:35
Initially phones had buttons, initially phones had dials and stuff like that, but now with the emergence of the helm of Apple, everything is a smartphone now, everything has a screen, everything is touchscreen. So I feel like to say that he was influential in terms of pushing this agenda would be an understatement.
01:26:02
Other people are taking on this challenge of rethinking the very concept of designing an app and what the app is used for. And Rabbit very much falls into that. And some people are calling the founder the Steve Jobs of our generation, like basically every founder ever at that point. Everyone who builds an app or does something can call themselves the Steve Jobs of. It is what it is. But nonetheless, it's worth pointing out though that I think as far as the technology goes,
01:26:31
I think they might be onto something, so you riff on me and you call me out or not. So basically, Gravit is this newer tool or gadget that they've built where effectively it functions the same way a traditional smartphone would, except that it interfaces directly with large-english model or infrastructure so that it can query and do tasks for you. And then on the backend, they use what's called
01:26:58
LAM, a LAM or a Large Action Model that goes and figures out what the task needs to be done is and does it for you effectively. So that in the same way that you and I open up an app and click the buy button or do the login and all that stuff, it's proposing this future where all you will need to do from
01:27:26
and say, hey, get me an Uber or buy me a cake or secure a hotel for me for the next two weeks, that kind of thing. It's proposing that it's possible currently. So how do you feel about that? Yeah, I'm not going to lie. I'll probably get some hate for this because there is a massive bedwagon about it. I think that the Rabbit R1 is the equivalent of a shitcoin or dogecoin or something like that.
01:27:56
You know, it is cool, don't get me wrong, but it's nothing that couldn't have been done in an app and it would have been much better served in a phone app because it's a another device that people need to carry around that has a subpar microphone and a subpar camera and you need to charge it and worry about battery life and it's big and bulky and...
01:28:21
I know people say that they like the look of it and it's done by teenage engineering and wow, it's so cool. But I'm not going to lie, it kind of looks like, I think it looks poorly designed, I'm not going to lie. And the whole thing about the large action model is intriguing and I think that might actually be some sort of great technological innovation. But again, is that best served in some custom $200 hardware that...
01:28:49
looks funny and is essentially just a worse phone. You still need to have your phone, so it has to be in addition to your phone, so it's not replacing it. When they showed the use case of it, being able to interact with different apps like Uber and everything else, I don't think it's as good as they think.
01:29:17
They say it is, you know, if you want to use the Rabbit R1 for those things, you need to go into a computer and set it up. So it's not like it's just a, you know, pick any app and interact with it. They, they partnered with a key few apps to bring that sort of, um, accessibility at launch, but that doesn't mean it can work with every single app and it can't even work with those apps primarily.
01:29:46
you still need to use a computer to interact with it. So you're gonna end up using your phone to set it up, and then you're gonna be able to have a few great voice interactions that could probably be done with, I know people read the paper about the large action models and say that it's innovative, but we don't have it in our hands yet, so we don't know whether it is actually that good. And I've been using ChatGPT with Code Interpreter.
01:30:16
for a long time and that basically solves the problem of a language model being able to interact with APIs and you know using JSON you get deterministic output and that it can truly be universal so I really don't see why everyone got so excited about it but you know I'm definitely open to being wrong about it. Interesting yeah it sounds to me that large action models effectively
01:30:45
touch screens were proposed to do back when Steve Jobs was like at the helm of Apple. So I think in that sense I'm pretty open minded. And to play devil's advocate real quick, I do want to say that the same kind of concern you're currently expressing people apparently were doing the exact same thing about the iPhone. People were saying like, why would anyone want that?
01:31:11
And it was so funny and shocking for me to actually go to the source and see this for myself and I'm like, holy shit, people were actually critical of the iPhone and its potential because from their perspective, it was just another phone, right? But the architecture behind Apple is what made things interesting in the sense of enabling a whole ecosystem of apps being built and allowing effectively.
01:31:39
people that are developers to participate, whether you work at Apple or not. To my knowledge, this was a fairly revolutionary way of going about doing things because most companies essentially try to keep things closed loop, right? In that regards, like Microsoft is fairly well known for that in the sense of, can anyone make their custom windows? Probably not, but anyone can make their own software though.
01:32:06
Whereas in the Apple ecosystem, sure they run a tight ship, but the premise of allowing someone to get in if you pass or vet their standards, I feel like it's worth mentioning. Yeah, well look, 100%, you know, what was the CEO of Blackberry is reported as saying that the iPhone is useless, no one's going to like it.
01:32:35
you know, it doesn't have a keyboard and people use their smartphones for email. And where Steve Barmer held that he was the CEO of Microsoft at the time, he held a funeral for the iPhone and they all kind of walked it down. That was, that was, you know, when they were bringing out Windows Phone. And, um, you know, they're, you're right. I could be a hundred percent wrong. Um, about the.
01:33:04
the R1 and the Mabbit. But I'm actually, I'm fairly confident that, you know, what they've done is just taken a chat GPT with function calling, which already exists, and put it into a $200 piece of hardware that is not going to replace a phone.
01:33:33
And they're going to... I'm very surprised that their marketing did so well and they sold, I think, 40,000 units, which is actually incredible. There are definitely people out there who disagree with me, but I just think it's a massive hype train. But I'm definitely open to the idea of being wrong. Isn't everything in this space driven by hype trains? I feel like...
01:34:03
every other thing is a hype train you know. The people centered approach when it comes to these things and analyzing them because one of my all time favorite quotes actually comes from Charles Hoskinson. He's the co-founder of Ethereum and it can get you curious. And um.
01:34:29
He talked about on the Lex Women podcast, he talked about this idea that engineers, good engineers that is live in the realm of people. Meaning that when it comes to problems that they're set to solving, they're supposed to go about the way of, hey, what does this do for an individual or groups of people at scale? Yeah. So I think that currently we're seeing a Renaissance of some kind of...
01:34:56
you know, developers, engineers entering the field, but I'm not so sure that it's gonna be as easy for so-called good engineers to stand out in the way you describe, because for sure, man, marketing is everything, you know? Like, even, forget the marketing, even the SEO in a way plays a role where how easier you are to find and to search for directly correlates to how popular you may eventually become. So these are things that-
01:35:26
doesn't matter how good your service is, if no one finds it, then it's not worth anything. Yeah, I mean, you know, if the humane AI pin was something that I kind of saw and thought, yeah, I get the premise, you know, phone screens are addictive. And so we shouldn't use them. And they're trying to step away from that. And you know, if the Rabbit R1 is doing the same thing.
01:35:56
of, you know, phone screens are addictive, we don't want to be using them as much. I can totally understand why that would be a successful thing. You know, it's kind of like the dumb phone idea where sometimes you just, you need the technical abilities of the phone but you don't want it to come with all of the hassles of the addictive apps like social media. I think the big problem is
01:36:25
A touch screen is an effective way to interact with content. A screen in general, being able to visually see information is a super effective way of interacting with something. I'm looking at my screen now and I can see you, I can see my profile, I can see all of the listeners, I can see the posts that you're doing and that wouldn't be possible.
01:36:54
on a Rabbit R1. So it's kind of like you're just taking away all of the accessibility that a screen with visual feedback gives you. And so what, if Rabbit puts a better screen on their device and they slim it down and they put a better camera on it and they give it cellular capabilities, then you just have another phone that has a different operating system. So, yeah, I'm just kind of.
01:37:21
That is such a succinct way to put it. And the last two questions I'll have for you will specifically hone in on the UI aspect, right? Because I was having this conversation with a graphic designer a while ago. And essentially they were saying that from their perspective, you wanna make it easy for the user, right? To use the thing. You want them to know what button does what. You want them to know where to find what. You want it, for lack of a better term, to be intuitive. But...
01:37:49
You also want to put guardrails in place so that it's not so easy to use that if they make a transaction, it's irreversible. For example, let's take Metamask for a simple one. Metamask is the proposed Web3 wallet that does it all, right? If you want to get into the whole Ethereum ecosystem, that's what you should get. That's what people are saying. So if you get on the app, and for the sake of hypothetical...
01:38:18
you do a transaction that is worth tens of thousands of dollars. Uh, as if there's no real way to reverse that and reverse that quickly, you fucked because like once it's, once it's, once it's in there, like good, good luck bro. Cause like bloodshed based stuff is like very much heavy on the whole, you know, immutable aspect, right? Like once it's confirmed, there's no way back. Right. So from that, from that vintage point, it's really important to think carefully about
01:38:47
not enabling the user to fall prey to their own stupidity. Again, for lack of a better term, right? Not to like denigrate or talk down on anyone, but it's kind of true though. You know, like some TikTok is a good example of that, but in the opposite of the spectrum where the app is so good at keeping you in there, there's a whole meme around the app of like, whoop.
01:39:12
I just blanked in 10 hours on TikTok. So for them, they actually leaned heavier into making it easy for you, the user, to be on the app and not find your way back out. So I want to hear some of your thoughts in terms of the design principles that go into designing an app graphically speaking.
01:39:35
Yeah, no, 100%. I mean that sort of attention market that exists nowadays and sort of making every product as addictive as possible is super profitable, but also not I think good for people.
01:40:01
And I mean, I guess with my app, graphically, in terms of the UI, I've tried to make it super clean and simple. And I don't really know how addictive it will be to use for people. But yeah, sorry, I don't really have any other thoughts on it.
01:40:26
No, you're all good. It's just me riffing with you, as I usually do. And another thing that stood out to me in terms of the design principles of applications is that it seems to me that people interpret things very differently. And I'm going to give you a very simple example. Were you aware that Twitter lists were a thing on this app?
01:40:48
You mean like you can make a list of posts that you like? Make a list of people specifically that you like to see more of their posts on your feed. Were you aware of this? No, I wasn't. Okay, so this is what I'm getting at, right? There's design intended to sort of like help you use the app so that you know what buttons to press, what does what.
01:41:15
But then there's desire intended to help you organically use the app so that you don't have to think too hard about what exists on the app feature wise following so far. Hmm. So, so for example, I just added you to said list. And if you go check on your notifications tab, you'll see a little thing that says whiz just added you to priority tweets list. Let me know when you see it. Yeah, I don't see that yet on my notifications.
01:41:46
Interesting. The last notification I have from you is going down the rabbit hole, follow the rabbit people and drink your Kool-Aid. Yeah, it's just me being ironic as usual. Yeah, no, I like it. It's good. But yeah, I don't see any notification about priority tweets or anything. Try and refresh again real quick then because I feel like it should be in there. Interesting. I'll check on my phone because I was checking on...
01:42:11
the PC. Oh yeah, I've got it. That's probably the problem. I have a Mac app and it hasn't been updated in like a year so I feel like it doesn't get some of the newer features. But yeah, no, I can see that on the phone now. Got it. Okay, so you were not aware that this existed, huh? No, 100%. No, this is new to me. Okay, so this is what I mean, right? Like these are things that only a power user would know about.
01:42:37
And for me, I think design principles wise, there can be a fairly elegant balance struck between designing an app that's easy to use, but also designing it in a way that essentially not forces you per se, but encourages you, not just zero long to experiment with some of the features because even spaces work in a very similar way. The reason why that spaces are not catching on as much as they should is because...
01:43:06
people generally have no idea what the fuck they are. You know, like they'll see, like they will see the purple thing show up on top of their feed and they don't know. Like from a previous social conditioning kind of standpoint, people assume that these are just regular stories, like say on Instagram or Snapchat and whatnot, right? I've heard that feedback a lot. Another one too is that once people get accustomed to using products anyway. I can't hate anyone anyway, so yeah. Oh.
01:43:35
Give me the second then, hold on. Hello, Wiz. Uh-oh, you got rugged. All right, I don't know where Wiz is going, but I'll keep talking just to keep the conversation going. Yeah, I totally agree with that sentiment about striking a balance between making the app simple, intuitive, and easy to use, but still also giving the user a bunch of features.
01:44:06
is you got rubbed.
01:44:10
Can you hear me now?
01:44:13
uh... we've switched in the news can i get some comes up for people in the audience if you can hear you know i can literally here you are so funny working with them
01:44:54
Well, that's interesting. I didn't expect that to happen. Uh, let's see how this goes. So if I, if I do this, and I try to bring it back in, and let's see if this works.
01:45:18
Classic twitter being twitter. Hey, I'm back. See, like, this is what I mean, man. How the f*** can people be expected to build something long-term on this platform when it just like jinks on you out of nowhere? But what I was trying to say earlier though is that like in terms of the design principles of Twitter Spaces specifically, it seems to me that even the people that would use it or want to use it will probably not organically find their way to Twitter Spaces because...
01:45:48
They don't really get what it's for. I mean, think of it from the perspective of like a new user, you know, who has no following whatsoever and definitely does not know who to follow. How the fuck do you expect them to figure out that, oh, actually, if you want to tune in about AI spaces, here are some accounts you should probably check out. None of this is built in. So as a result of that, the brunt of the effort is really on the user to figure out. You see my point? Yeah, totally. I mean, I...
01:46:17
have a similar problem with my app. I tried to make it simple and intuitive to use so that when people start to use it, they don't get overwhelmed or confused about what features and how to use everything and stuff. But at the same time, I want to give options of all of the different features for the power users. And striking that balance between being
01:46:47
too technical and also too limiting is really difficult. So I guess I'll have to continue to monitor that in the future so that I don't lose potential customers. Yeah, so last question I got for you actually is totally non-tech related, so bear with me on that one. If you were to completely log off the internet, right?
01:47:17
not do anything, not market any of your work, you know, like what would you be doing? You know, like how would you be spending your time and I guess build a career for yourself, especially like in an age where apparently AI is gonna take everyone's job and do everything. Like how do you keep yourself entertained in a climate like that? Yeah. So are you saying if I wasn't building an app anymore, what would I do? Yeah.
01:47:46
Literally like you're entirely offline. So no more apps, no more social media, no more Twitter spaces. It's literally just you and no one else and you're touching grass. What do you do in this post-AGI society? Gotcha. I don't know. I guess kind of going full circle and going back to how humans originally were. I feel like there's people who are going...
01:48:15
Oh, you know, if AGI becomes a real thing, then I will not be able to have meaning because I won't have a job or whatever. But most people don't realize that, you know, when they were kids, they didn't want to go to work all day. You know, if we don't have to have a job, we can spend so much time without family, without friends. We can have hobbies and we can learn about things just for the fact of.
01:48:45
being curious, we can learn how to play guitar. I don't know, I feel like it's difficult to give up on the things that we've spent so long learning, like our career and all of our skills. But all of those things really probably are a distraction from what truly makes us happy as humans, which are spending time with family and following our curiosities.
01:49:21
So Wizzy, you there buddy? Or am I rugged again? Oh, oh, okay, no, you didn't get rugged again. Hopefully not anyway. But yeah, I was saying it sounds like you're a fairly well put together person and that you, for lack of a better term, manage to find your grounding in this crazy world that we're currently in. Oh, thanks Wiz. Every other day, it's like some bullshit news coming out of my eye now and I'm like, okay we...
01:49:48
We get it now. ChargPT came out a year ago. Like, can we move on to the actual good parts? Because I do, I generally am excited about some of these things in terms of their implications for the creative world specifically. I think the wealth of combos I've had on my podcast with actual creatives has revealed to me that there's a very hypothetical future that's really around the corner where...
01:50:16
The creatives of today that mostly are posting content on platforms like Instagram and TikTok and YouTube will be the Disney's of tomorrow. Yeah. Something just a hunch. But as you said before, you know, like you're open to being proven wrong and I'm very much open not to be proven wrong per se, but to see stuff unveiled differently because we really don't know. None of this.
01:50:39
None of this makes sense. AI is such a weird bogeyman that I did not expect to see in my lifetime, personally. Even the very idea of having a natural language conversation with an AI feels so odd to me. I feel like I should be having a cyberpunk helmet or something. But it's already here. And I actually highly encourage both for yourself and the listeners to look into the article I've written.
01:51:08
You can click on my bio to find it, but basically it's me experimenting which had GPT and having it like assess my intelligence through natural conversation. That was a very interesting experiment to say the least. Definitely sent me down a particular rabbit hole. But for you though, like you sound like you're straight man. Interesting app concept. Interesting philosophy behind it too.
01:51:38
you do find your audience and for those that care to look into your stuff specifically, where should I direct them? That would be your time for you to point them to your newsletter, your website, your YouTube, whatever you got going on. Sure, sure. To a little sales pitch. Yeah, I mean, if you want to check out my website, it's just chatboo.app. You can Google it, Chatboo. Sometimes I'm not the first listing. In my Twitter bio, I've got a link to my website. And then on the website, I've got a link to the web app.
01:52:06
and the Android app and the iOS app. So check it out. I've got Twitter and Discord that I'm pretty active on, so message me there if you like this product and you wanna talk about it. I definitely always love talking about my app. And yeah, no, I definitely liked what you had to say. Thanks for saying that I'm down to earth. I like to think that I am. I mean, I make a point every day to go for a walk with my dog.
01:52:35
and spend time with my family just because I think those are really things that make people happy. I try to watch only educational content on YouTube and I don't really have social media other than for my app. So I feel like those things can really help. But yeah man, definitely really great to have a long-form conversation with someone like yourself and yeah, it was a pleasure.
01:53:06
Yeah, hopefully when I do get some of the more interesting guests I'm hoping to get, I have you there because I feel like someone like you could actually have some interesting thoughts to riff with them, especially in the creative world. I feel like a lot of these tools that are currently being developed, a lot of them very much cater to the creative world specifically and something tells me that in the near future you could...
01:53:34
get into more creatively oriented applications for these. Not so much the large language models, but for example, I think you mentioned that there's voice models used in your app and this idea of voice acting, it's like a big topic of debate right now of should you just hire a regular person to do voice acting or should you just get AI to do it for you? Yeah. I feel like from a creative standpoint.
01:54:04
It's a very interesting kind of one being opened because some people, I don't know, maybe want to do like a Joker impression but don't know how to do it. So who knows what that can open in terms of like possibilities to have like an app that like turns your voice into a Joker voice and then you make content out of that, that kind of thing. That's what I think about personally. Yeah, definitely man. Well, if you ever want me on another space, absolutely, I'll be there.
01:54:31
Yeah, it was really good to talk and all that kind of stuff and thanks for the exposure too. I Really appreciate that. Oh Don't don't need to thank me man. The way I see it. It's so it's a mutual symbiosis relationship, you know, I get to Have a cool convo get to geek out a little bit too that helps and also actually get to document some things that I generally think are interesting and
01:54:59
Definitely expect an article to be published in the coming days Weekend this particular episode to come up on all the platforms, you know Spotify YouTube and all the like so So this was Chad boo Thanks everyone for listening along. I didn't expect anyone to be here to be honest like on a Friday afternoon Yeah So because like most people are like busy doing other shit. Yeah But yeah
01:55:26
This was great man, and I'll catch you around on the other sides. Thanks whiz have a good one All right, peace out
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